Is Life Worth Living? E-Book

William James

• Herausgeber: e-artnow
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Is Life Worth Living? is a philosophical rumination by essayist William James. Whether life is worth living or not is a constant red thread question in this book, while reasons for not committing suicide are also pondered.

Leseprobe

William James

Is Life Worth Living?

 

e-artnow, 2023 Contact: [email protected]

EAN 4066339567702

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WORKS BY WILLIAM JAMES, M. D., ETC.,Professor of Psychology in Harvard University.

The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols., 8vo. New York:Henry Holt & Co. London: Macmillan & Co. 1890$4.80.

Psychology. Briefer Course. 12mo. Ibid., 1892. $1.60.

Is Life Worth Living?

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By

William James

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PHILADELPHIA S. BURNS WESTON, 1305 ARCH ST. 1896

PUBLISHER’S NOTE.

The address contained in this book was originally given before the Young Men’s Christian Association of Harvard University, in May, 1895. It was afterwards repeated before the Society for Ethical Culture of Philadelphia and the School of Applied Ethics at Plymouth. It was printed in the International Journal of Ethics for October, 1895, and, the demand for it having been so great, we are glad to have the permission of the author and of the management of the Journal to republish it in more convenient form.

The author desires us to add that he owes his application of the quotation with which the address closes, to Mr. W. M. Salter, who used it in a similar way in an article in the Index for August 24, 1882.

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IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

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When Mr. Mallock’s book with this title appeared some fifteen years ago, the jocose answer that “it depends on the liver” had great currency in the newspapers. The answer that I propose to give to-night cannot be jocose. In the words of one of Shakespeare’s prologues,

“I come no more to make you laugh; things now, That bear a weighty and a serious brow, Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,”

must be my theme. In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly, and I know not what such an Association as yours intends nor what you ask of those whom you invite to address you, unless it be to lead you from the surface-glamour of ​existence and for an hour at least to make you heedless to the buzzing and jigging and vibration of small interests and excitements that form the tissue of our ordinary consciousness. Without further explanation or apology, then, I ask you to join me in turning an attention, commonly too unwilling, to the profounder bass-note of life. Let us search the lonely depths for an hour together and see what answers in the last folds and recesses of things our question may find.

I.

With many men the question of life’s worth is answered by a temperamental optimism that makes them incapable of believing that anything seriously evil can exist. Our dear old Walt Whitman’s works are the standing text-book of this kind of ​optimism; the mere joy of living is so immense in Walt Whitman’s veins that it abolishes the possibility of any other kind of feeling.

“To breathe the air, how delicious! To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand!… To be this incredible God I am!… O amazement of things, even the least particle! spirituality of things!… I too carol the Sun, usher’d or at noon, or as now, setting, I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the growths of the earth…. I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old, I sing the endless finales of things, I say Nature continue– glory continues, I praise with electric voice, For I do not see one imperfection in the universe, And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last.”

So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing but his happiness to tell:

“How tell what was neither said nor done nor even thought, but tasted only and felt, with no object of my felicity but the emotion of felicity itself. I rose with the sun and I was happy; I went to walk and I was happy; I ​saw ‘Maman’ and I was happy; I left her and I was happy. I rambled through the woods and over the vine-slopes, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I worked in the garden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the indoor work, and happiness followed me everywhere; it was in no one assignable thing; it was all within myself; it could not leave me for a single instant.”

If moods like this could be made permanent and constitutions like these universal, there would never be any occasion for such discourses as the present one. No philosopher would seek to prove articulately that life is worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so would vouch for itself and the problem disappear in the vanishing of the question rather than in the coming of anything like a reply. But we are not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal; and alongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerning life, those of temperamental pessimism always exist and oppose to them a standing ​refutation. In what is called circular insanity, phases of melancholy succeed phases of mania, with no outward cause that we can discover, and often enough to one and the same well person life will offer incarnate radiance to-day and incarnate dreariness to-morrow, according to the fluctuations of what the older medical books used to call the concoction of the humors. In the words of the newspaper joke, “it depends on the liver.” Rousseau's ill-balanced constitution undergoes a change, and behold him in his latter evil days a prey to melancholy and black delusions of suspicion and fear. And some men seem launched upon the world even from their birth with souls as incapable of happiness as Walt Whitman’s was of gloom, and they have left us their messages in even more lasting verse than his–the exquisite Leopardi, for example, or our ​own contemporary, James Thomson, in that pathetic book, “The City of Dreadful Night,” which I think is less well-known than it should be for its literary beauty, simply because men are afraid to quote its words–they are so gloomy and at the same time so sincere. In one place the poet describes a congregation gathered to listen to a preacher in a great unillumined cathedral at night. The sermon is too long to quote, but it ends thus: