The Metaphysics Club [Archive]

JimFar

16th December 2007, 02:53

Ralph Dumain gave his take on Menand's book in the following review:

http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/pragmabib.html#menand

Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001.

This is a middlebrow work, but it is a reasonably intelligent one, and it does highlight the waffling compromising mentality of pragmatism, politically as well as philosophically. Menand offers a social explanation for the rise and fall of pragmatism, which is not dumb though not profound either, not at shallow as pragmatism itself, but not analytically deep. Menand does go to the trouble to explain the philosophical views of the leading players, so at least he understands philosophy to be able to do this, but it's all pretty much on the surface. Menand wants to show how the Civil War changed people and delimited generations, from settled metaphysics and the affirmation of absolutes to a recognition of fluidity, contingency, and chance. Abolitionism was still blamed for the Civil War and castigated as a form of uncompromising absolutism. Menand, to his credit, surprisingly makes racism a major undercurrent of this book. At the outset he claims that while pragmatism did not simply endorse the status quo, it did not fundamentally challenge it, either.

Philosophically, pragmatism was a rebellion against idealism and the old absolutes, based on idealist premises. Politically, it was a rebellion against old and new absolutes—i.e. principled positions—a compromise stance attempting to mediate the conflict between capital and labor. In both dimensions, all the conceptual issues were fudged. You have the genuine innovations of Peirce mixed up with some rather contradictory and confused foundations. With James you get the irrationalist wing, with Dewey the scientistic wing. In each case the conceptual edifice is completely screwed up. From my 2003-2004 reading I learned of the influence of religion and idealism on the development of American philosophy, even in the rebellion against it. Higher education was heavily religious in the 19th century, and various of the thinkers concerned, Dewey even, came out of a religious background. Also, idealistic schools of thought, e.g. the Transcendentalists and the American Hegelians, were dominant, and the rebellion against them rather incomplete. It is also important to note what a hodgepodge some of these philosophies consisted of, for example, the most original of them, Peirce, mixing up religious, idealist, and scientific thought. I don't think the record of classic American philosophy is altogether inspiring.

There is a lot about racism in this book. Louis Agassiz, Benjamin Peirce (Charles's father), maybe William James's father, and several others, were die-hard racists and one was a Southern sympathizer. Agassiz was a biologist and I think opposed Darwin. Anyway, it is very interesting to read about these people's pseudoscientific and philosophical ideas, because you get an idea about the structure of their thought, the inept way they put concepts together. On a larger scale, I would say this was the way the whole 19th century proceeded. Physics and chemistry could progress relatively untroubled (so I assume), but everything else was a mess. Shallow scientism mixed with religion and half-baked philosophy seems to have been the norm, fed by huge gaps in objective knowledge. (It is no wonder that Engels had to intervene.) My point is that it is not only the rise of science and the projection of subjective ideas into observed phenomena in a pseudoscientific manner that are responsible, which is bad enough, but the confused and methodologically naive way of structuring concepts and their relation to data. (Think also of the possible correlations, positive or negative or any, between Hume's empiricism and racism. And don't tell me it's about the Enlightenment.) There is no pure science in men's minds at this stage in history, there's a hodgepodge of notions and approaches. So the problem is the interaction of scientific and other conceptual processes, which means, the total cultural-ideological system. (Generally, philosophers are not prepared to handle this. Everything, including the study of cultural systems, is up in the sky, assuming a coherence in thought on the ground that doesn't exist.) (29 February, 3 & 7 March, 10 July 2004)

Chapter 13 brings the major players together. Holmes' view of law is discussed. James sets up a lecture series for Peirce and lectures himself, establishing the Peirce's obscure label pragmatism as a household philosophical word. With practice, the fixation of belief is consolidated, and proves ideas to be true, including religious ones, according to James. James detested Hegel, and criticized Dewey's The Principles of Psychology only because he saw too much Hegel in it. Dewey was out to do in representationalism. Pierce was not happy with either James or Dewey. You can read the philosophical summaries for yourself. My only comment is that it's a shame taht American philosophy could not produce better than all the insipidity outlined here.

James was influenced by the British empiricists while Dewey rebelled against them, also with a Hegelian touch. Both were influenced by the New Psychology, but both rebelled against German experimental psychology. Pragmatism seems to be scientific and Darwinian, yet James attacked science. Pragmatism seems to grow out of statistical thinking, but its proponents did not necessarily endorse laissez faire economics or ethical individualism. Menand is looking for a pragmatic account of the emergence of pragmatism. Menand already elaborated on the political ramifications of the Pullman strike (which involved Eugene Debs as one of the uncompromising 'absolutists', along with the Pullman company, as seen by Dewey and Jane Addams—what unspeakable banality!). Now he sees the solidification of pragmatism as tied to the end of laissez faire capitalism (Gilded Age) and the beginning of regulated capitalism (p. 371). James was not thrilled with social adjustment or the gigantic machinery of industrial capitalism, though. (He should be classified as a Romantic.) But Dewey and Addams were interested in reform and harmonizing antagonistic interests, abjuring a fundamental attack on the established order. (372-3) According to the tenor of the times Pullman and Debs (an "abolitionist" of the labor movement) were both seen as dangerous extremists and absolutists. Pragmatism fit nicely into this scenario. (373) Again, Menand emphasizes race, and makes a key point that the price of reformism at the end of the 19th century was the complete disenfranchisement of black people (374).

