Roberta Kevelson, "Tom Paine's RIGHTS OF MAN: An Aestheic-Anarchic Dimension of Legal Semiotic", International Journal for the Semiotics of Law III/8 (1990), 169-186.

I. INTRODUCTION

It is a truism that currants in interpretation of concept shift; almost as soon as the power of a revolutionary idea becomes mainstream it is reinterpreted by what might be called counter-revolutionary movements in thought, and such movements virtually change history. This paper is not going to approach the power of ideas as observational forces, but will set that topic aside for consideration at another time. Yet it is important to mention the imagistic and observable qualities of thought-power or ideas which bring about actual changes in the world since this observable function of ideational signs is synonymous with Peirce's iconic function -- that initial function of all semiotic processes including aesthetic processes.

We recall that Peirce understood "esthetics" as that division of his Normative Sciences which accounted for the play of Values in human affairs. Esthetics, or the Science of Values, governs Ethics in this scheme, and it is a Normative Ethics which provides rules for conduct, such conduct that systems of law make effectual in human societies. Indeed, the so-called "rules of law" may be regarded as "interpretants" (to use Peirce's well-Known term for "signs") for norm-like interpersonal patterns of behavior in social life. Both Esthetics and Ethics stand upon an expanded scaffolding of a Logic which includes the grammatical structures of natural and formal languages as well as the strategies of rhetorical operations which are easily mapped and graphed and are otherwise visually representable.

Thus while paper does not directly discuss the esthetic aspects of power in thought as observable and visually representable, I do intend to focus on Peirce's notion of the meaning of an idea as its observable consequences in the world, and as a kind of creation, like an artwork, when such ideas introduce genuine conceptual novelty into human thought and, by interpretation, into those institutions in society which, as signs, represent novel ways of knowing.

It might also be mentioned briefly at the outset of this paper that the anarchic reference and connection with the aesthetic in the title of my paper is intended merely to point up here a fundamental difference between the leading assumptions of Paine and Peirce, namely to the fact that any genuine revolutionary movement which introduces novelty as a power-for-change into any society, i.e., any complex system of signs, is an indeterminate movement.

This indeterminacy in Peirce characterizes all semiotic processes that are, at bottom, relational. They are not only relational in the sense of representing inseparable conjunctions between individuals, including individual human beings in human society, but are relational also in representing a basic interaction between the defined and the vague in all meaningful semiotic structures. In this sense a system of law which presupposes referent and ideational social values also presupposes a community or interpersonal reciprocity between members of the social organization in question.

To emphasize, this notion of community which is the ground of public values that represent public opinion is fundamentally different from a Benthamite notion of individualism which, however radically it reinterprets the age of the Glorious Revolution in England that preceded it, nevertheless holds a positive view of rules of law which are, in a significant way, reactionary of an age-old notion of atomism in western thought. Benthamite individualism is radical in its context, and Peirce's innovative response to Benthamite individualism is to introduce relationalism into all significant processes, including law.

By contrast, Paine's notion of the principles which are foundational at his RIGHTS OF MAN, are not revolutionary as we come to understand revolution by the middle of the 19th century; but are restorative in intent of natural law assumptions of rights which depend on implied absolute and axiomatic principles or beliefs in enduring features of human nature, i.e., of innate powers as natural rights.

Hannah Arendt, for one, observes that Paine's referential source-value for his concept of the rights of man are not novel but reactionary. She also points out that the frame of reference for Paine is not merely ideal and imaginatively conjectured out of wishes and visionary thinking, but actually points back, or is an index which retrospectively evokes, an actual time in human history, at which the rights of man, as idea, emerged and become, as any other emergent phenomenon, an existent part of our experiential world. Yet the actual time and place to which Paine refers is utopian and as such is a meaningful aspect of thought which evolved from Chiliasm and later become bifurcated into the general -- and vague -- idea of anarchism on the one hand, and into the notion of syndicalism on the other.

