Joseph,
I cant say whether Peircean scholars would accept a dialogue on this, but it would certainly be a very involved and complex one that is quite beyond my own resources of time and energy (especially in conjunction with our study of the Stjernfelt book). So Ill have to leave that for someone else, preferably someone who is familiar with Lupasco. gary f. From: Joseph Brenner [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 26-Nov-14 11:51 AM To: [email protected]; Peirce List Subject: [biosemiotics:7548] Re: Natural Propositions 6. Antagonism Dear Gary F., I would like to thank you for your thoughtful posting which enables me to show clearly where and how the Lupasco cosmogony differs from that of Peirce and suggest it has some value nonetheless. The key part of your citation from Peirce is the paragraph that begins: The distinction between the inner and the outer worlds antedates Time. ...The inner world that I mean is something very primitive. The original quality in itself with its immediate unity belonged to that inner world, a world of possibilities, Plato's world. The accidental reaction awoke it into a consciousness of duality, of struggle and therefore of antagonism between an inner and an outer. Thus, the inner world was first, and its unity comes from that firstness. The outer world was second. I consider it equally reasonable to deny the assumptions of an initial, primitive disjunction of 'inner and outer worlds' of which one was non-existent, that the arrival of duality was accidental and that the disjunction persisted. The key word is "antagonism". In 1951, Stéphane Lupasco wrote The Principle of Antagonism and the Logic of Energy. In this concept, the antagonism, without anthropomorphic connotations, is real and involves an exchange of energy between entities at all levels of reality, from molecular processes up to human cognition. The processes are not the same but isomorphous, involving the same movement from actual to potential as well as potential to actual, the former having been neglected by Aristotle. The formal elements of this logic are not possibilities but real, non-standard probabilities. The requirements for functionality are not logical/semiotic in Peirce's terms but physical, but there is another logic to them and people can and do make inferences with it about the evolution of the functional processes involved. (I think you do not really mean that "logic as semiotic .... actually makes inferences"). The consequence for me is that Peirce's "bold move to the human mind" was and is necessary for a certain complex view of language, truth-functional logic and a representational theory of mind and knowledge. But it is not sufficient to explain the ground of the on-going antagonisms at the individual human and social levels of reality, antagonisms whose logic does not involve absolute separation between inner and outer, self and other, presence and absence, appearance and reality, and so on. This is, therefore, a description of the ground in which I would hope Peircean scholars could accept a dialogue. 'Antagonism' comes, as Peirce would have known perfectly well, from the Greek for 'struggling against'. From the struggle here I hope that something useful may emerge. Joseph
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