The Reemergence of Schiller

Topa, Alessandro 2017. The reemergence of Schiller in Peirce's reminiscences of the Æsthetic Letters: a critical addendum to D. Dilworth's Account of the provenance of Peirce's Categories in Schiller. Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia 18(2): 326-343. DOI: 10.23925/2316-5278.2017v18i2p326-343

A philologically accurate and methodologically sound analysis of the depth and scope of Schiller's influence on Peirce's mature thought thus requires the following steps: (i) a preliminary analysis of those passages that could support the hypothesis of a protracted influence and might, therefore, also indicate its systematic vectors. If such an analysis were to give significant positive results, it would moreover (ii) become unavoidable to explore those juvenilia that document Peirce's early reception of Schiller, in order to (iii) attempt to identify those ideas apprehended in youth that can render intelligible the reeemergence of Schiller in Peirce's thought at a daterminate juncture of his later development. (Topa 2017: 327)

The same I shall have to perform on the "Chase-Peirce-affair". Analogously, I would first have first examine Chase on his on terms, then explore Peirce's early writings to find out if there are any other signs of Peirce using Chase in particular, and then attempt to show that this vector is intelligible and not coincidental, that - most emphatically - Peirce did not rely so much on Schiller as he did on Chase. Going by Dilworth (2014), I'd say that Chase already had what Dilworth thought Peirce constructed on the basis of Schiller's Letters.

"Why not examine Schiller?" - it is more than half a century ago that Max Fisch scribbled this question in his copy of Murray Murphey's The Development of Peirce's Philosophy. His marginal intervention occurs on page 36, where Murphey inquires into the origin of the three early pronominal categories and sees "no alternative but to regard the I, It and Thou as the Peircean equivalents of Kant's classes of transcendental ideas." The indirect proof Murphey gives in support of his thesis leans on the biographical information that "the only philosopher he [Peirce] is known to have studied by that time [1857] is Kant." - It must have been murphey's footnote to this sentence with its revealing use of the adverb 'only' that prompted Fisch's marginal intervention concerning the advisability of studying Schiller: "The only other philosopher he [Peirce] is known to have read at this time", Murphey explains, "is Schiller, and he had read only the Aesthetische Brief." Only the Aesthetische Briefe. Only a book on æsthetics. There is an enthymeme here, concealed in the adverb 'only'. Its suppressed major premise might be spelled out as follows: "Fundamental concepts of cognition play no role in theories of philosophizing poets." Max Fisch clearly saw that this premise is far from self-evident: Why not examine Schiller! (Topa 2017: 328)

Fuuck mee. Kant's "Table of Categories" is exactly the piece I'm missing to make sense of this mess. Unity, Plurality and Totality comprise the class of Quantity. Possibility, Existence (Reality), and Necessity comprise the class of Modality. I now have no other choice than to read at least The Critique of Pure Reason, and then read both Intellectual Symbolism and Aesthetic Letters again, all this before I can read young Peirce.

Two decades later, in his Introduction to the first volume of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce (W1), Fisch's private marginal memo to examine Schiller eventually became public and central. There, in the section entitled "I, IT and THOU", he eventually revealed the pedigree of the pronominal categories by identifying Schiller's theory of drives as the mother and a bunch of other abstract notions - including the stages of Hegelian dialectic, Kant's ratio divisionis for the trichotomization of the categorico-logical material and the concept of linguistic categories as potential fathers. (Topa 2017: 328)

Footnote places Kant's ratio divisionis in the Critique of Pure Reason, "§ 11, especially B 109-112".

Thus, although there is probably less than a dozen of passages, in which Peirce refers to Schiller after 1860, this, in itself, gives no justification to abort an examination of Schiller's influence on - or: stimulation of - Peirce's mature thought. (Topa 2017: 331)

And here I am, going off on the basis of only two passages.

The first philosophical book which attracted my attention was Whately's Logic, with which, as a schoolboy, I was delighted. At sixteen I entered college. I think we studied Jouffroy's Ethics the first year. It was a very interesting book. But a great part of my time that year was taken up by a most painstaking study of Schiller's Aesthetische Briefe. It produced so powerful an impression on me, thta I am unable to this day to disabuse myself of it. I then took up Kant's Critic of the Pure Reason which chiefly occupied my mind for three years [...]. (Peirce MS 1606: 1-2; in Topa 2017: 332)

Whateley's Elements of Logic and Jouffroy's Introduction to Ethics. The order I'm following Peirce in, thus, is exactly the same: Schiller before Kant.

Ideas so fundamental as I hold these [three categories] to be must have been uralt when the Neantherthal [sic!] man was a child. They must be traceable in the minds of the inferior animals. Much more must have been permeated human thought since Pherecydes. No, all that I have done is to give an exposition of them which, I hope, puts them in a clearer light than that of Hegel. (Peirce MS 310: 3-5; in Topa 2017: 333)

Uralt = igipõline. Pherecydes I've come across in Zhmud's Pythagoras and Pythagoreans: "'If Pherecydes had been a sage of the type naturally to attract miracle-stories (as Pythagoras was), the connection between two similar contemporaries would have been invented whether it existed or not.' [Zhmud's citations make no sense, no no idea to whom this quote is attributed] Strictly speaking, chronology is immaterial here: the legendary tradition linked Pythagoras with Zalmoxis, Empedocles, Hermotimus, Aristeas, and Abaris. Yet inluke Hermotimus and Abaris, Pherecydes was not a legendary figure, and unlike Aristeas and Empedocles he really was a contemporary of Pythagoras." (Zhmud 2012: 79)

I do not think I ever reflect in words: I employ visual diagrams, firstly, because this way of thinking is my natural language of self-communion, and secondly, because I am convinced that it is the best system for the purpose. (Peirce MS 619: 7-9; in Topa 2017: 336)

This curiosity I'll have to follow up later. There could be a significant difference between Morris's self-communication and Peirce's self-communion; much like there is between Malinowski's phatic communion and, say, La Barre's phatic communication.