American Philosophy by John Kaag Read Free Book Online

James instructs, “just as we rummage our house for a lost object … we visit what seems to us the probable neighborhood.” We look not for the memory itself, but for its known “associates.” One chilly March afternoon on my way home from Harvard Yard, I popped into a pastry shop called The Biscuit and waited for the bakers to bring out the Schnecken . As I waited, I found myself thinking about the words of the French Renaissance philosopher and essayist Michel Montaigne when he wrote of marriage: “Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.” Montaigne’s birdcage made painful sense. Marriage was something entered into expectantly and then suffered begrudgingly, at least in my case. I was trapped—my only hope that some moment of transcendence or perfect recall might whisk me away. At last the Schnecken arrived—just like the ones at the nameless coffee shop in New Hampshire—perfect morsels of golden brown coated with a mix of pecans and syrup. Their buttery aroma and that of my not-so-fresh coffee wafted into my expectant nose. And then—nothing. The Schnecken didn’t transport me back to the Hocking library. It didn’t open some portal to escape the ennui of my urban academic life. As I left the shop, I tossed my half-eaten Schnecken into the trash, stopped at a bar, and took the most indirect route possible back to our apartment on Commercial Street.
    The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued that human beings, even when they fall in love, are a bit like porcupines. We crave intimacy, the kind of familiarity that temporarily quells our fears about being completely alone in the universe, but this closeness means that we invariably stab the ones we love. My marriage was a bit like that. From the beginning, when I met my wife in our first year at college, we both wanted, sometimes desperately, to be close. But we bungled it rather badly. We were tender, perhaps too tender, meaning that we were often moved to sympathy or compassion, to a state of vulnerability, like a brush burn that won’t heal. We picked at each other for more than a decade. William Thackeray once claimed that “early love affairs ought to be strangled or drowned, like so many blind kittens.” Since all cats are born blind, the implication is pretty clear—young love rarely grows into something mature and healthy. I’d been a good son and a decent brother, but these experiences of love did pitifully little to prepare me for romance. After classes ended on Friday afternoons, she and I would go to the same family-style Chinese restaurant. We went so often that the owners got to know our names, our birthdays, our orders—moo goo gai pan, with chicken; mu shu vegetables, no oil. One evening, in a rare moment bordering on passion, we stopped on the sidewalk on our way out and had a non-perfunctory kiss. The owners rushed out the door after us. They were horrified to see a couple they’d long assumed were siblings kissing like that. We weren’t siblings, we just acted the part—sniping, teasing, cutting each other down to size. I, at least, didn’t have a clue how to be in erotic love. I often wished that someone would put us out of our misery. But no one did, so we groped through the next decade like two blind kittens.
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    Three weeks later, in the midst of yet another marital squabble brought on by my botched attempt to be romantic, Royce’s marginalia from the library came back to me all at once:
    ÏƒÏ…μβαίνει δ ’ Ἐμπεδοκλεῖ γε καὶ ἀφρονέστατον εἶναι τὸν θεόν˸ μόνος γὰρ τῶν στοιχείων ἓν οὐ