General Semiotics (GS) as the all-round interdisciplinary organizer: GS versus philosophical fundamentalism

1 What is the main challenge for the contemporary semiotics?

Immediately before the Sofia Congress, the author received a questionnaire from the Sofia Congress Committee asking “What is the main challenge for the contemporary semiotics?” (2 September 2014). The author responded to it with four sentences that are included here with added short notes. The questions and answers given in the following can help explain the critical background of the thought presented in this paper.

1. Commercialized utilitarian academic systems lead “professional success,” rather than “scientific truth,” as the genuine final aim of scholars’ practice. (Accordingly scholars tend to follow the established rules of doing scholarship that are determined by multiple external factors including more powerful non-academic forces.)

2. Nihilist ontological rhetoric is used to weaken the interdisciplinary human-scientific tendency of semiotics. (Accordingly scholars tend to search for any subjectively-invented rhetoric rather than objective validity as long as the former effectively works in academic market.)

3. In the global academic context, on one hand, western scholarship is far from being familiar with non-western traditional scholarship and thinking and, on the other, contemporary non-western scholarship about their own traditional studies is far from being familiar with contemporary western human-scientific theories as well. (Accordingly a truly global semiotic mission can hardly be attained.)

4. Commercialized cultural and academic circumstances lead to a general vulgarization of content, direction, practicing style of semiotic activities with a result that the term “semiotics” could be frequently misused as a “pop-cultural brand” to search for increasing any kind of propaganda, advertising effect, and factional influence through manipulating internet media in academic-educational marketing. (Accordingly the term “semiotics” could be more arbitrarily used by a variety of applied semiotics just for competitive profitability with a result that semiotic practices are further disconnected from the general trends of theoretical advances in various main disciplines in the humanities)

2 The basic points in connection with the above judgments involved

In light of the above basic judgments we further concisely derive the following proposals:

1. The urgent necessity in the intellectual mission of mankind today is to transform the less scientific “humanities” into the more scientific-directed “human sciences” in order to more rationally and systematically solve the crucial problems concerning inter-conflicting faiths and dogmas among different peoples and their traditions in this world.

2. For this goal an urgent related procedural necessity is to exclude the epistemological involvement of any philosophical fundamentalism in the above scientific-directed mission regarding general semiotics and human sciences.

3. The above two significant demands lead to a new conception of general semiotics as a strategic operator concerning epistemological-functional designs for realizing the interdisciplinary-organizing tasks about the humanities and theoretical semiotics.

4. Philosophical history presents a constant, gradually developing process of academic-disciplinary splitting from which have separated modern mathematics, natural science, and social science, respectively; it is time now for human sciences to follow the same academic-historical line.

5. Fundamentalist philosophy consisting of certain kinds of classical metaphysics and ontology partly shares similar non-empirical-scientific ways of thinking with those prevailing in religion and poetry. Also similar to the necessary segregation between religion and politics as well as to that between poetry and natural sciences, historically-shaped fundamentalist philosophy should be separated from the epistemological foundation of social sciences as well. All kinds of non-empirically-oriented intellectual activities can and should be the important object of semiotics and human sciences, but they would hopefully no longer be the theoretical foundation of the latter.

6. Accordingly a specially defined general semiotics called the GS model can help promote multi-rational operative coherence with respect to various departmental semiotics as well as to modernization of human sciences

7. In addition, GS will also undertake a related great task: to organize an institutional-semiotic anatomy of constitution and function of fundamentalist philosophy itself in terms of new epistemological-methodological perspectives derived from synthetically and coordinately advanced theoretical parts of human sciences.

