Sunday, February 28, 2010

Mimesis and Preception

In some cases, Preception is Mimetic. For example, the following of a cooking recipe imitates, not, of course, the words of the recipe, the imitation of which would be the re-writing of those words, but the movements of a chef, of which the recipe is a narration. Similarly, insofar as the Golden Rule is taken as a summary description of the actions of Jesus, the latter is the Mimant of the Conduct of one who follows the Rule. On the other hand, if the Golden Rule is taken as based on some insight into human nature, as Kant's Pure Principle of Practical Reason is deduced from the nature of Pure Reason, Conduct that follows it is not Mimetic. Also, some precepts are formulas expressed in specialized notation, with 'Do this: ' only implicit, e. g. a musical score. Now, if a musical score is based on an actual playing of the piece by the composer, then a player's performing it is Mimesis, with the composer's own performance the Mimant of the player's. But, the performance of a score of a polyphonic composition, especially one created by a Beethoven, who could not have heard it, is not Mimetic. Rather, it is an experiment that aims at discovering what such a concoction would sound like. So, these considerations show that the Mimant of a Mimesis is a particular, but with at least some generalizable characteristics. They furthermore suggest that even when Mimesis is not Preceptive, it still entails motor skills of some sort, e. g. the contortion into a sneer of the facial muscles of an Elvis impersonator.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Varieties of Mimesis

The traditional restriction of the study of Mimesis to Aesthetics has neglected its pervasiveness. For example, the camouflaging adaptation of an organism to its environment, from insects that blend in with tree bark, to humans who do as the Romans do, when visiting Rome, is Mimetic. A young child's adopting its parents' habits and gestures is Mimetic, as is a student's learning from a teacher, or an adult's following a role model. Adjusting the content and manner of one's speech to a listener is Mimetic, as is dressing according to the conventions of a social context. Now, while all of these can be classified as public, external Mimetes, others are internal and private. The primary quality in the mind of a Lockeian perceiver replicates a property of a physical object. In other theories, imagination--from the same root as 'imitation'--abstraction, representation, ideation, and reflection are all replicative cognitive processes. Sympathy imitates the feelings of another. So, Mimesis is to be found in phenomena of interest to Biology, Psychology, Education, Semiology, Epistemology, and Ethics. Plainly, the traditional specialized treatment of it in Aesthetics is hardly exhaustive.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Mimesis, Sameness, and Difference

Mimesis is fundamentally binary--a combination of two components, Sameness and Difference. The Mimete is in some respects the same as the Mimant, but in others it is different from it. The ratio of Difference to Sameness, in the comparison of Mimete to Mimant, is the Mimetic Degree of the Mimesis. The Mimete reproduces, represents, and abstracts from, the Mimant. Hence, the Mimant necessarily pre-exists the Mimete. But, though the emphasis in Mimesis is typically on the similarity between Mimete and Mimant, the co-fundamentality of their difference should not be underemphasized. For, without the contribution of some process of divergence from a potential Mimant, Mimesis could not even occur. Deleuze makes an analogous point regarding Repetition--a Repetition entails both Sameness and Difference between the involved moments, which the traditional Philosophical subordination of Difference to Identity obscures. But, while his Philosophy of Difference inverts the priority, here it suffices to observe the co-essentiality of both to Mimesis. Priority of either to the other is a function of context, e. g. what might be disapproved 'apery' in one context, can have the same Mimetic Degree as what is praiseworthy 'verisimilitude' in another.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

The Blame Game

The usual contemporary connotation of 'Superman' is a being with extraordinary physical powers, e. g. the ability to fly. The term derives from Nietzsche's concept 'Overman', which on its most prevalent interpretation, the Nazis', refers to traits that are physical, psychological, and racial. Neither of these have much in common with what Nietzsche had in mind, which is a being who has overcome 'ressentiment', or, on an alternative formulation, 'the spirit of revenge'. The Systematic significance to Nietzsche of such overcoming is based on his analysis that doctrines that privilege Spiritual realms, e. g. Platonism, or Afterworlds, e. g. Christianity, are all expressions of ressentiment, i. e. of revenge against the Natural world. Easily overlooked in his larger ambitions is the applicability of this analysis to the process of blaming. Blaming is so pervasive a phenomenon that perhaps only a constructivist doctrine, such as Pragmatism, can expose its true nature. According to Pragmatism, all activity is a solution to a problem, one important phase of which is identifying the cause of the problem, as a means to correcting the latter by an adjustment of some sort. In contrast, blaming is an identification of a cause of a problem, the main purpose of which is vengeance, with correcting the problem only an occasional consequence. As motivated by what is essentially hate, blaming is thus heteronomous behavior, the overcoming of which, is an Evolvement, and a psychological maturation that is hardly of the 'Super' magnitude of e. g. learning to fly.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Mimetology

