Dear Gary I think this problem you bring up here hinges on the definition of "mystical". I agree that Peirce does not use this term as he does not use the term Panentheism. These are terms that I have used to describe his position. The term "revelation" is also my term. I do not recall if Brent use of it in writing. But this was what I got out of a discussion with him in the "Symposium on the Religious Writings of Charles S. Peirce" in Denver 2003. http://wings.buffalo.edu/research/peirce/symposiumAnn&Call.pdf . Brent writes. ...for Peirce, semiotics should be understood ... as the working out of how the real is both immanent and transcendent and how the infinite speaker may be said to practice semiosis ... in the creation of our universe." Brent (1998:212)
But I do agree that it is a problem for many researchers of Peirce if there is such a connection between his ide og reasonableness as semiotic logic and a perennial philosophy idea of pure mysticism, where you transcends space and time into an "experience" of unity, which is described by so many mystics over the time, within various religions and outside them. As Nesteruk writes: Contemporary cosmology, as well as science in general, has to face the paradox of human subjectivity in the universe. This paradox was explicitly formulated in philosophical thought by E. Husserl and rephrased later by many thinkers across philosophy and theology. (Nesteruk 2005 p. 8) I do interpret Peirce's 'musement' as a form of meditation and his argument for that all men would reach to the concept of God as an explanatory factor for the reasonableness of the evolving universe and our place in it. Musement is an a free experiential abduction. It is not purely rational exercise. Peirce certainly new something about Vedic thinking and Advaita Vedanta and the pure forms of Buddhism as can be seem from a few quotes from CP. I have been unable to find anymore writings here. If he got it from James or Carus. I do not know. Peirce and William James were both influenced by Buddhist thinking. James also met with Vivekananda as well as with Suzuki, the most famous interpreter of Zen-Buddhism. Suzuki worked in the US for Paul Carus, the editor of The Monist. But surely Schelling is close to this kind of thinking too. Here is a quote on Vedic thinking from Peirce: "There is still another direction in which the barbaric conception of personal identity must be broadened. A Brahmanical hymn begins as follows: "I am that pure and infinite Self, who am bliss, eternal, manifest, all-pervading, and who am the substrate of all that owns name and form." This expresses more than humiliation, - the utter swallowing up of the poor individual self in the Spirit of prayer. All communication from mind to mind is through continuity of being. A man is capable of having assigned to him a role in the drama of creation, and so far as he loses himself in that role, - no matter how humble it may be, - so far he identifies himself with its Author." (Peirce CP 7.572) Like Aristotle, Peirce - based on his synechism - assumes that the "stuff" of reality or of which the world is built is Hylé, a continuum of matter and mind. Peirce viewed our non-scientific ways of thinking as being indispensable not only for knowledge but as the very basis for perception and thought. For Peirce it is his phenomenological, which he called phaneroscophy, basis of his philosophy. Evolutionarily this reflection also reminds you of the common origin of matter and consciousness. Rather than thoughts being substantial entities identified either with physical brains or immaterial minds, Peirce understands thoughts as signs. We are more in thought than thoughts are in us. Now I have had discussion with some pan-semioticians if experience is a necessary aspect of semiosis, and I have argued yes, since feeling is fundamental to Firstness. They think no, and that semiosis is a dynamical fundamental system of interaction in the physical world, more fundamental than the classical mechanical physics description. But in "The Architecture of Theories" (1891) Peirce wrote: Without going into other important questions of philosophical architectonic, we can readily foresee what sort of a metaphysics would appropriately be constructed from those conceptions... a Cosmogonic Philosophy. It would suppose that in the beginning -- infinitely remote -- there was a chaos of unpersonalized feeling, which being without connection or regularity would properly be without existence. This feeling, sporting here and there in pure arbitrariness, would have started the germ of a generalizing tendency. Its other sportings would be evanescent, but this would have a growing virtue. (Peirce: CP 6.33.) But I admit that the evidence is indirect and I have a strong feeling that we are missing some manuscripts on this matter. References: Nesteruk, A. (2005): "The Universe Transcended: Gods 'Presence in absence' in Science and