American Philosophy

by John Kaag

  Do you like me or not?—for example. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such cases what makes your liking come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt … ten to one your liking never comes … In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.

  I really wanted to agree: Faith based on desire, on the feeling of volition, was an indispensable thing. In James’s words, “The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth’s existence.” I returned to my computer to check Orbitz again. Nothing had changed, but I’d keep my eye on tickets.

  Setting Cudworth on the kitchen counter, I trundled off to bed with the thought that American philosophy had inherited an idealism and a sympathy for human feeling that made life slightly more bearable.

  EVOLUTIONARY LOVE

  Discovering Cudworth interrupted my daily routine and led me back to themes in American philosophy that I risked, once again, losing: the idea of freedom and the prospect of love. I woke, showered, shaved, cleaned up the apartment, and returned to my books.

  After publishing “The Will to Believe,” James faced a firestorm of criticism. He wrote to his friend and mentor Charles Sanders Peirce that he’d “been in a lot of hot water” over the essay. Peirce thought it was impressively original and admired James’s defense of free will, but he had some serious reservations. James’s argument for the causal efficacy of human volition was only a partial response to Huxley and other biological determinists. The question that continued to bother Peirce was about the origin of human freedom. Where did free will come from? What are freedom’s metaphysical preconditions? Peirce’s response to the problem of determinism had a slightly different emphasis than James’s did. Whereas James sought to prove the existence of freedom through an act of Renouvier-inspired willfulness, Peirce, the scientist, wanted to carefully explore the degree to which “chance”—what he took to be the enabling condition of freedom—operated in the workings of the universe. Like James, Peirce had struggled with Huxley and Darwin through his student years at Harvard. In the 1860s he had criticized the biological classification systems of both Agassiz and Huxley, but on the whole he found the possibilities of evolution fascinating. Darwin’s death, in 1882, provided the occasion for scholars, Peirce included, to assess the impact of evolutionary theory and to alter its course. Peirce thought that theorists working in the wake of Darwin had done him a great disservice by emphasizing the orderly design of evolution over chance and variation. At the end of 1883, in an unpublished manuscript entitled “Design and Chance,” Peirce wrote: “It has always seemed to me singular that when we put the question to an evolutionist, Spencerian, Darwinian, or whatever school he may belong to, what are the agencies which have brought about evolution, he mentions various determinate facts and laws, but among the agencies at work he never once mentions Chance.”

  Peirce’s interest in chance in the 1880s wasn’t purely academic. He was in this period preoccupied with the chances for his personal life and, more specifically, for romantic love. “Design and Chance” was written as Peirce was considering taking the most radical chance of his life. He’d married Harriet Melusina “Zina” Fay many years before, in 1862, thereby temporarily quashing any chance of happiness. Zina was independent and smart and wouldn’t put up with any of Charlie’s dandyish and dilettante ways, and his family was extremely grateful when she began to straighten him out. Peirce, however, was not suited for the straight and narrow and, by the late 1870s, was looking for distractions. He found one in Juliette Froissy, a beautiful, diminutive actress whom he probably met in 1876 at the Christmas ball at the Hotel Brevoort in New York. “Probably” is the operative word here. No one—except Peirce and Juliette—seemed to know exactly where or when they first met. For that matter, no one really knew who Juliette was. Peirce claimed, well into old age, that he didn’t even know her true family name. Some said she was a Hapsburg princess, others a Roma Gypsy, still others part of the French aristocracy.

  The saddest part of many scandals is the cover-up, a lame attempt to mask the radical choice that has been made and to fit a moment of madness into the comfortable sanity of the everyday. I thought that Peirce handled his romantic affair bravely, if not entirely wisely. He didn’t try to conceal it; in fact, he flaunted it for six years, traveling with Juliette while he was still married to Zina. I suspect he didn’t relish being cruel or shocking, but rather enjoyed the feeling of freedom that came from doing something socially unacceptable. For a man plagued by the question of determinism, this moment of free love was probably a welcome relief. In April 1883 Peirce finally decided that he wanted out of his marriage, and he filed for what in that day and age was a rare divorce. Two days later he married Juliette. In a single impulsive act, Peirce initiated a death-do-us-part romantic commitment, proclaimed his love for the power of chance, and solidified his reputation as an academic and social pariah. The fallout from this illicit marriage was ugly. Peirce wrote “Design and Chance” in the next month, as if his life depended on it. It was a metaphysical defense of radical contingency. Human life—like the universe at large—did not operate solely by laws and orderly habits. It was defined by chance occurrences, the frequencies of which are inversely proportional to their magnitude: Cataclysmic ones happen rarely; less dramatic ones happen more often.

