Charles Sanders Peirce in His Own Words

Torkild Thellefsen, Bent Sorensen

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781501510342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In 2014, Peirce will have been dead for one hundred years. The book will celebrate this extraordinary, prolific thinker and the relevance of his idea for semiotics, communication, and cognitive studies. More importantly, however, it will provide a major statement of the current status of Peirce's work within semiotics. The volume will be a contribution to both semiotics and Peirce studies.

Leon J. Niemoczynski⁶

1 Aesthetic Value in Peirce’s Theistic Naturalism

A man looks upon nature, sees its sublimity and beauty and his spirit gradually rises to the idea of a God. He does not see the Divinity, nor does nature prove to him the existence of that Being, but it does excite his mind and his imagination until the idea becomes rooted in his heart. In the same way, the continual change and movement in nature, suggests the idea of omnipresence. And finally, by the events of his own life, he becomes persuaded of the relation of that Being with his own soul. (W1: 108–109, 1863).

 

 

The above quote was taken from Charles S. Peirce’s “The Place of Our Age in the History of Civilization”, an oration delivered at the reunion of the Cambridge High School Association during the month of November in the year of 1863. The point of the address closely follows its title – to address the age, Peirce’s age – of the 18th, and 19th centuries, but also to track “the plot of history” on a “grand scale” (W1: 108).

Throughout the lecture Peirce references, alongside advances made by the sciences, the role that religion has occupied throughout the course of history. The quote under scrutiny here is of especial importance, as Peirce’s remarks about religion (historical or otherwise) are few and scattered among his large body of work. While there certainly has been a recrudescence of interest in Peirce’s philosophy of religion, and while specifically focusing on Peirce’s philosophy of religion alone could be one way to begin this entry, it is usually best to first aim for a broader context in studying Peirce’s outlook before focusing on a particular instance of his thinking (in this case with Peirce, his philosophy of religion as it is situated within his larger architectonic). However, with space constraints in mind, I hope that the reader shall permit me to focus on just one salient feature of Peirce’s outlook, which seems to me to be most pertinent to the above quote. That salient feature is Peirce’s affinity for science. What shall quickly become apparent is that Peirce was no ordinary scientist. Rather, a religious or theistic view shaped his scientific thinking in the form of a profound theistic naturalism. And I believe that the above quote precisely identifies what is most important in Peirce’s theistic naturalism with respect to his scientific view: the notion that the natural world studied by science is imbued with an aesthetic value intrinsically tied to the formation of religious belief.

During the early 1860s, when Peirce composed the address from which the above quote was taken, two things are sure: he was suffering terribly due to trigeminal neuralgia, and his religious outlook was intertwining ever more tightly with his scientific outlook. Joseph Brent writes in his Peirce biography, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (1998), that these were times when Peirce was suffering deep bouts of depression due to the pain caused by his neurological condition. The suffering was for Peirce, unbearable – or, as Peirce put it, “There are few ailments which give rise to greater suffering” (Brent 1998: 40). Prone to terrible pain and depression, Peirce infused himself with decoctions of opium and alcohol as he overworked himself. At times he was cold, aloof, and stupefied, yet at other times he had manic outbursts of temper (suggesting a manicdepressive illness) (Brent 1998: 40). This is remarkable given that, despite his manic and driven side, his paranoia, and his impulsive actions, he nevertheless maintained a commitment to a form of scientific query aimed at uncovering a universe pervaded by a living, developing, and personalized form of intelligence: the mind of God or “Absolute Mind”. This Absolute Mind could best be characterized not only by its developing intelligence, but also, as Peirce tells his readers in the essay, “Evolutionary Love” (1893), by its affinity for connection, synthesis, and love. Immediately one is struck by a tension: the horror of suffering and the idea of a pervasive, loving God endowed with “absolute mind” or intelligence. Yet Peirce saw mind and heart – science and religion – as being intertwined: two closely knit outlooks upon one nature. Given his personal trials, how was this possible?

