Life cannot be lived by ideals for long

"I could not think of anything worse than a community transforming the world through "intelligent ideals," and I do not think the statement accurately represents Peirce. This Pyrrhic victory of eviscerated, abstract intelligence in the service of ideals would be ruinous to life, just as Teilhard de Chardin's concept of a "noosphere" (in the sense of atmosphere, stratosphere) is, a film of planetary intelligence in which "life's domain" would be ruled by reason. Life from the neck up is ruinous to life: the noose sphere. Peirce, it seems to me, understood the limited place of science in the practice of life, which is why he thought pragmatically that science is impractical. Other people, such as Dostoyevsky and Melville and D. H. Lawrence, saw more deeply into the problem of the idealization of life than Peirce did, perhaps because they were artists.

"Life cannot be lived by ideals for long; life can be lived with ideals, never sustainably by them. Our age today, with its ideal religions and ideal science and technology, is fast realizing ideal ruination of the biosphere."

From a post by Eugene Halton at peirce-l@listserv.iupui.edu

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes