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Is Life Worth Living?
""Is Life Worth Living?"" is a philosophical work written by the renowned American philosopher and psychologist, William James. In this book, James explores the fundamental question of whether life has any meaning or purpose. He delves into the human experience and examines the various ways in which people find meaning in life, whether it be through religion, philosophy, or science. James also discusses the concept of free will and the role it plays in determining the meaning of life. Throughout the book, he draws on his extensive knowledge of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality to offer insights into the human condition and the search for meaning. This book is a thought-provoking and insightful exploration of the most fundamental question of human existence.THIS 38 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, by William James. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 0766174417.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.
- GenresPhilosophyPsychology
48 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1896
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222 people want to read
About the author
William James
344 books1,350 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, he is considered to be one of the greatest figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of the functional psychology. He also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James' work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty.
Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James. James wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are Principles of Psychology, which was a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology, Essays in Radical Empiricism, an important text in philosophy, and The Varieties of Religious Experience, which investigated different forms of religious experience.
William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Macedonio Fernández, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.
William James received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French. Education in the James household encouraged cosmopolitanism. The family made two trips to Europe while William James was still a child, setting a pattern that resulted in thirteen more European journeys during his life. His early artistic bent led to an apprenticeship in the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, but he switched in 1861 to scientific studies at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University.
In his early adulthood, James suffered from a variety of physical ailments, including those of the eyes, back, stomach, and skin. He was also tone deaf. He was subject to a variety of psychological symptoms which were diagnosed at the time as neurasthenia, and which included periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for months on end. Two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) and Robertson (Bob), fought in the Civil War. The other three siblings (William, Henry, and Alice James) all suffered from periods of invalidism.
He took up medical studies at Harvard Medical School in 1864. He took a break in the spring of 1865 to join naturalist Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition up the Amazon River, but aborted his trip after eight months, as he suffered bouts of severe seasickness and mild smallpox. His studies were interrupted once again due to illness in April 1867. He traveled to Germany in search of a cure and remained there until November 1868; at that time he was 26 years old. During this period, he
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, he is considered to be one of the greatest figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of the functional psychology. He also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James' work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty.
Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James. James wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are Principles of Psychology, which was a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology, Essays in Radical Empiricism, an important text in philosophy, and The Varieties of Religious Experience, which investigated different forms of religious experience.
William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Macedonio Fernández, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.
William James received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French. Education in the James household encouraged cosmopolitanism. The family made two trips to Europe while William James was still a child, setting a pattern that resulted in thirteen more European journeys during his life. His early artistic bent led to an apprenticeship in the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, but he switched in 1861 to scientific studies at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University.
In his early adulthood, James suffered from a variety of physical ailments, including those of the eyes, back, stomach, and skin. He was also tone deaf. He was subject to a variety of psychological symptoms which were diagnosed at the time as neurasthenia, and which included periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for months on end. Two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) and Robertson (Bob), fought in the Civil War. The other three siblings (William, Henry, and Alice James) all suffered from periods of invalidism.
He took up medical studies at Harvard Medical School in 1864. He took a break in the spring of 1865 to join naturalist Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition up the Amazon River, but aborted his trip after eight months, as he suffered bouts of severe seasickness and mild smallpox. His studies were interrupted once again due to illness in April 1867. He traveled to Germany in search of a cure and remained there until November 1868; at that time he was 26 years old. During this period, he
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January 21, 2021
James answers the question “is life worth living” by delineating the practical link between our beliefs and our “making” of a life worth living.
Take religious beliefs, for example, which are the beliefs par excellence (according to James) that gives us a paradigm for how we might live, and how our lives may be transformed if we were to act as if the invisible world (that religion suggests) were true.
Faith, then, is the inner assurance that there is an invisible, external, and eternal universe beyond our immediate grasp. Adverse life will be well worth living IF we were to live as if the courage, patience, and hope that we cultivate in the natural world would bear fruits in an unseen spiritual life.
James does not aim to prove the existence of an invisible, eternal universe exist by rendering any “hard” empirical evidence; rather he aims to suggest that our lives will be well worth living IF we were to believe that such an invisible world existed.
The pivotal point in his argument is not to validate that there is a metaphysically real invisible, eternal world. The point is, even if an invisible and eternal world did not exist, to live as if it did would be a qualitatively greater life that replenishes us with a sense of ongoing hope.
