Pragmatism, Pluralism and Academic Freedom

It took me a long time to finish the re-read of "The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America" by Louis Menand but I finally got through to the other side.  One would figure that a re-read of a book I had first read in 2001 would be a quick review of ideas that were relatively fresh in my mind (I've studied American pragmatism extensively since 1995) but it was not to be.  Presently, I have responsibilities in my life that were not even a figment of my imagination back in 2001.  In fact, I struggled most of the time trying to make sense of why I had underlined a passage or marked an entire page for review.  The enterprise ended up being a fresh-from-the-press read instead of a review of areas of academic interests.  Nevertheless, I am glad I re-read this volume and hope that eventually I can go back and reference it if I am challenged for having misunderstood any of it.

William James's pragmatism caught my attention as an undergraduate.  In graduate school, I ended up writing my thesis on Jamesian Pragmatism and defending it orally in front of a room of dumbfounded professors.  I remember distinctively an Assistant Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences whose first question to me was something to the effect of "how the hell did you come up with such an idea... no one writes about pragmatism anymore."  I was actually very glad for the question because it sent the tone of exposing my fundamental ideas about pragmatism and how it applied to the work I had chosen.  The defense lasted four hours (with two 15 minute breaks) and I emerged victorious, albeit almost life-less.  I never looked back from that experience and continue reading and studying pragmatism as a tool for literary interpretation.

American pragmatism is credited in name to William James, but she was a daughter of many thoughtful contributions from top-notch American scholars such as Charles Pierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Chauncey Wright, among others.  Personally, James gave an immense amount of credit to Holmes for its theoretical basis, but the bulk of his gratitude went to Charles Pierce.  At the time, most of these "heavy-hitters" were engaged in developing (or at least thinking heavily about) a system for answering seemingly unanswerable questions.  Charles Pierce early essay "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" was the early catalyst of the push to "concretize" subjective thinking.  From William James's "What Pragmatism Means" the method of answering the unanswerable gained momentum; or, more specifically, how not to get tangled in metaphysical questions without being able to yield some concrete result/answer.  The anecdote of the camping party observing the squirrel going round the tree seems an awkward way to start off in such an enterprising aim, but it does work as the text develops.  Basically speaking, the method for obtaining such concrete results is based on the "cash value" of ideas; that is to say, for an idea to be true, it must yield some practical benefit.  There were, of course, many detractors; chiefly among them was Oliver Wendell Holmes.  But Holmes did not object to pragmatism on the basis of challenging James' academic caliber (or anyone else's for that matter).  For Holmes, meddling in such methods was an attempt to inject the metaphysical into matters of logic, reason and objectivity and this for him was a fool's errand.  Why, then, did William James give so much credit to Holmes?  This is not a mystery, really, but we must move to today's state of academia to discover an answer (in order words, we have to be pragmatic).  These men were not in the "business" of trying to destroy one another's work.  The challenge was not that of personal attacks or attempts to jockey for position, for these men the exercise of intellectual inquiry was an art.  These gatherings of intellectual powerhouses were designed with the requirement that the opposition was as important as the gathering itself.  In other words, unlike today's academic circles--where everyone sits around for the most part parroting each other ideas and patting each other's back in self-assured comfort--these men (James, Holmes, Wright, Pierce, and others) gather or corresponded with each other with rigorous opposition/challenge to the ideas they presented.  No wonder the originality of the ideas developed during this epoch of American scholarship was so fruitful and far-reaching.

