CONCEPTUALIZING METAPHORS: On Charles Peirce’s marginalia IVAN MLADENOV
Conceptualizing Metaphors On Charles Peirce’s marginalia Ivan Mladenov Routledge Studies in Linguistics
ISBN 0-415-360471
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Conceptualizing Metaphors
The enigmatic thought of Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914), considered by many to be one of the great philosophers of all time, involves inquiry not only into virtually all branches and sources of modern semiotics, physics, cognitive sciences and mathematics, but also logic, which he understood to be the only useful approach to the riddle of reality. This book represents an attempt to outline an analytical method based on Charles Peirce’s least explored branch of philosophy, which is his evolutionary cosmology, and his notion that the universe is made of an ‘effete mind’. The chief argument conceives of human discourse as a giant metaphor in regard to outside reality. The metaphors arise in our imagination as lightning-fast schemes for acting, speaking or thinking. To illustrate this, each chapter will present a well-known metaphor and explain how it is unfolded and conceptualized according to the new method for revealing meaning. This original work will interest students and scholars in many fields including semiotics, linguistics and philosophy. Ivan Mladenov is Professor, Ph.D. and D.Sc. at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Routledge Studies in Linguistics 1 Polari – The Lost Language of Gay Men Paul Baker 2 The Linguistic Analysis of Jokes Graeme Ritchie 3 The Irish Language in Ireland From Goídel to globalisation Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost 4 Conceptualizing Metaphors On Charles Peirce’s marginalia Ivan Mladenov
Conceptualizing Metaphors On Charles Peirce’s marginalia Ivan Mladenov
First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2006 Ivan Mladenov Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catolog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0–415–36047–1
Contents
List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Introduction
vi vii x 1
1 The theoretical framework of the forsaken ideas: what was abandoned and what was expanded?
19
2 The categories, the ground and the silent effects
36
3` Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia: C. S. Peirce and M. M. Bakhtin
53
4 The living mind and the effete mind
71
5 The iceberg and the crystal mind
87
6 The missing notion of subjectivity in Charles Peirce’s philosophy
101
7 The unpredictable past
110
8 The quiet discourse: some aspects of representation in C. Peirce’s concept of consciousness 126 9 One-man-tango 10 How is meaning possible?
144 159
Appendix: Ivan Sarailiev – an early Bulgarian contributor to pragmatism
174
References Index
178 181
Illustrations
Figures 2.1 2.2 3.1 4.1 5.1 7.1 7.2 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 10.1 10.2
The trichotomy of breadth, depth and information The meaning deficiency Loading the silence Peirce’s division of sciences The transforming of signs Time-axis Time-axis effects Inside the painting A bridge An aesthetic object From fact to symbol The effete mind conceptualized The hope conceptualized
38 45 61 86 89 116 117 128 130 131 132 167 170
Tables 1.1 3.1 8.1
The logical triplet Peirce’s ten-fold-division of signs The double and the triple together
28 60 142
Preface
The end of any theory is to furnish a rational account of its object. A theory directly aims at nothing but knowing. (C. S. Peirce)
While I was writing this book I felt greatly indebted to all the wonderful Peircean scholars who began their works with the magic sentence: ‘Charles Sanders Peirce was born on September 10, 1839, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the second son of Benjamin and Sarah Hunt Mills Peirce.’ To all of those who brought to light the fact that Peirce began his study of chemistry when he was eight years old and wrote a history of chemistry when he was eleven; that he did not begin to study logic until the ‘old age’ of twelve; and graduated from Harvard in 1859 as seventyfirst in a class of ninety-one students. To those who made readers familiar with Peirce’s two marriages to Harriet Melusina Fay and Juliette Froissy (Pourtalais). To those who highlighted his years as an aid of the American Coast Survey, and to those who presented his life with deep compassion and sympathy. I am also truly grateful to the scholars who explained with great accuracy Peirce’s extremely complicated sign-system, who represented his ‘existential graphs’ as logical concepts, and who have analysed and modified his pragmaticism or developed his objective idealism. To those who used his cosmological theory for revealing contemporary phenomena in physics, I express my appreciation. Whether they were biographers, historians or scientists, these scholars did a great job and eased the way for new research based on Peirce’s ideas. This book rests on their Sisyphean work and takes its inspiration from a never completed house of thought in which every brick that built it counts. What Peirce has constructed can be seen from far over the horizon. His own desire was ‘to erect a philosophical edifice that shall outlast the vicissitudes of time … not so much to set each brick with nicest accuracy, as to lay the foundations deep and massive’ Collected Papers volume 1 paragraph 1 (CP 1.1). The objective of this book is best expressed in a metaphor, which I believe belongs to the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega Y Gasset, who wrote that from the centre of a round room with windows,
viii
Preface
there is less to be viewed from within than if we approach a single window. In this book I will try to both look from the centre and then slowly approach a large window with the name Charles S. Peirce carved on a brass plate on its sill. But I will not remain there. I shall try to rethink how I see and what I saw from this window. Then I will analyse the outside view in order to understand why it has different meanings for each viewer, and why each position yields different perspectives. By reading the outside ‘panorama metaphors’ I will rest on the ledge of Peirce’s window, but I will not adjust everything to its conceptual angle. It will not be a book on Peirce, but only heavily grounded in his ideas. It will rest on his marginal ideas, but developed from them towards my own sum of notions. It will determine a modified concept of searching for meaning, which is hidebound in undeveloped metaphors and symbols. It will not reflect Peirce’s philosophical terms in total, but reveals them to the extent of their use for a newly outlined theory. It will not be an easy task. The first difficulty will stem from the question of whether this is a book on Peirce or a book told from Peirce’s point of view. I know that if the answer to both questions is positive, eyebrows will be raised. I cannot avoid the reader’s doubtful look. I can only say that I did not go in search of it. I can almost hear Peirce rolling over in his grave as he reads some of his hypotheses as outlined by me. Or he may remain unfazed. However, even if I have misunderstood his thought but conceptualized it in a systematic way, it still matters because another thought will arise. Peirce believed that no idea really dies, but rather waits until it regains its fullness and then it silently swirls somewhere around us. Peirce himself might sleep calmly. His block in the latest reconstructed house of thought was gilded and indisputable long ago. This book is about the forsaken ideas that are now able to grow wings and fly anew in search of the truth that is neither old, nor new, nor both. But the reader may soon discover a conspiracy against him/her that slowly unfolds throughout the book. While it appears that its main topics are the abandoned notions behind the philosophical metaphors, the discourse develops from the opposite direction. It creates a metaphorical narration about the old concepts. The reason for this previously unannounced development is rooted in a three-fold belief of the author. The first belief rests on the understanding that metaphoric discourse is the only way of representing, producing and doubling meaning. (At the same time that we outline a problem and exert control over its meanings, an unrestrained flow of different meanings flourishes alongside it.) The second comes from the conviction that in the era of globalization, when all sciences merge and interact, they need to gain much more publicity than before. From this need stems the third belief that to bring to fulfilment the first two tasks, the only efficient way is to begin to talk not only as experts, but as much as possible, in pictures and metaphors. We have to amuse our readers.
Preface
ix
Science today like science before is, after all, nothing more than an overconceptualized, giant metaphor. (Does not the epigraph to this preface say the same?) I am grateful first and foremost to the pure accident by which more than a dozen years ago I read Peirce’s work. I became fascinated and remained loyal to this first impression until now. I have heard similar confessions by many Peircean devotees from whom I learned my lessons on this magnificent philosophy. The first lesson is to have patience, for anyone who dares to become a student of Peirce needs it. During the entire first year of my reading of Peirce’s works I understood the punctual signs with great certainty. Then, by chance, I found myself in a once-only postdoctoral course on Peirce given by Nathan Houser from the Peirce Edition Project at Indiana University. The clouds began to part. But there were many more years and much more work to be done until I began to feel more comfortable in the midst of the mist. My greatest gratitude in this respect is to Murray Murphey’s masterful book The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy, which along with Max Fisch’s work are classics. The chronological edition of the Peirce Edition Project, once completed, will be irreplaceable. But even now, The Essential Peirce, the two-volume edition of the project, could be used for any scientific purpose. The study of Peirce has a snowball effect. Perhaps the time has come to create a new academic discipline, a ‘Peirce-ology’. It will hardly be possible to list the names even of the prominent Peircean scholars who have contributed to the building of the magnificent castle of thought with its tall towers in the clouds. But after every new ‘stage of clearness of thought’ that is reached, we will see these towers more clearly in the sky. A worthy task.
Acknowledgements
It all began with the invitation of Thomas Sebeok to work for a couple of years with him and his international associate scholars at the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. To him I would like to express my deepest gratitude. The rest came with my ongoing interest in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, which brought me to the small but united community of Peircean scholars. From some of them I learned valuable lessons about persistence and the live ‘agapism’ needed in studying Peirce’s work. My further thanks goes to Daniel Anderson and Elizabeth Larsen for the patience and the care with which they read and corrected this work in manuscript. Thanks to Vladimir Dimitrov and Marc Posch for the technical assistance. Thanks to Paul Cobley of London Metropolitan University for his interest in, and encouragement of, my work. My greatest debt is to my family, which was a continual source of strength and courage during the time when the work was being written.
Introduction
One of the most frequent criticisms levelled at Charles Peirce’s philosophy concerns its inconsistencies and incompleteness. One cannot simply quote Peirce, as if he is Kant, Hegel, or Locke. S/he takes the risk of being blamed for not knowing an earlier or later stage of development of the concept from a chosen quotation where Peirce could have said something else or even something that meant the opposite. To this, one has to add the breathtaking depths of Peirce’s metaphorical thought, which very often approaches the edge of a sheer abyss. Peirce is not known to favour the metaphorical discourse; rather the opposite seems to be true. His disciplined way of thinking does not prefer a wealth of metaphors, but when these metaphors – such as the bottomless lake – emerge (see p. 153), they can serve almost like methodological tools. When he applies and unfolds it, he concludes: ‘The aptness of this metaphor is very great’ (CP 7.554).
C. Peirce’s philosophy – the romanticism of thought There are a growing number of authors today who are bound to view some of the most difficult philosophical problems as mere linguistic figures. Many of the theories are likened to scenery, movies, video clips, computer software, theatre, and so on. Let me here only mention titles of scientific books, such as In the Theater of Consciousness by Bernard J. Baars; or works that claim ‘the Self must be treated as a trope’ (Alexander 1997: 49). It is worth undertaking this yet unspoken characteristic of Peirce’s writings more seriously and to pursue it beyond its decorative function. The same group of philosophers–psychologists devised the term supervenience, which will be used in a particular manner in this book as well. In one of the recent discussions on Externalism and Self-Knowledge in a collection with the same title, Tyler Burge argues: ‘Traditional philosophical accounts of mind have offered metaphors that produce doctrine and carry conviction where argument and unaided intuition flag’ (1998:
2 Introduction 77). Highlighting some of the old philosophical metaphors and forsaken concepts can open up anticipated solutions and help unfold different perspectives. Let us only add that the view of metaphor did not change too much from the ancient one, which sees it as a distant comparison between two elements. ‘Conceptualizing’ will be developed as a method of representing the meaning that is undisclosed in the old philosophical metaphors and in the symbolizations we make in our everyday life. It rests on the understanding that in the nucleus of these metaphors lay concepts, or stored meaning able to represent itself anew, or to give birth to further theories. I will show that ‘conceptualizing’ works as an apparatus made of three macroelements. Conceptualizing ‘as technique’ represents, points or hints at the hidden meaning. It does this with the help of the seeking Self, which refers to and actively evokes this ‘sleeping meaning’. Finally, I will use the notion of the effete mind in a much broader and modified sense, for example as the layer from which the meaning is dug up. The entire analysis reflects on Peirce’s marginalia in two ways: it enlightens some of Peirce’s abandoned notions, but much more than that, it is based on those forsaken ideas and doctrines. Elaborating on the relation of pragmatism to abduction in his seventh Harvard lecture, delivered on 14 May 1903, Peirce says: The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason. (CP 5.212) This famous statement largely extends the three key points of pragmatism outlined in the previous six lectures: 1) that nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses; 2) that perceptual judgements contain general elements; and 3) that abductive inference shades into perceptual judgements without any sharp line of demarcation between them. Then he explains that in making every conception equivalent to a conception ‘of conceivable practical effects’ the maxim of pragmatism reaches far beyond the practical effects. Thus, it allows any ‘flight of imagination, provided this imagination ultimately alights upon a possible practical effect’. The latter explanation represents the solid basis of my ‘conceptualization’, grounded in Peirce’s philosophy on one side, but different, on the other. The difference is marked by the unusual suffix (conceptualizing), signalling that I am not going to devise an instrument for deriving meaning only. I am going to outline meaning, which was ‘devised’ on the ground of the flying imagination. Times ago it was not being grounded in a solid theory. On the basis of some of Peirce’s ideas, I will try to create a flexible tool for revealing meaning from the unfolded philosophical metaphors and everyday symbols.
Introduction 3 The need of such a doctrine comes from the ubiquitous role of the symbolizations of our everyday life. We need a tool to adjust to the mounting complications of the signs from our immediate environment. We need help for an active search for the coded thoughts of symbols’ creators. On the other hand, a careful study of the metaphors and vague hypotheses, which were mastered hundreds of years ago, may surprise today’s routine mind. Such images and tools have kept their masters’ longings from flying over the contemporary horizons. To derive meaning from them is to scratch carbons or to sieve the sand searching for diamonds or pieces of gold. The concept of the effete mind, for example, has not even been developed into a metaphor. It remained in an embryonic stage as a degenerate idea that had not grown wings because the context of the entire knowledge at the time was insufficient. Anticipating such an occasion, Peirce uttered the following phrase: ‘The work of the poet or novelist is not so utterly different from that of the scientific man’ (CP 1.383). Both are introducing a fiction, which is not an arbitrary one. The artist’s achievement evokes an approval of the audience, which pronounces it ‘beautiful’, and this quality possesses a kind of generality. The geometer draws a diagram, which although not fictitious, enables the viewer to trace unforeseen relationships between elements, which before seemed to have no necessary connection. Peirce repeats and deepens this comparison throughout his work. The deficiency of explanation of the effete mind will accompany the reader throughout this book. It is not by purpose either by us, or by Peirce himself. It is an idea, which does not allow a detailed account because it influences the collective mind by effects, whose source is unknown. It could only be illustrated by examples or observed in different perspectives. Perhaps here is appropriate to refer to Peirce’s metaphor on the bottomless lake, where he explains how an idea catches up another in an upward impulse to bring it into the upper visible layer. Or, better, let me introduce a passage by him on man’s genetic memory (he uses different words), which may give one more view of the effete mind: A man is capable of a spiritual consciousness, which constitutes him one of the eternal verities, which is embodied in the universe as a whole. This as an archetypal idea can never fail; and in the world to come is destined to a special spiritual embodiment. (CP 7.576) For the sake of accuracy it will be perhaps better to speak of conceptualizing ideas, rather than metaphors. The goal of this book is to strengthen the validity of the abandoned philosophical ideas in order to improve their applicability and to awaken them to a new life. Conceptualizing ideas would be a more exact title. The only reason to favour metaphors is the slight overlapping between ‘idea’ and ‘concep-
4 Introduction tion’. ‘Metaphors’ is preferred in order to avoid an undesired tautology. But it should be stressed that in the present book ‘ideas’ and ‘metaphors’ are synonyms. If an approach for ‘conceptualizing’ is to be successfully outlined, it must be valid for both philosophical metaphors and forsaken ideas. The difference between the method of conceptualizing metaphor and any regular analysis lies in my assumption that there are undeveloped concepts at the heart of a philosophical metaphor. The search for these concepts implies the development of a philosophical apparatus rather than the use of literary theory. However, the inquiry deals with metaphors and that requires a literary competence as well. The combining of both literary and philosophical methods under the auspice of a rather broad understanding of semiotics is what I will call ‘conceptualizing metaphor’. Peirce’s time was marked by a strong romantic impetus to overcome the classical philosophizing and to saturate human problems with methods and tools borrowed from the then burgeoning sciences. His semeiotic and pragmaticism were designed to serve this purpose. Nowadays, when tools and methods change rapidly, computer specialists, who update their technology daily, see philosophy with ignorance. We may find out that some of the most advanced programs were coded in metaphors and thoughts spoken of many years ago. Where can this guide us? Why dig up this old philosophical mumbling? Because the study of Peirce’s thought can be compared to a series of high tides that leave gems on the sea shore. Since this is nothing more than just another metaphor, let me try to illustrate the relevance of such a study by an example. In the already cited collection Externalism and SelfKnowledge, Donald Davidson claims with a number of authors, such as Tyler Burge, Hilary Putnam, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor and Steven Stich, that: The basic difficulty is simple: if to have a thought is to have an object ‘before the mind’, and the identity of the object determines what the thought is, then it must always be possible to be mistaken about what one is thinking. For, unless one knows everything about the object, there will always be senses in which one does not know what object it is … It is not just propositions that can’t do the job; no objects could. (1998: 108) He concludes: The reason is apparent: unless there is a presumption that the speaker knows what she means, i.e., is getting her own language right, there would be nothing for interpreter to interpret. To put the matter another way, nothing could count as someone regularly misapplying her own words. First person authority, the social character of language, and the external determinants of thought and meaning go
Introduction 5 naturally together, once we give up the myth of the subjective, the idea that thoughts require mental objects. (1998: 109) We can see that such an approach was employed by Peirce long ago – Chapter 6 in this book deals with ‘the missing notion of subjectivity’, where the benefit of this ‘abandonment’ is discussed. In regard to the ‘mistaken metaphor of the object before the mind’ (Davidson) and its interpretability, Peirce found an elegant solution, revealed in his most quoted definition of a sign, where the object ‘before the mind’ appears in a form of representation, and it can never be fully exhausted because the sign stands for it not in full but in some respect, or capacity. The definition then was masterfully displayed in the series of unexpected examples, comparisons and metaphors such as of the musical phrase (the pitch of a tone) and in his arguments against the immediate (intuitive) knowledge. The manner in which the topic of self-knowledge is framed by contemporary philosophy of mind forces it into an unseen dichotomy of subject/object dualism despite the frequent claims of the group of authors working on it. The hallmark of Peirce’s thought in this regard is evolutionism and synechism. They add the missing dynamic to the definition above. ‘First person authority, the social character of language, and the external determinants of thought and meaning’, without ‘the myth of the subjective’ – all this is easily reducible to Peirce’s trichotomy of sign under the condition of the unlimited signification. The triadic concept may further open up an evolutionary perspective for solving the problem of ‘interpreter and something to be interpret’, by which one loses the sense of the necessary Third. Peirce’s triads are closely connected with his categoriology, which he outlined remarking on phenomenology. The way we grasp objects lies in the heart of his phaneroscopy, as he later renamed the phenomenology. In the second of his seven Harvard lectures delivered in 1903, he shaped the doctrine of pragmatism, by isolating the new three categories. The latter were supposed to become the universal concepts of the experience. These are the quality of mere feeling (Firstness); the element of struggle, or reaction, or brute facts, evoked either in experience or in consciousness (Secondness); and an intellectual element of the nature of representation or a sense of learning (Thirdness). In Peirce’s own words, ‘we have already seen clearly that the elements of phenomena are of three categories, quality, fact, and thought’ (CP 1.423). It was not far in time, when, on the ground of his categories, Peirce outlined the division of signs, where the main groups gained the same characteristics. Peirce’s philosophy could successfully contribute to the study of mind with the notions of the synechism (his doctrine that all that exists is continuous), effete mind, ground, Other, and with his objective idealism. The merit of putting Peirce’s logic in the anti-individualistic pathos of the
6 Introduction externalism, which seems to be the latest philosophical fashion, is not really open to dispute. Thus, the concepts of the Self, self-consciousness and self-knowledge, which are main topics in almost all chapters of the present book, will also be adequately enlightened. An attempt will be made to see them from different perspectives in each chapter of the book.
Metaphor – the trigger of thought The majority of Peirce’s theses mentioned above, such as the ones about the effete mind, or the ground, were either abandoned by him or hidden in metaphors containing illuminative potentiality of a fruitful development that can eventually lead to new, original ideas. His notion of the effete mind can be found in a few sentences only, for example: ‘The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws’ (CP 6. 25). It can be compared to what he understood to be its opposite – perhaps a kind of a ‘living mind’, or something completely different. He never returned to this notion. Here only indirect methods of investigation are possible and a study of the margins of his manuscripts are needed. Peirce used this idea as an element of his original cosmology but it can serve for a better understanding of what he thought about time, music, literature and art, although these never became chief subjects in his philosophy. If Peirce believes that the universe is made up entirely of effete mind and develops towards a crystallized mind, it follows that he puts in this term something different than just ‘exhausted mind’, something which ultimately grows, becomes mature and crystallizes. When this something is a mind, questions arise as to what and how has been chosen to be accumulated and saved. What can activate this ‘frozen mind’, and for what purposes can it be awakened? Applying this notion to literature, art and music can widen our contemporary view of a number of problems, such as the relationship between the cliché and metaphor, practice and ideas. It can help to avoid the problem of mind/body dualism. For this purpose Peirce opposes the dualism to evolutionism, under which he understood the tendency to regard everything as continuous. He does this at a very early stage of his development. In 1893 he tried to apply his doctrine of synechism to the question of immortality (Immortality in the Light of Synechism) and finds that we only have carnal life. But the influence of our carnal consciousness does not cease when death comes. According to the synechistic theory, the carnal consciousness is but a small part of the man. We have to take into consideration the social consciousness, ‘by which a man’s spirit is embodied in other, and which continues to live and breathe’ (CP 7.575), much longer than we could suppose. Thus, Peirce touches upon the problem of personal identity, solved by him in quite modern manner. Synechistic doctrine claims that there is not such a thing as a pure
Introduction 7 and infinite Self: ‘All communication from mind to mind is through continuity of being’ (CP 7.572). In a peculiar way Peirce explains that to a man is assigned a role in the drama of creation. The synechistic doctrine is a substantial part of pragmatism and synechism is one of the three active agents in the creation of the universe from his evolutionary cosmology. The other two are tychism and agapism. The most succinct characteristic of them can be found in the following quotation: Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. We may term them tychastic evolution, or tychasm, anancastic evolution, or anancasm, and agapastic evolution, or agapasm. The doctrines which represent these as severally of principal importance we may term tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism. On the other hand the mere propositions that absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love are severally operative in the cosmos may receive the names of tychism, anancism, and agapism. (CP 6.302) Later on, he replaces ‘anancism’ with synechism. The most important lesson from Peirce’s evolutionism for our method is the assertion that ‘the synechist will not admit that physical and psychical phenomena are entirely distinct’ (CP 7.570). We will use it later to define the newly formulated phenomenon of the effete mind as a mediate stage between the organic and inorganic world. One way or another, the synechistic theory ascertains that the total sum of knowledge grows and transforms; that there are degrees of changes but also of likeness between all phenomena; and that there are not immeasurable differences between them. A series of comparisons between Peirce’s philosophy and the theories of other great thinkers has yet to be done. The most striking similarities can be found in the writings of another backwoodsman (as Peirce once called himself), the Russian literary philosopher M. M. Bakhtin. Bakhtin was not a deserted man in the sense in which Peirce was, although he was sent into exile deep in the Russian hinterlands. Friends and pupils surrounded him even there (in the Russian provincial town of Saransk), with whom he discussed topics and problems of contemporary literature and philosophy. True, Bakhtin had a circle of admirers, but what he needed throughout his lifetime was the same as Peirce – a highly deserved publicity and influence on his own students. He was not allowed to create his own school or to have followers. The iconic element of sign brings Peirce’s theory close to the contemporary post-modernist philosophers, such as Baudrillard, Lyotard and Derrida. (Surprisingly enough, Rorty is not among the relative thinkers.)
8 Introduction This element can facilitate the understanding of modern literary texts where the narration becomes less important for the sake of growing iconicity. Let us only mention that we currently do not read to experience the bliss of the text. Rather, we glance through the pages as if they were theatrical scenes, more like the delights of the voyeur. The authors are not writing novels or stories, but unfolding screenplays. Along with listening to classical music and going to the opera, reading is dropping out of everyday cultural practice. Polished with noble lustre, it becomes more and more an élite pleasure. By delving deeper into Peirce’s thought one may surprisingly find original suggestions for approaching contemporary phenomena. Baudrillard’s simulacra, for example, would be impossible even as a poetic figure had the author known about Peirce’s notion of unlimited semiosis. Next to the traditional philosophical company of Peirce – William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, George Herbert Mead – and today’s – Hilary Putnam, Richard J. Bernstein, Cornel West, Richard A. Posner, Richard Poirier – a number of art historians, musicians, literary critics and even practitioners can be included. There is a vast spectrum of ideas in his writings from which all of these thinkers can benefit.
A guess at the reading The meticulous reading represents the kernel of what we call ‘conceptualizing’ metaphor. At surface it is a loose technique of guessing (in more or less Peirce’s manner of the term) how metaphor or abandoned notion may be developed towards a new concept, or paralleled to a contemporary problem. Then the real work may begin. This consists of distinguishing a number of components surrounding the poetic image or the philosophic insight and comparing them to related elements from both close and more distant circles. The contemporary achievements serve as photographic negatives to contrast the positive silhouettes of the newly emerged thought. In turn, the revealed concept is metaphorized and opened out towards an anticipated theory, which functions as an interpretant of the initial one. Metaphorizing is a manner of thinking, not a property of thinking. It is a capacity of thought, not its quality. It represents a mental operation by which a previously existing entity is described in the characteristics of another one on the basis of some similarity or by reasoning. When we say that something is (like) something else, we have already performed a mental operation. This operation includes elements such as comparison, paralleling and shaping of the new image by ignoring its less satisfactory traits in order that this image obtains an aesthetic value. By this process, for an instant we invent a device, which serves as the pole vault for the comparison’s jump. Once the jump is made the pole vault is removed. This device could be a lightning-speed logical syllogism, or a momentary created term, which successfully merges the traits of the compared objects.
Introduction 9 It gives us the confidence that we will get over the high bar, but immediately thereafter we lose it. Strangely, however, the very same procedure has been used in solving mathematical problems. Peirce noticed this long ago: The widow of the great Boole has lately written a little book in which she points out that, in solving a mathematical problem, we usually introduce some part or element into the construction which, when it has served our purpose, is removed. (CP 3.561) One more characteristic of the method of conceptualizing metaphor will be that it is a search for the disappeared ‘pole of the comparison’s high jump’. As a term ‘conceptualizing metaphors’ is understood to be merely the search for reappearance of something that has not yet emerged through such an operation – such as the manifestation of a ‘third element’, the one that served as a barely sensed basis of the comparison. By this approach we are spared the difficulties of passing through a long set of modifications as we name the new image, which preserves the characteristics of the initial one and opens out a new perspective for further comparisons. (It is the same mechanism as telling anecdotes, in the Freudian sense.) By conceptualizing metaphor, say, of the ground, the search is for further or different development of the same thought. We try to display the core of mental operation that has led to the metaphorized image. Then we have a new starting point to derive a new meaning from the same thought. The process continues from the fresh meaning to new concepts – and then to original guesses. In each metaphor is a nucleus of effeteness. This is the code of similarity. The general law of frequent likenesses, accumulated and compiled as an experience of making comparisons, is ‘saved’ there. The rest of the metaphor consists of the thread (‘the pole vault’) that connects the effeteness and the comparable ‘image-object’. It is the active element of the process of building metaphor. By flying over the gap between the effeteness and the comparable object, ‘the thread’ (the very operation of comparing) must ‘remember’ the way back to the effeteness. This thread is a ‘moveable picture’, which ‘memorizes’ the return way. The method of conceptualizing metaphor is helping to de-code this picture and to regain as much as possible effeteness, i.e. a bigger part of the contextual meaning that has generated the entire process of building metaphor. It also focuses on the ‘reach of the pendulum’ between the compared and the comparable objects as a source of retracing the performed operation of metaphorizing. It is a universal approach for reconceptualizing the embryonic meaning of the metaphors, although there is no guarantee that the result of its application will be successful and predictable. It is only an analytical hint for deriving meaning from coded
10 Introduction and unfinished philosophical concepts frozen into remote comparisons. In this regard conceptualizing metaphor is to be understood in two senses: first it is an attempt to reveal the unexplored meaning in some of Peirce’s abandoned notions; second, it might be used as a general tool for different goals. The entire suggestion of ‘conceptualizing metaphors’ is based on Peirce’s claim that the whole universe consists of mind, by which it follows that the all-embracing evolution of the mind can reveal its code at any step in its development.
The third element In this book we will show that the already mentioned ‘thread’ or ‘pole’ is nothing else but our own Self. The concept of the supervenience as originally outlined by Donald Davidson in his philosophy of mind (back in 1970s) and modified recently by Ronald G. Alexander and others corresponds to the principle of conceptualizing metaphor. The classical definition of supervenience postulates that mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics. This means that two equal physical events cannot be different in some mental respect, or an object cannot be altered in a mental respect without altering in a physical respect. The usual example for supervenience is given in the relations between the acceleration, velocity and position of an object in space. An object cannot change its acceleration without changing its velocity and vice-versa. The doctrine of supervenience is an advanced version of the broader type-identity theory, whose earliest advocates U. T. Place, Herbert Feigl, David Armstrong and others postulate that at least some types (or kinds, or classes) of mental states are, as a matter of contingent fact, literally identical with some types (or kinds, or classes) of brain states. The typeidentity theory has been in constant trouble since the crucial objection of Hilary Putnam, who wondered whether it is likely to accept that physically possible life forms can be in the same mental state without having brains in the same unique psychical-chemical state. (Therefore, it is highly unlikely that the mind-brain-type-identity theory holds true.) Neither view will be taken utterly and non-critically, but an attempt will be made to outline a dynamic understanding of the supervenient Self. Jaegwon Kim’s positive answer to his own question ‘Does Consciousness Supervene on Physical Properties?’ will be taken in consideration, as well as his claim that ‘… without qualia supervenience there may well be no hope of providing with a place in the network of causal relations of this world’ (1996: 168–172). Another thesis to be considered is Ronald Alexander’s understanding of the Self as a supervenient trope. According to his view the supervenient Self should not be understood as a static, timeless quality but as that which serves as the ‘pattern’ or ‘narrative identity’ (the last term was coined by Paul Ricoeur):
Introduction 11 Rather, the Self is a supervenient abstract particular or trope that arises from and is dependent upon the mélange of properties constituting a human being. Yet, this supervenient trope is not identical with any of these properties constituting any given human being. The supervenient trope in this case – the Self – is dependent upon a collection of physical and psychological properties. (Alexander 1997: 10) This is a rather mysterious description that can serve perfectly well as a ‘third element’, a temporal one, which after solving the problem is removed. Only after the demystification of the concept of the supervenient Self will it be able to produce meaning. My suggestion is to put it together with the notion of the effete mind. ‘Abstract particular’, ‘qualia’, ‘mental property’ are nothing but timid refusals to acknowledge the possession of an active power by an immaterial entity. To put this power to work we have to link it with a potential, or continuous matter – with the effete mind. Then, like the sound of the gramophone needle hitting the track, ‘music of meanings’ will be produced. In this regard ‘a supervenient Self’ can better be explained as a genetic and generative trope, or rather as a ‘seeking Self’, a Self that searches for similarities (or tropes) to revive the frozen meaning of our past experience. Here, we will modify Alexander’s view in that the supervenient Self is not a trope; by its motion it generates tropes. The searching Self is indeed the ‘third element’, or ‘the pole’ with whose help the tracks of the effete mind creates new meaning. Throughout the book ‘the searching Self’ will be understood in this sense. From the physical point of view it seems that metaphorical thinking precedes (or follows) the building of hypotheses. Perhaps a metaphor comes before any act of reasoning. To begin to prove this thesis, let us start by examining the work of metaphors in the modern concepts of mind. When explaining the nature of our mentality, the great American psychologist Jaegwon Kim gives the following example: ‘Just try to imagine how something that isn’t anywhere in physical space could alter in the slightest degree the trajectory of even a single material particle in motion’ (1996: 4). He then concludes that the inability to explain how mental processes can make a causal difference to the world doomed Cartesian dualism. This example exhibits a literal truth and, at the same time, is completely untrue if taken literally. It is literally true in its own context of proving something obvious from the physical world. But it does not represent a literal truth if we do not forget that every coordinate movement of our bodies is a result of altering their trajectory by something that is not anywhere in physical space. Of course, Kim is completely aware of this fact: ‘It seems essential to our concept of action that our bodies are moved in appropriate ways by our wants and beliefs’ (1996: 8). Conceptualizing metaphors as a cognitive process should start from the above reached point but does not continue along a psychological pattern.
12 Introduction For example, what else alters the trajectory of the body if not a set of movements striving towards a new desired state? (‘State of metaphor’ in this sense takes up the literary meaning of the word ‘metaphor’ in Greek – ‘carrying’.)
Mere feeling and actual thought Before tackling the task of conceptualizing, let us see the whole process of carrying and revealing ideas from its reverse side, from the side of thought. Peirce tends to equate thought and mere feeling in the sense that both are unique in their appearances; No thought in itself, then, no feeling in itself, contains any others, but is absolutely simple and unanalyzable; and to say that it is composed of other thoughts and feelings, is like saying that a movement upon a straight line is composed of the two movements of which it is the resultant; that is to say, it is a metaphor, or fiction, parallel to the truth. (CP 5.289) Reading this, it is reasonable to question how we are able to understand each other, if no thought is similar to any other? Of course, Peirce is well aware of this danger: ‘Whatever is wholly incomparable with anything else is wholly inexplicable, because explanation consists in bringing things under general laws or under natural classes’ (CP 5.289). The solution lies in the fact that thoughts and feelings bear some general meaning. Everything that is thought-like, however momentous its appearance is, should be explicable by a mental operation. Feelings are ‘all alike’, according to Peirce, because they contain only what is universal. The distinction between thought and feeling consists in the way we recognize them in their appearances. Only that which we cannot reflectively know remains inexplicable – feelings. An actual thought, which for Peirce is also a mere feeling, has no explanation either, but it has the ability to affect another subsequent thought in which it is interpreted: Finally, no present actual thought (which is a mere feeling) has any meaning, any intellectual value; for this lies not in what is actually thought, but in what this thought may be connected with in representation by subsequent thoughts; so that the meaning of a thought is altogether something virtual. (CP 5.289) Actual thoughts are recognizable through their interpretations into other subsequent thoughts. It turns out that what we know about an object is its actual appearance. We cannot reflect on whether or not the same knowl-
Introduction 13 edge is always present if the object has no such appearance. This claim drew a lot of criticism against Peirce, and will be discussed a bit later. It seems though that he had anticipated such trouble and that is why in his late years he accepted the reality of the relation, which allowed him to elegantly avoid this objection: At no one instant in my state of mind is there cognition or representation, but in the relation of my states of mind at different instants there is. In short, the Immediate (and therefore in itself unsusceptible of mediation – the Unanalyzable, the Inexplicable, the Unintellectual) runs in a continuous stream through our lives; it is the sum total of consciousness, whose mediation, which is the continuity of it, is brought about by a real effective force behind consciousness. (CP 5.289) What can we say in conclusion about a metaphor which has an as if construction? On the one hand it can preserve the appearance of a thought by paralleling it to another appearance. On the other, the metaphor connects it to a subsequent image, or thought-sign. In other words, it contains an embryo of an ever-changing thought, a code ready to unfold towards a new cultural milieu. Expressed in a different manner, one can say that the metaphor supervines on the basic thought, originating from the effete mind (our frozen experience). Elsewhere Peirce says that each Self is ‘incongruous as the metaphor is’, which makes metaphor the ideal tool for conserving meaning and de-actualizing it by creating a new net of thought-connections to a different framework. A persistent follow-up of this direction at such an early stage can lead us into a hypostatic claim that we live in a kind of metaphorical continuum. Rather, let us stick for the time being to Peirce’s hypothesis that we live in a giant thought: ‘Should every mind cease to think it for a while, for so long it ceases to exist. Its permanent existence is kept up by its being an idea in the mind of God’ (CP 8.30). In a recent monograph on the mind from a psychological point of view Bernard J. Baars wrote a chapter called ‘Scientific Metaphors’. It opens with the following paragraph: Aren’t metaphors pretty crude for thinking about difficult scientific problems? Actually, they have a long and honorable history in science as tools for making the perilous leap from the known to the unknown. The clockwork metaphor of the solar system was of great help to astronomers in the sixteen century, as a way to think about the swirling interplay among sun, earth and moon. About 1900 physicists found the Rutherford model of the atom as a tiny solar system useful for generating testable hypotheses. Darwinian evolution was a powerful qualitative metaphor for its first century of existence, and it
14 Introduction is often still used today. Many scientific theories begin in this humble fashion. (1997: 53) I am not going to explore metaphors and forsaken notions as only quasiscientific tools, although this seems reasonable if related to a thinker like Peirce, who dealt with astronomy through his entire life. The broader metaphorical sense, which includes poetic insight, casts a great shaft of light into poorly shaped concepts that can potentiality be outlined. Metaphors in this sense will be understood more or less like a conscious dream, by which the insufficiency of the technological progress at the time has propelled the thinkers to build hypotheses shortly before insightful discoveries. The limits of technological progress are the only reasons that the anticipated schemes have not developed towards original hypotheses. We suggest calling these metaphors philosophical in order to widen their meaning and source of origin.
Concluding remarks Peirce’s legacy was only recently rediscovered and undertaken by many as a rare philosophical matter. Through his lifetime (1839–1914) he did not gain the respect his thought deserved and neither he, nor we, can be certain that his marginalia or his main topics ought to have further elaborated on a contemporary perspective. Peirce, along with a very few nineteenth-century thinkers, has successfully made the leap into the new millennium. His virtual ghost will further grace web pages, inspiring searchers with deep insights and fresh hints. This book aims to show that some of Peirce’s abandoned concepts from his marginalia and his powerful metaphors represent an unexplored philosophical treasure that sheds new light on phenomena that did not dominate his thought but contain original guesses as to the substance of things. In this book parallels with the work of a computer will be drawn very often, but not as a consequence of modern theories of mind as a computer. The computer is a machine that processes data, sometimes with fantastic speed. Many operations look like wonders, but they are not. It is the human mind that served as a model for the computer and not vice-versa. Computer scientists know that at the very basis of all machine operations lays Boole’s algebra, or rather a set of algebras, invented for the calculus of classes. By and large this system is nothing else but mathematics reduced/limited to logic. The discovery was made more than a century ago and even Peirce has acknowledged it in both his admiration and in his criticism of Boole: Boole was led, no doubt from the consideration of the principles of the calculus of probabilities, to a wonderful application of ordinary algebra
Introduction 15 to the treatment of all deductive reasoning not turning upon any relations other than the logical relations between non-relative terms. (CP 3.620) What we can learn from the work of the computer are really only hints and suggestions. The most valuable lesson – along with the notion that there are at least ‘three’ ways to solve a task that seems hopelessly complicated – is that the simplest route is the best. But sometimes comparisons can be truly surprising and can offer quite unusual solutions. What is more, the conception based on the computer’s work can inspire the creation of ‘powerful qualitative metaphors’ and preserve understandable concept for future generations. To ease the understanding of transformation of signs, the reader can use some of the most comprehensible of Peirce’s graphic analyses: the categories and the ten-fold division of the signs (Table 3.1 and Figure 3.1 on pages 60 and 61). These versions overlap his categories and trichotomies with his ten-classes of signs. Even if Peirce did not explicitly use these graphics, in some of his discursive analyses he strongly suggests such an approach, shape and numbers of the outlined signs. Nathan Houser uses these charts to study Peirce’s degenerate categories, David Savan (1987) and John K. Sheriff (1993: 52–72) to analyse the ten-fold classes of signs. I will try to ‘animate’ them in order to illustrate the transformation of signs. The second chart (Figure 3.1) is an immediate follow-up of the first one (Table 3.1), both serving as bases for the next graphics in the entire text. In Table 3.1 each imaginable line, which can go only up and right, represents one of Peirce’s classes of signs and the numbers indicate the order in which Peirce presents them. Otherwise, the most referred place for explaining the division of signs is in volume 2, paragraphs 254 to 273. The most detailed presentation of the ten main trichotomies is made in Peirce’s correspondence with Victoria Lady Welby, vol. 8, paragraphs 346 to 379 (or, in a separate volume, Charles S. Peirce’s Letters to Lady Welby). In my further versions attempts are made to diversify the original schemes and adjust them to the discussed problems from different areas. I hope that this practice represents one more step towards contextualization of Peirce’s system. Sometimes the charts are drawn according to Peirce’s indications, but often they are elaborated, and in some cases are completely new. However, the numerals and the characteristics of the signs are the same as Peirce’s. The perspective in which the following chapters are set up is neither thoroughly philosophical, nor completely literary, nor dominated by any particular area of human knowledge. Each chapter has its own basis and development and can be read separately, although for better understanding of some of the special terms, which are frequently used, referring to the introduction is recommended. In each chapter there is an attempt to apply the revealed concepts to modern philosophical phenomena and to refresh the contemporary way of thinking with the romanticism of philosophy. It
16 Introduction is not an eclectic combination of different approaches. The resemblance between these methods rests on the same principle in which Peirce once said that similarity is in characters not in qualities: ‘Resemblance is an identity of characters; and this is the same as to say that the mind gathers the resembling ideas together into one conception’ (CP 1.365). Sometimes the outlined concept of Peirce is strictly followed as it was in its original development, but more often, only the essence was taken and allowed to unfold towards a new thought-art. Frequently a blend of both approaches is undertaken. Chapter 2, about the notion of the ground, for example, opens up with an analysis of the doctrine of the categories, where the problem of the relationship of the sign to the ground emerges for the first time. Then, the concept of the ground takes a different route than by Peirce, preserving the freshness of something that cannot be thought of unless it is embedded into something else. On this basis a new hypothesis is developed, one that is about the silent effects in music, literature and art. Such a technique aims to outline the new method – conceptualizing metaphors. This is a philosophy about the nature of scientific metaphors and how they extract disclosed knowledge; or, to express the same from the opposite direction, it develops metaphors on the basis of philosophical concepts of Peirce, but the purpose is the same. These are either some of his wellknown ideas, which are elaborated according to their own implications, or abandoned notions carefully opened and applied to my hypothesis of conceptualizing metaphors. To the former belongs the chapter ‘Unlimited Semiosis and Heteroglossia’; to the latter, ‘The Living Mind and the Effete Mind’. In the first chapter, ‘The Theoretical Framework of the Forsaken Ideas’, an overview is made of Peirce’s philosophy from the perspective of the main shifts in his thought. Each time such a shift occurred, some ideas were abandoned and some were further elaborated. What was the logical reason for these shifts and how did they influence the overall thought of Peirce, is also the topic of this chapter. Did the abandoned notions remain mere fragments, or did they posses a potential nucleus of meaning, which pointed towards a new development? In ‘The Categories, the Ground and the Silent Effects’ the topic of discussion is an early notion by Peirce of the ground, which has the potential to enlighten modern phenomena, such as iconicity in paintings, language and music. The ground effects are conceived as a possible embodiment of the much wider concept of the effete mind, elaborated in the subsequent chapters. In ‘Unlimited Semiosis and Heteroglossia’ parallels are drawn with M. Bakhtin’s literary theory on the basis of its resemblance with some of Peirce’s philosophical concepts. The comparisons with Bakhtin go beyond his theory of heteroglossia and reveal similar notions implicitly originated
Introduction 17 by Dostoevsky. The elaboration of the concepts of dialogue, ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ continue into the ideas of consciousness, iconic effects in literature, and semiotic aspect of thought. Peirce’s theory, which is explained in this chapter, is about the endless growing of interpretation and sign building, or unlimited semiosis. The ten-fold division of sign is represented slightly differently than the Peirce way, and in a subsequent chart its work is demonstrated. This basic scheme is the same throughout the book, where the transforms of signs are shown. ‘The Living Mind and the Effete Mind’ and ‘The Iceberg and the Crystal Mind’ exhibit the goals of the book in full. Peirce’s notion of the effete mind is almost unexplored and unelaborated. The term itself has not been clarified and is surrounded with silence or coded prediction. It is the key idea of his objective idealism. To display these notions and unfold them towards a modern working hypotheses, special knowledge is needed and some fantasy as well. A good combination of both, along with carefully chosen examples may contribute to the advance of the modern study in areas such as literary theory, theory of consciousness, mind theory and semiotics. The conclusions reached in the previous chapters converge on these both in an attempt to clear up some of the oddest ideas of Peirce’s thought and give rise to my own method. ‘The Missing Notion of Subjectivity in Charles Peirce’s Philosophy’ examines an old philosophical problem from the perspective of its significant absence. The question of subjectivity and its presumed absence from Peirce’s philosophy is also investigated. Peirce’s inexplicable discontent on each occasion that this problem is broached in his writings is considered in terms of the possibility that he suffered an unconscious fear of falling into the trap of traditional subject/object dualism. ‘The Unpredictable Past’ conceives another old problem, that of perceiving the physical time and its psychological and semiotic consequences. The study is carried out through the spheres of music, memory and the layers of consciousness. The continuity, or Peirce’s synechistic doctrine, plays a decisive role by expounding on those themes. Here, as well as in all other chapters, Peirce’s understanding of the consciousness and self-knowledge is shown. These topics are explored throughout the book. His three categories are considered from the related perspectives of time and habit. ‘The Quiet Discourse’ considers some aspects of representations in Peirce’s theory of consciousness, as well as his understanding of iconicity. Perhaps here lie some of the biggest surprises. Most of Peirce’s concepts are comparable to any contemporary art movements. They could successfully shed light on, say, Baudrillard’s doctrine of simulacra as well as Bakhtin’s dialogical theory. Similar methods were used when outlining the concepts of representations in some modern art-phenomena, including the computer-designed holograms. The biggest problem here appears to be the fact that we have not yet created a meta-language to explain those
18 Introduction phenomena. Worse, we cannot analyse them without an appropriate language and derive meaning from them. The analysis at the beginning is based on the traditional Saussure/Eco/Late French semiology, but in the end settles on Peirce’s trichotomies. In ‘One-man-tango’ a decisive step is made towards a practical application of the method of conceptualization, grounded in Peirce’s theory of consciousness, of Self and Other for the purposes of literary analysis. All conclusions are employed, such as the one of the effete mind, as a layer of clichés; of the ‘Self and Other’ as hidden parts of a solipsistic ‘I’ and of the poet’s endeavour to integrate his individual solitude into an imaginable ‘I/Other’ relationship. Some metaphors and examples are taken from Bulgarian literature. In ‘How Is Meaning Possible?’ some competitive methods for deriving meaning are examined. A section of the chapter entitled ‘Dreaming of a White Christmas’ uses the same resources to provide a practical analysis of cultural clichés. A short essay in the appendix, ‘Ivan Sarailiev – an Early Bulgarian Contributor to Pragmatism’, is dedicated to the first representative of pragmatism in Bulgaria,. Ivan V. Sarailiev (1887–1969) was a Bulgarian pioneer converted to pragmatism, who incorporated the pragmatic viewpoint in his writings as early as 1909. He was a European scholar of great standing resembling in many respects Peirce’s and Bakhtin’s misfortune. Under more fortunate circumstances, Sarailiev would have been influential, perhaps greatly so. Instead, he suffered under harsh political persecution and was forced to be a social outcast. Throughout the book the method defined as conceptualizing the metaphors is employed: the focus of each chapter centres around one of Peirce’s doctrines, which was either unexplored or abandoned by him. After examining most of the possible signs of consciousness Jaegwon Kim concludes: ‘To the extent that we lack a satisfying answer to this question, we fail to have a unitary conception of what mentality consists in’ (1996: 23). Like most of the philosophers’, Peirce’s doctrines concern the moods of meaning. It looks like these moods are once and for ever shaped and it is our ever-changing Selves that move (supervene) outside from one to another searching for coherence with the new form. The latter becomes actualized and holds true on occasion. Then new meaning is derived, and arbitrariness of time, position and condition are considered. (Along with Ronald G. Alexander we may say that the Self supervenes upon the given moods of meaning.) Questions will arise as to how the particular problem is represented, what consequences it causes and for whom. But the knowledge of our minds may fall short of infallibility in defining proper thinking unless we accept that our statements are made in an ‘as-if’ or metaphorical use of language.
1
The theoretical framework of the forsaken ideas What was abandoned and what was expanded?
In this chapter I will search for a general perspective to explain Peirce’s philosophical systems. Each shift by Peirce to a new system seems to mark merely a different approach to the given structure of the formal logic. Those structures are the overall moods in which our human mind works, the metaphorical structure and that of pure reasoning being just two examples. By each turn some concepts remained and were further elaborated upon, some were abandoned and forgotten. In the time of Peirce, logic stood for all these known structures. Elaborating new principles merely scratched the surface material in order to outline the frozen (but still alive) principles.
