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The Essence of Being First
What is the quality of being first? This was a question that Charles Sanders Peirce thought deeply about because he felt that the quality of being first, or ‘firstness’ as he called it, was an essential element of the universe. Peirce’s conception of firstness is abstract, penetrating, profound and well worth giving yourself some time to think about.
One of the first things to come to mind when thinking about being first is the singularity of it. There can only be one first. There is only one person that comes in first in a running race. If two people arrive at the finish line at the same time before anyone else we don’t say that they were both first. We say they tied for first. That means they become fused into the one that was first.
Originality is another quality that comes to mind regarding firstness. If you are the first one to have an idea then we consider that idea to be original to you. Yet originality alone is not enough. You could have an original idea and find out later that someone else, without your knowing it, had the same idea before you did. Your idea is still original because when you had the idea it came directly to you not through anyone else. You can have an original idea – that is an idea that originates with you – without being the first person to have it. So the quality of firstness has to be both original and it also has to exist before any other of its kind.
The reason that Peirce was so interested in the qualities of firstness was because he was interested in the origin of the universe. He wanted to know what had to exist first in the universe. What was absolutely first? And he decided that before there could be anything that existed first there had to be the possibility and the quality of being first – there had to be absolute firstness before there could be any other thing. And whatever other thing came into existence would not be first – it would be second to the firstness that was already there.
And so in Peirce’s cosmology the universe starts with firstness – the quality of being first. Before there was anything at all in existence there was simply firstness. Peirce describes this initial quality of the universe in his essay A Guess at the Riddle in one of my most favorite paragraphs of philosophy.
The idea of the absolutely First must be entirely separated from all conception of or reference to anything else; for what involves a second is itself a second to that second. The First must therefore be present and immediate, so as not to be second to a representation. It must be fresh and new, for if old it is second to its former state. It must be initiative, original, spontaneous, and free; otherwise it is second to a determining cause. It is also something vivid and conscious; so only it avoids being the object of some sensation. It precedes all synthesis and all differentiation; it has no unity and no parts. It cannot be articulately thought: assert it, and it has already lost its characteristic innocence; for assertion always implies a denial of something else. Stop to think of it, and it has flown! What the world was to Adam on the day he opened his eyes to it, before he had drawn any distinctions, or had become conscious of his own existence—that is first, present, immediate, fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and evanescent. Only, remember that every description of it must be false to it.
Firstness is pure spontaneity – pure chance – pure possibility. Firstness is the ground from which the rest of the universe springs forth. It is a concept very similar to what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called Reason and what Ralph Waldo Emerson called The Over-Soul.
Wow, Jeff, I can see why that is one of your favorite paragraph of philosophy…it’s absolutely stunning – I’ve never read anything like it because it really does give you – through words – the sense of what it was like when Adam opened his eyes to existence and Pierce doesn’t give you anything to hold onto because as he says at the end “every description of it must be false…” I’m really getting why Pierce was such a genius. And who would ever think to reflect on the qualities of “firstness.” It’s so outside our usual thinking…His contemplation is so vast. I am getting more and more intrigued by who this person was. Thank you Jeff for this beautiful passage about firstness and Pierce.
Wow, Jeff, I can see why that is one of your favorite paragraphs of philosophy…it’s absolutely stunning – I’ve never read anything like it because it really does give you – through words – the sense of what it was like when Adam opened his eyes to existence and Pierce doesn’t give you anything to hold onto because as he says at the end “every description of it must be false…” I’m really getting why Pierce was such a genius. And who would ever think to reflect on the qualities of “firstness.” It’s so outside our usual thinking…His contemplation is so vast. I am getting more and more intrigued by who this person was. Thank you Jeff for this beautiful passage about firstness and Pierce.
Firstness, then, is emptiness, Sunyata in Buddhist language. Not an original realization, but nice new take. 😉 _/\_
Reading ‘a Guess at the Riddle’ the second question in your last blog came back into my mind: why all the variety in nature? It is not true that this all came because of mistakes in reproduction. I once saw an interesting program explain why so many children these days wear braces; that is because the front lob of the brain is growing which causes tension on the teeth.. I do not remember exactly, but it pointed to development. Peirce talks about Darwin. But also about Clarence King who points at the testimony of monuments and rocks that show that species are unmodified under ordinary circumstances, but are rapidly altered after cataclysms or rapid geological changes: ‘ under novel circumstances we often see animals and plants sporting excessibely in reproduction and sometimes even undergoing transformations during individual life, phenomena no doubt due partly to the enfeeblement of vitality from the breaking up of habitual modes of life, partly to changed food, partly to direct specific influence of the element in which the organism is immersed.
