American Philosophy (10 page)

I looked at our little piles of grass. “They used to be bigger,” Jennifer said, reading my mind. “We used to put the hay on the floor of the barn and the kids would jump from the second floor.” I grinned until she told me how her cousin Waud had landed on one of the thinner piles and broken his arm. More trips to the hospital. Unnecessary trips. I didn't have to be playing with blades and hay piles. There were people, like Jennifer, who didn't just play at husbandry, I thought. They lived out in the Midwest, in remote regions of North Dakota and Montana. Carol, my gray-eyed colleague, was one of these people—or at least she'd grown up with people like that. Not many philosophers grow up in Saskatchewan, four hundred miles north of the Montana border, but she had. I cringed to think what she would say about my scything. At one point, over too many beers, I'd asked her if it was the cold that kept her native land so clear of trees. “Um, no.” She'd blinked. “People farm it. Grassland turns to forest unless it's farmed. Or you can burn it—apparently that's what the aboriginal people did. But prairie never stays prairie by itself.” Farming was an ongoing attempt to insert oneself into the workings of nature. Jennifer explained that when they were kids, you could see all the way to Mount Chocorua. There'd been no trees to obstruct the view, because so much more of the land, now forest, had been devoted to farming. This, I guessed, was one reason why the Hockings came for the haying at West Wind: In an age of heated car seats, they were trying to remind themselves of the simple work of cultivating the earth, of the ongoing effort that goes into making a home.

Jennifer went inside to get an early dinner ready, and I went to check out the strange black box, about the size of a large toaster, sitting several yards from the porch. It had silver wings—four of them—attached to its top, and it smelled a bit like chicken. I'd never seen a solar oven before, and I cracked it open; inside was a chicken—one of those real, live animals you see when you go to a farm show, but dead. My ex-wife had spent years trying to convince me to give up meat, but I'd dug in my heels and kept eating flesh, mostly out of childish spite. It took my friend Carol exactly one night to convince me. She'd gone on about how animals have the same capacity for suffering that we do, and how anything capable of suffering has an interest in not suffering, and how this interest in not suffering is surely more important than our interest in eating cheap factory-farmed meat, at least when we have so many other options. We'd argued for a while, but I realized after about twenty minutes that my position was untenable. So I had stopped arguing and stopped eating meat.

“Are you ready for dinner?” Jennifer called from the kitchen.

She joined me outside with a knife and cutting board. For a split second I thought of the dissection tables at Holden Chapel, then swallowed hard and tried my best not to be sick. Meticulously, she deboned and carved the body. This, like scything, was sacred work. The chicken had come from a barn down the road where they still raised fowl in relatively humane ways. Though I was not convinced to partake of its flesh, I didn't judge the woman with the knife either. In the ebb and flow of compensation, little animals sometimes had to be roasted in sun-drenched boxes, and small pastures of grass eventually withered and died. Destruction was the inevitable by-product of survival. Thinking about my personal crisis of the last year, about the wreckage of my emotional life, I really hoped that was the case. Remembering the rest of the first canto of “Ode to the West Wind,” I realized that Shelley's poem wasn't actually that dismal.

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!

The first stars peeked out from behind low-hanging clouds. I thanked Jennifer for my dinner of cheese, bread, and locally grown apples (she'd graciously changed the menu when she noticed I wasn't touching the flesh) and then returned to the library to spend another night on the chesterfield. Inspecting the sofa for mouse scat, I stretched out. Hay, everywhere. Spring would come. Hay, all around. West Wind: destroyer
and
preserver.

 

PART II

PURGATORY

 

THE TASK OF SALVATION

It was nearly daybreak, and a light rain played on the roof above me. Boxes of books surrounded my makeshift bed. I'd promised myself that I would finish packing them and tote them off to dry storage, but after a day in the fields with Jennifer, the prospect of spending another hour inside with a cast of dead white men seemed suddenly unappealing. Through the shadows I could just make out a photograph on the mantel: two of Hocking's beloved teachers, Royce and James, sitting on a split-rail fence on the crest of a pasture outside Chocorua, which was no more than five or six miles from the Hocking library. Royce, who rarely took a break from philosophical speculation, had come to visit James's summer house in 1903 and had made yet another attempt to convince him of the existence of God. James was bored, which made him mischievous. He already believed in God, but Royce's God was too constrictive and meddling for James's religious tastes. According to legend, when James's daughter snapped this picture, her father cried, “Royce, you're being photographed! Look, out! I say
Damn the Absolute
!” For James, beautiful afternoons were for walking and breathing—not for abstract systematizing. We are free for such a short time, according to James, that there are often better things to do than philosophy. I roused myself and realized that if I got busy boxing and cataloging the Descartes and Hobbes, I might still have plenty of time for a hike.

“Trivial.” That was James's word to describe most of the rare books I was to spend my morning organizing. In 1895, just three months after delivering “Is Life Worth Living?” at Holden Chapel, James explained to George Howison, the founder of the philosophy department at Berkeley, that this belief about the value of the history of philosophy “came out of one who is unfit to be a philosopher because at bottom he hates philosophy, especially at the beginning of a vacation, with the fragrance of the spruces and sweet ferns all soaking him through with the conviction that it is better to
be
than to define your being.” At its best, according to James, philosophy helps us make sense of life—to understand it, yes, but also to awaken us to its nuances and potentialities. The love of wisdom is supposed to guide us in living more fully, more meaningfully. But in the modern era, which reached its height in the writings of Descartes and Hobbes, philosophy had begun to lose its existential bearing. James didn't have much time for it, particularly at the beginning of a camping trip in the Adirondacks, a vacation he routinely took to restore his mental health. Large swaths of European thought didn't make
sense
of life, but rather rationally deconstructed it, overintellectualizing everyday practices and reducing the richness of human experience to a small number of discrete aspects. In the process, James thought, philosophy, which had the potential to be the most significant of intellectual pursuits, became “trivial.”

