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Se eu quiser falar com Deus

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Se Eu Quiser Falar Com Deus, Gilberto Gil

A Brief Introduction to the State of Art

In 2003, I wrote a short and simple introduction for the Brazilian translation that I myself made of Peirce’s ‘A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God’, published as Rodrigues (2003). The present paper is a complete rewriting of that early work, developing the themes of synechism, the categories, and the logic of vagueness that I did not deal with then. I wish to express my gratitude to Fernando Andacht for having read an earlier version of this paper and for several more than helpful suggestions, and also to the referees for suggestions that allowed me to improve my work. Of course, responsibility for what is herein advanced is all mine.

Written in 1908, Peirce’s ‘A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God’ is one of his most difficult and profound writings. Published in 1908, and written by invitation of his friend the mathematician Cassius J. Keiser for The Hibbert Journal, the article presents Peirce’s association of scientific method and theology and is one of his most difficult and carefully written texts. It sketches a ‘humble’ argument for the reality—and not the existence—of God for Musers, that is, those who pursue the activity that Peirce calls ‘Musement’ (he uses capitalized words for specific concepts).

The concept of Musement appears late in Peirce’s work and not very often after its debut on the article on the Reality of God. Nonetheless, it has attracted the attention of the Peircean scholarship, and important work has been written about it. I will provide only a brief account of some approaches to it, since it is impossible to review the whole literature on the subject.Footnote 2 This will help the reader to distinguish the originality of my approach, especially in the treatment of the concept of God and the logic of generality and vagueness.

Musement is a sort of vague thought process, that is, an indeterminate play of rationality and imagination that favors abduction, ‘a particular state of mind which passes freely from one thing to another’ [Barrena 2013, p. 12]. In the words of S. Barrena, ‘free speculation, without rules or purpose or limits of any kind’ is the main character of Musement, a state in which the mind ‘plays with ideas and can sustain a dialogue with what it perceives, a dialogue not only of words but also of images, in which the imagination plays an essential part’ [id.]. As such, it describes a non-reflective and non-teleological mental activity, capable of giving a sort of instinctive response to produce a strong belief in the Reality of God. What Peirce means here is that the idea of a deity rises up in mind of the Muser as an inevitable result of Musement: one begins to muse and sooner or later the experience of musing will ‘prove puzzling enough to impel one down a path ending in the positing of God’s Reality’ [Kessler 1998, p. 3]. So, Musement is not an activity pursued with religious intent from the beginning. Rather, ‘religious meditation’ has to be ‘allowed to grow up spontaneously out of Pure Play without any breach of continuity’ [EP 2: 436Footnote 3].Footnote 4 Musement thus described is the very source of abduction, and the idea of God is the abductive hypothesis resulting from it, firstly as a kind of esthetic ideal capable of influencing human conduct.Footnote 5

This makes Peirce’s attempt at proving God’s Reality unique in the history of philosophy. First, these initial considerations show that it is not a traditional full deductive proof of God. Secondly, and coherently, it does not try to justify how we could know what possible form a deity could have in our world, that is, how its existence might be. That does not really matter. More important, we have to look at how we come to understand the world and to (inter)act upon the belief that Musement leads us to (and I say: call it God or any other name, if you will). This is a point stressed by several scholars. For instance, M. Raposa [1989, p. 150] claims that, due to the vagueness of the hypothesis of God, not only it requires that we give it further determination, but also that this determination can come only as habits that become embodied in our conduct: if we believe the idea suggested to us through Musement, we adopt it as a rule governing our reasoning, practically recognizing it as a gentle force shaping our perception. In the same line, D Anderson [1995b, p. 173] argues that the ‘Humble Argument’ for the Reality of God originated in Musement is ‘at the boundary of instinctive, perceptual judgment and abductive inference’. This means that it prompts us, through its esthetic allure, to act in accordance with it—it is a sort of ideal of conduct—and to search for its empirical validity. Anderson concludes, then, that ‘the upshot of this reading of Peirce’s ‘Neglected Argument’ is that, for Peirce, full religious belief is neither merely experiential nor merely theoretical, but both’ [idem]. A. Robinson [2010, p. 303–304] argues that Peirce’s Humble Argument is not a traditional deductive full proof of God’s Reality and should not be understood as an attempt to prove the existence of God from the standpoint of a sort of ‘post-Enlightenment’ ‘revealed theology’. Instead, from the Peircean theory of categories, what one gets is an argument for the Reality of God that can lead to practical habits of conduct, which is a kind of cosmological belief, indeed.

So, the testing of such a hypothetical belief is of course a difficult matter, if one tries to test it by seeking individual instances of it in the realm of existent things and events. The only possible fulfillment of the hypothesis lies in the course of our general conduct in the world; that is, the belief in God would gain plausibility as it can be practically lived, even though the feeling remains that there is not an exact argument for it, for the argument offered is not itself a matter of strict logical reasoning. As the premises of the hypothesis originate in Musement, its premises are not clearly formulated, and then one cannot assure that they are clearly true or false, as E. Salas [2009, p. 466] claims. In fact, the vagueness of the mused hypothesis of God is crucial, as Potter (1973, p. 163) precisely indicates, for this logical character corrects ‘anthropomorphism by negating the limitations of human experience and classification in the infinite reality. In a word, it is vagueness which allows our notions to be about God’. For Salas, also, the hypothesis of God’s Reality, ‘as it first occurs to the reasoner, has the weak feature of implying almost anything at all, such that an inductive procedure of testing would be almost trivial’ [idem].Footnote 6 Even if we do not perform a logically valid and sound reasoning, in Musement, we can achieve a kind of perception of the intertwining of the Three Universes of Experience—the universe of feeling, the universe of brute fact, and the universe of reason mediating between the other two. But this is just the sign of its high importance. As Trammell (1972, p. 9) argues, one could say that the relationship between the degree of engagement, intellectual and emotional, and the capacity to reason happens in the inverse proportion: the greater the detachment from a situation, the better the reasoning, and the greater the importance of the action to our lives, the less correct may be our reasoning. So, much more important it becomes that the hypothesis be continuously lived through, and not just submitted to particular tests.

