One of the things that Ecologies of the Moving Image has left unresolved, and left me needing to think more about, is the extent to which my Peircian “triadism” holds up.
Philosophically, the case for some sort of triadism as a way of getting around dualisms is, at first blush, appealing. But there are triads, and there are triads.
A triad can be static: three elements that make up the universe, like the Holy Trinity: irreducible, primary, originary, their interaction some magical (yet unchanging) function of the nature of things. Or it can be a glorified dialectic — thesis-antithesis-synthesis — a form of dualism opened up to time and process.
Or it can be genuinely trialectical, a triadism of elements that are not simply responses to each other, but that deny the sufficiency of a single response to anything: there is always a third, a shadow that haunts, whose effects play into the relationship between any duality. And the relationship between the three is always changing. (It seems to me that Henri Lefebvre’s “trialectics of space” vacillates between each of these: wanting to be a processual trialectics, but sometimes folding back into a static set of 3 elements or a 3-term version of Marxian dialectics.)
A triad can be simultaneously logical and processual, so that the three elements are not merely an irreducible three, but their inter-involvement is part of an open and dynamic process: 1 comes before 2 which comes before 3, but 2 is both the sum of two 1’s (points, uniquenesses, singularities, haecceities) and qualitatively different, as it involves the encounter of two distinct 1’s, not merely a continuous growth from 1 to 2. Three is different again, combining difference (2) with unity/uniqueness in a way that makes relational pattern possible. This is Peirce’s triadism, which is formal, mathematical, logical, and progressive all at once. Three, for Peirce, is the minimum, and the optimum, for a universe like ours: everything above 3 is reducible to 3, but if you try to reduce 3, you get a reduced universe.
And then there are triads that are deepened forms of dyads, continua with two ends and a third that is somewhere between them. When a continuum is let loose, set into motion, allowed to grow, then that growth can be led by a point anywhere on the continuum. The result is that the line becomes an ever changing triangulation of forces, with the forward point of the triangle moving somewhere on the line between the two ends, and thus being never predictable, and with the two ends also evolving and changing as they grow. They aren’t ends, then, so much as they are points of forward movement whose relationship is affected by a third point which is the point at which their relationship moves through at any given time. (Multiply that by infinity and you get the universe.)
While I’ve tried to follow the Peircian line in my three cinema triads, one of them is really closer to the “deepened dyad” model that I just described. This is the triad of the film-world as simultaneously geomorphic, anthropomorphic, and biomorphic.
The geomorphic has to do with the formation, or morphogenesis, of ground; the anthropomorphic (for humans) with that of figure. A useful analogy here would be that from developmental psychology: geomorphism is about the development of “object constancy”; it is the recognition that things stay the same over time. It names the way in which a world keeps producing some “ground reliability,” a sense that there is a background that is stable and given, an environment that we can respond to, affect, reshape, without making it completely unrecognizable.
Anthropomorphism, on the other hand, deals with something like what developmental psychologists call “theory of mind.” A child, at X number of months of age, begins to realize that some of those she interacts with — mother, father, other others — have the capacity to feel and desire things, and to decide things and act on those decisions, in the same way that the child herself comes to experience herself as doing. The cool thing about being human, as a friend of mine tells kids, is that we get to make decisions. The how of doing that is where mind happens.
The human piece, as I’ve described before, is a movable point on another continuum: we could be talking about dogs, and about canomorphism; or Belugas and belugomorphism; or amanita muscaria, and amanitomorphism; or maybe pencils and pencilmorphism. Each of these is a plateau, an outward-pushing point on the expanding circumference of the universe, and there’s no telling where it will go or at what point it might stop being identifiable as the “anthropomorphic” (or “canomorphic”) and become something altogether different. But it is a leading edge, and therefore one end of a many-ended, multi-pointed continuum. At the “other” end, if there is an other end, is the dead object, the thing that’s just there, settled, given, the thing we are moving away from, the objectivity that is always withdrawing.
The biomorphic is really “where everything happens”: it’s the place of activity, mobility, prehension, translation, along which the formation of the other two relata proceeds.
But even that is not quite right. If the anthropo- (etc.) -morphic is simply the actualization of “theory of mind” — the recognition of freedom, agency, the capacity to act and change things — extended in the way that we recognize as “ours,” then there is always also a beyond to that, a point at which the actor is no longer human but something more, something trans-, something, well, divine. At the opposite end from geomorphism, then, there is theomorphism, where dwell the gods and powers that lure us forward (which may be something like Whitehead’s “eternal objects”).
