Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

Colonizing and Decolonizing Minds

Marcelo Dascal

Tel Aviv University

Contents

[Preface] 3

1: What is ‘colonization of the mind’? 4

2: Between colonization and decolonization 7

3: Can there be fully decolonized minds? 14

4: Concluding remarks: Living with a colonized mind? 19

References 22

Notes 24

[Preface]

The colonization of each other’s minds is the price we pay for thought.[1]

Mary Douglas

Whereas the most visible forms of political colonialism have for the most part disappeared from the planet by the end of the millennium, several of its consequences remain with us. Criticism of colonialism, accordingly, has shifted its focus to its more subtle and lasting manifestations. Prominent among these are the varieties of what came to be known as the ‘colonization of the mind’. This is one of the forms of ‘epistemic violence’ that it is certainly the task of philosophers to contribute to identify and struggle against. ‘Postcolonial’ thinkers have undertaken not only to analyze this phenomenon, but also to devise strategies for effectively combating and hopefully eradicating colonialism’s most damaging aspect - the taking possession and control of its victims’ minds.

My purpose in this paper is to contribute, qua philosopher, to both of these undertakings. I begin by trying to clarify the nature of the colonization of the mind and its epistemic underpinnings and the typical reactions to it. Next, I examine examples of these reactions with their corresponding analyses and strategies. The assumptions underlying them reveal certain inherent paradoxes, which call into question the possibility of a full decolonization of mind. I conclude by suggesting an alternative strategy and a series of means to implement it.

1: What is ‘colonization of the mind’?

In this section, the range of phenomena that fall under the label ‘colonization of the mind’ is extended beyond its usual application and briefly toured; the main features of the phenomenon are described; its epistemic characteristics are analyzed; and the typical ‘instinctive’ reactions to mind colonization are considered.

1.1 The metaphor ‘colonization of the mind’ highlights the following characteristics of the phenomenon under scrutiny here: (a) the intervention of an external source - the ‘colonizer’ - in the mental sphere of a subject or group of subjects - the ‘colonized’; (b) this intervention affects central aspects of the mind’s structure, mode of operation, and contents; (c) its effects are long-lasting and not easily removable; (d) there is a marked asymmetry of power between the parties involved; (e) the parties can be aware or unaware of their role of colonizer or colonized; and (f) both can participate in the process voluntarily or involuntarily.

These characteristics are shared by a variety of processes of mind colonization, regardless of whether they occur in socio-political situations that are literally categorized as ‘colonial’. Therefore, ‘colonization of the mind’ may take place through the transmission of mental habits and contents by means of social systems other than the colonial structure. For example, via the family, traditions, cultural practices, religion, science, language, fashion, ideology, political regimentation, the media, education, etc.

Consider education, for instance. The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire has analyzed a typically mind-colonizing educational paradigm, which he suggestively dubbed the ‘banking’ model. In this paradigm, a commodity (knowledge) is ‘deposited’ by those who have it (the teachers) in the minds of those (the pupils) who don’t have it; the task of both is basically passive: the former’s, to transmit and the latter’s to absorb ‘knowledge’.[2]

1.2 The ‘banking’ model displays the characteristicepistemic nature of mind colonization: What grants the colonizer (in this case the teacher) the right to intervene in the pupil’s mind, thereby colonizing it, is the fact that the former possesses and the latter lacksknowledge . This is a commodity that everybody is presumed to desire by virtue of its epistemic properties, namelytruth anduniversality , whence itsapplicability andutility derive.

Analogously, parents have theexperience their children lack, customs and traditions embodyproven methods of survival in natural and social environments, religion grantstranscendental validity to human behavior, language providesreliable tools for mental operations such as identification, conceptualization, classification, and inference, science supplies the basis oftechnologies that work , and ideologies, ofpolicies that are presumed to work . The expressions in italics refer to epistemic warrants that yield epistemic legitimacy and thereby endow teacher, family, tradition, religion, language, science or ideology each with its brand ofepistemic authority .

Notice that in most of these cases those who perform the colonizing are either not aware of the nature of their action or of the epistemic and other damaging consequences of their action.[3]Quite on the contrary, they believe they are helping the colonized, by providing them with better beliefs and patterns of action that improve their ability to cope successfully with the environment. Furthermore, they are also unaware of the fact that for the most part their minds have themselves been colonized by others, whose agents they become by attributing to them the same epistemic authority they rely upon vis-à-vis those they colonize.

In order for any of these sources of authority to become, in turn, an effective vehicle of mind colonization, it must, in addition, obtain the support of power structures capable, by a variety of means, of transmuting epistemic authority intosocial authority and so to ensure its enforcement. These means range from semiotic displays of authority, through overrating some sources of epistemic authority and devaluating others, up to appealing to overt and covert forms of discrimination, making use of socio-economic rewarding or punishment, and sheer violent coercion.

Nevertheless, however powerful the pressure of its means, social authority alone, without an epistemic authority counterpart, isn’t sufficient, for it cannot per se generate the authority necessary for succeeding in the colonizationof minds . Success in this endeavor cannot be achieved by coercion and fear alone, for it consists in inducing a set of beliefs in the colonized mind via some sort of inferential, persuasive process - a process that is cognitive in nature. Its basic constituent is the implicit acceptance by the colonized of a ‘rule of inference’ that automatically grants superiority to the colonizer’s epistemic warrants or reasons when they clash with those of the colonized. By virtue of this rule, when comparing the colonizer’s and his own grounds for holding a specific belief, the colonized will usually tend to prefer the former’s reasons and consequently adopt the colonizer’s belief. In other words, colonizationof the mind is achieved when the colonized adopts the colonizer’s epistemic principle of ‘invidious comparison’.[4]This means his implicit acceptance of the colonizer’s asymmetric distinction between a ‘primitive’ mind - that of the colonized - and a ‘superior’ or ‘civilized’ one - that of the colonizer. It is this acceptance that establishes a sort of implicit agreement between colonized and colonizer which justifies the recurring inference by both to the effect that, in any matter involving cognitive abilities, the former’s performance must be presumed to be inferior to the latter.

1.3 Of course, not always the colonization of mind is successful and yields acceptance and resignation by the colonized, although its rate of success can be considered typical, in so far as it has been surprisingly high throughout history.[5]Another typical reaction of the colonized to the colonization of mind drive of the colonizer, characteristic of the relatively recent ‘decolonization’ movement, is characterized by all out rejection and resistance. These two types of reaction are not the only ones, but they deserve special attention because, though on the face of it contrary to each other, they are widespread and equally ‘instinctive’ or ‘natural’.

