Emerson said a very similar thing. In 1821, when he was 18 years old, he got very sick and said that temporary sickness has its advantages. Many of the questions that we ask in everyday life, or should ask in everyday life, don’t get asked because we’re too busy with the rat race. Emerson, even at the age of 18, says that sickness allows us to slow down and re-evaluate what life’s meaning actually is.

Today, there are walkers that have never taken up walking before. We’re also having to find ways to express ourselves. Many of us are painting or drawing or writing or reading, these ways of expressing ourselves that we typically don’t think about or have time to do in our everyday life, this is where we’re coming to now. James, I think, was very good about this. He said that even in times of great turmoil, we can find creative activities to change the habits of our lives. He’s a psychologist, and he wrote extensively on the power of habit. Maybe that’s what we can talk a little bit more about.

Sean Murray  04:39

Definitely. Why don’t you describe what James meant by “sick soul” and what he also meant by “healthy mind”. These are two different approaches to life. then you can touch on the role that habit plays in both because I think that’s important.

John Kaag  04:54

The sick souled person is the person who looks at the universe, and he sees the universe as something alien to him. He sees it as something that is ill-fit for them. The healthy-minded, according to James, is the person who looks out, and sees the universe as a sort of personal caring vow, as something that is fitted to their purposes. During times of crisis, however, the healthy-minded can get a taste of sick souledness, and I think that’s what’s going on in our current age.

When it comes to habits, James is suggesting that if we are sick-souled, you still can, in his words, be twice-born. What he means by that is you might have been born a particular way and view the world as pessimistic, as dour, as something antagonistic to our purposes, but James suggests that we can form habits of thought and habits of action that make our lives not only bearable but deeply meaningful.

Along with Aristotle, he thinks that human beings are habitual creatures. Habit is the way we get on in the world, and that, oftentimes, habits are heuristics or shorthand ways of handling different experiences. They make our lives easier. But James also observes that, sometimes, the habits of thought or habits of action that we take can actually be deadening or stultifying or just plain old boring. And in those times, habits need to be broken. I think that James is interested both in the ways that habits can be formed creatively or meaningfully, but also the way that habits limit us and the necessity of breaking them.

James was famous in the late 1890s for giving talks, entitled Talks to Teachers. He says that Norwegian women, of that day and age, we’re used to staying at home and they were “fireside habitats”, but when they took up Nordic skiing in the 1890s or early part of the 20th century, they became fierce warriors. They did something difficult, they change their habits, and in so doing, they changed who they are. I think that’s what James is challenging us these days. So, when we’re depressed or when we’re feeling cooped up or when we’re feeling like there’s nowhere else to go, James says, “Be not afraid of life.” He says to change your life. You will, almost always, have the ability to do that even if it’s in very small ways.

Sean Murray  07:28

You talk in the book about one of James’s ideas, which struck me, which was: When you feel the need to change, it’s almost like the Nike slogan, “Just do it.” You might need to break out of that habit if you’re in a detrimental habit. It’s the act of will and just taking that step. Sometimes, it’s even a physical step, a physical movement that lifts the spirits and gets you moving and back in touch with becoming more one with your environment and aligned with it, as opposed to being out of it. I found that it’s true in my life too, and I just think that’s powerful.

John Kaag  08:08

I think so too. It’s backed up or it’s grounded in James’s theory of the emotion. James, unlike many people, thinks that emotions are tied, inexplicably –like absolutely tightly, to action; and it is not the case that I smile because I’m happy, but rather that I’m happy because I smile. In other words, our physical activity changes the way we feel.

It’s not the case that my physical actions are reflections of my emotional state, but rather, I have to get up and go –in some cases, I have to look up, I have to open my throat, I have to get a deep breath of fresh air, and it changes my emotional state. This is interesting. It’s almost like you bootstrap yourself out of a bad mood by just acting. In other words, if you’re in bed, you’re depressed, and the one thing you don’t want to do is get up, but you get up anyway. But then, I know this doesn’t work for everyone, but many people have experienced the fact that if you can just force yourself to get up and keep going by an act of will, it changes the emotional disposition that we have. Yoga is a good example. You might not want to do these poses, but these poses change the way you feel. I think James was tapping into that with the James-Lange Theory of Emotions, that activity is first and the emotions follow suit.

