The Politics of Survival by Trout Lara;

Author:Trout, Lara;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

d. The Communal Value of the Individual and of Non-hegemonic Perspectives

The synechistic individual is an invaluable source of novelty for the community, as a result of the uniqueness of her or his experiential and creative perspectives. Since each person has her or his own body and her or his own spatio-temporal position in the world, each person’s experience is unique. The habits that make up each person’s past, present, and projected future are a constellation of contiguities and resemblances that, ultimately, revolve around that person alone. For example, Peirce himself plays the role of the creative synechistic individual in his Monist “Cosmology Series” essays, which hypothesize a synechistic universe in which consciousness, chance, and mind have a rightful place versus the mechanistic necessitarianism held by many of his scientific contemporaries. Alice Walker is also a creative synechistic individual; no one else could have written The Color Purple (1982).

The fact that synechistic individuals are inescapably socially shaped points to synechistic groups of community members also being sources of novelty for the larger community, because of shared experiences among synechistic group members, experiences that are not encountered by other community members. In other words, these groups have certain type(s) of experiential secondness in common, my focus being socio-political secondness. Peirce does not explicitly address group membership in the 1890s association writings, but it is a relatively straightforward extrapolation, given his general convictions about the influence of society on the individual’s habit-taking. Moreover, in his 1901 review of Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science, Peirce shows a sensitivity to group membership on the basis of economic class, sharply criticizing the tendency of British society to harness science to its sense of “social stability” (EP 2:58, 61). Peirce also hints at a similar economic-based class elitism in his criticism of the Gospel of Greed in the “Cosmology Series” essay “Evolutionary Love,” to which I turn in Part 2. He thus seems well aware that group membership can result in shared experience.

The socialization informing our individualized habit-taking involves our membership in various groups, including groups identified by race, sex, and a host of other factors. These groups are likely to reflect similar habit-taking in respect to societal forces that base privileged and oppressive treatment of people on group membership. Thus the similar habit-taking is not due to inborn instinctive habits shared by group members. That is to say, the similarity does not involve innate “essences” corresponding to each race, sex, and so on. Rather the commonality occurs because of shared experiences (or lack thereof) of discriminatory secondness. People of color and women, for example, often encounter racist and/or sexist secondness that targets them because of their group membership. Euro-American men do not often experience either of these types of secondness, and Euro-American women do not often experience racist secondness.

The Color Purple, beyond reflecting the experience of a unique synechistic individual, Alice Walker, also reflects the experiences of African American men and women living in the rural U.S. south in the early twentieth century (1982). The brutality

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