Experiencing (TS ·7)

·7 Experiencing

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
— John Lennon, ‘Beautiful Boy’

Experience is what happened just before you noticed that something just happened.
Afterwards, “the experience” is what you happen to remember.
Until you notice that remembering is happening.
Or you notice that you are dreaming.
Then you can really dream.
Or you can wake up.
But how do you know that you won't wake further up?
Remember not knowing?
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Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
— Franklin P. Jones

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Experiencing as the Firstness of Secondness is the actual appearing of existing things, or the happening of actual events, ‘before’ they are designated as things, events, (ideas, images, people, places, processes, .....).

Experience and appearance are verbs made into nouns, as when some‘thing’ has been identified as an event or entity lifted or “singled out” from the flow of experiencing. This formulation or ‘reification’ is the warping, woofing and weaving of a dialogue into a text.

Experiencing itself does not appear; it is the “space,” or rather the time, in which things appear or happen. Afterwards, we call a remembered appearance or happening an experience. When you ‘speak from’ it, this experience is an object of the signs you utter.

In Peirce's usage, experience is forceful: it comes to you as direct contact with an other. The “content” of experience, though entirely mental, is beyond your control. ‘All experience compels your acknowledgment. What, then, is the fact that is present to you? Ask yourself: it is past’ (CP 2.84, 1902). But by asking yourself, you have taken up the practice of philosophy, for which ‘experience can only mean the total cognitive result of living’ (CP 7.538).

Experience may be defined as the sum of ideas which have been irresistibly borne in upon us, overwhelming all free-play of thought, by the tenor of our lives. The authority of experience consists in the fact that its power cannot be resisted; it is a flood against which nothing can stand. The maxim that we ought to be “guided” by experience amounts to this, that what we have got to yield to at last we shall economically do well to be submissive to from the first. “Guided” is too egotistical a word.
We naturally make all our distinctions too absolute. We are accustomed to speak of an external universe and an inner world of thought. But they are merely vicinities with no real boundary line between them. It comes to this: there are some ideas,— objects, be it remembered,— which will have their own way, and we cannot swerve them much, and the little effect we can produce upon them we only produce indirectly. They make up or indicate the outward world. There are other ideas which seem very docile, they are just as we think they ought to be. They form the inner world. Yet it will be found that the inner world has its surprises for us, sometimes. It isn't so exactly as we would have it as we fancy. It is rather our wishes which conform to it, Mahomet that repairs to the mountain. Neither is the moderate amount of control which we exercise upon the world of ideas nearly so direct as we fancy it to be. We go about instinctively, and without being aware how circuitously we proceed to change the current of thought. There is an intermediate world, our own neighborhood, household, and persons, which belongs to us, which we sometimes feel inclined to class with the outer world and sometimes with the inner world.

Experience being something forced upon us, belongs to the external type. Yet in so far as it is I or you who experiences the constraint, the experience is mine or yours, and thus belongs to the inner world.

Experience is double, as much as reality is. That is, there is an outward and an inward experience. Under the latter head ought particularly to be reckoned a mathematical experience, not usually so called, which has compelled the development of pure thought to take a determinate course.

There is also an emotional experience, which has all the authority of any experience, provided it is equally irresistible. But experience and its irresistibility has a public character, which we shall study in another chapter.

Under the influence of association, the lash of experience needs only to be shown to us to cause us to submit. Now, there are indications by which we recognize the experiential character of certain ideas. One of these is the glowing blaze of their subjective vividness; but there are others, besides.

When an idea bearing the stamp of experience suggests another, that other in many cases itself carries that same stamp, which is carried forward in suggestion and thus a derivative authority from experience is conferred upon an idea which may have neither the vividness nor the other marks of directer experience. This sort of suggestion is inference.

— Peirce (CP 7.437-443, c. 1893)

When inference becomes self-critical and self-controlled, it grows into reasoning. But as Michael Polanyi says (1966, xi), ‘Thought can live only on grounds which we adopt in the service of a reality to which we submit.’ _[next]

Experience is that state of cognition which the course of life, by some part thereof, has forced upon the recognition of the experient, or person who undergoes the experience, under conditions due usually, in part, at least, to his own action; and the Immediate object of the cognition of Experience is understood to be what I call its ‘Dynamical,’ that is, its real object.
— Peirce, MS 299 CSP 8 (1906)

‘There must be an action of the object upon the sign in order to render the latter true’; so the ‘cognition of Experience,’ ‘in order to fulfill its office, to actualize its potency, must be compelled by its object’ (Peirce, EP2:380). The reality of its dynamical object is its compulsiveness, its forcing itself upon the attention. As Peirce observed (NEM3, 917), ‘Experience is first forced upon us in the form of a flow of images’ which act like a series of blows upon the bubble of perception – especially when they are unexpected. As the little current of cognition begins to “make sense” of these images, it is forced by its own nature to extract facts from the flow. These facts may be represented in propositional form, but the truth of these signs is ‘forced upon the recognition of the experient’ by their indexicality, their genuine dyadic relation to their objects.

Experience is re-cognized as such when the immediate object of the cognition or thought-sign is understood to be not merely flotsam in the little current of internal dialogue but an actual feature of the Big Current, ‘the course of life.’ This can happen when the reader (interpreter) understands the writer (utterer) of a symbol to be speaking from experience, whether the sign itself is factual or fictional: the experient actually feels the shock of recognition.

For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.
— Herman Melville, ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ (1850)

This kind of shock delivers a “blow” combining the Secondness of the unexpected with the closure of a circuit connecting the ‘genius’ of an individual bodymind with that ‘Poetic Genius which is every where call'd the Spirit of Prophecy’ (Blake).

Actually, that universal ‘genius’ goes by many other names, and the word genius is related to many others, including general, generate, genuine, gnosis, cognition, know, as well as nature and innate. All of these have their source in the Proto-Indo-European root *gn- or *gen-, meaning give birth or beget. It all springs from the encounter of inner and outer Nature, enhanced by the sexuality of cognition. _[next]

Reading is recognition of experience as symbolized by the text in its context; meaning is experiencing prompted by the text. The recognition can always become more fine-grained (subtle, articulate, ..... ) as the reading proceeds, because experiencing is never complete as long as it lives. Habits on the other hand must simplify (reducing or eliminating subtleties) in order to guide actual practice.

