Reading Readers Reading: A Brief Reply to my Interlocutors

Abstract

One of the central claims advanced in my book on Theosemiotic is that human experience consists of continuous acts of reading and rereading. The “texts” under examination can be as massive as the “book of nature” conceived in the broadest possible terms or as determinate as another human being with whom I am now engaged in conversation. In the remarks to follow, my reading is of the latter type, although my “conversation” with the five individuals who represent my interlocutors here is mediated by the written texts that constitute their critical reviews of my book. I have had the opportunity since receiving them to read and then reread them several times. The brief reply that is presented in these pages only serves to initiate what I hope can be a sustained dialogue with these individuals, concerning philosophical and theological issues that I clearly regard as being of the utmost significance.Given such a hope, my purpose has been to discern and then select for discussion a particular issue with which each review essay seems to be preoccupied, rather than responding to my interlocutors’ comments in all their detail. This is only a general rule of thumb for how I intend to proceed; obviously one topic can be so closely related to another that any adequate engagement with the former requires that the latter cannot be completely ignored. Nevertheless, my discussion is organized around certain clearly identifiable foci of concern that emerged as prominent early on and then shaped my reading experience of each of these reviews. Since the journal's editor has also invested considerable care in making the decision about how to arrange the five review essays in this issue, my reply will correspond to the order in which they are presented, with a few additional comments attached at the end in the form of a general (albeit quite “slender”) conclusion.I should observe at the outset of these remarks that each of my reviewers is himself the author of an important book devoted to exploring the significance of Peirce's philosophy for understanding religion. Brandon Daniel-Hughes, my first interlocutor, has developed an imaginative and pragmatically useful account of how religious communities can be conceived as embodied or “inhabited experiments.”1 I had the opportunity to review the manuscript for that book prior to its publication, but the conversation that continues here has roots that run even deeper, in exchanges concerning a series of scholarly presentations and journal articles that paved the way for this book's arrival in 2018.No author could hope for a more thoughtful and perceptive reading of his work than the one that Daniel-Hughes supplies.2 He recognizes clearly that I am preoccupied in my book with the task of complicating the standard account of Peirce's theory of inquiry. This requires decentering certain articles published by Peirce in the 1870s—typically included on any short list of his most important and best-known writings—while simultaneously shifting attention toward some later essays written early in the next century. Most notable among the latter, at least for my purposes in the book, is Peirce's 1908 article, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.” In my evaluation, it embodies one of the most useful summaries of his mature theory of inquiry, a philosophical position that by 1908 Peirce had chosen to distinguish from certain others (most notably, the “pragmatism” of William James and the “humanism” of F. C. S. Schiller) by identifying it as “pragmaticism.”It would be impossible for me to summarize effectively here the argument in my book as it was developed for various purposes. Suffice it to say that, on the standard account, inquiry for Peirce is a response to the irritation of a doubt that has arisen to unsettle some hitherto established belief; recovering the lost security that such a belief provided creates a problem that the inquirer is now motivated to solve. This portrayal of inquiry as a form of problem-solving is consistent with how Peirce typically described it in the famous series of articles alluded to earlier, published in the 1870s in Popular Science Monthly. Nevertheless, it is inadequate as a Peircean account of how and why inquiry occurs given the full range of his writing on that topic in publications spanning nearly half a century. What Peirce described as “musement” in the Neglected Argument, for example, is a playful form of inquiry that is unmotivated by any particular purpose established in advance and would be ruined if it was reduced to an exercise in problem-solving.Daniel-Hughes carefully observes the centrality and significance of my discussion of musement throughout the book; this is hardly surprising, since the Neglected Argument is undeniably Peirce's most important publication devoted to a religious topic and musement is the form of inquiry that he thought was most likely to result in the formulation of a religiously meaningful hypothesis. Daniel-Hughes appreciates the attention that I devote to this concept, apparently agreeing with my assertion that, of the “two stories” that might be told about Peirce's theory of inquiry, the one that traces it back to this form of playful meditation is far less frequently narrated. He wants to direct his own reader's attention, however, to the fact there is another story, that inquiry can be extended far beyond musement in order to engage a great variety of thorny issues and “serious” problems with which, among other inquirers, philosophers of religion and theologians must eventually be concerned (not least of all, the question of whether there is really any compelling evidence for the existence of a personal Deity).My own reading of Daniel-Hughes's book on Pragmatic Inquiry and Religious Communities clarified for me several years ago that—at least when it comes to matters Peircean—we concur about a great deal more than we disagree. But for the sake of stimulating the conversation that this special journal issue is intended to initiate, let me suggest that we may not agree perfectly about precisely how “serious” the play of musement ought to be perceived. I have become a grandfather in recent years, causing me also to recollect my experiences as a young father several decades ago, and it is important to recognize how terribly earnest toddlers (who after all are the “experts” in such matters) can be about their play behavior. To be sure, Peirce himself seemed to suggest that it can be a problem for the muser if her inquiry becomes a bit too specialized so that it is “converted into scientific study” (CP 6.459)3; indeed, he explicitly characterized musement as involving a “casting aside of all serious purpose” (CP 6.458). On my interpretation, as paradoxical as it may sound, this simply shows how serious Peirce was about maintaining this kind of activity as an exercise in pure play. Its very “purpose” (Peirce uses that word) is not to be constrained in advance by any particular practical purpose or agenda. That is why it is a tad misleading to characterize musement as “purposeless.” Its teleology is genuinely “developmental” in the sense that Peirce carefully described elsewhere, allowing goals that might shape the activity to arise spontaneously in the process of musement itself.Now, Daniel-Hughes is anxious not to be caricatured as a “spoil sport” who is constantly urging the muser to “put away childish play and engage in serious adult inquiries.” In his view, “there is nothing inherently immature in cultivating a taste for musement.” Nevertheless, he adds—and this may be the key to understanding our subtle difference of opinion—“from the perspective of the more serious inquiries that come later, it may always be viewed as a preparatory exercise” (emphasis added). What I wanted to suggest in Theosemiotic, however, is that nothing should be considered “more serious” than falling/being in love with the God encountered in musement. Moreover, this playful form of cognition is not merely the preparation for other forms of inquiry but also in a very really sense their telos. In fact, the book concludes by making precisely that point, as I indicate in my Postlude the necessity of a continuous “return” to the “space” of musement, so that (much as Peirce recommended) it becomes a “regular” practice rather than a “sporadic” activity.4All of this is to suggest that Daniel-Hughes and I might want to explore further in our conversation how each of us understands my claim that musement is both a kind of experiment5 and a type of spiritual exercise, both a reading of the book of nature and a continuous practice of rereading (relegere). I take great pains in the book not to isolate musement from the other “stages” of inquiry with which I consider it to be naturally continuous. I point out on several occasions (as Daniel-Hughes acknowledges) that proto-deductions and proto-inductions are always already occurring even in this first abductive stage of inquiry. Moreover, it should be counted as “first” only insofar as we think of inquiry episodically, isolating and abstracting a particular sequence of thoughts from the ongoing stream of semiosis in which it is embedded. It is the “spiral” movement of inquiry that I wanted most especially to emphasize, with our inductive practices constituting the upshot of inquiry when viewed from one angle, but also resulting in the continuous formation of habits that then play a crucial role in shaping the process of abduction.In musement, we are encouraged to treat all of our belief-habits with a certain playful lightness of touch, to have them “as though we did not have them.” I argue that induction supplies many of those beliefs and that they can serve as the rules by which we play. (This includes the type of induction involved when musement itself is treated as an experiment to be repeated.) I am not suggesting that our inductive praxis has no other purpose then to facilitate musement as an exercise. Daniel-Hughes is correct when he underscores the importance for my theosemiotic project (especially insofar as it is conceived as a liberation theology) of the question: “What then must I (we) do?” He thinks that there is “no way to answer this question within the playful spaces of musement,” but if Peirce is correct, the very ideals to which the muser will want to shape her life and behavior in conformity arise and become the objects of devotion in the practice of meditation itself. Daniel-Hughes's extended and insightful exploration of religious communities as “embodied experiments” certainly does nothing to undermine my claim that habitual practices—what we consistently do because of our religious beliefs—serve as the ultimate logical interpretants of those beliefs (including the belief that something ultimately personal is discernible in the depths of nature). Spiritual exercises are among the things that we do, sometimes alone but most frequently as members of religious communities. And it is the continuity of both selves and communities as forms of semiosis that makes it plausible for properly motivated persons to embrace the goal of transforming all of life into prayer.6 (This is an explicitly religious version, I would suggest, of the point that Daniel-Hughes himself makes when he talks about “ubiquitous inquiry.”)My second interlocutor, Roger Ward, is the author of an important and recently published book that explores the significance for Peirce's philosophy of certain religious beliefs to which he was committed; that book blends philosophical with biographical analysis in a manner that encourages its reader to evaluate Peirce's religious convictions as being highly relevant to the task of interpreting his writings on a broad range of topics.7 Our ongoing conversation about Peirce, however, traces a path back several decades ago to a pleasant evening in the mountains of North Carolina, where we both had gathered