Prima facie, the two reactions are indeed radically opposed.[6]While the former acknowledges the epistemic superiority of the colonizer and adopts it as a principle of colonized belief formation, the latter denies the alleged asymmetry, argues that it is groundless because based on an ‘invidious comparison’ procedure that is necessarily biased, and therefore refuses to adopt the presumption of epistemic inferiority of the colonized. While the former assumes the compatibility of adopting the colonizer’s conceptual framework with the preservation of the colonized identity, the latter stresses the incompatibility between these two attitudes, arguing that the adopted or adapted colonizer’s mind ultimately expels the original mind of the colonized, and thereby obliterates the latter’s true or authentic identity. As far as the political consequences are concerned, while the resigned acceptance reaction does not recognize in the adoption of the colonizer’s beliefs and forms of thinking one of the ways through which colonizers enhance their control over colonized behavior, the resistance reaction denounces it as a means of acquiring control over the will of the colonized, thus becoming a powerful tool of oppression, which must be combated.

2: Between colonization and decolonization

In this section, a version of the acceptance strategy, namely, the accommodation of the colonized with the ‘colonial system’ is described; the fact that the evils of this system persist even after the political decolonization of many states suggests the unsuspected depth and influence of mind colonization; the opposite reaction, the radical approach to mind decolonization, based on the total rejection of ‘foreign’ thinking patterns and contents, is then examined and its underlying assumption of a double mental colonization is pointed out; finally, the possibility of intermediate alternatives, admitting some interaction between the ‘two minds’ is discussed.

2.1 Albert Memmi, who experienced personally French colonialism as a native of Tunis and later as a teacher in Algiers, provides invaluable first person insight into the intricacies of the relationship between colonized and colonizer. The contrast between his first book (1957, transl. 1967) on the topic, written at the time of the Maghreb’s struggle for decolonization, and the second (2004, transl. 2006), well after it, raises questions directly pertinent to the issue of mind colonization that are worth being explored here.

In the first book, Memmi portraits colonizer and colonized as living in the grip of a “colonial relationship” that chains them “into an implacable dependence, which molded their respective characters and dictated their culture” (p. ix). Reaffirming his belief that colonialism is primarily an economic enterprise,[7]with no “moral or cultural mission” whatsoever (p. xii), he stresses that the ‘colonial system’ determines and controls their mental attitudes. Even the “colonizer who refuses”, on moral or political grounds, to endorse the exploitation of the colonized population and tries to do something about it, is dominated by the system, for “[i]t is not easy to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing to live with its actual relationships” (p. 20). This is a situation in which his “humanitarian romanticism” is viewed by the “colonizer who accepts” as a serious illness and his “moralism” is condemned as intolerable (p. 21). Under these circumstances, the well-intentioned colonizer soon finds himself sharing his companion oppressors’ derogatory image of the colonized: “How can one deny that they are under-developed, that their customs are oddly changeable and their culture outdated?” (p. 24), even though one is aware of the fact hat this is due not to the colonized “but to decades of colonization” (ibid.).

The colonizers, whatever their persuasion, inexorably develop a distorted portrait of the colonized that explains and justifies the roles of both in the ‘colonial system’ as ‘civilizer’ and ‘civilized’. “Nothing could better justify the colonizer’s privileged position than his industry, and nothing could better justify the colonized’s destitution than his indolence” (p. 79). The myth of laziness and incompetence is elaborated and expanded into an essential inferiority and its alleged effects.[8]The incongruity thus generated inevitably leads, “by obvious logic” (p. 121), concludes Memmi, to a “fundamental need for change”,[9]which will necessarily bring about the destruction of the ‘colonial system’: “The colonial situation, by its own internal inevitability, brings on revolt” (p. 128).

While revolt is for him clearly the preferred and necessary alternative, he does not overlook the other of “the two historically possible solutions” (p. 120), which the colonized tries to put into practice, and with top priority: “The first attempt of the colonized is to change his condition by changing his skin” (ibid.). And this changing of skin consists mainly in a change of mind, i.e., in the adoption of the forms of thinking and behaving of the colonizer, in the hope that this will carry with it the corresponding privileges.[10]Nevertheless, Memmi argues, imitation and compromise are ruled out as real possibilities. “[R]evolt is the only way out of the colonial situation, and the colonized realize it soon or later. His condition is absolute and cries for an absolute solution; a break and not a compromise” (p. 127).

Although Marxian assumptions and libertarian themes dominate his analysis, leading to the conclusion that revolt is the only way, Memmi is aware of the powerful role of characteristically mental factors in the unfolding of colonial drama. He describes the ‘absoluteness’ of the colonized situation as a loss of his traditions and culture,[11]a loss of self,[12]a loss of authenticity, unity and belonging.[13]However, even “at the height of his revolt - he points out - the colonized still bears the traces and lessons of prolonged cohabitation. …The colonized fights in the name of the very values of the colonizer, uses his techniques of thought and his methods of combat” (p. 129). Furthermore - and more importantly from the point of view of mind colonization - he ends up inheriting from the colonizer the dichotomous form of thinking that serves as the grounding of racism and xenophobia of all sorts.[14]

Memmi’s second book reflects his deep disenchantment with the fact that the evils of the ‘colonial system’, instead of disappearing with political decolonization, not only persist but have even worsened. Here is a sample of these evils, as seen by Memmi in 2004: “Widespread corruption and tyranny and the resulting tendency to use force, the restriction of intellectual growth through the adherence to long-standing tradition, violence toward women, xenophobia, and the persecution of minorities - there seems to be no end to the postulant sores weakening these young nations” (Memmi 2006: xi). For this situation he blames, among other factors, ‘dolorism’, the “natural tendency to exaggerate one’s pains and attribute them to another” (p. 19) - in this case, the colonial past.[15]Ably exploited by the corrupt economic, political and military potentates, this can only lead to the “destruction of the present” (p. 43).

