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Some Problems of Philosophy



The opening two paragraphs of William James' last book, Some Problems of Philosophy are presented below.

"The progress of society is due to the fact that individuals vary from the human average in all sorts of directions, and that the originality is often so attractive or useful that they are recognized by their tribe as leaders, and become objects of envy or admiration, and setters of new ideals.

"Among the variations, every generation of men produces some individuals exceptionally preoccupied with theory. Such men find matter for puzzle or astonishment where no one else does. Their imagination invents explanations and combines them. They store up the learning of their time, utter prophecies and warnings, and are regarded as sages. Philosophy, etymologically meaning the love of wisdom, is the work of this class of minds, regarded with an indulgent relish, if not with admiration, even, even by those who do not understand them or believe much in the truth which they proclaim."

The first paragraph there is a remarkable insight, aside from the specific direction that the second paragraph gives to it. We like to talk about "diversity" these days, but we often mean rather little except the inclusion of certain demographic categories within some group taken to be a social microcosm. James is talking about the benefits of the real individual outliers.

As the Bard said, "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imaginaton all compact." Leaving the lover out of it, Shakespeare was suggesting that lunatics are unsuccessful outliers from the "human average," and that poets are more successful outliers. Loving someone is (fortunately) within the "human average" however defined, but we might say that at peak moments of self-forgetting love, one becomes an outlier anyway.

Then in the second graf James moves to the question: what is philosophy? and is it a worthwhile institution? one worth continuing to offer undergarduate courses in, for example?  His answer is yes.

James believes that philosophy is only thinking about the world in an exceptionally rigorous way. The rigor is what puts a philosopher outside the "human action," not anything more specific by way of method. And that the consequences of such rigorous thinking can and do prove attractive and useful.
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