The Metaphysical Club is above all the story of a
historical context. A wonderfully
told story about a terribly complex context of ideas, of politic-civic
movements and social transformations, of major scientific discoveries and incandescent intellectual debates. It is
precisely the context in which the so called pragmatism, and some akin intellectual currents, emerged and
developed in the American intellectual life, somewhere at the end of the
nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. That his book is
about fluid social situations and sophisticated interpersonal relations, and
not about refined theories, about particular ways in which ideas are born and “embodied”
in various forms of public life, and not about philosophies considered in
themselves, Louis Menand seeks to point out from the very beginning of his
writing: “This book is an effort to […] try to see ideas as always soaked
through by the personal and social situations in which we find them.” (p.xii)
The “characters” of his book, promoters of some form or other of pragmatism
(significantly, Menand uses the very term Pragmatisms
as a chapter title), are seen not so much through the systems of thought each
of them designed and developed, as through the complex dialectic that made
those systems not only possible, but in a way necessary: “Holmes, James,
Peirce, and Dewey were philosophers, and their work is part of the history of
abstract thought. […] This book is not a work of philosophical argument,
though; it is a work of historical interpretation. It describes a change in
American life by looking at a change in its intellectual assumptions. Those
assumptions changed because the country became a different place.” (p. xii)

The book has five big sections. Each
of the first four parts is dedicated to one of the four figures already
mentioned: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935), legal writer, law professor,
and above all US Supreme Court Justice; William James (1842-1910), psychologist
and philosopher; Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), logician, mathematician
and philosopher; and John Dewey (1859-1964), philosopher, educator, and
reformer of education. The last section synthesizes much of what has been said
in the previous four sections in an attempt to place the problems dealt with
within the broader context of the American public and intellectual life as it
turned to be in the first part of the twentieth century. As a matter of fact,
one of the major merits of Louis Menand in this book is to realize an admirable
balance between, on the one hand, taking these figures as individual cases,
with their picturesque biographies and specific backgrounds, with their
personal peculiarities and irreproducible Weltanschauungen
(to the extent to which it would be possible to talk about four different “case
studies”), and, on the other hand, putting them all together and making them
form eventually one single problem, one topic: namely, the present book’s
topic. And it is precisely their common
concerns and problems, the interests, ideals, values, etc. they shared, that makes them so particularly interesting and appealing from a
today’s point of view. For things that were considered at that time “dangerous novelties”,
and these people had to fight a long battle before see them, if not widely
accepted, at least publicly recognized, are simply taken for granted in our
everyday life. A miracle repeating itself a number of times risks eventually
not to be noticed even as a banal, most common fact.

Maybe the most important feature they shared was a
certain inclination on their side towards a reconsideration of the classical,
traditional assumptions with regard to the relationships between the world of
the self and the world of the social facts within which that self found himself
placed. And what they did about it, and how
they did, made them belong to a way of thinking lying in the very heart of modernity. Let us take, for example, O.
W. Holmes’s notion that certitude leads
to violence (“The lesson Holmes took from the [civil] war can be put in a
sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence.” [p. 61]). The intellectual,
philosophical, even “existential” suppositions behind a notion like this are
from far in direct opposition to an entire system of values and norms, of
“virtues” and “merits”, a system in each such ideas as reconciliation,
toleration, negotiation, ireneism, and so forth, were metaphysically
subordinated to the more cardinal ideals of truthfulness, (political,
religious, etc.) certitude or (aristocratic) self-assurance. That the latter
led sometimes to violence, or to violent solutions, was not considered in
itself a matter of theoretical interest. According to Louis Menand, Holmes was
one of the first to have realized that, in late nineteenth century – early
twentieth century’s America (and not only, of course), the general circumstances of living, the
patters of rationality, socialization and interpersonal interaction, had
changed dramatically, and made it impossible for people to continue seeing
things like that. Hence his ardent advocacy of the notion of toleration,
acceptance of the other, of the
others’ opinions and worldviews. The underlying supposition behind such an
advocacy was, of course, the idea that a
certain degree of skepticism was absolutely necessary for one’s being able
to live in a (modern) society. And this form of scepticism was not for him a
matter of intellectual pursuit (in was not an epistemological skepticism at
all), but a matter of social reconciliation (it was some sort of practical
scepticism). He had a radical way of putting it “I don’t want to boss my
neighbours and to require them to want something different from what they do –
even when, as frequently, I think their wishes more or less suicidal.” (p. 62)
More than that, he thought that a modern society had the means not only of
making people live together in a peaceful, relatively harmonious manner, but
also – which is much more important – of taking significant advantages of this
fact. For a “negotiated”, legally “regulated” way of living makes people’s
lives better, and gives them benefits impossible to get otherwise: “The
spectacle of individuals falling victim to dominant politic and economic
tendencies, when those tendencies had been instantiated in duly enacted laws,
gave him [Holmes] a kind of chilly satisfaction.” (pp. 65-6)

William James held closed views. Even if there are
clear individualistic accents in his thought, he, too, placed a strong emphasis
on the social circumstances of living. Moreover, following some of Peirce’s
insights (Menand points out very well this continuity), he made knowledge social, and truth a process taking place in the course of our dealing with the world
around. And Menand quotes this unforgettable “definition” of truth as William
James saw it: “Truth happens to an
idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the
process namely of its verifying itself.” (p. 353) Truth is not “out there”,
something waiting for us – truth is simply producing
itself when we approach the world around, and the best thing for us to do
is to recognize this fact as such, and act
accordingly.

