From the Tree to the Labyrinth (91 page)

Let me make it clear from the outset, if it were not already obvious, that the
primum
that forms the starting point for any interpretation may also be a previous interpretation (as when, let’s say, a judge interprets the statements of a witness who gives his own interpretation of what took place). In such cases too, however, the previous interpretation (to be interpreted) is taken as a
given,
and that, and nothing else, is what is to be interpreted. If anything, the interesting problem is why the judge decides to start from that particular piece of evidence and not another. But this is precisely the theme of what follows.

Having made that clear, let me recap briefly what I said in
K & P.
First of all, I put this whole discussion into a section (2.8) entitled “Peirce reinterpreted.” This title was ambiguous since it could be understood in two different ways: as just one more interpretation of Peirce’s theory (but such, naturally, as to present itself as the only faithful and trustworthy reading) or as a free reformulation of some of Peirce’s suggestions.

The fact that what I was proposing was meant in fact to be a reformulation ought to have been clear from the section’s beginning, where I reminded the reader that Peirce, in endeavoring to steer a course between Ground, perceptual judgment, and Immediate Object, was attempting to solve, from the standpoint of an inferential view of knowledge, the problem of Kantian schematism. Since, however, Peirce himself had given not one but several different answers, I felt authorized to come up with one of my own, without claiming it was his. In fact, I wrote: “And so I don’t think it is enough to trust in philology, at least I have no intention of doing so here. What I shall do is try to say how I think Peirce should be read (or reconstructed, if you will); in other words, I shall try to make him say what I wish he had said, because only that way will I be able to understand what he meant to say” (
K & P,
p. 99).

Suffice it to say therefore that my proposals regarding primary iconism were all my own work and that, not being Peirce, I have the right to think differently from him, so I can’t be accused of saying something that cannot be justified from the standpoint of Peircean semiotics.

As the Italian proverb says, it’s not fair to throw a stone and then hide your hand in your pocket (
tirare il sasso e nascondere la mano
). Not only were my proposals constantly based on Peirce’s texts, but the problem at issue touched closely on one of the fundamental principles of his semiotics, his anti-intuitionism, a principle with which I am still inclined to agree. Finally, the object of my discourse was precisely that stage of the semiosic process that Peirce called Firstness, and it is undeniable that Peirce identified Firstnesss with the Icon (as he identified Secondness with the Index and Thirdness with the Symbol), and this explains my use of a term like “primary iconism,” despite the fact that for some time now I have been attempting to demonstrate that “iconism” is an umbrella term that covers a range of phenomena differing considerably among themselves.

Reflecting today on what I wrote ten years ago, I believe we must make a clear distinction between “-ists” and “-ologists.” Thinkers who have not created a militant posterity are the objects of straight historiography and philology (of the kind “what did Plato really say?” or “what was Aristotle getting at?”) and the people who write about them are the “-ologists,” if we are at liberty to coin terms such as “Plato-oloists” or “Platologists,” in other words, specialists on Plato. There also exist, however, thinkers of whom many people still declare themselves to be militant followers: hence, there have been and continue to be Neo-Aristotelians, Neo-Thomists, Neo-Hegelians, and Neo-Kantians, and these are the ones I call, for convenience, “-ists.”

What distinguishes an “-ist” from an “-ologist”? The “-ologist,” often engaging in honest-to-goodness textual criticism, is supposed to tell us if such and such a thinker really did say such and such a thing. For example, a Thomologist has to admit that Thomas Aquinas really did say that original sin is transmitted by the semen like a natural infection (
Summa Theologica,
I–II, 81, 1), whereas the soul is individually created, because it cannot be dependent on corporal matter. (Thomas was a creationist not a traducianist). For Thomas vegetables have a vegetative soul, which in animals is absorbed by the sensitive soul, while in human beings these two functions are absorbed by the rational soul. But God introduces the rational soul only when the fetus has gradually acquired, first the vegetative, then the sensitive soul. Only at that point, when the body has already been formed, is the rational soul created (
Summa Theologica
I, 90 and
Summa contra gentiles
II, 89). Embryos have only a sensitive soul (
Summa Theologica
I, 76, 2 and I, 118, 2) and therefore cannot participate in the resurrection of the flesh (
Supplementum
80, 4).

This is what makes a Thomologist. A Thomist on the other hand is someone intent on thinking
ad mentem divi Thomae,
as if Thomas were speaking today. Thus, a present-day Thomist might develop Saint Thomas’s premises to define lines of ethical conduct with regard to the current debates on abortion, the use of stem cells, and so on.

I still maintain that there exists a third position, between “-ists” and “-ologists,” and the best term I can come up with is that of “reconstructionists.” I take this position because, in my first work of philosophical history, devoted to the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, I found myself faced with the following problem: Thomas never devoted a specific text to aesthetics but simply scattered his works with statements regarding the nature of art and the beautiful. If he had had to write a specific text (the hypothesis is not too far-fetched, since for some time a
De pulchro et bono,
which turned out to be the work of his teacher Albertus Magnus, was attributed to him) or if he had been quizzed about it (then, in his own times), what would he have said, in the light (and only in the light) of the system that was in fact his (as even the “-ologists” describe it)? When one conducts experiments like this, one runs the risk of discovering that any system, subjected to an inspection of this kind, may reveal a few cracks. This is precisely what happened to me in the case of Thomas, in which, while recognizing that he had an implicit theory of beauty which could readily be reconstructed, I finally pointed out an aporia to be found in his system (precisely when that system was faithfully interpreted, as an “-ologist” ought to interpret it).

I am still pleased with the vaguely Gödelian flavor of that conclusion, but the purpose of this whole preamble is to say that in
K & P
I had made the “-ist” choice, while the objections subsequently brought against me (see
section 15.2
) were aimed at reconstructing the problem from an “-ologist” point of view.

My starting point was in fact a suggestion made by Armando Fumagalli (1995: ch. 3), who saw in the post-1885 Peirce an almost Kantian return to the immediacy of intuition, antecedent to any inferential activity (the Ground is no longer a predicate but a sensation, and indexicality becomes the kind of experience which takes the form of a
shock;
it is an impact with an individual, which “strikes” the subject without yet being a representation). In this connection, I attempted to say why precisely Peirce’s Firstness was exactly that, a “firstness”
(primità),
a sort of auroral moment that gives rise to the perceptual process. Speaking of the Ground, Peirce informs us that it is a Firstness, and if on occasion it has been interpreted as “background” or “basis,” or “foundation,” it is certainly not so in an ontological sense but in a gnoseological one. It is not
something
that presents itself as a candidate to be a
subjectum,
it is a possible predicate itself, more like the immediate recognition expressible as “red!” (comparable to the response “ouch!” to a blow that causes pain) than like the judgment expressible as “
this
is red.” In that phase there is not even something that resists us (this would be the moment of Secondness), and at a certain point Peirce tells us that it is “pure
species,
” in the sense of appearance, aspect (cf. Fabbrichesi 1981: 471), and he calls it icon, semblance,
likeness.
¹

Peirce says that the idea of the First is “so tender that you cannot touch it without spoiling it” (CP 1.358). The Firstness is a presence “such as it is,” a positive characteristic (CP 5.44), a “quality of feeling,” like a purple color noticed without any sense of the beginning or the end of the experience, it is not an object nor is it initially inherent to any recognizable object, it has no generality (CP 7.530). Only when both Secondness and Thirdness come into play can the interpretive process begin. But Firstness is still “mere maybe” (CP 1.304), “potentiality without existence” (CP 1.328), “mere possibility” (CP 8.329), and in any case the possibility of a perceptual process (CP 5.119), something that cannot be thought in an articulate way or asserted (CP 1.357). Elsewhere, by
feeling
Peirce means “that kind of consciousness which involves no analysis, comparison or any process whatsoever, nor consists in whole or in part of any act by which one stretch of consciousness is distinguished from another, which has its own positive quality which consists of nothing else, and which is of itself all that it is” (CP 1.306).

I thought I had recognized that, though this Firstness had the character of a nonmediated apprehension, it still could not be assimilated to Kantian intuition: it is not at all an intuition of the manifold offered by experience, but instead something absolutely simple, that I tried to assimilate to the phenomenon of
qualia
(cf. Dennett 1991).

Apropos of a
quale
Peirce is still not talking about perceptual judgment but about a mere “tone” of consciousness, which he defines as being resistant to all possible criticism. Peirce is telling us not that the sensation of red is “infallible,” but simply that once it has been, even if it was an illusion of the senses, it is indisputable that it has been. In this connection I gave the example (and it wasn’t meant to be flippant) of the housewife in the commercial, who declares: “I thought my sheet was white, but now that I’ve seen yours …” Seeing the detergent commercial, Peirce would have told us that the housewife initially perceived the whiteness of the first sheet (pure “tone” of awareness); then, once she had moved on to the recognition of the object (Secondness) and set in motion a comparison packed with inferences (Thirdness), she was able to declare that the second sheet was whiter than the first. But she could not cancel out the preceding impression, which as a pure quality
has been,
and therefore she says: “I was sure [
before
] I had seen something white, but
now
I recognize that there are different degrees of whiteness.” Only at this point, reacting to the
album
(white) of at least two different sheets, has the housewife moved on to the predicate of the
albedo
(whiteness), that is, to a
general
which can be named and for which there is an Immediate Object. It is one thing to perceive an object as white, without having become aware as yet that we are dealing with something external to our awareness, and it is another to perform the prescission whereby one predicates of that object the quality of being white.

But how are we to justify the fact that the starting point of all knowledge is not inferential in nature, because it is immediately manifest, without being open to discussion or denial, when Peirce’s entire anti-Cartesian polemic is based on the assumption that all knowledge is always inferential in nature?

In his doctoral thesis Claudio Paolucci (2005) maintains with a wealth of arguments that there is no “realistic” turning-point in Peirce that leads him to consider the possibility of intuitions of a Kantian type, and in so doing he is very polemical in his criticism of both Fumagalli (1995) and Murphey (1961), to whom Fumagalli is referring. Let me say at once that I have no intention of contesting this contestation of Paolucci’s. I simply want to point out that in
K & P
I wrote: “Fumagalli observes that we have a Kantian return here to the immediacy of intuition, prior to all inferential activity. Nevertheless, since this intuition, as we shall see, remains the pure sentiment that I am confronted with something, the intuition would still be devoid of all intellectual content, and therefore (it seems to me) it could withstand the young Peirce’s anti-Cartesian polemic” (p. 99).

Paolucci still finds this “I am confronted with something” embarrassing, and he writes: “There is no question that Peirce, to describe the formal moment that gives body to the second phenomenological category, describes on several occasions a type of nonmediated relationship between a subject and an individual external object (a
haecceitas
or thisness). Should this type of relationship turn out to be a
cognition
(but, as we shall see, it isn’t), it would certainly be correct to speak of a return on the part of Peirce to the immediacy of intuition, since we would be dealing with a cognition not determined by previous cognitions.”
Quod est impossibile,
if we assume that Peirce always remained anti-Cartesian.

But, in
K & P,
was I really talking about
cognitions?

The position Paolucci has always defended, including in his thesis, is that Peirce’s notion of synechism has to do, not with an amorphous
continuum
to be segmented (à la Hjelmslev), but with the series of cognitive inferences that, proceeding
en abyme,
always lead us to make a supposed
primum
that offers itself to our experience, the point of departure for a subsequent inference (and it is no accident that Paolucci has always appealed in this regard to the principles of infinitesimal analysis). Therefore, every cognitive phenomenon, even the most aurorally primal, must call upon all three categories. Assuredly, there are moments in which Firstness or Secondness seem preeminent, but they are never the exclusive components of the process because any kind of experience always needs to be made up of all three phenomenological categories. How then can we speak of a primary experience?