Benjamin Peirce, Charles’ father, was a scientist by training who was influenced in two fairly significant ways by the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. These influences appear to have carried over to affect his son, Charles. First, following Swedenborg, Peirce’s father seems to have influenced his son in thinking that nature was the exemplar of a “Divine Geometer”, where science and mathematics are the means to discovering that mind’s wisdom (Murphey 1961: 13). For example, Benjamin Peirce taught that mathematics was a kind of “Pythagorean prayer” and that the supernatural existed within the natural (Brent 1998: 33). As Murphey clarifies, for the Peirces, “The discovery of the true structure of reality through science was therefore more than a possibility: it was religious duty” (Murphey 1961: 15). The Peirces thus believed that nature was “divine ideality” and that the various laws and processes of nature were incarnations of the divine mind, part of its “divine record” (Raposa 1989: 8). Or, as Peirce put it, “such a state of mind may properly be called a religion of science … It is a religion, so true to itself, that it becomes animated by the scientific spirit” (CP 6.433). So while Peirce’s father’s Unitarianism did not rub off on him, his father’s view that how nature (the domain of science) was also “God’s great poem”, did.

The second way that Benjamin influenced Charles was that he followed Swedenborg’s doctrine that “evil is a good because it challenges us to become spiritually whole” (Brent 1998: 38). And so Charles, while suffering terribly, was still to find some element of goodness and virtue in his work because he understood that suffering was simply a part of the divine incarnation. Living with the divine incarnation in all of its guises was part of his religious duty. Therefore, following to some degree Schelling in accepting evil as part of nature’s naturing, Peirce stated that “Whatever is is best” (MS 970: 11ff) and that evil ought to be regarded as “one of the perfections of the universe” – that is, while evil is evil, it is still perfectly part of nature (CP 6.479). Of course, such statements may sound strange, but when they are situated within Peirce’s aesthetic theory – a theory crafted under the influence of German romanticism and idealism (whether Schelling or Hegel: both of whom Peirce would only begrudgingly admit as influential for him, or Schiller: whose aesthetics Peirce embraced at the “tender age of 16”) (W1:10–12) – their meaning becomes more intelligible.

For Peirce, evil and “the existence of pain” normatively appear to “harmonize beautifully” within a universe that is slowly being “worked out” (MS 843: 32ff). Aesthetically, evil (better understood in the more fundamental aesthetic sense of discord, as ethics is a species of the aesthetic) does have its place in an evolving cosmos where creatures who are aware of goodness, harmony, and connection must also know what is not good (what is discordant) in order for metaphysical contrasts to be obtained. In terms of aesthetics (the immediacy of qualitative experience) and the aesthetic’s relationship to the “absolute mind” of God, it is still possible for the divine reality to become present even where evil – or discord or ugliness – appears first to be (see MS 283: 43). In other words, while humans may perceive evil, its appearance seems necessary for there to be a real contrasts of value present. Thus Peirce will not deny the reality of evil (especially as it appears to human eyes); however he shall maintain that eventually good will “win out” (MS 843: 32ff).

As much as the divine may appear within what humans perceive as evil, the divine may also appear through what is beautiful and sublime. As Peirce writes, “A man looks upon nature, sees its sublimity and beauty and his spirit gradually rises to the idea of a God. He does not see the Divinity, nor does nature prove to him the existence of that Being, but it does excite his mind and his imagination until the idea becomes rooted in his heart”. In essence, here Peirce foreshadows his theory of musement as it is expressed in his 1903 essay, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”. Given a process of free play, the mind muses upon the beauty of the world and, sensing its connections and syntheses, alights upon an idea of God (CP 6.458). In the same way, taking suggestion from the motions of nature, science, too, tends to follow spontaneous forms of abductive inference performed within the aesthetic Spieltrieb, striking upon principles of explanation. In the case of the former those principles are religious in their orientation, and in the case of the latter they are scientific. Both may begin within aesthetic experience.

Now, Peirce finishes his thought in this quotation that the personal relationship to God may be guided and tested within the course of events constituting one’s own life, but there is no steadfast or readymade argument that could prove the existence of this Being any more than science can infallibly prove the eternal nature of physical laws which govern the universe. But this Being, “Absolute Mind” or God, can very well persuade or gently lure one into welcoming its reality within one’s heart either through the course of life’s event or by the presentation of astounding facts. Each constitutes the “divine incarnation”.

