Creative Love as Heuristic Principle in Peirce’s Philosophy

Abstract

One of the most important essays published by Peirce is, no doubt, The Law of Mind, in 1892. In this essay the author theorizes on the growing and spreading of ideas, reflecting on their interactivity, and, without less importance, resuming the classical question on how the matter can affect the spirit, taking into account the Cartesian dualism as an aporia for beginning a possible answer, such as was considered by Berkeley, for example. In this essay Peirce throws more supports to his Objective Idealism, in which eidos is the deepest substance of reality, rupturing the mind-matter dualism by making the latter a special case of the former. In the present paper we reflect on the dual semantic sense of the word affect, pivotal in Peirce’s essay, by exploring its meanings of influencing something and loving something, trying to show that both are meaningful in Peirce’s evolutionism. As a matter of fact, in The Law of Mind evolutionism already announces itself, requiring that its forms be designed. This is what we seek as the second part of this paper, by exposing how these forms are conceived under Peirce’s categories, highlighting Agapism, the doctrine of the cosmic creative love, whose agglutinating power ultimately accomplishes the semantic possibility of affect as expression of loving something.As the last part of this paper, we try to emphasize our point of view that idealism and realism conciliate within Peircean philosophy, beyond the classical opposition which, in fact, doesn’t consider the real content of both doctrines, namely, the objective character of idealism and the defense of the reality of continua of realism. Lastly, we make some considerations on Semiotics as a science that is nourished not only by its phenomenological grounds and of what are values in Ethics and Esthetics, but also that it is re-nourished by ontology adjust its forms, its internal structure, opening itself for interacting with the forms which appear in the object for determining the sign. Peirce’s Heuristic context is none other: the search for a justification for Abduction outside of this announced context seems to us to walk in circles, hesitating between two options which certainly find no support in the author’s thought, namely, a tacit transcendentalism or a psychological anthropocentrism.