Sean Murray  09:37

I think everyone has certain go-to’s for that. In the book, you talked about yoga is a way for you to kind of tap into that through the movement of your body to move your soul and get your mind going and staying healthy. For me, it’s running. I will often have low energy early in the afternoon. I start to feel the urge to just take it easy because I don’t feel like doing anything, but I know that if I can just will myself to go for a run, I’ll feel so much better when I get back and can just ride the wave of that energy through the afternoon. You’ll have to take that step though.

John Kaag  10:18

What’s interesting is that I used to be a very avid runner, but in February of this year, I was running on a treadmill in a gym, and I felt lightheaded. When I stepped off, my heart started beating fast, and when I laid down, I had a heart attack. I’m 40, and I was in very good shape, but they diagnosed me with a congenital heart issue. A week later, I had open-heart surgery. It’s now mid-April. I had the procedure last March 6, and I haven’t run for three months, but there are small things that you can do in life, even when you’re in a compromised state, like the ones I’ve been in the last few months, that make a huge difference. You can stretch, breathe deeply, go for a walk, appreciate the little things that, oftentimes, you’ve never appreciated before.

In philosophy, there’s a criticism of many philosophers being called ableist. Certain thinkers regard human experience as being linked to being able to do certain things like think, walk –any number. James is sometimes criticized for being an abler because he was an avid hiker and walker. He was just constantly on-the-go. He says that being on-the-go is something that makes you happy and makes you human, but I think James’s message is a little more subtle in saying that, even when you’re talking, even when you have a heart difficulty, you can still make small modifications to your existence that you can find deeply meaningful. That’s one of the lessons that I’ve taken from James Williams recently.

Sean Murray  12:03

So, in the last month or so, you’ve been through not just the Coronavirus and changes to our society but also have gone through this personal health challenge. Has that filtered how you’ve observed the rest of society changing or changed how you thought about this whole experience we’re going through?

John Kaag  12:23

Yes, we’re all dying. The fact of the matter is we’re all on the way. It sounds pretty darn bleak, but it’s the truth of the matter. And the question in life is: How are you going to deal with that? Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher in the early 1840s, said, “I have a question. What am I to do with this life? The central question is, ‘What am I to do?’ ” That’s the question that we’re all faced with.

I think having a heart attack at the age of 40, when you think that you’re quite fit, can be a wake-up call. I think having friends who are stricken with COVID-19 and whom either die or who are very, very sick is a wake-up call. Albert Camus says, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” To which most people react, “Oh my God, he’s so depressive, but again, what he was questioning: Is life worth living? That’s the question that I think is pressed on us when we unexpectedly fall ill. I had sort of a crash course in this a month and a half ago, and I think that that’s the lesson that James says to us: Do something difficult every day.

Also, I think that surviving something like one teen with kids with no school or a heart attack, of that, Frederick Nietzsche says, “I have to thank my sickest days for they have allowed me to become who I am.” I think it gives me a little bit of perspective. For that matter, I think it also gives you a bit of compassion and sympathy for those people who are suffering because, oftentimes, in our everyday life, we try to avoid suffering, but this is one of the first times, in my life, at least, where I get the sense that people are experiencing their separate hells and separate tortures. But, oddly enough, those separate tortures are what brings us together. When I see people walking outside, sometimes by themselves, sometimes with their families, find a chorale of four kids at once, I see that we’re all doing this in our ways, and it’s quite difficult. I think that difficulty is a point of commonality between us.

