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"When an idea is conveyed from one mind to another, it is
by forms of combination of the diverse elements of nature,
say by some curious symmetry, or by some union of a tender
color with a refined odor. To such forms the law of
mechanical energy has no application. If they are eternal,
it is in the spirit they embody; and their origin cannot be
accounted for by any mechanical necessity. They are
embodied ideas; and so only can they convey ideas." C. S. Peirce, "The Law of Mind," July, 1892. |
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[1]
The logician, polymath, and philosopher Charles Sanders
Peirce (1839-1914), then a figure of mysterious greatness,
was a most attractive subject for a dissertation in the
history of American ideas, when, in 1957, as a Ph. D.
candidate in History at the University of California at Los
Angeles, I came upon him in Perry Miller's introduction to
his pioneering anthology, American Thought: Civil War to
World War I.1 Almost nothing had been written about
Peirce's life, unlike the major studies on William James,
Royce and Dewey, and what had been written about Peirce
showed no citations to the reportedly extensive
biographical material at Harvard University. Correspondence
with the appropriate Peirce scholars determined that none of
them was working on a biography, and in March, 1958, at my
request, the Harvard Department of Philosophy, owners of
the Peirce papers, gave me permission to consult their
collection. That summer, research grant in hand, I moved to
Cambridge to begin work. Immediately, I encountered serious
obstacles. Getting into the papers was delayed for two
months while my permission to consult them was verified. I
discovered that four boxes of biographical material were
restricted from consultation. The papers were in
extraordinary confusion and disrepair, and the Harvard
philosophers, in various ways, but especially because of
Peirce's lurid reputation as a debauched genius, gave me to
know that they had made a mistake in giving me permission at
all. As a sop, the department offered to give me a written
apology and $500.00, if I would give up the Peirce project.
I appealed to McGeorge Bundy, then dean of the faculty, and
consulted a lawyer. In the end, I agreed not to press to
see the restricted papers, because I believed I had found
what they contained in other collections, both at Harvard
and elsewhere; there were about 10,000 pages of Peirce
material in the Coast Survey papers at the National
Archives, much Peirce material in other collections at the
Library of Congress, and at such depositories as the
Massachusetts Historical Society, the university libraries
at Columbia, Yale, Chicago, and in various private
collections.[2]
My difficulties with the Harvard philosophers were not yet
over, however. In 1959, they appointed Max Fisch, a Peirce
scholar who had been interested in Peirce's life for twenty
years, as their official Peirce biographer.
2
Fisch and I had
agreed earlier to share the results of our research into
Peirce's life and were then doing so. One of the conditions
of Fisch's appointment was that he break with me, which he
did and thereafter he never shared his Peirce researches
with me, though I had given him copies of my more than 3000
notecards made over three years of extensive archival
research. These notes were immediately integrated into the
effort that, in 1975, became the Peirce Edition Project at
Indiana-Purdue University at Indianapolis under Fisch's
general editorship. In 1960, I completed my dissertation
and was informed by Harvard that they would not give me
permission to quote from their Peirce collection. This bar
continued until Fisch retired, in 1989, without writing his
biography. Finally, in December, 1991, the Harvard
philosophers gave me permission to publish selections from
their Peirce collection in my forthcoming biography, which
the semeiotician Thomas Sebeok had solicited the year
before and Indiana University Press published, in 1993.3 In
his review of it, Murray Murphey, author of The Development
of Peirce's Philosophy, wrote that my biography:4
[3}
In the thirty years between the approval of my Peirce
dissertation and the revising of it for my biography, I had
continued to think about Peirce's way of thinking,
particularly his analysis of the nature of inquiry. The
most recent, interesting, and useful lesson I learned from
Peirce as a historian is that we are practicing
semeioticians, whether we know it or not. We study the past
to find out what happened and what it meant, using the
plethora of signs that was left behind. In studying the
past we depend on three kinds of sources or texts:
documentary, artifactual, and oral, and combinations of
these. All are concatenations of signs. Academic historians
are still mainly committed to the firstthe
documentarybut the other two are meeting with greater
acceptance, thereby providing an opening which is beginning
to break down the boundaries established in the nineteenth
century between the disciplines of history, archeology,
anthropology, sociology, politics, and economics. This kind
of deconstruction can be unsettling, because it undermines
the accepted models which have long hidden what working
historians do. We become deeply involved in a dialogue with
our sources; we come to understand the complexity of the
interrelationships that always exist between sources and
their interpretations. This understanding begins with the
collection and initial categorization of materials. Simply
placing some material in one category and other material in
anotherthe acts of colligation and
classificationestablishes primitive interpretive patterns
which subtly, but certainly, influence how we proceed
thereafter. As inquiry progresses, thoughtful historians
carefully maintain a continuous awareness of the dialogic
relationship between ourselves, our sources, and their
meaning, called their interpretations. This triadic
relation of sign, object and, interpretant Peirce calls
semeiosis. The facts as sign, the historian as object
(and sign), and their meanings as interpretant (and sign),
say, my biography, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life.>6 In
this process, we also become more and more aware of the
part that guessing, or hypothesizing, actually plays at
every step along the complicated way, from the very first
act of classification until we decide to stop and work out
our narrative (or more theoretically social scientific)
explanations. The influential philosopher of history R. G.
