American Philosophy: A Love Story

A Philosopher In Love

John Kaag's book, "American Philosophy: A Love Story" is deeply personal as well as philosophically insightful. Kaag, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, writes for a broad audience and, in words he uses to describe his aim, "successfully bridges the gap between philosophical and creative writing". The book is absorbing and a pleasure to read.

Kaag had earned his PhD and in 2008 was half-heartedly engaged in a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard. His long-absent father had just died and his marriage was crumbling. Kaag felt the force of doubts about the value of life that William James had addressed at Harvard in an 1895 lecture, "Is Life Worth Living?" Through a series of accidents, Kaag finds ways to keep going. He finds himself in a large, musty library in the New Hampshire mountains on an estate that belonged to the American philosopher William Ernst Hocking (1873 -- 1966) and was still owned by his family. Hocking was well-known during his lifetime but is little studied today. He was an idealist influenced heavily by his teacher at Harvard, Josiah Royce. I fell in love early with Kaag's book when I found out it was about Hocking. I have read Hocking's most famous book, "The Meaning of God in Human Experience" and reviewed it here on Alibris.

Kaag wins the trust of the Hocking family and begins a long project cataloguing the books in the philosopher's library, including many rare first editions. He is enamored to see first editions of Descartes, Hobbes, and Kant, but the books owned by the American philosophers whom Kaag has studied, frequently with their handwritten marginalia, win his heart. In the course of his project, Kaag firms up his resolve to get a divorce. He also begins a relationship with a colleague, a philosophical student of Kant, Carol, who assists him in his cataloguing. Over time, the two philosophers fall in love and marry.

As the story progresses over three-years, Kaag gradually works out his feelings of guilt, anger, and helplessness over his father and his failed marriage. He also comes to rethink the philosophers he has studied and to understand better what he finds of value in the philosophical enterprise. Kaag discusses many philosophers in the book but the focus is on the great American philosophers, Emerson, Thoreau, James Peirce, Royce, Hocking and on the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel who learned from them in many ways. Kaag states his guiding theme and what he learns from his endeavors at the outset of the book.

"For American philosophers like James, determining life's worth is, in a very real sense, up to us. Our wills remain the decisive factor in making meaning in a world that continually threatens it. Our past does not have to control us. The risk that life is wholly meaningless is real, but so too is the reward: the ever-present chance to be largely responsible for its worth. The appropriate response to our existential situation is not, at least for James, utter despair or suicide, but rather the repeated, ardent, yearning attempt to make good on life's tenuous possibilities. And the possibilities are out there, often in the most unlikely places."

Kaag's blossoming love flows together with the lessons he derives from the American philosophers with their independence, freedom, iconoclasm, and gradually developing sense of community to offset an earlier rugged individualism. In succeeding chapters, he offers short, pointed summaries of some of the thoughts of the philosophers, combining it with reflections on their lives. Biography is an important part of philosophy. Thus, Thoreau, for example, never married, was awkward with women (he suffered a rejection from a woman who had earlier rejected his brother) and is best-known for his short, solitary stay at Walden Pond. Several chapters are named for and develop philosophical texts. Thus, "The Will to Believe" examines James' famous essay on religious faith in the light of his relationship with a young woman. "Evolutionary Love" is the title of an essay by Charles Peirce which, for Kaag, celebrates Peirce's unconventional scandal-ridden second marriage to a woman of uncertain origin and the end of his first unhappy marriage. " Philosophy of Loyalty" is the title of a book by the American idealist philosopher Josiah Royce written at the time of the death of a beloved son. And an earlier chapter "Divine Madness" alludes to Plato and his discussion of love and madness in the "Phaedrus". Kaag finds the works of these philosophers rooted in their life experiences. He sees these thinkers as celebrating the value of love and freedom, as opposed to scientific determinism and solipsistic individualism, in giving life meaning.

This book movingly combines personal experience and change with reflection on what makes life valuable -- which is Kaag's understanding of the nature of philosophical thinking. I was glad to read Kaag discussing philosophers I have read and thought about. But the book may be read with pleasure by those without a background in philosophy. The book is a tribute to the power of love and of thought in the search to live a meaningful life in the face of sorrow and difficulty.

Robin Friedman