Philosophical Semiotics: The Coming into Being of the World of Meaning 9811930562, 9789811930560

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Yiheng Zhao

Philosophical Semiotics The Coming into Being of the World of Meaning

Philosophical Semiotics

Yiheng Zhao

Philosophical Semiotics The Coming into Being of the World of Meaning

Yiheng Zhao College of Literature and Journalism Sichuan University Chengdu, China Translated by Xiaoli Fang College of Foreign Languages and Cultures Sichuan University Chengdu, China

Xu Zhang College of Foreign Languages and Cultures Sichuan University Chengdu, China

ISBN 978-981-19-3056-0 ISBN 978-981-19-3057-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3057-7 Jointly published with Sichuan University Press Co., Ltd. The print edition is not for sale in China Mainland. Customers from China Mainland please order the print book from: Sichuan University Press Co., Ltd. ISBN of the Co-Publisher’s edition: 978-756-90-0536-3 Translation from the Chinese language edition: “哲学符号学” by Yiheng Zhao, © Sichuan University Press 2017. Published by Sichuan University Press. All Rights Reserved. © Sichuan University Press Co., Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publishers, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publishers nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publishers remain neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Introduction: Theory of Meaning, Semiotic Phenomenology, Philosophical Semiotics

The subtitle of this book is “The Coming into Being of the World of Meaning.” What is the “meaning?” What is the “world?” And what is the “world of meaning?” Starting with an introduction to the construction of the world of meaning, I will progressively characterize the “production of meaning”, the “experientialization of meaning,” and the “socialization of meaning,” covering some 30 philosophical topics, including epistemology and cultural studies. It is, however, necessary to clarify some of the terminologies that determine the choice of the title of this book “Philosophical Semiotics.” 1. Theory of Meaning: Among those many disciplines, taking meaning study as their focal subject: analytical philosophy, psychology, epistemology, and cognitive studies, etc., semiotics is supposed to be the one that focuses most intensively on the production, transmission, interpretation, and interaction of meaning, as well as all forms of meaning. The term “theory of meaning,” however, seems to be monopolized by analytical philosophy. Having its popularity in both England and America for over a century, analytical philosophy of language is mainly concerned with the questions of language and logic, in which the theory of meaning actually refers to the study of propositions. While it might be misleading to title this book “theory of meaning,” since its main purpose is to study the meaning of signs in a general sense instead of from a perspective of philosophy of language. This book discusses the “theory of meaning,” which I borrowed from linguistic philosophy by chance, however, from a different perspective. Modern semiotics has already been far away from the study of sentence pattern. 2. Semiotic Phenomenology: This tradition founded by Charles Sanders Peirce, who also termed it phenomenology, or sometimes “phaneroscopy” to avoid the repetition of the “Hegelian” terminology. He nevertheless used the term “phenomenology” in most of his manuscripts. Peirce’s Phenomenology lays a philosophical

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foundation for semiotics, building up quite a particular system of phenomenology with its specificity, as he situated the phenomenological problems within the scope of semiotics.1 Peirce made it clear: “So far as I have developed this science of phaneroscopy, it is occupied with the formal elements of the phaneron.”2 Peirce’s phenomenology is a formal theory of meaning. What Peirce didn’t know is that his contemporary Husserl had already developed a more complete phenomenological system, who he didn’t hear about until much later in his life and whose name was only mentioned twice in his notes.3 Peirce’s phenomenology is the basis of his semiotic system whose focal points are different from Husserl’s Phenomenology. The discussion of the theory of meaning unfolds in the book in line with Peirce’s thought. Since Peirce, a number of researchers have devoted themselves to establishing a Peircian-Husserlian “Semiotic Phenomenology.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as one of the pioneers, proposed the “Existential Semiotics” after World War II.4 Heidegger and Derrida should also be recognized that the former’s existentialism breaks a new path in the phenomenological tradition by emphasizing the question of meaning, and the later interrogates Husserl’s theory of signs in his Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. In recent years, despite the efforts of many researchers such as Richard L. Lanigan,5 Goran Sonesson6 or Carlo Sini,7 who have tried to establish a discipline of Semiotic Phenomenology, a clear and systematic formulation of the Semiotic Phenomenology has yet not been achieved. I agree with Peirce on considering semiotic phenomenology as the founding theory of semiotics. While based on the present semiotic instead of phenomenological studies, I mean to review and enrich Peirce’s study of semiotic phenomenology, with no ambition to rewrite phenomenology and no intention to refute Husserl. Although some of the points proposed in this book are divergent from Husserl’s phenomenology, it would only be a matter of different domains of discourse. 1

Nathan Houser. “Peirce, Phenomenology, and Semiotics,” in The Routledge Companion to Semiotics, Ed. By Paul Cobley. London: Routledge, 2010: 89–100. 2 Charles Sanders Peirce. Collected Papers. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1931– 1958, Vol.1: 284. 3 H. Spiegelberg said that Peirce “is well familiar with Husserl’s Logics” (see H. Spiegelberg. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (2nd Edition). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965.) without providing further references. On Peirce’s side, he only mentions the name of Husserl twice in his notes, without any quotation of Husserl’s works. See Charles Sanders Peirce. Collected Papers. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958, Vol. 4: 7; Vol. 8: 189. 4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Signs. Trans. with an Introduction by Richard C. Mccleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. 5 Richard L. Lanigan. “The Self in Semiotic Phenomenology.” The American Journal of Semiotics Issue 1/4(2000): 91–111. 6 Goran Sonesson. “From the Meaning of Embodiment to the Embodiment of Meaning: A Study in Phenomenological Semiotics,” in Body, Language and Mind, (eds) Tom Ziemke & Jordan Zlatev. Berlin: Mouton de Guyter, 2007: 85–127. 7 Carlo Sini. Ethics of Writing. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009.

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3. Philosophical Semiotics: Thinking twice about the title of this book, I decided to call it “Philosophical Semiotics” instead of “Semiotic Phenomenology,” which can be justified by the following reasons: the first reason is to avoid the possible controversy with the mainstream phenomenology as mentioned above. Philosophical semiotics does not put itself in opposition to phenomenology, some of whose methods of analysis and terms instead are close to the latter. The book also borrows some ideas from certain phenomenologists, but remains on a different way of semiotic reasoning and preoccupation. For example, the two have very different starting point for distinguishing between the thing and the sign: philosophical semiotics is interested in the production of meaning while the phenomenology is concerned with consciousness. Since we do not aim to construct a phenomenological theory, we prefer not to mix them up. The second reason seems even more important because our objective is to try to discover the philosophical foundation of semiotics. Since always considered as a methodology, semiotics is even nicknamed “mathematics in human sciences” because of its strong operability. Human culture is a set of meanings of signs, and semiotics is a discipline of meaning studies. It is therefore not surprising that semiotics has become a general methodology for the studies of human culture. Umberto Eco had already rightly pointed out that the application of semiotics to other disciplines cannot be always successful.8 In fact, phenomenology has not been always effective when applied to various disciplines, because phenomenology does not focus on the formal rules governing all the activities of meaning as semiotics does. Whereas all acts of meaning cannot avoid formal problems. The overarching questions I seek to address over the course of the study: Could semiotics deal with the philosophical questions of “metaphysics?” Could it differentiate the a priori from experience, intuition from understanding? I regard that the foundation of semiotics is based on a series of philosophical questions. I intentionally introduced earlier in my book Semiotics: Principles and Problems certain philosophical discussions, such as the cultural markedness, the subject and the self, the motor and the brake of historical evolution, etc., which will be more systematically studied in this book. Being a doctrine of activities of meaning, it is necessary for semiotics to answer some fundamental questions of philosophy, although not once and for all. As a Chinese scholar, we could no doubt contribute some unique ideas to philosophical semiotics. Since pre-Qin dynasty, we have seen rich thoughts of philosophical semiotics,9 for example, in the Book of Changes, the nominalist theory of the Motse, the theory of the School of Yin-Yang and the Five Elements, the doctrine of Zen, and the “Philosophy of Mind” (xinxue 心学) of Lu Xiangshan and Wang Yangming. The historical development of the Chinese thoughts of philosophical semiotics tightly intertwines with all the fundamental questions on how consciousness generates meaning confronted with the world.

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Umberto Eco. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. Zhu Dong. Semiotic Thinking in Pre-Qin Philosophy. Chengdu: Sichuan University Press, 2014.

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If we see few publications in philosophical semiotics today,10 it is because, in this aspect, the semiotics movement’s efforts are not acknowledged as its methodology. Fortunately, the history of semiotics and philosophy do not stop at our generation, and our successors will accomplish what we have not done. Before getting to the first chapter, I would like to highlight one more essential problem—the perceived “things” can be roughly classified into three categories: The first, often referred to as “entities,” concerns not only “object,” but also events, namely the change of the state of objects; The second corresponds to the represented and mediated texts; The third is other-consciousness, either the consciousness of others, or that of other living beings or artificial intelligence, including objectified self-consciousness. These three “things” form the categories of objects of meaning, while each school takes a different position on how to interpret their meanings. The traditional phenomenology considers only the second category (representation) as signs, while the traditional semiotics admits only materially mediated signs, skeptical about the “mental image” without a material form. The numerous debates on the consciousness of “other living beings or artificial intelligence” have been increasingly heated in recent years. Animals might be the potential carriers of consciousness, the present studies on which, however, have been scattered. If animals, to a certain degree, share some of the meaning capacities of human, it would definitely prove that these human abilities are innate instead of being acquired. Artificial intelligence is now a developing source of consciousness, the prospects of which we are eagerly awaiting. In this book, we prefer to limit the debates to the relationship between human consciousness and the world for fear that our subject matters are aimlessly dispersed. Thus, in most chapters we will be obliged to define “consciousness” as “human consciousness,” while the consciousness of other living beings or artificial intelligence will be referred to when necessary. Philosophical semiotics considers the three things confronted by consciousness as signs because they are all keeping with the definition “a perception understood as carrying meaning.”11 It will be seen, however, that the line between those three objects are blurred: in formal intuition, the object cannot be distinguished from the sign; in the analysis of experience and communal experience, the text is not able to distinguish itself clearly from the consciousness of others; in the complex construction of the world of meaning, the object, the text, the experience and the community constitute the essential condition for the being of the subject’s consciousness. Indeed, philosophical semiotics is not only the methodology of the form of meaning, but also the ontology of meaning. A general conclusion can be made: phenomenology is interested in consciousness, semiotics in meaning, while philosophical semiotics in the relation between consciousness and meaning, or in other words, meaning in consciousness or 10

John Deeply. The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics. St. Augustine’s Press, 2003: 1. Zhao Yiheng. Semiotics: Principles & Problems (3rd Edition). Nanking: Nanking University Press, 2015: 1.

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consciousness in meaning. In some discussions, “philosophical semiotics” is considered to be synonymous with “semiotic phenomenology.” I will sometimes use the term “semiotic philosophy” to highlight the relationship between my study and the mainstream phenomenology. The reason why this book is given the title “Philosophical Semiotics” instead of “Semiotic Philosophy” is that I do not have the ambition to deal with all the philosophical subjects, but only focus on some aspects that haven’t been touched upon so far in semiotic field. Nevertheless, whatever the issue we are dealing with, meaning and consciousness remain the two central concepts of this book, and the a priori and experience, individual and community, are the two main coordinates. This book will concern with the semiotics on the different aspects of “meaning world” of human.

Contents

Part I

The World of Meaning

1 The Plurality and Complexity of the World of Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Plurality of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Complexity of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Shared World of Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The World of Things and the Practical World of Meaning: Recognition, Understanding, and Reforming to Achieve Effects . . . . . 1 The Relationship Between the World of Things and the World of Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Recognition and Distinction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Understanding, Evaluation, and Reforming to Achieve Effects . . . . . . 4 The Transformation of the World in Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3 3 8 12 19 19 23 26 28

3 The World of Mind: Category and Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The World of Meaning and Fantasy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Category . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Planning and the Crossing in the World of Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

31 31 33 35

4 The Place of Play and Art in the World of Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Common Features of Plays and Sports: Opaqueness and Uselessness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Secondary Practicality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The “Four Master Tropes” of Art and Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part II

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The Production of Meaning

5 The Meaning of The Meaning of Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Story of The Meaning of Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Definition of Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Phenomenology and Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

51 51 55 60

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Contents

4 Interpretation and Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 An Attempt of Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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6 Formal Intuition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 What is Formal Intuition? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Is the Intentional Object the Thing or the Sign? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Formal Reduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69 69 74 79

7 The Heterogeneity of the Object of Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Intentionality Making the Heterogeneity of the Object . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The “Epoche” and the Noise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Activation of Zones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Psychologism and Anti-psychologism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

83 83 85 88 90

8 Apperception and Appresentation: Minimum Formal Integrity of Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 1 From Presentation to Appresentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 2 Transcendental Apperception, Empirical Apperception . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 3 Four Kinds of Appresentations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 4 Appresentation as Semiosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 9 Indexicality is the Firstness in Semiotics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Riddle of the Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The History of the Genesis of the Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Indexicals in Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Indexicality and Self-consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Is Indexicality the Secondness? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part I

The World of Meaning

Chapter 1

The Plurality and Complexity of the World of Meaning

1 The Plurality of the World It is believed that Immanuel Kant was the first to propose the term “Sinnenwelt”1 to designate the “sensual world” vis-a-vis the rational world. Kant did not, however, discuss this topic in detail. After him, some scholars touched the plurality of the world of meaning, but the academic world did not seem to pay enough attention to it. Several “XX-worlds” concepts have been proposed in modern intellectual world to explain the role of human consciousness in the construction of the world, which are to some extent close to the idea of the “world of meaning” in this book. It is fortunate that this book is written in Chinese, avoiding the chaotic use of the terminology of the Western academic community. It has to be admitted, however, that in Western languages the word “meaning” has many ambiguities that make it very difficult to explore the theory of meaning.2 In fact, it is difficult to discuss this problem in the Western languages in which there is no equivalent translation of the key Chinese term yiyi (意义) in Western languages. The English word “meaning” implies the sense of “intention,” while the word “significance” has the evaluative sense of “importance,” and the word “sense” has the instinctive sense of “sense;” in French, there is no equivalent word to the English word “meaning,” especially that the demarcation between the two words “sens” and “signification” is even more unclear. The same is true of the German “Sinn” and “Bedeutung.” Which English word should correspond to Gottlob Frege’s key term “Bedeutung,” the central concept of analytical philosophy, has been debated for more than a century. In 1970, the British Blackwell Publishing organized a special meeting with English-speaking researchers specializing in German philosophy to discuss the translation of the German word

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Li Guangchang. “The Teleological Explanation of ‘Sinnenwelt’ by Kant.” Zhejiang Academic Journal 06 (2006): 32–35. 2 In 1923, Ogden and Richards listed 22 definitions of “meaning,” see C. K. Ogden & I. A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning. New York: Harcourt, Grace Jonovich, reprinted 1989. © Sichuan University Press Co., Ltd. 2022 Y. Zhao, Philosophical Semiotics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3057-7_1

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“Bedeutung.” After an extremely lively debate, a compromise was voted on: the word would now be translated into English as “meaning.”3 None of these terms is a perfect synonym for the Chinese word yiyi (意义),4 which in modern Chinese is less ambiguous. According to the online Hudong definition, “Yiyi is man’s knowledge of the nature and the social facts, the meaning that man attributes to the object, and the spiritual substance that man transmits and communicates in the form of signs.”5 Although not very rigorous, this definition is accurate on three important points: the production of meaning (the meaning that man attributes to the object); the interdependence between meaning and signs (the spiritual substance that man transmits and communicates in the form of signs); the essence of meaning (the “spiritual substance”). In this book, we define meaning as “the way in which consciousness and things are connected.” According to Heidegger, meaning, in essence, is the correlation between and adjoining of the subject and the object. As is stated in the introduction: “things” refer to all the objects that provides perceptions, including entities, mediated texts (e.g. language, writings, images), and the consciousness carried by living beings (organisms, other human beings and the self-perceived by consciousness) as well as the mental forms in consciousness (mental images, dreams, and illusions). It is not always easy to distinguish between these three categories: Is the landscape in places of interest an object or a sign-text? Is the “image of a character” in a novel a sign or a consciousness? Let us borrow the famous example from Husserl: do we see wax figures (sign-text) or real men (object)? In this chapter, in the discussion of the “formal intuition” which is the starting point of philosophical semiotics, no distinction is made for the time being between the categories of “objects” as sources of meaning. Simply put, meaning is the correlation between object and subject. The correlation between things also generates meaning, but it is only on the condition that the correlation is taken as an object and objectified by consciousness. The thing-thing correlation outside of consciousness, like a thing outside of consciousness, is not able to form a meaning. Meaning therefore is the reason that makes consciousness and object respectively come into being and exist in the world. In this book I will limit myself only to discuss “consciousness” instead of using terms such as “mind,” “brain,” or “intellect.” “Mind” mostly applies to humans, “brains” to animals, while “intellect” seems to be more generally used. Since we are unable to assess with certainty whether or not animals possess consciousness, we are not in a position to declare whether or not the subject of this book is suitable for the animal world. Animals sometimes display an unexpected cognitive capacity, which is, however, difficult to be observed consistently. Even if one day artificial intelligence will reach a level close to human consciousness, it will nevertheless remain only 3

Michael Beaney (ed.). The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997: 36–46. See also “On the Translation of Bedeutung de Frege.” World Philosophy 2 (2008). 4 In the English-speaking world, “意义世界” can be translated as “the meaning world” or “the world of meaning.” 5 http://www.baike.com/wiki/意义, accessed on March 30, 2016.

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a replica or an improved version. It is therefore necessary to understand human consciousness first in order to be able to design artificial intelligence. Some of the aspects discussed in this book could be applied to a certain form of “consciousness,” specific to animals or machines, but as this is beyond the scope of my knowledge, I will not discuss it so as not to set foot in an unknown territory, a rapidly developing field, and can only wait for more competent colleagues to fill this gap. Do you and I live in the same world of meaning? In the common sense, this is not even a question: the world of meaning where I live is yours, and we share the same world, otherwise how could we communicate with each other? Just as we play the same chess: is it the fact that I win means you lose? If we think about this from a theoretical point of view, this question becomes extremely complex: the fact that we can share the same world results from the fact that we have shared meaning in this world. This is not “self-evident” but needs to be justified. We are not two opposing players when we are not playing the same chess; likewise, we do not share the same world of meaning when my interpretation is far different from yours. So the shared world is surely the shared world of meaning. Donald Davidson thus states that, “In sharing a language, in whatever sense this is required for communication, we share a picture of the world that must, in its large features, be true.”6 Heidegger believes that the common world is due to the nature of human existence: “The world is always already the one that I share with the others. The world of Da-sein is a with-world. Being-in is Being-with Others. The innerworldly being-in-itself of others is Mitda-sein.”7 The intersubjective relationship is not only based on the efforts of the two isolated subjects to get close to each other, but presupposes first of all a common world shared by the two subjects. Thus the identity of the worlds of meaning is conditional, depending on the inter-communicability of meaning between different subjects. The world of meaning we share is different from the physical world we are confronted with, and the latter is the same to the different subjects. Modern physics is interested in “parallel worlds,” which cannot, however, be perceived by us, and has not been verified so far. This “parallel world” would be part of our world if it were justified or perceived by us, just as a new constellation observed through a telescope becomes part of our world. The “new constellation” we envisage would then be shared by everyone and would be perceived by us in the same way, provided that the instrument of observation is analogous. No matter how divergent our conceptions of meaning, the physical world is unique and shared, which is the premise to our discussion. The above-mentioned knowledge, however, does not naturally convince us of this “uniqueness of the world.” I cannot be sure your world is “Mine.” We recognize that we are in the same world only when the meaning I receive is identical with the meaning you receive, and the signs signifying the meaning are communicable. 6

Donald Davidson. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984: 199. 7 Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Trans., by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996: 111–112.

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Having understood and accepted the way of describing the new constellation you have observed, “I” then recognize that we are talking about the same thing. We know little about the animal world: you can’t talk about a red flower and a green leaf with a color-blind dog. Communication with a dog is usually based on conjectures because the dog has no language. It is therefore essential to question the fact that “I” share the same world of meaning with others or other species, which, however, remains to be proved. William James seems to be the first to suggest the “plurality of world.” The multiple worlds stand in a certain relation with our consciousness: various interests determine the different empirical structures of each individual. James explains it in a vivid way: “We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos!”8 According to James, everyone has his own world, and they define the world as “the one he perceives and where he lives.” This principle is very challenging. Indeed, what it means is that the universe is an inaccessible chaos and the individual world is only constructed by the part that is meaningful to my personal consciousness. Jakob von Uexküll, a German philosopher from Estonia, proposed in the 1920s the notion of “Umwelt” that every organism has its own subjective environment. Uexküll believes each species has different ways of perceiving and interpreting meaning, which gives rise to a different world of meaning. The term “Umwelt” exerts an important influence on contemporary thinking and requires reflection on its translation into Chinese. Today, in the context of the environmental movement, this term is translated as huanjingjie (环境界) in Chinese, which does not, however, have the meaning of “environment.” “Um-” generally means “being around… or surrounding….” Heidegger borrowed this word in his writing, which is translated into Chinese “zhouwei shijie” (周围世界), i.e. the world the organism perceives and in which he exists as a subject. Published in 1921, in his book Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere,9 Uexküll explains that the “Umwelt” lies between the “Innenwelt” (cognitive world) on the one side and the “Umgebung” (material world) on the other side. Thus the existence of Umwelt is simultaneously independent of and dependent on consciousness. These two relationships are intertwined and the Umwelt is the integration of the subjective and objective worlds in meaning, which, however, have inspired a lot. According to Uexküll, all species live in a “world” constructed by their own signs. The Umwelt, constructed by the ability of the animal to create and accept signs, is associated both with their organum sensuum and their ability of signification. Uexküll believes that the Umwelt is species-specific with different ways of signifying. Beyond 8 9

William James. Essays in Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983: 51–52. Jakob von Uexkull. Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. Berlin: Springer, 1921.

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their ability of signification, there could perhaps be another “real world.” However, if this world goes beyond the perception or understanding of the organism, it will thus become a world that is both unknowable and inaccessible to it. One could also ask such a question: is the Umwelt of living creature (bats, for example) “real?” If so, why is it so different from that of men? We can only explain that the biological evolution allows bats to be better adapted to their environment. As they have very poor eyesight, bats perceive their environment through the echo produced by their ultrasounds, from which a world comes into being that is extremely different from that of men. No living creatures (including man), however, can completely grasp the world. The ability of any living beings to survive depends on their ability to grasp their Umwelt. If it survives, its Umwelt is, in a certain sense, “real.” The Uexküllian definition of Umwelt deliberately excludes the material environment. The objective physical world is unique for all living beings, but not every living being can perceive the Umwelt in the same way and in which it would live. Each living being produces a meaningful relationship only with a specific aspect of the physical environment through its particular sense organ and brain. The meaning networks of living beings are regulated by evolution, which makes it possible to “objectify” this part of the physical environment related to meaning, which means that the consciousness of this living being gets the givenness of meaning so that the objects in this part of physical environment will thus become signs carrying meaning. “Von Uexküll compared each Umwelt to an invisible bubble within which each species lives. This bubble is invisible precisely because it consists of relations, since all relations as such, in contrast to things which are related, are invisible. The objective meaning of each world and each part within each world depends less on physical being than it does on how the relations constituting the Umwelt intersect.”10 The object (duixiang 对象) differs from things and is opposed to consciousness. It relates to meaning and is the subjectifying of things. Chinese researchers translate “object” as “keti” (客体) which is opposed to “zhuti” (主体subject), while the “object” (duixiang) is opposed to consciousness. “Keti” suggests an existence of the “physical object,” whereas “duixiang” perceived by consciousness, can have different forms. Thus it is better in the philosophy of meaning to adopt the term “duixiang,” to which we will return later. As John Deely points out: “As a thing it merely exists, a node of sustenance for a network of physical relations and actions. As an object it also exists for someone as an element of experience, differentiating a perceptual field in definite ways related to its being as a thing among other elements of the environment.”11 When a thing enters the subject’s intention, its partial—not whole —character is perceived in a reduced way by the subject. Deely thus believes, “divisions of things as things and divisions of objects as objects are not the same and vary independently, the former being determined directly by physical action alone, the latter being mediated indirectly by semeiosy, the action of signs.”12 10

John Deely. The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics. South Bend: St. Augustin’s Press, 2003: 43. John Deely. Basics of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990: 24. 12 Ibid. 11

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Both James and Uexküll believe that the differences between worlds do not come from the difference between things, but from the difference between meaning relationships. Since meaning comes from “the correlation between the consciousness and the object,” the world, in relation to consciousness, is the world of meaning. Consequently, where there is a consciousness (or quasi-consciousness), there is a world, which corresponds to my idea of the plurality of the world proposed in this book. James advocates that everyone has a world of meaning, which over-atomizes this world, while Uexküll believes that every species has an Umwelt, which is true that each species has a world of meaning, but certainly not identical to that of human beings who possess an extremely powerful thinking so that it is not appropriate to analyze human beings’ world of meaning in the same way with that of the other species. Meanwhile, does the meaning world of the other species have such areas as “planning,” “art” or “fantasy,” which we will discuss later? Leaving this question to biologists, we will limit ourselves to our area of knowledge to reflect on the meaning world of human beings. The world is plural, but not necessarily to be personalized as James proposed, which is too atomized, nor to be species-specific according to Uexküll, which is too simple to reduce human beings who possess such a sophisticated thinking to an Umwelt. Here I propose an alternative pluralist mode of the world of meaning: “the meaning world of the cultural community.” Although everyone can construct his or her own Umwelt according to his or her consciousness, people of the same cultural community share certain essential elements of consciousness, because culture is the set of meaning and meaning rules, and all individuals from the same culture, though their world of meaning is imbued with a strong individual character, share to a large extent the same world of meaning belonging to that cultural community. There are as many worlds of meaning as units of cultural community.

2 The Complexity of the World We have just discussed about the plurality of the world, but each world is built in a complex way, which are different subjects needing to be clarified respectively. Many thinkers have already talked about the complex construction of the world of meaning. Kalevi Kull, a semiologist of the modern Tartu-Moscous school, has proposed the existence of “multiple natures” in the Umwelt of human beings, which comprises four spheres: “Zero nature is nature itself (e.g., absolute wilderness). First nature is the nature as we see, identify, describe and interpret it. Second nature is the nature which we have materially interpreted, this is materially translated nature, i.e. a changed nature, a produced nature. Third nature is a virtual nature, as it exists in art and science.”13

13

Kalevi Kull. “Semiotic Ecology: Different Natures in the Semiosphere.” Sign Systems Studies 26 (1998): 355.

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Kull admits that he was inspired by Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt to develop this rather clear theory of the complexity of the world.14 This proposition, however, remains to be discussed: certain natural states, such as the “wildness,” being already perceived and named by men, should be part of the world of meaning since they are already semiotizated. The true “zero nature” should be the unknown natural world of things; “first nature” should be the perceived world of practice; “second nature” would be the one being modified with effects; “third nature” would be the “mental world of meaning” that we will deal with in this book, which is much broader than the concept of “artistic and scientific” Kull spoke of, including categorization and projecting as well as fantasy and dreaming. The semiologists’ vision of the division of the world of meaning echoes Alfred Schutz’s view that “there are several, probably an infinite number of various orders of realities, each with its own special and separate style of existence. There are many subworlds, such as the world of sense or physical things, the world of science, the world of ideal relations, the world of ‘idols of the ribe’‚ the various supernatural worlds of mythology and religion, the various worlds of individual opinion, the worlds of sheer madness and vagary.”15 The division of the world proposed by Schutz is somewhat fragmentary, but nevertheless makes it clear that the world is multi-plural. In recent years, logicians such as Davidson and Jaakko Hintikka and narratologists such as Marie-Laure Ryan and Doležel have revived another theory of multiple worlds, corresponding to the concept of “possible worlds” initially proposed by Leibniz, who tried to in this way defend the benevolence of God as the Creator. The Creator is benevolent even though there are too many crimes and disasters in this world, because he has certainly given mankind the best of all possible worlds. The possible world is any world that can replace the real world but without doing it. This theory is thus a theory of multiple worlds. In the middle of the twentieth century, the academic community realized that the theory of possible worlds might solve problems in many disciplines, but probably suited better for the study of literature and art. Philosophy and logics deal with propositions. It would be too much of an exaggeration that a proposition refers to a world. But the art, literature and imagination present a fairly tight logic, within which the internal factors are threaded coherently. A narrative (like a novel, a soap opera) with sufficient details is therefore at least partially close to a logical completeness. According to Marie-Laure Ryan, “A description, verbal or mental, is always incomplete. When we think up an entity, we only specify a subset of its potential properties. It would take a divine mind to run through the list of all possible features and to think

14

Kalevi Kull & Peng Jia. “The Study of the New Tartu School: Inheritance, Fusion, and Advancement: The Interview of Kalevi Kull.” Signs and Media 1 (2013): 145. 15 Alfred Schutz. Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962: 207.

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up an object into logical completeness.”16 The fictional world in the narrative can— and indeed should—go across the actual world and the possible world, even to reach the impossible world. Thus the “accessibility among the three worlds” (sanjie tongda 三界通达)17 builds a complex “textual world.” The theory of possible worlds may lead to a complex construction of the world of meaning: beyond the actual world, it is possible that human mind may create parallel worlds. Although this theory seems to apply only to the virtual world, this question will nevertheless be constantly returned to in this book. Based on the points of view on the complexity of the world of meaning mentioned above, I propose an idea on the complex construction of the world illustrated in the diagram below:

This somewhat crude diagram requires further explanation: the world of things and the world of meaning, relatively independent of each other, have an overlapping area called “the practical world of meaning” (“the world of practice” in the diagram above), which works under the influence of both objects and consciousness. It includes Uexküll’s “first nature” (the perceived) and “second nature” (materially translated). In this world of practice, the object and the sign form a dyad. That is to say, all things in this world are capable of conferring meaning to consciousness. It is the world where consciousness works together with world of things to generate meaning.18 The part of the world of meaning which maintains a certain distance from the world of practice is called the mental world of meaning (“the world of mind” in 16

Marie-Laure Ryan. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991: 21. 17 Zhao Yiheng. “Accessibility among the Three Worlds: Using Possible World Theory to Explain the Relationship Between Fiction and Reality.” Journal of Lanzhou University (Social Sciences) 2 (2013): 1–7. 18 Tang Xiaolin. “On Signs and Their Medium” Signs & Media 11 (2015): 151.

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the diagram above). Although the acts of mind are more or less dependent on the accumulation of experience through practice and are not able to separate from it, the world of mind differs in essence from the world of practice. Consciousness does not necessarily need the presence of a specific object to engage in meaning activities: consciousness generates meaning through “pure acts of mind” such as designing or planning, fantasying or dreaming, and all different artistic representations, in which the object is the mental image, and the “empirical reality” is metaphorically borrowed as part of the content. With this diagram, we visualize the complexity of worlds, and the reciprocal independence and the overlapping of the world of things and world of signs. In this way, the worlds are thus divided into three major sections: “the world of things-inthemselves” outside the world of meaning, “the world of practice” produced by the interaction between the world of things and the consciousness, and “the world of mind” produced by pure acts of mind. The worlds, except the world of things-inthemselves, are all worlds of meaning. What should be noticed is that in the diagram is that the lines of the overlapping part are dotted, indicating that the three worlds are constantly changing with no clearcut boundaries. No activity of meaning can be limited definitely within any world of meaning. However, one point remains to be clear: the activities of practice, including perception, identification and understanding, “refer transparently” to things, having clear referents. The acts of meaning in the world of mind do not refer to the object but create it instead, in which fantasy and art refer to the object in an opaque way while the categorizing and projecting do so in a translucent way. All this makes the world of mind more complex than Kull’s “third nature” in human mind. I was wondering that there can only be a very small world of practice in other species’ Umwelt, and there’s tiny possibility that other species may have a world of mind. The world of meaning excludes only a part of the world of things that is still unknown or unknowable which has not been interconnected with consciousness to produce meaning. Consciousness necessarily recognizes the existence of such a world, in which the scope of human knowledge is expanding and will expand permanently, which justifies the existence of the world of things-in-themselves. The world of practice is accessible to consciousness and organized by consciousness, which is in fact the “reductive residue,” coming from consciousness’ suspending of the unknowable part of the world of things. Philosophers of various schools have reached a consensus that consciousness has only access to a part of the world: for Wittgenstein, the world is a “world of facts,” “The world is the totality of facts, not of things”19 ; for Cassirer, the human world is the “world of symbols;” for Peirce, the world of signs is the world of facts: “The purpose of every sign is to express ‘fact’”20 ; for Husserl and Gadamer, the human world is “the world of life” (life-world): “the concept of the life-world is the antithesis of all 19 Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. Mc Guinness. New York: Routledge, 2001: 5. 20 Charles S. Peirce. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 2 (1893–1913). Ed. Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998: 304.

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objectivism…. But the life-world means something else, namely the whole in which we live as historical creatures”21 ; Heidegger calls it “the world of being,” because “to say that a statement is true means that it discovers the beings in themselves.”22 In this book I call it the “world of meaning,” because the world where consciousness exists necessarily produces the possibility of meaning for it. Cassirer’s explanation could probably be the clearest on this point: “No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, myth, art and religion are parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines upon and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances.”23 According to Cassirer, man cannot confront “physical reality” immediately and the worlds of meaning force the physical reality to “recede.” This description is very vivid. He thus explicitly describes the world as a complex constitution of triple worlds: the world of meaning where men live is called the “symbolic universe:” “In language, in religion, in art, in science, man can do no more than to build up his own universe- a symbolic universe.”24 This universe is nothing but a “bubble” which allows human beings, “the symbolic animals,” to live in it.

3 The Shared World of Meaning Consciousness, as the foundation for the construction of the world of meaning, is possessed by those individuals who have subjectivity. The discussion above does not touch the problem of the level of maturity of human intelligence, because, for a variety of reasons, less mature intelligence such as that of children distances themselves from the world of practice. Their practices with a clear purpose might be even more “impractical” than the fantasy of other adults. I will therefore narrow down to the “normal” consciousness instead of concerning the consciousness of individuals who are too singular, otherwise our discussion might be dispersed. From this comes a major problem: in the study of the world of meaning, how do personal activities of meaning become that of community? More precisely, why does the purely personal world of meaning become a communally shared world of meaning? This question will not be easy to answer. The theory of “common subjectivity” proposed by Husserl in his latter period is often considered less clear than 21

Hans-Georg Gadamer. Truth and Method (Second, Revised Edition). Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London and New York: Continuum, 1975: 239. 22 Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996: 201. 23 Ernst Cassirer. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New York: Yale University Press, 1944: 43. 24 Ibid.: 278.

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his demonstration of individual subjectivity in his earlier period. Nevertheless, with the semiotic theory of metalanguage, I intend to complement the phenomenological discussion and propose a convincing argument. As we have already talked about in the “introduction,” the objects that the consciousness confronts to obtain meaning include the conscious activities of others. However, all things contain incomprehensible elements. This is even more true for the mind of others, which remains unfathomable. The fact that “people feel and reason in the same way” might be possible within a certain framework. “I” may roughly understand other people’s activities of meaning through my reasoning, referring to my own behaviors, experiences, and ways of using signs. “My” interpretation of the activities of others depends solely on “my” own experience; since “my” understanding of the minds of others can be adopted to justify my acts of meaning, “I” can, in reverse, assume that other people can understand me and “justify” my acts of meaning. Husserl points out: “It is also clear that men become appreciable only as finding Others and still more Others, not just in the realm of actuality but likewise in the realm of possibility, at their own pleasure.”25 Understanding between people depends on the shared metalanguage adopted to interpret signs. It is the world of practice generally shared by the same cultural community that builds the bridge for the understanding between different people. It thus can be inferred that the inner conscious state of the subjects of meaning activities are generally coincided with that of one another. The so-called “objective meaning” therefore is what that is postulated by the community of meaning as the universal meaning, which is assumed that the other members of this community have come up with or can generate this meaning. The shared meaning is often considered as a “sociological imagination.”26 There inevitably are a large number of information gaps and implications in interpersonal communication, which requires an imaginary association network to fill those gaps in order to link the whole of the society. Alfred Schütz clearly explains “Werelationship” in his Phenomenology of the Social World: All these different encounters with others will be ordered in multiple meaning-contexts. Since my encounter with you is an act of meaning, I am attending not only to my acts of meaning to you, but also to your acts of meaning to me and the world. As I watch you, I shall see that you are oriented to me; as I listen to you, I shall know that you are seeking the subjective meaning of my words, my actions, and what I have in mind. It is this interlocking mutual engagement of We-relationship that gets me out of the isolated state of mind. You and I share a living present. This face-to-face “I-Thou relationship” shall be the very form of my every encounter with another person. What Schutz describes is quite vivid: “Yet the world of my daily life is by no means my private world but is from the outset an intersubjective one, shared with my fellow-men, experienced and interpreted by Others; in brief, it is a world common to all of us…. I find myself 25

Edmund Husserl. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. Hingham: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1982: 130. 26 Charles Wright Mills. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000: 5.

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always within a historically given world which, as a world of nature as well as a sociocultural world, had existed before my birth and which will continue to exist after my death.”27 The sharing of meaning constitutes a community. I applaud with the whole audience for a play in the theater or I give common approval or taunt on some reports with others on the Internet. The meaningful relationship of the cultural community is only established through comparison and empathy when transposing “other people’s feelings” to “my own.” What we believe to be true is often postulated to be true by the whole community. It is referred to as “objective truth” when the community becomes large enough and the meaning sufficiently stable. According to phenomenology, meaning is a process of generalization by the sign: All signs do not simply designate the subjective experiences expressed by the people who use them, but also these signs themselves and the presentations of the object itself targeted by them, which is an invariable concept that exists objectively. The socalled objective existence is only a kind of interpretation of meaning that is accepted collectively.28 “The world exists not only for isolated men but for the community of men.”29 The world of meaning is plural, but how many such worlds are there? If each individual possessed his or her own world of meaning, it would be impossible to analyze those worlds because of such extreme relativism. Neither James’ personal world of meaning nor Uexküll’s Umwelt of the species suits for the descriptions of the human world of meaning: the man is the cultural product, whose world of meaning is a “We-World” shared by the individual members of the same cultural community. Social phenomenology believes that the world of meaning belongs to society. Schutz points out that each one of us “was born into a preorganized social world which will survive me, a world shared from the outset with fellow-men who are organized in groups, a world which has its particular open horizons in time, in space, and also in what sociologists call social distance.”30 Richards sees the question of community of meaning from another perspective. He insists on the construction of the world of communication through human experiences: “The very structure of our minds is largely determined by the fact that man has been engaged in communicating for so many hundreds of thousands of years, throughout the course of his human development and beyond even that. A large part of the distinctive features of the mind are due to its being an instrument for communication. An experience has to be formed, no doubt, before it is communicated, but it takes the form it does largely because it may have to be communicated. The emphasis 27

Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers Vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962: 312. 28 Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers Vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962:143. 29 Edmund Husserl. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970: 163. 30 Alfred Schutz. Collected Papers Vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973: 329–330.

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which natural selection has put upon communicative ability is overwhelming.”31 He thus believes that communal communication between human beings is the necessity of human nature, which creates the shared world of meaning. George Herbert Mead, the founder of “semiotics of communication,” contends, on the other hand, that the shared world of meaning is the prerequisite for communication: “The individual transcends what is given to him alone when through communication he finds that his experience is shared by others, that is, that his experience and the experiences of others fall under the same universal (in the first sense of that term). Where the particulars or instances of this universal fall within different experiential perspectives, universality has taken on the social dimension.”32 According to him, man can only communicate with each other within the shared world of meaning. Thus, from the point of view of philosophical semiotics, what constructs the essential foundation of this “shared world of meaning” is not as simple as “feeling for others” advocated by the social phenomenology, but consists of the signs necessary to express and interpret meaning, which are ultimately conventionalized by the social community. That is why Umberto Eco believes that similarity is also a matter of cultural convention: “Similarity does not concern the relationship between the image and its object but that between the image and a previously culturalized content.”33 The images that seem to be shared by all are in fact defined by the convention of the social community. Both icon and index function within the social convention to ensure that the meaning is shared. Ludwig Wittgenstein goes further to state that if the establishment of community of meaning is based on the sign system of language, category, etc., which must be communal, and impossible to be personal, because personal language does not signify. It is the communal features of language that model the world of meaning. The objective of establishing a language or a sign system by a community is to share the meaning that Wittgenstein illustrates with a telling example: “Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a ‘beetle’. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box…the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.”34 The communication of the comparable meanings can only happen when the referents of the signs are identical. If Wittgenstein’s example is reversed, it also shows that communication cannot work out if the signs are different, even if they refer to the same object. He who knows only the characters “甲虫” and he who knows only the word “beetle” cannot share their knowledge. Indeed, our individual consciousness, just like this covered

31

Ivor Armstrong Richards. Principles of Literary Criticism. London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2004: 20–21. 32 George H. Mead. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Ed. and with an introduction by Charles W. Morris. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934: XXIX. 33 Umberto Eco. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976: 204. 34 Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigation. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958: 100.

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box, depends on the similar interpretation of the common signs to communicate the meaning hidden in the box. The reason why meaning can be shared is mainly on the shared system of signs by the social community, who adopt the same standard interpreting metalanguage. At the very least, this system can guarantee that I may feel and signify in the similar way with others within a given community. But what must be noticed is that this community is structured by shared meaning, not shared areas. The Jewish diaspora all over the world, for more than two thousand years, has constituted a “cultural community;” the same is true of the “Chinese culture” which brings together all the Chinese over the world; Karl Marx calls for the “unity of the world proletarians” because of their shared class consciousness. Lu Jiuyuan (or Lu Xiangshan, 1139– 1192, a Chinese neo-confucianist philosopher, and one of the main representatives of the School of the Spirit) had the confidence to proclaim that “the universe is my mind, and my mind is the universe” since he believed that the mind of the whole world are all alike: “The mind is one, mine, my friend’s mind, the mind of the saints and sages before and after us.” As he describes: “A saint emerges from the eastern sea, his mind remains unaltered, his reasoning is also unaltered; a saint emerges from the western sea, his mind remains unaltered, his reasoning is also unaltered; the saints emerge from the southern sea and the northern sea respectively, their minds and reasoning remain the same.” From which Qian Zhongshu’s idea would derive: “The mind from the western sea and the eastern sea are similar; the way and method of the southern and northern schools are not separated.”35 “The western sea and the eastern sea are far away, but the minds from which are similar; the study of the southern school and northern school seem to be different, but they are brought together by the universal rules.”36 Apparently, they both seem to refer to the universal commonality, but impose a strict framework on the notion of community for the sharing of meaning. Lu Jiuyuan limits his community to “saints and sages” while Qian Zhongshu limits his community to scholars who share the same “way and method.” In fact, without a definition of the community, one would risk universalizing the world of meaning. No one could easily extend the idea that “feeling and reasoning in the same way” to everyone, except for the very limited few of “human universals.” It is therefore easier to understand the plurality of worlds of meaning that we have mentioned earlier in this book. The plurality and complexity of the worlds are related to the shared meaning within the same cultural community: We recognize that the world of things, unknown or unknowable, is unique, but different cultural communities construct different worlds of meaning. Some of those worlds of meaning are far apart and share only a very small common part. When I say that the world of meaning should be understood as the communal world of meaning, it doesn’t mean that I deny each individual’s will and capacity to grasp meaning. Each individual’s consciousness has its own different meanings and it is undeniable that specific personal meanings largely exist. However, we exaggerate 35 36

Qian Zhongshu. Thesis on Art. Beijing: Joint Publishing Press, 2007: 5. Ibid.

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the importance of the personal meaning quite often, without noticing the individuals are the products of the social culture.

The plurality of worlds of meaning could be illustrated by the diagram above. The “bubbles” of the “worlds of meaning” represent the meaning worlds of various cultural communities. “Cultural conflicts” or “cultural wars” are often caused by the large gap between different worlds of meaning. Some communities, sharing a very small world of meaning, can only achieve “meaningful communication” by radical means such as conflicts. This diagram applies as much to James’ idea that each individual has his or her own world of meaning as to the Uexküllian idea that each species has a world of meaning. Only James’ personal worlds are too numerous and too heterogeneous while in the Uexküllian universes, the oval for human beings is too large to be proportionate to those of other species which are too small.

Chapter 2

The World of Things and the Practical World of Meaning: Recognition, Understanding, and Reforming to Achieve Effects

1 The Relationship Between the World of Things and the World of Meaning We haven’t had a clear understanding of the complex composition of the world yet. In spite of the rapid development of human knowledge about the world of things, the larger part of which, however, is still beyond our consciousness, neither perceptible, nor comprehensible to human beings. The human history is a progression of expanding human knowledge about the world of things. As is mentioned above, the trend to broaden our understanding of the world of things cannot be terminated, which, in reverse, justifies that the world of things has some specific part of its own unknown to human beings and independent of human consciousness. The part of world of things accessible to our consciousness is called “the practical world of meaning,” which includes the consciousness’s cognition of things, the accumulation of experiences, the knowledge’s process, and the use of things. Once human understanding comes into play, this part of the world remains no longer the world of things-in-themselves, but a humanized world, which is a compound world of signs and things, i.e. a dyad of sign-thing. All in the world of meaning slide between the two poles of sign and thing. The humanized world is no longer the world of things-in-themselves, but a world full of meanings, i.e. the world of signs. There is no alternative way for the acts of meaning, except for signs: no meaning can be expressed without signs; meanings can only be conveyed by the sign; there is no meaning without a sign, and no sign without meaning. Thus, the practical world of meaning is a mixture of signs and things. When the things are carrying meaning, they are semiotizated, from which we can thus grasp meaning; things beyond our consciousness constitute the world of things-in-themselves, which is imperceptible to men. The meaning world of men is constituted by signs while the world of things remains chaotic and meaningless. According to Ferdinand de Saussure, “Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and © Sichuan University Press Co., Ltd. 2022 Y. Zhao, Philosophical Semiotics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3057-7_2

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nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.”1 For Cassirer, “No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe.”2 Some other theorists even believe that the world outside of consciousness is also constructed by signs: Peirce believes that “the entire universe … even if not entirely composed of signs, is filled with signs.”3 Hoffmeyer describes cosmic history after the big bang as a history of signs.4 Indeed, these visions are only made in terms of the potentiality of human knowledge: the idea that the whole universe is semiotizated by human is raised on the basis of the observed traces after the big bang presented in the form of red shift and cosmic background radiation, etc. These “signs” have nevertheless become part of the practical world of meaning. The world of things-in-themselves is not only chaotic, but also an unknown world which can neither be semiotizated nor meaningnized. As I explained in the first chapter, the objects consciousness confronts include the physical thing, the life, the text, and the form of mind, which are all objects outside of consciousness. The world of meaning is therefore constituted by a total of “objectified” objects. For example, I take myself as an object when I check for my blood pressure or my IQ. A thing is transformed under the pressure of intentionality into an object of consciousness. The object is thus the thing meaningnized. The “reified” usually indicates that the sign completely disengages itself from consciousness, while the “objectified” refers to the meaningnization or semiotization of the thing. “Objectification” and “reification” are thus two opposite concepts.5 The object is largely differentiated from the thing: a thing, independent of human consciousness, might be comprehensible or unknowable by its nature—the “Heisenberg uncertainty principle” in quantum mechanics is one of the agnostic models. An object is the aspect of a thing that responds to the intentionality with meaning. The object is therefore the thing from which the consciousness acquires meaning, and it is thus considered as already “grasped” by the consciousness even if what the consciousness grasps is only part of the aspects of the thing contributing to meaning. Whether consciousness is able to grasp the “truth” of a thing is quite another matter. When a thing correlates to the consciousness that acquires meaning, it becomes an object. The cognized object can exist only in and through this relationship. For example, I only need to know part of the aspects of an apple to know what it is, while the overall qualities of the apple is far from being grasped; it would be inaccurate and even wrong to predict that “an earthquake will take place here,” but this 1

Ferdinand de Saussure. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959: 112. 2 Ernst Cassirer. An Essay on Man: an Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New York: Yale University Press, 1944: 43. 3 Charles Sanders Peirce. The Essential Peirce. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1992– 1998, vol. 2: 394. 4 Jesper Hoffmeyer. Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997. 5 About the dyad of “sign-thing” and reification, see Zhao Yiheng. Semiotics: Principles and Problems. Nanjing: Nanjing University Press (3rd Edition), 2015: 27.

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warning speaking of plate tectonics has become an observed object and is no longer a thing-in-itself.6 The “practical world of meaning” is only a part of, but the fundamental part of, the human world of meaning. The world of meaning is formed by the meaningnization of part of the world of things by consciousness. Practice plays a more important role in the human evolution and socialization. The Umwelt of organism mainly refers to the practical world of meaning, while man has a large part of non-practical world of mind. However, it must be admitted that the formation of human consciousness has developed in the practice of grasping the world. The practical world thus presents the source of meaningful acts: Men, like animals, must first live in the world of things. The coming into being of the practical world of meaning is promoted by three important meaning activities: recognition and distinction, understanding and evaluation, and reforming to achieve effects. The three kinds of activities are widely different in appearance, but they are all the products of the correlation between the human consciousness and the world. For example, the man in the Stone Age needed to know and name the stone, to understand and evaluate its hardness or luster before transforming it into a weapon or an instrument: once they knew the hardness and the luster of the obsidian, from which they could make axes, knives or exorcism stones, that is then the essential activity of human consciousness. Men will never be able to know fully the world of things by his own intelligence, even in the future: the whole cosmos, either the microcosmos or the macrocosmos, contains permanently an unknowable part, out of men’s reach. Quantum mechanics even advocates that certain aspects of the world are naturally not “comprehensible.” The part of “the practical world” that we have grasped is only the part we have grasped. For Uexküll, the knowledge about the Umwelt can “help the organism to survive.” While this “validity” cannot serve as a criterion for the “truth.” We should also question the standpoints which believe we’ve grasped the meaning of the world of things. Although men have long been striving for building a practical world of meaning, the Umwelt of human beings remains in reality quite small, but much larger than that of animals. The finiteness of human “Umwelt” stems from a paradox: our knowledge about our own consciousness is perhaps more limited; and our understanding about our minds develops far behind our self-righteous understanding of the practical world. The understanding about the mind-object relationship throughout all the histories of thought and science is, however, a new subject of study for us. If I hasten in this book to discuss the world of meaning, it is because I feel this force that pushes me to know “my mind.” Cassirer points out, “In the first mythological explanations of the universe we always find a primitive anthropology side by side with a primitive cosmology. The question of the origin of the world is inextricably interwoven with the question of the origin of man.”7 From Mencius who thinks that “all things under heaven are being 6

John Deely. The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics. South Bend: St. Augustin’s Press, 2003: 28. Ernst Cassirer. An Essay on Man: an Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New York: Yale University Press, 1944: 17.

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prepared for me,” Lu Jiuyuan’s “inventing the mind,” and Zhu Xi who claims that “nature as ideal pattern,” to Wang Yangming for whom “the mind is principle,” after more than two thousand years of reflection, the philosophers are approaching such an idea: the major target of the consciousness is not the object, but human consciousness itself, i.e. the part of the “world of mind” in the human world of meaning. Knowing oneself remains forever the ultimate goal of philosophy. Modern philosophy has undergone a great epistemological turn in which Kant played the key role. He analyzed human cognitive capacity in-depth through the critique of reason so as to accomplish the “Copernican revolution” of understanding the consciousness. Human nature was no longer a physical essence, but a structural function. In the process of knowledge generation, the subject, instead of passively accepting the world, takes a leading role. It is not nature that establishes laws for man, but man for nature. For Kant, the secret of consciousness is a transcendental consciousness of absolute self-evidence. The understanding of human consciousness thus becomes the central subject of the study of thought. The critical theories, whether phenomenology, semiotics, or psychoanalysis, of the early twentieth century were all established surrounding the construction of consciousness. Husserl points out: “The experiencing ego, the object, the human being in worldtime, the thing among things, etc., are not absolute givennesses, and therefore experience as this human being’s experience is not an absolute givenness either.”8 And further on: “Thus the question that initially drove us is also reduced: not how can I, this person, in my experiences, make contact with a being in itself, something that exists out there, outside of me… we have now a pure basic question: how can the pure phenomenon of knowledge make contact with something that is not immanent to it, how can the absolute self-givenness of knowledge make contact with something that is not self-given, and how is this contact to be understood.”9 That is to say, the main question of philosophy no longer resides neither in the mind nor in the object, but in the mind-object relationship that serves as a springboard thanks to which the world of the mind is transformed into a world of meaning. All species possess their Umwelt, but animals’ practical world of meaning is comparatively quite small, whose reforming to achieve effects is even much smaller, and whose world of mind only remains a few imperceptible traces. The correlation between the world of consciousness and the world of practice has thus become the central issue of the modern philosophy. Cassirer points out: “As compared with the other animals man lives not merely in a broader reality; he lives, so to speak, in a new dimension of reality. There is an unmistakable difference between organic reactions and human responses. In the first case a direct and immediate answer is given to an outward stimulus; in the second case the answer is delayed. It is interrupted and retarded by a slow and complicated process of thought.”10 According to Cassirer, 8

Edmund Husserl. The Idea of Phenomenology. Trans. and introduction by Lee Hardy. Dordrecht: Springer, 1999: 64. 9 Ibid. 10 Ernst Cassirer. An Essay on Man: an Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. Yale University Press, 1944: 43.

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animals only have “a direct and immediate reaction” when they confront things, which is the limit of the animal world of practice. The semiotic relationship between the consciousness and the world of things may go a step further than what Cassirer believes. Although all animals have the ability to engage in some activities of signs, men are the only animal species who has the capability to understand the formal way of conducting the sign activities. Man is not only Cassirers’ “symbolic animal,” but also the “semiotic animal” or the “metasymbolic animal,” because the man is the animal with semiotic consciousness, who is fully conscious of using signs to give meaning to the world, aware of the fact that he has consciousness, which is the important demarcation between man and other parts of the world.11

2 Recognition and Distinction Different things are all registered by cognitive activities, i.e. they are objects presented to consciousness in a certain way. The more sophisticated and complex devices we need to observe an object, the more it shows that the object needs to be “presented.” The recognition of the objects is essential to the world of meaning. However, it is not the object itself that presents to consciousness, but only part of its aspects. In other words, the object becomes the vehicle of the sign. For the first cognition, a sign and a thing cannot at all be differentiated. It will go, however, very differently when the repetition of the cognitive acts accumulate judgments and experiences. At the first step, that is the form of intuition, we are unable to distinguish between a thing and a sign if they are in the identical form, because the meanings conveyed by similar perceptions are identical. Husserl gave a famous example of this: at first glance, it is difficult to distinguish wax figures (sign) in the museum from real people (object). But the situation will be reversed once we realize this is an illusion. We will only become aware of it through further semiotic acts, examining it carefully—for example, by touching the real character or wax figure, or by observing the gestures. Ernst Hans Gombrich also cited a similar example to “distinguish a thing from a sign”: A flower sample used in a botany class is not a picture. An artificial flower used for demonstration purposes must be described as picture.12 What the botany teacher holds in his hand is an artificial flower (sign) while the “sample” is a real flower (thing). So what is the difference between an artificial flower (sign) and a real flower (thing) for students in botany class? Nothing is different except that the students realize that they are in different forms. In this case, the observers have already 11

John Deely. The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics. South Bend: St. Augustin’s Press, 2003: 124. 12 E. H. Gombrich. “The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication,” in The Essential Gombrich: Selected Writings on Art and Culture. Ed. Richard Woodfield. London: Phaidon Press Limited: 1996: 47.

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noticed that they are different objects to which different meanings are attributed by consciousness. The two objects will not have distinctive meanings if the interpreter does not distinct the artificial flower from the real flower. The world of meaning is represented by the consciousness through signs. The problem of meaning cannot be perfectly solved by positivist science. We agree on that “Consciousness exists, but whether meaning exists is controversial. We can imagine respectable answers to the first two questions emerging from the mind sciences and evolutionary biology, respectively. The question of meaning, if it has a good answer, seems to require more resources than these sciences. In fact, many will say that the mind sciences and evolutionary biology are part of the problem, not part of the solution to the problem of meaning.”13 Science is able to observe the details of the cognitive process but is unable to give answer to how consciousness produces meaning, since the very question of science as an object-mind relationship is what exactly we are probing into. Li Guangchang has given quite an accurate description: “Man’s production and inquiry of meaning develops a philosophical landscape called the ‘world of meaning.’”14 Semiotics, revealing the unity of the development of semiotic acts of the human recognition, consists in principle of two aspects of knowledge, practice and consensus, though it is more consensus oriented of its nature, or we could also call it more philosophical. Semiotics is “prior to the very distinction between practical and speculative knowledge.”15 Semiotics as a “postmodern development” includes both practical knowledge and speculative knowledge. Yang Guorong has also studied well the composition of things and consciousness in the “world of meaning,” but he highlights the founding role of the world of things.16 I regard, however, that the mind and the world of things play a common role in the world of meaning. The world of things exists absolutely, regardless of any circumstances, without the intention of serving the purpose for man to acquire meaning. With regard to the acts of meaning—especially the projecting, concepts, imagination, and fantasy of the world of mind, which we are going to talk about in the following two chapters, we have to concern about the common founding roles of things and consciousness to the world of meaning, when the acts of meaning sets the world of things aside. What should be noticed and clear is that we are talking about consciousness’s founding role in the world of meaning, i.e. in man’s Umwelt, not in the world. Yang Guorong criticizes Husserl’s phenomenology: “From a certain point of view, phenomenology has already taken into account the correlation between presentation and the attribution of meaning in intentional activities. In general, phenomenology 13

Owen Flanagan. The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in the Materialist World. Cambridge, MASS: MIT Press, 2007: xii. 14 Li Guangchang. “The Teleological Explanation of ‘Sinnenwelt’ by Kant.” Zhejiang Academic Journal 06 (2006): 32. 15 John Deely. The Impact on Philosophy of Semiotics. South Bend: St. Augustin’s Press, 2003: 101. 16 Yang Guorong. “On the World of Meaning.” Social Sciences in China 4 (2009): 15–16.

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places more emphasis on the attribution of meaning without giving full attention to the presentation of things. In this respect, it is obviously difficult to say that it has really been able to grasp the interaction and integration of these two in the construction of meaning.”17 By this he means that Husserl did not pay sufficient attention to the material dimension of meaning, on which I agree with him though, I advocate that meaning comes from the interaction between consciousness and the world. Wang Yangming proposed a more “consciousness-oriented theory” than Husserl. According to Wang Yangming: “There is no thing outside the mind, there is no event outside the mind, there is no principle outside the mind, there is no justice outside the mind, there is no goodness outside the mind.”18 He goes on to say: “It could be wrong to seek the principle of the saints in external things, but in the inner mind.”19 Mind, both as the cognitive subject and the noumenon of the universe, is therefore for him the basis of the world of meaning, the reason for which is quite clear: “Heaven, earth, demons and gods, all these things would not exist in the world without my mind…. When a dead man’s spirit has disappeared, where is his heaven, his earth, his demons and his gods?”20 With this statement, he undoubtedly overlooks the complex relationship between consciousness and the world of things. The “heaven, earth, demons and gods” envisioned by our ancestors are different from the world of things we perceive hundreds of years later, which undergoes a great change. The way the meaning conveyed by culture is transmitted and evolved from generation to generation. The world of meaning is necessarily experienced and socialized, in essence, reflecting the historicity of the human world of meaning. The coming into being of the world of meaning outside the world of thingsin-themselves is originated from both mind and things, which is not idealism or solipsism, because there is no meaning without things. David Hume, who is the first to propose the discipline of “semiotics,” advocates strongly the examination of the human capacity of comprehension instead of being obsessed with the ultimate questions.21 Russell takes quite a similar position, who believes that my conviction is that the distinction between moral and material substances lies not in the intrinsic nature, but in the way we acquire knowledge of them.22 When we focus on the question of the acquisition of meaning, we are faced with the question of epistemology, which itself includes within it the ontological question. Semiotics is by nature the study of meaning, and semiotic philosophy is by nature epistemology. We believe that we only know the overlapping part of the worlds of things and consciousness, i.e. the world of practice. Since there will eternally exist a large dark and gloomy part in 17

Ibid.: 21–22. Wang Yangming. Instructions for Practical Living. Commented by Deng Aimin. Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 2012: 342. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature. Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2011: 47. 22 Bertrand Russell. Wisdom of the West: a Historical Survey of Western Philosophy in Its Social and Political Setting. London: Crescent, 1959: 254. 18

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the world of things, the world of meaning is obliged to take consciousness as its foundation in order to reach the world of things. Believing that the world of things can independently lay a foundation for the world of meaning is in effect exaggerating the role of things in the acts of meaning so as to seriously reduce the world of things. The first step of the practice of meaning is recognition: human consciousness recognizes things from their essential nature to their relatively complex physicchemical composition. We can call them the “presentation of things confronted by consciousness.” It is obvious that the perceptible light spots in the dark sky become in our consciousness a sky sparkling with stars. The meaning of the things can only be given under the intentional pressure of consciousness, even if the presentation of the thing needs a complex apparatus or modification of its normal conditions to present its quality. The being is partially recognized on the essential condition that the consciousness needs to acquire meaning. The thing gives meaning to the intentionality of consciousness in the formal intuition, which serves as the starting point of the self-clarification of meaning. The object’s givenness of meaning results from the interactions between consciousness and object. In this framework, the thing is no longer a thing, but the object of consciousness. While men will be not content with recognizing the first phase of this formal intuition. The superimposition and deepening of cognition leads to the understanding and evaluation of things and further to reforming to achieve effects. Even the meaning of the universe and the starry sky depend on human consciousness and the way of understanding of the cultural communities from ancient to present, from the division of constellations to the cosmophysics.

3 Understanding, Evaluation, and Reforming to Achieve Effects Since a thing is presented as an object only under the projection of the intentionality of consciousness, the recognition of a thing does not therefore refer to “the rules at the factual level.” Meaning depends not only on the instruments with which we observe, but also on what kind of meaning the consciousness needs. It depends on whether we need to know that the appearance of a “nova or comet” on a particular day in the astral houses announces a political upheaval at court, or we need to know that how many light years away from us that a star will form a “black hole.” Recognition forms the basis of the practical world of meaning. Men’s recognition and naming of a thing imply his understanding and description of the nature of the thing, which serves as the starting point of the meaningnization in the world of practice. Peng Jia points out that “The Han people, having been engaged in agricultural activities for thousands of years, invented the twenty-four periods of the solar year marking the various changes in climate. Ethnic Groups living for long periods on a plateau or in a coastal region also have different signifiers to the divisions of the solar terms and the calendar according to their customs. For example, the Dawu

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people in Taiwan have a Flying-Fish season in their calendar, while we can find the seasons of the cuckoo, hoopoe, teal in Tibetan calendar.”23 The understanding of the world of things cannot be possible to originate from things only, and the seemingly abstract objects, like interpersonal relationship, should be taken into consideration in the world of practice. Zhao Xingzhi points out that “In essence, the exchange of the gift is a practice of signification. The gift is a sign vehicle with which the donor transmits to the donee ‘the sense of relationship’.”24 The meaningful practices are not the purely practical activities independent of human mind, because there is no such pure practice. All practices carry meaning. Things recognized are, in most cases, a “sign-thing dyad,” and they have both the function of use and of carrying meaning, which depend on the interpretive intentionality of the receivers who perceive things. A pair of chopsticks can fulfill the practical function of taking food; it can also be a sign representing the “Chinese style, Chinese customs, or even Chinese characteristics.” It is the interpretation of the receiver that decides whether the dyad of the chopsticks leans to the thing, or the sign. A foreigner could probably, when taking a pair of chopsticks, appreciate its cultural meaning in China, while a Chinese would pay more attention to its practical meaning, as a utensil for taking food. If chopsticks are displayed in a folklore museum or in the window of a handicrafts store, they represent a cultural and aesthetic meaning. Tang Xiaolin thus indicates that “the sign as a medium is a mode of action, and communication is performative.”25 Human practices are always acts of meaning. Understanding and evaluation lead further to reforming to achieve effects, which is usually regarded not as acts of meaning but acts of practical work. Indeed, human work is by nature an act of meaning that is often difficult to distinguish from understanding and evaluation. As the objective of understanding is to reform to achieve effects, we discuss them together in the same chapter. These two stages all fall within the category of teleology or axiology of achieving effects, not the category of epistemology. What the object means to me depends on what function I recognize it has for me, all of which respond to my purpose of making the object present some meaning of practice through certain efforts. “Meaning” in understanding and achieving effects are all a kind of “meaning as purpose.”26 A life that we consider as “meaningless life” roughly means that this life is with no purpose or value both for the individual and the community. Man not only has a theoretical interest in the world, but also an eminently practical interest in dominating the meaning of the world. According to Alfred Shutz, everyday “working world” occupies the most important place among the various meaning partitions in which man exists as a supreme being, endowed with a penetrating and 23

Peng Jia. “How Nature(s) are Built: Proposal of an Ecosemiotic Model.” Philosophy and Culture 8 (2015): 153. 24 Zhao Xingzhi. “A General Classification of Gifts: A Semiotic Analysis.” Signs and Media 8 (2014): 96. 25 Tang Xiaolin. “On Signs and Their Medium.” Signs and Media 11 (2015): 141. 26 Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt. A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006: 8.

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mature mind, whose consciousness is full of tension: “The world of everyday life is the scene and also the object of our actions and interactions. Our bodily kinaesthetic, locomotive, and operative movements gear into the world, modifying or changing its objects and their mutual relationships. On the other hand, these objects offer resistance to our acts which we have either to overcome or to which we have to yield. We have to dominate it and we have to change it in order to realize the purposes which we pursue within it among our fellow-men.”27 Certainly, purpose and value in achieving effects represent the most important meaning of human practices and constitute the ultimate level of the relationship between men and things. What differs from recognition, however, is that Men’s evaluation of meaning dominates its production. “Meaning” here does not refer to the intentionality of men to obtain meaning from things, but to change things to correspond to the value of the consciousness. Each community has its own standard of value: the office life described in Tiny Times28 has a certain “meaning” for the white-collar petty bourgeoisie; the adventures on the road told in The Continent 29 represents different meaning for intellectuals in pursuit of personality. Though both groups of fans despise the “meaning” of the other, it cannot be denied that these ways of life are all the practices of meaning for the interests of cultural communities. Teleology, although not natural law, permeates human practices. The ultimate meaning of an individual is the consciousness of ideal as well as the obligation and responsibility toward the community. “Taking the world as one’s duty” could form one’s ideal personality and make one admirable, as Zhang Zai proposed that “to ordain conscience for Heaven and Earth, to secure life and fortune for the people, to continue lost teachings for past sages, to establish peace for all future generations.”30 But it is too demanding to impose this criterion on man, which undoubtedly overestimates his own will and capacity. The criteria for reforming to achieve effects should be more than making it completely conform to the established social project.

4 The Transformation of the World in Practice Since achieving effects in practices plays a very important role, the world of meaning is not an absolute subjective landscape fabricated by consciousness. Even though meaning received by mind is partially individual oriented, fulfills some personal needs. While men’s reforming to achieve effects is proved to represent a part of truth since meaning is shared in community practices. For example, Ptolemy’s geocentric 27

Alfred Schutz. Collected Papers Vol.I: The Problem of Social Reality. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982: 209. 28 Tiny Times is a novel adapted to the cinema that tells the stories of four young Chinese women in the city of Shanghai—N.D.T. 29 The Continent is a film about young Chinese intellectuals living on an island and later venturing out onto a mysterious continent—N. D. T. 30 Zhang Zai. The Collected Works of Zhang Zai. Beijing: Zhong Hua Book Company, 1978: 376.

