Kirsti M:
The entelechy or perfection of being Peirce here
refers to is something never attained to full, but strived at, again and
again. Just as with science and scientific knowledge. It's about striving
to approach, better and better, The Truth. If there ever would be an end,
the absolute perfection of knowledge, that would mean an end, which would
be in contradiction with life and living. Life and living IS
striving - with some kind of an end. Never the last possible
I have to disagree, Kirsti.
Life is more than science and scientific knowledge, and more than
striving to approach, better and better, The Truth. And I mean this in
a Peircean sense. Stated differently, science is part of life, not the
determinant of it.
By my
lights life is participant in the entelechy of being, not a spectator
looking at a scoreboard it can never reach. The perfection of being
manifests all the time in realized aesthetic moments. Entelechy has
Firstness, here and now, does it not?
Perhaps
something like this aesthetic perspective is what William Blake had in
mind when he wrote: If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing
would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up,
till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.
[T]he living intelligence
which is the creator of all intelligible reality
, as Peirce put it in
the earlier quotation you comment on, means that ongoing creation
involves more than chaos or chance, it involves a reasonableness
energizing in the world, as Peirce put it elsewhere. If logic, as
self-controlled thought, is a species of ethics, as self-controlled
conduct, and ethics is itself a species of aesthetics, as the
intrinsically admirable, then The Truth ultimately gives itself to
Beauty, as the ultimate of entelechy, as I understand Peirce.
And if so, as I see it, the
perfection of being involves genesis, as well as development. Perfecting
habits of conduct and even the laws of the universe itself, means the
perfection of ongoing creation, not the overcoming of it in some
Hegelian straitjacket. From this perspective the final entelechy of all
being is itself such a moment, poem, painting, banquet, music, or better,
mousike, rhythm-rhyme-dance-musicking, at least in the sense in which
Peirce claimed that:
The
Universe as an argument is necessarily a great work of art, a great poem
-- for every fine argument is a poem and a symphony -- just as every true
poem is a sound argument. But let us compare it rather with a painting --
with an impressionist seashore piece -- then every Quality in a Premiss
is one of the elementary colored particles of the Painting; they are all
meant to go together to make up the intended Quality that belongs to the
whole as whole. That total effect is beyond our ken; but we can
appreciate in some measure the resultant Quality of parts of the whole --
which Qualities result from the combinations of elementary Qualities that
belong to the premisses. CP 5.119
Gene
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