  Peirce realized that his defense of radical chance was not without problems. Determinism denied free will by holding that every act—including those of human beings—was caused by an infinite series of prior events. Our decisions and behaviors are fated and therefore out of our control. But suggesting that the universe was defined by radical chance could lead to a similarly dissatisfying result. Peirce knew that chance could break the spell of the determinists, but it also could break the idea of causality itself. Chance, as a purely random or chaotic event, implied that there was no necessary causal relationship between our past and the present or, more frighteningly, between our present and the future. This strictly chaotic system was not altogether different from a deterministic one: It conceived of a world beyond our control. In order to avoid this conclusion, Peirce had to refine his definition of chance.

  Chance can connote a random occurrence, but also, he observed, a rare opportunity, a possibility that is freely chosen. Discussing Peirce’s argument with Hocking and Royce in 1903, Ella Lyman Cabot, one of the few women of classical American philosophy, put the point nicely: “Chance is always my chance!” For Peirce, chance was an opening for human beings to explore at their will, a space to be personally responsible for one’s actions. The difference between Peirce’s first marriage and his second is instructive. The first one, with Zina, was forced and expedient. It foreclosed certain possibilities and narrowed Peirce’s angle of vision. The second, precipitated by chance, realized as potential, was most certainly free. He fell in love with Juliette, seizing an opportunity that flew in the face of societal expectations and traditional commitments.

  Peirce’s love had confounded me for nearly a decade. Theirs wasn’t always—or even mostly—a happy marriage, but he and Juliette remained together for nearly forty years. The later years of Peirce’s life were absolutely miserable. The facial neuralgia that had plagued him for decades took a turn for the worse, and he became addicted to the drugs—alcohol, morphine, and cocaine—that he used to self-medicate. His finances were terrible—he remained on the edge of poverty during his last twenty years. And he exhibited all the hallmarks of someone suffering from psychological afflictions—from Asperger’s to bipolar and depressive disorder. But he didn’t abandon Juliette as his life slipped out of control. They squabbled over money, and he would occasionally carp about her housekeeping, but for the most part he remained
firmly in love. When Juliette fell ill in 1889, he made it clear that he’d staked absolutely everything on the relationship, stating with classic Peircean melodrama: “If I should lose her, I would not survive her. Therefore, I must turn my whole energy to saving her.” And he did. Despite admitting that her husband could be “perfectly awful,” Juliette returned the favor and kept Peirce alive much longer than his self-destructive tendencies—drinking, drug abuse, overwork—should have allowed. If life was going to be a disaster, at least it would be their disaster. They were companions in misery to the very end.

  I ate my breakfast—the same banana and toast I’d eaten for a decade—and wondered how philosophy had managed to lose its personal character. In graduate school I was taught to carefully ignore the personalities that gave rise to philosophical arguments. But this was almost impossible when it came to American philosophy. The first page of Walden is explicit: “In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.”

  Peirce’s papers are not exactly like Walden. Most of them are covered with equations and charts, but insofar as they reveal Peirce’s personal character, his unpublished manuscripts were thoroughly Thoreauvian. His writings are mercurial—logical formalisms and metaphysical speculations interspersed with intimate anecdotes and private confessions. These personal tangents were signs that Peirce had been brought up under American Transcendentalists who held that philosophy should be woven into the conduct of life. Autobiography was the outgrowth of serious philosophical reflection. Peirce’s philosophical system was a reflection of a person who willingly got sidetracked. Beneath his formal critique of determinism was a living, breathing person whose life defied any prescribed logic. And beneath his technical metaphysical system was a man who craved intimacy and love.

  Darwinism and determinism, according to American pragmatists, overlooked the importance of chance but also produced a worldview that precluded the possibility of meaningful relationships. For thinkers like Huxley, the arena of life was just that—one where people were destined to be pitted against one another in a gladiatorial fight. Despite his occasional fits of rage, Peirce didn’t want to live in this sort of world, so he fashioned a philosophical one more suited to his desires.

  For him, the cosmos was neither held in gridlock by mechanical necessity nor a chaotic mess of competing forces. Instead, it was a “multiverse,” or a “pluriverse,” defined by complexity and held together in improvisational harmony by individuals freely pursuing a more perfect union that was always in the making—an ideal, never achieved but always pursued. To the extent that the world realizes this more perfect union, it does so loosely, provisionally, by means of what Peirce would call “evolutionary love.” This was not the self-love that drove the evolution of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. Peirce held that that sort was no love at all. He explains that evolutionary love, or agape, is characterized by the willingness to “sacrifice your own perfection to the perfectionment of your neighbor.” According to Peirce, it is the decision to hold our own selfish interests in abeyance and give ourselves freely to another. This is not easy, but it is also not impossible. “Love,” according to Peirce, “recognizing germs of loveliness [even] in the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely.” The movement of this love is “circular, at one and the same impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony.” Peirce realized this later in life, but it would be too late for Zina. As an elderly man, he argued that agape is the basis of creative evolution that begins by chance but grows as individual purposes harmonize and sympathize over time. Gardening, a pastime the Peirces enjoyed together on their estate in Milford, Pennsylvania, was Peirce’s favorite example of loving care. There is, according to him, a certain purpose or telos to gardening; the results can be influenced but not controlled or guaranteed, nor are they predestined. A master gardener lovingly encourages her plants to grow as they may. The best that a person could do in life was to cultivate a garden of her own. Peirce’s belief in the generative force of love influenced thinkers who carried the torch of American philosophy into the twentieth century. Writing in 1913, in The Meaning of God in Human Experience, Hocking continued to maintain that “love of this sort is the one thing in the world that is creative.” Hocking, following Peirce, understood love to be a reasonable principle for change because of its ability to hold opposites together in a kind of productive tension, encouraging the interplay of necessity and chance.