The facets of a mosaic – inside the systems The reason for Peirce’s incoherence may be found in his obsession to build systems. He was perhaps the last holistic philosopher whose approach was first to outline a systematic position and then to solve the difficulties within it. One of the most insightful researchers of his work, Murray G. Murphey shows Peirce’s important shifts in his system building as a consequence of the major discoveries in logic. According to Murphey, Peirce’s main principle in this respect was the architectonic one, borrowed from Kant. The basis of Kant’s principle is that the architectonic structure has to be found in formal logic. Murphey claims that ‘since logic is the basis of the architectonic order, the creative or dynamic agent in the development of Peirce’s philosophy should have been his logic’ (1961: 3). With this statement Murphey sets up an unsolvable ‘vicious circle’, which inevitably escalates to his next claim that ‘each major discovery in logic should lead to a major reformulation of his philosophy’ (ibid.: 3). In an overview of the phases of Peirce’s thought I will unfold his general framework, from which his doctrines, metaphors and marginal concepts drew contextual meaning and value. Murphey divides Peirce’s philosophical work into four main systems. The first one (1859–1861) is characterized as ‘a form of extreme post-Kantian idealism’. This is a kind of combination between Kantian transcendentalism
20 The theoretical framework and Platonic idealism, which eventually allowed Peirce to reject Kant’s philosophical categories. For the first time, Peirce’s inclination to reduce the manifold of the universe to a threefold ontological classification appeared: matter (the object of cosmology), mind (the object of psychology) and God (the object of theology). Peirce then renamed these three categories as the It (the sense world), the Thou (the mental world) and the I (the abstract world). From these pronouns he subsequently derived the names Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, as he usually referred to his categories. In this first system Peirce also dealt with the general problem of knowledge as a question about how the ideas in the mind of God can be known by human minds. For Peirce the solution lies in the Kantian principle that all phenomena and all concepts that can be before the mind are representations. He understood these as manifestations of the mind of God. Peirce conceived of these as Platonic archetypes, embodied in the form of the objects of our experience and then derived by us by complicated operations, simply characterized as abstractions. Murphey tends to describe this entire period as Peirce’s ‘semiotic idealism’, although, in my opinion, it is still too early to label anything as semiotic. After a transitional but intensive study of logic, the next system arises, built from 1866 to 1870. Many scholars are apt to see Peirce’s entire contribution to logic and philosophy materialized in this period only. This is when he wrote his first outstanding essays ‘On a New List of Categories’ (1867) and ‘Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’ (1868). From then on Peirce systematically pursued the idea of constructing his thinking on a principle, which he called architectonic. This became the first outlined criteria of meaning, proved by experience. Later this concept would become central to his theory of pragmatism. At this early stage, however, some important features of his thought emerged, such as his evolutionary characters, embodied in what he called synechism and a specific kind of realism, which Carl Hausman (1993) also calls evolutionary. Both doctrines depend on the idea of an architectonic principle, understood as a coherent overarching framework of his thought. In On a New List of Categories, Peirce attempted to relate his ontological categories to human thinking. For him this relationship appeared to have a sign character. His argument was that all syntheses involve a sign relationship, which means a sign stands for something (its object), to someone, or somebody (its interpretant), in some respect or capacity. In other words, unless there are some things, minds or abstractions to which/whom the sign stands for, the sign process (the knowledge) is impossible. Peirce asserted further that there is neither a first nor a last cognition. Our knowledge is never fully complete, because the interpretant of an object always turns alone into a sign from another sign-process. It is the experience that comes first and the notion of the object that comes later. One of the most important notions here is that the sign stands for its object not in full, but in some respect. Hence, any inferences would be
The theoretical framework 21 impossible if there were no pure abstract attributes embodied in the object to form the basis of comparisons among them. Murphey’s understanding of Peirce is unusually critical. (But unlike Rorty, who is also extremely critical of Peirce, Murphey respects him.) On the other hand Murphey’s criticisms are accurate, detailed, and try to see their subject dynamically, i.e. Peirce’s philosophy is observed as it unfolds through the time. But exactly because of his scrupulousness, Murphey’s conclusions often overlook the nuances and leave the impression that something in the revealed hypotheses is completely wrong or absent. Such an approach, although made after a detailed representation of Peirce’s concepts, is misguiding because of its harsh reductionism. It does not leave room for further elaborations, which were often foreseen by Peirce, who left his concepts open for deliberation. Murphey’s criticism mercilessly crosses out the blank spots that Peirce was not able to fill due to a lack of data. When he discusses Peirce’s theory of reality, Murphey claims that it was borrowed from the scholastic doctrine, which rests on the assertion that the idea of the universal in the mind and the individual out of the mind has a common nature. Compared to this, Peirce’s argument rests on the fact that no cognition is wholly determined – that is, there is no true individual, and therefore everything is to some degree a generalization. ‘Peirce’s “realism” was thoroughly idealistic throughout’, writes Murphey (in Edwards 1967, vol. 6: 73). That Peirce’s view was to some degree realistic, as well as idealistic, would be the more correct conclusion, although it sounds a little peculiar. To prove this statement, let us recall Peirce’s principle of objective idealism. If we jump ahead a bit, everything gets clearer: The principle now brought under discussion is directly idealistic; for, since the meaning of a word is the conception it conveys, the absolutely incognizable has no meaning because no conception attaches to it. It is, therefore, a meaningless word; and, consequently, whatever is meant by any term as ‘the real’ is cognizable in some degree, and so is of the nature of a cognition, in the objective sense of that term. (CP 5.310) The first sentence is conditional. It is an ‘if … then’ sentence that leaves a confusing impression of an idealistic viewpoint. But the second one makes it clear that the room left for cognition (to some degree) participates in the building of the definition of ‘the real’. We cannot ignore the condition to some degree because then we have to do the same with the unlimited interpretation; the latter is simply a synonym of cognition. What Peirce tries to define here is the process of cognizing and not the cognition itself or its nature as ideal-realistic. To cognize something means, according to Peirce, to treat something as cognizable, and hence to conceptualize it and interpret it. (Later, I will proceed similarly with the philosophical
22 The theoretical framework metaphors – they will be conceptualized and interpreted as stages of unfold cognition.) In other words, Peirce is interested here in the action of cognizing, which is possible only in a communicative act. That this is true proves his insistence that thought is dialogic in its nature and that ‘there can be no reality which has not the life of symbol’. The latter quotation is from his essay ‘On Science and Natural Classes’, where he also argues: What I do insist upon is not now the infinite vitality of those particular ideas, but that every idea has in some measure, in the same sense that those are supposed to have it in unlimited measure, the power to work out physical and psychical results. They have life, generative life. (in Houser and Kloesel 1998: 123) This view represents Peirce’s belief that ideas or representations can cause physical effects and, in a long run, physical facts. The unconditional equation of in some measure with in unlimited measure demonstrates for his critics that Peirce is interested in the dynamic nature of cognition, not in its ontology. In his Harvard Lectures on ‘Pragmatism’ (1903), Peirce asserted that nothing can be represented unless it is of the nature of a sign, and he reiterated this point many times, broadening it to the view that ideas can only be communicated through their physical acts.
The riddle of the pragmatism The third system, according to Murphey, was dominated by Peirce’s proposal of a universal principle for his philosophy. The latter, called architectonic, rests on his belief that ‘all cognition involves the sign relation; that the sign relation involves three classes of referents; and that these referents are real and can be adequately known by scientific inquiry’ (in Edwards 1967: 73). As Murphey continues: ‘but this theory depended upon logical doctrines that Peirce was forced to abandon when he discovered the logic of relations’ (ibid.: 72). Murphey then proceeds to outline the most important achievements of the third system (1870–1884), that is, according to him, the doubt–belief theory of inquiry (spoken of as early as in 1870) and pragmatism. In 1877–1878 Peirce published a series of six papers, entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science, in Popular Science Monthly. In the first, ‘The Fixation of Belief’, Peirce formulated his method of scientific investigation, which, according to him, contains the earliest allusions to his ‘pragmatism’. In this first paper Peirce develops his thesis that thought-in-search is an instrument of inquiry and belief the cessation of doubt, when a state of thought-in-rest is achieved. This is the essence of the scientific method, to which Peirce gives priority over the first three: tenacity, authority and the a priori method. He further argues that only the fourth possesses a selfcorrective nature and can guarantee success in the long run. In the other
The theoretical framework 23 papers of the series, Peirce widened his theory and set it in a surprising context of biological evolution. He claimed that, in order to survive, any organism has to develop habits of behaviour, according to its needs. The latter are rules of behaviour under which we must act in order to achieve experiential results. The most acceptable method of searching will be the one that leads to a condition of stable belief that will last in the long run. Also in this series is the famous essay ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ (1878). Here Peirce outlines his own theory of the clearness of ideas, which has three grades of clarity. This doctrine is important also from the perspective of some of the chief theses of this book. The third level of clearness is compared to a theory of meaning and is represented in the pragmatic maxim. Peirce then tries to employ some of the conceptions of meaning in an overall examination of his future realism. The pragmatic maxim simply asserts that the meaning of an object consists in the set of all habits that this object exhibits: It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (CP 5.402) But here Peirce also makes a precise justification; according to him the pragmatic theory is purely a theory of meaning, not of truth. (The philos opher who extended it to a theory of truth was William James.) This passage, along with other examples given by Peirce, on the hardness of a diamond, which does not expose its hardness unless scratched against a hard surface, received strong criticism from many philosophers. One of the most irreconcilable is H. O. Mounce. He shows no appreciation for Peirce’s attempts to avoid the difficulties of his maxim. Acknowledging that Peirce was not concerned with elucidating the practical purposes but focused rather on the intellectual ones, Mounce still refuses to accept it. Mounce argues that the sensory effects of an object cannot contain the entire knowledge we could have of that object, since they cannot exhaust all of the possible effects produced, say, on its atomic level. Mounce made a reasonable remark that ‘Where a substance [in this case substance, stands for object] is picked out by its sensible effects, this is only relative to certain circumstances’ (1997: 38). This is true. But let us follow Mounce’s criticism a little bit further. He finds it highly problematic to call an object hard when it exhibits no such effect. According to Mounce the problem arises neither in ordinary speech, nor in the course of Peirce’s paper. It cannot be solved by offering a conditional analysis. Therefore Mounce makes a logical objection:
24 The theoretical framework For, if nothing has meaning except in terms of sensible effects, it is only in terms of sensible effects that a conditional has meaning. But then in order to have meaning it must cease to be conditional. (1997: 39) It is hard to disagree with Mounce’s analysis. However, it remains to be seen whether or not his claim holds true. Is it possible for a substance to be seen, analysed, tested, proved, etc. in some way other than conditionally? It is possible, argues Mounce, since the reality is continuous and cannot be reduced to its actual instances in order to be known. Also true, but let us not forget that Peirce explores different arguments when talking about the knowable effects and the constant qualities of substance that resist tests. Those effects can certainly exhaust the test of the actual explication. By showing the difficulties in this view, H.O. Mounce resorts to the similar point made by Murray Murphey. Murphey calls Peirce’s example with the hardness of the diamond ‘his disastrous affair’ and went on to quote Peirce’s own revision of this example as a step ‘too far in the direction of nominalism’ (1961: 395–396). For both authors, it is evident that Peirce shows his incapability of solving the dilemma between his phenomenalism and his realism. According to Mounce, the phenomenalist element requires that a conditional be equivalent to the set of its actual instances, while the realist demands just the opposite. Here is the remark of Murray Murphey: The point is that Peirce himself at this point did not clearly distinguish the law from the set of all instances of the law, and the reason he did not is that to make such a distinction would have required admitting possible instances which are never actualised. (in Mounce 1977: 43) Let us take a closer look at Peirce’s justification of his early ‘nominalist’ statement. After admitting that he went too far in that direction, he explained the reason he did this: I said that it was a mere question of the convenience of speech whether we say that a diamond is hard when it is not pressed upon, or whether we say that it is soft until it is pressed upon. I now say that experiment will prove that the diamond is hard, as a positive fact. That is, it is a real fact that it would resist pressure, which amounts to extreme scholastic realism. I deny that pragmaticism as originally defined by me made the intellectual purport of symbols to consist in our conduct. On the contrary, I was most careful to say that it consists in our concept of what our conduct would be upon conceivable occasions. For I had long before declared that absolute individuals were entia rationis, and not realities. (CP 8.208)
The theoretical framework 25 This argumentation is in strong accord with another hypothesis of Peirce, namely, his synechistic theory, which is a true piece of the mosaic from his entire philosophy, and which prevents this concept from becoming contradictory. To compromise his maxim at this point would be worthless because he would rather accept the claim that there might be instances that are never actualized. From the point of view of the synechism, to cognize an object would mean to treat it as cognizable (as an inexhaustible continua), which is to conceptualize and to interpret it. The only way to do that is to see it as actualized in its appearance as a sign. It was Murphey who pointed out that to support the doctrine of synechism, Peirce had to accept the existence of external referents of true laws, which in their turn involved unactualized possibilities or real generality. Elsewhere Murphey argues that ‘when the doubt–belief theory is applied to the organic universe itself, the result is an evolutionary cosmology’ (in Edwards 1967: 77). It is obvious that there is no real danger for the theory of synechism from the ‘never actualized instances’ .
From ontology to categoriology Let us try to explain this with some examples. It is well known that if a tree falls in the forest and there is not any live creature ‘to hear’ the noise, there is no noise. That which is produced by this fall is a set of intensified airwaves, but not ‘noise’. There will only be a noise if there is something or someone to hear it. (Besides, any creature other than a human one, will perceive those waves differently.) There is a light if there is an eye to see it, there is a smell if there is a nose to sense it, there is a silence around us if there is another silence to contrast it, etc. Quoting Thomas Nagel, Jaegwon Kim agrees that: ‘Things don’t look, or appear, this way or that way, period; they look a certain way to one perceiving subject and perhaps a different way to another’ (Kim 1996: 162). In other words, there is something if there is an effect of it, or a sign. Only effects are interpretable, not the phenomena, and there must be another sign (subject, interpretant) in which the former is interpreted. Kim concludes the above quotation by saying that: ‘There can be no ‘looks’ or ‘appearances’ in a world devoid of subjects capable of having experiences’ (ibid.: 162). Is your 6-year-old daughter, who diligently plays a piece of a Mozart piano concerto, aware of the external-referents-associations she inspires in her listeners? She is producing musical signs of nominal values, and she does not even know of the further interpretation made by the older audience. She bows and enjoys the applause. The listeners (and especially her parents) adore her, for ‘she extorts such deep feelings from the chords of the piano’. Is that real? Are the interpreting feelings real? She accurately pushes the keys and we slowly sink into moods and visions, of which she does not have the slightest idea. At her age she is merely a movable part of
26 The theoretical framework the musical instrument and it is we who ascribe to her our awakened excitements. Signs are moving pictures, says Peirce. We may also say that they are like thought-atoms and it is entirely up to their interpretants as to what kind of combinations they will enter and will their ‘appearance’ as. The piece of music she plays is an instance, which will never be actualized in the same atmosphere and the interpretants of it will never be repeated, although we know this particular concert and, perhaps we know personally the little artist. Yet, both moments are real, general and synechistic. We can even reverse the claim of Murphey: this particular play is unactualizable; it will never be repeated as it was performed this evening, despite the fact that the musical score will always be one and the same. The particular play is for ever de-actualized and layered down as one more track of our effete mind. Perhaps, following the model of another concept of Peirce, we may say that we inhabit a synechistic world of continuous substances (perhaps, a complete thought-space) and this is reality, but we can only cognize this world’s actual instances, and this a reality as well. ‘Two realities?’ No, one cognizable (intellectual) and one synechistic, one of the ‘live’ and one of ‘the effete mind’, merged evolutionarily together. This is not the old dualism, but a three-fold knowable reality, the world of synechism. The notion of the ‘effete mind’ has not been developed in Peirce’s later writings. The problem of actualizing and de-actualizing – of the relationship of appearances and synechism – may be seen from another perspective, as a problem of a posteriori and a priori given concepts. All concepts are derived from the nature of the mind, and so all are a priori – they cannot be given in sensation. But all concepts are known only as they appear actualized in experience, so, all are equally a posteriori. The difference between a priori and a posteriori is thus made to coincide with that between actualized and unactualized innate ideas. So Peirce concludes: ‘Each element of thought is a motion of the mind. Therefore each thought is Innate. It is innate in its possibility. It is true in its actuality’ (in Murphey 1961: 25). In this respect, the effete mind is a continuous substance, or unactualised reality, from which we derive actual experience by pointing to it the light of the living mind. There is a problem aside from Peirce’s pragmatic concept and it is in his belief that a final opinion is reachable by a community of inquirers. It is a problem of definition, not of the idea. It is simply a vague and undefined theory. But it shows that Peirce has always put the weight on the dynamics, not on the phenomenological element of his doctrines. The concept of cognition leads at once to his understanding of reality. Something is real, according to Peirce, if a number of cognitions go to infinity, then the concept of this something (an object) diminishes to a limiting form. But the object is inexhaustible by any number of cognitions, so that nevertheless it exists only as it is thought. It remains independent of what any number of individuals thinks of it. What is arguable in this
The theoretical framework 27 theory, according to Murphey, is the acceptance that if inquiry goes on for ever, all hypotheses will converge to a final true description. Peirce would hardly worry if this claim were dropped either. It is purportedly vague enough, as he says elsewhere, to sketch an idea that is too abstract. In this case, his notion of a universe as a future crystallized mind is a good example. It remained sporadic in his work Perhaps, in the long run our time will also be labelled as a romantic stream of the electronic mind for a total domination over human thinking. Many of today’s ideas will be forgotten or forsaken as unrealized. But there will be something like a giant hard disc where they will be recorded with the hope that one day they will pull out and be proved again. Is not this ‘giant disc’ something similar to what Peirce meant about the effete mind? Yes. As he said in his sad, half-personal story of the beautiful Melusina: Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has, nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some bright morning to find it gone, clean vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of his life gone with it. I have myself known such a man; and who can tell how many histories of circle-squarers, metaphysicians, astrologers, and what not, may not be told in the old German [French!] story? (CP 5.393) Unfortunately, the cliché that Peirce’s thought is inaccessible and obscure is true. But in this bottomless lake one may find his/her own way of articulating problems in some stage of clarity – according to his/her assiduous reading of Peirce’s writings.
The triadic cancellation of the manifold The fourth system (1885–1914), according to Murphey, derives from the years Peirce spent at Johns Hopkins, where he was extremely productive in the field of logic. He then discovered the quantification and the set theory. Georg Cantor has already proposed the latter but it was Peirce who proceeded to clarify it and to develop it on the basis of his theory of synthetic inference. This phase is marked by Peirce’s return to his categories. In his earlier writings he distinguished sharply between their formal and material aspects. Through his lifetime he gradually recognized material character of the Firstness then of the Secondness and finally of the Thirdness. As Murphey argues, formally considered these categories are
28 The theoretical framework Table 1.1 The Logical Triplet defined in terms of the relation of the Final Interpretant to the sign. Proposition
Argument
Pheme, Dicisign or Dicent sign
Delome
A representative or sign (a name). The mortality of man is a seme. A fact of immediate perception is a seme. Any instance of percept. First.
A sign, which is equivalent to a grammatical sentence, whether it be Interrogative, Imperative, or Assertory. The perceptual judgment is a pheme. Socrates is a man is a pheme.
A sign, which has the Form of tending to ac t upon the Interpreter through his own self control, representing a process of change in thoughts or signs, as if to induce this change in the interpreter. Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Socrates is mortal.
Series of graphs
Rheme, (Seme or Concept)
A Graph
Ontological characteristic
Term
simply three classes of relations: monadic, dyadic and triadic. Peirce held that these classes are irreducible and that all higher relations are reducible to the combinations of those three. These operations were thought to reduce the manifold of the universe to three aspects of reference: reference to a sign (or to an abstraction); reference to an object; and reference to an interpretant. The three aspects then became the basis for a classification of sign and attributed to the wellknown mode of scholastic division of terms, propositions and arguments. In Peirce’s classification the latter represents the third division, based on the way the interpretant relates to the sign (see Table 1.1). Peirce further derived from the class of arguments the sub-classes of hypothesis (or abduction), induction and deduction, thus presenting the three forms of syllogisms. Then he clarifies and refines these relations, distinguishing among them pure and degenerate types. He went on to redefine some aspects of how relations have meaning. For example, Peirce used the term haecceitas (meaning thisness) as it was employed by Scotus, and attributed it to his category of Secondness. For Firstness he developed a theory that it has a qualitative character and thus possesses a material aspect. Firstness derives its meaning by referring not to a concept but to a phenomenal suchness, which is the immediate, non-conceptual given of sensations. In Peirce’s early explanation of Firstness, the concept ‘red’, for example, represented the wholeness of the quality ‘red’. Now, the ‘suchness’ of an object, which leads us to classify it as red, is a quality. Peirce put special emphasis on the material character of the Thirdness, although, according to Murphey, this aspect was less clearly defined than by the other two categories. Perhaps, it is best to say that this is the sphere of mediation, where the meaning is mastered in its completeness despite the new kind of insufficiency this term creates. To this sphere belongs the
The theoretical framework 29 newly developed semiotic apparatus in which Peirce preferred to dress his theories. The revision of the categories raised new needs to resort to old classifications such as the one of knowledge. The order now is according to the heuristic potentiality of the sciences, as the first one is to mathematics. Other important consequences of the category revision are the discovery of synechism and the creation of his evolutionary cosmology. Peirce regarded the synechism ‘or the doctrine that all that exists is continuous’ as his most important contribution to the philosophy. It comprises his other two concepts, of tychism and agapism, and, as he says, ‘opens our eyes to the significance of that fact is fallibilism’ (CP 1.172). After 1885, as a consequence of these two theories, Peirce asserted that the universe is itself a living organism possessed of feelings and habits and that our laws of nature describe the habits of the universe. He was forced to find continuous external referents for all laws in order to maintain its principle that a law, which he considered as governing the behaviour of an organism, is a habit. He then went a step further claiming that the law of nature describes the habits of the universe. Discussing Peirce’s position that the universe is an organism, Murphey comments on the difficulties for knowledge, feeling and volition to be redefined accordingly. But, perhaps, it will be easier to adopt another of Peirce’s ideas; namely, that the universe consists of effete mind. ‘The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws’ (CP 6.25). This is a very odd statement, but it is grounded in his synechism and evolutionary cosmology. (The division of sciences and its importance for the sake of knowledge, as well as the doctrine of synechism and of evolutionary cosmology, is discussed in Chapter 4.) In asking himself, how a person can possess any memory, Peirce argued that a past idea could be directly present in the consciousness. This enables us to suppose that the consciousness is not limited to a single instant but that it immediately and objectively extends over a lapse of time, without thereby extending over any sensible lapse of time. We are thus able to suppose that consciousness is carried along from one time to another, and is able to compare what is present to it at different times. (CP 7.466) This means that the idea is never wholly in the past; it can be sealed off in the past, but part of it always accompanies us: ‘We are thus brought to the conclusion that the present is connected with the past by a series of infinitesimal steps’ (CP 6.109). Thereafter Peirce had to deal with the immediate consciousness of an infinitesimal interval, with the difference between instant and moment in order to clarify its concept.
30 The theoretical framework But does the hypothesis that an idea cannot exist wholly in the past sound like a compelling metaphor? It certainly does, and its beauty comes from the insightful suggestion that we carry on our past for ever, as if we live within it. Explaining his theory further, Peirce reasons that an infinite succession of inferential acts of comparative perception objectively has to contain the entire series. Then he suggests that instead of this succession we imagine a continuous flow of inference through a finite period of time resulting in a mediated objective consciousness of the whole time in the final moment. As he concludes: ‘In this last moment, the whole series will be recognized, or known as known before, except only the last moment, which of course will be absolutely unrecognizable to itself’ (CP 6.111). This is the proof of his thesis about which Murphey writes that Peirce was very close to admitting the first impressions of sense or direct intuition in some form (1961: 337–338). In other words, this was his argument of the temporal continuity of the memory. Once the concept of the continuity of the mental phenomena was established, Peirce turned to the law of their behaviour. He arrived at a law of association, where the three forms of inference (deductive, inductive and hypothetic reasoning) become the logical representations of the psychological processes. He was led by these thoughts on continuity to a quite interesting analysis of personality. (We will conceptualize this idea everywhere in this book as it is embedded in the notions of the searching Self and the effete mind.) Yet when we consider that, according to the principle which we are tracing out, a connection between ideas is itself a general idea, and that a general idea is a living feeling, it is plain that we have at least taken an appreciable step toward the understanding of personality. This personality, like any general idea, is not a thing to be apprehended in an instant. It has to be lived in time; nor can any finite time embrace it in all its fullness. Yet in each infinitesimal interval it is present and living, though specially colored by the immediate feelings of that moment. Personality, so far as it is apprehended in a moment, is immediate self-consciousness. (CP 6.155) Another metaphorical statement: What else could be said on the equation of an idea and a personality? Of course, personality here should not be confused with the Ego or even with the human being. It is rather a set of integrated habits that form a continuum of feeling. Since a consciousness is only an aspect of feeling, it will be present in any such continuum. We have now to search for the law of such an understanding and there is no reason to search for a long time. Given that self-consciousness (personality) is defined as a mental process, the law of mind should be its general formula. The law of mind is not the same as the law of matter, warns
The theoretical framework 31 Peirce. ‘The law of mind only experiences gentle forces which merely render it more likely to act in a given way than it otherwise would be’ (CP 6.148). This stipulation allows him to claim that there always remains a certain amount of spontaneity in the mind’s action, without which it would be dead. This persistent description of mental processes into physical categories led Peirce to ground this doctrine into the lowest form of mind, which he believed to be the protoplasm. We will not examine it here at length, but will bring to light its main conclusions. Peirce thought that the protoplasm feels. In his view, this property seemed to arise from some characteristics of the mechanical system. As he concludes: ‘It can never be explained, unless we admit that physical events are but degraded or undeveloped forms of psychical events’ (CP 6.264). This last claim marks the basic argument of Peirce’s objective idealism. Or, in the words of Murray Murphey: ‘Whatever theory of mental phenomena is to be adopted must account for the presence of feeling; the mechanical theory cannot account for feeling; therefore the mechanical theory cannot account for mental phenomena’ (1961: 345). This will be our basis for outlining the notion of the effete mind as a lower grade of the living mind. We will consider the effete mind as a sleeping source of ideas that could be revived and modified for a future use. Ideas never really die, according to Peirce, and those which are stratified in the effete mind and enriched by the past experience could suggest a stronger development towards its future breeding. Such perspective of investigation agrees with another of Peirce’s understanding of the cosmic evolution, which leads from a less to a more orderly world and ends up in a crystallized mind.
The beauty and the law There are a number of significant accounts of the principal stages of Peirce’s development, other than those written by Murphey and Mounce. Some are more balanced (Nathan Houser 1992 and 1998; Christopher Hookway 1985); others use even metaphorical descriptions (Gérard Deledalle 1990). A classic is, of course, Max Fisch’s Peirce, Semeiotic, and Pragmatism, which represents years of scholarly devotion. I will not produce a list of the countless classifications in this book since it is not focused on the development of Peirce’s philosophy. It is rather intended for scholars who are familiar with his ideas. For a profound study of his thought in this and in any other regard, a parallel reading of his biography is required. Among the most accurate are Joseph Brent’s Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life and Kenneth Laine Ketner’s His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce. Names of prominent Peircean scholars such as David Savan and Thomas L. Short should never be omitted from the inventory of basic readings on the topic.
32 The theoretical framework Carl Hausman (1993), who sees Peirce’s thought as organized around four basic themes aiming at the construction of what Peirce called an architectonic, takes quite an original approach. Such an undertaking embraces the chronological method, putting more weight on the evolutionary realism, which Hausman regards as the main accomplishment of Peirce. The four topics thus are: his pragmatism (called later pragmaticism); his theory of signs – the semeiotic; his categoriology, or phaneroscopy; and his theory of continuity, or synechism. What brings together these viewpoints is studying them in the flow of semeiosis, as Peirce called the process of building signs, his evolutionary synechism. This approach is modern, flexible and offers possibilities that can be completed by other investigators, and its achievements can be almost immediately applied in the praxis. Finally, there are theses, which tend to undervalue, or completely ignore any theoretical hold of Peirce’s theory from the present-day point of view. We can most easily dig up phrases in this regard from any of Rorty’s writings from his essay ‘Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism’: Pragmatism is a vague, ambiguous, and overworked word … One symptom of this incorrect focus is a tendency to overprize Peirce … His contribution to pragmatism was merely to have given it a name, and to have stimulated James … (1982: 160–161) Along with some fine thinkers of everyday life, such as Roland Barthes, Baudrillard, and Umberto Eco, Rorty exhibits an immense potentiality of speaking ‘artistically’ on any philosophical issue. To conclude this brief overlook of the contemporary views on pragmatism, let us quote a summarizing sentence by Hilary Putnam: In particular, I hope to convince you that pragmatism offers something far better than the unpalatable alternatives which too often seem to be the only possibilities today, both philosophically and politically. (1995: 3) Murphey’s analysis, in its turn, is painstaking and scrupulous. Let us mention again his conclusion that ‘Peirce’s “realism” was thoroughly idealistic throughout’. Mounce’s analysis is thematically focused; his theory is that the original doctrine of Peirce’s pragmatism was transformed (mainly by James’s misunderstanding) into one completely different than the original, which further led to the contemporary coexistence of two pragmatisms and to even bigger misinterpretations from various forms of modern scientific rationalism. Elsewhere he argues: ‘Peirce’s Pragmatism rests on his realism’ (Mounce 1997: 32). To distinguish what is relevant in
The theoretical framework 33 those sometimes diametrically opposite claims, it is best to carefully read Peirce himself. Nathan Houser’s reminder to turn to Peirce’s own definitions from his Century Dictionary in order to reveal his stages of development can be very fruitful. These phases are Nominalism, Idealism and Realism. According to Houser, ‘The most significant development in Peirce’s intellectual life was the evolution of his thought from its quasi-nominalist and idealist beginnings to .its broadly and strongly realist conclusion’ (Houser and Kloesel 1992: XXIV–XXV). Then Houser goes on to quote Max Fisch that ‘Peirce’s progress toward realism began early and . was gradual, but there were key steps that divide it into stages’ (ibid.: XXIV–XXV). Houser argues that with Guess at the Riddle (1877–1878) Peirce ‘began to gather his philosophical doctrines together into an integrated system of thought and with his 1891 Monist article, Architecture of Theories, he began to attend .. explicitly to the structural integrity of his system as a whole’ (ibid.: XVII). This integrated system would be a much expended, though never fully completed, theory of signs. Peirce’s last work was another project entitled System of Logic, Considered as Semeiotic, which he left unfinished after his death in the spring of 1914. To ‘dress’ his complicated methodological apparatus in semiotic terms was Peirce’s final intention. This enormous attempt to put the mechanisms of thought into abstract terms is the reason why the great American philosopher Sidney Hook called him ‘a philosopher’s philosopher’ (ibid.: ... XXXVIII). From the period of the work on pragmaticism is another effort to reformulate his pragmatic maxim in semiotic terms. Peirce claimed that the meaning that pragmaticism seeks to enunciate is that of symbols rather than of simple conceptions. He extended his realism to include the acceptance of real vagueness and real possibilities and pointed out that for pragmaticisim the reality of some possibilities is most important. Along with his favourite work of the applications of the Existential Graphs (intended to represent a sort of graphical syntax for logical purposes), Peirce now aimed to build a new system of signs that had to integrate with his mature pragmatism. In the correspondence with Lady Welby he showed a great enthusiasm for restating his whole terminology in semiotic terms, which in fact he did with remarkable success. For this purpose Peirce tried to reshape his idea – to build an adequate theory of science applicable to philosophy, and to develop an objective theory of rationality. He then turned again to mathematics, which stands at the pinnacle of the sciences. Mathematics presupposes no other sciences but is presupposed by all other sciences. After mathematics comes philosophy, which has three main branches: phenomenology, normative science and metaphysics, dependent on each other in reverse order. All three categories appear in each of these parts of philosophy, then in each further division of sciences, etc. (see Figure 4.1 on page 86). When Peirce began to construct his concept, starting from mathematical
34 The theoretical framework formulae, he proceeded to expand the outlined principles to universal concepts, which he believed were fundamental to others, ‘so that it is possible to analyze our theoretical systems (our sciences) into a dependency hierarchy’ (ibid.: XXX). This cosmic principle of shaping systems rested on his belief that any true idea has its origin, then its bloom and in the long run gains full brightness. Whatever one’s theory may be as to the invalidity of human reason, there are certain cases where the force of conviction practically cannot be resisted; and one of these is the experience that one opinion is so far from being as strong as another in the long run, though it receives equally warm support, that on the contrary, ideas utterly despised and frowned upon have an inherent power of working their way to the governance of the world, at last. (CP 2.149) The idea will grow, and gain power and generality. But in its kernel, somewhere in its heart, a reverse process begins to breed, a process of degeneration. Even the most accurate formulae, say of Einstein, will turn one day into historical documents or into giant metaphors. This is the consequence of the self-correctness of the progress. It is also a paradox – the aspiration toward expansion presupposes its own death and a need for a new precision. In other words, even the most precise principle of law through time turns into a beautiful metaphor. Thus the main objective of this book is to extract the exactness’ of Peirce’s philosophical theories while keeping their metaphorical beauty. Perhaps, as time passes, a growing number of Peirce’s philosophical concepts will be seen as generative metaphors for the state of science in his day. If in a hundred years from now the entire philosophy of Peirce dries out, dismissed by the progress of human thought, something will still remain from it – the persistent claim that our hypotheses are fallible and need to be selfcorrecting. Peirce’s pragmaticism and his theory of signs are extremely abstract. They try to generalize a great expanse of meaning and to define the phenomena through action and growth. It is hard to maintain the scientific minimum using this method, but on closer inspection this does not appear to fall short of the demands of contemporary science after Peirce’s claim that his theories also embrace the reality of possibility. This allows him to stress: If pragmatism is the doctrine that every conception is a conception of conceivable practical effects, it makes conception reach far beyond the practical. It allows any flight of imagination, provided this imagination ultimately alights upon a possible practical effect. (CP 5.196)
The theoretical framework 35 It seems like Peirce himself has prepared his work for ‘a future flight’ of the metaphors. The key idea of the present book is to avoid the extremes in some of the outlined hypotheses and to offer my own long-lasting concept on the basis of what is of permanent value in Peirce’s philosophy. Many Peircean philosophers have successfully undertaken the latter task. The study that will be carried out in this book, though, will try to reveal the implications of some of Peirce’s own unexplored notions, which he sometimes metaphorizes or, about which he made incomplete statements. Unlike Peirce’s critics, who used to see his unfinished system as ‘a castle in the air’, I believe that a careful study of the plan of this castle will bring it into sharper focus so that the eye can enjoy the finer details. If we take the castle metaphor literally, i.e. without conceptualizing it, we may say that were there a real castle, even a solid one with a firm foundation, its walls would sooner or later begin to crack, its towers slant, its beauty diminish with time. ‘The ruins of the great structures’ often say more to the creative mind than the fragments of a real building. The mystery of the sphinx is hidden between the unsaid and the unfinished, which makes its everlasting magnetism real.
2
The categories, the ground and the silent effects
The notion of the ground represents one of the earliest of Peirce’s ideas of what gives rise to any sign. Very soon after ‘On a New List of Categories’ (1867) he replaced it with the idea of Firstness to which he gave more detailed descriptions. In this chapter I will analyse the concept of breadth, depth and information along with the notion of the ground. Then, I will take a different course in an attempt to simplify, modify and make applicable the heuristic reserve of these analyses.
The capacity of a sign Around 1867 Peirce wrote several drafts of his new list in an attempt to merge the numeric nature of his categories with the logical forms of judgement. According to Murphey (1961: 56) Peirce began the study of logic by 1864 ‘in order to correct the table of functions of judgment, then the first interest was the theory of proposition’. A very important part of this work became the outlining of a theory of propositions, served later as basis of his semeiotic. One characteristic has to be underlined in Peirce’s theoretical development, noticed by many researchers: first he devises terms and names, then derives meaning from them, and only later matches the terms with the new entity so that his doctrines retain form under constantly changing terminology. As Murphey (1961: 89) argues: ‘Thus, extensive revisions of position pass unnoticed under a shell of changeless terminology, to the utter confusion of the reader.’ This was the case with the categories ‘Firstness’, ‘Secondness’ and ‘Thirdness’, which have obviously a numerical origin but to which later on Peirce attached a connection to fundamental relations. Now the presupposition underlying the categories is that whatever conditions may be true of thought must be found in the laws governing symbols. The triple reference of symbols – their grounds, their objects and their interpretants – are governed by law. To each of these relations Peirce assigns a particular science: to the first, speculative grammar; to the second, logic; and to the third, speculative rhetoric:
The ground and the silent effects 37 As long ago as 1867 I spoke of a trivium of formal sciences of symbols in general. ‘The first,’ I said, ‘would treat of the formal conditions of symbols having meaning, and this might be called formal grammar; the second, logic, would treat of the formal conditions of the truth of symbols; and the third would treat of the formal conditions of the force of symbols, or their power of appealing to a mind, and this might be called formal rhetoric.’ (CP 4.116) In earlier drafts of his list of categories of the speculative grammar Peirce said that it treats ‘the formal conditions of symbols having meaning, that is of the reference of symbol in general to their grounds or imputed characters …’ (CP 1. 559). He sees logic as treating the formal conditions of the truth of symbols, thus of the relation of symbols to their objects. After 1905, this was called ‘semeiotic’. Rhetoric is concerned with the meaning, or interpretation. Since logic deals with the reference of the symbols to their objects, Peirce turned at once to the question of the nature of the reference. The categories are the fundamental moods of connection among signs and their referents; hence they must also afford the basic principles of combination among the outlined sciences. There are three ways in which a sign can refer to its object. The first one is by a real resemblance, in this case any real similarity constitutes a basis for reference, and a representation, which refers to its object in this way may be called ‘a likeness’ (CP 1.558). (Soon thereafter Peirce renamed those signs ‘icons’.) This relation is derived from the category of quality. The second way is by correspondence in fact between representation and object. Such signs Peirce calls ‘indices’. The third way is by convention, or imputed character. This is a representation regarded as such only because an interpretant sees it so. Thus the signs of this kind are called ‘symbols’. All words are symbols. Peirce further divided symbols into three new subcategories: terms, propositions and arguments. The term refers directly to its ground, the proposition to its ground and correlate, and the argument to ground, correlate and interpretant (CP 1.559). Accordingly, each of these three classes yields a trichotomy of its own, for example the trichotomy of breadth, depth and information ramifies into the related one – of induction, deduction and abduction. By the ‘depth’ of a term, Peirce understood the connotation of analytically derived qualities, i.e. the meaning. Whether the term of the object is true is a matter of denotation, or of breadth. In that sense breadth and depth concern the object and the quality. To exemplify what is meant, the dyadic relations of logical breadth and depth, often called denotation and connotation, have played a great part in logical discussions, but these take their origin in the triadic relation between a sign, its object, and its interpretant sign; and
38 The ground and the silent effects furthermore, the distinction appears as a dichotomy owing to the limitation of the field of thought, which forgets that concepts grow, and that there is thus a third respect in which they may differ, depending on the state of knowledge, or amount of information. (CP 3.608) As for the interpretant, it is a subject of ‘information’. Under ‘information’ Peirce understood ‘the sum of synthetical propositions in which the symbol is subject or predicate, or the information concerning the symbol’ (CP 2.418). Once these triads were settled, Peirce rushed to build on their basis a new triad of propositions. The new trichotomy is thus divided into analytic, extensive and synthetic propositions. An analytic (or connotative) proposition is defined as one ‘immediately determinative only of connotation’. This means for him that the predicate determines the depth of the subject. The extensive one concerns in multiplying the information between the two terms. For the synthetic propositions remain to be determinative both of denotation and connotation and therefore also of information, that is they can be called also informative propositions. Perhaps the chart in Figure 2.1 can clear up and summarize all these classifications. Breadth and depth concern the object and the quality. The interpretant refers to the object and furnishes information on both. The information alone is a sum of synthetic (or informative) propositions. As Peirce concludes: ‘These are the true and obvious relations of breadth and depth. They will be naturally suggested if we term the information the area, and write—Breadth × Depth = Area’ (CP. 2.419). When
Figure 2.1 The trichotomy of breadth, depth and information.
The ground and the silent effects 39 all new triads were established, Peirce went on to prove their irreducibility to other forms of inference. Then he showed that the triads could be derived from the categories. Finally, he was ready to claim that all inferences could now be regarded as instances of the sign relations, and the difference among signs afford a clue for the difference among inferences. Each form of a sign, taken as a middle term, should afford a way of combining the other two. This was a decisive step in proving that the categories are fundamental even in the bulk of inferences and signs. But what Peirce believed to be his greatest merit in outlining the new categories was their flexibility and dynamics. He was now confident that his categories could hold true, even when they represent the concepts as they grow and change. This enabled him to outline his ten-fold-classes division of signs, originated also from his new list of categories. In the next sections of this chapter the focus of the study will shift from the universality of Peirce’s categories to the unexplored notion of the ground in an effort to elaborate some of its immense creative potential.
A tulip for itself Next to its unexplored analytical power, the abandoned notion of the ground also possesses a kind of mystery. The latter comes from the virtual impossibility of the ground to be ‘thought of’, imagined or pictured in the consciousness. In this case it will immediately become something else. On the other hand, its alternative, the category of Firstness, is similar to an ‘in itself’ notion: it cannot constitute anything unless it turns into something else. It seems that Peirce claims the same regarding the ground. It has the same qualities as the notion of Firstness but Peirce added that its nature is transitional. (It will be helpful here to offer as a parallel example his notion that ‘no collection of points, no matter how abnumerable its multitude, can in itself constitute space’ (CP 1.319). And this is true, unless the collection becomes other than itself. In the course of defining the ground, Peirce also said that it cannot be abstracted from a relation to anything else but it can shape the phenomenon by reference to it: ‘Reference to a correlate cannot be prescinded from reference to a ground; but reference to a ground may be prescinded from reference to a correlate’ (CP 1.552). Here lies the very fine distinction between the notion of the ground and the one of the Firstness, although Peirce did not concern himself with such a difference. While the latter represents a mere potentiality, the former is a potential creativity. Firstness is passive and waits to become transformed, that is to continue in Secondness and Thirdness. The ground in its turn was described as a potentiality that alone gives raise to ideas. If we take a close look at the next quotation we may obtain a more correct understanding of what Peirce meant by favouring the one over the other notion:
40 The ground and the silent effects A quality is a mere abstract potentiality; and the error of those schools lies in holding that the potential, or possible, is nothing but what the actual makes it to be. It is the error of maintaining that the whole alone is something, and its components, however essential to it, are nothing. (CP 1.422) If we unfold this statement, in order to prove its hold, it would still be hard to realize how the abstract aggregate of qualities (‘the whole alone’) is not a mere potentiality too (like its components), which means that both are a dead passivity. On the other hand, Peirce insists that the ground of an idea hints at the actual realization of the idea. Let us try to clear up this with some examples. Imagine we open a graphic-design program because we want to create a computer graphic. We need a flower in our picture and we click on the name ‘flower’. There are thousands of flowers in this program, but we want to see some of them as they are being drawn before our eyes in order to decide which one best matches our purpose. Let’s say that the drawing goes on slowly. We follow each movement of the brush, laying down the lines, curves and colours, until suddenly something ‘clicks’, and we recognize that the computer draws, say, a tulip. First we see the stem, then the leaves, some shadows and in a moment, like after a flash of light, we know that in front of our eyes is a tulip. Where did the ‘clicks’ occur? The easiest answer is – in consciousness. What does this mean? It came after something on the screen was taking shape. Not before a decisive line was drawn were we able to ‘see’ that this was a tulip. Did we ‘see’ a tulip in our imagination before we saw it on the screen? Did we ‘see’ a vague image of a tulip in our imagination on which we were not certain that it would come out as a tulip? In such a strange case we would have an example of a self-representation. Or, did we passively expect to recognize it as a particular object? The drawing, which we recognize although it occurs without our help, is a perfect example of activating a program from our ‘effete mind’. Once started, it finishes what was created in front of us. Without such a ‘program’ we would hardly have known what we saw and what we were thinking of. In this moment our whole Self dived into a directory, where it searched for a suitable aura – a name and a Qualia for the newly appeared object. Our Self supervenes upon the effete mind – everything within and without us, which has the form of a ‘sleeping’ (genetic?) experience. It serves as a laser beam that activates the track of the effete matrix and produces a new image. ‘Supervene’ in this regard may be understood as ‘searching for resemblances’. We assume that our Self is not simply a trope; it is rather an active generator of tropes. This magic moment, when the very transition occurred from the picture of something that could be any plant, to the particular one, to the tulip,
The ground and the silent effects 41 marks the insensible appearance of the ground. This is the third element, the pole of the comparison. In this case, it was ‘shaping a tulip’, an emerging of a tulip from the multitude of all possible plants. Like a momentous opening of an aperture, where the object in focus is photographed, a ‘tulip-ness’ appears as an idea in our consciousness. The change from the shapelessness to the tulip-ness is instantaneous and is not fixed. It is different for different people. For one it comes faster, for another slower. As with the sensation of the musical tone, it depends on the speed with which a previously existing perception of a tulip recognizes the unknown phenomenon as belonging to the types of tulips. This is a process of lightning-fast comparison to other tulip examples, which constitute our experience. All these processes take place in our ‘effete mind’. (The computer specialists know also the reverse case, when they teach the machine to recognize human voices on the basis of a previously installed voice. Then there is a magic moment for the machine when it suddenly starts to know who is talking to it.) Now a superfluous conception is an arbitrary fiction, whereas elementary conceptions arise only upon the requirement of experience; so that a superfluous elementary conception is impossible. Moreover, the conception of a pure abstraction is indispensable, because we cannot comprehend an agreement of two things, except as an agreement in some respect, and this respect is such a pure abstraction as blackness. Such a pure abstraction, reference to which constitutes a quality or general attribute, may be termed a ground. (CP 1.551) Obviously, an agreement of two absolutely equal things would not be an agreement because there would not be two of them (if they are one and the same). The notion ‘an agreement in some respect’ is very important because it opens the door for unlimited semiosis. It is an important concept also because it shows one of the earliest efforts of Peirce to oppose to arbitrariness of the sign. As Carl Hausman argues: One reason for the resistance to arbitrariness has been overlooked by some commentators who believe themselves to be adopting Peirce’s theory of sign. The reason lies in what Peirce says about the way a sign stands for something in some respect. The respect is the ground of the sign or representamen. It is ‘a sort of Platonic Idea’. (1993: 9) No unlimited approximation (to ‘blackness’ in this case) can ever fully exhaust the general of blackness; hence the latter creates an openended ness of a possible interpretation. How could the ground be studied?
42 The ground and the silent effects We have seen that it appears differently for different people and its instantaneous coming is insensible. Well, this might be the reason Peirce gave up this fascinating idea. Too many ‘for itselfs’ and ‘without regards to anything elses’ have shaken his confidence in carrying on with further research. His next idea of Firstness was included in the triad with the other two categories, Secondness and Thirdness. Then it was loaded with fundamentality and served as a basic notion of his philosophical system. But the idea of the ground possessing an inexhaustible heuristic creativity is to be seen in his semeiotic, where it is perfectly suited to explain the transition of signs. The notion of the ground revived in the purely imaginable sign of quality, independent of anything else, which Peirce called a qualisign. A Qualisign (e.g. a feeling of ‘red’) is any quality in so far as it is a sign. Since a quality is whatever it is positively in itself, a quality can only denote an object by virtue of some common ingredient or similarity; so that a Qualisign is necessarily an Icon. Further, since a quality is a mere logical possibility, it can only be interpreted as a sign of essence, that is, as a Rheme. (CP 2.254) If we try to elaborate further the ground notion we can follow the open direction of its influence to the ‘correlate’ (a relation between two objects) and the searching Self or our lost third element. In order to start we may recall one of the most frequently quoted definitions of the ground and then continue on a different route: ‘The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen’ (CP 2.228).
