Existential Universals

1 Introduction

The starting point for the text you have laid your eyes upon is a relational concept of nature. Such an understanding of nature is described in the biological works of Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), among them Bedeutungslehre (cf. Uexküll 1956, translated as Uexküll 1982). The world as Uexküll depicts it consists of a myriad of organism-specific phenomenal worlds. Taken as a whole – interwoven by the interconnectedness that various ecological relations, etc. result in – the life worlds of all that lives (the phenomenal world at large) comprise what we call nature.

“The radical essence of the biosemiotics of the Uexkülls,” says Eero Tarasti (Nöth et al. 2008: 529–530), with reference to Jakob and his son Thure (1908–2004), “has been that man’s symbolic, signifying activities are not reducible to biology – as it has been in socio-biology – but that, quite the reverse, all biological and organic processes are processes of semiosis.” If the living world is indeed intrinsically semiotic, then perhaps we can make sense of what Warwick Fox (1984: 196) calls the central intuition of deep ecology: “the idea that there is no firm ontological divide in the field of existence. […] Rather, all entities are constituted by their relationships.” Isolated from its ecological relations, an organism would be nothing but a corpse. It is exactly a certain participation in the existence of others that constitutes the process of being alive. In this sense, life is not only inherently ecological, but further inherently social, or symbiotic.

“What we learn from complexity theory and science,” writes cultural theorist Wendy Wheeler (2006: 34), “is that human creatures simply cannot be properly understood as the isolated, rationally choosing, self-maximisers so beloved of liberal politics and political economy.” With the development of biosemiotics, she holds (p. 139), “we are in a position to think again about the biological and semiotic life of human beings in non-reductive ways.” Biosemiotics thus provides a world view potentially critical vis-à-vis a more modern, excessively rationalistic world view in which a human monopoly is assumed with regard to any kind of agency worthy of our attention. In the terminology of existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel, this modern world view, with roots back to Descartes – if not Plato – is highly problematic in its dealings with nature (cf. his statement that the denial of the mysterious is symptomatic of the modern world). Conceptually, nature – regarded as a force of its own – is unambiguously done away with.

If nature is fundamentally semiotic and relational, then so are we humans. But how do we define a human being in relational terms? In the words of Donald Favareau (2002: 84), “we can situate the deeply internalized, seemingly ubiquitous concept of [a human] ‘self’ as a product of the uppermost symbol level of our ‘biological inner semiosphere’”, including and yet exceeding “the supporting iconic and indexical levels of the never-ending sign-exchange activity mediating cell, brain, body and world.” Personally I have come to find it fruitful to distinguish between the explicit self that represents our more or less conscious identity, and our implicit self, i.e. our behavioural (“actual”) self as demonstrated by the (psycho-)somatic, social and ecological relations we maintain (our ontological footprint, as it were, in the phenomenal world at large). The human self, as Marcel states (1949: 167), “is always a thickening […] of the body”. It is through all of these processes – of the inner and the outer – and the steady coordination of them, that our living selves are constituted, and it is in these spheres of life (me – us – my world) that our developing selves manifest themselves at a conscious level whenever something calls for our attention with a sufficient sense of urgency.

Perception is not as such a self-reflective activity, but rather a sustained attempt at grasping something which in part opposes you and in part constitutes your very being. There is a world out there – a world of differences, a world of creatures, almost all of them differently constituted than you, but many of them nevertheless constitutionally related to you. In this world of existence-through-and-with-others, consciousness no doubt plays a part, but by no means delineates the horizon of our entire bodily awareness. In fact, consciousness is but a special case of awareness – which is a much more common phenomenon, appearing in countless forms ranging from the amoeba to the ludicrous human genius. While consciousness very well might represent the most novel evolutionary innovation in which we partake, being conscious is, in general terms, not a prerequisite for navigating in the world of the living. For us humans, it is first of all a matter of not getting trapped in our own minds. By neglecting the foundation of consciousness – its natural sources – we risk making a very bad figure indeed as big-brained animals.

