Sick Souls, Healthy Minds by John Kaag review can William James save your life? – The Guardian

From Plato to Heidegger, philosophers have taken a dim view of the common people. That, however, began to change when the common people turned into a mass-reading public hungry for a little philosophy, under the delusion that the subject has something interesting to say about the meaning of life. A number of pop philosophers emerged to meet this demand, some of them admirable such as Simon Blackburn, others more like the slightly sozzled character you bump into in a bar who thinks the stars spell out some momentous statement. The line between the pop and the pub philosopher is easy to cross.

One way of making things easier on your audience is to avoid a philosophers ideas and talk about his or her life instead. Very few readers understand the synthetic a priori or the law of the excluded middle, but a lot of them know about falling in love or what it feels like to be miserable. It helps, however, if the life of the thinker in question is reasonably exciting. This was certainly the case with Ludwig Wittgenstein, who fought in the first world war, had a number of illegal gay relationships, lived in a hut on a Norwegian fiord and had to do a runner as a village schoolmaster when he struck a pupil across the face.

The problem with the American philosopher William James, founder of so-called pragmatism, is that his life, externally at least, was about as exciting as a slugs. He was born in New York in 1842, the brother of the novelist Henry James and the grandson of an Irishman from the small Ulster town of Ballyjamesduff, who emigrated to the US and made an enormous fortune from banking and real estate. As an academic psychologist, William spent most of his life teaching at Harvard, and in his later years was fascinated by ghosts, table-rapping and general spookery. He also discovered he could attain a kind of Nirvana with the help of laughing gas. As a celebrated public intellectual, he preached a number of standard liberal pieties, including respect for the individual and the sanctity of personal freedom.

None of this was likely to set the Hudson on fire, so John Kaag has found various ways to liven up his subject. The first is to say as little about the intricacies of pragmatism as is decently possible. Popularly caricatured as the belief that truth is what works, it is more accurately a highly sophisticated creed for which truth is what, in the long run, makes a difference to the world. Kaag conveys something of this, while saying nothing at all about its notorious problems. He also tells us rather vacuously that pragmatism is about life and its amelioration and that its exponents study lifes value and worth, adding the stunning revelation that human thought (is) personal, continuous and changing.

In a curious way, it is pragmatism itself that licenses Kaags reluctance to delve into its subtleties. For if it is often described as the first distinctively American school of philosophy, it is partly because its critique of European rationalism can be made to merge into good old American anti-intellectualism. Kaag is all for the feel and taste of immediate experience, in contrast to some arid scheme of thought, and so is James; but in Jamess case this takes the form of a rigorous inquiry into truth and meaning, whereas rigorous is the last adjective one would use to characterise this book. We are told, for example, that the philosopher Baruch Spinoza was an idealist (he was in fact a materialist) and that Darwin taught that the weak shall perish, which is not what the doctrine of the survival of the fittest means.

Kaags cracker-barrel wisdom is occasionally punctuated by forays into his own biography, given that Jamess life fails to yield much drama. Sick Souls, Healthy Minds belongs to the American confessional genre, which runs all the way from Puritanism to Norman Mailer. As befits the Me generation, it is as much about the author as his subject. James is sometimes no more than a convenient peg on which Kaag can hang his dishevelled thoughts about getting divorced, his predictably beautiful daughter, getting divorced again and so on. We learn that he has a beer at five oclock every day, that as a kid he was uncoordinated and stuttered badly, and that his daughter swallowed some amniotic fluid on the way out of the womb but quickly recovered. He even threatens us with a future book on bringing up a child as divorced parents. It isnt obvious quite what any of this has to do with, say, the pragmatist claim that truth can only be established retrospectively, or indeed with the life of James, but like many an autobiographer Kaag seems to assume that others will be as interested in the small change of his own existence as he is himself.

Another way of peddling philosophy to the masses is to package it as spiritual therapy, for which there is a seemingly endless appetite. Hence the whimsical subtitle of this book: How William James Can Save Your Life. In reality, Kaag has to admit that James didnt so much save his life as, rather less sensationally, save him from depression. He tells us how as a young man he felt life was meaningless, as indeed did James himself. In truth, for an East Coast Brahmin with a liberal father and without material worries, he was something of a psychological mess. As well as a Sartrean sense of nausea at the futility of existence, he suffered from partial blindness and was haunted by thoughts of suicide.

Then, in a moment of enlightenment, James discovered that the world was not entirely governed by determinism and that there was something called free will. Like knowing where Sweden is, this is a discovery most of us have made without much sense of spiritual illumination. Kaag reads about his masters conversion and becomes equally life-affirming. There is a widespread prejudice in the Unites States that pessimism is somehow unpatriotic, along with the falsehood that you can be anything you like as long as you set your mind to it. In the end, James turns out to be exemplary of the power of positive thinking. The point of philosophy is to sort yourself out. William Jamess entire philosophy, from beginning to end, Kaag writes, was geared to save a life, his life. It is a typically imprecise claim.

It is no accident that Jamess brother Henry is among the finest stylists of the English language, given Williams own supple, graceful prose. Kaags literary style is rather less elegant: Nope, I sort of get it, sure as hell, to sweat a bunch and so on. But writing popularly doesnt mean you have to write badly. And being attuned to the nuances of everyday experience, as James taught us to be, doesnt mean you have to be suspicious of abstract ideas. What else is free will?

Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life is published by Princeton (RRP 18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Sick Souls, Healthy Minds by John Kaag review can William James save your life? - The Guardian