Forster: "On [Peirce's] view, human beings are not cogs in a vast cosmic mechanism, but rather are free, creative agents capable of transforming the world though the active realization of intelligent ideals. The ultimate fate of the world is indeterminate and there is no guarantee that the forces of reasonableness will triumph. Nevertheless, the potential for victory is there. All it requires, he thinks, is a community of individuals who devote their energy to the pursuit of truth and goodness, a community united, not by mutual self-interest, but by a common love of reasonableness" (Forster, op. cit., 245).
I could not think of anything worse than a community transforming the world through "intelligent ideals," and I do not think the statement accurately represents Peirce. This Pyrrhic victory of eviscerated, abstract intelligence in the service of ideals would be ruinous to life, just as Teilhard de Chardin's concept of a "noosphere" (in the sense of atmosphere, stratosphere) is, a film of planetary intelligence in which "life's domain" would be ruled by reason. Life from the neck up is ruinous to life: the noose sphere. Peirce, it seems to me, understood the limited place of science in the practice of life, which is why he thought pragmatically that science is impractical. Other people, such as Dostoyevsky and Melville and D. H. Lawrence, saw more deeply into the problem of the idealization of life than Peirce did, perhaps because they were artists. Life cannot be lived by ideals for long; life can be lived with ideals, never sustainably by them. Our age today, with its ideal religions and ideal science and technology, is fast realizing ideal ruination of the biosphere. We have butchered our spontaneous souls into ether, we have butchered our minds into believing that our bodies are machines and the universe is a machine, and we have butchered the earth: The poisoned fruit of our science and its cultural legacy. Scientific self-correction may be a matter of the long run. Hooray for it. The problem is that life is also a matter of once for all time. Cut its cord and it's gone. Creation issues forth as non-ideal spontaneous reasonableness, which may be an aspect of Peirce's understanding of the aesthetic as more encompassing than the ethical or logical and their concerns with the good and the true. "The admirable," literally that which one "wonders at," as an understanding of aesthetic (a word which means to perceive or feel), seems to have moved from its literal meaning of wonder toward one of idealizing, perhaps as an aspect of our idealizing, anesthetic age. Gene Halton --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
