Gary R, Ivar, list
Again I find Gary’s explanation more than adequate from my point of view, but
there’s no way it can be adequate for everybody, because when we talk about
Firstness we are talking about the ineffable. One of Peirce’s earliest
descriptions of it says that “every description of it must be false to it”
(EP1:248, CP 1.356). Besides, I think some people are phenomenology-blind, just
as some are light-blind or sound-deaf. How can we think of “sentience” without
a body to be sentient, or consciousness with nobody to be conscious?
“Consciousness” is an especially problematic term in both psychology and
philosophy. But rather than try to explain why, I’ll just quote Peirce from
near the end of his life:
[[ … what I am aware of, or, to use a different expression for the same fact,
what I am conscious of, or, as the psychologists strangely talk, the “contents
of my consciousness” (just as if what I am conscious of and the fact that I am
conscious were two different facts, and as if the one were inside the other),
this same fact, I say, however it be worded, is evidently the entire universe,
so far as I am concerned. At least, so it would seem. Yet there is a wonderful
revelation for me in the phenomenon of my sometimes becoming conscious that I
have been in error, which at once shows me that if there can be no universe, as
far as I am concerned, except the universe I am aware of, still there are
differences in awareness. I become aware that though “universe” and “awareness”
are one and the same thing, yet somehow the universe will go on in some
definite fashion after I am dead and gone, whether I shall be the least aware
of it, or not. ] Peirce, EP2:472, 1913]
To conceive of Firstness, we simply have to rewind the revelation that there
are differences in awareness. There is no difference between what I am
conscious of and the fact that I am conscious. There is no “I” either (pace
Descartes). That’s about all there is to it.
Love, gary
Coming from the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabeg
} At the time of speaking, you do not hear. [Dongshan] {
<https://substack.com/@gnox> substack.com/@gnox }{
<https://gnusystems.ca/TS/> Turning Signs
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of
Gary Richmond
Sent: 14-Dec-25 01:34
To: [email protected]; Ivar Borensved <[email protected]>
Cc: Gary Fuhrman <[email protected]>; Jeffrey Brian Downard
<[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Firstness and sentience
Ivar, Gary F, Jeff, List,
Ivar, your question as to whether stones can be seen as sentient seems to me to
go to the heart of what Peirce is attempting in his phenomenology. In my view,
the question of sentience in non-living things looks paradoxical only if we
consider it from a psychological or biological sense.
What I am more and more coming to imagine is that the key to understanding this
perplexing question is seeing that Peirce’s phenomenology is not an inquiry
into minds, organisms, or into any 'thing' but, rather, an inquiry into the
formal modes of appearance within the phaneron. As I remarked in an earlier
post, Peirce’s phenomenology does not begin with lived experience but, rather,
with the phaneron: that is, to whatever is present to a mind in any way. The
categories are not meant to express the 'contents' of some individual, personal
experience; rather, they are the formal modes under which something can appear.
In my view, Peirce is not claiming that a stone feels in the ordinary sense in
which we think of feeling (since that presupposes 2ns and 3ns). For him 1ns is
a suchness: the immediacy of a quality which is prior to any relation. So when
Peirce says that whatever is "First" (i.e.,1ns) is sentient, he does this in a
truly radically non-psychological, non-existential sense: 1ns is not something
that has a feeling; it is feeling as such before it is realized, embodied.
Your suggestion that sentience ought require an “internal drive” toward
something external doesn't, in my view, seem to apply to Peirce's phenomenology
because drive, will, purpose, etc. refer to organized, temporal systems. These
systems are existential and relational so that they necessarily bring in the
categories of 2ns and 3ns.
Phenomenology offers only the formal categorial elements which may be present
in a possible appearance (as they have been seen to be present in, say, a
particular phaneroscopic observation). As Jon Alan Schmidt has argued, before
something can be actualized, it must be possible. Phenomenology is all about
what qualities, what characters may possibly manifest themselves.
When Peirce defines the phaneron as the total content of consciousness he is,
I'm pretty sure, not claiming that everything in the phaneron is itself
conscious. Rather, a phenomena's appearance, say as a particular diamond
buried deep in the earth -- its hardness, size, shape, color, etc. -- belongs
(so to speak) to the phaneron. What is categorial 1ns is neither the diamond’s
'consciousness' as we think of it (certainly an absurdity) but, rather, a mode
of appearance abstracted from any subject-object relation whatsoever.
Seen in this light, the claim that a 1st is sentient is not a matter of
projecting our human experience onto inanimate things. Indeed, Peirce rejects
all that would psychologize quality. His point is that there is no such 'thing'
as a 'quality' that is not of the nature of feeling, even though that feeling
is not experienced by a subject. It is simply what immediacy is like (formally)
prior to any embodiment. But embodied, it may be experienced as a quality in
the ordinary sense: as hard, red, cold, sharp, etc.