Theology, European Journal of Science and Theology, June 2005, Vol. 1, No. 2, 7-19. Fra: Gary Fuhrman [mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca] Sendt: 20. maj 2014 13:48 Til: Peirce List Emne: RE: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science and religion: text 1 Søren, you've given us a lot to think about(!) in this introduction to the final chapter of Kees' book, and I can only focus on a couple of key words here: "mystical" and "revelation". I'm aware of the place in the Brent biography (revised ed., p. 210) referring to "an unsent letter from Peirce's hand describing a mystical revelation." Yet I'm not aware of any passage in Peirce's published writings - and I mean published now, not just published during his lifetime - where he applies the term "mystical" in an unreservedly positive sense; and his opinion of "revelation" was even less positive, as far as I can see. I've also seen no clear evidence to support Brent's claim that his "mystical experience" at age 52 had a profound effect on his later life. I haven't read all the secondary sources you cite here, so maybe that's why I haven't seen such evidence; but I'd like to see more specific support for your emphasis on the "mystical" as an important element of Peirce's religion (and maybe a clearer definition of what that word means in Peirce). I do agree with Raposa and others who describe Peirce as a "panentheist," but I don't think that either his panentheism or his "worship of science" places much value on either mysticism or revelation. In my view, Peirce's God is a combination of creative power with "reasonableness," and that's why "the best way to worship him is through the religion of science." I haven't included quotes from Peirce here, but I'll be happy to do so if you (or anyone) want to challenge my view of Peirce's religious orientation. Meanwhile - Thanks again for this introduction! gary f. } The oceanic vow of great compassion has no shore or limit, and saves living beings with release from the harbor of suffering. [Dogen] { www.gnusystems.ca/CSPgod.htm<http://www.gnusystems.ca/CSPgod.htm> }{ Peirce on God From: Søren Brier [mailto:sb....@cbs.dk] Sent: 19-May-14 10:35 AM 1. God is real but does not exist: so the best way to worship him is through the religion of science I thought this sums up nicely Section 9.6 in Kees' book and was a good way to start the discussion of: God, science and religion. Peirce's theory of the relation between science and religion is one of the most controversial aspects of his pragmaticist semiotics only second to his evolutionary objective idealism influenced by Schelling (Niemoczynski and Ejsing) and based on his version of Duns Scotus' extreme scholastic realism, which Kees' did an exemplary presentation of as well. Peirce's view of religion and how science is deeply connected to it in a way that differs from what any other philosopher has suggested except Whitehead's process philosophy, but there are also important differences here. I have no quarrels with Kees' exemplary understandable formulations in the short space he has. That leaves opportunity for us to discuss all the interesting aspects he left out like Peirce's Panentheism (Michael Raposa , Clayton and Peacock), his almost Neo-Platonist (Kelly Parker http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/csp-plot.html ) metaphysics of emptiness or Tohu va Bohu (see also Parker) and ongoing creation in his process view, and from this basic idea of emptiness ( that is also foundational to Nargajuna's Buddhism of the middle way ) a connection to Buddhism. This was encouraging Peirce to see Buddhism and Christianity in their purest mystical forms integrated into an agapistic Buddhisto-Christian process view of God. Brent mentions an unsent letter from Peirce's hand describing a mystical revelation in the second edition of the biography. This idea of Buddhisto-Christianity was taken up by Charles Hartshorne - one of the most important philosophers of religion and metaphysicians of the twentieth century - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hartshorne/ who also wrote about Whitehead's process view of the sacred (see references). I have collected many of the necessary quotes and interpreted them in this article http://www.transpersonalstudies.org/ImagesRepository/ijts/Downloads/A%20Peircean%20Panentheist%20Scientific%20Mysticism.pdf , and in Brier 2012 below. Even Peirce's evolutionary objective idealism is too much to swallow for most scientists who are not fans of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. So even today it is considering a violation of rationality to support an evolutionary process objective idealism like Peirce's, which include a phenomenological view. Even in the biosemiotic group this is dynamite. We have had the most wonderfully heated metaphysical discussion and quarrels about what it means to be scientific. That is when