American Philosophy Read online

  Many of the volumes in this library were from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and extremely precious, but many more contained their original owners’ marginalia, and these were absolutely priceless. When Hocking died, in 1966, his son Richard—also a philosopher—became steward of the collection. He’d tried repeatedly to donate the entire collection to Harvard, but with little luck. Harvard—like the relative from Berkeley—would have cherry-picked the selections, but had no intention of preserving the library in one piece. Its unity, however, according to Richard, is what made the collection so special. When Richard died, in 2001, the books simply remained in the dark wood at the end of Janus Road, in New Hampshire. Richard’s three daughters tried valiantly to look after the collection, but they lived all over North America and had the entire estate to worry about, not to mention their own lives.

  Books are just paper, wood pulp smashed and dried. In the realm of rodents and termites, they’re quite valuable: They’re tasty, and when torn into small bits, their pages make for cozy little nests. For a decade the Hocking library had been actively used—just not by humans. The porcupines and bugs had set up house, making sure that this great mass of paper didn’t go wholly to waste. “WHOEVER looks at the insect world,” wrote Emerson in “Quotation and Originality,” “at flies, aphides, gnats, and innumerable parasites … must have remarked the extreme content they take in suction, which constitutes the main business of their life. If we go into a library or news-room, we see the same function on a higher plane, performed with like ardor, with equal impatience of interruption, indicating the sweetness of the act.” I looked hungrily at the inventory one last time and then back at The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. The 1651 Leviathan was rare. The 1690 Two Treatises of Government, an anonymously written first edition that had served as the basis for American political liberty, was rarer still. In the last year, first editions of both had gone to auction. Hobbes’s masterpiece had brought $32,000; Locke’s tract was sold by a book dealer in Dallas for $41,000. As a student, I’d watched these auctions from a distance, snooping around the Internet to see what philosophy could actually be worth. The books on the inventory at West Wind, the classics of modern philosophy, could have been under glass at the British Library or at Yale or at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. But there was, I imagined, only one copy of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy with C. S. Peirce’s name in it. It was irreplaceable. And it was under a thin film of dust in the Hocking library. The termites would get to it soon.

  As a kid, I buried things in the backyard just so I could dig them up many years later. The Hocking library turned out to be the largest time capsule I’d ever opened. It was one large room, partitioned into different working nooks by walnut built-ins. In truth, there were no real walls. Just bookshelves and windows. I estimated about ten thousand books in total. To my right and left, at opposite ends of the building, were two large marble fireplaces, tall enough that I could have stood in them without stooping too much, substantial enough that they could’ve kept the whole building warm until October or November at least. Oriental rugs, mismatched and nearly worn through, covered the library’s wide oak floorboards. The first-generation Stickley rocking chairs—with their solid walnut slats and musty horsehair seats—looked as if they hadn’t held visitors for many years. A cramped winding staircase—more of a ladder, really—led to a loft above.

  Hanging from opposing walls were two enormous portraits—one of Hocking, his square Cornish jaw set just firmly enough that you knew he meant business, intellectual and otherwise; the other of his wife, Agnes. They looked down on me with what I could only imagine was quiet disapproval. Hocking had married Agnes O’Reilly in 1905. She was the daughter of the celebrated poet and journalist John Boyle O’Reilly, who in the late nineteenth century was the editor of Boston’s Irish paper, The Pilot. Before that he’d been a convict. O’Reilly was a central player in the Irish nationalist movement in the 1860s and had been sentenced by the English to twenty years of penal detention in Western Australia. He escaped in 1869 and eventually made it back to Ireland and then to New England.

