Harvard University’s Holden Chapel always struck me as the proper home of a crypt-keeper: an appropriate place to die, or at least to remain dead. The forty-foot brick structure has no front windows. Above its entrance are four stone bucrania, bas-relief ox-skull sculptures of the sort that pagans once placed on their temples to keep away evil spirits. In 1895, when William James was asked to address a crowd of young Christian men at the Georgian chapel, it was already more than 150 years old, a fitting setting for the fifty-three-year-old philosopher to contemplate what he had come to believe was the profoundest of questions: “Is life worth living?” (...)
James, by then quite famous as the father of American psychology and philosophy, was one of them—unequivocally “sick-souled,” as he put it. He knew something that the faithful often miss, that believing in life’s worth, for many people, is the struggle of a lifetime. He’d overdosed on chloral hydrate in the 1870s just “for the fun of it,” as he wrote to his brother Henry, to see how close he could come to the morgue without actually going there. James was not alone in his curiosity. A decade later, his colleague and founder of the Society for Psychical Research, Edmund Gurney, took the experiment with life and death too far, testing what turned out to be fatal dose of chloroform. In response to Gurney’s death, James wrote to his brother once again. “[This death] make[s] what remains here strangely insignificant and ephemeral, as if the weight of things, as well as the numbers, was all on the other side.” The other side. As in: No. Life is not worth living.
“No,” as it turns out, is an answer that has much to recommend it in a place like Holden Chapel. Religious services were moved out of the building in the middle of the eighteenth century and, for the next hundred years, it served as a chemistry lab and classroom for the nascent Harvard Medical School, where cadavers were dissected. “The Gross Clinic,” painted by Thomas Eakins in 1875, gives some idea about the nature of surgery at the time. In it, several doctors perform an operation on a child, working without gloves as their patient’s insides fester in the open air. The patient’s mother, meanwhile, sits nearby in horror, covering her face in a futile attempt to escape what James understood all too well: at the end of the existential day, we are a bunch of smelly carcasses. (When Holden was renovated in 1999, workers discovered skeletal remains in the basement.) James would have been aware of the chapel’s gory medical history as he pondered life’s worth with the YMCA.
The aging philosopher was not there to affirm the sunny convictions of these Christian acolytes. But he’d also managed to avoid suicide for more than half a century. By the end of the evening at Holden, somewhere between Pollyanna optimism and utter nihilism, James discovered the answer to his question: Maybe. Maybe life is worth living. “It depends,” he said, “on the liver.” (...)
When James suggested that life’s worth depends on the liver, he tapped into this particular, peculiar spiritual history. Most scholars continue to take James to mean that forming existential meaning is, in a very real sense, up to each of us, that our individual wills are the determining factor in making meaning in a world that continually threatens it. This is all well and good, but it doesn’t go quite far enough. For some people, their livers portend truly awful circumstances, and no amount of effort can see them through. When asked the question—“Is life worth living?”—some livers are naturally inclined toward, and then can finally give, but one answer: “No.” James wasn’t resigned to this fact, but he also wasn’t blind to it. The worth of life remains conditional on factors both within and beyond one’s control. The appropriate response to this existential situation is not, at least for James, utter despair, but rather the repeated, ardent, yearning attempt to make good on life’s tenuous possibilities. The risk of life—that it turns out to be wholly meaningless—is real, but so too is the reward: the ever-present chance to be partially responsible for its worth.
James, by then quite famous as the father of American psychology and philosophy, was one of them—unequivocally “sick-souled,” as he put it. He knew something that the faithful often miss, that believing in life’s worth, for many people, is the struggle of a lifetime. He’d overdosed on chloral hydrate in the 1870s just “for the fun of it,” as he wrote to his brother Henry, to see how close he could come to the morgue without actually going there. James was not alone in his curiosity. A decade later, his colleague and founder of the Society for Psychical Research, Edmund Gurney, took the experiment with life and death too far, testing what turned out to be fatal dose of chloroform. In response to Gurney’s death, James wrote to his brother once again. “[This death] make[s] what remains here strangely insignificant and ephemeral, as if the weight of things, as well as the numbers, was all on the other side.” The other side. As in: No. Life is not worth living.“No,” as it turns out, is an answer that has much to recommend it in a place like Holden Chapel. Religious services were moved out of the building in the middle of the eighteenth century and, for the next hundred years, it served as a chemistry lab and classroom for the nascent Harvard Medical School, where cadavers were dissected. “The Gross Clinic,” painted by Thomas Eakins in 1875, gives some idea about the nature of surgery at the time. In it, several doctors perform an operation on a child, working without gloves as their patient’s insides fester in the open air. The patient’s mother, meanwhile, sits nearby in horror, covering her face in a futile attempt to escape what James understood all too well: at the end of the existential day, we are a bunch of smelly carcasses. (When Holden was renovated in 1999, workers discovered skeletal remains in the basement.) James would have been aware of the chapel’s gory medical history as he pondered life’s worth with the YMCA.
The aging philosopher was not there to affirm the sunny convictions of these Christian acolytes. But he’d also managed to avoid suicide for more than half a century. By the end of the evening at Holden, somewhere between Pollyanna optimism and utter nihilism, James discovered the answer to his question: Maybe. Maybe life is worth living. “It depends,” he said, “on the liver.” (...)
When James suggested that life’s worth depends on the liver, he tapped into this particular, peculiar spiritual history. Most scholars continue to take James to mean that forming existential meaning is, in a very real sense, up to each of us, that our individual wills are the determining factor in making meaning in a world that continually threatens it. This is all well and good, but it doesn’t go quite far enough. For some people, their livers portend truly awful circumstances, and no amount of effort can see them through. When asked the question—“Is life worth living?”—some livers are naturally inclined toward, and then can finally give, but one answer: “No.” James wasn’t resigned to this fact, but he also wasn’t blind to it. The worth of life remains conditional on factors both within and beyond one’s control. The appropriate response to this existential situation is not, at least for James, utter despair, but rather the repeated, ardent, yearning attempt to make good on life’s tenuous possibilities. The risk of life—that it turns out to be wholly meaningless—is real, but so too is the reward: the ever-present chance to be partially responsible for its worth.
by John Kaag, Harpers | Read more:
Image: John Kaag
