Stern R. Hegelian Metaphysics

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300 Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness

in addressing Jacobi’s worry that our relation to the world must involve an

immediacy that cannot be grasped in conceptual terms? Where Peirce’s position

is interesting, however, is that while he wants to do justice to this concern,

he also wants to balance it with a commitment to what he calls Thirdness,

so that (I will argue) Peirce’s response to it cannot represent a complete

break with Hegel (as Peirce himself thought), but may rather provide a model

for thinking about what a properly Hegelian treatment of this issue should

really be.

The criticism of Hegel that I am concerned with is made at its clearest in the

paper ‘On Phenomenology’, which forms the text of Peirce’s second Harvard

lecture delivered 2 April 1903. In this text, Peirce offers a phenomenological

approach to the investigation of the categories as ‘an element of phenomena of

the ﬁrst rank of generality’: ‘The business of phenomenology is to draw up a

catalogue of categories and prove its sufﬁciency and freedom from redundancies,

to make out the characteristics of each category, and to show the relations of each

to the others’.³ Peirce says he will focus on the ‘universal order’ of the categories,

which form a ‘short list’, and notes the similarity between his list and Hegel’s,

while denying any direct inﬂuence: ‘My intention this evening is to limit myself

to the Universal, or Short List of Categories, and I may say, at once, that I

consider Hegel’s three stages [of thought] as being, roughly speaking, the correct

list of Universal Categories.⁴ I regard the fact that I reached the same result as he

³ EP II, 148 (CP 5.43).

⁴ Cf. also CP 8.213: ‘My three categories are nothing but Hegel’s three grades of thinking’,

and CP 8.267: ‘Anything familiar gains a peculiar positive quality of feeling of its own; and that

I think is the connection between Firstness and Hegel’s ﬁrst stage of thought. The second stage

agrees better with Secondness’. It is not immediately clear what Peirce meant by Hegel’s ‘stages of

thought’, and thus what in Hegel he took to correspond to Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.

The editors of EP suggest in one note (EP II, 517, n. 13), that ‘Hegel’s ‘three stages of thought’

consist of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis’; but as Hegel scholars often point out (e.g. G. E. Mueller,

‘The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis’ ’, JournaloftheHistoryofIdeas, 19 (1958),

411–14), this terminology is not Hegel’s. In connection with the passage we are discussing here, the

editors refer to §79 of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences,whereHegeldistinguishes

between three ‘sides’ of the logical: the understanding which treats each category as distinct (e.g.

freedom or determinism); the dialectical side where the need for both categories is seen to lead

to contradiction (e.g. freedom without determinism is mere arbitrariness); and the overcoming of

these contradictions where reason sees that categories can form a differentiated unity (e.g. freedom

is compatible with determinism). In other contexts, it does seem that it is understanding, dialectic,

and reason that Peirce has in mind, e.g. EP I, 237 (CP 8.45): ‘When Hegel tells me that thought has

three stages, that of naïve acceptance, that of reaction and criticism, and that of rational correction;

in a general sense, I agree to it’. But the difﬁculty is to see how understanding, dialectic and reason

can correspond to Peirce’s list of categories, when they seem more to be different ways of conceiving

the categories. A better match would seem to be §83 of the Encyclopaedia, where Hegel himself

Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness 301

did by a process as unlike his as possible, at a time when my attitude toward him

was rather one of contempt than of awe, and without being inﬂuenced by him

in any discernible way however slightly, as being a not inconsiderable argument

in favor of the correctness of the list. For if I am mistaken in thinking that my

thought was uninﬂuenced by his, it would seem to follow that that thought was

of a quality which gave it a secret power, that would in itself argue pretty strongly

for its truth’.⁵

In Peirce’s terminology, the ‘short list’ comprises the categories of Firstness,

Secondness, and Thirdness, although he does not introduce that terminology

until the next lecture. Here, he offers a characterization of the ﬁrst two categories

