The Will to Live in William and Henry James

While William and Henry James have personified for literary history opposite poles of the American mind — the “strenuous life” and the life of consciousness, doing and being, will and passivity, respectively — Barasch... [ view full abstract ]

While William and Henry James have personified for literary history opposite poles of the American mind — the “strenuous life” and the life of consciousness, doing and being, will and passivity, respectively — Barasch argues that each conceived of the will in its most basic manifestation as a “willingness” to live: a bare physiological attachment to life. Revising the caricature of the Jameses as opposites, Barasch shows that their shared concern with experience and the workings of consciousness is inflected by a strongly materialist, even vitalistic conception of the human organism. The Jameses each resist the idea of the resolute will while equally refusing a full-blown anti-intentionalism, exemplifying the transition from nineteenth-century conceptions of the will to those of modernism. Barasch suggests that their stances can help us to move beyond the longstanding impasse in the humanities between intentionalists and anti-intentionalists, humanists and anti-humanists, defenders and critics of the subject.