THE SEEKERS

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Kierkegaard viewed himself as a religious writer, a missionary aiming to bring Christianity back into Christendom. With his refined sensibility and subjectivity, it is no wonder that he found himself violently at odds with the established Church of Denmark, whose clergy had become mere civil servants, while the Danish Court Preacher was a champion of the Hegelian absolute. Against these false Christians, Kierkegaard led a crusade so passionate and strenuous that it wore him to death at forty-two. He finally spent his fortune on a polemical antiestablishment periodical, The Moment, to which he was the only contributor. And he left his few personal effects to the jilted Regine, who was by then the wife of the governor of the Danish West Indies.

  Kierkegaard’s vision of the dilemma of existence, which gave reality to human life, would enlist creative disciples in the century to follow—a stellar array including Nietzsche and Sartre. Those who would call themselves—or would be called—Existentialists were among the most probing and widely influential writers of the West. Their grand theme was carried in Kierkegaard’s most important (and most voluminous) work, Either/Or (1843). This was his heartfelt cry against the optimism of the Romantics who had dominated Western literature in the early years of the century. The title of this book, it has been said, is more important than the book itself. Its two volumes were arcane and elusive, but the title carried the simple message that existence was the life of choice. And it was a plain challenge to the fashionable philosophy of Hegel, which saw history as an endless mediation—always somehow preserving “thesis” and “antithesis” in a synthesis that reconciled the opposites.

  Kierkegaard the Seeker saw that the bland and cheerful affirmations of the Romantics did not touch the experience that alerted and awakened man to his existence—pain, sickness, frustration, and death. How far was all this from the encompassing Absolute simplicities of Hegel:

  If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret that; laugh at the world’s follies or weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it, believe her not, you will regret both; whether you believe a woman or believe her not, you will regret both. Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum and substance of all philosophy.

  Kierkegaard found a characteristically original way of describing man’s dilemma in what is sometimes called the first work of depth psychology. This was The Concept of Dread (1844), which concludes in a chapter declaring “Dread as a means of Salvation in conjunction with faith.” So he saw the poignancy of existence as an array of possibilities.

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  From Truth to Streams of Consciousness with William James

  There would be relief from the anguish of existence. The challenge of individual life could produce something other than Kierkegaard’s dread. The promise of experience found an eloquent and peculiarly American prophet in William James (1862-1910). A clue to the difference between existentialist dread and pragmatic hope was their ways of thinking about the current of daily experience, their ways of seeking the meaning of life.

  Kierkegaard had noted with dismay that “Repetition is not possible.” He recounts that this cosmic truth was impressed on him by the disappointing experience of returning to a theater in Berlin to enjoy once again a comedian he had seen there before.

  Beckmann was unable to make me laugh. I held out for half an hour and then left the theater. “There is no such thing as repetition,” I thought. This made a profound impression upon me. . . . I still believed that the enjoyment I once had in that theater ought to be of a more durable kind, precisely for the reason that before one could really get a sense of what life is one must have learnt to put up with being disappointed by existence in many ways, and still be able to get along—but surely with this modest expectation life must be the more secure. Might existence be even more fraudulent than a bankrupt? After all, he pays back 50 per cent or 30 per cent, at least he pays something. The comical is after all the least one can demand—cannot even that be repeated?

  For William James, on the contrary, this lack of repetition was the very spice of life.

  James would give a name to this fluid, dynamic nature of experience. He would call it “the stream of consciousness.” His suggestive metaphor would be fertile in philosophy, psychology, and literature in the following century. For James it would be a way of describing human freedom, the promise of experience—and his way of denying a static “block universe.” “Reasoning” for James, unlike the scholastics, would not be a process for arriving at empyrean truths, but simply the “ability to deal with novel data.” James’s homely metaphor would rescue the processes of thought from the arcanum of theology and pedantry:

  Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing joined; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. (Principles of Psychology)

  No life could have been better devised to open a lively mind to the many ways of seeking meaning in experience. William James was born in New York City into a family of rare talents and versatility. His father, Henry James, Sr., a prolific theological writer and disciple of the Swedish mystic theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, provided for young William a cosmopolitan atmosphere, wide travel, and schooling in France and Switzerland. Henry Senior’s works included Christianity the Logic of Creation (1857) and Society the Redeemed Form of Man, and the Earnest of God’s Omnipotence in Human Nature (1879). It was said that William acquired his openness to unfamiliar ideas at the family dinner table. The extraordinary family seminar included a philosophical sister, Alice, and Henry Junior (1843-1916), the leading American novelist of the later nineteenth century.

