Reverence for the Relations of Life

Re-imagining Pragmatism via Josiah Royce's Interactions with Peirce, James, and Dewey

Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J.

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780268159870
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

Josiah Royce and William James lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Irving Street, just two doors apart, and Charles Peirce grew up only blocks away. John Dewey was born and educated in nearby Vermont. These four great thinkers shared more than geographic space; they engaged in a series of formative philosophical discussions. By tracing the interactions of Royce (1855–1916) with James, Peirce, and Dewey, Oppenheim "re-imagines pragmatism" in a way that highlights the late Royce's role as mediator and favors the "seed-plant" image of O. W. Holmes, Jr., over the corridor image of Papini.

Josiah Royce emphasized that communities of all sizes—ranging from families to towns—needed "reverence for the relations of life" not only to thrive but to survive. This theme permeates the dialectic of Royce's interactions with Peirce, James, and Dewey. Oppenheim analyzes the agreement and disagreement of these thinkers on the method and content of philosophy, skepticism and intelligibility, and nominalism and intentionality, as he uncovers their varied stances toward transcendent Reality.

Oppenheim repudiates Ralph Barton Perry's tactic of using Royce as a foil to display James positively, by offering a richer portrait of Royce. Oppenheim calls attention to Royce's "doctrine of two levels" and its effects on the distinction of human and super-human, by showing the contrast of Royce's "third attitude of will" against two primarily self-centered attitudes of will, and by examining the roles of Spirit, Community, and semiotic process in Royce's late thought.

PARTI

Royce and Peirce

CHAPTER1

We and Royce Meet Charles Peirce

In his review of The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, Robert Burch states that its author, John Clendenning, succeeds in emphasizing Royce’s relation to Charles Sanders Peirce. Burch goes on to say that this relationship “is one of such tremendous import for the study of Royce that it is almost impossible to trumpet it enough.”¹ Clearly, the more one studies the late Royce, the more one detects the increasing “Peirceanization” and uniqueness of Royce’s mind. Although historians of classical American philosophy rightly avoid going to the extreme of claiming that Peirce’s mind also became “Royceanized,” they often lose sight of the interaction and increasing nexus of these two thinkers. Since Peirce was sixteen years older than Royce, first he and then the pragmatism he fathered deserve an introduction.

CHARLES PEIRCE

Amid that “cultural and intellectual ferment” which Van Wyck Brooks called “the flowering of New England,” Charles Sanders Peirce was born of Benjamin and Sarah Mills Peirce on 10 September 1839, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.² His father was Harvard’s outstanding mathematician and astronomer, acute both scientifically and religiously. He detected Charles’s precocity early on and personally supervised his education. Charles’s mother, Sarah, daughter of a U.S. Senator, was the heart of the family, lovingly serving her husband, daughter, and three sons. In this family, she especially indulged her eminent husband and her idiosyncratic son, Charles.

When eight years old Charles began his chemistry studies. To foster creativity and instill intellectual discipline, his father sometimes forced young Charles to play double dummy with him. Throughout the night, he corrected every logical mistake the lad made and required increased attention. His father tutored fifteen-year-old Charles in mathematics and challenged him to compete with him as the teenager developed. In 1855, as a Harvard freshman, Charles immersed himself in Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters and soon studied Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason so thoroughly that he had many of its passages memorized. The fact that in 1859 he graduated from Harvard in the lowest third of his class showed how little many of the traditional courses interested him. Yet it concealed Charles’s inner fire for science, logic, and mathematics which would soon flare up and blaze.

Almost throughout his life, Charles suffered from myalgia of the cheeks (trigeminal neuralgia). Its attacks occurred irregularly but caused intense pain. Charles regularly used ether and opium as a palliative and near the end of his life perhaps added cocaine. This affliction may have contributed to his “two-sided behavior—pleasant, cheerful, and charming at times,” but when hit by the neuralgia attacks, “aloof, cold, impatient, with occasional outbursts of violent temper.”³

Something of his sensitivity toward religion expressed itself when he, as a Harvard senior, identified three religious events to start the record of his life. After a youthful period of atheism, he joined the Episcopal Church, “without believing anything but the general essence and spirit of it,” yet always wanting communion with it.⁴ Later he felt disdain for the dogmatic tone of Christianity’s basic claims and for the theologians who propounded them. As for religious actions, he generally abandoned going to church, except for a notable experience in 1892,⁵ and avoided denominational practices until nearly the end of his life when he sometimes used his Episcopal prayer book. Perhaps his aesthetic appreciation of the Mystery “supremely admirable” flowered most strongly in his famous 1908 article, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.”⁶

From 1861 until 1891 Peirce served as a research scientist in the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. Doing so meant that at first he carried out scientific investigations in the swamps of Louisiana and on the mountains of Maine. Meanwhile he also pioneered in studying the measurements of the pendulum movements and stellar spectometry. In 1878 he published his astronomical studies in a work entitled Photometric Researches. Such investigations soon made scientific colleagues in Stuttgart, Paris, and London aware of his trailblazing work in astronomy, geodesy, and logic. In these ways he made an international name for himself among scientists and logicians.

