SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 95
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| I come now to another point. Most systems of philosophy
| maintain certain facts or principles as ultimate. In truth,
| any fact is in one sense ultimate -- that is to say, in its
| isolated aggressive stubbornness and individual reality. What
| Scotus calls the haecceities of things, the hereness and nowness
| of them, are indeed ultimate. Why this which is here is such as
| it is; how, for instance, if it happens to be a grain of sand, it
| came to be so small and so hard, we can ask; we can also ask how it
| got carried here; but the explanation in this case merely carries us
| back to the fact that it was once in some other place, where similar
| things might naturally be expected to be. Why IT, independently of
| its general characters, comes to have any definite place in the world,
| is not a question to be asked; it is simply an ultimate fact. There
| is also another class of facts of which it is not reasonable to expect an
| explanation, namely, facts of indeterminacy or variety. Why one definite
| kind of event is frequent and another rare, is a question to be asked, but
| a reason for the general fact that of events some kind are common and some
| rare, it would be unfair to demand. If all births took place on a given
| day of the week, or if there were always more on Sundays than on Mondays,
| that would be a fact to be accounted for, but that they happen in about
| equal proportions on all the days requires no particular explanation.
| If we were to find that all the grains of sand on a certain beach
| separated themselves into two or more sharply discrete classes,
| as spherical and cubical ones, there would be something to be
| explained, but that they are of various sizes and shapes, of
| no definable character, can only be referred to the general
| manifoldness of nature. Indeterminacy, then, or pure firstness,
| and haecceity, or pure secondness, are facts not calling for and
| not capable of explanation. Indeterminacy affords us nothing to
| ask a question about; haecceity is the 'ultima ratio', the brutal
| fact that will not be questioned. But every fact of a general or
| orderly nature calls for an explanation; and logic forbids us to
| assume in regard to any given fact of that sort that it is of its
| own nature absolutely inexplicable. This is what Kant calls
| a regulative principle, that is to say, an intellectual hope.
| The sole immediate purpose of thinking is to render things
| intelligible; and to think and yet in that very act to
| think a thing unintelligible is a self-stultification.
| It is as though a man furnished with a pistol to defend
| himself against an enemy were, on finding that enemy very
| redoubtable, to use his pistol to blow his own brains out
| to escape being killed by his enemy. Despair is insanity.
| True, there may be facts that will never get explained; but
| that any given fact is of the number, is what experience can
| never give us reason to think; far less can it show that any
| fact is of its own nature unintelligible. We must therefore be
| guided by the rule of hope, and consequently we must reject every
| philosophy or general conception of the universe, which could ever
| lead to the conclusion that any given general fact is an ultimate one.
| We must look forward to the explanation, not of all things, but of any
| given thing whatever. There is no contradiction here, any more than there
| is in our holding each one of our opinions, while we are ready to admit that
| it is probable that not all are true; or any more than there is in saying that
| any future time will sometime be passed, though there never will be a time when
| all time is past.
|
| C.S. Peirce, CP 1.405, circa 1890.
|
| C.S. Peirce, "A Guess at the Riddle", 'Collected Papers', CP 1.354-416,
| Editors' Note. One of the drafts of this work is headed: "Notes for
| a Book, to be entitled "A Guess at the Riddle", with a Vignette of
| the Sphynx below the Title".
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