Volume 48, Number 9 · May 31, 2001
The Group
By Alan Ryan
The Metaphysical Club
Louis Menand
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 560 pp., $27.00
Pragmatism claims that human thinking and acting, from the least sophisticated to the most sophisticated, are driven by the need to respond to problems: all thought and action are provoked by a tension between ourselves as needy organisms on the one side and, on the other, the environment that must satisfy those needs. We think and act in order to reduce that tension. We are hungry, so we identify food, acquire it, and eat it; we are puzzled by the recurrent patterns of the stars, so we elaborate our first astronomical theories, and as they produce more puzzles, we refine them. Our beliefs about food and the stars are labeled as 'true' if what we get is what sustains us. What we call the truth about reality is just a way of describing successful thinking. What, then, is the problem to which pragmatism is an answer? What tension between which organisms and what environment produced that philosophical position as an answer?
Review, 4492 words
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