June 10, 2001 Where They Got Their Ideas By JEAN STROUSE
THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB By Louis Menand. Illustrated. 546 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
In January of 1872, a group of young intellectuals in Cambridge, Mass., formed a conversation society. One of them, a prodigy in math, science and philosophy named Charles Sanders Peirce, said later that they called themselves the Metaphysical Club ''half-ironically, half-defiantly . . . for agnosticism was then riding its high horse, and was frowning superbly upon all metaphysics.'' Among the other members were William James, three years out of medical school, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the future justice of the Supreme Court. ''They wrangle grimly and stick to the question,'' James's brother Henry wrote to a friend that January. ''It gives me a headache merely to know of it.'' The club existed only for a few months, but over the remainder of the century and into the next, Holmes, James, Peirce and their intellectual heir John Dewey wrangled with the philosophical questions that defined modern American life.
Those questions, and the lives and work of these four men, are at the center of Louis Menand's brilliant ''Metaphysical Club,'' which might have spared Henry James the headache. Menand brings rare common sense and graceful, witty prose to his richly nuanced reading of American intellectual history -- a story that takes in (to name only a few of the other players) Emerson, Louis Agassiz, Chauncey Wright, the fathers of Holmes, James and Peirce, Charles W. Eliot, Jane Addams, Hetty Green, Franz Boas, Hegel, Kant, Wilhelm Wundt, W. E. B. Du Bois, the Second Great Awakening, probability theory, the nebular hypothesis, the Pullman strike, academic freedom and the ever-present issue of race.
For young people who came of age in the early 1860's, a group that included Holmes, James and Peirce (Dewey was born in 1859), two events changed the fundamental assumptions of the world they had grown up in -- the publication of Darwin's ''Origin of Species'' and the Civil War. Evolutionary theory did away with the idea of a supernatural intelligence governing the universe (although not with the human yearning for some higher order). And the devastating fratricidal struggle of 1861-65, Menand contends, discredited the beliefs that had failed to prevent it, sweeping away not only the slave civilization of the South but virtually the entire intellectual culture of the North as well: ''It took nearly half a century for the United States to develop a culture to replace it, to find a set of ideas, and a way of thinking, that would help people cope with the conditions of modern life.''
The broad name for the set of ideas that emerged to suit these conditions was pragmatism -- a term Peirce introduced to the Metaphysical Club in 1872. When William James publicly ''invented'' pragmatism 26 years later, he credited Peirce with the original formulation. Menand defines pragmatism as ''an account of the way people think -- the way they come up with ideas, form beliefs and reach decisions'' in a world ''shot through with contingency,'' a world in which Darwinian chance rather than providential design determines what happens. The challenge, if there is no higher ''truth'' or ''good'' out there waiting to be discovered, is to determine how people can distinguish right from wrong, decide how to act or choose what to believe. Holmes, James, Peirce and Dewey by no means saw the world in the same way -- Holmes didn't even call himself a pragmatist -- but each on his own took up the challenge.
The young Boston Brahmin Holmes, an ardent abolitionist, fought in the Civil War, was wounded three times, lost several close friends and emerged from the experience (rendered here in dramatic, grisly detail) with a profound moral skepticism that informed all his judicial opinions. The war not only destroyed his moral beliefs, Menand writes: ''It made him lose his belief in beliefs. It impressed on his mind, in the most graphic and indelible way, a certain idea about the limits of ideas.'' To put an extremely complex set of arguments much too simply, Holmes came to see all believing as essentially betting -- since we cannot know what's right or true, we make bets, based on experience. And since people passionately hold conflicting beliefs, the only way to keep the democratic experiment going is to allow everybody to have a say. ''We do not (on Holmes's reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one,'' Menand concludes. ''We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get the ideas we need.''
