Quality and Form in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to present a possible identity between the concepts of form and quality in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), by means of his arguments in his Semiotics and in his Cosmology. In other words, our goal is to show that firstness consists in a form, constituting part of the nature of thirdness, inasmuch as the tendency to generalization or to the acquisition of habits was foreshadowed in the origin of the cosmos. Of an inductive nature, the step from the absolute nothing to a unity of qualities foreshadows an intelligible universe of a formal nature. This unity may already be considered a restriction of a potentiality of a greater strength present in that germinal nothing: the first category is configured, then, as being of a qualitative potential nature. The adjective “qualitative” presents the kind of restriction of potentiality to which we referred: such potential is of this or that kind. The second category, by its turn, arises from a chaos of feelings: it is not the interaction between those feelings that brings the second category to reality, but the mere manifestation of the feeling which is, by its turn, characterized as the momentary appearance of quality. This appearance is not potential, but actual. It is already a fact; it is already a restriction of the qualitative potentiality. Feeling while actuality and quality in its potential state foreshadow the origin of the other that presents itself: this other is, therefore, inscribed in the nature of quality and already presents the duality object (quality as potentiality) and represented object (depersonalized appearance of a quality). Finally, the tendency to generalization is recognized by means of the relations that the qualities establish among themselves: inasmuch as the appearance of one or more qualities was maintained insistent, such qualities began to establish relations among themselves, giving space to a logical structure that multiplies those relations themselves, allowing for the inductive formation of laws and more complex objects, but always indebted to the available material foreshadowed in the origin: qualities.