Month: June 2016

Perhaps reality is just the illusion that no one will ever see through, despite our most honest efforts.

God, O Arjuna, dwells in the heart of every being and to His delusive mystery whirls them all, as the clay on the potter’s wheel.

— Bhagavad-Gita 18:61 (Gandhi 1926, 233)

Reality is what cannot be imaginary, but can inform your imagination like nothing else.

Whatever you have done, said, thought, deeply heard or read, has contributed something to the situation you are now living in. And then there’s reality, which breaks into your house of habits like a thief in the night.

Matthew 7:3 asks, ‘why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?’ (KJV). Good question, says the Dhammapada:

It is easy to see the fault of others, hard to see one’s own. One sifts the faults of others like chaff, but covers up one’s own, as a crafty cheater covers up a losing throw.

In one who watches out for the faults of others, always ready to blame, compulsions increase; such a one is far from extinction of compulsion.

— Dhammapada 18:18-19 (Cleary 1994, 58)

We have seen in Chapter 6 the parallel in the Gospel of Thomas, Logion 26. Also very similar to Matthew 7:3-5 is Luke 6:41-2: ‘cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.’ All of these texts (including the Greek version of Thomas, P. Oxy. 1) use διαβλέψεις (‘you will see clearly’). The word used for ‘beam,’ δοκὸν, refers to the bar of a gate or door – something solid and hard to break.

The English beam originally referred more broadly to a tree or post; use of the word in reference to a living, growing tree later dropped out of the language, and now it generally refers to a heavy timber used in construction, or a steel I-beam (named after the shape of its cross section, not after the first-person pronoun). We usually picture the biblical ‘beam in the eye’ as something like a log, in contrast to the ‘mote’ in another’s eye. But there’s another kind of eye-beam.

In a development called ‘remarkable’ by the OED, the original English sense was transferred to a sunbeam (such as the ray of light visible in the distance when it breaks through heavy clouds), and thus to any beam of light. Sometimes this light beam was turned outside in, as it were, referring to a beam that comes through one’s eye from the internal rather than the external world – a metaphor for one’s power of attention. A further metaphorical shift produced a verb for shedding light upon the world by one’s expression, i.e. beaming. Emerson, in his essay ‘Friendship’, used the term ‘eye-beams’ in this social context.

How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth.

Emerson also brought an eyebeam into his poem on ‘The Sphinx’ (first published in 1841). C.S. Peirce was fond of quoting lines from this poem in a variety of contexts. Here’s an example from one of his manuscripts on phaneroscopy:

… although the entire consciousness at any one instant is nothing but a feeling, yet psychology can teach us nothing of the nature of feeling, nor can we gain knowledge of any feeling by introspection, the feeling being completely veiled from introspection, for the very reason that it is our immediate consciousness. Possibly this curious truth was what Emerson was trying to grasp — but if so, pretty unsuccessfully — when he wrote the lines,

The old Sphinx bit her thick lip —
      Said, “Who taught thee me to name?
I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow,
      Of thine eye I am eyebeam.
Thou art the unanswered question;
      Couldst see thy proper eye,
Always it asketh, asketh;
      And each answer is a lie.”

But whatever he may have meant, it is plain enough that all that is immediately present to a man is what is in his mind in the present instant. His whole life is in the present. But when he asks what is the content of the present instant, his question always comes too late. The present has gone by, and what remains of it is greatly metamorphosed.

— CP 1.310 (1906)

The point here is that our immediate awareness cannot be an object of our immediate awareness. But Peirce was already quoting Emerson’s poem to make this point 40 years earlier, in his Lowell Lectures of 1866. He incorporated the eyebeam into his argument that a person is a sign, because he means something, yet is unaware of his own meaning. Like a symbol, he both denotes and connotes, i.e. has both breadth and depth (see Chapter 10):

A man denotes whatever is the object of his attention at the moment; he connotes whatever he knows or feels of this object, and is the incarnation of this form or intelligible species; his interpretant is the future memory of this cognition, his future self, or another person he addresses, or a sentence he writes, or a child he gets. In what does the identity of man consist and where is the seat of the soul? It seems to me that these questions usually receive a very narrow answer. Why, we used to read that the soul resides in a little organ of the brain no bigger than a pin’s head. Most anthropologists now more rationally say that the soul is either spread over the whole body or is all in all and all in every part. But are we shut up in a box of flesh and blood? When I communicate my thought and my sentiments to a friend with whom I am in full sympathy, so that my feelings pass into him and I am conscious of what he feels, do I not live in his brain as well as in my own—most literally? True, my animal life is not there; but my soul, my feeling, thought, attention are. If this be not so, a man is not a word, it is true, but is something much poorer. There is a miserable material and barbarian notion according to which a man cannot be in two places at once; as though he were a thing! A word may be in several places at once, six six, because its essence is spiritual; and I believe that a man is no whit inferior to the word in this respect. Each man has an identity which far transcends the mere animal;—an essence, a meaning subtile as it may be. He cannot know his own essential significance; of his eye it is eyebeam. But that he truly has this outreaching identity—such as a word has—is the true and exact expression of the fact of sympathy, fellow feeling—together with all unselfish interests,—and all that makes us feel that he has an absolute worth.

W1:498

The eyebeam also recurs in Peirce’s later works on logic, in connection with the ineffability of immediate consciousness and the inaccuracy of introspection:

… we shall have to assume that, practically speaking, there is a flow of ideas through the mind, that is, of objects, of which we have the barest glimpse while they are with us, but which are reported by memory after they have been associated together and considerably transformed; and this report, though not very accurate, is substantially acceptable as correct.

… The point to remember is, that whatever we say of ideas as they are in consciousness is said of something unknowable in its immediacy. The only thought that is really present to us is a thought we can neither think about nor talk about. “Of thine eye I am eyebeam,” says the Sphinx. We have no reason to deny the dicta of introspection; but we have to remember that they are all results of association, are all theoretical, bits of instinctive psychology. We accept them, but not as literally true; only as expressive of the impression which has naturally been made upon our understandings.

CP 7.424-5, c.1893

When we do think or talk about thoughts, we are forced to use symbols, perhaps recognizing that symbols grow by being “repurposed,” but blissfully unaware of the repurposing we are doing at the very moment when we take them to simply mean what they mean. And likewise, Peirce observes that logicians, who profess to be experts on forms and methods of reasoning, have for ages neglected the most important and commonly used forms of it.

But it should surprise nobody that the most characteristic form of demonstrative reasoning of those ages is left unnoticed in their logical treatises. The best of such works, at all epochs, though they reflect in some measure contemporary modes of thought, have always been considerably behind their times. For the methods of thinking that are living activities in men are not objects of reflective consciousness. They baffle the student, because they are a part of himself.

“Of thine eye I am eye-beam,”

says Emerson’s sphynx. The methods of thinking men consciously admire are different from, and often, in some respects, inferior to those they actually employ.…

One has to confess that writers of logic-books have been, themselves, with rare exceptions, but shambling reasoners. How wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and behold, a beam is in thine own eye? I fear it has to be said of philosophers at large, both small and great, that their reasoning is so loose and fallacious, that the like in mathematics, in political economy, or in physical science, would be received in derision or simple scorn.

— CP 3.404-5 (1892)

This brings us round again to the eyebeams of the Gospels, Peirce applying the ethical message to his fellow philosophers. We are all attending to all sorts of objects, but never to our own attention. We are all signs, but we never know what we mean at the moment of meaning.

Science, as the most formal and elaborate development of objectivity, is the most focused expression of the realist faith. To play her role as observer, the scientist must assume that the observed domain is a single world ruled by universal ‘laws’ operating independently of all observers. In order to contribute to the consensus on what those ‘laws’ really are, then, she must do what she can to eliminate idiosyncrasies from her own observations.

The striving for objectivity is thus understood, phenomenologically, as a striving to achieve greater consensus, greater agreement or consonance among a plurality of subjects, rather than as an attempt to avoid subjectivity altogether.

— David Abram (1996, 38)

Scientific inquiry aims at a consensus constrained by experiment: we test a hypothesis by drawing predictions from it, i.e. deducing what would happen in a specified situation if it were true, then observing what actually happens in that situation. If the experiment is well designed and produces an observation contrary to the prediction, the hypothesis is refuted or ‘falsified’; a positive result, though not conclusive, tends to confirm the hypothesis.

The failures as well as the successes of the predictions must be honestly noted. The whole proceeding must be fair and unbiased.

Some persons fancy that bias and counter-bias are favorable to the extraction of truth—that hot and partisan debate is the way to investigate. This is the theory of our atrocious legal procedure. But Logic puts its heel upon this suggestion. It irrefragably demonstrates that knowledge can only be furthered by the real desire for it, and that the methods of obstinacy, of authority, and every mode of trying to reach a foregone conclusion, are absolutely of no value.

