Jon, list,
refering to:
NG: The primordial soup of Peircean cosmogony, although so remote as to be on the fringe of existence and comprehensibility, is best understood as a pure state of feeling, that is, of psychic firstness, spontaneously sporting in random chaos. For Peirce, such spontaneity is the essence of mind, which is the principle of life or catalyst of cosmic development and order as we know it. (p. 196)
I guess "random chaos" would be the correct translation of "tohuvabohu" in the Bible (Genesis, is it, "In the begining God created heaven and earth, and the earth was ...(tohuvabohu)"), other than the sometimes incorrect translations such as "vast and empty". But, if the earth was chaotic, this chaos should have implied matter, "earth". If mind is primordial is impossible to say, not knowing the nature of God: Is He pure mind, or material too?
Different it is in Greek mythology (according to Wikipedia): Here "chaos" means abyss, or emptiness, or nothingness, the state before heaven and earth had been separated. In this case, "chaos" does not imply matter.
In Greek mythology, heaven, earth, and the gods "emerged" from the chaos. This sounds like Hegel or so, it is an atheistic creation concept. Nevertheless, this self-organized emergence might be interpreted like primordial mind, with mind being just a seed, a tautological necessity, or a big bang-singularity. But this interpretation is somehow far-fetched, or just one option out of two: You might as well, or even more reasonably, interpret it the way like that mind and matter did co-emerge out of "the" nothing.
And Guardiano and Peirce? What do they mean by "chaos"? A primordial soup sounds like containing matter. A primordial feeling sounds like not, but who feels the feeling, if not a material being, and what could be able to arouse a feeling, if not something material?
Best,
Helmut
07. August 2019 um 20:30 Uhr
"Jon Alan Schmidt" <jonalanschm...@gmail.com>
wrote:
"Jon Alan Schmidt" <jonalanschm...@gmail.com>
wrote:
John, List:
As a follow-up, I noticed that upon characterizing Peirce's objective idealism as "his theory of the Reality of Thought in the universe," Dilworth states in a footnote, "Here I should like to acknowledge my debt to Nicholas Guardiano’s incisive paper, ‘Peirce’s Metaphysics of Objective Idealism’, which was the William James Prize paper presented at the APA Eastern Division meeting in Boston, December 29, 2010" (p. 56). It appears that Guardiano's paper was subsequently published in Cognitio as "The Intelligibility of Peirce's Metaphysics of Objective Idealism" (https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d2ab/569f4d087b1729d1b93413f5efa669f105a1.pdf). Consistent with what I have been maintaining all along, the abstract describes Peirce's objective idealism as "an idealist metaphysics ... that conceives mind as the primordial or fundamental reality of nature." Moreover, Guardiano offers a helpful explanation of what is objective about this particular form of idealism in the body of the paper.
NG: It is useful to think of the "idealism" half of Peirce’s philosophy of objective idealism as pointing to a theory of metaphysics, and the "objective" half, pointing to a theory of epistemology ... We can say that objective idealism includes epistemological realism and idealist metaphysics. (pp. 192-193)
In an earlier footnote, he also describes how it differs from subjective idealism.
NG: I take subjective idealism as the position that the real is dependent on its being known. One version of it is Berkeley’s, which claims that “to be is to be perceived.” Peirce’s objective idealism, however, holds to a position of metaphysical realism about the mind; the real is mind, whether it is known or not. (p. 191 n. 14)
Guardiano goes on to echo what we have already said about the different meanings of "primordial."
NG: Primordiality is in fact the concept Peirce employs to relate mind and matter in each of the three versions of monism. Neutralism conceives mind and matter as both primordial; materialism conceives matter as primordial; and idealism conceives mind as primordial. The three possible configurations are clear enough, but the word “primordial” is an ambiguous term. It can mean first in a time series, logical priority, or convey some other sense of being fundamental or basic. (p. 195)
Quoting EP 1:297 (CP 6.33; 1891), he then links the concept to Peirce's cosmogony, initially associating mind with 1ns rather than 3ns.
