Gene, list,
Thanks for this remarkable quote by D.H. Lawrence. I too have been out of
the country for a while (I hope you had a good conference) so that I
haven't had a chance to respond to it earlier. For now, just a few comments
on the quotation.
“When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder.
Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are
based on wonder. Love without wonder is a sensational affair, and power
without wonder is mere force and compulsion."
Naturally, a diehard trichotomist like me will tend to see these three as
suggesting something like this tricategorial arrangement:
*wonder (or, awe), 1ns*
*|> love (i.e., Peirce's evolutionary love), 3ns*
*power, (law working through brute existential action/reaction and
individual 'will'), 2ns*
Well, I won't yet insist on this, although I think it makes sense enough to
me for the moment and in the context of 'consciousness' as Lawrence
describes it. The quotation continues:
The one universal element in consciousness which is fundamental to
life is the element of wonder. You cannot help feeling it in a bean as it
starts to grow and pulls itself out of its jacket. You cannot help feeling
it in the glisten of the nucleus of the amoeba. You recognize it,
willy-nilly, in an ant busily tugging at a straw; in a rook, as it walks
the frosty grass.
They all have their obstinate will. But they all live with a sense of
wonder. Plant consciousness, insect consciousness, fish consciousness, all
are related by one permanent element, which we may call the religious
element inherent in all life, even in a flea: the sense of wonder. That is
our sixth sense, and it is the natural religious sense.
His notion of wonder as "one permanent element, which we may call the
religious element inherent in all life," or, as he somewhat qualifies it,
in the living "consciousness" of plants and animals--"the natural
religious sense" doesn't seem to me to be at all foreign to Peirce's
thinking in the matter, and there are places where he discusses religion as
a primitive or quasi-fundamental sense of wonder or awe (he also associates
this sense with the creative arts).
This kind of thinking further suggests to me a possible non-dogmatic,
non-doctrinaire, but *not* non-religious way of looking at such matters for
those who can't abide organized religion, on the one hand, nor a
nothing-but reduction of everything to the matterial of the physical realm
science.
Lawrence continues, shifting the focus slightly to what he calls "mystery":
"Somebody says that mystery is nothing, because mystery is something
you don’t know, and what you don’t know is nothing to you. But there is
more than one way of knowing. Even the real scientist works in the sense of
wonder. The pity is, when he comes out of his laboratory he puts aside his
wonder along with his apparatus, and tries to make it all perfectly
didactic. Science in its true condition of wonder is as religious as any
religion. But didactic science is as dead and boring as dogmatic religion.
Both are wonderless and are productive of boredom, endless boredom.”
So, "Science in its true condition of wonder is as religious as any
religion. But didactic science is as dead and boring as dogmatic religion."
I personally can't help but fully agree with Lawrence here.
And Peirce had himself made this point in slightly different language (I
haven't the time at the moment to look up sources), for I don't recall his
using the term 'boring' in these contexts. But surely he employed the word
'dead' to describe the lifeless character of both science and religion when
either has lost its sense of wonder. Now I'm further suggesting that
'wonder' in this sense is a kind of 1ns.
Best,
Gary R
[image: Gary Richmond]
*Gary Richmond*
*Philosophy and Critical Thinking*
*Communication Studies*
*LaGuardia College of the City University of New York*
*C 745*
*718 482-5690*
On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 7:22 AM, Eugene Halton <[email protected]> wrote:
> Yes, beautiful Chesterton quotation, Ben N.
> I loved the "Tommy opened the door" example; and also "This proves
> that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and
> amazement." That "almost prenatal leap" is our genetic heritage, and why we
> are prepared already at birth to leap into intersocial musical dialogue
> with the mother/caretaker, as Malloch and Trevathen's research with
> newborns has demonstrated. They found "precise formulation in terms of
> three parameters: pulse, quality, and narrative,” which are revealed in
> turn taking interactions with mothers, and charted through spectrographs
> and pitch plots. And all of it from the days to weeks old subcortical brain!
> I agree with Gary F's post on Peirce's view of the mindedness in
> matter. Peirce claimed elsewhere, all matter is mind hidebound with habit.
> His claim for a psycho-physical universe and critique of necessitarianism
> as incapable of adequately explaining variegating life remains a challenge
> to materialism and its denial of thirdness.
> Helmut, you seem to be denying Peirce's claim that things are
> involved in thirdness as well as having their secondness. On another level,
> your characterization of "stone age peoples" ignores the nature of semiotic
> animism, which involves the livingness of things in relationships, not in
> isolate substances. That great stone mountain genuinely moves me, and my
> feeling of wonder genuinely involves me, the mountain, and the living
> relationship between us. Our minds live and learn in our transactions,
> which really involve the objects of those transactions, internal or
> external.
>
> Perhaps resonating somewhere between the Peirce and Chesterton
> quotations, though not the same as either's perspective, is this statement
> on the wonder inherent in life by D H Lawrence:
> “When all comes to all, the most precious element in life is wonder.
> Love is a great emotion, and power is power. But both love and power are
> based on wonder. Love without wonder is a sensational affair, and power
> without wonder is mere force and compulsion.
> The one universal element in consciousness which is fundamental to
> life is the element of wonder. You cannot help feeling it in a bean as it
> starts to grow and pulls itself out of its jacket. You cannot help feeling
> it in the glisten of the nucleus of the amoeba. You recognize it,
> willy-nilly, in an ant busily tugging at a straw; in a rook, as it walks
> the frosty grass.
> They all have their obstinate will. But they all live with a sense of
> wonder. Plant consciousness, insect consciousness, fish consciousness, all
> are related by one permanent element, which we may call the religious
> element inherent in all life, even in a flea: the sense of wonder. That is
> our sixth sense, and it is the natural religious sense.
> Somebody says that mystery is nothing, because mystery is something
> you don’t know, and what you don’t know is nothing to you. But there is
> more than one way of knowing. Even the real scientist works in the sense of
> wonder. The pity is, when he comes out of his laboratory he puts aside his
> wonder along with his apparatus, and tries to make it all perfectly
> didactic. Science in its true condition of wonder is as religious as any
> religion. But didactic science is as dead and boring as dogmatic religion.
> Both are wonderless and are productive of boredom, endless boredom.”
> Gene Halton
> Salzburg
>
>
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