ONT Re: De In Esse Predication
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DEIP. Discussion Note 7
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BM = Bernard Morand
JA = Jon Awbrey
CSP: | It has come about through the agencies of development that man is
| endowed with intelligence of such a nature that he can by ideal
| experiments ascertain that in a certain universe of logical
| possibility certain combinations occur while others do not
| occur. Of those which occur in the ideal world some do
| and some do not occur in the real world; but all that
| occur in the real world occur also in the ideal world.
| For the real world is the world of sensible experience,
| and it is a part of the process of sensible experience
| to locate its facts in the world of ideas. This is what
| I mean by saying that the sensible world is but a fragment
| of the ideal world.*
CSP: * For the simple reason that the real world is a part of the ideal world,
| namely, that part which sufficient experience would tend ultimately (and
| therefore definitively), to compel Reason to acknowledge as having a being
| independent of what he may arbitrarily, or willfully, create.
|
| C.S. Peirce, 'Collected Papers', CP 3.527,
|"The Logic of Relatives", 'Monist', vol. 7,
| pp. 161-217, 1897. * Marginal note, 1908.
BM: Thanks Jon. This marginal note is a very
important one and it deserves slow reflection.
BM: On one side, I was lead start from the beginning of my peircean studies
to think that such point could be a reason for me to differ radically
from Peirce. I thought that such statements were reflecting two bias:
BM: 1. they could support the critic that Peirce was some kind of
"intellectualist" who was ignorant of how things go in the
actual world: there would be an ideal world the knowledge
of which could be attained in the long run by wise people.
2. they were optimistic about the possibility of such
a happy end. I was wondering too if Peirce's thought
was not really representative of the major trends of
XIXth century that believed in an endless progress
of science, economics, welfare and so on. A kind
of belief in some "age d'or" to become.
BM: It is worth noticing that my background has been fed with marxism
for a long time and that I have no reason to think the contrary
today, particularly from the economical standpoint as it was
developped in 'The Capital'. In marxism too there is the
idea of communism as an ultimate stage of evolution where
all would be going fine.
BM: But undoubtly, there are major differences between both,
namely according to the ways as the happy end could take
place (materialism vs pragmatism). So I put the question
in some kind of provocative manner here:
BM: http://www.iutc3.unicaen.fr/~moranb/accueilperso51.htm
BM: But, on the other hand, I am now less sure about all that.
From the Capital itself, there is nothing that states the
necessity of the happy end. We have just two concluding
statements, first the necessity of the capitalism crisis
as a tendency and second, the statement that there are
"causes which go against this law" (Evidently, in his
political and social works, Marx is much less cautious).
BM: If we turn now to Peirce, the marginal note (written in 1908,
so it is not refering to some "young" Peirce) we get the idea
of tendency too. But we get also the idea that it is the growth
of EXPERIENCE in the real world which will lead Reason to overcome.
BM: So, returning to my starting point, may be they were not so far one
of each other, but not for the reasons I had thought. It seems that
they had in common an interest on the problematic of evolution, which
is after all a leading idea of the XIXth century too. The fact that
one of them was revolutionary and the other a strong conservative is
not without interest here.
Bernard,
When Peirce talks this way about the EOI, some people that I know
will reflexively (not too reflectively) label him as an "idealist",
and I take it that they mean this in a dismissive sense of the word.
I have always taken the concept of the EOI to be a "normative idealization",
or a "regulative principle" in Kant's sense, which I imagine that someone so
steeped in Kant as Peirce was must also have had in mind. In this connection
normative idealizations are bound up with the principle of hope, which also
corresponds to abductive reasoning in Peirce's categories. You will be
thinking of the story of a soldier.
Now the normative ideal or regulative principle of the EOI
refers to an intentional objective in the far remote future,
about the actualization of which we can of course know naught,
but the ideal is embodied in those who maintain it and thus it
has a very real action in the present, the "functional meaning"
of the EOI, in the sociological sense of the word "functional".
I think of Peirce's marginal note as the "Venus de Milo" theory of the
relations among the ideal world, the real world, and the sensible world.
The ideal world is the unhewn block of Parian marble, from which
substrate the brute encounter of recalcitrant experience chips away
everything that "does not look like Aphrodite", or some say Amphitrite,
and this is the real that eternally endures, whatever vicissitudes happen
to befall its concrete images, and yet we possess but a fragment of that in
our sensible world, jsut barely enough to intimate the nature of that reality.
Time to Muse the Facet:
http://www.louvre.fr/img/photos/collec/ager/grande/ma0399.jpg
Jon Awbrey
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