Is there such things as Good and Evil?
We have different perception on how we see. It seems to be a matter of making a choice, a decision ;if it is a Good thing to do, or looks to be not right at all. It can be a 2 sided coin, a neutral one , that everytime you've been tossed in a situation, you cant decide even though you may either become the Head ,that seems just right, but hides the Tail of morbidness, or to face the rough side of yours, even they don't see your sides of good intensions .
This explains the chapter from The Varieties of Religious Experience, The Healthy-Minded and the Sick Souls, written by Sir William James.
William James was the oldest among the five children of Henry James Sr., known to be a great writer of fiction, and Mary Welsh James He got his medical degree in Harvard after he studied Philosophy and medicine in Germany, but he did not plan to practice medicine and seemed lost also to what to do with the rest of his life. With the same year, James’ neurological symptoms had become worst that it almost makes him to be invalid, in that time he considered to commit suicide. But in 1870, after reading an excerpt of Treatment of Inner Freedom by Charles Renouvier, he finds answer to his problem in voluntary act of will, he start down his recovery. He was a member of a Metaphysical Club that included Oliver Wendell Holmes, who taught law at Harvard and would go on to serve on the U. S. Supreme Court, and Charles Sanders Peirce, a philosopher of science, who would become the founder of American pragmatism. He published “The Sentiment of Rationality,” his first important article in his new discipline.
Let now examine one of his Lectures in Varieties of Religious Experience , with the fascinating contrast between healthy-minded, and the one he called the sick souls.
Lets begin in William James view of religion. Religion was one of a polarizing subject people are associated with organized religion, often one attitude will determine their views on the religion as a whole, when we hear the world religion, its seem to have connection to a church, suggest so much hypocrisy , unfair treatment by people, tenacity or continuing so long of superstition , that we are not able to see and understand people,things situations clearly,intelligently.
But his interest was not actually on religious institutions, ritual, or even for the most part religious ideas, but on the;
"..feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far for as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to what they may consider the divine.”
An excerpt from his book The Principles of Psychology.
The central distinction of the early chapters on “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness” and “The Sick Souls”, Healthy-mindedness has a deep sense of “the goodness of life”, a soul of sky blue tint, can be involuntary, just natural to someone, but often comes in more willful forms. These represented alternative ways of viewing the world and resulted in different religious temperaments. The healthy mindedness was individuals who associated what he called “mind cure movement”. The leaders in this faith; James said, had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power it healthy-minded attitudes in conquering efficacy of courage, hope, trust and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states and mind, base on this description it is evident that this movement in one form from another has continued to be influential until the present day. He believe there were definite benefits to adopting the healthy-minded view of life, James was struggled with depression throughout his life so he understood the rejuvenating effect of positive thinking, but also James recognize the healthy mind of view are inappropriate as he said
“… does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who habitually lived on the other?”. Individuals who are incapable of living on the positive side of the “pain-threshold” probably won’t find healthy-mindedness an appropriate perspective to adapt. For the “Sick Souls” in the context “…radical evil gets its innings” (V, 163).
No matter how secure one may feel, the sick soul finds that
“…unsuspected from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something biter rises up, a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight…”.
These states are not simply unpleasant sensations, deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. Morbid-mindedness ,on the other hand, view of life is unavoidable for some people due to the circumstances of their lives or attitudinal disposition. However many would also suggest that such a view is not desirable and hence to be avoided at all cost, but this is not what James view.
” …the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”.
James saw a connection between the depth of one’s despair and the level of appreciation for life that one could eventually achieve.
James is our great philosopher of the point. He tells us more than anyone else about what it's like to stand in that open space and feel the winds pulling you now here, now there. It took very exceptional qualities to do this. Very likely it needed someone who had been through a searing experience of "morbidity" as James had been, and had come out the other side. But it also needed someone of wide sympathy and extraordinary powers of phenomenological description; further, it needed someone who could feel and articulate the continuing ambivalence in himself.
I conclude, Human personality was the most complex area to study, because of every individual’s unique characteristics. In his book, it tells us that the experience was the true religion. Teachings, practices, and attitude were just its secondary goal. Experience can be includes the conversion; the transformation from imperfect self to a more unified consciousness can be gradually process.
Jims Bryan Abecilla Stem 1A