Collingwood called this kind of dialogue with sources
imaginative reenactment.7
[4]
As Peirce's biographer, I try to reconstruct his life from
the sources as if it were my own, imagining the reasons for
his actions. Collingwood's idea, which we might call
rational explanationexplanation by reasonsto
distinguish it from explanation by causal laws, is actually
not explanation at all, but a species of what Peirce calls
abduction, or hypothetic inference, which, along with
induction and deduction, make up the elements of his logic
of inquiry. They are themselves elements in his more
general doctrine of signs, or, as he called it,
semeiotic. The vehicle for this imaginative inquiry, is
the existence of a public language and other conventional
signs. For any historian, the assumption is that the public
language changes in determinate ways through time. For a
Peirce biographer, this means that the public language and
other conventional signs of Peirce's time, place, status,
and culture can be learned and will dependably reproduce
their meanings.
[5]
For Peirce, all inquiry has three elements. The first is
creative, an almost irresistible inflowing of meaning. A
few inquirers have the openness and insight to harbor
hypotheses, or as Peirce preferred to call them,
abductions. He calls this activity the Pure Play of
Musement and suggests that it reflects "some natural
tendency toward agreement between the ideas which suggest
themselves to the human mind and those that concern
themselves with the laws of nature."8 The problem with
hypotheses is that, more often than not, more than one
could explain the facts. Hence, the requirement for
deductionfor the logical elaboration of the hypotheses
quite independently of the evidence for or against themin
order to determine what things would be like if the
hypotheses were true, and to enable the inquirer to choose
which among them seems most likely, if it were to be
tested. These two elements constitute the abductive phase
of inquiry and constitute what Collingwood meant by
imaginative reenactment. Peirce writes, introducing the
third element, induction, "that nature and the mind have
such a community as to impart to our guesses a tendency
toward the truth, while at the same time require the
confirmation of empirical science;" the requirement to test
to see if things probably do look like that, after all.9 All
three elements are constantly interwoven and integrated in
the process of inquiry, conceived by Peirce as a form of
semeiosis.[6]
The Peirce of my biography is (as are the persona of any
biography) a hypothetical Peirce, an imaginative
reenactment, the product of continuous deductive
elaborations of many related abductions. To be sure, there
must always be many inductive checks to test the movement
of this entire process, a process that Peirce called
ampliative reasoning, but whatever life exists in my
recreation of Peirce is entirely hypothetical. I will now
describe the way he came to be and, also, why I now think
the portrait of him in my biography is, in two important
respects, incomplete.
[7]
When I began my research in the Widener Library attic, I
had no clear idea of how to proceed except to go on my
musing way, taking hundreds upon hundreds of verbatim notes
by hand, with no consistent reasons for my choices, except
to establish a chronology (which itself involves a
controversial hypothesis about the nature of time) in the
hope that some useful way of understanding this obviously
complicated man would come to me. After two months, as I
studied my notes carefully for the first time, now
numbering more than 1000, I realized that I had already
decided on one category into which many of the notes fell,
that of the extremes of Peirce's behavior, subdivided into
three topics: possible diseases, defects of personality,
and the development of patterns of thinking as expressions
of his temperament. Without realizing it, I had been acting
on the hypothesis that, if I could only find out what the
Harvard philosophers were trying to hide, I would
understand Peirce. So, I was looking for the worst in him
and I found it. I found his intellectual and personal
arrogance, his extravagant dandyism, his violence, his
severe depressions, his sexual adventures, his addiction to
drugs and alcohol, his wild financial extravagances, his
thefts, and his lies, and I had tentatively decided that he
suffered from syphilis as the most likely hypothesis to
explain these extremes. But I had not found Peirce.
