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CP 1.24. "Let us begin with considering actuality, and try to make out just what it consists in. If I ask you what the actuality of an event consists in, you will tell me that it consists in its happening then and there. The specifications then and there involve all its relations to other existents. The actuality of the event seems to lie in its relations to the universe of existents. A court may issue injunctions and judgments against me and I not care a snap of my finger for them. I may think them idle vapor. But when I feel the sheriff's hand on my shoulder, I shall begin to have a sense of actuality. Actuality is something brute. There is no reason in it. I instance putting your shoulder against a door and trying to force it open against an unseen, silent, and unknown resistance. We have a two-sided consciousness of effort and resistance, which seems to me to come tolerably near to a pure sense of actuality. On the whole, I think we have here a mode of being of one thing which consists in how a second object is. I call that Secondness."
This reference to consciousness contains no real suggestion that Peirce thinks of consciousness as I do, as the substance within which Reality takes on life, and so forth. Here his reference is almost to the way we understand things and he is expressing another reality which I feel is open to question. He sees Secondness as a sort of push-pull, binary contest. I can understand this in terms of the need for Triadic understanding to move past binary binds.
But I believe it is possible to see secondness in terms of any barrier to consideration of a sign (the first) In my case I suggest that ethical values are the most useful expression of secondness. There are more bumps and even brutal occurrences caused by ethical lapses than by contests regarding swinging doors.
In any case we have seen that Peirce makes use of the term consciousness as a sort of context for willful conflict. I see consciousness as the field in which such considerations are possible and in some respects momentous.
Maybe actuality is changing as triadic awareness grows.
This reference to consciousness contains no real suggestion that Peirce thinks of consciousness as I do, as the substance within which Reality takes on life, and so forth. Here his reference is almost to the way we understand things and he is expressing another reality which I feel is open to question. He sees Secondness as a sort of push-pull, binary contest. I can understand this in terms of the need for Triadic understanding to move past binary binds.
But I believe it is possible to see secondness in terms of any barrier to consideration of a sign (the first) In my case I suggest that ethical values are the most useful expression of secondness. There are more bumps and even brutal occurrences caused by ethical lapses than by contests regarding swinging doors.
In any case we have seen that Peirce makes use of the term consciousness as a sort of context for willful conflict. I see consciousness as the field in which such considerations are possible and in some respects momentous.
Maybe actuality is changing as triadic awareness grows.
