16·     Practice and Performance

1. Semiotic agents
2. Enactions
3. Ethos and consciousness
4. Decisions and dicisigns
5. Pragmatism
6. Know them by their fruits
7. The practice of inquiry
8. Revolutions
9. Continuous practice

Semiotic agents

If information is made of differences, its genesis begins with the carving up of the One Presence (the uncarved block of Lao Tzu, the phaneron of Peirce). The primary cognitive act is to make a distinction (Maturana and Varela 1992, 40), and thus entities appear in the universe, which grows more intricate as more things are specified in relation to one another. Likewise each multicellular organism develops by articulation from a single cell, and myriad species evolve from the simplest forms of life. As bodymind grows, so does the complexity of interaction with other subjects and systems.

Back in Chapter 3 we quoted Maturana and Varela saying that ‘the being and doing of an autopoietic unity are inseparable.’ Their choice of the Greek root poie- is doubly fitting because this same verb which means “making” or “creating” can also mean “doing.” For instance, in the core Gospel statements of the “golden rule,” the English ‘do’ translates forms of Greek poie-:

καὶ καθὼς θέλετε ἵνα ποιῶσιν ὑμῖν οἱ ἄνθρωποι, ποιεῖτε αὐτοῖς ὁμοίως.
And as you wish that people would do to you, do so to them.

— Luke 6:31

πάντα οὗν ὅσα ἐὰν θέλητε ἵνα ποιῶσιν ὑμῖν οἱ ἄνθρωποι, οὕτως καὶ ὑμεῖς ποιεῖτε αὐτοῖς· οὖτος γάρ ἐστιν ὁ νόμος καὶ οἱ προφῆται.
So whatever you wish that people would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets.

— Matthew 7:12

τί δέ με καλεῖτε, κύριε κύριε, καὶ οὐ ποιεῖτε ἃ λέγω;
Why do you always call me Master, Master, and do not do what I say?

— Luke 6:46, Matthew 7:21

An autopoietic unity is also a semiotic agent. Semiosis is a continuous process from which we abstract the triadic relation sign-object-interpretant. Treating each of the three relata as an object of our attention, we say that the sign is determined by its dynamic object to determine an interpretant, which is typically another sign determined by the first sign to represent the same object that the first represents. But in order to be a sign in its turn – in order to mean anything – it must determine another interpretant, ‘and so on ad infinitum,’ as Peirce often said. According to this semiotic analysis, a semiosic process cannot actually complete itself, but it can direct itself toward an ideal limit, as the process of inquiry does.

Peirce wrote that ‘the “Truth”, the fact that is not abstracted but complete, is the ultimate interpretant of every sign’ (EP2:304) – which it approaches ‘by being joined with other signs.’ Yet the ‘ultimate logical interpretant’ (EP2:419) is not itself a sign. What is it then? As per Chapter 7,

… the only mental effect that can be so produced and that is not a sign but is of a general application is a habit-change; meaning by a habit-change a modification of a person's tendencies toward action, resulting from previous experiences or from previous exertions of his will or acts, or from a complexus of both kinds of cause.

— Peirce, CP 5.476 (R 318), 1907

Ultimately, then, all meaningful signs are Turning Signs, because they make a difference in practice. This is the upshot of Peircean pragmatism, which (crudely expressed) is the doctrine that the real meaning of any concept consists of its conceivable implications for future conduct. It takes language, or some kind of symbolic system, to conceive of the implications of future conduct; but the principle, in its most general form, applies to any semiotic agent, any living system capable of engaging in semiosis intentionally, and thus of forming and reforming its own habits by means of the meaning cycle – whether or not it pays conscious attention to semiosis or to its own intentions.

Since any system's habits guide its conduct, real increases or growth of information must have some effect on the habits which define the system's relations to the more inclusive systems which constitute its context. Information then alters the systemic relation between external reality and internal habits, and any increase of information is a step toward completion of that coupling, which (like the whole Truth) is an ideal never actually attained. To quote Gregory Bateson again, life is ‘a game whose purpose is to discover the rules, which rules are always changing and always undiscoverable.’ For living systems, which are autonomous agents (Kauffman 2001) to some extent, this game continues as the rules change.

Just as we can speak of a ‘sign’ as if it were a thing, we can speak of ‘information’ as something that can be quantified, stored, retrieved or conveyed. But it really counts as living information (in the Peircean sense) only to the extent that it can make a real difference in the way we conduct ourselves as anticipatory systems embedded in systems.

Knowledge which should have no possible bearing upon any future experience – bring no expectation whatever – would be information concerning a dream. But in truth no such thing can be presumed of any knowledge. We expect that in time it will produce, or reinforce, or weaken some definite expectation.

— Peirce (CP 5.542, c. 1902)

The network of ‘definite expectations’ develops in a meaning space where distinct concepts, represented symbolically, can be connected or recombined to form new concepts. Over the history of any given guidance system, all concepts within it evolve from a common ancestor – a primal, nameless beginning which was there (which is here) prior to any distinctions. Just as all the cells in a body develop from a single eukaryotic cell, and all eukaryotic cells on earth are genetically related (Lane 2018, 38), all current concepts are related to one another due to their common origin, and mutually define each other so that a change in the function of one may induce functional changes in many others. Of course the further the articulation process goes, the more subtle these changes become, to the point where they make no functional difference, and thus have no pragmatic meaning, to the semiotic agent as a whole.

