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CP 1:580. "Such self-questioning produces no infallible response. On the contrary, consciousness may be set down as one of the most mendacious witnesses that ever was questioned. But it is the only witness there is; and all we can do is to put it in the sweat-box and torture the truth out of it, with such judgment as we can command."
I am enjoying this island of consciousness quotes from our philosophical mentor. Do we take him seriously? I take him as someone who filled his entire philosophy with references to consciousness more than a century before it was widely suggested that it could not be defined.
This man has a prescience that no one sees today save those who know and understand him. I am among that number, on the fringes, flying part blind. I have no math, an actual mental block, and much the same regarding science. But the part of Peirce that appeals to me is the whole and Peirce's whole is vastly more than the sum of the parts and he is finally one who is first among equals, the other two being Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. The latter are not at all overrated. It is Peirce who remains either relegated to dim reaches of scholarly exegesis or is simply not within anyone's canon. Easily dismissed and minimalized, I cling to him as to others I have read that few know or attend to.
For Peirce in the closing years of the 19th Century when robber barons were running roughshod over miners in Ludlow and elsewhere, a man scorned and rejected, was proudly proclaiming his gospel of truth. More willing to be rejected than to be pushed into a box of conformity and rectitude.
The gold in the words above is that consciousness is the only witness there is. He understood. He was enlightened. He was aware. He had more wealth than the Rockefellers and Carnegies. And in heaven, he still agonizes over the fate of the pragmatism that people derived from him without paying attention to the fact that he rejected his first child and baptized a second with the name pragmaticism. No one talks of that much today. No one dares to for the same reason that science does not dare to see consciousness as more than a possible manifestation of each individual, enclosed in each person's skin.
That error makes me a more accurate scientist than the legions who hold to it.
The heavens resound with gladness that there was this renegade hidden in rural Pennsylvania, begging for wherewithall from his few friends and filching food from a NYC Club who had the capacity to be a professional scientist, a genius mathematician, and one who bequeathed to the world a trove from which we can begin to crawl back to the holism that must precede any recovery of intellect within the wastelands of academe.
I am enjoying this island of consciousness quotes from our philosophical mentor. Do we take him seriously? I take him as someone who filled his entire philosophy with references to consciousness more than a century before it was widely suggested that it could not be defined.
This man has a prescience that no one sees today save those who know and understand him. I am among that number, on the fringes, flying part blind. I have no math, an actual mental block, and much the same regarding science. But the part of Peirce that appeals to me is the whole and Peirce's whole is vastly more than the sum of the parts and he is finally one who is first among equals, the other two being Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. The latter are not at all overrated. It is Peirce who remains either relegated to dim reaches of scholarly exegesis or is simply not within anyone's canon. Easily dismissed and minimalized, I cling to him as to others I have read that few know or attend to.
For Peirce in the closing years of the 19th Century when robber barons were running roughshod over miners in Ludlow and elsewhere, a man scorned and rejected, was proudly proclaiming his gospel of truth. More willing to be rejected than to be pushed into a box of conformity and rectitude.
The gold in the words above is that consciousness is the only witness there is. He understood. He was enlightened. He was aware. He had more wealth than the Rockefellers and Carnegies. And in heaven, he still agonizes over the fate of the pragmatism that people derived from him without paying attention to the fact that he rejected his first child and baptized a second with the name pragmaticism. No one talks of that much today. No one dares to for the same reason that science does not dare to see consciousness as more than a possible manifestation of each individual, enclosed in each person's skin.
That error makes me a more accurate scientist than the legions who hold to it.
The heavens resound with gladness that there was this renegade hidden in rural Pennsylvania, begging for wherewithall from his few friends and filching food from a NYC Club who had the capacity to be a professional scientist, a genius mathematician, and one who bequeathed to the world a trove from which we can begin to crawl back to the holism that must precede any recovery of intellect within the wastelands of academe.