Our society isn’t particularly keen on talking about divinities, and when it does it talks only about one such megadivinity. But on a grander historical scale it’s been pretty common to imagine that there are those who are more agential than us, more powerful, more capable of ordering, disordering, and redesigning worlds. A process-relational view simply clarifies that these are relata, lures for our passions.
Yet even that’s not quite right. Some of them concern themselves with us; others go about their own business. Just as there are chunks of the electromagnetic spectum that remain invisible to us but are visible or audible to bats and other creatures, so there are divinities that are neither known to nor concerned with us.
Yet there are times when our sight is so blinded we forget there are deities at all. Heidegger’s statement that “only a god can save us now” was precisely this kind of recognition that human skills alone will not get us out of the circle that our technology and instrumental reason have gotten us into. We need to listen and hear the whispers of the appropriate deities. Which raises the question of our deity-literacy (and Heidegger was not a good guide in that).
Where am I going with this? That in an open, processual universe, three is the minimum for understanding processual complexity; it opens our understanding to nonlinearity. But it must be a three that is genuine — three autonomous terms — and that is continuous at the same time, in that the three aren’t pre-defined; they take on new qualities as they interact with each other. They are not a trinity of forces located outside the world, but an immanent trinity whereby the world itself is actively poised between what it pushes against (and away from) and what it is pulled by: between the past and the objects thrown up by it, and the open future with its potentialities emerging around us as we move.
Or something like that.
Thanks to Bugman for the images.
Thanks for this, Adrian. I think that “triads that are deepened forms of dyads” are those usually seen as “syntheses”, as opposed to a trialectical “triadism of elements that are not simply responses to each other”
In Peircean terms it becomes a problem of the respective roles of synechism (continuity), tychism (mutation), and agapism (“Evolutionary Love”).
James Bradley’s “Beyond Hermeneutics: Peirce’s Semiology as a Trinitarian Metaphysics of Communications” (courtesy of Michael Austin at COMPLETE LIES), insists that “In a relational world, there is no longer anything unintelligible about the triune principle”. But, he adds that there is a “sea-change that Peirce brings about in the theory of triunity, transforming the medieval theory of persons and the German Idealist theory of absolute subjects into a radically immanent logic of events”. A genuine “trialectic” comes about when we consider actualization, Bradley argues. It’s only when we focus of the virtual, Peirce’s universals or generals, that we encounter this Godelian ambiguity between Thirdness as synthesis and Thirdness as genuine creativity.
So far so good. Now for the hard part. Even today, after the supposed death of dualism, too many still practice a negative logic that leaves them paralyzed by ultimate polarities – and their inevitable expansion into quaternities, or four-folds. I won’t mention any contemporaries, but I’m particularly concerned with the way Charles Hartshorne blew it (IMHO), which is directly relevant to the dilemma that you’re discussing.
I’m referring to the Religion Online excerpt of chapter 7, “Hartshorne & Peirce: Individuals & Continuity”, by Manley Thompson (with a response by Hartshorne) from EXISTENCE AND ACTUALITY: CONVERSATIONS WITH CHARLES HARTSHORNE. Hartshorne’s arguments are strongly related to Whitehead. Hartshorne writes: “The disagreement concerns rather their [individuals] relations to their own momentary states, also the distinctions between the mind-body distinctions involved… My criticism of Peirce’s synechism concerns primarily his assertion that ACTUAL becoming is continuous and that, in a finite time, we have an infinity of experiences, each infinitesimally short, temporally”. I insist that Peirce himself would disagree with Hartshorne’s “and that” clause. I think Hartshorne’s usually flawless logic fails him here. ESPECIALLY when he also implies that Peirce didn’t foresee the coming THEORY OF RELATIVITY!
As usual, Peirce was way ahead of the game when it comes to Relativity (or the Logic of Relations). I’d like to cite the following as my epitath. It’s from 2004’s US Patent 6,819,474 B2 filed by Ralph G Beil and Kenneth Laine Ketner, for “Quantum Switches & Circuits”
“The significance with the PBK [Peirce-Beil-Ketner] method [for quantum switches & circuits] of the external or I-I [Interpretant-Interpretant] bonding in term’s of Peirce’s relational logic is that it is between Interpretants or, in more physical terms between observers. Each particle observes or makes a measurement of the other. Each alters the state of the other and carries away an interpretation of the interaction”.
This is a trialectic method, not a dialectic method. Best, Mark
what would such attunements to extra/supra-human powers actually look like, how should we do this?
Hi, Mark. As always, your comments are deeply appreciated.
