The Art of Manliness - The Metaphysical Club

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast in 1872 a group

00:00:12.040 of men that included future supreme court justice oliver wendell holmes jr father of modern

00:00:16.020 psychology william james and eccentric polymath charles saunders purse formed a philosophical

00:00:20.260 society called the metaphysical club to exchange and discuss ideas while very little is known about

00:00:24.840 how this conversational club was conducted over its nine months of life we do know that each of

00:00:29.080 its individual members made significant contributions to uniquely american philosophy

00:00:33.320 called pragmatism and that pragmatism would in turn greatly influence everything from legal theory

00:00:37.920 to education my guest day profiles the lives and thinking of each of these interesting men in his

00:00:42.400 polisher prize-winning book the metaphysical club the story of ideas in america his name is louis

00:00:46.880 manand he's professor of english at harvard and today we have a conversation about what the philosophy

00:00:50.860 of pragmatism is about why holmes james and purse as well as the intellectual john dewey arrived at

00:00:56.080 embraced and forwarded its principles and how pragmatism shaped american life between the civil

00:01:00.160 war and world war one we end our conversation with why pragmatism fell out of favor and whether

00:01:04.340 it remains salient today after show's over check out our show notes at aom.is metaphysical club

00:01:09.320 louis manand welcome to the show thank you so uh you wrote a book some 20 plus years ago

00:01:27.480 called the metaphysical club a story of ideas in america and this book takes a deep dive into changes

00:01:35.900 in american philosophy and thinking that influenced the law it influenced how we thought about civil

00:01:43.180 rights and freedoms and etc and all this happened between the civil war and world war one what drove

00:01:49.620 you to this period of time like what made you explore this period between the civil war and world

00:01:53.700 war one and how it changed how american philosophy changed uh i got interested in it in a kind of

00:02:00.020 a bleak way so when i graduated from college i went to law school and i didn't like it didn't really

00:02:08.420 feel it was the right place for me but i took the first year courses and i had a professor of torts

00:02:15.840 named morton horowitz at harvard and he taught a great class and was very interesting guy because he

00:02:22.660 was a historian which most law professors are not and so later so then i went and got a phd in english and

00:02:29.840 i became an english professor and then in the 1980s when i was teaching there was a lot of interest in

00:02:37.820 a school of legal studies called critical legal studies which was actually centered at harvard even

00:02:43.900 though those people weren't there when i was a student there and they were younger but horowitz was

00:02:49.640 sort of associated with this group and what was distinctive and some people disturbing about

00:02:56.120 them is that they applied critical theory to legal texts so they basically treated legal documents

00:03:05.860 judicial opinions and so forth in the way that a literature professor might treat them

00:03:11.380 do structuralist analysis or deconstruction and so on and so because i was in an english department

00:03:17.100 this was like an intersection of two interests of mine the one was the interest i had in the history of

00:03:21.560 the law and the other was an interest that i had in critical theory just as a person who was in the

00:03:27.000 literature department not because i was particularly you know devoted to it so i started reading some of

00:03:32.140 these journal articles there's a lot of debates in journals between law professors literature professors

00:03:36.720 philosophers and so on about critical legal studies and one of the articles was by morton horowitz

00:03:42.560 and it mentioned something called the metaphysical club which i'd never heard of so this is probably 1982

00:03:48.580 or something and i just sort of stuck in my mind what was this group and is was there a story there

00:03:55.900 and eventually i decided to try to explore it and see if i could make something out of it and so

00:04:05.360 probably 1992 maybe 10 years later i started working on the book and by that point i'd realized that

00:04:13.920 the metaphysical club is kind of a legendary semi-mythical uh group organization that met

00:04:20.860 sometime in the 1870s that included a lot of several people who became quite famous in american

00:04:27.940 intellectual life and that it was associated with the ideas of pragmatism so i knew that much going in

00:04:35.900 and then i thought i would try to figure out if i could find out what this club was

00:04:39.800 do some research and dig up any documents that might tell me what they talked about and

00:04:46.420 see if i could tell a story and then as i started working on it as these things happen you start

00:04:52.540 stretching the canvas and you realize it's a huge story it's not just a story of a club that met in

00:04:57.980 cambridge for a little while in 1872 it's actually a story about a change in american intellectual life

00:05:04.600 and american culture that maps onto social changes and in particular it seems to me it seemed to me

00:05:11.720 that it was associated with the aftermath of the civil war and that it culminated in the progressive

00:05:19.140 period and with the free speech opinions of all of wendell holmes jr who was a member of the club

00:05:24.640 so that's how that's sort of how the frame emerged and then i spent 10 years trying to fill it

00:05:31.640 you know fill it up yeah i think that's interesting that you pointed out that i mean for me like if i

00:05:37.320 look at american history and you look at your high school american history classes or college

00:05:40.540 and you look at when they explore like um you know american thought there's like the transcendentalism

00:05:46.140 movement and you like you explore that and then the civil war happens and then the next thing you talk

00:05:51.300 about you talk about progressivism and you're like well what happened in between there and a lot

00:05:56.180 happened in between there and this is what that book's about correct so you mentioned there's this thing

00:06:00.560 called the metaphysical club it's sort of like it was this group of guys oliver wendell holmes jr

00:06:05.200 william james father of psychology and this other guy named saunders purse that met together it kind

00:06:11.220 of reminded me of the inklings jr you know tolkien and c.s lewis they're getting together just to

00:06:15.340 discuss ideas these men contributed to an american philosophy called pragmatism we can get into the

00:06:22.780 details of what pragmatism is and appear in a bit but like big picture what is it like how is it

