Sometimes I get this peculiar feeling. This queer compulsion to discharge words or music. My ears burn and my heart pounds. The words or music when they come out seem to relieve this sensation. But the words are never good enough, although they are much better than the music that comes out, which often makes me feel like an incredibly expressive musical mute since I have limited means to translate my emotions into music, and can only put as much feeling as I can into an incoherent series of notes.

I’ve had a marked interest in William James lately and have been reading his works. For some reason, his writings sparked a desire in me to write my sensations away. I read his The Will To Believe, which touched on a topic close to my heart, the tension between the heart and the mind, between certainty and doubt.

But I will not write about this article tonight. Instead, I’ll just quote passages from On A Certain Blindness in Human Beings that resonated with me. Passages that reminded me of a conversation I had with my best friend on what I call “biodiversity”, an ecological term I perverted to succinctly describe the multiplicity of views, convictions, value judgements, ways of living and characters found in humans, from the saint to the fool to the pervert to the prostitute to the con to the selfless to the selfish. From the viewpoint of each of these characters and many more, their choices and ways of living are vividly valid. This pluralism undermines the suggestion that there is an absolute and singular best way to conduct one’s life or thinking. He remarked that without biodiversity the world and our relationship would have been a simpler affair because there would only be agreement and no disagreement nor the friction and grief found in people with conflicting convictions of equal intensity.

While I appreciate this view, I disagree with it because such a world be too predictable and monotonous and for reasons that Williams James cites in this passage:

OUR judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other.

Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat, is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.

We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons’ conditions or ideals.

...The spectator’s judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.

...Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is ‘importance’ in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.

And James then quotes from Robert Louis Stevenson, in an essay which James really thinks “deserves to become immortal, both for the truth of its matter and the excellence of its form”:

...”For, to repeat, the ground of a man’s joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology. . . . It has so little bond with externals . . . that it may even touch them not, and the man’s true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy. . . . In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.

“For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books. . . . In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall.”

And then this poetic and beautiful response from James:

These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. “To miss the joy is to miss all.” Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite, and each one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. And it seems as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only by hardening the heart toward everything unlike them. Our deadness toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective world, as Clifford called it, the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.

I have to end this post with a random comment, which probably mars the beautiful passage I just quoted from James. But Mixing Memory seems to have a similar interest in topics I write about, such as William James and Neuroaesthetics.

But actually, that’s not the end, as I suddenly realised that Chris’s views on certain matters bears a strong resemblance to the ideas expressed by James in the passage above. And I’m really partial to William James (and Chris). Chris, I should have gotten the hint from you that William James really rocks when you told me about your interest in him. As usual, I have to find out and experience it for myself if I’m not to discount it right away. I wonder, is all affirmation self-affirmation?

I think James’ works will be as lasting and influential as David Hume’s.

Link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on William James.