The Aesthetics of Charles Sanders Peirce
Key Terms
- Truth, Beauty, and Goodness
- Aesthetics, Ethics, Logic
- Phenomenology, Normative Science, Metaphysics
- Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness
- Monadic, Dyadic, Triadic
- One, Two, Three
- Values
- Norms
- Ideals
- Axiology
- Plato
- Ken Wilber
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- Integral Theory
- Cybersemiotics
- Critical Realism
- Winfried Nöth
- Soren Brier
- Summum Bonum
- Transcendental Values
- Agathotopia
- Trichotomic
- Tripartite
- Tri-Loka
- Tri-Guna
- Tri-Murti
- Tri-Dosha
- Tri-Bhuvan
- Tri-Kala
- Tri-Veni
- Sat Chit Anand
- Satyam Shivam Sundaram
- Theoretical Ethics
- Practical Ethics
- Ethical Reasoning
- Pragmatism
- Aesthetical Goodness
- James Jakób Liszka
- Vincent G. Potter
Source: The Agathotopia of Charles Sanders Peirce
The term Agathotopia applied to the set of thoughts and to the semiotic doctrine of Peirce was the theme of the PUC/SP Philosophy doctorate thesis in 2008, in which occasion we defended this attribution to the vast, complex and original system that dialogs in a very particular format with systems previous to it: occidental Greeks (mainly Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Stoics), and Medievals (specially Duns Scoto and the oriental Arab Avicenna), moderns (specially Descartes), and others closer to him in time and history of philosophy, such as the British Spencer, the Germans Kant, Schelling and Hegel, whether all of them because they also contemplated the cosmology and the anthropology in their phenomenological, epistemological and ontological principals, whether because they sought harmony or questioned the relationship between the universal and the individual, the ideal and the real, the general and the particular, the mind and matter, whether they deal with metaphysics, mathematics and logic and even, whether because they contemplated the Goodness — Beauty, Good and Real, the classical triadic relation found by Peirce in the Normative sciences and in the Summum Bonum (Bacha 1998 2003; Engel-Tiercelin 1993; Parker 2003; Pfeifer 1971; Santaella 2000; Silveira 2003/2007; Sini 2006)
Source: Theatre at the Birth of Semiotics: Charles Sanders Peirce, François Delsarte, and Steele Mackaye
Source: Theatre at the Birth of Semiotics: Charles Sanders Peirce, François Delsarte, and Steele Mackaye
Source: Peirce, Pragmatism, and The Right Way of Thinking
Source: Peirce, Pragmatism, and The Right Way of Thinking
Source: Peirce, Pragmatism, and The Right Way of Thinking
Source: Peirce, Pragmatism, and The Right Way of Thinking
Source: Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Value
Values as Norms in the Normative Sciences
The 19th-century philosophy of value emerged from economics, esthetics, and ethics (Rescher, 2017, pp. 8-9). Both Lotze and Hartmann developed their theories of value mainly in the domains of ethics and aesthetics.
For Peirce, aesthetics and ethics are only the first two of three philosophical sciences of values. The third is logic. The three constitute a triad of sciences that Peirce established within his general system of the sciences under the designation “normative sciences”. Peirce did not claim to be the inventor of the term but attributed it to Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834): “The word normative was invented in the school of Schleiermacher. The majority of writers who make use of it tell us that there are three normative sciences, logic, esthetics, and ethics, the doctrines of the true, the beautiful, and the good, a triad of ideals which has been recognized since antiquity” (“Ultimate Goods”, CP 1.575, 1902). The broader framework of this triad is Peirce’s general classification of the branches of philosophy as follows:
Philosophy has three grand divisions. The first is Phenomenology, which simply contemplates the Universal Phenomenon and discerns its ubiquitous elements, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, together perhaps with other series of categories. The second grand division is Normative Science, which investigates the universal and necessary laws of the relation of Phenomena to Ends, that is, perhaps, to Truth, Right, and Beauty. The third grand division is Metaphysics, which endeavors to comprehend the Reality of Phenomena. Now Reality is an affair of Thirdness as Thirdness, that is, in its mediation between Secondness and Firstness. (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”; CP 5.121)
Phenomenology is not concerned with norms or values since its “business is simply to draw up an inventory of appearances without going into any investigation of their truth” (“Why Study Logic”, CP 2.120, 1902). Metaphysics is not concerned with values either since it is “that branch of philosophy which inquires into what is real […] regardless of whether anybody thinks it is true or not” (“Reason’s Conscience”, NEM 4:192, 1904).
