Striving to speak in a human voice: A peircean contribution to metaphysical discourse

Review of Metaphysics

Volumn 58, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 367-398

  Colapietro, Vincent ^a  

^a PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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References (110)

1. Modes of Thought (New York: The Free Press, 1938): "Language halts behind intuition. The difficulty of philosophy is the expression of what is self-evident. Our understanding outruns the ordinary usages of words. Philosophy is akin to poetry. Philosophy is the endeavor to find a conventional phraseology for the vivid suggestiveness of the poet. It is the endeavor to reduce Milton's 'Lycidas' to prose; and thereby to produce a verbal symbolism manageable for use in other connections of thought" (49-50). "Philosophy is akin to poetry, and both of them seek to express that ultimate good sense we seek which we term civilization. In each case there is reference to form beyond the direct meaning of words. Poetry allies itself to metre, philosophy to mathematical pattern" (ibid., 174).
2. This expression is not quite accurate, though for the purposes of this paper it is more appropriate than asserting, "the form in which being comes to be expressed." The crucial point is that articulation is neither something to which being is subjected by forces utterly alien to it nor a process in which being plays the role of a ventriloquist and we that of dummies. Today one often hears warnings about how the demand for intelligibility does violence to what is encountered. We are instructed that alterity or otherness needs to be defended against the claims of reason or the demands for intelligibility. This can serve as an extremely helpful corrective to what is arguably the dominant tendency in Western philosophy, but our impulse to make sense out of what we encounter is one we can hardly eradicate without destroying ourselves (however much particular genres of interpretation or modes of explanation are justifiably criticized). Moreover, this impulse does not solely originate in us but is called forth by some aspect of what is encountered. Being invites articulation, solicits it in some respects, and almost always resists and even frustrates it in other respects. To suppose otherwise is to lapse into some form of nihilism (John E. Smith, "Being, Immediacy, and Articulation," Review of Metaphysics 24, no. 4 (June 1971): 593, 613).
3. Stanley Cavell, The New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989), 87.
4. Wallace Stevens, "Chocorua to Its Neighbors," in The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 244.
5. This is, in addition, almost always an interrogation of the limits and resources of our experience as a medium of disclosure and an interrogation of the nature and forms of being, especially as intimated by language and experience.
6. John E. Smith concludes "Being, Immediacy, and Articulation," his 1971 Presidential Address to the Metaphysical Society of America, by stressing: "If we are to avoid the nihilistic retreat to immediacy, we must advance again to philosophical articulation, something for which neither ordinary language nor the language of science is adequate" (613). In a sense, I take his conclusion as my point of departure, though with a slightly different emphasis: for the various purposes we engage in the demanding task of philosophical articulation, no language is adequate. What most importantly invites or demands expression entails linguistic innovation and thus experimentation.
7. But, such iconoclasm is not completely to be disparaged, for (as William James stresses) "[h]ow good it is sometimes simply to break away from all old categories, deny old worn-out beliefs, and restate things ab initio, making the lines of division fall into entirely new places"; Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1935), 606.
8. In this regard, it is illuminating to consider how the stance of the poet or the philosopher vis-à-vis language is analogous to the stance of the conscientious objector or civil disobedient to instituted law and the coercive means used to insure compliance with such law.
9. Nature and Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 189. "The philosopher who thinks there is an ideal of literalness and an ideal of clarity to which philosophy should conform, and that 'metaphor' is the instrument peculiar to poetry is deceived" (ibid., 184).
10. Nature and Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 189. "The philosopher who thinks there is an ideal of literalness and an ideal of clarity to which philosophy should conform, and that 'metaphor' is the instrument peculiar to poetry is deceived" (ibid., 184).
11. Ibid., 189-90.
12. Ibid., 190.
13. Whereas poets tend to be alive to the extent to which meaning is in the making, thus, to the extent to which meaning cannot be antecedently established but is only eventually-and precariously-achieved, philosophers tend to be excessively anxious about securing criteria for establishing clear concepts and literal clarity. "The poet is," as Buchler observes, "less impatient with and less inclined to dismiss 'obscurity' than the philosopher is. What the philosopher may regard as inarticulate the poet may regard as a stimulus to articulation, as the beginning and not the end. An influential deterrent to the progress of mutual understanding among philosophers is the assumption that there is some one proper way to articulate another's perspective, on the analogy of the code to which there is a key" (ibid., 182).
14. In the context of exploring the analogy between the bonds conjoining chemical substances and those linking the terms in prepositional forms, Peirce suggests, "any analogy, however fanciful, which serves to focus attention upon matters which might otherwise escape observation is valuable" (The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce [hereafter, "CP"], ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934], vol. 3, par. 470. Hereafter cited in accord with established practice, for example, 3.470, where the first number refers to the volume and the second to the numbered paragraph.)
