"The sanguine and healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery-line,
the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension.
There are men who seemed to have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed
to their credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the pain-threshold, which the slightest
irritance fatally send them over… Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one
side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually live on the other?"
WILLIAM JAMES
These are the words spoken by the philosopher and “Father of American Psychology” William James in his sets of lectures delivered in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. These lectures were later published under the name “Varieties of Religious Experience” and had become widely influential to this day.
William James was also one of the founders of Pragmatism, a branch of philosophy that deals with problem-solving, actionability, and practicality of conceptions as opposed to solely discussing endless ideas and hyperbole without exacting their real-world application. Consistent with his pragmatism, James insisted that the value of religious experience has everything to do with quality and its fruits – in other words, are these experiences reasonable and helpful in the long run?
James suffered from a variety of both physical and mental ailments in his early adulthood which left him in a period of continual contemplations of suicide. He was diagnosed with neurasthenia, a vaguely defined medical condition of his time that is characterized by fatigue, headaches, irritability, and emotional disturbances. For most of his life, he had to grapple with bouts of depression and melancholia. His profound experience with existential suffering led him to the realization and the development of his very own definition of free will which becomes the catalyst of being a sick soul to that of the “twice born”.
*To become the “twice born” is the goal of the sick-minded.
William James declared: “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”
In his book “Varieties of Religious Experiences”, William James presented his distinctive observation on the two perspectives of viewing the world and on life: the healthy-minded and the sick soul. Religion, according to James, rather than being a definitive and dogmatic institution of communal belief systems and its rituals, is a series of subjective emotional experiences, faith, and habitual behaviors of an individual in their solitude, or rather, whatever that an individual may consider divine in relation to their private selves.
(It is important to note that those who habitually live in the healthy-minded world may not find the perspective of the sick soul useful and vice versa.)
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In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James exacted a clear distinction between two different conceptions of our religious experience: healthy-mindedness and those with the propensity of the “twice born” – ones who had traversed through sick-mindedness and emerged luminously.
In their extremities, healthy-mindedness and morbid-mindedness seem to clash fiercely. However, we are most often a mixture of the two. Let’s take a look at the two varieties of perceptual tendencies:
The "Healthy-Minded"
The healthy-minded, according to James: “habitually live on the sunny-side of their misery-line”, their “escape is just a lucky chance” and no essential difference from the morbid-minded mystics… the so-called “naturally healthy-minded”, falls short in the practice of deeper reflections. Perhaps the sunny-sidedness perspective is only due to pure fortune where one has not been chronically introduced to severe suffering. To ascribe any religious value to the superficially sunny-sidedness could be a mere sign of forgetfulness, luck, and a lack of depth. The conventional understanding of happiness or blessedness, viewed in this way, is a fragile fiction, a hollow form of the so-called “security”, a sugar-coated lie of the cowardly, a sweeping under the rug of the greater questions that deserve diligent examination and radical understanding.
"Even if we suppose a man so packed with healthy-mindedness as never to have experienced in
his own person any of these sobering intervals, still, if he is a reflecting being, he must generalize and
class his own lot with that of others; and, doing so, he must see that his escape is just a lucky chance
and no essential difference. He might just as well have been born to an entirely different fortune.
And then indeed the hollow security! …take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world,
and in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure. Either his ideals in the line of
his achievements are pitched far higher than the achievements themselves, or else he has secret
ideals of which the world knows nothing, and in regard to which he inwardly knows himself to be found wanting."
WILLIAM JAMES
Of course, there are many merits to healthy-mindedness – for example: there is a rejuvenating power in positive thinking. Genuine positive thinking is a product of a transformed, or, “twice borned” individual and is not of the shallow who habitually ignore or overlook the darker side of existence. In other words, a genuinely positive attitude is capable of having a greater perspective which leaves few stones unturned due to a lowered sense of self-righteousness and judgment.
The "Sick Souls"
In stark contrast to the healthy-minded individuals – the sick souls are tormented by both external and internal conditions and their relation to existence. Experiences of meaninglessness and intermittent disconnectedness provide an opportunity to explore and understand the more philosophical and spiritual nature of our existence.
