John Kaag || How William James Can Save Your Life

philosophy from the University of Oregon. His running has appeared in The Parish Review, The New York Times, and Harper's Magazine. He's the author of Hiking with Nietzsche, American Philosophy, a Love Story, and his most recent book is called Six Souls, Healthy Minds, How William James Can Save Your Life. In this episode, my conversation with John Gaig revolves around the existential question we've all had, is life worth living? John

expounds on William James's the answer of maybe. He shares about his near death experience and how vulnerable moments in his life have led him to a more nuanced understanding of philosophy. We also touch on the topics of metaphysics, determinism, suffering, religion and transcendence. This conversation was very rich. William James is the founder of the field of psychology, so it seems really appropriate that we would have an entire episode

of the Psychology Podcast dedicated to William James. And I can't think of anyone better. Going to a real delight to chat with John Kaig about William James, considering he has such a broad depth of knowledge about him. So, without further ado, I bring you John Kaig. Well, I'd like to start off with discussing your philosophy specialization. What would you say is are the main areas within the

purview of the field that must excite you. My specialization is in nineteenth century philosophy, primarily American philosophy, but also existentialism. But really, I mean I was taught by a number of teachers who believed that philosophy at its best should go back to the Greeks, and the Greeks really thought about philosophy as helping us through the thoughtful business of living. It wasn't a discipline, it was really a way of life.

And so I have been attracted to philosophers who hold that position, and we find a number of them in the nineteenth century. Yeah. Yeah, So there's this thread that runs your work on what does what does it mean to live a life well lived? As well as more morose, why don't we kill ourselves? So those are two big questions. In a way they are they're in verses of each other. So I mean, we talk about the meaning of life, and we then talk about why we shouldn't. My teacher

John McDermott would say, why bother with anything? And my interests have really drawn me to philosophers who asked that question in a very sincere way, So Frederick Nietzsche on the one hand, and William James on the other. As I've grown older, I've gravitated toward James, at least in part because I think he gives us a better answer to the question is life worth living? Than Nietzsche does. And I have looked at James's life, not just his philosophy,

as a way of thinking through my own difficulties. Yeah, and I definitely want to get to that and hear how he saved your life, because that's the subtitle of your book, how William James? Well, it's I guess it wasn't. How wayn James saved my life, but it is how William James can save your life. But he did save your life, right. So there's an interesting thread that runs through this book that I wanted to open up with

and talk about. It almost feels like there's a real privilege for those who even have the resources to be able to think so deeply about why it was the purpose of life. It feels like so many people in this world are trying to get their basic needs met and that is their focus. It's a fascinating sort of thing. It's like no one's winning, you know. It's like you can spend your whole life trying to overcome so many

economic hardships only to get to the other side. And then when you get to the the other side, you start to ask questions like is this all there is? Maybe I should just kill myself. It just seems like there's no door or portal into utopia having human existence, And

I feel like there's a deep truth there. There's like a real deep truth that everyone at some point in their life kind of realize, and well, not everyone realizes it, but it feels like the philosophers throughout the generations realize it and they keep writing about the same thing generation, and no one solved the problem once and for all.

So I wanted to talk about that because that was a very interesting thread running through this because William James himself face that, you know, he got to a point He's like, I kind of have it all, yet I feel like I have nothing, and it's a very fascinating, fascinating sort of paradox. So can we start there with

that conversation? Of course. I mean there's a way in which existential crises are a luxury for those who don't have real on the ground crises, and it's the case that those who are just trying to make ends meet any My students, for example, are first generation college students, and they're just trying to get by. They're trying to pay their rent, they're trying to get food on the table, they're trying to provide if they have kids, for their kids.

