The Art of Manliness - #576： A Treasure Trove of American Philosophy

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast when you think

00:00:11.180 of philosophy you probably think of ancient greece or 18th century france probably don't

00:00:15.520 think of america but this country also birthed its own set of philosophical luminaries and my

00:00:19.660 guest today had a unique encounter with them when modern day professor philosophy john kegg was a

00:00:23.940 graduate student harvard he was dispirited and struggling personally and professionally but

00:00:27.920 thanks to a chance encounter with an elderly new englander he discovered an abandoned library in

00:00:32.120 new hampshire full of rare first edition books of the great works of western philosophy many of which

00:00:36.900 were owned by quintessentially american thinkers like ralph waldo emerson and william james kegg began

00:00:41.700 cataloging the books and in the process uncovered the intellectual history of american philosophy

00:00:45.740 and its responses to big existential questions like is life worth living today on the show i talked to

00:00:51.020 john about his experience with this abandoned library in the woods of new hampshire and with

00:00:54.240 the authors of the books which were contained therein we start off talking about how american

00:00:57.840 philosophy is often overlooked and its big ideas which include transcendentalism and pragmatism we

00:01:02.620 then dig into how the works of european and asian thinkers influenced american philosophers like

00:01:06.380 emerson and thoreau while they yet try to create something completely new john and i then discuss how

00:01:10.800 american pragmatism was developed in response to the philosophical issues darwinism created around the

00:01:15.380 ideas of free will and what it means to live a moral life and we enter conversation discussing how the

00:01:19.580 pragmatist william james answered the question of whether life is worth living and how his answer might be said

00:01:24.440 to hinge on one essential word if after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is

00:01:29.540 slash american philosophy

00:01:30.900 john kegg welcome back to the show thanks so much for having me again so we had you on last year to

00:01:43.840 talk about your book hiking with nietzsche and it was part memoir part an exploration of nietzsche's

00:01:49.020 philosophy and how it's influenced your life today we brought you back to talk about your book you

00:01:53.540 wrote before that called american philosophy and again it's this you know part memoir but also part

00:01:59.000 exploration of the history of american philosophy and it's a really unique hook on how you uncovered

00:02:05.800 or explored american philosophy before we get to that sort of personal connection let's talk about what

00:02:12.500 american philosophy is because i think a lot of people they are listening to this particularly american

00:02:16.460 listeners and they're like america has a philosophy typically they think of philosophy as european or

00:02:21.640 asian so big picture how would you describe american philosophy and who are the big names

00:02:28.640 involved with it great so your listeners are not alone in thinking american philosophy america doesn't

00:02:36.520 have philosophy in fact alexis de tocqueville when he came to the united states in the 1830s the french

00:02:42.240 critic said pretty much the same thing he said there is no place on earth that is more antithetical

00:02:48.100 to philosophy than america but what he didn't realize is that there was a different strain of

00:02:53.700 philosophy developing in new england right around that time and the first strain of american philosophy

00:02:59.760 is what's known as american transcendentalism and it was founded by three sort of central figures

00:03:05.920 ralph waldo emerson henry david thoreau and margaret fuller and the sort of central tenets of

00:03:12.800 american transcendentalism is that individuals can find themselves and express their freedom

00:03:18.480 apart from societal constraints the constraints of tradition or the constraints of uh conventional

00:03:25.180 culture so emerson is famous for saying trust thyself every heart beats sort of strings to that iron

00:03:34.060 iron core that's the notion of self-reliance and thoreau takes this and the famous naturalist goes

00:03:41.760 off to walden and tries to be self-reliant on the shores of walden pond margaret fuller tries to

00:03:47.440 take that expression of self-reliance and apply it to the position of women in the 1850s so

00:03:53.840 transcendentalism is about freedom and finding yourself in nature much like the european romantics

00:03:59.140 this gives rise in the 1860s and 1870s to a movement called american pragmatism that was founded

00:04:06.080 by william james and his friend c.s purse in the 1870s and pragmatism like american transcendentalism

00:04:14.900 is very much concerned with securing human freedom and human dignity in a culture that they thought

00:04:20.960 threatened both so the industrial revolution was going during the 1900s in new england and both the

00:04:27.940 transcendentalists and the pragmatists were worried that this compromised the freedom of individuals and

00:04:33.080 their communities and so james and purse thought the philosophy and this is different than european

00:04:39.620 philosophy it should be world ready or to be judged truth philosophical truths were to be judged on the

00:04:46.080 basis of their practical consequences how they affected people in the world well we'll talk a little

00:04:51.860 more detail about transcendentalism and pragmatism and how they connected with you during this time of

00:04:56.400 your life but let's talk about the personal connection you had with american philosophy and that is when you

00:05:01.820 were a graduate student at harvard you stumbled upon this private library in the middle of the woods of

