Dr. James O. Pawelski
Vanderbilt University
james.o.pawelski@vanderbilt.edu
Forthcoming in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy
William James, Positive Psychology, and Healthy-Mindedness
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James offers a psychological analysis of the religious experiences of leading figures in traditional world religions. James diagnoses the leading figures of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism as "morbid-minded." He describes them in this way because of their beliefs that evil is an essential component of the world and that the only way we can live a truly joyful and meaningful life is by maximizing our awareness of this evil.
James contrasts the views of these morbid-minded persons with individuals he calls "healthy-minded." Healthy-minded individuals believe evil is not an essential component of the world. For healthy-minded individuals, the way to a joyful and meaningful life lies through minimizing our awareness of evil. By ignoring or reinterpreting our experiences of it, they hold, we transform evil into good.
James argues that the differences between morbid-minded and healthy-minded views of life are functions of an underlying difference of temperament and that persons of different temperament need different types of religion. If the traditional world religions appeal to the morbid-minded temperament, James holds, the newer "mind-cure" is one example of a religion that appeals to the healthy-minded temperament.
James devotes two of the twenty lectures of Varieties to an explicit analysis of the healthy-minded temperament and to a discussion of the beliefs, practices, and successes of the nineteenth century mind-cure movement. While James was impressed with the practical successes of mind-cure, he also believed that its healthy-minded views and practices could be applied beyond the context of healthy-minded religion. In "The Energies of Men," the presidential address he delivered to the American Philosophical Association in 1906, James calls for the founding of a new field of psychology that would study scientifically and apply more broadly the psychological principles underlying the success of mind-cure.
It has been nearly a century since James made this call for a new psychology. During that time, it has simply been ignored by most philosophers and psychologists. [1] In the last few years, however, more and more psychologists have begun studying healthy-minded themes. Many of them, in fact, consider themselves part of an evolving new field of "positive psychology." [2] A more careful examination both of the nature of James's call and of the aims and methods of positive psychology will help us see to what extent this new field may constitute an answer to James's call. Such an examination will also yield insights about the potential value of positive psychology and about the types of questions it will have to address in its continued development.
James defines healthy-mindedness as "the tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are good" (1982, 87). [3] For James, there are several forms in which this tendency is to be found. In its simple and most natural form, it occurs involuntarily. Involuntary healthy-mindedness is a way of "feeling happy about things immediately" (1982, 88). Persons of this sort seem to have "started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to their credit" (1982, 135). They seem simply incapable of seeing the evil in the world. But James also identifies a more voluntary or systematic healthy-mindedness. In this form, healthy-mindedness appears as "an abstract way of conceiving things as good" (1982, 88). Abstract conception, for James, is a way of identifying one part of a thing as its essence and ignoring the rest of it. Voluntary healthy-mindedness deliberately chooses the good to be the essence of existence and systematically ignores everything that does not accord with this essence.
On the face of it, James admits, this may seem difficult for an honest person to carry off. It sounds like deliberate self-deception. But he offers two reasons, one psychological and one moral, for not dismissing this view out of hand. Psychologically, James points out, emotional states, whether positive or negative, are self-perpetuating. When we are feeling happy, we simply cannot feel sad, even if we think about things that at other times we would find depressing. So when a happy person reports not seeing evil in the world, she is simply reporting the way things are for her.
But this raises a moral question. If I see only goodness in the world only after consuming a bottle of champagne, is it ethical for me to remain perpetually tipsy and to base my evaluation of the world exclusively on the perception I have of it when I am in that state? Or do I have a duty to face the world as it really is? James's answer to such questions is to reject the realism they presuppose. If the moral value of the world were a function of the way the world "really is," independent of us, it might well be our moral duty to work to perceive that objective value as clearly as possible. In such a case the argument could be made that champagne clouds our ability to perceive this value accurately. [4] But James is no values realist. He believes the ultimate value of the world is determined, at least in large part, by our evaluation of it.
For James, evil is largely a function of our evaluation, and our evaluation is, in turn, largely a function of things such as attitude and focus. By simply changing our inner attitude, for example, we can eliminate much evil. If instead of trying to escape from painful events, we face and accept them as challenges to be overcome or as situations to be borne cheerfully, we often inure ourselves to their pain.