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theory shared by the community in ancient times, was a truth in the practical need of the ancient calendar; when there were many errors and modifications in the ancient calendar based on the geocentric theory, it was replaced by Copernicus’ heliocentric theory to represent truth, which for similar reasons, responded to the practical need of the social community. Consciousness is one of the components of the world, the critical view on which should be therefore the point of departure of the meaning theory. Critical analysis of the composition of the world of meaning often starts of necessity with the critical recognition of consciousness. From Freud’s psychoanalysis, we see that human consciousness is in reality splitted and driven by desire, which cannot act on his own. For Husserl, Descartes approached phenomenology, although he unfortunately did not further suspend the substantiality of “cogito” and analyze it properly. In turn, Husserl’s view on subject (transcendental subjectivity) was criticized by Derrida, who substituted the absence of the subject for Husserl’s subjective intentionality, and replaced the integral homogeneity of consciousness in phenomenology with difference. The same applies to the collective consciousness in a cultural community. Having examined the influence of Confucian Ritual theory on Chinese society, Zhu Dong points out the following universal law: “Man’s social activities are indeed a process in which he constantly invents and defines meaning and is in turn regulated by meaning.”31 Some may argue that man is not the only one capable of objectifying and meaningnizating part of the world of things, but as Uexküll’s Umwelt theory suggests, all living beings possess a similar capacity. Animals and even plants are able to take another animal or plant as an object of recognition and distinction (whether it is edible), and understanding and evaluation (if it can be hunted, and to use it and achieve effects). These criteria adopted by animals relate to the instinctive meaning ability of the species. But the practical world of animal meaning, compared to that of humans, is not only much smaller but also lacks the capacity to modify the way meaning understood according to the context. This is why certain animals or plants, when suffered from the severe climate changes, like in the Ice Age, were extinct, while the human species demonstrated its capacity to modify his practices by making clothing with fur, cooking food with fire, transporting things with logs, even planting plants, and domesticating animals to reform nature. As mentioned above, “consciousness” in this book refers to the consciousness of the social community, not personalized consciousness. Though Mencius said that “all things under heaven are being prepared for me,” “I” cannot claim to be the master or creator of the world, and nothing can make me happier than reflecting on myself to see clearly the limit role “I” play in the world. The idea that “Dao that can be described is not universal and eternal Dao” stated in The Book of Dao and Teh indicates that human recognition and representation will inevitably distort the truth, which is the essential reason why human world of meaning has its limits. In this case, we must remain cautious of the ability of consciousness, which is not to deny the 31

Zhu Dong. “Ritual, Politics and Ethics: A Critical Review of Confucian Ethical Semiotics.” Signs and Media 9 (2014): 80.

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primordial role of consciousness in the construction of the world of meaning, but to remind us that this role has not yet reached the absolute Cartesian level. Having apprehended the skepticism about reason from philosophers like Hume, Kant proposed a theory of “transcendental category” according to which the categories of experience are the result of the inner subjective logic, not the result of the inherent logic of the objective world, which thus become a general effect that transcends the particularity of things. Whenever the object is referred, it implies the existence of an initiative. Objectifying is always an initiative act for self. Husserl has described this precisely: “From the very first, everything which affects us in the background is already present to consciousness in an ‘objective apprehension’, and in an anticipatory way we are conscious of it as such… are grasped as possible substrates of cognitive activities… unfamiliarity is at the same time always a mode of familiarity.”32 Thus, in order to know the potentiality of the practical world, we must take effective action in it and what we should know first is “the pregiven,” that is aware of the construction of consciousness itself. Due to the common founding roles of the consciousness and the world of things to the world of meaning, the essential characteristics of the world of things are transformed into new qualities in the world of meaning. The uniqueness of the world of things is transformed by different consciousnesses into the plurality of the world of meaning. The consciousness transforms part of the aspects of things, which are by nature beyond apprehension, into signs to acquire meaning. The modeling of signs to the world of meaning makes the Umwelt apprehensible. The unlimitedness of details of the things is reduced to the limitedness of the world of meaning because of the limited capacities of consciousness. These three transformations make the world of practice meaningnized by human fundamentally different from the world of things-in-themselves. Even though the personal consciousness integrates with the communal world to form a world of meaning shared by the cultural community, this community is still constructed by consciousness. Thus I emphasize more than once in this book that either the individual subject or the communal subject should be modest enough to realize the limitedness of the conscious-centered ideas. The human mind is not the master of all things, nor is the world of meaning the only absolute world, even with regard to the mind capacity of a social community or a sociality rich in meaning. Impossible to penetrate the entire world of things-in-themselves, consciousness remains limited in its capacity to construct meaning, which is in this respect a matter of degree to men and animals.

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Edmund Husserl. Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973: 37.

Chapter 3

The World of Mind: Category and Planning

1 The World of Meaning and Fantasy As discussed previously, meaning is the correlation between consciousness and the object, and a thing becomes the object of meaning only under an intentional pressure of consciousness. Tough meaning is given by objects, consciousness serves as the point of departure of the acts of meaning. Moreover, the mind, while keeping a certain distance from the world of things, can pursue acts of meaning independently. In this respect, consciousness still confronts the object, but the object is then the object “in meaning,” not the things meaningnized in the world of practice, that is, the object is created by consciousness. This part of the world of meaning is clearly dominated by consciousness. Despite the world of things still plays a co-foundational role, it is suspended and put at a certain distance by consciousness. The creativity of consciousness is multi-dimensional and multi-category. Men’s practices of meaning, including recognition, understanding, achieving effects, are transparent, with respect to the object, and clearly have referents; the world of mind, however, can be either opaque or semi-transparent: the parts of fantasy and arts confront objects non-transparently, without referring to the world of things; the parts of category and planning are semi-transparent. The acts of meaning in mind do not refer completely to objects, but create objects instead. Hume points out: “All inferences from experience are the result of habit, not of reason.” Although meaning is produced by the relation between consciousness and the various objects in the world, it is primarily a connection in one’s own perception. Indeed, it would be difficult to justify or identify whether this “perception of meaning” refers to a real connection between mind and things, namely the truth, unless sufficient inter-textual study is added. Moreover, only a minor part of the knowledge stored in our mind is commonly recognized as “scientifically confirmed.” It is therefore necessary to solve the general problem of the mode of the acts of meaning before we further examine this particular problem of whether the meaning is true or false.

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It must be added that all the representations of the signs are only the incomplete “abbreviated formula” of the objects, because consciousness needs only part of the aspects of the objects to acquire meaning. The representation of the sign leaves a great gap that imagination must come to fill. Husserl emphasizes that the world is more “intersubjective” than objective: “Those who hold to a relational account of intentionality must, of course, be in a position to account for the fact that we can think about, or imagine, non-existent objects… that exist inside the mind and serve as the proper objects of those thoughts and imaginations of things.”1 Indeed, we do not need quite many formal materials to acquire meaning since consciousness and experience have a strong capacity of complementing. The ways in which mind constructs the world of meaning could be divided into the following steps, which, although not precise, corresponds to the idea of this book. According to some researchers, three categories have been identified in the meaning of human practices: narrative understanding depending on imagination, which is the nominative description that organizes the compositions with all the details; understanding depending on organization, which is exposed by the texts and represented by the intermediaries; philosophical understanding depending on logic, which is systematized, synthesized, and quantified so that a larger whole is constructed.2 This rough classification mixes up different dimensions of mind: description and representation are the practical dimension while “the systematization, generalization, and quantification to construct a larger whole” would be a mode of action in consciousness. I propose in this book that, based on the distance between the world of mind and the world of practice, the acts of mind can be divided into two parts: that of fantasy and that of planning. Before dealing with the fantasy part, I will first distinguish the part of planning in two dimensions: metaphysical reflection (category, true value, value, ethics) evaluates all acts of meaning in the world of practice; planning (design, invention, science, and technology) which influences the reforming to achieve effects in the world of practice.

1

Edmund Husserl. The Idea of Phenomenology. Trans. and introduction by Lee Hardy. Dordrecht: Springer, 1999: 10. 2 K. Egan. The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997: 4–6.

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2 Category In the world of meaning, the imagination of mind plays an important role in postulating category before recognition. Men’s cognitive practices on the objects always go after their categorization. This is a key subject in philosophical history. From the Platonic theory of idea, through Kant’s transcendental rationalism, to Husserl’s eidetic intuition, all are avatars of this key subject. According to Saussure, the signifier of a sign refers not to a specific entity, but to a social and collective concept. Peirce highlights the types of the meaning of signs: “Every picture (however conventional its method) is essentially a representation of that kind.”3 For Eco, the sign “is the relationship of implication between two propositions.”4 He further explains that “the semiotic relationship is, therefore, a law correlating a type-antecedent to a type-consequent… The relationship exists between types rather than between tokens. In other words, the interpreter of certain semiotic situations makes them occur as relations between tokens owing to the fact that he knows (while the barbarian does not) that -first of all-the same relation holds between types.”5 Some certain thing is only a particular case of some certain category. The idea that explanation is a category comes from Platonic idea theory; Eco’s central idea is the proposition that “the vehicle of the sign is also a category”: the thing here and now is both an “individual” and a model of archetypal identity. In recent years, some semioticians have still advocated that meaning is necessarily a category: “A verbal icon, in the same way as a visual icon, must have as its aim the depiction of prototypes, or archetypes of things; this is what both verbal icon and visual icons aspire to achieve. Thus, both the verbal and the visual icon demand the presence of a prototype, or an archetype,” so that “a verbal icon is equivalent to a visual icon in this respect.”6 The majority of these theorists believe that the essence of category is not directly presented as category. The subject of mind is, however, a priori. The mind’s ability of categorization can categorize all meanings. Some scholars are convinced that the concept of “imitation” itself imitates the typological category. Is it necessary for the interpretation of meaning to be reduced to category? I raised in Semiotics: Principles and Problems an idea distinguished from Western theories. I don’t think we can consider different matters as the same. It is only when a child reaches a certain age that he or she can recognize the woman in the picture as his or her mother, instead of seeing a mere “woman.”7 What I am talking about in this 3

Charles Sanders Peirce. Collected Papers. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958, Vol. 2: 279. 4 Umberto Eco. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984: 215. 5 Ibid. 6 Valerii Lepakhim. “Basic Types of Correlation Between Text and Icon, Between Verbal and Visual Icons.” Literature and Theology March (2006): 20. 7 Zhao Yiheng. Semiotics: Principles and Problems (3rd Edition). Nanking: Nanking University Press, 2015: 117.

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book is the point of departure of recognition, not the terminal point of interpretation. Despite the particularity of the result of recognition, a categorized prescience seems necessary in the pre-understanding structure of recognition. The functions of category are more than the specific steps of interpreting meaning. Many scholars believe that all rules, including the world’s operation law or ethical value, come from the a priori part of consciousness. Either for the philosophy of heart-mind advocated by Lu Jiuyuan and Wang Yangming or for the philosophy of Neo-Confucianism advocated by Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi, and Zhu Xi, they just have focused on different aspects of the same subject. Wang Yangming says that “my own nature is enough to know the way of the saints, it is futile to seek principles from things.”8 From this statement we can understand that what Wang Yangming emphasizes is that category does not exist in things but a priori in the mind. Zhu Xi highlights the notion of category’s extension to the practical world. He advocates: “Principle in man’s mind is called human nature… nature is principle. It is called Xing (nature) with regard to the mind, Li (principle) with regard to the thing.”9 Thus, the principle of a thing comes from the nature (Xing) of human mind. “Therefore, the principle should not be separated from the mind.” “The mind has two aspects: nature and emotion. Before acting, it keeps its natural aspect, and after acting, it manifests its emotional aspect. How to define the mind? It is undoubtedly the mind which dominates the emotional expression, and nature being the principle. Although nature is present, it is always the mind that dominates emotional expression.”10 He further analyzes the transcendence of the moral concept: “Benevolence (Ren) is something that is imposed on me by Heaven, which is why I am obliged to apply it.” Morality is put in my mind by Heaven, according to which I can evaluate the acts of meaning in the world of practice. The principle of the world of practice should conform to the nature “imposed on me by Heaven.” Kant holds the same idea on morality when he insists on “autonomy” as the basis for the “heteronomy.” Any individual’s benevolence is the presentation of the idea of pure benevolence, thus “The maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle of a universal legislation.”11 It is human nature to aspire for transcendence, which makes man abstract different things metaphysically to attribute intrinsic and unified nature to them, i.e. man’s pursuit of going beyond the intuition to the concept and category. This is why scientific recognition is by nature a priori grasping. Science imposes a mathematical and logical way of grasping meaning, which in fact requires that we can control the creation of meaning through repetitive experiments. It is not decided by science itself, but by man’s demand for “scientific” meaning, representing the way of thinking that

8 Wang Yangming. Instructions for Practical Living. Commented by Deng Aimin. Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 2012: 342. 9 Zhu Zi Yulu, vol. 5. 10 Zhu Zi Yulu, vol. 4. 11 Emmanuel Kant. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002: 45.

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has emerged in modern times. Category and concept are semi-transparent to the practical world of meaning because the category is only “suitable” when it is effective in practice. When there are no certain series of signs, there are no such series of concepts and practices. For example, for Chinese scholars in narratology, Western debates, such as whether a narrative should adopt past tense, or whether a drama is a narrative, appear overly dogmatic. The commonly used word “symbol” can be accurately translated into “fuhao” (sign) or “xiangzheng” (symbol) given certain context; the westerners, however, do not distinguish one from the other, and many semioticians thus mix up the basic meanings of sign and symbol. It is rather ironic that semiotics obscures the essential distinction (the sign is different from the symbol) because of the influence of the erroneous semiotic terminology. It must be said that the “symbol” (xiangzheng) and the “sign” (fuhao) would always be clearly distinguished in Chinese without the translation of the western terminology. Having been influenced by the chaotic use of the two words, the Chinese scholars mix them up in their books. In a recently published academic book, the author explains that the word “symbol” is often translated into fuhao when it is applied in the logical, linguistic, semiotic or psychological domains; into xiangzheng when it is applied in the artistic or religious domains.12 It seems to mean that “symbol” exists only in art and religion, while “sign” in other fields. The more we work on this question, the more we confuse it. Such “communication between China and the West” is truly a shame.

3 Planning and the Crossing in the World of Meaning Planning, a more important part in the world of mind, designs a plan of reforming to achieve effects so that it directly guides the practical world of meaning. This part of the world of mind is closest to the practical world, which has in fact gone beyond the boundary into the practical world of meaning. One could thus say that panning serves as joint part for the two major parts of the world of meaning. Marx described graphically in Das Kapital the key difference between man and animal in terms of acts of meaning: man has plans in his consciousness before acting, “We presuppose labor in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic… What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, and already existed ideally.”13 What Marx clearly points out above is 12

He Changsheng. Symbol: Sign and Metaphor. Nanjing University Press, 2007, p. 5. The author states on the same page of the book that “in the Western context, the ‘symbol’ tends to indicate the image of the object of rational thoughts, but when this ‘image’ is increasingly divorced from its concrete form and is replaced by a single ‘linguistic sign’, the ‘symbol’ becomes a purely linguistic phenomenon.” This explanation seems even more confusing. 13 Karl Marx. Capital (vol. 1). Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990: 283–284.

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that the “imagination” of mind makes plans for practices, which is a very important characteristic of human acts of meaning. The plans, conceived beforehand in mind, allows the meaning of the sign to go before the practical acts on the world of things. Indeed, the signs of the planning do not necessarily go after the objects to represent them, but to create them. In practical cognitive activities, the object in principle exists before recognition, for example, the moon rises in the sky first and the observers can subsequently recognize it and interpret it in different ways, from mythology to astronomy, or even reforms it, like planning to make it an aeronautical relay base. However, not all human activities follow this way, and in many acts of meaning, it is the sign that creates the object and not the other way around. When the object produces the sign, we call it meaning acts of “object preceding sign,” and we call it meaning acts of “sign preceding object” the other way around. Any sign means to represent absent meanings.14 When I talk about whether the object or the sign precedes, I mean the sign can not only create meaning, but also model the object. Both “dragon” and “snake” trigger the interpretation of meaning. The object of the sign “snake” refers to a living being that pre-exists, while the sign “dragon” creates an object that is modeled by the interpretation. Thus in the world of mind, it is more often than not that signs create their object: the mind generates the sign and its meaning according to which practice produces the object. The two acts of meaning, “object that precedes” and “sign that precedes,” situate across the world of mind and the world of practice in opposite directions. Art and dreaming (or illusion), both of which are part of the world of mind, can absolutely not be considered as the planning for practical acts of meaning, except for some certain particular cases where someone, such as a military strategist, “resemiotizated” the dream as an extraordinary phenomenon, and the strategist has conceived of it as a political or military will from heaven. The textual intention of fantasy and art tends not to go cross the boundary into the world of practical world of meaning because they are “purposeless” acts of meaning. This is different for the planning whose goal is to enter the world of practice and make cross-world creation. In other words, the planning aims to create “the meaning of cross-world that signs precede objects.” Thomas Aquinas states that speculative knowledge extends and changes into practices, which refers to the planning ability of speculation. Mind and practice, though as two different parts of the world of meaning, are within the domain of human consciousness. Their distinction can never be completely erased, but they can communicate with each other through category and planning: on the one hand, practical experience turns into materials for acts of mind, or provide “metaphorical” contents for fantasy, arts, and games; on the other hand, the mind’s acts of categorizing and planning directs the acts of meaning in practice. The interaction allows both parts of the world of meaning to maintain independent from and associative with each other. The greatest distinction between the world of meaning of mind and practice lies in the different statuses of the object of meaning: the object is always present in the 14

Zhao Yiheng. Semiotics: Principles and Problems (3rd Edition). Nanking: Nanking University Press, 2015: 45.

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practical acts of meaning, because the aspect of the object becomes a sign carrying meaning. For example, Mars is the closest planet to Earth. Thanks to its beautiful red color, it is nicknamed “yinghuo” (luminous seductress) and therefore becomes an object to which special attention is paid. Mars has long been there naturally and objectively since ancient times. Man, however, knows very little about it today. It is quite natural that Mars becomes a privileged object of human cognition and practice: one explores, with all possible and imaginable means, the geomorphic characters of Mars to know whether there are living beings there; the development of Mars as a human habitat thus becomes an object of the planning whose realization will depend on future practice. The goal of this project is in such adequacy with the practice that one day humans will migrate there, which is man’s great plan to “build another Earth on Mars” (Terraform). Mars is quite often the object of fantasy, such as in different fiction about Mars, where many stories of colonization of the Earth by Mars or human attacks against Mars take place. In the artistic imagination, Mars serves only as a metaphorical content. It metaphorically alludes to Mars, without necessarily requiring Mars to be a specific object. Art creates rich meanings on the fictionalization of the object in different degrees. The Mars in artistic imagination and the Mars in the planning for practice, though both as objects, have nothing in common. The planning, in which consciousness plays an important role, is thus one of the most critical questions that most philosophers in phenomenology concern. Heidegger, who considers meaning as the product of the project from the outset (Entwurt was often translated into “designing” or “project” in English), emphasizes that the question of meaning is the question of project. Meaning “is the upon which of the project in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something.”15 Projecting serves as the point of departure for meaning. “Understanding in itself has the existential structure which we call project… The project character of understanding constitutes being-in-the world.”16 He even advocates that human understanding and interpretation are not toward things, but toward “possibilities” expected from our projects, because “interpretation is existentially based in understanding… Interpretation is not the acknowledgment of what has been understood, but rather the development of possibilities projected in understanding.”17 Gadamer further clarifies the function of the project: “Working out appropriate projections, anticipatory in nature, to be confirmed ‘by the things’ themselves, is the constant task of understanding. The only ‘objectivity’ here is the confirmation of a fore-meaning in its being worked out.”18 Projecting is the pre-evaluation of cognition or achieving effects in practices.

15

Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York, 1996: 142. 16 Ibid.: 136. 17 Ibid.: 139. 18 Hans-Georg Gadamer. Truth and Method. Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004: 280.

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The project is one of the concrete types of meaning activities. For Heidegger, the “mathematical project,” marking the metaphysical nature of modern science, distinguishes modern science from ancient science. He points out that it was Galileo and Newton who mathematized science and who “made pure reason the starting point and the tribunal of metaphysics, the tribunal that defines an ontology of Dasein and existence, the materiality of being-substance.”19 He deplores that the “mathematical project” of modern science is too mechanical and eliminates the intelligence of science. In fact, the mathematical project always goes before the scientific experiments when modern science discovers new planets and particles, the orbit of comets, and pre-evaluates their structural stability. But the project of the sign does not necessarily work to the benefit of human acts of meaning. If man replaces God, it will be partially due to the reason that science could explain the universality of the living beings, which was originally explained in God’s concepts. Before modern times, the human world of meaning modeled on the characters of God was replaced by the all-powerful categorical modeling of science. All formulas, digitized, or experimented, that could not be scientifically proven were considered inadequate to the standards of the “true value” of meaning. From positivism to pan-scientism, exaggerating the capacity of scientific modeling has increasingly impoverished the intelligent human world. Basically, both categorization and projecting are “productive,” and capable of completing episodic perceptions and experiences, perceptual residues. They synthesize part of present perceptions into object, or even directly create things even in their absence, for example some synthetic elements. As Kant points out: “We therefore have a pure imagination, as a fundamental faculty of the human soul, that grounds all cognition a priori.”20 Perceptions and experiences must be necessarily combed and ordered by the transcendental function of the imagination of mind so as to transform things into objects of meaning. The synthesizing ability of mind necessarily precedes all perceptions and practices. Recognition is produced only after the synthesis of perceptions through the imagination of mind. The synthesis of consciousness thus becomes the source of knowledge which is transformed into reality through mind. Human life, no matter how mediocre, is necessarily part of the world of meaning and is established on the basis of categorization and project. It is through mind that men can integrate and harmonize the world with complexity and contradictory, and put in order the understanding and project to the world based on the chaotic sensory information. Depending on the project, men can find solutions and organize a series of decisions into options with the same goal. This kind of project, even if it is a precisely mathematical project, needs to be validated by the practice of cognition: “Thinking, we too often forget, is an art, that is to say a game of precision and imprecision, of vagueness and rigor.”21 The most regulated life of men is to organize

19

Sun Zhouxing. Collected Papers of Heidegger. Shanghai: Sanlian Bookstore, 1996: 870. Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998: 241. 21 Edgar Morin. Le Paradigme perdu: la nature humaine. Paris, Le Seuil, coll. “Points,” 1973: 104. 20

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through projecting, the disordered perception and the vague experience to make it a practicable project meaning. One of the main characteristics of the project is to pre-evaluate the risk, and estimate the possibility of achieving effects with “formal means”: the consciousness in the project widens as much as possible the domains of the possibility without strictly adhering to the necessity of the details. This question, seemingly abstract, is in fact quite concrete: If I plan to take the plane tomorrow morning, I could generally list the possible factors, like the weather, the difficulty of finding a cab, or the busy airport, but I cannot transform all the possibilities into the form of project unless I go to spend the night at the airport to avoid any incidents. It is therefore acceptable to take into account some errors in projecting in the process from pre-evaluation to the achievement of effects, since taking all precautions is not feasible. The same applies to other projects of cognition and reformation, for example which book to choose to solve a problem; or how to conduct some experiment to justify a theory. The risk of miscalculations will increase without deliberate planning given different circumstances, for example, a lack of precision in organization, too much risk-taking such as Zhuge Liang’s historical “empty city ploy”—a ploy consisting of giving a misleading appearance—or the choice of a movement that is too complicated to perform in a gymnastics competition. “A bluff to the cards” gives a dramatic tension in practice. Everybody’s daily life requires at all times a project of mind, because everything in life needs to be regulated and projected by social meaning. The personal factors of experience must be combined with the common experience of a cultural community when one has a project. Hoping to have the practice develop in the formula we are familiar with, we tend to follow the rules to do things so that the uncertainty of individual project can be reduced. The most reassuring formula for projects is generally the one that conforms to the standard defined by the community. For example, for one’s own education or that of one’s children, it is too complicated to project what to study and how to study it, so people prefer to follow the educational system of the society and the “customs” of the community. An individual may not be able to create an autonomous project to participate in a private class of the International Mathematical Olympiad or a preparatory class for studying abroad. The community project plays an important role in our lives. We must combine our own experiences with those of the community to clearly visualize the risks involved in the project. In most cases, man’s meticulous project is in fact a community project only with a slight modification to community customs, and man is not even conscious of his conforming to social customs. Only when he is in a new environment, such as living in a foreign country, does he realize consciously that he is obliged to balance his own project and the customs of this different community, in order to draw up an adequate project.

Chapter 4

The Place of Play and Art in the World of Meaning

1 The Common Features of Plays and Sports: Opaqueness and Uselessness Play and art are not meaningless, simply the meaning of which does not have the transparency of the meaning of the practical world. Even though games and art necessarily contain many materials of experience and those materials directly refer to the practical world, they always show a tendency to deviate from the referents. Johan Huizinga, a pioneer in the study of games, points out in his masterpiece Homo Ludens: Play is “not being ‘ordinary life’,” because, “it interpolates itself as a temporary activity satisfying in itself and ending there.”1 Art possesses the same quality with play and plays almost the same role of importance in the human world of meaning. Art itself can be regarded as a kind of play, so Gadamer illustrates art through the model of play and calls it “artistic play.” Conversely, play is also a kind of art. Today it is difficult to distinguish between play and art in “performance art.” From the perspective of meaning studies, two main features can be noticed: opaqueness with regard to meaning toward practices and uselessness from the teleological point of view. The Saussurean binary structure of the sign proves inapplicable to the study of play and art. Some theorists believe that artistic meaning in essence “has no signified but only a signifier.” Thus Roland Barthes states that literature means to “defeat the signified, the rule, and the father in combat;” similarly Keelty says that art “murders the signified.” Don’t they have meaning? We have seen in the previous two chapters that man does not act without meaning and there is no sign without meaning. To say that art and play are not signs goes against the essential definition of sign.2

1

Johan Huizinga. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949: 9. 2 Zhao Yiheng. Semiotics: Principles and Problems (3rd Edition). Nanking: Nanking University Press, 2015: 47. © Sichuan University Press Co., Ltd. 2022 Y. Zhao, Philosophical Semiotics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3057-7_4

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Those theorists who hold on to the idea of “canceling signified” cannot see that it is obvious that the meaning of art and play is so rich that it goes beyond the general practice of man, more or less with the referent of meaning being skipped. The scenes of the hurricane, the earthquake, the destroyed city, the volcanic eruption, the bloody battle, or an erotic or perverse scene in artistic movies, are not allowed to be on the news. The fact that art “goes beyond the object” and rejects the practice frightens people but without disturbing them, and it allows them to keep a certain distance to admire it without giving an interpretation of practical meaning. If such a spectacle were to appear in the texts of practical meaning such as television news or documentary film, it would bring practical knowledge and representative meaning, and once it became transparent, it would risk causing collective panic. Art can enjoy its freedom thanks to its “distance from practice.” I prefer to apply Peirce’s triadic model to examine the semiotic characteristics of play and art. This model allows us to see that the characteristics of artistic signification is to neglect the referent of objects but focus on the interpretant. The reduced denotation enriches the connotation. As the American poet T. S. Eliot said: “The main function of the meaning of poetry is to satisfy a habit of the reader, to distract his attention, to calm him. In this case, poetry exerts on him an influence similar to that of the burglar who brings a piece of meat to the watchdog.”3 Eliot’s vision is contrary to the traditional idea that art is composed of “useful thoughts + attractive forms.” John Crowe Ransom’s idea might be clearer: The structure of poetry, the “logical substance” creates an obstacle to the texture of poetry. The beauty of poetry is that it breaks through the structure and embarks on an obstacle course.4 The characteristics of the signs of art and play are to adopt different means to skip over the “referent obstacles” and to reveal the charm of this action that is exclusively possessed by the artistic text. The “aimlessness” of play and art has led to numerous scientific debates since Kant, focusing on art, and Friedrich von Schiller, extending to play. Since then, it has gradually become a common sense because many thinkers has repetitively discussed this question. Both play and art are opaque texts. They could adopt some certain materials of experience to refer to human practices of meaning, but it in essence tends to keep a certain distance from practice. They attentively exercise an act of meaning that is not in principle serious. Confrontation in a game or team wrestling in sports competitions may come from the imitation of war; throwing a javelin, a discus or a weight may be actions imitating warlike gestures. It is just like the battle scenes in paintings or movies, no matter how strikingly realistic, it is nonetheless a metaphor of the materials of experience. Winston Churchill mocked Italians who, he said, “make war as if they were playing soccer, play soccer as if they were making war.” This humorous remark highlights an essential distinction between the two activities: war is a practical activity, while play is a non-practical activity, though they are both human acts of meaning. 3

T. S. Eliot. Selected Essays 1917–1935. London: Faber & Baber, 1932: 125. John Crowe Ransom. “Criticism as Pure Speculation,” in Literary Opinions in America, (ed.) Morton D. Zabel. New York: Harper, 1951: 194.

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Art is not necessarily a useless thing, but its artistic value goes beyond the practical use and value of practical meaning. In the expression of a work of art, only one part carries artistic meaning. A poem, a song, and a painting, are artistic genres defined by a cultural system. They may also carry a meaning with the value of practical use that differs from their artistic value. A seemingly strange conclusion can thus be made: a garment of a prestigious brand and a counterfeit are no different in art. The difference in price comes from the practical meaning of the sign within it, i.e. the brand and the style of the fashion. The art itself is priceless: a soccer match, whether between two first division teams or between amateur clubs, will be a wonderful game as long as the players perform brilliantly. The only objective is to make the spectacle cheerful and delightful. Art and play cannot therefore be evaluated from the angle of true or false, better or worse (high class or low class). There is no distinction between authentic paintings and fake ones if you can’t see the difference; if the matches are equally brilliant, it is not necessary to distinguish a star from a novice. When an artistic work is at an exhibition or auction, it is no longer purposeless and becomes an artistic commodity. The “uselessness” of play and art thus becomes useful and serves a certain practical purpose. This is the “secondary practicality” I will focus on in the next part.

2 Secondary Practicality Secondary practicality refers to the process where play and art, removed from their point of departure as “opaqueness” and “purposelessness,” are re-contextualized within the practical world of meaning. It is important to highlight this issue. Many debates from ancient to now have been actually on play and art after “secondary practicality,” confusing art with artwork, and play with sport. Since the intellectual history of man started with practical meaning, early debates on play and art thus took them as activities of practical meaning. The major difference between sport and play lies in the fact that sport has a purpose and in some cases this purpose surpasses that of physical strengthening and becomes sublime, for example when Baron Pierre De Coubertin called for the reinstatement of the Olympic Games or when a sportsman honors his country by winning a gold medal. Sport as a cultural activity is itself a “secondary practicality” of the game. On the other hand, the nonpractical substance of play and art does not manifest itself in the intellectual history; we must wait until Kant and Schiller to see a few treatises, although no such theory has ever prevailed. Thus Zong Zheng advocates that “play is one of the most important cultural phenomena suspended and forgotten by the world of theory.”5 We have seen in the first chapter that the practical world of meaning is the overlapping of the world of consciousness and the world of things. Acts of practical

5

Zong Zheng. Ludology: A Semio-Narratological Study. Chengdu: Sichuan University Press, 2014: 11.

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meaning include consciousness’s recognition of things, the accumulation of experiences, and the reformation and use of natural things based on knowledge. Everything in the practical world slides between the two poles of signhood and thinghood. It is a “humanized” world whose meaning we can grasp because things carrying the meaning have acquired a semiotic nature. But this is not the case for art and play, which have no physical meaning and cannot be applied to the practical world. Kant distinguishes two kinds of art: the liberal art could turn out purposely only as a play. Kant, however, admits that most human “artistic” activities are “remunerative art” resembling the handicraft: “It is disagreeable in itself and is attractive only because of its effect, and hence as something that can be compulsively imposed.”6 The greatest difference between art and works of art is that art has no practical value, whereas the practicalized art is often a by-product detached from its artistic essence. The same is true in the field of plays, the “cultural product of play” is a practicalized play without the spirit of play. Among many of the methods of secondary practicality, three main methods can be identified: sublimation, commodification, and academication. We have seen that art and play in a primitive and natural state have a history as long as that of man. With the “maturation” of human culture, these three methods of secondary practicality appear successively. The sublimation was born out of good intentions early in the intellectual history of human. Man wanted play and art to perform more social functions, which nevertheless blurred their nature of purposelessness. In Book Seventeen of The Analects of Confucius we find the following passage: “The Master said, young people, why do none of you study the Odes? The Odes train you in analogy, allow you to observe customs, teach you to be sociable, teach you to express anger. Close at hand, you learn how to serve your father; in more distant terms, how to serve the ruler. And you become familiar with the names of numerous birds, animals, plants, and trees.”7 Zheng Xuan explains in the Book of Exegesis (Ji Jie) that The Song of Odes teaches us to “observe social vicissitudes.” For Zhu Xi, The Song of Odes is “to observe the gain and loss.” It is the cognitive meaning of practice, not artistic meaning. In his preface to New Yuefu (Xin Yuefu), Bai Juyi writes that The Song of Odes “records real facts that are examined and proven by poets,” that “no text remains a dead letter, every sentence expresses a strong recommendation… It describes the miseries of the people for the emperor to know.”8 His “artistic” text is not only transparent to practice, but also serves as a report of investigation. Sima Guang highly praised the “ritualization” of the game of Touhu (throwing chopsticks into a pot), and elevated it to the level of the art of governing a state. He spiritualized the game: “The game of chopstick throwing is a way to control the heart and cultivate character. It is used both to defend the country and to observe the 6

Immanuel Kant. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000: 183. 7 Confucius. The Analects of Confucius. Translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007: 122. 8 The Collection of Bai Juyi (Vol. 3). Beijing: Zhong Hua Book Company, 1979.