  “The world,” according to a rapidly aging Peirce, “lives and moves and has its BEING in a logic of events.” This “logic of events” was not your standard deductive or inductive variety; it was a logic that had to accommodate chance and variety, but also purpose and intimacy. It was the “logic” of love. Peirce borrowed his words from the book of Acts, where it is said that humans “live and move and have our being” in God. As he developed his essay “Evolutionary Love” in the 1890s, he came to the belief, expressed in the Gospel of John, that “God is love.” On April 24, 1892, Peirce entered St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue in New York City and came as close as he ever would to experiencing this firsthand. On that New York morning, Peirce was drawn into a religious experience that revealed the unseen but unmistakable affections of the world. He was not a churchgoer, but on that day he felt compelled to visit, and he later wrote to the rector at St. Thomas that he entered the church and approached the altar rail “almost without my own volition.” The “almost” is important. Every act of communion, of Emersonian “give and take,” of affectionate love, is a certain kind of choice. This agape, or divine love, according to Peirce, was just the way the world worked, and it was up to us to participate. Peirce had long criticized institutional religion and the idea of transubstantiation, but he suddenly, freely gave himself over to “the Master.” “I have never before been mystical,” Peirce writes, “but now I am.” The experience of divine love, according to Peirce, was not constrictive or inhibiting. Rather, it gave him the will to carry on through another difficult decade.

  I’d spent more than enough time thinking about determinism. I finished my toast, cracked my laptop open, and resolved to get in touch with the outside world. But first I would read “Evolutionary Love” one more time. I was so immersed in my Peirce that I barely registered the ping of my email notification. It was Carol, asking for a ride back from the airport. Tuscany had been beautiful, but she was ready to come home. The email went on for a few paragraphs, with no mention of Toronto. This probably meant little more than there was nothing to report about her husband. I assumed that their relationship was strong enough and habitual enough that she didn’t have to mention him to her colleague. This was not pleasant to think about, but if Peirce was right, it was best to embrace the objectionable whenever possible—to, in his words, warm the hateful into loveliness. So I’d pick my colleague up and try to make the best of it.

  PART III

  REDEMPTION

  A PHILOSOPHY OF LOYALTY

  Her plane was forty-two minutes late. I’d wandered around the terminal at Logan for more than an hour. I wanted to see Carol more than I had any right to, and at this point I was beginning to worry that I’d already missed her.

  Early in Agnes O’Reilly’s acquaintance with Hocking, months before they were married, she had traveled to Italy. In one of his many letters to her, Hocking wrote, “For one reason I am glad you have gone away. It gives me the chance to realize you … I like to see you from time to time mentally … and say, ‘She is a friend of mine.’ I am proud of it, dear, way down in the bottom of my heart.”

  Maybe Carol was downstairs in the baggage claim. I headed for the escalator and glided downward to continue the search.

 
; “John. Hey, John!”

  I turned around and spotted Carol’s curly head at the top of the escalator. I hadn’t missed her, but I was going the wrong way. I about-faced and made a dash against the mechanical flow. She caught me at the top. The hug started out professional enough, but my hand somehow ended up on the back of her head and gently pulled it into my neck. She didn’t pull away. And then she whispered something I could hardly hear.

  “I’m getting a divorce too.”

  Peirce never tells us about meeting Juliette for the first time or exactly what it felt like when she fell ill. And he never tells us what happened in his religious experience at St. Thomas’s or exactly what his communion with the Absolute was like. All he tells us is that he was radically, irreversibly changed: “I have never been a mystic before; but now I am.” Some things are better left unsaid, and others can’t be said at all. Carol and I drove home together in silence. We had dinner that night. And the next night. And the night after that. For many nights. And then we went back to West Wind.

  * * *

  Decisions that once seemed completely foolhardy now made perfect sense, so a month after Carol’s return, we decided to brave the awful weather and drive north toward Madison through a growing blizzard. We took our time and laid our plans for the coming years. The Hockings were open to the idea of donating a large collection of the books, and Carol and I were intent on finding them a proper home. We’d have to get the books appraised, but before that, we’d finish the cataloging. The appraisal and subsequent donation could happen in the warmer months, but the cataloging would be done in the unpredictable New England winter. This didn’t bother me at all. In fact, for the first time in my life I was singularly unbothered.