American Philosophy
Page 16
I thought about calling out to Carol, but thought better of it. She was happy with her Kant. I paged through the tiny volume, past words that looked archaic and menacingly long. With a dictionary and a lot of trouble I’d slogged my way through it once in graduate school. Hocking, however, could’ve breezed through this text without any problem. In 1902 he had traveled to Göttingen, where he became the first student to study with Edmund Husserl, the father of modern phenomenology, a school of European philosophy that, like pragmatism, believed that philosophical speculation should attend to human experience. Sixty-two pages of Schelling wouldn’t have intimidated Hocking. It wouldn’t have fazed his Harvard mentor, Josiah Royce, either. Royce, who was practically Teutonic, had made his own pilgrimage to Heidelberg and Göttingen in 1875 and 1876. Royce and Hocking—two of the last idealists at Harvard—were profoundly indebted to Hegel and Schelling, a fact that emerged repeatedly in the course of their philosophical lives. Royce lectured on post-Kantian idealism hundreds of times, and his lectures were so accessible, so thorough that many of them were published, first as The Spirit of Modern Philosophy in 1892 and then posthumously in Lectures on Modern Idealism in 1919.
I slipped out of the nook and returned with a copy of Royce’s lectures on German idealism. To understand American philosophy, you needed to get a sense of its European roots, but to understand certain bits of Continental philosophy, you sometimes needed to find a very good American teacher—such as Royce.
* * *
Josiah Royce was not exactly tall and not exactly handsome. As a philosopher, when you look like this, you have one of two options. You can sanctify all things lonely and unbecoming and head out to Walden with your neck beard. Or you can follow Royce’s lead and push beyond your awkwardness to fight the isolation that you seem almost fated to suffer.
Royce was elfish and a little pitiful, but his philosophy was grand and systematic. Many of his students even called it beautiful. Like Hocking, Royce was brought up far from the circles of the Harvard elite. Born in 1855 in Grass Valley, California, a tiny mining town between Reno and Sacramento, Royce didn’t share the pedigrees of Peirce and James. He was an outsider, and he felt that way his entire life—loneliness and discontent were not philosophical abstractions for him, but a way of life he desperately tried to escape.
As a boy in Grass Valley, Royce would hike up a deserted hill at the back of his house and sit for long hours at the solitary gravesite of a miner who’d lived and died long before an odd mixture of evangelical faith and lust for gold had inspired Royce’s family to trek to California. Royce read Edgar Allan Poe as a twelve-year-old and wrote a gothic essay, “The Miner’s Grave,” in his last year of high school. For Royce, the grave represented a life so insignificant that it hardly mattered when it flickered out: “Affection’s hand had not been present to erect anything by which the memory of the deceased might be kept up,” observed the thirteen-year-old Royce. “Only a little mound of earth … and a shingle, with a half-effaced inscription, distinguished the spot from the common earth around it.” Even in his youth Royce was terrified of being this sort of nobody. He entered the University of California at age fourteen and immediately became the brunt of his classmates’ jokes, including a graduation skit featuring him as a “fiery-haired Jehovah” with an enormous head and cartoonlike pot-gut. Not all teased kids become philosophers, but I suspect that all philosophers, at one point or another, were teased kids. When Royce went to study in Germany at the tender age of twenty, he was in search of genuine companionship for a way to escape alienation. He found what he was looking for in the post-Kantian philosophy that dominated the academy in Heidelberg and Berlin.
I flipped to Royce’s lecture on Hegel. Modern philosophy, from Descartes to Kant, reflected deep-seated and extremely problematic dualisms—the divide between mind and body, between the human and the natural, between subject and object, between individuals and their neighbors. Cartesian solipsism was the outgrowth of several of these philosophical divides, and philosophers writing in the aftermath of Descartes had been relatively unsuccessful in their attempts to overcome this legacy. So Schelling and Hegel, writing at the dawn of the nineteenth century, set out to develop an idealism that would unify the seemingly disparate parts of the universe. Royce, more than James and Peirce, was interested in this type of harmonious worldview. He wanted togetherness, a way of mending his broken world. And he wanted it more than almost anything else. He’d been brought to Harvard in 1882 as a replacement when William James was on sabbatical, and he spent the next thirty years ensuring that the insights of German idealism would not be forgotten.
