American Philosophy (11 page)

I'd spent the better part of a decade defending something that wasn't really worth defending, something allegedly certain but largely meaningless: a supposedly well-ordered marriage. At least ostensibly, it would have lasted well into old age if I hadn't realized that defending it, working on it, arguing about it was wasting the life it was meant to secure. Long after my marriage had fallen apart in the concrete, I spent many years defending the solidity of marriage in the abstract, but the abstraction ultimately did little to assuage my most personal feelings of insecurity and isolation.

*   *   *

I turned Descartes over in my hands and laid him to rest in the box. James had concluded his note to George Howison in 1895 with a stark admission: “I am a victim of neurasthenia, and the sense of hollowness and unreality that goes with it. And philosophical literature will often seem to me the hollowest thing.” Neurasthenia was the nineteenth-century term for depression and the irritability, headaches, and lassitude that went with it. Today, it is usually attributed to biological causes, to the fate of our physiology; and James the medical student knew there was something to this. But James the humanist was unwilling to believe that a life's efficacy was determined by material factors beyond our control. He would spend much of his later life arguing that the meaning of human existence turned on freedom. Many of the most celebrated figures from the history of philosophy, however, overlooked this empowering idea.

Who was the original owner of these first editions of Descartes? It was not, I was almost sure, a lover of Jamesian freedom. I'd begun to stack the remaining seventeenth-century books on Hocking's desk: a good-size pile edging a hundred, with the two most valuable on top. I picked up the smaller of the two and opened it to the cover page. It wasn't likely, but it wasn't impossible either: Maybe the Descartes volumes had once been owned by this author—Thomas Hobbes. It was
De Cive: Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society
, 1651. This was the first English version of the work, which, along with
Leviathan
, secured Hobbes's place in the pantheon of philosophical greats.

Hobbes met Descartes in Paris in 1648. According to most accounts, the meeting between them was respectful, if lukewarm. Respectful because Hobbes recognized that Descartes was a genius when it came to logic and geometry, lukewarm because Hobbes was a materialist and Descartes was decidedly not when it came to the human soul. But as American thinkers such as Royce observed, there were deep and abiding similarities between the two thinkers. Like the
Discourse on the Method
, Hobbes's
De Cive
had been written in a time of crisis. The Reformation, which had so pointedly challenged notions of truth and authority for Descartes, spilled over into the political strife of the Anglo-Spanish War. In 1588 Hobbes's mother heard the news of the impending invasion of England by the Spanish Armada; terrified by the prospect, she went into labor prematurely, giving birth to Thomas. Looking back on the circumstances of his birth, Hobbes writes that “fear and I were born twins together.” The religious wars of Europe got under way in 1618 with the Thirty Years' War, and Britain itself fractured along religious lines in the English Civil War about a quarter of a century later. So Hobbes was not crazy or pessimistic when he imagined—for the first time in
De Cive
—that life in the state of nature, in the absence of civil society, was best described as a
“bellum omnium contra omnes”
—a war of all against all. In this tumultuous historical setting, Hobbes's objective was not wholly different from that of Descartes: Both men were in search of security.

As the Chicago pragmatist John Dewey, a friend of James's, argued in 1918, Hobbes wanted desperately to find a solid basis on which to rebuild political authority. Hobbes was a Royalist, which meant that he fled England when the Civil War broke out in 1642, and he wrote this first edition in response to the beheading of Charles I. For Royalists everywhere, the execution of the king was a tragedy of unprecedented proportions. Not only did it signal the continuation of the political crisis in Britain, it also put a point on a belief that had gained currency in the previous century—namely, that kings and queens were not divinely appointed. The execution, for many, amounted to the death of God. Under these dramatic circumstances, Hobbes undertook the difficult task of
rationally
justifying the power of the monarchy. He realized that the foundational principle for grounding modern politics could not be derived from the hitherto unquestionable divine right of kings. Instead, it had to emerge from the rational self-interest of individuals who faced real social and political problems. Hobbes argued that when confronted with chaos, all rational individuals should prefer lockstep order over the risks of freedom. They should agree to institute an absolute monarch, what Hobbes termed the “Leviathan,” to maintain some semblance of peace and security. The modern social contract was born. Dewey conceded that this was a brilliant philosophical move, but one that stood to jeopardize personal freedom for centuries to come.

