Clark - you wrote:
"Well I was with you up until you said they “have nothing to do with the
pre-matter/mind state-of-indeterminacy.” I think they have lot to do with it.
But they aren’t the same thing. Firstness is a type of indeterminacy but it is
not the same indeterminacy as the earlier nothing."
Yes - I fully agree with you. I think one has to be very careful in how the
same word can have a different contextual meaning. Firstness is a type of
indeterminacy but..exactly right - it's not the same indeterminacy as the
earlier nothing. My point when I wrote that was that the original indeterminacy
could not be defined as a State of Firstness. That's because, in my reading,
the three categories refer to phenomena. Peirce calls them 'elements'[logical
elements]; they are interdependent [1.353] - which is also why I have trouble
with suggesting that Firstness is, in itself, operative in the pre-universe
state.
And yes- I can see that the below quote makes sense:
The chaos is a state of intensest feeling, although, memory and habit being
totally absent, it is sheer nothing still. Feeling has existence only so far as
it is welded into feeling. Now the welding of this feeling to the great whole
of feeling is accomplished only by the reflection of a later date
Again, Firstness as feeling 'has existence only so far as it is welded into
feeling'. And since the categories are interdependent, then..the other
categories necessarily function as well.
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
From: Clark Goble
To: Edwina Taborsky ; Peirce-L
Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2016 10:56 AM
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Peirce's neoPlatonism
On Oct 24, 2016, at 5:46 PM, Edwina Taborsky <[email protected]> wrote:
Aren't Plato's Forms 'real' - even when NOT embedded within matter/concepts?
Depends. Are numbers real even when not embedded within matter/concepts?
After all there are numbers that have never been formally thought yet it’s
pretty common today to think them real. Even Quine says that so long as you can
quantify over it then it’s real. So were fractional numbers real say 50,000
years ago? I’d say yes simply because they could *potentially* be embedded.
That is their reality isn’t due to their embeddedness but their potential
embeddedness.
My field is not philosophy - so I have no knowledge of Armstrong.
Ah, sorry. I assumed it was. (Mine is actually physics but I minored in
philosophy in school and philosophy was easier to keep up with than physics
once I left formal academics)
I don't have 6.612 in my collection. Those few pages are missing!
https://colorysemiotica.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/peirce-collectedpapers.pdf
The passage is primarily about the existence of chance and explanations. It’s
a fantastic if long passage dealing with a lot of Peirce’s foundational
ontology including the relationship of consciousness to chance (swerve). He
also makes a fascinating argument against the conservation of energy. (With no
reference to Noether although she didn’t publish her theorem until 1918 so that
makes sense)
And I don't see any of the categories as 'existent' or operational or
whatever term one uses, before the emergence of Matter-Mind. The categories, as
I understand them, are basic modes of organization of Matter-Mind and do so -
within the semiosic triad.
I don’t recall how Peirce deals with time on this matter. Typically the way
this is dealt with (and this goes back to antiquity) is to say there is a
logical order and not a temporal order. So emanations within Platonism are
logical emanations not a temporal creation. While he doesn’t really formally
discuss this, I’d say 6.12-6.18 is also primarily a discussion of logical order
and not temporal cosmology. I’d add it’s worth reading on where Peirce
discusses Being and Nothingness.
Prior to the emergence of Matter-Mind, I don't see the universe as a state
of 'Firstness'. But - as nothing. After all, in 1-412, Peirce says: "out of the
womb of indeterminacy, we must say that there would have come something, by the
principle of Firstness, which we may call a flash. Then by the principle of
habit there would have been a second flash....
Therefore, the way I read the above is NOT that Firstness 'existed' or 'was
real' within that 'womb of indeterminacy. As he writes, "The original chaos,
therefore, where there was no regularity, was in effect a state of mere
indeterminacy, in which nothing existed or really happened" 1.411.
I think Peirce would agree with that. But then so too would the platonists
I’m familiar with. Peirce says in 6.612 "I go back to a chaos so irregular that
in strictness the word existence is not applicable to its merely germinal state
of being…”
The three categories are fundamental principles of the world. But have
nothing to do with the pre-Matter/Mind state-of-indeterminacy. And Firstness
cannot be defined as 'indeterminacy’.
Well I was with you up until you said they “have nothing to do with the
pre-matter/mind state-of-indeterminacy.” I think they have lot to do with it.
But they aren’t the same thing. Firstness is a type of indeterminacy but it is
not the same indeterminacy as the earlier nothing.
Equally hasty is his oft-repeated objection that my absolute chance is
something ultimate and inexplicable. I go back to a chaos so irregular that in
strictness the word existence is not applicable to its merely germinal state of
being; and here I reach a region in which the objection to ultimate causes
loses its force. But I do not stop there. Even this nothingness, though it
antecedes the infinitely distant absolute beginning of time, is traced back to
a nothingness more rudimentary still, in which there is no variety, but only an
indefinite specificability, which is nothing but a tendency to the
diversification of the nothing, while leaving it as nothing as it was before.
What objectionable ultimacy is here? The objection to an ultimate consists in
its raising a barrier across the path of inquiry, in its specifying a
phenomenon at which questions must stop, contrary to the postulate, or hope, of
logic. But what question to which any meaning can be attached am I forbidding
by my absolute chance? If what is demanded is a theological backing, or
rational antecedent, to the chaos, that my theory fully supplies. The chaos is
a state of intensest feeling, although, memory and habit being totally absent,
it is sheer nothing still. Feeling has existence only so far as it is welded
into feeling. Now the welding of this feeling to the great whole of feeling is
accomplished only by the reflection of a later date. In itself, therefore, it
is nothing; but in its relation to the end it is everything.
Again I’d suggest reading the whole passage.
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