Royce’s lectures on German idealism began where all philosophy does—in biography. Hegel and Schelling met as students at the Tübinger Stift, a seminary in Tübingen where many of the greatest young minds of Germany came to study. These two “Stiftlers” (as students were fondly called) joined the poet Friedrich Hölderlin in 1789, and the trio embarked on a not-so-simple quest to transcend Kant. They shared a room at the seminary, but compared with his two friends, Hegel was a philosophical late bloomer; for much of his adolescence, he assumed a backseat to Schelling. In Royce’s words, “Nobody had yet detected any element of greatness in Hegel … during all these years Hegel matured slowly and printed nothing. The letters to Schelling are throughout written in a flattering and receptive tone.” I looked at Hegel’s first attempt at a book. It was largely and obviously derivative, a gloss of Schelling’s system.
Although Hegel would distance himself from Schelling in his later life, he was initially attracted to the idea, espoused by his mentor, that there was some “absolute identity” underlying and unifying all things. Individuals were never irretrievably lost; they are always, and have always been, an aspect of divine creation. In Schelling’s words, “The I think, I am, is, since Descartes, the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being is not my being, for everything is only of God or of the totality.” This was supposed to be reassuring, but Hegel was never fully satisfied with Schelling’s answer. Hegel agreed with Schelling that Descartes’s Cogito was the wrong way to think about personhood or individual identity. Individuals did not experience the world as solitary thinking things, but rather as relational, intersubjective beings. In his lecture Royce explained, “[For Hegel] I know myself only in so far as I am known or may be known by another … leave me alone to the self-consciousness of this moment, and I shrivel up into a mere atom, an unknowable feeling, a nothing.” I thought about the morning, now many months ago, when I’d gone swimming alone in the frigid pond below the library. I’d once assumed that self-reliance entailed total isolation. But when I tried to identify the self I was supposed to rely upon, I was never particularly happy with my findings. Royce’s lecture on Hegel told me why:
We are all aware, if we have ever tried it, how empty and ghostly is a life lived for a long while in absolute solitude. Free me from my fellows, let me alone to work out the salvation of my own glorious self, and surely (so I may fancy) I shall now for the first time show who I am. No, not so; on the contrary I merely show in such a case who I am not. I am no longer friend, brother, companion, co-worker, servant, citizen, father, son; I exist for nobody; and erelong, perhaps to my surprise, generally to my horror, I discover that I am nobody.
I’d made this unpleasant discovery in the early days of my divorce. In wresting myself from the shackles of marriage, I thought I’d discover personal fulfillment. But in Royce’s words, “My freedom from others is my doom, the most insufferable form of bondage.” Being romantically untethered had unintended consequences: I’d floated aimlessly for more than a year without even an albatross to keep me company. The point of life, for Hegel and Royce, was not to lose oneself on the high seas of existential freedom, but to seek out and find oneself in wider and more meaningful communities.
Ultimately Hegel’s notion of unity parted ways with Schelling’s. Schelling’s “absolute identity” was an underlying substratum that s
ilently brought together the various parts of the world. This struck Hegel as overly simplistic and out of touch with experience. Human experience was undeniably defined by tragedy that didn’t admit of Schelling’s underlying oneness. Hegel argued that unity is achieved through conflict, that conflict and differentiation are necessary steps in achieving oneness. I knew on some intellectual level that this strange contradiction was the heart of the Hegelian dialectic, but it took destroying my life—and partially reconstructing it—for the lesson to come home. As Royce puts it, “Life consists everywhere in a repetition of the fundamental paradox of consciousness: In order to realize what I am, I must, as I find, become more than I am or than I know myself to be. I must enlarge myself, conceive myself as in external relationships, go beyond my private self, presuppose the social life, enter into [the inevitable] conflict, and, winning the conflict, come nearer to realizing my unity with my deeper self.” This made better sense than Schelling because it explained the tumultuous life of individuals and their communities, but did not preclude the possibility of greater or more meaningful synthesis as a result of conflict. Unity is not the static substratum of Schelling; it is achieved through a difficult process, something like climbing a mountain. It was something to be accomplished by people—even, and perhaps especially, by people like Royce.
