John Kaag’s Studies in Self-Reliance

BY SAM COPELAND

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.

Courtesy of John Kaag

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.

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 memoir. His merciless self-reflections reveal a life that is itself exemplary of self-reliance and its fraught nature.

Courtesy of John Kaag

Kaag’s mother was a substitute english teacher and his father was an absent drunk, yet his heroic striving brought him to the halls of Cambridge and Harvard before he accomplished the dual impossible tasks of securing a tenured professorship and writing best-selling philosophy books for the American public.

At the same time, depression, eating disorders, and two divorces plague his biography. Kaag appears in his writings as someone who can rely on himself for everything except that which lies closest to himself. At his lowest points, Kaag finds his salvation in the care of his wife and children, not in the force of his own will.

Often when Kaag confronts the limits of Emerson’s self-reliance he turns to Concord’s other great sage: Thoreau. Although he is no less of an individualist than Emerson, Thoreau’s picture of heroic striving often takes the shape of quiet things like hoeing a garden or walking.

In the essay “Walking” Thoreau says, “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk.” As a young man, Kaag took this to be a statement about society’s corrupting influence on the individual, but as he grew older he came to see it as a sober plea to get the occasional distance from one’s life in society.

Courtesy of John Kaag

After his heart attack, “Walking” took on an entirely new meaning for Kaag. Now Thoreau’s statement struck him as “an encouragement that you don’t need to be a hero, you don’t need to run seven miles, you can just put one foot in front of the next, do what you can, and try to experience the world a bit more naturally and a bit more meaningfully.”

In order to “live deliberately” and “suck out all the marrow of life” it no longer seemed necessary to push the self to extremes, be they physical or intellectual. Being a heroic individual could simply mean walking in Estabrook Woods, provided that one is ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends – at least for an hour or so.

Even still, Thoreau poses ongoing challenges to Kaag, who worries that his comfortable life with its walks in Estabrook falls short of the philosopher’s standards. “I can’t pretend to be living a simple life these days – I don’t,” says Kaag, “I am as guilty as anyone of indulging in things that Thoreau would say are not essential.” Faced with the moral challenges of his success, Kaag looks to Thoreau and Emerson for reminders to “not take ourselves too seriously, or take luxury too seriously, because in the end we’re all worm food.”

Courtesy of John Kaag

What ultimately emerges out of John Kaag’s meditations on self-reliance is the centrality of other people. It seems the only better answer than James’s to whether life is worth living is “It depends on the livers.” Heroic striving is not, in the end, something we do alone, but with others, be they father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, or a circle of surgeons around an operating table, or, indeed, a philosopher from two hundred years ago.

They could even be the high school Latin teacher who took Kaag to visit Walden Pond at the age of 14. After walking around the pond together the young Kaag turned to his teacher and said, “I think I’m going to be a philosopher, and I think I’m going to live in Concord.”

Sam Copeland is a Concord native and a writer based in New York.