Re: C.S. Peirce • Objective Logic

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Note 4

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Objective Logic (cont.)

Aristotelianism admitted two modes of being.  This position was attacked
by William Ockham, on the ground that one kind sufficed to account for all
the phenomena.  The hosts of modern philosophers, to the very Hegels, have
sided with Ockham in this matter.  But now the question comes before us for
reëxamination:  What are the modes of being?

One might antecedently expect that the cenopythagorean categories would require
three modes of being.  But a little examination will show us that they could be
brought into fairly presentable accordance with the theory that there were only
two, or even only one.  The question cannot be decided in that way.  Besides,
it would be illogical to rely upon the categories to decide so fundamental
a question.  The only safe way is to make an entirely fresh investigation.

But by what method are we to pursue it?  In such abstract questions, as we shall
have already found, the first step, often more than half the battle, is to ascertain
what we mean by the question — what we possibly ''can'' mean by it.  We know already
how we must proceed in order to determine what the meaning of the question is.  Our
sole guide must be the consideration of the use to which the answer is to be put —
not necessarily the practical application, but in what way it is to subserve the
''summum bonum''.  Within this principle is wrapped up the answer to the question,
what being is, and what, therefore, its modes must be.

It is absolutely impossible that the word “Being” should bear any meaning whatever
except with reference to the ''summum bonum''.  This is true of any word.  But that
which is true of one word in one respect, of another in another, of every word in some
or another respect, that is precisely what the word “being” aims to express.  There are
other ways of conceiving Being — that it is that which manifests itself, that it is that
which produces effects — which have to be considered, and their relations ascertained.

— Charles S. Peirce, “Minute Logic” (1902), CP 2.116

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