Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (review)

Reviews Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993. 350 pp. $35.00. For the glimpse it gives of establishment academic politics in the United States, the history of the publication of Joseph Brent's fascinating biography of the American philosopher, C. S. Peirce, is itself worthy of study. Written originally as a dissertation at UCLA some three decades ago, this biography—the very first full-length effortwas effectively suppressed by the Harvard Department of Philosophy and McGeorge Bundy, acting for the Harvard Corporation. Denied permission to quote from the mass of Peirce papers and denied access altogether to four of the fifty-two boxes haphazardly stored in the Houghton Library, Harvard's outrage was sufficient to cause Bundy to threaten suit against Brent and to keep the dissertation from publication. Although the matter is fuzzy, these events seem also to have had consequences on Brent's academic career. What explains this worrisome story? Few would today disagree with the appraisal of Josiah Royce and William James that Peirce was America's most brilliant and seminal philosopher. As with Aristotle and Hegel, his philosophical essays, published and unpublished—he left no bookshave generated thousands of pages of commentary. A society and its Transactions are devoted to the study of his ideas. We know also that Peirce was fired from every important post he held, that he could not secure a permanent academic position and that he died in poverty, an outcast. Why? Why no biography until Brent's? And why the conspiracy against him? Viewed from the present, the most obvious reasons seem almost incredible: As Brent shows, Peirce was a Dandy, alike but also very different from Baudelaire's ideal of the Dandy. Peirce was arrogant, a terrible procrastinator, often abusive, irresponsible as regards money, prone to extravagance which he could not afford and to wishful thinking which led him to engage in fantastic get-rich schemes. He used ether, opium, and morphine—then legally and easily available—to pacify his recurring facial neuralgia , and he was unfaithful to his two wives, living with his second before formally 64 biography Vol. 17, No. 1 divorcing his first. His first wife, Harriet Melusina Fay, was a remarkable feminist, not incidentally, and had deserted him—for probably the best of reasons. None of this seems to us to be so remarkable. But not so to President Eliot of Harvard or to President Daniel Coit Gilman and Simon Newcombe of Johns Hopkins. Brent writes: "In his own day [Peirce] was personally notorious and considered by many influential academics and prominent men in other professions as something of a charlatan in his philosophical and religious pretensions, while at the same time he was highly respected as a scientist and logician" (p. 11). Brent's account is sympathetic, even loving, and it is both philosophically and historically informed. Brent attempts to explain the man and his ideas. To do this, he adopts Peirce's own method, that "facts speak only in the fallible voices of the guesses, conjectures, and hypotheses that imply them, deductively, and which then are verified inductively" (p. 11). For Brent, narrative is not sufficient. Nor is the sort of intellectual history which treats texts, contexted but more usually decontexted, in terms of their relation to other texts. Brent's study attempts "to portray both the Philosopher and the Dandy as two intimately related aspects of the same sign, Peirce himself (p. 25). In his effort to explain Peirce's personality, Brent emphasizes his left-handedness and the likelihood that Peirce suffered from trigeminal neuralgia, a neurological disorder which causes intense facial pain. But even if the neuralgia hypothesis is correct, it will not be easy to show why it had the presumed effects and not some other. His father, e.g., also seems to have suffered from the affliction. Moreover, even if it led him to use narcotics to relieve the pain, there is little convincing evidence that such use causes emotional instability. Again, Brent offers that "both father and son regularly took ether and decoctions of opium." As to the left-handed idea, recent brain research suggests that we must be wary about...