Rethinking America

The Metaphysical Club
By Louis Menand '73
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2001, 558 pages, $27.00

In his highly regarded new book, The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand '73 has given us a lesson in the history of American thought that may be particularly meaningful today. This is the story of new ideas that helped a country come together again after the most difficult of times and of four Americans who helped make a virtue out of tolerance.

The title notwithstanding, people who flinch at abstract and tortuous technical philosophy have nothing to fear from The Metaphysical Club. Aristotle defined "metaphysics" as the study of comparative first principles, and Hegel and company made it a nightmare of jargon. But in this ambitious work--subtitled "A Story of Ideas in America" --Menand seems to harken back to Plato and the Socratic dialogue, where philosophy means a discussion between differing individuals that takes place in the context of the controversial issues of the time. In this case, what Menand has given us is an intellectual account of the major issues dividing the United States in the 19th century, beginning with the Civil War, which set Americans apart from each other much as the Vietnam War would do a century later.

The Civil War, Menand says, "marked the birth of modern America." When the war began, our country was still little more than a reflection and a commentary on the cultures from which our immigrants came, whether on slave ships or on the Mayflower. The war, he points out, "discredited the beliefs and assumptions of the era that preceded it." In fact, it swept away not only a Southern culture based on slavery, but also the whole intellectual culture of the North, and "it took nearly half a century for the United States to develop a culture to replace it."

The names of four men whose ideas were influential in creating that new culture--a process that Menand traces in this book--are now household names. Three of them--Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James and Charles S. Pierce--were members of the self-styled "Metaphysical Club," a discussion group that shared the belief "that ideas are not 'out there' waiting to be discovered but are toolsÉthat people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves." The fourth figure, John Dewey, was a student of Pierce and a friend of James.

None of them majored in philosophy in college (just as Menand did not at Pomona). Their "philosophy" came largely out of their struggle with the crucial issue of their time--slavery. As Holmes put it, "the law opens a way to philosophy as well as anything else." And if the version of what would come to be known as pragmatism that they developed was based on a new sense of the uncertainties found in all of life, it is because they came to believe that certitude leads to violence. As Holmes put it, "When you know that you know, persecution comes easy. It is well that some of us know that we don't know anything."

(If, by the way, the readers of this review notice that I keep taking quotes from Menand, it is because one of the great virtues of this book is that it is full of quotations that are richly descriptive of both the culture of this determinative century and its intellectual and political leaders.)

What did the Civil War and the agonizing self-reflection it induced on America finally reveal? For one thing, it shook the nation's certainties and drew attention to the contingency of all social forms. At the same time that the Civil War was shaking the tree of political beliefs, Darwin and his evolutionary ideas were doing the same for religious certainties. And this is not a minor matter in our history, as Menand points out with a quote from de Tocqueville: "There is not a country in the world where the Christian religion retains greater influence over the souls of men than in America."

This new uncertainty applied to science, as well. James believed that "scientific inquiry, like any form of inquiry, is an activity inspired and informed by our tastes, values and hopes." James, Holmes and a few others founded the 'Metaphysical Club' in Cambridge in 1812 just when agnosticism was riding its high horse and frowning upon all traditional metaphysics. Probability--the law of errors--was simply a tool for quantifying our ignorance. So Pierce asked: What does it mean to 'know' something in a world in which things happen higgledy pigglety? Knowledge, then, does not so much simply mirror reality. Each mind reflects reality differently. Pierce's conclusion was: Knowledge must therefore be social. Science is characterized by change; therefore our knowledge is characterized by uncertainty.

Philosophy, then, becomes not a path to certainty but only a method for coping with uncertainty. So what makes beliefs true is not logic but their results. Charles Pierce summed it up this way: "What a man really believes is what he would be ready to act upon, and to risk much upon."

Holmes transferred the thinking of the Metaphysical Club into legal theories just as Dewey transferred it into education. "It is the merit of common law," Holmes said, "that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards."

First we decide, then we deduce. Beliefs are really rules for action. Or as Dewey put it, knowledge "is an instrument or organ of successful action." He goes on to say, "Philosophy recovered itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with problems of philosophers and becomes a method cultivated by philosophers for dealing with the problems of men." And as Menand continually reminds us, the United States in the 1890s (as it is in the 21st century) was a society fractured along many lines.

In the end, Menand brings us up to date by discussing the rising issues in U.S. society which divide us today and call for the next response by our practical philosophers--in particular, cultural diversity and freedom of speech. And he traces connections back to the Metaphysical Club, noting that "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. " According to Holmes, we do not permit free expression of ideas because some individual may 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, Menand concludes. "I tolerate your thought because it is part of my thought--even when my thought defines itself in opposition to yours." (Washington D.C., are you listening?) Democracy has one central logic: It is that a decision can be called 'democratic' only if everyone has been permitted to participate in reaching it.

Yet ideas are dangerous. Free speech is the language of risk. Life is an experiment, and since we can never be certain we must tolerate dissent. Of course, Plato's Socrates argued this way, too, in Athens and was offered hemlock to drink for his challenge to reigning conventional beliefs. The members of the Metaphysical Club helped, thus, to make tolerance an official virtue in today's America.

There is a lot we can learn from this account of reasoned discussion in difficult times, of tolerance for differing views, and of finding ways to put into words some of the powerful ideas needed to lead a nation into another new day. Above all, it's good to see we have done it successfully before.

Frederick Sontag is the Robert C. Denison Professor of Philosophy and
has been a member of the Pomona faculty since 1952.