Dear Gary and list
Since there seems to be a quiet time here in these American holidays allow me
to sum up a little on the view on the metaphysical background we have developed
here that makes it possible for Peirce to make a new integration of science and
religion, by changing the view of both through constructing that original
philosophy he himself called semiotic pragmaticism.
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Peirce's philosophical work proceeds in a way that suggests a new understanding
of science and religion as well as the relation between them, which transcends
our usual way of thinking of these matters in the West Peirce's triadic
semiotics worked on an original solution to the metaphysical problems connected
to the relation between science, philosophy, mathematics and religion in the
modern world. Peirce was truly a mathematical philosopher, believing that
philosophy must begin with logic resting in turn upon pure mathematics.
His theory of abduction rests on a philosophy of anticipation and includes a
theory of the divine on an evolutionary basis (Agapism). This still stands out
as an original renewal of a form of evolutionary theology after Hegel that is
compatible with modern science. It is an evolutionary theory of anticipation,
of would-bes or propensities as reals and therefore about Chance, Love and
Logic, as Cohen (1923) calls it, in the form of a theory of evolution
intertwined with a theory of signification, cognition, and communication that
unites meaning and rationality through a theory of hope. In opposition to
Descartes (1984) Peirce proposes that the process of inquiry proceeds in the
direction from anticipation or hope to the strengthening of belief through the
phenomenon of habit-taking:
The question of the nature of belief, or in other words the question of what
the true logical analysis of the act of judgment is, is the question upon which
logicians of late years have chiefly concentrated their energies. Is the
pragmatistic answer satisfactory? (CP 5.28-29)
Peirce's pragmaticist semiotics attempts to bridge the gap between natural
sciences and humanities by combining a phenomenological approach with an
evolutionary and realistic understanding of nature and society in the
development of meaning and logic. He further writes:
Such is our guess of the secret of the sphinx. To raise it from the rank of
philosophical speculation to that of a scientific hypothesis, we must show that
consequences can be deduced from it with more or less probability, which can be
compared with observation. We must show that there is some method of deducing
the characters of the laws which could result in this way by the action of
habit-taking on purely fortuitous occurrences, and a method of ascertaining
whether such characters belong to the actual laws of nature.
(CP 1.410)
Why a concept of the divine supplements the idea and functioning of science
Peirce's evolutionary theory must be seen as a process in which signs are
integrated into ever more complicated contexts in nature, culture and minds.
Thus there is a network of forces that further this evolutionary process.
Peirce's perspective is an attempt to understand science on the basis of a
compatible interpretation of a possible religious ground opposed to the modern
declared atheistic materialistic ground. It is in the hope that the old war
between empirical truth and existential belief can be exchanged for a mutual
synergy on a non-dogmatic basis. Peirce accepts a kind of final causation, but
under evolutionary temporal conditions in which "in the long process of
creation God achieves his own being" (Peirce, MS 313). His teleology is not
tied to any kind of necessitarianism, but is integrated into an evolutionary
agapism.
Peirce's point is that God is real (as Firstness) but does not exist as
Secondness (meaning an entity that interacts with others), but what God is
might be revealed at the end of man's systematic inquiry. If, through this
process of inquiry, we converge towards a stability of meaning, we have reached
the Peircean final interpretant. In Peirce's philosophy, God as thirdness is
agape or evolutionary love, which makes the universe grow evolutionarily by
taking habits. Therefore an aspect of God is the body of laws developing
through habits in evolution. The human pursuit of knowledge of these laws is
science. It is the being of God as a very abstract being without material form
that guarantees the existence of the object of the scientific enterprise and
ensures realism instead of nominalism-or radical constructivism as we would
call it today (DeMarco, 1972). In Peirce's view, science is the only road to
common knowledge about the world as Secondness and Thirdness, where personal
religiosity is a matter of the vague experience of the Firstness of pure
feeling in free musing (CP 6.452).
An important way into understanding Peirce is to stress that from his
synechistic view there have to be some deep invisible connection between matter
and mind. Like Whitehead, he suggests a process view. Peirce integrates chance
as a foundational element-tychism. Peirce considered tychism to be a
fundamental element of his metaphysics. The basis of reality is a spontaneously
generating field or force of possible existences of quale-consciousness, which
he called Firstness. It is a level of pure potentialities, like the quantum
vacuum field, a concept and theory that was not invented in Peirce's life time.
So these potentialities or virtual qualities manifest themselves in concrete
phenomena like forces and will, which he calls Secondness. They are immediate
differences and resistances between phenomena (haecceities). Peirce adopts Duns
Scotus' term haecceity to designate the arbitrary here-and-nowness of
existence, a person or object's this-ness, the brutal facts based on relations.
This haecceity Peirce identified as pure Secondness.
What Scotus calls the haecceities of things, the hereness and nowness of them,
are indeed ultimate. Why this which is here is such as it is; how, for
instance, if it happens to be a grain of sand, it came to be so small and so
hard, we can ask; we can also ask how it got carried here; but the explanation
in this case merely carries us back to the fact that it was once in some other
place, where similar things might naturally be expected to be. Why IT,
independently of its general characters, comes to have any definite place in
the world is not a question to be asked; it is simply an ultimate fact.
(CP 1.405)
Peirce's view of haecceities as being unexplainable as singular events is close
to the modern understanding of quantum events. Quantum physics cannot deduce
the singular event, but can only make a probability model from thousands of
them. This would be Thirdness in Peirce's paradigm. But in modern quantum
physics, there is an undetermined spontaneity of the single event that is not
explainable in itself from a scientific point of view and quantum mechanics
thereby breaks with classical deterministic mechanicism. For Peirce the problem
is that empiricist philosophy says that our ideas come from direct experience
of things. Peirce points out that it amounts to the claim that individual
pieces of data can be known directly in themselves, that is, without any
knowledge of associated concepts. But this would be contrary to his
foundationally view of synechism namely that everything is connected to
everything else in a hyper-complexity like the one we find in the mathematical
line where a new cut can always be inserted between two points no matter how
refined they are defined. It also means or supports his basic epistemology,
that all knowledge is fallible-it cannot be proven true. In Peirce's words,
The principle of continuity is the idea of fallibilism objectified. For
fallibilism is the doctrine that our knowledge is never absolute but always
swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy. Now the
doctrine of continuity is that all things so swim in continua .... (Peirce CP
1.171)
As Kultgen (1959-60) argued, it is important that both Peirce and Whitehead
(1929) thus deny Kant's (1981/1990) distinction between nature and freedom. To
Peirce, nature has spontaneity and pure chance at its basis in Firstness and
reasonability in Thirdness. Peirce denies the distinction between the
phenomenological and the noumenal, understood as the thing-in-itself, because
this idea of the incognizable appears as a null-term of theoretical and
practical thought. For Peirce, the real is wholly open to our pragmatic
observation and thinking and there is no absolute difference between objects of
theoretical and practical thought. Metaphysics is seen as an observable ideal
limit of empirical enquiry (Kultgen, 1959-60). Thus Peirce makes a full
naturalization of all possible knowing in the universe, including the
subjective and intersubjective phenomena. As opposed to Schopenhauer's Will
that seeks its own, Peirce's evolutionary love is - like Plato's - not
egoistic. Thus his conception of cosmic love is an evolutionary and
developmental principle.
The Great Emptiness
If we view the Universe as a system, then it follows that it is the largest
system of all, and all other systems are subsystems. But what then is the
environment of the universe? And what is before and outside of this space-time
system? And is it not from here the whole manifest universe emerges? Peirce
suggests that the universe is the immanent part of the divine and that the
other part is a transcendental emptiness (tohu bohu) "behind and before" the
manifest world (CP 6.490).
One way to interpret this is that the transcendental part of the divine is not
conscious, but obtains consciousness through creating the concrete manifest
world in time, space and energy (Secondness) as well as laws and signification
(Thirdness). God is real as a general, but does not exist as an actual. The
real in Peirce's paradigm is not only external things! The existent, or
Secondness, is that, which reacts against other things. The external world then
does not consist merely of existent objects and their reactions because among
the reals Peirce also counts words, signs, general types and would-bes as their
tokens exists ( CP 8.191). Thus Peirce does not believe that the external world
is completely independent of our semiosis. The universe newer completely
escapes its sign nature and become a completely independent "thing". In
Peirce's scholastic realism the thirdness of reals are vagues, would-bes or
possibilities (CP 5.453). Thus we must believe that there are real tendencies
and possibilities in the world, as later exemplified in quantum physics, with
its concept of virtual particles and probability waves. Truth is a
possibility through science, it is the settling of the irritation of doubt,
but, with the means we have, truth will always be provisional.
