Ben, you wrote:
[[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. ]]
Can you cite a text where Peirce says this? He does speak of a “spiritual
consciousness” but i haven’t seen any place where he speaks of this as the
consciousness of an individual soul surviving the body’s death, or expresses
belief in that kind of afterlife. He argues rather against it in CP 6.548-52
(1887), and again in CP 6.520-21 (c.1906), though he also says that the
possibility can’t be ruled out, precisely because it’s virtually impossible to
investigate. The “immortality” of which he speaks “in the light of synechism”
is of a very different kind, it seems to me, to which the survival of the
individual consciousness or ‘soul’ is quite irrelevant.
Gary F.
} Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the
contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. [Thoreau] {
<http://www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm> www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm }{ home
From: C S Peirce discussion list [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Benjamin Udell
Sent: August-08-11 8:15 PM
Drake,
For Peirce, truth is immutable so for him in some sense all truths are eternal.
Perhaps in "Immortality in the Light of Synechism" he was thinking about
something like truths _about_ eternity, the soul, etc.
Not having been religious since I was a kid, I don't easily put myself into
that frame of mind.
I don't know whether he thought that that which he called eternal truths
require or enliven spiritual consciousness. He might have thought that it helps
to have lively spiritual consciousness in order to apprehend eternal spiritual
truths in the right spirit, to learn of them and learn from them, and even that
such truths don't come through well when translated into everyday conversation,
but I just don't know. I also wonder whether he thought that such truths could
be equally well simple or complex like a scientific theory; it can be pretty
hard to guess about such things with Peirce.
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