William James on the Cognitivity of Feelings, Religious Pessimism, and the Meaning of Life

1.

The issue of whether life is meaningful is one that may be interpreted in different ways, and one, therefore, for which a range of analyses and answers might be appropriate. On one interpretation, it is held that life cannot be genuinely meaningful as long as we are susceptible to the destructive contingencies of our natural existence. From this point of view, it is held that there is no really significant difference between those people whose lives appear, on the surface, to be meaningful and those whose do not, between the life of a great philanthropist, poet, physician or philosopher on the one hand, and the life of a person mired in thoughtless conventionalism or triviality on the other. On this view, even the richest and most satisfying lives, even the morally most exemplary lives, are diminished and rendered pointless by the likelihood of suffering and loss, and the certainty of death; the vagaries of a contingent universe overwhelm and render trivial the meaning of all human endeavors. Such a pessimistic view of the meaning of life is expressed, for example, by the teacher in Ecclesiastes, when he looks back on his life and asserts that "everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; / nothing was gained under the sun." ¹ A similar expression of pessimism is found in the well-known monologue in Shakespeare's As You Like It, which begins with "all the world's a stage," and concludes with a view of our "strange eventful history" as one that ends in "second childishness and mere oblivion / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." ²

This gloomy outlook is one which William James addresses in The Varieties of Religious Experience ([1902] 1985). He offers an evocative representation of this broad and pervasive sense of meaninglessness. His most developed views on this topic are presented in his analysis of the "sick soul," whom he characterizes in contrast to the "healthy-minded" individual. ³ "Healthy-mindedness," for James, is "the tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are good" (78). Healthy-minded persons are optimistic, and remain metaphysically secure in the face of the appearance of evil. They are content with the satisfactions and pleasures of life, and accept the facts of suffering and death as natural and metaphysically unproblematic. They feel no need to look for deeper meanings than those that can be found on the surface. "Sick souls," on the other hand, are individuals for whom life is problematic. As James puts it, ". . . the vanity of mortal things . . . the sense of sin; and the . . . fear of the universe . . . in one or other of these three ways it always is that man's original optimism and self-satisfaction get leveled with the dust" (135).

Although it might appear that James is casting an adverse judgment on those who are "sick souls" by calling them "sick," in fact he believes that these individuals have a deeper and more sensitive view of reality than their more optimistic counterparts (136). Indeed, we know from the facts of James's biography, as well his discussion in Varieties, that he himself was, and saw himself to be, a "sick soul." His existential concerns were both professional and intensely personal, resulting, in his earlier years, in periods of serious depression. Later in his life, James still held vivid memories of those troubled times. In Varieties, at the age of sixty, he recorded some of his earlier experiences of deep existential anxiety. It is now known that the following passage, which is presented as a quotation from the report of someone else, is actually a description of James's own feelings of metaphysical insecurity:

"[S]uddenly there fell upon me without any warning . . . a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image...