I have earlier sketched a phenomenology of environmental change, and pinpointed Uexküll’s relation to phenomenology (Tønnessen 2009: 49–50 and 57–60, respectively). In the current text I explore a number of existential implications of biosemiotics – partly with an emphasis on living beings as such, but first of all aiming at improving our understanding of the human condition, in a more-than-human world. I will start out by reiterating a platform for a semiotics of being, as opposed to a more perfunctory semiotics of functioning (cf. also Tønnessen 2009: 60–63). Next, I will put forward a selection of existential universals – a subcategory of “biosemiotic universals” – and depict the Earth as the natural context in which the great drama of “the human condition” plays out. In conclusion I will give consideration to the terms “alienation” and “authenticity” within the framework of a semiotics of being.

A key figure potentially representing a “missing link” between existentialism and eco-philosophy is the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990). Throughout this text I will refer to him at occasion. Zapffe made use of Uexküll’s writings in his main work Om det tragiske [On the tragic] as well as in his explicitly “biosophic” work (cf. Zapffe 1996; 1961). Zapffe’s view was that mankind is an over-equipped, tragic species, only causing trouble for itself and other beings. The only enduring solution to any human problem, according to Zapffe, is to collectively stop reproducing, and voluntarily go extinct as a species. At the face of it, this is a bleaker philosophy than even primitivism. Although Zapffe never got beyond his “brotherhood of suffering shared by all that lives” (Zapffe 1993: 41), a semiotics of being – an existential semiotics enthused by biosemiotics – should indeed be able to provide a deeper and broader sense of community with fellow beings than can more anthropocentric versions. As Eero Tarasti (2000: 11) writes:

In the theories of existentialist philosophers, the movement of a subject stops [in negation]; Sartre remains in his Nausée, Camus in his The Fall. The experience of Nothingness is anguishing. But it can become a creative experience if the movement of a subject goes forth.

When the subject returns from his negation, the transcendence of his Dasein, he sees it from a new point of view. Many of its objects have lost their meaning and have proven to be only seemingly significant. However, those which preserve their meanings are provided with a new content enriched by the new existential experience. The subject is, as it were, reborn as a “semiotic self”[.]

2 Semiotics of being

The following points, taken from the abstract of “Steps to a semiotics of being” (Tønnessen 2010), represent a path to a semiotics of being and are pertinent to various sub-fields at the conjunction of semiotics of nature (biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, zoosemiotics) and semiotics of culture – semioethics and existential semiotics included.

1. Semiotics of being entails inquiry at all levels of biological organization, albeit, wherever there are individuals, with emphasis on the living qua individuals (integrated biological individualism).

2. An Umwelt is the public aspect (cf. the Innenwelt, the private aspect) of a phenomenal/experienced world that is organism-specific (rather than species-specific) and ultimately refers to an existential realm.

3. Existential universals at work on Earth include seeking out the edible, dwelling in a medium, holding a phenomenal world (possibly an Umwelt) and being endowed with life, and followingly being mortal.

4. Human Umwelten include speechless Umwelten, spoken Umwelten and alphabetic Umwelten.

5. An Uexküllian phenomenology – stating that semiotic states represent the general class to which all mental/cognitive states belong – can draw on the works of the phenomenologists David Abram and Ted Toadvine.

6. A task for such a phenomenology is to portray the natural history of the phenomenal world.

7. An imperative task in our contemporary world of faltering biological diversity is that of Umwelt mapping, i.e. a mapping of ontological niches.

8. The ecological crisis is an ontological crisis with historical roots in humankind’s domestication of animals and plants, which can be taken as archetypical for our attempted planet-scale taming of the wild.

9. The process of globalization is expressed by correlated trends of depletion of semiotic diversity and semiotic diversification.

10. Semiotic economy is a field which task it is to map the human ontological niche insofar as its semiotic relations are of an economic nature.^[2]

3 Universals of biosemiosis

Let there be no doubt: Existential universals can be articulated and conceptualized in a variety of ways. Any numbered list would be likely to be incomplete – and any chronological exposition may well be at least in part arbitrary. That being said, this is my bid. In Tønnessen 2001 (689) I pragmatically assumed “that semiosis is a universal characteristic of living beings, because without semiosis, there can be no recognition.” That is fair enough – but one should keep in mind that not all semiosis is conceptualized as existential, i.e. by nature experientially related to the existence of a being (cf. intracellular semiosis, and everything to do with genomes, in particular). Consequently, not all “biosemiotic universals” qualify as existential universals. All existential universals, however, are necessarily universals of biosemiosis.

