Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 08 Fall 1990

              The Problem of
Theoretical Self-Reflexivity
in Peirce and Santayana
PEIRCE'S THREE CATEGORIES
Here is one more paper on Santayana. If my readers should smile, I smile
along with them. And I have thrown Peirce in for good measure. The pleasure
is doubled, and so is the work of interpretation. Santayana's philosophy,
inimitably crafted, shines forth in many connected volumes. By contrast,
Peirce's career-text incorporates a great diversity of scholarly interests but
apparently lacks a major, unifying work.
The latter difficulty, I think, we can take in stride. Despite the manifaceted
nature of his writings, Peirce may have been the most original theorist in the
annals of classical American philosophy. A solid student of Kant, Peirce knew
that philosophers exercise a legislative right, based on the human mind's own
constructive power of thought. He was self-conscious of his own speculative
achievement. "But I seem to myself," he wrote William James in 1902, "to be
the sole depositary of the completely developed system, which all hangs
together and cannot receive any proper presentation in fragments" (8.255),'
Elsewhere he inveighed against certain "one-idea'd philosophies," and drew
upon Kant to support his own construction of an architectonic classification of
the sciences (6.7-25).
In the final analysis, Peirce constituted a foundational theory, one of the
most original as well as systematic in the history of philosophy. "Chance is
First," he wrote, "Matter is Second, Evolution is Third" (6.32). Looking at life
phaneroscopically, he everywhere articulated a trinity of monadic, dyadic, and
triadic experiences (1.351; 7.528); of feelings (qualisigns), molitions, and
habits (8.303); of possibilities, events, and thoughts (1.431, 537); of the
immediate present, actual past, and generality of the future (1.343); of
originality, obsistence, and transuasion (2.89); of presentness, struggle, and law
(5.41, 45, 59); of variety, uniformity, and passage from the first to the second
(6.97); of tychasm, anancasm, and agapasm (6.302); of chance, logic, and love
(L409). These "Kainopythagorean categories," as he called them (7.528), form
the inner latticing of Peirce's thought, subtending its various special
articulations.
A version of this paper was presented at the International Sesquicentennial Charles S. Peirce
conference at Harvard University in September of 1989,
1 All Peirce references are to Collected Papers of Charlm Sanders Peirce, vols, 1-6, ed. by Charles
Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, and vols, 7-8, ed. by Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1931-58).