[…] the love that God is, is not a love of which hatred is the contrary; otherwise Satan would be a coördinate power; but it is a love which embraces hatred as an imperfect stage of it, an Anteros – yea, even needs hatred and hatefulness as its object. For self-love is no love; so if God’s self is love, that which he loves must be defect of love; just as a luminary can light up only that which otherwise would be dark. Henry James, the Swedenborgian, says: ‘It is no doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love to love one’s own in another, to love another for his conformity to one’s self: but nothing can be in more flagrant contrast with the creative Love, all whose tenderness ex vi termini must be reserved only for what intrinsically is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself’. (CP 6.287)
The Peircean concept of reason fired by love calls to mind Welby’s own association between love and logic. An example from her writings is the following passage from a letter to Peirce of 22 December 1903:
May I say in conclusion that I see strongly how much we have lost and are losing by the barrier which we set up between emotion and intellect, between feeling and reasoning. Distinction must of course remain. I am the last person to wish this blurred. But I should like to put it thus: The difference e.g. between our highest standards of love and the animal’s is that they imply knowledge in logical order. We know that, what, how and above all, why we love. Thus the logic is bound up in that very feeling which we contrast with it. But while in our eyes logic is merely ‘formal’, merely structural, merely question of argument, ‘cold and hard’, we need a word which shall express the combination of ‘logic and love’. And this I have tried to supply in ‘Significs’. (Hardwick 1977: 15)
In an advanced phase of his studies and from the perspective of pragmaticism, Peirce described subjectivity, the self, as a set of actions, practices and habits. Furthermore, an essential characteristic of self was identified by Peirce in what he called ‘power’ as opposed to ‘force’. The incarnated self is a centre of power oriented toward an end, a ‘purpose’. This may be related to what Welby understood with the terms ‘purport’ or ‘ultimate value’ in her description of the meaning value of the third element of her triad, that is, ‘significance’ (the other two terms being ‘meaning’ and ‘sense’). Power is not ‘brute force’ but the ‘creative power of reasonableness’, accompanied by doubt though not amiable, which thanks to its agapastic orientation rules over all other powers (cf. CP 5.520). We could say that power, that is, the ideal of reasonableness, is the capacity for opening to the attraction exerted by the logic of otherness on self. It converges with the disposition to respond to the other and the modality of such a disposition is dialogue.
The self is not understood as an individual in an absolute sense. In other words, it is not an undivided, closed totality or a coherent and non-contradictory identity (Petrilli and Ponzio 2005: ch. 1). Insofar as it is a sign self is at least doubled into interpreted and interpretant. As evidenced by the activities of speaking, deciding, discussing, coming to consciousness, reasoning, self is structurally, constitutively other. Self is not monologic but, on the contrary, is modelled by a plurality of voices, logics, parts in dialogue. Therefore self’s identity is dialogic, plurivocal, detotalized (see Petrilli 2013: Introduction and Chs. 1, 2, 3).
Echoing Peirce self may be envisaged as a community endowed with a capacity for criticism and projectuality, a community that interacts with the social community at large, conceived as a sort of more fluid and less compact person (CP 5.421). The other is structural to identity while at once representing the external force of attraction that shapes identity in an evolutionary process of development oriented by the principle of love, by attraction for the other – the affective other, the cognitive other, the ethic other and the aesthetic other.