American Philosophy (24 page)

These were memories I could no longer suppress or rewrite. As Schopenhauer put it, “[I]n his powers of reflection [and] memory … man possesses, as it were, a machine for condensing and storing up … his sorrows … [I]t develops his susceptibility to happiness and misery to such a degree that, at one moment, the man is brought in an instant to a state of delight that may even prove fatal, at another to the depths of despair and suicide.” I couldn't go back in time to make Hocking understand how shortsighted he'd been, how his entire philosophical legacy would be lost in the hinterlands of New Hampshire, and how he shouldn't have let his wife fawn all over him. But suddenly I wished I could. And I wished similar things for my own past. Lines from the canon of American philosophy, written more than a century ago, continued to haunt me. One from Royce's
The World and the Individual
stuck in my head and refused to budge: “The most notable feature of the past is that it is irrevocable … unchangeable, adamantine, the safest of storehouses, the home of the eternal ages.” Adamantine: an unbreakable metal from the mythical past. According to Virgil, the gates to Tartarus are made of the stuff. Milton says that the Devil himself is bound up in adamantine chains.

According to Royce, who'd witnessed his son's psychological collapse, our histories are full of adamant atrocities. After Christopher died, Royce maintained his conviction that “salvation comes through loyalty,” but he was, for the rest of his life, plagued by the question of how one might be saved if he had willfully failed to be loyal to his cause. Disloyalty was an act by which one “should violate the fidelity that is to me the very essence of my moral interest in my existence.” It was, in his words, an act of “moral suicide.” Royce wasn't the first writer to make this point: Dante had beaten him to it by several hundred years. The Archangel's sin, what gets him banished to a frozen lake at the very bottom of hell, is one monstrously traitorous act. How could one live with this sort of betrayal? Painfully. Royce, however, suggested that this pain could, under certain circumstances, be meaningful: “No baseness or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter our human world, but that loyal love shall be able in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason its fitting deed of atonement.”

In the end, my ex-wife and I had split on surprisingly good terms. After the yelling and ring throwing, we'd been able to say our goodbyes amicably enough. But one of the “good” terms of our divorce was that we agreed never to speak to each other again. In that dusty attic I had the almost irresistible urge to call her, to write her a letter mapping the contours of my traitorous mind, to ask for her forgiveness. But I also knew this was something I would never do. At least I'd keep this promise. I pushed the chest full of nothing back under the eaves.

The point of Roycean atonement isn't to seek forgiveness, and it isn't to nullify the act of disloyalty—the first is often shallow and the second is always impossible. For Royce, after the devastation of moral suicide, atonement brings “out of the realm of death a new life that only this very death rendered possible.” It was a phoenixlike second chance that, until now, had always struck me as too convenient. “The world, as transformed by [atonement],” according to Royce, “is better than it would have been had all else remained the same, but had that deed of treason not been done at all.” Agnes, Lydia, and Fanny deserved another shot at freedom and homecoming, but somehow, by some act of cosmic injustice or infinite mercy, I was the one who was granted a second chance.

In the best-case scenario, if we had remained married, my first marriage would have been miserable, the archetypal life of quiet desperation. I'd broken with the woman, but I imagined that we were both better off for it. Royce would not have been happy with this rationalization. It reeked of a warped sort of hubris about making moral commitments—that promises could be broken so long as one could master the art of post hoc justification, when it was actually just immature and self-deceptive. Atonement was something else entirely. Atonement was to recognize that you'd freely, consciously done the wrong thing, and then to exercise your freedom, in light of that mistake, to try to make the world a slightly better place. To be clear, this isn't the banal platitude that one has to learn from one's mistakes or, more galling, that suffering is necessary for our moral education. It's the attempt to integrate the past, with all its not-so-little tragedies, into a more promising future.

