The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

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Summary: Ideas Matter
Review: There are times when we need to ask how we got here, and what we believe. There are books that help us do that. This is one of those books.

This book gives us a chance to experience the education, interaction, and growth of some of the most important men behind the ideas that shaped our country over the past century. These men believed what they believed was important, and they believed that what others had to say was important, and the result set a course for the country for a long time.

For a short period three men (Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce) along with others were part of a discussion group that gives the book its name. The book covers many more men, and a much longer period, but continually revolves around these three, returning repeatedly to them and their influence on each other, and through them to the world around them.

That many men are going to find it impossible to agree all the time, and in fact it is their dealing with the differences that contributes the most to the future, as well as the narrative of the book. When they start to contemplate the place of conflicting ideas, conflicting beliefs, and conflicting ideas of what free speech means in our democracy you know this book is carrying us onto a road we seldom travel in popular literature.

This book traces men, their ideas, and the results from before the Civil War (what did everyone in the North really want from abolition? and what did they really think about race relations?) through the 'club' to the Supreme Court decision in U.S. vs. Abrams in 1919. A group of important men in an important time, and a very important idea that demands our attention now more than ever.

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Summary: Should Become a Standard Work on Pragmatism
Review: For a short while in 1872 there was a "Metaphysical Club" at Harvard (a kind of talking shop for ideas). It included Charles Sanders Peirce, a scientist interested in logic, William James, a trained medic who would write a founding treatise of modern psychology, Chauncey Wright, the so-called "Cambridge Socrates", an inveterate conversationalist with a bent for the virtues of common-sense, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, a man shot three times in the Civil War and now making his way in the field of the Law. This club met for only a few months of that year and, by all accounts, we cannot be sure that any or all of these individuals attended that often; and yet it becomes for Menand in this book the totem by which the birth of Pragmatism is announced.

The book itself focuses on four individuals: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Peirce, William James and a man of a half generation later, John Dewey (who knew of Peirce and James without being intimately connected with them personally). We are given a historical presentation of the ideas of these individuals which encompasses both a history of their ideas and the socio-political context of their time and place with its intellectual background to boot (late 19th century America). This itself was a period of socio-cultural plurality in which, in a sense, a country was looking to define itself (one thinks of the example of Eugene Debs and the Pullman Strike of 1894 as an example in the field of workers' rights or of the steady stream of immigrants which were, even as the pragmatists whiled away their time, steadily streaming in from many corners of the globe.). What Menand presents us with, put simply, is the pragmatist development of the idea that the human being is subject to evolution. The human being, so the pragmatist would assert in his or her Darwinian-influenced way, is prey to the contingency which is part of the fabric of the Universe. That said, as a thinking being the human being uses ideas instrumentally as s/he adjusts to the conditions of life. But this instrumentalism is social, not individual (a point Dewey and his accomplice George Herbert Mead would insist on) for it is the social being which is the given and the individual which is an abstraction. As an account of thinking, Menand suggests, the Pragmatists present the thesis that "ideas [are] always soaked through by the personal and social situations in which we find them" (p. xii). Philosophically put, the Pragmatists are anti-foundationalists.

Menand finds in this account of pragmatist origins heros (and, in Jane Addams, a heroine) of tolerance and democracy. His account of the individual pragmatists here is of solid and sound intellectual pioneers (and done thoroughly, but engagingly so). A particular favourite of mine is the example of Nicholas St. John Green and his belief in beliefs as "that upon which a man is prepared to act" (p. 225). Fortunately for Green, Peirce gets a hold of this belief, a belief which checks out with Peirce and Wendell Holmes as the idea that beliefs are "bets", and, with suitable scientific and philosophical presentation, he calls his fledgling belief "pragmatism". Fortunately for Peirce (though not in his own estimation!) this was picked up by William James who popularised the notion (in a naturalising and humanising way) and expanded upon it into areas of truth, experience and consciousness. Fortunately for America it was seized upon by John Dewey who took its pluralist and developmental implicitnesses and developed a theory and practice of education and democracy in its spirit which still has effects in America today through such bodies as the ACLU (which he was instrumental in initiating) and the ideas of progressive education (which he was THE pioneer of).