15. In Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Free Press, 1978), for example, Whitehead suggests that the "life of man is a historic route of actual occasions which in a marked degree . . . inherit from each other" (89).
16. Modes of Thought, 40. The sentence, however, continues: how differently would Aristotle's metaphysical reflections read if we translated uλη as wood "and also insisted on giving the most literal meaning to that word." But Aristotle's usage here is irreducibly metaphorical.
17. Concluding line of "The Lesson for Today" ("I had a lover's quarrel with the world") in Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (New York: The Library of America, 1995), 322.
18. What Jonathan Lear claims in the concluding chapter ("Radical Evaluation") of Love and Its Place in Nature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) about the precarious career of our erotic attachment to the experiential world is helpful for coming to a deeper understanding of the point at which I am driving here.
19. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 193; 206-10.
20. CP, 5.314. Also in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 1:54.
21. See my "The Reconstruction of Institutions," The Journal of Speculative Philosophy [new series] 4, no. 3 (1990): 240.
22. For an excellent recent treatment of this relationship, see Mark Edmundson's Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defense of Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also Stanley Rosen, The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought (New York: Routledge, 1988).
23. For an excellent recent treatment of this relationship, see Mark Edmundson's Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defense of Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also Stanley Rosen, The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought (New York: Routledge, 1988).
24. Republic 607b.
25. In Reason in Art (New York: Collier Books, 1962), George Santayana suggests: "A real thing, when all its pertinent natural associates are discerned, touches, wonder, pathos, and beauty on every side; the rational poet is one who, without feigning anything unreal, perceives these momentous ties, and presents his subject loaded with its whole fate, missing no source of worth which is in it, no ideal influence it may have. Homer remains, perhaps, the great master in this art" (81).
26. This expression and, indeed, much else are borrowed from John E. Smith's "Being, Immediacy, and Articulation" and his other writings.
27. In Experience and God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1995), John E. Smith compelling asserts: "Experience . . . needs to be rescued not only from the charge of subjectivity, but also from the restrictive force of approaching it only through expression, that is, only through language" (13, emphasis added).
28. Smith, "Being, Immediacy, and Articulation," 594.
29. For an orientation toward the various modes of human symbolization, the works of Ernst Cassirer and Susanne K. Langer are still of great value. In particular, the now four volumes of Cassirer's The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (trans. Ralph Manheim, 4 vols. [New Haven: Yale, 1953-96]) and all of Langer's major works, including the relatively early Philosophy in a New Key (3d ed. [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979]) are useful in this regard.
30. For an orientation toward the various modes of human symbolization, the works of Ernst Cassirer and Susanne K. Langer are still of great value. In particular, the now four volumes of Cassirer's The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (trans. Ralph Manheim, 4 vols. [New Haven: Yale, 1953-96]) and all of Langer's major works, including the relatively early Philosophy in a New Key (3d ed. [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979]) are useful in this regard.
31. Though more than a few interpreters of Aristotle have either stated or implied that this is the case, my approach to him in this light has been shaped above all by G. E. R. Lloyd's Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of His Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) and especially John Herman Randall, Jr.'s Aristotle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960).
32. Though more than a few interpreters of Aristotle have either stated or implied that this is the case, my approach to him in this light has been shaped above all by G. E. R. Lloyd's Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of His Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) and especially John Herman Randall, Jr.'s Aristotle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960).
33. Experience and God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1995), 13.
34. I b i d.
35. For how philosophy performs an analogous function, the writings of Stanley Cavell are very important. Also see Stanley Rosen, Metaphysics in Ordinary Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
36. In "Art" R. W. Emerson claims, "historically viewed, it has been the function of art to educate our perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision. It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist and lead the dormant taste. We carve and paint, or we behold what is carved and painted, as students of the mystery of Form. The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety"; Emerson's Essays: First and Second Series, ed. Irwin Edman (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 248.
37. In "Philosophical Interpretation and the Religious Dimension of Experience," Logos 2 (1981), Smith notes, "In addition to all the contents of experience - persons, objects, situations, events, thoughts, relations - it is essential to notice that experience embraces contexts as well in the form of purposes and standpoints through which reality [or being] is received and interpreted. For these purposes and standpoints [might be identified by] . . . the term dimensions, meaning thereby to indicate the major frames of meaning" in and through which reality or being is encountered and articulated (9; compare Experience and God, 36-42). Given the actual history of Western metaphysics, what above all else must be underscored is that the differential perspective of the theoretical inquirer, especially when this perspective is taken to be that of an aloof spectator, is but one perspective among various other frames or dimensions.
