American Philosophy (14 page)

I squatted down next to Carol to look at the bottom shelf. It was dusty and tightly packed, as if it hadn't been touched for a century. Considering the contents, it probably hadn't. Outside of Harvard's Widener Library, I'd never seen a collection of Plato and Neoplatonism like this. Most of the texts had belonged to Royce and had been bequeathed to Hocking when Royce died, in 1916. I glanced up at the shelves that were stacked on top. For Hocking, Plato had provided the solid metaphysical and ethical foundation upon which all religions rested. This isn't exactly true (the Vedas were much older), and Hocking surely knew this, but Plato loomed large in his thinking and, for that matter, in the development of American philosophy. One of the first things Emerson ever wrote was the Bowdoin Prize Essay at Harvard, “The Character of Socrates,” in 1820. He was seventeen. This was the young man who would go on to be called the “Yankee Plato,” a moniker that amused Carol. I handed her an eighteenth-century translation of the Neoplatonist Plotinus. His was a form of idealism, but not the German sort she was used to. This was one of Emerson's favorites, I explained. He thought it contained the seeds of philosophical genius, so he called it a “spermatic book.” She thought that was hilarious. I'd not genuinely laughed for a long time, but that afternoon in the corner of a moldy library I remembered the nature of true laughter, the kind that plants itself in the pit of your stomach and grows into something life-affirming. For the average philosopher who's used to controlling each and every mental function, it's a strange sensation. You're laughing—you just can't help yourself.

Plato and Kant both thought that the point of life was to live a good one. But they disagreed about how exactly we should embody this goodness. For Kant, it boiled down to recognizing and acting upon moral duty; to live well was to follow a set of well-thought-out and well-defined rules. Being free amounted to being rational. He wasn't much for laughter. Laughter and passion were additive, not constitutive, when it came to living a good Kantian life. I turned back to the shelf and, arming myself with one of Royce's copies of Plato, settled into one of the Stickleys. Kant might have been right, but he was dead boring about it, at least by my lights. Plato and Socrates thought the good life couldn't be defined in this hard-and-fast way. Life, at its best, wasn't always to be lived strictly by the book. There's more freedom and feeling—the stuff of actual
life
—in the Platonic dialogues. The pursuit of the good life, for the Greeks, was a profoundly personal, emotion-laden, all-consuming quest for a beautiful soul.

The beautiful soul was worth sacrificing everything for. Everything! Socrates stands before his neighbors and says the unthinkable—that there is something worse than death: living an ugly, wicked, boring life. This is not the stuff of Kant's “pure reason.” It's the stuff of personal vision, insight, and a foolhardy courage to speak the truth. According to William James, who read his share of Plato, it's all about the “zest.” It's the zest that makes life significant. This is what Emerson found so attractive about Socrates. Socrates believed that the pursuit of the Good was a kind of divine madness. I paged through the
Phaedrus
and found one of my favorite bits: “The best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift of the god.”

I felt Carol behind me. The
Phaedrus
is a crazy dialogue. The craziest. She peered over my shoulder long enough to read both pages and see a passage I'd obsessed over for nearly a year: “There is no truth to that story that when a lover is available you should give your favors to a man who doesn't love you instead, because he is in control of himself and the lover has completely lost his head. That would have been a fine thing to say if madness were evil, plain and simple.”

“That's not particularly Kantian,” she whispered. “Is it?”

*   *   *

Laocoön kept faithful watch over us as we made our way through Hocking's shelves that afternoon, providing a constant reminder of the pains that attend dangerous truths. I knew the other version of the Laocoön story—where he was killed for having sex in a sacred place. With that thought, I forced myself to concentrate on the books.

The shelf packed with Plato was amazing. Hocking had ordered it chronologically, from the earliest dialogues, through the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proculus, to a curious group of seventeenth-century thinkers called the Cambridge Platonists. At the end of the shelf was a well-worn first edition of Samuel Coleridge's
Aids to Reflection
from 1825
.
I looked at this collection more closely. Emerson had never grown tired of these thinkers, writing in 1850:

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes he among our originalities. We have reached the mountain from which all these drift boulders were detached … every brisk young man who says in succession fine things to each reluctant generation,—Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge,—is some reader of Plato, translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good things.

Whosoever would be a Platonist must be a nonconformist. Being a follower of Plato meant never following anyone ever again. The philosopher Boethius was charged with treason in fourth-century Rome. There are a number of different accounts of his execution; he was either clubbed to death or chopped up in little pieces for conspiring against the Ostrogoths, who had taken control of the Roman Empire. The fifteenth-century French writer Rabelais fared a bit better, but only because he went into hiding to escape being condemned as a heretic for satirizing the Catholic Church. And then there was Coleridge. Rebel of rebels, hero of heroes, he occupied a special spot in my heart. Emerson loved him too—he had read Coleridge's
Aids to Reflection
as a young man; this is where Emerson picked up his early interest in Plato and Plotinus. Coleridge's Romantic interpretation of the ancients put the difference between Plato's bold drama and Kant's strict system into stark relief.

Coleridge—following a long line of Platonic thinkers—believed that Truth was realized through a sort of inner calling that granted each person partial access to the reality of the Divine. Every person could attend to this individual calling if he or she had the courage to take heed. For Coleridge, Socrates was courage personified; in the
Apology
, the Greek says that he pursues the Good and the True with the help of a
daimonion
—a “divine something”—that warned him against making bad decisions. Socrates listened to this
daimon
and therefore ended up living and dying nobly. The implication for Coleridge was clear: Those who fail to listen to the voices in their heads screw up royally. I knew all about these voices. One had warned me about getting engaged, and then about getting married, and then about staying married. If only I had taken its advice sooner. I'd watched Carol get married while my little
daimon
said all sorts of inappropriate things. My wife and I had traveled from Boston to Vancouver to hear my new colleague say her vows to another man. I'd forced myself to ignore the voice in my head, to lean over to my wife of the time and say in as convincing a voice as possible, “They're going to be happy together.” I think I almost believed it at the time.

