Sick Souls, Healthy Minds
Sick Souls, Healthy Minds
Section titled “Sick Souls, Healthy Minds”
Metadata
Section titled “Metadata”- Author: John Kaag
- Full Title: Sick Souls, Healthy Minds
- Category: #books
Highlights
Section titled “Highlights”- in the early stages of the Principles of Psychology, James seems to be veering toward the conclusion the seventeenth-century idealist Baruch Spinoza put forward, that the highest activity of human life is learning for the sake of understanding the world and ourselves, because, in short, to understand is to be free.
- Tags: #favorite
- James concludes his analysis of habit by underscoring its possible transcendence, writing in the Principles, “Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”
- Tags: #favorite
- If it is a choice at all, the act of having “an experience” is something akin to the act of laughing: one might be more or less inclined and disposed, but it’s never forced. We have the power to dull or preempt what James calls the “higher vision of inner significance,” but cultivating and maintaining it is another matter entirely. For a person who is obsessed with the force of free will, who thinks that life’s efficacy turns exclusively on one’s decisions and practical activities, this discussion can be rather disturbing. It suggests that human meaning often depends on seeing things clearly as they appear and pass away, and that seeing things clearly means not acting and willing, but rather being quiet and still—in seeing something else.
- Tags: #favorite
- Pragmatism is about life and its amelioration. That’s it. And that is enough. What could matter more than this? Other than this? James was interested in “the truth” only to the extent that the modest certainties that we live by might lead to the improvement of our not-so-easy-to-endure condition.
- Tags: #favorite
- By the 1890s, James’s life as a social and political reformer was unified by a coherent philosophical worldview espousing the sanctity of personal freedom, the respect for individual difference, the primacy of meaningful action, and an attentiveness to the experiential realities of individuals and their communities.
- Tags: #favorite
- In the words of James from “On a Certain Blindness,” “neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands.”31 There is, for the pragmatist, no such thing as a view from nowhere, some elevated position from which to evaluate truth claims. Rather, all claims are made in the thick of things, in the specific contexts of what John Dewey (pragmatism’s representative at the University of Chicago and Columbia University) would later call “problematic situations.” From beginning to end, philosophy was to be experiential: it was done in the midst of experience and judged on its ability to interpret and enrich it.
- Tags: #favorite
- For a Jamesian, Protagoras lays down an existential gauntlet: Can you live like you are the measurer of all things? Can you live like the life of the universe depends on it? These are the questions of a committed humanist, one who holds that the meaning of life is up to the liver. You can act on a whim. Go ahead. Just know that you must always own up to your actions. If “man” is indeed the measure of all things, individuals must be prepared to shoulder absolute responsibility.
- insisting in the Varieties, “Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”
- Tags: #favorite