The text is the instrument; the body is the player; meaning is the music. Practice is the dance. _[next]

Heraclitus on inquiry:

ἐὰν μὴ ἔλπηται ἀνέλπιστον οὐκ ἐξευρήσει, ἀνεξερεύνητον ἐὸν καὶ ἄπορον.
He who does not expect will not find out the unexpected, for it is trackless and unexplored.
— Heraclitus, Kahn VII

χρὴ γὰρ εὖ μάλα πολλῶν ἵστορας φιλοσόφους ἄνδρας εἶναι.
Men who love wisdom must be good inquirers (historas) into many things indeed.
— Heraclitus, Kahn IX

But

πολυμαθίη νόον οὐ διδάσκει.
Much learning (polymathia) does not teach understanding.
— Heraclitus, Kahn XVIII

ὅσων ὄψις ἀκοὴ μάθησις, ταῦτα ἐγὼ προτιμέω.
Whatever comes from sight, hearing, learning from experience: this I prefer.
— Heraclitus, Kahn XVI

But

κακοὶ μάρτυρες ἀνθρώποισι ὀφθαλμοὶ καὶ ὦτα βαρβάρους ψυχὰς ἐχόντων.
Eyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if their souls do not understand the language [if they have ‘barbaric souls’].
— Heraclitus, Kahn XIV

What “language” do eyes and ears speak to the soul? That depends on how the soul is embodied, how events in the nervous system become significant, how practiception works. _[next]

Heraclitus says that you cannot step twice into the same river. A more exact translation says that ‘As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them’ (Kahn 1979, 53).

Think of any river you can find on a map of the world, and it's clear that if you can step into it once, then you can step into it twice. But that's because the river is a continuous flow, and so are you. ‘Stepping in’ is a general term that covers any number of instances; on the other foot, an actual ‘stepping into’ the river is a singular event and a unique experience. You can't have that same experience twice, because the waters are always changing, and so are you. The next time you commit the act, you and the river have both moved on, and the difference between you is not the same as it was. _[next]

We are in the habit of attributing experience to other humans, to a lesser degree to other primates, and so on to other life forms in proportion to their similarity to us, and perhaps their complexity. We don't usually attribute experience to simple nonliving entities; we don't feel that a stone feels anything. Why not?

Everything has some quality, which in Peircean terms is its Firstness. But according to Peirce, Firstness can only be apprehended as a mode of feeling, and ‘whatever is First is ipso facto sentient’ (CP 6.201, RLT 260, 1898). This cannot mean that it is an existing thing or subject capable of sensing the presence of other things, as a First has no existence. Whatever Firstness we find in actuality, or in any event, is its spontaneous quality: it is not moved, motivated, guided or constrained by anything else.

Firstness may be defined as follows: It is the mode in which anything would be for itself, irrespective of anything else, so that it would not make any difference though nothing else existed, or ever had existed, or could exist. Now this mode of being can only be apprehended as a mode of feeling. For there is no other mode of being which we can conceive as having no relation to the possibility of anything else. In the second place, the First must be without parts. For a part of an object is something other than the object itself. Remembering these points, you will perceive that any color, say magenta, has and is a positive mode of feeling, irrespective of every other. Because, Firstness is all that it is, irrespective of anything else, when viewed from without (and therefore no longer in the original fullness of firstness) the firstnesses are all the different possible sense-qualities, embracing endless varieties of which all we can feel are but minute fragments. Each of these is just as simple as any other. It is impossible for a sense quality to be otherwise than absolutely simple. It is only complex to the eye of comparison, not in itself.
— Peirce, RLT 147, PM 167 (1898)

When we say that a stone has its quality, its Firstness, we are taking its itness – separate existence, identity – for granted. We are viewing it from without, which precludes seeing ‘the original fullness of firstness.’ Like the stone itself, any qualities we attribute to it have become other to something else, and thus lost the indeterminacy and spontaneity which is theirs as possibilities rather than actualities. This is why we do not think of the stone (or its quality) as sentient, or as experiencing. But the quality in itself, unembodied in anything, in ‘the mode of being of that which is whatever it is regardless of anything else’ (CD ‘Firstness’), appears in its ‘original fullness’ when the elements of Secondness and Thirdness are dropped from the experience of the stone; or in Peirce's terms, when its Firstness is ‘prescinded’ from its other elements. Can you sense it?

The experience of being a sentient agent is no less than being the locus of something that is incessantly and spontaneously emerging. This experience is itself an emerging locus at the center of a vast but only weakly constraining, weakly determinate web of semiotic and physiological influences.
— Terrence W. Deacon (in Weber and Depew 2003, 305-6)

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The wholeness of experience is its presence – which is the continuity of the difference between past and future, between the already-determinate and the to-be-determined. Determination, appearing, happening and experiencing are all continuous processes “taking place in” time. Semiosis brings forth meaning from this matrix with the recognition of regularity as an element of experience.

Regularity implies generality; and generality is an intellectual relation essentially the same as significance, as is shown by the contention of the nominalists that all generals are names. Even if generals have a being independent of actual thought, their being consists in their being possible objects of thought whereby particulars can be thought. Now that which brings another thing before the mind is a representation; so that generality and regularity are essentially the same as significance. Thus, continuity, regularity, and significance are essentially the same idea with merely subsidiary differences. That this element is found in experience is shown by the fact that all experience involves time. Now the flow of time is conceived as continuous. No matter whether this continuity is a datum of sense, or a quasi-hypothesis imported by the mind into experience, or even an illusion; in any case it remains a direct experience. For experience is not what analysis discovers but the raw material upon which analysis works. This element then is an element of direct experience.
— Peirce, CP 7.535 (1899?)

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A language is a symbol system, but some words are relatively indexical. Pronouns, by directing attention to specific features of the immediate context rather than general types, work indexically better than nouns do.

It is impossible to express what an assertion refers to except by means of an index. A pronoun is an index. A noun, on the other hand, does not indicate the object it denotes; and when a noun is used to show what one is talking about, the experience of the hearer is relied upon to make up for the incapacity of a noun for doing what the pronoun does at once. Thus, a noun is an imperfect substitute for a pronoun.… A pronoun ought to be defined as a word which may indicate anything to which the first and second persons have suitable real connections, by calling the attention of the second person to it.
— Peirce (EP2:15 fn.)

The thing to which a pronoun calls attention must exist in the situational context of both of these persons in order for communication to succeed. In order for a noun (even a proper noun) to direct attention to the object of a symbol such as a sentence, the prior experience of the hearer is called upon – not only her memory of prior language usage, but also her memory of previous acquaintance with the object of the sentence. This memory makes the difference between ‘the inexperienced and the experienced personmeeting the same man and noticing the same peculiarities, which to the experienced man indicate a whole history, but to the inexperienced reveal nothing’ (EP2:8).