In 1908 Royce attempted to translate Hegel’s conception of interpersonal meaning and self-overcoming into a language for nonspecialists, into what he called The Philosophy of Loyalty. Loyalty: It is the most two-faced of virtues—one that is absolutely necessary for one’s moral growth but also extremely easy to pervert. Hard to create and easy to destroy, it is a word for the downtrodden, for the hope, however slim, that one is not lost. According to Royce, loyalty was not a Kantian call to duty, but a heartfelt sense of belonging to a greater whole. Loyalty was the animating spirit of love and the power that could spare individuals from their feelings of quiet desperation. In the face of calamity, loyalty enters the scene, and though it might not save the day, it can make the day so much more bearable.
When Royce arrived at Harvard in 1882, he’d hoped to find himself a suitable home. By that point Harvard was widely regarded as the promised land for American thinkers, but Royce was far from satisfied. G. H. Palmer, who worked down the hall from him, referred to his younger colleague’s “afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes.” In the first years of the twentieth century, Royce’s afflictions multiplied. His son, Christopher, was diagnosed with “acute abulia,” a mental disorder characterized by paralyzing apathy. Christopher was placed in Danvers State Hospital on January 9, 1908, two months before The Philosophy of Loyalty was sent to press. In a letter to James written in the spring of that year, Royce conceded that they’d lost the battle against this mental illness: “We have fought our fight and lost. We shall keep on fighting and try not to make an outcry…” I’d read this note several times during my own dismal year at Harvard. What was it to fight, and lose, and keep on fighting? Royce closed the note with the hard truth about his son: “The poor boy will probably never see any of the light that I have been hoping and longing for him to see.” Christopher died in Danvers on September 21, 1910, on the brink of his twenty-ninth birthday. “And the way is a long and dark one for us all,” Royce continued. Loyalty was his way to find the strength to fight the darkness, with the sense that one isn’t, despite evidence to the contrary, alone.
The Philosophy of Loyalty was written not in an attempt to save Royce’s lost soul, but as a moral and spiritual instruction manual on how to save individuals like his lost son. Royce worried about the growing number of “detached individuals,” many of whom professed to be free, but only to the extent that they were alone. Echoing Hegel, he argued that the false freedom of “unhappy consciousness” was overcome only when we are loyal, when we willingly devote ourselves to a cause. For someone like me, brought up on the philosophical ideal of rugged individualism, this was initially off-putting. But in The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce voices a question that I’d failed to silence fully in my years studying Thoreau. “What worth,” Royce asks, “could you find in an independence that should merely isolate you, that should leave you but a queer creature, whose views are shared by nobody?” With Carol a few feet away, now closer than she’d ever been, I was hard-pressed to find any worth in it at all.
* * *
Royce’s classes were notoriously close-knit, and at the end of the nineteenth century he became one of the few Harvard professors to invite women into his classes. In fact, many a romantic relationship bloomed between his students as they listened to him extol the virtues of loyalty. Richard Cabot, the son of Emerson’s literary executor, James Cabot, was one of Royce’s disciples in the early 1890s. Cabot had become reacquainted with Ella Lyman in one of Royce’s seminars, and they would spend the rest of their lives crafting a sexless marriage based on Roycean principles. I’d stumbled across Lyman’s papers at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study before my father died and, in my first year teaching, successfully distracted myself from the book I was supposed to be writing about Peirce by writing one about her.
