Doubts about Peirce's Cosmology

Doubts about Peirce's CosmologyAuthor(s): Bernard SuitsSource: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Fall, 1979), pp. 311-321Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40319619 .

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Doubts About Peirce's Cosmology

Bernard Suits

The tone of the following remarks may suggest that their author, far from entertaining doubts about some of Peirce's doctrines, is entirely certain that those doctrines are false. But I intend my title to be taken

quite literally, and the occasional harshness of my language should be understood as nothing more than a fitting way to express the irritation -

one might even say exasperation - that Peirce himself insists is the leading characteristic of genuine uncertainty. What follows, accordingly, is intended not as a refutation of Peirce but as a cry for help. If readers of Peirce more percipient than myself, therefore, can show that these doubts are ill-founded, I shall respond with gratitude, not chagrin, at being restored to a condition of intellectual repose.

I. First, Second, and Third When Peirce's categories are applied to cosmology they receive the

following specification ("Architecture of Theories") :

FIRST SECOND THIRD Chance Law Habit-taking Mind Matter Evolution

Thirdness is the principle of continuity, or the "mediation" between First and Second. The principle of continuity here means that mind and matter are termini of a single continuum, and this expresses Peirce's radical anti-dualism. Similarly, of course, with chance and law. But before we continue with specifically Peircean matters we should notice that Thirdness taken, so to speak, abstractly or generically, may be regarded as continuity in general and as such provides an alternative to dualism in general. Thus in the physics of Democritus it seems fair to say that matter is First, mind is Second, and atomic combination is Third. The principle of continuity in general, that is, does not distinguish between idealism and materialism, since materialism too can imply a continuity of some kind. Thus, if for Peirce matter is effete mind, perhaps for Democritus mind is uppity matter. Another way of putting this is to observe that Peirce does not have exclusive title (nor does he



312 Bernard Suits

claim it) to the position of synechism. Peirce's principle of idealistic

synechism thus asserts not only the fact of continuity between First and Second but specifies an order between them. That mind is first rather than matter expresses his idealism; that chance is first rather than law expresses his tychism. Thus, Third is specified in Peirce's cosmology when it is denominated, on the one hand, "the tendency to take habits," and on the other hand, "evolution."

But this is not the end of the story. For "evolution," like "continuity," is also an abstract or generic term, and just as Peirce comes down for idealistic over materialistic synechism, he also comes down for agapastic over both anancastic and tychastic evolution. For "evolution," like

"continuity," is too general to specify either the priority of mind to matter or the priority of chance to law, since there is more than one kind of evolution. Thus, when it is said that mind and matter are mediated by evolution this leaves open the possibility that mind evolves from matter, as well as the possibility that evolution is predetermined, which means in the one case that mind is not primitive and in the other case that chance is unreal. These positions are not rebutted (that is, dialectically explained and transformed) by Peirce until agapastic evolution is introduced; not, that is, until habit- taking of a certain kind is proposed as the cosmological principle of continuity in "Evolu- tionary Love."

II. First Doubts So far I have merely reported what I take to be a bare outline of

Peirce's procedure from "The Architecture of Theories" through "Evolutionary Love" insofar as these essays are concerned with cosmology. Now the doubts begin. My basic uncertainty is whether Peirce's principle of continuity as expressed in the phrase "matter is effete mind" can do the job Peirce wants it to do. I suspect, that is, that it cannot adequately differentiate our ordinary notions of mind and matter better than dualism can, so that Peirce becomes per force a kind of dualist without noticing it. And this stealthy espousal of dualism is, if my suspicion is correct, both stealthy and an espousal because of a very basic ambiguity in the status of Peirce's three types of evolution. I shall begin my discussion, however, at a quite different point, in an effort to sneak up on the above conclusion as unexpectedly as possible. I shall begin by making the fairly obvious observation that Peirce's cosmology makes the evolution of the universe a kind of degeneration, with death



Doubts About Peirce's Cosmology 313

or mindlessness as its final cause. Then, in considering what I believe would be Peirce's rebuttal of this contention, I shall reveal that in his efforts to deny the contention Peirce must take back his original principle of continuity, and that he both does this and keeps the fact of his doing it from himself, by a kind of leger-demain with tychasm, anancasm, and agapasm.

III. The Killing Off of Mind In "The Doctrine of Necessity Examined" Peirce rejects mechanism

because, as he says, "law is just what requires explanation." Regularity or uniformity must be explained, he means, by what is not regular or uniform. Peirce's explanation then is: chance, via habit-taking, becomes law. At the same time mind, via evolution, becomes matter. It is this view which makes mind primitive and matter derivative, chance prima- tive and law derivative. Now, looked at cosmologically, or perhaps eschatologically, what does this make the purpose or end of the universe? It would seem to make it a condition of perfect regularity, or perhaps of many regularities perfectly regularized. The universe is tending toward a state of order and away from a state of disorder:

This feeling, sporting here and there in pure arbitrariness, would have started the germ of a generalizing tendency. Its other sportings would be evanescent, but this would have a growing virtue. Thus, the tendency to habit would be started; and from this with the other principles of evolution all the regularities of the universe would be evolved. At any time, however, an element of pure chance survives and will remain until the world becomes an absolutely perfect, rational, and sym- metrical system, in which mind is at last crystalized in the infinitely distant future. ("The Architecture of Theories," ¿.33)1

This is sound orthodox cosmogony; indeed, so orthodox as to be pre-Socratic, and especially Anaximanderian, if Anaximander's aperon is to be understood as the indeterminate out of which a determinate world is produced. It is also what might be expected in the cosmology of an epistemologist and logician who has earlier stated that "the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is



314 Bernard Suits

the real" (5.407). But more (though not much more) about the relation between the evolution of the universe and the evolution of knowledge in Peirce's philosophy later on.

Mind I take to be another way of looking at chance, and law another way of looking at matter; mind is essentially anarchic and matter is essentially law-abiding. Now, it is not too shocking to find chance at the beginning of the universe and law at the end of the universe, but it is shocking to find mind at the beginning and matter at the end, or at least to find matter and no mind at the end. Yet surely one implies, for Peirce, the other, and goes to reinforce it. If matter is degenerate mind, then Peirce's cosmological thesis is that the universe is degenerating. And we can also, of course, regard law as degenerate chance. I am taking the polar terms, as Peirce takes them, to describe ideal states of affairs. His way of expressing their ideal status is to say that a state of pure chance and pure mind is infinitely past and that a state of perfect law and sheer matter is infinitely future. But this does little to mitigate the picture of a universe with progressive hardening of the arteries. It might, in fact, be thought to make that picture even more dismal: not only are things geting worse, they will never stop getting worse.

But perhaps I have overstated this element of Peirce's philosophy. It is true that Peirce describes matter as effete mind. This is to show both the continuous and the derivative character of matter vis-a-vis mind. But he also states that matter never loses all of its spontaneity. Some of the great original reservoir of pure chance survives in all matter; that is, "the precise and universal conformity of facts to law" is denied by Peirce. Perhaps, therefore, that fated time when all investi- gators will agree need not be the same as the time when that upon which they will agree is a precise conformity of facts to law. But on second thought, perhaps these times must be the same, since both the end of the universe and the end of investigation occur at the end of infinity (although I must admit to being a bit shakey on the logical relations of infinitely distant events) . But let us grant to Peirce, in any case, that the degeneration of the universe will never be complete or, which is the same thing, that time must not have a stop, and that a frozen sea of perfect intelligibility as opposed to the pristine ocean of pure feeling will not occur at any actual point of time. Still, this simply means that although the world will never actually crystalize (Peirce's word) into absolute law, that is the direction of "progress."



Doubts About Pence's Cosmology 315

This bleak interpretation of Peirce's cosmology results, or seems to result, from applying the principle of continuity to matter and mind in a certain way, that is, where the continuity between them is regarded as a continuity between the primitive and the derivative. However, there is another kind of continuity between mind and matter in Peirce's

writings which is not expressed in the same way. It is the relationship of inside and outside.

