Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness

This paper examines how the Peircean category of Firstness can illuminate pre-cognitive and pre-interpretative aspects of learning. This study can be understood as part of a broader edusemiotic project currently gaining momentum (cf. Semetsky (ed.) 2010, 2017; Stables and Semetsky 2014; Olteanu 2015). I explore various iterations of Peirce's thought, from his early Lowell Lectures (1866) to what Strand (2013) has called his " rhetorical turn " following the introduction of the concept of semiosis in 1883. My contention is that engagement in arts-based processes is educationally useful in inducing and cultivating reflection on those primary aspects of consciousness that are often neglected by formal educational programs. My aim here is to explore what stimulates engaged absorption and examine how this can be applied to form an " education of inquiry " informed by Peirce's pragmatism, which places contemplation on this pre-interpretative realm of meaning in a central role. In conclusion, the paper will show how an understanding of Firstness is necessary for understanding Peirce's aesthetics, and thus his ethics, which depends upon the " habits of feeling " emerging from Firstness. Thus, we can understand how the cultivation of a " pedagogy of Firstness " is foundationally an ethical educational program.

DOI 10.1515/css-2018-0005  Chinese Semiotic Studies 14(1): 71–102 Cary Campbell* Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness Aesthetic education as Firstness experience1 Abstract: This paper examines how the Peircean category of Firstness can illuminate pre-cognitive and pre-interpretative aspects of learning. This study can be understood as part of a broader edusemiotic project currently gaining momentum (cf. Semetsky (ed.) 2010, 2017; Stables and Semetsky 2014; Olteanu 2015). I explore various iterations of Peirce’s thought, from his early Lowell Lectures (1866) to what Strand (2013) has called his “rhetorical turn” following the introduction of the concept of semiosis in 1883. My contention is that engagement in arts-based processes is educationally useful in inducing and cultivating reflection on those primary aspects of consciousness that are often neglected by formal educational programs. My aim here is to explore what stimulates engaged absorption and examine how this can be applied to form an “education of inquiry” informed by Peirce’s pragmatism, which places contemplation on this pre-interpretative realm of meaning in a central role. In conclusion, the paper will show how an understanding of Firstness is necessary for understanding Peirce’s aesthetics, and thus his ethics, which depends upon the “habits of feeling” emerging from Firstness. Thus, we can understand how the cultivation of a “pedagogy of Firstness” is foundationally an ethical educational program. Keywords: aesthetic education; arts education; consciousness studies; contemplative education; edusemitoics; philosophy of education.  *Corresponding author, Cary Campbell: Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, e-mail: clc25@sfu.ca  1 An earlier iteration of this study was originally published in the Brazilian philosophy journal Revista Reflexoes in December 2015, where it appeared in the original English along with a Portuguese translation by Professor Rita Helena Gomez. It has been substantially expanded and developed for this publication. Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 72  Cary Campbell 1 Preamble 1.1 My Firstness moment Art is an objectification of a purely experiential pattern […] a recollection of emotion in tranquility. The process of expression or objectification is an idealization of the [original] experiential pattern. It grasps the central moment of the experience and unfolds its proper implications, apart from the distortions, the inferences, the accidental intrusions that would arise in the concrete experience itself. (Lonergan 1993: 217–219) I have summoned Lonergan’s words here precisely to address this sort of recollection, but also for the personal reason that it was through reading these exact words that the ideas forming this paper settled into place in a moment of presence and attention. These words coalesced with my previous experiences, making visible a phase (or mode) of consciousness that I had long been trying to make sense of through my practice as a musician and music educator. I realized, for myself, and not on some intellectual authority 2 , that these sorts of transformative moments (often lumped in with that amorphous conceptual container “aesthetic experience”) evoke the memory of a sensory-quality driven aspect of experience that is often dimmed underneath our human drive toward associative forms.3 I am sharing this personal detail with the reader because it is precisely these sorts of moments that I will be exploring in this article. 1.2 Moments of ineffability We have all had encounters so powerful and singular they seem to extend outside and beyond ordinary and mundane experience, something we could almost brand (in common non-philosophical parlance) with that misleading label “transcendental.” This is something “over and above” what Dewey (1954:  2 See Peirce’s famous paper, On the Fixation of Beliefs (1877), and my paper A Dialogue on Inquiry (Campbell 2015b), for an explanation of the Peircean notion of belief and its obvious relevance to educational practice. 3 Within the domain of neuro-anthropology this has been referred to as the symbolic function (cf. Laughlin 1992, 1997; Laughlin and Throop 2001), which put simply refers to “the property of the nervous system by which partial information about the operational environment derived from the senses is associated neurologically with a far greater field of cognitive associations” (Laughlin 1998). Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness  73 183) aptly referred to as “the crust of routine and conventionalized consciousness.” These are moments of directness, and of presence, so present in fact, time is often felt as “slowing down” or even vanishing entirely from awareness. Experiences like these are often thought to be inexpressible through language with its generalizing and abstractive thrust. They are a spark so fleeting and ineffable the very acts of recollection and reflection seem to destroy them. These encounters represent the unique synthesis of often diverse sensory qualities into a moment of atemporal singularity, that is, a moment outside of our own conceptions of self and the (biologically/culturally informed) modeling systems we use to perceive and communicate the world. They are paradoxical: They exist as moments outside of any awareness of our own subjectivity, yet our only methods and tools to examine them are necessarily absorbed within the realm of discursive thought4. Thus, we can only hypothesize their occurrence and their nature. 1.3 Why aesthetic experience? The types of experiences I am describing are in no way necessarily tied to aesthetic experience and the art object. This said, following Dewey, I do believe art-as-experience provides a useful pedagogical model for two main reasons: Firstly, the powerful synthesis aesthetic experience performs – the coming together of disparate parts into a whole, a unified totality of qualities ready to be perceived – provides an ideal vehicle for reflection and contemplation on these primary aspects of an experience. Upon such engagement and reflection, we can better understand what qualities in the totality of our engagement with the art object ignited these powerful moments of absorption in us. This rests on the assumption that the art object captures and preserves an imprint of a more direct, and thus more sensory-dominant realm of consciousness that can often be concealed beneath our ingrained processes of categorization and schematization. This is an imprint that we can recollect (or retrieve) to understand more about our own engagements with the environment, and, through abstraction, the interpretative process as a whole.  4 Within the methodological approach of Modeling Systems Theory, these moments constitute an awareness of the primary forms (models) we use to extend reality beyond the immediate surround (the extensional modeling systems, in contrast to the primary modeling system). For more on the understanding of language as a secondary and extensional modeling system, see Sebeok 1994: Ch. 9. For Modeling Systems Theory generally, see Sebeok and Danesi 2000. Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 74  Cary Campbell Secondly, the art object (the material and semiotic furniture of aesthetic experiences) is well suited to the ignition of these moments of transformative engagement precisely because of its ability to arrange and combine known materials in de-familiarizing ways. This is expressed well by the poet Wallace Stevens’ famous statement, which I paraphrase “Poetry makes the visible a little hard to see.” Through engagement with this fleeting moment of disorientation we can perhaps gain a level of introspection into what qualities in the interpretative process stimulated our engaged absorption. 2 The domain of Firstness 2.1 What is Firstness? The metaphysical category of Firstness, as developed by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), is most useful in elucidating these singular and transformative experiences: Firstness is one of Peirce’s three domains of being 5 , the others being Secondness and Thirdness. We can say that Firstness experience is the preinterpretative auroral aspect of perception, the emergence of sensory qualities before they have been associated with any object or subject-perceiving. It is the abstraction of a quality, the pure and singular sensation of a redness before the subject has absorbed and related the sensation within her previous experiences. Once we recognize this quality in relation to ourselves, as something distinct from us and acting upon our perception, we have already entered the domain of Secondness. This is what makes Firstness so unattainable and transient. Secondness is already observed within time and space; it is the subject recognizing the phenomenon through the experience of these bundles-ofqualities resistance upon our Being. It is in this sense that Peirce asserts that Being is only realized through resistance and fallibility (CP 1.141), or more generally, through direct and contiguous (Secondness) communion with other Beings and things.6  5 For our immediate purposes, we can limit our treatment of the Peircean categories to ontological considerations, fully recognizing that they also have a metaphysical as well as a cosmological basis. 