The Metaphysical Club. (BookTalk: principle over pragmatism).

The Metaphysical Club By Louis Menand Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 546 pages, $27

The Metaphysical Club is an intellectual history of the lives and thoughts of the individuals who comprised the late-nineteenth-century intellectual movement known as pragmatism, a forerunner of modern liberalism. The original Metaphysical Club was a group of talented young men of distinguished lineage, with the benefits of a Harvard education, who met regularly to hold philosophical discussions. The most noteworthy among them were C. S. Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The club's name was ironic; the discussions were resolutely agnostic and anti-metaphysical. The aim of these men was to purge fixed conceptions of God, nature, and truth from American thought.

The club first met in January 1872. Menand reminds us that the Civil War was as traumatizing for the young men of the North as World War I was for the young men of Europe. Before the war, there was a strong abolitionist streak in the educated families of New England, and club members shared this idealism. Slavery was a moral evil over which compromise was contemptible. The principles with which slavery was condemned were those of the Declaration of Independence and Christianity--the idea that all men are created equal and possess natural, inalienable rights.

The pragmatists thought these firm principles produced horrible results. Holmes, in particular, was shaped by his experiences in battle. He was wounded three times and witnessed seemingly senseless slaughter. "The lesson Holmes took from the war," according to Menand, was that "certitude leads to violence." And so pragmatism began in Cambridge as "a mature debunking of the philosophical and scientific certitudes that had failed to prevent--in some cases even incited--four years of mutual destruction." That debunking was compatible with emerging Darwinian theories about the uncertain, mutable, and survivalist character of all life. But what came first, Menand suggests, is reflection on the war. The pragmatic definition of truth is what works for the survival and flourishing of a certain kind of organism. So, principles ...