More Against Correlationism

Posted on February 19, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Peirce, Philosophy | Leave a Comment

Just a quick followup on yesterday’s post on Kant, Heidegger, Peirce and externalism. This is from Gary Fuhrman’s paper I’d linked to in the sideblog earlier.

. . . anything which is ‘forced upon the mind in perception’ or exists in the domain of ‘actual Experience’ belongs to the realm of Secondness. Secondness is the ‘brute’ force of actual or factual existence, experienced actively in will (exerting itself against resistance) and passively in perception (insofar as it is beyond any rational control). The dynamical object is not something clean out of the mind and wholly unrelated to it as a Kantian ‘thing- in-itself’ is claimed to be; rather it is something in a ‘real relation’ to the mind, a relation occurring as a reaction or ‘outward clash’. Of course, our concept of the relation, being a sign, belongs to the realm of Thirdness; but genuine Thirdness must include Secondness, not obliterate it. This does away with the old and misleading question of whether a perceived or conceived object is inside or outside of the mind; it must be both, if the object is real. Peirce had expressed this point as far back as 1871.

“When a thing is in such relation to the individual mind that that mind cognizes it, it is in the mind; and its being so in the mind will not in the least diminish its external existence. For [the realist] does not think of the mind as a receptacle, which if a thing is in, it ceases to be out of. To make a distinction between the true conception of a thing and the thing itself is, he will say, only to regard one and the same thing from two different points of view; for the immediate object of thought in a true judgment is the reality.”

Thus the dynamical and immediate objects of a true proposition are identical. We need to distinguish them because we can’t be sure that any given proposition is true, but if we are realists, we engage in inquiry on the assumption that the truth about external reality can be known. ‘The external,’ according to Peirce, ‘means simply that which is independent of what phenomenon is immediately present, that is of how we may think or feel; just as “the real” means that which is independent of how we may think or feel about it’ [11] (p. 90). The very idea of external reality is thus grounded in the experience of Secondness, which is utterly familiar to all, since we cannot help sensing the difference between whatever we are currently conscious of and what clashes with it uncontrollably.

Relative to Heidegger one immediately thinks of the issue of polemos or strife.

The polemos named here is a strife that holds sway before everything divine and human, not war in the human sense. As Heraclitus thinks of it, struggle first and foremost allow the things that essentially unfold to step apart from each other in opposition, first allows position and status and rank to establish themselves in coming to presence. In such a stepping apart, clefts, intervals, distances,and joints open themselves up. In struggle (auseinandersetzung), a world comes to be. (Introduction to Metaphysics)

To quote from Fried in Heidegger’s Polemos:

Heidegger sometimes speaks of truth as the “free realm.” But in speaking of freedom, Heidegger insists on distancing himself from a subjectivists account of the free will, a will that might be conceived of as the source of the world and meaning: “Human beings have not created this clearing…this free realm, nor is it the human being. It is by contrast that which is allotted to human beings, since it addresses itself to them; it is what has been historically consigned to them.” (VS, 124-25) Truth possess Dasein; the opennes to a horizon of possibilities in Being-in-the-world is given to Daesein. Dasein neither creates nor possesses truth. (Fried, 51)

Related posts:

  1. Avoiding Correlationism
  2. Peirce and Consciousness
  3. Human Nature is Depressing
  4. Schelling, Heidegger, Freedom
  5. Vernacular Lanugage
  6. Peirce and Things

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