Chesterton (and the rest)

T h e   B r i d g e

by   Max Arnott

 

A sensible man doesn't put too much stock in first impressions, of course, but there may be profit, now and then, from the shock of introduction.

 

The first man ever to see a horse might have things to say that would break through our matter-of-factness, a little, and Chesterton once imagined how a man might feel landing in Brighton under the assumption that it was New Guinea.

 

Now in today's case, like a man who knew about Angkor Wat only that it was large, old, famous and orienta, our reading led us to someone familiar to the wise, but about whom we knew no more than a name, and that he was famously pragmatic.

 

How then does one react to a first view of Charles Sanders Peirce?

(Peirce, by the way,  pronounced his name "Purse.")

 

How except with admiration and horror?

 

Peirce was born in 1839 and died just months before the first world war.  It was a long life, a busy one, and one utterly discordant.

 

We see, on the one hand, Peirce in his accomplishments. Peirce was, as his biographer Joseph Brent writes

 

. . . perhaps the most important mind the United States has ever produced. He made significant contributions . . . as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor . . . and inventor. He was a psychologist, a philologist, a lexicographer, a historian of science . . . and above all a philosopher, whose special fields were logic and semiotics. He is widely credited with being the founder of pragmatism.

 

Take that, Richard Feynman!

 

The professional Peirce had brains, training,  and ruthless energy, and he was born into an time when new tools of science opened opportunities for conquest. As well as inventing semiotics, Peirce was  one of the inventors of the NAND function, a concept that lets Boolean logic work with only one logical operation (very handy in computers, we learned) and was the first to realize that Boolean logic could be implemented on electrical circuits. The patents on these two notions would today be worth roughly a trillion dollars.

 

On the other, sinister,  hand, there is Peirce in private.

 

Born to wealth, good looks, and useful friends, he died ignored and living on a diet of stale bread. Famous academics not only wouldn't hire him, they went out of their way to make sure no one else did either. He wrote on the back of old manuscripts because he couldn't afford paper; the ink froze in his inkwell because he couldn't afford heat. At Harvard, they considered him a moral menace.

 

Did a meteor land on him? Was it the black plague, or Mongols? 

 

No, by and large, he was a self-ruined man. He spent without thought, quarreled without restraint, abused his wives, and in general behaved like a major league pariah.

 

Such is the spectacle, and the disjunction between his professional life (Peirce worked hard) and his private ruin is sharper in that he focused on science, thought, and, above all, logic.

 

In this he meant with no middle flight to soar. His famous categories, the First, the Second, and the Third, along with his many (many) other triads, were meant to provide nothing less than a new machinery of thought itself.

 

According to Peirce, Peirce had it nailed. All thoughts, after all, he knew were signs, and he knew he knew how signs worked. He had a METHOD. 

 

It would be nice if it worked. Nor is this is the first time someone has come up with an art, or The Art, of thought, a sure-fire science that would train our intellects and turn our cogitation from barrel house brawling to kung-fu. The Gnostics worked on these lines, as did the sophists, the medieval logicians, Raymond Lull, Paul Valéry and Robert Heinlein too. And of course Hegel.

 

It is the old Siren and she sings still. On the shelves of the public library where we work, we can find half a dozen books promising to make you a genius.

 

But has anyone ever actually managed to think Peirce? 

 

Your columnist wouldn't mind hearing about it — seriously, write to this site and tell us. What is the internal weather of such mental operations? Has anyone built a better machine by thinking in Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds? Has anyone gotten along better with his or her spouse by virtue of knowing an icon from a symbol?

 

The question of why Charles S. Peirce, an indisputable genius, didn't die in wealth and honor with the president and all nine supremes crowded around his bed, the question of how a man can think so well and behave so stupidly, leads us, we are afraid, back to that disjunction of indicative from imperative, and knowledge from will.

 

It is a deep and fearful chasm and only the spell of the transcendent (call it poetic enchantment or grace) will bridge it, and if we refuse the bridge, what then?      

 

Max Arnott is an independent scholar living in Toronto and has been a reader of Voegelin for many years. He is also a devotee of the writings of G.K. Chesterton. In addition to contributing his regular column, Mr. Arnott is an editor at VoegelinView. He may be contacted by email from the Contact Us link found at the bottom of any page.