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ABSOLUTISTS_COCOANUT

                                             February 07, 2010

                                             MENAND_CLUBBED

"When the British writer G.K.Chesterton
complained ...  that '[p]ragmatism is a           Goddamn Brits, how dare
matter of human needs, and one of the             they attack our homegrown
first of human needs is to be something           American pragmatists.
more than a pragmatist,' Dewey was
delighted.  The remark 'spilled the
personal milk in the absolutist's
cocoanut,' he said."                                John Dewey,
                                                    "A Short Catechism
  -- Menand, "The Metaphysical Club", p.362         Concerning Truth" (1909),
                                                    _Middle Works_, vol. 4, 113
          This, according to Menand is:
          an admission that "that what
          people choose to believe is
          just what they think it is
          good to believe."


Going back to the source, what Chesterton said was:

    "...  I have here used and should everywhere defend the
    pragmatist method as a preliminary guide to truth,
    there is an extreme application of it which involves
    the absence of all truth whatever.  My meaning can be
    put shortly thus.  I agree with the pragmatists that
    apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that
    there is an authoritative need to believe the things
    that are necessary to the human mind.  But I say that
    one of those necessities precisely is a belief in
    objective truth.  The pragmatist tells a man to think
    what he must think and never mind the Absolute.  But
    precisely one of the things that he must think is the
    Absolute.  This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal
    paradox.  Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and
    one of the first of human needs is to be something more
    than a pragmatist.  Extreme pragmatism is just as
    inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully
    attacks. The determinist (who, to do him justice, does
    not pretend to be a human being) makes nonsense of the
    human sense of actual choice.  The pragmatist, who
    professes to be specially human, makes nonsense of the
    human sense of actual fact."

         -- G.K. Chesterton, _Orthodoxy_
            (New York: John Lane, 1908), 62




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