Peirce thought of qualia as reals, but not actuals. Qualisigns cannot be
actuals in themselves; they have to be carried by other things. There can thus
be no empirical scientific investigation of them per se, only their
manifestation as sign-tokens! Thus, though Peirce operates with God as a
necessary being in his metaphysics, this being does not have the Secondness
that produces empirical facts to be investigated by science (CP 6 199). This
makes for an unusual conception of God in Peirce's philosophy. For Peirce the
divine is Firstness of Firstness or pure potential quality and it cannot,
therefore, in its own nature, be investigated scientifically and/or formulated
more precisely in words or signs. It is too vague. There can therefore be no
self-evident dogmas about God. He insisted, "The endless variety in the world
has not been created by law. It is not of the nature of uniformity to originate
variation, nor of law to beget circumstance. When we gaze upon the
multifariousness of nature we are looking straight into the face of a living
spontaneity." (CP 6.553). In this basis one can now characterize an important
aspect of God as a living spontaneity or as a Firstness, which is a real, but
not an actual! Peirce reveals that he is influenced by the so-called "Concord
transcendentalism" of Emerson (CP 6.102).
For Peirce then evolutionary love corresponds to natural habit-taking, which in
turn corresponds to what Peirce calls "the social principle," which is the
Thirdness, habit or patterns to which the individuals are subjected. Thus
Peirce connects evolutionary love law to natural habit-taking, logic and
understanding, as the aim of logical analysis is to understand the true
character of the object in question, not to pass moral judgment. Love is thus
in Peirce's conception related to the recognition and understanding of the law.
Thus, the importance of love to fuel the evolutionary growth of knowledge and
the concept is therefore essential for Pierce's theory of science! Therefore
his emphasis on feeling and emotion as being central to all "rational" thought.
Peirce shows that an ontology of the world as a closed mechanism
deterministically run by universal laws is inadequate as a framework for at
theory of meaningful knowledge. Thus in Peirce's understanding God is also a
constant process of creation. Creation is not deterministic. Man's self is a
developing symbol.
In this process philosophy God is necessary for any kind of developing the
world through evolution. Without God, the world would be nothing more than a
static, unchanging existence. Thus the world has to be present in God and God
present in it, in order for the possibilities that lead to development to
manifest and influences God. As God is present to the world then the world will
influence God. Logic to Peirce is the thus the intersubjective product of a
social ethical striving for common rationality and the Summum Bonum, which is
how he ideally viewed science.
Steven Ericsson-Zenith on the Peirce list points out that the movement, marked
by early Unitarianism from Salem and Boston of the 18th and 19th century
involved a mature attempt to reconceive the notion of "God". The Peirce family
represents a century of intellectual excellence and enlightenment at Harvard
that appears to have been overrun by the religious conservatism. Peirce was the
beacon of a period of American Enlightenment that has been oppressed by
religious conservatism and is mostly forgotten.
His theory therefore has a deep concern for existential matters and the
discussion of what Enlightenment is. In some aspect it goes further than
Horkheimer and Marcuse's critique of the mythologisation of the technical
aspects of rationality in the Enlightenment movement in their book Dialectic of
Enlightenment. This mythologisation is also seen in many of the present so
called scientific world views and many of the present attempts to naturalize
all of philosophy of knowledge and its evolution for instance as computation
(info-computationalism). Peirce goes further than the Frankfurt School critique
in showing a constructive way out other than art because they lack Peirce's
foundation in a combination of pure mathematics, phaneroscophy, aesthetics and
ethics.
For Peirce then the sciences can then be considered a systems of rationalized
expectations in social commitment. These rationalized expectations are carried
by collectives and their scholarly discourses are a special kind of
communication systems that leads to a collective impersonal, still fallible
knowledge. As a consequence of this view, both science and religion are
fallible and therefore cooperation between science and religion is seen as
highly necessary in the pursuit of knowledge and meaning. As such, I see Peirce
as delivering a possible cultural paradigm for a new improved discursive
enlightenment in a global culture by way of his pragmaticist semiotic
philosophy.
References
Cohen, M. R. (Ed.). (1923). Chance, love and logic: Philosophical essays by the
late Charles S. Peirce. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.
DeMarco, J. (1972). God, religion, and community in the philosophy of C. S.
Peirce. The Modern Schoolman, XLIX, (May), 331-347.
Kant, I. (1990). Critique of pure reason (J. M. D. Meiklejohn, Trans.).
Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. (Originally published in 1781)
Kultgen, J. K. (1959-1960). The "future metaphysics" of Peirce and Whitehead.
Kant-Studien, 5, 285-293.
Happy holidays
Søren Brier
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