00:05:06.160 new hampshire that was pretty much abandoned and it contained thousands of rare and antique books

00:05:11.820 how did that library end up there who owned it and what did all the books have in common sure so

00:05:17.800 great question so in 2009 i was a postdoc at harvard and i was writing a book about the founder of

00:05:24.580 american pragmatism william james and my father had just gone through a sort of struggle with cancer and

00:05:32.920 had died and my first my first marriage was in shambles and i was looking for answers both

00:05:41.020 philosophical and personal answers at this time and in 2009 i was asked to organize a conference in

00:05:49.220 shakoro in new hampshire which was up in the it's up in the white mountains where james summered very

00:05:55.140 close to his old summer house and i went up to organize this conference or help organize the

00:06:00.780 conference and i came across a fellow by the name of bun nickerson he was 91 years old and he said hi

00:06:07.800 young guy what do you do for a living i told him i was a philosopher and he said oh i knew a philosopher

00:06:12.380 once his name was william ernest hawking now william ernest hawking was the last great idealist at

00:06:20.100 harvard in the first half of the 1900s first half of the 20th century hawking was also william one of

00:06:27.680 william james's last students at harvard hawking had a summer house actually in a state that he called

00:06:34.240 west wind which is in madison new hampshire about six miles from shakoroa and bun nickerson said

00:06:41.000 if you want i can take you up there you should see the library now i always thought the libraries

00:06:46.720 were something like widener library or houghton at harvard or something very big and impersonal but

00:06:52.640 back in the 1900s individuals had very impressive libraries and when individuals died they had to

00:07:00.020 figure out where their literary estates were going to go to in the case of william james he gave a large

00:07:06.280 number of his books to william ernest hawking who then took them to the hinterlands of new hampshire

00:07:11.900 and put them in a non-winterized 2 000 square foot house which he called the library next to a very

00:07:21.280 large mansion on 400 pristine acres of new hampshire wilderness and when i came across it in 2009 it had

00:07:29.480 been largely abandoned for 12 years and at the time the doors were open and bun nickerson said well

00:07:36.760 why don't you go look around i'm sure the family won't mind and that's what i did and inside it turns

00:07:43.420 out that william ernest hawking was one of america's greatest collectors of first editions from modern

00:07:49.880 philosophy so first edition descartes first edition kant first edition hume first edition thomas hobbes

00:07:55.740 and he also possessed the libraries or partial parts of the libraries of william james and another

00:08:02.440 idealist working in the 1900s josiah royce in total the books were about 10 000 in number and were for

00:08:10.980 the most part untouched for about 60 or 70 years and i'll stop there and maybe we can talk about what

00:08:18.120 what unified the books well yeah just to give you an idea like first edition hobbes that's like from

00:08:22.400 like the 1600s correct so i mean first edition leviathan 1651 1649 1651 these are 300 300 in some

00:08:33.320 cases 400 year old books and they were just hanging out in a non-winterized library in new hampshire

00:08:41.680 well so what was this guy what was hawking he was one of the last i mean maybe you can say he's one of

00:08:46.180 the last american philosophers why was he collecting first edition books of european philosophy

00:08:52.060 so there's this conception that american philosophy transcendentalism and pragmatism

00:08:58.020 is are or were divorced from the european traditions that they rebelled against this isn't quite true

00:09:05.480 so what hawking was doing was actually trying to amass the books that supported these american

00:09:13.020 traditions and in some cases the books that pragmatists and ideal american idealists responded to

00:09:20.140 but he he believed that there was something worthwhile about investigating the past in order

00:09:26.420 to understand our present day that's what he was doing with those very old books he also was collecting

00:09:33.200 creating a sort of time capsule of american intellectual history from its inception to to what

00:09:40.120 was his present day in 1960 which would explain why when he's one of the books that we discovered there

00:09:47.020 was john locke's two treatise on civil government which founded basically the political formation

00:09:54.000 of the united states locke was an englishman but his understanding of political philosophy got applied

00:10:00.180 almost directly to the american experience and as you said some of these you know a lot of these books

00:10:06.060 they were owned by william james and some of these other american philosophers and they not only were

00:10:10.840 they owned by and they had like notes written by them these guys themselves inside the books that's right i mean

00:10:16.360 the marginalia is was a fascinating sort of experience to go through so in the margins james would write

00:10:23.180 in in his books so when he's developing his famous lectures that turned into the varieties of the

00:10:29.340 religious experience that were published in 1910 he's reading a number of books which end up at the

00:10:35.720 hawking estate and a lot of books from buddhism from the early 1900s and so you can read his copies of

00:10:43.520 for example paul karras's buddhism and its christian critics and you can see the way that james is

00:10:48.900 responding to buddhist theology or to the buddhist spiritualism in real time so you can see that he's