Odour as Other Two of the examples most frequently used by Peirce for a ground, and later for Firstness, were the quality of aroma and the sense of colour. Let’s read in full one of his earliest notions of smell: A mere presentment may be a sign. When the traditional blind man said he thought scarlet must be something like the sound of a trumpet, he had caught its blatancy very well; and the sound is certainly a presentment, whether the color is so or not. Some colors are called gay, others sad. The sentiment of tones is even more familiar; that is, tones are signs of visceral qualities of feeling. But the best example is that of odors, for these are signs in more than one way. It is a common observation that odors bring back old memories. This I think must be due, in part at least, to the fact that, whether from the peculiar connection of the olfactory nerve with the brain or from some other
The ground and the silent effects 43 cause, odors have a remarkable tendency to presentmentate themselves, that is to occupy the entire field of consciousness, so that one almost lives for the moment in a world of odour. Now in the vacuity of this world, there is nothing to obstruct the suggestions of association. That is one way, namely by contiguous association, in which odours are particularly apt to act as signs. But they also have a remarkable power of calling to mind mental and spiritual qualities. This must be an effect of resemblance-association, if under resemblance-association we include all natural associations of different ideas. I certainly would do this; for I do not know what else resemblance can consist in. (CP 1.313) At first sight it seems that Peirce does not say anything here of great novelty; his remarks sound comparable to thousands of other statements. The chief quality of the odour, according to Peirce, is its connection to the olfactory nerve and from there on to the brain. It is this remarkable connection that brings to life its ability of total self-presentation, which leads to a momentum occupation of the entire field of consciousness. The latter effect triggers a resemblance-association that brings back old memories. It is that notion of the momentum occupation of the consciousness by a total self-presentation which is the original nucleus of Peirce’s statement. When the wholeness of the consciousness is entirely taken up by just one effect, the latter can change the path of any instant semiosis and, of course, revive forgotten memories. Can this effect be controlled and directed? This is a question with which Peirce did not concern himself. But his contribution to the revealed point is enormously inventive. We may observe similar mechanisms of acting by the audible or sensational effects. What is to be added here is that those effects are even stronger if they act in combination with others. Today, for example, there is a special kind of therapy, where different aromas and specific music are combined. In many art-installations similar effects can be achieved as well. But even the classical authors can purposely evoke memories by describing a sharp contrast between two scenes, say of emptiness (or absence of any effects) and another one full of colours and aromas. What actually happens when a wholeness of consciousness is instantaneously taken up by the ground effect? The ground effect is shapeless and noun-less, something that has just occurred but has not yet presented itself to the consciousness; that is, the consciousness has not yet shaped it. Its appearance resembles that of Secondness, when a push occurs and, immediately after that, a total change or a turn of a direction may follow. We smell something that returns us to our past days. How does this happen? In this same moment when the whole consciousness is occupied by the smell, our ‘Self’ is dismissed. An Otherness has replaced it. But we know that our self-consciousness does not know anyone else but its own
44 The ground and the silent effects ‘selfness’. It only plays different roles, so what has happened is a momentum freezing of the self-interpreting process. Its projection to the brain (its ground?) has stopped for a moment and has not produced a chain of interpretants. The self-consciousness has become iconized. Other has been seen as odour. It is again ‘we’ who identify with the odour, but ‘we’ were projected ourselves as some ‘Other’. Thus a pleasure effect has been derived, which comes from the adding of one more sense-dimension to our searching Self.
Vagueness-saturation We need to delve deeper in the process of the iconization of the Self in order to grasp the work of the ground. The conception of abstraction requires the notion of an agreement in some respect (the latter has to do with the capacity of the sign). The endless approximation to abstraction is the only way of featuring the ground. The ground cannot be known as a phenomenon but rather as a relation ‘in some respect’. These approximations can be followed from the sign to its object and from the sign to its interpretant. To both sides the approximations will create a meaning deficiency, which is the materialization of the ‘in-some-respect-relation’. We are talking here of sign-creation or of semiosis. The infinity of the semiosis is due to the relationship of the sign to its object on one side, and to its interpretant on the other. On both sides there is room for sense (or meaning) deficiency. We have seen that meaning deficiency could be taken as a synonym of ‘in some-respect’ relation. Meaning deficiency is that which is left by the endless approximation to the abstractness of the ground; in other words, this is the immediate result of its inexhaustibility. According to Peirce, the relations between the sign and its object leave space for further determination ‘in breadth’, whereas the relation between the sign and its interpretant is a source of indefiniteness ‘in depth’. Thus, one of the reasons for the infinity of the interpretation is vagueness, left by the progress of knowledge (semiosis). Peirce dwells on two types of indefiniteness: in connection with the object and with the interpretant. What causes vagueness is indefiniteness in depth, so that it comes into the domain of the interpretant. Let me try to simplify my first scheme, and to prove its analytical applicability to the effects of our everyday life (see Figure 2.2). If the process of attaining knowledge is seen as aimed at a certain final point where all meanings will be implemented and determined, vagueness will be an undesired component. Some scholars, for example Umberto Eco, seem to accept such a tendency as necessary, considering reality as an external world where semiosis must stop ‘at least for some time – outside language – at least in the sense in which not every practical effect is a semiosic one’ (1990: 40). Paradoxically, Eco’s conception does not contradict Peirce’s although it seems that for Peirce semiosis is unlimited by
The ground and the silent effects 45
Figure 2.2 The meaning deficiency.
definition. Eco reminds us that Peirce’s community of inquirers (as an external goal of semiosis) has an ultimate number but produces numberless meaning-combinations, which make the semiosis endless. This transcendental idea supplies the process of indefiniteness with a source of numberless beginnings. Eco points out that such a transcendental principle does not have anything to do with Kantian transcendence ‘because it does not come before but after the semiosis process; it is not the structure of the human mind that produces the interpretation but the reality that the semiosis builds up’ (ibid.: 40). Unlimited semiosis results, i.e. ‘ends’, in the Final Interpretant, the reality somewhere outside of the process, according to Eco. This is true only if we do not forget that we are talking of a transitory or a possible end. The result, or the final interpretant, produces in the long run a habitual tendency that is a disposition of semiosis to act upon the world in order to ascertain a socially shared view of the truth. The following remark of Peirce sheds bright light on the difference between sign-signification and its meaning: As for the ‘meaning’, logicians have recognized since Abelard’s day and earlier that there is one thing which any sign, external or internal, stands for, and another thing which it signifies; its denoted breadth, its ‘connoted’ depth. They have further generally held, in regard to the most important signs, that the depth, or signification, is intrinsic, the breadth extrinsic. (CP 8.119) Now, let us turn back to our perception of the ground effects. Peirce did not have in mind semiosis in the sense of a free reading or a ‘drift’ insofar as he barely cared about reading literary texts at all. We can only speculate on his personal view about literariness. According to him, the characteristics of such a community are its independence and its work towards a
46 The ground and the silent effects habit-taking tendency. We may then conclude, with a great amount of certainty, that its members produce various sets of combinations (texts) whereas the original truth is verifiable. The community does not read one initial text in an endlessly free process of ‘drifting’, but sets up new texts that are isomorphic to the original one. In this respect Peirce’s classes of signs, for example, have to be understood as a continuously functioning system where signs are reciprocally transformed one into another. The sign process presupposes such transformation although Peirce did not observe it. The system functions neither as a chain, nor as sets of paradigms, but as a network of basic references. Connecting signs does not mean affecting signs that are only immediate neighbours. It is, rather, a mosaic-like running process that goes on accompanied by a moving vagueness. Eco actually shares Derrida’s view that Peirce’s phenomenology does not reveal ‘a presence’. As he continues: But if the sign does not reveal the thing itself, the process of semiosis produces in the long run a socially shared notion of the thing that the community is engaged to take as if it were in itself true. The transcendental meaning is not at the origins of the process but it must be postulated as a possible and transitory end of every process. (1990: 41) The core of the dispute here is the automatically added ‘in itself’. What Derrida and Eco say is true for the metaphysical level on which they were outlining their arguments but it has not been Peirce’s concern, at least not here. Considering the ‘transcendence’ of meaning, Peirce meant a meaning achieved ‘outside’ of a particular semiosis but within its producers, the community of inquirers, and not as a transcendental truth of the ‘thing in itself’. Peirce’s point is that the sign as a sign does not aim at the thing itself, but at its object, which is another sign where the process of revealing this object goes on like an endless regress. And here is the binary trap, in which Derrida’s claim falls: For the paradox is that the metaphysical reduction of the sign needed the opposition it was reducing. The opposition is systematic with the reduction. And what we are saying here about the sign can be extended to all the concepts and all sentences of metaphysics, in particular to the discourse on ‘structure’. (1978: 281) Peirce reminds us that every sign stands for its object independent of itself, but it can only be a sign of that object insofar as that object is itself of the nature of a sign. Object from reality to which we point out, or which we see, are ultimate objects, or ‘brute facts’. At the same moment when we
The ground and the silent effects 47 start to think of them, or even to think ‘how’ we see them, in other words, when we start ‘to communicate them’, these objects turn into signs. This contradicts Eco’s postulate for transcendental meaning, which, according to him, is at the heart of the process of continuously approximating the thing (but not ‘the thing itself’). The community of knowers produces various sets of texts in which the sign as a ‘thing’ is isomorphic to the approximating object. In searching for this ultimate object our supervenient Self is interacting between its nature as a sign in thought, and its ‘brute-ness’ as a material entity. Explaining the need of pronouns and indices, Peirce argues that ‘The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description’ (CP 3.363). The work of tokens (symbols) toward a habittaking tendency (or generalization) within the semiotic field dilutes the sign-classes’ boundaries. They are fuzzy, notwithstanding the extension of the mathematical categories applied to them. The work of the signs towards the community of scholars on this macro-level closely resembles the work of the ground in regard to its meaning-deficiency effects on a micro-level. Knowing the latter, one would hardly confuse it with the former.
Framing Revealing the ground effects resembles walking on the edge of a razor: on one side there is a high abstraction, on the other a pure nebulosity. But the danger of slipping into the latter is generously compensated by a comprehension of a large body of thoughts hidden in an unsaved corps of data. Those effects can play the role of a human search system for lost pieces of meaning. The chief lesson the ground effects can teach us is never to forget the iconic origin of the entire human knowledge, and thereafter its iconic presentations and our respective approaches. Even the principles of the most abstract disciplines, such as physics and mathematics, rely on observation. One of the most frequently repeated notions of Peirce on mathematics is about its observational nature. In order to justify this view with the one about its deductive nature, Peirce just equates them. Observation in mathematics is diagrammatic: hence, it deals with icons. An icon must be a part of every sign. (Throughout the book the study that will be carried out relies on Peirce’s ten-folddivision of signs. See Figure 3.1. and the related explanations on p. 60.)
The truth, however, appears to be that all deductive reasoning, even simple syllogism, involves an element of observation; namely, deduction consists in constructing an icon or diagram the relations of whose parts shall present a complete analogy with those of the parts of the object of reasoning, of experimenting upon this image in the imagina-
48 The ground and the silent effects tion, and of observing the result so as to discover unnoticed and hidden relations among the parts (CP 3.363). Peirce further explains how iconic reasoning continues into the human mind: He makes in his imagination a sort of skeleton diagram, or outline sketch of himself, considers what modifications the hypothetical state of things would require to be made in that picture, and then examines it, that is observes what he has imagined, to see whether the same ardent desire is there to be discerned. (CP 2.227) Following the logic of vagueness, we may also say that iconicity does not consist of icons only. Diagrams, sketches and other incomplete signs may also carry some kind of iconicity and fill out the pictures of our imagination. This ‘degenerate iconicity’ produces a vagueness that facilitates a projection of knowledge processes into the mind. A diagram signifies more generally than a pure icon, i.e. it points to something beyond its object. The common use of ‘pure icon’ needs to be examined since it is often incorrectly explored either as a metaphor or as a methodological tool. Although a large agreement has been achieved on the nature of iconicity, there is still a need for several stipulations to be done each time there is a mention of an iconic sign. For example, does iconicity obtain a different quality when it is seen as incorporated in a more complex sign, such as a Qualisign? Peirce gives only a few examples for Qualisigns that barely can carry out any system of iconicity as much broader phenomenon. Is ‘emptiness’ an iconic sign of … what? Do we really perceive iconicity as neutral, that is purely by virtue of its similarity to some objects? Do we need to know the object of a Qualisign? Each time we shape a Qualisign in our imagination, it becomes something else, maybe Sinsign. Would it not be more correct to say that a Qualisign only directs (‘calls on our attention’) our perceptions towards a possible object? Since there is no sign unless it is interpreted, and the Qualisign represents only a hint at its objects, it follows that the Qualisign is to be seen as an unfolded relation. Its interpretant is rhematic, its object is anticipated, and in itself it has to be finished, i.e. to be embedded. How about calling its appearance ‘supervenience’? We mentioned the question about the equation between emptiness, e.g. a blank space on the page between two paragraphs, and a pure iconic sign. Now, let us move further and ask whether iconicity in the visual world can be equated with silence in the audible one. What would be the reason of such a relationship? Of what kind is the iconicity in literature? Does it have anything in common with the one in music, or in painting? Should we take into consideration the difference of the expressive forms (tones,
The ground and the silent effects 49 words, colours) as crucial and delve into them, rather than to reveal the iconic effects in the consciousness? Focusing on the pure icon, when contemplating a certain picture, Peirce says: ‘But in the middle part of our reasoning we forget that abstractness in great measure, and the diagram is for us the very thing’ (CP 3.362). Further, he talks for a moment of a ‘pure dream’ where the boundaries between the real and the copy are eroded and we perceive the picture in front of our eyes as something ‘fictional and yet not particular’. These words, spoken by a philosopher and mathematician, though arguable are not quite impressive. We could recall another prominent scholar, Wittgenstein, writing on the same issue: the danger of making distinctions between the concept of a material object (his example is a triangle) in terms of ‘what is really seen … This triangle can be seen as triangular hole, as a solid, a geometrical drawing, … as a mountain, as a wedge, as an arrow or pointer …’ (1958: 200). Let us use the same example but take a slightly different route than Wittgenstein’s. Suppose we see this triangle framed and exhibited in art gallery. What would be our most likely reaction? Of course, it depends again on the perspective and on the context, and, one could add, on a person’s education, on his momentum mood, on the lighting, on the surrounding noises, etc. In any case, it would be not unusual if most people thought of some peculiar but yet artistically shared view of reality. Suppose that we lay down our eyes and see another picture of the same triangle but with the characters ABC on its apex. The possibilities of seeing it as anything else but a triangle would be drastically cut off. (We are not asking here what supposedly one could ‘see’ beyond the geometrical figure ‘triangle’.) Even before, in the first picture, there was no ‘thing’ and, respectively, no object behind this triangle on which one could reflect. It would be difficult to ‘fall into a dream’ (except if you are not C. S. Peirce himself) or, rather, the dream would be broken, especially in the latter case. The suggestions may continue: What if the background of the same ABC-signified triangle was aggressively coloured or even surrounded by other figures? Or what would our reaction be if we were to see mathematical formulae in a frame or a simple equation? Of course, we could strengthen our insistence that these are pictures if there were some inscriptions below, pointing to names like Kandinski, Mondrian, Klee and Schiele. This insistence becomes even stronger if they were arranged next to each other in a gallery and its name is well known. And here we suddenly hit on the point: to arrange in a specific way, to deal with the effects of the surrounding atmosphere, to increase the level of the silence. The equation, the signified triangle, represents ‘brute facts’ in Peirce’s sense, pieces of actuality, though highly abstract, something that deals with the regular law. It has to be, literally, overshadowed by an accumulated silence of the outside space. The more brute facts we have before us the stronger need we feel to exceed the effects of the context:
50 The ground and the silent effects that is, the field of possibilities, the vagueness. The law, the rigorous order of the picture needs to be counterbalanced by an increasing disorder of the surrounded semiosis. These effects (re)conceptualize the picture.
Engraved silence We inhabit a giant sphere of a cosmic silence ‘perfused’ with all kinds of noises. The silence outside our window has nothing to do with the one in the concert room a moment before the raising of the curtain. The latter can even be marked on the score by the beat of the conductor. As Littlefield (1993: 326) points out: ‘This beginning silence serves as a callto-attention.’ Call-to-attention, according to Peirce, is Firstness. It differs from the pauses, which are parts of the music, and participate in the wholeness of the performance as well. The musical phrase breathes; it sounds, fades away, or silences. As mentioned before, the conductor marks it until the entrance of the next instruments. There is no movement in this silence except the beat, preceding the beat on which the first sound is produced. The beginning silence, which is not yet signalled by any gesture of the conductor, occurs a brief moment before his baton ‘shapes it’ as a part of the following music. This silence could be seen as a rhematic-iconic-qualisign. The stress on ‘seen’ marks the understanding that the absence of sound can be equated with the lack of a visible picture. The mere feeling can be abstracted from any kind of sign, whether it be visual, audible or material. It simply shows that something unknown, yet certain, will occur next. It does not point to the music, it resembles it by virtue of its organized absence. Once music emerges, the silent effects play a significant role in its dynamic, not only framing it but also facilitating the transition between new phrases. We may also say, it starts to derive meaning by activating the programs of the effete mind. Or we can say something from the point of view of the earlier notion on the supervenient Self. It supervenes onto the silent moments. We ‘hear’ its searching for similarity, for something which will disarm our inner senses. Dealing with a sign, although a sign of silence, we may expect it to generate a set of references or interpretants. More appropriately, we could talk of a zone of interpretants, taking into consideration the symbolical meaning of the opera hall, such as going to the opera as an index of a certain cultural level, and the specific behaviour and way to listen to the music as a conventionally established habit. The silence within the artistic work shares similar qualities with the sound, like, for example, duration and consistency. It can be seen as a rhematic-iconic-sinsign, which signifies for the listener how each conductor interprets this music. It also differs from the silence right after the falling of the curtain at the end of the
The ground and the silent effects 51 performance, just a moment before the applause. Both kinds of silence form an aura that encloses the event and ritualizes it. More importantly, the silence-signs are transformed one into another and loaded with meaning that helps to reveal hidden relations between the parts of the work. What would an expression like this one mean: ‘there is a lack of silence in this work of art?’ Before answering this question, here is what Reuben Abel says: The frame of a painting, the pedestal of a statue, the proscenium of a theater, the silence that precedes and follows a piece of music, and the space around the cathedral all act to enclose the work of art in what Rilke called a ‘circle of solitude’. Thus it is experienced as an isolated, unified, instantaneous presence. (1976: 258) Here the silence is seen as a gap that separates everyday experience from the mystery of the work of art. My goal is to reason on the floating silence that veils the piece of art and that can be intensified or declined, depending on the artist’s intention. The frame, the pedestal, the proscenium represent an engraved silence that freezes for a moment the glide of the eye over the surface. Their nature is material; they are what Peirce would call brute facts, with a minor aesthetic value in themselves, yet they act as a space of discontinuity in the dialogue between the work and the recipient. Turning back to the veiled silence, it may be said that notwithstanding its floating nature, it possesses a semiotic structure. At first sight it seems like this is a sphere of the Thirds, a net of Interpretants. And in a certain way it is, if we take it as a vehicle that conveys aesthetic and cognitive effects to be produced in the contemplator’s consciousness. But seen from the side of the work itself, it has more of the nature of Peirce’s concept of the ground. This web of sign-potentiality carries out the appeal of what the work of art might be if it were only for itself. It is a rescinded quality from the condensed silence that is the piece of art. The ground is the nucleus of the sign and, yet, it is to be found in each of the sign-elements, so that we may say it is a relation or, more specifically, a relation of potential creativity. The silence- and the frame-effects, those of odour and shape, all these represent a sleeping, yet influential potentiality of our everyday life. These are phenomena’s ground effects. Being potentially creative in the domain of the art work, that is in phenomena saturated with a frozen silence, the ground may also be determined as an intensified ‘no-thingness’, according to Peirce’s cosmological terminology. Despite the fact that Peirce replaced the concept of the ground with the notion of Firstness, it is possible to further conceive the ground’s effects as belonging to the realm of sleeping potentialities with the whole danger of such an oxymoronic
52 The ground and the silent effects expression. It is a notion quite similar if not equal to the one of the effete mind, which I will analyse later in the book. The notion of the ground even as a transitional idea by Peirce can help the elaboration of his thought in areas that he did not work on, especially if combined with the contemporary notion of the supervenient Self. The same is valid for the notion of the effete mind, which is much broader and full of potential elaboration. The ground effects can be seen as one possible embodiment of the idea of the effete mind. These effects may be intentionally revived and guided by the artist, loaded with potentiality, actuality and conventionality, just as any other effects can be. Indeed, such techniques lie at the very heart of the method I choose to call ‘conceptualizing metaphors’.
3
Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia C. S. Peirce and M. M. Bakhtin
The present book is about the forsaken ideas whereas Peirce’s discussion of unlimited semiosis is not among the less elaborated ones. On the contrary, it is one of the most important of his ideas of sign. As a semiotic notion it is largely exploited in many related areas. However, it is not often used as an analytical tool to examine literature or other works of art. In this chapter I will employ this notion in conjunction with M. M. Bakhtin’s doctrine of ‘heteroglossia’. By incorporating both models into the idea of the effete mind, I will conceptualize a part of literary text in order to demonstrate the efficiency of the new method. The ten-fold division of signs will be represented in a slightly modified way from the one by Peirce. In a subsequent chart the work of the ten-fold division will be demonstrated. This basic scheme is the same throughout the book, where the transforms of signs are shown.
Iconicity and polyphony In his 1929 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art, M. M. Bakhtin first popularized the theses of dialogism and polyphony, which deal with the harmonizing and autonomy of characters’ voices and emphasize contextual relations. These theses, along with carnivalization, derived from the work of Rabelais, became crucial for Bakhtin. (In fact, polyphony and carnivalization are manifestations of the broader phenomenon heteroglossia.) Subsequently Bakhtin often clarified and redefined these terms, rendering them more precisely. More and more he delved into the plurality and independence of many language-ness of artistic discourse. Bakhtin’s preoccupation with Dostoevsky’s novels is understandable in that Dostoevsky is not only a novelist, but also a moralist and a great thinker. It is quite possible to talk about Dostoevsky’s philosophy or even literary criticism, although they are often unsystematic and sometimes selfcontradictory. The same can be said of Bakhtin’s theses, whose formulations can be identified in Dostoevsky as artistic principles. What Bakhtin actually did was to calibrate more systematically ideas about the different voices, Otherness and polyphony already inherent in the novels.
54 Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia Bakhtin, as a zealous reader of Dostoevsky, was engaged in a constant dialogue with the latter’s heroes. Like Bakhtin, Peirce defines and redefines his basic terms, elaborating the formulae of the sign, sign-process and other key theses. Let us start with Bakhtin’s widely adopted term polyphony. For Bakhtin polyphony is an umbrella term over all interactive processes among the characters in artistic discourse. The individual speeches, genres and languages with their own voices in a literary work strive for harmony, which unites the structure of the whole. A more abstract term for this interaction, one that embraces the notion of harmony as well, is ‘heteroglossia’ (literally: ‘different voices’). Sometimes dialogue is used in a comprehensive sense, but it will be more precise in taking heteroglossia as a theoretical model and dialogue as a practical manifestation. Among the numerous explanations of polyphony given by Bakhtin is this one: An idea here is indeed neither a principle of the representation (as in any ordinary novel), nor the leitmotif of representation, nor a conclusion drawn from it … it is rather the object of representation. As a principle for visualizing and understanding the world, for shaping the world in the perspective of a given idea, the idea is present only for the characters, and not for Dostoevsky himself as the author. (1984: 24) The semiotic aspect of this statement concerns the idea as represented by its iconic part, i.e. by its resemblance or similarity to other ideas. A set of iconic signs, like a system of mirrors, can reveal ‘the idea as an object of representation’. Iconicity in text will generally mean different viewpoints, unguided by the author. The acts of protagonists then will resemble the lightning of a laser-pointer directed to a common object: the idea. In other parts of this book parallels are drawn between these ‘laser-pointers’ (or ‘seeking Selves’, or ‘living mind’) and the ‘effete mind’, which is seen as a continuous object. Dostoevsky’s novels, although deeply philosophic, are penetrated with iconicity. In every character’s speech, visions, hallucinations and nightmares dominate the narrated stories or thoughts. If we carefully follow the plots, we will see that each monologue is preceded by something similar to the setting of a stage: a cascade of pictures prepares the reader for hearing a prophecy rather than a story. Then the same happens in the next chapter: The narrative continues like an endless preparation for something more important that will come later, but instead only a new stage has been set, or rather a new system of mirrors. The plot lines are split, the ideas are vague, although they seem like they will be clarified in the next paragraph. But this expectation remains unfulfilled until the last sentence. This method can be compared to the developing of a photographic negative. The process continues until the new image appears, only the outcome looks different from what was
Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia 55 expected. Seeking a final meaning of a story by Dostoevsky resembles opening a series of Chinese boxes (or a ‘Matryoshka’ set). For Bakhtin a sign can live as a sign only if it appears as something other than itself, only in a dialogue with another sign of the contextual relations. Bakhtin speaks for an interior dialogue that is micro-dialogue in every sentence. Furthermore he found a dialogue even at the level of the single word, a double-voiced word. As David K. Danow claims: ‘The word … is conceived as a sign not only bearing meaning, or having a referent, but as being potentially engaged in continuous dialogue’ (Danow 1991: 24). For Peirce too, there is a sign only if it is mediated by its interpretant: i.e. there is no sign without the other sign, which interprets it. Each time this occurs, the interpretant in its turn becomes another sign. The identity of the sign (its meaning) lies in the field of mediation between the sign and its interpretant. It may be rather surprising to recognize in the following sentence Peirce’s (not Bakhtin’s) thoughts: ‘And the existence of a cognition is not something actual, but consists in the fact that under certain circumstances some other cognition will arise’ (CP 7.357).
Seeing and listening The roles that iconicity plays in dialogue can be best explicated from Peirce’s argument on this topic where he undertakes the medieval scholastic view. According to Peirce, to recognize something as being ‘red’ means to interpret actual cases of seeing the colour as similar to other possible occurrences of the sighting of red, and hence as a sign of the quality of red in these other possible occurrences. Or, in Peirce’s words: Two objects can only be regarded as similar if they can be compared and brought together in the mind … It is plain that the knowledge that one thought is similar to or in any way truly representative of another, cannot be derived from immediate perception, but must be a hypothesis. (CP 5.288) The idea here is that seeing is not a kind of passive registration of sets of pictures. It is rather a process comparable to reading. To see something as red, green, grey does not mean that all occurrences of red, green, grey are equal each time we see them, but that our minds have produced a series of comparisons (hypotheses, according to Peirce). Only the final result of this thought-like process could be named seeing something as green, which means recognizing the greenness. So, what we see as green depends, in fact, on our experience of greenness. Now, in order to stick closer to Peirce’s idea here, we have to take a step further and to conclude along
56 Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia with his hint that our perception of ‘this green’ relies on our thought. Or, as Murphey argues: For Peirce, then, color is a concept, which is applied to the manifold of impressions as an explaining hypothesis; it is not therefore an impression itself. The term ‘impression’ is thus restricted to the instantaneous neurological stimuli, which occasion the concept and are related by it. (1961: 71) This means that colour is similar to an expression, or even to a thought rather than being seen as a singular element. Murphey went on to quote an unpublished draft of a Peirce manuscript where the same judgement is made. Peirce compares the simplest colour to a piece of music – the perception of both depends on the relations between different parts of the impression. The impression of colour is not repeatable each time we see the same colour. Pierce saw differences between colours as differences between harmonies; a new impression has to be harmonized with a previous experience of the same perception. To comprehend the differences between the colours we must be conscious of the elementary impressions whose relation creates the harmony. The conclusion is that the colour is not an impression, but an inference. Such an understanding can explain why a particular human mood is expressible in music with relative accuracy, but a colour is not. Why, for example, can a musical tone sound cheerful or sad, but cannot depict redness or blueness? If we follow Peirce, we may answer that the perceptions of colour are complex and cannot be harmonized in only one tone. For Peirce perceptions or sensations are mental representations determined by a series of comparisons grounded in the previous experience. Those comparisons are represented in the mind, and with each subsequent appearance their details are less sharply defined. But how can one differentiate among the manifold sensations? What differentiates the perception of music from the one of colour, or of literature? We are thus approaching the medieval question of the ‘images in the mind’, but from an unusual perspective. If comparison and reflection are the only mental tools for recognizing the impressions, how can we know which are the tools and which are the results? In this book we will try to outline the process of transformation of signs by which we recognize our thoughts. But how can we be sure that we are not confusing impression with perception and sensation? We have seen that for Peirce colour is an explaining concept, thus it is not inseparable from itself, but a result of a complicated process of comparison. What the colour seems to contain is an element of generality that is found in all instances and in the final impression. According to Peirce, the universal conception that is ‘nearest to sense is that of the present in general’ (CP 1. 547). It is a conception because it is universal.
Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia 57 However, the present in general does not seem to be inseparable from itself. It is, rather, a general relation. If we return to a more strict version of Peirce’s terminology as well as an ‘atomic’ level of analysis, we could say that a quality is not just the sensory data of a particular thing, but a unit, separable and extractable from its occasional occurrence, which can be shared by more than one object. What follows is that every sign, conveying some information about the quality of its object, must involve, at least in part, a ‘qualisign’, or a sign of an iconic nature. As already mentioned, if the quality ‘redness’ depends on our experience – in other words, is in our thoughts – it follows that it grows and changes, that is the iconic is subject to interpretation. In a footnote Peirce says: I am not so wild as to deny that my sensation of red today is like my sensation of red yesterday. I only say that the similarity can consist only in the physiological force behind consciousness – which leads me to say, I recognize this feeling the same as the former one, and so does not consist in a community of sensations. (CP 5.289) But how can the iconic sign be subject to interpretation, if iconicity means a full similarity? How can an iconic sign keep its generality, and hence, its interpretability, if it is absolutely equal to its object? Does it follow the same rules as any other sign-interpretation? Are these rules cognizable? If ‘yes’, can they be used by the authors purposely in varying artistic discourses?
Signs and silhouettes That which gives rise to growth is the self-generative power inherently existing in the sign. Semiosis is a continuous process of interpretation. The infinity of the sign-interpretation results from the triadic definition of a sign. There is no other way for Peirce to define a pure icon, except as a ‘possibility’ or a monadic quality. The quality has to be one and the same in both, sign and its object, in order to be recognized as a pure icon. If there were a monadic quality, it would act as a sign of itself while retaining its identity; in other words, it would become the same old Kantian ‘thingin-itself’. Peirce overlooks this problem, accepting that even an idea, except in the sense of a possibility, or Firstness, cannot be an Icon. ‘A possibility alone is an Icon purely by virtue of its quality; and its object can only be a Firstness’ (CP 2.276). Furthermore he applied the same solution to words. In order to refer to an individual and still retain their generality, all words have to be legisigns. But at the same time, they are symbolically related to their objects, that is they are interpreted as related to their objects. Only by conveying some
58 Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia information about the quality of its object can any sign take part in semiosis, in communication and in extending of knowledge, in other words, can it be a sign. (A sign has to carry information and to be able to communicate this information.) To do that, any sign, which contains some new code, has to convey a nucleus of something known, an iconic similarity, which will enable its understanding. This is the only reason why, when speaking about words and meaning, one must mention icons. Of course, words are not icons, but they are capable of producing iconic effects. Words in literary texts can produce iconic effects, by virtue of which we recognize signs. When we read we do not see icons, indices or symbols before our eyes. What we read is a set of legisigns, as already mentioned; what we interpret is quite another thing. It is surprising to what great extent our readings are similar. We follow similar patterns to read and interpret signs, as if they were live pictures, a kind of coded ‘payper-view’. In our consciousness we decode those pictures and classify (or store) them in different programs such as ‘important to remember’, ‘less important’ and ‘archive’. We lay these categorizations down into the tracks of the effete mind. All this is possible because the signs reproduced in consciousness, being only silhouettes of the virtual pictures from reality, have looser relations to their ‘grounds’ and, similarly, to their objects. This is so because of the different way of establishing a meaning of the sign in each consciousness (seeing something as red depends on our individual case of a first recognition of red, as very young children, and on the following generalization of this individual act). But the way of establishing meaning in the mind takes time. As already mentioned, each sign inherently possesses a kind of generality, which in its turn means that its interpretation demands continuity. Peirce understood continuity as a real generality, which has not to be reduced to a set of its actual instances. Seeing pictures from reality means recognizing the signs represented in consciousness, in other words, reading them. The latter is a process that occurs in time and occupies time. As a next step, creating a meaning would mean establishing an inner dialogue in which a triadic relation is to be set. For Peirce, as for Bakhtin, meaning is essentially a three-term relation. A sign relates to a particular object but the latter can never exhaust its meaning, because this relation is ‘in-some-respect’ only, that is a sign is endlessly interpretable. This unlimited interpretation occurs in a dialogue, often an internalized one, when a person communicates with himself, taking on the part of the Other. In order that the fact should come to light that the method of graphs really accomplishes this marvelous result, it is first of all needful, or at least highly desirable, that the reader should have thoroughly assimilated, in all its parts, the truth that thinking always proceeds in the form of a dialogue – a dialogue between different phases of the Ego – so that, being dialogical, it is essentially composed of signs, as its
Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia 59 matter, in the sense in which a game of chess has the chessmen for its matter. (CP 4.6) At a higher level of abstraction, interpretation might be considered as a translation and a sign could be transposed to another level of identification not only by similarity, but also by hypothetical resemblance (for instance, pure icons). A sign may adopt another image and it will not be a result of necessary contiguity. In that case it will no longer be able to obtain its identity – it will be an invented or inspired sign like an invented image from a science-fiction movie or a computer-created graphic.
The logic of seeing Thus arises again the question about the identity of the sign but, as already mentioned, it is to be sought not in the interpreted sign, nor in its object, nor in the interpretant, but in the circulation field between them. The represented object, i.e. the immediate object, is a construct of thought, a product of a sign process and a part of semiosis. It is not the real object, or it is always an incomplete object. No sign gives us facts from reality unchanged by interpretation. Hence, being only a part of a system of producing meaning, no sign can convey to us the whole meaning; consequently there is only a transitional meaning, which is, in other words, a set of viewpoints. The fact that seeing means making hypotheses has a solid base in language: for example, the expression point of view is used both as a visual and mental concept. A different point of view is at the same time a different angle of seeing and of thinking. Bakhtin says: ‘Dostoevsky – to speak paradoxically – thought not in thoughts but in points of view, consciousness, voices’ (1984: 93). We may further deepen our knowledge of seeing by exploring its purely biological sense. Thomas Sebeok writes: The olfactory and gustatory senses are likewise semiochemical. Even in vision, the impact of photons on the retina differentially affects the capacity of the pigment rhodopsin, which fills the rods to absorb light of different wave lengths, the condition for univariance principle. Acoustic and tactile vibrations, and impulses delivered via the thermal senses, are, as well, finally transformed into electrochemical messages. (1991: 15) It would seem that this account does not have much in common with the making of hypotheses, although it confirms the semiotic nature of seeing. Seen as such, it can be found that there are signals (or ‘sinsigns’), which convey outside information and bring it to the mind for further consideration. The entire process starts by activating semiosis from pure iconic
60 Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia indeterminacy to forming hypotheses in the consciousness. Let us here recall that the play of the sign-triads is what causes changes of meaning, not the ‘iconic’, ‘indexical’ or ‘symbolic’ parts of them. We refer here to Peirce’s ten-fold-classes of signs (see Table 3.1). In the chart those signs can represent the changes of the sign-triads (or sign-classes), e.g. rhematiciconic-qualisign, passing into rhematic-iconic-sinsign, etc. A sign ‘in action’, in other words a sign that produces meaning, is never ‘iconic’, ‘indexical’ or ‘symbolic’ only. It is the transformation of the triads such as ‘rhematic-iconic-qualisign’ into dicent-indexical-legisign, for example, which shows the change of one sense into another. (All classes of signs involve lower-level classes or replicas – more immediate triads.) In Peirce’s view the completion of the sign-triads can only go from the bottom of the table, e.g. from rhematic, dicent or argument, up and right. Accordingly, the imaginable lines, which connect the single signs in triads and mark the transition, can also go only up and right. The solid lines show the process of transforming those triads, the doted ones – the possible triads only. This model of illustration is the same throughout the book in the similar charts. (See, for example, Figure 3.1.) Peirce considers the logic of seeing in ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’. There he makes several remarkable suggestions, which are proofs for the creative role of the mind in vision. He claims: ‘We carry away absolutely nothing of the color except the consciousness that we could recognize it’ (CP 5.300). Then he goes a step further: I will now go so far as to say that we have no images even in actual perception. It will be sufficient to prove this in the case of vision … If,
A sign in itself is:
QUALISIGN A quality A pure possibility
SINSIGN Actuality An event or an existent
LEGISIGN A convention A law or type
A sign relates to its object by virtue of:
ICON Some qualitative character with its object
INDEX Some existential relation with its object
SYMBOL Its interpretant (by reason)
The sign is represented by its interpretant as:
RHEME A sign of possibility
DICENT A sign of fact
ARGUMENT A sign of reason
Table 3.1 Peirce’s ten-fold-division of signs.
Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia 61
Figure 3.1 Loading the silence.
then, we have a picture before us when we see, it is one constructed by the mind at the suggestion of previous sensations. (CP 5.303) We can move even deeper in our sensorial life, taking this time a contemporary thesis. In an article called ‘A Modified Concept of Consciousness’, Sperry writes: As we look around the room at different objects in various shapes, shades, and colors, the colors and shapes we experience, along with any associated smells and sounds, are not really out where they seem to be. They are not part of the physical qualities of the outside objects, but instead, like hallucinations or the sensations from an amputated phantom limb, they are entirely inside the brain itself. Perceived colors and sounds, etc. exist within the brain not as epiphenomena, but as real properties of the brain process. (1969: 535) Seeing defines a semiotic process, which takes only the ‘idea’, the pure indeterminate iconicity, from the outside world and brings it to the mind for further treatment and recognition. In other words, shapes, shades, coluors, etc. can be considered as hypothetical devices of consciousness, which uses them as examples for comparisons it makes constantly. Perhaps our sensations could be taken as immediate objects. In other words, starting as rhematic-iconic-qualisigns, they attain their identity as sinsigns or legisigns in the mind.
62 Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia In general, a sign is not a sign until it is interpreted, that is until it becomes a part of a triad which includes an interpretant; consequently, the only way an iconic sign can refer to an individual is by being at the same time indexical. But Peirce also hints at the idea that ‘a sign may be iconic, that is, may represent its object mainly by its similarity no matter what its mode of being’ (CP 2.276). (Here he speaks of hypoiconic, and further he proposed that the iconic is to be divided into three types: images, diagrams and metaphors.) To recapitulate briefly, the formation of hypotheses by the iconic does not flow continuously as in the reading of words. We do not recognize ‘redness’ as continuity of syllogistic premises and consequences, i.e. syntagmatically, but as a result of mosaic-like associations, paradigmatically. Something is red because our cognition of redness tells us so, and because another instance of red has been activated in our consciousness, which interprets what we have seen. What is meant here is that the identification of a sign does not flow as a chain of mechanical synonymous substitutions. It involves inferences of all three types: deduction, induction and abduction. The sign’s identity is attained not because it is recognizable as fixed and definite but, on the contrary, because of its instability, which forces it to appear as something Other in order to be itself. This is similar to what our seeking Self does in order to merge with our personality.
Thirdness and Otherness Both Bakhtin’s and Peirce’s theses agree on this point. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, like Peirce’s, does not presuppose two but three elements. Michael Holquist writes: … it will be helpful to remember that dialogue is not, as is sometimes thought, a dyadic, much less a binary phenomenon. But for schematic purposes it can be reduced to a minimum of three elements having a structure very much like the triadic construction of the linguistic sign; a dialogue is composed of an utterance, a reply, and a relation between the two. It is the relation that is most important of the three, for without it the other two would have no meaning. (1990: 28) This sounds too Hegelian if not Marxist, with its unspecified emphasis on the relation only. In any case it is still a dyadic explanation, which precludes the dialogue between two elements that can be transformed into each other, but cannot interpret each other so that the result is something third. It would be more correct to say that in Bakhtin there is a creative ‘Self’ which implies ‘Other’ as a replica of an ‘I–Other’ construction,
Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia 63 called, at a higher level of abstraction, ‘Otherness’. (Let us here recall Peirce’s internalized dialogue.) Likewise, by reading a story, which is ‘Other’ to us, we are not outside of it as one element in dialogue with it. The story tells us its events as it tells them to all the other characters; it takes our emotion, anticipation, expectation, objection, vision; we become involved in the whole process of structuring the system of producing meaning. Our ‘searching Self’ becomes a sum of many ‘dialogue-oriented’ relations. It becomes an ever-changing Self. Here is Bakhtin again: Meanwhile our underground hero recognizes all these perfectly well himself, and understands perfectly well the impossibility of escaping from that circle in which his attitude towards the other moves. Thanks to this attitude toward the other’s consciousness, a peculiar perpetuum mobile is achieved, made up of his internal polemic with another and with himself, an endless dialogue where one reply begets another, which begets a third, and so on to infinity, and all of this without any forward motion. (1984: 230) In Peirce one can find almost the same thought: ‘It should never be forgotten that our own thinking is carried on as a dialogue, and though mostly in a lesser degree, is subject to almost every imperfection of language’ (CP 5.506). But if our entire thinking is in signs, how does a sign become dialogized in the language? Some scholars equate a sign with a Third. However, this equation cannot be the whole truth. What Peirce calls ‘a sign in itself’ (or a Qualisign), according to his ten-class division, is a shapeless flash of light before being embedded. A sign becomes meaningful by virtue of the Third, which fulfils its triadic structured relation. Thirdness is a category, which brings into life the process of growing and interpretation. Thus, Thirdness closely resembles the category of Otherness by Bakhtin. Let us start with the concept of ‘Other’ and then approach the category of Otherness. In the already quoted Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art, Bakhtin speaks of ‘Other’ not simply as a counterpart of a dialogue, but as a substance of discourse. It is a necessary condition in starting the process of narration. ‘Other’ may be embodied into another voice, another consciousness and even another discourse. This concept could be compared with Peirce’s concept of the ‘ground’: something which is inside the sign and provides the essential quality of any sign. Although not so specifically determined, ‘Other’ can be found at any level of the author’s own voice, from the single word to the whole story, as an inside substance of the narrative process. Without cognition of the ‘Other’ no cognition of the ‘Self” would be possible, but the relation
64 Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia between Self and Other is not binary. Both parts should not be considered as opposed to each other, but rather as including one another. Correspondingly, the category ‘Otherness’ is not simply alien to, or a mirror of, the Self, but is rather a distant prospect from which the narrator’s ‘I’ approaches the fictional truth. It is not only a theory of the Other’s presence in the author’s own vision, but also of the common vision in the author’s own presence. It is exactly that ‘perspective’ which becomes a locus, or ‘a place of events’ for the transforming and continuity of qualities. In other words, it is the context of a possible relationship. It is the category that furnishes meaning to the different points of view. The perspective of ‘Other’ is the crucial idea of a theory of a dialogue. The category ‘Otherness’ determines most of Bakhtin’s concepts, such as ‘chronotope’, ‘dialogue’, even ‘heteroglossia’, the last of which signifies the presence of more ‘voices’ on the entire scale of the discourse. In turn, the explanation of the non-dyadic nature of dialogue can be found in the continuity, unfinished-ness and interpretability of ‘Otherness’. Bakhtin also considers the word as wholly dependent on the context: hence, it cannot convey a meaning other than a transitional one, a meaning determined by previous contextual usages of the particular word and by its further intentions to complete its ever-incomplete object. There must always be something else, an ‘Other’ sign, and an ‘Otherness’ to affect the chain of interpretation. There is no meaning unchanged by interpretation, hence the dialogue is also a process of interpretation. However, interpretation is not a chain of continuous succession, like a domino effect. It is better to speak of a transitional discontinuity. It grows, covering and surrounding the interpreted object, affecting other signs and causing new sign-processes. The original sign can be reproduced in another sign-context, in another code, even in another ‘language’ by iconic or hypothetic similarity.
The frozen semiosis Let us take an example from Dostoevsky’s work. At first sight the story ‘Poor Folk’ is narrated in a traditional manner, that is descriptively. The narrator is not the author, but a young woman; she writes a letter to another character, telling about an incident from her life. She tells about a young student who suffers from tuberculosis. He needs books for his studies and gives private lessons in order to earn money. His father is an alcoholic who loves his son and would like very much to help him. The father dreams of buying books for his son, but he himself desperately needs money for drinking. Throughout the story there are repeated appearances of one image: books. At the beginning and at the end books appear merging with another intrusive image, that of mud. The discourse is typical for Dostoevsky – expressive, breathless, rapidly building to a climax. Only when the narrator remembers a small episode, which occurred in the student’s room, does everything change. The beginning of
Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia 65 the passage functions like the setting of a stage. The reader is, literally, seeing a small room; the eye casts about the room and focuses on the shelf with many books. In a brief scene, which follows shortly thereafter, the narrator accidentally pushes the shelf and the books fall down. As the story continues, the student dies, the father cries in his son’s room. A few days before, he had managed to buy several books for him and put them in his pockets. The funeral scene follows. Again, everything has disappeared: there are no houses, no people on the streets. There is only a hearse with the coffin, and the father running after it. They take up the whole field of vision. There is no speech, no author’s voice, no dialogue, only details: the running father, the raindrops pelting his face, his coat-tails, and the books falling from his pockets into the mud. There is a hint at the end of another impending death, that of the narrator’s mother. What we have here is a play of iconic effects, produced in the reader’s consciousness by the iconic signs. This is a process of systematic reduction of the dialogue by which heteroglossia and interpretation have been minimized to a few words, unrelated to each other. A strong impact is achieved by increasing the role of details. The few remaining details persistently refer to some previous, vivid associations: for example, the books falling from the pockets of father’s coat. This approach represents a total iconization of the narration, which turns back the process of interpretation, interrupts it, or stops it. Similar scenes exist in all Dostoevsky’s fiction, for example The Brothers Karamazov, Netochka Nezvanova and The Double. This technique could be described as an effect of frozen semiosis. Dostoevsky ‘freezes’ the interpretation by tightening the chain of associations, calling our attention upon one, already familiar detail (the falling books). The few signs relate only to a few details, which, in turn, have already been components of a similar picture. At the end, the mud in which the books have fallen takes up the whole visual field. But, in fact, even this is not the end. The end of the scene is the wide white space, like a blind spot, with which the printer has set off the section. Again, what we see here blocks the associative interpretation by augmenting the iconicity, which, in its turn, means creating different viewpoints to the single phenomenon. The ‘many voices’ have been gradually limited to a single one, which is, as much as possible, neutral. Well-orchestrated polyphony is silenced to a single tone like the silence in music that reigns when the conductor’s baton is raised, before a new theme explodes. This is meaningful silence. In the wholeness of the discourse it is of an iconic type; something certain, but ‘Other’, something contrapuntal will occur when it lasts. It is an activated, loaded silence. More abstractly, it could be said that in the effort to liken reading to seeing, Dostoevsky uses a method, which can also be named intensification of nothingness. By ‘nothingness’ it is meant the empty spaces of the pages, and the entire disturbance of the associative process. It
66 Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia can be described also as the opposite of polyphony, interpretative discontinuity, or as dialectic of a dialogue. In the terminology of our method we could say that this is a technique that increases the effects of the effete mind by the almost uncontrolled play of the many seeking Selves of the protagonists. In this case semiosis flows like the process of seeing, from the indeterminate polyphony, where all sign-processes occur, to the organized silence of the blank space, which acts as a Qualisign. As it has been mentioned above, Dostoevsky is trying here to compare the reading process with the visual one. Between the two there will always be a gap, which can be overlooked only imaginatively, like the small space a spark needs in order to jump to the other pole. Dostoevsky tries to overcome this gap by augmenting iconicity, i.e. by multiplying the signs that bring to mind iconic effects. The empty spaces between paragraphs are the very gaps where the intensification of nothingness occurs. There are all the processes of freezing the flow of the semiosis: gravitation around the single detail, return to the similar association, the sudden beginning of a different story without any transition. Holquist writes: ‘Dialogism begins by visualizing existence as an event, the event of being responsible for (and to) the particular situation existence assumes as it unfolds in the unique and constantly changing place I occupy in it’ (1990: 47). After being classified in the consciousness, the Qualisign attains a determined meaning. It begins to point to something, which is not a full analogue of its iconic origin. It becomes a Sinsign. In the ‘in-betweenspace’ of the blank page the sinsign has also made ‘a leap’ into a new semiosis. In terms of literary theory, it has become metaphoric. The blank space (the shape of emptiness) acts like a more general Emptiness, that of a human life. A more precise comparison of this transition would be again a musical one, when the conductor’s baton serves as the sign of rhythm. And, indeed, white spaces between sections are signs of the inner, ongoing rhythm of representation.
