Why life presupposes semiosis

1 Introduction

A common assumption in biosemiotics today is that semiosis presupposes life. The fact of the matter is, however, just the opposite: it is life that presupposes semiosis, and in this essay I want to indicate why, showing along the way that the common assumption to the contrary among the biosemioticians is an example insofar of what Thomas Sebeok called a “pars pro toto fallacy”, a fallacy of mistaking a part for the whole. Indeed, life presupposes semiosis in a double sense: first, life presupposes semiosis in order to sustain itself as existing; but, more fundamentally, life presupposes semiosis in order to come into existence in the first place.

Now, everything in semiotics foundationally turns around the understanding of relation. And “relation” is one of the most difficult terms really to understand in the whole history of philosophy. I would go so far as to say that there is no term that is more utilized and less thought about than relation.

You will find, even among the Peirceans – not among the great Peirceans, such as André DeTienne or Nathan Houser, but among run-of-the-mill Peirceans such as (so far as regards this aspect of semiotics, even T. L. Short) – there is a confusion of relations with related things. And if you go through the history of philosophy you find that the category of relation in Aristotle provided one of his most perplexing moments.^[1] It took him no less than three different tries before he arrived at a notion of relation that did not undermine his definition of substance as the foundational category for his whole scheme of το δυ, or what the later Latins would come to term ens naturae and later ens reale, being in a dimension independent of finite mind. For Aristotle the whole point of identifying relation as a category of το δυ was to recognize that there are relations within and among beings that are antecedent to and independent of anything that mind contributes to the world of reality at any level.

Later thinkers, even those who considered themselves followers of Aristotle, tended to veer from his understanding on this point of affirming the irreducible reality of relation to the subjective dimension of being, including substance as the fundamental “natural unit” of finite being. Among these, William of Ockham (c.1285–1349) was hardly the first, but, so far as concerns modern thought in philosophy Ockham was the one around whom the idea concentrated that relation has its whole being only in comparisons that the mind makes among things of which it becomes aware.^[2] This is precisely the essence of what has come to be called Nominalism: the claim that relations only result from comparisons that we make among objects, that independent of the mind there are only individual things interacting.

So, for example, it is common to speak of a couple “involved in a sexual relation”. But this way of speaking is technically inaccurate in the terms of the Aristotelian categories. For what the couple engages in is a sexual interaction, to which a sexual relation does not reduce but from which a sexual relation results. Relations are not interactions but results of interactions: relations arise from but do not reduce to interactions, and continue to exist even when the interaction is over and done.

So, even though and always relations result or arise from interactions, it remains always that the interactions, agere et pati, remain distinct from the relations that they provenate or effect. A relation will always arise from a sexual interaction, just as sometimes a child will result from such an interaction. But just as a child is something over and above sexual interaction, so also is any resultant relation over and above the interaction. And just as the child resulting from sexual interaction continues in existence when the interaction has ceased, so also does any resulting relation. Relation is thus like a child: it presupposes an interaction, but it has an existence independent of, even though consequent upon, interaction. The interaction brings the relation into existence, but when the interaction is over the relation continues in existence.

2 Peirce, relation, signs

There are many things distinctive of Peirce. One of them was that he was the first of the later moderns to reject the advice of Descartes to stop reading the Latins lest you be infected by their errors. So far the Peirceans have not much followed Peirce’s example on this point. Yet there is no doubt that it was precisely from reading the Latins that Peirce got many of his basic ideas about semiotics, the most interesting and important of which by far is his realization that what is essential to a sign, what is that without which there are no signs, is not only relations but triadic relation.^[3] Relations resulting from interactions will be at least dyadic, but will give rise to semiosis only insofar as they are further triadic.

The reason it is so difficult to understand relations is that relations cannot be seen or touched, even though they are part and parcel of our immediate physical surroundings of things that can be seen and touched. When an ordinary person talks about material things, what they mean is precisely something that can be seen and touched. Modern science began its development precisely by applying instruments to just such things, but what we have increasingly learned as a result of that scientific development is that there are many definitely material things that, with our bodies alone, cannot be seen or touched. In fact we have discovered – the name for the discovery is Umwelt – that what you can see or touch depends directly upon the type of body that you have. At the first North American Biosemiotics Conference in Oregon, Donald Favareau gave a marvelous slide-show of how a meadow, the same meadow, appears to the human eye, and how it appears in the eyes of different species. To the eye of a butterfly, to the eye of a snake, to the eye of a human, the colors were all different.

