1/17/13

Triadic Philosophy - Is There Any Truth in Triads?


Is there any truth in triads
Is a triad only in the eye of the beholder
Or is there a universal basis for assuming 
the usefulness of triadic thought
I would never make a claim for sentence three
or say yes to sentence one and 
no two sentence two
were it not for my encounter with
the semiotic thought
of Charles Sanders Peirce
When I speak of Peirce I am careful to say
I express my own conclusions
Many great thinkers can be taken in many ways
The semiotic I derive from Peirce
(and by semiotic I mean the landscape of his thought
and the process by which it attains logic)
is triadic
Peirce does not think in any other way
Peirce thinks truth in my view
So I would say truth lies in triads
In thinking in threes 
one can arrive at truths one can use
It makes sense to see 
the very process of thinking as triadic

What does this mean
It involves a First Second and Third
First in my view is what rises up 
every time our mind works
the thing we settle on
(we settle on many things and anything can be a First
by virtue of encounter with a Second)
The Second is something that jostles the first
that insists something
that cautions
or strikes 
or encounters with a blunt truth
(I do not subscribe Hegel's
Thesis Antithesis Synthesis
as the root of all triads)
But a Second does have elements of Antithesis
My declension of the Third
results from the interaction of
First and Second
not as a Synthesis but as Experiment
A Third is always action
a guess that is chosen
a hypothesis tried out

When one does things by rote 
one has already completed 
one or more triadic processes
and arrived at a habit
Much of our living is simply 
moving from one habit to another
We settle on habits
But we move forward from wherever we are
on the basis of thirds

I close this excursion by saying that
I subscribe to the triadic mode
because a monad has no reality for me
and a dyad is a binary that stops at off and on
at either or 
at yes or no
or at Internet's (double bind) OK?

Consciousness
human consciousness 
is inherently triadic
Starting always
from the First
I call the First Reality
the known and unknown ground of being
the source of all thoughts signs and words
The Second I call Ethics
warnings
related to ontologoical values
tolerance helpfulness democracy
and non-idolatry
The Third I call Aesthetics
the realm of action
appearance
doing 
which at one extreme can be
ugly and false
and the other
true and beautiful

The journey through this triad is universal
whether we acknowledge it or not
Awareness of this revolutionizes philosophy in this century
It elevates will (responsibiity) to the center of Reality
values to the center of Ethics 
and Aesthetics to the very center of actualization

In this century without the willed choice 
of the values noted above
and their acceptance universally
and the creation of societies that venerate
what is true and beautiful
over ugliness greed conflict and rampant harm
we are doomed to fall on the rusty sword
that is the remnant of past philosophies
religions and understandings of society 


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