'Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James'
Philosophy as often taught today deals in fine points of abstraction. William James belonged to an older tradition, insisting that philosophy can teach us how to live. James was America’s leading philosopher and psychologist as the 20th century began, a pragmatist with an awareness of the transcendental. He was also a persuasive writer, perhaps more so even than his brother, novelist Henry James,.
Some of his writing is collected in Be Not Afraid of Life. In their introduction, the editors acknowledge that James was periodically plagued with being—in his own words—“sick souled” and wrote in “a complex response to the question of meaning.” As James put it in an 1895 lecture, “Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
James argued against determinism and in favor of free will, against the narrowness of self-regard and for awareness of the inner lives of others. The pursuit of truth is vital, yet “the truth is too great for any mind … to know the whole of it,” he added. Running through Be Not Afraid of Life are James’ warnings against emotional dullness, boredom, ennui. “Wherever eagerness is found,” he wrote, “there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is ‘importance’ in the only real and positive sense in which importance anywhere can be.”