The understanding of color presents a most interesting development. In the middle ages, as in ancient Greek times, people assumed that color was in the thing: so you see this paper is yellow, that paper is grey, and so on. It’s “obvious” that color is in the thing colored!^[4] The modern philosophers adopted the opposite opinion: No, no, sorry about that. Color is not in things; it is a creation by the mind cut out of whole cloth, as it were. In things there is only the quantitative dimension.

And now what have we discovered? Color is neither “in” the things nor “in” the mind but in the interaction between bodies. And the type of body you have determines the color you will see in a given interaction, or if you will see any color at all. Because there are many bodies that interact but that have no awareness.

Now relations arise from every interaction. But the relations that constitute signs are triadic relations. How do triadic relations differ from other relations? Let us first ask what do triadic relations have in common with other relations? Cornelis de Waal (2013) wrote a book recently titled Peirce: A guide for the perplexed. He notes a distinction in Peirce between reality and existence. That is a novel distinction, inasmuch as usually what people think of a “reality” is precisely what exists. But there are two very different ways of construing existence. The way that Aquinas construed it in his proof for the existence of God is very different from what Peirce is talking about in this distinction between reality and existence. Because existence in this Peircean usage means things that are capable of Secondness; and things that are capable of Secondness are finite beings, bodies interacting out of which interaction arise relations.

Secondness involves individual things. So you have what Aristotle called “substance”, or what would be equally accurately but more linguistically compatible with modern culture called “subjectivity”. What is subjectivity? Subjectivity is everything that separates Farouk Seif from Myrdene Anderson. Subjectivity is everything that distinguishes you from the rest of the universe. Relation does not distinguish you from the rest of the universe. Relation unites you to other things in the universe. So if substance is subjectivity, or things capable of Secondness, relations are suprasubjectivity, “over and above” subjectivity. An important terminology in this regard that doesn’t come from Peirce but rather from Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) is the distinction between Innnenwelt and Umwelt. The Innenwelt is the animal’s private world, its “psychology” or “subjectivity”, if you like. The Umwelt, by contrast, is the world the animal shares within its species. You cannot make sense of the connection of the two except by bringing in the concept of relation as tying the two together: No Umwelt without an Innenwelt, no Innenwelt without an Umwelt. The Innenwelt is the foundation for the relations that result or “terminate” in Umwelt, but the Umwelt is an objective or “public” world, a world shared by whatever species of animal. So Umwelts can overlap.

For example, Christopher Morrissey knows what a camel is. How does he know what a camel is? Because he has the idea of a camel. And where is Christopher’s idea of a camel? Well it’s in his head! But where’s the camel? It’s not in his head (I hope!).

Now you have this interval called “modern philosophy” where semiotics is completely pushed aside, and things are decreed “unknowable”. It is a point that I have never been able to understand: why do people maintain an interest in Immanuel Kant, and even (especially the British) insist on mispronouncing his name, when his name and his doctrine in English pronunciation fit perfectly: According to Kant, you can’t know god, you can’t know the soul, you can’t know the world – you can’t know anything aside from the representations within your own mind! There is, there can be, no such thing as communication. The modern philosophers in trying to persuade one another – if Kant’s view were correct – were wasting their time.

Monads have no windows. Nothing enters in or exits out. Everyone is locked inside of their own bubble.

Why is that? Because the modern philosophers, bar none, missed the concept of relation. The concept of relation is something that is suprasubjective, that unites something to what is other. Now we get to the triadic relation and what distinguishes it among relations. What distinguishes the triadic relation is that it irreducibly involves three elements or factors. So a sign consists in a relation, and a relation though it involves subjectivity and cannot exist without some basis in subjectivity, is not reducible to subjectivity.