The ‘experienced’ reader of a text (i.e. the reader well acquainted with its subject and context) will also notice ‘peculiarities’ which not only ‘indicate a whole history’ but also point to previously unnoticed relationships among the signs woven into that text and their objects. My ‘real connection’ with a place becomes more finely articulated as i walk through it, even if i have taken that same path before, as long as i am attentive to its twists and turns on this walk. In my experience, reading and re-reading a challenging text (such as the works of Charles Peirce) can likewise sharpen the sense of what the author is writing about. For the ‘experienced’ reader, the very nouns in that text can act more like pronouns, drawing renewed attention to features of its object in order to regenerate its interpretant. No book can transmit acquaintance with such a ‘whole history’ or whole system; yet the writer works as if hoping that some future reader may be able to recreate or resurrect it. _[next]

Indexical signs inform an organism by redirecting attention within its Umwelt, which includes only those entities with which one is equipped to interact. An animal without ears, or rather lacking any way of detecting vibrations, lives in a silent world. For us humans, the external world includes all sorts of things we can think and speak about. When we talk about it, we say that the object out there is ‘intended’ by the term we use in reference to it (which relates it to our Innenwelt). Some philosophers refer to this ‘aboutness’ as ‘intentionality.’ It is a universal feature of language, and of what Damasio calls ‘extended consciousness.’

This very special kind of intentionality develops out of the more universal kind introduced in Chapter 4, which is characteristic of all life forms. But we humans are, as far as we know, unique on this planet in having developed an ability to talk about “things” such as development, or transformation, or experience – or to talk about other people in their absence. This ability, according to Richard Wrangham, enables the best and the worst of human behavior.

Both our “angelic” and “demonic” tendencies, therefore, depended for their evolution on the sophisticated forms of shared intentionality made possible by language—an ability that undoubtedly also contributed to much prosocial behavior. A chimpanzee-style form of shared intentionality launched the process at least seven million years ago. It took the mysterious dawning of a language facility, sometime between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago, to shake us into a new world. Language created our chimeric personality in which high killing power lies alongside reduced emotional reactivity. A unique communicative ability gave us a uniquely contradictory psychology of aggression.
— Wrangham 2019, 277-8

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In John Dewey's Experience and Nature, the difference between consciousness and mind is the difference between idea and meaning.

While on the psycho-physical level, consciousness denotes the totality of actualized immediate qualitative differences, or ‘feelings,’ it denotes, upon the plane of mind, actualized apprehensions of meanings, that is, ideas. There is thus an obvious difference between mind and consciousness; meaning and an idea. Mind denotes the whole system of meanings as they are embodied in the workings of organic life; consciousness in a being with language denotes awareness or perception of meanings; it is the perception of actual events, whether past, contemporary or future, in their meanings, the having of actual ideas. The greater part of mind is only implicit in any conscious act or state; the field of mind – of operative meanings – is enormously wider than that of consciousness. Mind is contextual and persistent; consciousness is focal and transitive. Mind is, so to speak, structural, substantial, a constant background and foreground; perceptive consciousness is process, a series of heres and nows. Mind is a constant luminosity; consciousness intermittent, a series of flashes of varying intensities. Consciousness is, as it were, the occasional interception of messages continually transmitted, as a mechanical receiving device selects a few of the vibrations with which the air is filled and renders them audible.
— Dewey (1929, 247)

That last metaphor can be misleading insofar as it evokes the ‘flashlight’ or ‘searchlight’ image of consciousness. Dewey clarifies this after offering a ‘formal definition of consciousness in relation to mind and meanings’:

Consciousness, an idea, is that phase of a system of meanings which at a given time is undergoing re-direction, transitive transformation. The current idealistic conception of consciousness as a power which modifies events, is an inverted statement of this fact. To treat consciousness as a power accomplishing the change, is but another instance of the common philosophic fallacy of converting an eventual function into an antecedent force or cause. Consciousness is the meaning of events in course of remaking; its ‘cause’ is only the fact that this is one of the ways in which nature goes on. In a proximate sense of causality, namely as place in a series history, its causation is the need and demand for filling out what is indeterminate.
There is a counterpart realist doctrine, according to which consciousness is like the eye running over a field of ready-made objects, or a light which illuminates now this and now that portion of a given field. These analogies ignore the indeterminateness of meaning when there is awareness; they fail to consider a basic consideration, namely, that while there exists an antecedent stock of meanings, these are just the ones which we take for granted and use: the ones of which we are not and do not need to be conscious.
— Dewey (1929, 251)

The “taken for granted” (or ‘ready-made’) is the tacit dimension of mind. The flashlight metaphor ‘postulates, even though only implicitly, a preestablished harmony of the knower and things known, passing over the fact that such harmony is always an attained outcome of prior inferences and investigations’ (Dewey 1929, 252). That ‘attained outcome’ is the structure of mind.

It is impossible to tell what immediate consciousness is – not because there is some mystery in or behind it, but for the same reason that we cannot tell just what sweet or red immediately is: it is something had, not communicated and known. But words, as means of directing action, may evoke a situation in which the thing in question is had in some particularly illuminating way.
— Dewey (1929, 250)

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A revelation or discovery must come as a surprise, but that is only the beginning of its integration into the guidance system. A turning sign can make a lasting difference to your “map of the world,” thus transforming your inhabitation of it, only to the extent that its interpretant is tested against your experience of interacting with the real world. The surprise is the spark, the trigger, sending you out on the path of inquiry. In order to grow into meaning, seed-signs need the water of life, which is your current experience; it also requires the soil, which is the residue of all past experience, the accumulated habits of the biosphere. And like all of the learning, development and evolution taking place on this planet, it also requires the energy of the sun and the continuous turning-out of time.

Present awareness, or awareness of what is currently happening, cannot be separated from memory of past events, or from anticipation of future events. Time, as the presence of impermanence, is simply the means by which the future both differs and continues from the already-determined, unalterable past. Experience is memory, while experiencing is time. _[next]

When Charles Peirce asks us to consider ‘the aggregate formed by a sign and all the signs which its occurrence carries with it’ (a ‘perfect sign’), how are we to imagine a sign carrying such an ‘aggregate’?

Maybe the same way we imagine that any ‘living cell carries with it the experiences of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors’?

