great stuff John, when I have more time tonight I'll make some comments thnx for those quotes -Ron
----- Original Message ---- From: John Carl <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, September 5, 2010 12:20:06 PM Subject: Re: [MD] An inquirey into "be-ing" Ron, > It has been understood for quite some time that experience > or "be-ing" is varied,many, dynamic and in flux. John: Yeah, like if it was all just one thing, like every color was the exact shade of pink, then it wouldn't even be pink, it'd be nothing. So differentiation is essential to being. I agree completely. Auspitz: For it is integral to Peirce's view that the more general our grasp of reality becomes,the more precise and ramified will be our explanations. Far from submerging all distinctions in the Oneness of the All, his concept of continuity would have us proceed from a core of received, often fruitfully vague ideas to an ever more differentiated picture. Each new discovery leads to others. Each new concept is open to further elaboration. It is through the purposeful embrace of the public and communal character of semiosis that the self finds its ultimate meaning. John: Whoa! That sounds good! because for differentiation to exist, it must see difference. Different signs must be designated, or differentiation isn't realized. Thus semiotics is reality. Sounds a bit idealistic, tho. And that's out of fashion so it probably won't fly far. Auspitz: Does this vision, congenial to science, extend beyond the laboratory? Do the compact conceptions of Peirce's philosophy have the broader applicability he intended? For the crucial core of Peirce's later philosophy -- the theorizing that proceeds from the continuous sign relationship -- the range of his relevance cannot be in doubt. Once we accept Wittgenstein's verdict that "all thinking is essentially operating with signs," it follows that theorizing about the power, presuppositions, and limits of semiosis has by definition a universal subject matter. It must apply to anything and everything that may occur to consciousness. Thus, had our discussion centered on the current scholarship that treats Peirce's significance for the arts, morals, religion, linguistics, anthropology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, cinematography, information theory, or quantum physics, the same organizing concepts -- semiosis, continuity, pragmatic meaning, modalities of signs, reality -- would have come into play. John: Whew! I dunno, Ron. This guy sounds pretty congruent to me. I'm liking him more and more. My girl Jackie, in that video I posted when I'd just joined, she said she came to Peirce through Royce, instead of the normal "other way around". I'm leaning that way myself. Auspitz: As a result, three tendencies in twentieth-century philosophy that have also claimed broad applicability require Peirce's perspective for their own completion. The linguistic turn that has dominated the English-speaking world is a subspecies of the semiotic approach that Peirce took. The phenomenological movement popular on the Continent is likewise insufficiently self-critical without a phenomenology of signs, the medium in which thought itself takes place (and Husserl's late metaphysical attempt in this direction in fact took a triadic, albeit ego-centered, form). The scientific trend in philosophy, insofar as it excludes the interpreting mind from its working definition of reality, is subsumed and re-oriented in Peirce, who locates its abstractions in a more capacious yet no less exacting context. (Abner Shimony, the noted practitioner and philosopher of quantum physics, concludes the section on complex systems of his two-volume Search for a Naturalistic Worldview with this self-effacing credo: "It is honorable to be an epigone of Peirce.") John: Oh well. QM is mentioned, the argument is invalid. (the krimel rule) I wonder what an epigone is. Something good, I guess. Auspitz: Admittedly, it seems extravagant to suggest that a blackballed, debt-ridden, small-brained, left-handed, pain-wracked, opium-eating, skirt-chasing, nineteenth-century recluse, by the simple device of including the sign-interpretant in the formal definition of the sign and by a life-long struggle to draw out the implications of this idea, may still have more to teach us than the contemporary discussions we have learned to regard as momentous. John: See, there's another thing. This guy fought Rigel his whole life. All this "moralizing" by cretins that'd never thought much upon what their morals were based, just assumed they were in the right - the ol' academic certitude. The ignored mad genius syndrome. Resonates. Auspitz: But consider: From his first paper on the subject in 1867, Peirce returned repeatedly to the continuous sign relationship. For the last three decades of his life, Peirce worked in increasing isolation, writing prodigiously, publishing only a portion -- buzzing furiously, as he put it, like a wasp in a bottle. His interests and his situation reinforced each other. He attended more and more to phenomena of common experience that could be examined without the benefit of colleagues or scientific instruments. Though the growth of the modern university has done great things for topics that can be cast into specialized departments, there is no reason to suppose that anyone in [618] the past century would have duplicated, let alone superseded, Peirce's concentration on a few ineluctable and inter-related concepts. The only excuse for not taking him seriously is a skeptical dogmatism that would have us deny (on a priori grounds?) that some ideas may be more fundamental than others. Peirce's chosen idioms were doubly demanding: on the one hand, metaphysics, in which contributions are judged against a tradition of 2,400 years; on the other, symbolic logic, then in its infancy, of which he was a pioneer in its algebraic, quantificational, and topological forms. He insisted that each must reflect the other. How many writers of the past century have had Peirce's aptitude for both prongs of this bilingual enterprise, or have matched his unrelenting fecundity in concurrent innovation in them into his seventies? Now, eighty years after his death, Peirce has himself become a topic for specialized inquiry. New tools for scholarship and for pedagogy are giving him a delayed afterlife. The consensus ad quem is that we shall have to take him more fully into account. The wasp is out of the bottle. His sting remains to be felt. John: Sorry, I wandered afield for a moment, Ron. "His sting remains to be felt" Sends shivers up my spine, ya know? His sting remains to be felt. I'm always getting these little excitements which must be heeded. Where were we? Ron: > And in hindsight we must ask ourselves if the idea > of "being" as equivalent to "one" has bore fruitful > consequences. John: Yeah, I can't see it. Being must be many or it's nothing. Ron: > The school of thought in the west from the Pythagoreans > to the Platonist to the Aristotelian empiricists take > "be-ing" as "one" whole unit. John: Oh, well. Those guys were wrong then. Ron: > The Platonists and Pythagoreans conceived of it as > a primary being of the universe, while the Aristotelian > understood it as predication of meaning. What it meant > when we say that something "is" in terms of definition. John: Well ole Aristotle sounds pretty close then. I like "is in terms of definition. That's sounds like semiosis to me. Ron: > The discussions revolving around this issue are many > and varied. > > But the question that is avoided is not whether or not > the idea of "being as one" is technologically superior > but rather is "being as one" better evolutionarily > than "being as in flux" and dynamic. > John: I don't see how 'being as one" is techno - superior. In a way, it seems to keep one in stasis. I know guys who believe in the oneness of all, tend to sit in one spot and go ommmm and not really get anywhere. So it seems less pragmatically useful, technologically speaking. But you probably have some different factor in mind. Ron: > Is this technological superiority better evolutionarily? > John: Ok, presuming the techno superiority... I'd still say no. "better evolutionary" is as close a synonym for "quality" that I can think of, and encompasses lots of aspects on many levels! Four, to be exact, but ultimately this question asks me, "what is the purpose of consciousness?" Ron: > This would be a great place to begin the discussion. > John: I agree completely, Ron. I'd say the purpose of consciousness is realization of the whole. Creating the unity, out of the many. That process IS consciousness. If we sort of intuitively jump to the assumed conclusion of oneness, then we become nothing. And I wanna be. I value being, therefore I am. Semiosis. Me and Peirce, baby, And I know how to pronounce him too, it's like something dmb would hold under his arm. John Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
