American Philosophy (28 page)

Marcel, however, was indebted to the elderly American for another, more important reason: Hocking helped him find God. At one point Marcel and Sartre had been, if not friends, at least civil acquaintances, but by the end of their lives they pretty much despised each other. The fissure reflected (because it partially caused) a rift in twentieth-century European philosophy between theists and a growing number of atheists. Sartre, who quickly became one of the most recognized philosophers on the planet, used Marcel's soirees as a forum to air what would later become his formal philosophical position—namely, that human individuals are completely alone in this world and therefore radically and unshakably free. There was no one—not your mother, not your boss, not your führer, and certainly not your God—who could make you do something against your will. This freedom was nonnegotiable. For Sartre, one of the greatest difficulties of being free, of being “condemned to be free,” is that we have to be free while at the same time being surrounded by others who desperately, connivingly, unconsciously want to enslave us. Being condemned to be free wouldn't be so bad if we weren't also subjected to the “hell [of] other people.” When it came to misanthropy, Thoreau had absolutely nothing on Sartre. Of course neither Thoreau nor Sartre would have called it misanthropy, just hard-nosed realism about the human condition. But Marcel, with Hocking's help, came to disagree, and he went on to take Sartre to task at every turn for most of his professional life.

Marcel agreed with Sartre about the basic method of philosophy: It should be realistic. Existentialists stood against those thinkers from the history of philosophy who had completely abandoned the ground of human experience, taking off into ever more distant spheres of abstraction, never to be seen again. Marcel maintained that a philosopher should start from the concrete stuff of life, instead of from abstractions, and then work “up from life to thought and then down from thought to life again, so that [one] may try to throw more light upon life.” Marcel got this idea of philosophical reflection directly from Hocking's
The Meaning of God in Human Experience
, and for him, it revealed something that Sartre never saw clearly. In Marcel's words, “My reading of
The Meaning of God
was to show me once and for all that it is actually in experience, grasped at its center, that we find the means of transcending that experience.”

I'd always regarded experience as the most personal of things, the one thing that makes me who I am. Experience was, by definition, immanent, always “right here”—the only thing that could not be taken from me. Experience was always
my
experience. And the freedom of my experience depended on it remaining, unequivocally and forever, not yours. So even if it were possible to transcend my experience, it would be far from preferable to do so. For many years I had embraced this Sartrean view and faced its attendant interpersonal failures. Marcel, following Hocking, following Royce, Addams, and Peirce, told a different story. And I was beginning to get a sense of it. Experience is always, even when we fail to recognize it, transcendent. Individual experience is not a form of solitary confinement, precisely because it is never strictly “mine.” In Marcel's contribution to Hocking's
Festschrift
(a thick book long out of print, checked out from the Harvard library exactly once in the last fifty years), he writes, “as Hocking sees it, for the individual,
being
is originally and, in a permanent way,
being with
.” For Marcel, the existentialist's obsession with individual freedom was to be tempered by the equally mysterious power of love.

*   *   *

Carol was right: Our camping under the stars was, by any standard, romantic. For a philosopher like me, it was just shy of a miracle. I'd like to say that we fell asleep in each other's arms—“companions for eternity” like Marcel and Hocking. I'd like to say that the whole thing ended in one perfect consummatory moment of “being with.” But it wasn't exactly like that.

The truth is, I fell asleep with her in my arms. And she woke me up an hour later. She couldn't sleep. It was a breezy night, and there were noises in the trees behind the meadow. She was sure there was “something in the darkness.” She was also sure that she could sleep if I would keep watch until she drifted off. She was absolutely right. As soon as I roused myself, she fell asleep, and I was left all by myself with “something in the darkness.” Of course, now
I
couldn't sleep. At all. It's amazing what you hear when you actually listen, unsettling what you see when you actually keep watch.

