Peirce and Nietzsche Precursors of the Future

As far as I know Peirce and Nietzsche did now know each otherThey lived the same timeThe achievements of both went unrecognized until they became posthumous authorsEach of them broke the very same ground from different perspectivesNietszche was a philologist and the greatest writer of a nation he excoriatedPeirce was a multi-disciplinary intellectual renegade rejected by his peersBoth wandered in substantial solitude Neitzsche a mite saintly Peirce a mite sinful What did they achieveThe marriage of the metaphysical and the scientific
Both vindicated a metaphysical (transcendent) philosophy Within the immanent frame of scienceBoth men arrived at the same conclusion Both failed to take the next step
In Pierce's case the next step would have been a vastly more forceful presentation of ethicsthan is implicit in his scattered writingsIn Nietszche's case it would have meant winning back the decade he lost to madnessand completing the revaluation of values he began with The Antichrist 
Both anticipated a world now coming into beingThe narcissistic nominalism that has ruled since Descartesis giving way to realism of the sort  Peirce developedThe hoary values Nietzsche scourgedare giving way not  so much to values we now attribute to NietzscheBut to values he would logically have developed had madness not intervened one day in Turin
Today I think of wandering around Sils-Maria as I did a few years backthinking of the solitary inhabitant of that Alpine villageAnd of days in Cambridgewhere my relatives came here with Pierce's forbears and walked on to Watertownin 1639Peirce - America's greatest intellectual - was flatly rejected by President Eliot at Harvard
Two of the greatest minds of the 19th centuryMerge in my own musingsWaiting for someone to create from their confluencesomething past the thin and vacuous theologies and philosophies and scientific understandings of the presentThe future lies with that merging of the metaphysicaland the scientificWith the realization that ethics and being belong togetherWith a universality that realizes the full reality of alland builds on the acknowledgement of fallibilityas redemptivea sign of movement forward

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes