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recognized symbol of the modern age. When will we know, Bill Brown
asks four years later, that it was not the implosion of Minoru Yamasaki's
Pratt-Igoe complex in Saint Louis (15 July 1972) but, rather, the collapse
of Yamasaki's World Trade Center in New York (11 Sept. 2001) that
marked the advent of postmodernity, a postmodernity we've just begun
to live.5
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9 On this side of Kierkegaard's writings, see Vernard Eller, Kierkegaard and Radical
Discipleship: A New Perspective, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1968, on line at
http://www.hccentral.com/eller2/ as of August, 2005. (This is not to be taken as a
comprehensive view of the subject.) Kierkegaard's idea of the subjectivity of truth
comes close to the Peircean principle that ideas must have some pragmatic meaning.
10 Helsinki: The Metaphysical Club of the University of Helsinki, 2000, on line at
http://www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/papers/redbook.pdf as of August, 2005.
11 A Friar of the Order of Preachers, Poinsot was long better known by his religious
name, John of St. Thomas, as an interpreter of Aquinas. He was one of the first to
separate Thomistic philosophy from theology as the subject of a different course.
12 The official story is to be found in Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America,
1720-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). For an alternative narrative,
see John Deely, New beginnings. Early modern philosophy and postmodern thought
(Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1994) and Four ages of understanding. The first
postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the Twenty-first
century, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).
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literary talk Emerson gave on the lecture circuit, though Neitzsche would
think so. Harris and Brockmeyer wanted the real thing, and got it. In
1867 they began the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and the following
year published a series of three articles composed by a government
computer.
The computer was Charles Peirce, who worked for his father,
Professor
Benjamin
Peirce,
the
head
of
the
Naval
Observatory;
13 , Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (1868), 287-298 on line
at http://www.peirce.org/writings/p32.html as of August, 2005.
14 Signum, p. 37. Of course, he goes on, like all official dates, it is but a fixed point
in otherwise shifting sands, a landmark rather than an absolute beginning. The
wintry winds of modernity would continue to blow long past this early date, but as
the official beginning of spring does not by itself bring an end to winter's blasts, still,
it signals that the end is near at hand.
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doubt;
whereas
scholasticism
had
never
questioned
fundamentals.
But [w]e cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the
15 Peirce's reformulation of Boolean algebra had been the first of the 1867 series of
papers of which the New List of Categories was the last.
16 Journal of Speculative Philosophy (1868) 2, 140-157, on line at
http://www.peirce.org/writings/p27.html as of August, 2005, but cited by convention
with the abbreviation CP followed by the volume and paragraph numbers in Charles
Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds.) The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1935). Peirce's own footnotes below are
marked with [CSP].
17 CP 5.264.
18 CP 5.265.
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philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the
community of philosophers. Hence, if disciplined and candid minds
carefully examine a theory and refuse to accept it, this ought to create
doubts in the mind of the author of the theory himself.
3. The multiform argumentation of the middle ages [was] replaced by a
single thread of inference depending often upon inconspicuous
premisses.
Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so
far as to proceed only from tangible premisses which can be subjected
to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of
its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning
should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but
a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are
sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.
4. Scholasticism had its mysteries of faith, but undertook to explain all
created things. But there are many facts which Cartesianism not only
does not explain but renders absolutely inexplicable, unless to say that
'God makes them so' is to be regarded as an explanation.
Every unidealistic philosophy supposes some absolutely inexplicable,
unanalyzable ultimate; in short, something resulting from mediation
itself not susceptible of mediation. Now that anything is thus
inexplicable can only be known by reasoning from signs. But the only
justification of an inference from signs is that the conclusion explains
the fact. To suppose the fact absolutely inexplicable, is not to explain
it, and hence this supposition is never allowable.19
19 Each numbered point brings together a characteristic of modern philosophy from CP
5.264 with the contrasting characteristic of Scholasticism from CP 5.265.
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block the road of inquiry, either in general, as with the Kantian principle
that reality is essentially unknowable, or in particular, as with the more
23 On reality tunnels see Robert Anton Wilson's delightful, and delightfully postmodern
Prometheus Rising (Tempe AZ: New Falcon Publications, 1993).
24 In Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991). Title
essay 1947.
25 It was such Ramist rationalism which insisted that a secular liberal democratic state
could be peacefully imposed on a traditional Islamic society.
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recent contention that some transitions in the history of life are beyond
scientific investigation because they depend on the direct intervention of
God in the course of nature.
