I’ve been reading Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club, which deals with William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, etc. I recommend it. It’s a blend of history, biography, and philosophy. It will make you laugh out loud. Menand did a vast amount of research, then selected the most charming anecdotes, and the most enlightening quotations. His approach to writing is somewhat similar to mine; we both combine teaching and entertaining (Horace’s miscuit utile dulci, mix of useful with sweet). We give readers the “intellectual vegetables” that their conscience insists on, as well as the rich desserts that their taste-buds crave.
The Metaphysical Club was published in 2001, and won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2002. Menand’s work strikes a chord with many readers. His NewYorker pieces are widely read.
William James and Charles Sanders Peirce are associated with the philosophy known as Pragmatism. Pragmatism emphasizes the link between thought and action, it judges ideas by their practical effects; it values truth, not for its own sake, but for its effect on life. The term “Pragmatism” was coined by Peirce, who got it from Kant.
As an example of a “pragmatic belief,” Kant cited a doctor who prescribes certain remedies, though he’s not completely sure what the illness is. The doctor feels that he must act, despite his lack of certainty. Kant compared “pragmatic belief” to betting.1
The most famous bet in the history of philosophy is Pascal’s bet on eternal life. We don’t know for sure, Pascal said, whether there is an afterlife or not. We must choose, we must believe or disbelieve, we can’t abstain. It makes sense to bet on an afterlife, Pascal argued, because if we win, we enjoy an eternity of bliss. If we lose, we’ve only lost some trivial pleasures. If we bet on an afterlife, if we choose to believe, it impacts our life, we focus on following God’s teachings, and earning a spot in heaven. So belief in an afterlife could be called a bet, a “pragmatic belief.”
Peirce said, “What a man really believes is what he would be ready to act upon, and to risk much upon.”2 You want to find truth so that your actions will be based on truth, and will have a better chance of success. A doctor will have a better chance of curing the patient if his diagnosis is true.
My attitude toward truth is different. I would point to Einstein’s theory of curved space and ask, How does this impact our actions? Isn’t it an important theory, despite its lack of practical effect? Like Einstein’s theory, my theory of history is somewhat remote from everyday life, it doesn’t shape our actions. But it might shape our general conception of the universe, and that in turn might affect our life. So for me, the link between thought and action isn’t as close, as direct, as the pragmatists thought.
Peirce thought that all belief was betting, nothing was certain. But isn’t the Copernican theory certain? Does anyone seriously believe that the sun goes around the earth? And doesn’t the Copernican theory impact our conception of the universe, and thereby impact our life? We live by our beliefs, but not all of our beliefs are uncertain.
One could argue, though, that a bold new theory is a bet, a “pragmatic belief,” for the person who propounds it. In the time of Copernicus, it wasn’t obvious that the earth goes around the sun; it was difficult to prove the Copernican theory. For Copernicus, his theory was a bet, and one that entailed certain risks. I’ve bet my life and my reputation on the truth of my theories, though there isn’t a single person in the world who understands them, much less subscribes to them. So one could argue that an original thinker is one who makes a bet, who holds a “pragmatic belief.” Eventually the idea may be universally accepted, but the person who first propounds it is “going out on a limb,” taking a risk, making a bet.
William James seemed to embrace Pragmatism as a way to support religious faith. He seemed to feel that life is better, the world is warmer, if you have religious faith. True, religion can’t be proven beyond doubt, but few things can be proven beyond doubt, so we have no choice but to act on unproven ideas. If these unproven ideas help us to live well, they deserve respect.
William James’ approach reminds me of Kierkegaard’s remark that “the postulate of God is a necessary act of self-preservation.”3 By using the term “postulate,” Kierkegaard made it clear he wasn’t trying to prove the existence of God; rather, he chose to believe without proof; he felt that he couldn’t live without religious faith.
As I mentioned above, Peirce got the term “pragmatism” from Kant. But he got the idea of pragmatism from Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer in the Metaphysical Club. Green defined belief as “that upon which a man is prepared to act.”4 Green got the idea from Alexander Bain (a philosopher/psychologist), and from James Fitzjames Stephen (a jurist, the uncle of Virginia Woolf). Stephen said, “All actions involve belief... and all successful actions involve true belief.” One might say that the idea of pragmatism was “in the air,” and therefore it’s difficult to trace it to one thinker.
How do we know if Einstein’s theory is true? How do we know if my theory of history is true? Peirce says that truth is what people agree about; Peirce viewed the life of the mind as a social thing. Einstein’s theory is widely accepted, so we regard it as true. Does the earth revolve around the sun? Everyone says it does, so we believe it does; we say that the Copernican theory is true.
According to Peirce, “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth.”5 Perhaps Peirce developed his social theory of truth because he was in the Metaphysical Club, he was part of a group-effort to find truth. But even a solitary thinker often discovers truths that society is moving toward; as Hegel would say, a solitary thinker is often in sync with the Spirit of the Age, the Zeitgeist. No man is an island.