The religious connotations of Peirce’s aesthetics can inform, I think, present and future research in fairly significant ways. It may be highly instructive to balance Peirce’s penchant for science with his view that the aesthetic of the natural world may actually serve as stage for the formation of religious belief. As the natural world is the domain of science, Peirce’s aesthetic (and the value he finds in that aesthetic) is thus the basis for his “scientific theism”, or perhaps more adequately put in this context, his “theistic naturalism”. In short, for Peirce the natural world studied by science can be understood as being imbued with an aesthetic value that is tied to the formation of religious belief where such belief is not antithetical to science but rather serves as its “animating spirit”.

Susan Petrilli⁷

2 Man, Word, and the Other

When I communicate my thought and my sentiments to a friend with whom I am in full sympathy, so that my feelings pass into him and I am conscious of what he feels, do I not live in his brain as well as in my own – most literally? True, my animal life is not there but my soul, my feeling thought attention are… Each man has an identity which far transcends the mere animal; – an essence, a meaning subtile as it may be. He cannot know his own essential significance; of his eye it is eyebeam. But that he truly has this outreaching identity – such as a word has – is the true and exact expression of the fact of sympathy, fellow feeling – together with all unselfish interests – and all that makes us feel that he has an absolute worth. (CP 7.591, 1866).

1. This passage is from Vol. VII, Science and Philosophy, of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Arthur W. Burks, 1958. As stated in the “Preface”, after Vol. VI appeared in 1935, it did not seem possible to publish a subsequent volume. Selection, preparation, and publication of further material was at that time impractical and for the next twenty years the remaining papers in Harvard’s custody were accessible exclusively to such scholars as could consult them in Cambridge. Only in 1954 was the Harvard Department of Philosophy able to renew the enterprise with the help of Rockefeller. The project was entrusted to Professor Arthur W. Burks, University of Michigan. Permission was obtained to print a letter from Peirce to William T. Harris; and texts from James Mark Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, Vol. II; The Nation (several reviews); Popular Science Monthly (Peirce’s review of Pearson’s Grammar of Science; parts of two letters reprinted from Irwin C. Lieb’s Charles S. Peirce’s Letters to Lady Welby); William James, correspondence; and quotations from a Peirce manuscript, “Questions on William James’s Principles of Psychology” (previously published in Ralph Barton Perry’s Thought and Character of William James). Hence volume VIII was added, containing selections from Peirce’s reviews and correspondence and a bibliography of his published works.

CP VII is organized in three books: Book I. Experimental Science; Book II. Scientific Method; Book III. Philosophy of Mind. The passage chosen is located in Book III, precisely Chapter 4, §6. Consciousness and Language (CP 7.579–596). It continues thus:

Each man has his own peculiar character. It enters into all he does. It is in his consciousness and not a mere mechanical trick, and therefore it is by the principles of the last lecture a cognition; but as it enters into all his cognition, it is a cognition of things in general. It is therefore the man’s philosophy, his way of regarding things; not a philosophy of the head alone – but one which pervades the whole man. This idiosyncrasy is the idea of the man; and if this idea is true he lives forever; if false, his individual soul has but a contingent existence. (CP 7.595)

Gentlemen and ladies, I announce to you this theory of immortality for the first time. It is poorly said, poorly thought; but its foundation is the rock of truth. And at least it will serve to illustrate what use might be made by mightier hands of this reviled science, logic, nec ad melius vivendum, nec ad commodius disserendum. (CP 7.596)

2. The topic relative to this part of Vol. VII of the Collected Papers relates to the semiotics of the self, a recurrent topic in my research à propos Peirce, focused on cognition, interpersonal communication and moral value. The semiotics of self, of personal identity that can be drawn from Peirce ideally develops across three fundamental stages: 1) writings from the years 1867–1868, published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and characterized by interpretation of the human conscious in a semiotic key: “whenever we think, we have present to the consciousness some feeling, image, conception, or other representation, which serves as a sign” (CP 5.283); 2) five articles published in the journal The Monist beginning from 1891. In them Peirce introduces the doctrine of tychism, synechism and agapism, develops his evolutionary cosmology, and works on the theory of the human person; and 3) three more recent writings on “pragmaticism” which unite developments in both Peirce’s cosmology and his semiotic theory (Colapietro 1989).

