Mind cure

"Not to put too glib a gloss on it: there is no denying that the rampant “spread of the movement” was “due to practical fruits,” as William James remarks affably in his 1902 lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Perhaps it did not cure tuberculosis, but what James called “the religion of healthy-mindedness” could not have amassed such a sizable following if it did not help people cope with their daily frustrations. Admittedly, it was helpful only to those already disposed to pathological optimism: James joked that mind cure produced such a militantly cheerful attitude that “complaints of the weather are getting to be forbidden in many households.”

But different temperaments require different medicines, and “mind-cure gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness.” As for the rest of us, those burdened with what James terms a “sick soul,” darker stratagems (prime among them more traditional species of fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism) are available. Perhaps because my soul is sick, I cannot share James’s sanguinity about mind cure.

The most charitable thing I can say is that, from a certain point of view, its popularity is understandable. It at least purported to relieve—which meant it at least took seriously—many of the symptoms for which the establishment was equipped to offer nothing but condolences. As the historian Donald Meyer notes in his witty study, The Positive Thinkers, “Statistics on the incidence of diffuse dissatisfactions, unfixed discontent, vague depletion and free-floating unhappiness do not exist.”

We cannot know whether “nervousness” and “neurasthenia” are uniquely modern ailments, but we can and do know that they hardened into acknowledged conditions at the turn of the century. Medieval peasants may have been (indeed, almost certainly were) anxious and unfulfilled in their own way, but it was not until the late 1800s that malcontents understood their complaints as maladies in want of remedy..."

"All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess" by Becca Rothfeld: https://a.co/d9iUwJ4

I Am An American Philosopher: Lisa Heldke – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

I Am An American Philosopher: Lisa Heldke

"I like to think that I'm always doing American philosophy, because I am trying to cultivate an understanding of philosophy that finds it manifested in all sorts of activities, and because I try to approach life as Deweyan inquiry."

Lisa Heldke is Professor of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College where she also directs the annual Nobel Conference. She is the author of Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer (2003) co-author of Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human (2016) with Ray Boisvert, and the co-editor of several anthologies, including Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food (1992), Oppression, Privilege and Resistance: Theoretical Readings on Racism, Sexism and Heterosexism (2003), & The Atkins Diet and Philosophy (2006). She works in philosophy of food, American philosophy, and feminist philosophy. In 2022 she was awarded the John Dewey Society Award for Outstanding Achievement.

What does American philosophy mean to you?

It's August, and I am (yet again) revising the syllabus for my course in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophies written by people living in the geographic boundaries of what is now the United States. That awkward, wordy description is intentional; each time I set out to write a syllabus for this course—the course that transformed me as a student, the course then called "American Philosophy" in the catalog—I confront the fact that I don't know what American philosophy means or should mean. I've changed the name of that very same course (I teach at my alma mater–it's literally the same course, at least on some solutions to the Ship of Theseus paradox) to "Philosophy Looks at the U.S." I advertise it as a course in which we explore how philosophers within this geographic area have reflected on some of the moments and movements from the 19th and early 20th centuries that have defined the country: settler colonialism, enslavement, immigration, urbanization, rural life...

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-lisa-heldke/?fbclid=IwY2xjawHNnTBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHdc0524qLx4P5_E7IADdg0GClgc0wQrcWridNJjCW76mYN6Vkrk3QIL7bw_aem_jiMsj9KjEPuWKt1rNhvrCQ