Defining the semiotic animal: A postmodern definition of human being superseding the modern definition "Res Cogitans"

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 79, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 461-481

  Deely, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ST THOMAS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249416978     PISSN: 10513558     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/acpq200579329     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. The term "Catholic" here is meant to connote neither "theological" nor "religious in a sectarian sense," but refers to that broad spectrum of writings that, through reflection upon and in continuity with the medieval Latin heritage of thought, have contributed to the development of the understanding of contemporary problems. This sense of the term is discussed at length in John Deely, "The Seven Deadly Sins and the Catholic Church," Semiotica 117 (1997): 67-71.
2. International Congress on "Christian Humanism in the Th ird Millennium: The Perspective of Thomas Aquinas," Rome, 21-25 September 2003.
3. Karol Jósef Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, encyclical letter on the relationship between faith and reason (Rome: Vatican City, 1998).
4. Ibid., ¶91: "A quibusdam subtilioribus auctoribus aetas nostra uti tempus 'post-modernum' est designata. Ita verbum idem.. in provinciam deinde philosophiae est translatum, at certa semper ambiguitate signatum, tum quia iudicium de iis quae uti 'post-moderna' appellantur nunc affirmans nunc negans esse potest, tum quia nulla est consensio in perdifficili quaestione de variarum aetatum historicarum terminis" ("Our age has been termed by some thinkers the age of 'postmodernity.' The term.. was finally transposed into the philosophical field, but has remained somewhat ambiguous, both because judgment on what is called 'postmodern' is sometimes positive and sometimes negative, and because there is as yet no consensus on the delicate question of the demarcation of the different historical periods"). The point is precisely that raised by Kenneth L. Schmitz, in "Postmodern or Modern-Plus?" Communio 17 (Summer, 1990), 152-66, at 153-4
5. See John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001)
6. The reader who wants the references and details of Peirce's dependency in his semiotic upon the late Latin medieval development can consult Mauricio Beuchot and John Deely, "Common Sources for the Semiotic of Charles Peirce and John Poinsot," Review of Metaphysics 48 (1995): 539-66.
7. See also Deely, Four Ages of Understanding, chap. 15.
8. Again we have the matter of a story not well-known among English-speaking philosophers. Details of this Latin "way of signs" are best found in the numerous writings of the Mexican philosopher and scholar Mauricio Beuchot, "La doctrina tomista clásica sobre el signo: Domingo de Soto, Francisco de Araújo y Juan de Santo Tomás," Critica vol. 12, no. 36 (1980): 39-60;
9. "Los terminos y las categorías sintactico-semanticas en la lógica post-medieval," Diánoia 29 (1983): 175-96;
10. "Signo y lenguaje en San Augustín," Diánoia 32 (1986): 13-26;
11. Metafísica. La ontología aristotélico-tomista de Francisco de Araújo (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1987);
12. "El realismo cognoscitivo en Santo Tomás de Aquino. Sus condiciones metafísicas," Diánoia 37 (1991): 49-60;
13. "La percepción sensible en Santo Tomás de Aquino," in Percepción: Colores, ed. Laura Benítez and José A. Robles (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma, Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, 1993), 11-29;
14. "El argumento 'ontológico' de San Anselmo," Medievalia 15 (1993): 24-31;
15. "Intentionality in John Poinsot," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1994): 279-96;
16. Escolastica ibérica post-medieval. Algunas teorías del signo, selección de textos, introducción y traducción (Maracaibo, Venezuela: Universidad del Zulia; Caracas, Venezuela: Universidad Católica Andrés, 1995).
17. See Thomas A. Sebeok, "The Semiotic Web: A Chronicle of Prejudices," Bulletin of Literary Semiotics 2 (1975): 1-65;
18. "Index of Names" added ibid. 3 (1976): 25-28.
