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Chapter 12 Charles Sanders Peirce on the Human Person  C harles Sanders Peirce asserted that the individual self, apart from other selves is an illusion. The notion that the separate self is an illusion runs contrary to the individualism that has governed modern Western thought from before the time of John Locke to the present. Political democracy and the system of capitalism and private ownership developed on the assumption that the individual first subsists, and then enters into arrangements with other individuals for their mutual benefit. The preeminence that each of us bestows on our separate selves bolsters the belief in the reality of separate individuals. Each of us seems to be self-contained and self-centered, and our cooperation and communication take place among ready-made selves. If Peirce stands correct and the separate self is an illusion, it certainly stands out as a powerful and attractive illusion and must have a basis in reality. To understand what Peirce meant by the self, we must probe his reasons for considering the separate self to be an illusion, as well as the basis in reality for the illusion. The idea of the self can be understood in the context of Peirce’s major metaphysical premises, which the following paragraphs will try to make clear. Peirce’s Critique of the Separated Self Peirce based his rejection of the self as a separate entity on his rejection of nominalism, the belief in irreducible unknowable entities. The nominalism of Peirce’s time stemmed from seventeenth-century British empiricism as initiated and developed by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. According to nominal-  127  istic empiricism, each idea consists of an isolated experience, whether a perception such as this or that tree, or a concept such as the abstract notion of a tree. The word “tree” in each case represents just the name or label of a particular concrete experience. The nominalists admit of no universal tree of which the particular trees serve as instances. Each of the experiences stands alone until the mind connects them through association. The experience of one object might resemble the experience of another, so we call them by the same name, for example “tree.” According to Locke and Berkeley, each self knows only it own ideas. Hume carried the notion of nominalism further and argued that what we name as a “self” consists only of a bundle of perceptions. Peirce, by contrast, held that no idea stands isolated from others. Each idea is signified by some things and in turn signifies others. Peirce called the continuity that exists among all things and ideas, synechism, a word he coined from the Greek word for continuity. Synechism serves as one of Peirce’s fundamental metaphysical beliefs. According to the theory of synechism, all phenomena consist of the same character and differ only in degree. Mind and body lie on a continuum. Some realities are more material and regular; others more spiritual and spontaneous. The embodied human self exists in communion with other selves, and only in illusion does the self exist separately from other embodied selves. According to this view, I do not completely constitute myself; my neighbor, to some extent is myself, and I am my neighbor’s self. This view will probably seem disturbing if not down right absurd to an individualist . Further elaboration will hopefully clarify and justify the theory. According to Peirce’s theory, each of us consists of a cell in a social organism. Before any other characteristic, our particular array of faults and limitations distinguishes us, as individuals, from the social organism. Such a one-sidedly negative view of individualism may have reflected Peirce’s own lifelong struggle to be accepted.1 But common childhood experience reminds us that we most easily call attention to ourselves by being out of step with social expectations. We base our strong lifelong sense of individualism on our blind will, a force on the organic level that falls below the level of personhood. Each organism naturally inclines to give top priority to its own survival. Human personhood, however, has the capacity for much more and can achieve self-control and live in community with other selves. The capacity for self-control presents a puzzle. If the self is an illusion how can it develop selfcontrol ? Moreover, how can the self enter into community with other selves who are themselves presumably illusions? This question provokes the more basic question dealing with how the self emerges and of what it consists.2...

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