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Monday, January 16, 2017

American Philosophy-A Love Story

This is one of these books that I was desperate not to finish reading, it is so good. It is an unusual book to fall into that category as it is a unique mix of the story of American philosophy as it intermixes with continental philosophy with a dollop of personal history and the history of the people involved. It is the story of William Hocking, his wife Agnes, their love story, a love story of the mind and the love story of John Kaag and his wife Carol Hay.
But it isn’t just about that, rather it is a broad and expansive overview of the evolution of American philosophy, some would call is pragmatism, and recitations of that uniquely American product with its European forebears and contemporaries. The scholarship of Prof. Kaag is impressive, but more impressive is his ability to tell the story of the flesh and blood people who created this story and history. His ability to disseminate the essential meanings and lessons from the history to the lay mind is beyond impressive. I envy his students in that not only are they getting exposed to a top philosophical mind , but they are benefitting from learning from a world level story teller.
The basics are that Prof Kaag stumbled upon Hocking’s estate, West Wind and in so doing he came into a treasure trove of books that made up William Hocking’s library. He was able to step in to help Hocking’s granddaughters catalog and sort through their beloved grandfather’s library and papers and he was able to expose himself to the thoughts and histories of one of the great American philosophers, now long forgotten by the rest of the world.
Prof Kaag comes to this work with a pedigree and a burden: he is undergoing a crisis in his professional and personal life. The work, however, allows him to let the philosophy take him through his crisis and to guide him through life. One major theme of the book is the explanation of what philosophy once was: based on experiential knowledge and used to resolve real world problems; and what philosophy has evolved into: a specialized and technical trudge through indecipherable language and rigid, technical formalisms. By dissecting the writings of the American philosophical greats: James, Hocking, Peirce, Royce, and Jane Addams through the lens of the continental greats which inspired much of the discussions: Descarte, Hegel, Schilling, Plato, Socrates, Kant et. Al. Prof. Kaag was able to make the connection between the continental philosophers and the American philosophers, i.e. create the causal and rational path that links these sometime disparate seeming schools of philosophy.
The remarkable part is that he was able to accomplish this task easily and pleasurably through his narrative and his willingness to expose his own personal history through incorporating it into the narrative. 
Other reviewers have expressed disappointment in Prof. Kaag’s light handed touch on his own personal romance with his colleague and now wife. They wanted more romance, such is the desire of the book reviewers for titillation. They assumed wrongly, that the love story that Prof. Kaag hinted at in the book title referred to his own story. It may be, but of great meaning in this story is the parallel paths walked by the author and his wife along with Hocking and his wife Agnes. And finally between Hocking and Pearl Buck, after Agnes’s passing.
One personal note of intellectual pleasure is that Prof. Kaag has combined much of what I have been reading lately and included them into the context of this book. His reference to some modern writings and cultural references coincides with some of the other books and ideas I have been dealing with recently. It was as if he was prescient in foretelling my own life at this point in time.

This was an outstanding read and an intellectual roller coaster ride.  I loved the ride and I am now distraught that it is over.

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