Reading and writing may be solitary occupations, but the goal is social, the goal is to touch people, influence people. Much of my work is an attempt to reach readers, even readers who have no interest in the classics; my work is aimed at a general audience. For ten years, I organized monthly discussions at a bookstore; anyone could walk in and join the discussion. Menand also tries to reach a broad audience, through teaching, through magazines, through books. Western philosophy traces its roots to ancient Greece, and for the Greeks, philosophy was often social/conversational.
The Harvard psychologist Erik Erikson said that our identity is molded by our society, our historical era.6 As Aristotle put it, man is a social being. My theory of history says that we’re linked to our society by unconscious instincts, we can’t “opt out” of society. Shakespeare was born in the Elizabethan Age, a renaissance age, he couldn’t opt out, he couldn’t be decadent.
I regard Peirce’s social theory of truth as original, interesting, true. But it’s one of those deep truths of which the opposite is also true.7 One could argue that what people agree about is often wrong, and the minority view is often right. One could argue that an original thinker makes his discoveries alone, through intuition. Kierkegaard argued that religious belief, and moral choice, occur in the solitude of one’s own conscience. So it would be easy to build a refutation of Peirce’s theory, but I think Peirce’s theory is at least one facet of the truth.
Several members of The Metaphysical Club were lawyers. Lawyers speak of a “chain of causation.” The closest link of the chain is the “proximate cause.” Other links are viewed as “remote causes.”
Nicholas St. John Green, a lawyer in the Metaphysical Club, argued that the “chain of causation” is a fiction. The chain of causation is “only a metaphor. In reality, every event has a multiplicity of interdependent causes. The ‘proximate cause’ is just the antecedent event people choose to pick out in order to serve whatever interest they happen to have in the case at hand.”8 Green wrote,
| There is no chain of causation consisting of determinate links ranged in order of proximity to the effect. They are rather mutually interwoven with themselves and the effect, as the meshes of a net are interwoven. As the existence of each adjoining mesh of the net is necessary for the existence of any particular mesh, so the presence of each and every surrounding circumstance, which, taken by itself we may call a cause, is necessary for the production of the effect. |
I’ve often said that causality is a net, not a chain. In an earlier issue, I wrote, “To grasp the connectedness of the universe, we need to think in a holistic way, not a reductivist way; we need to think in terms of systems, not objects; we need to think of causality as ‘mutual arising,’ as a net rather than a chain.” I got the net-metaphor from Joseph Campbell, who probably got it from India or China.
When you find that two thinkers reached the same idea independently, it’s interesting. It’s even more interesting when they use the same metaphor to express the idea. Nicholas St. John Green used the net-metaphor when discussing causality, just as other thinkers have done.
Another lawyer in the Metaphysical Club was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who was a close friend of William James for a time. Ken Burns quotes Holmes at the start of his famous CivilWar documentary: “In our youth, our hearts were touched with fire.” Surely this refers to Holmes’ experience of war.
But Menand quotes the same sentence, and interprets it differently; Menand calls it, “a sentence that both ennobles the antislavery cause and removes it to an irretrievable past.” In my view, this sentence is about war, the experience of combat, not “the antislavery cause.” In my view, it could have been spoken by a Confederate soldier. The full passage is, “We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire.”
Holmes didn’t focus on the goal of the war. He felt that “nobility of character consists in doing one’s job with indifference to ends.”9 Holmes planned to resign from the army; he didn’t view the war as a glorious cause or a solemn duty. “I have felt for some time that I didn’t any longer believe in this being a duty.” Holmes didn’t approve of slavery, but he felt that slavery would die out naturally: “Civilization and progress... will conquer in the long run.”9B
Holmes was regarded as a good soldier — one might say, a natural soldier. But the war left him with a rather dark view of the human condition. “After the Civil War, the world never seemed quite right again.” He had no children. “This is not the kind of world I want to bring anyone else into.”
But if Holmes was disillusioned with life, he wasn’t disillusioned with philosophy. His favorite philosopher was Emerson, whom he met at least once, and whom his father knew well. When Holmes Jr. was nearly 90, he said, “The only firebrand of my youth that burns to me as brightly as ever is Emerson.”
Menand says that the social worker Jane Addams viewed the Civil War as Holmes did. Addams opposed slavery, but also opposed war. In her view, “The Civil War... showed the futility of antagonism: ‘We freed the slaves by war and had now to free them all over again individually, and pay the costs of the war and reckon with the added bitterness of the Southerner beside.’” Addams believed in cooperation, and refused to admit that any conflict was fundamental and unavoidable.
Menand discusses the Pullman Strike of 1894, which pitted the railroad industry against railroad workers. Jane Addams felt that capital and labor should be able to cooperate; their conflict was a misunderstanding. She wrote an essay on the strike, comparing it to the conflict between Lear and Cordelia. She called the strike “an industrial tragedy.” Both parties believed that “their interests were genuinely opposed — that a gain for one must mean a loss for the other. But antagonism [was] only misunderstanding, a tension in the progress toward a common outcome. Cordelia, after all, does love her father. Lear doesn’t oppose her; he only misinterprets her.”
