4. Self between love and logic, reading together Peirce, Welby, Levinas
Love is directed to the concrete and not to abstractions, it is directed to singularities, one’s neighbour not necessarily in a spatial sense, locally, but in the sense of affinity, a person ‘we live near […] in life and feeling’: love is a driving force where iconicity, abduction and creativity are clearly operative at high degrees. Citing the Gospel of St. John whose evolutionary philosophy teaches us that growth comes from love, Peirce clarifies that love is not understood as sacrificing self or gratifying the egoistic impulses of others, but rather as sacrificing one’s own perfection to the perfectioning of one’s neighbour: ‘the ardent impulse to fulfill another’s highest impulse’. Applying the lesson learnt from St. John, we may infer with Peirce that the mind and the cosmos it inhabits develop through the power of love understood as orientation toward the other, as care for the other. And recalling his essay of 1892, ‘The Law of Mind’ (Peirce 1892), he reminds his readers that the type of evolution foreseen by synechism is evolution through the agency of love whose prime characteristic, as mentioned above, is the ability to recognize the germs of “loveliness” in the “hateful” and make it “lovely” (CP 6.287-289).
Peirce goes on to polemically contrast the ‘Gospel of Christ’, where the capacity for progress is described as depending on a relation of sympathy among neighbours, to the ‘Gospel of greed’. The latter is described as the dominant tendency of the times, which has progress depend on the assertion of one’s individuality or egoistic identity over the other (cf. CP 6.294).
A parallel may be drawn between Peirce’s critique of the supremacy of the “individual” separate from the other, and Welby’s critique of subjectivity (see Petrilli 1998a, 2009; Petrilli and Ponzio 2005: ch. 2). Welby theorized subjectivity in terms of the relation between I and Self, criticizing the tendency of the self to transform ‘selfness’ into ‘selfishness’ or ‘selfism’. The principles of natural selection, of the survival of the fittest, of the struggle for existence as developed by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species are all based on the concept of individual as adapted from nineteenth century political economy and applied to the life sciences, translating therefore from the sphere of economic development to evolution of the organic. On the contrary, Peirce privileged the agapastic theory of evolution and even considered his own strong attraction for this doctrine as possible proof of its truth insofar as it responds to the natural judgments of the sensible heart (Petrilli and Ponzio 2005: ch. 1).
Recalling Henry James, Peirce distinguished between self-love, that is, love which is directed toward another considered identical to one’s self, and creative love which, instead, is directed toward that which is completely different, even ‘hostile and negative’ with respect to one’s self. This is love directed to the other as other, autrui as Emmanuel Levinas (1961) would say. On this basis we can propose a typology of love which progresses from a high degree of identity to a high degree of otherness. But truly creative love, as both Welby and Peirce teach us, is love oriented by the logic of otherness, love for the other, directed without second ends toward the other as other. We can make the claim that otherness logic is agapastic logic and that love, otherness, dialogism and abduction together constitute the generating nucleus of signs, senses and worlds that are real, possible or only imaginary: