Hypoiconicity as Intentionality

Abstract

The paper analyses Peirce’s hypoiconicity through the lens of Husserlian intentionality. Peirce’s triple structure of hypoiconicity as resemblance relation, diagrammatical reasoning and metaphoric displacement is shown to require intentional acts in its production and interpretation. Regarding hypoiconicity as a semiotic schematization of Vorstellung, the paper places it in the context of Husserl’s conception of intentionality in which iconicity appears as a stepping-stone towards the skeletonization of resemblance in diagrammatical abstraction and as schematic displacement in metaphor. As such, hypoiconic intentionality is argued to play a role also in Peirce’s community conception of language. The paper’s core claim is that intentionality provides an avenue for revealing hypoiconicity as a major, critical concept of semiotics, functioning as paradigm case for investigating the convergence of semiotics and phenomenology.

… each kind of sign serves to bring	… to be a sign, likewise, is no real
before the mind objects of a different	(reales) predicate; it requires a founded
kind from those revealed by the other	conscious act …
species of signs. ([1]; my emphasis)	([2]; my emphasis)

1. Introduction

What is the point of looking at a concept in Peirce’s semiotics though the lens of Husserlian phenomenology? Furthermore, why choose a minor critical notion like hypoiconicity in order to launch such a comparative analysis? After all, much of the existing literature comparing Peircean and Husserlian notions tend to take a top-down view, arguing from the broader principles involved in the two in certain respects so very different enterprises [3,4,5]. Consistent advances in this comparative approach have been made especially by Richard Lanigan [6,7,8,9] and Göran Sonesson [4,10,11,12].

In contrast, the present paper starts with selected remarks by Husserl on intentionality and the minutiae of Peirce’s statements about hypoiconicity in an attempt at arguing a certain degree of commensurability between their overall positions. At the same time, from the perspective taken here, any comparative approach combining aspects of Peirce’s semiotics and Husserl’s phenomenology cannot avoid at least some of the implications of the triangular relationship which exists between Kant, Peirce and Husserl. This should not be surprising since, after all, Peirce semiotics is a massive take-up of the brief remarks Kant makes on the importance of Zeichen and his transformation of Kant’s schematism in diagrammatical reasoning, while Husserl makes the question of how precisely appearances appear the central concern of his phenomenology. For Peirce, “all thinking is conducted in signs [1] just as in Kant “alles Nachsinnen erfordert die Vermittlung der Zeichen” (all reflection requires the mediation of signs) [13], in language, “the signs are always words” [13] (p. 279), and its “use” (Redegebrauch), as well as “philosophical reflection” always occurs in “signs” [13] (pp. 284f.; 278). Which is not, of course, to suggest that there do not exist some fundamental differences between the three philosophical enterprises. The speculative character of this paper, then, is conceded from the outset. Methodologically, it draws its motivation from Kant’s change in his approach from the first Critique, where truth-claims are a characteristic of determining reason, to Kant’s reflective-teleological judgments in the third Critique, where he foregoes truth and only claims to intelligibility are shown to be appropriate. The modest aim of this paper, then, is to contribute to our better understanding of Peirce’s hypoiconicity.

Three reasons for the focus on hypoiconicity in Peirce inform my overall argument. For one, I view hypoiconicity as a unique and creative specification of Kant’s Anschauung, as well its virtual extension as Vorstellung, and their possible schematizations, just as I regard Husserlian intentionality as a key response to the Kantian question of the limitations of human cognition. Notwithstanding Peirce’s critical remarks on Kant, I will argue that the first Critique looms much larger in Peirce’s writings than many of his devotees are inclined to concede. Much the same applies to the Husserl reception, especially with regard to his transformation of Kant’s schemata into types and typification [14]. Second, the paper makes a contribution to Husserl’s emphasis in his Nachlass on Anschaulichkeit (picturability; imaginability), a notion the paper suggests that unites, and at the same time allows us to differentiate amongst, the three prongs of Peirce’s hypoiconicity. Third, in its elaboration of graded iconicity, hypoiconicity anticipates Husserl’s interest in the exploration of Ähnlichkeitsreihen (series of similarity) and Steigerungsreihen (series of increase in similarity) [15] (p. 130ff.). As such, hypoiconicity lends itself conveniently for a demonstration of a certain degree of compatibility between Peircean semiotics and Husserlian intentionality, the mainstay of phenomenology [16].

It will be obvious, then, that the paper avoids the temptation of an externalist reading of Peirce that would align his semiotics more closely with Frege, Wittgenstein, or neo-structuralism. As to Frege, I think that Peirce wisely avoids Frege’s seminal and yet reductive diminution of natural language to the sense-reference relation, as well as the externalist formulation of Wittgensteinian meaning as use without a necessary recourse to intentional acts, or the remnants of structuralist verbal circularity in neo-structuralism, as addressed by Manfred Frank [17]. True, Peirce, throughout his writings, firmly rejects any “falsely assumed subjectivism” [18], which, however, does not license a radical form of externalism in our conception of semiotics. As he makes quite clear in his caution, “not that the particular signs employed are themselves the thought!” [18]. At the other end of the spectrum, it is a major accomplishment of both Peirce and Husserl to have escaped, each in his different way, the looming trap of psychologism, Peirce by the anonymization of idiosyncratic thought in a system of signs and Husserl via the eidetic reduction and theorization of intersubjectivity. Yet, even when generalized as the quasi-mind, for Peirce, the human mind remains the platform of thought. As he is to write later in the Collected Papers, “each kind of sign serves to bring before the mind objects of a different kind from those revealed by the other species of signs” [18]. To mean at all, the icon is conceived as “that which is displayed before the mind’s gaze” [18], while the symbol is declared an “indirect sign depending on the association of ideas” [18], and “when we contemplate the premise, we mentally perceive that that being true the conclusion is true” ([18]; my emphases). Likewise, Peirce speaks of “a little mental experimentation”, “a mental diagram” and of “ideal of things in our imagination” [18]. Lastly, it is not an accident that Peirce sternly reprimands John Stuart Mill for having suggested that “inner experience is nothing” [18]. In short, Peirce neither embraces subjectivism nor does he deny intentionality.

In the literature, Peirce’s hypoiconicity has been read mainly in two ways, as iconicity when it is colored by convention as symbolicity (e.g., [19]) or phenomenally as mixed with other elements the abstraction of which leaves hypoiconicity (e.g., [20,21]). Some scholars have seen “a certain internal diagrammatic coherence” in Peirce’s metaphoric displacement [22] (p. 8). While such claims support the idea of cohesion within the tripartite structure of hypoiconicity, they undertheorize the specification of what precisely such diagrammatic relations consist in. What is not addressed sufficiently is what the sign user cannot but do in activating the three-step structure of Peirce’s hypoiconic sequence of mere resemblance, its diagrammatic schematization, and its metaphoric displacement in acts of interpretation, that is, in constructing relevant interpretants. This is why the analysis of hypoiconicity undertaken in this paper views Peirce’s concept from the perspective of iconic gradation, not unlike Husserl’s investigation of Ähnlichkeitsreihen [15] (pp. 71ff., 109ff.). Accordingly, hypoiconicity is conceived here as a concept addressing iconicity from the analytical viewpoint of graded resemblance. In other words, the paper claims that hypoiconicity cannot be construed as a critical term in isolation but only as a relational concept of degrees of schematization from maximal resemblance to its diagrammatic reduction and schematic, metaphoric displacement.

At the same time, the relationship between Peirce’s diagrammatic reasoning and Husserl’s typification under the shadow of Kantian forms of schematization deserve closer scrutiny. To contribute to the clarification of these relations will be a central theme of this paper. To some degree, this criticism also affects much of the literature focusing on Peirce’s semiotic taxonomy [19,23,24,25,26,27]. Nonetheless, beyond classificatory concerns, there is by now also a substantial body of literature addressing hypoiconicity in art [20,21,28,29,30]), on embodiment [31,32,33], in relation to iconicity and metaphor [20,21,34,35,36]), on diagrammatic reasoning as such [37,38,39]), on architecture [40], as well as cartooning [41,42,43]. Against this background, the paper is designed to offer a fresh look at the place of hypoiconicity in Peirce’s broader theme of iconicity from the angle of Husserlian phenomenology. First, then, we need a brief synopsis of Husserl’s conception of intentionality.

