American Philosophy (13 page)

“You brought your sleeping bag, right?” I asked Carol.

She nodded. “But I think I might've forgotten my pillow.”

“Don't worry,” I said without thinking. “You can use mine.”

We were getting close to West Wind. Mount Chocorua's rocky face was shrouded in dusky clouds, and the evergreens on the road's shoulder began to close in. We caught Route 113 and left the land of fluorescent lights and street signs behind. Why had I promised her my pillow? I asked myself. It made absolutely no sense. I
really
loved that beat-up thing. It was grimy and lumpy in all the right ways. Over the years, the down had slowly fallen out, so that it now squished right around my head like a little cave where I could escape the grimmer parts of my waking life. I wouldn't be able to sleep without it. Maybe she'd forget I had mentioned it.

“It's pretty spooky up here,” she admitted.

West Wind
was
spooky for a newcomer. If I were Hobbesian about the whole trip, I wouldn't care how spooky it was for her. But somehow I did care.

 

DIVINE MADNESS

The library was pitch-dark when we arrived. We turned on the lights just long enough to arrange our things and hit the sack—separate sacks. The following morning marked the first of many spent exploring West Wind together. The boxes in dry storage represented but a small fraction of the library; there were still thousands that needed to be sorted. This day would be spent gathering the last of the rarest books and shuttling them up to North Conway for safekeeping.

Saving the rarest books often meant agreeing on how old a book had to be in order to be considered for storage. After extended deliberation we reached what, in hindsight, appears to be a random decision: 1845. These books would be stacked on the long oval table in the center of the first floor and would be trucked off to join the rest. We would eventually hire an appraiser to handpick the most valuable ones for donation. Further additions could be made on a case-by-case basis, but we would generally leave most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century books behind. I knew that this meant missing dozens, if not hundreds, of valuable works, but for the time being, I couldn't see a way around it.

Carol paged through a slim, modest-looking volume of Emerson from 1878. According to our rule, we should have left this one for the mice. It was not Emerson's most famous work by any stretch of the imagination, but it was one of the more important ones if you were interested in his political views. A first edition of Emerson's
Fortune of the Republic
would bring enough at a Sotheby's auction to pay one of my students' tuition for a full year. And this one was inscribed by Emerson himself. It would be an exception to our rule.

Emerson gave this lecture for the first time in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, and repeated it a dozen times over the next fifteen years, making revisions along the way. Unlike Hobbes, Emerson thought there were worse things than revolution, more dangerous things than the exercising of one's personal freedoms. To him, the American Revolution was the best thing that could have happened to this country because it signaled a final departure from external control. The Civil War provided equal, although different, opportunities. Carol opened to a random page, scanned it quickly, and read aloud: “‘The end of all political struggle is to establish morality as the basis of all legislation … morality is the object of government. We want a state of things in which crime will not pay; a state of things which allows every man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man.'” This is even more radical than the thinking of John Locke, who said, “The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.” For Emerson, political and legal order was not merely about protecting personal liberty but also—and always—about fostering the good life. The point isn't necessarily to live longer. It's to live freely and
well
. Carol smiled. “This is just like Kant,” she said.

To Carol, the entire history of Western philosophy was about Kant. What came before him merely anticipated the philosophical moves that he would later master. And what came after him was either Kant warmed over or just plain wrong. She remains the only Kantian feminist I've ever met—every other feminist thinks he is completely irredeemable. In fact, American philosophers owed Kant a rather large debt. The diminutive professor from Königsberg, Germany, had initiated a massive philosophical project that the Transcendentalists and pragmatists extended through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kant, unlike Hobbes and Locke, insisted that individual freedom—and therefore morality—was the foundation of social and political life.

Theorists prior to Kant were worried about political stability and the relative significance that personal liberty had in its pursuit, but for the most part they argued that moral theory had a relatively small role to play in political life. Hobbes and Locke diverged in many ways, but they agreed that people were generally moved by sensations, fears, and desires rather than by profound moral principles. For them, human reason was predominantly instrumental, an extension of an animalistic drive for self-preservation, and the wisest thing to do was to set up political institutions that could keep base instincts in check. Idealists such as Kant and Emerson, however, couldn't have disagreed more.

To Kant, human beings possessed unique capacities that separated them from the rest of the animal kingdom—the nasty realm of self-interest and beastly impulse. Kant argued that humans were not simply moved by the forces of their world but, at their best, were motivated by an internal, almost divine force he called rational will. Unlike porcupines and termites, humans had minds that were not buffeted by random sensations or experiences; they actively structured experience. Humans were creatures that could think and thereby self-legislate. By virtue of their active rational capacities, humans were the only beasts that could set duties for themselves, and therefore the only ones that could be morally responsible. The point of philosophy, for Kant, was neither to sublimate self-interest nor to construct systems that keep people in check, but rather to awaken individuals to their own active minds and thereby make them pointedly aware of their moral duty. This was a philosophical position many American thinkers could happily endorse. In 1842 Emerson tied American Transcendentalism directly to Kant, writing:

What is popularly called Transcendentalism … acquired the name of Transcendental from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Königsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denominated them
Transcendental
forms.

Ideas and imperative forms: Kant and Carol were all about them. These forms allowed us to escape the vicissitudes of human experience, to hinge our destiny to something a bit more stable than our own fragile lives. All we have to do is make good on our rational capacities and recognize the convincing force of moral duty.

There was, however, a substantial difference between Emerson and Kant, but at that moment, with a daunting amount of work ahead of us, I couldn't put my finger on it. Instead of arguing with Carol—an activity I relished almost as much as she did—I wandered into an unexplored nook of the library to begin the book hunt. To my genuine surprise, she followed me.

*   *   *

I'd been steering clear of this cubbyhole in the library for months. It was supposedly filled with several hundred volumes on metaphysics and religious studies, but one couldn't really tell, because it was also packed with easels, rolls of canvas, and other sundry painting supplies. Though Hocking himself had been a painter, these were owned by his great-granddaughter, Katie, who'd recently made this part of the library her summer studio. For some reason Katie and I had rarely crossed paths, but the signs of her presence were everywhere. Half-finished paintings and pastels were strewn about, and sketches hung from most of the bookcases on the east side of the building. I thought about the half-finished painting of Agnes in the foyer and made a mental note to show Carol the portrait at the day's end. I couldn't fault Katie for the mess; the library was hers, after all. And I could empathize with a person who became so engrossed in a project that she ignored the mundane affairs of tidiness. I hated cleaning up after myself, almost as much as I hated cleaning up after others. So despite my recent fascination with religious experience, I'd assiduously avoided these shelves. Carol had absolutely no interest in religion or metaphysics, but the prospect of handling old books was more than enough to pique her interest. So we cleaned out the corner.

We gingerly shifted Katie's things out of the way, discovering that she was not the first of her family to use this section of the library as a makeshift studio. Her paintings were intermingled with much older artworks—tapestries, ceramics, paintings, sketches, and statues. Hocking had been raised on the pragmatism of James, but his commitment to idealism ran deep. This meant, among other things, that he'd been taken by the neoclassicism that defined the architectural and artistic world of nineteenth-century New England. For a time, American intellectuals were in love with all things Greek. They saw something in classical antiquity that modernity pointedly ignored—the idea that human beings were only fully human when they aspired to truly transcendent ideals. I took hold of a large bronzed bust and thought how pretentious it would look in my study at home. But it fit in nicely here. It was a replica of a famous statue in the Vatican,
Laocoön and His Sons
. It had scared the hell out of me on my first trip to Rome, when I was twenty.

In the
Aeneid
, Virgil tells us that Laocoön was the priest of Poseidon in Ancient Troy. When the Greeks, hoping to put an end to ten years of trying to conquer Troy, constructed the famous Trojan Horse and sailed away, Laocoön was the first one to sound the alarm. He stood on the beach outside Troy, pointed at the massive horse that the Greeks had supposedly left as a parting gift, and warned his fellow Trojans against drawing it into the city. “Beware,” Laocoön cried, “of Greeks bearing gifts!” But the Trojans wanted nothing more than to believe that the long, heinous siege they'd suffered was finally over and that the Greeks were on their way home. Laocoön's message fell on deaf ears. So he did what any true seer would do: He screamed it at the top of his lungs one last time and thrust his sword into the horse's side. This caught people's attention. It also caught the attention of Apollo, who sided with the Greeks and decided to shut him up permanently. Two sea serpents slithered up onto the beach, wrapped themselves around Laocoön and his two sons, and carried them off into the foam.

I looked into Laocoön's eyes, bulging in their deep-set sockets. He knew he was going to die, but not before he watched his beloved sons drown. John Dryden compares Laocoön's struggle to the torture of a sacrificial ox that doesn't have the good sense to die immediately on the altar: truth teller as mutilated beast. This is what happens to people who have the bad luck of being painfully honest. Maybe being less honest and alive was better than being self-righteously dead, I thought. My recent experiment with honesty had been rather brutal. I'd harbored secret doubts about my marriage for years, but as I edged toward thirty, it had become harder and harder to remain silent. Days before my birthday party I'd sold the ring. This, in turn, precipitated an epic fight with my wife that erupted in front of all of my friends who'd come to Boston to celebrate the occasion of my birth. Carol had been there and had watched the entire thing go down. As my mother shook her head, as only a mother with deep Calvinist roots can, I wanted nothing more than to be utterly dead. The next day, I told everyone we were getting a divorce, and once I did that, there was no going back. Our two families wrapped themselves around us and pressured us to stay together. In the end, I didn't die, but there were many nights I wished I could. I set Laocoön down gently on a nearby desk and placed a hand on his chilly head. Being punished for telling a lie made sense, but being sacrificed on the altar of truth seemed cruel.

I helped Carol move the last easel out of the way and surveyed the shelves. I had hoped to find a treasure trove of nineteenth-century commentaries on religious traditions—from Hinduism to Jainism to Christianity—that had fascinated William Ernest Hocking, and I wasn't at all disappointed. Max Müller's famous
Sacred Books of the East
(all fifty of them) were lined up on the top shelf. Müller, a German philologist born in 1823, had been responsible for bringing the Vedas and other sacred Indian texts to Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. I scanned the middle shelves: Christian apologetics from A to Z. William James's copy of Augustine was sandwiched between Royce's copies of Meister Eckhart and a bunch of other German mystics. Both James and Royce were critical of institutionalized Christianity, but their critique did not entail ignoring the offending traditions. A vellum binding, bleached white, peered out from the shadows.
Cosmologia Generalis, methodo scientifica pertractata.
First edition, 1731. This was the
Cosmology
of Christian Wolfe—the natural theologian from the early eighteenth century—also once owned by James. Halfway through the shelf I began to slow down enough to realize what I was looking at.

American philosophy often gets pooh-poohed by the rest of the world's thinkers as having no historical basis; in their attempt to be original, classical American philosophers, like James, supposedly turned their backs on any meaningful intellectual inheritance. What I was looking at was a massive amount of evidence to the contrary. James wasn't one to worship the past, but he hadn't ignored it either. He knew that the fastest way to become passé or obsolete is to inadvertently repeat history. It's tempting to ignore the past, to pretend it never happened. But it did—and it will again and again if one isn't careful.