Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 11:11:53 +0800
From: Paul Bains <P.Bains-AT-murdoch.edu.au>
Subject: Laugh a minute ecriture.


"My whole method will be found to be in profound contrast with that of
Hegel; I reject his phil. _in toto_. Nevertheless, I have a certain sympathy
with it, and fancy that if its author had only noticed a v. few
circumstances he would have himself have been led to revolutionize his
system. One of these is the double division or dichotomy of the second idea
of the triad. He has usually overlooked external secondness, altogether. In
other words, he has committed the trifling oversight of forgetting that
there is a real world with real actions and reactions. Rather a serious
oversight that. Then Hegel had the misfortune to be unusually deficient in
maths. He shows this in the v. elementary character of his reasoning. Worse
still, while the whole burden of his song is that philosophers have
neglected to take thirdness into account, which is true enough of the
theological kind, with which alone he was acquainted (for I do not call it
acquaintance to look into a bk without comprehending it), he unfortunately
did not know, what it would have been of the utmost consequence for him to
know, that mathematical analysis had in great measure escaped this great
fault, and that the thorough-going pursuit of the ideas and methods of
differential calculus would have been sure to cure it altogether. Hegel's
dialectical method is only a feeble  and rudimentary application of the
principles of the calculus to metaphysics. Finally Hegel's plan of evolving
everthing out of the abstractest conception by a dialectical procedure,
though far from being so absurd as  the experimentalists think, but on the
contrary representing one of the indispensable parts of the course of
science, overlooks the weakness of individual man, who wants the strength to
wield such a weapon." (Peirce, A guess at the riddle).

"Let the Universe be an evolution of Pure Reason if you will. Yet if while
you are walking in the street reflecting upon how everything is the pure
distillate of Reason a man carrying a heavy pole suddenly pokes you in the
small of the back, you may think there is something in the Universe that
Pure Reason fails to account for; and when you look at the colour _red_ and
ask yourself how Pure Reason could make _red_ to have that utterly
inexpressible and irrational positive quality it has, you will be perhaps
disposed to think that Quality and Reaction have their indep. standings in
the Universe." (Peirce, Pragmatism as a principle and method of right
thinking, p. 188).
..........................................................................
Isn't this Deleuze's criticism when he cites Peirce in Cinema 1? Not 1,2,3,
but 1,2in2, and 1,2,3 in 3. (This was my original comment when i asked the
fateful question about dialectic.
..........................................................................
"When anything is present to the mind, what is the first character to be
noted in it, in every case, no matter how elevated the object may be?
Certainly, it is _presentness_ in a certain sense. So far Hegel is quite
right. Immediacy he calls it. But to say that presentness, presentness as it
is present, present presentness is _abstract_,is Pure Being! is a falsity so
glaring that it is a wonder to me that any mind,-let alone Hegel-could ever
be deceived by it. That the Hegelians find it all right does not surprise
me, because they let Hegel do their thinking for them. How shall i show you
anything so manifest? I wish we were out of doors. Philosophizing ought to
be done under the light of heaven. Hegel himself in the opening of the
Phanomenologie supposes that he and his readers are out of doors. But
somehow his theory that the abstract is more primitive than the concrete
blinded his eyes to what stood before them. It was more dazzling than
sunlight to him..................................................(Peirce, as
above, p.140).

One notes in these posts on Hegel a super extraordinary _abstractness_.
There is hardly ever a concrete example, almost as if this was too low for
real philosophy! Give me a little secondness everyday.

Paul, overflowing with humour.
Ps. Peirce must be one of the great satirists.