> On Nov 30, 2015, at 8:24 PM, Helmut Raulien <[email protected]> wrote: > > Supplement: Now one of my weird ideas: Peirce starts with firstness, and > relation of firstness with itself leads from (1) to (1.1), and then to > (1.1.1), and so on, so in this case, the relation is not really something > more than the related. Hegel starts with nothing, and then dialectically > relates nothing to "nothing", which so becomes a thing, the concept of > "nothing". This is how "something" is created. This is not a monism, but a > no-ism, that does nothing but show, that it is wrong. Hegel just shows, that > the concept of "nothing" is impossible, but mistakes this insight for > evidence, that everything has come out of nothing. But it has not, because > there never has been nothing. Peirce in fact does not start from firstness in > the temporal sense, like in the beginning there was firstness: Firstness is a > part of the irreducible triad of the three categories. It is merely called > "firstness", because one needs some starting point to start thinking about > anything, but any anything is triadic from its start. Irreducible though, so > a sort of monism (but not a noism).
Peirce, like Hegel, starts with nothing. Again I heartily recommend Kelly Parker’s “Peirce as Neoplatonist.” http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/csp-plot.html <http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/csp-plot.html> I don’t think this cosmology is necessary to really accept Peirce’s categories. Effectively what in his early period he sees as this move from Nothing to Substance mean they are unthinkable limits and thus arguably irrelevant for most discussion. The Scotus on divine nothingness I posted as an attachment earlier this evening is probably worth reading relative to Parker’s paper as well. Whether one agrees with him I think Peirce most definitely was thinking through these issues. It’s not just in his early period either. The key passage of Peirce is this one. 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. … I do not mean that potentiality immediately results in actuality. Mediately perhaps it does; but what immediately resulted was that unbounded potentiality became potentiality of this or that sort -- that is, of some quality. Thus the zero of bare possibility, by evolutionary logic, leapt into the unit of some quality. (CP 6.215-220) Again I think this more neoplatonic or even Hegelian aspect to Peirce is his most controversial. I’m not sure we have to buy it to accept his other analysis.
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