In a given language, useful words get used in many different senses, in many different contexts, for many different purposes; and any given reader is more familiar with some usages than with others. A reader who develops an attachment to one particular sense of a word, and an aversion to others, is liable to misread any text which uses the word. A more careful reader of the word will allow its meaning to remain vague until the dialogic text and context afford the means of clarifying it. Otherwise we tend to get ‘caught by words,’ as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it (for instance 1992, 70).

Some writers, and dialog partners, seem to feel that misunderstanding can be avoided by defining key terms before using them. But a verbal definition is useful only to the extent that the terms used in the definition are already understood. Besides, it is always possible to make distinctions that are more cogent than salient – that is, they seem to clarify our thoughts at the time, but later turn out to be more trouble than they are worth. Precise definitions are more likely to appear toward the end of a productive dialog than at the beginning. Authentic understanding depends on recognition of the same concepts when expressed in a different idiom, and of different concepts when expressed in similar forms. This requires attention to context and purpose, and often requires us to set aside associations attached to words by our personal histories of usage.

Enactions

The significance of a word such as practice can vary depending on the situation of its use. As opposed to theory, practice is more directly related to the actual world than the world of ideas. For a physician, practicing medicine means actually treating people, as opposed to studying or doing medical research. Similarly, the practice of a religion is more active and “genuine” than the mere “profession” of faith. But for an athlete or musician, practice is a way of developing skills and getting ready for the main event, the game, the performance. And oddly enough, after all that work, we call the performance playing – as if games and concerts were less real and serious than the business of the workaday world. But then we also refer to Shakespeare's plays as his works. (In those works, by the way, ‘practice’ usually refers to some devious ploy designed to deceive or manipulate people.) The fact that we don't even notice such vagaries of usage in everyday discourse only shows that the adjustments we make for context are not made consciously. Jokes and puns often work by exploiting these oddities.

In terms of our meaning-cycle diagram, we could say that practice represents the top half of the cycle – making things happen in the World – while the bottom half makes sense of what happens. A practice is the actualization of a precept; in religion, “practice” often refers to engagement in prescribed rituals. When we refer to a “practicing” Catholic or Buddhist, we generally mean that the person actually carries out specific practices prescribed by the religion (such as meditation, chanting or going to Mass), which are supposed to exemplify, maintain or restore a sacred order of some kind. If we consider this order as based on “religious experience” – which can only be personal experience, even when felt as communion with God or with others – then the purpose of religious practice is to build a pragmatic consensus about the nature of the sacred Order and the human role in the order of Nature. The symbolic expression of that consensus generates the precepts, and practice is the observance of those precepts.

In science or reasoning, on the other hand, the essential practice is observation. The main performance in empirical science is the experiment, which tests a formal model (the hypothesis) by setting up conditions to make observations which can then be systematically compared with the prediction deduced from the hypothesis. Science aims to build a theoretical consensus based on a perceptual standard of “objectivity” (recall Chapter 12) to which observations must conform. Religion aims to establish a preceptual standard of behavior, a communal ethic based on shared beliefs, and thus to integrate individual lives with an authorized social consensus. Scientific practice aims to build a social consensus by making its observations independent of any one observer's idiosyncrasies, so that Nature itself, as the “author” of all occurrences, is the only “authority.” Of course, these are ideals of practice, to which actual practices do not always measure up, either in science or religion.

Science is based on the systematic and public practice of observation. The observance of moral or religious precepts is a different kind of practice. This is another case of polyversity: the one verb “observe” can refer to the deliberate practice of perception, or to a statement about perceived occurrences, or to the practice of a precept. According to OED, the earliest meaning of the verb observe was ‘to attend to in practice.’ We may think of religions as “belief systems,” but the crucial beliefs are the authorized precepts (rules, laws) which the believers observe in their practice. Scientific observation, when we do it methodically (as we do in an observatory), works more on the perceptual or theoretical side (the lower arrow of the meaning cycle diagram). But in a unified cultural guidance system, practical observance is functionally coupled with observation. Both contribute to the self-control embodied in our habit-systems.

A habit is a typical behavior pattern which develops in connection with a typical situation; it governs future behavior in that kind of situation by determining the type of action likely to occur whenever the situation arises. Thus a habit is a form developing over time toward an ideal fit of behavior to situation – an ideal never completely realized because the situation is always changing, and actions are always changing the situation. A turning sign as text can make a difference in its context, a difference determined by the actual interpretation of the text as a way of living the time.

An informed system is better able to predict the consequences of its own behavior than a less well-informed system. The predictability of those consequences depends on the system's knowledge of the world beyond its immediate awareness but within its sphere of interaction. Yet we change the World by describing it, because every description (every Model) plays a mediating role in the guidance system which determines how we interact with the World.

