Speaking from experience could mean either speaking from the primal truth or speaking toward the final truth. The primal truth, the very Firstness, can be neither expressed nor questioned within a conventional symbol system. We approach the final truth by means of the public dialog called science, but can never know how close we are to arriving at that ideal end of inquiry. Can the wholly authentic expression of primal truth penetrate the realm of public discourse? Can the public discourse incorporate the intimate on its critical path toward the ultimate?
Creative love
Man’s destiny on earth, as I am led to conceive it, consists in the realization of a perfect society, fellowship, or brotherhood among men, proceeding upon a complete Divine subjugation in the bosom of the race, first of self-love to brotherly love, and then of both loves to universal love or the love of God, as will amount to a regenerate nature in man, by converting first his merely natural consciousness, which is one of comparative isolation and impotence, into a social consciousness, which is one of comparative omnipresence and omnipotence; and then and thereby exalting his moral freedom, which is a purely negative one, into an aesthetic or positive form: so making spontaneity and not will, delight and no longer obligation, the spring of his activity.
Henry James the elder (1863, 6)
James was the father of Henry James the novelist and William James the philosopher and psychologist. Later (p. 10) in his book Substance and Shadow, he refers to the ‘perfect society, fellowship, or brotherhood among men’ as ‘the Social principle’ – which Peirce identified as the foundation of logic. Peirce also expanded on this theme in ‘Evolutionary Love’ (1893):
… We are to understand, then, that as darkness is merely the defect of light, so hatred and evil are mere imperfect stages of ἀγάπη and ἀγαθόν, love and loveliness. This concords with that utterance reported in John’s Gospel: “God sent not the Son into the world to judge the world; but that the world should through him be saved. He that believeth on him is not judged: he that believeth not hath been judged already.… And this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and that men loved darkness rather than the light.” That is to say, God visits no punishment on them; they punish themselves, by their natural affinity for the defective. Thus, the love that God is, is not a love of which hatred is the contrary; otherwise Satan would be a coordinate power; but it is a love which embraces hatred as an imperfect stage of it, an Anteros—yea, even needs hatred and hatefulness as its object. For self-love is no love; so if God’s self is love, that which he loves must be defect of love; just as a luminary can light up only that which otherwise would be dark. Henry James, the Swedenborgian, says: “It is no doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love to love one’s own in another, to love another for his conformity to oneself: but nothing can be in more flagrant contrast with the creative Love, all whose tenderness ex vi termini must be reserved only for what intrinsically is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself.” This is from Substance and Shadow: an Essay on the Physics of Creation.
— EP1:353-4, W8:184-5
What James calls ‘morality’ seems equivalent to Peirce’s ‘self-control,’ which enables taking responsibility for one’s actions. That this ‘moral freedom’ should ideally be ‘exalted’ into the form of ‘spontaneity’ and ‘delight’ sounds more like Blake than Peirce, but is reflected in Peirce’s classification of the ‘normative sciences,’ where ethics depends on esthetics, just as logic depends on the Social Principle.
Collusions
Recognition of others as experiencing subjects is essential to the nature of the human animal (and probably other social animals as well: see for instance de Waal 1996, chapter 2). Michael Tomasello (1999) found the uniquely human way of life to be based on our ability to identify with other selves: through ‘joint attention’ you understand that other people use things to realize goals just as you do. He offered this account of what happens when humans deal with artifacts such as texts:
An individual confronts an artifact or cultural practice that she has inherited from others, along with a novel situation for which the artifact does not seem fully suited. She then assesses the way the artifact is intended to work (the intentionality of the inventor), relates this to the current situation, and then makes a modification to the artifact. In this case the collaboration is not actual, in the sense that two or more individuals are simultaneously present and collaborating, but rather virtual in the sense that it takes place across historical time as the current individual imagines the function the artifact was intended to fulfill by previous users, and how it must be modified to meet the current problem situation.
