55. Is Life Worth Living?

ROSINA EMMET’S UNSETTLING SIMILARITY to Minnie Temple revived aspects of William’s uncertain, yearning, tumultuous past, and it may have been these associations that led him to put together and deliver, in April 1895, a talk for the Harvard YMCA called “Is Life Worth Living?” He took up the old question that had weighed heavily on him and his sister in his twenties and thirties, the question of taking one’s own life, of “ending it when you will.” James’s essay on suicide is no Sunday morning objection, no debater’s problem formulated in advance to lead to an already established conclusion. It is, like John Donne’s Biathanatos, a hard-eyed look at an act the awful attractiveness of which the author recognizes, darkly welcomes, but finally honors more by his serious and sustained attention than by actual approval.

Many of James’s strengths coalesce in this one piece and around this one issue. His basic position and conclusion are religious; his working procedure is psychological. The overall structure of the argument is philosophical; its power to connect—its accessibility—comes from his immersion in teaching and public lecturing. It is pitched to bright and troubled young people, to the spirit, perhaps, of Minnie Temple. It depends heavily on literary examples, and it rises stylistically to the kind of urgent eloquence that marks great writing. It is a liberating achievement that is too preoccupied with its practical effect to care how it is to be catalogued and shelved.

James begins with a quick glance at “temperamental optimism,” the great example of which is Walt Whitman, for whom “the mere joy of living is so immense... that it abolishes the possibility of any other kind of feeling.” “I do not see one imperfection in the universe,” James quotes Whitman, “and I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last.”¹ Opposed to this is “temperamental pessimism,” the “standing refutation,” an answer, and a convincing one, to Whitman. James’s example here—he quotes two full pages of it—is James Thomson’s “City of Dreadful Night”:

 

My wine of life is poison mixed with gall,
My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,
I worse than lose the years which are my all:
What can console me for the loss supreme?

 

“Lo, you are free to end it when you will” is all Thomson has to offer. James quotes Thomson and then says, plainly enough, “These verses are in truth a consolation for all to whom, as to him, the world is far more like a steady den of fear than a continual fountain of delight.” He goes on to face up to reality, to the facts. “That life is not worth living the whole army of suicides declare.”²

James is quick to concede that he can do nothing about the likely majority of suicides, those resulting from insanity or “sudden frenzied impulse,” and, like a good Stoic, he narrows his task practically: “My words are to deal only with that metaphysical tedium vitae which is peculiar to reflecting men.”³

After making it unmistakably clear that he means to confront the darkness and take it at its full fighting weight, he moves, without spiritual slither, to frame it as a religious problem. “Pessimism is essentially a religious disease,” he declares. It is not physiological, not psychological, not philosophical. “The nightmare view of life has plenty of organic sources but its great reflective source has at all times been the contradiction between the phenomena of nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind nature there is a spirit whose expression nature is.”

By religion James does not mean simply “Christian.” Quoting a passage of Carlyle’s on “the everlasting no,” which so deeply impressed Melville, James suggests that “the initial step towards getting into healthy ultimate relations with the universe is the act of rebellion against the idea that such a god”—a “moral and Intelligent Contriver of the World”—“exists.” He quotes Carlyle’s rebellion with approval: “Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped!...Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come then; I will meet it and defy it!”⁴

James’s argument comes down, as he said it would at the beginning, to a question of religious faith. “I use the word [religion] in the supernaturalist sense, as declaring that the so-called order of nature, which constitutes this world’s experience, is only one portion of the total universe, and that there stretches beyond this visible world an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive... A man’s religious faith... means for me essentially his faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddle of the natural order may be found explained.” Science cannot really help here, because our science is only “the minutest glimpse of what the universe will really prove to be when adequately understood.”

James proposes that we put scientific skepticism aside for a time and learn to trust our religious demands, which “means first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible world which they suggest were real.” That is to say, maybe they are true, and just as Shakespeare’s Touchstone declares there to be “much virtue in ‘if,’” James now proposes that, whatever science may counsel, we embrace the idea of “maybe.” “Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a scientific exploration or experiment or textbook, that may not be a mistake.” It is only, he concludes, “by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. It is all a question of ‘maybe.’” James brings up Meister Eckhart’s saying, which has flowered in modern theology, that God needs man as much as man needs God. “I confess,” James writes, “that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity.”⁵

At the close of the essay, James swings the argument back to his own testimony, his own experience, to the only possible authentication within our reach: “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.” That is, you can end it when you 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; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted.”

And then he adds a passage, a grand passage like Melville’s description of the ancient god throned on yet older gods, which one discovers winding one’s way down to the lowest levels of the Hotel de Cluny in Paris; it is a passage that shows how the new interest in abnormal psychology—in Janet, Breuer, and Freud—and the revelation of the hidden self feed into James’s religious search. From the lines just quoted he races on to: “The deepest thing in our nature is this Binnenleben [hidden life, hidden self]...this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As through the cracks and crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth’s bosom which then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things”⁶