Peirce on Hegel: Nominalist or Realist?

Robert Stern Peirce on Hegel: Nominalist or Realist.* My aim in this paper is to consider one of Peirce's criticisms of Hegel, namely, that Hegel was a nominalist.1 Of the various criticisms of Hegel that Peirce offers, this has been little discussed, perhaps because it is puzzling to find Peirce making it at all. For, Peirce also criticises Hegel for his overzealous enthusiasm for Thirdness, where it is then hard to see how Hegel can have both faults: how can anyone who acknowledges the significance of Thirdness in Peirce's sense also fail to be a realist? I will begin by setting out this difficulty and showing how it can be resolved, and will then consider the justice of Peirce's criticism once we have a clear idea of what it amounts to. I will suggest that this criticism is unwarranted, and that in some respects it is curious to find Peirce making it, when he could just as easily have treated Hegel as an ally in the struggle with nominalism. The issue therefore takes us to the heart of Peircean and Hegelian metaphysics, and in a way that relates to questions that are central to contemporary philosophical debates concerning the nature of realism, idealism, and anti-realism.2 I Whereas in the case of Peirce's other criticisms of Hegel,3 there is no internal difficulty in seeing how Peirce might have thought (righdy or wrongly) that Hegel could have been guilty of the mistake of which he is accused, in the case of his criticism of Hegel as a nominalist, there is an apparent tension to be overcome, between this criticism and Peirce's claim that Hegel was also overcommitted to Thirdness:4 how can Peirce make both these claims about Hegel, when on his understanding of each position, it would seem that each excludes the other?5 I will begin by exploring the context in which Peirce makes both of these criticisms, and why their juxtaposition is prima facie surprising, before offering a solution to the puzzle. The criticism of Hegel as a nominalist that I am concerned with is made at its clearest in the paper "On Phenomenology", which forms the text of his second Harvard lecture delivered on 2nd April 1903; and it is here where the juxtaposition of the criticism with claims about Hegel's commitment to Thirdness is also at its sharpest. In this text, Peirce offers a phenomenological Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Winter, 2005, Vol. XLI, No. 1 66 Robert Stern 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 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".6 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.7 I regard the fact that I reached the same result as he 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,8 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".9 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 characterisation of the first two categories in phenomenological terms, beginning...