A rather abstract abstract proposal for ACLA Conference in March

(It's at Harvard! i.e. the only reason I'm applying is to gain access to Houghton library's William James papers...)

Thinker, Soldier, Justice, Die: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and the Pragmatisms of Ending

In 1911, a seventy year old Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. would write that “the best way [to cope with mortality] is not to bother about death until it comes, but just crack ahead.” He would live to 93.

In his Introduction to The Essential Holmes Richard Posner writes that “a diverse cast of moderns….have been concerned with the…implications of taking seriously the definite possibility that man is the puny product of an unplanned series of natural shocks…” Pragmatism and Existentialism, in Posner’s figuring, stem from identical impulses, pragmatism being “typically American,” and existentialism “typically European.”

As has been observed by such critics as Posner and Louis Menand, pragmatism is both a post Darwinian and a post Civil War philosophy. Holmes, serving in the Union Army for three years, was wounded three times. Thus, as Menand argues, “the war was the central experience of his life.” Consequently, Holmes’s jurisprudential career was largely spent combatting those moral abstractions we might call universal principles or natural laws; such abstractions were, after all,  what called a young Holmes to enlist. But however “horrible and dull,” Holmes also found war necessary “everywhere and at all times.”

What I hope to contribute to this conversation on the interconnectedness between writing and death is an exploration of a particularly American voice of this soldier-philosopher judge. What are, for Holmes, the ends of pragmatic philosophy at the ends of life?