Categories

For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with Charles Sanders Peirce, to whose ideas we often have recourse, here is a brief overview of his most important idea, the one that undergirds his entire "architectonic" and his theory of signification. At the beginning of his intellectual development, Peirce wrote a brief and rather dense paper, "On a New List of Categories," which was an attempt to furnish the simplest and most general system of classification of phenomena, and which became the basis for nearly everything he wrote thereafter.

Classification has been in vogue since the dawn of science. All things contemplated by human knowledge are subject to classification, and the best schemes -- the Linnaean system, the Indo-European family of languages, and the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, for example -- have great utility because they appear to correspond to a natural ordering of things. We thus classify a horsefly as a fly of the family Tabanidae, which belongs to the order Diptera that encompasses similar creatures we style "flies." Fliies in turn are a type of insect, a creature with six legs and segmented body, and insects in turn are grouped with other entries in the phylum Arthropoda, all of which have segmented bodies, jointed legs, and exoskeletons. Arthropods are part of a grand "kingdom" of life forms that are mobile and multi-celled, features they share with creatures as disparate as birds, fish, nematodes, comb jellies, and human beings. And animals are but one of several types of living things.

But we can go further still. Living things are but a subset of the totality of tangible physical objects in the universe, a grouping that includes galaxies and stars as well as subatomic particles.

Beyond this, we enter the realm of phenomena, which embrace not only physical existents but ideas, laws, and concepts as well. And here is where Peirce steps in. How can we classify phenomena?

The answer Peirce hit upon in his seminal paper, and which he subsequently expanded and refined, was that the universe, both physical and ideal, is composed of but three fundamental and irreducible categories, which he came to call Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Firstness, in its most general possible expression, is that which is, irrespective of anything else. Secondness is that which is in respect to some Other (or First). Thirdness is that which is as an intermediate between two things (a First and a Second). All other conceivable categories of being can be shown to be composites of these three.

Firstness embraces (but is not confined to) such self-existent, immediate phenomena as qualities, feelings, and emotions. It thus has psychical as well as physical correlates; the same can be said of the other two Categories as well. Its temporal manifestation is the immediate present.

Secondness includes such notions as reaction, resistance, opposition, tangibility, and permanence, both in their physical and cognitive aspects. The past time is a Secondness, inasmuch as it resists any attempt to modify it.

Thirdness is the category of law, purpose, and meaning. Late in his intellectual development Peirce identified Thirdness no longer as "mediation" but as "representation," since he had come to believe, as do we, that all operations of Thirdness have the character of a symbol, and thus involve representation in its purest essence.

These Categories cannot be grasped all at once, as Peirce repeatedly warned. They must instead grow in the mind like living organisms, until it is clearly understood that they are universal and all-encompassing. All other categories and modes of thought may be derived from them; they are one of the grand Keys to comprehending the eternal unity of truth.

Their validity is already hinted at by our racial obsession with threes, but we can easily make our meaning clearer with a few examples. The Holy Trinity is a perfect example; the Holy Ghost, which operates as a feeling to direct the senses to eternal truths, is the ultimate Firstness. The Son, who was made flesh (i.e., tangible), and who suffered and died to atone for sin, is Secondness. And the Father, the grand director and source of law and light, is Thirdness.

We have already alluded to the present as Firstness and the past as Secondness. In like manner, the future, whose contours have yet to be determined by the operation of both law and choice (cardinal Thirdnesses), is Thirdness in its temporal instantiation.

Reality is thus triadic at its root, not dyadic, as Western thought has so often assumed. Some of the consequences that flow from this scheme of categories are well-nigh heretical to mainstream science -- for instance, that the continuum, not the discrete body, is fundamental (this doctrine Peirce styled "synechism," and a proper accounting of it would see the point, the particle, and the integer lose their privileged status!).