Frances to Saul and William and others...
Peirce held that "consciousness" can range from the vaguely unconscious to the fully conscious, and is simply a vast state of pure feeling, aside from any logic or reason for it to be so, and is given as a disposition to all organisms by nature, and is present in their quasi mind or mind to some degree. This presence would hold for the least primal microbe to the most civil human. He held that to be with consciousness furthermore is not necessarily for the organism to be aware of it or of any other thing. It would seem also that feeling and so consciousness for Peirce is in the mind, rather than the mind being in consciousness. He also claimed that the presence of consciousness is necessary for the experience of reality, but is not necessary for the existence of logic. This would imply that the stuff of consciousness for him is mainly of iconicity and thus somewhat of formal signs at least to this limited iconic extent; and to be iconic is to be of similarity and somewhat metaphoric; but not to be partially let alone mainly of symbolicity, which indeed is necessary for logic. Peirce held that "reality" unlike factuality or actuality is a subjective mental construct, made possible by the experiential sense of phenomenal stuff given uncontrolled to the consciousness of mind. To feel that a thing is real is thus quite sound for him. He posited that if some mere property of a phenomenal object like a vague quality of continuity could be sensed, then that object is real, so that an object is only as real as sense; and if the fact is not given to sense it is not real. For example, if a sick person in the company of others who are well alone sees a spider on the wall, but which spider is actually absent and not concretely present, then the spider is likely confirmed as probably a deluded illusion, but it is nonetheless real to the sense of the afflicted sufferer; because the imaginary spider is derived as an icon of similarity from their prior experience of sensed spiders. It therefore falls to the communal group to convince the individual person wrong, that while the spider may be real to sense in mind for him, it is not in fact actual. The feeling of the real is seemingly derived from states of consciousness, yet this determination need not necessarily rely on any kind of logic; although such feeling may be the foundation of initial abductive logic, which inferences like desires and guesses are held by Peirce to be preparatory to inductive logic and contributory to deductive logic. The real to sense in mind seems not opposed to the sign nor to the sign as a symbol, but rather is solely constructed of the sign, and partly of the sign as an icon and index and symbol. The real in being of the sign albeit in mind must thus be of logic, and thus in essence is an objective logical construct, aside from being realized via sense in the subjective mind, which mind and its sense itself is an objective material construct housed in the brain and body. This semiotic qualification is relative, and neatly makes the subjective rightly into the objective. How these early metaphysical ideas of Peirce on the psyche might stand today in light of empirical scientific advances is a strong curiosity for me. They suggest that the base of consciousness as pure feeling may likely be aesthetic and iconic, and that the feeling for form in say fine art at least must be a reasonable feeling, being derived after all from the good guess of common sense. Saul partly wrote in effect... The real subscribes to no logic or order. It merely exists in experience undisrupted by cognition. It is impossible to integrate the real into the realm of the symbolic, because the real has no other fact against which it may be opposed. As such it is portrayed, and only imagined. On the other hand its evocation is associated with a yearning for a unification of knowledge and pleasure, whose achievement is believed to result in dissolving the always already transitory illusion of control and agency. This vision of a space in which causality and actuality is non-existent is embedded in the notion that all that does exist is the product of our interpretation of signs of our own making. Premised on this, it is proposed that the real manifests itself in the blur or the smudge that is taken to be an accident that defaces the seamlessness of the symbolic, which is taken to be a sign of the real's resistance to being cut into pieces by the symbolic order of language and representation. It is the inability to differentiate between the real and the symbolic that makes our lives both fanciful and traumatic. William partly wrote in effect... I agree with this. I tried to say as much when I said that we must symbolize with metaphor, and the metaphor is never adequate to embody consciousness or the real.
