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- Author: Louis Menand
- Full Title: The Metaphysical Club
- Category: #books
- Secession allowed the North, for four years, to set the terms for national expansion without interference from the South, and the wartime Congress did not let the opportunity slip. That Congress was one of the most active in American history. It supported scientific training and research; it established the first system of national taxation and created the first significant national currency; it made possible the construction of public universities and the completion of the transcontinental railway. It turned the federal government into the legislative engine of social and economic progress. And it helped to win a war.
- The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but it swept away almost the whole intellectual culture of the North along with it. It took nearly half a century for the United States to develop a culture to replace it, to find a set of ideas, and a way of thinking, that would help people cope with the conditions of modern life.
- 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. They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals—that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.
- The belief that ideas should never become ideologies—either justifying the status quo, or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it—was the essence of what they taught.
- Another way to put it is to say that Emerson was a genuine moralist whose mistrust of moralism led him continually to complicate and deflect his own formulations. He was a preacher whose message was: Don’t listen to preachers. “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching,”33 as he put it in the essay on “Self-Reliance.” We are still going to church, in other words, but we’re no longer there to hear someone else tell us what to do.
- Unitarianism had rescued the integrity of the individual conscience from Calvinism. Emerson rescued it from Unitarianism
- he subscribed to Channing’s general view that “[o]ur danger is, that we shall substitute the consciences of others for our own, that we shall paralyze our faculties through dependence on foreign guides, that we shall be moulded from abroad instead of determining ourselves.”38 Like Channing, he rated the work of “self-culture” far above the work of social improvement
- They were both ways of discouraging people from thinking for themselves. “Each ‘Cause,’ as it is called,” he wrote in 1842, explaining why the Transcendentalists were not a “party,” “—say Abolition, Temperance, say Calvinism, or Unitarianism,—becomes speedily a little shop, where the article, let it have been at first never so subtle and ethereal, is now made up into portable and convenient cakes, and retailed in small quantities to suit purchasers.”40
- It was not a matter of choosing sides. It was a matter of rising above the whole concept of sidedness.
- Then, on April 12, Southern batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, and with one stroke the South accomplished what no Northerner had been able to do since the Missouri Compromise of 1820: it unified the North.
- It was as though all the floors of the intellectual house of antislavery had given way at once, and everyone found themselves sitting on the ground together. Overnight, the one solution no one had advocated became the one solution everyone agreed on: the North must go to war. Politics could at last be pursued by other means.
- In the midst of this mutilation and mayhem, Holmes did an extraordinary thing: he road tested his beliefs. Lying in the hospital on Harrison’s Island, watching his comrades dying around him and listening to rumors that the building was about to be shelled, he interrogated his philosophical convictions in order to discover whether there were any he now might wish to revise. He was undergoing an experience of terror that nothing in his life had prepared him for, and he decided to solicit his own reactions to it.
- Holmes carefully erased every connection between his experiences as a soldier and his views as an abolitionist. This is not because he changed those views. It is because he changed his view of the nature of views. It was the great lesson he thought the war had taught him, and he took pains, in later life, to make sure the record reflected it.
- And he began, after Fredericksburg, to rate the professionalism and discipline of the soldier higher than the merits of any particular cause—to admire success more than purity of faith.
- This is not a political judgment. It is a moral judgment. It is a rebuke to people (like Dr. Holmes and John Motley) who believe that their idea of civilization is a justification for killing those who decline to share it. Of course civilizations are aggressive, Holmes says, but when they take up arms in order to impose their conception of civility on others, they sacrifice their moral advantage. Organized violence, at bottom, is just another form of oppression. Embarked upon to abolish slavery, war reveals itself to be slavery’s twin—“parent, child and sustainer all at once.”
- This was exactly the kind of high-minded satisfaction in agonies actually being sustained by other people that Holmes found so exasperating in his father.
- To the Wendell Holmes who returned from the war, generalism was the enemy of seriousness. War had made him appreciate the value of expertise: soldiers who understood the mechanics of battle fought better—more effectively, but also more bravely—than soldiers who were motivated chiefly by enthusiasm for a cause.
- Holmes’s rejection of the intellectual style of prewar Boston mirrored a generational shift. To many of the men who had been through the war, the values of professionalism and expertise were attractive; they implied impersonality, respect for institutions as efficient organizers of enterprise, and a modern and scientific attitude—the opposites of the individualism, humanitarianism, and moralism that characterized Northern intellectual life before the war.
- The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideologues, dogmatists, and bullies—people who think that their rightness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to subscribe to their particular ideology, dogma, or notion of turf.
