Abstract
Sociology is a numeric art. Its work is to measure differences, of which, in social arrangements, there are many, few of them visible to the naked eye. Sociology’s aesthetic pleasure, when it takes it, is to imagine how they—these innumerable differences—come together, when they do. For all practical purposes, everything social is measured against everything else; hence the art.
The question to be asked of sociology, therefore, is what is its base number? It is commonly assumed—given the ubiquity of the Cartesian coordinate system with its x/y axes—to be two; which is to say 2. Yet 2-fold schemes and their multiples rest on the least stable of all prime numbers. Even 5, for example, is more stable because, putting its 2 aside, there is left over a 3—probably the most stable of all numbers. A 2, by contrast, is nothing but two 1s, wherein twoness (so to speak) encounters the risk that one of its 1s could be negative, in which case, the remainder is nothing. Since, in social life, we know that negatives are everywhere at once, then common sense would require that, sociologically speaking (and contrary to almost everything we believe), social things cannot survive as they have if they are essentially binary. We survive; ergo: 3 is our prime. No one has put it better than Charles Sanders Peirce: “By the third I mean the medium or connecting bond between the absolute first and last. The beginning is first, the end second, the middle third. The end is second, the means third. The thread of life is a third; the fate that snips it, its second” (Peirce 1931 [1875]: 170).
Yet, as is well known, and to an increasing extent much discussed, sociology, its necessary obligations to numeric work notwithstanding, remains improbably committed to binary thinking—as in, for example, micro/macro or agency/structures and so on and so forth. The sociological dilemma with binaries of this sort, and their kin, is that they allow, at best, for extreme differences, hence immutable distinctions, such as micro-sociologies versus macro ones or actions versus their limiting structures; thereby, they fail to resolve the problems for which they were conceived in the first place. Given structures, pure and simple, then actions must be external to the pure primary; and vice versa. Hence, without further comment on the obvious, the reason to explore the concept of the third.
Peirce was both a founder of pragmatism and of an American line of social semiotics. Yet, his value to sociology has been relatively neglected with some notable exceptions (from Wiley 1994 to Cossu 2011, for examples). One of the stumbling blocks to sociology’s use of Peirce is the seeming oddness of his trinitarian theory of signs and meanings. Where sociologists have taken an interest in classical semiotics they have tended to select such binary concepts of meaning-making as signifier/signified, speech/language, or performance/competence derived from Ferdinand de Saussure (and, often without acknowledgement, Roman Jakobson). Jeffrey Alexander and his colleagues in and beyond his Yale workshop on Cultural Sociology are well known for their persuasive applications of a politically robust simulacrum of Saussure’s binarism to civil cultures and related matters (in, inter alia, Alexander 2006: 48–67). Yet, again, pleading the severe constraints of time and space, I will forgo further comment on these lines of development with the stipulation that a relatively recent writer like Peirce, familiar to moderns by his originating influence on pragmatism, offers at least a hint of the productive value of trinitarian over binarian approaches to a whole range of topics from meaning and culture, to sign making, thus even to agency and structure. Famously, Peirce’s triad of the sign, its object, and its interpretant is an intriguing resource not least of all because of its eerie similarity to a key passage in the principal book of this review. Peirce, like Augustine, argues that explanatory values ascribed to binary couplets are ultimately ruined without a third, more active, and practical force that navigates the straits between the endless sands of particulars and the hard rock of absolutes:
A sign stands for something to the idea which it produces, or modifies. Or, it is a vehicle conveying into the mind something from without. That for which it stands is called its object; that which it conveys, its meaning, and the idea to which it gives rise, its interpretant. The object of representation can be nothing but a representation of which the first representation is the interpretant. But an endless series of representations, each representing the one behind, may be conceived to have an absolute object at its limit (Peirce 1931 [1875]: 171; compare Kockelman 2005).
Simply put, the Third (here, the interpretant) never stands alone yet is always tied to the string of what sociologists might prefer to call actions, thus to suggest that practical actions on the plane of performance can never be conceived (nor, in fact, can they be meaningfully thought) apart from this third factor that links the agent to an (absolute) structure.
Peirce was a true polymath in the sense that he seemed to have a clear grasp of every branch of science, mathematics, and philosophy in his day (1839–1914). His idea of the Third arose from mathematics and philosophy, still he did not miss the point that one of the (to him) endless instances of thirdness was the Christian doctrine of God as a trinity to which he made passing reference (Peirce 1935 [fragment, n.d.]: 501–02]. It is hard for anyone—even those numbed by ritual acquaintance with this doctrine—to overlook the salience of the closing words of the lines, just quoted, summarizing Peirce’s theory of signs, as lodged in a series of representations “each representing an absolute object at its limit.”
Peirce aside, the common sociological practice of overlooking religious ideas as a source of sociology’s conceptual work (as distinct from their being objects of its study) is very probably a sequela of the field’s culturally normal disposition to favor binary methods which, unfortunately, short-change the historical evidence. The idea of structural and structuring wholes (whether social or otherwise) would very likely have been unthinkable had it not been for the long Western history of entanglements with the cultures of gods, in particular with monotheistic absolute deities as in the three Abrahamic faiths. For absolutes of any kind (even socially structured ones) to be thought they must be mediated and mediations of whatever kind can never be achieved with the blunt instrument of 2s. A 3 is necessary. While versions of a dominant yet mediated god are present in many modern and premodern world religions, the monotheisms with their system of special god-like prophets (Moses, Mohammad, Jesus the son—not to mention Abraham himself) have been consistently preoccupied with the other-worldly/this-worldly dilemma. Yahweh, Allah, and God the father were so starkly transcendent that they made some principle of historical mediation necessary; hence, the threeness problem: sign, object, interpretant. The spirits and traditions of the god-like prophets are the interpretants that keep the whole thing moving along over time—much as, more abstractly, sociology employs mediating concepts like practices, rules, norms, socialization, habitus, recursivity and the like as interpretants between structures and actions. Without them, all would be lost between a sea of particulars and an unreachable horizon.
In the early fifth century of the common era, Augustine of Hippo’s De Trinitate (hereafter, The Trinity) is, among other of his works, the first, and until Peirce, the only full-blooded attempt to work through a trinitarian social psychology of cultural and historical meanings. All the more surprising is the fact that the famous Bishop of the Roman Church in North Africa was first and foremost a theologian, then a philosopher by background and training, and a social thinker only by accident of circumstance. Augustine was born in 354 CE in Thagaste, then a Numidian town, soon to come under the administration of Rome, but destined to be overrun by Vandals in 430, the year of his death. Today, Thagaste is Souk Ahras in northeastern Algeria.
Augustine’s parents were of modest means yet committed to their son’s education. As a result, his primary language was Latin rather than the local Numidian. As we know from his Confessions (397–398), Augustine, the boy, felt himself to be at loose ends—tempted by lust, drawn to vagrant philosophies, and repulsed by the harsh pedagogical methods of his secondary studies away from Thagaste. He quit the school in Madaura, to return home before studying further in the Latin language in Carthage. As a result he failed to learn Greek, a fact that is variously offered to explain the depth of his learning (focused deeply on Latin literatures, Roman and Christian—among others: Virgil, Cicero, Tertullian, Pelagius, Jerome, and his mentor in Milan, Ambrose); or, in the view of others, the ease with which in his youth he succumbed somewhat uncritically to philosophical ideas then current in the Latin-speaking world. Of these the most influential to his early formation were Manichaeism in his early years in North Africa and Neo-Platonism later in his Milan years (384–387). Thus, in the still impressionable years of adult life, he had given himself over to two of the more binarian philosophies. Whatever the truth of Augustine’s mono-lingual limitations, just as important were the circumstances of his times in the last years of the Roman Empire.
