by John Kaag
The mid-February snow was deep, making the unpaved roads nearly impassable. As we finally hit Route 113 and crept toward the Hocking estate, our conversation faded, and I was left listening to the low hum of the Subaru on unplowed snow. Carol was fast asleep. I too was tired. It was a little after noon, but it felt much later. I guided the car through the final turn with deliberate care and made the final ascent to West Wind. The library looked like an igloo; it was going to be absolutely frigid in there. I parked the car but kept the engine running. I’d let Carol sleep and enjoy the warmth of the car for a few more minutes.
The snow was only ankle-deep, but the wind had blown drifts that covered most of the library’s stone walls. Over the years, I’d learned a bit more about those walls. In 1926 Hocking, with the help of a friend, Fred Frost, had begun to gather the granite from the hills of West Wind. They devised their construction technique from one of the first DIY building manuals, Build a Home: Save a Third. The book outlined what is called slipform masonry, a method developed in the early 1920s for making reinforced concrete with stone facing. The slip form itself is just a greased wooden frame that can be filled with rock, cement, and reinforcing metal bars. When the concrete sets enough to stand by itself, the wooden forms can be slipped off and arranged to construct the next level.
By the time Hocking undertook the building of West Wind, he was already a master carpenter: Before starting his career in philosophy at Berkeley in 1906, he’d joined the American Federation of Labor—one of America’s earliest unions—as a carpenter-contractor to help rebuild San Francisco after the great earthquake. “We were using fresh-sawed redwood lumber,” Hocking recalled, “all the dry stock long since used up; our boards were so wet that the sap would jump out of them if we hit them with a hammer. Our faces were caked with the inescapable ash-dust blown by incessant winds.” In 1910 William James wrote “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in which he argues that college-educated men should be conscripted for several years of hard public service. In taking on this sort of manual labor, privileged youth would, in James’s words, “get the childishness knocked out of them, and come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.” Hocking didn’t need to be conscripted. He volunteered.
A decade later, after Hocking returned to Harvard, he interrupted—or rather augmented—his studies of ethics and metaphysics to join the army. He was one of the first Americans to enlist in the Citizens’ Training Camp at Plattsburgh, New York—an outgrowth of the Preparedness Movement, spearheaded by Teddy Roosevelt in 1915 as a response to the escalating war in Europe. “When the time came for choosing a specialty [at Plattsburgh],” Hocking later explained, “I took military engineering where my earlier experience would come into use.” The military is usually regarded as specializing in destruction, but Hocking’s experience in the armed forces told another story—it could also be a place of construction, or at least preservation. He perfected his engineering skills at Plattsburgh and was on the first transport of U.S. Army civil engineers to reach the Western Front in the summer of 1917. Hocking went as an “observer” and entered the trenches at Croisilles, a town on the Hindenburg Line, a German defensive position that stretched through much of Flanders and northern France. He’d been invited to oversee the British war effort by the now-defunct British Ministry of Information (MI-7), in the hope that he could advise the Americans as they joined the fighting.
Being an observer didn’t mean that you couldn’t be killed, and Hocking observed combat for much of that summer. During this time he was forced to think through the relationship between destruction and preservation rather carefully. Trench warfare depended in no small part on the expertise of engineers. Trenches had to be surveyed, framed, and reinforced, much like the walls at West Wind, and when Hocking returned to the States in 1918 and took over the ROTC program at Harvard, this is what he taught his students to do. But there was another side to army engineering that Hocking never wanted to talk about.
The British counterattack against the Hindenburg Line, in the summer of 1917, marked the single most devastating engineering project in the history of nonnuclear warfare. Hocking was stationed on Kemmel Hill, overlooking the Belgium town of Ypres and the nearby Messines Ridge, where German forces had built extensive fortifications. In the previous months the British Royal Engineers had tunneled under the Axis defenses. They were the most extensive tunnels ever built for the sole purpose of being destroyed. Under Messines Ridge, engineers laid 450 tons of high explosives. When the mines were detonated on June 7, they created craters, the largest being the size of a soccer pitch. The low boom of the explosion could be heard as far away as Paris and London. Many say that the Battle of Messines was one of the turning points of the war, one of the reasons that the free world was kept in one piece. Hocking knew firsthand the devastation required for this act of preservation. In September 1917, at the end of his time at the front, he wrote to Agnes: “I have had my baptism in this immense business of war making and war thinking, and now I can come back and do my work with a deepened understanding.”