Moreover, James contends that only by our “believing” a certain truth that the result of what we believe may come to pass. This does not mean James believes that anything we believe indiscriminately, by the mere act of willing and believing, would come true.
He is too good a logician to assert such phantasmological happenings.
But James does tenaciously assert that for something to be phenomenological true, we must believe in the possibility of its existence.
For it is our belief in things that would inform the decisions that we make: beliefs generate our actions and our actions seek to be in consonance with our beliefs.
See, for example,
“Belief and doubt are living attitudes, that involve conduct on our part.”
“Refusing to believe that a certain thing is is to continue acting as if it were not.”
In other words, belief is predicated upon our action; yet action is parasitic upon our beliefs.
What then may we choose to believe, and how then may we act in alignment with that belief, to live a life worth living?
According to James, We have two options: to choose to live a life believing that all there is, is what we see—the natural world with no other spiritual or extra-dimensional qualities of time and space.
Or, we can believe that the world we see and experience is not the ultimatum, thus ordering our lives and interpreting worldly events by trusting that the natural world exists only as a partiality of a whole, a finite portion of the total universe.
“What we call visible nature of this world, must be but a veil whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or another world.”
The metaphysics James proposes does not appraise that the physical world is less true, less significant than the “invisible” life he summons us to consider. The point is not for us to become gnostic escapists that focus merely on some vague sense of the “other” world out of a denial of the natural world we inhabit.
Jamesian order of nature corroborates a physical, natural world that exists, AND, that such a world can stretch beyond this visible world to an unseen world of which we “now knowing nothing positive”
Yet through our relation to this invisible world,
The “true significance of our present mundane life consists.”
The natural world and invisible world communicates with one another, both worlds altered by the phenomenon of the other (though the invisible world encompasses the natural world). We place the natural world within the phenomenological landscape of the invisible world with the hopes that the eternal and invisible world will one day unearth the meaning and potential of our experiences in the natural world.
It is unsurprising to me that James and this book garnered a great deal of detractors.
I, however, will sympathize with James and too contend that interpreting all events through merely a myopic vision of the world as it is, with the finitude of our knowledge, would squelch our imaginative capacities.
We will easily be closed off to the “what ifs” and the “maybes” (the phrases James considers to be indispensable questions of life), while attempting to generate a sense of certitude that only gives us a simulacrum of safety. A safety that imprisons, and even suffocates us.
To believe in the possibility of something more would expand our mental, emotional, and spiritual (if you believe that there is such a dimension) faculties and enable us to live as if what we do and who we are, matters, even if we cannot perceive the full manifestations of that truth.
What James proposes, I believe, is not that the invisible world is superior to the natural world we live in, as to discard our experience here as contemptible and paltry in any way.
James is too good a phenomenologist to have suggested this.
It is my understanding that James invites us to a wider phenomenological terrain that is not closed off to our perceptions of the events of reality, but is instead opened to believing in the unfolding possibilities of a life beyond what we know. This openness to believe in what we do not yet know can be the added fuel we need to orchestrate our lives in meaningful ways.
James exhumes sources of our lives from unexpected places, from a fecund land we may too have once dwelled in, but have forgotten our footing in it, for we have not allowed ourselves to believe such a land could exist.
“As through the cracks and crannies of subterranean caverns the earth’s bosom exudes its waters, which then form the fountain-heads of Springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer feeds and decisions take rise.”
Do we believe that what we see is our ultimate reality?
Or must we believe that what we see might be altered and illuminated by a beam of light too glaring for us to look at with our natural eyes?
Try living as if one of these statements are true
and ask
“Is this life worth living for?”
Take religious beliefs, for example, which are the beliefs par excellence (according to James) that gives us a paradigm for how we might live, and how our lives may be transformed if we were to act as if the invisible world (that religion suggests) were true.
Faith, then, is the inner assurance that there is an invisible, external, and eternal universe beyond our immediate grasp. Adverse life will be well worth living IF we were to live as if the courage, patience, and hope that we cultivate in the natural world would bear fruits in an unseen spiritual life.
James does not aim to prove the existence of an invisible, eternal universe exist by rendering any “hard” empirical evidence; rather he aims to suggest that our lives will be well worth living IF we were to believe that such an invisible world existed.
