immanence

Peircian thinker Gary Fuhrman has posted an interesting piece on the naming of the Anthropocene, entitled Holocenoscopy. Noting that the word Holocene means nothing more than “entirely recent,” as opposed to the Pleistocene, which means “most recent,” so there’s really nowhere left to go with naming geological periods after their recentness, Fuhrman suggests we look to another meaning associated with the Greek suffix -cene: not the new (kainos, καινός) but the common (koinos, κοινός). (Christians may recognize the term koinonia, κοινωνία, as a reference to fellowship and communion.)

The latter is the root of the word cenoscopy, or cœnoscopy, which C. S. Peirce defines as “the sort of science that is founded upon the common experience of all men,” as recognized under that name by Jeremy Bentham, “in opposition to idioscopy, which discovers new phenomena.” Cenoscopy, Fuhrman notes,

is closely allied to what Peirce called ‘critical common-sensism.’ Common sense in our time sees that philosophy, and even religion, ought to be working hand in hand with globally-based sciences such as ecology and climate science. Ironically, it’s the so-called “populist” politicians of our time, with their hate speech and antiscientific disinformation, who are working against the common sense that could save us from ourselves.

Interestingly, the only other reference I can find to this play between kainos and koinos, with a mention of cenoscopy, is from another book on Peirce, Cornelis de Waal’s Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2013). Because of its lucid summary of Peirce’s categories (which long-time readers will know my fascination for), I’ll quote the passage in full:

To recapitulate, according to Peirce three, and only three, categories present themselves in all that comes before the mind—no matter whether we speak of the most vivid sense impression or the faintest flight of fancy—and he calls them firstness, secondness, and thirdness. They are, first, the pure quality of being what it is, positively, and independently of anything else; second, the unmediated opposition of a first to something it is not; and third, a positive relation between two firsts that are second to each other.

Reminiscent of the ongoing Pythagoreanism in mathematics […], Peirce also calls them the cenopythagorean categories, where the prefix ceno echoes at once the Greek kainos (new) and koinos (common). At one point Peirce even reads them into the first three numbers of the Pythagorean decad: “One was the origin; two, stalwart resistance; three, mediation and beauty.”

Elsewhere Peirce refers to them as the Protean categories, after Proteus the Greek sea god who can foretell the future but who constantly changes his shape to avoid that he has to, so that he only answers those who can catch him. The same is true for the categories. They too appear in countless guises and are often hard to discern. This is all but to be expected as they universally apply to anything we can possibly think of, whether it is a toothache, the spatial relations of a twelve-dimensional hypercube, a conflict of values, Hamlet’s relation to Shakespeare, a paradigm shift, or the determination of guilt in a criminal case. (p. 46, paragraphing added)

In this sense, what we need as a designation for our time is not an “even newer new” (Transholocene?), nor the anthropocentric new many of us have settled on (Anthropocene), but a new that is finally a common world as well — a Koinocene, a Common New World, a world held in common by the commoners who ally together to take care of it.

Or Cœnocene. (But with its different-sounding c’s, that spelling merely highlights the inadequacies of English alphabetics.)