Ben, i don’t think this discussion of the “afterlife” is so far off the track
of Joe’s paper. It’s related to the connection (and the difference) between the
autonomy of semiosis and the autonomy of the individual sentient being. We just
have to bear in mind that in the 1893 paper you’ve been quoting, which follows
closely after the Monist metaphysical series including “The Law of Mind” and
“Evolutionary Love”, Peirce is speaking more in metaphysical terms than in
semiotic terms.
In those terms, death is the end point of the habit-taking process through
which original spontaneity takes on definite, determinate form. The death of an
individual is the throwing off of a habit, or rather a habit-system, whose
autonomy consists in self-definition. “The individual man, since his separate
existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything
apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a
negation” (EP1:55). In the more comprehensively autonomous universe of
semiosis, the loss of determinate individuality is like waking from the “carnal
consciousness” of habit-bound sleep to the “lively spiritual consciousness”
which, in Peirce’s cosmology, preceded the laws of nature, gave rise to them
and continues to keep the cosmos alive by preventing it from becoming totally
habit-bound. If this “lively spiritual consciousness” is an “afterlife”, it is
also a before-life and indeed a continuous life, to which an individual or
“carnal” life is little more than an interruption. “The world to come” is
simply the future, i.e. the not-yet-determined.
Peirce says that “A man is capable of a spiritual consciousness, which
constitutes him one of the eternal verities, which is embodied in the universe
as a whole.” The verb in the last clause is in the singular, so its subject
must be “one of the eternal verities” – not all of them -- and yet this one is
embodied in the universe as a whole. (Or else it’s the spiritual consciousness
which is embodied in the universe as a whole.) I think we are close here to the
double vision in which “a man's spirit is embodied in others” and yet, insofar
as he is conscious of them, all the others are embodied in him. Another
approach to this double vision can be found in EP2:472:
[[ what I am conscious of ... is evidently the entire universe, so far as I am
concerned. Yet there is a wonderful revelation for me in the phenomenon of my
sometimes becoming conscious that I have been in error, which at once shows me
that if there can be no universe, as far as I am concerned, except the universe
I am aware of, still there are differences in awareness. I become aware that
though ‘universe’ and ‘awareness’ are one and the same thing, yet somehow the
universe will go on in some definite fashion after I am dead and gone, whether
I shall be the least aware of it, or not. ]]
If the universe will go on living, then the “lively spiritual consciousness”
will go on in the afterlife (the future), while the error-ridden ego or
individual consciousness is dead and gone, like everything else which has been
relegated to the determinate past. My guess is that the “special spiritual
embodiment” to which the “archetypal idea” is destined is none other than the
ultimate logical interpretant of the person as sign, who is himself one of a
sequence of interpretants whose single object is the universe itself. I don’t
think this is incompatible with your reading, although the emphasis is
different.
Gary F.
} Freedom lies only in our innate human capacity to choose between different
sorts of bondage, bondage to desire or self esteem, or bondage to the light
that lightens all our lives. [Sri Madhava] {
<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-11-11 1:17 AM
Gary F., Stephen,
After this I promise to try to focus my attention on the slow read discussion
that Gary Richmond is leading. The first section of Joe's paper had my mind
running in so many direction that I fell off the track.
* * *
I agree that there's plenty of continuity in the 1893 paper with Peirce's later
views, the idea of one's living on in others. Still, he says: "we shall at
once perceive that we have had all along a lively spiritual consciousness which
we have been confusing with something different"
Gary is right to note the "we" - in the 1893 article Peirce speaks of what "we"
shall perceive after carnal death - a plural that's consistent with the idea of
a collective consiousness. Indeed there he discusses the falsity of absolute
divisions between onself and others.
A lively spiritual consciousness is still a _lively consciousness_, whether
it's we together or you and I separately who experience it. And it's a _lively
consciousness_ that we _perceptually_ distinguish from other forms of
consiousness _after we die_, according to Peirce. Now it's very hard to take
"lively consciousness" in a sense much weaker than "waking consciousness." And
it's one given to quick reflexive perceptions. Anyway, he doesn't predict
things like that later in 1906.
As regards immortality, Peirce said in the 1893 article, in the paragraph
before the one discussed above, "A man is capable of a spiritual consciousness,
which constitutes him one of the eternal verities, which is embodied in the
universe as a whole. This as an archetypal idea can never fail; and in the
world to come is destined to a special spiritual embodiment."
Steven seems to me to be right that the objective-idealist Peirce is referring
to a necessary universal basis of mind. At the same time, Peirce has it (in
1893) that a person's spiritual consciousness constitutes him _one_ of the
eternal verities (at any rate, not _all_ of the eternal verities), an
archetypal idea that "can never fail" (is immortal) and "in the world to come"
- that's an afterlife phrase if I ever heard one, a person doesn't use that
phase except in reference to an afterlife in a whole afterlife world
(especially when writing for The Open Court pubisher) - "is destined to a
special spiritual embodiment" - not an _individual_ spiritual embodiment, but
he also didn't say a _universal_ spiritual embodiment. "Special" is another of
those words that Peirce tended to use thoughtfully. Spiritual person -->
eternal verity --> infallible archetypal idea --> special spiritual embodiment
in the world to come. So he's suggesting an afterlife of collective
consciousness that is still distinguished somehow into kinds though not
sundered into individuals. I agree that it's not clear that in 1893 Peirce
thought that after death the consciousness would remain lively for all eternity.
Best, Ben
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