The pivotal point in his argument is not to validate that there is a metaphysically real invisible, eternal world. The point is, even if an invisible and eternal world did not exist, to live as if it did would be a qualitatively greater life that replenishes us with a sense of ongoing hope.
Moreover, James contends that only by our “believing” a certain truth that the result of what we believe may come to pass. This does not mean James believes that anything we believe indiscriminately, by the mere act of willing and believing, would come true.
He is too good a logician to assert such phantasmological happenings.
But James does tenaciously assert that for something to be phenomenological true, we must believe in the possibility of its existence.
For it is our belief in things that would inform the decisions that we make: beliefs generate our actions and our actions seek to be in consonance with our beliefs.
See, for example,
“Belief and doubt are living attitudes, that involve conduct on our part.”
“Refusing to believe that a certain thing is is to continue acting as if it were not.”
In other words, belief is predicated upon our action; yet action is parasitic upon our beliefs.
What then may we choose to believe, and how then may we act in alignment with that belief, to live a life worth living?
According to James, We have two options: to choose to live a life believing that all there is, is what we see—the natural world with no other spiritual or extra-dimensional qualities of time and space.
Or, we can believe that the world we see and experience is not the ultimatum, thus ordering our lives and interpreting worldly events by trusting that the natural world exists only as a partiality of a whole, a finite portion of the total universe.
“What we call visible nature of this world, must be but a veil whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or another world.”
The metaphysics James proposes does not appraise that the physical world is less true, less significant than the “invisible” life he summons us to consider. The point is not for us to become gnostic escapists that focus merely on some vague sense of the “other” world out of a denial of the natural world we inhabit.
Jamesian order of nature corroborates a physical, natural world that exists, AND, that such a world can stretch beyond this visible world to an unseen world of which we “now knowing nothing positive”
Yet through our relation to this invisible world,
The “true significance of our present mundane life consists.”
The natural world and invisible world communicates with one another, both worlds altered by the phenomenon of the other (though the invisible world encompasses the natural world). We place the natural world within the phenomenological landscape of the invisible world with the hopes that the eternal and invisible world will one day unearth the meaning and potential of our experiences in the natural world.
It is unsurprising to me that James and this book garnered a great deal of detractors.
I, however, will sympathize with James and too contend that interpreting all events through merely a myopic vision of the world as it is, with the finitude of our knowledge, would squelch our imaginative capacities.
We will easily be closed off to the “what ifs” and the “maybes” (the phrases James considers to be indispensable questions of life), while attempting to generate a sense of certitude that only gives us a simulacrum of safety. A safety that imprisons, and even suffocates us.
To believe in the possibility of something more would expand our mental, emotional, and spiritual (if you believe that there is such a dimension) faculties and enable us to live as if what we do and who we are, matters, even if we cannot perceive the full manifestations of that truth.
What James proposes, I believe, is not that the invisible world is superior to the natural world we live in, as to discard our experience here as contemptible and paltry in any way.
James is too good a phenomenologist to have suggested this.
It is my understanding that James invites us to a wider phenomenological terrain that is not closed off to our perceptions of the events of reality, but is instead opened to believing in the unfolding possibilities of a life beyond what we know. This openness to believe in what we do not yet know can be the added fuel we need to orchestrate our lives in meaningful ways.
James exhumes sources of our lives from unexpected places, from a fecund land we may too have once dwelled in, but have forgotten our footing in it, for we have not allowed ourselves to believe such a land could exist.
“As through the cracks and crannies of subterranean caverns the earth’s bosom exudes its waters, which then form the fountain-heads of Springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer feeds and decisions take rise.”
Do we believe that what we see is our ultimate reality?
Or must we believe that what we see might be altered and illuminated by a beam of light too glaring for us to look at with our natural eyes?
Try living as if one of these statements are true
and ask
“Is this life worth living for?”
November 7, 2024
** 4.5 stars **
Love this essay and was glad to reread it, especially given how hopeless I feel in light of the 2024 election in the U.S.
Some gems:
"It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough, our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true."
"This life IS worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view, and we are determined to make it from that point of view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success."
"If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the Universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it *feels* like a real fight; as if there were something really wild in the Universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem."
"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life IS worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."
Love this essay and was glad to reread it, especially given how hopeless I feel in light of the 2024 election in the U.S.