[8]
After three months of exhaustive research, I wrote in my
notes that I still vacillated between seeing him at times
as the misunderstood great philosopher I "expected to find
and at others only a pathological liar." Shortly
afterwards, I wrote that "Peirce was so complex a man that
four months of intensive research has produced only
frustrated confusion and a still unwavering suspicion of
his motives." As I was to discover during the next two
years, I was expressing the same judgments that Presidents
Eliot of Harvard and Gilman of Hopkins and others had made
a century earlier.
[9]
On the other hand, Peirce's 1902 application to the
Carnegie Institution, then in the unrestricted biographical
material at Widener, reflected the almost feral manner in
which he stalked Truth through the intricately abstract
branchings of his thinking. I was overwhelmed by the depth,
breadth, and apparent simplicity of his philosophizing. I
studied the application ignorantly, but with great care,
and concluded that the philosopher presented by Buchler,
Goudge, Madden, Gallie, Thompson, and Feibleman, the
leading Peirce scholars of the day, was not the Peirce of
the application. Unlike any of their differing attempts at
explication, the whole structure of Peirce's architectonic,
to judge from his own carefully elaborated statement, was
based upon a very general doctrine of signs he called
semeiotic, about which I knew nothing and could find
nothing of any significance in 1959 or the early sixties. I
did not learn until many years later of C. K. Ogden and I.
A. Richards 1923 work The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of
the Influence of Language upon Thought and the Science of
Symbolism, which mentions Peirce in its appendix has
having proposed "by far the most elaborate and determined
attempts to give an account of signs and meaning" of which
they were aware, or Jacques Maritain's 1956-57 articles on
language and signs.10
[10]
At the time of the completion of my dissertation in 1960,
my thinking about Peirce was still very confused. I had
more than 3000 notes from various collections and dozens of
hypotheses. The probability of the syphilis hypothesis had
declined for me to near zero. No one, I thought, could
write so clearly as Peirce did a few months before his
death in 1914 at seventy-four while suffering from that
disease. That Peirce was extremely neurotic seemed
probable. His father's demands on him overwhelmed him. He
suffered attacks of conversion hysteria during which he was
briefly paralyzed, had periods when his sanity was in
question, was episodically severely depressed, seemed
extremely narcissistic, frequently lost control of himself,
and showed other typical symptoms. In the never finished
draft of his memorial biography for the National Academy of
Sciences, the chemist E. B. Wilson wrote, about 1925, a
description that summarized the extent of my hypothesizing
at the time; "He had genius; he lacked character. It is
this Jekyll-Hyde duality which must be perceived if Peirce
is to be understood..."11 But none of this seemed to have
anything to do with the blurred picture that had been
slowly emerging in my mind (and which appeared tentatively
in my 1960 dissertation) of a truly singular man; a
prodigiously learned, protean, brilliant, Rabelaisian, and
extraordinarily productive intelligence, who lived a
humiliating, tragic, and tortured life.
[11]
Because of Harvard's continued opposition to my
publication of any of their Peirce biographical
manuscripts, I worked only episodically on Peirce and
semeiotic puzzle until thirty years later when, in 1990,
Sebeok and John Gallman, director of the Indiana University
Press, asked me to undertake a revision of my dissertation
as a full-length biography. In the biography, based
primarily upon my early archival research, I used three
hypotheses to account for the extremes of Peirce's
behavior; some were his own.
[12]
1) He was obsessed with logic and the commonplace and
obdurately inexplicable mystery of meaning. He also
believed that he had a God-given calling to present to the
world what he knew to be the original discoveries in his
doctrine of signs. As he put it in 1902, his passionate
dedication to the study of meaning derived from "an
uncontrollable impulse....it has been necessary for me at
all times to exercise all my control over myself, for fear
that my mind might be affected by such unceasing
application to a particular subject."12
[13]
2) After 1910, Peirce looked to the poison of biological
inheritance to account for his more bizarre behaviour. He
was born left-handed and a mathematical prodigy, both
common in his family. He blamed his inability to express
himself in language and his dependence on diagrammatic
thinking on these traits, as well as crediting them for his
aptitude in logic. In his old age, in trying to account for
his extremes of behavior, he blamed his genetic inheritance
for his uncontrollable emotionality, what he called the
"criminal trait in the blood" and added, "three mental
twists are strongly marked in the families that have given
me being, and seem to be so in myself."13 He described
these as unusual mathematical aptitude with its attendant
unworldliness, extreme belligerence, and exaggerated
sensibility, of which he wrote, "For long years I suffered
unspeakably, being an excessively emotional fellow, from
ignorance of how to go to work to acquire sovereignty over
myself."14 He also suffered terribly from the pain of
trigeminal neuralgia and took ether, opium and morphine,
alcohol, and later cocaine to control it. He was addicted
by thirty, if not before, and came to depend on these drugs
to get his work done.
