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.
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