The philosopher John Dewey was teaching at the University of Chicago, and became friends with Jane Addams. Dewey thought that Addams’ essay on the Pullman Strike was “one of the greatest things I ever read.” After hearing Addams discuss the strike, Dewey called her remarks, “the most magnificent exhibition of intellectual and moral faith I ever saw.”
Jane Addams ran a “settlement house” in Chicago called Hull House. “By the time of the Pullman strike, [Hull House] was a place distinguished figures from Europe made it a point to visit, and Addams was a leading citizen of the city.” Hull House was in a poor neighborhood, and some of the people in the neighborhood resented Hull House, threw stones at it, etc. Addams did not fight back, she insisted on cooperation. Addams “‘said she would give the whole thing [up] before she would ask for a policeman; one day a negro spat straight in her face in the street, and she simply wiped it off, and went on talking without noticing it.’ It was a degree of equanimity awesome even to Dewey.”
Addams said that Hull House had no “special aim, [it] wasn’t a thing but a way of living — hence had the same aims as life itself.” When the University of Chicago started its own settlement house, Addams said that a settlement house shouldn’t be started “from the desire to do good.” Addams felt that philanthropists often made the mistake of thinking that they knew what poor people needed. Addams felt that “the people she was trying to help had better ideas about how their lives might be improved than she and her colleagues did.” The manager of the university’s settlement house “made a pitch for money by suggesting that each student should donate two dollars and each faculty member five dollars in a spirit of philanthropic self-sacrifice. Addams was disgusted.”9C
Menand discusses the legal theories of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Holmes expressed his theories in writings such as The Common Law (1881). “It is the merit of the common law,” Holmes said, “that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards.” Law isn’t fundamentally a matter of principles and categories. “The life of the law,” Holmes said, “has not been logic; it has been experience.”
I find Holmes’ ideas congenial. I have little interest in logic and abstractions, I’m more interested in specifics, such as The Chappaquiddick Affair.
Holmes focused on
| “specific solutions — which cannot be reached through generalities any more than a picture can be painted by knowing some rules of method. They are reached by insight, tact and specific knowledge.... General propositions do not decide concrete cases.” Even people who think their thinking is guided by general principles, in other words, even people who think thought is deductive, actually think the way everyone else does — by the seat of their pants. First they decide, then they deduce.... Logical reasoning from a priori truths is just not the way people make practical choices most of the time. |
One might compare this to the way a thinker discovers a theory, then later develops arguments to support the theory.
It’s difficult to define what philosophy is. It could be a treatise, it could be a conversation at a bar, it could be a letter to a friend, it could even be a gesture or action. I sometimes define philosophy as what philosophers do. Likewise, Holmes defined law as what judges do:
| It is not the law that determines the outcome in a particular case; it is what judges say is the law. For “a precedent may not be followed; a statute may be emptied of its contents by construction.... The only question for the lawyer is, how will the judges act?” From the very beginning, Holmes’ view of the law was premised on the assumption that law is simply and empirically judicial behavior.... Law is nothing more or less than what judges do. |
Perhaps we understand this more clearly than Holmes’ contemporaries, since law may be more politicized now. Judges today often seem to rule as they want to rule, as their political preferences dictate. We assume that cases will eventually reach the Supreme Court, and we assume that the Supreme Court will rule in accordance with their political preferences. Hence we focus much energy on who gets a seat on the Supreme Court.
Menand says that “the most succinct expression of [Holmes’] judicial philosophy” is an 1897 essay called “The Path of the Law.” This essay outlines the “prediction theory of the law,” which says “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.”
Here again, I find Holmes’ thinking congenial. I’ve always been interested in predictions and prophecies. I sometimes think that a philosopher’s views are proven if his predictions come true. Nietzsche’s predictions (world war, genocide, Freud) are especially interesting to me. Tocqueville also made some accurate predictions. I’ve discussed election predictions and economic predictions. Should we judge philosophers by the accuracy of their predictions? Perhaps we should speak of a “prediction theory of philosophy,” as Holmes spoke of a “prediction theory of the law.”
Menand writes, “It is often hard to distinguish, in Holmes’s writing, between the descriptive and the prescriptive — between what Holmes believed the law was in practice and what he thought the law ought to be.” Here again I see a parallel with philosophy; the descriptive and the prescriptive (or normative) often overlap.
Holmes believed that law is often about probability. For example, liability is about what a “reasonable person” would think about “the greater or lesser probability of an injury being caused by such and such an action in such and such circumstances.” The probability that shooting bullets into the air would injure someone is greater in a crowded city than in an empty desert, and a reasonable person would know that. And if the probability is greater, then the liability may be greater. “Even in the domain of knowledge,” Holmes said, “the law applies its principle of averages.... For the rational study of the law [the] man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.”
