American Philosophy

by John Kaag

  The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,

  Each like a corpse within its grave, until

  Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

  Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill

  (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

  With living hues and odours plain and hill:

  Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

  Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!

  The first stars peeked out from behind low-hanging clouds. I thanked Jennifer for my dinner of cheese, bread, and locally grown apples (she’d graciously changed the menu when she noticed I wasn’t touching the flesh) and then returned to the library to spend another night on the chesterfield. Inspecting the sofa for mouse scat, I stretched out. Hay, everywhere. Spring would come. Hay, all around. West Wind: destroyer and preserver.

  PART II

  PURGATORY

  THE TASK OF SALVATION

  It was nearly daybreak, and a light rain played on the roof above me. Boxes of books surrounded my makeshift bed. I’d promised myself that I would finish packing them and tote them off to dry storage, but after a day in the fields with Jennifer, the prospect of spending another hour inside with a cast of dead white men seemed suddenly unappealing. Through the shadows I could just make out a photograph on the mantel: two of Hocking’s beloved teachers, Royce and James, sitting on a split-rail fence on the crest of a pasture outside Chocorua, which was no more than five or six miles from the Hocking library. Royce, who rarely took a break from philosophical speculation, had come to visit James’s summer house in 1903 and had made yet another attempt to convince him of the existence of God. James was bored, which made him mischievous. He already believed in God, but Royce’s God was too constrictive and meddling for James’s religious tastes. According to legend, when James’s daughter snapped this picture, her father cried, “Royce, you’re being photographed! Look, out! I say Damn the Absolute!” For James, beautiful afternoons were for walking and breathing—not for abstract systematizing. We are free for such a short time, according to James, that there are often better things to do than philosophy. I roused myself and realized that if I got busy boxing and cataloging the Descartes and Hobbes, I might still have plenty of time for a hike.

  “Trivial.” That was James’s word to describe most of the rare books I was to spend my morning organizing. In 1895, just three months after delivering “Is Life Worth Living?” at Holden Chapel, James explained to George Howison, the founder of the philosophy department at Berkeley, that this belief about the value of the history of philosophy “came out of one who is unfit to be a philosopher because at bottom he hates philosophy, especially at the beginning of a vacation, with the fragrance of the spruces and sweet ferns all soaking him through with the conviction that it is better to be than to define your being.” At its best, according to James, philosophy helps us make sense of life—to understand it, yes, but also to awaken us to its nuances and potentialities. The love of wisdom is supposed to guide us in living more fully, more meaningfully. But in the modern era, which reached its height in the writings of Descartes and Hobbes, philosophy had begun to lose its existential bearing. James didn’t have much time for it, particularly at the beginning of a camping trip in the Adirondacks, a vacation he routinely took to restore his mental health. Large swaths of European thought didn’t make sense of life, but rather rationally deconstructed it, overintellectualizing everyday practices and reducing the richness of human experience to a small number of discrete aspects. In the process, James thought, philosophy, which had the potential to be the most significant of intellectual pursuits, became “trivial.”

  I reached into my first box of the day for a book that was largely responsible for James’s disgust: the first Latin edition of Descartes’s most famous work, Dissertatio de Methodo, published in Amsterdam in 1644. There was one passage from Descartes that I wanted to read before getting down to the business of cataloging. It was the heart and soul of rationalism, arguably the most important claim of modern philosophy—“Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). American philosophers working in the nineteenth century were a diverse group of thinkers, but they found common ground in their critique of this seemingly innocuous statement. The Cogito is the concluding argument of a very intense investigation. American philosophers such as James appreciated Descartes’s inquiring spirit and the skepticism that drove his philosophical argument, but they also thought that the Frenchman had ultimately reached the wrong conclusion.

