The universe as Divine argument, Pierce’s Logic of Musement

Charles Sanders Pierce is one odd duck. The greatest philosopher since Aristotle according to some, much admired by the likes of William James to Bertrand Russell, his own thought anticipating several strands of philosophy from semantics to phenomenology. Unfortunately his work is scattered, a drug addict with an irritable, erratic personally, scarcely employed, scraping by in utmost poverty, living off the bread crusts of the local baker and so poor he couldn’t even afford stationary. He would scribble on the back of old papers and reports.

Nevertheless, the essay he wrote, “A Neglected Argument for God” or the “N.A” is bizarre, charming, and obscure. I confess I read the essay, got to the end, and found no argument for God at all ! Indeed it took me awhile, and left me with a deepening appreciation, and explanation for why, truly, we must become as children to see Him.

In essence he merely recommends one saunter about in reverie, as a child with the, mind free and in full play, and, he says, it is certain you will come to the vague belief in something like God.

“If one who had determined to make trial of Musement as a favorite recreation were to ask me for advice, I should reply as follows: The dawn and the gloaming most invite one to Musement; but I have found no watch of the nychthemeron that has not its own advantages for the pursuit. It begins pas- sively enough with drinking in the impression of some nook in one of the three Universes [Pierce calls our experience of the world the three “universes” of Ideas, brute actuality, and signs of experience - semiotics ]. But impression soon passes into attentive observation, observation into musing, musing into a lively give-and-take of communion between self and self….”

Pierce, anticipating phenomenology, says we live in three “universes” of experience, distinguished by modalities of being, the first of possibility, the first is one of free undetermined play of imagination, which is the mindset he recommends. It is one of vagueness and becoming, of ideas.

The second is of matter, physical facts, existents and actuality, completely determined and the most capable of conceptual exactness.

The third mediates between them -  Mind, Necessitants, signs, and laws.

Pierce claims that in revelry 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 that mediates between the other two.

Just as begins any other inquiry, the experience of God starts by “drinking in the impression of some nook in one of the three Universes”  That’s the musement, free play of mind that makes the muser aware of the connections and homogeneities among these three universes and in nature in general. 

It is Wonder he speaks of, similar to what Heidegger termed “Sein” or Being. We take for granted THAT things exist, that they appear to us, that they “be”. Heidegger means more than this though, he means the intelligible dimension that we encounter in the world.

As Brain Temple explains it, it is “The truth that we may know the objects of our experience in themselves, as over and above their contexts of referentiality.

We perceive the proper and common sensibles alike through our external sensory organs, but we—through another organ— conceptually perceive things as intelligible through another.

For instance, I sense the color, size, and shape of my coffee mug (slate gray, stone-like roughness to the finish, rounded, etc.) but I perceive that it is a coffee mug, a perception incidental to the facts of its sensory qualities.

Its “being a coffee mug” is not something which could reduce to any of its sensory qualities, but which must be inferred from them.”

So, "musement" 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.

Pierce says,

“By giving free play to our minds in contemplating our experience of the world, capable of any thought, we will see how our nature is continuous with the cosmos, we will see connections everywhere, and the more we ponder the more we will wonder at our minds response to reality, it’s fittingness,  especially our reactions of wonder at it’s beauty, that we are fitted for truth,  and behind this phenomena will be discerned the ideal of God spontaneously, if only vaguely, as an explanation between the concurrence of our experience and Nature. This hypothesis will appear so beautiful that man cannot but help adore this explanation.”
 

The ideal is esthetically attractive to one’s mind, not logically compulsive. 

The force that the ideal impels upon the mind is not as forceful as a projectile colliding against an object, but more like the influence of the sun upon a flower. For Peirce,  “Beauty is our ultimate telos” and “puts mind in a state of ‘infinite determinableness’ so that it can turn to any direction and is in perfect freedom” .

God influences the conduct of those who contemplate it and provides a purpose for life, just like a supreme ideal, which he defines as the growth of concrete reasonableness. 

