American Philosophy (2 page)

“It all depends,” James explains, “on the liver.” The liver, three pounds of reddish-brown flesh wedged below the diaphragm, was once considered the source of blood and therefore the seat of life itself. Back in the time of the
bucrania
, people would gut an animal just to get a good look at one. The liver was the sine qua non of many ancient forms of divination. Seers from Babylon to Rome examined the organ—much as phrenologists would later study the shape of the skull—to divine a future that was just barely within one's control. The liver, according to the ancients, was a way to negotiate the vagaries of chance. Had I looked at my father's liver when I was young, it might've told me all sorts of things: that he would attempt to help me get over my fear of the dark by turning off the lights in the garage and locking me in, that my mother would never fall in love again, that becoming him would be the single greatest fear of my life.

In the years that have followed my father's death, I've slowly come to think that perhaps things aren't quite as dark and inevitable as this. I've come to see how empowering James's “maybe” can be. It took writing a book about it—this book—for it to really sink in. For American philosophers like James, determining life's worth is, in a very real sense, up to us. Our wills remain the decisive factor in making meaning in a world that continually threatens it. Our past does not have to control us. The risk that life is wholly meaningless is real, but so too is the reward: the ever-present chance to be largely responsible for its worth. The appropriate response to our existential situation is not, at least for James, utter despair or suicide, but rather the repeated, ardent, yearning attempt to make good on life's tenuous possibilities. And the possibilities are out there, often in the most unlikely places.

 

PART I

HELL

 

IN A DARK WOOD, A LIBRARY

I spent my spring at Holden with James. Then the tourists descended on Harvard Yard—gawking, photo oping, jabbering, ridiculous tourists. In hindsight I know they're no more ridiculous than an angst-ridden philosopher camped out on a blanket in the quad, contemplating the sorry state of his father's liver. But at the time, my urge to kill them all was competing with my urge to kill myself. So on a warm afternoon in June I fled Cambridge, setting out on a final, desperate mission to recover the fathers of American philosophy and to answer James's question once and for all. My day of philosophical pilgrimage started with a drive out to the white clapboard house in Concord that Ralph Waldo Emerson once called home, then spending the afternoon wandering the two-mile loop around Walden Pond. I returned to the Yard only as dusk was approaching and my tourist nemeses were dispersing. In the twilight, I read Emerson's “American Scholar” address in what I figured was likely the precise location where he'd given the lecture in 1837. Oliver Wendell Holmes had called it “America's Intellectual Declaration of Independence,” a call for American thinkers to take control of their intellectual destiny. After finishing the piece, I made a quick stop at Kirkland Place, just down the street, the house where Charles Sanders Peirce had grown up. Peirce had taken Emerson's challenge seriously and had created the first genuinely American philosophy, amassing a body of work that was simultaneously scientifically rigorous and unexpectedly spiritual. Then I dropped my car off in a garage in downtown Boston before walking the rest of the way to the Durgin-Park Oyster Bar in the North End. That's where the Harvard idealist Josiah Royce met his students in the 1890s to discuss salvation and immortality before he shuffled back along the Charles River to his Cambridge home. I thought nothing of salvation and immortality at Durgin-Park, opting instead to drink myself senseless. At the end of the night I stumbled home and tried to convince my wife I wasn't drunk.

I was looking for help in all the usual places, all the wrong places. According to Thoreau, we spend no small effort “denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are,” he assures us, “as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre.” Is life worth living? James had found his answer at Holden Chapel, but I had to leave Harvard and Boston entirely. The road was all but forgotten. I am so grateful that I eventually found it.

*   *   *

When you travel north from Boston, after you leave 495 and hit Interstate 95, everything passes rather quickly and you're in New Hampshire before you know it. But then things slow down. Route 16 into the White Mountains is an odd little stretch, the sort of road that can't decide whether it wants to accommodate cars, trains, or buggies. It's stuck, like the small towns it bisects, between two eras. It was built at a time when the Boston Brahmins, who included many Cambridge intellectuals, migrated north to escape the summer heat. The signs of their migration can still be seen: Victorian mansions atop idyllic bluffs, impressive stretches of railroad—now inoperative—hitching posts next to boarded-up 7-Elevens. The 7-Elevens are another type of sign—indicating that the migration is over.

