We’ve been taught to think that the universe is made up of individuals, individual atoms, individual thoughts, individual truths. Based on this belief, we seek to reduce complex things down to the individuals that make them up (cells of the body, members of the community, strokes of the painter’s brush), in an endeavor to better understand complex things.
What if the smallest unit--the simplest things--are relations, rather than individuals? After all, no individual exists outside of relation with others; and every individual we’ve ever identified is itself made up of parts in (sometimes varying) relations. Atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, nucleus and electrons. What about human individuality? Sartre pointed out that Descartes’ Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) is made up of the part of a person that thinks and the part of a person that observes that s/he thinks.
This really got me thinking; it is paragraph 93 from the third volume of Peirce’s Collected Papers (edited by Hartshorne and Weiss):
“The logical atom, or term not capable of logical division, must be one of which every predicate may be universally affirmed or denied.”
This means that if something is truly an individual, i.e. not capable of being broken down into smaller parts, then any quality you might attribute to that individual is either truly or falsely predicated of it, and not both. Either Aristotle is sober, or he is not. Either the Aristotle is tall, or he is not. And so on for all qualities we might apply. The doctrine of individuals holds that if we do a thorough-going enough study of the term (in logic)/thing (in space and time), we will be able to distinguish it from all others determinately (i.e. with no vagueness or generality).
Makes sense, right? Even if two individuals are very much alike, there’s got to be some quality that sets them apart; otherwise they’d be indistinguishable. Some things (say Socrates) will share many qualities with Aristotle, but it is by the difference in predications that we tell them apart. So, even if they resembled each other very closely, Socrates was pug-nosed, and Aristotle’s nose exhibited a prominent sloping curve.
Peirce continues:
“For, let A be such a term. Then, if it is neither true that all A is X nor that no A is X, it must be true that some A is X and some A is not X; and therefore A may be divided into A that is X and A that is not X, which is contrary to its nature as a logical atom. Such a term can be realized neither in thought nor in sense.” (He goes on to show why.)
What if it is because we think reality is made of individuals that we unwittingly fall back into undemocratic ways of governing (our common defense, infrastructure, healthcare, etc.), rather than countenancing the fundamentally relational nature of government of the people, by the people and for the people? What if it is because we think reality is made of individuals that we keep miscalculating economic growth using a zero-sum model (one big individual, with have’s and have not’s as its parts), rather than recognizing the synergetic and emergent nature of the economy that is greater than the sum of its individual parts? What if it is because we think reality is made up of individuals that we behave like we are separate from nature (using up her resources), rather part of nature’s living body (burning down our own home)?
I’ve been reading and studying the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce for almost 40 years, and I find his way of making sense of our world startlingly more compelling, useful and inspiring than any other western philosopher’s, recent or ancient. I believe that studying Peirce’s logic of relations will aid us enormously in developing a democratic economy that works for all of us, as well as science and industry that lives and works in harmony with the environment.
It’s hard to know where to start this study of relations when everything is related (interconnected). In the following three paragraphs (numbered by his editors), Peirce lays out some of the background for his logic of relations. The passage begins with a discussion of probability, since all our observations and all our statements about what’s real/true, are a posteriori/synthetic.
This means that our method of gathering information and learning about reality is empirical, so our statements about our experience are either of a hypothetical nature (“If we adopt the hypothesis that whales are mammals, how far does it go toward explaining their behavior, e.g. the fact that they give birth to live young and lactate?”) or of an inductive nature (“All of the specimens I’ve seen so far corroborate the idea that swans are white”--versus a priori or analytic, i.e. theoretical or deduced; like Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum.”). In summary, our thoughts about reality carry some probability of being true (versus carrying absolute truth). Now look where Peirce goes with this.
Volume 2.paragraph 652 – “The idea of probability essentially belongs to a kind of inference which is repeated indefinitely. An individual inference must be either true or false, and can show no effect of probability; and, therefore, in reference to a single case considered in itself, probability can have no meaning. If a man had to choose between drawing a card from a pack containing twenty-five red cards and a black one, or from a pack containing twenty-five black cards and a red one, and if the drawing of a red card were destined to transport him to eternal felicity, and that of a black one to consign him to everlasting woe, it would be folly to deny that he ought to prefer the pack containing the larger proportion of red cards, although, from the nature of the risk, it could not be repeated. It is not easy to reconcile this with our analysis of the conception of chance. But suppose he should choose the red pack, and should draw the wrong card, what consolation would he have? He might say that he had acted in accordance with reason, but that would only show that his reason was absolutely worthless…
What I find fascinating about this paragraph is…
Unlike most Anglo Sachsen philosophers, Charles Peirce does not posit a correspondence between a single observation and particular phenomenon as definitive of truth, no simple pairing of individual proposition-to-individual fact has that power; instead, the relation Peirce observes as we seek to comprehend our world, is between a group of observations and a group of facts. The golfer makes many attempts, adjusting hand position, stance, and focus day after day, until s/he masters a certain her swing.
Whereas most western philosophers have been at pains to account for the correlation--which they presume must be there--between an individual phenomenon out there in reality and the experience/science of that phenomenon, Peirce recognizes that we have no experience of an individual thing-in-itself; indeed, our most reliable knowledge comes from repeated experiences of something (i.e. at different times and under varying circumstances).
We cannot conceive of a thing-in-itself, instead we bring together multiple observations of a similar sort and draw general conclusions, like, “In x-number of cases out of y, when we injected a tiny amount of the virus, the body developed antibodies and the person was protected from catching the illness.” It’s not an absolute, but it is a rule worth knowing.
Much of the drift nowadays from the study of truth towards the exploitation of relativism (e.g. in politics), and much of the drift from general theory towards nominal accounts of isolated phenomena (e.g. from general relativity theory to quantum mechanics), has come out of the despair we have felt at not being able to account for the thing-in-itself (even though it was—by our definition—unknowable). Peirce realigns with the ancient understanding that
“The essential nature of everything is worthy of being known. It is said that the mind is knowledge (because knowledge is obtained through the mind). One should consider knowledge to be identical with the object of knowledge. There is no way other than that (to liberation).” (from Shri Skanda Purana, Guru Gita, verse 100)
Because something is vague does not mean that it’s not real. Au contraire, reality is—by its nature—interpretable. The question is rather: which interpretation carries more probability of being true?
Peirce goes on to point out that…
2.654 – “…[D]eath makes the number of our risks, of our inferences, finite, and so makes their mean result uncertain. The very idea of probability and of reasoning rests on the assumption that this number [the mean result of our risks] is indefinitely great…It seems to me that we are driven to this, that logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall notbe limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community. This community, again, must not be limited, but must extend to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate or mediate intellectual relation. It must reach, however vaguely, beyond this geological epoch, beyond all bounds. He who would not sacrifice his own should to save the whole world, is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively. Logic is rooted in the social principle.
“To be logical men should not be selfish; and, in point of fact, they are not so selfish as they are thought. The willful prosecution of one’s desires is a different thing from selfishness. The miser is not selfish; his money does him no good, and he cares for what shall become of it after his death. We are constantly speaking of our possessions on the Pacific, and of our destiny as a republic, where no personal interests are involved, in a way which shows that we have wider ones. We discuss with anxiety the possible exhaustion of coal in some hundreds of years, or the cooling-off of the sun in some millions, and show in the most popular of all religious tenets that we can conceive the possibility of a man’s descending into hell for salvation of his fellows.
“Now it is not necessary for logicality that a man should himself be capable of the heroism of self-sacrifice. It is sufficient that he should recognize the possibility of it, should perceive that only that man’s inferences who has it are really logical, and should consequently regard his own as being only so far valid as they would be accepted by the hero. So far as he thus refers his inferences to that standard, he becomes identified with such a mind…The man whom we have supposed as having to draw from the two packs, who if he not a logician will draw from the red pack from mere habit, will see, if he is logician enough, that he cannot be logical so long as he is concerned only with his own fate, but that that man who should care equally for what was to happen in all possible case of the sort could act logically, and would draw from the pack with the most red cards, and thus, though incapable himself of such sublimity, our logician would imitate the effect of that man’s courage in order to share his logicality.
“But all this requires a conceived identification of one’s interests with those of an unlimited community. Now, there exist no reasons…for thinking that the human race, or any intellectual race, will exist forever. On the other hand, there can be no reason against it; and, fortunately, as the whole requirement is that we should have certain sentiments, there is nothing in the facts to forbid our having a hope, or calm and a cheerful wish, that the community may last beyond any assignable date.
2.655 – “It may seem strange that I should put forth three sentiments, namely, interest in an indefinite community [Charity/Love], recognition of the possibility of this interest being made supreme [Faith], and [H]ope in the unlimited continuance of intellectual activity, as indispensable requirements of logic. Yet, when we consider that logic depends on a mere struggle to escape doubt, which as it terminates in action, must begin in emotion, and that, furthermore, the only cause of our planting ourselves on reason [and the scientific method] is that other methods of escaping doubt fail on account of the social impulse [meaning that the strength of the method of tenacity, the authoritative method, and the a priori method, all rely on an individual, unmoving viewpoint, and do not stand up to democratic challenge, critique, or new data], why should we wonder to find social sentiment presupposed in reasoning? As for the other two sentiments which I find necessary, they are so only as supports and accessories of that. It interests me to notice that these three sentiments seem to be pretty much the same as that famous trio of Charity, Faith and Hope, which, in the estimation of St. Paul, are the finest and greatest of spiritual gifts.”