2. Husserl: Intentional Acts and Entities

In §84 “Intentionality as Principal Theme of Phenomenology” in the first book of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Husserl provides an overarching observation: “intentionality is what characterizes consciousness in a pregnant sense”. As such, intentionality can be observed as a common feature of “mental processes” as “an essential peculiarity”. At the same time, intentionality allows us to recognize “the whole stream of mental processes … as the unity of one consciousness”. Husserl then does not hesitate to declare intentionality “as a comprehensive name for all-inclusive phenomenological structures”. Understood always as “consciousness of something”, intentionality needs to be “apprehended in its undetermined range, as we have apprehended it,” as “a wholly indispensable fundamental concept which is the starting point at the beginning of phenomenology”. Much later, in the Crisis, Husserl consolidates the idea of the directionality of consciousness, when he writes, “here we find nothing other than ‘consciousness of … consciousness in the broadest sense” [44] (p. 233). Nor should we be disturbed by its “universality” which, says Husserl, “may be ever so vague prior to more precise investigations” [45] (p. 199ff.). Husserl’s idea of the universality of intentionality indicates from the very start that individual acts of consciousness are viewed strictly as instances of a general principle, not unlike Peirce’s quasi-mind. Both signal the fundamental anti-psychologism so characteristic of both semiotics and phenomenology.

Nor does Husserl include everything that happens during the process of cognition. The boundary which he draws around the scope of the concept of intentionality is that it is concerned only with “intentive” processes. What is excluded, then, is the “sensuous” since it “has in itself nothing pertaining to intentionality” [45] (p. 202f.). As Kant had noticed almost 200 years earlier, “the senses do not err” because “they do not judge at all” [46,47]). For Husserl, only once the “stuff” of mere sensuous impressions is transformed by consciousness into “intentive processes” by consciousness can we speak of intentionality. “Awareness” and its “intentive moments”, understood in their noetic-noematic eidetic character, make the decisive difference [45] (pp. 205; 210). These principles, Husserl insists, fundamentally inform the “eidetic intuition” which we cannot but perform in the three domains of perception, phantasy, and memory. In this way, Husserl identifies intentionality as “a beginning science” [45] (pp. 221; 235). Likewise fundamental to intentionality in his early conception are his differentiations between the approach itself, the “intentional experience or act,” [2] (p. 556), act content, act matter, the manner or “act quality” in which such acts are performed, and the intentional objects so constituted [48]. Importantly, “act-qualities change, while the matter remains the same” [2] (p. 586). On the manner as act quality, Husserl later adds, “in terms of intentionality, anything straightforwardly experienced as a ‘this-here’, as a thing, is an index of its manners of appearing, which become intuitable (or experienceable, in their own peculiar way) when our gaze is reflectively turned” [44] (p. 171; my emphasis).

It is the “intentional objects of acts, and only intentional objects”, then, that “are the things to which we are at any time attentive, and to which we can be so attentive” [2] (p. 585). Indeed, according to Husserl and in contradistinction to Descartes’s narrow cogito, intentionality “makes up the essence of egological life” [44] (p. 82). Thus, an intentional object is something that is meant, constructed, projected, and intentionally constituted [49]. What distinguishes Husserl’s cogito from Descartes’s is that it is embedded in the intersubjectivity of the Lebenswelt. As such, the cogito, ergo sum is transformed in a cogito, quod sumus, an ‘I think because I am with others’. Foundational also is the distinction drawn by Husserl between the “intentional relation” and the “real” or empirical relation. The former covers all conscious processes, the latter only a those by which we engage with empirical reality. Which resumes Husserl’s earlier observation that we must sharply distinguish between the “object as it is intended” from the “object which is intended” [2] (p. 578). Intentional here “names the essence common to the class of experiences we wish to mark off, the peculiarity of intending, of referring to what is objective, in a presentative or other analogous fashion” [2] (p. 562). The reason he provides for the distinction between two kinds of relation is that “the real relation collapses if the thing does not exist; the intentional relation, however, remains” [50] (p. 227; my emphasis). Which reverses the order of significance of what is and what is merely imagined in the natural attitude.

This distinction is of the utmost significance, for example, in the theorization of language. Unlike in the post-Fregean tradition, where existence is a criterion for analysing sentences in terms of true and false propositions, Husserl avoids this restriction by eliminating existence as a necessary condition of linguistic meaning. All that matters is essence, allowing for multimodal meaning fulfilment. “Essence can be given without existence”. (Essenz kann ohne Existenz gegeben sein) [15] (p. 33). From this perspective, truth-conditional semantics reveals itself as yet another possible, but by no means necessary analytical language-game, which restricts what is to count as natural language rather than elucidating its full scope. The theoretical convolutions that have to be applied to fictive uses of language once we are committed to truth-conditional semantics testify to its restrictive character. A Husserlian based theorization of language avoids this problem [51] (p. 146ff.); cf. [52,53].

An intriguing feature of Husserl’s life-long commitment to the elaboration of intentionality is that as late as in the Crisis he resumes the topic under the Kantian conception of reasoned understanding or intelligibility [54]. Now “the problem entitled ‘intentionality’ contains within itself, inseparably, the problems of the understanding or of reason”. So, intentionality always assumes “some mode of certainty—straightforward certainty, surmise, holding-to-be-probable, doubting, etc.”. Husserl elaborates as follows:

“Intentionality is the title which stands for the only actual and genuine way of explaining, making intelligible. To go back to the intentional origins and unities of the formulation of meaning is to proceed toward a comprehension which, once achieved (which is of course an ideal case) would leave no meaningful question unanswered. But every serious and genuine move from ‘ready-made entity’ back to its intentional origins gives us, in respect to those strata already uncovered and the clarification of what is accomplished in them, an understanding which, though merely relative, is yet an actual understanding as far as it goes.”

[44] (p. 168)

Perhaps even more intriguing is that the late Husserl re-incorporates the unconscious under the heading of intentionality. As he suggests in the Crisis, the concept of “horizon-intentionality contains very diverse modes of an intentionality which is ‘unconscious’ in the usual narrower sense of the word, but which can be shown to be vitally involved and co-functioning in different ways”. It is in this context that Husserl speaks of “‘unconscious’ intentionalities,” such as “repressed emotions of love, of humiliation, of ressentiments” [44] (p. 237). Unconscious phenomena are now part of intentionality proper but only in terms of their intended appearance. As such, they are “intentional objects” understood as “correlates” of intentional acts. They are “meant” in such acts as “being contained” in them as “correlates” [44] (p. 242). What still holds, then, is the sharp distinction between what is empirically given and its intentional transformation. As Husserl famously observed, “one can say of a simple tree that it burns up, but a perceived tree ‘as such’ cannot burn up” [44] (p. 242). In a similar vein, Peirce speaks of merely “operational” action of the mind versus intentional “self-control” [1]. In this latter sense, we need to distinguish Peirce’s “conscious habitualiter” versus “a conscious operation”, such as conscious “reasoning” [1] Husserl addresses operational intentionality in terms of unconscious sedimentation in the Nachlass volume Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie [55] (p. 62ff.), but already in the Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness he confidently declared that we can be “indifferent to the question of the empirical genesis” [56] (p. 28). In between perceptual intentionality and its non-conscious shadows, we could locate what Husserl has to say about memory. For Husserl memory is always compositionally distorted rather than like a reflection in a mirror. For example, in §25 of The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Husserl speaks of the “double intentionality of recollection”, whereby what is remembered is always already modified by the present. Recollections, thus, are empty intentions that are forever differently fulfilled [56] (p. 77f.). Which, once again, is a point of convergence with Peirce, who early in the Collected Papers likewise refers to memory as a modification [1]. Beyond the relationship with Peircean semiotics, Husserlian intentionality arguably received its most elaborate exploration in Roman Ingarden’s ontology [57,58].

