On September 11th this year the American Republic suffered a wound to its psyche, the scars of which will take a very long time to close, and may never fully heal. On that day when the towers fell, the global hegemony, economic and military, which many Americans regarded as the due spoil of victory in the Cold War, was suddenly challenged not by a new super-power, but by one of the most poverty-stricken and backward regions of the world. Among the harsh realities the wounded giant had to cope with was the fact that the country where its attackers had their base could not be bombed back to the Stone Age, since it was already there. Just as the lingering fires of two world wars seemed finally to have burned themselves out in Bosnia, a new flame had sprung up; George W. Bush was right when he identified the struggle against terrorism - specifically, let us face it, against Islamic terrorism - as the first war of the 21st century.
No war is ever fully won, no victory is untainted. The ideological certainties insisted upon by America's Cold War strategists did more damage to the country than all the unfired weapons of its opponents. That war was, as Louis Menand remarks, a war over principles. In the American homeland it was fought chiefly with images and ideas - fixed ideas, concrete images - and the result was an inevitable hardening over of the liberal ideals on which the Republic had been founded. Menand points out that even the struggle for civil rights arose not from a political but from a religious movement, the black Southern Baptists; he might have added that it was carried forward not by elected representatives, but by a loose confederacy of churchmen, Old Left activists and a new breed of radical students. Meanwhile, the politicians, with a few honourable exceptions, were engaged in their usual pursuits of power-mongering and the prosecution of foreign wars.
One of the most acute recent studies of modern American thought, by Cornel West, has the telling title The American Evasion of Philosophy. In that book, subtitled "A Genealogy of Pragmatism", West told us that "American pragmatism can be understood as what happens to the Emersonian evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy when forced to justify itself within the professional perimeters of academic philosophy." In The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand puts it more succinctly: "Pragmatism was designed to make it harder for people to be driven to violence by their beliefs". Pragmatism, that quintessentially American tool for living, was invented, almost accidentally, by William James out of, as it were, Charles Sanders Peirce, and was brought to its fullest and most engaged development by John Dewey. It is this "story of ideas" that Louis Menand superbly tells.
The story opens in the nightmare of war, and continues with, among many other matters, a consideration of the weather.
Self-styled European experts on America, very many of whom have not visited the country, sneeringly assert, in a peculiar access of inverted snobbery, that all of America's wars, unlike Europe's, were conducted on foreign soil, forgetting, it would seem, the War of Independence, the disgraceful Indian wars and the Civil War, in which more American lives were lost than in all the country's subsequent conflicts put together - in one 40-day period, Grant's Union army lost 60,000 men. At the Battle of the Wilderness, in north Virginia, "more desperate fighting", Grant later wrote, "has not been witnessed on this continent". In the thick of that fighting was Oliver Wendell Holmes, budding philosopher, future Supreme Court justice and one of the makers of modern America. The experience darkened his heart forever. "He told me," a friend reported, "that after the Civil War the world never seemed quite right again."
Holmes the atheist was not a pragmatist, associating the term, Menand writes, "with a desire to smuggle religion back into modern thought under a pseudo-scientific cover". And indeed, the original pragmatists were all more or less Christian. William James, the "Man of Two Minds", as one of Menand's chapter headings has it, was obsessed throughout his life with matters mystical, and compared the invention of pragmatism to the Protestant Reformation. He validated free will to his own satisfaction by deciding to believe in it. However, James's heterodoxy - he thought the universe would be better called the "pluriverse" - was frowned upon by the true begetter of pragmatism, Charles Peirce, the greatest philosopher America has so far produced.
Peirce's approach to the business of everyday living was hardly pragmatical. He found it hard to get work, and once in a job was quickly out of it. Toward the end of his life, his financial state became so desperate that for a time he lived on the streets, and was more than once arrested. An extra-marital affair lost him a lucrative post at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and shortly afterwards one of his servants, an elderly woman, was arraigned in court for having hit her employer with a brick. William James was a tireless champion of Peirce's work, despite Peirce's disdain - his sniffy rejoinder to an enthusiastic letter from James was that his philosophy "is not an 'idea' with which I 'brim over'; it is a serious research" - and James's first writings on pragmatism were an effort to bring the older man's ideas before the public.
Peirce's life work was bent to solving the question of how we can arrive at certainty in a world governed by chance. Menand writes that
". . . one part of his answer was that in a universe in which events are uncertain and perception is fallible [James's 'pluriverse']], knowing cannot be a matter of an individual mind 'mirroring' reality. Each mind reflects differently . . . and in any case reality doesn't stand still long enough to be accurately mirrored. Peirce's conclusion was that knowledge must therefore be social. It was his most important contribution to American thought, and when he recalled, late in life, how he came to formulate it, he described it - fittingly - as the product of a group."
That group was the so-called Metaphysical Club, a loose gathering of intellectual Boston Brahmins that included William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Chauncey Wright. Of all of them, the last-named was probably the oddest.
Wright, fondly known as "the Boston Socrates", was large, slow-moving and ruminant; he was also, as Menand pithily puts it, "a computer". He worked for the government, drawing up star tables for use by navigators, but most of his time was spent in conversation. "He could talk well," one wearied listener remarked, "too long for average human nature." He was able to explain anything, and once wrote a 1,000-word letter to a young woman telling her why toffee turns white when it is stretched.