Thus, in "The Metaphysical Club" Menand presents the life, thoughts and times of the Pragmatists, anti-philosophers who take a developmental and experimental attitude towards beliefs and use that attitude in their own fields of endeavour in order to promote the causes of democracy, self-responsibility and contingency. Menand presents an engaging intellectual history which persuades and beguiles as it details the historical events which brought pragmatism to birth. He has written a very good book indeed and is partial in favour of the pragmatists without being partisan about them. His book is also timely for the issues that the pragmatists were concerned with, and the common-sense approach to life's issues that they modelled, are abidingly, and today yet again, relevant to us all.

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Summary: good read, but a difficult subject
Review: The Metaphysical Club is a study of the foundations and conception of the philosophy of Pragmatism. Louis Menand approaches his subject by tying it to the biographies of Pragmatism's key authors -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey -- biographies which thread their ways through the rest of the history.

Menand's central argument, as I see it, is that the American Civil War was so murderous that it spawned in many that saw it through doubts about the morality of belief in the absolute. It provided a stark example of how beliefs strongly held can end up in carnage and as such a moral reason to be rid of absolutist thinking. The publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species' materialistic version of evolution provided an extraordinarily powerful means of doubting the truth of a designed universe - the basis of most arguments for absolute truths. And the invention of the science of statistics provided a way to understand mathematically, and thus predict, the behavior of groups of people, animals and things so as to demystify them. So, the Civil War provided the end and the reason to strive for it. What made it different from other examples of horrible destruction based on belief-systems is that Darwin and statistics provided the means to introduce doubt.

Therefore, one of the main goals of pragmatism was to undermine the idea of absolute truth. As Menand quotes James, "The whole notion of truth, which naturally and without reflexion we assume to mean the simple duplication by the mind of a ready-made and given reality, proves hard to understand clearly ... [A]ll our thoughts are instrumental, and mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma." (p. 358) Beliefs, then, are simply ways of thinking that have the property of making the organisms that hold them more or less likely to survive in any given environment. Those beliefs that are apt adaptations, or at least not hobbling in some way, will survive because their host organisms will survive and those that are not will die with their hosts. There is some reason to suspect that successful beliefs are closer estimations of the world in itself, but there is no way to know that to be true. Or as Menand quotes Dewey, "The chief service of pragmatism, as regards epistemology ... will be ... to give the coup de grace to representationalism." (p.361)

One way to think of pragmatism, then, is as "bets-ism". "Beliefs, Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey had said repeatedly, are just bets on the future. Though we may believe unreservedly in a certain set of truths, there is always the possiblity that some other set of truths might be the case. In the end, we have to act on what we believe; we cannot wait for confirmation from the rest of the universe. But the moral justification for our actions comes from the tolerance we have shown to other ways of being in the world, other ways of considering the case. The alternative is force. Pragmatism was designed to make it harder for people to be driven to violence by their beliefs." (p. 440)

Although Pragmatism is associated with progressive thinking and Menand ties it to the modern concept of pluralism, it is a very conservative creed, with a strong preference for the status quo. As Menand quotes Holmes letter to Laski, "Some kind of despotism is at the bottom of seeking for change. ... I don't care to boss my neighbors and to require them to want something different than they do -- even when, as frequently, I think their wishes more or less suicidal." (p. 62) I think that it is intellectually related to Pascal and Erasmus' apologias contra the reformation and in defense of the Catholic Church's historical inconstancy. Surely they knew they were alluding to Pascal's wager when they said that beliefs were just bets on the future. I think of both intellectual traditions as kinds of intellectual Thermidors, if you will.

The Metaphysical Club is very well written and has, in my estimation, a convincing argument to make, but I doubt that someone with little exposure to philosophy would find all of it easy going. There are sections that are quite dense and take some time to digest, while others are relatively straight-forward narratives. The book is not a biography of the four central Pragmatists, it has biographical sketches and those parts that are more relevant to the book's theme are stressed and those which are not are passed over. Nonetheless, difficult intellectual histories as approachable as this one are few and far between. If you find the subjects addressed intriguing, I think it would be difficult to find better than The Metaphysical Club.