00:06:28.720 what is it how is it different from other philosophies and that might be hard to do

00:06:33.780 because like you took an entire book of like you know 500 pages to to suss that out so a shorthand

00:06:40.760 way of explaining it is that it tried to adapt philosophical thought to darwin's theory of

00:06:49.160 evolution so the way darwin described the world and on the origin of species changed science obviously

00:06:57.160 because he produced a different idea of what organisms are and how they relate to one another

00:07:03.000 and how they evolve and so on but he also as a consequence of that theory about how life emerges

00:07:11.280 and how change happens was a different idea of the universe not in the universe and darwin is filled

00:07:18.080 with uncertainty it's unsettled it's fluid it's constantly changing and to the extent that philosophy

00:07:23.120 is looking for you know what's called first philosophy that is sort of fundamental principles

00:07:28.220 or absolute truths which is sort of the way people thought before darwin not everybody but that was

00:07:34.280 a common way of thinking about what science was doing these people thought philosophy had to adapt as

00:07:38.840 well and philosophy had to acknowledge the world that darwin described another way to put it with the

00:07:46.380 same along the same lines is to say that when we think about evolution of our species it's very natural

00:07:54.020 to think that well we evolved to have hands with fingers because we could just do more with the

00:08:00.840 environment if we have fingers and if we only had sort of a paw or you know stump at the end of our arm

00:08:06.680 so organisms that develop fingers adapted better than organisms that didn't have them because they

00:08:12.740 they could they could use them to to survive and reproduce and that's generally darwin's theory of

00:08:19.660 course of how characteristics evolve in all kinds of in every kind of organism so if you so if you think

00:08:26.600 of the human organism that way it's very easy for people to think yeah well hands you can explain

00:08:32.060 on evolutionary theory what about minds so for the pragmatist a mind is the same as the hand we develop

00:08:38.880 minds as a species which distinguishes us we believe as a species because it helped us adapt better so

00:08:45.420 the purpose of minds or the function of minds is to form beliefs about the world why do we form these

00:08:51.460 beliefs we we form these beliefs because it helps us adapt better to our environment so the pragmatist

00:08:57.460 thought that the purpose of minds is not to mirror a mind independent reality that say the way things

00:09:04.740 really are even if we weren't there to observe them because that's had no adaptive utility the purpose

00:09:11.080 of minds is to develop beliefs that will help us cope and when circumstances change and the same thing

00:09:16.320 is true of any other organism when circumstances change then the way we think our beliefs will change

00:09:22.400 too it doesn't have to be set in stone in other words so this was a this was a challenge to a certain

00:09:27.900 kind of philosophical tradition i don't want to exaggerate the extent to which other thinkers never come up with

00:09:33.260 this problem before but that was what they sort of launched their movement on so again to kind of

00:09:39.440 sum up this may be a blunt way to say it for the pragmatist truth is truth if it works or if it

00:09:44.240 allows you to function in the world and adapt and it's like that that's what truth is yeah well

00:09:50.860 william jay's put it this way the true is the name for whatever is good in the way of belief

00:09:56.240 okay truth is a compliment we give to our successful beliefs okay all right and how did this differ i

00:10:03.180 mean you said like hey well how did this differ from you know reigning philosophies the united states

00:10:06.860 at the time well it wasn't so much i don't think it's so much a quite i mean it's more has to do i

00:10:13.080 think with philosophy with science okay so in the pre-darwinian scientific world people thought of

00:10:20.420 species as belonging to sort of a chart of different types that was immutable and once you had this

00:10:27.280 taxonomy of the different species you could you know make a hierarchy out of them you know one consequence

00:10:32.840 of this of course is racial doctrine in the 19th century which is makes a hierarchy out of different

00:10:37.260 human races so so that way of thinking suggests that god had a plan and the plan was to create

00:10:44.800 these different organisms and it all fits into some hierarchical arrangement that doesn't change

00:10:49.720 particularly over time so the pragmatists saw that darwin had as i said upset this way of thinking about

00:10:56.340 organisms and therefore they thought philosophy needed also to make progress so to say that doesn't

00:11:03.240 have philosophical antecedents is it's not quite right because william james for example thought that

00:11:08.060 the british empiricists like hume john stewart mill barclay were pragmatists because they showed the cash

00:11:16.640 value of certain philosophical terms they didn't think about them in terms of absolutes so it's not that

00:11:22.060 people hadn't thought this way it's just that the post-civil war period getting rid of hierarchical

00:11:27.360 thinking and typologies and so on was a seemed like an imperative well let's kind of dig into each

00:11:33.140 of these guys you talk about because all of them brought something to this idea of pragmatism yeah and

00:11:39.260 you start off talking about oliver wendell holmes jr and you make the case that his experience

00:11:44.440 in the civil war it affected him profoundly and for the rest of his life and it kind of i mean in a way

00:11:50.600 there was like the darwinism going on as well but in a way it also his experiences of the war opened

00:11:54.900 him up to the idea to pragmatism i mean kind of big picture like what was his experience like and how

00:12:00.940 did it change his thinking yeah holmes is a really dramatic story in a way that the other figures in

00:12:07.480 the book are because he did fight in the civil war he was a college student at harvard and he enlisted

00:12:13.180 which is unusual as soon as the war broke out in 1861 and he joined the 20th regiment of

00:12:20.200 massachusetts volunteers and he fought for three years in the war and very bloody fighting

00:12:26.200 and he was wounded three times three different battles but he kept returning to the war even

00:12:33.520 though he was wanting to get out and he served out his three years and that was a really important