Let me say that again: The difficulty that we face by ourselves is a commonality between individuals. I think that’s something that we have to remember and something that we miss in our everyday life. In our everyday life, we oftentimes think that ethical communities are set up by way of similarities –common allegiances and loyalties. But I think the biggest ethical community is just a community of sufferers. And so I think that when you get sick like this, or when you face sickness the way we all are currently, 60% of us will get this herd immunity. We’re facing this we’re looking at it right in the face, and I think that one of the silver linings is that maybe we’ll get to see that we’re common in that experience.

Sean Murray  15:17

One of the reasons that I wanted to start this podcast is to explore what it means to live a flourishing life, what it means to live a good life. It gets to the question of the meaning of life, purpose, and the idea that you just sort of presented about: facing death. I mean, nothing clarifies the mind like thinking about the finality of death. I think in your book, you said something like nobody gets out alive. So reading, thinking, and reflecting on these issues are things that we all have a little bit more time to do now that many of us are going through this. I want to go back to James’s answer to “Is life worth living?” and “It depends on the liver.” What is it about the liver that can infuse meaning into life? What is it about the one who says yes to life? To the suffering in life, even? What is it about that particular path that we can learn from?

John Kaag  16:20

Great question. I mean, I think that the question, “Is life worth living?” is usually answered in two mutually exclusive ways: yes or no. If you answer no fervently enough, you’re eventually going to leave us, but if you answer yes, then you oftentimes find any number of well-crafted rationales for why life is worth living every day of the week. You find an absolute answer to this question, which is what many philosophers in the history of Western philosophy have done.

For example, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz says that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Christian theologians, like Aquinas or Augustin, say that God is in charge compared to the other historic gods’ creation. Immanuel Kant says, “We’re all rational beings,” that human life is always worthwhile if we have our rational capacities. These are all absolute answers. What’s weird about these absolute answers is that when you are in the midst of a depression, or when you’re struggling with the idea of suicide, these absolute answers just don’t matter. You might say, “My rational capacities bring me happiness and make life worth living? You’ve got to be kidding. My rational capacities make me more miserable.” The smarter I am, the worse the slump. In the face of depression or great anxiety, these absolute answers typically don’t hold water. William James, in the 1890s, was saying: Hey, let me give you another answer. The answer is not no, and it’s not yes. It’s maybe. In other words, it’s right down the middle, between these two, and that it depends on the liver. You can take this in several different ways, which I think are interesting.

18:09

First, James is not saying that life is worth living every day, including on Sundays. He’s saying it’s up to you to determine life’s worth, always. That’s the absoluteness. In other words, each of us can determine what life’s meaning would be. Maybe life is worth living. Also, “it depends on the liver” is an answer that’s right down the middle. James is saying maybe it depends on the liver. He is not saying to any of us that life’s worth is absolute. There might be people who experience such trauma or psychic disturbance that makes life not worth living. To those people, James concedes and says: I don’t fully understand your experience. It may seem like life is not worth living to you, and I have to respect that. But, he’s also saying to us that, almost always, life is up to us, and the meaning of life is up to us.

So, if I’m up on Brooklyn Bridge, looking over the edge, and somebody comes up to me, and says, “Life’s worth living!” I’ll turn around to them, and say, “Come on, you have to understand me.” And maybe I’ll jump just to prove them wrong. But, if I’m up on Brooklyn Bridge, and somebody comes up to me, and says, “Hold on. Maybe life is worth living. It depends on the liver.” First of all, at least it respects me as a human individual, right? Whereas somebody who’s experiencing something real. It says, “Maybe.” This individual coming up to me is saying, “Hey, maybe life’s possibilities are still out there. Maybe you have options. Maybe tomorrow is a different day, right? Maybe you can change your life.” I think that the latter answer is more convincing, oftentimes than a simple yes because it gives us freedom or power. Oftentimes, when we are feeling depressed or anxious, we feel powerless. What James will do is give that autonomy or that freedom back to us and say: Create your life. Be not afraid of life. Tomorrow is another day. I think that that’s a message that I found very, very useful in my own life and one that I’ve tried to pass on to leaders.

