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Symposia
On Emma Sutton’s William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician

Whatever Works

William James on Medical and Philosophical Health
Sarin Marchetti

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  • 1 The sustained attempt by philosophy, especially at the dawn of modernity, to become scientific is h (...)

1Emma Sutton’s William James, MD carries us in a territory often uncharted and sometimes derided: that is, the understanding of philosophy, especially the one performed within academic walls, as an exercise and way of life. The very idea of a philosophy to live by, both in the sense of its practicality and with which to experiment oneself, is one which seldom finds space in our contemporary mindset and culture: professional (read, serious and adult), as opposed to amateur (lowbrow and childish) philosophical thinking is to be distinguished from attempts to cure the soul and heal the body. Philosophy as knowledge has long emancipated itself from edification: by slowly distancing itself first from religion, with a relatively short partnership with the sciences (as in physics and mathematics),1 and most recently from psychology, philosophy finally reached autonomy from self-help and other such mundane goals. This attitude is apparently unremitting, and the handful of authors stubborn enough in their effort to accommodate serious philosophical thinking with transformative power are often sidelined, if not disbarred altogether. William James put up the good fight a hundred and fifty years ago, with a voice almost unique for his time as well as for ours, trying to strike a delicate balance between the craving for expertise and the hope of relevancy. What was distinctive of James was his commitment to keep the accountability of philosophical thinking and its effectivity in one breath: to make the best of its scientific (for lack of a better word) as much as of its humanistic aspirations. A philosophy theoretically appealing and yet practically sustainable, one for which thought indeed is for the sake of action. “His audience undoubtedly discerned a therapeutic quality to his work,” as Sutton notes (2023: 173), commenting approvingly on James’s own excitement at the news that his work brought light into the life of a woman attending one of his public talks, with several others vouching for his precious blessings.

2By depicting James’s struggles with his medical studies and feeble vocation, Sutton reinforces the image of the philosopher as torn between the search for a method and its application to lively matters. The conflict of ideals was, for James as for his generation, that between the learned and the sage, the researcher and the seer, the scientist and the artist, with the scepter of social respectability contended by both figures. This challenge was indeed one felt to the bone and marrow, as James grew up with the parental pressure to excel in both – possibly showing, down the road, their convergence. An accomplishment made even harder by his very constitution (upbringing, one might speculate): a skilled artist and budding explorer (for the combo, see Machado 2006), he saw his talents jeopardized by his physical conditions, putting a strain on his already chronically undecided mind, equally explosive and remissive. What was in for James in his education and professional career (as physician, psychologist, and philosopher, to reverse the order of the book’s subtitle) was nothing short of the willingness to find a recipe for health, intellectual and ordinary. “[H]ealth is the only good […]. [A]ll kinds of health, bodily mental and moral are essentially the same, so that one can go at them from any point,” wrote James to his dear friend Sarah Wyman Whitman commenting on her own fragile condition (Sutton 2023: 106), although his own understanding of such treasure shifted significantly over the years, as Sutton convincingly argues.

3The volume is exquisite in its archival as well as interpretative achievements, and the long list of reviews already available is a testament to its prodigy – with timelessness likely to succeed. Sutton is a subtle intellectual historian and Jamesian connoisseur, and with this effort she made a serious claim to become one of the most sophisticated interpreters of his life and work. What makes the volume a must-have for James scholars as well as for those interested in seeing what became of philosophy in the hands of one of the masterminds of pragmatism, is the careful blending of micro-histories of James’s many unofficial exchanges with his contemporaries, established and otherwise, with the exposition of his most well-known texts in the light of such exchanges. A first score at understanding James’s project of a philosophy to live by is in fact the appreciation of the spilling over of his private ruminations into his public addresses. As Sutton’s thorough selection of his correspondence and notes shows, James was not one fit to leave work at the doorstep, and, quite the contrary, looked for a line of inquiry that would address his most intimate concerns: a philosophy of, as well as for, the household. As much as he used to invite advanced students, colleagues, and acquaintances at his dwelling after class to keep the discussion of the day going, James let philosophy spill into his private correspondence and diary entries, thus finding an alternative path to eventually reach us with his thinking. Sutton notes (2023: 6) in this regard that “James’s thinking was formed in reaction not just to the academic provocations of his colleagues, or to the large-scale historical developments […], but also to the intimate details of his personal world and especially the mundane machination of his own body.” Situatedness was a necessity of his constitution as much as a goal of his thinking. A feature he shared with brother Henry and sister Alice, both at the level of symptoms and of their expression (although with rather disparate public recognitions), leaving the connection with his two younger brothers Garth Wilkinson and Robertson to its symptomatic surface only, with no equal ease or commonality of expression.