And they oftentimes say to me, they say, doctor Keg, I'm not worried about whether life is worth living. I'm just trying to live. And what's curious is that as they grow older and some of them do then sort of move into a position where they have the time and luxuries that they that they've always wanted. They then turn around and they say, well, now I have to ask the question is life worth living? And oftentimes they think,

huh is this it? So once you have all of your needs and desires met, you oftentimes find that they weren't the right pursuits or you find that they're deeply fulfilling or meaningless. But you have to get them first before you actually have that realization. William James, I mean

he was born into a life of privilege. His grandfather was one of the wealthiest men in the Northeast, and it gave his father, Henry James Sr. The ability to provide a great deal of freedoms, intellectual freedoms and spiritual freedoms to his kids. And the mandate in the James household, and it's a funny mandate, but it's a mandate that some of us can understand, is the mandate to make good on life's possibilities and freedoms. The mandate is be free,

go ahead. But James experienced something that many nineteenth, twentieth and twentieth twenty first century inhabitants too, which is freedom is really anxiety provoking, storing care of guards, said that there's this, you know, intimate relationship between possibility and drowning anxiety. Drowning is the word he used. Yeah, yeah, possibility. Yeah, and that's what we're facing, I mean, some of us

are facing today. But to get back to your point, those who are struggling to even have certain possibilities in life don't find themselves in such anxiety provoking positions. What they find themselves in, at least from what I understand, is positions of fear or insecurity or lack, which is different than anxiety. Anxiety, at least for the existentialists and pragmatists, is the feeling of freedom. It's a feeling of which way do I go? I have all of these options.

I don't know what to become or who to be. And that question is not raised for those individuals who are just struggling to get by. Yeah, you say in your book it is as if only after a person has been given everything that one has the chance to realize that everything might never be enough to really matter. Holy col Jonathan, Look, your book is not oprah asque

self help. You know you know you're you're like like philosophy, self help is always depressing as hell, like you wrote, by the way, your book's not depressing, I'm just being cheeky you But you do write things like at the end of the Existential Day, where a bunch of meat sacks destined for the grinder. So I guess the interesting the thing about philosophers is that they like, they like getting into the piercing reality and then say, well, what can we where's the hope there from that? And there

is a lot of hope in the right. That's right. I mean, you all start. Philosophs are really good at kind of starting with piercing reality as the foundation. You know, Yeah, that's right. And I mean I think that that's the place where many readers want to start. I mean, I think that it's really necessary to start where some readers who are really struggling are. And I think James was lovely at being able to do that for his readership

and his audience. He doesn't sugarcoat anything. And I think that his answer when he asked the question is life worth living in the eighteen nineties to this group of YMCA Christian Cambridge, you know youngsters, when he asked the question is life worth living? And he says, maybe it depends on the liver. He's not being cheeky. He really me so, I know. And there's something they're very, very

profound about that point that he made. Unpacking it a little bit, he's basically saying life can be worth living if you make it worth living. That and intimately tied up with that are notions that he's wrestled with in his lifetime of free will, notions of you know, what does it mean to have free will? What does it mean to have control over your life? But you know, he was very obsessed with things such as control as

well and chance and probability. These are a lot of issues he wrestled within his lifetime that people are still wrestling with modern day philosophers and modern day neuroscientists and psychologists. Interesting enough, the idea of suicide. I believe this is something that you wrote. You said suicide can be regarded not as a letting go, but rather a laying claim to a life that is otherwise out of control. Now, I find that that really interesting and that ties in

with a lot of the themes in William James's life. Right, you argued what he really wanted in his life was not to have non existence but to have control of

his existence. Is that about right? That's right? And I mean we oftentimes think that suicide and considering suicide is a weak action, but many nineteenth century philosophers and the Stoics, for example, in ancient thought that suicide and contemplating suicide was simply a matter of contemplating life's worth and also the issue of taking control of one's life, seizing it

in a particular way. And I think that that's what James, when he struggled with suicide through his thirties, who was really worried about the dilemma of determinism, this idea that all of the universe was controlled in a particular way and that we were just pawns in a great mechanical scheme. That this is a disempowering thought for James. This is the thought that led him to consider suicide. And at least one could do some thing right and this act,

this seemingly radical act, might be that something. And I think that many individuals that James encounters in his life who were suffering through depression or anxiety, felt disempowered, felt like they had nowhere to go, felt like they were all alone in their suffering, and I think what James

did was when he said is life worth living? The answer is maybe it depends on the liver is He was saying, hold on, you still have some control over your life, over your situation, and that control is embodied in a maybe. What does that mean? I think for James, what it meant was you have the ability to seize upon possibilities in your life the maybe's the hypotheses of your life, and that's where you can make your life meaningful. So maybe it depends on the liver. Wasn't simply saying, well,

maybe your life is worth living, Maybe it's not. James, I think was directing us a little more poignedly to the fact that when you experience and explore hypotheses, the maybe's of life, that's where the meaningful stuff. That's where the significance is. And I think that's something really powerful in James's answer, and powerful in a way where a simple yes, yes, life is always worth living would actually

not provide that same type of power. I think, yeah, yeah, I agree, And it seems like his life really fundamentally changed once he came up with a realization. He says, quote, my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. It seems like a lot changed for

him after coming to that realization. I could hear in the back of my head some modern day neuroscientists having a conversation with him after saying that, and saying, well, actually, you had no free will, that you're going to believe in free will, you know from an ultimate perspective, because it was decided at the start of the Big Bang and all the walls of the universe are outside of control.