I reached into my first box of the day for a book that was largely responsible for James's disgust: the first Latin edition of Descartes's most famous work,
Dissertatio de Methodo
, published in Amsterdam in 1644. There was one passage from Descartes that I wanted to read before getting down to the business of cataloging. It was the heart and soul of rationalism, arguably the most important claim of modern philosophy—“
Cogito ergo sum
” (I think, therefore I am). American philosophers working in the nineteenth century were a diverse group of thinkers, but they found common ground in their critique of this seemingly innocuous statement. The
Cogito
is the concluding argument of a very intense investigation. American philosophers such as James appreciated Descartes's inquiring spirit and the skepticism that drove his philosophical argument, but they also thought that the Frenchman had ultimately reached the wrong conclusion.

Descartes wrote
Discourse on the Method
as a response to a growing crisis in Europe. In the first half of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church had begun to come undone. In 1517 Martin Luther had tacked his 95 Theses, which outlined the sins of the Catholic Church, to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, Germany. This act initiated a dramatic break from the hierarchy and dogmatism of Catholicism that had structured much of everyday life for centuries. The theological crisis intersected with the scientific revolution: The findings of Galileo, Newton, and Kepler began to challenge long-standing assumptions about human nature and its relationship to the wider natural world. According to Galileo, we were not the unquestionable center of the universe. We were, at best, spinning around something much larger than ourselves and, at worst, simply spinning out of control. Unlike the dogmatic certainties that had held sway since the Middle Ages, the truths that science struck upon were flexible or, more frighteningly, provisional, ready to be overturned at any moment. At the same time, the discovery of the New World presented not only a social and political crisis but also a metaphysical one. For most Europeans, this discovery was tantamount to making contact with life from another planet. Modern skepticism was born at this historical moment and served as the backdrop for Descartes's philosophical system.

I flipped through a second edition of Descartes's
Meditations
—once owned by Royce—which I'd found wedged beneath the chesterfield: “The Meditation of yesterday has filled my mind with so many doubts, that it is no longer in my power to forget them … and, just as if I had fallen all of a sudden into very deep water, I am so greatly disconcerted as to be made unable either to plant my feet firmly on the bottom or sustain myself by swimming on the surface.” Drowning. Hyperbolic doubt is a little like that. Descartes understood that your own body weight pulls you down against your will, and you eventually suck in water instead of air. When set on the high seas of doubt, it is tempting to cling to a small handful of things about which one is fully, absolutely certain. In the absence of certainty, some of us manufacture it from scratch and then defend it as if life depends on it. This is what Descartes did with the
Cogito
argument. In response to the existential crisis of his day—and the skepticism it begat—he produced one truth that could underpin human knowledge. Many things, according to Descartes, can be doubted: Perhaps institutions of authority are deeply flawed; perhaps our senses mislead us; perhaps the material world is just the grand hoax of God; perhaps God isn't even in charge, and the Devil, the real master of the universe, rejoices in deceiving us. But there was one thing he could not doubt—that he was a thinking thing. What is most essential—or, in his words, “clear and distinct”—about an individual is the existence of his or her mental capacities.

Turning back to the
Discourse
, I looked down at the short Latin sentence. Just three words. Most American thinkers agreed: The
Cogito
was brilliant and rock solid—but more than a little strange. The essential truth that Descartes eventually uncovered is merely this: that to the extent that he is thinking, he exists as a “
res cogitans
,” a thinking thing. This was the sort of truth rationalists could believe in, one that did not require empirical evidence. It became what Descartes called his “Archimedean point,” an axiom upon which he could rebuild the human sciences and prove the existence of God. He'd struck upon the something that would keep his world from going to pieces.

Despite the argument's logical consistency and originality, thinkers working in the wake of Descartes slowly came to a rather disturbing opinion—namely, that many brilliant discoveries are deeply misguided. Something can be a certainty yet also be absolutely meaningless. Thinkers such as James suggested that defending brilliant but meaningless certainties is quite foolish. Descartes was so determined to secure human knowledge—to maintain order and rationality—that he would sacrifice almost anything to complete his task. American intellectuals of the late nineteenth century tended to believe that he'd sacrificed the very thing good philosophers were meant to address: the uncertainties and deep existential questions of life itself. They pointed out that in its search for order, the
Cogito
argument had relinquished a question that was supposed to remain central: What makes life significant? According to James and Dewey, Descartes's fixation on being a “thinking thing” ended up prioritizing mental powers over all other aspects of sentient life and ignored the basic bodily processes of organisms, the social contexts that ground our lives, and the emotions that touch us deeply. James, Royce, and Hocking were also quick to point out that Descartes's argument worked well to prove his own existence as a thinking thing, but it said absolutely nothing about the value of the world outside his immediate subjective life. This is what most philosophers of this century called “the problem of other minds.” Cartesian rationalism was a type of island mentality, solipsistic to a fault. In James's words, “Descartes's life was absolutely egotistic.”

American pragmatists had a problem with Descartes's conclusions but also with his philosophical method. They suggested that searching for a single absolute truth was not the appropriate, much less the only, response to personal or intellectual insecurity. Sometimes insecurity was a good thing. In many cases, it meant that you had the chance to be free.