For example, when the neo-utopians or so-called "new Leftists" began to stir subterraneously in the late 1950's emerging as a political force in the early 1960's especially in the United States, Tom Paine's RIGHTS OF MAN was revived as a text, and became a slogan, a sign, and a reference. The social revolutions of the 'sixties were deeply concerned with a perceived extinction of the Individual Human Being as an inviolate, creative force, created in the image of his god, who above all was possessed of such inalienable rights that seemed endangered by government, by officialdom, by establishment, and above all, by prevailing (and presumably) wrongheaded public opinion.

The new left was certainly not an homogeneous group. Almost every particular social revolution of the 1960's was characterized by factionalism and pluralism which seemed capable of conjointly steeping Utility and Marxism with Paine's "Right" and sweetening it all with Thoreau and Ghandi. What was almost entirely left out this reactionary movement which became in many instances, in spite of itself, genuinely revolutionary, was almost anything which smacked of pragmatism -- although Dewey was eclectically admitted here and there into the inner chambers of the rhetoric of the "new left."

But Peirce was almost totally ignored, since the main principles of American pragmatism had become stereotypically viewed as mainstays of laissez faire, although in fact it was the pragmatic voice in the courts -- of Justice Holmes, in particular -- that sounded the death-knell to a mythical immunity of free enterprise and private business from the regulatory forces of the law. Yet it is of Peirce's special view of pragmatism, that method of thinking which underlies his theory of signs or semiotics, which uniquely looks to indeterminacy and Pure Chance for the emergence of genuine novelty in the world, since it is novelty which makes possible the creation of new human values via revolutions both violent and nonviolent.

Furthermore, the truly radical meanings or consequences of the idea of "liberty" and "freedom" and "revolution" and "rights of man" assume unprecedented significance from the perspective of Peirce's theory of signs. It is not until we profoundly consider what Peirce intends when he says that the meaning of any idea, i.e., any conceptual sign, it its actual effectualness upon the world, and that we may begin to use our understanding as a partner for further investigations, i.e. as a tool with which we reciprocally interact -- creating new theory even as it creates us who use it.

It is this notion of community, of reciprocity, which is as fundamental to semiotic inquiring method as it is to those objects of inquiry we investigate, e.g. law and other dialogically-structured sign-system, which permits us to say in confidence that a means for investigating is appropriate to the end of our investigations, and appropriate also with respect to that which is being investigated as the object of inquiry.

This unification of method establishes an integrity in inquiry: a major value governs our ethical choice of a mode of inquiry, and this choice becomes our referent or model system for our actual process of investigation, i.e., for our selection of a method of reasoning which will be appropriate to that which we seek to find. It is precisely this integrity in inquiry which Peirce emphasized throughout his writings. An inappropriate method is unethical, according to his views.

For example, when Locke attempted to incorporate his ideas of liberty into the constitution he was requested to draft for the state of South Carolina he used an inappropriate method of syllogistic thinking rather than a more appropriate, nondeductive or hypothetical mode of reasoning which far better accorded with the topic of indeterminacy, liberties and rights of persons in free society. Similarly, Justice Story, a distinguished but elder contemporary of Peirce, wrote his famous opinions on abolition, but reasoned them in the deductive method of closed-world reasoning --a method suitable for logical demonstrations of a closed order but not for logical discovery, or the suppositioning. or the introducing genuine novelty into a conventional but incompletely-known idea, such as civil liberty for all.

The Peircean notion of appropriateness of methods or logics, for different purposes in reasoning and for different purposes intended to be realized by inquirers, is a topic I discuss in some detail elsewhere. Here I want merely to connect this sense of integrity with a creative process that semiotic inquiry begins to evolve. For example, if we use the example provided by Paine's famous RIGHTS OF MAN we may see Paine as an innocent but ignorant pathfinder in an area of freedom he really did not understand. Nor did he see his role as proclaimer -- as inadvertent herald or indexical sign -- of what it means to express and propose the idea of the constitutional rights of man.

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