— Tomasello (1999, 41)
These imaginative acts of assessment need not be self-conscious acts – in fact they are often no more conscious than the act of constructing a sentence in conversation. In order to carry cultural traditions forward in this way, the subject must be conscious of the situation in a (perhaps) uniquely human way, but not necessarily meta-conscious of her acts as such. In some cases of ‘sociogenesis’, as Tomasello calls it, the collaboration is not virtual but actual, with two or more individuals interacting in ‘real time’. This is in fact the prototypical situation; virtual collaboration does not develop at all if a child is deprived of real-time collaboration with caregivers.
This is the essence of the human dialog which generates cultures and persons. Our collaborative practices of guided and guiding interaction with each other, or with artifacts as described above, are what i call intimologies. They weave the network of connections that we call a community.
The Permanent Assurance
Outside of specialist/esoteric circles, consensus about the meaning of general and abstract language is hard to establish. When the objects of joint attention are invisible and intangible, and we need to believe that we have consensus, we are likely to confabulate in order to ‘keep the party going’ – just as a patient with severe memory loss or agnosia, unable to recall his history, will invent a story to cover up the deficit. Such patients have no idea that they are confabulating, and may refuse to admit that they are doing so even when the evidence is obvious to all.
On a purely perceptual level, the brain does the same thing when it ‘fills in’ the blind spot which is inherent to the structure of the retina. Just as there is no blank area in your visual field, even when you close one eye, no discontinuity in the consensual world appears to you: the sense you make of the world must on the whole appear seamless. To the non-participating observer, it is clear that the construction of consensus is hard work and the results dubious and impermanent. It is not surprising then that an established order tends to rely on unquestioned and unquestionable authority as a short cut through, or substitute for, the hard work of consensus-building. An authority figure offers an anchor, a point of stability, when the world of experience threatens to slide into chaos.
Human beings, fearing their own transience, have always associated value with permanence and preferred to put their trust in those who were ready to claim an unchanging truth.
— M.C. Bateson (2000, 135)
But the value attached to permanence is ever at odds with the value attached to life and consciousness, for these are dynamic and impermanent.
Common time
Habits and conventions, once formed, tend to sink beneath our notice. We are primed to notice the unusual, the uncommon, the exceptional; we look for the un- or super-natural rather than the natural. What is common to all experience is the deepest component of the phaneron, but the most difficult to attend to. It takes a communal effort to construct a context in which our language (or any symbol system) can refer to it at all. In more ordinary circumstances we have to approach it indirectly, by creating sudden openings in the bubbles whose surfaces furnish the ground of our awareness. Such mindquakes, momentarily at least, reveal the bubbles as impermanent. Indeed impermanence is the very presence of the bubble, the continuity of time.
As a social being, the inhabitation of your time is the interhabitation of our time, communal time.
Commensing
The geographic equivalent of Peirce’s commens is the commons, which is as essential to the well-being of a geographical community as the commens is to communication (Hess and Ostrom 2007).
The collective, communal belief system is organized by and for what we call common sense. But this consensus-building (or rebuilding) process depends crucially on the self-controlled efforts of community members: hence the dynamic tension between individual and communal belief systems.
The circumstance that each person is defined by and identified with a specific locus in a network of relations guarantees that selfishness is self-defeating. On the other hand, too much conformity to laws or patterns of behavior that ignore the specific circumstances of that locus can defeat (or at least anesthetize) the community guided or constituted by those laws.
I and I
Conversation is taking turns playing First and Second (person).
A Dialog is Third: it says something that neither person could say alone.
If your reading of this text is part of a real dialog, it is not a reading of the author’s intended meaning, or of your own, but a joint reading of the world (i.e. of that face of the world which is currently in focus). A complete comprehension of the author’s intention here is of no importance; what matters is the spark of interaction between two views of a reality which is independent of both views.
We have to learn what we can, but remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle, closing out the void, so that we forget that what we do not know remains boundless, without limit or bottom, and that what we know may have to share the quality of being known with what denies it. What is seen with one eye has no depth.
— Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home, 29
Turning takes
A path is made by people walking on it; a path discovers itself by crossing with other paths.
Reader, I beg you will think this matter out for yourself, and then you can see — I wish I could — whether your independently formed opinion does not fall in with mine.