All that experimentation, with its results propagated continuously through the generations, has made a difference to the genome and thus to the design of this living cell by evolution.

In energetic terms, emergy ‘records the available energy previously used up, expressed in units of one kind but carried as a property of the available energy of continuing outputs.’

This “carrying” is a metaphor, and “metaphor” evolved from the concept of carrying, just as semiosis carries information forward through a continuous series of actual meanings.

In physics, we call it energy. In biology, we call it metabolism. In psychology and phenomenology, we call it experience, or feeling. In religion, from animism on, we call it spirit. In semiotics, we call it semiosis. Time carries them all forward, impartially, continually.

What is the carrying capacity of a planet? It depends on the self-organizing flows and stores of energy.

What is the carrying capacity of a sign? It depends on the flow of semiosis and the habit-changes of organisms. _[next]

It was discovered long ago that direct electrical stimulation of a specific spot in the brain can evoke a vivid experience – for instance, stimulation of the temporal lobe can evoke visual hallucinations. You might guess that ‘experiences’ can thus be verifiably mapped to brain locations; but further investigation has shown that this is not the case. A later stimulus at the same spot often does not trigger the same experience, and

a given experience can first be evoked electrically, and then recur later as a spontaneous hallucination, even after the stimulation site which had first yielded it from the medial temporal lobe had already been surgically removed. This observation tells us that an ‘experience’ is widely distributed. How, then does the stimulation act? It seems to evoke the experience by tapping into its large network at one of several potential sites, and by doing so at one particularly responsive moment. Even then, each experience has been undergoing a substantial editing. Consider this singular fact: only one previous experience has been selected to take place at any one moment, whereas the electrical stimulus must have been passing across the links of many other potential memory circuits.
— James H. Austin (1998, 384)

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Walter Freeman (1999a, 159) defined phenomenology as ‘the systematic study of experiences.’ Another neurobiologist, Francisco Varela, called for a more rigorous method of investigating the nature of experience from the inside (Varela 1996, Varela and Shear 1999). But he seemed ambivalent about the expertise required to implement this phenomenological program; he described the ‘reduction’ which (according to Husserl) lies at the heart of it is a kind of ‘unlearning,’ and remarked that ‘I prefer to take my cues from Husserl's style as an eternal beginner, always willing to start anew; this is the hallmark of phenomenology itself (but it has not always been the case in practice)’ (Varela 1999, 266). Shunryu Suzuki (1970) takes the ‘beginner's mind’ to be the point of Zen practice.

The birds they sing
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
— Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem’

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According to Taigen Dan Leighton and Shohaku Okumura, the practice of zazen ‘promotes active attentiveness to our present life experience just as it is.’ Zen monastic life is ‘directed at helping practitioners together to embody and actualize this awareness in every aspect of ordinary life’ (Leighton and Okumura 1996, 16).

Phenomenology (and philosophy), as Peirce described it, begins with this same ‘attentiveness to our present life experience,’ but then proceeds to a description or analysis of it, with the goal of articulating what is essential to any possible experience, quite apart from anything peculiar to any individual subject of that experience, or to the culture or even the species of that individual. The formulations arrived at in this way furnish ‘fundamental principles’ to philosophy and other sciences (EP 2:258) in their quest for truth as well as their conduct in ordinary life.

According to Peirce (CP 1.522, 1903), the first of seven ‘mental qualifications of a philosopher’ is the ‘ability to discern what is before one's consciousness.’ In a sense, philosophy begins with phenomenology, the ‘most primal of all the positive sciences’ (EP2:144, CP 5.39, 1903). (To get a sense of what the word positive signifies in this philosophical context, see Dewey's and Peirce's entries in Baldwin's Encyclopedia.)

Although phenomenology is often said to be “the study of experience” (see above), its name points rather to the logos of the phenonomenon (Heidegger 1927, 28). As Peirce puts it,

Phenomenology ascertains and studies the kinds of elements universally present in the phenomenon; meaning by the phenomenon, whatever is present at any time to the mind in any way.
EP2:259, CP 1.186

The term was introduced by Hegel, but Peirce's usage differed from Hegel's.

I will so far follow Hegel as to call this science Phenomenology although I will not restrict it to the observation and analysis of experience but extend it to describing all the features that are common to whatever is experienced or might conceivably be experienced or become an object of study in any way direct or indirect.
EP2:143, CP 5.37

Peirce wrote in ‘Phaneroscopy or the Natural History of Concepts’ (1906):

It is more particularly to changes and contrasts of perception that we apply the word ‘experience.’ We experience vicissitudes, especially. We cannot experience the vicissitude without experiencing the perception which 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. Now constraint and compulsion cannot exist without resistance, and resistance is effort opposing change. Therefore there must be an element of effort in experience; and it is this which gives it its peculiar character.
CP 1.336

In a letter to William James, Peirce wrote of his phenomenological categories as

three modes of consciousness, that of feeling, that of EXPERIENCE (experience meaning precisely that which the history of my life has FORCED me to think; so that the idea of a struggle, of not mere twoness but active oppugnancy is in it), and thirdly the consciousness of the future (whether veridical or not is aside from the question) in expectation, which enters into all general ideas according to my variety of pragmatism.
CP 8.291 (1904)

In this context, Firstness is feeling, ‘experience’ as Secondness is forced (i.e. determined to affect consciousness in some way), while Thirdness is anticipatory and systemic (i.e. not yet fully determinate). In the context of his cosmological writings, Peirce used ‘consciousness’ more in connection with Firstness or feeling, and thus did not speak of all three categories as ‘modes of consciousness.’ In the ‘Trichotomic’ manuscript of 1888 (EP1:280), he had summarized them as follows: ‘First is the beginning, that which is fresh, original, spontaneous, free. Second is that which is determined, terminated, ended, correlative, object, necessitated, reacting. Third is the medium, becoming, developing, bringing about.’ In 1902, the year he first used the term ‘phenomenology,’ Peirce gave several sets of labels for the triad of categories; for example, one of them calls Firstness quality, Secondness occurrence, and Thirdness meaning (MS L75).