Peirce justifies his postmodern doctrine of method in terms of his
previous paper, Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for
Man, which he now summarizes:
1. We have no power of Introspection, but all knowledge of the internal
world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of
external facts.
2. We have no power of Intuition, but every cognition is determined
logically by previous cognitions.
3. We have no power of thinking without signs.
4. We have no conception of the absolutely incognizable.
These propositions, Peirce admits, cannot be regarded as certain; and,
in order to bring them to a further test, it is now proposed to trace them
out to their consequences.26 In other words, rather than rely on a single
thread of inference depending often upon inconspicuous premisses,27
Peirce entrusts his discourse rather to the multitude and variety of its
arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one.28 In due course the
principle that the meaning of an idea consists in its consequences will be
called pragmatism, a term that will eventually be hijacked, as we shall
see.
Meanwhile, let's see where all this is leading. First of all there is the
consequence that truth, our grasp on reality, involves the notion of the
26 CP 5.265.
27 CP 5.264.
28 CP 5.265.
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ideal community.
what happens to work for you or for me at one time or another, still less
what it happens to be expedient to pretend to believe: And what do we
mean by the real? It is a conception which we must first have had when
we discovered that there was an unreal, an illusion; that is, when we first
corrected ourselves. Now the distinction for which alone this fact logically
called, was between an ens29 relative to private inward determinations, to
the negations belonging to idiosyncrasy, and an ens such as would stand
in the long run. The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information
and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent
of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of
reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a
COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of
knowledge. And so those two series of cognition -- the real and the
unreal -- consist of those which, at a time sufficiently future, the
community will always continue to re-affirm; and of those which, under
the same conditions, will ever after be denied. Now, a proposition whose
falsity can never be discovered, and the error of which therefore is
absolutely incognizable, contains, upon our principle, absolutely no error.
Consequently, that which is thought in these cognitions is the real, as it
really is. There is nothing, then, to prevent our knowing outward things
as they really are, and it is most likely that we do thus know them in
numberless cases, although we can never be absolutely certain of doing
so in any special case.30
So far, so good. Peirce has attempted to explore a theory of mind
and method of inquiry which avoids the pitfalls of Cartesian, and, we now
recognize, Ramist modernism, and follows the paths actually taken by
29 Being (Latin).
30 CP 5.311.
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13
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This
14
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was
William
of
Occam,
Richard
Weaver
wrote,
who
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Not that there is anything wrong with being reactionary, provided that
what you're reacting against is truly wrong, and you understand how to
set it right.
The conservative
movement which the hapless Weaver helped inspire became one ideology
among others sunk in the swamp of modernity, and often a mischievous
one at that.36 The discourse of conservatism, while paying lip service to
the Medieval spirit (the Pope, after all, was reliably anti-Communist37)
remained mired in the Ramist rhetoric of preaching to the converted and
anathematizing the dissident.
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the investigation of Ramus, and was developing the ideas about media
and modernity for which he would become notorious in the '60s and '70s,
leading up to a brief appearance, as himself, in Woody Allen's Annie Hall.
McLuhan was not the only eminent figure lurking behind the scenes.
Weaver prepared Ideas for final publication under the careful eye of
Yale's Cleanth Brooks, a giant of literary studies, who had been his
advisor at Louisiana State and was then a visiting professor at Chicago.39
The University of Chicago itself was at that time very much still the
shadow of President Robert Hutchins. Hutchins had been impressed in
law school by the idea of natural law, that is, of the reality of universal
standards of human conduct, as expounded by Morris Cohen, who had
published the first collection of Peirce's philosophical essays back in the
'20s.
secret world of freemasonry (of which he saw his envied Toronto colleague Northrop
Frye as an avatar). Adrian John, in the Forward to Ong, p. xi. Mr. John may have
been misled somewhat by McLuhan's puckish sense of humor.
