The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand | Goodreads
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The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America
Louis Menand
4.07
5,483 ratings606 reviewsThe Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, founder of modern jurisprudence; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist and the founder of semiotics. The club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea - an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Holmes, James and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things out there waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent - like knives and forks and microchips - to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals - that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely dependent - like germs - on their human carriers and environment. They also thought that the survival of any idea depends not on its immutability but on its adaptability.
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560 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2001
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Louis Menand37 books207 followers
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Louis Menand, professor of English at Harvard University, is the author of The Metaphysical Club, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in History. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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BlackOxford1,095 reviews70.8k followers
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October 27, 2017Denying the Privilege and Presumption of Power
Philosophy is, more often than it likes to admit, a response to traumatic political events. It is therefore frequently less about the concepts it makes explicit - knowledge, truth, correct action - than it is about dealing with the lingering consequences of profound social upset. The Metaphysical Club documents this thesis in its analysis of the roots of American Pragmatism.
Few might recognise today that the various schools of American Pragmatism associated with philosophers from C. S. Peirce in the 19th century to Richard Rorty in the 21st century have their origins in a specific national tragedy, the American Civil War. The intention of the first ‘pragmaticists’ (as Peirce called them) was to release the world from the doctrinaire use of reason that they perceived led to that conflict.
Often confused with ‘vulgar relativity,’ Pragmatism is really a recognition that none of us actually knows what constitutes reason. The criteria of right thinking change about as frequently as what is thought. The contribution of pragmatic philosophy has been to establish truth as a necessary ideal but error as an equally necessary condition of inquiry. The essential lesson is one of humility rather than scepticism.
As the pragmatist philosopher Edgar Singer quipped in the 1930’s, “A fact is that which is not contradicted by any other fact.” This maxim is useful to keep in mind when dealing with various Trumpian attacks on science and the media as well as the fake news that has become routine on social media.
All knowledge is incomplete and defective. This is a consequence of human finitude. Nevertheless, some claims to knowledge are better than other claims. Distinguishing between what constitutes approaches to the truth and intellectual dead ends is what Pragmatism seeks to accomplish - mainly to help us stop killing each other.
Pragmatism therefore implies a liberalism of thought that denies privileged or preferred modes of thinking. At the same time it seeks to reconcile contrary modes of thinking in the ‘larger truth.’ Its ethical virtues are respect for the intentions of others, confidence that there is indeed a larger truth to be had, and the patience to persist in the search. These are commonly called by their classical names of Faith, Hope, and Charity.
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Frank Stein1,121 reviews179 followers
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July 29, 2010Although this is a supposed quadruplicate biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, it’s really an unparalleled intellectual history of America from the Civil War up through the turn of the century. Thankfully it doesn’t try to be a comprehensive intellectual history, and it doesn’t try to trot out every “important” thinker of the age and analyze them for relevance. It’s mainly a circuitous and winding story of how that most American of philosophical systems, “pragmatism,” with its suspicions of transcendent ideals and its awareness of multiple contexts, emerged gradually out of the mystical antebellum New England world of Emerson and Thoreau. It’s seemingly disparate chapters, which focus on such people as naturalist Louis Agassiz and reformer Jame Addams, at first seem difficult to pin together, but gradually the reader realizes that this is a way to show how many individual threads were woven into pragmatic philosophy.
While other writers act like philosophers were only reading other philosophers, Louis Menand uses multiple biographies to show how real life and real events shaped abstract thought. For instance, William James saw the failure of Louis Agassiz’s quest for an overarching natural explanation of the animal world, one that relied on God’s placement of all animals in their current environments (a quest which led him, with James, to look for evidence of glaciers in Brazil), as confirmation of a world mainly governed by blind evolution and chance. Holmes’s experience at the tragic Battle of Ball’s Bluff in the Civil War soured him on all high ideals, and his “survival of the fittest” theory later influenced his theory of judicial restraint (by which he hoped to let interest groups battle it out in politics) and paradoxically made him a liberal hero. Charles Pierce’s wrestling with astronomical observations as an employee of the US Coastal Survey led him to look at the fallibility of all human judgment and search for a probabilistic theory of thought. John Dewey’s concern over the 1894 Pullman strike, and his connections to Jane Addams, made him search for a tolerant pluralism that would encompass all apparent conflict into an actual unity.
Interestingly, a large part of the book is a biography of that strange, in-bred world of 19th century Boston (of course centered around Harvard), where everybody seemed to be a cousin or son or wife of a famous thinker and writer, and where everybody was part of their own philosophical club. Menand shows that before one can talk about a philosophy, one needs to talk about the peculiar environment that philosophy emerged from. The pragmatists would of course have entirely agreed.