One of the intellectual fashions of our time is expressing everything with numbers — the belief that an argument without statistics is weak. We find this approach in Behavioral Economics, and in books like Freakonomics. Menand shows that this approach has a long history, it was popular in the 1800s. The French scientist Laplace published his Philosophical Essay on Probabilities in 1814. Menand says that Laplace’s ideas reached “both specialists and nonspecialists,” and “enjoyed tremendous influence.” Laplace argued that
| probability could be used to assess the reliability of legal testimony and the fairness of verdicts, to ascertain rates of mortality and marriage, to predict the ratio of male to female births, and to calculate premiums for insurance and annuities. In short, Laplace extended the application of probability from physics to people, with the promise that events that seem random and unpredictable — such as, in his most celebrated illustration, the number of letters that end up every year in the Paris dead-letter office — can be shown to obey hidden laws. People marry and letters get misaddressed for apparently subjective and unreproducible reasons, but statistics reveals that the total number of marriages or of dead letters every year gravitates, as if by necessity, around a mean value. The consistency of that value, Laplace thought, signified the operation of a natural law. “All events, even those which, by their insignificance, seem not to follow the great laws of nature, follow them as necessarily as the revolutions of the sun,” he wrote. |
Laplace’s work was closely studied by Benjamin Peirce, father of Charles Sanders Peirce. Benjamin taught math at Harvard, and organized the U.S. Coast Survey, where Charles worked for many years.
Another person who studied Laplace closely was a French writer named Quetelet. In 1835, Quetelet wrote about “social physics” in a book called Treatise on Man, which Menand calls “a blockbuster.”
Quetelet’s approach made its way to England, where Quetelet’s “most zealous” disciple was a historian named Buckle, who took a statistical approach in his History of Civilization in England. Menand says that Buckle’s work was “read all over Europe, by novelists and by physicists; hundreds of responses to it were published.”10
Statistics are popular among today’s historians. In an earlier issue, I said that the historian Robert Darnton “questions whether culture can be understood through statistics. He says that French historians have become fond of counting — for example, counting ‘pounds of candle wax burned to patron saints in churches.’”
The study of statistics involved the study of errors (such as errors in addressing letters), and Darwin showed that outliers/mutations/errors can be important in evolution. So it could be argued that Darwin is part of a larger trend toward the study of chance.
I’ve argued that it’s a mistake to emphasize the role of chance in evolution, that evolution is driven by will, destiny, synchronicity, etc. I’ve argued that, as Darwin got older, he moved closer to my view, hence the scientific establishment dislikes the late versions of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and prefers to publish the first version.
Menand emphasizes the role of chance in evolution, and he largely ignores the alternative view (my view). But Menand makes the striking point that Darwin himself didn’t embrace chance: “Darwin did not think that variations were spontaneous in the sense of being uncaused, only in the sense of being unpredictable, and he was willing to leave it at that. On the Origin of Species is actually silent on the question of the origin.”11 Did Darwin view the driving force of evolution as a mystery? Was he skeptical of chance? Did he have a fundamentally different view of evolution than today’s biologists?
I’ve argued that the love of numbers is a fashion among today’s intellectuals, a fashion with a long history, as Menand shows. Some people would say, “Don’t dismiss it as a ‘fashion.’ Do you really think that a strong argument can be built without statistics?”
The strength of an argument can be measured by whether people will act on it, live by it. People generally don’t live by statistics, they live by poetry and history. Osama bin Laden attracted followers, and changed history, by saying “I’m going to destroy the infidel, and resurrect the Caliphate.” Bin Laden attracted followers with poetry and history. Statistics don’t move the world, statistics enable you to climb the academic ladder.
“You just proved my point. Bin Laden focused on poetry and history, and what was the result? Disaster. Hitler spent his time watching plays and operas, he wasn’t interested in statistics. And what was the result? Disaster. Isn’t it time that we had more respect for numbers?”
In my view, statistics and logic are popular in academia, but don’t move the world. People know that statistics and logic can be marshalled in defense of any position. If we don’t like the policies of Bin Laden and Hitler, we need to use philosophy/history/poetry to create an alternative, a compelling alternative, an alternative that speaks to human nature.
Another current fashion in academia is brain science — tracing psychological traits to brain anatomy. Here, too, Menand shows that this is a fashion with a long history. In the days of William James and Nietzsche, there was an attempt to link mental facts to physical facts; “physiology” was on everyone’s lips.
In the mid-1800s, psychology adopted the statistical approach, set up laboratories, and conducted experiments. This was known as New Psychology. Philosophy was in retreat before the onslaught of numbers. “The institutional bias toward hard data gave psychology the advantage in its claim to be the real mental science. Philosophy had to redefine itself or run the risk of going the way of theology.”
New Psychology was materialistic and reductive; it was atomistic, not holistic; it was fond of measuring and counting; it dealt with causes, not goals. In short, it dovetailed with the proclivities of the academic mind.