Memmi stresses the collusion of the intellectuals in this process: “The shortcomings of intellectuals, whether characterized as resignation or betrayal, play a part in national cultural lethargy” (p. 40). They may have their excuses,[16]but their silence “leaves the field open for those who opt for mystic effusion in place of rationality” (ibid.). Instead of envisioning a future for their nations, they “dream only of a return to a golden age, a renewed fusion, the only productive kind in their view, of religion, culture, and politics” (p. 41). They thus join the cohort of developers and believers in a decolonized’s ‘countermythology’, whose advent he had already anticipated in the final pages of his earlier book.[17]It is important to notice, however, that in so doing the intellectuals of the decolonized nations - perhaps unwittingly - endow a past, largely constructed culture with the epistemic authority (see 1.2) without which it would not gain its current political attraction. As the special role he attributes to the intellectual’s lethargy shows, Memmi no doubt detected, in both books, the colonization of mind as a factor both in colonization and in the failure of decolonization.[18]Nevertheless, he did not grant it neither the attention it deserves, nor its proper significance. As a result, he overlooked an important - presumably essential - reason for the continuation and worsening, after decolonization, of the evils of colonization. In all likelihood, the problems Europe and the ‘decolonized’ immigrants that come to its shores face are not only economical, but also - and perhaps mainly - due to the incapacity of both sides to deal properly with the phenomenon of mind colonization, especially with the stereotypical thinking it engenders and sustains both ways.

2.2 Decolonization, if it is to be successful as a reaction against such a deep, powerful, and long lasting colonization of the mind, cannot but be itself as radical as its opponent. It must, therefore, eradicate not only its surface manifestations and the concomitant ‘colonial system’, but its epistemic roots as well.

Frantz Fanon’s (1965, 1967) vigorous anti-colonial position fully acknowledges the need to combat the sources and effects of the colonization of the native’s minds and argues for the intimate relationship between this ‘cultural’ combat and the struggle for independence. His speech at the congress of Black African Writers (1959), “Reciprocal basis of national culture and the fight for freedom”,[19]begins with a very clear statement of the incompatibility between a colonial situation and the independence of a creative cultural life, “[c]olonial domination, because it is total and tends to over-simplify, very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people”, and stresses that “[e]very effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture”. Nothing short of “organized revolt” and violent struggle can put an end to the colonization of his mind achieved through this admission, which is in fact precisely the initially mentioned “total and over-simplified” submission to the forcefully imposed colonizer’s epistemic authority.

The conclusion appears to be ineluctable: “In the colonial situation, culture, which is doubly deprived of the support of the nation and of the state, falls away and dies. The condition for its existence is therefore national liberation and the renaissance of the state”. To the one remaining essential question he identifies, “what are the relations between the [liberation] struggle - whether political or military - and culture?”, Fanon’s reply is predictable: “It is the fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation”. This fight is decisive not only because it is a fight for “the national consciousness which is the most elaborate form of culture”, but also because it is through it that the nation will free its mind from colonization and thus pave the way for recovering its epistemic autonomy. Ultimately, this is why “[a]fter the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man”.

Another example of an uncompromising rejection attitude designed to achieve a total, radical decolonization of the colonized mind is the strategy developed by Uhuru Hotep (2008).[20]Unlike Fanon, he does not strive either for a political or for an armed struggle solution. Instead, he focuses on the mental aspects of colonization and his proposals, accordingly, are directly intended to overcome them. The motto chosen for his paper couldn’t be more explicit about Hotep’s main concern: “The central objective in decolonizing the African mind is to overthrow the authority which alien traditions exercise over the African”.[21]Of course the achievement of this aim also requires action in other areas of life, as the motto further stresses: “This demands the dismantling of white supremacist beliefs, and the structures which uphold them, in every area of African life”.

Hotep’s discussion targets the “psychology of African liberation” and, accordingly, he dubs the ensemble of techniques developed by Europeans with the purpose of creating the ‘authority’ capable of subordinating the African mind, a “method of psychological manipulation”. Yet, the obstacle to liberation he identifies and seeks to overthrow is roughly the same I denote by the expression ‘epistemic authority’, whereby I emphasize its philosophical underpinnings. According to him, the method was designed to gain control of the African mind through “disconnect[ing] Africans from their heritage and culture”, which would achieve the colonizers’ purposes “because people who are cut off from their heritage and culture are more easily manipulated and controlled”.[22]This process of ‘deculturalization’, alias ‘seasoning’ (in American slaveholders jargon) and ‘brainwashing’ (in today’s vernacular), comprises three main steps: feel ashamed of yourself, admire and respect the whites, and be rewarded with more indoctrination if successful in the former steps. In Black America, the main instrument, though not the only one,[23]of deculturalization is ‘mis-education’, responsible for “destructive effects on the Black mind by schools that use a pedagogy and curriculum that deliberately omits, distorts or trivializes the role of African people in and their seminal contributions to world history and culture”.

Regardless of what seems to be an excessive emphasis on the intentionally designed, not to say conspiratorial nature of the process,[24]it no doubt yielded in America and elsewhere a prime example of mind colonization in the form of a selective set of mental contents and attitudes, which were adopted by Blacks and clearly valued European history, culture and thinking as superior to their African counterparts. It is the results of this process and the threat of its continuation that Hotep purports to combat.

He summarizes his strategy succinctly and clearly: “In the American context, decolonizing the African mind means reversing the seasoning process”;[25]and with some more detail: “Reversing the seasoning process is a constructive way to frame a psychoeducational approach for cleansing African minds of European or Arab cultural infestation”. Obviously such a reversal, which implies the demise of an operating system and its replacement by another, amounts to no less than a revolution and calls for a rhetoric of total war - even though the battleground is the mind:[26]First remove the occupier; next cleanse the ground; then design your own new-old structure and install it in the freed space.[27]The combat thus involves the virtually simultaneous identification of the vestiges of colonization to be eliminated and of the colonized’s traditions remnants, which the Africans will immediately use, “as the colony is being dismantled”, in order to “fill the liberated spaces with those life-sustaining social values, beliefs and customs that enabled their ancestors to establish stable, autonomous families and communities prior to the Arab or European invasions and conquest of their societies”. It is by recovering and reconnecting in this way with “the best of traditional African culture” that “European dominance of the African psyche” will end for Africans in the Americas; for them, therefore, “decolonization isRe-Africanization ” (author’s boldface).