19. Modern students of Kant, generally preferring the trees to the forest, turn somersaults to avoid facing head-on that what Kant rejected in his "epistemology" is the whole tradition of natural philosophy and metaphysics from Aristotle's day to his own. What Aristotle called τò óν and the Latins called ens reale they deemed knowable antecedently to mind's activity, and categorized it accordingly. Over against ens reale the Latins set ens rationis, also knowable but only consequently upon and produced by the mind's activity. The Kantian move could hardly have been more opposed. Kant set this ancient notion of ens reale over against the " appearances" of experience, and categorized it as an empty unknowable, the realm of the Ding an sich, "thing in itself." Kantian commentators, thus-such as George Schrader, "The Thing in Itself in Kantian Philosophy," in Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Paul Wolff (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), 172-88, at 188-are quite right in thinking that Kantian epistemology "cuts the nerve of philosophical inquiry"; but they are curiously reluctant to accept the full consequence of that realization, which ought to be the relegation of the "critical philosophy" in which modernity culminated to the museum for the history of discredited notions. Among the Kantian progeny, of course, the one who did not lose sight of the forest for the trees was Hegel, and he goes for Kant's jugular in exposing the contradiction in asserting that we can know that something is but can in no way develop this initial knowledge. Yet in thinking that an ideal categorial scheme will enable us to arrive at the details of nature by principally deductive thought he has still one foot in the way of ideas. I discuss all of this in considerable detail in chap. 13 of Four Ages of Understanding.
20. Here let Charles Peirce's summary suffice, from his "Lessons from the History of Philosophy" (1903), in the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931-1958; in electronic form ed. John Deely, Charlottesville, Va.: InteLex, 1994), 1.19: "Kant was a nominalist;.. Hegel was a nominalist of realistic yearnings.. In one word, all modern philosophy of every sect has been nominalistic." Th is was also why, in the end, Peirce felt it necessary to distinguish pragmaticism from pragmatism, the former being incompatible with all forms of nominalism (another discrimination students of American thought strive mightily not to face up to).
21. See the entry "Augustine of Hippo," by John Deely, in Encyclopedia of Semiotics, ed. Paul Bouissac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 51-3.
22. Ibid., entry "Poinsot, Joannes," by John Deely, 498-500.
23. See ibid., entry "Medieval Semiotics," by John Deely, 399-404.
24. See Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).
25. See Jürgen Trabant, Vico's New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology, trans. Sean Ward (London: Routledge, 2004), chap. 3.
26. "The fondly cherished mythic characterization of man," writes Sebeok ("Zoosemiotics: At the Intersection of Nature and Culture," in his Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs [Lisse, Netherlands: Peter de Ridder Press, 1976], 85-95, at 89)
27. "adhered to by E. Cassirer's epigones and many others, as a unique animal symbolicum can be sustained only if the definition of 'symbol' is impermissibly ensnared with the concept of natural language.. By every other definition-invoking the principle of arbitrariness, the idea of a conventional link between a signifier and its denotata, Peirce's 'imputed character,' or the notion of an intensional class for the designatum-animals demonstrably employ symbols." Or again, in "Six Species of Signs: Some Propositions and Strictures," in Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs, 117-142, at 137: "Symbols are often asserted to be the exclusive property of man, the animal symbolicum, but the capacityof organisms to form intensional class concepts obtains far down in phylogenesis, and this ability for constructing universals from particulars was provided with a solid mathematical-neurological rationalization over a quarter of a century ago (Pitts and McCulloch 1947; cf. Arbib 1971).
28. animals undoubtedly do have symbols." For more particulars on the occurrence of symbolic forms and usage beyond the human realm, see esp. Sebeok's "Prefigurements of Art," Semiotica 27, nos. 1-3 (1979): 3-73; or (my two favorites)
29. Edward L. Kessel, "The Mating Activities of Balloon Flies," Systematic Zoology 4 (1955): 96-104;
30. and Karl von Frisch, The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). Needless to say, I am here pointing out, not exhausting, the literature on this important point.
31. The first important survey of this word as a twentieth-century phenomenon was undertaken by Thomas A. Sebeok in his 1971 essay "'Semiotic' and Its Congeners," in Linguistic and Literary Studies in Honor of Archibald Hill, vol. 1: General and Theoretical Linguistics, ed. Mohammed Ali Jazayery, Edgar C. Polomé, and Werner Winter (Lisse, Netherlands: Peter de Ridder Press), 283-95;
32. reprinted in the anthology Frontiers in Semiotics, ed. John Deely, Brooke Williams Deely, and Felicia E. Kruse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 255-63.
33. Detailed investigation into the contemporary provenance of the term "semiotics" was outlined by Sebeok in his Semiotics in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
34. I undertook something like a definitive inquiry in my article, "The Word 'Semiotics': Formation and Origins," Semiotica 146 (2003): 1-49.