In 1861, Charles entered the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. In 1872, he was a founding member of the Cambridge Metaphysical Club. There he fathered his idea of pragmatism—an idea that would seed a philosophical revolution. From 1879 to 1884, Peirce taught logic at The Johns Hopkins University and there created with his students a groundbreaking work, entitled Studies in Logic.

In 1862 he married Harriet Melusina Fay, familiarly known as Zina. This granddaughter of an Episcopal bishop reputedly calmed Charles’s unpredictable and flamboyant character. Yet by calling errant Charles to righteousness and conformity to the church doctrines she held, Zina took steps that hardly rendered their married life agreeable to him. Nor agreeable to her, once reports reached her of Charles’s apparent infidelity. They separated in 1876, and in 1883, only a few days after completing the formality of their divorce, Charles married Juliette Froissy. Hereupon upper-class New Englanders visited such a stigma upon Charles that it led to the termination of his five-year teaching position at Johns Hopkins as Lecturer in Logic. At Harvard, President Eliot’s aversion to Peirce led repeatedly to his being rejected from a possible teaching position there. Yet his friend, William James, often supported by Josiah Royce, occasionally succeeded in bringing “Charlie” into the Cambridge area to lecture on logic and pragmatism. Thus were born Peirce’s now-famous 1898 lectures, “Reasoning and the Logic of Things,” and his 1903 twofold lecture series, entitled “Pragmatism,” and “Some Topics on Logic.” Meanwhile Peirce was eking out partial support for himself and Juliette by drafting contributions to dictionaries and writing book reviews for the Nation until around 1906.

After being excluded from a teaching career and terminated from the Coastal Survey, Peirce descended into the nadir of his life. During his final twenty-six years (1888–1914), he lived with Juliette in an increasingly refurbished home which they called “Arisbe,” near Milford, Pennsylvania. Here he suffered extreme penury and lack of heat as he kept toiling upon the screeds of his works on logic and semiotics.

Of his years around 1897, Peirce wrote that “they have been very miserable and unsuccessful years,—terrible beyond anything that the man of ordinary experience can possibly understand or conceive.”⁷ After this existential low point and the moral renaissance that followed, his emphasis on human life’s summum bonum and the role of community in achieving it revealed his passionate commitment to becoming a more mature human person by exercising his imperative, “vir esto!” “Be a man!” Through the decades of destitution at Arisbe, his care for his second and often sickly wife radiated a compassion and tenderness that one might not readily expect from an acute logician like Peirce. Beside his physical affliction, he probably endured a manic-depressive personality, yet his labors toiled on relentlessly and precisely. Near the end, one of William James’s students discovered Charles in a rooming house in Cambridge, lying near death from malnutrition, so far had he fallen into abject poverty. And on several occasions Peirce threatened to take his life.

In this way a person can begin to tally up some of Peirce’s griefs—physical, economic, social, and psychological. Charles railed against the “gospel of greed,” which he saw animating America’s capitalistic system, especially its “robber barons.” For his unpaid debts he was so hounded by the New Jersey police that during several years he had to disguise himself in order to return to Arisbe. His final years amounted to a slow losing battle with a disease, probably cancer, which eventually caused his death. Thus no one acquainted with the life of Charles Sanders Peirce can avoid recognizing in him “a man acquainted with sorrow.” Still on the positive side, most of his encounters with so many sufferings seem to have made his mind more attentive, accurate, and perspicacious.

A century later, as his largely unpublished writings become published in chronological order, scholars are discovering the depth and brilliance of his work in the logic of relatives and the theory of signs. Today more and more scholars around the world recognize in Charles Peirce the greatest thinker America has produced.

PRAGMATISM

Charles Peirce regarded himself as the “father of pragmatism.” To trace accurately who “fathered an idea” can at times be more difficult than sometimes tracing physical fatherhood. Peirce himself traced pragmatism’s ancestry in modern times back to Berkeley, Kant, and Comte among others and identified Alexander Bain as its “grandfather” because of the latter’s definition of belief as “that upon which a man is prepared to act.”⁸ Yet of pragmatism as a clearly conceived and articulated “method of ascertaining the meanings of hard words and abstract concepts” Peirce claimed to be the principal initiator or “father,” though credit for first popularizing the term “pragmatism” needed to go to William James. From his reading of Peirce’s articles of 1878, the young Royce already caught something of pragmatism’s spirit and gradually developed a philosophy which in his late years he called “absolute pragmatism.” From the start, then, it seems fitting to grow familiar with the term “pragmatism” and some of its meanings, not least of all because this book calls the reader to “re-imagine pragmatism.”