38. To anticipate the conclusion of my paper, let me note here that the expression "human voice" in this immediate context is being deliberately used as an echo of famous lines in Wallace Stevens's "Chocorua to its Neighbors." The title of this poem refers to the mountain where William James had his summer home (the one described in a letter to his sister Alice: "Oh, it's the most delightful house you ever saw; has 14 doors, all opening outside"). It was here that James died. Chocorua is, especially for one as interested in American philosophy and poetry as I am, a place with "momentous ties"; George Santayana, Reason in Art, vol. 4 of The Life of Reason, (New York: Collier, 1962).
39. Since this essay was given as the Presidential Address to the Metaphysical Society of America, and since such an occasion allows a personal remark such as this, I have not deleted this and similar remarks in the published version of my address.
40. CP, 2.79.
41. For an elaboration of this thesis see my "A lantern for the feet of inquirers: The heuristic function of the Peircean categories," Semiotica 136, no. 1 (2001): 201-16.
42. "There is," as Richard J. Bernstein notes in Praxis and Action (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), "a descriptive, empirical, pragmatic temper in Peirce's use of the categories. The 'proof or, more accurately, the adequacy of the categories is to be found in the ways in which Peirce uses them to illuminate fundamental similiarities and differences in everything we encounter" (178).
43. See, for example, Peirce's "A Guess at the Riddle," in CP, 1.354-416 (esp. 1.400-14). The critical edition of this text can be found in Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, vol. 6 (1886-1890), ed. Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 166-210; also in The Essential Peirce 1:245-79.
44. See, for example, Peirce's "A Guess at the Riddle," in CP, 1.354-416 (esp. 1.400-14). The critical edition of this text can be found in Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, vol. 6 (1886-1890), ed. Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 166-210; also in The Essential Peirce 1:245-79.
45. It is instructive to recall that, in Peirce's own mind, his philosophy was intimately connected with his cosmology, so much so that he went so far as to assert: "my philosophy may be described as the attempt of a physicist to make such conjecture as to the constitution of the universe as the methods of science may permit, with the aid of all that has been done by previous philosophers. ... The best that can be done is to supply a hypothesis [a guess at the riddle of the universe], not devoid of all likelihood, in the general line of growth of scientific ideas, and capable of being verified or refuted by future observers" (CP, 1.7). The ideas of absolute or objective chance, primordial or thoroughgoing evolution, and genuine or irreducible continuity seemed to him especially ones "in the general line of growth of scientific ideas." Hence, tychism (his doctrine of absolute chance), synechism (his doctrine of irreducible continuity), and evolutionism were central to his vision of the cosmos.
46. In "Charles S. Peirce: Community and Reality," (Themes in American Philosophy: Purpose, Experience and Community [New York, Harper & Row, 1970], 80-108) John E. Smith has criticized Peirce for not wresting himself free enough of "that modern tradition in philosophy according to which the key to being is found through being known" (104). That is, "Peirce seems to have underestimated the differential character of the controlled, theoretical inquiry that is to issue in the real truth about things" (108). This is hardly an unjust charge. But, just as Peirce's theory of signs, while crafted to offer the indispensable means for articulating a normative account of objective inquiry, offers the tools for investigating virtually all other human uses of signs, so his approach to being, while unnecessarily limited by his dominant preoccupations (especially his interest in science), overspills the restrictive confines of his predominant concerns.
47. There is good evidence that among Peirce's earliest efforts to articulate a doctrine of categories there are ones in which the threefold distinction among firstness, secondness, and thirdness is derived from the grammatical distinction of first, second, and third person pronouns (for example, "I," "you," and "it"). See, for example, Joseph Esposito, Evolutionary Metaphysics: The Development of Peirce's Theory of Categories (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1980), 12.
48. CP, 2.22.
49. Peirce insists: "We can make no effort where we experience no resistance, no reaction" (CP, 2.84). The reverse is true, a point about which Peirce is explicit: "Effort supposes resistance. Where there is no effort there is no resistance, where there is no resistance there is no effort either in this world or any of the worlds of possibility" (CP, 1.320; compare 332).
50. In Experience and God (in particular, in chapter 1, "The Recovery of Experience") Smith offers an especially accessible and useful account of experience conceived precisely as a medium of disclosure.
51. Both as an interpreter of Peirce and as a philosopher in its own right, John Dewey throws much light on the qualitative dimensions partly constitutive of any human experience and, more broadly, of whatever is disclosed in such experience. See especially "Peirce's Theory of Quality" and "Qualitative Thought." The latter originally appeared in Journal of Philosophy 32 (December 1935): 701-8. It can also be found in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 11, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 86-94. "Qualitative Thought" first appeared in Symposium 1 (January 1930): 5-32. It can also be found in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 243-62
52. Both as an interpreter of Peirce and as a philosopher in its own right, John Dewey throws much light on the qualitative dimensions partly constitutive of any human experience and, more broadly, of whatever is disclosed in such experience. See especially "Peirce's Theory of Quality" and "Qualitative Thought." The latter originally appeared in Journal of Philosophy 32 (December 1935): 701-8. It can also be found in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 11, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 86-94. "Qualitative Thought" first appeared in Symposium 1 (January 1930): 5-32. It can also be found in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 243-62
53. Both as an interpreter of Peirce and as a philosopher in its own right, John Dewey throws much light on the qualitative dimensions partly constitutive of any human experience and, more broadly, of whatever is disclosed in such experience. See especially "Peirce's Theory of Quality" and "Qualitative Thought." The latter originally appeared in Journal of Philosophy 32 (December 1935): 701-8. It can also be found in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 11, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 86-94. "Qualitative Thought" first appeared in Symposium 1 (January 1930): 5-32. It can also be found in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 243-62
54. Both as an interpreter of Peirce and as a philosopher in its own right, John Dewey throws much light on the qualitative dimensions partly constitutive of any human experience and, more broadly, of whatever is disclosed in such experience. See especially "Peirce's Theory of Quality" and "Qualitative Thought." The latter originally appeared in Journal of Philosophy 32 (December 1935): 701-8. It can also be found in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 11, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 86-94. "Qualitative Thought" first appeared in Symposium 1 (January 1930): 5-32. It can also be found in The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), 243-62
55. 47 CP, 8.291.
56. Peirce's use of this term signals his indebtedness to John Duns Scotus. In general, he thought that philosophers had much to learn by opening "the dusty folios of the scholastic doctors" (CP, 1.15). In particular, he supposed the subtle doctor to be an exemplary practitioner of philosophical investigation. One of the reasons prompting this assessment directly concerns the nature of our own inquiry: "The great object of the metaphysics of Duns Scotus is so to state the results of ordinary experience, that it shall not close any positive experimental inquiry, or pronounce anything positively observable to be a priori impossible" (CP, 7.395).
57. See especially Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), chap. 3, esp. 50-1; also Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 18.
58. See especially Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), chap. 3, esp. 50-1; also Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 18.
59. What William James, in Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), calls "retroactive legislation" (107) pertains to this point. So too does what Abraham Drassinower, in Freud's Theory of Culture: Eros, Loss, and Politics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), calls "retrospective resignification" (see, for example, 79; also 93). Finally, Michael S. Roth, in Psycho-Analysis as History: Negation and Freedom in Freud (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), uses "retrodiction" in the sense to which I am calling attention here. The capacity to predict what will take place is undeniably an extremely important human achievement. The capacity, however, to make sense of the present by narrating the ways this present encompasses the significance of the past-in a word, the capacity of retrodiction-is an equally important human achievement. The challenge of doing so convincingly is no less than that of making reliable predictions. The history of philosophy and, in particular, that of metaphysics is, in my judgment, inseparable from our continuously renewed efforts to make convincing sense of our philosophical present by narrating the historical emergence of this particular present from a long history. It is not incidental or insignificant that one of the greatest contributions to first philosophy, Aristotle's Metaphysics, contains a narration of the history leading up to his own endeavors.
60. What William James, in Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), calls "retroactive legislation" (107) pertains to this point. So too does what Abraham Drassinower, in Freud's Theory of Culture: Eros, Loss, and Politics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), calls "retrospective resignification" (see, for example, 79; also 93). Finally, Michael S. Roth, in Psycho-Analysis as History: Negation and Freedom in Freud (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), uses "retrodiction" in the sense to which I am calling attention here. The capacity to predict what will take place is undeniably an extremely important human achievement. The capacity, however, to make sense of the present by narrating the ways this present encompasses the significance of the past-in a word, the capacity of retrodiction-is an equally important human achievement. The challenge of doing so convincingly is no less than that of making reliable predictions. The history of philosophy and, in particular, that of metaphysics is, in my judgment, inseparable from our continuously renewed efforts to make convincing sense of our philosophical present by narrating the historical emergence of this particular present from a long history. It is not incidental or insignificant that one of the greatest contributions to first philosophy, Aristotle's Metaphysics, contains a narration of the history leading up to his own endeavors.
61. What William James, in Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), calls "retroactive legislation" (107) pertains to this point. So too does what Abraham Drassinower, in Freud's Theory of Culture: Eros, Loss, and Politics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), calls "retrospective resignification" (see, for example, 79; also 93). Finally, Michael S. Roth, in Psycho-Analysis as History: Negation and Freedom in Freud (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), uses "retrodiction" in the sense to which I am calling attention here. The capacity to predict what will take place is undeniably an extremely important human achievement. The capacity, however, to make sense of the present by narrating the ways this present encompasses the significance of the past-in a word, the capacity of retrodiction-is an equally important human achievement. The challenge of doing so convincingly is no less than that of making reliable predictions. The history of philosophy and, in particular, that of metaphysics is, in my judgment, inseparable from our continuously renewed efforts to make convincing sense of our philosophical present by narrating the historical emergence of this particular present from a long history. It is not incidental or insignificant that one of the greatest contributions to first philosophy, Aristotle's Metaphysics, contains a narration of the history leading up to his own endeavors.
