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Quote by William James

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William James
William James

William James, born on January 11, 1842, and died on August 26, 1910, was an influential American philosopher, psychologist, and writer. He is considered one of the founders of functionalism in psychology and has had a profound impact on the fields of psychology, philosophy, and religion. more

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“Universality is a universality of 'strangers', of individuals reduces to the abyss of impenetrability in relation not only to others but also to themselves. [...] That's why the privileged way to reach a Neighbor is not that of empathy, of trying to understand them, but a disrespectful laughter which makes fun of them and us in our mutual lack of (self-)understanding (inclusive of 'racist' jokes)”

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Book:Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours
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“Our wealthy, Westernized classes are so obsessed with individualism, they’ve forgotten how to be themselves, let alone how to be individuals,” he said. “These Westernized Turks are too conceited to believe in God. Their individuality is all they care about. Most choose not to believe in God just to prove they’re not like everyone else, though they won’t even acknowledge that’s the reason why. But faith is precisely about being like everyone else. Religion is the haven and the consolation of the meek.”

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Book:Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın
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“Thus, it appears that unicellulars are biological individuals whose cohesiveness presupposes the constant action of an immune system. According to the view defended in the previous sections, it means that they are true 'organisms'. If this is correct, it means that the reflection offered about the emergence and maintenance of individuality in multicellular organisms through the activity of an immune system needs in fact to be raised at the level of the much more ancient transition from independent replicators to the first prokaryotic cell. Because this transition is not very well known, and because basically nothing is known of the possible role of the immune system in this transition, I will leave this discussion for now, pending more experimental evidence in the near future. I think, though, that it raises the fascinating hypothesis that immunity has been a key element in both the evolutionary transition to multicellularity and the very ancient evolutionary transition to the first cell - often conceived of as the first 'true' biological individual. It also suggests that each cell in multicellular organisms like us may have its own immune system. RNA silencing has been convincingly described as the 'genome's immune system'. Within this perspective, one can conceive a hierarchy of immunological individuals, or 'organisms': a multicellular living thing like us is an organism insofar as it possesses an immune system, and in addition it comprises billions of cells, which themselves are organisms insofar as they each possess their own immune system. It is an attractive hypothesis, though it probably needs to be complemented by an analysis of the way in which the whole organism regulates immune responses at the level of each cell.”

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Book:From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality
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