This dissertation will begin to collate and explore Peirce’s long term interest in religion, as a biographical background to his better known theories and philosophy. It will argue for a more central place to religion in the interdisciplinary spectrum of specialisms in the polyglot oeuvre of Peirce.
pp. 289-291
Peirce and Religion
By Geoffrey Sykes
Oral Commentary
Transcript
Prolegomenon
This dissertation will begin to collate and explore Peirce’s long term interest in religion, as a biographical background to his better known theories and philosophy. It will argue for a more central place to religion in the interdisciplinary spectrum of specialisms in the polyglot oeuvre of Peirce. In turn, Peirce’s semiotic grounding can be a bridge to a refreshed theology, that is Protestant Christian in origins but extends to a universal and cosmological understanding of the divine, society and human identity.
Intellectually, Peirce’s privileged education, as a teenager and young man, introduced him to a plethora of ideas in philosophy, logic and sciences. Theology would have been part of a broad spectrum, an influence that was not limited to books. He regularly attended a Protestant chapel in Harvard, especially with his first wife Harriet. In the household of his esteemed father Benjamin Peirce, the pre-eminent American mathematician of the time, there was a stable of visitors that reads like a who’s who of American nineteenth century intellectual life. Animated discourses and debates of James Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Agassiz, J. J. Sylvester, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Chauncey Wright, Theodore Parker, Asa Gray, Alexander Dache, William James, Joseph Henry, Gray, and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow imbued Peirce with a privileged confidence about the intellectual life, that would prove to be as much a curse as a blessing in his later years.
Theology would have been discussed as a matter of course in the long, carpeted and corniced, furnished double living room that ran through the length of the house at 4 Kirkland Place. Charles, who would often appear unmotivated at his school or college studies, was “capable of holding his own amongst elders”. The household became a stage for a distinct play of ideas, with interests ranging from applied sciences, botany, mathematics, surveying, literature, theology, politics and journalistic essays, at a buoyant time following the conclusion of the Civil War, that can be called an American Renaissance.
The evidence is that Charles actively joined in such meetings, and was encouraged to do so, from quite an early age. He is recorded as sitting at the knee of Henry Thoreau, and by his own account the influence of literary romantic or transcendental writing that typified New England at the time was etched onto his consciousness as a boy. “I was born and reared in the neighbourhood of Concord, at the time when Emerson, Hedge and their friends were disseminating the ideas they caught from Friedrich von Schelling.”
As a young adult Peirce prioritised his rich multidisciplinary background. Despite attending a local Harvard chapel with his wife Harriet, any scholarly interest in religion, and literature disappeared while he was aspiring to an academic career at Harvard and then at John Hopkins University. Whatever theological or literary New England influences might have been present for his upbringing, he eschewed these as he focused on a scientific and mathematical grounding for logic. He explicitly eschewed New England transcendentalism as espoused by Emerson, during this first stage of his adult life from 1867-1885 – even though he returned to it as a resource for ongoing religious, semiotic and philosophical thinking after 1885.
What was so pivotal about the year 1885? By 1885 his aspiration to find a permanent teaching position at two universities had failed – likewise his long standing employment at the US Coastal Survey was being questioned, and also would soon end. In January 1884 his contract to lecture logic at John Hopkins ended in a way, as Corrington notes, that is still the “subject of speculation”. What “so offended” President Pulman in this popular and respected lecturer (who had Dewey and Royce among his ardent student followers. Why was his position terminated, if, as it appears, there seems to be no substantial issue about the quality of his academic work? The answer is manifold, and long standing concerns about advocacy of Darwin, and his nascent theism certainly did not help his cause.
Peirce’s forthright espousal of Darwin’s theory of evolution, at the so termed “Metaphysical Club”, might have been shared among his immediate intellectual peers, like William James and Oliver Holmes. Yet it equally can be seen as rebellious of public and religious mores in the wider New England society. Peirce could have been unaware, or indifferent, to the apoplectic dialectic between Darwinism and Christianity. New England was not the bible bent south – a rapprochement was possible with Darwin in terms of a vision of liberal buoyant prosperous America that had emerged or evolved from the Civil War, and from the tyranny of slavery. The emergence of modern America was part of God’s plan, achieved through evolutionary progress. This was the religious version of the utilitarian albeit secular vision that Oliver Holmes argued in the Club. Protestantism was a social gospel, with the local church acting as a hub for contact and networking. Peirce however rejected any form of social Darwinism or God inspired evolution, in favour of a strict scientific and mathematical conception of biology and creation. He was at variance to the dominant and progressive scientific, social, and religious discourses of his time, and denied any mainstream religious accommodation of Darwin. Without doubt Peirce’s forthright defence of his views on Darwin would have been known – on and off campus – beyond the confines of the self appointed Metaphysical Club.
Religion played another source of Peirce’s public disfavour, perhaps more serious and dangerous than Darwinism, precisely because it was unspoken and involved values that ran deep in nineteenth century society. In 1885 Peirce published a “Review of Royce”, which explicitly addressed belief in God not as traditionally understood as omnipotent, but in terms of chance, development, and moral relativity – that is, according to themes that would come to be known in the mature semiotic category of Firstness. “I think that the existence of God, as well as we can conceive of it, consists in this, that a tendency toward ends is so necessary a constituent of the universe that the mere action of chance upon innumerable atoms has an inevitable teleological result. One of the ends so brought about is the development of intelligence and of knowledge; and therefore I should say that God’s omniscience, humanly conceived, consists in the fact that knowledge in its development leaves no question unanswered. ” (8.44) Oral dissertation must have preceded this publication, and if anything caused suspicion of his effect on the “moral conduct of the young” (surely an ironic phrase to use against Peirce, so concerned as he was with conduct).
