Peirce and Barfield

[wood jim]

Why Peirce? It makes good sense that Pynchon would be
attracted to some of what Peirce has to say about
science. His tychism. But the character does not fit
the name, the ideas, at all. 

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/

Science shows, then, that not everything is fixed by
exact law (even if everything
should be constrained to some extent by habit) and
that spontaneity has an objective
place in the universe. Peirce called this doctrine
"tychism," a word taken from the
Greek word for "chance" or "luck" or "what the gods
choose to lay on one."
Tychism is a fundamental part of Peirce's view, and
reference to his tychism
provides an added reason for Peirce's insisting on the
irreducible fallibilism of
inquiry. For nature is not a static world of law but
rather a dynamic world that
manifests considerable spontaneity. (Peirce would have
regarded the irreducibility of
quantum mechanics to some "hidden-variables" theory as
being a mere matter of
course.)

Three figures from the history of culture loomed
exceedingly large in the intellectual
atmosphere of the period in which Peirce was most
active: Hegel in philosophy,
Lyell in geology, and Darwin (along with Watson) in
biology. These thinkers have a
single theme in common: evolution. Hegel described an
evolution of ideas, Lyell an
evolution of geological structures, and Darwin an
evolution of biological species and
varieties. Peirce's thinking is deeply permeated with
the evolutionary idea, which he
extended beyond the confines of any particular subject
matter. For Peirce, the entire
universe is an evolutionary product; indeed, he
conceived that even the most firmly
entrenched of nature's habits (for example, even those
habits typically called
"natural laws") have themselves evolved, and
accordingly should be subjects of
inquiry. One can sensibly seek evolutionary
explanations of the existence of
particular natural laws.

One possible path along which nature acquires its
habits was explored by Peirce
using statistical analysis in situations of
non-Bernoullian trials. Peirce showed that, if
we posit a primal habit in nature, viz. the tendency
however slight to take on habits,
then the result is often a high degree of regularity
in the long run. For this reason,
Peirce suggested that in the remote past nature was
considerably more spontaneous
than it later became, and that in general the habits
nature has come to exhibit have
evolved, just like ideas, geological formations, and
biological species have evolved.

In this evolutionary notion of nature and natural law
we have an additional support
of Peirce's insistence on the inherent fallibilism of
scientific inquiry. Nature may
simply change sometimes, even in its most entrenched
fundamentals. Thus, even if
scientists were at one point in time to have accurate
conceptions about nature, this
fact would not ensure that at some later point in time
these same concpetions would
remain accurate.

An especially intriguing and curious twist that
Peirce's evolutionism takes is what is
called its "agapeism." According to Peirce, the most
fundamental engine of the
evolutionary process is not struggle, strife, greed,
or competition. Rather it is
nurturing love, in which an entity is prepared to
sacrifice its own perfection for the
sake of the wellbeing of its neighbor. This doctrine
had both a social significance for
Peirce, who apparently had the intention of arguing
against the popular
socio-economic Darwinism of the late nineteenth
century, and a cosmic significance,
which Peirce associated with the doctrine of the
Gospel of John and with the
mystical ideas of Swedenborg and Henry James. Peirce
even argued that logicality
in some sense presupposes the ethics of
self-sacrifice.

…to understand how it works, how to measure its field
strength, count the lines of force, she may fall back
on superstition…

In GR, the scientists, or better the technologists,
artificially accelerate what they have measured,
counted, determined to be the labor (both the work and
delivery of life from the womb) of nature. They do
this, in part, by fabricating History in the
laboratory of WAR and by impersonating mother nature.
For example, they  "pornographically" produce the
mysteries of life as film. But by this artificial
acceleration of History, of what they observe in the
lab and concoct in the "womb" of the Rocket with the
"advances" of scientific methods of measuring,
counting, determining, organizing, observing, they
cannot escape the "hypothesis of chance." 

And what has this to do with Oedipa and Peirce? 

As Barfield says, "there will in the end be no means
of communication between one intelligence and
another."
 
 Little by little we subtract   Faith and fallacy from
fact  The illusory from the true
  And starve upon the residue.
		







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