Through the decades the term “pragmatism” has acquired a rainbow of meanings. In popular and business usages, “pragmatism” and “pragmatic” often mean “just get the job done” with amoral efficiency. This sense may not be identified fairly with the two mainly logical meanings of pragmatism that follow, since both of these require an ethical nerve, at least implicitly.

Peirce drew his inspiration from the hypothetical imperatives embedded in the Kantian means-end relationship—e.g., “If you want Z (as an end), do X and Y (as means).” Yet Peirce was also influenced by British thinkers Alexander Bain and J. S. Mill, by evolutionists Charles Darwin and Chauncey Wright, by lawyers Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Nicholas St. John Green, and by physiologist William James. These latter four members of the Cambridge Metaphysical Club concurred with Peirce around 1872 that if an idea is meaningful, it tends to be acted upon; that is, it is a “plan of action” with an inner purpose. The faithful logical working out of a plan of action requires that human reason grasp the connection between a definite human purpose and all its consequences, that is, all the feasibly conceivable and experientially verifiable consequences of the idea. Interacting with Peirce, these four club members also concurred with him when he summarized his pragmatism into what he called a maxim.

Peirce’s “pragmatic maxim” aimed at further clarifying our ideas. In Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1901), Peirce put his maxim as follows: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (CP 5.2).

When interpreting this maxim, William James construed the effects (or consequences) of an idea or belief to lie in what can be experienced internally or externally in the now or near future. James’s followers interpreted the maxim to consist basically in a forward-looking bet about the practical outcome of a plan of action. For example, when one wagers that a particular law (= plan of action) will make a judge decide a case in a particular way (= future consequences), then one is using the pragmatic maxim in James’s way.

Peirce counteracted this Jamesian interpretation by refining his maxim through the years. He insisted instead on the long-range conceivable consequences of an idea or belief. Although he was positivist enough to avoid extreme ontological statements which talk about beings-in-themselves, Peirce became increasingly aware of the opposite danger of nominalism. Since nominalists acknowledge individuals as the only realities, they excluded nature’s general laws, habits, and tendencies from the reality which scientists investigate.

By emphasizing the effects or consequences that can be experienced in the short range, James led to a split in the history of pragmatism. Instead, Peirce focused intently on being led by “general ideas, as the true interpreters of our thought,” that is, by those ideas which lead ultimately “to further the development of concrete reasonableness” (CP 5.3). Using the neologism, “pragmaticism” to identify his own version of pragmatism, he felt sure it would be ugly enough not to be picked up by “kidnappers.”⁹

Thus there arose what can be called Cambridge Pragmatism, with its emphasis on the working out of an idea’s consequences in formal logic (Peirce, Royce, Clarence I. Lewis, Willard Quine, Hillary Putnam) and Instrumentalist Pragmatism, with its emphasis on a logic for solving practical human problems, urban, educational, social, governmental (John Dewey, Jane Addams, George Herbert Mead, John Hermann Randall, Sidney Hook).

Beyond this basic two-pronged way of viewing pragmatism logically, several of its other significant varieties deserve attention. For pragmatists may also be: 1) nominalistic or realistic, 2) naturalist and relativist or idealist and absolutist, 3) prophetic or less than prophetic, and finally, if they are Christian pragmatists, they may be 4) inclusive or exclusive.¹⁰

On 1), the question arises: Is the living idea at the heart of pragmatism at least partly receptive of the real Other as both individual and general? Because Peirce detected that nominalism systematically perverts science, ethics, economics, and religion, he designed his pragmaticism to overthrow it.¹¹ Nominalists hold that sense-data and individuals are the only realities. Yet people use terms like “nature,” “power,” and “matter,” which nominalists hold as in themselves meaningless except as simply convenient descriptions of particular phenomena. John Dewey treats the felt qualities of an experienced situation as individual particulars, naked of real generals, yet useful for reinterpreting the situation into a problem that calls for a solution. For him generals are ideas constructed by human thinkers, not realities “bleating their being” to conscious humans, as Heidegger put it. Hence, Dewey represents a nominalistic form of pragmatism. James does too to some extent, despite his efforts to free himself of nominalism. Since Peirce and the late Royce rejected nominalism, they thought as realists in logic. Yet in their largely idealistic metaphysics they transcended any realism and idealism which operated below the level of triadic relations and the theory of signs.¹² In his final decade Royce held his own unique absolute voluntaristic pragmatism which he connected to the absolute objective idealism of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Reverence for the Relations of Life
• Part I Royce and Peirce
• Part II Royce and James
• Part III Royce and Dewey
• Part IV Comparative Summary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Topics