My little beauty is fast asleep, leaving me alone with my thoughts for an hour or two. And for the past several days, while other commitments have prevented me from making any entries to this blog, it occurred to me that this blog needs to begin living up to its name (which, I admit, is a term I invented years ago, and which sprang readily to mind when I was groping for a title in the wee hours last week when I started this enterprise on something of a whim). Occasional effusions of self-pity such as the first two entries have featured may be therapeutic, but they are hardly in keeping with what I think I want to achieve.
And what I want to achieve, in the midst of a life-altering crisis (Is there any other kind?) is a sort of melding of the spiritual and the intellectual, such as I have been mulling on for many years, the bare beginnings of an LDS-informed architectonic, perhaps. For it seems to me that in our church we are either apt to regard intellectualism with narrow suspicion, cordoning it off from respectable Gospel-oriented discourse, or to embrace it in all of its secularist extremes, relegating the revealed Gospel to a lowlier status and sneering at that portion of Latter-Day Saint-dom that fails to live up to self-serving intellectual ideals. In this latter category I have always placed those obstreperous and energetic Church dissidents, whose sole purpose seems to be to disrupt the orderliness of the Lord's house. Little wonder that many faithful Saints, upon seeing the mischief such souls stir up on their way out the doors of Zion, push away intellectualism as a needless distraction.
In truth, the Lord encourages the Saints (and every leader of the Church from Joseph Smith on has done the same, both by exhortation and by personal example) to seek education and truth wherever it can be found. There is something inherently romantic and ennobling about the process of education -- which, by the way, is primarily to be had as a result of personal effort, under the guidance of the Spirit, rather than by inculcation under the rod of some trained and too-often nescient professional educator.
Thus the overarching concern of this blog will be to systematize some of my own thoughts, the fruits of roughly three decades of both formal and self-education, and to share with whatever readers should stumble on this site some suggestions on where the "best books" are to be found and what is in them.
Where to begin? Though not a philosopher as such, I take as my point of departure an idea that, while little known, will yet (in my humble opinion) come to be recognized as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, single concept ever brought to light by human intellect.
Most people, if asked, Who is the greatest genius that ever lived? would likely give the name of some eminent physicist or mathematician --Einstein or Gauss, Planck or Newton, perhaps. In our technocratic age, it is the great abstractionists of the physical sciences -- the theoretical physicists and the mathematicians who provide their theoretical tools -- who seem to get the highest acclaim. The most important ideas of our age? Undoubtedly (say the worshipful masses) Einstein's theory of relativity (E=MC2 being the easier version, special relativity, but the much less memorable equations of general relativity are far more significant), or perhaps the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, or the laws of thermodynamics.
But in the opinion of this humble pilgrim, the achievements of all of these men are dwarfed by the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, the greatest genius most people have never heard of. Peirce lived mostly in the 19th century, and never held a university professorship, his thinking being so far ahead of his time that even the Harvard savants could not abide him, except in small doses. He grew up in Cambridge, however; his father, Benjamin Peirce, was Harvard's (and America's) first bona fide theoretical physicist, and many of the extraordinarily talented people who lived in the Cambridge area in the first half of the 19th Century -- Emerson, for example -- were acquaintances of the Peirces. Charles read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason at the age of twelve, and knew that he wanted to be a philosopher first and foremost. In point of fact, he was many things throughout the course of his scholarly life: a mathematician, psychologist, linguist, historian, economist, astronomer, and geodesics expert among them. But it was in the field of philosophy that Peirce made his greatest contributions, although little of his work was published in his lifetime. In particular, Peirce was interested in the efforts of Kant to produce a taxonomy of phenomena, a fundamental classificatory system of everything that is or exists.
We are all familiar with the process of classification -- all of the descriptive sciences use it, and languages do as well, subconsciously creating classificatory categories for nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech (Latin verb conjugations and noun declensions being but one example). The question that Kant was willing to ask was: Is there a most fundamental classification for all things, both tangible and intangible, in which a self-consistent worldview can be grounded? Kant believed that there was, and came up with a fairly elaborate taxonomy (I forget how many basic categories he posited, but it was a significant number).
Peirce, beginning at a fairly tender age, set about to correct Kant's line of reasoning, and soon hit upon what he came to regard as his greatest insight, that there are in fact but three grand Categories into which all phenomena can be classified. He named them (prosaically but logically enough) Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, and devoted most of the rest of his copious scholarly output to tracing conclusions from this idea in various disciplines, like linguistics and graph theory, with which he was familiar.
The most accessible exposition of Peirce's Categories is to be found in a paper intended as an outline for a book he never wrote, A Guess at the Riddle. Firstness, Peirce explains, is that which first impresses itself on our senses --a mere feeling or quality of feeling. It encompasses things like odors, qualities of appearance, states of emotion, and the like. Firstnesses are such as they are without regard to anything else. Secondness is that which is such as it is with reference to something else. It encompasses the tangible, the reactive, the factual. Secondness embodies opposition, resistance, and effort, among many other things (or, perhaps better put, these things are all examples of Secondness). Thirdness is the domain of those things which stand in relationship between First and Second, that are such as they are by virtue of relating a thing or percept with something else. Thirdness is the domain of law, of motive, of meaning, of purpose, and of final causation. It comprehends both the laws of physics and of the human mind.
Now at first blush, these Categories may seem arbitrary or even pointless. But they are the grand key to understanding the makeup of the universe and the organization of all truth. They cannot be grasped in the same way that one might, for example, master a mathematical algorithm or memorize a verb paradigm. They must be learnt line upon line and not by rote, and be allowed to impress themselves gradually upon the soul until they come to perfuse our entire way of thinking. When I was first introduced to the Categories by John Robertson, my mentor at BYU, I was less than impressed. But over time (years, actually) and many readings and re-readings of Peirce's seminal papers, the Categories oozed through my intellectual pores,so to speak, until I appreciated with almost revelatory force their importance. To begin to comprehend the Categories is to see everything in an entirely new light, and to being to take one's first tentative steps away from the stifling nominalism (about which more in a future post) that is the unquestioned mode of thought of our age.
The Categories are everywhere manifest; they are the reason that the mind is so fond of threes, of which the Godhead is the preeminent example: Father (Thirdness -- final cause), Son (Secondness -- tangible, born in the flesh), and Holy Ghost (Firstness -- quality of feeling par excellence). Peirce saw reality as triadic rather than dyadic, and noted that Thirdness is typically cut out of modern systems of thought. This is tantamount to saying that modern thinkers are fond of excising law, motive, final causation, and the like from theory, and dealing solely in the domain of the First and the Second.
The hour is late and I need to retire, so I'll resume this thread at the next opportunity.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment