Being Itself Has No Content: Peirce Overturns Substance-Centrism in Nine Pages
In a nine-page paper from 1868, Peirce takes ‘a concept must be able to unify the content of consciousness’ as his test, deriving being from substance and then the intermediate categories such as quality. Being itself has no content; it only connects a predicate to a subject.
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The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
A concept earns its place only if nothing works without it
Peirce states it at the outset: the function of a concept is ‘to reduce the manifold of sense impressions to unity’, and a concept is valid if and only if the content of consciousness cannot be unified without introducing it. This is a reworking of Kant's transcendental deduction — not a complete table read off from transcendental logic, but a test run backwards: ‘it cannot be done without this’. Wes points out that Peirce, unlike Aristotle, never announces outright that he is doing metaphysics; he enters through a much shorter introduction, so reading him means supplying the systematic intention yourself.
Substance is not a natural kind, only an unsayable ‘it’
The first universal conception is ‘present in general’ — that is, ‘it’. It stands closest to sensation but carries no content, no predicates whatsoever, only the mind's pure capacity to point. Peirce gives it a philosophical name, one sense of substance: substance cannot be made the predicate of anything, and cannot be in a subject. Unlike Aristotle, who takes substance to be a natural kind, substance here is the ‘given’ before any cutting up has occurred, the X in the stream of perception that can be indicated but never said.
Being carries no content; it only fastens the predicate to the subject
The unity of a proposition comes from the connection of predicate to subject, and the being expressed by the copula ‘is’ is precisely the element that completes that connection. Peirce says the conception of being ‘plainly has no content’ — it contains only the connectibility of a predicate to a subject, what the two kinds of verb (is in fact / would be) have in common. Substance and being thus form the two ends: substance supplies no unity at all, being does all the work of unification. Further categories are still needed in between to fill the space.
Color can be prescinded from space, but never space from color
Peirce redefines three kinds of mental separation: discrimination only draws a line at the level of meaning; dissociation pulls two images apart when the association between them is absent; precision sits between the two, attending to one element without supposing that the other actually exists. Then comes the crucial break in symmetry: color can be prescinded from space, but space cannot be prescinded from color, and red cannot be prescinded from color. This directionality is the leverage for the derivation of the categories that follows.
Categories come from the direction of abstraction, not from a list
Peirce turns the asymmetry of precision into method: to find a universal conception lying between substance and being, ask whether a given conception reduces a manifold to unity, or connects an already unified object to another conception. The element that is prescinded can be thought before the conception, while the conception can be thought apart from the element. Working in that direction he derives three intermediate categories — quality, relation, representation — as the couplings between substance and being.
A property is not an accident of substance but a prior abstraction
Quality is the first intermediate category on the way from being back toward substance. The example ‘stove is black’ shows what the move requires: to make this proposition you must first detach ‘black’ from the stove itself and grasp it as an independent quality. Black is a pure abstraction, and applying it to the stove is hypothetical and fallible. Peirce uses this to insist that a property is not an accident inhering in a substance, but an abstract term that has to be separated out in advance.
A quality need not exist, but being cannot do without quality
Peirce names this pure abstraction the ground: when two things agree in some respect, that respect is the pure abstraction we use to compare them, such as black. The crucial asymmetry is this: the ground cannot be prescinded from being — being cannot do without a determinate quality; but being can be prescinded from the ground — a given quality need not exist. The ground therefore both connects substance and being and serves as the formal expression of quality.
In their own words · checked verbatim
This paper is based upon the theory already established that the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous impressions to unity.And that the validity of conception consists in the impossibility of reducing the content of consciousness to unity.Without the introduction of it.
The conception of being, therefore, plainly has no content.
Figures
| Length of the paper | 9 pages | 0:00 |
| Year written | 1868 | 2:02 |
| Related episode number | Episode 396 | 3:03 |
Glossary
- manifold
- The multiplicity of sense impressions; in Kant, the manifold content that is given to the mind.
- precision
- Peirce's own term for the kind of abstraction that attends to one part of an object without supposing another part; it runs in one direction only.
- ground
- Peirce's name for the pure abstract quality a predicate stands for, such as black, which serves as the respect in which objects agree.
- copula
- The word ‘is’, which joins subject and predicate.
- substance
- As Peirce uses it here, the ‘present it’ closest to perception: a pure object of indication with no content.
How to listen
Philosophy readers who want to see how Peirce rebuilds the categories out of an argument from unity, and anyone who likes analyzing conceptual systems by holding them against Kant and Aristotle.
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