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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 proportion
    relevant idea seemed equally important to      has little to do with
    him, and while he was composing he rarely      mathematical logic, and
    glimpsed a path down which he was not          perhaps little to do with
    tempted to wander ... This accounts for a      "clear thinking"; it is
    lot of the incompleteness: almost every        more of a practical
    time he wrote a fresh draft (and he            requirement for getting the
    customarily wrote many), Peirce sooner or      task at hand done...
    later found himself on an unanticipated
    detour with no clear route back to his         (A kind of pragmatism?)
    main point.  His drafts tend to start in
    the same place and wind up in widely             It is a flaw to be
    divergent cul-de-sacs"                           expected in someone who
                                                     sees that all fields are
     --Menand, "The Metaphysical Club", p. 275       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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