This leads to a question of the extent to which changes of attitude and focus are effective. When James claims that "much" of what we evaluate as evil can be eliminated through an attitude change, how does he differentiate evils that can be so eliminated from those that cannot? For James, at least part of the difference is a function of the temperament of the person experiencing the evil. There are some persons who by temperament are able to adopt the healthy-minded view, and there are some who by temperament are not. There are three main types of temperament at issue here. I have already mentioned the involuntarily healthy-minded persons, who just seem to have a natural tendency to feel happy about the world. I have also already mentioned the voluntarily healthy-minded, who feel happy about the world, not as a result of a natural tendency, but as the result of a deliberate choice to adopt and cultivate a healthy-minded attitude. The third type of temperament belongs to the non-healthy-minded. The non-healthy-minded would include the morbid-minded persons of the traditional religions. For such persons, evil is not something that can be overcome merely by ignoring it or by reframing it. For them, evil belongs to the essence of existence.
If James is right here, then it would seem important to make one further distinction in the category of voluntarily healthy-minded persons. Of persons with this temperament, there must be those who are actually healthy-minded, who have actually made the deliberate decision to see the world as essentially good, and those who are merely potentially healthy-minded, who have not made such a decision, but who are capable of making it. [5] This differentiation allows us to draw the important distinction among those who are not healthy-minded between the potentially voluntarily healthy-minded and the non-healthy-minded. The former would be those who could actually adopt the message of healthy-mindedness, while the latter would be those who could not.
James sees voluntary healthy-mindedness as a religious attitude and finds its major expression in his day in the mind-cure movement. As James defines it, mind-cure stands for a number of related religious perspectives. It has its sources in the four gospels, transcendentalism, idealism, spiritism, optimistic evolutionism, and Hinduism. James identifies the most characteristic unifying feature of the movement as "an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind" (1982, 94-95).
James points out that mind-cure, like other religious attitudes, is founded on an experiential dualism. According to this dualism, there is a shallower and a profounder sphere of experience, and we can learn to live habitually in either sphere. The shallower sphere is identified as that of "the fleshly sensations, instincts, and desires, of egotism, doubt, and the lower personal interests" (1982, 97). For Christianity, it is frowardness that keeps us in the lower sphere; for mind-cure, it is fear that holds us down. Although fear has been important in the evolution of our species, mind-cure writers argue, it is no longer necessary. If we do not evolve beyond it, we are likely to become trapped in the "misery-habit" and the "martyr-habit." Such habits arise, according to mind-curers, from the social training we receive to expect disease and to dread the unexpected loss of health or property.
This, in essence, is mind-cure's view of the fall of man. James points out that, although this view may not be so far from the view Jesus himself actually held, it certainly differs from that of orthodox Christianity. On the basis of James's account, we might also add that mind-cure's remedy for human fallenness, as well, differs from that of orthodox Christianity. For Christianity, of course, the key is a recognition of our separation from God and of our dependence on God for salvation. For mind-cure, the key is the pantheistic realization that our higher nature is always already one with the Divine. Since there is no fear in Divine love, a realization of our identity with this love eradicates our fear.
In spite of this significant difference between mind-cure and orthodox Christian theologies of regeneration, however, James argues that there is a curious similarity of experience to be found in their respective accounts of conversion. In particular, James points out that mind-cure, Lutheranism, and Wesleyanism all claim that regeneration comes, not through effort of will, but through a giving up of that effort. Each of these movements holds that moralistic efforts to be good end not in the goal desired but in frustration. And they counsel that it is precisely at this point of frustration that we must give up. It is by giving up our efforts, they hold, that the second birth occurs. James notes that these conversion experiences are often sudden and automatic, leaving the reborn religionist with the distinct impression that the experience has come from God.
According to James, the success of mind-cure, like the earlier success of Lutheranism and Wesleyanism, is a function of temperament. Lutheranism and Wesleyanism thrived because of the existence of large numbers of morbid-minded individuals who were susceptible to regeneration by letting go. Similarly, mind-cure is successful because of the existence of large numbers of healthy-minded individuals who are susceptible to the same kind of regenerative process.
