Authority and inquiry

For Peirce, the scientific method was the only reliable approach to truth, in the long run. The ‘method of authority,’ as he argued in his 1877 essay on ‘The Fixation of Belief’, can be effective in establishing social consensus or unifying a community, but ‘the notion of any weight of authority being attached to opinions in philosophy or in science is utterly illogical and unscientific’ (EP2:206).

But science students accept theories on the authority of teacher and text, not because of evidence. What alternatives have they, or what competence? The applications given in texts are not there as evidence but because learning them is part of learning the paradigm at the base of current practice. If applications were set forth as evidence, then the very failure of texts to suggest alternative interpretations or to discuss problems for which scientists have failed to produce paradigm solutions would convict their authors of extreme bias. There is not the slightest reason for such an indictment.

— Kuhn (1969, 80-81)

Kuhn is surely right that for the student, “learning the ropes” of any special science is not an entirely logical or scientific process, in the Peircean sense of those words. Similarly in a religious path, deference and submission to authority is a standard part of apprenticeship. It is by this route that one learns the basic stance from which discoveries can be made (when the situation becomes too hot for the old paradigm to handle) or learns how to pass on the tradition (in more normal circumstances). More generally still, obedience to authority is probably a necessary stage in moral development. But if development gets arrested at that stage – well, the Nuremberg trials should have taught us what happens then.

In a mature guidance system, ‘there are experts, but no authorities’ (Popper 1990, 34) – ‘experts’ being those with extensive and intensive experience in a given universe of discourse. The real authority belongs to the experience. The experience of a turning sign is the experience of turning and being turned. The truth of a turning symbol and the guidance value of its interpretant depend on the determination of that interpretant by its dynamic object, through the medium of the sign. Authority does not belong to its author, nor wisdom to the wise, nor is prophecy embodied in the prophet, but only in continuous semiosis. Worship of any human author is misdirected. In the idiom of the Gospel of Thomas,

Jesus said, ‘When you see one who was not born of woman, prostrate yourselves on your faces and worship him. That one is your father.’

— Thomas 15 (Lambdin)

As DeConick (2007a, 92) observes, ‘not born of woman’ is the usual code for ‘not human.’ Only the Creator is worthy of worship – the one whose need to be known is the sentient being’s need to know.

The web of life

A bit of 20th-century scripture:

Man does not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

These words have been widely quoted since the 1970s, and encapsulate much of the ecological awareness developing since then. They are usually attributed to ‘Chief Seattle,’ and thus taken to speak for authentic Native American culture. The real story (like the web of life) is a little more complex.

On October 29, 1887, Henry A. Smith published a column in the Seattle Sunday Star entitled ‘Scraps from a Diary—Chief Seattle.’ The column included Smith’s reconstruction, based on his notes taken at the time, of a speech given in 1854 by Chief Seattle, or Seath’tl, of the Duwamish people. There is no other record of this speech. Blaisdell (2000, 117-120) reprints the Smith text as given in Frederic James Grant’s History of Seattle (1891).

The Smith text was rediscovered, touched up and rendered into a more contemporary idiom by later writers, notably the poet William Arrowsmith in 1969. His version was used by screenwriter Ted Perry in producing the script for a documentary aired on television in 1971; and this is the source of the famous ‘web of life’ statement. But the producers of the film failed to credit Perry with the script, thus leaving the impression that the words were Chief Seattle’s. Perry’s text (given in Seed et al. 1988, 67-73), though doubtless quite different from whatever the Chief originally said, is now the most widely quoted version of it, and deservedly so: its power and beauty leave the Smith text in the dust. Many cite it as an authentic expression of Native American culture; Joseph Campbell, who recited it in his PBS TV series with Bill Moyers, attributed it to ‘one of the last spokesmen of the Paleolithic moral order’ (Campbell 1988, 41). Fritjof Capra helped to set the record straight by using it for the title and epigraph of his 1996 book The Web of Life, crediting ‘Ted Perry, inspired by Chief Seattle.’ There is no question that Perry’s stirring words have inspired many others in their turn.

The Perry text is related to Chief Seattle’s original speech in much the same way as the Gospels are related to the original words of Jesus. However much editing, translation and revision took place along the way, the resulting texts have undoubtedly served some readers as a revelation. The history of that revision process may not matter to those readers, but it’s an interesting case study for those of us investigating the genesis of scriptures.