Normative science, by contrast, is concerned with value insofar as it is “the science of the approvable and unapprovable, or better the blameable and the unblameable”, Peirce wrote in 1905 (“Adirondack Summer School Lectures”, MS 1334: 36-37). Although formulations such as these suggest dualisms, Peirce argues that it is a “widely spread misconception” to believe that the aim of the normative sciences is to decide
what is good and what bad, logically, ethically, and esthetically; or what degree of goodness a given description of phenomenon attains. Were this the case, normative science would be, in a certain sense, mathematical, since it would deal entirely with a question of quantity. But I am strongly inclined to think that this view will not sustain critical examination. Logic classifies arguments, and in doing so recognizes different kinds of truth. In ethics, too, qualities of good are admitted by the great majority of moralists. As for esthetics, in that field qualitative differences appear to be so prominent that, abstracted from them, it is impossible to say that there is any appearance which is not esthetically good. (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”; CP 5.127, 1903)
Instead of dualisms, Peirce’s normative sciences study “the laws of the relation of phenomena to ends” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”, CP 5.123, 1903). Ends are “the essential object of normative science” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”, CP 5.130, 1903). The ends differ in each of the three normative sciences. “Esthetics considers those things whose ends are to embody qualities of feeling, ethics those things whose ends lie in action, and logic those things whose end is to represent something”, a formulation which shows that logic meant semiotics (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”; CP 5.120-150, 1903).
Yet, dualisms cannot be entirely ignored in value judgments. However, whereas ends and ideals pertain to the category of thirdness, dualisms are a matter of secondness, the category of conflict and confrontation. Peirce solves this clash between his two phenomenological categories in the normative sciences by recognizing it as a phenomenon of secondness in thirdness. Opposites, such as good vs. bad, are phenomena of secondness, even though we encounter them in the domain of thirdness concerned with final causes. Dualisms are most apparent in ethics, “the study of what ends of action we are deliberately prepared to adopt” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”; CP 5.130, 1903). Logic is less concerned with dualisms. “Every [moral] pronouncement between Good and Bad certainly comes under Category the Second; and for that reason such pronouncement comes out in the voice of conscience with an absoluteness of duality which we do not find even in logic” (“Lectures on Pragmatism IV: The Reality of Thirdness”, CP 5.111, 1903; my emphasis).
In aesthetics, however, Peirce argues, dualisms and value judgments become altogether superfluous since “there is no such thing as positive esthetic badness; and since by goodness we chiefly in this discussion mean merely the absence of badness, or faultlessness, there will be no such thing as esthetic goodness” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”; CP 5.131, 1903). Pure esthetics, as Peirce conceives it, is not a science concerned with values. As Peirce sees it, “There is no such thing as positive esthetic badness; and since by goodness we chiefly in this discussion mean merely the absence of badness, or faultlessness, there will be no such thing as esthetic goodness” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”; CP 5.132, 1903).
Thus, pure aesthetics can do without dualisms. It is a domain of pure thirdness without any secondness. “I venture to think that the esthetic state of mind is purest when perfectly naive without any critical pronouncement, and that the esthetic critic founds his judgments upon the result of throwing himself back into such a pure naive state—and the best critic is the man who has trained himself to do this the most perfectly” (“Lectures on Pragmatism IV: The Reality of Thirdness”, CP 5.111, 1903). Consequently, Peirce even has doubts whether pure esthetics, as he conceives it, should still count as a “normative” science at all. In addition to his doubts concerning the disappearance of value judgments in aesthetics, there are his doubts as to the applicability of the notion of “ends” in pure aesthetics, “because an end—the essential object of normative science—is germane to a voluntary act in a primary way in which it is germane to nothing else. For that reason I have some lingering doubt as to there being any true normative science of the beautiful” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”, CP 5.130, 1903).
Source: Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Value
Normative Judgments as Value Judgements Guided by the Ideal of the Summum Bonum
The sense in which the normative sciences deal with values is the sense in which their norms, according to Peirce, are ideals, guided neither by necessary laws nor by dualism, but by “norms, or rules which need not, but which ought, to be followed” (“Why Study Logic?” CP 2.156, 1902).