Note: the book is listed as being 546 pages in length, but the text is only 445 pages, the rest is devoted to endnotes and the index. There are very few additional comments in the endnotes. The index is solid but not nearly as comprehensive as it could be.

Rating:
Summary: excellent - but not entirely accessible
Review: After reading Robert Richardson Jr.'s biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, MIND ON FIRE, and the development of transcendentalism in America in the early nineteenth century, I was very eager to continue the story of American intellectual development with Menand's book. I did enjoy it primarily because it was new territory for me - BUT I couldn't agree more with Jean Strouse's review in the New York Times Book Section especially her statement, "On occassion when the METAPHYSICAL CLUB travels into the pure geneaology of thought readers unfamiliar with these matters may feel a bit lost - but when the lives animate the ideas, everything works". Although Menand undoubtably wrestled with the form the book would take, I also had some misgivings about the book structurally - the various stories of each of the men weren't exactly woven together to form the whole that I would have liked to have read - and there were multiple climaxes to the narrative which were disconcerting at times - THAT SAID - it is a prodigious and fascinating work and one that I might reread again soon after the first digestion is completed!

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Summary: Making philosophy seem like it actually matters
Review: This book is a group briography of people to whom philosophy really mattered and actually affected real world events such as the way they ran a school (Dewey) or the way they ruled on court cases (Holmes). Menand takes a group of late 19th and early 20th century thinkers and shows how they attempted to deal with the loss of idealism the followed the civil war and developed a philosophy for the emerging modern nation.
You don't need any background in philosophy to thoroughly enjoy this book because it is so well written and Menand makes a concerted effort to open up this area to anyone with the patience to read a serious (but fun) book. There were certainly passages that I didn't fully understand, which is the case when I read almost anything about philosophy, but any section like that would inevitably be followed by something that would keep me thinking for hours. I was dissapointed when this book ended, especially because the last few pages were so terrific.

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Summary: Distinctly American
Review: The Metaphysical Club, while hefty in size, is an amazing piece of scholarship and writing. Menand's book, while nonfiction, reads much like a novel--characters interact as if it were a TV drama--in order to tell the story of the development of the distinctly modern, distinctly American idea of pragmatism. Throughout the book, the key players--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey--are richly highlighted by their always eccentric, sometimes hilarious contemporaries. Anyone interested in how American pragmatism developed would surely enjoy Menand's excellently-researched and written text.

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Summary: "Pragmatism: A philosophy that "works" for America?
Review: "The Sixties generation of student radicals, deeply traumatized by the experience of a morally questionable--and it seemed unwinnable war, upended their parents' America and created a radically different one. In this new America, all ancient values would be relativized and the future thrown open to the most dramatic and dizzying experiments in freedom. The story sounds familiar, but in Loius Menand's excellent new book, the Sixties in question are the 1860's, the war is the Civil War, and the revolution in values in the philosophical movement that came to be known as 'pragmatism'."

So begins Michael Potrema's review of Menand's "Metaphysical Club" in the July 9, 2001 issue of National Review Magazine. It is one reason I subscribe--the excellent book reviews. I agree with Potrema when he says of Menand's work that it is refreshing to read a history that does not advertise the political views of its author on every page,(although from his other books we know Menand leans left). In this book, Menand tells a fascinating story with fair-minded objectivity, backed up by amazing scholarship. His book provides a valuable complement to the work of another brilliant historian: "The Battle Cry of Freedom:The Civil Era," by Pulitzer Prize winner James McPherson. McPherson chronicles the war itself, while Menand illuminates one of the major intellectual movements (pragmatism) that developed in its aftermath. Reading these two works can greatly aid Americans in fulfilling what Menand states was his purpose in writing the book: to help us understand ourselves better.

The Civil War was a defining event in our history, and we benefit from reviewing our not-so-distant past. Menand describes how the Civil War affected the lives and ideas of the group of intellectuals that became known as the pragmatists. Oliver Wendell Holmes particularly, formed a conclusion from his wartime experience:"Certitude leads to violence." Thoughtful readers will reflect upon this conclusion and the exploration of other questions in this book though. In an unavoidable irony, I must ask, how could Holmes be certain of this absolutist statement? Was it people's certitude that led to the violence of the Civil War or simply a disregard and a forgetting of certitudes such as: The two great commandments are to love God and your neighbor as yourself?

After all, as Menand points out, the abolitionist movement emerged out of the religious revival known as the Second Awakening that invigorated the country in the pre-Civil War years. It was Harriet Beecher Stowe's plea for Christian compassion in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" that so galvanized the country. In the 1960's the saying was,"What if they gave a war and nobody came?" Well, what if in the 1860's North and South had paused, taken a few deep breaths, and democratically decided to hold a forty day prayer vigil asking God what to do about slavery before plunging into what was then the most bloody war in the history of the world, with brother killing brother in a frenzy of mutual destruction? Might not it have been a "pragmatic" thing to try?

Unlike Holmes and Dewey, neither Peirce nor James rejected Christian beliefs, they simply tried to reconcile scientific methods with them. William James recognized that faith is an act of the will (as he explains in his celebrated essay,"The Will to Believe"). Why didn't he realize that love is an act of the will also, and a powerful way to avoid violence? It would have been a more legitimate conclusion to draw than the one Holmes drew. In any event, Menand's and McPherson's books recount the truly perplexing scientific, moral and political questions the people grappled with at that time, and it is a fascinating study. If thinking made progress or took some wrong turns,this is where to discover it. One wonders what might have happened if leaders at that time had followed the example of the Founding Fathers and used their reasoning powers, but also humbly asked for divine guidance(the drafters of the U.S.Constitution frequently paused for prayer during the Philadephia convention, as recorded by James Madison in his "Notes"). We'll never know, but we can say that if the pragmatist's aim was to develop a philosophy that would prevent wars, it is pretty difficult to establish that they succeeded.

The two central flaws of pragmatism are as William James acknowledges in "The Will to Believe" (I did my master's thesis on it) and as Menand so aptly observes. One, to the extent that it rejects Biblical authority in favor of scientific naturalism (which should not be considered synonymous with science) it has no basis except personal preference for evaluating beliefs or their consequences, hence feeds the potential for wars as much as ever. Science can only provisionally tell us what "is", but not what "should be." The other major flaw is that it cannot account for unpragmatic behavior--"pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person would die for one." Contrary to what another reviewer said, this book will not be hated by conservatives. It illuminates how American philosophy has developed, for better or worse. In my opinion Pierce and James provided some valuable insights, but Holmes and Dewey led us to moral confusion. This book is the overview; further study is required to assess the thought and impact of these influential people.

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Summary: Absolutely Brilliant!
Review: Louis Menand is a rare author. He brings the reader a story of ideas that arose out of and because of the Civil War. And he does so, explaining and interpreting in his own manner which is unique and exciting. He combines these ideas which are based aroung philosophy and psychology, and he gives us his own subjective interpretation. A must buy for an inquisitve person that wants to know the things we think and do today are because of what arose following the Civil War in the past. Thank you for your time and God Bless America.

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Summary: History Blended With Philosophy Told Well
Review: Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club (A Story of Ideas in America) looks primarily at four men, William James, Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Pierce (all three members of the briefly existing Metaphysical Club) and John Dewey (influenced by the previous three). It is basically the story of the development of American philosophy from the Civil War unitl the 1920's (with that mode of thinking existing until swept away in the Cold War). The author has managed to create an exciting read and mixes up the personal, philosophical and poltical throughout the book in such a way to show that there truly is no separation. The story takes in many of the personalities both before the Civil War (such as the excellent chapter on Louis Agassiz) and after (Jane Addams) to give a broad perspective on the vast changes wrought by the war. Even if the philosophy gets a little too heavy (and it rarely does), the story never lets the reader down as a parade of fascinating personalities is continually moving through the pages. This is a vast achievement that is handled with great skill and will be a joy for any reader of history. What a pleasure to discover that the history of ideas is even more exciting than one would at first imagine in the hands of such a skilled author.

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Summary: Excellent Read in the History of Ideas
Review: A remarkably succinct overview of the history of ideas in America from the early part of the 19 century to the twentieth century. Haven't enjoy a book as much as this in a long time.