On Jun 17, 2014, at 1:40 PM, Edwina Taborsky <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:
> I wouldn't speculate that Peirce wanted God to be a 'thing-in-itself'. > There's no evidence, to my knowledge, of that. Only reason I bring that up is more because of the place of God in traditional Christian theology. My thinking was more that if Peirce did accept a thing in itself it’d probably just be God due to creation ex nihilo. I shouldn’t have speculated that he actually said anything like that. I’m not aware of anything he said pointing in that direction. You’re right that I shouldn’t have said that. Or at least put some serious qualifications on it. I was just following through the logic of the doctrine such that his more controversial statements about God really aren’t that controversial when placed in context. The question I still have is Peirce’s view of Christology and the persons which just isn’t at all clear to me. While I’ve not really read much of his religion what I have read just hasn’t gone into those issues. Doing a little googling I did find a book that was a conference printing. C.S. Peirce: Categories to Constantinople that delves into the issue. http://www.amazon.com/Peirce-Constantinople-Proceedings-International-Philosophical/dp/9061869390 In that book Gérard Deledalle has a paper, “Peirce, Theologian” that claims it’s just the person of the Father to which the quote about existence applies. God the Father has the reality of Firstness (he ‘is’ but does not exist); while the God the Son, although also real as first, did exist as second in the person of Jesus; as to the reality of God as thrid or organizer of the world, it is personified in the Holy Spirit. To conclude this first part of my paper, I should like to insist on the originality of Peirce’s argument. It is the first argument ever founded on the category of possibility whose argumentative scientific expression is neither induction (on which all the proofs of the existence of God rest), nor a priori deduction. The later is very often used by metaphysicians since Saint Anselm and it leads to God’s reality, but a reality which implies ‘existence’ which is a terminological contradiction denounced by Peirce and Duns Scotus. Rather, Peirce’s argument rests on the retroduction or abduction, the only argument which can ‘show’ the reality of God without imposing on God the haecceity of existence. A conception which is not incompatible with God’s incarnation as second in the historical existence of Jesus Christ, nor with the reality of God as first through the mediation of third of the Holy Spirit. (Gérard Deledalle, ibid, 142) I confess I don’t see how this avoids Duns Scotus view that this problem of haecceity applies to all three persons and not just the Father. But then I’m not theologian and what theology I’ve read of the dual natures of Christ never made much logical sense to me. Of course Peirce started out as an Unitarian who saw Jesus and the Holy Spirit as first among creatures. While he’d become Episcopalian when first married he’d always seemed to have an idiosyncratic of it. (He often referred to the Holy Spirit as Mother although of course one could argue about the place of Wisdom as divine female in the pre-Christian and even early Christian era. I’m not sure that was well understood at the time though.) Deledalle continues on about the controversy between the eastern and western churches over the Trinity and suggests Peirce adopts a neoPlatonic solution. The position that Peirce was to develop is closer to that of Plotinus than that taken by the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople: the Son proceeds from the Father out of time, but precedes him in time. He is a hypostasis in the greek sense adopted by the eastern church, not a substance in the latin sense of hte western church, while possessing both a divine nature and a human nature. The procession moves downward: what it gains in multiplicity, it loses in unity: the Father is first, the Son is second, the Holy Ghost is third. (ibid 149) I’m not sure this solves the haecceity problem at all. But I’m even less well read on the nuances of ontological difference between the eastern and western churches than I am on Peirce’s religion. And of course Scotus was of the west. He ends with a quote of Peirce’s though that might apply to the issue you critiqued my speculation on. …various great theologians explain that one cannot attribute reason to God, nor perception (which always involves an element of surprise and of learning what one did not know), and, in short, that “mind” is necessarily…unlike ours [and] that it is only negatively…that we can attach any meaning to the Name. (CP 6.502) While not properly a explicit thing-in-itself this comes rather close. I say that since it seems Peirce’s main criticism of the thing-in-itself is its unknowability. Yet if God here is known only negatively then that seems to lead to a very similar place as the thing-in-itself. Perhaps we might argue that negative theology really is different from what Peirce was addressing relative to Kant. Further than negative knowledge is still knowledge. I’m just not enough up on the nuances of the issue to be able to weight in there. But I’d be very interested in others comments.
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