Of course, it then can be further explored and defined, but 

“in the Pure Play of Musement the idea of God's Reality will be sure sooner or later to be found an attractive fancy, which the Muser will develop in various ways. The more he ponders it, the more it will find response in every part of his mind, for its beauty, for its supplying an ideal of life, and for its thoroughly satisfactory explanation of his whole threefold environment. “

“…from what I know of the effects of Musement on myself and others, that any normal man who considers the three Universes in the light of the hypothesis of God's Reality, and pursues that line of reflection in scientific singleness of heart, will come to be stirred to the depths of his nature by the beauty of the idea and by its august practicality, even to the point of earnestly loving and adoring his strictly hypothetical God, and to that of desiring above all things to shape the whole conduct of life and all the springs of action into conformity with that hypothesis. Now to be deliberately and thoroughly prepared to shape one's conduct into conformity with a proposition is neither more nor less than the state of mind called Believing that proposition, however long the conscious classification of it under that head be postponed."

Over time, Peirce’s philosophy will accept the fundamental reality of mind and that the physical laws are derived from it. In other words, reality is objectified thought; “the universe can be seen as a vast personality, an Absolute Mind, living and growing”. 

To investigate any aspect of the universe is, for Peirce, a kind of dialogue between minds:

“….the mind of that who inquires and the mind of the Creator. This fine communication produces some effects upon conduct, just as “long acquaintance with a man of great character may deeply influence one's whole manner of conduct…contemplation and study of the physico-psychical universe can imbue a man with principles of conduct analogous to the influence of a great man's works or conversation”.

It is this analogue of a mind is what he means by 'God.'

After all, from Plotinus on, the Ancients could not help but notice how mind-like the Cosmos appeared - ordered, rational, and intelligible, fitted to human knowing.

Tracy Witham comments,

“His point is that as we can recognize the cast of a strong mind's effect on the world without being able, even in principle, to say precisely what or how that cast of mind produces its effect, since it is bound up with a holistic impression of a person's character and cast of mind, so we can get from the world as a whole an impression of "that analogue of a mind..." called God.

One might recall Einstein's famous opinion that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Peirce's argument can be reduced to the simple fact that the universes comprehensibility can be taken to suggest an analogue of mind.

Peirce claimed that an analogue of mind is "suggested" by the universal feature of a scientific understanding of the universe, as Chomsky comments, "...our mental constitution permits us to arrive at knowledge of the world insofar as our innate capacity to create theories happens to match some aspect of the structure of the world." 

Presumably, then, the human mind's unfolding understanding of the world and the world's unfolding that the human mind studies share common features. Peirce's God hypothesis simply notes this.

That the universe works like a mind cannot be doubted by a mind that claims to understand the universe. And a mind that doesn't claim to understand the universe cannot comment…

This musement leads to a belief in an organized unity of the three universes of experience we name God.

Peirce goes on here to argue that “to believe in reasoning about phenomena is to believe that they are governed by reason, that is, by God.” 

Many have pointed out the remarkable success of science, that the scientist purposely confines himself to a set amount of data to investigate, but even then he is presented with innumerable facts, that can be combined in near infinite ways, and it is the mysterious, almost supernatural, process if insight that a mind will pick out the exact facts combined rightly to guess at the correct hypothesis.

This is miraculous and virtually inexplicable.


In this process of evolution the human mind has developed, as an instinct, a capacity that makes it able to guess the course of natural events, of which it is also a part, ruled by the same laws. 

This is Reason: “In other words our Reason is akin to the Reason that governs the universe; we must assume that or despair of finding out anything.” . There is a principle of continuity, based upon which the co-naturalness between mind and matter is claimed.

Pierce, as the ancient philosophers also affirmed, claims man was made for truth, and our success with science proves it. He rejects any alternative explanation that it is through mere trial and error science advances :

"….it is pretty clear that the number of facts with any one of which a conjecture might conceivably connect a surprising fact is, at the very least, a million. Consequently, if the conjecturer were completely in the dark ... he would, on the average have to make some half million of utterly wrong conjectures before he lit on the right one ...

The darkest mysteries of nature, instead of half a million false conjectures, have not called for a score.”

