Intellectual Gravity

Dilworth, David A. 2014. Intellectual Gravity and Elective Attractions: The Provenance of Peirce's Categories in Friedrich von Schiller. Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia 15(1): 37-72. [SemanticScholar]

Yes, he fruitfully interacted with Henry James Sr., William James, Josiah Royce, Paul Carus, John Dewey, and many other philosophical interlocutors in his own day. But in addition he sympathetically engaged the gamut of speculative ideas of the major classical authors - Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Duns Scotus, Leibniz, Swedenborg, Kant - while gathering other building materials from leading strains of the British as well as of the post-Kantian German traditions - notably those of Berkeley, Hume, Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel. It remains a huge project to establish the convergences of his architectonic system with the philosophical heritages he parsed to a considerable degree - and, what is more, in that expanded perspective justly to evaluate Peirce's place in the history of philosophy. (Dilworth 2014: 39)

Pliny Earle Chase not yet listed.

My focus, necessarily limited here, will fall upon the iconic-qualitative synergistic symmetry of Peirce's categories with Friedrich von Schiller's Aesthetic Letters. I will take seriously the judgment of Nathan Houser that Schiller left an "indispensable impression" on Peirce. Peirce declared that Schiller was in fact his "first" philosophical influence; and a force of intellectual gravity brought him back to Schiller as his system peaked in its later phase. In tandem with consciously and unconsciously absorbing Schiller, Peirce reconfigured the systems of Schelling and Hegel, in due course produced his categorial Tritism that he enthusiastically estimated as "one of the births of time." (Dilworth 2014: 40)

Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, I can now confirm, do indeed show evidence of triadic thinking I so associate with Peirce.

For his part, Peirce championed Schiller's position across the board via his Three Categories, thus in his general theory of experience and inquiry and in the specialized relation of Esthetics to Ethics (theoretical Ant-ethics) and Logic in the Normative Sciences. (Dilworth 2014: 40; footnote 6)

I'm not all that sure if the three categories are strictly Schiller's. There is a yawning gulf between Pythagoras and Schiller, which I'll have to start filling in, somehow.

In his "The Sense of Beauty never furthered the Performance of a single Act of Duty" (MS 12, 1857), the teen-age Peirce, taking the title of his essay verbatim out of Schiller's Letters, developed the opposing concepts of Person (autonomous source of form, pure ideas, laws) and existential Conditions (sensuous impulses, manifold contexts, empirical cases), as reconciled by a third Play-impulse productive of their harmonious integration; this Play-Impulse of Beauty is the condition of a complete humanity, and of perfect freedom. Exactly following Schiller, the young Peirce goes on to say that "Beauty gives the mind no particular direction or tendency, no result for controlling intellect or will"; thus "perform[ing] no single duty," it rather "places the mind in a state of 'infinite determinableness' [...] comparable to refreshing sleep, although sleep is a passive source of refreshment, whereas Beauty is an active one." His sense of aesthetic "refreshment" is conspicuously out of Schiller's text. (Dilworth 2014: 40; footnote 9)

One of the annoying things about Schiller is his creative play with the categories: instead of a linear progression from firstness to secondness to thirdness there's interplay and mediation. I don't yet know what to make of those instances and hope that some familiarization with early Peirce and then another reading of Schiller (a later translation) will clarify those instances.

Emerson read Thomas Carlyle's Life of Schiller (published in 1825), and throughout his career he hewed close to Goethe's and Schiller's aesthetic ideals and priorities, blending them with those of Schelling. His friend Coleridge was another conduit of information concerning the currents of German Idealism. Schiller's ideas also reached Emerson through his Transcendentalist colleagues - Theodore Parker, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Freeman Clarke, John Sullivan Dwight, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Henry Hedge, James Eliot Cabot, John Heath, Charles Stearns Wheeler, and Charles Timothy Brooks, among others. (Dilworth 2014: 43; footnote 13)

Welp. There's reading here for a lifetime.

Peirce's lines of phenomenological, metaphysical, and semeiotic inquiry in fact illustrate recombinant convergences with many affine variants in the history of philosophy. (His Three Categories, he insisted, were not new, but trace back before Neanthertal man.) Locally, in the Zeitgeist of his own times he appears to have digested leading ideas of Schiller, Schelling, and Emerson, developing them in like-minded but different registers of articulation than his predecessors, while arriving at symmetrical end points in significant respects. (Dilworth 2014: 45)

Well, Pythagoras left us no writings. I'll have to check the library to see what this Neanderthal fellow wrote.

Letter 11 reworks this "transcendental road" by appealing to "two final concepts," namely, Fichte's pure and empirical egos - the pure self and its existential determinations, respectively - for the task of "divinization of the human." The concept of the pure self or ego, Schiller writes, postulates that "The person must be its own ground"; and accordingly, "we have in the first place [my emphasis] the idea of absolute being grounded in itself, that is to say of freedom." Man receives this gift of "pure intelligence" qua "pure activity" from "the supreme Intelligence creating out of itself," while the spatial and temporal conditions of his personal identity constitute his manifested existence. "Only as he alters does he exist; only as he remains unalterable does he exist." (Dilworth 2014: 48)

"Freedom" does indeed come across in the Aesthetic Letters as an oversaturated notion, though I attributed it to its long history of use, as in Leibnitz. Intuitively I connected it with self-creation, which comes to a culmination in "The Philosophical Letters": "There was a time when I was conscious of nothing, when none were conscious of me; so we say, I was not. That time is no more, and se we say that I am created." (Schiller 1845: 345)

In these formulations, freedom is associated with Fichte's Tathandlung, the primary, foundational, irreducible Deed or Act (reminiscent of a famous line of Goethe's Faust, Part I), which Schiller here refers to as the personal embodiment of humanity that persists through change, turning every "perception" into "experience." Ficte's person and conditions dyad, itself a transformation of Kant's paradox of noumenal and empirical selves, reemerged in the I-word and IT-world dyadic [|] categories of the young Peirce's initial categorial formulations, while his third youthful category of the THOU-world translated the triadic Spieltrieb concept of the Aesthetic Letters. (Dilworth 2014: 48-49)

The crucial piece of analogy: I (person), IT (conditions), and THOU (play-impulse). I'll see if this works out with Peirce.

