Salt Lake Community College

An Attempt at the Moral Philosophy and Its Origin

Where does it come from?
Subject: William James
Tomas Hinds
Introduction to Philosophy
Alexander Izrailevsky
07-31-2014
http://tomashinds.weebly.com
William James was born in New York City in the year 1842. He was one of five children born
to Henry James, Sr.. His father had inherited a great sum of money and spared no expense on his
childrens education. As a result, William James attended schools in the United States, England,
France, Switzerland, and Germany, and was also privately tutored. He became familiar with the
major museums and galleries in every city his family visited. He was fluent in five languages,
including French, German, and Italian. He met, listened to, and talked with frequent visitors of
his fathers such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Thomas Carlyle, and Lord Alfred Tennyson. Through his fathers influence, as well
as these other well known friends, William became widely read and well versed in philosophy.
Uncommon at the time, his father even encouraged dinner table arguments by the children about
every kind of issue.
At the age of seventeen William James wanted to become a painter. His father, Henry James,
Sr.,wanted him to seek a career in the sciences or philosophy. Only because William persisted,
his father allowed him to study with William Morris Hunt, the leading American portraitist at
that time in Newport, Rhode Island. The inherited wealth of his father was a key factor of his
extensive, if sporadic education. After six months or so William decided it was not for him,
perhaps more because of guilt than a lack of talent.

In 1861, The American Civil War began. President Lincoln called for volunteers and William
committed himself to a short-term enlistment of three months. As his health was in delicate state,
he left when his enlistment expired. With his family moving to Boston, and obeying his father's
wishes, he enrolled in The Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University and began his
studies in chemistry. Over the next two years he moved into physiology and in 1863 entered
Harvards Medical School. After a couple of years, medicine, too, failed to arouse his
enthusiasm. He postponed medical school for a year to join a scientific expedition, traveling to
the Amazon, with Lois Agassiz, hoping natural history might be his true love. It proved to be just
another frivolous endeavor; he hated collecting specimens. His health problems forced him to
quit the expedition. He returned to his family home, now in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and
returned to medical school. Plagued with an assortment of ailments-back pain, weak vision,
digestive disorders-most likely exacerbated by his future fear. Seemingly restless, he left home,
again. For nearly two years, seeking relief from his ailments, he traveled to France and Germany
where he studied under Hermann von Helmholtz and other leading physiologists, becoming
thoroughly conversant with the New Psychology. Failing to find a cure for his medical
problems, he returned to America, back to his family home. He went back to Harvard Medical
School, passed his exams, and received his medical degree in 1869. Ultimately he had no
intention of practicing medicine and seemed lost. He had acquired the academic knowledge with
no intent of practical application. For the next year he would confine himself to his parents
home, troubled by the profound differences between his scientific views of the mind and the
world and his father's mystical and spiritual ones, the depression of determinism was sinking in,
to the point that he contemplated suicide.
Many years later he described his fears in Varieties of Religious Experience in the guise of a
memoir given him by an anonymous Frenchman:
I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there;
when suddenly there fell upon me without warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a
horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an
epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely
idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his
knees drawn up against his chin. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. I became a mass of
quivering fear. This universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning
with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I
never knew before, and that I have never felt since.
If mechanism gave a true picture of the mind, then all his thoughts, desires, and volition were
no more than the predetermined interactions of physical particles; he was as helpless to
determine his actions as the epileptic patient in the asylum.
In the spring of 1870, while reading Charles Renouvier, he discovered the solution to his
problem. Renouvier had attempted to prove the possibility of free will will by appealing to the
experience of deliberately sustaining a thought against the surge of other thoughts. Concentrated
thinking and deliberate attentiveness are the first examples of the possibility of freely willed
decisions. Where previously suicide was thought the only possible deliberate act, Renouvier
sparked new thought in James.
"Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without
carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed
the only manly form to put my daring into;now, I will go a step further with my will, not only act
with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power. My belief, to be
sure, can't be optimistic-but I will posit life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of
the ego to the world. Life shall be... doing and suffering and creating." --- William James
And he began investigating the conditions that made his decision possible.
True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are
those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that,
therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.
The trivial truth of his own life was, he was without a purpose. He was bored. He had vast
amounts of knowledge, with no outlet or interaction for further revelation of truth.
The remedy, his remedy, he found in revelation when reading the work of Charles Renouvier.
My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. -- William James
This revelation sparked in him the right to pursue interactions with others as a teacher.
Because the facts, and our experience of them, change we must beware of regarding our truths
as absolute, as rationalists tend to do (Pragmatism, pp. 91-97, 100-101).
The moral philosophy of William James lies in his life experiences and the most serious moral
problem, boredom, was the cause for his invalidity in his late twenties. The recognition of the
problem led him to define it, and finally, to offer a remedy. His remedy came in the form of a
professorship at his alma mater, Harvard. His career there spanned over thirty years.
Begin to be now, what you will be hereafter. -- William James
"The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without
the sympathy of the community." --- William James
"The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his
attitudes." --- William James
"To change ones life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly." --- William James
"Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action." --- William James
"If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it." --- William James
Works cited
Green, Christopher D. "Introduction to the Principles of Psychology William
James 1890." The principles of psychology (1999).
Hunt, Morton The Psychologist Malgre Lui: William JamesKnopf Doubleday
Publishing Group. (16 September, 2009). eBook 30 July. 2014
James, William. The meaning of truth. Vol. 2. Harvard University Press, 1975.
30 July.2014
James, William Pragmatism (31 July 2010) Hard cover. 30 July 2014.
Pomerleau, Wayne P. William James (1842-1910).IEP - Internet Encyclopedia
of
Philosophy. Web. 30 July. 2014