In CP 7.591 Peirce begins by observing that he had thought a lot about the analogy between a man and a word, and was taking it up again in relation to the questions of the “reality of mind” and of the “immortality of the soul”. In CP 5.313 (Some Consequences of Four Incapacities, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, II, 1868: 140–57), Peirce states that “the mind is a sign developing according to the laws of inference”. And to the question, continuing in the same paragraph, “What distinguishes a man from a word?”, after listing obvious and unquestionable differences, he observes that “there is no element whatever of man’s consciousness which has not something corresponding to it in the word; and the reason is obvious” (CP 5.314). And he adds: “It is that the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign” (CP 5.314).

For Peirce, the self is a sign; it converges with the verbal and nonverbal language it uses. The self is made of language and is inconceivable without language. Even more, the self, indeed as Peirce claims, man is a word. Man exists in terms of the interpretant-interpreted relationship; to interpret is to think and to think is to speak, with oneself and with others. Thanks to the word, the self is not only a semiosic process, but also a semiotic process⁸. Through enunciative/interpretative engagement the prospect in development of meaning itineraries (the open-ended chain of interpretants) is potentially infinite. As Peirce says, addressing the dilemma as to whether it is man who makes the word or the word that makes man – which evokes the egg and chicken puzzle, and in reality corresponds to the same question concerning the relation between interpreted and interpretant – “men and words reciprocally educate each other; each increase of a man’s information involves and is involved by, a corresponding increase of a word’s information” (CP 5.313). Peirce then goes on to specify that “the man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the words homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought” (CP 5.314).

But what I most wish to evidence here are the implications of such considerations not only for cognition and the relation between the I who interprets and its other, its self, or I/interlocutor, but also in the relation with the other from self, the external other, that is, on the level of communication with others. This is why I have started from where Peirce speaks of communicating one’s thoughts and feelings to a friend (CP 7.591). In this process not only can we ascertain that the other has understood correctly, but we can also feel what the other feels as a result of this communication.