IV. General Ideas

Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter.

Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness.

This move, however, does nothing to soften the cosmic pessimism expressed by the formula "matter is effete mind." What is required in order to accomplish that is surely some kind of Third which does not make death the cosmological Second. But what we get in this passage is the assurance that Second is, regarded internally, a case of First. Here the mind of the reader begins to boggle just a bit.

The passage quoted above is advanced by Peirce as a description of "the physical relations of general ideas" (in "Man's Glassy Essence," 6.268), and I propose now to turn to that topic. A general idea, or the formation of a general idea, manifests the operation of continuity as expressed in Peirce's statement of the Law of Mind: ". . . ideas spread continuously and . . . affect certain others which stand to them in a

peculiar relation of affectibility" (6.104). A general idea is different both from "mind" regarded as the state of affairs at the beginning of the universe, and from the spark of chance which persists after habit-

taking has caused the emergence of laws. A general idea appears to be more like our ordinary notion of mind when we contrast it with our

ordinary notion of matter; that is, the notion of mind which Peirce's

philosophical opponents explain as one member of a duality. The

question is, does the notion of a general idea save Peirce from making the annihilation of mind the final cause of the universe? Well, at least it makes, or could make, the final cause of the universe sound different. Since a personality (as discussed in the concluding sections of "The Law of Mind") is the same as (or possibly a kind of - I am not sure)



316 Bernard Suits

a general idea, the end of the universe might be described as the production or evolution of personalities or, if one wishes to introduce theology into cosmology (as Peirce seems to want to do), perhaps of Personality with a capital P. Peirce may well have something like this in mind. My uncertainty is whether or not it works. A general idea, I should think, is either the same as or shares a genus with a physical law, since the law of mind as continuity is a kind of habit- taking. This is how Peirce explains the non-polar continuity between general ideas and physical laws in terms of inside and outside:

These two views are combined when we remember that mechanical laws are nothing but acquired habits, like all regularities of mind . . . and that this action of habit is nothing but generalization, and generalization is nothing but the spread of feelings.

... a general idea is a certain modification of consciousness which accompanies any regularity or general relation between chance actions. (6.268)

My uneasiness is caused by the inference I make from this that general ideas, and therefore personalities (and the inference follows, of course, whether personality is the same as or a species of a general idea) are, like matter (whose essential charateristic is its obedience to law and order) effete mind. The production of a personality would thus also seem to be a degeneration. This inference suggests, at least to me, that Peirce needs, in order to support the desired distinction between physical laws and general ideas, at a minimum, two distinct kinds of habit-taking. I do not mean two phases of habit-taking, or the distinction between acquiring a habit and then using it, but two distinct kinds of habit and two distinct processes of acquisition.

V. Mind and Matter as Agapasm and Anancasm In "Evolutionary Love" Peirce describes the force of love in the

following words:

The agapastic development of thought is the adoption of certain mental tendencies, not altogether heedlessly, as in tychasm, or quite blindly by the mere force of circumstances or of



Doubts About Veirce's Cosmology 317

logic, as in anancasm, but by the immediate attraction for the idea itself, whose nature is divined before the mind possesses it, by the power of sympathy, that is, by virtue of the continuity of mind. (6.307)

And in "The Law of Mind" Peirce describes personality as a "ideological harmony of ideas" and a "developmental teleology" (6 A 5 6).

The description of personality as a "developmental teleology" should be compared with Peirce's remarks on time in the same essay:

One of the most marked features of the law of mind is that it makes time to have a definite direction of flow from past to future . . . This marks one of the great contrasts between the law of mind and the law of physical force, where there is no more distinction between two opposing directions in time than between moving northward and moving southward. (6.172)

The law of physical force, it would seem, is non- temporal in the sense, that what it applies to is devoid of genuine growth. And this, of course, is just anancasm (mechanism) : "The law of the conservation of energy is equivalent to the proposition that all operations governed by mechanical law are reversible; so that an immediate corollary from it. is that growth is not explicable by those laws" ("The Architecture of Theories," 6.15).