62. CP, 5.473, 484, 488-9. For the critically edited form of this text, see chap. 28 ("Pragmatism") of The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2 (1893-1913), ed. Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
63. In his major contribution to metaphysics, Experience and Nature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), John Dewey offers an intriguing suggestion bearing directly upon this matter. There he intriguingly suggests: "Qualitative individuality and constant relations, contingency and need, movement and arrest are common traits of all existence. This fact is source both of values and their precariousness; both of immediate possession which is causal and of reflection which is a precondition of secure attainment and appropriation. Any theory that detects and defines these traits [and Dewey identifies metaphysics with such a theory] is therefore but a ground-map of the province of criticism, establishing base lines to be employed in more intricate triangulations" (308-9). The intricate triangulations among the three dimensions of temporal flux are, I suggest, a specific example of what Dewey has in mind in making this suggestion.
64. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A, V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 31.
65. See, for example, James's Pragmatism, 121; also his The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 211.
66. See, for example, James's Pragmatism, 121; also his The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 211.
67. Smith, "Being, Immediacy, and Articulation," 595, 605.
68. Compare Modes of Thought, chap. 2 ("Expression").
69. Ibid., 597.
70. In "A Guess at the Riddle," he notes, "the conception of the absolutely first eludes every attempt to grasp it" (CP, 1.362). He also notes here: "The idea of second must be reckoned as an easy one to comprehend": it is "eminently hard and tangible." The category of secondness is indeed "very familiar" since "it is forced upon us daily; it is the main lesson of life." Whereas in youth everything seems absolutely fresh and we ourselves feel boundlessly free, "limitation, conflict, constraint, and secondness generally, make up the teaching of experience." In contrast the ease with which this category can be comprehended, that of firstness "is so tender that you cannot touch it without spoiling it" (CP, 1.358).
71. CP, 6.322.
72. This is a text from Emerson's "Experience," in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ztff (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 288. See Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
73. This is a text from Emerson's "Experience," in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ztff (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 288. See Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
74. One of the many places in which James uses this expression is "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results" (1898), the essay so important for calling Peirce to the attention of the philosophical world and, beyond this, for effectively launching the pragmatic movement. It is appropriate to note here that, in this paper, James asserted: "Philosophers are after all like poets. They are pathfinders. What every one can feel, what every one can know in the bone and marrow of him, they sometimes find words for and express. The words and thoughts of the philosophers are not exactly the words and thoughts of the poets - worse luck. But both alike have the same function. They are, if I may use a simile, so many spots, or blazes - blazes made by the axe of the human intellect on the trees of the otherwise trackless forest of human experience"; The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 346-7.
75. CP, 8.291.
76. See Vincent Potter, Peirce's Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), chap. 7 ("Peirce on 'Substance' and 'Foundations'"). Also, my Peirce's Approach to the Self (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 81-2, 86; Kory Spencer Sorrell, Representative Practices: Peirce, Pragmatism and Feminist Epistemology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Finally, Andrew Reek's Presidential Address to the MSA, "Being and Substance," Review of Metaphysics 31, no. 4 (June 1978), is a helpful treatment of this thorny topic.
77. See Vincent Potter, Peirce's Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), chap. 7 ("Peirce on 'Substance' and 'Foundations'"). Also, my Peirce's Approach to the Self (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 81-2, 86; Kory Spencer Sorrell, Representative Practices: Peirce, Pragmatism and Feminist Epistemology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Finally, Andrew Reek's Presidential Address to the MSA, "Being and Substance," Review of Metaphysics 31, no. 4 (June 1978), is a helpful treatment of this thorny topic.
78. See Vincent Potter, Peirce's Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), chap. 7 ("Peirce on 'Substance' and 'Foundations'"). Also, my Peirce's Approach to the Self (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 81-2, 86; Kory Spencer Sorrell, Representative Practices: Peirce, Pragmatism and Feminist Epistemology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Finally, Andrew Reek's Presidential Address to the MSA, "Being and Substance," Review of Metaphysics 31, no. 4 (June 1978), is a helpful treatment of this thorny topic.
79. See Vincent Potter, Peirce's Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), chap. 7 ("Peirce on 'Substance' and 'Foundations'"). Also, my Peirce's Approach to the Self (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 81-2, 86; Kory Spencer Sorrell, Representative Practices: Peirce, Pragmatism and Feminist Epistemology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Finally, Andrew Reek's Presidential Address to the MSA, "Being and Substance," Review of Metaphysics 31, no. 4 (June 1978), is a helpful treatment of this thorny topic.