Some gems:
"It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough, our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true."
"This life IS worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view, and we are determined to make it from that point of view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success."
"If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the Universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it *feels* like a real fight; as if there were something really wild in the Universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem."
"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life IS worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."
January 2, 2020
There is a pun so groan inducing here serving as the framing device that I was even impressed, but the eponymous subject matter is very serious and James first proposes his own personal secular positivist solution to the issue, before using his famous pragmatism to grant legitimacy to other perspectives.
Is life worth living? "It depends on the liver" is considered at first. If we feel fine we want to carry on. If we feel sick, we don't, and that's it. In what does not surprise me at all, and also in something I disagree with, James proposes that pessimism is essentially a religious disease, but in spite of his own atheism, we'll see later on that he provides a valuable room for the role of religion. He finds no value in traditional religions, and his pessimism view point is based on the reasoning that the world is filled with so much suffering, that the idea of a spirit, or an intelligence, a divinity being behind reality and allowing so much suffering or worse, causing it is inherently pessimistic.
If we cast off this belief and see that there is no one source, no metaphysical source of evil, we can then understand first of all that it is finite, like us. It leaves it a bit less intimidating. We can face it one challenge at a time, and even contemplate the possibility of defeating it. We can also of course just commit suicide if things get too difficult.
Okay, surely pessimism comes from weighing the good against the bad and having the latter come out a bit heavier. I'm not sure how a religion here is the pessimistic perspective when can have the opportunity of finding value in all suffering and eventually a way out.
I can't hate this essay however, because there is a valid perspective here, not always found among secular writers that suffering can be valuable, in the sense that overcoming challenges is what gives life meaning. Pessimism as James certainly must have noticed in the era he was writing is bred in times of peace and abundance, out of boredom perhaps. I would argue its not just pessimism, but nihilism that generates itself out of peace and prosperity. After noting the worst travails that men and their sects have endured throughout history, he notes the strength of our ideas to overcome anything that life throws at us, and even prosper against such challenges. If we can convince ourselves of the good that our suffering is producing there is nothing that the human mind can't endure. However he then notes that any belief that helps men overcome their challenges is in its own way valid then. 'It depends on the liver' living his own life, you see.
This is really the ancient perspective that man is the measure of all things, and that reality does not really exist apart from us. It's self defeating even from a pragmatist perspective. I don't think relativism is a very powerful conviction and its threshold of enduring suffering is prone to be very weak. When the challenges of the world are considered, its not going to be the relativistic pragmatists, kindly appreciating all the values that different people use to get by, whom are going to be left standing at the end.
Is life worth living? "It depends on the liver" is considered at first. If we feel fine we want to carry on. If we feel sick, we don't, and that's it. In what does not surprise me at all, and also in something I disagree with, James proposes that pessimism is essentially a religious disease, but in spite of his own atheism, we'll see later on that he provides a valuable room for the role of religion. He finds no value in traditional religions, and his pessimism view point is based on the reasoning that the world is filled with so much suffering, that the idea of a spirit, or an intelligence, a divinity being behind reality and allowing so much suffering or worse, causing it is inherently pessimistic.
If we cast off this belief and see that there is no one source, no metaphysical source of evil, we can then understand first of all that it is finite, like us. It leaves it a bit less intimidating. We can face it one challenge at a time, and even contemplate the possibility of defeating it. We can also of course just commit suicide if things get too difficult.
Okay, surely pessimism comes from weighing the good against the bad and having the latter come out a bit heavier. I'm not sure how a religion here is the pessimistic perspective when can have the opportunity of finding value in all suffering and eventually a way out.
I can't hate this essay however, because there is a valid perspective here, not always found among secular writers that suffering can be valuable, in the sense that overcoming challenges is what gives life meaning. Pessimism as James certainly must have noticed in the era he was writing is bred in times of peace and abundance, out of boredom perhaps. I would argue its not just pessimism, but nihilism that generates itself out of peace and prosperity. After noting the worst travails that men and their sects have endured throughout history, he notes the strength of our ideas to overcome anything that life throws at us, and even prosper against such challenges. If we can convince ourselves of the good that our suffering is producing there is nothing that the human mind can't endure. However he then notes that any belief that helps men overcome their challenges is in its own way valid then. 'It depends on the liver' living his own life, you see.
