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Gertrude Himmelfarb



Gertrude Himmelfarb has a lengthy discussion of William James in a recent weekend issue of The Wall Street Journal.

This discussion was apparently inspired by a recent book by the French philosopher, Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists. Botton thinks religion simply false (the world is just a mechanical push and pull of undesigned particles), but thinks that religions ( a word both plural in semantics and institutional in emphasis) valuable nonetheless, because they offer music, architectural achievement, rituals, community, feasts, etc. Atheism can't do that, and the failure of the old Comteans rather illustrates this point, so Botton thinks atheists should make their peace with religions.

That is just a starting point for Himmelfarb, though, who wants to talk about James, not Botton.

As Botton is an unorthodox sort of atheist, a neo-atheists if you will, James was an unorthodox sort of believer, a neo-believer.

About half way into her essay (at a point when she seems to have forgotten about Botton altogether) Himelfarb starts discussing James' distinction between the "healthy-minded" and the "sick souls." If all you knew of James was this dichotomy, surely you would understand that he was arguing in favor of those he called healthy-minded, right? After all, the terms are somewhat weighted.

It is one of the adorable things about James that he routinely weighs the terminology against the side that he wants to take. Himmelfarb agrees with me in finding this adorable. Yes, let the healthy-minded have the nice sound of that label. But he is in essence describing them as superficial.

"It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience," James wrote.
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  1. joeoMarch 29, 2015 at 11:14 PM

    Himmelfarb is way off-base if she thinks James' thinks catholics are closer to the twice born temperament than protestants:

    "In the Romish Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow in than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they have been abundant enough; and in its recent “liberal” developments of Unitarianism and latitudinarianism generally, minds of this order have played and still are playing leading and constructive parts. "

    Plus, James isn't against the once-born as much as Himmelfard believes.

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