Introduction
I continue to be preoccupied with the task of delineating the features of a distinctive tradition in American religious thought that I refer to as theosemiotic.Footnote 1 It can be traced back through Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jonathan Edwards as an early exemplar. It achieves full flower in the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce and then bears fruit in the work of the later Josiah Royce and in some of H. Richard Niebuhr's writings. This essay focuses on Peirce and on the later Royce. Peirce's theosemiotic is most clearly discernible in his 1908 article “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” especially when one reads that article in the context of Peirce's developed theory of signs. I do not intend to engage here in any sort of detailed exegesis of the Neglected Argument.Footnote 2 Instead, I wish to focus on the continuity between Peirce and Royce visible in the latter's book on The Problem of Christianity,Footnote 3 with most of my attention being directed to the discussion in the second part of that work.
Royce explicitly acknowledged that he had borrowed certain ideas from Peirce in the development of his argument; a number of scholars have explored not only Royce's selection, but also his adaptation, of these selected ideas for his own philosophical project.Footnote 4 Rather than determine the extent to which Royce “got Peirce right” or matched his objectives with Peirce's own, I instead begin to evaluate here the intellectual resources that these thinkers supplied as prolegomena to the elaboration of any future theosemiotic.Footnote 5
A World “Perfused” with Signs
The Neglected Argument begins with a consideration of the hypothesis concerning God's reality. Midway through that article, Peirce completes his “sketch” of the argument and turns his attention to the nature of human inquiry. This is not an arbitrary shift since Peirce was firmly convinced that one needed “a theory of the nature of thinking” in order to evaluate the religious hypothesis.Footnote 6 Peirce devoted much effort to the formulation of such a theory, so much so that his significance for contemporary theology and philosophy of religion cannot be assessed exclusively in terms of his explicitly religious writings. Toward the end of the Neglected Argument, Peirce refers to some of his own pioneering work in semiotic, published forty years earlier in a series of articles. These are the same articles from which Royce borrowed several fundamental ideas in his examination of The Problem of Christianity. Footnote 7
The three “stages of inquiry” described in the Neglected Argument each represent aspects of the interpretive process. Long before 1908, Peirce had begun to conceive of the whole of logic as semiotic so these late remarks presuppose much of what he said earlier and elsewhere about signs and interpretation. Simply put, “we have no power of thinking without signs” on Peirce's account.Footnote 8 All thinking consists in signs, both in their juxtaposition and in their vital interrelationship; one thought-sign determines another as its interpretant in referring to a third thought-sign as their common object. Not only does he conceive of thinking as a form of semiosis, but he also shades all forms of perception into thinking or conception, a Peircean insight that Royce firmly embraced and developed.Footnote 9 Peirce does not posit experience as the subject matter for interpretive reflection; rather, experience is always already itself a process and product of interpretation. Even perceptions and emotions constitute inferences, albeit often unconscious ones, typically involving ideas that are exceedingly vague. Moreover, all forms of inference—abductive (or hypothetical), deductive, and inductive—involve the manipulation of signs. Such manipulation includes the construal and explication of their meaning, as well as the testing of each interpretation's validity.
These basic semiotic insights were woven, both by Peirce and by Royce, into the fabric of a complex theosemiotic perspective. Peirce remarked that “all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs,” a claim later echoed by Royce when he affirmed that “the universe consists of real Signs and of their interpretation” and that “in the order of real time the events of the world are signs”; consequently, “if we consider the temporal world in its wholeness, it constitutes in itself an infinitely complex Sign.”Footnote 10 This is no longer simply a claim about human perception and cognition or about the essential nature of human inquiry as semiosis; rather, it is a fundamental metaphysical thesis. Moreover, it becomes a theologically significant claim to the extent that both philosophers regard the universe as a complex text (a universe of signs), the meaning of which is ultimately religious. For Peirce the hypothesis of a divine authorship for this text proves to be increasingly irresistible as one consistently, thoroughly, and disinterestedly contemplates it (a practice that he identified as “musement”). Royce portrays the world as a process of infinite semiosis, embodied in a universal community of interpretation, the living spirit of which he defined in terms of Pauline Christianity. He casts such a religious worldview in idealistic terms. Both men were objective idealists, for whom all of reality is ideal or of the nature of mind, as were Edwards and Emerson before them. It remains an important question, then (although not one to be resolved here), whether theosemiotic remains essentially bound to such a metaphysical (idealistic) point of view.
