Dear Helmut
I think your problem is solved by Panentheism, which accept the divine to be
both transcendent and immanent. Thus the Tohu va Bohu or pure Zero is the
transcendent, which as the first step in creation produces Firstness as real
possibilities of forms of existence, combined with the tendency to take habits,
which could be interpreted as The holy Ghost, which when stabilized produces
real Secondness and goes on to order it through the self-organizing drive of
thirdness. Now God = the Father in this scenario , is not a person because it
is pure potential. A person or a subject need both Secondness and thirdness to
manifest with a consciousness and a will. (Peirce writes: Since God, in His
essential character of Ens necessarium, is a disembodied spirit, and since
there is strong reason to hold that what we call consciousness is either merely
the general sensation of the brain or some part of it, or at all events some
visceral or bodily sensation, God probably has no consciousness. CP 6.489) The
manifestation could be The son, which can both manifest as a person like
Christ and/or Krishna and as our inner awareness. As Meister Eckhart says the
Sons is born again and again in every person and it is only through the birth
of the son in our consciousness that the way to Gods is possible. This
interpretation is pretty Gnostic and pure mystical and as such fits with much
Cristian mysticism, Taoism, Advaita Vedanta, Rumi’s Sufism and so on collected
in what is usually called the Perennial philosophy. This view on the divine has
been ad odds with most theistic religion that works with a personified creator.
Best
Søren
From: Helmut Raulien [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 11. oktober 2016 19:26
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Aw: RE: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce's Cosmology
List,
Regarding the question, whether Peirce was a pantheist or not, I was thinking
about the meaning of "immanent". If it means that something is contained
(nonlocally in this case), like as an epiphenomenon or a trait of something,
then something "immanent" implies not being the creator of this thing. But if
God is the creator, and still is present everywhere and everywhen, i.e.
nonlocally and nontemporally, might this still be pantheism, though without
immanence? In this case the universe does not contain God, but the other way
round. And the immanence is also the other way: God is not immanent in the
universe (or the three of them), but the universe is immanent in God? No, maybe
one cannot say so, if one believes in creation as a process, because then in
the beginning there must have been a God without a universe. But on the other
hand, this might be a too anthropocentric concept of God and of creation: Maybe
it is not a linear process, like a carpenter making a chair?
About possibilities: Are they creative or privative? Is a possibility an
invention, or something that remains when a lot of other items in question have
been identified as, or turned out to be, impossibilities? With God as
firstness, it should be the first (creative possibility) , I guess. But this
might be a hen-and-egg-question, which suggests that there was a beginning:
Either a nothing, or an everything. But maybe there was no beginning (like eg.
buddhists claim).
Best,
Helmut
11. Oktober 2016 um 16:59 Uhr
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> wrote:
Jon, list,
On the question of which of the three Universes may not “have a Creator
independent of it,” I’d like to offer an argument that it could be the Universe
of Firstness rather than Thirdness. However I won’t have time this week to
construct an argumentation as thoroughgoing as your argument for Thirdness as
Creator; so instead, I’ll just insert a few comments into your post, below.
I’ll put Peirce’s words in bold.
Gary F
} God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine
in the lapse of all the ages. [Thoreau] {
http://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ Turning Signs gateway
From: Jon Alan Schmidt [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 9-Oct-16 22:45
List:
As I mentioned a few weeks ago when I started the thread on "Peirce's Theory of
Thinking," there is an intriguing paragraph about cosmology in the first
additament to "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God." It did not
actually accompany the article originally, but nevertheless is in the Collected
Papers as CP 6.490. Before discussing it directly, a few preliminaries are in
order.
In the very first sentence of the published article itself, Peirce stated, "The
word 'God,' so 'capitalized' (as we Americans say), is the definable proper
name, signifying Ens necessarium; in my belief Really creator of all three
Universes of Experience" (CP 6.452, EP 2.434). In the second additament, the
one that did appear in The Hibbert Journal, he added, "It is that course of
meditation upon the three Universes which gives birth to the hypothesis and
ultimately to the belief that they, or at any rate two of the three, have a
Creator independent of them …" (CP 6.483, EP 2.448). Furthermore, in three
different manuscript drafts of the article that are included in R 843, Peirce
explicitly denied that God is "immanent in" nature or the three Universes,
instead declaring (again) that He is the Creator of them:
* "I do not mean, then, a 'soul of the World' or an intelligence is
'immanent' in Nature, but is the Creator of the three Universes of minds, of
matter, and of ideal possibilities, and of everything in them."
