Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914): The Most Systematic Pragmatist
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Life and Work
Charles Sanders Peirce is regarded as the founder of American pragmatism and one of the most original thinkers in modern philosophy. His father Benjamin Peirce was the leading American mathematician of his time, which shaped Peirce’s lifelong interest in mathematics and logic. Peirce worked for 32 years for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey while, on the side, producing an immense philosophical body of work that remained largely unpublished during his lifetime.
Peirce’s Categories and Hegel
Peirce’s theory of categories—Firstness (quality), Secondness (reaction), Thirdness (mediation)—emerged, as he himself said, after “thorough study” of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. The resemblance to Hegel’s triadic structure (immediacy—mediation—mediated immediacy) is unmistakable.
Peirce criticized Hegel for “neglecting Secondness”—raw facticity, resistance, contingency. Hegelian dialectic, Peirce argued, tends to dissolve everything into logical mediation and to overlook the irreducibly contingent.
But he recognized Hegel’s significance. Of the Logic of Essence, he wrote that it was an attempt to grasp the “experimental and turbulent character of experience.” He saw the “universe of phenomena as a logical process, similar to how Hegel understood it as a phenomenology of spirit.”[1]
The Pragmatic Maxim and Hegel’s Essence
Peirce’s famous pragmatic maxim states: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”
This sounds anti-Hegelian at first, since it reduces meaning to practical consequences. But on closer inspection it converges with Hegel’s insight that essence must appear. A concept that had no consequences would be indistinguishable from a merely invented one—it would have no “essence.” Peirce’s pragmatism and Hegel’s Logic of Essence share a rejection of a hidden “thing-in-itself.”
Semiotics and the Theory of Signs
Peirce’s semiotics—his theory of signs—is perhaps his most enduring contribution. For Peirce, the sign is an irreducibly triadic relation: a sign (representamen) stands for an object in relation to an interpretant. This triad cannot be reduced to dyadic relations.
Here a comparison with Hegel’s theory of signs would be fruitful. In the chapter on theoretical spirit in the Encyclopedia (§§ 451-464), Hegel develops a theory of the sign as part of the activity of representation (Vorstellung). For Hegel, the sign is an “immediate intuition” that represents a “wholly different content” from the one it has for itself. The pyramid as a sign for the deceased—the visible form points to an invisible meaning.
Both theories share: (1) the rejection of a merely dyadic theory of representation (sign–signified), (2) the emphasis on mediation through a “third” (for Peirce: the interpretant; for Hegel: the meaning-conferring spirit), (3) the processual nature of meaning.
Truth Theory and Consensus
Peirce’s theory of truth is remarkable: truth is what the community of inquirers would converge upon in the long run. This consensual dimension of truth anticipates Habermas’s discourse theory—but it is compatible with Hegel.
The truth text of this project shows that the classical theories of truth—correspondence, coherence, consensus, pragmatism—are not alternatives but complementary aspects of a complex performative act.[2] The performative theory of truth integrates them all: we need evidence (correspondence), systematic coherence (Hegel), communicative understanding (consensus), and practical validation (pragmatism).
Peirce’s theory of truth captures the pragmatic and communicative aspect—but it does not exclude the others. It is compatible with Hegel once one sees: the “community of inquirers” is objective spirit in actu.