Gene,
I always enjoy your eloquent rants, and i'd like to thank you for bringing MS 1334 to our attention; the few fragments of it which i found by online search are very interesting. But some readers of this list may not be aware (as of course you are) that “profitable pure research” is a pure oxymoron in terms of Peirce's conception of “science.” Peirce himself was often vociferous about the immense gap between the ideal of genuine science and the professional (profitable) practice which he called “Art”, which in our current vernacular is called “technology” and usually conflated with “science” (as in your own term “sci-tech”). The ascendancy (and destructiveness) of corporate “science” has vastly escalated in our time, but i don't see how Peirce can be blamed for that – or for using the term “science” to denote the ideal (self-correcting) form of inquiry, especially when he pointed out so clearly that this ideal was rarely actualized even in his own time, and that its place in society was commonly usurped by a corrupted practice for which he expressed a profound contempt. (Especially in the Cambridge lectures of 1898, but elsewhere too.) Anyway, i wonder if you can be a little more specific about Peirce’s “denigration of the here and now of creation in favor of the long run.” If you are referring to the passage you quote from MS 1334, you'll have to show me where you find this “denigration”, because i don't see it expressed or implied there. If you have found it expressed elsewhere in Peirce, i'd be grateful if you could point it out. If you can, it will pose quite a challenge to reconcile such an attitude with Peirce's consistently maintained principle that all the sciences – including philosophy, mathematics and phaneroscopy – depend crucially on observation; for observation is always here and now. To observe that any particular observation is an infinitesimal part of the process of inquiry is hardly a denigration; rather it’s a humble affirmation of continuity as Peirce conceived it, the continuity of mind and nature (and God, who for Peirce is anything but impersonal). Gary F. } None of us can fully realize what the minds of corporations are, any more than one of my brain cells can know what the whole brain is thinking. [Peirce] { <http://www.gnusystems.ca/Peirce.htm> www.gnusystems.ca/Peirce.htm }{ gnoxic studies: Peirce From: C S Peirce discussion list [mailto:PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU] On Behalf Of Eugene Halton Sent: September-28-11 6:09 PM To: PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU Subject: Re: [peirce-l] Slow Read : "Sciences as Communicational Communities" Segment 5 the schizoid machine 9/28/11 My apologies: Some uncensored thinking out loud follows. Joe’s remarks clarify the scarifying effects of the authoritarianism of reputation in academic and scientific life, and show how the reality of communicative qualities such as sincerity and earnestness are necessary for science. But something seems to me to be missing. Science comes out clean, while self-interested power mongers and status seekers come out dirty. But is actually existing science so clean? Or is it that Peirceans get lost in the mists of the unlimited community of inquirers, happily dissecting its way toward the horizon of truth…at any cost? Big Science in the USA emerged from The Manhattan Project sucking up to military-corporate money power, utilizing it to make precise discoveries at any cost. The big sciences today function in many ways as the research arm of global capitalism. Is that just a “blip”? How about altering genetic codes for profitable pure research? Don’t block the road of inquiry? Whoops, humans and numerous other species eradicated. A mere short-term fact without consequence in the long run of science? The broader development of scientific materialism, which animates the sciences today, is the Frankenstein of nominalism, which would destroy anything in the interests of “pure” research. If science is inadequate for the practice of life, as Peirce saw it, because it is too thin, then aren’t scientists, qua scientists, inadequately developed humans? Perhaps subhuman would be a more accurate term. They can be characterized as subhuman not because of extrinsic reputational or authority incursions into science proper, but because science proper, as is commonly practiced now, is conceived as a schizoid machine. It is all well and good to argue that Peirce’s conception of science can overcome the schizoid machine of science today in the long run, but that assumes the schizoid machine of science does not operate under a telos of its own, that of the sorcerer’s apprentice, able and willing to release powers it has no clue (or interest in) how to control. Modern, nominalistically conceived scientific materialism, far from evicting final purpose from nature, actually swept it under the table, so that it could function as the crypto-religious myth of the machine. The unacknowledged purpose? To progressively eradicate human qualities and all that is not machine-like. The deus ex machina religion of modern sci-tech. Peirce sought to put the pretensions of humanity in their place when he stated in 1905: “But the heurospudists [scientists who endeavor to discover] look upon discovery as making acquaintance with God and as the very purpose for which the human race was created. Indeed as the very purpose of God in creating the world at all. They think it a matter of no consequence whether the human race subsists and enjoys or whether it be exterminated, as [in] time it very happily will be, as soon as it has subserved its purpose of developing a new type of mind that can love and worship God better….Remember that the human race is but an ephemeral thing. In a little while it will be altogether done with and cast aside. Even now it is merely dominant on one small planet of one insignificant star, while all that our sight embraces on a starry night is to the universe far less than a single cell of brains is to the whole man.” (Peirce, 1905, ms 1334). Contrast Peirce with James, who said: “The only form of thing that we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely have, is our own personal life…And this systematic denial on science’s part of personality as a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may, conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short” (1986: 166). If the ultimate purpose of science, in Peirce’s terminology, is found in “developing a new type of mind that can love and worship God better,” humbleness might have us remove our eyes from the distant starry night to the mirror, to see that perhaps the human personality holds that very capacity to love, not anthropocentrically, but as our evolutionary legacy, and that it is the living variescence of the earth we should love even more than progress. The living earth itself, that we are so busily bent on destroying through sci-tech “progress,” is that “new type of mind” of which we are a dematured manifestation. Perhaps acknowledging that, and that the mind that shaped the modern world, including its sciences, is fundamentally misshaped and destructive, requiring a reanimated outlook, might mark a start. That is where I see Peirce’s vision as helpful. But his denigration of the here and now of creation in favor of the long run glosses over, irresponsibly to my mind, the world-destroying destructive fissure of modern thought. Gene Halton --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU