Abstract
C. S. Peirce posits that the self is known only through negation—by the knower finding out that he or she is wrong. Even more importantly he considers a man to be nothing more than a sign. This is existentially inadequate. In this chapter, Stacey Ake shows the shortcomings of Peirce’s Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness in creating human identity by utilizing and developing Walker Percy’s notion of Fourthness in order to show that there is a positive way to create identity and, more importantly, community.
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Notes
- 1.
While the terms phenomenological and phaneroscopic are frequently used interchangeably in the Peirce literature, as they will be here, I suspect they are not synonyms. Rather, like the distinction between pragmatism and pragmaticism, Peirce is stating a tangible difference between phenomenology (the study of appearances) and phaneroscopy (the observation of the obvious). The first is a discipline, while the second is a method.
- 2.
N.B.—The occasion for the existence of a “mere may-be” as realized in a phaneron is not the same as the existence of a quality as a “mere may-be” itself. See CP 1.304.
- 3.
In part, such a divine transformation makes sense. Much of what is attributed to Dionysus’ later cult actually reflects values originally attributed to Apollo: health, poetry, peace, blessedness. Moreover, Dionysus, like Apollo, had an extremely cruel side. Again, perhaps, only an exaggeration of Apollo’s. Unlike Apollo, however, Dionysus’ death is well-documented. Either by the Titans or on the orders of Hera, Dionysus is fated to be torn to pieces, resurrected, and torn to pieces again—only to follow in the cycle with another resurrection, another sundering. In this, Dionysus becomes the suffering god. However, to explain the relationship between the awful fate of Dionysus and the matter of selfhood and identity is not the subject of this chapter but the next one.
- 4.
Consider what happens when it is the individual who is the object of the community of scientists ? Is a stone altered or affected if it is mistaken for cubic zirconium, even though it is, in all actuality, a diamond? No, it is merely an object beset by erring subjects. (Besides, for Peirce, evolutionary love, by means of the community of scientists , will eventually amend this discrepancy.) But a person, a true subject, who—although a mere instance of the cosmos’ attempt to understand itself—may, indeed, suffer under such error. He may, in fact, be torn apart by mis-identification, only to be joyfully restored to wholeness by correct identification, a wholeness which is subsequently shattered by an error which is healed by correct recognition which is then … and so on. This is the Dionysian demise. When one’s quest for identity, for selfhood, for individuality is dependent on alterity, the result is an almost infinite flux between not wanting to be whatever it is that is oneself and wanting to be whatever it is that you have been told is yourself. In other words, it is despair.
- 5.
Another oddity is that Peirce requires an other to affirm the interpretant. Liars aside, one must need ask the question why other humans should be the only set of objects not hell-bent on negating the individual.
- 6.
In other words, they have named themselves by naming the semiotic community to which they pertain. They have articulated and admitted the social nature of their semiotic interaction as members of the scientific community.
- 7.
Something reflected in the presumptuous absurdity of the appellations modernity and post-modernity.
- 8.
Missing sentences: How can a child learn to speak a language in three years without anyone taking trouble about it, that is, utter and understand an unlimited number of sentences, while a great deal of time and trouble is required to teach a chimpanzee a few hand signals?
Why is it that scientists , who know a great deal about the world, know less about language than about the back side of the moon, even though language is the one observable behavior which most clearly sets man apart from the beasts and the one activity in which all men, scientists included, engage more than in any other?
Why is it that scientists know a good deal about what it is to be an organism in an environment but very little about what it is to be a creature who names things and utters and understands sentences about things?
Why is it that scientists have a theory about everything under the sun but do not have a theory about man?
- 9.
At best, the use of “c-a-k-e” can be viewed as an index—a second of a second. And even in this, the actual establishment of the sublated legisign aspect of the index was established by Annie Sullivan and not by Helen Keller. In a similar way, one might share the index “fetch!” with one’s dog. Thus, there are two interesting things here: (1) The aspect of Thirdness in “c-a-k-e” was imported by means of a person, a subject: Annie Sullivan , and shared along the axis of intersubjectivity with Helen Keller; and (2) because the level of exchange falls shy of the symbolic (even by Peircean standards), it would not be considered as truly or fully human in the Percyean sense.
- 10.