With healthy-minded persons who are by temperament susceptible to the mind-cure message, mind-cure works, James argues, through suggestion and through the subconscious. By "suggestion" James means "the power of ideas, so far as they prove efficacious over belief and conduct" (1982, 112, italics deleted). Mind-cure, then, proves effective for those for whom its ideas are suggestive. And to be suggestive, James argues, ideas must "come to the individual with the force of a revelation" (1982, 113). It is through the force of revelation, as well as personal faith, enthusiasm, example, and novelty that ideas of this sort are most effective in opening persons up to the possibilities of a higher religious life.
Mind-curers access the power of the subconscious, James notes, by means of volitional practices. Passive relaxation, concentration, meditation, and something akin to hypnotism are the systematic practices James mentions. These practices, which James says are intrinsically identical to the Catholic practices of "recollection" or of "practicing the presence of God," are intended to harness the power of the subconscious as a source of strength and comfort. The use of these volitional practices, as well as the suggestive power of ideas, is a topic to which we will shortly return in a different context.
James emphasizes that mind-cure's success is due, not to its theology, but to its practical results. According to James, the attractiveness of mind-cure is quite pragmatic: it works. Through mind-cure, he writes, "The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk: lifelong invalids have had their health restored....[R]egeneration of character has gone on on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has been restored to countless homes" (1982, 95). He goes on to quote some striking first-person accounts attesting to these astounding results and compares them deliberately to the accounts of the activities of Jesus and the early Christian church.
James argues that the results of mind-cure are too many and too remarkable to be dismissed out of hand by those who have not experienced them. But he also cautions that mind-cure methods do not always work. Those who have experienced the power of mind-cure must not assume that its results are equally available to all. Where mind-cure does work, it should be applied, James concludes, but where it does not work, other methods must be sought.
Four years after the publication of Varieties, James takes up the topic of healthy-mindedness again in a very different context. This context is his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association on December 28, 1906. Calling his talk "The Energies of Men," James addresses the question of dynamogenesis, of how to raise our levels of mental and moral energy. That we all have levels of such energy that we normally do not tap is made evident, for James, by a consideration of what we call "second wind." We normally stop an activity when we tire of it, but on those occasions when, for one reason or another, we feel compelled to continue, we experience great difficulty for a time—and then something quite remarkable happens: we get our second wind. We burst through into a new reservoir of energy that carries us forward in the task that a moment ago had seemed impossible to continue.
In his address, James examines ways in which these reservoirs of untapped energy can be accessed. He identifies three in particular: emotional excitements, volitional efforts, and abstract ideas. The most common means of access of these deeper energies are the emotional excitements that accompany our normal lives. The excitement of the responsibilities of a new position, for example, energizes us to work harder to meet them. Crises such as shipwrecks, battles, and—I might add—national tragedies call up levels of energy in us we had no idea were there.
James points out, though, that these crises and excitements are sporadic in most of our lives. In the intervening spaces, we tend to remain indolent, cut off from our higher powers by habits of fatigue. It is in these times that concerted efforts of the will can be effective in helping us access these energies. These efforts may be isolated or they may be practiced methodically. To illustrate the power of methodic efforts of will, James gives an extended account of the benefits experienced by a friend of his who took up a rigorous program of yoga.
In addition to emotional excitements and efforts of will, James observes, our deeper levels of energy may be accessed through ideas. Abstract ideas of country, flag, the Union, church, truth, science, liberty, and loyalty are all examples he gives of ideas that are powerful motivators for certain social groups. On a more individual level, conversions—whether religious, political, scientific, or philosophical—are ways of organizing our internal ideas in energy-producing ways.
It is important not to misunderstand what James means by "energy" here. The year after James delivered his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, he revised his talk for publication in the popular press. [6] In this revised version, which appeared in American Magazine in October 1907 under the title "The Powers of Men," James is careful to point out the importance of considering both the quantity and the quality of human energies. If we were to consider only the quantity of energy, we may mistakenly think that the problem of raising it has to do solely with "the maximum of pounds raisable against gravity, the maximum of locomotion, or of agitation of any sort, that human beings can accomplish." But James quite rightly points out that this might "signify little more than hurrying and jumping about in inco-ordinated [sic] ways." It might be instructive here to think about the kind of energy puppies have. Puppies have a high quantity of energy, but the quality of that energy is not always so high. Youthful exuberance is one kind of energy, but the accomplishment of desired goals sometimes requires a more mature quality of energy. As James points out, for example, it sometimes takes a high quality of energy to find peace in difficult circumstances. In sum, James means by "energy" something much more broad than merely physical or emotional agitation. It involves a "sum-total of activities, some outer and some inner, some muscular, some emotional, some moral, some spiritual" (McDermott 1977, 673).