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people. Why? Because the thrower must measure his strength, neither too strong nor too weak to target the opening of the pot. Righteousness does not derive from the path, it is the essence of the Dao, of the Way.”9 Such exaggeration seems unreasonable to us, because we may not be fans of the game of Touhu. Unlike poetry which, after being practicalized, produces only a secondary literary genre, play is practically transformed in human culture into a new field, i.e. sport. Sport has a clear and natural purpose: to strengthen the body. But the body itself is part of the world of things and sport is in itself an activity of practical meaning. Those who want to further sublimate it declare that sport allows people to improve their character, to “elevate cultural sentiments” and to realize freedom and spiritual sublimation. The goal of “improving oneself” through sport is so sublimated that it requires to exclude speculative games such as chess, bridge, mahjong, video games, or “noneducational” games such as fishing, cockfighting, bullfighting, or games “that do not benefit health” such as acrobatics or boxing from sport.10 This demarcation by means of exclusion seems to be clear evidence for my idea that “sport is not game” mentioned above. The fact that the International Olympic Committee has been hesitant for years about whether to include chess in the program is an evidence that sport is an activity of practical meaning that reforms nature to achieve effects. It refers transparently to “strengthening the body.” The excluded games we have just mentioned do not have this transparent reference, so they retain their original character of play. The second “secondary practicality” is the commodification of art and play, which has great success in the modern world. Commodification occurred with the rise of capitalism: when art was independent from the protection of the court, the nobility and the church, thus emancipating itself, more or less, from the constraint of political power. Market liberalization commodificated fine arts, music, theaters, and the novels so much that from then on, art such as films, television or popular songs, have been commodificated as soon as they appear. The price becomes the criterion for judging the success of a work of art. Commodification is therefore an act of meaning of reforming to achieve effects. The commodification of plays came a little later than that of art: In 1863 the English Football Association was established, marking the beginning of the practice of commodification. In 1984, the Organizing Committee for the Los Angeles Olympic Games began to generally commercialize the sport, with most games gradually reaching the market having been politically sublimated. From this, it appears that games institutionalized for commerce mainly remain attractive to the public. Those games which are regarded as “lacking in viewing value” by the Committee cannot be accepted as new programs, which is, put it in plain, the standard of commodification. Indeed, a game has its value as long as it is commodificated, regardless of whether or not it can fit into the sports system. Gambling has always existed, and it remains a game today if it is not about winning or losing; this differs from modern casinos 9

Sima Guang. “New Discourse on the Game of Touhu,” in Sima Guang’s Collection. Chengdu: Sichuan University Press, 2010. 10 http://baike.baidu.com/item/体育运动/198272?fr=aladdin, 02/16/2021.

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or cyber-casinos which are open to the public and benefit from it. In this situation, gambling has been commodificated. Those lotteries of all different kinds, some of which though may be sublimated a little bit, have lost their nature of play. Gambling is one of the few types of games that have never been sublimated but have been successfully commodificated once for all. The third “secondary practicality” is likely to arouse controversies. Indeed, academication reinforces the purpose of art and play. Aesthetics, the academication of artistic theories, occurred at almost the same time with the commodification of art, just a little bit later. The studies of sport, including the sociology of sport developed by Max Weber, George Herbert Mead, and Émile Durkheim, the study of sports culture proposed by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, also appeared after the great wave of commodification of sport. The establishment of departments and institutes of art and sport academicated art and play to train scholars from generation to generation, and foster a pedagogical career, allowing them to obtain in another way the practical meaning, a new transparency. I do not mean to say that the sublimation and commodification are wrong, but to say that their ways of signifying are varied. Moreover, I do not mean to say that academication is wrong, since I am currently buried up to my neck in it. What I would like to point out in the next part is that academication may be the hope that would allow art and play to return to their essence.

3 The “Four Master Tropes” of Art and Play We could see that the historical evolution of art and play in fact develops within the process of the “Four Master Tropes” in semiotic rhetoric, starting with metaphor, through synecdoche and metonymy, into irony, from which the meaning relationships of semiotic texts progressively disintegrate and a negative process is unfolding. Some thinkers make the four-step negative relationship of semiotic rhetoric the great models of historical evolution. For Jonathan Culler, in his book The Pursuit of Signs, the “four master tropes” is “the system by which the mind comes to grasp the world.”11 For Frederic Jameson, the “four master tropes” integrates four figures of speech within one system and it is both “the historical law” and “the basic types of concept” of human culture in general. Play and art, whose initial form is fantasy of metaphorical imitation of experience, are artificially elevated in some possible functions of certain parts as long as they are sublimated. Confucius ritualized games by classifying archery and chariot driving in the six classical arts and thus achieves a synecdoche reformation by substituting the whole for a part. The process of commodification means to metonymize art and game, to substitute the audience’s viewing for the game itself, to consider the benefits as the objective of the game, and the losing and winning of a contest as the essential 11

Jonathan Culler. The Pursuit of Signs : Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. London: Routledge, 2001: 72.

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purpose of sport or other games. It is not surprising that Umberto Eco comments on this in an ironical way that “there is no such thing as sport that has as its primary objective to train and strengthen the body,” since the sports fans are simply interested in watching games without the interest in doing exercises. One of the important characteristics of academication is irony: academication or institutionalization has its tendency of reinforcing “Re-secondary commodification,” that is to further emancipate through academic studies, the alienated art and play from their original form in order to make it “a career of normal education,” a professional pedagogical practice that is self-sustaining from generation to generation. Art and play are thus moving further and further away from the original position of meaning. But the academication can also lead to self-criticism and self-reflection, of which this book is a perfect example. We can see that the emergence of such irony and modern Ludology reflects this spirit. From Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens in 1938, Roger Caillois’s Man, Play and Games in 1958, to Gonzalo Fransca’s studies on video games in 1999, and Chinese researcher Zong Zheng’s proposing the semiotics of plays with the publication of Ludology: A Semio-Narratological Study in 2014, the discipline of Ludology has not developed in a fast pace, nevertheless constantly reinforcing its spirit of self-criticism. Certainly, it would be an anti-historical fantasy to have art and play return to their original state through academication, which cannot be possibly realized. But such self-reflexive academication reminds us of the forgotten initial aspect of art and play and allows us to return to their starting point in the human world of consciousness. In this respect, the academication plays the constructive role of the “killjoy” that Zong Zheng reiterates in his writing.12 The killjoy participates in the game but rejects the authority of the rules and the demarcation defined by the rules, which breaks the illusion of “organic whole” constructed by the game. I agree with Zong Zheng’s statement in his conclusion: “as long as one plays games out of free will and is free to quit it,”13 all is possible. Thus, academication provides us with a key to crossing the threshold into this realm.

12

Zong Zheng. Ludology: A Semio-Narratological Study. Chengdu: Sichuan University Press, 2014: 126. 13 Ibid.: 220.

Part II

The Production of Meaning

Chapter 5

The Meaning of The Meaning of Meaning

1 The Story of The Meaning of Meaning The title of the chapter seems to be a word play by which the author tries to confuse the reader’s mind. However, this title is exactly the same as the title of the lecture given at Tsinghua University in 1930 by Richards himself, in which he recalled the history of the writing of The Meaning of Meaning.1 In taking up this title, we try to pay a tribute to this great theorist not only for his academic contributions, but also because he was the first Western leading scholar teaching for years in a Chinese university. In 1929, Richards first came to teach at Tsinghua University, and returned six times thereafter. Unfortunately, hitherto his profound influence on China’s academia has not been comprehensively evaluated and summarized by Chinese intellectuals. According to Richards’ lecture, the idea to write a book like The Meaning of Meaning came from the discussions between him and his collaborator Charles Kay Ogden in 1918. Their discussions first appeared as a series of articles in Cambridge Journal from 1920 and then published as a book in 1923. The whole writing process lasted five years.2 The books published by Richards from the late 1920s made him one of the founders of New Criticism, among which The Meaning of Meaning, however, should be regarded as the initiation of the modern semiotic movement. With its subtitle “a study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism,” this book has already hold the banner of the “Science of Symbolism.” It was translated into Chinese in 2000 in a reduced version abbreviating about a hundred pages of the original text,3 including six appendices and two supplements 1

I. A. Richards. “The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of Meaning’.” Journal of Tsinghua University (Science and Technology). 01(1930): 11–16. 2 Cf. I. A. Richards. “The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of Meaning’,” in Li Anzhai, Significs. Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1934: 97–103. 3 C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning. Trans. Bai Renli and Guo Qingzhu. Beijing: Beijing Normal University Publishing House, 2000.

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which amount to a third of the content of the original text and contain the two authors’ criticisms of the theories of meaning developed by their “contemporaries,” such as those of Husserl, Peirce, Russell, and Frege. These “appendices,” however, are of great importance, and for the discussions of the book we will refer to them directly from the original text. Ogden and Richards proposed a fairly systematic theory of sign by stating that “Meaning, that pivotal term of every theory of language, cannot be treated without a satisfactory theory of signs.” This is because, “Throughout almost all our life we are treating things as signs. All experience, using the word in the widest possible sense, is either enjoyed or interpreted (i.e., treated as a sign) or both.”4 Today’s semiotic movement is still searching for the connection between Saussure and Peirce, except for a minority of scholars who speak of the role played by Ogden and Richards in the history of the study of signs. Umberto Eco points out that: “It was undoubtedly a seminal book, whose merit was to say certain things very much in advance of its time.”5 Because of Richards’ special relationship with the Chinese intellectual community, the Chinese scholars has paid due attention to The Meaning of Meaning from the outset. The important works published by modern Chinese scholars in the 1930s were directly influenced by Richards’ theory of semantic analysis.6 Li Anzhai, then still a student and teaching assistant in the Department of Sociology at Yanjing University,7 published the book, Significs (yiyi xue), in 1934, in which he mainly summarized Richards’ theory of meaning, supported by Jean Piaget’s psychological study of the development of children’s competence of signification. Piaget’s theory played an important role in the birth of structuralist semiology, which indicates that Li Anzhai thus grasped the essential of semiology. Richards made it clear in his lecture that it was Lady Welby who repeatedly emphasized the importance of research on meaning to her contemporary philosophers, psychologists and linguists. Indeed, “She was convinced that a new science, the science, of ‘Significs’ or of ‘Symbolism’ was badly needed.”8 The title of the 4

C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning, New York: Harcourt, Grace Janovich, 1989: 50. 5 Umberto Eco. “Introduction” to C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, New York: Harourt Grace Jovanivich, 1989: vi. 6 Several publications appeared at the time: Li Anzhai, Significs (1934), Aesthetics (1934); Cao Baohua, Sciences and Poetry (with Preface by Ye Gongchao, 1934); Wu Shichang, Poetry and Phonetics (thesis), New Poetry and Old Poetry (1934); Zhu Ziqing, Examples of Multiple Definitions of Poetry (1935), Ordinary Talk on Philology (1936); Liu Xiwei (Li Jianwu), Juhuaji (1936); Zhu Guangqian, “From Darkness” (1936); Cao Baohua, Four Meanings of Poetry (1937). This list, though incomplete, allows us to see the development of the formalist spirit in the Chinese academia in the mid-1930s. The article “On Gongsun Long” published by Feng Youlan in the same issue of the Tshinghua Journal with Richards’s can be seen as a response of Chinese philosophers to Richards’ theory. 7 Li Anzhan went to the United States after graduating from Tshinghua University and became one of the pioneers of modern Chinese social anthropology and tibetology. 8 I. A. Richards. “The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of Meaning’.” Journal of Tsinghua University (Science and Technology) 1 (1930): 11.

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book by Li Anzhai, Significs, comes apparently from this quotation from Richards. The definition commonly accepted in the international academic community that “semiotics is the study of signs” comes from Saussure, and Chinese intellectuals have constantly referred to this definition. However, this definition is in fact incomprehensible and I have already proposed earlier that semiotics should be precisely defined as “the study of meanings.”9 The Meaning of Meaning is written under the semantic principle proposed by Richards, which is the so-called “contextualism”: the meaning of a word does not depend on the word itself but on the context in which the word is applied. Due to the complexity of the context, all terms need “multiple definition.” In the chapter on the meaning of the term “meaning,” the authors have provided a list of sixteen main definitions of the term in all the different contexts in philosophical discussions. This book though intends to be eclectic with no preference for any schools, they always try to interpret the “meaning” from the perspective of the “science of Symbolism.” Any concept can test the validity of the “theory of context.” For instance, the book has spent a whole chapter discussing the definitions of “beauty,” though it seems irrelevant to the essential problem of the book, the extremely complex nature of the concept of “beauty” makes it the best example for the test. In the following years after the publication of the book, Richards continued his “analysis of multiple definition in multiple contexts,” collaborating with Huang Zitong and Li Anzhai in Beijing. He read and interpreted Mencius, and published Mencius on Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition in 1932 in Britain, in which he translated the main chapters of Mencius and explained the precise meaning of terms like “mind” (xin) and “nature” (xing) which are difficult to translate into the Western languages.10 In the preface to the fourth edition of The Meaning of Meaning which is republished in 1936, Richards acknowledged that Ogden’s Bentham’s Theory of Fictions (1932) and his own work Coleridge on Imagination (1934) all served to elucidate how “the technique of multiple definition” could apply profitably to all the complicated and difficult terms. In this regard, there are at least three intentions in considering the question of meaning through the analysis of “meaning”: firstly, it is about the sense of humor of the two English theorists—it is the most challenging task to talk about meaning around the word “meaning” and see if the study of meaning can clarify “meaning” itself; secondly, the word “meaning” has acquired completely different meanings in different systems of thinkers since the ancient time. However, the question of meaning is the essential question for any philosopher and it is inevitable to define meaning if one wants to establish a “science of symbolism;” finally, the word “meaning” is indeed the most complex term as well as the greatest challenge for all the methods of the analysis of meaning.

9

Cf. Zhao Yiheng. “Redefinition of Sign and Semiotics.” Chinese Journal of Journalism and Communication 35.06 (2013): 6–14. 10 C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, “Preface to the Fourth Edition,” in The Meaning of Meaning, New York: Harourt Grace Jovanivich, 1989: xxii.

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At the beginning of the twentieth century the question of meaning once again became the highest concern of the academic community: the world of thought has experienced an exhilarating and exciting time, which Lubomír Doležel called half a century later “the constellation age” in which the great wave of modern theories has taken shape.11 This spectacle of resplendent constellations was mainly unleashed on the theory of meaning with a surprising abundance of ideas. Although The Meaning of Meaning was first published in 1923, it has been republished all those years to the present day, because it is still at the cutting edge of the scientific research on the question of meaning. The question of meaning has a long history of discussion in the Western philosophical tradition, a large part of the book, however, focuses the attention on those contemporaries who were “little known” and had just emerged. Rereading this book today, we are still amazed to the fact that these two authors, with great insights, introduced in detail the works of scholars, most of whom are today considered to be the founders of modern philosophy of meaning. At the beginning of the twentieth century, theorists around the world were still confined in their own academic fields, and global higher educational system has not been established. The publications, translations, introductions, and critiques of scientific works were also not as prompt as they are today. As colleagues at the Cambridge University, it was natural that Ogden and Richards should know Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein, those pioneers of linguistic philosophy. However, they also spoke of Saussure, who was still little known by the public at the time and his General Linguistics Course (1916) had just been published, and even of Peirce who had published nothing in the field of philosophy at the time. They were perfectly familiar with Peirce’s complex terminology and devoted more than ten pages in the appendix to Peirce’s semiotic system. They were talking about Lady Welby as well, who is still largely unknown. After publishing What is Meaning: A Study of Significance in 1903, Lady Welby had been corresponding with Ogden for years, and in a certain sense, the question of “the meaning of meaning” was first proposed by her. Some may find that Ogden does not value Lady Welby’s contribution sufficiently in the book and regard this as his lack of respect for female scholars.12 Yet Richards devoted a whole passage of his lecture at Tsinghua University to introduce the “very astute English woman” and the “Significs” put forward by her. He then recommended “Significs” as a book title to his Chinese friend Li Anzhai,13 which shows his great respect for Lady Welby. The European intellectual atmosphere of the time reflected in the book indicates a bubbling of diverse thoughts. Since the participants are less aware than observers, the authors probably had difficulty distinguishing the great masters of the first rank— Husserl and Peirce—from the more common thinkers of the history of thought. Although their understanding of certain theories is barely satisfactory, their eclectic interests and the promptness in dealing with the most heated and original issues of 11

Lubomír Doležel. Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010: 134. 12 http://en.wikipedi.org/wiki/Victoria,_Lady_Welby, accessed on February 11, 2014. 13 Li Anzhai. Significs. Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1934.

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the time are indisputable. A large part of the “Appendix D” is devoted to a critique of the works of Husserl, Russell, Frege, and Peirce. Husserl, who was still unknown in Anglo-American academic circles, is regarded as “perhaps the best known modern scholar to deal comprehensively with the problem of Signs and Meaning;” Peirce, the late and former employee of the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, is a philosopher who conducted “by far the most elaborate and determined attempt to give an account of signs and their meaning;” Saussure, whose influence in France was growing, is also present in their critique. Their penetrating insights thus ran far ahead of the whole time in which they lived. With its important achievements in the history of thought and the emergence of various ideological schools, the twentieth century is called “the age of theory.”14 We believe that these innumerable currents are derived from the four pillars: Marxist cultural theory, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, formalism,15 and many subsequent theories can be seen as an amalgam of these four pillars in different ways. Ogden and Richards succeeded almost a century ahead of their time in the search for the meeting point between phenomenology (and its derivatives existentialism and hermeneutics) and formalism (especially scientific semiotics with an elaborating theoretical system based on the thorough study of diverse thoughts of the subject). This is also the approach employed by the book, examining how the two pillars of 20th-century thought integrate into a semiotic phenomenology on the question of “meaning.”

2 The Definition of Meaning The Meaning of Meaning has three salient points: “the semiotic triangle” (or Ogden’s triangle) decomposing meaning into three elements, “the six canons of symbolism,” and “the sixteen definitions of meaning.” The idea of the three elements of meaning, especially the distinction between referent and “reference/thought,” made a deep impression on Qian Zhongshu, who attended Richards’ seminars at Tsinghua University and later developed his own idea in Guanzhui Bian (Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters) by associating it with Peircian semiotics, on which I have published an article.16 “The six canons of symbolism” actually is the precursor of the famous “principle of cooperation” proposed by Paul Grice. What concerns us most here are “the sixteen definitions” of meaning, among which the two authors’ emphasis is laid upon the group C in which “meaning” is defined from the perspective of the “science of symbolism.” We are going to see how the two authors, smoothly narrow

14

Martin Kreiswirth. Constructive Criticism: The Human Science in the Age of Theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. 15 On the critique of the four pillar theories of the twentieth century, see Zhao Yiheng. “Constructing a Worldwide Critical Theory.” Frontiers of Literary Theory 8 (2011): 39–67. 16 Zhao Yiheng. “On Art as False but Genuine.” The special issue for commemorating the centenary of Qian Zhongshu’s birth in Comparative Literature in China 2 (2010): 21–31.

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down their discussions and finally draw the conclusion that “Only semiotic theory can analyze the question of meaning in a precise manner.” Group A: I. An Intrinsic property. II. A unique unanalysable Relation to other things. Group B: III. The other words annexed to a word in the Dictionary. IV. The Connotation of a word. V. An Essence. VI. An activity Projected into an object. VII. (a) An event Intended. (b) A Volition. VIII. The Place of anything in a system. IX. The Practical Consequences of a thing in our future experience. X. The Theoretical consequences involved in or implied by a statement. XI. Emotion aroused by anything. Group C: XII. That which is Actually related to a sign by a chosen relation. XIII. (a) The Mnemic effects of a stimulus. Associations acquired. (b) Some other occurrence to which the mnemic effects of any occurrence are Appropriate. (c) That which a sign is Interpreted as being of. (d) What anything Suggests. (e) In the Case of Symbols: That to which the User of a Symbol actually refers. XIV. That to which the user of a symbol Ought to be referring. XV. That to which the user of a symbol Believes himself to be referring. XVI. That to which the Interpreter of a symbol. (a) Refers. (b) Believes himself to be referring. (c) Believes the User to be referring.

Actually, this is a list of twenty-two definitions because three of the sixteen main definitions can be further divided into several sub-definitions. Not any of these definitions are untenable, according to the two authors, but in certain contexts some are more plausible than the others. The list of all the definitions is no more than a great evidence to prove that no concept can be defined by just one definition, even the concept that requires precision such as “meaning.” In their discussions, a few definitions, however, are gradually shown to be more ready to be adapted to the “science of symbolism.” “The first canon of symbolism,” according to Ogden and Richards, is “the canon of singularity” that one symbol stands for one and only one referent. Then how to explain the common phenomenon of polysemy? They argued that “When a symbol seems to stand for two or more referents we must regard it as two or more symbols, which are

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to be differentiated,”17 that is, we must consider them as two or more homographic symbols, such as a polyseme in the dictionary which actually refers to several different referents. This implies that there is no such a thing as a “multi-object symbol,” but only symbols sharing the same form. The ostensibility of polysemy comes from the fact that the meaning is, in essence, “A set of external or psychological contexts.”18 What changes is not the reference or the meaning of the sign, but the actual situations in which it is applied. This is exactly the main idea of Richards’ “contextual theory.” We can detect in Wittgenstein’s late and famous formula, “the meaning of a word is its use in the language,”19 the influences from The Meaning of Meaning published half a century before.20 In 1923 Ogden and Richards had already used the ever changing nature of the meaning of the word “meaning” to suggest that the true meaning of the sign is only the meaning applied in particular situations. Both authors stress that there is no need to resolve the conflicts between these twenty-two definitions, since they can all make sense within their specific context. The two definitions of Group A, according to them, are worth no further concern, because they are nothing but “phantoms linguistically generated;” similarly for Group B which is, though, often supported by great thinkers, for instances: definition V comes from critical realism, definition VI is supported by the followers of Schiller and Benedetto Croce, and definition IX is associated with the idea of William James, the founder of pragmatism, the authors nonetheless uphold that these definitions are “occasional” and “erratic” usages, which means that they are not based on systematic analysis. In contrast, all the ten definitions of Group C are analysis of “signsituations,” which can give us a general picture of the scope and the task of the “science of symbolism” and is also regarded as the key to the question of meaning. According to the two authors, “the science of symbolism” has been not yet established as an independent and full-fledged subject. At least, it may not suffice to reach consensus for the chaos of opinions on the central proposition of “meaning.” It therefore deserves the efforts and the time to examine comprehensively the central proposition of “meaning.” The two authors, however, after having closely studied the theories of signs proposed by Saussure, Husserl, Peirce and Welby, draw the conclusion that all of them “are not satisfactory” and that a “science of symbolism” should be established on the questioning of these definitions. Thus, in the concluding part of the book, the two authors confidently affirm that “The first stage of the Development of Symbolism as a Science is thus complete, and it is seen to be the essential preliminary to all other sciences,”21 which means that it 17 C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning. New York: Harcourt, Grace and World, 1946: 91. 18 Ibid.: 90. 19 Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Blackwell, 1997: 29; see also Garth Hallet. Wittgenstein’s Definition of Meaning as Use. New York: Fodham University Press, 1967. 20 Cf. Voir M. H. Abrams. “A Note on Wittgenstein and Literary Criticism,” “How to do things with texts,” in Doing Things with Texts. New York: Londres, w. w. Norton, 1991: 73–87, 269–296. 21 C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning. New York: Harcourt, Grace and World, 1989: 249.

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is necessary to base the discussions of the question of meaning on the establishment of the “science of symbolism.” This is a very determined point of view, if, however, there is anything to be regretted of is that they reject the terminology of Saussurean “semiology,” Peircian “semiotics,” or Lady Welby’s “significs,” but as Ernst Cassirer, continue to use the terminology “symbolism,” which, though, has a long history in European languages, also for its ambiguous nature, leads to numerous confusions and controversies. They try to clarify those contradictions of the meaning of the word “meaning,” with a more contradictory term as a “cleaning tool.”22 This is ironic, given the fact that The Meaning of Meaning was intended to be a clear and logical work, but gives rise to more confusions because of the term used. If The Meaning of Meaning is not taken as one of the founding works in the field of nowadays semiotics, it is probably because the terminology they employed does not correspond to today’s semiotic movement. The same was true of Cassier’s and Susanne Katherina Langer’s semiotic study in the 1930s that their insistence upon the term of “symbolism” which blurred disciplinary boundaries, resulted in the situation that there were no followers to their school. For Umberto Eco, Ogden and Richards were at a disadvantage because “They could know none of these things: logical positivism, analytic philosophy, structural linguistics, semiotics, hermeneutics, the application of logical models to the ordinary language, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics, in addition to the central role now played by the problem of meaning in research into artificial intelligence.”23 Eco’s point can be also addressed to Saussure and Peirce: no matter whether a concept appears sooner or later in history, it is its clarity that determines its fate in the academic progress. Before the appearance of The Meaning of Meaning, neither semiotics nor phenomenology had gained a foothold in the academic society. The authors of the book, however, have already referred to Peirce and Husserl as important theorists. If taking a close look at the “symbolic definitions” among the “sixteen,” it will be noticed that three directions have been clearly indicated which represent as a prelude to the later developments of the theories of meaning over the following century, and also point out the essential points of the problem of meaning. The first orientation can be found in definition XII: “That which is Actually related to a sign by a chosen relationship.” The meaning of a sign is “chosen” which implies that the meaning of a sign is determined. The chosen relationship indicates the fact that although it is carried by the sign itself, is determined neither by the quality of the sign—the pronunciation or the writing form of the language—nor by the will of the subject—addresser or interpreter—who uses this sign. It corresponds perfectly to Saussure’s concept of “arbitrariness,” according to which the addresser of the sign does not in fact have the ability to change the meaning of the sign, and that the sign communicates only what social conventions determine that it “shall communicate.” 22

On the confusing usages of the “sign” and “symbol,” “semiotics” and “symbolism” and how they can be clarified, see Zhao Yiheng. “Redefinition of Sign and Semiotics.” Chinese Journal of Journalism and Communication 35.06 (2013): 6–14. 23 Umberto Eco. “Introduction” to C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, New York: Harourt Grace Jovanivich, 1989: vi.

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The subjectivity of the addresser is involved in definition XV—“that to which the user of a symbol Believes himself to be referring.” The meaning thus produced is directly opposed to the two definitions cited above. Especially in English, meaning is the gerund of the verb “to mean,” which gives rise more easily to the explanation that “The addresser actively determines the meaning of the sign.” The authors of the book wisely suggest that even for such a meaning, it is only what “the user believes” he is using. The meaning of the sign, once having been sent out, is no longer determined by the user or his will. It only refers to what the user believes he is communicating with the sign. Is it according to whose will that the meaning of the sign is determined? It is that of the interpreter. The three definitions in the last group therefore are also the most complex and important in The Meaning of Meaning. Let’s look at the first two definitions first: XVI. That to which the Interpreter of a symbol. (a) Refers. (b) Believes himself to be referring.

These two definitions are in fact hard to distinguish: if the meaning is the subjective intention of the interpreter, then “to which he is referring” is objectively untenable, and “to which he believes he is referring” subjectively is his interpretation, except that the referential relation is “already chosen,” but, in this case, there is little difference between it and definition XII. If he does not believe the thing to which he is referring to, then it cannot be his intention at all. The last definition of this group: “to which the interpreter believes the User to be referring,” brings us face to face with the conundrum that has preoccupied the whole academic community throughout the twentieth century: is it necessary that the interpreter’s interpretation must pursue the intentional meaning of the “user,” or the addresser of the sign? Does the interpreter at least believe that his interpretation approximates the intended meaning of the addresser? It is the question of the “triple meaning” in semiotics: intentional meaning of the addresser of the sign, the meaning of the sign text, and the meaning interpreted by the interpreter.24 It is not hard to understand the “triple meaning” in itself. However, it is hard to understand the relationship between them: is it a must that the three meanings correspond to one another? If it is not, then which one is the standard and by which the other two are judged? Three representative positions can be distinguished: “the intentional meaning of the addresser of the sign” for the “phenomenological” hermeneutics and its followers; “the meaning of the sign text” for the textual criticism of New Criticism; “the meaning interpreted by the interpreter” for the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer, and the later “the reception aesthetics” and the “reader response theory.” We hope the simplification here will be excused by all the erudite scholars, and this, however, exactly corresponds to the order of the definitions of meaning given in this book. 24

Zhao Yiheng. Semiotics: Principles and Problems (3rd Edition). Nanking: Nanking University Press, 2015: 45.

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It is easier to clarify the second position, which is the textual criticism: after The Meaning of Meaning, Richards successively published his first two works of literary criticism, Principles of Literary Criticism (1925) and Practical Criticism (1929). He thus founded the essential position of New Criticism, which starts from the “textual meaning” and believes that the only way to acquire a valid interpretation is to read the text closely. This is called by later specialists of New Criticism such as John Crowe Ransom as “(textual) ontological criticism.”25 Meaning seems to settle down quietly in the text, waiting for the interpretation. It seems that everything for a valid interpretation is at the disposal of the text, regardless of the subjective intention of either the addressor or the interpreter. Early formalism (New Criticism, Russian Formalism, and Saussurean Semiology) stresses mainly on the textual meaning; phenomenology and hermeneutics tend toward the meaning of the addressor; Peircian semiotic philosophy emphasizes the last, the interpretative meaning.

3 Phenomenology and Meaning Both authors have a great interest in Husserl’s phenomenology, especially his discussions of the question of meaning. The last definition XVI (c) “that to which the Interpreter of a symbol believes the User to be referring” can be dated back to Husserl’s related discussions. Thus The Meaning of Meaning devotes an entire chapter to the theory of meaning of Husserl in the appendices. In June 1922, Husserl gave a course of four lectures on the subject of “Phenomenological Method and Phenomenological Philosophy” at London University while visiting England. After these lectures, he went to Cambridge University to meet analytic philosophers such as George Edward Moore. The Cambridge philosophers thus became acquainted with his thoughts. We have not known yet whether Ogden and Richards attended these lectures in London University, but they quote several times from the syllabus that Husserl prepared for these lectures and comment extensively on Husserl’s two fundamental and ground-breaking phenomenological works: Logical Investigations (1901) and Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (1913). Their commentary and review of Husserlian theory, grasping perfectly the essential relation between his theory and the question of meaning. Ogden and Richards point out that the most important thing in Husserlian theory of meaning is to distinguish between “meaning-intentions” (Bedeutungsintentionen) which are the acts of “meaning-conferring,” and “the realized meanings” (erfluellte Bedeutungen) which are the acts of “meaning-realizing.” This remark sums up the main idea of Husserl’s theory of meaning: intentionality is the key word to both Husserl’s theory and the problem of meaning. According to Husserl, meaning itself does not exist in “the intentional object” (noema), but it always relates to 25

John Crowe Ranson. Poetry: A Note on Ontolgoy (1932), in New Criticism. Ed. Zhao Yiheng, Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 1988: 46–72.

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“the intentional act” (noesis), that is, the intentional act ensures the production of meaning.26 It is necessary to bother here with a short explanation: in his phenomenological theory, to refer to the production of meaning, Husserl uses the word “Auffassung” which is translated into Chinese “li yi” (立义, constructing or apprehension) “which reminds us of an archaic expression found in Li ji, Ru xing.”27 According to Husserl, “if the intentional act can engender the intentional object, it is because the intentional act can organize the successive stream of sensations (contents of Auffassung or contents of consciousness) and refer them to the intentional object.”28 In my opinion, the consciousness and its intentional aim are to “acquire” meanings, the reference that intentionality acquires from the object is the meaning. It would therefore be appropriate to call it the intentionality of the “acquired meaning,” especially in the case where the object that the consciousness envisages is a text, a living being possibly with a consciousness, and a human being certainly having a consciousness, the egocentrism could weigh on the subject when it is said that consciousness “apprehends or constructs” (li yi). Just for joking: when we see the traffic lights, what should we do? Instantly construct a meaning or acquire a meaning? If the meaning does not lodge in the object, then where it is? Husserl elaborates on the origin of meaning in his momentous phenomenological work, Logical Investigations (Volume II) wherein a long chapter entitled “Expression and Meaning” is devoted to this problem: “The articulate sound-complex, the written sign etc., first becomes a spoken word or communicative bit of speech, when a speaker produces it with the intention of ‘expressing himself about something’ through its means; he must endow it with a sense in certain acts of mind, a sense he desires to share with his auditors. Such sharing becomes a possibility if the auditor also understands the speaker’s intention. He does this inasmuch as he takes the speaker to be a person, who is not merely uttering sounds but speaking to him, who is accompanying those sounds with certain sense-giving acts.”29 Husserl’s demonstrations are at most times obscure and hard to understand, but this passage is clear and concise: the intention of the “speaker” gives meaning to the sign, the “auditor” must understand this intention, and otherwise the sign remains only a meaningless “sound.” Meaning thus resides in the intention of the “speaker” of the sign and given by the subject of the act of “speaking.”

26

R. Magliola. Phenomenology and Literature. Indiana: Perdue University Press, 1977: 179. Li ji, Ru xing (or The Book of Rites, The Conduct of the Scholar). Trans. James Legge. Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou Ancient Books Publishing House, 2016. 28 Ni Liangkang. Husserl’s Phenomenological Concepts. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2007: 61. 29 Edmund Husserl. Logical Investigations (Second German Edition): Vol. I and Vol. II, Part I. Trans. J. N. Findlay and edited with a new introduction by Dermot Moran. London and New York: Routledge, 1970: 189. 27

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Thus we are directed to one of the definitions in The Meaning of Meaning: VI. An activity Projected into an object.