And if you believe that, if you don't, if you're a non if you're if you're you know, as long as you're like not a duellist, then there's really no etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. What would he say in response to all the modern day neuroscientists who kind of reduced free will to the causal patterns of the universe going back to the Big Bang. It's a great question, I mean, and we oftentimes downplay James as a metaphysical thinker because pragmatism is famously anti metaphysical,

but actually that's not the case. I mean, James had a view on what the universe was like, and it entailed and possibility, So I think it's a really good question. I think that James is a metaphysical thinker. I think that he believed against the determinists. He said that the universe is shot through with possibility and chance, and very famously, one of his students, l Alignman Cabot said, chance, metaphysical

chance is always quote my chance. In other words, there are these openings, sort of call them spaces or opportunities that the universe affords. And this is a very sort of idealistic nineteenth century thought, and that I explore those possibilities at my own risk, but also at my own reward. Now, James argues for indeterminism, so he says that large chunks of our life are governed by habit, by mechanical necessity, but there are spaces for us to still explore our

own free will. And in fact, the fact that the universe is set up by way of maybe's and a hypotheses and chances is how we as evolutionary beings came to have something like free will. And I think that he's getting that from his friend Csperse, who believes that Tuke or Taychism, as he calls it, is the sort of metaphysical position that chances are real in the world.

Chance is real. Yeah, I mean when I mean I follow the modern day free will debates and philosophers that if you survey philosophers and you survey neuroscientist, there's a rift in terms of the belief, you know, between libertarian free will and all the different varieties. And I like William James, like you know, he I like a lot of things he said he was probably one of the true geniuses of the field of psychology as well as philosophy throughout the ages. There are a lot of things

I like about him. But is he was a scientist, but he always left open this like possibility for the hidden order of the universe and like the unseen, And I love that shit. I mean I do. I like because I'm very spiritual myself. And I love the idea that he would used to turn off the lights in order to see if he could see the unseen. You know, where's the is the ghost in the room with me? You know that? Isn't that cool? That's cool? We need more of that kind of romantics. It's to me, it's

kind of a there's a certain romancesm there. It's hard to explain what I mean by that, but I mean, I really I agree with you one hundred So. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that James would turn down the lights in the rooms so the miracles could happen. And what I think is really philosophically interesting and also psychologically interesting, is that James took the question of the subliminal as the primary question of psychology moving into the next hundred years.

He says it, He says, says the question of the subliminal and the unconscious is a central question for the discipline of psychology and philosophy for the next hundred years. And he's getting that, at least in part from his Transcendentalist upbringing. I mean, he's the intellectual godson of Ralf Walden Emerson, you know, the big transcendent eyeball, the all

seeing eye. And James suspects, along with Emerson, that we live most of our lives half asleep, that we don't see things clearly, that we see the world through glass darkly, and that the point of living Alea Threau is to wake up, to come to to reach the end of Walden and say that the point of living is to see the dawn. James James was one hundred percent into that position, and I think that in part, that's his

interest in the unseen order. Yeah, it's funny because you have this part in your book where you link it to college kids and they're talking about wokeness. But I actually don't think that he would be very woke. If

he was. I mean, he would care about discrimination all that, don't get me wrong, but I think he means something different about what he means waking up, because I think that what I love about about what he brings to the table with this is my own interest in being able to see the hidden possibilities in others, like the potential that people have. You know, he has this beautiful quote. I'm not going to butcher by trying to remember, but like dafts are checked and you know what's the quote.

He's like, we're capable of so much more, you know, than we realized. And I love that idea as well, and I love that he applied his kind of mysticism to human potential as well. You know, like maybe the kid ostensibly and even being measured by our instruments doesn't show the potential, but if we turn the lights down enough, you know, metaphorically, we give the metaphorical, we give the kid the opportunities. You know, maybe they will surprise us.

