The following is a paper I just finished writing about the next lecture in Varieties titled "The Sick Soul." It will shed more light into my current state, I hope.
Miguel Carter-Fisher
PHI 290
Evil: The Sick-Soul
William James begins his lecture “The Sick Soul” by reflecting upon the healthy-minded conception of evil. A healthy-minded individual is one settles “his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or eve, on occasion, by denying outright that they exist.” To the healthy-minded evil is a disease and to worry over the disease is in itself an additional form of that evil (121). The best thing to do about evil is to repent and go on as if you never had any relation to the sin. The sick-soul sees evil quite differently:
“There are people for whom evil means only a mal-adjustment with things, a wrong correspondence of one’s life with the environment. Such evil as this is curable, in principle at least, upon the natural plane, for merely by modifying either the self or the things, or both at once, the two terms may be made to fit, and all go merry as a marriage bell again. But there are others for whom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. (127)” This later group is the sick soul.
The division of these two groups is based in how we experience the world around us. James states that recent psychology as found great use out of the term threshold, which is the point at which one state of mind passes into another. In general it is the amount of outer stimulus it takes to arouse one’s attention. For example in regards to sleep someone with a high threshold may sleep through noise that someone with a low threshold may be awakened by. The same applies to what may be called a fear, misery, or pain-threshold. James states that “The sanguine and healthy-minded live habitually on the sunny side of their misery-line, and the depressed and melancholy live beyond it, in darkness and apprehension.” He continues asking, “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 lived on the other?” (127-128) The following paragraphs shall highlight the ways in which evil is in our “essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure. (127)”
Failure is one of these inherent parts of the human condition. “The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results. (131)” But this is just the beginning. If you push further beyond the misery-threshold even successful moments are vitiated.
Life and death are inextricably together, and if life is good its negation must be bad, therefore everything is tainted (131). The cures the healthy-minded provide, such as “Cheer up, old fellow, you’ll be all right erelong, if you will only drop your morbidness!” are the application of religious value to a happy-go-lucky contentment. These solutions are superficial and do not capable of curing the full depth of the sick-soul’s longing:
“The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life not correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature.” (132)
James soon after states that, “Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness. (132)”
Throughout the rest of the lecture on the sick-soul James gives examples of various experiences of those who fall into this category. He illustrates how melancholy changes our perceptions:
“When we come to study the phenomenon of conversion or religious regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequent consequence of the change operated in the subject is a transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth. In melancholiacs there is usually a similar change, only it is in the reverse direction. The world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with. "It is as if I lived in another century," says one asylum patient.- "I see everything through a cloud," says another, "things are not as they were, and I am changed."- "I see," says a third, "I touch, but the things do not come near me, a thick veil alters the hue and look of everything."- "Persons move like shadows, and sounds seem to come from a distant world."- "There is no longer any past for me; people appear so strange; it is as if I could not see any reality, as if I were in a theatre; as if people were actors, and everything were scenery; I can no longer find myself; I walk, but why? Everything floats before my eyes, but leaves no impression."- "I weep false tears, I have unreal hands: the things I see are not real things." (141-142)
In the lecture he goes into much greater detail in the personal accounts of various individuals which shows differences in their melancholy and experience of it, but for this paper I will stop with the quote above.
James feels that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience. The healthy-minded method of ignoring evil, and “living simply in the light of good” is good as long as it works. For many it will work and there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But as a philosophical solution it is inadequate. This is because the evil which it does not take into account are genuine portions of reality. James says, “they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. (152)”
James later says, “It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever, and that, in respect of such evil, dumb submission or neglect to notice is the only practical resource.” He continues, “since the evil facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, the philosophic presumption should be that they have some rational significance, and that systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow, pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope.” (153-154)
James concludes that completest religions are those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed. He then uses Christianity and Buddhism as examples.
What really strikes me about evil to the sick-soul is that mental well being may not be dependent completely on the acceptance of new beliefs such as life after death and god, but also the denial of evils. So far, being a sick-soul myself, the greatest argument I have found in my own experience and in James for faith in God or any other religious object is its necessity for mental health. I believe it illustrates a dilemma, at least one I have experienced myself, over the choosing of truths. In all of James examples people are overtaken by their experience which largely is how it works, but in some individuals like myself there has been conflicting experience in which part of my being remains defiant. I have had moments of bliss that rush over me. Some of them have been in my mind religious experiences for a time, but physiological reasons for these experiences as well as a strong doubtfulness of religious experiences in general have often overshadowed and changed my original perception. I realize that our justification for an experience can become what the experience is to us just as our models of reality can be confused for the real thing. So James has opened up some questions to me. Do we have any choice in our justifications and reasoning in experience or are they completely predetermined by our temperament (for example could I have chosen to go with the religious rather than the physiological explanation of my own personal experiences)? If a choice is possible than I ask pragmatically which would be more useful? I am a firm believer in being open to new explanations and the benefits of critiquing one’s perceptions when new information comes about. It goes along with James’ pluralism and truth over the absolute Truth which has been very beneficial on some levels for me. But is it not also pragmatically beneficial to choose the religious explanation If that truth ensures my own mental health? If the meaning of something is what it does, than what happens when two conflicting meanings both have beneficial results? It leads me to a fork in the road where both paths lave me incomplete in some manner like our inability to get rid of evil inextricably bound to existence. I suppose these are questions any individual would have to take care of on his or her own, if they ever came across them.
3 comments:
I enjoyed the paper; however, it's based on the idea (and I'm referring here more to James's ideas than your paper) that evil exists. Perhaps in some part of his argument he justifies this; however, nowhere within what I read was I convinced that evil exists. It is stated that "Life and death are inextricably together, and if life is good its negation must be bad, therefore everything is tainted" which suggests that death is in fact a negation of life, when it could equally be argued that death is a continuation of life. I'm not even attempting to suggest that there is an afterlife, rather, that death itself, as final as it may be, is still a continuation of life (this brings up stuff about energy never being destroyed only changing forms, etc.) That was the only attempt I saw at proving the existence of evil, and, as you can see, I'm not convinced. Obviously, this post is hardly a means for adequate discussion; however, I would like to talk about whether evil exists because, obviously, I would like to argue that it doesn't.
Well I am not sure if I believe in evil existing and I don't believe that James thinks of evil as a thing, like a force in the world, so much as a category of experience (which would go well with his other philosophical writings). I think what James means by evil is an experience that we would perceive to be overwhelmingly negative (like death, depression, insanity, our inability to deny these things, and simply what many would call a "pessimistic" outlook). I hope that made sense. The healthy-minded according to James can look beyond those things in a state of denial, or refusal to take them into account. My friend Dan last class brought up a good point. He asked if there really are healthy minded people or do people just carry on like everything is going to be fine and convince themselves that it's true. This is something I'd like to discuss with you sometime, that is denial and self deception.
Actually I've had a back and forth with myself as to whether it is enjoyment of life or suffering which is the self deception. On the one hand, we could all be repressing how awful everything is and trying to pretend to be happy; however, on the other it is possible that all things enjoy life (as evidenced by every creatures incredibly strong self preservation instincts) and that suffering is merely a sensation, an equally important and enjoyable part of existence as happiness.
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