From the issue dated March 3, 1993
The Jumbled Papers of a Troubled Genuis
The task of arranging Peirce's work made even the author shudder
By Peter Monaghan
Since the death of Charles Sanders Peirce in 1914, the disarray of his papers and manuscripts has often rivaled that of his life.
So voluminous and disorganized were the materials that the task of arranging them made even Peirce, a multifaceted but troubled genius, shudder. He once wrote: "I must tell you that all that you can find in print of my work on logic are simply scattered outcroppings here and there of a rich vein which remains unpublished. Most of it I suppose has been written down; but no human being could ever put together the fragments. I could not myself do so."
That passage is quoted in a paper that Nathan Houser, associate editor of the Peirce Edition Project at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, delivered in 1989 at an international congress of semioticians.
Peirce, Mr. Houser concludes, did not exaggerate. The philosopher rewrote frequently without indicating which was his final draft of papers, and he often removed pages from one paper to incorporate in another.
The Peirce Edition Project has undertaken the monumental task of issuing The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, in a projected 30 volumes. In conjunction with Indiana University Press, the project has issued four volumes since 1982. Another is due in the fall.
The project's goal is to sift through 80,000 manuscript pages, much of which was never published during Peirce's life, and 12,000 pages of papers he did publish, and to determine which warrant publication.
At Peirce's death, his widow, Juliette Peirce, arranged for the transfer of Peirce's jumble of manuscripts and other papers to Harvard's department of philosophy. She was assisted by Josiah Royce, the eminent Harvard University philosopher whom Peirce considered the only contemporary who understood his work.
Much of the material came to Harvard in the form of yellowed, dog-eared, unnumbered, and disorganized pages. Once there, the collection became more jumbled, as a series of editors battled with the papers, sometimes publishing editions of Peirce's work that were clearly muddled compilations.
Nonetheless, Mr. Houser says, one effort -- the six-volume Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss and published by Harvard University Press from 1931 to 1935 -- was a landmark event in American philosophy. Together with two further volumes published by Harvard in 1958, the work sparked broad interest in Peirce's thinking, Mr. Houser says.
Most disturbing to Peirce scholars has been some of the abuse the papers have suffered over the years. Joseph Brent, a historian at the University of District of Columbia who has just published a biography of Peirce, says that when he first arrived at Harvard in 1958 to begin research, he noticed that Peirce's manuscripts were still "stuffed into the boxes they'd been in since maybe 1923," as he puts it. "Using them, it was almost impossible not to tear them."
Mr. Houser says the Peirce papers were shoddily handled at various times at Harvard. Despite later denials, some department members were permitted in the 1940's to select Peirce manuscripts and keep them as private mementos, he says. Apparently, a Harvard librarian discovered the giveaways and occasioned a recall, he says.
It's not clear how many of those papers found their way back to Harvard, Mr. Houser says. "Stacks of pages that were thought to be worthless were donated to a wartime paper drive, and there is a persistent rumor that some of Peirce's intimate letters were deliberately destroyed," he writes in his paper.
Since then, he hastens to add, the papers have been well cared for at Harvard's Houghton Library. "It really wouldn't be fair to cast blame on the present department," he says. "I don't think the libraries at Harvard were ever at fault. In some respects, they were the papers' saviors."
He adds: "I have high hopes that maybe some persons who have some of Peirce's notebooks and letters and possibly manuscript material may come forward."
Meanwhile, the Peirce Edition Project proceeds. The project originated in the mid-1970's at Texas Tech University's Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism, a center of Peirce research. It moved to Indianapolis in 1975.
The project's work is painstaking. Scholars are working with a difficult medium -- microfilms of the original papers, together with data gathered by a team of Texas Tech scholars in 1974 to help organize the papers. The scholars went to Harvard, Mr. Houser writes in his paper, to make notes about paper size and type, watermarks, ink colors, and markings and notations on the original manuscripts.
To allay the eagerness of Peirce scholars for publication of the papers, the project last year issued with Indiana University Press the first volume of The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. The second and last volume of that series will appear in the fall.
Copyright © 1993 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