It's really not all that together different than his other views about other things in life. I think James is interested in individual human potentials. He's always interested in second wins, these places where we think, oh, I can't go any further,

and then suddenly something happens and you can. I mean, the varieties of religious experience is about transcendence, but it's not just about transcendence in a sort of religious sense, although it can also be transcendence in our religious sense, but it's also transcending the self imposed boundaries that we have in life. And we have so many of them that James says, do one thing that is difficult, okay, just no, do two things that are difficult every day,

just for the practice of it. This is tran I mean, this is going beyond the self imposed boundaries that you have in life. I think that when it comes to the interpersonal world, I think James is pretty good on this as well. He says that we as human beings are prone to a what he calls a certain blindness and human beings which is I like to think about it as David Foster Wallace's comment that we are naturally self centered little beasts, and that all of our experience

is filtered through my experience. It's my table, it's my desk lamp, it's my computer, it's my life, and so salience dictates that whatever is mine feels the most vivid and therefore the most important. And the blindness that we have in life comes in when we actually think we see someone else living their life and we can't actually understand why it might be significant to them, And that's

I mean. James, in the essay on a Certain Blindness and Human Beings, says that he's driving along in the South, at least south to his Cambridge, Massachusetts, and sees a number of towns and houses that he could never imagine living in there, just too lowly, and then he realizes how incredibly both insensitive but also blind he is to the experience of others. And I think that that moment of humility is a really important one in James's corpus,

and a really important one for readers of James. I agree. I agree. He says, our fires are damped, our drafts are checked, we are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. The human individual thus lives far within his limits. He posis as powers of various sorts, which he habitually fails to use. And then there's the word habitually. He's obsessed with habits too, right, and like changing. He does believe in the potential for

change through the use of habits of mind. He does, And I mean this is why he's fascinated with yoga in part, I think as well, because I mean yoga does. I mean the mind body dualism sort of breaks down, obviously both for James and the yoga practitioner, but also yoga creates habits in our mind and our bodies. But it's also about breaking habits, breaking certain routines, or getting

in a rut and breaking out of that rut. And James famously he's talking to c Us Purse about this pretty famous essay of Purses called the Fixation of Belief. And the essay that Purs writes is about how does belief get fixed in our minds and our bodies and our societies. And James comes back and says, what I'm interested in is how believes, how belief is unfixed. How does it come, how does it come apart? How does it change? How does it grow? How does it morph quickly?

And I think that's that's an interesting question for all of us. I think very interesting. I mean, these questions still don't have answers in science. It's not like I can point you to the that's all study, you know, But I love it. I love the things he would raise and postulate, especially his second win ideas she tried to tackle for a long time in his life. He wrote, once, it is evident that our organism has stored up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon, but they

may be called upon. Deeper and deeper strata of combustible or explosable material discontinuously arranged, but ready for use by any one who probe so deep and repairing themselves by rest, as well as do the superficial strata. Most of us continue living unnecessarily near our surface. That's an interesting question. Near our surface? What is the What is the surface is the surface? Our consciousness is our surface. The things that we currently are and that we just keep repeating

them over and over and over again. Maybe that's what he means by surface. Well, as opposed to like really testing the limits of our of what we could change in two. I don't know, I just riffing with you. I don't know the answer. I think he means it in several different ways. One is, we live, according to James, and then also according to the transcendentalisms like Fuller and Emerson and Threa, we live our daily life in a

sort of surface world, in the world of appearances. I mean this goes way back to the Platonic idea of the difference between semblance and reality. We just deal in surfaces, surfaces of people, and very rarely do we go deep with anyone, including ourselves. So that's one issue. The other issue I think has to do with consciousness, which is we very rarely are aware of everything that we could be aware of a we are only our angle of vision is severely restricted, and we have the tendency to

confuse the immediate with the actually important. That which is most immediate to me is usually not the most ultimately important thing that I should be attending to. So I think there's that mistake. I also think that when it comes to surface, we very rarely ask about ourselves, what's inside, how things are making me feel how I am reacting.

