William James on suicide and hope

A timely discovery given recent talk of suicide: I was perusing pragmatism.org and looking through the contents of the journal published by the William James Society when I found a most interesting article. The author, while mounting a convincing defense of James and his defense of religion, discusses James's depression and his reflections on suicide:

In an address to the Harvard YMCA later published
in the volume titled The Will to Believe, James
set out to tend to the “profounder bass note of life” by
addressing the question that became the title of the
essay, “Is Life Worth Living?” His approach here is
simple and direct: what would we say to convince
someone suicidal that life is in fact worth living? James
distinguishes between suicide as the product of genuine
insanity, in which case we can be of no help, and a
more reflective melancholia that results from the studious
life, which may be remedied with yet more reflection.

James identified the hope that life might be anything other than utterly meaningless as a religious impulse. But this was far from any sort of orthodoxy--James, being the good empiricist, believed anyone paying attention to the world would have a hard time assenting to any sort of orthodox theism. The author quotes him:

The visible surfaces of heaven and earth refuse to be
brought by us into any intelligible unity at all. Every phenomenon
that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl
with some contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious
effect upon the mind. Beauty and hideousness, love
and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble
partnership, and there gradually steals over us,
instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that
of an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all
things together meaninglessly to a common doom.

Gotta love that James. He looked around at the world and understood perfectly well why someone might want to checkout permanently. But despite his own troubles, James could not allow himself to succumb to despair. He held on to hope and he believed that belief might prove to be self-fulfilling. As the author puts it, both paraphrasing and quoting James:

We have a hand in creating the worlds we inhabit; life is worth living because we have some say in the matter: “believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”

Good stuff. I find James a helpful philosophical companion because he does not shy away from difficult truths even while sounding an upbeat note. I take solace from that. But I'm still ok with suicide.

If you want to read the whole article, and it's quite good, it's available as a PDF here.