Religion and guidance

Broadly speaking, every religion preaches peace, love and unity. Religions differ in the means by which they try to realize these ends; also in their attention to secondary principles such as liberty, equality and justice. They also differ in the scale of the group they aim to include. Some wish to unify only a part of humanity, some the whole of it, and some the greater whole of the biosphere (though this remains rare).

The problem is that peace, love and unity within the group – regardless of its size – is not enough to guide the collective conduct of the group. If a loving, united group is unable or unwilling to learn what its real situation is, and to renovate its habits (including beliefs) accordingly, it could end up like the legendary herd of lemmings, rushing off the cliff in perfect loving unison. Does it matter whether a form of life now extinct was ‘saved’, entered nirvana or went to heaven? Certainly not to its future generations.

What's necessary to any well-guided system is the creative tension between individual discovery and incorporation into the higher-scale system. Neither can have any meaning without the other.

The identity of any self-organizing system – that is, any living system – is determined by the collective behavior of its membership and the differentiation of its functional parts. Every member of the corporate body has a mission to carry out, in the scale of real time at which that member's experience unfolds. The health of the whole system depends on each member's freedom and ability to carry out that mission within its defining context.

The explicit intricacy

Today i'd like to introduce a passage from Blake's Milton, a long poem about its own genesis. In Book 1

Milton, who walkd about in Eternity
One hundred years, pondring the intricate mazes of Providence

descends back into the fallen world of everyday life to unite his prophetic inspiration with Blake's, and thus to correct some errors of his earlier life's work. Blake and Milton together become one with Los, who might be defined as the Creative Imagination who expresses, or makes explicit, what Eugene Gendlin has called the implicit intricacy.

The division of being into beings or systems, each with its inside and outside, is what makes it all so intricate. On Plate 26 of Milton we find a vision of the natural environment as the work of Los. Here it is (replacing some of Blake's remarkably quirky punctuation with my own):

Thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summer
Upon the sunny brooks & meadows: every one the dance
Knows in its intricate mazes of delight, artful to weave;
Each one to sound his instruments of music in the dance,
To touch each other & recede, to cross & change & return –
These are the Children of Los; thou seest the Trees on mountains
The wind blows heavy, loud they thunder thro' the darksom sky
Uttering prophecies & speaking instructive words to the sons
Of men: These are the Sons of Los! These the Visions of Eternity.
But we see only as it were the hem of their garments
When with our vegetable eyes we view these wond'rous Visions.

Our eyes are ‘vegetable’ when they are not animated with the creative power of vision – the same power with which you the universe are at once wholly guided and animated.

All over now

All that matters is what's present to the mind. This is what mattering means.
(What mind? Whooth?)
It's the wind in the woods.
It's a quiet Little Current Conversation.
It's the crash of collapsing economies,
or the groan of ever-growing debt.
It's Blake's Jerusalem, or John's Apocalypse.
It's all over now, baby blue.
It's written all over your face.

Natural symbols

From the beginning of his semiotic work — before he called it that — C.S. Peirce recognized three kinds of sign: icon, index and symbol. Symbolic signs are essential to human language, and that makes all the difference between language and other kinds of communication found in nature. Peirce wrote in 1909 that symbols ‘represent their objects, independently alike of any resemblance or any real connection, because dispositions or factitious habits of their interpreters insure their being so understood’ (EP 2:461). A language is a complex set of habits common to all who speak the language. ‘Factitious habits’ are artificial conventions; ‘dispositions’ however need not be artificial. Obviously the primary reference here is to the use of language, which is partly conventional, but not entirely so in the case of ‘natural languages’: the ‘dispositions’ which guide the interpretive process can be as deeply grounded in human nature as the habits of laughing, crying or smiling.

And what about the larger natural context of human nature? Could the dispositions of language-interpreters be grounded in pre-linguistic habits? Is there a kind of interpretation older than language, a kind of symbol older than humanity? What about the genome: it is obviously a sign of the organism, but can we call it a symbol?

The analogy between genetic and linguistic structures has been made many times, because both are modular and combinatorial. That is, the molecular structures within the genome consist of parts which hang together as units and can be rearranged to generate a somewhat different organism, just as a new arrangement of word-symbols can mean something new. (Of course there are constraints on this rearranging — not every structure is viable in either domain, genetic or linguistic.) Both genetic and linguistic ‘statements’ are holarchic, i.e. they are multilevel structures, each level consisting of units which are both parts of larger wholes and wholes made up of their own parts. The main difference seems to be that statements in language are intentionally (consciously, deliberately) meant to be interpreted, while genetic ‘utterances’ are not. But is this an absolute difference, or are there levels of intentionality mediating between those two extremes? If so, then it's more than metaphor or analogy to say that genes are symbols.

There is of course a big difference between the interpretation of a linguistic sign and that of the genome, but not so big a difference that the latter can't be called interpretation.

Language is a social phenomenon, which means that the interpreter of a sign is a different person from its producer. We do talk to ourselves — usually not out loud — but you first learn to talk by interacting with others, and later internalize a virtual other as yourself, i.e. a self you can talk to while you're alone (we call this thinking, or internal dialogue).

The interpreter of your genome, on the other hand, is your biological self (rather than a social or virtual self). Each replica of the genome is read by the cell in which it is embedded, and the reading process is guided from without by indexical signs of the cell's environment. The collective interpretant of all these cellular-semiotic processes is the growth, differentiation, self-organization and behavior of your body — including your verbal behavior!

As with any linguistic utterance, the meaning of the genome is context-dependent. Why not, then, call it a symbol?

Thought for the winter of our discontent

Even the smallest candle burns brighter in the dark. — anonymous

Ungraspable mind

The Diamond Sutra says that ‘Past mind cannot be grasped, present mind cannot be grasped, and future mind cannot be grasped.’ (For an extended elucidation of this, see Dogen's ‘Shin fukatoku’ (Heine 1994, 153-6; Nishijima and Cross 1994, 189-205)). Perhaps Peirce is pointing in the same direction when he says that a sign must generate an interpretant in order to function as a sign (i.e. to enter into a real relation with its object), and beyond that, the interpretant in turn must function as another sign in the same relation to that object, and so on ad infinitum. This is the triadic nature of all genuine signs. Knowing and thinking, cognition and representation, being continuous relational processes, necessarily take time, and thus cannot be pegged to any specific location in time or space.

At no one instant in my state of mind is there cognition or representation, but in the relation of my states of mind at different instants there is. [note by CSP: Accordingly, just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body we ought to say that we are in thought and not that thoughts are in us.]

— (EP1:42)

Just because thinking is unstoppable, and mind ungraspable, does not imply that the object of cognition, or thought, is itself unreal. The laws of nature really do govern what actually happens and are not merely ‘results of thinking’, as ‘conceptualists’ believe. Peirce considered this doctrine a form of nominalism, and thus rejected it, as the scholastic realists had several centures earlier:

The great realists had brought out all the truth there is in that much more distinctly long before modern conceptualism appeared in the world. They showed that the general is not capable of full actualization in the world of action and reaction but is of the nature of what is thought, but that our thinking only apprehends and does not create thought, and that that thought may and does as much govern outward things as it does our thinking. But those realists did not fall into any confusion between the real fact of having a dream and the illusory object dreamed. The conceptualist doctrine is an undisputed truism about thinking, while the question between nominalists and realists relates to thoughts, that is, to the objects which thinking enables us to know.

— CP 1.27 (1909)

The apprehension of thought by thinking could be called ‘grasping’, but it cannot be completed—just as mind cannot be grasped—because it takes time. Since we are in time just as we are in thought, there is no way to get one ‘handle’ on either without letting go of another.

Peirce and the implicit intricacy

In one of his Lowell lectures of 1903, C.S. Peirce listed seven ‘mental qualifications of a philosopher’:

1. The ability to discern what is before one's consciousness.
2. Inventive originality.
3. Generalizing power.
4. Subtlety.
5. Critical severity and sense of fact.
6. Systematic procedure.
7. Energy, diligence, persistency, and exclusive devotion to philosophy.

— CP 1.522

He remarked that ‘Kant possessed in a high degree all seven’ of these; and although he didn't say so at the time, we may infer that Peirce considered himself to possess them too. But he also had something that Kant didn't have, for he says in the next paragraph that ‘Kant had not the slightest suspicion of the inexhaustible intricacy of the fabric of conceptions, which is such that I do not flatter myself that I have ever analyzed a single idea into its constituent elements.’

Now, ‘analyzing into constituent elements’ might be described as the core activity of Peirce's logic and philosophy. That includes his phenomenology, which is the part of philosophy directly grounded in the ability listed first above. As Peirce defined the discipline, it ‘ascertains and studies the kinds of elements universally present in the phenomenon; meaning by the phenomenon, whatever is present at any time to the mind in any way’ (CP 2.186, 1903). From a semiotic perspective, we could say that ideas or concepts are signs of various aspects of the phenomenon, while words and phrases are signs of these conceptions. What Peirce is implicitly claiming for himself, then, is a highly developed awareness of how difficult the core philosophical task of analysis is—and how difficult it is (therefore) to use words with the kind of exactitude Peirce was after. This might account for Peirce's lifelong interest in lexicography and his obsession with ‘the ethics of terminology’. Hypersensitivity to ‘the inexhaustible intricacy of the fabric of conceptions’ might also account for the notoriously tortuous qualities of his style. To me at least, that seems a more promising hypothesis than the claim that he had difficulty putting his thoughts into words because he was left-handed (Brent 1998, 15).

However much it might have contributed to the density of Peirce's style, his sensitivity to ‘the inexhaustible intricacy of the fabric of conceptions’ might also explain why his work continues to be so fruitful for the discerning reader. Eugene Gendlin ascribes this kind of fruitfulness to the functions of ‘implicit intricacy’ itself in the creation of meaning. This is the main point of Gendlin's essay ‘Thinking Beyond Patterns’ (1992a)—which i highly recommend!

A philosophy re-positions the old words to make new sense. That is possible only because more than forms is at work in thinking. The process of making new sense involves more than new distinctions displacing the old ones. It involves functions of implicit intricacy.

It may not have occurred to Peirce to think of these functions as the engine of abduction, or of that ‘inventive originality’ which he listed second among the ‘mental qualifications of a philosopher’ (above). Indeed, of the seven, this may be the one which Peirce was least inclined to claim for himself. But his awareness of that ‘intricacy’ might well have enhanced its implicit functioning, and thus contributed to those qualities in his work which his deeper readers continue to ‘carry forward’, as Gendlin would put it.

Peirce: growth of reason as continuous creation

This week i've reorganized and expanded several pages on my website devoted to the work of C. S. Peirce. That work is so comprehensive that intensive study of it is highly rewarding, but for the same reason it's difficult to convey a sense of those rewards by taking quotes out of context. Nevertheless i keep trying to do that …

Late in 1903, Peirce gave a series of lectures on logic at the Lowell Institute in Boston. The first was entitled ‘What Makes a Reasoning Sound?’ The bottom line according to one school of thought is that ‘If it feels sound, it must be sound’—or in terms of conduct, ‘If it feels right, do it.’ Peirce shows this to be a fallacy, and then gives his own answer: sound reasoning bears its fruit in future conduct which, upon later reflection, we judge to approach an implicit or explicit ideal—which itself is constantly evolving and never ‘fully manifested’, but none the less real for all that. (Thinking is itself one kind of ‘conduct’.) Here are two excerpts from near the end of this lecture.

The very being of the General, of Reason, consists in its governing individual events. So, then, the essence of Reason is such that its being never can have been completely perfected. It always must be in a state of incipiency, of growth. It is like the character of a man which consists in the ideas that he will conceive and in the efforts that he will make, and which only develops as the occasions actually arise. Yet in all his life long no son of Adam has ever fully manifested what there was in him. So, then, the development of Reason requires as a part of it the occurrence of more individual events than ever can occur. It requires, too, all the coloring of all qualities of feeling, including pleasure in its proper place among the rest. This development of Reason consists, you will observe, in embodiment, that is, in manifestation. The creation of the universe, which did not take place during a certain busy week, in the year 4004 B.C., but is going on today and never will be done, is this very development of Reason. I do not see how one can have a more satisfying ideal of the admirable than the development of Reason so understood. The one thing whose admirableness is not due to an ulterior reason is Reason itself comprehended in all its fullness, so far as we can comprehend it. Under this conception, the ideal of conduct will be to execute our little function in the operation of the creation by giving a hand toward rendering the world more reasonable whenever, as the slang is, it is ‘up to us’ to do so.

— Peirce, first Lowell Lecture, 1903 (EP2, 255; CP 4.615)

The other excerpt here refers to the work of Victoria Welby; an earlier post of mine dealt with their relationship.

A little book by Lady Victoria Welby has lately appeared, entitled What is Meaning?. The book has sundry merits, among them that of showing that there are three modes of meaning. But the best feature of it is that it presses home the question ‘What is meaning?’ A word has meaning for us in so far as we are able to make use of it in communicating our knowledge to others and in getting at the knowledge that these others seek to communicate to us. That is the lowest grade of meaning. The meaning of a word is more fully the sum total of all the conditional predictions which the person who uses it intends to make himself responsible for or intends to deny. That conscious or quasi-conscious intention in using the word is the second grade of meaning. But besides the consequences to which the person who accepts a word knowingly commits himself to, there is a vast ocean of unforeseen consequences which the acceptance of the word is destined to bring about, not merely consequences of knowing but perhaps revolutions of society. One cannot tell what power there may be in a word or a phrase to change the face of the world; and the sum of these consequences makes up the third grade of meaning.

(EP2, 255-6; CP 8.176)

Meaning and the logic of vagueness

My work in progress, Turning Words, documents an inquiry guided by the question How do you mean?. The question is not What do you mean?—although that is sometimes a good question for clarification purposes. The root question is how meaning happens, or how semiosis works.

Writers, thinkers and scholars have been asking this kind of question for a long time, but their work tends to be ignored because most of us are either too busy committing our acts of meaning to reflect on how we do it, or don't see the point of thus reflecting. A century ago, C. S. Peirce and Victoria Welby were both looking into the nature of meaning, but they didn't learn of each other's work until near the end of their lives. The correspondence between them began in 1903, and parts of it are among the clearest explanations of Peirce's mature semiotics. Most of it was published in 1977 under the title Semiotic and Significs (which i cite as PW), but copies of this are hard to find, and i only got hold of one recently.

In one of his earliest letters to Welby, Peirce explained why the study of what we mean, important as it is, should not be taken too far:

I fully and heartily agree that the study of what we mean ought to be the … general purpose of a liberal education, as distinguished from special education,—of that education which should be required of everybody with whose society and conversation we are expected to be content. But, then, perfect accuracy of thought is unattainable,—theoretically unattainable. And undue striving for it is worse than time wasted. It positively renders thought unclear.

— Peirce to Welby (PW 11, 1903)

When a theorist like Peirce says that something is theoretically unattainable, he is not implying that it might be attained in practice (because theory is unreliable); he is saying just the opposite, that ‘perfect accuracy’ is unattainable because of the way meaning works. The very logic of meaning guarantees that all language is necessarily vague to some degree. Here's a fuller explanation of the point, written a year or two later (CP 5.506):

No communication of one person to another can be entirely definite, i.e., non-vague. We may reasonably hope that physiologists will some day find some means of comparing the qualities of one person's feelings with those of another, so that it would not be fair to insist upon their present incomparability as an inevitable source of misunderstanding. Besides, it does not affect the intellectual purport of communications. But wherever degree or any other possibility of continuous variation subsists, absolute precision is impossible. Much else must be vague, because no man's interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man's. Even in our most intellectual conceptions, the more we strive to be precise, the more unattainable precision seems. It should never be forgotten that our own thinking is carried on as a dialogue, and though mostly in a lesser degree, is subject to almost every imperfection of language. I have worked out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness, but need not inflict more of it upon you, at present.

That last sentence has inspired scholars to look for a text among Peirce's papers that ‘works out the logic of vagueness with something like completeness’, but as far as i know, nobody has claimed to find it. And considering how well that final sentence works as a pragmatic ‘punchline’ to Peirce's argument, it would be at least a little ironic if anyone did find such a text.

When Peirce says that ‘no man's interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man's’, he is talking about what i call polyversity (see TW Chapter 2). In the earlier stages of writing this book, i collected quite a few examples of what i took to be statements of the same idea expressed in diverse ways. But there's a limit to the usefulness of that, just as there's a limit to how exactly you can say what you mean. Indeed, as Peirce said, ‘the multiplication of equivalent modes of expression is itself a burden’ (PW 20). I hope that my final draft will not burden the reader too much in this way.

The ‘trust’ in dialog includes a willingness to let most of the meaning process work implicitly—trusting that it can become explicit, can bear the spotlight beam of attention, if that becomes necessary. Genuine dialogue requires an exquisite sense of what needs to be explicated and what needs to work implicitly.