The Metaphysical Club Quotes

“The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideologues, dogmatists, and bullies—people who think that their rightness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to subscribe to their particular ideology, dogma, or notion of turf. If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later, by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

“If you look up a word in the dictionary, you find it defined by a string of other words, the meanings of which can be discovered by looking them up in a dictionary, leading to more words that can be looked up in turn. There is no exit from the dictionary.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“Modernity is the condition a society reaches when life is no longer conceived as cyclical. In a premodern society, where the purpose of life is understood to be the reproduction of the customs and practices of the group, and where people are expected to follow the life path their parents followed, the ends of life are given at the beginning of life. People know what their life's task is, and they know when it has been completed. In modern societies, the reproduction of the custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of life are not thought to be given; they are thought to be discovered or created. Individuals are not expected to follow the life path of their parents, and the future of the society is not thought to be dictated entirely by its past. Modern societies do not simply repeat and extend themselves; they change in unforeseeable directions, and the individual's contributions to these changes is unspecifiable in advance. To devote oneself to the business of preserving and reproducing the culture of one's group is to risk one of the most terrible fates in modern societies, obsolescence.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“James believed that scientific inquiry, like any other form of inquiry, is an activity inspired and informed by our tastes, values, and hopes. But this does not, in his view, confer any special authority on the conclusions it reaches. On the contrary: it obligates us to regard those conclusions as provisional and partial, since it was for provisional and partial reasons that we undertook to find them.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“…in a universe in which events are uncertain and perception is fallible, knowing cannot be a matter of an individual mind ‘mirroring’ reality. Each mind reflects differently—even the same mind reflects differently at different moments—and in any case reality doesn’t stand still long enough to be accurately mirrored … knowledge must therefore be social.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“Everyone is simply riding the wave chance has put them on. Some people know how to surf; some people drown.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“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.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

“[Addams] found that the people she was trying to help had better ideas about how their lives might be improved than she and her colleagues did. She came to believe that any method of philanthropy or reform premised on top-down assumptions—the assumption, for instance, that the reformer’s tastes or values are superior to the reformee’s, or, more simply, that philanthropy is a unilateral act of giving by the person who has to the person who has not—is ineffectual and inherently false.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“Of course civilizations are aggressive, Holmes says, but when they take up arms in order to impose their conception of civility on others, they sacrifice their moral advantage. Organized violence, at bottom, is just another form of oppression.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

“No belief, James thought, is justified by its correspondence with reality, because mirroring reality is not the purpose of having minds.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“[Dewey’s ‘Reflex Arc’ paper] is the strategy he followed in approaching every problem: expose a tacit hierarchy in the terms in which people conventionally think about it. We think that a response follows a stimulus; Dewey taught that there is a stimulus only because there is already a response. 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. We think we know in order to do; Dewey taught that doing is why there is knowing.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“Scientific and religious beliefs are important to people; but they are (usually) neither foundational premises, backing one outcome in advance against all others, nor ex post facto rationalizations, disguising personal preferences in the language of impersonal authority. They are only tools for decision making, one of the pieces people try to bundle together with other pieces, like moral teachings and selfish interests and specific information, when they need to reach a decision.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“gradualism in theory, is perpetuity in practice.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

“[A] right,” he said there, “is only the hypostasis of a prophecy—the imagination of a substance supporting the fact that the public force will be brought to bear upon those who do things to contravene it—just as we talk of the force of gravitation accounting for the conduct of bodies in space.”17”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

“We do not (on Holmes’s reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. No individual alone can have the right one. We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity. I tolerate your thought because it is part of my thought—even when my thought defines itself in opposition to yours.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“If behaving as though we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“[Addams’s] idea was that the conflict between Pullman and his workers was analogous to the conflict between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia in Shakespeare’s play: an old set of values, predicated on individualism and paternalism, had run up against a new set of values, predicated on mutuality and self-determination.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“[According to Peirce] ‘The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.’ … nominalism denies the social altogether … ‘the community is to be considered as an end in itself’… knowledge cannot depend on the inferences of single individuals … Logic is rooted in the social principle.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“The broader appeal of statistics lay in the idea of an order beneath apparent randomness. Individuals—molecules or humans—might act unpredictably, but statistics seemed to show that in the aggregate their behavior conformed to stable laws.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“Darwin’s ideas are devices for generating data. Darwin’s theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz’s closes them.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“[Emerson] saw, in the beginning, no difference between abolitionism and the institutionalized religion he had rejected in the Divinity School address. They were both ways of discouraging people from thinking for themselves. "Each 'Cause,' as it is called," he wrote in 1842, explaining why the Transcendentalists were not a "party," "—say Abolition, Temperance, say Calvinism or Unitarianism, --becomes speedily a little shop, where the article, let it have been at first never so subtle and ethereal, is now made up into portable and convenient cakes, and retailed in small quantities to suit purchasers.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“It was not a matter of choosing sides, it was a matter of rising above the whole concept of sideness.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“When Holmes emerged as a consistent judicial defender of economic reform and of free speech, he became a hero to progressives and civil libertarians—to people like Louis Brandeis, Learned Hand, Walter Lippmann, and Herbert Croly. Holmes did not share the politics of these people, but he did not think it was his business as a judge to have a politics, and he did nothing to discourage their admiration. It suited his conception of heroic disinterestedness to serve as their Abbott—privately denouncing the stupidity of the views he strove, often boldly and alone, to defend.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

“Thinking that a demonstration of the New Psychology’s practical applications might make it less threatening to traditionalists, Hall delivered a series of lectures on education in Boston (arranged by Charles Eliot). The lectures drew on the work of a man named Francis Parker, who had become famous as the superintendent of schools in Quincy, Massachusetts, and the founder of a theory of pedagogy known as “the Quincy system.” Parker had served as a colonel in the Union Army (he retained the title ever after); after the war, he had spent several years in Europe, returning with a philosophy of education derived from Kantian and Fichtean ideas of mental growth, and emphasizing the importance of experience in acquiring knowledge. Hall expressed the germ of the theory in recapitulationist language: “The pupil should, and in fact naturally does, repeat the course of the development of the race, and education is simply the expediting and shortening of this course.”24 The lectures, attended mostly by teachers, were hugely successful. Hall still couldn’t get a job. He started to think about going to medical school.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

“If we are looking for alternative visions of American life in the decades following the Civil War, Homes, James, Peirce, and Dewey are not the figures we would turn to.  This has something to do, no doubt with their temperaments and their politics, but it is also a consequence of their attitude toward ideas.
What was that attitude?  If we strain out the difference, personal and philosophical, they had with one another, we can say that what these four thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea -- an idea about ideas.  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.  They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment.  And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“There is a difference between an idea and ideology.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America

“the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

“the indeterminacy of individual behavior can be regularized by considering people statistically at the level of the mass.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

“statistical fiction,”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America