immanence

I keep trying to rephrase the second piece of the “double insight” — or two ontological “twists” — around which the philosophical argument of Shadowing the Anthropocene (and Ecologies of the Moving Image) is woven.

The first insight is the process-relational one, which is at the core of both A. N. Whitehead’s metaphysics and many variations of Buddhism (in its idea of pratitya-samutpada). That one is easier to grasp, once you have some familiarity with either of those formulations. It has to do with the processual and relational nature of every event that makes up the universe.

The second is the semiotic insight. It is at the core of one of the two source traditions underlying the contemporary field of semiotics: the Peircian one. (The other one, Saussurian linguistics, should be set aside for our purposes, as it is unrelated and somewhat tangential in its goals.) What follows is another attempt to elucidate this second insight.

The Peircian semiotic insight is an insight into meaning, or what I also call realization, which for Peirce is triadically emergent within every semiotic event — every event of signification or meaning-making — that makes up the universe. (Whether there are non-semiotic events or not is a separate question that need not concern us. There most likely are, but since all of our experience is semiotic, and since for Peirce the same can be said for all things that experience anything at all, then that ought to be the starting point of any philosophy relevant to living our lives.)

Peirce’s crucial insight, which underpinned his entire philosophy, was that reality is irreducibly triadic: that everything can be parsed into three kinds of elements: firsts, which are elements that are really there, sui generis, in and of themselves irrespective of anything else; seconds, which are relations, interactions, or encounters between firsts; and thirds, which are mediations of those relations between seconds — that is, “accountings” or “sense-makings” of the interactive happenings that we just called seconds.

Because there are firsts (in everything), there are real differences, and real spontaneities — not just ideas, and not just causal streams linking one thing to the next and flowing on like a great big machine. (To say there are “real differences” is to already presume thirdness, since difference is always a matter of comparison. The point is that the differences are rooted in the reality of the things that are comparable and accountable-for. Acknowledging firstness is a way of pointing at something even when the destination of our pointing might never be arrived at.)

Seconds are easy to grasp, and few would deny their reality. An ontology that denied firsts and thirds would be a “billiard ball” model of the universe, which is the kind of mechanistic reductionism familiar to those who critique early modern scientific accounts of reality. If there were only seconds, it would mean that after an initial burst of energy that gave rise to the universe (from wherever that came — an external agent we could call God, for lack of any other conceivable term), all that can ever happen is just a kind of mechanical unfolding of one thing after another, one set of causes leading to effects that generate their own causes, with no genuine action or agency possible at any step of the way. The world as a stream of continuities. That there is a continual arising of both novelty (firstness) and generality (thirdness) means that this billiard ball model is neither accurate nor complete.

As for thirds, relations of relations, these are inherently interpretive — that is, they account for the causal happenings (seconds) between genuinely different things (firsts). In some cases this accounting may be automatic — a matter of habit — but it is always an accounting or mediation, with greater levels of interpretability arising from greater levels of complexity in relation.

If the world consisted only of seconds supplemented by thirds, we’d be simply interpreting what happens without affecting it in any way, like passive observers of a deterministic reality. But in fact our interpretations do affect what happens — thirds both beget other thirds (interpretations give rise to further interpretations, patterns beget further patterns, etc.) and they alter the potentials for firsts (real virtualities) to arise and to encounter each other as seconds.

“We” arise at the confluence of firsts, seconds, and thirds. We are neither fully determined (pure secondness) nor fully determining (pure thirdness) nor fully indeterminate (pure firstness). Where other philosophers tend to parse those into two (for instance, Bergson with his duality of matter, which is determined, and memory, which is free and determining), Peirce gives equal voice to what we might call passive determination (secondness), active determination (thirdness), and indeterminacy (firstness).  These terms are not really adequate, however, since thirdness can be quite passive (in the case of habits and laws) and secondness is the very definition of activity (in the sense of cause and effect, or action and reaction). There is the action of mediation (thirdness), and there is the action of action itself. And then there is the spontaneity or virtuality that gives rise to the impulse for action.

One of the points I take from this whole triadic edifice is that meaning, or realization, is inherent and intimately connected to (and within) the structure of events. It is not a separate realm from physical or material reality — outside of that reality, imposed onto it (by humans, for instance), or secondarily produced by it (as a kind of shadow or ghostly emanation). It is inherent to every event that we can access, and every event that can be accessed by anything at all. And meaning is certainly not exclusively symbolic (which in Peircian terms means linguistic) — it is affective as well, that is, not idea but feeling, or feeling-idea, feeling-thought.

The point of seeing things this way, in combination with seeing the processuality and relationality of every event (the Whiteheadian insight), is to be able to accurately understand the nature of the events that make up both us and our worlds. When we realize that those worlds are not exclusively human (far from it), then it becomes clear that we haven’t done a good job of understanding the continuities between thought and feeling, mind and matter, human and nonhuman life (and non-life), et al. Peircian triadism can be extremely valuable for this task.

Some forms of Buddhism (for instance, the Yogacara, or “Mind-Only” school, though I believe that is a misleading translation) contend something very similar to all this. Other forms underemphasize one or another of Peirce’s three categories. (For instance, Huayan Buddhism, with its famous metaphor of “Indra’s net,” underestimates, and perhaps completely ignores, firstness. My reason for favoring Tiantai Buddhism in my account in Shadowing the Anthropocene is because I find its triadism helpful to think with, and because in Brook Ziporyn’s iteration of it I also find it very processual.)

Ultimately I find this conceptual distinction of firstness, secondness, and thirdness to be one of the most interesting and potentially satisfying philosophical concepts I have ever encountered. It’s not of course an entirely novel concept: Catholic and (long before that) Hindu “trinitarianisms” anteceded it, and G. I. Gurdjieff formulated his “Law of Three” independently, though more or less concurrently, with Peirce’s development of his categorial schema. Even “Ecozoic geologian” Thomas Berry seems to channel it in his trinity of principles: subjectivity (which loosely correlates with firstness), differentiation (with secondness), and communion (with thirdness). And readers of my book know that I point to Lacan’s trinity as well as a kind of correlate (Real=firstness, Imaginary=secondness, Symbolic=thirdness). The correlation between all of these is of course far from precise; I only list them to be suggestive.

My writing about this Peircian “twist” is my own attempt to be faithful to Peirce’s leap, his abductive hunch about the universe, which, from what I can tell, has yet to be fully fleshed out in its implications.