On Reading Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club"

What a stroke of fortune that I read this book, which I probably wouldn’t have touched for years if I hadn’t been home sick and in need of something to hold my attention. I am moved by both the accomplishment of Menand’s book and by the philosophy of pragmatism, which is its main subject.

On the book…

Menand’s book is maybe one of the first great models I’ve encountered of how intellectual history can work as scholarship. That he is able to weave a story of intellectual influences and rivalries over nearly a century, and clearly articulate complex philosophical nuances and make sweeping assertions about the way American cultural thought became modern, all without ever being general or glossing over details, is stunning. I’m frankly humbled that I could ever compile and process the amount of research he clearly needed to do to write the book.

I remember Chris Grobe and his (now ex-)girlfriend Michaela discussing Greenblatt-style New Historicism, and complaining about how it led to lazy scholarship in which the existing of a particularly engineered map or cultural object on one side of the continent can be seen to justify and explain an otherwise unrelated cultural object on the other side of the continent. Anyway, while Menand’s work is historicist in a general sense (it’s not a work of literary criticism), he shows how the influence of biographical, cultural, and historical context can be traced precisely and without generalizations. He literally shows how the terms of an argument John Dewey, say, had with Jane Addams about “antagonisms” reappeared twenty years later in a philosophical treatise he wrote, showing without room for skepticism that that arguing actually made a substantive difference in his thinking and his ultimate philosophy. That’s amazing.

What’s more, content meets form, as Menand essentially bases his work on pragmatist principles. His implicit argument is that pragmatist philosophy is no more exempt than any other belief system from the principle that all ideologies are derived from cultural need, rather the other way around (as Menand summarizes: “First we decide, then we deduce”). By showing why pragmatism was born in its particular social, historical, and biographical context, Menand gives credence to the philosophy itself, arguing that all ideologies are contingent, and that that’s okay.

A downside is that in being exhaustive, the book is at times exhausting. Menand complex web demands his primary mode to be that of discursiveness: Three pages on one thinker leads to three pages on another, five pages on another, two pages on another, all without a clear sense of where he’s going. Menand usually ties his various strands loosely together by the end of each chapter, but it’s not until the last couple chapters of the entire book — starting around page 350 or so — that he actually ties all of his work together and explains just what exactly pragmatism is. It’s a hugely rewarding pay-off, inspirational in its accomplishment, but it takes a long time to get there. And, as a corollary, since the book is designed for a general audience, to be read straight through, it doesn’t have the advantage of being easily skimmable, like most academic books (read the Intro, visit the chapters that are relevant to your interest, done). So, you really have to stick with Menand. But, if you’re willing, the results are rewarding. I can’t imagine a better introduction to American pragmatist philosophy than this.

On Pragmatism…

I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this philosophical movement before. How fascinating. On the one hand, I can see how it can be especially exciting and invigorating, in that it reconciles the individual, psychological, and cultural need for belief with the maxim that external reality is inaccessible at best.

I will never forget the letter I wrote, or tried to write, to the bishop of the catholic diocese to which I was about to be confirmed. My opening sentence read something like: “I don’t know if there is in fact a God out there watching over us, but I do know that the belief in such a God, that the faith in Christ’s love, has benefits that justify that faith in themselves. Believing in Chris helps me to get through the day, and so long as religion helps us to get through the day, to live better with each other, to be loving and tolerant and all that, then I am pleased to be confirmed a Catholic.” I’m paraphrasing because I lost the original letter and, more important, my parents forced me to rewrite anyway because they were afraid I would offend the bishop.

Still, I’m seeing in pragmatist principles a justification of the very position I took that day as a youngster contemplating the value of religion, writing to the pope. I see also a response to the questions I’ve been mulling over for the past few months: In the face of modern and postmodern philosophy, and the realities of modern and postmodern life, how do we get through the day? Does philosophy help us or hurt us in that endeavor? In a world in which there is no objective truth, objective value, stable identity, or general teleology—on what basis do any of us act? I called the inability to act, in an earlier blog entry, the experience of the suffering spectator, with which I identify Nietzsche’s angst.

Pragmatism seems to complement Nietzsche’s frustrated assertion that all philosophies are merely the prejudices of individuals. Where that discovery drove Nietzsche’s nuts, it seems to calm and even empower the pragmatists, because it gives license to individual ideologizing. Furthermore, it justifies a pluralist democracy in which many, varied, often opposing ideas are allowed to coexist and, not compete, so much as complement and enrich the possibilities of human prosperity.

