AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

(My subject here is once again Charles Sanders Pierce. For more on Pierce, see my entry Deduction, Induction, Abduction, from the Philosophy section, already posted on my blog on January 30^th, 2012. It would have been nice to have them posted together, but it did not happen that way.)

I first learned the name of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) from Bertrand Russell, who briefly mentions him twice in his History of Western Philosophy--- first in connection with William James (“The principle of pragmatism, according to James, was first enunciated by Charles Peirce, who maintained that, in order to attain clearness in our thoughts of an object, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve.”), then in connection with John Dewey. (“Dewey quotes with approval Peirce’s definition: Truth is the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate.”) Russell is critical of this last definition: “This leaves us completely in the dark as to what the investigators are doing, for we cannot without circularity say that they are endeavoring to ascertain the truth.” Apparently, at the time of writing his History, Russell had little idea of who Peirce was, as both references to him are indirect. It would be only in 1959, in his book Wisdom of the West, that Russell, having read some newly discovered works of Peirce, was able to refer to him directly, acknowledging that: “Beyond doubt, [Peirce] was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever.”

Peirce was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, chemist, founder of pragmatism (he called it pragmaticism, in order to avoid any terminological confusion) and semiotics. (He defined “semiotic” as the “quasi-necessary, or formal doctrine of signs [that abstracts] what must be the characters of all signs used by… an intelligence capable of learning by experience.” Locke, and a few others, had been using the term semiotic before Pierce, but not in its modern meaning.) Modern German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel is of such high opinion of Peirce that he has called him the “Kant of American philosophy.”

Tragically, Peirce was unappreciated, and even maltreated by his detractors, being able to hold just a single position as an untenured lecturer in logic at Johns Hopkins University for less than four years, and dying in poverty. His sole friend and supporter in his misfortunes was William James, who however died before him, leaving Peirce in dire straits. As a result of his neglect and open persecution, Peirce’s philosophical legacy, constituting a large, but disorganized and scattered body of work, was grossly mishandled. Nothing of it had been published during his lifetime. His only publications before his death was his monograph on astronomy and a collection of Studies in Logic, published in 1883 during his short stay at Johns Hopkins, where a few chapters were written by him, and others by his students. After his death, Peirce’s manuscripts were bought from his widow by Harvard University, but subsequently they were mislaid, none of them even microfilmed until 1964. There were altogether some 1650 manuscripts (totaling over 100,000 pages) eventually accounted for, but it is now sadly understood that an unknown number of manuscripts have been lost, probably, irretrievably.

The first “edition” of Peirce’s works appeared at intervals in the 1930’s under the general title The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Unfortunately, it was incompetently put together, with the editors taking a lot of liberties, apparently “explained” by the great difficulty of taking the time and effort to organize the randomly perused manuscripts, or at least to arrange them in their chronological order. It was only since the 1980’s that a more responsible edition of Peirce’s writings began to appear under the auspices of Indiana University Press, but this project has been lagging, and as of today (2013), only seven of the projected thirty volumes have been printed in a ridiculously small number of copies, many of these works for the first time ever.

So, this is how America has been treating her geniuses, in this case, her “Kant,” and “certainly, the greatest American thinker ever.” Theodore Dreiser’s fiction? Not exactly!