Conduct — What Makes Us Act?
Well, we cry with no memory and that is an action, so scratch memory as the sole cause of actions.
Write in need, desire, longing, anger, pain as possible answers to what makes us act.
But let the baby grow a bit and memory makes a mark. At least according to Charles Sanders Peirce, whose pragmatic maxim informs our thinking.
Says Peirce:
[EP2:258], “Whenever we set out to do anything we ‘go upon’, we base our conduct on facts already known.”
We act on what we know. Hold that thought.
Peirce adds: Our conduct rises rise when the thoughts we respond to have been
“reduced to a memorial maxim.”
So a memorial maxim, a jog, a push, a shove, something that moves you to action.
Here’s what I take from this.
Words have present and future import.
Even that crying baby, soothed, may coo on hearing pacifying words.
If I listen to Pharrell Williams “Happy”, I may ‘go upon’ happiness as a memorial maxim for a while.
How many do prodigious feats of memorization without a thought?
It’s influence.
We are at least in part the society around us. Our mental furniture is a collection of treasures and debris from everywhere.
But then.
We are each endowed with a freedom that means for every act that we take we may well act in a way that we determine freely, without reference to any external influences.
Therefore I conclude that Peirce is partly right.
We operate on what we have taken in and on our refinements of it. We also make choices based on conscience and consideration of things as WE choose.
We are not confined to memorial maxims, nor to anything in our past.
We can make decisions about the near and farther future on the basis of our immediate mental work. And our immediate choice of the values we will honor.
