Semiotics, Schemata, Diagrams and Graphs: a New Form of Diagrammatic Kantism by Peirce

Around 1885 Peirce claims (i) that the greatest fault of Kant's philosophy lays in “his sharp discrimination of the intuitive and the discursive processes of the mind,” (ii) that Kant drew “too hard a line between the operations of observation and of ratiocination,” and (iii) that the doctrine of schematism must have been an afterthought, “for if the schemata had been considered early enough, they would have overgrown his whole work” (CP 1.35). Umberto Eco (1997, 6 5 -6 6 ) has remarked that this quotation seems like “a research program,” “the identification of a breach” through which it should be possible to arrive at a new form of Kantism. In this paper I will argue that Peirce’s semiotics is exactly this new form of Kantism, as it inherits and reformulates Kant’s schematism and that a Peircean sign is precisely akin to a Kantian schema, that is, to that element capable of keeping together aesthetic and logic, intuition and concept, observation and reasoning. I will do this by considering the transformation of Kant’s Vorstellung into Peirce’s representamen. I will further show that in the late Peirce’s philosophy it is the notion of diagram that will play this role of schematism. I will end up by showing how this original Peircean transformation of the Kantian schema has a perfect embodiment in his theory of existential graphs.