00:10:56.340 responding to certain lines from the dhammapada or from the lotus sutra in particular ways which is a

00:11:03.260 fascinating way to think about research i believe and then how did how did no one know about this library

00:11:08.300 well people had visited in in the past but those people for the most part john mcdermott for example

00:11:16.320 visited the hawking estate in the 1960s john mcdermott's professor was a professor at texas a&m

00:11:23.220 he visited the library and was friends with hawking and he passed down the knowledge of the library to a

00:11:28.860 few scholars within the american philosophical tradition but not very many see idealism this the

00:11:35.560 sort that hawking supported along with american pragmatism went out of favor in the 1900s around

00:11:42.660 the 1950s and 1960s when philosophy took what might be considered a logical or analytic bent philosophy

00:11:51.020 during that time modeled itself off of mathematics and science rather than these more humanistic

00:11:57.420 disciplines such as transcendentalism well let's dig into more details about american philosophy so you

00:12:04.600 mentioned sort of the first strain of american philosophy were the american transcendentalists

00:12:09.180 and their whole idea their big tenet was self-reliance and and freedom right and breaking from

00:12:14.760 tradition and in marching the beat of your own drummer and as i was reading your description of

00:12:19.520 transcendentalism the impression that i got was that thoreau and emerson and fuller like they were

00:12:27.220 very self-conscious of the fact they were trying to make something new in philosophy yes no that's true

00:12:35.380 um and actually what you can think about is that many of these thinkers emerson's grandfather for

00:12:42.960 example or rather many of these thinkers had relatives and had their ancestors who were part of the american

00:12:50.940 revolution emerson emerson for example grew up in the old manse which overlooked old north bridge which is

00:12:58.600 where one of the first battles of the revolution occurred and his grandfather was part of that fight

00:13:04.180 and if you think about that legacy the challenge was to make something new not only in a political sense which

00:13:11.120 their grandfathers did but in this case in a personal and intellectual sense so the transcendentalists

00:13:17.320 shared that political freedom secured through military or political means was one thing but it

00:13:24.880 meant pitifully little actually if we didn't exercise our personal freedoms and intellectual freedoms

00:13:30.380 and also our artistic freedoms so what you what you hear in that desire to make something new

00:13:36.860 is also the attempt to stand up to your sort of inheritance this free inheritance and so as you said

00:13:44.060 despite them rebelling against traditional philosophy they both emerson and thoreau read widely and deeply

00:13:50.100 from philosophy not only european but asian i mean were there ideas that ended up in their idea of

00:13:56.800 transcendentalism that they took from greek philosophy or asian like what what were those ideas so one thing

00:14:02.880 that your readers and your listeners might be interested in is that emerson proposed self-reliance which is this

00:14:10.200 notion of individual freedom but he always wanted it to be tempered with a concept that he called

00:14:15.700 compensation compensation is an essay that he publishes in a collection with self-reliance

00:14:22.120 he intends them as sister essays self-reliance says to thine own self be true compensation says no

00:14:30.160 matter how free you are or no matter how true you are you and you are to yourself you always operate

00:14:36.560 within a wider cosmic and social give what he calls give and take and this given take is a sort of karmic

00:14:44.620 model of action where every action has a sort of equal and opposite reaction and this is a position

00:14:52.120 that he takes directly from what he calls indian superstition but what is really sort of hindu

00:14:58.080 metaphysics which he's studying in the 1830 1820s and 1830s well that's interesting because yeah i think a lot

00:15:05.160 of young americans they read emerson and they're like this especially when they're teenage you always

00:15:08.760 read it when you're 14 15 and it's like nietzsche you're like yes this is this tastes good and it's

00:15:15.600 all about the individual but that's not the end of the story that's right and in fact these two things

00:15:20.780 need to be weighed and they they stand in what philosophers call a dialectical relation they seem

00:15:27.240 to be opposites but they're really supposed to be balanced or there's they're supposed to be a give

00:15:32.540 and take between these concepts so the radical freedom that we find in emerson needs to be tempered

00:15:38.020 or toned down with the realization that really we're actually not that free which we see in emerson

00:15:45.000 and also in nietzsche right like so yeah that radical individualism can lead to anime and like

00:15:50.880 neurostinia like i mean i guess like james would call it neurostinia that sense of anxiety and like

00:15:55.120 existential angst and emerson said well yes you need to be an individual but also see yourself within a

00:16:01.140 bigger picture that's correct that's correct and i mean they also mean something about indian

00:16:05.740 philosophy they i know i know emerson and thoreau like they read the bhagavad-gita which kind of talks

00:16:09.860 about this concept of you being part of a cosmic whole like you're you're unique but you're also

00:16:14.700 not at the same time that's right and i think they also took very seriously that individuals in

