SIX

From a Broader Point
of View

I. ALONG THE GREAT DIVIDE. In view of the last section of chapter 5, Peirce’s “man-mind ≈ sign” equation, which, when extrapolated to the limit, becomes “cosmos ≈ sign ≈ mind,” bears further commentary. Peirce grounds his (1) objective idealism, (2) tychism, and (3) synechism on the assumptions that, to recap, (1) all that is is mind, matter being congealed mind, (2) all originary actions are a matter of pure vagueness and chance, and (3) actions tend increasingly toward continuity and generality.

Peirce took pains to point out that his “everything is mind” postulate coincides with the experimental evidence available to him during his day. In 1891 he attributed mind of a rudimentary sort to life-slimes and protoplasm. Given their reaction to certain stimuli, he argued, they feel, possessing a primitive form of consciousness, and hence they exercise the basic functions of mind. To the questions, “What mechanistic framework can account for this phenomenon?” and “What molecular composition can possibly cause feeling, mind, and consciousness?” he responded that an answer cannot be easily forthcoming, since mind is (pluralistically and nootemporally) irreversible, while inanimate matter, according to classical laws, is (monistically and eotemporally) reversible (CP:6.127). Yet mind and matter constantly engage in interaction. In fact, mind, from a complementary vantage, is matter, and vice versa (CP:7.370, 8.168). It would be a mistake, we are told,

to conceive of the psychical and the physical aspects of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct. Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness. These two views are combined when we remember that mechanical laws are nothing but acquired habits, like all the regularities of mind, including the tendency to take habit itself; and that this action of habit is nothing but generalization, and generalization is nothing but the spreading of feelings. (CP:6.268)

This implies that the mind/matter dualism must be tossed in the trash can in favor of synechism. For everything, Peirce argued time and again, is continuously related to everything else such that “all phenomena are of one character, though some are more mental and spontaneous, others more material and regular” (CP:7.570). Rejecting the mind/matter dichotomy thus, we once again appear to be driven to hylopathy, otherwise termed monism (CP:6.24). One cannot, it seems, embrace both pluralism and monism at the same time. Nevertheless, Peirce repeatedly tried to plunge between the Scylla of the impossibility of conceptualizing the monadic realm and the Charybdis of myriad particulars between a consummate Firstness-Thirdness on the one hand and the ultimate nominalist extension of Secondness on the other. This enigmatic “monistic” inclination must be further qualified.

Peirce’s remark of 1891 that the traditional form of Cartesian dualism “will hardly find defenders today” was, in retrospect, rather optimistic. However, in his fellow pragmatist William James—whom he on occasion severely criticized—we find another champion of the idea that subjectivity and objectivity are fused, if not hopelessly con-fused. James writes:

Let us take outer perception, the direct sensation which, for example, the walls of these rooms give us. Can we say that the psychical and the physical are absolutely heterogeneous? On the contrary, they are so little heterogeneous that if we adopt the common-sense point of view, if we disregard all explanatory inventions—molecules and ether waves, for example, which at bottom are metaphysical entities—if, in short, we take reality on which our vital interests rest and from which all our actions proceed, this sensible reality and the sensation which we have of it are absolutely identical one with the other at the time the sensation occurs. . . . In this instance, the content of the physical is none other than the psychical. (James 1968:186)

James’s intriguing, aberrant sort of “monism,” though simple enough in principle, is still mind-boggling, for it implies that when the originary split (cut, mark) is exercised, our world, as well as our-selves, remains mutilated and no more than partial. As Spencer-Brown (1979:105) puts it, the world “is itself (i.e., as indistinct from itself),” but once the subject is separated from the object, the world has made itself “distinct from, and therefore false to, itself.” This artificiality cannot be “real,” since the total world always must be indistinct from itself, hence any further distinction will be illusory. Such “monistic,” that is, nondual, consciousness, then, cannot itself be a clear and distinct idea or thought. Neither can it be put into words. Much as the Eastern sages tell us, it is pure, unadulterated experience. Ideas, thoughts, words—signs all—cannot iconically mirror it, indexically point to it, or symbolically represent it, for they are part of that very experience—thus Schrödinger’s quasi-mystical words that apparently defy intellection. Monistic consciousness is not a luminous mass of mush. Indeed, it exists exactly as it does for pure experience, but not for signs perceived, conceived, and said as such and such. The dancer and the dance are one, the knower is simultaneously the known.

In Peirce’s conception of things, the only feasible answer is that the phenomenon cannot be explained except indirectly by way of the concession that physical happenings are but underdeveloped manifestations of psychical happenings. Initially matter behaves according to pure chance, but it slowly takes on uniformity of action, continually evolving according to specific modes of habit formation that cannot be accounted for in mechanistic terms (CP:6.238-71; also 6.301).

