"He knew what the alternative was."įor the pragmatists ideas are tools we use to cope with the world. Holmes in his judicial decisions "believed in experiment," Menand says. "It is that certitude leads to violence." Ideas should be viewed as provisional, tentative, subject to change. "The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence," Menand writes. Both the abolitionists and the apologists for slavery knew what they believed, knew they were right and ended up unleashing a conflict whose horror none could have predicted. Holmes blamed the war on zealotry and self-righteousness and a passionate attachment to abstract principle. But the war "had burned a hole, so to speak, in his life," Menand writes. Supreme Court and dying in 1935 at age 94.
He lived long, sitting for 30 years on the U.S. Born in Boston, educated at Harvard, Holmes served in the Union army and was wounded three times. Holmes is Menand's key witness here, and the great jurist's story opens the book. Those fratricidal years cleaved the country's intellectual life, he contends, and for the men and women who survived, many of the ideals, values and ways of thinking characteristic of antebellum America were simply no longer viable. Menand's starting point is the Civil War. His object is not so much a history of philosophy as a joint biography that seeks, in the true pragmatic spirit, "to see ideas as always soaked through by the personal and social situations in which we find them." soil - grew out of the life experiences of four men: James, Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
In The Metaphysical Club he sets out to show how the constellation of ideas known as pragmatism - generally considered the most important philosophical tradition born on U.S. Menand is that rare bird, the academic (he's a professor of English at City University of New York) who also writes for a wider audience (he's a staffer at New Yorker magazine). And it serves Louis Menand nicely as the title for his sweeping account of men and ideas in the post-Civil War era. Despite its brief existence, then, the Metaphysical Club was an exemplary moment in American intellectual history. But Peirce, in one of the papers he read to the group, employed the word "pragmatism," a term James eventually took up to describe his and Peirce's brand of philosophy. By the end of the year the members had drifted apart.
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