  I was used to square-jawed philosophers, but Agnes’s beauty truly scared me. She reminded me of someone, though I couldn’t, at the time, place her. Her portrait wasn’t complete; the sleeves of her dress were just a few scribbles of underpainting. I was later reminded of Hocking’s comment in The Meaning of God in Human Experience, published in 1912, that “idealism fails to work … chiefly because it is unfinished.” But then I remembered the next line: “Unfinishedness is not in itself a blemish … there are tolerable and intolerable kinds of unfinishedness.” This portrait was the tolerable kind. Agnes’s face was finished in careful detail. Especially her eyes—calm, gray, and omniscient. I wonder if the man from Berkeley had caught her eye on that February evening as he packed up the books. If he had, he probably wouldn’t have had the gall to complete the heist.

  I couldn’t imagine stealing books from Agnes. Or even that blue-and-white Qing vase sitting on the desk across from me, flanked on one side by books of English common law and on the other by early translations of Buddhist and Hindu texts. The vase looked old and valuable, as if it had found its proper place between these shelves, between Eastern traditions and Western institutions.

  Turning away from English common law, I was finally convinced of something I’d often suspected—that classical American philosophy was actually an amalgam of European thought, Asian philosophy, and that of the New World. The task of classical American philosophy was to declare its intellectual independence while remaining firmly rooted in the distant past. “Where do we find ourselves?” Emerson asks in his essay “Experience.” Always on a staircase, he answers: “[T]here are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.” The task of life is to transcend the past, to never remain where one starts, to find a place of one’s own.

  This was the predicament Emerson faced as a writer in Concord, Massachusetts, in the 1840s: how to reclaim the foreign, often hostile, intellectual tradition in a way that made it new; how to proceed with and without its guidance. Worshipping the past was obviously unacceptable to Emerson, as it resulted in a world without growth or originality, but ignoring history was equally dangerous. In the much-repeated words of George Santayana, “[T]hose who refuse to learn from history are [also] bound to repeat it.” Hocking had clearly taken this point to heart. It meant learning from any wisdom tradition that might provide insight into the chances for human salvation. A pragmatist, Hocking remained dedicated to the idea that philosophy could affect human experience, but he was also an idealist who hoped that experience was a gateway to another, more lasting, more meaningful reality. I would later find out that this hope had led him to initiate an active discourse between Eastern and Western thinkers: In 1939, 1949, and 1959, he organized the East-West Philosophers’ Conferences at the University of Hawaii, where he was joined by D. T. Suzuki and Hu Shih, two of the first thinkers to popularize the study of Chinese Buddhism in the West. I discovered that the bookshelves at West Wind were filled with inscribed first editions. Some of the older commentaries of Hinduism and Buddhism, however, were from the late nineteenth century—too old for Hocking to have been the original owner. I wondered who these books had belonged to.

  Surveying the shelves, I was reminded that American thinkers had not been uncritical admirers of Eastern philosophical traditions. “Thank God,” Thoreau once wrote, “no Hindoo tyranny prevailed at the framing of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not sentenced to any caste.” Thoreau was not about to endorse any metaphysical system that compromised his ability to choose his own path. At the same time, he was attracted, almost against his will, to the Eastern idea that freedom—the really meaningful variety—depended on one’s ability to move with, rather than against, the world at large. Thoreau was repeatedly drawn to Buddhism for this reason. I knew that he’d owned a copy of
Burnout’s French translation of The Lotus Sutra, and I secretly hoped that this translation had made its way to New Hampshire. The Sutra suggests, in a nutshell, that all human beings, no matter their lot in life, have an innate Buddha nature, their own inherent capacity for wisdom and, more important, for compassion. This means that each of us, in his or her own way, can pursue a life of freedom—freedom from suffering and fear. This sounded pretty good to Thoreau, and to Hocking too, if the preponderance of Buddhist and Taoist commentaries in the library was any indication. To my disappointment, however, Thoreau’s Lotus Sutra was nowhere to be found. But eventually I came across, quite by accident, what I desperately needed to find.