BOOK EXCERPT
"Holmes's father, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., was a unionist. The Holmeses were related to families that had prospered in New England since the time of the Puritans -- the Olivers, the Wendells, the Quincys, the Bradstreets, the Cabots, the Jacksons, and the Lees -- but they were not exceptionally wealthy. Dr. Holmes was a professor; his father, Abiel, had been a minister. He regarded himself as a New England Brahmin (a term he coined), by which he meant not merely a person of good family, but a scholar, or what we would call an intellectual. His own mind was a mixture of enlightenment and conformity: he combined largeness of intellect with narrowness of culture." -- from the first chapter of 'The Metaphysical Club'
Where Holmes's intellectual style was high and austere, James's was heated and headlong. James switched occupations the way other people change socks, conducted experiments on himself, disliked the rules of spelling and wanted the universe renamed ''pluriverse.'' He made a personal bet about belief, declaring, in 1870, ''My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.'' His diary, as he contemplated retiring from Harvard in 1905, reads: ''October 26, 'Resign!'; October 28, 'Resign!!!'; November 4, 'Resign?'; November 7, 'Resign!'; November 8, 'Don't resign'; November 9, 'Resign!'; November 16, 'Don't resign!,' '' and so on, into December. Two years later, he retired. In the lectures he published as ''Pragmatism'' in 1907, James said: ''Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.''
Recommending Charles Sanders Peirce for a job at Johns Hopkins in 1875, James generously said there was ''no intellect in Cambridge of such a general power & originality as his.'' Peirce spent most of his career trying to figure out what it means to say we ''know'' anything in a world governed by chance, and to square modern science and philosophy with his belief in God. His cosmological question was, Does the law of causality have a cause? And his tempestuous life made James's look like the law of gravity. Peirce got into trouble with drugs, money, women and work. Expected to give a paper before the Metaphysical Club one night, he was said to have shown up late, then held forth on how minutes got into the habit of coming one after another. He, too, thought that all believing is betting, based on probabilistic odds, and compared it to a physician making a diagnosis: the doctor doesn't know the cause of the illness, but symptoms lead him to make an educated guess. If the remedy works, the bet becomes right. Truth happens to an idea.
Dewey, an ardent admirer of James, carried this kind of thinking into new territory at Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago and Columbia (his writing didn't help: he wanted readers to respond to the cogency of his argument rather than the felicities of his prose and was, Menand notes, ''uncommonly successful in getting rid of the felicities''). Dewey's pragmatism found its clearest expression in the progressive school he started at Chicago, the Laboratory School, based on the idea of learning by doing: all students took carpentry, sewing and cooking -- there was a three-year course on making cereal. (My mother, who attended the Lab School in the 1920's, vividly recalls flunking French seams in the sixth grade.) Dewey thought that ideas are just tools we can use when we need them, and Menand's neat elucidation captures the deflationary dynamic of pragmatism: ''An idea has no greater metaphysical stature than, say, a fork. When your fork proves inadequate to the task of eating soup, it makes little sense to argue about whether there is something inherent in the nature of forks or something inherent in the nature of soup that accounts for the failure. You just reach for a spoon.''
On occasion, when ''The Metaphysical Club'' travels into the pure genealogy of thought, readers unfamiliar with these matters may feel a bit lost. But when the lives animate the ideas, everything works. Holmes and James had been close friends as young men, but philosophical differences -- largely, James's willingness to believe in a realm beyond the senses -- drove them apart. When James was dying in 1910, he asked his brother Henry, who had come from England to be with him, to stay on for six weeks after his death, since he was going to try to send a message from the great unknown. (Under the circumstances it's hard to see why geography mattered, unless William expected the message to transmit through his Boston psychic-research friends.) Henry obediently remained, but if there was a fraternal communication from beyond the grave, he never got it. Holmes, who attended William's funeral, wrote afterward, ''His wishes made him turn down the lights so as to give miracle a chance.'' Two years later, on reading over his letters from James, Holmes told his old friend's son that they ''revive a lifelong pain -- the partial drawing asunder of two who loved each other.''
Pragmatism, the American philosophy from the 1890's through the 1930's, fell out of favor in the 1950's, but has re-emerged in the wake of the cold war, and the case Menand makes to explain why will join the current scholarly debate. It would probably horrify Holmes and delight William James to find themselves posthumously attending this reconvening of the Metaphysical Club, but even Holmes might enjoy seeing their ideas so carefully and imaginatively explored.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- Jean Strouse is the author of ''Alice James: A Biography'' and ''Morgan: American Financier.''