Marcel Barbieri left the group being tired of Peirceans "unscientific stance". In my days studying in the sciences it was really a problem to be a true religious Christian and a scientist at the same time as one of my teachers in comparative physiology was. She reflected a lot on it in some interesting seminars. (By the way I am not a member of any church or religion). But it is difficult to be part of main stream science today if you are an objective evolutionary idealist and you have the Peircean family's conviction (see some of Steven Ericsson-Zenith's contributions to this list and Benjamin Peirce's book on Ideality in The Physical Sciences) that science reveals the truth about God's nature. Look for the truth and you will find God seems to be their view. Science is driven by the ethic of finding truth and as such in the end it is a religious search, as Pierce has integrated phenomenology with ethics and aesthetics in his theory of science. Not keeping them apart as traditional views of science does in the slip stream of logical positivism. But, what is also interesting is, that Peirce's view is close to a combination of modern quantum field physics, thermodynamics, systems theory and self-organization theory - except for his integration of phenomenology, ethics and aesthetics in his theory of science. No system theorist and cyberneticians have made this including, though there are some objective idealists like Erwin Làszló standing out in meticulously working an integrated view of modern physics with a pure mystical objective idealism and system thinking through a concept of information. See for instance Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything. But he also started as a musician http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ervin_L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3 . Let us end with John Sheriff's wonderful summarizing statement about Peirce's theory: "It places humans in a universe of signs that connect mind and matter, inside and outside, transcendence and immanence. It gives us a theory of human and cosmic meaning that does not lead to the dead-end nothingness of pure form or to the decentering of the human subject, but to the possibility of unlimited intellectual and moral growth..." (Sheriff 1994 p. XVI). Interesting works dealing with Peirce's view on religion and science: Brent, J. (1938): Charles S. Peirce: A Life, Revised and Enlarged Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Brier, S. (2010): The Conflict between Indian Vedic Mentality and Western Modernity. I: Mentality and Thought: North, South, East and West. red. / Per Durst-Andersen ; Elsebeth F. Lange. Frederiksberg: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2010: 53-86. Brier, S. (2012). C. S. Peirce's Complementary and Transdisciplinary Conception of Science and Religion, Cybernetics & Human Knowing, Volume 19, Numbers 1-2, 2012: 59-94 Corrington, R. S. (2000) An Introduction to C.S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993) and A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Clayton, P. and Peacock, A. (2004). In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God's Presence in a Scientific World, Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Ejsing, A. (2007). Theology of anticipation: A constructive study of C. S. Peirce. Princeton Theological Monograph Series. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Hartshorne, C. (1972). Whitehead's philosophy. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Hartshorne, C. (1984). Towards a Buddhisto-Christian religion. In K. K. Inada & N. P. Jacobson (Eds.), Buddhism and American thinkers (pp. 1-13). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Innis, R.E. (2013). The Reach of the Aesthetic and Religious Naturalism: Peircean and Polanyian Reflections, https://www.missouriwestern.edu/orgs/polanyi/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD38-3/TAD38-3-fnl-pg31-50-pdf.pdf Orange, D. M. (1984). Peirce's Conception of God: A Developmental Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), Peirce, B. (1881). Ideality in the Physical Sciences , Boston: Little , Brown, and Company. Potters, V.G. (1997): Charles S. Peirce: On Norms & Ideals, American Philosophy Series, Fordham University Press. Raposa, M. (1993).Peirce's Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) Sheriff, J.K. (1994): Charles Sanders Peirce's Guess at the Riddle: Ground for Human Significance, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Niemoczynski , L. (2011). Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011). Best wishes Søren Brier Professor in the semiotics of information, cognition and commmunication science, department of International Business Communication, Copenhagen Business School, Home page: www.cbs.dk/staff/sbibc<http://www.cbs.dk/staff/sbibc>. , Cybersemiotics.com
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