William James's main ideas are nicely encapsulated by Menand, making the reading a pleasure not only on the wealth of its historical content, but also in the facility of digesting the difficult or out-of-reach philosophical substance.  Menand explains, "Pragmatists think that the mistake most people make about beliefs is to think that a belief is true, or justified, only if it mirrors 'the way things really are'--that (to use one of James's most frequent targets, Huxley's argument for agnosticism) we are justified in believing in God only if we are able to prove that God exists apart from our personal belief in him.  No belief, James thought, is justified by its correspondence with reality, because mirroring reality is not the purpose of having minds.  His position on this matter was his earliest announced position as a professional psychologist.  It appears in the first article he ever published, 'Remarks on Spenser's Definition of Mind as Correspondence,' which appeared in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in the same month that 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' was appearing in the Popular Science Monthly--January 1878.  'I, for my part,' James wrote, 'cannot escape the consideration... that the knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foot-hold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing.  The knower is an actor, and co-efficient of the truth... Mental interests, hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human action--action which to a great extent transform the world--help to make the truth which they declare.  In other words, there belongs to mind, from its birth upwards, a spontaneity, a vote.  It is in the game."  The clarity of this passage underlines the complexity of the dilemma of the value of ideas.  I ran this passage by a friend of mine (a man of deep faith with no college experience) and he agreed wholeheartedly.  The way he phrased it was enlightening to me because, as both a man of faith and academic interest, I never really saw the distinction with clarity.  My friend gave credence to the belief that agnostics or even atheists are at a liberty to believe as they do, but that they should also acknowledge that the Judeo-Christian principles that forged the morality of modern society is of benefit to them in their lack of belief or skepticism.  That is to say, the moral functioning of American society (if it can be said to be credited to those Judeo-Christian principles as so many conservatives believe) allows for the agnostics/atheists to live in a relatively safe environment where crime is minimal (compared with other countries, he was keen on qualifying).  As I understood his example then... the "cash value" of a belief (even when you are not holding that belief at all) is that what gives credibility to the belief itself.

As the pragmatism segment of the book came to a close, a neatly detailed account of Charles Pierce's follies and sad fate came into brighter focus.  William James did a great deal trying to help Pierce get a foot-hold inside academia again, but it was not to be.  Nevertheless, the men continued correspondence and James even set up a fund to help Pierce in the last days of his life.  Pierce was certainly not forgotten or eclipsed, but his influence in academia had been damaged beyond repair since his dismissal from Johns Hopkins.  It is hard to understand how administrators (still to this day) can make or break the career of a brilliant mind simply on the merits of mistakes or poor judgments made outside the classroom.

The last two segments of "The Metaphysical Club" cover some historical account of the path to academic freedom and how pluralism helped define culture in early 1900s America, and the role of academic freedom in higher education.  Academic freedom in higher education is a war that, in my opinion, was lost years ago.  The very same progressive minds, the so-called liberal activists, who tore down the walls of censorship, of excessive administrative oversight, are the same clowns that today have turned our campuses into totalitarian states.  I don't take this stance as a conservative or even as part of the same liberal movement; my intention is to disclose a very well-kept secret about American colleges and universities and that is that the overwhelming liberal bias has seemingly destroyed academic freedom in the United States.  Particularly, as a member of a liberal arts/humanities program, if you don't tug the liberal ideology, you either do not get tenure or don't even get a position to begin with.  What we have is a compartmentalized academia, where it is in vogue to be a conservative if you are in the business or economic departments, but not so much if  you are, say, an English professor.  An English professor, it seems, is expected to advocate the liberal causes in their teaching, to make their teaching an extension of their scholarship, whereas a business professor (whose audience by nature of his/her field appear to be more conservative as conventional wisdom holds) pitches the corporate rhetoric of practical capitalism and political expedience.  I am convinced we've lost that war and the members of "The Metaphysical Club" (particularly John Dewey) would die of embarrassment, really.  There's no pragmatism left in American academia (let alone American politics), and the loss is irreparable.  No wonder that Assistant Dean had to start with the question he did during my oral defense.

"The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America" was a volume written before the events of September 11th, and, as a result, it ends on a very positive note (as opposed to my previous paragraph).  It would be interesting to see what Louis Menand would say, for example, about the totalitarian turn the Federal government has taken since with the Patriot Act (Bush) and the National Defense Authorization Act (Obama).  Menand expertly studies how Oliver Wendell Holmes walked a very thin line regarding First Amendment issues and their relation to the Espionage and Sedition Acts at the outbreak of World War I.