One of the pioneers of New Psychology was the German scholar Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt was influenced by Kant, who was influenced by Locke, who was influenced by Newton. Menand writes,
| Like Newtonian physics, Lockean philosophy is atomistic: it imagines everything as a concatenation of independent entities. In the Lockean theory of knowledge, mental contents are aggregations of discrete items of sense data linked by chains of association.... No whole greater than its parts. Also like Newtonian physics, Lockean empiricism explains everything as a matter of cause and effect.... the billiard-ball picture of the mind.11B |
Psychologists often took an interest in education. One intellectual who combined an interest in psychology with an interest in education was William James. Another was John Dewey, who opened a school at the University of Chicago.
Dewey’s school took a hands-on approach; for example, children cooked food in order to learn about diet, digestion, chemistry/heat/combustion, etc. “As cooking established a continuity with the sphere of the home, other activities established continuities with the spheres of industry and business. There was much work, for example, with iron. The children built their own tiny smelters.” Dewey aimed to merge learning and doing.
Dewey moved away from the atomistic approach of Wundt and Locke. Dewey took a holistic approach, Dewey borrowed ideas from Hegel. Wundt had spoken of a “reflex arc” made up of sensation, idea, and response. Dewey insisted on looking at the whole action. “Actions have goals built into them,” an action is an indivisible whole, an “organic circuit,” a “circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end for its beginning.”
As Jane Addams viewed capital and labor as one whole with common interests, so Dewey viewed stimulus and response as one whole, knowing and doing as one whole. “Later in his career, Dewey would criticize, in the same manner, the distinctions between mind and reality, means and ends, nature and culture.”
One wonders if Dewey was interested in Eastern philosophy. Eastern thought views opposites as inter-connected and relative, not fundamentally separate. This view is symbolized by the yin-yang image.
Menand tells us that William James’ family was Irish, so they weren’t part of the American aristocracy. But the word “Irish” is ambiguous, and we can’t call the James family “Irish” without qualification.
There are the true Irish, Irish Catholics, indigenous Irish. There are the Anglo-Irish, who came from England, and were Protestant (often Church of Ireland, an offshoot of the Anglican Church). And there are the Scots-Irish, who came to Northern Ireland from Scotland, and were Protestant, often Presbyterian; the Scots-Irish are sometimes called “Ulster Scots.” Below is a map of Ireland’s provinces.
James Joyce was “true Irish,” Irish-Irish, Irish Catholic; Joyce attended Catholic schools (usually Jesuit-run) from early childhood through college. Jonathan Swift was Anglo-Irish; both of his parents were born in England; Swift was Protestant. Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and Samuel Beckett were also Anglo-Irish, and also Protestant. Some Anglo-Irish had deep roots in Ireland — for example, Edmund Burke’s paternal ancestors came to Ireland from England in 1185 AD. Burke’s father was Protestant (Church of Ireland), while his mother was Irish-Catholic.
The family of William James and Henry James was Scots-Irish. William’s grandfather (also named William, let’s call him William Sr.) came to the U.S. around 1789, later than “American aristocrats,” later than Hawthorne’s family, Emerson’s family, and Thoreau’s family. William Sr. was Presbyterian, and was born in Ulster; he came to the U.S. at about age 18.
Henry James Sr. (the father of William the philosopher, and Henry the novelist) went to Princeton Theological Seminary, a bastion of the Presbyterian faith. Henry Sr. became wealthy by inheriting from his father, William Sr., who had become rich around 1820, by investing in Albany real estate, and the Erie Canal.
Andrew Jackson’s family was also Scots-Irish, also Presbyterian, and also came to the U.S. in the latter 1700’s (1767). Like Henry James Sr., Andrew Jackson didn’t see himself as part of the American upper class. On the other hand, William James the philosopher, and Henry James the novelist, probably were part of the upper class; by their time, whatever stigma attached to Scots-Irish origins had worn off. But the stigma attached to Irish-Catholic origins persisted into the 20th century.
I did some research on Charles Sanders Peirce using ChatGPT. If you want to read Peirce, ChatGPT recommends four essays:
- The Fixation of Belief (1877)
ChatGPT calls it “beautifully clear, surprisingly dramatic” (Menand says that Peirce is a “vivid writer... in his nontechnical work”)
html version with footnotes here - How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878)
ChatGPT says that it deals with “the basic idea behind Pragmatism: that a concept’s meaning is rooted in its practical effects” - Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (1868)
This essay challenges “the idea of private consciousness and intuition.” It “plants the seeds for his later idea that reasoning and knowledge are social.” - The Architecture of Theories (1891) Peirce’s “grand vision of how philosophy, science, and cosmology fit together.”
When I read “The Fixation of Belief,” it seemed rather unclear, rather difficult to read, rather dry. On the other hand, I can understand why some people describe it as “clear,” “vivid,” “dramatic” — some passages are clear and dramatic. If I summarize Peirce’s essay, perhaps I can remove the sand, and leave behind only nuggets of gold.