Reading the world

We read the word wondering
what we mean by it.

We read the world wondering
what it means by us.

The sense of wonder is a primary spiritual capacity. But we tend to waste it on extraordinary or imaginary phenomena, because our habits tend to blind us to the ordinary wonders right under our noses. Like all of our habits, we tend to take our perceptual reading skills for granted – especially our skills at reading ‘texts’ (such as other people’s faces) that we are most predisposed to read. One way of gaining a new respect for the range and depth of such reading is to consider some unusual cases. Murray Gell-Mann takes up one of these:

The man in question, Dr. Arthur Lintgen of Pennsylvania, said he could look at a record of fully orchestrated post-Mozart classical music and identify the composer, often the piece, and sometimes even the performing artist. [Professional magician and debunker James] Randi subjected him to his usual rigorous tests and discovered that he was telling the exact truth. The physician correctly identified two different recordings of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’, as well as Ravel’s ‘Bolero’, Holst’s ‘The Planets’, and Beethoven’s ‘Sixth Symphony.’ Naturally Randi showed him some other records as controls. One, labeled ‘gibberish’ by Dr. Lintgen, was by Alice Cooper. On seeing another control, he said, ‘This is not instrumental music at all. I’d guess that it’s a vocal solo of some kind.’ In fact it was a recording of a man speaking …

— Gell-Mann (1994, 290)

Gell-Mann comments, ‘This odd claim that turned out to be genuine violated no important principle’ – meaning that it didn’t undermine currently well-supported models of either biology or physics. On the contrary, it shows that the natural semiotic processes by which people extract meaning from physical signs (sinsigns) can be more powerful and versatile than we usually give them credit for.

One more specific example (from Wegner 2002, but also found in other sources): a horse called ‘Clever Hans’ became famous in Germany around 1900 because he could apparently add, subtract, multiply, divide, read, spell, and identify musical tones, answering questions by tapping his hoof. It took a persistent investigator named Pfungst to figure out that Hans was doing all this by reading very subtle body language cues from his trainer and other humans – cues so subtle that the trainer himself was wholly unaware of them. So Hans really was ‘clever’ enough to fool quite a few humans, but not because he was trying to, and not by violating any basic principles of equine psychology. This case does not undermine the consensus that using symbolic language is beyond the skill of a horse, but it does extend our understanding of how meaning can happen biologically (and without conscious intent) – because Herr Pfungst managed to explain the apparent anomaly by means of careful empirical observation.

Sensory perception is far more worthy of wonder than speculations about extrasensory perception. Ordinary experience of the natural world is infinitely more wonderful than stories of the supernatural. Perhaps the greatest wonder of all is the continuous presence of the phaneron – if only we could look it in the face.

Wherever you turn, there is the Face of God.

Qur’án 2:115 (Cleary)

Theory

The English word theory derives from a Greek root meaning either contemplation or being a spectator or onlooker, as in the theater. In purely theoretical science, one takes on the role of spectator rather than actor, so that he is not “trying to prove” his own idea.

The scientific man is eager to submit himself, his ideas, and his purpose, to the Great Power which, no doubt, penetrates his own being, but is yet all but wholly external to him and beyond anything that his poor present notion could ever, of itself, develope unfructified. The Absolute Knowledge of Hegel is nothing but G.W.F. Hegel’s idea of himself; and it has not taught him the very first true lesson in philosophy, that “whoever shall choose to seek his own purpose and idea shall miss it, and whoever shall abandon his own purpose and idea to adopt the purpose and idea of the Author of nature shall accomplish that, and his own long-abandoned purpose and idea along with it.”

— Peirce, CP 8.118 (1902)

Einstein remarked that ‘the true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.’ According to Gadamer (1960, 124), to abandon of one’s own purpose in contemplation is to participate in that ‘sacral communion that lies behind the original Greek concept of theoria.’

Greek metaphysics still conceives the essence of theoria and of nous as being purely present to what is truly real, and for us too the ability to act theoretically is defined by the fact that in attending to something one is able to forget one’s own purposes.

Like Peirce, Gadamer affirms that losing oneself in this way, either in theoretical contemplation or in the theater, leads to a higher self-development. ‘A spectator’s ecstatic self-forgetfulness corresponds to his continuity with himself’ (Gadamer 1960, 128).

