Three Moral Wordviews

I think Peircean semiotics and Peirces postulate of a fundamental Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness to ontological reality can be associated with three ways by which the human being - a biological dynamical object - is able to regulate its awareness, and that this ontological power derives from the qualities of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness.

Firstness

The above picture is taken from the infamous Bank of America murals, and it seems like an apt description of what I mean by the morality of Firstness.

First of all, morality of firstness correlates with Peirces description of firstness as "pure feeling". This corresponds to any ideology that situates temporal awareness pointedly on the now, and not on reflection of past or future selves which dialogically affect one another through affects (as memory) and projective takes on the future.

A primary feature of any mind which evolves in terms of the morality of Firstness is narcissism and pridefulness, which can otherwise be described as a robust identification with idealizations of strength and power (the primary value of firstness) and an effective denial (i.e. dissociation) of self-representations present in the rhetoric of others.

This morality is itself a sort of artform. The self is fundamentally, at root, built by mirroring processes with others; identifications are inevitable in interactions; identifications guide motivational processes. We thus are, in effect, constantly regurgitating our own relational histories and the semiotic "coherencies" they hold for us - in all their nuanced particularities. Nothing, in fact, is outside the chain of cause and effect. Only ignorant and arrogant minds which trick themselves into hiding from the fullness of the truth come to believe what sane minds see is patently impossible.

Yet, firstness is just this: an effective - though extremely entropic - dynamic which rigorously feeds of the life-force of the surrounding environment. The vampire is a creature of firstness; to gain "supernatural power", he "forever" dysregulates his affective and interpersonal life; self-sabotgage after self-sabotgage - the short term self at war with the long-term self. Firstness is the logic of the short term, the now, or what Peirce also associates with "qualia". Qualia are feelings - this is Hollywood and the life of people who love pleasure and only pleasure - and anything that is not pleasurable is interpreted as a function of an evil scheming demiurge who seeks to enslave human beings.

Because metaphysics - or, in fact, reality itself - really does admit different ontological zones of being and existence (according to Peircean semiotics) that then means that the people who live within Firstness really do got a sort of existential-metaphysical reason for believing as they believe, even if it necessarily implies the complete destruction of physical reality - hence, perhaps, Stephen Hawkings warnings to "get off the planet". Hawkings logic is cynical and negative and disembodied. He is a profoundly inappropriate person to go turn to - or listen to when he "speaks" - given that is operating from entirely different existential conditions from most human beings.

Humans can never really destroy Earth itself; but they, quite assuredly, kill of most of the biosphere as well as end human civilization, so long as the morality of Firstness stays in place as it currently is in our postmodern era.

Finally, the morality of Firstness is mostly predicated in sexuality - and a conflating of love/care with sex. Asymmetrical relationships like adult-child sexual relationships aren't properly recognized as wrong; and this becomes a big moral issue between themselves and their relations with people in the other two categories.

Secondness

Secondness is dissociative - just like firstness. Except the morality of secondness is really "caught up" in multiple competing identifications which sometimes put them into a Firstness state of mind, and other times into a thirdness state of mind. Most people exist in this category, which is associated by Peirce with Objects, or the fact that Pure Feeling becomes separated such that an object emerges on the other end, opposite, and in opposition to Firstness.

Most religious people are examples of Secondness: good intentions, horribly dissociative and out-of-touch with what's actually happening in the now. Fundamentally speaking, secondnessis objectifying, and so it corresponds to that basic human concept of "objectification": where we relate to other people as "objects".

A corollary of Firstness is relating to people as objects, but they do this as a conscious commitment to Firstness as a way of being. Because of this, only their experiences count - other people are "on their own", and so everyone becomes an object for the affect-regulation of the moral Firstness of another persons functioning.

Secondness sees, but it is superficial and inconsistent. All religion is more or less this: superficial representations of reality which are based purely in faith. This is not the "interior", or the mystical or theological, which attempts to explain and make sense of things at a higher level of connection, but a cheap and superficial acceptance based within the insecurities of an existentially ignorant consciousness, relying on stories and tales rather than dynamics, processes, and a sense of the "units" (part) and systems (whole) they exist within.

