PEIRCE AND I DIVERGE WHEN DISCUSSING TRIADIC MATTERS

CP 6.201. Let me here say one word about Tychism, or the doctrine that absolute chance is a factor of the universe. There is one class of objectors to it who are so impressed with what they have read in popular books about the triumphs of science that they really imagine that science has proved that the universe is regulated by law down to every detail. Such men are theologians, perhaps, or perhaps they have been brought up in surroundings where everything was so minutely regulated that they have come to believe that every tendency that exists at all in Nature must be carried to its furthest limit. Or, there is I know not what other explanation of their state of mind; but I do know one thing: they cannot be real students of physical science -- they cannot be chemists, for example. They are wrong in their logic. But there is another class of objectors for whom I have more respect. They are shocked at the atheism of Lucretius and his great master. They do not perceive that that which offends them is not the Firstness in the swerving atoms, because they themselves are just as much advocates of Firstness as the ancient Atomists were. But what they cannot accept is the attribution of this firstness to things perfectly dead and material. Now I am quite with them there. I think too that whatever is First is ipso facto sentient. If I make atoms swerve -- as I do -- I make them swerve but very very little, because I conceive they are not absolutely dead. And by that I do not mean exactly that I hold them to be physically such as the materialists hold them to be, only with a small dose of sentiency superadded. For that, I grant, would be feeble enough. But what I mean is, that all that there is, is First, Feelings; Second, Efforts; Third, Habits -- all of which are more familiar to us on their psychical side than on their physical side; and that dead matter would be merely the final result of the complete induration of habit reducing the free play of feeling and the brute irrationality of effort to complete death. Now I would suppose that that result of evolution is not quite complete even in our beakers and crucibles. Thus, when I speak of chance, I only employ a mathematical term to express with accuracy the characteristics of freedom or spontaneity. END

Peirce does two things here. The first is to establish chance as he wishes. The second is to tell us how his understanding of the triadic is stated. We will see from the above that by First he means feelings --things that come up, that are there, that are present in the mind. By Second he means Efforts resulting from the meeting of the feeling with forces it must reckon with, conditions necessary to developing an active response. The third he says are Habits -- that is to say conclusions that become for us a basis for responding.

Now when I came up with Triadic Philosophy my initial triad was not Feelings, Efforts, Habits. I did not imagine realms of firstness, secondness and thirdness. I imagined a universal discipline anyone could play with and adapt to their own sense of things. My triad remains as it was when it emerged a decade ago. I forget exactly when.

I envisioned and still do Reality as first -- the vast field of semiotic information that is the universe, dark matter, whatever we cannot see but know as consciousness, as an aspect of consciousness. I see Ethics as the challenging Second. I pin it down with three ontological values that are heavenly -- tolerance, helpfulness and democracy. I see Aesthetics as the Third as the revolutionary call to see action and expression as nonviolent, beautiful and true. As heavenly.

That to me sets the table for a universal basis for moving into the future.

UPDATE 2/4/2020

To carry this a bit farther, my impression is that Peirce and I diverge for two main reasons, one good from his perspective, and one that reflects a struggle that is inevitable and insoluble. The first is simply that I have forged from exposure to Peirce an explicit system and given little credence to the complexities of the system that can be inferred from his writings. The second is that the capacity to judge between free action and determined "reality" is dulled  by our human condition. We simply cannot be assured that we are entirely who we think we are or that life is entirely what we take it to be. This is because, if we are souls passing through a time of testing, we cannot differentiate what is determined and beyond us from what is demonstrably the result of our unrestrained will. Triadic Philosophy resolves this at the outset by acknowledging that Reality is all, what we can and cannot know. The ultimate is something I think Peirce and I are one in confessing. We believe in God. We believe is Agape or Unconditional Love. And Peirce having moved on no doubt is aware of being a Soul.

Peirce: CP 6.294 Cross-Ref:††
294. Here, then, is the issue. The gospel of Christ says that progress comes from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his neighbors. On the other side, the conviction of the nineteenth century is that progress takes place by virtue of every individual's striving for himself with all his might and trampling his neighbor under foot whenever he gets a chance to do so. This may accurately be called the Gospel of Greed.
Peirce: CP 6.295 Cross-Ref:††
295. Much is to be said on both sides. I have not concealed, I could not conceal, my own passionate predilection. Such a confession will probably shock my scientific brethren. Yet the strong feeling is in itself, I think, an argument of some weight in favor of the agapastic theory of evolution -- so far as it may be presumed to bespeak the normal judgment of the Sensible Heart. Certainly, if it were possible to believe in agapasm without believing it warmly, that fact would be an argument against the truth of the doctrine. At any rate, since the warmth of feeling exists, it should on every account be candidly confessed; especially since it creates a liability to one-sidedness on my part against which it behooves my readers and me to be severally on our guard. END

But I will not be gentle. Nor will the preponderance of those who hearken to the signs of the time. We are suffering the tag-end of the Darwinian declension in the simple and rapacious form that it has taken.
in culture and society

Progress is clearly as the Gospel has it, not Darwin's militant followers. This is being demonstrated by a preponderance of thinkers who are hampered only by an academic establishment that is ferociously clinging to the gospel of greed.

Triadic Philosophy moves past Peirce's notion of cooperation as a merging of individualities. It gives equal status to the three persons of human reality, to I, to We and to All. Liberals and conservatives have made mincemeat out of the individual and the collective. Leaving both as useless halves of superficial binary logic.

As souls who are here in spirit form individuals are clearly meant to be the protagonists in the human drama. But they are urged to practice the virtues of empathy and cooperation. And they are likewise counseled to embrace values that underline our equality and the universality of all that matters.

That this is practical and even scientific merely requires rejecting academic materialism and accepting quantum-based consciousness understanding and the logic of heaven which understands that freedom is the essence of existence and responsibility is the willingness to be careful in the face of temptations.