What is it like to be a human being? (In other words: What is the human condition?). Before we can answer that question, we have to answer a more general question, the answer to which has foundational validity for the human question, namely: What is it like to be a living being?^[3] In what follows I will allude to sixteen answers to that question. Sex and pain are both off this list of universals, given that neither sexual reproduction nor sentience (or enmity, for that matter) are universal phenomena in the sphere of the living (though Descartes was terribly wrong in theorizing that only humans feel pain). First, all living beings are alive. Second, all living beings are ultimately mortal. Third, all living beings eat, i.e. consume nutrition (be it animate or inanimate). Fourth, all living beings dwell and find their way in a medium (be it aquatic, aerial or terrestrial). Fifth, all living beings display awareness – i.e. they are one way or another aware of distinctive properties of their life worlds (all that lives, in other words, is able to make distinctions). Sixth, the awareness (experience, perception) of the living is always directed, namely at what matters (what is relevant, has a function) to the living in question (consciousness is always about something – and so is awareness). Seventh, by being directed, the awareness of the living is further proof of the intentionality (goal-oriented nature) of all living beings. Eighth, the awareness of the living is always normative (evaluative) in that distinctions made in and through awareness not only categorize but further categorize in terms of likes and dislikes, what should be sought and what should be avoided (and what can safely be ignored). Ninth, by being endowed through awareness with intentionality as well as with normativity, all living beings are subjective (i.e. they are goal-oriented living systems with their own norms, their own agenda). Tenth, qua subjective beings, all living beings are in a state (one state or another) of well-being (judged along the lines of the criteria they themselves put forth).

Eleventh – as we can see from the fact that all that lives is somewhat aware of its relevant surroundings – all living beings carry and inhabit a phenomenal world (be it an Umwelt or a Wohnhülle (Uexküll 1940/1982) – or whatever else we prefer to call it – Lebenswelt, life world, experiential world, etc.). Twelfth, for all that lives and is aware, it is the case that behaviour is logically primary to awareness in that behaviour – that of others as well as, crucially, that of oneself – is always anticipated in awareness.^[4] In actual processes of life, however, behaviour and awareness are practically indistinguishable – no place do we witness behaviour without some variant of awareness involved. The logical primacy of behaviour nevertheless points to a fundamental trait of the living: All beings are principally ‘thrown into the world’, already acting, already acted upon – doomed from the outset to choose between rivalling interpretations of their dubious surroundings, which eats into their initial privacy from the first moment of unguarded existence. As Camus (1991: 8) said with the human context in mind, “We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.”

Thirteenth, qua aware, intentional, normative creatures anticipating behaviour, all living beings are principally (though oftentimes unsuccessfully) receptive or responsive with regard to their own paths of life as well as regarding changing environments and environmental conditions. Pragmatically, we could make two more statements which (I would argue) are descriptively true but do not concern the principal constitution of the living: Fourteenth, all living beings are today within the reach of human causation;^[5] and fifteenth, all living beings – qua aware, phenomenal, more or less well-off creatures – are to be regarded as moral subjects (cf. Tønnessen 2003: 292)^[6], i.e. worthy of moral consideration. These lead us to a final universal which is indeed of constitutive character: Sixteenth, by systematically (though oftentimes unsuccessfully) attempting to resist being subdued by the human hand or its control technologies, all living beings display an innate autonomy (it is a telling fact of nature that practically only humans commit suicide). Resignation is of course an option, in nature, as in human society. But as Albert Camus (1965) wrote – again with the human context in mind – “[t]he habit of despair is worse than despair itself”.

4 On Earth – the natural setting of the human condition

Every human being, then – like any other living creature – is alive, mortal, eats/consumes, and dwells and navigates in a medium. Every human being is further aware in a directed and intentional manner; normative, subjective, more or less well-off, etc. There is naturally much to be said about our particular dwellings – almost exclusively in terrestrial settings – our preferred diet, and so on. Needless to say, we are further characterized by several non-universal phenomena, our sexual lives and sentience included. Finally, many existential universals have no doubt found a special expression in man (not least the fact that our awareness is distinctively apt to abstract thought). Any living being whatsoever has its peculiar taste and habits. The point I am nevertheless making is that very much of what characterizes us as human beings – and as experiencing subjects, or persons – is, in one form or another, characteristic of all that lives.

