The Categories in Disguise

Topa, Alessandro 2018. The Categories in disguise: a categoriological specification of D. Dilworth's account of the provenance of Peirce's Categories in Schiller. Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia 19(1): 160-178. DOI: 10.23925/2316-5278.2018v19i1p160-178

A fundamental question Dilworth, 2014, does not answer is: In which sense are the three Schillerian drives - the Formtrieb, Stofftrieb and Spieltrieb - categories? How can drives be categories at all? This becomes only intelligible if we see how the purely formal (i.e. mental) characteristics of the categories of modality act as mediators between a transcendental theory of faculty-psychology of Kantian descent and a theory of categories with strong praxeological Fichtean tendencies. (Topa 2018: 164)

This doesn't bother me at all. I've come across so many variations that "drive" isn't surprising. For example, McDougall formulated them into instincts (sympathy, imitation, suggestion).

The few texts documenting Peirce's early study of Schiller indicate that the [|] pronominal categories I, THOU and IT are derived from Schiller's impulses of form, play and matter. The intellectual horizon, into which Peirce integrated these ideas, is nowhere as comprehensively represented as in this diagram, hand drawn in 1857:

I	Reason Faith	Goodness	Love of Order	Unity	Reality	Permanence
THOU	Affection Love	Beauty	Love of Men	Totality	Limitation	Causality
IT	Sensation Hope	Truth	Love of World	Plurality	Negation	Community

(Topa 2018: 165-165)

Nice. The hand-drawn diagram (in Topa 2012) wasn't completely legible for me.

In Raphael and Michel Angelo, Peirce correlates "I" with "Intellect", "THOU" with "Heart" and "IT" with the "Sense". These "elements of the soul" compose the "inward nature" as an irreducible triadic capacity to perform basic acts. No intellect [|] could conceive, no heart love, no sense feel anything if these were not correlated in a primordial communicative constellation, whence their specific determinateness and the possibility of expression arises. Peirce's "soul" lives in and as expression. (Topa 2018: 165-166)

Yeap, Dilworth connected I, IT and THOU with Schiller's categories, which didn't exactly pan out. Does the Heart mediate between Sense and Intellect?

De Tienne, 1996, p. 51ff., has noted that the disposition given to Kant's categories reflects a remark added to the second edition of the First Critique, according to which a combination of the second and first category of each triad produces its third member (cf. CPR, B 110 f.) In this sense, Peirce's diagram registers the resulting third category in the middle position correlated to the THOU as emerging from the combination of the category correlated with the I with the category of the IT of each group. Thus, the unity of plurality gives totality, the negation of reality gives limitation and the permanence of community causality. Note that the correlation between I-impulse and permanence, i.e. Kant's transcendental scheme of substance (cf. CPR, A 144/B 183), is imperative in the context of Schiller's theory of (persisting) "Person" and (everchanging) "Condition" (cf. AEM XI). Note also that Kant's description of the generation of the third category does not reflect that the operation of synthesis required cannot be commutative, as the plurality of unity does not give us totality etc. Only the relation brought about by prescision will be able to establish a strict ordering-relation among categorial concepts; cf. EP 1:3 (1867): "Prescision is not a reciprocal process". (Topa 2018: 166; footnote 17)

Extremely interesting stuff. Can't wait to see the implications of this play of categories unfold.

The theory of categories contained in our diagram is different from the topical structures Peirce will design between 1859 and 1864, which consist of eight triads and do not integrate the universal pronominal categories, but rather develop subsystems, notably of the categories of the IT (cf. W 1:49, 113; MS 923:23). Doubtless our diagram belongs to the earliest stage of Peirce's theorizing on the categories, since The Diagram of the IT (W 1:530) and the Letter Draft, Peirce to Pliny Earle Chase (W 1:115f.) represent the first (June 1859) and last (April 1864) evidence for Peirce's commitment to this theoretical framework. Unpublished manuscripts clearly show that Peirce switched from a classical Kantian scheme composed of four triads to the scheme with eight triads offered byt he Diagram of the IT in June 1859; cf. in particular the text New Names and Symbols for Kant's Categories (MS 921:42f.), which was written May 21^st, 1859 and still operates within the Kantian scheme with four triads. (Topa 2018: 168; footnote 25)

Coincidence?