Thirdness

The logic of the morality of Thirdness is to recognize the unit - or process, dynamics, or events - which mediate two perspectives, or sides, so that they form a "third" between them. The entirety of human consciousness is in itself a Thirdness (this would then mean that people in the Firstness group express a Firstness at the level of conscious choice i.e. in interpersonal relationships, which is effectively dissociable from the dynamics of bodily self-organization, which is always operating at multiple scales in terms of triads), in that it is the emergent product of an 'observing function' which exists to mediate the bodies needs with the social world around it. Consciousness is a third which becomes entangled in yet a deeper third: how it represents to itself - via philosophy, beliefs, and attitudes - what the nature of 'reality' is. Saying you know for certain; or you know nothing for certain. Misrepresenting reality is perhaps infinite; only science allows a coherent or "apt" representation of the outside or inside process being described (and based on empirical evidence as well).

In interpersonal relationships, as I have shown before, shame is that outside element which constrains and undermines the coherence of your sense of selfhood: you are shown to be limited by the power of shame. Therefore shame refers to the largest structure which the individual human personality is ultimately in service towards: the social context of families and communities. Michael Tomasello has described this condition as "shared-intentionality", and it would seem to me that human phenomenology more or less functions according to an affective psychodynamical logic which compels human minds to "acknowledge the perspective of the Other", by inflicting on us experiences of shame.

The morality of Thirdness therefore accepts shame as a message of our larger existential condition: we are formed by a social logic which puts us into contact with a larger ontological "hidden-hand": the collective social body, which dynamically tethers us towards the ones we've been affected by via the signs (or states) that link us.

Since that is the truth, thirdness, or love, can become the basis of a deeper existential relationship with living.

Life doesn't have to be something we hate or are afraid of. Or rather, I can acknowledge all my states, and come to understand that an acceptance of the passivity of our self to the world around us can shift our awareness from the self, to the world as existential observer: from such a perspective, being embodied or disembodied (dead) is irrelevant. Let each be each - and since I'm alive, let me nourish and nurture my aliveness by better understanding the conditions of life.

We all need to grow past this existential fearfulness - and we can if we only trust the logic that its not normal for something OF reality to be afraid of it. The "it" is you. You are it, observing itself. This is basically the truth.

a reply to: Astrocyte

We all need to grow past this existential fearfulness - and we can if we only trust the logic that its not normal for something OF reality to be afraid of it. The "it" is you. You are it, observing itself. This is basically the truth.

Ya for the narcissist.

a reply to: Astrocyte

You seem to be a critical-thinker, why do you lose your message by writing prose filled with vestigial terms/phrases? Less is more. Write like you talk. Be succinct. Your message may poke its nose out and your audience just might pick up what you’re laying down. Your OP isn’t cutting it. It’s constructive criticism. On the real.

Good luck.

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
We all need to grow past this existential fearfulness - and we can if we only trust the logic that its not normal for something OF reality to be afraid of it. The "it" is you. You are it, observing itself. This is basically the truth.

A self licking ice cream.

'Who' needs to grow past 'what'?

There is no 'thing' of reality. The assumption that there is a 'thing' (a believed image of yourself) is what makes fear arise. There is only this that is - what IS is reality.

J Kristnamurti says that an image is a representation - not a presentation, but a re-presentation - of reality. We have for example, our actions, our behaviour - reality, factual; then we have our subjective view, our opinionated critique of our behaviour (couched in the past tense: e.g., "I shouldn't have said what I said; it made me look stupid"). In other words, there is our self as we are; and then there is our self as we imagine that we ought to be. It is this self-image which separates us from reality and creates conflict.

Taken from Living Nonduality page 245 written by Robert Wolfe.


There is only what there is and there isn't a (separate) thing that can change it - so what's the problem?