Dear Gary
My question was to a Bhakti Vedanta apprentice who believe that the absolute
truth was to be found in the Vedas and therefore doubted science, evolution and
democracy. Although the quotes you have found are interesting I do not quite
see how they answer the question?
Best
Søren
Fra: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
Sendt: 31. januar 2016 15:50
Til: 'Peirce-L'
Emne: [PEIRCE-L] RE: Can we encompass spirituality, democracy and science in
one culture?
List,
My online book Turning Signs is, in part, an attempt to give a positive answer
to Søren’s question in the subject line. Since my blog post today,
http://gnusystems.ca/wp/2016/01/bodymind-evolves/, draws heavily upon Peirce
and has relevant implications, I’m posting it here in full. It is of course
only a fragment of Turning Signs, but it contains a link to the main text where
a key term is developed.
Suppose we define ‘self’ as the boundary between internal and external worlds.
Its social function then is to manifest the individual person in the social
milieu; but this also means concealing the primal
person<http://gnusystems.ca/TS/bdy.htm#person> behind the mask of
individuality. Now suppose that primal person is the deeper self as ‘inner
world’: how primal is it? In Peirce's evolutionary cosmology, it goes all the
way back to the beginning:
The distinction between the inner and the outer worlds antedates Time. I do not
mean by the inner world that human consciousness which Baldwin and Royce have
lately so forcibly reminded us is a social development and therefore very
recent, only now in fact in process of taking a shape which has not yet been
attained. 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. The social world was logically
developed out of those two and the physiological structure of man was brought
to forms adapted to that development.
— NEM 4, 141 (probably 1898)
Peirce is here proposing a co-evolution of a ‘the social world’ and the
physical form of humanity – a more daring and comprehensive hypothesis than the
co-evolution of language and brain as advanced by Deacon (1997), for instance.
The logical development of the social world is the continuing evolution of
Thought in the Peircean sense, of Thirdness mediating between the Firstness and
Secondness which it involves, for ‘everything is involved which can be evolved’
(CP 4.86). Insofar as humanity is engaged in learning from experience, it
continues to evolve through collective pursuit of the truth we hope to arrive
at consensually.
This ultimate destiny of opinion is quite independent of how you, I, or any man
may persist in thinking. It is thought, but it is not my thought or yours, but
is the thought that will conquer. It is this that every student hopes for. It
is the Truth; and the reality of this truth lies, not at all in its being
thought, but in the compulsion with which every thinker will be made to bow to
it, a compulsion which constitutes it to be exterior to his thought. If this
hope is altogether vain, if there is no such compulsion, or externality, then
there is no true Knowledge at all and reasoning is altogether idle. If the hope
is destined only partially to be realized, then there is an approximate reality
and truth, which is not exact.
—MS 735, “The Theory of Reasoning,” undated (quoted in Kaag 2014, Kindle
Locations 2034-2036)
Gary f.
} And one day you get that letter you've been waiting for forever. And
everything it says is true. And then in the last line it says: Burn this.
[Laurie Anderson] {
http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ Turning Signs gateway
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