September-October 2002

« AAUP Homepage

From the General Secretary: Pragmatism and the AAUP

By Mary A. Burgan

Noting that the founding of the AAUP figures importantly in its chapter on “freedoms,” a friend recently gave me a copy of Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. I’ve just finished reading this superb study of the rise of American pragmatism, and in the spirit of the thinkers chronicled there, I now report on how the book has been useful to me as general secretary of the AAUP.

But first let me warn that I am an English professor and not a philosopher: after spending fifteen precious minutes cogitating, I gave up on answering a question about pragmatism on my doctoral prelims, and I finally wrote about Henry rather than William James. Nevertheless, Menand’s book has alerted me to the extent of my continuing intellectual debts to thinkers like William James and John Dewey.

There are three features among the ideas in turn-of-the-century American “metaphysics” that endure in my own thinking these days. The first is the notion that truth is so much the product of collaborative, and often oppositional, searching that the process itself is essential to the knowing. Epistemological propositions about the ways through which we may (or may not) gain access to universal truths may be argued philosophically, but American intellectuals have generally agreed that no one proposition can be allowed to dominate over others in the academy. Menand’s analysis emphasizes that this agreement was not merely a compromise but a philosophical conclusion of great import to the progress of such disciplines as biology, anthropology, education, and the social sciences.

The second notion is that if truth is a product of collective dialogue, it must be pursued freely. Menand shows that although major American universities were founded by corporate magnates, the liberal tendencies of pragmatism were critical in resisting the founders’ instinct to ally research and teaching according to their economic, political, or ideological interests. The third striking feature of pragmatism has been its suspicion of any rhetoric of rightness, or of righteousness.

Menand doesn’t dwell on A. O. Lovejoy, Dewey’s partner in founding the AAUP, but Lovejoy’s concept of “metaphysical pathos” denotes the liabilities of rhetoric. In The Great Chain of Being, Lovejoy coins that phrase to express the unacknowledged attachment that can weight certain concepts with a kind of emotional value that prohibits further discussion or critique. Adjectives like “eternal” can make a regular noun glow in the dark, and so “eternal truth” defies analysis. Interestingly enough, Lovejoy’s book was drawn from the William James Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1933. Menand suggests that Dewey’s avoidance of such metaphysical pathos was what made much of his writing awkward and dry.

The Association is often accused of being fixated on process rather than content, and Menand’s book gives not only a historical context for that emphasis but also its philosophical justification. It is not that we don’t care about or can’t fathom the substance of major controversies, it is that our mandate is to serve arguers about them. Our service to knowledge is our protection of the argument that generates it. Substance is left to the experts in the field, and for validation of that, we turn to peer review. Menand carefully distances this philosophical tradition from views that advise a promiscuous acceptance of every idea because nothing is, essentially, certain. William James insisted that the aim of the pragmatic mind was to be “in the game.” And so is the AAUP’s.

Considering these points, I find some guidance for the issues we confront these days. For example, the acts of terror that we have seen since September 11, both in our own country and abroad, are so heinous as to have tempted some of our colleagues to assert that the most patriotic, and pragmatic, thing we can do is to judge our enemies in absolute terms. Realizing that our allegiance to questioning had derivations in the devastating experience of the Civil War by some of the AAUP’s founders, however, makes their reliance on the social and political benefits of freedom as relevant today as it ever was. And current examples of what happens in government and business when internal criticism is silenced remind us of how canny our founders were to insist on the protection of the naysayers. And finally, we draw strength from a great American tradition when we unveil the pernicious sentimentality that lies behind popular rhetorics that caution us not to argue, not to complain, to accept on faith. Our founders have taught us to know metaphysical pathos when we see it.