Dear Gene A agree with a lot of what you are saying here. It is very clear-cut. But I did not catch the argument why "Peirce's term "Buddhisto-Christian" seems to try to get at something like this, but simply does not go far enough to break through the Buddha-Christ human-centered anthropomorphism endemic to these products of the past 2,500 years. But his philosophy and appreciation of "the natural light" does allow for the longer evolutionary perspective. " I think there is an ongoing evolutionary perspective i Peirce's Buddhisto-Christian Synechistic Agapism. It is a process philosophy and in that the state of perfection is irreversible evolution. It is one of the argument in Hartshorne's book: The logic of perfection" , which I just bought and hope to read when my fever allows me. I guess you agree with me that the zero-state og vacuum fields are not supernatural in the way you use the term here?
Best Søren Fra: Eugene Halton [mailto:eugene.w.halto...@nd.edu] Sendt: 23. maj 2014 17:38 Til: 'Peirce List' Emne: RE: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science and religion: text 1 I agree with Gary Fuhrman's point on the significance of "the natural light" as the root for Peirce's conception of instinctive beliefs, common sensism and practical beliefs, religion, and the potential connection of science with religion. It opens up evolutionary questions that also can inform a critique of religion and science. If "the natural light" represents some evolved resonance of human intelligence with the laws of nature, it is, as Peirce argued, because we are evolved out of determination by and alignment with those laws, and so are able to have insight, in-sight, and "see the light," even with the great range of human plasticity. So that for modern science, built on the model of Galileo's emphasis on il lume natural, "...it is the simpler Hypothesis in the sense of the more facile and natural, the one that instinct suggests, that must be preferred; for the reason that unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all." 6.477. Something more than human must be the object which determines human beliefs, to cite the quotation from the revised version of "The Fixation of Belief," "To satisfy our doubts, therefore, it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency...by something Real..." CP 5:383-4 (revised version of "Fixation of Belief"). Religion, in my view, evolved into being with a very similar outlook, taking what we feebly call nature, in its minute particulars, as the living determinant of human belief and also object of reverence. The gods, or "God," were insignificant or non-existent, only becoming significant much later as human social constructions. Civilized religions turned away from the primordial attunement to wild nature and turned toward the domesticated world, radically altering the conception of religion, and gave rise to supernatural conceptions of divinity as transcendent, as well as anthropocentrism. But modern science also imposed a grid between itself and wild nature, the grid of the machine, the clockwork grid, and derived a subnatural conception of nature. There can be no reconciliation between supernatural religions and subnatural science. The filter of anthropocentrism and its human-centered conception of supernatural divinity or transcendence is unsustainable, having lost the touch of the earth. But so too is the filter of subnatural science, which would disqualify the qualitative dimensions of experience, as Galileo nominalistically did. Galileo: "I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated" Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, 1623. The possible reconciliation of religion and science would have to involve the broader evolutionary foraging past through which religion and humans co-evolved, and the original natural illumination that the more one attunes to the variescent surrounding wild living earth, practically and reverentially, the more one becomes participant in the drama of creation. I will call this the NEA, Neglected Evolutionary Argument. Our foraging ancestors believed in a psycho-physical universe, and religion, as seen in numerous ethnographies, exhibits itself as a two-sided reverential and practical way of living in a psycho-physical universe, however fantastically imagined. Peirce's term "Buddhisto-Christian" seems to try to get at something like this, but simply does not go far enough to break through the Buddha-Christ human-centered anthropomorphism endemic to these products of the past 2,500 years. But his philosophy and appreciation of "the natural light" does allow for the longer evolutionary perspective. Gene From: Gary Fuhrman [mailto:g...@gnusystems.ca] Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 11:21 AM To: 'Peirce List' Subject: 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 :)) while also exemplifying Peircean usage of the terms "mystical" and "revelation". CP 1.142-3, c.1897: Now if exactitude, certitude, and universality are not to be attained by reasoning, there is certainly no other means by which they can be reached. Somebody will suggest revelation. ... I do not think it is philosophical to reject the possibility of a revelation. Still, granting that, I declare as a logician that revealed truths - that is, truths which have nothing in their favor but revelations made to a few individuals - constitute by far the most uncertain class of truths there are. There is here no question of universality; for revelation is itself sporadic and miraculous. There is no question of mathematical exactitude; for no revelation makes any pretension to that character. But it does pretend to be certain; and against that there are three conclusive objections. First, we never can be absolutely certain that any given deliverance really is inspired; for that can only be established by reasoning. We cannot even prove it with any very high degree of probability. Second, even if it is inspired, we cannot be sure, or nearly sure, that the statement is true.... All inspired matter has been subject to human distortion or coloring. Besides we cannot penetrate the counsels of the most High, or lay down anything as a principle that would govern his conduct. We do not know his inscrutable purposes, nor can we comprehend his plans. We cannot tell but he might see fit to inspire his servants with errors. In the third place, a truth which rests on the authority of inspiration only is of a somewhat incomprehensible nature; and we never can be sure that we rightly comprehend it. As there is no way of evading these difficulties, I say that revelation, far from affording us any certainty, gives results less certain than other sources of information. This would be so even if revelation were much plainer than it is. CP 2.23-5, 1902: The opinion just now referred to, that logical principles are known by an inward light of reason, called the "light of nature" to distinguish it from the "light of grace" which comes by revelation, has been the opinion entertained by the majority of careful logicians. The phrase "light of reason," or its near equivalent, may probably be found in every literature. The "old philosopher" of China, Lao-Tze, who lived in the sixth century B.C. says for example, "Whoso useth reason's light, and turneth back, and goeth home to its enlightenment, surrendereth not his person to perdition. This is called practising the eternal." The doctrine of a light of reason seems to be inwrapped in the old Babylonian philosophy of the first chapter of Genesis, where the Godhead says, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." It may, no doubt, justly be said that this is only an explanation to account for the resemblances of the images of the gods to men, a difficulty which the Second Commandment meets in another way. But does not this remark simply carry the doctrine back to the days when the gods were first made in man's image? To believe in a god at all, is not that to believe that man's reason is allied to the originating principle of the universe? EP2:324: "The very entelechy of being lies in being representable. A sign cannot even be false without being a sign and so far as it is a sign it must be true. A symbol is an embryonic reality endowed with power of growth into the very truth, the very entelechy of reality. This appears mystical and mysterious simply because we insist on remaining blind to what is plain, that there can be no reality which has not the life of a symbol." CP 5:383-4 (revised version of "Fixation of Belief"): Now, there are some people, among whom I must suppose that my reader is to be found, who, when they see that any belief of theirs is determined by any circumstance extraneous to the facts, will from that moment not merely admit in words that that belief is doubtful, but will experience a real doubt of it, so that it ceases in some degree at least to be a belief. To satisfy our doubts, therefore, it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency - by something upon which our thinking has no effect [But which, on the other hand, unceasingly tends to influence thought; or in other words, by something Real]. Some mystics imagine that they have such a method in a private inspiration from on high. But that is only a form of the method of tenacity, in which the conception of truth as something public is not yet developed. Enough for now! gary f. From: Søren Brier [mailto:sb....@cbs.dk] Sent: 20-May-14 9:19 AM To: Gary Fuhrman; Peirce List Subject: SV: [PEIRCE-L] De Waal seminar chapter 9, section on God, science and religion: text 1 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.
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