American Philosophy: A Love StoryBy John KaagFSG 2016John Kaag once found himself like Dante in a dark forest, but in that other Holy Land, New England. Suffering through another academic conference (Kaag is a professor of philosophy), he leaves for a bakery but has the better luck to instead find first editions of Descartes, Hobbes, and Kant when a wizened Yankee drives him into the woods of the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Here is "West Wind," the estate of the late William Ernest Hocking, last of the Harvard pragmatists. When Kaag trespasses into Hocking's magnificent and forgotten library, he finds a vast collection of books and marginalia belonging to William James, Josiah Royce, Charles Sanders Peirce, and other of Hocking's mentors, now going to the mice and begging for preservation.The story, great on its own, is made better by the changes it works on Kaag. In the narrative that unfolds in American Philosophy: A Love Story, we learn that West Wind appears with providential timing. Like Dante in the middle of life's road, Kaag is floundering at a midpoint, dogged by unrequited loves. His passion for philosophy is drying in the arid climes of academic specialization. His marriage has rotted beyond repair. His estranged and alcoholic father dies. To cope, he follows suit and drinks himself dumb on cases of pinot.Before West Wind, Kaag admits that for an entire year of an enviable postdoc with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, "I gave up." He abandons his research to skulk about Harvard's Holden Chapel, successively a place of worship, med school lab for cadaver-dissection, and lecture hall where William James asked "Is Life Worth Living?" "Holden Chapel always struck me as an appropriate place to die," Kaag opens his book, sketching his depression:

"I assidously avoided [Harvard]'s libraries. I avoided my wife, my family, and friends. When I came to the university at all, I went only to Holden Chapel. I walked past it, sat next to it, read against it, lunched near it, sneaked into it when I could -- became obsessed with it. James had, as far as I was concerned, asked the only question that really mattered. Is life worth living? I couldn't shake it, and I couldn't answer it."