I enjoyed re-reading this book very much.  I will return to it, I am sure, as the demands of remembering what I've read about pragmatism over the years returns to me.

The Law Explained: Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Limits of Concrete Reason

The frightening thing about American law is how dependent it is on strictly individual opinions.  A jury of your peers can be questions to really not be categorically correct.  At the risk of sounding like an elitist, I will venture to ask an important question... Who exactly qualifies as your peer?  Is it people with advanced degrees in philosophy or any other liberal art, or people whose concept of the law comes from watching re-runs of Judge Judy on television?  And what about the judges?  A judge who is up for reelection might be inclined to think of his career first and send an innocent man to prison simply to have a record that is tough on crime.  I am not suggesting that this is the case all of the time, but human nature is a funny squirrel and it open the door for formulating these types of difficult questions.  With some of the decisions made at the Federal level lately, I wouldn't be surprised one bit if a Federal judge renders an opinion one way or the other based on advancement opportunities.  At least I can say that I am not pulling this out of the abyss of my non-exercised academic brain.  Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes held such ideas about the law and went as far as suggesting (rather firmly I might add) "that law is nothing more or less than what judges do."  

"The Path of the Law" was Justice Holmes' most definitive insight into the processes of the law.  In it, Holmes explains the law as a series of experiences, but his concept of experience was riddled with non-concrete categorical imperatives.  For example, Menand points out the problematic: "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.  Holmes didn't do a lot to help his readers make this distinction, but the reason is that his favorite method of argument was to show that what the law ought to be is what it pretty much already is, only under a wrong description....  Whose experience?  The experience, Holmes said, of 'an intelligent and prudent member of the community.'  He didn't mean by this a particularly prudent and intelligent person--a judge, for instance.  He meant, precisely, a person who is neither particularly prudent nor particularly imprudent, an 'average member of the community"--in other words, a jury.  Could we count on these so-called members of the community to know how to judge, considering the aversion to anything logical and reason-based in today's society?  With political correctness running amok in just about every single region of American life, who could even begin to count with anything resembling a fair trial?

I'm not in any way criticizing the contributions of Oliver Wendell Holmes to American jurisprudence.  What I am trying to advocate here is a departure point for a critical analysis of the American justice system.  This is something that perhaps a few of us actually think about, or would even consider until we're knee-deep into some legal issue that takes us to court.  For many years I never understood the general public's aversion to jury duty, and, not having served on a jury myself, I cannot speak from experience.  Yet the amount of weight that falls on the shoulders of people like you and me (intelligent and prudent members of society) in, say, a criminal case seems to require more than just emotional thought or intelligence and I dare say NOT ALL people are prepared or even equipped to go through such an experience.  Wave a jury of your "peers?"  Then pray the judge assigned to your case is not up for reelection, or on the fast-track to an upper court appointment.

Charles Pierce: Mathematician, All-Around Genius and Ladies Man

Charles Sanders Pierce is one of those intellectual historical figures that strikes the reader like the proverbial ton of bricks.  The son of Benjamin Pierce, Charles had the doors to the academic life wide open by virtue of his pedigree, but it was his precocious and powerful genius that took him all the way to the top and, from there, all the way down to the bottom.  One is reminded (in a good way) of Peter Shaffer's treatment of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the play (later movie by Milos Forman) "Amadeus."  Charles Pierce was a member of "The Metaphysical Club," a book by Louis Menand that I have been re-reading so slowly I might set the record for slow reading a 440 page book.  At any rate, Pierce was probably one of the most arrogant and loud-spoken of all of the scholars Menand covers in the volume.  He was abrasive in presence and overpowering in conversation.  Not to be one to allow his ideas share the stage with his colleagues and peers, Charles Pierce wrote letters to university presidents praising himself as the "next big thing," or simply the "big thing" (a designer of systems) in an age when modesty and professional bearing were still very much protocol.  He made enemies here, allies and opponents there--in short, Pierce was a man for the ages.