I read in the introduction that Peire borrowed an idea from Henry James (the elder): ‘ love, recognizing germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradually warms it into live, and makes it lovely’ . This force is called by Peire ‘ agapasm’ and is considered by him to be the creative force that moves the evolutionary process. He sets this doctrine as the antithesis of Darwinism’s notion of the survival of the fittest, which he sees as extolling cruelty as the force that moves evolution.
I forgot to say in the last lines that ‘sporting’ means ‘accidental variations’. Peirce: in biology, the idea of arbitrary sporting is First, heredity is Second, the process whereby the accidental characters become fixed is Third. Chance is First, law is Second, the tendency of taking habits is Third. Absolute chance as opposite to determinism. Ideas are connected through continuity (chance brings an idea that is not in one general idea: than the law of continuous spreading will produce a mental association: when ideas come together it can grow into a general idea: from general ideas that became habits thought/actions will be deduced). Habit-taking is a primordial principle of the universe.
Peirce names three modes of evolution: tychism (absolute chance), anancism (mechanical necessity) and agapism (law of love), Agapistic thought has a purposeful character: the development of an idea. Suppose, he says, that I have an idea that interests me. It is my creature, I love it, I will sink myself in perfecting it. It is by cherishing and tending it that I can make it grow (as Jeff wrote, the same idea may arise in several individuals).
It is the way mind develops; and as for the cosmos, only so far as it yet is mind, and so has life, is it capable of further evolution.
Shamasun, I also looked at your blog and it looks wdenorful. Count me as a New Enthusiast ! Jeff, I will be again the critics here, maybe because I am too much of a Platonician to be very happy with the triads.One of the illumination of my intellectual life, was when I understood what Plato meant by the idea of the circle . You can draw a circle, of course, but the idea of a circle is something completely different. It is kind of already there, belonging to the Absolute, for eternity. Think of what a circle means to you, go very abstract and let the mental image, or idea emerge in you, but don’t try to draw it for the moment.Quite miraculously you will realize that you already know what a circle is, you know it absolutely, before even starting to think. The same happens for a square, or for a triangle. Those geometrical figures are kind of pre-formed in the human brain. They are a priori, as Kant would say.Now let’s follow the pragmatists and draw the circle. Indeed then, there is the inside, the outside and the boundary. Well, well the question I am asking is the following. Between the two approaches, the platonician one or the one of the pragmatists , which one do we you choose ?For me no doubt, I am a platonician [ and also French, which maybe explains it], I am magnetically interested in thinking with God , with the Absolute, I want to follow the flow of pure ideas, so I choose to put the musics of the spheres before everything else, hence much higher than the drawing of the circle.More drastically, I am not sure that the drawing of the circle has anything to do with reality of the circle; by consequence, I am not sure that the inside the outside and the boundary have anything to do with reality. A circle IS the idea of the circle before being a drawing, and in the idea of the circle there is no inside, no outside, no boundary. There is just the circle itself, as an absolute concept in its pristine purity. I doubt very much that the circle emerges at all from these three constituents.Jeff, your blog was fascinating for me, because for the fist time I understand my huge difficulties with Ken Wilber. For me he cuts every concepts into parts, where they should not be cut at all. My reaction to this approach is always very strong because this approach is essentially the same as scientific materialism. For example, the scientific materialists want to explain consciousness by some emergent collective activity of the brain. For example myself as a professional scientist, I study the phenomenon of cuprate superconductivity as the collective quantum emergence of the pairing between electrons. It is OK, it is where science is at the moment.But I got convinced that the spiritual approach to Truth should be based on a completely different starting point, that we should learn how to think as a Whole, with Absolute concepts and entities and not add together any separate triads, even with different viewpoints.The act of adding is already a terrible sin from the platonician view point ! Thanks for the wdenorful blog!