3 Necessity of general semiotics as an interdisciplinary-scientific organizer

The modern semiotic movement has entered its so-called global semiotics stage in the new century. The global movement of semiotics is mainly characterized by its three emerging consequences: the global expansion of the horizon of geographic-historic-cultural territory, the comprehensive widening of scholarly-theoretical perspective from different semiotic traditions, and the deeper reexamination of the all-round relationship among society, culture, and knowledge in the real world. And all three tendencies can be relatively reflected on the relationship between modern semiotics and traditional philosophy; or, more precisely, in the epistemological confrontation between something named as general semiotics and any type of philosophical fundamentalism. The fact is that a theoretically more productive conception of general semiotics urgently requested by human sciences in general and theoretical semiotics in particular has not yet been accepted widely today. This is especially due to the prevailing professional protectionism and scholarly conservatism based on academic compartmentalization and competitive individualism.

On the other hand, the academic-institutionally strengthened mechanism supported by the commercial-technological establishment is embodied in its solid control of a humanity-scientifically institutionalized system and therefore in encouraging educationally rigidified ways of doing scholarship of the humanities fixed in different segregated disciplines. The desirable approaches to the modernization of human sciences in the new era, on the contrary, should lie in organizing horizontally comparative and extensively cross-disciplinary research by breaking through academic boundaries. Accordingly there emerges a necessity for certain strategic goals to be guided by “general semiotics” taken as a functional-operative organizer with respect to promotion of interdisciplinary interaction not only between different departmental semiotic practices but also between various social-human sciences.

4 Philosophy and human knowledge

As is generally known, philosophy was the very source of all kinds of human knowledge in intellectual history. On the other hand, the existence of both developed mathematics/natural sciences and social sciences is the consequences of their respective independent developments because of gradual segregations from their philosophical origins in history. This dialectic evolution finally brings about a clear differentiation between philosophy and sciences in general. Eventually the nature of science of all kinds is even characterized by excluding all philosophical elements from its constitution. The same tendency has been just emerging in the humanities today as well although the latter as an academic field still naturally includes philosophical parts as its constitutive contents. Logic, the very core of philosophy, has already become an independent discipline closely combined with mathematics; aesthetics, as an important branch in classical philosophy, has been also widely and effectively replaced by newly-shaped independent disciplinary theories in connection with literature and arts. It is well known that the latter two have already turned out to be the most important parts of contemporary departmental semiotics. Even one of central parts of philosophy – ethics or moral philosophy, as I stressed before, is better off being disconnected from its philosophical frameworks and even should be further closely tied with semiotic sciences in our new era. Finally, philosophy of history, another important part of modern philosophy, must be separated from any metaphysical-ontological doctrines as well from a scientific point of view and should be further included into the new contemporary discipline “historical theory,” which could be closely linked with a recently emerging new discipline “historical semiotics.” Differently from the cases of natural and social sciences, however, the last three independent disciplines of the humanities present themselves as a scholarly-disciplinary mixture containing social/humanity-scientific and remaining philosophical elements alike. On the other hand, philosophy, especially European-continental philosophy, as a current discipline also contains a lot of interdisciplinary-scientific elements, almost becoming a scholarly combination of traditional philosophical and modern scientific parts.

We may ask why human knowledge presents this changeable way of developing in history? Simply, it’s due to a natural demand for a gradual deepening of human rational practices in historical evolution. Therefore the constitutively self-splitting change of the composition of philosophy as an entire discipline in history is a natural and necessary historical process. We can regard this scientific-oriented process as progressive and constructive in nature. The process actually brings about multiple advanced qualities of reasoning expressed in humanity’s capability for doing observation, description, analysis, generalization, and even predication in understanding human affairs. Thus, eventually we see the new term “human sciences” has been reasonably created after the Second World War. This completely new intellectual phenomenon indicates a more obvious scientific-directed and less philosophically-oriented tendency in our times. It’s just in this general context that current semiotics has become more and more a methodological and epistemological guide in reconstructing contemporary human sciences. The fact has become further concretized and multiplied when the interdisciplinary nature of semiotics has grown up to impact the field concerning modernizing enterprise of the non-western traditional humanities. The recent development of the latter for the past decades further proves that a less philosophically-oriented position for advancing the theoretical humanities becomes even a necessity today if the modernization of non-western traditional heritages are to really be scientifically conducted and be accordingly reformulated for carrying out true international academic-dialogue concerning theoretical humanity.

