Purcell

The Postmodern Peirce

Frank Palmer Purcell

3:32 p. m. A muffled series of explosions, a great cloud of dust,

and the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project is no more. The modern age
comes to an end on July 15, 1972 in St. Louis, Missouri, according to
architectural historian Charles Jencks1, and the postmodern era is born.
Some seven years later the government of Quebec commissions Jean
Francois Lyotard's report on The Postmodern Condition2, and the thing is
official. (German philosopher-theologian Romano Guardini had published
The End of the Modern World3 in 1945, a more insightful and
comprehensive treatment, one pretty largely ignored4. Never mind.)
A generation of intellectuals is born, graduated, and tenured when
a graduate student of urban planning crashes a stolen 767 into a more
grandiose project of the same architectural

firm, and a more widely

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

Indeed, July 15 was little noted at the time and is now

remembered only by English Department professors of postmodernism.

And surely the Islamicist destruction of the World Trade Center and the
1 What is Post-Modernism? (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986).
2 The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1979).
3 Wilmington: ISI Books, 2001
4 As are John Lukacs' The Passing of the Modern Age (1970), The End of the Twentieth
Century and the End of the Modern Age (1993), and At the End of An Age (2002), and
the much earlier writings of Nikolai Berdyaev.
5 The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory), PMLA Vol. 120, Number 3
(May,2005), p. 74.

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wars that followed are events closer in magnitude to the self-destruction

of the West analyzed by Guardini.

It was clearly Mohammad Atta's

intention to strike at the chief symbol of the world-dominating Secular

(infidel) City, and surely Al Quaeda wanted to set the clock back to
September 11, 1683, the last high water mark of Islam in Europe, the day
before the Poles relieved the siege of Vienna6.

(We shall return to St.

Louis in due course.)

For Lyotard the distinguishing mark of postmodernity is our
growing disbelief in the grand historical narratives generally used to
legitimize the status quo. To be sure, such narratives had been called
into serious question by Herbert, later Sir Herbert, Butterfield in The Whig
Interpretation of History (1931), but as late as 1992 Francis Fukuyama
was still insisting, in The End of History and the Last Man7, that the
human race had at last reached the end of its long pilgrimage in a world
civilization based on secular liberal democratic welfare capitalism.
Resistance is futile; the West seemed to be saying, you will be
assimilated.8 A turn of the Millennium variation held that America, as
champion of the West, had won three world wars, two against the
Germans and one against the Soviets, and was now engaged in a fourth,
6 When the Turks left their coffee behind, the Viennese christened the version with
milk cappuccino, after Capuchin friar Mark of Aviano, who did so much to rally
Europe to the cause. On April 27, 2003, Pope John Paul II elevated Mark to the rank
of beatus, one step short of full sainthood. Muslims are not the only ones with long
memories. (John Paul died before he could confer the same distinction upon Charles
de Foucalud, a former soldier of the French Foreign Legion, a priest and an expert on
Tuareg linguistics, who became a hermit in the Sahara, living in poverty, peace, and
friendship with his Muslim neighbors. John Paul's successor is following through
with the beatification.)
7 New York: Free Press, 1992, incorporating and elaborating upon The End of
History? in The National Interest, Summer 1989.
8 According to Stanley Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1996), p. 1, the original Star Trek series is modern, the Next Generation,
postmodern. The Borg, then must be seen as the return of the repressed modern to
haunt the incompletely postmodern..

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against the Arabs.

Lyotard's criterion of disbelief in grand narrative leads one to doubt
that the world as a whole has achieved the postmodern condition.
Postmodernism remains an ideology of the academic elite, and one not
entirely without grand narratives of its own.

What is perhaps more

embarrassing, it seems to define the literary Modernists of the first third

of the last century as postmodern, which would hardly do. After all, it
was Eliot who wrote that A people without history/ Is not redeemed
from time, for history is a pattern/ Of timeless moments. And what are
the Cantos but an attempt at a collage of such timeless moments,
magnificent in detail, monstrous as a whole?

In Finnegans Wake the

timeless moments of all human history are eternally present in the

speech act of a dream.

For better or worse, it is the giants we call

Modernists who leave behind the grand narratives of liberal complacency.