The Buddhist term for a system, and more specifically for a guidance system such as Buddhism itself, is dharma. When a buddha “turns the dharma wheel,” buddha teaches dharma and dharma teaches buddha. Here is Eihei Dogen's advice on ‘the key to studying the way’:

When you first enter the gate to study the buddha way, listen to the teacher's instruction and practice as instructed. When you do that there is something you should know: Dharma turns you, and you turn dharma. When you turn dharma, you are leading and dharma is following. On the other hand when dharma turns you, dharma is leading and you are following.

(Tanahashi 1985, 40)

Practice in this sense is engagement in the meaning cycle – which, from the point of view of any sentient being, is engagement with the external World. But the breadth and depth of this engagement, its mindfulness, depends on cognition. ‘Cognition is behavior or conduct in relation to meaning and norms that the system itself enacts or brings forth on the basis of its autonomy’ (Thompson 2007, 126). There is no cognition without intent, as Peirce recognized by pointing out ‘the whole indebtedness of our cognitive to our conative functions’ (EP2:458), i.e. to our doing, or rather our willing to do something. Conative functions are to will as cognitive functions are to knowledge. Cognition can only develop in a context of conduct. As Evan Thompson put it,

Sense-making = enaction. Sense-making is viable conduct. Such conduct is oriented toward and subject to the environment's significance and valence. Significance and valence do not preexist “out there,” but are enacted, brought forth, and constituted by living beings. Living entails sense-making, which equals enaction.

— Thompson (2007, 158)

Reading literature while ignoring the way of practice is like a person reading a prescription but forgetting to take the medicine; what is the benefit?

— Dogen, Bendowa (Okumura and Leighton 1997, 26)

A belief which really guides our actions (whether we profess it or not) is a kind of habit. To change our genuine beliefs about the world in which we live is to change our habits. The great work of this or any time is to recreate our inhabitation of the time, to transform it from occupation or exploitation of a place into something more like communion with it.

Ethos and consciousness

According to Heraclitus (DK 119), the guiding spirit (daimon) for humans is ethos: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων. Ethos is “character,” one's habitual way of behaving, of ‘conduct’ (Peirce) or comportement (Merleau-Ponty 1942). Daimon originally meant a god or divine power with a strong influence over human conduct. For Socrates, in Plato's dialogues, the daimon was an inner voice, which sometimes warned him against carrying out his own intentions. In New Testament Greek, it became an evil spirit (“demon”) who sometimes “possessed” a person. But for Heraclitus, the real daimonic power was personality itself, in the form of ethos.

All animals have habits or behavioral patterns, and the science of ethology is the study of these. The ethos of every species is an internal guidance system, but humans have taken ‘self-control’ to a new level ‘by the indefinite replication of self-control upon self-control,’ as Peirce put it (below). Peirce also pointed out that ‘self-control of any kind is purely inhibitory’ (EP2:233): that is, it prevents the acting out of impulses that would cause behavior contrary to the guiding ethos, while allowing actions compatible with it. Guidance and control are embodied in legisigns; by talking about our own ethical (or legal) systems – by making these legisigns the objects of other symbolic signs – we have taken more conscious control of them. Thus we harness the semiotic cycle to turn the guidance systems that turn us.

Biologically, guidance systems have evolved as nervous systems embodied in organisms who relate to their Umwelts as individuals.

The biological logic behind the formation of nervous systems in nature is to delegate increasing amounts of power away from the level of the species and to the level of the individual. Genetic adaptations take generations to construct, whereas the brain can effectively wire itself up in the lifetime of the single individual. In the large scheme of things, the appearance of species with brains corresponds to a concretization or individualizing of the semiotic subjecthood that in more primitive species unconditionally resides at the level of the species. With the creation of more and more sophisticated brains, the individual increasingly takes power over its own actions and becomes an autonomous semiotic agent in its own right.

— Hoffmeyer (2008, 165)

For an autonomous semiotic agent, ‘there is no perception that is ever separated from a possible, functional, motor implementation’ (Llinás 2001, 169). Action-perception is a single semiotic cycle. ‘Behavior is, as it were, dialogical and expresses meaning-constitution’ (Thompson 2007, 71). In terms of energetics, the nervous system economizes by using small amounts of metabolic energy to inform and control behavior that consumes much larger amounts.

The Greek root of metabolism itself signifies an “exchange”; in the biological context, one form of energy is exchanged for another by chemical means. This internal transformation powers the semiotic cycle which in turn enables the organism to interact with the external world which is (by definition) beyond its immediate control. The semiotic agent can do this only because of its dialogical interface with the world, and has control of this interaction to the extent that perception and action are connected in real time through the medium of ethos. Reasoning gives the agent conscious control of this ethos, and critical logic in turn enables conscious control of reasoning. But each level of self-control is powered by the spontaneous activity of bodymind, which it guides by selectively inhibiting some of its expressions.

As we have already heard from Peirce (in Chapter 10):

The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason.