5 Philosophy discipline as a modern professional depositary of certain knowledge and philosophy as a fundamentalism with its historically transmitted ideological implication

In spite of its philosophical and linguistic origins, the modern semiotic movement has been synthetically realized in different scholarly fields and disciplines, including both their traditional and the modern fields. The remarkable involvement of semiotic practices in human sciences is just due to the steady strengthening of interdisciplinary or horizontal interaction between different scholarly disciplines. And this general academic development has been obviously caused by the general progress of respective scientific-theoretical practices in various academic branches. No doubt, this semiotic turn in the humanities also represents a scientific turn in modernization of the humanities. In addition, this semiotic-scientific turn exactly amounts to a less philosophically-oriented turn. Yes, a lot of traditional philosophical content has been already converted into modern scientific content, as we mentioned above. But there is indeed an essential basis of traditional philosophy that we may call generally metaphysics that keeps its historically unchanged fundamentalist-theoretical dogmas. Philosophy as a modern discipline has a right to keep any kind of constitutive contents in its discipline as long as the traditional topics are still interesting to academia. However, besides being an academic unit as an accumulating site of historical thoughts, philosophy has also implicitly reserved a historically unique privilege for organizing theoretical activities in the both historically and contemporarily institutionalized humanities. This academic-typed institutional-ideological power itself silently possessed by the fundamentalist philosophy today is still quite influential at different aspects of theoretical constitution of the humanities. Owing to the traditional academic-institutional background, which is even basically encouraged by the contemporary technology-oriented social-cultural mechanism, this philosophical-fundamentalist-typed ideological power would continue exercising its dogmatic epistemological domination over the theoretical direction and practical ways in the entire humanities, even giving a hint that theoretical elaboration of the humanities still needs such a fundamentalist leadership as the “first philosophy.” This tendency, no doubt, is also directly impacting the ways of theoretical reconstruction in our semiotic world, including its departmental and general parts alike. Naturally, if semiotics, as an innovative or revolutionary tool in stimulating theoretical modernization of the humanities, accepts, implicitly or explicitly, this theoretical position of philosophical fundamentalism, a cognitional self-contradiction will occur within semiotics like this: general semiotics based on any philosophical-central theoretical framework becomes immediately contrary to the interdisciplinary essence of semiotic science as such. Therefore any philosophical-central reductionism of semiotic theories could indicate a regressive movement against modern semiotic spirit. This philosophy-central preference for theoretical construction of general semiotics is mainly caused by the exacerbating tendency of the present-day system of institutionalized professional competition in current social-human scientific academia, which presses scholars to more profitably calculate the cost of their research investment and the competitive-tactic advantage during the process of searching for their profit-seeking-directed professional aims (Li 2013). If so, a more convenient and profitable way for them is to appeal to this traditional privileged potential or an implicit theoretical-domineering power of certain dogmatic-philosophical fundamentalism in order to save or put aside some more painstaking and more complicated efforts for learning from various specialized theoretical experiences of other related disciplines.

On the other hand, we should immediately distinguish here between two different relations between semiotics and philosophy. One is that which exists between interdisciplinary-directed semiotics and philosophy also as a discipline containing its various valuable materials. In this case semiotic theory always needs to learn from philosophy and to pertinently absorb as much as possible the related philosophical-theoretical elements into semiotic-theoretical constructions, just as all other disciplines of humanities should do the same in their inter-actional relationship with philosophy. The reversal process presents the same desirability: philosophical thinking should also pay more and more attention to the theoretical fruits of other humanities in order to enrich or reform its own structure with respect to the theoretical perspective of the entire humanities in which philosophy has been always engaged in history. For example, we see the book Main Trends in Philosophy edited by Paul Ricouer (1979) and the French Philosophy Encyclopedia edited by A. Jacob (1989–2000) indeed present really interdisciplinary perspectives and horizon. The other is the relationship between semiotics and philosophy that is taken as an exclusively self-enclosed speculative corps guided by philosophical centralism or fundamentalism that is also implicitly supported by the academic-institutional establishment with its historically conservative ideology. This historically unchanged philosophical fundamentalism is mainly displayed in its abstrusely elaborated metaphysics and metaphysical ontology insisting in its ever-lasting fixed system of absolute values and logical-central dogmas embodied in various “first principles” that can be traced back to philosophical sources in remote ancient times.