4Among the key preoccupations haunting James early and late, then, was the issue of health: mental and bodily alike. This is the interpretative bet around which Sutton’s volume revolves, which throws new light on the intertwinement of personal and philosophical. What makes us damned, evil, or even unfit to live, as opposed to saved, saints, or successful, was for James something to be inquired through a philosophy of moods and deeds, of checks and balances, of energization and deflation. A philosophy of the self, single or multiple, isolated or rather associated, understood as a therapy of one’s personal or collective expectations and rigidities to be seized and possibly transformed. Health being a contested concept, with medicine and philosophy equally interested in having a say about how to understand and fashion it accordingly, James made it the very centerpiece of his thinking. Unwilling to practice as a doctor, even though evidence shows how he kept a score of patients throughout his life (being a regular himself), James strived to find a way into the lives and well-being of his peers (and of himself, of course) via a psychological cum philosophical line of inquiry addressing the aspirations and disquiets inbuilt in the perilous navigation of world and self. Individuality, as in one’s (mostly singular and yet at times collective) peculiar flavor and constitution, was for James together mystery and explanans. Shying away from the challenges of what to make of individuality, understood as an achievement as much as a challenge, meant for James to delude oneself into believing that sound thinking, talking, and acting flows from forces irrespective of the situated perspective from which they materially spring. A fine thinker, speaker, and actor is one for whom health is paid tribute and eventually won over. James questioned himself as a debilitated body and mind, chronically affected by fatigue and aching pain: his nervous system being in constant distress, James wondered how he could ever be fitted to work and hence correspond to the society he partook in. Troubled eyes and back, unreliable bowels and hearth, poor faith and ambivalent will, the invalid James sook validation in a philosophy of health-seeking and stabilization: a philosophy fully psychologized and even physiologized, and yet skeptical of the deadening perspective of materialism and reductionism. This is a James working counter to the spirit of his time (e.g. the Huxleys, the Spencers, the Cliffords), fully soaked in the quest for certainty as an antidote to both chance and sin, opening new vistas (for sure together with the Emersons, the Peirces, the Janets) for a world and self still unfinished, mostly inconsistent, and yet manageable enough to stick by and abide to. A modernist world and self in which one’s mental and moral health called for an unbroken exercise in introspective, transformative analysis. A world very much akin to ours, contemporary readers of his philosophy, and hence interested in his take and tale. Many of his challenges became ours, and some of his predictions became our reality: most notably, the interrogation of the nature and scope of philosophical activity past foundationalism and into professionalization, a philosophy speaking to our earthly concerns without either sermons or demonstrations, hence fully soaked in contingency although not in despair because of it.

5This being a promising take on James’s work, one likely to leave a mark on the scholarship to come, I would like to highlight two features that I find equally illuminating and puzzling in Sutton’s account: the very desirability of infirmity and the different ways morality and religion contribute to health. Sutton’s James seems undecided between salvation and its impossibility, between the ability to redeem oneself through strokes of deed and the tragedy of falling short of such medication, with morality and religion being the two perspectives from which one could look at one’s soul and body and judge their fitness accordingly. I will start with the negative, so to speak, of infirmity, and then proceed to the allegedly positive of health.

6Whether infirmity was a blessing or rather a curse is not an easy issue to unravel, as James seemed to be in two minds about the fate of those, like himself, for whom suffering was the watchword. A life-long self-professed invalid, James repeatedly questioned his capacity for success, but also how much his own (perhaps everyone’s) realization was a matter of coping with pain and an adverse nervous system rather than of getting free of such complications. Could, in fact, a sound body and mind excel, or do they miss a fateful ingredient in the race for human victory and even happiness? This very question had several ramifications for James, having to do both with his own personal condition and with the wider cultural horizon he lived in (and partially contributed to shape). Sutton nicely shows the complexity of the issue, for example when she addresses James’s earliest tribulations with pain and evil in chapter one on Misery and Metaphysics, where James is depicted as torn between “an illusion […] of our own autonomy” (Sutton 2023: 19) and “the pressure of results” (ibid.: 25), that is, between seeing us as puppets in the hands of either God or society and sole makers of our own fates, between “evil as something done to us rather than done by us” (ibid.: 20). Our bodies and minds, upon which moral evaluation depends, are thus the sole responsible for our existence being either productive or unproductive. Now, James struggled to find a way to change such fate, and as early as 1878 started to consider the possibility that our ideas, our consciousness, could play a significant part in our physical constitution, prompting us to catch up with ourselves and eventually get better by cultivating the right dispositions and habits of thought. This further shift made room for a hygienics and ethics of improvement, which focused on exercise over success, on deeds over results: “he had begun tentatively exploring the possibility and potential of a different kind of moral life, one that celebrated effort over achievement” (ibid.: 39).

