Point Omega: Chardin & Peirce

[ish mailian]

THE PROMISE OF PRAGMATISM
Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority
By John Patrick Diggins
University of Chicago Press, 1994


On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 9:30 AM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.