3. Peircean Hypoiconicity

Before we approach any details of Peirce’s semiotics, we need to stress its holistic character, which he has summed up in this formulation: “The most perfect of signs are those in which the iconic, the indicative, and the symbolic characters are blended as equally as possible” [1]. The holistic thesis of Peirce’s semiotics is strongly endorsed for example by Douglas Anderson, who suggests that if we read him “carefully and comprehensively”, we will find “both growth and coherent direction in Peirce’s work” [59,60]. Indeed, in spite of certain inconsistencies in his Collected Papers, we are entitled to view Peirce’s semiotics as an intricate system of critical concepts, in the tradition of a Kantian conceptual “architectonic” [46]. After all, Peirce himself rightly conceives of his semiotic in Kantian parlance as a coherent doctrine. “What I call semiotic”, he writes “is the doctrine of the essential nature of and fundamental varieties of possible semiosis” [1], whereby semiosis is viewed as “an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign [representamen], its object, and its interpretant” [1]. In this doctrine, hypoiconicity plays a minor but nevertheless important role as an intriguing specification of the first in Peirce’s basic trilogy of signs, consisting of “an Icon, an Index, or a Symbol” [1], “the most fundamental division of signs” [1]. As hypoiconicity, iconicity itself is divided into three conceptually different formations: direct similarity, schematized resemblance, and displaced likeness. In Peirce’s words, “hypoicons may be roughly divided according to the mode of Firstness of which they partake. Those which partake of simple qualities”, he calls “images; those which represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams; those which represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors” [1]. Peirce exemplifies the hypoicon by way of a titled portrait. “A man’s portrait with a man’s name written under it is strictly a proposition, although its syntax is not that of speech, and although the portraits itself not only represents, but is, a Hypoicon” [1]. Which points to at least some of the intentional relations which the viewer of the portrait typically entertains: naming, resemblance relations, a kind of syntax, Husserl categorial relations, and other acts we conduct under the broad notion of representation.

Sparse as Peirce’s definition of hypoiconicity is, it nevertheless provides a number of salient, conceptual clues. The kind of representation that relies mainly on “similarity” he calls iconic. Resemblance regarded by itself is the first step in the tripartite structure of hypoiconicity. What is equally important at this stage, especially in relation to Husserl’s conception of intentional objects, is Peirce’s emphasis on the irrelevance of the “mode of being” (Seinsweise) of such representations [1]. In other words, it does not matter whether iconicity as the simplest form of hypoiconicity is actual or merely thought, whether it characterizes something material or something that is merely imagined or, in phenomenological parlance, whose mode of being is purely intentional. This is significant not only in terms of the commensurability of Peirce’s semiotics with Husserlian intentionality, but also with respect to his mature position of the division of knowledge “according to the manner in which it is in the mind”, whether it is “actual”, “virtual”, or “habitual” [1].

The second step in Peirce’s tripartite concept of hypoiconicity is his accent on “analogous relations”, a highly compressed formulation which refers us to an entire theory of the “diagrammatization”, or what he also calls “skeletonization”, which we find explained throughout the remainder of the Collected Papers [1]. As we learn later, the “principal purpose” of such abstractive procedures is “to strip the significant relations of all disguise” [1], a process by which “all features that have no bearing upon the relations of the premises to the conclusion are effaced and obliterated” [1]. As such, diagrammatical reasoning reveals itself as the core component of hypoiconicity conceived as the summary notion for conceptualizing a variety of forms of schematization. A further, third, step in the hypoiconic modification of iconicity is Peirce’s intriguing description of metaphor as a special case of resemblance relations. Here, the transformation of iconicity is achieved by a parallelism in something else, which both distances the sign use from an “original” icon while at the same time guiding it to recognize and maintain a sign relation. Such are hypoicons “which represent the representative character of a representation” via an analogous configuration. Important here, too, is Peirce’s stress on the “representative character” of the signifier in contrast to its mere signifying form. What distinguishes this third step from the second, then, is that in addition to skeletonization we are also dealing with a side-stepping of aboutness. Not only are we now focusing on abstracted relations, we are guided to construct a new objectivity, actual or merely imagined. With these preparatory remarks in place, we are now in a position to provide the broader background against which to view Peirce’s first hypoiconic step.

3.1. Iconicity

The purpose of this section is not to offer a synopsis of Peircean iconicity but rather an introduction meant to serve as a stepping-stone towards the tri-partite structure of hypoiconicity. On iconicity itself there is by now a massive body of literature which can only be hinted at here. See, for instance, the writings of Göran Sonesson [12,61,62,63,64] as to its function in the conceptual structure of the hypoicon, the icon is viewed in terms of its “simple qualities”, defined by Peirce as a “First Firstness”. As such, hypoiconicity appears as a sign of direct resemblance. Which goes well with Peirce’s definition of the Icon as “a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, and which it possesses, just the same whether any such Object actually exists or not” [1]. As such, the icon is an all-pervasive and fundamental concept in Peirce’s semiotic [29,31,65,66]. What is less well discussed is that Peircean iconicity resumes Kant’s Anschauung (intuition; a looking-at) adapted to semiotics and as such also does much of the work indicated by the term Anschaulichkeit (ability to intuit; or perhaps imaginability) in Husserl’s writings and especially in his Nachlass [67,68]. In spite of obvious and important differences between Peircean semiotics and Husserlian phenomenology, their partial commensurability should not be too surprising, since both draw significantly on Kantian principles. In spite of some significant disagreements, such as on Kant’s transcendental procedure, the mature Peirce still regards himself as “one who had learned philosophy out of Kant” [1].

In its most empty function, iconicity is viewed by Peirce as presenting ideal or “pure forms” if it “is strictly a possibility involving a possibility, and thus the possibility of its being represented as a possibility is the possibility of the involved possibility” [1]. From this somewhat obscure angle, iconicity is the most abstract form of the condition of the possibility of representation. In its concrete realizations, iconicity is all pervasive in its sign-function of conveying a likeness. Accordingly, “anything whatever” can be an icon, “in so far as it is like that thing and used as a sign of it” ([1]; my emphasis). In this sense, the icon “may represent its object mainly by its similarity”, quite apart from “its mode of being” ([1]; my emphasis). Peirce refers to iconicity as likeness also in terms of a relation in kind, that is, “a mere community in some quality” [1]. Any sign that “stands for something merely because it resembles it”, then, is “an icon”. However, resemblance can only always be a matter of degree. Which opens up a vast spectrum of similarity relations from realist photographic ‘replication’ to the faintest degree of resemblance. Some icons can be “so completely substituted for their objects as hardly to be distinguished from them”. Which, Peirce writes, is the case with “the diagrams of geometry” [1]. Mathematics, too, thrives on iconicity. This is why, for Peirce, “the reasoning of mathematicians will be found to turn chiefly upon the use of likenesses” [1]. Alternatively, iconicity can be limited to an object’s “internal structure” [1]. In all these forms, however, iconicity is constrained by the fact that by itself it does not assert. While every “proposition asserts something” [1], by themselves “icons and indices assert nothing” [1]. All that is happening here is that “every assertion is an assertion that two different signs have the same object” [1]. Yet, at the same time, all assertions of necessity partake of iconicity. As Peirce noticed early in his semiotic search, “every assertion must contain an icon or set of icons, or else must contain signs whose meaning is only explicable by icons” [1]. A conceptually related term is Husserl’s aboutness (Worüber) [68] (pp. 401; 456), to be carefully distinguished from its mode of presentation.

In the strong sense of iconic representation, Peirce speaks of iconicity as “veridically iconic, naturally analogous to the thing represented, and not a creation of conventions” [1]. Resemblance relations here are not to be doubted and are immediately imaginable, that is, vorstellbar in both Kant and Husserl. Which stands in marked contrast with those icons in which the “likeness is aided by conventional rules. Thus, an algebraic formula is an icon, rendered such by the rules of commutation, association and distribution of the symbols” [1]. Though Husserl likewise addresses the perspective on language via the notion of “logical grammar” in the Fourth Investigation of the Logical Investigations [69], his turn to resemblance relations via intimation and especially introjection in the Sixth Investigation, [69](pp. 276ff.) as well as his foregrounding of Anschaulichkeit in the Nachlass volumes, shift the emphasis away from logical relations towards vivid imaginability [67,68]. Another strong parallel between Peirce and Husserl is their mutual commitment to a communal understanding of signification. Not unlike Husserl’s uncompromising conception of natural language as communication since the Logical Investigations [69] (p. 276f.), in sharp contrast to the Fregean tradition, Peirce accentuates the role of semiosis in the service of communication as a deliberate creation of likeness in the service of communication. “We should always study to make our representations iconoidal” ([1]; my emphasis). Iconicity, then, is a quality of representation which, in sign practices, appears in different degrees of intensity and schematization, much in the way Husserl is speaking about Ähnlichkeitsreihe (series of similarity), Ähnlichkeitskreis (circle of resemblance), Ähnlichkeitsmilieu (milieu of similarity) and Steigerungsreihe in Ähnlichkeit (series of increasing similarity) [15] (pp. 42f.; 63f.; 71ff.; 106f.; 109ff.; 230f.; 233).

Peirce also insists that any “qualisign is necessarily an Icon” [1], that is, any sign indicating or intimating a quality of something, on the grounds that if resemblance relations are being signified, a sign is “used as such because it possesses the quality signified” [1]. The character of quality of an iconic sign is well expressed, according to Peirce, by “the image we have in our minds of a lover and his beloved” [1]. For Peirce, all qualia then are iconic [3,70,71,72]. Except that linguistic qualia are to be regarded as second-order icons, that is, linguistic expressions understood as standing on the shoulders of the nonverbal semiosis out of which language evolved in the mists of human prehistory. As Peirce notes, in the evolution of language an initially “large portion of mimicry” has been “replaced by conventional auditory signs”, which, “however are such that they can only be explained by icons” [1]. In other words, the symbolicity of natural language must be cashed out via iconicity. Husserl dealt with this problematic under the heading of categorial intuition [73] (p. 294ff.). Much the same point is made a little earlier when Peirce insists that “every assertion must contain signs whose meaning is only explicable by icons” [1]. The mature Peirce does not disavow this fundamental position.

At a later stage of the Collected Papers, Peirce draws a neat distinction between the general principle of “quale-consciousness” and the specific consciousness of “vividness” or “liveliness”, for the important reason that the former may be “oblivious” to us, while the latter is typically “intensified by attention” [1]. It is intriguing in this context that Husserl in his Nachlass revisions of the Logical Investigations likewise foregrounds the idea of iconic vividness in his emphasis on lebendige Anschaulichkeit (vivid picturability, imaginability) of which his Bildbewusstsein is a special case [15,67,68]. Unfortunately, however, what precisely a quale is supposed to be is never made crystal clear either by Peirce or in the broader literature [25,70,72,74]. All we find in Peirce about it are some exemplifications, such as that “there is a peculiar quale to purple”, a “distinctive quale to every combination of sensations so far that it is really synthesized” and “a peculiar quale to my whole personal consciousness” [1]. More important perhaps is that methodologically, Peirce is appealing here somewhat reluctantly to “introspection”, a key notion in phenomenology, which allows him to conclude, with reference to Kant, that “quale-consciousness” functions as a synthesizing unity “upon which the intellect operates” [1]. Peirce here replaces Kant’s synthesis, as well as Husserl’s passive synthesis, by the quale-consciousness. Both Peirce’s leaning on Kant, much denied by the semiotics scholars around the work of John Deely, and the distinction between the ineffability of the primitive side of quale-consciousness and “vividness” find support in Husserl’s sharp distinction between the “sensuous” which “has in itself nothing pertaining to intentionality” and intentionality proper [45] (p. 203). Another intriguing point is made by Peirce in the Lowell Lectures of 1903 when he observes that a “symbol” can “stand in for a Quale or, what is again the same, to have meaning without truth” [75].

As in Husserl, one characteristic of Peircean iconicity is aboutness presupposed as a necessary condition of all representation. In the literature, aboutness and Fregean reference tend to be conflated. By contrast, both Husserl and Peirce treat reference as separate from aboutness. In Peirce, the aboutness of an iconic sign can be used to refer, to merely identify, or simply to imagine something that does not exist. So, when it does the work of referring, the “Icon is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, and which it possesses, just the same whether any such Object actually exists or not” [1]. Denoting thus precedes referring and so restricts the Fregean concept of reference to the act of identifying a particular object [76,77], while the broader notion of Husserlian aboutness (Worüber) caters for the intentionality of such matters as the class of green things. Two different kinds of intentional acts are involved here, one identifying the specificity of objectivities, the other, distinguishing it from the generality of higher-level abstractions, a distinction which serves a clear logical advantage [51] (p. 25). More to the point, Peirce leaves little doubt that iconic aboutness requires for its realization an intentional act. Instructive in this respect is Peirce’s example of the “bay horse” as a component of an extended resemblance chain where “one imagines a bay horse and on contemplating the image one sees that it is a horse”. What is “meant”, writes Peirce, is what “is intended or purposed”, adding the rider that we can always later apply logical judgments “to the interpretation of images” [1].

Iconic aboutness in the Peircean scheme covers a broad spectrum of nonverbal, multimodal signs, variously summed up under such headings as visual, tactile (external touch), haptic (internal sensations), aural, olfactory, gustatory, emotional, proxemic, kinetic, and other modalities, quite independent of the Seinsweise of their aboutness, that is, independent from their mode of being. Accordingly, “an icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders it significant, even though its object had no existence; such as a lead-pencil streak as representing a geometrical line” [1]. Importantly, though, this broad scale of nonverbal signs differs fundamentally from iconicity in language. Natural languages share the loss of iconicity at the level of the signifier, a deficit which however is compensated for by a massive and all-important dose of iconicity at the level of the motivated signified [78]. If the latter were not the case, language could not function as it does. As to signed languages, we can detect a more prominent presence of iconicity at the level of the representamen, comparable perhaps to the lesser iconic traces of onomatopoeia in speech.

We should add also the all-important the linguistic linkage compulsion by which the speech community trains and monitors its members in how to link signifiers with the iconic content of motivated signifieds, which is likewise subject to conventional rules [79,80]. Wittgenstein referred to this kind of instruction as Abrichtung, that is, coercion [81]; Husserl had identified it much earlier as Zumutung (imposition) and Sollenstendenz (tendency of an ought) [68] (pp. 57; 74f. 104; 170). Peirce associates the idea of “compulsion” mainly with percepts and brute “existence” [1]. However, at the same time, signs can be intended “to have some sort of compulsive effect on the Interpreter” [1]. As to compulsion as a general feature of semiosis itself, Peirce writes, “what the sign virtually has to do to indicate its object … is just to seize the interpreter’s eyes and forcibly turn them upon the object meant … it is pure physiological compulsion” ([1]; my emphasis). Beyond physiology, Peirce is adamant that the semiotics of “logic is rooted in the social principle” as its inexorable backdrop [1]. Thus, iconicity is the delimiting conceptual frame within which hypoiconicity displays its diagrammatic and metaphoric schematizations.

3.2. Diagrammatic Hypoiconicity

Peirce radically declares that “all reasoning is diagrammatic” [1]. In other words, human reason is fundamentally a schematizing activity [82,83]. Following Kant, we might even say that not only reasoning (Vernunft) but even understanding via concepts (Verstand) beyond mere percepts likewise reduces perceptual input via schematization. In Kant, schematism performs two function, as the monogram which is the transcendental condition of our ability to imagine anything at all and as the general form in which all our acts of generalization, as well as formalization, occur [46]. Peirce rejects Kant’s transcendental argument, while taking up and transforming the second option throughout his writings. Peirce, however, is mainly interested in the establishment of “diagrammatization”, also referred to as “skeletonization”, as a critical concept for the analysis of complex relations [70]. For this purpose, Peirce distinguishes between “diagrammatization” as a form of analysis and the “application of a diagram” for the enhancement of understanding [1]. He further separates two kinds of “reasoning by diagrams”, one which he calls “imaginative”, the other, “reasoning by experiments” [1]. At the heart of all diagrammatic reasoning Peirce identifies abstraction, which he dubs the “great engine of discovery” [1]. As his ubiquitous examples demonstrate, Peirce traces abstraction especially as logical relations in algebra, graphs, and geometry. Indeed, for Peirce, the ideal of diagrammatic reasoning is the generality of “geometrical continuity” [1]. He agrees with Kant that the method of mathematics is fundamentally diagrammatic [1]. As well as with Kant’s emphasis on formal sign systems as “constructions” [1]. Where the Peircean conception puts the accent in the description of the diagram in general is that it is “an Icon of intelligible relations” [1]. As “predominantly an icon of relations”, the diagram functions above all as a representamen of the “forms of relations in the constitution of its Object” ([1]; my emphasis).

