Out in Paperback / William James -- In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

William James -- In The Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson, Mariner '06, 622 pages, ISBN #0618919899. Index, principal sources, source notes, grouping of b&w images.

"If this life be not a real fight," said William James, "in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight -- as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem."

Such is the remarkable epigraph of William James's biography, which won the Bancroft Prize. In an interview, author Robert D. Richardson describes James's importance to American culture:

Why is William James, who died almost a hundred years ago, still important today?

William James has three big claims on our attention. First, he was one of the founders of modern, physiology-based psychology. Second, he is a key figure in American philosophy, giving us both pragmatism and radical empiricism. Third, he made religion possible for educated moderns by his insistence that real religion is not churches, creeds, scriptures, and priests, but the personal religous experience of the individual. Taken as a whole, his work is a major underpinning of American individualism. He was also a great teacher and a great writer, though in a way entirely different from his famous novelist brother, Henry."

It begins to sound like William James means something to you personally. How?

He is one of the people I go to for help, for guidance, for strength to get through a bad day. Like Marcus Aurelius, Samuel Johnson, Thoreau and Emerson and Erik Erikson, William James is someone I read when things get tough, when I get confused, depressed, or lost. To borrow a phrase from the great Quaker leader Rufus Jones, William James has laid his mind on me.

In a passage History Wire found particularly insightful, James tells of a theory of emotions he discovered along with a Danish psychologist named Lange, to the effect that emotions follow events rather than precede them. "We are afraid because we run, or sad because we weep, not the other way around. This has huge practical implications. "If we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves," says James, "we must assiduously,  and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the outward movements of those contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate....Smooth the brow, brighten the eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the frame (straighten up!) and speak in a major key, pass the genial compliment, and your heart must be frigid indeed if it do not gradually thaw."