I can honestly say that I’ve never read a book like this anywhere, one that brings so much to the table and makes it all seem so interconnected. Menand is someone who actually knows how to mold a good story out of abstract ideas, and who makes all these ancient, intractable debates seem important and worthwhile.
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Brad Lyerla235 reviews259 followers
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January 29, 2013Pragmatism is uniquely American. It is America's only home-grown school of philosophy. THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB is Louis Menand's award-winning book about the emergence of pragmatism as a distinct school of thought. The book's vehicle for describing the early decades of pragmatism is a discussion of a group of thinkers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who participated in a loosely organized club that, in fact, called itself "The Metaphysical Club". The participants developed the founding principles of pragmatism in the final decades of the 19th century, though they appear not to have been aware that they were inventing a new way of thinking until the very eve of the 20th century.
An important feature of pragmatism, not the only feature by any means, but the feature that I will focus on in this short review, is that it rejects absolutes. Menand traces this back to the horror of our Civil War and a perceived need for a philosophy that would accommodate multiple points of view in order to avoid conflict in the future.
A difficulty with absolutes in government is that there may be no way to resolve conflicting points of view when they are based on absolutes, except though violence. American scholars after the Civil War tried to solve the problem that Lincoln struggled with: how can a nation founded on the principle of self-government peacefully resolve an issue when its citizens are irreconcilably divided based on absolute positions (for example, an inalienable right vs God's will)? The pragmatists' approach was to re-define truth for purposes of governing (though this varies among pragmatists, some regard it a comprehensive theory of truth) in order to tie truth to solving problems and no longer to inflexible Platonic ideals, which was the prevailing way of thinking about truth in the United States before the civil war. Some thought that such an approach was more realistic for a dynamically pluralistic society like ours - where we are not going to agree on everything, even fundamental things.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the great American legal scholar and Supreme Court Associate Justice, participated in the Metaphysical Club. He was also an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War and, astonishingly, sustained serious wounds in battle on six separate occasions. Menand seems to believe that Holmes’ war-time experience shaped his later thinking about government and law. Holmes was on the Court when it decided the seminal legal case, Erie v. Tompkins. I mention Erie here because it illustrates what can happen when we abandon the habit of thinking about truth in terms of absolutes.
For decades, our federal court system assumed that federal judges would look to something referred to as "federal common law" to decide legal claims that were based on state law, but were being litigated in federal court. The assumption was that common law was the same for all wise judges because law is based on principles that are unchanging in nature. To understand this, imagine that the common law is written on golden tablets (in the sky like Plato's famous theory of forms). The assumption is that if a judge is wise enough and free from distracting passions, he can discern what's written on those tablets without regard to whether he is a state or a federal judge. A federal judge need not read the decisions of the courts in the relevant state. Instead, he can simply read the golden tablets. If you will forgive the over-simplification, that was how many people thought about truth before the pragmatists.
After the war, as legal scholar and state court judge in Massachusetts, Holmes recognized that once we abandon a Platonic view of the law, and accept that the law is not based on absolute ideals, but on ever-changing human values, then we can understand that law will be different in different jurisdictions. That understanding will lead us to the realization that the concept of a federal common law does not make sense. Different states have different values and can fashion different laws to reflect those values. And of course, values change and so law will change. Accordingly, once we abandon the Platonic ideal, federal judges adjudicating claims based on state law, must study the law of the state in question to discern the applicable rule of law to decide the case. The rule will not be the same from state to state. Nor will the outcome be the same, even on similar facts. In Erie, the Court embraced this view and over-ruled an old case called Pennoyer v. Neff, in which Chief Justice Storey, who authored the opinion, had implicitly relied on the Platonic conception of law.
Menand discusses Holmes at length in THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB, though not specifically the Erie case. He might have. It nicely illustrates a point that he seems to want to make.
The balance of the book focuses on the thinking of the great triumvirate of pragmatism: Charles Sanders Pierce, William James and John Dewey. These are fascinating men and uniquely American. It is difficult to imagine that they could have arrived at “pragmatism” in any other place or time.
Menand won the Pulitzer Prize for his book and deservedly so. THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB is a very readable book about the history of ideas in America during a period that uniquely influenced politics, philosophy and law in the United States.
Menand is a professor of English and not a professional philosopher. Some professional philosophers have criticized Menand's interpretation of pragmatism. I would urge anyone who is thinking about reading THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB not to let these criticisms discourage you. I found Menand's book to be an excellent re-introduction to pragmatism. James, the best-known of the Pragmatists, might well say that professionals have no monopoly on good philosophy.
