From the Tree to the Labyrinth (93 page)

Let us talk, not about the borderline case of the holes, but about the normal case of the absence of holes. There can be no doubt that if I take a fresh sheet of standard 8.5 x 11 typing paper there are no holes in it. Similarly, if I were to attempt to walk from one room to another without using the door but by going through the wall (or going through the looking glass like Alice), I would come up against the fact that there are no holes (or ways through of any kind) in the paper or the wall or the looking glass. And yet—as one would have to admit from a molecular, if not a molar, point of view—using an extremely powerful microscope I would see in both the paper and the wall an infinite number of holes or empty spaces, just as I am aware that the crystal atoms of the mirror are miniature solar systems with empty interstellar spaces.

The point is that
from my own point of view,
or in some respect or capacity, those empty spaces are of no interest, and therefore as far as I am concerned
do not exist.

Whether we call it primary iconism or use some other name, there is something we cannot get around as soon as we introduce an interpreting subject into the process of semiosis. In other words, if primary iconism does not exist cosmologically, it exists for the subject.

Let us take another look at the Peircean concepts. In CP 5.213 it is specified that “the term
intuition
will be taken as signifying a cognition not determined by a previous cognition of the same object, and therefore so determined by something out of the consciousness.”
⁶
If denying all intuition, however, meant denying that everything that happens in our minds is not determined by something outside of our consciousness, we might be tempted to believe that Peirce was opting for a magical idealism à la Novalis. But Peirce does not say “everything that happens outside of our minds”; instead he speaks of cognitions. If someone kicks me and I cry out (and feel pain) can we speak of cognition? I would speak simply of stimulus-response, which is nonetheless something that involves our neuronal processes. Now, Peirce never said that stimulus-response processes are cognitions, or that the stimulus that I feel when kicked does not come from something outside of our minds (or our brain). Can we reasonably speak, without being accused of not thinking
ad mentem divi Caroli,
of the sensation of pain I would feel if (for example and
per absurdum
) Paolucci were to kick me in the shins?

Faced with this stimulus, my brain would probably perform processes of whose complexity I have no inkling, as it does when it inverts (as if there were nothing to it!) the retinal image. We can say therefore that processes occur in my neuronal circuit that we may define as inferential or in any case interpretive. But about these processes
I know nothing
and, just as it seems natural to see Paolucci walking with his feet on the ground and his head in the air, it seems natural to react with a cry of pain to his kick in the shins, even if to invite me to emit it my brain has performed who knows what labor. And that the brain labors to interpret, often making mistakes in interpretation, is proven by the fact that the brains of amputees cause them to suffer painful sensations that appear to come from the limb they have lost. This does not exclude the possibility that the sensation of pain itself (once involved in the triadic process that transforms it into cognition) may take on a semiosic character: it becomes a sign, to be specific a sign of the fact that someone (who through subsequent inferences I will discover was Paolucci) has given me a kick. But as soon as I become aware of pain and cry out, I assume that pain as
a point of departure in an upward direction,
to find out what it is and what caused it, and not
in a downward direction,
to understand how my brain
processed
the external stimulus. I consider that
quale
beneath a
molar
respect and capacity.

It is true (see Proni 1990: sect. 1.5.2.3.1, n. 6) that Peirce remains very ambiguous on the definition of sensation, and at times what I am calling the sensation of a
quale
is for him an impression (in the sense of a nonorganized aggregate of sensorial data), but there is no call (with a thinker who changed his terminology so often) to split hairs over lexical issues. In CP 1.374 it is said that the three categories, though they are imposed by logic and have a metaphysical valency, nevertheless have their origin in the nature of the mind and are “constant ingredients of our knowledge.” Of course, this could be simply meant to confirm that they are transcendental forms in the Kantian sense, and in fact Peirce makes it clear that
they are not sensations.
But in CP 1.381 he says that “
feelings,
in the sense in which alone they can be admitted as a great branch of mental phenomena, form the warp and woof of cognition” (emphasis mine), while in CP 1.386 he speaks of feeling as “immediate consciousness,” and something that “arises
in a active state of nerve-cells
” (emphasis mine). Nor can we forget that from CP 1.374 to 1.394 he speaks of the triads in psychology and physiology.

