PEIRCE / HEGEL / MARX: THEORIZING PRAGMATICIST DIALECTICS

 PEIRCE / HEGEL / MARX 

Theorizing Pragmaticist Dialectics

          by E. San Juan, Jr.

By consensus, Charles Sanders Peirce laid the groundwork for pragmatism as a scientific method of inquiry, later vulgarized by William James, forcing Peirce himself to rechristen his view “pragmaticism.” In 1878, Peirce suggested a way of ascertaining meaning in the axiom: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (1992, 132). James, however, misconstrued it, thinking that ideas prove their truth “just so far as they help us get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience’—an instrumentalist, idealist notion.

For a long time, this tendency to foist all kinds of excesses on pragmatism ran wild. Peirce’s notion has been equated with diverse schools, such as radical empiricism, irrationalism, experimental naturalism, neopositivism, semantic idealism, etc. Vincent Potter has formulated the ultimate thrust of Peirce’s pragmaticism in his overarching realism (versus early nominalistic tendencies) by underscoring Peirce’s emphasis on “rational purport” or end/telos. Peirce later clarified that “the rational purport of a word, or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life” (1998, 332). 

For Peirce, thought is not just a complex of sense data but of general ideas, possibilities, contingent actualities that configure the mutable patterns of experience. Potter explains that for Peirce, generals, not particulars, function as the ultimate interpretants of reasoning: “Peirce makes the possible and the destined constitutent of the real along with, of course, the actual” (1996, 95).

Consequenly, not mere problem-solving but acquiring knowledge of reality by fallible means, is Peirce’s paramount concern. Peirce proposed a convergence theory of truth/reality: “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is real” (1998, 155). Hence, “every intellligible question” will be answered provided it is “sufficiently investigated by observation and reasoning.”

Peirce’s fallibilist stance is shared by a community of inquirers so that the pursuit of knowledge/truth implies a collective, social responsibility (elaborated by Appel 1981). In contradistinction to James and Dewey who subsumed the scientific quest for truth to the demands of nominalistic interests, Peircean realism dictates that these knowledge-claims or constructivist discourses are ultimately controlled by the structure of reality which involves possibilities, actualities, novel contingencies (1998, 75-114).

Can we detect the presence of a dialectical logic in Peirce’s speculations? By dialectic here I refer to a method or process of reasoning designed to comprehend the totality of the sociohistorical world, its laws of motion, its internal coherence. This is intimated by Peirce’s open-mindedness to future discoveries and access to unpredictable spheres of knowledgeability. His method recognized fallibility in the experimental testing of hypothesis (abduction) and the role of random, stochastic forces:”…thus admitting pure spontaneity or life as the character of the universe, acting always and everywhere though restrained within narrow bounds by law, producing infinitesimal departures from law continually…The inexhaustible multitudinous variety of the world…can spring only from spontaneity… I make use of chance chiefly to make room for a principle of generalization, or tendency to form habits, which I hold  has produced all regularities”(1992, 308-10)

Max Fisch was perhaps the first to investigate Peirce’s debt to Hegel. He found that Peirce tried to improve on Hegel’s categories of Being, Essence, and Notion with his Quality (Firstness), Reaction (Secondness), and Mediation (Thirdness). In 1893, Peirce planned to expound on “”the philosophy of continuity [which] leads to an objective logic, similar to that of Hegel, and to triadic categories” (Fisch 1986, 265-66).  Instead of the march of self-consciousness toward Absolute Knowledge, Peirce offers the flow of Interpretants from immediate to energetic to logical stages. The growth of interpretants parallels the itinerary from sensory immediacy toward self-consciousness and objective forms of the Spirit. The linkage of the categories was synechism, the logic of continuity, which Hegel described as a process of sublation (Aufhebung), the “labor of the negative.”

It was Peirce’s development of his triadic structure of thought as sign-interpretation, sign-action or semiosis, that completes his inclusion of Hegel’s objective logic in a larger framework, as envisaged in the dynamic construal of sign: “A sign is anything which is related to a Second thing, its Object, in respect to a Quality , in such a way as to bring a Third thing, its Interpretant, into relation to the same Object, and that in such a way as to bring a Fourth into relation to that Object in the same form, ad infinitum” (1998, 272-73; Short 2007, 164-65).

In 1897, Peirce wrote to James about the Cambridge lectures on his categories will show “wherein my objective logic differs from that of Hegel” (1992, 24). Peirce agreed with Hegel that phenomenology is basic to the foundation of the normative sciences. But Hegel’s “fatally narrow spirit” gave it the nominalistic, “pragmatoidal” character. But his phaneroscopy will not just analyze experience but “extend it to describing all the features that are common to whatever is experienced or might conceivably be experienced or become an object of study in any way direct or indirect” (1998, 143).

