PRESS RELEASE - 21 Aug 2005
NEW BOOK ON LOVE OFFERS “SOLUTION” TO PEIRCE MYSTERY
Delta,
CO, USA:
A major new study of one of Peirce’s
favorite subjects, Love, is now available: The Technology of Love
by Charles E. Hansen. This book, the
first of a two-volume project, is audacious in offering a solution to some
of the unfinished work of Charles S. Peirce, the founder of “pragmatism” and
perhaps America’s
greatest philosopher. Hansen, who began
his study of Love while a doctoral student at George Washington University in
the 1970s, offers the first formal “working” or pragmatic definition of Love
applicable to the entirety of daily living; and buttresses it with a
breakthrough argument that Love is a scientific reality of our Universe
that is here to stay along the lines of Peirce’s ultimate contention: the
fundamental ingredients of our Reality he held to be tychism,
synechism, and agapism
– roughly chance-spontaneity, continuity and “evolutionary love.”
Peirce
left us intriguing hints of Love’s scientific supremacy; and near his
death he stated that he "had in his head a book" in which he would
logically address some of the most fundamental issues of nature, of the laws of
the universe, and how "I propose to show just what 'free will' really consists
in and how it acts." He suggested
that his proof would be "surprisingly simple"; and that it would
impact every department of human knowledge and penetrate even into religion,
not as concerns faith, but as concerns logical conviction, to use
his terms and his italics. But spurned
by academia, ill, and financially unsupported in his later years, he could only
write, "I tell you the plain truth I know I have thought[s] that would be
of great use to the world and that nobody is likely for a very long time to
reach the same truths; and yet owing to my obscurity and lack of information I
had better seek the tomb as quietly as possible."
In proposing a completion to Peirce’s
mysterious “unfinished book,” the author offers remarkably penetrating interpretations
of David Hume, Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, and others – including Jesus to make
the case that the ingredients that ultimately form the experience of Love are
the same fundamental ingredients of constructive social-economic
interaction in general. Hansen also
demonstrates that Love has scientific foundations in both physics and biology
that will shock even the staunchest of sociobiologists
– and of considerable significance to readers secular or religious, Hansen
offers the first scientific based definition of Justice as a derivative of Love
much as Hume suggested.
While this book is a thick read (500+ text
pages), there is no part of the book that does not offer new insights and a new
clarity of our human condition that will surely impact the reader’s daily
living as well as the major departments of human knowledge as Peirce held;
nevertheless, it provides such a simple understanding of Love that even a child
can now grasp the key ingredients of “how Love works”.
The
Technology of Love Vol. I is
available at www.corsense.org.