I know that we live in a fairly me centered world, but I think if we're honest with ourselves, we typically don't spend the time to ask ourselves about our own emotional state, about how things are affecting us honestly, in a sort of the unexamined life is not worth living sets. So I think those are at least three meanings of surface that we could go deeper. That's great. Thank you, Thank you for doing a seance here with me and resurrecting William James. You're like the three meetings. How do

you hell know what he means? I have no, So to be absolutely clear, I mean downstairs, I have the whole selection of James's journals from the Psychical Research Society that he helped found, and I mean he is he was one of the world's greatest ghostbusters, ghost hunters, and he was fascinated by the and the eccentricity of it,

the mystery of it, the perhaps hoax of it. And he comes to the end of his life and he says, these wonders are not for human you know, are not are not meant to be sorted out, And so like maybe I can maybe channeling William James is also channeling the admission that like you just don't know. I mean, his friend Alfred North Whitehead said, like, you know that after philosophy has run its course, the wonder remains that. So it's not supposed to extinguish it. I think James was.

James was in there on that realization, absolutely absolutely. I also like this. Of course there are limits that trees don't grow into the sky, but the plain factor means that men the world over possess amounts of resource which only very exceptional individuals pushed to their extremes of use. So I love that. So just closing the circle on the second wind idea. So his pragmatism is it goes deep.

You know, it doesn't just cover free will, but it also covers things like zest and authenticity, right what you know, like it goes deep, it does. And I mean the thing is is that James is such a he was called an adorable genius. He's such an adorable writer, such a good writer, that sometimes we miss how profound his thoughts are. I think, and the question of authenticity is central to James in a way that it's central to existentialists who we regard as real philosophers because they're so

you know, serious and dark. And also to the Greeks who that we need to give an apollo geo or a good account of our life. I mean Thoreau says we need to improve the nick of time. James spent his entire life trying to figure out how to improve the nick of time. I mean his voluminous writings over

at least three disciplines philosophy, psychology, religious studies, physiology. I mean this is an almost manic attempt to improve the nick of time and to sort himself out and to lay claim to something, to say, I my life is worth living. Okay? What makes He's obsessed with this phrase? What makes life significant? And his life bears it out.

I mean, if you look at the energy that this man put into living, I know you're not supposed to create the or make the biographical fallacy where you look at a person's life and interpret their philosophy according to it. I do it all the time, and I think you should because like the person behind the philosophy matters. And when you look at James's life, I think he might have been limited in a number of different ways. One has his blindness to race relations and socioeconomic disparity. He

wasn't great on those things. But there are certain things about James's life that are deeply inspiring. One of them is the Zest. So okay, so first of all, I want to actually tell you about my friend David Yayden, who has a new book coming out on William James. I think you're really going to like. So I just wanted to tell you about that. I wanted to plug my friend David Aiden, he said. So David reached out

to me and we just missed each other. Actually I was up in Vermont and he came into Harvard or you know, he was giving a talk at Cambridge and we were supposed to have dinner, but we just missed each other. Oh bummer. Well, maybe someday all three of us can hang out and get out over Willam James. But anyway, really looking forward to David's new book. It's going to be a great update William James ideas about religion,

spirituality and transcendence. And speaking of which, let's let's talk about wonder and hope, you know, because I mean, my gosh and what like I said, in the one sense, you say a lot of really brutal, you're kind of savage in some places at about the reality of human existence. You know, on the one hand, like you say things like each of us suffers in our own unique hellholes according to Schoppenhower, But this is the isolating fact that each of us shares. But then you do get to

the wonder and hope. You do get there. You do get there. You say, it is up to us to literally to make what It is up to us to literally make what we will of life. The existence of chance makes the difference between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life to which the keynote is hope. So let's double click on that sentence right there. What do you mean about that? And how can we influence that chance a little bit? Do we have an

control over that? Yeah? I mean, this is a deep question, and actually it has become a more and more personal question since I've written the book. I mean, six days after the book was published, I was running on a treadmill and hopped off the treadmill, laid down on the floor, and went into cardiac arrest and was shot back to life. And taken to a Tough's medical center, where I was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect and given bypasser or

I went through bypass surgery. And it doesn't get more dismal, Or maybe it does get more dismal, but I hadn't experienced anything more dismal than the experience right before I left this world. I mean, the feeling of dying is not a one to mess around with, but the feeling of coming back is quite remarkable, and it clarified things that I had written into the book that I had only theoretically understood, but now at least well I might not understand them. I think I experienced something of them.

