American Philosophy (17 page)

Glancing at Huxley's tightly wound inscription, I turned to the preface of Cudworth's
The True Intellectual System of the Universe
. Such a boring title to handle such a fascinating problem. Cudworth understood the implications of Hobbes's materialism: Determinism, which, in turn, implied moral subjectivism (the stance that moral goodness was simply a matter of self-interest), left the door open for atheism. In fact, Cudworth was one of the first writers to take Hobbes to task, initially in his
Intellectual System
and then in his defense of morality entitled
A Treatise of Free Will
. As an undergraduate, I'd read enough of the
Treatise
to get its gist; in fact, the book's opening claim sums up its conclusion: “We seem clearly … to be led to think that there is something in our own power, and that we are not altogether passive in our actings, nor determined by inevitable necessity in whatsoever we do.” The philosophical battle lines were drawn.

*   *   *

Thomas Huxley was interested in the free-will debate in no small part because he was, in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the process of renewing it. He heralded the second coming of modern determinism. His philosophy, when coupled with that of Darwin and Spencer, was the flash point for a generation of classical American thinkers, such as Hocking and James, who wanted to preserve free will in a scientific age that threatened it. Despite being trained in modern biology and physiology, fields that made him sympathetic to the evolutionary hypothesis, William James would be Huxley's most nuanced American critic.

On December 26, 1859, Huxley published a five-thousand-word book review of Darwin's
Origin of Species
in
The Times
of London. With a few minor criticisms, Huxley's review, entitled “The Darwinian Hypothesis,” was extremely positive. In subsequent years, as this controversial hypothesis was supported by empirical evidence, Huxley became Darwin's greatest supporter. Many people, however, were considerably less sanguine. These critics understood Darwinian evolution as providing evidence for the sort of materialism and determinism that Hobbes's philosophy had presupposed. The thinking was that life was not the product of divine creation or choice, but of the inevitable process of material variation and selection. This selection occurred through a struggle for survival that looked disturbingly like the Hobbesian “warre of all against all.” Even more unsettling to traditional humanists was the idea that the seemingly transcendent aspects of human civilization—its art, its morality, its faith—were really just necessary outcroppings of this biological struggle. When all the ideology was stripped away, according to Hobbes, we were simply isolated animals, bloodied in tooth and claw.

Huxley thought that Darwin had shied away from the most radical and disturbing of his theory's implications—namely, that human beings were the direct product of evolutionary history. Huxley was resolved not to make the same mistake. In 1861 he was invited to give a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh on comparative anatomy; here he made the charged claim that humans, along with every other animal, evolved through natural selection. Although he didn't come right out and say that we are descended from apes, he came close, suggesting that humans and other apes might have a common ancestor. In a letter to his wife, Huxley commented on the popularity of the lectures and joked about what this large audience might be learning: “My workingmen stick by me wonderfully, the house being fuller than ever last night. By next Friday evening they will all be convinced that they are monkeys.” Some of the members of his audience were happy with Huxley's argument, but others were not. A good friend of Huxley's satirized the utter terror that some of his audience experienced as they listened to his findings on comparative anatomy:

The professor … had even got up once at the British Association and declared that apes have hippopotamus majors in their brains just as men have. Which was a shocking thing to say, for if it were so, what would become of the faith, hope and charity of immortal millions?… [I]f a hippopotamus major is ever discovered in one single ape's brain, nothing will save your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greater-greatest grandmother from having been an ape too.

Huxley was blasted for his views. The lectures were described as the most “blasphemous contradiction to Bible narrative and doctrine” and “the most debasing theory that has ever been propounded before a civilized audience.”

Despite the criticism, Huxley repeated the Edinburgh lectures in the fall of 1861 and then compiled them into
Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature
, which suggested that the proper place for human beings was right next to their primate brethren. This was the series of lectures that drew the attention of American thinkers, including William James. In Britain, the theologically minded rallied their troops to defend the special niche that God had set aside for human beings. The anatomist and paleontologist Charles Carter Blake suggested that Huxley's view was “indistinguishable from that of absolute materialism and even tends to atheism.” Huxley had to admit that Blake had a point. The challenge for Huxley now was to advance a thoroughgoing materialism, one that implied agnosticism if not atheism, without jettisoning all semblance of morality and human meaning.

To many contemporary readers, Cudworth and Huxley seem to be strange characters in a story of American philosophy—they aren't even American. But Hocking understood that the question of free will was
the
question of American pragmatism. James, Dewey, and Peirce had cut their philosophical teeth on the British evolution debate of the 1860s, and in varying degrees, they viewed Huxley as their principal interlocutor. In 1865, at the age of twenty-three, William James published his first review in the
North American Review.
It was on Huxley's
Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy
, a version of the talks Huxley had given in Edinburgh. James wrote approvingly of Huxley's empiricism, praising him for holding “the view of the phenomena of life which makes them result from the general laws of matter, rather than from the subordination of those laws to some principle of individuality, different in each case.”

Like Huxley, James supported the Darwinian hypothesis, but unlike Huxley, he was also deeply disturbed by it, writing that the Darwinian framework is “hypothetically at least, atheistic in its tendency, and, as such, its progress causes much alarm to many excellent people.” The scientific James had to stick to the facts of biology and anatomy, but this left him in a bit of a fix. He'd grown up with a father who had been an acolyte of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, which meant, among other things, that he wanted to leave space for the supernatural. In his review of Huxley, James states, “Grant that [evolutionary] theory leaves much of our moral experience unaccounted for, and is but a partial synthesis,—grant that at present it turns its back upon the Supernatural,—may it not, nevertheless, serve an excellent purpose, and in the end, by introducing order into the Natural, prove to be a necessary step in the way to a larger, purer view of the Supernatural?”

In the end, maybe evolutionary theory would reveal the purer view of God. This was possible, but not likely, and James knew it. Concluding the review, he commends Huxley for his fierce defense of Darwin but thinks the Brit has gotten into a horrible quagmire. In a moment of gross understatement James assesses the whole of Huxley's argument and finds that “all this is somewhat problematical.” James fell into a deep depression after writing this review. In the late 1860s he considered killing himself. “Somewhat problematical.” The lesson that James gleaned from evolutionary theory was of an existential variety—human life was a natural process that began in the wailing of babes and ended in the pangs of death. In between was the seemingly futile struggle for survival. It probably didn't help that James spent most of the decade studying the workings of the biological world with the famous Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz. He'd gone on Agassiz's expedition to Brazil, reflecting at the time that he was “body and soul, in a more indescribably hopeless, homeless and friendless state than [he] ever wanted to be in again.” When he returned to the States, he took a post in Henry Bowditch's anatomy laboratory and got an even closer look at the nasty fate of humankind.

I thought back on the morbid sketches James had worked on during this time—dozens of gruesome bodiless heads. I could still remember the call number of the box at Houghton Library: MS Am 1092.2. A box full of dead people. I remembered being attracted to the darkly Gothic themes of James's doodles and ignoring a raft of drawings that didn't at the time seem to fit a narrative of existential angst. Specifically, there were lots of pictures of animals from his trip to Brazil and, more specifically, lots and lots of monkeys. It seemed that James liked monkeys almost as much as he liked dead people. On that bleak evening, alone in my apartment, the monkeys began to make more sense in the context of existential torment. In the end, evolutionary theory might reveal the purer view of God, as James once suggested. But more likely it would reveal that all of us, in the end, are just a bunch of dead primates. I looked up from my book to survey the messy cage I called my home. An eon of evolutionary development had delivered me to this miserable domicile in the North End, which I could scarcely afford. And here I was to remain for the rest of my life.
Somewhat
problematical?

*   *   *

Huxley's findings terrorized James through his depressive twenties. He managed to bootstrap himself out of depression and determinism only after reading the French philosopher-recluse Charles Renouvier, who argued that the best proof of free will turned on an individual's willingness to affirm its existence. In the months after my father's death, this idea had occupied no small amount of my mental energy, but it always struck me as oddly—if not viciously—circular. I eventually concluded that James, at the brink of emotional collapse, was grasping at philosophical straws. On April 30, 1870, James wrote of this turn toward Renouvier and away from Huxley:

I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second “Essais,” and see no reason why his definition of Free Will—“the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts”—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

This private moment of insight became the basis of his public affirmation of free will against Huxley's determinism. In 1874 Huxley published “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata,” which entertained and revived the hypothesis that Hobbes had affirmed in his
Leviathan
—namely, that living organisms bear an uncanny resemblance to machines. For Hobbes and Huxley, human beings, as living organisms, were bound to the mechanical laws of nature. “It is quite true, to the best of my judgment,” Huxley concludes, “that the argumentation which applies to brutes holds equally good of men; and, therefore, that all states of consciousness in us, as in them, are immediately caused by molecular changes of the brain-substance.” He maintained that mental life could be reduced to physical states and that “the feeling we call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of that act. We are conscious automata…” In his youth, James would have read these words with no small amount of fear and trembling, but he was older now, and armed with the philosophical tools of Renouvier, he was ready to put up a real fight. In 1879 he published his rejoinder to Huxley in
Mind
, an article that he entitled “Are We Automata?” This article put James on the philosophical map and served as the foundation for one of the most famous essays in American pragmatism, “The Will to Believe.” In “Are We Automata?” James answered Huxley with feeling: No—no, we most certainly are not.

Feeling. For a split second I thought about Tuscany, about how I could max out my credit card in one fell swoop, buy a one-way ticket, and be there tomorrow. This sort of impulse—as emotionally vivid as it was absurd—buttressed James's argument against determinism. He argued that the feeling of freedom could not be analyzed away or reduced to a discrete set of physical processes. Feeling—immediate, personal,
free
—was not predetermined and had causal efficacy. Until science or philosophy furnishes evidence to the contrary, James argued, it was best to believe that free feeling was an active force in the universe:

When a philosophy comes which, by new facts or conceptions, shall show how particular feelings may be destitute of causal efficacy without the genus Feeling as a whole becoming the sort of
ignis fatuus
and outcast which it seems to be to-day to so many “scientists” (loathly word!), we may hail Professor Huxley … as [a] true prophet. Until then, I hold that we are incurring the slighter error by still regarding our conscious selves as actively combating each for his interests in the arena and not as impotently paralytic spectators of the game.

I didn't have enough money left on my credit card to get out of the state, much less buy the plane ticket to Italy that I found on Orbitz. But it didn't really matter. James's point still held. Feeling was not, in James's words, “destitute of causal efficacy.” The will undoubtedly had limits on what it could accomplish, but it could, in fact, accomplish something. This anticipated James's position in “The Will to Believe,” published in 1896, a year after his evening at Holden Chapel, in which he argues that there are many situations that cannot be thoroughly explained through empirical analysis. When certain questions cannot be settled on the basis of empirical evidence, we are justified in answering them through what he calls “voluntarily adopted faith.” In other words, we are entitled to believe whatever we want. In the aftermath of my father's death I'd come to believe that such questions didn't exist, or if they did, they weren't really worth asking. To me, James's argument smacked of Pascal's Wager. In the seventeenth century the Frenchman argued that in the absence of proof, it is safer to believe in God (since you lose relatively little if you are wrong about his existence) than to adopt atheism (and face eternal damnation on the Day of Judgment). “Voluntarily adopted faith” struck me as a euphemism for willful ignorance, but I was slowly having a change of heart.