It is somehow comforting to know that one of the greatest minds of the past 100 years had a hard time making up his own mind.<\/p>\n
William James, the oldest child in a celebrated American family and a pioneer in psychology and philosophy, was apparently a famous ditherer. \u201cHe\u2019s just like a blob of mercury,\u201d his sister Alice wrote. \u201cYou cannot put a mental finger upon him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Better than that, perhaps, James was a man of restless intelligence. While teaching at Harvard<\/a>, he explored medicine, the mind, religion, and all the big questions that still beset people.<\/p>\n One of those questions was: \u201cWhat makes a life significant?\u201d \u2014 the title of a lecture James delivered at Harvard in 1900. (The answer, in sum, was to be awake to the significance of other people, and to escape that \u201cgreat cloud bank of ancestral blindness\u201d that leads to intolerance and cruelty.)<\/p>\n The same question was also the title of a panel on Monday (April 26), which celebrated James\u2019 life and marked the centennial year of his death.<\/p>\n James Kloppenberg<\/a>, a 40-year James scholar and Harvard\u2019s Charles Warren Professor of American History, moderated the panel, and began with a question of his own: What relationship does James\u2019 thought have to \u201cour own cultural moment?\u201d<\/p>\n Panelists Louis Menand<\/a>, Sissela Bok<\/a>, and Cornel West<\/a> arrived at variations on the same answer: that James lives on into the 21st century, still a formative, formidable mind.<\/p>\n Menand, Harvard\u2019s Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English, said James was the equivalent of today\u2019s public intellectual. He still offers a lesson to the modern world, said Menand: Beware of training and revering only specialists. James, after all, was not trained in anything he excelled in, and his schooling was as scattershot as it was fervent.<\/p>\n Bok, a philosopher who is Senior Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies<\/a>, said one of James\u2019 ideas, to harness the energy of making war to the pursuit of making peace, would find purchase today. \u201cHe would surely be encouraged,\u201d she said, at the vitality of doing public service, both inside and outside the university.<\/p>\n It is worth noting too that James\u2019 \u201cnon-militarism\u201d was at odds with the tenor of his own time, said Bok, and James \u201cagonized over the increasingly aggressive role his country was taking\u201d in the world.<\/p>\n And in another modern echo, she said, James worried that peace-loving men carried no weight equivalent to the warriors of the day.<\/p>\n In answer to his own doubts, James wrote \u201cThe Moral Equivalent of War,\u201d a 1906 essay in which he proposed harnessing \u201cmanly\u201d virtues to the cause of peace. \u201cThe martial type of character,\u201d he wrote, \u201ccan be bred without war.\u201d<\/p>\n He had a similar thought in \u201cWhat Makes a Life Significant?\u201d inspired by a train ride back from the Assembly Grounds in Chautauqua, N.Y. This \u201cSabbatical city\u201d of sobriety, peace, and order, this \u201chuman drama without a villain or a pang,\u201d James wrote, made him suddenly long \u201cfor something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre.\u201d<\/p>\n But if humans yearn for \u201ceverlasting battle\u201d or visions of \u201chuman nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack,\u201d he mused, why reach for war? Why not satisfy the same urges with hard labor \u2014 with pick, ax, scythe, and shovel. Such work, James wrote, reveals \u201cthe great fields of heroism lying around me.\u201d<\/p>\n West, a former Harvard scholar who is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton<\/a>, said James had a sense of what the modern world needs now: \u201cnon-market values like love, empathy, benevolence, and sacrifice for others.\u201d<\/p>\n He also had a sense that greatness could be something \u201cdifferent than success,\u201d said West. \u201cWilliam James,\u201d he wished out loud, \u201cspeak to us in 2010.\u201d<\/p>\n James might bring another lesson forward into the 21st century: Leave your mind free, open, and skeptical.<\/p>\n It stood him in good stead that James lacked a systematic education, said Menand, author of \u201cThe Metaphysical Club,\u201d a 2001 primer on pragmatism and other intellectual currents in James\u2019 post-Civil War America.<\/p>\n Menand outlined the hopscotch schooling of James, whose father moved the family from place to place \u2014 back and forth to Europe \u2014 settling sometimes for only months in one place. By age 13, James had already attended 10 schools.<\/p>\n By 1861, James was enrolled at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, where he quickly jumped from engineering to anatomy to natural history and finally to medicine. A medical degree from Harvard in 1869 was the only credential James ever earned, and it was one he never used. He went on to do pioneering work in psychology and then philosophy. In the end, said Menand, James remained \u201ca restless spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n Through it all, James had a capacious, welcoming intelligence, said Kloppenberg.<\/p>\n The philosopher\u2019s summer home in New Hampshire had nine doors, and \u201cthey all opened out,\u201d he said, \u201cconsistent with James\u2019 approach to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Those open doors invited in the big questions.<\/p>\n The meaning of life, said Bok, \u201cis a question people keep asking.\u201d<\/p>\n In a continuing James celebration this year, Harvard\u2019s Houghton Library will house \u201cLife is in the Transitions: William James, 1842-1910,\u201d an exhibit of sketches, manuscripts, lecture notes, and letters, from Aug. 16 to Dec. 23. Houghton will host the final day of an Aug. 13-16 conference on James, \u201cIn the Footsteps of William James: A Symposium on the Legacy \u2014 and the Ongoing Uses \u2014 of James\u2019s Work.\u201d It\u2019s co-sponsored by the William James Society and the Chocorua (N.H.) Community Association. (For more information, visit the William James Society Web site<\/span><\/span><\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is somehow comforting to know that one of the greatest minds of the past 100 years had a hard time making up his own mind. William James, the oldest child in a celebrated American family and a pioneer in psychology and philosophy, was apparently a famous ditherer. \u201cHe\u2019s just like a blob of mercury,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-546924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Celebrating William James<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n