In "The Energies of Men," James claims that having our energy levels raised is the most important thing that can happen to us (1907a, 2), and in "The Powers of Men" he considers in more detail why this is so important and why we must learn how to raise these levels in different types of people (1907b, 672-3). James argues that this ability is crucially important for ethics, for economics, and for education. In the realm of ethics, it is only by maximizing our energy that we have the power to fulfill our potential for the good life. In the realm of economics, the closer an individual comes to fulfilling her potential, the greater will be her individual economic success; and the closer all the individuals in a particular nation come to fulfilling their potential, the greater will be the overall economic success of that nation. With this in mind, the problem of education becomes how to train youth to access their most useful levels of energy.
At the end of his address, James reveals his reason for having chosen human energies as his topic. He believes that the problems associated with these energies are of paramount importance and constitute a program for a new "concrete individual psychology." He notes that questions of human energy and their cultivation have been left to moralists, mind-curers, and doctors; he laments that, in all his reading in scientific psychology, not once has he come across a discussion of it; and he hopes that members of his audience will be motivated to take up the challenge of studying it. According to James, this new psychology will need to address two fundamental problems. The first is the problem of our powers. James writes, "We ought somehow to get a topographic survey made of the limits of human power in every conceivable direction, something like an ophthamologist's [sic] chart of the limits of the human field of vision." The second problem is one of means. He writes, "[W]e ought...to construct a methodical inventory of the paths of access, or keys, differing with the diverse types of individual, to the different kinds of power" (1907a, 19).
James stresses that this study must be "absolutely concrete." Laboratory experiments will be only marginally useful, because the study involves the energies that are called up in us only by real emergencies in life. Instead of laboratory data, this study must rely mainly on historical and biographical material. The powers identified must be powers actually realized by concrete individuals; the means of accessing those powers must have been used by concrete individuals, as well.
This, then, is James's program for psychology. To a significant extent, it amounts to a call for the scientific study of healthy-mindedness. But turning now to the new field of positive psychology, we can see to what extent it may be an answer to James's call. [7]
Positive psychology was officially launched in 1998 by Martin Seligman during his term of office as president of the American Psychological Association. [8] In his presidential address to the Association, made ninety-four years after James gave a presidential address to that same Association, Seligman observed that, since World War II, psychology has focused largely on healing. That is, psychologists have focused on pathology—on the identification and cure of mental illness. Seligman notes that this focus has generated remarkable results. By his count, there are some fourteen mental disorders that can be cured or at least effectively treated that could not be so treated fifty years ago. But Seligman emphasizes that this is only part of psychology's mission. Psychology is not only about healing disease. More broadly, it is about making the lives of all people better. Exclusive focus on pathology leaves out the study of flourishing individuals and thriving communities, with the information this study might give us for fostering such individuals and such communities. This situation is particularly unfortunate if Seligman's hypothesis is correct that one of the most effective ways of buffering against mental illness is the cultivation of human strengths (1998b).
Since 1998, the field has expanded rapidly and now involves hundreds of researchers, many of whom are placed in top academic institutions in the United States and around the world. [9] These researchers are seeking to correct the imbalance of mainstream psychology by focusing, not on pathology, but on human strengths and virtues. As the scientific study of optimal human functioning, positive psychology aims to "discover and promote the factors that allow individuals and communities to thrive" (Sheldon, Fredrickson, Rathunde, Csikszentmihalyi, and Haidt 2000, 1). It is a "science of positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions" (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000, 5). A central part of the work of positive psychology is the creation of a classification of human strengths, intended to be a counterpart to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) is a resource developed by the American Psychiatric Association that catalogues hundreds of pathologies. It lists each pathology and operationalizes it for purposes of diagnosis. Lacking in this impressive catalog of the various ways in which the human psyche can go wrong are the ways in which it can go right—ways that would include James's "human powers" and positive psychology's "human strengths."