So you have in the Aristotelian categories, substance – the individual, basically; and accidents, the characteristics of the individual; but a relation is not a characteristic of an individual but something that arises from the characteristics of an individual. A relation is based upon the characteristics of an individual, but the relation is over and above those characteristics and uniting the individual to something other than itself on the basis of its individual characteristics. And the relation, in contrast to the characters upon which it is based and at which it terminates, cannot be seen or touched. The way that Poinsot puts it: neither location in space nor distance in space makes any difference to a relation in its proper and distinctive being as suprasubjective. His actual expression is that “a son, far or near, is in the same way the son of the father”.^[5] If you have a son or a daughter in space on a NASA mission, for example, it doesn’t matter which side of Jupiter they are on or whether they are any longer in the solar system: there is a relation between you and that child that is unaffected by the distance.

So neither distance nor location makes any difference to relation, which I suspect has much to do with “quantum weirdness”. The son or the daughter, the wife or the husband, are “things” that you can see and touch; but the relation making them what they are as related you cannot see or touch. And yet it is relation that enables you to say what is connected and what is not. It used to be, in the old days, if a man and a woman had sex and the woman got pregnant as a result that could be “her tough luck”, because there was no mistaking who the mother is, while there was no way to prove who was the father. Now we do have ways of proving who is the father. If the government were up-to-date with science, before they gave a woman childcare benefits, they would make her identify the father and make him too take responsibility. So as our knowledge expands we can increase control of the world; but everything depends on the reality of relations, which are not something you can directly see or touch.

The triadic relation irreducibly involves three, but the three involved are not necessarily things, because what is distinctive about the action of signs is that it is the only form of causality that can directly involve nonbeing. I was once teaching for a semester in Bulgaria and I told a class confidentially how I got the money to come to Sofia. It was by robbing a bank. I had searched out a small bank in a small town where the police were newcomers, and where the main road from the bank went over a steep hill on the other side of which the road forked, one going into a woods and the other going over another hill. In my escaping the bank with its money, of course, the police were soon in pursuit, sirens blazing. I went over the first hill, stopped, put up a sign on the left fork saying “Bridge Out”, then took that fork into the woods. Very soon the police with their howling siren came over that same hill and screeched to a halt at the road’s fork. But on seeing the sign they at once abduced that I would have to have taken the right fork, and immediately continued their pursuit in that direction, of course in vain. In order to be really “out” there had to be a bridge; but in semiosis the bridge did not have to exist in order to provide me with an escape from the police pursuing me! And that involvement of nonbeing is what is distinctive about semiosis as the action of signs as Thirdness, in contrast with the actions comprising existence as Secondness.

In fact, not only was the “Bridge Out” announcement false, but on that forest road there was not even a bridge at all. You may recall Umberto Eco’s famous definition of semiotics as everything that can be used to lie. The reason that is so is precisely because the action of signs involves nonbeing as well as being. Reality is more than what exists. Luckily for me. If reality was not more than what actually exists, I could never have succeeded in pulling off that bank robbery.

3 Natural signs, inner and outer signs, triadic signs

I gave a series of lectures in 1983 with Umberto Eco on the history of semiotics. Eco’s lectures covered the twenty-one centuries from Thales (c.625–c.545BC) to Ockham (c.1285–1349), leaving to me the six centuries from Ockham to the present (as including in particular Poinsot [1589–1644] and Peirce [1839–1914] – the two, independently, first to demonstrate the irreducibility of triadic relations as the basis of sign action).

In the first of Umberto’s lectures he made a point which, had it been coming from almost anybody other than Umberto, I could not have believed: there is thematically proposed no general notion of sign, he said, in the whole span of ancient philosophy. The only notion of sign thematically pursued in ancient philosophy is what we after Augustine would call natural signs: you see smoke, you know that something’s burning; you find milk in a woman’s breasts, you know she is near childbirth; and so on.^[6] Augustine comes along and defines the sign (397AD) as anything that, beyond the impressions it makes upon sense, brings something other than itself into awareness. There were of course anticipations of such a definition among the ancient Greeks. But generally they distinguished signs (“δηυ∊ìα”) in nature from the symbolic systems of culture dependent upon language (“δνυβολα”) without thematizing any common ground underlying the two, any distinctive “action” that provides the framework for both alike.

Augustine’s point, however, once made, borders on “self-evident”: if a sign is anything that brings into our awareness something that it itself is not, clearly it makes no difference if that “something” is a phenomenon of nature or an artifact of human culture. So throughout the so-called “Middle Ages”, Augustine’s understanding of sign as a phenomenon transcending the nature/culture divide displaces the original Greek notion and becomes everywhere taken for granted. Indeed when Peter Lombard composes his books of the Sentences (c.1150), he begins the 4th Book using Augustine’s definition as the basis for the scholastic development of sacramental theology, the “outward signs instituted by Christ”.

