Was CS Peirce a Mystic? Hypostatic Abstraction

Peirce's notion of "Hypostatic Abstraction" was formulated to reflect the "Hypostatic Union" of the history of Christian theology. Both relational schemas reflect the necessary dependence that oneness has on multiplicity and that multiplicity has on oneness, which can also be formulated as the dependence of self on other(ness), or presence on absence. The immediate, given oneness of Peircean "Firstness" flows into the relational, cause-and-effect, self-as-other twoness of "Secondness" generating the incarnate trinity of the "Thirdness" that is the Hypostatic Abstraction of the appearance of "thirds" (phenomenal objects), which comprise Peirce's semiological ontology of the Firstness of first person, subjective experience.

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Transcript

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Madame Guillaume, 17th century French mystic, wrote of the Song of Songs that God is all-mouth. The Song of Songs is probably one of the most ancient poems that we have, and it is certainly one of the oldest texts in the Hebrew Bible. It is a pastoral love poem that was preserved because of its resonance with the inhabitants of the ancient Near East who preserved the poem by writing it down so that it can be enjoyed from one generation to the next. But something happened along the way in which the poem was no longer read as about a merely human beloved, but of the love that God has for the Hebrew people and that the Hebrew people have for their God. The famous first lines of the Song of Songs, Let Him Kiss Me with the Kisses of His Mouth, reviewed by Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the early medieval mystics, who picked up on the tradition of reading this poem as an ecstatic, mystical expression of God's love for his creation. Bernard wondered why the repetition, Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. What other sorts of kisses are there? He came to the conclusion that this indicates the erotic nature of God's love. Not a metaphorical kiss, not an allegorical kiss, but an actual, real, embodied kiss of the flesh, one mouth to the next. Madame Guillaume, God is all mouth, for your love is more delightful than wine. So this comparison, bodily, delightful, pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes. Your name is like perfume poured out. No wonder the young woman love you. Take me away with you. Let us hurry. Let the king bring me into his chambers. We move into a clearly erotic direction. The exemplar gratis of the feminine mystical experience was that of Teresa of Avila, who was thrown into orgasmic delight and ecstasy upon being penetrated by God. Many of the metaphors in the poem and make a connection between things that are alike and unalike. Things that share some similarity but also present some difference. How beautiful your eyes are doves. How charming our bed is verdant. The green bed all around me, the flesh of the world. I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys, like a lily among thorns is my darling among young women, like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my beloved among young men. I delight to sit in his shade, and his fruit is sweet to my taste. Let him lead me to the banquet hall, and let his banner over me be love. Strengthen me with raisins, refresh me with apples, for I am faint with love. His left arm is under my head, and his right arm embraces me. Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you, by the gazelles and by the does of the field, do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires. What Madame Guillon has noticed is what all of the great mystics knew: that God does not speak from a faraway place, a transcendent heaven, or a throne on high. God's transcendence is somehow eminent in this enfleshment, in this incarnate world, this bodily expression of God's desire to create, to be procreative. God's procreation is us and is all around us. And as Mary Lou Ponti points out, I am connected to this flesh because I am also this flesh. I am the flesh of the world. When I bite into an apple, I taste something of myself, but also I taste something different. As with all analogy and metaphor, I am making a simile based on resemblance. There is something that is the same. There's also something that is different. And I need this difference, and I need this sameness in order to present the difference. It may seem odd at first to draw a similarity between Madame Guillon's statement, God is all mouth, and the 19th century C.S. Pierce's semiology. But Pierce also had a notion of the erotic nature of creation. A sort of participatory creation in Owen Barfield's sense. For Pierce, semiology forms or makes the phenomenology that I see all around me. What appears to my first person subjective screen. These things, what Pierce called thirds. These thirds are all given to me as the gratuitous gift of phenomenological appearance. What appears is not something on the one hand that I generated beforehand and planned out. No, as in Heidegger's notion of thrownness, I was thrown into this world, into this, into the facticity of this body and this time and this place, in evolutionary terms, in this particular niche. But I can participate in this world and in its creation when all of these determinations are made indeterminate by my access to the imaginal realm, which Heidegger understood as my relation to the void, or as determinate being's relation to indeterminacy. That relation is the erotic relation of procreation. Pearce, like the great Christian mystics of the Middle Ages, saw that semiology was the study of a triadic union, which Christian mystics called the hypostatic union, and Pierce called hypostatic abstraction. For Pierce, this was the relationship between firstness, secondness, and thirdness. Thirdness is what we are looking at all the time. Firstness and secondness are difficult to access in themselves. That's because just like the Trinity in Christian theology, they're always in relationship with each other. There never was a time when one wasn't. Firstness would be the phenomenology of our initial throneness. I show up, sensory perceptions abound. My sensual apparatuses were given to me by my genetics, the genetics of niche construction, as evolutionary biology would have it. But as an enlanguaged being, I almost never experience any of this in the raw, as it is in itself, so to speak. But I do have access to a sort of in itself through the triadic relation given by hypostatic abstraction. Firstness in itself is nothing because it is without the relation of secondness. You can think of these phenomenologically as the firstness of the subjective screen and what appears or what is given, as raw percepts. And then those percepts are put into relation in secondness. Secondness is relatedness, cause and effect, subject-object, or first person, second person, I and you. But it is not yet the you to which I relate. It is not yet the object that is the third that appears to me on my subjective phenomenological screen, according to my intention. And my intention is also given to me via the Nietzsche construction, the biology that I was born into, so that what appears to me on my phenomenological screen accords with my intention, which is a blind intention, to survive and reproduce. But there is another intention in there that has been also given to me, that is beyond me, for what is not merely advantageous or instrumental for what is other than me. My desire is not only for an extension of my own intention, which would be a desire for the unity of an absolute oneness. My desire is for two-ness to be in relation with the other, to be put into relation with otherness, for my determinations, my intentions to be put into relation with what is counter to my intentions, what is unintentional, and what is indeterminate. And this is my desire for the freedom of participatory creation. For Pierce, thirdness then is what appears to me on my phenomenological stream after it has been mediated through the relation of secondness. In particular, for Pierce, you could consider the sign as firstness, the interpretant, which is the semantic meaning of the sign as secondness, and then the thirdness is the referred to or the referent or the signified. But notice that the signified is never in itself, is never a direct index pointing to something that is unmediated through the interpretant. Because the interpretant is composed of concepts. For in language being, language is the house of being, as Heidegger put it. Pearce breaks down famously three kinds of signs. The first one is an index, the indexical relation between a sign and what it indicates, something like smoke indicates fire. It's a cause and effect simple, determinant, the cause and effect relationship of secondness. The icon is a relation of resemblance, so that something resembles something else. But a resemblance is never a pure likeness. But resemblance is never a pure repetition of the same. A resemblance always is a repetition with difference in the Deleuzian sense. So that the third type of symbol, which is a sign, is made up of both an index, a pointing at some sort of referent, some sort of signified. The sign points to a signified. Whatever a sign is, it is saying something in terms of another, most associated with Wittgenstein, but Pierce expressed that idea many decades earlier. The relation of analogy involves both an affirmation as well as a negation. Something is both like and different. Whenever I put them into relation. As Deleuze pointed out, there is no possibility even of a repetition of the same. In whatever way genetics, biological niche construction reproduces the same we call form, formal causality. The form is a repetition plus different. This is not a bush like any other that's ever existed. It includes both repetition and difference. And as it turns out, this includes even clones or things made by asexual reproduction. And this is the reason why there is evolution. Without variation, there is no evolution. There cannot be a continual repetition of the same. Every act of replication includes the failure to reproduce. Because every repetition is put into relation with difference. Again, in Heidegger's sense, determinate being brought near to indeterminacy or put into relation with indeterminacy actuates new possibility. Again, in a very deluzian sense, pure void, pure potential is not any kind of freedom, it's not any kind of anything. It's inaccessible nothingness. Determinate being, the limits of form and structure, is opened up by its relation to chance. What Pierce would call real objective chance, potential, indeterminacy. For Deleuze, a possibility space was potential in relation to determinate being, which actuated possibility, which he called an actual possibility space. An actual possibility space or an actualized possibility space can then be realized by a selector. According to evolution, the selector is always a blind selector, survival and reproduction relative to one's place in a niche. But in a creative participatory notion of the universe, there are degrees of freedom that are accessible within an actualized possibility space to make something different, new, because of our access to true indeterminacy. The creation of the third is the enfleshment of the world. So it's not just a conceptual semiological creation. It actually makes whatever there is not only appear but incarnate. And my participation in the flesh of the world is an erotic, creative, procreative, productive act that is ecstatic in the original Greek sense of ecstasy, standing outside of oneself, and that I actually, from within myself, stand outside myself. Hypostatic abstraction is then just this relation between firstness, secondness, and thirdness. What appears in immediacy is mediated through an interpretant, secondness. Objective phenomenological world, the phenomenon that I see here, are an expression of the relation between concepts and percepts. A.N. Whitehead's way of putting it is that a concept is two percepts joined together by a rule. That rule for Pierce is the interpretant. Interpretants are concepts that are given to us, that we usually by the symbolic, the language that we inherit. So that my erotic participation in this universe is my incarnation in the flesh of thirdness. The sign for Pierce is always a combination of the index and the icon. So that the sign indicates, points to, in the indexical sense, but the sign also contains the iconic resemblance, so that one thing stands in for another. Again, including the fact that resemblance always includes what it does not resemble. So that in the Delusian sense, every repetition presents something new, presents difference. But every presentation of a discrete object, of the phenomena of the infleshed world, is only a moment. In Pearcyan, abduction, as opposed to induction or deduction, I don't build up what am what I see out of discrete moments in time or discrete, discrete spatiotemporal slices. I abduct by throwing my imaginal attention, intention, into the void, into indeterminacy. So that my intention is a relation between what is intentional and what is unintentional. And this is the ecstasy in which I stand outside of myself by being in relation to what is not myself. I don't just desire a continual, determinate universe that is just an extension of my own intention. I desire a universe that is counter to my intention. This is the otherness that I encounter when I encounter the counter-intentional. For my determinate intentions to become indeterminate, I need the secondness of the other, the relation of two-ness, not just more oneness. In the thirdness, I make it one through the relation given to me by the interpretant. That is the relation. The relation of the concept that puts the percepts together. It also relates one concept to another. We might call this copulating percepts with concepts, copulating concepts with concepts, making a world. Or as Heidegger would put it, I am a worlding being. As Jean-Luc Marion would put it, all phenomena are saturated, saturated with the presence of absence, saturated with the transcendence of elsewhere, the eminent transcendence of elsewhere. So that in Mary Lou Ponty's way of putting it, what I see, what is visible, what I touch, what I taste, what I all these thirds, this thirdness, is an imaginal cut because I am continuous with the flesh of the world. But I imagine this cut, this difference, so that I can make the world new and make the interpretant a connection through an indication as well as through an iconic resemblance that presents difference. For Mary Lou Ponty, when I touch the flesh of the world, when I observe it, when I smell it, when I become it, as well as for Jean-Luc Marion, the reason why it is so saturated is because I'm encountering both what accords with my intention and then the relation, what doesn't accord with my intention. As the mystics put it, what is far is near through the relation of the second, through the interpretant. So that what I see, what is visible, and Mary Lou Ponty's way of putting it, also remains invisible. Or as Jean-Luc Murrian would put it, I see the invisible not as revealed, but as invisible. What is revealed to me is simultaneously hidden. As Meister Eckhart would put it, as God