The upshot is, then, that the universe of mind ultimately coincides, as a final interpretant, with the universe of matter (CP:6.501; also Holmes 1964). Mind is not merely the outgrowth of or an entity emerging from the brain, nor do its activities parallel brain activities, nor is it merely nothing but brain activity. Peirce was aware of the work in physiology of his day pointing to the fact that after brain damage “other parts of the brain are made to do the work, after a fashion, with perhaps other parts of the body” (CP:7-376). It is entirely mistaken, Peirce therefore believed, to claim that the mind dwells exclusively in the brain “as something within this person or that, belonging to him and correlative to the real world” (CP:5.128).

In fact, Peirce once made the apparently outlandish remark that, regarding language, it is more valid to state that it exists in the speaker’s tongue or the author’s book than in a brain (CP:7.364). It exists no more in the brain than do emotions in the heart. The tongue that speaks and the hand that writes, once having taken on habit, possess a life of their own: they do what they do best, following pathways of least resistance, often in spite of, or in addition to, the intentions of their erstwhile master—i.e., embedded, automatized activity. These are habits which are “taken, lost, replaced continually, and felt, no matter how. Mostly no doubt lodged in nerve matter, but not necessarily so” (CP:8.85). Mind and its product, thought, then, appear in rudimentary form in slime molds and protoplasm, as well as, to repeat, “in the work of bees, of crystals, and through the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there” (CP:4-551; for problems with this notion, see Holmes 1964). True to Peirce’s antidualism, there is no clear-cut line of demarcation between res extensa and res cogitans.¹

More firmly to place Peirce’s formulation within Spencer-Brown’s ball of wax, the contrived split between subject and object forming an illusory severance between thinker and thought, perceiver and world, necessarily evinces a time component, since space and time themselves are not Newtonian dichotomies but make up a continuum: a separation in space is also a separation in time. Some-thing which has become a distinction appears as a quality (First), but it is not a full sign as such until it has been mediated by an increment of time, a difference and deferment, such that it becomes this-here thing, a some-thing (Second), as such and such (Third). Thus it can be said from one perspective that there are two separations, first spatial and then temporal, which ultimately merge into one. Life—of a sign or any other organism—is created in space, and it begins its journey in time until it reaches its destination, at which point a conjunctionis oppositorum is enacted, death having once again closed the gap between space and time.

This necessarily introduces us to the broader ramifications of the mindmatter conjunction. Ultimately, Peirce believed physical reality consists of discrete bits and pieces composing a set of underdeveloped parts of a cosmic process, mind. Mind is another name for semiosis, which incorporates any and all “semiotically real” or “semiotically objective” worlds “out there” as well as any and all “semiotically real” universes “in here.” The conjunction of these two “realities” constitutes the cornerstone of Peirce’s objective idealism, which, as I have pointed out, embraces both methodological-epistemological realism and ontological-objective idealism, which must be subject to a more penetrating look.² A portion of Robert Almeder’s (1980: 148-59) critique of this fusion of “isms,” and especially of the finite with the absolute, bears full citation:

If, on the one hand, real external objects are causally and logically independent of finite minds, but are not causally or logically independent of the Absolute Mind (since they are of its nature and since without the Absolute they would not exist), then there must be a real distinction between finite minds and the mind of the Absolute—otherwise the union of epistemological realism and objective idealism is impossible. For, if the aggregate of finite minds (Community) is, in fact, identical to the Absolute Mind (as Peirce sometimes suggests), then either there really are no finite minds or the Absolute mind is finite, being simply the collection of finite minds; but if there are not [sic] finite minds, then it is nonsense to defend the thesis of epistemological realism, and if the Absolute Mind is finite, then it would be nonsense for an epistemological realist to claim that physical objects do not exist independently of the Absolute Mind. If, on the other hand, the aggregate of finite minds is not identical to the Absolute Mind, then the thesis that one can be an epistemological realist and an objective idealist seems tenable. But this, of course, only raises the question as to how it is possible to assert that there is an Absolute Mind which is the sum total of all being while at the same time asserting that there is something which the Absolute is not. (Almeder 1980, 156-57)

At the outset Almeder’s point appears well taken. He presents the classical dilemma with which one is confronted if one wishes to propound the notion of an Absolute Being endowed with the quality of mind and at the same time the notion of finite and physical entities which are not identical to the Absolute in the sense that they do not possess properties which are absolute in the Absolute being. If the aggregate of finite minds could somehow be coterminous with the Absolute, then epistemological realism and objective idealism could not both be adopted. Everything would be objective and “real.” There could be nothing that the Absolute is not. And if the aggregate is not coterminous with the Absolute, then the problem of there being something which the Absolute is not arises.³

Almeder, in face of this dilemma, urges that one cannot consistently be both an epistemological (or methodological) realist and an objective (or ontological) idealist. He does admit, however, that Peirce, in arguing for his doctrine of objective idealism, prudently relied on the claim that quality, feeling, or Firstness is irreducible to the properties of matter, which plays the role of bringing about the “clash” of the “real.” He also adds the corollary that Peirce’s argument can hardly be defended as a basis for objective idealism, since the problem of discontinuity and finitude contradictorily interjected into continuity and the infinite remains, and, given the mind-body problem, which resists a clear-cut distinction between subject and object, idealism and realism, continuity and discontinuity, neither can it successfully be refuted. In this light Popper would likely decry Peirce’s claim as no more than metaphysical mush.