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robin friedman2,012 reviews445 followers
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September 19, 2015How Ideas Matter In America
Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club" is a rare book which manages to be both scholarly and popular. As a popular work, it offers an accessible exposition of complex ideas and thinkers. On a more scholarly level, the book succeeds because it awakens in the reader an appreciation of the scope of intellectual life in the United States and a desire to understand and to perpetuate it.
The key figures in "The Metaphysical Club" include the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes and the philosophers William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey. They were the basic American practitioners of a philosophy called pragmatism, which teaches that ideas are tools to be used to accomplish a purpose rather than abstractions which mirror to greater or lesser accuracy some independent reality.
Menand examines each figure in light of his family life (Holmes, James, and Peirce all were products, in their different ways, of homes were ideas mattered; Dewey less so), temperament, reading, and educational and cultural background. He places a great deal of emphasis on the American Civil War as a basis, with his protagonists, for rejecting absolutistic views of principle and reality. An uncompromising commitment to absolutes led, for post Civil War thinkers, to the War and its carnage. This is an important historical claim and it works very well in the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes. I am not sure how convincing it is as an explanation of the thought of the other three figures. William James wrote an important essay "The Moral Equivalent of War" unmentioned in Menand's book, which concerns the apparent inability of modern life to find values to move the heart and spirit as the heart and spirit were moved in the passion of war. In other words, James, at least, was searching for values, and perhaps even for absolutes, rather than expressing a skepticism towards them.
In addition to placing pragmatism in the context of the post Civil War era, Menand places great emphasis on the development of modern science, particularly Darwin's theory of evolution and statistical theory. These developments, for Menand, tended to discourage a view of the universe as fixed, rational, and purposeful. Knowledge became tied closely to theories of statistical generalization and theory of error, with an emphasis on what worked. Scientific theory in fact gets a larger place in the book than does the Civil War as a basis for the development of pragmatism and I think deservedly so.
Menand stresses how intellectual development in the United States was tied to racial theories and to other theories such as spiritualism that we find markedly out of place today. This is not a new story, but it is well told and does show something important about how ideas we value can emanate from teachings we would reject or find strange.
In addition to the four primary figures, Menand discusses many other philosophers and thinkers, predecessors, successors, and colleagues to Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey. The title of the book is based on an almost legendary "Metaphysical Club" that met all-too briefly in the 1870's under the auspices of Chauncey Wright, the "Cambridge Socrates". Ideas and intellectual life flourish briefly and quietly, but they may illuminate people's lives for times to come.
The book is chatty in tone with many digressions on matters such as the Dartmouth College Supreme Court case, the Pullman Strike, Jane Addams and Hull House, and Louis Agassiz's expedition to Brazil. The digressions make it hard at times to keep to the thread of the narrative, but they do cast light on the era and on the development of thought in the United States.
The book does not expound in detail the thought of its principal characters. For that the reader will need to turn to texts, and the book encourages him or her to do just that. Menand is not overly critical or analytical about the success of pragmatism. He points out that the later Civil Rights Movement in America could not have succeeded with pragmatism as a base but rather required a commitment to principle and absolutes found more in other writers.
Pragmatism is a distinctive achievement of thinkers in the United States. This book teaches about it well and, perhaps not entirely consistently with the theory of pragmatism itself, promotes respect for the role of ideas in our country and for the value of the life of the mind.
Robin Friedman
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Mark90 reviews17 followers
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June 3, 2012The premise is that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, John Dewey and, to a lesser extent, Charles S. Peirce (who is the only one of the four that I'd never heard of until I read this book) were the first intellectuals of American modernity (a phrase that seems to communicate the correct amount of portent where simply "modern thinkers" would have fallen short) and that being young men who knew each other during the American Civil War (and who travelled in the same social circles) shaped a great deal of their intellectual temperament.
A densely intricate history of American intellectualism after the Civil War that I'm glad I read, although it may have been a wee more challenging to my ADD comprehension than it was rewarding. Menand didn't compress or narrow the results of his research in a way that might have made for a more accessible read and I'm glad of that, but it at times seemed he could have--even with the extensive detail--constructed the narratives and the points he was trying to make through them in a more linear fashion. I found myself wishing the book had hyperlinks so that when he connected a minor academic figure he had introduced several chapters previously to a matter presently at hand, I could click back and refresh my memory. I could have used the index more diligently, but I'm ADD and lazy, too.
Upon finishing the book I'm a bit distracted by the extent to which he ignored the issue of socioeconomic class in the book. Yes, perhaps how the nascent philosophy of pragmatism wrestled with ingesting Darwinism was a consuming issue for the Harvard elite and their ilk, but how much impact if any did that have on the day to day lives of the lumpen proletariat?