'Mimesis' is the process of imitation, and, accordingly, 'Mimetology' is the study of Mimesis. For purposes of analytical clarity, and to avoid confusion with some common usages of related terms, the performer of Mimesis is the 'Mimist', that which is being imitated is the 'Mimant', and the product of the process is the 'Mimete'. In many cases, Mimesis and Mimete are identical, e. g. whistling in imitation of birdsong, but in others they are distinct, e. g. the process of painting of a portrait vs. the finished artifact. Mimesis is an active process performed by the Mimist, which does not imply that it is consciously voluntary, e. g. the instinctual camouflaging by an insect is Mimetic of its environment, and is an active process. On the other hand, an effect of a mechanical cause is not active, and, so, is not Mimetic of its cause. One important application of this distinction is that in Causal Epistemological Theories, perception is not Mimetic, whereas in Representational ones, it is. Mimete and Mimant can be compared in terms of how similar and dissimilar the former is to the latter, formulated as 'Mimetic Degree', i. e. the ratio of Difference to Identity of the one to the other. Gauging of Mimetic Degree is implicit in such Aesthetic Evaluations of a work as either too "slavish" or too "oblique". A special case of Mimesis is Individual Conduct, which, on the Evolvemental analysis is fundamentally Self-Variation--insofar as new Action takes as its point of departure some Self-Image, the variation is a process of Mimesis, to a lesser or greater Mimetic Degree.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Mimesis

The process Mimesis is important to Aristotle's theory of Art, because, as he asserts, all Art is imitative. But such a thesis hardly begins to exhaust the Philosophical significance of Mimesis. Despite the simplicity of that formulation, Mimesis is no determinate element in merely specialized Art. For example, an abstract impressionistic characterization of a subject is as imitative of it as is a 'realistic' portrait, so a wide range of processes can be called 'imitative'. Nor is Mimesis a process that is exclusive to the field of Poetics. Insofar as the reproduction of an object is involved in Cognition, Mimesis is significant to Epistemology, and the extent to which interpersonal behavior is imitative, or to which following a rule is an imitation of it, Mimesis is significant to Ethics. And, of course, the term 'ape' connotes a more general biological function. Now, while Plato makes Imitation an explicit theme in many of his works, especially in the Sophist and the Republic, despite its pervasiveness in the subsequent tradition, it seems to not appear again as a focus of investigation until the second half of the 20th-century, in the studies of Deleuze and Derrida, most notably. Mimesis is of great interest to Formaterialism, because it is a combination of the two central notions of that System, Sameness and Difference, so a further discussion will follow.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Kant, Teleology, and Theology

While 'purposeless purposiveness' is central to the study of Aesthetic Judgement in the first part of Kant's third Critique, the second part, the study of Teleological Judgement, relies on 'purposeful purposiveness'. By interpreting mutual mechanical relations in Nature as reciprocally purposeful, Kant shows how Nature can be conceived of as not merely including organisms, but as itself an organistic system. Now, in Formaterialism, Organism is a special case of System, so any organism can be defined in terms of Formal, independently of Efficient and Final, Causality. However, the one purposive notion in the third Critique that seems recalcitrant to explanation in terms of Formal Causality, a notion to which the entire work seem preparatory, is that of Deserved Happiness--the answer to the question 'What can I hope for?', that Kant sometimes describes as the main theme of this Critique. Since Happiness is the satisfaction of all physical needs, in Kantianism it is an exclusively mechanical concept, but since Deservedness entails both an evaluation of the purposeful Conduct of a Rational being, and an evaluator, i. e. a Divine Judge, Deserved Happiness combines both Efficient and Final Causality. On the other hand, Kant had introduced the notion previously, in the Critique of Practical Reason, as a concept of Pure Practical Reason, as the Highest Good for a person. He argues there that while adherence to Pure Practical Reason is unconditional, i. e. cannot have Happiness as an ulterior motive, nevertheless, Rational Virtue is incomplete without Happiness. So, Pure Reason also requires Happiness, but only on the condition that it is caused by Virtue, which is only possible, according to him, on the supposition of the existence of a Divine rewarder of Virtue. Such constitutes Kant's 'Moral' proof of the existence of God. But, as I argue elsewhere, that impersonal Reason regards Happiness, of any sort, as a Rational Good, is unjustified not only within his System, but in Spinoza's more rigorous Rational System, in which Virtue is its own reward. Kant does address Spinoza in the third Critique, but while he argues persuasively that Happiness can reinforce the propensity to Virtuous behavior, he falls short of demonstrating the decisive point, namely, that impersonal Reason, in principle, requires Happiness over and above Virtue. So, minus Kant's Theological commitments, his study of Teleological Judgement, like that of Aesthetic Judgement, can be a demonstration of how Formal Causality integrates Theory and Practice, as an alternative to both Efficent and Final explanations. As such, Kant arrives at the conception of Humanity as Homo Faber.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Purposeless Purposiveness

