Habermas and The Metaphysical Club

Louis Menand has written a remarkable book. The Metaphysical Club is a social and intellectual history that, thanks largely to its fascinating character studies, reads like a novel. The story traces connections between characters and events that really do make for “a story of ideas in America,” as the subtitle goes.

The best way to indicate its worth is probably not to summarize that story, but to try and explain “what I learned.” Specifically, I’ll try to say what I learned about “pragmatism,” because I read it (on Mandanglelow’s recommendation) with that in mind.

Menand makes four characters central to the story: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey. I had known next to nothing about these four. I knew Holmes was a Supreme Court Justice, that James was a psychologist who had written The Varieties of Religious Experience (thanks to Dr. Lowe’s American Intellectual History class at ONU), that Peirce was some freakishly complex logician, and that Dewey was a big influence on the modern public education system and is well-liked by Richard Rorty (and, for some reason, much disliked by conservative Christians). I didn’t know that Holmes had anything to do with pragmatism, that William James was Henry James’s brother, that Peirce was a sad kind of asshole, or that Dewey had anything to do with any of them.

Menand tells us in the preface that all four of these men had in common

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. (xi-xii)

Holmes, for example, came out of the Civil War convinced “that certitude leads to violence.” (61) James, a “man of two minds,” “thought that certainty was moral death, and he hated to foreclose anything.” (75) Peirce, working to set out the “law of errors,” believed that “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.” (200) And Dewey, who “rethought the relation between liberty and conformity,” (237) agreed with all the others that “beliefs . . . are just bets on the future” and that “the moral justification for our actions comes from the tolerance we have shown to other ways of being in the world, other ways of considering the case. The alternative is force. Pragmatism was designed to make it harder for people to be driven to violence by their beliefs.” (440)

By no means did these four agree with one another on everything. Menand notes the broadest and perhaps most important disagreement at the very end. All four agreed that the logic of an ever-changing universe is also the logic of democracy: democracy is an experiment in which as many differing ideas as possible should be gathered together, in order to better approximate the truth (this is Peirce’s law of errors). But unlike the others, Holmes – who alone had really seen war – was pessimistic about the experiment’s likely outcome. “Democracy is an experiment, and it is in the nature of experiments sometimes to fail.” (433)

One of the main things I hoped to gain from reading the book was a better understanding of pragmatism as way to think about democratic politics, and I was not disappointed. With Habermas fresh on my mind, part of how I came to understand it better was by contrasting it to his theory of discursive democracy.

The interesting and helpful thing about the contrast is that Habermas has some very similar ideas (not suprising, of course, since he draws heavily on certain pragmatists). He too thinks of legitimacy in terms of democratic procedure. He also emphasizes the wrench thrown into representation or correspondence theories of truth by the fact that observers and enquirers are also participants. With his relentless emphasis on participatory, “deliberative” democracy, in some ways Habermas takes pragmatist ideas and runs with them.

The difference is that Habermas still insists on a certain kind of “universalism,” which seems like the antithesis of everything Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey thought about “the search for truth.” For them, truth was a moving target that had to be approximated through experiments that included as much data (ideas) as possible. For Habermas this is also the case, in a sense, because for him “truth” is a technical term designating a certain kind of claim validated by a certain kind of discourse. But he goes further, and says that the nature of this discourse is itself “universal” in a sense analogous to the more familiar, non-pragmatist usage of the word “true.”

This might actually be harmless, if all he’s saying is that “this is the way things are.” For the pragmatists say as much: that “ideas are provisional tools” is for them “the way things are,” and must always be. If this is “universalism,” then everyone who says anything about the way things always are is a universalist, by definition.

But it is more than this, and in two ways. First, if this is “all it is,” then it is hardly worth saying. It’s just redundant, unhelpful. To make it into an argument – and for Habermas it is a central argument, the argument about the “performative contradiction” – is to say something more. What more it is is unclear, but it seems to me that it serves as a rhetorical strategy for adding extra weight to one’s claims about the way things are.

Habermas’s performative contraction argument (which he takes from Karl Otto-Apel) is that you can’t argue against argument: it’s like saying outloud “I am not speaking right now.” He brandishes this argument primarily at deconstructionists. The reason I think it’s more of a rhetorical flourish than an argument is that what is at issue is not whether there is such a thing as “argument” (or more precisely, whether there are such things as “valid reasons”), but whether one description of that thing or another is the more helpful.

This, from what I understand, is something like the pragmatist point. The pragmatist would agree with Habermas that freely exchanging ideas has priority, period, over the “truth” of any of those ideas. But he or she would not see any reason then to close the loop and call “the free exchange of ideas” a “truth” in the strong universalist sense that Habermas wants to give it. If the loop is closed, then “free exchange of ideas” becomes an unhelpful description of what we’re trying to get at – it becomes another “principle” about which we can acquire “certitude,” which as Holmes recognized, leads eventually to violence. Of course being certain about the principle of free deliberation seems likely to lead to far less violence than other principles, or at least less it will do so less explicitely or directly. But the point is that it is not even helpful to describe it in such terms, so why bother? Do we really need some way to be certain about the rather obvious fact that performative contraditions are unhelpful? Again, it seems like an extra rhetorical flourish - not an argument.

Second, Habermas’s universalism is more than just a statement about the way things are because he ties specific ideas to it. He supports his project of deliberative democracy – which by itself is very exciting and holds lots of promise – by resting it on the theory of communicative action. One of the two basic premises of that theory is that communicative action – an orientation to reaching agreements rationally, by exchanging reasons for and against – is not only the way we should use language, but that it is actually the primary mode of language use per se (other uses are parasitic distortions). The effect of the premise is to make communicative action a scientific description of the way things are, not just a argument about how things should be. Ultimately it is an attempt to tie democracy to nature.

Now in a sense the pragmatists in Menand’s book make similar attempts. The logic of democracy is thought to echo the logic of a variable, evolving universe in which to participate is to change the very context of participation, and to be changed by it. What then is the difference?
The difference – I think – is that for the pragmatists, it is participation period, and the participation is (at least for Holmes) an experiment which can fail. Participation does not guarantee success; in the case of democracy, it does not guarantee a healthy society. For Habermas, the procedures of participation, which probably are much the same as the pragmatists procedures, are at bottom immutable. While Habermas is careful to emphasize fallibilism, in his scheme the procedure itself is unrevisable, because it is staked on a claim about the way things are that is itself finally unrevisable (not, of course, in the practical sense that Habermas would never consider that he might be wrong. But it is precisely that “practical sense” of fallibilism that should imbue the theoretical sense of the procedure with its provisionality. This, if it happens at all, does not come through very clearly in Habermas’s writings).

But at the end, even if Habermas’s universalism is unhelpfully “more than” just a provisional description of the way things are, doesn’t the contrast still lies on the level of theory? The model of discursive democracy looks like John Dewey’s dream. And this is in my mind a point in favor of (my understanding of) pragmatism. For if the theoretical differences do not connect with some logical priority to the practical differences, but only rhetorically bolster them in ways that turn practical ideas into certainties that do make a practical difference, but finally a negative one, then Dewey’s insistence on “the unity of knowledge” (by which he meant the unity of knowing and doing) seems all the more convincing. I guess the question that Menand’s pragmatists would ask of Habermas is, “why do you need your universalist argument for discursive democracy? Does it not seem redundant, probably unhelpful, and possibly even detrimental to its own point – perhaps a “performative contradiction” in its own right?”