Thinking Big, Thinking Free

The “Metaphysical Club” really wasn’t much of a club at all, as clubs go--and especially by comparison with the other all-male town-gown clubs for dinner, discussion and debate that were founded on and around several New England campuses in the latter part of the 19th century (some of them still flourishing today, having meanwhile become more inclusive). Max H. Fisch even went so far as to write an article in 1964 titled “Was There a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge?” The name “Metaphysical Club” doesn’t appear in Louis Menand’s book (after the title page) until Page 200. Even after that, the club remains rather shadowy, having existed, he thinks, for perhaps nine months altogether, so that 25 pages after its first mention we hear that it “had started to pull apart toward the summer of 1872.”

But the club does provide the author with a tent, flimsy though it may be, for a collective biography of four thinkers from 19th century New England who, individually and collectively, went on to cast a large shadow across much of American culture during the 20th century: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935), associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932; William James (1842-1910), professor of psychology and philosophy at Harvard from 1880 to 1907; Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), who after a false start at the Johns Hopkins worked most of his adult life, in penury, as a private scholar in Pike County, Penn.; and John Dewey (1859-1952), professor at the universities of Michigan, Chicago and Columbia, beginning in 1884.

“These people had highly distinctive personalities,” Menand explains, “but their careers intersected at many points, and together they were more responsible than any other group for moving American thought into the modern world.”

Holmes is the most imposing of the four and was certainly the best known in his own time. He had a gift for the memorable turn of phrase (for example, his epigram that the 1st Amendment does not guarantee the right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater), and his opinions and dissents on the court have endeared him to civil libertarians and political progressives ever since. Menand finds this to be quite surprising, for, he writes, “Holmes’s defense of civil liberties had nothing to do ... with the notion that such liberties were owed to people merely by the fact of their being human--a belief he held in conspicuous contempt.” Indeed, “he disliked the self-righteous, but he had no sympathy for the weak,” and “he had no concern for the individual.” This darker side of his mind, which Menand relates in part to his traumatic experience fighting in the Civil War, set him apart from his friends and colleagues, especially his friend James, of whom Holmes said in memoriam that “his wishes made him turn down the lights so as to give miracle a chance.” James is perhaps the member of this group whose name would be recognized most readily today. In part this could be because he has been fortunate in having a series of highly successful biographies written about him, including the two-volume work of 1935, “The Thought and Character of William James” by Ralph Barton Perry, but also Linda Simon’s “Genuine Reality: A Life of William James” (1998) and “William James: His Life and Thought” by Gerald E. Myers (1986), which has just appeared in paperback. James’ sprawling but eminently readable Gifford Lectures of 1901-1902 at Edinburgh, “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” can still be found on many people’s shelves and on many college reading lists. And it remains endlessly intriguing to compare his career with that of his brother, Henry James Jr. (As the cliche has it, Henry wrote novels as though they were philosophy and William wrote philosophy as though it were a novel).

Of the four, by contrast, Charles Sanders Peirce was then, and still is now, the least known. He is in many ways a tragic figure, and for all of his life he was “a disaster waiting to happen.” Arguably the most original intellect of the four and often brilliant and profound to the point of being incomprehensible, he never actualized the potential that everyone, or almost everyone, recognized in him. Another reason, Menand surmises, is that as a writer, “every relevant idea seemed equally important to him,” and he tended never to get things done. Chapter 8 of “The Metaphysical Club” is titled “The Law of Errors” and, in it, Menand (who is a professor of English) describes in considerable detail the testimony that Peirce and his father, Benjamin--identified by “Who Was Who in America” as the “leading mathematician of his time”--gave in a celebrated court trial about the genuineness of signatures by one Sylvia Ann Howland. He explains why that testimony “captivated, and sometimes appalled people” by its “apparent reduction of a human activity ... to a set of numbers. For in the 1860s such reductions had a particular philosophical implication. They were understood to point toward determinism.” But Peirce’s aberrant personal life, what one colleague called “his broken and dissolute character,” and his defiance of both social and academic convention shipwrecked a promising career. It was only in the decades after his death, with the collection and publication of his scattered papers (1931-58), that he began to reach the position of respect that he deserves.

Both Holmes and Dewey lived and remained intellectually vigorous into their 90s, Dewey having died only in 1952. I remember well that as a Ph.D candidate at the University of Chicago in 1944 and 1945, amid the intellectual ferment caused by the polemics of Robert Maynard Hutchins against the educational philosophy of John Dewey, I came to know firsthand what an influence he still was. Even after I became a professor there in 1953, and after Dewey’s death, I continued to feel his presence, also because my children attended the Laboratory School that he helped to create. It is noteworthy that in “Left Back,” Diane Ravitch’s recently published historical interpretation of American educational thought in the 20th century, Dewey is in many respects the central figure. Menand says of him: “Unlike almost every other serious thinker of his time, he was at home in modernity.”

Hovering behind these four men throughout the book are some of the most important figures not only in the history of ideas but in the history of American education: Daniel Coit Gilman, first president of Johns Hopkins University; William Rainey Harper, first president of the University of Chicago; Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard for 40 years; and the “fantastically charismatic” Jane Addams, founder of Hull House. Above them all there looms the massive eminence of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was he, the young Holmes wrote in a grateful letter to the aged Emerson, “who more than any one else first started the philosophical ferment in my mind”; nearing his own 90th birthday, Holmes could still write to Sir Frederick Pollock that “the only firebrand of my youth that burns to me brightly as ever is Emerson.” Lumping together the other three, James, Peirce and Dewey, Menand speaks of “a disestablishmentarian impulse in American culture--an impulse that drew strength from the writings of Emerson, who attacked institutions and conformity.” And then there is, of course, the family legend, which Menand repeats without committing himself to its historical credibility, that “Emerson is supposed to have visited the James home and blessed the infant William in his cradle,” thus conferring on him a kind of apostolic succession.

