William James, The Principles of Psychology

notes to the dog-sitter & philosophers who fall asleep at the symphony

“How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young, — or slender!”

Your friend has dragged you to an endless awards dinner in a hotel ballroom. It’s the culmination of a conference about… psychology or something? The mind and society? The mind in society? One of those titles that leaves your brain as soon as you hear it. 

But it’s important to your friend, so you’ve dressed up, you’ve agreed not to check your phone too often or too conspicuously, and here you are, at a round table of strangers, picking at a freezing salad. 

Whenever one of your table-mates learns that you’re not in the field — that you’re merely a plus-one — conversation turns cool and perfunctory. You feel like one of the out-of-season cherry tomatoes on your plate: unwanted, unnecessary, ineffectually decorative.

There is, however, this one guy next to you. He’s got a long beard (you didn’t catch his name, or maybe he forgot to introduce himself) and he’s so cheerfully intent on everything you say that you wonder if he somehow missed the memo about your irrelevance. Or maybe he too is a cherry tomato? Anyway the conversation is proceeding too quickly for you to ask.

He notices that you hold your fork in your left hand — are you left-handed, or did you grow up in a country where the silverware is handled differently? Do you realize what an outlier America is, cutlery-wise?

You mention that you’ve got a babysitter at home, and he all but leaps into your lap, wanting to know how old your child is. You see, he was just reading the most fascinating thing about how drawing abilities develop through toddlerhood, and, well, it would really be much easier to show you — you don’t think they’d mind if he drew on the tablecloth, do you? 

You’re so involved in this peculiar conversation that you don’t notice, for a minute, that someone has lowered the ballroom’s lights. And that everyone else in the room has gone quiet. There’s a woman  up on stage at the podium — you have the impression that she’s just finished saying something. And now she seems to be gazing in your direction. Is she asking you to be quiet? Oh dear. You blush and stare into your lap.

But your bearded friend (Oh God, what is he doing?) leaps to his feet. He starts toward the stage, murmuring and apologizing, wedging between peoples’ chairs (he’s going to be kicked out; his napkin is still tucked into his pants; of course you befriended the one lunatic in the room). He climbs onto the stage — 

And everyone in the ballroom stands to applaud. He is, it turns out, not a guest — he’s the honoree.

Ladies and gentleman, I give you William James.

I am not, I assure you, one of those people who reads philosophy for pleasure. I don’t even read it out of obligation; I simply don’t read it. I’m comforted, in the abstract, that people much smarter than me have gone to the trouble of sorting out the deep truths of existence, just as I’m comforted that engineers have sorted out the proper dimensions for bridges. But in neither case do I feel a tremendous impulse to check their work.

William James, though, belongs to that narrow class of philosophers (Montaigne, Hume, Schopenhauer) who refuse to stay put in the philosophy building; he accompanies you to the bar, to the supermarket, to the gym. He writes not for his fellow professors and not for posterity but for you. You know those notes you write to the dog-sitter before you race off to the airport — hurried, candid, useful, brimming with emendations in the margins and multiple postscripts (If she’s being weird about the living room, turn off the fan — sometimes the curtains flap in a way that freaks her out…)? That’s how William James writes about everything. He’s leaving you in charge of a human body — a human life —  and he needs to be sure, before he goes, that you know how this stuff works. 

On the importance of maintaining a schedule: 

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work are subjects of express volitional deliberation.  

On surviving an earthquake:

Everybody was excited, but the excitement at first, at any rate, seemed to be almost joyous. Here at last was a real earthquake after so many years of harmless waggle! Above all, there was an irresistible desire to talk about it and exchange experiences.

On the experience of anticipation:

When watching for the distant clock to strike, our mind is so filled with its image that at every moment we think we hear the longed-for or dreaded sound. So of an awaited footstep. Every stir in the wood is for the hunter his game; for the fugitive his pursuers. Every bonnet in the street is momentarily taken by the lover to enshroud the head of his idol.

For years I’ve kept the two volumes of his collected works by my bedside, and I dip into them whenever I need a concentrated dose of intellectual joy. He makes most writers (including those who haven’t been dead for a century-plus) seem to be lacking vital signs.

The book in which his pulse throbs most vigorously is The Principles of Psychology. Usefully whittled down to 400 pages (from 1,400!) in the Library of America edition, it’s a bristling encyclopedia on the strange condition of sentience. It features sketched-on-a-napkin-looking graphs (do sharp pains dissipate more quickly than dull ones?), cheerily antique drawings of the brain, and more sensible advice than you can find in gigabytes of well-meaning self-improvement podcasts.

In the chapter on The Self, James writes about the fact that we must choose among our various contradictory ambitions. Our aspiration to be rich, he writes, runs counter to our ambition to be a saint; “the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay.” And, he goes on, once we choose to focus on wealth-accumulation or romantic conquest, we no longer feel tormented by our lack of philosophical distinction or saintliness. The un-chosen identity withers away. 

The chosen identity, on the other hand, has a tendency to metastasize.

So we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing; he has ‘pitted’ himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn’t do that nothing else counts. 

 So far, so insightful. But what makes it a William James passage is what he does next — which is to extrapolate this observation into a bit of practical advice. 

The second best boxer doesn’t care that he’s the world’s billionth best poker player — because it’s boxing rather than poker that he’s chosen to identify with. But what if he were to give up his identification with boxing too?

“To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified,” he writes. 

There is the strangest lightness about the heart when one's nothingness in a particular line is once accepted in good faith. All is not bitterness in the lot of the lover sent away by the final inexorable 'No.' Many Bostonians… would be happier women and men to-day, if they could once for all abandon the notion of keeping up a Musical Self, and without shame let people hear them call a symphony a nuisance. How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young, — or slender!

This is the voice of a man who has been broken up with, who has fallen asleep at the symphony, who has noticed with alarm a new patch of scalp in the mirror. Even the punctuation of that last sentence, with its archaic “,—”, suggests handwriting to me, with its human fallibility. And that final clause ( — or slender!), with its confessionally candid exclamation point, reads like a helpless and live realization. I am not exempt!, James seems always to be reminding us. He gave up recently on being slender, and, after years of unhappy sucking in, it brought him joy. He tells you this not because it bolsters some philosophic project of his, or because it makes him sound impressive, but because it’s true — and because he wants you to be happy.

Which is why William James — in addition to being a philosopher, psychologist, and essayist — has a decent claim on being the father of self-help. No genre is derided as often — or as justly. Most self-help books, with their recycled platitudes and cardboard case histories, deserve their place on the curb, under the wobbly air conditioner, in the giveaway bin. James’s books, though, flow directly from the genre’s headwaters, where the water is pure and life-giving. What he delivers, from beneath iron-jawed dust-jacket photos, is what the genre’s name seems actually to promise. He acquaints you with yourself. And he gives you help.