* "Indeed, meaning by 'God,' as throughout this paper will be meant, the
Being whose Attributes are, in the main, those usually ascribed to Him,
Omniscience, Omnipotence, Infinite Benignity, a Being not 'immanent in' the
Universes of Matter, Mind, and Ideas, but the Sole Creator of every content of
them, without exception."
* "But I had better add that I do not mean by God a being merely 'immanent
in Nature,' but I mean that Being who has created every content of the world of
ideal possibilities, of the world of physical facts, and the world of all
minds, without any exception whatever."
These passages shed light not only on Peirce's concept of God--he was clearly a
theist, not a pantheist or panentheist, at least as I understand those
terms--but also on what exactly he had in mind with his three Universes of
Experience that the article describes as consisting of Ideas, Brute Actuality,
and Signs. These evidently correspond respectively to (1) ideal possibilities,
matter, and minds; (2) Ideas, Matter, and Mind; and (3) ideal possibilities,
physical facts, and minds. Of course, it is barely a stretch, if at all, to
identify these with his categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.
[GF: ] I think it would be less of a stretch to identify the contents of those
Universes as Firsts, Seconds and Thirds, i.e. as subjects or objects in which
Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness (respectively) inhere. This leaves open
the possibility of identifying one of the categories as Creator of all three
Universes. As you have pointed out already, Peirce begins by defining “Idea” as
“anything whose Being consists in its mere capacity for getting fully
represented, regardless of any person's faculty or impotence to represent it.”
These are clearly contents of the first Universe, and Peirce certainly asserts
their Reality (after defining that term): “Of the three Universes of Experience
familiar to us all, the first comprises all mere Ideas, those airy nothings to
which the mind of poet, pure mathematician, or another might give local
habitation and a name within that mind. Their very airy-nothingness, the fact
that their Being consists in mere capability of getting thought, not in
anybody's Actually thinking them, saves their Reality.”
[GF: ] I think it is worth noticing that Peirce defines the contents of the
first Universe by quoting from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V – which is
largely a dialogue about reality and dreams; and that his definition of Reality
(in the previous paragraph) uses a dream as an example of something that is
unreal in one sense but real in another: ““Real” is a word invented in the
thirteenth century to signify having Properties, i.e. characters sufficing to
identify their subject, and possessing these whether they be anywise attributed
to it by any single man or group of men, or not. Thus, the substance of a dream
is not Real, since it was such as it was, merely in that a dreamer so dreamed
it; but the fact of the dream is Real, if it was dreamed; since if so, its
date, the name of the dreamer, etc. make up a set of circumstances sufficient
to distinguish it from all other events; and these belong to it, i.e. would be
true if predicated of it, whether A, B, or C Actually ascertains them or not.”
[GF: ] Peirce is saying that the substance of the dream is not Real, although
the fact of the dream is. But he has just defined “idea” in the vernacular
sense as “the substance of an actual unitary thought or fancy” and contrasted
that sense with “Idea,” defined as “anything whose Being consists in its mere
capacity for getting fully represented, regardless of any person's faculty or
impotence to represent it” – which has the Reality proper to the first
Universe, the Reality of a possibility. (and not the reality of a substance.
Once this “airy nothing” or “anything” does get fully represented, then it has
the Actual (and perhaps substantial) Reality proper to the second Universe, and
if it actually represents something to somebody (insert sop to Cerberus), then
it has the Reality proper to the third Universe. To me it seems logical enough
to regard this insubstantial Being, this capacity, as the Creator of all three
Universes. This would be somewhat analogous to regarding abduction as Creator
of the hypothesis which, my means of deduction, creates a theory which through
inductive testing becomes more and more substantial. As we all know, abduction
is the only source of new ideas; perhaps Firstness is the only source of Ideas.
Likewise we might regard the dreamer as Creator of the dream and of the fact of
the dream and of whatever might be predicated of it (i.e. of its meaning, if it
has any). Thirdness, on the other hand, has connective rather than creative
power: “The third Universe comprises everything whose Being consists in active
power to establish connections between different objects, especially between
objects in different Universes.”
[resuming JAS:] What I quoted above from CP 6.483 and EP 2.448 suggests the
possibility that only two of the three Universes have a Creator independent of
them, which raises the question of which one might not. Peirce provided a
major clue in CP 6.490:
A full exposition of the pragmaticistic definition of Ens necessarium would
require many pages; but some hints toward it may be given. A disembodied
spirit, or pure mind, has its being out of time, since all that it is destined
to think is fully in its being at any and every previous time. But in endless
time it is destined to think all that it is capable of thinking … Pure mind, as
creative of thought, must, so far as it is manifested in time, appear as having
a character related to the habit-taking capacity, just as super-order is
related to uniformity.