in phenomenological terms, beginning with Firstness, which he identiﬁes with

presentness. Peirce then turns to Secondness, which he characterizes in terms of

‘Struggle’, by which he means the resistance of the world to the self and vice versa,

illustrating this with the examples of pushing against a door; being hit on the

back of the head by a ladder someone is carrying; and seeing a ﬂash of lightning

in pitch darkness.⁶ He also argues that this resistance can be felt in the case of

images drawn in the imagination, and other ‘inner objects’, though this is felt less

strongly. Then, at the beginning of the next section of the text,⁷ Peirce comes to

the category of Thirdness; but here we do not get any phenomenological analysis

of the category, but an account of why ‘no modern writer of any stripe, unless it

be some obscure student like myself, has ever done [it] anything approaching to

justice’.⁸

talks about the Logic as the ‘doctrine of thought’ having three parts, in terms of the categories

of Being, Essence, and Concept, or immediacy, mediation, and mediated immediacy; and this is

the terminology Peirce himself uses in making the comparison (see e.g. EP II, 149 (CP 5.44)).

But for further discussion of some of the complexities here, see Martin Suhr, ‘On the Relation

of Peirce’s ‘‘Universal Categories’’ to Hegel’s ‘‘Stages of Thought’’ ’, Graduate Studies Texas Tech

University, 23 (1981), 275–9. In view of these difﬁculties, it has been suggested by Kipton Jensen

that Peirce may not have intended any very precise reference to Hegel here: ‘I do not think it

possible to pin down a speciﬁc text in Hegel, for example, to §82 of the Logic, as decisive to the

meaning of the ‘‘three grades of thinking’’; we are dealing instead with a popular gloss on Hegel’s

thought—i.e., with something much more in the air than something on the page’ (Jensen, ‘Peirce

as Educator’, 276–7).

⁵ EP II, 148 (CP 5.43). Cf. also CP 8.329. ⁶ EP II, 150–1 (CP 5.45).

⁷ Because it is made up from different unpublished manuscripts (which do not form a ﬁnal

draft), this section actually marks a break between manuscripts: see the editors’ explanation in EP

II, 517 n. 1. For more on the provenance of the text, see C. S. Peirce, Pragmatism as a Principle

and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard ‘Lectures on Pragmatism’, ed. Patricia Ann Turrisi

(Albany: SUNY Press, 1997).

⁸ EP II, 155–6 (CP 5.59). Cf. also CP 7.528:

‘experience is composed of

1st, monadic experiences,orsimples, being elements each of such a nature that it might without

inconsistency be what it is though there were nothing else in all experience;

2nd, dyadic experiences,orrecurrences, each a direct experience of an opposing pair of objects;

3rd, triadic experiences,orcomprehensions, each a direct experience which connects other possible

experiences’.

302 Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness

Now, Peirce offers a c riticism of Hegel in relation to each of the three

categories. Thus, in relation to Secondness, Peirce argues that Hegelians will

tend to reduce ‘struggle’ to a lawlike relation and hence to something general,

and so will eliminate Secondness in favour of Thirdness;⁹ and in relation to

Thirdness, Peirce goes on to claim that Hegel’s position here is nominalistic.¹⁰

These criticisms will not concern us directly here, as it is the criticism of Hegel’s

treatment of Firstness that I wish to concentrate upon.

This criticism is presented as follows: Peirce begins by saying that ‘presentness’

or Firstness is the ‘very ﬁrst and simplest character to be noted’ in ‘anything

[that] is present to the mind’, and comments that ‘[s]o far Hegel is quite right.