Peirce’s three modes of reality, or three universes of experience, provide the coordinates for his epistemology and cosmology. They function as nodal linkages where qualities (icons), reactions (indices), and representations (symbols) coalesce. The lawfulness of Thirdness subsumes or sublates the contingencies of Secondness and Firstness, enabling a synergesis of lawful causation and spontaneous happenings.

Josiah Royce speculated on Peirce’s much more ambitious framework: “There is no essential inconsistency between the logical and psychological motives which lie at the basis of Peirce’s theory of the triad of interpretation, and the Hegelian interest in the play of thesis, antithetis, and higher synthesis. But Peirce’s theory, with its explcitly empirical origin and its very exact logical working out, promises new light upon matters which Hegel left profoundly problematic” (cited in Fisch 1986. 275). One of the problematic aspects that Peirce noted was Hegel’s downgrading of Secondness, of Reaction/Index, as something to be quickly sublated or transcended.

 

Marx’s critique of Hegel was fully articulated in  1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Hegelianism was “the display, the self-objectification of the essence of the philosphic mind as nothing but the estranged mind of the world  thinking within its self-estrangement” (1964, 174). Hegel discounts real determinateness, Peirce’s Secondness as something to be transcended. In Hegel’s dialectic, the process of cognition occupies center-stage as a “grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative,” whereby contradictions are resolved through incorporation in later ideational wholes. 

While Hegel’s Becoming ends in the authoritarian state, Peirce’s “becoming” culminates in habit-change, in transformation of sociohistorical norms and conduct, toward “concrete reasonableness.” Marx stood Hegel’s idealism (the epistemic fallacy of reducing being to consciousness) on its head. He purged the mystical shell of the dialectical kernel, demystifying the hypostatized, reified realm of thought. Marx refused the Hegelian Absolute in favor of historical becoming evinced in a complex, differentiated history of modes of production and social relations (Bernstein 1971). 

The Marxian concept of praxis may be extrapolated from Peirce’s notion of Thirdness (Symbol) which makes Secondness (Index) and Firstness (Icon) intelligible. Thirdness contains the general concept of “True Continuity.”  Richard Robin explains that “Peirce’s metaphysical realism consists in his view that the general concepts that go to make up meanings are real…They have a real external counterpart in the percept—which is the equivalent in consciousness of a firstness present in the perceived object” (1998, 11). Every concept (Thirdness) refers to a sense-percept (Secondness) to bear some meaning (the real). No concept is meaningful unless it refers to sense-experience, which undergoes inferential procedures (abduction, deduction, induction) from the percept to generate concepts expressed in a judgement. As long as there is something in the physical world that exemplifies particular qualities, the concept signifying them is a real concept.

Finally, Peirce was concerned not just with an adequate theory of meaning and the productive communication of conceptual reasoning. He was grappling with the validity of scientific laws for which the nature of potentiality, possibility, and chance-events are central in proving hypotheses. Peirce was engaged in the formulation of categories necessary for substantiating the methodology of science.  He espoused a realist perspective in which general concepts found in our grasp of meaning are real, with a counterpart in the percept, the equivalent in consciousness of a Firstness present in the perceived object situated in Secondness and made intelligible in Thirdness.  For Peirce, alll thought is a sign relation yielding a series of Interpretants (emotional, energetic, logical) that makes intelligible our relation to ourselves, nature, and the world—the ideal of “concrete reasonableness” informing his singular pragmaticism (San Juan 2020).

REFERENCES

Apel, Karl-Otto. 1981. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism. 

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Bernstein, Richard. 1971.  Praxis and Action.  Philadelphia: University of 

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Fisch, Max.1986.  Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism.  Bloomington: Indiana 

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Marx, Karl. 1964.  Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.  New  

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Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1992. The Essential Peirce.  Bloomington: 

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—-. 1998.  The Essential Peirce.  Bloomington: Indiana UP 

          Press.

Potter, Vincent.  1996. Peirce’ Philosophical Perspectives.  New York: Fordham 

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Robin, Richard. 1998,  Peirce: The Essential Writings.  Amherst, NY: 

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San Juan, E. 2020.  Peirce/Marx.  Washington DC: Philippines Center.

Short, T. L. 2007.  Peirce’s Theory of Signs.  New York: Cambridge UP