The Metaphysical Club QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " …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

12 " [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

13 " [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

14 " gradualism in theory, is perpetuity in practice. "

― Louis Menand , The Metaphysical Club

15 " 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

16 " [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

17 " [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

18 " The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence. "

― Louis Menand , The Metaphysical Club

19 " 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. "

― Louis Menand , The Metaphysical Club

20 " 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 socialist Charles Fourier: ‘Man’s destiny on earth,’ as James expressed it in Substance and Shadow (1863), ‘…consists in the realization of a perfect society, fellowship, or brotherhood among men.’ The chief impediment to arriving at this redeemed state was belief in an independent selfhood (what Swedenborg called the ‘proprium’). James considered this belief ‘the great parental fount of all the evils that desolate humanity.’ Belief in selfhood was bad because it led some people to regard themselves as superior to other people. "

― Louis Menand , The Metaphysical Club