Gary R., Joseph,
Peirce did not regard pleasure, pain, and other kinds of affectivity
mainly as qualities of feeling. By "feeling" Peirce seems to mean
something more like sensation, although across his work it has seemed to
me that he doesn't mean only sensation.
1. Feeling, sensation (feeling of red, etc.). Pleasure and pain are, at
most, feelings of states of volition (1905) or
secondary feelings, feelings of attraction and repulsion which in turn
are actions (1906)
2. Sense of reaction (including will and, more or less, pain and, in
1905, pleasure).
3. General conception (he tends to put or correlate pleasure with this
in 1903).
In particular, Peirce doesn't think that there is any feeling-quality
common to all pleasurable experience or to all painful experience.
Lectures on Pragmatism (1903), Lecture 4, "The Reality of Thirdness",
Peirce start a paragraph (CP 5.112) saying "It is a great mistake to
suppose that the phenomena of pleasure and pain are mainly phenomena of
feeling." In CP 5.113, he goes on to say about pleasure and pain, that
[Peirce quote]
[...] these phenomena themselves do not mainly consist in any common
Feeling-quality of Pleasure and any common Feeling-quality of Pain,
even if there are such Qualities of Feeling; but they mainly consist
[in a] Pain [which lies] in a Struggle to give a state of mind its
_/quietus/_, and [in a] Pleasure in a peculiar mode of consciousness
allied to the consciousness of _/making a generalization/_, in which
not Feeling, but rather Cognition is the principal constituent. [....]
In that view of the matter, the objection to the doctrine that the
distinction Moral approval and disapproval is ultimately only a
species of the distinction Esthetic approval and disapproval seems
to be answered.
[End quote]
Section 6 "Ego and Non-Ego" in "Phaneroscopy or the Natural History of
Concepts," c. 1905, CP 1.333.
[Peirce quote]
As for pleasure and pain, which Kant and others have represented to
be of the essence of feeling, whether it be merely because they and
the section of the psychological world for which at this moment I
have the presumption to speak apply the word feeling to different
modifications of awareness, or whether there be a faulty analysis on
the one part or the other, we certainly do not think that
unadulterated feeling, if that element could be isolated, would have
any relation to pain or to pleasure, For in our opinion if there be
any quality of feeling common to all pleasurable experiences or
components of experience, and another one quality of feeling common
to all that is painful (which we are inclined to doubt, to say the
least), then we hold the opinion that the one is the feeling of
being attracted, the other that of being repelled, by the present
state of experience. If there be two such feelings, they are
feelings of states of volition. But perhaps pleasure and pain are
nothing more than names for the state of being attracted and that of
being repelled by present experience. Of course, feelings accompany
them, but under the latter hypothesis no feeling would be common to
all pleasures , and none to all pains,
If we are right, the position of the hedonists is preposterous, in
that they make mere feelings to be active agencies, instead of being
merely conscious indications of real determinations of our
subconscious volitional beings. [I may mention that their _/talk/_
(however it may be with their thought) is further preposterous as
seeming to make pain a mere privation of pleasure, although it is
plain that it is pain that indicates an active, and pleasure only a
passive, determination of our volitional being.]
[End quote, brackets in text in the original]
CP 5.552, from "The Basis of Pragmaticism" (1906). Here he ties the
ideally mature person's pleasure and pain to esthetic good and evil, but
still regards pleasure and pain as secondary feelings or generalizations
of such feelings and as really pertaining to action.
[Quote Peirce]
Esthetic good and evil are closely akin to pleasure and pain. They
are what would be pleasure or pain to the fully developed superman.
What, then, are pleasure and pain? The question has been
sufficiently discussed, and the answer ought by this time to be
ready. They are secondary feelings or generalizations of such
feelings; that is, of feelings attaching themselves to, and excited
by, other feelings. A toothache is painful. It is not pain, but pain
_/accompanies/_ it; and if you choose to say that pain is an
ingredient of it, that is not far wrong. However, the quality of the
feeling of toothache is a simple, positive feeling, distinct from
pain; though pain accompanies it. To use the old consecrated terms,
pleasure is the feeling that a feeling is "sympathetical," pain that
it is "antipathetical." The feeling of pain is a symptom of a
feeling which repels us; the feeling of pleasure is the symptom of
an attractive feeling. Attraction and repulsion are kinds of action.
Feelings are pleasurable or painful according to the kind of action
which they stimulate. In general, the good is the attractive — not
to everybody, but to the sufficiently matured agent; and the evil is
the repulsive to the same. Mr. Ferdinand C.S. Schiller informs us
that he and James have made up their minds that the true is simply
the satisfactory. No doubt; but to say "satisfactory" is not to
complete any predicate whatever. Satisfactory to what end?
[End quote]
Best, Ben
On 11/30/2014 5:40 PM, Gary Richmond wrote:
Joseph wrote: Firstness is a happy land . . .
Not at all! The following are also all qualities of feeling (or
complexes of them):
suffering, pain (physical, say, toothache, or emotional, say,
heartache), agony, distress, anxiety, fear, despair, fatigue, worry, etc.
Good or bad, painful or pleasurable, it is the "living" character of
the feeling which matters. Yet the feeling must be present (even if it
presents itself in, say, an intense memory of a feeling which comes to
consciousness).
Best,
Gary R
*Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
C 745
718 482-5690*
On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Joseph Brenner
<[email protected]:
Gary R.,
Thank you for this note which helps me understand what is embodied in
Firstness.
Firstness is a happy land in which there is no absence, delay,
staleness, wear,
slavery, vagueness, dullness, repetition, unconsiousness and permanence.
Happy, then, the biosemiotician or any scientist who can live and
work in that land.
Joseph B.
-----------------------------
PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L
to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To
UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the
line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at
http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
