The role of sentiment, aesthetic behavior, and narrative semiosis in the identification of selfhood from Peirce’s semiotic perspective

1 Introduction: matters of ‘mattering’

Quoting Mary Gaudron, the High Court Judge, Dorothea Sophia states: “The matters that matter may differ depending on who is doing the mattering” (Sophia 2023: 176, emphasis mine). She does so in order to develop the idea of mattering in connection with Peirce’s categories. She focuses on the who/what of mattering and the doing of mattering to reveal a universal telos. Thus, Sophia’s “mattering” is designed to show how value is identified in the Peircean categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Accordingly, her hypothesis consists of three parts: value with purpose is the ground for mattering in Firstness, value with power is that for the actual mattering in Secondness, and evolutionary realization of a universal telos of mattering is concerned with Thirdness (Sophia 2023: 23). As Sophia indicates, this idea of mattering is inspired by Carl Hausman’s (1979) “Value and the Peircean Categories,” particularly his contention that

Intelligibility would be blind without value, for it would be nothing but a collection of generals. It would have no context by virtue of which generals could be assessed and brought under the control of a condition for their interrelations. (Hausman 1979: 221)

Like value, categories also function as criteria of intelligibility (Hausman 1979: 207). Accordingly, Hausman argues that value and Thirdness are co-present in the way in which Firstness as abstract possibility and Secondness as actuality, which are not intelligible, become intelligible with Thirdness because Thirdness alone is to do with laws and therefore has generality (CP 5.49). Thus, “when they [Firstness and Secondness] are operative and not abstracted, they are inseparable from Thirdness: along with Thirdness, they are aspects of wholes, namely the phenomena in which they are discoverable” (Hausman 1979: 207).

Hausman’s argument for the co-presence of value and Thirdness in intelligibility is explored in the relation of value to the categories in Peirce’s Classification of the Sciences (Hausman 1979: 209). In Peirce, the categories are also central to his classification of the branches of philosophy: phenomenology, normative sciences, and metaphysics: “Phenomenology and mathematics are the sciences within which and in connection with which the triadic structure of Peirce’s philosophy as a whole is described and justified” (Hausman 1979: 209). The normative sciences of esthetics, ethics, and logic rest upon phenomenology and they deal with value (what ought to be) or “devalue” (what ought not to be) in feeling, action, and thinking, which are allied to Secondness. Following Hausman, aesthetic value, which is closely related to phenomenology, is associated with qualitative aspects of phenomena while at the same time insisting that they are complex (Hausman 1979: 212). This means that aesthetic value is not identical with Firstness; rather, it has proximity with them, being operative in Secondness, functioning as the co-condition of the final end of Thirdness: that is, intelligible growth of Thirdness (Hausman 1979: 214).

What I have been attempting to introduce in discussing Hausman’s reflection on value and Peircean categories is the idea that the aesthetic goodness in phenomena which appear to have aesthetic value as a quality in Firstness are capable of being intelligible, being operative as a moral value in Secondness, with Thirdness offering a teleological account of growth. In respect of this idea, Peirce introduces a term, “axiagastics” which combines two words in Greek, axia (‘worth’, ‘value’) and agamai, which expresses “how the common people in primitive times looked upon their leaders with passionate admiration and devotion” (Peirce in de Waal 2013: 53). This attitude of the common people was akin to worshipping God in a self-effacing manner. In this sense, for Peirce, esthetics is not limited to a theory of sensuous beauty (de Waal 2013: 53), but is allied to poetics as a specific form for the ideas of aesthetics in the sense of a poetics of possibility (Wall 2005, 2011: ch. 5).

The motivation in writing this paper derives from two ideas: one is the idea of “mattering” by Sophia (2023) and the other is “the ethical implication of narrativity” (Ricoeur 1992) in science fiction (SF). The two ideas fit the pragmatic inquiry into the semiotic self in a developmental account from the Peircean perspective. Thus, I will explore the conception of the self as semiotic agency from practical to theoretical dimensions, bridging the two aspects of self-control and self-consciousness based on Peirce’s method of categories.

Based on “mattering” within Peirce‘s approach to phenomena via the theory of categories, particularly in which aesthetic value and Thirdness are co-present, this paper strives to show the semiotic self as an agent in sign activity for a self-developmental teleology. Aesthetic value, being intelligible, requires first the who/what of mattering and, second, the doing of mattering. In this regard, I shall focus on semiotic agency in two dimensions: the practical and the theoretical, through discussion of Peirce’s concept of ‘philosophical sentimentalism’ (EP 2: 32; Sheriff 1994: ch. 6).