Kant construes his Critique of Judgement as his systematization of Theory and Practice. Hence, it attempts to offer a systematization of Efficient Causality and Final Causality. Its central notion is what he calls 'purposeless purposiveness'. A 'purpose' is anything which is the effect of a process initiated by a concept of that purpose. 'Purposiveness' is the relation between an intention, i. e. a purposeful concept, and the process that follows, i. e . it abstracts from the actuality of an effected purpose, an abstraction which further qualifies the relation as 'purposeless'. In other words, purposeless purposiveness combines the two Causal types into a intention-effect relation. But this resolution of Theory and Practice can also be interpreted as his demonstration of the priority of Formal Causality. For, in abstraction from any ulterior purposes, the guidance of an activity by an intention is Formal Causality, and, as the Formaterial analysis of Experience shows, activity can have Form without Purpose, e. g. improvisation, even if it frequently is purposeful. One explicit acknowledgement in the Critique of Judgement of the priority to Kant of Formal Causality is that the ultimate determining factor in judgements of Beauty is the form of an object.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Making and Doing

Someone who might object to the characterization of Kant as advocating a theory of Humanity as Homo Faber, is Kant himself. For, he insists on a distinction between Doing and Making that is reminiscent of Aristotle's. Just as the latter argues that Doing is activity for its own sake, while Making is for the sake of something else, Kant asserts that Practical Reason is followed only for its own sake, while Technical Reason, i. e. the source of hypothetical maxims, is a means to something else. Surprisingly, neither suggests that Making, not Doing, requires some external material. In any case, someone who maintains that Philosophical self-interpretation can miss what a successor can notice with the advantage of hindsight, is Kant himself. So, for example, the vestigial Aristotelian characterization of his project in teleological terms, i. e. that Practical Reason is an End, and Technical Reason a Means, with some historical distance, seems anomalous in the context of a System in which the Form-Matter distinction is so central. In other words, from the perspective of Formaterialism, the operation of Kantian Practical Reason is as much a Making as is Technical Reason, a self-Making. Furthermore, if Doing is a kind of Making, Making is a kind of Doing, and not merely insofar as the latter abstracts the Maker from external material being acted upon. For, as Marx observes, and as McCluhan has more recently popularized, human artifacts are all extensions of the human organism, so Making, on the Evolvemental analysis, is as much a mode of Exposition as is the stretching of one's arm.

Friday, February 19, 2010

Constructivism

The label 'Constructivism' would seem to be a suitable name for the Philosophical study of Homo Faber, and such usage would seemingly be consistent with applications already in effect. These are to doctrines in specialized fields, probably the most prominent of which are Epistemology and the Philosophy of Mathematics. Both of these assert that their objects, of Cognition and of Mathematics, are the products of processes that are genetically defined, and both their founders, Piaget and Brouwer, are explicitly neo-Kantian. Hence, they tend to support the thesis that Kantianism itself is Constructivistic. But, while a Constructivistic interpretation of Kantianism does demonstrate that Kant conceives of Humanity as Homo Faber, it lacks the historical dimension, unlike e. g. Marxism, in which the transition from Homo Sapiens to Homo Faber becomes an explicit theme. In contrast, Evolvementalism, with the resources lacking in traditional Evolutionism, proposes that such a transition marks an Evolvement of the species, in which the emergence of the Idionomic Individual is a crucial stage. At an earlier phase, the Individual is a Particular, a creature who passively instantiates the Universal, via its mimesis of the given world, with its facility in its specifically mental mirroring of the world earning it the distinction 'Sapiens'. But, as the Particular matures, it begins to put its knowledge to practice, and begins to make its own world, or, in other words, Homo Sapiens becomes Homo Faber. So, while Constructivism may be a useful and limitedly accurate characterization of what Humanity has grown into in recent centuries, as an a-historical theory, it lacks the genetic dimension that it requires of its own definitions, and it cannot explain that growth itself.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Poiesis and Experience

Dewey objects to the characterization of his study of Art as 'Aesthetics', because that term primarily applies to receptive processes, whereas his concept is of Art as interactivity. While 'Aesthetics' is suitable for most modern treatments, with their emphases on the perception of a work, Dewey's approach is more in line with Aristotle's seminal treatment. The latter is called 'Poetics', from 'poiesis', meaning 'making', and while Aristotle does explicitly state that his theory is meant to apply to all forms of Art, his focus is on the linguistic arts, of which the modern notion of 'Poetry' is a further narrowing. Still, the literal term 'Poiesis' is available to characterize Dewey's conception of Artistic activity, and, likewise, 'Poietic' can describe his conception of experiences, insofar as they entail Artistic elements. His Poieticization of Experience is, furthermore, a Poieticization of Pragmatism, bringing to light the conspicuous absence in Peirce's System of any explicit study of Art, one which might explain why Peirce falls short of noting that the inculcation of a habit is also a Poiesis of character. So, Dewey's development refines Kant's Practical turn, especially given the latter's reliance on the notion of Form, as a Poieticization of Humanity, a redefinition of Homo Sapiens as Homo Faber. Evolvementalism, continues that development, with a concept of Experience in which the Formal Principle is a fundamental component.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Experience and Experiences