The proposition that all of reality consists in signs is clearly related, in Peirce's and Royce's philosophies, to the assertion that all experience is interpreted experience. Whether the former claim entails the latter, the portrayal of experience as semiosis is itself potentially of religious significance. Moreover, upon the adoption of such a point of view, certain implications for one's understanding of the nature of theological inquiry immediately suggest themselves. If there is no absolute distinction between perception and conception (in Royce's terms), or if all perception involves judgments in the form of abductive inferences (on Peirce's analysis), then there must be fundamental continuity between religious experience and theological reflection. The perspective of theosemiotic matches Peirce's description of the natural and continuous connection between musement and the other stages of inquiry in his Neglected Argument. Peirce understood musement as a kind of playful “conversation” with oneself that, if regularly pursued, might flower into prayerful meditation.Footnote 11 Such meditation, in turn, occasionally evolves into “scientific study.” Within the context of theosemiotic, then, even the most complex theological inquiry has experiential roots in this type of meditation-as-conversation.
Now Royce was clearly familiar with Peirce's 1908 argument when he drafted his Hibbert Lectures in 1913, and he referred directly and favorably to it in the “Summary and Conclusion” of The Problem of Christianity. Footnote 12 Earlier in those lectures, Royce had concluded that “the life of a reasonable being” cannot consist merely in a disconnected series of conceptions or perceptions or “thoughtless deeds,” but “life may be a colloquy or a prayer” since such a characterization affirms the insight that “interpretation is a necessary element of everything that, in life, has ideal value.”Footnote 13 Such talk clearly resonates with Peirce's brief account of musement as a lively colloquy with the universe of signs, resulting ideally in a “communion between self and self.” All such talk underscores the unity of thought, feeling, and perception in the process of interpretation as it undermines the sharp or simple contrast between human experience and the subsequent reflection on that experience. At the same time, this emphasis on the “conversational” quality of interpretation exposes another essential ingredient of any philosophical theology conceived of as theosemiotic.
Signs, Selves, and Semiosis
Royce deliberates at great length about the social aspect of interpretation, once again citing Peirce as the thinker whose insight sparked this line of deliberation. If human experience and cognition are always acts of interpretation, then interpretation itself is always already socially formed and constituted. The latter is not, however, a single claim but instead embodies a number of closely related viewpoints. It is a claim both about the true nature of the self and about the self's essential relationship to the community of interpretation.
Peirce conceives of the self as thoroughly semiotic in character.Footnote 14 Just as every thought is a sign, so too every person's life is a continuous stream or “train” of thought-signs, one that displays a certain consistency and purpose.Footnote 15 The self is a complex sign in his view, a living colloquy of selves; the present self mediates between past and future versions of itself. Following Peirce closely here, Royce stipulated that “an interpretation is a relation which not only involves three terms, but brings them into a determinate order.” Royce characterizes interpretation both as irreducibly triadic and as essentially connected to the time-order. Every act of interpretation involves something or somebody being interpreted by someone and for someone, and this inevitably takes time. Every person is a complex sign, the meaning of which gradually unfolds in time and only as the result of an ongoing “interior conversation.” “When a process of conscious reflection goes on,” Royce explained, “a man may be said to interpret himself to himself.”Footnote 16
From this perspective, the self is “social” in the sense that it comprises a complex collection of selves; to be a self is necessarily to be in continuous conversation with oneself. But this is by no means a private conversation in which the individual is isolated from the greater community of selves. That greater community is the very condition for the possibility that any such conversation might take place. Royce rejects what he perceives to be a position defended by William James. It is not the case that I first know my own mind and feelings, later postulating the existence of other minds by a process of analogy; rather, “the most important part of my knowledge about myself is based upon knowledge that I have derived from the community to which I belong.”Footnote 17 Royce here extends an argument that Peirce proposed more than forty years earlier. Peirce had insisted that “we have no power of Introspection, but all knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of external facts.”Footnote 18 Similarly, there is “no direct intuition or perception of the self” from Royce's Peircean perspective; rather, “one discovers one's own mind through a process of inference analogous to the very modes of inference which guide us in a social effort to interpret our neighbors' minds.”Footnote 19 We do not intuit but only gradually learn what it means to be a self, and that self-knowledge is dramatically contingent upon our various encounters with other persons.
