William James and a Life Worth Living

As part of Harvard Divinity School's annual William James Lecture on Religious Experience, Professor John Kaag will present "William James and the Sick Soul." In the lecture, held Thursday, February 2, at 5:15 pm (EST) on campus and online, Kaag will discuss James's 1895 lecture "Is Life Worth Living?"

Professor Kaag is Donahue Professor of the Arts at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He has written extensively on American philosophy, from Jonathan Edwards to the present. His most recent books are Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James (2023) and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (2021).

In the interview below, Professor Kaag discusses how William James saved his own life, why James was revered by his Harvard students, and why the founder of pragmatism and empirical psychology can still speak so directly and profoundly to anyone struggling to make a life worth living.

Harvard Divinity School: You’ve said that William James is the “intellectual godson of Ralph Waldo Emerson,” who of course plays a significant role in the history of Harvard Divinity School. How did James’s transcendental roots impact his views on how we should live our lives?

John Kaag: James, like Emerson, was concerned with the preservation and meaning of human freedom. The Transcendentalists, thinking and writing in the 1840s, were interested in carving out a space for spiritual and personal liberty in a culture that seemed hell-bent on undercutting it. The rise of consumerism and modern capitalism, coupled with the industrial age and religious conformity, struck Emerson—and then James—as real threats to human meaning-making.

Both thinkers turned to the concept of “experience” as touchstones for a philosophy that might awaken individuals to their latent powers (what Emerson called “genius” and what James called “energies”). The point of philosophy for both of these thinkers was to respond to and enrich experience, from the most local and immediate sense to the broadest and most universal.

I also think that Emerson and James were very much aware of the existential challenge that confronts—let me just term it—“we, moderns.” I take this challenge as the risk and reward of making meaning and finding significance in a world that has largely jettisoned traditions and institutions. Prior to 1830, lots of New Englanders turned to the Calvinist church for guidance, but since Emerson’s “Divinity School Address,” things have changed and thinkers have had to confront tragedy and human finitude on their own terms. I think Emerson and James crafted philosophies to make “life worth living,” to take a word from James.

HDS: In a 2016 New York Times review of your book American Philosophy: A Love Story, we learn of your chance encounter at a coffee shop in the White Mountains of New Hampshire that led you to the private library of William Ernest Hocking, a philosophy professor and one-time powerful mainstay of Harvard in the early twentieth century.

Among the library’s dusty treasures were inscribed publications of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce; signed gift copies from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost; and marginalia and annotations by William James as he prepared The Varieties of Religious Experience. Such an opportunity to delve deeply into these primary materials and sources would be thrilling for most scholars, but for you, it was also a transformative experience. Could you talk about how your time in the Hocking library changed your life?

JK: My time writing American Philosophy was a very difficult one for me. I had just gone through a divorce, and my father had died of esophageal cancer. I was unmoored and looking for anchorage, and I found safe harbor in the work of Emerson, Thoreau, and James, in a physical locale that James had loved (he summered in nearby Chocorua). Their thoughts—and the woods of New Hampshire—saved my life.

For the first time, I thought about what it would mean to, as Thoreau says in Walden, “live deliberately,” to craft a life that I could live and stand by as death slowly encroaches. It means, at least for me, deciding what to worship, where to tap meaning, and how to love in the right way—and to do so, again with Thoreau “to improve the nick of time” before everything goes black.

There really is no time to waste, I think that, in the shadow of my father’s untimely demise (brought on by alcohol addiction) and with James’s help, I think I came to realize the pressing nature of our existential situation.

HDS: In 1895, James delivered the lecture "Is Life Worth Living?" to the Harvard Young Men’s Christian Association, in which he asks: “Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.” What did James mean by this? Was this a kind of carpe diem cry to live life to the full, or something else? Also, you wrote in Aeon that, for many people, life’s worth is never in question. What does James have to teach those who don’t doubt that life is worth living?

JK: Well, I think I might have gone too far in saying that there are many people who never question life’s worth. I actually think that most people eventually, or at certain points, do question the meaning of life.

Now, what does James mean by “maybe life is worth living, it depends on the liver.” I think he wants to place the question of life’s significance squarely in our hands, since those who teeter on the brink of meaningless feel like it is not in their hands at all. So, he is saying—hey, it is up to you to both deem whether life is worth living and to make it so or not. I think this is immensely empowering.

I think James is also holding off from passing judgment for others about the value of (their) life. It is a matter of respecting others subjective experience and acknowledging that in some very important cases, life might not be experienced as possessing great value. Life can be truly hard for particular people, and far be it for James or anyone else for that matter to pronounce it to be meaningful when all evidence points to the opposite.

Think about it this way: if you are flirting with feelings of total meaningless, the most alienating and I will say, cruel, thing a friend can do is assure the sufferer that life is unadulteratedly meaningful and good—as if the sufferer is missing out on some cosmic fact or unable to solve a very simple riddle. There is nothing easy about tragedy, loss and hopelessness, and James knew that firsthand. This is why he offers the sufferer, "Maybe, maybe life is worth living, it is up to you."

