Rare Book Monthly
Articles - January - 2005 Issue
The Metaphysical Club<br>By Louis Menand
This book is widely recommended.
By 1890, when William James published his Principles of Psychology, the black keys were identified on the keyboard. The brain was divided left and right and emotions and feelings given seats at the table. Facts and experience would have their place but they would share the stage with emotions whose origins ands meanings would prove to be infinitely more complex than the infinite adding machine tapes of facts in the right brain.
Out of the recognition that the mind is an interleaving of fact and feeling arose pragmatism which ought, and today still seeks, to explain and reconcile what we know with what we feel. Its principal television advocate is Dr. Phil and he spends 52 minutes of every televised hour connecting feelings to rules.
The second half of the book sees this emerging philosophy put into action in the words and actions of John Dewey and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
For me the interesting story is in the development of pragmatic theory. It was an enormous, if gradual, intellectual conversion and discovery made possible by the incremental contributions of many thinkers and is as defined by what it clearly was not as by what it came to be understood to be. The quickly changing facts of the nineteenth century demanded a theory to explain them and pragmatism emerged as the logical box big enough to encompass and contain them. Of course, had the facts been different, the theory too would have been different for it is defined, understood and explained by the events and facts of the moment. In other words it is philosophical reverse-engineering.
Where does that leave us today? In an apparently precarious place but at least we have a theory to explain it.
Read this book and draw your own conclusions. Feel free to disagree with me. This book will make you think. I've read 500 or so books over the past 10 years and I'd put this one in the top 10.
The Metaphysical Club was written by Louis Menand who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for history for this work in 2002. It is available in hardcover and paperback online and at bookstores around the world.