Positive psychologists are working to create a diagnostic and statistical manual for strengths instead of weaknesses. Called the Values in Action (VIA) Classification of Strengths Manual, this "manual of the sanities" contains—in its current draft form (Peterson and Seligman 2003)—twenty-four strengths clustered under six main virtues. The main virtues are wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Positive psychologists argue that these six virtues are consistently valued across cultures and across time. Human strengths, they hypothesize, constitute the various ways in which these different virtues are instantiated.
This Classification of Strengths seems remarkably close to what James had in mind with his ophthalmologist's chart of human powers. Although James was not completely clear himself what he meant by "human powers," he doubtless would have approved of the efforts of positive psychologists and would have seen their work as clarifying and further developing his initial insights.
A second key way in which positive psychologists are further developing James's initial insights is in the area of method. As a radical empiricist, James is committed to avoiding two dangers in psychology. One is the rationalist approach. This armchair approach is too theoretical and speculative, too far removed from the concrete facts essential to a proper understanding of psychology, to satisfy James. The second danger is reductionistic empiricism. Psychologists who are too enamored by laboratory experiments tend to ignore anything they do not know how to measure in the laboratory. This is why James warns in "The Energies of Men" that, in the study for which he is calling, "[l]aboratory experimentation can play but a small part" (1907a, 19).
In his own work in psychology, James explored research methods intended to avoid these two dangers of rationalism and reductionistic empiricism. Varieties constitutes one of his most notable applications of these methods. The study of religious experience presents real challenges to the scientist who wants to go beyond mere theological and rationalistic speculation about such experiences. Conversions, for example, are not the sorts of things that can be replicated in laboratories. James's solution is to comb historical and biographical materials in search of accounts of individuals who have actually had the kinds of religious experiences he is studying. He takes as his data on conversion first-hand accounts of individuals who have experienced a conversion.
James's use of this method in Varieties has resulted in a classic work in the psychology of religion. By appealing to the perceptual experiences of religious persons themselves, and by relying on their own personal narratives of these experiences, James intends to avoid the pitfalls of both rationalism and reductionism. Yet, innovative as James's method is and important as the results of his application of that method are even today, there are also real problems with such a method. Most of the data James uses comes from written accounts, accounts often recorded years after the experiences they describe. It is unclear to what extent James's analysis is about conversion experiences themselves, and to what extent it is about how individuals come to interpret such experiences. One of the notorious inconsistencies in human beings is the great difference that lies between our experience of an event and our later reports about that experience.
This distinction between moments and memories is not a trivial one. James himself alludes to it when he notes that what "immediately feels most 'good' is not always most 'true,' when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience" (1982, 15-16). Intense mystical experiences, for example, carry with them a powerful sense of authority. But when they are over, they often seem to be disconnected from—or worse, to be contradictory to—the rest of our experience. James observes that some people give more credence to the moment while others give more to the more habitual experience, and he claims that this difference is at the root of human disagreement about values, particularly in religion.
But recent research into the distinction between moments and memories indicates that the problem is even deeper than the important distinctions James makes. The research of Daniel Kahneman, Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, indicates that differences between momentary and remembered experiences are not due merely to a lack of habitual support for the momentary experiences. Rather, Kahneman argues that momentary experiences differ so radically from remembered experiences that we can talk of an "experiencing subject" and a "remembering subject." For Kahneman, the experiencing subject is "wholly devoid of permanence" (2000, 692); the experiences of this subject never arise in an undistorted way for the remembering subject.
Kahneman and his colleagues have conducted experiments that show a clear difference between momentary experiences of painful events (through frequent self-assessments made during the event itself) and the remembered experience of those painful events. One counter-intuitive result of this research is the "Peak-End rule." According to this rule, remembered levels of pain can be predicted by averaging the reported levels of pain when it is at its worst and when it is ending. In accordance with this rule, "adding a period of pain to an aversive episode will actually improve its remembered utility, if it lowers the Peak-End average" (2000, 676).