We certainly recognize that fundamentalist philosophy as such is very important in human intellectual history just like religion and should keep their independent academic existence in our intellectual world. On the other hand, nevertheless, we also maintain that there is no scientific reason for theoretical semiotics to accept its habitually taken-for-granted authoritative intervention in theoretical constructions of other empirical-scientific scholarship related to the empirical historical world. Just think: Just because of this kind of irrelevant engagement in causational thinking and ethical judgment about historical-empirical human affairs, so many contemporary fundamentalist-typed philosophers, both western and eastern, have brought about so many seriously misleading interpretations and wrong conclusions in contemporary political history. The main reason for this sad development really lies in the fact that there exist no reasonable links between metaphysical-ontological way of thinking and all other empirical-scientific ways of thinking in social and human sciences. The ambiguous idea about the two ways of conducting theorization is in fact caused by an epistemological misunderstanding in human history. Accordingly abstruse philosophical fundamentalism has a special negative influence on empirical-scientific scholarship in connection with history, society, morality, and politics in our actual anthropological world. Nowadays we attempt to state that the fundamentalist philosophy plays, in some sense, a speculative-imaginative role like poetry, if not really like religion. Both imaginative-spiritual kinds of activity are of course justified in their preferred ways of organizing their thinking but shouldn’t be allowed to improperly apply their speculative or imaginary rhetoric into theoretical practices requesting genuinely empirical-scientific reasoning. Even “science” as a modern term should be separated from its less strictly defined acceptation formed in remote antiquity, however the same term is still used in various modern fundamentalist philosophies.

6 General semiotics as a strategic designing for reorganizing interdisciplinary-directed theoretical progress of human sciences

It is evident that the humanities or even human-social sciences, rather than the entire human knowledge, should be completely readjusted or reorganized in our new century. But the point is that the theoretically readjusting process within a semiotic framework shouldn’t be organized at a substantial level; instead it should be designed and performed at multiple structural-functional-relational levels. Traditional systematical-philosophy, some modern philosophy attempting to reconstruct unified sciences, modern all-embracing theoretical sociology, contemporary universal historiography and philosophy of history, all of them have tried to provide such a synthetically processing ground for reorganizing and recombining the entire human knowledge at a substantial level. As is generally known, all such efforts in modern and contemporary history, despite their respective theoretical achievements involved, can hardly attain their goals. One of the reasons for the consequence is just caused by their commonly shared simplistic strategy designed for reaching respective discipline-centralist unifications. In fact, however, the truly reasonable theorizing mode for integrating and harmonizing human and social sciences cannot be understood as carrying out any disciplinary-central reductionism or as realizing a new expanded syncretism of human knowledge. The acceptable conception of the unification of contemporary human sciences can only reasonably refer to the advancing and widening of coordinating and coherent relationship among empirical-positively confirmable fruits of different disciplines, each of which must also firstly carry out their respective interdisciplinary-directed empirical-scientific practices separately. This principle is just what general semiotics attempts to follow.

