Quotes from Louis Menand

Holmes writes, "…I also would fight for some things—but instead of saying that they ought to be I merely say they are part of the kind of world that I like—or should like.

What [Peirce] meant was that since nature evolves by chance variation, then the laws of nature must evolve by chance variation as well. Variations that are compatible with survival are reproduced; variations that are incompatible are weeded out. A tiny deviation from the norm in the outcome of a physical process can, over the long run, produce a new physical law. Laws are adaptive.

If behaving as thought we had free will or God exists gets us results we want, we will not only come to believe those things; they will be, pragmatically, true.

Peirce's theory of signs—there are no prerepresentational objects out there. Things are themselves signs: their being signs is a condition of their being things at all.

Anxiety is the price tag on human freedom

Every thing is what it is" is a famous phrase in British philosophy, and the essence of the empirical view.44*

For Peirce, inquiry is always communal—it is the median of many observations that gives the position of the star—and the last analysis really is the last. In Peirce's cosmology, everyone's beliefs have to be the same in the end, because all opinion must converge.

For I say to you in all sadness of conviction, that to think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists. Only when you have worked alone—when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude more isolating than that which surrounds the dying man, and in hope and in despair have trusted to your own unshaken will—then only will you have achieved.

knowledge is cut off from the activity in which it has its meaning, and becomes a false abstraction.

There is a difference between an idea and ideology.

In a time when the chance of another civil war did not seem remote, a philosophy that warned against the idolatry of ideas was possibly the only philosophy on which a progressive politics could have been successfully mounted.

In modern societies, the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of life are not thought to be given; they are thought to be discovered or created. Individuals are not expected to follow the life path of their parents, and the future of the society is not thought to be dictated entirely by its past.

According to Holmes], 'Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.

We do not (on Holmes's reasoning) permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. No individual alone can have the right one. We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity. I tolerate your thought because it is part of my thought—even when my thought defines itself in opposition to yours.

i. e. a society in which the largest number of persons are allowed to pursue the largest number of ends as freely as possible, in which these ends are themselves criticised as little as possible and the fervour with which such ends are held is not required to be bolstered up by some bogus rational or supernatural argument to prove the universal validity of the end."46

The solution has been to shift the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures. We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures. Science became modern when it was conceived not as an empirical confirmation of truths derived from an independent source, divine revelation, but as simply whatever followed from the pursuit of scientific methods of inquiry.

statistical fiction

the indeterminacy of individual behavior can be regularized by considering people statistically at the level of the mass.

the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.

The subject of Cahier is the cultural dislocation of a French-educated Black man from the islands. The poet finds himself between two worlds, belonging completely to neither, and the poem is the record of his struggle to recover his native identity.

Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the western world," Kennan explained, "is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points

Mere mouthpieces of a party, take away the party & they shrivel & vanish.

One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.

If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the segments together.