39 See Smith, pp. 22 and 24.
40 For a more recent analysis of education as initiation into an ongoing dialogue, see,
Timothy Fuller (ed) The voice of liberal learning: Michael Oakeshott on education. (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
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every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a
train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought is an
external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man
and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the words
homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself;
for the man is the thought.42
To call myself an external sign invites the further questions, of
what and to whom, but Peirce leaves them for another occasion, focusing
instead on what would seem to be the main objection to the idea: It is
hard for man to understand this, because he persists in identifying
himself with his will, his power over the animal organism, with brute
force. These words have particular poignancy in the context of Peirce's
own life, and his struggle with the animal organism, with the constant
acute pain of trigeminal neuralgia and the disorienting effects of
medication, and, it is rumored, other afflictions of the flesh -- he once
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Peirce's
intellectual life, over the course of the decades, was itself a thing of
massive integrity and consistency. In 1905, with William James about to
make pragmatism a household word, Peirce would set out to define
what he had meant by it in 1872 and 1877 in terms of the paper of 1868
we have been reading, the one that came before it, and the one that
followed.45
We are our thoughts, and the truth, the value, the reality of our
thoughts consists in their contribution to the community of inquiry, to
the human race as a whole in the long course of time. Finally, as what
anything really is, is what it may finally come to be known to be in the
ideal state of complete information, so that reality depends on the
ultimate decision of the community; so thought is what it is, only by
virtue of its addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought
identical with it, though more developed. In this way, the existence of
thought now depends on what is to be hereafter; so that it has only a
43 Kuklick, p. 133. The woman in question was undoubtedly Charles' beloved second
wife Juliette, whom he married as soon as the divorce from his first wife, who had left
him many years before, was final. When the threat of scandal was brought to the
official notice of the Johns Hopkins, Peirce would be done for professionally. (The
scandal may not have been so much that he kept a European mistress, but that he
married her.) In 1868, all this was far in the future, though his first marriage,
contracted in 1863, may have itself involved a certain struggle with the animal
organism. From what evidence survives one gets the impression that the first Mrs.
Peirce found his sexual advances disgusting, and he reacted with shame and anger.
44 CP 5.315.
45 CP 5.439, CP 5.453. (The latter refers to a review of 1871 as a statement of his
Scholastic realism, but that doctrine is clearly present in the earlier work we have
been looking at.) Purity of heart, Kierkegaard reminds us, is to will one thing; the
heart of Peirce's philosophy remains pure. Kierkegaard's existential thinker has a
great deal in common with Peirce's pragmatic philosopher.
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potential
existence,
dependent
on
the
future
thought
of
the
community.46 This may have been the best Peirce could hope for in the
way of personal immortality, at least at that point in his life. And his own
contribution to the intellectual life of the species would be very great
indeed. But as far as his individuality as such goes, it is almost as if he
were under what an Evangelical Christian would call a conviction of sin:
The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by
ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and
from what he and they are to be, is only a negation.47
We may see this sense of life as a kind of despair, but it could also
reflect a kind of mysticism of the creative process such as Virginia Woolf
describes: Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the
rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to
what: making a scene come right; making a character come together.
From this I reach what I might call a philosophy:;
at any rate it is a
constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern;
that we -- I mean all human beings -- are connected with this; that
the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work that we
call the world.
certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the
music; we are the thing itself.48
In the midst of the misery of his individual existence, Peirce, too,
felt the words, the music, the thing itself flowing through him, accepted
that process as the only reality of his life, and consented to the final
oblivion of any parts of his life that failed to express it. As to the reality
of God, he might not accept Woolf's glib, fashionable, emphatic
46 CP 5.316.
47 CP 5.317.
48 Quoted by Tristine Rainer, Your Life as Story (New York: Putnam, 1997), p. 16.
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Bloomsbury certainty that there is none,49 but rather question the whole
idea of the god Woolf was rejecting, the Victorian Nobodaddy50, the God
of the nominalists, and thus the God of the Reformation.
For in the
nominalistic analysis God is but one individual among others, though the
only one of his species, more an inscrutable Will to be submitted to than
a cosmic Mind to be adored through the study of creation. Peirce invites
us to imagine what our spiritual life might be once we reverse the error of
centuries and once again acknowledge the reality of universals. But need
we, in doing so, deny our own reality, or that of other persons?
Not long before Peirce wrote, William Tecumseh Sherman saw the
human population between the mountains of Georgia and the sea not as
persons, or even as individual human beings, but as mere instances of the
universal rebel, which, precisely as such, has no right to exist; himself
he saw not as a man or a Christian, much less the Catholic he later
became, but as a mere instance of the universal soldier, who, precisely
as such, had no right to humane sentiment.
many, many years later, tomorrow is another day. For General Sherman
that day would come when he received the apotheosis of soldierhood, the
49 He was too much the artist not to be overwhelmed by the manifest beauty of the
universe and too much the scientist not to be overcome by the sheer mathematical
tour de force of the hidden laws behind it. For him, precisely as a scientist, God was
eminently real, and his conviction of the reality of God grew as he developed as a
philosopher: If a pragmaticist is asked what he means by the word God, he can only
say if contemplation and study of the physico-psychical universe can imbue a man
with principles of conduct analogous to the influence of a great mans works or
conversation, then that analogue of a mindis what he means by God. [T]he
discoveries of science, their enabling us to predict what will be the course of nature,
is proof conclusive that, though we cannot think any thought of Gods, we can catch a
fragment of His Thought, as it were (CP 6.502.) These are, to be sure, the musings of
later period; Peirce's theism is not fully developed in his earliest papers, but his early
discoveries and formulations surely do not prevent that development.