Peirce then gives as examples the orbit of Mars (18 false hypotheses by Kepler before the true one), the acceleration of a falling body (only one by Galileo), and the nature of light (seven by various people over the centuries). He also cites "Bernoulli's kinetical theory of gases" and "Dalton's atomic theory" as instances when "the very first definite theories were right”

Peirce says, 

"A man must be downright crazy to deny that science has made many true discoveries. But every single item of scientific theory which stands established today has been due to Abduction. But how is it that all this truth has ever been lit up by a process in which there is no compulsiveness nor tendency toward compulsiveness? Is it by chance? Consider the multitude of theories that might have been suggested. A physicist comes across some new phenomenon in his laboratory. How does he know but the conjunctions of the planets have something to do with it or that it is not perhaps because the dowager empress of China has at that same time a year ago chanced to pronounce some word of mystical power or some invisible jinnee may be present. Think of what trillions of trillions of hypotheses might be made of which one only is true; and yet after two or three or at the very most a dozen guesses, the physicist hits pretty nearly on the correct hypothesis. By chance he would not have been likely to do so in the whole time that has elapsed since the earth was solidified."

For Peirce the explanation of this surprising phenomenon of the human ability to choose easily and rightly between those innumerable hypotheses lies in "that 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" 

Nubiola presents this as a properly formulated abduction :

The efficiency of the scientist (guessing right between innumerable hypotheses) is a really surprising fact. 

If God were the creator of human cognitive abilities and of nature this efficiency would be a matter of course. 

Hence, there is reason to suspect that God is the creator of human minds and nature.


Given the success of our spontaneous conjectures in mathematics, phenomenology, and the special sciences, why would metaphysics be any different? 

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. “

For Peirce, trust best describes authentic faith. For Peirce, faith arises from perception, emerges as trust, and leads to beliefs about particular religious propositions. In relation to perception, faith is a distinctive attitude towards the testimony of a perceptual judgment. Trust is inherently fallible and requires constant vigilance, but it is nonetheless reasonable. 

“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?”

If there’s 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 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”. 

Peirce insists that “when a man has that experience with which religion sets out, he has as good reason ... to believe in the living personality of God as he has to believe in his own.”

Musement “begins passively enough with drinking in the impression of some nook in one of the three Universes. But impression soon passes into attentive observation, observation into musing, musing into a lively give-and-take of communion between self and self”

In this state, we are in consonance with the universal.


In another essay The Place of our Age in the History of Civilization (W1: 101, 1863), Peirce says something similar:

“A man looks upon nature, sees its sublimity and beauty and his spirit gradually rises to the idea of a God. He does not see the Divinity, nor does nature prove to him the existence of that Being, but it does excite his mind and his imagination until the idea becomes rooted in his heart. In the same way, the continual change and movement in nature, suggests the idea of omnipresence. And finally, by the events of his own life, he becomes persuaded of the relation of that Being with his own soul”

Brandon Daniel-Hughes sums it up thus :

“It is the mere fact that, when the mind plays without antecedent purpose (muses) upon the variety of things that the universe contains, it hits upon and adopts the hypothesis of a creator. Its force is a product of naiveté or innocence. The muser finds the creator an attractive idea and believes.”

The "humble argument" . . . may be described as follows. Let a man begin by contemplating in all sorts of elevated general ways the three worlds, the world of sensuous experience, or physical universe; the world of minds, both high and low; and the world of pure ideas, or arbitrary hypotheses . . . which the pure mathematician studies. Let him ponder them long and without haste, until the suggestion springs up of itself, without forcing, that maybe these three worlds have a common Author and Upholder

Also interesting, is that for Pierce, in his semiotic conception of the cosmos, sufficed with signs he says, in a move anticipating much of today’s information theory within physics viewing the universe as an information exchange system, a communication system, he claims the entitre creation is quite literally an argument. God’s argument.

It’s complicated, but this is possible because on Peirce’s account, perceptual judgments are our first premises, yet they emerge as the upshot of an inferential process analogous to abduction ; and this inference ultimately depends, as interpretant to sign, upon prior “premisses of nature.”

The bursting forth from musement of the hypothesis that God is real is simply the universe qua argument “working out its conclusions in living realities” :

“A man looks upon nature, sees its sublimity and beauty and his spirit gradually rises to the idea of God”

Peirce developed his technical concept of a natural sign, genuine index. Genuine indices are effects of law-governed causal interactions that, like propositions, indicate their object while also communicating iconic content about that object.


As an exact logician, Peirce realizes that the universe is “perfused with signs, if not composed exclusively of signs,” that, as such, it is like a vast sign combining countless premises.


