PEIRCE ARGUES REPEATEDLY AND PERSUASIVELY THAT THERE ARE REAL GENERALS Part 1: 5:45 pm 14 June 2014 CST GCM: GR stated, “Peirce argues repeatedly and persuasively that there are real generals.” GR also stated, “The third grand division is Metaphysics” or “(2ns)” which is third in GR’s listing. GR also said, “Most, if not all of you, are, I doubt not, Nominalists; . . . To be a nominalist consists in the undeveloped state in one's mind of the apprehension of Thirdness as Thirdness. The remedy for it consists in allowing ideas of human life to play a greater part in one's philosophy.” -x- GCM: Now, my ill-fated attempt to promote Umberto Eco’s FROM THE TREE TO THE LABYRINTH was to end in the last 4 pages, 582-5, which dealt directly with “Peirce argues repeatedly and persuasively that there are real generals”: << “When we claim to have learned from experience that nature exhibits stable tendencies, there is no need to think of complex laws like the law of universal gravity, but of experiences that are simpler and more immediate, like the apparent rising and setting of the sun, the fact that things fall downward and not upward, the existence of species. Universals may well be a figment and infirmity of thought, but once a dog and a cat have been identified as belonging to a species, we immediately learn that if we couple a dog with a dog what is born is a dog, and if we couple a dog with a cat nothing is born – and even if something were born it would be unable to reproduce itself. This does not yet mean that we have recognized is the reality (Darwinian or Platonic) of genera and species. All it is meant to suggest is that speaking “per generalia” may well be a result of our “penuria nominum” but that SOMETHING resistant has driven us to invent general terms (whose extension we can always revise and correct). The objection that biotechnology may one day render these tendencies obsolete and create a new species halfway between a cat and a dog is not relevant. The fact that a technology (which by definition alters the limits of nature) is required in order to violate them MEANS THAT THE LIMITS OF NATURE EXIST.¶ -x- “We use expressions to express a “content”, and this content is carved up and organized differently by different cultures (and languages). Out of what is it carved? Out of an amorphous magma, which WAS THERE before language performed its vivisections and which we may call the “continuum” of the content, all that can be experienced, all that can be said, all that can be thought – if you will, the infinite horizon of all that is, was, and will be [GCM: Cf. BEING AND TIME, Martin Heidegger], either of necessity or contingency. It would SEEM that, before a culture has organized it linguistically in the FORM of “content”, this “continuum” is everything and nothing, and THEREFORE eludes all definition. Nevertheless when Louis Hjelmslev [page 583] (PROLEGOMENA TO A THEORY OF LANGUAGE, trans. Whitfield, Wisconsin U Press, 1961, pp. 13 & 46-8) speaks of thuis amorphous continuum that every language organizes in a different way, he says that linguistic chains such as “I do not know”, “je ne sais pas”, “”en tiedä”, “”naluvara”, “jeg véd det ikke”, despite their differences, express the same “mening”, that is, the same thought. The Danish term “mening” is a cognate of “meaning”, and for the English version of his work Hjelmslev accepted the term “purport”. How can an amorphous continuum have a meaning or a purport? -x- “As a matter of fact Hjelmslev was not speaking of a linguistic phenomenon but rather of an extra-linguistic one: he said that the purport could be described by various extra-linguistic disciplines. Thus languages are obliged to recognize extra-semiotic constrictions that they cannot ignore. In other words different expressions such as “it is raining”, “il pleut”, and “piove” all refer to the same phenomenon. This amounts to saying that in the magma of the continuum there are lines of RESISTANCE and POSSIBILITIES for flow, like the grain in wood or marble that makes it easier to cut one way rather than another. Every culture runs up against that extra-linguistic problem of rain: it rains or it does not rain in every culture, and “tertium datur” (and the third is) only when it drizzles or when hoarfrost forms. -x- “If the continuum itself has lines of tendency, we are NOT entitled to say whatever we like . There are “directions” maybe not compulsory directions, but certainly directions in which entry is FORBIDDEN. There are things we cannot say. It does not matter if these things were once said. We subsequently “banged our heads into” evidence that convinced us that we could no longer say what we formerly said. -x- “Although we talk about encountering something that obliges us to recognize lines of tendancy and resistance, we are not yet ready to start defining “laws”. If, on the path I am taking through the woods, I find a boulder blocking the way, I have no choice but to turn left or turn right or decide to go back (though, unlike Chrysippus’ dog, I could also stop and lean back against the rock and dedicate the rest of my life to contemplating the Tao). But I have no reassurance that the decision I make will help me to get to know the woods better. The occurrence merely interrupts my initial project and induces me to come up with another. Stating that there are lines of resistance does NOT amount to saying, AS PEIRCE CLAIMS, that there are universal laws that operate in nature. The hypothesis of a law is