50 William Blake's wonderfully expressive name for Nobody's Daddy, or Big Daddy
Nobody. To the extent that Blake had the God of the Unitarians in mind, it is
interesting to note that Peirce left Unitarianism for the Episcopal Church when he
married Melusina, remained Episcopalian when he divorced her, and became rather
more devout as he got older.
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invitation to lecture the Prussian General Staff on the novel theory and
practice of Total War. It was the beginning of the end for Old Europe.
Richard Weaver would attribute our descent into barbarism in a
century of total war to our denial of the reality of universals in general,
and in particular to the loss of our sense of humanity.
If a
being as a person sacred by his very nature. For this we may need to go
beyond not only the nominalism of Occam, but the essentialism of
Scotus, of Hegel, and perhaps, in a sense, of Peirce. To put the matter
plainly, what I am is only one of the important things about me; the fact
that I am counts for something too. We must become existentialists of
51 On this point see Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, the Last Self-Help Book (New York:
Picador, 2000).
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sorts,52 that is, learn again how to value humanity as it actually exists, to
protect it, to provide it, in so far as we are able, with the conditions it
needs to flourish, starting of course with ourselves and those nearest us.
In the last century Etienne Gilson53 and Jacques Maritain54 went beyond
Peirce in attempting to recover the existentialism of Thomas Aquinas.
Their policy of going back to the original sources was praiseworthy
indeed, but bypassed the so-called textbook Thomism of John of St.
Thomas, or as we are calling him here, John Poinsot, and thus missed the
chance to craft a semiotically informed existentialism.55 That remains a
task for the Twenty-first Century.
Recent preoccupation with modernity and the postmodern began
with the demolition of a public housing project which stood as the
epitome of the modern, rational, and utilitarian in architecture, and was
highlighted by the collapse of New York's World Trade Center, the prime
symbol of everything Islamicists56 and other traditionalists hate, fear, and
despise in the modern Western world. There is an emerging consensus
that postmodern thinking must be based in large measure on semiology,
which John Deely traces to Charles Peirce's 1867 New List of Categories,
pointing out that the first of the postmoderns was picking up threads of
dialogue which got lost at the death of John Poinsot in 1644. For Deely
the modern period in philosophy is to be identified with this fairly brief
eclipse of signum, but Peirce himself had a better idea, that the real
52 If not a Neitzsche, Heidegger, or Sartre sort, perhaps a sort of Kierkegaard, Berdyaev,
Marcel, or Jaspers.
53 See Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: P.I.M.S., 1952) and The Unity of
Philosophical Experience (San Fransisco: Ignatius Press, 1999).
54 See especially Existence and the Existent (Garden City NY: Doubleday Image, 1959).
55 They wouldn't have called it that, though. They were good Catholics, and the Church
had defined existentialism as a heresy.
56 Not all Muslims by any stretch of the imagination. See Frederick Wagner, THE
OTHER: Islam and September 11th, 2001, on line at
http://www.fritzwagner.com/ev/the_other.html as of September, 2005.
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turning points had come with what Walter Ong would later call The
Decay of Dialogue, and, even earlier, with William of Occam and the
triumph of nominalism. That postmodern thought ought to be dialogical
rather than didactic makes obvious sense; that we should take the
position of John Duns Scotus, as Peirce did, on the reality of universals, is
counterintuitive, to say the least -- all many of us know of Duns is the
eponymous origin of the English word dunce. On second thought,
however, Peirce seems quite right that much of the civilization we take
for granted depends on the discoveries of scientists who habitually
assume something very like Scholastic realism, and Richard Weaver might
not be entirely wrong to ascribe the last century's catastrophic descent
into the barbarism of total war to the discrediting of such universals as
our common humanity. If Peirce's kind of pragmatic, semiological
realism57 is what our civilization, the civilization of the dialogue, needs to
survive and flourish, and this does seem to be so, we do well to honor
Charles Sanders Peirce as the prophet of the postmodern.
2005 by F. P. Purcell
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