00:12:38.620 experience for him i suggest i'm not the only person but i think it's important serious for him

00:12:43.740 so what happened was that he was an abolitionist this is kind of buried in biographies of him

00:12:49.760 because he tried to sort of conceal this part of his past i think but he was an abolitionist in boston

00:12:55.640 in the 1860s and 1859 that era when he was a college student that was unusual because most bostonians

00:13:02.660 were unionists they didn't want the south to secede they didn't particularly like slavery necessarily

00:13:08.860 but they didn't they also didn't want to start a civil war whereas the abolitionists were secessionists

00:13:14.120 they wanted the south to secede they would have nothing to do with the south so he so he took the

00:13:18.900 radical position in other words on slavery and on the war so he joined in that spirit and he wrote

00:13:25.440 letters to his parents during the war which he talked about fighting for christian civilization and

00:13:29.520 things like that that's very unholmsian but he was an idealist as young people are and the war sort of

00:13:35.680 purged him of his idealism because you know when you're actually out there seeing people die in

00:13:39.860 front of you often he saw friends of his from harvard would die was shot right you know when in

00:13:45.300 battles he was fighting in and when you're wounded yourself the first time he was pretty sure he was

00:13:49.220 going to die he shot through the chest you see you see the you see war differently you see that

00:13:54.360 there's nothing particularly noble or idealistic about it and i think that he came to the conclusion

00:13:59.640 when he left the army and started his career in the law that absolutism of the kind that the

00:14:07.420 abolitionists profess leads to violence so what you need is a system which allows people to express

00:14:17.140 differences of opinion and to resolve those differences by democratic means that failed in

00:14:23.340 the case of the extension of slavery into the territories which is the big issue after 1850

00:14:27.740 and it failed partly because these woodholms came to regard as fanatics like the abolitionists

00:14:34.060 drove the north and the south to war so he became essentially and i think all the pragmatists were

00:14:40.320 essentially a unionist meaning that you can't quit you have to stay in the game but the game has

00:14:46.200 can't be rigged it has to be designed so that everybody has an opportunity to settle their differences

00:14:51.040 non-violently so that's why i think the civil war was so important william james did not fight in the

00:14:56.820 civil war though he certainly could have he was certainly the right age the same age as holmes

00:15:00.660 but two of his brothers did and they had a terrible war one was really badly wounded they went back to

00:15:06.220 the south after the war to start farming with free blacks and that was they were run out of town

00:15:11.940 so he knew what the cost of the war was as well so i think the war to me this is i would say when i

00:15:19.220 would say this is the only original contribution that my book makes the historiography of pragmatism

00:15:23.400 so the war really drove this way of thinking in a way that usually is usually in histories of

00:15:29.260 pragmatism it's attributed mainly to darwinism yeah i think that the whole section about the the

00:15:34.720 history of the civil war i thought was really interesting because you give a look at i think

00:15:37.960 if you're probably not going to get in your high school history class i mean you typically think

00:15:42.860 civil war was fought over slavery yes but it was a lot more complicated than that like as you said

00:15:47.920 there was people who were pro-union not a fan of slavery but if they're like well you know if the

00:15:52.900 south can have slavery and we keep the union together that's fine but then as you said you 0.81

00:15:57.180 also had the abolitionists who were at the time they were they were yeah considered very radical and

00:16:01.940 they were actually one of one of their solutions yeah like yeah i mean one of their solutions to

00:16:06.500 slavery as well you just said that it was a disunionism just dissolve the country completely it was a

00:16:12.200 religious movement basically yeah okay so wendell oliver wendell holmes he went in an idealist

00:16:17.940 civil war basically disabused him of that and he said okay i got to figure out a way how can i

00:16:22.980 how can we exist with differences and how we see things without resorting to violence then you had

00:16:29.840 and so he started you know his legal thing he started to go down that path then you had uh you said

00:16:34.320 william james who didn't fight in civil war but he was really involved and really saw firsthand the

00:16:40.080 debate about darwinism because okay he's the father psychology but when he's in college he was

00:16:45.240 studying biology and he actually went to the amazon with this guy named uh louis agassi who was this

00:16:52.900 naturalist what was william james's what did he see in the darwinian debate and how that influenced his

00:16:59.020 thought later on yeah that's kind of a long story but he didn't go to college actually he uh he went to

00:17:05.400 lawrence scientific school which was a scientific school at harvard essentially a graduate school

00:17:10.620 but you didn't need a college degree you didn't need a college degree to law school either in the

00:17:14.720 1850s um so he went to this scientific school that's where he met charles purse and he as you say he was

00:17:23.540 originally a naturalist and so he's he went on an expedition to brazil with his character named louis agassi

00:17:31.320 so louis agassi was from switzerland and he was a very famous scientist in the 1840s who

00:17:40.260 is one of the discoverers of the ice age and his specialty was fossil fishes but he was sort of an

00:17:48.500 all-around science maven and he came to boston in the 1840s he gave some lectures called the low

00:17:56.040 lectures that had were very popular he's french or he had a french accent he was you know kind of

00:18:03.140 flamboyant character and he was very good at talking about fossil fishes and people felt fell for him

00:18:09.700 and lawrence scientific school was started in part to give him a job at harvard so he was teaching

00:18:14.260 there when william james was there and one of the things agassi got obsessed with when he came to

00:18:20.440 the united states settled here was race he was virulently anti-black and he worried about the

00:18:30.040 effects of the of uh abolition because he worried about racial interbreeding which which a lot of

00:18:37.820 obviously white people worried about including some people who were anti-slavery so agassi's position was