35. Peirce's coinage was based on a reading and discussion of Philodemus; see Max Fisch, "Philodemus and Semeiosis (1879-1883)," section 5 (329-30) of the essay
36. "Peirce's General Theory of Signs," in Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism: Essays by Max H. Fisch, ed. Kenneth Laine Ketner and Christian J. W. Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 321-56.
37. See further Giovanni Manetti, Theories of the Sign in Classical Antiquity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
38. This seminal work, the link between Peirce and Poinsot, has been published in a bilingual edition by John P. Doyle, The Conimbricenses: Some Questions on Signs (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001).
39. See the Index entries on this cenoscopic/ideoscopic distinction in Deely, Four Ages of Understanding, 865 and 910.
40. Thomas A. Sebeok, Global Semiotics (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001), "Introduction," ix.
41. Such as Thomas Aquinas, In I Sent., d. 26, qu. 2, art. 2c: "in relativis autem neutrum est sicut privatio alterius, vel defectum aliquem importans. cuius ratio est, quia in relativis non est oppositio secundum id quod relativum in aliquo est: sed secundum id quod ad aliud dicitur. unde quamvis una relatio habeat annexam negationem alterius relationis in eodem supposito, non tamen ista negatio importat aliquem defectum. quia defectus non est nisi secundum aliquid quod in aliquo natum est esse: unde cum id quod habet oppositionem relativam ad ipsum, secundum rationem oppositionis non ponat aliquid, sed ad aliquid, non sequitur imperfectio vel defectus; et ideo sola talis oppositio competit distinctioni personarum."
42. See Poinsot Tractatus de Signis, Second Preamble "On Relation," art. 2, 88ff. Page reference is to the bilingual critical edition arranged by John Deely with the consulatation of Ralph Austin Powell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); also available in electronic form as a fulltext database, stand-alone or with the Aquinas Database (Charlottesville, Va.: InteLex, 1992).
43. The semiotically sophisticated will recognize here the monumental contribution of Jakob von Uexküll with his "Umweltstheorie": see Jakob von Uexküll: A Paradigm for Biology and Semiotics, ed. Kalevi Kull, a special issue of Semiotica 134 (2001);
44. and, for the Th omistic context, Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, new English trans. by Gerald Malsbary (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 1998).
45. See the "Definition of Umwelt" in John Deely, What Distinguishes Human Understanding (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 2002), 126-43.
46. See Thomas de Vio Cajetanus, Commentaria in summam theologicam. Prima pars, qu. 1, art. 3;
47. John Poinsot, Treatise on Signs, Question 2, "Whether the Sign-Relation in the Case of Natural Signs Is Mind-Independent or Mind-Dependent," 135-52, at 149/46;
48. Question 4, "In What Way Are Objects Divided into Stimulus Objects and Terminative Objects?" 166-92, at 179 n. 13, 187/35 and 188 n. 38;
49. Question 5, "Whether the Division of Signs into Natural, Stipulated, and Customary Is a Sound Division," 269-77, at 270/33 (the parallel bilingual columns are marked every fifth line; hence the page number followed by an "n." for note or by a / and line number gives the exact location on the page cited).
50. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, qu. 28, art. 1;
51. commentary in Poinsot, Treatise on Signs, Second Preamble, esp. art. 2, 93/16-98/40.
52. See John Deely, The Human Use of Signs, or Elements of Anthroposemiosis (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994);
53. and Vincent Guagliardo, "Being and Anthroposemiotics," in Semiotics 1993, ed. Robert Corrington and John Deely (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994), 50-6.
54. See Martin Heidegger, "On the Essence of Truth," trans. R. F. C. Hull and A. Crick, in Existence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (Chicago: Regnery, 1949), 319-51.
55. The interpretant is distinct in principle from an interpreter, even though, like objects and things, the two may happen to coincide. Thus, in the more obvious cases, representation is made to a person or cognizing organism, but not necessarily in cases we do not have the space here to discuss, exemplified in the contemporary debate over the extent of the action of signs and the notion of physiosemiosis in particular; see "The Semiotic Threshold: Semiosis in the Physical Nature?", in Sign System Studies 29:1 (2001), ed. Winfried Nöth and Kalevi Kull, 13-69.
56. See the "spiral of semiosis" diagram in John Deely, The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 2003), 164.
57. Claus Emmeche, The Garden in the Machine (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 126.