Moving silence The sign of silence is of iconic nature. This might appear paradoxical, but because the written text is soundless, the ‘sound effects’ are achieved by virtue of the iconicity. This does not mean that there are icons or pictures in the text, which ‘resemble’ sounds, although the hypothesis of synaesthesia was alien neither to Peirce nor to Bakhtin. Rather ‘the pictures of signs’ in consciousness create sound/silence by combining many different signs. For instance, there is a silent effect when after a scene of a quarrel the narrator depicts a single detail. Silence is produced through icons. This is an evoked silence: it is produced as all voicing signs in polyphony fade away, so that from the indeterminate manifoldness only a few ‘tones’
Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia 67 remain, only single details. The silence reigning immediately after is a mere feeling, that is it may be seen as a Rhematic-Iconic Qualisign (Qualisign). But when we recognize (or hear) it through intensification of icons, it becomes a Rhematic-Iconic Sinsign (Sinsign). Here we may recall Peirce’s remark that there are no actual Iconic Qualisigns. In other words, in the process of muting the polyphony, the Rhematic-Iconic Qualisign (the feeling of a silence) becomes an Iconic Sinsign, that is a sign of a silence, which points to both the final chord of the previous polyphony and to an anticipated leap towards another discourse (see Figure 3.1). The fading away of polyphony simultaneously acts as a process of loading the silence. With the inclusion of all the additional effects, such as the play with the blank portions of the page (the latter possibly seen as an indeterminate effete mind) and the sudden finishing of the chapter, reducing the heteroglotic narration to one or two voices, it might be considered as a process of completing the sign, that is a movement to a complex sign, involving both an icon and an index. Further speculations can be made as to how the moving silence attains a symbolic character. In this case, according to Peirce, a sign must relate to its object by virtue of law, rule or habit, i.e. a word must be a sign of a class or a law. (In the chart in Figure 3.1 the Roman numerals, according to him, signify the difference between the First, Second and Third correlate of any triadic relation, or, more loosely, between his categories, Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness; while the Arabic ones, are the numerals of the signs.) Let us go back to the end of the scene from Dostoevsky discussed above. The whole field of vision is occupied by mud. In the blank spot of the page, mud, through which the pathetic funeral procession makes its difficult way, has been transformed into a sinsign; it points to itself and to desolation. The empty space is a locus where the semiosis flows and freezes at the same time, a moment when a new association is involved in the process of interpretation. It is a very complicated play of iconicity; the opposition ‘white space/mud’ animates a whole chain of basic associations. As polyphony dies away to a single symbol, the process of loading the silence is achieved. Its sign has been related to its object by virtue of likeness (Qualisign and Sinsign), and then by virtue of its interpretant (symbol). We can now take a more general look at the same process, considering the entire phenomenon of ‘frozen semiosis’ as a sign. When it becomes recognizable through its frequent appearance in the whole of the novel, or even in different novels, we can speak of Dicent-IndexicalLegisign. This new sign is accomplished by abduction, which means that the nature of the relation between premises and conclusion is of the ‘iconic type’. In fact, the sign (life–death) is invented ex novo. Concentration on a few details, the ‘mirror-play’ with the previous associations, directing the sight to the mud, the emptiness of the space – all of these inevitably create an open connection to a new semiosis. We can carefully start to speak
68 Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia about Dicent-Symbolic Legisign. (The whole process can be also represented by numbers of the signs: 1→2→3→7→ 9.) If we now combine what we have achieved from both Peirce and Bakhtin, we can take a different route. It will again be necessary to undertake the analysis on the micro-level of the perception of sign. We may say that the result of the meeting of the comparison and the reflection (associated with the ‘seeking Selves’) with the effete mind is that which governs our understanding of colour, music or even literature. The tracks of the effete mind direct the explaining concept (the seeking Self). By the drop of the searching Self onto the track of the previous impression, an iconic effect is produced that is a part of any sign. We need some examples to clarify the last claim. We know that ever since movies were screened they were accompanied by music. Why is this so? Music takes away tension, or builds suspense. Music gives hints about the next scene, or suppresses the development of the plot. On the other hand, why is an art exhibition only rarely accompanied by music? In some of their most frequently used clarifications musicologists would probably say that music is a condensed silence, a defrosted feeling or a drifting thought. We could further ask why film music as a rule is not intrusive? Why is it the exception rather than the rule that a person talks convincingly of music, without using practical examples? By their mutual interaction both music and pictures borrow devices for increasing their effects from each other. Music and picture together carve deeper grooves in our past experience, both acting as seeking Selves. The purpose of such action is to awaken the ‘effete mind’ (i.e. an explanatory text) as much as possible. When both drop onto the effete mind the process of drawing relations intensifies. The sound of music generates more iconicity from the memories where these combinations occur. The iconicity induces sharpness in the effete mind by shining brightness on any single representation. It is an effect comparable to an unexpected discovery of a bundle of old letters that brings to mind nostalgic memories. As time passes, the events from the letters, similar to the representations in mind, lose their freshness. What remains is the sentimental feeling that seizes us. (We confuse these moments by saying that something is gone, when in fact it has arrived. Now it is possible to store these feelings in a track of the effete mind, a sensation which serves as a relief from the de-actualized present that has until now accompanied us.) We have to keep in mind that we are talking about signs whose appearances are somewhere beside those evoked by the immediate reading of the text. The impact of the former is built up next to the images and pictures that emerged as a result of following the narrated signs. The signs we are discussing were silently layered in our mind, turning our emotional memory in a direction different than the one created by the events of the
Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia 69 novel. Using the play of iconic effects, an author could make its reader feel inexplicable nostalgia while imagining, for example, a luxury ship heading somewhere deep in the night. Thus another paradox arises: the combination of music and pictures increases the effects of silence by which the implementation of signs is fulfilled. From the undefined mass of emotions to the sharpness of particular memories, the process continues until actual thoughts emerge. Such is the effect of loading the silence.
The turn of a kaleidoscope The effect of unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia may be compared to playing with a kaleidoscope: with a turn of a tube, a very few elements create endless new figures. Or, in a more sophisticated view, to looking at a broken mirror: all pieces reflect the same object, but in a refracted way. And even if someone sums up all the pieces, they still show the object as a manifold of different images. The whole process can also be described from a reverse perspective, as a ‘visualization’ (projection) of an idea into the realm of words (symbols), through the effect of the ‘broken-mirror-world’ that occurs in the play of an ‘unfinished dialogical consciousness’. Bakhtin speaks of ‘an image of the idea’ (1984: 89); Peirce discovers its representation as a complex sign. Any time a picture of an idea arises in a consciousness, it interrupts the semiosis. But, on the other hand, this sharper image is refracted into many ‘broken pieces’ and what we have before us is ‘just another sign’, requiring further interpretation, which is essentially the technique of dialogue. The purpose is a ‘different-like’ sign, established in semiosis, which slows down the interpretative process and guides it to the effete mind. But instead of stopping it, it affects another interpretation chain in another meaningspectrum. Bakhtin believed in both the ingenuity of silence and its potentiality for playing with sign-effects, as well as in the growth and inexhaustible creativity of dialogue. The last sentence of the essay ‘Discourse in the Novel’ states: ‘For, we repeat, great novelistic images continue to grow and develop even after the moment of their creation; they are capable of being creatively transformed in different eras, far distant from the day and hour of their original birth’ (1981: 422). The two discussed ideas of C. S. Peirce and of M. M. Bakhtin both have strong potential for serving as analytical tools to explain many abandoned ideas. This has always fascinated artists: to create an image through the play of a broken mirror, a ‘live’ product of consciousness. This image then would be centred, as by an illusion, somewhere before the mirror-pieces, outside of the mind. For a very brief moment it would represent the thought, the sign or the searching Self. What characterizes Bakhtin’s efforts in his theory of heteroglossia is the constant attempt to explicate ‘inner speech’ at any level of human
70 Unlimited semiosis and heteroglossia communication, from the single word to philosophical discourse. One of his many definitions of heteroglossia states: ‘Another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way’ (1981: 324). Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse. The special emphasis on dialogue always emerges when Bakhtin proclaims that language is the basis of all human communication and that language is always dialogic in its nature. Formulated repeatedly in an unequivocal manner, that view relates very closely to essentially similar thoughts of Peirce’s, for example the frequent postulate that ‘All thinking is dialogic in form’ (CP 6.338). But that which links the philosophic efforts of the two thinkers is the demonstration of how the sign constantly escapes from its ‘final’ meaning, striving for an ‘openness’ and ‘unfinished-ness’, by which alone reality can be approached. The common perspective of both theories is to see the sign in one more meaning-dimension through an unlimited dialogue and a hetero-interpretation.
Acknowledgement For the notion of ‘loading the silence’ I am grateful to Professor Nathan Houser of the Peirce Edition Project at Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis.
4
The living mind and the effete mind
In contrast to the ‘unlimited semiosis’, the notion of the effete mind is among the less developed by Peirce. The most natural approach of studying it is to oppose it to the living mind, but on such a comparison Peirce did not work at all. Only indirect methods of investigation are possible and a study of the margins of his manuscripts is needed. At stake here is not only his original cosmology but also his profound understanding of time, music, literature and art, notwithstanding that these never became chief subjects in his philosophy. The problem of the effete mind is one of the keys for elaborating Peirce’s work towards a contemporary perspective. It arises from the thesis of objective idealism, which levels mental and physical phenomena to a single ideal system. This chapter aims to show that grounding it in the relationship between the effete mind and the living one, coupled with Peirce’s unique category apparatus, sheds new light on these phenomena, which did not dominate his thought.
Enlightening and vagueness The living mind throws a light upon the ‘sleeping programs’ of the effete mind with the help of the supervenient Self, and they in turn begin to produce meaning. To activate the programs and start the thought process, the single or collective mind throws a light upon them and tries to recognize the elicited effects – signs. This is the succinct summary of my working hypothesis that I intend to prove in this chapter. At the very beginning we can say that there is something confusing in the expression ‘throws a light’. It sounds more or less like a metaphor, no matter that Peirce was concerned with the dominating expression of light too, when the subject turns to mind or reason. Here is what he says: The phrase ‘light of reason,’ or its near equivalent, may probably be found in every literature. The ‘old philosopher’ of China, Lao-Tze, who lived in the sixth century b.c. says for example, ‘Whoso useth reason’s light, and turneth back, and goeth home to its enlightenment,
72 The living mind and the effete mind surrendereth not his person to perdition. This is called practising the eternal.’ The doctrine of a light of reason seems to be inwrapped in the old Babylonian philosophy of the first chapter of Genesis, where the Godhead says, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ It may, no doubt, justly be said that this is only an explanation to account for the resemblances of the images of the gods to men, a difficulty which the Second Commandment meets in another way. But does not this remark simply carry the doctrine back to the days when the gods were first made in man’s image? To believe in a god at all, is not that to believe that man’s reason is allied to the originating principle of the universe? (CP 2.24) To this we may add something new. When we search for an item on the Internet we ‘high-light’ it. An interpreting sign appears, which usually refers to more than one option. Then, in order to reach the goals (the final interpretant) we look for, we have to establish a habit, or an algorithm of our thought; otherwise we will be lost in a possibly endless interpretative chain. The effects of thought have almost entirely been produced in the domain of language, so we have to search for them there. According to the pragmatic maxim the objects we look for are the effects that ‘might have practical bearings’: these would be our entire conceptions or our thoughts. So, what happens when the living mind meets the effete one? But what does ‘living mind’ stand for? After a short tychistic phase a synechistic one begins. In order to start a sense-deriving process, an interpretation has to occur, in other words an agapistic period has to come. (And, of course, we should not think of any beginning or end, as Peirce’s main thesis of mind and matter from his objective idealism is their continuity.) Even so, a sign does not obtain its meaning by merely pointing out its object; the semiosis in this case is ‘unintelligent’, it is a physical process only. What makes the sign interpretable and activates the effete mind to be set in motion? Or, vice-versa, there is no direction in thought process. Let us see how Peirce defines this ‘meeting’: When a sign determines an interpretation of itself in another sign, it produces an effect external to itself, a physical effect, though the sign producing the effect may itself be not an existent object but merely a type. It produces this effect, not in this or that metaphysical sense, but in an indisputable sense. As to this, it is to be remarked that actions beyond the reach of self-control are not subjects of blame. Thinking is a kind of action, and reasoning is a kind of deliberate action; and to call an argument illogical, or a proposition false, is a special kind of moral judgment, and as such is inapplicable to what we cannot help. (CP 8.191)
The living mind and the effete mind 73 Two things have to be remembered here: the description of thinking as an action and also as an incomplete process, which goes on endlessly. Now, our metaphor ‘throwing a light’ might be substituted by those two characteristics. To think means to produce a physical effect and to be vague in order to continue, because ‘vagueness’ is incompleteness. But how exactly do those two processes act when they fall into the domain of the effete mind, which supposedly is a non-living reality? In the meantime another metaphorical expression has appeared, ‘fall into’, which is worth nothing as compared to ‘throwing a light’. Can we not avoid it – why does the metaphorical usage consistently appear when we discuss starting the process of thinking? One of the reasons is that we speak of the beginning of something that should not have any beginning. And one of the solutions might be to think of us, human beings, as ‘points’ in the universe where the thought-process occurs. This process does not start with us: it is rather like switching on a laser-pointer, which flares up some spot of the effete mind and then flickers for some time. Numberless such pointers are crossing the universe/effete mind by filling it with meaning. It does not matter that this sounds like a new expanded metaphor; it helps to construe the way we think. Let us only remember what Peirce says about space: that it is made up of points, yet no collection of points can in itself constitute space. Still there is this intrusive picture of light, laser-pointer, etc., when we speak of the thinking process. Let us concentrate even deeper on it. The best help we may find in Peirce’s concept of Firstness. The typical ideas of firstness are qualities of feeling, or mere appearances … For example, when you remember it, your idea is said to be dim and when it is before your eyes, it is vivid. But dimness or vividness do not belong to your idea of the quality. They might no doubt, if considered simply as a feeling; but when you think of vividness you do not consider it from that point of view. You think of it as a degree of disturbance of your consciousness. (CP 8.329) The clue here is that in memory, an idea is dim, but put before the eyes it becomes vivid. Both dimness and vividness belong to our consciousness rather than to the quality of what is remembered. But how do we remember things, by virtue of our ‘disturbed’ consciousness or through our ‘feelings’ of qualities? Did we forget the language? Why are our memories dim before being put into words? Do they appear at all without words? The latter is actually an old problem, which we are not going to touch upon right now. Nevertheless we may say that dimness is about the past and that except for the past we do not have any clear concept, say for the future. To make the remembered things clearer we only have words at our disposal, but they come after the effort to
74 The living mind and the effete mind remember, i.e. after the action of thought. What we do by thinking is to recognize paths, which seem familiar to us. These are the traces of past experience, in other words, signs. To move on these paths we need our laser-pointers, which are qualities of vividness, or stages of clearness. Are the latter feelings as Peirce proposed? In any case they are those ‘lights’ we mentioned before, and now we may rationalize the metaphorical statement. Thinking is producing physical effects in order to clear up vagueness, which covers the paths of our concepts of the past – but something sounds terribly wrong here, and this is obviously the assertion that physical effects have been produced in order to conceptualize the unclear past. Yet, this was the logic of substituting the elements of the fragmentary process of thinking. I say ‘fragment’, but why not ‘fractal’ or ‘similar’? Is thinking not a permanent conceptualizing of the past, and then laying the prepared ‘raster’ onto the vagueness of the future, the whole process emulating guessing? We can find strong support of these words in Peirce’s own writing, on the possibility of thinking the universe and the current in time: ‘ … the past influences our intellect, the future our spirit, with entire uniformity. Still universal experience merely favors a guess as to larger periods’ (CP 1.273). The only rough ‘thought’ given to us is our verbal (memorable, ‘saved’) experience. This given thought is like a formatted disk, ready to be used for the copying of new files. We place the experience onto the lattice of clichés, which we throw against the future. Language is our lattice, our desperate appeal for clarity. Thoughts do not mirror all the facets of the network; they are the sum of the ‘fractal’ ones and the still-to-come meaning of the guessing. They tear off strips of meaning from the effete mind and try to fit it onto the language lattice. Many ‘pieces’ remain hanging from the lattice; these are as yet unread signs, which, altogether with language, form the network of thinking.
The waltzing Self and the living mind How does this relate to Peirce’s ideas of stages of clearness, of consciousness, or of categories? Well, it does generally by following the main notion of thinking in signs but it is far from a synthetic statement about it. For it is still necessary to clear up some new metaphors introduced here which disturb the understanding. But before trying to throw light upon expressions like us ‘fractal’, or ‘formatted experience’, or ‘prepared raster’, let me elaborate on the very notion of the ‘e/ffete mind’. It will not be an easy task; we know that Peirce himself did not make an effort to explain it. Let us recall what he says about the ‘thinking’ of nature and non-human beings:
The living mind and the effete mind 75 Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there. (CP 4.551) What else appears to be a thought-like process in nature? Well, first and foremost, energy. Growing, blooming, falling of tons of leaves on the earth, each rising again in the spring, the wonder of the grass, which pierces the heaviest stones – all these are after all ‘physical effects’. We may suppose that there is a giant thought behind them, which sets in motion this thought-like process. Its effects are repeatable and predictable. They need time to occur and thought in which to be. They are in thought, or rather they are appearances of thought. If we continue in this direction we will soon reach a smooth theistic view of thinking and, in that way, find the ‘ideal’ solution. On the other hand, if you ask a biochemist about the processes inside a living body you may be surprised to hear expressions like copying, carrying out and saving information about/to the cells. Is this not the real ‘Other’ of the effete mind? But what is then the saved information inside an organism? Is ‘the effete mind’ in our bodies? This would not sound too odd if we replace ‘the effete mind’ with Other or even with the Bakhtin’s term Otherness. The question then would go like this: is there an Otherness within us? Most probably, yes: this is not inconceivable. We only have to remember that both thinkers, Peirce and Bakhtin, understood Otherness quite specifically. It seems that they have anticipated the great anthropological discoveries of our day. They thought that the conceptualizing of I and Other merges both as one ever-changing subject. Here is what Bakhtin says in his late writings: ‘Thought creates a unified, general world of man, irrespective of I and Other. In primitive, natural self-sensation, I and Other merge. There is neither egoism, nor altruism here’ (1987: 147). If we strictly follow this thesis, we have to say that our consciousness is for ever doomed to be imprisoned in his own/one world. It ‘only’ has its unlimited abilities to play different roles of others who it wishes to know. We will see later if this is true, but here now are some more words by Bakhtin: Everything that is repeatable and recognizable is fully dissolved and assimilated solely by the consciousness of the person who understands; in the other’s consciousness he can see and understand only his own consciousness. He is in no way enriched. In what belongs to others he recognizes only his own. (1987: 143) But the real challenge with the effete mind would be the assertion that there is such a mind inside us, which can react with the living one and
76 The living mind and the effete mind produce uncontrolled information. This information rather controls us. It is sluggish, passive and ‘conservative’. Perhaps this can explain why the changes in the human organism are evolutionary and not revolutionary. For a deeper clarification of a ‘personal effete mind’ we may recall some notions from the introductory chapter regarding the seeking Self. We assume that the latter is ‘the magic third element’ of any metaphorcreation, the generative power, which produces meaning when touches upon the effeteness. We can now substitute ‘lights’, ‘laser-pointers’, ‘feelings’, or even Firstness with the notion of the active Self, which searches for similarities in an attempt to conceptualize the old metaphors that have arisen from the effete mind. Figuratively speaking it is a dancing Self that seeks to reshape the lost concepts into new metaphors. In this sense it will not be unacceptable to talk of a kind of an effete mind inside of us, perhaps something similar to the genetic memory, which is set in motion only by the collision between the seeking Self and the sleeping experience. The searching Self interacts with the effeteness inside us and the guesses we make for the future by integrating our desires in reality. There is a very fine notion in this respect made by Ronald C. Alexander, who asks why we should not consider the ‘Self’ as being one or more of the psychological properties of the human being, and gives the following answer: The answer lies in the fact that the fully functioning person, the human being that can be said to have a Self, does not only have the psychological characteristics mentioned above but also has the dynamic power of integrating all of its physical and psychological properties by making decisions for its future. (1997: 18) Such integrative power arises within us when our actively seeking ‘Self’ falls into a deeper track of our effete mind. To make decisions for the future means to trust the choir of the awakened meanings from our ‘scanned’ past. Alexander argues that ‘we cannot “locate” the Self in the same manner as one locates individual brain states or skin color’ (ibid.: 50). In this way there is no ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ place of interacting Self. According to Alexander, it cannot be defined as a sum of freely floating supervenient qualities, because it must be instantiated at a certain point. To Alexander’s question, ‘But what instantiates the quality of selfhood?’, our answer will be its meeting (link, touch) with the effete mind, as a result of which a new metaphor or reshaped concept appears. Now we can agree with the claim of the majority of mind-philosophers including Alexander about the overall character of the supervenient Self: ‘Yet, just as an individual’s psychological qualities must be attached or connected to a specific grouping of physical qualities, so must the quality of the Self be connected to a specific grouping of physical and psychological qualities’ (ibid.:
The living mind and the effete mind 77 50–51). It is safe to say that unlike Bakhtin’s postulate that our consciousness is imprisoned in our bodies, it seems that it rather enjoys the freedom of a metaphor in its relation to the body. However, it does this with all the limitations of a specific connectedness with it; for example, the most frequent images it takes are of ‘Other’ consciousness’ that it plays. Very often the searching Self is emulating someone else’s Self in order to sink into the tracks of the effeteness. Perhaps, this is the place to drop the notion of the living mind for the sake of the one of the seeking Self. There will not be any danger of dualism anymore. From here on, ‘living mind’ will be used as an operational term only.
Mind–matter structure of reality We are heading in the opposite direction from the one once recommended by Peirce, who prefers to be rather vague in talking about the structure of the effete mind. He argues that our conceptions of the first stages of the development, ‘before time yet existed, must be as vague and figurative as the expressions of the first chapter of Genesis’ (CP 1.412). Let us continue for a while in this way. We used to say that the thought-like effects in nature fail in some substantial points. They are not communicable, cannot convey any thought, and they possess no self-control. But what if we accept the thesis that there exists uncontrolled information in our bodies? The two other claims of communicability and carrying thoughts in a strict sense do not hold true either. All cells communicate and convey information. What we actually do is raise arguments for differentiating the living from the effete mind by pointing to the characters of language mixed with a psychological demand. In this case we have no other choice to prove our hypotheses, but to ask again for a subject (author, utterer, speaker, communicator). In a comment on Lady Welby’s book on ‘significs’ Peirce said: But it appears to me that all symptoms of disease, signs of weather, etc., have no utterer. For I do not think we can properly say that God utters any sign when He is the Creator of all things. But when [Lady Welby] says, as she does, that this is connected with Volition, I at once note that the volitional element of Interpretation is the Dynamical Interpretant. (CP 8.185) It seems that it will be better to give up the notion of language as the only form of expression of thought. We also have to add to thinking the ‘thought-like effects’ which can be found everywhere in nature. And we can also try to elaborate on the latter in their relationship to the effete mind. Or, maybe they are the same as the effete mind? Are they equal to the Dynamical Interpretant? One of the most vague and complex
78 The living mind and the effete mind definitions Peirce gives is of the difference between the dynamical and the logical interpretant. Here it is: The concept which is a logical interpretant is only imperfectly so. It somewhat partakes of the nature of a verbal definition, and is as inferior to the habit, and much in the same way, as a verbal definition is inferior to the real definition. The deliberately formed, self-analysing habit – self-analysing because formed by the aid of analysis of the exercises that nourished it – is the living definition, the veritable and final logical interpretant. Consequently, the most perfect account of a concept that words can convey will consist in a description of the habit, which that concept is calculated to produce. But how otherwise can a habit be described than by a description of the kind of action to which it gives rise, with the specification of the conditions and of the motive? (CP 5.491) Let us try to lessen the difficulties in this quotation on the basis of what has been already achieved. It is about habit, which can be thought as it is continuing in the effete mind. The effete mind is a continuous habit, a huge repository, consisting of sets of final interpretants. It is not an exhausted mind or it is not only such; it is a manifold of thought-like channels, something like the tracks on a compact disc. When the living mind highlights these tracks, their programs become revived. By the touch of the searching Self the continuous habit creates a set of dynamical interpretants. The ‘formatted’ experience is placed onto the giant mass of clichés (the effete mind) and between both starts to flow combinations of almost immediate comparisons, measurements and relations, activated by the interactive Self. This is the phase of agapistic interpretation. New final or logical interpretants produced as consequences become re-active and create further habit-taking tendencies. Meeting of the effete and living minds through the mediation of the searching Self opens up a process of producing incompleteness and vagueness, which are needed for fresh interpretation. Incompleteness and vagueness are just other names for generality, which is inherent in signs. All general terms (words, signs) are types: e.g. they have objects and interpretants, which generate an infinite number of new signs. But what do we recognize in the effete mind, how do we read its programs? How much are we helped by the substitution of ‘effete mind’ with ‘a massif of clichés’? We experience its ‘thought-like’ effects, produced as physical reactions to our searching Selves. We do not hold any conversation with it, although we try to. This is again the desperate attempt to guess the future by asking … the past. Let us turn to Peirce’s own assessment of his theory:
The living mind and the effete mind 79 I have thus developed as well as I could in a little space the synechistic philosophy, as applied to mind. I think that I have succeeded in making it clear that this doctrine gives room for explanations of many facts which without it are absolutely and hopelessly inexplicable; and further that it carries along with it the following doctrines: first, a logical realism of the most pronounced type; second, objective idealism; third, tychism, with its consequent thorough-going evolutionism. We also notice that the doctrine presents no hindrances to spiritual influences, such as some philosophies are felt to do. (CP 6.163) But before we take up more substantive issues, it would be reasonable to consider the biggest possible danger and to clarify our terminology. The danger in this book comes also from an unseen fall into the traditional dichotomy of mind/body dualism despite the numberless claims for just the opposite intentions. To prevent this we have to not lose sight of Peirce’s chief conclusion from his synechistic theory – that everything which is continuous is realistic. To avoid dualism one has to factor in the main concept from his objective idealism, that all matter is really mind, to be found in his cosmological theory. Now, in obedience to the principle, or maxim, of continuity, that we ought to assume things to be continuous as far as we can, it has been urged that we ought to suppose a continuity between the characters of mind and matter, so that matter would be nothing but mind that had such indurated habits as to cause it to act with a peculiarly high degree of mechanical regularity or routine. Supposing this to be the case, the reaction between mind and matter would be of no essentially different kind from the action between parts of mind that are in continuous union, and would thus come directly under the great law of mental association, just as the theory last mentioned makes sensation to do. (CP 6.277) This quotation hints at another possible difference – that between the durated and indurated minds, all living organisms can also be indurated from Peirce’s perspective. But this distinction has to be presupposed by a very odd stipulation, namely that there is a sufficient gulf between durated and less durated things in order to differentiate between them. And then a vicious circle will arise in the next claim that it is precisely this unforeseen gulf that prevents a fall into dichotomism. Peirce believed all non-psychic phenomena are reducible to the psychic ones, without those processes being reversible. On Peirce’s evolutionism of his cosmology, Murphey says: ‘Peirce’s descriptions of the process of cosmic evolution are brief, vague, and somewhat metaphorical, but it is nevertheless clear that they are psychological models of the above theory’
80 The living mind and the effete mind (1961: 404). We may also add that they represent a perfect case of a psychological reductionism, although this is quite surprising. One expects from Peirce’s view just the opposite extreme – that it will be rather physicalistic. According to Jaegwon Kim, ‘Contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mind have generally proceeded within a physical frame work’ (1996: 12). There is no need to back up either view. For the outlining of my projected method, the positive kernel of the objective idealism (its synechistic concept of reality and its mind–matter structure) suffices for further development. The contemporary psychologists consider ‘mental’ (also the ‘thought-like-effects’) and ‘psychological’, as well as their respective cognates as interchangeable terms; the same holds true for ‘Self’ and ‘self-consciousness’. What we understand to be consciousness will not contradict the widely accepted psychological view: When we reflected on these and related issues, the higher-order thought model seems to fare better as an account of self-consciousness rather than consciousness itself. It is clear that self-consciousness requires an ability to form thoughts involving oneself, to take the firstperson point of view and attribute properties to oneself qua oneself. (Kim 1996: 166) The distinction we have to draw, though, is between the Self and its isomorphic terms, such as ‘the seeking Self’ or ‘active Self’ on one hand, and the terms relating to the Self in more or less moral aspects, such as the Ego, or personal identity, on another. The former group of terms is dynamic and available to the experience of human behaviour, while the latter is not reducible to either physical qualities, or psychological properties. In this regard it is reasonable to resort to a notion of Ronald G. Alexander: ‘However, I do not want to identify the Self with the concept of the Ego because even if there were such an entity, it cannot be experienced by another person. The same reason applies to identifying the Self with consciousness and/or self-constituting consciousness’ (1997: 50). I am not going to explore the Ego and its cognate terms.
The continuous past What do we rely on in our quasi-dialogue with the past? When I say ‘mass of clichés’ I mean that there are sorts of channels in which the physical effects of thinking were shaped. In other words we do not have the whole power of this process, although it looks like we do. We experience an opposite influence by the effete mind, say its conservatism, or its resistance. Only a small amount of change is allowed, only non-revolutionary forms will grow. Why is this so? Well, something bigger than a lantern (our ‘laser-pointer’) is needed, a longer tychistic period and a general
The living mind and the effete mind 81 approval, the agapistic law. For Peirce, every mental phenomenon, which sometimes appears, which grows and affects other phenomena by following some laws, is of the nature of an idea. Ideas are thoughts and the latter are products of feelings, so ideas are living phenomena too. They spread continuously, affect other ideas and, after a while, lose their intensity but gain generality. So they become ‘thoughts in rest’ and, finally lay down somewhere around us, forming a resting organism, in other words, the effete mind. The effete mind is a continuous habit. Its texture consists of general rules applicable to the resting thoughts. ‘Throwing a light’ upon them might now mean starting a communication process, or thinking of ‘thoughts in rest’. Both processes are activated by the role of the searching Self. Then general rules awake and start to produce channels, or traces, in which thoughts flow again. ‘Habit is that specialization of the law of mind whereby a general idea gains the power of exciting reactions …’ (CP 6.145). The contemporary view on the nature of mentality has not advanced too far away from Peirce’s time. Jaegwon Kim argues that ‘we ordinarily take it for granted that our mental events have physical effects’ (1996: 8). Now we can proceed further with the substitutions and say that the effete mind seems very much alike, but also differs from, some contemporary terms, such as context, Bakhtin’s hetroglossia, Lotman’s semiosphere, Derrida’s ‘la différance’, ‘loaded silence’, ‘vagueness’, ‘incompleteness’ or ‘simulacrum’. (Just one example, ‘la différance’, according to its author, signifies the inexhaustibility of the object of the sign, the impossibility of any sign to fully exhaust its object.) The advantage of using the notion of the effete mind is that it is not defined as an invariable element in any analysis, which is always dangerous. As analytical source the effete mind must be activated each time it is used. It is always there, somewhere, yet it has to be evoked in order to produce a new meaning. It is not reality itself; it becomes reality only when it is thought. It is language-like reality, but language is inferior to it. Law governs it but these are laws of mind, not of matter. It is saturated by final interpretants but they are inferior to its texture, which is construed as continuity. As a consequence, it can grow and change in the same way as natural processes. Finally, it does not mirror nature, because it depends on mental phenomena, such as thinking, if thinking is supposedly different in nature: It remains to consider the physical relations of general ideas. It may be well here to reflect that if matter has no existence except as a specialization of mind, it follows that whatever affects matter according to regular laws is itself matter. But all mind is directly or indirectly connected with all matter, and acts in a more or less regular way; so that all mind more or less partakes of the nature of matter. Hence, it
82 The living mind and the effete mind would be a mistake to conceive of the psychical and the physical aspects of matter as two aspects absolutely distinct. (CP 6.268). Can we not think of the effete mind as a mediate stage between mental and natural? Something, which is not yet nature, but is already different from a human phenomenon? Would it not be best to call it ‘mediate reality’? Such an assumption will repeat the vicious circle of the durated and indurated organisms. In some stricter Peircean terminology, effete mind could be named ‘continuous Thirdness’ in a paradigm where ‘Secondness’ would be ‘immediate reality’. Let us examine closely the need of this renaming and its usefulness. But before that it will be correct to express some doubts even about the fruitfulness of reviving and expanding the characteristics of the term ‘effete mind’. Why do we need it? Do we need it at all and how could it serve the purpose of contemporary thinking? Do we really deepen its capacity as a heuristic tool, or do we simply attribute to it an omnipotence, which it does not really possess, as is the usual case with every new philosophical toy? What is the benefit of its use, which is radically different than in so many other doctrinal methods? What new benefits can its conceptualizing bring to the light? Let me summarize its characteristics as derived by following Peirce’s thought and by adding some contemporary achievements. The effete mind is an exhausted consciousness; it is real ‘beyond’ reality, in the way in which the horizon remains always beyond the line where earth and heaven meet. But it exists and its existence is perceptible, just as thought is, by a human sense. (We should recall Chapter 2 on the ground effects as an example of an embodiment of the effete mind.) And we have to stop to think of thought as something not alive. On the contrary, thought is ‘warm’ like the warmth of the human body and sensible like the susceptibility of human feeling. The first character of a general idea so resulting is that it is living feeling. A continuum of this feeling, infinitesimal in duration, but still embracing innumerable parts, and also, though infinitesimal, entirely unlimited, is immediately present. And in its absence of boundedness a vague possibility of more than is present is directly felt. (CP 6.138) If we look at it from the perspective of the searching Self, it is free with the freedom of a metaphor. What differentiates it, however, from its bodily ‘plank’ is its metaphysical ability of being continuous. It spreads and grows, affects other thoughts and welds them with living and exhausted thoughts. But away from its capillary machine it loses its vitality, gets trivialized and ‘lays down’, or freezes itself as an unspoken, yet preserved
The living mind and the effete mind 83 meaning, in which only very slow processes are running. Where is this ‘place’ where it is ‘layering’ century after century? An easy answer would be ‘in thinking’, of course, in human experience, in culture, in art and in skills. It is certainly there too. Let us see what Peirce says about such ‘place’: I suppose that if I were to ask a modern psychologist whether he holds that the mind ‘resides’ in the brain, he would pronounce that to be a crude expression; and yet he holds that the protoplasmal content of a brain-cell feels, I suppose: there is every evidence that it does so. This feeling, however, is consciousness. Consciousness, per se, is nothing else: and consciousness, he maintains, is Mind. So that he really does hold that Mind resides in, or is a property of, the brain-matter. The early students of electricity, who assumed that an electrical current resides in the metallic circuit, had infinitely more reason for their mistaken opinion. Yes, without exaggeration, infinitely more; for the ratio of something to nothing is infinite. (CP 7.366) Despite the disputing form of expression, Peirce is very careful to specify such a place. This could lead him at once to Descartes’ dualism or to some reductionist form of physicalism, or psychologism. Other patterns may be suggested too. The effete mind might be found in the fine satin-like radiance that encircles all of our knowledge. It is in the strongest doubts that accompany all discoveries, in the scepticism that presupposes thought processes, in the uncertainty of any single mathematical integral, sometimes turning it into a trope. The effete mind is more like a cloud of knowing that surrounds every lonesome fact of every proposition. This cloud exists like the visible line of the horizon. Its metaphorical definition does not make it less useful if its intellectual value is undeniable. Let us remember Peirce’s definition of man as a sign: ‘This does not prevent its being a phenomenon of something without us, just as a rainbow is at once a manifestation both of the sun and of the rain. When we think, then, we ourselves, as we are at that moment, appear as a sign’ (CP 5.283). But how can such a term make thoughts clearer if it is always neither here nor there? This is a funny question but it should be asked for the sake of the materialistic times we live through. It comes from the hard naturalistic view that merges reality with materiality. Thoughts alone are not sensible either, but they possess qualities of sensibility; they are not physical entities, but they cause physical actions; the effete mind is not thought, it is a giant thought-potency, which becomes active only by the mediation of the supervenient Self. Finally, we do not ask ourselves whether we think or not, we simply do it, completely ignoring the fact that this is uncertain for many people with mental problems and for all of us when we approach the end of our lives. The fear of dehumanization hangs over a philosopher
84 The living mind and the effete mind like the sword of Damocles and the more dedicated the thinker is, the bigger the fear is.
The firstness and the Self Now another thing to defend is the importance of widening the meaning of the effete mind. Why not stick with the notion of interpretant, for instance? Do we really need to guess what Peirce would say on this matter when he did not actually say it? One of the strongest arguments here could be found in the famous example with the balloonist. Let us recall it in its length: Imagine yourself to be seated alone at night in the basket of a balloon, far above earth, calmly enjoying the absolute calm and stillness. Suddenly the piercing shriek of a steam-whistle breaks upon you, and continues for a good while. The impression of stillness was an idea of Firstness, a quality of feeling. The piercing whistle does not allow you to think or do anything but suffer. So that too is absolutely simple. Another Firstness. But the breaking of the silence by the noise was an experience. The person in his inertness identifies himself with the precedent state of feeling, and the new feeling, which comes in spite of him, is the non-Ego. He has a two-sided consciousness of an Ego and a non-Ego. That consciousness of the action of a new feeling in destroying the old feeling is what I call an experience. Experience generally is what the course of life has compelled me to think. (CP 8.330) Why did Peirce need here two types of ‘Firstness’? In fact, he does not speak of two types: there is not more than one Firstness. It is hopeless to try to fix the moment the balloonist ‘suffers’ as well as the next moment, when he ‘identifies himself with the precedent state of feeling’, and when his Ego clashes with a non-Ego. It might be possible to divide the accident into a set of phases, and to define each of them according to Peirce’s signdivision. But if we take into account the effete mind and its effects, it would be far easier to describe the stages of thought in such extreme moments. Imagine, if you please, a consciousness in which there is no comparison, no relation, no recognized multiplicity (since parts would be other than the whole), no change, no imagination of any modification of what is positively there, no reflexion – nothing but a simple positive character. Such a consciousness might be just an odour, say a smell of attar; or it might be one infinite dead ache; it might be the hearing of a piercing eternal whistle. In short, any simple and positive quality of
The living mind and the effete mind 85 feeling would be something which our description fits that it is such as it is quite regardless of anything else. (CP 5.44) Here Peirce describes quite the opposite status, an impartial extension of only one quality, or feeling. Yet, it gives us a perfect idea of what he thinks the Firstness could be. ‘And then, the clash occurs.’ Peirce called the knowledge of breaking silence ‘an experience’. Was it really the experience of one of the phases of feeling, which came right after the ‘second’ Firstness? The balloonist may or may not have had a previous experience with a similar incident. What he has for sure is a vague feeling of what unavoidably will happen in such a terrible catastrophe, in other words, what will certainly endanger his life. This is what has destroyed his old feeling and compelled him to think. Is this not a general knowledge that causes his pain and suffering? A balloon in the night, far above the earth, a lonesome person, an accident in the air: is it not clear ‘by itself’ what could happen? Of course it is, and in that case the knowledge of consequences is not even a passive one. It is simply ignored and suppressed somewhere in the consciousness. Then the crash occurs and it jumps out, accompanied by an explainable panic. It is like a light that illuminates for less than a second a whole mass of sleeping thought-clichés. They freeze all reactions until a readable command has been given. Before this command the Self is awakened and set in motion. All further actions flow from the clash between the passive knowledge and the concrete circumstances of the reacting organism (the Self). This passive knowledge permeates the whole surrounding atmosphere of the accident as already counted: the latitude of the flight, the balloon and the images, which the balloonist has in his mind of similar occurrences. We may call this general knowledge ‘effete mind’, ‘coded program’, ‘sleeping files’, ‘frozen traces’. Now we can turn to our doubts in regard to benefits we can draw from their conceptualizing. What gives us such a renaming? First and foremost it hints at the mathematical nature of our entire knowledge. The closer we approach to the pure mind, the more mathematical its structure appears. Let us recall Peirce’s understanding of the division of the sciences: mathematics is placed at the very beginning of it. Philosophy follows immediately and then all the others (see Figure 4.1). If we imagine a reverse approach from the side of, let us say, aesthetics backwards, with any further step the knowledge becomes more and more mathematical. It is the same thing with computers: all commands in a computer follow the path from more general symbols to numbers; at the end, in the processor itself (in the computer’s heart), the codes with which the programs are manipulated consist of pure numbers, from ‘0’ to ‘9’, and of numberless combinations among them.
Figure 4.1 Peirce’s division of sciences.
5
The iceberg and the crystal mind
This book is on the method called ‘conceptualization of metaphors’. It reveals the method by clashing its main constructs with examples from outside reality. Then, we can see how the elements of the method ‘behave’ in the process of collision. Do they survive by deriving more (or unexpected) meaning, or do their roles remain insubstantial? What I have achieved up to now is the outgrowth of Peirce’s notion of the ‘effete mind’, with an unanticipated sense that constantly provides it with unusual roles in the process of thinking. I asked whether we could not grasp the effete mind as an intermediary stage between mental and natural? Something, which is not yet nature, but is already different from a purely human phenomenon. Something, which possesses the freedom of a metaphor and yet the intellectual potentiality of a theoretical tool.
A conceptualized scene All this gives us a good reason to ask: ‘why not try to follow a hint from Peirce himself on challenging our method?’ By reflecting on how we make scientific discoveries, he gives an example, which cries out to be revealed. We will do something more. We will tell a whole new story, and we will try to conceptualize it. Here is what Peirce says: But precisely how does this action of experience take place? It takes place by a series of surprises. There is no need of going into details. At one time a ship is sailing along in the trades over a smooth sea, the navigator having no more positive expectation than that of the usual monotony of such a voyage, when suddenly she strikes upon a rock. The majority of discoveries, however, have been the result of experimentation. Now no man makes an experiment without being more or less inclined to think that an interesting result will ensue; for experiments are much too costly of physical and psychical energy to be undertaken at random and aimlessly. And naturally nothing can possibly be learned from an experiment that turns out just as was
88 The iceberg and the crystal mind anticipated. It is by surprises that experience teaches all she deigns to teach us. (CP5.51) In 1912, when the Titanic sank in the Atlantic, Peirce was still alive and just outlining a draft of his projected volume System of Logic, Considered as Semeiotic. There is not any record of his reaction to one of the deepest tragedies of the past century. No connection is to be drawn between his work, the sinking ship and the 1517 victims. However, linking his thought and some contemporary achievements from the philosophy of mind to this catastrophe, one may outline an unforeseen potentiality of his forgotten notions. In that night the Titanic carelessly cut through the waves in a way that resembled a giant Firstness, a knot of feelings or qualities, severed from any interpretants by the ice-cold water. From the other direction, the oncoming iceberg approached the ship as a fatal thought – a bulk of unwrapped interpretants. The crash occurred not only in the Atlantic, it stuck in the collective memory of the next generations. Let us try to conceptualize some of the metaphors surrounding the collision of the century. At first sight it seems like the closest synonym for the effete mind is ‘context’. I have already introduced doubts regarding the benefits of conceptualizing it. Let us try to examine closely the need for them. Imagine that we see on TV an excerpt of a commercial, or a movie, where an elegant lady’s hand is shaking a glass with a drink and several pieces of ice in it. If we have seen only this particular excerpt, we may suppose that this is an advertisement for a drink or for a ring, or for something else. In that case the hand shaking the glass will be a rhematic-indexicalsinsign (I am referring again to Peirce’s ten-fold-classes of signs). Suppose we learn that this fragment is (as it is indeed) from a movie about the Titanic. How shall we now ‘read the excerpt?’ Would not the shaking glass with the clinking ice-pieces in it be easily recognized as a symbol of the coming crash and, accordingly, as a rhematic-dicent-legisign or even as a dicent-symbolic-legisign? This could be represented in the following way: RInSn → RDL → DSymL or, even more ‘technically’, by the numbers of the signs as outlined by Peirce: 3–8–9 (see Figure 5.1). On the other hand, if we have never seen or heard anything about the Titanic’s crash, would it be possible for the discussed excerpt to be read as just a separate detail? Certainly, but let us now suppose that a person who has never seen or heard anything about the Titanic is watching a movie about it and sees the fragment. Would it be absolutely impossible for him/her to guess that this is a symbol of the ship’s coming collision with an iceberg? Of course not, especially if the detail is repeated many times during the movie and the whole vision is taken up for a moment by it. So, what is more important – the many previously known texts on the ‘crash of the century’ or the experience that tells us that by some
The iceberg and the crystal mind 89
Figure 5.1 The transforming of signs.
particular circumstances, some expected consequences will follow? The answer is indubitable. Now, the next question is whether we will receive a clearer picture by using the notion of ‘experience’ or of ‘effete mind?’ Again, watching the fragment, we might or we might not have a personal experience of what could happen in a ship-crash like the one from the movie. And we may or may not have read anything on the subject. Of course we may imagine it with relatively accuracy, having in mind many similar occurrences in our lives, which we have witnessed or about which we have read. But collecting these many experiences in our mind is nothing else than the awakening of a general knowledge that precedes any real experience. It is the same sleeping (or ‘slipping’) knowledge that is somewhere ‘there’ in the mind, ready to send signals or symbols through the supervenient self, which will enable our memory to produce an entire picture of the event, in other words, to wake up the effete mind. Let us expand this example in order to find a stronger motivation for using the notion of the effete mind. Sooner or later the Titanic will be pulled out of the water or simply restored. Imagine that this has already happened. The company, which has done it, decides to repeat the historical trip. It starts a large advertising campaign and asks the passengers to stick closer to the historical facts of the trip: say, to wear clothes that emulate the ones worn nearly a century ago (but warning them though not to take any treasures on the ship). The trip begins, everybody is in a good mood, the famous orchestra plays, the crew does its job, and hidden cameras carefully watch each face. Most of the passengers are either relatives of the historical ones or well-prepared journalists and scientists interested in human behaviour. In all the theatres on the ship a movie-marathon goes on with the best pictures of the famous crash.
90 The iceberg and the crystal mind Can we describe all this in Peirce’s terms? Why this full restoration of the old decoration? For more fun, would be the best answer. It would be like shooting a movie ‘live’, where all the passengers would be players. Now, let us count: the real person first becomes a historical actor; second, a special passenger; third, an object of scientific interest. Three more sensedimensions than s/he usually has. From where would the amplified meaning come? Logically – from another meaning, from the one that has to be revived, from the effete mind. The fuller the emulation is, the stronger the excitement arises of something that will happen despite the guarantee of safety. What actually happens is an increase of the cloud of knowledge that surrounds the atmosphere of the trip. Now, imagine the evening comes, when the real catastrophe takes place. The passengers are eating dinner. The waiters are serving drinks and put in every glass an additional piece of ice. Everyone is cheerful, the captain raises his glass for a toast … in that moment, a push is felt by all. Can we imagine the reactions? Yes, we can guess relatively correctly, there would be screams, applause (such accurate imitation), confusion, fear, expectations that soon somebody will announce that this was a part of the restoration of the historical truth. But what if the floor of the ship quickly starts to tilt? And no official statement is released? Why are we going so far? Only because in that case we may ‘observe’, i.e. explain, the effects of the effete mind. What would the hidden cameras register on the passengers’ faces? Confusion, fear and strained expectation. No panic certainly. Not yet. The cloud of the effete mind hangs very close to the people’s heads. This is not a non-ego that clashes with their personal egos. There is a buffer zone between what they were thinking moments ago and what they expect to happen in the next few minutes and this buffer is the effete mind. Their consciousnesses are neither here nor there. Their Selves supervene in the literally sense on this term. This is not Firstness, Secondness or Thirdness, because there are not any moments without knowing what is going on. But what is happening indeed is not anticipated and nobody is ready to produce an interpreting thought. Most of the passengers would hardly react, but wait until a new message is released. This is almost a laboratorial representation of the effects of the effete mind. It is conscious, but it looks unreal; reason has been activated, but no action flows from thoughts; it ‘flashes’ (some signals were given), but no logical commands are possible. In fact, such appearances are highly unlikely. The effete mind influences thought from a distance only; it is not ‘tangible’, i.e. perceptible. All passengers reside on their previous knowledge of the same crash and hope that this might be a theatrical replica only. At this moment they are deeply submerged into a total effeteness. Against the latter slowly crawls a horrible feeling, a feeling of something absolutely new and at the same time painfully familiar. A slight idea of what is happening in the minds can be obtained from Peirce’s description of quality, or feeling as it takes the whole consciousness for a moment:
The iceberg and the crystal mind 91 A feeling is a state of mind having its own living quality, independent of any other state of mind. Or, a feeling is an element of consciousness which might conceivably override every other state until it monopolized the mind, although such a rudimentary state cannot actually be realized, and would not properly be consciousness … A feeling is necessarily perfectly simple, in itself, for if it had parts these would also be in the mind, whenever the whole was present, and thus the whole could not monopolize the mind. (CP 6.18) Let us now consider the whole situation above as a dream. There is no need to repeat the details. There are interesting results of some recent medical research, which show that all representations we have in our dreams, say of different people, and even of a crowd of people, are embodiments of one and the same person – us, ourselves. The subconscious does not know any other person but us, and it always plays different roles trying to gain more … what? Meaning-dimensions, we may answer now. To multiply the sense, to sense one more meaningdimension, it creates decors and thought-out scenes, separates roles and ‘enjoys’ the play. In other words, it animates the effete mind’s effects. (This is not the play of the searching self that enjoys a far greater freedom.) Then how can a dreamer sometimes talk of and interpret absolutely unknown/unseen occurrences that have indeed happened? Psychoanalysis is full of such examples; is it possible to say something new about them from the standpoint of the notion of the effete mind? It may be suggested that it is the deep track of the effete mind, in other words, the continuous mass of the clichés, which is enlightened like in a storm, within an instant, by the supervenient self, so that the dreamer’s thought can jump over a numberless operations and land safely into the realm of the conclusions. Is this not a giant retroactive (abductive) guess of the supervenient self (or to use our abandoned notion of the living mind), which has ‘visited’ the effete one and has got some clues as a present?