00:16:23.460 isolation live very difficult lives so in other words arjuna in the bhagavad-gita is basically is

00:16:33.640 conveying that to live a solitary existence is necessarily a futile and counterproductive one

00:16:41.720 and i think that this this is an idea that the transcendentalists and the pragmatists also have

00:16:47.680 we don't live in a bubble we're not all by ourselves we are necessarily with others all the

00:16:53.620 time and negotiating our freedom in the midst of otherness or in the midst of companionship is

00:17:00.100 probably the task of life and connecting the transcendentalists with with uh your book we

00:17:06.280 talked about last time hiking with nietzsche from what i understand nietzsche read emerson like he was

00:17:09.480 aware of emerson in his writing right that's right and i mean what nietzsche sees in emerson is he says

00:17:15.540 that emerson is a good friend for his what he calls skeptics skeptics being the word that gives us

00:17:22.200 skeptical and emerson and nietzsche share a deep skepticism about the worth of conventional wisdom

00:17:28.660 and the the worth of conventional institutions like for example modern christianity and both of them are

00:17:36.780 critical of christianity for particular reasons and in fact many of the transcendentalists are critical of

00:17:44.220 political educational and religious institutions because they believe that these institutions lead

00:17:51.080 lead a person astray and make it very difficult for them to follow their conscience or their call

00:17:56.760 to conscience well it's interesting emerson often give these critiques at churches like they would be

00:18:01.440 like sermons almost that's right i mean he got kicked he basically got kicked out of harvard

00:18:06.240 or rather banned from harvard for 30 years for giving what's called the divinity school address

00:18:12.820 and the divinity school address is basically his critique of christianity he had done something

00:18:18.420 similar in in an essay or in a series of series of lectures called the american scholar and the

00:18:24.380 american scholar said that we needed to break from european intellectual traditions everybody at harvard loved

00:18:30.780 that essay or rather that lecture but when he gave the divinity school address he was making the

00:18:35.880 claim that we needed to break from the stultifying or deadening influence of christianity which was

00:18:43.340 still very much alive and well at harvard and it got him got him banned for many decades from speaking

00:18:49.660 there so we've been talking about emerson thoreau was another big player in the transcendentalist movement

00:18:54.040 how did his approach to transcendentalism differ for emerson or did it even differ no i think it differed

00:19:00.160 probably in in degree maybe not in kind so thoreau thoreau's philosophy i see as a sort of modern

00:19:08.240 version of cynicism cynicism is a very old philosophy that says that institutions corrupt individuals

00:19:17.000 and that in order to avoid that corruption individuals should separate themselves off or get a little

00:19:24.500 distance on society and that's what thoreau's attempting to do at walden thoreau also um like the cynics

00:19:33.700 and like nietzsche is not afraid to be extremely polemical or extremely critical of his neighbors of the

00:19:43.420 people who are very well respected in society this doesn't gain him a huge number of friends emerson i think

00:19:51.220 on the whole was a bit more congenial was a bit more uh well-mannered compared to his friend thoreau

00:19:58.060 thoreau was less disciplined than emerson as well and believed that philosophy should be wed with other

00:20:05.280 other forms of writing such as narrative and poetry emerson believed the same but not to the extent that

00:20:13.520 thoreau did so walden is really the account of thoreau's life in the woods not not very remote

00:20:20.660 woods only two miles from concord but still woods nonetheless and he believes that narrative a first

00:20:28.560 person narrative needs to be reintroduced to philosophical inquiry in order for philosophical

00:20:34.440 inquiry to actually matter to individuals in their communities it's kind of like nietzsche like

00:20:38.920 didn't nietzsche say like all philosophy is biography that's right that's right all philosophy is either

00:20:46.040 conscious or unconscious autobiography yeah right so the transcendentalist like i think everyone

00:20:52.280 can probably see the influence the lasting influence they've had particularly on american culture that's

00:20:58.040 still with this this idea of self-reliance of of being an individual freedom let's talk about the

00:21:03.940 pragmatist where did the pragmatist pick up where the transcendentalist left off

00:21:07.900 so the pragmatists arising and pragmatism arising in the 1870s came on the heels of

00:21:15.040 darwin publishing the origin of species in 1858 and darwin's insights about the nature of biological

00:21:25.100 development and evolution radically shifted the landscape the intellectual landscape of america and

00:21:33.360 europe one of the thoughts that came out of darwin and picked up by his friend thomas huxley the englishman

00:21:40.100 often known as darwin's bulldog was that human beings are related genealogically or evolutionarily

00:21:49.400 to basic you know let's just say apes and huxley and darwin began to struggle with a thought that

00:22:00.000 then you know the american pragmatist had to take up which was if we are just animals just organisms

