In 1789, a young man of 18 set off from his family’s five-acre farm in County Cavan, Ireland. His parents wanted him to go into the ministry, but to escape that fate he decided to go to America instead. He arrived in Albany, N.Y., penniless, as many immigrants to the United States still do, and took the first job available as a store clerk. Over the next 30 years, the Irishman bought his own store, purchased large sections of land in upstate New York, acquired the salt factories of Syracuse, helped build the Erie Canal and amassed a $3 million fortune second only to that of the Astor family. His name was William James and he later become known as William of Albany.
“Money is like manure,” Thornton Wilder once said. “It’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.” After William’s death in 1832, the James fortune was spread around and supported two generations of literary and philosophical prodigies, most notably the two famous James brothers: the novelist Henry and the philosopher William (their sister Alice was not provided the same education). Like many second- and third-generation immigrants, the James brothers tried to brush off the dust of poverty and distance themselves from their lowly origins.
William of Albany’s grandson, Henry, later wrote of that time, “The rupture with my grandfather’s tradition and attitude was complete; we were never in a single case, I think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke of business.” William James, who would become best known for his work “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” was even more forceful, writing to H.G. Wells that, “The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That — with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word ‘success’ — is our national disease.” Money is like manure: Once you have enough in a pile, it’s easy to complain about the smell. As their grandfather had been an industrialist, the James brothers would be thinkers and writers. As their grandfather had been “distinctly Irish,” they would do their best to be distinctly not.
Disavowing their Irish roots, however, would be no easy thing. Henry James once rejoiced that there was at least one family line, through his paternal grandmother, Catherine Barber, that was purely English. “She represented,” Henry wrote, “for us in our generation the only English blood — that of both her own parents — flowing in our veins.” The rest of the blood was Scots-Irish or Irish alone. In truth, John Barber, Catherine’s father, came from Longford County, Ireland, a fact that Henry conveniently overlooked.
According to the Irish novelist Colm Toibin, Henry James cultivated a secrecy — in both his personal life and letters — that successfully masked not only his sexuality as a gay man but also his cultural heritage. There was in Henry James a willing neglect, or more often disparagement, of his Irish roots. Henry and William were born into an age in which impoverished Irish immigrants, living in the urban centers of the United States, were subject to deportation. Being Irish often meant being poor, which often amounted to being un-American. While his sister, Alice, the depressive genius of the James clan, supported Irish Home Rule against British occupation in the 1880s, Henry maintained his general disdain for the movement and most of the immigrants who crossed his path.
At first glance, William James appears every bit as classist — and anti-Irish — as his brother. In 1898, on a trip to San Francisco, William wrote to Henry from the luxurious Occidental Hotel. “The fare is very good, but the servants are all Irish, who seem cowed in the dining-room, and go about as if they had corns on their feet and for that reason had given up the pick and shovel … ” William failed to see the stark reality faced by many Irish workers in California at the time: That the “luck of the Irish” (a term originating from the occasional success of Irish miners in the Gold Rush) was exceedingly rare, and that most immigrants ultimately made their way to the cities for stable employment. He was also seemingly ignorant of the fact that his own family’s prosperity, which made possible his place in the world, was built upon menial labor.
Leisure, the type enjoyed by the Jameses, can allow us to produce works of literary genius, or to conveniently mask our humble origins, or both. Leisure, however, can also afford us the time to be philosophical, to be just a little more self-reflective about our misguided stance on the world. This was, I think, the case for William James. In 1899, the year after his trip to San Francisco, William James published his “Talks to Teachers and Students,” a series of lectures that he had given at the beginning of the decade to a Cambridge, Mass., audience. When it was published, William highlighted one lecture for special consideration, a talk entitled “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” (Today, we’d think again about the author’s use of the word blindness, which associates the physical state of blindness with ignorance.)
In 1891, James toured the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. There he encountered workers who had yet to give up “the pick and the shovel.” In “On a Certain Blindness,” James describes the trip:
I passed by a large number of ‘coves,’ as they call them there, or heads of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. [A settler family] had then built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs and cattle out. The forest had been destroyed; and what had ‘improved’ it out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature’s beauty. Ugly, indeed, seemed the life of the squatter … beginning again away back where our first ancestors started, and by hardly a single item the better off for all the achievements of the intervening generations.
In the face of this “ugliness,” James remarked that no “modern person” should be willing to live a meager life of “rudimentariness” and “degradation.” He said as much to his local tour guide, who responded with jovial defiance: “We ain’t happy here unless we are getting one of these coves under cultivation.” They were cultivated, but not in the way that James expected. Shocked, he admitted that he “had been losing the whole inward significance of the situation.” What appeared as a wasteland to James was the intimate home of the Appalachian mountaineer.
In a rare moment of self-examination, James admitted that “I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.” Too true. He realized at last, if only temporarily, that the inner lives of others are as vibrant as our own. In his Ingersoll Lectures, published two years later, James scolded his xenophobic audience, insisting that “each of these grotesque and even repulsive aliens is animated by an inner joy of living as hot or hotter than that which you feel beating in your private breast.”
James’s late writings centered almost exclusively on what he termed “pluralistic” philosophy — on the idea that individuality and particularity should be respected almost at all costs. This continues to run against the prevailing notion that American culture ought to be solidified through ethnic commonality. The only thing truly common, actually universal, James contended, is that each of us is uniquely and meaningfully different, that we find significance in our own particular ways. “Culture is too hidebound,” he explained, and what is passed down to its inhabitants is “an ancestral blindness,” which makes recognizing the worth of other types of lives particularly difficult if not impossible.
There are at least two types of moral “blindness” — the inability to see the inner lives of individuals unlike ourselves, and also the unwillingness to recognize those aspects of ourselves that quietly underwrite our histories. It is difficult but essential to remember that at one point in the not so distant past we were all trespassers and foreigners. William James rightly said that he could not fully comprehend the lives of the Appalachian mountaineers, but they shared something that he perhaps consciously or habitually overlooked: They were all Scots-Irish.
John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the author, most recently, of “Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.”