6 Peirce explains the categories with precision: “First is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else. Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness  75 Firstness on the other hand, is never spatial or temporal – it is purely monadic and faces no exterior resistances or reactions. This is what Peirce called quale-consciousness. The consciousness of quality is sentient, sense qualities. The consciousness of quality is not a “waking consciousness – but still something of the nature of consciousness. A sleeping consciousness, perhaps” (CP 6.221).7 It should be noted that the fact that it is “sleeping” or “slumbering” does not make it less intense, “For it is the absence of reaction – of feeling another – that constitutes slumber, not the absence of the immediate feeling that is all that it is in its own immediacy” (Peirce in Sheriff 1994: 6). This idea that the qualities that make up our experiences of Firstness possess their own distinctive form of consciousness has implications for the education of inquiry I am envisioning. It reminds us that not having the reflective or ritualistic “tools and practices” to adequately make sense of and assimilate a transformative experience does not make it less intense for the person experiencing it, just perhaps less educative in regards to their personal growth and learning.8 The “power” that many locate in aesthetic-encounters9 rests in their ability to “de-familiarize” our habitual ways of living and being in the world. The  reaction with, something else. Third is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and second are brought into relation [...] Feeling is First, sense of reaction Second [...] the tendency to take habits is Third. Mind is First, Matter is second, Evolution is Third (CP 6.32 1891; emphasis added).” 7 This numbering system refers to the 8-volume “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”. For this example: paragraph 223 of volume 6. Otherwise I will be quoting from the still in progress Chronological edition, which seems to be slowly superseding the former in Peirce scholarship. 8 This is an important realization for neuro-anthropology as well: “Experiences in alternative phases may be lost or compartmentalized in memory due to a failure of cross-phase transference. Memory of experiences in one phase of consciousness (dream, “trance”) may be lost to another phase of consciousness (“awake”) due to a radical transformation of conscious network across the warp between phases […] Fragmented phases of consciousness may arise in societies in which there are neither ritualized cross- phase transference, nor a culturally transmitted, multiple reality world-view” (Laughlin 1992: 19). Our dominantly “monophasic” culture consistently ignores, represses and devalues “consciousness organized around the inner life of the individual” (Laughlin 1992: 19). One of the implications of this for aesthetic education is that without cultivation of ritualized practice (being-in-habit, Thirdness), Firstness will never be properly integrated with the continuity of the learner’s experience. 9 Not specifically experience with art, but rather Dewey’s (2005[1934]) broad designation of “art as experience,” which, although inadequate to account for aesthetic experience as a philosophical definition, is pedagogically relevant, as Shusterman (2003: 405) has argued, for Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 76  Cary Campbell aesthetic encounter demands to be engaged with, drawing us out of our familiar positions to experience a feeling of transformation. Often, our perceptual behavior is so conditioned that we (instantaneously) infer cognitive frames and behavioral/motor responses in anticipation of the world we expect to be there.10 In Firstness, we (but of course not yet a “we” for this would imply Secondness and thus Thirdness) are immersed in an all-encompassing quale-consciousness. In this auroral phase of the perceptual process there is no prior experience to relate the sensation, and in fact no body/nervous system to recognize this something as a sensation at all. But in a flash (characteristic of the pure potential of Firstness) this quality of redness becomes merely “this sort of redness” and finally just “red” when we return to it in reflection. This is to say; we almost instantaneously attribute these singular qualia to existing processes of schematization.11 That is, we must (often in anticipation) generalize the singularity of Firstness in order to connect it with the continuity of our perceptual-action in the environment. This final step of interpretation and expression through feed-forwarding associative sign systems is an aspect of the domain of Thirdness, which we treat in more detail in Section 3. 2.2 An education of inquiry Peirce did not sharply segment the conscious from the unconscious, or instinct from inference. He believed that Firstness directly impacted upon intentional phases of experience, despite its elusiveness. In what follows I will explore how Firstness comes to play a role in reflection and inquiry specifically through what it can reveal about aesthetic experience. This is essentially what Semetsky  its “‘directional’ or motivational value by directing us toward the value of aesthetic experience” and for “challenging the rigid division between art and action or real life.” 10 Charlie Laughlin explains this behavioral and cognitive feedback loop: “the intentional nature of the cognized environment is anticipatory in its function. Our world of experience, as it were, feeds forward into the world, each moment expecting the world to be as we expect it to be. If activity in the world produces the experience desired, then such behavior contributes negative feedback as to the veridicality of the [neural] model. But if activity in the world fails to produce the experience desired, then the behavior contributes to a disconfirmation of the anticipatory model” (Laughlin 1998). 11 See Eco 2000 for more on cognitive types and the semiotic processes involved in inferring previous models to account for novel stimulus patterns and experiences. Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness  77 (2005b) does in her discussion of how abduction can inform issues related to intentionality in philosophy of education12: Any talk “of unconscious mental phenomena that are in principle inaccessible to consciousness is incoherent” (Searle 1884: 550). The abductive suggestion “comes to us as a flash. It is an act of insight” (Peirce CP 5. 181) which is fallible but still has a mysterious power “of guessing right” (Peirce CP 6. 530) even while being pre-conscious and not rationally controllable. (2005: 232) I argue along with Semetsky13 that reflecting on these aspects of Firstness – as revealed by the logical form of abduction and the principle of the included middle (see Semetsky and Stables 2014) – can aid the learner in contemplative and reflective practice, offering a sort of phenomenological window into the primary (qualia-driven) aspects of their perceptual engagements that may provide insight into more conscious aspects of inquiry and learning.14 My aim  12 Unlike deduction or induction, abduction “is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea” (CP 5.172). Elsewhere Peirce says abduction encompasses “all the operations by which theories and conceptions are engendered” (CP 5.590). Semetsky (2014: 20) shows the form of abduction as follows: “If A is B, and C can be signified by B, then maybe A is a sign of C. As a hypothesis-bearing statement, abduction asserts its conclusion only conjecturally […].” Thus, we can begin to see how (without getting fully into it here) abduction is the illative process behind human creativity, intuition, and insight generally. For more on the relevance of abduction for educational research, see Cunningham 1998; Shank 1998, 2008. 13 And it is also important to note that Dinda L. Gorlee (2009) has considered the relevance of “primary Firstness in the Arts” in a detailed and trailblazing study, advancing a similar thesis to the present work: “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” (2009: 205). 14 The relevance of what I am calling “Firstness experience” to education has already been explored in many different guises and names, specifically in the realm of contemplative education (cf. Gunnlaugson et al.: 2014). See, in particular Morgan’s (2012) discussion of what she refers to as “ground-of-being experiences, ” which is, like Firstness, described as being a realm of pre-cognitive meaning that often occurs when deeply engaged in artistic and meditative processes. To highlight these similarities, it is worth quoting from one of the interviews that Morgan (2012: 42) conducted as part of a study into adult education: “I don’t know why anyone would paint things that they didn’t love because when you get to paint something you get to think about focus and almost become the object you’re looking at you know, and what is that about? I don’t know, it’s another space that is very meditative where thought stops and time stands still [...] That’s probably why I can meditate because I already know what that feels like, now there’s this place in my brain, and I can find that spot because I’ve been there before.” Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 78  Cary Campbell here is to explore what stimulates engaged absorption and examine how this can be applied to form an education of inquiry that places reflection on this preinterpretative meaning in a central role. My hope is that educators who possess an awareness and the means to reflect on this realm of Firstness will be better equipped to stimulate the types of transformative aesthetic engagements that John Dewey (1934 [2005]) and Maxine Greene (1977) placed at the center of their vision for education.15 2.3 The Ground Firstly, it will be necessary to enlarge our understanding of Firstness by examining the before-mentioned notion of “quale-consciousness,” as explicated by Peirce (later finding a place within his theory of signs as quali-sign). One of the earliest references to this elusive concept came from the twenty-six-year-old Peirce’s 1866 Lowell Lectures series entitled The logic of science; or, Induction and ‘hypothesis.’ Here Peirce (clearly influenced by Kantian transcendentalism) says: Our first impressions are entirely unknown in themselves and the matter of cognition is the matter of fact and what is not a question of a possible experience is not a question of fact. The impressions are grasped into the unity which the mind requires […] by conceptions and sensations. (1982 [1866]: 471) These unknown and ineffable impressions are the raw content that the mind uses to discover meaning in the environment, through the senses, but also through community-verified networks of interpretative responses to particular sign-vehicles, what Peirce will later come to call interpretants (see Section 3).  15 Firstness has been an important pedagogical orientation in my teaching practice for some time. Over the years my students have expressed and described the various “senses” of Firstness in the following ways: an experience of presence; a sense of vibrancy; a sense of being outside of time; a loss of sense of self; a sense of emergence; a sense of being singular and ungeneralizable; the sense that Firstness is a space one can enter into; a sense of general possibility. It is remarkable to me how consistent my student’s descriptions often are to Peirce’s own growing and changing notion of Firstness. The related notion of “Firstness moments” has become a useful reflective concept for helping my students cultivate a more aesthetically minded creative process. It is also worth noting how these descriptions are similar to (but also different from) what Csikszentmihalyi (2014[1990]) describes as the eight essential aspects of flow experience. Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness  79 Because these “qualia” are “impossible to describe” yet apparently form the basis of experience, they must be made to refer to Grounds. A Ground is the abstraction of a quality and the basis of a future signification stream, like how “blackness” is an abstraction of the singular quality of black experienced within quale-consciousness. It marks the beginning, the terminus a quo of the semiosic process. Umberto Eco explains this concept of “the Ground” cogently in Kant and the Platypus (2000: 61): The Ground, insofar as it is a quality, is a predicate […] the Ground has to do with “internal” qualities, the properties of the object. In “The Ink is black” the quality “black” or, rather, blackness embodied by the ink, is abstracted from it […]. Nonetheless, even from a logical standpoint, the Ground is not the totality of markers that make up the intension of a term (such a totality can be ideally realized only during the process of interpretation): in prescinding, attention is paid to one element by neglecting another. By predicating the blackness of the ink, we ignore its liquid quality, or any other quality we experienced in our perceptual encounter. In short, in-between the processes of sense-impression to form-recollection, we alter the wholeness of the initial “quale.” The Ground is a Firstness but it is already charged with function, and according to Peirce’s later pragmatism, since meaning is always in reference to purpose (CP 5.116), it is also charged with its own “pre-cognitive and pre-inferential” universe of significance. With this concept, Peirce is attempting to transcend the implicit idealism that he inherited from Kantian doctrine, to assert that our first impressions and percepts, before they need concepts, are embedded with their own domain of (“fugitive”) meanings that provide the foundation for our habitual use of signs in the environment. In short, he is suggesting that there is a directness to perception and Being that needs to be accounted for. It is the relevance of this neglected aspect of the phenomenology of consciousness to the philosophy of education that we are addressing in this study. Here we reach an important cornerstone in pragmatic thought, the notion of “meaning without truth” (Peirce 1866/1982:477). Expression through symbolization (the generalizing of the particular) – though a necessary step in the extension of primary models beyond the immediate sensorium – in a dual sense closes interpretive possibilities just as well as it opens up new ones. That is, once an all-encompassing quale-consciousness forms the Ground of a signifying process, we cannot return to that initial quale, which is ironically the very foundational object (or dynamical object in Peirce’s terms) that we are seeking to know and understand. Peirce explains this process in the Lowell Lectures: “To assign a name to a thing is to make a hypothesis. It is plainly a predicate that is not in the data” (472–473). Through this formulation our initial Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 80  Cary Campbell impressions are however not forgotten. No, they are understood as they act as the foundation of our objective awareness as a sensation. And “sensation is […] the writing on the page of consciousness. Conception is the meaning of the sensation” (472–473). This is to say that once we attempt to express and formulate our experiences (to others and even ourselves), we enter the realm of language as modeling system.16 As Thomas Sebeok (1994: Ch. 9) adopted the concept from the Moscow-Tartu school, this is language unconnected to speech/written language and is essentially the ability to think through language. This necessary transformation from a moment of pure possibility (quale, Firstness) to a state of generality (language, Thirdness) represents a logical necessity in creating meaning and unity out of experience, but still, we must remember this is a unidirectional system. Once we “recognize” the quality acting upon our perceptual systems and proceed to derive meaning out of it through the generalization inherent in language (and more specifically Thirdness), there is no real “going back” to that initial “quale-consciousness.”17 These very concepts of “quale”  16 The reader will no doubt notice that I reference language repeatedly as a kind of embodiment of Thirdness throughout this paper, fully recognizing that Thirdness itself extends beyond the narrow scope of natural language. Following the path laid down by Poinsot (1632– 1635[1985]), Thirdness can be understood simply as “the being proper to relationship” (Deely 2009) in general: Thirdness is quite literally the act of mind (or quasi-mind) that relates a first to a second. It is representative of every cognitive process that perceives resemblances between things. Language remains my dominant example here for the simple reason that its ubiquity in our human experience makes it (pedagogically) an excellent entry point into conceptualizing the realm of Thirdness. 17 For mostly didactic reasons, I am imposing a sense of linearity on this explanation that can be misleading, suggesting that perceptual learning is fundamentally a constructivist process of processing (like a computer) raw sense-data through concepts. I remind the reader that the semiotic account of learning implicit in Peirce’s later (post-1883) thought is much more an ecological process of attuning one’s perceptual systems and sign-use to the operational environment, in a teleological and anticipatory dynamic (see Section 4). However, and unlike more Gibsonian (Gibson 1979) accounts of perception, this is an account that does not completely exclude the impact of representational processes, nor the notion (gradually gaining empirical validation from the neurosciences) that “Abduction appears to function instantaneously because a tiny temporal interval of inference remains unperceived by the conscious mind [...]” (Stables and Semetsky 2014: 21). All this by way of saying something I’ve said (Campbell 2017: 20) elsewhere, that the “experiential aspect of learning (embodied by Thirdness and semiosis generally) is of course not reducible to any ‘complexus of dyadic relations’ (CP 2.274). That is, semiosis-as-experience is ‘not a drawn out series of steps’ but an immediate cognitive event that involves ‘not only the brute actuality of interaction between two as a pair, but also the interpretation of this interaction’ (Quay, 2016: 83–84), no matter how automatic, pre-rational/instinctual, or anticipatory this interpretant-process appears to be.” Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness  81 and “Firstness” are in themselves attempts to examine the very forces that drive perceptual semiosis, and since we are attempting this examination through concepts – that is, through recourse to community-verified interpretants – we can only hypothesize their existence, as a scientist hypothesizes the existence of atoms through tests, though the atoms are never themselves visible. It must be emphasized that “quale-consciousness” is not simply the mind “taking in” a single intentional object. 