For the past decades, besides adopting some quasi-philosophical modes of general theorization, the idea of general semiotics was also considered as a new type of encyclopedia about the entire interconnected knowledge of mankind. The editing guidance of different projects in the field indeed reflects a comprehensive point of view of semiotic science taken as something including and integrating human knowledge as extensively as possible. Nevertheless all of these efforts to systematically gather together entire scholarly-informational materials merely amount to presenting certain co-exhibitions of different collections of more or less sign-related knowledge of the existing disciplines while theoretical interconnections among them remain less or even not studies. In other words, this kind of projects only completes the jobs of presenting huge collections of knowledge without really attempting to further organize interdisciplinary-theoretical studies among them (Posner et al. 1998). It is obvious that remarkable achievements of current semiotics are mostly realized and displayed in a variety of departmental or applied semiotics with respective to their interdisciplinary practices performed at the epistemological-methodological level. Furthermore, we also have to note that the actual creative vigor of semiotics lies only in various disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices of the entire humanities. Therefore far from being a mere single discipline, semiotics must keep its progressive steps synchronistic with those of human sciences. At present we are indeed faced with a serious challenge regarding how to relevantly and effectively develop interdisciplinary strategies in the entire field of human sciences. Concretely, the current theoretical retardation disclosed in both general semiotic practices and the entire human sciences could be mainly due to the fact that the modernization of the humanities, with their richly accumulated traditional heritages, positive and negative, western and eastern, requests first of all a deeper and wider interdisciplinary-directed epistemological breaking-through. Or, more precisely, what we request especially at present is something related to the general interdisciplinary strategy overarching all disciplines of human sciences. In terms of this interpretation we could reach a more suitable conception of general semiotics that, far from being a semiotic type of philosophy, should be involved in creating such a theoretically more suitable functional-operative organizer. What I presented about the concept “institutional semiotics” before (Li 2014), for example, is a related attempt that is made by dint of exercising such an all-round analytic-synthetic scientific anatomy of the profession and scholarship of semiotics. Let’s call this type of general semiotics as GS, which can be taken as a universal semantic-anatomical organizer at academic-strategic level with respect to entire human sciences in general and semiotics in particular.

Furthermore, differently from the idea of a semiotic philosophy, GS does not need to be a fixed system of theoretical propositions representing an alternative new type of theoretical foundation, intending to methodologically unify various concrete practices performed in different disciplines; instead most semiotic practices should be firstly implemented in the existing individual disciplines by means of their various interdisciplinary tactics. What GS is and does lies in analyzing, synthesizing, readjusting, and reorganizing the results of theoretical interactions among all related disciplines. Rather than being a solidified system of theories, we prefer to say, GS can be regarded first of all as a set consisting of epistemological direction, methodological procedure, scholarly-ethical attitude, and a scientific-intellectual consciousness. And the concrete methodological-operative tools used by GS come from scientific experiences of various departmental semiotics. The main purpose of GS is to promote or restructure the interdisciplinary interaction in the world of human sciences so as to more closely strengthen scientific-practical ties between semiotics and human sciences. Or, more precisely, GS deals with the relational issues of both departmental and general interdisciplinary practices, regarding the interdisciplinary-theoretical relationship as the operative center for promoting the progress of human sciences in general and semiotics in particular in order to realize an important task about the systematic anatomy of the humanities in the new century. Besides, differently from the deductive-logical-theoretical type of rationality used by philosophical fundamentalism, GS adopts an empirical-inductive-practical type of rationality. The scientific orientation of semiotics should be settled in reference to historical, social, cultural, and academic real experiences in this anthropological world.

