Review of Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 546 pp.
Review by Eugene Taylor, Harvard University
June 2001
Here we have an extraordinarily well-written work, extensively researched, erudite, even wry in places, that purports to examine the origins of pragmatism in the late nineteenth century. Specifically, the author examines the ideas of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey, first against the backdrop of the Civil War and then in context of the subsequent rise of evolutionary theory, probability, and indeterminacy in philosophy and the sciences, as well as mainstream culture. In the end, he depicts pragmatism as our own distinctively American philosophy. This is a must read, even if you disagree with him, as I do, about his interpretation of William James.
This is to say that Menand’s wonderfully written account of James, delightful as it is, is a mere normative one. He accepts what all the commentators have said about James as true and repeats their misinterpretations. But where is psychical research? Where are the references to James’s training in French experimental physiology? Where is radical empiricism, and not pragmatism, as the core of James’s metaphysics?
True, the Emersonian connection is there, but not much emphasized for the profound intellectual influence it had on James’s thinking, and there are a few mentions of James’s Paris connections, but by and large, Menand casts James erroneously in the tradition of German experimental science, Kantian philosophy, and British Empiricism (only this last is partly true). This amalgamation fits Menand's thesis that American high culture has benefited from the various pragmatisms of his protagonists, but it washes over the point that James was more than a mere meliorist, within whose eclectic philosophy all can somewhere find the expression of their own inclinations.
To the contrary, James’s proper intellectual lineage, I maintain and the archival documents show, is the intuitive, literary, and philosophical inheritance of the Swedenborgian and transcendentalist milieu. And out of this lineage he did take a very specific stand—against scientific reductionism, bigness, rationalism, imperialism, moral high-handedness, and material greed. Instead, he was for a science that was a tool and not an ultimate end, the primacy of the mystical experience, the importance of individuals, pure experience in the immediate moment, and the moral equivalent of war.
Menand gets the economic, statistical, and social currents of mainstream white culture, but he misses the spiritual currents of both the Swedenborgians and the transcendentalists (He thinks Emanuel Swedenborg was spelt "Immanuel" and that the philosopher-scientist was from Denmark—he was from Sweden; and he's never heard of the Swedenborgian Doctrine of the Rational and the Doctrine of Use, key influences on Charles Peirce as well as William James (Taylor, 1986). He also misses the deeply religious currents of the spiritualists and mental healers, and he does not know his depth psychology before Freud, an integral chapter in the development of the contemporary women's spirituality movement today (Taylor, 2000). James was deeply immersed in these alternative currents in his attempt to reconcile science and religion and he spoke for more than just mainstream American white culture (Taylor, 1896).
Professor Menand can be forgiven for these omissions, however, as one can only get so much between two covers. Also his style of excursing on the subhistory of every little issue, though distracting at first, turns out to be one of the more felicitous marks of his style. The danger is, however, that if the voracious reader of James does not know the alternative realities swarming around Menand’s normative interpretation and is getting James in this pragmatist context for the first time, and then repeats the author at random, the same ingrained prejudices being recycled over and over again by the reigning Jamesean commentators will continue.
The antidote for this is to keep going back to James in the original and to work at recreating the period in which James lived as James himself and the people who lived in that period saw it for themselves. Compare with Prof. Rorty, for instance, who puts himself up as a contemporary interpreter of James, but who apparently got his James through his reading of Dewey. But James was neither in favor of the supremacy of the rationalist tradition, nor a Hegelian. Similarly with the present Cambridge Companion to William James, which depicts James as a mild mannered rationalist when his very message to the logicians was that the non-rational did not always mean the irrational and that there were alternate ways of knowing besides a near pathological adherence to the doctrine of the supremacy of the intellect. In this regard, we have a saying amongst professional historians of psychology, that if contemporary writers would just read more, perhaps they would discover less.
In any event, Menand’s book goes a long way toward successfully elucidating at least the normative, if not exactly the Jamesean, stream of American pragmatism.
Eugene Taylor, PhD
Harvard University
©2001
References:
Taylor, E. I., "Peirce and Swedenborg," Studia Swedenborgiana,. 1986, 6:1,
25-51.
Taylor, E. I., William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1996.
Taylor, E. I., Shadow Culture: Psychology and spirituality in America. Washington,
D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999. Paperback edition, May, 2000.