Attending to 'Mapping the Medium'

My writing for a while will be limited to completing Mapping the Medium's Episode 6, 'The Inside Out of Color'. I will be back here to carry on once that is completed. Until later... :)

Judgment vs Fixation of Belief

What is real? ... The biggest reason that I am a Phaneroscopist is because I understand that Charles Peirce's goal was to explain what he knew would be, well, as he put it, a "beneficent" science. One that anyone could become proficient in, and one that is uniformly applicable and shared alike with everyone. It is true that his writing is difficult for most to follow, but once you 'get' that 'key' to what he wants us to understand, the beauty and love that underlies the scientific and philosophical terminology that he felt was necessary in his academic environment to challenge the veins of thought that keep us from reaching our full potential, shines so brilliantly through. It often saddens and frustrates me that his words are reduced and dissected, and then pieces pulled out and used to support some particularly dogmatic, cultural system. ...... It's such a 'cluster' (ORIGIN: Old English clyster; probably related to clot). .... This morning I opened my old book of his 'essential writings', and the first thing I saw was my handwritten note in black marker that said this; "REAL: That which is not affected by what we think of it." .... This is the kind of statement that is so riveting that some might even think it worthy of tatooing on one's arm, or at least wearing the t-shirt. ;-) .... I do constantly refer back to this one statement as I read and scrutinize not only the written books and papers of other thinkers, but also in my interactions with the general public each day. There are so many fixed beliefs in our dealings with others. Nominalism and ontological individualism have taken their tolls on humanity, and cemented those individual and cult-like beliefs, wearing down and often severing the biological neccessity of Secondness that encourages dialogue and is required for healthy identity. .... Since my blog theme of recent days also considers comparisons of Charles S. Peirce to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, what is Merleau-Ponty's perspective on this topic? In Phenomenology of Perception he wrote, "But intellectualism defines sensing as the action of a real(?) stimulus upon my body. Since there is no real(?) stimulus here (hmm... but isn't there? according to the mental cognition of Secondness?), it will thus be neccessary to say that the box is not sensed (I disagree!), but judged to be heavier, and this example that appeared ready-made for showing the sensible appearance of the illustration serves, on the contrary, to show that there is no sensible knowledge and that one senses insofar as one judges." .. Again, there is much to discover from Merleau-Ponty's perspective toward classical science, materialism, and intellectualism, but he just doesn't seem to understand the sensing involved in Secondness! Once again, I am in my little mental bumper car, traveling the path between analytical and continental philosophies! Peirce's science points directly at this issue. In Illustrations of the Logic of Science he wrote this, "Our external permanency would not be external, in our sense if it was restricted in its influence to one individual. It must be something which affects, or might effect every man. And, though these affections are necessarily as various as are individual conditions, yet the method must be such that the ultimate conclusion of every man shall be the same. Such is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more familiar language, is this: There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning, how things really are, and any man (or woman ;-) ), if he has sufficient experience and reason enough about it, will be led to the one true conclusion." ... Peirce's science is not phenomenology. Peirce's science is the science of Phaneroscopy.

If the Sun is the Width of a Human Foot, How Big is the Moon?

“The sun is the width of a human foot.” ― Heraclitus ................... I adore Heraclitus, always have. Materialists have tried, often in vain, to reconcile all of his fragments into useable 'material' for their purposes. They often ridicule some of his statements while heralding others, sometimes even reaching the conclusion that he was not stable in his thinking, and that it was no wonder that he was a recluse. And in regard to phenomenological thinking, one vein runs long on Heraclitus, but it takes him in a different direction than would well align with Peirce. As with even today, we must always consider our sources when hearing, reading, and learning anything, in general ;-) . .. It's all about perspective, and the importance of remembering that 'perspective' is through the eye of the beholder. This is a hint into what Heraclitus also said about "The eyes are better witnesses than the ears." .. He was not trying to say that if your vision is bad, you have unreliable insight, and he was not trying to say that learning from others is unreliable. He was talking about attention and perception. .... It's helpful to consider this in the light of what Gregory Bateson was pointing to when he said, ”We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. … Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.” .... Heraclitus was talking about attention and representation. ..... All of this came to mind to me today upon reading something Merleau-Ponty wrote about attention. Please keep in mind that although I may not subscribe to everything Merleau-Ponty posits, he does offer much to consider in the light of Charles S. Peirce, and my dear old friend, Heraclitus. Merleau-Ponty wrote this... "When I look about freely, in the natural attitude, the parts of the field motivate this enormous moon on the horizon, this measureless size that is nevertheless a size." He goes on to insert how psychological and philosophical reflection factor into "a true theory of attention", but I see this from more of an analytical Phaneroscopic perspective. I always seem to be in that mental bumper car mode :) . So what does Peirce have to say about this? ... "A REPRESENTAMEN is a subject of a triadic relation TO a second, called its OBJECT, FOR a third, called its INTERPRETANT, this triadic relation being such that the REPRESENTAMEN determines its interpretant to stand in the same triadic relation to the same object for some interpretant." -CP Lowell Lectures, 1903. ... Notice how he emphasizes "TO a second". Thinking back on my blog post from yesterday, Secondness is the experience of relation to what is not. Per Peirce, "The idea of other, of not, becomes a very pivot of thought. To this element I give the name of Secondness." ... Heraclitus was bringing attention to the fact that the sun is clearly not a foot, and that this is a lesson in perspective and relation. At this point, how can one not imagine Heraclitus lying on his back in the grass on a lovely, sunny day, holding up his foot to the sun, and mentally drawing that triadic relation from his foot, to the sun, and then to his eye. ... What Merleau-Ponty also needs to do, is to hold his foot up to the moon. ... Now I am imagining the two of them together having that fascinating dialogue! Wouldn't THAT be something! Ha! :)

Mental Bumper Cars

Ah..Secondness. ... I have come to realize that materialists may have difficulty fully understanding Secondness because they think in terms of materialism! I have also realized that idealists can be just as extreme due to their views of Platonism and the non-recognition of Secondness. Both views are wearing blinders in this divided crowd. ... It is so important to understand that Secondness is more than just what we experience when we bump into a door. It is true that Secondness is perceived in a physical sense by what we experience in the interactions of forces acting and reacting upon each other, but in remembering that there is gradience in the emergence of all of existence (the physical and non-physical), Secondness is experienced throughout, including within the mental cognition of consciousness. ... I was reading an article on Absolute Idealism this morning, and it dawned on me how it related to my post here yesterday. ... Imagine this... I am doing my best to move forward in a passionate and raucous crowd. On my left are materialists. They are yelling and screaming their theories at me, trying everything within their power to convince me that they are correct, and that I should meld into their side. On my right are idealists. They too are yelling and screaming that I absolutely should not listen to the materialists, and that idealism is all that we need to understand about the universe and existence. ... I am effectively in a mental bumper car. There is value in both of their perspectives, and I can see that because I think Phaneroscopically. ... I understand what Charles Peirce meant when he said "The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws (Peirce, CP 6.25)." .... Right now, in this imaginary crowd, I am dealing with constraints. But because I think Phaneroscopically, and I recognize the Secondness of what I am experiencing, I realize that they have become immersed in Thirdness, and their constraining crowds have ingrained their habits of thought. It has become difficult for them to see what lies beyond their blinders. .... Not to worry. Phaneroscopy has fueled my little bumper car, and I have worked my way free of the constraints of those crowds. ;-) ................................ And as Peirce said..... 1903 | Lowell Lectures on Some Topics of Logic Bearing on Questions Now Vexed. Part 1 of 3rd draught of 3rd Lecture | MS [R] 464:30-34; CP 1.324 "I begin with the [element] which the rough and tumble of life renders most familiarly prominent. We are continually bumping up against hard fact. We expected one thing, or passively took it for granted, and had the image of it in our minds, but experience forces that idea into the background, and compels us to think quite differently. You get this kind of consciousness in some approach to purity when you put your shoulder against a door and try to force it open. You have a sense of resistance and at the same time a sense of effort. There can be no resistance without effort; there can be no effort without resistance. They are only two ways of describing the same experience. It is a double consciousness. We become aware of ourself in becoming aware of the not-self. The waking state is a consciousness of reaction; and as the consciousness itself is two-sided, so it has also two varieties; namely, action, where our modification of other things is more prominent than their reaction on us, and perception, where their effect on us is overwhelmingly greater than our effect on them. And this notion, of being such as other things make us, is such a prominent part of our life that we conceive other things also to exist by virtue of their reactions against each other. The idea of other, of not, becomes a very pivot of thought. To this element I give the name of Secondness."

It May Be a Peg, but Whether It's Square or Round Makes a Difference!

My early morning mind took issue today with comparisons of Plato and Peirce. Yes, it is true that I recognize Peirce as an 'Ancient Ionian-like natural philosopher'. His kindredness with Epicurus, and many other apsects of his thought that I see pointing to that 'excellence of thought era', prompts me to look at his thinking in regard to the changes in Plato as he grew and developed in Athens. Although he was a student of Socrates, the differences in the mature Plato are quite clearly tainted by Athenian life. Peirce also recognized this. ..... Here is an excerpt from a paper delving into this topic. I have issues with it. I will leave it to you to see what you think. It seems like a clear stretch to me, and the more that others have gone down that path of thinking, the more difficult it is to get them to rethink their position (as in 'way leads on to way' in episode 2 of Mapping the Medium). First, the link to the paper... https://arisbe.sitehost.iu.edu/menu/library/aboutcsp/o'hara/csp-plato.htm ........ And here is the excerpt......... "Besides the previously mentioned wealth of unpublished MSS on Plato and the “Logic of History”, Plato figures prominently in several of the later Peirce's published works. Among these are the 1898 Cambridge Conference papers, notably “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life”, (where he refers to Plato so often he feels compelled to apologize for doing so); the 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism[21] (where Aristotle is identified as a sort of Platonist); and, arguably, still resonate in the 1908 “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (where Plato and the Ideas are mentioned explicitly and favorably in the introduction). The conclusion to “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life” provides an excellent example of the depth of the Platonic influence on Peirce in this period: If you enjoy the good fortune of talking with a number of mathematicians of a high order, you will discover that the typical pure Mathematician is a sort of Platonist….The soul's deeper parts can only be reached through its surface. In this way the eternal forms, that mathematics and philosophy and the other sciences make us acquainted with, will by slow percolation gradually reach the very core of one's being; and they will come to influence our lives; and this they will do, not because they involve truths of merely vital importance, but because they are ideal and eternal verities. (EP2:40-41) This is, for Peirce, a new picture of Platonism. Earlier in the lecture, Peirce explains that he has recently come to understand something about Plato that Plato himself never seems to have fully recognized, namely that Plato is a philosopher of three, not two categories, and that he is a philosopher of continuity. Peirce's researches into the dating of the dialogues serve the purpose of placing the Sophist at the end of Plato's career, allowing the later theory of the forms as continuities (i.e. as thirds rather than as transcendent seconds) to be the fruit of a life of research. Against the prevailing notion of laws of nature as invariable and inviolable fixities Peirce contrasts this Platonic notion of real generalities that are synechistic. Such generals have inherently the possibility of growth, at least in terms of their getting represented in a variety of ways. Peirce writes elsewhere in “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life” that The really continuous things, Space and Time, and Law, are eternal. The dialogue of the Sophistes, lately shown to belong to Plato's last period—when he had, Aristotle tells us, abandoned Ideas and put Numbers in place of them—this dialogue, I say, gives reasons for abandoning the Theory of Ideas which imply that Plato himself had come to see, if not that the Eternal Essences are continuous, at least, that there is an order of affinity among them, such as there is among Numbers. Thus, at last, the Platonic Ideas became Mathematical Essences, not possessed of Actual Existence but only of a Potential Being quite as Real, and his maturest philosophy became welded into mathematics. (EP2:35.) The evolution of Plato's thought thus appears to correspond to the evolution of Peirce's thought. The re-evaluation by Plato of his Theory of Forms closely parallels the re-evaluation of the notion of “natural law” that Peirce is calling for. Both the Forms and natural laws have been thought incorrectly either as mere names or as unchanging existences. Peirce connects Number with Law, and calls Law a continuity. Natural laws then, like the later Forms, are to be re-thought as continua with infinite possibility of getting represented in the world, and the job of science is not to presuppose laws, but to “begin to discern…one great cosmos of forms, a world of potential being,” one “for which the real world affords no parallel.”[22] Elsewhere he writes that “the evolutionary process is, therefore, not a mere evolution of the existing universe, but rather a process by which the very Platonic forms themselves have become or are becoming developed.”[23" .............. Yes, there is way too much to say to fit it into this blog post today! My schedule only permits me to address these things in time, but dialogue is an excellent way to approach these discrepancies. Don't forget to consider this writing of Peirce's .... https://www.unav.es/gep/MS1604En.html .......... Bring the comments if you've got them! :)

