American Philosophy (3 page)

I'm not sure why I talked to Bunn (in my profession one learns to be circumspect). I do remember being embarrassed when he asked me what I did for a living.

“I teach philosophy,” I said, bracing myself for the awkward silence that usually follows this admission.

It turned out that Bunn had grown up with philosophers, or, more accurately, grown up in a little house on a corner of one philosopher's—“Dr. Hocking's”—land. Today, philosophers have arguments and the occasional student. Most of them don't have “land.” Bunn made it sound like the realm of a philosopher king, and this wasn't too far from the truth: The Hocking estate, as I would find out, comprised one stone manor house, six small summer cottages, two large barns, and one fishing pond with three beaver hutches, all situated on four hundred acres of field and forest. And a
library
. Bunn must have seen me light up when he said the word. In an act of generosity I've never been able to understand, he offered to take me there. Getting to see it struck me as a very good reason to skip out on the rest of the conference planning, so I piled into the old man's blue Dodge pickup and we bumped up the hill toward “Dr. Hocking's land”—or, as Bunn called it, “West Wind.”

 

FINDING WEST WIND

Today, most academics don't have personal libraries worth talking about, so they avoid a problem many nineteenth-century intellectuals had to face in the twilight of their lives—what to do with an intellectual home after it's permanently vacated. Of course, the books can be donated to a large institutional library. Widener is full of volumes once owned by Harvard's famous alumni. When this happens, however, the books are lost among the millions of others in the stacks, reorganized in a homogenized Library of Congress categorization. The books are put in rigid order, and the unique integrity of the original collection is lost. To avoid this fate, writers in Hocking's day would often give their libraries to like-minded friends and students.

When Bunn and I got to West Wind, the Hocking library looked abandoned. On the trees surrounding the buildings were
NO TRESPASSING
signs, but Bunn didn't seem to care. He explained that the members of the Hocking family still spent time on the land, particularly in the summer months, but no one was around on that brisk fall day. Bunn climbed out of his truck, trotted down the hill away from me to explore his old haunts, and, waving at the library, invited me to “look around.” The building was constructed of rough-hewn, multihued granite, as solid (and almost as large) as a house. From the outside, I couldn't tell whether it had two full stories, but I was able to make out the skylights in the roof, which probably filled the space with glorious reading light. It was definitely grand enough to suggest that its owner had never intended it to be abandoned. The front bore large arched windows and three sets of French doors. I peered in and was reminded of William James's love of Goethe's
Faust
. Surrounded by well-read books in the opening scene, Faust laments the fragility of human knowledge:

I've studied now Philosophy

And Jurisprudence, Medicine,—

And even, alas! Theology,—

From end to end, with labor keen;

And here, poor fool! with all my lore

I stand, no wiser than before …

James had pored over Goethe in his youth; he possessed Faust's polymathic abilities—he could have been a painter, a biologist, a surveyor, a novelist, a theologian—but James also shared Faust's sense that human capacities, even seemingly impressive ones, were pitifully limited. “All natural goods perish,” James wrote. “Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.” As I peeked into the Hocking library for the first time, I thought this was probably a place where goods come to perish. Of course, I yearned to go inside. I assumed I should wait for one of the family members to let me in, but I began to wonder if the family would ever come back. Maybe they just weren't interested in old books. I couldn't wait until the summer to look through the books. Maybe this was my only chance. “He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity,” James wrote, “loses the prize as surely as if he had tried and failed.”

Then, through the window, I spotted the
Century Dictionary
on a shelf. First published between 1889 and 1891, it was a masterpiece of lexicographical detail, running more than seven thousand large quarto pages, with ten thousand wood-engraved illustrations. When the
American Anthropologist
reviewed this dictionary a year later, the reviewer agreed with the growing sentiment of the time—saying that it was “the most conspicuous literary monument of the 19th century.” Some of the best minds in America had worked for years on this first edition, including one of the founders of American philosophy, C. S. Peirce. I'd always had a certain strange fascination with Peirce—the kind of fascination that makes you write a doctoral dissertation.

After the dissertation was finished, I decided to write a book on him. Peirce was compulsive, brilliant, and just a little mad. Son of the Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce, he picked up his brother's copy of Whately's
Elements of Logic
at the age of fourteen and breezed through it. Despite being trained as a chemist and geodesist, Peirce considered logic and metaphysics his lifelong calling. He was always an outsider to mainstream philosophy, a strange place to be for arguably the most original philosopher of the nineteenth century. His work in logic and mathematics anticipates that of Gödel and Russell. His writing on the philosophy of science easily rivals that of Popper and Kuhn. And his papers in
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy
in the late 1860s would set the terms for the first three decades of American pragmatism. James and Royce looked to him for inspiration and guidance.

In February 1903 James tried to convince Charles Eliot, Harvard's president, that Peirce would flourish if he had a stable position in the philosophy department: “He is one of our 3 or 4 first American philosophers,” James argued, “and it seems to me that his genius is deserving of some official recognition.” Eliot was unconvinced—Peirce's reputation as a troublemaker preceded him. Despite his achievements, Peirce never fit in—he was always meddling, often quite effectively, in other people's research. He dissected his colleagues' carefully crafted arguments with the unnerving ease of young brilliance. Over the course of his life, Peirce perfected the art of self-sabotage and foiled his friends' ongoing attempts to secure him a permanent position and source of income. So he found part-time employment better suited to a genius, writing entries for the
Century Dictionary
in a few fields of study: logic, metaphysics, mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, weights and measures. Once I spotted this dusty edition, I had to page through it, even though I felt a little like a trespasser. But this wasn't breaking and entering, I thought. When doors are unlocked, it is just entering. I'd take a quick peek and leave things as I'd found them.

