American Philosophy (19 page)

“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.

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 such 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.”