Ever since Plutarch, collective biography, as a genre and as a method, has been both fascinating and tricky. At its best, it can illumine each of its subjects in a new light, as it does, for example (to stay with one of the subjects of Menand’s book), in the collective biography by R.W.B. Lewis, “The Jameses: A Family Narrative” (1991). But it can also slide very easily into a reductionism that subordinates the individuality of any one person to a typology or a “school of thought” or an ideology or a zeitgeist. Menand strives to avoid this danger by providing substantial individual portraits of the four men in two or three chapters each.

But his point in linking these four is to chart an epoch of American intellectual history during which “a way of life, and a way of thinking about life, that the [Civil] war and modern science rendered essentially obsolete” was superseded by the loss of “belief in beliefs” and by the belief that “scientific and religious beliefs ... are (usually) neither foundational premises, backing one outcome in advance against all others, nor ex post facto rationalizations, disguising personal preferences in the language of impersonal authority.” Rather, beliefs “are only tools for decision making, one of the pieces people try to bundle together with other pieces, like moral teachings and selfish interests and specific information, when they need to reach a decision.” By the second half of the 20th century, this “way of thinking about life” had not only changed the minds of many people about their traditional philosophical or religious doctrines but had produced, explicitly in Holmes but implicitly in the other three (particularly in John Dewey’s contribution to the related but not identical idea of academic freedom), “the constitutional law of free speech,” which Menand counts as “the most important benefit to come out of the way of thinking that emerged in Cambridge and elsewhere in the decades after the Civil War.”

“Pragmatism,” therefore, an understanding of truth as vindicated in its actions and results, was a convenient category under which to pull together these disparate elements. It is, of course, principally associated with William James and was the title of his book of 1907. But the term was invented by Peirce on the basis of a passage in Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” about “pragmatic belief,” which consists in betting on one’s “subjective conviction.” In his Chapter 13, “Pragmatisms” (note the plural), Menand skillfully embeds the Jamesian brand of pragmatism in a broader and deeper context, so that it emerges as not only the name of a philosophical movement in the technical sense, Pragmatism with a capital “P” alongside Rationalism or Idealism, but also as the description of a distinctive weltanschauung that was shared across philosophical party lines by these four “pragmatists” and many others who would have eschewed the label.

Through most of the narrative, the tone in Menand’s treatment of this historical development is altogether sympathetic, and occasionally he seems to sound a celebratory or even a triumphalist note. He appears to agree with the conclusion of Holmes after the Civil War that “certitude leads to violence” and to accept the historical explanation that “[o]ne of the things that had held back scientific education in American colleges ... was the dominance of theology in the curriculum.” Several times he speaks of one or another thinker as “doing without the hypothesis of a god,” and he quotes the formula of James, in the final chapter of “Pragmatism,” that “if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.” Peirce’s continuing “belief in the existence of a personal God” and his having “remained observant [not the usual word one would use about a Christian] all his life” makes him rather exceptional for Menand, in contrast to the increasing number of academics and other intellectuals whose “religious commitment was shaky.”

But toward the end of the book, Menand seems to qualify this endorsement somewhat. Near the beginning, speaking about Holmes’ antipathy to “certitude,” he acknowledges that “in the end, though, there just are some things that we are certain about. We have beliefs we cannot help feeling are valid--the belief, for instance, that slavery is wrong.” Later on he quotes, in a rather neutral tone, G.K. Chesterton’s celebrated bon mot in his book “Orthodoxy”: “Pragmatism is a matter of human needs, and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.” But a few pages later, in the concluding paragraph of his chapter on “Pragmatisms,” Menand expresses his own judgment, which sounds similar: “Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person would be willing to die for one.”

And in the concluding paragraphs of the entire book, he relates this judgment to the Cold War and other burning moral issues of the 20th century: “The notion that the values of the free society for which the Cold War was waged were contingent, relative, fallible constructions, good for some purposes and not good for others, was not a notion compatible with the moral imperatives of the era. Martin Luther King Jr. was not a pragmatist, a relativist, or a pluralist, and it is a question whether the movement he led could have accomplished what it did if its inspiration had come from Dewey and Holmes rather than Reinhold Niebuhr and Mahatma Gandhi.” Having quoted earlier the definition of “belief” as “that upon which a man is prepared to act” or to “bet,” Menand has now raised the ante (to stay with Kant’s betting metaphor): that for which “a person would be willing to die.” But he seems to be saying that most of the time we do not live or believe on this existential edge. And for most of life, therefore, the commitment of the Metaphysical Club to the experiment of democratic participation, skeptical reserve and pragmatic openness is the only means of keeping human life human, regardless of ultimate beliefs and foundational theories or, for that matter, the absence of any such theories and beliefs.

Yet I am not, I hope, speaking only as a historian of the development of Christian doctrine and an Eastern Orthodox believer when I feel obliged to react to all of this by raising the question: And just who could be counted upon to provide the continuity that would preserve, protect and defend all the traditions of these beliefs and convictions for another generation until the next existential crisis came along if everyone had meanwhile joined the “pragmatists, relativists and pluralists” of the Metaphysical Club or its present-day successors?