Charles Pierce: Mathematician, All-Around Genius and Ladies Man

Charles Sanders Pierce is one of those intellectual historical figures that strikes the reader like the proverbial ton of bricks.  The son of Benjamin Pierce, Charles had the doors to the academic life wide open by virtue of his pedigree, but it was his precocious and powerful genius that took him all the way to the top and, from there, all the way down to the bottom.  One is reminded (in a good way) of Peter Shaffer's treatment of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the play (later movie by Milos Forman) "Amadeus."  Charles Pierce was a member of "The Metaphysical Club," a book by Louis Menand that I have been re-reading so slowly I might set the record for slow reading a 440 page book.  At any rate, Pierce was probably one of the most arrogant and loud-spoken of all of the scholars Menand covers in the volume.  He was abrasive in presence and overpowering in conversation.  Not to be one to allow his ideas share the stage with his colleagues and peers, Charles Pierce wrote letters to university presidents praising himself as the "next big thing," or simply the "big thing" (a designer of systems) in an age when modesty and professional bearing were still very much protocol.  He made enemies here, allies and opponents there--in short, Pierce was a man for the ages.

Pierce's glory as a scholar came from his immense intellect and his ability to produce some of the most challenging theories about the nature of all his fields of endeavors.  For example, he (and his father) were engaged in the famous Howland case, in which a signature on a last will and testament to decide the fate of Issac Howland's estate became a national sensation.  The case centered around the contention that one of the signatures was traced/fake and therefore the document was invalid.  The Pierces engaged in calculating the probability of said signature appearing in the same place on the paper, particularly the margin distance.  The Pierce calculation for this probability proved to be ineffective in the decision of the case because of the "extravagance" of its scholarly "pretentiousness" (or at least that is the general consensus).  The calculation, as Menand reports it in the book goes as follows: "The change that Sylvia Ann Howland could have produced two signatures in which all thirty down-strokes coincided was... one in 5^30, 'or, more exactly it is once in two thousand six hundred and sixty-six millions of millions of millions of times, or 2,666,000,000,000,000,000,000."  The case was lost, and while Pierce's contribution seemed to have been concrete enough, the general consensus was that the abstraction of such calculation, understood by perhaps a handful of mathematicians in the world, was not the type of evidence conducive to resting a verdict on.  

Charles Pierce's personality was welcomed in some circles and, without a doubt, contemplated with envious eyes in others.  He had his champions and William James proved to be one of them writing letters of recommendations for Pierce, as Pierce desperately looked for an academic position.  One such position was the inaugural chair for the Philosophy Department at Johns Hopkins University.  The president of the university, one Daniel Coit Gilman, was one of those people in administrative positions of power who carry grudges and remembers favors and double-crossings and is quick to take his revenge when the opportunity appeared.  Pierce pestered Gilman with letters looking for an appointment but a storm was brewing on the horizon regarding Pierce's personal life and Gilman was not about to turn a blind eye to such transgressions.  In short, Pierce was denied a position at Johns Hopkins because of marital problems, as Charles Pierce had left his wife for a much younger woman in a case that was socially scandalous as it was salaciously enjoyed by people like Gilman.

Charles Pierce never recuperated his status as America's preeminent mathematician.  As a matter of fact, the true nature of his genius was his ability to transcend his field into physics, philosophy and even the young field at the time of Natural Psychology.  He left hundreds of unfinished manuscripts for articles, books and systems of thought and one is left to wonder what would have become of American scholarship if Charles Pierce had not been derailed by his own awesome intellect and personal weaknesses.  

Chauncey Wright: The Man, The Myth... The Sad and Troubled Paradox

Chauncey Wright, one of the main characters of Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club," was considered by many the quiet driving force behind the group.  The reason for this claim is that Wright lived for conversation and therefore served as the intellectual "fuel" of the group.  Officially, he was a "computer," meaning a mathematician paid to do calculations all day.  When not calculating, Wright lived the life of the bachelor scholar.  He was an alcoholic and suffered from massive bouts of depression.  He was able to offset his mood in public because people loved his interlocution.  Back in the mid to late 1800s, the "life of the party" wasn't the drunk uncle wearing a lamp shade on his head, or the suave operator with the funniest jokes and quickest lines; the life of the party back then was the guy who could sustain an intellectual conversation without monopolizing the affair.  Chauncey Wright was just that perfect in conversation.  He was, however, troubled in many, many painful ways.

Chauncey Wright was not an antagonist or a contrarian.  He was an intellectual powerhouse that swam with the biggest minds of the epoch.  The mid to late 1800s were also a time of social decorum, or propriety and extremely conservative protocol.  Unfortunately for Wright, he didn't meet several of the categorical standards.  For as much a social talent when it came to conversation, he was a life-long bachelor and his interest in the opposite sex seems to have remained either a secret or uncatalogued to this day.  Wright boarded in homes while working out his ideas and attending meetings of The Metaphysical Club.  He also had an extremely soft heart and did an incredible amount of good in quiet and anonymous ways.  He helped locate and free the children of Mary Walker, a fugitive slave who ran a boarding house where Wright lived for some time.

His ideas were a mixture of his contemporaries and good old fashion European cutting edge.  Menand sums it up this way: "What Wright meant by positivism was, at bottom, an absolute distinction between facts and values.  Fact was the province of science and value was the province of what he called, always a little deprecatingly, metaphysics.  Wright thought that metaphysical speculation--ideas about the origin, end and meaning of life--came naturally to human beings.  He didn't condemn such ideas out of hand.  He just thought they should never be confused with science.  For what science teaches is that the phenomenal world--the world we can see and touch--is characterized, through and through, by change, and that our knowledge of it is characterized, through and through, by uncertainty."  There's enough in this passage to understand that Wright was focused on bringing in the opposition to some very lofty ideas being held at the time.  I can imagine how The Metaphysical Club (people like Charles Pierce, William James, Benjamin Pierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the rest, all of whom corresponded heavily with each other) reacted to some of Wright's hard questions.  James was particularly influenced--perhaps not by Wright's writing which he found obfuscated and difficult--in conversation and by Wright's mere commanding presence.  Holmes was particularly full of praise for Wright: "Chauncey Wright, a nearly forgotten philosopher of real merit, taught me when young that I must not say necessarily about the universe, that we don't know whether anything is necessary or not."

I look back on the days when I was teaching full-time at ______, and those long weekend when, as a bachelor scholar, I used to close the door of my apartment behind me on Friday afternoon after work, and not open it again until Monday morning when I headed out to the classroom.  I wonder if the changes that came to my life in 2005 had not taken place if I wouldn't have ended life Chauncey Wright.  That's not to say I would have drank myself to oblivion in a sea of depression, for I was very happy to live as I did.  But Chauncey Wright died at the age of 45, after two strokes which left him unable to care for himself, and as I said, I was happy living quietly among books, writing and my teaching.  Life has changed too much to make a comparison.  I am very happy to have learned about Wright... a true TITAN for evidence and the balance between the empirical and the metaphysical.