John Kaag is an American philosophy professor who figured out something most academic philosophers never do: the way to make philosophy land for regular readers is to put yourself into the writing. Not as an authority. As a guy who's also working through his own stuff, using the philosophy as one of the tools, and reporting back honestly on what worked and what didn't.
He was born in 1979 in Pennsylvania. His father, an alcoholic, drank himself out of the family when Kaag was young and eventually drank himself to death. Kaag has written about how that loss formed everything in him — the chronic depression he's lived with most of his adult life, the obsessive intellectual seeking, the early sense that the world was a dangerous place where good things didn't last.
He went to college, got hooked on philosophy, did a PhD, ended up teaching at UMass Lowell. He specialized in American pragmatism — the tradition of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey — which is sometimes called the only original American contribution to world philosophy. Pragmatism is mostly about how ideas have to be tested in actual experience, how meaning is constructed through practice, and how truth is what works rather than what corresponds to some abstract Platonic ideal.
His first popular book, American Philosophy: A Love Story (2016), tells a slightly insane true story. While in his early 30s, depressed and going through a divorce, Kaag got a tip about an abandoned library in rural New Hampshire. He drove out there. Turned out to be the personal library of a Harvard philosophy professor named William Ernest Hocking, who had died decades earlier and whose books had been sitting in a forgotten New England estate ever since. First editions of Kant. Original printings of Emerson and Thoreau. Personal letters between William James and Bertrand Russell. Just sitting on shelves, slowly being eaten by mice.
Kaag spent three years cataloguing the library. The book is partly about that work and partly about what those American philosophers — Emerson, Thoreau, James, Royce — had to teach him about how to live through grief and find his way back to caring about anything. The book also includes the love story with Carol Hay, the philosophy professor he met while cataloguing the library and eventually married.
His next book is the one I'd start with if I were you. Hiking with Nietzsche (2018). The premise: Kaag had climbed a particular mountain in the Swiss Alps — Piz Corvatsch, near Sils-Maria, where Nietzsche spent his most productive summers — when he was 19, alone, basically starving, in the middle of his own dark night. He climbed it again seventeen years later as a 36-year-old married father, with his wife and young daughter waiting at the foot of the mountain.
The book moves between those two climbs. The 19-year-old Kaag was reading Nietzsche the way many lonely young men read Nietzsche — as a permission slip for radical individualism and contempt for conventional morality. The 36-year-old Kaag is reading Nietzsche differently. He's reading him as someone who actually lived through what Nietzsche was writing about — the loneliness, the suspicion that the inherited meaning systems were collapsing, the question of how to find a reason to live without resorting to easy answers.
Become who you are.
That's the line from Nietzsche that becomes the spine of the book. Easy to say. Almost impossible to actually do. Becoming who you are requires that you first figure out who you are, which most of us postpone our entire lives. And then it requires the courage to live as that person, even when the world wants you to be something simpler. Kaag's argument, by the end of the book, is that this is the work of a lifetime, and that even the people who do it never fully complete it. Becoming is a verb, not a destination.
His next book, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds (2020), is about William James — the American philosopher and psychologist — and the choice between two fundamental orientations to life. James himself, as a young man, struggled with severe depression and considered suicide. He thought his way out by deciding, almost by an act of will, to believe that his actions could matter. Pragmatism's whole project grew out of that personal crisis. Kaag uses James's life and ideas as a way to think about depression, meaning, and the choice we have about how to relate to our own minds.
Kaag is open in the book that he's writing partly out of his own depression. He's been on antidepressants. He's had moments where the case for staying alive felt thin. He's not lecturing readers from a position of safety. He's sharing tools that have helped him.
Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
He's written more recent books too — on the American philosopher Henry Adams, on the question of evil, on the meaning of money. He's a working philosopher who's still trying to figure stuff out, in public, with each book. He doesn't pretend to be done. He's not selling enlightenment. He's showing his work.
The reason John Kaag still matters to me is that he's writing the rare books where the philosophy is genuinely a tool for actual living, not an ornament. He's not using his life to spice up philosophy. He's using philosophy as scaffolding for life. The two are inseparable in his work, and that integration is what most academic philosophy lost a long time ago.
If you're feeling lost af and you suspect that some old dead philosophers might actually have something useful to say about it but you can't bring yourself to read them directly — Kaag is the way in. He'll bring you to Nietzsche through his own marriage. To William James through his own depression. To Emerson through a haunted library. The philosophy comes through the lived stories, and that's how it actually gets in.