Dewey distinguishes between Experience and experiences. For him, an experience is marked by a distinctive beginning and a consummation, and by a unity that is the product of emotion. For example, a mellow meal in a restaurant is an experience. What such an example implies is, first, that without the pervasive mellowness, the meal would lack its unity of experience, e. g. it would be broken up into two experiences if a pleasant conversation during the entree erupted into an argument during the dessert. Second, it implies that Experience, in general, lacks unity and consummation. Now, if there is any unity to such a meal, it would seem to derive first and foremost from its uniformity of location, i. e. beginning at sitting down at the table, ending when rising to leave, regardless of any emotional coloring. Furthermore, a restaurant meal could be part of a date, which could be part of a courtship, which could be part of a long-term relationship, demonstrating that Dewey's parameters of an experience are arbitrarily drawn, and that it is the drawing of those parameters that is the source of its unity. Hence, an entire life, as an experience, has unity as much as the episodes that it includes. Now, on the Evolvemental analysis of Experience, every moment is a combination of Propriation and Exposition, and Propriation is the Formal Principle of Individual Experience. So, Evolvementalism disagrees with Dewey's thesis that only emotionally-colored discrete experiences, not Experience itself, possesses unity.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Dewey, Art, and Experience

Dewey's conception of Experience as Art is interactive--a rhythm of one's action upon, and being acted upon by, one's environment. The conception is also an aestheticization of Pragmatism, for in the Means-End structure of Pragmatist behavior, a Means is an action on the environment, aiming at an End to be enjoyed. Dewey accomplishes this transfiguration of Pragmatism by showing how every Means is also an End, and every End also a Means, based on his deeper observation that every termination is also a new beginning. This project also has a political significance for Dewey, because in his analysis of class relations, the working class functions as a Means to the enjoyment of the leisure class. The scope of his achievement can be better appreciated by comparing it to two other independent contemporaneous aestheticizations of Experience. For Whitehead, personal Experience is a special case of organic harmonization. For Heidegger, the Pragmatic behavorial context, 'ready-to-handedness', is technological, and Technology is Ontological Poetry. Furthermore, if Whitehead's conception has political application, he never explains how, while Heidegger does suggest that his does, but he never elaborates on how National Socialism is Poetry. Regardless, on the basis of these conceptions, for Whitehead, Experience is fundamentally passive, while for Heidegger, fundamentally active, both one-sided from Dewey's perspective. Evolvemental Experience, the combination of Propriation and Exposition, entails both components.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Dewey and Ends

One recurrent project in Dewey's long and multi-faceted career is his development of Peirce's pioneering Pragmatist Logic. The pivotal innovation for both is the introduction of the Conditional, 'If A, then B', which, especially for Dewey, facilitates, first, the Logical accommodation of Causal propositions, 'A causes B', and then translation of them into behavioral terms, 'A is a means to B'. But later in his career, the influence of Darwinism on Dewey's thinking begins to come to manifestation, primarily in the form of a concept of Experience as adaptive behavior, a process which Dewey sometimes calls 'Reconstruction', and sometimes characterizes as a process of harmonization. By the work Art as Experience, the combination of his two main influences comes to its most mature expression, in a concept of Experience perhaps best epitomized by his presentation of three distinct senses of 'End': End as terminus, End-in-View, and End as culmination. End as terminus is the final moment of an Experience; End-in-View appears at the outset of the Experience, as the imaginative projection of the terminus; and End as culmination is the final moment, as an accumulation of what has preceded. With these distinguished, Dewey is equipped to argue that one of the limitations of Peirce's Pragmatism is that its only notion of End is End as terminus, with respect to which his concept of Experience as aesthetic experimentalism is a further advance. Now the Evolvemental concept of Experience, while developed independently of Dewey's views, agrees with Dewey's in many respects, especially that Experience is cumulative. But, one crucial difference pertains to a facet of the notion of Evolution that Dewey inherits from Darwin--that all Experience is a response to some environmental disruption. In Evolvementalism, de-stabilization, i. e. Variation, is an internal Principle, so an Experience need not wait upon some external challenge, as e. g. boredom demonstrates. At one point, Dewey does observe that Experience is expansive, but he falls short of characterizing such expansiveness as internally motivated.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

The Will

The 'Will' is traditionally defined as a Causality obtaining between a thought, 'I will do X', and an event, X. The general acceptance of the existence of Will is demonstrated by the fact that if one resolves to e. g. raise their arm, but the arm does not move, some malfunction, e. g. neurological, is assumed to have occurred. But to some Philosophers, such an instance is proof of either the dubiousness, or even the illusoriness, of the existence of Will. For Hume, any case of Efficient Causality, 'A causes B', is no more than a constant conjunction of the perception of A and the perception of B, so, likewise, 'Will' is not an independently-existing connection inhering between a thought and a physical event. For Spinoza, mental and physical events are parallel and independent, so a thought could never cause a bodily movement. For Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Santayana, a thought is only an epiphenomenal expression of some physical process, so Willing is only an expression of some process that is transpiring independently of its being thought. In contrast, Formaterialism shows the conceptual inadequacies of the these accounts of the Will. In this System, the Material Principle is, in general, Becoming-Diverse, and Exposition, the Material Principle, is Thought-Becoming-Motion. Now, 'Will' is just another name for Exposition. So, as opposed to Hume's treatment, Will is a Material, not an Efficient, Cause, to which his analysis does not apply, and, insofar as Will precedes the Mind-Body abstraction presupposed by Spinoza and the Epiphenomenalists, their analyses are, likewise, irrelevant. More generally, the sincere resolution that 'I will do X', is the initiation of the doing of X, in which 'I will do' is the Material Cause, and 'X', which guides and shapes the performance, is the Formal Cause. Formaterialism might seem eccentric in the context of traditional Philosophy, but it explains a common event with greater fidelity than does the latter.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Intentionality and Attentionality

'Intentionality' is a Theory of Consciousness that Brentano originates, and Husserl further develops. Instead of the traditional construal of Consciousness as a passive receptacle of its objects, Intentionality proposes that Consciousness actively aims at its objects. At one point, Husserl argues that Intention is more fundamental than Attention, on the basis of his analysis that in acts of Attention, there is still Consciousness of objects that are at the periphery of what is the center of Attention, and that Consciousness still has an Intentional relation towards them. Hence, Consciousness is more pervasively Intentional than Attentional. But, it can be responded that the difference between center and periphery is only a difference of degree of Attention, not one of Attention vs. non-Attention, so Husserl fails to rule out an Attentional Theory of Consciousness. On the other hand, the Evolvemental analysis of Individual Conduct demonstrates how Attention is more fundamental than Intention. On that analysis, all Conduct is fundamentally a process of self-variation, guided by Attention, from which Intention abstracts the projected terminal phase of the process, to help set it in motion. And, once the movement has begun, the Intention has been left behind, while Attention continues to guide what is being done. So, an examination of how the two are involved in Conduct demonstrates that Consciousness is pervasively Attentional, and only intermittently Intentional.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Attention and Preception

A topic in theories of Consciousness that has been relatively neglected is Attention. For example, according to Peirce's appreciative but brief analysis, Attention is an act of Abstraction that is supportive of memorization and of recall processes. What is typical of this treatment is that it construes Attention as functioning primarily in a cognitive context, specifically in outer perception. But, what even the founder of Pragmatism misses is how cognition is a mode of behavior. For, when one is 'paying attention' to e. g. what someone is saying, the immediate object of Attention is not, as traditional theories of Consciousness have it, uttered words, but the process of listening to the uttering of words. More generally, on the previously discussed Evolvemental analysis of Individual Experience, it is what one is doing that is always the immediate object of Consciousness, and, hence, of Attention, and listening to someone speak is as much one such object as is playing a musical instrument or pitching a baseball. Furthermore, Attention is always Preceptive, and Preception is always Attentive. That is, at least implicit in every act of Attention is the guidance of some precept--'listen to what he is saying', 'keep your fingers relaxed', 'push off your legs', for the above examples, respectively. Conversely, Preception cannot guide behavior without Attention mediating between words and movements. so, while the 'fixation of Belief' that Peirce studies aims ultimately at the ingraining of a habit, if he had further examined how Belief guides bodily movements, he might have noticed how Attention helps fixate them.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

The Will to Believe

The expression 'Will to Believe' was coined by William James as a justification of Faith on the Pragmatist grounds that subscription to the hypothesis that God exists, even in the absence of any empirical evidence, has constructive consequences. Peirce's brief but derisive comment on--that a 'Will to Believe' amounts to a 'Will to not Will', an element of death in a vitalistic notion--sounds more like Nietzsche than Pragmatism. In contrast, a Pragmatist critique would focus on James' notion of Belief, rather than on Will. For example, Peirce could assert that James seems to concur with the cardinal Pragmatist Principle that the fixation of Belief is an adoption of a rule of action, but that Faith essentially involves no action at all, other than re-affirmations of it in form or another, e. g. prayer. Still, James could respond that Faith that God exists entails Faith that good deeds will be rewarded, and, hence, does influence action, i. e. the performance of good deeds. To which, Peirce could insist that the hypothesis of forthcoming reward is completely unverifiable, and, hence, contrary to Pragmatism. In any case, James is plainly using the term 'Believe' in a more restricted sense than Peirce intends it, and hence, his 'Will to Believe' is misrepresentative of Pragmatism. Now, Preception entails the interiorization of some prescriptive expression, i. e. 'One should do X' must be translated into 'I will do X', and surely 'Will to Believe' is an accurate description of this interiorization. But such interiorization is the final phase of the fixation of belief by adopting it as a rule. So, perhaps Peirce's best response to James is that the latter's 'Will to Believe' is, while not quite a betrayal, a distraction from a fundamental Pragmatist Principle.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Kant and Transcendentalism