Not only do I feel what I myself experience, but I also feel what the other experiences. I am inside myself, inside my body, inside my space-time, with my own value-system and, simultaneously, I share in the spatial-temporal architectonics and axiology of others, as though endowed with the gift of ubiquity. This is the word’s ubiquity, ubiquity of thought and of the word. Man is not a thing; as such he does not answer to the “barbarian notion according to which a man cannot be in two plac...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface by Cornelis de Waal
• Table of contents
• Charles Sanders Peirce – Primary Sources and Abbreviations
• 1 Aesthetic Value in Peirce’s Theistic Naturalism
• 2 Man, Word, and the Other
• 3 Semiotic Gold at the End of Peirce’s Rainbow: on the Fallible Pursuit of Reality
• 4 Testimony and the Self
• 5 Against Pretend Doubt
• 6 Motion and Thought – a Generic Metaphor
• 7 Peirce on Realism and Nominalism: the Metaphysics and Ethics of a Community of Inquirers
• 8 Peircean Inquiry and Secret Communication
• 9 Peirce on Non-Accidental Causes of Belief
• 10 Scientific Method and the Realist Hypothesis
• 11 Logic is Rooted in the Social Principle (and vice versa)
• 12 Reasoning is Communal in Method and Spirit
• 13 The Bottomless Lake of Consciousness
• 14 Physical Laws are not Habits, while Rules of Life are
• 15 Semiosis: from Taxonomy to Process
• 16 Is Peirce’s Fallibilism an Ethical Attitude?
• 17 Peirce’s Fallibilism in the Context of the Theory of Cognition and the Theory of Inquiry
• 18 Diagrams or Rubbish
• 19 How does Cognition come from Chance?
• 20 Peirce’s Graph of “a Sort of Equilateral Hyperbola”
• 21 Icons and Indices Assert Nothing
• 22 Bohemians, Like Me
• 23 Peirce’s Evolutionary Thought
• 24 Peirce’s Guess at the Sphinx’s Riddle: The symbol as the Mind’s Eyebeam
• 25 Love as Attention in Peirce’s Thought
• 26 A Person is Like a Cluster of Stars
• 27 Crystal-Clearness: For the Second-Rates
• 28 On the Nature of Rare Minds & Useless Things
• 29 The Heart as a Perceptive Organ
• 30 On the “realistic hypostatization of relations”
• 31 Peirce’s Role in the History of Logic: Lingua Universalis and Calculus Ratiocinator
• 32 Pure Zero
• 33 Peirce on Theory and Practice
• 34 Peirce and the Discipline of Metaphysics
• 35 Peirce’s First Rule of Reason and the Process of Learning
• 36 Bridging Ancient and Contemporary Knowing
• 37 Peirce’s Process Ontology of Relational Order
• 38 The Degenerate Monkey
• 39 On Digital Photo-Index
• 40 Semiotic Propedeutics for Logic and Cognition
• 41 The First Correlate
• 42 Logic, Ethics and the Ethics of Logic
• 43 Beauty and the Best
• 44 Iconicity in Peircean situated cognitive Semiotics
• 45 The Purloined Inkstand
• 46 A Very Short Version of Diagrammatic Reasoning
• 47 Against Preposterous Philosophies of Mind
• 48 Dream and Drama: Peirce’s Copernican Turn
• 49 Words that Matter: Peirce and the Ethics of Scientific Terminology
• 50 The Curious Case of Peirce’s Anthropomorphism
• 51 Peirce and the “Flood of False Notions”
• 52 Peirce on Science, Practice, and the Permissibility of ‘Stout Belief’
• 53 Logic, Time, and Knowledge
• 54 The Hypoicons
• 55 The Phenomenon of Reasoning
• 56 Peirce’s Abduction
• 57 Terminology and Scientific Advancement
• 58 Fibers of Abduction
• 59 Experience and Education
• 60 Peirce, Pragmatism, and Purposive Action
• 61 Peirce’s Method of Work
• 62 Metaphysics of Wickedness
• 63 A Pragmaticist Appreciates the Past
• 64 Peirce’s Logotheca
• 65 Animals use Signs, They just don’t know it
• 66 A Purely Mathematical Way for Peirce’s Semiotics
• 67 Pragmatism, Cultural Lags and Moral Self-Reflection
• 68 Peirce on Hegel, Pragmaticism, and “the triadic Class of Philosophical Doctrines”
• 69 Science as a Communicative Mode of Life
• 70 Not an Individual, but a dual Self (at least)
• 71 Science and Metaphysics
• 72 The Semiosphere: A Synthesis of the Physio-, Bio-, Eco-, and Technospheres
• 73 Peirce’s Persistent Interest in Economics
• 74 The River of Pragmatism
• 75 Visualizing Reason
• 76 Self-Control, Self-Surrender, and Self-Constitution: The Large Significance of an “Afterthought”
• 77 The Peircean Concept of Existential Graph and Discovery in Mathematics
• 78 Peirce on Metaphor
• 79 Peirce’s System of 66 Classes of Signs
• 80 Peirce’s Philosophical Theology, Continuity, and Communication with the Deity
• 81 The Play of Musement
• 82 On Peirce’s Visualization of the Classifications of Signs: Finding a Common Pattern in Diagrams
• 83 Truth and Satisfaction: The Gist of Pragmaticism
• 84 Collateral Experience and Interpretation: Narrative Cognition and Symbolization
• 85 “Don’t You Think So?”
• 86 Collateral Experience as a Prerequisite for Signification
• 87 Comparing Ideas: Comparational Analysis and Peirce’s Phenomenology
• 88 Developing from Peirce’s Late Semeiotic Realism
• References
• Index