Continuity and Inheritance: Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Work of C.S. Peirce

John Kaag Continuity and Inheritance: Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Work of CS. Peirce I. Revisiting Peirce's Kantian Inheritance "When I was a babe in philosophy," Charles Peirce wrote, "my bottle was filled from the udders of Kant."1 It is widely recognized that this early form of philosophic nourishment granted young Peirce the opportunity to recognize the respective shortcomings of empiricism and idealism and provided the point of departure for his philosophic architectonic. Peirce himself comments on this indebtedness to Immanuel Kant at multiple points, especially in the early stages of his work. In reference to his categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, Peirce writes that the "list grew originally out of the study of the table of Kant."2 This table, found in the beginning of the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason is crucial in Peirce's thinking, for it stands as Kant's attempt to bring analytic unity to the manifold of representations in judgment and supplies the necessary triadic structure that characterizes Peirce's system. The community of Peirce scholars today seems to acknowledge the contribution Kant made to the development of American pragmatism3 and, more particularly, Peirce's pragmaticism. This acknowledgement, however, has been somewhat cursory, and often serves as a mere preparatory move in highlighting the way in which Peirce overcomes and abandons the Kantian project as framed in the First Critique. According to Karl-Otto Apel, André De Tienne4 and Sandra Rosenthal,5 Peirce "grows up," and "weans" himself from Kant's formal theory of cognition. The commentators' perspective on the relation between Peirce and Kant is understandable; despite his praise for the "king of modern philosophy," Peirce regards Kant's work as antiquated and underscores the way in which the Critique of Pure Reason stands apart from a more organic, active, and pragmatic reading of ontology and epistemology. Peirce writes that he "was a pure Kantist until he was forced by successive steps into pragmaticism."6 My intent is not to reemphasize the arguments posed by Peirce against his philosophic forefather, but rather to suggest a type of response to these criticisms — a response made on Kant's own terms. I will not attempt to Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Summer, 2005, Vol. XLI, No. 3 516 John Kaag extrapolate this response from the First Critique. Peirce's extensive study of this work has made such an attempt nearly impossible. His analysis of Kant seems accurate if we, like Peirce, only take account of the Critique of Pure Reason. First, I will highlight the way in which Peirce justifiably criticizes parts of the Critique of Pure Reason and the various supporting roles certain commentators play in Kant's critique. I will then examine the Critique of Judgment in showing how Kant himself abandons, or at least mediates, some of the dualisms and contradictions that Peirce finds so problematic in his earlier work. My analysis was motivated, at least in part, by Douglas Anderson's observation that, in his fixation on logic, Peirce "paid little attention to Kant's Third Critique" and might have overlooked Kant's development of "imagination," "genius," and aesthetic creation on the grounds that they had little to do with the formal subjects of the first two Critiques.7 There is scant evidence that Peirce carefully considered Kant's later works.8 I will argue that this omission in Peirce's reading encourages him to maintain a strict demarcation between Kantianism and pragmaticism, one that seems unnecessary and unproductive in light of Kant's rendering of aesthetics. In the examination of various themes of the Third Critique, I hope to expose Peirce's Kantian inheritance to be far more extensive than Peirce or his commentators would like to admit. The lacunae I hope to identify in Peirce's reading of the history of philosophy seem to be especially important in terms of Peirce's own emphasis on historical continuity. If we are to take Peirce's comments about continuity seriously, it seems to follow that we must acknowledge that his philosophical moves are, in a certain way, indebted to the preparatory maneuverings of earlier thinkers. At the very least, it seems...