Peirce and Royce view the self as a kind of community (sustained by an “interior conversation”); at the same time, they also view various communities (families, teams, nations, churches, etc.) as greater “persons” or “selves.” Each exists within time. The life of each is marked by continuously ongoing events of interpretation. The meaning of such a life is shaped internally (by the self through its own deliberate actions and intentions) and externally (by the environing communities in which each self or “sub-community” is embedded). The self is constituted by acts of interpretation, yet interpretation is itself an essentially social process, not only because it is an irreducibly triadic process (A interprets B for C) but also because the self interprets itself by first encountering and learning about other minds.
It is certainly possible to understand the self as socially constituted without attaching any particular religious significance to such a conception, yet theosem-iotic clearly entails such a picture of the self. Methodologically, this requires recognition of the essential nature of theological inquiry as an art and a discipline of conversation (in this respect, no different from various forms of scientific inquiry, as both Peirce and Royce were eager to observe). Now, genuine conversation always involves some kind of self-transcendence in reaching out to meet and communicate with the other. Even the meditative “interior conversation” with oneself requires a certain quality of attentiveness; as Peirce described it, this is an awakening to “what is about or within you.”Footnote 20 It is a refusal to remain bound by the past or by entrenched habits of thought and feeling so that the present might become genuinely open to the future, to new meanings as they emerge in the process of interpretation. Genuine interpretation involves a willingness to place the self at risk in the service of meaning, through the cultivation of a certain quality of detachment or disinterestedness.
On another level and in another sense, theosemiotic is a form of inquiry that is always socially located. Its conversation involves a real exchange of ideas with other persons in the community and its interpretations are always tested against alternatives proposed by others, modified in this process, or verified to the extent that they prove to be shared. In Royce's view, the recognition that other minds possess ideas that both resemble and contrast with my own, and the “will to interpret” these others, together establish a “community of interpretation.” To the extent that persons share common events in their past, as well as purposes that direct them to common goals in the future, they will also form communities of memory and of hope. Royce's paradigm for all such communities is the “Christian church”—not some historically actual ecclesiastical body but an ideal and a genuinely universal community of persons.Footnote 21 Here is a powerful Roycean vision of theosemiotic, not merely as a practice situated in community but as one actually effective in constituting social bonds. The will to interpret, the drive toward mutual understanding, is one of the primary factors contributing to the formation of any community. Consequently,
No one who loves mankind can find a worthier and more significant way to express his love than by increasing and expressing among men the Will to Interpret. This will inspires every student of the humanities; and is present wherever charity enters into life. When Christianity teaches us to hope for the community of all mankind, we can readily see that the Beloved Community, whatever else it is, will be, when it comes, a Community of Interpretation.Footnote 22
In this fashion, Royce regards interpretation as a great “humanizing force”. Every example of genuine loyalty involves the essential element of loyalty to a community of interpretation. Interpretive activity is ubiquitous, just as the social bonds that it presupposes are pervasive. Moreover, such loyalty displays a “third attitude of the will,” one that transcends the contrast between egotistical self-affirmation and a resignation that culminates in extreme forms of self-denial.Footnote 23 These, then, are the crucial ingredients, indeed, the very life-blood of theosemiotic as a vital practice: acts of interpretation that, because of the social character of the self, always take the form of a conversation; a will to interpret that, because of what is presupposed in every interpretive situation, manifests itself as love in the form of loyalty to a community.
On Living and Interpreting Deliberately
In his earlier work, The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce defined loyalty as “the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause,” a definition that was then incorporated into his Hibbert Lectures on The Problem of Christianity.Footnote 24 At the same time, he has transformed the concept in the later work, where loyalty now is “the practically devoted love of an individual for a community.”Footnote 25 This is an important concept in Royce's mature philosophy and one that might be examined from a number of interesting perspectives.Footnote 26
Here I am limited to making two brief observations, both relevant to the topic of theosemiotic. First, loyalty (including any kind of love that is understood as loyalty) is primarily a matter of “willing” or volition, whatever possible feelings it may involve. Second, loyalty is “practical,” not simply an inward attitude of devotion but something to be manifested in concrete actions. Royce's philosophy of loyalty is distinguished, then, both by its voluntarism and by its pragmatism. Here again, the later Royce has articulated a perspective similar to that of Peirce. His understanding of the “practical” resonates more with Peirce's pragmaticism than with James's or Dewey's pragmatism. And while Peirce's voluntarism is sometimes muted, I would argue that it is an important feature of the medieval Scotism that Peirce at least partially embraced.
