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In the Presence of the Universe: Peirce, Royce, and Theology as Theosemiotic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2010

Michael L. Raposa
Michael L. Raposa*
Affiliation:
Lehigh University
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Extract

I continue to be preoccupied with the task of delineating the features of a distinctive tradition in American religious thought that I refer to as theosemiotic.1 It can be traced back through Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jonathan Edwards as an early exemplar. It achieves full flower in the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce and then bears fruit in the work of the later Josiah Royce and in some of H. Richard Niebuhr's writings. This essay focuses on Peirce and on the later Royce. Peirce's theosemiotic is most clearly discernible in his 1908 article “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” especially when one reads that article in the context of Peirce's developed theory of signs. I do not intend to engage here in any sort of detailed exegesis of the Neglected Argument.2 Instead, I wish to focus on the continuity between Peirce and Royce visible in the latter's book on The Problem of Christianity,3 with most of my attention being directed to the discussion in the second part of that work.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 103 , Issue 2 , April 2010 , pp. 237 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2010

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References

1 I first used this label in the final chapter of my book, Peirce's Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

2 I do engage in that sort of extended exegetical exercise in chapter five of Peirce's Philosophy of Religion. Consult also Douglas R. Anderson's superb commentary on the “neglected argument,” located in his Strands of System: The Philosophy of Charles Peirce (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1995) ch. 4.

3 Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christiainity (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 2001) 275–76.

4 Most notable in this regard are John E. Smith's early classic, Royce's Social Infinite: The Commu-nity of Interpretation (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1950) esp. ch. 2; Frank M. Oppenheim, Royce's Mature Philosophy of Religion (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987); and Oppenheim's more recent work, Reverence for the Relations of Life: Re-Imagining Pragmatism via Josiah Royce's Interactions with Peirce, James, and Dewey (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) esp. Part I on “Royce and Peirce.”

5 I am already convinced that both men share certain fundamental religious and metaphysical insights and that they possess similar views on the nature and purpose of human inquiry.

6 See one of the drafts of Peirce's 1910 “Aditament” to the Neglected Argument, in the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (eds. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur Burks; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958 [1935]) 6.491 (read as “volume 6, paragraph 491).

7 See Peirce, Collected Papers, 6.481, as well as the note in Royce's The Problem of Christianity, 275–76. The bulk of this material consists of an important series of articles that Peirce published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1868–1869.

8 From “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities”; see in Peirce's, Collected Papers, 5.265 and 5.283–309. See also the earlier discussion in “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” especially Peirce's response to “Whether we can think without signs” in Collected Papers, 5.250–53.

9 Consider, in particular, ch. 11 of The Problem of Christianity on “Perception, Conception, and Interpretation.”

10 Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.448 n. 1; Royce, Problem, 345–46.

11 Peirce, Collected Papers, 6.459, 461, 465.

12 Royce, Problem, 390 n. 1.

13 Ibid., 292.

14 No one has explored this feature of Peirce's thought more systematically and insightfully than Colapietro. See Vincent Colapietro, Peirce's Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989).

15 Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.314–15.

16 Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 287.

17 Ibid., 358.

18 Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” Collected Papers, 5.165.

19 Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 285.

20 Peirce, Collected Papers, 6.461.

21 The refusal to identify the “Christian church” with any particular historical community is characteristic of both Peirce and Royce. Compare Royce's frequent remarks to this effect in the Hibbert Lectures with Peirce's discussion in the Collected Papers, 6.443–51.

22 Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 318.

23 Ibid., 351–58.

24 Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995) 9; see also The Problem of Christianity, 83.

25 Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 41.

26 Royce conceives of loyalty as both a martial and a religious virtue; I sketch some of the basic features of Royce's “martial spirituality” in ch. 5 of Meditation and the Martial Arts (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2003).

27 Ibid., 128–48 for an extended philosophical discussion of self-control.

28 For a brief explication of Scotus on firmitas, consult Allan Wolter's Introduction to Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986) 14–16.

29 Royce, The Problemof Christianity, 337–38.

30 Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.213–357.

31 Ibid., 5.295–98.

32 Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 349.