Sent: Wednesday, June 30, 2021 10:20 PM
To: JACK ROBERT KELLY CODY <[email protected]>
Cc: Jon Alan Schmidt <[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Aw: Re: [PEIRCE-L] [EXTERNAL] RE: André De Tienne: Slow Read slide 8
Sent: Wednesday, June 30, 2021 7:58 PM
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] [EXTERNAL] RE: André De Tienne: Slow Read slide 8
JC: Isn't it a fact, though, that thirdness is the irreducible mode of consciousness?
JC: I was wondering whether it is possible to prescind "time" from "thought"?
CSP: The idea of time must be employed in arriving at the conception of logical consecution; but the idea once obtained, the time-element may be omitted, thus leaving the logical sequence free from time. That done, time appears as an existential analogue of the logical flow. (CP 1.491, c. 1896)CSP: For we never think at all without reasoning; and if we try to do so, the attempt merely results in our reasoning about reasoning. Now reasoning takes place in Time; and so far as we can understand it, in a Time that embodies our common-sense notion of Time. (R 300:54[53], 1908)
JC: Also, if we say there is "more to the phaneron than what we call reality", are we also not moving in the direction of Kant's "thing as such" or thing in and of itself?
Welcome to the conversation on the Peirce list, Jack! I hope your post will inspire some of the other “novices” to join in as well.
You may get a reply from Jon when he has the time, but for now I’ll just offer my own response to one key point in your post:
JC: Isn't it a fact, though, that thirdness is the irreducible mode of consciousness?
GF: Thirdness is the predominant mode of cognition and of semiosis, but not of consciousness according to Peirce’s usual employment of the term: “Consciousness may mean any one of the three categories” (CP 8.256, 1902). Secondness is felt or sensed as “dyadic consciousness” (R 300, 38) before it is abstracted and named as a category. As for Firstness,
CSP: Stop to think of it, and it has flown! What the world was to Adam on the day he opened his eyes to it, before he had drawn any distinctions, or had become conscious of his own existence — that is first, present, immediate, fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and evanescent. Only, remember that every description of it must be false to it. (W6:171, CP 1.357, 1887-8)
GF: Description, being semiosic, is ‘contaminated’ with Thirdness; but the pure “first” is conscious even for Adam before he had become conscious of his own existence. This is a broader usage of “consciousness” than we usually find in cognitive science or psychology, where many virtually identify it with self-consciousness. But it’s the appropriate usage for phaneroscopy, where direct “observation” of the phaneron has to come before “generalization.” In the latter stage, where a “doctrine of categories” emerges, there does seem to be a kind of “feedback loop” where the investigator has to go back and forth between theory and observation in order to “test” the theory, as in any positive science. But preconceptions are not supposed to interfere with phaneroscopic “observation” proper.
We should also address the questions you raise about time and about the Kantian thing-in-itself, but since André addresses that one directly in the next slide (9), I think I’ll wait until that’s been posted.
Gary f.
} This sentence contradicts itself—or rather—well, no, actually it doesn't! [Hofstadter] {
https://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ living the time
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf Of JACK ROBERT KELLY CODY
Sent: 29-Jun-21 17:21
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] [EXTERNAL] RE: André De Tienne: Slow Read slide 8
Gary, list,
GF: That’s why we can prescind Firstness from Secondness (or Thirdness), but we can’t prescind Secondness from Firstness, because Secondness is not logically possible without Firstness. And that’s why there must be more to the phaneron than what we call reality, even though phaneroscopy (unlike mathematics) is a positive science, and indeed the first of the positive sciences.
Isn't it a fact, though, that thirdness is the irreducible mode of consciousness? That we can metaphorically arrive at ideas of firstness, Secondness, and so on, but always from the vantage point of thirdness? I might have this wrong, but if not it would seem to suggest a kind of feedback loop in attempts to prescind Secondness from Thirdness or Firstness from Secondness.
Reading Jon Alan Schmidt's article, Temporal Synechism: A Peircean Philosophy of Time, I was wondering whether it is possible to prescind "time" from "thought"? I'm thinking of this in synechist terms (i.e., "Time is no exception; in fact, it is 'the continuum par excellence, through the spectacles of which we envisage every other continuum'
(Peirce in JAS 2020: 12). The problem being that surely "time" is, in phenomenological terms, "thought"? Kant makes time the precondition for the possibility of existence (or something along those lines) which seems to merely reify its a priori status (along with space). And whilst we can take time and space as a priori categories, it doesn't seem to me that we can "literally" do this - that is, time and space are a priori for no one even though we suppose they must, logically, be a priori for everyone. We know it/each only through experience so that whilst we can suppose that time/space exist prior to our experience of it as such, such judgement must still be made from within that experiential prism.
So, in essence, how can we usefully prescind one from the other when the two are either mutually constitutive (dialectical) or a kind of monadic firstness to which we have no real access (except through consciousness which is always at the level of mediation - of Thirdness)? Also, if we say there is "more to the phaneron than what we call reality", are we also not moving in the direction of Kant's "thing as such" or thing in and of itself? Again, absolute novice here but I do know that Peirce in general seems opposed to traditional "metaphysics" and "metaphysicians" which an attribution of there being "more to the phaneron than... reality" would suggest.
This may just be a long-winded way of saying that there may be value in disregarding too rigidly defined conceptions of temporality.
Thanks
Jack
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