[14]
3) Peirce's father Benjamin was a loving and overwhelming
figure of a man, who rigorously trained his son for genius
from childhood on and also thought of him as an extension
of his own metaphysical vision, paying little attention to
standard curricula or expectations of academic performance.
At the same time in this hothouse of a scientific
environment, he encouraged his son's social explorations
and introduced him to the good life. A nephew wrote that he
became a "highly emotional, easily duped and rather snobbish
youngster going his own way indifferent of consequences."15
Because of his neurological and nervous disorders, his
family, and particularly his father, indulged and protected
him into his forties. I summarized Peirce's character by
means of the poet Baudelaire's ideal of the Dandy, the
modern hero who makes himself into a great man, according
to his own standards.[15]
As an elaboration of Wilson's characterization of Peirce
as a Jekyll-Hyde personality, I thought that these three
hypothesesPeirce's obsession with meaning, his
neurological pathologies, especially the terrible pain of
neuralgia, and his father's powerful and destructive
influencecould account for his extremes of behavior. Two
months after the biography's publication in January, 1993,
I read Kay Redfield Jamison's brilliant and scholarly
study, Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the
Artistic Temperament (just released) and suddenly
recognized that what I had written about Peirce was
probably an account of the course of the disease she
describes so vividly. I had suggested this possibility in
the book, but the signs of it I then had were too
scattered. After studying Jamison, I proposed the
hypothesis, which I still find convincing, that beginning
at about twenty, Peirce began to show the symptoms of manic
depressive illnessthe inherited "divine madness" of so
many great creators, whether statesmen, physicists,
painters, poets, philosophers, mathematicians,
entrepreneurs, saints or generalsand that the disease is
the primary reason for his extremes of behavior. The
disease is heavily skewed toward successful upper class and
professional families like the Peirces. It is not
psychological in the typical meaning of an emotional
maladaptation (though it obviously exhibits this); rather
it is the result of a genetic chemical imbalance in the
brain for which today effective treatment exists. In
Peirce's day, the often alternately terrifying and ecstatic
mood swings which accompany the disease were generally
thought to be entirely failures of character. It is
surprising that his most dependable friend and ally William
James, the brilliant and pioneering psychologist, who was
himself an often tortured sufferer from pathological
depression for which he several times sought treatment, did
not recognize, in his friend Charles, the signs of a similar
malady. James wrote in 1903, when Peirce was producing some
of his most original work:
[16]
Peirce was subject to the wide and uncontrollable mood
swings typical of the disease. He also exhibited other
associated symptoms: manic grandiosity and visionary
expansiveness; driven, paranoid, and impulsive actions;
extreme insomnia; almost superhuman energy; hypersexuality;
irrational financial dealings, including compulsive
extravagance and disastrous investments. These manic
states, beginning in his twenties, during which Peirce
worked feverishly on his philosophy and often prolonged
over weeks or months by his knowledgeable use of drugs,
were interlaced, in a constant undulation of emotions, with
severe melancholic or depressive states characterized by
suicidal feelings or flatness of mood, accompanied by
inertness of mind, inability to feel emotion, and a sense
of unbearable futility.17 At first, the severity and extent
of the disease were relatively mild and could easily be
interpreted as the consequence of his passion for logic,
but by his forties it was increasingly severe and had
already shown apparently psychotic episodes, which
continued to increase in severity and frequency as he grew
older.18 In his sixties, suffering from abdominal cancer,
he was sometimes completely incapacitated for weeks at a
time by depression and pain and utterly dependent on
cocaine to continue work. I give one of many examples of
the severity of his mood swings. In the space of two months
in 1895, in his mid-fifties, Peirce wrote joyfully, "my
ideas are immortal"19 and in suicidal despair, "A strong
desire for death had long been on me, is yet."20
[17]
I will examine these extreme swings of mood and other
symptoms of the disease in the context of the collapse of
his professional life. In 1884, President Gilman of Johns
Hopkins fired him on the grounds of his unsuitability for
"the guidance and instruction of young men in their
university studies."21 The knowledge of Peirce's adulterous
relationship with his future second wife, which affected
Gilman's judgment, came from the astronomer and
mathematician Simon Newcomb, Peirce's colleague at Hopkins