I think you’re more or less right (which means I’m not quite sure if it’s more or if it’s less, but think it’s probably more) that “triads that are deepened forms of dyads” are (dialectical) “syntheses” as opposed to genuinely “trialectical.” Yet I have the sense that Peirce’s triads are, in a sense, more “trialectical” than the “trialectics” (under that name) that I’ve been most familiar with, which are those of Lefebvre and his followers, such as geographer Ed Soja. So words can get a little confusing here.
To re-state the problem as it comes up in my own work: I think I vacillate somewhat, in my writing to date, between thinking of my triads in “Peircian trialectical” fashion and, on the other hand, in a “deepened dialectical” (pseudo-trialectical?) fashion. I’m still working out the difference. And the difference seems to hinge on the fact that seconds are where the “activity” (actual encounters, experience, actualization) occurs; and thirds are where generalities emerge, which makes them a sort of spin-off from seconds. So at times I prefer to think of firsts, seconds, and thirds as different dimensions altogether — something like virtuality (/spontaneity), actuality, and generality, but all highly active and productive in their own ways. And at other times I think of secondness as the realm where actual action happens, with firstness and thirdness serving as the two ends of an outstretched continuum between which it occurs. Firstness is the virtuality that gives rise to it; thirdness is a sort of cognized result, by-product, or extension of it.
To explain that any further, I would have to go more into the details of my use of Peirce than I want to right now. (And, in any case, my use probably goes further away from Peirce than most Peircians would care to go.)
However, I don’t think that that second characterization is necessarily either Peirce’s *intent* or my own; rather, it’s a tendency I find myself falling into, for better or worse. And I think it’s related to the question of continuity versus discontinuity, which the debate between Hartshorne and Thompson gets into. I haven’t quite worked out exactly what I make of that debate, but my first reading of it was to favor Hartshorne’s arguments on the whole.
Which makes me curious about what you’re getting at in referring to Hartshorne “blowing it.” Do you mean specifically in this particular argument about continuity/discontinuity, relativity, etc.? (And I love your epitaph!) Or are you suggesting that Hartshorne blew it more generally in his “revision” of Peirce, with this argument being perhaps but a small indication of the larger blow?
Thanks also for reminding me about that Bradley article, which I read some time ago and found oversimplified at times (e.g., in his list of monadic, dyadic, triadic, and tetradic philosophies/ers) but helpful in positioning Peirce among the alternatives. I like his characterization of Peirce’s metaphysics as a “radically immanent logic of events”; that’s how I’ve been thinking of it myself.
(In fact, looking it up right now, I realize I wrote about that article on this blog at one point. One of my other favorite quotes from it is this: “In this context, the crucial implication of Peirce’s theories of infinity and vagueness should now be clear: there is no opposition between realism and constructivism, for the real is itself a movement of constructive activity.” Peirce isn’t the only one to have made that case, but he made it clearly and earlier than most of the others I’m aware of. In that sense he’s the – recognized or unrecognized – predecessor of a lot of people writing along these lines today.)
dmf – You raise a challenging question that, in its brevity, makes me realize how difficult it would be to concisely and convincingly answer it (!). But I’ll try, briefly…
“what would such attunements to extra/supra-human powers actually look like, how should we do this?”
We do it all the time when we extend ourselves beyond ourselves. If we understand humans, or any entities, as always in the midst of “becoming” (as I do), then the question is: what is it we are becoming? To the extent that a human is aiming to, and succeeding at, actualizing some ideal of what “humanity” means to them, then they would be “becoming human” (which I call “anthropomorphosis”). When people talk about becoming “fully human,” as opposed to being inhuman, subhuman, bare life, et al., that’s what I think they have in mind. And to the extent that we are unsatisfied with the potentials “humanity” seems to offer us and aim to – and ultimately succeed to some extent – in becoming something else, then we do this generally out of an intuition or idea of a *something else.*
Often that intuition or idea comes to us from myths, stories, images, poetry, and other sources that we encounter in states of prehensive openness (e.g., when we’re excited by something we’re learning or encountering). But where do those images themselves come from? I suppose you’d have to ask some of the people who’ve produced the more lasting ones; e.g., if it were possible, I’d love to do a focus group with William Blake, Goethe, Shakespeare, Rumi, Teresa of Avila, whoever else….