It's that when you hit rock bottom, or when you disappear, or when you when you encounter your ownfinitude or your own mortality, there is you have a choice about how you respond to that. And that choice has to do with the difference between resignation and hope and also isolation and connection, and those those choices are not fully yours, but you can lean it. I think about them as lead in the direction of either. In my case, I really I think I lean toward hope and connection, and

that doesn't make me some sort of existential hero. I think lots and lots of people have done this and have experienced something like this that in the darkest moments of their lives they have you know. Victor Frankel says, between stimulus and response, there's this little space and we

get to respond to our situation. Everything can be taken from a man, but one man, woman, person, but one thing, and it's the ability to respond and lean into something like hope, expectation, and connection rather than you can hear me, you can hear it in my voice, instead of leading, instead of leaning the opposite direction in terms of resignation, alienation and yeah, yeah, wow, I mean that's really powerful. My favorite psychologist is Abraham Maslow, and he talked about

the post mortem life. He thinks everyone should have one. He had something similar happened to him, that happened to you, and he said, from that point forward, he just saw such more transcendent possibilities in the universe that he never saw before. Everything became more special and more precious. And he argued everyone should be able to have a post mortem life. To die, and he said everyone should be able to die and come back. What's interesting is that

this relates very closely to the James family. I mean the mystic that Emmanuel Swedenborg had what's called a vast station where everything is wiped out. You just feel your entire self sort of completely wiped out, and all of a sudden you feel something toward a divine or another. And Emanuel Swedenborg was basically the patron saint of the James household. I mean, Henry was Henry James was a Swedenborgian.

William James was pretty close. And this feeling of being there's this expression in varieties of varieties of religious experience where James says, there is an experience known to religious men and women where they quote be as nothing in the water spouts of God. And that experience of being as nothing in the water spouts of God is not necessarily,

I would contend, just for the religiously observant. It's for anyone who experiences something of the dissolution of the self and then the reconstituting of the self in what Maslow would call a post mortem life or a life after death. Yeah, and some people say they get that from like psychedelics. You know that that experience for them helps them kind of dissolve the self in a certain way that they see the world differently afterwards. Have you experimented with psychologists? Yeah,

I mean I can. I'm going to speak to something that I very rarely speak about. But I mean, many of my books are memoir and they hiking with Nietzsche and American Felosy a love story, and that life was lived with a woman who I'm no longer married to, and who the dissolution of that marriage had had something to do with psychedelic use. And I think so the answer to your question is have I experienced psychedelics indirectly at least? And it is the case that it changes

people's lives. I mean, Poland Michael Polland is not off the mark when he talks about about that. Similarly, I was recently recently talking to Bessel vendor Clo the body keeps the score, the author of a Body keeps the score, and and he's become more and more interested in the relationship between psychedelic you know, psychedelic treatment and the treatment of trauma. And I think James would have been interested

in this, would have been interested in this work. Now I think that all of those comments might be true, but I think that there's a danger in the dissolution of the self as well, because it's it's what mystics used to call pre list. It's a confusion between absolute narcissism and communing with the absolute. And there's again it's pre prelest p r e l E s T. And this experience of the dissolution the self and then connecting with something else. I think that there is a confusion.

There is a potential confusion that's always present about prioritizing your experiences and your transcendental experiences over the lives of others. I mean, this is a concern that I've harbored for

a long time. I mean, I'm kind of curious since you just since we're riffing, I'm curious what you think about that in terms of when for those individuals who claim transcendental experiences in the religious or spiritual sense, do you always do see that there is a temptation to air morally, to air in a self centered way, to air on the side of narcissism rather than connection. Yeah.

I actually wrote a Scientific American article on spiritual narcissism and try to delineate the difference between what psychologists have found the I'm enladened in your not effect versus what a spiritual what spiritual, what authentic spiritual growth looks like, which is more of a of a deepening of humility, of awareness of your fallibility and the complexities of being human.

So I absolutely agree with that and think that we can really easily fall prey to the imun lane and you're not effect because yeah, William James talked about this, right. He talked about how we're prone to to our ego in spirituality, you know, but the ego is really what it is that we're developing, not the spirituality, but the ego.