That such a difference between Peirce’s semiotic and phenomenological Thirdness is even possible is perhaps reflected in his use of the category of thought as a weasel-term. I posit that there is a qualitative difference between “thought thinking itself” and my thinking the thought that “thought thinks itself,” and that these two types of thought are not immediately interchangeable.
- 11.
What Percy will be drawing upon in his use of the word symbol as opposed to the more common term sign is an observation made by Peirce himself but not developed. Note the following (emphasis mine):
A man walking with a child points his arm up into the air and says, “There is a balloon.” The pointing arm is an essential part of the symbol without which the latter would convey no information (See CP 1.33).
Why is the raised pointing arm essential to the symbol which is, ostensibly, nothing more than a particular kind of mediated thought? I suspect, along with Percy, that it is not the raised arm conveying information, but the father’s arm conveying authority that is the essential part of the symbol.
- 12.
It should also be kept in mind that water or wa-wa was the first word Keller learned as an infant. Thus, she lost her hearing and sight to illness after she had begun the process of naming. Whether the same results would come to someone who was born deaf and blind is another question entirely.
- 13.
Emphasis mine.
- 14.
It is, perhaps, easy to disregard this second contention on the hermeneutical grounds that it is Helen Keller, the adult, who is writing this memoir and imbuing it with her own ethico-religious experience. I agree. I am sure the seven-year-old Helen knew next to nothing about “Aaron’s rod”; however, the seven-year-old Helen did go over to the hearth and cry. This is a fact that can be corroborated by those around her. So that, regardless of her own interpretation, we are still left with her empirical action.
- 15.
I suspect that one of the reasons “feral children” fail to learn human language is not merely their missing the “language acquisition age,” but missing the human company from which one might learn language. The “wild boy of Aveyron” never learned to properly speak, but he could respond to the cracking of a nutshell or the placing of plates on a table. He responded by coming to the sound in the same, albeit inverted, way Helen Keller signed c-a-k-e when she was hungry. But neither the “wild boy” nor the pre-well-house Helen would have ever said, “I am hungry.” The reason for this, I contend, is that they both lacked the capability to have an “I” or even a proper name. If one cannot comprehend that w-a-t-e-r is water, how much less can one comprehend that H-e-l-e-n is—is what??? If one cannot concede that the “I” is a socially learned phenomenon (and not necessarily one acquired by negation, although it may be amplified by it), consider the fact that a two year old does not learn “I am Sebastian,” what he learns is “My name is Sebastian.” In other words, my “name” is “Sebastian,” my “fuzzy bedtime friend” is “Bamse the teddybear,” the “big noisy thing” is “tractor.” Another observation concerning Sebastian: when he was a little over two years’ old, his mother was “mommy,” his father was far (Danish for father), and “anybody who will help me get out of bed or will play with me and my toys or will take me for a walk” was mor (the Danish for mother). Why? I think it is because, if you are in Denmark and scream “Mooooooooooooooor!” loud enough, somebody will come. Scream “Mommmmy” and you are left out in the cold—linguistically and existentially. One final observation concerning language, social interaction, and individual consciousness: a human toddler cannot go through the “no!” stage unless he or she has fellow humans to negate. This sounds quite trite, but it is not. Peirce posits that one comes to self-consciousness by being negated by the world. I suspect that it is quite the opposite. I believe self-awareness begins when the toddler discovers that he or she can control (negate) others and their actions by the word “no!” I remember a friend of mine’s daughter whose “terrible twos” lasted merely two weeks. One day, sitting demurely in her high chair, she was told to eat her peas. “No!” came her rallying cry, and everybody in the kitchen froze. She just smiled. She had felt the power. A few days later she was told that she could say either “yes or no” to questions depending on what she wanted. Shortly thereafter, the “terrible twos” subsided. By use of the word “no” she had successfully individuated herself from those around her; by the option to use yes or no, she received the capacity to integrate or not to integrate as she saw fit. This is the true beginning of autonomy. The “wild boy” never gets to individuate; perhaps Helen Keller never gets to choose until the moment in the well house.
- 16.
That symbols are twice removed from their objects and once removed from their signs can be supported by the utter unintelligibility of Egyptian hieroglyphics throughout most of modern history. Such a language of pictographs should have been easy to decode, if it was a set of signs. Instead, it was a set of symbols such that the interpretation in the minds of the interlocutors transmogrified the signs themselves. Let me give another example. If you are driving and a ball rolls out into the street, you slow down and/or stop, just in case a child might be following it. The ball is a sign to stop. If you approach an upside-down triangle street sign, you may stop, slow down, or continue depending on the traffic conditions. And, in the United States, that would be the right thing to do. Not so in parts of Europe where that sign means “Stop!” In the case of the “Stop signs,” one sees that they are really “Stop symbols.”
- 17.
It should also be noted that Percy essentially collapses the representamen and the interpretant into the sign itself (which he calls the “symbol”), thus giving the symbol a life of its own in opposition to the object as particular. The symbol, then, becomes the shared item, the creator of identity between the two organisms/subjectivities involved in this process. Because identity is clustered around the symbol and not around the object, the representamen, or the interpretant, the process of inquiry can move beyond questioning the nature of the process of inquiry or the semeiotic itself into questioning the relation between the object and the symbol, the object and other objects, the symbol and other symbols, and so on. In other words, where the sociality, the Fourthness, of the two interlocutors is assumed, a true scientific inquiry can proceed.
- 18.
Consider the reaction of the electorate to the sexscapades of their leaders. Here is an almost quantifiable relationship between trust (public confidence) and authority (the probabilities of successful re-election). Public figures “name” our values. If they cannot be trusted in the little things, what right do they have to be entrusted with authority over the big things?
- 19.
If one considers the nature of Percy’s symbol, one notices something very strange. In Percy’s account of symbolosis (semiosis), the assumption is made that there will be no difference between the symbol in the minds of the two interlocutors. In other words, the interpretant and the representamen are collapsed into one another. This leaves one wondering whether Percy’s Fourthness which results from the Delta Factor is not simply a form of fixation of belief by authority. That it, in fact, is not can be shown by two things: (1) the fact that both of the interlocutors are concentrated upon the object at hand and that communication of this sort (i.e., naming) cannot occur in the absence of an object, and (2) that the explicit social nature of Percy’s semiotic approach almost guarantees not the veracity or good will of the community at large, but its multivocity. Moreover, the attitude of trust assumed by the recipient (adult) interlocutor stands to judge the veracity and goodwill of any particular namer.
- 20.
This is classically illustrated in teenage behavior. Either a teenager will retreat into their own little world (and indulge in the error of tenacity; a four year old will also do this) or the teenager will join a self-reifying peer group (and thus become involved in the a priori error; something that can readily become a lifetime occupation). However, in neither of these cases has the actual axis of intersubjectivity been diminished one whit.
- 21.
I suspect that all philosophical antinomies, when you come right down to it, participate in this very dichotomy and difference of approach.
- 22.
However, if you say the word “soft” a hundred times, it will not only stop to seem soft, it will cease to mean anything. Eventually, it will become “ofts” because the “o” is the strongest sound in the word. In this way, the concept or perception of “softness” can be experimentally separated from the word in which it inheres.
- 23.
In positing logic as semeiotic, man as a sign, and logic as the third of the normative sciences, Peirce betrays a prejudice which undermines the real-order veracity of his project: a belief that life is logical or fully collapsible onto logic. Existentially, this is not the case. Thus, while Peirce goes to great lengths to define and describe his categories discursively, he does not define them (in the sense of bas-relief) by setting them out existentially. Even Secondness is not valued for its existentiality per se. Rather, it is valued as an heuristic device that hones the precision of Firstness in its pursuit of Thirdness. Thus, reality is not to be valued in and of itself but for its tutorial abilities. However, such a criticism is not devastating to Peirce’s project, since, as mentioned before, all the elements necessary to creating a definition of Fourthness are present within his writing—but not in such a way as to be readily discerned.
- 24.
N.B.—But a logic as semiotic views man as a sign not as a man per se. Thus, one can see how the formative aspects of sociality may have escaped Peirce’s notice.
References
Hoopes, James. 1991. Peirce on Signs. Ed. James Hoopes. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1932. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Percy, Walker. 1975. Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
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Ake, S.E. (2018). That Mystery Category “Fourthness” and Its Relationship to the Work of C. S. Peirce. In: Marsh, L. (eds) Walker Percy, Philosopher. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77968-3_4
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