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Louis Menand
Historian; Columnist, The New Yorker; Author, The Metaphysical Club
When I started out to write The Metaphysical Club, the idea was to do what Hollywood producers call a "buddy story," a book about a friendship between two young men: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., later the Supreme Court justice famous for his many dissents, and William James. This friendship interested me because these were two very different personalities.
Oliver Wendell Holmes was a Brahmin of the Brahmins. His father coined the term "Boston Brahmin." Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was dean of the Harvard Medical School, a poet, orator and one of the founders of The Atlantic Monthly. He was thought to be one of the greatest talkers in Boston, and his son inherited that tendency.
Brahmins & Sponges
Sometimes it's imagined that the Jameses were Bostonians, because the family ended up living in Boston. But actually they were New Yorkers, and far from being Brahmins - they were pure Irish. So the friendship between Oliver Wendell Holmes and William James was interesting on that social level.
Oliver Wendell Holmes was a rather austere, somewhat aloof, somewhat arrogant and cynical man. Although he was a brilliant conversationalist and socially adept, he had a rather fixed idea about ideas, unlike William James, who was very sponge-like. William James was somebody who never wanted to make his mind up about anything. He thought, for example, that it shouldn't be a requirement that everybody spell the same way. He thought that the universe should be renamed the "pluraverse," and he enjoyed switching from one position to another and changing his mind. But in the years after the Civil War - they probably met in 1864 - William James and Oliver Wendell Holmes became very good friends. They used to get together every Saturday night in Cambridge or Boston with a bottle of rum and talk about the nature of the universe. If you read the letters they exchanged there is a kind of love that they felt for one another that you don't find in any other letters they write.
In almost every history of American thought, or in biographies of figures in this period, one finds a reference to The Metaphysical Club. It's achieved a kind of semimythical status in American intellectual history. In fact, we know very little about The Metaphysical Club. It met in 1872, and it seems to have lasted for about nine or ten months. The members of the club, we feel pretty sure, were William James, his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes and several other Cambridge intellectuals. No records were kept; no papers survived from the club. Only one person who participated in the club ever mentioned it in any of his writings, and he did so 30 years later in unpublished manuscripts.
Pragmatism
Why has The Metaphysical Club achieved this semimythical status? Why does everybody mention it in histories of American thought? The reason is that The Metaphysical Club is supposed to have been the first place in which the term "pragmatism" was used. Pragmatism eventually became America's contribution to philosophy.
The man who introduced the term "pragmatism" in the meetings of the club and who was credited with essentially inventing pragmatism was Charles Sanders Peirce. It would be a little inaccurate to say that Peirce is a forgotten figure, because even in his own lifetime he was not well remembered. But there's a reason for that. In fact, Charles Peirce was one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. He was the son of a famous Harvard mathematician, Benjamin Peirce, and Charles was a prodigy. He made contributions in almost every field of science and mathematics: set theory, formal logic or symbolic logic, chemistry, astronomy, metrology, geodesy and philosophy. He's also the founder of semiotics, the study of signs. Yet he was an extremely difficult personality. First of all, he was a drug addict. He had a very painful condition, facial neuralgia, and because of the pain he took opium, and later in his life he took cocaine. He was also a somewhat violent person, and he was a notorious womanizer. Because of the womanizing he was ultimately fired from every position he ever had. He spent the last 20 years of his life in abject poverty. But when Peirce was a young man, in the 1860s and 1870s, he was one of the leading intellectual lights of Cambridge.
A Defining War
What distinguished Holmes from James, among other things, was the fact that Holmes was a veteran of the Civil War. James never fought in the war. Holmes enlisted immediately. In fact, he dropped out of Harvard in his senior year, in 1861, and enlisted in the Union Army. He joined the 20th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers and served for three years.