for a meeting of the organization that sponsors this journal. Like Brandon Daniel-Hughes, Ward's reading of Peirce is basically congenial to my own; we differ primarily on certain nuances and matters of emphasis in our respective interpretations.One of those areas where some divergence might be visible is in our understanding of Peirce's voluntarism, a topic that Ward has made central to the account supplied in his review of my book. Ward reads the chapters of my book as being divided into two “triads,” with the opening chapter on “A Brief History of Theosemiotic” serving as an introduction to the whole. He announces early on that it is the second of these triads, on “Community/Discernment/Prayer,” that he has chosen to make his primary topic in the review, with a particular emphasis on community. On my reading, Ward is concerned that my stress placed on the “will to interpret” (borrowing Royce's phrase) of its members in the building up of any community may be excessive.I want to begin my reply by noting that obedience is an important concept for Ward, both in his own book and in the response that he has supplied to mine. It is not a term that I use frequently in my discussions of Peirce, but I have no real objection to the way that Ward employs it. Peirce was most assuredly a metaphysical realist, one who insisted on secondness as a genuine element of human experience. That is to say, experience is not a matter of simply imagining and constructing a world that we then choose to inhabit, but rather, it involves an openness to and acceptance of whatever forcefully and consistently presents itself to us as real. This does not mean for Ward (or for me) that there is no element of or room for creativity in human experience. It does mean, however, that there is something given in experience; even if we have no direct access to it in a way that is unmediated by signs, nevertheless, it places certain constraints on our interpretive activity.In my book, I strenuously and consistently emphasize the role that attention places in shaping experience-as-semiosis. For pragmatists like James and Peirce (also Royce, I would suggest), human volition is primarily an exercise of attention, a choosing to attend to one thing rather than another and in a certain distinctive fashion that lays the foundation for whatever else we then choose to do. I do not think that my account in any way rules out the sort of volitional act that Ward would classify as an act of obedience. To some extent (and here there may be a lack of clarity in how I develop the account in my book), Ward's concerns seem to presuppose that the pragmatic voluntarism I am embracing is more explicitly Jamesian than Peircean. I do take pains to soften James's somewhat “muscular” portrayal of attention-as-volition by juxtaposing it to Simone Weil's approach to this issue, her rather sharp contrast (and for reasons that are religiously motivated) between attention and volition. Nevertheless, the Jamesian philosophy does seem more directly focused on individual, episodic acts of will, on how one chooses at each moment to direct attention and thus to shape the quality of one's experiences and the character of one's memories. As a Peircean, I am ultimately concerned about the development of certain habits of volition, many of which are dramatically shaped by our participation in certain communal practices. And so, I would absolutely agree with Ward that “Peirce does not balance the community of interpretation completely on the will of individuals.”I also affirm in the book the importance of a kind of freedom that consists in saying “yes” to certain experiences and events that would occur willy nilly, for example, as in the religiously meaningful case of developing an acceptance of and relationship to one's own death. In all of these instances—an inquirer being open and responsive to the “secondness” of experience; the shaping of habits of attention through participation in traditional activities and communal practices; the exercising of freedom in a way that may change the meaning but not the fact of what occurs—it might make sense from a certain religious perspective to follow Ward and to talk about “obedience.” I have no serious objection to doing so.This raises questions that Ward does not pursue in his comments, however, about the function of theosemiotic as critique, about both the possibility and necessity of submitting not only ourselves, but also those habit-forming institutions and communities to which we pledge loyalty and obedience, to serious critical scrutiny. Even if one considers obedience as a response to the will of God as it is manifested to human inquirers, the divine volition is always mediated by semiosis, thus, vulnerable to distortion or occlusion. To recognize that the semiotic results established by communities of interpretation are typically more reliable than those achieved by individual interpreters, as Ward does in his review, is not to eliminate the need for theosemiotic as critique. Ward contends that “New possibilities of meaning emerge as communal action is manifested in inquiry, no longer dependent on the mind or life of single individuals.” Nevertheless, communities as well as individuals can fail in their inquiries; moreover, individuals sometimes need to speak in a prophetic voice in order to exercise a type of volition that acts as a form of resistance to communal “inquiries” gone astray.This is a continuous balancing act for any careful reader of Peirce, that is, to balance creativity in interpretation with what Ward refers to as obedience to communal norms and protocols. I think that the puzzle lies at the very heart of Peirce's semiotic, as he insisted that a sign determines its interpretant without ever supplying perfect clarity about what this means (certainly not an interpreter's “blind obedience” to whatever influence any given sign will exert.) Now it makes a certain amount of sense to regard musement as the most