American Philosophy (20 page)

Hocking liked this sentiment, in no small part because it reminded him of his own philosophical system, developed in
The Meaning of God in Human Experience
. His insistence that Whitehead be brought to Harvard permanently in 1924 reflected Hocking's desire to have a philosophically kindred spirit in a department that was quickly being handed over to philosophers who wanted nothing to do with idealism. Hocking courted Whitehead for several years and finally invited him to deliver the prestigious Lowell Lectures at Harvard in 1923, which were subsequently published as
Science and the Modern World
in 1925. The presentation copy of this book had been wedged into a rusty file cabinet at the back of the Hocking library, signed, “To Agnes and William Ernest, with love, Alfred North Whitehead.”
Process and Reality
was published four years later; a first edition of the book, inscribed by the author, was still tucked away on its shelf when we entered the icy library. I found it and placed it next to the pencil sketch Hocking had done of Whitehead in the 1930s. Both of them could sit on the mantel this weekend.

Carol was already happily ensconced at Hocking's old desk, surrounded by volumes that needed to go into our catalog. She didn't give a hoot about Whitehead. Or about metaphysics, for that matter. But she'd done her part in helping me beyond self-imposed loneliness, not least by giving me a book by David Foster Wallace when she returned from Tuscany. I'd devoured
Infinite Jest
almost against my will and then turned to his much less intimidating pieces, memorizing his famous commencement speech, “This Is Water,” in a week and internalizing his argument for the “intersubjective Thou-art.” According to Wallace, we're not fated to be “imperially alone” at the center of our little “skull-sized kingdoms,” but have the rare and precious choice to venture outside with others. Whether we do is completely up to us, but this choice of togetherness beckons even, and most importantly, when we feel the most cut off.

*   *   *

In the previous months of working at the library I'd moved chronologically through the first editions of West Wind: from Spinoza and Descartes to Hobbes and Cudworth, Paley and Malebranche, Locke and Hume. Now we'd finally reached Carol's bread and butter: Kant. Hocking had collected the first editions of every major book Kant had ever written, starting with the
Critique of Pure Reason
, published in Riga in 1781, and finishing with the
Critique of Judgment
, released a decade later. Carol was intensely interested in Kant's middle works, particularly the moral theory of the
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
. She was slowly fingering through this ambitious yet skinny volume. Our cataloging of Kant was going to take a long time, but we didn't need to hurry. We could come back to West Wind as often as we needed to. The Hocking sisters had met Carol the previous year and had immediately fallen in love with her.

Carol looked up for a minute. “What are you doing?”

Looking at you, I thought. “Same thing you are, colleague. Cataloging.”

She worked through the
Groundwork
—collating a book that most people would describe as a mere pamphlet. As the pages turned, she peered in for a better look, as if to decipher the whole of Kant's deontology in a few pages of German. She was one of the few scholars I knew who allowed Kant to be exactly as formal and morally exacting as he'd intended. Deontology—one of the three great moral theories of the West—was all about duty. Duty to others and duty to oneself. Most of my friends who wrote about American pragmatism thought that Kant's sense of duty was so rigorous and inflexible that it didn't fit with human experience. For Carol, this wasn't a problem—she believed that when people fail to conform to universal moral principles, it's the people, not the principles, that need to be fixed.

Kant thought it important to establish certain obligations to others even when we don't especially like them. Moral obligations arise from the ability to recognize others as rational agents who can set and pursue ends for themselves. It was irrational, and thereby morally impermissible, to impede the rational projects of one's neighbor. This all made good sense to Carol, who was especially taken by Kant's view of self-respect—he argued that each of us has moral obligations to ourselves to protect our own powers of self-determination and dignity. I always suspected that Carol's divorce could be traced to this Kantian duty of self-respect, which, on her reading, usually trumped conventional moral commitments. In any event, as I peered over her shoulder at the
Groundwork
, I decided never to test my hypothesis about the importance of her self-respect. I put my hands on her shoulders, we stood together for a long moment of contemplative silence, and then I slipped around to the other side of our desk.