On reflection, I know these are excuses for pretty bad behavior. But it could've been much worse. The year before, a Hocking relation had explored the empty library without the family's permission. Except this guy was high on heroin. And he proceeded to steal four hundred rare books—among them a first edition of Thomas Hobbes's
Leviathan
, published in 1651—and ship them to his home in Berkeley, California. At the library's entrance, next to the dictionary, was a manila envelope labeled
INVENTORY
. I scanned it quickly to find a list of extremely expensive books:

Rene Descartes.
Discourse on the Method
(First English Edition 1649).—(FBI Returned)

John Locke.
Two Treatises of Government
(1690).—(FBI Returned)

Immanuel Kant.
Kritik der reinen Vernunft
(Riga: 1781).—(FBI Returned)

These were first editions—hundreds of them—written by the European philosophers who had inspired and then frustrated such American intellectuals as James. Hocking collected them for one reason: He was in search of the origins of American philosophy. At the time, I didn't know what the FBI had to do with philosophical classics, but it turns out that the federal government is surprisingly good at tracking stolen books across state lines. Apparently the Hockings went to the Madison police, who went to the FBI, who retrieved a good number of the expensive volumes. Some, however, are still missing. When the thief was apprehended and brought to trial a year later, the court record notes, he “reported that he had made several attempts to convince the Hocking family to take better care of the books, but the family refused to comply … The defendant claim[ed] he took the books to protect them and had no plans to sell the books for money.” That said, he took more than a quarter of a million dollars' worth of books and did sell some of them. I carefully set the inventory list back in its place and turned to the dictionary. Its cover was original, tan leather that had taken on a dark patina over more than a century of use. The pages were surprisingly brittle for a book of its relatively young age, a fragility born of mold and of enduring many seasons of freezing temperatures followed by warmer spells.

I looked at a few random entries—“maid-pale,” “maid-servant,” “maieutic”—just enough to realize that what went into dictionaries, and into philosophy, had changed radically since the time of Peirce and James. At one point, philosophers like Peirce could determine the very language we use. They had the power to define reality. But no longer, and this was, at least for me, no small tragedy. Over the last century, mainstream philosophy had retreated into the upper reaches of the ivory tower, and as it specialized and professionalized, it largely lost touch with the existential questions that drove James and Peirce. Above the dictionary, on an unfinished oak shelf, was a set of leather-bound volumes:
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy
, where Peirce had made his mark. It was the first run of the complete set, from 1867 to 1893, all twenty-five volumes. I'd just take a look, and then I really would leave. I wanted to see Hocking's signature, so I gingerly pulled the first volume from the shelf.

Hocking's name was not inscribed in the front of the book. Instead, “Charles S. Peirce” was written in tight, neurotic script. The volume slipped out of my hands. As a professional philosopher, I very rarely hyperventilate while doing research, but Peirce was a notorious recluse. Most of his books had been sold or carried off to Harvard at the end of his life, but somehow this little treasure—Peirce's own copy of his first and most famous publication—had ended up here.

*   *   *

The last decades of the nineteenth century are often regarded as the Golden Age of American Philosophy. This era coincided with an equally exciting transition in European philosophy, marked by the birth of phenomenology, a school of thought that, not unlike American philosophy, held that philosophical questions must emerge from experience and that their answers must be judged on their ability to enrich lives. Phenomenology would eventually grow into existentialism and postmodern philosophy. All golden ages, however, eventually fade—in this case, with the passing of a number of great American thinkers. William James died in 1910; Charles Sanders Peirce in 1914; Josiah Royce in 1916; George Herbert Palmer in 1933; Edmund Husserl, the German father of phenomenology, in 1938. So William Ernest Hocking, who had studied with them and outlived them all, apparently took care of their books.

Many of the volumes in this library were from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and extremely precious, but many more contained their original owners' marginalia, and these were absolutely priceless. When Hocking died, in 1966, his son Richard—also a philosopher—became steward of the collection. He'd tried repeatedly to donate the entire collection to Harvard, but with little luck. Harvard—like the relative from Berkeley—would have cherry-picked the selections, but had no intention of preserving the library in one piece. Its unity, however, according to Richard, is what made the collection so special. When Richard died, in 2001, the books simply remained in the dark wood at the end of Janus Road, in New Hampshire. Richard's three daughters tried valiantly to look after the collection, but they lived all over North America and had the entire estate to worry about, not to mention their own lives.

Books are just paper, wood pulp smashed and dried. In the realm of rodents and termites, they're quite valuable: They're tasty, and when torn into small bits, their pages make for cozy little nests. For a decade the Hocking library had been actively used—just not by humans. The porcupines and bugs had set up house, making sure that this great mass of paper didn't go wholly to waste. “WHOEVER looks at the insect world,” wrote Emerson in “Quotation and Originality,” “at flies, aphides, gnats, and innumerable parasites … must have remarked the extreme content they take in suction, which constitutes the main business of their life. If we go into a library or news-room, we see the same function on a higher plane, performed with like ardor, with equal impatience of interruption, indicating the sweetness of the act.” I looked hungrily at the inventory one last time and then back at
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy
. The 1651
Leviathan
was rare. The 1690
Two Treatises of Government
, an anonymously written first edition that had served as the basis for American political liberty, was rarer still. In the last year, first editions of both had gone to auction. Hobbes's masterpiece had brought $32,000; Locke's tract was sold by a book dealer in Dallas for $41,000. As a student, I'd watched these auctions from a distance, snooping around the Internet to see what philosophy could actually be worth. The books on the inventory at West Wind, the classics of modern philosophy, could have been under glass at the British Library or at Yale or at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. But there was, I imagined, only one copy of
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy
with C. S. Peirce's name in it. It was irreplaceable. And it was under a thin film of dust in the Hocking library. The termites would get to it soon.