00:18:46.400 after the origin of species came out which is 1859 his position was that the reason that you see

00:18:55.960 changes in the fossil record so in other words to establish that there is evolution what you show is

00:19:02.040 that species in the fossil record evolve over time so agassi argued that the reason that you see that

00:19:08.060 is not because of evolution it's because there were several ice ages that would wipe out everything and

00:19:13.840 and guard there'll be a separate creation and that the creation that human beings were

00:19:18.760 emerged from was god's last act of creation the culminating act of creation and that you know

00:19:25.820 and that established the hierarchy of the species and including the hierarchy of the races

00:19:30.020 so he went to brazil amazingly to discover if there was an ice age there that's really why he went it's

00:19:35.540 really crazy so william james goes there in 1864 65 i guess right the end of the civil war and he

00:19:43.320 spends a year there he hated it he got some kind of eye disease you know he was collecting specimens

00:19:49.680 he didn't like agassi very much he was a little horrified by the pictures he was taking of naked

00:19:56.100 native women i guess he had sort of a weird reputation in that area so blah blah so anyway

00:20:01.360 that's kind of i think where william james first started thinking about the effect of darwinism on

00:20:06.900 naturalist science and philosophy and his first articles which were written after the brazil trip

00:20:13.300 are about the change that darwinism has made in the way people think about the natural world so

00:20:19.280 so that that was an important part of his education is seeing up close how agassi operated

00:20:26.200 we're gonna take a quick break for your word from our sponsors

00:20:28.620 and now back to the show okay so the the next guy is kind of a he's a strange guy charles sanders purse

00:20:39.740 he was eccentric he was plagued by personal problems his entire life but he was like a genius like he made

00:20:46.920 important contributions to math and philosophy that went on to influence pragmatist thoughts in fact

00:20:52.340 he's often credited as sort of beginning sort of the making it explicit right but what's his big

00:20:59.680 idea like what did he bring to the table to pragmatist thinking yeah purse was a somewhat eccentric 1.00

00:21:05.080 guy and he was a polymath so he made contributions in a lot of scientific fields he's thought to be the

00:21:14.120 father of semiology which is the study of signs which is a particular obsession of his but he also was

00:21:20.900 very involved in projects like measuring the true shape of the earth so he was sort of and he was a philosopher so

00:21:27.360 he wrote these papers in the 1870s right after the metaphysical club is supposed to have met so they

00:21:34.320 seem to have met just for like nine months in 1872 it's very hard to really know exactly what they talked about

00:21:40.180 there's some there's some evidence anyway so he writes these papers that's published in a journal called popular

00:21:44.900 science monthly which is actually a serious science journal published in st louis and there

00:21:49.840 years later when william james introduces pragmatism to the world in 1898 he credits these papers of

00:21:58.280 purses with the origins of the idea of pragmatism now purse didn't use the word pragmatism in the papers

00:22:03.440 james said he used it in their discussions at the metaphysical club but that's sort of the origins of it

00:22:09.500 so purse was a cantankerous guy who got fired from all of his jobs and basically the last

00:22:17.340 20 years or so of his life lived in complete poverty supported by william james really he

00:22:23.880 continued to write stuff but he couldn't get anything published so when james accredited him

00:22:28.940 with the idea of pragmatism in this paper in 1898 when james was by then an academic star

00:22:35.680 it was to help rehabilitate or resuscitate purses reputation but it didn't did that much effect 0.99

00:22:41.280 the use that i think that i make a person in the book is to explain why statistics and probability

00:22:49.060 are important parts of the pragmatic worldview and that was something purse was interested in because

00:22:56.820 he was a scientist and so he was involved with measuring things and so on which requires the use

00:23:02.520 statistics and he was also interested in probability because given the uncertainty of the world

00:23:09.320 our guesses about the truth can only be probable guesses there can't be absolute certainty so those

00:23:17.320 were the terms that he wrestled with in his own writing and those are the terms i think that he

00:23:21.840 introduced into pragmatism because neither holmes nor james was particularly interested in probability

00:23:29.240 theory theory or statistics because that's not that was on their field but that was that was what

00:23:33.600 purse did yeah i mean i think the step he made is um he said okay he took darwinism okay this can

00:23:40.460 happen to organisms but like he said like it could also happen to natural laws as well yeah um yeah the

00:23:47.800 reason why the theory of gravity exists is because well there's been other maybe there's been other laws

00:23:52.380 that tried to happen but it didn't fit and they failed yeah it failed and gravity is the one that's

00:23:58.220 that's left over yeah so purse had a real teleology which the other which the others did not which is

00:24:04.060 to say that he thought there was a final state that the universe was going to approach and that the you

00:24:10.360 know eventually everything would be law-like right now things are still in a condition of uncertainty

00:24:14.920 or probabilistic certainty but eventually everything would be would be strictly law-like including our

00:24:20.560 beliefs so that he had a sort of cosmological view which james and dewey certainly didn't have

00:24:26.520 okay so you let's talk about that let's you mentioned dewey he wasn't part of the metaphysical

00:24:30.740 club but you you spent a lot of time talking about him let's talk about john dewey like who was he for

00:24:35.720 those who aren't familiar with him and why is he included in this book about pragmatism yeah so

00:24:40.140 yeah you know in his day he was the most more famous than any of them really he was a major american

00:24:46.640 public intellectual in the 20th century he was born in 1859 so obviously any for in vermont

00:24:54.060 obviously he wasn't part of the metaphysical club that met in 1872 so most of those other guys are