In the tradition of Ishmael, Hawkeye, and Huck, Kaag can't find his answer until he lights out for the forest. "I had to leave Harvard and Boston entirely," he realizes. In the White Mountains he begins to find new purpose in rescuing Hocking's library with the help of his colleague Carol. More importantly (and again very American-ly), the wilderness serves as the symbolic backdrop for encountering America's philosophical tradition afresh, amounting to remarkably religious experiences very much like conversion, revelation, even salvation -- phenomena not often associated with philosophy. In the White Mountains frequently hiked by James, Hocking, and other thinkers, Kaag finds philosophy in its natural habitat, freed from what Whitman called the "indoor complaints" and "querulous criticisms" asphyxiating the modern university, instead inhaling inspiration on the open road. "I was looking for help in all the usual places," he confesses, testifying like a sinner at a country revival altar-call that "the road was all but forgotten. I am so grateful that I eventually found it ... I came across, quite by accident, what I desperately needed to find."What Kaag finds (by the grace of something more than chance, if not exactly God) is less any systematic take on the particularities of the ideas in American philosophy and more, in their spirit, his experience of them, using them to infuse his life with a sense of freedom and choice. In this deeply Protestant tradition, revelation flows from this kind of inward transformation; in Kaag's own words, "American philosophy -- from Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century straight through to Cornel West in this one -- is about the possibilities of rebirth and renewal." Rebirth and renewal require a re-, a sense of being snatched graciously from some prior slough. More simply, salvation flows through a story. One once was lost but now is found.Kaag plots his experience of West Wind along the Dantean stages of hell, purgatory, and heaven, the book's three parts. By the end of his time cataloging Hocking's library and making arrangements with the family to find it a permanent home (at UMass-Lowell), Kaag has made peace with his father and has even fallen in love; in one of their first real acts of free will, Kaag and Carol choose to reclaim their lives by leaving unhappy marriages, eventually falling for one another. Above all, Kaag rediscovers a vitality in the examined life that is as powerful as spiritual experience, and his narrative spreads this gospel: philosophy is a lived experience, life is worthwhile if you make it so, and love is the key to both. "At its best, according to James," he explains, philosophy not only helps us understand life rationally, "but also to awaken us to its nuances and potentialities. The love of wisdom is supposed to guide is in living more fully, more meaningfully." Running on convert's zeal, American Philosophy testifies to loves reclaimed.Perhaps to its credit, the book so realizes the pragmatist timbre that it sometimes suffers from some of the same flaws that have been found in this tradition. Kaag never serves ideas in isolation but -- to counteract his sense that "philosophy had managed to lose its personal character" -- always overtop biographical sketches, emphasizing ideas as the broth condensed from the bones of life. But this very emphasis on lived experience sometimes blurs into experiences, and too many of them, fast and shallow streams of consciousness when fewer and deeper pools would be better. Even besides the many philosophers who appear in the book's relatively short two-hundred pages -- including, in addition to the pragmatists, Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Sartre, and Marcel -- there is an overloaded cast: Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, John Boyle O'Reilly, Fanny Parnell, Thoreau, Emerson, Jane Addams, Lydia Maria Child, Eliza Lee Cabot, Alfred North Whitehead, Ralph Cudworth, and more all make cameos. (Even David Foster Wallace drops in.) The biographical sketches of Hocking, Royce, Peirce, and James are excellent, the thinkers that Kaag knows best and to whom he devotes the most page-time as the actors more central to West Wind. But with the other sketches, curt and copious, the result feels like a buffet at which one over-eats and under-tastes, snacking on two dozen hastily-cooked dishes.Just as the pragmatists' emphasis on ideas as useful experiences for average people was put forth in democratic language that some have found simplistic, Kaag sometimes slips into the over-confident simplicity of a New York Times's op-ed. I first encountered his work in a sketch of a St. Louis Hegelian, quite good until he breezily noted that "today, the sprawl of St. Louis is a sad wasteland." I read the piece while living in St. Louis, a city that I and others happen to like. These kind of silly grapeshot clauses explode too frequently in American Philosophy. They are too broad and aimless to be of any use and haphazard enough to court unnecessary damage, as when a man bored on a hunt decides to fire his shotgun at nothing in particular. More accurately, it's as if Kaag is lecturing sleepy freshmen whom he expects won't protest superlatives when he makes declarations like "in Irish poetry, women weren't people, but icons" -- "the bard from Concord, along with every other man in New England, was a sexist" -- or "most men of Hocking's age fell in love at a very early age. With themselves." Sometimes such statements are plain wrong, as when he remarks that the eminently cautious William Ellery Channing was America's "most vocal abolitionist" or when he vents that "today, philosophers aren't supposed to care about the past. They're supposed to construct sound philosophical arguments that are timeless," ignoring that not insignificant tradition called Marxism and probably other vast sectors of university philosophy. More often, this slack generality is merely aggravating, regardless of one's opinion on St. Louis, the gender politics of Irish poetry, or the state of philosophy in the academy.Such simplicities are often paired with a didacticism in which Kaag overemphasizes that he is, take note, learning lessons (and by implication, we should too). "[My father] helped me learn very important lessons about being a parent -- and about being alive. He taught me that William James was probably right about the meaning of life," Kaag instructs, ending with the awkwardly-phrased moral that life "is up to the liver." Lists of lessons multiply, as when he warns that "it's tempting to ignore the past, to pretend it never happened. But it did -- and it will again and again if one isn't careful." Or that "West Wind taught me many things. About longevity in the face of destruction, about dealing with loss, about love and freedom, but also about the discipline of philosophy." This is, to use a threadworn phrase, too much telling and too little showing. In these statements, Kaag acts the preacher rather than the storyteller, not trusting that his congregants will see the lessons for themselves.Finally, the narrative's greatest strength -- its grounding in the author's individual experience -- also risks narrowing the ideas brought to bear on it. In American culture, Emerson and James are often softened into stuffing for therapeutic pillows, a use which Kaag roundly rejects: "Emersonian self-knowledge wasn't the shallow self-help of the twenty-first century, the solipsistic quest of a neurotic culture, but rather an attempt to interrupt the neuroses of our society." Yet the book's end result has whiffs of self-help. As ideas from Royce, James, and Pierce are introduced, one feels them go cotton soft as they are enlisted into remedying the author's love life. Even Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is "actually a thinly veiled tale of a dismal marriage," and Kaag quotes "Water, water, every where/ Nor any drop to drink" only to note that "marriage can be something like this." Like Charles Peirce, Coleridge heroically leaves a failed marriage that is justified retroactively by the birth of romanticism. Kaag has little interest in how the inward transformation championed by romanticism, transcendentalism, and pragmatism applied as much to politics, consciousness, and God as to relationships. These thinkers' sense of love went beyond the sexual and interpersonal varieties.And if one of Kaag's primary goals is to reclaim the American intellectual tradition as a way to repel Cartesian solipsism with togetherness, the book is oddly egocentric in one glaring respect: for a love story, American Philosophy gives us precious little on Carol -- her manners, quirks, words, or the particularities of their own togetherness that fan a kindling love. We learn that she is an expert on Kant and lives by his vision of reason and morality, has an "uncanny knack for argumentation," once led camps in Canada, and little else. Given that Kaag devotes an entire chapter to the undervalued women of pragmatism and that he reveals his talent for portraiture in accounts of the women who live on the Hocking estate, it is a shame that our sense of Carol is so sparse.But the book remains worthwhile precisely because these shortcomings are usually the underside of Kaag's strengths. His sprawling cast, for instance, if overstretched, works well to establish the close-knit, at times provincial atmosphere of Harvard intellectuals and what he calls "this circuitous history." One of many examples, consider how he traces the tight twists connecting Josiah Royce, Emerson, Hocking and his wife Agnes, and underappreciated transcendentalist Ella Lyman Cabot:

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 ... Ella helped Richard organize a Cambridge choral society ... they invited William Eernest Hocking. He arrived twenty minutes before the concert started and met another early arrival: Agnes O'Reilly.