  Behind the fascinating logic of total revolt they argue for, it is no less fascinating to notice that neither Fanon nor Hotep are aware of the double colonization of mind upon which their argument is in fact based. If we recall that, in the extended characterization of ‘colonization of the mind’ (see 1.1, 1.2), the ‘colonizer’ performing the ‘external intervention’ that inserts in the colonized mind contents and patterns of thinking endowed with ‘epistemic authority’ that will serve as a model for that mind, need not be the typical colonizer of a ‘colonial situation’. As we have seen, there are many other kinds of situation where mind colonization may take place. One of them is the transmission of accepted beliefs, patterns of behavior and thought, ideologies, etc. that are considered constitutive of a community’s, society’s or nation’s ‘culture’ or ‘identity’. One cannot but won]der whether, after decolonizing one’s mind through its complete cleansing from the foreign model, the following step in Fanon’s or Hotep’s strategy, namely re-filling the ‘liberated space’ with another set of contents, whatever their origin, does not amount to re-colonizing the just liberated mind.

2.3 In the light of the problems faced by both options - full acceptance and total rejection of mind colonization - we should look for alternatives to them. Of course, such alternatives are not easy to formulate and defend, especially in situations of acute conflict; after all, in comparison to the appealing simplicity of the two poles of the much simpler dichotomy such alternatives purport to overcome, they must not only be rather complex, but also involve a degree of uncertainty that renders them problematic for guiding political action.[28]Still, valuable suggestions for such intermediate alternatives do exist.

When referring (in 2.2) to the motto of Hotep’s paper, I deliberately omitted one sentence of Chinweizu’s quote. My intention was to highlight the mutually exclusive, dichotomous way in which Hotep opposes the European and the African worldviews. Chinweizu, in this respect, is more nuanced. He distinguishes between rejecting the allegiance to ‘foreign traditions’ and advocating that they shouldn’t be learned at all. Here is his missing sentence: “It must be stressed, however, that decolonization does not mean ignorance of foreign traditions; it simply means denial of their authority and withdrawal of allegiance from them”. Hotep, on the other hand, though also combating the mind colonizing effect of granting unwarranted epistemic authority to foreign scholarship, suggests a policy of segregation towards it, presumably on the grounds of a sweeping attribution of falsehood to whatever emanates from the hidden intentions of the colonizer.

The practice Hotep recommends consists in protecting the decolonized African mind from any contact with beliefs that might call into question the legitimate, authentic African perspective. The rule he advises the African youth to follow in order to keep his mind decolonized might be phrased exactly in Peirce’s (1877: 235) words: “systematically keeping out of view all that might cause a change in his opinions”. This is one of the ways to implement what Peirce called ‘the method of tenacity’, whose basic principle is to “cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing just what we do believe” (ibid.: 231). Yet, as Peirce points out, the application of the ‘belief protection rule’ is not easy, for whoever tries to apply it “will find that other men think differently from him” and will realize that “their opinions are quite as good as his own, and this will shake his confidence in his belief” (ibid.: 235). Chinweizu’s distinction, however, is compatible with this observation of Peirce, for it would permit - at least in principle - a practice of open examination of the epistemic authority of any set of beliefs, without prejudging its acceptability on the grounds of their being foreign or native. Evidently, to take advantage of this possibility and develop on its basis an alternative to the acceptance vs. rejection dichotomy requires much more cognitive effort than that demanded by the ‘tenacity method’. Philosophers may have contributed their share to this effort.

Among African philosophers, there is indeed much concern with the issue of colonization and decolonization of the mind, which is at the background of philosophical reflection in the continent.[29]An interesting question is whether this background concern does not itself affect the range of alternatives that are considered ‘valid’ (should I say ‘politically correct’?). Doesn’t the fact that philosophy is supposed to deal with “the universal” necessarily contest the legitimacy of philosophical accounts from whose scope certain cultures are excluded? And if this is the case, wouldn’t extreme particularistic positions regarding mind colonization rule themselves out as acceptable within a broad philosophical discussion of the topic? Or doesn’t the fact that the discussion takes place in a former colonized environment, say, in the African context, require participants to assume that mind colonization is wrong and that, whatever the arguments presented in the inquiry or debate, the conclusion must be in conformity with its condemnation?

All these questions are in fact present and easily recognizable in the philosophical debate about what is or should be African philosophy that runs through the pages of the Coetzee and Roux (1998) excellent reader, which thus exemplifies the variety of possible positions towards the thorny issue of what should be expected - if at all - from the decolonization of African philosophy. Let us consider a few instances.

In contradistinction to ‘ethnophilosophy’, which sees African philosophy as comprising essentially the collection and interpretation of traditional proverbs, folktales, myths and similar materials, Kaphagawani (1998: 87) discerns another, modern, multi-perspective conception of African philosophy “as a joint venture and product of traditional as well as modern trend philosophers, … of divergent world outlooks and who employ different methods … in debates and research … of relevance to the cultures and nationalities of Africa”. Appealing as this program is, it turns out that its followers “insist, in a frighteningly fanatical way at times, that rationality, rigour, objectivity, and self-criticism be properties of the African philosophy they have in mind” (ibid.). That is to say, they are perceived by Kaphagawani as mind colonization agents, who import European or North-American criteria of philosophizing. He is afraid bowing to these conditions “confines the conception of philosophy to just one aspect”.[30]In support for this claim he appeals to Wiredu (1980: 6): “If we demand that a philosophy has to have all these attributes by definition, then we are debarred from pointing out, what is a well known fact, that some philosophies are unrigorous or unsystematic or dogmatic or irrational or even anti-rational” - all of them, I would add, kinds of philosophy that deserve to be pursued, for their intrinsic value and for the fact that they may contribute significantly to clarifying the nature of those imported criteria African philosophers allegedly ought to blindly respect.

It is curious to observe to what extent an author such as Kaphagawani, eager to protect African philosophy from Euro-American hegemony, inadvertently falls prey to the latter’s mind-colonizing power. In order to justify that there is no need to provide a single, unitary definition of ‘African philosophy’, he argues as follows: “since even Western philosophers define philosophy in different ways, there is no reason why African philosophers should all define African philosophy in the same way” (Kaphagawani 1998: 98).