Overall, though, I enjoyed it, have half a mind to reread it at some point down the line and may seek out other books by Menand. A height, for me, was the point he made about modernity near the end of the book:
"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 the 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 contributions 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."
Wow. It's like I always knew that on some level but it feels good to have someone lay it all out so nicely. I wish I'd found more high points like this in the book.
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hayatem856 reviews159 followers
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October 27, 2019يطوف الكتاب على بعض أهم الأفكار والقصص التي ألهبت الفكر في القرنين التاسع عشر والعشرين. لشخصيات كان لها عظيم الأثر على خارطة الفكر والأدب والتاريخ والعلوم والفلسفة والسياسة، بما تكتنفه من إنسانيات ملتهبة في الجذور ، ساهمت بشكل أو بآخر في كتابة أو تغيير مجرى التاريخ .
كل عقل من هذه العقول عكس بشكل مختلف آراؤه وتصوراته الثرية عن مفهومه المعقد للحياة والعلاقات البشرية، وطرق بناء أو تطور المعرفة.
أمثال: ويليام جيمس، أوليفير ويندل، وهولمز الابن، تشارلز س، جون دوي. وآخرون تقاطعت حياتهم معهم ك هالويل، ريتشارد داروين، جن ماكسويل، ولابلاس، كانط، وآخرون. لم يكتفي الكتاب في تقديم السيرة العلمية ل هذه الشخصيات، بل تجاوزها لسيرتهم الذاتية، كما طاف على أهم النقاشات والآراء النقدية التي نالت منهم مابين موافق ومفند+ سرد تيار الأحداث المهمة من الحرب الأهلية في الولايات المتحدة إلى الحرب الأمريكية الأسبانية ، حتى اندلاع الحرب الأمريكية الفلبينية، وأثر هذه الحروب في إشعال الصراع أو النزوع للتحول على أصعدة مختلفة؛ سياسية، علمية ، اقتصادية، اجتماعية، وأخرى. وكيف أثرت هذه الأحداث على حياة هذه الشخصيات، وألهمها في تطوير وخلق أهم الأفكار في الولايات المتحدة حول :التعليم والديمقراطية والحرية والعدالة والتسامح، بكل ما يحملوه من إرث إنسانوي- ثقافوي مطبوع بأوضاعهم الشخصية و بيئتهم الاجتماعية.
بعض أهم الأفكار والقصص التي تناولها الكتاب:
العبودية بسياساتها المختلفة إلى حد إلغائها .
ظهور أصل الأنواع- نظرية التطور وما رافقها من إشكالات.
تأسيس جامعة هارفارد.
المثير في هذا الكتاب هو تتبع كيفية نشوء بعض أعظم الأفكار في أمريكا والتي تبدو في فترات زمنية معينة، أنها اتخذت منحنيات مضطربة وغير متوقعة حتى رسوخها على أرض ثابتة .
هذا الكتاب اشتغال في تأويل التاريخ عبر قراءة تاريخ الأفكار أو أركيولوجيا المعرفة، ومآلاته الإنسانية.
الترجمة جميلة.
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Todd149 reviews113 followers
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June 2, 2024This was well written. John Dewey and the pragmatists have long held a place near the top of my intellectual pantheon. That may be how this read got started. How it ended was a much broader look at a landscape of American life in the two generations that came of age during and after the Civil War.
Louis Menand told this microhistory by way of the influences and relations that shaped the lives and ideas of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, Williams James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Dewey. The tale of their generation's ascendance is also the tale of the eclipse of the ideas and institutional models that previously held sway in the antebellum North. Menand shows how this plays out in several spheres of American life including in the ideas about race relations, the foundations of the scientific enterprise, jurisprudence, the struggle between capital and labor, and higher education, among other areas. It's to his credit that Menand makes each of these forays come alive as part of his panorama.
My quibble, and it's a pretty minor one, is that I would have liked to see Menand spend a little more time on the actual bios of his protagonists. The sketches provided are more often their intellectual bios along with their social milieus. A dozen additional pages for Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey may have provided additional grounding for their work and ideas. It may also have further grounded the social and personal struggles that each of these men faced, some more successfully than others, in taking part of their generation's inheritance and path clearing for future generations.
In any case, Menand would like us to understand that these men were part of the first generations of modern Americans. As such their lives and times feel both remote and strangely close to us all these years later. The sketch Menand provided is both interesting in itself and perhaps instructive about the type of social and intellectual endeavors we need in our times in the 21st century to work through our own issues at home and abroad.
