Page i Charles Sanders Peirce Page ii Charles S. Peirce in Berlin in 1875. Page iii Charles Sanders Peirce A Life Revised and Enlarged Edition Joseph Brent Indiana University Press / BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS Page iv This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404­3797 USA www. indiana.edu/~iupress Telephone orders 800­842­6796 Fax orders 812­855­7931 Orders by e­mail [email protected] Jacket photo of author by Ann Garfinkle First printed in paperback in 1998 © 1993, 1998 by Joseph Brent All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48­1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging­in­Publication Data Brent, Joseph Charles Sanders Peirce: a life / Joseph Brent.— Rev. and enl. ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0­253­33350­1 (cloth: alk. paper). — ISBN 0­253­21161­1 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839–1914. 2. Philosophers—United States—Biography. I. Title. B945.P44B73 1998 191—dc20 [b] 98­23868 1 2 3 4 5 00 01 00 99 98 Page v To Thomas A. Sebeok and in memory of Duncan Brent Page vii Contents Foreword ix by Thomas A. Sebeok Preface to the Second Edition xv Preface to the First Edition xvii Acknowledgments xix Introduction: Facets of the Puzzle 1 1. Father, Son, and Melusina: 1839–1871 26 2. "Our Hour of Triumph is What Brings the Void": 1871–1882 82 3. Expulsion from the Academy and the Search for a New Eden: 1883–1891 136 4. Paradise Lost: 1890–1900 203 5. Endgame: 1900–1914 270 6. The Wasp in the Bottle 323 Appendix 1: Glossary of Terms As Used by Peirce 349 Appendix 2: Chronology 363 Notes 375 Bibliography 396 Index 403 Page ix Foreword I was an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1936, just mastering English, when I first encountered Charles Sanders Peirce, in the appendix of The Meaning of Meaning by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. There, pressed between a consideration of Baldwin at one end and "a little fable concerning Amoeba" at the other, a discussion of Peirce's thinking, especially of a seminal paper of his dated May 14, 1867, took up about twelve pages. The efforts of Peirce, identified as an "American logician . from whom William James took the idea and the term Pragmatism, and whose Algebra of Dyadic Relations was developed by [Ernst] Schroeder," were further characterized as by "far the most elaborate and determined attempts to give an account of signs and their meaning. ." Those of us in England who troubled to read these passages on and by Peirce mispronounced his name (which is correctly pronounced "purse"). Worse, we were put off from pursuing his writings because Ogden, alluding to a letter of 1908 from Peirce to Lady Welby, felt compelled to add that, "unfortunately," Peirce's "terminology was so formidable that few have been willing to devote time to its mastery, and the work was never completed." Only at the outset of the 1940s, in the second of Charles Morris's University of Chicago seminars on "semiotic," did I hear Peirce's name uttered correctly. Too, it was there that I came eventually to realize that Morris was propelling me toward the same lofty intellect Ogden and Richards had ephemerally ushered in to their readership. Thereafter, at the instigation of Morris but later strongly abetted by the illustrious Russian philologist Roman Jakobson—who time and again insisted that, after the 1940s, Peirce was his ''most powerful source of inspiration"—I embarked with determination and ever­escalating awe on my studies of Peirce's "semeiotic." That Peirce's reputation for turgidity was unjustifiably overstated by Ogden and others, at least as concerns semiotic studies, became apparent to me only after decades of attentive study. Collaterally, I began to wonder about this prodigious thinker, to whom Ernest Nagel still felt compelled to refer in a 1959 Scientific American review as a "little known American philosopher." There were, to be sure, occasional sightings high­ Page x lighting this or that aspect of Peirce's life or character—just its "glassy" overall shape, never the jagged details. For instance, according to a sharply etched cameo by Joseph Jastrow, Peirce's former pupil and sometime collaborator, Peirce's personality was affected by a superficial reticence often associated with the scientific temperament. He readily gave the impression of being unsocial, possibly cold, more truly retiring. At bottom the trait was in the nature of a refined shyness, an embarrassment in the presence of small talk and introductory salutations intruded