Any creature indulges in – as if taking pride in – its specific differences. Homo sapiens sapiens has at occasion described itself as a rational animal (a political animal), or a semiotic animal – a particularly gifted animal. More often than not we have defined ourselves in opposition to “animals”, the biological kingdom to which we belong. Man, as I wrote in Tønnessen 2003, is “the animal that does not want to be an animal”. The aforementioned existentialist Peter Wessel Zapffe claims in his essay “The last Messiah” (Zapffe 1993) that “most people manage to save themselves [from our all-too-conscious selves] by artificially paring down their consciousness”, and names four suppression mechanisms (each representing “a betrayal of man’s most potent gift”): isolation, attachment, diversion and sublimation (43–44). Through attachments – beliefs, superstitions, prejudices; altogether providing a metaphysically imposed structure that gives purpose and organization – we build a certain necessity into our lives. I would suggest that anthropocentrism is a near universal attachment in this sense. Zapffe for his part refers (51) to “the dire misconception that we are biologically ordained to conquer the earth”. This conception is likely to be fortified as increasing portions of our biological talents are rendered superfluous in the modern technological game with the environment (as a consequence, says Zapffe [50], “we are victims of increasing ‘spiritual unemployment’”).

Many would assume that a superstitious anthropocentrism was a thing of the past – a feature of a geocentric world, perhaps. But it is in no way obvious that our present societies are less anthropocentric than past societies, or that our advanced and bureaucratic anthropocentrism is in the big picture any less “mythical” than that of low-tech societies. What matters the most is in what terms we think about our own role on this planet (conquerors, caretakers, fellow inhabitants?). “Today”, as phenomenologist David Abram (1997: ix) observes, “we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technology.” Noting that we, in modern, “civilized” humanity, have “a strange inability to clearly perceive other animals – a real inability to clearly see, or focus upon, anything outside the realm of human technology, or to hear as meaningful anything other than human speech”, Abram suggests that “we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human”.

In this section I will proceed thematically from existential universals to what we may call Earthly (terrestrial, as opposed to extra-terrestrial) universals. First, it should be noted that what has been said thus far derives from a cellular notion of life (cf. the problematic status in biology of viruses). It is conceivable that the very first forms of life were not cellular (but perhaps the experiential dimension of life emerged only with cellular life). Second, as is well known, all known life is carbon-based. Various authors have hypothesized the possibility of silicon-based life forms (some have even had the courage to suggest that we should improve the photosynthesis of plants by applying principles of solar energy technology to genetic engineering). The materiality of all known life, in short, is intimately tied to the history and location of planet Earth. Whether or not the biochemical composition we observe all known life to display on Earth is truly universal (and necessarily so), we do not know. What we do know is that there are more than 90 chemical elements occurring in terrestrial nature, and that some 22 of these are directly necessary to human life (Bonnet and Woltjer 2008: 238–40). These 22 elements were synthesized at various stages of the gradual unfolding of the universe. Many of them, like iron and silicon, were for the most part created in supernova explosions. One implication is that it is not by chance alone that we live in a universe that is 13–14 billion years old. At much earlier stages, our existence would not have been physically possible.

Before I proceed further, I owe it to Frederik Stjernfelt to point out that there is a profound difference between universality and globality. In Tønnessen 2001, I asserted (689) that “[e]ven though I do find speculation about what characteristics of living beings, if any, are universal, interesting, I consider claims that certain characteristics are in fact universal to be unfounded, and impossible to justify.” My statement referred to Stjernfelt’s article “Biosemiotics and formal ontology” (Stjernfelt 1999). In Stjernfelt 2002, he replied in a footnote that it does indeed make sense to describe universal characteristics of living beings, since something lacking all recognizable characteristics would not even be recognized by us as life (and would therefore be irrelevant to the discussion). If it is alive, I reply, it is alive – regardless of our conception of life, or our recognition of it. It should consequently be noted that what I in this chapter call “existential universals” are to be regarded as universals of living creatures as far as our knowledge goes (cf. my notion in Tønnessen 2001 of “biosemiotic possibilism”). Might there be – or, might there have been – experiencing creatures with constitutions others than those described by the aforementioned existential universals? There might (were that the case, I would, of course, have been wrong in asserting that these “universals” are in fact universals). To stress such a possibility, one could replace the term “universal” with “global (terrestrial) property” – though there is much life that lurks on Earth, as well, unknown to man.