80. Though he uses this terminology in a number of places, my own thinking has been influenced by how he employs it in Social Ontology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) to elaborate these important features of dynamic systems.
81. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography and Selected Letters, ed. Francis Darwin (New York: Dover, 1958), 25-6. I am indebted to Robert Frodeman for not only reminding me of this wonderful passage in Darwin's Autobiography but also connecting it explicitly with the Peircean understanding of semiosis extending to the telltale signs unintentionally formed in natural processes far removed from animal communication. He did so in a talk entitled "The Philosophy of (Field) Science" (The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 29 February 2003). In The Problem of Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1913), Josiah Royce makes (as John Smith reminded me) a similar claim regarding the Grand Canyon: "Its walls record, in their stratification, a vast series of long-past changes" (2:146).
82. "The Poet," in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, 271.
83. See my "Marking Distinctions and Making Differences: Being As Dialectic," in Being and Dialectic: Metaphysics as a Cultural Presence, ed. William Desmond and Joseph Grange (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 37.
84. See ibid.
85. "Forms of life: mapping the rough ground," in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluga and David G. Stern (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 401. Some of the essays in
86. William James's The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
87. especially "The Sentiment of Rationality," in effect argue just this point: we demand a world in which our energies and exertions, our actions and struggles, have an intelligible place. Finally, the all too ignored American philosopher John William Miller in The Midworld of Symbols (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982) makes this point with characteristic force when he asserts: "[T]here is no escaping an account of the world that can include the utterances, the affirmations, and denials that permit any world to be intelligible" (129). "The person, utterance, and the world become," for him, "inseparable" (70). What he is "unwilling to say is, 'There is the world, and here are the signs'" and symbols by which we articulate the world (191). No wedge is to be driven between articulation and being. But, as Miller notes in The Paradox of Cause (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), "what we must have is then to be not only our own, but also a world" (118). What manifests itself in our various modes of articulation is an enveloping, (to some extent) sustaining, and hazardous order transcending anything yet articulated. In
88. The Fateful Shapes of Human Freedom: John William Miller and the Crises of Modernity (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003), I explore these points in detail.
89. For a development and defense of this, see my "Expression: A tentative formulation of an ontological category," Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 53, no. 4 (1997): 515-27.
90. Modes of Thought, (New York: Free Press, 1968), 40-1.
91. Ibid., 41.
92. I intend the psychoanalytic connotations associated with compulsion, for what I observe in Western ontology in this particular respect is something approximating a repetition compulsion.
93. One place where this is found in her writings is in Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 51.
94. This recalls the trope used by Whitehead, noted at the outset of this paper. Recall that, for him, the self is a route of inheritance. The human self in its present actuality is, at once, an inheritor of a determinate past and a benefactor of an indeterminate future.
95. Once again, the insights of John E. Smith are extremely useful for delineating the most crucial features of human experience. In "Philosophical Interpretation and the Religious Dimension of Experience," Logos 2 (1981), he notes: "In addition to all the contents of experience - persons, objects, situations, events, thoughts, relations - it is essential to notice that experience embraces contexts as well in the form of purposes and standpoints through which reality is received and interpreted. For these purposes and stand-points I use the term dimension, meaning thereby to indicate the major frames of meaning in which reality comes to us" (9). In the history of metaphysics, theoria has been accorded undue and, often, undetected privilege as the most authoritative frame of meaning. Following Dewey, John Herman Randall, Jr., Smith and others, I am trying here to counteract this tendency.
96. See my "Expression: A tentative formulation of an ontological category."
97. In Experience and Nature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), John Dewey writes: "An empirical philosophy is ... a kind of intellectual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off [that is, they we critically distance ourselves from some of our modes of experience and articulation], that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us. We cannot achieve recovery of primitive naïveté. But there is attainable a cultivated naïveté of eye, ear and thought, one that can be acquired only through the discipline of severe thought" (40).
98. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
99. Ibid., xviii.
100. The New Yet Unapproachable America, 87.
101. Wallace Stevens, "Chocorua to Its Neighbors."
102. Perhaps the most characteristic way in which philosophers have tried to speak in more than human voice is to attain absolute precision and apodictic certainty even in metaphysical discourse. Here Peirce offers a number of crucial correctives. Approximation is, he insists, the only fabric out of which philosophy can be woven (CP, 1.404). Even more pointedly, he claims: "The demonstrations of the metaphysician are all moonshine. The best that can be done is to supply a hypothesis" (CP, 1.7). In a letter to William James quoted in Ralph Barton Perry's The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 2 (Boston: Boston, Little, & Brown, 1935), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., confessed: "I think none of the philosophers sufficiently humble" (462). This lack of humility has all too often made the philosophical voice in human culture an all too inhuman voice. But one can, in a knowing, inhumane tone, denounce or, worse, ridicule those who struggle to escape their humanness, especially their finitude, historicity, and mortality. And, as James notes in "The Social Value of the College-Bred," in Essays, Comments, and Reviews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), "By their tone are all things human either lost or saved" (111). Perhaps more than anything else, the human voice is lost or achieved by the tone in which it articulates its criticisms and affirmations.