And in so doing they call into question the universal ethics of the
Enlightenment in favor of, in Pound's case, the supposed glory of
Malatesta and the squalid brutality of Mussolini; perhaps only Eliot's
Christian faith and Joyce's solipsism preserve them from the glamour of
Fascism. Fascism is postmodern too, and for the most part consciously
so.
Many critics, like Michel Foucault, point to Friedrich Nietzsche, a
great favorite of the Fascists, as the paradigmatic postmodernist, though
this has done nothing for the canonical status of Henry Mencken, our
Baltimore Nietzschean. Nietzsche, the rogue classical philologist whose
brilliant essays teeter on the brink of syphilitic delusion, has remarkably
little to offer in the way of philosophy strictly speaking, especially in
comparison with Sren Kierkegaard, whose critique of bourgeois
Hegelianism raises all the postmodern issues, but whose Anabaptist
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flavored Christianity9 is still distinctly unfashionable. John Deely's The

Beginning of Postmodern Times, Or: Charles Sanders Peirce and the
Recovery of Signum10 proposes the American Aristotle, as he has been
well called, as the paradigm case. This is not as preposterous as it may
appear, for Peirce has been an acknowledged inspiration for postmodern
figures as diverse as Richard Rorty, Jrgen Habermas, Umberto Eco, and
Walker Percy.
For Deely, as for Eco, semeiology is a central concern, perhaps the
central concern of philosophy. Peirce was long credited as the inventor of
this arcane discipline, but Deely shows that he merely picked it up where
John Poinsot11 (1594-1644) had left it. In the theory of signs it is the
modern period which constitutes the dark ages. For Peirce, viewing the
matter as a mathematician and laboratory scientist, this is true of
philosophy as a whole, a view which goes against the grand narrative of
the history of philosophy most of us have learned12.
If we care to have an official date for the beginning of the
postmodern era in philosophy, Deely informs us, the 14th of May, 1867,

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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the date Peirce's delivered his New List of Categories,13 would

suffice.14 The doctrine of categories takes out into deep waters, whether
Aristotle's categories of things, Kant's categories of thought, or Peirce's
categories of... pretty much all of that and anything else, and all of which
would be pretty rough sailing for most of the folks who like to talk about
the postmodern. So we will open up the time frame a little, a very little, if
only to get back to St. Louis.
St. Louis. Heart of the American heartland. Future birthplace of T.
S. Eliot. Cauldron of postmodernism. The year is 1866; a high school
shorthand teacher, soon to be Superintendent of Schools and, eventually,
U.S. Commissioner of Education and a German immigrant found the St.
Louis Philosophical Society.

It is the beginning of professional

philosophy in the United States.

To be sure, colleges had courses in

mental and moral philosophy, based on Christian doctrine and Scottish

common sense realism, and taught by the president or some other
clergyman, but this is not what is, or was, commonly understood by the
term philosophy as used by the educated.

Neither was the kind of

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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computer, like dishwasher, was a job title before it was an appliance.

The high speed digital electronic computer is perhaps the visible sign of
the postmodern age, and of course Peirce, as a chief architect of Boolean
algebra and binary arithmetic as we know them today, has as much right
as anyone else to be called its inventor, though he died before there were
any digital components to build one with.15
It is in the second paper of the series, Some Consequences of Four
Incapacities,16 that Peirce makes it clear what he is taking on: Descartes
is the father of modern philosophy, and the spirit of Cartesianism -- that
which principally distinguishes it from the scholasticism which it
displaced -- may be compendiously stated as follows... ,17 as we shall see
in a minute.

In some, or all of these respects, most modern

philosophers have been, in effect, Cartesians. Now without wishing to

return to scholasticism, it seems to me that modern science and modern
logic require us to stand upon a very different platform from this.18
For convenience, let us pair each element of modernism with its
premodern -- and postmodern? -- counterposition:
1. [Modern philosophy] teaches that philosophy must begin with
universal