NG: The primordial soup of Peircean cosmogony, although so remote as to be on the fringe of existence and comprehensibility, is best understood as a pure state of feeling, that is, of psychic firstness, spontaneously sporting in random chaos. For Peirce, such spontaneity is the essence of mind, which is the principle of life or catalyst of cosmic development and order as we know it. (p. 196)
The key concept here is psychic 1ns, as Guardiano later elaborates.
NG: Recall that the cosmogony story explicitly characterizes the "pure arbitrariness” of the cosmic starting conditions as "a chaos of unpersonalized feeling" (my emphasis), that is, of psychic firstness. The specification is crucial, for it furthers the meaning of "mind" as the metaphysical basis of reality. It is one thing for a theory of metaphysics to argue for a vague unqualified spontaneity in the world, and another thing to argue for a spontaneity of feeling. (pp. 198-199)
In Peirce on Realism and Idealism, Robert Lane also quotes CP 6.33, noting the "unpersonalized" nature of feeling "in the beginning," such that it "was not experienced by any individual person or other conscious being" (p. 71, emphasis mine). Nevertheless, he likewise goes on to describe objective idealism as the doctrine "that every instance of matter is also an instance of mind/feeling" (p. 78); in other words, there is a sense in which mind encompasses both 1ns (feeling) and 3ns (thought), while matter primarily corresponds to 2ns (action). Moreover, Guardiano states the following immediately after the excerpt above about "primordial soup."
NG: The complete narrative of the cosmogony appears to follow the logic of a particular trichotomy Peirce provides in the previous paragraph: by a process of evolution (thirdness) the spontaneity of mind (firstness) grows into matter and other regularities (secondness) of the universe. In cosmic logic, thus, mind is primordial, not because it is first in a time series, but because it has (phenomeno-)logical priority. (p. 196)
I suggest that this accords with the "topological" conception of continuity, in which a true continuum as a whole (3ns) has only indefinite parts (1ns) unless and until some are "marked off" as singularities (2ns). Specifically, the entire universe is just such a continuum (mind) governed by psychical law, whose indefinite parts (feelings) still exhibit considerable freedom, but whose actual parts (matter) are constrained by "inveterate habits becoming physical law." In Lane's words ...
RL: Eventually, as the universe became even more orderly and habit became more habitual, stricter laws took hold, and there came to be instances of mind/feeling that behaved in less spontaneous, more deterministic ways. Those feelings, "effete" and "partially deadened," were matter, subject to "absolute," physical laws. Mental law is primordial, and physical law emerged from it as the universe evolved; ergo, what the mental law governs--mind/feeling--is primordial, and matter emerged from it. But matter is not totally free of the spontaneity that is the hallmark of feeling ... (pp. 73-74)
As Guardiano summarizes ...
NG: ... Peirce’s justification for postulating his metaphysical theory of objective idealism appears to come down to the following reasoning: taking evolution, growth, novelty, variety, and specificity as facts about the world, mind must be primordial to matter, since it is a necessary condition of such facts. (p. 198)
All of this led me to revisit another, more recent paper by Guardiano--"The Categorial Logic of Peirce's Metaphysical Cosmology" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/pluralist.10.3.0313), which we discussed on the List in late 2016 and I reference in an endnote of my online essay. There he proposes three accounts, each associated with one of the Categories and addressing a different aspect of the overall scheme.
- The perspective of 1ns describes the constitution of being--an inexhaustible continuum (blackboard) underlies indefinite possibilities (whiteboards), some of which are actualized (discontinuous mark).
- The perspective of 2ns describes the sequence of events in each case of such actualization--spontaneity, then reaction, then habit-taking.
- The perspective of 3ns describes the evolution of states--chaos in the infinite past, ongoing sequences of events at any assignable date, and complete regularity in the infinite future.