18 Qualia refer not only to sensory experience, but also to an enveloping and general feeling that encompasses all the senses, as well as collective memory – the learner’s entire acquired experiences – as well as the unique temporal and situated feeling of the encounter. The quale-consciousness is not confined to simple sensations. There is a peculiar quale to purple, though it be only a mixture of red and blue. There is a distinctive quale to every combination of sensations so far as it is really synthesized – a distinctive quale to every work of art – a distinctive quale to this moment as it is to me – a distinctive quale to everyday and every week – a peculiar quale to my whole personal consciousness. I appeal to your introspection to bear me out in this. (CP: 6.223) This quotation sheds light on my insistence on referring to a (some would say) outdated and euro-centric notion of art object. The art object stimulates for us the wholeness of experience that the quale embodies. It is an assertion of Peirce’s phaneroscopy (cf. CP 1.284) that all experiences possess this characteristic wholeness before they become segmented or “diced up” through the mediating tendency of the symbolic function. Again, let’s take language as our example: Language highlights and reveals one aspect of an experience and simultaneously buries and conceals another. Through this generalization process the experience is changed. Peirce saw artas-experience as a powerful opening into quale-consciousness, a way of reigniting the unique wholeness of the “quale” for introspection and for imagining things anew. In short, art-as-experience ignites the imagination, understood in the Deweyian sense as a “way of seeing and feeling things as they  18 What is contained in Firstness, this initial moment of perception – this primary iconism as Eco calls it (Eco 2000) – is not simply empirical sense data, but rather traces of everything that is manifest in experience. It is not simply that our nerve endings pick up raw content that the mind than absorbs within pre-existing systems of thought, but rather that all shades of experience (past states, present sates, and possible future states) are present in this subdoxastic stage of cognition. To fully flesh this assertion out would require another paper (or doctoral dissertation for that matter). For now, I direct the reader to Eco's late essay On the threshold of the infinite included in Eco 2014. Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 82  Cary Campbell compose an integral whole” in which “old and familiar things are made new in experience” (Dewey 2005[1935]: 267).19 This imaginative learning process is concurrent with what Peirce would later come to call the play of musement, which is essentially representative of the inventive and intuitive powers of abduction. It is, as suggested by Peirce, central to meditation and creativity: “It begins passively enough with drinking in the impression of some nook in one of the three universes. But impression soon passes into attentive observation, observation into musing, musing into a lively give-and-take between self and self” (CP 6.459). 2.4 Introducing a pedagogy of Firstness This process of reigniting a memory/imprint of Firstness experience for the purpose of (abductively) re-imagining our normal interpretative and habitual action (as well as our cognized phases of consciousness20) I call a pedagogy of Firstness. Central to this pedagogical orientation is reflecting on and participating in processes of artistic engagement (doing and perceiving art) through ritualized practice. This pedagogical orientation rests on the conviction that the immediacy of presence experienced when deeply engrossed in artprocesses provides an “objectification of an experiential pattern” within our awareness, and that awareness of this experiential pattern provides insight into better understanding the learning process as a whole. That is, knowing how to cultivate this engaged absorption, provides learners with insight into the very spark that ignites their own learning and inquiry, the site that opens up the perpetual flow of semiosis within their experience.  19 Here is the young Peirce in lecture IV of the above 1866 lecture series, expressing the basis of this conviction in the wholeness-inducing power of art: “When we hear a sonata of Beethoven’s the predicate of beautiful is affixed to it as a single representation of the complicated phenomena presented to the ear. The beauty does not belong to each note or chord but to the whole” (1866/1982: 471–472, my emphasis). 20 “Because the definitive characteristic of awareness is re-collection, re-membering, or recognition of patterns in experience, awareness tacitly presumes the role played by knowledge in the construction of experience. Furthermore, since the recursive quality of experience displays discernible patterns, and may thus be recognized as such, reflexive knowledge about consciousness itself involves knowledge of experiential episodes... These cognized and labelled categories of experience, and their mediating neuro-cognitive entrainments, we call phases of consciousness” (Laughlin 1992: 19). See also Laughlin, d’Aquili and McManus 1990: 140–145. Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness  83 Although the singularity of quale-consciousness is not directly “knowable,” the retention of Firstness is always weighing upon and guiding our learning in the present according to the logical form of abduction. As Semetsky (Stables and Semetsky 2014: 19) tells us, quoting from Peirce: “Abduction partakes of first, gut, feeling at the level of bodily response”; yet it is equivalent to those “operations of the mind which are logically exactly analogous to inferences excepting only that they are unconscious and therefore uncontrollable and therefore not subject to criticism.” (Peirce CP 5.108) Thus, we can begin to see how such a pedagogical approach stresses the entirety of our consciousness, and does not artificially segment consciouslearning from unconscious-learning, body from mind, nature from culture. For Peirce, consciousness exists only […] in the relation of my states of mind at different instants […]. In short, the Immediate (and therefore in itself unsusceptible of mediation – the Unanalyzable, the Inexplicable, the Unintellectual [Firstness]) runs in a continuous stream through our lives; it is the sum total of consciousness, whose mediation, which is the continuity of it, is brought about by a real effective force behind consciousness. (CP 5.289) In this pedagogy, the possibility of educative encounters is premised on the fact we can retrieve an impression of this “Firstness” through active coparticipation in a shared environment (cf. Ingold 2017). Therefore, I see dialogue and discussion as essential tools in revealing, to ourselves and the people we commune with, the transformative power inchoate in aesthetic experience. It is only through acts of dialogue, in the Gadamerian sense, that we as learners and teachers thoroughly absorb these potential transformative experiences. Dialoguing with my students on these glimpses of Firstness has been extremely educational, specifically in the context of one-on-one private music instruction. In the spirit of the hermeneutic tradition we are not seeking an end; this is no “quest for certainty” as Dewey would say. Through these acts of reflective practice we are always trying to understand our changing self (a conception of part) as it relates to the changing world (a conception of whole): a constant and rapid dance that grows and remains active throughout our lives. The notion of “truth” I am adopting for this type of pedagogy, like hermeneutics, represents something that, when adhering to the laws of logic, appears as a fallacy. Because meaning is always contextual and in flux, and there is always more whole to realize as well as more parts to relate, hermeneutic knowledge is always imperfect and metamorphosing. In the spirit of Peirce’s phaneroscopy, we are not searching for some absolute certainty beneath appearances, but Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 84  Cary Campbell rather trying to address the very process of taking in and creating the world. A fuller pedagogical account will be offered in Section 4. 3 Thirdness Now, with a re-envisioned understanding of the close affinity between aesthetic experience and Firstness, let us dip our feet into the often-daunting world of Peirce’s semiotics. This is the exclusive domain of Thirdness but yet our only way of “speaking about” any notion of Firstness, and thus a necessary step in our journey. It should be emphasized that like Eco (2000), the era of Peirce I am emphasizing is a post-1883 Peirce, who (following the introduction of the concept of semiosis) turned his focus away from a semiotic routed in formal logic toward a more evolutionary account of semiosis in the universe. In this later period Peirce emphasizes: [T]he immediacy of intuition, antecedent to any inferential activity (the Ground is no longer a predicate but a sensation, and indexicality becomes the kind of experience which takes the form of a shock; it is an impact with an individual, which “strikes” the subject without yet being a representation). (Eco 2014: 511) This is the embedded philosophy of learning that most interests me in Peirce: one that is more phenomenologically routed; one that takes us to the core of learning-through-the-senses, so to speak. I have drawn upon Peirce’s earlier writings to highlight this change in perspective. I want to suggest that the potential for this mature semiosic perspective is dormant in these earlier explorations into terms like “quali-consciousness” and “Ground.” 3.1 Finite semiosis and the beginning of learning How does semiosis begin in the organism? Well firstly, there is a “something” radiating from the sensorium that demands to be accounted for. Often this surprising “something” presents itself as a rupture in the constant flow of semiosis that makes up our conscious experience. We can understand this spark that initiates finite semiosis (semiosis in the organism, contrasted with the action of signs generally) by returning to Peirce’s cosmological account of the universe’s formation: Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness  85 Out 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) […] first, present, immediate, fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free [...]. Only, remember that every description of it must be false to it. (CP 1. 357) So we return to the beginning, a terminus a quo of cognition, or rather, to an imprint, an impression left by an impresser that is no longer accessible to us. This impression-caste metaphor is how I have, in my own arts education practice, come to conceptualize a pedagogy of Firstness: the process through which the student realizes different qualitative possibilities inchoative in sensory experiences. In Kant and the platypus (2000), in a brilliantly detailed study, Eco addresses this hypothesized Firstness of experience, concluding that all knowledge (even knowledge of primary iconism/Firstness) must be attained through resource to a text, “an organizing principle whereby an element can be identified insofar as it is not the other, which by evoking it, it excludes” (2000: 111). This is to say that this spark that ignites semiosis is realized in relation to us at a first level, as acting upon our senses. This instance of primary indexicality is the “brute force” (CP 1.24) characteristic of Secondness that thrusts us toward semiotic determination. In more general terms, we can say that learning begins with coming up against the unknown, what I have (Campbell 2016) previously called the indexical rub of new learning.21 It is this “indexical rub” that directs our attention to this ground-state-of-being expressed through Firstness experience. The learner reaches outward to find some previous cognition22 to relate to this flash, experienced through the corporeal and contiguous reaction characteristic of indexical sign processes and the realm of Secondness. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists have suggested that our inclination toward forms – toward creating wholeness and unity out of experience – may in fact be an internal human presupposition.23 Langer asserts as much when she states that “our merest sense-experience is a process of formulization” (Langer 1957: 89). Here we arrive at a necessary re-envisioning of  21 For an in-depth study of the role of Secondness and indexical sign processes in the learning/developmental process, see Campbell 2016. 22 See Peirce 1868 for Peirce’s inferential account of knowledge acquisition, where all cognition is said to be the result of previous cognition. 23 Again, bio-genetic structuralism with the useful notion of the symbolic function, which is essentially concerned with “how sensory stimuli as symbols are able to penetrate to, and evoke... neurocognitive models mediating meaning, and, in turn, how models express themselves via symbolic actions and artifacts” (Laughlin 1997). These insights from neuroanthropology provide semioticians with another window into better understanding abduction. Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 86  Cary Campbell the classical notion of “object” from a clear and distinct phenomenal object into something more dynamic and fluctuating. “An object is not a datum, but a form which is all at once an experienced individual thing and a symbol for the concept of it, for this sort of thing”24 (Langer 1957: 89). This is essentially what Peirce referred to as the immediate object (the object that is immediately present in the sign, the content or, in a loose way, the intension of the sign, that is, the object as the sign determines it) as distinct from the dynamical object, the hypothetical mind-independent forces radiating from the continuum (see Section 4) that motivate the activation of the sign as a terminus a quo of semiosis. Abductively inferring such a beginning to semiosis is what attention to Firstness is concerned with. As we move from initial perception of a dynamical object to sign recognition, a procedure of abductive inference occurs no matter how effortless or automatic this inference is due to previous conditioning. Because we have no power to directly intuit the whole of the object in its metamorphosing complexity, we must refer to an immediate object, based on previous cognitions, to cope with the singularity, the novelty, the Firstness, of these initial percepts. The Ground fits into this picture as being the salient and dominant qualia that form the basis for a future process of inferential schematization/sign generation, although the Ground is not yet an inference. The Ground can be thought of as emerging from a vague amorphous continuum of un-segmented sensory-semiosic soup (this metaphor I take from Merrel 1997). From out of this soup certain pervasive “qualia” rise to the surface of a pre-cognitive, subdoxastic (see Semtsky 2005b) consciousness (essentially consciousness devoid of, or prior to, intentionality). But how, we must ask, do these qualia manage to form Grounds for future illative acts? Qualia, as emerging from this unsegmented continuum, are peculiar mixes of interpretant responses (behaviorally and culturally informed); neurognostic structures present at birth (Laughlin 1996)25; and environmental  24 In Peircean semiotics this is a sign-vehicle, not a symbol, which is more specifically understood as a sign that signifies its object based on convention (and habit). 25 This is a significant concept within the field of biogenetic structuralism (1974). Best hear Laughlin (1996: 363) himself on this one: “The neural networks comprising the cognized environment have their developmental origin in initial neurognostic structures that are generally present before, at, or just after birth, and the organization of which is largely genetically determined. The evidence for the neurognostically organized, cognitive and perceptual competence of older fetuses and newborns is overwhelming (see Laughlin 1991), and is far more persuasive now than when we originally introduced and argued for the concept (Laughlin and d'Aquili 1974: Chap. 5). It is clear at this point that the brains of fetuses, Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness  87 stimulus. To emphasize this point: qualia do not form Grounds exclusively because they are rich in sensory information. These qualia manage to form Grounds because of an inchoative qualitative possibility that a pre-cognitive stage of consciousness relates26 (in a semi-automatic abductive process27) to an immediate object, to account for this rupture in the continuity of experience (the Firstness moment). The sign-vehicle consists of a representamen (that is the form of the sign or its signifier) which represents an immediate object (that which the representation refers to). These two entities in their combined union make up a sign-vehicle. This binary structure is tightly woven together in the learner’s mind. When this sign-vehicle is interpreted, it triggers a new sign for a (possible) interpreter, which is called the interpretant. The interpretant is not to be confused with the sign’s interpreter but rather, simply “that which guarantees the validity of the sign” (Eco 1979: 69). It is the constantly evolving result of an individual and community’s interpretation of a particular signvehicle, or “a collective, public, observable product laid down in the course of cultural processes” (Eco 2000: 3). The interpretant upon being interpreted becomes a new sign-vehicle pertaining to the same object, thus we have the process of unlimited semiosis where a sign is always reaching out towards something new, something other than itself, never complete in one static determination, but rather immersed in a continual process of transformation. Peirce elaborates in this famous passage: The object of representation can be nothing but a representation of which the first representation is the interpretant. But an endless series of representations, each  newborns and infants are complexly and actively organized to explore and model their physical and social operational environments, and that this is an intrinsically driven, selfregulating, adaptive process”. 26 In the glossary of Sebeok’s (1994: 151) famous introductory text on semiotics, abduction is defined simply as a “process by which a new concept is formed on the basis of an existing concept which is perceived as having something in common with it.” 27 Instinctual and semi-automatic, although fully recognizing that our abductive capacity is constantly being refined through our engagements with the environment. My contention in this paper is that engagement in arts processes is educationally useful in inducing and cultivating reflection on these baseline automatic processes. This is in fact the role of the artist, according to Eco (2000: 223): “The work of the artist always tries to call our perceptual schemata into question, if in no other way than by inviting us to recognize that in certain circumstances things could also appear to us differently, or that there are alternative possibilities of schematization, which make some features of the object pertinent in a provocatively abnormal way”. Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 88  Cary Campbell representing the one behind it, may be conceived to have an absolute object as its limit. The meaning of a representation can be nothing but a representation. In fact, it is nothing but the representation itself conceived as stripped of irrelevant clothing. But this clothing never can be completely stripped off; it is only changed for something more diaphanous. So there is an infinite regression here. Finally, the interpretant is nothing but another representation to which the torch of truth is handled along. (CP 1.339) The torch of truth analogy is another useful device to elaborate the beforementioned pragmatist’s concept of “meaning without truth.” Put as succinctly as possible, unlimited semiosis tells us that a sign is understood only through other signs. This is to say that once we attempt to express and formulate our singular experiences (to others and even ourselves) we enter the realm of semiosis – which, necessary extends, as Deely (1990, 2001, 2009) insists, “over and above” any individual subjectivity. Figure 1: The emergence of semiosis in the learner We would like to believe that language can reach out and touch some dynamical object at the foundation of perception with the exactitude of a scientific method. Aesthetic education has historically not been exempt from this conviction, nor has philosophy of education (as the long-standing analytic tradition in the discipline – represented well by Peter’s seminal text Ethics and education (1966) – attests). This is yet another iteration of the Socratic myth of Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness  89 the “knowing subject,” the belief that words point to underlying essences, that they describe things as they really are. This is not possible, for alas signs can only refer to habitual connections among signs; in other words, they are “grounded” in habitual actions and processes which are (at least, in the human use of signs) not something fixed in perfect union with the environment, but rather “contingent” and perpetually open to revision. The following is one of Peirce’s clearest descriptions of a sign. In it he also explains the before-mentioned concept of Ground. A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in every respect, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representatmen. (CP 2.238) The very use of the concept “ground” in this description – that the sign stands for its object in a “certain respect or capacity” – reiterates the point that our only experience of Firstness is achieved through the mediation of Thirdness. Whenever we think,” Peirce says, “we have present to the consciousness some feeling, image, conception or the representation which serves as a sign […] to some thought which interprets it.” (CP 5.238) This is saying that the initial semiosic interaction that forms the Ground of signification, in and of itself is merely the possibility of a particular quali-sign, which is gone before we can even conceive it. For this reason the interpretant, is necessary for thought and learning to occur in general. Sheriff (1994: 137) summarizes this process saying: “The only way a sign can stand for any object, regardless of how complex or artificial is by referring to it through previous thought” which it projects into the future in an anticipatory dynamic (cf. Campbell 2017). Thus, the being proper to semiosis is relational, it lies not in one ontological disposition or another, subject-object, organism-world, signifier or signified, learner or knowledge-content, but rather in the action between signs, where a sign opens up to a new sign, but a sign not yet become, always becoming. “A sign is something by knowing which we know something more” (CP 8.332 [my italics]). Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 90  Cary Campbell 4 Pedagogical implications 4.1 To in-habit the world The pedagogical significance of Firstness experience is only realized through perceptual-tuning-to-the-world. Educating for Firstness involves “a gradual finetuning or sensitisation of perceptual skills that renders perceivers ever more attentive to the nuances of the environment” (Ingold 2017: 31). An example: Before the music student can experience such glimpses of Firstness, they must be able to enter into states of absorbed attention through processes of enskillment (Ingold 2000). That is, they must have sufficient familiarity with: their instrument; the musical components both semiotic (systems of harmony melody and rhythm) and material (artifacts like LP’s, sheet music, guitar picks, etc.) that provide the “furniture” for their music-making; as well as the people they (ritualistically) commune with in these engagements. And further, they must embody these relations, for it is only through such embodied ways-ofbeing in relation that the emergent space of the possible becomes accessible (and sensible) to the skilled practitioner. Abduction, the inferential process associated with this “emergent space,” is thus not to be understood as an active cognitive operation upon a passive environment, but of potential emerging from out of the actual.28 This is the emergence of Firstness from Thirdness, realized through the dynamic corporeality of Secondness. We can say with Ingold (2017: 31, my emphasis) that “the skilled practitioner resonates with the properties of their environment.” The more able and practiced the practitioner is at entering into these processes of being-in-habit, the more open and receptive they become to felt-variations in the continuum, these emergent qualitative possibilities characteristic of Firstness experience and revealed by the cultivation of our abductive capacity. Abduction is central to this account of learning, and can be defined in this way as “a move from what is known to the unknown” (Stables and Semetsky 2014: 25). Peirce says that abduction constitutes a “mediated immediacy” (CP 5.181). This is a way of saying that abduction “exceeds direct Cartesian intuition understood as a merely dyadic relation between the knowing mind and the known object that delivers the self-evident truth” (Stables and Semetsky 2014: 20). Abduction reflects a tri-relative sign-model that paradoxically, through its  28 Peirce says “we only know the potential through the actual, and only infer qualities by generalization from what we perceive in matter” (CP 1:429). Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness  91 constant closing in on itself (its circularity and self-reference), always opens new (virtual) possibilities. This is a model that incorporates growth. Edusemitoics is thus concerned not with the growth of knowledge or truth, but the growth of meaning. Meaning is different than knowledge for it enters-into-relation with the learner. It extends beyond the actual to incorporate the potential, beyond the individual to the community, and is not constructed, or built up, but rather (notice our musical metaphors) discovered, attuned to, resonating. Peirce asks: “What is growth? Not mere increase” (CP 1.174). In reply to this Peircean riddle, Semetsky (2014: 26) explains that “meaning cannot be quantified; the task of reasoning semiotically is to make us act ethically and intelligently in our embodied practice by creating meaning for a singular [Firstness] experience.” This is, she says, broadly the task of learning abductively. Peirce, paraphrasing Shakespeare, describes abduction as partaking of “airy nothings to which the mind of poet, pure mathematician or another might give local habituation and a name within the mind” (CP 6.455). Abduction represents that surprising fact (felt through the encounter in Secondness) that “breaks in and disturbs the airy nothings of our unconscious habits, therefore bringing them to consciousness by virtue of mediation” (Stables and Semetsky 2014: 25). Abduction shows how Firstness is revealed through routine and habitual practice. That is, Firstness only emerges from out of a rupture in the regularity of being-in-habit (Thirdness).29 Without awareness of the flow of experience (and a sense of being in flow) that a daily practice reveals, Firstness will remain forever elusive and sporadic. Engaging in contemplative arts practices represents an excellent example of this “being-in-habit.” Thus, we can better understand how a pedagogy of Firstness involves not detached reflection, but active doing-undergoing (Dewey 2005[1934]). To experience this transformation of being led out of familiar positions (educere) – the de-familiarizing awareness that a pedagogy of Firstness wishes to cultivate – one must be present in their encounters. I have focused on aesthetic experience, precisely for it’s potential to induce such an experience of presence (singular and atemporal). I have come to view my own work as a music teacher primarily as about cultivating an awareness of this ground-state-of-being that is revealed through engagement in  29 “The emergence of Firstnesses through their being opposed to one another (Secondness) starting from the regularity of the habit (Thirdness) for Peirce is an event (CP 6.200), i.e. a singularity, a point at which something occurs […]. In this way the spontaneity of Firstness, whose irregular and singular nature Peirce underlines (CP 6.54) turns out to be nothing other than an infinitesimal deviation from the law and from the regularity on whose basis it is produced (CP 6.59)” (Eco 2014: 514). Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 92  Cary Campbell arts practices. I have witnessed many times, how students who possess an understanding and awareness of Firstness experience possess a sense of the auto-didactic. These learners know how to self-learn, that is they often have that intuitive knack for realizing the transformative potential in the events of their life, and it is my contention that they develop this capacity through regular meditative forms of practice. At a fundamental level, the process of learning (as a process of adaptation and growth) is co-extensive with the life process itself. 