This is really the ancient perspective that man is the measure of all things, and that reality does not really exist apart from us. It's self defeating even from a pragmatist perspective. I don't think relativism is a very powerful conviction and its threshold of enduring suffering is prone to be very weak. When the challenges of the world are considered, its not going to be the relativistic pragmatists, kindly appreciating all the values that different people use to get by, whom are going to be left standing at the end.
August 29, 2023
As a person who yearns to be given the meaning of life, this book gave a somewhat comforting, humbling, yet contemplative answer to my endeavor. James emphasizes the need to believe life is worth living, and that this belief will lead us to living a meaningful life. I don’t feel like typing out my thoughts on this, nor a summary of the argument. But if you read this, and you want a nugget of wisdom, there ya go. It is definitely worth a read.
October 22, 2024
Is Life Worth Living? "Maybe. It all depends on the liver."
And I absolutely love this answer from the father of American psychology and pragmatist philosopher William James.
For many people, the value of life is unquestionable, which means that it's rarely a subject of conversation or debate. Life is simply lived, without doubt, until it isn't. But one thing troubled me: if the worth of life is so self-evident, why some of us, at times, find ourselves standing on the top of the bridge, contemplating a final fall?
Decades after his struggle with depression in 1870, William James developed, in the early 20th century, the american pragmatism, a philosophy that argued truth should be evaluated based on its practical consequences. Basically, a philosophy focused on making life more livable in its essence. And, for the most part, it succeeds, but pragmatism is not a permanet solution for saving us. For James, a human being is more than just a bundle of perceptions and nervous reactions, and more than just a body that could disappear without a trace. As he tell us: "optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world" and "our own reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts of the whole thing". The deepest thing in our nature is "Binnenleben", a region of the heart in which "we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears".
Although this essay does not offer us a concrete answer, it leads us to introspection and help us understand that we shouldn't be afraid of life: "Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact".
I loved this book so much, that I think I'm becoming addicted to William James.
And I absolutely love this answer from the father of American psychology and pragmatist philosopher William James.
For many people, the value of life is unquestionable, which means that it's rarely a subject of conversation or debate. Life is simply lived, without doubt, until it isn't. But one thing troubled me: if the worth of life is so self-evident, why some of us, at times, find ourselves standing on the top of the bridge, contemplating a final fall?
Decades after his struggle with depression in 1870, William James developed, in the early 20th century, the american pragmatism, a philosophy that argued truth should be evaluated based on its practical consequences. Basically, a philosophy focused on making life more livable in its essence. And, for the most part, it succeeds, but pragmatism is not a permanet solution for saving us. For James, a human being is more than just a bundle of perceptions and nervous reactions, and more than just a body that could disappear without a trace. As he tell us: "optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world" and "our own reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts of the whole thing". The deepest thing in our nature is "Binnenleben", a region of the heart in which "we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears".
Although this essay does not offer us a concrete answer, it leads us to introspection and help us understand that we shouldn't be afraid of life: "Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact".
I loved this book so much, that I think I'm becoming addicted to William James.
December 20, 2020
Famous American Essayist William James writes on the philosophy of life and whether it's worth living or not. He presents an interesting argument, however his focus is on proving that suicide is not worth it. These concepts can and should be treated as mutually exclusive. Life could very well not be worth living, but taking one's own life is another philosophical step. This therefore diminishes James' thesis.
He also argues very strongly pro-faith as a reason for living and makes the all-too-common misstep of harping on science for not providing all the answers: the God of the Gaps argument.
In total, his work was not very persuasive.
He also argues very strongly pro-faith as a reason for living and makes the all-too-common misstep of harping on science for not providing all the answers: the God of the Gaps argument.
In total, his work was not very persuasive.
April 14, 2023
This is such a lucid, concise, and compelling distillation of the philosophy that James articulates in such essays as "The Will to Believe" and "Pragmatism," one wonders if it's really necessary to read the other pieces at all.
Read
April 8, 2025read for class, wasn’t expecting to be philosophically enlightened. lovely read.
January 15, 2017
William James is a delight to read and his ruminations on what can make life worth living are wonderful. James exhorts his listeners to "Be not afraid of life." It is a well written, well thought out rebuttal to the sterility of the scientific mode of thinking that was in opposition to religion in the nineteenth century.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews