Illogical metaphysics is shaky indeed
Metaphysics means to me that something is there that we cannot easily explain.
But it is real because it has an effect which, to our satisfaction, can be registered, measured, evaluated, described and passed on.
When something is such, it is social.
It can be authenticated as real by others.
That does not make it true or beautiful, two qualities that would make a thing “more” metaphysical.
But it is getting closer because ultimately these designations are consensual.
Now if I claim daily conversations with Abba, that will not suffice as proof that I have a logical (valid) metaphysic.
But suppose I teach this mode of spirituality. And others report changes in their lives with reference to their dealings with Abba?
Again, getting closer.
For Peirce, a change in his life led him to believe in the reality of the Creator.
Peirce was hardly the first or the last to sense these things.
Should we, with efforts we give advertising, show how the cumulative efforts of such souls tended toward good, would this be a proof a philosophy could honor?
It would be proof Triadic Philosophy would honor.
I shall speak for myself.
I feel community with what Peirce recounts both in his writings of events in a Manhattan Church and his writings about musement and guessing at the riddle of divinity.
“When an idea is conveyed from one mind to another, it is by forms of combination of the diverse elements of nature, say by some curious symmetry, or by some union of a tender color with a refined odor. To such forms the law of mechanical energy has no application. If they are eternal, it is in the spirit they embody; and their origin cannot be accounted for by any mechanical necessity. They are embodied ideas; and so only can they convey ideas.” C. S. Peirce, “The Law of Mind,” July, 1892. http://buff.ly/1OQtVFz
And I will profess, on the basis of my cumulative writings, this sense:
Metaphysics is validated by the authenticity of experience that can be validated by actions, statements and other evidences. Only by such validations can metaphysics be demonstrated to be the crown of logic.
And only if goodness IS logical is there much of a future for us all.
Peirce: CP 2.36 Cross-Ref:††
36. Fourthly: Some writers make it the boast of their systems of logic that they rest upon a philosophical basis; others really use the same method, though they rather keep the fact in the back-ground, despite the good ring of saying that one’s logic is philosophical. Only, if logic is to be a pavillion on the roof of metaphysics, then metaphysics cannot conveniently be made an upper story of logic, as Aristotle and Kant, the two greatest of metaphysical systematizers, would have it to be. To me, it seems that a metaphysics not founded on the science of logic is of all branches of scientific inquiry the most shaky and insecure, and altogether unfit for the support of so important a subject as logic, which is, in its turn, to be used as the support of the exactest sciences in their deepest and nicest questions.