I cracked open the brittle cover of the first-edition
Leviathan
. Today, the first page of a book is often its most boring part—a bunch of copyright information or some banal, platitudinous dedication. But in the seventeenth century it was often the most informative. If you understand the etching on the frontispiece of Hobbes's
Leviathan
, you don't really have to read the rest.

Even before finishing the manuscript, Hobbes began to consult Abraham Bosse, a French artist who would be commissioned for the etching for the frontispiece. Hobbes's intention was to depict an argument that was three hundred pages in the making. After dozens of false starts and failed attempts—revisions that drove Hobbes to distraction—Bosse pulled it off.

Hobbes's Leviathan is represented by a giant king, arms raised Rocky-style, looming over a landscape that is dwarfed by comparison. This is no simpering aristocrat of the seventeenth century. In his right hand the king holds a sword. In his left, a crosier. He is covered in chain mail from the neck down. Above him are inscribed the words from the book of Job to describe God:
“Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur”
(No power on earth can compare to him). His chain mail is a thing of artistic beauty. If you look closely, though, you see that it isn't chain mail at all. What looks like metal links are, in fact, the profiles of tiny men and women—the subjects of the Leviathan. Hobbes argued that legitimate and absolute authority came from the rational self-interest of each and every person. Each subject gives up his or her (yes, there are women in the chain mail too) personal liberty in return for the security that the Leviathan provides. This quid pro quo became the basis of the social contract that underpinned the modern nation-state for the next three hundred years. And it was the hard core of Hobbes's philosophical project, which established rational principles for a political state that was less susceptible to civil war.

I squinted at the chain mail. All those frightened little people. They weren't forced to obey the king, but their fear of insecurity compelled them to take orders. The subjects of the Leviathan couldn't have cared less about one another; they weren't standing arm in arm out of some deep sense of fellow feeling. Hobbes's “non-tuism” (literally, “non-you-regarding”) suggested that people were pointedly indifferent to the interests of their neighbors; fear and self-interest are what brought them together. For most of my life, despite my on-again, off-again love for American philosophy, Hobbes and Descartes had been my go-to men when it came to explaining human behavior. People were generally scared senseless and would do just about anything to quell their fears. They cooperated, became friends, and fell in love, but at the end of the day they loved exactly one person—themselves. Relationships were, at best, functional: ingenious ways of coping with individual frailties and neuroses. Non-tuism made sense too. It wasn't that I had malevolent intentions when it came to others; I'd just never cared much about them.

*   *   *

Looking up from my boxes of philosophy, I caught sight of a small marble bust on the corner of the mantel behind the picture of James and Royce. It wasn't Hobbes or Descartes: It was Dante. A five-inch monument to humanistic genius. The contrast between the
Divine Comedy
, published in 1320, and the tracts of modern philosophy was not lost on American thinkers of the nineteenth century. Hocking—along with every other thinker from the Golden Age of American Philosophy—loved Dante as much as he disliked Hobbes and Descartes. In 1843 Emerson produced the first English translation of Dante's
La Vita Nuova
, or
The New Life
, a work the Transcendentalist called “the Bible of Love.” The poet James Russell Lowell, who was a frequent visitor at the James and Peirce households and who, with the help of Charles Eliot Norton, installed the
Divine Comedy
as a centerpiece of educational life at Harvard in the 1860s, explained the poem's appeal. It was, in Lowell's words, “a diary of the human soul in its journey upwards from error through repentance to atonement with God.” It was to be read personally, tenderly, as a how-to manual for living a meaningful life. Personal salvation wasn't just a single triumphant moment of beatific insight, as some of the Transcendentalists had suggested. Moments of insight do occasionally happen, but Dante's point is that the real trick to salvation is that there's no trick to salvation. It's just work, plain and not at all simple. Salvation is revealed in the long road of freedom and love. Pragmatists like Peirce and James—who assumed the mantle of philosophy from Emerson after the Civil War—knew that this journey was an arduous one and that it almost always began in hell. It was a journey filled with Lyme disease and mouse droppings and frigid water, but one in which you could still possibly make a bit of progress toward the light.

