Be Not Afraid of Life, edited by John Kaag & Jonathan Van Belle

Be Not Afraid: In the Words of William James
Edited by John Kaag & Jonathan
Van Belle
Princeton University Press 2023

It’s not often that a book starts off by invoking reviews of its predecessor, particularly if the most prominent of those reviews were subtle reprimands. But in Be Not Afraid: In the Words of Henry James, the new collaboration from John Kaag and Jonathan Van Belle, two such reviews not only appear but act almost as epigraphs. Writing about Kaag’s 2020 book Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life in the Literary Review, John Banville warned, “To start, let us be clear on one thing: William James cannot save your life.” Writing in The New York Times, John Williams wrote, “... if you haven’t read James himself, do that first. It’s wonderful that he inspires intermediaries to bring his thought to modern-day readers, but his cogent and human work doesn’t strictly need intermediaries.” 

They’re right, of course, and yet Kaag is at it again in Be Not Afraid of Life, which is a curated collection of diced-up bits from the master’s writings and letters, here presented with introductions and contextualizations by Kaag and Van Belle. If Sick Souls, Healthy Minds was the prescription, Be Not Afraid of Life is a little jar of the pills themselves. 

And it comes with instructions, hoo boy, does it come with instructions. “Philosophy is usually regarded as the most inessential and superfluous of human pursuits – right up until the point when a person suddenly realizes that it’s not,” our editors write in their Introduction, “… In these moments of crisis – in the face of suffering, injustice, and death – one may begin to ask a question that has always been and will always be at the heart of philosophy: “Is life, this lie, my life, the life that frightens me to the core, worth living?” No thoughtless answer will suffice.”

And only deeply irritating answers need apply, since it’s a deeply irritating question, resting as it does on unspoken presumptions and in-built manipulation. If Kaag and Van Belle don’t first pose this kind of question, they can hardly expect to attract readers seeking an answer. Instead, they’re relying entirely on the paradox posed by James’s Harvard colleague Josiah Royce, which they accurately summarize: “Many beings experience life as completely botched, as a lost cause, as completely unredeemable; these individuals want to be, need to be, saved; yet any form of salvation would turn either on the efforts or the insight of these self-same individuals, and these individuals are devoid of the resources that might make salvation possible because they are completely botched.” 

It’s the core at the heart of all motivational bunkum – as James well knew, since it motivated him to craft an entire system of thought by which people could un-botch their own lives without needing any con-artist or mystic or professional un-botcher. This is one of the half-dozen ways Be Not Afraid of Life is indeed the spiritual successor to Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: it’s not only redundant in the face of James’s own writings but stands almost in opposition to them. Kaag and Van Belle claim that they intend their book not only as “an offering for the sick-souled” but also for “the ‘healthy-minded’ [note the scare quotes: any likely customer can be sick-souled, but we’re invited to doubt that anybody is actually healthy-minded], those who experience the universe as a satisfying and accommodating whole,” but they’ve clearly chosen their excerpts to help those who want help. And they include themselves: 

Over the years, the editors of the anthology in your hands have read and reread particular passages from James’s corpus. In moments of difficulty, both small and momentous, James has helped us understand the perplexities and tragedies of life with greater clarity; but more importantly, his words have provided a wise companion, a Virgil-like guide to help us walk through our own little rings of hell. 

Do Kaag and Van Belle realize how much they trivialize their hero by reducing one of the 19th century’s most interesting writers to this kind of existential Heimlich maneuver? Are they aware of how much they weaken masterpieces like The Varieties of Religious Experience or The Principles of Psychology by slapping this kind of “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass” label on a couple of nuggets quarried from their texts? 

Whether they do or don’t, healthy-minded … sorry, “healthy-minded” readers will appreciate the passion of our editors in their section prefaces (and in the book itself, a pretty little hardcover from Princeton University Press). And the sick-souled? Well, maybe Be Not Afraid of Life is just what the doctors ordered. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.