This research indicates that there is an important distinction between our experience of events and what we remember about those events. And this distinction is prior to the one James points out regarding our ability to choose between trusting the power of a remembered significant moment or the stability of our habitual experience.
Narrative accounts of the sorts on which Varieties is based are products of the remembering subject and not the experiencing subject. How might it be possible to see events from the perspective of the experiencing subject? One way is through the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) developed in the 1970's by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues at the University of Chicago. The ESM is a way of taking "snapshots" of momentary experience. Subjects are given palmtop computers (these have replaced the pagers that were used originally) and signaled randomly throughout the day. At each signal, the subject records data such as current activities and present affect. These snapshots are then put together to create an account of the view of the experiencing subject. [10]
While Kahneman and Csikszentmihalyi began their research long before the official beginning of positive psychology, their work is clearly within the realm of this new field of study, and they are both members of the Positive Psychology Network. Their research raises an important question for James and for our understanding of his study of the varieties of religious experience. The question is, what is experience? Does it belong to the domain of the remembering subject or to that of the experiencing subject? In Varieties James studies the religious experiences of the remembering subject. What could be discovered by studying the religious experiences of the experiencing subject? Would such religious experiences differ in surprising or significant ways from the experiences of the remembering subject? [11]
I want to mention briefly two other methodological ways in which positive psychologists are furthering James's study of healthy-mindedness. First is the extensive use of assessments. Although James himself does not seem to have created his own assessments for the study of healthy-mindedness, a significant amount of the data he uses in Varieties is from both qualitative and quantitative assessments conducted by E. D. Starbuck, and his mention of the need for "something like an ophthalmologist's chart" in the "Energies of Men" implies a need for diagnostic measurement. James emphasizes that we need to be clear about the different kinds of human powers there are, about the different ways different types of individuals can access them, and about how to determine to which type a particular individual belongs. Positive psychologists continue to rely heavily on the use of qualitative and especially quantitative assessments for a variety of purposes, including diagnostic ones. The Classification of Strengths discussed above is positive psychology's attempt to get clear about the different kinds of human strengths and about their different paths of access. The Values in Action Inventory of Strengths, currently under development, is its attempt to develop a diagnostic instrument for identifying the strengths of particular individuals. [12]
Another way in which positive psychologists are moving beyond James's analysis is through the development of interventions. Of course, the cash value of the study of healthy-mindedness is in its clinical applications. Positive psychologists are involved in the development and testing of a number of interventions. I will describe one briefly here. [13]
Martin Seligman has spent much of his life studying depression. Research he and his colleagues have conducted demonstrates that one of the causes of depression is pessimism and that pessimism is a function of a pessimistic explanatory style. By "explanatory style," Seligman simply means the way in which we explain to ourselves and others the causes of events in our lives. He identifies three factors that characterize a pessimistic explanatory style. Such a style interprets negative events as being caused by factors that are permanent, pervasive, and personal. That is, the cause of a negative event will never go away, it affects every area of life, and it is entirely the subject's fault. An optimistic explanatory style, by contrast, identifies the cause of the negative event as temporary, limited in scope, and due at least in part to factors beyond the subject's control.
Seligman argues that explanatory style is not something we are simply born with. He believes—and has demonstrated—that explanatory style is something that can be changed. In other words, pessimists can learn optimism by learning to change their explanatory style. And by changing their explanatory style, they decrease their risk for depression.
"Disputation" is a key intervention for developing an optimistic explanatory style. Once pessimists become aware of their tendencies to use a pessimistic explanatory style, they can dispute the conclusions to which such a style normally leads. By deliberately looking for ways in which the causes of a particular adversity are not permanent, not pervasive, and not personal, pessimists can dispute their negative view of a situation. With practice, an optimistic explanatory style begins to replace a negative one and optimism begins to replace pessimism in a person's life. [14]
Like that of mind-curers, Seligman's goal is a healthy-minded one: to effect an increase in human flourishing through interventions that minimize evil. But Seligman's methods of assessing the effectiveness of those interventions are quite different from those of mind-curers. Mind-cure relies on the personal testimonies of those who experience positive results in their lives as a result of adopting the beliefs and practices of mind-cure. While testimonials can be convincing, they can also be misleading. The subjects themselves may be confused about what has caused the change they have experienced. Furthermore, testimonials shed light on the experiences of certain individuals but leave out of account those of the other individuals subject to the intervention. In view of these difficulties, positive psychologists emphasize the importance of quantitative assessments. By studying a large number of persons undergoing an intervention and by including control groups in the study, positive psychologists work to screen out the effects of external factors that may actually be the real causes of change in individual cases. Furthermore, quantitative assessments take into account, not just the experiences of those giving testimonials, but of those of all participants in an intervention.