Ends, for Peirce, are final causes (Santaella, 1999), and philosophical final causes are ideals, which imply ultimate values. The norms of logic, according to Peirce, consist in “the control of thinking with a view to its conformity to a standard or ideal” (“Basis of Pragmatism”, CP 1.573, 1906). The norms of ethics have their “root in the nature of the human soul, whether as a decree of reason, or what constitutes man’s happiness, or in some other department of human nature” (“Why Study Logic?” CP 2.156, 1902). In aesthetics, the norm is the ultimate value of the ideal of a summum bonum [highest good as a goal]. “Within this principle is wrapped up the answer to the question, what being is, and what, therefore, its modes must be. It is absolutely impossible that the word ‘Being’ should bear any meaning whatever except with reference to the summum bonum” (“Partial Synopsis of a Proposed Work in Logic”, CP 2.116, 1902).
The values of the three normative sciences are interrelated in a way that the ultimate value of aesthetics, i.e., its summum bonum, is the supreme value of all. Since “esthetics is the science of ideals, or of that which is objectively admirable without any ulterior reason” (“A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic”, CP 1.191, 1903), its values of firstness are then, so to speak, passed on to the secondness of ethics and the thirdness of logic. “Ethics, or the science of right and wrong, must appeal to Esthetics for aid in determining the summum bonum. It is the theory of self-controlled, or deliberate, conduct. Logic is the theory of self-controlled, or deliberate, thought; and as such, must appeal to ethics for its principles” (ibid.).
The conception of an aesthetics that embodies an ultimate ideal that is also valid for ethics and logic is the distinctive mark of Peirce’s axiology. Ethics is founded on aesthetics insofar as self-controlled ethical conduct cannot find its justification in its moral judgements as such. It needs to find some ulterior justification for its values, and this ulterior value is the supreme one of the summum bonum. The reason why the values of logic are based on the ones of ethics are that “a logical reasoner is a reasoner who exercises great self-control in his intellectual operations; and therefore the logically good is simply a particular species of the morally good” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”, CP 5.130, 1903). In this way, logic, being based on ethics, which in turn is based on aesthetics, is also based on the ideals of the summum bonum.
An ultimate end of action deliberately adopted—that is to say, reasonably adopted— must be a state of things that reasonably recommends itself in itself aside from any ulterior consideration. It must be an admirable ideal, having the only kind of goodness that such an ideal can have; namely, esthetic goodness. From this point of view the morally good appears as a particular species of the esthetically good. (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”; CP 5.130, 1903)
Ultimately, the normative sciences are thus not only guided by three different kinds of value. At their root is only one, which is the supreme value for all. “The morally good will be the esthetically good specially determined by a peculiar superadded element; and the logically good will be the morally good specially determined by a special superadded element. […] In order to analyze the nature of the logically good, we must first gain clear apprehensions of the nature of the esthetically good and especially that of the morally good” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”, CP 5.131, 1903).
Source: The Origin and Growth of Peirce’s Ethics
My Related Posts
The Good, the True, and the Beautiful
Truth, Beauty, and Goodness: Integral Theory of Ken Wilber
Aesthetics and Ethics: At the Intersection
Charles Sanders Peirce’s Theory of Signs
Cyber-Semiotics: Why Information is not enough
Interconnected Pythagorean Triples using Central Squares Theory
Maha Vakyas: Great Aphorisms in Vedanta
Indra’s Net: On Interconnectedness
Fractal Geometry and Hindu Temple Architecture
Mind, Consciousness and Quantum Entanglement
Consciousness of Cosmos: A Fractal, Recursive, Holographic Universe
Key Sources of Research
Peirce, Pragmatism, and The Right Way of Thinking
Philip L. Campbell
Prepared by
Sandia National Laboratories
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87185 and Livermore, California 94550
SAND2011-5583 August 2011
The Origin and Growth of Peirce’s Ethics
A Categorical Analysis
Rachel Herdy
European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [Online], VI-2 | 2014, Online since 24 December 2014, connection on 23 September 2022.
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/1060; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.1060
https://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/1060
“The Aesthetics of Charles S. Peirce.”
Smith, C. M.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31, no. 1 (1972): 21–29. https://doi.org/10.2307/429607.
Charles S. Peirce: On norms and ideals
Potter, V. G. (1997).
(2nd ed).
New York: Fordham University Press.