Marcel said that our modern age was a special one, but not in a good way. Never in our history have human beings lived with such a profound sense of existential disjointedness, a dark unease felt at the very pit of our being. We moderns live in what he called a “broken world.” Marcel argued that the Industrial Revolution, mechanized warfare, and genocide had conspired to fracture our sense that the world was a place to be inhabited and revered. But I always suspected that Marcel's sense of our brokenness was more immediate and autobiographical—the result of losing a parent at an early age.

His mother had died when he was four. Looking back on her brief and sudden illness, he wrote, “Strange as it may seem I recall absolutely nothing of those two desolate days … Yet I retain a rather definite memory … I still seem to hear the murmurs of Granny and other members of the family who had come to extend their condolences.” When he was eight, on a walk with the aunt who had assumed the job of raising him, the young Marcel asked if there was any way to know if the departed continue to live on in some way. “When I grow up,” exclaimed the child, “I am going to try to find out!” His entire philosophy can be understood as the attempt to escape and then to mend his broken world. Philosophy provided ample chances to escape: “On the plane of ideas alone,” Marcel admitted, “was I able to create a shelter from these wounding contacts of everyday life.” Later in life, his position on the value of philosophy began to shift: The point was not to escape, but rather to engage the deep mystery of being human. In philosophy, for Marcel, “the unity of a broken household was reconstituted.”

I was attracted to philosophy for similar reasons. My father left us twice: first when I was four and then, permanently, when I was twenty-nine. I can hardly recall the day he first departed, but I still have a definite memory of my mother telling my brother and me that he wouldn't be coming home. It was in our furniture-less playroom, adjacent to the garage, where my brother and I usually spent the evenings dancing to folk music, one of the few things that my parents, at the end of their marriage, both liked. A beige Berber rug—the kind that lasts forever—covered the floor. My mother sat us down, and I remember pushing my little fists into the rug to see the imprint it left on my knuckles. My mother and brother, neither of whom I'd ever seen cry, sat on the rug and wept. I watched them for several minutes, slightly confused but mostly just embarrassed, and then crept into the other room to watch cartoons. I could hear them from the other room, which seemed, even at the time, very far away. I turned up the volume, and eventually the crying and the afternoon faded away.

My mother was right: My father was gone. But his absence remained. I now understand that it eventually drove me to philosophy, to study the writings of men who worked at figuring everything out, who could tell me the meaning of life, who could help me make sense of my place in a difficult world. At least at first, to philosophize was to compensate for something, for someone, I'd lost. I was, unsurprisingly, drawn to the fathers of American philosophy, obsessing about the intimate details of their lives, hanging on their every word, hoping they would explain themselves and the world to me.

*   *   *

I adjusted my sleeping bag and peered out into the night. I'd done this before. In bed, with my erstwhile wife, I'd stared at absolutely nothing for hours, unable to sleep, unable to shake the problems that I blamed for my unhappiness. What if I became a real drunk? What if I sabotaged yet another relationship? What if I became a father or, more frighteningly,
my
father? For a moment I tried, once again, to problem solve, but then I remembered Marcel's suggestion that this reaction to existential angst isn't the appropriate, much less the only possible, response to our human condition. Framing the universe—and our estrangement from it—as a problem to be definitively solved has the unintended consequence of distracting us from our ongoing participation in what Marcel called the “mystery of being.” And this participation, according to him, is about the best we humans can hope for. “A mystery,” in Marcel's words, “is a problem that encroaches upon itself because the questioner becomes the object of the question. Getting to Mars is a problem. Falling in love is a mystery.”

I was so busy with my problems that I almost didn't notice the faint light beginning to creep up from the East. On an intellectual level I knew lots of things about the moon—that it actually didn't give off light, that it moved very quickly, that it came up in the East and set in the West—but I'd never truly experienced it before. I'd just have to wait a few more minutes and the upper pasture would be bathed in light. As the moon rose, I thought it would take care of the darkness, but it simply let me see it more clearly. Long, strange shadows—the kind that weren't supposed to be cast at night—pitched down the hillside and quivered in the breeze. This wasn't some deus ex machina that would save me from my situation; it was one of those Walpurgis Nachts that do nothing to solve our discrete, often petty problems but to cast them in the proper light. Little woodland creatures—satyrs, fairies, angels, werewolves—scurried about in the thicket behind us.

