It is surprising how Peirce and Welby anticipated considerations that were to reappear in the writings of a contemporary philosopher like Emmanuel Levinas, prime thematizer the otherness relationship. As he claims throughout his writings (see in particular his books of 1961, Totalité et infini, 1972, Humanisme de l’autre homme, and 1974, Autrement ch’être), we experience desire for the other even in the most insignificant social experience. Desire here may be understood as pure transportation, absolute orientation, an essential movement toward the other, the ultimate sense and signficance of interpersonal relations.
Developing Peirce’s discourse in the direction of Levinas’s philosophy of subjectivity, love transforms fear of the other, fear that the other provokes in self, into fear for the other, for his/her safety, to the point of becoming wholly responsible for the other, of taking the blame for all the wrongs s/he is subjected to. Love, reasonableness, creativity are grounded in the logic of otherness and dialogism, and move the evolutionary dynamics of human consciousness, if not of the universe in its wholeness, as we learn from the authors thus far cited. Levinas is critical of the approach adopted by contemporary philosophy to the analysis of language insofar as it insists on hermeneutic structure and on the cultural effort of the incarnated being who expresses itself, forgetting a third dimension.
This third dimension is orientation toward the other who is not only a collaborator and neighbour in the cultural work of expression, or a client for our artistic work, but an ‘interlocutor’. Levinas defines the interlocutor as the person to whom the expression expresses, for whom the celebration celebrates, at once the term of orientation and primary signification. In other words, before being the celebration of being, expression is a relation with the person to whom I express the expression and whose presence is a necessary condition for the very production of my cultural gesture of expression. The other in front of me, autrui as says Levinas, is not included in the totality of the expressed being, but escapes being, as its shadow, face, excess with respect to being. The other is neither a cultural signification, nor a simple given. Far more radically the other is primordial sense, the possibility of sense for the expression itself. Indeed, it is thanks to the other alone that such a phenomenon as signification itself can enter being (cf. Levinas 1972: 49–50).
5. Cosmology, semiotics and logic
If we shift our attention from the modalities of evolutionary development in the universe – the effects of chance, love and necessity; and from our focus on the concepts of self and thought in semiosis, where dialogism and otherness are placed at the very heart of the sign; and if we enter the sphere of logic to consider inferential procedure (deduction, induction and abduction), we find that in Peirce’s universe of discourse the categories of cosmology, semiotics and logic are interconnected by a relation of reciprocal implication. As Peirce above all teaches us, the self too is a sign and develops according to the laws of inference (CP 5.313). Correspondences also continue to emerge between Peirce’s thought system and Welby’s.
Each of three evolutionary modes thematized by Peirce, that is, what he calls “tychasm,” “anancasm” and “agapasm”, contains traces of the other two. Thus, they are not pure; instead, they affect one another reciprocally and share the same general elements (cf. CP 6.303).