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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.
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Louis Menand |
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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..
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Louis Menand |
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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 s..
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Louis Menand |
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Everyone is simply riding the wave chance has put them on. Some people know how to surf; some people drown.
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Louis Menand |
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0378142
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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."
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Louis Menand |
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46bbb2a
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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.
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Louis Menand |
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2cd849d
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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.
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Louis Menand |
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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 informat..
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Louis Menand |
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f2ac8f8
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It was not a matter of choosing sides, it was a matter of rising above the whole concept of sideness.
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Louis Menand |
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4834967
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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.
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Louis Menand |
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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.
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Louis Menand |
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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.
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Louis Menand |
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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 t..
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Louis Menand |
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gradualism in theory, is perpetuity in practice.
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Louis Menand |
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What are the liberal arts and sciences? They are simply fields in which knowledge is pursued disinterestedly--that is, without regard to political, economic, or practical benefit. Disinterestedness doesn't mean that the professor is equally open to any view. Professors are hired because they have views about their subjects, views that exclude opposing or alternative views. Disinterestedness just means that whatever views a professor does ho..
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Louis Menand |
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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 disi..
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Louis Menand |
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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"
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Louis Menand |
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70a76f7
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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..
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Louis Menand |
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The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence.
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Louis Menand |
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Holmes writes, "...I also would fight for some things--but instead of saying that they ought to be I merely say they are part of the kind of world that I like--or should like."
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Louis Menand |
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From this premise, the usual conclusions follow: humankind is now separated from the true and the real; its destiny is to arrive at the consummation intended for it by God; philosophers are here to help the rest of us understand what that consummation is. James's particular conception of it was derived in part from his reading of Swedenborg and in part from a writer with whom Swedenborg was often paired in the nineteenth century, the French..
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Louis Menand |
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Darwin's ideas are devices for generating data. Darwin's theory opens possibilities for inquiry; Agassiz's closes them.
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Louis Menand |
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Quatelet's first claim to catch attention] was that since (as he believed he had shown) there is a 'law' governing the amount of crime in a society, moral responsibility for crime must lie with the society and not with the individual criminal. 'It is society that prepares the crime and ... the guilty person is only the instrument who executes it,' is the rather dramatic way he expressed it. People who murder--like people who marry and peopl..
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Louis Menand |
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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.
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Louis Menand |
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What [Peirce] meant was that since nature evolves by chance variation, then the laws of nature must evolve by chance variation as well. Variations that are compatible with survival are reproduced; variations that are incompatible are weeded out. A tiny deviation from the norm in the outcome of a physical process can, over the long run, produce a new physical law. Laws are adaptive.
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Louis Menand |
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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 h..
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Louis Menand |
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If behaving as thought 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.
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Louis Menand |
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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.
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Louis Menand |
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No belief, James thought, is justified by its correspondence with reality, because mirroring reality is not the purpose of having minds.
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Louis Menand |
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Peirce's theory of signs--there are no prerepresentational objects out there. Things are themselves signs: their being signs is a condition of their being things at all.
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Louis Menand |
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For Peirce, inquiry is always communal--it is the median of many observations that gives the position of the star--and the last analysis really is the last. In Peirce's cosmology, everyone's beliefs have to be the same in the end, because all opinion must converge.
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Louis Menand |
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In a time when the chance of another civil war did not seem remote, a philosophy that warned against the idolatry of ideas was possibly the only philosophy on which a progressive politics could have been successfully mounted.
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Louis Menand |
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In modern societies, the reproduction of 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.
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Louis Menand |
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According to Holmes], 'Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.
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Louis Menand |
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We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need.
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Louis Menand |
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good & universal (or general law) are synonymous terms in the universe....
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Louis Menand |
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The biggest undergraduate major by far in the United States is business. Twenty-two percent of all bachelor's degrees are awarded in that field. Ten percent of all bachelor's degrees are awarded in education.
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Louis Menand |
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He defended them because he believed that every social interest should have its chance.
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Louis Menand |
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When you know that you know persecution comes easy.
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Louis Menand |
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When the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, on January 1, 1863, Abbott wrote from the front to his aunt to explain that "[t]he president's proclamation is of course received with universal disgust, particularly the part which enjoins officers to see that it is carried out. You may be sure that we shan't see to any thing of the kind, having decidedly too much reverence for the constitution."
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Louis Menand |
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He believed that "a day will come when the sexual relations will be regulated in every case by the private will of the parties. The public sentiment, then, or law, ... will declare the entire freedom of every man or woman to follow the bent of their private affections, will justify every alliance sanctioned by these affections."31"
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Louis Menand |
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I think you are hopeful because (excuse me) you are ignorant.
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Louis Menand |
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Mixed with this frustration was the suspicion that Northern lives were being wasted because of mismanagement and political meddling, a suspicion reinforced by Lincoln's firing of McClellan, who, despite his poor showing in the field, was widely respected as a military professional. These are the views reflected in Holmes's letter. They were Copperhead views, but one did not need to be a Democrat in the fall of 1862 to share them.
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Louis Menand |
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James's general position on the difference between the sexes, which was that woman is "by nature inferior to man. She is man's inferior in passion, his inferior in intellect, and his inferior in physical strength"; she is, very properly, her husband's "patient and unrepining drudge, his beast of burden, his toilsome ox, his dejected ass, his cook, his tailor, his own cheerful nurse and the sleepless guardian of his children." But their infe..
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Louis Menand |