Limits of Interpretation

The number of coherent interpretations of a text may be infinite, but not all interpretations are coherent.

Texts frequently say more than their authors intended to say, but less than what many incontinent readers would like them to say. Independent of any alleged intention of the author is the intention of the text. But a text exists only as a physical object, as a Linear Text Manifestation. It is possible to speak of text intentions only as the result of a conjecture on the part of the reader. The initiative of the reader basically consists in making a conjecture about the text intention. A text is a device conceived in order to produce its Model Reader. Such a Model Reader is not the one who makes the only right conjecture. A text can foresee a Model Reader entitled to try infinite conjectures. But infinite conjecture does not mean any possible conjecture.

— Eco (1990, 148)

Eco follows this up with an example of how some conjectural readings of a passage in Finnegans Wake – which is ‘itself a metaphor for the process of unlimited semiosis’ (Eco 1979, 70) – are tested and refuted by invoking the principle of ‘internal textual coherence.’ The scientific method of ‘conjectures and refutations’ (Popper 1968) also takes coherence as a leading principle, although it also brings experience of the external world to bear on the question, by making observations which could refute even an internally coherent conjecture. The method of the artist is essentially the same, according to Gombrich (2002); he calls it ‘schema and correction’ or ‘making before matching.’ If the goal of a drawing, for instance, is an accurate depiction of an object, you have to make the drawing before you can see how well it matches the object.

A hypothesis is a model or theory on probation. An explicit model is a habit on probation; an established (‘fixed,’ ‘proven’) habit acts implicitly.

Who means?

It has been said of Boehme that his books are like a picnic to which the author brings the words and the reader the meaning. The remark may have been intended as a sneer at Boehme, but it is an exact description of all works of literary art without exception.

— Northrop Frye (1947, 427-8)

This would certainly apply to works of literary art – and to scriptures – which function as turning symbols. Do they differ in this respect from scientific works, or philosophical works, which can also work as turning symbols? That depends on the nature of the objects of these symbols, and the nature of the collateral experience of those objects which the reader brings to the act of meaning. That is always the reader’s act, although the Truth of the symbol (argument or proposition) must be, for the reader, independent of the reader’s personal belief.

Cognation

Do you read me? Then you have to believe that your experience is cognate with mine. Co-gnatus, ‘born together’ (or ‘descended from the same ancestor’), derives from the Latin verb gigno (earlier geno), meaning ‘beget’ or ‘bring forth’. Its root forms -gn-, -gen- and-gon- have begotten the stems of many English words, along with its complement verb nascor (‘to be born’), through its participial form natus (or gnatus), source of English words such as nature and native.

Turning how?

How can scripture reading come to pierce an ox hide?

— T’ien-t’ung (Cleary 1997b, 322)

Where does a gnox hide? Who knows?
Our habit is to read utterances like these as rhetorical questions – as if we gnew the answers. A reading practice like Dogen‘s challenges this habit, challenges us to penetrate the shell of habits. Symbols which are only symbols do not act as turning signs: ‘Strictly pure Symbols can signify only things familiar, and those only in so far as they are familiar’ (Peirce, CP 4.544n, 1906). The turning symbol must involve an Index directing attention beyond the familiar.

Where is the Index in this sentence?

Nor are Symbols and Indices together generally enough. The arrangement of the words in the sentence, for instance, must serve as Icons, in order that the sentence may be understood. The chief need for the Icons is in order to show the Forms of the synthesis of the elements of thought. For in precision of speech, Icons can represent nothing but Forms and Feelings.

— Peirce, CP 4.544, ‘Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism’

How do you Feel?

Scatterlings

And among His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the living creatures that He has scattered through them: and He has power to gather them together when He wills.

— Qur’án 42.29 (Yusuf Ali)

To ‘gather them together’ is to un-differentiate them, i.e. to uncreate them. On the other hand, the scattering is only through physical spacetime. In eternal meaning space, the myriad beings together now constitute the Living One, the buddha-nature, the Universe of Firstness. And since the world is inside out, each individual is a recreation of that singularity. ‘The entire universe suffers the pangs of a new creation in and through a person’s existence’ (Kim 1975, 172, after Dogen).