I surveyed the grayish-blue landscape surrounding the library. It was barren beneath the snow—rugged and largely uninhabitable. Yet Hocking had decided to put down roots here. “The essence of military engineering, as distinct from ‘regular’ engineering, consists in doing everything with nothing,” he’d once remarked. West Wind was really something—to Hocking, it was everything—and it had grown out of virtually nothing. The essence of military engineering, I imagined, also consisted in the knowledge that everything could be laid to waste once again. The task was to build something from nothing and then carefully protect it.
* * *
I turned the engine off, leaned over to Carol, and gently brushed the hair out of her face. She opened her eyes slowly. “Oh,” she said after a moment, taking my hand, “here we are.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Here we are.”
It’s amazing how powerful these three little words could be. I wasn’t the first to find them philosophically and personally significant. Alfred North Whitehead—one of William Ernest Hocking’s more famous friends—placed them at the center of his philosophical system. “Hang it all!” Whitehead once exclaimed in the midst of a Harvard seminar, “Here we are!” Hocking was co-teaching this seminar and loved the expression. The “we” was definitive: Both of these thinkers developed an idealism of togetherness. Hocking quoted Whitehead, somewhat ironically, long after the Englishman was gone, recounting the “here we are” moment in his 1956 The Coming World Civilization: “When my colleague Whitehead, in one of our joint seminars, throws out an amiable aside, ‘Hang it all! Here we are: We don’t go behind it, we begin with it,’ he has implicitly brushed aside one of the theoretical bases of modernity … [O]n Descartes’ ground, which is modernity’s, we must all … be solipsists in theory.” Descartes had fixated on, and defended, the sole existence of the unitary “I.” Whitehead and Hocking were much more concerned with the existence and feeling of a “we.”
“Here we are” was Whitehead’s response to the Cartesian cogito ergo sum. By the time Whitehead began writing his magnum opus, Process and Reality, in 1926, Descartes had dominated epistemology and metaphysics for almost three hundred years. Whitehead thought that was long enough. Following Hocking, he traced modernity’s hyper-individualism, its tendency to slip into uncaring solipsism, to Descartes’s philosophical position, which implied that we had, at best, limited access to the thoughts and feelings of other people. For Descartes, there could be no meaningful meeting of the minds, and people were destined to be strangers. Other people be damned—nothing else was as certain nor as preciously intimate as the existence of one’s own mental life. Whitehead and Hocking couldn’t face this philosophical loneliness. Extending a long line of American thinkers, they set out to overcome this alienation and instead argued, in Hocking’s words, for “an intersubjective Thou-art, inseparable from each subjective I-am, serving to bind their several experiences together in su
ch a way that the loose suggestion of shared experience with an identical object is defined and confirmed.”
Whitehead would have never gotten his Harvard appointment at the age of sixty-three had it not been for Hocking. Whitehead made a name for himself in logic and mathematics when he and his student, Bertrand Russell, wrote the Principia Mathematica in the first decade of the twentieth century. Yet Hocking was attracted not to Whitehead’s expertise in logic, but to the intellectual move he had made toward metaphysics and philosophy in the 1920s. In 1918 Whitehead lost his son, Eric, in World War I, a tragedy I’d always interpreted as the reason he went on to broaden his intellectual life beyond the confines of formal logic. After the war, Whitehead’s philosophical interests took an idealist turn, and he developed a metaphysical system that looked uncannily like the philosophies of Peirce and Royce. In Whitehead’s system, the world doesn’t consist of discrete billiard ball–like objects that knock against one another. Instead, parts of the universe live and move together, and have their being in a logic of events in which individuals freely participate. The task of philosophy was not to secure an individual’s solitary existence, divorced from all other beings, but to affirm a shared life in a common place. The experience of this shared life was not unlike James’s appeal to the “varieties of religious experience” that temporarily quelled the fear of existential isolation. In Whitehead’s words, “[I]n its solitariness, the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value until it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe.”
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, l
ove.” 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.