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:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Eugene Halton
Sent: September-28-11 6:09 PM
To: [email protected]
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
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