They might say the images come from a god or divinity, or from creativity or genius itself, as a kind of active force or presence infiltrating into them. But the point is that these “attunements,” as you call them, are not unknown and that there is a long history of them. They come with risks, including those of self-delusion, and with a lot of cultural baggage. But they are also always being reinvented.
not sure that any of those folks actually got “outside” of themselves and surely William James was wrong to think that it wouldn’t matter to a methodist if he was worshiping products/gifts of his un-conscious or an actual Divinity but I’ll stay tuned (pardon the pun).
via enowning:
http://writing.markfullmer.com/daimonion-last-god-socrates-heidegger-and-god-thinker
Adrian, I recently read an article (which I can’t find right now!) by Latour on Souriau’s different modes of existence. Some of what you’re saying sounds very much like what Latour/Souriau is getting at. Have you read any of his essays on it (there’s one in The Speculative Turn, but I’m not sure right now if that’s the same one I read – close enough, I suppose)? If so, how does it fit (or not) with what you’re describing here?
PS – I have to admit, I don’t fully grasp where Latour is going, but I’m curious to learn more and also about what you’re developing here!
dmf – That’s a nice piece (by Robert Gall) that you’ve linked to. The “daimon” is a pretty good name for what I’m after, though I think there’s a spectrum that’s worth mapping between the different kinds of daimons, gods, et al. one can find in the western philosophical tradition (and of course in other traditions). I like Gall’s argument about the “god of the thinker” – and Rorty’s about theological “knockoffs” (indeed…).
The “god of the thinker” comes close to the god or daimon that James Hillman has tried to revive in his “archetypal psychology,” which I’ve also referenced here before (and do in a bit more depth in my book, in consideration of the image).
Thanks for that.
Great discussion, Adrian. I see that it’s moved on beyond my exhausted slump. Not surprising! In my own work, I’m struggling to design a system that will impute historical indexes when new structures arise.
The insights from Gall’s essay, “From Daimonion to the ‘Last’ God”, are an alien phenomenology for me. This seems to assume that if there’s something we don’t know, it can only be given to use by a ‘divinity’, understood as an inspirational sign that takes us by surprise and, if only briefly, pops us out of our everyday world. But, everything is a surprise to me, though some events more than others, simply because I don’t assume that I have a plan for the time-period’s activities and can only ever respond to the demands of the occasion as they arise.
The problem with “threeity” is that Thirdness has 3 senses: 1st: It is the self-assured habit of the rationalist who knows what needs to be done and has a plan of action; 2nd: It is a pattern or law that has been discovered to be pervasive, and can be used predictively; 3rd: It is the ‘divine’ intervention of something defying the usual habits of expectation – returning us to a surprising Firstness that requires new explorations to further refine understanding.
Regarding your concern that you “vacillate” between “Peircean trialectical” and “deepened dialectical”, I think this is mostly the normal flow through our multi-mode circuits as these various daemons from other actual occasions disrupt our habits and reasons.
Regarding Hartshorne, I still think he failed to appreciate the importance of the 3-fold model of reality. However, (the early) Peirce saw “four methods of inquiry”, and even Kenneth Ketner, after bowing before Threeity, will insist: “Thus, in a sign relation, there are FOUR realities: the Object, the Representamen, the Interpretant, and the fourth is the triadic sign relation itself”. At the time that Thompson & Hartshorne were discussing Peirce, Ketner tells us (in a very recent draft essay on “Semeiotic” posted to Peirce-L in February), the buzz was that WV Quine had disproved Peirce’s theorems of Nonreduction (“No genuine triadic relation may be constructed solely from dyadic relations”) and Completeness (“Any relation of adicity four or higher may be constructed solely from triadic relations”). Thus, Hartshorne may be forgiven for thinking that Peircean Threeity was a dead end!
I would propose that interpreting a sign relation as a “fourth reality” can only mean that it becomes a process of inquiry on a different daemonic level from that where the vicarious sign relation arose.
Part of what any notion of divinity might mean is that there is an encounter that we did not choose (1stness), an interaction that fires various triggers for us (affects, percepts, concepts) in an unexpected pattern (2ndness), which we must resolve either by assimulation to our existing scheme of things (3rdness as habit) or by propagating a new path of exploration (3rdness as return to 1stness, rather than some transcendental 4thness 😉 I don’t think it’s “pop-zen” to suggest that we find this encrypted in the writings of Deleuze (especially in his CINEMA books 😉 where his trialectical argument is often hidden in the form of an “on the one hand … on the other hand … meanwhile” discussion. This “meanwhile” always reminds me of my favorite poetic stanza:
“Altogether elsewhere, vast / Herds of reindeer move across / Miles and miles of golden moss, / Silently and very fast” (WH Auden, “The Fall of Rome”).
In this daemonic spirit, here’s a similar epitath, from a Washington Post WEEKEND section blurb for Craig Clunas’s National Gallery of Art lecture series, CHINESE PAINTINGS AND ITS AUDIENCES. Michael O’Sullivan writes: “The idea that art is more than an inert object isn’t new. Central to traditional Chinese painting is the notion of a transaction – flowing both ways – between the art object and the person looking at it”.
May your daemons be mostly insightful, rather than frightful! Mark
In light of some comments elsewhere, I just want to add that I was being way too arrogant in saying that “Hartshorne blew it”. I’ve read far too little Hartshorne to be making such claims (just CREATIVE SYNTHESIS & PHILOSOPHIC METHOD and THE ZERO FALLACY collection edited by Mohammad Valady, along with various articles). So, I’m intrigued by the trichotomy of “Six Arguments in Favor of God in Speculative Realism”.
Just realized why I used the spelling “daemon”, rather than “daimon”, since that was how Philip Putnam spelled it in HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy where, if I may, his GOLDEN COMPASS is the Firstness of Feeling & Phenomenology, followed by the Secondness of THE SUBTLE KNIFE, of Reaction & Science, leading, Thirdly, to the AMBER SPYGLASS of Knowledge & Ecology.
While I remain suspicious of any LOGIC OF PERFECTION, those interested in modal logic may be intrigued by this triadic take on the traditional Square of Opposition: Scroll down to the diagram that looks like a well-connected Star of David at the following link: http://www.square-of-opposition.org/start2.html (I’m not sure the link will work – it’s from the June 2010 conference in Corsica).
Best, Mark
Wonderful writing as always, but you cannot possible call the Holy Trinity “static,” especially in regard to relationality, if you’ve read anything at all of Orthodox or Catholic theology. See, for example, David Bentley Hart’s “The Beauty of the Infinite” (he is Orthodox yet understands many Catholic theological visions – for example, Aquinian analogy – as well). See anything at all by Balthasar. Read Soloviev. Heck, read the Catechism and on Theo-Drama, anything by Benedict XVI or John Paul II! The Trinity is conceived of as a DYNAMIC relationship because through the Incarnation it is OPEN to the “missio”, in which, in Orhtodox terms, human beings are divinized, though not by identity – instead, within the “ever greater” mystery.
It may be different in Protestantism, because with the rejection of philosophy came the “two-tier” world of Absolute Other Transcendent ending in irrational fideism. Something similar is true in Islam because there is no Trinity, and hence God becomes utterly remote and to our minds capricious. But in Orthodoxy and Catholicism – nope, not static, not by a long shot!
But beside that — thank you!
Mark,
I thought your initial post was fine with respect to Hartshorne – in fact, it would be great to hear more of your posts. Do you have a blog?
Glad to see some discussion of logic is coming up. I think that Adrian, too, and perhaps his readers, would love to hear more of your thoughts on logic as semiotic (Peirce) as well as what you like and don’t like about Hartshorne pertinent to Adrian’s post above. It seems that you are pretty well versed in all of this and so reading your comment was a pleasure. Great to see!
Bella,
I loved your comment, really. Indeed there is such a thing as Process Catholicism. If you don’t mind (and if I ever have some time), I would like to use your comment as a seed for a post on my own blog. If I only can find some time! Very nice reflections.
It is a pleasure to meet the two of you.
Best regards,
Leon/after nature
Bella – You are right that the Trinity (in the more interesting Orthodox and Catholic interpretations) is not static in terms of its relationships with each other *or* with humanity. And there is something about Peirce’s triadism that is very trinitarian in a Christian sense (firstness as the Father’s generativity, secondness as the “begottenness” of the Son, thirdness as that which proceeds from the two). But, as I understand it, the Father remains the Father, the Son the Son, and the Spirit the Spirit. They do not exchange properties with each other, or become things that are unrecognizable within the basic triadic framework (say, for instance, Mother).
Perhaps, in the end, I’m just more comfortable with the abstraction of Peirce’s categories; the others (father, son, spirit) are too easy to reify, as indeed they have been, and as they embody, in their very iconicity, assumptions about gender, appearance, specific actions, etc.
I do agree that theosis (the Christian doctrine of the divinization of man, to use the traditionally gendered term) is a pretty radical idea, though, that often gets lost in popular Christianity. It is, of course, anthropocentric, but that’s another argument…
Mark,
That’s interesting about Ketner and Quine’s “disproving” Peirce. (I find it impossible to keep up with Peirce-L, but I’ve just looked it up and, yes, Ketner’s piece is there…) Trying to come to grips with Quine’s critique and responses to it tells me how much more reading I need to do here…
Question for contemplation: Is there a daemonic that corresponds to the semiotic? Do the two respond to each other?
More on these topics when I get around to them. Thanks for your insights.
http://slought.org/content/11085/
Santner on the psychotheology of everyday life