  Descartes wrote Discourse on the Method as a response to a growing crisis in Europe. In the first half of the sixteenth century the Catholic Church had begun to come undone. In 1517 Martin Luther had tacked his 95 Theses, which outlined the sins of the Catholic Church, to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany. This act initiated a dramatic break from the hierarchy and dogmatism of Catholicism that had structured much of everyday life for centuries. The theological crisis intersected with the scientific revolution: The findings of Galileo, Newton, and Kepler began to challenge long-standing assumptions about human nature and its relationship to the wider natural world. According to Galileo, we were not the unquestionable center of the universe. We were, at best, spinning around something much larger than ourselves and, at worst, simply spinning out of control. Unlike the dogmatic certainties that had held sway since the Middle Ages, the truths that science struck upon were flexible or, more frighteningly, provisional, ready to be overturned at any moment. At the same time, the discovery of the New World presented not only a social and political crisis but also a metaphysical one. For most Europeans, this discovery was tantamount to making contact with life from another planet. Modern skepticism was born at this historical moment and served as the backdrop for Descartes’s philosophical system.

  I flipped through a second edition of Descartes’s Meditations—once owned by Royce—which I’d found wedged beneath the chesterfield: “The Meditation of yesterday has filled my mind with so many doubts, that it is no longer in my power to forget them … and, just as if I had fallen all of a sudden into very deep water, I am so greatly disconcerted as to be made unable either to plant my feet firmly on the bottom or sustain myself by swimming on the surface.” Drowning. Hyperbolic doubt is a little like that. Descartes understood that your own body weight pulls you down against your will, and you eventually suck in water instead of air. When set on the high seas of doubt, it is tempting to cling to a small handful of things about which one is fully, absolutely certain. In the absence of certainty, some of us manufacture it from scratch and then defend it as if life depends on it. This is what Descartes did with the Cogito argument. In response to the existential crisis of his day—and the skepticism it begat—he produced one truth that could underpin human knowledge. Many things, according to Descartes, can be doubted: Perhaps institutions of authority are deeply flawed; perhaps our senses mislead us; perhaps the material world is just the grand hoax of God; perhaps God isn’t even in charge, and the Devil, the real master of the universe, rejoices in deceiving us. But there was one thing he could not doubt—that he was a thinking thing. What is most essential—or, in his words, “clear and distinct”—about an individual is the existence of his or her mental capacities.

  Turning back to the Discourse, I looked down at the short Latin sentence. Just three words. Most American thinkers agreed: The Cogito was brilliant and rock solid—but more than a little strange. The essential truth that Descartes eventually uncovered is merely this: that to the extent that he is thinking, he exists as a “res cogitans,” a thinking thing. This was the sort of truth rationalists could believe in, one that did not require empirical evidence. It became what Descartes called his “Archimedean point,” an axiom upon which he could rebuild the human sciences and prove the existence of God. He’d struck upon the something that would keep his world from going to pieces.

  Despite the argument’s logical consistency and originality, thinkers working in the wa
ke of Descartes slowly came to a rather disturbing opinion—namely, that many brilliant discoveries are deeply misguided. Something can be a certainty yet also be absolutely meaningless. Thinkers such as James suggested that defending brilliant but meaningless certainties is quite foolish. Descartes was so determined to secure human knowledge—to maintain order and rationality—that he would sacrifice almost anything to complete his task. American intellectuals of the late nineteenth century tended to believe that he’d sacrificed the very thing good philosophers were meant to address: the uncertainties and deep existential questions of life itself. They pointed out that in its search for order, the Cogito argument had relinquished a question that was supposed to remain central: What makes life significant? According to James and Dewey, Descartes’s fixation on being a “thinking thing” ended up prioritizing mental powers over all other aspects of sentient life and ignored the basic bodily processes of organisms, the social contexts that ground our lives, and the emotions that touch us deeply. James, Royce, and Hocking were also quick to point out that Descartes’s argument worked well to prove his own existence as a thinking thing, but it said absolutely nothing about the value of the world outside his immediate subjective life. This is what most philosophers of this century called “the problem of other minds.” Cartesian rationalism was a type of island mentality, solipsistic to a fault. In James’s words, “Descartes’s life was absolutely egotistic.”

  American pragmatists had a problem with Descartes’s conclusions but also with his philosophical method. They suggested that searching for a single absolute truth was not the appropriate, much less the only, response to personal or intellectual insecurity. Sometimes insecurity was a good thing. In many cases, it meant that you had the chance to be free.

