CSP: (NOTE. Permit me, by the way, to express my satisfaction that every competent critic will recognize in me a disciple of Berkeley, although I am utterly opposed to his Nominalism, and although his denial of Matter, bad enough in his own day, has become ridiculous in ours. His attack on infinitesimals is of a piece with his Nominalism. But the Truth of Berkeleianism lies in his hinging all philosophy,--all Coenoscopy, to borrow Bentham's excellent word,--on the concept of SIGN; and in his Methodeutic of Noology. No doubt lurks in my mind that his view of Perception as a revelation from God is, in this particular, quite correct. Indeed, if one admits the Reality of God, it is all but a truism. Yet the Percept certainly does not profess explicitly to be such; nor can it be regarded as involving any Assertion by God addressed to the Percipient. On the contrary, it is just a plain Sign, or indication, of the Existence of Matter. As for that presupposition which I, for my part, regard Berkeley's view as requiring (though he, of course, did not,) namely, the presupposition of God's Reality, most of the usually current Arguments in its favour are Logically Valid, however weak some of them are; and the host of Nominalists who deny this are, upon this and much else, led far astray from sound Logic, chiefly by their false Metaphysics. The most powerful of the proofs of His Being is that the sincere inquirer, (who will first have been freed from Nominalism, so as no longer to confound the assertion of God's Reality, with the proposition that God Exists, since this being a contradiction in terminis, will not receive five minutes' consideration from any clear-headed person,)--if he meditates well upon God's Reality considered as a mere hypothesis,--and until he has done this, he is unfit to judge of it,--will, as a fact, find himself utterly incapable of doubting it, which is more than a Proof of it to him;--it is a Rational Compulsion. Meantime, for all those who have not yet themselves received that illumination, testimony to that effect lies open;--testimony stupendous in volume, and moreover quite unopposed if, as I believe to be the case, all Atheists are Nominalists; and this testimony ought to be accepted as a proof that a belief in God is a natural instinct, comparable with the instinct that leads various insects to lay their eggs where the larvae will find abundant food, though the mothers have no experiential acquaintance with eggs, unless they can remember being eggs themselves; and indeed even this would not, of itself, suffice.) Now it would certainly be the height of folly to discredit any such natural instinct. Surely, this consideration ought to suffice to induce any non-nominalist, any Scholastic Realist,--don't take fright at the name!—if he cares at all whether God really be or not, to try, for himself, the effect of thorough consideration of the hypothesis, and to devote, say, six or seven per cent of his waking hours for six or seven years to a sincere trial of the experiment. For the exercise, will, in any case, be the most refreshing of pleasures. See my paper in the Hibbert Journal for October 1908.There is one more consideration that will not be out of place here, in this digression, which is itself so lawless. It is that all Logic and all Reasoning goes on the assumption that the Universe, that each Universe, is governed by a Reason to which our own is akin. It only remains, therefore, to inquire whether that Universal Reason is or represents anything that can be properly likened to a Mind. For we must not predicate any Attribute of God otherwise than vaguely and figuratively, since God, though in a sense essentially intelligible, is nevertheless essentially incomprehensible. It may, therefore, truly be said that each of us believes in God, and that the only quest is how to believe less crudely,--a commonplace yet worth reminding ourselves of. It always seemed to me that, about 1875, when many men of science used to call themselves "agnostics," they were, in truth, among those whose Faith in God was firmest, and that it was precisely because it was so firm that they did not recognize it. (R 641:17-22; 1909 Nov 7)
- Berkeley was correct that perception is a revelation from God; and once one admits the Reality of God, this is all but a truism.
- Nevertheless, a Percept does not profess this explicitly, and does not involve any assertion by God addressed to the one perceiving it.
- Berkeley's view requires the presupposition of God's Reality, and most of the usual arguments for this are logically valid, even though some of them are weak.
- Anyone who denies this has been led astray from sound logic, chiefly by the false Metaphysics of nominalism; and all atheists are nominalists.