In short, if Peirce does not speak of sensations, and if he is vague when he speaks of impressions, he nonetheless alludes to states of
immediate consciousness
(see also CP 1.306). In CP 1.317 he says that “the whole content of consciousness is made up of qualities of feeling, as truly as the whole of space is made up of points or the whole of time of instants,” and in CP 1.318 he writes that these qualities of feeling are “a pure
priman.
”

I believe (when I read CP 5.291 carefully) that a sensation, insofar as it is recognized as such in an interpretive process, is already a semiosic phenomenon and functions as a hypothesis; but, as pure
feeling,
“a mere feeling of a particular sort, it is determined only by an
inexplicable, occult power;
and so far, it is not a representation, but only the material quality of a representation” (emphasis mine). “A feeling, therefore, as a feeling, is merely the
material quality
of a mental sign” (emphasis in original). What does the material quality of a mental sign mean? It means, I believe, that if I do not consider the word
dog
as a sign (and therefore, we would argue today, as a composite of expression and content, or signifier and signified), but consider only the phonation
dog
as it can be physically recorded and played back by someone who does not know English, I find myself faced with the material quality of the sign (the substance of the expression, so to speak), but not yet with the semiotic phenomenon developed and concluded in a representation and an act of cognition. The
feeling,
then, is not yet a hypothesis but the material occasion offered me or offered to my brain as a stimulus
provided
to allow it to proceed to the inference. “The hypothetic inference of the sensation is two-thirds written (the premises) by the nature of our sensorial system: it is a hypothesis, but our conscious intervention is limited simply to drawing the conclusion, which is obtained in an automatic manner.… The laws of logic construct the form of the sensation, but its content, that which arrives from without, is not part of it: the
feeling
is the
material quality
of the perceptual sign” (Proni 1990: 106).

I believe it is possible to reconcile this idea of the sensation as
priman
with a nonintuitionist theory of all knowledge as inference. Provided that what I assume to be the initial sensation or stimulus is recognized as such, at the molar level, in the respect and capacity of something that
interests me at that moment,
independently of all cosmological considerations.

When reading Peirce, we must not confuse cosmology and gnoseology. As I already remarked in
K & P,
two different but mutually interdependent perspectives are interwoven in Peirce’s thought: the metaphysical-cosmological and the cognitive. Unless we read them in a semiotic key, Peirce’s metaphysics and cosmology remain incomprehensible. But we would have to say the same thing of his semiotics with respect to his cosmology. Categories such as Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness, and the concept of interpretation itself not only define
modi significandi,
that is, the ways in which the world can be known: they are also
modi essendi,
ways in which the world
behaves,
procedures through which the world, in the course of evolution, interprets itself. In
K & P,
I cited Mameli (1997: 4): “Given that Peirce thinks and demonstrates that intelligibility is not an accidental characteristic of the universe, that it is not, that is, a mere epiphenomenon of how things are, but a characteristic that ‘shapes’ the universe, it follows that a theory of intelligibility is also a metaphysical theory of the structure of the universe” (
K & P,
p. 399, n. 28). The theory of intelligibility and metaphysical theory, however, must sometimes be kept separate.

Kant said that the fact that we believe we know things on the basis of the mere evidence of our senses depends on a
vitium subreptionis
or subreption: we are so accustomed from childhood to grasp things as if they appeared to us already given in intuition that we have never thematized the role played by the intellect in this process. Therefore even what were for him empirical intuitions were already the result of a work of inference.

