To be human is to repeatedly mistake our frames of reference for actuality itself. We so readily overlook that our vantage level is however a speck on the immense airplane of attainable views. We so readily overlook that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.
The self-discipline of countering our reflex for self-righteousness is a triumph of existential maturity — one more and more uncommon in a tradition the place most individuals would slightly armor themselves with judgment than tremble with uncertainty, would slightly be proper than perceive.
The pioneering psychologist and thinker William James (January 11, 1842–August 26, 1910) explores the making of that triumph in a pair of fantastic lectures — “On a Sure Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes Life Important” — posthumously collected within the 1911 quantity Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (public library | public domain).
With a watch to “the value we inevitably must pay for being sensible creatures,” James considers these uncommon moments when our recurring blinders fall away and we see a fuller image of actuality:
Solely in some pitiful dreamer, some thinker, poet, or romancer, or when the frequent sensible man turns into a lover, does the arduous externality give means, and a gleam of perception into the ejective world… the huge world of inside life past us, so totally different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our thoughts. Then the entire scheme of our customary values will get confounded, then our self is riven and its slender pursuits fly to items, then a brand new centre and a brand new perspective should be discovered.
That new perspective contains the popularity that different folks attempt for happiness and which means in methods apart from our personal, simply as legitimate within the making of a life. James considers the worth of this shift in understanding:
It completely forbids us to be ahead in saying on the meaninglessness of types of existence apart from our personal; and it instructions us to tolerate, respect, and indulge these whom we see harmlessly and joyful in their very own methods, nonetheless unintelligible these could also be to us. Fingers off: neither the entire of fact nor the entire of fine is revealed to any single observer, though every observer positive aspects a partial superiority of perception from the peculiar place wherein he stands.
Observing “the falsity of our judgments, as far as they presume to determine in an absolute means on the worth of different individuals’ situations or beliefs,” observing “how soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings which we fail to appreciate due to our exterior and insensible viewpoint,” observing how usually and the way readily we decide the outward decisions of others whereas shedding sight of the “inward significance” of these decisions, James writes:
The very first thing to study in intercourse with others is non-interference with their very own peculiar methods of being joyful, offered these methods don’t assume to intrude by violence with ours. Nobody has perception into all of the beliefs. Nobody ought to presume to guage them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in one another is the foundation of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character almost definitely to make the angels weep.
Complement with Joan Didion on learning not to mistake self-righteousness for morality, then revisit William James on the psychology of attention, how our bodies affect our feelings, and the four features of transcendence.