Finally, an example that should not be missed in the present discussion is the attempt to override the universalistic-particularistic dichotomy by creating an alternative based on merging these two poles. I will limit myself to quote two passages of the first page of a paper dealing with the “moral foundations of an African culture”. Its opening statement is categorical: “Morality in the strictest sense is universal to human culture. Indeed, it isessential to all human culture” (Wiredu 1998b: 306). The opening of the second paragraph is no less categorical: “The foregoing reflection still does not exclude the possibility of a legitimate basis for differentiating the morals of the various peoples of the world” (ibid.). Whether upholding the two claims and combining them successfully is feasible or not depends, of course, on the details of the author’s proposal. In any case, it is a courageous attempt to overcome the grip of an entrenched dichotomy.[31]

IV

At first sight, there may certainly appear to be a good deal of justice in Peirce’s specific claims regarding Hegel’s unwillingness to give Secondness its due, and Peirce’s complaints here undoubtedly fit a certain traditional way of reading Hegel as a speculative metaphysician with an extravagantly idealist and a prioristic project. However, in many respects that traditional reading has been challenged in recent years, in ways that show a side to Hegel’s thought in which a greater role for Peircean Secondness can perhaps be found.

The first issue, then, concerns how far Hegel leaves room for what Burbidge called “the brute facts of Secondness”, such as the poke in the back “that Pure Reason fails to account for”. On a traditional view, which Peirce seems to endorse, Hegel’s position is seen as being Spinozistic, ruling out possibility or contingency, and rendering everything necessary. However, as several commentators have argued recently (including Burbidge), this is a mistaken picture of Hegel’s position, for (as Hegel puts it) “Although it follows from discussion so far that contingency is only a one-sided moment of actuality, and must therefore not be confused with it, still as a form of the Idea as a whole it does deserve its due on the world of ob-jects”.[65] Here it is important to remember Hegel distinction between what is actual and what exists or what is “immediately there” (das unmittelbar Daseiende ),[66] where the actual is necessary but the existent is not, and where Hegel is quite happy to accept that (for example) the natural world is not fully “actual” in this sense, though it does of course exist. Thus, while Peirce might have been right to say that Hegel took a greater philosophical interest in actuality than in possibility and contingency, he was far from denying its reality: “It is quite correct to say that the task of science and, more precisely, of philosophy, consists generally in coming to know the necessity hidden under the semblance of contingency; but this must not be understood to mean that contingency pertains only to our subjective views and that it must therefore be set aside totally if we wish to attain the truth. Scientific endeavours which one-sidedly push in this direction will not escape the justified reproach of being an empty game and a strained pedantry”.[67]

Turning now to the second issue, of whether Hegel’s neglect of Secondness can be seen in his corresponding neglect for the role of experience in the acquisition of knowledge, it is again a complex matter to decide whether Peirce is right in what he claims. Central to Peirce’s position is the way in which he sees Hegel as a typical proponent of what in “The Fixation of Belief” Peirce identified as the “a priori method”, and thus as someone who holds that our reason will lead us to a convergence on the truth; according to Peirce, Hegel therefore fails to recognize that unless there is a sufficient role for experience, this method cannot result in any stable consensus, as what is “agreeable to reason”[68] (like what is agreeable to taste) is “always more or less a matter of fashion”,[69] which depends too much on the subjective dispositions of inquirers and not enough on how things are in the world. Peirce thus sees Hegel’s dialectical approach as an attempt to reach truth in this rationalistic fashion, in the hope of showing that each limited category or standpoint can lead to the next until we attain a category or standpoint for which no limitation can be found; but he doubts the feasibility of this enterprise, claiming that not everyone will find the moves Hegel makes or the criticisms he offers “rationally compelling”, so that in the end Hegel cannot claim to reach “absolute knowledge”, as a picture of the world to which we must all consent; rather, he can only appeal to those who already think like him and share his preconceptions:

[Hegel] simply launches his boat into the current of thought and allows himself to be carried wherever the current leads. He himself calls his methoddialectic , meaning that a frank discussion of the difficulties to which any opinion spontaneously gives rise will lead to modification after modification until a tenable position is attained. This is a distinct profession of faith in the method of inclinations.[70]

Thus, rather than guiding his inquiries by the “outward clash” of experience, Peirce claims that Hegel fails to see the significance of Secondness in this respect, because he hopes that by following “that which we find ourselves inclined to believe”[71] (and thus “the method of inclinations”), we can be led to convergence, and so to truth.

Now, one difficulty in assessing Peirce’s criticism here is that he does not tell us precisely what he has in mind: Hegel’sPhenomenology , hisLogic , or theEncyclopaedia system as a whole. As regards thePhenomenology , we have already seen that commentators such as Burbidge would choose to emphasise the role of Secondness in that work, as what moves consciousness on from one standpoint to the next is an awareness of how things around us do not fit how we conceive them to be.[72] In the case of theLogic , Peirce may be correct to say that there is no role for experience as such here, as one category is seen to lead on to another, in accordance with “Hegel’s plan of evolving everything out of the abtractest conception by a dialectical procedure”;[73] but in fact Peirce allows that Hegel might be right to adopt this method here, commenting as we have seen that it is “far from being so absurd as the experientialists think”,[74] his only reservation being its ambitiousness: “[it] overlooks the weakness of individual man, who wants the strength to wield such a weapon as that”.[75] Peirce thus chooses to argue for the necessity of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness not in this dialectical manner, but by showing (in “A Guess at the Riddle”) how this triad plays a fundamental role in all the “fields of thought”, such as logic, metaphysics, psychology, physiology, biological development, and physics, as well as showing (in the later Harvard lectures) that they have a fundamental role in our phenomenology. It could be argued that by appealing to the sciences in support of his categorial theorizing in this way, Peirce is again showing a greater recognition of Secondness than Hegel, in acknowledging that the empirical nature of these sciences must play a role in warranting our speculations about the categories. But again this implied contrast between Peirce and Hegel is potentially misleading: for Hegel himself uses the second and third books of theEncyclopaedia (thePhilosophy of Nature andPhilosophy of Mind ) in just this way, trying to show how the categories he has developed in theLogic can be used to inform our inquiries into the natural and human worlds, to which they must themselves be compatible: “It is not only that philosophy must accord with the experience nature gives rise to; in its formation and in its development, philosophic science presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics”.[76] Hegel’sPhilosophy of Nature andPhilosophy of Mind can thus be read not as spurious attempts to use a priori methods to try to establish truths about the natural and human worlds that are in fact really established through the empirical sciences (as Peirce suggests at one point),[77] but rather as attempts to reflect on the categories that our inquiries into these areas employ, in order to “clarify” them[78] and make them more explicit, so that those inquiries can be made more fruitful, in a way that their empirical results will then attest to. Of course, none of this makes Hegel a straightforward empiricist, in confining knowledge to the evidence of the senses or treating that evidence as if it was somehow independent of or prior to our capacity for thought: but Peirce himself was no such empiricist either. Thus, while Peirce’s picture of Hegel as an a priori metaphysician and thus as an opponent of Secondness fits with a certain traditional interpretation,[79] we have seen how it can be argued that this does not do justice to the full story.[80]

