Ereignis and Peirce

Posted on May 17, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Peirce, Philosophy | 4 Comments

Enowning has up a great little quote from Jussi Backman’s “The Singularity of Being and the Fourfold in the Later Heidegger” which gets at Ereignis. Upon reading it I immediately thought of Peirce. I think this is a good place to examine some of the differences between Peirce and Heidegger instead of their overlap. Some of this is more a difference of focus rather than content as such. And, as I’ve often said, I simply think Peirce’s framework for discussion is a bit more clear.

Effectively Ereignis is a purely singular event where meaningfulness can occur. The singularity aspect of this is quite important and of course can be found as well in Being and Time. Dasein in Being and Time “corresponds to the uniqueness of Be-ing (Seyn) as taking place (Ereignis)” The point is that Ereignis isn’t singular events in a kind of multiplicity but something absolutely unique. As Backman puts it, “the singularization of the singular as such.”

In Peirce we have the notion of firstness which is a phenomena as it is purely in itself with no reference to anything else. Now of course what enables a moment of firstness is contextual. My experience of love is made possible by meeting my wife, living in a culture in which love of a sort is given a sense, a set of practices, and so forth. But the absolute phenomena of love is something purely singlular. Being, although rarely discussed by Peirce, is often seen as something prior to firstness which enables firstness. (Kelly Parker has argued that Peirce adopts a nearly neo-Platonic cosmology of Being)

What is key is that Being isn’t simply a collection of events but a transcendental move of what makes the events possible as the kind of events they are.

The difference between Peirce and Heidegger is that Peirce isn’t only doing phenomenology. That is he sees phenomenology as one category within existence. Whereas Heidegger is doing phenomenology (although with his move to “thinking” he clearly expands beyond pure phenomenology). The question then becomes what makes not just phenomena but all things ontically what they are. Is Heidegger’s Ereignis up to the task? I don’t think it is.

Related posts:

  1. GESCHICHTLICHKEIT / EREIGNIS / KEHRE
  2. Qualia, Quale and Peirce
  3. Heidegger, Plotinus and Ereignis
  4. Gary and Peirce on Mind and Functionalism
  5. Peirce and Things
  6. “What is Ereignis?”

Comments

4 Responses to “Ereignis and Peirce”

” The question then becomes what makes not just phenomena but all things ontically what they are. Is Heidegger’s Ereignis up to the task?”

I think Ereignis can account for how things show up, things that we interpret ontically, as having substance (ousia) since the Greeks, and more recently as hadrons and leptons. But it won’t explain why they are there physically, they already are when dasein finds them in the open. You cannot get physical entities from transcendentals, unless you are prone to some form of idealism. I suppose, the current standard explanation – the ontic will be explained by the Higgs boson, once it’s found – may be just that.

The Higgs can only explain mass unfortunately. And that then leaves the question of what grounds the Higgs. As I mentioned at your post Aristotle gets down to the four elements and then injects the mysterious prime matter. Not everyone even agrees if he accepted prime matter. But that question is, in a sense, the ultimate question of grounds ontically.

My point is more we just have to bifurcate the question of being as ground from that ontic sense from the sense Heidegger speaks of.

Accepting, as I do, that there’s a universe before there’s a dasein to interpret it, I don’t think that what grounds the ontic will be determined through some ontological insight.

However, if the hidden Higgs explains mass, it will in turn explain gravity, and because animals have to make sense of the velocity (delta distance/delta time) and the acceleration (delta distance/delta time squared) due to gravity, and the difference between them is time, and time has its ontological aspects, then maybe, there will be common ground for the ontic and ontological.

But the Higgs likes to hide.

Well I’m skeptical that the Higgs will explain that much. There is context to the Higg field and that context changes the meaning quite a bit. Physics has largely been at an impasse for at least 30 years now. Mathematical advances have been made in string theory and to a lesser extent loop quantum gravity. But I don’t think we’re really close to explaining quantum gravity, even if we find the energy of the Higgs. (And honestly a lot of physicists are hoping we don’t find it as that might actually lead to more progress than finding what we expect to see)

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