Augustine’s most important crypto-sociological writing is De Civitate Dei contra Paganos (Concerning the City of God against the Pagans) or, popularly, The City of God. This enormous, sprawling book was composed over a decade and a half from 413, just after the sack of Rome by Alaric to 427, on the eve of Augustine’s death and the collapse of Christian North Africa. Augustine lived through and wrote about one of the most important historical conjunctures in human history. It would be a stretch to describe Augustine as a sociologist before the fact; yet, it is not an exaggeration to describe The City of God as a work of social history of the moral troubles of Rome in its declining years. Thus the reader finds such pithy condemnations (in Henry Bettenson’s lively and much admired translation) as: “Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale” (Book IV: 4). Which is followed by the near-famous parable which Augustine poached from Cicero:
For it was a witty and truthful rejoinder which was given by a captured pirate to Alexander the Great. The king asked the fellow, “What is your idea, in infesting the sea?” And the pirate answered with uninhibited insolence, “The same as yours, in infesting the earth! But because I do it with a tiny craft, I’m called a pirate, because you have a might navy, you’re called an emperor.” (Book IV: 5)
These are but samples of Augustine’s sociological attentions to this-worldly matters of justice, evil, and politics—in respect to which his writings led recent writers to theories of social and political realism (notably Reinhold Niebuhr 1941–1943; compare Lemert 2011; also Elshtain 1995, Wolfe 2012).
Yet, the justification for a long review of The Trinity, a hugely more obscure book than City of God, rests not on the clues that, had he been ours, Augustine might have been a sociologist. Rather, The Trinity merits our attentions because it engages riddles that still beset our field—from the near-oxymoronic confusions of the concept of a social self to the impenetrable dark space between structures and practical actions. How can a self, the most interior of human aspects, be social? How does the individual alone or, even, in concert with those near at hand, act in measurable consistency with immeasurable structural forces? Augustine’s The Trinity does not, to be sure, answer these still troubling questions, but it does set a cairn along the path to a vantage from which we might see them amid the lowland brush of binarian thinking. Plus which and curiously, Augustine may in fact expose the theoretical benefits of threeness even more cogently than did Peirce (Manetti 1993).
The Trinity (like The City of God) was written over a prolonged time (399–c.426) which in part accounts for its strange organization into fifteen books, of which the first seven are, unsurprisingly, concerned with the Christian doctrine of the trinity. This first section can be and has been (Matthews 2002) set aside as less interesting to the general reader. On the other hand, Edmund Hill, the translator of the edition I chose to review, offers that the first half (Books I–VII) are essays, first, on the trinitarian texts in the Christian scriptures; thence of the theological, linguistic, and logical elements in the doctrine of the trinity. Though the material alluding to linguistic and logical considerations (Books V–VII) anticipate what is to come in the latter half, they are written in the manner of scriptural proof texting. By startling contrast, the second half (Books IX–XV) is an explicit exposition of what today we might call the social psychological and cultural elements of a philosophy of (in Peirce’s word) the Third. In Hill’s view, Book VIII serves as a short transitional essay that folds the two parts back over one another (Hill 1991: 21–27). I would emphasize that the first half of the book, while as charmingly translated as the entire book, is of lesser scientific interest (which is not say that it is of no interest).
The second half of The Trinity is a brash statement of theories of the trinity that not only anticipates Peirce but in certain ways improves on his modern semiotic of meaning, language, and sign making. For example, the following astonishing lines appear in the crucial Chapter X on mental images:
Now, let us put aside for the moment the other things which the mind is certain about as regards itself, and just discuss these three, memory, understanding, and will. … These three then, memory, understanding, and will, are not three lives but one life, nor three minds but one mind. So it follows of course that they are not three substances but one substance. When memory is called life, and mind and substance, it is called so with reference to itself; but when it is called memory it is called so with reference to another. I can say the same about understanding and will; both understanding and will are so called with reference to another. But each of them is life and mind and being with reference to itself. For this reason these three [memory, understanding, will] are one …with reference to self. … But they are three in that they have reference to each other (Book X: 4, 17–18; Hill: 298).
To be sure, the skeptic would recoil from mention of three substances in one (nec tres substantiae, sed una substantia) which has all the glamour of a creedal recitation. Even so the religious code here fades before a secular purpose. Not only that but the memory- understanding-will conceptual series retains superficial traces of Platonic subdivisions of the psychos (or today, the psyche; then, mind or soul)—these no doubt leakages from his Neo-Platonic days in Italy.