What, then, are these “Earthly universals”, apart from the restraints on our materiality that follow from the exact selection of elements appearing on Earth? My focus in the following will be on our deep-seated astronomical (or cosmological) situatedness. As creatures of Earth, we inhabit a planet – a planet with a history which has in effect determined many of our perceptions and conceptions. Let me start out by reminding you how the Moon came to be (Bonnet and Woltjer 2008: 19–22). Most likely the early Earth was hit by a large body more or less the size of Mars. A substantial fraction of the Earth’s mantle was ejected into space, and eventually formed the Moon. Under the shock the Earth went into a spin, and its axis of rotation tilted. Following tidal interactions with the Moon – much fiercer in early times than today – the present cycle of seasons, and the duration of our days, was in place. The tidal coupling stabilized the Earth’s rotation axis, giving the Earth a fairly stable climate. In sum: Our days and nights, our summers and our winters – all these have been shaped by this initial clash. What we conceive of as archetypically normal is in fact to a considerable extent the outcome of a singular astronomical event. We talk about days and nights because we live on a planet that is not tidally locked to its star but rotates, and rotates rather rapidly at that. We talk about months because we inhabit a planet that has one and only one Moon, with a certain orbit. We talk about spring and autumn, summer and winter because of the Earth’s tilted rotation axis. We talk about years because we live on a planet that orbits around a star frequently enough for us to perceive multiple turns during a lifetime. And not only do we talk. We fine-tune our entire lives to these natural rhythms, and their local configurations.

Surely there is great variety in different cultural conceptions of time and space – but there are also palpable restraints, dictated by the history of our planet. There are many other Earthly universals as well, related either to planetary conditions (in the bigger context of the solar system) or to Earth history, but here it will suffice to allude to one more, namely the force of gravity at the surface of our planet. Our particular strength of gravity (determined blindly by the mass of the Earth – once again affected by the creation of the Moon) has not only shaped our sense of balance, weight, motion, etc., but further set the base conditions for how thick or thin the limbs of animals of various sizes can possibly be – think about an elephant and a mosquito.

What is the point of all this? The lesson to learn is that we are not some kind of general creatures, for which anything is possible, but particular beings with a history, a geographical (astronomical) location, and physical (perceptual, and behavioural) restraints. I would not be retelling such obvious facts, were it not for our modern God complex. In Surviving 1,000 centuries: Can We Do It?, the astronomers Bonnet and Woltjer contribute to the eventual fall of the human fantasy of leaving Earth for good – another brick in the great wall of human megalomania. Zapffe (1993a: 57) potently summarizes the existential prospects of settling elsewhere: “Sure, and it’ll be exciting the first week. Eventually, though, people will start worrying about how much to tax the uranium mines in order to keep the price of margarine down.” Bonnet and Woltjer’s bet (2008: 300) in this context is a reply to a 1950 lunch discussion among a group of scientists which included Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi (cf. also Webb 2002: 288).

[T]here was a consensus that the Universe should contain billions of planets capable of supporting life, and most probably millions of intelligent species. Fermi made a rapid calculation and remarked that these putative civilizations, based on the human tendency to expand and on the promising capabilities of space technology, would already have colonized the entire galaxy within a few million years and visited us a long time ago and many times over. He then asked the stunning question: ‘But where is everybody?’

The simplest answer, suggest the two astronomers, is that “interstellar travel is just an impossible concept.” Either that, we may infer, or there is no intelligent life elsewhere, or there is intelligent life elsewhere but it does not sustain a technological civilization (what a shock that would be!), or there is intelligent life elsewhere but it is wise enough not to have imperialist ambitions (again – what a shock!).