and the most powerful and influential American scientist of
his generation.22 Thereafter, Newcomb and an informal group
of prominent scientists and educators intervened to destroy
Peirce's scientific and academic career.23 In September,
1891, Superintendent T. C. Mendenhall of the Coast Survey,
Peirce's employer, wrote a letter firing him at the end of
the year from his thirty year career in geodesy there, an
event Peirce expected, welcomed and dreaded.24 Mendenhall's
decision was based on an evaluation of Peirce's major
gravimetric work written, unknown to Peirce, by Newcomb at
Mendenhall's request, which called Peirce's work virtually
worthless.25 Two weeks before his termination became
effective, Peirce wrote Mendenhall a letter begging a
year's extension, the last of many such requests, to bring
it into shape.[18]
Before examining the letter, it will help to characterize
briefly the conditions and setting of Peirce's life at the
time he wrote it in mid-December, 1891. In 1887, he and
Juliette had moved from New York City to the virtual
wilderness of Pike County, Pennsylvania. Using small
legacies from his mother and aunt, he rebuilt to his own
design old farmhouse in Milford, which his young and
mysterious French, second wife Juliette then decorated to
her taste. There, black-balled by the academy and many of
his scientific colleagues, he intended to write his
philosophy and to make a new life for himself as a
scientific entrepreneur and educator with the help of the
self-made millionaire James W. Pinchot. Pinchot, after
making a fortune in the New York City dry goods business,
had retired at forty-four and built, in addition to other
residences elsewhere, in Milford a large Norman castle
called Grey Towers. There, in the summer season, Pinchot
entertained the barons of great new wealth, such as the
Belmonts and Vanderbilts. Pinchot's wife and chatelaine
Mary Eno Pinchot was Juliette's close friend and adviser.
Mary's father, Amos Eno, was a real estate tycoon and one
of the richest men in New York City. He owned the glamorous
Fifth Avenue Hotel, as well as some of the leading brothels
in the city. Mary's brother John Eno was president of the
city's Second National Bank and absconded to Canada with
several hundred thousand dollars. At the time of the letter
to Mendenhall, Peirce was involved in two schemes which he
expected to make him very rich, the first a technique for
extracting wood alcohol he was hoping to sell to George W.
Vanderbilt and the second a dyeing process of his
invention, which his brothers James Mills, then chairman of
Harvard's mathematics department, and Herbert, then a minor
bureaucrat in the Department of State, were trying to help
him market in Boston. Both failed. On January 1, 1892, the
day after his forced resignation from the Survey, he began
a diary:
[19]
Peirce's grim forecast was accurate. Within two years, in
large part because of a number of reckless business gambles
and his alcoholism and drug addiction, he was ruined both
financially and in reputation and, by the summer of 1895,
he was down and out in New York City, expelled from the
Century Club, his elite retreat, and a fugitive from
Pennsylvania law. These desperate events profoundly
depressed him and he became increasingly suicidal.27
[20]
Yet, in his work, he had come to believe that he had
unlocked the key to understanding the way things are and
how they got they way. This conviction of elemental success
had its beginnings at Johns Hopkins just after his father's
death in 1880, when he first considered the idea, put forth
in his 1884 lecture "Design and Chance" that the existence
and evolution of physical laws must themselves be explained:
[21]
In the same lecture, he proposed for the first time his
grand hypothesis to answer such questions: out of chance,
in the Aristotelian sense of absence of cause, comes habit,
of which physical laws are a kind, whose main element "is
the tendency to repeat any action which has been performed
before." In 1887-88, in his unfinished work a "Guess at the
Riddle" he summarized his solution to the problem of the
origins of the universe in the sentence, "According to
this, three elements are active in the world, first,
chance; second, law; and third, habit taking."29 This
cosmological proposal evidently has its basis in his system
of triadic categories, which goes back in various forms to
his 1867 paper "On a New List of Categories."30 Though
Peirce failed in his intention to make "A Guess at the
Riddle" a great architectonic work of speculative
philosophy in the tradition of Aristotle, its major ideas
were briefly set forth in The Monist series of 1891-93,
the very time of his travails just described.31
[22]
At the beginning of his draft of "Guess at the Riddle," he
had written with manic grandiosity:
[23]
Peirce never gave up his belief that his philosophy had
that great and persistent a potential. Now, increasingly,
ordinarily sober-sided scholars are seeing things at least
partly his way.33 Such is often the case with great
intellects who are also manic-depressives.