James described his night in Panther Gorge, surrounded by spirits and thoughts of Pauline Goldmark, with such romantic flair, but I'd be shocked if he wasn't a little overwhelmed by the dark. James's mentor, Peirce, might have been right that the “world lived and moved and had its BEING in a logic of events,” but that night on a hillside in New Hampshire convinced me that it was not the sort of logic humans could ever fully master. It wasn't supposed to be mastered at all. It was supposed to be experienced. We play a role in the living and moving and being, and we are free to participate, but never simply as we see fit.

In June 1904 Hocking wrote to James to thank him for a course Hocking had attended on the concept of “pure experience.” Hocking had learned many lessons that term, “one of these … [being the] lively sense of how big the truth is, and how little any philosophy which flourishes its solution in a few formulae is able to do it justice.” Defining the whole truth of experience was much like describing this moon: perfectly impossible. “There is nothing more paralyzing,” in Hocking's words to James, “than an even remotely adequate sense of the complexity of the truth.”

I lay motionless on the grass. Somewhere in the last hour I'd given up on the thought of sleeping and become lost in questions about how I'd come to this hill above the Hocking library. I remembered Whitehead's comment, borrowed from Plato: “Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.” Wonder remains the origin, animating force, and ultimate end of philosophy. It is what keeps us, intellectually and spiritually, on the move. In 1951 Marcel wrote
Homo Viator
(Man, the Wanderer). Royce, whom Marcel deeply admired, would have been happy with the traditional Christian connotation of “Man, the Pilgrim,” but it still chafed me. I'd stick to the wandering, though not aimlessly. My own attempts to describe the journey to myself seemed incomplete, and were aptly explained by Marcel in
The Mystery of Being
:

Consider what happens when we tell our friends the very simplest story, the story, say, of some journey we have made. The story of a journey is told by someone who has made the journey, from beginning to end, and who inevitably sees his earlier experiences during the journey as coloured by his later experiences. For our final impression of what the journey turned out to be like cannot but react on our memories of our first impression of what the journey
was going to be like
. But when we were actually making the journey, or rather beginning to make it, these first impressions were, on the contrary, held quivering like a compass needle by our anxious expectations of everything that was still to come.

I was, like the rest of these shadows, quivering. And had been for a long time. I tried to stop, to control myself, to put my thoughts and memories in order: Buffalo, Holden Chapel, James, trespassing, prison ships, leaping, falling, willing, love, gray eyes, Agnes, Carol. It was no use. It had been, and still was, one monstrous quiver. I took a deep breath and held it as the night continued to move in its perfectly inexplicable way.

Freedom and love. For Marcel, those were the two quintessential mysteries of the human condition. At the end of
The Mystery of Being
, he concludes that the point of life is not to figure them out, but to remain open to them, in touch with them despite their utter perplexity. “Man can touch,” according to Marcel, “more than he can grasp.” I pulled a blanket around Carol's shoulders and settled in next to her. In the months before their marriage, Hocking had written to Agnes, “[Y]ou are with me nearly always. How incredible it all is. I spend most of my time trying to realize it—and giving it up.”

Dante's
Divine Comedy
ends in a similar way. At the end of his epic journey through hell and purgatory and paradise, he finally arrives at the Empyrean, the everlasting abode of God. When I first read the poem, I thought that I'd done so to get some concrete answers about divine love and freedom. The Empyrean was the place where all this reading was supposed to pay off. At the time, I'd been deeply disappointed. In the last stanzas of the poem Dante tries to understand how the highest spheres of heaven fit together. Because they really must, after all, fit together, but he doesn't have the words to articulate their majesty. Dante looks up at the divine orb that lights the sky, tries to explain it, and finally concludes that such a venture “is not a flight for these wings.” A decade ago I'd thought that the whole point of Dante's journey was to reach the end. But there was no definitive ending: