Peirce[1]

Chapter Six, "The Principles of Phenomenology," from Justus Buchler's "Philosophical Writings of Peirce" Randolph Thompson Dible II Charles Sanders Peirce is himself a first rate man of science, 'science' here meant in a more expansive sense than the reductive nominalistic sense of empirical scientists. This is the best way I can qualify Peirce, in so few words, other than merely saying he is one of the greatest philosophers and original, systematic thinkers. The most pervasive system to his thinking, as best I can discern, are the three categories, the most general countable categories, easy as one, two, three. Buchler does his best in this chapter to describe Peircian phenomenology informed by Peirce's three categories, in Peirce's own words. The first section is "The Domain of Phenomenology," the second section is "The Three Categories: Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness," the next section is "The Manifestations of the Categories," the next three sections are each one of the three categories, then, the seventh section is "The Categories in Consciousness," and the last section is "The Interrelationship of the Categories." From this selection, we can see that Buchler expresses Peircian phenomenology in terms of the manifestation in consciousness of the three categories and their interrelationships. Our first task toward an intuitive grasp of the three categories is to step away from this text, and indeed any text or context, away from any manifestation, away from the world, and imagine (as it is only within that which is known as our 'imagination' that we can entertain such abstractions) such general essences as the first three countables. Metaphysics may be appropriately qualified by the philosophical term "first principles," the science of "first principles," or principles which have priority of order over other principles in other specialties. Firstness is the first principle, although we often find it in Peirce's phenomenological applications, as a characteristic of the phaneron ("...the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not." Chapter 6, page 1, Buchler's page 74.) Peirce further explains that this science of phaneroscopy he develops describes the "formal elements" of the phaneron in general. Phaneroscopy, Peirce's phenomenology, appeals to our common sense because, says Peirce, "there is nothing quite so directly open to observation as phanerons" (as he begins the third paragraph.) These observations and their generalizations, for Peirce, "signalizes several very broad classes of phanerons," and furthermore their character proves that we can discern the broadest categories and their features. Even so, "phaneroscopy has nothing at all to do with the question of how far the phanerons it studies corresponds to any realities. Perhaps here it would be appropriate to recognize a significant distinction Peirce makes between reality and existence, in "The Concept of God" (as he begins the second paragraph.) Peirce takes existence to mean "reaction with the other like things in the environment." The word reality, on the other hand, "is used in ordinary parlance in its correct philosophical sense...."

Peirce begins, at the beginning of the second section, Buchler's "The Categories: Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness" "My view is that there are three modes of being. I hold that we can directly observe them in elements of whatever is at any time before the mind in any way. They are [respectively,] the being of positive qualitative possibility, the being of actual fact, and the being of law...." He begins by taking up actuality, qualifying it as brute actuality. Peirce says that actuality, as he describes it, is second because it occurs as a particle in a particular context. This more pure sense of actuality necessarily occurs in a mode of being "of one thing which consists in how a second object is" (Buchler, page 76.) Then, taking us Firstness, which Peirce describes as the mode of a subject's being positively such as it is regardless of anything else. Since it is independent of any context, it is not actual; it is a "positive qualitative possibility," which has priority over any instantiation, "before" any moment of time (logical priority, priority of order.) Thirdness Peirce associates with prediction, in this sense; "This mode of being which consists... in the fact that future facts of Secondness will take on a determinate general character, I call Thirdness" (top of page 77 in the Dover edition.) Here Peirce describes the categories of elements of phenomena. The first such elements are qualities such as red, bitter, hard, redness, redness itself. The second category are 'actual facts,' individuals, immediate incidents at specific instants. Matters of fact are brutal in that they resist our will. We directly (immediately) observe 'actual facts' by way of reaction, which mere unmaterialized qualities cannot. The third category of elements of phenomena, when we think about them from the outside only, are laws, but when we consider both sides are simply known as thoughts. In a certain respect, the first category of phenomenal elements are feelings, and the third are thoughts, when the Thirdness is separate from the subject. In Whitehead's theory of prehension, feelings are what he calls "positive prehensions" and thoughts are "negative prehensions." Perhaps, if any connection between these systems in this respect is valid and revealing, the inter-activity of Secondness are the acts of distinguishing thoughts from feelings, acts which exist intercoherently with the nexus of other actualities, or as Whitehead would say, the 'actual entity' which is the 'subject-superject,' self and world in togetherness, a unity of signifier and signified in an act of distinction, the 'unit act' in the ontogenetic matrix. I believe there is a valid underlying connection of these metaphysical systems, and of other good metaphysical systems, and more than valid, only one ultimately sound system is possible, employing various aspects of these and other systems, until one day when the completed system can be articulated in one correct metaphysical system, and generalities of the Eastern and metaphysical systems, their key distinctions, are closest to this view. An overlapping such system is found in the systems theory whose source is attributed to the act of drawing a distinction, most generally, called the 'first distinction,' severing the "unmarked state" (Peirce's "page of assertion" in his existential graphs, which is not a graph, but the empty, dimensionless background) into a self-referentially phase-locked state

distinguished from the "unmarked state," which comes from logician George Spencer-Brown's "Laws of Form" (1969,) as connected to Peirce by (second-order) cyberneticist Soren Brier as the thesis of his "Cybersemiotics." I believe this is a sound connection, insofar as I understand the logic as semiotics, and I believe the implications of the Spencer-Brownian mystical connection to what he calls the "Triplicity" of the act of consciousness. This follows into the seventh section on the categories in consciousness, and my connections to other systems I found sound, such as the most general formulation of consciousness as the subject-superject, itself distinct from the unconscious which includes the subconscious and super-conscious realities precisely in inverse relation to the reality of consciousness. And in Patanjali's yoga sutras we find that ultimate reality is clearly distinguished from a penultimate reality which is the central ground which acts as a spring-board to access ultimate reality from any non-ultimate reality including all derivative and consequent finite experience. This is the essential method of meditation as the complimentary of mediation, of experience mediated through consciousness. In this regard, more than merely in the Zen nature of tychism, Peirce's metaphysical system of synechism from semiotics and mathematics, and his phenomenology of the Three categories are indicative of the reality Eastern philosophy and mysticism alike express. I am reminded that synechism and synthesis come from the same prefix which indicates connection in recognition of continuity, the same method of inner verification used by mystics or anyone independent of external corpuses. These different systems are alike in the categories of elements of phenomena, in their different ways of expressing a phenomenology, because they share mediation of (or thinking about) what Peirce calls "synthetical consciousness" (at the very end of section 8 on consciousness) and "mind" (at the very end of section 2 on the categories.) Peirce's "The Law of Mind" from The Monist, chapter 25 in Buchler, begins with his connection to the Eastern cosmogony in his tychism and synechism. In section three, on the manifestations of the categories, Peirce tells us the manifestation of Firstness occurs in freshness, life, and freedom. "Freedom can only manifest itself in unlimited and uncontrolled variety and multiplicity... Firstness is predominant in feeling, as distinct from objective perception, will and thought." Next, Peirce says in the idea of reality, Secondness is predominant, as in actuality, for "the real is active... the actual." He explains the sources of these words in two parenthetical notes: 1. "Remember that before the French word, second, was adopted into our language, other was merely the ordinal number corresponding to two." and 2. "This word [the actual] is due to Aristotle's use of ... action, to mean existence, as opposed to a mere germinal state." The explanation of the Third expressed here, in the third section on the manifestation of the categories, is very assertive, a great source for explaining Peircian Thirdness: "By the third, I mean the medium or connecting bond between the absolute first and last. The beginning is first, the end second, the middle third. The end is second, the means third. The thread of life is third; the fate that snips it, its second.... Continuity represents Thirdness almost to perfection. Every process comes under that head." The way

Peirce speaks of continuity and his synechism can thus be set in reference to the Whiteheadian process as the experiencing subject itself, myself, the continuity of myself. "Action is second, but conduct is third." The opposite of conduct is product, making conduct the same as process, which holds here, in Peirce. In this distinction, Peirce again has the same structure as the aforementioned systems theory of distinction where the act of drawing a distinction is second to the distinction itself, as an indication of the distinction, as the medium between the distinct and the continuous aspects. In section four on Firstness, the focus is on pure qualitative feeling. Of course, these are not actualized, "mere may-bes," not realized, not actually experienced. Quality, or suchness, does not inhere in a subject. "A true general cannot have any being... A quality of feeling can be imagined to be without any occurrence, as it seems to me. Its mere may-being gets along without any realization at all" (Buchler, page 81.) What Peirce says about Firstness that is positive is general, meaning it is vague. H speaks of feeling that it "is all that it is positively, in itself, regardless of anything else." And again we must be careful to distinguish feeling itself from any feeling in particular, or feelings in finite plurality, although in it's occurrence lies the indications of the quality. A feeling is simply a quality of immediate consciousness, and immediate consciousness is always present in any mode of consciousness. We cannot gain knowledge of any feeling by introspection because the feeling is our immediate consciousness. Peirce quotes the poetry of Emerson to express the impossibility of introspection to grasp feeling. Emerson says "Of thine eye I am eyebeam.... Thou are the unanswered question ; Couldst thou see thy proper eye, Always it asketh, asketh, And each answer is a lie." "[Man's] whole life is in the present" (Buchler, page 83.) But the present is infinitesimal, gone already from consciousness. "...feeling is nothing but a quality, and a quality is not conscious, it is a mere possibility.... there is no resemblance at all in feeling, since feeling is what it is, positively and regardless of anything else, while the resemblance of anything lies in the comparison of that thing with something else...." Peirce continues this section asking what a quality is. He begins his answer by saying what it isn't. Conceptualism holds that quality is dependent upon sense, that quality is what actuality makes it to be. Peirce calls this the great error of all the nominalistic schools. "It is the error of maintaining that the whole alone is something, and its components, however essential to it, are nothing" (Buchler, page 85). A quality is one of the three categories of quality, fact and thought. A quality is the idea of a phenomena considered as a monad, the total phenomena as a unit, without reference to it's parts or components within, and without reference to anything else without. "Anything whatever, however complex and heterogeneous, has its quality sui generis, its possibility of sensation, would our senses only respond to it" (end of section 4). Peirce goes on to speak of change, shock and resistance as fact. In this regard, Peirce has something to add to his use of the word "experience." "We experience vicissitudes especially. We cannot experience the vicissitude without experiencing the perception that undergoes the change; but the concept of experience is

broader than that of perception, and includes much that is not, strictly speaking, an object of perception. It is the compulsion, the absolute constraint upon us to think otherwise than we have been thinking that constitutes experience." Going on about the necessity of resistance for there to be constraint and compulsion, and the necessity of change for there to be resistance, Peirce insists his logical conclusion that experience in general involves an oppositional element of volitional effort is there, although overlooked, since we yield to this resistance as soon as we can detect it. He is so sure that what he says about experience is logically sound, he challenges interested parties to figure it out. Infinitesimal changes necessitated by the continuity of processes and activity are not perceived, but experienced as events, which Peirce explains, cannot be directly perceived, only experienced intellectually. The cognition of change involves a volition of resistance to the inertial state. And, furthermore, this resistance is an element of struggle. By "struggle" Peirce means "...mutual action between two things regardless of any sort of third or medium, and in particular, regardless of any law of action" (Buchler, page 89.) He begins with the example of the simple feeling. Even in the simple feeling there is a struggle, and it is the vividness of the feeling. The vividness is "a sense of commotion, and action and reaction, between our soul and the stimulus." Lastly, in the fifth section on Secondness, Peirce writes about fact, most generally. He says that first it is necessary to exclude one category from fact; that of the general, and along with the general, the permanent or eternal, and the conditional. "Generality is either of that negative sort which belongs to the merely potential, as such, and this is peculiar to the category of quality; or it is of that positive kind which belongs to conditional necessity, and this is peculiar to the category of law. These exclusions leave for the category of fact, first, that which the logicians call the contingent, that is, the accidentally actual, and second, whatever involves an unconditional necessity, that is, force without law or reason, brute force." Critical of this, he continues, "It may be said that there is no such phenomenon in the universe as brute force, or freedom of will, and nothing accidental.... but granting that... it still remains true that considering a single action by itself, apart from all others, and, therefore, apart from the governing uniformity, it is in itself brute, whether it show brute force or not." (Buchler, page 90.) So fact is not the whole unity of the phenomenon, which is eternal and general, but an element of it that is particular, in space and time. In section Six, Peirce writes about Thirdness. Peirce explains that it is our meaning or intentionality that moulds the future by the conformity of conduct to the form of the mind. And every triadic relation involves this meaning. "We are too apt to think that what one means to do and the meaning of a word are quite unrelated meanings of the word "meaning...." Peirce means by meaning the mean or middle term of such a relation, and this meaning he connects to the normal usage. Then Peirce sketches a thorough proof that the idea of meaning is irreducible to those of quality and reaction. The two premises are that meaning is a triadic relation (which can be seen in reference to Peirce's system of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness,