II. FROM GRAND DICHOTOMIES TO COMPLEMENTARITY. In fact, juxtaposing Popper’s falsification thesis with Almeder’s critique of Peirce may help clarify the apparent inconsistency of Peirce’s thought. Almeder puts forth the stipulation that the cotenability of Peirce’s epistemological realism and objective idealism requires a concise demarcation between finite minds and the Absolute Mind. The problem is that such a demarcation “involves certain classical difficulties which Peirce was either reluctant or impotent to discuss” (Almeder 1980:156). This “unfortunate turn” in Peirce’s philosophy, however, is perhaps not so tragic as Almeder makes it out to be, for two fundamental reasons:

(1) The distinction between a given collection of finite minds and the Absolute is, by Peirce’s definition, fairly clear-cut: his ideal model of the Absolute is the mathematical continuum, an actual infinite. Since no collection of finite entities can stack up to it, Peirce, one must suppose, enjoys no warrant for mixing the finite and the infinite. Regarding knowledge, Popper (1974) commits the same sin when he points out that, as our knowledge is destined to remain finite, or better, for practical purposes infinitesimal, our ignorance will always be infinite, since extracting a finite section from the infinite still leaves it with its same quality of infinitude. In addition, since the Absolute, or Truth, is infinite, it must be ipso facto unfalsifiable by any collection of finite minds, which also renders Popper in this particular case compatible with Peirce’s framework. That is, if we can falsify our knowledge, then it does not correspond to Absolute Truth, and if we cannot falsify it, then either it is not legitimate scientific knowledge or it is Absolute Truth, in which case we will never know we have it, for we cannot falsify it. In other words, we must be wrong as many times as we can, for therein lies our only possibility of approximating (asymptotically, Peirce would chime in) the Truth. (Peirce’s scheme of things also fits the Spencer-Brownian universe necessarily mutilating itself so as to look at [know] itself. The [finite] knower sets himself apart from the [infinitely variable] universe, which cannot be known because of the incompatibility between the knower’s [deluded] desire for infinitude and his infinitesimal capacities.)

(2) Peirce’s contention that feeling is irreducible to material properties is partly exonerated if we accept the notion that Firstness is a superposition of possibilities, any one of which can at a given moment become actualized into the domain of the “semiotically real.” Firstness, precisely, is irreducible to Secondness. It is an unruly sea of vagueness as opposed to this-hereness, the implicate as opposed to the explicate, the nonselective, nondistinguished, and nonindicated as opposed to the actualized. However, Thirdness, one must bear in mind, is capable of mediating between the two.⁴

Now, (2), when placed in our contemporary milieu, is predicated on the assumption, for some years on the rise, that the world does not present itself to us conveniently fractured at its necessary joints consisting of systems, subsystems, and contexts. Each observer, and each community, by agreement, and whether tacitly or not, makes these divisions according to particular and collective needs and demands as well as individual and social desires. This is true not only of human communities but of all societies, from micro- to macro-levels, cells to aggregates of cells, and to fishes, fowl, and mammals. Regarding part and whole, the aggregate and the absolute, finitude and infinity, it appears, in light of the preceding paragraphs, that alternative views, though at first glance they may appear mutually exclusive, are, at their lowermost level, interdependent and mutually defining. This effectively does away with dichotomies, traditionally conceived. Rather, each pair of interdependent terms is in reality complementary, not contradictory or oppositional—neither is it differential in the Saussurean sense. I write “lowermost level,” implying that at this level there is no essence, only form.

This abrogation of dichotomies lies at the heart of marks-cuts insofar as they coexist, with some sort of unspecified and perhaps unspecifiable purpose. An entity, such as an individual cell, must define its boundaries in order to separate itself from its background, and it attempts to maintain itself in this condition as an individual with a certain rudimentary form of self-identity. Distinction is thus the manifestation of individuality (ego, self-maintenance) in a collective unit (organism, society, subculture). The problem is that even Spencer-Brown’s distinction, which accompanies the mark, usually turns out to be some sort of designation of one of the two distinctions as being primary (“I,” “us,” “this,” “here,” as opposed to “you,” “them,” “that,” “there”). In fact, it is the very purpose of a distinction to give rise to an indication (Varela 1984a, 1979:84).

The notion that a universe of forms comes into being by the marking of a distinction is nothing new; it is germane to much Eastern thought, as well as to the underpinnings of the binary system of Boolean algebra and the construction of natural numbers from the empty set or zero by means of forming a collection. The empty set, ø = { }, brackets or forms nothing. Nonetheless, the brackets indicate a distinction in two-dimensional space—Peirce’s initial sheet of his book of assertions—upon which the brackets are ciphered—Peirce’s initial cut. The two-dimensional space itself is the indication of nothing, the void—that is, the absence of a set or collection of entities. Significantly, in this respect, the essence of Spencer-Brown’s calculus is, however strange it may seem, radically nonnotational, in which case the equivalent of the empty set first frames nothing, then the frame is discarded entirely (Kauffman and Varela 1980). This calculus is independent of the vagaries of notation, for only pure form remains, whose very existence depends upon the process by means of which the form was formed in the first place. This is perhaps best illustrated by the following experiment:

Sprinkle sand over the surface of a metal plate; draw a violin bow carefully along the plate boundary. The sand particles will toss about in a rapid dance, swarming and forming a characteristic pattern on the plate surface. This pattern is at once both form and process: individual grains of sand play continually in and out, while the general shape is maintained dynamically in response to the bowing vibration. (Kauffman and Varela 1980:171; see also Merrell 1982)

The form is there, bounded by no more than a set of undulations like the hologram introduced in chapter 2. The ongoing, dynamic process brought about by the dancing grains of sand is the manifestation of the form. The form is permanence, yet it is a constant flow of energy: discontinuity within continuity, finitude within infinity, so to speak. Its manifestation is a stable structure, yet at no instant is it identical to what it was at the previous instant: transitoriness within sameness. Hans Jenny, in his work on such stable but dynamic vibrating and undulatory systems, observes further that

since the various aspects of these phenomena are due to vibration, we are confronted with a spectrum which reveals patterned figurate formations at one pole and kineticdynamic processes at the other, the whole being generated and sustained by its essential periodicity. These aspects, however, are not separate entities but are derived from the vibrational phenomenon in which they appear in their unitariness. . . . [T]he three fields—the periodic as the fundamental field with the two poles of figure and dynamics inevitably appear as one. They are inconceivable without each other. . . . [N]othing can be abstracted without the whole ceasing to exist. We cannot therefore number them one, two, three, but can only say . . . that we have morphology and a dynamics generated by vibrations, or more broadly by periodicity, but that all these exist together in true unitariness. . . . It is therefore warrantable to speak of a basic or primal phenomenon which exhibits this threefold mode of appearance. (Jenny 1967:176-77)

What appears to be a form/process duality in Jenny’s discussion is actually not an opposition in the classical sense but rather a complementarity, which requires, for its proper manifestation, triadicity. The apparent duality is, at a more intuitive level, part of a triad in which the extremes of the original poles are related. Yet they remain apart, their relation being provided by a third pole, which can be given the following expression, as Varela (1979:99) formulates it:

* = form/process

The star is to be read as “Consider both sides of the “/”, that is, “Consider both the form and the process giving rise to it.” Thus the virgule provides for transition from one side to the other of the supposed opposition by way of the star. The starred equation offered here is a paradigm case: all such activities imply both form and process as well as transition. In fact, the traditional dualism between Being and Becoming is actually a complementarity, since any conception of Being is impossible without the notion of Becoming, and vice versa. For example, consider the aphorism “One must be somebody before one can be nobody.” It entails one’s becoming somebody before there exists the possibility of one’s being somebody, and such becoming implies nothingness (nobodyness) from which it was possible for somebody to be distinguished and indicated as somebody in the first place. Hence:

* = Somebody/Becoming somebody from nobody

is the legitimate equation, since merely to write somebody/nobody is to ignore the process and highlight the form as opposed to its absence.

This notion of complementarity is a departure from classical thought. The star does not indicate a synthesis in the Hegelian sense, for nothing new has been generated. It is no more than a bringing to attention the manner in which two complementary expressions are combined. In Hegelian thought duality is polarity, a struggle between opposites which are related by bilateral symmetry. Both extremes exist at the same level in the negative form: A/not-A. Therefore:

Form/process, in contrast, is chiefly, though not entirely, one-way and asymmetrical: the two extremes are related by inclusion/exclusion, process being more general and including within its domain of becoming the formation of all that is. Thus:

The terms A and B now extrend across levels indicated by the cut within a cut. They belong to distinct “logical typing,” so to speak, in the terms of Bateson (1972) and Wilden (1980).

The central nervous system controlling this “logic” is that of self-reference, and ultimately paradox, following Russell’s Theory of Logical Types, according to which paradox arises from a confusion of logical levels. Opposites remaining at the same level, A/not-A, are distinctions well-nigh impossible to specify either in nature or in human discourse. For example, male/female and all such supposed binaries are not value-neutral and viewed with an innocent eye. On the contrary. They are inevitably hierarchical, one indication of the pair supposedly being primordial and hence primary, the other inexorably taking on its subordinate role.