  I’d spent the better part of a decade defending something that wasn’t really worth defending, something allegedly certain but largely meaningless: a supposedly well-ordered marriage. At least ostensibly, it would have lasted well into old age if I hadn’t realized that defending it, working on it, arguing about it was wasting the life it was meant to secure. Long after my marriage had fallen apart in the concrete, I spent many years defending the solidity of marriage in the abstract, but the abstraction ultimately did little to assuage my most personal feelings of insecurity and isolation.

  * * *

  I turned Descartes over in my hands and laid him to rest in the box. James had concluded his note to George Howison in 1895 with a stark admission: “I am a victim of neurasthenia, and the sense of hollowness and unreality that goes with it. And philosophical literature will often seem to me the hollowest thing.” Neurasthenia was the nineteenth-century term for depression and the irritability, headaches, and lassitude that went with it. Today, it is usually attributed to biological causes, to the fate of our physiology; and James the medical student knew there was something to this. But James the humanist was unwilling to believe that a life’s efficacy was determined by material factors beyond our control. He would spend much of his later life arguing that the meaning of human existence turned on freedom. Many of the most celebrated figures from the history of philosophy, however, overlooked this empowering idea.

  Who was the original owner of these first editions of Descartes? It was not, I was almost sure, a lover of Jamesian freedom. I’d begun to stack the remaining seventeenth-century books on Hocking’s desk: a good-size pile edging a hundred, with the two most valuable on top. I picked up the smaller of the two and opened it to the cover page. It wasn’t likely, but it wasn’t impossible either: Maybe the Descartes volumes had once been owned by this author—Thomas Hobbes. It was De Cive: Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, 1651. This was the first English version of the work, which, along with Leviathan, secured Hobbes’s place in the pantheon of philosophical greats.

  Hobbes met Descartes in Paris in 1648. According to most accounts, the meeting between them was respectful, if lukewarm. Respectful because Hobbes recognized that Descartes was a genius when it came to logic and geometry, lukewarm because Hobbes was a materialist and Descartes was decidedly not when it came to the human soul. But as American thinkers such as Royce observed, there were deep and abiding similarities between the two thinkers. Like the Discourse on the Method, Hobbes’s De Cive had been written in a time of crisis. The Reformation, which had so pointedly challenged notions of truth and authority for Descartes, spilled over into the political strife of the Anglo-Spanish War. In 1588 Hobbes’s mother heard the news of the impending invasion of England by the Spanish Armada; terrified by the prospect, she went into labor prematurely, giving birth to Thomas. Looking back on the circumstances of his birth, Hobbes writes that “fear and I were born twins together.” The religious wars of Europe got under way in 1618 with the Thirty Years’ War, and Britain itself fractured along religious lines in the English Civil War about a quarter of a century later. So Hobbes was not crazy or pessimistic when he imagined—for the first time in De Cive—that life in the state of nature, in the absence of civil society, was best described as a “bellum omnium contra omnes”—a war of all against all. In this tumultuous historical setting, Hobbes’s objective was not wholly different from that of Descartes: Both men were in search of security.

  As the Chicago pragmatist John Dewey, a friend of James’s, argued in 1918, Hobbes wanted desperately to find a solid basis on which to rebuild political authority. Hobbes was a Royalist, which meant that he fled England when the Civil War broke out in 1642, and he wrote this first edition in response to the beheading of Charles I. For Royalists everywhere, the execution of the king was a tragedy of unprecedented proportions. Not only did it signal the continuation of the political crisis in Britain, it also put a point on a belief that had gained currency in the previous century—namely, that kings and queens were not divinely appointed. The execution, for many, amounted to the death of God. Under these dramatic circumstances, Hobbes undertook the difficult task of rationally justifying the power of the monarchy. He realized that the foundational principle for grounding modern politics could not be derived from the hitherto unquestionable divine right of kings. Instead, it had to emerge from the rational self-interest of individuals who faced real social and political problems. Hobbes argued that when confronted with chaos, all rational individuals should prefer lockstep order over the risks of freedom. They should agree to institute an absolute monarch, what Hobbes termed the “Leviathan,” to maintain some semblance of peace and security. The modern social contract was born. Dewey conceded that this was a brilliant philosophical move, but one that stood to jeopardize personal freedom for centuries to come.