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Clif467 reviews199 followers
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October 31, 2011Modernity. I've heard it mentioned so many times but have never paused to think of what it means. In this book, Louis Menard gives a simple definition. Modernity is the break from the cyclical world where one generation succeeded another by taking on the same tasks, to one where each generation is faced with a new world. Once, the son would become a farmer to replace his father. The peasant of medieval times would sire a peasant to be. Now the janitor can be father to the astronaut.
In the pre-modern world there was no concept of Progress for society (or technology). Medieval painters had no difficulty showing ancient times and current times in the same painting. There was only progress of the individual toward salvation and often even that was not considered possible (see Calvinism). Little was expected to change in a world that called for struggle and endurance. Everyone was just serving time until Judgement Day. Without science, whatever concepts were created that people were willing to believe were the truths that could be lived under for one generation after another without question. Curiosity was discouraged because it was pointless; the deep questions were already answered.
The understanding that there was a purposeful God who, though inscrutable, had a plan, made it possible to escape the fear of the unknown that continually knocked on everyone's door. Whatever terror was presented by disease or weather or simple accident, all was known to God who knew best.
Then came modernity. As science grew to explain everything on the surface, it explained nothing at depth only raising doubt where certainty was most desired.
The Metaphysical Club is a rich adventure that marks the way from the old view to the new, from the certainty of belief to the insecurity of today. The four men around whose intellectual lives the book is built (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey) illustrate through their thoughts and actions the transformation of the world (on the American scene) and how human beings have come to deal with uncertainty as fact.
I don't mean uncertainty about what to wear tomorrow, I mean profound uncertainty about the universe we inhabit and the thoughts that sculpt our identities. Even the idea of free will is doubtful. This is the territory of profound anxiety where all that we value is questioned.
Moving easily though matters of faith, elements of statistics, the mania for eugenics and so very much more, each new chapter takes in another aspect of society to reinforce the narrative of intellectual and social transition Menand so skillfully describes.
How do we know "the truth"? Yes, we can say that the world accords with much of what we know, but couldn't this indicate only that our minds have evolved to deal with the environment of which they are a product, rather than any objective understanding of reality? Perhaps we are certain only of a charade.
And what of our dearest beliefs? What of good and bad, right and wrong? What is there of them outside of our heads? We create concepts (metaphysics) that have no reality in themselves, yet we act as if they were real. Does it matter if they have no hard reality if we believe they do and act accordingly? Are the laws of science any more real than those of faith? Faith "worked" when it was the system within which everyone lived. Now science provides the system.
The Metaphysical Club takes us from the moral certainties based on faith of the Civil War period to the foundation of reality on chance demonstrated by Darwin and his idea that intelligence is simply a product of blind chance, an accident on planet Earth.
The thoughts and actions of the four principles of the book (along with background from their parents' generation) allow us to see how this happened and the intellectual challenge in the accommodation, with generous samples of the schools of thought that were involved along the way (Transcendentalism, Socialism, etc.)
To say that God knows all is simple and satisfying. Our being here as an accident of chance may be entirely deceptive, but is nonetheless all we have to work with, alone as we are in an otherwise meaningless universe. This is both terrifying and challenging. This book is about those who looked directly at the challenge, teased out the implications and attempted to meet them.
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Mehrsa2,249 reviews3,564 followers
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September 1, 2018This is such a brilliant and thoughtful book. I came here after reading Louis Menand's slash and burn review of Fukuyama's new Identity book. The review was excellent and I was curious about Menand's own thoughts. What's fascinating about this book is that it just sort of starts. It doesn't have a build up or an intro and it doesn't tell you what it's going to be about. It's about America and philosophy and law. I learned so much and was spellbound the whole time.
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Andrew2,325 reviews1,014 followers
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February 28, 2012I have a habit of using philosophy books as self-help. And when I discovered the pragmatists, it was such a breath of fresh air... all of the sudden, so many variations on my general malaise became irrelevant. William James and Richard Rorty seemed to point the way to some plane of thought that was comfortable with contingency, uncertainty, and relative truth while at the same time making bold, positive statements and seeming to provide very useful ammo for dealing with the problems of the world.
Louis Menand traces the lives of the pragmatists through 19th Century America, through the mass bloodshed of the Civil War and the callousness of the Gilded Age, but also through the hallowed chambers of Harvard and Johns Hopkins and the forests of Vermont that inspired a generation of writers and thinkers. Bonus points for revealing Charles Sanders Peirce to be pretty much the Eddie Van Halen of philosophy (cocaine, mistresses, champagne, the whole 9 yards). A fascinating piece of intellectual history.
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