I was, once again, getting offtrack, but I didn't care. I went to Hocking's desk, sat down, and went rooting through one of its side drawers. The book I found was thickly bound and “diced”—scored with a diamond pattern on the cover. The leather was still soft, and it had been read so often, so ardently, that the raised sections of the binding had developed a high patina. It was Hocking's copy of the
Divine Comedy
. I grabbed the bust from the mantel and placed it with the book in the box with Hobbes and Descartes. If I had to slog my way through “trivial” philosophical research, Dante could join me. Over the last month, I'd begun some arcane cataloging system for the books, the rubric of which I'd wholly forgotten by that point. I just needed to pack up the rest of the seventeenth-century books—the ones the thief had missed—and move them to the dry storage container the Hockings were renting a few miles away. There I could separate them by date—or was it by topic?—and type out all the annotations and bibliographical information. This would be tedious. But maybe I'd learn something along the way.

When I finished packing the books, it was almost noon. Eleven boxes in total: 151 books, 110 first editions. I wondered why Hocking had been intent on rescuing so many of the books that American thinkers had roundly criticized. His collection proved that despite their attempt to twist free of the European tradition, American thinkers still pored over the writings of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, Wolfe, Locke, Kant, Mill, and Hegel. Hocking's teachers thought that you had to understand an entire tradition in order to criticize it. Today, philosophers aren't supposed to care about the past. They're supposed to construct sound philosophical arguments that are timeless, divorced from the cultural and historical context from which they first emerged. This ahistorical approach, however, often has the strange consequence of producing theories that have no bearing on any time or place. Dante was timeless, but only because every single character of the
Comedy
was a figure from the past. Most of the figures in the
Inferno
and
Purgatory
had screwed up in any number of infamous ways, but their screwups were worth talking about. American philosophers felt this way about Descartes and the rest of their European interlocutors: misguided but instructive—even, and perhaps especially, in their mistakes.

I shoved the last of the books into the trunk of the Outback and headed for their new home.

*   *   *

North Conway Dry Storage is situated on a largely deserted road at the base of Mount Washington and looks like a cross between a mausoleum and a meth lab. But, at least on that fall day, it would be relatively warm and dry. I punched in the code for the giant maroon gate, which opened slowly and closed behind me as I rolled through with a trunkful of philosophical corpuses. Box F, Crate 73: The Hockings had yet to discuss any final plans for permanent donation of the books, so I could only hope that this would not be the library's final resting place. Box F was a long, echoey, fluorescent-lit hallway lined with locked doors. On my first visit, nearly a year earlier, the room had seemed like something out of a dystopian nightmare. By this point, however, it had become another home away from home. Crate 73, at the end, was the size of a large outhouse. I pulled the key to its padlock, which Jennifer had given me, from my pocket. She was, among other things, profoundly trusting despite the fact that books had been stolen from the family. The padlock came off, and the door creaked open. The books already filled three dozen neatly stacked packing boxes. The hallway was climate-controlled, but fall in New England meant that the cement floor was still pretty chilly. Over the course of a year of work, I'd learned to come prepared. I pulled two large insulated sleeping pads from the container and spread them out in the hallway. My desire to go for a hike was quickly fading, and I decided to read for the rest of the afternoon. But I refused to waste it on Descartes or Hobbes; I dug around in the boxes until I found the well-worn treasure from Hocking's desk and reacquainted myself with Dante.