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MENAND_PIERCED

                                             February 07, 2010


   Menand's discussion of Charles
   S. Peirce may be a little light        MENAND_HAACKED
   on his philosophy, but there's
   no shortage of biographical            TRAITORS_OF_INTELLECT
   information.

     In particular, Menand seems to have
     the true academic's fascination
     with vying for position: the
     process of application, the need to
     hustle recommendations, the damage
     that can be done by a whispering
     campaign against you...

           Could it be that Menand
           regards Peirce's failure at
           this game as evidence of an
           actual failing in the man as
           an intellectual?  A sign that
           this particular pragmatist        If you don't know what to
           wasn't very pragmatic?            do when opportunity knocks,
                                             what else don't you know?



    MENAND_CLUBBED

    "His [Peirce's] weakness (apart from a
    chronic inability to finish things) is a
    little unexpected in a person so
    committed to logic and the art of clear        What he thinks of as a
    thinking: a lack of proportion.  Every         logical sense of
    relevant idea seemed equally important to      proportion has little
    him, and while he was composing he rarely      to do with mathematical
    glimpsed a path down which he was not          logic, and perhaps
    tempted to wander ... This accounts for a      little to do with
    lot of the incompleteness: almost every        "clear thinking"; it is
    time he wrote a fresh draft (and he            more of a practical
    customarily wrote many), Peirce sooner or      requirement for getting
    later found himself on an unanticipated        the task at hand
    detour with no clear route back to his         done...
    main point.  His drafts tend to start in
    the same place and wind up in widely           (A kind of pragmatism?)
    divergent cul-de-sacs"
                                                     It is a flaw to be
     --Menand, "The Metaphysical Club", p. 275       expected in someone who
                                                     sees that all fields are
                                                     connected, who regards
                                                     every one of his thoughts
                                                     as a part of an organic
                                                     whole, a "philosophy".

                                 Here Menand shows a
                                 lack of understanding
                                 of Peirce, certainly      A wandering,
                                 a lack of sympathy.       infinitely
                                                           branching body
                  Just as reading Bertrand Russell         or writings
                  on the subject of Dewey makes            makes perfect
                  me feel the need to look at the          sense to me.
                  original, so with reading
                  Menand on Charles Peirce.

  Menand's summary of Peirce's
  thought looks like a strange        "[Peirce] did not think chance variation
  dueling of opposed principles:      could explain evolution adequately-- he
                                      thought God's love must play a more
    An insistance on absolutes,       important role, a theory he called
    combined with a view of           'agapism,' ...  and derived in part from
    knowledge as an ungrounded        the Swedenborgian writings of Henry
    network of symbols.               James, Sr.-- and he could not imagine a
                                      universe devoid of ultimate meaning.  He
                                      was quite explicit on this point:
                                      'physical evolution works towards ends in
                                      the same way that mental action works
                                      towards ends,' he wrote in 1902 ... "

                                      -- p.365, Menand, "The Metaphysical Club"


  "Peirce thought that our representations
  can be classified, filled out, and
  elaborated in all sorts of ways, that
  they can even become 'better,' in the
  sense of 'more useful,' as we peel off
  their metaphysical husks.  But we can
  never (as individuals) say that they are
  identical with their objects.  This is
  not just because our knowledge always
  'swims,' as Peirce put it, 'in a
  continuum of uncertainty and of
  indeterminacy'; ... it is also because--
  and this is the distinctive feature of
  Peirce's theory of signs-- there are no
  prerepresentational objects out there.
  Things are themselves signs: their being
  signs is a condition of their being
  things at all.  You can call this notion
  counterintuitive, because that is exactly
  what it is: it is part of Perice's attack
  on the idea that we can know something
  intuitively-- that is, without the
  mediation of representations.  For
  Peirce, knowing was inseparable from what
  he called semiosis, the making of signs,
  and of the making of signs there is no
  end.  If you look up a word in the
  dictionary, you can find it defined by a
  string of other words, the meanings of
  which can be discovered by looking them
  up in a dictionary, leading to more words
  to be looked up in turn.  There is no
  exit from the dictionary.  Peirce didn't
  simply think that language is like that.
  He thought that the universe is like
  that."

    -- p.364, Menand, "The Metaphysical Club"



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