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ABSOLUTISTS_COCOANUT

                                             February 07, 2010

                                             MENAND_CLUBBED

"When the British writer
G.K.Chesterton complained ...                     Is it important to Menand
that '[p]ragmatism is a matter of                 that Chesterton was British?
human needs, and one of the first
of human needs is to be something                    Goddamn Brits, how dare
more than a pragmatist,' Dewey was                   they attack our homegrown
delighted.  The remark 'spilled                      American pragmatists.
the personal milk in the
absolutist's cocoanut,' he said."

  -- Menand, "The Metaphysical Club", p.362         Menand attributes to:
                                                    John Dewey,
          This, according to Menand is:             "A Short Catechism
          an admission that "that what              Concerning Truth" (1909),
          people choose to believe is               _Middle Works_, vol. 4, 113
          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



                             So, Chesterton is pushing
                             religious belief as a         The Big Lie
                             psychological necessity?      theory of
                                                           religion.
                                And yet, some of us
                                don't seem to feel
                                the need.              PSYCHSOPHY





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