The problem is that symmetrical, reversible, and static states of affairs are never actually the case. Predator/prey do not operate as opposites of exclusion but call for a larger context, a unity, an ecosystem implying asymmetry, irreversibility, complementarity, and survival values insofar as the system can be maintained in some sort of equilibrium. Once the equilibrium is broken and, say, the prey faces destruction, the whole system is thrown out of kilter. Ecosystem is precisely the larger, self-referential domain constituting the legitimate left side of the complementarity, the right hand consisting of species interaction. Hence: * = Ecosystem/Species interaction (where the right side incorporates both predator and prey). Likewise, male/female can be subsumed into the all-encompassing equation: * = Society/Male-female interaction (which allows for the possibility of roles’ being altered, of equality, or even of the subordinate’s becoming superordinate). In this sense, pairs of the starred form entail different levels with a bridge connecting two expressions specifying each other: form needs process, and vice versa.

In short, (1) unstarred opposites generally depict symmetrical relationships, and (2) starred equations are generally qualified by complementary relationships. Unstarred equations are a matching, or a pitting of something against something else: A/B(not-A). Starred equations are a fit: A → B. Unstarred equations, in their pristine form, consist of mirror imagery, enantiomorphic symmetry. But, in light of the preceding chapters, exact repetition never exists in the nitty-gritty of “semiotically real” worlds—or the “real” world for that matter. Everything is always something other than what it was. Differences appear, which can threaten to become distinctions (either/or, atemporality). On the other hand, starred equations are quite effectively characterized by part-whole, container-contained, and cause-effect relations, which fuse time and space. The problem with complementarity is that, either in conjunction or in competition with symmetry—which is invariably the case in human social systems—progressive differentiation can snowball, sometimes approaching a critical mass. Bateson (1958) calls this snowball effect schismo gene sis, which can be beneficial only if controlled.

The combination of two-way symmetry relations and one-way asymmetry relations is thus seen as dynamic, ongoing, and proper for a valid conception of semiosis. For whatever pair of presumably contradictory expressions, the starred operation creates a complementarity wherein an original pair of opposites makes up the right-hand side of the virgule. Thus interrelations of the form (a) , however artificially contrived, are invariably blemished, and tend toward interrelations of the form (b) , which in turn threatens, in its interrelations with the first form, to ignite a chain-reaction effect. In other words, symmetries (or binaries), fabricated rather than found, are actually part of the comings and goings of all signs most appropriately described as the irreversible, asymmetrical process depicted in (b) rather than (a). A (an enfolded possibility, First) is perpetually unfolded into B (a mark-indication, Second), both of which are mediately and synthetically embraced by the outer orb (Thirdness).

In the familiar binaries, Simultaneity/Sequentiality, Space/Time, Langue/Parole, Synchrony/Diachrony, and Paradigmatic/Syntagmatic, the dual elements specify each other in the same manner. For example, as Saussure himself emphasized—though he often ignored it—diachrony is of utmost importance, and with synchrony, it makes up part of a larger, more encompassing, whole. Let us call this whole, consisting of a network of exceeding complexity, an “organism.”⁵ The equation now becomes: * = Organism/Synchrony-diachrony manifold. In similar fashion, langue/parole can be reformulated as: * = Langage/Langue-parole. Moreover, regarding the obstinate body-mind dilemma, we might posit the equation: * = mind/body, with the qualifier that body and brain are a manifestation of effete mind. A complementarity can thus be seen to inhere. One term cannot be duly considered without the other, and one of the two must properly be construed as a process from which the other arises. The equation, in this light, would more appropriately be: * = organism/mind-body. By the same token, Bohm’s cosmology in notational form becomes: * = holomovement/ explicate-implicate.

Observer/observed and subject/object, from this more general system, obviously compose a broader unity than the traditional mindset has hitherto allowed. Whatever this unity may be, it must surely encompass both expressions of the form interaction/interacting agents—the left side as the more general domain, and the right side as that which is subsumed within it. In all cases the system entails a Peircean dialogic between mind and minds, self and other, self and Other, interpretant and sign. The interacting duo does its dance while embraced by the larger domain. Dialogic interaction between what is and its other-Other (what is not) is crucial. In essence, as suggested in chapter 4, Sheffer’s “stroke” function, as well as Peirce’s “logic of relatives,” provides the origin by negation of all logic and perhaps all thought—which, by extension, is tantamount to the general semiosic process. The not both or neither nor of the “stroke” is transformed into standard unities (signs) which then engender other unities (signs). And what is the largest of possible unities? The universe itself, the Final Interpretant, which “is constructed,” Spencer-Brown (1979:105) concludes, “in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself.”