00:22:08.280 are we then not dictated or are our lives not dictated by natural laws by physical laws and if that's the

00:22:17.340 case then where does free will reside or exist so this is a question that american transcendentalists had

00:22:26.000 taken up but they hadn't been forced to go against modern science or to integrate their ideas into

00:22:33.540 modern science that then was becoming general knowledge and that's what the pragmatists had to do

00:22:39.460 the pragmatists were good scientists and c.s purse william james john dewey they were all scientists of a

00:22:48.380 certain sort james founding empirical psychology purse being a chemist and a physicist what these

00:22:56.580 scientists philosophers had to do was to reconcile the findings of modern science particularly evolutionary

00:23:02.900 science with a hope and desire to maintain free will and to maintain moral order by virtue of free

00:23:11.340 will because after all morals would mean very little if we were controlled simply by physical laws

00:23:17.800 or at least they thought that so that's one difference and i can sort of expand on that a

00:23:23.020 little bit the other difference is that american pragmatism is coming out of the civil war and

00:23:28.720 louis manon suggests and i think he's right that in his book the metaphysical club that american

00:23:35.240 pragmatism looked at the ideological struggle of the civil war and came to the conclusion that ideologies and

00:23:42.620 dogma led into violent conflict and so what they tried to do is to propose a model of truth that was

00:23:51.780 flexible that was empirically verifiable or falsifiable and to judge truth on the basis of

00:23:59.180 its practical consequences which is very different than just holding on to an ideology and going and

00:24:04.900 shedding blood you know having bloodshed in accord with that ideology we're gonna take a quick break for

00:24:11.260 your word from our sponsors and now back to the show well let's talk about this this problem of

00:24:15.720 free will the pragmatists try to tackle because this is something this is a question that plagued

00:24:19.680 william james his whole life and in fact it put him in these funks like he got really depressed

00:24:25.720 like on the verge of suicide because for him and i think people would when they think about this like

00:24:31.240 if there's no free will like life has no meaning right i can't make my own so that was like he's like

00:24:36.440 he was grappling this question is life even worth living so what was how did james like what was his

00:24:42.780 answer to those questions are we free does life have meaning it's great so i mean james is usually

00:24:49.600 thought of as this very vivacious very active man but what we forget when we read james's biography is

00:24:57.940 that he was a depressive at many places in his life and a depressive because of philosophical issues

00:25:03.720 like the one that you just described in his 20s james considers suicide and when he reaches the age

00:25:10.820 of 30 he reaches a real crisis in his life he has so many options in terms of what to do professionally

00:25:18.160 he has so many opportunities but they just don't seem to matter because in a cosmic sense he oftentimes says

00:25:27.280 why bother i'm not in control anyway right so what happens in 1874 is that he reads a frenchman by the

00:25:36.200 name of charles renouvia and renouvia makes an argument he says that there are not proofs for the

00:25:44.400 existence of free will but that individuals in the absence of proof can believe that they are free

00:25:52.440 and they very active believing that they are free can be their first free act and that once they start

00:26:01.340 acting as if they have free will then it changes the way that the world both looks and is which is a

00:26:10.380 strange thought but this is the basis of james james's famous essay what's entitled the will to believe

00:26:17.500 james says that in the absence of empirical proof about certain matters it is still all right for

00:26:23.800 us to believe wholeheartedly in something and in fact our belief then changes the circumstance and

00:26:30.240 changes the universe you can think about this in terms of depression for example james the depressive

00:26:37.460 suggests a couple things he says act as if you are in a good mood and it will change your perspective

00:26:45.220 it will change how you feel in other words my mother used to say fake it till you make it so

00:26:51.200 basically james says don't lie down if you're depressed stand up take a big breath of fresh air

00:26:57.700 and see how it changes changes your statures changes how you how you live how you think the same goes for

00:27:04.840 moral issues and also relationship issues james says there is no empirical proof to say that you're going

00:27:11.420 to fall in love but you have to be open and believe in it or it or it simply probably will not happen

00:27:18.960 so even in the absence of empirical evidence we can still believe james thought and so this is a

00:27:25.840 perfect example of pragmatism like this for james like this is true because the consequences of this idea

00:27:31.920 of just believing even if you don't have evidence that is true it works like it changes your outlook on life

00:27:38.460 that's right and i mean james in the varieties of religious experience makes this distinction

00:27:43.420 between the two types of people the healthy minded and the sick sold and these aren't derogatory he's

00:27:50.160 not criticizing the sick sold in fact he was probably one of them he simply says that the sick sold

00:27:55.740 the universe just doesn't seem square with them something is out of joint and most of his philosophy is

00:28:04.100 geared to overcome that sense of disjointedness and the sense that things just aren't right and in

00:28:10.660 many cases you can will yourself into another state of affairs and will the universe into another state