7 GS model and modernization of the non-western traditional humanities

Let’s turn to a more complicated challenge concerning cross-cultural semiotics and humanities in the current global cultural context. As I explained many times before, with the sharp constitutional divergence between the western and non-western historical-cultural-intellectual-academic traditions, the much more elaborated western metaphysics cannot be suitably employed for interpreting or helping modernize the latter at a theoretical level (Li 2008, 2011). With regard to this problem, western semiotic theories have been experienced to be much more relevant and desirable alternatives. In essence, so-called cross-cultural semiotics is only a special type of interdisciplinary semiotics that requests scholars to obtain knowledge of both western theory and non-western history at the same time. The problems of theoretical modernization of non-western traditional humanities is not only related to advancement of the scientific level of the latter but also to a more realistic intellectual challenge that the non-scientific-characterized non-western traditional humanities, including their quasi-counterparts in the west (namely, western studies of non-western cultural traditions such as Sinology), under the contemporary situation of universal weakening of the educational conditions of the humanities, could much more easily be manipulated to continue playing its less-scientific/more-ideological roles within their respective circumstances with a result to seriously lead to the stagnation of scientific development of the non-western humanities in general. On the other hand, all non-western scholarly traditions, especially those with rich historical records, provide highly valuable collections of historical material and experiences that are terribly useful for promoting cross-cultural development of global human sciences. Based on this understanding, the global expansion of the semiotic movement can be understood by us to be extremely significant for our global semiotic mission, which also requests of us to courageously redouble our efforts in carrying out semiotic-interdisciplinary boundary-breaking.

8 GS model as an interdisciplinary organizer for synthetically anatomizing philosophy as an institutionalized discipline with any logical-centralist dogmatism

General speaking, there still exists a pressing task for us to promote an active, creative interaction between semiotic theory and philosophy. Let’s be clear that philosophy remains the number one important theoretical source for the scientific-theorization of the humanities even from the point of view of interdisciplinary semiotics (Li 2013: 32). Semiotics at its general and individual levels always needs to intensify its theoretical strength through learning from philosophy. For the sake of advancing the quality of theoretical studies in human sciences, first of all, we need an especially desirable preparative project of institutional-semiotic anatomy of philosophy as a traditional discipline. A very significant task in present-day semiotic-theoretical practice is to more scientifically penetrate into the mechanism and functions of this historically shaped and continuously transmitted philosophical discipline. This project is especially referred to ontology, metaphysics, and some other related rhetorically sophisticated ways of thinking (even including derived or related nihilism and extreme relativism). In a word, this GS project will make philosophy itself an object of a theoretical semiotic analysis. In handling this project, the GS model as a total synthetic strategic guidance will make use of all related human knowledge, social-cultural conditions and even historical experiences as its methodological weapon and epistemological references. Based on the remarkable progress of human knowledge in the twentieth century, all scientific capability available could be hopefully converged on anatomizing this most powerful, taken-for-granted theoretical mechanism in intellectual history. Nevertheless, this challenging mission will play two-way roles in practices. Therefore we may conclusively say that this project taken by GS will be a double-directed theoretical interaction between philosophy as a big single-discipline and semiotics as interdisciplinary-directed scholarly assemblage functioning at operative level. The latter always needs to enrich its theoretical potential through learning from the former. In return, the former, as a theoretical-institutionalized system should also be the analyzed object of scholarly practices based on the GS model, together with different theoretical achievements of various departmental semiotics. And the consequences of this two-way scholarly interaction would wishfully push forward the unifying progress of human sciences at a multi-rationally operative level.

In my last paper published in Semiotica (Li 2014) I treated general semiotics as a tool for institutional analysis with a focus on the internal and external institutionalized objects and contexts; in this paper I treat general semiotics as an all-round functional organizer by emphasizing a focus on epistemological-methodological relationship between semiotic approaches and reorganized humanity knowledge. Both the identity and function of general semiotics exclude any theoretical involvement of philosophical fundamentalism that is traditionally taken as some absolute or authoritative theoretical foundation. Such a historically and habitually accepted relationship between philosophy and knowledge is no longer valid; and fundamentalist philosophy as a conception of “first theory” should disappear forever in our new century. Conversely, philosophy as a professional discipline should become the object and material of theoretical-semiotic analysis based on the GS model. From this point of view, we can understand either the GS model or institutional semiotics implies an extremely profound significance for effectively advancing theoretical level of human sciences.