Listening to your
daimon
isn't necessarily easy. Coleridge gave it a go as a young adult. He had great plans to start what he called a “pantisocracy,” a coed agrarian commune based on principles of equality, of which his
daimon
silently approved. With one of his Cambridge buddies, Robert Southey, Coleridge spent months laying the groundwork for a utopian community in the Susquehanna Valley, Pennsylvania. It would not be unlike the Transcendentalist commune that sprang up at Brook Farm, outside of Boston, in the 1840s. But Coleridge's idea was more than a little insane—he had no experience farming and wouldn't have survived a week on the eighteenth-century frontier. In preparation for the trip he married Sarah Fricker, the sister of Southey's fiancée, in the belief that the foursome would form the core of their new community. On this point, his
daimon
screamed at him to stop, but he didn't have the guts to listen. After the wedding, things quickly turned sour. Southey backed out of the pantisocracy, having decided that the simple life was untenable in the modern world. Coleridge's idealism had led him to drop out of Cambridge to raise money for this egalitarian society, so he was left without a calling and with a wife he didn't really care for. In a scathing letter to Southey he wrote, “You are lost to me, because you are lost to Virtue.” It was self-righteous anger born of the frustration of an ill-suited marriage.

I thought for a moment about Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” written months after his union to Fricker. Ostensibly it is a poem about an old captain whose ship is lost at sea, but it's actually a thinly veiled tale of a dismal marriage. It's no coincidence that the whole ghastly poem is told to a group on their way to a wedding party—it's a warning about what can happen in such a union. The Mariner makes one really bad decision, and the winds change, set the ship off course, and then fail to blow at all. Motionless in the middle of nowhere:

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

Marriage can be something like this, and the albatross is always there, a sign of regret tied around one's tired, scrawny neck.

Many say that divorce is too easy today, but most of these people have never tried it. In my experience it's very difficult to shake the albatross. In Coleridge's day it was next to impossible. When he eventually got around to listening to his
daimon
, it told him to jump ship, and quickly. He did. He left his wife, and European Romantic poetry was born.

“I have to get a little air,” I said, looking around to see where Carol was.

A voice answered from the middle of the library: “Okay, go on, I'll join you in a bit.”

I grabbed a book, traversed the bookcase, and made my way toward the voice. She was hunched over a reading table that was stacked with dirty volumes, just underneath the portrait of Agnes Hocking. She looked up long enough for me to once again appreciate the uncanny resemblance, and she smiled and went back to work. I stepped out and took a long breath before wandering around the manor house through the uncut grass now covering nearly all of West Wind, and I looked down across the valley. At some point in the not-so-distant past the grassy stretch between the library and the mansion had been trimmed back so that the Hocking girls—now the Hocking women—could perform plays for the family on the lawn. I imagined a bunch of children assuming the roles of Shakespeare or Sophocles as their hyperintellectual parents directed the whole affair. A scene of human culture, performed by babes, set in the vast expanse of nature. Coleridge would've eaten it up with a spoon.

I walked across the back porch, laid my hands on the back of a rickety Adirondack chair, and watched the sun pass slowly overhead. My god, the light. It cast long, steady shadows down the hill. I searched for my own among the shapes but eventually gave up and turned my attention to Emerson. He met an aged Coleridge in the early 1830s; Emerson was in his late twenties and had escaped to Europe after the death of his first true love. Coleridge's Platonism and Romanticism gave the young American hope. As Socrates suggests in the
Phaedo
and the
Crito
, our physical existence is not the be-all and end-all. We should tether our frail bodily lives to enduring ideals and hold fast, even if doing so means giving up life. These ideals—the Real, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful—were to be understood through persistent reflection, the type of self-examination that Socrates believed made life worth living. At the beginning of
Aids to Reflection
, Coleridge states this clearly: “There is one art of which every man should master, the art of reflection.” Only through reflection and its product, self-knowledge, were self-determination and self-possession possible. But self-determination wasn't just a matter of looking back on your actions and wishing that you'd paid closer attention to your
daimon
. For these Platonic thinkers it was more mystical, more mysterious. Reflection brought you into immediate contact with something beautifully transcendent.

I'd picked up a biography of Emerson—one of the very good ones—on my way out of the library. The author, Robert Richardson, knew Emerson inside and out. I sat down and paged through the biography slowly. Richardson had realized that Emersonian self-knowledge wasn't the shallow self-help of the twenty-first century, the solipsistic quest of a neurotic culture, but rather an attempt to interrupt the neuroses of our society, to find oneself in nature, and to consider the possibility that, in Emerson's words, “the currents of Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God.”

As young men, Emerson and James hoped with all their being that this was true. A generation later, Virginia Woolf summed up Emerson's Romantic Platonism rather nicely: “[W]hat he did was to assert that he could not be rejected because he held the universe within him. Each man, by finding out what he feels, discovers the laws of the universe.” This might sound like a bit of megalomania, as if the only thing in the world that matters is how one feels. But Emerson's message about nature and selfhood was equal parts empowering and humbling, restoring and effacing. As I sat in front of West Wind looking at the mountains in the afternoon's shadow and light, it made sense. It came close to William James's description of mystical experience as “a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God.” I sat perfectly quietly and listened. How did I feel? The question was a good one, which I'd not answered for a very long time. I found my answer when I looked over the ridge, to places where the trees had recently been clear-cut. New growth was already beginning to pop up, eking out a bit of life before the freezing temperatures set in.