Charles S. Peirce's Philosophy of Signs: Essays in Comparative Semiotics

16 -Cosmology: Chaos and Chance within Order and Continuity

The question of the relation between chaos and order can be dealt with from many viewpoints, theoretical and practical. From Greek cosmogony to the scienti ¤c thought of today, it is the same question which is raised when Western man wants to picture the world he lives in. Our way of thinking has changed since the Greeks and one can hardly compare Greek philosophy and American philosophy, let alone Plato’s cosmogony and Peirce’s cosmology. However, even if their answers are different, Plato’s and Peirce’s question is the same and represented in almost identical fashion. GREEK GODS AND COSMOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES According to Greek mythology, as expressed by Plato in the Symposium (Le banquet in French), the ¤rst three gods were Chaos, Gaea, and Eros. Chaos (X$ow) was born ¤rst without any father or mother. Gaea (Ga.a)—the Goddess Earth—sprang from Chaos, and then Eros (*Erow), whose creative capacity, by uniting and dividing, shapes every being and thing. Thus, the essential mythological Triad represents and illustrates respectively the three cosmological principles : Chaos the principle of potentiality, Gaea the “unshakeable and eternal foundation of all things” (Plato), and Eros the category of Love as mediator. Peirce’s triadic cosmology rests on the same categories: First the category of potentiality, illustrated by chaos; Second the category of actuality, illustrated by the cosmos as it is; Third the category of regularity or “order,” illustrated by “love” as agape, not Eros. We will come back to that point later. - 16 Cosmology : Chaos and Chance within Order and Continuity peirce between plato and darwin EPISTEMOLOGY AND MYTHOLOGY Right from the beginning, the Greek philosophers do not sever image from thought. They do not advance any special epistemology, idealist or empiricist. They simply borrow from the Greek mythology the necessary images to express their philosophy. It is the very conception that Charles S. Peirce proposed when idealism and empiricism failed to explain the relations between the concepts and their representations. The only way of directly communicating an idea [concept] is by means of an icon [representation]; and every indirect method of communicating an idea must depend for its establishment upon the use of an icon. Hence, every assertion must contain an icon or set of icons, or else must contain signs whose meaning is only explicable by icons. The idea which the set of icons (or the equivalent of a set of icons) contained in an assertion signi¤es may be termed the predicate of the assertion. (1902: 2.278) The resort to diagrams gives substance or rather existence to all kinds of abstractions and especially mathematical abstractions. It is a pedagogical device, as old as the Greeks, that Peirce will justify in his chef d’oeuvre, the theory of Existential Graphs: The term (Existential) Graph will be taken in the sense of a Type; and the act of embodying it in a Graph-Instance will be termed scribing the Graph (not the Instance), whether the Instance be written, drawn, or incised. (Charles S. Peirce 1906: 4.537) HOW DO WE PASS FROM CHAOS TO ORDER? THE GREEK CONNECTION Plato’s cosmology rests on a static and rather dualistic ontology: What is that which always is and has no becoming [the Ideas as Patterns or Forms]; and what is that which is always becoming and never is [the things which are the copies of Ideas? [ . . . ] That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is. According to Plato in Timaeus, Chaos and Order are linked by the sensible and the intelligible. But the sensible and the intelligible are not the only ontological “forms”; there is a third “form” (eqdow), the chôra (xQra) without which the intelligible—the Idea—could not be copied in a sensible image—icon. As the Chôra is the spatial gap, the topow, the “hole” through which the sensible Cosmology: Chaos and Chance within Order and Continuity 163 can be reached by the intelligible, there is another “hole” through which the eternal character of the Ideas can be instantiated in copies. This “hole” is called Exaphnès (&Eja,fnhw): “Instantaneous” (Mattéi 1996: 191–216. See Wahl 1951: 167–172). Chaos (X$ow) Order (Eqdow) [or L1gow] Sensible Chôra (XQra) Intelligible Instant...