And he says you can kind of apply that to any field anything that you become you master or you become good at, including in the spiritual demean you can be prone to this bias to sort of think you're better than others because you've mastered it. I think James, even though he was called it an adorable genius, I mean, I think the amount of self examination m kept his

potential arrogance in check. And I really appreciate that in James, and also at least the attempt to understand that fallibility is our own and that fallibility is what we see

out in the world. So while he doesn't, well, while he never really liked Arthur Schopenhauer and his studies and pessimism, I don't think James would have disagreed that that we are suffering, that we are suffering beings, and that to see our fallibility clearly is to regard each other as what Chopenhauer calls companions and misery, which when I say that to my students, they're like, oh man, what a bummer. We're just companions and misery. But maybe that's some of

the best solace that humans like us can have. I mean that I don't feel like that's that's as optimistic as it could be, because it's true each of us suffers in our own uniskelholes. But we're not always suffering in a hellhole, right like we can't. We sometimes, ever, just bond over having a good day, I wonder. So my concern about that move and it's not just that I'm the dark, dark philosopher who says that we're sacks of meat, because I mean, I like bonding over commonalities

as well, and we all get a concert. We can all go to a concert. Or we can all have a soda together or whatever. Yeah, like, so, yeah, it's it's there's nothing wrong with that, except I think logically speaking,

it's almost necessarily exclusionary. And what I mean by that is that the loyalties that we have that govern our camaraderie are often times exclusive ones, and I think that will suffer is not like the membership status you want to have in life, like, that's not it is, however, the membership status that we all share, which is one of the reasons why I'm like, yeah, at least it's not exclusionary. Yeah, I hear that. I like that. I mean, I like the idea of bonding over are you know,

the fact that human existence is suffering. And I also try to make the point that suffering is not a competition, because some people kind of do treat it that way. So I agree, I agree with that for sure. I mean I tend to just you know, I work in the field of positive psychology and even its psychologies. I also like the potential for people to bond over transcendent experiences, you know. I mean, I get into this argument with James Powalski, who's a positive psychologist at Penn and also

at James in all the time. I mean, and we have slightly different angles on James. I mean, I read James as an ext stentialist, and I think James Polski does too to some extent. But it's it's really a bit more. It's hopeful without tearing with the darkness. Sometimes that's what I worry about, and I think James. I

don't know what James would want. Actually, I have no idea, but I know that when I'm reading James's writings when he tarries with the darkness, when he says when he tells the story of having a nightmare and envisioning this epileptic in an asylum and looking, you know, in his nightmare, thinking oh my gosh, this is me. This is that here I here I and sorrow sit. Those are the moments that have saved my life. Frankly, I mean, those

are the moments where I say, I'm not alone. James lived this really amazing life and he's still had these

feelings and it's okay to have these feelings. It's not there's nothing wrong with me that I'm not completely unmoored and by myself, and I think James is giving us those really useful breadcrumbs, saying it's okay, I'm here too, I've gone through it, And then I trust him when he says things like, I mean, I'm thinking about his love of Walt Whitman, who he does see as a type of like healthy minded, strong I contain multitudes and he admires Whitman, and I'm like, now, I believe you

that somebody like me who has a kind of sick soul could aspire to becoming what he calls twice born, in other words, to become a more healthy, well adjusted, positive person. I believe him more. Yeah, I mean, I've noticed that a lot of philosophers tend to have a melancholic personality disposition anyway, And I'm wondering what the chicken and egg is here? Is it that because the thing is, I mean, what you focus on in your life kind

of influences, I mean, that is your life. Is it the case that philosophers tend to become more melanchock once they do foster, because they start seeing reality more clearly? Or is it that they're writing about certain darker aspects of humanity because their melancholic disposition causes them. And this is my personality psychologist Lens asking this question, you are asking the question that I have since my heart surgery.

I have been asking it every day because when my readers send me stuff, and they have recently, they say, where's the writing, What's happened? You've stopped, Like you haven't published anything since William James came out, Like what's going on? And I write back to them and I say, I'm writing because I'm happy. And they think they're like what, And I say, and I'm not sure, as you say, what the direction of causation is? Okay? Is it because I'm happy because I'm not writing, or is it because

I'm not writing because I'm happy. I'm not sure, but I'm telling you, and I've not told others that if you read American Philosophy and a Love Story and Hiking with Nietzsche, there's a dark line in those books, and there's even a dark line in Six Soles Healthy Minds. And since heart surgery, I have not been able to bring myself to write about the stuff again, primarily because I'm not living it. I mean, I'm remarried with two kids and two crazy dogs and a big, robust life.

