Thirdness is one of the three universal categories of Charles Peirce.
Defined formally and abstractly, it is something in between or mediating (CP 5.104). Everything is something in itself; this Peirce calls firstness. We can call it a “thing-in-itself.”
Everything either actually or potentially reacts against or opposes other things; this Peirce calls secondness.
Everything is to some extent understandable only because it could be referred by me to something else. For example, I suddenly receive flowers. My first reaction is “What is this?“. Something is thrown at me, something is pushed in front of me, the bouquet of flowers confronts me as an object (ob – against; jacere – I throw).
The bouquet catches my eye, but then I take it as a sign that someone is thinking of me. Flowers project my thought onto something different from themselves. I see them as a connection between me and another person. Finally, I admire the beauty and colors of these flowers; I am absorbed in the flowers themselves, as they are, so I am absorbed, this is my state and it is like a dream (a state of consciousness in which there is no clear difference between me and my world, in fact, I fall into oblivion about my environment, nor someone else’s self-consciousness struggles to impress me and divert me from what is in front of me).
Now let’s briefly follow my footsteps:
- Flowers confront me with their otherness or their secondness (I wonder “What is this?”)
- Understanding emerges by referring to something other than themselves or me (“Someone thinks of me“),
- They completely captivate my attention. Only their uniqueness and their qualities remain.
The bare structures of this simple narrative can be described as follows: opposition (secondness or otherness) is followed by interposition (thirdness or mediocrity), and it is followed by thing-in-itself (firstness or immediacy).
One of Peirce‘s most preferred examples of thirdness or mediation is the act of giving.
For him, giving is an irreducible triadic structure or form – any attempt to break it down into simple forms loses its meaning.
In every act of giving there is
- a giver
- a receiver
- something that is given.
Half of this act is deprivation (the giver is deprived of the thing he gives), the other half is receiving (the recipient enters into possession of what is given to him). But in giving these two dyads (the giver and the giving as deprivation the recipient and the receiving as receiving) are inextricably linked. If the giver simply gets rid of his property, and shortly after that the recipient comes and finds it, we have two randomly related ideas, not an act of giving. In formulating his three categories, and in particular the category of thirdness, Peirce does not try to be unnecessarily vague and incomprehensible. He tries to take into account the deep-rooted tendency of people to oversimplify things.
