Point Omega: Chardin & Peirce

[ish mailian]

for a more extensive analysis of the Teilhard and Father Rapier see

Gravity's Rainbow, Domination, and Freedom
by Luc Herman  (Author), Steven Weisenburger (Author)


from Weisenburger's useful Companion to GR

V539.12, B627.33 Teilhard de Ghardin A Jesuit father, paleontologist;
and philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) wrote his
best-known work, The Phenomenon of Man, while serving as a
missionary in China during the early years of World War II. His philosophy ;
attempts a synthesis of evolutionary science and mystical Christianity;
The question of a ''return" thus arises here because, in Teilhard's
view, the evolution of material forms up to man is an evolution of spirit),
and man is the "omega point" of a linear progress that Teiihard sees
as an escape from entropy, a transcendence founded on love and unity.
For mankind he projects no "return" to repressed, primitive forms
but rather a continued evolution of that divine spirit.

V539.21, B628.4 "Critical Mass" This is the smallest amount of
fissionable material necessary to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. But
the date is late July or very early August of 1945, and the first A-bomb
(or "Cosmic Bomb," as the news media dubbed it) will not become
common knowledge until after August 6, the day of the Hiroshima blast.
So the idea, here, is still "trembling in its earliness."

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 7:36 PM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> p. 364  Peirce thought that our representations can be classified,
> filled out, and elaborated in all sorts of ways, that they can even
> become “better,” in the sense of “more useful,” as we peel off their
> metaphysical husks.  But was can never (as individuals) say that they
> are identical with their objects.  This is not just because our
> knowledge always “swims,” as Peirce put it, “in a continuum of
> uncertainty and of indeterminacy”; it is also because—and this is the
> distinctive feature of Peirce’s theory of signs—there are no
> prerepresentational objects out there.  Things are themselves signs:
> their being signs is a condition of their being things at all.  You
> can call this notion counterintuitive, because that is exactly what it
> is: it is part of Peirce’s attack on the idea that we can know some
> things intuitively—that is, without the mediation of representations.
> For Peirce, knowing was inseparable from what he called semiosis, the
> making of signs, and of the making of signs there is no end.  If you
> look up a word in the dictionary, you find it defined by a string of
> other words, the meanings of which can be discovered by looking them
> up in a dictionary, leading to more words to be looked up in turn.
> There is no exit from the dictionary.  Peirce didn’t simply think that
> language is like that.  He thought that the universe is like that.
>
>
>
> p. 364  So what did he mean when he accused the Chicago school of
> treating truth as a matter of linguistic expression rather than a
> matter of fact?  He meant that Dewey had no teleology.  The
> evolutionary concept of teleology is confusing.  Darwin’s theory is
> teleological in that it conceives of everything about an organism as
> designed for a purpose—ultimately, the purpose of survival.  That was
> one of the most revolutionary aspects of Darwin’s thinking, and the
> source of James and Dewey’s functionalism—their idea that beliefs are
> instruments for action.  We don’t act because we have ideas; we have
> ideas because we must act, and we act to achieve ends.  But Darwin’s
> theory is antiteleological in that it does not conceive of the
> universe itself as designed for an end.  Change is continual but not
> directional.  Evolutionary development is not guided by anything prior
> to or outside of itself.
>
> [Peirce} did not think that chance variation could explain evolution
> adequately—he thought God’s love must play a more important role, a
> theory he called “agapism,” and derived in part from the Swedenborgian
> writings of Henry James Sr.—and he could not imagine a universe devoid
> of ultimate meaning.