[24]
I will use his letter to Mendenhall begging indulgence to
give substance to Peirce's profound demoralization as he
saw his world collapsing around him in 1891. He wrote:
[25]
Peirce requested a year to bring his reports into shape,
but Mendenhall refused.[26]
Peirce's letters, diaries, and publications contain
hundreds of expressions of both manic and depressive
symptoms, only a few of which I have quoted. The symptoms
of severe depression which he exhibited episodically during
much of his adult life include apathy, hopelessness ("I
think I shall very soon be completely ruined"), slowed
thinking, impaired memory and concentration ("My greatest
trial is my inertness of mind"), and thoughts of suicide
and death ("a strong desire for death had long been on me,
is yet"), all of which significantly affected his behavior
and reputation for the worse. The same sources also exhibit
mania, the other extreme of ebullient, almost transcendent
self-confidence. All The Monist articles (1891-1893) are
shot through with the most expansive claims for his
"Working Hypothesis" of the evolution of the universe. For
example, to conclude "The Architecture of Theories" he
asserted:
[27]
In "The Doctrine of Necessity Examined," he announced
grandly:
[28]
As is usual with manic-depressives, Peirce's behavior was
also quite ordinary for much of his life, a fact that
further confused his friends and enemies, making it appear
that he could control himself if he wished.[29]
If we provisionally accept the hypothesis that Peirce was
severely manic depressive, doing so would appear to put in
question Peirce's whole philosophical enterprise as the
outpourings of a mad genius whose claims are, therefore,
deeply suspect. Yet madness and genius have been joined
since antiquity as the sign of extraordinarily productive
creativity. As Jamison has shown at length, modern
psychological and medical research has found that the
disease is genetic in nature; that there is often a causal
relationship between the extremely creative person and
manic-depressive illness; and, further, that the disease
occurs far more often among families in the successful
classes whose abilities it has enhanced down the
generations. The following names, most taken from a list
prepared by Jamison, of those who may well have had the
disease is illustrative of the connection: the poets George
Gordon, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, and Marina Tsvetayeva;
the writers John Bunyan, Leo Tolstoy, and Virginia Woolf;
the composers and musicians George Frederic Handel, Robert
Schumann, and Peter Tchaikovsky; the artists Thomas Eakins,
Georgia O'Keefe, and Mark Rothko; the mathematicians Georg
Cantor, Luitzen Brouwer, and Kurt Gödel; the
physicists Ludwig Boltzman, Erwin Schrödinger, and
David Bohm; the philosophers Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Charles Peirce, and
many more.[30]
Many of the most brilliant sufferers have learned to ride
the wild rollercoaster of moods by using the highs, often
amplified and extended by drugs, as their flights of
ecstatic invention. Byron, among others, demonstrates the
characteristic pattern of intense creative activity
followed by cold, depressed, critical analysis of the
creation, as the thoroughly annotated manuscripts of many
of his greatest poems shows. Byron sometimes studied his
disease with detached curiosity and understood both its
marvelous gifts and its often fatal consequences.39 Peirce,
in his letter to Mendenhall understood the same relation
between the period of intoxicated creativity and that of
analytical reconsideration, when he said he was "never so
brilliant as then" in his logical work, but found that it
contained "some very curious and unaccountable errors"
which he detected and corrected. In his late maturity,
Peirce, the fallibilist, constantly reworked his inspired
and intricate manuscripts, always looking for errors.
Peirce is joined with a brilliant, motley, and immensely
productive company of creative genius through his
manic-depressive illness. I find no reason to suspect his
splendid work because of it, and every reason to admire the
disciplined genius of his philosophical originality, despite
it and because of it.[31]
This elaboration completes the outline of the manichean
personality I first hypothesized in 1958. Since reading
Jamison's book, I have found in Peirce's manuscripts an
abundance of the kinds of facts to which the hypothesis
points deductively. These discoveries also support, as
well, Peirce's own general hypothesis of the poison of
biology as a major cause of his self-destructive behavior.
