The evolution of Peirce's thought seems to go through a series of dramatic turns and breaks, among them the appearance of phenomenology by the turn of the century, along with the emergence of Hegel in place of Kant as a source of inspiration. However, if we take seriously enough the outcome both of his kantian and hegelian efforts, that is, the categories, we can recognize a general continuity in Peirce's thought. Instead of a maze of "empirical" and "metaphysic" strands in his philosophy, we should see a most consistent empirical transformation of metaphysics.
Surely his audience would have preferred what Peirce had to say of Hegel thirty years before, when he almost overtly despised him as a metaphysical philosopher. And it's not hard to find Peircean scholars that would add these conferences as another step in Peirce's late recess into nineteenth-century metaphysics, the same metaphysics that he had got rid of in his early years. What I want to show here is that there is no such recess, and that the new outlook is the most consistent development of his previous tenets —I'd even say, the surest path to his intended scientific overcoming of metaphysics. What alienated his audience in those conferences, and what continues to alienate many of his readers, is his stubbornness in facing philosophical problems that even then seemed old-fashioned, and to deal with them with a vocabulary that yet then sounded archaic. But as I see it, the Peircean position would rather be that if we don't want to end up saying the same old stuff, only with new words, we should overcome the received ideas from the inside, and not simply wash them off.1 In that he was also in accord with Hegel.
In fact, the emergence of phenomenology above logic was only a minor move in the wealth of changes Peirce had introduced a year before in his classification of sciences: logic belonged now with a triad of normative sciences (aesthetics, ethics, logic), which in turn belonged with a triad of philosophical sciences (phenomenology, normative sciences, metaphysics), which in turn belonged with a triad of sciences of discovery (mathematics, philosophy, special sciences) (CP 1.180). We could go on tracing further divisions and subdivisions, but we need no more to see that the new science responsible for the categories is certainly placed above logic, but still under mathematics. With that comes the first nudge to Hegel: "A phenomenology which does not reckon with pure mathematics, a science hardly come to years of discretion when Hegel wrote, will be the same pitiful clubfooted affair that Hegel produced" (CP 5.40).
In the classification of sciences broached by Peirce twenty years before, logic seemed to hold the highest rank as a discipline responsible for the development of the most general hypothesis, that of the categories, which was then to guide every other branch of science, and at the same time be confirmed or dismissed by them (CP 1.354). That was the essence of Peirce's empirical response to Kant: the categories drawn from the logical analysis of thought could be nothing more than a hypothesis to be confronted with experience. Of course, this implies a denunciation of the whole opposition between a realm of thought-in-itself and a realm of things-in-themselves, but –contrary to the usual procedure– we'll come to that later. For now we'll stick to another line of reasoning, as Peircean as that one, and stress that to draw any demonstrative force from the fact that we think one way or another, as did the transcendental argument, betrays the very idea of a category, since these are to describe the most general features of every possible thought, and not of any actual thought. The phenomenological transformation of the project is nothing but a more accurate translation of this idea: Kant's choice of logic as the discipline charged with developing the categories reflects his mistake of tying them to actuality, not possibility, since there's only one discipline that works strictly with the latter, and that's mathematics. In keeping with this more refined approach, the experience relevant to test the categories couldn't be that provided by any special science, or even by metaphysics –interpreted here as the most general of empirical sciences–, as Peirce had held until then, because strictly speaking the categories couldn't be proved by their correspondence to the facts of the universe we live in, but rather to the facts of any possible universe. Thus Peirce's phenomenology was born with the sole purpose of setting the adequate testing field for the categories.
For Peirce, mathematics is the only hypothetical or conditional science, because it's the only science that defines entirely its object, or because its "only aim is to discover not how things actually are, but how they might be supposed to be, if not in our universe, then in some other" (CP 5.40). This also means that mathematics absorbs a good deal of what had been a part of logic until then, in particular the logic of relations Peirce used to prove his categories in the seventies. In a sense, Peirce was only offering a generalization of the same argument now, on the basis of a graphic model on which he was still working —and would continue to be on end (Peirce Edition Project, 1998, p.173 ff.; see also CP 1.346-347, 1.369-372, CP 4.347 ff.).
To obtain a demonstration of the categories, or in other words, to prove that a certain model is able to express every possible thought, the mathematician should analyze every conceivable model to determine whether there is a list of features common to all of them. However, that is a task that plainly exceeds the field of the hypothetical, and thus requires a transition to the first of the positive sciences, or to the new science of phenomenology. But if the mathematician should not speak of any universe in particular, the phenomenologist must make sure that he speaks for every possible universe at the same time. Obviously, that means trading mathematical precision for the greatest indetermination, since the phenomenologist cannot introduce any specification in his object that could constrain the range of his investigation. One can hardly exaggerate the difficulty of doing this: not only should he ignore the difference between reality and fantasy, but also strictly ignore every difference between what an object is and what it seems to be, a requirement that, taken to the extreme, would make it impossible to talk of any object, or of any fact, or generally to say anything in any proper sense of the term, since that would be already introducing an inadmissible distortion in what is presented before the mind. "Phenomenology can only tell the reader which way to look, to see what he shall see" (CP 2.197), concludes Peirce.