  * * *

  They were side by side on the shelf closest to the desk, as if someone—perhaps Hocking himself—had just spent the afternoon working through them: Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translations and Paul Carus’s Buddhism and Its Christian Critics. These works, published in the late 1890s, were after Thoreau’s time, but they became mainstays for the next generation of American intellectuals who wanted to use Buddhism to think through the concepts of freedom and salvation. Warren was a recluse, but Carus, an American philosopher in his own right and a close friend of Hocking and James, was truly a rare bird: a philosopher who actually liked people. He, independently of Josiah Royce and a very young Hocking, also attended the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893, one of the first events in history to promote interfaith dialogue. After the parliament, Carus renewed his study of non-Western religions and in 1897 published Buddhism and Its Christian Critics, an evenhanded treatment of two world religions to which Carus professed no allegiance. He was a self-described “atheist who loved God,” happy to join the ranks of American thinkers, such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Dewey, who thought that an exclusive commitment to a particular institutionalized religion could have the unintended consequence of thinning out what James would call the “varieties of religious experience.”

  “Wm. James.” The scrawl on the flyleaf of the Carus book was unmistakable. I’m now so relieved that the man from Berkeley had snatched only the conspicuously expensive books and generally overlooked the volumes that would’ve been simply impossible to replace. These were the books James read in the 1890s as he formulated The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he was on the trail of “experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” In other words, he was searching for some indication that each of us was not, despite evidence to the contrary, inconsolably alone in an uncaring universe. I hadn’t given The Varieties a great deal of thought since my father’s death. All I could think about was Buffalo and the dissected bodies in Holden Chapel; the God talk in The Varieties made my stomach churn. But that was about to change.

  Alone in an empty library, in a deserted wood, in a nearly forgotten field of American philosophy, I felt momentarily at home. Often secure and well-ordered homes are also tight and repressive. I knew all about these sorts of homes. I had one myself back in Boston. My sense of the Hocking library, however, was something different—spacious but intensely intimate. By some strange twist of fate I was on the verge of experiencing something more enduring, more meaningful than my minor scholarly life. West Wind was not, despite appearances, a place where things came to perish. In the years after his 1895 lecture at Holden Chapel, James came to suspect that there might be ways to escape the specter of life’s meaninglessness. Social organization, professional affiliation, athletic camaraderie, physical exertion, experimental drug use—James found that all of these worked to broaden a person’s otherwise narrow conception of selfhood. But they didn’t work well enough, which is why he remained fascinated by religious experience and spiritualism. In preparing The Varieties, he was, like Carus, completely uninterested in advocating for any one religious doctrine; rather he was obsessively interested in the way certain mystics (from Saint John to Meister Eckhart to Eckhart’s student, Heinrich Seuse) had come to know the reality of the unseen. James’s interest in mysticism also led him to Carus’s book on Buddhism.

  As I looked through the spotty marginalia James had left in the book, I thought about his recurring obsession with religious experience, about how bound up it was with the hope for salvation. Salvation as a theme can be found in all world religions, but James wasn’t primarily interested in its place in any particular theological framework. He understood it more generally, more experientially: Salvation is a singular, deep-seated response to an individual’s feeling utterly lost. James often felt himself so, and he was attracted to the Buddhist sense that existential alienation is not the inevitable outgrowth of being human. He wanted, quite desperately, to be saved from himself. I ran my fingers over a passage he had underlined in Carus’s book: “He who has attained arúpam, the formless [or the spiritual], surrenders with it all the petulancy of self, for jealousy, spite, hatred, pride, envy, concupiscence, vainglory—all these and kindred ambitions—have lost their sense. He is energetic, but without passion; he aspires, but does not cling; he administers, but does not regard himself an owner; he acquires, but does not covet.”

  Philosophers are generally unimpressed with “spiritual” explanations, and some of us spend our careers cultivating petulancy, pride, and vainglory. But the Hocking library was no place for “all these and kindred ambitions.” Its shadowy nooks and crannies, filled with half-eaten treasures, provided just enough space for a visitor to lose himself, or at least the last vestiges of his self-importance. It was possible, surrounded by the moldy remains of great books and porcupine scat, to come to terms with the existential fragility that most of us, most of the time, try to ignore.

