Conversations on Peirce: Reals and Ideals

Nine The Pragmatic Importance of Peirce’s Religious Writings

nine the pragmatic importance of peirce’s religious writings Doug Anderson  Carl and I have both written on the import of Peirce’s thought for aesthetics , creativity, ethics, and politics. Our conversations have often turned towards discussing the relevance of Peircean ideas for a variety of cultural issues and practices, including education, cosmological speculation , history, and religion. In the following chapters we focus on a few of these themes. One of the seemingly peculiar aspects of Peirce’s philosophy was his commitment to a belief in a vague idea of God. Because nineteenth -century idealism was often limited to theisms, Carl and I have often tried to sort out what it was to which Peirce was committed when he made such claims. Many scholars come to Peirce’s work from backgrounds in which matters of religion are of little or no interest, and when they encounter Peirce’s religious writings, they see them as an aberration . These writings are interesting or off-putting according to one’s inclinations and aversions. For some scholars, these writings stand {  }  doug anderson out as a blemish on an otherwise elegant and technically compelling philosophical architectonic. But, as Michael Raposa1 and Hermann Deuser2 have shown, Peirce’s interest in religion was manifest at every stage of his career. If then these writings constitute an aberration, the aberration is not a momentary madness but a deeply habitual feature of Peirce’s outlook on life. Given the pervasiveness and consistent presence of religious matters in Peirce’s work, it seems at best arbitrary to suggest that they do not belong. Seeking their role and import in Peirce’s thought seems a more relevant endeavor than does seeking ways to excommunicate them, even if one is not fond of their presence . Judging their importance is a pragmatic task; we can ask what consequences these religious interests have for Peirce’s work. Such consequences are to be found both within and without the structure of Peirce’s philosophy. I begin with a few remarks about the outward influence of Peirce’s ideas concerning religion, about their usefulness in addressing some traditional questions in the philosophy of religion and natural theology. The bulk of what I have to say will, however, look inward to the heart of Peirce’s philosophical architectonic and practice, and by implication to the heart of the origins of pragmatism. I read Peirce first and foremost as an American scholar. This is not to say that he might not be the most cosmopolitan of the pragmatists, but rather that his work nevertheless emerged in an American intellectual context. Specifically, Peirce and James were the immediate successors to New England transcendentalism. Late in his career Peirce acknowledged this: I may mention, for the benefit of those who are curious in studying mental biographies, that I was born and reared in the neighborhood of Concord—I mean in Cambridge—at the time when Emerson, Hedge, and their friends were disseminating the ideas that they had caught from Schelling, and Schelling from Plotinus, from Boehm, or from God knows what minds stricken with the monstrous mysticism of the East. But the atmosphere of Cambridge held many an antiseptic against Concord transcendentalism ; and I am not conscious of having contracted any of that peirce’s religious writings  virus. Nevertheless, it is probable that some cultured bacilli, some benignant form of the disease was implanted in my soul, modified by mathematical conceptions and by training in physical investigations . (CP 6.102)3 I take this description not as an off-hand remark, but as a reasonably sound self-assessment. I will follow it to focus not only on the transcendentalist environment out of which Peirce’s thought developed, but on the transformations his other experiences brought to this environment . My hope is that in so doing, we can catch a glimpse of the importance of his religious writings within the confines of his own developing system. The outward influence of Peirce’s religious writings was generated by his transformation of transcendentalist ideas. In the trajectory of American philosophy of religion and theology in the twentieth century , Peirce’s work played some interesting mediating roles. Early on, for example, it served as a way to stand between James’s pluralistic individualism and Royce’s aggregational monism. As I discussed in chapter 2, Peirce warned Royce of too much closure, and Royce responded with The...