The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

Summary (from the publisher): The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, founder of modern jurisprudence; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist and the founder of semiotics. The club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea - an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Holmes, James and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things out there waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent - like knives and forks and microchips - to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals - that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely dependent - like germs - on their human carriers and environment. They also thought that the survival of any idea depends not on its immutability but on its adaptability.

 

Review: "They all believed that ideas are not 'out there' waiting to be discovered, but are tools - like forks and knives and microchips - that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals - that ideas are social. [...] The belief that ideas should never become ideologies - either justifying the status quo, or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it - was the essence of what they taught" (xi-xii).

 

This work of non-fiction covers the social evolution of ideas in America from the time of the Civil War through the first decades of the twentieth century. An exceedingly difficult book to summarize, this book provides a meandering walk through the history of scientific, economic, and social thought in America through key figures including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, Louis Aggassiz, Jane Addams and numerous others. In doing so, it provides brief biographies of numerous individuals, paints an overview of academic theory through this period of American life, and covers the fuel behind great shifts in attitudes towards economic and social processes during the same period.

 

The basis for the author's strategy at covering such a broad stroke of American history is the idea "knowledge is social" that arose out of the Metaphysical Club that met for about nine months in 1872. In short, every brain responds differently to different events. And so, the Civil War resulted in a series of different, but related, schools of thoughts and reactions, which led to yet more reactions, etc. In this book, Menand thus sets out to show how social and group-minded thought truly is by providing an overview of key ideas developed between the 1860s and the 1920s. Yet it wasn't really until I had made it nearly halfway through the book that I grasped that this was what the author was trying to demonstrate. My biggest frustration with most of this book was a lack of coherent thesis or guiding theme until far too late; the Metaphysical Club itself wasn't introduced until two hundred pages into the book, leaving the first couple hundred feeling like a disjointed history of multiple different individuals. If provided earlier for context and as a guide to readers, I think I would have enjoyed this book far more.

 

To further illustrate both the meandering quality and immense scope of the book's narrative, John Dewey is seen on page 289 taking his young son Morris to Chicago by train in 1894, which just so happened to be in the middle of the Pullman Strike. The book then diverges to give a detailed overview of the strike, including key figures, before finally getting back to Dewey on page 295. All this to show the reader how the event impacted Dewey's thinking, which was that the strike was a way "to get the social organism thinking" (299). In short, the event exposed what a "tangle of contradictions and anachronisms" was American thoughts toward social and economic life in the years after the Civil War, which were a mixture of "Christian piety, laissez-faire economics, natural law doctrine, scientific determinism, and popular Darwinism" (299).

 

One of the things I enjoyed the most about this book was it gave me an opportunity to learn a great deal about multiple individuals; in covering their contributions to American ideas this book thus functions as mini biographies of its key characters. I particularly enjoyed reading about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s experiences during the Civil War and the resulting impact it had on his opinions on abolition and war itself. "The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put it in a sentence: It is that certitude leads to violence" (61). As a result of his war experiences, in later life Holmes was concerned with the group and never for the individual: "It struck him as analogous to the death of soldiers in a battlefield victory, and justified on the same grounds - that for the group to move ahead, some people must inevitably fall by the wayside" (66).

 

This book provides an excellent overview of the various iterations in American thinking that have shaped our outlooks today by zeroing in on some of the key thinkers and events that proved critical in pushing changes in accepted thought. This was quite an innovative way to organize a history text and was clearly extremely well researched and the product of hours of work.

 

Stars: 3.5