At the same time, as Menand acknowledges on page 375, pragmatism still, ultimately, leaves us empty. In asserting that we should feel free to embrace whatever ideologies work for us, it doesn’t give any guidance to determine what “works for us” means. Pragmatism discredits metaphysics, but it still leaves behind a general determining factor for all action and all belief, but it leaves that determining factor ambiguous and shadowed. It leaves us to the Judith Butler question: What does it mean, after all, to thrive?

I of course don’t know how to fill in the blank, or if it’s necessary to do so, but I suspect that pragmatist philosophy does not account for a human individual and cultural need for metaphysics, a need to believe that there are objective truths and values worth dying for. If for nothing else, we need them to turn to when the difficulty of actually making a decision proves too difficult. I suspect it goes even deeper than that: We need to have stable identities, stable truths, stable values, and teleologies, or perhaps at least the potential for all these things, in order to act in the world at all.

The election of Barack Obama, whose inaugural address turned on the words, “These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history,” lends truth to this credence. We elected Barack Obama because we needed to believe again. And, since the pragmatists were generally distasteful of passionate belief, of holding onto our ideologies as though they were lifeboats from the heavens (rather than tools from the workshop), I don’t know how they would feel about Obama Mania, and I don’t know how they would account for the general morass of the 21st century.

Rethinking Postmodernism

This rehashes some of what I said in my last note, and it’s also influenced by Terry Eagleton’s The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction, which I’m halfway through right now. I’m clarifying my position, I think, on postmodernism and post-structuralism. It’s not that I feel these theories and cultural attitudes need somehow to be resurrected. I feel that they have created a problem, not just for philosophy but for our culture, and for the role of the humanities in that culture. The problem is that the deconstructionists and post-structuralists have finally smashed all hope for objective truth, deep meaning, grand narratives and illusions. They’ve cut so deep they’ve even erased the idea of the self as a unitary stable being. They’ve killed metaphysics, and they’ve killed the self. No God. No Earth. No us. Just language and culture, and fiction.

They’ve created this crater of meaning because, I think they believed, it would free us from the constrictions and the injustices inevitably created by all grand narratives, and all institutions (literal and metaphorical) that support them. And there is a great deal to be said for the validity of such a project.

Where they have failed us, I feel, is that they have not offered us any advice on what to do when we’re free, of how to live as free people. Sure, now we’re free of all illusions, but it is illusions (O’Neill: pipe dreams) that permit us to move forward and to act in the world, to believe that our lives are worth living. I fear they’ve, quite without intending to, finally cleared the way for nihilism to sweep the world.

HOWEVER, the problem with the post-structuralists is that they’re right. Or at least, they’ve yet to be seriously disproven. Ammended, sure. Abhorred, sure. But disproven? Not yet. And I think it would be unwise for the intellectual community to ignore or put aside Foucault and Derrida simply because the implications of their work are, as I’ve said, discomforting at best.

I think what we need—or, I should say, I think what I need, and I’m just going to assume everyone else does too—is a revival of the existentialist movements. In general, we need a revival of the concern with how to live that informed Nietzsche’s work, and the American pragmatists’, and the existentialists, and others besides. It seems to me that these questions of how to survive inside the ontological black hole of modernity was of much greater concern to philosophers—and playwrights (not so much other artists of other mediums?)—in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second. Maybe because everyone what post-structuralist crazy. But now it’s time to go back and ask the question of how we can move forward and make our way in a Godless, narrative-less world.

This sounds so pretentious, but I think that the underlying project of my work/career may be, if not to find that solution (I’d love to, but something tells me I may never be equipped), at least to clarify the problem, and to bring the academic community’s attention to it, and to demand solutions from artists and from academics.

ENOUGH with celebrating meaninglessness. ENOUGH with placing all art that troubles meaning on a great pedestal, and all art that reifies and suggests and confirms meaning in the “lowbrow” category. FUCK YOU to Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman and the fucking German postdramatic directors. Their time is done. There are new questions to ask in the wake of what they and their pet philosophers have done to our culture, and that is, what now?

[it could be that Elinor Fuchs’s observation that the postdramatic may be on the wane in Germany is an indication that at least certain Western culture makers are already coming to this conclusion]

As a side note or illustration, I saw Judith Butler give a talk at Yale, called “What Does Gender Want of Me?,” back in April. The speech was a lengthy and obscure argument with a French theorist I’d never heard of whose book, which she was arguing against, hadn’t even been published yet. Anyway, after it was over, she took questions from the audience and was very generous (and, surprisingly, clear and accessible) in her answers. One of the questions involved transsexualism and the value of surgery. Butler was arguing that the question of one’s gender-location is ongoing for every one of us, and that surgery does not solve that problem or that questioning process. She said that the basis for any decision about surgery, or any decision about determining self-identity, is to do what makes one “thrive.”