What is projected by the subject’s mind is the intentionality of “meaningacquiring” of the subject which will reveal the essence of the object and is also the essence of the intentional act. This is the most important thesis on meaning in Husserl’s phenomenology. If meaning is a function of the unified intentional act, then Husserl gives a conclusion that seems obscure: “Every sign is a sign for something, but not every sign has “meaning” (Sinn), a “sense” (Bedeutung) that the sign “expresses.”30 It should be pointed out that the Chinese as well as the English translations of these two terms (Bedeutung and Sinn) remain controversial all the time. What is in the sign is called “meaning” while what is expressed is called “sense.” This interpretation, however, will not be accepted by everyone.31 In the Husserlian words, the sign certainly refers to something—“sign for something”—but it does not necessarily have a “meaning.” In other words, the meaning comes from the “intentional” act of the speaker, the meaning is only the sense expressed through the sign. Another definition by Ogden and Richards: VII. (a) An event Intended, underscores this trend. From a phenomenological point of view, the intentional act gives rise to the being of pure essential conceptuality of the intentional object, which can be seen as a kind of “givenness” responding from the intentional object of apprehension to subjective intentionality. Taking up Husserl’s vivid metaphor that “The tree simpliciter can burn up, be resolved into its chemical elements, etc. But the sense–the sense of this perception, something belonging necessarily to its essence– cannot burn up.”32 Meaning does not reside in the tree, but in the intentionality of the subject and therefore cannot be destroyed or modified as the thing. When the subjective consciousness “envisages the object itself,” the consciousness intuitively perceives the form of the meaning. At this moment, the intentionality becomes the act of constructing the meaning. The Husserlian phenomenology emphasizes the subjective intention of the addressor of the sign while neglecting the textual meaning and the interpretive meaning, which are the other two component elements of the “triple meaning” in the semiosis. This point of view had a direct influence on the theory of the “validity in interpretation” proposed by Eric Donald Hirsch in the 1960s, according to which the authorial will has the determinant power in the process of interpretation to which the interpreter must return. Hirsch’s theory, however, brings us back to the last definition proposed by Ogden and Richards in The Meaning of Meaning: 30

Ibid.: 183. For these two terms, the translations proposed by Ni Liangkang are not fixed. See Chapter I of this book on the English translation of metalanguage and the next chapter on the translation of Eric Donald Hirsch’s book. 32 Edmund Husserl. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy I: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Trans. F. Kersten. Hague: Kluwer Academic Publishers Group: 216. 31

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(c) That to which the Interpreter of a symbol believes the User to be referring.

For both authors, there is no choice but to add at the last moment such a definition to the multiple definition of “meaning” and conclude the list with it. It is not, however, a final conclusion, but Husserl and Hirsch regard it as the supreme criterion. Hirsch again distinguishes between “meaning” (Sinn) and “significance” (Bedeutung), with the intention to find a supporting point for the “validity in interpretation” among the chaos of debates: “meaning” is intrinsic to the text and is related to the authorial will, which does not change with the time, culture or interpreter; “significance” is extrinsic and produced in the interpretive act which is susceptible to the changes of the context.33 In Validity in Interpretation, Hirsch clearly claims his aim of “defending the author.” To do so, he argues that the meaning of the text comes from the author, the addressor of the sign: “the meaning of the text has remained the same, while the significance of that meaning has shifted.” In this remark, meaning is “that which is represented by a text, and is what the author meant by his use of a particular sign sequence; it is what the signs represent,” and “significance, on the other hand, names a relationship between that meaning and a person, or a conception, or a situation, or indeed anything imaginable.”34 Thus, the essential direction of interpretation is to pursue the meaning produced by the addressor’s intentional act, and it is another matter whether or not the endeavor will be satisfied. The essence of interpretation is to read the text carefully enough in order to grasp the intentional meaning that the author intended to express by the text. Hirsch keeps stressing that he is only advancing on the road paved by Husserl. However, I think that he distorts Husserl’s original intentions somewhat.35 It is true that in the original text of Logical Investigations, for Husserl, the intention of the speaker confers the meaning to the text of signs and the auditor must return to it to get the meaning. It is also true that Husserl himself underlines and justifies this point unceasingly. Hirsch, however, merely takes it as the fundamental principle of the interpretation of meaning.

4 Interpretation and Meaning The “determinism of authorial intention” in Husserl and Hirsch is challenged by many critics who indicate that it can never identify the author’s “meaning,” let alone take it 33

E. D. Hirsch. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967. Frege also proposes to distinguish between these two terms, but in his case, the meanings of these two German terms are different. His application is analogous to Ogden’s semiotic triangle in distinguishing “the referent” from “the thought of reference,” as is also the case in Peircian thought, which differentiates between “object” and “interpretant.” The application of these two terms by Hirsch indeed differs from Husserl as well. 34 E. D. Hirsch. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967: 213, 8. 35 R. Magliola. Phenomenology and Literature. Indiana: Perdue University Press, 1977: 179.

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as the principle of “validity” in interpretation, and the approach of interpretation is not to search carefully for the authorial intention either. In 1982, an important conference dedicated to the “Problem of the Interpretative Principle” was held at the University of Chicago and the papers collected were entitled The Politics of Interpretation and published the following year.36 Hirsch’s theory was strongly against by theorists from different schools and he had also constantly justified himself.37 For most critics, what the interpreter has is nothing more than the text in which the author can only leave some traces of his intentionality. Nevertheless, the text cannot sufficiently represent this intention. Indeed, the perceptual materials—a poem or a series of gestures—that the text can provide is often too weak and obscure to convey the authorial intention. This debate revealed that most theorists tended to put the principle of meaning on the interpretative meaning, arguing that meaning can be only fulfilled when the interpreter has acquired it, which is the position of neo-hermeneutics developed by Heidegger and Gadamer, moving toward the “reception theory” in Germany in the 1970s and “reader response criticism” in the United States in the 1980s. The emphasis on interpretation, however, is an important point that makes semiotics and hermeneutics move closer to each other in recent years. Certainly, after the appearance of The Meaning of Meaning, many schools emerged during the twentieth century and participated in the debate on meaning, which cannot be known by the two authors. However, the book “gives us many presentiments of what would later happen, many anticipations of genius,”38 in which the most creative and constructive is their review of Peirce’s semiotics, although most of the manuscripts of Peirce had not been published at the time. They bring out the quintessence of Peirce’s semiotics: “An account of the process of Interpretation is thus the key to the understanding of the Sign-situation and therefore the beginning of wisdom.”39 Having perceptibly discerned this trend, they put, in the last group of definitions, the origin of meaning in interpretation: XVI. That to which the Interpreter of a symbol. (a) Refers. (b) Believes himself to be referring.

These are different formulations for the same principle: once we approach the question of meaning from the interpretive point of view, then what the interpreter refers to can only be what he subjectively believes he is referring to. Meaning is thus the intentional act of the interpreter, and what he grasps from the object intended. In this act of interpreting, if the authorial intentionality does not leave sufficient traces, then it can only be suspended, and put aside without discussion for the time being. The components of the metalanguage of interpretation itself fulfill the task necessary 36

T. J. Mitchell (ed.). The Politics of Interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. E. D. Hirsch. “The Politics of Theories of Interpretation,” in The Politics of Interpretation. T. J. Mitchell (ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983: 321–34. 38 Umberto Eco. “Introduction” to C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning, New York: Harourt Grace Jovanivich, 1989: vi. 39 Ibid. 37

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to understand meaning. The following definition thus just came to the point. Meaning is defined as: XIII. (c) That which a sign is Interpreted as being of.

The key problem is not the essence of meaning any more, but the process of interpretation. Thus, the Husserlian theory of meaning cited above is reversed: it is the interpreter and not the author who “must endow it (the sign) with a meaning in certain acts of mind.” The intentional act of the interpreter makes the sign the intentional object from which the meaning is produced. The interpretation of the interpreter thus becomes the true actualization of meaning. The two authors of The Meaning of Meaning, however, had no way of knowing the appearance of Being and Time by Heidegger two years later. Different from Husserl and Hirsch, Heidegger’s understanding of the question of meaning eventually worked as the theoretical starting point of the Heideggrian-Gadamerian hermeneutic model. There are two essential points on which they disagree: for Husserl and Hirsch, meaning produced by the intentional act of the addressor of the sign toward the object intended and is therefore a function of the intentional act; for Heidegger and Gadamer, with the return to ontology, meaning is the relationship between subject and object. The question of meaning plays a central role in Heideggerian philosophical system, with an elaborated analysis in the chapters of thirty-one and thirty-two of Being and Time and in the two parts §20 a, b of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. The crucial concept of “pre-understanding” proposed by Heidegger—the mode by which consciousness controls understanding—is akin to the metalinguistic theory of semiotics. It is obvious that on the question of meaning, Heidegger tends toward hermeneutics, which he designates as “intelligibility.” He believes that his theory of meaning is “in principle ontological-existential interpretation.”40 Thus, “Meaning is that wherein the intelligibility of something maintains itself. What can be articulated in disclosure that we understands we call meaning.”41 Heidegger would disagree (although he does not reply directly) with Husserl that “meaning is a function of the intentional act,” since he thinks that meaning constitutes an essential condition of being: “But strictly speaking, what is understood is not meaning, but beings, or being.”42 To fall in the consciousness and conferred with meaning is the reason that being is known (semiotized) and understood, and become “beings.” Consequently, the definition of meaning, from Husserl’s epistemology, returns back to ontology, and the representation and understanding of meaning reassume the ontological position. This is the reason why we indicated in Chapter Two of Part One that what the meaning theory of philosophical semiotics studies is the ontology enveloped by epistemology. The hermeneutic theory develops along the direction set by Heidegger. HansGeorg Gadamer, the greatest contributor to hermeneutics, often repeats Heidegger’s famous formula: “language is being understood.” Man is not the subject that speaks, 40

Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996: 142. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid.

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but language speaks. For Heidegger, not the individual man, but language itself speaks and speaks being. Meaning is communicated by the sign, which is not the thing in itself and for itself, but constructed by the intentionality of the interpreter. The interpreter selects, from the perception of the sign, the aspects of the perception related to the construction of meaning. Although limited and superficial, these aspects of perception are sufficient to constitute a text to grasp a meaning. This leads to the phenomenon that I call the “partialization” of the sign: what is perceived is not the thing itself, but certain qualities that it possesses. The thing does not demand comprehensive recognition to carry meaning: it will be a burden to involve too many qualities in the process of signification; too many “perceived” qualities do not help meaning to restore the thing itself, on the contrary, the sign, out of the need to carry meaning, forces the receiver to “partialize” his perception, and forces the thing to become a “simplistic form” of meaning,43 because truth cannot be fulfilled in a single act of grasping. Meaning arises from the reciprocal relation between the subject and object, but there cannot be full interactions between the two. Once the perception of the interactions is interpreted as a sign, the meaning must arise. This refers back to Heidegger’s words: meaning is generated when the object and the subject are in some way related, and generated only from “the interpretative act” which works as a juncture for the relation. The object only acquires its “givenness” at this particular juncture, but the other parts of the sign are bracketed and “suspended” by the interpreter. To put it in another way, in favor of the grasping of meaning, the existence of those parts deliberately excluded from the consciousness, whose relevance then are suspended without further consideration. Semiotics further regards that when the sign is present, the meaning is absent, and the existence of the thing itself is one of the elements that are “suspended” by the subject who tries to understand. When a person perceives the coming of a car, the car, as the origin of this perception, can carry infinite meanings, but only the interpreter’s intentionality can grasp the aspects that are related and obtain the meaning of “danger.” Thus, the meaning does not reside in the object, as the meaning of “danger” does not reside in the car itself, but in the relation between the subject’s intentionality and the object, and requires the comprehension of the subject’s intentionality to open up the “intelligibility” of the thing from the thing. In comprehension, if the meaning of “danger” is absent, or, it is just because of the lack of this immediate presence, for people who are “slow minded” in the ordinary sense which means the “presencing” process of meaning is delayed too much, the consequence will not be good.

43

On the problem of “Partialization,” see Zhao Yiheng. Semiotics: Principles and Problems (3rd Edition). Nanking: Nanking University Press, 2015: 45.

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5 An Attempt of Conclusion After all the discussions, the book would like to propose an adequate definition of “meaning”: the necessity of consciousness lies in the fact that intentionality of the consciousness releases the meaning from the “intelligibility” of the thing when it confronts the world. Meaning is the contributions made by the things to the existence of my consciousness. The reason why I am living in this world is due to the stimulation of the object by my intentionality and then the current of meaning produced by my intentionality. But meaning does not exist in the object, and a sensor that only receives external stimuli cannot produce meaning without the consciousness behind the back. It is like a surveillance camera that will never make sense and will never become a sign if it is not controlled. The coming into being of meaning, therefore, needs the conscious intentionality to receive the perception. The confrontation between the intentionality of the interpreting subject and the world is the only origin of meaning. From the other perspective, meaning is the way of explaining the subject’s existence in the world. “I think” in the Cartesian “cogito” does not lead to “I am,” but the fact that “I think” in the face of the world and grasp a meaning out of the thinking can make sure “I am.” The acts of meaning, instead of being an insignificant intermediate element between the subject and the world, is a fundamental link in which the subject and the world reciprocally stimulate existentiality. For Heidegger, meaning is the reciprocal relation between the subject and the world. From the discussion above, the definition of meaning can be understood of a two-way and to and fro structure: meaning is the sign that the intentionality of consciousness grasps from the object, which needs to be explained by another sign. This is where our basic definition of meaning comes from: meaning is the correlative way in which the consciousness and the object come in to being respectively. Meaning is the product of the intentional act of the subject taking the object “as” the source of meaning. Only the being with subjectivity has this intentional act. The intentional act from the subject toward things are conferred with meaning by the object intended. The sign is the qualities of things “relevant to meaning,” and meaning must be explicated through another sign. The acquisition, transmission, and explanation of meaning are thus all found at the convergence of the signs of both the subject of things. Perhaps, with such a review of these ideas, we can no doubt integrate the different theories of meaning synthesized in The Meaning of Meaning, namely those of Husserlian phenomenology, of Heideggerian existentialist hermeneutics, and of Peircian semiotics, to find a possibility for semiotics and phenomenology to complement each other. Ninety years has passed since the publication of The Meaning of Meaning, but the logic of this work still remains legitimate today, leading naturally to an adequate conclusion which accords with philosophical semiotics. At a time when various theories of meaning are emerging, in the light of this book, we hope to disentangle out of the knob a thread for the advancement of the theory of meaning. Indeed, the following parts of the book will further develop the points of this chapter.

Chapter 6

Formal Intuition

1 What is Formal Intuition? The relationship between the meaning and the sign is a shared subject that has preoccupied all disciplines since the beginning of the twentieth century (especially analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and semiotics). It has thus become a central problem of modern thought. The sign is not only the means of communication but also of production of meaning. As a science of meaning, semiotics is more interested in the formal question of meaning. Meaning must be carried (produced, communicated, understood) by signs, and conversely, the sign can only be used to carry meaning. Thus Derrida avers that “by definition there can be no sign without signification, no signifying without the signified.”1 There is no sign that does not carry meaning, and no meaning that does not be carried by a sign. The first question that semiotic philosophy must answer is that how do meaning and sign appear when consciousness first confronts the thing? How does meaning occur? How does the “thing” that the consciousness confronts become the object, and, furthermore, become the carrier of meaning? In other words, how does intentionality transform the object into a sign? This process of the transformation is designated as “formal intuition,” in which the fundamental elements of the act of meaning, like the consciousness, intentionality, the thing, the object, are directly involved. How their relationships are constructed thus becomes, for philosophical semiotics, the foremost question to be answered. The primordial connection between the consciousness and the thing in their confrontation is the intentionality from the consciousness. The intentionality is the basic propensity of the consciousness to seek and grasp meaning. It is both the primary function and the way of being of consciousness. “Formal intuition” is the 1 Jacques Derrida. Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans., and with an introduction by David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973: 17.

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essential act of the consciousness to grasp meaning, which means that the impetus of formal intuition is the intentionality with which the consciousness seeks meaning. The consciousness projects the “noesis” (the intentional act) on the thing which is then transformed into a “noema” (an intentional object), and meaning is produced during the process of transformation. These two terms derive from Greek whose root “nous” means both “mind” and “intellect,” and the ambiguity offers several possibilities of translation: acts of consciousness, objects of consciousness, intentional acts, intentional objects; acts of intentionality, object of intentionality and so on and so forth. The term “noema” can be translated into “object” and “correlative.” The “object” does not equal meaning, which should be differentiated from one another, but the “correlative,” however, is another variation of meaning. The thing, under the pressure of the intentionality of the consciousness renders the form to carry meaning, that is, the object, and responds to intentionality. Meaning is therefore the reciprocal relation formed by the consciousness and the thing. In the book, we will name “noesis” as the “intentional act,” “noema” the “intentional object.” It should also be pointed out that this pair of important categories only appears as a result of the essential nature of consciousness to seek meaning. We will call the initial phase in which meaning is grasped “formal intuition.” The so-called “initial” is the first step that consciousness and the thing come into contact. For Peirce, the acts of the sign can be necessarily divided into three stages: “Firstness,” namely the “appearance” of the sign, which “immediate and instantaneous,” like the siren whistling; when it demands the subject to interpret the perception, it comes to “Secondness;” and finally in “Thirdness.” The act of meaning will not remain at its initial phase, and along with the accumulation and comprehension of meaning will lead to the emergence of experience. We will limit ourselves, in this chapter, to the initial phase of the act of meaning. Different from the “essential intuition” in Husserl’s phenomenology, the task of the formal intuition of semiotic philosophy, though also as an intuition, is only to understand how the meaning is grasped. What they have in common is the understanding of the concept of “intentionality” and “the self-evidence of intuition.” Husserl’s understanding of “intuition” is that “Every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.”2 There are two reasons that formal intuition should be the essential starting point for the act of meaning: first, the intuitive motivation is self-evident that the nature of consciousness is to “seek meaning” which is also the origin of the noesis; second, the “form” of the intuitive object, as described by Peirce,

2

Edmund Husserl. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy I: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Trans. F. Kersten. Hague: Kluwer Academic Publishers Group: 44.

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is “that by virtue of which anything is such as it is,”3 thus the manifestation of the unconcealable qualities of the object. The “essential intuition,” also called the “ideation,” is the starting point of Husserl’s phenomenology. In the essential intuition, what is conferred by the object is not only the perceptual individual, but also the essential concept of phenomenology. Is it possible for intuition to grasp the essence of a thing through conceptualization? In my opinion, semiotic philosophy is primarily concerned with the production and interpretation of meaning, but whether the meaning thus grasped is the essence of the thing or not, is not necessarily the issue that should be solved in the discussion of the initial noesis. Peirce proposes to reduce the scope of the phenomenological intuition to the initial formal appearance of the object: “It religiously abstains from all speculation as to any relations between its categories and physiological facts, cerebral or other. It does not undertake, but sedulously avoids, hypothetical explanations of any sort.”4 Peirce therefore suggests: the deep understanding of the thing as a problem should be solved later by the accumulations of lived knowledge and experience after the formal intuition. The initial phase of the noesis of consciousness is essentially an intuition, the reason for which is that the very existence of consciousness is to seek for meanings, and in turn the seeking for meaning is the essential characteristic of the “being-inthe-world” of consciousness. Peirce calls it the “innate tendency” of mind toward truth. The consciousness can never stop searching for meaning because man must live in a world constituted by meanings and this pursuit of meaning will not end until the consciousness cannot function any more. Thus, consciousness is, by definition, “the consciousness of something”: the act of seeking for meaning is the mode by which the consciousness being in the world (whether the noesis can get “truth” or not is another issue). As an act of consciousness, formal intuition is self-evident and does not need to be justified or verified. To put it differently, consciousness will engender the intentionality to grasp meaning, and this need and ability are both the anchor point of intrinsic self-evidence and the starting point of philosophical semiotics: the intentional act of grasping meanings does not depend on anything else. In contrast, the response from the object, however, is not spontaneous, but the result of pressure from the intentionality of consciousness. The consciousness, seeking for meanings, thus is the unchangeable starting point of the act of meaning. Once human consciousness no longer seeks for meanings, then the consciousness will disappear as well, because the consciousness is the psychic existence of the act of seeking for meanings. Mencius once declared: “To the mind belongs the office of thinking. By thinking, it gets the right view of things; by neglecting to think, it fails to do this. These—the senses and the mind—are what

3 Charles Sanders Peirce. The Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce. Ed. by Max Fisch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981–1993, Vol. 1, p. 371. 4 Charles Sanders Pierce. Collected Papers. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958, Vol. 1: 287.

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Heaven has given to us.”5 It makes it clear that the primary condition of meaning is not sensations, but the intentional function (to think) of consciousness (the mind). The only purpose of consciousness is “to think,” which provides the intentionality to grasp meanings. “The right view that the thinking gets” is the meaning, the object is the product of the act of “thinking,” and this pursuit of the consciousness of meaning is the intuitive instinct that “has been given to us by Heaven,” which needs no further justification. Not all mental activities are manifestations of consciousness. A person who passes out no longer has consciousness when it ceases the search of meanings. In this sense, mental illness, illusion or hallucination, and even sleep, can indeed be considered as preview of death. Although, in these cases, consciousness continues to pursue meanings, it functions partially and in a distorted way, and can only maintain a vague, confused, and intermittent pursuit of meaning, from which one can only get an incoherent text of meanings. Formal intuition cannot know the entirety of the object, and any further understanding of the object must go beyond the limits of formal intuition. Each thing has countless aspects, and “a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower,” is not an exaggerated metaphor any more. In a given initial noesis, only some of the aspects fall within the correlative scope of intention. For example, when we see the expression of an angry person, we intuitively perceive the meaning of “being angry,” but we cannot and probably never will be able to “correctly” understand the very cause of it and the physiological, psychological and personality mechanisms behind it. Instead of being resolved by a single formal intuition, the basic understanding of this situation, however, at least requires an accumulation of several noesis. For Peirce, this is only possible after knowledge has been accumulated in experience, and “By being joined with other signs, to approach as nearly as possible to determining an interpretant which would be the perfect Truth, the absolute Truth.”6 To know and understand requires more semiotic acts. But all advanced understandings are triggered by primary formal intuition. Formal intuition is the first spark generated when consciousness and the thing confront for the first time. Without this initial noesis, there will be no further chainextended meaning acts or the so-called “unlimited semiosis” in semiotic terms. In addition, it is impossible to enter into an understanding of the “Secondness” of the cognitive process, and let alone categorical distinction and value judgment of the “Thirdness.” Peirce believes that “truth is the ultimate interpretant of every sign.”7 “Truth” is only the impossible goal toward which we strive to move forward. The understanding of a thing can be completed by progressive accumulation, which even allows us to get further to the “essences” of things, but it is beyond the reach of formal intuition.

5

Jiao Xun. Annotation on Mencius. Beijing: Zhong Hua Book Company, 1987: 796. Charles Sanders Peirce. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Ed., by Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, Vol. 2: 304. 7 Ibid. 6

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Then what is after all “meaning?” Husserl repeatedly emphasizes that meaning is not the intentional object, but that on the contrary, it is always the intentional act. Hirsch, who claimed to be the successor of Husserl’s thought, however, declares that “the general term for all intentional objects is meaning.”8 Some think that this proposition goes against Husserl’s original thought,9 because for Hirsch, meaning is the quality of the object. In my view, meaning is a two-way constituent: it is the response that the noesis of consciousness obtains from the object, and which, in turn, allows the subject of consciousness to exist in the world. Meaning is therefore the correlation between subjectivity and objectivity. More precisely, meaning is also the mode in which objectivity and subjectivity are constituted jointly: consciousness not only constitutes the object, but also is constituted by meaning due to its constitution of the intentional object. Maurice Merleau-Ponty highlights, however, the principle of the reciprocal constitution of meaning: the object is necessarily that of the consciousness, and the consciousness that of the object. In his Instructions for Practical Living, Wang Yangming avers that “the master of the body is the mind, the product of the mind is meaning, the essence of meaning is knowledge, the lodging of meaning is the thing.”10 The important process in which consciousness in search of meaning is thus very clear: “The master of the body is the mind” focuses on the fact that the subjective existence of self is the consciousness of self; “the product of the mind is meaning” regards intentionality as the main function of consciousness; “the essence of meaning is knowledge” points out that the fundamental purpose of intentionality is to grasp meaning; “the lodging of meaning is the thing” explains the fact that the pressure of intentionality turns the thing into an object. The development in order of “thing-knowledge-mind-body” corresponds well to the theory of meaning posited in the book. Researchers have noted that Wang Yangming’s proposal echoes phenomenology. Many debates on their commonalities and differences have thus taken place.11 In my opinion, the proposal is more in keeping with the formal intuition of philosophical semiotics: the “meaning” Wang Yangming speaks of does not refer to the purely subjective “mind,” but to the “intentionality” emitted by consciousness; the “thing” can be understood as the “object.” This understanding is justified by another passage of Wang Yangming: “Acts of consciousness all refer to the existence of concrete things. As long as there is such a meaning, there is such a thing; without such a meaning the thing disappears.”12 The thing may exist independent of the consciousness, but without the pressure of intentionality, it certainly cannot be transformed 8

E. D. Hirsch. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967: 218. R. Magliola. Phenomenology and Literature. Indiana: Perdue University Press, 1977: 179. 10 Wang Shouren. The Complete Works of Wang Yangming. Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House Co. Ltd., 2014: 6. 11 Cf. Lin Dan. “The ‘Mind’ and ‘Thing’ in the Situation—The Phenomenological Analysis of the Relationship between the Mind and Thing Posited by Wang Yangming.” Jiangsu Social Sciences. 2010 (2): 25–29. 12 Wang Shouren. The Complete Works of Wang Yangming. Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House Co. Ltd., 2014: 8. 9

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into an object; on the other hand, once there is “acts of consciousness,” there is accordingly such a “thing,” and all the things will be transformed only under the pressure of intentionality into objects. The definition of the meaning in formal intuition has an additional process of response. It can be added one more sentence following the logic of Wang Yangming: “the meaning from the object’s response is the mind,” because Wang Yangming knows well that consciousness is constituted by the meaning responded from the object, and he declares later that “the eye without form takes the color of all things as its form; the ear without form takes the sound of all things as its form; the nose without form takes the smell of all things as its form; the mouth without form takes the taste of all things as its form; the mind without form takes the true and false of all things in the universe as its form.”13 The responding meaning from the object to the meaning grasping intentionality in turn constitutes consciousness. The relationship is thus formed as (mind) consciousness → (meaning grasping) intention → meaning (given by the object) → (mind) consciousness. In this way, the cycle of the constitution of meaning from the subjectivity to the objectivity and back to itself is accomplished.

2 Is the Intentional Object the Thing or the Sign? Is the object of the noesis ultimately the thing or the sign? This is a question that philosophical semiotics cannot avoid. A few years ago, I proposed to define the sign as “a perception understood as carrying meaning.”14 If it is true that meaning is manifested by the sign, the “object” that the formal intuition creates must be both the sign and the thing, or, more clearly, “the thing that is presented in the form of a sign.” It is because the thing provides aspects carrying meaning that it presents itself as an object in the formal intuition. In the process where the thing presents itself as an object and the object provides a perception as a sign, the two elements—the thing and the sign—are two different ways of being of the intentional object, which combine into one thing in formal intuition. Once out of the category of formal intuition, the two elements are clearly distinguishable: the thing can continue to provide aspects to the consciousness, with which the consciousness can form a deeper apprehension of the thing; while the sign proposes a perception only in this noesis, and for a better understanding, as Peirce says, it will be necessary “to associate with other signs (with similar meaning)” first. Peirce goes on to say clearly and positively that “the idea of a quality is the idea of a phenomenon or partial phenomenon considered as a monad, without reference to its parts or components and without reference to anything else. We must not consider whether it exists, or is only imaginary……Experience is the course of life. The world

13

Ibid.: 108. Cf. Zhao Yiheng. “Redefinition of Sign and Semiotics.” Chinese Journal of Journalism and Communication 35.06 (2013): 6–14.

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is that which experience inculcates. Quality is the monadic element of the world.”15 The meaning of the passage is that the thing permanently existing in the acts of meaning constantly responds to the intentional act. Whereas if we confine ourselves to the discussion of a single and given initial noesis, then the aspects provided by the thing will be the sign, and the thing thus becomes the sign in formal intuition, because it corresponds to the definition of mine: “A perception understood as carrying meaning.”16 If some researchers in semiotics emphasize the distinction between the thing and the sign, it is because they consider the sign as an instrument with which meaning is transported after being grasped. On this subject, Husserl has a remarkable formula: “Every sign is a sign for something, but not every sign has ‘meaning’, a ‘sense’ that the sign ‘expresses.’”17 According to whether a sign “has meaning” or not, he classifies signs into two categories: “indications and expressions.” Signs in the sense of indications “do not express anything, unless they happen to fulfill a significant as well as an indicative function.”18 On the other hand, “expressions” are “meaningful signs.”19 According to Husserl, the sign only appears when it needs to be expressed after intuition. It is neither initial nor necessarily carried by the perception that the consciousness has grasped. Indeed, the “acts of intuition” and the “acts of signification” fall within two quite distinct phenomenal categories, depending exactly on whether the object is represented “symbolically” or “intuitively,” or in a mixed way.20 Thus, Max Scheler, the German phenomenologist, repudiated Cassirer’s idea of man as a “symbolic animal,” and “conceived of phenomenology as a concerted effort to go from the symbols back to the things, from a conceptual science and a civilization contented with symbols to intuitively experienced life.”21 While I define the sign as “a perception understood as carrying meaning.” If, in the intuition of consciousness, a thing is transformed into an object, it is because it carries meaning. Consequently, the perceived aspect of the object is the sign and is no longer the thing-in-itself, which can be expressed with Peirce’s formula: “All our thought and knowledge is by signs.”22

15

Charles Sanders Pierce. Collected Papers. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1931– 1958, Vol. 1: 424–426. 16 Cf. Zhao Yiheng. “Redefinition of Sign and Semiotics.” Chinese Journal of Journalism and Communication 35.06 (2013): 6–14. 17 Edmund Husserl. Logical Investigations (Second German Edition): Vol. I and Vol. II, Part I. Trans. J. N. Findlay and edited with a new introduction by Dermot Moran. London and New York: Routledge, 1970: 183. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.: 187. 20 Ibid., Vol. II: 183–188. 21 Herbert Spiegelberg. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (2nd Edition). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965: 242. 22 Charles Sanders Pierce. “Letter to Lady Welby,” in Collected Papers. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958, Vol. 8: 332.

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It is supposed to say that some scholars hold the same view that the thing and the sign are not essentially different in the production of meaning. For the cultural philosopher, Stuart Hall, “There are two systems of representation involved: First, there is the ‘system’ by which all sorts of objects, people and events are correlated with a set of concepts or mental representations which we carry around in our heads;” the second system of representation is signs: “the general term we use for words, sounds or images which carry meaning is signs.”23 Hall actually acknowledges that “concepts of things or mental representations,” like signs, are to “represent” meaning, so they are difficult to distinguish in the initial acts of meaning, or, as Husserl suggests, it is impossible to, all the time, make a distinguish first and perform the noesis second. As it is already discussed above, things and signs whose continuities of meaning differ in a fundamental way cannot be distinguished in initial acts of meaning by consciousness, because at the moment things present themselves as signs. The object provides aspects to constitute meaning. Whereas, in the phase of formal intuition, such an aspect is either impossible or useless to distinguish whether it comes from a thing or from another sign. The red of an apple and the red of a wax statue or a painting of apple can each lead to the meanings like being “fresh,” “edible” and “delightful;” a smile, on a person’s face, a picture or a screen, can all evoke the senses of being “nice,” “approachable,” and so forth. Another example: whether the morning sounds that a person hears in a village when he wakes up are the natural sounds from surroundings or the sounds from a recording, for the initial intuitive meaning, there is no difference. This is not to say that the things and artificial signs such as the image are hard to distinguish, but there is no way to distinguish them in intuition. The divergence between semiotic philosophy and phenomenology derives from the different understandings of the essence of signs. Those who believe that the thing is different from the sign probably think from the bottom of their hearts that the sign substitutes for meaning in “something standing for something else” (aliquid stat pro aliquot) manner. If there are meanings to be conveyed, the sign is called upon as an instrument to fulfill this purpose. The meaning, however, does not appear before the sign, but there is a sign as the carrier as soon as there is a meaning. The freshness of an apple does not necessarily need to be transferred by another sign, such as an image or a picture. The fact that the apple itself becomes the object of consciousness is the consequence of the red and fresh aspects becoming a sign. When the consciousness perceives certain aspect of the thing, the thing will be transformed into an object of knowing, and all the cognitive acts depend on the “appresentation.” At this point the partial aspect of the thing thus becomes the sign of the thing, and between the two is thus born a significative relationship with which the partial relates to the whole (The topic will be further discussed in Chap. 8 “Aperception and Appresentation”). The apparent distinction between the sign and the aspect of the “thing,” in the practical meaning activities, would be temporarily bracketed or suspended for various reasons, provided that these points of difference are subjectively overlooked: a picture 23

Stuart Hall, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage Publications, 1997: 17–18.

