John Kaag: Sick Souls, Healthy Minds

John Kaag discusses his new book, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.

Praise for Sick Souls, Healthy Minds

“Kaag’s reading of James is as elucidating as readers have come to expect from him. Once again, he writes in a clear, focused, and winningly self-aware style that makes friends of James and himself for anyone who wonders if life is worth living. A book in which Kaag further carves out his niche in philosophy: personal, practical, and crucial.”– Kirkus Reviews

“Not since Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance have I read such a mesmerizing confluence of personal experience and formal thought as John Kaag’s American Philosophy: A Love Story. That combination is on display again in his Sick Souls, Healthy Minds—a brief and powerful book about one of America’s most profound minds, William James, and what he can teach us about what makes life worth living.”―Robert D. Richardson, author of William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism

“In this beautifully written book, which is filled with bracing insights, John Kaag shows why William James has had a deep, life-altering, therapeutic effect on his readers over the past century—and can continue to have the same effect on new readers today.”—Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, author of American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

About Sick Souls, Healthy Minds

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. Indeed, as John Kaag writes, “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 a compelling 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.

Kaag tells 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. Along the way, Kaag also movingly describes how his own life has been endlessly enriched by James.

Eloquent, inspiring, and filled with insight, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds may be the smartest and most important self-help book you’ll ever read.