These variations illustrate the kind of polyversity which makes it so difficult to practice philosophy, and especially phenomenology, as a science – a difficulty of which Peirce was acutely aware, although (optimistically) he kept on trying. In a letter to Victoria Welby, he distinguished between experience and feeling:

The experience of effort cannot exist without the experience of resistance. Effort only is effort by virtue of its being opposed; and no third element enters. Note that I speak of the experience, not of the feeling, of effort.
SS, 12 Oct. 1904; CP 8.330

Later, in his ‘Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,’ Peirce asserted the reality of all three categories, or ‘Universes of Experience’:

Of the three Universes of Experience familiar to us all, the first comprises all mere Ideas, those airy nothings to which the mind of poet, pure mathematician, or another might give local habitation and a name within that mind. Their very airy-nothingness, the fact that their Being consists in mere capability of getting thought, not in anybody's Actually thinking them, saves their Reality. The second Universe is that of the Brute Actuality of things and facts. I am confident that their Being consists in reactions against Brute forces, notwithstanding objections redoubtable until they are closely and fairly examined. The third Universe comprises everything whose being consists in active power to establish connections between different objects, especially between objects in different Universes. Such is everything which is essentially a Sign – not the mere body of the Sign, which is not essentially such, but, so to speak, the Sign's Soul, which has its Being in its power of serving as intermediary between its Object and a Mind. Such, too, is a living consciousness, and such the life, the power of growth, of a plant. Such is a living constitution – a daily newspaper, a great fortune, a social ‘movement.’
EP2:435 (1908)

Even in that same essay, Peirce's definition of the word experience as ‘brutally produced’ emphasizes the element of Secondness. But in the appearing of ordinary phenomena, the three Universes are throughly entangled, and not merely mixed like the classical four ‘elements,’ which are more like kinds of matter than like universal modes of being. The universality and ubiquity of the three ‘categories’ or ‘elements’ is a key feature of Peirce's phenomenology and phaneroscopy. _[next]

Semiosis is a kind of triadic action. Peirce (CP 5.472-3, c. 1906) explains that the difference between ‘dynamical, or dyadic, action’ and ‘intelligent, or triadic action’ is that the latter involves the use of means to an end. Dyadic action consists of reactions between things, such as collisions, attractions, repulsions, chemical or nuclear reactions, none of which are intentional. It may include chain reactions, chains of efficient causality in which no final cause or “purpose” is involved. Event A causes B to occur, and if B later causes C as a separate event, we simply have another dyadic action with no intrinsic relation to the first. But in triadic action, A causes B because B has a systemic tendency to be followed by C, so that A is the system's way of getting to C by means of B. Such tendencies are the habits which are essential components of the processes enabling development and self-maintenance of complex adaptive systems. Triadic actions are also essential to semiosis.

All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects,— whether they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient, entirely or partially,— or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by “semiosis” I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.
EP2:411 (MS 318, 1907)

This ‘tri-relative influence’ is at the root of intentionality and of animate intelligence. Such actions are essentially triadic because they involve signs mediating between events and actions in such a way that the interpretant action (the ‘dynamic interpretant’) is determined by some ‘defining internal cause,’ although its ‘individuating external cause’ may be some actual event (Peirce, EP2:315). An interpretant is a response rather than a dyadic reaction, but genuine triadic sign-action also involves a dyadic relation between dynamic object and sign. This is essential to the sign-function we call indexical, as Peirce goes on to explain: ‘

For the acceleration of the pulse is a probable symptom of fever and the rise of the mercury in an ordinary thermometer or the bending of the double strip of metal in a metallic thermometer is an indication, or, to use the technical term, is an index, of an increase of atmospheric temperature, which, nevertheless, acts upon it in a purely brute and dyadic way. In these cases, however, a mental representation of the index is produced, which mental representation is called the immediate object of the sign; and this object does triadically produce the intended, or proper, effect of the sign strictly by means of another mental sign; and that this triadic character of the action is regarded as essential is shown by the fact that if the thermometer is dynamically connected with the heating and cooling apparatus, so as to check either effect, we do not, in ordinary parlance speak of there being any semeiosy, or action of a sign, but, on the contrary, say that there is an “automatic regulation,” an idea opposed, in our minds, to that of semeiosy.
CP 5.472-3 (MS 318, 1907)

The functioning of a thermostat is not considered semiosic ‘in our minds’ because no ‘mental’ action connects the dyadic action of the environment upon the thermometer with the dyadic action directly affecting the heating or cooling apparatus. Yet there is mentality involved in the action of a thermostat because it was designed to work as a balancing loop. It works automatically, meaning that there is no present experience of mental action in its functioning; but we could say the same of our own automatic (purely habitual) actions and reactions, things we do “unconsciously.”

On a longer time scale, though, habit formation is a mental process, and if we adopt Gregory Bateson's definition of ‘mind,’ we can say the same of evolution. Thus all warm-blooded animals have evolved to regulate their own temperature by means of homeostatic processes of which they are not normally conscious. The thermostat is just a mechanized version of that type of process, externalized from our bodyminds, but still within the mental processes of nature and culture, just as our habits are.

Returning to Peirce's ‘ordinary parlance,’ we say that mental sign-action does occur when someone reads a thermometer and interprets the reading as an index of a fever, or of an overheated or underheated space. The actual response of the reader will then be more intentional (i.e. mental) than automatic, and will thus be the completion of a ‘triadic action’ (CP 6.332, c. 1909). In the case of an index, though, the dyadic action of the object upon the sign is essential to the possibility of the sign conveying any information, or actually functioning as a sign. We might think of a thermometer which can be (but has not been) read as a “potential” sign, but as a sinsign, we assume that it exists whether anyone reads it or not. Likewise, we may call an uninterpreted index simply an ‘index’ even though it has not yet acted as a sign. The same goes for a ‘symbol’ – which indeed must involve an index, for as Peirce told us (EP2:193), ‘every symbol must have, organically attached to it, its Indices of Reactions’; and the same goes for every argument, since every argument is a symbol. The reality of a symbol depends on the real possibility of its informing somebody about its object, not on the existence of some actual representation (or ‘replica’) of the symbol. _[next]

The truth of a proposition depends on the dyadic or real relation (as opposed to a relation of reason) between that sign and its dynamic object. It must involve ‘action of brute force, physical or psychical,’ of the dynamic object upon the sign, so that the relation between the two is ‘real,’ i.e. surd – no sign can express or describe it.

The Secondness of experience itself is a dyadic relation or dynamic action between two subjects; it is ‘brute,’ ‘surd,’ indicible, ineffable. But a subject capable of attention and intention can become a host, as it were, of Thirdness, or semiosis, so that another subject can become an ‘object of thought’ (Peirce, CP 1.343, 1903). Now we have a triadic relation involving the object, the sign or ‘thought,’ and the experiencing subject, the system of interpretation or ‘mind.’ This is the essential structure of mental experience. The Firstness of experience, or the ‘feeling of what happens,’ is what Peirce calls consciousness. Using the term in this way clears up much of the confusion between “mind” and “consciousness” which Peirce pointed out in 1902, but which persists over a century later.

