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

Alessandro Topa

doi:10.23925/2316-5278.2017v18i2p326-343

Abstract

A determinação da profundidade e âmbito da influência que as Cartas Estéticas de Schiller exerceu sobre a filosofia de Peirce revelou-se como uma desafiadora tarefa interpretativa. Tanto o entendimento de sua necessidade quanto a consciência de suas dificuldades apenas surgiram gradativamente na obra de gerações de estudiosos. O objetivo deste trabalho é delinear a situação hermeneutica atual em relação à ‘questão-Schiller-Peirce’ (Seção I) e executar a sub-tarefa de interpretar um grupo de passagens que, até agora, não receberam a atenção e o rigor filológico que merecem: as recordações de Peirce (1902-1913) de seu estudo juvenil das Cartas. Como constituem nossa única garantia da premissa de que o pensamento de Schiller – além de servir como acesso a Kant, em torno de 1855 – teve algum significado para Peirce, as recordações são documentadas o mais plenamente possível (Seção II), a fim de situar o ressurgimento de Schiller no pensamento de Peirce no contexto dos desafios teoréticos enfrentados por Peirce, em vista da reconcepção coenoscópica das ciências filosóficas que ocorreram entre 1900 e 1903 (Seção III). Esta contextualização arquitetônica das recordações corresponde aos resultados de nossa análise da juvelinia obtida em um trabalho conjunto. A essência categoriológica das Cartas, em torno da qual Schiller constrói uma lógica tripartida de processos psíquicos, agiu como um catalizador para a análise de Peirce das deficiências da categoriologia de Kant e, assim, fundamentou sua concepção (conotação) e uso (aplicação extensa ao objeto-domínios) das categorias como constituintes meramente formais – verdadeiramente universais, estritamente ordenados, essencialmente modais – de fenomenalidade, normatividade e processualidade histórica, i.e., como os elementos constitutivos e dimensões arquitetônicas da semiose de uma inteligência, capaz de aprender através da experiência.

Highlights

The fundamental problem in analyzing and assessing the influence of Friedrich von Schiller’s On the Æsthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters on Peirce’s mature philosophy originates in a gap of 50 years: the Æsthetic Letters act as Peirce’s initiation to philosophy around 1855, but are only mentioned again in a few reminiscences dating from the last and most productive decade of Peirce’s career
The aim of this paper is to sketch the present hermeneutic situation concerning the “Schiller-Peirce-affair” (Section I) and to perform the subtask of interpreting a group of passages that has hitherto not received the philological attention and accuracy it deserves: Peirce’s reminiscences (1902-1913) of his juvenile study of the Letters. As these constitute our only warrant for the assumption that Schiller’s thought – besides acting as a gateway to Kant around 1855, – had any import for Peirce, the reminiscences are documented as completely as possible (Section II), in order to situate Schiller’s reemergence in Peirce’s thought in the context of the theoretical challenges Peirce is facing in view of the coenoscopic redesign of the philosophical sciences carried out between 1900 and 1903 (Section III). This architectonic contextualization of the reminiscences matches the results of our analysis of the juvenilia obtained in a twin-paper: The categoriological core of the Letters, around which Schiller builds a three-level logic of psychic processes, acted as the catalyst for Peirce’s analysis of the shortcomings of Kant’s categoriology and informed his conception and use of the categories as purely formal – truly universal, strictly ordered, essentially modal – constituents of phenomenality, normativity and historical processuality, i.e. as the constitutive elements and architectonic dimensions of the semeiosis of an intelligence, which is capable of learning from experience
A philologically accurate and methodologically sound analysis of the depth and scope of Schiller’s influence on Peirce’s mature thought requires the following steps: (i) a preliminary analysis of those passages that could support the hypothesis of a protracted influence and might, indicate its systematic vectors

Summary

Introduction

The fundamental problem in analyzing and assessing the influence of Friedrich von Schiller’s On the Æsthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters on Peirce’s mature philosophy originates in a gap of 50 years: the Æsthetic Letters act as Peirce’s initiation to philosophy around 1855, but are only mentioned again in a few reminiscences dating from the last and most productive decade of Peirce’s career. The reader will find the full passage quoted above in the fifth reminiscense (R5), in which Peirce speaks of the Æsthetic Letters as “one of these books in which the three categories, in an almost unrecognizable disguise, played a great part” This is an eminently important passage, the unreflected compression of which into an inaccurate quotation naturally leads to imprecise interpretive claims: Even if, in the following quotation, we replace the words “contained his earliest articulation” with ‘contained the earliest articulation’, it is not true, that – as DILWORTH, 2014, p. We need to show that there really are categorial concepts at work in the theory exposed in the Letters, before we can claim that anyone derived her categories from them.[18]

Peirce’s Reminiscences of the Æsthetic Letters

Architectonic contextualization of Peirce’s reminiscences