only one of the ways in which we can react to the encounter with a resistance. Jürgen Habermas, in seeking [page 584] to identify the kernel of Peirce’s criticism of Kant’s thing-in-itself, stresses the fact that PEIRCE’S PROBLEM is not saying that something (hidden behind the appearances that aspire to mirror it) has, like a mirror, a reverse side that eludes reflection, a side that we are almost certain to discover some day, so long as we can circumvent the figure that we see: THE FACT IS THAT REALITY IMPOSES RESTRICTIONS ON OUR KNOWLEDGE ONLY IN THE SENSE THAT IT DOES NOT PERMIT FALSE INTERPRETATIONS (Jürgen Habermas, PEIRCE AND COMMUNICATION, In Ketner, ed. 1995. P. 251) -x- “Stating that there are lines of resistance simply means that, even if it appears as an effect of language, the World always presents us with something that is ALREADY GIVEN and NOT posited by us. What is “already given” are precisely the lines of resistance. -x- “In KANT AND THE PLATYPUS , I expressed my opinion that the appearance of these resistances is the closest thing we can find, before any First Philosophy or Theology, to the idea of “God” or the “Law”. Certainly, this is a “God” who manifests ‘Himself’ as pure Negativity, pure Limit, pure “No” – something quite different from the God of revealed religions, of whom he retains only the severest traits, as exclusive Lord of Interdiction, ever intent only upon repeating “Of this tree thou shalt not eat”. Since, however, a tendentious [marked by a tendency in favor of a particular point of view]reader has seen in these affirmations of mine a proposal for a new proof for the existence of “God”, I find myself obliged to make up for his lack of sensitivity to the stratagems of “elocutio” (expression) by pointing out (as in the most desperate cases we may be obliges to explain we were making a joke) that the lines of resistance are not a metaphor for “God”, but on the contrary, the idea of a God who says “No” functions as a metaphor for the lines of resistance. -x- “And seeing that our need not to be misunderstood compels us to explain even our metaphors, labeling them as such, let me make it clear that it is also a metaphor to say that the lines of resistance confront us with a no. The World says no is the same way that a mole would say no if we asked it to fly. It is not as if the mole is aware that he cannot fly. The mole proceeds on his terrestrial and subterranean way., and does not know what it means not to be a mole. He plays the mole to his own moliness, -x- “To be sure animals run into obstacles too, and struggle to overcome them: think of the dog that barks and scratches at the closed door and bites at the handle. But in a case like this the animal is already approaching a condition similar to our own; it evinces desires and intentions, and the limit is a limit WITH RESPECT TO its desires (or its instincts). A closed door in and out of [page 585] itself is not a no, indeed it could be a yes for someone seeking privacy and protection behind it. It becomes a no only for the dog who wants to come in. -x- “It is we who, since the Mind can also provide imaginary representations of impossible worlds, ask things to be what they are not and, when they continue to be what they are, conclude they are answering no, opposing a limit. But the limit lies in our desire, in our aspiration towards absolute freedom. Death appears to us as a limit, when as living creatures we fear it. But at the moment of death it arrives just when things are going the way they must go – the very idea that death arrives is no more than a metaphor: no one arrives., heart and brain simply stop, from the most natural causes. -x- “In the face of the ALREADY GIVEN, we proceed by conjecture, and we do our best to get others to accept our conjectures. That is to say, we publically compare our conjectures with what others know of the ALREADY GIVEN. It may be that this attitude does not define a “strong” thought, in the sense in which the various tribunals of Reason and Faith (more closely related than may appear at first blush) see themselves as strong. But it certainly defines a thought that runs up against the “forces” that oppose it. And since racing improves the breed, a conjectural thought, while it may not be strong, may not be weak either, but it will be well-tempered.”¶ -x- GCM: So I would request, since GR seems to regard (“Peirce argues repeatedly and persuasively that there are real generals”) “real generals” as a “strong” thought, a ‘positive’ statement and not a mere conjecture, where does Peirce make such explicitly clear. I am sure he does from what Eco says. I would like to see the best wording of it, though, and be able to analyze it. ¶ -x- Now whether this makes me a Nominalist I am very unsure of. That I have an “undeveloped state in one's mind of the apprehension of Thirdness as Thirdness” is, for sure, true, and I desire to develop it. That the “forces” not only justify the creation of “generals” but, even more for the sake of life itself, demand them, I certainly grant. But that makes them into tools to succeed in living more, not “absolute knowledge”. However, there is an “absolute knowledge”: I know that I live. There can be no question about that. But if it is “truly reasonable reasonableness” (GR) to you that I live is the most extreme contingency. Ergo it is a matter of “relation” and even of “position” though it could be a vector also. I don’t know.
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