Gary, thanks for posting Andre’s impromptu letter on “phaneroscopic analysis”
to the list (and to Andre for giving permission to do that). It offers some
good explanations both of what this practice is (and isn’t), and of why it’s so
hard to describe. We can give some suggestions as to what to do, as I did in
Turning Signs (sometimes without calling it “phaneroscopy” — in Chapter 2
<https://gnusystems.ca/TS/dlg.htm#trans> for instance), but the core practice
itself isn’t really observable, not even by introspection. That makes it
difficult to design replicable experiments! Lately I’m thinking that “training”
in the practice would have to be something like guided meditation, with the
guide acting as a mentor. Then it could be usefully correlated with observables
such as brain activity (as in Francisco Varela’s “neurophenomenology”).
For those of us who learn mostly by reading and writing, I think description or
explanation of the actual practice is more like an art than a science. One has
to give a peculiar twist to ordinary language now and then (as Andre did a few
times in his piece.) My own favorite artist in this respect is Dogen Zenji,
whom I quote in my book for that purpose. Once Peircean category theory has
emerged from the practice of phaneroscopy and iconoscopy, then the logic of
science takes over and we can apply them to classification of signs or
whatever. But that logic can go astray if we forget that the Peircean
categories are not a set of three separate bins into which we sort things or
parts of processes. They are irreducible elements all of which are present (in
varying proportions) in every phenomenon in the universe of discourse. And they
are ordered not serially but subsumptively, so we have to prescind the
Secondness of a phenomenon from its Thirdness, and its Firstness from its
Secondness.
I don’t suppose I’m saying anything original here, so I might as well stop. I
don’t have much to say about the applications of Peircean category theory
anyway, so I’ll leave that to you (Gary and Andre) and others who have taken it
much further than I have.
Gary f.
} (Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs
(please stoop), in this allaphbed! [Finnegans Wake 18] {
<https://gnusystems.ca/wp/> https://gnusystems.ca/wp/ }{ living the time
From: [email protected]
<[email protected]> On Behalf Of Gary Richmond
Sent: 23-Mar-21 18:32
To: Peirce-L <[email protected]>
Cc: De Tienne, Andre <[email protected]>; VINCENT M Colapietro
<[email protected]>; Gary Fuhrman <[email protected]>; Jon Alan Schmidt
<[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Phaneroscopy, Iconoscopy, and Peircean Category Theory,
was, Peirce's Categories and Semeiotic
List,
Peirce-L members most likely know Andre de Tienne from his articles on Peirce
(I provided a link to his "Iconoscopy Between Phaneroscopy and Semeiotic" in my
first post in this thread, but others are available online) and as editor (or
co-editor) of several books. Andre is also the current Director and General
Editor of the Peirce Edition Project. Yesterday he responded off List
(addressed to Gary f, Jon Alan Schmidt, and me) to my initial post in this
thread.
I was delighted to discover that he is "of the same mind" as Gary, Jon and
myself regarding Peirce's phenomenology, being fairly fully in agreement with
Gary's brief essay on phenoscopy in his book Turning Signs, as well as my
initial post in this thread which he referred to as a "manifesto in favor of
phaneroscopic practice" but which I have come to think of as a kind of outline
of a possible phenomenological project. Andre mentioned that these are matters
he has thought deeply about but which he has not yet gotten around to
articulating in writing; he seemed pleased that we had.
Caught up in personal business, and so with no time left for extensive
comments, he instead copied a letter he'd written about a year ago in response
to a person asking the following question:
Has anyone to your knowledge done an actual phaneroscopic analysis of anything
(anything from a poem to a dog show) and published a report on what he or she
discovered using this method? The method, as far as I can understand, appears
to have practical potential but it is hard to see how one actually applies it
in a concrete situation. As you know, watching someone actually make an
omelette is a lot more instructive than just being told about it.
Andre offered the following "impromptu" answer which, I believe, offers some
considerable, yet non-technical insight into phaneroscopic practice/analysis,
both what it is and what it is not, as well as several examples, including some
from Peirce which connect his phaneroscopic practice with the development of
his semeiotic. He generously gave me permission to forward his answer to the
question to Peirce-L.
Yes, watching people in action is more instructive than reading the recipe for
that action. Hence a recipe is no phaneroscopic analysis. Still, watching
people in action is no phaneroscopic analysis either. In the first place,
“scoping the phaneron” as such is no analysis per se, because usually an
analysis looks for separable parts which, when separated, lose the very
connection to the whole that was their reason for being (and manifesting). In
this phaneroscopy doesn’t seek to separate things abruptly, otherwise it fails
to observe what gets manifested in its very manifestation.
Peirce explained that the phaneroscopic activity was intrinsically challenging
because of the peculiar mindset it requires. It is a peculiar act of attention,
one that seeks to observe, without any bias or preset goal, the patterns that
govern any sort of manifestation, and take notice of such patterns because they
are precisely the very agents of that manifestation. Watch someone making an
omelette, and as long as you are fixated on the making of the omelette as such
you shall never see the manifesting of the phaneron, biased as you are in the
activity itself and its desirable outcome. To conduct a phaneroscopic
observation of the activity, the least interesting aspects of it are the eggs,
the developing omelet, the ingredients, the pan, the stove, and the cook in
action. After all, such kind of observation can be done by anyone anywhere and
requires no special competence, least of all that of a phaneroscopist.