Why does Peirce call the essay “The Fixation of Belief”? Peirce thinks that man is at peace when he believes something, and uneasy when he has doubts. Man wants to fix his beliefs. Peirce:
| The instinctive dislike of an undecided state of mind, exaggerated into a vague dread of doubt, makes men cling spasmodically to the views they already take. The man feels that, if he only holds to his belief without wavering, it will be entirely satisfactory. Nor can it be denied that a steady and immovable faith yields great peace of mind. |
We’re far happier when we believe than when we doubt. When we believe, we have a basis for action; when we doubt, we lack a basis for action.
| Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else. On the contrary, we cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing just what we do believe. |
This is an important point, and Peirce makes this point forcefully. Man must believe something, and whether his belief is true is a secondary issue. “When an ostrich buries its head in the sand as danger approaches, it very likely takes the happiest course.” Man does not seek truth, he seeks “the fixation of belief.” “The settlement of opinion is the sole end of inquiry.” I’ve often argued that, with respect to the Chappaquiddick Affair, the Shakespeare Controversy, the origin of species, etc., man believes what is almost certainly untrue, and all the leading authorities go along with that untruth.
Intellectual inquiry isn’t about answering an artificial question, a question that a teacher has created. A real inquiry is about wrestling with a real doubt. “There must be a real and living doubt, and without this all discussion is idle.”
There are four ways to fix beliefs:
- Private conviction, “tenacity.” You believe what you want, and cling to that belief tenaciously. “I admire the method of tenacity for its strength, simplicity, and directness. Men who pursue it are distinguished for their decision of character.” Is Osama bin Laden an example of “tenacity”?
- State censorship, “authority.” “For the mass of mankind... there is perhaps no better method than this. If it is their highest impulse to be intellectual slaves, then slaves they ought to remain.” This method of fixing belief has prevailed through most of history, and it has achieved much. “The mere structures of stone which it has caused to be put together — in Siam, for example, in Egypt, and in Europe — have many of them a sublimity hardly more than rivaled by the greatest works of Nature.” If modern societies no longer fix belief by violent measures, nonetheless subtle forms of pressure are still used, hence “the greatest intellectual benefactors of mankind have never dared, and dare not now, to utter the whole of their thought.”
- Metaphysical philosophy. “Systems of this sort have not usually rested upon any observed facts, at least not in any great degree. They have been chiefly adopted because their fundamental propositions seemed ‘agreeable to reason.’ This is an apt expression; it does not mean that which agrees with experience, but that which we find ourselves inclined to believe. Plato, for example, finds it agreeable to reason that the distances of the celestial spheres from one another should be proportional to the different lengths of strings which produce harmonious chords. Many philosophers have been led to their main conclusions by considerations like this.” This metaphysical method has clearly failed, Peirce says. The arguments made by metaphysics have reflected intellectual taste, “but taste, unfortunately, is always more or less a matter of fashion, and accordingly metaphysicians have never come to any fixed agreement, but the pendulum has swung backward and forward between a more material and a more spiritual philosophy, from the earliest times to the latest.”
- Science, which tests beliefs by observation and experiment. “The method must be such that the ultimate conclusion of every man shall be the same. Such is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more familiar language, is this: There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion.” Peirce has a high opinion of the scientific method: “Experience of the method has not led us to doubt it, but, on the contrary, scientific investigation has had the most wonderful triumphs in the way of settling opinion.”
Peirce concludes his essay with a spirited defense of the scientific approach, of “a clear logical conscience.” This approach, he argues, enables us to achieve “integrity of belief.” We’re willing to look at the grounds of our beliefs, we don’t close our eyes to counter-arguments out of fear of losing our beliefs. “To avoid looking into the support of any belief from a fear that it may turn out rotten is quite as immoral as it is disadvantageous.”
| The genius of a man’s logical method [Peirce writes] should be loved and reverenced as his bride, whom he has chosen from all the world.... He will work and fight for her, and will not complain that there are blows to take, hoping that there may be as many and as hard to give, and will strive to be the worthy knight and champion of her from the blaze of whose splendors he draws his inspiration and his courage. |
Peirce writes top-notch prose, but I think he has too much faith in logic and science, and too little faith in intuitions, hunches, dreams, etc. Galileo laughed at Kepler’s theory of tides, which turned out to be true. Sometimes you need to feel the truth of a new theory; evidence and argument are often insufficient. Even a great scientist like Galileo sometimes fails to grasp a new truth. Einstein couldn’t grasp the truth of quantum physics. Even great scientific minds are often closed.
My approach is the opposite of Emerson’s: Emerson declared America’s intellectual independence from Europe, I merge America with Europe. Emerson said, We Americans can build our own philosophy, an American philosophy. I say, Americans are part of the larger Western culture — one might even say, the larger global culture.
The thinkers who have influenced me most — Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Freud, Jung, Ruskin — are European. I’m a fan of American writers like Emerson and Thoreau, but they don’t seem to have gone quite as far as the Europeans.
Thoreau, however, went a long way toward nature and Zen; in these respects, Thoreau went further than the Europeans. Thoreau was an avid reader of Asian literature. Zen is important to me. Zen’s impact on the West suggests the possibility of merging Western and Eastern culture into a larger global culture. My main ideas, which I call Cycles and Connections, would seem to appeal as much to people in the Orient as to people in the Occident.
