From Fancy Amoeba to Fallible Self: Peirce’s Evolutionary Theory of Human Persons

A perennial concern among Peirce commentators has been the articulation of Peirce’s model of individual selfhood which underwrites his notion of self-control. A sticking point for most accounts is that Peirce seems to characterize the self along two different lines, at times describing it as a sign and produced by a community while at others characterizing it primarily in terms of embodiment and continuity with the rest of nature. However, if we adopt a view of Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics along the lines of what I call his “Darwinianized Hegelism”, then Peirce’s speaking about the self in these apparently contrasting ways is precisely what we would expect. In this paper, I draw on one of Peirce’s unpublished manuscripts (MS 329) to trace the development of his theory of the self in terms afforded by both aspects of his metaphysics (the Darwinian and the Hegelian), beginning with the biological origins of consciousness (the condition for selfhood on the level of the species), and then proceeding to his semiotic account of the cultural and linguistic formation of cognition and “personality” (Peirce’s favored term for those aspects of selfhood which are not reducible to biology alone). In doing this, I show that fallibilism is a crucial element in both lines of development and reemerges as part of the organizing principle of the joint workings of both processes. The final account hints at a promising connection between Peirce and Josiah Royce on this theme (an idea which I introduce, but do not pursue in this paper).