Recently Published Book Spotlight: Sick Souls, Healthy Minds

This edition of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is on John Kaag’s Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life. John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.  He is author of American Philosophy: A Love Story and Hiking with Nietzsche, which were both named NPR books of the Year and NYT Editor Choices.  He resides outside of Boston with his wife Kathy and two children, Becca and Henry. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life was published with Princeton University Press in the Spring of 2020, which John Williams of the NYT called “characteristically elegant.”  Williams continued, explaining that “Kaag questioned the meaning of life. William James answered.”

What is your work about?

Very generally, I’m trying to figure out—with my readers and students—the relationship between philosophy and the conduct of everyday life.  For the Greeks, philosophy wasn’t the stuff of academic journals or highly specialized conferences, but a thoughtful way of working through the business of living.  I write what has been termed “philo-memoir,” and John Muller of the LA Review of Books kindly (but maybe too boldly) said that this was a “genre all my own.”  He also, rightly notes that many, many thinkers have worked in this personal-intellectual stream: Socrates, Rousseau, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Thoreau, and William James.  Each of these thinkers interleaved their philosophy with moments of confession and autobiography.  Obviously, each of these thinkers is dead, but I very much believe that this form of philosophy deserves to be brought back to life. Reading and thinking is an act of living, and what I am trying to show (not really argue) is that one can use philosophy as a way of providing a satisfying account of one’s life. 

How about your most recent book?

In 1895, William James, the father of American philosophy, delivered a lecture entitled “Is Life Worth Living?” It was no theoretical question for James, who had contemplated suicide during an existential crisis as a young man a quarter century earlier. James’s entire philosophy, from beginning to end, was geared to save a life, his life―and that’s why it just might be able to save yours, too. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds is meant to be an introduction to James’s life and thought that shows why the founder of pragmatism and empirical psychology―and an inspiration for Alcoholics Anonymous―can still speak so directly and profoundly to anyone struggling to make a life worth living.

I wanted to explain how James’s experiences as one of what he called the “sick-souled,” those who think that life might be meaningless, drove him to articulate an ideal of “healthy-mindedness”―an attitude toward life that is open, active, and hopeful, but also realistic about its risks. In fact, all of James’s pragmatism, resting on the idea that truth should be judged by its practical consequences for our lives, is a response to, and possible antidote for, crises of meaning that threaten to undo many of us at one time or another. 

It sounds like your work is quite appropriate for 2020. The coinciding of numerous stressful situations all at once has led many to feel despair. What advice would you give to people today regarding truth and meaning?

Yes—so most of the readers of the new book are thoughtful people (living well outside of academic philosophy) who are drawn to thinkers and writings that promise to enrich their lives, their relationships with others and their understanding of themselves.  The pandemic has forced many people to ask existential questions—like is life worth living?—in urgent and unprecedented ways.  I think that explains why people are reading new book. 

Advice?  I think that James and Nietzsche suggest that the questions that scare us the most deserve our immediate attention.  When we give these “forbidden questions” our attention they usually turn out to be far less scary than we thought.  That’s for starters.  From there, I think James would suggest us figuring out what habits of life are enriching and which ones are stultifying or deadening.  Finally, I think he would suggest, along with the Transcendentalists and Romantics that he read, that thoughtful action was the primary way to derive meaning in the world.  So even when our lives close in around us and there seems to be pitifully little latitude, there is still usually enough space to make small adjustments in our behavior and beliefs.  Act like your life depends on it, because it usually does. 

How does Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life fit into your broader work?

That’s a good question and one that has bred a bit of misunderstanding.  American Philosophy a Love Story and Hiking with Nietzsche, begin to explain how a reading of 19th century philosophy helped me through a first divorce, the death of my father, a remarriage, and the challenges of parenting.  They are extremely personal.  Heller McAlpin, when she reviewed Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, assumed that it was the next installment in this story—and in some respects it is.  William James, the father of American pragmatism and empirical psychology, did, in many ways, provide needed assistance as my second marriage of seven years came apart in 2019.  And James’s theory of the emotions, which holds that we act first and feel things differently, helped me survive several heart attacks (yes, I know, pathetic fallacy all over the place) and open heart surgery earlier this year.  But, in truth, I never intended Sick Souls to be the extension of the first two books.  The tone is slightly different and does not rely on memoir as heavily as the first two books.  It’s also not primarily about relationships but rather combating modern despair in a Jamesian fashion.  The final book in the trilogy with Farrar, Straus and Giroux is called Love’s Conditions and will be out in spring 2022.   I finished that book last year, but, it needs to be placed on the back burner for a little while.  I can say that it features Thoreau, Emerson and Margaret Fuller.  They provide the philosophical framework to think through marriage, adultery, betrayal, freedom, honesty, and the perils and promise of monogamy and polyamory.   

“Relationship advice” and “coping with death” are not the first things most people probably think of when imagining philosophy. In my experience, many turn to psychiatry or religion. What do you think philosophy provides that distinguishes it from these other approaches?

We live in a time in which the traditional modes of deriving meaning and caring for ourselves (therapy, religion, friendship, vocations, relationships—the list goes on) are either being tested or have failed to live up to their overblown promises.  Philosophy provides a way to think through the crisis of meaning we might experience without giving us canned answers or dumbing down the questions that keep us up at night.  The answers it provides (when it provides any) are usually justified in ways that make sense to a thinker and his or her community of inquiry.  That is the thoughts, at least.  But honestly, I think that one of the things that philosophy has given me in times of real darkness is the sense that I am not completely alone in my bewilderment.  I just wrote a review for Wolfram Eilenberger’s new book on Wittgenstein, Cassirier, Benjamin, and Heidegger—a beautiful piece of public philosophy.  But here is the take away: Wittgenstein’s ability to face sorrow and perplexity, so human and so earnest, was what drew me to philosophy.  Here I find someone, something, to aspire to—that actually makes sense. 

What are you working on now?

Honestly, with COVID-19 and kids and recent bypass surgery, I am just trying to survive—the way that all of us are.  I am finding myself more productive during the few hours I can steal away though, so I am trying desperately to finish Think Again, which is Norton’s Introduction to Philosophy textbook—I hope it takes a novel (read critical) approach to the Western canon.  And I am eventually going to turn to a book on Emerson with Princeton about how he might help us imagine our world anew in times of crisis—like the times we are going through right now.