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}JAS, Gene, list
Obviously I disagree with both theological outlines of JAS and Gene.
I didn't comment on Gene's outline because I thought it would take
too much non-Peircean analysis to explain my view that theological
structures - whether expressed within animism, polytheism or
monotheism - are related to societal functionality and not to
psychological needs. That is - there may be a psychological
requirement for a belief in continuity of Type, i.e., in habits, in
laws that are more authoritative than singular events and people --
but I don't think there is a psychological requirement for a specific
religious mode. That is, there is no psychological requirement as Gene
points out for 'bonding with nature' - but the mode of religious
organization [animism, polytheism, monotheism] - is related to the
economic mode, population size - which are both related to ecological
factors. I don't think this is an issue for Peircean discussion.
As for JAS's view that atheism is akin to nominalism - I don't think
this is what Peirce meant - for nominalism rejects the view that
universals or generals are real - and that only particular,
existential objects have any reality. In other words, nominalism is
focused around 2ndness and rejects 3ns. Most certainly, nominalism
was a strong philosophical and scientific view in the 15th-19th and
on centuries, but I think that correlating it with atheism
misunderstands both theories. The old nominalism was a rejection of
the equally basic theistic view that God-caused-everything, eg, the
argument vs Darwinism's natural mutations and natural selection. I
think that Peirce's definition of atheism refers to the rejection of
'supernatural causes' [God] and support for mechanical causality;
i.e., a view that the only causes of anything in the world are 2ns,
or mechanical causality.
But Peirce has THREE modal categories in his semiosis; 1ns or
freedom/chance; 2ns or mechanical particularity; and 3ns or, the rule
of laws or generals...Nominalism rejects Thirdness. Therefore Peirce's
definition of atheism essentially was that it rejected 3ns. But is
this a valid definition??????
I am a committed atheist - and equally committed to 3ns, so,
therefore, I reject the opinion of JAS. I know he is a committed
theist - and a monotheist - but, I don't think that it's helpful to
assert that 'even if you deny that you believe in God, you still
believe in God. So there'.
I think one has to analyze what the term of 'atheism' means. A
belief in 'God' surely can't be defined as a belief in genetic
knowledge - as with insects/birds/animals. What about a belief that
the Universe is 'rational'? As Peirce wrote: " 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." And there it is. My view is that the Universe
operates as a Mind, within the 3 categorical modes - and this is
hardly nominalism but is, indeed, firmly Peircean.
Nor can nominalism be defined as asserting that something is
inexplicable. The definition of nominalism is simple: a belief only
in 2ns and 1ns [individual particular things and random interactions]
- and a rejection of 3ns or laws of mind
As for the assertion by Peirce that 'It may, therefore, truly be
said that each of us believes in God, and that the only quest is how
to believe less crudely,-- I strongly disagree with such an
assertion. It is without any intellectual foundation and is an
intrusion into my beliefs. Again - to equate a belief in 3ns or laws
with a belief in God - simply doesn't , to me, make any sense.
I, quite firmly, do not believe in God - and as I've pointed out, I
believe that the need to believe in a metaphysical agency is a
psychological need, but the nature of this agency - is societal.
Therefore, monotheism arose in large populations which required a
centralizing and cohesive moral and social authority to prevent
diversity and dissension. Polytheism, on the other hand, flourished
in less centralized smaller populations with local economies and
diverse local loyalties. Animism is found primarily in populations
which are hunting and gathering and thus, have no control over the
production of their food and well-being. My analysis of religions and
religious beliefs, therefore, is based on the societal function of
these beliefs.
As for my own psychological need for a force beyond the simple
mechanics of 2ns - I, as an atheist, am a firm believer in the
function of Universal Mind or 3ns - and thus, am neither a nominalist
but remain a committed Peircean.
Edwina
On Sun 02/06/19 2:57 PM , Jon Alan Schmidt [email protected]
sent:
Gene, List:
Allegedly historical accounts like those you cite presuppose the
non-Reality of God, such that God's attributes are whatever a
particular group of people ascribes to God, and thus can vary between
different cultures and over time within the same culture. Peirce
obviously had a different view, explicitly and repeatedly affirming
the Reality of God, such that His attributes are as they are
regardless of what anyone thinks about them. As I mentioned recently
in a post [1] about "Direct vs. Indirect Experience," he made some
interesting (and likely provocative) remarks about this in the
manuscript for "Significs and Logic."
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)
Here are the specific claims that stand out to me.
*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.
These are controversial opinions, to be sure, but Peirce's statements
of them are unmistakably clear. Of course, we are free to disagree
with him on any or all of them. The identification of atheism with
nominalism may be especially objectionable to some, but he elsewhere
explained in some detail his reasons for making that particular
connection.
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)
As Peirce demonstrated in his first Additament to "A Neglected
Argument" (CP 6.490; 1908), denying the Reality of God as Ens
necessarium effectively renders the Being of the three Universes of
Experience inexplicable; and the illogical supposition that anything
is inexplicable is a defining characteristic of nominalism.
Regards,
Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur
Philosopher, Lutheran Laymanwww.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt [2] -
twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt [3]
On Sat, Jun 1, 2019 at 6:56 PM Eugene Halton wrote:
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
Links:
------
[1] https://list.iupui.edu/sympa/arc/peirce-l/2019-05/msg00225.html
[2] http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt
[3] http://twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt
[4]
http://webmail.primus.ca/javascript:top.opencompose(\'[email protected]\',\'\',\'\',\'\')
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