Finally, I think that James's response "maybe" life is worth living gestures to a metaphysical position that is very important for James: He thinks that the universe is shot through with "maybes" and this is where human beings can strike upon the greatest significances of their lives. More on that last point during my lecture on February 2.

HDS: The Washington Post wrote that you, "a twice-divorced, self-described social misfit, lets readers into his own attempts to stave off depression when he felt the walls of his life closing in." Did William James save your life? Are you and James kindred spirts, of sorts?

JK: Yes, twice I think. First, at the Hocking estate, but again when my second marriage fell apart and I went through bypass surgery at the tender age of 40. "Up again old heart," Emerson instructs us. I think James took these words to heart. He was constantly interested in the experience of "second wind," the ability to hit rock bottom and somehow find reserves of energy, of power, that were hitherto unknown to us.

I think that his lecture "Energies of Men" is particularly good on this point. He writes, “Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater." I think that this comment is very helpful to anyone suffering from bouts of what James called "the sick soul."

It is not a guarantee that things will turn out well in the end or even moderately acceptable, but rather that things aren't destined to go badly. It gives one who is struggling with life's challenges a sense that all is not lost and that the ability to find oneself or save oneself might still be in one's grasp—even and perhaps most importantly when one is tempted to fully let go.

I would not be so bold as to think of James as my kindred spirit, but I am indebted to his generosity and his spirit that lives on in his work, his readers, and in the places he held dear.

HDS: I listened to an interview where you described how you went into cardiac arrest and needed to be shocked back to life. You talk about the feeling of dying and the feeling of coming back and how, when you encounter your own mortality, you have a choice to either lean into hope or lean into resignation. You leaned into hope. How much of what you’d been writing about and learning from James played into that “leaning into hope” mentality?

JK: James had heart problems for much of his later life, but he never, ever succumbed to them. Instead—sometimes recklessly—he drove his physical body as a sort of protest against mortality. I think that approach hastened his death, but he lived vibrantly and productively in the interim. I think that is something quite beautiful.

The sick soul, as James described it in The Varieties of Religious Experience, is experienced as a sense of disjointedness with the world at large. One is just not right with the world. And there are many objective aspects of the world that frankly would lead one to the conclusion that human beings really just don't belong or fit in with the cosmic order. But James held out hope that we are, indeed, well-fitted to the workings of nature, and I find that reassuring and bolstering in moments when I see no way to reconcile myself to reality. Tomorrow is another day. And then we can try again.

That openness—to the world's particularities and hairpin turns—is what is distinctive about Jamesian pragmatism, as a philosophical movement, as a way of life. And yes, it helped me a great deal when I was unable to set myself right after a cardiac arrest in 2020.

HDS: Robert Richardson said that William James was one of America’s great teachers. What kind of teacher was James? What do you image it would have been like to have been one of James’s students?

JK: Oh! Bob was so right about this. Philosophy, at its core, is the act of teaching and learning. It is not about how many peer-review journal articles you can write or about how smart you can seem to everyone else. It is about communication and connection and helping each other think through the very difficult business of living thoughtfully, awake to ourselves and awake to each other.

Students absolutely worshipped James. Worshipped is the wrong word—adored—that is right, and there is a reason why James was called "the adorable genius." Some geniuses really aren't that adorable. James was.

When James delivered his final lecture—on philosophy and the meaning of life at Harvard—his students got together and bought him a "loving cup," like the sort that you might win if you were the victor of a race. But this one was for a lifetime of teaching in the most humane way possible. I wish I could have been his student. But honestly what I really wish is that the discipline of philosophy, as a whole, could take its cues from James's approach to the classroom.

HDS: Finally, James sought to understand his own trial and tribulations, his suffering, suicidal thoughts, and health troubles. What makes James’s teachings and questions of struggle so relevant today?

JK: I think we often try to approach trouble—psychological, personal, political, physical—as a doctor would approach a patient, with cool scientific methods and working things out as objectively as possible.

There is nothing particularly wrong with this, and James would have admired this resolve. He wrote the Principles of Psychology at least in part as a way to address, empirically, psychological conditions. This being said, the empirical was always balanced with the personal, ethical, existential (maybe even spiritual) disposition of a man who was willing to simply sit with the trouble and acknowledge its gravity. When my students read James, they often say they are listening to a "friend" or a "counselor"—and my students come from every walk of life.

—Interview by Jonathan Beasley

If you or a loved one are having emotional distress or thoughts of suicide, call 988 to connect with a lifeline specialist for support. Harvard students can call the CAMHS Cares line at 617.495.2042, and support for the HDS community is available through the School’s Office of Student Services, Office of the Chaplain and Religious and Spiritual Life, and the Employee Assistance Program.