What I am trying to get at by citing these passages is that there seem, to be two kinds of law at issue in Peirce's theory. One kind is characteristic of love, life, and progress; the other of routine, degeneration, and death. But the question that bothers me is whether Peirce can make out such a distinction nondualistically. He attempts to do so in the concluding sections of "The Law of Mind," where it is, inter alia, the "uncertainty of mental action" which is alleged to distinguish mind from matter. I quote 6.148 in its entirety:

But no mental action seems to be necessary or invariable in its character. In whatever manner the mind has reacted under a given sensation, in that manner it is more likely to react again; were this, however, an absolute necessity, habits would become wooden and ineradicable and, no room being left for the formation of new habits, intellectual life would come to a speedy close. Thus, the uncertainty of the mental law is no



318 Bernard Suits

mere defect of it, but is on the contrary its essence. The truth is, the mind is not subject to "law" in the same rigid sense that matter is. It only experiences gentle forces which merely render it more likely to act in a given way than it otherwise would. There always remains a certain amount of arbitrary spontaneity in its action, without which it would be dead.

It should be clear that this simply will not do as a way of distinguishing mind from matter, for Peirce has said precisely the same things about matter that he here advances as characteristic of mind. (See the passage quoted earlier from "The Architecture of Theories," 6.33.) Peirce, I suggest, has surreptiously substituted one meaning of mind for another. His original chracterization of mind makes it equivalent to "indeterminate"; it is virtually adjectival. But in the passage quoted mind has become a kind of thing, with indeterminacy as one of its properties. Mind is held to exhibit indeterminacy. But so does matter, and will do so until the end of infinite time. I believe that Peirce un- consciously equivocates on "mind" in a rather systematic fashion in these papers. In "The Architecture of Theories" mind is simply identical with the indeterminate, consistently with Peirce's doctrine of anti- dualistic synechism, so that it seems fair to say that here the distinction between mind and matter is fundamentally chronological: more mind earlier in the history of the universe and less mind later on. In terms of Peirce's original ontological scheme mind and matter are, to use an electrical metaphor, in series. But in "The Law of Mind," where Peirce is concerned with "general ideas" and "personalities," he wants to regard mind and matter as though they were in parallel. The question is, can Peirce do this with the philosophical circuitry he has at his disposal? We have seen that the uncertainty he ascribes to mental phenomena will not do the job. However, Peirce proposes another basis for making the distinction. It is the principle of teleology; that is, love; that is, agapasm. In "The Law of Mind" personality is described as follows:

. . . personality is some kind of coordination or connection of ideas. . . . But the word coordination implies ... a teleological harmony in ideas, and in the case of personality this teleology is more than a mere purposive pursuit of a predetermined end; it is a developmental teleology.



Doubts About Parce* s Cosmology 319

This reference to the future is an essential element of personality. Were the ends of a person already explicit, there would be no room for development, for growth, for life; and consequently there would be no personality. The mere carrying out of predetermined purposes is mechanical.

. . . a pseudo-evolutionism which enthrones mechanical law above principle of growth is at once scientifically unsatis- factory, as giving no possible hint of how the universe has come about, and hostile to all hopes of personal relations with God. (6A55 - 6.157, my italics throughout)

It seems to me that very little reflection on these passages is required to reveal that agapastic evolution is no more capable of distinguishing mind from matter than was the principle of uncertainty. For anancasm, which is the "pseudo-evolutionism" referred to in the last passage quoted, cannot be the doctrine which correctly describes the process by which matter has been produced. Anancasm is an incorrect cosmogonie theory, and hence pseudo-evolutionary. How did the universe come about? For Peirce, surely through an agapastic process, since agapasm is the only genuinely adequate evolutionary theory. Matter, therefore, must have been, and presumably is now in the process of being, produced agapastically. Again, therefore, the only difference there can be between mind and matter is a serial difference.