creative of all forms of interpretation, wherein the muser has the license to play with even the most clearly established meanings of certain signs. Nevertheless, I echoed the point that Ward is trying to make here when articulating my own concern that Peirce's emphasis on musement may be too individualistic.8 As Ward succinctly puts the matter in his discussion of the relationship between community and prayer, “community is vital both as the condition and telos of prayer.”While Ward shares my admiration of both Jonathan Edwards and Simone Weil—their common perspective on the austere practice of “listening to God while staring into the pit of non-meaning”—I think that he is a bit harsh in his judgement of Josiah Royce's celebration of the “loyalty to loyalty” as a supreme ideal. On my reading, Ward's analysis of obedience is quite consistent with what Royce had to say about loyalty (or what Gabriel Marcel and H. Richard Niebuhr, both influenced by Royce, advocated in their praise of fidelity). Royce's dream of an ideal or an unlimited community was not purchased at the price of devaluing our membership in specific, concrete, traditional communities (although it is nourished by an ideal, the loyalty to loyalty itself, that does serve as a standard for the critique of such communities). I attempted to make this argument in chapter four of my book, drawing extensively on the concept of “semiotic complementarity,” while trying also to juxtapose Royce's description of the Beloved Community with his vigorous praise of a certain kind of “healthy provincialism.”9 I cannot recreate that line of analysis here, but I do think that it does more to underscore my basic agreement with Ward on this issue than any fundamental difference of opinion.If Robert Corrington is the founding father of that philosophical and theological school of thought known as “ecstatic naturalism,” for some years Leon Niemoczynski has served as its high priest—organizing conferences, editing volumes, and publishing articles devoted to its exploration and development. “Speculative naturalism” is the preferred label for a particular “offshoot” of ecstatic naturalism that Niemoczynski has chosen to cultivate in his own work and writing, beginning with a Peirce-inspired book-length analysis published just over a decade ago.10 Both ecstatic and speculative naturalism are among the most ambitiously creative directions in which contemporary thinkers have extended Peirce's ideas for theological purposes. For both Corrington and Niemoczynski, the influence of Schelling and certain other continental philosophers rivals that of Peirce in shaping their systems of thought.Of course, Peirce actually identified himself as being a “Schellingian” of sorts (CP 6.605). Indeed, in some of his early work, Niemoczynski contrasted ecstatic naturalism with my theosemiotic as an approach to doing philosophical theology by suggesting that the latter underscores the Scotistic (referring to the influence of John Duns Scotus) rather than the Schellingian features of Peirce's thought. In my account, however, I attempt to trace the history of theosemiotic to its multiple sources, including both medieval scholasticism and German idealism. It is true that Duns Scotus draws a bit more of my attention than Schelling does in that account, but this is not the issue with which Niemoczynski is preoccupied in his review of my most recent book.Peirce's robust defense of a certain kind of anthropomorphism in his philosophy is quite controversial among religious naturalists who otherwise tend to be positively attracted to many features of his thought. This topic was raised by Daniel-Hughes in his essay, who concluded that I do a slightly better job that Peirce does by hedging a bit, rather than rushing to embrace a doctrine of anthropomorphism. Daniel-Hughes's concern (and mine for the most part, when I address the topic in my book's third chapter) is about whether or not there is a warrant for describing the ultimate reality as being vaguely personal (as Peirce does, and as Royce is also more than blithe to do). But this is not Nieomoczynski's primary interest. In whatever fashion the ultimate reality might be conceived, he is raising a separate question about whether species other than the human might also properly be regarded as “personal.”Niemoczynski accurately records my observation in the book that Peirce's anthropomorphism does not require the judgement that he must be guilty of anthropocentrism; but he justifiably inquires about the intellectual resources embodied in my theosemiotic approach that might safeguard against this sort of slippage. Like Ward, Niemoczynski is quite interested in my treatment of the concept of community. Quite differently, however, he is less invested in the task of portraying traditional human communities than in the possibility of reimagining the concept itself, so that a community might be extended beyond the human to include a great variety of other species. This is true for the concept of “person” as well. Since Peirce insisted that love is something properly directed to persons, moreover, since communities not only consist of persons but themselves can display a certain distinctive personality, Nieomoczynski wants to argue for a more radically inclusive conception of what it means to be a person. There is an important ethical agenda associated with this conceptual task. As Niemoczynski explains early in his remarks, “a gentle corrective to the possibility of anthropocentrism which could result from within Raposa's theosemiotic is one intended to achieve a more capacious sense of environmental justice and community that would include human and non-human alike.”This is an admirable goal, and I suspect that I could have done a much better job of developing those aspects of my book's argument that might have contributed to its achievement. Before making a very abbreviated attempt to address that shortcoming, however, I need to reply (also quite