In fact, it is perhaps symptomatic of Peirce’s tendency to read Hegel in a rather one-sided way on this issue, that in the Royce review, where he accuses Hegel of making the “capital error” of ignoring “the Outward Clash”, the text from Hegel that he cites in support of this claim does not seem to substantiate it sufficiently. The text Peirce refers to is from the Remark to §7 of theEncyclopeadia Logic , which Peirce renders as follows: “ “We must be in contact with our subject-matter,” says he [i.e. Hegel] in one place, “whether it be by means of our external senses,or, what is better , by our profounder mind and our innermost self-consciousness”“.[81] This is in fact a paraphrase of part of the following:

The principle ofexperience contains the infinitely important determination that, for a content to be accepted and held to be true, man must himselfbe actively involvedwith it , more precisely that he must find any such content to be at one and in unity with thecertainty of his own self . He must himself be involved with it, whether only with his external senses, or with his deeper spirit, with his essential consciousness of self as well. – This is the same principle that is today called faith, immediate knowing, revelation in the [outer] world, and above all in one’sown inner [world].[82]

Aside from the fact that Peirce’s paraphrase is somewhat inaccurate (for example, there is nothing in the original corresponding to the phrase “orwhat is better ”), Peirce’s way of using this remark by Hegel also fails to appreciate its context. For, Hegel’s aim here is not to contrast experience on the one hand with some form of knowledge acquired solely by “our profounder mind and our innermost self-consciousness” on the other, and certainly not to claim that the latter would be “better” than the former. Rather, he is simply registering the fact that some of his contemporaries (and the language he uses strongly suggests he has F. H. Jacobi in mind) have extended “experience” to include not just the evidence of our outer senses concerning the spatio-temporal world around us, but also the evidence of our experience of ourselves as subjects as well as of God. Hegel is thus not saying that knowledge is better had without experience or “the Outward Clash”, but rather noting that his contemporaries have extended this notion of “the Outward Clash” beyond our awareness of the empirical world to our awareness of ourselves and of God, because otherwise we would feel alienated from the latter as much as without experience we would feel alienated from the former. But if this is all that Hegel is saying here, it would seem Peirce is wrong to take the passage in the way he does, as attempting to give priority to our “essential consciousness of self” as a form of non-experiential knowledge, when Hegel’s aim is to show how the concept of experience has come to beextended to knowledge of this kind, rather than being excluded from it (as many more traditional empiricists may have thought). Of course, it may be that Peirce would be critical of this extension;[83] but nonetheless the fact that Hegel here remarks upon it in the way he does in no way suggests that he was opposed to the “infinitely important determination” that “the principle ofexperience contains”, which is what Peirce wants to claim.

The Peircean might argue, however, that Peirce’s characterisation of Hegel’s method as a priori in Peirce’s sense can be shown to be justified, because Hegel’s lacks the commitment torealism that Peirce identifies with the “method of science” and which lies behind its recognition of the importance of experience in our inquiries. In a well-known passage from “The Fixation of Belief”, Peirce makes this connection clear, between the method of science, realism, and what he would later call Secondness:

To satisfy our doubts…it is necessary that a method [of inquiry] should be found by which our beliefs may be caused by nothing human, but by some external permanency – by something upon which our thinking has no effect… Such is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more familiar language, is this: There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them; those realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really are, and any man, if he have sufficient experience and reason enough about it, will be led to the one true conclusion. The new conception here involved is that of reality.[84]

This then brings us to the third issue of dispute between Peirce and Hegel over Secondness: namely, the claim that Hegel is an idealist, who fails to see that experience is needed because our beliefs must be related to “something upon which our thinking has no effect”, whereas the coherentism of the dialectical method neglects to incorporate any such relation, leaving us to move from one standpoint to the next within the circle of thought.

In categorising Hegel as an idealist in this manner, it is plausible to think that Peirce was following the lead of F. E. Abbot, whose work had a major influence in taking Peirce’s thought in a realist direction.[85] In his bookScientific Theism , Abbot portrays all modern philosophy as nominalistic, and thus as idealistic in a mentalistic or subjectivist sense, so that for modern philosophy, nominalism is “its root” and idealism “its flower”;[86] and he sees Hegel as exemplifying this trend:

Hegel, the greatest of the post-Kantian Idealists, says: “Thought, by its own free act, seizes a standpoint where it exists for itself, and generates its own object;” and again: “This ideality of the finite is the chief maxim of philosophy; and for that reason every true philosophy is Idealism.” This is the absolute sacrifice of the objective factor in human experience. Hegel sublimely disregards the distinction between Finite Thought and Infinite Thought: the latter, indeed,creates , while the formerfinds , its object. And, since human philosophy is only finite, it follows thatno true philosophy is Idealism, except the Infinite Philosophy or Self-thinking of God.[87]

It is likely that comments such as these encouraged Peirce to adopt this reading of Hegel.[88]

However, while plausibly read as statements of mentalistic idealism when taken out of context in this way, it is not clear on closer inspection that the remarks Abbot cites here can bear the interpretative weight he places upon them. The first statement might be translated more accurately as follows: “Only what we have here is the free act of thought, that puts itself at the standpoint where it is for itself and where hereby it produces and gives to itself its object”.[89] This comes in the Introduction to theEncyclopaedia Logic , where Hegel is discussing the difference between philosophy and other forms of inquiry. Other inquiries, Hegel suggests, must presuppose their objects (such as space, or numbers), but philosophy need not do so, because philosophy investigates thought and the adequacy of our categories and so produces its own object simply through the process of inquiry itself, as this already employs thought and the categories. Thus, in saying here that (in Abbot’s translation) “Thought…generates its own object”, Hegel is not making the subjective idealist claim, that the world is created by the mind, but rather saying that in theLogic , thinking is not simply taken for granted as an object for philosophy to investigate, as thinking is inherent in the process of investigation itself.

Likewise, Abbot’s second quoted statement is not best read as a declaration of subjective idealism. For, although Hegel does indeed say in theEncyclopaedia Logic that “This ideality of the finite is the most important proposition of philosophy, and for that reason every genuine philosophy isIdealism ”,[90] the context is again important here, as the corresponding passage from theScience of Logic makes clear:

The proposition that the finite is ideal [ideell ] constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritable being [wahrhaft Seiendes ]. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism, or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is how far this principle is actually carried out. This is as true of philosophy as of religion; for religion equally does not recognize finitude as a veritable being [ein wahrhaftes Sein ], as something ultimate and absolute or as something underived, uncreated, eternal. Consequently the opposition of idealistic and realistic philosophy has no significance. A philosophy which ascribed veritable, ultimate, absolute being to finite existences as such, would not deserve the name of philosophy; the principles of ancient or modern philosophies, water, or matter, or atoms arethoughts , universals, ideal entities, not things as they immediately present themselves to us, that is, in their sensuous individuality – not even the water of Thales. For although this is also empirical water, it is at the same time also thein-itself oressence of all other things, too, and these other things are not self-subsistent or grounded in themselves, but areposited by, arederived from, another , from water, that is they are ideal entities.[91]

When looked at in detail, it is clear that Hegel is not conceiving of idealism here in mentalistic terms: for if he was, he could hardly claim that “[e]very philosophy is essentially an idealism”, as mentalistic idealism is a position held by few philosophers, and not by those classical philosophers directly and indirectly referred to here, such as Thales, Leucippus, Democritus and Empedocles, not to mention Plato and Aristotle – as Hegel clearly recognized.[92] A better reading of the passage is to see Hegel as offering a picture of idealism not as mentalistic, but asholistic .[93] On this account, Hegel claims that finite entities do not have “veritable, ultimate, absolute being” because they are dependent on other entities for their existence in the way that parts are dependent on other parts within a whole; and idealism consists in recognizing this relatedness between things, in a way that ordinary consciousness fails to do.[94] The idealist thus sees the world differently from the realist, not as a plurality of separate entities that are “self-subsistent or grounded in themselves”, but as parts of an interconnected totality in which these entities are dependent on their place within the whole. It turns out, then, that idealism for Hegel is primarily an ontological position, which holds that the things of ordinary experience are ideal in the sense that they have no being in their own right, and so lack the self-sufficiency and self-subsistence required to be fully real. Once again, therefore, Abbot would seem to lack adequate textual support for his account of Hegel’s idealism.

As a result of misreading Hegel in this way, Abbot failed to recognize how much Hegel’s trajectory away from Kantian idealism resembled his own; and in following Abbot here, Peirce did the same. Much like Abbot (and later Peirce), Hegel complains that for Kant “the categories are to be regarded as belonging only tous (or as ‘subjective’)”,[95] giving rise to the spectre of “things-in-themselves” lying beyond the categorial framework we impose on the world; to dispel this spectre, Hegel argues (again like Abbot and Peirce) that we must see the world as conceptually structured in itself: “Now, although the categories (e.g. unity, cause and effect, etc.) pertain to our thinking as such, it does not at all follow from this that they must therefore be merely something of ours, and not also determinations of ob-jects themselves”.[96] Like Abbot (and Peirce), Hegel sees himself as reviving here a vital insight of classical philosophy, which the subjective idealism of modern thought has submerged: “It has most notably been only in modern times…that doubts have been raised and the distinction between the products of our thinking and what things are in themselves has been insisted on. It has been said that the In-itself of things is quite different from what we make of them. This separateness is the standpoint that has been maintained especially by the Critical Philosophy, against the conviction of the whole world previously in which the agreement between the matter [itself] and thought was taken for granted. The central concern of modern philosophy turns on this antithesis. But it is the natural belief of mankind that this antithesis has no truth”.[97] No less than Abbot and Peirce, therefore, Hegel was a realist concerning the relation between mind and world, where that relation is mediated by the conceptual structures inherent in reality, in a way that the nominalist and subjective idealist denies.

If this is so, then once again it can be argued that Peirce’s case is undermined, that Hegel naturally adopted a dialectical method that had no role for Secondness: for, this involves the assumption that Hegel was a coherentist idealist, who rejected the hypothesis that “There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them”; in seeing Hegel as a realist, we do not have this reason to hold that Hegel to have neglected Secondness in this respect.

V

Thus far, therefore, we have given grounds for supposing that Peirce’s critique of Hegel on Secondness is wide of the mark, in so far as Hegel can be shown not to have held many of the views that Peirce attributes to him, and which Peirce suggests led him to neglect that category in favour of Thirdness. However, I now want to turn to two remaining issues that Peirce identifies as differentiating his view from Hegel’s – the issue of haecceity, and of indexicality – and to show that here there is a genuine difference between these two thinkers; but I want to suggest that on these issues Hegel can perhaps stand his ground in the face of Peirce’s critique, and argue that Peirce’s emphasis on Secondness in these respects is misplaced.

The doctrine of haecceity comes from Duns Scotus, and while its details are notoriously complex, it is evident in a general way why Peirce should associate it with Secondness.[98] For, as we have seen, Peirce distinguishes Secondness from Thirdness in so far as it relates to particularity, whereby the individual is differentiated from other things: “Secondness, strictly speaking, is just when and where it takes place, and has no other being; and therefore, different Secondnesses, strictly speaking, have in themselves no quality in common”.[99] Secondness thus leads inevitably to the classical problem of individuation: how is it that individualscan be unique in this way, where any properties we attribute to them are universal and so can be shared by other individuals?:

A law is in itself nothing but a general formula or symbol. An existing thing is simply a blind reacting thing, to which not merely all generality, but even all representation, is utterly foreign. The general formula may logically determine an other, less broadly general. But it will be of its essential nature general, and its being narrower does not in the least constitute any participation in the reacting character of the thing. Here we have that great problem of theprinciple of individuation which the scholastic doctors after a century of the closest possible analysis were obliged to confess was quite incomprehensible to them.[100]

Scotus’s solution to this problem, which Peirce favours above the others, is to introduce the idea ofhaecceity , as the unique “Thisness” of the thing that makes it an individual, and which cannot be characterised in any way, for to characterise it would make it general again: “An index does not describe the qualities of an object. An object, in so far as it is denoted by an index, havingthisness , and distinguishing itself from other things by its continuous identity and forcefulness, but not by any distinguishing characters, may be called ahecceity ”.[101]

Now, in so far as Peirce associates the doctrine of haecceity with Secondness in this way, I think it is right to see a real difference here with Hegel. This is not because, as some critics have suggested, Hegel does not recognize the status of individualsat all , and so failed to take the problem of individuation seriously;[102] it is just that he was suspicious of answers to that problem which left the solution opaque, in so far as the “Thisness” that supposedly constitutes the individuality of the particular has no determination of any kind, where for Hegel this indeterminacy means that in fact it cannot serve an individuating role, and is rather utterly general. Hegel famously makes this point when he writes as follows concerning sense-certainty, and its claim to grasp the particular thing in its sheer individuality as “This”:

It is as a universal…that weutter what the sensuous [content] is. What we say is: “This”, i.e. theuniversal This; or, “it is”, i.e.Being in general . Of course, we do notenvisage the universal This or Being in general, but weutter the universal, in other words, we do not strictly say what in this sense-certainty wemean to say.[103]

I take this and related passages to suggest that Hegel would reject the Peircean solution to the problem of individuation that he adopts from Scotus, and this his claim that Secondness involves haecceity.

But, the Peircean might ask: what then is Hegel’s solution to the problem of individuation, if it does not involve haecceity in this way? Very briefly, as I understand it, Hegel’s solution is to argue that what constitutes the individuality of a thing is its properties, each of which it may share with other things, but where the particularcombination of these properties makes something an individual: so, while many other individuals also have properties that I possess (being of a certain height, colour, weight etc.), only I have the specificset of properties that determine me as an individual, and so make me who I am. Peirce’s conception of individuality means he would be dissatisfied with this, because he wants individuation to be something more than can be derived from the properties of the individual in this way, and so thinks that things could be different even if they were exactly alike inall qualitative respects:[104] but it is open to the Hegelian to deny this, and to argue that to say that it is the “Thisness” of each that would differentiate them is to make this differentiation wholly mysterious, for if “This” is indeterminate,how can it distinguish one thing from another?

Peirce might go on to claim, however, that where Hegel goes wrong is in failing to see that Peirce’s conception of Secondness here is vital to his view ofindexicality , which picks out the individual as a “bare this”, and not as anything general:

An indexical word, such as a proper noun or demonstrative or selective pronoun, has force to draw the attention of the listener to some hecceity common to the experience of speaker and listener. By a hecceity, I mean, some element of existence which, not merely by the likeness between its different apparitions, but by an inward force of identity, manifesting itself in the continuity of its apparition throughout time and space, is distinct from everything else, and is thus fit (as it can in no other way be) to receive a proper name or be indicated asthis orthat .[105]

Peirce argues therefore that in so far as “the index…designates [the subject of a proposition] without implying any characters at all”,[106] we can refer to the individual as a “this” which appears to us as an individual in the “ouward clash” of experience.

I take it that Hegel’s response to this final issue concerning Secondness reflects the previous one, and is also to be found in his discussion of sense-certainty: namely, that for indexicality to work, a description must be involved in the way the thing is picked out, otherwise what “this” refers to is indeterminate: is it (for example) the door in front of me that I am pushing, the door in the wall, the wall in the building, the building in the city, and so on – what exactly is the “this” to which my indexical refers, outside some further specification of theclass of things to which the “this” belongs?[107] Peirce writes: “We now find that, besides general terms, two other kinds of signs are perfectly indispensable in all reasoning. One of these kinds is theindex , which like a pointing finger, exercises a real physiologicalforce over the attention, like the power of a mesmerizer, and directs it to a particular object of sense”,[108] and gives the example of experiencing as a “Now!” a flash of lightening. But unless the flash is conceptualised in some wayas a particular in distinction from other things (the sky against which it is set, the trees below it, and so on), how can we determine the “particular object of sense” to which the indexical is meant to refer?[109] Of course, in normal contexts, that specification is taken for granted, and so may not be articulated, making it possible to refer to something determinate by just saying “This”: but this background is important and should not be forgotten, as Peirce appears to do when he takes it that two speakers will know that “this” or “now” refers to a flash of lightening “without implying any characters at all”.[110]

However, if the Hegelian is arguing that we are incapable of referring to anything by pointing and just saying “This”, but must also categorise the individual in some general way (“This house”, “This tree” etc.), so that we must use descriptions in picking out individuals, does the Hegelian position have the implications which Peirce fears, and which he thinks Royce accepts: namely, “If the subject of discourse had to be distinguished from other things, if at all, by a general term, that is, by its peculiar characters, it would be quite true that its complete segregation [as an individual from other individuals] would require a full knowledge of its characters and would preclude ignorance”?[111] Peirce’s concern here is that the Hegelian neglects the role of indexicals altogether, and so can only use general descriptions to refer to individuals; but because any such description can never be specific enough to capture the individual (or at least would require a complete knowledge of all other individuals with which to contrast it), this would seem to put the individual out of reach.

Some interpreters of Hegel have indeed taken this to be his view;[112] but others have argued that this is one-sided,[113] in so far as Hegel is not assuming that indexicals haveno reference, but only that they cannot perform this role on their own, independent of a use within a context that helps determine what general kind the indexicals are referring to when we say “This”: so, the proper Hegelian view is that neither the indexical “This”, nor the universal description can pick out the individual on their own, but that both must operate together, where the universal serves to mark out the kind of individual to which we are referring using the indexical.

Now, it might be said that to criticise Peirce as having failed to see this is unfair, as it treats Peirce as if he thought Secondness (and hence individuality and indexicality) could be entirely independent of Thirdness (and hence generality), when (as Peirce emphasises in his Harvard lectures) he agrees with Hegel that each of these categories must involve the others: “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”.[114] Peirce might therefore be expected to agree with this Hegelian view of indexicality, and only to object to the way in which Hegel takes it too far, and moves to claim from this that “Firstness andSecondness must somehow beaufgehoben ”.[115]

But, of course, we have precisely tried to show that this concern of Peirce’s is an exaggeration, and that it is possible to read Hegel in a way that shows him to have accorded just the same status to these categories as Peirce himself demanded: namely, as each requiring the others, and none as “refuted” or “refutable”. On this account, then, Hegel’s conception of the Peircean category of Secondness is close to Peirce’s own, so that on many of the issues raised by this category, Peirce and Hegel can find common cause in a way that Peirce failed to recognize, and which therefore may have surprised him.[116]

Notes