In April 1870, when he was twenty-eight, William James, already deep in a debilitating depression, a symptom of what he later termed the sickness of soul, underwent an hallucination as harrowing as any horror story.
I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient whom I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day on one of the benches, or rather shelves against the wall, with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them inclosing his entire figure. He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other[.] THAT SHAPE AM I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid within my breast gave way entirely, and I became a mass of quivering fear.
The moment broke James’s life in two. After the incident, he continues,
the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before, and that I have never felt since. It was like a revelation; and although the immediate feelings passed away, the experience has made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others ever since. It gradually faded, but for months I was unable to go out into the dark alone.
Those of us afflicted with chronic depression (the doctors call it clinical, as if it were taking place or could be cured in a sanitary white large room) have suffered such moments of our own, but rarely have our horrors (I have had one) borne the burden of being the same ghoulish vision, almost to the detail, that our own fathers endured.
When William had been in the world for two and a half years—and his brother Henry thirteen months—the father, also named Henry, had a horrific collapse of his own. This was in May 1844, when the family was living in a cottage near Windsor, England, called Frogmore. Thirty years later, Henry Sr. recalled the terror:
[H]aving eaten a comfortable dinner, I remained sitting at the table after the family had dispersed, idly gazing at the embers in the grate, thinking of nothing, and feeling only the exhilaration incident to a good digestion, when suddenly—in the lightning flash as it were—“Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake.” To all appearance it was a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life.
This “damned shape,” eerily akin to the monstrous “SHAPE” his son witnessed twenty-six years later, wrecked the next two years of Henry’s life, a period the older James termed his “vastation,” an archaic version of “devastation,” a Job-like affliction. (Note his quoting of Job 4:14 to describe his fear, a passage Søren Kierkegaard later invoked for his equally terrifying Fear and Trembling, in which he wonders what kind of God would command Abraham to kill his boy Isaac.) Henry saw his emergence from this depression as a second birth.
William referenced his father’s collapse in a footnote to his printed description of his own mental disintegration, appearing in his 1902 Varieties of Religious Experience, where he actually attributes his dreadful experience to another sufferer. Like his father, William saw his healing as resurrection but likely had to labor more arduously to achieve his rebirth because he lacked his Swedenborgian progenitor’s belief in a merciful God. In fact, a primary source of his despair was his fear that the universe was void of ultimate goodness, meaning, and purpose and that he didn’t have the will to face such a world honestly and thrive.
James overcame his hopelessness through a heroic implementation of Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of “as if,” later embodied, though James didn’t know it (how could he?), by Murray’s creation of a new persona for every critical pulsation. Soon after his nightmare, James writes: “I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second Essais and see no reason why his definition of Free Will—‘the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts’—need be the definition of an illusion … My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will…” What is real: beside the point. What one believes is real is decisive.
I am William James. I believe that the universe is ruinous and I can’t do anything about it. I can’t prove if this belief is valid or not, but it certainly creates undeniably palpable encounters—with mental anguish, weapons I might use to kill myself. Then again, I am William James. I will myself to believe that I am free to shape my life in ways less destructive, that I can perhaps create a flourishing existence, in which green-fleshed asylum wards recover their healthful flush, and revolvers—antique, burnished in the twilight—hang over the fireplaces of the philosopher’s study, decorating the room, giving it depth, seriousness, heritage. I act as if this belief were true. I don the mask of the resurrected. The sick becomes well. Weapons turn artifacts.
After his reentry into life through faking to live—performing as though he were free—James fashioned original theories on emotions. He concluded that physical action precedes feeling, not the other way around. We don’t laugh because we are joyful; we are joyful because we laugh. (This idea remains integral to psychology, serving as a core principle for cognitive behaviorism.) It follows: if I want to be happy, I should smile more; my content will rise up to meet my form, just as a life will reach for a belief, a character will conform to clothing.
These insights provided the foundation for the philosophy for which James is most famous, pragmatism, based on the idea that there’s no such thing as TRUTH—universal and unchanging—but rather various interpretations of the world, some of which are temporarily true in that they are useful, not just physically but psychologically and spiritually. Truth happens to those interpretations of life that empower us and those around us to enjoy more capacious, charitable, beautiful, vigorous existences. These veracious happenings are necessarily temporary, since the world is radically evanescent, constantly requiring new ideas to make sense of new circumstances, to transform them into horizons toward which purposeful meaning can emerge. To use the words of the literary critic Ross Posnock (who locates William’s ideas in the late novels of his brother Henry), self in this perspective is “contingent, inseparable from the process of experimental inquiry and interpretation,” constantly interacting with the world, composed of “open and revisable events.” The void inspires value. Successful improvisation is wisdom.