briefly) to Nieomoczynski's claim that my reference to homo symbolicus marks a difference between human beings and other species that is one of “degree, not kind.” I think this is true at one level. When I distinguish humans as animals with an extraordinary “ability to use and understand signs,”11 I am surely not suggesting that we are the only species whose members engage in semiotic behavior. That difference is one of degree, noting the level of complexity and sophistication that characterizes the languages developed by humans, the unusual facility with which they employ a great variety of different sign-systems, and the like. But it is one thing to engage in interpretive behavior (which Peirce insisted was the proper way to characterize every perceptual act) and quite another thing to recognize what one is doing as such. In the book, I carefully make this distinction between using signs and recognizing something as a sign.12 I would not rush to the conclusion that the latter is a capacity that other animal species possess or display. Perhaps some of them do, but I think that is something that would need to be demonstrated.The question here is about whether this occupation of a metacognitive or metasemiotic space is a uniquely human phenomenon, involving the self's awareness of a thing (and not merely the use of that thing) as a sign.13 A further question, relevant only if one chooses to accept Peircean criteria for what constitutes “personality,” is whether or not the kind of purposeful behavior that he identified as displaying a “developmental teleology” requires this sort of metacognition for its enactment. From a theosemiotic perspective, the self is a complex symbol (“living legisign”) narrative in form, a story that the self tells about itself, both to itself and to others. This is a story constantly being adapted and revised as new situations present themselves, with fresh purposes also being adopted and enacted. Such a self displays the sort of creativity—precisely by being both an author and a reader of its own self-as-story—that it would be difficult to imagine being manifested in the behavior of other animal species, even those that make steady use of a complex variety of signs for the purpose of communication. To “argue that each animal—whether human or non-human—has a unique life story,” as Niemoczynski does, is to assert nothing about its ability to read/interpret that story for itself and others.While these ruminations may have some bearing on whether or not other animals ought to be regarded as non-human “persons” (once again, a decision about this question would hinge at least partially on the extent to which one endorses a Peircean perspective on the nature of persons and personality), they are inadequate as a response to Niemoczynski's challenge that our communities ought to be more radically inclusive, and for compelling moral as well as philosophical reasons. As already indicated, I am not confident that my book's argument can be characterized as having directly responded to such a challenge. As an attempt here to address such a shortcoming, I can only point to those places in the book where I gesture toward what Niemoczynski might regard as an adequate response, while also indicating possible resources that my book's argument does provide for the development of a more robust and inclusive conception of community. With regard to the former, I do wonder out loud in the book (as Niemoczynski notes) if it would make sense from a Peircean perspective to talk about bonobos forming a community.14 Elsewhere, I insist that any theosemiotic properly grounded in a capacious religious naturalism (and conceived as a liberation theology) would require a “keen attentiveness to the suffering, needs, and habits of species other than the human.”15The key resource that I want to suggest my book supplies for moving in the direction that Nieomoczynski is pointing is its heavy emphasis on the use of a logic of systems rather than of classes for understanding adequately the relations that define and constitute a genuine community. The relationship of sameness, while not altogether irrelevant for determining what makes a community worth caring about, nevertheless, is decentered for the purposes of my analysis. Peirce's agapism and Royce's ideal of “loyalty to loyalty” both underscore the significance of a loving attention directed to others—of a dispositional being toward others—even those quite different from oneself. My balancing in the book of a typical focus on consensus in the discussion of Peirce's theory of inquiry with talk about semiotic complementarity, combined with this stress on those relations that define systems as well as classes, lays the groundwork for an argument of the sort that Niemoczynski is defending. Whether we want to extend the meaning of the concept of “person” in order to classify other species as such or choose instead to use the word in a more restricted sense, there is sufficient rationale on these grounds for including those species as members of what Royce called the “Beloved Community.” Even if they lack the metacognitive ability to tell their own stories, we have a moral obligation to incorporate them in our own.Among my interlocutors here, Rory Misiewicz offers the most detailed and sharply critical review of my book on Theosemiotic. While our conversation about Peirce and his significance for theological inquiry began fairly recently, it was maintained in a fashion that was quite continuous and intense during the period (of a few years) leading up to the publication of my book in 2020, and also of his own impressive work a year later.16 Given my recollection of those numerous exchanges, I assumed that Misiewicz had a clearer understanding of those respects in which our projects differed. Although a distressingly small group of individuals have invested energy in attempting to adapt Peirce's ideas for specifically theological/religious purposes, their approaches to the ex