As I have attempted to demonstrate throughout this article, man’s reality is not only one of embodiedness (entailing an embodied mind etc.). The individual is constituted as an organism, and this organism is not only part of an ecosystem but further serves as an ecosystem in its own right for trillions of miniscule creatures (only thus could it come into being) – the great majority of which we live in symbiosis with. A human being is impossible to understand in merely human terms. Human beings are constitutionally more-than-human – already partaking in (and depending on) something bigger than themselves. Human creatures, then, are not isolated, simply rational beings (cf. Wheeler) – we are, indeed, “human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human” (Abram 1997: ix).

But that is only part of the story. It is no accidental trait that we are “part of nature”. We are, vitally, “beings of nature”. In general terms, that implies that we are aware, intentional, normative, subjective creatures etc., and in specific terms it further implies, in our terrestrial environment, that nature – Earth – is our situation, and that its history is our history. We are not some kind of general creatures. We are grounded on Earth. As Bonnet and Woltjer (2008: 311) say, there “is no serious alternative to our occupying the mother planet for another 1,000 centuries, even if we manage to inhabit the Moon, Mars and perhaps Titan […] for science, resource exploitation and tourism […] The Earth is what we have”.

What, then, of the semiotic animal? What of “unlimited semiosis”? Surely we are magnificent creatures. But by opining that it faces no restraints whatsoever, the human spirit only deludes itself. All is not arbitrary, and it is plain falsehood to claim that anything whatsoever is possible. In existential terms, each and every human individual does, principally, have an immense semiotic freedom to define itself as a persona, and shape its very being. But there are restraints. There is a world out there. Physics matters. History matters. What we do matters. We are not inhabitants of a wholly abstract, wholly intellectual landscape.

5 On the alienation of the semiotic animal

Some might think that I am propagating a return to essentialism – often conceived of as the very arch-enemy of existentialism. What I am propagating, however, is but a variety of existentialist thought informed by natural reality. In no way do I wish to belittle the extraordinary qualities of human fervour and despair. “Animals, too, know angst”, observes Zapffe (1993: 41), but “man feels angst for life itself – indeed, for his own being.” It is uniquely human to think in universal, general terms. But our intellectual achievements (so often written in sand, carved in stone, materialized as monuments over the greatest and freest spirit ever to have wandered the Earth) come at a high price: Namely that we easily confuse our purely human sets of signs with reality as such. Here I would like to introduce a notion, with reference to Jean-Paul Sartre (cf. his notion of bad faith) and John Deely (cf. Deely 2005), of our twofold confusion of objects and things. Firstly, we human beings tend to confuse objects with things – this entails, for example, to believe that a social/historical, human construct (such as a nation state) is in fact necessary (cf. Zapffe’s concept of attachments). Secondly, we oftentimes practically confuse natural things (something existing in its own right) with (merely human) objects. In being anthropocentric, we frequently treat natural entities aiming only at their utility in human terms. The construction of human reality and the reduction of the natural world as it is being incorporated into human culture, and made “useful”, go hand in hand, and one presumes the other. As we can see, this anthropocentric reductionism is at work in thought as well as in “real life”, and intrinsically tied to our constitution as thinking things.

Man, as I have argued, is not alone in being aware – but what is characteristic of humans qua creatures endowed with awareness? Paradoxically, the more conscious a being is, the more selective is its conscious awareness. To be conscious is not simply to be aware. Rather, it is to be exceptionally aware of a small selection of all the impressions bestowed to the body. Odd as it might seem, to be conscious is to be aware only of the most urgent events – in other words, to be very aware of very few of all the sign processes that our bodies are continuously engaged in.

The human self was not always an issue. Portraying it as a historical, social construct was pioneered by Hegel (1977) – others, Kierkegaard and Heidegger included, take a self-conscious self as a given. I have previously in this text mentioned my distinction between our implicit self (our identity) and our explicit self (our “behavioural” self). For no being, I would claim, is the divide between its idea or impression of itself (its implicit self) and its actual behaviour (its explicit self) wider than in the case of human beings. We are consequently prone, from the outset of human existence, to be alienated from ourselves as beings of and in nature (and yet, our current split between identity and behaviour is a historical fact, and cannot necessarily be taken as exhaustively representative of human nature!). Ironically, less conscious beings, and creatures with awareness but without consciousness, are in a sense much more (directly) aware of their undertakings than we are. With higher levels of semiotic freedom come higher degrees of arbitrariness in interpretation.

