Abstract
Both in Arendt’s political phenomenology and in Peirce’s pragmatist theory of inquiry, plurality is rooted in the capacity to see that which for someone else speaks for something. This is our central thesis. By ‘plurality’ we mean the specific experiential mode of sharing a common world with beings that are implicitly taken to be equals in as much as they are embodied perspectival openings on the world, i.e. in so far as they can be proto-, hetero- and co-perspectival at one and the same time. And by speaking of a certain δύναμις as the ‘root of plurality’ we mean to indicate that plurality is not a naturally given property of our experience, but rather a necessary accomplishment. A necessary accomplishment the degree of which, however, depends on the mode of actualization of one and the same dúnamis. For Arendt and Peirce, therefore, plurality is both rooted in a capacity we, as human beings, necessarily have to actualize in at least some rudimentary form, but also something that has a determinate developmental potential and is thus capable of unfolding towards an intrinsic state of realiziational perfection. The fundamental difference between both accounts of the phenomenon, however, concerns the status of the mediality and finality of plurality, ultimately the ontological status ascribed to the phenomenon of individuality.
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Notes
- 1.
Further cited as Rhet.
- 2.
Heidegger’s emphasis on what might best be called rhetorica naturalis goes, as far as I can see, against the traditional standard interpretation of the term dúnamis in the phrase “δύναμις […] τοῦ θεωρῆσαι τὸ ἐνδεχόμενον πιθανόν” at 1355 b26. Thus Grimaldi (1980, 36), glosses that “the faculty resides in the person who has mastered the rules and principles of the τέχνη.” I can here only hint at the fact that the distinction between a theoretically reflected logica docens and a performatively actualized logica utens is fundamental in Peirce’s dynamic conception of logic; cf. Pietarinen (2005).
- 3.
The English term originally used for ‘Besinnung’ is “reconsideration” (Arendt, 1958, 5) which lacks the whole semantic component of ‘coming to one’s mind’, ‘coming to one’s senses’ and ‘regaining self-control’ which is part and parcel of ‘Besinnung’ which, moreover, is an act that presupposes a preceding state of indecision, confusion, altered consciousness and/or lack of principled judgment.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
Peirce’s most substantial contributions to Evolutionary Metaphysics have been published in Peirce (1998, 1,215–371).
- 7.
Dossa (1988, 74); it should be noted that whenever Arendt speaks of human plurality as a quantitative “fact”, these claims are always supported with hermeneutic evidence which—far from originating in empirical observation from a third-personal stance—articulates a determinate historical self-understanding of man. In this sense the biblical account of the creation of man in Genesis (Arendt, 1958, 8), the Latin verb inter homines esse (Arendt, 1958, 7–8), or our historically grown mode to conceive of the otherness among human beings as categorically different from the otherness obtaining among things and animals (Arendt, 1958, 176), all reflect plurality as a “fact” given nowhere but in our first-personal perspective as agents.
- 8.
Benhabib (2003, 50, 104 ff.).
- 9.
The characteristic of the three activities of the vita activa to function as modes of existential enactment is emphasized and carefully analyzed in Loidolt (2018, 109–123), who sees these activities reflect “who we are and how” (110), and in Braun (1994, 13–37), who conceptualizes the activities as Geschehnisweisen (34 ff.), i.e. as “»ways of taking place« of human life”, as Loidolt aptly translates the term.
- 10.
The first number refers to the manuscript, second refers to page number.
- 11.
Alternatively Peirce also refers to a classification or division of three: “types of men” (Peirce, 1969, MS 401:1, 1893; Peirce, 1998, 2,445, 1908), “divisions of human life” (Peirce, 1969, MS 477:01, 1903), “ways of life” (Peirce, 1969, MS 604, c. 1904), or “bodies [of men]” with correlated “classes of human vocation” (Peirce, 1969, MS 992:1, c. 1904).
- 12.
This becomes particularly clear in the unpublished manuscript “Of the Practical Sciences”: “Let us begin, then, our enumeration of the principal sciences. A science, in the sense in which we are here to take the word is a deliberate course of inquiry. As such, it is animated by a purpose. Now every purpose has its root in a desire, and every desire is a phase of an instinct. The instincts of every animal appear to have for their quasi-purpose the preservation of the race of which that animal is a member, and this in one or other of two ways, 1st, by preserving that individual alive, 2nd, by causing him to reproduce his kind, and rear his offspring.” (Peirce, 1969, MS 1343:17–18, emphasis added). will then also include a third class of “specicultural instincts”, which, other than the two reproductive instincts concerning food and reproduction, is not related to things or fellow-beings, but rather to ideas.
- 13.
Aristotle (2001, 1095 b10–1096 a10).
- 14.
- 15.
Cf. Peirce, 1958, (1.55 (c. 1896), 1.135 (1898), 5.582 f. (1898)).
- 16.
- 17.
Cf. Arendt (1958, 206–207).
- 18.
On the Peircean conception of habit-taking as a manifestation of the formal category of thirdness in psychic and physical processuality. cf. Peirce 1958, 1.351, 1.409, 6.299, 6.262, 8.80.
- 19.
Cf. also Section 25.
- 20.
- 21.
Hookway (1985, 48).
- 22.
I have developed this interpretation in detail in Topa (2016, 82–93).
- 23.
Kant (2000, § 40).
- 24.
Loc. cit.; See also Borren (2013), for an excellent account of the central role the common sense already plays in Arendt’s work before the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy.
- 25.
- 26.
Thus, as Habermas (1992, 110), rightly points out, “the generalization of a consensus [for Peirce] not only implies the dissolution of contradictions, but also the extinguishing of the individuality of those who are able to contradict each other—their disappearance within a collective representation.”
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Topa, A. (2022). On a Rhetorical Ground of Human Togetherness: Plurality and Mediality in Arendt and Peirce. In: Robaszkiewicz, M., Matzner, T. (eds) Hannah Arendt: Challenges of Plurality. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81712-1_3
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