TRANSCENDENT ACTION IN THE LIGHT OF C.S. PEIRCES ARCHITECTONIC SYSTEM
PIOTR JANIK
University School of Philosophy and Education Ignatianum, Krakow, Poland
https://philarchive.org/archive/JANTAI-5
Aesthetic Experience in the Semiotics of Charles S. Peirce
Codruța Hainic
Department of Philosophy, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
e-mail: codrutap4@gmail.com
AGATHOS, Volume 10, Issue 2 (19): 19-32
https://www.academia.edu/44612899/Aesthetic_Experience_in_the_Semiotics_of_Charles_S_Peirce
Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Value
Winfried Nöth
Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil
Language and Semiotic Studies Vol. 7 No. 3 Autumn 2021
Click to access f613b082-3b13-42aa-827c-952694c94830.pdf
The ‘Summum Bonum’ in the Philosophy of C. S. Peirce
David Elmer Pfeifer
Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1971)
The agathotopia of charles sanders Peirce
Maria Augusta Nogueira Machado Dib
international center of Peirce studies [*]
Proceedings of the 10th World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS/AIS)
Universidade da Coruña (España / Spain), 2012.
ISBN: 978-84-9749-522-6 Pp. 1337-1348
Theatre at the Birth of Semiotics: Charles Sanders Peirce, François Delsarte, and Steele Mackaye
Iris Smith Fischer
TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY Vol. 49, No. 3 2013
https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/24750/Fischer_2013.pdf?sequence=1
The “Infinity” of the Transcendental Properties of God
Charles Peirce on Ethics, Esthetics and the Normative Sciences
(Routledge Studies in American Philosophy) 1st Edition 2021
by James Jakób Liszka
ISBN-13: 978-0367746001
ISBN-10: 036774600X
COLLECTED PAPERS OF CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE
EDITED BY
CHARLES HARTSHORNE AND
PAUL WEISS
VOLUME I PRINCIPLES OF PHILOSOPHY
CAMBRIDGE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1931
Charles Sanders Peirce: Architectonic Philosophy
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Charles S. Peirce on Esthetics and Ethics A Bibliography
Kelly A. Parker
Department of Philosophy Grand Valley State University Allendale, Michigan 49401 USA email: parkerk@gvsu.edu
11 May 1999; PDF formatting and minor revisions 4 March 2002
Click to access CSP_norm_bib.pdf
Charles Sanders Peirce
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy SEP
First published Fri Jun 22, 2001; substantive revision Thu Feb 11, 2021
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/
Peirce’s Esthetics: A Taste for Signs in Art
Author(s): Martin Lefebvre
Source: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Spring, 2007), pp. 319-344
Published by: Indiana University Press
‘Charles Peirce on Ethics’
Liszka, James,
in Cornelis de Waal, and Krysztof Piotr Skowronski (eds),
The Normative Thought of Charles S. Peirce,
American Philosophy (FUP) (New York, NY, 2012; online edn, Fordham Scholarship Online, 24 Jan. 2013),
https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823242443.003.0003,
accessed 24 Sept. 2022.
The Normative Thought of Charles S. Peirce
de Waal, Cornelis, and Krysztof Piotr Skowronski (eds),
American Philosophy (FUP) (New York, NY, 2012; online edn, Fordham Scholarship Online, 24 Jan. 2013),
https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823242443.001.0001,
accessed 21 Sept. 2022.
https://academic.oup.com/fordham-scholarship-online/book/20962
Problems at the Intersection of Aesthetics and Ethics
Seth Vannatta (Morgan State University)
Response Journal, 2016
https://responsejournal.net/issue/2016-08/article/problems-intersection-aesthetics-and-ethics
Continuity and Inheritance: Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Work of C.S. Peirce
John Kaag
THE ESSENTIAL PEIRCE EP2
Selected Philosophical Writings
VOLUME 2 (1893-1913)
THE ESSENTIAL PEIRCE EP1
Selected Philosophical Writings
VOLUME 1
(1867-1893)
edited by Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel
Indiana University Press
Peirce’s Conception of Metaphysics
Joshua David Black
Department of Philosophy University of Sheffield
PhD Thesis, May 2017
Pragmatism
First published Sat Aug 16, 2008; substantive revision Tue Apr 6, 2021
SEP Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/
Peirce’s Philosophical Perspectives
Vincent G. Potter
Published: 1 January 1996
Online ISBN: 9780823284832
Print ISBN: 9780823216154
Publisher: Fordham University Press
https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823216154.001.0001
Peirce’s esthetics as a science of ideal ends
A estética de Peirce como uma ciência dos fins ideais
James J. Liszka
Senior Scholar – The Institute for Ethics in Public Life
State University of New York – College at Plattsburgh – USA
James.Liszka@plattsburgh.edu
Cognitio, São Paulo, v. 18, n. 2, p. 205-229, jul./dez. 2017
Viewpoints which Matter 