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The Gospel of Relaxation
The Metaphysical Club:
A Story of Ideas in America
by Louis Menand
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 546 pp., $27)
Pragmatism is America's distinctive contribution
to the history of philosophical thought, though
there has always been some dispute about exactly
what doctrine it is supposed to name. The philosopher
and psychologist William James, in a lecture
given at Berkeley in 1898, attributed the view
to
a philosopher whose published works
. . . are no fit expression of his powers. I
refer to Mr. Charles S. Peirce, with whose very
existence as a philosopher I dare say many of
you are unacquainted. He is one of the most
original of contemporary thinkers; and the principle
of practicalism--or pragmatism, as he called
it, when I first heard him enunciate it in Cambridge
in the early '70s--is the clue or compass by
following which I find myself more and more
confirmed in believing we may find our feet
upon the proper trail.
James was at the time one of America's pre-eminent
intellectuals, so his advocacy of this new outlook
provoked a great deal of attention and debate.
Charles Sanders Peirce, by contrast, was very
much down on his luck. A brilliant logician
and scientist, he had been fired from his academic
position at Johns Hopkins for living in sin
with his wife-to-be, and he had lost his job
at the Coast Survey. At the time of James's
lecture, he was penniless, unemployed, and surviving
largely through the generosity of his friends.
It was natural for him to see, in James's promotion
of his thought, a unique opportunity to reclaim
the prominence that was his due. On looking
more closely at what James had written, however,
Peirce was so repelled by its substance that
he began calling his philosophy "pragmaticism,"
to distinguish it from what everyone else was
talking about, and to discourage, through the
ugliness of the chosen label, any further misappropriation.
For better or for worse--in my own view, for
worse--it is the pragmatism that derives from
James, and from his follower John Dewey, that
goes by that label today, and that is hailed
as America's great gift to modern thought. It
is this pragmatism to which Louis Menand subscribes,
and whose history he seeks to tell in his new
book (though he often writes as though he is
recounting the history of an idea that is common
not only to James and Dewey, but also to Peirce
and Oliver Wendell Holmes). What, then, is this
variety of pragmatism? Menand offers the following
characterization of the core idea:
If we strain out the differences,
personal and philosophical, they had with one
another, we can say that what these four thinkers
had in common was not a group of ideas, but
a single idea--an idea about ideas. They all
believed that ideas are not "out there" waiting
to be discovered, but are tools--like forks
and knives and microchips--that people devise
to cope with the world in which they find themselves.
Menand has an arrestingly original story to tell
about why this idea caught on in the waning years
of the nineteenth century. It arose, he says,
as a response to the horrors of the Civil War.
To hear Menand tell it, the Civil War was fought
in the name of certitude in an abstract principle:
that slavery was wrong and had to be abolished.
But the grim reality of what a defense of this
principle entailed led many a committed abolitionist
to question whether any idea could be worth that
sort of cost. "The lesson Holmes took from the
war can be put in a sentence," Menand observes.
"It is that certitude leads to violence."
This prompted Holmes, and his intellectual
peers in mid-nineteenth-century Cambridge, to
look for a conception of belief and judgment
that would eschew certainty. The challenge facing
the young post–Civil War intellectuals was "to
devise a theory of conduct that made sense in
a universe of uncertainty." And "pragmatism,"
says Menand, was their answer:
it was designed to make it harder
for people to be driven to violence by their
beliefs.... Holmes, James, Peirce and Dewey
wished to bring ideas and principles down to
a human level because they wished to avoid the
violence they saw hidden in abstractions. This
was one of the lessons the Civil War had taught
them.
At another point in his book, Menand makes it
clear that, in his view, pragmatism did not just
make it "harder" to fight for a belief, it made
it impossible to do so: "Pragmatism explains everything
about ideas except why a person would be willing
to die for one."