Peirce relates each of these universes to the distinct phases of inquiry, induction, deduction, and abduction or retroduction, but without a deeper discussion, leaving mainly to the reader to discover how to do it. The way that he explains his claims allows him to outline an abductive hypothesis that explains how the three universes make up a whole, believing the Reality of God can be inferred from his Humble Argument. In order to ground this claim, Peirce writes a very long and meticulously written text, dealing with his most original ideas on scientific method and human evolution. One of the key features is his discussion of G. Galilei’s lume naturale: why our instinct to guess right is so often well succeeded? In this paper, I aim at throwing some light at these points, focusing on Peirce’s concept of vagueness as a logical modality of being as a determinant feature to understand his main concerns.Footnote 7

Categories, Mind, and Experience

One interesting thing in this text is the link between the concept of ‘Play of the Musement’ and Peirce’s realism. The starting point to understand this is in the metaphysical thesis that humans’ mind is attuned with nature’s mind [EP 2. 445; CP 1.121, c. 1896]. Peirce says: ‘I infer in the first place that man divines something of the secret principles of the universe because his mind has developed as a part of the universe and under the influence of these same secret principles [CP 7.46]’. This is why human beings can discover any truths about the universe, just like other living beings have instincts, so humans have developed a capacity to guess, in such a way that we are able to predict what has not yet happened by means of formulating hypotheses—our lume naturale, like the sun in the sky. Now, the metaphysical hypothesis that Peirce follows is an evolutionary one: in the very origin of the universe, there was not any substantial separation between mind, spirit, and matter; everything was configured as total and unrestricted possibility. So, why should we now suppose that mind and matter are two distinct substances? For Peirce, there still is in nature some of that primordial chaos, so that a principle of continuity remains bonding together all dimensions of reality, all Three Universes of Experience, as he says. Peirce calls this doctrine of real continuity synechism.

Synechism comes from the Greek synechein, a term known since at least Parmenides to mean the unity and continuity of being. Described by Peirce in first place as a ‘regulative principle of logic’ [CP 6.173, 1902], synechism recommends ‘what sort of hypothesis is fit to be entertained and examined’ [idem]. Bearing a normative character, synechism prescribes all explanatory hypotheses and excludes any which would block the way of inquiry. And, for Peirce, nothing could be more antiscientific than to suppose facts are utterly individual, isolated, unrelated, and, therefore, blindly inexplicable and ultimate. So, the more reasonable is to suppose that there is more to existence than sheer brutishness, and the more reasonable supposition, in Peircean terms, is to assume that there is real mediation between things and events; that is, there is some sort of agreement to rationality and law really working in the world. That is why synechism amounts to ‘that tendency of philosophical thought which insists upon the idea of continuity’ [CP 6.169, 1902]. This is the same as to suppose that ‘the form under which alone anything can be understood is the form of generality, which is the same thing as continuity’ [CP 6.173, 1902]. Synechism becomes Peirce’s main pièce de résistance against doctrines that entail necessary sharp breaks in ‘the great chain of being’, if one wants to use this expression, against the idea that mind and matter are not continuous with each other and are thus substantially distinct.Footnote 8

One question arises: how can we explain the world’s infinite variety? The idea that it was created by law or some kind of order is not satisfactory, for how can order beget chaos, how can strict necessitarian rules give birth to phenomena as totally different from themselves as are phenomena of freedom and chance? From observation of the phenomena of the world, we come to the hypothesis that the laws that we discover result from processes which are still running, being themselves subject to evolution and change. The hypotheses to explain what we see should then put the terms in converse order: law, regularity, uniformity, and continuity of the universe originated in variation, in complete disorder, in the lack of laws or any other kind of organization, and in the unrestricted freedom of chance: ‘When we gaze upon the multifariousness of nature we are looking straight into the face of living spontaneity [CP 6.553, 1887].’ Evolution is understood as process beginning from disorder, freedom, and total and unrestricted possibility, to a determinate kind of an organized and regular existence.

Human reason was born out of this very process: as an instinct we evolutionarily developed, it allows us to guess explanatory hypothesis for phenomena of the world. Mind, as all other natural phenomena, is not exclusively human, but human mind developed a very peculiar capacity to reason correctly more often than not.Footnote 9 This is Peirce’s interpretation of the expression lume naturale, which he identifies to our reason. Human reason, then, is but an evolved capacity that makes us able to guess the course of natural events exactly because it is a part of nature, ruled by the same laws that all other natural events: ‘In other words our Reason is akin to the Reason that governs the universe; we must assume that or despair of finding out anything.’ [EP 2.502, 1909]. There is Peirce’s synechism, the affirmation of a principle of continuity, based upon which the co-naturalness between mind and matter is claimed.