  I cracked open the brittle cover of the first-edition Leviathan. Today, the first page of a book is often its most boring part—a bunch of copyright information or some banal, platitudinous dedication. But in the seventeenth century it was often the most informative. If you understand the etching on the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, you don’t really have to read the rest.

  Even before finishing the manuscript, Hobbes began to consult Abraham Bosse, a French artist who would be commissioned for the etching for the frontispiece. Hobbes’s intention was to depict an argument that was three hundred pages in the making. After dozens of false starts and failed attempts—revisions that drove Hobbes to distraction—Bosse pulled it off.

  Hobbes’s Leviathan is represented by a giant king, arms raised Rocky-style, looming over a landscape that is dwarfed by comparison. This is no simpering aristocrat of the seventeenth century. In his right hand the king holds a sword. In his left, a crosier. He is covered in chain mail from the neck down. Above him are inscribed the words from the book of Job to describe God: “Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur” (No power on earth can compare to him). His chain mail is a thing of artistic beauty. If you look closely, though, you see that it isn’t chain mail at all. What looks like metal links are, in fact, the profiles of tiny men and women—the subjects of the Leviathan. Hobbes argued that legitimate and absolute autho
rity came from the rational self-interest of each and every person. Each subject gives up his or her (yes, there are women in the chain mail too) personal liberty in return for the security that the Leviathan provides. This quid pro quo became the basis of the social contract that underpinned the modern nation-state for the next three hundred years. And it was the hard core of Hobbes’s philosophical project, which established rational principles for a political state that was less susceptible to civil war.

  I squinted at the chain mail. All those frightened little people. They weren’t forced to obey the king, but their fear of insecurity compelled them to take orders. The subjects of the Leviathan couldn’t have cared less about one another; they weren’t standing arm in arm out of some deep sense of fellow feeling. Hobbes’s “non-tuism” (literally, “non-you-regarding”) suggested that people were pointedly indifferent to the interests of their neighbors; fear and self-interest are what brought them together. For most of my life, despite my on-again, off-again love for American philosophy, Hobbes and Descartes had been my go-to men when it came to explaining human behavior. People were generally scared senseless and would do just about anything to quell their fears. They cooperated, became friends, and fell in love, but at the end of the day they loved exactly one person—themselves. Relationships were, at best, functional: ingenious ways of coping with individual frailties and neuroses. Non-tuism made sense too. It wasn’t that I had malevolent intentions when it came to others; I’d just never cared much about them.

  * * *

  Looking up from my boxes of philosophy, I caught sight of a small marble bust on the corner of the mantel behind the picture of James and Royce. It wasn’t Hobbes or Descartes: It was Dante. A five-inch monument to humanistic genius. The contrast between the Divine Comedy, published in 1320, and the tracts of modern philosophy was not lost on American thinkers of the nineteenth century. Hocking—along with every other thinker from the Golden Age of American Philosophy—loved Dante as much as he disliked Hobbes and Descartes. In 1843 Emerson produced the first English translation of Dante’s La Vita Nuova, or The New Life, a work the Transcendentalist called “the Bible of Love.” The poet James Russell Lowell, who was a frequent visitor at the James and Peirce households and who, with the help of Charles Eliot Norton, installed the Divine Comedy as a centerpiece of educational life at Harvard in the 1860s, explained the poem’s appeal. It was, in Lowell’s words, “a diary of the human soul in its journey upwards from error through repentance to atonement with God.” It was to be read personally, tenderly, as a how-to manual for living a meaningful life. Personal salvation wasn’t just a single triumphant moment of beatific insight, as some of the Transcendentalists had suggested. Moments of insight do occasionally happen, but Dante’s point is that the real trick to salvation is that there’s no trick to salvation. It’s just work, plain and not at all simple. Salvation is revealed in the long road of freedom and love. Pragmatists like Peirce and James—who assumed the mantle of philosophy from Emerson after the Civil War—knew that this journey was an arduous one and that it almost always began in hell. It was a journey filled with Lyme disease and mouse droppings and frigid water, but one in which you could still possibly make a bit of progress toward the light.