As the world’s refugee crisis builds — reminding us that much worse movements of people loom ahead, and much worse wars, as climate systems destabilize and the capitalist world-ecology unravels in the decades and centuries ahead — I can’t help asking myself what, if anything, philosophy can offer in response.
It depends on which philosophy, of course. But to take one of my favorites: C. S. Peirce’s whole philosophical work was an extended argument for an expanded understanding of reason. Reason, for Peirce, was rooted in human nature and in nature itself; it is a development of the very process of making meaning that is the essence of all living things (and, Peirce would say, all things living or not).
Reason grows out of intuitive common sense — the hunches that Peirce labeled “abduction,” which supplement and ground the better known processes of induction and deduction. As logical reasoning, it is rooted, furthermore, in aesthetics and ethics — the capacity to cultivate habits of perception and relation commensurate with the habits of reason that beckon to us through our efforts to know the universe. And reason develops through dialogue and increasingly refined communication into something that is shared across a community of reasoning beings.
Peirce is not a Cartesian, however. He doesn’t believe in a division between mind and matter, soul and body, reason and passion. This brings him closer in spirit to those — Buddhists, Daoists and neo-Confucians, Sufis, process philosophers, Franciscans, and others — for whom reason is subordinate to the heart, that organ of perception by which we feel the solidarity of those whose sentience (like ours) appears and disappears on a sea of interdependent relationality.
The following quote is the kind of thing that gives me hope:
“Inanimate things do not err at all; and the lower animals very little. Instinct is all but unerring; but reason in all vitally important matters is a treacherous guide. This tendency to error, when you put it under the microscope of reflection, is seen to consist of fortuitous variations of our actions in time. But it is apt to escape our attention that on such fortuitous variation our intellect is nourished and grows. For without such fortuitous variation, habit-taking would be impossible; and intellect consists in a plasticity of habit.” [CP 6.86, italics added]
In other words, reason alone is risky, and it’s often better to go with our instinct. But it is because we can err that we can learn, and because learning is possible, learning will ultimately occur, however long it may take.
Raymond Williams referred to the faith that things are moving, however chaotically (or at least dialectically) towards a better human future, as “the long revolution.” Williams was a socialist, and the optimism of his particular formulation may not ring as true today as it did to him half a century ago. I find interesting, however, that Williams wasn’t just intending this as a description of change; he was also aiming to cultivate an attitude toward that change:
“In naming the great process of change the long revolution, I am trying to learn assent to it, an adequate assent of mind and spirit. I find increasingly that the values and meanings I need are all in this process of change.”
If, as my work is devoted to showing, and as Peirce, Whitehead, and many other ontologically minded philosophers have argued, the social and the natural are not opposed to each other but are integrally, if complexly, intertwined, interdependent, and ultimately inseparable, then there’s something beyond socialism that would be a good description of this side of Peirce.
A socialist in this understanding is a believer in the eventual triumph of an ever better, more just and more sustainable, social world. A naturalist, by the same token, would be a believer in the eventual triumph of an ever more beautifully evolved natural world. (The Darwin of The Origin of Species is one of our better representatives of that view.)
Peirce would instead be something like a cosmopolist, a believer that the cosmos itself is evolving toward something better. In that evolution, sociality and reason play important roles — even increasing roles — but never in separation from nature.
Such an “even longer revolution” may take many deep, dark turns along the way. Contrary to what our human pride suggests, it may shed civilizations, even worlds (not to mention species like ours), in the process. But Peirce seemed to believe that those, too, will be redeemed in the end — that, to paraphrase Mikhail Bakhtin, they, too, will have their homecoming festivals.
That’s a leap of faith that I wouldn’t expect anyone to take without some experience that conformed to or resonated with it. Certain forms of ethico-aesthetic practice aim to engender such experience. (Mahayana Buddhist practices, for instance. Or Hadotian Stoicism.)
With his insistence that habits are to be cultivated, Peirce belongs to the class of believers in the practice of cosmopolism (or what William Connolly calls immanent naturalism) — the cultivation of a better, more reasonable, more ethically satisfying, and more beautiful universe by the universe itself, including us. Just as ontological constructivism (of the sort that Whitehead, Stengers, Latour, and others speak about) is broader and more capacious than social constructionism, so this is more capacious than socialism.
In the end, its vision is very much a social vision, but it’s a sociality that is extended, deepened, and redefined by the deepest withdrawals of dark matter we will ever find, or not. (I admit I’m going beyond Peirce here.) It’s a faith in what is unencompassable by faith itself. A realism that believes in a reality that trumps and outwits all our ideas about it — believes in it not only intellectually, but emotionally and spiritually. Believes in its goodness. “Assents” to it “in mind and spirit,” as Williams would have it.
I’m not sure how that bears on our capacity to respond to the refugee emergencies that are and will be arising all around us. The refugees are people, families with kids, from Syria, Iraq, Lybia, Somalia, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. But they are also nonhumans, Gaia’s vast proletariat, whose own abodes are being demolished, destroyed, and abandoned in the wake of the building climate emergency.
To deal with them adequately, we’ll need all the resources we can muster. One of those is the faith in responsiveness itself, agapistic (or agapastic, as Peirce called it) responsiveness. Because that’s what grows the universe into the new folds that are worth growing into.
great thoughts, Adrian. But the “ideal” end of a Peircean universe is static – there’s a tendency to growth and variation, sure, but that would eventually lead to a complete effetiveness of matter, a complete deadening of mind (matter is effete mind); how would you call this “better”? I guess I would have an idea on that, but would like to know your thoughts.
Hi Cassiano – Here’s an attempt at a quick response…
I take Peirce, in his late writings, as asserting something less like a “complete deadening of mind” than a complete “livening of matter.” (Perhaps these are two sides of the same coin.) Yes, according to his objective idealism (which T. L. Short identifies as his early 1890s period), matter is “effete mind,” and ultimately one could say that all mind ends up going that way- i.e., becoming physical law. But he also believed in the evolution of mind. The universe, for Peirce, is friendly to intelligence, and “in the long run,” or in “the fullness of time” (I’m quoting from Nicholas Rescher here), there would be “a conclusive convergence between cognition and reality: between intelligence in the world and its cognitive grasp.” (But then he seems to mean “cognitive” in a larger sense that that’s usually defined.) There’s a kind of fulfillment of thirdness – a maximal satisfaction of relational mediation.
I don’t feel any need to follow Peirce in his quasi-teleological thinking (as it sometimes appears), i.e. his faith in reason, or thirdness, or evolutionary love, or whatever, as ultimately triumphing. What I take from it, however, is the idea that if this universe produces the *possibility* of agapistic love (etc.), then it is *likely* to emerge at some point in time/space. Peirce’s contribution, I think, is the argument that that kind of thing inherently builds on itself. Even if it’s extinguished in one place, it will arise elsewhere, and in the long run that arising will lead to something more true, good, and beautiful than its intermittent arising in our lives today.
Not sure if that makes sense… In the end, I think, we all may get the Peirce that we look for. (Well, that sounds too relativistic, but until I fully master his writings — which I never will — it will seem that way to me.)
when were the bright spots in societal evolution and how would we sort them out from their contexts?
Good question… It would take a long & complex answer. Societal evolution has arguably been a very long process (we’ve gotten quite far since the first vocalizations began turning into what we now know as language) or a very short one (given the time since the last ice age, all we’ve done really is fill up the space of the globe and intensify our usage of it). There’s a long way left to go, and if we cross the sustainability rubicon (bottleneck), we might be able to figure some of these kinds of things out.
I know with Josiah Royce and co. the Holy Ghost was going to help steer our efforts at group processes into a more beloved community but couldn’t find such a guiding spirit in Peirce (maybe why people tend more to Whitehead these days?), is there one I missed in my less than comprehensive forays into the corpus, or are we left to making it up as we go along, are there to be signs if not wonders?
I think of Peirce as in the same category as Whitehead on this… Call it God, evolutionary love, or whatever, but in the end it’s pretty abstract… concepts from the cultural milieu that fill functions in a conceptual scheme. Not too many signs or wonders, just an optimism about the grand scheme of things (where others find pessimism because of the falling away of human coordinates — they’re still there in both Peirce and Whitehead, but at least they don’t tower over everything else).
thanks that was my sense that he was big on Eros, here I’m with Stengers (and in some sense William James) that we are in the grips/midst of the many, differing interests all trying to make their own ways in and of the world.
http://syntheticzero.net/2014/02/25/on-a-certain-blindness-in-human-beings-william-james/
[…] One of the problems here may be to distinguish thought from attention in the context of mindfulness. If we adopt the broader notion of attention, and presume that attention is not one thing but a complex of material interactions, implying the primacy of feeling over thinking, then one could possibly argue that meditation is what ecophilosopher Adrian Ivakhiv calls an “ethico-aesthetic practice,” involving the sort of extended or deep sociality implicit in Bergson’s notion of “open” society. Ivakhiv writes: […]
Adrian, thanks for “an expanding understanding of reason”, one that evolves as the world does. The Real bursting through the temporary Symbolic Order. A Real that is always en route toward new purposes, twisting the tendencies, leaving older influences and assurances behind in the Dark Matter halo of Appeal (per JA Schmidt’s “10 Trichotomies” 😉 Thus, the ancient, inchoate Dark Matter congeals and bursts into photonic matter, and its influence surrounds us in the form of structure, and gravitational flow, A Dark Matter bridge in our cosmic neighborhood, to make way for movements of the future. As one refugee is quoted in The Washington Post, upon making it across the Austrian border: “We are simply passing through on the way to a better life”.
Nicely put… The hope of a better life (for oneself and for others) is what drives us all forward, isn’t it? And it can only come from a little taste of a better life now, and from its passing.