Tags
The Inquiring Mind of Charles Sanders Peirce
At the science and nonduality conference I intend to make the subject of evolutionary ways of thinking part of what I present. I believe that the American Pragmatists were practicing an evolutionary form of thinking and Charles Sanders Peirce is a great example to use to describe it.
Charles Sanders Peirce believed that you should “never block the path to inquiry.” And so Peirce would always avoid settling into any conclusion or belief that would make further investigation impossible. He saw ideas not as endpoints to inquiry, but as stepping stones to deeper inquiry and because of that he approached all questions with a wild openness, remarkably unhinged from fixed ideas or preferential outcomes. His unbridled willingness to follow logic down whatever path it led was the source of many blind allies of inquiry, but it was also the source of his creative genius.
One of the things that made Peirce’s thinking so original was that he, like Emerson, was attempting to envision how everything evolves as one singular event that included not only matter and life, but consciousness and mind as well. Peirce recognized that the human mind creates intelligibility through a never ending succession of signs pointing to other signs in an infinitely complex web of interrelated meaning. He did not, however, see language and ideas as signs that point toward some separate actuality. Ideas did not act like mirrors that reflect reality or hang like a cloud of knowing above the world. Language and ideas, as Peirce saw them, were an inseparable, essential and integral aspect of reality. The intelligibility of the universe is part of the ontological construction of the universe and so the growth of human understanding is not the growth of knowledge about, but is actually part of the growth of the universe itself. In a later paper “The Architecture of Theories” Peirce refers to Objective Idealism as the one theory of the universe that he found intelligible. “Matter,” he described, “is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws.” Peirce sees matter as being constructed out of habits of mind that have become so deeply ingrained that all of their fluidity has been removed until they froze into our experience of solid materiality. In this way Peirce held that there was not a sharp line between mind and matter. Instead Matter was solidified mind and so consciousness and material were part of the same continuum.
Peirce was a bold and fearless inquirer partly because he had come to peace with what he saw as the extreme limits of human understanding. In an essay called “Fallibilism, Continuity, and Evolution” he explains his understanding that all human reasoning comes through a process of “judging the proportion of something in a whole collection by the proportion found in a sample.” We can never be absolutely certain of anything because we are always making judgments based on what we can observe and we can never observe every possible occurrence of any phenomenon. As human beings we experience the universe from the surface of only one planet out of trillions upon trillions. We have direct knowledge of only a few thousand years of recorded history on a planet nearly 5 billion years old. And the tiny slice of the universe that we are aware of is seen through the very limited filter of the perceptual and intellectual apparatus of the human form. Our attempts to understand the universe are akin to standing on a beach for a few hours peering through a drinking straw and from that information drawing conclusions about the nature and history of life on Earth. The sample of reality that we are able to investigate in comparison to the totality of the universe is minuscule and so Peirce didn’t assume to find final solutions to the mysteries of existence, he wanted only to find the next best step forward for humanity to follow.
direct knowledge is an interesting phrase … “We have direct knowledge of only a few thousand years of recorded history on a planet nearly 5 billion years old” …
bet you would have to go a long way to find any “non-dualist” who would buy into the concepts behind that 🙂
Reading this blog brought me back to what I learned about Aristotle this week, even ough for him here is only mind. He seems to me the first Pragmatic because he said we should look at earth instead of at heaven. He said science is about the forms that nature takes. Form with Aristotle is not material form, but its essence. Because of this I understood why Heidegger said we should first study Aristotle first for 15 years before going on: finding form or essence of things proved last week for me a training in thinking. Looking for essence is a training: all sense qualities are to be skipped: seize, colour, quantity, quality, time, position etc. it is not something we can see we have to contemplate: what was the cause of its existence, what is its relation to the world, its primary goal.
What has to happen so that the cause of something realizes its potential. It is very beautiful to read and very pragmatic. God for Aristotle is the essence of all, it is the highest potential of the mind. I had to think about this when you talked about language, because language is our expression of mind. And Aristotle says that language = reality. It is how we perceive reality.
Life is about transcending the (individual) human thinking form towards impersonality -in the end everybody will find the same meaning. It is not only about pure reason, but also about context (=wisdom). This is different from Plato: where all essences are separate. Aristotle says: The essence of a human is reason. But the essence of a father is (not only reason as a human being) but tha he has a child. So everything is connected.
The ability to think in pure essences is th highest. The soul is about immaterial cognition. If everybody would be able to practice divine comtemplation, we would be all completely together -in practice, Aristotle is really about practice. It is possible compare it as children learning, coming from incoherent insights, their insights become clearer and clearer.
Thanks to Catherine, I imagne divine mind as the sun rising in the sky.
Wow Jeff. I think this is very profound. And as with many of your blogs it takes multiple readings to let in the bigness of it. I love what you say here about Peirce’s view that “The intelligibility of the universe is part of the ontological construction of the universe and so the growth of human understanding is not the growth of knowledge about, but is actually part of the growth of the universe itself.” This hits such a deep cord of recognition, grounded in rationality. Yet it is far from how I normally and habitually think. When I step way back, or allow myself to let go of everything, I know this view as absolute truth, as an utterly perfect expression that there is no separation anywhere, in time and in space. That the “intelligibility of the universe is part of the ontological construction of the universe” expresses a perfect integral view. New understandings emerge as integrally and actively informed by what came before – and make up the continually renewed fabric of conscious thought, awareness and understanding. So when we begin to wake up to this and take it on – it utterly and entirely shifts our identity of who we think we are. Pretty cool…
Anyway, I’m just touching on a part of what you wrote, and there’s so much more to explore here – but thank you – you always give me much to think about. And I’m excited about your conference 😉
Oh, one more thing… Gregory – In speaking about direct knowledge and the few thousands years of recorded history, I’m curious what you mean by how Jeff would have “to go a long way to find any “non-dualist” who would buy into the concepts behind that”.
Andrea… Non-dual is non-linear … time and history, linear concepts
Dear Gregory, I don’t disagree that time and history are constructs that exist outside of the reailty of nonduality. Is your point that time and history don’t exist and so we waste our time if we bother with them at all. I guess to me I feel it is necessary to interpret our experience in order to act and so how we interpret events that occur in time and history is also important even if they are not non-dual. Some would say that once you realize that only non-duality is real that you should not concern yourself with time and history. I guess I would have to understand better what they mean by that to know if it is even possible to exist that way. Thank you for your comments. Jeff
My original comment was just a riff based in amusement at the sentence I quoted.
Since it is a conference of academics and not yogis, conceptualise at will. 🙂
Yes, I suppose if I was with yogis I would sit and silence and enjoy non-duality instead of talking about it. 🙂
Thanks Jeff, very interesting post. I have read a number of times that many philosophers consider Peirce to be the greatest philosopher that America has ever produced. Yet, he apparently had a very difficult life and was often bailed out of financial difficulties by his friend from Harvard William James.
I will have to read and reread your post to get a better sense of what Peirce was trying to say – but I hope you might be able to do a “Peirce for Dummies” sometime.
Nils
Awesome – my new favorite blog. Being a lay-person, I appreciate how you talk about these concepts from a scholarly, yet clear and understandable way.