- And he had a knee-jerk suspicion of causes. He regarded them as attempts to compel one group of human beings to conform to some other group’s idea of the good, and he could see no authority for such attempts greater than the other group’s certainty that it knew what was best. “Some kind of despotism is at the bottom of seeking for change,” he wrote to Laski. “I don’t care to boss my neighbors and to require them to want something different from what they do—even when, as frequently, I think their wishes more or less suicidal.”38
- Still, Holmes did not think that the world would be better off without people like this, because he thought that everyone was like this—and this is the difficult part of his belief about certitude and violence.
- But he did not think that the absence of a higher authority made it pointless to talk of beliefs as good or bad, true or false, right or wrong. He only thought that rightness and wrongness are functions of the circumstances in which our lives happen to be embedded. Since we cannot (except at the margin) change the circumstances, it makes sense for us to talk of right and wrong without mental quotation marks. In the long view of human affairs custom and habit may be contingent, but in the short view they are often as good as necessity.
- Truth, Holmes said many times, is just the name for what it is impossible for a person to doubt. “All I mean by truth is the path I have to travel,” as he explained to his friend Alice Green.44
- Holmes did not share the politics of these people, but he did not think it was his business as a judge to have a politics, and he did nothing to discourage their admiration. It suited his conception of heroic disinterestedness to serve as their Abbott—privately denouncing the stupidity of the views he strove, often boldly and alone, to defend.
- Holmes had grown up in a highly cultivated, homogeneous world, a world of which he was, in many ways, the consummate product: idealistic, artistic, and socially committed. And then he had watched that world bleed to death at Fredericksburg and Antietam, in a war that learning and brilliance had been powerless to prevent.
- James believed that a risk-assuming decisiveness—betting on an alternative even before all the evidence is in—was the supreme mark of character. He thought that the universe would meet such a person halfway. But he also thought that certainty was moral death, and he hated to foreclose anything.
- Agassiz also insisted on a comparative approach. He taught that the scientist’s work consists not of enumerating facts, but of making sense of facts by putting them in relation to other facts.
- Once our attention is redirected to the individual, we need another way of making generalizations. We are no longer interested in the conformity of an individual to an ideal type; we are now interested in the relation of an individual to the other individuals with which it interacts. To generalize about groups of interacting individuals, we need to drop the language of types and essences, which is prescriptive (telling us what all finches should be), and adopt the language of statistics and probability, which is predictive (telling us what the average finch, under specified conditions, is likely to do). Relations will be more important than categories; functions, which are variable, will be more important than purposes, which are fixed in advance; transitions will be more important than boundaries; sequences will be more important than hierarchies.
- Agassiz, on the other hand, had given himself no room for compromise. He couldn’t separate the phenomenal from the transcendental: his entire system was tied to the belief that all observable order in nature is prima facie evidence of a supernatural intention. The species, he insisted, were “categories of thought embodied in individual living forms,” and natural history was ultimately “the analysis of the thoughts of the Creator of the Universe, as manifested in the animal and vegetable kingdoms.”
- was a distinctly Bostonian view of race—revulsion at the racism of others.
- But for James, anti-Darwinian scientists like Agassiz were mistaken not because they ignored the facts in favor of preconceived theories, but for the opposite reason—because they collected facts without a working hypothesis to guide them.
- This is what Asa Gray had meant when he said that Agassiz had no scientific explanation for the phenomena he observed; for Agassiz had only his observations on one side and his theory on the other. His science wasn’t theoretical and his theory wasn’t scientific. His ideas are edifices perched on top of mountains of data. Darwin’s ideas are devices for generating data. Darwin’s theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz’s closes them.
- The mistake is not simply endowing science with an authority it does not merit. It is turning one belief into a trump card over alternative beliefs. It is ruling out the possibility of other ways of considering the case. That there is always more than one way of considering a case is what James meant by the term (which he introduced to English-language philosophy) “pluralism.”
- Scientific and religious beliefs are important to people; but they 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. They 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.
- The real lesson of On the Origin of Species for James—the lesson on which he based his own major work, The Principles of Psychology (1890)—was that natural selection has produced, in human beings, organisms gifted with the capacity to make choices incompatible with “the survival of the fittest.” There is intelligence in the universe: it is ours. It was our good luck that, somewhere along the way, we acquired minds. They released us from the prison of biology.
- Peirce called himself an idealist, by which he meant that he believed that the universe is knowable because our minds are designed to know it.
- The right answer is, in a sense, a function of the mistakes. By uncoupling the idea of precision from the idea of a single absolute value, statistics and probability theory allowed scientists to achieve far greater degrees of precision than they had ever imagined possible. Statistics conquered uncertainty by embracing it.
- In short, Laplace extended the application of probability from physics to people, with the promise that events that seem random and unpredictable—such as, in his most celebrated illustration, the number of letters that end up every year in the Paris dead-letter office—can be shown to obey hidden laws. People marry and letters get misaddressed for apparently subjective and unreproducible reasons, but statistics reveals that the total number of marriages or of dead letters every year gravitates, as if by necessity, around a mean value.
- But one part of his answer was that in a universe in which events are uncertain and perception is fallible, knowing cannot be a matter of an individual mind “mirroring” reality. Each mind reflects differently—even the same mind reflects differently at different moments—and in any case reality doesn’t stand still long enough to be accurately mirrored. Peirce’s conclusion was that knowledge must therefore be social.
- We accept this state of affairs about the weather—that it is a perfectly lawful, rather mundane phenomenon whose complexity nevertheless vastly exceeds our ability to understand it—and yet we freely pontificate about the causes of human unhappiness and the future progress of society, things determined by factors presumably many times more complex than the weather.
- Wright was, in short, one of the few nineteenth-century Darwinians who thought like Darwin—one of the few evolutionists who did not associate evolutionary change with progress. “Never use the word[s] higher & lower,”19 Darwin scribbled in the margins of his copy of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1847. The advice proved almost impossible to follow to the letter, even for Darwin, but if anyone respected its spirit, it was Chauncey Wright.
- Spencer’s mistake was to treat the concepts of science, which are merely tools of inquiry, as though they were realities of nature. The theory of natural selection, for example, posits continuity in the sequence of natural phenomena (evolution does not proceed by leaps). But “continuity” is simply a verbal handle we attach to a bundle of empirical observations. It is not something that actually exists in nature. Spencer failed to understand this, and he therefore imputed cosmic reality to what are just conceptual inferences—just words. He did with the word “evolution” what Agassiz did with the word “creation”: he erected an idol.
- And he therefore agreed with Wright that philosophy and logic don’t have much to do with the practical choices people make. He certainly thought this was true in the law. “It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards,”31 is the first sentence of the first law review article he ever wrote, in 1870, two years before the Metaphysical Club came into existence; and he spent much of his career as a philosopher of jurisprudence explaining how the fact that judges conclude before they reason does not mean that legal decision making is arbitrary.
- The only noncontradictory position, Renouvier held, is to believe that we freely believe, and therefore to believe in free will. Even so, we cannot be absolutely certain of the truth of this belief, or of anything else. “Certainty is not and cannot be absolute,” he wrote in the second Essai. “It is … a condition and an action of human beings.… Properly speaking, there is no certainty; there are only people who are certain.”
- Renouvier had taught James two things: first, that philosophy is not a path to certainty, only a method of coping, and second, that what makes beliefs true is not logic but results. To James, this meant that human beings are active agents—that they get a vote—in the evolving constitution of the universe: when we choose a belief and act on it, we change the way things are.
- the universe remains constant. It was
- Wright was a Laplacean, though without the Laplacean hubris. He did not think that things happen by chance; he just thought that causation is generally too complex for our minds to grasp, and that the future course of the universe, like the future course of the weather, is largely unchartable. When he used the word “uncertainty,” he meant our uncertainty—just as when Laplace used the word “probability,” he was referring not to events themselves, but to our imperfect knowledge of them.
- Peirce was a Maxwellian. He thought that physical laws are not absolutely precise, and his experience as a scientist seemed to confirm this. Scientific laws rely on the assumption that like causes always produce like effects, but as Maxwell himself once put it, this assumption is a “metaphysical doctrine.… [I]t is not of much use in a world like this, in which the same antecedents never again concur, and nothing ever happens twice.”45 As all efforts to measure phenomena repeatedly with exactitude reveal, things never cease varying. The facts are always susceptible to (as Peirce later put it) “a certain swerving”46 from the paths their laws dictate, and Peirce interpreted this to open the door to the possibility of pure chance.
- If scientific laws are not absolutely precise, then scientific terminology has to be understood in a new way. Words like “cause” and “effect,” “certainty” and “chance,” even “hard” and “soft” cannot be understood as naming fixed and discrete entities or properties; they have to be understood as naming points on a curve of possibilities, as guesses or predictions rather than conclusions. Otherwise, scientists are in danger of reifying their concepts—of imputing an unvarying essence to phenomena that are in a continual state of flux.
- His favorite target was legal formalism—the belief that legal concepts refer to something immutable and determinate. His criticism of legal formalism was Wright’s criticism of Spencer’s evolutionary philosophy: he thought it treated what were merely tools of analysis as though they named actual entities.
- Things are unique before they are alike. Legal terms, therefore, should be understood as naming not a single discrete entity, but a set of limits within which a thing can plausibly be counted as (for instance) “negligence” or “libel” or a “proximate cause.” These limits do not exist independently of our interest; but that does not mean they have no reality. They have precisely the reality that legal liability attaches to whatever is commonly understood to fall within them.