Immediacy is his word’.¹¹ However, where Hegel goes wrong, according to

Peirce, is in treating this presentness as abstract, and thus as akin to Pure Being,

in the sense that (according to Hegel) Pure Being lacks all determination and is

thus equivalent to Nothing:¹² ‘To say, however, that presentness, presentness as

it is present, present presentness, is abstract,isPureBeing,isafalsitysoglaring,

that one can only say that Hegel’s theory that the abstract is more primitive than

the concrete blinded his eyes to what stood before them’.¹³ Peirce’s thought here

is not entirely clear, but he seems to believe the following kind of argument must

have been moving Hegel:

1. The abstract is more primitive than the concrete

2. Presentness is primitive

Therefore

3. Presentness is abstract

4. Pure being is abstract

Therefore

5. Presentness is Pure Being

⁹ EP II, 151–2 (CP 5.46). For further discussion of this claim, see Robert Stern, ‘Peirce, Hegel,

and the Category of Secondness’, Inquiry, 50 (2007), 123–55; repr. as Ch. 9 above.

¹⁰ EP II, 156–7 (CP 5.61–2). For further discussion of this claim, see Robert Stern, ‘Peirce

on Hegel: Nominalist or Realist?’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, XLI (2005), 65–99;

repr. as Ch. 8 above.

¹¹ EP II, 149 (CP 5.44).

¹² Cf. CP 1.533: ‘Hence Hegel ...regarded pure being as pretty much the same as nothing’;

and CP 1.302: ‘In the idea of being, Firstness is predominant, not necessarily on account

of the abstractness of that idea, but on account of its self-containedness. It is not in being

separated from qualities that Firstness is predominant, but in being something peculiar and

idiosyncratic’.

¹³ EP II, 149 (CP 5.44). Cf. C. S. Peirce ‘Charles Sanders Peirce: Contributions to The Nation,

Part Three: 1901–1908’, compiled and annotated by Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Edward

Cook, Graduate Studies Texas Tech University, 19 (1979) 125: ‘What, for example, could be more

monstrous than to call such a conception of Being a primitive one; or indeed, what more absurd

than to say that the immediate is abstract?’ These comments come from a review (of a book on

Hegel’s Logic by John Grier Hibben), which was also written in 1903.

Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness 303

Peirce doesn’t tell us exactly what he has in mind in attributing the ‘theory’ of

premise 1 to Hegel, but a reasonable conjecture might be Hegel’s distinction

between abstract and concrete universals, where Hegel treats some universals

such as ‘red’ as more ‘primitive’ than others such as ‘man’ or ‘rose’, where these

property universals are seen as simple aspects of the more complex substance

universals under which a plurality of property universals are related (for example,

to be a rose is not just to be red, but also sweet smelling, prickly and so on).¹⁴

Peirce then might think that Hegel believed that presentness was primitive in

this way (it just contains a singular, undifferentiated and simple experience that

forms an aspect of something more complex), and so holds it to be abstract, like

Pure Being, which just ‘is’ and nothing more.

Now, Peirce doesn’t state precisely where this Hegelian argument is mistaken,

but probably believes he doesn’t have to, as (he holds) its conclusion is so

‘glaringly’ false, we can be sure something is. And, to bring home to us its glaring

falsity, he offers us a series of examples, designed to show that presentness is

not abstract in the way Hegel believed, because the ‘qualities of feeling’ we

experience in these examples are simple and unanalyzable, but not ‘abstract’,

either in the sense of being aspects of a more complex experience which is

prior to them from which they are abstracted and on which they depend, or

in the sense of being ‘empty’ or ‘pretty much the same as nothing’¹⁵ like Pure

Being:

Go out under the blue dome of heaven and look at what is present as it appears to the

artist’s eye. The poetic mood approaches the state in which the present appears as it is

present. Is poetry so abstract and colorless? The present is just what it is regardless of

the absent, regardless of past and future. It is such as it is, utterly ignoring anything else.

Consequently, it cannot be abstracted (which is what Hegel means by the abstract) for

the abstracted is what the concrete, which gives it whatever being it has, makes it to be.