00:24:59.940 born in the early 1840s so he's younger but he went to graduate school at johns hopkins he went to

00:25:06.440 university of vermont then he went to hopkins and his teacher was charles purse so he knew purse

00:25:11.660 and dewey's thought evolved from he was really an egalian interestingly a neo-egalian but it evolved

00:25:19.280 general in the general direction of pragmatism so that by the time in 1898 when james publishes his

00:25:26.160 paper called i think philosophical conceptions of practical results or something like that

00:25:30.540 announcing pragmatism dewey's already he's there too and then they sort of team up like tag team

00:25:35.620 wrestling and they for the next 10 or 12 years until james dies in 1910 they debate philosophy with

00:25:43.260 philosophers all over the world so he becomes very important in getting the word out beyond just

00:25:49.000 james's circles and certainly purse's circles to a larger public and he's the one who influences

00:25:54.320 but james too but mainly dewey journalists and so on progressivists you know they read dewey because

00:26:01.140 he writes on he's a public intellectual he wrote on social topics political topics up until his death

00:26:07.000 in 1952 so he's really important because he was this kind of dominant figure in american philosophy

00:26:12.940 and i mean he was also he's also known as like an education reformer and it seemed like what he was

00:26:18.020 doing he was actually trying to take pragmatism and apply it to education so you know before dewey and

00:26:24.980 his ideas like you just go to class you just sit there and the idea was like a professor is just supposed

00:26:29.920 to transmit information into the student's head yeah uh dewey took this idea well no actually

00:26:35.860 knowledge isn't like that it's okay it's for the starwinian if it works it's true and the way you

00:26:41.860 figure out what works you actually have to do things and so you kind of introduce this idea of like well

00:26:46.540 instead of teaching about the digestive system with the diagram like we're gonna make graham crackers

00:26:52.640 or something and then you eat it and then the student can will be able to explore well we can

00:26:58.200 discover chemistry math physiology by by doing so like learning was doing for dewey

00:27:04.020 yeah learning by doing so most early childhood education to this day is learning by doing kids

00:27:10.020 do stuff you know they make things let's say and the idea is that it's by doing stuff in the world

00:27:15.220 that we acquire knowledge and then that knowledge enables us to do more stuff in the world that's

00:27:20.080 how it works so the disjunction between learning and doing which he thought dated back to the greeks

00:27:25.580 you know was an outmoded was an outmoded way of thinking that we learn and do at the same time

00:27:30.800 so he created this school he was first teaching at the university of chicago in the 1890s created

00:27:37.540 school which is still at chicago called the laboratory school which instituted this theory of education

00:27:43.120 and then he became very famous and influential as a philosopher of education traveled all over the

00:27:48.780 world talking about his theories of education and his books had a lot of influence that area but

00:27:53.420 it's as you say connected with his pragmatism well let's talk about the influence uh this

00:27:58.580 sort of pragmatic thought had all these guys and and had on america we talk about holmes so holmes

00:28:04.760 originally he was an idealist civil war made him jaded and he kind of became pessimistic about what was

00:28:10.180 possible in life he didn't he didn't think utopia was possible so he he kind of he took a pragmatic

00:28:15.660 approach to his jurisprudence as a as a judge he's like well we're gonna do the best we can

00:28:22.060 and and just whatever works and for him like what worked was like what can you do to like

00:28:26.460 dissipate violence it seemed like that was how can we avoid another civil war how did so i asked

00:28:33.000 the question is like how did holmes apply his pragmatic thought to his jurisprudence and how

00:28:38.440 do we see that holmesian legal theory that's influenced by pragmatism how do we see it today

00:28:44.620 yeah so just on one point there he he definitely did not use so holmes was a judge right from 1882 to

00:28:53.980 1902 he was a judge on the supreme judicial court of massachusetts eventually i think he was chief

00:29:00.500 justice and then in 1902 he was made associate justice in the supreme court by theodore roosevelt

00:29:06.860 and he served for another 30 years on the supreme court so he spends 50 years as a judge in courts of

00:29:13.520 last resort meaning that he he wrote opinions he's supposed to have written over 2000 judicial

00:29:19.680 opinions so he did not use the law to further his political objectives his theory he does make a

00:29:28.200 contribution at very at the very end of his near the end of his career which i'll get to in a second

00:29:32.080 but in general his judicial opinions are notable for their lack of commitment to the idea of

00:29:43.420 rights so that's a complicated thought so i'll try to explain it we think of rights as individual

00:29:51.500 liberties like the first amendment right to free speech for example but in the 19th century

00:29:58.260 the courts generally thought of rights as in terms of the needs of business so the court

00:30:09.300 confected something called liberty of contract which allowed supposed to have allowed workers

00:30:16.660 to contract to work under conditions that might be inhumane but that prevented the government

00:30:24.100 from regulating those conditions let's say working 12 hours a day or something like that

00:30:29.420 the government can't interfere with that because the workers freely entered into a contract to work

00:30:36.460 12 hours a day and that's protected by this right called liberty of contract and they also believed

00:30:42.340 in a right a property which also prevented the government from regulating business because it was

00:30:49.680 interfering with the right of the property owner to use the property in the way they saw fit so

00:30:55.040 holmes was skeptical of this whole idea of rights protecting people or individuals or corporations or

00:31:03.420 businesses and that included individual rights he was very skeptical of individual rights having any

00:31:08.740 particular value because he thought that a democracy is supposed to allow the legislature

00:31:16.540 the government to decide on what basis society should be organized he said if the majority of people

00:31:25.840 want a socialist country it's their right under the constitution to have one he said he wouldn't want one