III. THE UBIQUITOUS MIND. Now, I do not wish to give the impression that I am attempting to vindicate Peirce once and for all. His attempted synthesis, for which he was often branded a crackpot during his day, is still looked upon by many as inconsistent at worst and bizarre at best. Yet his objective idealism bears on contextualization within many of the hypotheses, conjectures, and assumptions I have presented throughout this inquiry.

In the first place, Peirce posited neither an objective reality in the form of the correspondence theory of truth that ruled during the heyday of empirical positivism nor the computational/representational approach of many cognitive psychologists.⁶ On the other side of the ledger, he never propagated any Berkeleyan solipsism or Protagorean relativism according to which each person is the measure of all things. Rather, it may be said that he attempted to exercise a leap beyond what Richard Bernstein (1983) terms “objectivism and relativism,” though Bernstein, as well as Rorty (1979), feels he generally failed in this respect. The fine line between objectivism and relativism is also precisely that precarious pathway along which Maturana and Varela attempt a balancing act. They oscillate, in an effort to give account of their descriptions, between the organism as a self-referential, autopoietic, autonomous system grounded in its own internal workings, and the organism in terms of its interaction with its environment when coupled with other organisms (Varela 1984a, 1984b).

In the second place, Peirce appears hell-bent, long before his time, on “transcending,” by something rather akin to a principle of complementarity, the mind-matter—or software-hardware (wave-particle)—dichotomies (see Davies 1988:142-46). If on the left side of these three dichotomies we suppress mind (or consciousness) and replace it with self-’I’ in complementary relationship with matter, we have, I believe, a more adequate formula. Just as for Peirce ideas spread continuously to merge into one another, so Mind is everywhere and everywhen. Communication between minds within the Universal Mind occurs through “continuity of being,” which entails a swallowing up of the individual into the whole. A person, we are told, “is capable of having assigned to him a role in the drama of creation and so far as he loses himself in that rôle—no matter how humble it may be,—so far he identifies himself with its Author” (CP:7-572). The idea is that the general “law of mind” is precisely that: general in the broadest possible sense. As a bundle of habits, a person consists of “a connection of ideas” which make up “a general idea, and . . . a general idea is a living feeling” (CP:6.155), and feelings, “coordinated a certain way, to a certain degree, constitute a person” (CP:6.585). On the other hand, upon those feelings’ “being dissociated (as habits do sometimes get broken up), the personality disappears” (CP:6.585). And, we must suppose, in the same fashion, when an aggregate of ideas making up a general idea is dissociated, that general idea becomes fractured.

Many would charge Peirce—and by proxy, me—with some form of blearyeyed mysticism, whether of the Eastern or Western variety. There is really no mysticism implied here, certainly not of that naive and distorted sort according to which mystics are inwardly turned on and tuned out, more in a trance than in the world. This version of “mysticism,” recently popular in certain circles, largely overlooks the sayings of the great masters of every mystical tradition that the Tao, Buddha, Brahman, Absolute, Spirit, Mind, is fundamentally the essence of one’s everyday consciousness. One’s state of consciousness, no matter what it may be—sad, jubilant, depressed, ecstatic, calm, preoccupied, frightened—just as it is, is mind. In other words, the mystical experience is in the final analysis identical to whatever one happens to be doing and experiencing at a given moment.

Since Tao, Mind, or any other holistic level we care to paste on this experience is everywhere and everywhen, that is, tantamount to Peirce’s continuous welding of all minds, then there is no meaning to the question, “Where is it?” It is not there-then, for the finding or the grabbing. In fact, the question itself is paradoxical, for to ask where it is is to imply that one does not have it. One always has it here-now, so we are told, though it has neither where nor when. According to a reliable report:

The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient beings, but that sentient beings are attached to forms and so seek externally for Buddhahood. By their very seeking they lose it, for that is using the Buddha to seek for the Buddha and using Mind to grasp Mind. Even though they do their utmost for a full aeon, they will not be able to attain it. (Blofeld 1958:29-30)

So much for the so-called unspeakable totality. My introducing it in the manner I did serves to reintroduce Bohm’s metaphysics within a Peircean context. Specifically, the holomovement concept (whole [= monad] plus scintillating, vibratory motion [= pluralism, myriad particulars]) is germane to the tenor of the discussion at hand. In addition to overcoming Zeno’s paradox generated by the succession of “nows,” Bohm’s model of the universe implies the possibility for a quantization of time according to classical mechanics and of “real” time as a slice out of something comparable to Eddington’s (1953:46-67; 1958b) complex or “imaginary” time. Here we have the implicate and the explicate, the continuous and quantized or particulate—which is found also in Oriental thought. Hindu philosophers teach that the Totality, or Sunyata, is propertyless (neti, neti, or “not this, not this, . . .”). This implicate order is the background of possibilities from which the particulate or explicate domain can be distinguished and indicated, thus yielding maya (illusion) to become the world of discrete entities.

However, unlike Zeno, and certain Eastern teachings, Bohm’s implicate order is not mere propertyless stasis. It is, like the hologram and Jenny’s dancing grains of sand, constant flux, incessant trembling—the moire effect—without there being any overall change. Everything cancels everything else out.⁷ What is more important—and this places Bohm directly in the same ballpark with Peirce—the notion of implicate and explicate orders represents an effort to speak the unspeakable by means of the language of mathematics and sheer ratiocination. This is an utter impossibility according to Eastern sages, but, as marvelously illustrated through the works of Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges, which constitute literary counterparts to this ultimately futile mathematical game, what interests us is the sheer Faustian effort expended and the means involved rather than the inconceivable end itself.

Bohm speculates on the relevance of his implicate-explicate orders to natural language and mind. He struggles to construct a language of becoming appropriate for his metaphysics, which gives him enough trouble. But the real bugbear is mind. Alex Comfort (1984:168) makes the timely observation that

at one point [Bohm] seems to be saying that the mind, being an offshoot of a 4-space explicate, contains and intuitively perceives the “grain” of the multidimensional implicate which he postulates (a “Tao of mind”) simply through being plugged in to material neurones. At other times he treats mental events as a separate order parallel with material, 4-space events, but having some measure of autonomy.

The same subtle (con)fusion of the mind-brain muddle exists in Bohm’s struggle to explain consciousness, as we noted in chapter 2. Consciousness is construed on the one hand as an explicate parallel with the brain (the parallelism thesis) and on the other as itself an explicate of brain activity (the epiphenomenon thesis). But things don’t seem to jibe here. If the brain as explicate is the implicate for explicates in consciousness, then consciousness represents a third order, much like a psychologist watching a patient through a two-way mirror as she reacts to the action on a TV screen before her. According to Peirce this would be a non sequitur, for consciousness cannot be so reduced to or derived from the brain (matter) because it is itself mummified mind (consciousness). Most likely neither would Peirce be attracted to epiphenomenalism, which tends to place consciousness (mind) and matter-energy (brain) on somewhat equal ontological footing.

Moreover, if self-consciousness is introduced into the implicate order, knee-jerk reactions will certainly be forthcoming from all directions. The door is opened to a mirror-image regress of consciousness of itself ad infinitum, which recalls the best of Borges’s images as well as Schrodinger’s observer of a live-or-dead cat, who in turn requires another observer observing him, and so on—to say nothing of uncanny though logically worked-out notions such as Dunne’s (1934) and Matte Blanco’s (1975) infinitely regressive consciousness. It also evokes, to repeat, the unspeakable totality. One is not comforted much by the thought that thought cannot reveal the “real reality,” at least until one comprehends what the point is all about: Wigner’s (1969) “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.” It is not so much mathematical thought but that more mundane form of thought enshrouded in natural language or sensory images that is so incapable of the task. The trouble is that the helpless Western mind is so in tune with feeling and cogitating in terms of ocular images and abstract concepts, that he/she cannot intuitively grasp the forest for being surrounded by an arbitrary symbolic stand of trees that are neither heard nor seen but merely conceptualized.

If one assumes, on the other hand, that both the perceived mental (Peirce’s inner) world of consciousness and the perceived objective (Peirce’s outer) world are explicates of different orders, the first being primary and the second secondary, one might be on the right track. Mind, or consciousness, as a First, is an implicate that can be explicated as consciousness of something “out there” (a particular Second) which stands for something else (via a mediating Thirdness) in some respect or capacity (a particular interpretant or Third). By the same token it can be consciousness of itself, of its inner workings, mediately, and by way of something representing something else to that consciounsess. This accounts for a measure of autonomy regarding the separate order of mental events.

It also bears on Maturana and Varela’s oscillation between the selfreferential, autopoietic entity and its being plugged into, or, better, coupled with, other entities in order to dance in step to the tune of the Big Band. In this case, which is also one of Comfort’s (1984:174) suggestions, the operator that extracts explicates from the implicate is mind itself: mind in general is the process of explication, which equates it with the entire holomovement. More specifically, while one aspect of mind is the implicate, another aspect, the inner explicate (thought-signs), pertains to consciousness, while the explicate “out there” (signthings) is matter—i.e., fossilized mind. In this sense mind is the nonselective as well as the selective domain. A little mind separate from but at the same time within the Big Mind (i.e., the melded community of minds) defines itself recursively, and as such on a small scale it maintains a level of autonomy. Consequently, this little mind is a paltry and radically fallible mirror image of the self-contained, self-sufficient, recursively defined Grand Mind. Or so it would seem.

