American Philosophy (12 page)

In his younger years, William James was obsessed with the
Inferno
, the first movement of the
Comedy
, terror and despair perfectly suiting his melancholy. He recognized something familiar in the torture of its hell-bound souls: They were unwilling or unable to free themselves from their past. James grew up in a controlling household, with a father he both worshipped and feared. Henry James Sr. had inherited a sizable family fortune in midlife, which freed him from traditional occupational duties and allowed him to obsess over his children's upbringing, which drove most of the James children to one form of mild insanity or another.

Most of William's decisions as a young man reflected his father's desires (Alice Gibbens, whom James married in 1878, was explicitly Henry Sr.'s choice). Admittedly, the days in James's Inferno passed, but they did so in accord with someone else's plan. There was no such thing as a future, at least not in the sense of being able to transcend the present moment on one's own terms. It was this fixity that James and Dante found truly unbearable. According to Dante, the damned

Cursed God and their own parents

And humankind and then the place and time

Of their conception's seed and of their birth.

As a teenager, James played with the idea of becoming a painter. He fixated on Delacroix's
La Barque de Dante
, a massive work that depicts an early moment from Canto XIII of the
Comedy
. As Virgil ferries Dante across the river Styx, the damned writhe in the water below. Virgil stands straight and resolute; Dante just cowers. James wrote to his brother Henry that Delacroix was “always and everywhere interesting,” in no small part because the existential situation he depicts—that one can, at any point, go overboard and irreparably lose his bearings—is at once so universal and so pointedly personal.

As James grew older, he began to work his way out of hell through a philosophical purgatory of trial and error—the result of which became an important aspect of his pragmatism. Although he was interested in mystical transcendence, pragmatism is usually geared toward more modest, earthly goals. It has a perfectionist streak, but its idealism is in the process, always on the way. In James's words, “ever not quite.” This mountain of Purgatory has its appeal. It is realistic but hopeful—the one place in the
Comedy
where individuals make progress on their own terms. At the beginning of
Purgatory
, at the base of the hill, Dante asks his guide, Virgil, how long it will take to summit the mount. Virgil informs him that there isn't a concrete answer: The duration of the ascent depends on the pilgrim, on his virtue, and, more important, on his self-knowledge. Volition, personality, insight—these actually matter in Purgatory. The mountain, at least the way Dante describes it, is the place where lives are won or lost—“Wherein the human spirit doth purge itself / And to ascend to heaven becometh worthy.” The souls in Purgatory retain many of their human attributes, and their acts of repentance are meant to be frighteningly familiar. The souls in Purgatory look a hell of a lot like us, working out the problems of being human. And these problems, for Dante, were the problems of freedom and love.

To what extent are we free? And if we are free, what should we do with our freedom? Dante's questions were central to American philosophy. As I sat there at the base of Mount Washington reading about Purgatory, I still wasn't exactly sure what love had to do with salvation, but Dante had given a clue. At the beginning of the
Divine Comedy
, Dante meets Beatrice. She's no ordinary woman. She's a vision of a woman, a symbol of beatific love. Of course she vanishes immediately, and Dante spends the next hundred cantos trying to catch another glimpse of her. That she doesn't love him back immediately is what makes the story so tantalizing, and so realistic. He follows her, dreams about her, writes about her, secretly lusts after her. Her vision is what propels him through the underworld and up the mountain. The story of the
Comedy
is the story of Dante's attempt—his bungling, faltering, laborious attempt—to love in the right way.

I made a halfhearted effort to comb through the other boxes, but after inspecting the remains, I only ended up imagining how Dante might have evaluated these long-dead thinkers. Most of them wouldn't have fared particularly well. Many titans of modern philosophy weren't particularly worried about freedom and love, and were happy to sacrifice them on the altar of order and rationality. Dante would not have approved. James developed an entire philosophy in protest. At least since Emerson's day, American philosophy has made its name by deviating from such modern European thinkers as Descartes, attempting to resuscitate the concepts of free will and genuine communion that Dante held so dear. Transcendentalists and pragmatists alike made this departure in their insistence that philosophy should not be exclusively concerned with abstract concepts and “pure reason,” but was meant to help individuals work through the trials of experience in their New World.

Under the fluorescent lights, I lost all sense of time. I read Dante for hours, hunched over on my insulated mat. I was making progress, although not the sort I'd planned on, and I stopped only when I realized how light-headed I was. I'd skipped lunch (and dinner), but perhaps there was something in the car. I stepped out into the New Hampshire darkness. Another day had passed me by. The backseat was empty except for a six-pack of Rolling Rock. I thought about drinking it in the car, but that seemed too cold and lonely, so I took it inside and drank it where I could keep reading. I'd have to bring a real, live companion the next time I came up, I thought, and I really would go for that hike. I clearly needed my own Beatrice. By midnight my six-pack was gone. Three hours later I stopped reading. I woke up on the concrete floor in the wee hours of the morning, just in time to head south toward UMass Lowell to teach a group of undergrads about American intellectual history. After class, Carol pulled me aside to inform me that I looked like hell, which wasn't too far from the truth.

*   *   *

I should have hated Carol.

In the academic world, permanent teaching jobs are hard to come by. In the discipline of philosophy, they are bloody scarce. Each fall, thousands of newly minted Ph.D.s are released into the job market, most of them hoping to secure an underpaid junior teaching job at a college that might eventually lead to a safe, cushy tenured position in which they can ride out the rest of their career. The whole thing resembles Hobbes's nasty, brutish state of nature, where life is a “perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbor.”

