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?

Louis Menand on Pragmatism's Three Moments

This lecture is great. Menand, editor of Pragmatism: A Reader and author of The Metaphysical Club (an incredible book, and excellent as an introduction to American philosophy) is as intelligent and concise as his philosophical subjects. He also importantly points out in this lecture the blind-spots of pragmatism, such that while pragmatism (an idea about ideas) is a great philosophy to take down traditions and dogmatism, it's not great at pushing social movements. Which makes sense, really, when you think about pragmatism's Emersonian inheritance--the emphasis on the individual so strongly endorsed by pragmatism--William James in particular. Civil rights movements, for example, strongly rely upon the notion of universal human rights ("We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" etc.). 

Idealism relies upon certainty. William James said that "certainty is the root of despair," and his friend the Honorable Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. similarly said that certainty led to death. Conflicting certainty about ideals led to, oh I don't know, the Civil War for instance. In this context, Emerson's observations in "Fate" about slaves "crowing about liberty" seem slightly more understandable:

So far as a man thinks, he is free. And though nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a "Declaration of Independence," or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act...

Freedom is earned for Emerson by how you think, how you approach the world. It's not so much an ideal state one can attain via some document or legal status, but a process, a way of thinking. Of course, this is rather easy to say when you're not a second-class citizen.

One might go about this in a pragmatist way, but you sometimes need Idealists and dreamers (Martin Luther King Jr. would be one example of a dream, a visionary, a prophet of sorts). I'm still thinking about the problems of pragmatism as a political tool.