American Philosophy (21 page)

Although Hegel would distance himself from Schelling in his later life, he was initially attracted to the idea, espoused by his mentor, that there was some “absolute identity” underlying and unifying all things. Individuals were never irretrievably lost; they are always, and have always been, an aspect of divine creation. In Schelling's words, “The
I
think,
I
am, is, since Descartes, the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not
my
thinking, and being is not
my
being, for everything is only of God or of the totality.” This was supposed to be reassuring, but Hegel was never fully satisfied with Schelling's answer. Hegel agreed with Schelling that Descartes's
Cogito
was the wrong way to think about personhood or individual identity. Individuals did not experience the world as solitary thinking things, but rather as relational, intersubjective beings. In his lecture Royce explained, “[For Hegel] I know myself only in so far as I am known or may be known by another … leave me alone to the self-consciousness of this moment, and I shrivel up into a mere atom, an unknowable feeling, a nothing.” I thought about the morning, now many months ago, when I'd gone swimming alone in the frigid pond below the library. I'd once assumed that self-reliance entailed total isolation. But when I tried to identify the self I was supposed to rely upon, I was never particularly happy with my findings. Royce's lecture on Hegel told me why:

We are all aware, if we have ever tried it, how empty and ghostly is a life lived for a long while in absolute solitude. Free me from my fellows, let me alone to work out the salvation of my own glorious self, and surely (so I may fancy) I shall now for the first time show who I am. No, not so; on the contrary I merely show in such a case who I am not. I am no longer friend, brother, companion, co-worker, servant, citizen, father, son; I exist for nobody; and erelong, perhaps to my surprise, generally to my horror, I discover that I
am
nobody.

I'd made this unpleasant discovery in the early days of my divorce. In wresting myself from the shackles of marriage, I thought I'd discover personal fulfillment. But in Royce's words, “My freedom from others is my doom, the most insufferable form of bondage.” Being romantically untethered had unintended consequences: I'd floated aimlessly for more than a year without even an albatross to keep me company. The point of life, for Hegel and Royce, was not to lose oneself on the high seas of existential freedom, but to seek out and find oneself in wider and more meaningful communities.

Ultimately Hegel's notion of unity parted ways with Schelling's. Schelling's “absolute identity” was an underlying substratum that silently brought together the various parts of the world. This struck Hegel as overly simplistic and out of touch with experience. Human experience was undeniably defined by tragedy that didn't admit of Schelling's underlying oneness. Hegel argued that unity is achieved
through
conflict, that conflict and differentiation are necessary steps in achieving oneness. I knew on some intellectual level that this strange contradiction was the heart of the Hegelian dialectic, but it took destroying my life—and partially reconstructing it—for the lesson to come home. As Royce puts it, “Life consists everywhere in a repetition of the fundamental paradox of consciousness: In order to realize what I am, I must, as I find, become more than I am or than I know myself to be. I must enlarge myself, conceive myself as in external relationships, go beyond my private self, presuppose the social life, enter into [the inevitable] conflict, and, winning the conflict, come nearer to realizing my unity with my deeper self.” This made better sense than Schelling because it explained the tumultuous life of individuals and their communities, but did not preclude the possibility of greater or more meaningful synthesis as a result of conflict. Unity is not the static substratum of Schelling; it is achieved through a difficult process, something like climbing a mountain. It was something to be accomplished by people—even, and perhaps especially, by people like Royce.

In 1908 Royce attempted to translate Hegel's conception of interpersonal meaning and self-overcoming into a language for nonspecialists, into what he called
The Philosophy of Loyalty.
Loyalty: It is the most two-faced of virtues—one that is absolutely necessary for one's moral growth but also extremely easy to pervert. Hard to create and easy to destroy, it is a word for the downtrodden, for the hope, however slim, that one is not lost. According to Royce, loyalty was not a Kantian call to duty, but a heartfelt sense of belonging to a greater whole. Loyalty was the animating spirit of love and the power that could spare individuals from their feelings of quiet desperation. In the face of calamity, loyalty enters the scene, and though it might not save the day, it can make the day so much more bearable.

