Buddhist Romanticism

thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts.” 2 In other
words, one’s choice to think one thought rather than another showed
freedom of will in action, something that no outside fact could deny. In his
later language, James would call this a “lived fact.” It led to his Fichtean
motto, “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” 3
It also led to his choice of career, at the intersection of psychology and
philosophy, focused on the issue of felt experience. As a psychologist,
James had been trained primarily in physiological psychology, an
outgrowth of the philosophical medicine in which Schiller had trained. But
James’ research interests came to focus less on the physiology of
psychological states and more on their phenomenology: how those states
felt from within and could be cured from within. Similarly, as a
philosopher, he focused on the issue of what it feels like to be an acting,
willing being. Philosophical issues should start within, with the fact of felt
experience, and not from without, with metaphysical assumptions about
the world, even if those assumptions were based on the sciences of the day.
In an important passage in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he
argued, “So long as we deal only with the cosmic and the general, we deal
only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and
personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the
term.” 4 For James, the realm of the private and personal was where life was
actually lived. The knowledge provided by physical sciences was
peripheral to the conduct of life; the knowledge provided by his style of
psychology and philosophy was where the conduct of life began. Thus his
embrace of pragmatism—the doctrine that philosophical issues should be
addressed only if they made a difference in the conduct of life, and should
be answered in ways that were most helpful to that conduct.
Thus also his assertion, in The Will to Believe (1897), that there were two
types of truth: what might be called truths of the observer—the facts that can
be discovered only by suspending one’s desire that the truth come out one
way or the other (this applied to physical scientific truths); and truths of the
will—events and accomplishments that can be made true only through a
unified act of desire and will. Truths of the will were the truths that
mattered most in life. In fact, only through acts of will could human beings
can make sense of what James famously called the “blooming, buzzing
confusion” of sensory input. The experience of life even on the most basic
sensory level thus requires an interactive process—which the Romantics
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