In this war, Carol and I had been enemies. We had both interviewed for the exact same job, a coveted tenure-track position that would allow the victor to live in Boston and enjoy a reverse commute to Lowell, and out of hundreds of candidates we had been selected as finalists for the post. The search committee voted on which of us to hire and came out evenly split—half of the committee wanted me, a specialist in American philosophy; the other half wanted her, with her strengths in feminist ethics and Kant. This situation could have resulted in a failed search, meaning that neither of us would have gotten the job, but instead, the provost, in a moment of Solomon-like wisdom, managed to make two tenure-track positions available, and we were offered identical positions. The fight was not over, however—we both assumed that only one of us could get tenure six years down the line. She was, in other words, the competition. And Hobbes would have encouraged me to hate her.

A hundred years ago, men began to compete with women in the field of philosophy. Before then, men stole ideas from them, were inspired by them, and relied on them for domestic and material support but rarely considered them peers. Even women as brilliant as Carol rarely became philosophy professors—they became Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Agnes Hocking, influencing the field from the sidelines. When they did manage to sneak their way into the discipline, they usually fled to an intellectual no-man's-land—colleges in St. Louis or California—where the Ivy League patriarchy had yet to be fully entrenched. Marietta Kies, one of the first women to teach philosophy in North America, had to go to Michigan for her doctorate in the 1880s, and then had to move even farther west to get a permanent post at a tiny liberal arts college in Oakland, California. Women in philosophy nowadays have only a slightly easier time of it. Those who make it through their doctorate and land a tenure-track position remain a rare and especially sharp breed of intellectual.

Carol had the uncanny knack for argumentation that defines what is known as “analytic philosophy.” Today, there are two schools of philosophy: the analytic school and everything else. Analytic philosophers tend to understand philosophy as the task of parsing arguments, breaking down complex and confusing phenomena by analyzing their constituent parts. Like scientists at a laboratory bench, these thinkers dissect human experience in order to see how it ticks. Of course, this dissection often results in the distortion or destruction of the experience itself, but many analytic philosophers don't seem to care. They scrutinize for a living. Scrutinize. It's a strange word. Literally, it means to sort through the
scruta
, the shit. Carol scrutinized me just for the fun of it and came to the conclusion that American philosophy was full of it—a mess of such ill-defined concepts as “freedom” and “experience.” I consoled myself by insisting that she didn't understand it. The point of American philosophy isn't to be “right” in any definitive sense of the word; such Cartesian certainty struck most American pragmatists as overly simplistic or just plain arrogant. The point of American philosophy is not to have a specific, rock-solid point, but rather to outline a problem, explore its context, get a sense of the whole experiential situation in which the problem arises, and give a tentative yet practical answer. Carol, perhaps rightly, figured that anyone could tackle problems at this vague level of specificity. The role of a philosopher, she thought, was to be much more specialized.

Beginning in the 1950s, analytic philosophers began to make their definitive departure from the rest of the humanities. They were intent on making philosophical reflection rigorous, which meant aligning the discipline, which has been historically coupled with literature and the arts, with mathematics and logic. Writing twenty-five hundred years ago, Thucydides anticipated what would happen to scholars who refused to support the analytic domination of the field: They suffered the fate of the neutral Melians in the Peloponnesian War and were simply wiped out. American philosophers were, in fact, a bit like that. From its inception, classical American philosophy represented a philosophical middle ground, aiming to mediate between competing theoretical schools, between the thinkers who focused on the trees and those who saw only the forest. American philosophers such as Peirce and James wanted to see forest
and
trees. In this they were not unlike the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who'd spent the last decades of the eighteenth century bridging the gap between empiricism and rationalism, the two dominant strains of modern philosophy. According to Kant—and the pragmatists—the gap needed to be bridged so that the disparate parts of human experience (which the empiricists analyzed) could be unified in some objectively valid form of knowledge (the sort of knowledge that rationalists cherished).

American philosophers picked up where Kant left off, suggesting that careful scrutiny, the kind Carol was so good at, was indeed valuable, but could go only so far in making sense of human experience. There was also a holistic, qualitative dimension to experience that couldn't be dissected in order to be understood. To get a sense of this unity, American pragmatists drew heavily from such post-Kantian thinkers as Schiller, Coleridge, Schelling, and Goethe: Romantics who wanted to revive the idealism of Dante and even Plato. These Romantics were also the thinkers, in the European tradition, who began to think through a notion of freedom that would be more amenable to an American ethos. In the twentieth-century battle for academic philosophy, pragmatists remained too committed to this idealism to be good analytic philosophers and too committed to science to join the rest of the humanities. So American philosophy died off or headed for the hills of northern New Hampshire. And that's where Carol and I were headed on one beautiful day in late November.

My previous trip to West Wind had sparked a hope to find a Beatrice to lead me through Purgatory, but I now realized how misguided that hope had been. Carol was a friend, and Beatrice and Dante weren't friends, and they certainly weren't equals. Carol wasn't a figment of my imagination, either, or some chaste vision of godly perfection—she could swear a blue streak, think circles around me, and drink me under the table. She and her husband had been in a long-distance relationship for most of her adult life, a circumstance that seemed to suit her quite nicely. She was, in a word, independent. As we drove up to West Wind that first time, we chatted nonstop as we usually did at the office or over beers. This time I told her about my divorce—about which she had absolutely nothing to say—and we chatted about pragmatism and how it intersected with Dante's vision of beatific love.

Carol reminded me of something I'd conveniently overlooked on my last trip to visit the books: Beatrice had been a real person. Her name was Beatrice Portinari, and Dante had seen her one morning in Florence, walking arm in arm with her “maiden ladies.” She was one of the wealthiest, smartest, most self-possessed young women in the city. Dante was immediately infatuated with her, but he didn't have the nerve to approach her. She was way out of his league. So he did what any self-respecting poet would do: He turned her into his muse. If he couldn't get to know her in life, he would fashion her to his liking in a work of art. This made for a great story, but her idealization obscured how impressive she actually was.