"We must address ourselves to the unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls, as we may call
them in contrast to the healthy-minded, have to say of the secrets of their prison-house, their own
peculiar form of consciousness… Let us see rather whether pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment of
human helplessness may not open a profounder view and put into our hands a more complicated
key to the meaning of the situation… Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure,
as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight,
a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of
coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life
ceases at their touch as a piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it."
WILLIAM JAMES
The sick souls, often times suffer from decapacitating melancholy and moments of existential perplexity, whether arising through troubled external circumstance, physiological ailments, or are purely philosophical in nature, sometimes develop profound astonishment and take life-saving inspirations from their negative realities.
Due to the unsettling nature of inmost suffering, it has a much broader effect on one’s perceptions, thoughts, and emotions than that of the positive states of mind. Inmost suffering, by its very nature, is highly discomforting and thus it thrusts one out of the comfort zone of shallowness and into a much deeper region of self-reflection. The sick souls seem to experience more profound shifts in how one experiences the world of which such shifts between contrasting realities give rise to very profound levels of insight into the meaning of life.
According to James, there are three kinds of sick souls:
Existential angst – vanity of mortal things (Tolstoy)
Neurotic – pathologically sensitive conscience (Bunyan)
Panic-fear nervousness – fear of the universe (“the Frenchman”)
It is important to note that there is no intellectual insanity or delusions present in all three types of sick-mindedness that James had described – the sufferer is able to observe and describe their condition with cognizant clarity. James had also briefly touched on the ones who endure “insane melancholia, with its hallucinations and delusions… desperation absolute and complete”. However, the more extreme forms of sick-mindedness were not incorporated into James’ three examples.
Characteristics of the Sick-minded:
Hard-won faith but exceptionally strong faith once won
No white-washing or sugar-coating
Open to painful paradoxes and despair
Cannot ignore world’s evil and meaninglessness
Crisis of meaning (existential crisis)
Active participants
Profound insight
Personal discovery of the path of deliverance
The "Twice Born"
The “twice-born” are those who employ the continuously “sick-mind”, a sort of Kierkegaardian “sickness unto death” as a source of inspiration for continual self-development. Eventually, some of these sick souls become the “twice born” – ones who had recovered from their existential melancholy, a crisis of meaning, and have even triumphed by thrusting themselves into the realm of saintliness.
Those who belong to the “twice born” category emerge much stronger with more enthusiasm for life than those who just go through the motions by not being open to deeper questions and not living a life of close examination. The twice-born who are able to restore their own mental health reach a much deeper plane of happiness and a more well-rounded state of conscious being.
Another important aspect of the “twice born” seems to be that they have made friends with their personal suffering, or, demons – deep existential uncertainty that never seems to subside.
Application of Pragmatism and Free Will
William James had clearly identified himself with the morbid-minded. His stance on existential crisis, interpretation of free will, and the need for pragmatism in philosophy led him to become one of the most influential philosophical thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries.
According to James, free will is the decision to focus our attention on whatever we would like to focus on. His unique definition of free will is one that enables us to act accordingly, as opposed to the definition of one having full capacity to choose without impediment. This understanding of free will would become one of the most invigorating assertions that helped James transform his melancholic disposition into that of the “twice born”.
Consequent to free will, he had also decided that one can act according to what is most beneficial for the situation, the individual, and the wider society as a whole. Affirming free will was his first deliberate act of freedom.
James had also realized that in order for profound depression to lead to any significant religious experience, the sufferer must possess an extraordinary desire to make sense of things despite the pain that one is enduring.
Pragmatism contains the function of thought that guides action. Consequently, we can apply this perspective and view morbid-mindedness as a tool that guides our actions and method of resolution. A pragmatist, in a nutshell, is someone who is able to see endless possibilities and endure uncertainty with contrivance. Jamesian Pragmatism can be employed as a method of resolving and grounding the more unstable nature of existence into a more concrete, applicable, and harmonious solution.
"See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings to facts and concreteness,
observes truth at its work in particular cases, and generalises. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for
all sorts of definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a pure abstraction, to the
bare name of which we must defer. When the pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we
must defer, the rationalist is unable to recognise the concretes from which his own abstraction is taken.
He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have only sought to trace exactly why people follow it
and always ought to follow it. Your typical ultra-abstractions fairly shudders at concreteness:
other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered,
he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler."
WILLIAM JAMES