Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>>RICHARD RORTY: I think the philosopher I find most attractive as a human being is William
James.
He has the best sense of humor of any philosopher I've read except perhaps Kierkegaard or Nietzsche.
He's a human being who it's easier to identify with than either Kierkegaard or Nietzsche.
>>BRUCE WILSHIRE: William James was engaged in a lifelong battle with depression, which
he won, apparently, most of the time.
>>TOM ALEXANDER: You certainly get a strong sense of the tragic with James.
If you read his essay "The Dilemmas of Determinism", you realize that James thought that life was
a struggle, always up for grabs and that real defeat is possible and real loss is possible
and James himself struggled with psychological problems all of his life, as well as existential
problems.
The death of friends and close members of his family.
>>BRUCE WILSHIRE: James, in a very real way, fought his way out of bed
[music]
struggling with the question of freedom.
What is freedom?
And this led to, as everyone knows, a great creative life in philosophy.
>RUSSELL GOODMAN: And William James was just a live intellect.
He founded American psychology.
He wrote this great book called The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, which revolutionized
the field.
He's a plurality all in himself.
He wrote a book called A Pluralistic Universe, but James himself is a pluralistic universe
'cause he's got this psychology part.
His degree was actually in medicine.
Never studied philosophy formally but after doing physiology at Harvard, teaching it,
and then psychology, he finally got a position as professor of philosophy and wrote philosophy.
He's most famous for writing the book Pragmatism and getting pragmatism going.
>>RICHARD RORTY: James' life is something of a puzzle because he was more or less a
neurotic wreck for a good deal of his 20s and 30s and then he pulled himself together
and became an immensely productive writer and extremely active public figure.
I'm not sure how he did it, but it was something of a triumph over what were obviously certain
psychological disadvantages.
>>JAMES PAWELSKI: James' own life experience is fascinating to consider in this context.
As is well known, he faced a crisis in his late 20s and he was suicidal and he didn't
know if there was any meaning in life whatsoever and by his own self-report, at least, a turning
point, the turning point, he wrote, was when he came to believe that he had freedom and
that he had the freedom to believe that his life was meaningful and that his own actions,
his own thoughts, his own moral choices actually mattered in the world.
Now he didn't know if he absolutely did have freedom or not but he decided to live as though
he did and to see what the consequences would be and sure enough the consequences were that
he passed a crisis point.
>>RICHARD RORTY: I have no idea how James recovered but I think most people who recover
from severe mental illness don't know what happened.
They just used to be sick and now are well.
I don't think that there is typically any life-changing event.
It's a mystery to them why therapy worked or why they got well without therapy.
>>JAMES PAWELSKI: I think it would be simplistic to reduce all of James' difficulties, all
of James' depression and suicidal period of his life and so on simply to that point.
I think there were a variety of things that were going on.
In part, his own illnesses.
His back trouble.
His eye trouble and so on.
A variety of factors.
Among them I think his scientific study where he began to wonder whether determinism were
true, and materialism and that all there is really is just matter and it's been predetermined
to behave in certain ways and there's nothing we human beings can do about it but obey.
So there's an interesting parallel between James' scientific limitations, or the limitations
that he got from the study of science and my own limited, the limitations in my own
world view that there's not really any freedom.
There's not really anything we can do as human beings but obey.
Whether it's a dictate, a divine dictate or whether it is a dictate of the material universe.
And I think for James a really important point, if not the sole cure, was when he came to
believe that he had freedom and this raises the interesting question, can we really think
ourselves out of philosophical problems or, maybe even more poignantly, can we really
think ourselves out of psychological problems.
And is this just kind of a facile gloss over real deep pathology to say well, just journal
and think that you have freedom and you'll be fine.
>>RICHARD RORTY: I don't think that you can decide to get over a mental illness.
It doesn't work that way.
It's like saying to someone suffering from depression, 'Oh cheer up, snap out of it.'
There's no way they can obey that instruction.
JAMES PAWELSKI: Again, I think it's easy to misunderstand.
It's easy to caricature.
I also think it's easy to miss an important point.
And I think contemporary psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy makes much about the ability
that human beings have to think in different ways and that thinking differently makes a
significant difference in our mental health and so I don't think.
I think it would be irresponsible to dismiss James' own report as having nothing to it.
How much we make of it.
I think it's possible to go, again, to the other extreme and say, well then, if anybody
has any psychopathology whatsoever it's because they're not thinking straight.
And they need to sign up for philosophy 101 or something of that sort and I think the
situation is much more complex than that.
But I do believe that there is a lot that can be done for, for example, depression.
The rate of depression in this country now is, has gone by some estimates, it's multiplied
tenfold over the last 50 years.
And that's an astounding reality and how can we then work to ameliorate the situation.
What can we do?
And one approach is psycho-pharmacological.
So let's get enough Prozac to help people along and I think there's a role that these
kinds of drugs can play.
My concern is that they're playing a role that's far too large...they're being asked
to play a role that's far too large for them to be able to play realistically.
And I think that, again, cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive psychology, and other kinds
of even thinking about philosophical practice, philosophical counseling as an example.
There's a lot that can be done.
There's a lot that we can learn as human beings about how to shift our focus, how to create
meaning, how to shift our perspectives on situations and that that then really has a
lot to do with how well we do in terms of our mental health.
Think back to Plato's myth of the cave.
What is that but a story of perspective shift where the folks who are chained to the back
wall of the cave see their, what they perceive seems to them to be the ultimate reality and
the freeing of that is a perspective shift of a pretty radical nature and the implication
there, I think, is that that has a real important, makes a real important difference in our lives
as human beings.
[music]