Dear Gary and list
Peirce seems keen to work with the foundation of all religions, which is one
way to characterize the pure types of mysticism and the theory of collecting
them into a perennial philosophy. His theory of the immanent divine as
Firstness and his idea of an emptiness before the three categories or
universes, as he also calls them -a Tohu Bohu (the great emptiness) as he
quotes from the old testament - is pretty mystical. It is also important to
note that Peirce is both inspired by transcendental Christianity as well as
Buddhism in a sort of panentheism. The divine is both immanent and transcendent
in Peirce's philosophy. It is both an emptiness "behind and before" the
manifested world in time and space giving birth to a Firstness of
possibilities, "random sporting", qualia and possible mathematical forms.
Peirce writes:
"If we are to proceed in a logical and scientific manner, we must, in order to
account for the whole universe, suppose an initial condition in which the whole
universe was non-existent, and therefore a state of absolute nothing. . . . But
this is not the nothing of negation. . . . The nothing of negation is the
nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure
zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no
compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which
the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely
undefined and unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no
compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom.
Now the question arises, what necessarily resulted from that state of things?
But the only sane answer is that where freedom was boundless nothing in
particular necessarily resulted. . . .
I say that nothing necessarily resulted from the Nothing of boundless freedom.
That is, nothing according to deductive logic. But such is not the logic of
freedom or possibility. The logic of freedom, or potentiality, is that it shall
annul itself. For if it does not annul itself, it remains a completely idle and
do-nothing potentiality; and a completely idle potentiality is annulled by its
complete idleness."
(CP 6.215-219)
This philosophy places "emptiness" and "the void" at a central a place in
Peirce's metaphysics, as it is in the pure mysticism of Buddhism, for instance
the version represented in the writings of Nargajuna (1995) in his famous verse:
"Whatever is dependently co-arising
That is explained to be emptiness.
That, being a dependent designation
Is itself the middle way."
(Garfield 1995, p. 93)
This verse defines "the middle way" of Buddhism. It is the view arising from
the contention that everything is supported and connected by a positive
emptiness (which is not an absence but a primary being), the foundation for
nearly all major Buddhist schools in East Asia (Garfield 1995)[1]. The
metaphysics of emptiness is to be found not only in Buddhism but also in the
Vedic thinking of Shankara's Advaita Vedanta and Christian mysticism (John of
the Cross and Eckehart). Peirce saw Buddhism and Christianity melting together
within a transcendental religious view of empathy and love as the foundation of
reality. The emphasis on feeling and emotion as central to all "rational"
thought is one of Peirce's outstanding contributions to understanding the
processes of mind. Such a way of thinking is close to the mystical thinking we
find in many cultures and many historical periods inside and outside religions,
and is sometimes referred to as "the perennial philosophy."
The idea of "mystic" does not mean a personal meeting with a personal God, but
the merging of the inner and the outside of our being in a unity consciousness,
which as such is a no-experience as it lacks the duality need for a subject to
experience something else. It is well described in Zen. Eckhart also say "I
pray to God to get writ of God". The idea of a personal God only arise on the
"other side" of the mystical state. But Peirce did not seem to know very much
about these kinds of descriptions.
Best
Søren
Fra: Gary Fuhrman [mailto:[email protected]]
Sendt: 21. maj 2014 17:21
Til: 'Peirce List'
Emne: RE: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science and
religion: text 1
Søren, list,
Peirce did not use the term "panentheism" because it wasn't available in his
time. But he did use both "mysticism" and "revelation" - even defined the
latter for the Century Dictionary - and his usage of both is fairly consistent
with his own philosophical work as a whole, and with current usage of those
terms as well. So I don't think it's helpful to apply them to Peirce's work in
a sense quite different from Peirce's usage.
I agree with what you say below about "musement", even to calling it a form of
"meditation". But what animates musement, and the whole Neglected Argument
which begins with it, is neither mysticism nor revelation; rather it's the
"natural light" of reason, as Kees explains in 9.5. This "natural light" is the
root, as it were, of Peircean common-sensism and of Peirce's view of religion;
it's what makes science religious. It's also the root of the instinctive
beliefs which, according to Peirce, are more reliable in most practical
situations than deliberate reasoning is.