When you reach Route 113 and turn right, you're getting close. If you go through the tiny New Hampshire town of Chocorua and pass William James's summer home, you know you've gone too far. James bought the house in 1886, when he'd finally made enough money as a Harvard philosopher to afford a retreat. But it's not what you are looking for. Backtrack and travel 113 toward the village of Madison. You'll pass a number of places selling antiques, sad little shops dedicated to helping people stay afloat in the present by selling off their pasts, entrusting their memories to strangers.

Route 113 jogs left after a time and passes the borough hall. At this point fir and spruce trees grow right up to the shoulder of the road, making it impossible to see more than a hundred yards ahead or behind. This protected forest is a welcome reminder that not all old things go to waste. Turn left onto Mooney Hill Road and start up the hill. This is the road less traveled in American philosophy. In fact, it doesn't look like it's been traveled at all, at least not by anyone without four-wheel drive. Keep going. You think you might be lost. You are, in a sense—the terrain of philosophy you're approaching has been largely unexplored for more than a century.

At every fork in the road, take a left. A few miles on a deserted dirt road seems like forever, so you'll be relieved to see the one-room schoolhouse ahead. Now turn right onto Janus Road and make the final ascent. If you look to your right, you'll have a clear view of the Sandwich Range of the White Mountains, with Mount Washington off your right-hand shoulder. If you look to your left, at first you won't see anything except white pine, but then you'll catch sight of two stone buildings of Georgian architecture. One is a very large house. The other is set back in the woods, a short walk from the mansion. Covered with windows, it looks nothing like Holden Chapel. That's the Hocking library. You've arrived at West Wind.

*   *   *

“Traveling is a fool's paradise,” Emerson once said, “[since] my giant goes with me wherever I go.” That's generally true, but when I travel to certain places, my giant leaves me alone long enough for me to think. William Ernest Hocking found—or rather made—one of these rare places at West Wind.

Like many American philosophers, Hocking didn't initially intend to become one. Born in Cleveland in 1873, he spent his teenage years in Joliet, Illinois. His mother came from the Pratt family of Southbridge, Massachusetts, previously from Plymouth Colony and, prior to that, from the
Mayflower
. His father, a Canadian, studied medicine in New York and Maryland before moving his family west in the early 1870s. Hocking, the first of five children, grew up in a staunch Methodist family and underwent what he would later call a “conversion experience” that cemented his teenage faith in the Almighty. After finishing high school in 1889, he worked for four years as a surveyor and mapmaker in an attempt to save enough money to enter the University of Chicago, but the financial panic of 1893 dashed these plans, and he settled for Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (now Iowa State University) instead.

Hocking wanted to be an architect or an engineer—at least that was the plan, until he read Herbert Spencer's
First Principles
in his third year of high school, at the tender age of fourteen. Spencer spent most of his career disseminating Darwin's theory of evolution, a theory that would radically affect American philosophy in the coming century and, to this day, fundamentally challenge religious faith. When Hocking's father discovered his son immersed in
First Principles
, he did what any reasonable Methodist would do: He insisted that his son return it to the public library. But Hocking's father hadn't said he couldn't check it out again. So that is what he did the next week. And this time he hid Spencer in the haymow of the barn and promptly lost his religion. This crisis of faith was Hocking's first foray into metaphysical thought. His reading of William James's
The Principles of Psychology
in the early 1890s was his second.

By the time the teenage Hocking read the
Psychology
, James was well on his way to founding a school of thought known as American pragmatism. Pragmatism holds that truth is to be judged on the basis of its practical consequences, on its ability to negotiate and enrich human experience. James's pragmatism was just grounded and practical enough to convince a would-be civil engineer that philosophy wasn't a complete waste of time.

On the way to philosophy Hocking toyed with the idea of studying religion exclusively. He was one of the youngest attendees of Chicago's 1893 World's Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition. No one is sure, but he might have met his future teachers Josiah Royce and George Herbert Palmer at this event, as they both gave talks there. What we do know is that Hocking came to Cambridge to study philosophy at Harvard in 1899, finishing his undergraduate studies two years later.