00:28:16.420 of affairs not always but frequently enough that it's worth trying so this idea of that you can believe

00:28:22.560 something even if you don't have empirical evidence that it's true this one thing i thought was

00:28:26.820 interesting about the pragmatists as i was reading your description of them and as i read more about them

00:28:30.400 they're an interesting group of people because they're both scientific you know william james was

00:28:34.900 a psychologist who did scientific experiments data driven but at the same time they were really

00:28:39.120 spiritual as well can you describe i mean like they're they're scientific and spiritual in a way that

00:28:44.940 i think would bother a lot of people today yeah so one caveat needs to be expressed william james

00:28:52.580 believed in evidence so in other words if there was evidence for for example climate change

00:28:58.600 james would be very interested in hearing all of the evidence is so it's not simply that you can

00:29:04.760 believe what you want in every single case he however says that there are certain types of

00:29:10.240 questions that cannot be closed automatically and in some cases can be believed in or answers can be

00:29:17.360 believed in if they're the type of issues that don't allow empirical justification so issues of

00:29:24.720 believing in god for example issues of believing in a love in a love affair issues in believing in being

00:29:32.920 moral and issues about free will these are the sorts of categories that james thinks that you can

00:29:39.260 entertain even if you don't have empirical standard empirical justification now when it comes to

00:29:45.780 spirituality and science james believed that i want to be very careful here james believed in science but he also

00:29:57.880 thought that the standard methods of science the way we typically conduct science today even miss

00:30:08.040 small nuances small nuances small existences the reality of what he oftentimes describes as the unseen

00:30:17.680 james believed in an unseen order whether we call that ghosts or whether we call that the spiritual world

00:30:26.440 or whether we just call it something that is happening below the level of consciousness james believed that

00:30:33.660 this was a deeply interesting question and certainly did not preempt or certainly did not preclude the

00:30:41.260 possibility that this order existed james was interested in psychics for his entire life mediums his entire life

00:30:50.140 he was the founder of the american society for psychical research which conducted empirical experiments about

00:30:57.740 psychic you know psychic phenomenon or supernormal phenomenon james said at the end of his life that

00:31:05.100 these tests had been inconclusive but that it seemed like the world was set up in such a way that the questions should

00:31:13.380 continue james was open to closing empirical issues if proof could be found okay in other words coming to

00:31:20.660 conclusions but these conclusions were always provisional and could be reopened on on a different empirical basis

00:31:27.440 he also however was open to a type of spirituality which many scientists today might not agree with

00:31:36.220 but i for one think that it's quite interesting to think about what we don't see and how to how to attune

00:31:43.760 ourselves to the unseen order because it's certainly the case that everyone has had the experience of not

00:31:50.640 seeing something and then it coming into sight and that coming to i think is what james is very interested

00:31:57.900 in and also in part what he thinks that life should be about coming to becoming aware of something that

00:32:04.240 was unseen how is so you know pragmatism and james's philosophy and pierce's philosophy it's all about

00:32:11.880 it was i mean he was trying to answer that big question of does free will exist does life have meaning

00:32:16.760 how has his philosophy influenced your life on a day-to-day basis yeah so in 1895 william james was

00:32:25.500 invited to holden chapel which is the second oldest building at harvard and he was invited by the

00:32:31.880 cambridge ymca and the ymca was asked him to respond to an issue that had plagued harvard for the last two

00:32:39.980 years which was the number of suicides on campus and james began a lecture at holden called is life worth

00:32:48.180 living which became becomes a famous essay now this question is life worth living has been answered

00:32:55.140 typically in two mutually exclusive ways yes or no okay and if you're if you're a no if you believe the no

00:33:02.900 long enough and strongly enough you kill yourself you're no longer with us the history of

00:33:08.220 western philosophy is usually construed as promoting a yes okay so there have been lots of philosophers

00:33:15.120 that have defended the yes life is worth living for any number of reasons kant thinks that we are

00:33:20.700 rational animals and therefore we can't violate our rational capacities by killing ourselves leibnitz

00:33:27.040 believes we live in the best of all possible worlds and far be it from us to mess up the best of

00:33:31.960 all possible worlds augustine and a bunch of christian theologians think that this is god's gift and we

00:33:37.840 don't we don't have the right to violate god's gift james however in 1895 expresses something that i

00:33:46.800 think is the best answer to the question is life worth living and he says he says is life worth living he

00:33:54.820 says maybe it depends on the liver and at first i thought that this way as a teenager and as a in my

00:34:02.760 20s i thought this was a complete cop-out i thought give me a yes okay but over the years i've thought

00:34:09.900 this is brilliant for the following reason to say maybe it depends on the liver is to say that it is

00:34:19.120 up to us to make life worth living it's up to the liver which a lot of other explanations about why life