Peirce, W3:331 (1878)

This in a nutshell is the objectivity proper to science – that is, to all honest argument. It amounts to respecting the reality of the object observed rather than clinging to the observer’s or experimenter’s bias. In other words, it relies crucially on inductive logic.

It is of the essence of induction that the consequence of the theory should be drawn first in regard to the unknown, or virtually unknown, result of experiment; and that this should virtually be only ascertained afterward. For if we look over the phenomena to find agreements with the theory, it is a mere question of ingenuity and industry how many we shall find.

Peirce, BD ‘Reasoning’

A Sign is determined by its Object even when, ‘as not infrequently happens, the Object is brought into existence by the Sign’ (Peirce, EP2:493).

The Object of the sentence “Hamlet was insane” is the Universe of Shakespeare’s Creation so far as it is determined by Hamlet being a part of it. The Object of the Command “Ground arms!” is the immediately subsequent action of the soldiers so far as it is affected by the molition expressed in the command. It cannot be understood unless collateral observation shows the speaker’s relation to the rank of soldiers. You may say, if you like, that the Object is in the Universe of things desired by the Commanding Captain at that moment. Or since the obedience is fully expected, it is in the Universe of his expectation. At any rate, it determines the Sign although it is to be created by the Sign by the circumstance that its Universe is relative to the momentary state of mind of the officer.

EP2:493

The Command is a Sign whose dynamic interpretant is the action of the soldiers, which is determined by ‘the molition expressed in the command.’ Molition is Peirce’s term for ‘volition minus all desire and purpose, the mere consciousness of exertion of any kind’ (CP 8.303, 1909). The officer was conscious of the exertion which he expected, and it was the object of his attention which determined what sign he would utter in order to bring that object into the Universe of actuality.

Semiosis, as a process, takes time. It cannot be well represented by a timeless logic, which generates self-contradictory propositions such as the ‘liar paradox’ by allowing a proposition to refer to itself as if it could exist as an individual (as the possible object of an index) before it is uttered, which in fact it cannot.

In his third Harvard Lecture of 1903, Peirce explained the relations between the subject of a proposition and the object of a sign in a way that shows why a genuine proposition cannot refer to itself. He begins by referring to the principle of excluded middle, which in classical logic says that a proposition must be either true or false – any option in between those two is excluded. He points out that this principle applies only when the subject of the proposition specifies an individual, and not when it is general.

That is, to say that the principle of excluded middle applies to S is no more than to say that S, the subject of the proposition, is an individual. But how can that be? We know very well that universal propositions have general subjects of which the principle of excluded middle is [not] true. That is, it is not true that “all men are either tall or not tall.” The logic of relatives furnishes the solution, by showing that propositions usually have several subjects, that one of these subjects is the so-called Universe of Discourse, that as a general rule a proposition refers to several Universes of Discourse, the chief of which are Singulars, and that all propositions whatsoever refer to one common universe,—the Universal Universe or aggregate of all Singulars, which in ordinary language we denominate the Truth. The analysis of the logic of relations shows that such is the fact, and by the aid of the categories we can easily see why it should be so. A proposition is a symbol which separately INDICATES its object, and the representation in the proposition of that object is called the subject of the proposition. Now to INDICATE is to represent in the manner in which an index represents. But an index is a representamen which is such by virtue of standing in a genuine reaction with its object; while a singular is nothing but a genuinely reacting object. It does not follow that the subject of a proposition must literally be an index, although it indicates the object of the representamen in a manner like the representation of an index. It may be a precept by following which a singular could be found. Take for example the proposition:

Some woman is adored by every Catholic.
This means that a well-disposed person with sufficient means could find an index whose object should be a woman such that allowing an ill-disposed person to select an index whose object would be a Catholic, that Catholic would adore that woman.

Thus the subject of a proposition if not an index is a precept prescribing the conditions under which an object is to be had.

Consequently, though the subject need not be individual, the object to which the subject of a proposition applies must be the object of a possible index and as such it must be such as it is independently of any representamen or other Third. That is to say it must be real.

Consequently, it is impossible that a proposition should relate to itself as its object, since as long as it has not yet been enunciated it possesses characters which are not independent of how they may be represented to be.

EP2:168-9

A semiotic process involving self-reference, when it takes the form of a proposition, takes its already-determined past (and not its living presence or semiotic functioning) as its object to determine its future as its interpretant. In the same way, a self-referential function in mathematics takes the result of its previous iteration to produce the result of the current iteration, which will in turn be used to produce the next result, and so on.