Pierce's glory as a scholar came from his immense intellect and his ability to produce some of the most challenging theories about the nature of all his fields of endeavors.  For example, he (and his father) were engaged in the famous Howland case, in which a signature on a last will and testament to decide the fate of Issac Howland's estate became a national sensation.  The case centered around the contention that one of the signatures was traced/fake and therefore the document was invalid.  The Pierces engaged in calculating the probability of said signature appearing in the same place on the paper, particularly the margin distance.  The Pierce calculation for this probability proved to be ineffective in the decision of the case because of the "extravagance" of its scholarly "pretentiousness" (or at least that is the general consensus).  The calculation, as Menand reports it in the book goes as follows: "The change that Sylvia Ann Howland could have produced two signatures in which all thirty down-strokes coincided was... one in 5^30, 'or, more exactly it is once in two thousand six hundred and sixty-six millions of millions of millions of times, or 2,666,000,000,000,000,000,000."  The case was lost, and while Pierce's contribution seemed to have been concrete enough, the general consensus was that the abstraction of such calculation, understood by perhaps a handful of mathematicians in the world, was not the type of evidence conducive to resting a verdict on.  

Charles Pierce's personality was welcomed in some circles and, without a doubt, contemplated with envious eyes in others.  He had his champions and William James proved to be one of them writing letters of recommendations for Pierce, as Pierce desperately looked for an academic position.  One such position was the inaugural chair for the Philosophy Department at Johns Hopkins University.  The president of the university, one Daniel Coit Gilman, was one of those people in administrative positions of power who carry grudges and remembers favors and double-crossings and is quick to take his revenge when the opportunity appeared.  Pierce pestered Gilman with letters looking for an appointment but a storm was brewing on the horizon regarding Pierce's personal life and Gilman was not about to turn a blind eye to such transgressions.  In short, Pierce was denied a position at Johns Hopkins because of marital problems, as Charles Pierce had left his wife for a much younger woman in a case that was socially scandalous as it was salaciously enjoyed by people like Gilman.

Charles Pierce never recuperated his status as America's preeminent mathematician.  As a matter of fact, the true nature of his genius was his ability to transcend his field into physics, philosophy and even the young field at the time of Natural Psychology.  He left hundreds of unfinished manuscripts for articles, books and systems of thought and one is left to wonder what would have become of American scholarship if Charles Pierce had not been derailed by his own awesome intellect and personal weaknesses.  

Chauncey Wright: The Man, The Myth... The Sad and Troubled Paradox

Chauncey Wright, one of the main characters of Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club," was considered by many the quiet driving force behind the group.  The reason for this claim is that Wright lived for conversation and therefore served as the intellectual "fuel" of the group.  Officially, he was a "computer," meaning a mathematician paid to do calculations all day.  When not calculating, Wright lived the life of the bachelor scholar.  He was an alcoholic and suffered from massive bouts of depression.  He was able to offset his mood in public because people loved his interlocution.  Back in the mid to late 1800s, the "life of the party" wasn't the drunk uncle wearing a lamp shade on his head, or the suave operator with the funniest jokes and quickest lines; the life of the party back then was the guy who could sustain an intellectual conversation without monopolizing the affair.  Chauncey Wright was just that perfect in conversation.  He was, however, troubled in many, many painful ways.

Chauncey Wright was not an antagonist or a contrarian.  He was an intellectual powerhouse that swam with the biggest minds of the epoch.  The mid to late 1800s were also a time of social decorum, or propriety and extremely conservative protocol.  Unfortunately for Wright, he didn't meet several of the categorical standards.  For as much a social talent when it came to conversation, he was a life-long bachelor and his interest in the opposite sex seems to have remained either a secret or uncatalogued to this day.  Wright boarded in homes while working out his ideas and attending meetings of The Metaphysical Club.  He also had an extremely soft heart and did an incredible amount of good in quiet and anonymous ways.  He helped locate and free the children of Mary Walker, a fugitive slave who ran a boarding house where Wright lived for some time.

