Clark, Jerry R., list,
It seems to me you evade Jerry's question, Clark. A very sensible
question to me, well worth an answer to the question, not just beside
it.
As we all know, CSP took himself to be a laboratory minded philosopher,
in contrast with seminary minded philosophers. That is, he took it as
his job to find out. And not just by reading what others had written &
making compilations out of them.
CSP did not need a laboratory with special equipments. Everyday life was
his laboratory. Still, his experimentations on it were very, very
sophisticated.
In NA, CSP was exploring Christian religious beliefs as a philosopher.
Being bourn and raised as a member, he was exploring beliefs he had
himself grown into, just as well as his community. Thus something his
heart had already taken in - as a part, perhaps even a parcel. (How & to
what degree, we simply do not know. NA is not a confession!)
When you say: "Peirce’s religious views were rather idiosyncratic ...",
you say nothing. Everyone's views on any issue are idiosyncratic IF
studied in detail. In this particular context saying so sounds like you
were blaming him for being unique. - Which I do not take to be your
intention, however.
CSP most probably had a certain set religious beliefs, but NA is not a
declaration of those. Common beliefs were what he was interested in. And
he was examining their soundness & sense. Religious beliefs formed a
significant part of the prevailing set common beliefs.
If CSP was true to himself, then it must have been that he started with
some doubt on the immortality of the soul, BUT he ended up with finding
grounds for the belief, even though in an unorthodox way.
No use in trying to fit CSP into theological classifications, whatever
they may be.
And, I may add, if someone would call me a "pseudo-buddhist", I would
feel insulted.
So, please accept my objections to calling CSP by that name.
With best regards, Kirsti
Clark Goble kirjoitti 1.7.2016 18:23:
On Jun 30, 2016, at 8:35 PM, Jerry Rhee <[email protected]> wrote:
Do you find my previous writing to be religious or theological?
For instance, if I were to ask "what would God be?",
would that question not fit neatly into the previous argumentation?
When you start talking God or Trinity there’s a lot of theological
and philosophical assumptions one brings in. Add in that Peirce’s
religious views were rather idiosyncratic - much more on the deist
side of things but maintaining a significance of the Trinity but with
an odd pseudo-Buddhist like twist - and I just don’t feel I know
enough about the assumptions to say much. I’m religious myself but
my own religious views are rather unlike Peirce’s. By and large from
what I could see Peirce couldn’t bring himself to believe in
anything like an interventionist God. (For quite reasonable
epistemological reasons I might add - he just didn’t appear to have
much by way of religious experience and distrusted the ability of the
masses to interpret their religious experiences)
When you raise the question of God it inevitably gets into whether you
see the very sense of God determined primarily by the Greek
philosophical tradition - where God is ultimate cause or even Being
itself. However there’s a strong opposing view as well that sees God
much more as a person and therefor much more at odds with Greek
absolutism tendencies. At a minimum this opposing view is driven more
by religious experience, however naively interpreted it may often be.
This tension can be found throughout Christian history as well as
Jewish history. And certainly prior to the rise of philosophy both
Greek religion and Jewish religion was far more anthropomorphic in
religious beliefs. (Zeus or Jehovah are more like people, with
emotions and involvement in various ways with humanity rather than
absolutely Other — arguably Judaism started picking up the more
absolutist conceptions during the Hellenistic conquest of the near
east by Alexander and then more so with Roman control of the region)
So the question “what would God be” brings with it a slew of
historical and theological questions and presuppositions. In
Peirce’s intellectual class of the 19th century deism, platonism
(Emerson) and Hegelianism tended to define respectable intellectual
religion. Peirce, to my admitted limited eyes, seems largely caught up
with the religious views of his peers. In the 20th century this shifts
although much of the shift is nominalistic. That is people still tend
to believe the same sorts of things about interventionist deities,
miracles, and grounds of existence but over time divorce it from
religious language. Often the distinction between a deist and an
atheist is purely over language and how much they dislike being
connected rhetorically with organized religion. This continues until
the 1980’s when there was a somewhat countermove in Continental
philosophy where typically self-avowed atheists return to religious
language. But the influence of that culturally seems minor. And there
always were religious thinkers such as Levinas or Marion but the fact
they can enter into dialog so well with atheists in their own
traditions shows their religion is still compatible with that fuzzy
deist/atheist distinction.
I’ll confess my own views see tying grounds of being (in any of its
guises or meanings) with God to not be terribly fruitful. So it’s
just not a topic I’m interested in unless it relates to specific
philosophical questions (say with understanding Spinoza or Hegel).
Outside of how the Neglected Argument helps illuminate abduction and
Peirce’s notion of reality, I’m just not aware of the significance
of his religious beliefs. I’m not even convinced his ontological
beliefs (a fairly neoplatonic cosmological origin, the ontology of
swerve as tied to consciousness, etc.) necessarily affect his other
beliefs such as the pragmatic maxim or his semiotics.
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