At any rate, Bohm’s unfolding-enfolding holomovement, Jenny’s grains of sand dancing in and out again, Spencer-Brown’s schizophrenic “I”-“not-I” universe, the “stroke” function, Deleuze and Guattari’s vacillating nomadic sensibility, all of them commensurate with V-I, or the “I am lying” paradox, defy any attempt to give them appropriate linguistic window-dressing (recall the words of de Broglie and others on the limitations of language from chapter 1, section V). In modern times, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and more recently figures such as R. D. Laing and Antonin Artaud, were driven either well-nigh or literally crazy in their struggle with the contrapuntal either and the or. Bach used it to the hilt in his art of the fugue, Nicholas de Cusa was fascinated by it, Pascal anguished over it, the surrealists reveled in it, Beckett and Borges teased it virtually to its linguistic end, Escher and Magritte created tantalizing visual images of it, and Godel raised it to a shrill pitch of abstraction. Some “postmodernists” claim they get along fine with such discomfitures. In whichever case, I trust that the obsession to know what it is all about will endure.

Perhaps, by and large, one of the most fruitful approaches on the contemporary scene—though prima facie it seems to border on the outlandish—is Wheeler’s (1984) quite Peircean idea that meaning consists of the joint product of all the communication occurring in an entire community. Wheeler’s suggestion that an explicate becomes an explicate in the full sense only when it is duly recorded and used as something that represents something to some organism in some respect or capacity implies that the only knowable “reality” is the “semiotically real,” a given universe of signs. For example, the blackening of a grain of photographic emulsion in a camera due to a radioactive emission is an irreversible act of amplification. A single photon can bring about the reaction, yet the grain contains an enormous number of atoms, hence the amplification is mindboggling in its complexity. And the act is asymmetrical and irreversible, since the grain stands hardly any chance of turning back to white once it is blackened. The irreversibility in question here is complementary rather than contradictory. The first is strictly arithmetic, the second pertains to the organic (bionootemporal) realm; the first lends itself to self-identity, the second demands difference and divergence from one reiteration to the next, from one cycle to the next.⁸

Wheeler takes pains to point out, in his opposition to Wigner’s strictly consciousness-constructed world, that even the lower organisms communicate with one another and in the process use the signs of their “semiotic world,” which as a result take on a less powerful sort of meaning in line with their relatively dim state of consciousness. Nevertheless, they are equally participants with human beings in creating a meaningful world (Wheeler 1980:63-64). In either case, the end product is the same: meaning is the joint product of all the information that is exchanged by a community of communicators, whether human, animal, insect, or slime mold, and as such information ultimately arises from a set of myriad quantum phenomena.

This is meant to be neither reductionism nor physicalism nor determinism. At the quantum level there is no classical causality or determinacy, but probability factors in indeterminacy. In the final analysis it boils down to a yes/no process, but it eventually becomes nonlinear and non-Boolean. There is no simple-minded physicalism but a complex probability state based on superposed wave amplitudes. And reductionism is out of the question, since a given wave amplitude is not actualized of its own accord but depends upon its context, its environment, its community of observers, and the entire universe, for its existence. Moreover, “meaning” in the sense of what Wheeler (1984) calls “Era III meaning physics” is by no means a mere set of “nothing but” happenings.⁹ Rather, quantum happenings have no meaning—i.e., “semiotic reality” is not “actual reality” as such—except insofar as they are subject to some community of actor-participants in collaboration with the self-organizing universe’s creative advance. In this sense, meaning is always there, though it may not yet be generated for some observer in some respect or capacity. It is the implicate with the potentiality to become explicate (Bohm 1987a).

To extend Bohm’s dye-drop-in-a-vessel-of-glycerine trope, what defines the dye drop when it has been explicated from the implicate medium is the jointly agreed-upon concept “dye drop,” as a meso-level molecular entity (Second) whose thingness is related to all other molecules in the system. What lies behind the drop’s appearance and disappearance is continuous, as quality, vagueness (Firstness). And that which endows the dye drop with its concept—the collective acts of the community of interpreter-interpretants (or observer-participants)—belongs to the Third order of habit, regularity, law, or generality. Or, once having been explicated, the meaning of a sign can sink into oblivion (Firstness) by embedment, subsequently to be de-embedded, explicated as a “semiotic” object (Second), raised to consciousness, and endowed with some form or fashion of a minute portion of its myriad possible meanings (Thirds).

Placing these three orders in the Varela starred framework, we have:

* = Consciousness-mind-self-“I” (Third)/(Second)//Mind(First)

where the single slash is inextricably artificial or false to itself, representing two different—and even incompatible—orders of the same phenomenon, while Mind, The Mind, is the possibility, as an implicate order, for representing the all-encompassing, synthetic whole, the Monad, which renders the opposition truly dialogical rather than merely dyadic, binary, or dialectical.