When Royce arrived at Harvard in 1882, he'd hoped to find himself a suitable home. By that point Harvard was widely regarded as the promised land for American thinkers, but Royce was far from satisfied. G. H. Palmer, who worked down the hall from him, referred to his younger colleague's “afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes.” In the first years of the twentieth century, Royce's afflictions multiplied. His son, Christopher, was diagnosed with “acute abulia,” a mental disorder characterized by paralyzing apathy. Christopher was placed in Danvers State Hospital on January 9, 1908, two months before
The Philosophy of Loyalty
was sent to press. In a letter to James written in the spring of that year, Royce conceded that they'd lost the battle against this mental illness: “We have fought our fight and lost. We shall keep on fighting and try not to make an outcry…” I'd read this note several times during my own dismal year at Harvard. What was it to fight, and lose, and keep on fighting? Royce closed the note with the hard truth about his son: “The poor boy will probably never see any of the light that I have been hoping and longing for him to see.” Christopher died in Danvers on September 21, 1910, on the brink of his twenty-ninth birthday. “And the way is a long and dark one for us all,” Royce continued. Loyalty was his way to find the strength to fight the darkness, with the sense that one isn't, despite evidence to the contrary, alone.

The Philosophy of Loyalty
was written not in an attempt to save Royce's lost soul, but as a moral and spiritual instruction manual on how to save individuals like his lost son. Royce worried about the growing number of “detached individuals,” many of whom professed to be free, but only to the extent that they were alone. Echoing Hegel, he argued that the false freedom of “unhappy consciousness” was overcome only when we are loyal, when we willingly devote ourselves to a cause. For someone like me, brought up on the philosophical ideal of rugged individualism, this was initially off-putting. But in
The Philosophy of Loyalty
, Royce voices a question that I'd failed to silence fully in my years studying Thoreau. “What worth,” Royce asks, “could you find in an independence that should merely isolate you, that should leave you but a queer creature, whose views are shared by nobody?” With Carol a few feet away, now closer than she'd ever been, I was hard-pressed to find any worth in it at all.

*   *   *

Royce's classes were notoriously close-knit, and at the end of the nineteenth century he became one of the few Harvard professors to invite women into his classes. In fact, many a romantic relationship bloomed between his students as they listened to him extol the virtues of loyalty. Richard Cabot, the son of Emerson's literary executor, James Cabot, was one of Royce's disciples in the early 1890s. Cabot had become reacquainted with Ella Lyman in one of Royce's seminars, and they would spend the rest of their lives crafting a sexless marriage based on Roycean principles. I'd stumbled across Lyman's papers at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study before my father died and, in my first year teaching, successfully distracted myself from the book I was supposed to be writing about Peirce by writing one about her.

Ella and Richard's relationship was a fascinating mix of religious piety, philosophical sophistication, and artistic inspiration. They'd decided to forgo having children so that they could fulfill God's purposes more fully, but this was the God of Emerson and Thoreau, which meant that they were free to pursue their own consciences and life projects. They fostered dozens of children, wrote dozens of books on topics that ranged from education to medical ethics, and sponsored—mostly with Ella's family fortune—the arts and sciences at Harvard (Cabot Library and Science Center at Harvard is dedicated to their family). In her spare time—which was admittedly slim—Ella helped Richard organize a Cambridge choral society that rehearsed and performed at their home at 190 Marlboro Street in Boston. At a holiday concert on November 17, 1903, they invited William Ernest Hocking. He arrived twenty minutes before the concert started and met another early arrival: Agnes O'Reilly. “Our conversation,” Hocking reminded Agnes in a love letter written later that year, “began with candles [that adorned the Cabot house] and continued with flames.”

In the “flames” the couple discussed philosophy and the fact that Agnes had an interest in the subject but little opportunity to study it. After the meeting, William wrote to her: “Have you then a discontent with your thought-horizon? If it is not a mere discontent but at the same time an earnest aspiration, there are goods in store for you whether you seek them among the mountains of philosophy or elsewhere. I wish I might lead you to some peak of vision, but it is seldom that I feel myself more than a wanderer—a climber.”

Hocking agreed to tutor Agnes on Descartes. She found Descartes boring, but eventually fell in love with her tutor. William Ernest and Agnes were married the next year, and they turned to Royce, repeatedly, for marital guidance. Royce might not have been particularly qualified (his own marriage was not unproblematic), but he was happy to oblige. This was an extended philosophical family—with all its lasting loyalties and dysfunctional intimacies. Royce drew a particular type of acolyte. His best students were just like Royce himself: They came from devoutly religious families and they were also wickedly smart, which meant they typically had serious misgivings about institutionalized religion. In short, they were perfectly equipped to be loyal servants, but they lacked an object of loyalty that could satisfy their intellectual sensibilities. Royce's philosophy fit the bill perfectly.

Hocking's Methodist roots meant that devotion came naturally to him. He was a loyal Roycean, and he dedicated himself, from beginning to end, to his gnomish teacher. He participated in the philosophical conferences of 1903, informal weekly meetings of faithful students organized by the Cabots, often held on Sunday evenings at Royce's Irving Street home. James, who lived two doors down but attended only one of these philosophical meetings, joked that “the conference [was] a queer illustration of [the students'] inability to live without Royce.” Most likely, this was a slight that stemmed from the fundamental disagreement between James and Royce. The individualism of James's pragmatism, which had become hugely popular, stood against any form of community that might stifle free expression. For James, “experience” was the philosophical watchword, and he worried that Royce's near obsession with community would sacrifice individual experience on the altar of devoted service. Hocking was well aware of the tension between Royce and James, and while he was intensely loyal to Royce, he acknowledged that James had a point. Sociality was important, but unless you could articulate the
experience
of community—immediate and intimate—your loyalty would remain a mere abstraction. If you wanted to overcome solipsism, it wasn't enough to argue for the necessity of community; you had to tap into the personal experience of togetherness. “Solipsism is overcome, and only overcome,” in Hocking's words, “when I can point out the actual experience which gives me the basis of my conception of companionship.” This would become Hocking's philosophical mission.

Hocking's works—many of which had been written at West Wind—were scattered throughout the library, placed hopefully, insistently (presumptuously?) among the truly monumental works of Western philosophy. As a graduate student interested in Royce, I'd read Hocking's first book,
The Meaning of God in Human Experience
, but at the time, I was too obsessed with my own academic and marital woes to understand its message, even though the whole point of Hocking's book is to move beyond one's own narrowly personal obsessions. To achieve this end, Hocking had to show that genuine communion with others was possible.

I hunted for
The Meaning of God
for a few minutes and discovered it in Hocking's desk drawer. “I have sometimes sat looking at a comrade,” Hocking says, “speculating on this mysterious isolation of self from self. Why are we so made that I gaze and see of thee only thy Wall, and never Thee? This Wall of thee is but a movable part of the Wall of my world; and I also am a Wall to thee: we look out at one another from behind masks.”

Sitting down in his seat, opening his book, reading his words, I was, for the first time, ready to face the question that Hocking put to his reader: “How would it seem if my mind could but once be
within
thine; and we could meet and without barrier be with each other?” The romance of this had been completely lost on me when I first read it, but now I knew that Hocking's “comrade” was Agnes. The rest of the passage rushed through me suddenly:

And then it has fallen upon me like a shock—as when one thinking himself alone has felt a presence—But I am in thy soul. These things around me are thy experience. They are thy own; when I touch them and move them I change thee. When I look on them I see what thou seest; when I listen, I hear what thou hearest … This world in which I live, is the world of thy soul; and being within that, I am within thee. I can imagine no contact more real and thrilling than this …