- The proposition that God exists is a contradiction in terms, which nominalists wrongly confound with the assertion of God's Reality.
- Anyone who has not meditated well on the hypothesis of God's Reality--which means spending an hour a day for six or seven years (!) doing so--is unfit to judge of it.
- Anyone who does conduct such an experiment will be utterly incapable of doubting God's Reality--i.e., rationally compelled to believe it--because belief in God is a natural instinct.
- God is both essentially intelligible and essentially incomprehensible, such that we can predicate attributes of God, but only vaguely and figuratively.
- At some level, everyone believes in God, so the objective of further inquiry about God is learning how to believe less crudely.
CSP: There seems to have been a great deal of downright atheism in England in the XVIIth century. The knowledge of this has to be either derived from the testimony of such contemporary writers, Sir Thomas Browne, for example, we find to be careful to restrict the word atheist to its proper meaning, or inferred from the number of books which were directed against that doctrine. From ordinary prudence, an atheist would not write a book in open support of his position, and this fact would naturally prevent the opinion from developing into a system. But a slight modification of Ockhamism, would be required, and that, a modification in the general spirit of that sect. It is true it would introduce difficulties, or rather render more patent difficulties which already attacked the system: but then those were difficulties from which the Ockhamists were habituated to averting their attention. Now such atheists must have often asked themselves, or have been asked, what they could say to the laws of nature; the only answer they could, by any possibility, have made, must have been precisely the doctrine of John Stuart Mill, who indeed, might, for anything in his published writings to the contrary, have perfectly well been an atheist himself. That is to say, they must have said that a law of nature was a similarity between events on similar occasions, which they must suppose was inexplicable. There have been at all times from Ockham to this day in England a great party of nominalist thinkers. For a long time, they wrote comparatively little because they were atheists, or would be called so. They undoubtedly all held that very same opinion about the laws of nature, which Mill in the preface of his logic refers to as a prevalent view. I will permit myself a brief paragraph on the merits of this opinion, which will be easy for the reader to skip if he likes.Now a phenomenon may be manifestly inexplicable, that is, may be such that it is nonsense to ask for an explanation of it. Thus it is nonsense to ask why blueness is blue and not sour, or to ask for an explanation of the variety of nature, since all that an explanation can explain is an agreement which may indeed involve a definite diversity among things, but no expla[na]tion can explain mere diversity as such; or to ask for an explanation of the element [of] brute force in experience, since without such element of brute existence nothing rational enters; to ask for example why that being I call "I, myself," should appear to have been born in the XIXth century, instead of, like so many others, in the XVIIth, or aborted before birth. But an analogy in phenomena is a rational relation. It is not manifestly per se inexplicable. If it be set down as inexplicable, this is a theory about it. Now to suppose anything to be inexplicable is illogical, because the only logical justification of a supposition is that it affords a rational explanation of phenomena; and it is not a rational explanation of phenomena to suppose that they have no rational explanation. (R 870:43-44[37-38]; 1901)
Dear Gary R,
Your response seemed to me that you were upset with my criticism of the father-son-spirit metaphor and broader post. I was not directing it against you personally, but as a cultural critique, and I apologize if it came across as a personal attack. I certainly respect your role as moderator of this forum and contributor to it.
To respond to your post, you say of Peirce’s first wife, Harriet Melusina Fay:
Gary R: “I don’t know whether she ‘saw through’ anything, while a growing sense of patriarchy was dawning on especially English and American women in her day.”
First, this seems to me to diminish the originality of her idea. And Harriet Melusina Fay herself used a visual metaphor when she claimed in 1859 that the mother was veiled in the traditional scriptures. That is part of why I said she “saw through” the veil, though one could also say she removed it. Here are her words (cited from the edition of Peirce’s Writings, Vol 1, introduction):
“a Divine Eternal Trinity of Father, Mother and Only Son—the ‘Mother’ being veiled throughout the Scriptures under the terms ‘The Spirit,’ ‘Wisdom,’ ‘The Holy Ghost,’ ‘The Comforter,’ and ‘The Woman clothed with the sun and crowned with the stars and with the moon under her feet’.”