20:33

There’s also a way that James says, at the end of his talk, Is Life Worth Living?, which he gives to the YMCA in 1895, responding to the number of suicides in Harvard’s campus at that time. He says at the end of that talk, “If you are not satisfied with the ‘maybe’, consider all of the maybes of life and how they make life meaningful.” I’ve often thought to myself: What did he mean by that? How do the maybes make my life meaningful? I think it’s something like this: When I asked my students what the most meaningful things in their life are, they say it’s music or relationships or playing soccer or some experience. I’ve thought over the years that this is where the maybe fits in: When I ask if they knew how the soccer game is going to go, they say, “No.” When I ask if they knew the outcome of the soccer game, would the game be meaningful, “No,” they say. And I say, “So, you’re saying that you’re playing because of them maybe? Maybe I’ll win. Maybe I’ll lose. I have to engage to see how it goes.” They nod, and say, “Yeah.” I say, “How about music? If you knew how every chord was going to play like it was some sort of like phonograph or recorder, would it be enjoyable?” They say no, and I say, “Well, maybe it applies there, too? Maybe it goes one way. Maybe it goes another. It’s up to you. How about when you fall in love? How about when you have friends? If these things were planned out in advance in its deterministic fashion, would you find them meaningful or significant?” No. So, I asked them about relationships. “What about the meaning of relationships? Doesn’t that also turn on the ‘maybe’?” And they say, “Yeah, I guess so.”

So, I think James was saying that the universe is shot through with what James would call contingency or chance, and that our lives are, too, and that the task of life is to make the chances of the universe arc the opportunities that we have. That’s something that I think James is very good on.

Sean Murray  22:48

I like that answer. One of the reasons I like it is that it suggests that there is no answer in a book nor a philosopher who’s going to say, “Hey, Sean. This is the meaning. This is how you’re going to find purpose in your life.” Or, “This is the absolute reason we’re here.” Or “This is so profound that you’re going to bow down and realize that now you found meaning.” What it’s saying is, “Hey, Sean. You’ve got to work hard to figure out for you what that meaning is in your life, given your situation and experiences and the maybes in your life that you are going to go out and try to realize.”

That to some things that I keep coming back to around meaning, which is creation and art. I’m going to just go back to your other book briefly. I know this podcast is mainly about Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, but I also want to encourage the audience to read John’s other book, Hiking with Nietzsche, that I’ve read. It’s also very good. There’s something in there around the will to live, Nietzsche’s will to power, that you describe really about art and creation. I think those are all intertwined. Perhaps it is in creation, whether it’s creating relationships, creating art, writing, experiencing the world. There’s something about that idea that is compelling for me. I think James is getting data from his perspective, and Nietzsche is from his, and they’re telling us: Hey, you’ve got to go out into the world and do it.

John Kaag  24:25

That’s right. They’re also saying that creation if we think about it, is a mixture of the will and receptivity. In other words, it’s a middle point between our will, creating something, and the world receiving it, and us adjusting our behaviors for the world. I think that that’s an important point, especially at a time when our will doesn’t seem to be that effective. It’s also about receptivity, about listening, about being aware, about being quiet. Creation happens by activity, but also by passivity, by sitting back and also being receptive in the right way. I think there’s always this give and take with creation that is important, especially today. What is it to be cooped up in social isolation? How can we be receptive in a new and meaningful way? How can we act in a new way?

Sean Murray  25:17

Exactly. We’re all sort of in new environments, different environments, faced with novel experiences. And in that, in some ways, it gets us out of the habits. That now gets back to habit; the habits that we were in, like getting in the car, commuting, or getting on the airplane to fly here to do this or that for a business meeting or workshop. All of those habits have sort of been broken. A lot of my traditional habits were thrown out the window, so now, I’m in new situations, forced to create my own experiences or my maybes of how I’m going to deal with these situations.