Now, Peirce’s approach to understand the imbrication of the aforementioned Three Universes of Experience is thoroughly synechistic. What are them? How are they connected?

He explains this saying:

Of the three universes of Experience familiar to us all, the first comprises all mere Ideas, those airy nothings to which the mind of poet, pure mathematician, or another might give local habitation and a name within that mind. Their very airy-nothingness, the fact that their Being consists in mere capability of getting thought, not in anybody’s Actually thinking them, saves their Reality [EP 2.435].

This is the first universe of experience of pure possibility, a universe where nothing is determined and where absolute freedom reigns (this is also not determined, it is a reality that this is so, not a necessity). This is the universe of absolute chance, where nothing has yet become, from which everything can still become, and the universe of pure qualities of feelings, without any further specification.

However, we know that our universe is not exclusively composed of qualities of feeling. Our world is determined with limitations, it has already became in a determined fashion, and nothing is totally free—things exist; facts occur. We move to the second universe: ‘The second universe is that of the Brute Actuality of things and facts. I am confident that their Being consists in reactions against Brute forces, notwithstanding objections redoubtable until they are closely and fairly examined’ [idem]. In this universe, all things are opposed, one against the other put—immediacy is all there is, everything is here and now, and everything actually exists. This is what brute actuality means. In the vernacular usage of the idiom, the words ‘actual’ and ‘actuality’ sometimes come to mean ‘in fact’, ‘as a matter of fact’, and similar things. Here, for Peirce, there is evidently the heritage of the Aristotelian energeia, the Latin actu, and especially the German Wirklichkeit, which in the philosophical jargon often carries the Hegelian meaning of ‘effective’. Combining then this notion with a temporal one, we find the idea of an actual reality, a conception of being reduced to the current state of the thing, a nowness, according to the Aristotelian sense: this is the universe of existence, of what Actually or in fact exists, possessing a reactive nature. As Peirce says: ‘Whatever exists, ex-sists, that is, really acts upon other existents, so obtains a self-identity, and is definitely individual’ [EP 2.342, 1905].

And then there is the third universe of experience:

The third universe comprises everything whose being consists in active power to establish connections between different objects, especially between objects in different universes. Such is everything which is essentially a Sign — not the mere body of the Sign, which is not essentially such, but, so to speak, the Sign’s Soul, which has its Being in its power of serving as intermediary between its Object and a Mind. Such, too, is a living consciousness, and such the life, the power of growth, of a plant. Such is a living constitution— a daily newspaper, a great fortune, a social “movement” [ibidem].

The description of the third universe shows the continuous complexification of natural processes and their constant capacity to self-organization bear witness of the implausibility of reducing the domain of existence to absolute actuality. Better said, it is to suppose that reality is totally restrained to what immediately and actually exists and nothing more is illogical. Reality comprises more than mere brutal existence, embracing possibilities and relations themselves [EP 2: 456–457. 1909].

All three aspects are together in reality, all three universes are intertwined. The domain of the real comprises all that is what it is regardless of what any finite number of people actually think of it: ‘‘Real’ is a word invented in the thirteenth century to signify having Properties, i.e. characters sufficing to identify their subject, and possessing these whether they be anywise attributed to it by any single man or group of men, or not’ [EP 2.434]. The real remains, either we like it or not, so that its persistence and irreducibility to our fancy are a determinant feature. But concepts should not be confounded: reality is not existence. On the one hand, existence is marked by individuality, capacity of reacting, and actuality. Reality, on the other, is broader: not exhausted by any particular individuality in any absolute actuality; it comprises vaguely definable qualities and general connections as well. The realm of the real transcends the immediately given to embrace relations and possibilities. Nothing exists in isolation, but there is always a relation with other beings, something always indicates something different, and there is always—at least—the possibility of going outside itself. If the real were definable solely by the existential field of the actual phenomena that we can perceive, an explanation for the diversification and the formation of the species would not be possible, or at least would be a nominalistic one—all ideality would either be confined to the human mind or lie somewhere outside the world, and everything else would be reduced to sheer contingency with no room for change. There must be in reality something original that escapes determination, for we observe the growth of diversity in nature. This is the sense of the following passage:

The matter of Nature is in every star of the same elementary kinds, and (except for variations of circumstance) what is more wonderful still, throughout the whole visible universe, about the same proportions of the different chemical elements prevail. Though the mere catalogue of known carbon-compounds alone would fill an unwieldy volume, and perhaps, if the truth were known, the number of amino-acids alone is greater, yet it is unlikely that there are in all more than about 600 elements, of which 500 dart through space too swiftly to be held down by the earth’s gravitation, coronium being the slowest-moving of these. This small number bespeaks comparative simplicity of structure. Yet no mathematician but will confess the present hopelessness of attempting to comprehend the constitution of the hydrogen-atom, the simplest of the elements that can be held to earth [EP 2.438-439].

In his 1868 article ‘Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic’, Peirce had already denied that regularity and total determination were the only constitutive features of nature. This denial is at the very bottom of his mature thought. He in fact asserts in 1892:

Those observations which are generally adduced in favor of mechanical causation simply prove that there is an element of regularity in nature, and have no bearing whatever upon the question of whether such regularity is exact and universal or not. Nay, in regard to this exactitude, all observation is directly opposed to it; and the most that can be said is that a good deal of this observation can be explained away. Try to verify any law of nature, and you will find that the more precise your observations, the more certain they will be to show irregular departures from the law. We are accustomed to ascribe these, and I do not say wrongly, to errors of observation; yet we cannot usually account for such errors in any antecedently probable way. Trace their causes back far enough and you will be forced to admit they are always due to arbitrary determination, or chance [CP 6.46].

Accompanying growth in the phenomenal domain of existence, there is the remarkable complexification of laws, that is, the arising of organization (as we would say today) out of chaos. For Peirce, growth and complexification are not due to fortuity, but they do exhibit an organization of individual existences under generalities so that the idea of freedom and creativity operating in nature is the best explanatory hypothesis that we can come up with, if we want to explain phenomena without appealing to a sort of Deus ex machina theory.Footnote 10 Therefore, we have to assume that chance, existence, and law tend to grow together:

From speculations on the homogeneities of each universe, the Muser will naturally pass to the consideration of homogeneities and connections between two different universes, or all three. Especially in them all we find one type of occurrence, that of growth, itself consisting in the homogeneities of small parts. This is evident in the growth of motion into displacement, and the growth of force into motion. In growth, too, we find that the three universes conspire […] [EP 2.439].

The three universes of experience described by Peirce thus cover the domain of his three categories: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. They describe the modes of being first, second, and third, respectively. To be a first is to be what it is regardless of anything else, to be a second is to be determined in relation to a first, and to be a third is to be of the nature of a relation itself. Among Peirce’s usual examples are qualities of feeling for firsts, like the perfume exhaled by roses or the colors; any reaction or dyadic relation for seconds, like the sensation of forceful physical opposition; and the phenomena of representation or mediation for thirds, like laws, conventional symbols, habits, and the like. Though the universes are definite in themselves, they are continuous with each other, and there is no sharp boundary between them; nonetheless, we are able to distinguish specific features that can be specifically categorized in experiential phenomena.

Musement

Now, returning to Musement, Peirce says:

So, continuing the counsels that had been asked of me, I should say, “Enter your skiff of Musement, push off into the lake of thought, and leave the breath of heaven to swell your sail. With your eyes open, awake to what is about or within you, and open conversation with yourself; for such is all meditation.” It is, however, not a conversation in words alone, but is illustrated, like a lecture, with diagrams and with experiments [EP 2.437].

Note he does not distinguish between an inner and an outer world: meditation is defined as a conversation, not restricted to a linguistic one, that makes use of experimentation and diagrams, with what is ‘about and within’ oneself. This is possible because the description of the modes of Being contained in the universes is extensive to all possible experience, without any precise border between the inner and the outer, mind and matter, and subject and object: there is no difference, there is co-naturalness. Reason’s spontaneity and nature’s intelligibility are conjugated—humans are able to discover something of nature because we are a part of it and can therefore be in communion with it: there is a cosmomorfism and not only an anthropomorphism [CP 2.444, c. 1903]. On such grounds, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that eventually in the long run, the discrepancy between the expressions of our human mind and natural events will tend to disappear, for both are part of the same evolutionary process.

This accords with his definition of experience as one source for our habits: ‘An Experience’ is a brutally produced conscious effect that contributes to a habit, self-controlled, yet so satisfying, on deliberation, as to be destructible by no positive exercise of internal vigour’ [EP 2.435]. No exercise of internal skepticism can alter a habit already consolidated by experience; in conduct, habits are not removable by means of mere theoretical speculation. There must be some other experience to change my belief that the Sun ‘is born’ every morning, if the Sun actually does not stop ‘being born’. As signs inscribed by the world of brute facts in our minds become reiterated by the persistence of the real, the tendency to create habits of action emerges, in a process of beginning that surely does have an initial chronological starting point, which is nonetheless impossible to ascertain with precise exactitude. But this is not only a matter of blindly following dispositions to act in such or such a way when such or such occasions arise, for there is an active role of reason itself in the creation of habits: we are able to exercise self-control—at least to some degree—to direct our conduct in spite of having consolidated certain habits: ‘reiteration in the inner world—fancied reiterations—if well-intensified by direct effort, produce habits’ [EP 2.413].Footnote 11 The very fact that the reactivity of seconds is essential to fixing our beliefs shows that there is an active role reserved for our reasoning in shaping our conducts. Our mind is not a dumb receptacle of outer stimulation—it is not a tabula rasa. It can modify, it can change, and it can evolve.

This is a feature of the human mind—it is akin to the law that governs the growth of complexity—that explains the arising of order out of chaos: general rules of conduct arise amidst chaos from an eidetic original level. Thus, there is on the one hand generalization on the mental level and, on the other, the tendency to create habits of action, general rules of conduct, and determined forms of existence in the material level:

Take for illustration the sensation undergone by a child that puts its forefinger into a flame with the acquisition of a habit of keeping all its members out of all flames. [EP 2: 435].

Pure mind, as creative of thought, must, so far as it is manifested in time, appear as having a character related to the habit-taking capacity […] [CP 6.490, c. 1910].

In Peircean cosmology, intelligibility combines with chance, that is, the possibility to represent makes a pair with possibility to become. As already stated, there is a principle of spontaneity in the universe, which makes our experience fluid and continuously varied. This is Peirce’s doctrine of tychism, according to which the principle of spontaneity, or absolute chance, is really operative in nature [EP 1.362]. By absolute chance, he means that indetermination which is itself intrinsic to events and not only any lack of knowledge of the causes by us. One of his examples is clear enough to make the concept clear:

A certain antecedent, for example that I throw a die from a box, determines the general character of a consequent, namely that a number is turned up, but does not specifically determine the character of the consequent, that is what number that is to be; but that is determined by other causes which cannot be taken into account. I suppose that on excessively rare sporadic occasions a law of nature is violated in some infinitesimal degree; that may be called absolute chance [W 4.459, 1883].

So, chance is not only defined by our ignorance of what causes there may be; it is spontaneous irregularity or ‘that diversity and variety of things and events which law does not prevent’ [CP 6.612, 1893]. It is a real feature of things and events, the fact that they do not always behave according to some definite law. It is pure freedom, pure possibility, and pure ‘energetic projaculation’ [W 8: 192, 1892].

Together with this, there is an evolutionary principle of continuity that warrants our intelligible experience. According to Peirce’s synechism, there are real continuities in nature or, better said, continuity is real. This is the reality of Thirdness: ‘the very fact that there seems to be Thirdness in the world, even though it be not where it seems to be, proves that real Thirdness there must somewhere be. If the continuity of our inward and outward sense be not real, still it proves that continuity there really is, for how else should sense have the power of creating it?’ [NEM 4.344, 1898]. If there is a complete difference in nature between reality and us, how should ever get to know anything? If there were no real continuities, how would knowledge be possible? The fact that reality is open to be understood contributes to the validity of synechism: there is nothing uncognizable about it, for our mind is continuous with the rest of the cosmos: ‘The extraordinary disposition of the human mind to think under the difficult and almost incomprehensible form of a continuum can only be explained by supposing that each one of us is in his own real nature a continuum’ [NEM 4.345, 1898]. Just as natural processes in the third universe, as possibilities ideas are real, they share with the cosmos the same feature of freedom and generality—we are in thought; thoughts are not in us. Just that in the first universe of experience, they are bare possibilities and, in the third, developed ones.

Now, leaving mind free to think by itself, leaving it to its Pure Play in a state of openness and wonder—the most uninterested, free, and single-hearted possible—to the world, we enter in a state of Musement. In this state, we are in consonance with the universal. Peirce thus defines the concept:

There is a certain agreeable occupation of mind which, from its having no distinctive name, I infer is not as commonly practised as it deserves to be; for indulged in moderately — say through some five to six per cent. of one’s waking time, perhaps during a stroll — it is refreshing enough more than to repay the expenditure. […] it involves no purpose save that of casting aside all serious purpose […]. In fact, it is Pure Play. Now, Play, we all know, is a lively exercise of one’s powers. Pure Play has no rules, except this very law of liberty. It bloweth where it listeth. It has no purpose, unless recreation. The particular occupation I mean — a petite bouchée with the universes — may take either the form of esthetic contemplation, or that of distant castle-building (whether in Spain or within one’s own moral training), or that of considering some wonder in one of the universes, or some connection between two of the three, with speculation concerning its cause. It is this last kind — I will call it “Musement” on the whole — that I particularly recommend, because it will in time flower into the N.A. [Neglected Argument] […] [EP 2.436].

Musement is a free frame of mind—free of every definite speculation. It is not concerned with the truth of any particular religious belief (to meditate upon some specific dogma with the purpose to become convinced of some specific religion is a kind of sham reasoning, Peirce would say). Musement on the contrary seeks nothing but Pure Play. He says: ‘There is no kind of reasoning that I should wish to discourage in Musement; and I should lament to find anybody confining it to a method of such moderate fertility as logical analysis’ [EP 2.437]. It is an ideal state of freedom of mind, a heuretic mental state. The Muser in this amorphous state of mental freedom will pay attention to what is unique, different and resistant to classification, not distinctively contained in an universe, but capable of being a part of any of them: ‘Let the Muser, for example, after well appreciating, in its breadth and depth, the unspeakable variety of each universe, turn to those phenomena that are of the nature of homogeneities of connectedness in each; and what a spectacle will unroll itself!’ [EP 2.438]. What is diverse, unique, irregular, and deviant to the laws of logic makes an invitation for us to escape time and to contemplate something that has neither determined cause nor effect. In Musement, to think is to be in a state of thought, but remaining open outwards, leaving the mind as a vacant ‘nest’ for the ideas of the environment to land there. It is as if our thinking should have to roam loose about the world so new ideas can arise—and only after they would be examined by logical speculation..Footnote 12

Vagueness and Generality

In a 1906 text called ‘Answers to Questions Concerning my Belief in God’, Peirce writes: ‘‘God’ is a vernacular word and, like all such words, but more than almost any, is vague [CP 6.494].’ In the article on the Neglected Argument, he will claim that the hypothesis of God, as every hypothesis does, supposes its object to be true, and even though it is ‘itself inevitably subject to the law of growth, [the hypothesis] appears in its vagueness to represent God as so’, that is, to represent God as an object so indeterminate yet in some sense definite and capable of continuously being more definite.