  As a graduate student, I’d learned about James’s investigations of the spiritual realm, which I’d viewed with suspicion as a weird by-product of his Victorian upbringing. But on this rapidly dwindling fall afternoon I was about to have a change of heart. I peered across the alcove to another volume that just had to be James’s: a well-worn original copy of The Year-book of Spiritualism for 1871. Sure enough, it was, purchased when James was thirty. Years before he wrote The Varieties, in the midst of what might have been his most serious bout of depression, he had become fascinated by the reality of the unseen. Being a good pragmatist, however, he wanted proof of this reality. For more than two decades he attended regular meetings with spiritualists living in Cambridge and was one of the founding members of the American Society for Psychical Research, an organization whose members were either convinced of or at least deeply interested in the existence of the spiritual world. James’s fascination with ghosts wasn’t a fetish or a novelty. It was more serious, more philosophically grounded. Along with friends of his such as Henry Bowditch, James wanted proof that when we die, we aren’t fully gone.

  The American Society for Psychical Research was founded in Boston in 1884. Its mission was to investigate all things supernatural. This was not some nut-job organization, but it was not altogether normal either. One of its founders, G. Stanley Hall, had come to Harvard to do doctoral work with James in the late 1870s and was awarded the first psychology degree in the United States. With James’s support, Hall organized a group of researchers to explore the possibility of spirit contact, divining rods, multiple personality, and telepathy. By 1890 Hall had resigned from the organization, concluding that parapsychology amounted to vicious pseudoscience. But others, such as James and Bowditch, marshaled on into the turn of the century. In 1909 James reflected on twenty-five years of ghost busting:

  At times I have been tempted to believe that the creator has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure, so that although ghosts and clairvoyances, and raps and messages from spirits, are always seeming to exist and can never be fully explained away, they also can never be susceptible of full corroboration.

  Despite the bafflement—or perhaps because of it—James and his fe
llow researchers attended the séances and mind experiments that were conducted regularly through the 1880s and 1890s. Unlike most psychics, however, the members of the society documented and published their findings. None of these findings were anywhere near conclusive, but they did their part to push the boundaries of science, to explore an area that science couldn’t quite explain.

  James was hired to teach anatomy at Harvard in 1872, the same year he acquired The Year-book of Spiritualism. He was not satisfied as a physiologist. He complained that the factual, objective approach of the anatomist missed something crucial in its understanding of human nature. “[A] fact,” he wrote, “too often plays the part of a sop for the mind in studying these sciences. A man may take very short views, registering one fact after another, as one walks on stepping-stones, and never lose the conceit of his ‘scientific’ function.” But for James something important was lost: the sense that a human being was more than a series of disparate material realities. A person is more than just a bundle of perceptions and nervous reactions. More than just a body that can be dissected and discarded. James hoped that there was something ethereal, transcendent—something even ghostly—that was free from the constraints of our physical lives. This led him to play with nitrous oxide in the early 1880s, in the belief that psychotropics might open portals to other realms of experience. It also led him back, repeatedly, to religious experience.

  Later, James would come to have a very personal and more serious stake in the spiritualism of the late-Victorian era. In July 1885 his eighteen-month-old son, Herman, contracted whooping cough and died. The whole family was devastated. James wanted to believe that the boy was not fully gone. In September, James visited Leonora Piper, a medium who had become a Boston sensation for supposedly channeling spirits. James found Piper’s “spirit control” sorely lacking, but he concluded that the woman might very well have what he called “supernormal powers.” At the end of his life, he begrudgingly admitted that evidence was “yet lacking to prove ‘spirit-return.’” He therefore “[left] the matter open” with the hope that science would one day have more than just an inkling of the supernatural, would understand what James called the “dramatic possibilities of nature,” the possibility that the deceased are never irretrievably gone. Under the watchful eyes of Agnes Hocking, as I read James’s scribblings about ghosts and ancient Asian traditions, I wondered whether, for me, that day had finally come. Because William James was right in front of me exactly a century after his death.