This Morning's Favorite Moment in My Readings

What I have come to understand so clearly now is that the many different brilliant philosophical minds who study and write about consciousness, phenomena, and experience, approach it with what seems like a magnifying glass pointed at and coming from different directions, as if it were a circular sliding scale, or even more so like a kaleidoscope, where each examiner is a colored, morphing bit of appearance, that shows itself and then bows out, making room for what is birthed by the melding of the colors and patterns. And depending on which way you turn the kaleidoscope apparatus, the results they report may be from a position of folding or unfolding within the whole. They argue and fuss about who is correct in what they see from their position of perspective, when they so often don't take the time to realize that they are 'within' what they are examining. They far too often approach the task of examining as if they are on the outside. ... So it's really no wonder that they keep missing the solution to the problem of universals. This morning I was reading from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, and I came upon a passage that instantly reminded me of something I wrote about in my Episode 3 of Mapping the Medium. Merleau-Ponty wrote, "The miracle of consciousness is to make phenomena appear through attention that reestablish the object's unity in a new dimension at the very moment they destroy that unity. Attention, then, is neither an association of ideas nor the return to itself of a thought that is already the master of its objects; rather, attention is the active constitution of a new object that develops and thematizes what was until then only offered as an indeterminate horizon. At the same time that it sets attention to work, the object is continuously recaptured by attention, and reestablished as subordinate to it. The object only gives rise to the "knowing event" that will transform it through the still ambiguous sense that it offers to attention as needing-to-be-determined, such that the object is the "motive" [motif] of and not the cause of this event. .. The act of attention.... emerges from its indifferent freedom to give itself a present object. This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this continuous taking up again of its own history in the unity of a new sense, is thought itself." What the above captivating passage instantly reminded me of, is this utterance by Mikhail Bahktin; "“The better a person understands his determinism (his thingness), the closer he is to understanding and realizing his true freedom.” ... How absolutely beautiful these combinations are to me this morning. :) A wondrous kaleidoscope indeed! I will end this morning's blog entry with a Peirce quote.... "Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there. ... Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there." ~ Charles S. Peirce 1906

General Thoughts About Generality :)

What is on my mind today is how frustrated Charles Peirce must have felt with others wanting to dissolve his Phaneroscopy into other types of work regarding consciousness and phenomena. The reason I think he was so adamant about how his Phaneroscopy was/is so clearly not the same, is that from all that I understand, 'Phenomenology' is about a feeling / an idea / a perception, whereas Peirce tried and tried to get others to understand that his Phaneroscopy was/is about the qualities of feelings (Firstness), reaction against one's will (Secondness), and their generalizing or associating element (Thirdness). Everything that I have read where others are trying to include Peirce in their 'Phenomonology' seems as though they are just wanting to find ways to add his highly revered name to their postmodern conglomerations that are handed down from some other system of thought, and I truly believe Peirce would have found these attempts very off base and/or inadequate, not to mention quite upsetting. He dealt with that same frustration regarding pragmatism, which he had to change the name of his to Pragmaticism, and to this day he is still lumped in with those pragmatists! Most people have no idea how different the two are! There are a few resources online that delve into the differences for the persevering seeker of understanding, but only VERY recently has any scholar of Peirce attempted to shed light on his Phaneroscopy, and I'm one of them. It's difficult having seen life this way for most of mine, and not being able to explain it comprehensively to others. It took years of persistant searching to find whatever scraps I could that aligned with my thinking and perspective, and then I came upon Charles Sanders Peirce. I am forever grateful, and driven to use my understanding to the best of its ability. ... OUT