You really can't take any further the logic of empirical investigation, and many would say that we have reached absurdity here; but even they should admit that the path we've followed is that of consistency: any assumption that the phenomenologist could bring to his investigation would betray the very experimental principle that he was supposed to apply, precisely because we're dealing with the first of positive sciences, whose function is to investigate the most general of facts —namely, the fact of what's possible, which is also the fact of what's a fact. Peirce is only setting here the conditions for the only valid demonstration of the categories, a demonstration based on experience and nothing more than experience, and reaching thus the natural endpoint of his empirical critique of kantianism. But even if we agreed to this critique, it seems reasonable to think that it amounts to denouncing the whole issue as trivial: once we put in place the necessary corrections to the original metaphysical setup, the project loses all interest, since it can lead us nowhere.
Something of this sort must have been in the minds of those who had come to listen at Harvard, so surprised as James himself that the founder of pragmatism didn't see it as they did. But Peirce didn't see his conclusion as trivial; moreover, he regarded this kind of take on what he said as a fallback into the old metaphysics –prompted, ironically, by the very urge of breaking up with it–, and as an essential misunderstanding of the pragmatic revolution on which he'd been invited to talk. To understand this, let's turn to what Peirce has to answer to the first and most obvious objection emanating from his audience, then and today, which would be to ask the phenomenologist to justify that the way the phenomenon appears to his mind corresponds to the way it appears to the mind of any other —or that the way the object appears to his mind corresponds to the way it is in itself, if we prefer to pose the question in terms of the "thing-in-itself," which doesn't make any difference to what follows. Peirce's answer seems to be another question, that is ¿why should we ask such a question?
We need only change the timeline perspective on the logic of research, and the project of the categories, as stated by Peirce, escapes the charge of circularity and gets its full credit back. But then again, many pragmatists would rather have the first proposal, without really caring of the last. The answer here can only be that such an attitude simply doesn't add up: the change proposed in the logic of research comes straight from the research done with the categories. And that is exactly how it should be, because a research in the categories is nothing but a reflexive research into the nature of research; moreover, the categories themselves are only a formal presentation of the very process that leads to them. Trying to follow the path of pragmatism, without caring of the project of the categories, or without using them as the vocabulary that makes full sense of it, is a sure ticket to losing track.
Red is simple not because it is red, but because we consider it regardless of its relation with anything else, and if Peirce has chosen it is only because we understand that more easily with colours. But that's just another "psychological fact" entirely irrelevant to what we're discussing here, because the point is that every phenomenon is simple when considered in itself, and just as long as it is so considered; and that's the only meaning of simplicity. Our objector would say again that this implies linking phenomena to how we consider them, instead of how they are in themselves, to which Peirce would answer again that red is red even if no-one sees it, or even if nothing (or everything) in the world were of this colour. Phenomena are what they are regardless of their relation to us, or to any other phenomenon, a statement that should eventually lead us to the conclusion: what we "do" with a phenomenon when we consider it apart of any other phenomenon is nothing alien to what it is in itself as a pure possibility of being apart of anything else, or conversely, as a pure possibility of getting into a relation with some other. What Peirce is trying to point out with his examples, against all modern common sense, is that every phenomenon is in itself a relation, and as such something possible rather than something determined or "given." Incidentally, that's the core of the platonic philosophy to which Peirce eventually traced his own, and what the reader is asked to discover anew by himself, with the only help of the first of the faculties of the phenomenologist, that of "seeing what stares one in the face, just as it presents itself, unreplaced by any interpretation" (CP 5.42).
It certainly doesn't seem like the bullet is pursuing any end, nor that anything could be seen as a means here. We have only a chain of entirely determined reactions, with a cast of two characters each time: the finger and the trigger, the trigger and the cartridge, etc. The hunter would be the only one to establish indirect relations among phenomena, or to be influenced by what tradition calls a final cause. However, a closer look would reveal that our picture is distorted again: as far as the reactions prompted by the trigger are determined, they are strictly unrepeatable facts… but if there were nothing else to them, pulling the trigger would also be a completely meaningless action. You can't really have thirdness in one place, and secondness around: hunting is only possible to the extent that the reactions between the hunter and the phenomena that surround him are essentially repeatable, or to the extent that they reveal some form of finalism, even if it is "blinder" than his. That's why Peirce says that the efficient causation that guides the bullet ultimately belongs to the same category as the final causation that guides the hunter —the irony being here that our resistance to seeing it thus is felt as a refusal to admit any magical forces in nature, when it works in fact as defensive preservation of a magical flame in men. To go back to our example, the hunter can only aim at his prey inasmuch the bullet also "aims" at an end of its own, definitely not the eagle but the trajectory that every bullet would follow under the same circumstances.