To have a better grasp of this point, we need to understand what Peirce understands by vague. Vagueness is a logical notion that in his writings frequently appears together with generality. Vagueness and generality are, thus, close but not identical logical modalities of indetermination. A degree of indetermination, for Peirce, is always present in our concepts and in the universe as well, as we have seen. But in our theories and language, the reach of the unavoidable indetermination can be limited using the logical quantifiers, existential (Σ) and universal (Π), in Peirce’s notation [W 4.477, 1883].Footnote 13 This is what he means with vagueness being capable of becoming more definite. The main difference between the two quantifiers concerns the principles of non-contradiction and excluded middle. This is the formal criterion of distinction between generality and vagueness:

Perhaps a more scientific pair of definitions would be that anything is general in so far as the principle of excluded middle does not apply to it and is vague in so far as the principle of contradiction does not apply to it. Thus, although it is true that ‘Any proposition you please, once you have determined its identity, is either true or false’; yet so long as it remains indeterminate and so without identity, it need neither be true that any proposition you please is true, nor that any proposition you please is false. So likewise, while it is false that ‘A proposition whose identity I have determined is both true and false,’ yet until it is determinate, it may be true that a proposition is true and that a proposition is false [EP 2.351, 1905].

Now, a currently widespread view of logic understands it as propositional logic, in the sense that logic deals mainly or mostly with propositions. But Peirce understands the matter differently. For him, logic is not restricted to propositions, but is in fact a general and quasi-formal theory of all kinds of signs that he sometimes spells ‘semeiotic’ [CP 2.286, c. 1893]. So, vagueness and generality have to be understood in a broader context, for semeiotic is much broader than propositional logic and has links with his phenomenological categories and his cosmology as well. This is what we are going to see now.

Vagueness and generality are the logical expressions respectively of the first and third universes of experience. Together with singularity, the logical expression for the second universe of experience, they make up a complete triad of logical modality.Footnote 14 Now, vagueness and generality are related to different sorts of continuity. The continuity characterized by Firstness is a vagueness, meaning that it is impossible to specify with total accuracy a definite quality in the continua of qualities, and so only an infinitesimally slight variation of the qualitative aspect in question can be thought of, loosely speaking. The continuity characterized by Thirdness, on the other hand, appears as a generality that can be further specified in regard to its particular instances in actual events. These latter can be subsumed under the category of Secondness, which does not characterize any continuity at all, but actual existences. Individual actual existence, then, can be characterized by the validity of both principles of contradiction and excluded middle, for in an individual, there is a complete determination of all of its properties: it is necessary for a determined individual to possess either the property P or its contradictory not-P, but not both. So, he says: ‘Although the principles of contradiction and excluded middle may be regarded as together constituting the definition of the relation expressed by ‘not,’ yet they also imply that whatever exists consists of individuals.’ [CP 3.612, 1901].

Like Aristotle, Peirce reproves the logicians who consider the generality expressed in the universal quantifier as a collective character. His way of understanding quantification is according to distributive rules. This means that a collective term is singular, for it denotes one given group and one given collection, the reason why it can be neglected by formal logic [EP 2.352–353, 1905]. But a truly general term is different, for it is a distributive quantifier; that is, it applies to each one of the members of a class, and a particular or vague term does not specify to which individual subject that it applies, leaving it undetermined, nonetheless giving a general description of it [EP 2.284, 1903].

That said, let us examine generality first. Take the proposition ‘All cats are grey in the dark’. The quantifier in this case is ‘all’, and refers only to the subject and not to the predicate. Otherwise, the proposition would mean that every cat is every black. Footnote 15 So, it would be a mistake to attribute the quantifier to the whole proposition—when one asserts that all cats are gray in the dark, one defines to another person the domain where the predication is effective. In a more technical language, one could say that a general proposition asserts that a given function f(x) has the value T for all instances of x (that is, ‘(x)fx’)Footnote 16 [W 5.178–180, 1885]. In effect, the proposition does not assert the existence of the subject, but it says that, if one individual x be found, any x, the predicate ‘f’ could be applied to this x, so denying the existence of some x that is not f [W 4.452, 1883; CP 2.357, 1901]. And there is also another way to define a general sign: ‘a sign […] that is in any respect objectively indeterminate (i.e., whose object is undetermined by the sign itself) is objectively general in so far as it extends to the interpreter the privilege of carrying its determination further’ [EP 2.350, 1905].

General signs, then, do not stand for specific individuals, but define classes. By defining a class, a general sign thereby excludes of such class all the objects that do not possess a given character. For instance, if one asserts the proposition ‘All cats are grey in the dark’, the utterer gives to the interpreter of the proposition the right of singling out any member of the class of cats. And the interpreter can do this by means of a predicative act. So, a universal affirmative proposition, as the one above, says that a certain property—being black—is predicable to all the objects of a certain class—all cats—without determining a special one—anyone you please. The interpreter is free to specify any individual among the subjects of the proposition—any cat that the interpreter chooses would possess the property of being black.

So, we should not understand Peirce’s claims according to a-nowadays widespread-propositional logic standpoint (for any proposition, p, either p or not-p is true, but not both). The Peircean notions of vagueness and generality are more clearly understood within contexts of assertions. For him, assertions are like bets, with the difference that when laying a wager you only commit yourself to some consequences if you win or lose, but when making assertions, you commit yourself to the truth of what is being asserted expecting to commit others, your interlocutors, to believe certain things and act in a certain way [EP 2.140, 1903; 312–314, 1904]. So, making a general or a vague assertion is different things. If the principle of excluded middle is thought of in the fashion of propositional logic, we cannot accept a third truth value—indeterminate—to general propositions.Footnote 17

Now, Peirce can do this because his logic is not only propositionally oriented, but there is an ontological interpretation of logical principles as well that is essential to his conceptions (and this is a typical Peircean move). He holds that for all properties P, any subject either has Property P or Property non-P (either ‘S is P’ or ‘S is not-P’). The conclusion is that the principle can hold absolutely good only for individuals, that is, for subjects of the second universe of experience. Thus, to say that the principle of excluded middle does not apply to continua of Thirdness means that the ontological status of such continua can be indeterminate, however determinable. In other words, both ‘S has to be P’ and ‘S has to be not-P’ can be false—it is not actually possible to ascertain which is in fact true, only that either one or the other would be true under certain conditions. This is what Peirce calls real possibility.Footnote 18 He elsewhere gives the example of a triangle in general, which is indeterminate; that is, it is not isosceles, nor equilateral, nor scalene [CP 5.505, c. 1906].

Time to Turn to Vagueness

An indeterminate vague sign does not define a class, but only some one individual, and then, it is not possible to say that it is neither true nor false. The way to diminish the indetermination of a vague sign is to render it general: ‘A sign that is objectively indeterminate in any respect is objectively vague in so far as it reserves further determination to be made in some other conceivable sign, or at least does not appoint the interpreter as its deputy in this office’ [EP 2: 351, 1905]. So, vagueness is the ‘antithetical analogue of generality’ [CP 5.505]. For instance, take the vague proposition ‘Some truths are better left unsaid’. It does not allow the interpreter to determine which truths are better be said or not, for a vague proposition represents something without specifically saying what. The interpreter cannot define an individual object, but only a property: which other objects could or could not make part of a possible set of objects referred by a general proposition. In this way, the possibility of completing the determination depends upon another sign, the determination of which is the right of the utterer and not the interpreter’s. We could say that the proposition, in such case, asserts that the logical function f(x) has the value T for some instance of x, without specifying exactly which (that is, ‘(∃ x)fx’).Footnote 19 To put it differently, it is the same to say that there is at least one x that possesses the property f [W 4.452, 1883; W 5.178–180, 1885]. In other words, he is not saying that for a proposition p, not both p and non-p are valid (as in propositional logic would be usual), as he also does not mean that propositions about the first universe of experience can have several truth-values. What he does indeed claim is that for all properties p, no subject has both properties p and non-p (not both S is P and S is not-P), and so, the principle of non-contradiction only holds for explicitly definite subjects (would you commit a fallacy, if you said which truth is better left unsaid?).

God

But remember the typical Peircean move: the mode of being First is pure possibility, the metaphysical status of which is defined by an ontological interpretation of logical principles. Firsts are, ontologically speaking, pure possibles, may-bes, and as such, they do not exclude their correlate may-not-bes. In other words, if any singular subject is or is not an instance of a certain may-be, this cannot be decided on the basis of the may-be alone—there being some truths better left unsaid does not exclude the possibility of there being other ones which are better when said (maybe we can discover which is which then?). The fact that the principle of non-contradiction does not hold for some subjects refers thus to the modal character of the entities that are under the category of Firstness. The logical expression of vagueness is that ‘S can be P’ and ‘S can be not-P’ can be both true. So, we can conclude that there is at least one truth, which is better left unsaid, but we cannot for sure determine which; we can only guess.

As to the mode of being of Seconds, that is, entities of the second universe of experience, Peirce stops short of accepting the absolute determination of all properties as a definition of the existential mode of actual individuals. There is a reason for that, and it has to do with continuity: such a definition would make the relationship between possibilities of the first and third universes of experience too discontinuous and in an unbridgeable way. Peirce always points to the great and unsuccessful efforts by the schoolmen, specially Duns Scotus, to account for the relation between general concepts and individual objects in terms of contraction: the general is contracted to the mode of being of individuality [CP 8.208, 1905].Footnote 20 This is a mistake, for Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, to him, are real. Thus, vagueness and generality are supposed to inhere in individual existence, even though in an ‘infinitesimal’ way (for lack of a better word), in contrast to the two categories of continuous possibility. This is why Peirce maintains a definition of individual existence as reactivity, not relatedness, as already seen [EP 2.342, 1905]. A sense of effort, a reaction against my will, he says elsewhere [CP 1.324, 1903]. According to this definition, therefore, only ideal objects can be totally determined, and thus, wholly thorough and absolute determination by and submission to the principles of excluded middle and non-contradiction is possible only to ideal objects or events. One could isolate singular individuals in all dimensions of reality and levels of discourse without absolutely imposing the ontological requirement of complete determinacy, since reactivity is the defining character of the haecceitas of the individual.Footnote 21

Real possibilities are indeterminate generals. Further specifications of generals are equally possible and are indeterminate (different kinds of triangles), while in the case of vaguenesses, contradictory properties can appear (animals that are hermaphrodites or that have no gender). So, when Peirce says that vagueness does not follow the principle of non-contradiction, he could well say that both ‘God may exist’ and ‘God may not exist’ are true possibilities. So, the Reality of God is a logical assumption about the possible nature of an entity that we tend to name using the word ‘God’ in assertive contexts as a monstrative index.

Peirce draws an important distinction between argument and argumentation: ‘An ‘Argument’ is any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief. An ‘Argumentation’ is an Argument proceeding upon definitely formulated premisses’ [EP 2: 435]. This means that his hypothesis for the Reality of God is not an argument in the same way that the traditional ones-cosmological, ontological, and teleological—are. These, in his sense, are argumentations properly speaking. His own argument, on the contrary, is a conjunction of three different ways to present his claim in favor of the belief in God; it is ‘a nest of three arguments’, as he himself says [6.486, 1910].Footnote 22 So, the core of Peirce’s claim is that if we follow his advice and pursue Musement, this will lead us to a belief in an organized unity of the three universes of experience that we name God. The argument is a livable synechistic hypotheses that recommends itself as a good belief for one to abide by, indeed.

