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CP 1.320. "Standing on the outside of a door that is slightly ajar, you put your hand upon the knob to open and enter it. You experience an unseen, silent resistance. You put your shoulder against the door and, gathering your forces, put forth a tremendous effort. Effort supposes resistance. Where there is no effort there is no resistance, where there is no resistance there is no effort either in this world or any of the worlds of possibility. It follows that an effort is not a feeling nor anything priman or protoidal. There are feelings connected with it: they are the sum of consciousness during the effort. But it is conceivable that a man should have it in his power directly to summon up all those feelings, or any feelings. He could not, in any world, be endowed with the power of summoning up an effort to which there did not happen to be a resistance all ready to exist. For it is an absurdity to suppose that a man could directly will to oppose that very will. A very little thinking will show that this is what it comes to."
But effortlessness is not impossible. And therefore resistance is not inevitable. I am not sure what Peirce calls secondness as a sort of brute force to be reckoned is always a factor. Surely, even when secondness is the interposition of ethical markers agreement with the values adduced implies not resistance but acceptance. The world may interpose obstacles but if we live by a goal of love and values that lead to nonviolence we are suggesting that the sense of heaven can become the sense of life on earth.
Of course, the stance of anyone professing these values is bound to contain aggression, force, effort. So Peirce may be describing a universal condition. But the agapaic teleology of his own triadic philosophy suggests that secondness is hardly an end.
But effortlessness is not impossible. And therefore resistance is not inevitable. I am not sure what Peirce calls secondness as a sort of brute force to be reckoned is always a factor. Surely, even when secondness is the interposition of ethical markers agreement with the values adduced implies not resistance but acceptance. The world may interpose obstacles but if we live by a goal of love and values that lead to nonviolence we are suggesting that the sense of heaven can become the sense of life on earth.
Of course, the stance of anyone professing these values is bound to contain aggression, force, effort. So Peirce may be describing a universal condition. But the agapaic teleology of his own triadic philosophy suggests that secondness is hardly an end.