by convention to start one's mind. His nature was generously hospitable; he was an intellectual host. In that respect he was eminently fitted to become the leader of a select band of disciples. "Under more fortunate circumstances," Jastrow had intimated but never made plain, "his academic usefulness might have been vastly extended. For he had the pedagogic gift to an unusual degree, had it by dower of nature, as some men handle a pencil and others the bow of a violin." Jastrow went on to comment, not on the actual or possible causes but on the deplorable implications of Peirce's presumptive shortcomings and misadventures in Baltimore: "It may be an inevitable result of the conventional system of education, but it is none the less a sad one, that his type of ability does not flourish readily in an institutionalized atmosphere than had Johns Hopkins in those days." He then proceeded to formulate this laudable yet nebulous moral: "Systems must give way to personalities, if the best talents of the best men are to be available. An educational policy that makes it possible to find a place for such men as Peirce on their faculties of the great universities is a worthy ambition for those who control the educational future of America." The antecedent of the head pronoun "It" must have remained irksomely opaque to all but Peirce's best­informed contemporaries, as it certainly did to me. To be sure, Peirce's years at the Johns Hopkins were reinvestigated by Max H. Fisch and set forth in 1952, but again they were reported on so allusively that the Cheshire cat almost within view once again evanesced into the woodsú Some years afterwards, when I asked Jakobson, by then himself an acclaimed professor at Harvard, what he thought about this sort of equivocation, he gave me this Delphic answer: ''I think that Peirce was much too good for Harvard." Indeed, Peirce's close friend William James characterized him, in a vain plea to Harvard's President Eliot to secure the fifty­six­year­old American master even a temporary academic appointment, as a "name of mysterious greatness." His stature was palpable to discriminating contemporaries such as James and, after his Collected Papers began to appear in the 1930s, to a host of devoted followers, but his manifestly quirky personality continued to perplex. I grew increasingly curious about the man concealed behind the philosophical, math­ Page xi ematical, and scientific opulence. But other than a handful of perfunctory, curtailed portraits and a couple of shallow, derivative biographies composed by some of Peirce's deepest misinterpreters, there was precious little to go by. In 1968, there did appear a useful book by Paul K. Conkin, titled Puritans and Pragmatists: Eight Eminent American Thinkers, the sixth chapter of which was devoted to Peirce. Fourteen pages or so dealt with his "life," the rest (sixty pages) with some of his ideas. I dipped into Conkin's book with zest in the late 1980s (mainly for the chapter on Emerson) but found myself wondering uneasily where Conkin had gotten the data for his succinct biographical sketch of Peirce. He provides no references, only a short "reading guide" at the end of his collection, where he divulges that ''more than any other major American philosopher, the life of Peirce is hidden from lay readers. There have been," he confirmed, "no full biographies, nor even very helpful intellectual portraits." Then his "guide" casually reveals: "of greatest assistance to me . was Joseph Lancaster Brent, III's unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 'A Study of the Life of Charles Sanders Peirce' (University of California at Los Angeles, May 1960)." In his preface, he acknowledges that Dr. Brent provided him with "indispensable insights and knowledge about Peirce." When I later chanced across a footnote in a book about Emerson which credited the same dissertation for incidental data about Peirce, I decided that the time had come for me to search directly in what was undoubtedly the fountainhead: Brent's manuscript. But first I needed to make sure that I had not overlooked a version, or at least an excerpt, published in the intervening thirty years. Although Brent's dissertation was listed in Christian J. W. Kloesel's and Joseph M. Ransdell's bibliography of "secondary studies" on Peirce, and again in Beverley Kent's "selected bibliography" to her study of Peirce's logic and classification of the sciences, I was unable to find any other citation in the by now massive literature of Peirceiana, not even among the writings of Fisch.