reveals, as God shows, he hides. He conceals. Heidegger's notion of unconcealment, Halithea. Whatever I determine, whatever I make a momentary cut in the continuity of the flesh of the world, what Henri Bergson would call dure, being as dure, my being is a continual process of becoming, all being is becoming, allows for a thirdness, allows for the phenomenal objective world. But there's never a final expression of being. It's always becoming. So that I can't let whatever resembles the past obscure the difference of the present. Otherwise, I will not be able to imagine myself and others into a new world. I won't be able to become new through the other, often put in the mystical tradition, the self as other, if I just see the other as an extension of myself. As Jean-Luc Marion will put it, elsewhere, the transcendent is here, in this flesh, in this saturated phenomenon all around me. What is counter to my intention? Whenever I encounter that in the phenomenon of my intentional world, I experience saturation. Marion's nice way of putting it, there's more intuition than I can make intentional, which he calls the overproximal affects intuition of too muchness, too much givenness. Too much to be made intentional means too much to know. Which brings us back into the mystical idea of knowing what can't be known through analogy. The analogy that always contains a negation and an affirmation. So famously for Aquinas, when I say God is a rock, there's an affirmation there. There's a predication being made. But God is so clearly whatever God is, not a rock, that it contains its own negation. But I hold together this irresolved contradiction in analogy, in the same way that Pierce holds together the indication and the iconography, the likeness and the difference, to make a thirdness, to make a third, to make a reified phenomenon of the inflashed incarnate world all around me. For Pierce, I am always participating in the world because I'm always abducting. In hypostatic abstraction, a predicate becomes a subject, a noun, a third. And I do this through the process of abduction, which is an inference, it's a projection into the void. Again, because the world is not made up of discrete units, the world is not digital, the world is analog. And so the world that appears to me, not through a scientific lens, but through the ecstatic lens of semiotic abduction, is the ontological, is the ontologically real world. What is. So thirdness is mediated through a concept, mediated through a sign, but it is the union, the relation, the erotic relation of my imaginal projection and what pushes back against that, the otherness outside of me. God is all mouth because she kisses me when I eat the fruits of the earth. She enters me when I consume its flesh, as it was for Mary Lou Ponty with the flesh of an apple. Or as it is in the Catholic tradition, especially in the work of John Luke Marion, when I consume the Eucharist, which is an icon. Because for Marion, it makes visible the invisible. As invisible does not reduce as it reveals. As for Pearce, this flesh cannot be reduced to the scientific, determinate description of discrete things and units and building blocks. Everything is everything, as Donnie Hathley would say. So we're always abducting because we're always imagining the world. It's always an imaginary exercise. But that imagination is that self-alienation, is that transcendence, is that ecstasy that is inherent inside already eminent to the eminent transcendence of incarnation. So that in hypostatic abstraction, if I am abstracting by making a general, by making a category, by making an idea, by making a concept, I'm putting that concept in the interpretation back into relation with otherness, with the outside, with the exterior. So that interior and exterior are constantly flipping in this ecstasy of inside and outside at the same time. I'm standing outside of myself whenever I abduct, whenever I imagine into. Because my experience of the world is not built up bits and parts. It's not digital, it's analogical. It's an all-at-on's infinity. Infinity in a blade of grass. You can imagine in hypostatic abstraction a predicate becoming a thing. The pot is black. Because I can then take the blackness that's predicated to the pot, and I can make that a thing also. That I can use predicates for blackness as well. But blackness is not a discrete place on the color spectrum. In fact, it's the absence of all color. The gradations between blue, purple, and black are continuous. They're not discrete. Just as presence and absence are continuous, not discrete. And when I make something present, I have to make a cut between it and what is absent, which is the backgrounding and foregrounding of what is present, the present thing, the third, and the absence upon which it is foregrounded. The Deridian difference, which is the system of symbolic differences that allow for one particular difference to be foregrounded. So as we enter into a mystical type of spirituality, we renew our creative participation in the flesh of the world, which is an erotic procreation of triadic incarnation, hypostatic union.