Then, in Charles Peirce’s theory, truth is not an
individual thing at all, but it is something of a social nature, and the rules guiding its pursuit are shaped by
patterns determined by the social interactions of the individuals. As he puts
it, “[l]ogic is rooted in the social principle.” (p. 230) Truth can only be
grasped by a “community of knowers”; as a matter of fact, Peirce’s truth is not
– properly speaking – “discovered”, but arrived
at through “negotiations” and repeated adjustments within a certain
community of researchers: “in a universe in which events are uncertain and
perception is fallible, knowing cannot be a matter of individual mind
‘mirroring’ reality. Each mind reflects differently […] and in any case reality
doesn’t stand still long enough to be accurately mirrored. (p. 200) In other
words, the true knowledge is beyond the reach of an isolated individual,
however dedicated, ingenious or skillful s/he would possibly be; it is only
through the common efforts of a multiplicity of minds that something of the
nature of truth can ever be achieved. Thus, far from being inherent to the
objects investigated, the truth has a social and a statistical nature; it is
the statistical result of human
interaction: “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all
who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in
this opinion is the real.” (p. 229)

Finally, Louis Menand shows how John Dewey develops,
along the same lines of thought, a theory of knowledge as praxis.
We do not know a priori which way to
go in order to reach something, we do not even know what are going to reach. We have simply to proceed doing things,
and we will thus realize what those things are like. It is only within the
process of knowing-acting that we can “know” something about the surrounding
world. For, as Dewey saw it, “thinking and acting are just two names for a
single process – the process of making our way as best we can in a universe
shot through with contingency.” (p. 360) The very reform he proposed in
education was one based primarily on this sort of view of the intricate
relationship between knowledge and acting. In order to help children learn more and better about the world, the best thing we can do is to leave them
realize by themselves what this world is like: and they will do it only through
immersing into it, and seeing how it works “from the inside”: “Education at the
Dewey School was based on the idea that knowledge is a by-product of activity:
people do things in the world, and the doing results in learning something
that, if deemed useful, gets carried along in the next activity.” (p. 322)

These thinkers sought therefore to propose a new way
of looking at the “order of knowledge” (with all its embodiments: systems of
abstract thought, academic institutions, research principles and practices, definitions
and criteria of the truthfulness, etc.), actually, they proposed a thorough
reformation of it, namely, on the (pragmatic) principle that knowledge is
“validated” only insofar as it is closely drawn from the current social
practices, is “produced” by socially endorsed procedures, seeks to satisfy real
intellectual needs of a certain community of people, and takes (living in)
society as its scope. In short, these people stroke a decisive blow at the
classical, so movingly idealist, myth of “knowledge for its own sake”:
knowledge cannot be for its own sake, they say, it must be for something. In a modernist society,
knowledge will be useful or it will not be at all. As Dewey frankly put it:
“Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the
problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for
dealing with problems of men.” (p. 362)

I will dedicate the last part of this review to
saying a few words about the impressive literary
art Louis Menand displays in writing his book. Most of all, there is a
sense in which this book has been constructed following some sort of musical method: it has a marked
symphonic structure and seems to be “unfolding” itself according to the rules
of the musical composition. Each section, each chapter has its own (clearly
delimited) role to “play” within the whole. For example, every “theme” (say, a
biography of a secondary character, introduction of a scientific school, etc.)
is first allusively announced, just a few words scattered at an end of chapter,
only for being increasingly dealt with in the next chapter, and then developed
to its completion. A quite pleasing thing to notice is how the author who has
“composed” this piece proves always that he has full control over what he is
doing. The dialectical tension between the whole
of the story, with all its outlines and ample frames, and the world of small
details into which is he is so often forced to descend is wonderfully,
releavingly solved, and made use of ad
majorem auctoris gloriam.

To conclude, by its being so admirably well told,
and so artfully unfolded, the story this book proposes becomes as it were true: its truth is continually produced as we
read the book and follow its author – its truth is simply “verifying itself” in
front of our eyes.

©
2002 Costica Bradatan

Costica Bradatan is a doctoral candidate in
philosophy at the University of Durham (UK). His research interests include
early modern philosophy, history of ideas, philosophy and literature,
philosophy of religion. Bradatan is the author of two recent books (in
Romanian): An Introduction to the History
of Romanian Philosophy in the XX-th Century (Bucharest, 2000) and Isaac Bernstein’s Diary (Bucharest,
2001), as well as of numerous book chapters, scholarly papers, articles and
reviews, published in both Romanian and English.

Categories: Philosophical, General