00:31:33.160 he was perfectly happy with let's say fair capitalism but he said it wasn't his opinion that governed

00:31:39.120 that it was the opinion of the majority so in other words he had a democratic defense of law but and

00:31:46.540 therefore he found rights to be a kind of abstract principle that was an obstacle to the majority doing what

00:31:53.680 it wanted to do so that's that was part of his position what changed that was in the time of the first

00:32:01.300 world war the congress passed something called alien a sedition act which made it or maybe the espionage

00:32:08.680 decision act i'm sorry which made it illegal for people to interfere with the war effort including

00:32:16.200 by making anti-war speeches so there were several cases in 1919 after the war of people who had been

00:32:25.460 convicted under the sedition espionage act whatever the act was claiming first amendment right to say

00:32:33.720 with just first to speech and holmes the court holmes was on upheld the convictions in all three

00:32:41.160 cases but in the third of the three cases called abrams against united states holmes wrote a famous dissent

00:32:47.920 and he upheld the right of the defendants who would distribute anti-war leaflets to express their

00:32:54.960 views and he argued that the reason that we have protection of speech is because it allows dissenting

00:33:03.260 views to be expressed if we suppress them then the people who hold those views will rightly feel

00:33:10.780 that the government is not legitimate because they were not allowed to express and persuade other people

00:33:17.400 of their opinions so it makes majority opinion legitimate is because the majority has had its

00:33:23.980 say that at the end of the day when the majority wins when minority has to accept the rule of the

00:33:30.100 majority because they've had their say so that became the basis for the protection of political speech

00:33:36.260 in the 20th century so that dissent is really the first time that the supreme court protects what we

00:33:43.000 think of as the right of free speech yeah that's interesting point i think oftentimes we think

00:33:48.140 well it was that was been around since the 1780s when you know the constitution was was drafted and

00:33:55.000 ratified it really wasn't until late 19th century early 20th century that this idea i can say what i want

00:34:00.740 to say free speech as we know it that's when it came so it's not very it's not a very old idea

00:34:04.820 no i mean the original obviously the original language of the amendment is freedom of the press

00:34:09.840 and it was illegal to it was it constitutional to exercise prior restraint in other words you

00:34:17.500 couldn't prevent somebody from publishing something but you could persecute them after they published it

00:34:22.460 so you know the first amendment is a football it's it is today it's very controversial because

00:34:28.320 it requires us to tolerate opinions that we find abhorrent it's hard for people to do that but

00:34:34.860 holmes was saying in his opinion he says even ideas we find loathsome and fraught with death he said

00:34:40.440 we have to protect the right to express them i mean i think another point you made too sort of like a

00:34:47.380 meta idea about the importance of free speech was that when you censor someone else he says you're

00:34:52.320 actually censoring yourself because for him like knowledge again this is a very pragmatic idea

00:34:57.120 knowledge is a social thing yeah um and so if you if you don't allow everyone to say say their say

00:35:03.500 no matter how much you disagree with it there's a chance that you we are missing out on getting

00:35:08.000 closer to the truth whatever yeah whatever that is that's a pragmatic idea that's a persian idea

00:35:13.020 yeah it's that you need a lot of points of view to get the right point of view so when you're

00:35:17.940 measuring something we're trying to measure something precisely let's say the position of a star

00:35:23.240 in astronomy you're going to get discrepant observations because for all kinds of reasons

00:35:29.460 are not all going to be exactly the same so you need a method of sort of sorting out out of all the

00:35:35.260 variety of observations that you have all the differences what's likely to be the truest

00:35:41.700 observation so this was a problem in astronomy days from the 18th century so in holmes's opinion

00:35:47.400 he uses the phrase marketplace of ideas it's the same idea it's a darwinian idea which is that

00:35:51.480 the more ideas you introduce even really bad ones the closer you can get to figuring out what the

00:35:56.640 right idea is the right thing to do is so you need the contributions even of wackos it's like

00:36:02.320 that's how wikipedia is edited for example they're very it's basically wisdom of crowds you know you

00:36:07.180 have all these different people contributing to wikipedia page who have partial knowledge of the

00:36:12.860 subject and their partial knowledge is corrected by the partial knowledge of other people but you add

00:36:18.280 it all up together you get something approximating the right account of whatever it is the article

00:36:23.740 wikipedia article is about so wikipedia is very very insistent on not discriminating against

00:36:30.720 contributors even though some of them may be wacko or frauds or imposters because you need the

00:36:36.760 outliers to know you know where the norm is another so let's talk about william james he's an

00:36:42.420 interesting character because with his pragmatism it seemed like he was trying to figure out how to

00:36:49.500 jibe darwinism with religious belief yeah william james was a guy he like he like he was a scientific

00:36:57.280 man of science but like he also like he really wanted to believe like he seems like he was struggling

00:37:02.160 that with his entire life so how did how did pragmatism help william james resolve some of that

00:37:07.960 tension that existed between accepting darwinism which said okay things happen because it's just it's

00:37:14.800 god's not even involved but then also this desire like that humans have to believe in a higher power

00:37:20.460 yeah well you're right james was has an interesting personality and you have to understand it a little

00:37:27.780 bit to kind of get what he's doing with pragmatism but you you're what you said is correct so

00:37:33.260 he was he had a kind of mercurial health so he had a bad back that made him depressed he

00:37:42.880 have long he would have extended periods of depression i mean clinical depression he also

00:37:49.380 starting about 10 years before his death he had a serious heart problem and he was a guy who

00:37:58.040 thought a lot about you know it's the meaning of life let's put it that way and his father henry james

