Charles Sanders Peirce was a renegade who did everything and could fit in nowhere. He was nasty and rude and at the same time the soul of decency and love. The world of the 19th century made him, with his students Dewey and Veblen, thinkers of massive merit in a sea of robber barons. We had Trumps then as we have them now. I follow Peirce and if you want to know more I have embedded a good access to him below.

Re-education

We all need re-education always.

For me Peirce was seismic. From Peirce, I derived and adapted a way of thought that revolutionized my life. I created a triad -- three steps -- to the completion of a thought. Reality, ethics, and aesthetics. The reality was the sign, ethics was the index and aesthetics the outcome -- actions and expressions emerging from the process of thinking.

Aesthetics

In this understanding, aesthetics became the very heart of human existence. It was impossible for us to achieve the good that ethics aims at without having the aims of goodness as the actual gateway to action. Those aims I take to be the achievement of Truth And Beauty seen as fused together. This was a summons to the exercise of freedom in thought, That freedom was based on selecting universal values and living by them.

Imprisonment

It did not take long to realize aesthetics had been co-opted by the so-called Art World. It remains so as we speak. Money and auctions and mega collectors are at its center. Cyber challenges this assumption.

Places like Pinterest remind us that art is in the eye and that we are all artists. But we have not made the transition to regarding aesthetics as the final term in a three stage thought process -- reality, ethics, aesthetics.

We will and when we do we will experience a global moral evolution.

Nonviolence

Why did Mao fail to create a Cultural Revolution? Why did the US fail in its neocon mode to create democracy all over the world?The answer is that you cannot create truth and beauty at the end of a gun.

Violence and war are ugly. They are at the bottom of the spectrum of aesthetics. Keats was correct in fusing truth and beauty. If the final fusion of all is love and justice, you cannot reach it on the basis of violent premises.

Global democratic revolution

I derive from the energy three stage (or triadic) thinking creates the sense that this is a century during which nonviolence will become standard and the playing field of the world will become much more level. Truth and beauty are united, fused and universal. Every time we act or speak it is an aesthetic event. The world's the stage. As the Bard noted, we're players.
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