- Green thought that all beliefs have this purposive character—that knowledge is not a passive mirroring of the world, but an active means of making the world into the kind of world we want it to be
- but we are so constituted that all actions involve belief, and the world is so arranged that all actions involve belief, and all successful actions involve true belief. Hence, the ultimate reason for believing is, that without belief men cannot act. And the reason for believing what is true is, that without true belief they cannot act successfully; thus the advantage derived from true as distinguished from false belief, and not the bare fact that the thing is true, is the reason for believing what is true.… If all the affairs of life, moral and intellectual education included, could be conducted as well by a person who believed that twice two make six, as by one who believed that twice two make four, there would be no reason for believing the one proposition rather than the other. Hence, belief is not mere impression which the mind receives passively from the contemplation of facts external to it, but an active habit involving an exertion of will.52
- Kant thought of “pragmatic belief” as one of several kinds of belief; Peirce thought it was the only kind of belief. In a world that never repeats itself with exactitude, all believing is betting. Our beliefs and concepts are, in the end, only guesses about how things will behave most of the time. As Peirce expressed it six years later, in a series of articles he said were based on his Metaphysical Club paper: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”
- But just as a star exists independently of the observations made by individual astronomers, “reality is independent of the individual accidental element of thought.” The real star is the object around which repeated observations ineluctably converge. The purpose of all scientific investigation is therefore to push our collective opinions about the world closer and closer to agreement with each other, and thus closer and closer to the limit represented by reality itself.
- This was the conviction at the bottom of all of Peirce’s thought. It was that knowledge cannot depend on the inferences of single individuals.
- mechanism in post-Enlightenment European culture.
- The question Kant was trying to answer was, essentially: How does the world hang together? Our senses don’t apprehend the world as a unified totality. What they pick up is an apparently endless procession of discrete phenomena, one unique event after another. But all minds, after only a little bit of experience, take for granted a world that is organized spatially, temporally, and causally—a world that hangs together. This can’t be merely a subjective projection of order onto a random flux, since all minds order experience in roughly the same way (that is, causally, temporally, and spatially), and they never encounter a sensible phenomenon that fails to conform to that order. If there are uncaused or timeless entities out there, we are unable to perceive them with our senses.
- At one meeting, presided over by Morris, Dewey heard Peirce read a paper called “Design and Chance,” and joined in the discussion afterward. The paper is the germ of Peirce’s later cosmology, and it sums up in a few pages what was probably the substance of the yearlong class Dewey had chosen not to take. Peirce’s subject was the laws of nature—the laws that Newtonian physicists believed explained the behavior of matter and that physiological psychologists believed explained the behavior of minds—and he began with a simple question: Does the principle that everything can be explained have an explanation? Or, as he also put it: Does the law of causality (which is another name for the principle that everything can be explained) have a cause?
- A law, in Peirce’s pragmatic view (derived, of course, from Wright), is essentially a path of inquiry. It helps us find things out—as the law of gravitation, for example, helped us discover Neptune—and Peirce’s first rule as a philosopher of science was that the path of inquiry should never be blocked, not even by a hypothesis that has worked for us in the past.
- For the strike showed what a tangle of contradictions and anachronisms lay in the accumulated mixture of Christian piety, laissez-faire economics, natural law doctrine, scientific determinism, and popular Darwinism that characterized many people’s attitudes toward social and economic life in the decades after the Civil War.
- Pullman himself, for instance, though in many respects a prime specimen of the Gilded Age tycoon, was plainly not a Social Darwinist. His model town was predicated on the reformist idea that character is a function of things like good housing and regular garbage collection rather than genes, and his intransigence about the rents almost certainly had as much to do with moral values (and amour propre) as it did with economic theory. What looks like Social Darwinism in the businessmen of Pullman’s generation was generally just a Protestant belief in the virtues of the work ethic combined with a Lockean belief in the sanctity of private property. It had nothing to do with evolution.
- (In later years Dewey deliberately adopted an antirhetorical style, in the belief that readers should be persuaded by the cogency of the thought rather than the felicities of the prose. He was uncommonly successful in getting rid of the felicities.)
- Dewey argued that in thinking of majority decisions as the sum of so many independent selfish preferences, Maine had committed the empiricist’s error of assuming that what we can see is more real than what we can’t see—that individuals exist but “the popular will” is a fiction. This, Dewey thought, was exactly backward.
- Democracies are not just the sum of their constituent atoms because atoms are not independent of their molecules. They are always functioning as parts of a greater whole. Participation changes everything.
- Real evolutionary economics, Veblen thought, required a picture of human beings not as passive reactors to stimuli, but as actors for ends. And not all our ends can be expressed in the language of profit and loss.