Peirce declared (CP 7.364) that ‘feeling is nothing but the inward aspect of things, while mind on the contrary is essentially an external phenomenon.’ He often makes ‘mind’ and ‘thought’ pretty much synonymous, as also are ‘feeling’ and ‘consciousness.’

Only take care not to make the blunder of supposing that Self-consciousness is meant, and it will be seen that consciousness is nothing but Feeling, in general, … the immediate element of experience generalized to its utmost.
CP 7.365

The mediate element of experience is the mental element, which is semiosic but not necessarily conscious.

The psychologists say that consciousness is the essential attribute of mind; and that purpose is only a special modification. I hold that purpose, or rather, final causation, of which purpose is the conscious modification, is the essential subject of psychologists' own studies; and that consciousness is a special, and not a universal, accompaniment of mind.
CP 7.366 (1902)

If experiencing is the interplay between the bodymind and its world, perception is the collision and/or collusion of subject and object. But when we speak of experience, we often think of it as internal, while the world consists of external objects. Some say that your capacity to experience is your ‘inner life.’ The image schema or root metaphor of the container seems to be involved here, but its role is ambigous (as Heidegger pointed out in Being and Time). We forget that the word ‘experience’ attaches the prefix ex-, meaning ‘out,’ to the original Greek root -peir-. In Latin this combination produced the verb experior and the nouns experientia and experimentum. The ex- prefix can serve as a reminder that the “view from within” is naturally oriented outwards, generating a dyadic relation between viewer and viewed, or “subject and object”. It's like the e- of emotion:

The departure from a state of calm rest without anticipation is aptly named: e(x)motion (‘ex’ = ‘outward’). An emotional state need not be revealed in immediate overt actions, but it certainly implies the high probability of actions that will soon be directed outward from an individual into the world.
— Walter Freeman (2000, 213)

We all recognize that emotional reactions, like all feelings, are fundamentally irrational or ‘surd.’

Rationality is being governed by final causes. Consciousness, the feeling of the passing instant, has, as such, no room for rationality.
— Peirce, CP 2.66

Yet we can be mediately conscious, or “mindful,” of mental experience as semiosis. Feelings, emotional or not, are intrinsic to mentality, just as Firstness is intrinsic to Secondness and thus to Thirdness. Conversely, when we drop off the Thirdness and even the Secondness from current experience (or prescind the Firstness from it), we are left with a flow of feelings or qualia such that there is no distinction between the feeling and what happens. This is the primal sense of nonduality. _[next]

Truth does not accumulate; it flows in a continuous current through any open channel. However, the effects of the flow can accumulate (like sediment) as instructions, constructions, obstructions, records and habits. Of course the longest-lasting effect of the flow is the channel itself. ‘The stream of water that wears a bed for itself is forming a habit’ (Peirce, EP2:418).

Self-control involving all three Universes can be continuous practice because the “self” is impermanent – it is a work in progress, or at least in process. The sign “self” is an empty “term” or Seme unless it is involved in a Pheme, ‘a Sign which is equivalent to a grammatical sentence, whether it be Interrogative, Imperative, or Assertory’ (CP 4.538). The Pheme itself is implicitly, if not explicitly, involved in an argument or iteration of the meaning cycle.

Your memory of an event – that is, your ability to recall it not only now but in the future – is itself a habit. Your memory edits itself, as it were, in the very act of remembering, but this too (like the perceptual judgment) is beyond your control – which makes it a real memory, not a factual replication of what actually happened. As accurate representations of past events, memories are fallible. Denial of this fallibility makes memory delusional; denial of ‘brutally produced’ experience makes self-control itself delusional. _[next]

A person can do what he wants, but not want what he wants. [Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.]
— Schopenhauer, On The Freedom Of The Will (1839)

In the last of his 1903 Harvard lectures, Peirce pointed out that ‘self-control of any kind is purely inhibitory. It originates nothing’ (EP2:233). What then is the original face of the guidance system? Ultimately, says Peirce, ‘it must come from the uncontrolled part of the mind, because a series of controlled acts must have a first’ (EP2:233).

All of our reasoning originates in what is “given” to us in perceptual judgments. Every such judgment is ‘the result of a process’ which is ‘not controllable and therefore not fully conscious’ (EP2:227). Consciousness takes up the task of controlling the process, domesticating it, harnessing a ‘logical energy’ which is originally wild. In its Firstness it is spontaneous and free, and yet the prerequisite of self-control. Logic as the ethos of inquiry is the heart of self-control in the use of symbols, but is grounded in a process continuous with direct perception, even with creation.

A consciousness for which the world ‘can be taken for granted’, which finds it ‘already constituted’ and present even in consciousness itself, does not absolutely choose either its being or its manner of being.
What then is freedom? To be born is to be simultaneously born of the world and to be born into the world. The world is always already constituted, but also never completely constituted. In the first relation we are solicited, in the second we are open to an infinity of possibilities. But this analysis is still abstract, for we exist in both ways at once.…

We choose our world and the world chooses us.
— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 526-7 (tr. Smith))

There's a split in the infinitive from to have to have been to will be.
— Finnegans Wake, 271

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As Mary Catherine Bateson points out, human learning tends to follow a spiral path: ‘Lessons too complex to grasp in a single occurrence spiral past again and again, small examples gradually revealing greater and greater implications’ (Bateson 1994, 30). Thus it is that a scripture continues to recreate meaning with each re-reading, as Gandhi said in his commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita:

If we do not feel a new interest in this every time we read it, the fault must lie with us, it cannot be that of the author of the Gita.
— Gandhi (1926/2000, 233)

But human learning has often been hampered by the ‘transmission’ model – the assumption that the teacher knows and sends, and the learner merely receives passively, and that learning can take place without trial and without incorporation of feedback from trials. The great teachers know better, as their methods show: Socrates led the learner through trial by dialog, and the Buddha encouraged his followers to apply his own trial-and-error method rather than claiming to have received an authoritative revelation. The sutras even record some of his failed experiments (see e.g. Thich Nhat Hanh 1998, 14).