Pragmatism was skewered by none other than Bertrand Russell, not exactly Mr. Profundity himself, but imagine how banal it must be for Russell to turn up his beak at it (374-5). Menand sees the weakness of pragmatism as the inability to judge interests and wants. (375)

Chapter 14 treats the historically important conception of cultural pluralism. While I know something of the figures that come under this category, I am not so well versed in the relations between them, and I learned quite a bit in this chapter. This is also, not surprisingly, a topic in which Jews and blacks play a significant role. James's pluralism was a metaphysical one, another plank of his irrationalist world view. Arthur Bentley, a student of Simmel and Dilthey, applied pluralist ideas to the study of interest in politics and government. The issue of cultural pluralism grew out of the disquiet induced by the mass immigration of Eastern and Southern Europeans under way. Even progressives of that day were largely racists who maintained the superiority of Anglo-Saxons above all others. Interestingly, Menand links the anti-immigrant hysteria of the time with the explosion of anti-black hysteria, manifested in the film Birth of a Nation and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan (directed against immigrants and Catholics as well as blacks). (387-8)

Franz Boas absorbed some of the pseudoscience of his time, but he boldly challenged the racist presumptions of his day beginning with an argument for the "plasticity of human types." Horace Kallen, a Jew, and Alain Locke, a black philosopher and the first black Rhodes scholar, met at Harvard. Kallen was initially an assimilationist, did an about-face and embraced his Jewish identity. He also sought to enlist his student Locke in his campaign for dual identity. (388-9) Locke initially attempted to rise above race, but he was mistreated so badly at Oxford this proved to be impossible. Kallen unsuccessfully attempted to intervene on Locke's behalf. Kallen claimed that cultural pluralism was born out of discussions with Locke. In any case, both articulated their ideas about the same time (390-1). Kallen opposed the melting pot concept, and also opposed Boas by adopting the racial assumptions of the antimmigrationists. Kallen argued for preservation of traditional cultures, which would also serve as a bulwark against the vulgarizing tendencies of mass culture. But this was also an argument against the aspiration of upward mobility. Once again, blacks were left out of the picture. (393-4)

W. E. B. Du Bois began with ideas such as the "conservation of races" but ended up with a relational rather than essentialist view of race. Racial identities were fluid and essentially meaningless except in relation to one another. One racial identity cannot change without all others contrasted with it changing as well. The notion of double consciousness embodies this understanding. (394-6)

Alain Locke insisted on the distinction between race and culture. Furthermore, he was a modernist, eschewing separatism, and recognizing that modern systems are predicated on common institutions and social assimilation. This is the real meaning of the melting pot. Ethnic identity and race pride are, paradoxically, means to overcome racialism and foster assimilation. Sameness and difference are functional concepts, not essentialist ones. In modernity, life is no longer cyclical, and the reproduction of custom is no longer imperative. (397-9)

Dewey was no advocate of Anglosaxonism, and could not abide by Kallen's separatism. Dewey also believed in the melting pot concept, wherein everyone would contribute their distinctive accomplishments to a common American identity (400).

Randolph Bourne, a devotee of pragmatism and Boas, was much more radical than Dewey. Bourne advocated a 'trans-national America', criticized mass culture, advocated dual identity and international cosmopolitanism. He did not want to preserve premodern cultures as such. He also advocated Zionism and touted transnationalism as a Jewish idea. (401-4)

Bourne split with Dewey over World War I and denounced pragmatism (401ff). Kallen introduced the term "cultural pluralism" in 1924, at the same time that immigration restrictions became a reality. Cultural pluralism was no longer a radical idea as it had been when Woodrow Wilson had vigorously denounced the very recognition of groups. Menand points out a cardinal weakness of cultural pluralism: like racialism, it prejudges the individual's possibilities via identification with presumed collective properties and presumes "culture" as a stable entity. (406-7) Only Dewey, who did not consider himself a cultural pluralist, seems to have risen above this limitation. Menand also argues that cultural pluralism violates its parent concept, metaphysical pluralism (407).

Overall, this chapter is instructive, but an insufficiency of detail inhibits our ability to judge the overall intellectual and political commitments of the players. Boas was a pioneer of militant anti-racism but was also a carrier of suspect volkish conceptions. The same might have been the case with Bourne. (The German influence was not always a good one, Dewey's wartime slanders of German philosophy notwithstanding.) Dewey comes out looking like a rose, but Dewey also accepted Jane Addams' reactionary ideal of non-antagonism. Bourne was a radical in his antiwar opposition, but more needs to be known about his overall position. (See Lloyd's Left Out.) Du Bois and Locke faced realities none of the others had to deal with; their positions require further analysis as well. Kallen was admirable in his defense of Locke, but his world view seems to be reactionary on the whole. (7 March 2004)