American Philosophy (16 page)

I'd heard about this mountain long before my acquaintance with William James. I grew up on the outskirts of Reading, Pennsylvania—a sad town that had never managed to reclaim its industrial glory days. But it tried desperately, which meant that students in town had to pay their respects to such authors as Wallace Stevens, who'd had the questionable fortune of calling Reading their home. Stevens had been Hocking's classmate at Harvard in 1901 and picked up the pragmatism of James that continued to circulate through New England at the turn of the century. Both Stevens and Hocking were drawn to the belief, held by James, Royce, and Santayana, that ordinary experience always pointed to some deeper, more meaningful reality. And sometimes to something genuinely sublime. Stevens had hiked Chocorua after graduating from Harvard; maybe he'd even felt his way through the morning gloom to this very perch. His poem “Chocorua to Its Neighbor” is disturbingly beautiful. It is, according to the literary critic Harold Bloom, “a morning-star poem, astral and Shelleyan, stationed in the difficult rightness of the moment when day is half risen.” The difficult rightness of the moment—he had that right. I sat there in silence, listening to the mountain, reciting the poem in my head:

I hear the motions of the spirit and the sound

Of what is secret becomes, for me, a voice

That is my own voice speaking in my ear.

The sound of what was secret quietly echoed in my ear, a tiny
daimon
voice. I should just tell her, it said. It wouldn't have to be grand or sublime. I would just—just once—be honest, and she could take it or leave it. It was a type of difficult rightness that should at the very least be faced. Stevens, however, knew that this was no easy matter.

I looked down the hill to where the gray birches were beginning to show themselves in the morning light. They didn't waver or shrink back into the shadows.

“I think we've officially missed the dawn,” she said with a hint of disappointment. “Maybe we'll catch it next time. Let's keep going, okay?” I got up and turned to follow her. Maybe I could tell her at the top, or on the way.

Emerson was a walker. He believed that the plight of modern society could be traced to its inhabitants' inability to stand squarely on two feet. Thoreau “sauntered,” and “having no particular home, [he was] equally at home everywhere.” And William James hiked. Hard. For James, the point of climbing mountains was not to get to the top or to see the sun rise at a particular time; it was about the journey. James simply liked to tramp, to feel the dull ache in his legs, the burn in his lungs. And he just about died doing it. On July 7, 1896—in the summer after his address at Holden Chapel—he set out from the Adirondack Loj near Keene, New York, and, making for Mount Marcy, took the Van Hoevenberg Trail to the top. The fifty-four-year-old James had his sights on Panther Gorge, on the southeast side of Marcy, about seven miles away. He reached the lodge there just before dusk and spent the next few days scrambling up the High Peaks of the Adirondacks. I've spent days on these trails, and none of them is particularly easy. In hindsight James admitted that this weekend of exertion did something to his heart—it was never the same again.

But the story of James and Panther Lodge is not merely a story about hiking. It's a story about hiking and a woman who was not his wife. A twenty-four-year-old named Pauline Goldmark was the woman James had arranged to meet at Panther Lodge. Goldmark was the ninth of ten children of Czech and Polish Jewish immigrants. She'd just graduated from Bryn Mawr and would, according to the married James, “make the best wife of any girl [he knew].” There was nothing particularly scandalous about their meeting in the wilderness. Except that James loved her. On some level she probably loved him back. As far as I knew, they never consummated this probable love, but that didn't really matter. In a letter to fellow pragmatist F.C.S. Schiller, James described Pauline: “[She] is a biologist, has done practical philanthropy work among the poor in N.Y., is athletic, a tramper and camper, and a lover of nature such as one rarely meets, and withal a perfectly simple, good girl, with a beautiful face—and I fairly dote on her, and were I younger and ‘unattached' should probably be deep in love.”