  Returning from erratic schooling abroad, William studied painting briefly with William Morris Hunt, then sciences at Harvard before entering the Medical School. After joining the naturalist Louis Agassiz on an expedition to the Amazon, William went to Germany, where he studied with Hermann Helmholtz and Claude Bernard, the philosopher of experimental medicine, and became acquainted with the writings of the French relativist philosopher Charles Renouvier. After receiving his M.D. he taught physiology, which for him was to become an avenue to psychology. Departing from what Santayana called “the genteel tradition” in which psychology (or “mental science”) was a branch of theology, he developed psychology into a laboratory science.

  James’s education had been a mini-encyclopedia in an age of burgeoning sciences. These revealed an ever-widening range of forces—biological, economic, sociological—that inhibited man’s power to decide. As the spirited young William James was introduced to the spectrum of human possibilities, he was deeply troubled by the problem of personal freedom. This, with other ailments, had led him to a breakdown and thoughts of suicide when he was in Germany, and then to periods of panic and despair on his return. Looking back from the career of the sanguine, healthy-minded, mature William James, it is hard to imagine him ever incapacitated by existential despair. He himself offered a charmingly simple, if not quite convincing, explanation of how he came out of it. He wrote in his diary in April 1870:

  I think yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—‘the sustaining of thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts’—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume . . . that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

  Openness to new ideas and belief in the incompleteness of the universe would be the leitmo
tif of his life. It explained his receptivity to many ideas— including Christian Science, mind cure, and spiritualism—that were suspect to his fellow scientists.

  It must have troubled James that his openness was treated as a “system” by champions and critics. The closest he came to congealing these ideas was in his Lowell Lectures, which he characteristically entitled Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Popular Lectures on Philosophy (1907). Of course, he could not prevent academics from treating his refreshing distrust of “systems” of philosophy as if it were a “system” of its own. James’s appealing colloquial mind preferred “Ways of Thinking.” He had adopted his distinctively American “Ways” from the works of the eminent astronomer and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), whose arcane articles had invented “pragmaticism.” Peirce had said that word was “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers,” but it was not safe from James, who wrote philosophy for everybody, and translated it into simple “pragmatism.”

  Seeking escape from the private world of academic philosophers, James’s Pragmatism, with the enthusiasm of the amateur, offered an instrumental definition of truth that could make sense to everybody.

  A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power.

  So James rescued Truth from the metaphysicians. “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. . . . Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. . . . The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. . . . The possession of truth, so far from being an end in itself, is only a preliminary means towards other vital satisfaction.” Among these satisfactions he would include “the religious experience,” which he surveyed with a brilliant tolerance and encompassing sympathy in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). He shows that religion, like other experience, is to be tested not by its origin but by its fruits.

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  The Solace and Wonder of Diversity

  William James’s flowing experience was only one of many escapes from the “block universe.” Another was the feel for diversity in every moment—in ideas, in institutions, in nature. The revolt against static Absolutes found eloquent expression in two early-twentieth-century Seekers—prophets of diversity—one who sang the virtues of diversity in thought and institutions, another who celebrated diversity in nature.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935), all three of whose names tied him to eminent New England Brahmin ancestors, was a surprising advocate of diversity. He found his forum in the law, which is more commonly seen as the agent of stability, uniformity, and predictability. With his temperament for action, it is remarkable, too, that Holmes made the law his vocation. In his family tradition, he attended Harvard College and on the outbreak of the Civil War enlisted as a private in the Massachusetts infantry. He saw action, was three times seriously wounded, and was mustered out as captain in July 1864. The war experience left a mark on his thought and character. He never ceased to talk of the “fighting faith.” “Through our great good fortune,” he recalled on Memorial Day, 1884, “in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.” He believed that a man “should share the passion and action of his time in peril of being judged never to have lived.”

