Yes, I suppose the Nothing of Peirce is akin to the biblican 'tohuvabohu
'formless chaos', but my point is that it does not include any direction. And
certainly there is no metaphysical agent to introduce a direction.
This nothing is limitless possibilities BUT, after those first two 'flashes'
outlined by Peirce, these flashes which introduce particular matter also
introduce Thirdness or habits of formation, and these then start to limit and
constrain the possibilities. So, I don't consider that the 'Nothing' is like
Firstness, since my reading of Peirce posits that Firstness operates as a mode
of organization of matter...and this requires matter to exist! That is, my
reading of Peirce is that the three modal categories only develop when matter
develops. So, before there was matter, this 'Nothing' is not Firstness. As
Peirce outlines it - it is 'nothing'. Firstness is a powerful mode of
organization of matter, rejecting closure, limits, borders. And certainly,
since matter at this pretemporal phase hasn't developed any laws of modal
organization, it doesn't yet function within Thirdness.
Edwina
----- Original Message -----
From: Helmut Raulien
To: tabor...@primus.ca
Cc: Peirce List
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 1:55 PM
Subject: Aw: Re: [PEIRCE-L] nominalism
Edwina,
I agree, by adopting Peirce´s definition of "Nothing", which is only a
no-thing, meaning no things, no secondnesses, but possibilities there are, even
limitless. So Peirces "Nothing" is not the absence of possibilities. Maybe this
Peircean "Nothing" is the same like the Thoran/Biblical "Tohuvabohu"? In
contrast to a nihilistic "Nothing", in which there is nothing, not even
possibilities, unless whoever plants some ideas into it. What I wanted to say,
is, I think I agree with you, there just has been or is an unclarity about the
term "nothing".
Best,
Helmut
24. Januar 2017 um 19:30 Uhr
"Edwina Taborsky" <tabor...@primus.ca>
Helmut - I'll try to reply in points below:
1) HR: I understood that Nominalism means to reduce (or upduce?) everything
to a symbol of a secondness, a language that adresses brute facts. So bio- and
physicochemical semiotics are ignored, as there is no symbolic language. Only
humans have languages, so now Nominalism for me appears to be human hybris. Is
the linguistic turn also nominalistic? I guess so.
Edwina: Agreed
2) HR: Maybe my tentative attempt to rescue Nominalism by extending the
"mind"-concept towards the universe´s mind is anthropocentric:
EDWINA: But according to Peirce, the universe IS an evolving Mind. Don't
worry about the 'anthropocentrism'.
3) HR: It would mean, that possibility, firstness, is not real by itself,
but consists of symbols of secondnesses:
EDWINA: The categories are modes of being; that is, they are modes of how a
'being' or individual unit is organized. The question then is: Is 'possibility'
a real force in nature, and I think we have to acknowledge that the force in
matter organized in a mode of Firstness, is objectively real. A symbol is in a
mode of Thirdness not Secondness.
4) HR: That would be Platonism, I guess: To say, that something, an
organism, a repeated situation, whatever, does not occur because it was
possible (firstness), and then became a habit (thirdness), but is only a copy
or token of a divine or super-divine (in polytheism) idea.
EDWINA: I'm not sure what you mean by the above. Are you saying that the
FORM of Platonism is in a mode of Firstness? I don't accept the notion of a
divine idea....I think you are moving into Platonism!
5) HR: To me it boils down to the question we have had, what was in the
beginning: Tohuvabohu, everything was possible, then possibility was not ideas,
but everything (in a pre-world in which "everything is possible" possibility is
everything). Or was there "nothing" in the beginning: In this case
possibilities are ideas, planted into the nothing (by whom or what, Mr.
Plato?), like in Platonism. I tend towards the Tohuvabohu-Hypothesis, and
against Nominalism. My tentative attempt (to rescue Nominalism on the basis of
universal mind) has failed, and I am happy about that.
EDWINA: I tend to agree with Peirce - that in the beginning, there was
nothing. .."a state of mere indeterminancy in which nothing existed or really
happened" 1.411. Then, "Out of the womb of indeeterminacy we must say that
there would have come something, by the principle of Firstness, which we may
call a flash. Then by the principle of habit there would have been a second
flash. Though time would not yet have been, this second flash was in some sense
after the first, because resulting from it. Then there would have come other
successions ever more and more closely connected, the habits and the tendency
to take them every strengthening themselves". 1.412. He continues on outlining
the development of habits within space and time...
You can read from this that there was no a priori Agent [God]; no necessary
determinism. "We start then, with nothing, pure zero....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". 6.217.
You can read from this that Thirdness or Laws did not exist prior to
Secondness or the appearance of particular matter. In this phase, there were
only - the tendency to the three modal categories of the organization of
matter. Thirdness, as a modal category, can be understood as akin to Mind, and
emerges with matter. Peirce was quite open about his view that Mind exists and
is operative in all forms of matter:
"Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work
of bees, or crystals, and throught the purely physical world" 4.551.
This does then raise the question of 'what is Mind'? My answer, which i
derive from Peirce, is that it is a process of all three modal categories
where "Mind is a propositional function of the widest possible universe, such
that its values are the meanings of all signs whose actual effects are in
effective intercommunication'. [Note. 4.550]. That is, Mind is not just
Thirdness nor is it a metaphysical agent but is a semiosic action of all three
categorical modes.
Edwina
Best,
Helmut
24. Januar 2017 um 16:07 Uhr
"Edwina Taborsky" <tabor...@primus.ca> wrote:
Helmut - further to your post, where you write
"if you believe that the universe itself is an organism (pantheism) or part
of an organism (panentheism), then nominalism would make sense?"
I'd say 'no' to that. I, myself, consider that the universe is an organism,
a massive operation of 'Mind', but that's not nominalism.
Again, as Peirce pointed out in 1.16 - the question is, 'whether laws and
general types are figments of the mind or real". As I mentioned in an earlier
post, the Saussurian semiology is an example of a perspective that considers
that general types are mental concepts. That is, since nominalism is expressed
in symbols/words, then, information becomes almost entirely operative in the
human realm. Plants, animals, cells, molecules..become inanimate or dumb
matter.
And further, as Peirce noted, the great era of nominalism emerged in the
14th century, with the rise of the battle against the control of thought by
the Church. That is, with the emergence of a market economy and middle class,
the civic individual, i.e., the non-clerical working man, began to require the
political and economic right to individually and personally 'handle' the
environment. This 'handling' was all about 'the being of individual thing or
fact' [1.21]. This new age man was not interested in the amorphousness of
general laws outside of his direct actual grasp and personal perception.
Thus, the world of nominalism reduces everything to only one mode of being;
that of Secondness, or existent particular objects. It ignores Firstness, that
mode of being of isolate free possibility - or, if it acknowledges it, it is to
transform this mode into an 'unconscious' psychological feeling within that new
age man..which can then be brought into the consciousness by ..guess what...by
words.
And most certainly, nominalism rejects Thirdness, the mode of being made up
of general laws - since, for the nominalist, laws are not real in themselves
but are intellectual constructs of the human mind...."this general rule is
nothing but a mere word or couple of words" [1.26].
When we reject nominalism for its obvious limitations, I think that we have
to be careful with analyzing the two modal categories absent in nominalism;
Firstness and Thirdness. These are modes of being, actual means of organizing
matter, and can't be reduced to terms or words.
Edwina
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