Who was James kidding? Over the next twenty years he'd write eighty-five letters to Goldmark. In one of them he wished that his own twenty-one-year-old daughter could meet Pauline and thereby learn to be more like her. There was much to emulate: In the first decade of the twentieth century Goldmark would become the president of the National Consumers League, which fought for workers' rights against the forces of industrial exploitation. After that she became the associate director of Columbia University's School of Social Work. James's wife, Alice, knew all about Pauline: They were acquaintances, although Alice was understandably cool to the young woman. James made no secret of the feelings he had for her. That summer, he was preparing the Edinburgh lectures that would later become
The Varieties of Religious Experience
, and in Panther Gorge he had one of these experiences with Pauline. He wrote to Alice about the evening, which “turned out to be one of the most memorable of all [his] memorable experiences”:

The moon rose and hung above the scene before midnight, leaving only a few of the larger stars visible and I entered into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description. The influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people around me, especially the good Pauline, the thought of you and the children … the problem of the Edinburgh lectures, all fermented within me till it became a regular Walpurgis Nacht.

Walpurgisnacht
, also known as Witches Night, can be confused with Halloween, but it shouldn't be: It is a gathering of spirits in late April to celebrate the coming of spring, a ceremony of rebirth. James and Pauline spent most of this night at Panther Lodge outside, presumably alone, save for the spirits that walk the earth on Walpurgis Nacht, the moonlight streaming down to light up the woods in a “checkered play.” To James, it seemed as if “the Gods of all the nature-mythologies were holding an indescribable meeting in my breast with the moral Gods of the inner life.” What a meeting it must have been: Pan and Dionysus and a bunch of satyrs gathering with the moral Gods of James's grandfather. James concluded that “the two types of Gods have nothing in common” but that this tension made the spiritual meeting “something worth coming for, and repeating year by year.”

The sun eventually rose on James's Walpurgis Nacht, but the madness continued. Pauline was a tramper and camper, and James tried to keep up. Their party set off the next morning to the east and climbed Mount Marcy again, and then the 4,800-foot Basin Mountain, and then the Gothics. They finally reached the Putnam Camp just before dark, and the ten-hour trek almost killed William James. His heart gave him trouble from that day forward, but it was worth it. In 1902, when he traveled to Edinburgh to deliver the Gifford Lectures, which would later become
The Varieties of Religious Experience
, he wrote to Pauline, admitting that “[r]ather than be writing in Edinburgh, I would be sitting or lying on any summit in the neighborhood of K.V. [Keene Valley] with your adjacent soul.” Many things had happened to James's heart on that arduous trip to Panther Gorge, and he would never be the same again.

A few small rocks spilled over a lip about ten yards ahead of me. I looked up just in time to see Carol climb out of view and to realize that I was falling behind. I quickened my pace. For a woman who hadn't wanted to get out of bed, she was making good time. I was reminded of Emerson's comment that “in the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.” She'd tied the puffy coat around her waist and now was making her way up the mountain with her whole body.

I managed to catch up before we reached the rocky cone atop Chocorua. Three hundred feet below the summit is a little cabin where campers can still spend the night, though it was empty when we arrived. We peeked our heads through the open cabin door and then took a seat on the rocks to survey the view of the lake below. The last ten minutes of the hike are the most demanding, and it is best to make a go of it when you're somewhat fresh. I, at least, needed a break. I realized that this was probably the longest stretch of time Carol and I had spent together without speaking. I turned to look at her, realizing that I'd been so busy catching my own breath and thinking about James that I'd failed to notice how tired she was. Her face was beet red, and her cheeks—not her forehead—were glistening with sweat. I handed her a water bottle and stretched back on the rocks behind us, peering up at the summit.

Four hundred years ago, according to legend, an Abenaki seer named Chocorua had thrown himself off that high cliff, probably landing right where the cabin now stands. Chocorua had welcomed the incoming English settlers, but when they killed his son, he was less hospitable. After avenging his son's death, he fled to this mountaintop, a number of Englishmen in hot pursuit. Instead of being captured, he opted for a fatal fall of several hundred feet. Before he jumped, the seer had placed a curse on the surrounding valley. “Evil spirits breathe death upon the cattle of the white man! Wind and fire destroy your dwellings! Panthers and wolves howl and grow fat on your bones. Chocorua goes now to the Great Spirit!” It was quintessential New Hampshire, quintessential American philosophy: live free or die. In a similar act of free will, Socrates chose hemlock over a life of imprisonment or exile. And in a more protracted but less dramatic decision, a middle-aged James hiked his way to a relatively early grave. For James, it was more a case of “live free
and
die.” Better to die freely than to live in chains, or so the story went.

