Jon, List, Your reference to the Latin and Greek roots of the words 'purpose' and 'object' make me think about the purpose of a theory of semiotics. For the sake of reading Peirce, I've mainly assumed that the purpose is articulated in the science of esthetics and then refined in the science of ethics. It is probably worth noting that the scientific articulation of the highest aesthetic and ethical ideal is something that we need for the purposes of pure theoretical inquiry. That is, we need more clarity than common experience already supplies. These philosophical accounts of the ideals of pure inquiry are, for the sake of our everyday experience, accounts of ideals that are themselves really parts of much larger ends that live and grow in human communities and in the larger community of nature of which we are but a part.
In the third lecture in RLT, Peirce says this about the end of life: "Generalization, the spilling out of continuous systems, in thought, in sentiment, in deed, is the true end of life." (p. 163) The phrase always reminds me of the following passage from the early part of Goethe's Faust. Having earned doctorates in the trivium of philosophy, medicine and jurisprudence, Faust has grown tired of the futility of trying to discover the great secrets about Nature herself. As he enters his study, he is trying to determine an end for the next phase in his life. At this point, as he calls on the old arts of magic, he says: 'Tis written: "In the beginning was the Word!" Here now I'm balked! Who'll put me in accord? It is impossible, the Word so high to prize, I must translate it otherwise If I am rightly by the Spirit taught. 'Tis written: In the beginning was the Thought! Consider well that line, the first you see, That your pen may not write too hastily! Is it then Thought that works, creative, hour by hour? Thus should it stand: In the beginning was the Power! Yet even while I write this word, I falter, For something warns me, this too I shall alter. The Spirit's helping me! I see now what I need And write assured: In the beginning was the Deed! What kind of end, I wonder, might prove to be inexhaustible? Only an end of this kind could, I suspect, serve as the purpose of pure inquiry. Hence the importance of getting greater clarity about the inexhaustible nature of the true continuities in this world. --Jeff
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