One gets not only a good example of Kaag's belief that philosophy grows from lived experiences of love, but a feel for the tangled tightness that marked Boston's relationships as much as its roads. (To close his loop, Kaag notes that Agnes and Hocking eventually went to Royce for marital advice.)In his deeper portraits, Kaag's sketches of philosophy as lived experiences are among the book's best achievements, especially as we feel their vitality driving him to the grand realization that "salvation can't be accomplished alone." On James's well-known Gifford Lectures that would become The Varieties of Religious Experience and his essay "The Will to Believe" -- in both of which he argues that empiricism fails to answer all questions of human experience and that in such gaps, responses drawn from faith and desire have merit -- Kaag links the idea itself not only to James's deep depression in response to Darwin and Huxley's materialistic and deterministic universe (this correlation is frequently noted) but also to his budding love for Pauline Goldmark, a Jewish graduate of Bryn Mawr nearly thirty years his junior whom he met while hiking the Adirondacks, just prior to writing these landmark works. It is wonderful to note the overlap between the will to believe and "a biologist...athletic, a tramper and camper, and a lover of nature...and withal a perfectly simple, good girl, with a beautiful face," as James gushed. "I fairly dote on her, and were I younger and 'unattached' should probably be deep in love." Would James's meditation on mystic experience have happened without this tramper?Equally captivating is the line that Kaag traces through colleagues dissatisfied with James's ostensible individualism, from Alfred North Whitehead's "here we are" as a response to Descartes to the surprisingly confessional private writings of the logician Charles Peirce that reveal "a man who craved intimacy," while Kaag marks the affair that grew from his unhappy marriage as the prime example of "his love for the power of chance." He similarly explores how Josiah Royce's experience of his son's death to mental illness provoked his "philosophy of loyalty" in which unhappy consciousness finds freedom in devotion to a common cause. Kaag concludes with Hocking's idea of an "intersubjective Thou-art, inseparable from each subjective I-am" that aimed to balance Jamesian individualism with Roycean communalism. On Hocking's most influential book, The Meaning of God, Kaag sketches the relationship through which Hocking co-authored the book with his wife Agnes, arguing that "the Hockings' book," as it was called, "was not an argument against solipsism. It was a demonstration, a performance of intersubjectivity, one that I now desperately wanted to try."In these respects and others, Kaag inherits the pragmatists' superb pedagogical talent for translating complex ideas into language available to a wide audience. Rather than just venting about the university's elitist insularity and esoterica, he does something about it, daring to carry American intellectual history outside the academy and introduce its treasures to a broad audience. These kinds of books hold little weight on tenure committees (and for this reason aren't often written), but American Philosophy will prod readers to further explore these thinkers' lives and ideas. I wanted to return to Royce and James, to find out more about Cabot, to read The Meaning of God after finishing the book. Maybe it will even do its part to slow the much feared dwindling of philosophy majors.Kaag also knows when to pause his philosophical reflection and biographies of historic thinkers to charm and relax readers with quotidian scenes from his time at West Wind. His portrait of Jennifer, Hocking's granddaughter and current tenant of the estate, is especially good. Ironically, Kaag ends up connecting with her, the least bookish of the descendants, the most, as when he turns off his brain to try (and fail at) the Hocking family ritual of mowing West Wind's grass with a scythe, or when she artfully changes a supper from chicken to cheese when she notices the vegetarian Kaag skirting around the flesh.And if readers are stuck in Kaag's head for long stretches, he avoids solipsism by way of self-deprecation. With slapstick flare, he notices how "the thing about Emerson is that you tend to remember him at the least opportune times," as when he finds himself stranded with a flat tire. "The pain in my hands told me to use my foot. Of course the goddamned tire iron just bent. And then broke. And then was thrown as far as possible." When the "trust thyself" of "Self-Reliance" springs to mind, Kaag erupts: "Emerson could go fuck himself." Kaag later reflects on West Wind's upper field as "the place where Bunn once told me he'd learned how to downhill ski, where I'd picked up Lyme disease and decided to get a divorce." Though more often earnest, Kaag can make fun of himself, thankfully.Kaag's earnestness stems from his sense of these thinkers' vitality. This, ultimately, is the book's best success, as he realizes his calling to proclaim the good news that philosophy is not ideas to be bound in anthologies nor dissected in journals, but experiences to deepen our lives. The book's last and best chapter ends unexpectedly with the French existentialist Gabriel Marcel, enemy of Sartre's atheism and disciple of Hocking's god. In an idea he called the "mystery of being," Marcel argued that trying to "solve" our relation to the universe distracts from our participation in it. Life "wasn't supposed to be mastered at all. It was supposed to be experienced," Kaag concludes, while

I was, like the rest of these shadows, quivering. And had been for a long time. I tried to stop, to control myself, to put my thoughts and memories in order...It was no use. It had been, and still was, one monstrous quiver. I took a deep breath, held it, and the night continued to move in its perfectly inexplicable way.

What Kaag fails to accomplish in the moment, American Philosophy achieves in retrospect like a Puritan conversion narrative, shaping the present's streams as much as one can into some kind of providential arc. Whether one's god is Calvin's Jehovah or Being itself, both of them suprapersonal mysteries, Kaag lands on the most gracious result of both: "the proper response to the chance of redemption is unadulterated gratitude."____Kenyon Gradert is a doctoral candidate in English at Washington University in St. Louis.