“Is Life Worth Living?” was the title of a lecture given in 1896 by philosopher and psychologist William James. It began by mentioning a similarly-entitled self-help book—to which, when it had been published 15 years earlier, newspapers had proposed the facetiously ambiguous answer: “That depends on the liver.”
He himself, James said, “cannot be jocose” about the question which had been a vital and serious one for him during his early 20s when he had been contemplating suicide. Waking every morning “with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach”, and with a sense of everything’s ultimate precariousness, he had wondered “how other people could live, how I myself had ever lived, so unconscious of that pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life”. To this, “the morbid-minded way, as we might call it [of viewing life], healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow”.
Read Full Article »