/lit/ - Literature

>>21969713
>In the context of this reformulation, Peirce was caught between the obvious power of the semiotic realm (hence his commitment to pansemioticism) and the realm of Firstness that is presemiotic. In addition to his repeated analyses of Firstness is his fascination with nothingness, which he divides into two types. There is a kind of 'greater nothingness' that lies outside the realms of the world, and is certainly prior to Firstness. And there is a kind of 'lesser nothingness' that is roughly equivalent to the cosmic soup of possibilities that obtains at the origin of all Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds. What is Peirce moving toward when he speaks of this greater nothingness?

>>20591242
Meant for >>20591218

See also:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CHegel's%20dialectics%E2%80%9D%20refers%20to%20the,contradictory%20process%20between%20opposing%20sides.

Scholars often use the first three stages of the logic as the “textbook example” (Forster 1993: 133) to illustrate how Hegel’s dialectical method should be applied to his arguments. The logic begins with the simple and immediate concept of pure Being, which is said to illustrate the moment of the understanding. We can think of Being here as a concept of pure presence. It is not mediated by any other concept—or is not defined in relation to any other concept—and so is undetermined or has no further determination (EL §86; SL-M 82; SL-dG 59). It asserts bare presence, but what that presence is like has no further determination. Because the thought of pure Being is undetermined and so is a pure abstraction, however, it is really no different from the assertion of pure negation or the absolutely negative (EL §87). It is therefore equally a Nothing (SL-M 82; SL-dG 59). Being’s lack of determination thus leads it to sublate itself and pass into the concept of Nothing (EL §87; SL-M 82; SL-dG 59), which illustrates the dialectical moment.

But if we focus for a moment on the definitions of Being and Nothing themselves, their definitions have the same content. Indeed, both are undetermined, so they have the same kind of undefined content. The only difference between them is “something merely meant” (EL-GSH Remark to §87), namely, that Being is an undefined content, taken as or meant to be presence, while Nothing is an undefined content, taken as or meant to be absence. The third concept of the logic—which is used to illustrate the speculative moment—unifies the first two moments by capturing the positive result of—or the conclusion that we can draw from—the opposition between the first two moments. The concept of Becoming is the thought of an undefined content, taken as presence (Being) and then taken as absence (Nothing), or taken as absence (Nothing) and then taken as presence (Being). To Become is to go from Being to Nothing or from Nothing to Being, or is, as Hegel puts it, “the immediate vanishing of the one in the other” (SL-M 83; cf. SL-dG 60). The contradiction between Being and Nothing thus is not a reductio ad absurdum, or does not lead to the rejection of both concepts and hence to nothingness—as Hegel had said Plato’s dialectics does (SL-M 55–6; SL-dG 34–5)—but leads to a positive result, namely, to the introduction of a new concept—the synthesis—which unifies the two, earlier, opposed concepts.