I turned away from the chest, toward the rustling on the other side of the attic. Disloyalty was to be avoided, but if you commit treason against a cause, according to Royce, this treachery is an occasion to deepen, rather than abandon, your ties of loyalty. I thought about a letter from George Herbert Palmer, another of Hocking's Harvard professors. Early in his relationship with Agnes, Ernest had confided to his mentor that he and his new wife were having a little trouble. Palmer responded with an appeal to genuine loyalty: “Differences are an enrichment, if in every jar you can take refuge in one another.” During my first trips to the attic, in the midst of a disintegrating marriage, I'd wholly missed this possibility.

I made my way out of the eaves and straightened to my full height. Something cool brushed across my cheek, a metal chain hanging from the ceiling. I grabbed it and pulled gently. The entire attic lit up. Years of fighting darkness with headlamps, and only now was I discovering the lights.

*   *   *

I left Fanny behind and joined Carol where she was rooting through a shelf of books written by a woman who had only recently regained her rightful place in the canon of American philosophy. Earlier that week, Jennifer had suggested that we explore the corner of the loft that held the “Addams stuff.” I knew who Jane Addams was: the founder of Chicago's Hull House in the 1880s and one of the very few women who is now regarded as an American philosopher. But I didn't know she had a Hocking connection. In the late 1880s, Jennifer explained, Addams and her friend Ellen Gates Starr envisioned a settlement house that was modeled on Toynbee Hall, in London, established in 1884. But Addams's house would be for women, and her settlement would grow in tandem with the progressive educational ideals being developed at the time by John Dewey at the University of Chicago. It was a good plan, but they needed a building. They finally got one when a wealthy woman, Helen Culver, decided to first rent and then donate the Hull family home, on Halsted Street in Chicago's Near West Side, to Addams and Starr. Culver's nephew, Charles Hull Ewing, continued to oversee the Hull House Association at the turn of the century. Ewing's daughter, Katherine, married Richard Hocking in 1939, making Ewing Jennifer's grandfather. The “Addams stuff” were all the clippings, letters, and books Jane Addams had sent to Culver.

Carol and I tucked ourselves under the eaves and inspected the lower shelves. Just as Jennifer had promised: a pile of first editions of every book Jane Addams had ever published, each flyleaf bearing a personal dedication to the author's benefactor. News clippings from the opening of Hull House and Addams's interactions with luminaries from Leo Tolstoy to Teddy Roosevelt were neatly stacked around the books, interspersed by inventories, letters, and settlement house contracts—a hidden shrine to what philosophy had once been able to accomplish. Addams had been living proof that freedom could be far-reaching and should be exercised in responsible, loving ways.

Addams opened Hull House at the age of twenty-nine and did most of her philanthropic work and writing after she turned forty. She was prolific, writing ten books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of letters. In 1908
The Ladies' Home Journal
named her “America's First Woman.” Five years later the New York Twilight Club (a literary club founded by Twain and Emerson, among others) sent three thousand ballots to representative Americans asking them who they thought was the “most socially useful American.” Addams won by a landslide, handily beating out Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Edison. She went on in 1931, at the age of seventy, to become the first American woman, and the only American philosopher, to win the Nobel Prize.

I'd learned most of what I knew about Addams from my friend Marilyn Fischer, a professor at the University of Dayton and a careful scholar, fastidious in all the right ways, who insisted that one needed to know the history and culture of a time in order to understand its philosophy. And she
knew
the history of American philosophy. “Of all the American thinkers you like to talk about, John,” Marilyn once observed, “Jane Addams has the strongest claim to national and even international superstar status.” But today Addams remains only slightly more famous than Fanny Parnell. Both women ended up in the attic at West Wind.