Wright was a positivist, and made an absolute distinction between facts and values, science and metaphysics. Human beings naturally indulge in speculation of the "what is the stars?" variety, but it is, Wright held, no more than a harmless pastime. He was content to accept the standard religious formulas - Menand: "the good is equal to the greatest happiness of the greatest number" - but he was against organised religion, which he regarded, Menand says, as "oppression through the fetishisation of words". His attitude to metaphysics in general is summed up in his pre-echo of Wittgenstein: "about what we really know nothing we ought not to affirm or deny anything".
The world, Wright held, is made by weather. Life at its lowest levels, in plants and animals, has no natural powers of development, and depends on the stimulation of external forces, in particular, the vagaries of weather conditions. His form of Darwinism was at once sceptical and poetic.
"The old leaves and branches must fall, the wood must be frost-bitten or dried, the substance of seeds must wither and then decay, the action of leaves must every night be reversed, vines and branches must be shaken by the winds, that the energies and the materials of new forms of life may be rendered active and available."
Holmes was a firm admirer of Wright, citing him as the inspirer of his own brand of philosophising, which he described as "bettabilitarianism": "I believe that we can bet on the behaviour of the universe in its contract with us". This is something like James's wager on free will, although Holmes eventually came to disapprove of James's thought, which he considered too optimistic and human-centred; his own belief, as Menand writes, was "that beneath all the talk of principles and ideals, what people do is just a fancy version of what amoebas do". For James, the core of Wright's thinking was inimical; against the "pluriverse", he felt, Wright had set a "nulliverse".
Charles Peirce, on the other hand, found Wright highly congenial - apart from anything else, they both shared an enthusiasm for inventing card tricks. Wright was "our boxing master", he wrote, "whom we - I, particularly - used to face to be severely pummelled". They differed, however, in their view of how reality works. Wright believed that things do not happen by chance, only that causation is too subtle a process for us to apprehend. Peirce held that physical laws are not as fixed as we think they are, that there is always "a certain swerving" of the facts. He was, like his celebrated father, Benjamin Peirce, a statistician - between them, father and son virtually founded probability theory.
No two observers make the same observation of a physical phenomenon, Charles Peirce pointed out, and "reality is independent of the individual accidental element of thought". These seemingly finical distinctions lead to momentous conclusions, for instance, on the nature of truth. "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate," Peirce wrote, "is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real."
The theories put forward by Peirce, by Wright and by William James formed John Dewey's intellectual inheritance. From the start of his career, Dewey was a critic of American laissez-faire individualism, that approach to society and to life in general predicated on Herbert Spencer's doctrine of the "survival of the fittest", which, according to one Metaphysical Club speaker, "might as well be called, the destruction of the weak". Dewey was highly suspicious of that brand of market capitalism which had made America rich - a brutal motto was coined for it by the conservative economist William Graham Sumner: "Root, hog or die" - and was equally sceptical of the claims of the great European metaphysical systems. The task of philosophy, he believed, is to help human beings to live and thrive in the world in which they find themselves. It was in this spirit of practical philosophising that he set up in Chicago a school for children in which, as he wrote, "to work out in the concrete, instead of merely in the head or on paper, a theory of the unity of knowledge". Children at the school would combine intellectual learning with practical chores in a group atmosphere; he put heavy emphasis on cooking, a social, goal-directed activity "continuous", as Menand has it, "with life outside school". Dewey's theories were, and are, heavily influential among educationists - even those who have never heard of him - and not always to best effect.
In the 30 or so years up to the second World War, Dewey, like Holmes, was a figure of enormous importance in the life of America. He was, Menand shows us, a supremely commonsensical thinker who, along with his predecessors in the pragmatist school, "helped to put an end to the idea that the universe is an idea, that beyond the mundane business of making our way as best we can in a world shot through with contingency, there exists some order, invisible to us, whose logic we transgress at our peril". Beliefs, the pragmatists insisted, are just bets on the future, and it is in the nature of human freedom that we must act on what we believe, without waiting, as Menand trenchantly puts it, "for confirmation from the rest of the universe".
The two main practical results of pragmatism Menand sees as the institution of academic freedom, in which Dewey played such a significant role, and the codification of the right to free speech, as formulated primarily in Holmes's juridica writings on the constitution. The democracy that the pragmatists championed was one in which not only the right people, but the wrong people, too, shall have their say. "Democracy," Menand writes, "means that everyone is equally in the game, but it also means that no one can opt out."
All the same, it is no wonder that pragmatism fell from favour in the Cold War years. "The notion," Menand writes, "that the values of the free society for which the Cold War was waged were contingent, relative, fallible constructions, good for some purposes and not so good for others, was not a notion compatible with the moral imperatives of the age." Those imperatives today are being reinforced under the new threat posed to American democracy by the forces of the dispossessed, the envious and the fanatical. In such a perilous time, America, and not only America, would do well to turn again to the teachings of a great indigenous philosophical movement, the development of which Louis Menand, Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has traced in this most perceptive, elegantly organised and beautifully written book.
John Banville is Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times.