Here's a few Peirce passages to illustrate this point (I can give many more :))
while also exemplifying Peircean usage of the terms "mystical" and "revelation".
CP 1.142-3, c.1897:
Now if exactitude, certitude, and universality are not to be attained by
reasoning, there is certainly no other means by which they can be reached.
Somebody will suggest revelation. ... I do not think it is philosophical to
reject the possibility of a revelation. Still, granting that, I declare as a
logician that revealed truths - that is, truths which have nothing in their
favor but revelations made to a few individuals - constitute by far the most
uncertain class of truths there are. There is here no question of universality;
for revelation is itself sporadic and miraculous. There is no question of
mathematical exactitude; for no revelation makes any pretension to that
character. But it does pretend to be certain; and against that there are three
conclusive objections. First, we never can be absolutely certain that any given
deliverance really is inspired; for that can only be established by reasoning.
We cannot even prove it with any very high degree of probability. Second, even
if it is inspired, we cannot be sure, or nearly sure, that the statement is
true.... All inspired matter has been subject to human distortion or coloring.
Besides we cannot penetrate the counsels of the most High, or lay down anything
as a principle that would govern his conduct. We do not know his inscrutable
purposes, nor can we comprehend his plans. We cannot tell but he might see fit
to inspire his servants with errors. In the third place, a truth which rests on
the authority of inspiration only is of a somewhat incomprehensible nature; and
we never can be sure that we rightly comprehend it. As there is no way of
evading these difficulties, I say that revelation, far from affording us any
certainty, gives results less certain than other sources of information. This
would be so even if revelation were much plainer than it is.
CP 2.23-5, 1902:
The opinion just now referred to, that logical principles are known by an
inward light of reason, called the "light of nature" to distinguish it from the
"light of grace" which comes by revelation, has been the opinion entertained by
the majority of careful logicians.
The phrase "light of reason," or its near equivalent, may probably be found in
every literature. The "old philosopher" of China, Lao-Tze, who lived in the
sixth century B.C. says for example, "Whoso useth reason's light, and turneth
back, and goeth home to its enlightenment, surrendereth not his person to
perdition. This is called practising the eternal." The doctrine of a light of
reason seems to be inwrapped in the old Babylonian philosophy of the first
chapter of Genesis, where the Godhead says, "Let us make man in our image,
after our likeness." It may, no doubt, justly be said that this is only an
explanation to account for the resemblances of the images of the gods to men, a
difficulty which the Second Commandment meets in another way. But does not this
remark simply carry the doctrine back to the days when the gods were first made
in man's image? To believe in a god at all, is not that to believe that man's
reason is allied to the originating principle of the universe?
EP2:324: "The very entelechy of being lies in being representable. A sign
cannot even be false without being a sign and so far as it is a sign it must be
true. A symbol is an embryonic reality endowed with power of growth into the
very truth, the very entelechy of reality. This appears mystical and mysterious
simply because we insist on remaining blind to what is plain, that there can be
no reality which has not the life of a symbol."
CP 5:383-4 (revised version of "Fixation of Belief"):
Now, there are some people, among whom I must suppose that my reader is to be
found, who, when they see that any belief of theirs is determined by any
circumstance extraneous to the facts, will from that moment not merely admit in
words that that belief is doubtful, but will experience a real doubt of it, so
that it ceases in some degree at least to be a belief.
To satisfy our doubts, therefore, it is necessary that a method should be found
by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external
permanency - by something upon which our thinking has no effect [But which, on
the other hand, unceasingly tends to influence thought; or in other words, by
something Real]. Some mystics imagine that they have such a method in a private
inspiration from on high. But that is only a form of the method of tenacity, in
which the conception of truth as something public is not yet developed.
Enough for now!
gary f.
From: Søren Brier [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 20-May-14 9:19 AM
To: Gary Fuhrman; Peirce List
Subject: SV: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science and
religion: text 1
Dear Gary
I think this problem you bring up here hinges on the definition of "mystical".
I agree that Peirce does not use this term as he does not use the term
Panentheism. These are terms that I have used to describe his position. The
term "revelation" is also my term. I do not recall if Brent use of it in
writing. But this was what I got out of a discussion with him in the "Symposium
on the Religious Writings of Charles S. Peirce" in Denver 2003.
http://wings.buffalo.edu/research/peirce/symposiumAnn&Call.pdf . Brent writes.
...for Peirce, semiotics should be understood ... as the working out of how the
real is both immanent and transcendent and how the infinite speaker may be said
to practice semiosis ... in the creation of our universe." Brent (1998:212)
But I do agree that it is a problem for many researchers of Peirce if there is
such a connection between his ide og reasonableness as semiotic logic and a
perennial philosophy idea of pure mysticism, where you transcends space and
time into an "experience" of unity, which is described by so many mystics over
the time, within various religions and outside them. As Nesteruk writes:
Contemporary cosmology, as well as science in general, has to face the paradox
of human subjectivity in the universe. This paradox was explicitly formulated
in philosophical thought by E. Husserl and rephrased later by many thinkers
across philosophy and theology.
(Nesteruk 2005 p. 8)
I do interpret Peirce's 'musement' as a form of meditation and his argument for
that all men would reach to the concept of God as an explanatory factor for the
reasonableness of the evolving universe and our place in it. Musement is an a
free experiential abduction. It is not purely rational exercise.
Peirce certainly new something about Vedic thinking and Advaita Vedanta and the
pure forms of Buddhism as can be seem from a few quotes from CP. I have been
unable to find anymore writings here. If he got it from James or Carus. I do
not know. Peirce and William James were both influenced by Buddhist thinking.
James also met with Vivekananda as well as with Suzuki, the most famous
interpreter of Zen-Buddhism. Suzuki worked in the US for Paul Carus, the editor
of The Monist. But surely Schelling is close to this kind of thinking too. Here
is a quote on Vedic thinking from Peirce:
"There is still another direction in which the barbaric conception of personal
identity must be broadened. A Brahmanical hymn begins as follows: "I am that
pure and infinite Self, who am bliss, eternal, manifest, all-pervading, and who
am the substrate of all that owns name and form." This expresses more than
humiliation, - the utter swallowing up of the poor individual self in the
Spirit of prayer. All communication from mind to mind is through continuity of
being. A man is capable of having assigned to him a role in the drama of
creation, and so far as he loses himself in that role, - no matter how humble
it may be, - so far he identifies himself with its Author."
(Peirce CP 7.572)
Like Aristotle, Peirce - based on his synechism - assumes that the "stuff" of
reality or of which the world is built is Hylé, a continuum of matter and mind.
Peirce viewed our non-scientific ways of thinking as being indispensable not
only for knowledge but as the very basis for perception and thought. For Peirce
it is his phenomenological, which he called phaneroscophy, basis of his
philosophy. Evolutionarily this reflection also reminds you of the common
origin of matter and consciousness. Rather than thoughts being substantial
entities identified either with physical brains or immaterial minds, Peirce
understands thoughts as signs. We are more in thought than thoughts are in us.
Now I have had discussion with some pan-semioticians if experience is a
necessary aspect of semiosis, and I have argued yes, since feeling is
fundamental to Firstness. They think no, and that semiosis is a dynamical
fundamental system of interaction in the physical world, more fundamental than
the classical mechanical physics description. But in "The Architecture of
Theories" (1891) Peirce wrote:
Without going into other important questions of philosophical architectonic, we
can readily foresee what sort of a metaphysics would appropriately be
constructed from those conceptions... a Cosmogonic Philosophy. It would suppose
that in the beginning -- infinitely remote -- there was a chaos of
unpersonalized feeling, which being without connection or regularity would
properly be without existence. This feeling, sporting here and there in pure
arbitrariness, would have started the germ of a generalizing tendency. Its
other sportings would be evanescent, but this would have a growing virtue.
(Peirce: CP 6.33.)
But I admit that the evidence is indirect and I have a strong feeling that we
are missing some manuscripts on this matter.
References:
Nesteruk, A. (2005): "The Universe Transcended: Gods 'Presence in absence' in
Science and Theology, European Journal of Science and Theology, June 2005, Vol.
1, No. 2, 7-19.
________________________________
[1] See also floyd merrell's wok on these aspects in Merrell 2009.
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