— Peirce (EP2:241)

Thus the practiception circuit is closed by reasoning, which inhibits (‘arrests’) some elements of Thought in order to channel semiotic or ‘logical energy’ from percept, through precept, into controlled practice; and thus ‘it is in action that logical energy returns to the uncontrolled and uncriticizable parts of the mind’ (Peirce, EP2:241). This ‘logical energy’ determines a here-and-now action which is the energetic interpretant of the current thought-sign (EP2:409-10). But if the sign has a logical interpretant, or what we usually call a meaning, it must be general, as a habit, precept or law must be in order to guide behavior into the indefinite future. At the same time, the energetic interpretant actualizes the logical interpretant by specifying its application in the current context: the path is made by walking it. Thus logical or semiotic energy can also be called information (i.e. energy of the highest transformity). At the same time, it is also the energy which gives semiosis the ‘active power to establish connections between different objects’ (EP2:435).

Decisions and dicisigns

The meaning of a precept is the practice of it; but what makes a practice meaningful?

A practice is a routine, a habit manifesting itself in action. It could not be recognized as a practice – that is, abstracted from the stream of behavior – if it did not have a perceptible pattern which must be repeated in order to be effectively performed. Perception of patterns, and the recycling and crossing of habits, are greatly enhanced by human-style consciousness, which allows us to experiment with habits symbolically before acting them out. But in order to appreciate the special qualities of consciousness, we need to see how it differs from other aspects of the guidance system, even within humans. The structure of the visual system affords a remarkable example of this difference.

‘Conscious visual experience presents the world to a subject in a form appropriate for the reason-and-memory based selection of actions’ (Clark 2002, 197). But to carry out selected actions in real-time situations, the brain requires another component of visual experience which is not conscious.

Some organisms, including humans and other primates, have developed two ‘streams’ of visual functioning, identifiable in the brain as ‘dorsal’ and ‘ventral’ streams. The dorsal enables motor coordination with things around us and allows us to respond to changes of situation faster than consciousness would allow. The ventral is filtered through categorization, planning and meaning systems involving memory, thus allowing us to deal with situations not immediately present, and extending the scope of “real time” for organisms thus equipped.

There is wealth of evidence, of various sorts, for this separation of function in human and some animal brains. I will just mention some of the most fascinating here. There can be a dissociation between the function of locating an object in the space around you and the function of deciding what it is. Some patients, suffering from what is known paradoxically as ‘blindsight,’ cannot tell an experimenter whether a postbox slot in front of them is horizontal, vertical, or diagonal, or even whether the thing in front of them is a postbox; but they can hold an envelope at exactly the right angle to post it in the slot whose angle they cannot, with one visual subsystem, see. For such patients, the dorsal stream is intact, but the ventral stream has suffered an injury.… Conversely, Goodale et al.‘s patient RV could discriminate one object from another, but was unable to use visual information to grasp odd-shaped objects accurately (Goodale et al. 1994); RV’s dorsal stream was impaired.

— Hurford 2007, 100-101

One common use of the word “conscious” implies that being conscious of a percept or a purpose means being able to produce a verbal formulation of it. That ability is a sign of consciousness, but not the only sign. A more basic sign is the ability to choose among various courses of action. As Llinás (2001, 168) remarks, ‘consciousness has the great ability to focus—that is why consciousness is necessary. It is necessary because it underlies our ability to choose’ (168). But our choices would be meaningless if the bodymind as a whole could not put them into practice by directing our actions as well as our attention.

The advantage of consciousness is that it enables post-conscious habits to be better than pre-conscious habits. But since your habits work most effectively when you are unaware of them, the optimal guidance system uses consciousness to minimize the need for conscious control over future behavior. To learn a habit or skill means to practice it until we can delegate its performance to unconscious processing, thus freeing up consciousness to deal with novel realities. Pragmatically, then, the best reason for making an ethos explicit – for explicating or explaining ethical principles – is to improve its implicit functioning. As long as rules or precepts are consciously observed, they have not yet become habits, and thus their integration into genuine practice remains incomplete.

Conscious communication between learners also has the power to form or reform the semiotic habits of the communicants. In conversation, signs may take on new roles in the play of meaning, or sink further into familiar roles. Any dicisign (i.e. any sign that can be true or false), to the extent that it communicates successfully, also changes the signification of its terms, so that the next time the term is used, it may mean something different with the next interpretant. The language itself has been altered by that utterance, and so has the pragmatic content (from the Greek πρᾶγμα, a deed or act; plural πράγματα, circumstances, affairs, business).

As John Deely observes, ‘the being of signs is realized and maintains itself only in acts of relating’ (Deely 2007, 117). Requoting Gregory Bateson from the previous chapter: ‘Message material, or information, comes out of a context into a context.’ When you are informed, the context into which that information comes is your ethos or habit-system – and that system is changed by the advent of that information. Any semiotic agent capable of relating to its environment by uttering informational signs will thereby modify their external context as well.

As far back and ahead as we can imagine, the bodymind is still turning, turning and returning. What is this semiotic process, that you should be mindful of it? You are already intimate with it, and consciousness is no substitute for that intimacy; but when your habits get too hidebound, it can help you change them. Likewise logic, as conscious attention to the soundness of a reasoning process, can help you change your practice of thinking.