- She found that the people she was trying to help had better ideas about how their lives might be improved than she and her colleagues did. She came to believe that any method of philanthropy or reform premised on top-down assumptions—the assumption, for instance, that the reformer’s tastes or values are superior to the reformee’s, or, more simply, that philanthropy is a unilateral act of giving by the person who has to the person who has not—is ineffectual and inherently false. She decided that for the settlement movement to be successful, it needed to correct for the antidemocratic animus that ran through the social criticism of Arnold, Carlyle, and Ruskin (as Dewey had set out to correct a similar animus in the political writings of Henry Maine). The obliteration of invidious group and class distinctions became her obsession. Anything that made division sharper—such as a strike—she deprecated. Anything that promoted the cooperative idea—such as arbitration—she encouraged.
- Pullman had wished to be a great man and to do good, but he didn’t understand the meaning of greatness or the method of goodness. “It is easy for the good and powerful to think that they can rise by following the dictates of conscience by pursuing their own ideals, leaving those ideals unconnected with the consent of their fellow-men,”51 Addams said.
- The right outcome is always the outcome democratically reached. Otherwise we cannot know if it is right. “It is easy for the good and powerful to think that they can rise by pursuing their own ideals”: Addams might have been thinking of Alice Palmer. She was certainly thinking of herself. Addams understood Pullman because she had been like him once, too.
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- Note: Move the needle by changing hearts, and do that only by example.
The “social organism” can evaluate and select possibilities by their outcomes, but not in the abstract. We advance its knowledge by trying out new things and letting their effects be observed.
- 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 into the next activity. In the traditional method of education, in which the things considered worth knowing are handed down from teacher to pupil as disembodied information, knowledge is cut off from the activity in which it has its meaning, and becomes a false abstraction. One of the consequences (besides boredom) is that an invidious distinction between knowing and doing—a distinction Dewey thought socially pernicious as well as philosophically erroneous—gets reinforced.
- what was learned was precisely what was useful. Relevance was built into the system.
- What, after all, is “attention”? It is what happens when we are performing an act that is not, or is no longer, habitual. For example, we don’t pay attention to the way we walk until we encounter an obstacle that makes walking in the normal, unselfconscious way a problem.
- In other words, the reflex arc pretends to be a description when it is really just an ex post facto interpretation. “A set of considerations which hold good only because of a completed process,” Dewey complained, “is read into the content of the process which conditions this completed result. A state of things characterizing an outcome is regarded as a true description of the events which led up to this outcome.”
- The child wasn’t seeing and then, as a separate act, touching; the child was seeing-in-order-to-touch. The correct way to picture an act is therefore not as a series of concatenating billiard balls, or as an arc, but as an organic circuit. It has to be indivisible before it can be divided.
- Knowledge is not the result of experience, any more than a response is the result of a stimulus; knowledge is experience itself in one of its manifestations.
- It is the strategy he followed in approaching every problem: expose a tacit hierarchy in the terms in which people conventionally think about it. We think that a response follows a stimulus; Dewey taught that there is a stimulus only because there is already a response. We think that first there are individuals and then there is society; Dewey taught that there is no such thing as an individual without society. We think we know in order to do; Dewey taught that doing is why there is knowing.
- Dewey was not proposing to elevate doing over thinking instead. He was only applying the idea Addams was trying to explain to him when she said that antagonism is unreal: he was showing that “doing” and “thinking,” like “stimulus” and “response,” are just practical distinctions we make when tensions arise in the process of adjustment between the organism and its world.
- “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience,” does not say that there is no logic in the law. It only says that logic is not responsible for what is living in the law. The active ingredient in the compound, what puts the bones in the goose, is the thing called “experience.” It’s a word with a number of associations, but Holmes was using it in a particular sense. He meant it as the name for everything that arises out of the interaction of the human organism with its environment: beliefs, sentiments, customs, values, policies, prejudices—what he called “the felt necessities of the time.”4 Another word for it is “culture.”
- experience is not, in Holmes’s view, reducible to propositions, even though human beings spend a lot of time so reducing it. “All the pleasure of life is in general ideas,” Holmes wrote to a correspondent in 1899. “But all the use of life is in specific solutions—which cannot be reached through generalities any more than a picture can be painted by knowing some rules of method. They are reached by insight, tact and specific knowledge.”5 Even people who think their thinking is guided by general principles, in other words, even people who think thought is deductive, actually think the way everyone else does—by the seat of their pants. First they decide, then they deduce.
- From the very beginning, Holmes’s view of the law was premised on the assumption that law is simply and empirically judicial behavior. A rule may be written down, it may express the will of the sovereign, it may be justified by logic or approved by custom; but if courts will not enforce it, it is not the law, and lawyers who bet their cases on it will lose.