When I was in high school and college, the classics were dead, and Western civilization was hanging by a thread. Socrates and Napoleon were never mentioned in my high school; the classics were out, the multi-cultural approach was in. We studied the Eskimos, not the ancient Romans. The spirit of the Sixties was in the saddle.
Likewise, when I was in college, the classics were in retreat. Who needs books by dead white men? Education wasn’t about the pursuit of truth and beauty, it was about social engineering (raising up oppressed groups) and career preparation.
I approached the classics as if I were discovering them for the first time — as if they were an unexplored continent and I was Columbus. Perhaps if I had grown up in Europe, or if I had attended a private school, I wouldn’t have had this attitude. My book Realms of Gold: A Sketch of the Western Classics is an attempt to introduce the classics, and revive interest in them. In some respects, my work may be distinctively American. Philosophers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer didn’t write anything like Realms of Gold.
To this day, I’ve never been to California; I’m definitely a creature of New England. Has this impacted my work? Does New England have more regard for the past, for history?
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe
A recent piece in the New York Times says that F. Scott Fitzgerald got into a brawl with policemen in Rome, and was badly beaten. The brawl occurred in 1924, when Fitzgerald was 28. In an earlier issue, I discussed a similar incident in the life of the novelist Thomas Wolfe, an incident that occurred when Wolfe was 28:
| Wolfe’s first novel was translated into German, and he had fans in Germany; he often visited Germany. On one such visit, he went to the Oktoberfest, got into a fight, and was severely injured. This experience was a turning point for Wolfe’s protagonist: “When George wakes up in a hospital with his face and head battered, the shock of physical violence jars him into the deeper discovery of self that he had been seeking.” Did George himself bring about this defeat, this beating, in order to achieve this “deeper discovery of self”? According to Jungians, we often unconsciously bring defeat upon ourself, in order to achieve personal growth, in order to become whole. As Shakespeare says, “To willful men, the injuries that they themselves procure must be their schoolmasters.” Wolfe was certainly a willful man. |
It seems that Wolfe learned from his beating, grew from the experience. He may have felt that he had an unconscious desire for defeat, because his unconscious knew that defeat leads to wisdom. Wolfe was reconciled to his beating, he seemed to regard it as one of the best teachers he had encountered. He planned to write a multi-volume novel called October Fair, in which his beating would play a key role.
What about Fitzgerald? Did he learn from his beating? Did he think he had unconsciously arranged it? To answer this question, we could look at Chapter 22 of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, in which Fitzgerald discusses the experience. My reading is that Fitzgerald viewed his beating in purely negative terms. “In a letter to a friend 10 years later, Fitzgerald described it as ‘the rottenest thing that ever happened in my life.’”12
Trump is right, or partly right, when he says that China has never played fair with trade; our trade deficit with China is partly a reflection of these unfair practices. China shouldn’t have been allowed in the WTO. Our tolerant attitude toward their trade practices has enabled them to make lots of money, spend lots of money on weapons, bully other nations, and disturb the peace of the world.
Free Trade ==> Unfair Trade ==> Military Buildup
The developed world shouldn’t have allowed this. Trump is trying to fix this, he deserves some credit for trying. But it may be too late, the horse may have left the barn. Trump’s tariffs are too abrupt. Supply chains are complex, delicate, easily disrupted. In his eagerness to punish foreign countries, Trump is punishing the U.S. Never has one person had such a negative impact on the world economy.
Fair play isn’t part of Chinese morality. The Chinese emphasize duties to relatives, and to friends/connections, they don’t emphasize universal duties, universal principles. Max Weber said that the Chinese have an
| unscrupulous competitiveness toward sib outsiders [i.e., non-relatives]. The personalist principle [in China] tended to tie the individual ever anew to his sib members.... Mencius rejected the universal “love of man” with the comment that it would extinguish piety and justice and that it is the way of animals to have neither father nor brother....
The great achievement of ethical religions, above all of the ethical and ascetic sects of Protestantism, was to shatter the fetters of the sib. These religions established the superior community of faith and a common ethical way of life in opposition to the community of blood, even to a large extent in opposition to the family.13 |
Economists say, “Trump is wrong, trade deficits don’t mean that foreign countries are ‘ripping off’ the U.S.” But don’t trade deficits indicate that foreign countries are profiting from the U.S. market? Aren’t China and Germany (for example) making money in the U.S. market? If they’re making money in the U.S., Trump wants to squeeze them in order to get a better deal, in order to get some of the money that they’re making, in order to enable American businesses to make money in their countries.
Another reason why Trump likes tariffs is that he hates income taxes. He spent his entire career battling the IRS, so he wants to neuter the IRS, and reduce income taxes. In his mind, tariffs are a substitute (or partial substitute) for income taxes. He sees tariffs as a fee charged to foreign countries for the right to sell in the American market, a fee that they can pay out of the profits they make in the U.S. But to a large extent, the tariff will be passed to the American consumer, hence inflation is likely to result.