Pragmatism

In 1887, Charles S. Peirce designed a correspondence course on ‘the Art of Reasoning,’ hoping to improve on the way the subject was being taught in the colleges. Part of his appeal to prospective students went like this:

Logic as it has been taught is trifling.… But the new logic taught by Mr. Peirce is eminently practical; and the great thing is not to allow the pupil to fall into trifling subtleties,— and to teach him to unite scientific profundity and even a philosophical insight with thoroughly practical aims. The practical must never be lost sight of, or the reasoning becomes dry and worthless.

(W6:30)

Semiotic habits are entangled with practical habits; communication is a practice affecting other practices. Indeed, a sign has no meaning if it has no conceivable effect on subsequent pragmata. This is the core idea of pragmatism, which was first popularized by William James, although it had been formulated decades earlier by Peirce.

The term is derived from the same Greek word pragma, meaning action, from which our words “practice” and “practical” come. It was first introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in the “Popular Science Monthly” for January of that year Mr. Peirce, after pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that, to develop a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce: that conduct is for us its sole significance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.

— James (1907, 506-7)

Philosophical pragmatism is essentially a theory of meaning. In other contexts, the word “pragmatic” is used in very different ways. A “pragmatic” politician, for example, is one who is willing to do whatever is expedient or necessary for whatever purpose he considers “practical” (whether the practice is ethical or not). As a philosophical practice, though, pragmatism is necessarily concerned with ethos, and especially with the ethos of philosophy itself. Peirce had this to say about the purpose of pragmatism:

What is it expected to accomplish? It is expected to bring to an end those prolonged disputes of philosophers which no observations of facts could settle, and yet in which each side claims to prove that the other side is in the wrong. Pragmatism maintains that in those cases the disputants must be at cross-purposes. They either attach different meanings to words, or else one side or the other (or both) uses a word without any definite meaning. What is wanted, therefore, is a method for ascertaining the real meaning of any concept, doctrine, proposition, word, or other sign. The object of a sign is one thing; its meaning is another. Its object is the thing or occasion, however indefinite, to which it is to be applied. Its meaning is the idea which it attaches to that object, whether by way of mere supposition, or as a command, or as an assertion.

CP 5.6 (c. 1905)

… the maxim of pragmatism is that a conception can have no logical effect or import differing from that of a second conception except so far as, taken in connection with other conceptions and intentions, it might conceivably modify our practical conduct differently from that second conception.

EP2:234

There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere—no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.

— James (1907, 508)

Know them by their fruits

In the context of the meaning cycle, pragmatism tells us that the meaning of a precept is the practice of it. There is no pragmatic difference between a ‘world-formula’ and a comprehensive ‘model’ (i.e. one that structures all of meaning space). These terms are labels, and pragmatism exposes the futility of disputes about labels. That is one difference it makes – and, given the ease with which people fall into disputes over labels, that alone makes the concept and practice of pragmatism worthwhile.

In his original 1878 article, Peirce had stated the ‘maxim’ of pragmatism this way:

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

W3:266, EP1:132

Before we undertake to apply this rule, let us reflect a little upon what it implies. It has been said to be a sceptical and materialistic principle. But it is only an application of the sole principle of logic which was recommended by Jesus; “Ye may know them by their fruits,” and it is very intimately allied with the ideas of the gospel. We must certainly guard ourselves against understanding this rule in too individualistic a sense. To say that man accomplishes nothing but that to which his endeavors are directed would be a cruel condemnation of the great bulk of mankind, who never have leisure to labor for anything but the necessities of life for themselves and their families. But, without directly striving for it, far less comprehending it, they perform all that civilization requires, and bring forth another generation to advance history another step. Their fruit is, therefore, collective; it is the achievement of the whole people. What is it, then, that the whole people is about, what is this civilization that is the outcome of history, but is never completed? We cannot expect to attain a complete conception of it; but we can see that it is a gradual process, that it involves a realization of ideas in man's consciousness and in his works, and that it takes place by virtue of man's capacity for learning, and by experience continually pouring upon him ideas he has not yet acquired. We may say that it is the process whereby man, with all his miserable littleness, becomes gradually more and more imbued with the Spirit of God, in which Nature and History are rife. We are also told to believe in a world to come; but the idea is itself too vague to contribute much to the perspicuity of ordinary ideas. It is a common observation that those who dwell continually upon their expectations are apt to become oblivious to the requirements of their actual station. The great principle of logic is self-surrender, which does not mean that self is to lay low for the sake of an ultimate triumph. It may turn out so; but that must not be the governing purpose.

When we come to study the great principle of continuity and see how all is fluid and every point directly partakes the being of every other, it will appear that individualism and falsity are one and the same. Meantime, we know that man is not whole as long as he is single, that he is essentially a possible member of society. Especially, one man's experience is nothing, if it stands alone. If he sees what others cannot, we call it hallucination. It is not “my” experience, but “our” experience that has to be thought of; and this “us” has indefinite possibilities.