“... the universe is a vast representamen, a great symbol of God's purpose, working out its conclusions in living realities. Now every symbol must have, organically attached to it, its Indices of Reactions and its Icons of Qualities; and such part as these reactions and these qualities play in an argument that, they of course, play in the universe—that Universe being precisely an argument ... The Universe as an argument is necessarily a great work of art, a great poem—for every fine argument is a poem and a symphony— just as every true poem is a sound argument.”

According to Peirce, "Reality, therefore, can only be regarded as the limit of the endless series of symbols. A symbol is essentially a purpose, that is to say, is a representation that seeks to make itself definite, or seeks to produce an interpretant more definite than itself" Moreover, "An Argument is a sign which distinctly represents the Interpretant, called its Conclusion, which it is intended to determine.” 

He predicts that musing for fifty minutes daily for six or seven years will eventually—whether through nature’s beauty, vastness, variety, growth, or by some other route—provoke the hypothesis that God is real, but only if musement becomes a daily habit. 

The surest way to God is to make wonder a daily habit.

As Saint Gregory Of Nyssa says,

'Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.'

Now, faith,ffor Peirce, is a person’s response to an experience that pulls at her instincts and sentiments, whether those be her natural disposition or the influence of others on her desires. 

Hume , as Milbank reads him, says something similar, as he understands ‘feeling’ as a category intermediate between faith and reason as a mode of cognitive relationship to the whole of immanent reality.

Milbank says,

“Within the terms of this genuinely Humean perspective …one can see how ‘feeling’ operates as the crucial third term in two respects. First (as Bergson saw), between matter in motion and mind that experiences ‘meanings’. It is not that mind ‘represents’ an external world; it is rather that natural habits in us turn reflective, more intense and more adaptable….


…he also began to break with empiricism by allowing (albeit in a highly reserved fashion) that, in being slaves to habit, human beings must acknowledge the workings of a natural power constituted through time that exceeds our capacity to observe it. This is why Jacobi argued that Hume was effectively showing that all reason requires faith….

Nature is a matter of sedimented habits and not laws: on this assumption it became possible for Ravaisson to reconcile Hume with Aristotle and restore a ‘classical’ metaphysics in terms of the view that all reality is a matter of mutually affective (passive and active) response, in which habit is both degeneration (as identical repetition) and elevation (as non-identical repetition).

This is because it is theology that, in terms of grace, thinks the paradox of ‘a habit at the origin’. Thus for Aquinas grace was a ‘supernaturally infused habit’

….Ravaisson, deploys this model to conclude that, if all temporal, evolutionary being is habitual, then its deepest character must be that of ‘grace’ which implies for him at once both ‘gift’ and ‘beauty…”

Milbank also brings up this co-naturalness of mind and reality, mediated by way of feeling :


“Because neither the brain nor the mind primarily ‘mirrors’, we can see how the crucial aspect of thought is to do with ‘feeling’ other realities in such a way that one is both responding to them and asserting oneself in relation to them – in terms of a rather more ecstatically-inflected version of Spinoza’s Conatus. Thought is reciprocal – it establishes a real relation, precisely because it is a species of feeling.

If other things besides ourselves belong within the space of meaning…this will be because something already approximating to mutual feeling (without necessarily being fully conscious as we experience consciousness) exists within the physical world and is indeed its most primary ontological characteristic - responsible for shaping the sedimented habits that then constitute the regular shape of the universe, and with which human ‘culture’ is in essential continuity.”

You can download Milbank’s entire essay HERE

Reason’s frailty is the very reason that, when it comes to the conduct of life, we ought to rely upon our instinctual sentiments grounded in perception. As Peirce puts it: 

“We should chiefly depend not upon that department of the soul which is most superficial and fallible,—I mean our reason,—but upon that department that is deep and sure,—which is instinct. Instinct is capable of development and growth,—though by a movement which is slow in the proportion in which it is vital; and this development takes place upon lines which are altogether parallel to those of reasoning. And just as reasoning springs from experience, so the development of sentiment arises from the soul’s inward and outward experiences.”

In fact, people normally conduct their lives based on what they trust,. It is Peirce’s account of faith as trust that emphasizes both how authentic faith “arises from the soul’s inward and outward experiences” and how those experiences are grafted in to the conduct of one’s life. 

It’s a short, but idiosyncratic, essay, which you can read HERE