2.8 Peirce Reinterpreted
In 2.2, we said that Peirce, in feeling his way through Ground, perceptual judgment, and Immediate Object, was trying to solve the problem of schematism from the standpoint of an inferential view of knowledge. I do not think that, on the various occasions in which he again took up the theme that runs through all his work, Peirce gives us one definitive answer. He attempted lots. He needed a concept of schema, but he could not find one with its modalities already founded and he could not deduce them. He had to find them «in action,» in the middle of an incessant activity of interpretation. And so I don’t think it is enough to trust in philology, at least I have no intention of doing so here. What I shall do is try to say how I think Peirce should be read (or reconstructed, if you will); in other words, I shall try to make him say what I wish he had said, because only in that case will I manage to understand what he meant to say.
Fumagalli (1995: 3) points out that in 1885 there was a change in Peirce’s thinking. From that date the categories of the youthful «New List» were no longer deduced from an analysis of the proposition but concern three areas of experience. There is a sort of shift, I would say, from logic to epistemology: the Ground, for example, is no longer a predicate but a sensation. Likewise, the second moment (that of indexicality) becomes a type of experience that has the form of a shock; it is an impact with an individual, with a haecceitas that «strikes» the subject without being a representation yet. Fumagalli observes that we have a Kantian return here to the immediacy of intuition, prior to all inferential activity. Nevertheless, since this intuition, as we shall see, remains the pure sentiment that I am confronted with something, the intuition would still be devoid of all intellectual content, and therefore (it seems to me) it could withstand the young Peirce’s anti-Cartesian polemic.
The Ground is a Firstness. As we have seen, the term can mean «background» (and this would be a misleading interpretation) or «basis» or «foundation.» It is a «foundation» in the sense of the cognitive process, which is nonmetaphysical, otherwise the Ground would be the substance, something that obscurely proposes itself as the subjectum of predications. Instead, the Ground itself seems a possible predicate, more like an «It is red» than a » This is red.» We are still before the encounter with something that resists us; we are about to enter Secondness, but we are not there yet. At a certain point Peirce tells us that it is «pure species,» but I don’t think one can understand the term in its scholastic sense; it should be understood in its current sense, as appearance, as semblance (Fabbrichesi 1981: 471). Why does Peirce call it icon, and likeness, and say that it has the nature of an idea? I think this is because Peirce was brought up in the Graeco-Occidental tradition, in which knowledge is always transmitted by a vision. If Peirce had been brought up in the Jewish tradition, perhaps he would have talked of a sound, of a voice.
2.8.1 The Ground, Qualia, and Primary Iconism
What is visual about the immediate sensation of heat, which is every bit as much Firstness as a sensation of red? In both cases we still have something elusive, so much so that Peirce uses an extremely delicate term to express the idea of Firstness, which is «so tender that you cannot touch it without spoiling it» (CP 1.358).
But this is the way the Ground should be seen, from the standpoint both of Peirce’s realism and from that of his theory of the icon. From the point of view of Peircean realism, Firstness is a presence «such as it is,» no more than a positive characteristic (CP 5.44). It is a «quality of feeling,» like a purple color noticed without any sense of the beginning or the end of the experience, without any awareness other than the feeling of color; it is not an object, nor is it initially inherent to any recognizable object; it has no generality (CP 7.530). It is, and it induces us to pass on to Secondness, to take account of several qualities, which already reciprocally oppose one another before opposing us (7.533), and also because at that point we do have to say that something is there. From that moment interpretation may begin, but forward, not backward. However, by appearing, it is still «mere may-be» (CP 1.304), potentiality without existence (CP 1.328), mere possibility (CP 8.329), and in any case a possibility of a perceptual process that is «not rational, yet capable of rationalization» (CP 5.119). «It cannot be articulately thought: assert it, and it has already lost its characteristic innocence; for assertion always implies a denial of something else … Only, remember that every description of it may be false» (CP 1.357). 25
Peirce is not a Kantian here: he is not at all concerned with discovering a manifold in intuition. If primary intuition exists, it is absolutely simple. I imagine that other attributes, after the first red, the first heat, the first sense of hardness, may later be added, in the inferential process that follows as a consequence; but the beginning is an absolute point. I think that, when Peirce says the Ground is a quality, he means to say what philosophy still defines today as the phenomenon of qualia (see Dennet 1991).
The Ground shows all the antinomies of the dramatic problem posed by qualia: How can it be pure possibility, prior to any conceptualization, and yet become a predicate, a general predicable of many different objects; in other words, how can a sensation of white be a pure album that precedes even the recognition of the object to which it is inherent, and still be not only nameable but predicable as albedo of different objects? And, a further problem for Peirce, how is it possible that this pure quality and possibility (as we mentioned in 2.2) can be neither criticized nor called into question?
Let us start with the last problem. With regard to a quality Peirce is still not talking about perceptual judgment; he is talking about a mere «tone» of cognition, and it is this tone that he defines as being resistant to all possible criticism. Peirce is telling us not that the sensation of red is «infallible» but that, once it has been, even if we then realize that we were wrong, it is still beyond doubt that it has been (see Proni 1992, 3.16.1). In an example in CP 5.412, there is mention of something that in the first instance strikes one as perfectly white and then, after a series of successive comparisons, strikes one as off-white. Peirce could have developed the example to tell me of a housewife who in a first moment perceives of her freshly washed sheet as extremely white but then, after comparing it with another, admits that the second is whiter than the first. There is nothing casual or roguish about this reference to the canonical schema of detergent commercials: Peirce’s intention was to talk about exactly this problem.
Faced with the television commercial, Peirce would have told us that the housewife initially perceived the whiteness of the first sheet (pure «tone» of awareness); then, once she had moved on to the recognition of the object (Secondness) and had begun a comparison full of inferences (Thirdness), discovering that whiteness is manifested by degrees, she could state that the second sheet is whiter than the first, but at the same time she could not cancel the preceding impression, which as a pure quality has been; and therefore she says, «I thought (before) that my sheet was white, but now that I have seen yours, et cetera.»
But—and now we come to the first problem—in the course of this process, by comparing diverse gradations of the album that was at first pure possibility of awareness, in other words by reacting to the album of at least two different sheets, the housewife has moved on to the predicate of the albedo, i.e., to a general, which can be named and for which there is an immediate Object. We might say that it is one thing to perceive an object as red, without having become aware as yet that we are dealing with something external to our awareness, and it is another thing to perform the prescission whereby one predicates of that object the quality of being red.
But having said this, we still have not answered a series of questions. We have made clear what Peirce wanted to talk about but not how he might have explained the process he was talking about. How is it that a pure quality (Firstness), which should be the immediate and unrelated point of departure of all subsequent perceptions, can function as a predicate, and therefore already has been named, if semiosis is established only in Thirdness? And how is it, all knowledge being inference, that we have a point of departure that cannot