Neither must we understand the practical in any low and sordid sense. Individual action is a means and not our end. Individual pleasure is not our end; we are all putting our shoulders to the wheel for an end that none of us can catch more than a glimpse at,— that which the generations are working out. But we can see that the development of embodied ideas is what it will consist in.

CP 5.402n, R 422: 8–9 (1893); ILS (Kindle Locations 2726-2748)

What does ‘the development of embodied ideas’ mean in practice? In the late 19th Century it could have meant ever-growing complexity, but the fruits of the 20^th Century have revealed the limits to growth, and led in the 21^st to ‘The Great Simplification’ (as Nate Hagens calls it). The use and abuse of a highly concentrated energy source, along with a fourfold increase of the human population, have certainly led to development of enormous embodiments of the idea of power, both physical and social. Vertical social power and wealth have been increasingly concentrated as well, so that inequity among humans has been growing along with the iniquitous human dominance over natural systems. The trajectory of civilization now appears to mirror that of an ecosystem approaching the collapse or ‘release’ phase of its life cycle.

In this period of ‘The Great Unravelling’ (Joanna Macy), Peirce's remarks about ‘advancing history’ may seem unduly optimistic. But if the 21^st Century is to be a time of transition to more wisely limited uses of available energy, ‘it is important for present morale, during transition, to believe that the mission of information progress of our era can continue far into the future, albeit more slowly’ (Odum 2007, 392-3). If we don't believe that it can continue, we are unlikely to make it so. But as Peirce says above, there is no need to expect ‘an ultimate triumph’ or even a permanent improvement in the human condition or the conditions of life on Earth. The ‘mission of information progress’ requires only that the will to learn prevails, for the time being, over the will to power. This could lead to an ecological sensibility which might renew civilization in symbiosis with its biological basis.

Getting back to “pragmatism” – after the word had gained wide currency among philosophers, Peirce

proposed that the word “pragmatism” should hereafter be used somewhat loosely to signify affiliation with Schiller, James, Dewey, Royce, and the rest of us, while the particular doctrine which I invented the word to denote … should be called “pragmaticism.” The extra syllable will indicate the narrower meaning.

CP 8.205, 1905

Pragmaticism makes thinking to consist in the living inferential metaboly of symbols whose purport lies in conditional general resolutions to act. As for the ultimate purpose of thought, which must be the purpose of everything, it is beyond human comprehension; but according to the stage of approach which my thought has made to it … it is by the indefinite replication of self-control upon self-control that the vir is begotten, and by action, through thought, he grows an esthetic ideal, not for the behoof of his own poor noddle merely, but as the share which God permits him to have in the work of creation.

CP 5.402n

This ideal, by modifying the rules of self-control, modifies action, and so experience too — both the man's own and that of others, and this centrifugal movement thus rebounds in a new centripetal movement, and so on; and the whole is a bit of what has been going on, we may presume, for a time in comparison with which the sum of the geological ages is as the surface of an electron in comparison with that of a planet.

— Peirce, CP 5.402n (1906)

The practice of inquiry

Given such a difference in time scale between ‘the purpose of everything’ and the ethos of our own (transitional) era, what is the use of theories about the nature of things that appear to have no currently practical applications? The pure scientist is not at all concerned with that kind of usefulness, but only with the advancement of our knowledge toward the Whole Truth. The scientific mind, like that of the young child, is driven by curiosity; and as Kant observed, ‘no curiosity is more disadvantageous to the expansion of our knowledge than that which would always know its utility in advance, before one has entered into the investigations, and before one could have the least concept of this utility even if it were placed before one's eyes’ (Critique of Pure Reason, B296-7).

Hadamard, in his study of creative thinking in mathematics, put it even more strongly: ‘Practical application is found by not looking for it, and one can say that the whole progress of civilization rests on that principle’ (Hadamard 1945, 124). You might think that he meant ‘practical application is not found by looking for it,’ but the examples he gives (such as the geometric investigation of the ellipse by the early Greeks, which made the discoveries of Kepler and Newton possible many centuries later) are of purely theoretical inquiries which would have been short-circuited by concerns of practicality, but which later found very important applications.

In his Cambridge lectures of 1898, Peirce described scientific inquiry as a spiritual quest guided by ‘the light of nature’ – while also contrasting it with ‘Practice’:

The only end of science, as such, is to learn the lesson that the universe has to teach it. In induction it simply surrenders itself to the force of facts. But it finds, at once,— I am partially inverting the historical order, in order to state the process in its logical order,— it finds I say that this is not enough. It is driven in desperation to call upon its inward sympathy with nature, its instinct for aid, just as we find Galileo at the dawn of modern science making his appeal to il lume naturale. But in so far as it does this, the solid ground of fact fails it. It feels from that moment that its position is only provisional. It must then find confirmations or else shift its footing. Even if it does find confirmations, they are only partial. It still is not standing upon the bedrock of fact. It is walking upon a bog, and can only say, this ground seems to hold for the present. Here I will stay till it begins to give way. Moreover, in all its progress, science vaguely feels that it is only learning a lesson. The value of facts to it, lies only in this, that they belong to Nature; and Nature is something great, and beautiful, and sacred, and eternal, and real,— the object of its worship and its aspiration. It therein takes an entirely different attitude toward facts from that which Practice takes.

