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Title: The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Henry Leyva, Louis, III Menand ISBN: 1565115422 Publisher: Penguin Audiobooks Pub. Date: 2001 Format: Audio CD Volumes: 6 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.42
Rating: 5
Summary: How Ideas Helped To Save The Great Experiment
Comment: The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand is a tour de force of biography, history, and philosophy, and is so well-written that it kept me up for nights in a row reading it. The book focuses on four men, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, their contemporaries, their philosophical musings, and the history of the U.S. from the Civil War to the early parts of the 20th Century. Whether you love it or hate it, pragmatism is one of the offspring of this long and complex piece of history. I like to tell people that I don't subscribe to any -ists or -isms, but I know that much of my personal philosophy stems from the thinking of these gentlemen and I found it interesting to see what their thinking was like, warts and all. I found that reading the book helped me put a lot of things I'd been thinking about into perspective. The United States of America is one of the greatest experiments ever conducted on the planet Earth. Often things have faltered [as it did in the Civil War], but bright and determined people have helped to see it through the low spots. The Metaphysical Club covers an important part of that story. I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Club for All Times
Comment: Louis Menand - The Metaphysical Club
At the heart of "The Metaphysical Club" is the American Civil War, an epochal event which split America in two and forever scarred a generation of Americans. It was so profound an experience that many Americans would, like Oliver Wendell Holmes (one of the four "members" of the Metaphysical Club), drink libations each year in memory to their fallen countrymen. Such an experience rendered the old modes of thinking about life obsolete and after the Civil War Americans were in search of new ideas through which they might interpret and understand their existance and the society in which they lived. The discovery and development of these ideas is principal concern of Menand's book.
Pragamatism is the philosophy most closely connected to the post-war American generation, and it is around this philosophy which Menand constructs his narrative. Menand carefully shows how each of pragmatism's four principal developers (the four members of the Metaphysical Club, Holmes, Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey) contributed to making it a uniquely American response to the challenge posed by a new era.
And what a new era it was. Post Civil War America was filled with startling ideas such as evolution, determinism, psychoanalysis, and statistics. As Louis Agassiz, whose lectures on the superiority of the white race were delivered to packed audiences, could tell you Americans were fascinated by these ideas, some of which were used to solidify old myths, while others arose and threatened to overturn some of the most basic assumptions of human understanding. Menand skillfully relates these important ideas and draws on historical events to illustrate the logic and impact these new thoughts had on American society.
Portraits of the lives and times of the four principal figures in the development of American pragmatism - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey - are well-drawn and robust. The personal development of these four principals is traced, examining the events and conditions that helped build each man's pragmatist philosophy. Menand is concerned not only with telling each man's story, but in examining how each came to discover pragmatism for himself. The last section of the book unites each man's tale, bringing the four lives together in a beautiful synthesis of understanding and revelation.
Although these four figures are the focus of "The Metaphysical Club", Menand's book also creates a compelling picture of the post-Civil War generation by bringing alive several tributary characters including the eugenist Louis Agassiz, Charles Pierce's father, Benjamin, William James' brother and father, Henry and Henry, Sr., respectively, humanitarian Jane Addams, and the socialist Eugene Debs. The narrative is filled with interesting, even at times thrilling, anecdotes featuring these characters, each of which illustrate some crucial fact or idea.
Overall Menand's book points to where we (America) as a society have been and where he believes we are headed. The strong reception this book has received speaks to how many people agree with his analysis. After reading The Metaphysical Club do not be surprised to find yourself discovering that the very same ideas that captivated Americans of the post Civil War generation still figure most prominently into contemporary America.
Rating: 5
Summary: Relevant Reading in Time of Jihad: Absolutes vs Democracy
Comment: As I was reading Thomas Friedman's "Latitudes and Attitudes," I kept coming back to Louis Menand's "Metaphysical Club," where a major theme is how we form beliefs; and how we are to navigate through life in a universe shot through with contingency. When an absolute belief dominates one's thinking, when theocracy is held high and democratic dissension is not allowed: violence results. This is as true today with the Islamic Jihad as it was in the antebellum US, when differing beliefs on race and slavery led to Civil War.
To appreciate this fully, one would need to read Menand's book. It isn't really about a philosophy club - indeed the club is hardly discussed. Nor is it a biography of the key members of that club - Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Chauncey Wright and Charles Sanders Pierce, John Dewey et. al. It's not even about an idea. It's about an approach to thinking - Pragmatism -"an account of the way people think - the way they come up with ideas, form beliefs and reach decisions." It's about the interplay of necessity, belief, free will and chance in the face of war, labor unrest and the dynamic growth of a young country.
This is not a biography in the usual sense. Indeed, the main characters are "Representative Men" in Emerson's sense - or - l'homme moyen -- " the average man" in The Queteletan, statistical sense. These are the men who "for a given era...represent everything that is grand, beautiful and good." The book begins with Holmes - whose story opens and closes the book. Holmes serves the story as an encapsulation of the changes in America, from antebellum Boston-Brahmin beliefs in absolutism and abolitionism to the Supreme Court Justice whose jurisprudence rests on hard-won experience and the first widespread use of the concept of "the reasonable" man.
This approach to biography was both fascinating and frustrating. Holmes is not Holmes, but the nexus of Emerson, the Civil War, and progressive politic in the court. William James serves as the point of departure for a comparison of the absolutisms of Agassiz vs. the contingency of Darwin, societal pluralism, race relations, and the assimilation of Eastern and Southern European immigrants into the American "race." Pierce is emblematic of the use of statistics in the analysis of personality traits (the Hetty Green case), and an object lesson in the clash of changing morals and a conservative academy. Dewey serves as the transition from the impractical Burlington (VT) school of Transcendental philosophy and Hegelianism (absolutisms) to a reformer of education, psychology, university-faculty tenure rights, sociology and labor practices.
All of these ideas and currents wend through the individual lives and times Menand covers. The overall narrative structure of this book is equally fascinating and frustrating. The reader is forever led down tangents that circle back and intersect with some other section, thought, event, or person covered elsewhere. In this way, the book really is a tapestry showing the warp and woof of American life.
Menand handles most of the people in this narrative in a dismissive and belittling manner: Emerson comes across as nothing more than a lapsed Unitarian who never really read a book but grabbed higgledy-piggledy for gems among the works of others. William James is a procrastinating, depressed dilettante and drug taker, a mystic who "discovered" Pragmatism in the works of a French philosopher, and then promptly dropped it (indeed, this reader got the sense that Pragmatism was not an original American idea at all but was derived from France). Eugene Debs is a drunk. All these things may be true of these men, but it is not the key to their greatness or why they are remembered today.
One thing I was not aware of which Menand covers at some length, is the degree to which American Transcendentalism derives from Coleridge's Aids to Reflection and how this in turn derives from Coleridge's misreading of Kant. I studied Coleridge, Kant, James and Emerson at Harvard Divinity School and still I didn't know this. Must of missed class that day (it was known to happen).
All in all, The Metaphysical Club was well worth the time invested. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the development of American cultural identity, history and philosophy. Of all the books I've read so far this year, this is the one I keep turning over in my mind. "The Metaphysical Club" is a thrilling, intellectual and cultural adventure. Highly recommended.
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Title: Pragmatism: A Reader by Louis Menand ISBN: 0679775447 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 1997 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: American Studies by Louis Menand ISBN: 0374104344 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 13 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis ISBN: 0375705244 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 05 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker ISBN: 0670031518 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 26 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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