Yet, appearances aside, there is one key difference from anything that had appeared to that point: memory. “When memory is called life, and mind and substance, it is called so with reference to itself; but when it is called memory it is called so with reference to another.” (Memoria quippe, quod vita et mens et substantia dicitur, ad se ipsam dicitur; quod vero memoria dicitur, ad aliquid relative dicitur [emphases added].) Any who remember their high school Latin better than I do can judge the friendliness of Hill’s translation. Still, anyone can see through the English words to Augustine’s original and subtle meaning. Where some interpreters claim that memoria (memory) is a simple cognate for mens (mind), Augustine (and here Hill) spare the difference both in the locution “is called” (dicitur) and in the plainly stated exception that memory can be called life or mind when the reference is the one remembering but memory as such must refer to another.
It is also plain enough that Augustine’s trinitarian concept of the self as three dynamic actions in one embraces or, at least, allows for a distinctive social element. Memory, understanding, and will are each themselves but also each and all in social relations to the others. This to be sure is no more an unambiguous sociological trinity than is Peirce’s concept of the Third. Still, it may, like Peirce’s Third, serve us well. For one, it exposes the futility of binarism. The self (to use a term unique to our times and unavailable to Augustine) is not and cannot be a straightforward “I” / “Me” dialogue (in George Herbert Mead’s vocabulary) or, more generally an Ego/Other relation (in William James’ formula. With rare and arguable exception, all of the classical formulae (even W.E.B. Du Bois’ idea of the double consciousness of the two souls of the American Negro) lapse into overly strong discriminations at the crucial point. To speak of the “Me” or more generally of a social self as the social factor in the formative process of an individual’s identity is to create a distinction that cannot breathe in the suffocating binary—neither by Mead’s airy dialogic in which the Me of one moment is the I of the next nor by Freud’s more abstract theory of introjections as it was adapted by Talcott Parsons (1952). At a stretch, among thinkers at the turn of the previous century, the sole (if unselfconscious) concept of thirdness would be Freud’s tripartite taxonomy of the psyche, if the Ego is taken as the interpretant of the conflict between Superego and Id. Only Peirce nearly a generation earlier stands alone as, if not heir, at least latter day apparition of Augustine’s social psychology.
Augustine’s theoretical method in The Trinity transposed a theological doctrine into a formal trinitarian theory by inserting memory as the active tertium quid in the self/other, inside/outside, individual/social couplets as in the following:
So too we absorb the images of bodily things through the sense of the body and transfer them somehow to the memory, and from them we fabricate images with which to think things we have not seen, whether differently from what they actually are or by a chance in a million as they are; but whenever we correctly approve or disapprove of something represented by such images we have the inescapable conviction that we make our judgment of approval or disapproval within ourselves by altogether different rules which abide unchangeably above our minds (Book IX: 2, 10).
There could not be a better, more succinct, if abstract, statement of the pragmatism Peirce and others were inventing a good millennium-and-a-half later in North America. At the same time, Augustine broke the hold of doctrines that had flourished in his time—notably the Neo-Platonic ideology that the mind is real even as in this life it is trapped in the body. For Augustine, by contrast, the mind uses the body to imagine the body without strict philosophical rules of necessity. For us, just imagine how much more useful C. Wright Mills’ sociological imagination slogan would have been had he, Mills, read more Augustine, less sociological pragmatism. For Augustine the genius of freedom from material proof is gained not by mental discipline but by memory, hence: imagination. Memory thus is far more than interior consciousness. Memory, he argues, is history:
Thus when I call to mind the ramparts of Carthage which I have seen, and also form a picture of those at Alexandria which I have not seen, and prefer some of these forms in my imagination to others, I make a rational preference. The judgment of truth is shining vigorously from above, and it is firmly supported by the wholly unbiased rules of its own proper law, and even if it is somewhat veiled by a kind of cloud of bodily images still it is not entangled and confused by them. (ibid.)
