American Philosophy Read online

  Hocking wanted to be an architect or an engineer—at least that was the plan, until he read Herbert Spencer’s First Principles in his third year of high school, at the tender age of fourteen. Spencer spent most of his career disseminating Darwin’s theory of evolution, a theory that would radically affect American philosophy in the coming century and, to this day, fundamentally challenge religious faith. When Hocking’s father discovered his son immersed in First Principles, he did what any reasonable Methodist would do: He insisted that his son return it to the public library. But Hocking’s father hadn’t said he couldn’t check it out again. So that is what he did the next week. And this time he hid Spencer in the haymow of the barn and promptly lost his religion. This crisis of faith was Hocking’s first foray into metaphysical thought. His reading of William James’s The Principles of Psychology in the early 1890s was his second.

  By the time the teenage Hocking read the Psychology, James was well on his way to founding a school of thought known as American pragmatism. Pragmatism holds that truth is to be judged on the basis of its practical consequences, on its ability to negotiate and enrich human experience. James’s pragmatism was just grounded and practical enough to convince a would-be civil engineer that philosophy wasn’t a complete waste of time.

  On the way to philosophy Hocking toyed with the idea of studying religion exclusively. He was one of the youngest attendees of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition. No one is sure, but he might have met his future teachers Josiah Royce and George Herbert Palmer at this event, as they both gave talks there. What we do know is that Hocking came to Cambridge to study philosophy at Harvard in 1899, finishing his undergraduate studies two years later.

  He was one of the last students to work under the “Philosophical Four”: James, Royce, Palmer, and George Santayana. Hocking, twenty-six at the time, didn’t waste the opportunity. Looking back on his student years, Hocking wrote, “I believed and believe it the strongest Department of Philosophy on the planet … it was strong because the individual men were strong, and sufficiently varied so that most students could see in some one or other of the central group one who spoke directly to his problems.”

  * * *

  Hocking’s reading of Spencer had disabused him of the notion of a benevolent and all-powerful God, and he desperately wanted to find some intellectually reputable replacement. He had come to work with James, but the famous psychologist-philosopher was in Europe when Hocking initially arrived. While he waited for James to return, Hocking mastered German and French, continued his study of mathematics and the physical sciences, and took classes on metaphysics and aesthetics with Royce and Santayana. “I worked greedily and happily,” he later wrote, “suffering only because I was limited to six classes at a time.”

  Hocking, however, was not your average bookworm. In the spring of 1900 he planned his first trip to Europe, to see the International Exposition in Paris. He was broke—“impecunious,” to use his word—so he and seven other Harvard students sought the help of a Mr. Buffum. Buffum was, according to Hocking, “a not too reputable cattleman’s Agent … of the waterfront of Boston” who hired the students as cattlemen on the SS Anglican. They shipped out of Charlestown, the primary port of Boston, on June 14. “We were interlarded,” Hocking wrote, “with eight experienced cattlemen to make four squads of four men each, to each squad being assigned 125 Texan steers.” The journey took twelve days, and they landed in Victoria Docks, London. The students were then set free for seven weeks to experience the best of European culture. The fusion of real life and high culture embodied an important strain of American philosophy that Hocking sought to preserve for the remainder of his life.

  Shortly after Hocking’s return to Harvard in the fall of 1900, William James also came back. James had been working on the manuscript of The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book that attempted to preserve a space for religious experience in a world increasingly dominated by science. As an undergraduate, Hocking attended the seminars James held as he refined Varieties. One evening, after reading a section of the manuscript to his students, James, who was edging toward sixty, turned to Hocking: “Hocking, why did you sit there with a perpetual frown on your face?” Hocking later admitted being unaware of the frown—he had simply been focused or, better yet, “enthralled.” After graduating with his doctorate from Harvard in 1904 and spending two years teaching at Andover Theological Seminary, Hocking moved to California to join the faculty at Berkeley. Instead of dedicating himself to philosophy, however, he spent most of his time in San Francisco helping to rebuild after the great earthquake of 1906, honing what would become the architectural skills necessary to design and build an estate in the White Mountains. In 1908 he was called to Yale to teach, and when his mentor Josiah Royce died, in 1916, he assumed Royce’s chair in philosophy at Harvard, which was widely recognized as the most prominent position in the field. By the end of his forty-year career at Harvard, Hocking had become one of the icons of American philosophy. By 1944 he was only the sixth American to deliver the famed Gifford Lectures in Scotland (the other American Gifford lecturers being Josiah Royce, William James, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, and Reinhold Niebuhr).