The habitual nature of the universe The next problem we have to deal with is how to differentiate between the effete and the living minds, although we have almost entirely dropped the latter. Let us reflect deeper on this direction, in order to get a clearer view of both. When we say that the effects of the effete mind are such and such, what tells us that these are not results of the efforts of the living mind to awaken the effete one’s effects? Suppose we read a historical novel. In order to achieve a more realistic view, the author attentively describes plenty of details. S/he provides information for as many senses as possible. S/he recalls colours and odours, places and events, moods and facts; s/he
92 The iceberg and the crystal mind uses the language in any possible way to evoke the effects and affectations, which could facilitate the communication between her/him and the reader. These and many other effects of the living mind resemble touching the piano-keys. While the author knows with high certainty what sound every key possesses and can almost hear the melody s/he composes, the final orchestration depends on the audience, which is listening. Whether some of the listeners will hear more loudly the bass key or the treble depends on their own disposition, on their musical education, experience, etc., in other words on the effects of the effete mind. The personal aura is the targeting goal, i.e. the effete mind, which meets ‘the sounds of the keys’ of the living one touched by the author. (Perhaps, we have to reconsider the full invalidation of the ‘living mind’. It has fewer restrictions than the searching self. The only danger that remains from using it is the misguiding parallel to the effete one where an eventual dualism is probable.) The effete mind is not always passive. Why did Peirce use the example of the balloonist when trying to explain his concept of categories? Let us reflect on the beginning of his example: ‘Imagine yourself to be seated alone at night in the basket of a balloon, far above earth, calmly enjoying the absolute calm and stillness.’ Here Peirce needed a laboratory analysis of solitude and he logically found the conditions for it in the atmosphere. (When he wants to explain that Secondness means resistance, pushing, Peirce talks about ‘the breaking of the silence by the noise’, another ‘pure’ example.) Finally, the complicated nature of Thirdness asks for more than one way of explanations. Deriving more than one sense-dimension is what the effete mind can provide and the supervenient self is the device for this. The new exact meaning, produced as a result by everyone’s interpretation, is the third element of the thought process. Once placed into the domain of the effete mind, Peirce starts to follow its logical effects; we learn of a sudden piercing shriek of a steam-whistle, of the impression of stillness, of a person’s inertness to identify himself with the precedent state of feeling. This is a restoration of something that has already been: something heard, seen or sensed. In other words these are traces or paths of the animated past. We do not know whether Peirce himself had ever been seated in a balloon far above the earth, most probably not. But we have not been passengers on the Titanic either, nor were the movie-directors. Still, we are able to foresee human reactions in both cases without any difficulty, which means we can read other’s thoughts approximately. What is hardly to be achieved is not the truth about these thoughts but thoughts about the truth of the moment. This is what every author tries to accomplish: to revive the thoughts of the instant, the reality of the true event in order to provoke an immediate process of contrasting it with the laws of the general experience. For such particular events, the audience might or might not have read, seen, or heard. That is why we need the notion of the effete mind; it gives us the pattern for achieving this truth. Neither of the terms or ideas
The iceberg and the crystal mind 93 we have at our disposal can completely cover the range of the notion of the effete mind: the power of memory, some psychoanalytical methods, or context. Nor can we easily describe this variety with any sort of definition. What we can do is to define the effete mind as ‘the cloud of knowing more that accompanies every knowledge’. And, of course, to accept that even an objection like ‘or knowing less’ would not be denied. But we have vagueness and generality that can help here. Well, not too much, because both terms are concrete, hence they cannot clarify a less concrete term. What we really have more is another notion of Peirce’s, namely, the notion of the universe developing itself towards a ‘crystallized mind’, but that is another topic. We can get some help by the vague concept of the supervenient self as the magic, active, ‘third element’ in our new ‘mind–mind’ disposition.
The syntax of the universe It’s now necessary to sum up what has been achieved by exploring the notion of the effete mind to see whether it really brings some benefits by a further study of, let us say, literary or philosophical texts. On one hand it is a wider term than most of the up-to-date terms in use. It seems that, automatically, it is more abstract too. Further, it seems if we ignore it, we will not lose too much: we will still be able to analyse and interpret texts. What is more, it even looks like Peirce’s own thought will not suffer too much from not using it. All these are objections of a sluggish mind. Dealing with the notion of the effete mind one must take into account a term which is even ‘not there’; this is what disturbs its recognition. It is not there in the sense that it is not known up to that time; it constantly escapes from the sight and senses of every analyser; and still one should account for it. If one uses it, s/he must always talk of something, which cannot be described. But still, the analyser must be able to derive meaning with its help. It is a unique term, with the help of which Peirce was able to explain the structure of the universe, or more precisely, its syntax. It is the syntax of the universe that he tried to examine by the notion of the effete mind. This is also a giant attempt to merge logic with grammar in order to show that … the mathematical approach is the only relevant method of studying the process of thinking. It gives us the unique chance to describe phenomena that are far away from any experiential imagination. In addition, by a careful elaboration of it, one could easily modify it from any contemporary perspective, so that new dimensions of meaning can be upgraded; after all it is the mind that creates everything else. It is the effete mind; still, it is thought, it is nearly a metaphor, but it is alive. Taking it into account, one gets more self-control over the ideas s/he has in her/his own mind. It is a notion of a powerful absence. If we close our eyes to its absence it will immediately come alive. If we open them to
94 The iceberg and the crystal mind its presence it will slip away. Like any thought it causes action, but this action is not determined. We are talking about the secondary panic of the imaginary restored Titanic, or about the anticipated action which will follow that panic. And here it is, the effete mind. It is quite near to such a term as intuition, for example, or to pure mathematics. We must think of the laws of habit, which are laws of mind. We also have to acknowledge the existence of phenomena such as the moving line of the horizon, which is here with its effects, but never ‘there’ where the living thought seeks it. With the help of the effete mind and its effects it would be possible to explain why most artifacts look familiar, and most stories seem predictable. In many ways we are all Titanic passengers. Is this one of the reasons we feel like this story was written for every one of us? Possibly yes, but not only because of this existential element. The explanation lies rather in the fact that similar to dreams, our searching self does not know any other laws but its own. The general laws of thought are the deep traces of the effete mind. Originality is provided by the living mind when it meets the patterns of the effete one. Very soon the searching thought (the supervenient self) falls into the track of the effete mind and takes the route of the cliché. And we all recall that we are Titanic passengers fighting against the banality of the situation and our narrow choice of self-identification. Our personal goal does not coincide with the one of the universe. The ultimate goal of the universe is a perfect system with absolute ordered, classified mind. Thus, the tendency to habit would be started; and from this, with the other principles of evolution, all the regularities of the universe would be evolved. At any time, however, an element of pure chance survives and will remain until the world becomes an absolutely perfect, rational, and symmetrical system, in which mind is at last crystallized in the infinitely distant future. (CP 6.33) The thought-like effects of the effete mind are describable, but are they predictable too? Is it possible to create the effete mind’s effects? We may try: what we need to do is to fully adjust one piece of our life to the nearest future according to the conclusions of the nearest past. Unfortunately, we know that by definition this is impossible: we do not have any power over the next moment of our existence; we only can manipulate the floating past. Restoration of the details of familiar occurrences is one of the very important conditions for such creation. It is widely used in literature as a magic tool for evoking the effete mind’s effects. The story of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, when you come right down to it, is one of the most trivial of love stories. In that way it falls into some of the deepest tracks of the effete mind: love, passion, misfortune, hatred, death and catharsis. All this is accompanied by a bunch of
The iceberg and the crystal mind 95 masterful effects called to mind by a genius of language, suggesting a plentitude of possibilities of identifications. The viewer experiences an enormous range of feelings: from those of the lovers to the ones felt by the killers. The effects of the effete mind are at work here – it is all our consciousness that passionately loves, hates or kills; its desires and obsessions that ‘know more’ than the author’s, because it knows others; that is, its own tracks of floating thoughts are revived by the thrown light of the laser-like self. It is ‘we’ who kill, hate or love, ‘we’ as remembered by a giant thought that embraces our own and gives rise to ‘new’ experiences, ‘we’ in thought, or rather in-between thoughts, between the effete and living ones. This continuous thought is the effete mind. It is not God’s thought, which speaks us, it is the effete and the living minds that meet, clash and give rise to all knowledge shaping by the searching self. We are surrounded by thought but we become aware of it only after our searching self throws light upon mind-reality. Is there anything else which is not thought, but a kind of ‘final object’, a hard reality? No doubts about that, but, similar to the question ‘is there anything, which is not a sign?’, the answer should stipulate: ‘certainly, yes, but there is not such a thing which cannot become a subject of the thought.’
Doubts and beliefs Does this sound like a pure solipsistic view? It certainly does, but what keeps it away from such a danger is the recognition of the influence of generality as outlined by Peirce. Yes, it is only ‘we’ in thought, our seeking self that acts, responding to the particular situation, but this ‘we’ follows the pattern of thought (the effete mind’s tracks) that are common to all human beings. The particularity is our ‘software’, which works under similar ‘hardware’ – the uniqueness of chance and the laws of habit. Or maybe we have to rethink the solipsism; maybe there is solipsism or, at least, a solipsistic view capable of being multiplied. If it is always ‘we in-between thought’, playing other’s roles, how do we know that these are roles and not realities? Are these not pieces of life where our consciousness is ‘the only one’, alone with itself? Certainly not; any kind of solipsism fails in a substantial point. It presupposes a limited reality incapable of being continuous. Taking Peirce’s metaphysical view here is a good choice because it deals with the realities of both, continuity and discontinuity. His understanding is that no continuum can be reduced to a set of actual instances and that all instances embody continuity. We may here recall his famous example with the chalk-line he made on the blackboard. For him drawing is a ‘brute act’, which dismisses the vagueness of the general continuity of the blackboard. Comparing the board and the line, he states:
96 The iceberg and the crystal mind This blackboard is a continuum of possible points; while that is a continuum of possible dimensions of quality, or is a continuum of possible dimensions of a continuum of possible dimensions of quality, or something of that sort. There are no points on this blackboard. There are no dimensions in that continuum. I draw a chalk line on the board. This discontinuity is one of those brute acts by which alone the original vagueness could have made a step towards definiteness. (CP 6.203) A striking conclusion indeed, by which continuity or generality is conceived as unoriginal, whereas the discontinuity is seen as unique. Yet, the explanation goes on further dealing with the fact that the discontinuity can only be produced by mutual influences between the blackboard and the line, or between their two continuous surfaces. This is how Peirce clarifies the nature of the Firstness. It is the ‘whiteness’, a springing of something new. For the Secondness he uses the same example: ‘But the boundary between the black and white is neither black, nor white, nor neither, nor both. It is the pairedness of the two. It is for the white the active Secondness of the black; for the black the active Secondness of the white’ (CP 6.203). If we make a leap from pure logical details to literature, we may notice that quite the opposite seems to be true for the latter. Is it really? For the Shakespearean protagonists, for example, the originality plays the most significant role. The same is true of Dostoevsky. Raskolnikov (from the novel Crime and Punishment) kills an old woman in order to overcome his inferiority complexes. Another murder, represented in all the details of its preparation; then the slaying and the consequences for all players. What we have further is the next example of brilliant language and thought’s depth. Does our mind here ‘know more’ too, following the author’s? Yes, it does; it constantly measures its own ability with the character’s during the reading. It has been remembered and uttered by someone else, or by something else, and that is why it feels superior to the author’s thought, enhanced by the effects of the effete and living thoughts. It becomes a cross-point of a new and of an old (already ‘known’) experience. It recognizes its own tracks and paths of doing and thinking in similar situations, but at the end it only produces another layer to be laid down into the tracks of the effete mind. By using Peirce’s explanation of continuity and discontinuity we may metaphorically consider the blackboard as an example of effete mind and the chalk line as unique act (living mind); their mutual influences as effects of the effete mind. We may carefully describe the effete mind and its effects as something (not only artifacts) once thought out by humans and ‘shaped’ in mind and nature. Thus, we can observe originality as it is ‘produced’ every time it arises; it can be rationalized dynamically as it grows up before our eyes.
The iceberg and the crystal mind 97 It will be useful here to reflect on the role of the media from this perspective. Unlike the pre-video era, there is a worldwide exhaustion for inventing new ideas to be used by the media. When print was predominant, it took a long time to have an idea published on paper. This has changed substantially. There is a real thirst for originality as a result of the fast revitalization of the effete mind. The eye of the camera permeates every part of the living and past minds. There is hardly any such thing left as a hidden place where examples for uniqueness or particularity can be found. Any existing knowledge can immediately be exhibited before the eyes and mind. Mankind has grasped an enormous power over past knowledge. As a result we have grown too tired to rethink and re-classify events and ideas. It seems like the time is not too far away when we will have unlimited access to all human knowledge, available on different information carriers. Every hint or idea, once it appears, will be presented in a minute. Then we will literally have an ambience made of the effete mind. The steps towards such a future have already been made. They are preceded by metaphors, which try to clarify them. But instead new metaphors appear and more vagueness arises. Was the usage of a verb such as ‘surf’ for searching for an item on the Internet just a pure accident? Why ‘surfing’? What is beneath the surf – is it not the information-sea, which is ready to swallow the inexperienced surfer? Is there anyone who can say that s/he is well ‘trained’ and can never get lost? Lost … in the effete mind? We have our purposes and intentions, before we jump into this sea, something which draws our attention and directs it to the subject searched. In other words, we have signs, but are they ‘living’ enough to scratch new tracks into the fascinating depths of the past and to derive new meanings? Even today the most powerful companies are those that produce materials for storing information, in other words, for the effete mind. What happens then is the elimination of the mediation between the living and the effete minds; even now there are computer-based machines with which we can directly talk: we can teach them and they can learn and become ‘upgraded’, which means ‘more intelligent’. So what can be expected in the near future? Perhaps a development of an industry for the effete mind, whose effects will facilitate learning and teaching. This is the positive perspective. The negative one would be an increasingly lazy living mind (a mass of spilled selves), which would fail to clash with the effete one and evoke the thought-like-effects. What, for example, does it mean that the most successful movies lately are the ones whose directors revive memories of their childhood: we see dinosaurs, cosmic catastrophes, giant fishes, animated mechanical toys, vampires, witches and machine-guns all the time. This is the scary world of someone’s childhood, revived, exaggerated and artificially put in motion in order to be suppressed and overcome
98 The iceberg and the crystal mind someone’s effete-mind ambience when he (usually ‘he’) was too young to put his living mind to work to conceive the creatures from this environment as fictional. On the other hand, there are invincible heroes, who bring safety and often combine mismatched human qualities. These are a few common clichés that always successfully provoke human emotions, and do not demand efforts at thinking. The situation is the same with books: the most successful ones are those in which the distance between shock and relaxation is breathtakingly short, and there is a lack of any description or reasoning. If today’s students must read Crime and Punishment or Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, they will simply go to the nearest video shop and ask for the short-version movie. This is quite the opposite of what has been discussed in the previous chapter about the way the story in a novel develops: rather than from the quality to the ‘hard’ fact, now it is from the fact to the ‘hard’ emotion (or rather from the artifact to the art-emotion).
Effete mind and matter What is still disturbing about the entire issue of the effete mind is the as yet unanswered question about its difference from matter. In a chapter on Peirce’s cosmology, H. O. Mounce identifies three implications that the elements of this cosmology are not speculative but rather exhibited in the world about us. He says: The first is that mechanical phenomena are not fundamental in nature; the second, that the regularities of physics are contingent and are not ultimate; the third, that since the processes of nature are not fundamentally mechanical, there need be no gulf between those processes and the processes of mind. (1997: 61) Here it will be worthwhile to generalize the same formula as the one with objects and signs. There is certainly such a thing as ‘hard reality’, which exists independently from the effete mind, but there is not any kind of reality that cannot become an effete mind. The only condition for this is that this reality has to be thought; in other words, the mind-lattice has to be thrown on it. This is a slight reshaping of Peirce’s theory that the fundamental features of the universe are more comparable with processes of mind than with those of matter. If there be a gulf between mind and matter, then there might be reality, which is ‘untouched’ by any ‘immediate signifier’ (searching self), but this would be an unthinkable reality. With this, we are leaving Peirce’s Objective Idealism, according to which the objective universe may be seen ultimately as mental in character, and we enter a new realm of ‘methodological significism’ where reality is seen as a potentiality of becoming an effete mind. We may say along with Peirce
The iceberg and the crystal mind 99 that the processes in the universe from a contemporary point of view are more like the processes in a giant thought rather than a giant mechanism. They are unpredictable, chaotic and continuous. They grow and spread. What is more interesting, they never really die. I have begun by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind. (CP 6.102) We have tried to show that this is conceivable even today, but it must be reshaped and rephrased in order to adjust to the new situation in physics and ideas. We also have to be prepared to answer naïve questions such as ‘after all, what is the effete mind like?’ Most of the answers up to here were of the nature of pure metaphors: ‘the moving line of the horizon’, ‘the satin-like radiance that encircles all of our knowledge’, ‘the sleeping programs’, ‘a huge repository’, ‘a continuous habit’; or of technical terms: ‘ground effects’, ‘an unlimited mass of clichés’, ‘coded program’, ‘frozen tracks’, ‘exhausted reality’, etc. It seems that they serve more to escape a straight answer than to give one. No matter how long the list of the names we are giving to the effete mind is, we will always be trapped into one of the numberless ‘language games’, namely the magical feeling that we are approaching the nucleus of the problem, whereas new vagueness arises. (But the same set of problems arises when the philosophers of mind use the term supervenience, which does not prevent them from applying it in order to solve some abstract tasks.) It appears that posing the simplest question about the very nature of the effete mind will destroy the whole complicated building, and in many ways this holds true. But, on the other hand, if someone asks only simple questions s/he has to expect only simple or genius answers. Difficulties will arise every time somebody attempts to convey an idea whose embodiments are not yet known. We are interested in the syntax of the phenomenon ‘effete mind’, i.e. its rough characteristics and its relations to the living one. What we say each time is just the next perspective from which we try to clarify this term. But to fully accept it will probably mean taking one more step towards a future ‘logic of science’ of which Peirce dreamt. Perhaps it is still early, but even so, the elaborate issue of the effete mind is one more challenge to the view that such logic holds impossible. From this perspective, we may say that our attempts at determination are more than figures of speech, since they prove to be true for some artificially created situations; hence, by guessing correctly they will prove valid for some more. What does this strange sentence mean? First, it is a sincere statement because it follows the logic of the above inquiry.
100 The iceberg and the crystal mind Second, it seems strange only superficially considered. This is because we think about the artificially created situations in the same way we do the real ones, the only difference being that for the first we have pure analytic conditions that allow us to prove the laws of the mind in a laboratorial environment. (‘Imaginable laboratorial environment’ one could object, fully correctly.) To this we can answer by recalling the way we think, which in its generality does not provoke anybody’s objection, because we do not have pictures in our minds of the things we are thinking of, but rather ‘potentialities’ (signs, ‘laser pointers’, ‘lanterns’ or seeking self) of recognizing things. Hence, the deeper the tracks with the help of which we recognize something, the clearer is the evoked picture or the conceptualized metaphor. Is ‘track’ anything else but a pure metaphor? What else can we conceive of instead: perhaps a scrupulous description of some biological processes in the brain? How ‘exact’ and, again, not ‘imaginable’ will they be? Perhaps our inquiry up to now must consider one more definition: the effete mind is a recorded experience. This is a direct consequence of the fact just mentioned, that a sign (the supervenient self) is a moving picture. By a careful study of Peirce’s involvement in diagrammatic thinking there is a strong hint that he has seen diagrams that result in a kind of mathematical algorithm, and on the basis of these diagrams somehow pictures arise. Thought is nothing else but a constant comparison of such pictures, a giant, hidden metaphor. In the effete tracks, revealed by Peirce, thought moves inside computers and behind our foreheads: sometimes faster, sometimes slower, depending on the thirst of knowledge of our seeking selves. Let us see what Peirce thought of the identity of selves, ego, self-consciousness and subjectivity.
6 The missing notion of subjectivity in Charles Peirce’s philosophy
Peirce did not produce anything in particular that has the name ‘subjectivity’ and never missed the opportunity to deny any use of it. Instead, he dealt with terms which seems to be isomorphic to it, such as ‘personality’, ‘Self’ and ‘self-consciousness’, or with Other, which are integrated in his system building. Traces of his understanding of subjectivity can be found in his concepts of the ‘general idea’ and in his categoriology. Peirce’s semiotic was, by and large, pure of any subjective notions, as he stands on his anti-intuitivist and anti-psychologist positions. In this chapter I will try to re-conceptualize his view of subjectivity from his metaphorical use and from his relative hypotheses of the issue.
The German tradition The notion of subjectivity and the areas related to it represent one of the oldest philosophical problems. It has been treated in a different way by different thinkers through the centuries but it never has really vanished from sight. What is more, it is one of the most dynamic parts of every philosophical system. It could be found at its embryonic stage by a certain philosopher and, as his system grows and matures, the understanding of subjectivity changes as well. Paradoxically, there are only a few philosophers who undertake this task as central. It is usually thought that it is somehow known by itself or that this problem permeates all other problems so that it is not worth studying it separately. It is also one of those issues that everybody thinks s/he has inborn knowledge of. People get surprised when a question arises and they realize how long they have not really thought about the answers, or they have forgotten them. Or, as Peirce once said, people are most unlikely to think their own thinking. On the other hand, it looks like it is Peirce who has totally ignored the entire issue of subjectivity. It is traditionally thought that German classical philosophers such as Fichte, Kant and Hegel have carried out the most developed study of subjectivity. In this tradition the subject–object relationship is usually seen as a possibility of an appearance of the Absolute and has a status of
102 The missing notion of subjectivity general structural principle. Here, as well as in Anglo-Saxon treatment, subjectivity is widely used as a synonym or as a nuance of Self, selfconsciousness, Ego or individual mind. In the subject–object relationship the subject is a symmetrical although identical part of this unity. Generally, ‘the Self’ refers to the activity, which constitutes the subject–object relation. The nature of this activity is cognitive. Thus begin the bigger differences between Idealism, for example, and materialism. They abstract the object of knowledge from the subject and reflect on both in this abstraction. Idealism goes on to regard the object as a thing in itself, whereas materialism tries to connect it to the matter. Since the focus of this study will be Peirce’s rather than the German classical view of this topic, I will not consider the latter in too much detail. Let’s begin with the definition in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie: Subjectivity is not just active; it has awareness of its own activity … Bringing the outside relations in classical German philosophy under the rubric of the subject–object relationship may cause some problems. The inter-subjective relationship must follow the same general logic. Perhaps the deficiency of this philosophy consists in the fact that the Otherness of the subjectivity is always seen as another ‘objective’, rather than as another subjective of a general logic. (1998: 413; my translation from the German) To be more specific, we have to mention that Nietzsche made a strong objection to subject–object dualism. For him (as well as for Collingwood, for example), if anything is at all ‘given’ it is ‘the world’, neither an ‘external’ world nor a subjective world merely. The given world is already constituted and it looks like an interpreted text. He further held that nothing in the world is devoid of human interpretative activity, for the world is, in some sense, a product of thinking. This became a very fruitful approach in the 1960s, during the bloom of semiology, although by then its source had been long forgotten. It is fruitful to study Peirce’s treatment of this problem from two main perspectives. The first one has been adopted by Vincent Colapietro in his book Peirce’s Approach to the Self. A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity. It offers a very exhaustive outline of any area in Peirce, which is somehow related to subjectivity. Colapietro concludes that the sum of characteristics of the Self by Peirce is only negatively described: The personal self as mainly an illusory phenomenon; personal identity as a barbaric conception; personal existence as not only an illusory phenomenon but also a practical joke; and the individual person as a mere cell of the social organism. (Colapietro 1989: 65)
The missing notion of subjectivity 103 (I have some trouble thinking of the last sentence as Peirce’s and not as one that belongs to another well-known philosopher, who constantly uses the same metaphor of ‘the individual person as a mere cell of the social organism’ – Marx.) This perspective has helped Vincent Colapietro to achieve productive results. It reveals Peirce’s view of the Self as a sign in the process of developing. The Self is further viewed as being in dialogue with itself. Colapietro was able to trace Peirce’s understanding of the Self/subjectivity as it matures and includes a larger context of interaction. ‘Such interpersonal dialogues are capable of generating such intimate unions among distinct Selves as to be comparable to personal beings themselves’ (Colapietro 1989: 91). In a wider sense, on the basis of Peirce’s account of Self, it is possible to speak of the relationship between an inner and an outer world. In a letter to James (28 September 1904) Peirce described this relationship in a rather poetic manner: ‘We separate the element under control from the element we cannot help – although in this mode of consciousness there is no inseparable reflection that is done. We separate the past and the present. The past is the inner world, the present the outer world’ (CP 8.228). This relationship is mutual and complex; its essential characteristic is the inward control over itself. There is a permanent tension between the inward thought and its outward expression. Or, in Colapietro’s words: ‘Between solitude and solidarity’ (1989: 118). Peirce held that we have no direct knowledge of ourselves (or, as he said, of ‘the inner world’) but know ourselves only by ‘hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of external facts’ (CP 5.265). Let us here toss in a remark by T. L. Short made in an article on the same topic. Bearing in mind Peirce’s comprehension (as quoted above) of the inferential nature of the Self, he says: It is not immediately obvious that inferring the ‘inner’ from the ‘outer’ is possible. From where would a concept of the inner come if we never observe it directly but know it only by inference from something else that, by conception, is quite different? (1997: 289) It does not seem that much success has been achieved by following this direction. Colapietro’s study of subjectivity is by and large a descriptive one. It embraces all the aspects of the problem, yet it was not intended to raise critical questions of the matter. It revealed consciousness’s cultural overdetermination and its triadic division according to its nature of a sign. Overall, Vincent Colapietro’s book suggests that although it is inconsistent, there is such a thing as Peirce’s understanding of subjectivity.
104 The missing notion of subjectivity
Peirce’s dissent But after a closer look, the strong impression remains that something about the issue of subjectivity constantly irritated Peirce. This did not change with the maturing of his view. So, other approaches, although naïve at first glance, can pursue the question ‘why’ Peirce was always ignorant when touching the problem. I will try to follow this second tendency and relate the results to the facts presented by the first approach. Let us start from … the middle. The researchers have always had a hard time in looking for a clue as to why Peirce persistently denies the very notion of subjectivity. Whenever one reads something about this issue it is either negatively stated, or brutally ignored. There are numerous examples. In the original manuscripts of Peirce’s archives in the Houghton library at Harvard University under the topic of subjectivity one can find a large list of items and some others that fall into related area. Peirce always carried some paper cards in his pockets to write down everything that occurred to him. Some ten cards are related to ‘subjectivity’. They all contain ironical thoughts about it. One is really sarcastic: ‘Old lady at camp-meeting said she felt very bad. She did not know whether it was Religion or wind.’ What makes him so angry about this issue? In a letter to Lady Welby from 1908 he says: I do not make any contrast between subject and object, far less talk about ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ in any of the varieties of German senses, which I think have led to a lot of bad philosophy, but I use ‘subject’ as the correlative of ‘predicate’, and speak only of the ‘subjects’ of those signs which have a part which separately indicates what the object of the sign is. (Charles S. Peirce’s Letters to Lady Welby, 1953: 24) Here we are again, in German classical tradition. The largest list of writings on subjectivity here belongs to Hegel and to Hegelianism. Hegel’s logic is grounded in absolute subjectivity. The subjective ‘I’ possesses the entire knowledge of the Absolute Spirit. (Soon ‘spirit’ was replaced by ‘idea’.) At the beginning the idea is a unified substance and in the process of growing and developing obtains the truth, which is the ‘I’, and therefore the Absolute Spirit. Peirce made some remarks about Hegel, for example in his early essays ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’ and ‘Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic’, but the philosopher to whom he strongly objected (thus showing his full respect) was Kant. He says: ‘Kant’s adjectives “objective” and “subjective” proved not to be barbarous enough, by half, long to retain their usefulness in philosophy’ (CP 2.223). Kant divided mind into the faculties of feeling: the feeling of pleasure and pain; willing (volition and desire); and knowing (cognition). Peirce was also aware that Kant had taken this division from Johann Tetens, who in turn had long worked on the sixteenth-century rhetoricians and,
The missing notion of subjectivity 105 most probably, got the idea from them. Unlike Hegel, Kant rarely opposed subjective to objective. When he did this it was in order to reveal the appearance of something third, the synthesis, described as spontaneity or perception. This was Kant’s attempt to free his thought from Idealism. Now the point here is that Peirce’s own attempt to do the same refers to another kind of Idealism. Peirce’s Idealism is objective, and, as H. O. Mounce puts it: ‘… it was compatible with the most thoroughgoing Realism’ (1997: 9). Nathan Houser’s opinion sounds more balanced: ‘The decision to label Peirce one way or the other seems to reflect the relative importance one attaches to the different elements of the sign relation, and often seems to be a matter of emphasis rather than a divergence of doctrine’ (Houser and Kloesel 1992: XXXV). Elsewhere Houser provides a safe criterion for classifying consciousness, according to Peirce: ‘All of Peirce’s writings on consciousness, whether from the point of view of phenomenology, psychology, biology, semeiotic, or whatever, rest on the foundation of Peirce’s doctrine of categories’ (1983: 2). For Peirce, there are three types of consciousness. The first one is feeling-quality, the appearance of Firstness. This is undivided feeling without parts, which Peirce called Primisense. The second division of consciousness deals with reaction: this is the appearance of Secondness. This is what gives to consciousness its ‘here’ and ‘now,’ the effort, the brute fact. Its name is Altersense. And the third division of consciousness is the sense of learning, the awareness of Thirdness. This mode of consciousness provides knowledge of the connections between elements of experience. It mediates our understanding for all that is represented. It is called Medisense. Accordingly, Peirce sometimes identifies this last class of consciousness as consciousness of habit, consciousness that is lawgoverned, or consciousness of a middle term, something that represents a process of attaining experience. We can easily grasp these divisions of consciousness by some examples, given by Peirce himself. In a manuscript unpublished during his lifetime he says: 1st, Qualities, or feeling or, sensation. 2nd, Reaction between that which is within and that which is without. Imagine that you are lying in bed in the dark with a somewhat vacant mind when the loud scream of a railway whistle begins and continues indefinitely. As the instant of its commencement, you are conscious of a shock involving a compulsion you to hear the noise. Not that you think of yourself, but you have a sense that the previous silence has been brutally forced and there is here and now a Second something. – The law of action and reaction belongs as much to consciousness as it does to physics.
106 The missing notion of subjectivity Secondness, or Otherness. Secondness differs from firstness in always being here and now. It is a definite event. 3rd, Representamens, or consciousness of an element as connecting two others. – These distinct elements cannot be combined in one consciousness without the idea of such an intellectual Mediation between: I call this element Thirdness. In all such cases one idea, the object represented, influences another, the interpreting idea, through a third, the representamen. (MS 1135 in Houghton Library, Harvard College)
Ego and consciousness The next step requires summarizing what Peirce held for the problem of subjectivity, seen as the ‘subject–object relationship’, and how this problem fits into his scheme of consciousness’s division. We have seen that he rejected the traditional understanding as approached by German classical philosophy; the denial aimed at the opposing of subject and object to each other and placing them without or within us. Peirce preferred to see them under the department of the three-categorical consciousness. We can draw this conclusion with a relatively great amount of certainty by following his insistence that thoughts are determined by previous thoughts, and that not thought but relation, or the object of substance of thought, is in the mind. This means that the roots of the Self have to be found in the Secondness. Hence, there is no opposition, but rather a process of smooth transition between conception, i.e. understanding and representation, of the outer world. He therefore denies the very notion of talking of subject and object like they were two separate parts of consciousness. For Peirce the Ego is to be opposed to the Non-Ego, but the latter is not something of a different matter. So when he talks about subjectivity, he is using terms like ‘Ego’, ‘non-Ego’, ‘Self’, ‘I’, ‘private Ego’ and ‘self-consciousness’, and sometimes ‘individual mind’ or ‘individual’. To explain them Peirce uses ‘self-awareness’ which is not a term, but suggests a process or an inference. Ego, or Self, is a mode of consciousness that is achievable only by experience. As already pointed out it could be most easily recognized as an appearance of secondness, as action from outside and resistance from inside, in other words, as experience of opposition. On the other hand, selfconsciousness for Peirce is fundamentally inferential and, therefore is of the nature of Thirdness, so Peirce understands the whole of ‘subjectivity’ as an unfinished cognition of an ongoing experience. We may further ask, what is the nature of Ego or Self, of selfhood? Peirce’s answer is that this is the shock of some new state of mind, some new feeling, all these being the characteristics of Secondness. Here we can recall Peirce’s balloonist’s feeling of solitude which was suddenly superseded by a new feeling of piercing shrillness, or the loud scream of a railway whistle, or the sudden
The missing notion of subjectivity 107 cry from the street, all senses that evoke the resistance between two feelings or states that is our foundational experience of Self against non-Self. Self-consciousness, as the term is here used, is to be distinguished both from consciousness generally, from the internal sense, and from pure apperception. Any cognition is a consciousness of the object as represented; by self-consciousness is meant a knowledge of ourselves. Not a mere feeling of subjective conditions of consciousness, but of our personal Selves. Pure apperception is the self-assertion of THE Ego; the self-consciousness here meant is the recognition of my private Self. I know that I (not merely the I) exist. The question is, how do I know it; by a special intuitive faculty, or is it determined by previous cognitions? (CP 5.225 Ignorance and error are all that distinguish our private Selves from the absolute Ego of pure apperception. (CP 5.235)
Self and reality All the foregoing leads to the conclusion that Peirce did not outline a consistent concept of subjectivity, simply because he emphasized a dynamic understanding of it. He suggested that self-consciousness or knowledge of us is an interfering process between ‘I’ and the ‘Other’, or, between the individual mind and the community mind. Private Self is never achieved during one’s lifetime; it is, in Peirce’s words, like a wave through a sea of mind. As Nathan Houser (1999) says: It is clear from this metaphor that the wave of consciousness is distinct from the mind through which it moves, but it is doubtful that we would say that either the mind possesses the wave or that the wave possesses the mind. – So, perhaps we should consider giving up the notion that we have distinct minds. Now, our account of Peirce’s notion of subjectivity takes a different root and tries to offer a guess of it in light of the least exploited part of his work, namely his evolutionary cosmology. Some regard it as the weakest enterprise among his achievements but recently there are quite opposite attempts to see it as the most promising hypothesis for future study. This is a good opportunity to examine our results on the same issue. We are going to make our proposal, on the basis of what is traditionally thought to be the weakest chain of this already weak conception, namely the notion of the ‘effete mind’. Let us recall how was it formulated:
108 The missing notion of subjectivity The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. But before this can be accepted it must show itself capable of explaining the tri-dimensionality of space, the laws of motion, and the general characteristics of the universe, with mathematical clearness and precision; for no less should be demanded of every philosophy. (CP 6.25) (No wonder that this assertion was highly appreciated by physicians, like Helmhotz or Prigojin.) According to Nathan Houser (1999) it is better to think of ‘effete mind’ in Peirce’s definition of ‘matter’ as being ‘hidebound in habit’, rather than merely as ‘exhausted’, which was our initial interpretation: Here, we have to think of the final interpretant, which is of intellectual habits that no longer call for further interpretation, yet they serve in some sense as repositories of information – something like little ‘programs’ for action, and thus can be said to have intellectual value. Now, of course, intellectual habits CAN be altered, they can evolve, IF experience throws ‘curves’ at us and forces us to confront circumstances that we are unprepared for. In this sense, intellectual habits are not altogether ‘effete’. This suggests that we can think of effete mind as a kind of preserved sense, upon which the living mind throws a light and revives each time it focuses on it. (Virtually the same idea was introduced by Lotman in his conception of the semiosphere.) Then why oppose one mind to another mind’s product as subjective to objective? Was it not this that irritates Peirce so much? Did he not try to hint at such an idea by saying that ‘Thought is more without us, then within, and that it is we that are in it, rather than it in any of us’ (CP 8.256). Is not ‘matter’ thinkable in terms such as inactivated Self or interpretable Otherness, or frozen habit, or effete mind? On the other hand, what then is the difference between Peirce’s and any idealistic hypothesis? Both regard the world as being, so to speak, made of mind. In order to comprehend this difference we also cannot avoid turning to one of Peirce’s most famous maxims of pragmatism: ‘Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object’ (CP 5.402). Now, to evade the discussion of the effects of objects, which according to Peirce are objects of conceptions, so that we are not thrown into an infinite regress, let us take into consideration the view of the effete mind. Matter, for Peirce, is ‘hidebound in habit’; from a contemporary point of view we can say that it is like a giant computer disc with numberless ‘sleeping programs’, storage of potential meaning, which every person can
The missing notion of subjectivity 109 approach differently. The ‘programs’ consist of masses of clichés with condensed meanings. To activate them (by starting the thought process), the single or collective mind (or the supervenient Self) throws light upon them and tries to recognize the elicited effects – signs. This is not the idealistic world of virtual mind but the virtual reality of our active interpretation. According to Houser (1999): Matter is ‘exhausted’ mind, in a sense in that it is no longer part of a ‘living’ organism or ‘rapidly’ evolving universe, yet it still retains some ‘intellectual’ value as a repository, in some sense, of physical law, and may perhaps be viewed as a ‘final’ interpretant that has survived the ‘living’ semiotic system that somehow spawned it. In that case we would no longer talk of two unabridged parts: our Selves, and the independent Real, ‘… independent of how you or I think is an external reality’ (CP 5.405). Peirce never did take this next step himself, perhaps because he was too careful not to attribute the weakness of our thought to the Real in a way that was done when the division ‘subjective–objective’ was established. This is not an invitation to jump into an ordinary solipsism, because our experience is inferentially determined in the way it was already shown. As a last irony in our efforts, let me conclude by quoting a few more sentences by Peirce himself: Reason is of its very essence egotistical. In many matters it acts the fly on the wheel. Do not doubt that the bee thinks it has a good reason for making the end of its cell as it does. But I should be very much surprised to learn that its reason had solved that problem of isoperimetry that its instinct has solved. Men many times fancy that they act from reason when, in point of fact, the reasons they attribute to themselves are nothing but excuses which unconscious instinct invents to satisfy the teasing ‘whys’ of the Ego. The extent of this selfdelusion is such as to render philosophical rationalism a farce. (CP 1.631) Not too encouraging, is it? And a few more lines from a letter to Lady Welby from 1 December 1903: We say ‘type-written’ here; but your ‘typed’ is better. Ours sounds like a German word. There is too much German influence in this country, in every way. Their subjectivism is detestable & antipragmatical. (Charles S. Peirce’s Letters to Lady Welby, 1953: 4)
7
The unpredictable past
An indivisible part of our relationship to the objective reality is our perception to physical time. Which time do we perceive in reality? The more we get away from the past the more we learn from it. We freely read the Egyptian hieroglyphs; we successfully guess the mystery of the pyramids; we have even restored the dinosaurs according to the signs of their past existence. We know more of the first representatives of the human species than they alone have known of themselves. Contrary to the maxim ‘we can only experience our present’, the truth seems to be that we only experience our past. Our conscious Selves versus our unpredictable past.
Time and consciousness At that same moment when we utter the phrase ‘I am’ we send the instant to the past, since this proposition is logically structured; that is, it has passed from perceptions through thinking and has been even ramified with interpretative meaning. We have no power over the true present. The present is the absolute First, something which is unrelated and incomparable to anything else. We cannot be conscious of the immediate present; it is unimaginable. The instant is a flash to a present moment and a freezing of all signs in it. Any awareness, or understanding of these signs, means interpreting and relating them to others. In its turn ‘relating’ is possible to the past only. The present is unknowable and the future is inexhaustible. The very fine difference which Peirce draws between the impossible awareness of the present and its quality as a present allows him to use by this definition one of his categories, Firstness: The immediate present, could we seize it, would have no character but its Firstness. Not that I mean to say that immediate consciousness (a pure fiction, by the way), would be Firstness, but that the quality of what we are immediately conscious of, which is no fiction, is Firstness. But we constantly predict what is to be. Now what is to be, according to our conception of it, can never become wholly past. In general, we may say that meanings are inexhaustible. (CP 1.343)
The unpredictable past 111 The inexhaustibility of the future makes it so that it cannot be fully turned into a past experience. This is what feeds our illusion that it is achievable. We have seen that Peirce prefers to talk of three types of consciousness: primisense, altersense and medisense, rather than directly of time. The first one presents the feeling-quality – this is Firstness; the second deals with reactions, efforts and brute facts – this is the appearance of Secondness; and the third one is the sense of learning, or the awareness of Thirdness. Only the last one provides knowledge of the connectedness between elements of experience. It mediates our understanding for all that is represented. Accordingly, Peirce sometimes identifies this last class of consciousness as consciousness of habit, consciousness that is law governed, or consciousness of a middle term, something that represents a process of attaining experience: Let us now take up being in futuro. As in the other cases, this is merely an avenue leading to a purer apprehension of the element it contains. An absolutely pure conception of a Category is out of the question. Being in futuro appears in mental forms, intentions and expectations. Memory supplies us a knowledge of the past by a sort of brute force, a quite binary action, without any reasoning. But all our knowledge of the future is obtained through the medium of something else … All our knowledge of the laws of nature is analogous to knowledge of the future, inasmuch as there is no direct way in which the laws can become known to us. (CP 2.86) Bad thinking sees human evolution as a constant movement towards some future moment, which passes through the present and continues to the past. The truth is that there are not future moments (as there are not any present ones) in a purely logical sense, since they would be completely unknowable and unpredictable. Upon us are flowing series of instances from the forthcoming past, which we would know afterwards. The universe, according to Peirce, is made of the effete mind; this is the cliché of past knowledge, in which the living mind (or the searching Self) tries to derive its identity. This searching for and finding bigger and bigger portions of the collected mind is what we call evolution. Then ‘perfection’ would be the ongoing process of approaching the past by reasoning on it. The progress is a luminous past carved by the power of the living mind: One of the most marked features about the law of mind is that it makes time to have a definite direction of flow from past to future. The relation of past to future is, in reference to the law of mind, different from the relation of future to past. This makes one of the great contrasts between the law of mind and the law of physical force,
112 The unpredictable past where there is no more distinction between the two opposite directions in time than between moving northward and moving southward. (CP 6.127) When a person approaches death s/he gets clearer memories about his/her childhood, compared to those from yesterday, which turn pale. Based on the former, his/her thought becomes deep and sharp, while reflecting on the immediate moments makes it shallow and superficial. Education is an ongoing correction of a past experience, which is our only orientation mark for evolution. Sometimes the statement that knowledge grows is badly interpreted as a movement with a direction. In truth ‘growing’, ‘branching’ and ‘spreading’ are descriptions of collecting something, which has been extracted from something else, already existing. We study that which has already been. We turn it to the light, which is always falling from a new perspective, while we wander through our immediate past. The movement through the world of ideas is similar to walking in a dark forest. We walk sightlessly, with both hands outstretched to protect ourselves from unseen dangers, following an algorithm of habit, which we have got as a gift from the frequent gazes we throw back to the past. This algorithm, which is a delicate feeling for the ongoing past, is all that we have at our disposal for reacting to the coming quasi-future. We call it intuition, but it is simply habit, resting on the known past. Our insight is a faculty of an instantly calculated blindness. In a true continuum there must be a common moment, but not an absolute instant, independent of all that is before and after. Looking at matters through the wrong end of a telescope, as it were, – that is, aggregating the parts, – there certainly is something in a moment altogether independent of past and future. But examining the moment under a microscope we find this independent element divided up into portions, less independent of one another. Finally, we come to this, that while there are elements of secondness, – of irrational compulsion – they flow in upon us continuously, thus being subjected from the very first to thirdness. Take away considerable time, – as a day; – and doubtless much therein happens that could not have been expected. But if we divide the day into hours, we find that much that was unexpected on the whole is no more than might have been anticipated from a part; and so we are led to say that the unexpected comes, not only in driblets, but in inappreciable flow. (CP 7.674). The expanded metaphor of our perplexity is the discovery of virtual reality. Millions of people have suddenly got the opportunity to look into the existence of other millions; their own ‘Otherness’ has been exposed to
The unpredictable past 113 the eyes of others. They have rushed to study the endless treasury of unknown knowledge, but have soon found out that, as in a Middle-Age Japanese koan, they are trying to applaud with one hand. Everything they receive on their computer screens instantly runs away in fragments of thoughts; signs of past dialogues and pieces of a luminous mosaic, which never fit to each other to create the promised figure of the missing ‘Other’. We have found ourselves in a giant pavilion of funny (distorted) mirrors. It has turned out that we have only re-read the next prayer for forgiveness in the new temple of electronic communication. Now they are trading there. With a great amount of certainty we could predict the next step: an opening of even higher doors, and our astonishment again at the new treasurers of the … known future. Let us imagine that we have found ourselves among the ruins of an ancient town. There is nobody there and no one entire building is left. But following every single step, noises arise; we see colours and sparkling window glasses. A melancholy past, without compassion and emotion, lacking the uncertainty of the lying present, comes to us. We see cheerful people, who are stealing, begging and killing each other. Remarkably, even the smallest detail, or the instant picture, is about some action. Our spontaneous recollection, inspired by the ruins, restores a merry-go-round of activities. Here we see the strained muscles of a builder; there, the oldfashioned instrument of a blacksmith; we glimpse some half-naked wrestlers and veiled women, balancing with the clay vessels on their heads, and lot of other scenes. But we never notice traces of the thoughtful face of some philosopher. Why? Did the ancient people think less than we do? Why is there, in the old paintings and historical descriptions, a lack of any hints about the ideas that dominated minds at that time? Why, even in Raphael’s ‘Academy’ does the portrait of the young thinker (Michelangelo) evoke a vague anxiety in the viewer? Is it not because in its clearest appearance the process of recollection, which is thinking again, restores only its effects, and these are actions? The tracks of the effete mind have silently layered around us, freezing the efforts of living thought (the seeking Self) to achieve a new past. They have been mitigated into the worthy ruins of the ancient town and appeased by the downhearted absence of a breathing reality. Our mind is like a phonograph needle sunk into the groove of memory, playing an old melody that makes us dream and recall how much future we have accumulated. Thought inhabits only the past; only the past contains thought. Only the third consciousness, the mediating one, is able to collect and preserve experience. The present represents an instant flash towards the masses of clichés that hold frozen interpretation chains. All that we do when we try to predict something is based on repeatable past experiences. We are convinced that, if put on a known track, the phonograph needle will play the same old melody. What we call the ‘future’ is nothing else but our expectation that the past moment will begin to talk, i.e. to
114 The unpredictable past produce a system of relations and comparisons. Of course, it will start to talk to us from the past, when it is exposed to the laser-pointer of our attention. Calling attention is the first step of understanding. This is still Firstness: there is no element of continuity and no awareness, only the aperture has just been opened. The enlightening, without any relations to the object enlightened, is innocent, another Firstness. Only conceiving the object as ‘Other’ represents a state of Secondness. This is the moment when the knowing mind faces the unknown object and experiences its resistance. The beginning of setting a relationship to it defines the work of Thirdness. The process of knowledge that has continuity and establishes a habit has begun. From there on, we ‘predict’ … what has already been. Now for Thirdness. Five minutes of our waking life will hardly pass without our making some kind of prediction; and in the majority of cases these predictions are fulfilled in the event. Yet a prediction is essentially of a general nature, and cannot ever be completely fulfilled. To say that a prediction has a decided tendency to be fulfilled, is to say that the future events are in a measure really governed by a law. (CP 1.26) Physical time does not stand still, nor passes by, nor comes to us. Thinking it into categories of a process that has a beginning, middle and a possible end is as untrue as the thinking before Copernicus that all planets spin around the earth. We settle only with images through which we have already passed. These images are always warm and friendly because they are deceivingly dialogized with our own consciousness, which does not know anything else but its personal ‘I’. If we sink into a memory, or into a dream, or into an immediately past moment, it will be indifferently for the truth, which we carry as individuals, because these are the fields of our own emotions and they will not tell us our mistakes before clashing with other emotions or other thoughts. The ruins of the ancient town, the spectacular visions from our imaginative walk, the observations that strike us: all these are tracks from the disc of the effete mind from which the laser pointer of the living mind extracts a harmonious or a contrapuntal knowledge of the past.
