As I explain in Shadowing the Anthropocene, process-relational philosophy in a Peircian-Whiteheadian vein takes aesthetics to be first, ethics to be second, and logic (which, in our time, we need to think of also as eco-logic) to be third.
This is not a temporal sequence, but a logical one: aesthetics is found in the response to the firstness of things, their immediate, uninterpreted presence to us; ethics — in the response to a concrete, empirically encountered other; and logic — in the response to the patterns those encounters and appearances take. Each of them is a “normative science,” a way of cultivating one’s character in the world, so each takes repetition, and the difference found between repetitions, as its way of being, of becoming, and of inhabiting the world.
On the firstness or primacy of aesthetics, this perspective is in agreement with the object-oriented forms of speculative ontology. On the others it is not, because the latter lack Peirce’s insight into triadism, or what we might call the ontological three-dimensionality of the world. To explain that again: for anything to be a world, there must be the firsts (things in their purely qualitative “isness”) and the seconds (actual causal encounters between things) and the thirds (meanings, representations, interpretations). Take away any one of those, or even de-emphasize any one of them (as so many metaphysical systems do), and you lose something crucial in your understanding of the world.
Logic, and thus also eco-logic, is built from ethical interactions and aesthetic encounters.
How do we respond to images of the killing of an unarmed black man by police in a distant city in our own country? Most immediately, I respond with revulsion, with horror, and upon realizing what this is and what it means (its thirdness), with shame. Shame to live in a country that cannot contain its racism. The thirdnesses being generated in my incapacity to do anything about it cry out for some form of secondness, some responsive action: so I speak, I write, I share, I respond to a call (to join a protest, to express a need for change).
I remain alert to reports that come in, in all their (alternatingly) exhilarating and deeply disheartening confusion. Aesthetics is here in everything; ethics is here in everything; logic is here in everything. The desire to unleash the beauty of the world, to right the wrongs of the world, to reset the conditions that shape the world — all of these begin from the sensibility by which we receive the world as it comes to us. That sensibility does not need training, but for those (so many of us) in whom it has been deconditioned, it needs releasing, reopening, reorienting.
Every day, and every moment, brings the world to us just as that one did. Every moment calls upon us to orient ourselves in our response to it. But some moments call for wider and more encompassing arcs of reorientation.
This is one such moment.
(Among the places I go to in order to stay informed about daily developments in U.S. politics is historian Heather Cox Richardson’s wonderful, and extremely well researched, Letters from an American blog. Here’s yesterday’s post.)
