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."