[32]
There is one other, equally controversial, aspect of
Peirce's life, which I believe is crucial to understanding
not only his life, but his thought as well. In my
biography, I called attention to a close similarity between
Peirce's metaphysics and mysticism, which Leibniz, whom he
considered his closest philosophical relative, called the
perennial philosophy.40 I then knew of no direct evidence
in support of the hypothesis, but after publication of the
biography, two Peirce scholars informed me that there was a
letter (first published in 1984 by Donna M. Orange) in which
Peirce called himself mystical.41 He had at least one
mystical experience, of which he wrote a description
addressed to the Reverend John W. Brown, Rector of St.
Thomas's Episcopal Church in New York City. I quote the
letter entire, because of its interest:
[33]
The letter was probably never sent and there is no reason
to believe that Peirce met with Rector Brown, a perfect
stranger. Peirce had a life-long and profound ambivalence
about formal religion. On the one hand was his intense
distaste for theology and its associated metaphysics. I
imagine him one Sunday sitting in a pew picking out of the
Creed the doctrine of the resurrection of the body and
contemptuously making fun of it: "These perfected bodies
will certainly enjoy feasting on perfect food and being
lulled by a divine process of digestion. Will there be
perfected toilets in Heaven?" On the other hand, Peirce had
a deep and constant longing for a religious community in
which he would be able to express his "passionate love for
the church and a complete faith that the essence of
christianity,whatever that might be,was Divine,"
without the dangerous absurdities of theological
metaphysics. This community would be a transfiguration of
his ideal of the community of scientific inquirers and
Peirce described its nature sixteen years later in his 1908
essay, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," which
is, among other things, a manual to help others achieve
mystical experience by means of the "Pure Play of
Musement," whose practice will lead to a state of mind in
which
[34]
Peirce had some knowledge of the mystical tradition from
his father, from Henry James Senior's Swedenborgianism,
from Emerson, and from his own reading, at this time
particularly the works of F. W. J. Schelling with its
references to European mystics like the Neoplatonists and
Jacob Boehme, and Eastern mystical writings.44 It was from
Schelling that Peirce took the phrase, "objective
idealism," which he introduced in The Monist articles of
1891-93. But as the phrase, "I have never before been
mystical; but now I am," indicates, Peirce before the
experience had thought of himself as non-mystical, or
better, anti mystical as a practicing scientist and
philosopher of science.
[35]
When Peirce used the image of "the cross like death," the
unidentified burden that he was to bear "for the Master's
sake," it was almost certainly as the sign of his belief
that he must dedicate his life, whatever the sacrifice, to
the work God had given him to do: "to make a
philosophy...so comprehensive that, for a long time to
come, the entire work of human reason...shall appear as the
filling up of its details." The extent of his obsessed and
desperate dedication is revealed in a letter to William
James's wife Alice written in April, 1902, in which he
described how he worked while he was developing his Minute
Logic. He blamed that feverish intensity for his harsh
criticism of James and Royce in it:45
[36]
That Peirce was able to maintain this kind of manic
concentration by means of drugs is supported by a letter
also to Alice James from his wife Juliette several years
later in which she described a very different perspective
of his labors:
[37]
Juliette understood almost nothing of Peirce's
philosophical life, though she believed in his genius and
sacrificed herself to support his passion, just as Peirce
believed in his calling and sacrificed the two of them upon
the "cross like death."[38]
I now turn to Peirce's mystical experience, an event which
must also bring his work into question for many, especially
those whose faith lies in the scientific doctrine that
every event has a cause. To understand why Peirce said "I
have never before been mystical, but now I am," we must be
able to understand his experience. Fortunately, the record
of the mystical tradition is as old as writing, and much
has been written by the mystics themselves. Unfortunately,
that record is often confusing because of cultural
differences, the difficulties of language, and because it
has often included aberrations of various kinds, including
sympathetic magic, numerology, astrology, witchcraft,
scientism, and other oddities associated with spiritualism.
[39]
The central experience of the mystic is that there is a
mysterious fissure or juncture in our everyday world, if we
analyze it in a certain way. One way to do so is to examine
our visual experience of objects. We perceive a red rose
and the experience is seamless; the form and color are seen
as one and we scarcely ever question its unity. Yet it is
possible to see the redness and not the rose at all. The
eye is a sensor (like a camera, spectroscope, or X-ray
machine) and it perceives color (the light of the visible
spectrum), but not specific form. One example, which may
help to understand the mystic's insight into the origin of
experience, is camouflage. A naturalist watches a pheasant
alight in a bare autumn field and disappear from her sight.