He was one of the last students to work under the “Philosophical Four”: James, Royce, Palmer, and George Santayana. Hocking, twenty-six at the time, didn't waste the opportunity. Looking back on his student years, Hocking wrote, “I believed and believe it the strongest Department of Philosophy on the planet … it was strong because the individual men were strong, and sufficiently varied so that most students could see in some one or other of the central group one who spoke directly to his problems.”

*   *   *

Hocking's reading of Spencer had disabused him of the notion of a benevolent and all-powerful God, and he desperately wanted to find some intellectually reputable replacement. He had come to work with James, but the famous psychologist-philosopher was in Europe when Hocking initially arrived. While he waited for James to return, Hocking mastered German and French, continued his study of mathematics and the physical sciences, and took classes on metaphysics and aesthetics with Royce and Santayana. “I worked greedily and happily,” he later wrote, “suffering only because I was limited to six classes at a time.”

Hocking, however, was not your average bookworm. In the spring of 1900 he planned his first trip to Europe, to see the International Exposition in Paris. He was broke—“impecunious,” to use his word—so he and seven other Harvard students sought the help of a Mr. Buffum. Buffum was, according to Hocking, “a not too reputable cattleman's Agent … of the waterfront of Boston” who hired the students as cattlemen on the SS
Anglican
. They shipped out of Charlestown, the primary port of Boston, on June 14. “We were interlarded,” Hocking wrote, “with eight experienced cattlemen to make four squads of four men each, to each squad being assigned 125 Texan steers.” The journey took twelve days, and they landed in Victoria Docks, London. The students were then set free for seven weeks to experience the best of European culture. The fusion of real life and high culture embodied an important strain of American philosophy that Hocking sought to preserve for the remainder of his life.

Shortly after Hocking's return to Harvard in the fall of 1900, William James also came back. James had been working on the manuscript of
The Varieties of Religious Experience
, a book that attempted to preserve a space for religious experience in a world increasingly dominated by science. As an undergraduate, Hocking attended the seminars James held as he refined
Varieties
. One evening, after reading a section of the manuscript to his students, James, who was edging toward sixty, turned to Hocking: “Hocking, why did you sit there with a perpetual frown on your face?” Hocking later admitted being unaware of the frown—he had simply been focused or, better yet, “enthralled.” After graduating with his doctorate from Harvard in 1904 and spending two years teaching at Andover Theological Seminary, Hocking moved to California to join the faculty at Berkeley. Instead of dedicating himself to philosophy, however, he spent most of his time in San Francisco helping to rebuild after the great earthquake of 1906, honing what would become the architectural skills necessary to design and build an estate in the White Mountains. In 1908 he was called to Yale to teach, and when his mentor Josiah Royce died, in 1916, he assumed Royce's chair in philosophy at Harvard, which was widely recognized as the most prominent position in the field. By the end of his forty-year career at Harvard, Hocking had become one of the icons of American philosophy. By 1944 he was only the sixth American to deliver the famed Gifford Lectures in Scotland (the other American Gifford lecturers being Josiah Royce, William James, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, and Reinhold Niebuhr).

*   *   *

On my first trip to the Hocking estate, I knew much more about his teachers than about Hocking himself. I'd driven to Chocorua to help organize a conference on the life and work of William James. Today, most philosophy conferences are held in enormous nondescript hotels in enormous nondescript cities, so this little gathering of philosophers at the Chocorua Public Library had piqued my interest. I knew the conference would be good, but not quite good enough to assuage my abiding fears that philosophy really didn't matter. So once again I found myself elsewhere—this time considering the delectable virtues of
Schnecken
at a German pastry shop at the junction of Routes 16 and 113. The place didn't even have a name, just a sign outside that read
COFFEE FOR SALE
. This is where I found Bunn Nickerson. Bunn was one of those fellows you hope you'll become when you turn ninety-three. He was sharp and wiry and nothing like most of the philosophers I meet. He walked slowly, like most old philosophers do, although his hobble wasn't a function of long-standing inactivity, but of farming and skiing.