The definition of human beings as “rational animals”, often attributed erroneously to Aristotle, was first formulated as such by Porphyry (c.270AD), but perhaps the better translation of the Latin formula “animal rationale” would be “slow learner”; for it took no less than some eight additional centuries for the Latin thinking about signs further to realize that material objects sensed, in order to be signs as well as objects, generally (at least beyond the distinction between common sensibles as dependent upon proper sensibles) ordinarily presuppose concepts formed within the animal soul.

Take the example of a clock as something that “tells the time”. But as a matter of fact, the only reason a clock can tell you what time it is, is because you have an idea (a “concept”) of clock presupposed to your seeing the clock as clock, as “time-telling device”. Take two people, one of whom does not know what a clock is (say, Richard Lanigan), and another who does know what a clock is (say, André DeTienne). The two enter a room together and both see exactly the same material object hanging on the wall. André sees at once the time, but Richard only sees a material object concerning which he says to André “What the heck is that?” André explains, and now for the first time Richard actually sees a clock.

Material objects as a whole presuppose an interpretation, however tacit, in order to become, as a whole, outward signs. Whence outward signs require in their full development as signs inward signs, psychological realities or “states”, qualities of the soul, which fulfill the function of making present in awareness what they themselves are not. The idea of a camel is in my head, but what that idea makes present in my awareness is something more than a psychological state! Signs are not only objects making an impression upon sense which brings something other than themselves into animal awareness, but are more generally something presupposed to the presentation of an “other than itself”; and that “something” is a relation irreducibly triadic which, when it directly involves as one of its three terms a psychological state makes of that state a sign no less than that psychological state makes of the material object sensed a sign in its turn.^[7]

Making present something other, whether in being or nonbeing, turns out to be the “essence” of being a sign.

Yet even this development of semiotic consciousness leaves out a realization essential to the further development of that consciousness. The realization that states of the animal psyche are inward signs no less than material objects become outward signs can be found in the thirteenth century writings of Aquinas, where he early denies semiosis of angels based on Augustine’s definition, then later affirms that angels too make use of signs based on the realization that concepts as well as objects function as signs.^[8] By the fourteenth century, the Latins will distinguish between the signs as defined by Augustine (material objects that become signs via sense impressions) and the signs that are internal to animal awareness by calling the former instrumental signs (signs which have to be objects in order to become signs) and the latter formal signs (the cognitive and affective states before they are even known to exist – i.e., before they become themselves objectified in reflexive awareness).

In the currently standard histories of philosophy – which take as their backdrop the various periods in their contrast with the original Greek development – the Latin Age, by the time the formal/instrumental sign distinction becomes central, no longer is considered part of the mainstream development, which has veered off after Ockham into Renaissance Humanism (with the recovery of Plato’s writings, just as the “High Middle Ages” was defined by the recovery of the writings of Aristotle, and the “Dark Ages” was defined by the loss of the main Greek writings shortly after Augustine).

The development of semiotic consciousness rather dramatically changes – or “redraws” – this picture, not only because it makes of the closing two centuries of the Latin Age sidelined in the standard picture central to the semiotic development, but especially because it compels recognition of the modern development synthesized in Kant as the truly marginal period for an understanding of philosophy’s history overall insofar as the development of semiotic consciousness is at issue. Among the moderns, it was Leibniz (1646–1716) and Berkeley (1685–1753) above all who realized as inescapable the consequent entailed by the modern reduction of the direct objects of awareness to the ideas that the individual forms (whether by reason, as the “rationalists” emphasized, or by sense, as the “empiricists” emphasized). This consequent cannot be better summarized than in the formula Bertrand Russell provided for all – past, present, or to come – who embrace “the Way of Ideas”: “we can witness or observe what goes on in our heads,” and “we cannot witness or observe anything else at all”.^[9]

To put the modern development of philosophy on its speculative side in a nutshell, the universal adoption of the nominalist view that relation has no suprasubjective character, i.e., that relation as such reduces wholly to the order of mind-dependent being, not only implies that the dimension of being as mind-independent lies beyond the grasp of our intelligence, but it implies more fundamentally that there is no central reality involved in attempts at communication.

