William James was born on January 11, 1842, in New York City, at the Astor House.¹ His father’s father made a great deal of money. Among other things, he invested in the Erie Canal. At one time, he was reputed to be the second-richest person in New York State, after John Jacob Astor. James’s father inherited a considerable amount of this fortune; he also suffered a serious accident, which required that his leg be amputated at the knee. This loss of mobility gave him large amounts of time to dote on the education of his children, the two most famous of whom were William and Henry, although Alice was a formidable figure in her own right. William made the first of many trips to Europe at the age of two. In the 1850s, he attended a private school in New York City, where he impressed his drawing teacher with his natural talent for sketching. During the period 1855–58, he was in London and Paris and attended college in Boulogne-sur-Mer; in 1859, he was at school in Newport, Rhode Island. In 1860, he was at the Academy in Geneva. In 1861, he was back in America, studying painting under William Hunt. James’s father, however, did not approve of art as a vocation. A devotee of Emanuel Swedenborg, he believed that salvation could only be granted en masse, not through individual effort. This was something William could never accept.

What James realized in this instance is that what we might abstractly term the philosophical problem of freedom versus determinism cannot be solved on exclusively logical grounds or by an appeal to neutral empirical data. That is, one could construct a coherent argument for determinism—that we are the victims of our circumstances—and bolster it by showing that it corresponded to data—in this case, primarily the data of James’s physical disorders and of his lack of any gainful employment thus far. On the other hand, one could construct an argument that the human self is free and able to act creatively and efficaciously; this argument, too, could be bolstered by appeal to corresponding empirical data—in this case, for example, by referring to James’s successful pursuit of a medical degree. But when all is said and done, the arguments are inconclusive or indeterminate. Two competing hypotheses of equal worth can be put forth, both passing the traditional criteria of logical coherence and confirmation through correspondence with empirical facts. In brief, what James realized on a personal level in 1870 was that, first, the issue of freedom versus determinism was ambiguous or “vague” and, second, that this vagueness was what was most important about it. The problem cannot be solved but only be “resolved” through affirmation or action. For, in a vague situation like this, one is forced to react, and this participation is at least sometimes constitutive of the outcome. The issue of his own freedom versus determinism was richer, subtler than what appeared at the manifest level in terms of linguistic or conceptual categories.

The action taken by James in 1870 was not a onetime affair. There were other crises in James’s life that called for a similar type of response. Other commentators have unveiled different crises in James’s life. Thus, Daniel Bjork, in William James: The Center of his Vision, views the period between 1899 and 1902 as a time when James suffered a deep depression “perhaps even more severe” than the melancholia of 1869.⁵ James irreparably strained his heart while walking in the mountains of Keene Valley, New York, in 1898. For Bjork, James tried to deal with this second crisis in the same way as he did the first one, that is, by choosing an attitude, by redirecting and refocusing his vision: “Yet what worked in 1870 was not so workable in 1900. The active will was more likely to be broken during a terminal illness.”⁶