The Politics of Survival: Peirce, Affectivity, and Social Criticism by Lara Trout (review)

Pragmatism, with its insistence that philosophy attend to practical affairs of what Charles Sanders Peirce called "vital importance," has always faced a unique double bind. If it spent too much time on philosophical speculation, it made no difference to practical affairs. But if it fixated on the practical affairs of the social and political realm, it was no longer engaged in philosophy. This double bind is not unique to pragmatism and has shown itself repeatedly in the last two hundred years as feminist and anti-racist philosophy have gained traction in academia. Feminists who worry about concrete cases of oppression, who work in practical ways to end this oppression, are not regarded as true philosophers. Feminists who enmesh themselves in mainstream philosophy have the tendency to remain enmeshed in theory and are at pains to make practical contributions to feminist projects. In The Politics of Survival: Peirce, Affectivity, and Social Criticism, Lara Trout advances an argument that attempts to negotiate this double bind, putting Peirce, arguably the most theoretically sophisticated of the classical American philosophers, to work in handling some of the most practical problems of the contemporary sphere, namely racism and sexism. This is, almost by definition, an unpopular type of book project. Trout could be criticized by the Peirceans for not being Peircean enough and by the feminists for not being feminist enough. These criticisms, however, would only strengthen the claim that Trout is engaging in genuinely pragmatic philosophy.

In this work, Trout aims to provide a "demonstration of the rich compatibilities between Peirce's thought and social criticism" (2). By "social criticism," Trout primarily means the type of critique presented in race theory and feminism. She does not suggest that Peirce himself was interested in either the motivation or outcomes of such twentieth-century critiques, but rather that his philosophy provides valuable resources for understanding and combating discrimination based on race, sex, sexuality, and other sociopolitical factors. The argument that she advances, however, also suggests that Peirce should have been deeply concerned with such sociopolitical realities had he attended more closely to the contours of his own philosophy (11). As Trout states: "Taking an infinitely inclusive community of inquiry as its ideal, Peircean science requires social justice" (3). This is a point that Peirce acknowledges in his later thought—commenting that logic needs the help of aesthetics and ethics—but it is an insight that he did not develop in any real detail. Trout's project aims to trace out the practical consequences of this insight, applying Peirce's philosophy to two of the most difficult questions of social justice: How can well-intentioned people unintentionally perpetuate institutions of oppression? And how should this oppression be combatted?

The first three chapters of The Politics of Survival address the first of these questions, providing a descriptive account of the way that discriminatory biases (most notably implicit bias) are learned and internalized through particular cultural practices. In the first chapter, entitled "Peircean Affectivity," Trout opens her descriptive analysis of discrimination with Peirce's treatment of affectivity and habit formation and the way in which they help "body-minded, social animals" (i.e., humans) negotiate their surroundings (25). Trout writes, along these lines, that "whether humans acknowledge it or not, their ends are shaped by factors outside of their complete control, including culturally mediated interests in the survival of the self and the species" (31). This post-Darwinian perspective was one that Peirce held, and it served as the limiting and enabling condition of Peirce's theory of knowledge. For Trout, this perspective is the limiting and enabling conditions of any project of social justice. It is the limiting condition to the extent that it poses a serious obstacle to anyone interested in overcoming prejudice: internalized bias and structural oppression are hard to identify and hard to combat because they often function adaptively for members of a hegemonic class. This obstacle is described in detail as Trout draws on Peirce's...