As described in Gary R.'s "Outline of trikonic: Diagrammatic Trichotomic" (http://www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/richmond/trikonic.htm), these correspond respectively to the vectors of representation (3ns→1ns→2ns), order (1ns→2ns→3ns), and process (1ns→3ns→2ns). 3ns is thus logically primordial relative to both 1ns and 2ns, while 1ns is both logically and temporally primordial relative to 2ns. 3ns comes last in the sequence of events, but as Peirce himself eventually noted--crediting Ogden Rood with bringing it to his attention--"there must have been some original tendency to take habits which did not arise according to my hypothesis [of 1891-1893]" (R 842:114[128]; 1908, emphases mine). 1ns also precedes 3ns in the evolution of states, but only as an ideal limit. Hence this analysis confirms the "really commanding function" of 3ns, which is why Peirce preferred the name "synechism" for his overall system, rather than "tychism" (CP 6.202; 1898).
Regards,
Jon S.
On Mon, Aug 5, 2019 at 3:19 PM Jon Alan Schmidt <jonalanschm...@gmail.com> wrote:
John, List:JFS: But in order to understand the issues, it's essential to relate what Peirce wrote to his sources and to his successors.It is also essential, as you have emphasized before, to read carefully and interpret faithfully what Peirce actually wrote--and not attribute positions to him that he never said, meant, implied, or intended.JFS: For a discussion of Schelling's influence on Peirce's objective idealism, I recommend two articles by David Dilworth:Thank you for those links. What Dilworth says about T. L. Short in the first paper is exactly what I have been saying about Edwina.DD: Short of course is free to develop a positive alternative to Peirce’s system. It would be in the spirit of Peirce’s philosophy to welcome and cherish his endeavor. Be that as it may. But as a bottom line, Short’s article plays fast and loose with Peirce’s own text. It does not adequately represents [sic] Peirce’s “completely developed system” of “Schelling-fashioned objective idealism” ... (p. 70)This should put to rest once and for all the complaint that it is somehow illegitimate to deem someone else's "reading" or "interpretation" of Peirce as inaccurate, and therefore invalid. It happens all the time in the secondary literature.JFS: The similarities of Logos, Tao, and Dharma is recognized by many philosophers and theologians.I have not disputed this. Again, equating any two (or three) of the terms within a particular context and for a particular purpose is a very different proposition from equating all of them without qualification. The latter assertion is neither vague nor certain.JFS: The word 'primordial' is another vague term.Google's online dictionary suggests two potentially relevant definitions--"existing at or from the beginning of time" and "(especially of a state or quality) basic and fundamental." Peirce's summary of objective idealism--"that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws"--clearly asserts that mind is "basic and fundamental," such that matter is derived from it; and that habits (psychical laws) existed "from the beginning of time," while physical laws evolved later. In other words, in both senses of the word "primordial," Peirce's view was that "the physical law [is] derived and special, the psychical law alone [is] primordial, which is idealism" (CP 6.24; 1891).JFS: Since Peirce claimed that matter is effete mind, that implies that matter is a kind of mind. It does not come after mind. That would support Edwina's point.The implication that "matter is a kind of mind" entails that mind is more "basic and fundamental" than matter; i.e., that mind is logically primordial (second definition) relative to matter. The description of "inveterate habits becoming physical laws" implies that physical laws come about after habits; i.e., that psychical laws are temporally primordial (first definition) relative to physical laws. That refutes Edwina's point.Regards,Jon Alan Schmidt - Olathe, Kansas, USAProfessional Engineer, Amateur Philosopher, Lutheran LaymanOn Mon, Aug 5, 2019 at 1:56 PM John F Sowa <s...@bestweb.net> wrote:Gary, Jon, and Edwina,
GR
> It should be obvious from my own previous messages in this thread
> on the topic that I fully concur with Jon's conclusion in general
> and in the particulars he outlined. Indeed, we have both been making
> the same points based on many of the same quotations
Yes, that's obvious. It's always the same quotations. But in order
to understand the issues, it's essential to relate what Peirce wrote
to his sources and to his successors.
> JFS: Many philosophers and theologians of various persuasions
> agree with that equation at a "sufficiently vague" level.
>
> JAS: but your claim was that it is vague enough to be certain,
> which I continue to deny.
The starting equation is Theos = Logos. The criterion for certainty
is Peirce's: "It is easy to be certain. One has only to be
sufficiently vague."
