A sketch of Peirce’s Firstness and its significance to art

Abstract

Abstract. This essay treats the growth and development of Charles S. Peirce's three categories, particularly studying the qualities of Peirce's Firstness, a basic formula of "airy-nothingness" (CP: 6.455) serving as fragment to Secondness and Thirdness. The categories of feeling, willing, and knowing are not separate entities but work in interaction within the three interpretants. Interpretants are triadomaniac elements through the adopted, revised, or changed habits of belief. In works of art, the first glance of Firstness arouses the spontaneous responses of musement, expressing emotions without the struggle and resistance of factual Secondness, and not yet involving logical Thirdness. The essential qualities of a loose or vague word, color, or sound give the fugitive meanings in Firstness. The flavor, brush, timbre, color, point, line, tone or touch of the First qualities of an aesthetic object is too small a base to build the logic of aesthetic judgment. The genesis art is explained by Peirce's undegeneracy growing into group and individual interpretants and building into the passages and whole forms of double and single forms of degeneracy. The survey of the flash of Firstness is exemplified in a variety of artworks in language, music, sculpture, painting, and film. This analysis is a preliminary aid to further studies of primary Firstness in the arts.

Institutional Misfits: Law and Habits in Finnish Wolf Policy

“…As Peirce articulated further, " [o]ut of the womb of indeterminacy we must say that there would have come something, by the principle of firstness, which we may call a flash" (CP 1.412). Firstness is not an actual entity but exists only in the interpreter's imagination, being hypothetical and possible (Bernstein 2010, Corlée 2009 For Peirce, will is always set against something, reacting in the realms of relations, disturbances, and struggles.…”

From words and sentences to interjections: The anatomy of exclamations in Peirce and Wittgenstein

“…so far as this is a significant word, it is, as will be seen below, something more than an index; but so far as it is simply intended to act upon the hearer's nervous system and to rouse him to get out of the way, it is an index, because it is meant to put him in real connection with the object, which is his situation relative to the approaching horse. The memory of the exclamations of the drivers has awakened in Peirce the first, vague, and unidentifiable qualities of firstness, when associated to real secondness (CP 1.530-1.544, 3.419, 3.434; see Gorlée 2009). The stories of the interjective "ejaculations" produced by the drivers interrupted the pastoral sensation of the Common Park in the cries left in the sign-hearer (Peirce) to direct the "direct, forceful attention upon the nervous system" (CP 3.419).…”