Positive psychology, understood as a furthering of William James's study of healthy-mindedness, will have to address a number of important issues as it continues to develop. First is the issue of free will. Like the voluntary healthy-mindedness James discusses in Varieties, positive psychology is based on the assumption that we have freedom in our thoughts and actions. This assumption runs counter to many of the fundamental theories that have driven psychology in the twentieth century, as well as to many traditional philosophical and theological views. To what extent is free will a philosophically and scientifically tenable notion in the twenty-first century? How might the free will assumption of positive psychology be reconciled with current theories in the philosophy of mind? How might positive psychology be rescued from the dangers of grounding itself in naïve and anachronistic conceptions of freedom?
A second issue positive psychology will have to address is the question of method. While positive psychologists see their use of quantitative assessments as constituting an important advance over humanistic psychology, some humanistic psychologists are critical of these methods. Eugene Taylor, for example, has leveled strong critiques against positive psychology's use of what he terms "reductionistic quantitative analysis" (2001, 17). While I am not convinced that Taylor's attacks truly hit the mark, they raise questions that must be addressed more fully.
A third challenge is the account positive psychology must give of tragedy. Mind-cure, James observes, generally responds to evil by simply ignoring it, reinterpreting it, or moving past it. James argues that this approach is effective, but limited. He contends that, in not taking serious account of evil, mind-cure is guilty of a "bad speculative omission" (1982, 107) and that the morbid-minded view presents a broader, more complete perspective of human experience (1982, 162-5). The challenge here is that it is this very omission that seems to be a precondition for the effectiveness of mind-cure methods. Positive psychology, like mind-cure, holds that "one of the best ways to help suffering people is to focus on positive things" (Seligman and Pawelski, in press). Positive psychologists are making great strides in demonstrating the value of positive focus and are working to develop ways in which more people can access it. But is positive focus the only way open to positive psychology to help suffering people? If so, how is it possible for positive psychology to escape mind-cure's "bad speculative omission"? How can positive psychology both maintain a positive focus and acknowledge the tragic? [15]
A final issue I would like to mention is related to the problem of the tragic. It concerns the breadth of application of positive interventions. James argues that healthy-minded methods work only for persons of certain temperaments. If this is true, morbid-minded persons would not respond well to interventions, like Seligman's disputation intervention, that focus on minimizing evil. For morbid-minded persons, this would be precisely the wrong approach. Assuming for a moment that James's analysis is correct, positive psychology runs the risk of being a "healthy-minded psychology," applicable only to healthy-minded persons. Is it possible for positive psychology to avoid this limitation? Can positive psychology develop interventions that would work for morbid-minded, as well as for healthy-minded persons? [16]
While these questions have yet to be answered adequately, it seems clear that positive psychologists are laboring in fields James surveyed almost a century ago and marked as sorely in need of workers. That James identified this need in an address to the American Philosophical Association seems to imply a belief that philosophical as well as psychological laborers are needed. Indeed, there is much that philosophers—healthy-minded or not—can do to address questions raised by positive psychology. And it would be difficult to imagine a more fitting way of paying tribute to the classic we are now celebrating or to conceive of a more appropriate way of honoring its author than by laboring in fields it and he have done so much to open up for us.
[1] Perhaps the most notable exception is humanistic psychology, led by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, which explores themes very much in keeping with James's program.
[2] There is at present considerable debate among psychologists concerning the relation between humanistic and positive psychology. To find out more about this debate, see Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) and Taylor (2001). See also the other articles in the journal issue in which Taylor's article appears. Seligman's view, in brief, is that the empirical commitments of positive psychology set it off methodologically from humanistic psychology and warrant its claims to uniqueness.