I’m not aware of any women who made that interpretation of the Trinity before 1859, but would be interested to know if someone did.
Here’s an interesting one from Peirce, also from the introduction to Volume 1 of Writings: “And as late as 1907 we find a distant echo of Zina’s feminist version of the trinity. In outlining a draft of what turned out to be his best account of pragmatism within the framework of his general theory of signs, he then wrote: ‘A Sign mediates between its Object and its Meaning. . . Object the father, sign the mother of meaning.’ That is, he might have added, of their son, the Interpretant.”
In criticizing my use of a Feuerbach idea and a quote from Nietzsche, you claim a direct line from Feuerbach through Nietzsche to Hitler, also via Wagner. This is quite an axis of evil! Feuerbach was in turn influenced by Hegel. Would you include Hegel in that influencing line of history leading to Hitler? I am not a Feuerbachian materialist, I was simply citing an apt idea which is credited to Feuerbach. He also said, “Der Mensch ist was er isst,” which translates roughly to the English _expression_, “you are what you eat.” Except the German is also a humorous play on the third person singular of “is” and the third person singular of eating (isst), which sounds like the same word when spoken. I like that audible play too, “Man (humankind) is what he is.” You say of Feuerbach, “in my opinion, one ought to have outgrown by the time one leaves one’s intellectual adolescence when nihilist intellectual brilliance had been so seductive.” Again, I’m not a Feuerbachian, so how could I “outgrow” him. One doesn’t need to buy into all of a particular philosopher to find something useful in him or her. And Wagner, who you mention, yes, well, I can’t agree with Mark Twain that his music is better than it sounds.
In any case you didn’t address the specific point I was making citing Feuerbach, regarding the Heavenly family as an idealizing abstraction masking the earthly family, and my further point that the human nuclear family is also an inadequate metaphor today for divinity, too narrow because of its anthropocentrism.
You also question “innocence” of hunter gatherers: “So, we have lost our innocence if we ever had it. Were those ‘hunter-gatherers’ you so admire, Gene, really so pure of heart?” I did not discuss hunter gatherers in my post. The point of my criticism of anthropocentrism was that it was an historical development (which I have written about extensively elsewhere), which involved a distancing of religion from nature and the community of life. In Christianity, for example, the divinization and sacralization of a particular human being came at the cost of the descacrilization of the community of life, a process already begun in Judaism.
The construction of the transcendent in Judaism involved, for example, as Henri Frankfort stated in his book, Gods and Kings: “The Hebrew prophets rejected both the Egyptian and the Babylonian views. They insisted on the uniqueness and transcendence of God. For them all values were ultimately attributes of God; man and nature were devaluated, and every attempt to establish a harmony with nature was a futile dissipation of effort.” This also involved a transformation from the natural order as something to be obeyed, practically and religiously, to a sense that the natural order needed to be subdued (the word in Genesis is kabash, with a sense of subduing an enemy).
My broader argument is that the loss of nature as a direct informing source of perceptive religious experience and valuation was a grand historical mistake, one whose consequences are now being reckoned in the anthropocene. As John Stuart-Glennie, whose work I have resurrected in my last book and elsewhere said: “the Civilisations prior to the Sixth Century B.C. were chiefly determined by the Powers and Aspects of Nature, and those posterior thereto by the Activities and Myths of Mind.” (John Stuart-Glennie, The Modern Revolution, Proemia 1: Pilgrim Memories, London, GB: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1876, p. 479).
The historical fissioning of religion from nature left that gap, so that science as it developed would be concerned with direct perceptive experience of nature and religion with the myths of mind. This is the gap Peirce struggled to fill in essays such as “The Marriage of Religion and Science.” I am suggesting that a reopening to the community of life as a moral and sacred responsibility of religion is a potential path toward that reconciliation Peirce sought. One can even see potentially a new sensibility in this direction in the papal encyclical, Laudato si, subtitled “Care for Our Common Home,” that is, the earth.
Gene Halton
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
