Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

  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.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more