00:38:06.700 senior his brother was the novelist henry james his father henry james senior was a theologian

00:38:11.420 a very eccentric theologian who really believed in divine providence he was swedenborgian and so he

00:38:22.400 grew up in a household which his father who was independently wealthy and just wrote and traveled

00:38:27.900 around with a family talked a lot about theology and he william james himself could never quite bring

00:38:35.640 himself to believe in god but he felt it must be real to people because you ask them about it and

00:38:43.300 it's quite genuine when they say yes i believe in god there is a god so he wrote probably his most

00:38:49.040 popular book varieties of religious experience 1902 that's what it's about it's about the fact that

00:38:54.600 human beings many human beings most human beings probably will tell you that they have religious

00:38:59.400 experiences they feel the truth of religion there's some kind of supernatural being or entity out

00:39:05.760 there that shapes the the world that we're in and that we should be guided by so but he himself

00:39:12.120 found that prayer never really worked and so on so he wished that he had religion because he felt when

00:39:17.680 he got depressed he would feel better if he thought there was a god or if he could pray and he felt god

00:39:23.480 was answering his prayers so his in other words his rather fragile psychology it's one of the things

00:39:30.140 that got him interested in the possibility of there being some kind of supernatural being and uh so after

00:39:38.160 darwin the common way for scientists to deal with the question of whether god exists was to say that

00:39:46.560 we're scientists and therefore we can't claim to know anything unless we can empirically prove it

00:39:52.820 it says it's impossible to empirically prove the existence of god we have to be agnostic that's 0.89

00:40:00.040 when the term agnostic is created by thomas huxley so james thought that was stupid he thought it should 0.83

00:40:07.580 be possible to believe in god without having to prove it scientifically that there is a god 0.60

00:40:11.560 and his name for this was what he called the will to believe and the will believe the doctrine of the

00:40:17.740 idea behind the concept of the will to believe is that i can believe in god if belief in god makes

00:40:23.920 a difference for me in the world it's just like believing in causation you can't prove causation

00:40:30.980 because nobody can see causation but we all believe in it because it cashes out it it pays to believe

00:40:36.660 there's causation it's not just random shit out there so james thought the same thing could be true for

00:40:42.680 belief in god if it changes the way you live in a way that you in the way you want it to change it

00:40:47.420 then it's true pragmatically so it is interesting that everything he writes about pragmatism from 1898

00:40:55.540 or even earlier in the will to believe which is earlier in that decade through the book pragmatism

00:41:01.420 which i think is 1907 is basically comes down to justifying on pragmatic grounds people's belief in

00:41:08.760 the supernatural so basically it's like the idea is well if it works for you

00:41:12.860 yeah but if you think about it but that's kind of what religion is religion says if you take like

00:41:18.080 christianity if you take jesus into your life you'll be happier you'll be a better person you don't have

00:41:24.120 to show that there is a real spirit of jesus out there you just have to believe and and that's what

00:41:30.800 james james says people people have done this throughout history and it made a difference to them

00:41:35.520 we can't say oh they never proved it what proof what proof is there why do you need proof so he

00:41:41.760 thought generally the claims of 19th century science this is you know big period of science

00:41:46.220 post darwin period of science that 19th century science was too sure of itself you know he believed

00:41:51.460 there might be extrasensory perception he believed there might be seances might actually be in contact

00:41:55.600 with the souls of dead people he you know he he didn't he was never convinced of it but he thought

00:42:01.580 we should have an open mind about it we shouldn't just assume that what 19th century science tells

00:42:06.160 us is the way things are have to be we should be open to the possibility that they're wrong there's

00:42:11.080 all kinds of stuff they don't know so that's why he was a great thinker but it's also why you know he

00:42:16.380 he's kind of out there in terms of the stuff that we're talking about yeah i think one thing yeah

00:42:20.860 something i was having in the 19th century with darwinism is that they were scientists were trying to

00:42:26.300 figure out okay this this works in the with animals and natural laws let's apply this to

00:42:32.380 human beings like they were trying to create like a mechanistic world where every every aspect of life

00:42:37.500 was could be explained with science and it is it's a very deterministic view it's it's like well it's

00:42:43.240 all leading up to this certain idea and james is like well no humans are irrational they do things that

00:42:48.560 are that that aren't deterministic you know this could even like this is a debate about free will

00:42:53.400 that we're having well does free will exist in a deterministic world no and james said no free

00:42:59.060 will exists many his argument was like uh my first act of free will is to say that free will exists i

00:43:04.680 say it exists so therefore it exists yeah to believe in free will yeah yeah and yeah i mean that's i mean

00:43:10.560 it's something that people still struggle with today and we're seeing you you can see james's influence

00:43:15.080 there well it's sort of like it's a pragmatist would say if somebody tried to convince you that

00:43:20.980 free will is that be phenomenal that is to say that you think you've made a conscious decision

00:43:24.980 but actually you you've already made it before you've thought you made it you your answer could

00:43:29.580 be but but so what i still experience it in free will i still experience that i'm that i'm consciously

00:43:36.920 choosing to talk to you you could persuade me that was all determined by our set of genes or

00:43:43.940 whatever that we would have this conversation but i don't experience it that way yeah and his idea

00:43:48.480 about faith too it's like faith's a self-fulfilling prophecy if you don't like he gives example of a

00:43:53.360 leap of faith right it's like if you don't believe that you can make the leap of faith you're not going

00:43:57.960 to make it yeah he has this he has a silly analogy of let's say you're mountain climbing and you come

00:44:05.120 to a crevasse you know that's like six feet across you can jump over it if you believe you can jump

