In American Philosphy , philosopher and professor John Kaag, beset by personal circumstances, undertakes to catalog the neglected personal library of William Hocking. As he combs the stacks and chronicles the delights and challenges he faces, Kaag peppers his reflections with references to philosophy. It works well as a non-textbook-style review of the philosophy without coming across as a survey or critical examination, and explicates a larger point: the place for philosophy in daily life. It is, in structure, similar to his excellent Hiking with Nietzsche, trading the Nietzschean hikes in the Swiss Alps for climbs among the library’s stacks.
In American Philosophy, Hocking’s private library, still standing as a drafty, neglected museum of first editions and personally imprinted tomes, allows Kaag to leaf through pages and reconsider the cannon.
What’s appreciable about American Philosophy, as with _Hiking with Nietzsche,_is that neither books are attempts at defense or critique (although the latter shoots the occasional dart at Kant). In addition to Hocking’s work, he reviews the writing and thought of James, Emerson, and other luminaries of America’s contributions to philosophy, as well as Hocking’s own life.
As Kaag points out, American philosophy has never been included in the classical cannon of philosophy: “To this day, American philosophy is regarded as provincial and narrow in its focus, just another by-product of the nation’s political and cultural exceptionalism,” he writes.
Rather than a unifying system of thought, American philosophy, in Kaag’s analysis, reveals a cannon that leans heavily on its forebears, borrowing and hybridizing from both the Bible and European thinkers. American philosophy is connected, in its development, to other models of thought, including existentialism. It’s historically satisfying and unifying in showing American philosophy’s evolution from its European forebears.
Wonder and mystery feature heavily in the upshots of American philosophy; there’s an optimistic aura of wonder and mystery that distinguishes it from European philosophy. And while there is not a defense or refutation of American philosophy itself in Kaag’s book, he does offer this:
Philosophy, and the humanities more generally, once served as an effective cult of the dead—documenting, explaining, and revitalizing the meaning and value of human pursuits. It tried to figure out how to preserve what is noble and most worthy about us. At its best, philosophy tried to explain why our lives, so fragile and ephemeral, might have lasting significance.
As a younger man in college growing distant from my religious upbringing, I found in philosophy a kind of replacement: in Nietzsche, the call to forge one’s own values and ideals, and bringing meaning to one’s own life in the absence of one anointed truth. So, too, in writing: polishing my verbal effluvia into structured writing could be, in its own way, a thing that lives beyond me. That continues in me to this day, and is easily relatable to becoming a leader: lacking external direction is a reliable feature of adulthood, and the capacity to generate priorities and values is paramount .
Too, it connects to this post here on Uncorrected, a quick one-off pull quote with a comment, on why anyone undertakes the task of writing and publishing: in the absence of waiting for Godot, instead of waiting for the promises of an afterlife, American philosophy approaches human existence as a mystery:
Gabriel Marcel’s comment that “life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be experienced…
More importantly, it reveals an important feature of philosophy (and, I might add, the arts themselves, and perhaps our entire generative proclivity as a species, echoing Erik Erikson’s description of self-actualizing whereby we evolve, if we’re lucky enough, to generativity):
Philosophy, and the humanities more generally, once served as an effective cult of the dead—documenting, explaining, and revitalizing the meaning and value of human pursuits. It tried to figure out how to preserve what is noble and most worthy about us. At its best, philosophy tried to explain why our lives, so fragile and ephemeral, might have lasting significance.
We often quietly toil in some way unique to ourselves: behind a keyboard, in an office, repairing things, whatever. Our hope is that our efforts spread beyond our own narrow interests, and, in their way, supplant our quiet, desperate hope for an idyllic afterlife with something less fantastical, but no less immortal.