00:34:27.020 is worth living don't give us that power in other words it's up to god or it's up to the way the

00:34:32.680 universe works that life is worth living james says maybe it's up to the liver that's one reason why i

00:34:39.420 think it's a smart response and has saved me from my own untimely demise more than once he also says

00:34:46.720 that the maybe is significant because if you think about seeing somebody at the top of brooklyn

00:34:56.800 bridge threatening to go off of it you go up to that person and you don't want to say to them

00:35:03.320 you're silly you don't see the point of life right it's definitely the case that life is worth living

00:35:09.140 you want to be compassionate you want to be able to say maybe you're right maybe you're wrong right but

00:35:15.920 why don't we get down off the ledge long enough to just explore that possibility a little longer

00:35:20.940 because the possibility is always there that life is worth living but we have to explore the

00:35:27.060 possibility for ourselves and and thirdly the maybe i think is a smart answer because if we think about

00:35:34.200 the most meaningful times in our life don't they always turn on a maybe james argues so think about

00:35:42.160 what is meaningful in life love well would love be fun if you knew it was going to happen in advance

00:35:48.320 like it turns on a maybe how about the winning of a game do we play a game if we already know the

00:35:54.720 outcome what about a scientific experiment do we know the outcome of that these all turn on maybes

00:36:01.600 and james is saying let's explore the maybe of life let's not be afraid of it he says in this essay

00:36:07.700 be not afraid of life okay because there's a risk to it but so too there's also a potential reward

00:36:15.300 if we just risk ourselves it sounds like uh roger kipling's poem if if yeah if that's exactly it

00:36:22.100 that's nice i've never thought about that correspondence but i think it's really there

00:36:25.400 yeah that's nice so this idea that life is worth living maybe i mean this sounds

00:36:29.720 like existentialism as well did the pragmatist influence 20th century existentialist

00:36:34.700 yep guess who john paul sart the founder of existentialism or one of the founders of

00:36:40.240 existentialism read religiously well william james so i mean yeah so 20th century existentialism resonates

00:36:47.540 closely with james's philosophy but how did they differ what are they what was their fork yeah so i mean

00:36:54.940 some of the fork there is that james believed that the universe was fitted to our human to human

00:37:04.060 purposes or could be fitted to human purposes in a way that many existentialists don't so camus

00:37:12.180 albert camus the frenchman who's oftentimes put into the existentialist camp controversially

00:37:17.620 says that we live in a sort of absurd universe or rather our human condition is absurd because

00:37:23.880 the universe is out of joint with our human purposes james was not that dismal or that

00:37:32.680 metaphysically pessimistic and what he believed is that if we attune ourselves to our surroundings

00:37:41.160 our environment we will notice that there are chances affordances opportunities that the universe

00:37:49.100 gives us and that we can in very very meaningful times find ourselves very well fitted to the universe

00:37:57.000 and i think that's a picture that many of the existentialists don't emphasize well let's go back

00:38:02.860 to this library because what happened is you start cataloging these books you're like oh my gosh we got to

00:38:07.400 save these books and you start putting them in order and cataloging so you can work with the family to

00:38:11.920 potentially donate it to a library but during this time you start working with a colleague of yours

00:38:17.260 named carol who was also a philosopher but she was a kantian philosopher and you were more of an

00:38:24.820 existentialist nietzsche american philosopher kind of guy experience to i don't self be true to kind

00:38:30.640 of guy and those those those kind of philosophies kant and existentialism like on the face sort of they

00:38:37.180 seem incompatible they don't go together but like you found that maybe there was actually a connection

00:38:42.840 to kant and these american philosophers yeah and so i mean just to the story the the book is called

00:38:50.020 american philosophy a love story and it's a love story i mean the fact is is that carol and i fell

00:38:55.840 in love in this library we both went through divorces in order to be together and so it's a story about

00:39:02.480 p2 people trying to organize a relationship or a love around central philosophical tenants in the american

00:39:11.580 tradition one of them being freedom the other one being a sort of togetherness based on respect and

00:39:18.600 self-respect kant the german philosopher writing in the 1790s was very good on self-respect and on the

00:39:27.380 duty of self-respect he says that we are rational and we are rational animals what makes us special is

00:39:34.380 that we can exercise our rationality that we can set and pursue ends for ourselves and that we should

00:39:40.760 respect that ability or that capacity in others and that we should respect ourselves for that capacity

00:39:49.100 and not compromise that capacity that idea about self-respect is one that was carried through in the

00:39:58.500 american transcendentalists what was not carried through by the american transcendentalists was the

00:40:04.640 sort of lockstep order kant thought that moral life should be executed on or by and that's a difference

00:40:13.100 between kant and the american tradition and additionally the americans thought that the passions and that feeling