John Kaag  25:55

My friend, Todd May, who advised this show, The Good Life, wrote a book called A Decent Life. He, basically, makes the argument that our drive for perfectionism is, in part, sort of misguided, and that what we need to do is just get back to just living a decent life, both in the sense of decency, but also in the sense of “It’s good enough, and I’ll just try to feel or do a little bit better.” I think that these more modest goals are ones that we can sort of living up to in these times of crisis, as well. It’s not that we have to be moral exemplars all the time. Just find a little bit of decency and a little bit of compassion, a little more creativity, and a little more receptivity. These are small things that, when you can go to bed at night, you can think, “I tried, and I did not do a bad job. I did a decent job.” I think that’s something that, at least for me, especially over the last month and a half, that I’ve had to come to terms with. I’m a big-time perfectionist to the point where I kill myself in terms of trying to be more open, and over the last weeks, I’ve just had to say that just a little bit better is good enough. Okay, good enough. That’s the slogan for these days: Good enough.

Sean Murray  27:10

Yes, it lowers the bar, and that takes the anxiety level down a little bit about trying to reach perfection or living up to something. I just sort of experienced that ethos on the street, when we ran into someone, keeping our six to eight-feet distance. In those kinds of conversations, it’s like, “Hey, we’re getting through. We’re surviving.”

John Kaag  27:30

One more day closer to the antidote. Just one more. You just have to think that. Then, as we were talking about earlier, when you face your own mortality, you also have to think: Good enough is not good enough. We don’t have that much time left. So, you have to balance this sense of “I’m just getting through. I’m getting through one more day,” and have to find moments where you find real transcendence or the sublime in the ordinary. Most or some of us, the lucky ones, are surrounded by loved ones, and we have the option to find them highly annoying or to find them beautiful, and probably in equal measure. What I think what needs to happen is for us to think: How would I be acting right now with my loved ones if I contracted the virus? What if I only had two weeks left? More often than not, I would act slightly differently. I’d act a bit more appreciative or a bit softer or a bit kinder, or if I might think that you typically annoy the heck out of me, don’t because it’s just not worth it.

Sean Murray  28:37

Yeah, just not that big of a deal facing that kind of circumstance.

One thing that I noticed in James’s life that we haven’t talked about yet, but you go into detail in the book about, is his upbringing. He was raised with a very privileged childhood. I would say he had a considerable degree of freedom to be the person he wanted to be and to choose the life that he wanted to choose. In that respect, I think he was a little bit ahead of the game in the modern world, in the world that we live in today. He was living roughly a hundred years ago. We have more freedom now, but maybe you could talk about, from your perspective, what was it about that freedom and that childhood that led him to these ideas? And what can we take away from today’s world, where our kids are being raised with a similar amount of freedom? We’re all sort of facing the James’ life now. Due to our affluence or success, more of us will be asking the same questions that James did because of what he went through.

John Kaag  29:40

The James family came from Ireland in the late 1700s and ended up in Albany, New York. The eldest, William James of Albany, became the second wealthiest individual in New York state after the Astors. William James and Henry James, his brother, and Alice James, their sister, all grew up in a family of affluence. Henry James, the father, encouraged them to use their minds in any way they want and to be free in any way that they want.

Now, I think the lesson that we can learn from James when we experienced this wide array of freedoms, we realize a couple of different things. One is James’s theory of emotion of action. James would say it doesn’t matter that much what you choose beforehand. Just act and put your back into it. That changes the way that the world operates, changes the way that you feel, and you will notice how you feel. So, just act and put yourself into something. It doesn’t matter, by a huge amount, what. Just put back into it, which James did with the principles of psychology in the 1890s. He just put his back into writing his two-volume work, which pulled him. But he wanted to be a painter. He was interested in music, but he picked something and dedicated himself. So, that’s the first takeaway.