You may recall that Peirce's “would-be” account of a diamond hidden deep in the
earth -- and perhaps never to be seen -- saves realism by locating reality not
in hidden, actual properties but, rather, in law-like tendencies that govern
how things would behave under definite conditions. The buried diamond (in his
later revision of his earlier view) is real insofar as it conforms to certain
habits -- such as resisting pressure, brilliance, etc. -- which would manifest
themselves in a suitable interaction, even if no such interaction ever occurs.
Reality, therefore, is fundamentally a continuous, law-governed order of
tendencies some of which are actualized. Actualities, as Jon Alan Schmidt has
shown, are discontinuities in the cosmic semiosic continuum. (Thank goodness
for those discontinuities or we earthlings wouldn't be here at all!)
So, to cut to the chase: diamonds and other 'stones' and such are obviously not
sentient in the ordinary sense. As I commented in an earlier post, Peirce is
most certainly not offering some form of proto-panpsychism. Rather, he is
insisting on the irreducibility of 1ns within the logical architecture of
appearance itself. In my view, the language of sentience that Peirce employs is
meant to, shall we say, constrain our descriptions of 'that which is'. It is
meant to suggest that before reaction (2ns), even before the evolution of the
laws inherent in our cosmos (3ns), that there is qualitative possibility (1ns).
Perhaps one might conclude that quality can only be understood as feeling in a
maximally abstract and formal sense.
In his classification of the discovery (theoretic) sciences, Peirce put
phenomenology just above the normative sciences (so, offering principles to
them), and just after First Science, mathematics (from which it garners its own
abstract principles).
As I see it, Peirce's phenomenology is far from being fully developed.
Best,
Gary R
On Sat, Dec 13, 2025 at 10:37 AM Ivar Borensved <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:
Gary F, Gary R, List,
Gary R: Peirce’s phenomenology is normative.
I’m not sure I fully agree that it is normative, but when I look closer I have
begun doubting myself. As I understand Peirce, his phenomenology is primarily
an observational science and should avoid making any normative claims or
prescriptions. But, in a sense it comes into play if we consider the method of
phenomenology. Following Richard K. Atkins in Charles S. Peirce’s Phenomenology
(2018), one can argue that Peirce has a fourfold method of doing phenomenology:
“First, she observes the phaneron. Second, she describes the phaneron. Third,
she analyzes the phaneron. Fourth, she evaluates the accuracy and adequacy of
her descriptions and analyses.” (p. 106, see also EP2:147-8). The fourth step,
Atkins argues, is something Peirce made use of, even if he rarely discussed it.
In the step of evaluation we do make judgments on how accurate a description is
of a phenomenon, the result should be a normative claim in the sense that we
and others should make use of the description that seems to fit best with the
observation. So perhaps Peirce’s phenomenology is indeed normative, in the
evaluation and critique of descriptions of phenomena inside the phaneron? Or
did you have anything else in mind Gary R? Maybe you mostly thought of it in
comparison to James?
And I have to say I like your summation that “Peirce's phenomenology initiates
an inquiry into the logical architecture of appearance itself.” very much!
Gary F: Can stones be sentient?
I enjoy the question, as it is something I have been pondering myself! But I
have great difficulty in understanding Peirce’s claim that “whatever is First
is ipso facto sentient”. Is it that the First of a stone, is that of being in
the feeling of a stone (or stonyness)? Is not sentience tied to at least some
other object, introducing secondness? The problem is exacerbated by me not
having access to RLT or CP 6 at the moment…
To at least answer your first question over at Turning Point, I believe that we
usually attribute feelings to object that we somehow believe have some will or
want. A chat bot might seem to want to make us happy or hurt us. An organism
might search for food or mates for reproduction. Stones do not seem to exhibit
this behavior. I think that the dividing line between sentient objects and
non-sentient ones hinges on the condition of whether the object has some sort
of “internal drive” towards something external. Gravity could explain the
moments of a stone, such that the stone on its own does not have an internal
will or power. This is a very crude sketch of an undeveloped idea. But then we
return to your question Gary F, when does something feel sentient? Or from my
perspective, have an internal drive?
Also, is not the stone or the feeling of the stone part of phaneron, which is
the collective total of consciousness? “I propose to use the word Phaneron as a
proper name to denote the total content of any one consciousness (for any one
is substantially any other), the sum of all we have in mind in any way
whatever, regardless of its cognitive value.” (EP2: 362, 1905). Thus, the stone
is content of a consciousness. Is it also consciousness then? Or is it not a
“content” of a consciousness, but rather as a whole, the entirety of a
consciousness?
This part of Peirce’s philosophy has always puzzled me. So I would happily hear
what you all think it means that a First is sentient. Is sentience here the
pure feeling as presented in the mode of thought? Does it not mean that we only
talk about ourselves when we say that a stone has sentience?
Best regards
Ivar
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