She stalks it, reaching a distance from it of no more than
three feet, but she cannot see it, though she knows exactly
where it is. Then, she sees it blink its inner transparent
eyelid and can see an eye, but no more. Knowing the
structure of the eye she can, in imagination, place the
bird almost exactly where it must be, but she cannot see
it, even though she knowledgeably and carefully searches
the ground with her eyes where the bird must be. She leans
over and the bird suddenly flies away, leaving an empty
spot on the bare ground. Her eyes saw the variety and
intensities of the colors of the feathers, but not the form
of the bird. Specific form may be represented in sense, but
not perceived by us and, in this sense, is independent of
us.[40]
Form, then, is not sensible, it is intelligible, but form
is not the only element in our perception of that type. A
quick sample of such elements might include space (here),
time (now), number, cause, person, life, and love. The list
can be extended indefinitely. For space alone, we might add
position, distance, height, measurement, extent, interval,
opening, separation, contraction, divergence, compression,
mass, reach, margin, contiguity, conjunction, touch, union,
and many more. As the mystic Duncan Brent puts it, taken in
themselves, these elements
[41]
But it is also true, in the mystic's experience, that the
intelligible elements, if they are to be perceived, must be
represented by means of that which is not intelligible but
perceivable and further, that these intelligible elements
cannot be in, but are only represented to be in the world
of sense. In this way of understanding things, there can be
no disembodied ideas existing in some heaven. Instead, in
the type of realistic metaphysics that underlies Peirce's
distinction between the real and existent and informs his
doctrine of signs, the intelligible, mind, or the real is
itself or through the agency of the representing sign both
immanent and transcendent in the world of nature.
[42]
A world which so represents the real transfigures its
perceiver into something magnificently alive and sacred. I
suggest (a study I am currently pursuing at length) that
Peirce's development of his doctrine of signs, after his
mystical experience, transformed it in such a way that
semeiosis, the action of signs, became for him the
formalization of the mystical tradition of the logos,
which is equated with the idea of the world as God's
utterance, a figure of speech that is more than metaphor.
In the semeiotic triad, sign, object, interpretant, the
interpretant is the name for the intelligible represented
by the object acting as sign. Peirce expressed this
transforming universe as a puzzle:
[43]
Peirce was a lonely and afflicted man who, in spite of his
personal degradation, never lost an essential innocence or
allowed his condition to destroy his passion for the
highest goods of the discipline of philosophy. But his
disorders warped and distorted his character, which, when
he was free of them, was considerate, and affectionate. He
was intensely and uncontrollably emotional and deeply
affected by the senses, in fact unlike cold, arrogant, and
distant logician he often seemed to be. The wild and
charismatic poet Byron, the model for manic
depressive-illness in Jamison's book, like Peirce, received
his inspiration from the "divine madness" and refined his
work in pain and suffering. Both men produced controlled
works of genius. I believe that the terrible disease was a
tragic and perhaps an essential part in that outcome for
both, as it was for many others we also call great.[44]
I conclude with a quotation well-known to Peirce scholars
from John Jay Chapman's letter to his wife written in the
summer of 1893, two years before Peirce was reluctantly
expelled from the Century Club for stealing food, failing
to pay his dues, drunkenness, and probably for forging
members names on checks. I invite the reader to indulge in
the pure play of musement and to imaginatively reenact the
scene and its meaning for an abductive understanding of the
life of this greatest of American logicians, polymaths, and
philosophers:
Citations to works other than those by Peirce are given in
the usual form. Those for Peirce are given in abbreviated
form: for the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce,
C.P 1.1 means volume 1 paragraph 1; for Writings of Charles
S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, W1:100 means volume 1
page 100; for The Essential Peirce, EP:100 means page
100; for Reasoning and the Logic of Things, RTL:100 means
page 100; for Peirce manuscripts at Houghton Library, MS, L,
or MSL followed by a number means the manuscript as numbered
by Richard S. Robin in his Annotated Catalogue; other
Peirce manuscripts are identified by the collection, as in
Mendenhall Collection.
Brent, Duncan. 1967. Of the Seer and the Vision.
Amsterdam: MennoHertzberger & Co. |
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