The casual use of the term 'transcendental' obscures both its Kantian roots and the important distinction that Kant attempts to draw with it. In common parlance, it seems to vaguely refer to extraordinary experience, while for Kant, it indicates, more precisely, what is beyond experience. But for him, there are two ways that something is unencounterable in experience, which he distinguishes by the characteristics 'transcendent' and 'Transcendental'. The first is 'things-in-themselves', namely things as they are outside of any experiential context, and it is these are 'transcendent'. The second cannot be encountered within experience either, but are still part of it, because they are the formal structures of any experience--these are 'Transcendental', which he defines as 'pertaining to the innate structures of any cognition'. So, contrary to the common use of the term, what the Kantian term indicates is not merely not extraordinary, but what is prevalent in experience. The historical significance of Kantian 'Transcendentalism' is that it revives the Form-Matter distinction, without Forms inhabiting some transcendent realm, as they do in e. g. Platonism. However, despite the significance in his System of this distinction, he does not seem to go further and invoke Formal Causality, even when discussing Beauty, and seems content with Efficient and Final as exhaustively treating Causality. So, Peirce seems to have no interest in Formal Causality, and while Dewey does, it remains only an implicit theme. Formaterialism obviously makes it explicit, and with the Formal Principle defined as 'Becoming-the-Same', Form cannot be construed as transcendent to Experience in this System.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Reason and Democracy

Kant's notion of Pure Practical Reason is, at least in part, derived from Rousseau's idea of a Democratic General Will--personal rational interests are conditioned by Universal Reason. Kant thus both Rationalizes Democracy and democratizes Reason. Less obvious is a democratization of Reason elsewhere in his System. When he briefly alludes to the categories of traditional Logic in his development of Transcendental Logic, he effectively is demonstrating how the former is derived from the latter. That is, he is showing how Logic, traditionally regarded as having a supernatural origin, is no more than a refined expression of cognitive processes that are intrinsic to every ordinary experience of anybody. Peirce's Pragmatist treatment of Logic similarly implicitly democratizes it, by showing how reasoning is ingredient in most ordinary behavior, and Dewey does so explicitly, by explaining how the split between Theoretical and Practical Reason, with priority accorded to the former, is historically the product of class distinctions. Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, with its attempt by a few specialists to treat Language as applied theoretical Logic, is, despite its debt to Peirce, thus, a reaction against the democratization of Reason. So, efforts such as Wittgenstein's 'language games', and the notion here of Preception, which extends Peirce's study of the Logical role of Language in all behavior, is, with respect to Analytic Philosophy, a further democratization of Reason.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Preception and Imagination

In what little analysis that there has been of the process that I am calling 'Preception'--the carrying out of any linguistic instruction, of precepts, imperatives, recipes, etc.--the relation between a proposition and some behavior seems to be based on the notion of constant conjunction. That is, learning at the earliest age to associate a phrase with some bodily movement, we can follow similar or more complex instructions as adults, on such an hypothesis. Now, Peirce seems to have noticed that on such account, behavior is never more than mechanical, leaving no room for voluntary Preception. Hence, he suggests that we can also voluntarily use a Belief to develop new habits, but he falls short of adequately explaining what this voluntary element, which would mediate between a Belief and an inculcated habit, consists in. Clues to what it might be come from two of those few aspects of the Kantian System that Peirce does not incorporate into his own. Those are--Form and Imagination. With all his attention on Efficient and Final Causality, Peirce seems to fail to appreciate the significance to Kant of Formal Causality, which is certainly relevant to the process of, say, the forming of a habit. Furthermore, while he does note the role played by Imagination, specifically Productive Imagination, i. e. Schematism, as mediating between Sense and Understanding for Kant in the acquisition of knowledge, he misses its potential mediation in the converse process, between the understanding of a Precept, and its physical instantiation. In contrast, on the Formaterial analysis of the Individual, Imagination is the fundamental Formal Cause of behavior. As has been previously discussed, syn-kinaesthetic processes serve homeostatically to regulate physical movement, producing a bodily image. Such production of a bodily image is the fundamental function of Imagination in its reproductive mode. But, with the development of higher degrees of self-awareness, Imagination becomes Productive as well, e. g. any projection of a possible course of action entails the production of a bodily image that vicariously rehearses a possible scenario. So, on the Formaterial analysis of Preception, a precept is cognized, it is associated with the Productive Imagination, and the Productive Imagination shapes the subsequent motions. Because association therein can be free, and because Productive Imagination is creative, Preception is not a mechanical process.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Pragmatism and Belief

In its most common usage, the word 'believe' is followed by the preposition 'in', e. g. 'I believe in God'. But for Philosophers, it is usually followed by the grammatically proper conjunction 'that', because the object of a Belief is, strictly speaking, a proposition, not a thing, e. g. 'I believe that God exists', or 'I believe that the ball is red' are grammatically proper. Belief, in the latter sense, is a pivotal notion in Peirce's Pragmatist turn: hitherto it had traditionally been an observational state, but for Peirce, it becomes an element in behavior. Perhaps best crystallizing the transition is that in a behavioral context, 'A causes B' becomes 'A is a means to B'. In other words, Belief is no longer an end in itself, i. e. the telos of inquiry, but is itself a further means to behavior that it guides. As Peirce himself briefly suggests, and as Dewey more fully develops, behavioral Ends are solutions to problems, so in Pragmatism, the fundamental role of Belief is as a problem-solving tool. However, as both William James and Nietzsche note, there are occasions when behavior, specifically locomotility, is not a Means to an End, is not as e. g. walking is a Means to being at a destination. For, on those occasions, having a destination facilitates walking, by giving it a focus. On the Evolvemental analysis of Experience, such occasions are not exceptions, but are expressions of the essence of locomotility--that it is a manifestation of Exposition, the Material Principle in the Individual, a process that is in itself independent of the Formal Principle, the source of ulterior purposes. So, the Pragmatist analysis of Belief stops short of how it functions in what might be called 'Preception', the process of what Wittgenstein calls 'following of a rule'.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Pragmatism and Semiotics

One basic articulation of Peirce's Pragmatism is the Principle 'The meaning of propositions lies in the future', e. g. the meaning of 'A is B' is 'If one were to examine A, one would perceive that it possesses the characteristic B'. His notions of Mathematics and Logic, as consisting of operations to be performed, thus exemplify the Pragmatist Principle, as does his category Thirdness, insofar as it pertains to law-like formulations with predictive potential. But, in general, Thirdness, as well as the rest of his Phenomenology is merely descriptive of given mental activity, and so seems at odds with his Pragmatism. His Semiotic seems to likewise vacillate between Phenomenology and Pragmatism. On the one hand, his Mathematics and Logic are Pragmatistic, but, on the other, his explanation of an Interpetant, as mediating between a given Sign and a given Object, is plainly descriptive. Also, conspicuously absent from his attempt to establish that a Sign precedes its Object is an easy Pragmatist analysis along the following lines: A proposition is a Sign, and its meaning lies in the future, but an Object of a Sign is the Sign's meaning, so, therefore, Signs precede their Objects. A further development of a Pragmatist Semiotic might observe, as does Evolvementalism, that any prescriptive language is a Sign that precedes its Object, e. g. as a recipe precedes the action that it directs. Furthermore, insofar as any proposition, including a prescription, is logically General, its actualization is logically its Instantiation, i. e. the prescription-action relation is Syllogistic.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Peirce and Quality

Peirce's modal triad of Possibility-Actuality-Necessity seems to replicate Kant's arrangement of them, but he ascribes more to them than does the latter. For Kant, they are primarly Logical categories, e. g. 'Possibility' means 'non-contradictory', whereas Peirce imputes more to them, e. g. 'Possibility' also means 'germinal'. Complicating Peirce's treatment of Possibility is his attribution of it to another First, Quality, a notion that is itself unsettled in his System. His notion of Quality vacillates between an Empiricist interpretation, as an immediate monadic datum of experience, e. g. bare Red, and a Platonist account, as a Form that transcends any awareness of it, e. g. Redness. Both interpretations are difficult to reconcile with other aspects of his System. In the one case, his analysis elsewhere of Sensation as an homogenization of a manifold of neural irritations seems to conflict with his assertion here of it as simple and immediate. In the other, his criterion of the Truth of a proposition, namely experienceable effects, seems grounds to reject his assertion here that a Quality exists even when it is not being perceived. Furthermore, this confusion over the nature of Quality may be the root of the complications in his Semiotic theory that have been under discussion. It may be that the main reason that he insists that a Sign is a First, and, therefore, that it precedes its Object, is that Qualities are main examples of Signs, and he has committed himself to according Firstness to Qualities. In contrast, in Evolvementalism, the immediate object of any awareness, even sensation, is some bodily process, so, a Quality, qua Sign, represents some preceding Actuality. From that perspective, Peirce's insistence that a Sign precedes its Object may be vestigial Platonism in his System.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Peirce and Ordinal Numbers