For both thinkers volition determines interpretation insofar as the latter is deliberate or self-controlled. This sort of volition is not primarily operative or visible in any particular inference, act, or interpretation. It is manifested, rather, in a general purposefulness that guides all acts and interpretations, in the self's positive devotion to a cause or ideal (as well as to those communities that such causes engender, and in which such ideals become embodied).Footnote 27 It is revealed in the shape that one gives to the self in the ongoing process of interpretation. This is accomplished not just by exerting tremendous willpower in the making of choices immediately at hand, but rather in selecting ideals for the long-run and then maintaining a constant fidelity to those ideals. Here Peirce and Royce both echo Duns Scotus's earlier articulation of the insight that volition is perfected in firmitas, a certain steadfastness of purpose that can only manifest itself clearly over time.Footnote 28
These aspects of selfhood help to make this talk about self-control fully intelli-gible. Purposeful actions performed in a manner consistent with one's ideals are themselves thoughts embodied in conduct, thus also a species of interpretation. Just as the category of interpretation undermines sharp contrasts between thought and perception for Royce and Peirce, so too it establishes an important continuity between thought and action. Meaningful patterns (or habits) of behavior, displayed over time, are essential aspects of the process of interpretation. And it is typically the observation of such patterns that allows us to infer what someone means or intends—or indeed, what we ourselves mean or intend. What one does in response to some sign (not just immediately, but, again, in the long run) is a part of the interpretation of what that sign means. Correspondingly (within the theological realm), what persons do, deliberately and consistently, in response to religious signs and symbols plays a crucial role in the determination of the meaning of these signs. Religious practice is not merely the subject matter of theological reflection but is itself a meaningful sign-generating process.
The concept of self-control seems inevitably to require some kind of social conception of the self. After all, in the exercise of self-control, who controls whom? This concept has been unpacked in various ways, sometimes pitting a “higher” against the “lower” aspect of the self, such as “spirit” against “flesh” in one common strand of Christian discourse. Royce preferred a different reading of Paul's doctrine, one that was noticeably consistent with a good deal of what Charles Peirce had to say about self-control. His interest was not in the hegemony of higher over lower, but in the comparatively gentle influence of the present self over future versions of itself through the adoption of purposes and the gradual cultivation of virtuous habits. Recall how Royce observed an essential connection between interpretation and the time-order: the past is irrevocable, but the present is open to a future that can be partially controlled. Such control is a real possibility only for one who pays attention to and seeks to interpret the contrast between past and future, between the actual and the ideal, between what is and what ought to be.Footnote 29
Peirce's early essays in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy reveal the germ of what was later to become a full-blown theory of semiotic.Footnote 30 They also reveal the importance of the concept of attention in his account of semiosis and the general nature of inference. For example, inductive inference (as with any process of habit formation) involves the continuous exercise of attention.Footnote 31 One repeatedly attends to selected aspects of experience, noticing how X is typically associated with Y, thus gradually developing certain distinctive habits of thought. The careful observation of phenomena resulting in the abductive generation of specific hypotheses, as well as the process of deductively explicating such hypotheses, both also presuppose specific acts of attention; consequently, every form of inference involves a modification of consciousness brought about through the deliberate exercise of attention. We can control our attention more readily than our feelings, sometimes even more than our actions, so our careful direction of attention gives both feelings and actions a certain distinctive shape in the long run. On Royce's account, too, loyalty is a kind of sustained and loving attention; he uses the word devotion and speaks in terms of faithfulness and fidelity. Once again, this is all in large measure a matter of volition; here, one exercises the will in acts of attention that guide the ongoing process of interpretation. (Of course, the systematic linking of volition with attention was a defining feature of James's psychology, in addition to Peirce's early essays, a likely factor influencing Royce's mature deliberations.)