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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prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of

philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for
they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence
this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt;
and no one who follows the Cartesian method will ever be satisfied
until he has formally recovered all those beliefs which in form he has
given up. It is, therefore, as useless a preliminary as going to the North
Pole would be in order to get to Constantinople by coming down
regularly upon a meridian. A person may, it is true, in the course of his
studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that
case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on
account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in
philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.
2. [Modern philosophy] teaches that the ultimate test of certainty is to be
found in the individual consciousness; whereas scholasticism had
rested on the testimony of sages and of the Catholic Church.
The same formalism [as before] appears in the Cartesian criterion [of
certainty], which amounts to this: "Whatever I am clearly convinced of,
is true." If I were really convinced, I should have done with reasoning
and should require no test of certainty. But thus to make single
individuals absolute judges of truth is most pernicious. The result is
that metaphysicians will all agree that metaphysics has reached a pitch
of certainty far beyond that of the physical sciences; -- only they can
agree upon nothing else. In sciences in which men come to agreement,
when a theory has been broached it is considered to be on probation
until this agreement is reached. After it is reached, the question of
certainty becomes an idle one, because there is no one left who doubts
it. We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate
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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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Peirce here attacks not only the content of post-Cartesian

philosophy, empiricist as well as rationalist, but the very method of
modern thought, a method the St. Louis philosopher Walter Ong would
trace back to one Petrus Ramus (1515-1572). The title of Ong's book is
telling: Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue20. The Ramist ideal of
discourse is not dialogue or the discovery of truth, but the exposition,
that is to say, the imposition, of truth. This should give postmodernists
pause. It would be Foucault's great theme that all discourse is of this
type, a dance of domination and submission, and the whole prior
literature of deconstruction might easily be read as a struggle by the
critic to wrest authority from the author. The enterprise of Foucault and
the deconstructionists is not as patently absurd as it first seems when
viewed as the coming into consciousness of an authoritarian structure
present from the very beginning of the modern project, the inevitable if
sometimes delayed outcome of which is terrorism21. Having renounced
the give and take of dialogue, Ramus in the end embraced Calvinism and
was murdered on St. Bartholomew's Day. His martyrdom would of course
give his works particular authority in Puritan England and New England,
as well as (perhaps to a lesser degree) in Enlightenment France.
Charles Sanders Peirce, at twenty eight, has no particular
foreknowledge of Derrida and Foucault, or even of Nietzsche, though
Emerson is a friend of the family. Nevertheless, any account of Peircean
pragmatism as postmodern would seem deeply perverse if it failed to
shed some light on what most people think of as postmodernism.22 It is
20 Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004; originally published in 1958. Of
course it didn't start with Ramus. See Ong's Chaper VII, The Pedagogical Juggernaut.
Again, the title says it all.
21 Foucault is particularly concerned to describe the growth of the machinery of terror
in the modern period.
22 That is, most people who think of postmodernism at all. That most people in general
have no use for the term doesn't mean that it's up for grabs.

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useful in this regard to view modernity as the Ramist reality tunnel23 of

which the classical postmoderns and their predecessors have reached the
dead end, from which they do not know how to escape. Their general
failure to come to grips with great works of literary or visual art despite
their frequent brilliance when treating daily life and popular culture is
clearly due to the fact that the great artists of the last half millennium
never descended into the modern tunnel for long. Their embarrassing
tendency to fall in love with terrorism, rightist as well as leftist, can
be best understood as an inability to get beyond that rationalism which
Michael Oakeshott24 well described as rampant in his times and which
still rules in ours. We have already noted the belief that the long history
of the human race has come at last to a triumphant conclusion in Western
Europe and North America, to which the rest of the world must submit or
be damned.25
Peirce, on the other hand, wants to restore the philosophy of
dialogue. For him, the search for truth is a collaborative effort. There is
no need for the solitary savant to jump start the process of inquiry by
systematically doubting everything; there is always enough disagreement
already in the community of inquirers to suggest fruitful lines of
investigation.

Nor need the inquirer aspire to absolute subjective

certainty as the criterion of success; it is enough to be able to persuade

competent colleagues.

The only really binding rule of method is not to

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.

Contrary to the hijacked pragmatism, truth is not

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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modern science as it has built upon its medieval foundations,

foundations that are more generally acknowledged today than they were
in Peirce's lifetime.

What comes next might give the hardiest

contemporary thinker, the face he presents to the modern world freshly

shaved with Occam's razor, real vertigo.
But it follows that since no cognition of ours is absolutely
determinate, generals must have a real existence. Now this scholastic
realism is usually set down as a belief in metaphysical fictions. But, in
fact, a realist is simply one who knows no more recondite reality than
that which is represented in a true representation. Since, therefore, the
word "man" is true of something, that which "man" means is real. The
nominalist must admit that man is truly applicable to something; but he
believes that there is beneath this a thing in itself, an incognizable reality.
His is the metaphysical figment. Modern nominalists are mostly
superficial men, who do not know, as the more thorough Roscellinus and
Occam did, that a reality which has no representation is one which has no
relation and no quality. The great argument for nominalism is that there
is no man unless there is some particular man. That, however, does not
affect the realism of Scotus; for although there is no man of whom all
further determination can be denied, yet there is a man, abstraction being
made of all further determination. There is a real difference between man
irrespective of what the other determinations may be, and man with this
or that particular series of determinations, although undoubtedly this
difference is only relative to the mind and not in re. Such is the position
of Scotus31. Occam's great objection32 is, there can be no real distinction
which is not in re, in the thing-in-itself; but this begs the question for it
31 "Eadem natura est, qu in existentia per gradum singularitatis est determinata, et in
intellectu, hoc est ut habet relationem ad intellectum ut cognitum ad cognoscens, est
indeterminata." -- Quaestiones Subtillissimae, lib. 7, qu. 18. [CSP]
32 See his argument Summa logices, part. 1, cap. 16. [CSP]

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is itself based only on the notion that reality is something independent of

representative relation.33
None of this is going to upset the science majors much, if any
science majors are reading this.

After all, the chemist as such is

interested in the properties of carbon as such, not in this diamond on a

woman's finger, or in that lump of coal in a child's Christmas stocking.
It's the liberal arts majors who are most likely to go ballistic here, the
professoriat in particular.

Academic humanists are heavily invested,

most of them, in a grand narrative of the history of ideas in which Occam

is acclaimed as our intellectual ancestor precisely because since he
invented the razor34 respectable people have derided the reality of
universals, denying that universal terms referred to anything but
particulars, and to them only in a confused way. Nominalism reached a
kind of peak in the General Semantics movement around 1950.

This

teaching holds that belief in the metaphysics of nominalism is a major

criterion of sanity. Popular psychotherapist Albert Ellis agreed, and the
theory was built into such high pressure human potential marathons as
EST, taken by thousands of the Hollywood elite in the 1970s. It is also the
basis of at least one classic work of science fiction, and of a new
language, English Prime, which forbids all forms of the verb to be
because all is statements are lies. It was in the midst of this popular
culture that deconstructionism, with its insistence that general terms are
all merely cultural constructs, took root in departments of English.
In 1948, when the General Semantics fad was sweeping academic
America, a University of Chicago instructor of English set out to write
another book about the dissolution of the West. In it he likens Western
33 CP 5.312.
34 The celebrated but fairly superfluous remark that entities should not be multiplied
unnecessarily is often referred to as Occam's razor.

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man to the unfortunate Macbeth: Have we forgotten our encounter with

the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and
what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man
could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the
existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working
subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly
innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism
in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of
Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern
decadence. No doubt Peirce would have agreed with the thrust of this,
while criticizing the author's use of the term existence rather than
reality.
It

was

William

of

Occam,

Richard

Weaver

wrote,

who

propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that

universals have a real existence. His triumph tended to leave universal
terms mere names serving our convenience. The issue ultimately involved
is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of,
man; and the answer to the question is decisive for ones view of the
nature and destiny of humankind. The practical result of nominalist
philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and
to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. With this change
in the affirmation of what is real,, the whole orientation of culture takes a
turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism.35
Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences became something of a
bestseller, and the inspiration of generations of political, social, and
cultural reactionaries who didn't have a clue what he was talking about.
35 Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1948), p. 3.

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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.

But that is precisely the problem.

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.