What is interesting is that, when you look at William James’s life, there was a time in his 20s where he faced almost a paralysis by analysis. He had too many options and too much freedom, and he couldn’t figure out how it goes. What’s interesting is that William James comes out of this experience feeling very bound up, both by paralysis by analysis, but also thinking that he’s not free in some sort of metaphysical sense. In other words, he thinks that the laws of nature were against him and that no human being is free. We’re all controlled by the laws of nature.

The second takeaway that James came to later in life is we’re lucky to have these options. Many people don’t have these options. This is what James came through later in life, as well. He said that the affluent have certain blindness in human beings where we can’t see that other people are either suffering or are not afforded the same options that we are.

The third is there are no absolute answers to life’s questions and that we can change and are free to do so. James does change the course of his life multiple times. He goes from principally teaching anatomy at Harvard to writing the principles of psychology to become a full-fledged philosopher and sort of forming the school of thought, American pragmatism, to then working back through his interest in spirituality and religion in the varieties of religious experiences. People would say that James was all over the place, but one of the beautiful things about James’s work is that he was all over the place, that he put his back into everything he did. That was quite clear. I think that’s something that we can take away.

Sean Murray  33:06

There’s a wonderful passage in the book that I think relates to what James is saying about putting your back into something. I’m going to read it. You quoted James. He says, “Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there, life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is ‘importance’ in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.” That’s the closest I took away from your book and gleaned from James’s work by reading your book, where he was saying: This is the way. He was pointing to me, at least, when I was reading: This is the way forward. Look at your life. Find out where that energy and passion is, and then –to your words– Put your back into it. Go into it. That’s where the importance lies; and we have to be open and reflective, and have our perceptions out to know where that is. Then, we’ve got to go all in. As I look around my life. I see people who are flourishing. For the most part, I think there are people who’ve gone all in, in certain ways in their life.

John Kaag  34:25

I would suggest thinking about it this way too: The zest, that feeling of excitement, that feeling of significance, that one experiences; are you ever going to come to the end of your life and look back on those zestful moments and say, “Oh, I just wasted my time.”? No. I think that that’s one of the things that these American philosophers, like William James, but also the transcendentalists, give us. So, when Henry David Thoreau goes out the wall, he says, “I went to the woods to live deliberately to make sure that I don’t get to the end of my life and discover that I haven’t lived.” So, living deliberately, I think is putting your back behind the zest, in other words. Because when I get to the end of my life, I don’t want to discover two things that I think oftentimes happens. I mean, death is not the scary part. It’s getting to the end of life and discovering you haven’t lived. I mean, that’s the scary part about that. It’s not dying. The dying part, everybody does. The death itself is not scary. Getting to the end and be like, “Oh, crud. That was my life.” That’s the scary saw. That’s the stuff nightmares are made of.

Sean Murray  35:31

The dying won’t be scary if you are content, in the end, to know that you followed the zest, that you followed your purpose and you live the life that you wanted to live.

John Kaag  35:39

That sounds exactly like Socrates. Philosophy is preparation for death. Life is just a euphemism for dying. That’s what we’re doing. So, what we have to do is to figure out how to die well and how to live well. I think that this is the time to be negotiating this; when we’re cooped up at home, when we have sickness at our doorstep, do it now. I’d say to my students that philosophy is like spring training for the rest of your life, which means, while you still have the chance to be reflective and change your life, do it now. Because when you get to the very end, that’s going to be the point where you think, oh, crap, I should have done something else, but then there’s no more time. That’s the tragedy of all this. And I think that that’s where we have to be mindful.

Sean Murray  36:26

That’s a wonderful note to end on.

John, where can people find out more about you and your writing?

John Kaag  36:31

johnkaag.com is my new website. I have some books on there, and paintings that I’ve done around my books. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux is my publisher. You can check their website. Also, Princeton University Press is where I publish Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.

Sean Murray  36:51

Great! John, it has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you for being on The Good Life.

John Kaag  36:56

Thanks so much for having me.

Outro  36:58

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