00:40:21.620 could also be what guided a life not just rationality so that's a difference as well carol and i sort of

00:40:30.820 overcame those differences by sort of reaching a compromise i became a little more analytic or a little

00:40:38.260 more rational and i think she sort of began to explore freedom in very real ways radical freedom like the type

00:40:45.420 that thoreau or emerson or the existentialists wanted to come to and i said this to brett before brett you

00:40:53.780 before we started every memoir this is a 10 year old memoir and hiking with niches the story of carol and i raising our

00:41:04.220 daughter becca and this is the first time that i've mentioned this publicly but carol and i are now divorced and

00:41:11.040 there's one more book that needs to be written it's called love's conditions and this is a story about how freedom can

00:41:18.940 bring two people together but also at times freedom can you know drive people apart so that will come out a year from now

00:41:27.140 and who are the philosophers you go to for that one i go back to my american standbys so i go to thoreau on freedom

00:41:36.020 i now live with becca becca splits her time between carol and i our daughter becca seven becca and i live in a parsonage

00:41:45.200 right next to walden pond and so thoreau is a central character but also margaret fuller

00:41:51.820 margaret fuller was deeply ambivalent around marriage and deeply interested in uh women's rights

00:41:59.220 and also in untraditional forms of love and marriage and so it gives us some perspective on uh what happened

00:42:07.580 between carol and i and so maybe the listeners will be interested but they'll have to wait for the book

00:42:12.460 sure yeah and the the pragmatist also to grapple that idea of how freedom is connected with love

00:42:18.320 that's right that's right and there's there's risk in both like i guess that's that goes back to this

00:42:22.620 idea of maybe that's that's exactly it you don't know how it's going to turn out the maybe can be

00:42:27.480 joyous it can also be completely filled with despair at times so uh the risk is real so too is the reward

00:42:34.920 so how can grappling with these ideas of american philosophers help our listeners find more meaning

00:42:41.080 insignificant i mean like what would be like the question that you would hope people would walk

00:42:44.560 away i'm going to start thinking about and you're not going to find an answer possibly no i mean

00:42:50.260 starting with the question is life worth living is a nice one to start with but other than but

00:42:55.800 another question that james poses in another essay is what gives life significance and that's a very

00:43:02.900 hard question because the traditional answers to that question in the 21st century or rather in the

00:43:08.620 20th century no longer fit the 21st century the fact of the matter is is that nietzsche wasn't so

00:43:14.300 stupid when he said god is dead what he meant what he meant by this is that the traditional forms of

00:43:19.860 guidance that we used to look for in life are no longer available to us god the authority is dead and

00:43:27.160 so it's up to us to make and make our living and make our lives significant the pragmatists also

00:43:33.040 believed this they thought james thought that two things one is he was emersonian enough to believe

00:43:42.020 that exercising our freedom while being together with others is part of what makes life significant

00:43:48.860 but james also said something that maybe uh our listeners might tune into which is he says that the

00:43:57.180 significance of life depends on what he calls the zest that feeling that you get at the pin of your

00:44:04.180 stomach when you do something significant and we should the reader should ask their listener should

00:44:09.900 ask themselves what gives me zest and to go back to a nietzschean phrase does it elevate my soul or does it

00:44:17.820 crush me in other words is this zest long lasting where do i find it what sort of experiences do i have

00:44:25.700 another watchword for both the pragmatists and the transcendentalists was experience and they took

00:44:33.000 this as both a description of life but also as a mandate have an experience go like experience the

00:44:40.880 world and maybe this will get us out of our phones just a little bit okay and i know that the podcast and

00:44:48.180 uh a lot online is great but also have experiences go out and enjoy the world which i think sometimes

00:44:56.340 we forget in the 21st century well john kegg where can people go to learn more about the book in your

00:45:00.900 work so my website is john kegg it's so john kegg.com a number of pictures from the two different books

00:45:08.460 are there we also have a book coming out or i have a book coming out in march with princeton

00:45:14.180 university press it's called six souls healthy minds how william james can save your life which

00:45:20.160 will be out march 17th but it's on pre-order now right we might have you come back to talk about

00:45:24.920 that in detail well john kegg thanks for your time it's been a pleasure thanks a lot brett

00:45:29.620 my guest today was john kegg he's the author of the book american philosophy a love story it's

00:45:35.100 available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find out more information about his work at

00:45:38.780 his website john kegg.com also check out our show notes at aom.is american philosophy we can find

00:45:44.080 links to resources we can delve deeper in this topic well that wraps up another edition of the

00:45:54.840 aom podcast check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives

00:45:58.820 as well as over 3 000 articles that we've written over the years about how to be a better husband

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00:46:36.440 you

The Art of Manliness - January 15, 2020

#576： A Treasure Trove of American Philosophy

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