“Defund the IRS!” is just as silly as “Defund the police!” The IRS are the financial police. If you weaken the IRS, there will be more tax-cheating, less government revenue, and higher deficits.
Trump’s war with elite colleges is similar to his trade-war with China. Trump wants to punish colleges as he wants to punish China. He thinks colleges have too good a deal, as he thinks China has too good a deal. He wants to squeeze colleges financially, as he wants to squeeze China; he wants colleges to give more money to the government, and receive less money from the government.
In his attack on elite colleges, Trump enjoys some public support. Conservatives have long resented academia’s liberal bias, academia’s preoccupation with affirmative action and DEI, and academia’s preoccupation with race and gender. But higher education is one of this country’s strengths, and punishing elite colleges could have unintended consequences, just as punishing China has unintended consequences.
Democrats can’t understand why Republicans would freeze funding of medical/scientific research. But when Democrats were in power, they did something similar: if they needed to rescue astronauts from space, or provide broadband to rural communities, they refused to hire an ElonMusk company; their principle was, “Not one penny of federal money for an ElonMusk company, under any circumstances.” Likewise, Republicans don’t want to fund research carried out by colleges that have a left-wing bent. When partisan feelings are running high, other issues take second place.
In general, Trump is acting too boldly. Like Biden, Trump is acting as if he had a big mandate, but actually he has a slim majority. Like Biden, Trump is acting as if only bold policies will save the country. But bold policies could hasten the country’s decline. Perhaps Trump should borrow a maxim from the medical world: Do no harm.
Like most Trump voters, I don’t regret voting for Trump. Trump is terrible, but the Democrats are worse.
© L. James Hammond 2025
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| Footnotes | |
| 1. | The Metaphysical Club, Ch. 9, #3 back |
| 2. | Ibid back |
| 3. | Kierkegaard, by Walter Lowrie, IV, 1 back |
| 4. | The Metaphysical Club, Ch. 9, #3 back |
| 5. | Ibid back |
| 6. | Erikson wrote, “We cannot separate personal growth and communal change, nor can we separate [the] identity crisis in individual life and contemporary crises in historical development.... The whole interplay between the psychological and the social [could] be conceptualized only as a kind of psycho-social relativity.” (Youth: Identity and Crisis, Prologue, #3) back |
| 7. | As Niels Bohr said, “There are the superficial truths, the opposite of which are obviously wrong. But there are also the profound truths, whose opposites are equally right.” back |
| 8. | The Metaphysical Club, Ch. 9, #3, quoting Menand, not Green.
Arthur Waldron wrote a book on China’s Great Wall. Waldron argued that there is no Great Wall; rather, there are different walls built at different times. Menand makes a similar point about the Metaphysical Club: there was no Metaphysical Club; rather, there was a loose, casual series of meetings, and almost no one referred to the gatherings as “The Metaphysical Club.” back |
| 9. | Ch. 3, #2 back |
| 9B. | Ch. 2, #3 back |
| 9C. | Ch. 12, #4. I’m reminded of the Communist propagandist Willi Münzenberg, who asked workers to donate, not out of charity, but out of solidarity. back |
| 10. | The Metaphysical Club, Ch. 8, #3
Quetelet and Buckle are, in my view, second-rate thinkers. Lovejoy argued that an intellectual historian “should pay particular attention to second-rate writers, since they reflect the outlook of an epoch most faithfully, while the greatest thinkers are more universal, more timeless.”
I think both Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche scoffed at Buckle, not because he relied on statistics, but because he took an overly-optimistic view of human nature and human progress. back |
| 11. | In an earlier issue, I said that William James didn’t accept mechanical Darwinism, William James “wasn’t convinced that evolution was entirely the product of physical laws and random mutation. William ‘balks at positivism pure and simple,’ he couldn’t ‘stifle our idea of final cause.’ Perhaps, William wrote, there were ‘final causes on some deeper plane underlying the whole of Nature at once.’”
What William calls “final cause” is similar to what I call destiny. In my discussion of Aristotle, I said that the idea of Final Cause was developed by Aristotle, and I argued that Final Cause might play a role in evolution. “The rational-scientific worldview is skeptical, even contemptuous, of the idea of Final Cause. I think it’s an important idea.” back |
| 11B. | Ch. 10, #3 and Ch. 12, #5. Menand connects Locke’s theory of knowledge with his theory of politics: “In the Lockean theory of politics, social groups are aggregations of autonomous individuals linked by voluntary and revokable contractual bonds.” This contrasts with the organic theory of society, which says that we can’t conceive of an individual apart from society, just as we can’t conceive of a heart or liver apart from a body.
Menand says that Dewey had an organic view of society: “We think that first there are individuals and then there is society; Dewey taught that there is no such thing as an individual without society.” Dewey had a holistic bent — like Hegel, unlike Locke. back |
| 12. | New York Times article back |
| 13. | Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism back |