Charles Sanders Peirce, pronounced “purse,” was an emphatic asshole: arrogant, deceptive, pretentious, insensitive, sullen. He was also a genius, as a mathematician, scientist, philosopher, and manic-depressive. He was, moreover, left-handed. Finally, brilliantly predicting Gazzaniga’s split-brain theory by almost one hundred years, he hated his mind’s side—the right, controlled by the left hand—which made him crazed.
Peirce was born in 1839, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, Benjamin, was a famous mathematician at Harvard, a founder of the National Academy of Sciences, and an acquaintance of Abraham Lincoln’s. (He appears in an 1863 painting with Honest Abe, along with Louis Agassiz, for whom Thoreau, at a dark period in his life, trapped, killed, and tagged green brownish Walden turtles.) Austere, pre-free-range, outtigering Amy Chua by thirty cubits, Father Peirce pushed Charles toward tortured geniusdom. He forced his boy, as did James Mill his son John Stuart Mill (before that scion was redeemed by Wordsworth), to outrageous feats of juvenile erudition. Goaded by Benjamin, Peirce taught himself to read and write when he was not long out of diapers. Soon after, Benjamin sharpened Charles’s intellect by forcing him to play a complicated bridge game, called double dummy, from 10:00 p.m. until dawn, sternly correcting the boy’s errors. He encouraged Charles to solve difficult word and number puzzles, master chess, make up card tricks, and cultivate his own code language. He also engaged Charles in games of sensual discrimination, inspiring the son later to hire a sommelier to instruct him in the intricacies of wine.
Charles responded favorably to his father’s rigorous regime. By the age of eight he was studying chemistry. At eleven he wrote a history of the science, and one year later he built a lab for conducting his original experiments. The next year he mastered a sophisticated logic textbook, Richard Whatley’s Elements of Logic. By the time he turned eighteen he was deep into the thickets of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
Though Benjamin strictly dictated Charles’s education, he also inculcated independence in his boy, empowering Charles to think for himself. This freedom, while beneficial to philosophy, was detrimental to character: Charles grew into a rule scoffer, a troublemaker. He was a problem student, a womanizer, impetuous, hot-tempered. He had trouble holding down jobs, maintaining professional connections, committing to romantic relationships. By the end he had squandered all his gifts, spending his final years battling drug and alcohol addiction, starvation, creditors, lawmen, depression, scandal, ignominy.
His last scene is pure Foster Kane, another Charles. There Peirce is, at seventy-five, with his second wife, Juliette, at his side, the only one (save the philosopher William James) with the gumption, or foolishness, not to abandon him. He lies on dirty sheets in a squalid room in his once-fine Pennsylvania manor, Arisbe, nestled amid the two thousand acres on which the rash intellectual had squandered his inheritance.
Peirce attributed his sinister behavior to his unorthodox dexterity. He assumed that right-handed people, which then, as now, composed 90 percent of the population, are right-thinking, their behaviors dictated by the left side of the brain, in charge of reason and logic. Lefties, the extreme minority, are, he supposed, right brain–ruled, and so unreasonable, illogical, tending to be contrarian, not right in the head, outcasts, evil, true to etymology, “left” deriving from the Latin sinister, which also means “ill-omened.”
Peirce tried to rectify what he perceived as his imbalance by learning to use his right hand as well as he could his left. He willed himself into ambidexterity, digit-wise, fingers as well as numbers. He learned to write out complex mathematical problems with his left hand, while simultaneously solving them with his right. But this virtuoso party trick did not grant Peirce equilibrium.
(I am a lefty. I have bipolar disorder. I have tried, and failed, to learn to write with my right hand. I for six months contemplated writing a biography of Peirce. I found him too difficult for my half-ass brain, opted to write instead on Coleridge, another probable manic-depressive, a definite drug addict, and a poet for whom phantoms, even those of his worst nightmares, were profoundly more beautiful, and compelling, than facts.)