In the 1890s the wealthy Bostonians who vacationed around Chocorua thought it would be a nice idea to build a hotel at the top of the mountain. Carol and I were sitting about one hundred yards from where the hotel, called the Peak House, once stood. This single-gabled clapboard house was a precarious-looking thing, foundationless, perched on slick granite. In 1894 a thousand visitors signed the logbook, William James among them. It cost $13 to spend a week at the Peak House—just shy of $1,500 by today's standards. The Boston Brahmins were apparently happy to pay it. They returned year after year to make the rough trek up the mountain and then dine like royalty.

I stood and extended my hand to help Carol up. It was a three-hundred-foot scramble to the top. She was worn out, but she rallied, and we turned for the summit. I'd made the trek many times, but today I too was tired. And cautious. The wind was blowing, and I knew it could be very strong up at the top. The wind had actually taken down the Peak House in 1915, and it had never been rebuilt. Carol still wanted to make a go of it, but I suddenly realized that the wind was too strong. We could face the cone another day. She reluctantly agreed, and we carefully inched our way back down the mountain.

 

THE WILL TO BELIEVE

The days grew shorter and colder, and winter break approached. Carol and I went back to our separate end-of-semester slogs, and our weekend with Chocorua, James, and Coleridge slowly faded into the bleak grayness of New England snow. She left for the holidays, first with her husband in Toronto and then with her sister's family in Tuscany. I stayed at home. My
daimon
could protest, but it didn't change matters one bit: At the end of those short days I was still alone in my apartment. There was a horrible inevitability about the evenings, as if they'd been evoked by a force wholly indifferent to human needs. In
The Myth of Sisyphus
, Camus writes that human nature is marked by “the absurd,” which he defines as the divorce between human purposes and a world that continually thwarts them. Sisyphus pushes his boulder up the hill, but gravity repeatedly gets the better of him. I filled the days as best I could—grading papers, doing my laundry, finishing my taxes, trying my best not to think about Toronto or Tuscany—but everything seemed so empty, so mechanical, so painfully Sisyphian.

I'd never brought any of the Hocking books back to Boston, but Huxley's copy of Cudworth had somehow followed me home and interrupted the monotony. I found it one evening on the backseat of the Subaru while unloading groceries: an unexpected but meaningful reminder of my—nay,
our
—last weekend in New Hampshire. Placing it gently in one of the flimsy market bags, I headed for my empty apartment. There was now plenty of time to think through the puzzle of Neoplatonism, evolution, and American philosophy.

The idea that the workings of the world are set out in advance, mechanistically determined, destined to pinball human beings from one tragic moment to the next, is one that has haunted the history of philosophy from its inception. This was the idea that Cudworth spent the better part of his life combating. I set the groceries and the Cudworth in the living room and slipped into the dimly lit bathroom. Looking in the mirror, I had to admit that the evidence for determinism was pretty convincing. I'd aged rather uncontrollably over the last year, with wrinkles, stubble, and gray hair appearing out of nowhere. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was becoming someone else against my will, and that I was looking more and more like my father. Returning to the living room, skirting the sofa that my ex-wife and I had squabbled over but I had eventually bought, I settled into the beat-up armchair, setting my feet on the coffee table where we had regularly eaten dinner in silence. I eyed the empty bottle of wine on the table. I'd split it with myself the night before. Twice. At that moment, with Cudworth in my lap, it seemed likely that I would live in this chair for the rest of my life.

Cudworth would have chided me for my fatalism. He'd been a defender of free will in an age when science was just beginning to show that life—including human life—was a function of hard-and-fast physical laws. Many philosophers, including Cudworth, raged against the indifferent machine of determinism. Others, such as Hobbes, just gave in. For Hobbes, like many of the scientists of his time, life was just matter in motion. In
De Corpore
, Hobbes describes human beings as natural bodies, as just one kind among others, like mice and porcupines. According to him, when it comes to choice, human beings are on the same footing as other sentient beings; their wills are determined by external forces. In the words of John Fruit, who summarized Hobbes's materialism in the 1890s, “Man is an automaton; the notion of personality, especially in its characteristic of self-determination, is excluded … [T]he argument is, that what are called voluntary actions are necessarily caused, for they are caused by the will, which in its turn, is necessitated.” Cudworth went ballistic. This was not a world that the Cambridge Platonist could stomach. Without choice, the world was without morals and therefore—perish the thought—without God.