The “Neglected Argument” Revisited: From C. S. Peirce to Peter Berger

THE "NEGLECTED ARGUMENT" REVISITED: FROM C. S. PEIRCE TO PETER BERGER IN AN OBSCURE but not entirely neglected article, the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce developed an argument which was designed to lead those who follow its directions to an affirmation of the reality of God. The essay, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," is actually only a rough sketch of the author's theory, and in some sections the barest outline of his thought. It first appeared in Hibbert Journal in 1908, and can be found together with a later and important addition in volume six of the Collected Papers of the author.1 Maddening for those who look to Peirce for logical and scientific rigor, it excited for its author, nevertheless, a " peculiar confidence " and, when its intricacies are explored, it continues to do so for subsequent generations of scholars. In the" innermost nest" of this argument, Peirce has identified an activity of the mind which he describes as a form of pure play; this he proposes as one of the simplest and most certain ways of arriving at the hypothesis of God's reality. The argument is not entirely original, nor is it, in itself, a proof. In effect, Peirce takes elements from traditional arguments for the existence of God from design, contingency and causality, the immediacy of religious experience, and universal consent. These he places within a prior context to illustrate 1 Collected Pap!N's of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. I-VI, eds., Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; Vols. VII-VIII, ed., Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1960-66), 6.45~-491. The article, but without the later "additament," appears in Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Change), ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Dover, 1958), pp. 358-879. Subsequent references to this article and other material from Peirce will be incorporated in the text in the standard notation that indicates volume and paragraph from the Collected Papers. 94 THE " NEGLECTED ARGUMENT " REVISITED 95 their intuitive source and their warrant for truth.2 The source is the activity of musement which Peirce presents as a peculiarly effective and trustworthy environment for generating the hypothesis that there is indeed a God. The hypothesis must then be tested, and much of the article is a complicated apparatus of deductive and inductive logic to be utilized in the testing process . Peirce's own original contribution to logical theory, abduction , is exhibited in the process whereby the hypothesis is first generated. Any attempt to fathom the unfathomable will be hazardous, and subject to criticism from those who demand for the Godquestion more (or less) analysis and precision; Peirce's Neglected Argument is no exception.3 Yet it contains in its phenomenology of play the hint of an insight which Peirce found intellectually compelling and which later research has remarkably reinforced. In the pages that follow I hope to aileviate some of the neglect of this obscure piece of philosophical literature by exposing its complicated structure for the sake of clarity in pinpointing where, for Peirce, it reveals its particular force. I shall then relate Peirce's notion of musement to some of the subsequent literature dealing with the religious implications of human play. I shall conclude with some reflections on the peculiar qualities of play which may account for the attraction it held for a pragmatist like Peirce, the social historian Johan Huizinga, and the sociologist Peter Berger. A" NEST" OF THREE ARGUMENTS An "Additament" to the original article, written m 1910, •Recent articles have used Peirce's "Neglected Argument" to defend and strengthen arguments from design (Bowman Clarke, "The Argument from DesignA Piece of Abductive Reasoning," lnte:rnational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5 [Summer 1974]; 65-78) and from religious experience (D. Wiebe, "The Religious Experience Argument," Sophia 14 [March 1975]: 19-28). Peirce himself, in a letter to William James (July 23, 1905), claimed that he held a form of the ontological argument (C.P., 8.262). •One of the most thorough and balanced criticisms can be found in John E. Smith, "Religion and Theology in Peirce," in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles...