It would seem, at first glance, that Carl Jung and C. S. Peirce
would have little in common. Jung was a romantic corrective to a scientific
Freud, and Peirce was a scientific corrective to a romantic James. Jung was
fascinated by the mystical, and Peirce distrusted it. Jung relied on dreams,
and Peirce thought of them as "lacking all Thirdness”.
Jung stressed compensation over Freud's causation despite Freud's prohibition
about mysticism, and Peirce persistently articulated
the Categories and Firstness even if James defined the pragmatic method as
"The attitude of looking away from
first things, principles, "categories," supposed
necessities” (1948:146). Yet Jung was a psychologist interested in
alchemy, and Peirce was a chemist interested in the processes of Mind.
Moreover, the constructs of both, the psychological for Jung and the semeiotic
for Peirce, were concerned with the representation of the infinite. Their
life-time studies were given over to how human beings articulated their
responses to the infinite, and both found themselves drawn into the vortex of
divinity and origin in trying to articulate their own understandings of the
role and function of human mentation.
What first drew me to the similarity of Jung and Peirce was the
fact that both used the same odd term to describe their understandings. That
term was "tohu bohu” -- a Hebraic phrase
translated as "without form and void” and meaning the unspecified
potentiality of Chaos or infinity, and as I looked more closely I found there
were a number of similarities between the Jungian outlook on Infinity and the Peircean notions of Firstness. First, both see the area of
infinity as an area of growth and spirit, and both
used established systems to investigate that growth -- Peirce using the trichotomous structures of surveying and Jung the
emblematic nature of alchemy. Two, both saw growth as fundamental to
understanding the universe Peirce seeking
"the principle of growth of principles” and Jung articulating the process
of individuation. Third, both thought of infinity as a complete openness to all
possibility with Peirce thinking in terms of Firstness, evolutionary love, and
Pure Freedom and with Jung thinking in terms of the compensatory nature of the
psyche and the Pleroma. Fourth, both saw the edges of
representation of infinity in the pictorial and the visual with Peirce defining
the Icon as the initial sign of Firstness and Jung pursuing the pattern of the
archetype as a kind of open-ended diagram. Lastly, both sensed something of the
gnostic in their systematic understanding of
totality with Jung clearly owning his gnostic
sources, and Peirce stressing that mentality was a process of growing knowledge
and discovery. In fact, both make the same kind of distinction between
"knowledge” and "belief” -- there is a growing
consciousness of the process of representation and a kind of entelechy
operating in the development of our representation of the Universe. So I want
to look at some of the conceptual similarities of Jung's and Peirce's concepts
to try to fathom something of their gnostic visions
about representation, their concepts of infinity, the Godhead, and the growth
of human mentation.
In discussing the three Categorical Universes, Peirce
distinguishes between Doubt, Truth, and Belief and between Reality and
Existence. Despite his critique of Cartesian doubt, Peirce's understanding is
that doubt is a fundamental biological fact and not some guiding principle of
argumentation; it, like the uncertainty of surprise, "is an uneasy and
dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the
state of belief”. (5.371) It is, thus, part of the process of discovering truth and
belief. Whereas Truth is the results of Scientific Endeavor, subject to the
proofs of logic, mathematics, and reasoning, Belief is, for Peirce, something
considerably more vague even if equally important, for he returns to the 1877
"Fixation of Belief” (5.358-387) Peirce several times, in 1893,
1903, and 1910, to make it clear that belief has "the nature of a habit.”
(5.377) As for
"existence,” Peirce uses that term "in its strict philosophical sense
of "react with the other like things in the environment.” (6.495) Although his concept of existence is a
concept of Secondness, the more philosophically First term of "reality” is
"... that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not
the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to
be, or ever will have thought them to be, .... (6.495) Thus he obviously defines reality in terms of
its teleological purpose, and as part of the complex of purpose, habit, growth
in Firstness.
Although Peirce might object to being called a gnostic, (6.102) he still pursues spiritual implications in
the Semeiotic. To see the universe as "a great symbol of God's purpose” is
an idea common to both Christianity and science when one recognizes that the
"readable world” is the common element in both. But more importantly, the
additional idea of that purpose being "worked out ... in living realities”
is a distinctly gnostic idea, and given Peirce's
categorical understanding of Firstness, God as a/the Sign is God as the
Semeiotic; it is part and parcel of a gnosis of discovery and the articulation
of the process of becoming. Moreover, the examination of the principle of
growth of principles (6.585) is a pursuit of gnosis of the Semeiotic. It is a
process of an anthropomorphic microcosm of the Mind operating in our understanding
of the Stuff of the Universe; it is the paradoxical epistemology of the
Knowable Unknown framed by the Dynamic and Immediate Objects, the laws of Interpretance, and the Categories. Thus, Peirce's concept
of Firstness is parallel to the Gnostic principle of the Pleroma,
the fullness, which Jung describes as "A thing that is infinite and
eternal hath no qualities, since it hath all qualities. This nothingness or
fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the
eternal and infinite possess no qualities. .... In the pleroma
there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would mean self-dissolution.” (Storr, 1983:342) The
similarities between Jung's definition of the Pleroma
and Peirce's definition of Firstness are clear. The Zero infinity of Firstness
is total potentiality, a fullness of all possibilities which admits the
concretizing web of the Semeiotic as a complexus of qualia leading eventually to the fullness of Thirdness. Such a Thirdness is
what Gregory Bateson, responding to Jung, refers to
as the Creaturae, the "world of explanation in
which the very phenomena to be described are among themselves governed an determined by difference, distinction, and information.”
(1986:18) In
fact, the semeiotic is aimed exactly at patterns of explanation as Logic and
Semeiotic. The very mode of semiosic operation is to avoid the surprises of
Brute Secondness in a Universe of possibility by explanation. Thus in gnostic terms, the function of the semeiotic is to avoid
the "errors” of the creation which further reduce organisms to "stony
sleep” of positivism.
I would argue that Peirce's notion of the Personality of God is
also gnostic. In fact despite the distortions of
error, the Peircean notion of a growing, personal
godhead has been generally a gnostic, or at least
theistic, one which holds it all together as First Cause, Pure God, The Cosmos,
Cosmic Consciousness, or the God Sign. Peirce was eager to establish an
evolutionary theory that accepted both the notion of nothingness and a
principle of growth of principles, and it was essential to Peirce's
concept of the Categories that both respected the known laws of physical
science and the yet-to-be-discovered laws of a psychical
science. Thus, many of his examples and arguments are representations of a law
of association operating within a nothingness which is truly infinite -- A Zero Infinity that
contains an infinity of infinities. Of course, this is
no simple mathematical conundrum for Peirce, rather it
is fundamental to his articulation of both a semeiotic and a metaphysic that
one understands that "We cannot ourselves conceive of such a state of nility; but we can easily conceive that there should be a
mind could conceive it.” (6.490)
Implicit in Peirce's Categories is the concept of Zero -- either as the Absolute
frame outside the Categories or as the digital concept from Secondness as NO‑thing.
The proto-creative potential of the Semeiotic lies in the interface between an
analog reality and a digital sign system; the frictions between the two systems
in the multiple meta-transformations at their boundaries fuel the
generative power of the Semeiotic, but Peirce obviously attributes the same
kind of generative power to a purposive Universe. The paradox of a Knowable
Unknown, as distinct from an Unknowable Known, godhead is the paradox of the
Immediate and Dynamic Objects, and the evolutionary development of the Absolute
Final Interpretant is parallel to the gnostic self‑realization
of the godhead. Both are the conceiving mind "working out its conclusion
in living realities.”
However, there are two ways to look at the hypothetical
conceiving mind. One, of course, is a kind of Peirceo-Berkleyian
God who hears the droppings of nada trees even in the nada forest, but Peirce
is too much the mathematician to accept such a pseudo‑Idealism. The
problem of Infinities is the problem of God as a Firstness,
and thus the Gnostic pattern is quite a natural one for demonstrating what
Peirce wishes to demonstrate: that the human mind can critically discuss the
kinds of operations without resort to the tenacity of solipsistic belief or the
brute forces of social belief. In addition, the whole notion of discussing the
totality of Firstness as Zero Infinity is crucial to the semeiotic and the
metaphysic as God, Freedom, or Immortality (1.192) under the triad of
Philosophy. (1.186) So for Peirce to
describe the spatio-temporal
Universe(s) topologically
as he does in 6.211 or to describe the logic of the Universe as
dimensionalities of continuities as he does in 6.203f, or to discuss a
principle of growth of principles as the association of habit is little
different than a discussion of how God is the ultimate paradox of something
coming from nothing.
The second way of looking at "conceiving
mind” is in terms of the human mind itself, and Peirce often follows this tact.
On the one hand, such a concept has to do with the anthropomorphic quality of
ideas and the Universe of Ideas, but on the other hand, the very construction
of the habit‑forming mind is itself that which forms hypotheses, for
"man's mind must have been attuned to the truth of things in order to
discover what he has discovered. It is the very bedrock of logical truth.”
(5.476) Thus, the very human mind/brain
is a hypothesizing organ designed by natural selection on the basis of the
principle of growth of principles echoing the process of
the creation if not the creator.
The Logic of Discovery and consequent operations of Firstness
often lead Peirce to contemplate the godhead and the problems of cognition,
reason, and Semeiotic, but what is crucial for him is the principle of growth
and increase of self, and it is a systemic problem, perhaps of a mind which can
contemplate mind conceiving of nothingness, perhaps of the origin of things,
perhaps of the Reality of God, but such shifts are at the margins of Firstness.