Phaneroscopy sits between mathematics and the normative philosophical sciences
(aesthetics being first, but aesthetics of course has nothing to do with what
is usually called aesthetics, like Peirce’s ethics has no connection to what is
usually called ethics, because Peirce’s approach has a fundamentality to it
that is lacking in the more ordinary kind of inquiry such terms designate).
Phaneroscopy is the first research activity preoccupied with the positivity of
experience. Its preoccupation is entirely about that: the elements that preside
over experiencing as such. Not experiencing someone making an omelette. Merely
experiencing the experience of it for the sake of that experiencing. As a
research activity, phaneroscopy does have a goal, but not one that is biasing.
Its goal is to identify patterns that govern the coming of something into
experiencing. Those patterns are not arbitrary, not fictive: they structure the
dough of what goes on in experience. They are mathematizable in the sense that
they manifest persistent forms that allow them to condition in various ways the
emergence of other forms that could not emerge otherwise. Phaneroscopy makes
good use of such mathematical clues to make out the phylogenetic rules (as it
were) that govern relations of dependencies among forms within processes of
manifestation.
Who has conducted such kind of phaneroscopic observations and reported them in
ways not assertive but suggestive? Why, Charles Peirce himself of course. Most
of his semiotic distinctions arose from a preliminary long-sustained
phaneroscopic observation. Take the distinction between three types of
sign-manifestations: qualisign, sinsign, legisign. Being able to appreciate
their distinctive experiential character in their presentification does require
phaneroscopic competence. Making them out is not the result of a semiotic
analysis but of phaneral alertness. Other example: Peirce’s MSS 940/941 (“Logic
of events”, 1897-98). That document shows Peirce as his phaneroscopic best,
especially from p. 9 to 11 in MS 940 and the whole of MS 941 regarding
quale-consciousness, where Peirce seeks to establish fundamental patterns of
quale-consciousness.
As to the omelette-maker, focus not on what he or she’s doing but on how
certain qualia emerge that appear to predominate in ways that govern the
experiencing or witnessing of the activity. What is it about the level of
brownness that is somehow desirable up to but just short of excess, at which
point the omelette-maker will remove the pan from the heat? What about the
complex of smells? What about the joyfulness of the affair? What about the
growing pangs of hunger? What about the rhythm of distinct sub-actions? What
about the manner in which quick decisions appear to be taken? What about the
musical humming in the omelette-maker’s mouth? And so on. What phaneral
dependencies do they govern that one usually ignores despite the fact that they
fashion every aspect of the flowing manifestation?
Usually such things are captured by poets, without their knowing they are good
at phaneroscopy.
Somewhere in a letter to Lady Welby, Peirce praised her for her distinction
between sense, meaning, and significance, ascribing her making such a
distinction to her power of sensitive apprehension. He contrasted that ability
with his own, more theoretical, which forced him to discover the roots of the
manifestations of distinct forms less through direct observation than through
educated guesses or predictions of what forms ought to be expected to emerge
and become manifest on the basis of patterns whose forms had already been
ascertained (I am writing from home and don’t have the letter in front of me,
so what precedes is no quotation). I took Peirce to mean that, when it came for
him to classify all sorts of signs, and thus name them as appropriately as
possible, that exercise was less based on some sort of direct apprehension than
on the speculation that (for instance) if I harbor the sense that I am still
lacking an essential triad of sign forms, and that such a lack forces me to
create all sorts of ad-hoc complexifications that don’t hold up with any sort
of elegance (e.g., “hypoicons”, “hyposemes”) there must be something I have
neglected and I must go back to the drawing board. So Peirce goes back to the
drawing board, studies the prescissive rules when applied to triadic relations,
and realizes, from theory, that he had missed the most important triad of all,
the one that acknowledges the distinct phanerality of each major type of sign.
Hence he had to surmise the reality of the triad qualisign, sinsign, and
legisign, decades after he had elaborated the other two triads. That new triad
then gave him a path back toward observation: there ought to be in the
manifestable something whose phanerality corresponds to such categories when it
comes to signs. That’s the theoretical prediction. And lo and behold, so do
they now appear! They had always been there, but it took Peirce a preparation
of thought to finally sense their phanerality (or better [to a francophone
ear], their phanerance).
We can infer that phaneoscopy may be harder on some types of mind than on
others, and that there is no unique royal road to the phaneral. But the road
is open to everyone if only a whole range of effective and alternate practices
could be worked out.
For now I would especially like to emphasize the last sentence which, I
believe, functions in the present context as an invitation to phaneroscopic
practice.
Best,
Gary R
“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
Gary Richmond
Philosophy and Critical Thinking
Communication Studies
LaGuardia College of the City University of New York
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