The main categories of Peirce's System are 'Firstness', 'Secondness', and 'Thirdness'. He gives no precise definition of them, but some triadic examples include, respectively, Possibility-Actuality-Necessity, Quality-Fact-Law, and Sign-Object-Interpretant. He acknowledges that his triadic structure is somewhat influenced by the Kantian and Hegelian Dialectic of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, but while Thirdness similarly links the other two components, it is not as their sublation, but as their mediation. A clue as to the nature of this mediation is his description of the categories as 'cenopythagorean', presumably meaning 'neo-Pythagorean'. On that basis, a geometric construal suggests a point-line-triangle progression, e. g. in which the vertex of the triangle mediates between the endpoints of the opposing side. But the invoking of Pythagoras also suggests why 'Firstness', 'Secondness', and 'Thirdness' are inappropriate names for the categories. For, the Pythagorean characteristics that Peirce attributes to these categories are Numerically more accurately Cardinal, not Ordinal, i. e. are more accurately 'Oneness', 'Twoness', and 'Threeness'. Most obviously, the infinitude of the becoming-diverse of the Ordinals does not accommodate, as does Peirce, the closure of the sequence at Thirdness. Furthermore, Thirdness, unlike Pythagorean Threeness, merely succeeds Firstness and Secondness, and does not mediate between them. Likewise, Peirce's concept of Interpretant, which mediates between Sign and Object, is more accurately Threeness, not Thirdness.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Peirce, Phenomenology, and Logic

While Peirce is best known as a pioneer of Semiotics, Logic, and Pragmatism, they are special aspects of a more comprehensive System, the general character of which is more traditional. His Ontology is a version of Spiritualism which he calls 'Objective Idealism', in which all reality is Mind, of which Matter is an "effete", as he puts it, mode, reminiscent, though Peirce does not seem to treat it explicitly, of Bergson's construal of Matter as ennervated Energy. In particular, human mental activity is 'Phenomenological', closer to Hegelian than Husserlian. But, the traditional and the innovative dimensions of the System do not quite cohere, and his ambivalent treatment of a Sign is a manifestation of that incoherence. On the one hand, he treats a sign Phenomenologically, insofar as it is an immediate datum of mental activity, e. g. a Sensation, but, on the other, in the Rationalism of his Semiotics, Logic, and Pragmatism, a Sign plainly mediates between Interpretant and Object. Furthermore, there is an analogous ambivalence in the nature of the Object of a Sign. On the hand, his Phenomenology commits Peirce to an Object being itself another Phenomenon, but, on the other, his Rationalism has it as the product of an inference from a manifold of neural excitations. So, while Husserl makes explicit the suspension of the non-mental actuality that opens the door to the Phenomenological realm, Peirce, like Hegel, implicitly suppresses it, but unlike Hegel, is ambivalent about such suppression. In contrast, by affirming that Consciousness represents, and, hence, is preceded by, physical processes, as does Evolvementalism, Peirce's resistance to treating a basic datum of Consciousness, e. g. a Sensation, as a Sign of a non-mental Object would likely disappear.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Inference and Representation

For Peirce, all mental activity is inferential, i. e. has a basic syllogistic structure, but how he holds the Sign-Object-Interpretant relation to be syllogistic is unclear. Some passages suggest that a Sign functions as a Middle Term between Object and Interpretant, with similarities to each. But, the representational relation between Sign and Object entails that they are different in some respect, and Inference abstracts from this difference, so, as such, that relation cannot be reduced to a type of Inference. Furthermore, Peirce's System resists the treatment of a Sign as a Middle Term; rather, it is the Interpretant which is a Middle in the System. For example, if smoke is taken as a Sign of fire, it is, seemingly following Hume, only because an Interpretant conjoins fire and smoke. Still, Representation is more than mere conjunction, which is indifferent to the distinction between representation and represented. Now, on the Evolvemental analysis, a representation interiorizes what it represents, an analysis that is applicable to the commonest example of a Sign-Object relation. What transforms sounds emitted from someone's mouth into words, is that they are taken to contain meaning, as if they were the wrapping around the latter. No doubt that unwrapping must occur before meaning is conveyed, but such unwrapping presupposes a wrapping. Likewise, in order for something to be taken to be a Sign, and no mere phenomenon, it must, at the outset at least, be interpreted as containing, in some respect, an Object. Now, it is Peirce himself who introduces the relation of Inclusion into contemporary Logic, so insofar as Representation is Inclusion, it is an element of a Rational structure. But if that structure is: Sign includes Object, Intepretant includes Sign, therefore, Interpretant includes Object, then a Sign functions as the Middle Term in mental activity.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Peirce and Representation

In Peirce's Semiotic, a Sign is part of a triadic structure entailing Sign, Object, and Interpretant. The Sign represents the Object, and the Interpretant reads the Sign as a conveyance of that Object. Hence, the process of interpretation entails what Derrida calls the 'effacement' of the Sign, because the role of the Sign is never more a medium between Object and Interpretant, the more transparent, the more effective. But this construal of the process of Interpretation also effaces a structure that is essential to it, namely that of the representational relation between Sign and Object. On the Evolvemental analysis, the Object precedes the representation of it, an ordering from which Peirce's Semiotic abstracts.