  In his letters throughout his life he would note the anniversaries of the Civil War battles of Ball’s Bluff and Antietam in which he had been wounded. He liked to call himself an “old soldier,” and to describe the qualities needed to make a lawyer “a fighting success.” Although no American jurist would be more reflective, Holmes seemed to find satisfaction in the study of law not so much because it was philosophical as because it dealt with conflicting interests. And he even expressed his theological doubts in the metaphor of battle. As he wrote to Sir Frederick Pollock in 1925:

  I think the proper attitude is that we know nothing of cosmic values and bow our heads—seeing reason enough for doing all we can and not demanding the plan of campaign of the General—or even asking whether there is any general or any plan. It’s enough for me that this universe can produce intelligence, ideals, etc.—et superest ager.

  Despite his philosophic temperament, he always seemed to enjoy the battle more than the cause. “It is the merit of the common law,” he wrote early in his career, “that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards.” Nor would he ever be paralyzed by this conflict in his nature. “I am inclined to belittle the doings of the philosophers,” he wrote as he approved Santayana’s Life of Reason, “while I think philosophy the end of life.”

  With his active temperament it is doubly remarkable that Holmes never became a dogmatist and remained a lifelong champion of openness and diversity in our seeking. Paradoxically, he would make the law and the highest court in the land his forum for preaching his gospel of uncertainty. The federal system of the United States Constitution had conveniently made the Supreme Court an ideal pulpit for an advocate of diversity, for the Court had the power to encourage experimental variety in the laws of all the states of the union.

  Instead of following medicine, the profession of his eminent father, Holmes entered Harvard Law School after leaving the army. His father is reported to have exclaimed in dismay, “What’s the use of that? A Lawyer can’t be a great man!” The traditional law curriculum did not inspire young Holmes. But he stayed with it, graduated, and then took the traditional grand tour of Europe. Holmes returned to practice law in Boston, but his real interest was in the theory, philosophy, and history of law. He edited a scholarly law review and Kent’s classic Commentaries on American Law (1873). Then he produced a legal classic of his own in his Lowell Lectures that became The Common Law (1881).

  That book made him the spokesman of a refreshing pragmatic view, bringing into the law the same seeking spirit that his friend William James had brought into philosophy. He opened with what would become the manifesto of a new American school of jurisprudence:

  The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellowmen, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and rules of a book of mathematics. In order to know what it is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become.

  In this spirit throughout his life Holmes reviewed the hallowed abstractions of legal thought.

  One of the most ancient and revered legal abstractions was the idea of “natural law,” which he dissolved in a wholesome inquiring suspicion, and with his attractive colloquial eloquence. “It is not enough,” he observed of the reverence for “natural law,” “for the knight of romance that you agree that his lady is a very nice girl—if you do not admit that she is the best that God ever made or will make, you must fight.” “Natural law,” according to Holmes, was only another example of the paralyzing temptation to believe in changeless absolutes. “There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil who has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk.” But lawyers have no more right than philosophers to idolize their current beliefs. “Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cock-sure of many things that were not so.”

  Everything Holmes did he did copiously and with a passion. He served for twenty years on t
he Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Then President Theodore Roosevelt named him to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1902, where he served for thirty years, until he was ninety-one. On the Court he was a voice for judicial restraint, believing that the federal system was intended to allow different experiments by state legislatures within the limits of the Constitution. He became famous as the Great Dissenter, seizing opportunities to speak out for urgent views that differed from the majority opinion. And his eloquent opinions, whether for the Court or in dissent, produced ideas and aphorisms that enriched the American legal tradition. In case after case he spoke up for freedom of expression, even in wartime. He had a talent for the commonplace examples, which he would make classic: “the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing panic.” His test was “whether the words used are in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evil that Congress has the right to prevent.”

  Inspiring all Holmes’s championship of free expression was his seeking spirit, his doubt that he or anyone had an avenue to the absolute. “The great act of faith,” he wrote to his friend William James (who hardly needed the advice), “is when man decides that he is not God.” On his ninetieth birthday he was still reminding young men that his “discovery I was not God” was his “secret of success.” And in his dissenting opinions he gave unforgettable expression to his liberal faith: