The Categories in disguise: a categoriological specification of D. Dilworth’s account of the provenance of Peirce’s Categories in Schiller

Abstract

A methodologically sound analysis of the depth and scope of Schiller’s influence on Peirce’s mature thought requires three steps: (i) a preliminary analysis of the passages that could support the hypothesis of a protracted influence and thus might also indicate its systematic vectors. In case such an analysis were to give positive results, it would (ii) become necessary to explore those juvenilia that document Peirce’s early reception of Schiller, in order to (iii) attempt to identify those ideas that render intelligible the reemergence of Schiller in Peirce’s thought after 1900. Based on the results that our preliminary architectonic contextualization of Peirce’s reminiscences of his juvenile study of the Æsthetic Letters yielded in a twin-paper, the present paper focusses on the second and third step. We thus aim to show that the threefold appearance Schiller’s categories make in their disguise – as moments of logical determination, as individual and collective mental states of socialized minds shaped by the relations of elementary psychic drives, and as stages of historical processes – first acted as the catalyst for Peirce’s early understanding of the shortcomings of Kant’s categoriology, and was consequently ‘fated’ to later reemerge in view of determinate architectonic challeges Peirce found himself confronted with while working on the coensoscopicredesign of the philosophical sciences in the years from 1900 to 1903. The influence Schiller exerted on Peirce, therefore, originates in his prefiguration of Peirce’s conception of categoriality and the coherence of architectonic uses it enables, especially as a means for the prescisive stratification of the – phenomenal, normative and metaphysico-entelechial – components of common experience and the modes of rationality embodied therein.