7If this is the case, and Sutton offers us compelling evidence of this early path of thinking, one is left wondering whether for James illness should still to be considered evil, or rather becomes the very possibility of amelioration: a stigma to be cleared and disheartening condition to be overcome, as opposed to the spur of the much-needed work to be done and the difficulty to be acknowledged. The paradox of illness seems to consist in the fact that it debilitates us, and might eventually obliterate us, and yet it (also) makes us our better selves. James’s mature philosophy of pragmatism, the seeds of which had already been planted in texts and ideas from the 1870s (and even in earlier ruminations), tells the story of the opportunity represented by illness for our lives to become stronger and fuller: we are capable to will ourselves out of illness, without which we would be stuck in either idealizations (the absence of bodily constraints) or sensibility (the domination of such constraints). Illness would then be bad and yet useful. If successful. Still, such success is a matter of chance, perhaps of temperament. The case of sister Alice is to the point: her invalidity made her the wonderful and talented person she was, and yet she was unable to will herself out of it. Quite the contrary. Her life was hardly one of energy and success, at least not according to the social standards of her time or of ours. The pragmatism of her brother was of little effect on her, even though she knew it firsthand, and carefully and approvingly registered its positive effects on his successful brothers. Was she a failure of an apprentice, or was the cure of the wrong kind for her? This difficulty speaks to the complicated diagnosis of the illness for which effort and will were presented by James as the cure: what exactly was the relation between the fatigue and exhaustion affecting the minds and bodies of the best part of American society and the possibility to overcome it via strokes of practice had to be measured and negotiated in deed one case at the time, with no general formula working for the literate class most prone to such maladies, let alone the population at large.

8This brings us to interrogating James’s 1880s and especially 1890s writings on the laws of mental and bodily hygiene which Sutton presents in chapter two on Health and Hygiene, as well as in chapter five on Politics and Pathology, where the invalid is not only celebrated for her resilience and fortified will, but also made socially acceptable by showing how, far from being a degenerated, hopeless human being, the neurasthenic was indeed at the forefront of humanity, pushing for an individualized form of treatment eschewing medical materialism and welcoming alternative forms of medicine mindful of the peculiarities of each individual and their potentiality to enrich the society they are part of by the sheer fact of their different constitution. Pluralism and mutual respect aside, for sure goods in themselves in an age of conformism and authoritarianism (then and now), one is unsure about how to read such celebration of the invalid: wasn’t James still complaining about his physical and mental rundowns, and fearful of their negative spell on our highest human possibilities, as for example when in The Energies of Men (delivered at the tail end of 1906) he enrolled yoga and alternative medicine among the remedies for our morbid constitutions and energetic shortfalls, adding that the very secret for personal and social fulfillment was the endorsement of salutatory habits of the will though which we strike ourselves out of inanity?

9This unresolved ambiguity brings us to the second issue mentioned above about the best perspective from which to seize health: whether ethical or religious. Like illness, health is an essentially contested concept, as the very word suggests both the neutral, descriptive condition of a certain body and mind, and its excellence and hence prescriptive dimension. This duality of understanding is best reflected in James’s quite equivocal mix of the ethical with the religious when it comes to characterizing our healthy life and how to achieve it. Sutton dedicates chapters three and four on, respectively, Religion and Regeneration and Energy and Endurance to a detailed discussion of such intertwinement, in which however the distinction of the two planes (if any) is hardly detailed. Quite the contrary, one gets the impression, from reading her reconstruction, that none is needed, at least when the topic is that of mental and physical health. The key sources here are of course both The Will to Believe and The Varieties of Religious Experience, and everything revolving around these two seminal texts, with a place of honor for the long disregarded 1896 Lowell Lectures on Exceptional Mental States. Now, I find this association rather baffling, as it seems to mix two sets of concerns one might claim James had reasons to mingle when talking about health and yet could and perhaps should be kept separated on more general terms: namely, the attempt to bestow religious experience with a capacity for self-improvement or even fulfillment, and the claim that overbeliefs (hence one’s relationship with the divine) are a needed component of ethical amelioration without which “our fires are damped, our drafts are checked” and “life grown in one tissue of impossibilities,” as James writes in The Energies of Men. While I think James fully embraced the former, I am more skeptical about the latter, and hence their mix in Sutton’s account of personal and philosophical health risks jeopardizing the wider issue of the degree of autonomy James was ready to grant to the ethical with respect to the religious life.

  • 2 The best organic attempt at figuring such a relation out is still Slater 2009.