Following the graceful Schiller, the young Peirce showed signs of his future philosophical genius in formulating the polarity of the rational and sensuous drives in the terms of the I- and the IT-worlds, while completing th Spieltriebparadigm with the synthesizing function of the THOU-world, - dialogic harbinger of Peirce's theory of the indefinite community of inquirers, of Man as a sign, of dialogic Mind as an indecomposable Thirdness, of nonanthropocentric connatural creative semeiosis, of Evolutionary Love through the efficiently finious force of normative ideals, and in his later concepts of the commens and of Reasoning not in Security but in Uberity. (Dilworth 2014: 49)

The THOU embodying the social aspect seems to hold water, as in noticed in the following: "and if, secondly, the reason has maintained its own, it is allowable for propriety to make the third demand upon man, and to enjoyn upon him regard for society" (Schiller 1845: 205). Though I read it very simplistically as the "community of inquirers" having the final say on whether one's reasoning is sound.

In sum at this juncture, the evidence is that Peirce began his monumental career-long task of re-conceptualizing Kant's Table of Categories under the heuristic guidance of Schiller's Letters. The developmental teleology of his thinking blossomed over time. The initial TUISM of his first re-conceptualization of Kant via Schiller took the form of the mediating function of REPRESENTATION in the "New List of Categories" of 1867, and then, - as he completed the structural integration of his trichotomic system as a whole in a new vocabulary beginning with "A Guess at the Riddle" of 1887-88, - of the synthetic power of THIRDNESS and, in due course, of ESTHETICS as the first Normative Science. (Dilworth 2014: 50)

Schiller's influence not sufficiently proved, Chase's influence not yet refuted.

His semiological Tritism deliberately employed the term "interpretant" to get away from cognitive associations with existent minds, psychological acts, events, entities, rather postulating indefinitely proliferating sign-transferences ("semiotic wave-packets") with cosmological and theological implications. In such an inherently "vague" register of maximally comprehensive generality, Peirce marked Kant's critical idealism as nominalistic for its dichotomous focus upon individual minds and unknowable things in themselves. (Dilworth 2014: 56; footnote 54)

Phraseology reminiscent of how Chase "attempted to find a kind of algebraic symbolism for the expression of the faculties and powers of the mind and their relations to one another, indicating by letters as symbols the broadest possible generalizations" (Holmes 1863: 226).

Letter 19 further elaborates upon this complex confluence of post-Kantian concepts that seem to have left an unforgettable, though for years an unconscious, impression on Peirce. Beauty is a means of leading Man from matter to form, from perception to principles, from a limited to an absolute existence. But again, the mind itself is neither matter nor form, neither sensuousness nor reason. The will operates as the authority over these two conflicting necessities, giving rise to freedom. (Dilworth 2014: 62)

Perception to principles = Motivity to Rationality. The Second term being problematic, as usual, there appears a marked contrast, even direct opposition, between Will and Spontaneity.

Schiller refers here to Goethe; and according to Reginald Snell, this passage could be the original precedent for Hegel's "dialectical" concept of Aufhebung. But I am rather inclined to interpret Schiller's "middling" or "intermediate region" of aesthetic play as a variation on Aristotelian method of conjugating matter and form; the same methodic form is characteristic of Goethe. Kant employed the same "synoptic" (not "dialectical") method that resolves material subject matters and their formal principles into their essential features in his three Critiques. (Dilworth 2014: 62; footnote 66)

Something I'll have to keep in mind, as this "interplay" of the play-impulse, between sensuousness and understanding, might indeed have influenced "mediation" in semiosis.

If we parse this in rough schematic form, we can see that the "IT" of his initial categories corresponded to Schiller's realm of the sensuous drive - that is, the realm of reification in objective material being which in its brute otherness anticipated his category of Secondness. The "I" of his initial categories corresponded to the (Kantian and Fichtean) freedom and spontaneity of the intellectual and moral life - which Peirce transformed into the incipient freshness of qualitative consciousness in Feeling (Firstness), while relegating the existential condition of the I-object polarities of "transcendental" epistemological and moral consciousness to the subject-object binary of secondness. The mediating, moderating, dialogic THOU of Peirce's youthful categorial speculation was then his earliest - and already "gravid with young truth" - formulation of his mature iconography of synthetic, sympathetic, communicating Mind in variescently concrescent intra-, inter-, and extra-personal modalities of experience. It symmetrized with Schiller's sense of the aesthetically liberating disposition in its harmonizing function of the play-drive, combining the conflicting tendencies of the sensuous and formal drives in the realized and realizable embodiments of graceful personal character and, in the long educative run, of cosmological concrete reasonableness. (Dilworth 2014: 66)

Dilworth is affected with adverbialism. Why use expressions like "variescently concrescent" when you haven't first introduced these terms? Showy, giving off the impression of lacking substance. This sketch does not conform to young Peirce's schema. For example, I is here connected with feeling, whereas Peirce's MS scheme (in Topa 2018) shows I connected with Reason. Maybe that scheme is just fucked, an early attemt that didn't hold any water. This paper was fairly frustrating.