- Pragmatism is an account of the way people think—the way they come up with ideas, form beliefs, and reach decisions. What makes us decide to do one thing when we might do another thing instead?
- In the end, you will do what you believe is “right,” but “rightness” will be, in effect, the compliment you give to the outcome of your deliberations. Though it is always in view while you are thinking, “what is right” is something that appears in its complete form at the end, not the beginning, of your deliberation.
- When we think, in other words, we do not simply consult principles, or reasons, or sentiments, or tastes; for prior to thinking, all those things are indeterminate. Thinking is what makes them real.
- choosing to keep a confidence helps make honesty a principle and choosing to betray it helps to confirm the value we put on friendship.
- When we are happy with a decision, it doesn’t feel arbitrary; it feels like the decision we had to reach. And this is because its inevitability is a function of its “fit” with the whole inchoate set of assumptions of our self-understanding and of the social world we inhabit, the assumptions that give the moral weight—much greater moral weight than logic or taste could ever give—to every judgment we make. This is why, so often, we know we’re right before we know why we’re right. First we decide, then we deduce.
- If we have the will to act on our belief, James thought, the universe should meet us halfway. We will stand a better chance of getting the pellets. If we stop getting them, we may not drop the belief—we may keep going to church, for example—but we will cease using it as a rule for action. Our belief in God will no longer have cash value.
- Pragmatists think that the mistake most people make about beliefs is to think that a belief is true, or justified, only if it mirrors “the way things really are”—that (to use one of James’s most frequent targets, Huxley’s argument for agnosticism) we are justified in believing in God only if we are able to prove that God exists apart from our personal belief in him. No belief, James thought, is justified by its correspondence with reality, because mirroring reality is not the purpose of having minds.
- No belief, James thought, is justified by its correspondence with reality, because mirroring reality is not the purpose of having minds.
- Mental interests, hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human action—action which to a great extent transforms the world—help to make the truth which they declare. In other words, there belongs to mind, from its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game.
- The reason human beings came to possess the idea of causation, James concluded, is not because causation really exists and would exist whether we were around to believe in it or not. We have no way of knowing whether this is so, and no reason to care. “The word ‘cause,’” as he remarked in The Principles of Psychology, “is … an altar to an unknown god.”37 The reason we believe in causation is because experience shows that it pays to believe in causation. Causation is a cashable belief. It gets us pellets.
- “Philosophy recovers itself,” he wrote in 1917 in a famous sentence in his essay “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” “when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.”58
- The year James introduced pragmatism was also the year the American economy began to move away from an individualist ideal of unrestrained competition and toward a bureaucratic ideal of management and regulation.
- Everything James and Dewey wrote as pragmatists boils down to a single claim: people are the agents of their own destinies. They dispelled the fatalism that haunts almost every nineteenth-century system of thought—the mechanical or materialist determinism of writers like Laplace, Malthus, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, and Marx, and the providential or absolutist determinism of writers like Hegel, Agassiz, Morris, and the Peirces. James and Dewey described a universe still in progress, a place where no conclusion is foregone and every problem is amenable to the exercise of what Dewey called “intelligent action.” They spoke to a generation of academics, journalists, jurists, and policy makers eager to find scientific solutions to social problems, and happy to be given good reasons to ignore the claims of finished cosmologies.
- For many white Americans after 1865, the abolitionists were the century’s villains—not only because they were thought to have been responsible for the war, but because they and their heirs were thought to have been responsible for the humiliation of the South during Reconstruction. They had driven a wedge into white America, and they did it because they had become infatuated with an idea. They marched the nation to the brink of self-destruction in the name of an abstraction.
- But leaving aside its merits as philosophy—leaving aside, for example, the question of whether its theory of truth is logically supportable—turn-of-the-century pragmatism does have two larger deficiencies as a school of thought. One is that it takes interests for granted; it doesn’t provide for a way of judging whether they are worth pursuing apart from the consequences of acting on them. We form beliefs to get what we want, but where do we get our wants? This is a question asked by writers like Veblen and Weber and Freud, but it is not a question that figures centrally in the thought of James and Dewey. The second deficiency is related to the first. It is that wants and beliefs can lead people to act in ways that are distinctly unpragmatic. Sometimes the results are destructive, but sometimes they are not. There is a sense in which history is lit by the deeds of men and women for whom ideas were things other than instruments of adjustment. Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person would be willing to die for one.
- Philosophically, pluralism is the view that the world consists of independent things. Each thing relates to other things, but the relations depend on where you start. The universe is plural: it hangs together, but in more ways than one. Reality, as William James liked to say, is distributive, by which he meant that things are connected loosely, provisionally, and every which way, and not, as in a monistic philosophy like Hegel’s, logically, ineluctably, and in one ultimate and absolute way.