To raise the hypothesis of God’s Reality—grounded upon the contemplation of the possibilities of connection between the three universes, their eidetic nature, so to speak—means to ask what other beings have in common with human beings. Letting ideas roam through our minds, bringing the outside inside—this is to synthesize in consciousness the nature of the three universes. This is what Peirce means by saying that ‘the hypothesis will lead to our thinking of features of each universe as purposed’ [EP 2.439–440]. To the unitarian beauty of this eidetic whole,Footnote 23 he gives the name God: ‘The word ‘God’ […] is the definable proper name, signifying Ens necessarium: in my belief Really creator of all three universes of Experience’ [EP 2.434].

Peirce also claims that the idea of God is necessary to reality itself (it is not an idea of the pure reason, as it was in Kant’s philosophy). So, he defines God at the very paragraph of the article as a necessary being, an Ens necessarium [EP 2: 443]. As we keep reading, his argument seems to imply that God thus defined is equivalent to an Ens realissimus. Given the continuous homogeneities between the three universes of experience, a real relation between them is necessary. Then, the whole cannot be reduced to each one of its parts taken in isolation, and neither can be conceived apart from their interconnectedness—this relation is of a higher order and constitutes a dimension of reality that we can experience only when we forget our immediate and objectifying certainties, those that arrest us in dull immediacy. In other words, it is not possible to know God in itself, but only insofar as God be, that is, as God is part of reality. We grasp the notion of such divine being’s reality only if and when we come to realize the necessity of the organization of the three universes wherein we live, if and when we come to realize it is impossible that each living being, each existing entity and thing is only by itself and for itself, having an individual end in itself, without any relation to everything else that is.

Several other questionings remain problematic in Peirce’s argument for the Reality of God. One could ask, for instance, is Peirce’s God a transcendental entity? His argumentation seems to imply that God can only in fact be immanent, for this is more coherent with his synechism. But, then, would Peirce be a pantheist? I do not intend to give any definite answer to those questions. As already said, vagueness is here crucial. That the idea of a deity spontaneously and vaguely arises when we let our minds muse seems more interesting than ascertaining a determined nature to the deity itself. The idea of a deity is then pinned up by the beauty of the understanding that the three universes of experience are closely related and participating of the same tendency to growth and diversification. The very likelihood of such an idea is supported by its beauty. In sum, it is beautiful to think that the three universes of experience are connected and that such connection has a higher reality than our mere existence. It is as if God were the possibility of the existence of all things, as if the fact of existence were itself the warrant of such possibility—there lies the irresistible beauty of the idea, for Peirce. So, he lays down his Humble Argument:

Were the theologians able to perceive the force of this argument, they would make it such a presentation of universal human nature as to show that a latent tendency toward a belief in God is a fundamental ingredient of the soul, and that, far from being a vicious or superstitious ingredient, it is simply the natural precipitate of meditation upon the origin of the three universes [EP 2.446].

At the state of Musement, the hypothesis not of the existence, but of the Reality of God irresistibly recommends itself, in account of the esthetic attraction of the very idea. This idea of the divine does not necessarily involve the belief in an absolute transcendence. The belief in God’s Reality is a belief in the very reality of the evolution of the universe, a belief in the continuous differentiation and complexification of the natural processes, in the persistence of spontaneity and constant disclosure of a dimension that encompasses the three universes of experience, and consequently in their ever growing dissipation in time—insofar as the Ens necessarium grows, it becomes proportionally exhausted in existence, more and more concrete, so to say. Is it possible? Well, remember that the hypothesis of God is a vague one and, as such, cannot be deemed flatly false, even if it is contradictory to attribute the characters of the hypothesis to its object:

The hypothesis of God is a peculiar one, in that it supposes an infinitely incomprehensible object, although every hypothesis, as such, supposes its object to be truly conceived in the hypothesis. This leaves the hypothesis but one way of understanding itself; namely, as vague yet as true so far as it is definite, and as continually tending to define itself more and more, and without limit. The hypothesis, being thus itself inevitably subject to the law of growth, appears in its vagueness to represent God as so, albeit this is directly contradicted in the hypothesis from its very first phase. But this apparent attribution of growth to God, since it is ineradicable from the hypothesis, cannot, according to the hypothesis, be flatly false. Its implications concerning the universes will be maintained in the hypothesis, while its implications concerning God will be partly disavowed, and yet held to be less false than their denial would be [EP 2.439].

To suppose that God is purposeless, then, is presumably more false than the contrary. But what would be the purpose, the end? Now, if our minds are apt to know truths about reality, and if the process of interpreting the real—in an analogue manner to the diversification and complexification —is asymptotic, is it not logical to assume that the reachable final aim, the possible end is nothing but a complete identification of the mental representation of the real and the real itself in an indistinguishable future? From this, is it not at least interesting to think of God as vanishing itself in representable existence in so far as it reveals itself?Footnote 24 As the process tends to infinity, the assumption is that the complete dissolution of the deity in existence should never totally occur (at least, not in any conceivable time), since the complexification of chaos shows the same tendency to growth, so many other truths are yet to be known, so many dawns yet to shine. In Musement, it is as if guided by the muse, we vaguely gaze at nature’s unfolding with the eyes of a poet or of a child.