American Philosophy Read Free Page B

as he refined Varieties . One evening, after reading a section of the manuscript to his students, James, who was edging toward sixty, turned to Hocking: “Hocking, why did you sit there with a perpetual frown on your face?” Hocking later admitted being unaware of the frown—he had simply been focused or, better yet, “enthralled.” After graduating with his doctorate from Harvard in 1904 and spending two years teaching at Andover Theological Seminary, Hocking moved to California to join the faculty at Berkeley. Instead of dedicating himself to philosophy, however, he spent most of his time in San Francisco helping to rebuild after the great earthquake of 1906, honing what would become the architectural skills necessary to design and build an estate in the White Mountains. In 1908 he was called to Yale to teach, and when his mentor Josiah Royce died, in 1916, he assumed Royce’s chair in philosophy at Harvard, which was widely recognized as the most prominent position in the field. By the end of his forty-year career at Harvard, Hocking had become one of the icons of American philosophy. By 1944 he was only the sixth American to deliver the famed Gifford Lectures in Scotland (the other American Gifford lecturers being Josiah Royce, William James, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, and Reinhold Niebuhr).
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    On my first trip to the Hocking estate, I knew much more about his teachers than about Hocking himself. I’d driven to Chocorua to help organize a conference on the life and work of William James. Today, most philosophy conferences are held in enormous nondescript hotels in enormous nondescript cities, so this little gathering of philosophers at the Chocorua Public Library had piqued my interest. I knew the conference would be good, but not quite good enough to assuage my abiding fears that philosophy really didn’t matter. So once again I found myself elsewhere—this time considering the delectable virtues of Schnecken at a German pastry shop at the junction of Routes 16 and 113. The place didn’t even have a name, just a sign outside that read COFFEE FOR SALE . This is where I found Bunn Nickerson. Bunn was one of those fellows you hope you’ll become when you turn ninety-three. He was sharp and wiry and nothing like most of the philosophers I meet. He walked slowly, like most old philosophers do, although his hobble wasn’t a function of long-standing inactivity, but of farming and skiing.
    I’m not sure why I talked to Bunn (in my profession one learns to be circumspect). I do remember being embarrassed when he asked me what I did for a living.
    â€œI teach philosophy,” I said, bracing myself for the awkward silence that usually follows this admission.
    It turned out that Bunn had grown up with philosophers, or, more accurately, grown up in a little house on a corner of one philosopher’s—“Dr. Hocking’s”—land. Today, philosophers have arguments and the occasional student. Most of them don’t have “land.” Bunn made it sound like the realm of a philosopher king, and this wasn’t too far from the truth: The Hocking estate, as I would find out, comprised one stone manor house, six small summer cottages, two large barns, and one fishing pond with three beaver hutches, all situated on four hundred acres of field and forest. And a library . Bunn must have seen me light up when he said the word. In an act of generosity I’ve never been able to understand, he offered to take me there. Getting to see it struck me as a very good reason to skip out on the rest of the conference planning, so I piled into the old man’s blue Dodge pickup and we bumped up the hill toward “Dr. Hocking’s land”—or, as Bunn called it, “West Wind.”

 
    FINDING WEST WIND
    Today, most academics don’t have personal libraries worth talking about, so they avoid a problem many