The systemic and semiotic principle of growth is a play principle concerned
with beauty, and the vividness of the qualia work on
the sensory mechanisms to move the psychological aspects of perceptual judgment
into being the process of cognition. In the co‑territory of abduction and
Firstness, the infinite degrees of vividness hypostatically and prescissively become the complex predicates which replace
simpler predicate complexes and then are replaced, in turn, by new predicates
on the road to propositions, arguments, and beliefs.
Peirce's portrayal of the semiosic path as being between an
absolute Firstness of inconceivable infinity and an absolute Secondness of
totally particularity is based on his argument that "all Being involves
some kind of super-order.” As he
argues, "In that state of absolute nility, in or
out of time, that is, before of after the evolution of time, there must then
have been a tohu bohu
[my emphasis] of which nothing whatever affirmative or negative was true
universally. There must have been, therefore, a little of everything
conceivable. There must have been here and there a little undifferentiated
tendency to take super‑habits. But such a state must tend to increase
itself. [emphasis Peirce's] (6.490) Thus, the phrase Peirce uses to describe this
"order” of increasing existence is "tohu bohu,” which he uses to
refer to an undifferentiated state of stuff in which no distinction has
occurred. A similar use of this term may be found in Jung's "Answer to
Job,” where Jung is discussing the process of differentiation of the Godhead
and its human creation: "The ominous happenings ... at the beginning of a
seemingly successful and satisfactory Creation ... catch our attention, and
one is forced to admit that the initial situation, when the spirit of God
brooded over the tohu bohu [my emphasis],
hardly permits us to expect an absolutely perfect result. .... What happened on
that day was the final separation of the upper from the lower waters by the
interposed "plate" of the firmament.” (1971:557)
Thus, the Creation Jung describes is parallel to the one
described by Peirce. The issue is one of a contradictory totality and infinity
being differentiated by a process of distinction, or "individuation.” Jung's theological process here is one of
sign particularization -- a principle of growth
of theistic principles in a pleromatic order which
contains every possibility. The process of individuation is, thus, a separating
maturation from a collective into a full personhood certainly for the
individual human, but also, in the gnostic terms of
"Job,” for the godhead as well. The gnostic
godhead separates gradually from the Pleroma, dealing
continually with its unarticulated "evil” and coming in stages to the full
personhood of a personal god. Thus, Jung's individuated deity, in a gnostic fashion, is a godhead
"working out its conclusion [in personhood] in living realities” of both a
macrocosmic deity and a microcosmic human.
As Peirce's arguments about personality suggests, the godhead
does become personal. In the Jungian sense, the godhead individuates. It
separates from a Transcendent Unconsciousness to become an Immanent
authoritarian father and then to become god incarnate-- first as a Christos and then as god within. From Eros to Logos to
Individuation, the process of growth is one both for the human and the divine;
the Pleroma is an undifferentiated fullness, which,
in Peircean terms, differentiated by a process of
association. Such patterns are as easily theological constructs (even if a
nasty methodology for Peirce) as they are semiotic ones. Firstness Pleroma is by its very nature transcendent potentiality,
and Secondness is a Immanent occurrence of hecceiticity, but Thirdness is
Incarnation -- literally the
embodiment of Firstness which has a replica existence as a Secondness. Finally
these concepts are as physical as they are psychical, for Pleroma,
as the immanent universe can be read either as a Tennysonian
nature "red in tooth and claw” or as some interstellar sense of cold
infinity -- a Freudian backdrop for
Eros/Thanatos no doubt -- which finds a
Reconciliation of bloody error and cold impersonal infinity in the articulation
of a spiritualized Selfhood. The matho-mythical
constructs of Heat Death for physical systems and the Wormy Grave for psychical
living systems find a resolution in the Incarnation of Heaven's Body in the
fully realized and articulated Individual. The growing connective increasingly
becomes the personhood which by a time-line of future oriented purposiveness creates hypothesis and the semiotic complexi that approaches the Final Interpretant even though
human knowledge never reaches a full articulation of the Pleroma,
and even if that knowledge only attains an approximation, the conceiving mind
can still conceive of a replica of itself which can incorporate nility.
References
Bateson, Gregory (1987). Angel's Fear:
Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. New York: MacMillan.
James, William (1948). Essays in Pragmaticism.
Ed. by A Castell. New York: Haffer Press.
Jung C. G. (1971). The Portable
Jung. Ed. by J. Campbell. New York: Viking
Press.
Peirce, Charles S. (1931‑1966). Collected Papers of
Charles S. Peirce. 8 Vols. Ed. by Hartshorne,
Weiss, and Burks. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Storr, Anthony (1983). The Essential Jung.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.