30 Dewey himself (2005[1934]: 108) hinged his mature educational philosophy on such an alignment, saying that the process of living […] possesses continuity because it is an everlastingly renewed process of acting upon the environment and being acted upon by it... of relations between what is done and what is undergone [...] The world we have experienced becomes an integral part of the self that acts and is acted upon in further experience. In their physical occurrence, things and events experienced pass and are gone. But something of their meaning and value is retained as an integral part of the self. Through habits formed in intercourse with the world, we also in-habit the world. It becomes a home and the home is part of our every experience. To live and to learn is to “be in intercourse with the world”, to inhabit is to be in-habit. To be out of habit with the world is to closed to it, and in effect, to be working against it. Thus, to be in-habit is to be in learning, to be realizing the perpetual emergence of semiosis in the environment. As Torill Strand (2013) declares: “Thirdness is learning.” Thus, a pedagogy of Firstness is primarily concerned not with instilling students with representations (or knowledgecontent), but rather with fostering what Peirce called habits of feeling. This is nothing more than the awareness of Firstness experience upon our habitual ways-of-being in the world, a recognition of what I have (Campbell 2016, 2017) previously referred to as the palimpsest nature of the categories (how all three categories are present in all phases of consciousness, despite our level of awareness). Now we can begin to understand how such aesthetic educational philosophy is fundamentally an ethical orientation to the other.  30 See my paper “Learning that reflects the living” (2017) for some possible implications of this alignment for educational philosophy. Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness  93 4.2 Ethical considerations 4.2.1 Ethics through aesthetics Semiotics tells us that the meaning of signs is always something virtual; “it lies not in what is actually thought [immediately present], but in what this thought may be connected with in representation by subsequent thoughts […]” (CP 5.289). To understand the process of semiosis as it relates to the formation of aesthetic experience is to address the realm of all human understanding, of which Firstness is the bedrock. Although it is by nature unattainable, Peirce evidently believed that through reflection on moments of Firstness we can realize some ultimate aim that extends beyond our immediate conduct. For Peirce, this greater aim is merely a reflection of his cosmology: the trend of everything in the universe to progress from a state of indeterminacy – a state of pure quality – to a state of generalization. This is the progression from Firstness to Thirdness, which Peirce translates as the gradual perfection of reason, both in terms of a grand cosmology and in terms of human conduct. In contrast to much of his work, Peirce’s aesthetics is jarringly comprehensible – even beautiful in its simplicity. To distil its essence in one sentence, Peirce believed that all deliberate human conduct is shaped and molded from habits of feeling – the site of the emergence of sensory experience. This understanding of ethics does not demand an absolute or universal rulebased ethics, but is rather a form of artistry (related to the process of abduction) that cannot be reduced to a simple codification. The learner deliberately shapes their conduct through the abductive process of re-imagining the qualitative possibilities inchoative in our perceptual engagements. As a community, it is the merging together of our collective aesthetic judgments that shape our fundamental methods of valuation, distinguishing what is good from bad, what is pleasurable from not pleasurable. To understand how this process occurs, it is useful to contrast aesthetic experience from aesthetic judgment. Sheriff describes aesthetic experience as “the feeling of a quality embodied in an action or object, a feeling that is remembered in a subsequent aesthetic judgment” (Sheriff 1994: 67). It is important to remember that for Peirce “aesthetic judgments […] are neither good nor true” in themselves (Sheriff 1994: 68). What makes them so fundamental to human experience is their ability to synthesize isolated qualities into a wholeness which leads to the formation of habits of feeling, aesthetics for Peirce being nothing more than “the theory of the deliberate formation of such habits Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 94  Cary Campbell of feeling” (CP 1.574). It is these habits of feeling that determine deliberate conduct even once they become so habitual we may no longer “remember” their initial aesthetic qualities. This synthesis creates a behavioral and interpretative response that at its core is still associated with these initial moments of pleasurable feeling. Like his Italian contemporary Croce, Peirce believed aesthetics to be a propaedeutic to the normative sciences of ethics and logic. Sheriff (1994) explains by reference to Peirce’s “classification of the sciences”: Good aesthetics is the deliberate formation of habits of feeling that lead to good actions and good logic (66) […]. The essence of these sciences [ethics, logic, and aesthetics] is controlled thought, controlled conduct and the formulation of habits of feeling (62–63). 4.2.2 Self through other Naturally no logical or ethical system is possible without adherence to some sort of standard or ideal, regardless of whether this ideal is purely hypothetical and regulative, as it is in a pragmatist framework. But if aesthetics leads to the formation of habits of feeling which dictate logical and ethical action, what is the ultimate aim of this action? Peirce insists that this can only be “a state of things that reasonably recommends itself in itself aside from any ulterior considerations. It must be an admirable ideal, having the only kind of goodness that such an ideal can have; namely, aesthetic goodness” (CP 5.130). Since no logical system can be verifiable in a single case, logicality ensures that a private aesthetic ideal extends beyond a learner’s own fate, to a conceived identification of one’s interest with those of an broader (potentially unlimited) community. Logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community […]. This community, again, must not be limited, but must extend to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate or mediate intellectual relation. It must reach, however vaguely, beyond this geological epoch, beyond all bounds. He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the world, is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively. Logic is rooted in the social principle. (CP 2.654) Thus, according to Peirce, the ultimate aim of reason instills the sentiment of love and community, and as evidenced by the title of Alin Olteanu’s (2015) book, a philosophy of education derived from Peirce must take love very seriously indeed. As we’ve already established “Firstness can be prescinded (logically) from Secondness but cannot occur in its absence” (Eco 2000: 110). So, to realize the Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness  95 “pure potentiality” of the learning process – that takes the form of an allencompassing quale-consciousness – involves recognizing this Firstness in relation to some sort of self-conception, no matter how minimal. For, even the act of banging our nose on a window where we thought there was none necessitates some awareness of self-through-resistance. This is why I have argued (Campbell 2016) that such a pedagogy of Firstness can only be realized through a prior “pedagogy of novelty” – or what has relatedly been called “a pedagogy of surprise” by Strand (2013: 801) – of fostering learners receptive to the indexical rub of coming up against the unknown, characteristic of new learning. Only once such a receptiveness and attending to novelty is established can a learner grow to embrace the bedrock of Firstness experience at the core of this novelty. To get back to our discussion of “ethics through aesthetics,” it is precisely through such a process that dialogic philosophers can say that the self is only realized through the other. So in a certain provocative way the learner reflecting on the artistic/creative process of abduction – the contemplative re-imagining of qualitative possibilities, or realizing the imprint of Firstness on our experience – takes us to the heart of Peirce’s ethics. For, to enter Thirdness is to enter the flow of semiosis that extends over and above our own subjectivity (verified intersubjectively, but necessarily relational and thus suprasubjective 31 ). And thus, just as Peirce’s above quote attests, embracing Firstness (which involves embracing the other, for Firstness is unknowable to us outside of the dynamic encounter with Secondess) is always a necessary condition for the principle of community, both definite – in terms of our dealings with other beings in our immediate contact – but also in terms of that distinctly pragmatic belief in an indefinite community of inquirers, which extends our inquiry into the future. Shusterman (2003: 412), informed by Dewey (2005[1934]), holds a similar perspective on the ethical dimensions of aesthetic education: This is but one example of the crucial theme of caring for oneself as a means of caring for others. A wise pragmatism knows that effective concern for the ends requires equally respectful concern for the means necessary to achieve those ends. This is also an argument for the crucial role of aesthetic education and criticism, even if one’s ultimate aim is simply richer aesthetic experience. But aesthetic experience, like the experiencing self, will be all the richer if its interest reaches well beyond itself and out to the environing fields that gives it structure.  31 Again, see Deely 2014. Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 96  Cary Campbell We can make this idea clearer by exploring the opposite condition. When learners are faced with an overabundance of sensory-semiotic novelty, the learner reverts into itself, solidifying the boundaries of their world (see the lower circle in Figure 2 on next page). In this condition, the learner no longer abductively searches for a frame of reference to account for and map this novelty, but rather rejects such stimulus by closing off the flow of finite semiosis, by reinforcing existing internal structures (innenwelt) and rejecting sensory-semiotic content (from the umwelt) that challenge these structures. Such a movement, according to Peirce, is wholly irrational and is in fact a rejection of the other, in favor of selfpreservation. The dissolving of any cognitive certainty that aesthetic experience implies necessarily has an ethical core. For to act like the artist, to hone the skills of creative intuition (abduction) is first and foremost a constant and perpetual receptiveness to alterity. An inability to understand the relational Being of semiosis seems emblematic to me of our inability to understand what the other is saying: to understand the dialogic process of unlimited semiosis and to reduce this encounter – what Levinas (1981: 5-8) calls “the saying” – to a mere technical operation, to a product, “the said.” This is the understanding that ethics in education must not deal with conceptual-entities or approach things metaphysically, but rather deal with interpretants (not interpreters!), those publicly verified results of a community’s interpretation of semiotic content that are always in flux and striving to align (at least asymptotically) with our operational environments. Figure 2: How learner’s adapt to novelty (adapted from Campbell 2016: 26) Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness  97 Now we can understand how an educational program centered around the cultivation of habits of feeling must have profound implications for ethics. One can easily grasp the practical inadequacy of a rule-based ethics for practical conduct: The child who learns about ethical conduct through rigid axioms taught to them irrespective of context will be less receptive, less attentive, and most importantly, less caring to the needs of others than the child who has learned ethical ways-of-being in relation (habits of feeling) in a shared environment. Educating Firstness means educating for intuition and compassion, not abstract reason or conscious and involved problem-solving: “For any judgement that had no basis in intuition, however justified it might be on the grounds of ‘cold’ logic, would carry no practical or motivational force whatever” (Ingold 2000: 25). Yet, although our dominant educational frameworks cannot fully conceptualize the huge importance of feeling upon all learning and living, they cannot fully abandon it either: “Where the logic of ethical reasoning, setting out from first principles, leads to results that are counter-intuitive, we do not reject our intuition but rather change the principles, so that they will generate results which conform more closely to what we feel is right” (2000: 25). An education of habits of feeling cannot be plotted out in advance, decided before it’s even begun, but is rather expressed in doingundergoing, in abduction and the perpetual growth of habit expressed by a theory of unlimited semiosis. This is a process of leading learner’s out of their familiar position, which Ingold playfully calls ex-duction – merging together one of the Latin origins of the word education, “educere” (to lead out), with the concept of abduction: “One goes not from facts ‘on the ground’ to theories, by in-duction, nor conversely from theories to facts by a reverse process of deduction, but rather along the sensible path of continuous variation, that is by ex-duction. One is led out along the way” (2017: 41). 5 Concluding remarks Concentration on and mindfulness to “Firstness” is similarly about better understanding our own reactions and engagement with the world in the hope that this attention will merge together with others to form positive habits of feeling. The theory and concepts that I have presented throughout this paper are not necessarily intended for dissemination to students. I have presented them to enrich educators’ and educational researcher’s understanding of Firstness as a useful reflective tool. I have attempted to present various paths to get at the core of these moments of ineffability, in the hope that educators will Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 98  Cary Campbell adopt the concepts and ideas that they find useful in developing their own personal education philosophies (their own habits of feeling). To realize the significance of aesthetics as a central aspect of the learning process – but also, as Mandoki (2015: 4) argues, as a central adaptive/evolutionary mechanism, and thus having a role in determining inter-species and ecological conduct – it is necessary to unshackle the still persistent educational practice and belief that “a discussion of aesthetics must be conducted in relation to art and beauty.” The notion of aesthetic education I have been adopting is thus not something synonymous with an ideal of “the good” but rather, as it is defined in Baumgarten’s seminal mid-eighteenth century work, as the science of sensible knowledge (scientia cognitionis sensitivae). In the spirit of Hans-Georg Gadamer, my goal is to encourage “aesthetic attentiveness rather than make iconoclastic declarations about what the aesthetic is” (Davey 2011). I have specifically focused on Peirce’s often difficult and convoluted terms and concepts, not to alienate the reader, but because I believe Peirce is one of the only philosophers to adequately address this pre-interpretative stage of consciousness in his work. I feel these concepts (such as quale-consiousness, primary iconism, Ground, Firstness) are useful and pragmatic, as they give us the means to talk about what is by its nature unspeakable. The difficulty of this speaking is evidenced by Peirce’s own struggles with these terms, which I have tried to convey by drawing upon different stages of his philosophy. But alas, this is not an education of concepts. I see the task of this kind of education is in many ways very similar to Dewey’s explication of The role of inquiry (1939) – “to distinguish immediate, unreflective values from those values worth retaining upon reflection because their consequences contribute to human flourishing” (Garrison 1999). Like Dewey’s logic of inquiry, the concept of Firstness provides us with a practical toolbox to grab hold of these transient sensations that I believe are at the core of learning engagement. What these concepts encourage is reflective mindfulness of the very moments that ignite in students – but also just people – transformative engagement, whether it be with a piece of gallery art, playing music, a plastic bag, or a chemical reaction. The philosophical notion of the “continuum” – as introduced by the Danish semiotician Louis Hjelmslev, but expanded to fit within a Peircean framework – is a useful concept in this discussion. The continuum is the amorphous external stuff from which organisms etch out their realities. The continuum is not like Plato’s hidden universe of ideal forms but rather is the very limits of being, the boundaries prescribed upon our perception. Eco (2000: 52–55) compares the continuum to the grains in a log of wood. Different people can make many different things out of the same block of wood – just as different life forms Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM Toward a Pedagogy of Firstness  99 perceive reality differently – however there are grains inherent in the wood that motivate how and which direction we cut. Firstness speaks to us from this inchoate void and is the spark that drives inquiry. Out of indeterminacy something grabs hold of us and absorbs our attention in such a way as to block out everything else and cause us to focus solely on it, the phenomenon. This is primary indexicality, which is what drives us to speak before we have spoken. We look to the art object because it embodies and concentrates this Firstness before us into “a unified whole,” focusing our gaze for us, etching sense and meaning out of the continuum. It is in this sense that all art is a remembering – an elegy for this fleeting moment of atemporal singularity that is already dead once we have noticed it. Acknowledgement: Thank you to Sandy Gillis, Rita Helena Gomez, Maria Spychiger, Susan O’Neill, Michael Ling, Kalevi Kull, Charlie Pearson, and Marion Benkaiouche for offering guidance on different iterations of this ongoing study. Your assistance and mentorship has been instrumental in the development of this paper and my ongoing research. Thank you most of all to my students. This work is about you and it is for you. References Campbell, Cary. 2015a. Educating firstness: An enquiry into Peirce’s domain of firstness and its implications for aesthetic education, Revista Reflexões de Filosofia, 4I(7). 1–16. Campbell, Cary. L. 2015b. A dialogue on inquiry. SFU Educational Review 1. 1–18. Campbell, Cary. 2016. 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Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM 102  Cary Campbell Strand, Torill. 2013. Peirce’s rhetorical turn: Conceptualizing education as semiosis. Educational Philosophy and Theory 45(7). 789. Stables, Andrew & Inna Semetsky. 2014. Edusemiotics: Semiotic philosophy as educational foundation. Routledge. Bionote Cary Campbell Cary Campbell (b.1990) is a music educator and musician residing in Vancouver, Canada. He is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University and an educational researcher for MODAL research group. He studies the relevance of semiotics and the philosophy of Peirce for conceptualizing the foundations of education. Recent articles include “Learning that reflects the living: Aligning anticipation and edusemiotics” (2017) and “Indexical ways of knowing” (2016). He is also co-founder and editor of the website/magazine philosophasters.org. Authenticated | clc25@sfu.ca author's copy Download Date | 3/2/18 7:00 PM

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