John Kaag’s Studies in Self-Reliance
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On a cold February day John Kaag went for a jog down Lowell Street and had a heart attack. This was no case of an out of shape man pushing himself too hard. On the contrary, Kaag is a lifelong runner and a formidable racer. Running, for Kaag, was akin to an ascetic practice. He found inspiration in legendary mountain-climbing monks in Tibet who use physical discipline to reach beyond human limitation and embody a pure ideal. But on that cold February day the ideal was not forthcoming, and Kaag met instead with human limitation. At Tufts Medical Center doctors told him he had inherited a deadly heart condition and would require bypass surgery. Heart surgery is a harrowing prospect to anyone, but to Kaag it presented a special spiritual challenge. Kaag is a philosophy professor at UMass Lowell and the author of multiple acclaimed books including American Philosophy: a Love Story, Hiking with Nietzsche, and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds. His philosophical interests center on the American tradition inaugurated by Concord’s Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was the great intellectual champion of the independent individual. In his famous essay “Self-Reliance,” he entreats us: “Trust thyself – every heart vibrates to that iron string.” But the very vibration of Kaag’s heart was failing him, and he had to rely on others to save him while he lay unconscious on the operating table. Kaag’s writings constitute, among other things, a series of meditations on the possibility of self-reliance. He wrestles constantly with the view that individuals have everything they need within themselves to become something better. 60
Discover CONCORD
| Summer 2021
BY SAM COPELAND
That view appeared in this country in response to the revolution started in Concord. “The thinkers who became the transcendentalists were the direct descendants of those minutemen,” says Kaag, “They had a sense that the political revolution was only a first start, and that what we needed was a revolution of the soul and mind.” The old values had been swept away with the old order, so American philosophers looked to the heroic striving of
individuals to supply life’s purpose. Now Kaag lives among the same woods as those thinkers, but in his writings he ponders whether their philosophy can really answer the central question: is life worth living — or at least provide a better answer than, as William James said, “It depends on the liver.” Kaag has fashioned a unique style for himself that weaves together philosophical ruminations with stories from his own life, synthesizing intellectual history with personal