*   *   *

Hocking had been more skeptical than Carol about Kant's project. He believed in treating others with respect, but he was concerned that Kant failed to move beyond the “problem of other minds” set up by Descartes. In the course of Kant's formal—some might say tedious—analysis, he never gets around to explaining how we could overcome this solipsism. He does his best to set up a clear system of moral duties, but articulating our most intimate connection with others was not something the bachelor from Königsberg was prepared to address. In Hocking's words, the modern age was “infected with the relativity and the warping of the disparate egos, whose problem of togetherness Kant himself never squarely faced.”

I knew that Carol would want to pore over the Kant, to make sure that every page was fully intact. Even if I inspected a few and cataloged them, she'd still take the time to go through everything herself. My eyes wandered around the library. West Wind had changed since I had first come here two years earlier. Once a resting place for “pestilence-stricken multitudes,” it had slowly become a place where what was on the brink of destruction could be preserved. As Shelley had once said: destroyer and preserver. I thought about the chesterfield where I'd inhaled the mouse droppings more than a year before. Maybe that was where Carol and I would be sleeping tonight. I looked up to the portrait of Agnes, who now seemed to smile down on us with those cool, all-knowing eyes. I was no longer ashamed in the face of her omniscience.

“You're not really interested in these books, are you?” Carol asked in a way that was only slightly accusatory. As I stammered some excuse, she laughed and gave me a look suggesting that nothing could be more important than Kant.

“I was thinking about you and Agnes.” I pointed to the portrait. “I'm going to go work on the Hegel. I assume you want to stay put?”

“You assume correctly, love.” That was a nice and unexpected addition to our repartee. “Love.” It sounded vaguely English, like something from Carol's Canadian past, and more sincere than I could have hoped.

*   *   *

The Hocking library was partitioned by its bookshelves into cozy nooks, little intellectual crannies where a scholar could set up temporary residence for an afternoon or a week. Each nook, consisting of shelves on its two opposite sides and a wall of windows, was approximately six feet wide—just large enough that a person of my size could sit at the desk, facing the window, and reach for books from either wall without having to get up. The post-Kantian philosophy was in the southwest corner at the front of the library and was in surprisingly good shape. I'd spend the rest of the afternoon there, plucking out first editions that were interspersed with family photo albums.

One of the first books I came upon was
Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie
, published in the German university town of Jena in 1801. When it came to the greats of German idealism, there was Kant, and then there were Schelling and Hegel. This was the first printing of Hegel's first publication:
The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Philosophical Systems
. The first editions of Hegel's famous
Phenomenology
and
Encyclopedia
had already made their way to dry storage, but I'd missed this early volume. It was tucked behind a number of newer volumes, as if it had been hidden there for safekeeping or meant as the backdrop for the rest of German idealism. Something else was back there, but I'd have to remove all these books to reach it. With them came the customary centimeter of what I hoped was only dust. Pinched behind was a postcard-size tome, no thicker than my wallet. I opened it and read—or tried to read—the filigreed eighteenth-century German.
Ueber die Möglichkeit einer Form der Philosophie
überhaupt
(On the Possibility and Form of Philosophy in General), published by a nineteen-year-old Friedrich Schelling in 1795, his first book.

I thought about calling out to Carol, but thought better of it. She was happy with her Kant. I paged through the tiny volume, past words that looked archaic and menacingly long. With a dictionary and a lot of trouble I'd slogged my way through it once in graduate school. Hocking, however, could've breezed through this text without any problem. In 1902 he had traveled to Göttingen, where he became the first student to study with Edmund Husserl, the father of modern phenomenology, a school of European philosophy that, like pragmatism, believed that philosophical speculation should attend to human experience. Sixty-two pages of Schelling wouldn't have intimidated Hocking. It wouldn't have fazed his Harvard mentor, Josiah Royce, either. Royce, who was practically Teutonic, had made his own pilgrimage to Heidelberg and Göttingen in 1875 and 1876. Royce and Hocking—two of the last idealists at Harvard—were profoundly indebted to Hegel and Schelling, a fact that emerged repeatedly in the course of their philosophical lives. Royce lectured on post-Kantian idealism hundreds of times, and his lectures were so accessible, so thorough that many of them were published, first as
The Spirit of Modern Philosophy
in 1892 and then posthumously in
Lectures on Modern Idealism
in 1919.

