Benjamin, you say: " Peirce believed in a spiritual consciousness, a soul-consciousness, confusable with social and carnal kinds of consciousness but becoming clear to one, as Peirce came to believe, in surviving the body's death."
That statement makes little sense to me, and I was brought up a Roman Catholic. I might think of the consciousness of a person, e.g. Aristotle, in which case I say that Aristotle was conscious of the ideas that he taught, along with all the things his consciousness roamed over in his well-examined life. This consciousness of one or the other object is *identical*, it is Aristotle's and none other that I mean. Now, Aristotle's consciousness didn't "survive his body's death", as if such disassociation from reality were possible. Unlike his consciousness in his life of learning, the written record of his teaching remains static, unchanging, and unless we can find a long-lost volume somewhere, the intricacies of his terminology will forever have to be judged as-is, finished. What survives Aristotle isn't some "spiritual soul-consciousness surviving Aristotle's death", but only his body of writings in context of histories written of that epoch. In those writings Aristotle speaks of "eternal truths". But Aristotle isn't speaking about some "eternal-spiritual-soul-consciousness", he's speaking (in a precise and definitive manner) about certain declarative sentences. It is the declarative sentences that he's speaking of that are "eternally true", but only as defined - and this sense of 'eternal' is not identical with some mystical "eternal consciousness" or "soul-consciousness". Drake --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to [email protected] with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to [email protected]