EP2:54-5, CP 5.589

And so, says Practice, I can safely presume that so it will be with the great bulk of the cases in which I shall go upon the theory; especially as they will closely resemble those which have been well tried. In other words there is now reason to believe in the theory, for belief is the willingness to risk a great deal upon a proposition. But this belief is no concern of science which has nothing at stake on any temporal venture but is in pursuit of eternal verities (not semblances to truth) and looks upon this pursuit, not as the work of one man's life, but as that of generation after generation, indefinitely.

EP2:55-6

A theory meant to be tested by observation has to use symbolic terms to denote (and inform us about) the objects to be observed. But pragmatic definitions of those terms often involve precepts. According to Peirce, ‘If you look into a textbook of chemistry for a definition of lithium, you may be told that it is that element whose atomic weight is 7 very nearly. But if the author has a more logical mind,’ he will tell you what procedure you can follow in the laboratory to obtain a specimen of lithium.

The peculiarity of this definition,— or rather this precept that is more serviceable than a definition,— is that it tells you what the word lithium denotes by prescribing what you are to do in order to gain a perceptual acquaintance with the object of the word.

— Peirce, EP2:286

Revolutions

Observation of a surprising phenomenon is often the starting point of scientific inquiry. The next step is to frame a hypothesis which would either explain the phenomenon by integrating the observed facts with the established model, and thus would inform or reform that model – or would reveal its inadequacy. A good hypothesis is one worth testing because it generates expectations different from those which would follow from previously established beliefs. The next step is a series of experiments testing by actual observation whether these new and surprising expectations are borne out. The scientist records these observations so the resulting data can be made public and the experiment replicated.

A scientific consensus can only be approached by reiterated experiments and observations by various researchers. Science is a communal enterprise, but one that welcomes debate and dissension instead of discouraging it, since it aims at formulating propositions whose truth is independent of anyone's belief in them. According to Thomas Kuhn, the major debates that lead to scientific revolutions are about paradigms and thus involve a measure of circularity in the arguments of their proponents. A paradigm in this sense is an implicit way of observing which includes both perceptual and preceptual elements. Moreover, the act of explicitly mentioning that we have observed something, or of expressing an opinion based on such observation, can also be called observing.

When paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm's defense.

The resulting circularity does not, of course, make the argument wrong or even ineffectual. The man who premises a paradigm when arguing in its defense can nonetheless provide a clear exhibit of what scientific practice will be like for those who adopt the new view of nature. That exhibit can be immensely persuasive, often compellingly so. Yet, whatever its force, the status of the circular argument is only that of persuasion.

— Kuhn (1969, 94)

Within any community that uses language, pivotal points of disagreement may reflect not differences of model but different choices concerning which aspects of it to explicate and which to leave implicit. Differences may also arise from variant namings of niches in the communal meaning space or commens. Such differences can only be resolved by the practice of dialogue – or by the dialog of scientific practice, i.e. by inquiry as a collective conversation with nature.

Due to the simplexity of our minds, we sometimes forget the fallibility of cognition and think of theoretical models or received truths as Eternal Verities. We are encouraged to think of religious beliefs that way, as transcendental certainties. Likewise in science, we are encouraged to think that our theorizing ‘in pursuit of eternal verities’ will somehow reach The Whole Truth in the long run. But the semiotic cycle shows these timeless perfections to be illusions, or ‘flowers in the sky,’ as Zen masters have called them (Dogen, ‘Kuge’). Practice is part of the revolving meaning cycle, and practice takes time.

Practice is living the time, continuing in a way that makes some sense (whatever that is) at the moment (whenever this is), becoming a living symbol playing its (perhaps infinitesimal) part in the continuing argument or Scripture of the Universe. All the while knowing that it is incomplete. Life simply drives us onward, no matter what we think “onward” means.

Intentional practice has a direction: it points toward the future like the arrow of time itself. Time is continuous, as far as we can tell – meaning (according to Peirce) that every moment of time, no matter how short or long, has parts of the same nature as itself, with no real boundaries or gaps between them. To say that time is continuous is the same as to say that change is continuous, which is essentially the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence. But the other side of this coin is that Buddhist enlightenment is neither a “state” to be attained nor a sudden break in awareness. According to Dogen, practice is immediately enlightenment. ‘Indeed, the continuous practice of one person will merge with the place of the way of all buddhas’ (Tanahashi 2010, 369).

Continuous practice

A buddha's practice is to practice in the same manner as the entire earth and all beings. If it is not practice with all beings, it is not a buddha's practice. This being so, from the moment of arousing the aspiration for enlightenment to the moment of attaining enlightenment, all buddhas realize and practice the way together with the entire earth and all beings.

