The Second Founding
by Eldon E. New
Mexico has had more than one revolution. The U.S. has had at least two.
The founding fathers of the 1776 era were mostly Deists, according to some accounts. Then, about a hundred years later, Emerson, Thoreau, and other trancendentalists were influential in abolitionist circles before the second revolution, or "the unfinished work", Lincoln called it.
Franklin once started a group called the Junta that met weekly. (curious choice of words).
After the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey had weekly meetings at what they called "The Metaphysical Club."
The name was partly in jest because of the fact that in their academic circle, metaphysical explanations were discouraged.[1]
Holmes went on the the Supreme Court, James became alternately the leading American psychologist and the leading American philosopher[2]. Peirce invented a truth test called pragmatism or pragmaticism that James popularized, and Dewey became the most influential person in education for half of a century, and is considered leading liberal intellectual of that period by some.
"The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but it swept away allmost the whole intellectual culture of the North along with it. It took nearly half a century for the United States to develop a culture to replace it, to find a set of ideas and ways of thinking, that would help people cope with the conditions of modern life." [3]
The book "The Metaphysical Club" follows the lives of four of the most influential people of this time:
"Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Chales S. Pierce, and John Dewey. These people had hightly distinctive personalities, and they did not allways agree with one another, but their careers intersected at many points, and together they were more responsible than any other group for moving American thought into the modern world. They not only had an unparalleded influence on other writers and thinkers; they had an enourmous influence on American life. Their ideas changed the way Americans thought - and continue to think - about education, democracy, liberty, justice, and tolernce. And as a consequence, they changed the way Americans live - the way they learn, the way they express their views, the way they understand themselves, and the way they treat people who are different from themselves." [3]
The club met in Peirce's study:
"It was in the earliest seventies that a knot of us young men in Old Cambridge, calling ourselves, half ironically, half defiantly, 'The Metaphysical Club' - for agnosticism was then riding high horse, and was frowning superbly on all metaphysics, used to meet, sometimes in my study, sometimes in that of William James." [4]
There are some curious similarities with this group in the 1870's and the (possibly fictitious) Jack London story of the group called "Real Dirt" in San Francisco in the 1920's, and the actual group Metaphysics Anonymous in San Francisco in the 1970's :
"The pivotal figure in this group was not James or Holmes or Peirce. It was Chauncey Wright, a man who, allmost literally, lived for conversation. Wright was a computer. ..He worked for the 'American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac', the federally financed publication at which Peirce was consulting astronomer....Wright composed ephemerides, tables giving the future positions of the sun, moon, planets, and principal fixed stars.... It was a full tme job, but he sqeezed the entire year's work into three months..." [5]The rest of the time, he lived for conversation: "he was content to serve as the local Socrates.....It seems likely that the hospitality he enjoyed was due partly to his gifts as an interlocutor..."[5]
from "The Metaphysical Club"[6] about William James:
When he was living in Germany in the late 1860s, he had got caught up in the speculative frenzy about free will and determism inspired by Buckle's book....
After he took his M.D. from Harvard, in June 1869, James collapsed. He descended in to a deep depression, exacerbated by back pains, eye trouble, and various other complaints. His diary for the winter of 1869-70 is a record of misery and self loathing. Then in the spring, after reading the second installment, published in 1859, of a three part work called the "essais de critique generale" by the French philosopher Charles Renouvier, he had a breakthrough.
Renouiver was a French Protestant from a family active in liberal politics, but he had quit political life after the rise of the Second Empire, in 1948, to devote himself to the construction of a political defense of freedom. Renouiver's argument was that "the doctrine of necessity" is incoherent, since if all beliefs are determined, we have no way of knowing whether the belief that all beliefs are determined is correct, and no way of explaining why one person believes in determinism while the other person does not. The only noncontradictory position, Renouiver held, is to believe that we feely believe, and therefore to believe in free will. Even so, we cannot be absolutely certain of the truth of this belief, or of anything else. "Certainty is not and cannot be absolute," he wrote in hte second "Essai." "It is ... a conditon and action of human beings.... Properly speakng, htere is no certainty; htere are only people who are certain."
In 1870 James tried an experiment on himself and made some important discoveries:
"My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will - the sustaining of a thought * because I choose to * when I might have other thoughts..."[6]
Henry's mention of the formation of the Metaphysical Club in January 1872 is one of the first signs, after the diary entry about Renouvier, written a year and a half earlier, that William was socially active again.
[1] The "Dictionary of Cultural Literacy" has an interesting paragraph on James: "He was one of the first theorists to suggest that humans, like other animals, posess instincts. He also opposed the then- dominant views by arguing that human identity is grounded not in Metaphysics, but in behavior."
[2] "James's lectures at the Lowell Institute in 1906 and others given at Columbia University the next year formed the basis of "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking"(1907), with which he took rank as the formost American Philosopher of the time, and throughout the English-speaking world was the brilliant exponent of a new approach to the theory of knowledge." Enclylopedia Americana, 1960, Vol 15 P606
[3] "The Metaphysical Club, A story of Ideas in America", by Louis Menand, 2001, Preface, pg X
[4] "The Metaphysical Club" , pg 201
[5] "The Metaphysical Club" , pgs 206-207
[6] "The Metaphysical Club", pg 218-219