Peirce’s divorce from his first wife, Harriet, a professional feminist and social agitator, was fair and harmonious: Harriet was a theologically grounded feminist, quite advanced for her time, and there appears to be mutual resp[ect and sympathy at the time of their separation. Any lack of shared interests can be attributed in part to religion – Harriet was close to the progressive social christianity of her time, while Charles was more abstract and universal in his thinking.
What might have been of more concern to local authorities about his personal conduct, as determined by morals based on religious codes, was less his diveroce and more his second marriage to the enigmatic younger French woman, Juliet, in 1884. Did an earlier liaison of Peirce with Juliet suddenly become known at the time of marriage? Why was this one, almost decent and lawful deed, so harshly judged, when the sexual indiscretion of his accusers went unnoticed? Why did some sense of social scandal follow and frustrate him for the next 30 years?
Marital status was a contributing, if exaggerated, reason, for conspiratorial ostracism that had profound effect, positive and negative, on the productivity of a major American intellectual – and on the history of American and semiotic thought generally? What explanation is there for the strange isomorph of crisis, in pragmatic ideas and in career, for Peirce’s mid life development?
Peirce could be very exuberant in his exchange of ideas – something learned in his father’s household. He vigorously defended his preferred lifestyle and matters of personal justice. Faced with exclusion from Hopkins he engaged in sustained, litigious and obdurate complaints for years after 1885, which would have cemented rather than restored any breach, and added post hoc fuel to superficial judgments of his reputation, of being a brilliant yet difficult personality and obscure in ideas who brought his unnecessary difficulties and finally failure on himself.
Was Peirce’s self pleading the exaggerated indulgence of a “dandy” as his biographer argues, or did he have no option, faced as he was with dire and arbitrary loss of employment? Hypotheses in Peirce’s favour are needed to explain the extent of the indifference and opposition that would prevail long after the circumstance of 1885 and through the condition of ignominious poverty of his latter years.
By the mid 80’s, the Coastal Survey, which provided his main security, came under close public scrutiny, with political appointees substituted for its scientific leadership, and a public commission set up to examine its expenditures and efficiency. A long tradition of sinecured scientific research work, supplementing core survey work, was suddenly regarded as a public scandal and greatly restricted “ treasury officials … had come to regard the [coast survey] as a supercilious little aristocracy of scientists, who considered themselves an entirely self contained and independent organisation, accountable only to Congress”. It appears that the service stopped its field work, as a result of this inquiry. Peirce’s independent research, into gravity for example, was singled out as an example of such shortcomings. Ironically, it was the cessation of field work that gave him, after 1885, several years of income with lesser duties in which he could continue private research.
These attacks on Peirce were a secondary cause of his moral disapprobation, compounding his agnosticism about the Protestant faith, and innuendos about his personal life. It is on record that his work with the Survey was a cause of increased concern at Hopkins – although this was ironic in terms of demands on his time. Such judgments were unfair, emotional and motivated politically. Peirce earned no more than $500,000 at today’s rate for 20 years work in the service – hardly the basis for corruption or indulgence. His work at Hopkins was also part-time and equally moderate. His international success in publication of scientific papers was exemplary, and should have been automatic grounds for tenure at Hopkins, not the opposite.
This is the point: it was the distinctive quality and innovation of his work, both recognised and unrecognised, scientific and non-scientific, that was misconstrued by the managerial, commercial and religious culture of his time. His bete noir Newcombe, who stimulated and focused opposition to Peirce’s academic work, had little grasp of the main directions of Peirce’s scientific or mathematical inquiries. Newcombe betrayed the loyalty and support shown to him as a student by Peirce. Newcombe’s outspoken ignorance about the mathematics of infinity did not stop him singlehandedly constructing a biased case against the worth of Peirce’s work – rather it typified the flawed judgment of a new commercial values. Such was this unrecognised quality that few in America understood the nature of his gravity experiments; no one on the reconstituted Coastal Service was in a position to assess his pleadings for continuation. In a way work that would be done after 1885 followed ironically from the failure of a quite outstanding scientific and mathematical career.
Peirce’s international contacts were not an optional, but an essential, part of an audience that included the “community of inquiry” that he sought at Hopkins during his stay there. Any degree of public political disfavour could only be compounded by a growing nationalism that accompanied economic progress. A reputation earned overseas and managed by European trips, was viewed ambiguously, much too readily misconstrued as exotic or extravagant. The marriage, courted in France, was doubly damned. Peirce could not win against a barrage of innuendo provoked by political grandstanding. Peirce maintained an international, cosmopolitan indeed cosmological context for his research that was defined by his falling out with localised American society. This cosmopolitan period of Peirce’s life, commencing in 1885, foregrounded religion in theological and semiotic/logical terms that helped Peirce transcend the factional, nationalist factors that has ended his youthful plans.
Further development of this dissertation will outline two ongoing directions in Peirce’s theology. The first, what has been often termed, pansemiotic, and the second, lless commonly referenced, will explore what will be theologically termed, the Spirit in Thirdness.