The present, being such as it is while utterly ignoring everything else, is positively such as

it is. Imagine, if you please, a consciousness in which there is no comparison, no relation,

no recognized multiplicity (since parts would be other than the whole), no change, no

imagination of any modiﬁcation of what is positively there, no reﬂexion,—nothing but

a simple positive character. Such a conscio usness might be just an odor, say a smell of

attar; or it might be one inﬁnite dead ache; it might be the hearing of [ a]¹⁶ piercing

eternal whistle. In short, any simple and positive quality of feeling would be something

which our description ﬁts,—that it is such as it is quite regardless of anything else. The

quality of feeling is the true psychical representative of the ﬁrst category of the immediate

as it is in its immediacy, of the present in its direct positive presentness. Qualities of

feeling show myriad-fold variety, far beyond what the psychologists admit. This variety

however is in them only in so far as they are compared and gathered together into

collections. But as they are in their presentness, each is sole and unique; and all the

¹⁴ Cf. Hegel, EL, §163–93, 239–71 [Werke, VIII: 311–50]. ¹⁵ CP 1.533.

¹⁶ Words appearing in italic brackets have been supplied or reconstructed by the editors of EP.

304 Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness

others are absolute nothingness to it,—or rather much less than nothingness, for not

even recognition as absent things or as ﬁctions is accorded to them. The ﬁrst category,

then, is Quality of Feeling, or whatever is such as it is positively and regardless of aught

else.¹⁷

Peirce’s case against Hegel here seems to be as follows: According to Peirce,

the category of Firstness is monadic, and is irreducible to the categories of

Secondness (dyadic) and Thirdness (triadic); and he believes he can offer a

phenomenological argument to show this, because he believes we can view

aspects of our experience ‘monadically’ in this way, as ‘sole and unique’ and

unrelated to anything else, as when we prescind from the way certain properties

form part of a complex whole, and focus on them simply as such—like the

redness on the coat of a guardsman, when we focus just on this redness, or

the whistle of a train when we focus just on the whistle.¹⁸ Once we recognize

these phenomena, we will see that Firstness is a category we cannot do without,

because these phenomena are monadic rather than relational (Secondness) or

general (Thirdness). Now, Peirce thinks that Hegel failed to see this, because

he thought that there was no experience of this monadic (or immediate) kind,

because Hegel held that all experience was relational (or mediated), in the

sense that redness or whistling cannot be experienced simply as such, but only

as interconnected with other experiences, and so as part of a more complex

experiential whole (Secondness) and not just as this red or this whistling sound,

but only as an instance of a more general type (Thirdness): away from these

relations and types, Peirce holds that Hegel takes these experiences to be empty.

By giving us his examples, Peirce hopes he can persuade us that we can envisage

experience as ‘monadic’ in the way he suggests, and that we will therefore

recognize (contra Hegel) that Firstness should have its own irreducible status as

acategory.

Having set out the mistake he takes Hegel to have made in this way, in the next

Harvard lecture Peirce provides a diagnosis of what led Hegel to make it. The

suggestion he offers is that for Hegel, it was not sufﬁcient to recognize merely the

interdependence of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness (an interdependence

which Peirce himself accepts); rather, Hegel’s monistic conception of the Absolute

meant that he had to move to a more reductionist position, and so t o make

the kind of ‘glaring’ phenomenological error attributed to him by Peirce in the

earlier lecture:

¹⁷ EP II 149–50 (CP 5.44). Cf. MS 304 [c.1903]: ‘How shall I show you anything so manifest

[as presentness]? I wish we were out of doors. Philosophizing ought to be done under the light of

heaven. Hegel himself in the opening of the Ph

anomenologie [i.e. in the discussion of sense-certainty]

supposes that he and the reader are out of doors. But somehow his theory that the abstract is more

primitive than the concrete blinded his eyes to what stood before him. Let us try to get into an

unsophisticated state so that we can perceive what is present to us. Let me read you a bit of poetry

just to rinse out your thoughts’.

¹⁸ Cf. CP 8.329–30.

Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness 305

Not only does Thirdness suppose and involve the ideas of Secondness and Firstness, but

never will it be possible to ﬁnd any Secondness or Firstness in the phenomenon that is

not accompanied by Thirdness.¹⁹

If the Hegelians conﬁned themselves to that position they would ﬁnd a hearty friend

in my doctrine.

But they do not. Hegel is possessed with the idea that the Absolute is One. Three

absolutes he would regard as a ludicrous contradiction in adjecto. Consequently, he wishes

to make out that the three categories have not their several independent and irrefutable

standings in thought. Firstness and Secondness must somehow be aufgehoben. But it is not

true. They are no way refuted or refutable. Thirdness it is true involves Secondness and

Firstness, in a sense. That is to say, if you have the idea of Thirdness you must have had

the ideas of Secondness and Firstness to build upon. But what is required for the idea of

a genuine Thirdness is an independent solid Secondness and not a Secondness that is a

mere corollary of an unfounded and inconceivable Thirdness; and a similar remark may

be made in reference to Firstness.²⁰

Peirce then goes on to offer two further examples, one designed to show the

irreducibility of Secondness, and the other to show the irreducibility of Firstness:

Let the Universe be an evolution of Pure Reason if you will. Yet if while you are walking in

the street reﬂecting upon how everything is the pure distillate of Reason, a man carrying a

heavy pole suddenly pokes you in the small of the back, you may think there is something

intheUniversethatPureReasonfailstoaccountfor;andwhenyoulookatthecolorred

and ask yourself how Pure Reason could make red to have that utterly inexpressible and

irrational positive quality it has, you will be perhaps disposed to think that Quality and

Reaction have their independent standings in the Universe.²¹

In general, then, Peirce argues that while Hegel had some insight into Firstness,

the direction of his thinking made it impossible for him to do proper justice to

those insights, so that in the end they were lost.²²

¹⁹ Cf. EP II, 267: ‘According to the present writer [i.e. Peirce], these universal categories are three.

Since all three are invariably present, a pure idea of any one, absolutely distinct from the others, is

impossible; indeed, anything like a satisfactorily clear discrimination of them is a work of long and

active meditation. They may be termed Firstness, Secondness,andThirdness’.

²⁰ EP II, 177 (CP 5.90–1). Cf. also CP 8.268: ‘The third stage is very close indeed to Thirdness,

which is substantially Hegel’s Begriff. Hegel, of course, blunders monstrously, as we shall all be seen

to do; but to my mind the one fatal disease of his philosophy is that, seeing that the Begriff in a sense

implies Secondness and Firstness, he failed to see that nevertheless they are elements of the phenomen-

on not to be aufgehoben, but as real and able to stand their ground as the Begriff itself ’; and EP II,

164 (CP 5.79): ‘Hegel ...regards Category the Third as the only true one ....For in the Hegelian

system the other two [i.e. Firstness and Secondness] are only introduced in order to be aufgehoben’.

²¹ EP II, 177–8 (CP 5.92).

²² Cf. also CP 1.524: ‘Hegel brought out the three elements [i.e. Firstness, Secondness and

Thirdness] much more clearly [than Kant did]; but the element of Secondness, of hard fact,isnot

accorded its due place in his system; and in a lesser degree the same is true of Firstness’; CP 4.354:

‘To recognize the triad is a step out of the bounds of mere dualism; but to attempt [to deny]

independent being to the dyad and monad, Hegel-wise, is only another one-sidedness’; and EP II,

345 (CP 5.436): ‘Had Hegel, instead of regarding the ﬁrst two stages [of thought; i.e. Firstness and

Secondness] with his smile of contempt, held on to them as independent or distinct elements of the

triune Reality, pragmaticists might have looked up to him as the great vindicator of their truth’.

306 Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness

Having set out the criticisms that Peirce offers of Hegel on the question of

Firstness, we may now assess their cogency; doing so will also reveal some of the

deeper issues underlying them.

Initially, it may seem that Peirce’s position is clearly ﬂawed, because the

diagnostic part of his critique of Hegel appears to suffer from obvious weaknesses.

Two points of that diagnosis appear to be particularly vulnerable. First, Peirce

seems to have misunderstood the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung or ‘sublation’,

which Peirce glosses as meaning ‘refuted’;²³ but of course, while for Hegel this

aspect of the term is important, equally so are its other meanings of ‘preserve’

and‘raiseup’,sothattobeaufgehoben is not to be destroyed or done away with,

but to be retained at a higher level, as when spirit retains an indissoluble relation

to nature, even while going beyond it to a more developed form of being, so that

nature is ‘sublated’ within it:

At this point we should remember the double meaning of the German expression

‘aufheben’. On the one hand, we understand it to mean ‘clear away’ or ‘cancel’, and

in that sense we say that a law or regulation is cancelled (aufgehoben). But the word

also means ‘to preserve’, and we say in this sense that something is well taken care of

(wohl aufgehoben). This ambiguity in linguistic usage, through which the same word

has a negative and a positive meaning, cannot be regarded as an accident nor yet as

a reason to reproach language as if it were a source of confusion. We ought rather to

recognize here the speculative spirit of our language, which transcends the ‘either-or’ of

mere understanding.²⁴

It would seem, therefore, that Peirce is mistaken in taking from Hegel’s talk of

Aufhebung that he meant what is sublated to be ‘refuted’ or ‘refutable’.²⁵

It might be said, however, that Peirce does not commit this error in the

way I have suggested: for, in saying that Firstness and Secondness are ‘in no

way refuted nor refutable’ he may not necessarily be claiming that for Hegel

²³ EP II, 177.

²⁴ Hegel, EL, §96 Addition, 154 [Werke, VIII: 204–5]. Cf. also Hegel, SL, 107 [Werke,V:

114]: ‘ ‘‘To sublate’’ [Aufheben] has a twofold meaning in the language: on the one hand, it means

to preserve, maintain, and equally it also means to cause to cease, to put an end to. Even ‘‘to

preserve’’ includes a negative element, namely, that something is removed from its immediacy

and so from an existence which is open to external inﬂuences, in order to preserve it. Thus

what is sublated is at the same time preserved; it has only lost its immediacy but is not on that

account annihilated ....Something is sublated only in so far as it has entered into unity with its

opposite; in this more particular signiﬁcation as something reﬂected, it may ﬁttingly be called a

moment’.

²⁵ Cf. Shapiro, ‘Peirce’s Critique of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Dialectic’, 271–2: ‘But since

Hegel insists that this Aufhebung is as much a preserving as a dissolving, Peirce’s contention that

Hegelian triads are really monads, leaving his own pragmaticism as a more genuinely triadic system

of philosophy, is a premature judgement’.

Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness 307

Thirdness ‘cancels’ the other two categories, but rather just that it is said to

be that on which the other two categories depend, so that they lack ‘their

several independent and irrefutable standings in thought’, with the result that

for Hegel ‘an independent solid’ Secondness and Firstness are lost, as each is

made ‘a mere corollary of an unfounded and inconceivable Thirdness’. Peirce

may therefore be taken to be saying that it is because Hegel does not give

Firstness and Secondness this ‘independent’ standing that they are aufgehoben,

in a way that is much closer to Hegel’s use of the term, and Hegel’s suggestion

that ‘something is sublated only in so far as it has entered into unity with its

opposite’.²⁶

However, the difﬁculty now is to see clearly where Peirce is to be taken

to be differing from Hegel: for, as we have seen, Peirce’s own conception

of his three categories is also an essentially relational one, in so far as he

is prepared to agree with the H egelian that ‘Not only does Thirdness sup-

pose and involve the ideas of Secondness and Firstness, but never will it be

possible to ﬁnd any Secondness or Firstness in the phenomenon that is not

accompanied by Thirdness’.²⁷ How can Peirce accept this much, while also

insisting that Firstness and Secondn ess must be given an ‘independent and

irrefutable’ standing in relation to Thirdness? And how can he speak of the

latter as being ‘built upon’ the former categories, when he allows that they

cannot be found in the phenomena without the latter? It is thus hard to see

how, if he did indeed have an accurate understanding of Hegel’s doctrine of

Aufhebung, Peirce could have come to view Hegel’s position as so different from

his own.

But, it is not just the doctrine of Aufhebung that is at issue in this passage:

another, and related, aspect of Peirce’s diagnosis of what he sees as Hegel’s error

is his claim that ‘Hegel is possessed with the idea that the Absolute is One’,

where this suggests that although Hegel may have wanted to conceive of the

categories as mutually interdependent, in the end his picture is a monistic one,

where the category of Thirdness is prioritized over the other two. This second

element of Peirce’s diagnostic picture also appears to be vulnerable, however.

For, Peirce offers no textual evidence that Hegel is ‘possessed’ in this way, and in

fact all the evidence counts against it, as Hegel is consistently critical of monism,

whether in its Schellingian²⁸ or Spinozistic²⁹ varieties. Of course, Peirce is right

to say that ‘Three absolutes [Hegel] would regard as a ludicrous contradiction

²⁶ Hegel, SL, 107 [Werke, V: 114]. ²⁷ EP II, 177 (CP 5.90).

²⁸ Cf. Hegel’s famous jibe against Schelling: ‘To pit this single insight, that in the Absolute

everything is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and

demands such fulﬁlment, to palm of its Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows

are black—this is cognition naively reduced to vacuity’ (Hegel, PS,9[Werke, III: 22] ).

²⁹ Cf. Hegel, LHP III, 288 [Werke, XX: 166]: ‘As all differences and determinations of things

and of consciousness simply go back into the One substance, one may say that in the system of

Spinoza all things are merely cast down into this abyss of annihilation. But from this abyss nothing

comes out’.

308 Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness

in adjecto’, and that Hegel did indeed want to deny that ‘the three categories

have ...their several independent and irrefutable standings in thought’, if by this

Peirce means that each is in no way dependent on the others and so ‘absolute’ in

this sense: but such a picture is compatible with making the categories mutually

interdependent, rather than reducing them all to one. Thus, Peirce seems to

suggest here that there is a contrast between his holism regarding the categories,

and Hegel’s monism; but it is hard to take this seriously, when in offering his

deﬁnition of the Absolute as Concept (Begriff ),³⁰ Hegel makes clear that the best

way to think about the Absolute is not as One, but as a complex interrelation of

the categories of universality, particularity, and individuality, where no ‘moment’

is reducible to any of the others:

Taken abstractly, universality, particularity, and singularity³¹ are the same as identity,

distinction, and ground. But the universal is what is identical with itself explicitly in

the sense that it contains the particular and the singular at the same time. Furthermore,

the particular is what is distinct or the determinacy, but in the sense that it is inwardly

universal and is [actual] as something-singular. Similarly, the singular means that it is

subject, the foundation that contains the genus and species within itself and is itself

substantial. This is the posited unseparatedness of the moments in their distinction

(§160)—the clarity of the Concept, in which each of the distinctions does not constitute

a breach, or blurring, but is transparent precisely as such.³²

Very brieﬂy, I take Hegel’s position here to be the following: Starting from any

one of the categories of the Concept (universality, particularity, individuality),

this category can only be made intelligible in the light of the other two:

individuality is constituted by the particularized substance universal (as an

individual, I am a man with a determinate set of properties that distinguish me

from other men); the substance universal exists only in individuals, through its

particularization (the universal ‘man’ exists in rebus, as instantiated in different

men); and particularity is the differentiation of a substance universal, whereby

it constitutes an individual (it is qua man that I have the properties which

distinguish me from other men). It is the dialectical interconnection between the

three categories which Hegel characterizes as ‘development’ (Entwicklung), on

the grounds that ‘the [moments: i.e. universality, particularity and individuality]

that are distinguished are immediately posited at the same time as identical with

one another and with the whole, and [each] determinacy is as a free being of

³⁰ Cf. Hegel, EL, §160 Addition, 237 [Werke, VIII: 308]: ‘As we said earlier, the various stages

of the logical Idea can be considered as a series of deﬁnitions of the Absolute. Consequently, the

deﬁnition that results at this point is that ‘‘the Absolute is the Concept’’ ’.

³¹ In their translation, Geraets, Suchting, and Harris use ‘singular’ rather than ‘individual’ to

translate ‘Einzelne’, for reasons they give in the translators’ introduction, xix–xx. While appreciating

some of the points they make in favour of this practice, and while I will retain its use when quoting

from their translation, in the text I will continue to talk of ‘individual’ rather than ‘singular’, in part

because this is still the more common translation in the secondary literature.

³² Hegel, EL, §164, 242 [Werke, VIII: 314].

Peirce, Hegel, and Category of Firstness 309

the whole Concept’.³³ It would appear, then, that considered in terms of the

Concept, Hegel’s Absolute is to be conceived along holistic and not monistic

lines, as involving not just one category to which the others are reduced, but as

three categories standing in a relational unity; if this is right, Peirce is therefore

mistaken in accusing Hegel of being driven by his conception of the Absolute to

prioritize Thirdness over Secondness and Firstness, when in fact his conception

of the Absolute seems precisely designed to make room for the sort of holistic

picture that Peirce himself wants to endorse.

Thus, in attempting to convince us that his handling of Firstness will differ

signiﬁcantly from that of Hegel, on the grounds that he and Hegel differ on

the question of the oneness of the Absolute and the related need for Aufhebung,

Peirce may be judged to have failed, for on neither issue does Hegel seem to take

a signiﬁcant step beyond a relational conception of the categories, of the sort that

Peirce himself sets out to defend. So far, then, we have no reason to think that

there is any meaningful critical distance between the two positions.

There is, however, a third aspect to Peirce’s diagnostic story which would

appear to many to have a greater degree of plausibility, and is certainly close to

a central issue raised by critics of Hegel from the beginning. This third aspect

concerns what Peirce sees as Hegel’s speculative idealist project, summarized as

the claim that ‘the Universe [is] an evolution of Pure Reason’,³⁴ in such a way

as to undermine his appreciation of Firstness (and Secondness). Peirce’s other

critical remarks suggest three ways in which this comment could be taken: as a

criticism of Hegel as a determinist and ‘necessitarian’; of Hegel as trying to derive

the existence of the world from concepts or thoughts; and of Hegel as trying to

claim that everything in the world can be grasped in conceptual terms, so that

nothing is ‘inexpressible and irrational’.

On the ﬁrst reading of Peirce’s criticism here, the error Peirce is attributing

to Hegel is the mistake of being a determinist, where this is the view that ‘every

single fact in the universe is precisely determined by law’.³⁵ Peirce appears to

adopt this account of Hegel in drawing the following contrast with his own

position:

Now the question arises, what necessarily resulted from that state of things [i.e. potential

being]? But the only sane answer is that where freedom was boundless nothing in

particular necessarily resulted.

In this proposition lies the prime difference between my objective logic and that of

Hegel. He says, if there is any sense in philosophy at all, the whole universe and every

³³ Ibid., §161, 237 [Werke, VIII: 308].

³⁴ EP II, 177 (CP 5.92). Cf. also EP I, 256 (CP 1.368): ‘Finally Hegel’s plan of evolving

everything out of the abstractest conception by a dialectical procedure, though far from being so

absurd as the experientialists think, but on the contrary representing one of the indispensible parts

of the course of science, overlooks the weakness of individual man, who wants the strength to wield

such a weapon as that’.

³⁵ EP I, 298 (CP 6.36).