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CP. 1.324. "[There is a category] which the rough and tumble of life renders most familiarly prominent. We are continually bumping up against hard fact. We expected one thing, or passively took it for granted, and had the image of it in our minds, but experience forces that idea into the background, and compels us to think quite differently. You get this kind of consciousness in some approach to purity when you put your shoulder against a door and try to force it open. You have a sense of resistance and at the same time a sense of effort. There can be no resistance without effort; there can be no effort without resistance. They are only two ways of describing the same experience. It is a double consciousness. We become aware of ourself in becoming aware of the not-self. The waking state is a consciousness of reaction; and as the consciousness itself is two-sided, so it has also two varieties; namely, action, where our modification of other things is more prominent than their reaction on us, and perception, where their effect on us is overwhelmingly greater than our effect on them. And this notion, of being such as other things make us, is such a prominent part of our life that we conceive other things also to exist by virtue of their reactions against each other. The idea of other, of not, becomes a very pivot of thought. To this element I give the name of Secondness."
Peirce is speaking here of a situation which he calls both hard fact and secondness. He is furthermore suggesting that consciousness can be two-sided. I understand that Peirce and I already differ on secondness.
I see secondness as anything that offers a challenge in considering any sign. If it is a door we need to open that is the sign. How are we to proceed. In my iteration I do not have a shoving match spontaneously. I mindfully submit the matter to ethical markers which constitute the bump in the road which I take to be a universal presence of conscience. The hard fact for Peirce is the resistance on the other side of the door. For me it is the fact that tolerance, helpfulness and democracy are an ever present basis for considering the merit of any action, a way of proceeding. This limits Triadic Philosophy to being essentially a method for developing a pedagogy of universal goodness. Since there are situations where the sort of resistance Peirce says is normal exists, I will argue that consciousness is emphatically not divided.
Consciousness is the part of us that relates to who we are in essence, as mindful, feeling beings otherwise known as souls. If this is a false assumption, then the entire edifice of philosophy is affected and it is pointless to speak of consciousness at all.
This is not an effort to create a binary distinction between Peirce's view of divided-consciousness and my view of consciousness as a theater of modifying feelings with thought and thought with feeling. I am going to leave this matter as an open question for now. I will regard it as a bump in the road and concede that virtually any challenge over which we agonize leaves us with a choice which we cannot easily or in good conscience make. But when that occurs it is precisely consciousness itself that leads us to the best result, often one that was never obvious to begin with.
Triadic Philosophy leads to redemptive constraints not to a permanent test of opposing strengths.
Peirce is speaking here of a situation which he calls both hard fact and secondness. He is furthermore suggesting that consciousness can be two-sided. I understand that Peirce and I already differ on secondness.
I see secondness as anything that offers a challenge in considering any sign. If it is a door we need to open that is the sign. How are we to proceed. In my iteration I do not have a shoving match spontaneously. I mindfully submit the matter to ethical markers which constitute the bump in the road which I take to be a universal presence of conscience. The hard fact for Peirce is the resistance on the other side of the door. For me it is the fact that tolerance, helpfulness and democracy are an ever present basis for considering the merit of any action, a way of proceeding. This limits Triadic Philosophy to being essentially a method for developing a pedagogy of universal goodness. Since there are situations where the sort of resistance Peirce says is normal exists, I will argue that consciousness is emphatically not divided.
Consciousness is the part of us that relates to who we are in essence, as mindful, feeling beings otherwise known as souls. If this is a false assumption, then the entire edifice of philosophy is affected and it is pointless to speak of consciousness at all.
This is not an effort to create a binary distinction between Peirce's view of divided-consciousness and my view of consciousness as a theater of modifying feelings with thought and thought with feeling. I am going to leave this matter as an open question for now. I will regard it as a bump in the road and concede that virtually any challenge over which we agonize leaves us with a choice which we cannot easily or in good conscience make. But when that occurs it is precisely consciousness itself that leads us to the best result, often one that was never obvious to begin with.
Triadic Philosophy leads to redemptive constraints not to a permanent test of opposing strengths.