Which is demonstrated in a very special way in Peirce’s intriguing use of diagrammatic relations in his meagre description of his hypoicon. In contrast with non-labelled images, such as paintings, viewed purely in terms of resembling something else, the diagrammatic hypoicon is characterized as representing “the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts” [1]. In interpreting a diagrammatic hypoicon, then, we must construct one-to-one relations, purely as relations, that is, stripped of their other functions within the constitution of the object. This is how we proceed when we abstract a possible street directory from the photographs of a city. A difficulty in the analysis of the concept of the hypoicon has been Peirce’s rider which he adds as clarification of the painting viewed hypoiconically. “Any material image, as a painting, is largely conventional in its mode of representation”. 70] The difficulty arises, I suggest, because painting conventions are not part of the Firstness to which Peirce has limited his initial hypoiconic step. Peirce’s only other reference to the way hypoiconicity is meant to work assists us in clarifying the matter of conventionality. It does so by separating mere resemblance from resemblance plus diagrammatical reasoning via syntax. As Peirce writes, “A man’s portrait with a man’s name written under is strictly a proposition, although its syntax is not that of speech, and although the portrait itself not only represents, but is, a Hypoicon.” [1]. This passage allows for the following re-reading of CP 2.276f.

(1) Peirce introduces the important notion of hetero-semiotic syntax, that is, a form of syntax that cuts across distinct significatory domains (visual signs and natural language). If we wish to construct an appropriate interpretant as a response, we therefore cannot but engage in diagrammatical reasoning. (2) Representation by itself does not amount to diagrammatic hypoiconicity. What makes it so is the historically specific “skeletonization” involved in all paintings [1], as a specialized form of diagrammatic reduction. (3) It is such diagrammatization which is largely responsible for the contamination of resemblance via conventionality since the skeletonizations that inform our painting styles are always historical and recognizable as such. (4) It would seem, then, that for Peirce, diagrammatic relations exist as sign relations, which we cannot but recognize, and so are components in our projection of interpretants, such that they can be determined by the object, as stipulated by Peirce. Which leaves hypoiconicity as such to be defined as a relational concept covering degrees of abstractive reduction from maximal similarity to forms of diagrammatic and metaphoric schematization, as foreshadowed in the Introduction.

Although he does not refer to his earlier triple notion of hypoiconicity in the following passage, in as far as Peirce here precisely delineates the steps which we cannot but take in proceeding from an imaginable icon of our “hypothetical state” of mind to its diagrammatic abstraction, it contributes to a better understanding of the concept. First, we select the “features” which we think are “pertinent” to our purpose, an “art” which “consists in the introduction of suitable abstractions” [1]. Once these are in place, Peirce identifies three principles of diagrammatic reasoning: (1) the subsumption of “separate propositions” under a single “compound proposition”; (2) reduction by way of the omission of a number of less pertinent features; and (3) the addition of certain new features, on condition that we do not introduce any errors by doing so [1]. Though intended primarily for the logical use of diagrams, this list likewise makes sense in the application of hypoiconicity in general interpretation of nonverbal, as well as verbal signification.

When Peirce is speaking of the “diagrammatization of thought” [1] he is resuming Kant’s idea of schematization as “outline”, much as does Husserl. Kant’s general observation that “it is schemata, not images of object, which underlie our pure sensible concepts” is exemplified by the “concept ‘dog’” which, he writes “signifies a rule according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in a general manner” [46]. While Peirce transforms the schematization of the outline into the principle of diagrammatical reasoning, Husserl elaborates it as intentional acts of typification. “When we see a dog, we immediately anticipate its additional mode of behaviour: its typical way of eating, playing, running” [84] (p. 331). Both Peirce and Husserl thus add certain internal resemblance relations to mere outline schematization, the former in terms of mere relations, as in the reduction achieved in mapping, the latter in terms of summary typification instead of a simple similarity. In Peirce, diagrammatic hypoiconicity is variously elaborated as analogical resemblance, [1], as a kind of diagram, [1], as aided by conventions [1], as stipulation of hypothetical reasoning, [1], as “the only fertile form of reasoning” [1], as a form of “general signification” [1], and as similarity “only in respect to the relations of their parts” [1]. As such, hypoiconicity falls under what Peirce calls “speculative grammar” as “the general theory of the nature and meaning of signs” [1], a kind of general geometry not unlike Husserl’s “geometry of experiences” [85,86].

In images, hypoiconicity functions as direct resemblance relation, whereby we (or quasi-minds) are able to read anything in terms of a strong likeness with something else, an aliquid pro aliquo. In its diagrammatical form of schematization, like the index and the symbol, hypoiconicity is “indispensable in all reasoning” [1]. However, reasoning here is of a specific kind, that of reductive schematization, whereby direct resemblance is discarded in favor of abstracted relations, as for example in mapping. Here, the three-dimensionality of objectivities is collapsed into two dimensions, texture and color may be relinquished, leaving only spatial relations projected onto a single plane. As Peirce asserts elsewhere, all reasoning makes use of such a diagrammatical procedure. What is new in Peirce is that he draws our attention to the kinship between close similarity and its abstracted forms, both allowing for a broad spectrum of “sameness”. It is Peirce’s hardly noticed merit to have here elaborated the relationship between Kantian Anschauung and its schematic variants by changing their relation as argued in the schematism chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason [46]. Instead of arguing his case, as does Kant, from the source of human cognition in “an art concealed in the depths of the human soul” [46], Peirce starts his description from the observable facts at the level of human sign production and consumption, a move that appears to anticipate Husserl’s focus on intentionality as it functions in his statements on Ähnlichkeitsreihe (series of similarities) and Steigerungsreihe (series of gradations) [15] (p. 231). Instead of beginning with the Kantian presupposition of schematization a necessary condition of the very possibility of Anschauung, as in image projections, both Peirce and Husserl proceed from instances of Anschauung to signs of abstraction and metaphorization. When sign users perform Peirce’s transformation of simple, direct resemblance of the image into its skeletal diagrammatical schematization, the specificity of the former is sacrificed to the generality of the latter. A parallel process can be observed in the crystallization of the eidos at the expense of subjective specificity in Husserl’s eidetic reduction.

A summary of Husserl’s eidetic reduction must retain at least the following ten steps. (1) The identification and bracketing of a given, contingent phenomenon; (2) to be viewed as an “arbitrary example”; (3) its transformation into a “guiding model”; (4) its free imaginative variation resulting in a “multiplicity of variants; (5) the recognition of a “unity” within the “multiplicity”; (6) the identification of something invariant as “general essence”; (7) the latter defined as “that without which an object” cannot be “thought”; (8) which is to be translated into Vorstellung as that without which it “cannot be imagined as such”; (9) now defined as the “general essence” which “is the eidos”; and lastly, (10) any empirical example can be replaced by “a mere imagining” [51] (p. 41).

One striking similarity between this procedure and Peirce’s three-step conceptualization is the transformation of specificity into generality, another the inexorable involvement of intentional acts in the reductive process. However, while in Husserl the emphasis is on the imaginative variation of particulars and their schematization into invariability, Peirce’s diagrammatic schematization of resemblance focuses on the retention of “analogous relations” [1]. Yet, just as Husserl’s eidetic reduction foregrounds relevance and schematization, so does Peirce place his accent on pertinent “features” and “suitable abstractions” [1]. A further parallel between the two processes is their claim to general validity. In Husserl, the eidetic reduction is asserted as a universal principle, just as diagrammatical reasoning is argued by Peirce to ground all human thinking. Throughout the Collected Papers, the reasoning involved in hypoiconicity is relevant to a broad spectrum of objectivities, from paintings and architectural elevation to language and Euler graphs. At times, as a result of Peirce’s celebration of logic, the emphasis on diagrammatic reasoning overpowers his subject, as for instance in Peirce’s reduction of natural language to algebra: “language is but a kind of algebra” [1], which is untenable. In such cases, Peirce’s bias in favour of aboutness leads to a failure to acknowledge the equally important side of the Kantian “mode of presentation”, which makes all the difference in the analysis of discursive language as speech, where tone is an indispensable component [68] (p. 102).

Perhaps the most striking feature which allows us to align Peirce diagrammatic hypoiconicity and the Husserlian eidetic reduction at least in certain respects, is that both transformations retain an essential portion of the aboutness of resemblance relations. Iconicity is reduced, one could say, in Husserlian parlance, to its eidetic core. While a photo of a cityscape can thus be viewed as a hypoicon at the level of simple resemblance relations, its street directory would be a diagrammatic hypoicon in Peirce’s sense. It could likewise be regarded as an eidetic reduction in Husserl’s sense, but viewed from a specific perspective and as an abstraction for an identifiable purpose. Both are schematizations and both retain resemblance in a specific form. One could also say, as does Peirce, that “making thought diagrammatic” is “treating generality from the point of view of geometric continuity” [1]. In terms of intentionality, Peirce’s remark once more resonates with Husserl’s search for a “geometry of experiences” [85] (p. 202). Likewise, in Peirce, even “an expectation” viewed as “a habit of imagining” is regulated “by a general law of action” ([1]; my emphasis). “Diagrams and diagrammatical figures,” then, “are intended to be applied to a better understanding of states of things, whether experienced, or read of, or imagined” [1]. Which makes it clear that for Peirce, it is our imagining of diagrammatic relations which takes the lead because without it there would be no remembering nor any understanding via reading. Diagrammatic form of understanding, rather than specified iconicity, then, is at the core not only of hypoiconicity but at the heart of human cognition [87]. The foundation of the claim of which is laid down by Kant when he states that “it is schemata, not images of objects, which underlie our pure sensible concepts” [46], an observation in the first Critique which is supported by Peirce when he writes, “Kant says that no image, and consequently we may add, no collection of images, is adequate to what a schema represents” [1], Peirce’s theorization of the diagrammatic dimension of hypoiconicity then makes a persuasive case of the claim that humans are, above all else, schematizing beings.

3.3. Metaphoric Hypoiconicity

This idea is further buttressed by Peirce’s third step in his tripartite structure of hypoiconicity, metaphoric displacement. However, here, iconic resemblance undergoes a further complication. As the third step of hypoiconicity, metaphoric displacement achieves its meaning effects by either shifting its ground of iconic materiality to an entirely different form of iconicity or retaining its iconic formation while transposing it into an entirely different cultural environment, or by a combination of both. In the first case, we recognize the salient iconic relations by a structural parallelism, in the second, we are forced to re-adjust our take on its assumed purposiveness. To repeat Peirce’s wording, hypoicons “which represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors” [1]. Hypoiconicity here rests on a double distancing from an initial image, first, by a hypoiconic reduction of straightforward semblance, that is, by deliberate skeletonization, followed by a sideways move to a quite different objectivity. What guarantees metaphoric cognition here is that what Peirce identifies as a parallelism is sustained by salient abstractions. A symptomatic example of metaphoric hypoiconicity combining the two options indicated above is the description provided by Yingchi Chu of an oversized, concrete, Chinese moon-gate placed in a modern suburb of Suzhou, divorced from its time-honored gentry garden environment [40]. Not unlike in a Mandelbrot set, in this case we recognize the traditional architectural motif by the shape and internal proportions of the structure, even though it is garishly amplified, as well as displaced and so no longer able to serve its original function. At the level of the interpretant appropriate to its special kind of hypoiconicity, the reconstituted objectivity of the moon-gate straddles traditional culture and postmodernity.

Although there is no evidence that Peirce’s theorization of metaphor was in any way influenced by the Critique of Judgment, Peirce’s “parallelism” closely matches Kant’s observation of the “analogous” relation that links ordinary discourse with metaphor, called a “symbol” in Kant. Metaphors for Kant are “indirect presentations (Darstellungen) modelled upon an analogy enabling the expression in question to contain, not the deeper schema for the concept, but merely a symbol for reflection.” (my emphasis) In this sense metaphors are “analogous” to “schematism”, such that “schemata contain direct”, while “symbols” are “indirect presentations of the concept”. (my emphasis) The crucial difference is that we are moving from schematizing abstraction to a conceptual parallelism via “analogy” [88,89,90,91]. Kant further strengthens the idea of metaphor via analogy when he describes “symbolic hypotyposis” as an “indirect Anschauung” and “Vorstellung” by which such conventional metaphors as “ground (support, basis), to depend (to be held up from above), to flow from (instead of to follow), substance (as Locke puts it: the support of accidents), and numberless others, are not schematic, but rather symbolic hypotyposes, and express concepts without employing a direct intuition for the purpose.” ([88]; my emphases). In both Kant and Peirce, the similarity relation of metaphoric hypoiconicity is no longer restricted to the schematization of recognizable features, that is via reduction, but in addition by shifting our gaze to another, parallel objectivity, typically imagined, that appears to us as analogous in terms of its projected meaning content. Alternatively, as we saw, metaphoric displacement can also be the result of iconic resemblance relations being displaced from their original cultural context and re-inserted in a new and alien cultural environment.

It should be a little surprising that amongst the three components of hypoiconicity the least attention has been granted to its metaphoric version. An exception is Anderson [92,93] who distinguishes “creative” from “conventionalized” metaphors, the former regarded as “the ground” of the latter. He reformulates the traditional distinction of vehicle and tenor as “two relata” and their “different quality sets of each”, before identifying Peircean metaphor as “a symbol whose iconicity dominates”. This allows for “indexical and symbolic” aspects in one and the same metaphor, according to Peirce’s rule that “one sign frequently involves all three modes of representation” [75]. Crucial here is that metaphoric iconicity lies “in the unity of the two” components as “a third thing which they somehow constitute”. Hypoiconic resemblance, then, is articulated in the “isosensism” characteristic of metaphor. I will return to this reading in terms of the necessary intentional acts that are involved in such form of sense. Anderson’s accent here, however, is on the inseparability of the constituent parts of the Peircean metaphor. Like all sign, metaphors “grow”, some of them into “frozen” or “conventionalized” figures of speech. In the end, Anderson observes that “the creative metaphor must be vague”, lacking “precision”, a concession he then qualifies by pointing to Peirce’s conviction that in spite of his leaning towards scientific truth he thought that “the poet expresses artistic hypotheses” via “feelings” and that “nothing is truer than true poetry” [1,92]. In distinguishing metaphor from direct similarity and its diagrammatic abstraction, Peirce’s “parallelism” consists in its “isosensism” which needs to be recognized in the interpretant, Peirce’s summary concept for acts of sign interpretation [36,94,95,96,97,98]. What is also in need of addressing is what “isosensism” amounts to. On this point, both Kant and Peirce appear to return us to the idea that indirect presentations are semantically meaningful only with the help of the schematizing Vorstellung.

In the tripartite series of hypoiconic signs, the interpretant plays a special and complicated role ([99] on Peircean trichotomies). As we proceed from simple resemblance to forms of diagrammatic schematization and finally to metaphoric displacement, Peirce’s quasi-mind produces highly differentiated interpretants [100]. When direct resemblance begins to be overshadowed by the predominance of mere relations, as in a two-dimensional mapping of a three-dimensional objectivity, the quasi-mind produces a predominantly diagrammatical form of similarity. Furthermore, when both content resemblance and schematized sameness have been replaced by a recognizable set of similarities in an altogether different objectivity, we can speak of an interpretant of metaphoric displacement. In this kind of interpretant, Anderson’s observation of isosensism is a fitting way of describing its similarity relation with its more direct conceptual cousins. Peirce’s triple ideation must however not be construed as undermining the social reality of significatory gradation. It should go without saying that in reality Peirce’s pure concepts of image, diagram, and metaphor do not exist. Instead, we will always only have to deal with admixtures dominated by one of the three modes of representation. It is this dominance to which the idealized types point, and it is the gradations of similarity that constitute the reality of intentional sign communication. In principle, however, Peircean hypoiconicity should not be viewed as a special case of intentionality, but as a paradigm case demonstrating the broad, explanatory force of Husserlian phenomenology. Whether we interpret hypoiconicity in terms of signs or eidetic reductions, we cannot but conduct comparable, directional acts. At the same time, neither Husserl nor Peirce allow for any finality of such acts. Nowhere in the tripartite hypoiconic chain of image, diagram, and metaphor does Peirce conceive of any semantic finality. Nor does Husserl’s ascending series of similarity in any way contradict Peirce’s remarks on the principle of infinity in semiosis. For a sign is “anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum” [1]. This is so because “the meaning of a representation can be nothing but another representation” as an “infinite series” [1]. Both in Husserlian phenomenology and Peircean semiotics, meaning “is always in a process of becoming” [1], such that we can speak of an “infinite regress of signs” [1] and at the same time of an infinite series of events of meaning fulfilment, Husserl’s Bedeutungserfüllung [67,68].

