Soren:
Forgive my intrusion and brevity. This is a beatiful message. In
Spanish we would say: muy hermoso.
Eduardo Forastieri-Braschi
<-----Original Message----->
From: Søren Brier [sb....@cbs.dk]
Sent: 5/21/2014 2:11:56 PM
To: g...@gnusystems.ca;Peirce-L@list.iupui.edu
Subject: SV: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God,
science and religion: text 1
Dear Gary and list
Peirce seems keen to work with the foundation of all religions, which is
one way to characterize the pure types of mysticism and the theory of
collecting them into a perennial philosophy. His theory of the immanent
divine as Firstness and his idea of an emptiness before the three
categories or universes, as he also calls them -a Tohu Bohu (the great
emptiness) as he quotes from the old testament - is pretty mystical. It
is also important to note that Peirce is both inspired by transcendental
Christianity as well as Buddhism in a sort of panentheism. The divine is
both immanent and transcendent in Peirce's philosophy. It is both an
emptiness "behind and before" the manifested world in time and space
giving birth to a Firstness of possibilities, "random sporting", qualia
and possible mathematical forms. Peirce writes:
"If we are to proceed in a logical and scientific manner, we must, in
order to account for the whole universe, suppose an initial condition in
which the whole universe was non-existent, and therefore a state of
absolute nothing. . . . But this is not the nothing of negation. . . .
The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to,
or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having
been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor
inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe
is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and
unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion
and no law. It is boundless freedom.
Now the question arises, what necessarily resulted from that state of
things? But the only sane answer is that where freedom was boundless
nothing in particular necessarily resulted. . . .
I say that nothing necessarily resulted from the Nothing of boundless
freedom. That is, nothing according to deductive logic. But such is not
the logic of freedom or possibility. The logic of freedom, or
potentiality, is that it shall annul itself. For if it does not annul
itself, it remains a completely idle and do-nothing potentiality; and a
completely idle potentiality is annulled by its complete idleness."
(CP 6.215-219)
This philosophy places "emptiness" and "the void" at a central a place
in Peirce's metaphysics, as it is in the pure mysticism of Buddhism, for
instance the version represented in the writings of Nargajuna (1995) in
his famous verse:
"Whatever is dependently co-arising
That is explained to be emptiness.
That, being a dependent designation
Is itself the middle way."
(Garfield 1995, p. 93)
This verse defines "the middle way" of Buddhism. It is the view arising
from the contention that everything is supported and connected by a
positive emptiness (which is not an absence but a primary being), the
foundation for nearly all major Buddhist schools in East Asia (Garfield
1995) [1]. The metaphysics of emptiness is to be found not only in
Buddhism but also in the Vedic thinking of Shankara's Advaita Vedanta
and Christian mysticism (John of the Cross and Eckehart). Peirce saw
Buddhism and Christianity melting together within a transcendental
religious view of empathy and love as the foundation of reality. The
emphasis on feeling and emotion as central to all "rational" thought is
one of Peirce's outstanding contributions to understanding the processes
of mind. Such a way of thinking is close to the mystical thinking we
find in many cultures and many historical periods inside and outside
religions, and is sometimes referred to as "the perennial philosophy."
The idea of "mystic" does not mean a personal meeting with a personal
God, but the merging of the inner and the outside of our being in a
unity consciousness, which as such is a no-experience as it lacks the
duality need for a subject to experience something else. It is well
described in Zen. Eckhart also say "I pray to God to get writ of God".
The idea of a personal God only arise on the "other side" of the
mystical state. But Peirce did not seem to know very much about these
kinds of descriptions.
Best
Søren
Fra: Gary Fuhrman [mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca]
Sendt: 21. maj 2014 17:21
Til: 'Peirce List'
Emne: RE: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science
and religion: text 1
Søren, list,
Peirce did not use the term "panentheism" because it wasn't available in
his time. But he did use both "mysticism" and "revelation" - even
defined the latter for the Century Dictionary - and his usage of both is
fairly consistent with his own philosophical work as a whole, and with
current usage of those terms as well. So I don't think it's helpful to
apply them to Peirce's work in a sense quite different from Peirce's
usage.
I agree with what you say below about "musement", even to calling it a
form of "meditation". But what animates musement, and the whole
Neglected Argument which begins with it, is neither mysticism nor
revelation; rather it's the "natural light" of reason, as Kees explains
in 9.5. This "natural light" is the root, as it were, of Peircean
common-sensism and of Peirce's view of religion; it's what makes science
religious. It's also the root of the instinctive beliefs which,
according to Peirce, are more reliable in most practical situations than
deliberate reasoning is.
Here's a few Peirce passages to illustrate this point (I can give many
more J) while also exemplifying Peircean usage of the terms "mystical"
and "revelation".
CP 1.142-3, c.1897:
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