This Morning's Letter to A Pen Pal

The first thing I did in writing my reply to you is fix that hideous typo in the subject line of the email. Ha! ;-) ... Then I gathered a few things to include in this email to help explain my thinking. You see, the more I have learned about Peirce over the years, the more I have realized how much I identify with his work and his personal writings. Of course the one thing I have always had issue with is how Wikipedia has those remarks about racism in their page on Peirce. I have no doubt that Benjamin Peirce may have been racist, and as often happens when a child grows up in such a household, Charles may have had to reconcile that with the times and his own personal feelings. His writings reveal his growth and changes in every other way, so I truly believe this may have been yet another metamorphosis for him. Afterall, in his later years he described himself as a bohemian, and I challenge anyone to tell me how many racist bohemians they know. I have read the letters to his mother when he was a young man traveling throughout Europe and visiting different cultures and museums, commenting on language articulations, but never mentioning skin color. It seems to me that his true nature would be revealed in letters to his own mother. Anyway, on to my other thoughts. .... The more I read, the more I am in agreement with Peirce about his use of the word phaneroscopy. As with so many terms in philosophy that become tainted and difficult for anyone to decipher the differences without having laboriously studied the ins and outs of the history of philosophy and somehow avoiding the Cartesian 'knowledge' of academia in the process, he wanted to clearly distance it from nominalistic thought twists and misinterpretations. He wrote, "I propose to use the word Phaneron as a proper name to denote the total content of anyone consciousness (for anyone is substantially any other,) the sum of all we have in mind in any way whatever, regardless of its cognitive value. This is pretty vague: I intentionally leave it so. I will only point out that I do not limit the reference to an instantaneous state of consciousness; for the clause “in any way whatever” takes in memory and all habitual cognition. The reader will probably wonder why I did not content myself with some expression already in use. The reason is that the absence of any contiguous associations with the new word will render it sharper and clearer than any well-worn coin could be." He then wrote this in 1909, "phaneroscopy is still in the condition of a science-egg, hardly any details of it being as yet distinguishable, though enough to assure the student of it that . . . it surely will in the future become a strong and beneficent science.” He was always so careful to choose his words. I get that, as that is probably the most striking thing that he and I have in common. I also consider some other aspects of his work that others seem to pay less attention to. Imagination, for example. He has this in common with C.G. Jung. I do not know if you know much about Jung's Active Imagination, or his work with mandalas, but there are a lot of similarities in regard to iconic representations. As you said,"logic with hints of humanness", but I see him as having much more humanness than many academics do because of their focus on his brilliant logic. I get that, as that is what academics do in the pursuit of knowledge and constantly scrutinizing comparisons, but I see beautiful gems in there that I think many others may overlook. On to some of my other thoughts..... There is so much focus on Plato, and I really do understand why, but one of the reasons I like that Isonomia book by Karatani so much is because I recognize Peirce there. Here is a link to something Peirce wrote that I sometimes think others are unaware of in regard to how they connect his thought with other variations of phenomenologies and Plato. ... https://www.unav.es/gep/MS1604En.html Another way that I identify with Peirce is that I credit Epicurus for beginning this fascinating journey of mine so many years ago. Karatani recognized Epicurus as a terminus of Ionian natural philosophy, and he also wrote about Socrates as the last great Ionian natural philosopher to grace the streets of Athens (being killed because they thought he was of Sophist intent), and even though Plato was a student of Socrates, Plato was the beginning of an Athens tainted line of thinking. The lineage described by Karatani is quite fascinating. I've included just one image of a page from the book (pg 37). https://photos.app.goo.gl/UkB9aQfHCFuFj5QA7 I also see so many similarities with Heraclitus in Peirce's thought. Because of all of these reasons, I believe that Peirce was of an Ionian natural philosophy-type perspective, and I have concluded that I am that as well. So, for the purposes of what I have planned in my group discussions, I am going to use the term phaneroscopy, and do my best to apply it in the dialogue sessions around the two books I mentioned to you in previous emails (Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy, and The Theological Origins of Modernity). Those two books have the potential for a deprogramming effect, and plenty of topics to discuss in a phaneroscopic way. :) So... my next challenge is to get folks to actually be interested and come to meetings! Things are starting off slow, as people are just starting to feel safe to get together again after COVID. I did go ahead and purchase a GoToMeeting account so that I can offer online gatherings at times that will work for people in other countries. Between that and offering a local gathering, perhaps I'll attract a few people to start, and then hopefully grow. It's unfortunate that so many people are afraid to learn something new, or even read a few pages in a book chapter. .... I won't give up. I'm in this for the long haul. I hope things are going well for you in other aspects of your life. I picture you up there in D.C. holed up in your office writing and sharing your brilliance with others. I consider myself very lucky to have you as a pen pal. :) Enjoy your day!