12/15/2023 0 Comments Frigid father eldest souls![]() ![]() When William James later described his brother as being “really a native of the James family and no other country,” he expressed the peculiarly unaffiliated nature of all of the family members which partly derived from this experience and from the elder James’s particular wariness regarding all social roles. Such transcendental antinomianism affected the evolving egos of his five offspring, who had no little difficulty in developing attachments and goals, vocations and achievements their father, having a benign indifference to these, desired that they should be free simply to be.His educational plan was to expose them to as much and as varied a succession of tutors, schools, systems of study and scenes of travel as possible their younger lives were spent in the constant process of transfer either in America or Europe, precisely in order that they should fail to make commitment to one thing or another but cultivate instead the stability and independence of the self. He was the son and namesake of a well-to-do 19th century philosophic eccentric, a Swedenborgian irregular and friend of Emerson who was not unlike him in holding that the condition of personal being was separate from and superior to any doing-in a word that identity was nothing but a state inwardly achieved. His effort to define the relation between the two began in a peculiar family environment. It allows, also, a retreat from consciousness at those times when it is more bearable to subsist in our acts and find them sufficient or to take efficacy as all.įor Henry James the question of being versus doing was of more than usually conscious importance, and it is a principal theme of his fiction. Being is not the same as doing, and their discrepancy protects the human spirit from that loss of selfhood which would otherwise result when life is defeating, and especially when our own acts seem unworthy of the mysterious I that has wanted some finer demonstration. ![]() But the distinction between being and doing, their disconnection, can also be precious. This is why the presumption of free choice, of composing one’s own story in coherence with one’s character, is as precious to the determinist or existentialist as to others. In the pages of the many-leaved consciousness he “writes” a journal in which one question is repeatedly asked: Who am I? Like a historian or portraitist, he tries to connect essence and extension he composes a private description of that inner selfhood which is somehow involved with what he does and what happens to him he strives to see these last as linked to significances stemming from the self, to seek, even, a language of action which is a demonstration of his inwardly imaged being. EVERYONE is his own unpublished biographer.
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