Peirce has, however, a final rejoinder. In "Evolutionary Love" he seems to present anancasm as not simply an incorrect view of physical, historical, psychological, or cosmological processes, but also as correctly describing something which in fact occurs, even though there is still something somehow wrong with anancasm. It is almost as though mind as personality differs from matter as law-abiding physical force in that matter has done something wrong - has behaved badly - whereas mind has done the right thing. Matter is a kind of philistine who has settled for respectability and routine, while mind has embraced life and love. But how can these two views of anancasm (false cosmological principle and correct descriptive term) be brought together? Is "anancasm" a term which figures in meta-cosmology, or is it a term which figures in the morals of matter? When Peirce uses the term does he mean to dis- credit a theory or does he mean to scold the universe?



320 Bernard Suits

VI. Last Doubts This brings me to my final remarks regarding Peirce's use of his

categories in cosmology. First, Second, and Third are for Peirce dialectical moments in two distinct but perhaps not related senses. They are ways of talking about the stages of a process (either in mind or in nature), and they also describe a way of dialectically absorbing alternative theories about mind or nature, in very much the manner of the Hegelian aufgehoben.

The latter use of the scheme is clearly exemplified in "Evolutionary Love," where tychasm and anancasm are viewed as each having an opposite defect and a complementary virtue, so that agapasm results when the defects have been cast aside and the virtues combined. Thus in that essay Darwinism is regarded as adding genuine chance to Hegelian- ism's genuine teleology, with the result that chance is not blind nor teleology predetermined. However, and this is the point that most bothers me, tychasm is not merely a partially erroneous theory, but also correctly describes one kind of evolutionary process; for example, Peirce's characterization of the history of Christianity for the five hundred years following Constan tine. And just as tychasm, a partially false theory of evolution, can correctly describe a part of what goes on in the world, anancasm too can correctly describe part of the world. Peirce's example in "Evolutionary Love" is the development of philosophy. I am, of course here using the word "correct" descriptively, to mean that things have in fact happened that way. But it does not mean that things ought to have happened that way. In discussing Christianity Peirce is clearly criticizing the degeneration of a habit-taking process which began with love:

. . . wherever we find men's thought taking by imperceptible degrees a turn contrary to the purposes which animate them, in spite of their highest impulses, there, we may safely con- elude, there has been a tychastic action. (6.310)

But at the same time that tychasm and anancasm are movements toward undesirable states, they are formulated in theories which are held by Peirce to be incomplete. However, if the latter is the case, it is difficult to see how they can adequately describe the processes they inadequately formulate. Only an agapastic theory, one would think, could really adequately describe any process, since agapasm is the only really



Doubts About Peirce's Cosmology 321

complete theory. But this clearly will not work. If, for example, agapastic principles or the agapastic model were used to describe the degeneration of Christianity, we would get a false description, since the degeneration of Christianity was, according to Peirce, a tychastic process. It would seem to follow from this that agapasm, like anancasm and tychasm, is also a partial theory: it is not adequate to account for all the kinds of process there are, but for only one kind. On this view there are actually three parallel processes at work in the universe, and not one process which somehow contains in Hegeloid solution the other two. But if this is Peirce's doctrine, he has not avoided dualism but com- pounded it. He has embraced what I should be inclined to call synechistic triplism.

There is a final move Peirce might make. He might propose that tychasm and anancasm are partially incorrect theories just because they correctly describe normatively incorrect states of affairs. This proposal, I suggest, makes as much sense, and the same kind of sense, as did the

antique practice of executing the bearer of bad tidings. And that, of course, was a practical application of Peirce's Method of Tenacity.

As an extra dividend arising from the foregoing investment of time and labour, we are perhaps in a position to address ourselves, at least tentatively, to the question of the relation between logic and metaphysics in Peirce's philosophy. If the doubts I have expressed are well founded, I am tempted to propose the following answer to that question: for Peirce metaphysics is effete logic.

University of Waterloo

NOTES

1. All textual references are to The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Harvard University Press.



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Doubts about Peirce's Cosmology