Graphic instinct: the account of graphic instinct: the account of rhetorical action and its instinctive roots in Peirce’s classification of practical sciences

Abstract

In an article intimately related to the present one, we have shown that Peirce’s maturest account of Speculative Rhetoric in Ideas, Stray or Stolen, about Scientific Writing (1904) invites us to reflect on and seize the phenomenon of rhetoric in its totality. Following Aristotelian clues, Peirce—implicitly—differentiates three categorial aspects of rhetorical action, differentiating between (i) its potentiality [δύναμις] and perfection [ἐντελέχεια] as an instinctive faculty of rendering signs effective in a utopian universal art, (ii) its actuality as a historically effective, normative practical discourse shaping rhetorical practice [τέχνη], referred to as ordinary rhetoric, and (iii) its formality, articulated by the purely theoretical investigation [θεωρία] of the necessary conditions of the efficiency of signs in general entitled Speculative Rhetoric. As our mode of being with others in a common world of shared purposes, the rhetorical, both for Aristotle and Peirce, constitutes a semeiotic form of the summum bonum, the cultivation of which is essential for the growth of concrete reasonableness in any political community and civilization as a whole. In the present paper, we start out by reconstructing Peirce’s account of rhetoric in the framework of his classification of the practical sciences (Section 2.1), and then show how this account of rhetoric as a faculty rooted in the “Graphic Instinct” confirms the analysis we have presented in the foregoing paper (Sections 2.2-2.3). In the final section we will eventually try to outline in which sense the importance of conceiving of the rhetorical as a δύναμις with a specific ἐντελέχεια, or “idea-potentiality” of developmental perfectioning, can help us to appreciate the emancipatory historical role Peirce ascribes to the Normative Sciences (Section 3).