Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Pierce

2. Strands of System

CHAPTERI T W O Strands of System There are at least two reasons why the notion ofstrands ofsystem is appropriate to Peirce's life's work. The first is his claim that philosophy proceeds not from a single premise or set of premises along a single thread of reasoning but inductively, gathering from experience what it can and braiding it into a cable ofbelief. He first stated this in "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities" in 1868 when responding to Descartes's method: "Its [philosophy's] reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected" (W, 2:213). The second reason lies in the fragmentary nature ofPeirce's philosophical writing , which we noted in the biographical sketch. Because of his employment , travel, and marital and economic difficulties, Peirce had to work wherever and whenever he could. In a very direct way, then, readers ofPeirce's work are forced to take up the variety ofstrands he produced to reconstruct the architectonic he offered. The strands present a variety of avenues into Peirce's system. As Carl Hausman puts it, "Peirce's architectonic is formed by a sufficiently interdependent arrangement ofcomponents that it is questionable whether it is proper to say that one component has priority over another" (Hausman 1993, 191). Yet each interpreter must take some approach to the system, and this, it seems to me, in part accounts for the variety of"Peirces" that have been presented over the years. I believe that a thorough reading ofPeirce requires us to examine each ofthe approaches taken to his philosophy to find the insight it uncovers. As an indication ofwhat I mean, let me preface my brief overview of Peirce's philosophy with a look at four texts that provide the kinds ofinsights I have in mind. These texts are Thomas Goudge's The Thought orC. S. Peirce, Murray Murphey's The DevelI 26 27 I Strands ofSystem opment ofPeirce's Philosophy, Hookway's Peirce, and Hausman's Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy. I offer them not as a comprehensive collection, ofcourse, but as representative ofsome of the variety occasioned by Peirce's strands ofsystem. Goudge is well known for arguing that Peirce's philosophy was at heart schizophrenic, irremediably bifurcated. This fundamental duplicity he attributed to Peirce's character. Now Peirce's temperament, I believe, harbored a conflict which exhibits itself philosophically in the espousal oftwo incompatible sets ofpremisses for his thought. One ofthese is his naturalism ; the other is his transcendentalism. (Goudge, 5) My contention, then, is (a) that there are genuine discrepancies in the philosophy ofPeirce; (b) that the major discrepancies are due to the presence of the two sets of premisses just indicated; and (c) that at various places there is a conflict between the consequences which flow from these premisses, so that no single, coherent doctrine results. (Goudge, 7) I am not the first to argue that this is an extreme view. Goudge was, however, working only from the Collected Papers and did not have the benefit of a full consideration ofthe manuscripts and published works in their chronological order. Nevertheless, Goudge identifies a crucial feature ofPeirce's work: that his synechism-theory ofcontinuity -eoupled with his experiential method of inquiry, required him to bring together items that have historically stood in fundamental opposition. The result is that his system is rife with points of tension, all ofwhich seem crucial to the structure ofhis system. As Richard Trammell and Hookway have independently argued, for example, Peirce kept an Aristotelian distance between theory and practice but was by his own thinking led to see them as merging in certain respects (Trammell; Hookway 1993). A second point of tension , common to the late nineteenth century, arose when Peirce sought a satisfactory way ofmarrying science and religion. Indeed, it was here that Goudge centered his naturalism/transcendentalism bifurcation. The results ofPeirce's efforts seem to me much closer to a coherent doctrine than Goudge allows, but his highlighting ofthe points of tension is crucial to a thorough reading of Peirce's work. Not surprisingly, much ofPeirce's most difficult and most important work is to be found in those places in which he attempts to show continuity where there is an apparent disparateness. Unlike Goudge, Murphey does not deny the systematic nature of Peirce's philosophy; he denies only that Peirce finished his system : "The magnificent synthesis...