The time-capsule It will be useful to see if all the poetics from the above writing are stripped off whether any denotative function remain. Let me put all concepts in between a dialogized mind (the one that asks and answers questions) and see what conventions rule them. Let me further reverse the perspectives of cliché and original thought to see whether my notions become shaken or survive.
The unpredictable past 115 First, who are ‘we’ whom we were talking about as if it were clear to us? In other words, to whom would our discussion up to now make sense? When we say ‘past’ or ‘present’, do we think these are terms that do not need further elaboration? We have already seen that for Peirce the future is connected with mental phenomena, such as intentions and expectations. This is the only way to cognize a continuum, time. Past and future are mediated according to him, by memory, which provides knowledge by a sort of brute force. Memory does this ‘without any reasoning’. (We have earlier called this mediating memory ‘the searching Self’ or ‘living mind’.) Past is fully unpredictable, not only because time is a true continuum but also because its characteristics are based on memory, which is mediated. Peirce also claims that all our knowledge of the future is obtained through the medium of something else. But, talking on a true continuum is it not one and the same what we will say about past, future or present? Let us take a step further and ask a question about language. As language itself represents a giant convention, are terms like ‘past’ and ‘present’ not conventional too? Do we have perceptions of past, present, or future? In Peirce’s philosophy physical time is always connected to his categories that deal with non-physical phenomena. This is easy to explain with his insistence that we can only observe the effects of thought and not thought itself. These effects are other than thought, yet they are the only sources of knowing it. We cannot think Firstness; any thought of it makes it something else. Thought is embedded in its effects: In the flow of time in the mind, the past appears to act directly upon the future, its effect being called memory, while the future only acts upon the past through the medium of thirds … In sense and will, there are reactions of Secondness between the Ego and the non-Ego (which nonEgo may be an object of direct consciousness). In will, the events leading up to the act are internal, and we say that we are agents more than patients. In sense, the antecedent events are not within us; and besides, the object of which we form a perception (though not that which immediately acts upon the nerves) remains unaffected. Consequently, we say that we are patients, not agents. In the idea of reality, Secondness is predominant; for the real is that which insists upon forcing its way to recognition as something other than the mind’s creation. (CP 1.325) It turns out from this quotation that there can hardly be something called a present here. We can see this from the scheme in Figure 7.1 with the time-axis ‘past–future’ and all the accompanying effects. But the scheme alone is incomplete because it shows a slice rather than a whole model of the flow of time. If the effects are different than the flow of time, represented by the time-axis, it follows that they will form their
Figure 7.1 Time-axis.
The unpredictable past 117
Figure 7.2 Time-axis effects.
own imaginable lines, which will not be parallel to the time-axis. They will form imaginable curves. (Of course, ‘lines’, ‘curves’, and ‘axis’ are fully arbitrarily here, used only as heuristic tools.) In order to represent the flow and to become a model, the ‘past–future’ axis and its accompanying curves have to be rotated. Thus the signs ‘past’, ‘future’, ‘present’ will no longer remain partial, i.e. Rhematic-Iconic, or Rhematic-Index, but will get connected to their remainders and become Rhematic-Iconic-Sinsign, or Rhematic-Indexical-Sinsign, or, most probably, Rhematic-IndexicalLegisigns. Now what we see is that the present circulates outside; the future and the past form their axis … inside a sphere: the sphere of their effects (see Figure 7.2). This is a far more correct scheme of what Peirce possibly thinks of time in his categories and their sign correspondences. From it one can see that all we have are time effects known by an ongoing present. Why is this so? Simply because the present is like Firstness: it slides tenderly around the sphere; it does not insist on being real or objective. It is outward because it does not force anything; it does not push or try to call memory; it is that which mediates between past and future. In this quality it should be Thirdness, or at least Firstness of Thirdness, as Peirce
118 The unpredictable past would certainly prefer to call it. In general, it provides continuity or is itself a continuum. Truly, our entire memory flows like we are inside a space capsule, where it is always ‘now’ and ‘there’, no matter if we visit our past or sink into the future, or even if we dream or say what is to be. We are inside an ongoing present that is the only state known by our unconsciousness. It does not know what has been happening to us for five or fifty years; it is simply the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of our life that does not flow but moves towards … our past, pretending it is the future. We were different people five years ago, but our sub-consciousness knows us as if we had not changed at all. It knows us, as individuals that are changing constantly and in no moment are fixed, i.e. cognizable. What our sub-, un- or super-consciousness really knows of us are floating pieces of memories, fantasies and dreams; in other words, an ever-growing past. Its ‘memory effects’ are thinkable in separate instances, seized by consciousness as an ever-changed present: The only important thing here is our metaphysical phenomenon, or familiar notion, that the past is a matter for knowledge but not for endeavor, that the future is an object that we may hope to influence, but which cannot affect us except through our anticipations, and that the present is a moment immeasurably small through which, as their limit, past and future can alone act upon one another. (CP 8.113) A very strong objection to this is that there cannot be such a thing as the immediate effect of the present moment; the effects of any moment immediately turn into effects of the past. That is why our ‘present’ is like a sphere, which encircles the uncertainty of searching for and finding an ‘objective reality’; this is nothing else but another name for the effects of the past. This objective reality is the only one that is cognizable. We all know that there is another objective reality ‘independent of how you or I think’, etc.; the truth is that we do not want to know that it is so because this reality is hardly bearable for humankind. The only knowable reality lives in the past, but we prefer to hide it in something that we call the ‘present’, which, in fact, we cannot experience. Such a quasi-reality is like a shield that protects us against the external reality, the latter being nothing else but a true Secondness. We always try to ‘present’ reality as if it is completely outside of itself; as if we know it and we are used to it, as it is Thirdness. This is the reason why, even when we visit our past or future, we need the capsule of an ongoing present and the shell of the quiet Thirdness.
The unpredictable past 119
Of thinking music Let us see how this goes on. We have to examine phenomena that exist exclusively in the present and, each time they are revived, they become different. It seems that these could be many things: for example, a text, but the text is fixed and only its reading/interpretation differs. Besides, the text relates to understanding, which presupposes even greater freedom of interpretation. To what/whom is a piece of classical music related? Its sound is different each time it is performed, no matter that the score is the same. Of course it can be recorded, but still, each performance is perceived differently, as with the text. But while the text pertains to language and, respectively, to understanding, and thus seeks meaning in its universality, the music aims at the silence and thus at individuality. The Russian composer, Mussorgsky, once said: ‘Music is an organized silence.’ This is nicely put. Music makes us understand silence – people seem to always know that. Here is another wise sentence, originating from the Far East: ‘That which shatters the silence we call noise. That which enhances the silence we call music.’ I do not want to focus here on examining the meaning of music or on whether its system is self-centred. I am not going to ask a question about the presence of an outside referent. It is also necessary here to point out that my attempt to differentiate between thought, music and time has nothing to do with styles, codes or movements within music. Different styles, codes and movements have developed from the solidification of conventions that involve technical features as well as socially constituted meanings. The latter have established their own expressive devices and relate them to social changes. We are trying to explain how music is thought, how it relates to thinking of time and whether there is such a thing as logic of silence. On the other hand, what does it mean ‘to see’, or ‘to feel’, ‘within’ the music? Above everything else, music influences the intellect, thought. Let us recall how Peirce conceives music: The pitch of a tone depends upon the rapidity of the succession of the vibrations which reach the ear. Each of those vibrations produces an impulse upon the ear. Let a single such impulse be made upon the ear, and we know, experimentally, that it is perceived. There is, therefore, good reason to believe that each of the impulses forming a tone is perceived. Nor is there any reason to the contrary. So that this is the only admissible supposition. Therefore, the pitch of a tone depends upon the rapidity with which certain impressions are successively conveyed to the mind. These impressions must exist previously to any tone; hence, the sensation of pitch is determined by previous cognitions. Nevertheless, this would never have been discovered by the mere contemplation of that feeling. (CP 5.222)
120 The unpredictable past Suppose we are listening to a classical musical piece, for example the Violin concerto no. 1, D-Dur, op. 6, by Paganini; we have heard the main musical phrase, and we await the next famous virtuoso tones. Let us further assume that we know this piece by heart. The music is playing: can we say that we are in the state of what I have called an ‘ongoing present’? Or, let us imagine that we are listening to the same piece playing on our stereo at home. Have we reached it now? The question is obviously pointless since we can take any kind of example and ask it again. Music is an ever-revived appeal for evoking thoughts or emotions that are different each time they are played. But so are many other arts, for example ballet or drama. Then, let us stick to the point: where does the music direct us? One possible answer would be: to the inner silence of the listener, where it can be endlessly interpreted or emotionally ramified with different senses by our supervenient Self. Let us here recall the meaningful silence in a piece of music composed by John Cage. He strikes a chord and then in the rhythmically ordered silence nothing can be heard for a very long time. The listener is invited to play his/her own piece of music that sounds inside him/her. As in Peirce’s example of the general predictability of each day, which turns out to be as unpredictable as a whole as it is if divided into hours and seconds, the direction to which a piece of classical music will bring us is as non-cognizable in general as it is in any single tone. The always new interpretation of music occurs in silence, which is the ‘capsule’ of our ongoing present each time we visit our personal past. There is no fixed moment in which we realize that we are in this imaginable past; it could happen during or after the music is played. The nature of time capsule is musical because it influences our thought only while music is perceived. The contradiction seems overwhelming: from one side, we do not have any present (there is no any quality of our consciousness to seize it); from the other, we only have an ongoing-present capsule in which we could think of past and future. The contradiction is at the same time solved: if we are talking of a continuum, it cannot be anything else but present in its actual instances; being only present, how do we know it is present? How do we know it is a continuum? We do not, because the ‘present capsule’ is a metaphor only, but so is ‘past’ and ‘future’. We think of time, when we perceive it: we cannot ‘see’ or ‘sense’ time, we can only ‘hear’ it; we hear it, when it is … silent, when we interpret it, i.e. cognize it, in silence. Let us see how this relates to Peirce’s thought of perceiving music: A friend of mine, in consequence of a fever, totally lost his sense of hearing. He had been very fond of music before his calamity; and, strange to say, even afterwards would love to stand by the piano when a good performer played. So then, I said to him, after all you can hear a little. Absolutely not at all, he replied; but I can feel the music all
The unpredictable past 121 over my body. Why, I exclaimed, how is it possible for a new sense to be developed in a few months! It is not a new sense, he answered. Now that my hearing is gone I can recognize that I always possessed this mode of consciousness, which I formerly, with other people, mistook for hearing. In the same manner, when the carnal consciousness passes away in death, we shall at once perceive that we have had all along a lively spiritual consciousness which we have been confusing with something different. (CP 7.577) The words of Peirce’s friend sound more like Peirce’s own. But he must have highly appreciated them for their correspondence to his description of the habit-taking tendency. Evidently his friend had developed a habit of perceiving music that became triggered each time he realized that he stood next to a good performer. ‘The mode of consciousness’ of which Peirce’s friend spoke cannot be confused with anything else: it was interpretation of music in silence; in other words, he enjoyed the pleasure of thinking music, circulating around his individual past. The ability of the mind to interpret tones is crucial in understanding music. Perhaps a special nerve centre in the brain is responsible for the musical sensibility. The largely accepted cliché, that we see or feel something definite each time while the music plays, is of little help when we reason on it. ‘The Other’ of the music is neither the music again, nor any particular emotion, but its capacity of being an echo wherein the interpretation occurs in absolute silence. The silence is absolute because it arises while the tones are continually perceived. Never mind the oxymoron, it is this silence that appears in-between the sounding of two tones of a melody, in the ‘air’ between two tones, as Peirce describes it. This interpretative ability represents the response to the tones. Thinking is responding: that is why it is dialogical. But to what does our immediate perceiving of a succession of tones respond? To pure emotions, as the trivial answer would say, or to a kind of thought that is coded in tones? The echo is responding and in this case it responds to another echo arisen by remembering other responses heard in a similar emotional situation like the momentum one. Thoughts respond to thoughts, without mediation: this is the chief effect of music. Our searching Self has been integrated into the universal Self while it sounds. Being alive in music only, these thoughts are conveyed by the everchanged present of tones; they are stripped of any signs and they are not signs themselves. Sign vehicles, such as notes and tones, are not thinkable while they are at work. Tones play directly upon the consciousness, appealing for further interpretation. Of course, these are thoughts in a Peircean sense, in which feelings are thoughts too. And, in another Peircean sense, previously existing thoughts respond to previous thoughts:
122 The unpredictable past In a piece of music there are the separate notes, and there is the air. A single tone may be prolonged for an hour or a day, and it exists as perfectly in each second of that time as in the whole taken together; so that, as long as it is sounding, it might be present to a sense from which everything in the past was as completely absent as the future itself. But it is different with the air, the performance of which occupies a certain time, during the portions of which only portions of it are played. It consists in an orderliness in the succession of sounds which strike the ear at different times; and to perceive it there must be some continuity of consciousness which makes the events of a lapse of time present to us. We certainly only perceive the air by hearing the separate notes; yet we cannot be said to directly hear it, for we hear only what is present at the instant, and an orderliness of succession cannot exist in an instant. These two sorts of objects, what we are immediately conscious of and what we are mediately conscious of, are found in all consciousness. Some elements (the sensations) are completely present at every instant so long as they last, while others (like thought) are actions having beginning, middle, and end, and consist in a congruence in the succession of sensations which flow through the mind. They cannot be immediately present to us, but must cover some portion of the past or future. Thought is a thread of melody running through the succession of our sensations. (CP 5.395) Music resembles the purest intellectual work, if not the purest thinking. Unlike text, music does not try to produce and seize new reality; we cannot ‘live’ in a piece of music, like in a text. We live in music not like in a new reality, which is the case with a text, but as we do in a thought. Music aims at a silent response, at an echo that reverberates after the tones fade away into a quiet interpretation of subtle harmonies and contra punts. In such silence we can adjust or transfer the feelings and the thoughts into which we have sunk before the beginning of music. This ‘reality’ occurs in the ‘ongoing present’ of the music. Sometimes musical effects mould into outside shapes, something like Goethe’s famous phrase that architecture is frozen music. True, in the middle of Verdi’s Requiem the raised eyes of the listener must glide over the oval shape of the baroque opera-hall, on the dark velvet of boxes, and then silently rest on the plaits of the shell-like ornaments. Such music needs pillars, capitals and large mirrors with golden-plated frames. It needs the cessation of reality because it tries to overcome its own nature and to produce reality as the text does. (Just for the sake of curiosity, what architecture style corresponds to contemporary pop music? In foreseeing the disappointing answer, let me ask one more question: does today’s music not suffer most of all because it has reformulated its aim from understanding silence to deconstructing it? Instead of being a ‘continuous
The unpredictable past 123 silence’, modern music has turned into a rhythmic thump and has given up its will to be a silent continuum, where thoughts interpret thoughts.) So …
… the Otherness of time … … is thought. The action of time is time again, in other words there is not any action. The action of thought is action again, that is, other than thought itself. It results in an ongoing effort to seize reality by producing belief. Music is only the best metaphor of such an action. It starts and runs; it has a middle part and an end with different motives and themes; it evokes new senses. That which differs it from text is the way it is interpreted, or rather the occurrences of its interpretation. The text needs mediation, that is, a sign action. In music, with each single strike of a tone, a chain of thoughts arises that occupies ‘the events of a lapse of time’. This net of thoughts assembles the tones in an occasion present to us. The chain, consisting of ‘instant thoughts’, facilitates the perception of the wholeness and creates an illusion of continually ongoing orderliness of succession. This multiple thought resembles a computer drawing where an initial image can be endlessly reproduced in the virtual space, one after another, as it gets smaller and more vague. There is no sign-action (growing of signs) but rather a sign muting. The interpretant of a single tone is an image reflected in numberless mirrors. We see only its shadows but not its shape. The interpretation of music does not breed outward but inward. In this sense Peirce’s comparison of thought with music could be corrected. It is too technical and maybe this is what makes it sound untrue. He says: ‘In a piece of music there are the separate notes, and there is the air.’ First, the tones, not the notes, are playing, and this makes a big difference. While playing, the piece of music is a true continuum, where even ‘the air’ in-between two tones, in other words the silence, is intellectually loaded. Music is a desperate effort to emulate time in its continuous flow to the past. It is also a perfect time capsule for visiting all other times. Music cannot ‘think’ time, but echoes it, flowing parallel to it. In this respect it is thought and not music that is the Otherness of time. Similar to the present from our scheme that circulates around the other times, music slides around our muting Self.
The muting Self In what respect is thought an Otherness to time? The famous concept of Bakhtin of Other/Otherness is grounded in his dialogic theory: his point of view starts from the dialogue between men. Here is what he says in his ‘Notes Made in 1970–71’: Everything that is repeatable and recognizable is fully dissolved and assimilated solely by the consciousness of the person who understands;
124 The unpredictable past in the other’s consciousness he can see and understand only his own consciousness. He is in no way enriched. In what belongs to others he recognizes only his own … I live in a world of others’ words. And my entire life is an orientation in this world, a reaction to others’ words … (1986: 143) This is a logo-centric view. We can use it as long as we consider the psychological understanding of time. According to it, thought might be regarded as the Otherness of time in the sense that it is an effort to seize reality. Time can only be cognized as a past. But as already shown and confirmed in the latest quotation, ‘other than itself’ represents exactly the same illusion as the big conventional terms ‘present’ or ‘future’. There is certainly such a thing as ‘other than itself’. I can approach it to a certain extent, but I cannot be this thing; I cannot cognize it completely as ‘other than me’. What I can do is closely slide around its ‘surface’ inside of a time capsule, or ‘hear’ it in a muted music interpretation. In other words, I can sink in silence. As mentioned above, this is a silence in which tones and harmonies are gradually muted; one cannot hear them, but can hear one’s thoughts about them. It is something similar to the special mode/consciousness of Charles Peirce’s friend. This view has to be combined with the phenomenological one in order to become more complete. It is known that we cannot stand absolute silence; only a few minutes in full sound-isolation could deteriorate our health. In the stillness of a vacuum, we hear the sounds of our organic life. To cognize something in silence means to approach the individual Self by virtue of an unexpected sense. By the syncope in a piece of music there is no movement in silence, except the beat, preceding the beat, on which the first sound is produced. (This beat could also be mute, marked only by the conductor.) The conductor marks it until the entrance of the next instrument. S/he marks the measures, which make the music sing while the musical phrase breathes. Music is not engraved in stone as in Goethe’s metaphor: it is itself engraved silence. Perceiving music means engraving silence on thoughts. We need to explicate the silence that is in music in order to perceive it. This silence has much in common with thinking, that is why we hardly differentiate between perceiving music and thinking it: as we have seen, the latter is an Otherness of time. Listening to music has its own final or logical interpretant: this is the silence concealed in it. We are talking of the silence that precedes a musical performance. It is like a cloud that reaches us before the tone. This is an intellectually loaded silence that emerges first when the conductor raises his/her baton and again shortly after the last tone has been muted. (It would be exciting to define what kind of a sign represents such silence.) It appeals to the Self and directs us toward ourselves. The Self is its final interpretant. Listening to music means to aim at a self-centrism. Unlike in the text where under-
The unpredictable past 125 standing is possible if interpretation points only to something outside (Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogue), interpreting music occurs only for the sake of the supervenient Self. Listening to music aims at stopping the float of the Self. It is no more a trope; it turns into a self-centred meaning. (In this regard, it is no more ‘meaning’; it is a silence that means.) Text-interpretation represents a constant progress, while music-interpretation is a permanent regress. Interpreting texts directs us to establish a habit-taking tendency, whereas understanding music tries to destroy any such tendency, and to enable our Self to get a sense of Firstness. In order to stress the meaning of silence for human beings, Bakhtin draws a difference between quietude and silence: ‘In quietude nothing makes a sound (or something does not make a sound); in silence nobody speaks (or somebody does not speak). Silence is possible only in the human world (and only for a person). Of course, both quietude and silence are always relative’(1986:133–134). We interpret music in silence, where nobody speaks but we. This silence is our own: the silence ‘speaks’ to us, and the only way to hear it and to respond to it is by listening to music. Then our own silence ‘learns’ to respond and understand; it becomes loaded silence, able to ‘think’ music. Exactly this ‘learned’ silence is the strange sensation of a pitch of a tone, which precedes any tone according to Peirce. (These impressions must exist previously to any tone; hence, the sensation of pitch is determined by previous cognitions.) Perhaps this is cognition of our dark present, or a touch of our quiet Self. Music mutes the Self.
8
The quiet discourse Some aspects of representation in C. Peirce’s concept of consciousness
In this chapter I will try to conceptualize a series of metaphors that occurred to me while looking at a holographic picture, an art-installation and a painting by Paul Cézanne. The analysis will resume all achievements of the method of conceptualizing metaphors and parallel them to those of some other competitive methods, such as the iconic theory as outlined in some early works of Umberto Eco, and to the approaches of the continental (Saussurean) semiotics. At the end of the chapter I will try to order the results gained from using the used methods of conceptualisation in a triadic model of representation.
Peirce, Bakhtin and Baudrillard I was inspired to write this text by visiting an exhibition. It was one of those post-modern installations placed in several halls with darkened windows. There were no art works at all, but the visitors themSelves acted as art-objects. A complex video-system was reproducing the image of any single person from different perspectives. On large wall-screens everyone could see his/her own figure, getting in/out of the room, crossing the hall to encounter one’s own Self or going away from himself, talking, smiling, multiplied, magnified. What struck me at that moment was the famous thought of Charles S. Peirce: But it follows from our own existence … that everything, which is present to us, is a phenomenal manifestation of ourselves. This does not prevent its being a phenomenon of something without us, just as a rainbow is at once a manifestation both of the sun and of the rain. When we think, then, we ourselves, as we are at that moment, appear as a sign. (CP 5.283) I felt like an animated sign, I entered the semiosis as a sign, I acted like a sign and I asked myself where my triads were. Then I began to ask more
The quiet discourse 127 serious questions. If I was a sign, participating in an interpretative chain, how could I foresee the new cognition that would follow from my action? I obviously cannot, hence I am nothing more than a mirror, which mirrors itself. Otherwise I must take myself as a transcendental signified, i.e. an ultimate signified, or, in other words, something which is fully and finally present. What is moving outside my guesses is the semiosis resulting from my mistakes. To see a perspective of possible interpretations I enter the sign-chain and break it down. I multiply the fractions in order to sense one more dimension of myself. I am a sum of all pieces, which are parts of me plus my action. The question that arises is what is my interpretant as a sign? What is ‘the second consciousness’ interpreting mine? When I say ‘second consciousness’ I have in mind some striking similarities between Peirce’s and Bakhtin’s thought. In Peirce’s definition of a sign, the relation to its object is described as ‘something other than itself’. In his Late Essays Bakhtin speaks of a ‘second consciousness’ which is the Other’s consciousness, the one that is permanently involved in a silent, internal dialogue with the artist’s. He says: The second consciousness and meta-language. Meta-language is not simply a code; it always has a dialogic relationship to the language it describes and analyzes. The position of the experimenter and the observer in quantum theory. The existence in this active position changes the entire situation and, consequently, the result of the experiment. The event that has an observer, however distant, closed and passive he may be, is already a different event … The problem of the second consciousness in the human sciences. Questions (questionnaires) that change the consciousness of the individual being questioned. The inexhaustibility of the second consciousness, that is, consciousness of the person who understands and responds; herein lies a potential infinity of responses, languages, codes. Infinity against infinity. (1986: 136) As the series of questions goes on, I wonder: What am I in the semiosis, what am I as part of an installation, or in a dark cathedral, in a homepage of the Internet, in the opera-hall, a moment before the raising/dropping of the curtain, in all places where my self-consciousness is silent? What kind of a sign does it produce, surrounded by the absolute presence of my iconic images? Let us examine some parallels between such situations in art. In Paul Cézanne’s painting Les baigneuses, the painter’s eye enters the painting in a similar way (see Figure 8.1). It is inside the painting and everything it sees is stereoscopic as if the eye is surrounded by what it is seen. This is a step further from the position of a distant observer. After
128 The quiet discourse
Figure 8.1 Inside the painting.
this step is done all that is observed looks differently. And here is my point concerning Jean Baudrillard’s famous term ‘simulacra’. His ‘third-order simulation’ or the ‘hyperreality’ would not be able to produce ongoing semiosis or acting signs outside of itself: Baudrillard suggests that hyperreality is produced algorithmically (or via mathematical formulae), like the virtual reality of computer code; that is to say, detached from notions of mimesis and representation and implicated, for example, in the world of mathematical formulae. (Lane 2000: 86) For a moment I felt like I had stepped into a world of endless simulation, but unlike Baudrillard’s assumption that this is a world for itself, I preferred to think of it as a realm of unlimited semiosis. What saved my soul (and my observational legitimacy) was Peirce’s notion of the sign as a never fulfilled entity: a sign can never fully exhaust the object represented: When a sign determines an interpretation of itself in another sign, it produces an effect external to itself, a physical effect, though the sign producing the effect may itself be not an existent object but merely a
The quiet discourse 129 type. It produces this effect, not in this or that metaphysical sense, but in an indisputable sense. (CP 8.191) This quotation also argues with Derrida’s criticism of Western philosophy. The instability of language, says Derrida, makes meaning a fleeting phenomenon, that evaporates almost as soon as it occurs in spoken or written language; or keeps transforming itself into new meaning. He further claims that all Western philosophy is based on the premise that the full meaning of a word is ‘present’ in the speaker’s mind. It can be communicated without any significant slippage to the listener. For Derrida this is ‘illusion’. ‘The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix … is the determination of being as presence in all senses of this word’ (1978: 281). Derrida is right to doubt that there is such a thing as a ‘full meaning’, which can occur in the communication act. If it does, it will stop the communication processes, since they are fleeting phenomena too. Derrida calls this belief in the completeness of communication act ‘metaphysics of presence’. Peirce’s view on this point is that the stability of meaning is not due to the kind of overall stability but to the produced effects, which influence further action. Perhaps, Derrida was also right to criticize Western philosophy, in that the full meaning of a word is achievable from mind to mind without any significant losses. (How is it in Eastern philosophy? The obvious fact there seems to be that there is no reflection whatsoever on the channel of communication.) For Peirce the full meaning of the word is not residing in one’s mind; rather it causes outside physical (not metaphysical) effects. We do not inhabit virtual ‘solipsismograms’ where the sense of reality produces uncontrolled circulations of signs, as Baudrillard used to think, but a physical world where changes occur and knowledge grows. It is true that the world is becoming CNN-ized, but it is also true that this does not quench the thirst of knowing more. We still keep our abilities to see (or to think) by changing our position and by exerting self-control on the knowledge that we consider to be ours. In an installation as the one described above, I found myself in the middle of a sign-channel; I made a step towards thought itself (or should I say towards the simulacra?). We should not be misled by the expression ‘a step further’; it is just another ‘language game’ (in Lyotard’s sense) or ‘postmodernist game’ (as Baudrillard would prefer). What we mean by that is learning something more, becoming aware of a cognition that has always been there, but we are realizing it now. Becoming a thought-sign, I turned into a simple sign-triad, i.e. an element of semiosis. Is this not the new cognitive paradigm? Is it not our time pushing us to enter thought itself in order to become conscious of some new experience? Can I suggest
130 The quiet discourse something new from the inside of thought? Well, first of all that the thought-process is going on with a little help from me. The sign signifies not only through its characteristics, but also through its position as is already shown by Bakhtin. Now, will we be not surprised to see what scholars think about the same subject in Peirce. I completely agree with what Jorgen Dines Johansen says about Peirce’s sign concept: ‘The most important feature of Peirce’s sign concept is its positional character’ (1993: 63). In my classes of Peirce’s early philosophy I ask the students to define, for example, what kind of sign is a photograph of Paris’s Pont Neuf with an inscription below? They usually answer that it is a DicentIndexical-Sinsign (Sinsign). It is Dicent because it represents an actual existing object and because ‘it is a sign that conveys information, in contradistinction to a sign (such as an icon) from which information may be derived’ (CP 2.309). It is indexical, because it directly indicates (points to) the particular artifact. It is interpreted by its final Interpretant (the students) as proposing some information about an existent. ‘Such a sign is capable of being true or false’ (CP 2.310). Then we try to imagine Pont Neuf as any bridge, as a device, which connects two sides of something (see Figure 8.2). In this case it comprises meanings such as connection, joining, even relating, as a habit. From this new point it is a Dicent-Indexical-Legisign. It is interpreted as providing information concerning Pont Neuf as any bridge in the world. (All classes of signs involve lower-level classes; for example, a Symbolic Legisign is in fact a class of replicas (tokens) but no finite collection of replicas can exhaust the class.) Every thought is a Legisign. Every Legisign signifies through an instance of its application, its Replica.
Figure 8.2 A bridge.
The quiet discourse 131
Figure 8.3 An aesthetic object.
We try several more perspectives, and then we look at Pont Neuf as it was wrapped up by the Bulgarian-born avant-garde artist, Christo (see Figure 8.3). The bridge then turns into an aesthetic object. It is a DicentSymbolic-Legisign. And here the students are getting a little confused. The meaning of the trope ‘symbol’ they usually think of is the literary one – a swan as a symbol of the poet’s soul, or something. But Peirce insists that a symbol is a sign that is related to its object by virtue of a law, rule or habit. It gets clearer when we stress that we are talking of sign relations by which both sign and object are symbolically related and are themselves laws or habits. We finally take a look at Pont Neuf as a painting in which case it is an Argument-Symbolic-Legisign. The new discussion, then, follows the
132 The quiet discourse
Figure 8.4 From fact to symbol.
philosophical laws of logical argumentation that tend towards what Peirce refers to as ‘truth’. What we see here is the same process of growing/loading the silence, already discussed in the chapter of Peirce and Bakhtin, a process by which we go from the brute fact (of the real existent) to the symbolic meaning. This is characterized by the attenuation of the voices (signs) of reality. The scheme in Figure 8.4 can illustrate this phenomenon.
Seeing the Other Peirce relates representation to the cognitive processes and to learning in general. A fruitful discussion on this topic has been held in recent years when the criticism against him has been entirely dismissed. Peirce did not see knowledge as a catoptric (mirror, ‘ocular’) metaphor as he was blamed. Moreover, he understood representation not as a synonym of iconicity. We may here recall the outstanding answer of Stanley Harrison to Rorty’s critique of Peirce: When Peirce speaks of progress in human inquiry he is not talking about the gradual advance of knowledge as the construction of a ‘copy’ of an original as if our symbolic representations were literally ‘images’ of things. Rather, to reach the predestinate opinion of any given question is to have the object of that opinion (the independently Real) made present to us via our representations. But the context of the representation is the independently Real in its nature as Thirdness. (1986: 178)
The quiet discourse 133 We may only try to dynamize (activate) this statement, approaching more closely Peirce’s own thought. His examples of the blind spot on the retina and the circle form of the eye are now well known. Given these organic features, the space we immediately see should have too little in common with the one labelled as ‘independently Real’. But it is constantly ‘contextualized’ by the work of the intellect. We are conscious of the existence of the Real as Thirdness, but what consciousness consists of is Thirdness: signs, functioning as Interpretants, i.e. a re-adjusted Real. This ‘mirrored’ reality is based on a very special kind of iconicity, which presupposes iconic interpretation, in other words, reality has to be recognized each time it appears in human consciousness. And it will mean differently each time the position of the interpretant changes and each time when the interpreters are different. (Consciousness is nothing but generalized feeling.) It will not be a surprise that we will find similar thoughts in Bakhtin (though in a different pattern). He also sees the process of obtaining knowledge (of the ‘Other’) not as mirroring others’ consciousness, but as listening in silence (the latter interpreted as context), the Other’s voice. This is his famous ‘heteroglossia’ (his ‘many language-dness’ as translated by Michael Holquist). Sinking in a single consciousness in order to make a thought comprehensible would be for him the same mistake as is for Peirce the imprisonment of thought in the monastery of one consciousness. Peirce would recommend leaving the thought in the street and letting it fight for its own truth. And here are Bakhtin’s ‘silent’ truths: The false tendency toward reducing everything to a single consciousness, toward dissolving it in the Other’s consciousness (while being understood). The principal advantages of outsideness (spatially, temporally, and nationally). One cannot understand understanding as emotional empathy (Einfühlung) as the placement of the self in the Other’s position (loss of one’s own position) … One cannot understand understanding as a translation from the Other’s language into one’s own language. (1986: 141) Bakhtin understood consciousness in a broader sense, as something which covers the concept of ‘mind’. As a literary philosopher, he was more interested in transformations of silence in literary texts which itself represents a mirrored reality. The silent moment in consciousness may appear as a metaphor, which mirrors another reality or becomes a textual reality, that is a mirror that mirrors itself. (Elsewhere Baudrillard (1988) develops virtually the same idea, saying that scene and mirror give way to screen and network.) But he had in mind a moral aspect of a future deserted hyperspace. On the other hand mental representation does not mirror what it represents, rather reconstructs it in a quasi-mirror way from the fragments of
134 The quiet discourse the reality. This is proved by the surprising fact that representation is capable of representing something which is ‘behind’ the imaginary eye, but first and foremost, by the work of the intellect which accomplishes the mirrored Real. While consciousness is the true context of sign-action, where signs are completed and conveyed to the mind for further processing; mental representation is meaning itself. Such meaning has been produced not by mirroring what is represented but by mapping it onto the mind. Thus, if we can imagine a broken hologram (to use Baudrillard’s image of America), where each piece irradiates its own ‘copy’ of the represented object, we will have a model of mental representation closest to Peirce’s. Each piece reflects the same object as layered on mind but in different sizes, nuances and volumes. This will be a model of relations between iconicity and consciousness but from the reversed side, from the perspective of the consciousness.
Seeing in depth In a technical sense, according to Peirce, representation would mean relating a sign to its Immediate and Dynamic objects, which are mediated by three kinds of Interpretants: emotional, energetic and logical or final. To say more about this process from a contemporary point of view, we need a new perspective and a higher level of abstraction. Let us examine Peirce’s enlightening on the representative nature of knowledge as postulated in his ‘Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’. In Question 3 he says: Every cognition involves something represented, or that of which we are conscious, and some action or passion of the Self whereby it becomes represented. The former shall be termed the objective, the latter the subjective, element of the cognition. The cognition itself is an intuition of its objective element, which may therefore be called also, the immediate object. (CP 5.238) If we focus on the expressions ‘that of which we are conscious’ and ‘something represented’, we will notice none of them has been granted autonomy. They are rather conditions, which will be fulfilled if the second part of the sentence is accomplished, namely, the requirement for ‘passion or action’. Passion or action by whom has not been answered. It seems intelligible – for an individual or an Interpreter. But Peirce never specified or emphasized such a condition. (Therefore it became possible for Umberto Eco to raise a debate about the difference between the Interpreter and the Interpretant.) Conventionality is another feature of representation that proves its nonmirroring nature. It is a necessary part of some classes of signs (which will
The quiet discourse 135 be considered below) but to a certain extent it is characteristic of any class of signs. To create conventions, as well as rules and habits, is the very essence of consciousness (more correctly, for the effete mind in which consciousness continues). Conventions and rules that are distinctive, for example for Legisigns, can convincingly demonstrate the complex nature of representation. Law or habit governs the relation of the Legisign to its object. But the same is true even for the iconic signs. According to Peirce ‘… the iconic sign functions as such only if it is related to a concept of a purpose’ (in Johansen 1993: 117). Or, as Jørgen Dines Johansen puts it: ‘conventions specifying the relevant frame of reference govern iconic signs’ (1993: 117). Since the iconicity must be a part of any signification (i.e. conscious processing) and it has (as already shown) a non-mirroring nature, we may conclude that consciousness, specifying the relevant frame of understanding, is the true context of semiosis. As Douglas Greenly says: ‘A convention or rule of interpretation must establish the ground of the representation (and accordingly signification) of the icon’ (in Johansen 1993: 117). We are ready to take a further step and ask what brings together the cognitive potentiality of mind and the iconic effects of semiosis. It seems that this is our seeking Self that supervenes upon the cognitive processes. In a piece of art it appears as a special kind of silence, as a ‘call-to-attention’ effect that directs the observation and reflection. Along with Bakhtin we can say that this is a specific human silence. It furnishes an effete continuum (a special environment) for deriving meaning: ‘Silence is possible only in the human world (and only for a person) … Silence – intelligible sound (a word) – and the pause constitute a special logosphere, a unified and continuous structure, an open (unfinalized) totality’ (1986: 133–134).
Thinking gaze We may here recall Peirce’s notion of the grades of clarity and apply it to the concept of representation. Clearness is not mirroring but a process of teaching the eye to ‘feel’ (how to be ‘conscious of’), and the consciousness how to ‘see’. If we reason more deeply in these questions we could also ask about the equation between emptiness, e.g. a blank space on the page, between two paragraphs, and a pure iconic sign. We can move further and ask whether iconicity in the visual world can be equated with silence in the audible one? What would be the reason of such a relationship? Of what kind is iconicity in literature? Does it have anything in common with the one in music, or in painting? Should we take into consideration the difference of the expressive forms (tones, words, colours) as crucial and delve into it, rather than reveal the iconic effects in the consciousness only?
136 The quiet discourse The process of attaining knowledge as described by Peirce is as follows: There are such vast numbers of ideas in consciousness of low degrees of vividness, that I think it may be true that our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way. (CP 7.547) Is it just accidentally that both thinkers were using audible and poetic metaphors talking on the same subject – learning, knowing more via representing? As John Sheriff points out, ‘focusing on consciousness objectively as cosmic phenomenon emphasizes the point that consciousness/feeling is not only something that is within us; we are within it. We do not have it; it has, or is, us’ (1993: 44). Following the same model of reversing the question in a subsequent chapter, we will find out that an identical conclusion holds true for our seeking Self. Many philosophers believe that all ideas have already been turned into statues in a giant amusement park. Still, there is a lot one can do in an amusement park. One could, for example, rearrange the statues by changing the light and scenery so that a new scene appears and new roles will be given to the ideas (i.e. a manifold of interpretants arises). Sooner or later the interpretants of ideas turn into ideas too. Perhaps, this is all that was given to the thinkers. But this is nothing to complain about since all the ideas were layered down around us, shaping what Peirce has called ‘the effete mind’ of the universe, a giant store of sleeping directories ready to produce new meaning if enlightened by the living mind. This act of creation is far more than the postmodernists have graciously given our minds credit for. If we now go back to my walk around the exhibition, what can we say from the newly reached point? The first thing may be about the wrong perspective we are used to taking. We ask the question how do we produce signs, by which it appears that we are somewhere outside semiosis. I believe the new question we can ask was inspired by Peirce himself by many hints in his thought and it would sound like this: how signs are producing us as their objects and how we are ‘perfused’ by them while our consciousness is capable only of rearranging the mosaic of the outside facts? We can also say, without exaggerating the passivity of man, that we are within signs, that signs are we. We can change our position only and obtain the privilege of making mistakes. We may live our lives as an unlimited guessing of the riddle of semiosis. This notion made in the spirit of Peircean philosophy calls in memory the way he described his method of abduction: ‘the play of musement’. It seems like a perfect vision of the post-modern times.
The quiet discourse 137
A diamond in the dark Going through one of the 1989 issues of the journal Leonardo, my attention was caught by several holographic photos. One was of a human skull, and by changing the angle of observation it was possible to see the brain and the membrane; another was of the Statue of Liberty against a magnificent blue background. The third I nearly passed over. In fact, I did not even understand what it was, and it was this that later made me return to it repeatedly. The first impression was one of looking at a cobweb where a greenish fly had been caught and glittered there inside it – still alive. Since the light in the library was artificial, I brought the page to the window. In the white light I could make out the shapes. At first glance I could not exactly define what it was that I saw; in any case, some geometric structures surrounded by a delicate blue membrane. I looked at the caption. It said: ‘Honor to Kepler.’ The author of the hologram is Shunsuke Mitamura. The recorded message is in an arts journal and would require an artistic interpretation; for the time being, this is all I can say. So, back to the beginning. Who was Kepler? But this is not the beginning. Indeed, after looking at the hologram, the eye wanders to the caption. Therefore, the beginning is the ‘call-to-attention’ sign of the message: ‘read the caption!’ I did read it, but since ‘Honor to Kepler’ did not say much to me I went back to the hologram. What I saw there puzzled me. I could make out something like a table under which was a pyramid, and inside it a shining sphere. All the shapes were placed in something like an eggshell, the upper half of which had been removed. More precisely, the eye had mentally penetrated the shell, but the latter had not nevertheless ceased to exist; it had just become transparent for a moment. When the page was in a neutral position (with no light falling on it), the whole composition was reminiscent of the inner side of a mussel’s shell. When the page was moved, a coloured shaft of rays flamed up from the centre of the hologram – like a lost diamond in the dark. There was something else, too, which had not yet reached my mind. I still could not name it. I needed additional information.
A step into the simulacra Without mathematical formulae and geometrical figures, Kepler’s thought was approximately as follows: he presented a model of planetary movement on the basis of the idea of the projective complementation of Euclid’s plane, i.e. Euclidean space. This is the conjecture that two parallel straight lines have a point of intersection in infinity. The projective complementation of the Euclidean plane is obtained by adding a multitude of infinitely distant points, which gives as a result an infinitely distant straight line made up of all the infinitely distant points. This projection plane then has the following features: every two points are connected with a straight line, and every two straight lines have a common point. This is the ‘principle of
138 The quiet discourse duality’, scientifically elaborated later by the French mathematician J. V. Poncelet (1788–1867). What Kepler managed to do is simple, functional and beautiful. A statement such as the one that in projection, in a real projection plane, two parallel lines can be connected with a common point is not simply true. It is also beautiful because it brings something from the sphere of fantasy closer to reality. It is beautiful to find out that things that appear similar to each other lend themselves to calculation, that their ‘magic’ can be proved. Still, if we simply colour one of the numerous geometric figures in ‘New Astronomy’, it will hardly become a work of art. Let us again go back to the hologram. Everything on this page radiated an unobtrusive appeal for closer scrutiny. Around the oval shape of the hologram were two large white spots like spots of silence. The hologram was the centre of this sheet, as if it were a centre in the human eye. The softness of the silver-grey colour that covered it aroused a desire to go all over it and caress it with the eye. With each movement of the paper, colours started glimmering, as if awakened by a caress. The etymology of the word ‘hologram’ refers both to wholeness (from Greek hólos) and to something that is written down (grápho – write). It is obvious that the image emits an aesthetic message, but the perception of this message is greatly impeded. There is a mere flash in which the geometric figures stand out sharply and in relief: so sharply and in such strong relief that they upset the flowing harmony of the whole, just as the anxious red glow of the thermometer’s glass tube upsets the soft, harmonious background of the partitioned scale and fixes attention on itself. It is this instant disharmony that asks for a more aesthetic perception; it is this that demands explanation and a different kind of communication. In order to overcome the difficulty and disharmony, the artist needs a metalanguage that he can share with the perceiver. He needs a complementary discourse. And the eye instinctively seeks an explanation in the explanatory caption. Instead, it is faced with a cross-reference to a new puzzle – the puzzle of ‘Kepler’. It is noteworthy that much further down from the subscript with the author’s name and the caption, there is another text that is at first glance purely technical. This is a description of the type of the hologram (coloured, synthesized by a computer – a graphical image) and its dimensions. Then comes a sentence beginning as follows: ‘The design of this hologram was inspired by the ‘Cosmic model’ of Johannes Kepler (1571–1630).’ And following that comes another: ‘The artist wishes to express’ – here the reader expects to read ‘the artist’s idea of …’ but instead we find ‘his gratitude to Topan Printing Company for the technical and financial support in the reproduction of this embossed hologram’. The beginning of this second sentence resounds in the reader’s mind: ‘The artist wishes to express.’ The main figure inside the composition is a cube, positioned in depth, i.e. creating the illusion that the image is three-
The quiet discourse 139 dimensional, not flat. This cube is in marked disharmony with the oval of the overall composition but correlates harmoniously with the white sheet containing the overall image. The positioning of the cube and of missing lines from the sheet relative to each other also demands a text, demands reading and conceptualizing.
The traces of duality In order to do that we will try to arrange the correlations established thus far, in order to find out whether it is possible to speak of the work’s code. In a first subgroup, we can set the correspondences following the principle of the narrating code: ‘signifier – signified’. These are the correlations of the geometric figures from the composition with the constructions in Kepler’s model. A second subgroup may contain paradigmatic (metaphorical) correlations of the kind ‘form of the model – egg-shaped look of the whole work’ or ‘mathematical formulae – diamond in the dark’. The latter associations follow the principle of the metaphoric relations known as ‘tenor – vehicle’. A third group should also be set up, comprising correlations brought about by the material used for the hologram: the colour combinations achieved with a special laser technique, the positioning of the hologram on the sheet, the silhouettes of the coated paper vis-à-vis the shining surface of the work, etc. Here the plane is aesthetic and relates to symbolization of a more general kind. We are thus faced with a work having its own thematized language (idiolect) with a complex, masterfully coded message. In the process of perception the interplay between known and unknown plays a significant role. We could speak of an external and internal correlation, respectively, of an external and internal code. The external one is the code that the hologram itself develops: its originality, its appeal for decoding. This code embraces the complex game of correlations between angles, curve, and arcs that have beforehand been loaded with cultural connotations. What changes the hologram, when seen differently, is not the object of its image but rather the manner in which we view this object. We have the opportunity to penetrate the beauty of the geometry, and to anticipate the harmony of numbers. In comparison with the three subgroups enumerated here, a code of a higher level of information can be established. It will contain the comparison ‘known/unknown’ and will include elements from the immediate communication and from the cultural convention. The artist can thus communicate with the viewer who must learn how to decipher his code. We can define this comparison as a group to which the enumerated subgroups relate. The iconic code can further be decomposed into smaller units: figures, signs, semes. But this decomposability is dialectically related to the continual non-decomposability of the syntagmatic order of perception.
140 The quiet discourse The hologram is not a fully immobile photographic image. It changes in every moment so as to perform its sign function and to suggest the appearance and the fading away of the colours. The image is like a scene in a film where the stills are frozen and piled on top of each other so that behind each one can see the next. The only way to inspect the whole is to conceptualize it. The eye travels along the path of the glittering perspective, thus creating the iconic expressions/semes of the paradigmatic axis. The artist has both embedded a new code in the work and primed the senses for the perception of other, already familiar codes. He was not aiming to ‘visualize’ or to make more intelligible Kepler’s model (in such a case, communication between artist and perceiver would be like that between scientist and student). Shunsuke Mitamura has also used the beauty of the model to convince the viewer. The computer that the Japanese artist employed seems to have traced out the curves of motion of the heavenly bodies, just as the eye would mentally trace them out when looking through a telescope. It has also animated the scheme, making it ‘vibrate’ and produce meaning about the harmony of the planets.
The mixed discourses Along with this, there is also a strong feeling that the hologram does not simply let itself be interpreted but also ‘radiates’ meaning, that it produces meaning upon being viewed, even before its explanatory text. A writtendown image or an observed story are the qualifications that one would like to use in this case, independently on its disputable scientific value. In the first moment the viewer has the impression that s/he cannot clearly see any image. S/he tries many angles, compares, or reflects on what s/he sees. All these are processes analogous to the ones of learning. The look itself becomes meaningful, it produces meaning and thus changes the meaning of the object observed. The parallel between watching and thinking is obvious. Correspondingly, the visual and narrative discourses are mixed up. Both discourses amplify … the absences. The initial impression of the visual discourse being ‘something unintelligible’ is complemented by the laconic text ‘Honor to Kepler’. The point of intersection of the two discourses is the apex of the triangle, which the eyes form with the image observed. But the viewpoint of the investigator (the scientist) cannot just be that of the perceiver. As the eye moves from the centre of the hologram, it tries to translate what it perceives into a text. But the hologram was created ‘outside’ the verbal world and acts as something foreign to it. That is why the semiotic approach desperately seeks its codes and its languages from the microphysical level of the material structure to the analytical and discursive level of its message. In the analysed hologram, ‘harmony’ is constructed by the viewer’s gaze, by the passing of one’s eye over the soft chromatic coloured surface
The quiet discourse 141 as the paper vibrates. The verbal text is but an incantation, a formula and a key. It is the starting line on a path whose final destination is unknown. This text is only one of the layers in the crystal lattice of silence, awakened during our mute dialogue with beauty. This glittering silence resembles the structure of the effete mind, and the many alluring curves and soft surfaces that guide the look are appealing to our seeking Self. Now we come to the penultimate comparison and the essence of the present chapter: analysis/discourse. The main problem to be discussed here is: what language should be used to describe or analyse new phenomena of art? There is already a trend called ‘dataism’ – computational art. The works of dataism are not independent pieces of art but algorithmic procedures and digital computer data with a complex system of symbolic description. As early as 1970 the ‘fractal geometry’ of the French scientist Benoit B. Mandelbrot appeared. While Mandelbrot proposed several options himself, calling it ‘a new geometry of nature’ or ‘a new geometric language’, for in the production of computer art there is just no analytical language. And little help is provided by the objection that these phenomena are themSelves languages of a kind, developed in a code of their own. In all cases, a meta-language of communication is needed.
