Enunciators

I just read an interesting article on Nicola Tesla, the great inventor who gave us the "electrical age" (and, according to some, many other technological marvels that were suppressed by sinister forces). I'm not competent to agree or disagree with those who believe the Federal Government managed to gain exclusive control over Tesla-inspired technologies that have been withheld from the rest of us, but I was struck by the fact that this extraordinary man, so very far ahead of his time in his vision of wireless communications, among many other things, died penniless. The very phrase "ahead of his time" does not seem to pay him adequate tribute; "ahead of his dispensation," a choice of words Latter-Day Saints will appreciate, seems closer to the mark.

And Tesla was not the only man who was "ahead of his dispensation," not by a long shot. Roger Bacon, John Duns Scotus, Thomas Jefferson (and a number of other Founding Fathers), and Charles Sanders Peirce all merit such a characterization. So does the founding "Mormon" prophet Joseph Smith.

There are, after all, geniuses aplenty for whom the world is essentially ready and on whom are showered all the plaudits and honors the world can give. Such were the great "Renaissance men" - Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and their ilk -- and the great physicists -- Planck, Einstein, Dirac, Pauli, and all the rest -- of the 20th Century. So too were many of the great inventors -- Bell, Edison, and Ford -- and the great entrepreneurs -- Sam Walton, Ray Kroc, Steve Jobs, and so on -- who gave the consuming masses things they wanted. Such are the Nobel Laureates, the glitterati, and the overachieving politicians of every age: men and women doing not only what they were born to do but, still more importantly, what their times demanded. Most of these died as they lived, reaping graveside encomia and commemorated in print and song.

But there have been others who gave every appearance of having been born out of time. While some of us know their names, they were less appreciated than admired by their contemporaries. Bacon, one of the first modern scientific minds, lived in the 13th Century, hundreds of years before Newton, Copernicus, Pascal, and the rest of the early modern parade of savants who ushered in the scientific age. Though a devout Franciscan and greatly admired for his learning, he was apparently persecuted for his precocity, and suffered arrest and imprisonment in his later years. Duns Scotus was he who gave the "Dunce cap" its name, yet in his time (he was a rough contemporary of Bacon) was nicknamed "Doctor Subtilis," "the subtle doctor," for his extraordinarily penetrating philosophical insights. After his death, his ideas were brushed aside by followers of William of Occam (he of "Occam's Razor," less a logical than a methodological principle), and the European academy was "cleansed" of his realist heterodoxies.

Thomas Jefferson, the most brilliant and idealistic of all the Founding Fathers, needs no introduction to most Americans; but how many are aware that he died deep in debt, and that most of his property had to be sold off to satisfy his creditors?

Charles Sanders Peirce, the greatest mind ever to be nurtured on American soil, never succeeded in finding a professorial post, although he had substantial connections at the likes of Harvard and Johns Hopkins. So prolific was he as a thinker that the Peirce Edition Project at the University of Indiana has published less than one third of his entire oeuvre, much of which has yet to be sorted and annotated -- yet Peirce never wrote a single book. He died in relative obscurity and virtually penniless in his modest house in northeastern Pennsylvania almost 100 years ago, but it was decades before "mainstream" scholarship discovered him.

Tesla, too, died penniless, with none of the popular recognition of celebrity inventor Edison.

As for Joseph Smith, he not only died deep in debt, he met his end at the hands (or rather, the muzzles) of a lynch-mob, the culminating episode -- when he "sealed his testimony with his own blood" -- of a life that included numerous lynchings, beatings, frivolous lawsuits, and profound betrayals by erstwhile friends and boon companions. Many of the things he taught continue to cause profound discomfort and even embarassment among some modern Latter-Day Saints, who are prone to dismiss some of his musings as products of a "magical world-view" (whatever that might mean!) typical of the early 19th Century American frontier.

To be ahead of one's time is one thing, but to be ahead of one's dispensation is quite another. I happen to believe that Charles Sanders Peirce will be to the science of a dispensation not yet fully gestated, let alone birthed, what Aristotle and Pythagoras are to ours. His ideas now are much in vogue, but only selectively; our age is not ready for post-Cartesian reasoning, it would seem.

In a similar vein, the Founding Fathers, however unwittingly, bequeathed on their posterity the perfect system of Terrestrial (in the LDS sense of the term!) government; small wonder that succeeding generations, in a Telestial age, have managed to apostatize almost completely from the principles they articulated and the documents they produced. No one of any education, not even the rankest of the so-called "liberals," could straight-facedly claim that we enjoy limited Constitutional government anymore, yet very few, aside from a vociferous ten percent or so of "right-wing extremists," seem to mind in the least. And why is this so? Because the Constitution and the American government in their pristine forms (bereft of a few anachronisms, like chattel slavery) are inadequate to the needs of the venal majority, who militantly uphold the workings of Telestial government: government by compulsion.

There are, of course, a few who embrace the vision of the Founding Fathers, and, with the exception of Ron Paul, they are marginalized, reviled, ignored, caricatured, slandered, and systematically excluded from the machinations of the wealthy, powerful, and connected. They are not, and never will be (so long as the present order persists) the Establishment.

So it is too in the academy, where Peirce and his epigones are acknowledged but infrequently recognized. The discipline founded by Peirce, semiotics (to which we have made frequent allusion in this blog) is nowhere in North America offered as an academic major or subject for a postgraduate degree. You cannot get a PhD in semiotics, except in a couple of European universities. There are no job openings for a semiotician; most such must camouflage themselves philosophers, sociologists, or (ahem!) linguists.  In spite of admirable work on the subject done by people at the University of Indiana and the University of Toronto, there are no departments of semiotics. Few if any courses are taught, at least on this side of the pond, on Peirce.

Nor is this all. We once had, at our own venerable LDS university in Provo, an extraordinary man, Dr. John Robertson, under whom it was my profound privilege to study linguistics years ago. It was Robertson who introduced me to Peirce, but I suspect I am one of his few students who really "got" Peirce, albeit in a superficial, preliminary way. John holds a Harvard PhD but, unlike some of our LDS celebrity intellectuals, has never sought the admiration of the masses of Latter-Day Saints. His insights -- on language, meaning, semiotics, and many other things -- would make fascinating and edifying reading (every whit the equal of anything Nibley ever wrote, I might add), but, unless John somehow ceases to be the private, unassuming person he has always been, they are never likely to be published. John Robertson, like Peirce, is intellectually a man ahead of his dispensation.

It's hard to see why the Teslas, the Bacons, the Jeffersons, and the Peirces were ordained to traverse this mortal coil when they did, so far before ages that could truly appreciate them. Perhaps what we LDS call the "Elias" principle -- the need for a spiritual forerunner or enunciator, like John the Baptist -- is operative also in the secular world.

As for Joseph Smith, his enormous revelatory output has "withstood the test of time," as we are apt to say. But because he was a man born so far before his dispensation (despite standing at the spiritual head of ours), it will also -- far more importantly -- withstand the test of eternity.