I slipped out of the nook and returned with a copy of Royce's lectures on German idealism
.
To understand American philosophy, you needed to get a sense of its European roots, but to understand certain bits of Continental philosophy, you sometimes needed to find a very good American teacher—such as Royce.

*   *   *

Josiah Royce was not exactly tall and not exactly handsome. As a philosopher, when you look like this, you have one of two options. You can sanctify all things lonely and unbecoming and head out to Walden with your neck beard. Or you can follow Royce's lead and push beyond your awkwardness to fight the isolation that you seem almost fated to suffer.

Royce was elfish and a little pitiful, but his philosophy was grand and systematic. Many of his students even called it beautiful. Like Hocking, Royce was brought up far from the circles of the Harvard elite. Born in 1855 in Grass Valley, California, a tiny mining town between Reno and Sacramento, Royce didn't share the pedigrees of Peirce and James. He was an outsider, and he felt that way his entire life—loneliness and discontent were not philosophical abstractions for him, but a way of life he desperately tried to escape.

As a boy in Grass Valley, Royce would hike up a deserted hill at the back of his house and sit for long hours at the solitary gravesite of a miner who'd lived and died long before an odd mixture of evangelical faith and lust for gold had inspired Royce's family to trek to California. Royce read Edgar Allan Poe as a twelve-year-old and wrote a gothic essay, “The Miner's Grave,” in his last year of high school. For Royce, the grave represented a life so insignificant that it hardly mattered when it flickered out: “Affection's hand had not been present to erect anything by which the memory of the deceased might be kept up,” observed the thirteen-year-old Royce. “Only a little mound of earth … and a shingle, with a half-effaced inscription, distinguished the spot from the common earth around it.” Even in his youth Royce was terrified of being this sort of nobody. He entered the University of California at age fourteen and immediately became the brunt of his classmates' jokes, including a graduation skit featuring him as a “fiery-haired Jehovah” with an enormous head and cartoonlike pot-gut. Not all teased kids become philosophers, but I suspect that all philosophers, at one point or another, were teased kids. When Royce went to study in Germany at the tender age of twenty, he was in search of genuine companionship for a way to escape alienation. He found what he was looking for in the post-Kantian philosophy that dominated the academy in Heidelberg and Berlin.

I flipped to Royce's lecture on Hegel. Modern philosophy, from Descartes to Kant, reflected deep-seated and extremely problematic dualisms—the divide between mind and body, between the human and the natural, between subject and object, between individuals and their neighbors. Cartesian solipsism was the outgrowth of several of these philosophical divides, and philosophers writing in the aftermath of Descartes had been relatively unsuccessful in their attempts to overcome this legacy. So Schelling and Hegel, writing at the dawn of the nineteenth century, set out to develop an idealism that would unify the seemingly disparate parts of the universe. Royce, more than James and Peirce, was interested in this type of harmonious worldview. He wanted togetherness, a way of mending his broken world. And he wanted it more than almost anything else. He'd been brought to Harvard in 1882 as a replacement when William James was on sabbatical, and he spent the next thirty years ensuring that the insights of German idealism would not be forgotten.

Royce's lectures on German idealism began where all philosophy does—in biography. Hegel and Schelling met as students at the Tübinger Stift, a seminary in Tübingen where many of the greatest young minds of Germany came to study. These two “Stiftlers” (as students were fondly called) joined the poet Friedrich Hölderlin in 1789, and the trio embarked on a not-so-simple quest to transcend Kant. They shared a room at the seminary, but compared with his two friends, Hegel was a philosophical late bloomer; for much of his adolescence, he assumed a backseat to Schelling. In Royce's words, “Nobody had yet detected any element of greatness in Hegel … during all these years Hegel matured slowly and printed nothing. The letters to Schelling are throughout written in a flattering and receptive tone.” I looked at Hegel's first attempt at a book. It was largely and obviously derivative, a gloss of Schelling's system.