103. Perhaps the most characteristic way in which philosophers have tried to speak in more than human voice is to attain absolute precision and apodictic certainty even in metaphysical discourse. Here Peirce offers a number of crucial correctives. Approximation is, he insists, the only fabric out of which philosophy can be woven (CP, 1.404). Even more pointedly, he claims: "The demonstrations of the metaphysician are all moonshine. The best that can be done is to supply a hypothesis" (CP, 1.7). In a letter to William James quoted in Ralph Barton Perry's The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 2 (Boston: Boston, Little, & Brown, 1935), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., confessed: "I think none of the philosophers sufficiently humble" (462). This lack of humility has all too often made the philosophical voice in human culture an all too inhuman voice. But one can, in a knowing, inhumane tone, denounce or, worse, ridicule those who struggle to escape their humanness, especially their finitude, historicity, and mortality. And, as James notes in "The Social Value of the College-Bred," in Essays, Comments, and Reviews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), "By their tone are all things human either lost or saved" (111). Perhaps more than anything else, the human voice is lost or achieved by the tone in which it articulates its criticisms and affirmations.
104. Though Whitehead stresses this kinship, it might not seem appropriate for me to do so in a paper drawing so heavily on Peirce. But it is, in fact, quite appropriate. Because this side of Peirce is insufficiently noted, however, it is reasonable for readers (even ones familiar with Peirce's writings) to suppose otherwise. But I would strenuously argue that, even in the context of metaphysics (perhaps especially in this context), speaking in a Peircean voice does not preclude speaking in a poetic voice. Indeed, in response to the naturalist Georges Cuvier's claim that "Metaphysics is another name for Metaphor," he insists: "if Cuvier was only using a metaphor himself, and meant by metaphor broad comparison on the ground of characters of a formal and highly abstract kind," then metaphysics professes to be metaphor - that is just its merit - as it was Cuvier's own merit in Zoology" (CP, 7.590). Moreover, Peirce emphatically asserts: "[N]othing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for" (CP, 1.315). Artists no less than scientists draw distinctions and construct syntheses "in the interest of intelligibility." Herein lies a deep affinity between art (including poetry) and science (including philosophy), an affinity explicitly underscored by Peirce: "The work of the poet or novelist is not so utterly different from that of the scientific man. The artist introduces a fiction; but it is not [at least in the best art] an arbitrary one; it exhibits affinities to which the mind accords a certain approval in pronouncing them beautiful, which if it is not exactly the same as saying that the synthesis is true, is something of the same general kind" (CP, 1.383). The affinity between art and science is that both are engaged in modes of articulation ordained to exhibiting affinities and discerning differences. In the work of scientists, Peirce also appreciates the ineliminable role of metaphor in an irreducible sense (metaphor as a mode of utterance that cannot, without loss, be translated into a literal paraphrase). "The Universe as a argument is," according to him, "necessarily a great work of art, a great poem - for every fine argument is a poem and a symphony - just as every true poem is a sound argument" (CP, 5.119). On this topic, see Michael Raposa, Peirce's Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); also Christopher Hookway, chap. 11 ("On Reading God's Great Poem") of Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Finally, for a deep sensitivity to the aesthetic dimensions of Peirce's philosophical project, see Douglas R. Anderson, Creativity and the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987).
