Auke, List: Again, I have no desire to revisit previous on-List debates about Peirce's views concerning the reality of God and their relation to his semeiotic. However, you posed a couple of specific questions to me that I am happy to address, especially with respect to the new subject line.
AvB: Since it proves a recurrent theme, I suggest we ought to try to find out what exactly is the meaning you attribute to the concept of God. It was *not *a recurrent theme in our recent exchanges, as far as I was concerned. I merely offered a single quote in which Peirce happens to mention God, not for that reason but because he asserts that the entire universe is a sign--specifically, a symbol and an argument. All I was noting in context was that there is necessarily a final interpretant for every sign, even at the scale of the universe as a whole. You then remarked, "God or the conception of god do not deliver valid arguments in semiotics," and I *agreed *with you. That somehow prompted additional off-topic comments by others, and here we are. AvB: What other characteristics do you attribute to the conception of god? My own conception of God is quite beside the point. What matters are the characteristics that *Peirce *attributes to God. You suggest that his view is merely "a refinement of Comte who too bluntly equated the truth of science and god. And also of Spiniza who equated god=nature." With all due respect, this either ignores or dismisses much of what he wrote about God after a personal religious experience that he apparently had in 1892, beginning with the following statements. CSP: A difficulty which confronts the synechistic philosophy is this. In considering personality, that philosophy is forced to accept the doctrine of a personal God; but in considering communication, it cannot but admit that if there is a personal God, we must have a direct perception of that person and indeed be in personal communication with him. (CP 6.162, EP 1:332-333, 1892) According to Peirce, synechism *requires *that there is a personal God, of whom we have a direct perception and with whom we are in personal communication. That is obviously very different from equating God with science or nature, and Peirce goes on to offer a hypothesis to explain why anyone could think otherwise. CSP: Now, if that be the case, the question arises how it is possible that the existence of this being should ever have been doubted by anybody. The only answer that I can at present make is that facts that stand before our face and eyes and stare us in the face are far from being, in all cases, the ones most easily discerned. That has been remarked from time immemorial. (ibid) Peirce thus anticipates "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," published sixteen years later, in which he says that the Neglected Argument itself "should be obvious to all minds, high and low alike" (CP 6.457, EP 2:435, 1908). He also states plainly in the very first sentence of the article, "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, 1908). Moreover, in several manuscript drafts for it, he has a lot more to say about his conception of God. Here is the most comprehensive of those passages. CSP: By the proper name, God, I shall refer to that Being who possesses those Attributes which I take to be most essential to the traditional notion; that is to say, while His nature is incomprehensible, He doubtless has Attributes called by proper extension of the terms Omniscience, Omnipotence, and Infinite Benignity. This statement excludes a finite god; although the Being of God would not, as far as I see, necessarily exclude that of a whole race of beings immensely superior to ourselves, such, for example, that the whole visible universe might be no more than a nucleolus in a single cell of the body of one of them. 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. For the argument that I am to consider; and which, by the way, I will designate as 'The Neglected Argument,' would not be true of any other being than God. But I do not, by 'God,' mean, with some writers, a being so inscrutable that nothing at all can be known of Him. I suppose most of our knowledge of Him must be by similitudes. Thus, He is so much like a mind, and so little like a singular Existent (meaning by an Existent, or object that Exists, a thing subject to brute constraints, and reacting with all other Existents,) and so opposed in His Nature to an ideal possibility, that we may loosely say that He is a Spirit, or Mind. So far as we can detect any general character in his three universes of minds, of Existents and actual facts, and of Ideas, (i.e. ideal possibilities,)--as, for example, each of them teems with variety,--we may say that He likes to have his creations various, although we have no reason to suppose that variety makes at all the kind of impression upon Him that it makes upon us. Beside those two modes of knowledge of God, there is a third, which it seems to me folly for the man to whom it comes to deny: I mean that probably every human being that reaches maturity, at some time feels something like an intimation, as from a higher power, calling upon him for a gathering of his powers for some endeavour, whether active or passive. A prick of conscience coming when one is upon the point of acting, let us say, indiscreetly or in neglect of a question of loyalty, is of that description. Doubtless, such suggestions ought, at most, to delay action until they can be subjected to calm criticism. They show, nevertheless, on the whole, that, in some practical directions, and in some measure, the mind of man is adapted to interpreting what may loosely be called the ideas of the Governor of the three worlds, (supposing such Governor there be,) and that it would be folly to deny this, or to forget it in particular cases. (R 843:25-29[3-7], 1908) At a minimum, Peirce explicitly affirms the traditional attributes of personality, revelation, communication, necessary being, creativity, omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, infinity, transcendence, knowability, mind, and spirit. Moreover, although God does not *exist *because he is not subject to brute constraints and does not react with other things, he is still *real* because he has "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" (CP 6.453, EP 2:434, 1908). AvB: And what are the premisses of the argument in your take? This is what has been rather contentious in the past, so I will simply summarize my argumentation and hope to leave it at that. The major premiss is that every sign is determined by an object other than itself; i.e., something that is independent of and unaffected by the sign, as Peirce affirms on multiple occasions. I trust that it is *not *controversial to call this a fundamental tenet of his comprehensive semeiotic. The minor premiss is that the entire universe is a sign, as Peirce affirms in what I quoted previously (CP 5.119, EP 2:193-194, 1903). Although he indeed says elsewhere that "all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs" (CP 5.448n, EP 2:294, 1906), he also says that "[t]here is a science of semeiotics ... and one of its theorems ... is that if any signs are connected, no matter how, the resulting system constitutes one sign" (R 1476:36[5-1/2]; c. 1904). As far as I know, Peirce himself never colligated these two premisses. Nevertheless, the conclusion that necessarily (i.e., deductively) follows from them to complete the syllogism is that the entire universe is determined by an object other than itself; again, something that is independent of and unaffected by the entire universe. I suggest that this is what we call God, echoing the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas; what else could it be? Of course, such an outcome is avoided by those who reject one of the premisses; e.g., by denying that the entire universe is a sign. Regards, Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USA Professional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran Layman www.LinkedIn.com/in/JonAlanSchmidt - twitter.com/JonAlanSchmidt On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 5:00 AM Auke van Breemen <[email protected]> wrote: > Jon Alan, > > Since it proves a recurrent theme, I suggest we ought to try to find out > what exactly is the meaning you attribute to the concept of God. > > You wrote: > > God as the real and independent object that determines the entire universe > as a sign. > > -- > > And earlier you cited: > > As for scale, he stated that the *entire universe *is a sign, > specifically an argument--"a vast representamen, a great symbol of God's > purpose, working out its conclusions in living realities" (CP 5.119, EP > 2:193, 1903). > > -- > > I'd like to add to this Peirce's remark 'we have to choose between mammon > (Greed, Trumps basic strategy, individualistic and setting communities > against each other in a zero sum game) and god (conceived as pure > reasonableness [community of investigators needed] that argumentatively > works out its conclusions in living realities, Independend of what any > individual might think but dependent on thought in general and thus > realizes itself)'. Along these lines Peirce's concept of god is a > refinement of Comte who too bluntly equated the truth of science and god. > And also of Spiniza who equated god=nature. > > What other characteristics do you attribute to the conception of god? > > And what are the premisses of the argument in your take? > > For me Peirce's conception of god is primarily to be looked at as the > foundation (the recognition of reasonableness functioning somehow as the > sublime in Kant) of a code of conduct and an urge not to rely on tenacity, > authority or first principles, but on scientific method in the fixation of > belief. In this case the premisses of the argument are 'reasonableness' and > 'living reality' that in their interaction determine the universe to be a > sign. > > best, Auke >
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