10The relationship between ethics and religion in James is a vexing one,2 and here I intend to touch only on one string of it related to our topic of a philosophy as a way of life hinged on the concern and care for one’s singular and collective health. Sutton brings attention to those passages in which James appeals to religious belief and religious life as openers to a reality wider than the narrow one tolerated by science and the scientific mindset. She associates such a wider perspective to that of the heroes and saints, who challenged the status quo and limitations of their own bodies and minds to reach a higher (and wilder) level of moral intensity and tension. The chapters on mysticism and conversion of The Varieties of Religious Experience, together with those on the healthy-minded and the sick souls (or twice-born) speak to the need, deeply felt by James, to bestow some meaning to those whom, unlike himself, could dedicate their lives to causes other than earthly. Crazy they were not, as medical materialism wanted them to. Quite the contrary, they could use their peculiar constitution – high bodily sensibility and capacity for pain, abstinence, and willingness to throw themselves in seemingly hopeless situations – as tools for putting their miserable nervous system to productive use, capable of turning passivity into activity, and in so doing making their existence a moral one. Morality here means one’s life becoming active, alive, and capable of sustaining adversities and drawing paths previously unconceived of. This operation is meant to achieve the two goals of rescuing religious experience from insanity, associating it with a distinctive kind of health, and of including religious thinkers among the moral advisers of society, hence widening the very scope of morality.

11In this sense, as Sutton remarks (2023: 112 ff.), James is rehearsing the story told at the beginning of Varieties, itself a rehearsal of his earlier reflection on stoicism and evil, where religious tension is needed exactly by those whose life is plagued by a difficult constitution. For them, in fact, the strike of moral choice is hard to hit, and often on the verge of being dumped into the dustbin of inanition. Yet, and I suspect here some suspect trespassing takes place, this does not mean to grant moral significance to those religious experiences alone, leaving those of us (James included) unable to cover such supernatural length demoralized and half awake. And this is problematic on at least two counts. First, those subliminal states in which one is fighting for meaningful existence and selecting the ideas one is about to live by and discard the ones competing with them, are in all respects subconscious, and not necessarily mystical, ones. Religious people have their self torn between heaven and earth, but mundane forms of severed consciousness are equally possible and morally significant. Second, to energize the self and become an active member of society in the face of doubt and lack of a “pungent sense of effective reality,” as James calls this sense of deadness in the chapter on the will of The Principles of Psychology, is all the more challenging and hence appreciable in the lack of higher forces to rely upon. The healthier human is thus the one who manages to overcome limitations internal and otherwise by keeping going from within the “moral republic here below,” as James writes in the 1891 The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. In this way health and its counterpart of illness are to be understood as thresholds to be marked and eventually overcome by struggling within the very situation one finds oneself in, seizing it and trying the best one can to make something out of it without necessarily looking for a solution outside of the contingent “world we practically live in,” as James wrote in his posthumously published Some Problems of Philosophy.

12To wrap up, the two issues raised above might be resolved by way of reference to the variety of audiences James engaged, hence to the situated variety of goals and concerns behind his words, or rather to a more generalized ambivalence towards the issues of illness and health, with some notable shifts and longer-term attachments dictated by the very unfolding of his experiences and thinking about and with them. In both cases, issues of coherence and capacity loom large over James’s fascinating if elusive therapeutic philosophy, which Sutton helped us digging. Maybe, just maybe, in the end, whatever works.

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Bibliography

D’Agostino Simone, (2023), Spiritual Exercises in Early Modern Philosophy, Leiden, Brill.

James William, (1890), The Principles of Psychology, New York, Henry Holt & Co.

James William, (1891), “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” International Journal of Ethics, 1(3), 330-54.

James William, (1911), Some Problems of Philosophy, London, New York, Longmans, Green & Co.

Machado Maria Elena P. T. (ed.), (2006), Brazil Through the Eyes of William James: Letters, Diaries, and Drawings, 1885-1886, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

Slater Michael L., (2009), William James on Ethics and Faith, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Sutton Emma, (2023), William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician, Chicago-London, The University of Chicago Press.

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Notes

1 The sustained attempt by philosophy, especially at the dawn of modernity, to become scientific is however not free from appetites for spiritual and civic edification. See, e.g., D’Agostino 2023.

2 The best organic attempt at figuring such a relation out is still Slater 2009.

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References

Electronic reference

Sarin Marchetti, “Whatever Works”European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [Online], XVII-1 | 2025, Online since 24 April 2025, connection on 20 June 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/4896; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13t9r

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About the author

Sarin Marchetti

Sapienza Università di Roma

sarin.marchetti[at]uniroma1.it

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