Dear Stephen et al.,
But what about this, a darker side of Peirce from a letter to Lady
Welby of December 28, 1908. Though against English liberalism (update to
today's "neoliberalism") as futile rationalism, Peirce's alternative is not a
more inclusive democracy, but one in which people ought to be enslaved,
universal suffrage denied, labor organizations repressed. He approves the
"intelligent slaves" who enabled classical Greek to be "the most perfect
language ever spoken."
Peirce's sheer blindness to the blood and depravity wrought by
American slavery, and which American Apartheid was continuing to inflict, to
what the unfettered emergent capitalism of what Mark Twain and Charles Dudley
Warner had termed "The Gilded Age" was effecting in spawning new breeds of
Aristocrats of Money and levels of social inequality, to the repressive and
killing work conditions that industrial capitalism was wreaking, to the rights
of women and minorities excluded then from voting to be fully participant
citizens, is just appalling:
"Being a convinced Pragmaticist in Semeiotic, naturally and necessarily nothing
can appear to me sillier than rationalism; and folly in politics cannot go
further than English liberalism. The people ought to be enslaved; only the
slaveholders ought to practice the virtues that can alone maintain their rule.
England will find out too late that it has sapped the foundations of culture.
The most perfect language that ever was spoken was classical Greek; and it is
obvious that no people could have spoken it who were not provided with plenty
of intelligent slaves. As to us Americans who had, at first, so much political
sense, we always showed a disposition to support what aristocracy we had; and
we have constantly experienced, and felt but too keenly, the ruinous effects of
universal suffrage and weakly exercised government. Here are the labor
organizations, into whose hands we are delivering the government, clamouring
today for the 'right' to persecute and kill people as they please. We are
making them a ruling class; and England is going to do the same thing" (Dec.
28, 1908. Hardwick, 1977: 78-79).
Peirce, C. S., and Welby-Gregory, Victoria (Lady Welby), Semiotic and
Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby,
edited by Charles S. Hardwick with the assistance of James Cook, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 1977
Gene
From: C S Peirce discussion list [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Stephen C. Rose
Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2011 7:56 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [peirce-l] "Some Leading Ideas of Peirce's Semiotic"
....Peirce like Nietzsche is a posthumous author and I do not believe he will
come to full flower save possibly in this century. When he does it will most
certainly be because he influenced the thinking behind the global democratic
revolution.
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