Born in 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois, Addams started off doing what most young women born in tiny midwestern towns did, which is to say not much. She contracted tuberculosis when she was four, and it twisted her spine in all sorts of unnatural ways. Despite this difficulty, she had great expectations for her life, primarily constructed from the Dickensian fiction that she devoured. For most of her childhood, however, these expectations remained the stuff of fantasy. Addams was bright enough to aspire to attending Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, but her father, John Addams, a wealthy agricultural businessman who thought that women should stay close to home, didn't like that idea at all. So his daughter went to Rockford Female Seminary, right down the road. This, an evangelical training ground for overseas missionaries that didn't even award proper college degrees, wasn't the place for Addams. She initially hoped that her stellar grades would convince her father that the seminary was too easy for her, that she was ready for a real education in the East. These hopes were promptly dashed, and Jane was left to her own devices at Rockford, where she struggled to convince her teachers to act as if they were at a respectable college. But in 1881, after she completed her course work at Rockford, Addams's father died. Jane worshipped her father, but his death meant an inheritance of $50,000 and her freedom. She, along with the rest of her family, left Illinois at once. In Philadelphia, at the Women's Medical College, Addams pursued her dream of going into medicine, a profession that appealed because it would let her live among the poor. Although she'd objected to the missionary mentality of Rockford—overbearing, insensitive, proselytizing—its ethos of self-sacrifice was deeply ingrained in her psyche. Her studies went extremely well, but she grew increasingly dissatisfied with the process of dissecting life in order to make it better. She realized that many of the problems of modern medicine had nothing to do with biology and much to do with the social and psychological conditions of patients that many doctors of her time had failed to understand.

In 1882 Addams slipped down a path charted by Thoreau, O'Reilly, James, and Royce by having a serious mental breakdown. It was bad enough that she spent time at Weir Mitchell's hospital in Philadelphia. Mitchell was famous—some might say infamous—for the “rest cure” he prescribed to late-Victorian women to treat their “hysteria,” a catchall diagnosis that ranged from a mild case of being “uppity” all the way to full-blown schizophrenia. But the treatment was always the same: relax, put your mind at ease, do as little as humanly possible. The “rest cure” was somewhat effective for some overworked women, but most middle-class neuroses were not the effects of hard labor, but rather a result of repression and oppression. Rest was the last thing in the world that bright, ambitious women such as Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (who resided at Hull House for a time, and whose “The Yellow Wallpaper” documented the absurdity of this supposed “cure”) needed. They wanted, more than anything, to have something meaningful to do. When Mitchell's treatment didn't work for Addams, she returned to Illinois, acting on the prevalent but often mistaken belief that being closer to home can settle the nerves. When that didn't work, she left for Europe. Again, to get some more rest.

By the time Addams reached London in 1883, she was desperate to escape the mind-numbing pleasantness of relaxation; and the plight of London's workers—“pestilence-stricken multitudes”—gave this midwesterner something to
do
. At first, according to Addams, she “went about London almost furtively, afraid to look down narrow streets and alleys lest they disclose again this hideous human need.” But she eventually conquered her fears and realized—in a way that many philosophers never do—that the things that frighten us the most are usually the ones that deserve our greatest attention. Addams's was not an academic interest in the general character of urban poverty, but an ongoing response to its concrete and horrible particularities. She quickly came to the opinion that “the first generation of college women had … developed too exclusively the power of acquiring knowledge and of merely receiving impressions; that somewhere in the process of ‘being educated' they had lost that simple and almost automatic response to the human appeal, that old healthful reaction resulting in activity from the mere presence of suffering or of helplessness.”

This was a very early articulation of what the pragmatist John Dewey, a close friend of Addams's, would later term the “philosopher's fallacy,” a pernicious case of overintellectualization. Abstractions and generalizations were inappropriately substituted for the flesh-and-blood realities of individuals and their communities. For Addams, London wasn't the place for sentimental abstraction but for moral activity and social activism. There was no better place to do that kind of work than at the newly opened Toynbee Hall, the first of many settlement houses in London. Toynbee Hall served the working poor of London's East End and was meant to provide some much-needed guidance to a community that was on the verge of being irretrievably lost. Addams's frequent visits gave her an understanding of the settlement movement, and she began to envision how it might take shape in an American context. First of all, it would have to lose its Christian trappings. It also wouldn't be formed strictly around working
men.
Masculine hierarchies were largely responsible for the economic inequality and political violence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so a solution to injustice would have to be found elsewhere. As an alternative, she founded a relatively egalitarian community where men and women worked and lived side by side.