By shifting the emphasis from consciousness to the regress of signs Peirce accomplished something not unlike Husserl’s eidetic reduction, namely the escape from psychologism. Peirce did so by introducing the notion of the quasi-mind, thus objectifying mental processes via generalized semiosis [1]. The quasi-mind replaces the “mind of someone” such that it covers under a single more general concept both “a quasi-utterer and a quasi-interpreter” [1]. Furthermore, under the general concept of the quasi-mind, the interpreting consciousness is then de-subjectivized by the notion of “the Interpretant” [1]. Peircean semiotics and Husserlian intentionality share this anti-psychologistic agenda, the former resolving it in terms of the emphasis on sign functions and sign relations, the latter by the eidetic reduction as embedded in intersubjectivity and so the anonymization of intentional acts and their contents [101]. From this angle, one can say that the entire apparatus of Peirce’s semiotic benefits from being viewed from the phenomenological perspective of Husserlian intentionality. A number of similar points of departure can be found in the literature on Peirce’s interest in mind and cognition [4,10,11,12,18,102,103].

That Peirce’s hypoiconicity is commensurate with an approach via intentionality can be substantiated by a broad front of his comprehensive remarks on the function of signs, as for example his observation that “whenever we think, we have present to the consciousness some feeling, image, conception, or other representation, which serves as a sign” ([1] my emphasis). All three sign productions, of direct resemblance, diagrammatical abstraction, and metaphoric distortion fall squarely within the compass of intentional acts in Husserl’s sense. Likewise, as to what Peirce has to say about the role of signs in communication where

“the deliverer makes signals to the receiver. Some of these signs (or at least one of them) are supposed to excite in the mind of the receiver familiar images, pictures, or, we might almost say, dreams—that is, reminiscences of sights, sounds, feelings, tastes, smells, or other sensations, now quite detached from the original circumstances of their first occurrence, so that they are free to be attached to new occasions. The deliverer is able to call up these images at will (with more or less effort) in his own mind; and he supposes the receiver can do the same.”

[1]

Much of which is commensurate with the framework of Husserl’s intentionality, just as do the three versions of hypoiconicity. After all, they fall under Peirce’s “non-symbolic thought-signs” and, more specifically, under “predicate-thoughts” ([1]; my emphasis). We could rephrase this, without causing logical damage, in terms of intentional acts as acts of predication. As such, Peirce’s tripartite structure of hypoiconicity finds a parallel also in Husserl’s discussion of different kinds of similarity in Zur Lehre vom Wesen und zur Methode der Eidetischen Variation, as well as in Husserl’s discussion of similarity in terms of a Steigerungsreihe, a series of increasing resemblance on the way to identity [15] (pp. 109ff.; 230ff.). Lastly, looking at the three stages of hypoiconicity we can discover a chiastic set of relations amounting to an overall, crosswise structure. While the resemblance relations from image and diagrammatic schematization to metaphoric displacement decrease in intensity, what increases at the same time is the interpretive labor which we cannot but expend in the construction of our interpretants. Which testifies to both the conceptual complexity and theoretical elegance of hypoiconicity as one of Peirce’s most intriguing critical concepts. What lends additional weight to its minimal definition as provided by Peirce is that its centerpiece, which is diagrammatical reasoning, receives ample attention throughout the Collected Papers, much of which can be drawn on to buttress the claims made about hypoiconicity made in this paper.

The relative commensurability of Peircean semiotics and phenomenology can also be demonstrated with respect to the question of existence versus essence. In Husserl’s scheme of things, intentional objectivities have equal value in terms of meaning no matter whether they exist or are merely imagined. In this sense, Husserl speaks of “fantasy as quasi-experience” [15] (p. 184ff.). thus separating existence from essence in meaning intentionality [15] (p. 33). Peirce is meeting Husserl halfway when he observes that “an icon is a representamen which fulfils the function of a representamen by virtue of a character which it possesses itself and would possess just the same though its object did not exist” ([1]; my emphasis). Which amounts to no less than a radical ubiquity thesis of iconicity. [104] Indeed, as it turns out, Peirce’s conception of semiosis suggests a large-scale, all-encompassing, agapestic evolutionary cohesion of iconic relations [1]. In Husserl, the ubiquity of Anschauung and especially his accent on lebendige Anschaulichkeit (vivid picturability or imaginability), from their most concrete to their most abstract variations, plays a similarly central role [15,67,68]. What remains to be addressed, at least briefly, then is the concept of Vorstellung in both philosophical enterprises.

4. Vorstellung as Acts and Intersubjective Signs

As demonstrated, all three components of Peirce’s hypoiconicity cannot be realized by the sign user except in terms of what is imaginable via signs and as such by way of intentional acts. At the heart of this fact is the Kantian notion of Vorstellung. Both Peirce’s semiotics and Husserl’s phenomenology have inherited and transformed this crucial Kantian notion, a notoriously difficult term to render in English. The standard translations as representation, mental presentation, idea, conception, perceptual modification, imagination, and others all introduce unsatisfactory semantic shifts. Peirce’s unique rendering as “a setting-forth” in the sense of a “doing”, an “act”, not a “mere saying”, brilliantly captures its original speech intention [1]. In Kant, Vorstellung is the conscious awareness of something and the condition of our very “ability to think” [46,88]. In this way, it is our Vorstellungen which make our concepts imaginable (bildlich), an “admixture” which we discard when we focus on the concept purely as “a rule of thinking” [13] (p. 133). That likewise Vorstellungen should play a pivotal role in Husserl is not surprising. He addresses it in his Nachlass as a special concept and an essential ingredient of intentionality in “Zur Klärung des Vorstellungsbegriffs,” with reference to Hume [15] (p. 155f.). As such, Vorstellung also receives special attention as a “quasi-experience” [15] (p. 184ff.) and as a transformative notion in “Umphantasieren” (transformational imagining) [15] (p. 252f.).

In his adaptation of Kantian motifs, Peirce draws a careful distinction between the “concept” as a “predicate considered by itself” and Vorstellung, as he does in regarding the former as “more removed from the perceptual object than is Vorstellung” [1]. A little later, Peirce identifies Vorstellung as a “composite of images” [1]. Early in the Collected Papers, he had already sorted out Vorstellung from perception, the percept and memory. “A perceptual fact is a memory hardly yet separated from the very percept” which “is a single event happening hic et nunc” and which “cannot be generalized without losing its essential character”. Memory, on the other hand “preserves this character, only slightly modified”. After all, “memory is merely the reverberation of the shock of perception, essentially anti-general, though worn down here and there into generality by rubbing against other memories of other similar occurrences” [1]. When Peirce resumes the topic of Vorstellung much later, he does so by drawing the new distinction between the “percept” or “image” and as such as “apprehensive knowledge” and “judicative knowledge” [1]. More broadly across his writings, Vorstellung appears in what Peirce has to say about imagining. Furthermore, even though Peirce at one point doubts “whether we ever have any such thing as an image in our imagination” [1], he nevertheless continues to speak of a mere “imagining” [1], of “acts of imagination” producing “a habit” [1], that “we imagine ourselves in various situations”, [1] that “the difference between seeing a color and imagining it is immense” [1], that pragmatism “allows any flight of imagination” on condition that it “ultimately alights upon a possible practical effect” [1], allows for “imaginary experimentation” [1] and of “experimenting in imagination” [1]. Above all else, Peirce “can see no way of escaping the proposition that to attach any general significance to a sign and to know that we do attach a general significance to it, we must have a direct imagination of something not in all respects determinate” [1].

In short, in Peirce as in Husserl, without imaginability, the respective events of interpretant and meaning fulfilment cannot occur. In Husserl, imaginability, that is, our ability to be conscious of existing as well as non-existing entities, is central to human intentionality. What is of primary importance is the directionality of such acts rather than the question of their empirical existence. For Husserl, “phantasy and imagination are intentional modifications of perception” [68] (p. 432f.). As such, phantasy experiences differ from perception as “reproductive acts” [68] (p. 439). They hover [vorschweben] before our inner eye. This is why Husserl refers to “mere phantasy” as a “quasi-intention” [68] (p. 472). Furthermore, although “what is phantasied is something merely imagined” and so “merely semblance,” [68] (p. 71), its character of iconicity is not impugned. At the same time, Husserl insists that this character of iconicity guarantees the continuum of intentionality across the divide of actuality and what is merely imagined. So, Husserl can say that “an important theme of my analysis is the mixture of phantasy and actually experienced reality, as well as the distinction between the phantasy of what is purely immanent and the phantasy of natural events” [68] (p. 545). Likewise, while Peirce sharply separates acts of “imagining, opining, and willing” from the actuality of what empirically exists [1], iconicity is not affected by this distinction. What he does insist on is “the slightly superior vividness of the memory of the thing seen as compared with the memory of the thing imagined” [1]. No doubt, then, the very notion of iconicity as resemblance looms equally large in both Peircean semiotics and Husserlian phenomenology. Which likewise reveals itself when we address their conceptions of natural language.

