It was chilly at the top. I looked across to the Statue of Liberty in the harbour and then back into Manhattan where James had grown up. Then I looked down. There was a terrifying liberty in this – the choice to live and die in a particular moment, as time stretches out endlessly in either direction. After reading James for most of my adult life, this liberty still has its appeal. I think it always will. In the first decade of the 20th century, James developed American pragmatism, a philosophy that held that truth should be judged by its practical consequences. It was a world-ready philosophy that, at its most basic, was supposed to make life more liveable. And it does, for the most part. But if pragmatism does save your life, it’s never once and for all. This is a philosophy that remains attuned to experiences, attitudes, things and events, even when they are the tragic ones. While James occasionally disparaged Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism (and refused to give a cent to a memorial in honour of the 19th-century German philosopher), James’s posthumous writings reveal a deep respect for the grim thinker’s willingness to stare clear-eyed into the gloom of human existence. There was something like courage in this brutal confrontation with quickly impending darkness.
According to James, the sign at the bottom of the bridge should be repainted or at least amended: LIFE IS WORTH LIVING – MAYBE. As he said to a crowd of young men from the Harvard YMCA in 1895: ‘Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.’ It is up to each of us to, literally, make of life ‘what we will’. These days, when I peer down from great heights, in addition to experiencing vertigo, I almost always think about Steve Rose, a young black psychology graduate who threw himself off the William James Hall at Harvard University in 2014. Perhaps James’s way of thinking could have saved him – the suggestion that he was still in charge of his life, that the decision to end it all might be reasonable, even respectable, but so too was the possibility of continuing to live. The possibility was right there – still, always, even in the shit and rancour of it – for him to explore. Perhaps he thought that choosing to die was the only free decision at his disposal, but James always suggested there might be other options. [...]
I think one surefire way to send jumpers off the edge is to pretend that you know something they don’t: that life has unconditional value, and that they are missing something that is so patently obvious. On the ledge, I suspect that they’d detect some deep insecurity or hubris in this assertion. And they might jump just to prove you wrong. Because you would, in fact, be wrong. In James’s final entreaty in his essay ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings’ (1899), he reminded his readers that they often don’t have a clue about how other people experience the meaning of their lives. Better to leave it at ‘maybe’.
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