Whereas Hegel traced the origin of alienation to the breakup of the Greek Polis, Engels (1958) and Marx mainly related it to the emergence of a division of labour. Zapffe, for his part, traces the roots of modernity back to the first division of labour, and philosophizes that ongoing specialization leads to an ever-increasing surplus of vacant skills at the individual level, thereby contributing, as mentioned, to “spiritual unemployment” (cf. Zapffe 1996). Though experiences of alienation have likely preceded modernity, the term is typically modern in that it applies well to a social world in which individuals are expected to choose their own roles. For Kierkegaard (cf. Westphal 1987) as well as for Heidegger (1962), estrangement or inauthenticity is the default human situation, and only escapable for exceptional individuals. What, then, of a semiotics of being – an existential semiotics inspired by biosemiotics?

While the implicit self – our identity – is predominantly a social (to some extent personal) creation, the explicit self is less so, rooted as it is in man’s ecological activities, whatever form they might take. At the face of it, it appears that a person would be more “authentic” the better her implicit self came to reflect her explicit self – the better, in other words, she consciously came to understand herself in terms of how she actually behaves in all her engagements, be they social or ecological. In principle, such a “semiotic rebirth” could take two forms: more truthful self-comprehension or behaviours more actively guided by her proclaimed ideals. While that may serve as a fine norm, it should be noted that the ecological as well as social relations that any sociable person (except perhaps the very poorest) of our era engages in qua economic player by far transcend the horizon of his conscious self (many an all-to-mindful soul in our society consequently choose a dignified solitude – the price (in terms of sociality) of consequence and oversight).

From the perspective of science, it appears that this process of being reborn as semiotic self, as it were, is not a wholly philosophical enterprise. It is true enough that aspects of our groundedness as beings of Earth – our situatedness in ecological and astronomical/cosmological terms – are there to be rediscovered in various cultural sources. Others, however, we have to discover for the first time, at least on a proper scientific ground. Here, then, we re-encounter the hope that a semiotics of being – or whatever we would call a fertile existential semiotics – could potentially transcend the “subject [of mainstream existentialism] who essentially moves alone in the universe, without the presence of other subjects” (Tarasti 2000: 13).

If David Abram (1988: 101) was right in claiming that the ecological crisis “may be the result of a recent and collective perceptual disorder in our species”, then perhaps we need also to reconsider the aforementioned twofold confusion of objects and things, and start treating objects like objects and things like things. Again, a fine norm, apparently, but alas: Each and every creature on Earth does by necessity objectify some things. Nevertheless we should as far as practically possible treat other creatures, not least, as more-than-economic bodies (cf. the notion of semiotic economy), and take their respective subjectivities into account. Once again knowledge of reality emerges as a definitive advantage: Due to the considerable size of the global human population, there are demographic restraints to how drastically we can possibly change our behaviour, and these restraints are likely to be in place for hundreds, but not thousands, of years (cf. Tønnessen 2008). A truly virtuous humankind is therefore – one might very well argue – necessarily a phenomenon of a fairly distant future. For the same reason, our environmental impact is likely to remain elevated for a long time to come, no matter what happens with our economy.

In his famous essay “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren”, written during the depression, John Maynard Keynes (1930: 366) envisioned that “the economic problem”, the struggle for subsistence – which had always up till then been the primary, most pressing problem of the human race – “may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years.” “If the economic problem is solved,” reasoned Keynes (1930: 367), “mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose” – “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.” It is arguably the case that more than half of all the economic activity that has ever taken place – since the birth of humankind – has taken place since the publication of Keynes’ essay (cf. Tønnessen 2008). We have reached our “destination of economic bliss” (Keynes 1930: 370). And yet, there is no end in sight. The aim of pursuing (endless) economic growth has been universally acclaimed across the globe, as a primary attachment of our time. The human tendency to transcend our species’ actual circumstances in both ambition and perception – indeed, in our worldview – lingers on.

Alluding one last time to Gabriel Marcel, we may say that when all mysteries are approached as problems to be solved, man is nothing but a problematic being. To behave bluntly as efficient, problem-solving creatures – treating everything (and everyone non-human) as reducible to controllable entities – appears to entail a terrible waste of human resources and potential. But then again, what is man? Only history will tell. To define what a human being truly is remains premature.