> On Oct 24, 2016, at 10:55 AM, Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Clark, List: > > At this point, it seems appropriate to shift this conversation to the > spin-off thread that I started last week based on Ben Novak's post and the > ones to which he was responding, which I have reproduced below. As we have > previously discussed under the heading of Peirce's Cosmology, he explicitly > referred to multiple "Platonic worlds" as one of the stages preceding the > emergence of this actual universe of existence. I have suggested that the > former correspond to the coalescing chalk marks on the blackboard, which then > serve as a whiteboard for the "discontinuous mark" that represents the latter.
I’m slowly working through the posts I missed. Allow me to repost the relevant quote. This is 6.202-209. I think you quoted the paragraph referring to platonism. (See the other quotes at the bottom of this post too that differ from this version) I’ll try to relate this to the other comments later this evening. However having the original sources undoubtedly helps the discussion. Permit me further to say that I object to having my metaphysical system as a whole called Tychism. For although tychism does enter into it, it only enters as subsidiary to that which is really, as I regard it, the characteristic of my doctrine, namely, that I chiefly insist upon continuity, or Thirdness, and, in order to secure to thirdness its really commanding function, I find it indispensable fully [to] recognize that it is a third, and that Firstness, or chance, and Secondness, or Brute reaction, are other elements, without the independence of which Thirdness would not have anything upon which to operate. Accordingly, I like to call my theory Synechism, because it rests on the study of continuity. I would not object to Tritism. And if anybody can prove that it is trite, that would delight me [in] the chiefest degree. All that I have been saying about the beginnings of creation seems wildly confused enough. Now let me give you such slight indication, as brevity permits, of the clue to which I trust to guide us through the maze. Let the clean blackboard be a sort of diagram of the original vague potentiality, or at any rate of some early stage of its determination. This is something more than a figure of speech; for after all continuity is generality. This blackboard is a continuum of two dimensions, while that which it stands for is a continuum of some indefinite multitude of dimensions. This blackboard is a continuum of possible points; while that is a continuum of possible dimensions of quality, or is a continuum of possible dimensions of a continuum of possible dimensions of quality, or something of that sort. There are no points on this blackboard. There are no dimensions in that continuum. I draw a chalk line on the board. This discontinuity is one of those brute acts by which alone the original vagueness could have made a step towards definiteness. There is a certain element of continuity in this line. Where did this continuity come from? It is nothing but the original continuity of the blackboard which makes everything upon it continuous. What I have really drawn there is an oval line. For this white chalk- mark is not a line, it is a plane figure in Euclid's sense -- a surface, and the only line there, is the line which forms the limit between the black surface and the white surface. Thus the discontinuity can only be produced upon that blackboard by the reaction between two continuous surfaces into which it is separated, the white surface and the black surface. The whiteness is a Firstness -- a springing up of something new. But the boundary between the black and white is neither black, nor white, nor neither, nor both. It is the pairedness of the two. It is for the white the active Secondness of the black; for the black the active Secondness of the white. Now the clue, that I mentioned, consists in making our thought diagrammatic and mathematical, by treating generality from the point of view of geometrical continuity, and by experimenting upon the diagram. We see the original generality like the ovum of the universe segmentated by this mark. However, the mark is a mere accident, and as such may be erased. It will not interfere with another mark drawn in quite another way. There need be no consistency between the two But no further progress beyond this can be made, until a mark will stay for a little while; that is, until some beginning of a habit has been established by virtue of which the accident acquires some incipient staying quality, some tendency toward consistency. 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. The whiteness or blackness, the Firstness, is essentially indifferent as to continuity. It lends itself readily to generalization but is not itself general. The limit between the whiteness and blackness is essentially discontinuous, or antigeneral. It is insistently this here. The original potentiality is essentially continuous, or general. Once the line will stay a little after it is marked, another line may be drawn beside it. Very soon our eye persuades us there is a new line, the envelope of those others. This rather prettily illustrates the logical process which we may suppose takes place in things, in which the generalizing tendency builds up new habits from chance occurrences. The new curve, although it is new in its distinctive character, yet derives its continuity from the continuity of the blackboard itself. The original potentiality is the Aristotelian matter or indeterminacy from which the universe is formed. The straight lines as they multiply themselves under the habit of being tangent to the envelope gradually tend to lose their individuality. They become in a measure more and more obliterated and sink into mere adjuncts to the new cosmos in which they are individuals. Many such reacting systems may spring up in the original continuum; and each of these may itself act as a first line from which a larger system may be built, in which it in turn will merge its individuality. At the same time all this, be it remembered, is not of the order of the existing universe, but is merely a Platonic world, of which we are, therefore, to conceive that there are many, both coordinated and subordinated to one another; until finally out of one of these Platonic worlds is differentiated the particular actual universe of existence in which we happen to be. There is, therefore, every reason in logic why this here universe should be replete with accidental characters, for each of which, in its particularity, there is no other reason than that it is one of the ways in which the original vague potentiality has happened to get differentiated. But, for all that, it will be found that if we suppose the laws of nature to have been formed under the influence of a universal tendency of things to take habits, there are certain characters that those laws will necessarily possess. As for attempting to set forth the series of deductions I have made upon this subject, that would be out of the question. All that I have any thought of doing is to illustrate, by a specimen or two, chosen among those which need the least explanation, some of the methods by which such reasoning may be conducted. Interestingly this is different from the form it takes in some printed versions. Here’s a link to the printed version. See especially page 258. http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/siap/readings/peirce_lecture_8_continuity.pdf Allow me to quote from this version. It’s relevant for the points I made in my prior posts today, particularly that of logical emanation. >From this point of view we must suppose that the existing universe with all >its arbitrary secondness is an offshoot from, or an arbitrary determination >of, a world of ideas, a Platonic world; not that our superior logic has >enabled us to reach up to a world of forms to which the real universe with its >feebler logic was inadequate. If this be correct, we cannot suppose the process of derivation, a process which extends from before time and from before logic, we cannot suppose that it began elsewhere than in the utter vagueness of com- pletely undetermined and dimensionless potentiality. The evolutionary process is, therefore, not a mere evolution of the existing universe, but rather a process by which the very Platonic forms themselves have become or are becoming developed. We shall naturally suppose, of course, that existence is a stage of evolution. This existence is presumably but a special existence. We need not suppose that every form needs for its evolution to emerge into this world, but only that it needs to enter into some theatre of reactions, of which this is one The evolution of forms begins, or at any rate, has for an early stage of it, a vague potentiality; and that either is or is followed by a contin- uum of forms having a multitude of dimensions too great for the indi- vidual dimensions to be distinct. It must be by a contraction of the vagueness of that potentiality of everything in general but of nothing in particular that the world of forms comes about.
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