We require the embodied things we have seen to imagine those we have not. Familiarity is the interpretant of the abstract. Thus in Augustine’s Roman world, references to ramparts familiar and unfamiliar to him illustrate both the denotative value of the sign “rampart” or any other object represented in language and also the connotative value of a prominent figure in the Roman world, then teetering on the verge of ruin. In our days, these ramparts are memorials (so to speak); in his, they were already representations destined to endure as mental and cultural repositories of worlds that would be remembered long after Rome and Roman North Africa would disappear. Signs, thus, carry forward their meaningful objects by becoming interpretants of what came before. Historical truth, like all social structures, resides not in the data but in the imagination, where memory joins the past, thus to make history possible.
Charles Norris Cochrane in Christianity and Classical Culture—which, long after its publication in 1939, remains the greatest study of religion and classical cultures—cuts quick to the undiminished importance of Augustine’s trinitarian thinking: “The discovery of personality was, at the same time, the discovery of history” (1939: 457). Hence, correlatively, since history is collective memory, then memory is identity. To which, in our time, Julian Barnes, the novelist, in Nothing to Be Frightened Of, remarks: “You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death” (2008: 138). Equally so, of the one and the all. Barnes adds, thus, that identity is memory; as memory is identity.
Correlatively, even William James’ axiom on personal identity entails, if implicitly, both memory and a robust social sensibility. “I am the same self I was yesterday” (James 1981 [1890]: 316). To be a self, one must recognize one’s self—in the most intimate of social relations, that between the self as other to ego. Yet, for James and those among American pragmatists who followed him rather than Peirce, memory was never regarded for its necessary function as the interpretant of any and all recognitions. Without memory, there is no history; without history, collective society has no identity. Yet, James was, in a certain sense, still caught in what had been, since medieval scholasticism, an Aristotelian psychology of memory.
Among sociologists, it was Goffman in Stigma (1963) who, more analytically even than Maurice Halbwachs in La mémorie collective (1950, posthumous), decomposed the centrality of memory as the necessary third force linking social and individual life. Many will balk at the suggestion that Goffman’s method was trinitarian. Yet in the early works, his ideas of face work and self as presentation clearly required the notion, if not a formal concept, of an interpreting mediator. Otherwise, the front/back stage figure would have remained an abstraction when it was clearly a framework for an essential and omnipresent social process. Most explicitly, Stigma offers a trinitarian theory of identity as a dynamic social process by which information in respect to discrediting personal identity markers is controlled or not. For Goffman, the active third aspect between social and personal identities is ego identity—decidedly not a faculty of the interior self but the effective affective element by which discrediting personal information is managed. Not incidentally the affections are on Peirce’s list of thirds as “that by which I feel my neighbor’s feelings” (Peirce 1931 [1875]: 171; compare Peirce 1934 [1903]). Still, in Goffman, ego identity, more than either social or personal, is that identity learned and remembered from social experience (Goffman 1963: 106). Goffman, whose University of Chicago years are too often taken as a reason to assimilate him to the weak pragmatism of the Symbolic Interactionist school, was in his day the single most important American trinitarian theorist. In its own way perverse, Goffman’s theory of identity is, first, necessarily social but, second, something quite beyond the binarism found in Durkheim (Goffman’s one acknowledged classical resource) and American social theory down to the present time.
Naturally, one is exposed to embarrassment upon attempts like this one to redraw the map of intellectual history in order to align Goffman, possibly Freud, certainly Peirce, and Augustine. In defense, the line from Goffman back through James to Peirce is not so hard to imagine. At the least, it brings Peirce’s third into the relative present. What then of the leap in time back to Augustine?
These days, to refresh is to click a button that for an invisible instant dims the present screen to offer who knows what in its place. We hope it will be a version of what we know. Hence, for starters, Augustine’s theory of memory is, if not a refresh button, at least a flash stick that stores the familiar by which we are able to recognize the unfamiliar. Even the universe of digital notations is, first, storable, and second, decodable. The mediating code is the third by which the concrete and abstract are put to practical uses they can only effect together. Operating codes are always trinitarian. If so, then too theories of all kinds; not to mention the operating rules by which we individual ordinaries navigate the strange, intrusive world of structures.