  * * *

  On my first trip to the Hocking estate, I knew much more about his teachers than about Hocking himself. I’d driven to Chocorua to help organize a conference on the life and work of William James. Today, most philosophy conferences are held in enormous nondescript hotels in enormous nondescript cities, so this little gathering of philosophers at the Chocorua Public Library had piqued my interest. I knew the conference would be good, but not quite good enough to assuage my abiding fears that philosophy really didn’t matter. So once again I found myself elsewhere—this time considering the delectable virtues of Schnecken at a German pastry shop at the junction of Routes 16 and 113. The place didn’t even have a name, just a sign outside that read COFFEE FOR SALE. This is where I found Bunn Nickerson. Bunn was one of those fellows you hope you’ll become when you turn ninety-three. He was sharp and wiry and nothing like most of the philosophers I meet. He walked slowly, like most old philosophers do, although his hobble wasn’t a function of long-standing inactivity, but of farming and skiing.

  I’m not sure why I talked to Bunn (in my profession one learns to be circumspect). I do remember being embarrassed when he asked me what I did for a living.

  “I teach philosophy,” I said, bracing myself for the awkward silence that usually follows this admission.

  It turned out that Bunn had grown up with philosophers, or, more accurately, grown up in a little house on a corner of one philosopher’s—“Dr. Hocking’s”—land. Today, philosophers have arguments and the occasional student. Most of them don’t have “land.” Bunn made it sound like the realm of a philosopher king, and this wasn’t too far from the truth: The Hocking estate, as I would find out, comprised one stone manor house, six small summer cottages, two large barns, and one fishing pond with three beaver hutches, all situated on four hundred acres of field and forest. And a library. Bunn must have seen me light up when he said the word. In an act of generosity I’ve never been able to understand, he offered to take me there. Getting to see it struck me as a very good reason to skip out on the rest of the conference planning, so I piled into the old man’s blue Dodge pickup and we bumped up the hill toward “Dr. Hocking’s land”—or, as Bunn called it, “West Wind.”

  FINDING WEST WIND

  Today, most academics don’t have personal libraries worth talking about, so they avoid a problem many nineteenth-century intellectuals had to face in the twilight of their lives—what to do with an intellectual home after it’s permanently vacated. Of course, the books can be donated to a large institutional library. Widener is full of volumes once owned by Harvard’s famous alumni. When this happens, however, the books are lost among the millions of others in the stacks, reorganized in a homogenized Library of Congress categoriz
ation. The books are put in rigid order, and the unique integrity of the original collection is lost. To avoid this fate, writers in Hocking’s day would often give their libraries to like-minded friends and students.

  When Bunn and I got to West Wind, the Hocking library looked abandoned. On the trees surrounding the buildings were NO TRESPASSING signs, but Bunn didn’t seem to care. He explained that the members of the Hocking family still spent time on the land, particularly in the summer months, but no one was around on that brisk fall day. Bunn climbed out of his truck, trotted down the hill away from me to explore his old haunts, and, waving at the library, invited me to “look around.” The building was constructed of rough-hewn, multihued granite, as solid (and almost as large) as a house. From the outside, I couldn’t tell whether it had two full stories, but I was able to make out the skylights in the roof, which probably filled the space with glorious reading light. It was definitely grand enough to suggest that its owner had never intended it to be abandoned. The front bore large arched windows and three sets of French doors. I peered in and was reminded of William James’s love of Goethe’s Faust. Surrounded by well-read books in the opening scene, Faust laments the fragility of human knowledge:

  I’ve studied now Philosophy

  And Jurisprudence, Medicine,—

  And even, alas! Theology,—

  From end to end, with labor keen;

  And here, poor fool! with all my lore

  I stand, no wiser than before …

  James had pored over Goethe in his youth; he possessed Faust’s polymathic abilities—he could have been a painter, a biologist, a surveyor, a novelist, a theologian—but James also shared Faust’s sense that human capacities, even seemingly impressive ones, were pitifully limited. “All natural goods perish,” James wrote. “Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.” As I peeked into the Hocking library for the first time, I thought this was probably a place where goods come to perish. Of course, I yearned to go inside. I assumed I should wait for one of the family members to let me in, but I began to wonder if the family would ever come back. Maybe they just weren’t interested in old books. I couldn’t wait until the summer to look through the books. Maybe this was my only chance. “He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity,” James wrote, “loses the prize as surely as if he had tried and failed.”

  Then, through the window, I spotted the Century Dictionary on a shelf. First published between 1889 and 1891, it was a masterpiece of lexicographical detail, running more than seven thousand large quarto pages, with ten thousand wood-engraved illustrations. When the American Anthropologist reviewed this dictionary a year later, the reviewer agreed with the growing sentiment of the time—saying that it was “the most conspicuous literary monument of the 19th century.” Some of the best minds in America had worked for years on this first edition, including one of the founders of American philosophy, C. S. Peirce. I’d always had a certain strange fascination with Peirce—the kind of fascination that makes you write a doctoral dissertation.

  After the dissertation was finished, I decided to write a book on him. Peirce was compulsive, brilliant, and just a little mad. Son of the Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce, he picked up his brother’s copy of Whately’s Elements of Logic at the age of fourteen and breezed through it. Despite being trained as a chemist and geodesist, Peirce considered logic and metaphysics his lifelong calling. He was always an outsider to mainstream philosophy, a strange place to be for arguably the most original philosopher of the nineteenth century. His work in logic and mathematics anticipates that of Gödel and Russell. His writing on the philosophy of science easily rivals that of Popper and Kuhn. And his papers in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy in the late 1860s would set the terms for the first three decades of American pragmatism. James and Royce looked to him for inspiration and guidance.

