Nor must any synechist say, “I am altogether myself, and not at all you.” If you embrace synechism, you must abjure this metaphysics of wickedness. In the first place, your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in psychology, you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity.

-C.S. Peirce, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism” (1893)

The unbearable presence of discontinuity

Humankind cannot bear very much discontinuity. This is not an a priori postulate, but an observationally-derived truth, and one which a study in attitudes towards so-called postmodern art will confirm, a form of art which is deliberately discontinuous. Presented with a fragmentary visage or a lack of musical harmony or with any prolonged experience of aesthetic rupture, we seek out meanings — whether by invention, authorial biography, social context, etc. — which may serve as a common foundation in which the disparate presented minima may be unified, or, at least, cobbled into a coherent object-narrative.

If the meaning found in one experience does not fit that found in another, we struggle to maintain our personal coherence to the degree that those experiences have importance and inversely to their evident disparity. When we cannot resolve the objects of our experience into a unified narrative, the result is any number of psychological disturbances: perhaps as mild as a momentary outburst of anger, of disgust; or as severe as a spiraling mania or a schizophrenic break. It is not an unreasonable conjecture that the seeming proliferation of mental ailments in the contemporary West is neither the result of capitalist pharmacological greed nor improvement in diagnostic abilities, but a creeping encroachment of unresolved cultural (and therefore psychological) fragmentation. The superficial bandage holding together the pieces of the shattered Western psyche has been the promise of illusory-realization — the belief that we can live out all our fantasies, no matter how incoherent it all seems — a bandage which has only obscured the subcutaneous hemorrhage.

But what if this fragmentation is not — despite the still-echoing voices of Eliot, Heidegger, Ellul, Tolkien, Postman, and many others whom we ought to heed — the exclusive provenance of modern industrial and now digital technology (which latter, if anything, is tearing off the bandage of illusion), but more deeply rooted in the theoretical underpinnings of modern philosophy?

Modernity’s presumed chasm

While questions of the mind’s relation to the world, and vice versa, are at least as old as Plato, there occurs a radical break with René Descartes in how those questions are pursued. Most medieval and ancient philosophers had taken it for granted that the mind truly knows the world (or at least substances in the world) — questioning how they are known, and not if — where Descartes presumes instead that the mind knows its own ideas, and only through their mediation does it, can it, have a grasp on what exists independently of the one cognizing. This presumption becomes the founding belief of all modern philosophy, not only as a chronological era but as an intellectual epoch. For centuries, it was thought we could not know how the world outside the mind is known, let alone what is known, unless we could first answer whether and how such a knowledge was possible; how it is that we could transcend the divide from the mental existence of an idea to some existence of the extramental correlate. This cart-before-the-horse approach rests upon the belief that our intellectual lives begin “inside” the mind, and only later do we transcend to the world outside. Even the empiricists of modern philosophy held that while the external world may generate the ideas, the ideas themselves are the direct and immediate objects of knowledge — retaining, therefore, the presupposed chasm between the mind and the world and prolonging the question as to how we know extramental reality as true.

This presupposed chasm between the mind and the world further diverges: if not into explicit dualism, then either into a materialist reductionism or an idealist reductionism (which ends as a de facto implicit dualism anyway); to a denial of either any reality insensate or of the accessible intelligibility of anything not intellectually-conceptualizable. Its inheritors are not only Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant, but Churchland, Dennett, and Harris. On either side of this divide we find, typically, culture and nature, subject and object, philosophy and science, opinion and truth.

This is not to say modernity has not attempted to bridge the chasm — indeed, modern philosophy, from Descartes up through contemporary analytic philosophers, has made little else its goal — but only that it has started from an impossible presupposition. Any dualist stance–the philosophy that performs all its analyses with an axe, leaving unrelated chunks of being (Peirce 1893: “Immortality in the Light of Synechism”, in The Essential Peirce, vol.2, p.2)–begins with incommensurability of its dual parts as the basic premise. If mind and body, or thought and thing, are cut of entirely different substance with no common third to unite them, transcending from the mind to the world is an impossibility.

A question of metaphysics

It was just this default position leading inevitably towards fragmentation that Charles Sanders Peirce sought to overcome. Though he produced no magnum opus — indeed, never completing any of the many books he intended to author — Peirce sought his whole life to produce an architectonic view of human knowledge which corralled not only the insights of philosophy but also those of science; a comprehensive theory of thought which united empirical investigation with speculative inquiry.

Best known as the American father of semiotics (in distinction from the semiological school of thought founded by Ferdinand de Saussure and promulgated in the work of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, et al.), Peirce is also recognized as a seminal figure in pragmatism, being credited with the name and the general gist of the movement — though Peirce would deliberately distance himself from those more famously associated, Dewey and James, and rename his own theory “pragmaticism”, a name so ugly no one would hijack it into a nominalist track, he thought. But less recognized is that both Peirce’s semiotic thinking and his pragmaticism depend intrinsically upon his metaphysics: the first metaphysics which can truly be called “postmodern”, in the sense of no longer following the modern presumption that what we know directly are our own ideas.

A biography in sketch

Peirce’s life, as artfully depicted in Joseph Brent’s biography, fits the profile of tortured genius more than most. Born the son of a Harvard professor of mathematics, he was precocious, brilliant, unsure of himself, erratic, temperamental, by turns abstemious and lascivious. He suffered all his life from the pains of trigeminal neuralgia — which he treated by various chemical concoctions, including morphine and cocaine — and likely had bipolar disorder. He was, moreover, convinced that his left-handedness was a physiological deformity that rendered him at odds with the rest of society, and would experience agonizing paralytic spells to which no diagnosis fit. He believed in God seemingly more from philosophical conviction, and perhaps mystical (or drug-induced) experience, than from any religious habit or practice.

At the age of 74, he died in abject poverty — despite the repute of his father and the renown in which he was held by established thinkers, such as William James and Josiah Royce — having never held a permanent academic position. When the young Johns Hopkins University, influenced by the machinations of Simon Newcomb, wanted to diplomatically remove Charles from a lecturer position, they cited budgetary cutbacks, laid off all contingent faculty — and then re-hired everyone but Peirce. Much of his income was through loans and gifts of family and friends, as well as irregular payments for various odd bits of writing. He was a victim of not only himself, but the malice of others, who saw to it that his moral profligacy impeded the success of his career. But for a handful of faithful adherents, his immense but disorganized body of work would likely have been buried forever in the archives of Harvard, if not incinerated.

Though versed in Hume, Kant, and Hegel, the deepest currents in Peirce’s thought flowed from Aristotle and Scholasticism. Though he references them rarely, one finds traces of Johannes Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and the lesser-known Modist, Thomas of Erfurt (whose most important work, Tractatus de modis significandi sive Grammatica speculativa, was mistaken to be Scotus’ until 1922) throughout Peirce’s oeuvre.

Where his personal life was marred by interruptions — mania and depression, pain and addiction, rejection and isolation — his thought was marked by continuity. Not to say that Peirce never changed his mind or even that he was steadfast and consistent in his writings; but what more than anything else what he sought was the coherence of thought. Such a search for coherence stems, I believe, primarily from the Scholastic background, from immersion in the thought of men who saw the universe as an essentially continuous and essentially intelligible whole. But, although he well-understood the importance of knowing the history of philosophy, Peirce was far from repeating the theories of ages past. He was a truly original thinker, who saw in the thought of his forebears truths that they themselves had not recognized, truths which allowed him to bring new and unique insights into the world.