Of the 2,000 regiments in the Union Army, only four suffered a higher number of deaths than Holmes' regiment. Holmes himself was wounded three times - the first time in a battle known as Ball's Bluff, fought in the fall of 1861, shortly after the Union rout at Bull Run. It was an incredibly stupid engagement, because the Union troops, of which Holmes was a part, tried to scale a cliff on the Virginia bank of the Potomac, 40 miles up river from Washington. They carried artillery pieces and 1,700 men up this steep cliff, about 100 feet from boats in the river, without knowing that there were Confederate forces lurking in the trees at the top of the bluff. They were ambushed and driven back down the cliff into the river, where they were shot trying to swim to safety. Holmes was shot early in the battle through the chest, by a rifle bullet which just missed his heart. He was evacuated to a hospital and ultimately survived, but it was a very close thing. Many of his friends in the regiment died in front of his eyes in the hospital or on the battlefield.
Holmes was wounded a second time, after he had recovered, at the battle of Antietam, where he was shot in the neck and left behind enemy lines for dead until the Union troops were able to regain the ground and evacuate him. And he was shot in the foot at an engagement known as Second Fredricksburg, leading up to the Battle of Chancellorsville. Holmes said he hoped that his foot would have to be amputated so that he could be discharged. Fortunately or unfortunately, the foot was saved and he served out his commission.
The war had a profound effect on Holmes because, when it began, he was an ardent abolitionist. We think of all people from Massachusetts as abolitionists now, but they absolutely were not. The abolitionists were a very small party in Boston because most Northerners, particularly in and around Boston, were unionists. They didn't want the South to secede. They wanted slavery to wither away, but they didn't want to go to war to end the institution of slavery. The abolitionists wanted the South to secede. They were moral absolutists, and young Holmes was an abolitionist. So when he joined the Army, he joined in the spirit of a moral crusade. The horror of the war, the trauma of his own wounds and the trauma of seeing his friends die completely disillusioned him. When Holmes emerged from the war, he had shed his idealism and had become the kind of thinker that he remained for the rest of his life: a rather cynical, disillusioned, highly realistic, skeptical thinker who had no use for absolute, moral ideals.
The Civil War had an enormous effect on the thinking of everyone who was part of the generation that lived through it. Think about it using the analogy of the war in Vietnam. For the generation that lived through the war in Vietnam, they emerged from that experience with a sense of disillusionment and skepticism because they thought that the older generation suffered from too much certainty. They weren't skeptical enough of their own beliefs, and look what they got us into: this quagmire. The generation that lived through the Civil War experienced a similar sense of disillusionment, and they blamed the older generation for an excess of certainty, for thinking they knew what they were doing when they got the United States into the war and then unleashed these terrible forces that nothing had prepared anyone for. The Civil War marks a kind of watershed moment in the transformation of American intellectual culture from the first half to the second half of the 19th century.
There's a second reason for this transformation, which is that the war also modernized the United States. During the Civil War, the South was not represented, of course, in Washington. And the Northern Congress then unleashed forces of expansion - territorial expansion, for example - underwriting completion of the transcontinental railroad, instituting a system of taxation, creating a national currency and so forth, that helped industrialize and modernize the American economy. So the United States, after the Civil War, was a much more modern, industrial, capitalist society than it was before. The North really dominated America in the second half of the 19th century, and the Northern socioeconomic form was industrial capitalism.
So, first, we have a disillusionment with older intellectual values and beliefs, and second, we have a new socioeconomic world that people are living in. How were intellectuals going to cope with this new world? The answer was, in a word, pragmatism.
What is True?
As a philosophy, pragmatism is basically a theory of truth: An idea or a belief is true if it works for us. What does it mean "to work for us"? If it puts us into a better relationship with our environment, if we get something back out of the world by holding this belief or by believing this idea. James was the person who introduced pragmatism publicly, crediting the idea to Peirce. James used to say that the important thing about an idea was its cash value. Will the idea, our belief, cash out for us in experience? His favorite example was believing in God. James said that if we want to believe in God, we don't have to be able to prove that God exists. All we have to do is to see what difference believing in God makes for us. And if it makes the world a better place for us, it becomes pragmatically true.