According to Peirce, then, God is "pure mind," and thus in some sense may not
be completely independent of the Universe of Mind (i.e., Thirdness), while
nevertheless being the independent Creator of the other two Universes--of Ideas
and ideal possibilities (i.e., Firstness), and of Matter and physical facts
(i.e., Secondness).
What does all of this have to do with cosmology? By 1908, Peirce apparently
no longer held (if he ever did) that Firstness came first, so to speak; God
created Firstness (and Secondness), but God Himself is Thirdness. Furthermore,
what exactly did God create when He created Firstness? Peirce once again
supplied the answer in CP 6.490:
In that state of absolute nility, in or out of time, that is, before or after
the evolution of time, there must then have been a tohu-bohu of which nothing
whatever affirmative or negative was true universally. There must have been,
therefore, a little of everything conceivable.
In other words, there was an infinite range of vague possibilities, consistent
with Peirce's evolving mathematical definition of a continuum, which is a
paradigmatic manifestation of Thirdness.
[GF: ] But I think you will agree that possibility is the logical equivalent of
Firstness, not Thirdness. Peirce at this stage in his thinking often identified
continuity with generality, and he wrote c.1905 that “The generality of the
possible” is “the only true generality” (CP 5.533). So I don’t think continuity
is confined to Thirdness; and I think Gary Richmond has argued that the
ur-continuum or tohu bohu represented by the blackboard in Peirce’s famous
cosmology lecture is the first Universe, which comprises “vague possibilities.”
—Anyway, that’s all I have time for today, so I’ll leave the rest to you, for
now!
He continued:
There must have been here and there a little undifferentiated tendency to take
super-habits. But such a state must tend to increase itself. For a tendency
to act in any way, combined with a tendency to take habits, must increase the
tendency to act in that way. Now substitute in this general statement for
"tendency to act in any way" a tendency to take habits, and we see that that
tendency would grow. It would also become differentiated in various ways.
The tendency to take habits is another paradigmatic manifestation of Thirdness,
and Peirce had suggested thirty years earlier in "A Guess at the Riddle" (CP
1.414, EP 1.279) that "habits of persistency" were precisely what enabled
substances to achieve permanent existence; i.e., Secondness.
I probably could (and eventually might) say more about CP 6.490, but these
initial observations are reminiscent of and consistent with the famous
"blackboard" passage from the last Cambridge Conferences lecture of 1898, "The
Logic of Continuity" (CP 6.203-209, RLT 261-263). Peirce offered a clean
blackboard as "a sort of Diagram of the original vague potentiality," differing
from it by having only two dimensions rather than "some indefinite multitude of
dimensions." A chalk line drawn on the blackboard--by the hand of God,
perhaps?--represents a brute discontinuity, but it is not really a line itself;
it is a surface, one whose continuity is entirely derived from and dependent on
that of the underlying blackboard. The only true line is the limit between the
white and black areas, "the reaction between two continuous surfaces into which
it is separated."
Peirce acknowledged that all three categories--whiteness or blackness
(Firstness), the boundary between them (Secondness), and the continuity of each
(Thirdness)--are necessary for the reality of the chalk line. However, he
suggested that the continuity of the blackboard (Thirdness) is primordial in
the sense that its reality somehow precedes and sustains that of anything drawn
upon it. A chalk line that persists, rather than being erased, represents the
establishment of a habit--which is also entirely derived from and dependent on
the continuity of the underlying blackboard:
This habit is a generalizing tendency, and as such a generalization, and as
such a general, and as such a continuum or continuity. It must have its origin
in the original continuity which is inherent in potentiality. Continuity, as
generality, is inherent in potentiality, which is essentially general.
As additional lines are drawn and persist, they join together under other
habits to constitute a "reacting system." Eventually, "out of one of these
Platonic worlds is differentiated the particular actual universe of existence
in which we happen to be." So Peirce reaffirmed here that the law of mind,
which is the law of habit, is primordial in the sense that all physical laws
are derived from it (cf. CP 6.24-25). Furthermore, according to Peirce, God as
"pure mind," as well as the universal tendency to take habits and the "Platonic
worlds" of Ideas and ideal possibilities, were and are real prior to--and hence
apart from--the world of Matter and physical facts that now exists. His
position was an "extreme scholastic realism," indeed!
Regards,
Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA
Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman
www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt<http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt> -
twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt<http://twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt>
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