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of flowers might deceive birds; a portrait of beauty might let Liu Mengmei (who is the main character in the play, Peony Pavilion) fall in love, which is an uncommonly emotionally aroused identification; hearing Cao Cao say “plum,” seeing a drawing of plums, and smelling the smell of plums, will all have a similar effect to seeing or tasting the real ones; the actual meaning one acquires from watching a soccer match on the spot or through a live broadcast or even a late re-broadcast on television will not be that different, (if only the result has not been known beforehand). Some will disagree by saying that the atmosphere can only be felt on the spot. While television also presents more details that you can’t see on the spot. The formal meaning will be the same if the match on the spot and the match broadcast on television provide the same aspects (at least in the eyes of “fake fans” like me). As it has been previously mentioned that Husserl, with a different position, carefully distinguishes between the “thing” and the “sign”: the meaning of a thing is that of the pre-sign, and the meaning of understanding or interpretation could be that of a thing before mediated. Husserl classifies the process of human cognition into four stages: perception (of a thing), intuition (of the essence of a thing), non-intuitive representative acts (or objectifying acts), non-objectifying acts (value). The sign only appears in the third stage. Thus, for Husserl, the sign is the “indirect” meaning after intuition and is not of a primary nature. The “acts of intuition” in the second stage and the “acts of signification” in the third stage are different in kind: the intuitive representation is authentic and the symbolic representation is “inauthentic.” The socalled “objectifying acts” is to express the meaning of the object with mediated or textualized signs.24 The distinction between the two cannot be denied: the mediated representation, whatever the medium, whether by saying, writing, drawing or gestures, all have presupposed interpretation. The explanation of Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky can help: “The conversion of a chain of facts into a text is invariably accompanied by selection; that is, by fixing certain events which are translatable into elements of the text and forgetting others, marked as nonessential.”25 By these words, they mean that once textualized, (e.g., an apple is named, drawn or sculpted as an “apple”), the sign has already been interpreted once, which will lead to the partial representation of the thing, instead of being the original one. The interpretation of the representation is, therefore, the interpretation of interpretation, a secondary one. In that case, our apprehension of things and interpretation of signs will be unconnected with one another and end in their own proper place. Nonetheless, from the following parts, it can be seen that such a distinction is made only for the convenience of discussion. Human cognition has no such clear and definite boundaries. In the Gadamerian system, the object of hermeneutics is not only the set of literary or philosophical writings, but also actual things. “We have seen that the goal of all 24

Edmund Husserl. Logical Investigations (Second German Edition): Vol. II. Trans. J. N. Findlay and edited with a new introduction by Dermot Moran. London and New York: Routledge, 1970: 183–188. 25 Yuri Lotman and B. A. Uspensky. “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture,” in New Literary History: Soviet Semiotics and Criticism: An Anthology, 1978, Vol. 9, No. 2: 216.

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attempts to reach an understanding is agreement concerning the subject matter…. and it must direct its gaze ‘on the things themselves.’”26 Here, Gadamer emphasizes in brackets that “(‘things themselves’ which, in the case of the literary critic, are meaningful texts, which themselves are again concerned with objects).” The object of interpretation can be both things and texts, and the latter, as we explained in the introduction, are also things themselves. Many philosophers have already discussed of the question (the difficulty of distinguishing between the thing and the sign). As it has been quoted from Ogden and Richards that “Throughout almost all our life we are treating things as signs. All experience, using the word in the widest possible sense, is either enjoyed or interpreted (i.e., treated as a sign) or both.”27 Husserl also understands the potential identity of the thing and the sign in the acts of meaning. Whereas Derrida, when criticizing Husserl’s theory of signs, indicates that “if one considers the sign as the structure of an intentional movement, it does not fall under the category of a thing in general, it is not a ‘being’ whose own being would be questioned?”28 For Mikhail Bakhtin, even the reality of thought or experience is a sign: “The text is the immediate reality (reality of thought and experience), in which thought and law can be constructed independently, and without which there is neither the object of thinking nor thought.”29 Deleuze, however, is more positive: “The thing and the perception of the thing are one and the same thing, one and the same image, but related to one or other of two systems of reference.”30 The kind of being “related to” will not happen until the accomplishment of the formal intuition. While if they present “the same image,” the noema, or the intentional object, will be the same. The cognitive semiotician, Patrizia Violi is “convinced that consciousness always includes what we might define as a semiotic function, and that we therefore cannot have consciousness without semiosis. However, such an implication does not necessarily imply the opposite; and we might well envision the presence of semiosis before we have fully developed consciousness.”31 The so-called “before we have fully developed consciousness” is indeed the period wherein the consciousness evokes the initial instinctive intuition. The above-mentioned thinkers all believe that it is in fact not possible to distinguish the thing from the sign in acts of meaning. So why we emphasize on this point again 26 Hans-Georg Gadamer. Truth and Method (Second Revised Edition). Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London and New York: Continuum, 1975: 268–293. 27 C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning, New York: Harcourt, Grace Janovich, 1989: 50. 28 Jacques Derrida. Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. and with an introduction by David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973: 25–26. 29 Quoted in Tzvetan Todorov. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981: 17. 30 Gilles Deleuze. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997: 63. 31 Patrizia Violi. “Semiosis without Consciousness? An Ontogenetic Perspective.” Cognitive Semiotics 1. Fall (2007): 65.

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and again? Why do we differentiate our position from the definition of signs proposed by Husserl? Because it is not a purely theoretical question, but connected with the starting point of acts of meaning. Moreover, it would be impossible to deal with the discrimination and analysis of the notions of “apprehension” and “interpretation” without this identical relationship between the thing and the sign. It follows, therefore, that meaning is necessarily that of a sign, that the sign is not only the instrument for expressing or vehicle of carrying meaning, but also the essential condition for the interpretation of meaning, because acts of meaning only appear when there are signs, and there is no meaning that does not need to be carried by a sign. The formal intuition of consciousness, when it directs at a thing, renders the related aspects manifest as signs.

3 Formal Reduction What we mean by “reduction” is to reduce to the most essential elements. Intentional acts must exclude all the factors which are not immediately related to the noesis in order for the consciousness to grasp the meaning. The first step of formal reduction is to “bracket” (epoché) the irrelevant aspects in terms of the interpretation. As we have already discussed, the thing under the pressure of the meaning-grasping intentionality is reduced to the object which is constituted of the aspects that provide meaning. The noesis put certain elements of the thing into “brackets,” without further consideration and discussion of their existential status, which explains the point of view proposed previously that the thing and the sign cannot be differentiated in the formal reduction, because the formal intuition in the first place suspends the “thingness” of the object without further concern. The thing loses its thingness during the production of meaning. Peirce’s exposition regarding the problem is perspicuous: “It will be plain from what has been said that phaneroscopy has nothing at all to do with the question of how far the phanerons it studies correspond to any realities.”32 He continues the explanation at another place: “The quality of red depends on anybody actually seeing it, so that red things are no longer red in the dark.”33 The bright red color and the shape is the undeniable evidence of the existence of an apple, but in the dark, the red color “disappears,” and the color we know of the apple remains only in our memory. At the moment, the formal intuition can only depend on other aspects, e.g., the touch of the roundness, the smell of the sweetness. Thus in the initial noesis, the object loses its thingness and is reduced by the formal intuition to the perception of a bunch of signs. In the noesis, it is through formal reduction that the thing acquires the meaningconferring ability. All that is originally presented in consciousness is the perceptual representations that Peirce designates as “phaneron” when he discusses of the “nature 32

Charles Sanders Pierce. Collected Papers. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1931– 1958, Vol. 1: 287. 33 Ibid.: 422.

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of phenomenon” of the firstness, and by the phaneron he means “The collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind.” Phaneron is both a thing and a sign, since what “appears” is only a part of the aspects. Through the formal reduction, the thing that the subjective consciousness intends is reduced to significative perception carrying meaning, or simply, signs. The object of the noesis is in essence the construct of intentionality. In order to grasp meaning, the consciousness first envisages the form of the thing, the intentionality delimitates the scope of its perception, which is a necessary precondition for meaning-grasping. In the course of the pursuit of meaning by consciousness, all objects are likely to present certain aspects to become sign-vehicles of meaning; on the contrary, each sign-vehicle can be decomposed into the thing when the meaning it carries disappears. Each thing and each sign is thus a “sign-thing” dyad of signness and thingness. Even the “pure signs” invented solely by man such as speech, figures, marks, brand, and money include elements of things. Since all things are sign-thing dyads, they can move toward the purely material pole in order to transform themselves into the thing completely extraneous to the acts of meaning. They can also move toward the purely sign-vehicle pole, no longer being things, solely to express meaning, or more precisely, solely to provide the sign-vehicle for acts of meaning. When one pays, one uses the symbolic meaning carried by the aspects of the paper money. While the material qualities, or physical characteristics of the bill do not participate in the act of paying, the concrete act of meaning, unless an abnormality of the material quality of the bill makes its symbolic meaning suspicious. All sign-things slide between the two extremities, and the things, for the most part, are sign-objects with different deviations, whose “distribution” between practical parts and symbolic parts depends on the particular intentionality of meaning-grasping.34 Starting from this basic notion, it can be seen that the sign-things reduced by formal intuition to the objects of the noesis can be classified into three categories: The first includes natural things, e.g., thunder, lightning, rock, which do not originally appear to “carry meaning,” but “fall” within human consciousness and are semiotizated: thunder and lightning are perceived as the anger of the ruler of Heaven or the omen of a storm; rock can be considered as the mark and clue of a vein of ore or an extraordinary craftsmanship of nature. The second contains artificial things: man-made artifacts, e.g., stone axes, bowls and chopsticks, food, are not originally intended to carry meaning, but things to be used. These things become signs when they present the aspects “understood as carrying meaning,” or “semiotizated”: a stone axe in a museum becomes the witness of a civilization; a food product in a display case arouses our appetite; “pure signs” invented sole to express meaning, like speech, facial expressions, gestures, figures, smoke, money, the parade, the shield, the banner, game, sport, art, and so forth, do not need to be “semiotizated” to become signs, because they are in the very beginning invented to be carriers of meaning. In some cases as it is mentioned above, they can be decomposed into things. 34

On the “sign-thing” dyad, see Zhao Yiheng. Semiotics: Principles and Problems (3rd Edition). Nanking: Nanking University Press, 2015: 27.

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The third concerns “pure perceptions” without thingness, for instance, mental images, illusions, dreams, or “blank signs” which are caused by “the absence of the due perception,” like the silence and poke face.35 They exist as signs because they are also “perceptions understood as carrying meaning.” The homeland in a dream, a pause in a music, and the blankness in a painting, all are signs carrying meaning. Even a blank sign can manifest thingness, e.g., the silence between the two movements of a symphony makes one feel the existence of something, although there is nothing.36 The kind of perception is sometimes too illusory and unreal, but the receiver of the image does not necessarily believe that it is a fantastic vision. As Lao Zi writes about the Dao in chapter XXI of The Book of Dao and Teh: “Evasive, elusive, yet latent in it are forms. Elusive, evasive, yet latent in it are objects. Dark and dim, yet latent in it is the life-force. The life-force being very true, latent in it are evidences.” Then why? Because “The thing that is called Tao is elusive, evasive,” the meaning lies by nature in perception. All sign-things belong to these three categories and can be transformed into signs to express meaning in certain cases. The part with which they express meaning, however, is only the sign and not the thing. In this case, the “original” thing in the Husserlian sense is not inherently distinguishable from the “original” sign when the meaning is expressed. When the formal reduction takes place, not only must the thing’s thingness be bracketed, but also the aspects of the sign-thing which are irrelevant to the intentional act. What is chosen by the noesis to constitute an object is thus not the thing itself, but a definite aspect of that thing. A thing does not need to be entirely perceived to carry meaning. It could be cumbersome for the grasp of meaning if too many aspects of a thing participate in the constitution of the object, because it will produce too much noise. Formal reduction does not make the sign transform back into the thing itself, but on the contrary, having to carry meaning, the sign obliges the thing to be “partialized” and becomes a simplified form of meaning. The sign vehicle is thus neither a thing nor a set of perceptions of the thing, but only the manifestation of the one or several aspects of the thing related to the noesis. This is also the reason why the same thing can carry completely different and even opposite signs. For instance, an apple can carry meanings regarding the taste, the juiciness, the shape, or the crossbreeding of species; the same apple, stimulated by different intentionality, can produce different meanings according to the different manifestations of aspects. This is why in this book I reiterate that the thing and the perception of signs are of equal value to the consciousness in formal intuition. But only can the thing accommodate infinite aspects for further cognition, and it remains thus capable of continuing to respond to acts of knowing which, on the other hand, can come into being based on the accumulation of meaning. We take again the example of the 35

Wei Shilin. “Analysis on the ‘Blank Sign’ and the ‘Empty Set’.” Journal of Kunming University 4 (2009): 42–47. 36 Zofia Lissa. “Aesthetic Functions of Silence and Rests in Music.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 22.4 (Summer, 1964): 443–454.

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rooster crowing in the village. If “I” wake up after hearing this “divine crow” and goes to look, smell and touch, then the other aspects of the thing will become new signs and respond to the new noesis of “me.” At the moment, “the continuity of meaning” of the thing which differentiates the thing from the sign manifests itself. The meaning is thus getting closer and closer to the “truth.” The meaning once is accumulated, it will be again possible for “me” to further understand either the idyllic life in the countryside or the music recorded on a CD. Only then it will probably be rational to call the former a thing and the latter a sign.

Chapter 7

The Heterogeneity of the Object of Meaning

1 Intentionality Making the Heterogeneity of the Object It has been discussed previously that the meaning is constructed by the noesis in objects, which in turn allows the subject of consciousness to be in the world. The meaning therefore is neither in the subject’s consciousness nor in the world of objects, but between the two: it is the correlation between the consciousness and the thing. Such a definition of meaning, however, may cause a series of consequences. Intentionality is the impetus of acts of meaning, but itself is not the source of meaning. If meaning is the result of the “activation” of the object by the intentionality from the consciousness, then it can be imagined that things were, before being “activated” by intentionality, in an obscure chaos without meaning or order. They have meaning and order only after being illuminated by intentionality. In Pre-Qin philosophy, the theories of meaning were grouped together under “The Study of Names.” According to Shuo Wen Jie Zi: “The meaning of the name (ming 名) derives from the two parts of the word, the mouth (kou 口) and the sunset (xi 夕). During the darkness after the sunset, people can only tell their names to one another with the mouth.”1 The world would remain chaotic and dark if there were no signs carrying meaning. Things, once “regularized by meaning,” are no longer pure and free, but transformed into objects of consciousness. The consciousness selects a part of the thing and activates it with the intentionality that it projects, which in turn confers meanings on the consciousness. Things falling into the flux of meaning, however, are no longer in a natural state of freedom. Indeed, the intentionality has two characteristics: directness and aboutness. The directionality

1

Shuo Wen Jie Zi or Explanation of Pictograms and Ideo-Phonograms is the first dictionary of Chinese characters compiled by Xu Shen (58–147) during the Han dynasty.

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of intention aims at a thing and makes it an object with heterogeneous “givenness”— some parts being more “meaningful” than others. While the aboutness allows all the participating aspects to relate to the act to meaning.2 The question we face is that in which mode the “object” that the thing transforms when producing meanings is represented? This is the question which imposes itself on us. The regularizing effects of the intentionality changes the originally natural state of countless aspects of the thing, leading to the three ordered “partial” variations. The first is the epoche zone: the parts of the thing that do not relate to the given correlative area of the intention for meaning-grasping are put in brackets by the intentionality with no further consideration. These parts, however, still exist, but do not serve as constituents of the object. The qualitative elements of a thing outside the correlative area, although they may be considered to be the “essential nature of being,” are likely to be unrelated to the act of meaning and therefore do not enter into the process of meaning production between the subjective and objective exchanges. The epoche delimits the boundaries “illumined” by intentionality in this noesis, within which the object is located and outside of which there are parts of the thing unrelated to this noesis. The second is the noise zone: if there are numerous aspects of the objects which are unrelated to this noesis, but enter into acts of consciousness, the perceptions of these aspects will be “noises.” These aspects are not “bracketed” and completely neglected by the consciousness, but cannot contribute to the meaning-grasping task of the intentionality, which constitute a part that can neither be removed nor participate in the construction of meanings. The role the noise plays in the production of meaning, which is a controversial problem, will be treated more closely in the upcoming parts. The third is the zone of the related: even if they are aspects “illumined” by intentionality—that is, the part that contributes to the meaning acquiring activity—their contributions to the production of meaning are not homogeneous. Some parts are concentrated more precisely and intensely than others because of their more intimate relation with meaning. They are hierarchized into three sub-zones according to their importance: the background, the contrasted, and the focused. Albeit they are named as “zones,” they should not be understood as areas in space. While, in fact, for sensual perceptions such as hearing, touch, and smell, the focus on which by intentionality does not form zones. The three zones of the epoche, the noise, and the related are different in kind and therefore require respective examination. Whereas they are all produced by the same noesis, by which the aspects of the thing are “objectified” in varying degrees. The relationship between intentionality and the object can be compared to the lighting of a flashlight in the dark: between the brightest core and the points where light cannot reach appear different strata of brightness.

2

Martin Davies. “Consciousness and the Varieties of Aboutness,” in C. Macdonald and G. Macdonald (eds.), Philosophy of Psychology: Debates on Psychological Explanation. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995: 356–392.

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2 The “Epoche” and the Noise “Epoche” is a philosophical term coming from ancient Greek. It designates the suspension of judgment in the situation of certain phenomena in philosophical speculation. Husserl, in reusing this word, reveals a common thread for phenomenological speculation: “to free oneself from all existential and natural questions of the ‘outside world’” in order to apprehend “the essential intuition.” Consequently, the consideration of the actual existence of the “outside world” is “bracketed out” or suspended, and the relationship between the thing and consciousness is only one which need to be discussed. In philosophical semiotics, consciousness must suspend the aspects of things that are beyond the formal perception in order to acquire the “formal intuition.” In the formal intuition of meaning, the suspension of aspects of the object is not blindly enacted, because noesis is an intentional act emitted by the subject to select aspects related to meaning. The intentional epoche first delimits the demarcation that intentionality will “activate” and excludes as far as possible aspects that should not be in the related zone. However, intentional acts cannot exclude all the aspects unrelated to this act of interpretation, which gives rise to the complexity of the question. Aspects outside of the related can usually be perceived, some “occasionally grasp the attention,” and form as noises in the interpretation. For instance, when I cross the street, I pay attention to the speeds and distances of cars heading toward me and interpret the meaning of “danger.” In this case, the interpreter does not need to know all the characteristics of the cars, nor does he or she need to have experienced the action of being run over by a car. Other characteristics of cars, such as color, model, brand, and the like, which are not related to the weight and speed, can and should be neglected. They will become noises if these unrelated characteristics are perceived. If acts of apprehension continue and are repeated, the qualities and aspects of the object will all relate to the apprehension of that thing, e.g. the luxury brand of this car, the arrogant attitude of the driver, the look of a drunk driver, and all these elements will allow “me” to further accumulate the knowledge and deepen the comprehension. In this respect, there would probably be no noise in a perfect comprehension of the thing, while the perfect comprehension is only an ideal hypothesis. An in-depth understanding is a synthesis, in the mind, of the accumulation of a series of successful acts of meaning. In each act of meaning, intentionality ensures as far as possible that the related does not exceed the necessary boundaries, which is because the width and depth that the particular intentionality can activate are limited, while the initial noesis must seize the aspects within the boundaries. Once the boundaries of the related has been determined, formal intuition is able to control intentionality to project only on some aspects while suspend the other aspects. Let us imagine that the object of the noesis is an apple: The customer who wants to tell if the apple is fresh. The intentional act aims first in the visual sense at the color, the degree of the brightness, and redness. For the person who would like to buy as presents, or for an artist who decides to take it as a model, the intentional act aims primarily at the appearance of the apple.

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The person who buys for eating will smell and even taste to tell the quality of the apple. As an intentional object, the apple can provide infinite aspects. Its givenness to intention is also infinite. Thanks to this infinity, the apple, as a thing, is not a sign, but something that hosts the perceptions of signs. For a specific noesis, aspects outside of the related can and should be suspended. Thus, most aspects of the apple do not appear within the related zone of a single act of meaning. It is necessary to accumulate many times the meanings captured by noesis of different orientations, synthesize them and form a judgment of them in order to understand this apple in a complete and essential way. The noise is the aspect that is susceptible to being perceived, but cannot contribute to the production of meaning: when we read, we neglect scribbles on the page by the former readers of the book as much as possible; when we watch a movie, we do not pay attention to the neighbor who gets up and blocks our view. In intentional acts, excluding noises to achieve meaningful ends is a drying up of the richness of the world of experience. The interpretation excludes intentionally all the perception of “noise,” and the object of meaning intended is not the entire thing. If an aspects without the related zone enters the perception, e.g. if I only need the appearance of an apple to paint it but feel its flavor, this aspect is only taken as a noise that does not have any quality for meaning-construction. The noise is thus the unrelated perception that must be, but not successfully, suspended in the act of meaning. In acts of meaning, the noise, however, is unavoidable because objectivity of the thing is not constituted by the intentionality of consciousness. Excluding “unrelated aspects” outside the zone of the related would not be absolutely effective. In semiotics, the question of the “noise” always remains a controversial topic. Roland Barthes, in his essay “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” avers that “art does not acknowledge the existence of noise,”3 by which he means that art, as a sign expressing meanings and invented by man, is a complete text in which all the elements constitute a systematic unit, and no component is likely to be excluded from the noesis. Barthes again says in Système de la mode that “the described garment contains no noise,” because there is “nothing that interferes with the pure meaning it transmits: it is all meaning.”4 Thus the range of “the text without noise” is further widened. But to say that the artistic text has no noise is to consider it as a self-constructing system. In the same sense, Keir Elam firmly maintains this idea in The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama: “Theatrical messages are non-redundant to the extent that… each signal has (or supposedly has) an ‘aesthetic’ justification, and the reduction of signals will drastically alter the value of the ostended messages and text.”5 The “non-noise theory,” corresponding to the tendency of the structural “organism,” thus prevails in the structuralist semiotics.

3

Roland Barthes and Lionel Duisit. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, On Narrative and Narratives (Winter, 1975): 245. 4 Roland Barthes. Système de la mode. Éd. du Seuil, 1967: 53. 5 Keir Elam. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London and New York: Routledge, 1980: 26.

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In reality, the text, like anything else, cannot be grasped wholly by intentionality. It is understandable that the intentionality excludes the noises when confronted with the natural things: it is impossible for us to take into account the integral existence of natural things—for example a rock—but we can only grasp the aspects that fall within the related, e.g. the hardness or color of it. The difficulty appears when we are in the face of a “pure sign” which is invented by man, specifically a work of art. If it is an artificial sign with an end, especially an artistic text crafted carefully and even meticulously by an artist, then why would there be noises? If noises are the hindrances that do not carry any meaning, wouldn’t it be possible that the artist eliminates them all in advance, or in the process of creation? If the existence of the noise is inevitable, the reason is that the noesis of consciousness, even if it is aimed at an artistic text, e.g. a painting, will constantly change its focal points. In other words, it is the subjective side of meaning that gives rise to the “heterogeneity” of works of art. The “entirety” of the work of art cannot be captured by the noesis. The directness of intention necessarily constructs a perceptual framework, even if the “entirety” of the works of art is not able to be grasped by the human consciousness. The plurality of interpretations determines the inevitability of noise. In addition, many works of art take noise for beauty. Thus, if the rough lines on the canvas is smoothed by the brush, the noise will probably be reduced, but the aesthetics of the art will be reduced accordingly. In the 1960s, in contrast to authors like Barthes, Algirdas Julien Greimas argued that the noise correlated with the level of the openness of the system: “Starting from the principle that any semantic redundancy is meaningful in a closed text—unlike open texts where it is only ‘noise’—and that it is all the more meaningful when it is manifested in identical or comparable terms in natural language.”6 For him, the presence of noise depends on how to interpret and whether the text is closed or not; redundancies are inevitable outside of a closed system. Although all aspects of the thing may carry meaning, those related to a single noesis remain limited. In Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings by Wang Yangming, it is said that “if one wants to enjoy the beauty of a flower, the flower will be good, and the grass will be vile; if one wishes to make use of a grass, then the grass will be good.” Wang Yangming believes that it is wrong to conceive of being good or vile in such a way, because what is good or not should not be determined subjectively. This view can also be seen as a precise comment on the fact that the presence of the noise depends on the interpretation: when we would like to “enjoy the beauty of a flower,” it is the intentionality that activates the flower and makes it the object of intention, and then the aspects of the grass surrounding the flower become noises. In this respect, Barthes has held the same view that in his latest work Camera Lucida, he writes: “Society, it seems, mistrusts pure meaning: It wants meaning, but at the same time it wants this meaning to be surrounded by a noise (as is said in

6

Algirdas Julien Greimas. On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (Volume II). Trans. Feng Xuejun and Wu Hong Miao. Tian Jin: Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, 2005: 148.

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cybernetics) which will make it less acute.”7 The consciousness seeks and acquires meaning in the object, but the related zone of intentionality cannot be clearly bounded around which the noise attaches itself. Barthes therefore talks about the socio-cultural factors that contribute to the inevitability of the noise. Even if at the purely technical level, a message cannot be constituted wholly by elements related to meaning. The information with no irrelevant elements, in fact, cannot be transmitted. Even when the “Signal-to-Noise-Ratio” is too high, the information will be practically non-transmissible, e.g. if a histogram is simplified to such a degree that it contains only information, then columns will become lines.

3 The Activation of Zones In the noesis, intentionality not only determines the range of the epoche, excludes the noise out of the related zone, but also produces an inequality of levels of meaningfulness of the object, which is due to the heterogeneity of the intensity of the intentionality that transforms a thing into an object. Although it sounds mysterious, it is in this way that the consciousness operates all the time. Our consciousness constructs not only the abundant and diverse landscapes in the meaning world, but also variations of the “same” object in the related zone. Hence the fact that the same thing, after being objectivized in different ways, is likely to become signs carrying different meanings. Recently, many authors have talked about the heterogeneity and its consequences on meaning. Fu Xiuyan, a narratologist, is the first to have paid attention to the topic in China.8 Raymond Murray Shafer published a book in 1977 entitled The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World which is considered a pioneering work on the subject in western academic community.9 Borrowing from the musical term “tuning,” he describes this process where the sounds of the outside world are tuned in a certain way to appear in an order of priority. Whether the sound comes from the nature, the human society, the family, or the workplace, even from the musical organization of a concert, what we capture is not the “authentic” voices in its natural state, but the heterogeneous “soundscape” that has been selected and reorganized by human consciousness. The perception of sounds is also a phenomenological process, whose givenness of meaning manifests a remarkable heterogeneity. According to Shafer, three strata have been distinguished, which is designated as “signal,” “keynote,” and “soundmark.” The first two terms are easily confused, but the last, a parody of the familiar 7 Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981: 36. 8 Fu Xiuyan. “Introduction to Acoustic Narrotology.” Jiang Xi Social Sciences 2 (2013): 220–231. 9 R. Murray Shafer. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Vermont: Destiny Books, 1977.

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English word landmark, is excellently coined. These three terms indeed correspond to the three sub-zones mentioned above, i.e. the background, the contrasted, and the focused. The honk of an automobile constitutes a soundscape: the urban sound environment depicts the background in which the traffic noise brings out the focal point, the honk of a galloping automobile. It is not because the focused sound is louder than the other sounds that it appears, but it is because it is “tuned” by our consciousness in this environment. The intentionality activates the meaning of the honk which signals an approaching automobile. The heterogeneity of the object is a prerequisite for consciousness to grasp meaning. Obviously, this heterogeneous situation is not limited to the acoustic sensation, which can be applied to all human sensations. In the 1960s, Trygg Engen began to study the perception of odors and distinguished it into three similar spheres: “The immediate, the ambient, and the episodic.”10 The latest is the division where meanings appear in a concentrated way and where the olfactory sensation occurs after the noesis, thus allowing to “make sense”—whether it is rotten, delicate, or fresh. In 2004, Joy Monice Malnar and Rank Vodvarka made an excellent summary of the demarcation of the heterogeneity of all the human sensations by presenting a “Legibility Schematic Gauge,” also known as the “sensory slide.”11 They list visual sensation, audition, olfaction, and tactile sense, and each has three distinct divisions. The gustation is not included in the list, because the perception of taste is too narrow to be distinguished clearly into three divisions. While theoretically it is impossible to deny the gustation can also be further distinguished into three divisions. As for the visual sensation, the two authors designate the background as the “figure,” the contrasted the “ground,” and the focused the “icon” which allows the consciousness to grasp precise meanings. Although all these terms are old, they obtain new meanings in the Gauge. In their summary, a new and unexpected field of perception appears, that of orientation.12 The field of orientation has three special divisions: the background is known as the “self,” which is the bodily sensations of oneself; the contrasted the “space,” which is one’s position in his surroundings; the focused the “activity,” which are closely associated with the human orientation and is the essential condition for meaningful human acts. The orientation is particularly significant because the acquisition of meanings by consciousness cannot be reduced to a single sensation but should synthesize all the sensations from different sense organs. The ways in which the noesis objectifies a thing are multiple, among them, the core mechanism is the selection: the thing necessarily has a “meaningless” part for the intentionality to become the object intended; in the same way, an object necessarily has a weak signifying part to produce the focused meaning. Taking the example of a soccer match where the judgment of a “fault” provokes disputes, everyone 10

Trygg Engen. Odor Sensation and Memory. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. Joy Monice Malnar and Rank Vodvarka. Sensory Design. Madison: University of Minnesota Press, 2004: 244. 12 Ibid.: 248. 11

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watching or participating in the match can grasp meanings after going through the “partialized” focus: First, “suspend” the irrelevant aspects of the thing (e.g. “I” ignore the clouds passing over the stadium); second, take the irrelevant aspects that enter into perception as noises (e.g. “I” notice by chance the movement of a camera in the air); then among the aspects in the related zone, choose a part as the background (e.g. “I” look at the whole stadium), a part as the contrasted (e.g. “I” notice the positional relationship of the twenty-two players on the spot), a part as the key sign by which the meaning is acquired (e.g. “I” see that the defender “fouls” by discreetly and furtively knocking down the forward of the opposing team). Everyone—the referee, coaches, club owners, bettors, fans, fans of the other side, fake fans—sees differently, because for whom not only the focal point of the act of fouling are different, but also the five divisions (“the epoche, the noise, the background, the contrasted, the focused”) mentioned above also vary. For each person’s subjective consciousness, the relationship between these zones constitutes a particularly meaning pattern in which each person apprehends the meaning given by the same scene in a different way, from which the disputes over the “controversial penalty” are generated. In reality, the subjective consciousness exists in the world because the meanings grasped are different; if the meanings were the same, only one subject would remain. It is just due to the fact that the subjective experiences vary from person to person that things seem to exist objectively and neutrally and waiting to be “observed.” Which in fact every subjective consciousness transforms things into objects in different ways. Borrowing from pedagogical and advertising terms, it can be said that the subjective consciousness, instead of passively receiving meaning from the environment, “participates actively in the production of the meaning, in which transforms informational perception is transformed into transformational perception.”13

4 Psychologism and Anti-psychologism Intentionality itself has “directness” which is the way in which consciousness finds the necessary footing for its own existence. Thus the question arises: Is intentionality a psychological act? Is consciousness the human psychological structure? The examples quoted above on the heterogeneity of the sensory senses is indeed investigated and determined by psychologists. But it must be stressed that psychological achievements are not the equivalent of psychologism. Semiotics, as an interdisciplinary study, should not refuse achievements accomplished and problems proposed by any discipline. Philosophical semiotics and psychology both speak of intentionality, but speaks of it in different ways that isn’t the existence of subjective consciousness merely a kind of psychological fact? Why, after all, do we insist on the difference between the intentionality defined in philosophy of meaning and in psychology? 13

Ezequiel Di Paolo et al. “Horizons for the Enactive Mind: Values, Social Interaction, and Cognition to Free Will” in (ed) Mark Rowlands. The New Science of Mind: From the Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology. London and Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010: 70.

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First of all, it is not academically necessary to benefit oneself at the other’s cost. It is also unnecessary to make a strict distinction between psychology and philosophy that we have cited many psychological facts for the philosophical study. However, the debate between the psychologism and anti-psychologism of the problem of meaning have lasted for more than a century, which is a common concern of phenomenology, analytical philosophy, and semiotics, while how to distinguish philosophical intentionality from psychological intentionality, remains a major problem till today. The psychologism we are talking about is not a science, but rather a doctrine that reduces the question of meaning to that of psychology. It is a short cut to explore all the subjects concerning meaning without resorting to the examination of the essential nature of it. In the second half of the nineteenth century, psychologism prevailed in the study of the logic issues: psychologism regarded logic as an integral part of psychology, and the logic deals with the natural laws of experience. Franz Brentano, an Austrian philosopher and psychologist, was the first of the modern academic community to propose the concept of intentionality, considering it as a “psychical phenomenon” opposed to the “physical one.” Inspired by this theory, Gustav Frege, founder of analytical philosophy, suggested that logic did not belong to the subjective psychological category since it sought the validity of reasoning. Thus the questions that logic talks about are objective and necessary, whereas the questions that psychology investigates are subjective and contingent. Frege had criticized Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), which was his first published work, as one of psychologism in a review of the book. This, however, had influenced Husserl profoundly, and he had completely changed his attitude toward psychologism by publishing the groundbreaking work Logical Investigations between 1900 and 1901, which fully criticized psychologism and established phenomenology on the basis of anti-psychologism. He thus makes it clear: “In an objective respect, talk of the conditions for the possibility of any theory do not concern the theory as a subjective unity of items of knowledge, but theory of as an objective unity of truths or propositions, bound together by relations of ground and consequent.”14 The emphasis is added by Husserl himself. He insists on the essential difference between phenomenology and psychology: the former is the “theory of as an objective unity of truths or propositions, bound together by relations of ground and consequent,” which is the law, while the latter is the theory of as a subjective and individual knowledge. Phenomenology is a “metaphysical examination” of the practical modality of human beings, which is philosophical investigation, thus differentiating itself from psychology which emphasizes experimental data. Phenomenology is a philosophical study of the humanities; psychology is an empirical science. Both for Husserl in his Logical Investigations and for Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of

14 Edmund Husserl. Logical Investigations (Second German Edition): Vol. I and Vol. II, Part I. Trans. J. N. Findlay and edited with a new introduction by Dermot Moran. London and New York: Routledge, 1970: 76.