5. Hypoiconicity in Natural Language as Schematized Communication

As defined as a general semiotic phenomenon by Peirce, hypoiconicity does not appear to be immediately relevant to the theorization of natural language. Yet, in our acts of linguistic comprehension, generalized resemblance relations loom large in language in the form of our construction of aboutness, as diagrammatized hypoiconicity. At the same time, the very character of generality at the heart of natural language can only be realized semantically by a schematizing, that is diagrammatical, form of comprehension. Much the same applies to the processing of indirect aboutness in all circumlocution, a feature that plays a much larger role in language than its surface suggests. Metaphoricity, for example, identified by Kant as indirect Darstellungen, in Nietzsche’s view of language as an “army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphism” and, more recently, as discussed by Derrida in “The Retreat of Metaphor”, is without doubt a fundamental characteristic of language as our dominant form of communication [105,106].

In this respect, the iconization of the dicisign under the authority of the speech community is a far-reaching insight on language in Peirce’s semiotics. After all, it provides us with the necessary condition of the possibility of constituting communal meanings via language: word sounds in their specific syntactic combinations are in need of animation via community-controlled iconicity, and specifically by hypoiconicity in its abstractive forms. Indeed, hpoiconicity can be located at the very heart of natural language in its capacity of generalization, hierarchization, and multimodal subsumption. Alone at the level of word meaning, it is generalization which makes it possible for language to transcend the “vagaries of me and you” [1]. In this respect, Peirce subsumption of idiosyncratic speech acts, as well as individual, nonverbal forms of communication viewed as a comprehensive system of hypoiconic semiotics parallels Husserl’s combination of the eidetic reduction under the umbrella of the intersubjective Monadengemeinschaft. Both approaches involve the levelling of the peaks and troughs of what is merely subjective, and both do so by making intentional acts communicable. In Peirce, it is community-sanctioned interpretants which provide the framing conditions for sufficient semiosis [107]. Although general, communal “unanimity” is neither to be expected nor necessary [1], what we regard as reality, for Peirce, is a reflection of a “communal mind” [1]. Furthermore, even “logic”, which could be argued to be the result of a radical hypoiconic skeletonization, is “rooted in the social principle” [1]. In Husserl, it is the eidetically constrained intersubjectivity of shared, multimodal meaning fulfilment by which linguistic sound patterns are semantically activated in the Monadengemeinschaft, as elaborated in five volumes of his Nachlass (On language in [67,68]; on intersubjectivity in [108,109,110]).

Even poetic deviations from standard speech only work on this foundation, namely the alignment of standard speech expectations with a roughly shared communal imaginability, our ability to project and process Peircean iconicity, as much as Husserl’s sedimented, vivid picturability, especially in its schematized, hypoiconic forms. In Peirce’s example “it rains”, the hypoicon is the reduced, intentional “composite photograph of all the rainy days the thinker has experienced” [1]. This is how the speaker of English has been trained to employ imaginability to flesh out a sound schema of the language. Much the same applies to Peirce’s “monstrative signs, or icons, serviceable in reasoning” [1], or in “the design an artist draws of a statue, pictorial composition, architectural elevation, or piece of decoration” [1]. In all such cases, iconicity serves what Husserl accentuates in his Nachlass volumes as “Anschaulichkeit” (vivid picturability; imaginability), predominantly in the form of hypoiconic schematization [40,41].

Although Husserl’s concept of intentionality remains relatively stable throughout his career, as argued below, what does undergo a shift from his early use of Kant’s Anschauung as intuition is a much stronger, later emphasis on Anschaulichkeit (picturability; imaginability; vividness) [67,68]. Having abandoned the talk of images in favor of schematization, Husserl’s mature notion of vivid imaginability (Anschaulichkeit) is a major advance over his early meaning grasp “without illustrative intuition” [69] (p. 303f.). It is replaced in the Nachlass by a field of differentiations between the merely stipulated limit cases of “pure Anschauung and pure empty intention” where the possibility of his “empty consciousness (Leerbewusstsein) is superseded by what is imaginable (anschaulich)” [67,68]. Now Husserl’s accent is on “gradations of vividness of the entire Vorstellung” (Graduationen der Lebendigkeit der ganzen Vorstellung) [67] (p. 240). Whereby such gradations are nothing other than hypoiconic schematizations.

All of which demonstrates that both Peirce and Husserl embrace some version of abstractive intentionality, Peirce in acknowledging “the immediate objects of consciousness” [1], Husserl in allocating intentionality a central place in his phenomenology. Importantly, though, both at the same time reject any assumed plenitude of individualistic, subjectivist conception of intentional acts and their objectivities. Here, Derrida’s critique of presence goes wildly astray. Peirce and Husserl achieve this restriction via different avenues: Husserl by a combination of the eidetic reduction with the substitution of his turn to intersubjectivity and the Lebenswelt as necessary ontological inferences for his early epistemic methodology, Peirce by anonymizing individual acts of consciousness into a systemic sign practice theorized as semiotics. It is in this sense that Peirce speaks of “the logical necessity of complete self-identification of one’s own interests with those of the community” and of “the ideal perfection of knowledge” which must “belong to a community in which this identification is complete” [1]. Such is the transformation in both Husserl and Peirce of the Kantian Vorstellung into an intentional and yet intersubjective phenomenon.

6. Conclusions

The core claim of this paper is the assertion that hypoiconicity as defined by Peirce not only benefits from an analysis via Husserlian intentionality, but cannot be performed without interpretive, intentional acts. In the process of arguing this case, the paper has assembled a series of additional observations. Hypoiconicity makes sense within Peirce’s semiotic holism as a specification of iconicity as schematized Anschauung and Vorstellung. In this respect, for both Peirce and Husserl, the mode of being (Seinsweise) of objectivities, such as existence, is not as important as aboutness, whether actual, virtual, or habitual. A consequence of which is Peirce’s meaning without truth, suggestive of Husserl’s consistent separation of essence from existence. What Peircean conceptualization via hypoiconicity also demonstrates is that semiotic abstraction as skeletonization is a fundamental feature of human cognition, adding to the Kantian heritage of schematization. Although the concept of hypoiconicity is given short shrift in its minimal definition by Peirce, its centerpiece of diagrammatic reasoning receives intensive treatment throughout the Collected Papers, which shores up the assertion of its significance in semiotics. As metaphoric displacement, Peirce’s hypoiconicity was found to be a semiotic extension of Kant’s indirect Darstellungen as argued on the principle of analogy. As a schematized perspective on iconicity, hypoiconicity was found to be a ubiquitous feature of all signification, including the evolution of language. As Peirce insists, symbolicity must be cashed out be iconicity, just as language requires Bildbewusstsein in Husserl and Kant. A further degree of convergence between semiotics and phenomenology emerges in that Peirce’s pre-linguistic mimicry can be productively associated with Husserl’s pre-predicative categorial intuition. Another indication of commensurability, once more traceable to Kant, is that both hold a fundamentally communal conception of signification in which signs exert a certain degree of compulsion, just as language for Husserl is coercive in its imposition of an ‘ought’ (Sollenstendenz).

Other points of convergence between semiotics and phenomenology asserted in the paper are Peirce’s ideal of geometric continuity and Husserl’s dream of a geometry of experiences, a certain parallelism between the abstractive procedures in hypoiconic skeletonization and Husserl’s eidetic reduction, as well as the decreasing grades of similarity in hypoiconicity if compared with Husserl’s increasing resemblance relations on the way to identity. Peirce’s semantic infinite regress is likewise shown to be compatible with Husserl’s open-ended Sinn as verbal and nonverbal meaning fulfilment of Bedeutung. Perhaps the most significant aspect of commensurability between the two philosophical enterprises is the shared goal of barring subjectivism and psychologism from the theorization of signification, even if its founders chose two very different paths for reaching it. In Peirce, it is accomplished by anonymizing our acts of consciousness via signs processed in the quasi-mind; in Husserl, subjectivism is denied by the eidetic reduction and the theorization of the intersubjective community as the ground of intentional individuality. Thus socially transformed, in both semiotics and phenomenology, intentionality nevertheless remains the platform without which neither human semiosis nor Husserlian acts of consciousness could be enacted. In this respect, imaginability (Vorstellbarkeit) has been shown to be as pivotal to Peirce as it is to Husserl.