And the back to the matter is just that sometimes philosophy can save your life from you know, taking the final exit, and it has for me. I mean, that's what I That's what I've talked about in six Holes Healthy Minds. The philosophy can also deepen depression, deep in melancholy, and initiate existential crises that aren't otherwise there. So who I mean. My wife Kathleen says to me, She goes, when do you think you're going to write again? I said, when I can, when I can figure out how to

write about something happy. I love that. Yeah, yeah, I love your honesty and I love your your examination. You know. I would argue though, that the examined life is a good life up to a point. I think one can examine life too much. I'm not saying you do that. I'm not saying you do that, but I think, like I'm just saying, I'm just making a general point, which is there's such a thing as overthinking. Sometimes it's good to just get out there and just get into the

stream of life. Yeah. And I also think that writing philosophy in a particular confessional memoir genre lends itself to a type of naval not na. It's not exactly navel gazing. It's more like you end up living in order to write rather than living in order just to live. And it requires you to step outside yourself so often and in order to write about it that remaining present is very difficult. And so even the materials that I'm going to publish in the future, they're not going to be

memoir based, because life is to be lived. And I mean, let me just rephrase, I'm not going to be so self excruciatingly self examining or personal like those days are past. So never say never, Never say never. Let's end on the note of the loving cup. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about what is the loving cup?

Why does it matter? Yeah? Of course. So James was a philosopher, obviously, and he believed that all philosophy really is is a form of teaching, that philosophy that cannot be taught or is not to be taught really is a philosophy. And he was a brilliant lecturer at Harvard, and he taught Harvard's most popular at the time class, which was basically Philosophy one oh one or Philosophy and the Meaning of Life. Okay, And when he finished his

career at Harvard. The lecture hall was absolutely packed. It was the fullest lecture hall that had that Harvard had seen. And at the end of it, after the ovation, his students brought a loving cup up to him. A loving cup is basically like a trophy, and it was a

trophy for his teaching. And this trophy that James received was then placed in Robin's Library, which is the philosophy library at Harvard, and over the years it had been sort of pushed back into the stacks of books, and it was hiding back in a cupboard when I was rooting around when I was a post doc there, I was rooting around and found this cup and I pulled it out and it said in honor of teaching Philosophy nine, which was this last delivered dedicated to Professor William James.

And then in Greek it said translated it was a Protagoras quotation, and it said man is the measure of all things. Yeah, A couple thoughts come to my mind when I found it. One is that philosophy needs to remind itself that it is a form of teaching, that it's a very humane pursuit, and that this loving cup was probably one of the most valuable items in Robin's library, and it shouldn't have just been sort of set aside.

Another thought that I have is that James believed, not in a sort of radical relativistic way, but in a way that could be respected that human beings are the measures of things, and maybe not that humans are the measure of all things, which is not to say that all things can be measured. Okay, it's just that we, you know, we measure things. We give life its meaning and the question is life worth living? Maybe it depends on the liver, It's up to us. That's a way

of interpreting that protect quote. And a last thought was that that quote man is the measure of all things had been a candidate to be inscribed on the side of Emerson Hall, which holds the philosophy department at Harvard, but instead they picked something from the Bible, which basically I'm not going to get the quote exactly, but it says you better, you better work for God, and that

was the quote that was chosen. But I thought that it was beautiful that William James's cup had that inscription, because I think James really understood it in a way that deserves to be remembered today. Oh my god, that's so cool that you found it and it was like it wasn't even prominently displayed now, John Keg, I love your work, I really do, and love your books, and even if though you're not writing memoirs anymore, the ones you have written will still impact a lot of people.

I really appreciate it coming to my podcast today and and talking through lots of these kinds of issues with me. And these are only the most important issues of human existence. So thank you so much and wish you all the best. I look forward to reading your more positive stuff later on. I look forward to reading your future books as well. Thank you. Oh thanks, thanks so much. It's been a real honor and pleasure, wonderful. Thanks for listening to this

episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at Thusycology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain behavior, and creativity.