In the currently “standard picture” of philosophy’s history, the mainstream Latin development of thought was confined to the “High Middle Ages”, as a period that ended more or less with the works of William of Ockham, generally identified as a principal pioneer, if not indeed the father, of Nominalism.^[10] Nominalism begins with the denial of relation as a mode of το δυ, inasmuch as with that denial the boundary between inner and outer becomes an uncrossable divide. On the side of conscious awareness, the “inner” side, says Ockham and the moderns, there are only relationes rationis, comparisons the mind itself makes among its ideas as the objects of awareness. They do not see at first that, in order for these very objects also to be, even in part at least, things existing in themselves and independently of the finite awareness we have of them, these very things must be the terminus of what has already been denied: relationes reales. That is why, as I have put it elsewhere, the moment people began to thematize their experience of communication and to think of communication itself as something real, the moment they began to think of that experience as a proper starting point for philosophy, the days of modern philosophy were numbered.^[11] For with the substitution of the experience of communication for ideas as the point of departure for considering “the nature and extent of humane understanding”, with a belief in the occasional success of communication as the guiding notion for developing the consequences of that point of departure, postmodernism had begun.^[12]

So in the very period that Latin Age philosophers advanced beyond Augustine’s general definition of sign as transcending the nature/culture divide by coming to recognize that signs also transcend the inner/outer (or subjective/objective) divide, the current standard histories direct students’ attention away from that development.^[13] Instead, these currently standard histories shift attention toward Renaissance humanism and the Latin recovery of Plato’s writings, then on to the “modern development” based on Descartes’ advice to stop reading the Latins lest their errors continue to infect us, and to pursue rather a new “Way of Ideas” whereon all genuine experience of communication perforce turned out to be, in Kantian terms, a “transcendental illusion”.

From the later Latin “idea of ideas” as being signs (formal signs: subjective psychological states necessarily provenative of relations suprasubjectively terminating) presupposed by objects as interpreted (instrumental signs), modern philosophy turned rather toward the idea of ideas as being themselves alone the objects of which we are directly aware. This turn not only proved to be a dead end, but it missed the crucial later Latin development which anticipated the rejection of Nominalism and the overcoming of the modern implication of solipsism, namely, the discovery that so-called instrumental and formal signs alike are not strictly signs but sign-vehicles which succeed in conveying whatever signification they carry only by being foreground foundational terms of relations irreducibly triadic in the suprasubjective conveyance of what is a term other than the sign-vehicle (the significate) on the basis of yet a third term (an interpretant) which links sign vehicle to object signified.

In short, what are everywhere today commonly called signs, namely, objects of awareness exactly fitting Augustine’s general definition of 397AD, are signs as well as objects largely on the basis of ideas not commonly today thought of as signs but which are so by reason of fulfilling the essential semiotic function of presenting in awareness what they themselves are not (e.g. a clock seen as telling time). Yet both these “signs”, – the material objects as outward, the ideas as inward, as well as the sense-interactions mediative of the two – have the formal being of signifying not by reason of themselves as material beings or psychological states but by reason of the position they occupy under a triadic relation that unifies the three in a suprasubjective manner not reducible to any one of the terms united, including that terminus or “foreground element” commonly called “sign”.^[14]

The action of signs, thus, consists in communication, and communication depends, precisely, upon the suprasubjective reality of relations linking what is otherwise individually distinct. But that communication among bodies in physical interaction becomes semiosis, in contrast to the result of the “brute” communication of simple physical interaction, only when the interaction is assimilated to a third: thus clouds of certain types have a dyadic relation with rain, and this relation becomes a sign relation within the experience of living things; but such a relation is also a sign-relation as an anticipation of the future, of what “can or will be”, and also as a notification of the past, of what has been. As Peirce, the first serious reader of the Latins among the moderns – and as a result the first of the truly Postmoderns – summarily made the point: “Thirdness is the triadic relation [in contrast with the foreground element “commonly called ‘sign’” conveying that relation to a third] ... considered as constituting the mode of being of a sign”.^[15]

Hence in the most common sense of the word “sign” we mean precisely something you can see and point to; but what the scholastic Latins after Ockham came to realize is that the being of signs is precisely not anything that can be seen or pointed to, for relations as relations, triadic or dyadic, have no material feature in the spatial sense required for bodily contact. To see a clock as a clock you have to know what a clock is, but you don’t have to know what a clock is to see the object called “clock” by those who do know what a clock is. So there is, as Poinsot best pointed out in the very opening to his ground-breaking Treatise on signs of 1632, an irreducible difference between objects and signs precisely in that objects as objects are self representations whereas signs as signs are other-representations; but to be an other-representation irreducibly requires entanglement with a relation as both over and above and also presupposed to objectivity. Precisely that relation as suprasubjective is what gives to signs their formal, in contrast to their material, being as signs – alike when the object signified is in nature only a being in futuro, as Peirce put it, or in awareness whether mind-dependently or mind-independently. Relations, whether dyadic or triadic, in their character as suprasubjective transcend the distinctions between nature and culture, inner and outer, subjective and objective, even as they also involve those elements in a variety of ways.

4 Summing up

In nature things occur that tell something of the future; in the experience of living beings things occur that do the same. Things whether in nature or in culture also have stories to tell about what is past. That web of relations as revelatory, actually or virtually, is precisely semiosis. The stories of what will be and what has been are everywhere in the universe, however much or little of them comes to be read. Many of those stories antecede life; many of them are posterior to life. But they are semiosis in every case. Whence it is that life presupposes semiosis, but semiosis precedes rather than presupposes life.

Two texts make this point, one from Charles Peirce (c.1902: CP 2.92), the other from John Poinsot (1632: 126/3). Peirce says, “It is not necessary that the interpretant should actually exist. A being in futuro will suffice”. A parallel quote from Poinsot: “It suffices to be a sign virtually in order to be a sign in act”. Thus a statue of an emperor who is dead still represents (other-represents) that emperor. Not only a being in futuro will suffice, but also a being in praeterito!

What turns the things of the physical universe all around you into signs will be precisely what they tell you, sometimes about the future, sometimes about the past, sometimes about that elusive transition between the two that we call “the present”. So the action of signs, semiosis, involves things you can see and touch. But it is the aspect of things that cannot be seen or touched that makes them signs – namely, relations. And such relations are not just any relations, but relations that are irreducibly triadic.

I think of the text in Peirce where he testifies “I, a person of the strongest possible physicistic prejudices, as the result of forty years of questioning” – “since the beginning of the year 1867”, to be more precise – “have been brought to the deep conviction that there is some essentially and irreducibly other element in the universe than pure dynamism”, something more than the mere Secondness exhibited in “brute force”.^[16], ^[17]Peirce was convinced that this “essentially and irreducibly other” element in the universe could only consist in “a genuine triadic relation” which, since it had to be an element that preceded both human life and every other biological form, could neither be “an intellectual relation” nor “a relation concerned with ... phenomena of life” (i.e. life in the biological sense: Peirce, c.1909: CP 6.322).^[18].

The key to understanding the priority of semiosis over life, permit me to suggest, is Peirce’s proposition that “nothing can be more futile than to attempt to form a conception of the universe which shall overlook the power of representations to cause real facts”. ^[19] “The life of symbols” in Peirce’s sense, rather than “the life of organisms” in the biological sense, provides us means to realize that semiosis involves an influence of the future (“vis a prospecto”, changing relevance of past circumstances to present situations) at work not only in the lifeworld but in the universe as a whole – including the physical dimension of the universe as “environment” both preceding and surrounding biological life.^[20]

Wherever you have something in nature that could, under other circumstances, tell you something either about the future or about the past or even about the present, you have semiosis. And that is a situation that prevailed before, during, and after the beginning of life! Life takes semiosis for granted precisely because semiosis was always there in the universe, from its beginning up till the beginning of life and continuing thereafter until the universe’s very end. Thus “semiosis” says openly what “evolution” says in a hidden way, just as “significate” says openly what “object” says in an obscure way. Hence in physiosemiosis is that process of development wherein the future that doesn’t yet exist is nonetheless influencing the development of the present by changing the relation of the past to the present. It is the vis a prospecto of that being in futuro of which Peirce speaks. Semiosis presupposes neither life nor (still less) cognition (awareness), but life in every form presupposes semiosis.