- “Everything is many directional, many dimensional, in its external relations,” James wrote in a notebook; and after pursuing one line of direction from it, you have to go back, and start in a new dimension if you wish to bring in other objects related to it, different from those which lay in the original direction. No one point of view or attitude commands everything at once in a synthetic scheme.…
- The first had to do with the consequences of allowing assimilationist tendencies to take their natural course. The children of immigrants who lose their parents’ culture, Kallen explained, replace it not with a genuine Anglo-Saxon culture, but with a manufactured culture purveyed for a deracinated audience—the culture of motion pictures, baseball, and the “yellow press.”37 The preservation and protection of national cultural traditions was therefore a bulwark against the debilitating effects of mass culture.
- Because he did not think of pluralism as a means to facilitate social mobility; he thought of it as a means to eliminate the lure of social mobility. The great evil of popular culture, he believed, was that it encouraged workers to aspire to the lifestyle of the rich.
- What he now proposed was a way to make the fiction useful for minority ethnic groups. He did not think those groups could improve their situation by maintaining separateness, as Washington had advised in the case of African-Americans and as Kallen had advised in the case of European immigrants. For—and this was Locke’s special insight—modern civilization does not tolerate separateness. “Modern systems are systems that require or seem to require social assimilation,” he said. People may eat their own ethnic food, but in the things that matter, they are obliged to adhere to the dominant standard.
- The price of cultural separatism is social subordination. Locke had given Kallen’s pluralist vision the equivalent of a cold shower.
- The desire to be accepted as like everyone else—the desire to meet the “common standard”—flows from the desire to be recognized as different from everyone else. You want to prove that your group is as good as every other group.
- Modernity is the condition a society reaches when life is no longer conceived as cyclical. In a premodern society, where the purpose of life is understood to be the reproduction of the customs and practices of the group, and where people are expected to follow the life path their parents followed, the ends of life are given at the beginning of life. People know what their life’s task is, and they know when it has been completed. In modern societies, the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of life are not thought to be given; they are thought to be discovered or created. Individuals are not expected to follow the life path of their parents, and the future of the society is not thought to be dictated entirely by its past. Modern societies do not simply repeat and extend themselves; they change in unforeseeable directions, and the individual’s contribution to these changes is unspecifiable in advance. To devote oneself to the business of preserving and reproducing the culture of one’s group is to risk one of the most terrible fates in modern societies, obsolescence. It was not a question, for Locke, of approving or disapproving of modernity. It was a question of coping with it.
- Note: Big if true! And I think it’s true.
- Locke was an Americanist and a modernist by necessity: he felt that those were conditions African-Americans had no choice but to accept. Dewey was an Americanist and a modernist by desire. To Dewey, Americanism meant democracy, and modernity meant a life in which possibilities are unforeclosed.
- Trans-nationalism, Bourne told the members, “is a Jewish idea.”57 The accommodation that diaspora Jews had had to make to the dominant culture was the model for the accommodation every ethnic group must make. Zionism was the ideal because “a genuine trans-nationalism would be modern,” and “[t]he Zionist’s outlook is intensely modern.… The Jew in America is proving every day the possibility of this dual life.”58
- In 1917, in the Seven Arts, Bourne published an essay called “Twilight of Idols,” in which he denounced pragmatism, and Deweyan instrumentalism in particular, for being “against concern for the quality of life as above machinery of life.” Pragmatism provided no stable criteria for how values are to be judged, Bourne now complained. Dewey “always meant his philosophy, when taken as a philosophy of life, to start with values. But there was always that unhappy ambiguity in his doctrine as to just how values were created, and it became easier and easier to assume that just any growth was justified and almost any activity valuable so long as it achieved ends.” This had led to an inability to see that “war always undermines values.” “A philosophy of adjustment,” Bourne concluded, “will not even make for adjustment.”60 It was not a criticism; it was a renunciation.
- Dewey never referred publicly to Bourne or his criticisms again, but after seeing Wilson’s vision for a democratic Europe dissolve in the Treaty of Versailles, he became a pacifist, too.
- Cultural pluralism was a brave idea at a time when Woodrow Wilson himself was on record as opposed to even the notion of groups. “America does not consist of groups,” he announced in 1915, the year Kallen’s essay appeared. “A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American; and the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.”
- But cultural pluralism makes a problematic politics, and the reason is that identifying people by culture has the same effect as identifying people by race: it prejudges their possibilities.
- Culture is only a response to the conditions of life; when those conditions change—and in modern societies they change continuously—cultures change as well. “Frenchness” is as variable as “finchness,” and no more worthy of respect as a thing in itself. It’s all a question of what people make of it.
