Book Review: The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand

By Tom Baule
June 2004

The incompetence of Union generals was on full display when the 1700 union soldiers, including the 20th Massachusetts, crossed the river to Ball's Bluff in October, 1861 to make a "slight demonstration" on the confederate force in Leesburg Virginia. The Unions intelligence was faulty, and a substantial confederate force was waiting for them in the woods. The Union troops had left themselves no retreat route, having to descend a cliff and cross a river with only three boats. Only 800 men survived. One of those survivors was future chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The 19 year old Oliver was hit by a mini` ball just above the heart. When he thought he was dying, as he lay critically wounded in the field hospital among the death and stench of his bloodied friends and comrades, Oliver did an extraordinary thing, he road tested his beliefs. He found that the assurance he had done his soldierly duty was wholly adequate consolation for his life, he did not require the certainty of religious faith. Uncertainty, "I am to take a leap in the dark" turned out to be all the certainty he needed.

His views persisted, when in Sept 17, 1862 13,000 thousand Union troops were massacred at Antietam, and Oliver was injured again, shot in the neck. Oliver again concludes that the professionalism and discipline of the soldier are higher merits then of any particular cause - to admire success more than the purity of faith, and that certitude leads to violence. Pragmatism, that uniquely American philosophy, rose from the ashes and filled the void left by the old ideals discredited by the failure of American democracy and the blood of 600,000 soldiers killed in the civil war.

After the war, an informal club formed in Boston called "The Metaphysical Club" where members presented ideas and discussed. Most members were affiliated with Harvard University in some capacity, and it is here that the ideals of Pragmatism were first presented, discussed, dissected and flushed out. The club was deeply influenced by the writings of Emerson, Kant, Hegel, and the 1859 publication of Darwin's "Origin of the Species." Darwin once scribbled in the margins "never use the word(s) higher & lower." The advise proved almost impossible to the letter, even for Darwin, but if anyone respected its spirit, it was club member Chauncey Wright. Chauncey was an atheist and nihilist, who "was content to serve as the local Socrates" as he managed to fail at almost every endeavor he undertook, but was a very influential club member and retained Holmes' life long admiration.

Contrary to Chauncey Wright, Henry James was the literary promoter of Pragmatism, and was chiefly concerned with its relation to religion. Like so much of 19th century philosophy, James sought to bridge the chasm between modern science and religious faith. Through Pragmatism, he was able to, as both religion and science were useful tools to him and therefore it was pragmatic to believe in both. The popular Swedenborgian mysticism was his greatest religious influence, but his religion was largely of his own creation. Although Darwin had persuaded most scientists of humans common descent, James was comfortable with a hierarchical conception of race "the inferior races who live with us." Yet the charismatic and adored James ardently believed that "certainty was moral death".

Another club member, Charles Peirce coined the term "pragmatism" borrowing it from Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." Peirce was a philosopher and system builder who wrestled with Nominalism, Positivism, Kant, Hegel, Schiller and others, as he took the idea of pragmatism and gave it a philosophical foundation in his writings. Peirce was interested in probability, and merged his own "Law of Errors" with the prevailing ideas of the club. With so many different ideas and men, its not surprising the "The Metaphysical Club" only gathered for a few years and mostly unraveled in 1869, as new leadership arrived at Harvard, yet the ideas discussed in this brief time would change America.

The Civil war, for the people who lived through it, was a terrible and traumatic experience, it tore a hole in their lives. The war seemed not just a failure of democracy, but a failure of culture, a failure of ideas, "the civil war discredited the beliefs and assumptions of the era that preceded it." The old ideas that underpinned the first generation of this new republic had clearly failed. Into this vacuum seeped the new pragmatic ideas that mark the birth of modern America. Pragmatism is an idea about ideas, that ideas are tools, like forks, knives and microchips, that people devise to cope with the world in which the find themselves. Ideas that are useful and promote success in the real world are correct, they are useful tools.

Oliver Wendell Holmes went to fight because of his moral beliefs. The war did more than make him lose those moral beliefs, it made him lose his belief in beliefs. Justice Holmes' Pragmatism underlies many of the influential opinions he wrote while on the supreme court. Procedure was what was most important. Allowing democracy to work its way, without peremptory restriction by courts was his influential legal legacy that dominates jurisprudence today [well, in most cases anyway!]

After WWI, in 1919 and 1921, opinions put forward by Justice Holmes became judicial touchstones, and the basis for a broad expansion of First Amendment freedoms. The constitutional law of free speech is an important benefit to come out of the pragmatic ideals that emerged in the decades after the Civil War. It makes the value of an idea not its correspondence to a preexisting reality or a metaphysical truth, but simply the difference it makes in the life of the group. Holmes concept of the "marketplace of ideas" is a metaphor of probabilistic thinking; the more arrows you shoot at the target, the better sense you will have of the bull's eye. The more individual variations, the greater chances the group will survive. Thinking is a social activity, we permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need.

The solution has been to shift the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures. We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures, or due process. Justice does not preexist the case at hand, justice is whatever result just procedures have led to. Holmes believed political opinion should be protected because that is the only way for democratic governments to maintain legitimacy.

John Dewey was born later and is the final personality the author focuses on, is a celebrated American atheist academic who wrote prodigiously and brilliantly to help establish Pragmatism as the American philosophy in the early twentieth century. In the nineteen fifties and sixties, other European philosophies came to the fore in American universities, but they have become unfashionable of late as Pragmatism has once again regained its preeminence in American academia on the strength of writers such as Richard Rorty. I felt the author downplayed the role of atheism and focused way too much on the religion of Henry James, but overall the author, Louis Menand provides a Pulitzer winning page turner reintroducing important ideas that shaped modern America in the context of the life and times of the men who originated them.