— Peirce, CP 4.540 (‘Prolegomena’, 1906)
Once a person has escaped the cage of his own opinions by entering into the quest for truth, even the internal monologue, the stream of consciousness expressed as a train of thought, can be a dialogue, or even a dialog (for the difference, see the obverse of this chapter). What counts is the sense of mission, the spirit of inquiry. The logic of this, as Peirce saw it, is that each thought is addressed by the self you are now to the self you will be momentarily: past self addresses future self through present semiosis, and the former future self proceeds to test the received idea. A philosophical writer like Peirce will typically test an idea in this way, sometimes for years, before she considers it worthy to launch into the great conversation for further testing.
The appearance of monologue, then, can be deceptive. The difference between an ordinary conversation and the reading of a text like this one is mostly a matter of medium (spoken, written, printed, electronic, etc.) and of time scale. The great conversation among authors is simply a macro-dialog, in which each partner can take years, or a lifetime, to consider and deliver his reply to what’s been said before. Since a partner does not have to wait her turn, and can reply to any number of prior texts all at once, this conversation is ‘wired’ in parallel rather than series – it’s a network rather than a train of thought. Even readers who never write are involved in this conversation, to the extent that their reading makes a difference in how they live their lives. True, the reader/author relationship is not symmetrical in ‘real time’ like the partnership in a face-to face conversation, because the text of a book does not change in response to the reader’s contribution – but the meaning certainly does. A book on the shelf means nothing at all. Don’t think that the meaning is all in the text, or all in your mind. The meaning is in the relationship, the intimate space, between you and me. Regardless of scale or medium, dialog is always talking through together.
Growing meaning
When we read the primary scripture, the Book of Nature, scientifically, we assume that its development was continuous and consistent – that the Mind of its Creator does not contradict itself, but changes itself continuously (evolves), so that throughout any measurable span of spacetime, at least some of its legisigns continue to govern unfolding events. In science, when well-documented facts or observations appear to be mutually contradictory, we guess that there is something wrong with the theoretical framework(s) within which some of those facts have been hitherto understood.
Likewise, when a systematic philosopher such as Peirce appears to make an assertion incompatible with some previous assertion of his own, without giving any indication that the new assertion is a correction or improvement of the older one, our first guess should be that our interpretation of at least one of his statements is faulty. We could call this the principle of hermeneutic fallibilism. The next step is to look for a more comprehensive interpretation of the author’s work, whereby the statements in focus appear complementary rather than contradictory, or occupy different contextual niches in a consistent meaning space, or represent different stages in the development of a single consistent system. If we do come up with a more comprehensive interpretation, it may bear fruit in future readings of this writer’s work, revealing more of its depth, breadth and complexity – perhaps more than its author himself recognized. Or the hypothetical framework may prove incompatible with subsequent readings, and have to be discarded in its turn. If no such comprehensive interpretation seems to work, then the next hypothesis to try is that the author has changed his mind on the subject without giving notice of the change – or that his system is not so consistent as we thought.
Of course, all this deep reading requires sustained attention, which means not turning attention to other possible objects in the meantime.
Casting a dragnet
We can talk about ‘speaking from experience’ but we can’t say what ‘experience’ is. We can talk about the causes or conditions for having some specific experience, or for experiencing generally; but like all talk it means nothing unless you are already acquainted with the subject. Semiotically, i.e. from inside of semiosis, that subject is the object of the symbol; and the difference made by the operation of the sign is its interpretant. But the symbol can’t make a difference in the absence of ‘collateral experience’ (Peirce) on the interpreter’s part.
I fear I may be producing the impression of talking at random. It is that I wish the reader to “catch on” to my conception, my point of view; and just as one cannot make a man see that a thing is red, or is beautiful, or is touching, by describing redness, beauty, or pathos, but can only point to something else that is red, beautiful, or pathetic, and say, “Look here too for something like that there,” so if the reader has not been in the habit of conceiving ideas as I conceive them, I can only cast a sort of dragnet into his experience and hope that it may fish up some instance in which he shall have had a similar conception.
— Peirce, EP2:122