Conceptual beauty As already mentioned the description of the technical side would provide little help. The traditional analysis (and with respect to computational art, this is also true of the semiotic one) still seeks approaches. Sense-creating observation is allotted an increasingly important function in the process of knowing. What the eye ‘learns’ can be distinguished on an independent information plane where the ‘meaningful’ observation is integrated in the preceding aesthetic experience. This is also the moment where what the machine (computer) has created is ‘doubled’ according to the principle of the artistic message. In the hologram the precision of the scheme is ‘doubled’ by the mysterious game of visualization of meanings that awakes a larger number of senses in the perceiver. Here the paradox is that new spaces are set free for a poeticizing language with still-unknown interpretative codes and a non-established system of comparisons. In Peirce’s terms the relations derived can be classified according to his earliest relational division into Quale, Relate and Representamen (see Table 8.1). A finite number of statements can be made relating to the structures of projective geometry that are reversible. For instance, ‘a point is defined by two straight lines’ is true, no less than ‘a straight line is defined by two points’. But the synthesizing computer can achieve that doubling of the message, which is considered a characteristic feature of artistry. Then the design of the magnificent game between expression and precision becomes obvious, reminiscent of an artistically drawn portrait of
142 The quiet discourse
Codes Code from Information Level I
Comparisons and Oppositions
Illustrations
1. signifier – signified 2. sign – object 3. tenor – vehicle
Relations on a microphysical level. (The structure of the art material – the elements from the cultural convention)
(Relations of the Quale type) Immediate perception of the qualities of hologram.
Code from Information Level II (Correlations ) Deriving qualities by observing and reflecting.
Code from Information Level III (Integration and Interpretation ) Combining qualities and setting meanin g
1. visual – narrative 2. presence – absence (of the painted objects) 3. observation – aesthetic doubling
The diagram of the composition – the Kepler's model
1. mathematical formulae – conceptualizing metaphors 2. analysis–discourse 3. interpretants – poeticizing languages
Geometrical figures – diamond in the darkness
Types of Relations
Syntagmatic relations .
Paradigmatic relations, (Substitutions )
Symbolic relations (Effete Mind )
Table 8.1 The double and the triple together.
a literary work. The effect reminds one of the ‘Möbius strip’. This figure has two sides, but it appears that it has only one. Therefore from any point on one side one can reach another point on the other side without passing over the edge. In other words, two ‘circuits’ are needed for the complete inspection of this ‘ribbon’.
The structure of silence Back in the 1970s the scientific community around the world could become enthusiastic about a single concept raised by an inventive mind. And the media covered in detail the disputes among prominent scholars.
The quiet discourse 143 The discussions were represented as if they had universal significance. Philosophical arguments were over-interpreted so that it seemed that the world’s fate rested on the reply of an individual thinker. There was an illusion that the technical progress needed to be dressed up in aesthetically suitable concepts. It was believed that the latter had to be nicely and wisely devised in order to last for decades. Those times ended suddenly. In the first years of the twenty-first century, technical progress overtook the development of humanitarian thought. Moreover, technical progress surpassed its own boundaries and found itself in a borderless space. It now continues without either direction or a goal. The trouble is that this ‘space’ is shapeless and empty. It cannot hint at ideas for future development. Via the World Wide Web, knowledge today is on hand for everyone on the globe. What is missing is the elaboration of adequate schemes for its systematization and conceptualization in order to make it work for people. But the real problem is what has happened to people. The places in which we live and work have become insignificant. People are disconnected from a sense of place. (A person with a computer and a mobile phone can technically work anywhere in the world without changing his/her position by a millimetre; or, s/he could also move anywhere in the world without altering the nature of his/her work.) Men have slowly turned into ‘walking solipsismograms’. The universality of computer language is firmly reaching its climax, and it is not far from the time when we will discover that the peak consists of a single atom, called ‘no-thing-ness’ – an atom whose inside-ness we unconsciously enter and thus turn ourSelves into solipsismograms. People will start to interact on a less intense level with each other. This is another consequence of this type of progress. We not only lack a meta-language in which to describe the new discoveries, but we are losing our habits of unmediated communication. The first sign that we are steadily approaching a newly de-humanized society is the language used today by computer scientists – a cipher-like, dead language without any idiomatic beauty or emotional expressiveness. In the spherical solipsismograms we will only hear the noise of ‘clickcommunication’. No one can predict what consequences this new communication will bring. One possible outcome might be to add more text to the viewed phenomena. While reading, we do not perceive signs passively, as we do with pictures and images. We need to turn back to the effete mind and to ‘dig up’ as much as we can from the mass of clichés of frozen feelings, meanings and longings. We need to slow down for a while and to start listening. Perhaps a newly structured silence will arise from these forsaken notions and feelings. This silence will help us be able to hear the crackdown of the shell of the solipsismograms. The present chapter is an illustration of this problem: is it an analysis or a description of the chosen subject?
9
One-man-tango
Having examined and conceptualized the effects of Thirdness, in this chapter I will move on to study Peirce’s category of Secondness/Otherness as a possible starting point for outlining a contemporary view of the Other. Then I will place this view in the expanded frames of a psycho-semiotic context. As an integral part of Peirce’s categoriology, the notion of Secondness did not change substantially in his theory of relation.
Dream-semiosis and self-control In previous chapters I reached a probable conclusion that men are walking ‘solipsismograms’ – everyone lives inside of a giant image-bubble, made up by the global media. The majority of people have never visited the places they have heard about; most of us have never experienced what we have seen on film, or read in print. In other words, we have no real contact with what the media has pumped into our minds. We keep these places and occurrences in our imagination like stored files, ready to be open and (hopefully) to produce meaning. In our sub-consciousness it seems as if the same movie starring just one character – us – is showing. From this lowest level other layers of consciousness are affected by the boredom of sub-consciousness and its vain desire to be amused by ‘pictures’ from outside. However, the thick, graceless filters of the other layers do not allow more than a censored knowledge of us through from the external world. In dreams the ‘inner Self’ authorizes some fictional characters taken as mere silhouettes from outside to represent us in many imaginative roles. It is still we; it is our dispersed Ego only, seen in action. (Of course, this dark picture holds true only if orthodox Freudianism is taken into consideration.) We could begin by asking the question ‘do we think when we dream?’ The first danger we encounter could come from the already represented spatial image of sub- or super-consciousness ‘layered’ in the mind. Misguided by metaphorical description, one could asked whether different layers ‘produce’ different ‘products’, and how these ‘products’ (images, thoughts, emotions) jump from one layer to another. But the nerve centres
One-man-tango 145 are fragmented throughout the brain. Therefore it will be better to go another way. In dreams we ‘see’ pictures, we ‘hear’ words, we ‘act’ correctly or incorrectly; it seems like we do everything that we do in reality, but can we exert control on this dream-semiosis? When we wake up, if we have a clear memory of the dreams, we try to find an order for all we have dreamt about. We attempt to restore ‘logic’, and to relate it to our waking life. In other words, we try to put control on our dreams, which (as we thought) was missing. We try to furnish meaning to the dream, i.e. to conceptualize it. Sometimes this operation is successful, sometimes not. What determines this success or failure? Eventually, this will shed light on the more general question of the nature of Self and Other. Surprisingly, Peirce’s understanding of dream seems to be far more radical than the above one. The reason of such modernity, in my opinion, lies in his confusion of ‘reality’ with ‘actual experience’. A dream, as far as its own content goes, is exactly like an actual experience. It is mistaken for one. And yet all the world believes that dreams are determined, according to the laws of the association of ideas, etc., by previous cognitions. If it be said that the faculty of intuitively recognizing intuitions is asleep, I reply that this is a mere supposition, without other support. Besides, even when we wake up, we do not find that the dream differed from reality, except by certain marks, darkness and fragmentariness. Not unfrequently a dream is so vivid that the memory of it is mistaken for the memory of an actual occurrence. (CP 5.217) If a dream could be taken as an actual experience it is still not the whole reality that we are able to experience. For something to be perceived as reality, it should be classified and ordered in consciousness, so that it is cognizable. It is true that in the dream the self-consciousness produces pieces of reality but it does not learn anything from this ‘reality’. The pieces fluctuate like vivid pictures from everyday life, but they do not furnish knowledge to consciousness. The fragments are not sources of experience, but rather broken experience mistaken for reality. A dream’s content is not determined, either by previous cognition, or by any kind of cognition. It is actually not determined at all. Some sporadic relations can be established for a short time, but they can hardly last long enough to produce a chain of interpretants, i.e. thoughts. That is why the ‘dreamknowledge’ cannot become effete mind, for it cannot be re-conceptualized and re-used. What sleeps (or is missing) in a dream is not a cognitive faculty, but our self-control, which otherwise directs this faculty. Here the objection may be raised that we also dream words, or even whole stories made of words. Very often the plots are logical: they have
146 One-man-tango beginnings, developments and ends. Still, we cannot learn anything from them, i.e. we cannot obtain cognition or an experience, and we can only guess another story behind the dreamt one, exactly like in a psychoanalytic session. We miss the grooves of the effete mind. The reason the plots in a dream appear ‘logical’ is because words alone are (quasi) logically structured and possess self-control. As separate parts of the dream they maintain a kind of a meaning-system that is continually falling apart. Then why do we need ‘more’ control to be exerted over the meaning of the dream? Is it because we need to reconstruct the fragmentary dream-plots? The simple answer is, that in the dream the syntagmatic order is chaotic and we are anchored in a lower ‘degree of vividness’, as Peirce would say. The chain of interpretants is disordered so we can recognize the meaning of the words, but we do not know why a particular meaning must affect another particular meaning. It is impossible to make dream-propositions, dream-arguments (or syllogisms). In the dream, we cannot walk on the avenues of our thoughts. We can cross some passages that lead to foggy ends. That which could orient us in these avenues is the control over our thoughts. The stronger the control the broader the streets will appear … and the closer the idea of Otherness will become.
The solipsistic trap How did we land upon the notion of Otherness? By falling in panic, because of the solipsistic danger? The universe of thought has always been threatening to slip into the sheer abyss of a wild solipsism. It is the oneman-tango temptation that attracts human thought towards its own death. The end of reasoning marks the beginning of this tango, when all reductive processes start to point to the Ego as the only source of interaction … with itself. If Otherness becomes reducible to Ego, the magic circle is closed and all movements of the dance begin to mirror the ones of the Ego. What is the difference among consciousness, self-consciousness and the Ego? How can we avoid this solipsistic trap? Peirce relates his understanding of self-consciousness to self-knowledge and further to knowing in general: Self-consciousness, as the term is here used, is to be distinguished both from consciousness generally, from the internal sense, and from pure apperception. Any cognition is a consciousness of the object as represented; by self-consciousness is meant a knowledge of ourselves. Not a mere feeling of subjective conditions of consciousness, but of our personal Selves. Pure apperception is the self-assertion of THE Ego; the selfconsciousness here meant is the recognition of my private Self. I know that I (not merely the I) exist. The question is, how do I know it; by a special intuitive faculty, or is it determined by previous cognitions? (CP 5.225)
One-man-tango 147 This is Peirce’s anti-intuition argument. He is clearly speaking of the danger of confusing a feeling with an instinct-belief that there is a feeling. The real feeling, or a conscious degree of feeling, is reached, according to him, when a considerable vividness of consciousness has been achieved. A recognizable degree of feeling is attained when it calls to attention a sign, which detects it and interprets it. Peirce further speaks of ‘an upper layer of consciousness to which reflex consciousness, or self-consciousness, is attached’. This remarkable notion of ‘upper’ or lower layers of consciousness was made decades before the emerging of psychoanalysis. What is even more striking is the original approach of paralleling the grades of vividness of the consciousness with the emerging of the Ego (or self-consciousness). This is his way of escaping the solipsistic trap. The cognition of an object begins by reflecting on this object as represented, not as intuitively perceived. No percepts, directly related to the object, maintains Peirce, can be proven and one is driven into solipsism. The denial of intuition confronts Peirce with several contra-arguments. One of these is that there must be a time before which we have no cognition of an object and the time when we start to know this object. Then the process of cognizing that object must begin at some point between these two times. Peirce’s answer to this argument is demonstrated by his famous example of dipping a triangle into water, where knowledge that is undetermined by a previous knowledge is represented on the triangle as ‘a sectional line made by the surface of the water lower [than that] on which no surface line had been made’ (CP 5.263). Murray Murphey disagrees with good reason about this point with Peirce, concluding that from the denial of intuition in general, the denial of any kind of intuition of one’s Self and of the subjective elements of cognition follows at once. It also follows, according to him, that, ‘since we do in fact have knowledge of our internal world, Peirce must either show that such knowledge can be inferred from external facts or postulate a power of introspection to account for them’ (1961: 111). For our purposes another question of Murphey is important, namely, that in order to be consistent in his claims, Peirce had to explain (since we do not have any immediate knowledge) ‘how self-consciousness can arise as a product of hypothetic reason?’ (1961: 111). Peirce argues that the emergence of Otherness can be explained as a process of ‘uprising of the ideas in consciousness’. By their movements ‘upwards’, the ideas will give birth to knowledge of something different, or even opposite to the Ego: a knowledge of the Other and of the Otherness. To clarify this, Peirce takes as an example the first manifestation of consciousness in very young children and explains the conception of Self with the appearance of maturity and the ability to make hypotheses based on external facts. For Murphey this explanation of the Self ‘may be regarded as a
148 One-man-tango hypothesis to explain ignorance and error, and must suppose a self in which these qualities inhere’ (1961: 111). From this point on I have to build a new hypothesis of the Other: There is as it were, an upper layer of consciousness to which reflex consciousness, or self-consciousness, is attached. A moderate effort of attention for a second or two only brings a few items into that upper layer. But all the time the attention lasts, thousands of other ideas, at different depths of consciousness, so to speak, that is, literally, of different degrees of vividness, are moving upwards. These may influence our other thoughts long before they reach the upper layer of reflex consciousness. There are such vast numbers of ideas in consciousness of low degrees of vividness, that I think it may be true, – and at any rate is roughly true, as a necessary consequence of my experiments, – that our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. (CP 7.547) I can now conclude along with Peirce that the awareness of something different than the self-consciousness is connected to the clarification of ideas. The awareness of the Other does not have an ontological existence. It is a process of derivation and delegation of characteristics from the self-consciousness to ‘an upper layer of consciousness’, where it ‘continues’ until the self-consciousness becomes mature to recognize this new phenomenon. (In child psychology, for example, the most important moments of the relations between mother and child are the ones when the child gradually realizes that it is a different body than that of his/her mother.) Important here is the phrase concerning the past experience as continuing in consciousness. The maturity of consciousness is related to its past experience; in other words, it has to become aware of the effete mind. Peirce’s picture of the structure of consciousness is quite vivid and is metaphorically depicted as consisting of several layers. As a result of controlled efforts, we could evoke ideas from the lower layers, and bring them to an upper level. For Peirce the latter deals directly with the ideas. Metaphorically speaking, the effete mind exists at the lowest level of consciousness. We must not forget that the ‘layering’ of the mind is only a metaphorical representation without any cognitive value. In different chapters of this book I call it many different names, such as ‘the sleeping mind’, a ‘directory with stored files’, ‘the continuous mind’ ‘frozen semiosis’ and ‘muted thought’. But it will be the same idea of digging up meaning from the forsaken conceptions of the lowest level of the consciousness and pushing it up to the upper ones. This process starts when our seeking Selves shed light on the worn-out grooves of the effete mind. The
One-man-tango 149 awakened thoughts are then adjusted to the new signs for the search of the old truths. Upon the completion of this book, I may be able to correct my previous claim (of the metaphorical representation of the mind) by saying that this image is both metaphorical and conceptual. I will then argue that it is metaphorical to the extent that there are no distinct levels in our consciousnesses; it is conceptual in that it holds true for describing the movement of the ideas in our minds. There is certainly no law in this movement, for example only up or down. In Peirce’s view this movement is connected to the stages of clearness and represents the essence of the growth of our knowledge. The lower stages are dominated by pure perceptions, while the upper by a strengthened control of consciousness. There, in the upper levels of consciousness appears the feeling of something beyond the Ego, and even of something that is absolutely opposed to the Ego – of the Otherness.
Secondness as Otherness The above analysis presupposes and imagines Peirce’s understanding of Otherness by revealing his notions of how self-consciousness appears, i.e. of a conscious I. His idea of Otherness is further integrated in his theory of categories. When Peirce speaks of Otherness he understands ‘Secondness’ and, respectively, an inseparable part of sign. Defining it as ‘a relation of reason’ Peirce has to distinguish its nature as dynamic. In this way Otherness mirrors the characteristics of the Self, moreover of the seeking Self: Otherness belongs to hecceities. It is the inseparable spouse of identity: wherever there is identity there is necessarily Otherness; and in whatever field there is true Otherness there is necessarily identity. Since identity belongs exclusively to that which is hic et nunc, so likewise must Otherness. It is, therefore, in a sense a dynamical relation, though only a relation of reason. (CP 1.566) As a category Otherness is to be understood as the necessary second part of a dynamic relation. It is a concept of mutuality, of affecting, hitting, brute-ness, of something that cries to something else in order to be recognized as such. In this respect, it is also a concept of identity, because the result of the interaction between two entities is the knowledge we obtain for them. Again, Peirce does not understand it ontologically, but as a virtual process. It is a signal that causes effects. In this respect it emulates the characteristics of the supervenient Self. In the next example, Peirce finds its presence at the level of a conscious effort, in volition. Regardless of its brutal nature, Otherness is described in terms of sense:
150 One-man-tango What I call volition is the consciousness of the discharge of nerve-cells, either into the muscles, etc., or into Other nerve-cells; it does not involve the sense of time (i.e. not of a continuum) but it does involve the sense of action and reaction, resistance, externality, Otherness, pair-edness. It is the sense that something has hit me or that I am hitting something; it might be called the sense of collision or clash. (CP 8.41) However, it seems that such understanding is far from the notion of personality, which is our ultimate goal. Peirce is not talking here about the Other as a person. He is outlining his idea of Otherness in a larger context of relations between consciousness and self-consciousness. He applies the notion of Otherness to logic: But I am prepared to show in detail, and indeed virtually have shown, that all the forms of logic can be reduced to combinations of the conception of inference, the conception of Otherness, and the conception of a character. These are obviously simply forms of Thirdness, Secondness, and Firstness of which the last two are unquestionably given in perception. Consequently the whole logical form of thought is so given in its elements. (CP 5.194) Thus reducing the manifold of thought to a three-element-relation resembles the triadic cancellation of the universe in Peirce’s three categories. To this we have to add his notion that the movement of the stimuli from the perceptions to the upper layers of interpretants represents a process of clarification of ideas and a growth of knowledge. Interestingly, to visualize this process Peirce uses psychological examples: ‘giving is a triadic relation; loving is dyadic, i.e. to love something that is not loved by implies Otherness’ (CP 3. 341fn2). We need now to dive into the deep waters of metaphor in order to establish a logically defined understanding of the Other as an inseparable part of the personality.
The quince garden … Let us now turn to our conscious experience and see what correspondences exist between dreaming and imagining or seeing and reading. Imagine, back in our childhood, that we have spent a day in a wonderful, heavily fragrant quince garden. Suppose we have had a great time there. We vaguely remember the situation of our life in that particular moment but we know that we were in a special mood, signs of which we occasionally still glimpse or smell. Those signs extract many exciting memories from our ongoing life. We tirelessly attempt to restore the original circumstances of this scene. We wander, see new places, plants and animals, and get to
One-man-tango 151 know different people. Possibly, we even study the type of quince in order to fully reinstate what we contemplated and smelled in that past moment. We have done this, although we are fully convinced that it would not work. Everyone has such enchanting moments in his/her life, which are usually explained with the magic of childhood that is gone for ever, but sometimes grins at us, only to bring to mind what we have lost, or what we still have to lose. Very often we wonder why gazing the same type of quince and smelling its strange aroma excites us. We ask ourselves whether we have forgotten something from the original ‘stage’. Then we begin to recall: the day, the daylight, the shine of leaves, the buzz of bees, our thirst, our satisfaction of the time, etc. Slowly the boundary of recollection and imagination melts, and we lose our orientation. We know for sure: it is a lost cause; and we wait until the next time it happens again. The only thing that counts is the strange feeling that we met something from our inner Self. This rare psychological experience marks the appearance of the Self from the mass of consciousness. (An interesting question, we rarely ask: who are ‘we’?) This experience is individual and, at the same time, it seems that those memories harmonize our Selves with the universe. In the latter case we are thrilled by the resonance of a cosmic timbre. At that same moment we are alone with the totality of the world, we have experienced the joy of being everything, everywhere and … ourselves. The frequent poetic metaphor for such a mood is flying, the feeling of having the ability to do impossible things. Another common metaphor is the one of a Nirvana state-of-mind characterized by peace and tranquillity, something like Peirce’s ‘thought at rest’. The most direct way to reach (to ‘smell’) such a state is by reading poetry, especially that which deals with personal memory. There are numberless examples for such poetry but since a Bulgarian is writing this book, let me use a Bulgarian one.
… and the sleeping lake Pencho Slaveikov (1866–1912), a humanitarian, poet and philosopher, was educated in Germany and became the first modernist of Bulgarian literature, i.e. the first writer to link up more directly with the international movements. (It is interesting to note that he was a Nobel Prize nominee in 1912, but he passed away in May, while the meeting of the committee was in October. Had he taken the prize he would have been only the twelfth winner Damianova, ivka, 1980: 199–225.) Besides his aesthetic and critical works, he wrote some short poems saturated with a surprising warmth and longing. We will focus on some of these poems now. Here is the first one, written in 1899: The lake is sleeping; white-stemmed oak-trees their spiral boughs are inclining
152 One-man-tango and in the silent sunless depths reflected shadows are twining. Whispering, trembling are the oak trees, yet nothing would the peace unsettle except the ripple from the touch of a falling faded flower’s petal. Water is an old symbol of wisdom and the Bulgarian poet has certainly considered this meaning of it too. I also mentioned Nirvana as another common symbol of quietude, but the expression ‘the water of Nirvana’ is even more popular than the image of a wave-less lake. Peirce did not pass over this widely used metaphor either, but he did something more. He used it as a methodological tool. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way. But in this water there are countless objects at different depths; and certain influences will give certain kinds of those objects an upward impulse which may be intense enough and continue long enough to bring them into the upper visible layer. After the impulse ceases they commence to sink downwards. (CP 7.547) When he writes of the grades of vividness of consciousness he literally sees this process as moving upwards or a sinking down of ideas. All this resembles dreaming or reading poetry. The only difference is that unlike in the dream we can learn from this famous image, as mentioned above. We can put control on it and study it as a past experience. The same happens in the poem of Pencho Slaveikov. The Bulgarian author was reflecting rather than enjoying the landscape he described. We can only speculate on the topic of his reflection, having in mind the common meanings of the symbol of the lake – wisdom, eternity, beauty, etc. But obviously, he was not trying to mirror only what he ‘saw’ or what he dreamt about. He was thinking. It is a question of aesthetics or poetics whether the poem is beautiful, but this lies beyond the scope of this study. It could be said that such a resemblance was easily produced because the water metaphor was popular at that time (both examples are chronologically close). Why do I need this example in order to discuss the topic of the Other? Let us focus on both images and their meanings. In the poem there are two things poetized – the lake and the oak trees, the former mirroring the latter. In the first verse the lake is mentioned just once as sleeping, while the oak boughs do everything else: they wave silently and show themselves in the water. But why it is so that we ‘see’ the boughs as if from the perspective of the lake, as if the lake shows them to us? It is the lake’s
One-man-tango 153 sleepy but also wide-open eye that looks upwards to the tree. The visual perspective is set up in the first line: ‘the lake is sleeping.’ This perspective is from bottom-up to the oak tree: everything we ‘see’ afterwards will be seen from the viewpoint of the lake. What does the tired lake ‘see’? It sees the trembling oak tree with its twinning shadows. The lake opens its silent sunless depths not to reflect something but to show something (or somebody). This is an undeniable conceiving, confirmed by the next line. The oak tree’s boughs are ‘whispering and trembling’; they are scared and lured by what they were seeing in the lake’s mirror. What did they see? ‘Themselves’ would be the confusing answer but it does not sound true enough. The ‘lake’s depths’ – could be another one, not particularly convincing either. What they ‘see’ makes them troublesome and causes them to tremble. In the final stanza we learn that nothing can disturb the peace of the lake ‘except the ripple from the touch of/a falling faded flower’s petal’. Everything that can change takes place in the water and the boughs can see it. What disturbs the stillness of the lake is a possible change anticipated by the tree. Emerging from a change, emerging from something Other, emerging of the Otherness. It will come up from the depths of the lake’s water – another solitude.
Conceptualizing metaphors Let us take another beautiful example written in 1894 and published in the same volume of poetry, Dreams of Happiness, in 1907: The nosegay that you casually left sheds sweet perfume about the little room and all my soul is lost in reverie of you, my child, for this sweet perfume. And then I see you lost in reverie of me, your brow shadowed by a gloom. The nosegay that you casually left sheds all about the room a sweet perfume. At first sight it seems that this poetic pearl was construed effortlessly, in one sigh. It only aims to show a cosy, little room where nothing really happens but a momentous dream arises and fades away. By the way, why did I say ‘cosy’ room, given that there was no word dropped in for cosiness in the poem? Well, something nice has happened in this room that made it charming and attractive. Something has changed it. And this is the ‘sweet perfume’. The perfume wafts passively from the nosegay. But it is this perfume that causes the change. Everything else is ‘seen’ through its fragrance, as if it was ‘seen through’ its own eyes. The perfume has the power to evoke a dream that is seemingly ‘sweet’ enough to make the poet
154 One-man-tango fall into a dream. It sheds its aroma and produces effects that are both instant and long-lasting. More than that, it obviously multiplies the clearness of the dream and the longings of the poet. With a little speculation we are able to visualize the pictures of both, the poet and his lover. In what he sees we can see him. It is he who is dreaming of his lover, who, in her turn, is thinking of him. It is again he, who thinks of … himself. It is a reverie of his ‘Self’ about himself. And the reverie is so sweet because the picture is completely made up by this Self, longing through an imaginative Other for himself. The dreaming is so vivid that it becomes transparent. It seems that a magic materialization of the Other takes place in the small room. We may see and feel this in the picture of the lover, who is supposed to be similar (if not equal) to the one of the poet, who wants to see her in a particular pose, thinking of him. The harmony is so deep and the music/perfume so sweet that an old picture emerges before the eyes, the one of the same old ‘one-man-tango’. Although there is not any hint that there is a scene of a dream only or of a painful absence – quite on the contrary, there is a sign of presence, the perfumed nosegay – nevertheless, a deep nostalgia permeates the poem, not the superfluous joy that seems to be depicted. What is meant here to be expressed is the emergence of the idea of the Other from the imagination of the Self. From the poet’s warm and beautiful solipsismogram emerges an image of the Other. This is a poetic lesson on the process of learning to recognize the emergence of the Other. In order to be preserved, this new knowledge needs to be integrated in the totality of the personal self-constitution. It has to become a part of selfconsciousness and to obtain non-psychological characteristic, i.e. an inter-subjective potentiality. The sense of the Other emerges by defocusing the vision of the Self. This diffusion activates the lowest layers of consciousness and hauls up an empty memory-store that will be filled out with a new knowledge. Then the ‘brute facts’ of the new appearance have to be adjusted to the empty container from the memory. We become conscious of something, once we memorize it, that is, we adjust it into the stored files of the effete mind. The process of connecting the actual to the memory flows continuously and then becomes ‘saved’ in the ordered experience of the effete mind. Viewing the Other as an endless process of approaching it is the only way to beat the idealistic view ‘at its own game’. In Peirce’s words: We apprehend our own ideas only as flowing in time, and since neither the future nor the past, however near they may be, is present, there is as much difficulty in conceiving our perception of what passes within us as in conceiving external perception. (CP 1.38)
One-man-tango 155 This is a rather strange claim that seems to contradict the beautiful example of the dipping of a triangle into water. True, our ideas are ‘flowing in time’, but by saying that they are comprehensible in a definite time only (past, future), we are misguided to think that time has ontological meaning, in other words, beginnings or endings. What our Selves perceive is what we are at the moment of the self-reflection, when our Selves supervene onto our physical state. Along with Ronald G. Alexander we could say that our seeking Selves are tropes of our inner Selves. Then we can continue to say that we conceptualize the information perceived through the seeking Self, which was dug up from the effete mind. The seeking Self has hypothesized what in Peirce’s view is ‘present’. It is not a simple picture of the inner Self, but rather a momentous conclusion made by the seeking Self after its meeting with the effete mind. In this respect, what is present is complicated and general. Therefore, the immediate present resembles the difficulty in conceiving external perception. The immediate present is not a single clear picture of an idea but a set of conclusions about this idea. That is why this picture can possess different stages of clearness.
Metaphorizing concepts Let us take one more example of Pencho Slaveikov’s poetry, from 1901: In days of youth the sun sheds golden rays and golden yearnings set the heart ablaze. In days of youth light feet are running fast and worldly worries are so lightly cast. In days of youth so easy comes relief! The heart knows not a single shade of grief and pure joy of grief itself is born in days of youth, in days of youth alone. What the poet here says about youth represents his actual desire for today. His wishes are pure fiction, to which actuality is ascribed. The days of youth do not represent an endless chain of joy. They can be difficult as well. They are sunk deep in the consciousness. Here also, the stage is set at once with the beginning that shows ‘the whereabouts’ of the following scenes: ‘In days of youth.’ This refrain does not serve to remind us persistently of the poet’s idea, but to point out to a hidden text, which is ‘the whereabouts – wishes’ of the poet. And the next pictures are tools he uses to try to see his Self, doubled with another one – that of the missing youth. He believes that this new double picture constitutes in full his individual Self. What we have here again is a mono-spectacle, played by two. Still, the main question remains – where does the Self play in this magic memory, set up as a theatre, in which the only actors are us and the only
156 One-man-tango ‘viewer’ is … the same bored Self? A part of the answer could be the claim that the Self is active, variable and transferable into something else. All these games are just longings to materialize itself into an Other. Does it have a substance or any kind of perceptible Qualia? If my presence were so intensely felt in the quince garden, what would I be in a foggy, misty day in my room, ten years later? On this day I found out that I was too tired to search for the quince aroma; for the perfume of someone’s nosegay or for the days of youth, when my feet were running fast. I slightly remember all these things, and I am not even convinced that they existed in reality. Whose Self was then in my body? Would it not be better to reverse the question and ask it like this: in whose Self was my body then and now? Does not my Self represent an aura of poeticism (metaphors), which is now fading? Was not my Self a metaphor of the Other conceptualized by me? Or, one more time from the reverse side: have I not metaphorized my vague conception of the Other until my Self becomes an appropriate symbol of it? Then my whole Self in that particular moment becomes a sum of all of the signs of the Other. In Other words, the whole of my Self becomes a total sign of myself, able to recognize the Other. The nature of my Self is one of the sign; its substance is relational and metaphorical, as is Nature itself.
A dynamic explanation In classical philosophical tradition the relationship of the Ego and non-Ego is explained in connection with the ability of the Ego to act. The totality of the Ego consists of its action in accordance to thought that directs this action. In order to be recognized, the Ego has to act, but this action only occurs in respect to some Other, to a non-Ego. It has to act in respect to something else than itself in order to exist. Such an understanding of the Ego, which is characteristic for Fichte and Hegel and pierces the contemporary thought of philosophers such as Husserl and Habermas, is not abandoned by Peirce. Let us here recall his early essay ‘Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’ where he describes the acting child and the hot stove. Peirce adds two more conditions, ‘ignorance’ and ‘error’, with the help of which a Self is emerging: The child, however, must soon discover by observation that things which are thus fit to be changed are apt actually to undergo this change, after a contact with that peculiarly important body called Willy or Johnny. This consideration makes this body still more important and central, since it establishes a connection between the fitness of a thing to be changed and a tendency in this body to touch it before it is changed. (CP 5.231)
One-man-tango 157 Then the child learns his mother tongue; by explaining this, Peirce uses referential arguments that can be read in every contemporary semiotic textbook. The child obtains a communication tool, which enables him to differentiate his own pains and desires from those of someone else, of the Other. This is not yet the stage when the Other is something clear enough to be loved or hated; it is one more instrument of obtaining delight.
The child learns to understand the language; that is to say, a connection between certain sounds and certain facts becomes established in his mind. He has previously noticed the connection between these sounds and the motions of the lips of bodies somewhat similar to the central one, and has tried the experiment of putting his hand on those lips and has found the sound in that case to be smothered. He thus connects that language with bodies somewhat similar to the central one. By efforts, so unenergetic that they should be called rather instinctive, perhaps, than tentative, he learns to produce those sounds. So he begins to converse. (CP 5.232) He also begins to collect experience. At the very beginning of the development of his communicative abilities this experience is all that his consciousness consists of; it has not yet to sink into dimness, and it has not been turned into the past. The newborn child does not know itself as something ‘for-itself’ because he cannot regard himself as something ‘other than his mother’s body’. This exact process takes place within his early maturity, when his consciousness becomes able to communicate. Communication represents two things at once – the ability to acknowledge himself and thus the recognition of an Other. ‘Thus, he becomes aware of ignorance, and it is necessary to suppose a self in which this ignorance can inhere. So testimony gives the first dawning of self-consciousness’ (CP 5. 233). The realizing of testimony – the first clear signal of the Other’s presence – emerges from the undetermined mass of the child’s original communication ability. The Other is something that resists against his boundless knowledge; in other words, it is a first reminder of his limits. Thus this ‘something’ will become suspicious for the whole of his life, as the selfconsciousness will always slip away from being defined or located. There will be only a few people who would admit to this: ‘Ignorance and error are all that distinguish our private Selves from the absolute Ego of pure apperception’ (CP 5.235). If all this is true, or in Peirce’s expression, it must be ‘at any rate roughly true’, it follows that the emerging of the Other is connected with transcending past experience. In order to regard an Other we have to
158 One-man-tango ascribe to him/her our own past experience. This is so because consciousness embraces the continuing experience, i.e. the past. As a surprising consequence, we see the Other not as an alive consciousness but as an effete mind. In other words, s/he represents a past experience that has not yet been enlightened by the laser-pointer of our mind. We can do that at a certain stage of consciousness, but not before we have started to collect and to lose experience. Does this mean that at an earlier stage of our maturity we see the Other closer to us with many similar characteristics, which slowly sink into the past and become replaced by differences? A great solipsistic shadow arises behind such a statement. How can one define the emerging of the awareness of the Other? To what extent are we really able to recognize that it is the Other and not an instinct feeling that there is an Other? Do we not rely too much on common sense, which would say that this is a naive question, since its presence is simply obvious? When we think that we know the Other, how much ‘Otherness’ are we ready to bear upon? How big is our languageand thought-lattice that we throw upon the Other in order to recognize him and to disarm him? How do we overcome this always-present solipsistic trap? What do we like in a very individual poem: the poet’s Ego with its brilliance to evoke metaphors or the opportunity for our seeking Selves to find out new places in our memory where we are able to dig up in search of more effete mind? What is the Other – new meaning, new feeling, new metaphor? Where is the feeling of the Other located – in our perception, in our super-consciousness or in our self-consciousness? What ‘layer’ of our mind is affected by recognizing the Other: an upper one or the lowest? It seems that a study based on Peirce’s philosophy would answer that the awareness of the Other arises with the stages of clearness of our seeking Selves. The clearer the idea of the personal Self, the closer the notion of the Other appears. A vivid self-consciousness can opens up towards an Other. More vivid – to still another. An open-ended process of knowing the Otherness. Knowing more means approaching the Other in an ongoing ‘one-man-tango’ dance of learning more.
Acknowledgement All poems were translated from Bulgarian into English by Professor Evgenia Pancheva of the University of Sofia.
10 How is meaning possible?
As we approach the end of this book it is necessary to finish some still open claims by adding proofs from more distant areas where conceptualizing metaphors might also be applicable. I need to show that the suggested method holds true even for metaphors from our everyday life or from the mass of clichés that rise up from our common genetic experience. Some striking similarities between my method and other competing approaches will be considered as well.
The patina-meaning Conceptualizing metaphors can take place at each moment of our everyday life. It is involved in every instance of behaviour or thinking. Just as there is no such a thing as an interpretation ‘for itself’, there is no concept or term that can fully exhaust its object. To understand the significance of a sign means to be illuminated as regards an aspect of its meaning, not to unveil its wholeness. The method of conceptualizing metaphors considers this property of the sign to be the most important one. Even the simplest sign, say a qualisign, is virtually inexhaustible by any interpretation, because each interpretation represents only one possible approach to its relevance. Even the simplest of signs needs to be conceptualized in order for it to act upon the sensations. The footsteps of sign building are followed by coded (recognizable) instructions for acting. Any sign contains traces of its creation, i.e. it represents an outcome of something that resembles the device of metaphor. There is something general in every sign, which makes possible its reading. So, conceptualizing a sign-system (for example, a metaphor) does not attain the same results each time it is approached. I try to prove this claim from several different perspectives. Let me first discuss a strange but probable objection. In computer operations, the punch of a certain key evokes a certain response. This is so because the key as a sign works in an artificially created environment. But even in this case, it is possible to go deeper in defending the limitlessness of interpretation and the need of conceptualization by pointing to Peirce’s century-old claim
160 How is meaning possible? on a similar phenomenon: ‘ … it requires mind to apply any formula, or use any machine. If, then, this mind is itself only another formula, it requires another mind behind it to set it into operation, and so on ad infinitum’ (CP 5.329). The mind behind the machine is a final interpretant, presented by any stroke of the key. This giant interpretant is in no way fully exhausted by this single stroke. In nature and life, we never reach two identical results by two equal approaches. What is the difference between interpretation and conceptualization? Do we need the latter as one more theoretical tool? One of our assumptions was that, while interpretation resembles more or less a reading or free-association process that seeks meaning, conceptualizing might be defined as a flexible scientific method. In its kernel lies a search for ‘effeteness’ that unfolds from any metaphor. We can refer to the effeteness directly, or we can devise a concept to search for it at every layer from our past experience. In both cases we deal not with mental entities but with signals or stimuli, which activate the mass of sensation in consciousness, and from which we receive a symbolized (metaphorized, conceptualized) response. Conceptualizing metaphors is a method of representing, referring or evoking meaning with the help of seeking ourselves from stored experience. Thus, it represents a process-model, which can provide explanations and derive meaning, but above all, which is applicable to diverse situations of decoding symbols from our everyday life. In this respect, conceptualizing stands for a search for an inactive, effete mind that gives rise to any metaphor. The effete mind provides patterns for acting. To bring to mind these patterns requires another active element, and this is the seeking Self. In general, here we are outlining a process model of thinking, which shows how knowledge grows. It rests on the fundamental claim that we learn something new by making clearer something that is already known. The same is valid for the way we approach the Other. If we do not look deeper into our own consciousness, we cannot know the consciousness of the Other. We can express the same hypothesis from a linguistic perspective. At the surface of language flows a stream of thought-clichés, which after some time moves to a lower layer of language, and after still more ‘hardens’ into a linguistic structure that is something like a mound of frozen metaphors. The most successful metaphors need to touch this floor of ‘patinameaning’ in order to be lifted upwards, as in Peirce’s famous metaphor of the bottomless lake. I cannot be sure whether Peirce thought similarly when he invented his undeveloped concept of ‘the effete mind’. I can only say that the present book turned out to be about this notion, abandoned by Peirce, and that it developed around a new approach for deriving meaning from Metaphors We Live By. Unlike the reference to the wellknown book by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), however, this book is not about metaphor as an object. I share the fundamental claim of both authors that metaphors are not merely poetic tools, but a part of everyday
How is meannig possible? 161 speech that affects the way we think, perceive and act. Still, the method of conceptualizing metaphors takes off from this poetic figure in order to approach its object, which is the work of the mind. Let me try to answer another strange question: why was the computer created? Was it not because of a desperate need for a more effective way of closing the gap between past and present? Today’s most advanced technologies try to emulate the way the human being learns. The newest robots can memorize, save and apply what they have learned. These machines learn by storing memories, making mistakes, trying not to repeat them. In the near future the most advanced computer will surely be the one that produces an immediate past – a pure effeteness. It will be a computer that can make the past occur each time the needle of the seeking Self touches upon the grooves of the effete mind. Then the animated past will be a step taken before being annihilated by the living present. We still do not know to where this will lead – perhaps to a combination of virtual past and real present? The two cannot merge because the past occupies real time in order to be realized as such. As for the present, we cannot have a concept of it; we simply live in it. The past can provide concepts for the future, and this is its main function; but it cannot correct our future, and this is an argument for why we cannot exert control over our present. In the present, we act by being pushed by the conceptualizing past that reflects on our action. I can now propose a new explanation of the limitlessness of thinking and the need for its conceptualization. Any sign that signifies a segment of action from reality is inexhaustible by another sign that interprets it. This is obviously true, since an action occupies a present moment, whereas interpretation grips a past one. Action is also divided into numberless atomic segments, which were first comprehended in the past and then realized in subsequent present moments. Action and thought-action are synechistic phenomena that mirror each other but do not overlap. This is what makes knowledge a continuous process. The mediator between these two processes is our dynamic Self, and it supervenes onto the temporal characteristics of both. By acting, we simply follow the patterns provided by the effete mind. By thinking we are saving the recognizable traces from our action through metaphorizing (or conceptualizing) them. We are pushed forward by the concept devised by the past. And we dream of the coming of the inexperienced future.
The invisible Self By writing down our thoughts we produce a net of recognizable traces. We then cast that net, as if it were a screen, into our stream of consciousness, which passes by constantly. With this woven ‘thought-net’ placed onto the flow of unordered thoughts, we try to recapture or revive the exact thoughts that occurred to us during writing. Then we discover that we
162 How is meaning possible? always meant more than we were able to recapture later, and that we always do less than we meant to do while thinking. The computer enters the game, pretending to shorten the distance between the written and the revived mind, but it does not seem to achieve success. Why not? Simply because ‘behind the machine … etc.’; in other words, it is again our personal, seeking Self, which mediates between the woven meaning (from the thought-net) and the living past. For the latter claim, we find support in Peirce’s famous reflection on man as an external sign: For, as the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that every thought is an external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the words homo and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought. (CP 5.329) The woven thought and ‘the living past’ flow parallel to each other, but never form two lines of equal length. The former is constantly a step behind the latter. Continuing in the same direction, we could ask: ‘Where, then, is man (or his Self) located? In ‘the external sign’? Or in the ‘train of thought’, which is the original matrix of this sign? The answer is obvious: in neither place alone, and in both places at the same time. Again we can be helped by Peirce’s evolutionary understanding of the Self: Every reality, then, is a Self; and the Selves are intimately connected, as if they formed a continuum. Each one is, so to say, a delineation, … with mathematical truth, incongruous as the metaphor is, we may say that each is a quasimap of the organic aggregate of all the Selves, which is itself a Self, the Absolute Idea of Hegel, or God … It will be observed that if the Selves did form a continuum, each would be distinguished by its own point of Self-consciousness. (CP 8.125) Now I can discuss the problem once defined by Wittgenstein: ‘That the world is my world shows itself in the fact that the limits of language (the language, which I alone understand) means the limits of my world’ (1961: 5.62). It appears not to be valid for my hypothesis, if the view of the woven thought-net is adopted. First, this net is ‘elastic’, because it represents an interpretation of the wholeness of thought that flows below it – coming from the effete mind. Second, it is only one possible languagelattice, which tries to seize the stream of all thoughts sliding by us. Moreover, this web is completely artificial; that is, it is made up by us and does not include the signs that stand for thought-like processes in nature. For the sake of accuracy, we have to say that our metaphor here may be
How is meannig possible? 163 misleading in the same way as Wittgenstein’s is. When he spoke of a ‘world of thoughts’, he might not have envisioned any limitations. Let me now try to answer the question, what is the nature of this seeking Self? It is obvious that a contemporary view of the Self must be dynamic. That is why I prefer the definition of Ronald G. Alexander, who sees the Self as ‘a supervenient, abstract particular or trope that arises from and is dependent upon the mélange of properties constituting a human being’ (1997: 10). Most important in his definition is that, in such a case, no ultimate collection of physical and psychological characteristics can constitute any given human being. Man’s personal identity depends (or supervenes) upon numberless factors that are changeable at any instant and for any person. It seems that we cannot achieve something basic in the nature of Self. But there is such a foundation, and it consists of its nature as … a trope. The Self – the seeking Self, as we formulate it – is a sum of conscious re-actions with the effete mind. The outcome of this reaction is a ‘logical Self’ that is embedded in a concept or metaphor.
A discursive explanation We saw that the technical sophistication of the programming model was not matched by a coherent theory of meaning. Despite the rapid rise of use of symbols, meaning remains inexhaustible by any symbol theory. Theories of the translatability of meaning register only its ‘grades of translatability’. Recent developments in psychological and cognitive disciplines are trying to catch up with the human demand for ecological values within current social and cultural settings. The traditional idea of explanation in psychology was assimilated by modes and models assumed to provide lawlike predictions, linking presumable conditions and measurable outcomes. Mathematical formulae, patterns of stimulation and detectable reactions by simpler organisms were supposed to serve as applicable models for human beings. All this turned out to be inefficient. One of the surprising results of this failure was the intervention of more traditional sciences into the new mind-modelling search. The boundaries of different theories blend together. This is valid also for this book. What we are dealing with is easily seen as literary theory just as much as semiotics or philosophy, but above all it looks like psychology if the latter were ordered under the rubric ‘human sciences’. This holds true, but it will be even more precise to continue to insist that we try to lay out a new method. We believe that the method of conceptualizing metaphors matches the latest effort of the cognitive sciences to model human behaviour and to suggest an approach for deriving meaning. We hope that it will legitimize the need for studying symbols and signs of the surrounding ‘semiosphere’. We need now to reveal some contemporary approaches similar to ours, from different areas of social studies. Along with theories of emergentism, externalism, self-knowledge and numerous doctrines developed under the
164 How is meaning possible? auspices of the ‘philosophy of mind’, a recent discipline, discursive psychology, tries to deal with the ubiquitous role of symbol usage in human life. According to Harré and Gillet, discursive psychology is a sum of independent developments that reach ‘as far back as the work of George H. Mead and L.Vygotsky’ (1994: viii). It is a kind of language-psychological theory, which advances the idea that events and objects are given significance by the sequences of their appearances (discourse) in the mind. It tries to achieve dynamic explanations of the psychological phenomena as patterns of discursive acts, which serve as norms and rules in historical and cultural circumstances. The world of metaphors and symbols we use every day, say with computers, is organized by norms and technical rules. The world we live in is structured by causal processes. In a similar statement, the discursive psychologists Harré and Gilett make this surprising claim: ‘Our language is our main means for managing in the world of symbols, and our hands and brains are in the material world. It is characteristic for human beings to live in these two worlds’ (ibid.: 100). This statement is unexpected because it looks quite dualistic, almost in a Cartesian spirit, which the authors deny. But it is perfectly acceptable, if we keep in mind that they put the brain alongside the hands in the material world. In the world of symbols and metaphors, the hands are only extensions of the brain. Outlining their theses, the authors count three distinct sets of constraints with which anyone must reconcile his or her life. The interesting fact is that, as regards each constraint, they mention conceptualizing the situation from everyday life. Even more interesting is the claim from the third constraint that ‘[the Self] inhabits many different discourses each of which has its own cluster of significations’ (ibid.: 25). It is significant also that the authors appeal to the notion of ‘supervenience’ in seeking support for their theses: ‘We cannot explain the world of symbols and how it works by reference to physical processes. Philosophers have called this process “supervenience” ‘ (ibid.: 100). They speak further for ‘fluid positionings instead of fixed roles of subjectivity’ (ibid.: 36), and finally they insist that ‘the sense of self is an experience’ (ibid.: 111). According to their discursive thesis, the necessary condition to experience oneself is one’s relation to others.