His ideas were a mixture of his contemporaries and good old fashion European cutting edge.  Menand sums it up this way: "What Wright meant by positivism was, at bottom, an absolute distinction between facts and values.  Fact was the province of science and value was the province of what he called, always a little deprecatingly, metaphysics.  Wright thought that metaphysical speculation--ideas about the origin, end and meaning of life--came naturally to human beings.  He didn't condemn such ideas out of hand.  He just thought they should never be confused with science.  For what science teaches is that the phenomenal world--the world we can see and touch--is characterized, through and through, by change, and that our knowledge of it is characterized, through and through, by uncertainty."  There's enough in this passage to understand that Wright was focused on bringing in the opposition to some very lofty ideas being held at the time.  I can imagine how The Metaphysical Club (people like Charles Pierce, William James, Benjamin Pierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the rest, all of whom corresponded heavily with each other) reacted to some of Wright's hard questions.  James was particularly influenced--perhaps not by Wright's writing which he found obfuscated and difficult--in conversation and by Wright's mere commanding presence.  Holmes was particularly full of praise for Wright: "Chauncey Wright, a nearly forgotten philosopher of real merit, taught me when young that I must not say necessarily about the universe, that we don't know whether anything is necessary or not."

I look back on the days when I was teaching full-time at ______, and those long weekend when, as a bachelor scholar, I used to close the door of my apartment behind me on Friday afternoon after work, and not open it again until Monday morning when I headed out to the classroom.  I wonder if the changes that came to my life in 2005 had not taken place if I wouldn't have ended life Chauncey Wright.  That's not to say I would have drank myself to oblivion in a sea of depression, for I was very happy to live as I did.  But Chauncey Wright died at the age of 45, after two strokes which left him unable to care for himself, and as I said, I was happy living quietly among books, writing and my teaching.  Life has changed too much to make a comparison.  I am very happy to have learned about Wright... a true TITAN for evidence and the balance between the empirical and the metaphysical.

A Roll of the Dice... Probability "Explained"

Writing about "The Law of Errors," in his masterful work "The Metaphysical Club: The Story of Ideas in America," Louis Menand explains discrepancies in calculative mechanics this way (which I find brilliant, by the way): "The solution to this problem [the problem of not knowing what produces a discrepancy] was borrowed from probability theory--specifically, from a formula published in 1738 by a mathematician named Abraham De Moivre, a Huguenot who had emigrated to England, in the second edition of a work called The Doctrine of Chances.  When you roll two dice, you get one of thirty-six possible combinations (one and one, one and two, one and three, and so on, up to six and six).  These thirty-six combinations can produce eleven possible totals (two through twelve).  The total with the greatest likelihood of coming up is seven, since a seven can be produced by any of six different combinations (one and six, two and five, three and four, four and three, four and two, six and one).  Only five of the thirty-six combinations will produce an eight or a six, only four will produce a nine or a five, and so on, down to the two and the twelve.  If you chart on a graph the results of many rolls of the dice, with the totals (two through twelve) on the horizontal axis and the number of times each total comes up on the vertical axis, you will eventually get points that connect to form a bell-shaped curve.  The highest point on this curve will be at seven on the horizontal axis (approximately one-sixth of your throws will produce some combination of numbers adding up to seven), and the curve will slope downward symmetrically on either side to two and one end and twelve at the other."

What I find most fascinating about this is the fact that in gambling there are many ways of calculating risk this way, enabling experienced and knowledgeable gamblers to "beat" the house again and again.  Case in point: the mathematical genius that is card-counting. While its application to "real" life is hard to interpret right at this moment, I am going to take some time this summer to study this roll of the dice probability issue and come up with some results.  I don't know how the roll of the dice game works at casinos but my curiosity has been cracked and now there'll be hell to pay :-)