[3] Although Harvard University Press has published a critical edition of Varieties, citations in this paper refer to the more widely available edition listed in the Works Cited section.
[4] Of course, the contrary argument could be made, as well—that it is champagne that opens our eyes to this moral reality.
[5] This distinction really describes a continuum and not merely two discrete classes of persons. That is, the decision to view the world as essentially good is not merely one that an individual either has made or has not made. There are many different degrees of thoroughness to which one could make such a decision. And there are, of course, many different degrees of thoroughness to which one could carry it out.
[6] It is this revised version that John McDermott (1977) included in his comprehensive edition of the writings of William James.
[7] For a very brief discussion of this connection, see Rathunde (2001). (His reference to James's "Energies of Men" is to James's revised, popular version of the address.) Rathunde points out valuable contributions to positive psychology made by American philosophy as well as by humanistic psychology.
[8] The field of positive psychology is expanding rapidly. The best way to keep abreast of this expansion is to visit the website maintained by the Positive Psychology Network. The address is www.positivepsychology.org. The best general introduction to the field is Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness (2002).
[9] For a list of these researchers, see www.positivepsychology.org/ppemail.htm.
[10] Csikszentmihalyi gives a brief account of the ESM in his book on "flow" (1991, 4-5). When I asked Csikszentmihalyi where I could find a more complete account of the ESM, he responded, "there is no good account of the ESM's origins. I was inspired in that direction, however, by reading Husserl's 'Ideas for a pure phenomenology', and I thought of the ESM as doing 'systematic phenomenology'" (personal correspondence with the author, September 24, 2001).
[11] Some researchers are using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and related methods to study the religious experiences of the experiencing subject from a neurological perspective. Among these researchers are Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania.
[12] Anyone who would like to take this assessment may do so online at www.positivepsychology.org.
[13] Like the work of Kahneman and Csikszentmihalyi, the intervention I describe here predates the official beginning of positive psychology. In spite of that, it quite clearly is a positive psychology intervention.
[14] For a more complete account of explanatory style and disputation, see Seligman 1998a.
[15] I am indebted to my former colleague Jeffrey Barker for helping me think seriously about this matter of the tragic.
[16] If this turns out not to be possible, how can positive psychology distinguish between potentially healthy-minded persons, for whom its interventions presumably would work, and non-healthy-minded persons, for whom they presumably would not?
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1991. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed. (DSM-IV). 1994. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association.
James, William. 1907. "The Energies of Men." The Philosophical Review 16.1: 1-20.
______. 1907b. "The Powers of Men." American Magazine (October). This version of James's essay appears as "The Energies of Men" in McDermott 1977, 671-83.
______. [1902] 1982. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin Books.
Kahneman, Daniel. 2000. "Experienced Utility and Objective Happiness: A Moment-Based Approach." In Choices, Values, and Frames, ed. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, 673-92. New York: Cambridge UP and the Russell Sage Foundation.
McDermott, John J., ed. 1977. The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Peterson, Christopher, and Martin E. P. Seligman. 2003. Values in Action (VIA) Classification of Strengths Manual. At www.positivepsychology.org/taxonomy.htm.
Rathunde, Kevin. 2001. "Toward a Psychology of Optimal Human Functioning: What Positive Psychology Can Learn from the 'Experiential Turns' of James, Dewey, and Maslow." In Journal of Humanistic Psychology 41.1: 135-153.
Seligman, Martin E. P. 1998a. Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. New York: Pocket Books.
______. 1998b. "The President's Address." In APA 1998 Annual Report at www.positivepsychology.org/aparep98.htm.
______. 2002. Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Seligman, Martin E. P., and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. 2000. "Positive Psychology: An Introduction." In American Psychologist 55.1: 5-14.
Seligman, Martin E. P., and James O. Pawelski. In press. "Positive Psychology FAQ's." Psychological Inquiry.
Sheldon, Kennon, Barbara Fredrickson, Kevin Rathunde, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Jonathan Haidt. 2000. "Positive Psychology Manifesto." At www.positivepsychology.org/akumalmanifesto.htm.
Taylor, Eugene. 2001. "Positive Psychology and Humanistic Psychology: A Reply to Seligman." In Journal of Humanistic Psychology 41.1: 13-29.