Our teachers are buddhas and ancestors. We encounter our teacher as a buddha and an ancestor even though our teacher is just an ordinary human being. Uchiyama Rōshi often said, “No human being can be a true teacher. Only Buddha and zazen are our true teachers.” Human beings are just ordinary human beings. Yet the teacher who teaches us that only buddhas and zazen are the teacher is a true teacher. If we meet a person who says, “I’m a true teacher. I make no mistakes, so you have to believe and follow me,” we should take this with a grain of salt. It is better to question.
— Okumura 2018, 193-194

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πάντα δὲ δοκιμάζετε τὸ καλὸν κατέχετε
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
— 1 Thessalonians 5:21 [KJV]

The King James translation of this verse employs the primal sense of ‘prove’ in English, which according to the OED is ‘to make trial of, try, test’ – the meaning of the root Latin verb probare (and Greek δοκιμάζειν). To prove a statement or proposition in this sense is to investigate whether it really works as an act of meaning – whether it fits a niche in meaning space which is in real relation to the external world. Since context, occasion and meaning space are transformed by each act of meaning, the fit is always more or less temporary. In order to ‘hold fast that which is good’ in it, you may need to let go of a previous expression of it.

In recent centuries, the word prove in English most commonly invokes a secondary meaning, ‘to establish something as true’ – as if “truth” were a permanent and context-free quality of the “proven” statement. “Proof” in this sense is usually “demonstrated” by deduction from unquestioned principles or assumptions, from mathematical or ‘necessary reasoning.’

Scientific method is a matter of investigation, not of “proof” in this secondary sense. ‘Science probes; it does not prove’ (Bateson 1979, 32). Its “conclusions” are always tentative and probable, never permanent and certain. The same goes for ‘proving’ scriptural verses or metaphysical assertions. If they mean anything to us, we can only try them out in dialogical practice and learn from the results. As Peirce put it: ‘Demonstrative proof is not to be thought of. The demonstrations of the metaphysicians are all moonshine’ (CP 1.7). The realistic and pragmatic path is to live by those principles we have tried, and ‘hold fast’ to them because we are still trying them, not because we think our beliefs are permanently and absolutely true. _[next]

You can test your hypothesis by experiment, but how do you test your method of testing?

‘Science is a system of beliefs to which we are committed’ (Polanyi 1962, 171). The scientist is committed to those beliefs he must take for granted in order to investigate or test a hypothesis. Among the most fundamental of those beliefs are (first) that nature has a real order independent of what we think of it, and (second) that this order can be investigated by means of direct experience. Logically, this implies that any formulated belief about that order is fallible. But if we deny that there is some order, and some continuity, to the universe, we deny that there is any method of testing the veracity of any belief. Then the word “truth” is meaningless, and the third Universe collapses, leaving only a chaos of collisions without collusions. _[next]

The early Wittgenstein wrote that ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (Tractatus 5.6). But the deeper limitation of a world is the limitation (determination) of experience due to the mind's embodiment, which enables not only perception but even the wildest imagination. This includes one's conception of the Creator of the universe. Peirce as a pragmaticist held

that man is so completely hemmed in by the bounds of his possible practical experience, his mind is so restricted to being the instrument of his needs, that he cannot, in the least, mean anything that transcends those limits. The strict consequence of this is, that it is all nonsense to tell him that he must not think in this or that way because to do so would be to transcend the limits of a possible experience. For let him try ever so hard to think anything about what is beyond that limit, it simply cannot be done. You might as well pass a law that no man shall jump over the moon; it wouldn't forbid him to jump just as high as he possibly could.
For much the same reason, I do not believe that man can have the idea of any cause or agency so stupendous that there is any more adequate way of conceiving it than as vaguely like a man. Therefore, whoever cannot look at the starry heaven without thinking that all this universe must have had an adequate cause, can in my opinion not otherwise think of that cause half so justly than by thinking it is God.
CP 5.536, c. 1905

Unfortunately, for many believers the conception of “God” has not been anywhere near vague enough, as they imagine the ‘stupendous agency’ to be something like a dominating alpha male, rather than a Mind whose manifestation is the lived and living universe of experience. Surely the Creator and Determinator of whatever happens cannot be as determinate (delimited) as any willful or existing Self. The Creator must be the sole disembodied agency, quite inconceivable to any bodymind. There is no Dominus but the dominance of reality itself, to which we poor creatures can only submit, even in our most creative moments.

What Peirce called ‘the scientific method’ in his ‘Fixation of Belief’ essay, he later called ‘the method of experience’ – emphasizing the wild reality of experience and the humility of the method.

Changes of opinion are brought about by events beyond human control. All mankind were so firmly of opinion that heavy bodies must fall faster than light ones, that any other view was scouted as absurd, eccentric, and probably insincere. Yet as soon as some of the absurd and eccentric men could succeed in inducing some of the adherents of common sense to look at their experiments – no easy task – it became apparent that nature would not follow human opinion, however unanimous. So there was nothing for it but human opinion must move to nature's position. That was a lesson in humility. A few men, the small band of laboratory men, began to see that they had to abandon the pride of an opinion assumed absolutely final in any respect, and to use all their endeavors to yield as unresistingly as possible to the overwhelming tide of experience, which must master them at last, and to listen to what nature seems to be telling us. The trial of this method of experience in natural science for these three centuries – though bitterly detested by the majority of men – encourages us to hope that we are approaching nearer and nearer to an opinion which is not destined to be broken down – though we cannot expect ever quite to reach that ideal goal.
— from How to Reason, 1893 (R 407: 20–21, CP 5.384fn)

Over a century later, is ‘the trial of this method of experience’ still encouraging us? Or is it more like Kafka's Process, a labyrinth with no exit but death? _[next]

Discovery often means simply the uncovering of something which has always been there but was hidden from the eye by the blinkers of habit.
— Arthur Koestler (1964, 108)

Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill prepared for making discoveries; they also make very poor observations. Of necessity, they observe with a preconceived idea, and when they devise an experiment, they can see, in its results, only a confirmation of their theory.
— Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), trans. H.C. Green

Dewey (1929) argued that an intelligent ethical (guidance) system treats every course of action as an experiment, i.e. considers every principle modifiable by learning from experience. Eugene Gendlin, citing R.P. Crease,

points out that experiments have the character of ‘performances.’ What enters into a performance is more than the script or score. It includes a whole background of intuitive practices. All sorts of trials and errors, hunches and wildly derived ideas enter into the design of experiments. In a laboratory many improvised moves occur. One may employ procedures that lack theory for years, as well as theory that lacks procedures.
— Gendlin (1997)

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Like Elaine Pagels (2003 – see Chapter 6), Stephen Patterson in 5G (42) recognizes that ‘the rough treatment Thomas receives in John 20:24-29’ may represent ‘a direct attack on the Gospel of Thomas and the particular form of Christianity associated with it.’ Yet even in the story as John tells it, the “doubting Thomas” stands up for experience against wishful thinking or peer pressure as reasons to believe. Like Hamlet in his plan to test the claims of his father's ghost, he wants empirical evidence even though he is predisposed to believe what he's been told.

