The Metaphysical Club
Greetings Chris:
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StumbleUponWith your last entry you win, and retire, the prize for "Best Tag Line" in a "Book Club" exchange.
Here, less pithily, are some quick concluding observations after our long previous rounds.
* The more I've thought about Holmes through these discussions, the more I've come to share your coolness toward him, as a thinker and as a person. I very much like your observation that he elevated to Philosophy what has in fact been the classic outlook of the battlefield survivor. The theme of nearly all great combat literature is the fatalism of the man on the front and his skepticism about the big ideas that put him in harm's way. Name your war and you can find the corresponding work of art--Marcus Aurelius in a sense, War and Peace ditto, Stephen Crane, everything from World War I, Mailer and James Jones and Bill Mauldin from World War II (plus the great Das Boot), the movie version of M*A*S*H, everything from Vietnam. Through the centuries and in many cultures, works like these are considered Art, while glorifying treatments like Sands of Iwo Jima are eventually seen as curiosities. (I grant some exceptions, for instance the "Saint Crispin's Day" speech from Henry V.) This suggests some long-standing appreciation of the fatalistic soldier's outlook, even in largely civilian societies.
If you were to make a philosophy out of hard battlefield experience itself, the proper scope of its application would seem to be war, peace, and affairs of state--rather than all human interaction, as Holmes seems to have done. By this standard I suppose you could call Colin Powell a philosopher--and a Pragmatist at that. His "Powell Doctrine"--essentially, never get into a war unless you are absolutely certain you can win--seems to be a direct extrapolation of his sobering experience in Vietnam, with the Pragmatist twist of allowing for all the unknowable ways things could go wrong. We can leave the merits and nuances of that "Doctrine" to another day. My point for now is that in a way I respect him more for applying battlefield experience to future battlefield contingencies, than I do Holmes for (as Menand suggests) elevating his experience on the front to a complete political and social philosophy.
*Although neither of us has really meant to suggest this, it's worth saying again that there is nothing fundamentally new about some of the paradoxes the Pragmatists wrestled with. People have always been fascinated by the line between what is knowable and what is mysterious about life. Long lines of philosophic and scientific inquiry predate and follow the Pragmatists on these points. What I think is particularly admirable about Menand's book is the way he explains the connections between his Pragmatists and what came before them, in the realms of philosophy and of scientific-mathematical discourse. The book is less ambitious or complete in connecting the Pragmatists with what came after them (as a number of Fraysters have pointed out). Isaiah Berlin is one obvious later thinker where both resemblances and differences come to mind. If I were commissioning an article by Louis Menand right now, I would love to hear his thoughts about the descendants of his Metaphysical Club. Maybe this is an item for "Mickey's Assignment Desk" on Kausfiles.com?
*There's not the space, and before a minutes-away deadline there is clearly just not the time, to go fully into all the ramifications of "unknowability" in public life. A great virtue of this book is that it will leave us with many, many of those ramifications to think about for a long while to come.
You raise a number of them with your concerns about Dewey, Addams, and the like. Others that intrigue me range from detail-level unknowability in public policy (What if a tax cut or interest-rate change comes at just the wrong time? What if welfare reform doesn't work as planned?) to uncertainty about the validity of our deepest political views. On the first count, I am intrigued by a link that Slate's Jodi Kantor found, involving Robert Rubin's comments during the Mexican debt crisis. Rubin obviously thought the United States was intervening in the right ways--but his comments allowed for the "what if" possibilities of the policy turning out wrong. I would like to have heard more "what if" awareness of this sort from the Bush administration what pushing its tax cut. I suppose the "sunset" provision for the bill as a whole is a stab at Pragmatist caution, but a weird one.
And on the largest question of political values, I'm left wondering about an issue you raised at the very start, about when Pragmatism actually allows for any "values." Menand addresses this on the next-to-last page of his book:
Beliefs, Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewy 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.
That is fine, and highly desirable for the day-to-day conduct of society. At the same time we're aware that big, necessary, historically admirable leaps were taken by people who were not fully tolerant of "other ways of considering the case"--Jefferson, Washington, et al. relative to King George; Martin Luther King relative to George Wallace; and so on. So I am left thinking about the criteria for separating the "on the other hand" consciousness desirable in daily life from the "damn the torpedos" certainty that history respects in particular moments. This is not a complaint about Menand's book; on the contrary, it's one of many reasons I'm glad to have read it.
And I am very glad to have had a chance to discuss it with you, Chris--each of us from the perspective of the "generalist" rather than expert reader. I hope the book will prove stimulating to others too.
--Jim Fallows
This week, Slate's Book Clubbers read The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand's history of pragmatism (which might be the most influential philosophy you've never heard of). Click here for a word on our format, here to read an excerpt, and here to buy the book. 
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Tom Freeland, who is reading the book, starts a good discusssion here, and his exchange with Cato the Censor, below, is a sample of the high level of debate in the "Book Club" Fray this week. Steve Sailer weighs in on the subject of Darwin, here. Dave Zimny recommends another book on pragmatism, by Richard Rorty. Bill Casebeer, below, attempts to answer several of the questions posed by Christopher Caldwell , and if you can bravely face clauses such as "apodictic certainty is not a bona fide epistemic goal", then he is very helpful.]
[Does Pragmatism lack a value system?] One thing to keep in mind is that the pragmatists are not monolithic--the answers to [such] questions depend crucially upon which pragmatic thinker one is discussing. Generally speaking, though, pragmatists stress the need for a values system--it's just that they think such a values system should not find succor in the hopeless quest for "absolute, necessary, and timeless" truths. Apodictic certainty is not a bona fide epistemic goal, especially when one approaches the world scientifically and with a healthy fallibilism, as all the pragmatists did (or, at least, the classical pragmatists and most neopragmatists such as W. V. O. Quine; Rorty's verson of pragmatism is a notable exception). So, the values that a pragmatist holds will be critically important for framing and resolving conflicts but will not be reified into an eternal and unchanging fabric of the universe. Of course, the conditions that enable intelligent inquiry to take place will have to be respected; in that sense, pragmatists do consider questions about method to be questions of value as well. In general, pragmatists would support liberal democratic forms of social organization and healthy and vibrant educational institutions--they would value these things as instruments and as ends. But this seems a strength of the system, not an objection to it.
--Bill Casebeer
(To reply, or to read this post in full, click here.)
It may not be reasonable to take one quote from a book or a book review. However, I believe that to label the abolition of slavery a "deadly abstraction" is grotesque. On the basis of this alone I would posit that pragmatism is bereft of utility. If the abolition of slavery was an abstraction, was the defeat of Hitler, also? If "certitude leads to violence" is a tenet of pragmatism, from which follows that there should be no certitude, then a corollary is that no idea is worth fighting for. Then what idea is even worth thinking or holding. It seems to me that this is a very curious "philosophy."
--Cato the Censor
(To reply, click here.)
To Cato:
Holmes' experience in the war--his particpation in Frederickburg, Antietem, the Wilderness, being left for dead after a neck wound and surviving that and a chest wound and a leg wound--burned off all idealism. He was left with the views that ideals eventually lead to violence, and a horror of what that entailed. He went into the war an Emersonian and an abolutionist, and lost all that.
There is much to disagree with in Holmes' view of the world. I certainly don't share what seems to me his corrosive skeptism. But the way his war experience formed his view about ideals and the world produced the most interesting and original thinker on legal subjects that America has seen; I can't imagine thinking seriously on the subject and not dealing with Holmes.
--Tom Freeland
(To reply, click here.)
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