00:44:11.940 over but if you have you don't you're you're going to go down if you don't go down well okay so

00:44:17.360 pragmatism it was a serious thing an american thought it influenced legal theory it influenced

00:44:22.220 psychology it influenced even how we thought about religion influenced education reform with john dewey

00:44:28.100 but then it just kind of disappeared like we don't really talk about it like why why did pragmatism

00:44:33.820 fall out of favor in the united states when like what took its place yeah well in it so in the end of

00:44:39.560 the book my physical club i have like a very short epilogue and i say that holmes james and dewey were

00:44:48.080 colossal figures in american intellectual life in the first half of the 20th century and then after

00:44:58.040 1945 they get eclipse they kind of disappear and pragmatism doesn't really make a comeback until

00:45:06.480 the end of the cold war right 1989 and then there's a huge amount of interest in right this

00:45:15.000 is 1980s huge amount of interest in pragmatism largely because of the work of philosopher called

00:45:19.660 richard randy and my book you know came out of that interest you know so what was this thing that was

00:45:25.140 going on back then that we didn't learn about when we were in school so i've gotten more criticism for

00:45:31.360 for that part of the book than anything else because people say oh no it was still around

00:45:36.000 it was still important but i don't think so when i was in college we did i never heard of john dewey

00:45:39.880 we never read william james yeah never never did never did we read nietzsche we read marx you know we

00:45:45.640 read freud i mean we should have been reading john dewey but we didn't so i think that they really

00:45:51.080 weren't they weren't somehow compatible with the mindset of the cold war period which is a mindset

00:45:58.540 very much based on principle and as we've talked about pragmatism is kind of anti-principle

00:46:04.160 so pragmatism says beliefs are sort of contingent they're provisional they sometimes work sometimes

00:46:11.180 they don't principles aren't supposed to be like that principles are supposed to be immutable good

00:46:16.580 for all purposes good for all occasions man for all seasons so i think that's to me that's why

00:46:22.460 that kind of thinking went out of fashion then after the cold war when the world became less

00:46:27.960 bipolar and there seemed to be kind of more diversity intellectually and ideologically

00:46:33.200 pragmatism comes back because it's kind of appropriate to that kind of world and what do

00:46:38.540 you think the state of pragmatism is in the 21st century is it is it relevant i don't see it so as i

00:46:45.760 said the period between about so rorty published a book called philosophy the mirror of nature in

00:46:50.860 1979 which is sort of his big book but he doesn't it's an attack on analytic philosophy but he doesn't

00:46:58.620 mention pragmatism in that book and then he published a book in 1982 called consequences of

00:47:03.360 pragmatism that's where i first encountered his writing and that was about a lot of those essays

00:47:09.420 were about a collection of essays about pragmatism and then following that in 1982 there began

00:47:15.620 growing interest in pragmatism among people in literature and then eventually people in the

00:47:21.280 art world architects it began people began reading dewey again and quoting dewey as a biography of

00:47:29.040 dewey was very influential guy named robert westbrook and there just was a revival but just that all

00:47:34.400 these editions started coming out all the letters were being collected it's a lot of scarley activity i was

00:47:39.280 writing my book so really between maybe 1980 and 2000 or so you know it was just flooded flooded the

00:47:47.880 field there was also a lot of debate about a lot of people hated it it was a lot of argument about it

00:47:51.160 and so on and then after 9-11 i think it it kind of faded from the scene a little bit and then when

00:47:59.440 after rorty died interestingly that it just sort of died out which is odd because i think a lot of it was

00:48:05.460 because of rorty because he was very prolific and people were fascinated by what he was saying

00:48:10.540 and then it kind of died out a little bit so i don't know i don't know why you don't know why

00:48:15.140 yeah yeah to me it's no longer really central part of intellectual life but it's like as as we've been

00:48:22.220 saying it's one of those things that can come and go i mean it fits a certain kind of moment really

00:48:27.180 well it doesn't fit other kinds of moments very well it's pragmatic or if it fits it fits right

00:48:32.640 it's pragmatic yeah but if you're really for something or really against something

00:48:36.040 you tend to you tend to hold those positions on principle you don't want to hear somebody saying

00:48:40.880 well there might be esp you know right yeah that's my i'm sort of ambivalent about pragmatism

00:48:46.260 like on one hand i'm like well that makes sense right like if it works then it works but then there's

00:48:50.920 other hand well what about principles like you got to have like some sort of like foundational

00:48:54.140 principles that you know sort of platonic and i don't know how to i don't know but doing with

00:48:58.800 yeah doing would say your principles you hold those principles because they make sense

00:49:02.860 right in other words you don't hold them because they're out there in the sky somewhere yeah that

00:49:08.220 your principles correspond to you hold them because they work for you so one of the principles that

00:49:12.600 people have is a desire to believe in absolutes but that's perhaps would say that's fine but

00:49:16.680 understand why you believe in absolutes because it works for you well uh this has been a great

00:49:21.020 conversation i got to explore an idea that i'm i'm because i keep on bumping into these guys in my

00:49:26.280 reading in in american history and it was great to finally like okay what were these guys really

00:49:32.100 about or all about yeah good go ahead louis manan thanks for your time it's been a pleasure

00:49:36.180 it's a pleasure for me too thanks so much my guest today was louis manan he's the author of the book

00:49:41.040 the metaphysical club it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere check out our show notes

00:49:44.980 at aom.is metaphysical club where you can find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic

00:49:56.280 well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at

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The Art of Manliness - November 01, 2021

The Metaphysical Club

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