But ask me to free-associate one word with the philosophy of John Lachs, and it wouldn't be libertarian, Santayanan, pragmatist, stoic, or anything else than immediacy.
"…rejection of immediacy entangled Hegel in a thicket of mistakes. He failed to do justice to consciousness as actually lived, to that flow of unreflective and unverbalized awareness of which much of everyday life consists. As a result, he left no room in his system for the privacy and individuality that escape description in universal terms, but that constitute the heartbeat of personal consciousness. And because of this misunderstanding of the nature of consciousness, he thought he could assign it to institutions, to states, and to an abstract, cosmic spirit seeking self-realization in history. Misplacing consciousness led him to misplace the source of agency as well—he thought that concepts, social forces, and such impersonal abstractions as reason are the ultimate sources of whatever takes place.JL @dawn
An adequate theory of mediation must rectify these errors. It must strike a proper balance between mediation and immediacy, assuming at the proper times the perspective of individual awareness. It must limit the assignment of consciousness to living animals alone. And it must lodge agency where it rightfully belongs, on the ontological level of particular persons. Without this, social life cannot be seen to have private costs at all. The truth is that "the litany of lamentations" of which, from the standpoint of suffering individuals, so much of history consists, constituted for Hegel neither loss nor cost. For he viewed the pain in its objectivity, the way scientists observe the death-struggle of flies caught in a spider's web or well-fed generals the discomfort of their starving soldiers. But suffering merely seen and described loses its hurt; it ceases to be pain. Without proper attention to the private soul, without deep sympathy for how things feel, theories of alienation remain laughable.
Peirce called himself a Hegelian. There are a number of reasons why the designation is appropriate. Fortunately, however, Peirce's faith in the power of thought did not blind him to the reality and importance of immediacy. He knew that Hegel went too far in denying all immediacy and, with it, the significance or even the possibility of a private, subjective life. Fortunately, Peirce corrected Hegel's tragic denial. He saw that the qualitative feel of things is an ineliminable and unsublatable element of life. His categorial scheme testifies to his belief in the irreducibility of direct experience.
He called such immediate feelings and private apprehensions "firsts" and spoke of them, at least in some places, as necessary conditions of thoughts, laws, or "thirds." With the faithfulness to experience for which he is rightly celebrated, he went so far as to note that even the most exalted thoughts have a certain inexpressible feel to consciousness—in other words, even thirds have firsts. One is tempted to speculate what the last section of the Phenomenology of Spirit would be like had Peirce written it. But, of course, Peirce knew that it could not be written: absolute knowledge would not emerge, he thought, until the completion of infinitely extended inquiry. Was part of his reason for lodging the fulfillment of thought in the indefinite future his realization that no finite mind could accommodate the feel of such omniscience?
Peirce's work in semiotics shows the same respect for irreducible immediacy as we find in his metaphysical speculations. When he discussed signification, he spoke not only of energetic and logical interpretants (seconds and thirds) but also of the emotional interpretant, which is the feeling produced by a sign. Moreover, when he came to distinguish the properties of signs, he was not satisfied to note their "pure demonstrative application" (their physical connection with their object) and their properly cognitive representative function. He also identified their "material qualities," which are the characters they possess in themselves or the way they appear when they stand naked in human consciousness. Direct experiences of this sort, such as the all-pervasive aroma of oranges on Christmas morning, defy analysis, explanation, or even adequate description in words. Yet their reality is undeniable, and Peirce accordingly announced that "the Immediate . . . the Unanalyzable, the Inexplicable, the Unintellectual runs in a continuous stream through our lives." 1
In spite of Peirce's commendable focus on the way things feel to us, immediacy continues to receive little attention in the world of thought. In philosophy, in semiotics, in law and the other professions, thirds occupy pride of place. Our interest is focused on rules and laws, on the intelligible structure of what we do. We seem to think that understanding is possible on the basis of description alone and that living, direct experience, what we might call direct acquaintance, is an impediment to thought. In our urgency to know the outcome of our acts, we overlook how they feel. We appear not to realize that some of the most important consequences we help cause are feelings and emotions. Instead, we relegate private experience to the realm of the "merely subjective" and thereby rob it of dignity and significance. Even worse, some philosophers go so far as to deny the existence of feelings and private minds altogether. In the quiet of their minds, they clearly feel good about holding such positions.
Our disregard of firsts is so thorough that we are unaware of the magnitude of the loss this involves. John Dewey, who accepted Peirce's account of firsts, called such immediate experiences and ideas that which is "had." He thought that in the form of direct enjoyments, these moments constitute the only delights or consummations of which we are capable. They are, in this way, the core of value and goodness: all the instrumentalities of life aim at securing and extending these periods of gratification. Dewey's point is as right as it seems forgotten. Pleasure, satisfaction, enjoyment, and delight can exist only in being had: they are moments of life that can be shared but not expressed, experienced but not explained. In overlooking immediacy, therefore, we decline to pay attention to the values that make our existence worthwhile. If everything is merely a means to some distant objective, we are left with no intrinsically enjoyable ends at all. If everything is public activity and busy work, we are robbed of exhilaration, of joyful absorption in the moment, of the private smile of the soul."
— The Cost of Comfort by John Lachs
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