“Thrive.” What does that mean? Suddenly the deep purpose of Butler’s entire work on gender, its social and personal and psychological value, opened itself up. What does Judith Butler want of me? She wants me to thrive.

But Butler never offered a theoretical explanation of the term. What does it mean, after all, to “thrive”? I wanted to ask her but didn’t get the chance, but it seems to me the most important question to ask of her and all philosophers who employ post-structuralist methods and views. What does it mean to thrive??

Another note from 4/7/2009

I must remember that my own work on the theatre and philosophy must acknowledge and respond to the fact that I learn as much, or more, about philosophy and how to live from, say, Pirandello or Kushner or Chekhov, as I do from reading theory, philosophy, history, etc. One possible question for study could be, then, how do I learn differently in the theatre from nonfiction theory/philosophy books?

4/7/2009: Thoughts While Sitting in Jury Duty and Reading Pirandello's "Henry IV"

How is it possible to live in a world where it is impossible to know? This must be the great question of drama in the 21st century. The theatre today must not simply try to present new knowledges or arguments without acknowledging that all stable meaning is inherently impossible (this is most “social” or “political” drama). Nor must it take as it entire task to deconstruct the possibility of stable meaning, to destroy the comforts we find in knowledge/meaning, without simultaneously acknowledging and accounting for the suffering that being bereft of the chance for meaning causes. This is the flaw of much of the late avant-garde — cf. Richard Foreman’s Astronome. The twenty-first century theatre must inhabit both sides of this dilemma and articulate a way through without denying need or potential.

“There is no theory, but you have to have a theory” is the best articulation of the position of the new theatre that I am yearning for. A theatre that knows the former and also the latter.

For that matter it must be the position of the new journalism, the new art, the new filmmaking, the new music, the new criticism, the new theory, and, certainly, the new philosophy. This should be the project of the 21st century, and maybe beyond—newly enlightened, can we rebuild a new world out of the ashes of the old without simply rehashing the old forms of ignorance?

If Nietzsche’s “God” is finally and irrevocably, or almost irrevocably dead, then, in a way, the project of modernity (from Copernicus forward) is nearing its completion. Hence, perhaps, our instinctive sense of impending apocalypse. Because the question is—what now? And there has never been a more urgent time for our civilization to ask such a question.

The theatre has a special place because it is the place where illusion and truth, flesh and knowledge, and all the contradictions of modern existence are given bodily form. This is why Pirandello was attracted to the theatre. Because there, we have always faced these darkest and most important questions of our time (as we still do in church), and we must return to the theatre to face these questions, to reckon with these dark truths, all over again.

Those who point the way (or, writers who care about this conflict):
Shakespeare
Nietzsche
Chekhov
Pirandello
Kushner
(the Attic Tragedians?)
(O’Neill’s last plays?)

After Reading "Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction" in March 2009

I find Nietzsche riveting, transforming in a way that I have not found in a thinker in a long time. I yearn to read all this books, although this little book has presented, so it seems to be, a great enough summary that I can already begin to feel that I know the man.

What stimulates me about Nietzsche is his awareness and articulation of a particular kind of suffering this is special to the human condition and, particularly, to modernity. That is the suffering of the great philosophical skeptic. The suffering of the one who cannot make meaning, who cannot trust knowledge, who has no metaphysics, who has seen or faced the dark Dionysian truth of existence and its ultimate failure to offer deep or higher meanings. I have always been concerned and interested in this dilemma, but I have never thought of it in terms of suffering before, but it is the suffering that defines Nietzsche’s psyche and informs all his work and ultimately contributed to his insanity (the syphilis surely helped).

There is a necessary corollary that I think would be pertinent to theatre and performance studies, and that is the necessary study of the suffering spectator. It would be useful to reconsider all the studies of audience and spectatorship and consider what kind of spectator is assumed in each of these studies (the Lockean blank-slate spectator? The mass public non-individualistic spectator? Most famously, the feminist spectator?). I wonder if we have considered the role of the theatre for the spectator who is suffering as Nietzsche suffered, the spectator who is undergoing an ontological crisis. For, indeed, isn’t this crisis increasing in magnitude and desperation as 21st century proceeds? That fewer and fewer people are willing to engage the question, to look into the abyss, suggests the growing pandemic of nihilism that threatens, I feel, to engulf us all.

What does the theatre offer the suffering spectator? How does reconsidering the attitude of the audience member force us to rethink our concepts of spectatorship, of performance, of artistic and aesthetic value, of the purpose of the theatre and the responsibilities of the art form?