The ‘felt experience’ At first sight, it seems that the weakest point of the method of conceptualizing metaphors is the lack of objectivity that one normally associates with a scientific approach. I believe, though, that one reason many excellent methods for deriving meaning are rejected is because of the demand for infallible objectivity. Today, when our lives change with lightning speed, we can no longer require the objectivity demanded of classical philosophical explanations. We need, instead, something like a flexible pole vault,
How is meannig possible? 165 with the help of which our judgements can be catapulted over the bar of an admissible falsity. Many in the contemporary scholarly community share this belief. For example, we find this view expressed almost in the same way by Eugene Gendlin: Because experiencing can be referred to directly, as [can] concepts, therefore we need no longer fear the distortive power of conceptualization. Rather than assuming that concepts must substitute for experiencing (and then deploring what a poor substitute they necessarily are), we can employ concepts and a direct reference to experiencing. (1997: 18–19) Gendlin persuasively defends the need for effective observational variables, which, once defined, can serve as testable propositions. Then ‘the orthodox scientific method can take it from there’ (ibid.: 20). His main concept is that we permanently symbolize phenomena from our life in order to comprehend them by constantly referring to our experience. The meaning is then formed in the field circulating between experiencing and symbolization. ‘Feeling without symbolization is blind; symbolization without feeling is empty’ (ibid.: 5). Gendlin uses the expression ‘the preconceptual experience’, by which he understands a sum of past artifacts, such as culture, economics, biological drives and psychological needs. This concept is almost completely the same as Peirce’s ‘effete mind’. Gendlin explains the process of conceptualizing with the help of the term ‘felt meaning’. It is an insistence that we feel what we think (not too far from Peirce’s claim that feeling is thought). The condition of a successful conceptualization is the appearance of felt meaning. Gendlin’s theory comes close to the method of conceptualizing metaphors when he describes how thinking takes place in the actual present. The immediate thought, according to him, follows logical patterns that are the sums of it and of the felt experience. This way of reasoning can form a different thought: A concept in actual thought is not only the logical pattern and implications that it has at a given moment. It also involves a felt experiencing of meaning, which can lead – in the next moment – to radically different concepts, new differentiations of meaning, contradictions in logic yet ‘predictable’ as human behaviors. (ibid.: 6) In this explanation, it is not clear what plays the active role in the thought process. But the theory recognizes the creativeness of the ‘felt experiencing of meaning’, which is very much akin to the characteristics what we are called the ‘effete mind’. The nature of ‘felt meaning’, according to Gendlin,
166 How is meaning possible? is readily available to every person, because it is an inward property that can be evoked each time we simply direct our attention to it. We do that each time we have to relate an actual (specific) idea, wish, emotion, perception, word or thought to a broader concept that we have inside of us. ‘It is a concrete mass in the sense that it is ‘there’ for us’ (ibid.: 11). We cannot verbalize this mass of feeling, meaning, etc. We cognize it only by virtue of symbols, which specify only certain aspects of the mass, not the totality. In this statement we recognize the properties of effeteness, as outlined in the method of conceptualizing metaphors. There is nothing there that cannot also belong to the effete mind. The trouble with this theory arises when the author describes how it works: I want to emphasize one vital characteristic of experiencing: any datum of experiencing – any aspect of it, no matter how finely specified – can be symbolized and interpreted further and further, so that it can guide us to many, many more symbolizations. We can endlessly ‘differentiate’ it further. We can synthesize endless numbers of meanings in it. (ibid.: 16) The question that remains is ‘how?’ How are all these magnificent opportunities made possible? Despite the author’s insistence on the dynamic nature of his concept, he does not name what sets the process in motion. But his accurate and systematic approach hints at conclusions that might provide a clue for answering this question. When he gives examples of conceptualizing the actual changes of a thought, we understand that these changes occur most often in language. Then, according to the author, we must refer directly to experience, for neither logical concepts nor any amount of words can fully exhaust the meanings of an actual thought. The thesis of unlimited semiosis is at work here although ‘the agency’ is ignored – the limits of sign function and the role of the seeking Self. One indication of the question of agency might be found in the stress the author puts on relations to the Other, and in his brilliant explanation of experiencing reality. Gendlin claims that his concept is dynamic, flexible and ‘protean’, in the sense that it is ‘there’ if we direct our attention inward to evoke it. In other words, when we speak of this thesis, we are dealing with a preconceptual experiencing of the actuality: ‘For past experience does not function in the present as the discrete events that have happened in the past. These are past. What is present is the experiencing of now, and the past events have made it what it is’ (ibid.: 35). This is a sophisticated explanation to which nothing can be added. In order to create meaning in communication, for example, we have to rely on the experience. But this is not the experience of a certain relationship between symbols and objects. When humans speak, think or read,
How is meannig possible? 167 according to this thesis, we experience meaning. ‘Another way to phrase it is that we feel the meaning’ (ibid.: 45). Of course, the biggest advantage of Gendlin’s study is its immediate applicability in psychological practice, where it ‘behaves’ convincingly.
Some marginal remarks Both theories, as well as others represented earlier in Gendlin’s book, show remarkable similarities to my method. What differentiates the method of conceptualizing metaphors from others, however, is the employment of the notions of the effete mind and of the supervenient Self. According to my approach, the seeking Self is an active element for producing meaning. By touching the effete mind, the supervenient Self evokes abandoned concepts, which enter into confrontation with symbols from everyday life. Between the hands and the brain the Self supervenes as a gyroscope for our orientation. The outcome is a new, metaphorized concept embedded in the Self (see Figure 10.1). Our understanding of the Self is closely connected to the relation to the Other. But, above all, such understanding relates to the stages of clearness to which it sinks in searching for the effete mind. In this diving-down process, the Self becomes a metaphor of the Other, conceptualized by consciousness until it becomes a sum of all signs of the Other. Then, the whole Self becomes a total sign of the conscious Self, which is able to recognize the Other. (This is so, because this latter Self shares some general features with any Other’s Self.) The emerging of the Other from the ‘passive mass of sensations’ occurs with its movement ‘upwards’ to consciousness. For the ‘passive mass of cliché-thoughts’, I have adopted and elaborated Peirce’s term ‘effete mind’. The advantages of this adoption are in its enormous potentiality for dynamic explanations of the analysed phenomena. This understanding enables us to visualize the way we think and feel. It
Figure 10.1 The effete mind conceptualized.
168 How is meaning possible? entails more properties than the notion of experience, since it was meant to be a concept for explaining the growth and transformation of the universe into a crystallized mind in the future. The totality of effeteness can be imagined as layers of swirled notions, capable of being lifted upwards by the awakening of ideas. By referring to the ‘effete mind’ we use metaphorical descriptions only. We cannot have a definite and ultimate picture in our consciousness of what this notion represents. It is an abstract but very powerful concept for analysing hypotheses as they grow and gain wings. The idea of the effete mind is our only possible ‘click’ for awakening of the sleeping (and ‘slipping’) knowledge that is unfolded in the old everyday and philosophical metaphors. We can literally ‘see’ some processes from our consciousness by referring to the notion of the effete mind. For example, the psychological condition known as ‘multiple personality disorder’ (a kind of schizophrenia) consists in a person’s belief and related behaviour that s/he possesses more than one identity. The best popular culture example would be the killer Norman Bates from the classic Hitchcock movie Psycho, whose two personalities are embodied in a motel manager and his mother. Two factors play a decisive role in this disease: the frequent amnesia that occurs in the mind of the patient between his/her identities; and the activation of another cell-centre that evokes the feeling of having another Self. Then the question arises: From where does the new Self (the second identity) receive the necessarily different experiences, memories, wishes, desires and motives? The answer – ‘from the effete mind’ – sounds quite credible here. It is possible to proceed further in the same direction, and say that ‘the needle of the seeking Self’ in this case has fallen into a false groove of the effete mind. This explanation sounds like a metaphor, and it might not help to heal the disease, but it is a sophisticated explanation. The latter rationalization, along with Peirce’s comparison of a man to a ‘train of thought’, give me a good excuse for one more metaphorization. Our consciousness resembles a huge international airport. It is built in many different layers – terminals, depots, hangars, etc. – where our memories are stored and are waiting to take off. Similar to planes, thoughts arrive or depart; and if somebody (our seeking Self) spends a sufficient time there, trying to study the schedules, it may memorize the exact time for almost every flight (thought). Still, this will not prevent it from being wrong sometimes, since weather conditions and accidents cannot be predicted. Some thoughts seem to become bored when staying on their own level, and they can move up to another one; still others can go one level down. No single passenger (our seeking Self) has come to the airport to stay for ever. An airport is meant to provide greater order. But often the chaos becomes real, not just fictional. Now, back to reality. Despite the fact that conceptualizing metaphors is a notion that explains the past – something turned into a passive mass, say, of clichés – it is a live concept, a protean device. Along with ‘the pole
How is meannig possible? 169 vault’ of the seeking Self, it provides dynamics to a scientific explanation of the world. At the same time, all elements of this method possess a very high level of abstractness, so that they can embrace the rapidly changing events of everyday life, as well as the deep theoretical judgements of any doctrine. The proposed method both enlightens some old logical forms, and serves as a generative model for obtaining new principles. In the analysis of metaphors we receive from interaction with the effete mind, as presented here, the process of creation of thought-action is examined. In this sense, conceptualizing metaphors is a kind of semiotics, applicable to the new cognitive methods, something like a semiotics of methodology or semiotics of semiotics or meta-semiotics.
Dreaming of a white Christmas I now take one more metaphorical example and develop it into a concept, in order to demonstrate how the method of conceptualizing works with non-conceptualized material from everyday life. I try to employ all the arguments I have made up to now and to draw as many conclusions as possible. In thinking of Christmas we usually imagine snow-covered lawns, houses and woods lying in complete stillness. We think of family reunions, cheerfulness, going to church, singing songs, feeling cosy and peaceful. On a deeper layer rests another cliché – this is the time when somebody prepares to go somewhere, most commonly-back home. The cliché in Europe visualizes this trip made in a wooden sleigh (the variant in Russia, for example, is the famous troika – a sleigh pulled by three horses). In Scandinavia, Britain and America, this is the reindeer sled with Santa Claus. We have to hear or otherwise ‘sense’ the jingle of the horses’ or reindeers’ bells. This is a jolly sign that somebody is coming back. On Christmas Eve we sing or listen to ‘Silent Night’, and we feel safer than we do at any other time of the year. Safety and hope – these are the two dominant emotions of this evening. This is what we expect to feel, again and again, no matter how old we are. This is the time we celebrate the myth of our childhood – that we were born to grow up in peace and joy and to have children of our own, which we will raise with the same myth. We go back to our mythological phase, and for a short time we turn into mythological creatures, careless and cheerful. As far back as 1816, when the priest Joseph Mohr penned the verses and the composer Franz Xaver Gruber wrote the music of the unforgettable ‘Stille Nacht’, they were driven to do this by similar impulses. Both were serving in the then extremely poor area of Salzburg, in the small village of Oberndorf, where hope and joy were desperately needed. They made up their composition so that it emulated a cradle carol. It was not even a myth, but an allegory that they composed. It is an allegory of something lost, for which we will soon be generously rewarded. Let us visualize
170 How is meaning possible? this musically conceptualized hope. (In Figure 10.2 can be seen one of the four earliest copies of the score, kept in the Carolino Augusteum Musem in Salzburg.) Both author and composer dig very deep into the effete mind, reaching a numberless cell, which keeps memories for genetic human development. Their seeking Selves fall into the right groove of longings and expectations. Somebody’s return is the climax of the celebration. Something will happen, and it will be good. Something or somebody will step over the threshold, and s/he may stay at home until the next year. Or for ever. S/he will bring something good for this home. God, perhaps?
Why something ‘matters’? Meaning is about ordering, comparing and translating. Something means more than something else. Meaning is also about hierarchy, conventionality and values. I am not going to deal with the classical revelation of the problem of meaning as a semantic, syntactic or causal outcome of inquiry. Neither will I investigate the countless theories of truth-conditions or evaluative descriptions. Let me rather start from pure curiosity by asking the naïve question: Why does one thing matter and another not? For a newborn child only a few things matter. As the child grows, the number of things that matter to him increases. As old age sets in, a person’s range of interests naturally narrows. For a man on his deathbed
Figure 10.2 The hope conceptualized.
How is meannig possible? 171 almost nothing matters. But who defines the values that matter? For example, how did the myth arise that what is real matters and what is fictional does not? If we jump ahead to the near future when, thanks to genetic engineering, even brain cells will be replaceable, can we be sure that the same values will matter for these half-artificial human beings? Why do we ask such a question? Is there any unveiled relationship between ethics and philosophy? This is an old question, which seemed to have been solved long ago, but which is soon to be asked anew. I now need to examine the already posed question, what is meant by ‘effete mind’ and ‘effeteness’? We saw that Peirce did not provide an explanation. He employed the term without clarifying it. The term played into his seemingly vague concept of the universe: ‘The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws’ (CP 6.25). He soon gave up this notion, which was tidily linked with his earlier view about objective idealism, and rarely returns to it later. What is the kernel in this short remark that makes us think that it is capable of elaboration? It is a notion with the potential to be elaborated further in many ways. It is also general and vague, as Peirce intended. In just one part of his sentence – ‘… inveterate habits becoming physical laws’ – he managed to place an enormous amount of meaning: that matter is ruled by habits and develops from a less orderly to a more ordered world, to a crystallized mind: This obliges me to say, as I do say, on other grounds, that what we call matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hidebound with habits. It still retains the element of diversification; and in that diversification there is life. When an idea is conveyed from one mind to another, it is by forms of combination of the diverse elements of nature, say by some curious symmetry, or by some union of a tender color with a refined odor. (CP 6.158) This is another strange and poetic explanation of how Peirce viewed the way we think. The somehow non-dead matter is a kind of exhausted mind, a bulk of past thoughts – the effete mind. It provides us with models or patterns of action. We do not attain complete ideas from anywhere. ‘Symmetry, tender color and refined odor’ participate in the magical combination of creating a sense that can be conveyed and communicated. By virtue of our seeking Selves we activate these traces from the past and conceptualize them. We make our own meaning. Does such a view not correspond to recent discoveries of genetic engineering? Today we know that our cells (even those that do not belong to the brain) have ‘memories’ about their origins as human organs, along with other ‘memories’ about this particular human body of which they are a part. But we have to be very careful. What we call ‘memories’ is
172 How is meaning possible? material. These are not tactile traces, but rather genetic codes of information. Still, there must be a vital thought, a sum of rules, an ultimate law that governs our life. Somewhere in our consciousness must exist a kind of aggregation of thoughts from the time before we were born. One very important way that things ‘matter’ is by constant reference to this mere ‘mind, hidebound with habits’ to the effete mind. Let us now try to answer what might at first seem to be a remote question. Why do some events from our lives, such as Christmas, not lose their significance? Do we really like to live in an allegory or in a myth? What makes us feel safe in poetic figures? I think the answers here (if any) must be supralogical or, rather, ‘pre-logical’. We have to accept the fact that there is something higher and more important than meaning, or that there is a kind of ultimate meaning. Perhaps we are looking for pre-existing moods of our collective mind, something like an undiscovered myth, by which we will save ourselves. This is similar to huge depositories of effeteness, where everything that is occurring has already happened. We do not need to reflect on this latter example. It denies any reasoning for itself, being made openly in a metaphysical course of thinking. It can only become significant by closing with one more remark by Peirce: I hear you say: ‘All that is not fact; it is poetry.’ Nonsense! Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for. (CP 1.315) We can agree with either opportunity that Peirce offers – we can continue to observe these special minutiae, or to stay with the good old metaphor. Perhaps we have one more option, thanks to the notion of the seeking Self: to supervene on both. Can we say today something different on the same topic, on the nature of scientific findings? The great men of science have made their discoveries within the special minutiae mentioned by Peirce. The great poets always knew about them.
And some compromised remarks There are several points in which this book has failed to fulfil its promises. Despite the frequent claim that it would outline a conception that can produce testable propositions and provide behavioural patterns for a better orientation in the everyday life, it seems that the status of the devised model is a flexible analytic method. It is only fair to admit that the original aim has reached this level and the theory has to be considered rather as an applicable concept, not as a new doctrine. There are also a few notions that have remained abandoned, for example the idea of
How is meannig possible? 173 human beings as ‘walking solipsismograms’, as well as the concept of the ground effects, suggested to be considered as an embodiment of the broader phenomenon of the effete mind. The concepts of dialogism, Other, Otherness, and the entire ‘subject–object’ relationship as devised by Peirce and by related philosophers, have not been elaborated enough. There is not satisfactory evidence that the relationship between metaphorizing as a method and metaphors used as examples is balanced. The reverse, more optimistic view, however, points to the indisputable open end-ness of the proposed concept.
Appendix Ivan Sarailiev – an early Bulgarian contributor to pragmatism
Ivan V. Sarailiev (1887–1969) was a pioneer convert to pragmatism, incorporating the pragmatic viewpoint in his writings as early as 1909. Sarailiev whose father was a St. Petersburg lawyer, studied in Paris under Bergson and graduated summa cum laude from the Sorbonne in 1909. Although he was fluent in French, English and German, he wrote almost exclusively in Bulgarian. As a result, his achievements remained largely unknown. To make things worse, his work was heavily suppressed by the Communists after they gained power in 1944. After his graduation from the Sorbonne, Sarailiev spent a year in England where he had frequent discussions with F. C. S. Schiller (some of Schiller’s letters to Sarailiev have survived). Upon his return to Bulgaria, Sarailiev taught at a Sofia high school for the next eleven years. In 1920, he was appointed assistant professor at the University of Sofia, where he became a tenured professor in 1927. Sarailiev’s On the Will appeared in 1924. That same year Sarailiev returned to Britain where he met again with Schiller and attended H. W. Carr’s course on Bergson. In 1934, he published a collection of papers on Bergson under the title Essays. On some Unclear Moments in H. Bergson’s Philosophy. In 1931, about six years after his return from Britain, Sarailiev travelled to New York, where he spent a year as a Rockefeller fellow at Columbia University. At Columbia he discussed Peirce with William Pepperel Montague and with Dewey. In his diary, Sarailiev made a special note on the pronunciation of Peirce’s name, and in ‘Charles Sanders Peirce and his Principle’, which was published in the Bulgarian journal Outchilisten Pregled (vol. 32, June 1933, pp. 725–736) he made sure that the readers knew how to pronounce Peirce’s name. In March of the following year, Sarailiev went to Harvard where he met Ralph Barton Perry, Alfred N. Whitehead, George Allen Morgan and James Bissett Pratt. Later that year he visited several other American universities. Upon his return to Europe, Sarailiev travelled first to Italy, where he met with several Italian pragmatists, and spent two years in Germany and Switzerland.
Appendix: Ivan Sarailiev 175 In the 1930s, Sarailiev gained recognition among Bulgarian intellectuals because of his debate with a well-known Bulgarian professor, Dimiter Mikhalchev, on the dilemma between religion and science. Sarailiev used a pragmatic approach with semiotic influences to defend his view that life is not solely a product of physical causality. He argued that we live in a world of ‘pre-thought’ and that we live and act in accordance with its rules and laws rather than with physical ones. Those rules and laws do not contradict modern science but, rather, complete and prove its validity. Somewhat as Peirce had, Sarailiev sought to unify scientific and religious thought and to show how knowledge of God might be gained through hypothetical (or abductive) reasoning. Sarailiev set out his views on science and religion in two essays that were published in 1931 as Contemporary Science and Religion: Response to a Critic. In 1944, however, Sarailiev’s career came to a sudden halt after the Communists took power in Bulgaria. This brought an abrupt end to his extensive international travels, and immediately isolated him from the international scholarly community. In June 1946, Sarailiev was elected president of the University of Sofia, but because of his unwillingness to cooperate with the communist authorities, he was compelled to resign within the year. Then he was asked to give up his pragmatist ideas and to teach Marxism. Again Sarailiev refused and was saved from the labour camps only because of his reputation as a scholar. A few years later, in 1950, Sarailiev was forced to retire, and he spent the rest of his life in almost complete isolation. He was banned from publishing and his previous publications were blacklisted. Even his name was classified. Sarailiev died peacefully but in total obscurity, in Sofia in 1969. There are few reliable documentary sources on his life and it is still difficult to obtain any of his books, articles or papers. Sarailiev was all but erased from history. This story of Ivan Sarailiev’s life and work might not have been told were it not for a pure accident by which I stumbled upon one of his books. The book, entitled Pragmatism (in Bulgarian), was published in 1938. Pragmatism, with a photograph of the famous Ellen Emmet Rand portrait of William James for its frontispiece, is a remarkable book. It is an important record of Sarailiev’s involvement with the European spread of pragmatism and of his extensive travels in France, England, Germany and the United States. It also provides a vivid snapshot of pragmatism at this critical period of Europe’s history. In the introduction, Sarailiev identified Peirce as the founder of pragmatism with a reference to the latter’s ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ (1878). Sarailiev added, however, that this paper remained unnoticed until 1898, when William James published his ‘Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results’, in which he credited Peirce with the discovery of pragmatism. The further spread and the European premiere of pragmatism Sarailiev credits to Ferdinand Schiller, in particular his 1891 Riddles of the Sphinx.
176 Appendix: Ivan Sarailiev Sarailiev found the greatest number of pragmatists in Italy, and he discusses Giovanni Papini, Calderoni, Giovanni Vailati and Giovanni Amendola. Sarailiev also includes a brief discussion of Mussolini. In the London newspaper the Sunday Times (April 1926), the Italian dictator expressed his gratitude to pragmatism by saying that it was of great help to his political career, and that he had learned from James that any action must be tested through its results rather than on doctrinal grounds. Mussolini continued: ‘James has inspired in me a trust in action and a will for living and fighting on which Fascism has built its great success.’ To balance this, Sarailiev also quoted others who were enthusiastic about pragmatism, like the Russian revolutionist Vladimir Lenin. Sarailiev also made sure to include Giovanni Amendola, who died after being tortured by the Fascists. Sarailiev continued his overview of the European expansion of pragmatism with an outline of its influence in German-speaking countries. Although weaker than in Britain and Italy, it had some influence; Sarailiev mentioned George Wobbermin, Wilhelm Jerusalem, Julius Goldstein, Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Ostwald and Georg Simmel, among others who were influenced by pragmatic ideas. He then continued to show how pragmatic ideas influenced several of the Logical Positivists in Vienna. Sarailiev finally follows pragmatism to France, where it was met with more appreciation and played a role in the development of a new religious philosophy founded by Alfred Loisy and George Tyrell. In the 1930s, Sarailiev continued, with further contributions from thinkers such as Maurice Blondel, Laberthonière and Le Roy, this developed into a French movement for a renewal of philosophy and religion known as ‘modernism’. The introduction is followed by the essay ‘Charles Sanders Peirce and his Principle’ as well as essays on the pragmatism of James, the humanism of Schiller and the instrumentalism of Dewey. Also included are an essay on Italian pragmatism, a conclusion and a supplement with an essay on the meaning of the words ‘pragmatism’, the adjective ‘pragmatic’ and Peirce’s term ‘pragmaticism’. The book is concluded with a lightly annotated and remarkably complete bibliography of pragmatic thought. Sarailiev’s account of pragmatism’s invasion of Europe is scrupulously researched and very well written. He described pragmatism as a new theory of truth, marked its crucial points and concluded that after the death of its chief representatives the debate about it had begun to fade away. Also in his own work Sarailiev followed a model of thinking that exemplified Peirce’s ‘logic of science’. In his Genetic Ideas (1919), his Socrates (1947), and in his debate on science and religion, he closely followed the pragmatists’ doctrine for the clarification of meaning. Under more fortunate circumstances, Sarailiev would have enjoyed an influence, perhaps a great influence. Instead, he suffered under harsh political persecution and was forced to be a social outcast. His thought was
Appendix: Ivan Sarailiev 177 suppressed and was left to drift in the darkness of the following ignorant decades. As Peirce understood so well, thought must not be imprisoned in the monastery of a single consciousness, but it must be let out to fight in the street with other thoughts – for the sake of truth. The recent discovery of Sarailiev’s work most assuredly confirms, at least, that no authority can hope to ‘fix’ the truth for ever.
References
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Index
a posteriori method 26 a priori method 22, 26 abduction 2, 28, 37, 62, 136, 175 Abel, Reuben 51 Absolute 101–2, 104 abstraction 28, 41, 44 action/active Self 76, 161 agapism 7, 29, 78, 80–1 Alexander, Ronald G. 1, 10–11, 18, 76–7, 80, 155, 163 Altersense 105, 111, 116 Amendola, Giovanni 176 analytic propositions 38 anancism 7; see also synechism apperception 107, 146 arbitrariness of the sign 41 architectonic principle 19, 20, 22, 32 architecture and music 122 Architecture of Theories (1891) 33 arguments 28, 37, 60, 89, 131–2 Armstrong, David 10 aroma 42–4 art works: and consciousness 126–32; and music 68; and signs 50–2; see also literary theory; music astronomy 137–8 authority 22 Baars, Bernard J. 1, 13–14 baigneuses, Les (Cézanne) 127–8 Bakhtin, M. M. 16–17, 59, 81, 130; heteroglossia 16, 53–5, 69–70, 132; Otherness 62–4, 75, 77, 123–4, 133; ‘second consciousness’ 127; silence 125, 135; similarities with Peirce 7, 69–70; see also dialogism/dialogue balloonist metaphor 84–5, 92, 106
Barthes, Roland 32 Baudrillard, Jean 7, 32, 128–9, 133, 134; simulacra 8, 17, 81, 128 Bergson, Henri 174 Bernstein, Richard J. 8 Bible: Genesis 72, 77 blackboard metaphor 95–6 blank space 65, 66, 67 Blondel, Maurice 176 Boole, George 9, 14–15 bottomless lake metaphor 1, 3, 27, 136, 152, 160 breadth of a term 37, 38, 44, 45 Brent, Joseph 31 broken mirror images 69 brute acts 95 brute facts 49–50, 51, 105, 132 Burge, Tyler 1, 4 Cage, John 120 Calderoni, Mario 176 call-to-attention 50, 135, 137 Cantor, Georg 27 carnal consciousness 6, 121 carnivalization 53 Carr, H. W. 174 Cartesian dualism 6, 11, 79, 164 castle metaphor 35 categories 5, 15, 19–20, 27–9; doctrine of 16; and Otherness 62–3, 144, 149–50; and signs 36–9; studies of 32; and time 110, 111, 114, 115–17; see also Firstness; Secondness; Thirdness Cézanne, Paul: Les baigneuses 127–8 chalk line metaphor 95–6 chance 7, 94
182 Index characters 16 childhood and Other 156–8 Christmas 169–70, 172 Christo (artist) 131–2 clarity see clearness of ideas classification of sciences 33–4, 85, 86 clearness of ideas 23, 27, 73–4, 135–6, 148, 149, 176 clichés 18, 78, 80, 91, 108–9, 167 coded program 4, 85 cognition 21–2, 25, 26, 134–5; and dreams 145–6 Colapietro, Vincent 102–3 Collingwood, Robin George 102 colour 42, 55–7, 62 communication: in computer age 143; and Other 156–7; see also language; media Communism 174, 175 community of inquirers 26–7, 45–6, 47 comparison 56, 57, 61, 68 computational art 141–2 computer: Boolean logic 14–15; dehumanization 143; as effete mind 161; mathematical structure 85; mind as computer 14–15, 27; virtual reality 112–13, 128 conceptual beauty 141–2 conceptualizing metaphor 1–2, 3–4, 16, 18, 52, 159–73; methodology 8–10, 168–9; ‘third element’ 9, 10–12 connotation 37–8, 45 consciousness: and categories 105; and Ego/Self 106–7, 146–8; layers of 147, 148–9, 152, 158, 168; and mind 83; and Self 80; and signs 58, 128–36; theory of 17, 18, 126–43; and time 29–30, 110–25; see also carnal consciousness; mind; perception; self-consciousness; thought context 81, 88 continuity 95–6; see also synechism continuous past 80–4, 112, 148 conventionality 134–5 correlate 37, 39, 42 cosmology see evolutionary cosmology Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky) 96 crystallized mind 6, 27, 31, 93, 94, 168, 171
dancing Self 76 Danow, David K. 55 dataism 141 Davidson, Donald 4–5, 10 death 6, 12, 121 deduction 28, 37, 47, 62 degenerate categories 15 degenerate iconicity 48 degenerative metaphors 34 de-humanization 143 Deledalle, Gérard 31 delome 28 Dennett, Daniel 4 denotation 37–8, 45 depth of a term 37, 38, 44, 45 Derrida, Jacques 7, 46, 81, 129 Dewey, John 8, 174, 176 diagrams 3, 48, 62, 100 dialogue/dialogism 17, 53, 54–5, 66, 173; and Self 103, 123–4; and sign 62–4, 69–70; and unlimited semiosis 58–9; see also heteroglossia; Other/Otherness diamond, hardness of 23–4 dicisign/dicent signs 28, 60, 67–8, 88, 89, 130, 131, 132 différance 81 different voices see heteroglossia dimness 73–4, 136 discontinuity 96 discourses, mixed 140–1 discursive psychology 163–4 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 16–17, 53–5, 59, 64–6, 67, 96 doubt–belief theory of inquiry 22–3, 25 dreams 49, 91; dream-semiosis 144–6; see also sub-conscious dualism 6, 11, 79, 164 duality principle 137–8 Duns Scotus, John 28 durated minds 79, 82 dyadic relations 28, 37–8 dynamic Self 161 dynamical interpretant 77–8 Eco, Umberto 18, 32, 44–5, 46–7, 126, 134 effete mind 2, 5, 6, 17, 18, 71–100; conceptualization 3, 9, 82–4, 99–100, 171; and consciousness
Index 183 148–9; and dreams 145–6; and evolutionary cosmology 29, 79–80, 98–9, 107–9, 136; and experience 87–91; and feeling 31; and ground 40–1, 52; and identity 168; and literary analysis 53, 54, 66, 68, 94–5, 96; and matter 98–100, 108–9, 171; and meaning 165–73; and metaphor 160; and Other 75, 77, 158, 160; and past 113–14, 161; place of residence 83; and seeking Self 76, 77, 78, 94, 95, 148–9, 160, 167, 168–9; and silence 50; and supervenient self 10, 11, 40, 50, 76–7, 91, 92, 167; and synechism 26, 79 Ego: and consciousness 106–7; and Other 156–7; and Self 80, 84; solipsistic trap 146–9, 158; and subconscious 144 emptiness 66, 67 engraved silence 51, 124 Euclidean plane 137–8 everyday life 51 evolutionary cosmology 5, 6, 7, 20, 23, 25, 31; and effete mind 29, 79–80, 98–9, 107–9, 136 evolutionary realism 32 Existential Graphs 33 experience 84, 85, 87–91, 105; and dreams 145; felt meaning 164–7; and Other 157–8; surprises 87–8 experiments 87–8 expressions 56 extensive propostitions 38 external referants 25 externalism 5–6 feeling 5, 12, 31, 68, 73–4, 84, 85, 90–1, 105; felt meaning 164–7 Feigl, Herbert 10 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 101, 156 film music 68 final interpretants 45, 78, 81, 108, 109 Firstness 5, 20, 27–8, 36, 50, 96; and consciousness 105, 111; dimness and vividness 73–4; distinction from ground 39–40, 42; and icons 57; and Self 84–5; and time 110, 114, 115–18; see also ground, the
Fisch, Max 31, 33 Fodor, Jerry 4 formal grammar 37 formal rhetoric 37 fractal geometry 141 framing 49, 50, 51 frozen semiosis 65–6, 67, 148 frozen traces 85 future 111–12, 113–14, 118, 161; timeaxis 115–17 Gendlin, Eugene 165–7 generality 3, 78, 80–1, 93, 95 generative metaphors 34 Genesis 72, 77 genetic memory 3, 76, 171–2 geometrical figures 141–2 German philosophical tradition 101–3, 104, 109 Gillet, Grant 164 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 122 Goldstein, Julius 176 grammar, speculative 36, 37 graphic analyses 15 Greenly, Douglas 135 ground, the 5, 6, 9, 16, 36, 37, 39–50, 173; distinction from Firstness 39–40, 42; and Other 63; and signs 41–2; and silence 51–2; see also Firstness ‘Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic’ 104 Gruber, Franz Xaver 169–70 Guess at the Riddle (1877-8) 33 guessing 8 Habermas, Jürgen 156 habit 17, 29, 78, 81, 112, 171; and evolutionary cosmology 107, 108; laws of 94 haecceitas 28, 149 hardness of diamonds 23–4 Harré, Rom 164 Harrison, Stanley 132 Harvard lectures (1903) 2, 5, 22 Hausman, Carl 20, 32, 41 Hegel, G. W. F. 101, 104, 156 Helmholtz, Hermann von 108 heteroglossia (different voices) 16–17, 53–5, 65, 69–70, 133
184 Index Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie 102 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 8 holograms 17, 134, 137–41 Holquist, Michael 62, 66, 133 Hook, Sidney 33 Hookway, Christopher 31 Houser, Nathan 15, 31, 33, 105, 107, 108, 109 ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ (1878) 23, 175 Husserl, Edmund 156 hyperreality 128 hypoiconic 62 hypothesis see abduction icons/iconicity 17, 37, 42, 60, 62, 89, 132; holograms 139–41; iconic reasoning 47, 48; iconization of the Self 44, 126–7; in literary analysis 7–8, 54, 65, 66–9; pure icons 48, 57, 59; and silence 48–50, 66–9, 135; and words 57–8 idealism 19–20, 21, 33, 34, 102; see also objective idealism ideas: conceptualizing 3–4; see also clearness of ideas; idealism; thought identity 6–7, 102–3, 107, 149, 163; multiple personality disorder 168 Illustrations of the Logic of Science (1877-8) 22–3 images 62 immortality 6 impressions 56–7 in-some-respect relation 5, 20–1, 22, 44, 58 incompleteness 78, 81 indefiniteness 44–5; see also unlimited semiosis indices 37, 60, 89, 132 individual mind 106, 107 induction 28, 37, 62 indurated minds 79, 82 information 38 informative propositions 38 inner world 103 intensification of nothingness 65–6, 67 Internet 97, 143 interpretants 28, 36, 37–8, 44; dynamical and logical interpretants
77–8; final interpretants 45, 78, 81, 108, 109 intuition 5, 94, 112; anti-intuition argument 147 It 20 James, William 8, 23, 32, 103, 175, 176 Jerusalem, Wilhelm 176 Johansen, Jorgen Dines 130, 135 Johns Hopkins University 27 Johnson, Mark 160 judgement 36 kaleidoscope 69 Kant, Immanuel 19–20, 101, 104–5 Kepler, Johannes: hologram 137–41 Ketner, Kenneth Laine 31 Kim, Jaegwon 10, 11, 18, 25, 80, 81 knowledge 20, 97, 129, 143 Laberthonière, L. 176 Lakoff, George 160 language: of computer scientists 143; discursive psychology 163–4; lattice of 74, 162; and meaning 129; and metaphor 160–1; and Other 156–7; and time 115 Lao-Tze 71–2 law of mind 30–1, 81, 94, 111–12 Le Roy, E. 176 legisigns 57–8, 60, 61, 89, 130, 132, 135 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 176 Leonardo (journal) 137 Letters to Lady Welby 15, 33, 77, 104, 109 ‘light of reason’ 71–2 likeness 37 literary analysis 8, 16–17, 18, 53–70; and effete mind 53, 54, 66, 68, 94–5, 96; and icons/iconicity 7–8, 54, 65, 66–9; metaphor in poetry 151–6, 158; and unlimited semiosis 53, 57, 58, 69–70 Littlefield, Richard 50 living mind 6, 71, 72, 77, 91–3, 94, 97–8 loading the silence 65–6, 67, 69, 81 logic 27; Boolean logic 14–15; and categories 36, 37; and Otherness 150; of science 99, 176; of seeing 59–62; of silence 119
Index 185 logical interpretants 77–8 Logical Positivism 176 logical realism 79 logical Self 163 Loisy, Alfred 176 Lotman, Yuri 108 love 7 Lyotard, Jean-François 7, 129 Mach, Ernst 176 man as sign 162 Mandelbrot, Benoit B. 141 Marx, Karl 103 mass of clichés 78, 80, 91, 108–9, 167 materialism 102 mathematics: Boolean logic 14–15; classification of 33, 85, 86; and effete mind 85; Euclidean plane 137–8; observation 47–8; use of metaphor 9 matter: and effete mind 98–100, 108–9, 171; see also mind–matter structure of reality; reality maxim of pragmatism 2, 23–4, 25, 33, 72, 108 Mead, George Herbert 8, 164 meaning 159–73; felt meaning 164–7; meaning deficiency 44–5, 47; patinameaning 159–61; sleeping meaning 2; stability of 129; transcendence of 45, 46, 47; see also signs media 97, 143, 144 mediation 106 Medisense 105, 111, 116 Melusina 27 memory 29–30, 111; dimness 73–4; genetic memory 3, 76, 171–2; nostalgia 68–9, 150–1; and odours 42–4; and time 113, 115, 118 meta-language 127 metaphor 1–2, 12, 62; in poetry 151–6, 158; scientific metaphors 13–14; see also conceptualizing metaphor Metaphors We Live By 160–1 meta-semiotics 169 Mikhalchev, Dimiter 175 mind: as computer 14–15, 27; law of 30–1, 81, 94, 111–12; see also effete mind; self-consciousness; thought mind/body dualism 6, 11, 79, 164
mind–matter structure of reality 77–80, 81–2; effete mind and matter 98–100, 108–9 Mitamura, Shunsuke 137, 140 mixed discourses 140–1 modernism 176 Mohr, Joseph 169–70 monadic relations 28, 57 Monist (journal) 33 Montague, William Pepperel 174 Morgan, George Allen 174 Mounce, H. O. 23–4, 32, 98, 105 moving silence 66–9 multiple personality disorder 168 Murphey, Murray G. 19–35 passim, 36, 56, 79–80, 147–8 music 5; associations 25–6; perception 56, 119, 120–1, 124; and pictures 68–9; and silence 50–2, 66, 68, 69, 119, 120–1, 122–3, 124–5; ‘Silent Night’ 169–70; and thought 119–23 Mussolini, Benito 176 Mussorgsky, Modest Petrovich 119 muting Self 123–5 myth 172 Nagel, Thomas 25 nature and thought 74–5, 81–2 necessity 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 102 Nirvana 151, 152 nominalism 24, 33 non-Ego 84, 106, 115, 156 nostalgia 68–9, 150–1 nothingness: and computer age 143; in literature 65–6, 67 objective idealism 5, 6, 17, 21, 23; and effete mind 71, 72, 79, 80–1, 171; and evolutionary cosmology 29, 98, 107–8; and law of mind 31, 81; and subjectivity 105 objective reality 118 objectivity 164–5 objects: and categories 28, 36; and signs 37–8, 42, 44, 46–7; subject–object relationship 5, 101–2, 106–7, 108, 109, 173; of thought 4–5, 12–13, 26
186 Index observation 47–8 odour 42–4 ‘On a New List of Categories’ (1867) 20–1, 36 ‘On Science and Natural Classes’ 22 originality 96, 97 Ostwald, Wilhelm 176 Other/Otherness 5, 17, 43–4, 173; and categories 62–3, 144, 149–50; and effete mind 75, 77, 158, 160; literary analysis 18, 53; and music 121, 123; and poetic metaphor 151–6, 158; second consciousness 127; and Self 63–4, 153–8, 167; and self-consciousness 147–8; and time 123; see also dialogue/dialogism outer world 103 Papini, Giovanni 176 past 17, 29–30, 110–25; and consciousness 148; continuous past 80–4; and effete mind 113–14, 161; and experience 166; as inner world 103; and Other 157–8; thinking of 73, 74; time-axis 115–17 patina-meaning 159–61 Peirce, Charles Sanders: abandoned notions 16; influence in Europe 175; marginalia 2, 6, 14; reputation and legacy 14; studies of work 31–3; terminology changes 36; use of metaphor 1 perception 2, 25–6, 55–7, 149; logic of seeing 59–62; music 56, 119, 120–1, 124; smell 42–4 Perry, Ralph Barton 174 personal identity/Self 6–7, 102–3, 107, 163 personality 30–1, 62, 150 phaneroscopy 5, 42; see also categories pheme 28 phenomenology 5, 24, 26 philosophy: classification of 33, 85, 86; German tradition 101–3, 104, 109; and meaning 129; philosophical metaphors 14 pictures: and music 68–9; and subconscious 144 Place, U. T. 10
place 83, 143 poetry 151–6, 158, 172 point of view 59 Poirier, Richard 8 polyphony 53, 54, 65, 67 Poncelet, J. V. 138 Pont Neuf 130–2 Ponzio, Augusto 67 ‘Poor Folk’ (Dostoevsky) 64–6, 67 pop music 122–3 Popular Science Monthly (journal) 22 Posner, Richard A. 8 post-modernism 7–8 potentiality 39–40; sleeping potentialities 51–2 pragmatic maxim 2, 23–4, 25, 33, 72, 108 pragmatism (pragmaticism) 2, 4, 31–5; early outlines 22, 24; in Europe 18, 174–7; studies of 32–3 Pratt, James Bissett 174 preconceptual experience 165, 166 prediction 113–14 present: and consciousness 110, 118; in general 56–7; and music 119–23; as outer world 103; and past 29–30, 161, 166; time-axis 115–17 pre-thought 175 Prigojin, I. 108 Primisense 105, 111, 116 Private Self 107 propositions 28, 36, 37, 38–9 protoplasm 31 Psycho (film) 168 psychology 163–4 pure abstraction 41 pure chance 7, 94 pure dream 49 pure icons 48, 57, 59 pure mind 85 Putnam, Hilary 4, 8, 10, 32 Quale 141–2 qualisigns 42, 48, 57, 60, 63, 66, 67, 89, 132 qualities 40, 105 quantification theory 27 ‘Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’ (1868) 20, 156 quietude 125
Index 187 reaction 105 reading 8, 58, 98, 143; as seeing 65–6 realism 21, 23, 24, 26–7, 32–3, 79 reality: and dreams 145; and effete mind 98–100, 108–9; hyperreality 128; objective reality 118; and Self 107–8; virtual reality 112–13, 128; see also matter reasoning 109; iconic reasoning 47, 48; ‘light of reason’ 71–2; see also deduction reductionism 80 reflection 68, 152 Relate 141–2 Replicas 130 representamens 41, 42, 106, 141–2 representation 22, 132, 133–4 resemblance 16, 37, 40, 43 rhemes 28, 42, 50–1, 60, 61, 67, 88, 89, 117, 132 rhetoric, speculative 36, 37 Ricoeur, Paul 10 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 94–5, 96 Rorty, Richard 7, 21, 32, 132 Royce, Josiah 8 Sarailiev, Ivan V. 18, 174–7 Saussure, Ferdinand de 18, 126 Savan, David 15, 31 Schiller, F. C. S. 174, 175, 176 science: classification of 33–4, 85, 86; logic of 99, 176; and poetry 172; see also mathematics scientific metaphors 13–14, 16 scientific method 22 Scotus see Duns Scotus searching Self see seeking Self Sebeok, Thomas 59 second consciousness 127 Secondness 5, 20, 27–8, 36, 43, 96; and consciousness 105, 106, 111, 115; and Otherness 144, 149–50; and time 111, 114, 115–18 seeing 55–7, 65–6; logic of 59–62 seeking (searching) Self 2, 11, 42, 44, 62, 68, 135; and effete mind 76, 77, 78, 94, 95, 148–9, 160, 167, 168–9; and Otherness 149–50; and time 113, 115
Self 1, 6–7, 17; and consciousness 146–9, 150; and dreams 144–6; and effete mind 76, 80, 81; and Firstness 84–5; iconization of 44, 126–7; muting Self 123–5; and Other 63–4, 153–8, 167; and reality 107–8; as sign 126–7, 136, 156, 162; and subjectivity 101, 102–3; as third element 10–12, 62–3; see also seeking Self; self-consciousness; subjectivity; supervenient self self-awareness 106 self-consciousness 6, 30–1, 43–4, 80, 106–7; and child 157; solipsistic trap 146–9, 158 self-knowledge 4, 5, 6, 17, 146–7 seme 28 semeiotic 4, 32, 37 semiosis: dream-semiosis 144–6; frozen semiosis 65–6, 67, 148; and silence 51; vagueness-saturation 44–7; see also signs; unlimited semiosis semiosphere 81, 108, 163 semiotic idealism 20 semiotics of methodology 169 semiotics of semiotics 169 sensation see perception set theory 27 Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet 94–5, 96 Sheriff, John K. 15, 136 Short, Thomas L. 31, 103 signs 5, 20–1, 22, 33; classification of 28, 36–9, 46, 47, 60–1; and consciousness 58, 128–36; in daily life 3; and dialogue 62–4, 69–70; and effete mind 72–3, 83; and ground 41–2; in-some-respect relation 5, 20–1, 22, 44, 58; in literature 54–5, 68–9; man as 162; and odours 42–4; paradox of 46–7; and perception 25–6; Self as sign 126–7, 136, 156, 162; sign-creation 44; and silence 50–2; ten-fold division 15, 17, 39, 47, 53, 60–1, 89; transformation of 15, 17, 89; see also dicisigns; icons/iconicity; legisigns;; meaning; qualisigns; semeiotic; semiosis; sinsigns; unlimited semiosis sign-triads 60, 62 silence 16, 48–52, 135; engraved silence
188 Index 51, 124; and iconicity 48–50, 66–9, 135; in literature 65–6; loading the silence 65–6, 67, 69, 81; logic of 119; and music 50–2, 66, 68, 69, 119, 120–1, 122–3, 124–5; structured silence 143 ‘Silent Night’ (carol) 169–70 Simmel, Georg 176 simulacra 8, 17, 81, 128 sinsigns 48, 59, 60, 61, 66, 67, 89, 132 Slaveikov, Pencho 151–6 sleeping experience 76 sleeping files/programs 85, 108–9 sleeping meaning 2 sleeping potentialities 51–2 smell 42–4 social consciousness 6 solipsism 95, 146–9, 158 solipsismograms 143, 144, 173 ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’ 104 space 73, 143 speculative grammar 36, 37 speculative rhetoric 36, 37 Sperry, R. W. 61 spiritual embodiment 3 Stich, Steven 4 ‘Stille Nacht’ (carol) 169–70 structured silence 143 sub-conscious 91, 118, 144 subject as utterer 77 subject–object relationship 5, 101–2, 106–7, 108, 109, 173 subjectivity 4–5, 17, 101–9; German tradition 101–3, 104, 109; Peirces dissent 104–6, 109; see also consciousness; Self suchness 28 supervenience 1, 48, 50, 99, 164 supervenient self 10–11, 18, 52, 135, 163; and effete mind 10, 11, 40, 50, 76–7, 91, 92, 167; and music 124–5 surfing the Internet 97 surprises 87–8 symbols 37, 47, 60, 89, 131, 132; discursive psychology 163–4; and experience 165–7; see also signs synechism 5, 6–7, 17, 20, 25, 32, 72;
and categories 29; and effete mind 26, 79 syntax of the universe 93 synthetic propositions 38 System of Logic, Considered as Semeiotic (1914) 33 systems 19–22, 33–4; see also categories technical progress 143 ten-fold division of the signs 15, 17, 39, 47, 53, 60–1, 89 tenacity 22 terminology changes 36 terms 28, 37 Tetens, Johann 104–5 thing in itself 46, 57 thinking see thought ‘third element’ 9, 41, 42, 92, 93; Self as 10–12, 62–3 Thirdness 5, 20, 27–9, 36; and consciousness 105, 106, 111, 133; and Otherness 62–3; and time 111, 114, 115–18 thisness 28 Thou 20 thought 12–14; and action 161; and dreams 144–6; and effete mind 72–6, 94; and music 119–23; objects of 4–5, 26; and Otherness 123–5, 150; pre-thought 175; and signs 161–3; see also consciousness; mind thought-in-rest 22, 81 thought-in-search 22–3 thought-like effects 77–8, 80, 94, 115 thought-net 161–3 ‘throwing a light’ 71–3, 74, 81, 108–9 time 17, 29–30, 110–25; and music 119–23; time-axis 115–17 time capsule 114–18, 120 Titanic experiment 87–91, 94 tokens 47 tones 42, 119, 121–2, 123 transcendence of meaning 45, 46, 47 transformation of signs 15, 17, 89 triadic relations 5, 28, 37–8, 60, 62; see also categories triangle in water 147 tychism 7, 29, 72, 79, 80–1, 99
Index 189 type-identity theory 10 Tyrell, George 176
volition 77, 149–50 Vygotsky, Lev 164
universe: syntax of 93; see also evolutionary cosmology unlimited semiosis 8, 17, 41, 44–5, 166; and literary analysis 53, 57, 58–9, 69–70 utterer 77
water metaphor 151–3 wave of consciousness 107 Welby, Victoria, Lady 15, 33, 77, 104, 109 West, Cornel 8 white Christmas 169–70, 172 Whitehead, Alfred N. 174 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 49, 162–3 Wobbermin, George 176 words: and dreams 145–6; as signs 55, 57–8
vagueness 48, 50, 78, 81, 93 vagueness-saturation 44–7 Vailati, Giovanni 176 values 170–1 virtual reality 112–13, 128 vision see perception; seeing vividness 73–4, 136, 152 voice: different voices 53; see also heteroglossia
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