Paul Jerome Croce

Review Essay

His Scholarly Essence; or, A Philosophical Authority on Peirce in Search of a Wider Audience

Kenneth Laine Ketner, His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce. [Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy, Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., General Editor.] Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. xiii + 416 pp.; 20 illustrations.

KENNETH LAINE KETNER is a well-respected philosopher, especially in the circles that have swelled around the work of the elusive genius of American philosophy, Charles Sanders Peirce. Even a brief look at Ketner's career shows his high standing in the specific confines of an important scholarly niche. An important producer in the Peirce industry, he has written monographic essays, edited volumes of professional papers, and collected bibliographies of Peirce's writings (no easy task because of their scattered quality). Add to these achievements his "Charles Sanders Peirce Professorship" at Texas Tech University's Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism,¹ and Ketner clearly has all the markings of a distinguished specialist. In the last few years, however, he has broken the mold. In this his latest endeavor, Ketner takes on a literary identity, using a mystery-novel format to tell "the story of Peirce's life for its own sake as an interesting and enlightening piece of our national cultural heritage."² This explains the quizzical title: an "autobiography" written by someone other than the subject. Inside the mystery frame, excerpts from Peirce's autobiographical and philosophical writings create a chronological narrative of the philosopher's life. This book, the first of a projected three-volume set, covers Peirce's early years. Although the paradox of the non-self-authored autobiography may seem shocking at first, it's important not to be put off: this work pulls Peirce's ideas out of the rarified air of academia and presents new biographical material.

Ketner's unusual book enters the field of Peirce studies after more than a generation of mushrooming interest. Peirce's reputation has grown steadily over the twentieth century despite the unconventionality and irascible temper that prevented him from maintaining a steady teaching post or many other jobs during his career, which began in the 1860s and ended with his poverty-ridden death in 1914. He was hailed in his youth as a promising scientist and as a brilliant logician and theorist of the methods of science. He taught briefly at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and conducted precise scientific work for the United States Coast Survey until 1891. (The premiere scientific organization of the nineteenth century changed its name to the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1878.) His reputation rose, although in shadowy form, at the turn of the century, when William James publicly credited him as the founder of pragmatism. Still, he was widely ignored as an overly abstruse Moses who depended on James—his Aaron—to explain pragmatism in terms that people could understand. In his final years, Peirce slipped into obscurity, becoming largely reclusive.

The depths of Peirce's encyclopedic understanding and profound philosophical wisdom gained recognition gradually over the first half of the twentieth century. A six-volume set of Collected Papers emerged in the 1930s—but it comprised only a small sampling of his immense writings, which had gone largely unpublished or appeared only in piecemeal form during his lifetime. By the 1970s, it became clear that more of the original works needed to come to light; The Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce: A Chronological Edition has been answering that need, beginning in 1982, with a projected series of thirty or more volumes. It will be a prodigious monument to Peirce's philosophical achievement, and it will certainly be the basis for a new wave of scholarly evaluations. To date, extensive scholarship has displayed and assessed the great insights of his philosophy, including his evaluation of the tripartite character of thought (briefly: reasoning, empirical thinking, and hypothesis formation), his commitment to realism in the long run of scientific work, his faith in the community of inquiry, his recognition that all thought exists in signs, and his trust in the authority of scientific thinking despite its fallibility. (Many of these ideas were uncanny anticipations of twentieth-century theories.) The growth of Peirce scholarship, however, only slightly mitigates the problem of the inaccessibility of his work: as primary texts become readily available, the ideas those works express exist in a rich complexity that remains difficult to grasp. Communicating his astute insights to a wider audience will continue to be a challenge.

Ketner's turn to literature is a creative response to this vexing problem. The fictional "leads" of His Glassy Essence, Louis E. "Ike" Eisenstaat and his significant other, Betsey Darbey, meet in the introductory philosophy class of an actual Harvard professor, Hilary Putnam. Their study session over an "assignment on William James" (5) leads to amatory adventure and to a lifelong partnership personally and in pursuit of Peirce. These philosophical Yuppies and the detective story narrative are pitched to appeal to a general audience. Ike, a writer of detective fiction and "an amateur by inclination and instinct" (3), represents Ketner and his hoped-for audience; Ketner, Ike, and the reader all are—or should be—attracted to Peirce from sheer curiosity.