105. Though Whitehead stresses this kinship, it might not seem appropriate for me to do so in a paper drawing so heavily on Peirce. But it is, in fact, quite appropriate. Because this side of Peirce is insufficiently noted, however, it is reasonable for readers (even ones familiar with Peirce's writings) to suppose otherwise. But I would strenuously argue that, even in the context of metaphysics (perhaps especially in this context), speaking in a Peircean voice does not preclude speaking in a poetic voice. Indeed, in response to the naturalist Georges Cuvier's claim that "Metaphysics is another name for Metaphor," he insists: "if Cuvier was only using a metaphor himself, and meant by metaphor broad comparison on the ground of characters of a formal and highly abstract kind," then metaphysics professes to be metaphor - that is just its merit - as it was Cuvier's own merit in Zoology" (CP, 7.590). Moreover, Peirce emphatically asserts: "[N]othing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for" (CP, 1.315). Artists no less than scientists draw distinctions and construct syntheses "in the interest of intelligibility." Herein lies a deep affinity between art (including poetry) and science (including philosophy), an affinity explicitly underscored by Peirce: "The work of the poet or novelist is not so utterly different from that of the scientific man. The artist introduces a fiction; but it is not [at least in the best art] an arbitrary one; it exhibits affinities to which the mind accords a certain approval in pronouncing them beautiful, which if it is not exactly the same as saying that the synthesis is true, is something of the same general kind" (CP, 1.383). The affinity between art and science is that both are engaged in modes of articulation ordained to exhibiting affinities and discerning differences. In the work of scientists, Peirce also appreciates the ineliminable role of metaphor in an irreducible sense (metaphor as a mode of utterance that cannot, without loss, be translated into a literal paraphrase). "The Universe as a argument is," according to him, "necessarily a great work of art, a great poem - for every fine argument is a poem and a symphony - just as every true poem is a sound argument" (CP, 5.119). On this topic, see Michael Raposa, Peirce's Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); also Christopher Hookway, chap. 11 ("On Reading God's Great Poem") of Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Finally, for a deep sensitivity to the aesthetic dimensions of Peirce's philosophical project, see Douglas R. Anderson, Creativity and the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987).
106. Though Whitehead stresses this kinship, it might not seem appropriate for me to do so in a paper drawing so heavily on Peirce. But it is, in fact, quite appropriate. Because this side of Peirce is insufficiently noted, however, it is reasonable for readers (even ones familiar with Peirce's writings) to suppose otherwise. But I would strenuously argue that, even in the context of metaphysics (perhaps especially in this context), speaking in a Peircean voice does not preclude speaking in a poetic voice. Indeed, in response to the naturalist Georges Cuvier's claim that "Metaphysics is another name for Metaphor," he insists: "if Cuvier was only using a metaphor himself, and meant by metaphor broad comparison on the ground of characters of a formal and highly abstract kind," then metaphysics professes to be metaphor - that is just its merit - as it was Cuvier's own merit in Zoology" (CP, 7.590). Moreover, Peirce emphatically asserts: "[N]othing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for" (CP, 1.315). Artists no less than scientists draw distinctions and construct syntheses "in the interest of intelligibility." Herein lies a deep affinity between art (including poetry) and science (including philosophy), an affinity explicitly underscored by Peirce: "The work of the poet or novelist is not so utterly different from that of the scientific man. The artist introduces a fiction; but it is not [at least in the best art] an arbitrary one; it exhibits affinities to which the mind accords a certain approval in pronouncing them beautiful, which if it is not exactly the same as saying that the synthesis is true, is something of the same general kind" (CP, 1.383). The affinity between art and science is that both are engaged in modes of articulation ordained to exhibiting affinities and discerning differences. In the work of scientists, Peirce also appreciates the ineliminable role of metaphor in an irreducible sense (metaphor as a mode of utterance that cannot, without loss, be translated into a literal paraphrase). "The Universe as a argument is," according to him, "necessarily a great work of art, a great poem - for every fine argument is a poem and a symphony - just as every true poem is a sound argument" (CP, 5.119). On this topic, see Michael Raposa, Peirce's Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); also Christopher Hookway, chap. 11 ("On Reading God's Great Poem") of Truth, Rationality, and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Finally, for a deep sensitivity to the aesthetic dimensions of Peirce's philosophical project, see Douglas R. Anderson, Creativity and the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987).
107. According to Peirce, metaphysics as part of philosophy "limits itself to so much of truth as can be inferred from common experience" (CP, 1.184).
108. There is inherent in human experience what Cassirer calls "symbolic pregnance" (Prägnanz), that which according to him gives, as John Michael Krois notes, in Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), form and fecundity to human expression in its irreducibly different modes (53). For Krois's illuminating exposition of this central notion in Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms, see pp. 52-62 of this study. But, above all, see chap. 5 ("Symbolic Pregnance") of part 2 of Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).
109. There is inherent in human experience what Cassirer calls "symbolic pregnance" (Prägnanz), that which according to him gives, as John Michael Krois notes, in Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), form and fecundity to human expression in its irreducibly different modes (53). For Krois's illuminating exposition of this central notion in Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms, see pp. 52-62 of this study. But, above all, see chap. 5 ("Symbolic Pregnance") of part 2 of Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).
110. The original title of this address was "Mutable Forms and Generative Processes." But this is, in truth, the title of a paper yet to be written, one toward which this essay only gestures in its concluding section. A more accurate title is thus required. For this and other important suggestions, I am indebted to Kory Spencer Sorrell, who took pains to help me put this address into a form worthy of the journal founded by Paul Weiss, also the person most responsible for there being a Metaphysical Society of America! I am also indebted to comments on earlier draft offered by Douglas Anderson, Wes DeMarco, Brian Martine, Jorge Nobo, David Weissman, and above all John E. Smith.