Peirce, Phenomenology, and Logic

While Peirce is best known as a pioneer of Semiotics, Logic, and Pragmatism, they are special aspects of a more comprehensive System, the general character of which is more traditional. His Ontology is a version of Spiritualism which he calls 'Objective Idealism', in which all reality is Mind, of which Matter is an "effete", as he puts it, mode, reminiscent, though Peirce does not seem to treat it explicitly, of Bergson's construal of Matter as ennervated Energy. In particular, human mental activity is 'Phenomenological', closer to Hegelian than Husserlian. But, the traditional and the innovative dimensions of the System do not quite cohere, and his ambivalent treatment of a Sign is a manifestation of that incoherence. On the one hand, he treats a sign Phenomenologically, insofar as it is an immediate datum of mental activity, e. g. a Sensation, but, on the other, in the Rationalism of his Semiotics, Logic, and Pragmatism, a Sign plainly mediates between Interpretant and Object. Furthermore, there is an analogous ambivalence in the nature of the Object of a Sign. On the hand, his Phenomenology commits Peirce to an Object being itself another Phenomenon, but, on the other, his Rationalism has it as the product of an inference from a manifold of neural excitations. So, while Husserl makes explicit the suspension of the non-mental actuality that opens the door to the Phenomenological realm, Peirce, like Hegel, implicitly suppresses it, but unlike Hegel, is ambivalent about such suppression. In contrast, by affirming that Consciousness represents, and, hence, is preceded by, physical processes, as does Evolvementalism, Peirce's resistance to treating a basic datum of Consciousness, e. g. a Sensation, as a Sign of a non-mental Object would likely disappear.