Royce's discussion of loyalty nicely complements Peirce's analysis of self-control since it reinforces the insight that the latter notion is never to be confused with some lonely exercise. The self does not exist in solitude, flexing its volitional musculature in a heroic effort to subdue its baser inclinations. Even in its most private meditations, the self is shaped by ideals drawn from the community to which it is loyal, just as one can be moved and motivated by a great love even in the absence of the beloved. In addition, self-control must be identified with the discipline that makes our social interactions and conversations with other persons genuinely meaningful, rather than chaotic and meaningless. The skilled conversationalist, the socially graceful person, is someone through practice who has developed those habits of attention and expression considered felicitous for various inter-subjective purposes. It might prove interesting, in this regard, to speculate about whether specific communities, as greater “selves,” possess the capacity to exercise anything like “self-control” in a way that might cause their interactions with other communities consistently to be either graceful or clumsy.
Conclusion
These remarks were not intended to be programmatic. Rather, they merely suggest the resources that Peirce and Royce supplied for the development of theosemiotic. Theology conceived as theosemiotic is a deliberate process of interpretation with all of the implications that such a proposition entails. Religiously meaningful experience, sometimes arising in periods of prayerful meditation, is a vital part of that process; the same is true for those practices and projects that one formulates as a consequence of disciplined theological reflection. No theology as theosemiotic can survive as formal inquiry detached from any empirical roots or practical consequences. In the terms supplied by Peirce's logic, this would be like supposing that we could learn something useful about the world by performing deductive inferences without ever formulating new hypotheses about the nature of things (abduction) or engaging in the sweaty labor of experimentation (induction). In any event, from beginning to end, the proper business of theology is the interpretation of signs. Moreover, theology conceived as theosemiotic must presuppose a generously expanded sense of what it means to “give an interpretation”—in such a way that human feelings and actions displaying a certain pattern and consistency will have hermeneutical value, in some instances more articulate than thoughts expressed in words.
Theosemiotic is also a social enterprise, one most effectively carried out by a vital community of interpretation. Just as scientific results are of little value if they hold true today but not for tomorrow, if they work for me but never for you, so also must our theological claims represent insights that are shared and have been socially validated. The art of conversation is not easy; it is a rigorous discipline, whether it takes the form of a disinterested meditative exercise or of the self-controlled exchange of theological ideas in a public forum. Each of these conversations is a deliberate consideration of the past in order to discern how best to shape the future. Individuals, loyal to the ideals of their community while also creatively adapting those ideals, must decide what sorts of persons they want to become and how best to achieve that goal. Communities themselves must struggle with the identities that emerge in a continuous process of self-interpretation. Memories and hopes, even when shared, nevertheless can be contested, and so must often be negotiated. This is all a part of the ongoing task of interpretation-as-conversation.
Royce and Peirce envisioned that task as a potentially endless one. Semiosis is an infinite process, to be terminated or interrupted only by something external to itself. Every sign determines an interpretant which itself becomes a sign open to interpretation and so on. The process is infinite; both philosophers regarded the community of interpreters as, ideally, an unlimited community. To terminate that process prematurely or to circumscribe that community narrowly, from the perspective of theosemiotic, would be highly problematic. Moreover, since selves are signs, their disciplined practices constituting a type of discourse, their interpretive behavior must extend to what they deliberately do and not only to what they write or say. On this view, the arbitrary interruption of semiosis, the narrow and premature delimiting of meanings, can readily eventuate, not simply in forms of censorship but also in dangerous acts of oppression.
To conclude with such a remark is only to offer another vague suggestion. This one, in fact, has to do with the logic of vagueness, some basic understanding of which seems crucial to the theosemiotic enterprise. Every deliberate act, every interpretation, determines part of the meaning of a sign while yet leaving that sign vague in numerous other respects. The universe as a vast, complex sign is exceedingly vague, yet its meaning is also determined by every deliberate human act, every interpretation. By constantly attending to the vagueness or indeterminacy that persists—to the infinity of the interpretive process—one preserves the humility of the theological enterprise. This should not halt the process of inquiry or render us mute. It is what Royce described as the “right attitude” of the will “when we stand in the presence of the universe, and when we undertake to choose how we propose to bear ourselves toward the world.”Footnote 32