wherein Thirdness involves a medium between two other substances,) and that triadic relations are inexpressible as dyadic relations alone. The proof itself is perhaps beyond the scope of this analysis. Suffice it to say that Peirce employs his existential graphs from his logical work to illustrate this proof graphically, as he also explains it. The manifestation is the sign. "Now, a sign is something, A, which denotes some fact or object, B, to some interpretant thought, C" (Buchler, page 93.) Peirce's semiotics is purely triadic. Section Seven is about the categories in consciousness. "So far there is nothing in my argument to distinguish it from many a Kantian. The noticeable thing is that I do not rest here, but seek to put the conclusions to the test by an independent examination of the facts of psychology, to see whether we can find any traces of the existence of three parts or faculties of the soul or modes of consciousness, which might confirm the results just reached." (Buchler, page 94.) Since Kant, says Peirce, three departments of mind have been generally recognized. They are Feeling, Knowing and Willing. Peirce says this is surprising, as it did not originate in Kant, and Kant adopted it as a dogmatic concession. Peirce outlines objections to these categories. For instance, he subtracts desire from Will and thus reduces Will to merely involuntary activity. He also says that of pleasure and pain, they are not true feelings, but judgments. Peirce says of activity that the only consciousness we have of it is the sense of resistance, which involves reaction. Revising these categories after his criticisms, Peirce restates the true categories in consciousness. They are: first, feeling, second, consciousness of an interruption into the field of consciousness, and third, synthetic consciousness. The first is passive consciousness of quality, immediate consciousness. The second is the resistance of "another something," an external fact. And the third is thought as the sense of learning through higher synthesis. That form of cognition which is the consciousness of a process cannot be immediate, but is the form of consciousness which binds our life together, through synthesis. Restated, the three are immediate feeling, the polar sense, and synthetical consciousness. In the lasts section of this chapter, "The Interrelationships of the Categories," Peirce introduces terms for the three categories' modes of separation. He does this because he says it may not be right to call these three categories conceptions, but rather, hints or tints of conceptions, since they are so intangible. The first mode of separability is called dissociation, "...two ideas may be so little allied that one of them may be present to the consciousness in an image which does not contain the other at all." Dissociation is not so deeply contrary to association. The second is called precession. Precession occurs when "...even in cases where two conceptions cannot be separated in the imagination, we can often suppose one without the other, that is we can imagine data from which we would be led to believe in a state of things where one was

separated from the other." His example is that of color and space. We can suppose space without color, but not color without space. In the case where one element cannot be supposed without another, but they may still be distinguished from one another, Peirce calls this mode distinction. Distinction is present in the other modes, as it is primary, synonymous with difference, the fundamental separation. Peirce is the author of many dictionary entries, as is evident here. I have read deeply into Peirce, and have the greater part of a lifetime to continue this project. Perhaps some specificities of the connections I perceive in Peirce are too hasty, as he has expressed volumes of work, and all expressions unfortunately fall short of his opinions, which are now inaccessible. We must continue to read into Peirce and reconcile his systematic analyses and inventions with the true metaphysical system as best we can, to get a better feel for his contributions.