  In February 1903 James tried to convince Charles Eliot, Harvard’s president, that Peirce would flourish if he had a stable position in the philosophy department: “He is one of our 3 or 4 first American philosophers,” James argued, “and it seems to me that his genius is deserving of some official recognition.” Eliot was unconvinced—Peirce’s reputation as a troublemaker preceded him. Despite his achievements, Peirce never fit in—he was always meddling, often quite effectively, in other people’s research. He dissected his colleagues’ carefully crafted arguments with the unnerving ease of young brilliance. Over the course of his life, Peirce perfected the art of self-sabotage and foiled his friends’ ongoing attempts to secure him a permanent position and source of income. So he found part-time employment better suited to a genius, writing entries for the Century Dictionary in a few fields of study: logic, metaphysics, mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, weights and measures. Once I spotted this dusty edition, I had to page through it, even though I felt a little like a trespasser. But this wasn’t breaking and entering, I thought. When doors are unlocked, it is just entering. I’d take a quick peek and leave things as I’d found them.

  On reflection, I know these are excuses for pretty bad behavior. But it could’ve been much worse. The year before, a Hocking relation had explored the empty library without the family’s permission. Except this guy was high on heroin. And he proceeded to steal four hundred rare books—among them a first edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651—and ship them to his home in Berkeley, California. At the library’s entrance, next to the dictionary, was a manila envelope labeled INVENTORY. I scanned it quickly to find a list of extremely expensive books:

  Rene Descartes. Discourse on the Method (First English Edition 1649).—(FBI Returned)

  John Locke. Two Treatises of Government (1690).—(FBI Returned)

  Immanuel Kant. Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Riga: 1781).—(FBI Returned)

  These were first editions—hundreds of them—written by the European philosophers who had inspired and then frustrated such American intellectuals as James. Hocking collected them for one reason: He was in search of the origins of American philosophy. At the time, I didn’t know what the FBI had to do with philosophical classics, but it turns out that the federal government is surprisingly good at tracking stolen books across state lines. Apparently the Hockings went to the Madison police, who went to the FBI, who retrieved a good number of the expensive volumes. Some, however, are still missing. When the thief was apprehended and brought to trial a year later, the court record notes, he “reported that he had made several attempts to convince the Hocking family to take better care of the books, but the family refused to comply … The defendant claim[ed] he took the books to protect them and had no plans to sell the books for money.” That said, he took more than a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of books and did sell some of them. I carefully set the inventory list back in its place and turned to the dictionary. Its cover was original, tan leather that had taken on a dark patina over more than a century of use. The pages were surprisingly brittle for a book of its relatively young age, a fragility born of mold and of enduring many seasons of freezing temperatures followed by warmer spells.

  I looked at a few random entries—“maid-pale,” “maid-servant,” “maieutic”—just enough to realize that what went into dictionaries, and into philosophy, had changed radically since the time of Peirce and James. At one point, philosophers like Peirce could determine the very language we use. They had the power to define reality. But no longer, and this was, at least for me, no small tragedy. Over the last century, mainstream philosophy had retreated into the upper reaches of the ivory tower, and as it specialized and professionalized, it largely lost touch with the existential questions that drove James and Peirce. Above the dictionary, on an unfinished oak shelf, was a set of leather-bound volumes: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, where Peirce had made his mark. It was the first run of the complete set, from 1867 to 1893, all twenty-five volumes. I’d just take a look, and then I really would leave. I wanted to see Hocking’s signature, so I gingerly pull
ed the first volume from the shelf.

  Hocking’s name was not inscribed in the front of the book. Instead, “Charles S. Peirce” was written in tight, neurotic script. The volume slipped out of my hands. As a professional philosopher, I very rarely hyperventilate while doing research, but Peirce was a notorious recluse. Most of his books had been sold or carried off to Harvard at the end of his life, but somehow this little treasure—Peirce’s own copy of his first and most famous publication—had ended up here.

  * * *

  The last decades of the nineteenth century are often regarded as the Golden Age of American Philosophy. This era coincided with an equally exciting transition in European philosophy, marked by the birth of phenomenology, a school of thought that, not unlike American philosophy, held that philosophical questions must emerge from experience and that their answers must be judged on their ability to enrich lives. Phenomenology would eventually grow into existentialism and postmodern philosophy. All golden ages, however, eventually fade—in this case, with the passing of a number of great American thinkers. William James died in 1910; Charles Sanders Peirce in 1914; Josiah Royce in 1916; George Herbert Palmer in 1933; Edmund Husserl, the German father of phenomenology, in 1938. So William Ernest Hocking, who had studied with them and outlived them all, apparently took care of their books.