For the definitions of the terms, we can use the ones that Peirce wrote
for _The Century Dictionary_. See the attached idealism.jpg, which
contains his definitions for 'idealism', 'objective idealism', etc.
CSP, Century Dictionary
> idealism 1. The metaphysical doctrine that the real is of the nature
> of thought; the doctrine that all reality is in its nature psychical.
> ...
> Objective idealism. the doctrine of F. W. J. von Schelling (1775-1854)
> that the relation between the subject and object of thought is one of
> absolute identity. It supposes that all things exist in the absolute
> reason, that matter is extinct mind, and that the laws of physics are
> the same as those of mental representations.
For more detail, see idealism.jpg. It also includes Peirce's
definitions of other varieties of idealism, including Kant's
transcendental idealism. An interesting example is ideal-realism,
which C. S. Peirce attributes to B. Peirce. That was probably
a version that he discussed with his father while they were both
studying Kant.
For a discussion of Schelling's influence on Peirce's objective
idealism, I recommend two articles by David Dilworth:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/db5f/2d660a8ee2f64eeef4d85033922ca38f6cc8.pdf
http://www.commens.org/sites/default/files/biblio_attachments/peirces_schelling-fashioned_critique_of_hegel.pdf
For more background, I recommend _On the History of Modern Philosophy_
by Schelling (152 pages) with a 40-page intro by the translator.
Schelling begins with Descartes's dualism and Spinoza's monism.
Spinoza had a huge influence on German idealism, which led many
religious and political leaders to denounce pantheism as a version
of atheism. Any philosopher in Germany who was accused of atheism
could be ousted from any university. Even Kant felt the danger.
Schelling's history is based on lectures he presented in 1833 and
1834, which were attended by many leading philosophers of the day.
He was very careful to develop a version of monism that supported
the development of science while avoiding an accusation of atheism.
Peirce would find that quite congenial.
The similarities of Logos, Tao, and Dharma is recognized by many
philosophers and theologians. I mentioned that 'Tao' is the
translation of 'Logos' in Chinese versions of the New Testament.
In any case, Peirce's definition of 'idealism' is sufficiently
broad (or vague) to include them.
If anyone needs more evidence, consider the writings of the Catholic
monk, Thomas Merton. He wrote extensively about varieties of mystical
experience, East and West. And he observed that the descriptions of
their mystical experiences were very similar. Merton also wrote his
own translation of Lao Zi's book of the Tao.
Peirce also had a mystical experience at the church of St. Thomas
in New York. That could have affected his feelings, as expressed
in various writings, especially the Neglected Argument. Merton's
analyses would support a similarity of Peirce's experience with
others around the world.
For an equation of Peirce's Objective Idealism with Whitehead's
process philosophy, Hartshorne's process theology is good evidence.
Gary R said that the details of the writings by Peirce, Whitehead,
and Hartshorne are very different. I agree. But at the level of
the definitions in idealism.jpg, the equation stands.
For more evidence on that point, I recommend the article "From Kant
to Schelling to process metaphysics" by Arran Gare:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282232558_From_Kant_to_Schelling_to_Process_Metaphysics_On_the_Way_to_Ecological_Civilization
Gare calls both Peirce and Whitehead "process metaphysicians", and
he discusses their similarities to Schelling.
ET
> My reading of Peirce is that 'objective idealism' means that Mind is not
> primordial but emerges with Matter as Matter emerges after the first
> chaos. Mind emerges as evolving habits within 'the material Object' .
The word 'primordial' is another vague term. If it is taken in the
sense of "prior in time", it cannot be defined in the absence of
matter, since the laws of physics define time in terms of the
motions of matter. If it is defined in terms of logical dependence,
it is based on the laws or Logos.
Since Peirce claimed that matter is effete mind, that implies
that matter is a kind of mind. It does not come after mind.
That would support Edwina's point.
In any case, all the terminology is "sufficiently vague" to comply
with Peirce's criterion for certainty. Therefore, I repeat:
Theos = Logos = Tao = Dharma = Natura = God of Spinoza, Einstein...
John
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