Dear Gary,
Thanks for your comments. Yes, I agree with your diagramming,
that if Lawrence’s statement could fit Peirce’s triad it would look
something like that. But Lawrence tends to treat power and love more as
contraries rather than modes of being. Still, yes, I think his idea that
wonder is endemic to life, including the life of science, is resonant with
Peirce’s philosophy. As Peirce said speaking of musement:
“But let religious meditation be allowed to grow up spontaneously out of
Pure Play without any breach of continuity, and the Muser will retain the
perfect candour proper to Musement” (6.458). One important difference is
that Lawrence writes as a champion of life whereas Peirce the logician sees
“vitally important topics” as relatively insignificant for philosophy. I
find in this difference that Lawrence and Peirce make for good contraries.
I like the capitalization of “Pure Play” by Peirce. Play is
indigenous to our primate and mammalian genome. Biologists often discuss it
in terms of utility for survival, not that it doesn’t have that, but what
if we take it as an embodiment of the wonder of life? Homo ludens is a
longer lineage for which our homo sapiens aspect is a relative newcomer.
Consider Johannes Huizinga’s statements from his book *Homo Ludens*
“The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than
culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew
up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play, music and
dancing were pure play. Wisdom and philosophy found expression in words and
forms derived from religious contests. The rules of warfare, the
conventions of noble living were built up on play-patterns. We have to
conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played.
It does not come *from* play like a babe detaching itself from the womb: it
arises *in* and *as* play, and never leaves it” (1955: 173).
And, “The most we can say of the function that is operative in the process
of image-making or imagination is that it is a poetic function; and we
define it best of all by calling it a function of play — the *ludic*
function, in fact. So that the apparently quite simple question of what
play really is, leads us into the problem of the nature and origin of
religious concepts” Huizinga, p. 25).
As John Moore put it in an interesting 1990 work titled *Lovebite:
Mythology and the Semiotics of Culture*:
“The metaphorical perception of the play of resemblances and differences
remains central to cult-lore sensibility, its predilection for experiencing
transformation and its effortless shifts into nonordinary modes of
consciousness. Playfulness constitutes its fundamental characteristic…
Spirituality allows belief to emerge from the ludic reticulations of
make-believe, whereas religion denies all connexion, denigrating
make-believe as fantasy and exalting belief — or faith — as actuality.
Recognizing belief as merely doctrinal/sacramental scaffolding around the
numinous, spirituality grants that imagination constitutes the most valid
and congenial faculty for formulating beliefs about the sacred. But
religion, with each of its authoritarian sects claiming their methodology
as the only true path to salvation, demands literal belief in its tenets.
This difference occurs because religion externalizes and anthropomorphises
its deities, who then demand worship, whereas spirituality does not
differentiate between interior and exterior, and rather than personify the
sacred promotes participation in its vast elemental mysteries.”
Lawrence explored this kind of difference in depth, and argued
for an imaging and instinctive mode of “affirmative mind,” (with some
resonances with Peirce’s abduction) as primal and as something the
development of civilization has progressively lost touch with in the past
2,500 years. I’ve discussed this in my book, *From the Axial Age to the
Moral Revolution*.
Gene Halton
On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 6:18 PM, Gary Richmond <[email protected]>
wrote:
> 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 <718%20482-5690>*
>
> 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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