Hamlet is acutely aware that self-deception (or spirit-deception) is a real possibility, especially because of his own ‘melancholy’ and his deep-rooted prejudice against his uncle. So he looks for corroboration from the very person most unlikely to give it: his uncle himself, whose conscience will speak through observable behavior:

I'll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle. I'll observe his looks;
I'll tent him to the quick. If a do blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil; and the devil hath power
T' assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds
More relative than this. The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.
— Hamlet, II.ii.590-601

In this context, the word ‘relative’ suggests both relational and relevant. We could almost say that Hamlet is calling upon what Peirce called ‘the logic of relatives.’ His ‘relative grounds’ amount to what a lawyer might call a “material witness.” Later on, he also calls upon another reliable witness (Horatio) to confirm his own observations. His method is sound enough, devious as it may be, and proves successful (though he indulges in manic glee at his own success and thus loses the advantage of it). Contrast all this with the words put into the mouth of Jesus at John 20:29, which exalt blind and absolute faith over all ‘relative’ grounds for belief: ‘blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.’

“Absolute” beliefs and “literal” readings look to habit or convention rather than experience for guidance, but the reading grounded in experience is the relative, relevant, material, pragmatic, integral reading: the one that integrates body, path and situation. _[next]

Jesus said, ‘Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the Son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven.’
— Thomas 44 (Lambdin)

Just what is this unforgivable sin? According to DeConick (2007a, 167) ‘it was believed to be blasphemous to speak against a prophet filled with God's Spirit since the spirit was concerned with the realm of revelation.’ The early Christian text Didache said: ‘While a prophet is making ecstatic utterances, you must not test or examine him. For “every sin will be forgiven”, but “this sin will not be forgiven”’ (11.7, DeConick's translation). It seems that critical thinking, or at least critical speaking, at the time of revelation, is the unforgivable sin.

However, this doesn't explain why blasphemy against the Father or the Son will be forgiven, as they are no less divine according to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Perhaps we might venture a semiotic explanation, based on the analogy between the Trinity and the core semiotic triad of Sign, Object and Interpretant.

Peirce did something like this at the end of his Lowell Lecture series in 1865, referring to an ‘infinite Symbol’ which ‘denotes not the contingent facts of the universe but the absolute law in all its detail and unity to which the universe is subjected,’ which law is ‘the Creator of the World’ and ‘is essentially identical with the Symbol’ (W1:502-3). This is the object of the ‘finite symbol’ which represents it, and its ‘interpretant is the Divine Logos’ which is ‘also the Son of God.’

In this Peircean text, the third member of the triad is not the Sign but ‘the ground of the symbolization or the comprehension of the symbol, since it completely determines the symbol in all respects’ – in other words, the very Source of semiosis, that continuous process underlying not only revelation but all forms of communication, cognition and life itself.

Here, therefore, we have a divine trinity of the object, interpretant, and ground. Each fully constitutes the symbol and yet all are essential to it. Nor are they the same thing under different points of view but three things which attain identity when the symbol attains infinite information.
— W1:503 (italics added)

‘Infinite information’, if any human symbol could attain it, would be something like knowing the Whole Truth. Interpreting Thomas 44 (and its parallels in other gospels) in this light, we could say that it is forgivable to blaspheme against Father and Son (the object and interpretant of the symbol) because we can only conceive of them as persons whose names are human conventions (and patriarchal conventions at that). But the Holy Spirit, as the ground of all semiosis, is the transpersonal, more-than-human Source of revelation.

We might say that the Holy Spirit is a name for semiotic energy.

At the crucial time when the prophetic Sign breaks into the ‘cognitive bubble’, to ‘test or examine’ it is to close the gate through which we can learn anything new. The time for testing the Truth of the Word, or our comprehension of it, is later on, when we seek to find out how it could modify our guidance systems, i.e. what it means for our practice. But if we don't first allow the rain of revelation to penetrate the soil of our consciousness, there would be nothing to test and nothing to learn. Now that would be unforgivable. On what ground could forgiveness ever take place? _[next]

Annie Dillard (1974) writes of the ‘newly sighted,’ people given a visual world by removal of cataracts after years or lifetimes of blindness: some refused the gift of sight and space because it was too disturbing. It felt like the loss of innocence.

Our whole experience of the external world arrives by way of perturbations, often accompanied by a sense of loss. As Dillard says, ‘Form is condemned to an eternal danse macabre with meaning’ (1974, 35). ‘The fluttering patch I saw in my nursery window – silver and green and shape-shifting blue – is gone; a row of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the distant lawn’ (36). They are mute because they turned out to be what the fluttering patch had to say, and the innocence or Firstness of its appearance is covered up by its name. We are driven out of the mythical Garden when we feel this loss of innocence. Yet the emergence of meaning is hardly less amazing, when we step back from that. And those condemned to live in the pure “magic” of presence undiluted by memory – like Zasetsky in Luria (1972), or Clive Wearing (Restak 1998, 29-31) – feel an even greater sense of loss, feel as if they have been dead or asleep all their lives. _[next]

Learning lives in the dynamic tention between the simplifying, classifying, framing work of cognition and the perturbing force of experience; ‘it is on the basis of this happily unstable equilibrium that our understanding proceeds’ (Eco 1997, 252).

The more stable you are, the more ‘set in your ways,’ the less able you are to learn from new experiences; but the more open you are to new experience, the more it will destabilize you. In the study of neural networks this is called the stability-plasticity dilemma:

If new input is fully integrated, as the result of strong plasticity, then the representation of past experience must be degraded, producing catastrophic instability. Conversely, the network's developmental context (its stable connectional inertia) frames the recognition of each new input pattern, and the opportunity for plasticity that remains. Therefore, to the extent that the continuity of the self is maintained, new experiences can only be understood as they are organized and framed by the templates of past experience.
— Harkness and Tucker (in Lewis and Granic 2000, 198)

The greater the learning opportunity, the more it comes on like “the end of the world.”