Ella and Richard’s relationship was a fascinating mix of religious piety, philosophical sophistication, and artistic inspiration. They’d decided to forgo having children so that they could fulfill God’s purposes more fully, but this was the God of Emerson and Thoreau, which meant that they were free to pursue their own consciences and life projects. They fostered dozens of children, wrote dozens of books on topics that ranged from education to medical ethics, and sponsored—mostly with Ella’s family fortune—the arts and sciences at Harvard (Cabot Library and Science Center at Harvard is dedicated to their family). In her spare time—which was admittedly slim—Ella helped Richard organize a Cambridge choral society that rehearsed and performed at their home at 190 Marlboro Street in Boston. At a holiday concert on November 17, 1903, they invited William Ernest Hocking. He arrived twenty minutes before the concert started and met another early arrival: Agnes O’Reilly. “Our conversation,” Hocking reminded Agnes in a love letter written later that year, “began with candles [that adorned the Cabot house] and continued with flames.”
In the “flames” the couple discussed philosophy and the fact that Agnes had an interest in the subject but little opportunity to study it. After the meeting, William wrote to her: “Have you then a discontent with your thought-horizon? If it is not a mere discontent but at the same time an earnest aspiration, there are goods in store for you whether you seek them among the mountains of philosophy or elsewhere. I wish I might lead you to some peak of vision, but it is seldom that I feel myself more than a wanderer—a climber.”
Hocking agreed to tutor Agnes on Descartes. She found Descartes boring, but eventually fell in love with her tutor. William Ernest and Agnes were married the next year, and they turned to Royce, repeatedly, for marital guidance. Royce might not have been particularly qualified (his own marriage was not unproblematic), but he was happy to oblige. This was an extended philosophical family—with all its lasting loyalties and dysfunctional intimacies. Royce drew a particular type of acolyte. His best students were just like Royce himself: They came from devoutly religious families and they were also wickedly smart, which meant they typically had serious misgivings about institutionalized religion. In short, they were perfectly equipped to be loyal servants, but they lacked an object of loyalty that could satisfy their intellectual sensibilities. Royce’s philosophy fit the bill perfectly.
Hocking’s Methodist roots meant that devotion came naturally to him. He was a loyal Roycean, and he dedicated himself, from beginning to end, to his gnomish teacher. He participated in the philosophical conferences of 1903, informal weekly meetings of faithful students organized by the Cabots, often held on Sunday evenings at Royce’s Irving Street home. James, who lived two doors down but attended only one of these philosophical meetings, joked that “the conference [was] a queer illustration of [the students’] inability to live without Royce.” Mos
t likely, this was a slight that stemmed from the fundamental disagreement between James and Royce. The individualism of James’s pragmatism, which had become hugely popular, stood against any form of community that might stifle free expression. For James, “experience” was the philosophical watchword, and he worried that Royce’s near obsession with community would sacrifice individual experience on the altar of devoted service. Hocking was well aware of the tension between Royce and James, and while he was intensely loyal to Royce, he acknowledged that James had a point. Sociality was important, but unless you could articulate the experience of community—immediate and intimate—your loyalty would remain a mere abstraction. If you wanted to overcome solipsism, it wasn’t enough to argue for the necessity of community; you had to tap into the personal experience of togetherness. “Solipsism is overcome, and only overcome,” in Hocking’s words, “when I can point out the actual experience which gives me the basis of my conception of companionship.” This would become Hocking’s philosophical mission.
Hocking’s works—many of which had been written at West Wind—were scattered throughout the library, placed hopefully, insistently (presumptuously?) among the truly monumental works of Western philosophy. As a graduate student interested in Royce, I’d read Hocking’s first book, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, but at the time, I was too obsessed with my own academic and marital woes to understand its message, even though the whole point of Hocking’s book is to move beyond one’s own narrowly personal obsessions. To achieve this end, Hocking had to show that genuine communion with others was possible.