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Perception, modern sciences have already reified the world in an excessive manner, and philosophy must return back to humanity. Peirce develops the semiotic phenomenology on the foundation of logic and recognizes that there are points in common between philosophical semiotics and psychology: “First, second, and third are not sensations. They can only be given in sense by things appearing labelled as first, second, and third, and such labels things do not usually bear. They ought therefore to have a psychological origin.”15 However, throughout his research in semiotics, which lasted almost half a century, Peirce always insisted on the non-psychological essence of logic, clearly suggesting that semiotics should avoid the trap of psychology: “The non-psychological concept that I adopt for logic, although it is not generally recognized, has actually existed for a long time.”16 He severely refuses psychology: “It (phenomenology) religiously abstains from all speculation as to any relations between its categories and physiological facts, cerebral or other. It does not undertake, but sedulously avoids, hypothetical explanations of any sort.”17 Moreover, he states firmly and clearly that “I must be understood as talking not psychology, but the logic of mental operations.”18 Nevertheless, psychology often shows itself in discussions of philosophical semiotics. Even the chief scholars in the field will also employ the psychological terminology to explain formal and phenomenal issues. Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the founders of semiology, in fact considered the meaning of the sign as a psychological product, and designated the “paradigmatic axis,” one of the two axes constituting the text, as the “axis of association,” which, however, would later be rejected with the development of semiology and would be appropriately renamed as the “axis of selection” by Jakobson, who took the process of constructing a text as a modality of operations of meaning. I. A. Richards, one of the founders of modern theory of meaning, defines “the poetic language” as “the pseudo-statement” in which the language is sentimentally and emotionally employed.19 For him, the art therefore is an emotional use of language. He even once stated that the development of neurological physiology would solve all the poetic problems. Such a standpoint was regarded as “psychologism” and fiercely criticized by New Criticism, who insisted on the “ontic criticism” of the text. This, however, does not mean that psychology has been completely excluded from philosophical and semiotic discourse. John Rogers Searle, one of the most important theorists of “the philosophy of ordinary language,” which is an important branch 15

Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993– 1958, Vol. 1: 374. 16 Annotated Catalogue of the Paper of Charles S. Peirce, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967: 364. 17 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993– 1958, Vol. 1: 287. 18 Ibid.: Vol. 4: 539. 19 I. A. Richards. Principles of Literary Criticism. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1924: 282.

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of the analytical philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, often associates psychology with the philosophy of language in his discussions. According to him, “Consciousness and intentionality are nothing but the neurobiological state and process describable in purely neurobiological terms.”20 The development of cognitive sciences in recent years has further blurred the boundaries between cognitive semiotics and cognitive psychology.21 It is therefore necessary to make clear the question that seemed to have already been resolved, because intentionality is the key to the problem of heterogeneity of meaning. What are, in the end, the differences between intentionality in psychology and intentionality in philosophical semiotics? There are some differences, however, in some basic principles, although these basic principles determine their common points and thus are often confused by some scholars, they are essentially different. In the first place, there is the question of teleology. In Western languages, the same word “intention” designates both intention (yixiang 意向) and motivation (yitu 意图), which leads to the fact that Western authors often easily confuse “intentionality” (yixiang xing 意向性) in semiotic philosophy with “motive” (yitu xing 意图性) in psychology. Motivation coming from the personal psychology is the product of psychological acts, such as desire, will, attention, and the like. The motive, as manifested in the Chinese translation 意图性 (yitu xing) falls under the psychological category, and is a psychological act with an end. While the “directness” of intentionality in philosophical semiotics is constituted by the link between the consciousness and the object, which is not decided by the will. Thus the heterogeneity of meaning in psychology is the result of the purposefulness of consciousness. If this “purposefulness” is absent—when one is distracted—the heterogeneity will be obscure, and even the chaotic state will serve as a background perception. Intentionality in philosophical semiotics, however, is essential and the object is necessarily heterogeneous as long as there is consciousness. That is to say, there is no homogeneous object in the act of meaning, which does not change in any way as the psychological state changes. Psychological observations only focus on the empirical evidence. While psychology also discusses the cognitive law, but its observers can probably only quantitatively measure the capacity of the mind or the brain whose results are most likely displayed in the form of figures and statistics. Whereas the discussions of intentionality in philosophical semiotics is to emphasize the essential character of the latter, which constitutes the existence of consciousness. In Peirce’s words: “That is a phaneron peculiar to metaphysical thought, not involved in the sensation itself, and therefore not in the quality of feeling, which is entirely contained, or superseded, in the actual sensation.”22 Psychology is an empirical science, and the discussion 20

John R. Searle. Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in The Real World. New York: Basic Books, 1999: 86–87. 21 Cf. Zhao Yiheng. “Cognitive Semiotics: Humanities or Science?” Signs and Media 20 (2015): 105–115. 22 Charles Sanders Peirce. Collected Papers. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1931– 1958, Vol. 1: 304.

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initiated by philosophical semiotics on meaning brings a philosophical reflection: meaning does not reside in the brain or in the individual consciousness, but it is an essence of existence that can be described through textualization and understood through interpretation. Finally, it must be seen that the psychological exploration of intentionality and acts of meaning is individualized, even if it talks about general characteristics of human beings, it only reasons in the statistical sense. Philosophical semiotics, however, insists on the humanity side of the subject. What Peircian theory is most concerned with is the interpretation of the meaning of signs. For Peirce, once man seeks to interpret meaning, it is no longer an individual act, but it necessarily enters into social relations. The meaning of signs is certainly a communicative relationship, because “We have no power of thinking without signs.”23 The fact that the search of meaning is not an individual act is explained by Peirce in such a way that “Logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community. This community, again, must not be limited, but must extend to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate or mediate intellectual relation.”24 The search of meaning is exactly the value of human existence. It is therefore not a psychological study, but a study of the essential relationship between consciousness and the world when we discuss in philosophical semiotics the heterogeneity of meaning. The intentionality of meaning-grasping is always heterogeneous, so the heterogeneity of meaning is the essence of the object intended. The heterogeneity of meaning proves that consciousness cannot “create the objective world” in an arbitrary way. On the contrary, man, limited in his capacity, needs to grasp the whole of the object from the partial perception, in which a key connection is needed, namely the apperception and the appresentation which will be dealt with in detail in the next chapter. The inherently heterogeneous nature of human consciousness when it grasps meanings and the inevitable partialization of acts of meaning testify the limitation of the essence of man’s consciousness, even if man’s understanding of things by accumulating experiences can develop into deep and vast knowledge, even if communal cooperation enables man to reform the world to some degree according to his own meaningful ways.

23 24

Ibid., Vol. 5: 265. Ibid., Vol. 2: 654.

Chapter 8

Apperception and Appresentation: Minimum Formal Integrity of Meaning

1 From Presentation to Appresentation Since the intention for the acquirement of meaning necessarily partializes the object, how then does consciousness grasp the desired meaning? This is the place where apperception and appresentation play the primary role together, transforming the perception of partialized aspects into a relatively integral grasp of the object. The essential driving force of apperception and appresentation is the “need for minimum formal integrity” of consciousness with respect to meaning. In this chapter, a series of concepts will be included in the discussion, such as “consciousness, intentionality, thing, object, meaning,” and the “formal intuition” that connects them, which has been explained in detail previously. In formal intuition, the intentionality of meaning-grasping of consciousness activates only a part of the aspects in the object. What the consciousness obtains is only a starting perception, the basis of the acts of meaning. Even if in the formal intuition, which is the first stage of the act of meaning, the pure perception is far from being sufficient, because it is certainly limited—dispersed, multiple, superficial, fragmented, constrained to the present moment—and is not capable of constructing the meaning which constitutes a correlation between subjectivity and objectivity. How, then, does consciousness manage to apprehend more or less the whole object— although it is not an integral grasp and not a deep grasp either—through a dispersed perception? This is the question that needs to be answered in this chapter. The mode by which the object is given can be distinguished in two phases: the first is intuitive, original, and close to the present, in which the object addresses itself with its scattered and dispersed aspects to the intuition of consciousness. The intentionality of meaning-grasping activates the thing to present the aspects of the object. Presentation means that the thing provides directly and originally the aspects of the object, and meanwhile, the consciousness with the ability of the a priori apperception makes the presentation elicit the appresentation. Apperception is the immediate cause of appresentation, which is the consequence of the consciousness’s ability of apperception. When there is apperception, there is appresentation; when © Sichuan University Press Co., Ltd. 2022 Y. Zhao, Philosophical Semiotics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-3057-7_8

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there is apperception and appresentation, there is the result. It is a pair of inseparable concepts occurring simultaneously on the object and the subject. The commonest example: the apple we see is always a half, while the apple we understand is always a whole. The half we see is the presentation, and the whole we understand is the product of appresentation in consciousness. If the consciousness can only seize the aspects presented and genuinely perceived, it would not know any object, because the aspects that can be concretized in the object always remain partialized and localized. While the way the object exists in the consciousness must have a minimum completeness. Although the perception of the sign is always partialized, the interpretation of the meaning of the sign, however, is by no means fragmented. Husserl points out that “Noetically speaking, perception is a mixture of an actual exhibiting that presents in an intuitive manner what is originally exhibited, and of an empty indicating that refers to possible new perceptions,”1 because “that what is appresented by virtue of the aforesaid analogizing can never attain actual presence, never become an object of perception proper.”2 The intentionality of meaning-grasping must obtain a meaning that meets the basic requirements, otherwise it would be “an unfulfilled intention.” Meanwhile, if the object remains at a partialized state, the grasp of meaning would be impossible. The presentation is uncertain, and more or less an appearance without real content, which cannot meet the requirements of the intentionality of consciousness and “fulfill” it further. How is it possible that the object gives relatively complete meaning and that the consciousness forces the object to do so through a way that transcends the perception? To answer these questions, I believe that the intentionality of consciousness exerts pressure on the thing so as to obtain meaning with a “minimum formal integrity,” and that it only reaches a minimum realized level after having fulfilled this basic requirement for the grasp of meaning. Why does the intentionality of consciousness intended at the object inseparably contain this requirement of the “Minimum formal integrity” of meaning? Because consciousness only acquires meaning that satisfies itself after satisfying this requirement of “minimum formal integrity.” According to Kant, “This (the original unity of apperception) is the ground of the possibility of all cognitions.”3 It should be noted that Kant speaks of “all cognitions.” The object that the consciousness essentially grasps necessarily envisages the combination of presentations and non-presentations: It is necessary for the consciousness to perceive through the apperception of aspects that are not presented but necessary. Until this moment, the consciousness can accomplish the whole process of formal intuition. Certainly, what the consciousness acquires in this way always remains “basic meanings” rather than the so-called “understandings.” The object of the appresentation 1

Edmund Husserl. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Trans. Anthony J. Steinbock. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001: 41. 2 Edmund Husserl. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. Hingham: Kluwer Academic Publishers: 1982: 112. 3 Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998: 237.

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remains still in the formal intuition: Meaning cannot depend completely on perception, because perception is too scattered and fragmented; meaning, even if it is the meaning of the initial formal intuition, is not completely composed of perceptions and requires a combination between perception and appresentation. In a more detailed analysis, one could say that what appresentation produces is not the true instantialization of unperceived aspects, but the “quasi-instantialization” in imagination. This “quasi-instantialization” is caused immediately by sensuous presentations. The combination of the last two leads to the “com-instantialization” of the object as a whole. The object at the moment, however, is “represented” by the cooperation of presentation and appresentation. Only after the appearance of the “representation,” the thing no longer presents itself simply through fragmented aspects, but manifests as an object. Hence the object that is activated by intentional intuition is necessarily composed of two parts: the one whose givenness is direct, and the other, although not directly perceived, given indirectly through appresentation. The intentionality of consciousness will not be satisfied with partial formal intuition, but require a meaningful grasp of the object in a minimum formal integrity. The pure presentation of the immediate aspects of the object will not be able to satisfy the need of the consciousness to grasp the object. Only when the appresentation fills the interstices and gaps left by the perception, the object is supplemented as an object in relation to which the consciousness can acquire its minimum formal integrity of meaning.

2 Transcendental Apperception, Empirical Apperception The important question that has to be answered in this chapter is: What is the essential driving force behind appresentation? Why is it that this force can push the meaning of formal intuition to a satisfactory and acceptable level, that is, a meaning in a relatively integral form given to consciousness by the object, in which the subjectivity and objectivity can form a preliminary correlation? Simply speaking, it is the instinct of apperception of consciousness that causes the object to be given to consciousness by means of appresentation. There are two types of apperception, one of which is empirical: Experience is the set of traces of knowledge that consciousness accumulates from previous acts of meaning on a thing or a category of things, while comprehension is a cognitive ability formed based on these repetitive activities. The most elementary apperception is the transcendental constitution of consciousness, that is, the innate instinct independent of experience. For the philosophy of meaning, the ability of the transcendental apperception is fundamental. Philosophers have been preoccupied with the question: How does consciousness correlate the isolated and scattered aspects of a thing? Many thinkers, from Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, to Husserl and Schutz, have discussed this question. Their theories go further and further and all present a rather rigorous reasoning. Nevertheless, on certain important junctures, each school has a divergent viewpoint, which deserves to be deliberated over again even today.

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Descartes’ theory does not employ the pair of concepts of apperception and appresentation, because his theory does not need such concepts. In his system of the cogito, everything in the material world is derived from the subjectivity. From the presentation to the grasping of the “truth” of the thing, everything comes from the cogito, including the objectivity, which means that it is possible to move from the partial perception to full grasping of the object by the means of creativity. Cartesian rationalism believes that innate and self-evident rationality is apodeictic and serves as a foundation for the establishment of the great edifice of knowledge. This theory has been strongly criticized by empiricism, of which Locke and Hume are the representatives. Hume, by questioning skeptically some generally accepted axioms such as the law of causality, believes that what consciousness can obtain is only perception, which can hardly be considered as the equivalent of the perception of truth. He thus destroys the conviction that rationalists have held of the certainty of knowledge and indicates that there is a huge gap between perception and the thing. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is the first to propose and discuss the concept of “apperception.” He particularly criticizes Cartesian rationalism which tries to explain with the concept of apperception how the object relates to the ego. Leibniz demonstrates that the subjective and the objective are not absolutely distinct, and that the faculty of consciousness is particularly expressed by the fact that it can perceive the sensuously unperceived part of the thing. Perception is therefore the most important function of consciousness.4 According to him, through apperception, which depends on the influence of the contents already existing in the mind, man understands, memorizes and reflects on interconnected concepts to perform more advanced acts of thinking. From this point of view, the apperception Leibniz talks about is essentially empirical, not transcendental. Immanuel Kant, in his founding work of the philosophical system Critique of Pure Reason, proposes precisely that apperception can be transcendental, original, and pure, which is also the ground for redefining the necessity of human knowledge. Kantian philosophy takes an important step in the investigation of the constitution of consciousness by carrying apperception forward into the transcendental category: experience is complex, isolated, and limited. Consciousness necessarily uses the transcendental category to analyze and order perceptual experiences in logic and inherent time. “The principle of the necessary unity of the pure synthesis of the imagination prior to apperception is thus the ground of the possibility of all cognition, especially that of experience.”5 For Kant, what consciousness deals with are “representations,” rather than the “ideas” proposed by Descartes, nor limited to “perceptions” that Hume holds tenaciously. He thinks that the faculty of apperception is related to the pure synthesis of the imagination, which is pure and “productive” differing from the “reproductive” one that rests on conditions of experience. Thus he has famously suggested: 4

Gittfried Leibniz, The Principles of Philosophy Known As Monadology. Trans. Jonathan Bennett, p. 3, part 14, http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/leibniz1714b.pdf. 5 Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998: 238.

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“Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought.”6 According to him, transcendental apperception is the ground for “A threefold synthesis: the first is the synthesis of the apprehension of the representations, as modifications of the mind in intuition; the second is the one of the reproduction of them in the imagination; the last one is of their recognition in the concept.”7 The constitution of the object is realized after the imagination of understanding has synthesized the perception: although the perception is given, only the purely transcendental synthesis is the origin of knowledge. It is Husserl who contributes the most to Kantian theory on transcendental apperception and appresentation. He calls his phenomenology “transcendental philosophy” while taking apperception and appresentation as the constructive function of meaning. Kant focuses on the analysis of the appresentation of time, space, and unity; Husserl pays more attention to categorical synthesis: if the object exists, it is because it belongs to some certain species or category. This categorization, however, is established in the constitution of consciousness. The essential structure is recognized by the means of “essential reduction,” by means of which we can move away from the thing to concern ourselves with its general definition, since what the consciousness perceives is the grasp of the thing, not “the grasp of the essence of the thing.” The true essence can only be acquired through the appresentation. Husserl points out that what the consciousness perceives in a thing “is a mixture of an actual exhibiting that presents in an intuitive manner what is originally exhibited, and of an empty indicating that refers to possible new perceptions,”8 because “that what is appresented by virtue of the aforesaid analogizing can never attain actual presence, never become an object of perception proper.”9 For Husserl, an integral object is constructed by consciousness, filling the gaps within the given intuitive perception. Hence all complete objects are imbued with subjective consciousness. “Apperception is our surplus, which is found in experience itself, in its descriptive content as opposed to the raw existence of sense; it is the act-character which as it were ensouls sense, and is in essence such as to make us perceive this or that object.”10 What a vivid statement to say that “apperception ensouls sense.” Husserl thus proposes two patterns of apperception: “the interpreted content— interpretation” and “the kinaesthesis—image.” The first pattern of apperception makes a distinction between the interpreted content (sense-content) without intentionality and the act of interpretation with intentionality. The precondition of interpretation is the sense data with no intentionality and that the process of appresentation 6

Ibid.: 193. Ibid.: 228. 8 Edmund Husserl. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Trans. Anthony J. Steinbock. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001: 41. 9 Edmund Husserl. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Trans. Dorion Cairns. Hingham: Kluwer Academic Publishers: 1982: 112. 10 Edmund Husserl. Logical Investigations (Second German Edition): Vol. II. Trans. J. N. Findlay and ed. with a new introduction by Dermot Moran. London and New York: Routledge, 1970: 105. 7

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is the one in which the sense-content was conferred with meaning; according to the second pattern, the consciousness itself having a particular intentionality can form a nexus between the kinaesthesis and the image, by which the consciousness itself is born out of the sense data which is void of intentionality.11 “The kinaesthesis— image” associates the two different states: the former is the flux state of kinaesthesis in time and the latter is the sense-content. In the visual field, it is the state of visual data that extends: Each kinaesthesis corresponds to a sense-image at every time phase. Thus, “If we first direct our attention toward the connection between the fluxes belonging to the kinaesthesis and those belonging to the appearances, we shall at the same time gain a better understanding of the motivational nexus binding the kinaesthesis and the data of sensation or the appearances.”12 Appresentation is in fact a matter of common sense, although the discussion on this subject sounds very abstract. An English joke mocking pedantic philosophers illustrates vividly that appresentation is an integral part of daily life: a philosopher in a carriage passing by the typical English cattle farms along the road, notices the herds of sheep on the grass. His neighbor passenger says casually: “These sheep have just been shorn.” After having carefully observed the sheep, the philosopher replies: “One can only say that these sheep are sheared on our side.” If we persist in believing that the only truth lies in the aspects being perceived by consciousness, we are reduced to a state of absurdity close to that of the philosopher. What is in the end the driving force behind the apperception-appresentation? Neither Kant nor Husserl indicated that there was a direct motive behind this innate faculty, which is that consciousness, for its own existence, must seek meanings meeting the basic conditions, which, in turn, has to depend on apperceptionappresentation. Thus, formal intuition is not only the perception immediately received by the sensory organs, but also the “observation of the mind,” the cognition that goes beyond the sensuous perception and the meaning formed by the consciousness through formal intuition. Only such a meaning will be accepted by the consciousness, because it has the “minimum formal integrity” necessary for a meaning. That which is inferior to this degree of integrity is like the flock of sheep with only one side, too fragmented to become an object to which meaning can be given.

3 Four Kinds of Appresentations There are as many possible appresentations according to the different standards of classification. In order to be intelligible and perspicuous, the book has summarized

11

Edmund Husserl. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy I: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Trans. F. Kersten. Hague: Kluwer Academic Publishers Group: 203–207. 12 Rodolf Bernet, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach. An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1993: 136.

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four kinds of appresentations based on the threefold synthesis by Kant and the two patterns of appresentations by Husserl. The first is “the appresentation of the whole” in space. The perceptible aspects of the object are always partialized, and the spatial appresentation mainly fulfills the minimum requirements of the integrity of the object. When I write, sitting in a chair, I feel only the backrest and not the whole chair. But I am aware that this chair is supported by its legs or is somehow supported by something on the ground. Although I can neither see nor touch the part that supports this chair, the other necessary parts certainly appresentated to me in an integral way. This appresentation does not require any experience whatsoever with a chair, because the apperception of the conscious mind knows that there is certainly a support. The appresentation of the whole is the most essential of all kinds of appresentations: a part of the presentation leads to the appresentation of the whole object. Merleau-Ponty has discussed this problem in Phenomenology of Perception, thinking that “the perception of the whole” is an a priori uneasiness: “This does not only mean that, without the perception of the whole we would not imagine observing the resemblance or the contiguity of its elements but rather, literally, that the elements would not be a part of the same world and that resemblance and contiguity could not exist at all…. The unity of the object…will resolve a problem only posed in the form of a vague uneasiness.”13 The second is “the appresentation of the process” in time. The perceptual aspects presented by the object are probably in movement or in a changing state. Even at the particular instant when perception takes place, in which only an instantaneous state or lapse of time occurs, the apprensentation will be dynamic. This dynamic apprensentation is not limited to the “temporalizated” past. The a priori apperception of this moment presents the dynamic perception or appresents the relatively dynamic position of the perceived object in terms of the perceiving subject (e.g. the eyes or ears) as the movement in a given time. The most obvious or pressing thing in the noesis is the protention of the direction of the movement of the object. What is perceived instantaneously is the state of the object at that moment. While the meaning that the consciousness grasps is not limited to this moment, but includes the results of the momentary state of the object. Seeing the falling movement of an object, we will intuitively understand that it will fall in the following instant; when we hear the roar of traffic, we understand that a heavy thing—car or some other vehicle—is approaching: the roar refers not only to the car as a whole, but also to the time relation of the movement of the car heading toward “me.” This kind of apprensentation is in fact the protention of the state and position of the upcoming object. The temporal appresentation of the process seems rarer than the spatial appresentation of the whole, but is actually more important. Whether the food we take up with our hands will bring to the mouth or not, and whether the thing thrown to me will be caught by me or not, and the movement of body, with no doubt needing certain techniques, all depend on the protention of consciousness which is 13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge, 2012: 17–18.

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the primary condition. Due to the appresentation of the process, the object can move and become part of the extension of the world of meaning in time and space. The perception of a temporal object, sounds for example, begins with the stimulation of an “original impression” and the linkage of the “retention”14 of this impression with the successive sounds that allows the formation of a piece of music or a car horn. The retention maintains the original impression received at present. That is to say, when the physical moment in which this original impression occurs has passed and thus becomes “absent,” the a priori imagination of the consciousness will automatically retains it (which allows a presence of the trace of perception). “Retention” is therefore the intermediate link of the a priori imagination. Thanks to the ubiquity of the human instinctive imagination, retention is repeated continuously in intuition: “It changes into retention of retention and does so continuously. Accordingly, a fixed continuum of retention arises in such a way that each later point is retention for every earlier point. And each retention is already a continuum.”15 Regarding the phenomenon that the “retention” becomes a “continuum” through imagination, Qian Zhongshu has given an excellent example. By citing an instance in Upasaka Shila Sutra (a Buddhist classic): “A wise man who has been insulted regards insults in such a way: Insults do not appear at the same time; when the first word comes out, the next word is not yet born; when the next comes out, the former has already disappeared. If these words are not present at the same time, what are insults?” This attitude, for Qian Zhongshu, can “serve as a pleasure.”16 The third is the cognitive “appresentation of the reference.” This is a relatively complicated issue. What consciousness perceives is not necessarily a part of the object, but the mode by which the aspects of the object is connected with meaning, and it is perhaps a cross-media connection. We see the finger pointing, while what is being appresented is the sense of direction; we perceive a color, what is being appresented is warmth or coldness; we perceive raindrops on the window, what is being appresented is a heavy rain outside; we perceive the physical characteristics of a thing, but what is being appresented is often a psychological meaning, e.g. the appresentation of a person’s facial expression is “anger” or “surprise.” This last instance, easily confused with experience, is in fact a priori: anthropologists have already discovered that all people, regardless of cultural background, level of civilization, or age, possess six universal expressions—anger, fear, disgust, surprise, sadness, and happiness—which have no relation to life experience.17 14

Dong Minglai. “Interpretation as Protention: The Temporal Mechanism of the Process of Interpreting.” Signs and Media 8 (2014): 54. 15 Edmund Husserl. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. Trans. John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht: Springer, 1991: 31. 16 Qian Zhongshu. Guan Zhui Bian (Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters. Trans. Ronald C. Egan.). Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, Vol. 1: 685. 17 Paul Ekman. “Universal Facial Expressions of Emotions.” California Mental Health Research Digest 4 (Autumn 1970): 151–158. The list of universal expressions, however, have been updated several times, cf. What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (2nd Edition). Ed. Paul Ekman and Erika L. Rosenberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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The last is “the appresentation of the type” which is extremely important in the Western intellectual history. It is considered, from Plato to Husserl, as the essential starting point of human understanding. It is the most controversial issue in philosophical semiotics, because it is related to the most subtle mode of maintenance between transcendence and experience, between individual consciousness and communal opinions.18 “The appresentation of the type” refers to a perception of a particular object will lead to the perception of the category or type of the object. When one sees or smells an apple or sees other images, before taking into account the other qualities of that apple, the interpreter is already acquiring a categorical or typological apprehension: This is a fruit. Other non-related “thingness” is still suspended, including even the particular category of this apple, but the perception of the redness and the appetizing and fragrant smell, however, will intuitively lead to the category of the “fruit.” The typological appresentation is the most complicated appresentation, which is the cause by which a particular perception is likely to be understood, i.e. “the essential reduction” in phenomenology. But philosophical semiotics is not obliged to consider the typological appresentation as the essential intuition. Man possesses a strong faculty for categorization, effectively classifying objects into the world of meaning. This categorization could not completely exclude transcendence, but neither would it exclude the influences of experience: e.g. a child who does not necessarily have the experience of eating an apple, sees a red fruit, able to make the apple appresent the meaning of “being edible,” and reaches out his hand with the desire to bite it. Although the typological appresentation ensures the general necessity of knowledge, the category is only one possible element of appresentation which guarantees that knowledge apprehended by consciousness is universal to some limited degree. This statement seems paradoxical, but the typological appresentation produced by a priori apperception can only exist in the paradoxical sense: It is only a categorization satisfying the requirements of the minimum formal integrity of meaning. The appresentations listed above can be classified into two groups, i.e. concrete appresentations and abstract appresentations. The former one includes the appresentations of the whole and of the process. Although they are important faculties of human consciousness, their embryos have perhaps already existed in the consciousness of animals who necessarily need these two instincts in order to live in their environment, e.g. foraging, preying, and mating; while appresentations of the reference and of the type are, though, instincts preceding experience, probably possessed by some higher animals, only the complete human mind possesses the faculty of appresenting meaning to such a highly effective degree. It should be emphasized that experience often participates in the appresentations illustrated here, whose essential form depends only on the a priori apperception of consciousness, which can be independent of experience: neither the accumulation from daily life nor the acquisition from social communities. The evidence is that not only children, but also animals, possess these faculties to a certain extent. Less 18

Michael Ranta. Mimesis as the Representation of Types: The Historical and Psychological Basis of an Aesthetic Idea. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2000: 6.

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intelligent animals, such as the frog, who knows how to decide instantaneously the direction to which to turn to catch the mosquito when it senses its presence, or who understands by smelling the odor, if a male or female is in a rut. These simplest activities of meaning, e.g. hunting or mating, obviously depend on the a priori faculty, not on the capacity acquired through experience. Although the meanings given by these appresentation are limited, they are the place in which the fundamental link of life lies. The strong learning capacity of human beings may supplement a much stronger cognitive capacity to that of the four appresentations. Whereas the a priori basis of the human capacity of knowing is the way of apperception produced by these four appresentations. The discussions of the appresentation seem to be hard to understand, while it in fact resides perpetually in our consciousness. There is an interesting passage in The Great Learning by Confucius: “What is meant by ‘making the thoughts sincere’ is the allowing no self-deception, as when we hate a bad smell, and as when we love what is beautiful. This is called self-enjoyment. Therefore, the superior man must be watchful over himself when he is alone.” The general hermeneutical interpretation believes that the good and the evil derive from the inner heart of man. A statement made by Wang Yangming in his Instructions for Practical Living regards the passage as the discussion of the origin of essential knowledge and judgment of the human mind. He says: “Thus, The Great Learning inspires people what is true knowledge and act by saying that ‘as when we hate a bad smell, and as when we love what is beautiful’. To see a beautiful thing is knowledge, to love it is act: loving the beautiful thing by instinct after seeing it, instead of deciding to love it with a second thought after seeing it; to smell a bad smell is knowledge, to hate it is act: hating the bad smell by instinct after smelling it, instead of deciding to hate it with a second thought after smelling it.”19 What Wang Yangming means by the statement is that “seeing a beautiful thing” and “smelling a bad smell” is the innate cognitive mode of the human mind; to “love” the beautiful thing after seeing it is due to the a priori instinct of the mind; to hate the bad smell after smelling it also as an a priori instinct of the mind. To love the beautiful thing or to hate the bad smell are neither the cognitive habits acquired from experiences, while they are the necessary cognitive mode of the mind. Wang Yangming thinks that knowledge comes from “the essence” of consciousness: “The sages teach us to know and to act in order to recover the original essence of the knowledge and act, not to teach to us how to know and to act casually.”20 If Wang Yangming examines “knowledge” in the relationship between knowing and acting in terms of instinct, it is because in his terminology: “where thinking begins is acting.”21 It should be said that the knowledge of “loving” or “hating” has not yet been applied to “acting” in a general sense. The way of apprehending the “knowledge” (meaning)

19

Wang Yangming. Instructions for Practical Living. Commented by Deng Aimin. Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 2012: 10. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid.: 226.

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that Wang Yangming talks about is in fact the above-mentioned “appresentations of the reference and of the type.” Wang Yangming’s idea obviously comes from Mencius: “Therefore I say mouths find savor in the same flavors; ears find satisfaction in the same sounds; eyes find pleasure in the same beauty. When it comes to our minds, could they alone have nothing in common?”22 Mencius only says that human minds has something in common, while Wang Yangming clearly shows that something is innate, which is not acquired from experience. Indeed, if one “deliberately establishes another heart” and substitutes experience for intuition, one risks giving an explanation against instinct and risks not “loving a beautiful thing” and “hating a bad smell.” Lady Wang in A Dream of Red Mansions seeing Qing Wen will feel uncomfortable: “I will let you off now, but very soon I’ll have you skinned alive.”23 In the concrete acts of cognition and meaning, it is often found that it is difficult to make a clear distinguish between the transcendental appresentation and the empirical one, which though cannot prove that the place of a priori appresentation in the human mind has already been replaced. For a child with practically no accumulation of experience, the a priori appresentation formed by the a priori apperception is his essential mode of consciousness; for a well experienced adult, the a priori apperception always remains the fundamental part of his consciousness, although he confuses sometimes the transcendental with the empirical in the process of cognition. Or it can be asked: how does a person know that a chair necessarily has legs or some kind of support and that an apple has the other half if he, actually, does not see or feel them? Certainly, a chair with missing legs or a bitten apple is not impossible, just as it is possible to meet a flock of half-sheared sheep that are exactly facing us. The conclusion can be drawn: No knowledge acquired through apperceptionappresentation is absolute. The knowledge acquired through apperception-appresentation is often imprecise. If one observes more carefully, one may realize that the other half of the apple is not necessarily as red as the half seen; the object that is thrown at me may stop at the last moment; one may be mistaken when trying to guess a person’s mood through facial expressions; the apple one sees may be a wax figure and not a real fruit. But on the other hand, the absolutely “correct” understanding cannot be acquired directly through formal intuition, which is not the task of the initial noesis of consciousness as well, whose aim is to grasp the meaning that satisfies the “minimum formal integrity.” Further acts of cognition are needed to prove or justify that whether the object being appresented is the absolute truth of the thing or not. But this is a next stage of the acts of knowledge where the superimposition of acts of meaning of signs occurs, which is not the part of the discussion concerning appresentation in this chapter. Understanding a thing based on experience cannot depend on formal intuition, but

22

Mencius. Mencius. Trans. Irene Bloom; edited and with an introduction by Philip J. Ivanhoe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009: 125–126. 23 Cao Xueqin and Gao E. A Dream of Red Mansions Trans. Yang Xianyi and Dai Naidie. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994: 580.

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must be based on the accumulation of acts of apprehension with respect to the same thing. Precise knowledge requires the superimposition of meaning and needs to be testified further between the intuition and evidence. In any case, knowledge acquired through the contrasts of several acts of meaning is more precise than that acquired through a priori instinctive apperception, because what the consciousness obtains through presentation and appresentation always remains a preliminary knowledge of formal intuition. According to Kant, “One must assume a pure transcendental synthesis…which grounds even the possibility of all experience as that which the reproducibility of the appearances necessarily presupposes.”24 While for Peirce, knowledge depends on a sign that relates to another sign in the same consciousness: “The purpose of every sign is to express ‘fact,’ and by being joined with other signs, to approach as nearly as possible to determining an interpretant which would be the perfect Truth, the absolute Truth.”25 The knowledge produced by the empirical appresentation is certainly more precise than the pre-empirical one, but it goes beyond the category of formal intuition grasping meaning. The intuition is a descriptive explanation and the knowledge is an empirical interpretation, which should be distinguished: apperception as well as the resulting appresentation always remains in the intuitive category; experience, however, is acquired through the repetition and superimposition of several similar acts of meaning. The integral perception, the cross-mediate cognition, and the protention toward the future and of the type are only at the most elementary and simplest level of meaning. Whereas these four kinds of appresentations are very important in the activities of meaning of men, since they lead to the transcendence of the whole of the thing with perceptual limitation, the knowledge of the media with limited range, the protention toward the future constrained by the present moment, and finally, the category of the particular thing.

4 Appresentation as Semiosis What is, after all, the relationship between the presentation of the object produced by perception and the appresentation of it produced by apperception? What is present is the perceived aspects, while the elements appresented, including the whole, the process, the reference, and the type are originally absent. Their relationship corresponds to the fundamental definition of the sign which is “a perception understood as carrying meaning.”26 What is between the elements of the presentation and the 24

Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998: 230. 25 Charles Sanders Peirce. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Ed. Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, Vol. 2: 304. 26 Cf. Zhao Yiheng. “Redefinition of Sign and Semiotics.” Chinese Journal of Journalism and Communication. 35.06 (2013): 6–14.

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appresentation is the relation of the signs, and the appresentation itself is a typical semiosis. The first paradox of the signification of the sign lies in the fact that a sign is needed only when the meaning is absent.27 What is present and what is absent constitute the signification of the sign. In formal intuition, the perception produced by the presenting aspects of a thing refers to the appresenting part absent from the thing, which, eventually, jointly form a “representation” that carries a meaning which satisfies the requirements of the minimum formal integrity. Thus we can return to the question posed in the previous chapters: what is the difference between the sign and the thing? In my opinion, since appresentation has proved that the grasp of meaning of the consciousness depends on the perceived presenting part which leads to the unperceived appresenting part, then consciousness, when it envisages a thing, still obtains a sign; all meanings, including those that gained by cognition, must be carried by means of a sign. Appresentation and apperception confirm that sign and formal intuition appear simultaneously, which is contrary to Husserl’s statement that the sign is born only in a second time to transmit meaning. Moreover, it is not a peculiar and abnormal sign. The basic act of meaninggrasping of consciousness is in fact the so-called “index” that we have often seen. The present and perceived part of the thing gives rise to the knowledge for the absent and unperceived part, e.g. the photo is a part of perception pointing to the whole of the meaning: the spire of a church represents the whole church; a side of a bookshelf represents the whole bookshelf; the posture of a person points to the orientation of his or her action. Peirce defines index as “A sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object,”28 which is also “as a sign determined by its dynamic object by virtue of being in a real relation to it.”29 “The index is physically connected with its object; they make an organic pair.”30 That is to say that there is neither a qualitative similarity nor a sociocultural connection between the perceived sign and the object signified, while their relationship is “real,” “natural,” and “organic”: several kinds of appresentations—the part refers to the whole, the instant to the process, the contiguity to the cognition as well as the particularity to the category, posed in this book—are all included in the indexical relationship of the sign. The act of meaning of the index is in fact the most fundamental mode of the construction of human consciousness. Since the existence of man is the existence of the meaning of the sign, we can propose this bold conclusion: the starting point of the semiotic activities of consciousness of man is indexicality. Regarding this point, we should dwell a little on an essential concept of Peirce’s who reiterates that iconicity is the most fundamental part, i.e. the Firstness part of semiotic activities of man. He specifies that, “An Icon is a Representamen whose 27

Zhao Yiheng. Semiotics: Principles and Problems (3rd Edition). Nanking: Nanking University Press, 2015: 46. 28 Charles Sanders Pierce. Collected Papers. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958, Vol. 2: 248. 29 Ibid., Vol. 8: 335. 30 Ibid., Vol. 2: 299.

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Representative Quality is a Firstness of it as a First. That is, a quality that it has qua thing renders it fit to be a representamen”31 ; “A sign by Firstness is an image of its object”32 ; “A regular progression of one, two, three may be remarked in the three orders of signs, Icon, Index, Symbol.”33 While in my view, if the process of the presentation-appresentation in formal intuition is the basis of the acts of meaning, then indexicality will be the most fundamental activity of the sign. Iconicity can, should, and must be analyzed, because it resorts to the memory of experience in consciousness: the fact that an icon refers to another iconic object must rely on certain experience to finish the work of comparison. Iconicity presupposes an accumulation of experience which, based on many intuitions, requires an association of the identity of the interpreting subject, which is not necessarily the consciousness of the same person, e.g. it could be that of a social community, with the constant identity of the intentional object in order to accumulate and order the acts of meaning into experience. Thus experience obtains the essential meaning of the group of correlative objects through the accumulation and transformation of iconicity. Indexicality is, however, different: a part of aspects referring to the absent aspects depends only on the appresentation produced by apperception. The essential dimension of apperception, as Kant points out, is innate and self-evident, whose existence in human consciousness is independent of experience, and also the essential modes of meaning and existence of man as man. The basic activities of meaning, the innate meaning-synthesizing capacity of man, and even the requirements of the “minimum formal integrity” of consciousness for meaning, all demand precisely the indexical relationship of sign between presentation and appresentation. Indexicality is the fundamental correlation of the sign’s activities, which is the Firstness of semiotic phenomenology. On the fundamental character of the index, some authors’ opinion is close to the conclusion of the book. Some social semioticians demonstrate that identifying signs of a social nature such as sex or power through accent or tone depends on the essential indexicality of “pre-meaning”34 ; from the point of view of biological evolution, the preliminary mode in which animal consciousness connects to the thing is not iconic but indexical. Dario Martinelli, an Italian zoosemiotician, points out: “The significance of indexicality, within zoosemiotic study, is to be considered more central than in the case of anthroposemiotics, particularly its aspects related to human culture, whose logocentric nature predictably manifests a greater interest in symbols and icons. In a sense, one may go as far as to say that one of the main side-effects of the production of an artificial and/or cultural sign system is exactly its emancipation from

31

Ibid.: 276. Ibid. 33 Ibid.: 299. 34 Elinor Ochs. “Indexicality and Socialization,” in Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development. Ed. James W. Stigler, Richard, A. Shweder, and Gilbert Herdt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990: 287–308. 32

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indexicality, in favor of iconicity and (most of all) symbolicness.”35 Some authors even demonstrate that the essential mode of connection of the artificial intelligence of robots is also indexical.36 Until today, no semiotician, however, has proposed a definitive conclusion about the problem of the Firstness of the index. In my point of view, the three basic categories of the sign should be classified according to the following order: indexicality, iconicity, and conventionality. Since the signs that living beings use the most are the index, while the presentationappresentation, as the most instinctive mode of meaning of man continue, extends this indexical foundation. Contrary to the idea of Peirce, founder of semiotics, who considers the iconicity as the Firstness, the book proposes a different point of view concerning the semiotic essence of appresentation, in order to exchange with our predecessors, and also with today’s semiotic movement around the world. I am not a good debater, but serious reflection once begins, it will be difficult to evade reasoning which will lead to a necessary but perhaps undesirable conclusion.

35 Dario Martinelli. A Critical Companion to Zoosemiotics: People, Paths, Ideas. New York: Springer, 2010: 70. 36 Yves Lespérance and Hector J. Levesque. “Indexical Knowledge and Robot Action—A Logical Account.” Artificial Intelligence, Volume 73, Issues 1–2 (February 1995): 69–115.

Chapter 9

Indexicality is the Firstness in Semiotics

1 The Riddle of the Index In Peirce’s triadic semiotic theory, in the light of which the “motivatedness” of meaning is introduced, the trichotomy of signs appears to be the best known: icon, index, and symbol, whose grounds, i.e. the reason for being or why the sign connects to the object, are the well-known “iconicity, indexicality and conventionality.” This question is extremely important and deserves serious study, because motivatedness is the starting point from which Peircian semiotics breaks away from the Saussurean path and proceeds toward the post-structuralism. Saussure advocates “the arbitrariness of the signifier-signified relationship” that allows semiotics to rely on an organic system. While Peirce’s motivational concept emancipates the signification of the sign from the systematic constraint, which thus moves toward the openness of the interpretation of meaning. Of these three categories of signs, “conventionality” seems to be the most intelligible one, which is the convention within the human cultural community. What interests us more and is most discussed is “iconicity,” since this quality is the foundation of human experience and thought activities and is the essential starting point from which human thoughts construct the world of meaning, in parallel with the objective world of things. Whereas “indexicality” may be the least studied in semiotic circles, a quality which also seems simple, clear, and concrete. It must be said that none of these three “grounds” is as easy to explain as it seems. If we look more deeply into all the possibilities of meaning, we will see that they are far from being clear and easy to understand. While after that indexicality would probably be the one to be found as the most surprising and complex one. Peirce himself defines the index as follows: “I define an Index as a sign determined by its dynamic object by virtue of being in a real relation to it.”1 He explains it further 1

Charles Sanders Pierce. Collected Papers. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958, Vol. 8: 335.

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in other note: the index is “A sign, or representation, which refers to its object not so much because of any similarity or analogy with it, nor because it is associated with general characters which that object happens to possess, as because it is in dynamical (including spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the one hand, and with the senses or memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign, on the other hand.”2 These definitions are a little hard to understand, especially the last sentence of the last one saying that the index is “in dynamic connection with the senses or memory of the person for whom it serves as a sign,” which is in fact the common character of signs. Compared with the other two categories of signs, the index is farthest from memory and experience. While Peirce gives many examples that are easy to understand: a weathercock, an exclamation like “Oh!,” “Hey,” the letters on a geometrical diagram, subscript numbers which in algebra, a proper name, professional clothing, a sundial or clock, a barometer, a leveling instrument or perpendicular, the North Star, a ruler, a longitude and latitude, a pointing finger, etc., he even says: “Of this nature are all natural signs and physical symptoms. I call such a sign an index.”3 He even thinks that photographs are icons, “but belong to the second class of signs, those by physical connection,”4 which seems due to his strong impression of the chemical reaction of silver photosensitive materials. The number of examples Peirce illustrates for the index far exceeds those for the other two categories of signs, which shows to a certain degree that it is clearer to explain this issue with concrete examples than with a theoretical deliberation. In conclusion, it can be noticed that there are various relationships between the index and the object it refers to: the part and the whole, the cause and the consequence, the starting point and the direction of movement, and the particular case and the substitute. But the connection between the sign and the object that is not created by the activities of signs is “real,” which requires neither the similarity between the sign and the object (which requires further a study and analysis within the brain of the receiver), nor the cultural convention (which requires the receiver to mobilize the memory relating to the convention). Thus, Peirce points out: “An Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object,”5 which is in fact a succinct conclusion. Peirce further explains the function of the index: “A pure index simply forces attention to the object with which it reacts and puts the interpreter into mediate reaction with that object, but conveys no information.”6 Because the index only directs the receiver to focus attention on the object, Peirce refers to the effect of indexicality as a “mediate reaction” that forces the receiver’s attention only to the

2

Ibid.: Vol. 2: 305. Ibid.: Vol. 3: 361. 4 Ibid.: Vol. 2: 281. 5 Ibid.: Vol. 2: 248. 6 Charles Sanders Peirce. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Ed. Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, Vol. 2: 306. 3

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object instead of directly transmitting the meaningful information. Indeed, it is not any kind of representation. It must be said that neither of these two definitions is clear enough. The effect of “forcing attention” is found on almost all signs, e.g. a sign marking a dangerous area can be an X mark (index), a picture a skull (icon), or the exactly word “danger” (symbol). All three play a warning role, so why will the X mark necessarily be “affected by the object?” The index is only taken seriously from the end of the 20th century, a century after the appearance of the notion of index, and the credit should be given to Thomas Albert Sebeok who published in 1990 an article “Indexicality” in which he demonstrates that in Peirce’s semiotics: “The notion of ‘icon’ is as old as Plato’s (i.e., that the sign imitates the signified); Peirce’s notion of the symbol is original but fruitless; it is with his notion of index that Peirce is at once novel and fruitful.”7 In reality, the notion of index itself is, however, very common, there are many synonyms in English, e.g. the “cue” of the director, the “clue” of the criminal investigator, the “trail” of the scout, the “track” of the hunter, the “symptom” of the doctor, and so on so forth. The index is seen more often than the scenes described above, and the indexicality is also a much more complex issue. Unable to answer all the questions related to indexicality, this chapter attempts to examine the mechanism of signification and the essential qualities of the index in order to give a clearer definition. Especially in comparison with iconicity, the crucial question needs to be answered: Is indexicality a priori or experiential? Is it of Firstness (original or intuitive) or of Secondness (based on experience)?

2 The History of the Genesis of the Index The section first starts from the history of the genesis of the sign to study this question. To all the phenomena of human consciousness (e.g. the production of the selfconsciousness which can be viewed as the self-awareness of the self being opposed to the other), researchers often discuss the process of its genesis from two aspects: the one is to observe the performance of the animal. If the animal also has this faculty, it proves that it is not particular to humans, but is acquired in the course of biological evolution; the other is to examine the development of a child looking for the time when he acquires this quality, since the development of a child’s intelligence condenses and repeats the biological evolution of the race. If the child has this quality at an early age, it proves that this quality is an innate instinct which does not need to be learned from culture and experience.

7

Thomas Sebeok. Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics (2nd Edition). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001: 84.

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In the early 1980s, some authors claimed that the semiotic act in plants could not have icons and but only indices, e.g. the reaction of plants to sunlight and gravity.8 In reality, the “endo-semiosis” in the body, e.g. blood glucose and insulin secretion, diet and bile secretion, sports and adrenaline release, etc., are also indexical, which shows that index functioning hardly needs to be consciously perceived. The index, especially the primary index, is in fact analogous to the “signal” which is a special sign that does not require any interpretative effort on the part of the receiver and is characterized by the need for practical reaction on the part of the receiver instead of an interpretation. On the other hand, the index requires an interpretation, the perception of which needs to be interpreted in a meaningful way. Thus, the index is a sign, but its original state (in plants or in the body) is indeed similar to the signal and close to the anthropo-semiotic threshold of meaning. For years, primates have been used as a contrast object in the study of acts of meaning of humans. Numerous experiments, of which we will mention only a few, have been carried out. Researchers have discovered that in the calls of rhesus monkeys, the formant structure in their “coo” calls can be used to assess the physical characteristics such as the age-related body size or sex.9 René Dirven summarizes that monkeys make use of a system of nine different cries, which are more complex than the system of songs by whales and the pattern of dance by bees, conveying more information, while “these systems of communication are almost exclusively indexical.”10 But these calls are “almost all clues.” Leavens conducted an experiment on chimpanzees, finding that pointing with the “index finger of the dominant hands” at the object by these chimpanzees was intentionally communicative, which refuted “claims that indexical or referential pointing is species-unique to humans or dependent on linguistic competence or explicit training.”11 “There is a hierarchy of abstraction amongst the three types of signs. Indexical signs are the most ‘primitive’ and the most limited signs.”12 The Center for Cognitive Semiotics at Lund University in Sweden, directed by Professor Jordan Zlatev, has carried out several solid experiments in identifying the characteristics of the sign. They have designed a complex experiment which takes both chimpanzees and children of three ages (18, 24, and 30 months) as objects. In the experiment, a “helper” indicates the location of a hidden reward in one of three boxes of different colors “by means of one of the four cues: Pointing, which is the index with directionality, Marker, which places a ‘post-it’ note on top of the indicated box, Picture, which hold up a color photograph of the correct box, and 8

Martin Krampen. “Phytosemiotics,” Semiotica, 1981: 195–196. Asif Ghazanfar et al. “Vocal-tract Resonances as Indexical Cues in Rhesus Monkeys.” Current Biology 17.6 (March 2007): 425–430. 10 René Dirven and Marjolijn Verspoor. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics (Second Revised Edition). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004: 3. 11 D. A. Leavens. “Indexical and Refrential Pointing in Champanzees.” Journal of Comparative Psychology 110.4 (1996): 346–353. 12 René Dirven and Marjolijn Verspoor. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics (Second Revised Edition). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004: 3. 9

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Replica, which holds up an identical replica of the correct box.”13 The experiment takes the number of trails as the criterion, and success rates of the results, however, exceed some predications, but with considerable variation, “The cognitive capacity that is well-developed in children, while underdeveloped in chimpanzees”14 that they all success to a degree with the indexical non-representational vehicles, but only the children can success with the last two iconic representational vehicles.15 The index is thus the most elementary and primitive, while the index with vectorality would be even more primary, whose kinetic momentum involves the bodily reaction of the receiver. An animal, unless specially trained, cannot use iconic signs. The knowledge it has acquired is only temporary and limited to the particular scene of training unable to be applied in a general way, because the identification of an icon presupposes the formation of memory and experience. As for the symbol which is completely a privilege field of the human beings cultivated culturally, it is totally outside the “natural” capacities of animals or babies, to clarify the relations within the three categories of signs, the diagrams below are thus proposed: Index sign

meaning

Icon sign

symbol meaning

sign

meaning

The index relies on contiguity as semiotic ground that one can easily grasp the meaning when one sees the sign clearly. On the other hand, the other two signs require an intelligent operation. Thus, Zlatev arrives at an interesting conclusion: although the index is a sign carrying meaning, it is not a fully-fledged sign since it does not have the “representation” of the aspects which is related with the meaning of the object.16 Among the hierarchy of abstraction among the three types of signs proposed by Peirce, the indexical signs are the most “primitive.”17 I prefer to call the index as the “sign of the first level,” which, however, deserves an in-depth study, because it makes us to reflect again on the celebrated Peirce’s triadic semiotic model.

3 The Indexicals in Language Since a sign is often a mix of the three qualities, i.e., the iconicity, indexicality, and conventionality, the study of which forces us to go back to some more complex issues. Peirce himself points out that “A weathercock has a certain analogy with the 13

Jordan Zlatev et al. “Understanding Communicative Intention and Semiotic Vehicles by Children and Champanzees.” Cognitive Development 28 (2013): 312–329. 14 Ibid.: 327. 15 Ibid.: 320. 16 Ibid.: 325. 17 René Dirven and Marjolijn Verspoor. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics (Second Revised Edition). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004: 3.

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direction of the wind, which is both an index (veering with the wind) and an icon (really taking the self-same direction as the wind).”18 Since the indexicals are the lexis of the language, they are symbols whose meanings are culturally determined, while they are also the indexical signs that exist in the huge linguistic system, therefore their way of signification associates the characteristics from these two positions and manifests a rather remarkable particularity. The indexical is an old question in linguistics to which many analytical philosophers of language have contributed specific terms: “egocentric particular” by Russell, “shifter” by Jespersen, “indicator” by Goodman, “token-reflective” by H. Reichenbach, and “demonstrative” by Kaplan.19 Academic circles finally reached a consensus on the term “index” proposed a century ago by Peirce, as it appeared to be an appropriate term covering the semiotic and linguistic domains.20 In fact, Peirce was the first to study this question in detail, so this section will be in keeping with semiotics, regarding the “indexical” as a linguistic indexical sign. Chinese linguistic circles translate indexical as “zhidai ci” (指代词 pointing pronouns),21 which is easily misunderstood as only the quality of some pronouns. In reality, indexicals includes pronouns, adverbs, modal verbs, locutions, and even grammatical relationships such as tense. Peirce has already claimed: “The demonstrative pronouns, ‘this’ and ‘that,’ are indices. For they call upon the hearer to use his powers of observation, and so establish a real connection between his mind and the object; and if the demonstrative pronoun does that—without which its meaning is not understood—it goes to establish such a connection; and so is an index.”22 He thus specifies that the modality of meaning of the indexical is that the hearer understands what the speaker refers to is the real connection between them, which is established based on the indexical. The exact meaning of “this” or “that” can only be understood within a particular context. Peirce has listed three categories of indexicals: The first is that “grammarians call by the very indefinite designation of indefinite pronouns,” i.e. “selective pronouns,” and to be specific “universal selectives,” e.g. “any, every, all, no, none, whatever, whoever, everybody, anybody, nobody.”23 The second is the “selective qualifiers, consisting of the particular selectives” in grammar, e.g. “some, something, somebody, a, a certain, some or other, a suitable, one.” Allied with the above pronouns are “such expressions as all but one, one or two, a few, nearly all, every other one, and the first, the last, the seventh, two-thirds 18

Charles Sanders Pierce. Collected Papers. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1931– 1958, Vol. 2: 286. 19 David Kaplan. “On the Logic of Demonstratives.” The Journal of Philosophical Logic, Vol. 8 (1979): 81–98. 20 Richard M. Gale. “Indexical Signs,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Paul Edwards. New York: MacMillan, 1996, Vol. 4: 151–155. 21 Hand Donghui. “On Indexical.” Journal of Renmin University of China 6 (2015): 56–65. 22 Charles Sanders Pierce. Collected Papers. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1931– 1958, Vol. 2: 287. 23 Ibid.: 289.

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of, thousands of, etc. Along with these are to be classed adverbs of place and time, etc.”24 The third category includes prepositions, and prepositional phrases, such as, “on the right (or left) of.”25 Peirce points out that indexical words are very common in language and is characterized by the fact that “when they refer … to a situation relative to the observed, or assumed to be experientially known, (place and attitude of the speaker relatively to that of the hearer), then the indexical element is the dominant element.”26 “These mean that the hearer is at liberty to select any instance he likes within limits expressed or understood, and the assertion is intended to apply to that one.”27 Although the explanation seems complicated, in fact, it simply means that what these words or phrases mean depends on the linguistic context in which the speakers express themselves. On the surface, the indexical words express a clear meaning, but what they are exactly referring to totally relies on the concrete choice by the hearer which cannot be determined from the literal meaning. What is meant by “the two on the left” will be determined according to the particular linguistic context. The indexical words are more than the three above-mentioned categories. These words are actually centered on and determined by the reference of the speaker that the listener understands, e.g. “now, the past, today, tomorrow,” which day they refer to actually depends on the object the speaker is referring to. Hilary Whitehall Putnam therefore believes that all “natural kind terms” depend on the linguistic context and that they have at least some of the “indexical” elements, such as, “big, small, late, early, tall, short, rich, poor, etc.,” because “the one who is tall in the south may be short in the north.” The expression that changes “as the linguistic context changes” is so general that there is a joke-like proposition: “Why ‘water’ is nearly an indexical?,”28 which certainly does not make any sense. The words of generality, like “apple, car,” even if their definite reference depends on the linguistic context, are not indexicals, because they determine the actual reference without depending on the relationship between contiguity and vectorality in the speaker’s intention. For Kaplan, all indexicals are characterized by a double meaning (different from the polysemy with several meanings), one of which is “linguistic meaning,” that is, the meaning in the dictionary, e.g. “I” refer to the sender of the sign, “you” the receiver, “left” the left of the speaker or the left of something that both interlocutors implicitly know. The other is “content actually referred to,” “I” refer to someone saying these words, “you” someone receiving them, which cannot be found in the dictionary. At the moment when “I” say “today,” which refers to the day “I” wrote

24

Ibid.: 289. Ibid.: 290. 26 Ibid.: 290. 27 Ibid.: 289. 28 J. P. Smit. “Why ‘Water’ Is Nearly an Indexical?” SATS, European Journal of Philosophy 11.1 (January 2010): 33–51. 25

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it, and whose linguistic meaning remains the same after midnight, but the reference has already changed. It is reasonable that these are named as “indexicals” by Peirce. It is not only because this concept was proposed when he was discussing of the index, but also because he made it clear: Indexicals are linguistic signs with indexicality. They do refer to an object, but it depends not only on the semantic meaning that the word itself carries, but more on the communicative interaction between the sender and the receiver. They are indices with the “semantic vector.” Since these words have virtually no representative objects, the receiver must understand the relationship of direction and contiguity in the sender’s intention in order to really understand the meaning of these words. Thus, by pointing out the character of indexicals as “the systematic ambiguity of the egocentric particular,”29 Russell comes to the point: The index that consciousness emits from its ego-centric self builds a network of meaning with the world.

4 Indexicality and Self-consciousness For semiotic phenomenology, the most essential indexicality can be seen in the apperception-appresentation of the initial noesis discussed in the previous chapter. What is the relationship between the presentation of the object produced by perception and the appresentation of the object produced by apperception? What is present is the perceived aspects, while the elements appresented, including the whole, the process, the reference, and the type, are originally absent. What is present and what is absent constitutes a signification of the sign. Moreover, the minimum noesis of consciousness is an index. The present and perceived part gives rise to a knowledge of the absent and unperceived part. The part refers to the whole, the instant to the process, the contiguity to the reference, and the individual to the category, which are therefore all semiosis of an indexical nature. The appresentations of the whole and the process are mainly indexical, the referential and typological appresentations manifest iconic characters. The appresentation of the reference may represent images, and that of the type may be based on the relationship between image and replica, which, though, may have indexicality, can only be a partial one. Peirce draws a reasonable conclusion: “The index is physically connected with its object; they make an organic pair.”30 These two words, “physically” and “organic” are used with precision. The act of meaning of the index is in fact the most fundamental mode of the construction of human consciousness. Since the existence of man is the existence of the meaning of the sign, we can propose this bold conclusion: The starting point of the semiotic activities of consciousness of man is indexicality. 29

C. J. Koehler. “Studies in Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Knowledge.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 26.102 (1972): 449–512. 30 Charles Sanders Pierce. Collected Papers. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1931– 1958, Vol. 2: 299.

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I have already demonstrated in Semiotics: Principles and Problems that, “The index has an important function, which is to give order to the composition of objects: They connect to the object while relying on causality and contiguity, so the connection of the sign in signification allows the objects to have a relatively orderly mode of comparison and to constitute a sequence.”31 Why is indexicality related to order? The world was initially in chaos, without order. But the meanings that the consciousness grasps must be in order, so that the consciousness transforms the accumulated traces of meaning into experience by the repetition of acts of meaning of the same kind, which is the learning process necessary for man, but also a requisite for “the grasp of the law of how the world works.” Even the existence of the self must depend on the grasp of the law of selfconsciousness, otherwise the consciousness will remain in chaos, because every noesis has to start all over again. The concept of “I” is an abstract mode, in which consciousness controls the knowledge and acts of its self. This does not mean that self-consciousness can know itself from within, but that consciousness can know itself in interactions with the world, in which the index plays the role as a conjurer. Taking the simplest example: The interpersonal relationship and the kinship are in fact indexical. “Boss,” “neighbor,” “father,” “cousin” are all existing in relation to “me.” The referent is obtained only in “my” linguistic context. In reality, their meaning has appeared in terms of “who I am,” and alters according to the subject. Without these linguistic signs, the interpersonal relationship of me would be a real mess. The index arranges not only the order of things, but also the position of the self: Self-consciousness, the axis of all things in the world as the object of cognition, refers to itself through referring to all things in the world. This is why the report of the speech of someone else is called a “quote” and put in quotation marks when written out. Whereas this is not necessary when one expresses oneself, because “I” is the speaker, as if I were at the heart of the world of meaning, which is probably a self-deception, but it is also the most natural state of the existence of consciousness. The indexical order in the essential noesis we are talking about here refers to more than the order in linguistic expressions. All indexicals take “I” as the starting point, and thus linguistic philosophers call this “ego” “indexical I.” “I think, therefore I am” is the exaggeration of the egotism, while “I designate, therefore I am” is the real axis of the world of meaning. The causality, the part-whole relationship, and the vectorality on which the index is based are not at the disposal of the world itself, but of the world of meaning that we try to create from the present world. They are graspable orders that we try to “seek” in things. The most common example is that almost everyone has “souvenirs.” The most valuable memory for one person will be worthless or meaningless to others. The souvenir is a sign referring to one’s own personal experience or some kind of “selfgift” that cannot be substituted for personal reasons. More broadly, most things or

31

Zhao Yiheng. Semiotics: Principles and Problems. Nanking: Nanking University Press, 2011: 83.

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memories in our lives have value exclusively for ourselves.32 These souvenirs can be tangible and physical, but can be also events reserved in “my” memory, thus possessing an “egocentric” psychological value. One could even say that “my” life is constructed of a series of indices, which build at least the skeleton of “my” memory, because the indexical parts are often easier to be remembered than the other parts, e.g. a person’s clothing, face, voice, the rosy clouds by the sunset, and all the details that seems unimportant, on the contrary, can be remembered more easily.33 Furthermore, the history of a social community or a civilization also works in the same way. This is also the very reason why Jakobson avers: “In … lyrical songs, for example, metaphoric constructions predominate, while in the heroic epics the metonymic way is preponderant.”34 In the large-scale cultural life of the human community, the “order” of indexical signs actually becomes a socio-semiotic constitution. In Chinese, those concerning kinship are expressed in terms that are more complicated than that in most European languages, because the indexicals construct an ethical ideology of the Chinese family. The “indexical valorization” is a mode of composition necessary to all human cultures, which establishes the foundation of the order. First Emperor of Qin, (Qin Shi Huang) established the system of prefectures and counties taking the place of the system of enfeoffment; the heroes in the Water Margin “take their seat in order,” which does not only need a division of labor, but also a hierarchical order. As a social being, our language style, such as, the diction, tones, the honorific, and the way of dressing, hair style, the seating arrangement, and the order of walking, all have hierarchies. Even the consumption (the life style) is also hierarchized by the society,35 which is an important mode of the formation of the “political economy of the sign.”

5 Is Indexicality the Secondness? Close examination of the characteristics of the index leads us, however, to question one of the essential views of Peirce, whose triadic theory is the foundation of semiotic phenomenology and the essential way in which human consciousness organizes the relationship between itself and the world by means of the signs. According to the trichotomy, the sign is divided into three parts: representamen-objectinterpretant. While the representamen can be further divided into qualisign-sinsignlegisign; the object icon-index-symbol; the interpretant immediate interpretantmiddle interpretant-ultimate interpretant. They are all in a triadic relation and 32

Kent Grayson and David Shulman. “Indexicality and the Varification Function of Irreplaceable Possessions: A Semiotic Analysis.” Journal of Consumer Research 27.1 (2000): 17–30. 33 Wee Hun Lim and Winston D. Goh. “Variability and Reception Memory: Are There Analogous Indexical Effects in Music and Speech?” Journal of Cognitive Psychology 5 (2012): 602–616. 34 Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle. “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” in Fundamentals of Language. Hague: Mouton Press, 1956: 77. 35 Michael Silverstein. “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.” Language and Communication 23.3–4 (2003): 193–229.

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there are more triadic relations in Peircian semiotics. In fact, he generalizes his triadic theory as the fundamental law of semiotics. The fundamental aspects of his trichotomy: Strata

Signification Representatum

Object

Interpretant

Firstness

Qualisign

Icon

Rheme

Secondness

Sinsign

Index

Dicent

Thirdness

Legisign

Symbol

Argument

Peirce writes that, “Among phanerons there are certain qualities of feeling, such as the color of magenta, the odor of attar, the sound of a railway whistle, the taste of quinine, the quality of the emotion upon contemplating a fine mathematical demonstration, the quality of feeling of love, etc. I do not mean the sense of actually experiencing these feelings, whether primarily or in any memory or imagination. That is something that involves these qualities as an element of it. But I mean the qualities themselves which, in themselves, are mere may-bes, not necessarily realized.”36 Obviously, it is the quality of the “qualisign,” that is, the character of the sign manifested in the phase of “perception” that Peirce describes here, without specifying the fact that the perception of the quality leading to meaning is the matter of the next two phases. Thus, the “First” is the first stage of the meaning process of all signs. But in other places, Peirce relates “First” to “Firstness,” to which he gives a precise description. However, it is difficult to say whether the latter applies well to iconicity or indexiciality: “The idea of First is predominant in the ideas of freshness, life, freedom. The free is that which has not another behind it, determining its actions; but so far as the idea of the negation of another enters, the idea of another enters; and such negative idea must be put in the background, or else we cannot say that the Firstness is predominant. Freedom can only manifest itself in unlimited and uncontrolled variety and multiplicity; and thus the first becomes predominant in the ideas of measureless variety and multiplicity.… In the idea of being, Firstness is predominant, not necessarily on account of the abstractness of that idea, but on account of its self-containedness. It is not in being separated from qualities that Firstness is most predominant, but in being something peculiar and idiosyncratic. The first is predominant in feeling, as distinct from objective perception, will, and thought.”37 While at other times, he specifies more definitely that iconicity is the essential part of human semiotic activities, which is “Firstness.” He avers that “An Icon is a Representamen whose Representative Quality is a Firstness of it as a First. That is, a quality that it has qua thing renders it fit to be a representamen.”38 “A regular 36

Charles Sanders Pierce. Collected Papers. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1931– 1958, Vol. 1: 304. 37 Ibid.: 302. 38 Ibid.: Vol. 2: 276.

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progression of one, two, three may be remarked in the three orders of signs, Icon, Index, Symbol.”39 A conclusion therefore can be drawn: “First” Peirce talks about corresponds to the perception of qualities, or simply qualisign, and is the first step of the act of meaning, on the basis of which rests “Firstness,” or the iconicity of the sign. Hence, in the Peircean triadic system, the icon is primary and fundamental. It is necessary to indicate that there is also a little confusion here: it is clear that the sign originates from the perception of certain aspects of the object by the consciousness. Following this logic, however, the indexicality enters first, through the apperception-appresentation, forming the first stage of the act of meaning for which we devoted a whole chapter to demonstrate the point. Three conclusions can be drawn from the experiments or demonstrations cited above: From the point of view of biological evolution, the most primitive semiotic acts in plants and animals are the index. From the point of view of a child’s development, a baby begins its semiotic acts from the index and gradually learns to use the icon. From the point of view of the sequentiality of the indexicals, the ambient world of human is essentially constructed with order by indexicals. All these have eloquently explained that indexicality is the essential act of the world of meaning, or at least its starting point is a priori and intuitive. Whereas iconicity is based on experience because it appeals to the memory left by previous meaning acts in the consciousness. An icon referring to an iconic object must rely on the analysis of some kind of existing experience in order to form a comparison. Iconicity presupposes an accumulation of experiences, which, based on many intuitions, requires the identity of the interpreting subject and the enduring identity or similarity of the intentional object. Only through comparison it is possible to accumulate meaning acts and to order them into experience. Experience grasps the essential meaning of the related object through the accumulation and transformation of iconicity. Thus I can only confirm that the initial form (the perception) of the index would probably be the “qualisign,” like the icon and the symbol. While its cognition of meaning, especially in the initial phase, would nevertheless come from the direct connection with the object and form the instinctive intuition, without the need for accumulated experiences of previous meaning acts or cultural training. Thus, contrary to Peirce’s assertion that “a sign by Firtness is an image of its object,”40 with all due respect, I venture to propose a different point of view according to which the sign of Firstness is an index leading the consciousness to the object.

39 40

Ibid.: Vol. 2: 299. Ibid.: 276.