— Dogen, SBGZ ‘Yuibutsu yobutsu’ (Tanahashi 2010, 880-1)

‘As one practices,’ Dogen writes, ‘one must not anticipate realization apart from practice in that practice points directly to original realization.’ Dogen also maintains the ‘unceasing circulation of continuous practice’ (gyōji-dōkan), such that ‘the Way [of buddhas and patriarchs] is circulating ceaselessly without even the slightest gap between resolution, practice, enlightenment, and nirvāna.’

— Heine 1994, 72 (citing ‘Bendōwa’ and ‘Gyōji’)

The image of ‘unceasing circulation’ is not limited to Buddhism; we also find it in Kabbalah, though expressed in very different terms. ‘The essence of the Kabbalistic idea of God … lies in its resolutely dynamic conception of the Godhead: God's creative power and vitality develop in an unending movement of His nature, which flows not only outward into Creation but also back into itself’ (Scholem 1976, 158). In Kabbalistic practice the ‘recitation’ of Torah as performance of Scripture embodies the divine dynamism. The emphasis on practice is even stronger in Zen Buddhist scriptures such as the Platform Sutra:

This Dharma must be practiced; it has nothing to do with recitations. If you recite it and do not practice it, it will be like an illusion or a phantom. The Dharma body of the practicer is the equivalent of the Buddha.

— Hui-neng (Yampolsky 1967, 146)

Religious institutions are in constant danger of turning genuine practice into a set of rituals, routines, piously followed habits. The problem with such “pious practices” is that the element of ritual can become a substitute for, or even a hindrance to, spiritual transformation. The Gospel of Thomas warns about this danger, with particular reference to fasting and prayer, in Sayings 6 and 14 (as we saw in Chapter 6). The point is made a third time in Saying 104:

They said to [Jesus]: ‘Come, let us pray and fast today!’
Jesus said: ‘What sin is it that I have committed, or wherein have I been overcome? But when the bridegroom comes out of the wedding chamber, then let (us) fast and pray.’

(5G)

Here the groom's presence within the wedding chamber is comparable to a buddha's continuous practice ‘together with the entire earth and all beings,’ or the spiritual consummation of embodiment, symbolized by the sexual union in Kabbalah. From this perspective, ritual performances are inferior substitutes for authentic practice. Saying 53 says much the same about another traditional religous practice:

(1) His disciples said to him, “Is circumcision useful or not?” (2) He said to them, “If it were useful, children’s fathers would produce them already circumcised from their mothers. (3) Rather, the true circumcision in spirit has become valuable in every respect.”

(NHS)

And where does faith fit into this picture? It has little to do with the intellectual belief which amounts to assenting to the truth of some verbal formula, but it may have a lot to do with trusting the path you are walking. ‘If you practice with genuine trust, you will attain the way, regardless of being sharp or dull’ (Dogen, Tanahashi 2004, 32). The material witness to your faith or belief is your full-time behavior. Praxis uses belief to organize itself. Any given practice can actualize a variety of beliefs, and any given belief can authorize a variety of practices: another case of polyversity. In this sense we can say that belief informs practice, and practices inform praxis.

The praxis promoted by Thomas is not ritualistic, but neither is it common, as it seems that only one in a thousand can live up to it. Radical religious movements are often ascetic in this sense. Richard Valantasis points out that the Greek root askesis refers primarily to ‘the preparations that athletes performed in order to be capable of rigorous athletic competition.’ As a spiritual discipline, it includes ‘all the actions … required to build a new identity’ (Valantasis 1997, 22). One engages in such practices in order to reform or transform one's praxis, one's meaningful actions in relation to the world or to other subjects. One such practice is the zazen or ‘just sitting’ taught by Dogen and the others in his Zen lineage. This discipline of bodymind is taught and monitored by an experienced guide to enable the practitioner to realize her buddha-nature and live from it fully. This is a practice whose business is becoming a full-time praxis. ‘Continuous practice is the circle of the way,’ says Dogen (Tanahashi 2010, 332).

In regard to freely penetrating the great way that completes birth and masters death, there is an ancient statement, “A great sage surrenders birth and death to the mind, surrenders birth and death to the body, surrenders birth and death to the way, surrenders birth and death to birth and death.” As this teaching is actualized without limitation in the past and present, the awesome presence of active buddhas is thoroughly practiced immediately.

The teaching of birth and death, body and mind, is the circle of the way and is actualized at once. Thoroughly practicing, thoroughly clarifying, it is not forced. It is just like recognizing the shadow of deluded thought and turning the light to shine within. The clarity of clarity beyond clarity prevails in the activity of buddhas. This is totally surrendering to practice.

To understand the meaning of totally surrendering, you should thoroughly investigate mind. In the steadfastness of thorough investigation, all phenomena are the unadorned clarity of mind. You know and understand that the three realms of desire, form, and formlessness are merely elaborate divisions of mind. Although your knowing and understanding are part of all phenomena, you actualize the home village of the self. This is no other than your everyday activity.

This being so, the continuous effort to grasp the point in phrases and to seek eloquence beyond words is to take hold beyond taking hold, and to let go beyond letting go.

— Dogen, ‘Gyobutsu Iigi’ (Tanahashi 2010, 268-9)

Next chapter: Self and Other Subjects →

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