And that is often enough to make any

open sympathy with the Peircean critique of nominalism a distinct

professional liability in some places, and to make the whole idea of a
postmodern Peirce a little harder to take seriously.
Still, if the essence of modernity is not only the Ramist-Cartesian
model of discourse, but the break with the medieval conviction of the
reality of universals, then Peirce is the first philosopher to fully
understand modernity and thoroughly explore the alternative to it, and
Weaver is the first to openly advocate medieval realism in the general
culture. Yet Weaver must not be imagined as totally isolated. During the
writing of Ideas Have Consequences, Weaver had the occasional beer with
Canadian polymath Herbert Marshall McLuhan, a deep student of
Scholasticism.38 McLuhan had already turned his student Walter Ong to
36 In a 50th anniversary symposium on the book, Ben Toledano complained of the fickle
nature of present day conservatives whose struggle in search of heroes is badly
impaired by their own poorly formulated principles... The consequences of his ideas
should be alarming to many who awkwardly wear the fashionable garment of
conservatism... Thinkers who can't conveniently be pigeonholed present obstacles to
frantic men scrambling to get nowhere quickly. In Ted J. Smith III (ed.) Steps Toward
Restoration, The Consequences of Richard Weaver's Ideas (Wilmington: ISI Books,
1998), p.257.
37 At least the last Pius. So-called Movement Conservatives didn't take to his successors
(Mater si, magister, no!), and probably didn't understand Pacelli himself as well as
they thought they did.
38 McLuhan saw himself as a Thomist of sorts... Besides, he was keen to revive a
Catholic scholasticism in part to combat what he was convinced was an unrestrained

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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.

Hutchins himself had just written The Great Conversation, his

introductory volume to Britannica's Great Books of the Western World, in

which he characterized Western Civilization as the civilization of the
dialolgue, built upon a canon of literature the authors of which were
speaking to each other's concerns over the span of centuries.40 Only the
single work, taken artificially in isolation from the rest, could be
described as didactic, nondialogical, thus modern in our bad sense of the
term. It is amusing to note that Richard Weaver was himself too much
the modern to appreciate the Chicago style of encouraging students to
figure out the ultimate things for themselves;

there was too much

emphasis on dialectic, bordering on superficial cleverness, and too little

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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respect for the eternal verities to suit his sensibility.41

For Charles Peirce the real problem is not the reality of universals,
but the reality of individuals, himself included:

For, as the fact that

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

41 In 1997 the University hosted a Conference on After Postmodernism. A summary

was published on line at http://www.focusing.org/apm.htm (as of October, 2005) by
Eugene Gendlin and his associates: Like post-modernism, but a generation earlier,
the University of Chicago shifted the recognition of ungrounded variety from the
outer limits of thought to the center and the beginning. No student can be here for
more than a few weeks without encountering our ethos that there are many
intellectual approaches to any issue, and no possible resolution of this fact. For
example: One professor tells an audience of first-year students: 'The University of
Chicago holds that every approach is canceled out by some other approach, so there
is no point in studying any of them.' The students laugh. This indicates both that they
have already encountered the problem, and that it is a puzzle, since they find the
thinking here so extremely exciting and rewarding. Obviously the different viewpoints
do not just cancel out, but how and why not has never been articulated. This was
precisely Weaver's issue with the Chicago ethos.
42 CP 5.314.

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lived with a woman not his wife43 --

as well. Now the organism is

only an instrument of thought. But the identity of a man consists in the

consistency of what he does and thinks, and consistency is the intellectual
character of a thing; that is, is its expressing something.44

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.

But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven;

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.

But, as the movie put it

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

deconstructionist should ask why we so privilege our own species, we

may answer semiologically that reality itself is a matter of sign, and it is
to us alone, as far as we know directly, that signs signify51. And that is all
well and good, but Virginia Woolf suggests that apart from the significant
moment our lives are pointless, and gives a rather painful example of
what one might do, and perhaps ought to do, when the memory of such
moments fades along with the hope for any to come. In a way, perhaps,
Virginia's suicide is her own business. But in another way, all conscious,
deliberate suicide legitimizes murder, calling into radical question the
privileged status of humanity as embodied in the individual human life.
A renewed and deepened sense of the reality of universals may well
be required for the preservation and recovery of our basic human
decency. But it is not nearly enough, even intellectually. After all, how
many men, women, and children have been tortured and murdered, are
being tortured and murdered even now, for the sake of some abstract
idea of humanity or another?

We need to see each individual human

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

57 Tempered, perhaps, with a certain existentialism.

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