However, the whole strategy of confronting efficient versus final causation can be misleading. The notion of an end is by no means as relevant to the category of thirdness as the example above might suggest, and even less so the notion of a cause, which is a vestige of a way of thinking still too steeped in secondness; we discover thus the elusive nature of this and the other categories: in a way, even using the term "third" for a third could turn out to be misleading. In all these cases the mistake is not that the features used to describe a category have nothing to do with it, but that they don't reach properly to its essence. And the only way of reaching there is by a more resolute appeal to the third faculty of the phenomenologist: "The generalizing power of the mathematician, who produces the abstract formula that comprehends the very essence of the feature under examination, purified from all admixture of extraneous and irrelevant accompaniments." Even Peirce accuses himself of a lacking exercise of this faculty, in particular for having drawn too tight a link between thirdness and representation (CP 1.565); and if we look back at the example above we will have to acknowledge that the end is always the fixed part of the relation, which properly brings us back to secondness. The real clue to understanding thirdness is the notion of a means to some end, or what Peirce sometimes calls "betweenness" —as in the last analysis the notion has no more content than the continuing possibility of inserting a third between any first and second. That's the basic model behind Peirce's definition of a sign, his description of a hunting party, etc.
In other words, a continuum is not so much defined by some determination of its parts, but for being itself a determination (or a part) of a continuum of more dimensions, from where we could draw a model defined by two limits: to one end, that continuum not limited by any superior continuum, which is no longer a continuum but the very notion of indeterminacy; to the other end, that continuum that doesn't limit any inferior continuum, which is no more a continuum but the very notion of determinacy.2 Both extremes match the first and second categories discovered before, confirming that this is the mathematical model that best translates the conclusions of the phenomenologist, or conversely –as we ideally should see it– the hypothesis of the first rank of generality that has found better empirical evidence so far, and that should therefore guide any lower level investigation. In this vein, Peirce advances the idea that the continuum model suggests a cosmos limited by a beginning and an end, or following an irreversible course from indeterminacy to determinacy;3 thus we should see the chalk line on the "original" board as a diagram of the first law of nature, and so on (CP 6.191 ff.). To sum up: the existence of one continuum implies in this model the continuity of everything else, as suggested by our examination of the case of the hunter; on the other hand, everything that is continuous (or third) is also in some measure determined (or second) and in some measure undetermined (or first), as also suggested by our other excursions in the field of phenomenology.
Anyone with a familiarity with Hegel's work will see that nothing of what we've said so far really matches with what the German philosopher understood by phenomenology. And we don't take any great risk if we say that Hegel's opinion of Peirce's performance in this science would have been rather poor. In a way, he would have considered that his American counterpart hasn't gone one step further from the transcendental outlook he was set to overcome, that is, he is still trapped by the way things appear to his mind, unable to prove that it effectively corresponds to how things are in themselves, as Hegel thought he had done. In fact, Hegel only assumed a phenomenological perspective, or took an interest in how the object appeared to his mind, to show that this very enterprise leads by internal necessity to an overcoming of any difference between what an object is and what it appears to be —which means, of course, the overcoming of phenomenology itself in a knowledge that can only be called absolute.
What has Peirce to answer to this objection? Well, his answer would probably be that Hegel is the one trapped in a transcendental position, on account of his "fatally narrow" (CP 5.37) way of considering phenomenology. Not that Peirce objects to the idea that the way of overcoming the breach between subject and object, or between thought-in-itself and things-in-themselves, is construing their relation as a process —or the notion that a partial knowledge is only conceivable in such terms as would eventually lead to its overcoming. That's exactly what thirdness, or what Peirce sometimes calls Hegel's "Secret" (CP 1.40), added to the picture some lines above. Peirce's point would rather be that the very idea of reaching this end deprives it of all meaning, or plunges the whole project back to secondness; the identification of what an object is and what it appears to be will always be a desideratum for the Peircean phenomenologist, not an accomplished fact as it is for the hegelian. So instead of the protracted history of human experience that Hegel's phenomenology inevitably becomes, Peirce's version of this science would rather be the scribbled notepad of the philosopher seeking for the most general, or in other words, the "next" configuration of experience —and that's exactly what he produced.
We see thus that Peirce uses against Hegel the same objection that he had used before against Kant, based on the very notion of category: sticking to what's possible, not to what's actual. That's also the idea that kept Peirce always in motion, and prevented him from settling for any definitive version of his position. We have then a most compelling answer to metaphysical dogmatism, expressed in the very terms of that metaphysics; but as the audience in Harvard made clear, those terms seemed suspect enough to avoid much toying with them. In fact, no one really wanted to hear any more of that. It is our opinion though that James' refusal to take those terms into his picture, and that of many others after him, could explain why their brand of pragmatism is to a great extent a mere new name for the old empiricism –sometimes rather the old skepticism– instead of an entirely new understanding of it.
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