Peirce List Conundrums
The following is a post I sent to the Peirce List after being dressed down for being opaque. I do not belong there. I do not belong anywhere. I never have.
I have made my reply into something more my style.
+
I rose up
with no
specific sense
of Peirce
+
Nietzsche and Wittgenstein
were influences as well
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Peircean
to me suggests
a man who filched food
from the Century Club
near where I write
and made his way down Fifth Avenue
passing a block
from where I now live
+
A man unjustly
perhaps providentially
given no quarter
by Harvard
generally unable
to have a career
save in measuring and
writing for bits of pay
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Whose philosophy
appeared
in a popular magazine
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My mother’s family settled
in Watertown
when Peirce’s family did
There is today a Mason walking path
from Cambridge
to there
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Peirce was American
I am no hyper-patriot
Dostoevsky
and Charles Sanders Peirce
are comparable
Tied to their nations
inexorably
+
Not
what you mean by
“Peircean”
+
As to what Pierce thought
I don’t know
I read a lot
even in mathematics
which I can prove I
do not understand
+
What Peirce does
is take me
past dualism
to where he might have ended up
Making a methodology
ordinary
universal
understandable
emphatically not
passing muster with
most “Pierceans”
+
Nietzsche and Wittgenstein
traveled similar roads
+
All
post-Christians
largely nonviolent
scientific
mystics
with a streak of good values
and universal musings
+
Nietzsche may have
completed his
revaluation
with “The Antichrist”
(That’s a scholarly conundrum)
+
Nietzsche wasn’t anti-Jesus
He was confounded
between Z and Jesus
Perhaps that drove him mad
+
Wittgenstein was somewhat Peircelike
flying off the handle
Fallible and philistine
a Tolstoyan Christian
+
Peirce was an American
a mystic critic of greed
a lover of good things
+
Peirce may be the most
important
not cause he’ll emerge
as an academic replacement
for whoever is being lionized
this year or next
though
With with the academy you never now
+
It would be because
The bigger question is
whether the world gets to be
triadic
If so Peirce wins
+
If Peirce is the new Aristotle
it will be because his influence was similar
as in
No war instead of just war
that sort of thing
as in the unprecedented in
stead
of