- Culture is not an individual acquirement; it is the name for a set of products, practices, and perspectives of which individuals can avail themselves. In modern societies, which are the kind of societies Locke and Bourne and Dewey contemplated, culture is a Rubik’s Cube of possibilities. Bentley’s argument about political interest groups applies to culture as well: every combination produces a new relation among the elements. The only thing prescriptive one can say about culture as a political matter is that the more access individuals have to whatever other human beings have produced, the greater the number of new combinations that are possible. Since there is no way out of the Cube, the most useful thing is to secure a degree of freedom within it.
- COERCION IS NATURAL; freedom is artificial. Freedoms are socially engineered spaces where parties engaged in specified pursuits enjoy protection from parties who would otherwise naturally seek to interfere in those pursuits. One person’s freedom is therefore always another person’s restriction: we would not have even the concept of freedom if the reality of coercion were not already present. We think of a freedom as a right, and therefore the opposite of a rule, but a right is a rule. It is a prohibition against sanctions on certain types of behavior. We also think of rights as privileges retained by individuals against the rest of society, but rights are created not for the good of individuals, but for the good of society. Individual freedoms are manufactured to achieve group ends.
- The deal they offered was that in return for exemption from ordinary market conditions, professors would commit themselves to the unselfish and disinterested pursuit of truth. Implicit in the argument they made was that the public—though supposedly the real “owners” of universities—would abstain from interference in university affairs out of its own self-interest.
- Dewey was not saying that Cattell should not have been dismissed, only that his dismissal was the business of his professional peers, not of the president or the trustees. Academic freedom is a privilege enjoyed at the pleasure of a community; fights over academic freedom are, at bottom, fights over how that community should be defined. It is all a question of who gets to decide.
- the term “right” names the fact that there are some activities that courts will, with a high degree of predictability, prevent other parties from interfering with, just as “gravity” names a highly predictable behavior observed of bodies in space. “Right” is a term of convenience; it is not a thing in nature, or something that inheres in us simply by virtue of being human.
- From a civil libertarian point of view, a contextual interpretation seems to invite juries to read their own prejudices into the evidence. But Holmes thought that juries would do that no matter what—that dominant opinion would have its way in the end, anyway. The only reasonable attitude was to assume that if a jury understood the standard, it would apply it correctly. It was not that Holmes had a deep faith in the judgment of the average person. He just thought that was the way the system worked.
- The constitutional law of free speech is 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. 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’s conceit of a “marketplace of ideas” suffers from the defect of all market theories: exogenous elements are always in play to keep marketplaces from being truly competitive. Some ideas just never make it to the public. But it is the 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 the chances that the group will survive. We do not (on Holmes’s reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. No individual alone can have the right one. We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity. I tolerate your thought because it is part of my thought—even when my thought defines itself in opposition to yours.
- But in societies bent on transforming the past, and on treating nature itself as a process of ceaseless transformation, how do we trust the claim that a particular state of affairs is legitimate? 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.
- The modern conception of law is similar: if the legal process was adhered to, the outcome is just. Justice does not preexist the case at hand; justice is whatever result just procedures have led to.
- But his belief that life is an experiment, and that since we can never be certain we must tolerate dissent, is consistent with everything James, Peirce, and Dewey wrote. What Holmes did not share with those thinkers was their optimism. He did not believe that the experimental spirit will necessarily lead us, ultimately, down the right path. Democracy is an experiment, and it is in the nature of experiments sometimes to fail. He had seen it fail once.
- The simple explanation for the change in their status is the common explanation for changes of this kind, which is that Holmes, James, and Dewey became identified with the work of disciples whose stature was a lot less intimidating and whose claims struck many people as a lot more controversial.
- In doing so they helped to put an end to the idea that the universe is an idea, that beyond the mundane business of making our way as best we can in a world shot through with contingency, there exists some order, invisible to us, whose logic we transgress at our peril.
- 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 possibility 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.
- Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey wished to bring ideas and principles and beliefs 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. The political system their philosophy was designed to support was democracy. And democracy, as they understood it, isn’t just about letting the right people have their say; it’s also about letting the wrong people have their say. It is about giving space to minority and dissenting views so that, at the end of the day, the interests of the majority may prevail. Democracy means that everyone is equally in the game, but it also means that no one can opt out. Modern American thought, the thought associated with Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey, represents the intellectual triumph of unionism.
- 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 inspirations had come from Dewey and Holmes rather than Reinhold Niebuhr and Mahatma Gandhi. Americans did not reject the values of tolerance and liberty during the Cold War—on the contrary—but they replanted those values in distinctly non-pragmatic soil.