In Ike's occupation and character, Ketner is able to bring together several disparate elements of his project: the telling of Peirce's life story along with some synopsis of his thought and a model of how an "amateur" can passionately appreciate that life story and thought. In line with the latter, Ketner invites the reader to "kick back" and "have an Anchor Steam with Roy [Wyttynys]" (353), the fictional stand-in for the late Walker Percy, who mentors Ike in his search. The actual friendship that existed between Ketner and Percy, captured in A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy (1995), models the possibilities of the remarkable friendship of scholar and writer, Peirce expert and Peirce admirer. That friendship shaped this new book, where Ketner portrays himself as a worker in the vineyard of scholarship, researching Peirce's autobiographical passages and even sometimes imagining "the broad contours that such an autobiography would possess," when a chance reading of Walker Percy in 1984 became "a transforming experience" (351). Percy, who had a vivid intellectual appetite for Peirce rather than a scholarly interest, had the literary genius which "enabled [Ketner] to learn more—in a direct, nontheoretical way—about the power of literature, ... about the way in which truths can be expressed within proper fictional settings, in some cases better than in scientific prose" (352).

In this spirit, as Ike sets his talents to assembling the pieces of Peirce's puzzling biography, he fears "becoming, an expert on the subject," because, of course, "I despise professionalism" (9). Ketner, of course, already is a professional—a very good one—but this book offers a path out of its abstract and narrow confines. In addition to whatever joking mockery or psychological insight the comment on professionalism may suggest, this hint of self-contempt marks a problem in the culture of academia at the end of the twentieth century. The dynamic of specialization, first unleashed with great force a century ago—during Peirce's lifetime and with some support from his theories³—has produced an array of tall, thin monuments of erudition. The workers in these specialized fields show an enormous enthusiasm for projects of forbidding complexity. Yet to their bafflement and annoyance, the public barely notices these tomes, treating them as just some more of the information clutter of a technologically sophisticated age.

In a world of mass communications and digital revolutions, specialized scholarship is received like charts of statistics: nice for reference, but no source of life-influencing meaning—and certainly nothing to sit down and read. As columnist Katha Pollitt astutely noted in response to the fierce debates over "political correctness" in the last decade, each side has become more passionate about the appropriate canon for teaching young people our cultural heritage as the turf—interested readers—grows ever smaller.⁴ Naturally, scholarly authors find this shrinkage exasperating. With so small an audience, large chunks of our culture's contribution to human wisdom remain hidden among the bushelbaskets commonly known as journals and scholarly monographs. Ketner's lament is echoed throughout academia: "Peirce's ideas are barely known among citizens of our age" (38). So Ketner seeks to step out of this narrow confine, to bring his passion to a broad audience, while remaining faithful to the rich complexity of Peirce's thought.

The problems with this attempt at popularization emerge in the body of the work, in the depictions of Peirce's own life and thought, whose deep complexities stubbornly persist inside the adventurous quality of the narrative frame. In general, Ketner succeeds at vivifying the events of Peirce's early life. The beginning of the book includes fascinating detail about Peirce's youth and his distinguished family. Ketner shows Charles engaged in logical and mathematical work and games even in his early years. He also brings out a rich cast of characters for us to see, including Charles's father, Benjamin, who was perhaps the greatest mathematician in nineteenth-century America; his brother Herbert, who was a distinguished diplomat; his brother James, who was instrumental in the development of Harvard's graduate programs; and Charles's second wife, Melusina Fay, who inaugurated feminist attention to women's unpaid housework. This latter revelation—that "Zina" was in fact Charles's second wife—demonstrates just one instance of the original biographical work that Ketner has managed: he unearths Peirce's earlier, secret marriage to Carrie Badger in 1860. This cloaked, counter-Victorian event reveals Peirce's charismatic appeal and shows that he was even more unconventional than previously suspected.

As much as these details bring Peirce to life as a person, certain details emerge with a troubling ambiguity. In his depiction of the secret marriage, for example, Ketner relates that Carrie tended to blurt out enraptured statements to her husband, such as "it takes very little from you to make me believe anything is right" (217). Assuming that the author's general, public intellectual purpose is to communicate Peirce's message to our own time, he fails to make clear what insights the reader should gain from this anecdote. Similarly enthralling stories of Peirce's married life offer the same combination of enticing drama and troubling opacity. The identity of his third wife, Juliette Froissy Pourtalais, has been hidden for many years in a shroud of mystery—most accounts place her vaguely as a Frenchwoman of some noble standing. "Ike's research," however, which is based on existing scholarly hypotheses, reveals that she was actually the illegitimate daughter of a high-ranking French diplomat—a monarchist no less—and a Spanish gypsy. The discovery of Pourtalais's true identity as Fabiola de Lopez is the stuff of page-turning novels, but its relation to Peirce's evolving thought or its enduring significance is unclear.

Beyond these engaging stories, the bulk of Ketner's text—long extracts from Peirce's private and public writings—does not match either the voice of the public intellectual or that of the amateur. Some of it is whimsical, such as the extension of Peirce's chronological summary of his early years, which he produced in one sitting but which Ketner has filled out with accounts of his life and thought during those years as if it were an extended diary; some is rich philosophical prose compiled so as to depict Peirce actually working up his philosophy out of the methods of scientific practice. Throughout these expositions, Ketner does not fully show the reader why Peirce's ideas so enthrall Ike—Ketner achieves that effect best with the dramatic story of Peirce's life. Unfortunately, this delivery of Peirce's ideas—without systematic form, in order to avoid professionalism—would hardly make them comprehensible to a general audience. Ketner also presents Peirce's thought as if it will be interesting in itself, but since the philosopher's ideas are more profound than popularly appealing, he may undermine his own goals with this strategy. And Ketner sometimes resorts to depicting the authority of Peirce's ideas through their influence in abstruse fields, as when Wyttynys boasts that "Peirce's nonrelational logic is now routinely used in computing" (345). The author misses this opportunity to explain what this means or how those ideas grew from the theories that bloomed, remarkably, from the bizarre life of Charles Peirce. Overall, Ketner's hope to bring together the revelations of Peirce's life and the revelations of his ideas in popular form is not fully realized.

For biographical evaluation of Peirce's life in relation to his ideas, and for an evaluation of the enduring significance of his philosophy for contemporary politics and culture, readers will be better served by Joseph Brent's Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (1993) and James Hoopes's Community Denied: The Wrong Turn of Pragmatic Liberalism (1998). The comparisons with these historical works reveal most strikingly the lack of attention to history in this book. Ketner the philosopher engages in biography by leaping over history and landing in literature. The leap has many consequences, just one of which is the bridge unbuilt between Peirce's significance as a philosopher and his political and social conservatism. For all his radical innovation in thought and importance for twentieth-century philosophy of science and semiotics, he was also an unapologetic sympathizer with the South and its race relations. Albeit not necessarily a reason to condemn his logical and scientific thought, it does call for explanation and connection in a book claiming to reveal Peirce's enduring relevance. Where literary historians warn about the dangers of ignoring narrative, Ketner shows the problems with avoiding history.

One available methodological rationale for Ketner's innovative and unorthodox strategy is the turn among some historians toward literature, based on the proposition that all history is literature, because, as Simon Schama puts it, "ultimate [historical] truth ... remains obscure." In Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), he states brashly that "some passages are pure inventions, based however, on what [the] documents suggest." Schama aims to debunk facile views of historical truth, especially those that support hero-worship. For example, he constructs the scenes around Benjamin West's production and display of his famous painting, "The Death of General Wolfe," in order to show how "West produced the grandiloquent lie the public craved"—and that later generations smoothly swallowed.⁵

C. Vann Woodward uses small doses of this approach in his treatment of Mary Chesnut's Civil War, reporting that "in exploiting material from her Journal of the [eighteen-]sixties for her simulated diary of the eighties, Mary Chesnut took many liberties." Woodward is satisfied, however, that she maintained a "sense of responsibility toward the history she records."⁶ Historian Kenneth Lynn nonetheless caustically suggests stronger doses of literary awareness in the writing and reading of history. In his review of Woodward's book, he expresses shock that Woodward "denies that the passage of 20 years produced any significant alteration in the perceptions she wished to record of the Civil War South"—in other words, we ignore the narrative constructions embedded in history writing at our ideological peril. To Lynn, Chesnut's literary reconstruction of her lived experience of the Civil War—her personal history—is just one more example of "postbellum Southern writers [who] sought to gloss over what the South had done to the Negro as a slave and to justify the new repression it had imposed upon the freedman."⁷

While these works show some resemblance to Ketner's approach, they differ fundamentally in that he is less attracted to narrative theory and has none of the debunking mood. He does not manipulate quotations to fit his construction of the narrative. The book has abundant, accurate, and detailed references. His goals are more pedagogical than theoretical. Where Schama writes a history with artistic panache to shake up the public's comfortable assumptions, Ketner writes an "autobiography" framed in fiction in order to make a difficult philosopher more understandable to the public.⁸

For his teaching goals, however, a discussion of cultural context would actually add the richness of storytelling to his accounts and build bridges among the parts of his story: the mystery tale, the revelations of biography, and the intricacies of philosophy. Nonetheless, the book remains, in essence, a scholarly account with the philosophical core just beneath the fictional skin. Ketner's anti-scholarly jacket photo hints at this orientation: his shirt pocket holds two pens. Despite the casual air and the bolo tie, Ketner looks as if he is ready to sit down and take notes. But what wonderful notes he took. Readers of all stripes—professionals and amateurs—will be grateful for the fabulous stories he tells.

PAUL JEROME CROCE, associate professor and chair, department of American Studies, Stetson University, is the author of Science and Religion in the Era of William James (1995).

NOTES

^1. Ketner has edited, among others, Peirce and Contemporary Thought: Philosophical Inquiries (1995); Reasoning and the Logic of Things: The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898, by Charles Sanders Peirce (1993); and the primary bibliographical work on Peirce, A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Published Words of Charles Sanders Peirce (1986). His writings include Elements of Logic: An Introduction to Peirce's Existential Graphs (1990).
The word "pragmaticism" in the name of the Texas Tech Institute is not a typo but Peirce's invention to distinguish his more precise, logical thinking from the more popular and psychological versions of pragmatism, especially William James's. In the essay "What Pragmatism Is" (1905), at the height of the early interest in James's pragmatism, Peirce said wistfully that his neologism was "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers." See The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass., 1931–1960), 5:276–277. This eight-volume collection, as testimony to Peirce's precious and fragmentary writings, refers to volume and paragraph, separated by a period; hence, this quotation would be cited as 5.414.

^2. Kenneth Laine Ketner, His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce (Nashville, 1998), 352. All subsequent references to this volume will be cited paranthetically by page number in the body of the text.

^3. Daniel Wilson, Science, Community, and the Transformation of American Philosophy, 1860–1930 (Chicago, 1990), presents Peirce among others at the turn of the century who modeled philosophy on science.

^4. Katha Pollitt, "Why Do We Read?" (1991), in Debating P. C.: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on College Campuses, ed. Paul Berman (New York, 1992), 201–211.

^5. Simon Scharma, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), (New York, 1991), 320, 322, 30.

^6. C. Vann Woodward, Mary Chesnut's Civil War (New Haven, 1981), xxv, xxvii.

^7. Kenneth Lynn, "The Masterpiece That Became a Hoax," New York Times Book Review, April 26, 1981.

^8. With this goal, Ketner's book bears more resemblance to Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy, trans. Paulette Møller (New York, 1991).

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