There is no denying the interest of Menand's
thesis, or the narrative flair with which he
constructs his account. Bringing a fluid, journalistic
style to the history of ideas, he treats his
reader to lively, often amusing, and always
informative biographical sketches of some of
the nineteenth century's most influential American
thinkers. We learn a great deal not only about
Holmes, Peirce, James, and Dewey, but about
a host of less central figures with whom their
lives intersected, among them the naturalist
Louis Agassiz, the brilliant conversationalist
Chauncey Wright (he was dubbed the "Cambridge
Socrates"), the social activist Jane Addams,
and the union organizer Eugene Debs. While Menand
makes some effort to explain these vivacious
digressions and detours as throwing light on
his central theme--the origins of pragmatism--his
reader often comes away with the impression
that the judgment as to what to pursue and for
how long to pursue it was made on purely narrative
grounds: would it make for a good yarn?
It usually does. The anecdotal entertainments
aside, though, there is a real problem making
sense of Menand's argument. Even before we engage
the inevitable philosophical complexities, we
are puzzled. If pragmatism really did make it
impossible for us ever to fight for something
we believe in, shouldn't that be a cause for
concern rather than a cause for celebration?
Doesn't virtually everyone agree that some beliefs
are so important that one ought to be willing
to risk one's life in their defense? And isn't
it easy to understand how the conviction that
no one may enslave another human being should
be one of those beliefs? And is it really plausible
that such socially conscientious thinkers as
James and Dewey should have wanted to box themselves
in, devising a philosophical view that would
make it impossible for them ever to advocate
the use of force in defense of basic values--freedom,
equality, justice, self-defense? Didn't Dewey
argue for America's entry into World War I?
And since when do we need a corrective to
an excess of certitude in philosophy? Philosophical
thought has undeniably been obsessed with certainty;
but it has been obsessed with the difficulty
of achieving it. It could hardly be accused
of having made glib claims to having achieved
it, claims that would then stand in need of
correction. Finally, if the aim is to make it
impossible for people to be certain of the truth
of grand moral abstractions, why do we need
a general theory of belief and not just a skeptical
theory of moral belief? In an increasingly atheistic
nineteenth century--fascinated by the thought
that if God is dead, then anything goes--the
commitment to the very existence of moral truths
(let alone to our indubitable knowledge of them)
had already lost much of its grip. Did anyone
really see the need for a general theory of
belief with which to dislodge excessive moral
certitude?
These are some of the puzzles that make one
suspect Menand's story even before examining
its details. And such an examination only bears
them out. Thinking of ideas not as "out there,"
but rather as "tools": how, exactly, does such
a notion deprive belief of its capacity to motivate
force? We know from Menand's description what
we have to look for. The Civil War was fought
in the name of certitude in a moral abstraction,
in this case the moral abstraction that "all
men are born equal." If pragmatism is to secure
its pacifying effect, it must either undermine
certitude or undermine abstraction or both.
Menand clearly thinks it does both. But in this
he is multiply confused.
There are two distinct ways of reading the
claim that ideas are not "out there" but are
rather tools, depending on whether one takes
it to be making a point about what beliefs are
or a point about how beliefs are caused. Menand
never sufficiently recognizes the ambiguity,
and consequently he trips over it. On the first
reading, pragmatism's central claim would be
that beliefs are tools, and hence can be evaluated
coherently only in terms of their utility and
not in terms of their "agreement with reality"
(with what's "out there"), at least as that
is classically understood. According to this
view, a belief is good if--like a hammer or
a microchip--it gets the job done, and satisfies
the concrete need for which it was devised;
and no other sort of evaluation of beliefs could
be appropriate. Call this the metaphysical thesis.
On the second reading, to say that beliefs
are not "out there" is not to make some claim
about what beliefs are; it is rather to make
a historical claim about how they come into
existence. The thought is that what we believe
is not to be explained by the way the world
is or by the available evidence, but rather
by the fact that some of our beliefs turn out
to be more useful than others in helping us
cope with our environment. We are caused to
have the beliefs that we have by our perception
of their utility. Call this the causal thesis.
Next
Page: Pragmatism's
connection between a belief being useful to
us and it being true.
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