We can construct a semiotics without a subject or (what amounts to the same thing) in which the subject is everywhere. In this semiotics there will never be a
priman
because interpretation will proceed by
mise en abyme.
But, if from the cosmological point of view the inferential process is infinite, because there are no intuitions, we cannot ignore the cognitive instance, that is, that edge of the semiosis that is formed when a subject (any instance capable of saying
I
that somehow enters into the semiosis from the material and corporal outside—what I am speaking about is a brain) installs itself and touches off a chain of inferences under the stimulus of something that, from its own point of view and only in this precise spatiotemporal segment,
attracts its attention.
⁷
The I in this case stands on that edge where on the one hand there stands, let’s say, the dog—the thing that interests him at that moment—and on the other hand, everything else—which does not interest him.

In this phase Firstness, as we saw, is a presence “such as it is,” nothing but a positive characteristic, like a purple color perceived without any sense of the beginning or the end of the experience, without any self-awareness separate from the sensation of the color; it is a potentiality without existence, the simple possibility of a perceptual process. In order to contest these
qualia
that precede any inference, we must take as our point of departure the principle that they constitute an intuitive moment, without our being able to conceive of further inferential processes behind it, in a sort of infinite fractalization. But I would like to remind the reader that the infinite fractalization of a sea coast does not prevent a human subject, who has a molar view compared with the molecular view of an ant, from covering in a single step what would be for the ant an extremely long and tortuous trajectory.

We are back, if you will, to the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, in which we must take into account the distinction between
potential infinity
and
infinity in act,
already present in Aristotle.

In the paradox Achilles must first cover half the distance, but before that he must cover a quarter, and before that an eighth, and so on ad infinitum, so that he will never succeed in catching up with the tortoise. It has been observed, however, that, although this process of fractalization can continue infinitely, its result will never be greater than one—as occurs in any case with irrational numbers, so that 3.14, however successful we may be in analyzing it, will never be 4.

If we apply this argument to the fractal length of a coast, where the
potential
process of division could be infinite, at least insofar as we can always postulate smaller and smaller microbes, this does not prevent Achilles in practice covering this space with a single stride. Achilles will cover a unit of distance appropriate to him in a unit of time appropriate to him.

Already Aristotle (
Physics
III, 8, 206) objected to Zeno that, among magnitudes, there exists infinity by addition (I can always find an even number greater than the preceding one) but not by division, insofar as the infinity of the subintervals into which a unit of length is divisible is always contained in a limited totality (never greater than one) which may constitute the object of an empirical intuition.

In other words, if, cosmologically speaking, there is never perhaps a Firstness that is not the result of a previous Thirdness, cognitively speaking there is a limit to our perceptive abilities, which experience as undivided something that, cosmologically speaking, is
in posse
capable of being further divided. What is
in posse
belongs to cosmology. What is
in actu
belongs to the agent subject.

What happens when we put ourselves in the place of a perceiving subject? Zellini (2003: 26–27) reminds us that:

Adolf Grünbaum [(1969)] recently demonstrated that the measured structure of physical time justifies applying the arithmetical theory of limits to the solution of the paradox. Human awareness of time has a base limit of perceptibility, that is, a minimal threshold beyond which temporal intervals vanish into inconceivable smallness. If we consciously tried to contemplate ‘all’ the intervals of the series (a), it would be realized concretely as a countable infinity of mental acts, and the duration of each of these would be larger than the minimal threshold that time allows. But this insuperable ‘minimum’ is an Archimedean quantity: when added to itself infinite times, it yields an infinite result. Consequently, the mental contemplation of the entire series would result in an impossibly unlimited period of time. This would happen, for example, if one ‘counted’ the intervals of (a) one by one, assigning to each of them an ordinal number. This would take more time than the necessary minimum just to conceive or pronounce them. (But it is absurd, Aristotle objected [
Physics
8, 8, 263a–263b], to maintain that whatever moves, moves while counting.) In reality, by raising doubts about the possibility of traversing the interval (0–1), Zeno exploits the unacceptable delay that is implied by reducing the series (a) to the corresponding mental acts of the counting process, but he fails to make clear that this process does not reproduce exactly the measurement of the physical time involved in the actual traversal.