Conceiving of the self by means of a categorial method from a phenomenological perspective differs from the same from the perspective of analytical philosophy. Likewise, the Peircean categories from two dimensions, the logical or formal and the phenomenological, have their different emphasis: categories from the logical perspective are illustrated in “structural relations” of subject and predicate as the formal features of thought; those from the phenomenological perspective are shown in terms of the ‘logic of relations,‘ as in the three kinds of relation – monad, dyad, and triad (Hausman 1979: 204). However, they do, indeed, intersect so that the two become intelligible together by way of a dialectic of sameness and selfhood. This idea is also found in Ricoeur’s statement on the ethical implication of narrativity in SF:

Later we shall ask whether a certain convergence of the literary fiction which I assign to selfhood and those of science fiction (which, in my opinion, concerns only sameness) is not reconstituted when one takes into account the ethical implications of narrativity. There is perhaps for us, too, a way of saying that identity is not what matters. (Ricoeur 1992: 151 n. 14)

Therefore, based on the convergence of the two perspectives from phenomenology and analytical philosophy, I shall consider the self as semiotic agency both in the subject of experience in sign activity and as storytelling agent in narrative communication. These two layers of semiotic system serve to demonstrate the two levels of who is mattering and the actual doing of “mattering,” thus describing and prescribing a moral value based on aesthetic quality in a narrative world and enabling the re-presenting of the world. In this line of thought, I will discuss three phases of the semiotic self in the following sections: the biosemiotic self in aesthetic behavior which paradoxically enhances survival by not enhancing survival in human (and even some other) animals (Cobley 2014); value-driven activity of the agentive self, bridging between sentiments (instincts) and reason; the narrative or virtual self which is capable of reflecting itself in a narrative world for narrative communication of aesthetic quality, exemplified here in the case of the SF film Jung-E (2023).

2 Aesthetic behavior and the biosemiotic self

Thomas Sebeok’s work on the semiotic self within the discipline of zoosemiotics allows us to see the conception of the self from the Peircean perspective of humans as semiotic animals.^[1] The essays by Paul Cobley (2016) and Timo Maran (2010) will be useful guides for understanding Sebeok’s work in “Prefigurements of Art” and “Zoosemiotics and the semiotic self,” through which the idea of the semiotic self is understood as a biological organism with aesthetic behavior as a habit of action in consonance with the environment.

The aim of this section is to show how aesthetic behavior in animals as a semiotic process is produced and what kinds of aesthetic functions are operative in semiotic activity from the developmental account of the self. Considering a rather long essay, “Prefigurements of Art” (1979) by Thomas Sebeok, Cobley views animals’ aesthetic behavior as a paradox, positing that aesthetic behaviors of animals are implicated in enhancing survival by not enhancing survival (Cobley 2016: 122). Then he poses a big question for us: “What do we pursue in order to maintain an activity which ensures our survival but is not often used instrumentally as such?” (Cobley 2016: 6). Cobley argues that the answer to that question lies in the realization that aesthetic behavior is survival and, further, the topic concerns the nature of humans’ existence and their instinctive pursuits, quoting Sebeok, which evokes Peirce’s classification of science as a living organism:

The propensity to classify seems to have acquired, through evolution, diminishing survival value, but then so did sex: humans can enjoy either, but most tokens, though pleasurable per se, are not biologically relevant. Only the type of activity has a clearcut biological function. (Sebeok 1979: 42, cited in Cobley 2016: 128)

The point I am making from this quotation concerns “the propensity to classify”; it is relevant to my argument for the semiotic self as agent in a triadic relation of semiotic activity. Sebeok returns to this topic in his conclusion to “Prefigurements of art,” referring to the subject of rhyming elements in instances of beauty and the biological advantage of seeking them out in the environment (Sebeok 1979: 60). Then he proffers three drivers of the propensity to classify. First, the knack of classification is important for biological survival: if “the function of categorization is to sort out sensory experience … then the evolution of efficient classificatory technique is bound to be of survival value.” Second, the relationship between parallelism and the classificatory animal is illustrated to distinguish prey from predator, and this is the organizing principle employed in taxonomical procedure. Third, beyond classifying their surroundings, animals also are attracted, in particular, to parallelism – something akin to aesthetic pleasure, even when the process or product is disunited from its presumed biological context (Sebeok 1979: 61). The propensity to classify, understood as enhancing survival by not enhancing survival, and based on parallelism as a source of beauty, implies, too, all the aesthetic functions beyond the least expected one – biological survival.

To extend the idea of classifying, Sebeok mentions a rather less well-known case of naming in animals as semiotic activity from which they “assign to one another and carry proper names”; in so doing they “individuate each from every other”^[2] (Sebeok 1979: 62; see also Sebeok 1986: ch. 7, emphasis mine). This semiotic activity of naming by assigning allows them to distinguish own self and non-self as a special case of parallelism, which appears to evoke a kind of pleasure to children (Sebeok 1979: 62). This process of name-giving embodies an example of a symbolic play toward iconicity through which icons (signs of resemblance) cooperate with indexes (demonstrative signs) by labelling (cf. Sebeok 1986: 94, 96).

Sebeok’s work on zoosemiotics is geared to merging the natural sciences and the humanities, in that it is grounded on, or in concordance with, philosophical traditions of Peirce’s semiotics (Maran 2010: 322). So, the Sebeok approach reveals the continuity of the non-human animal and the human semiotic system. In this regard, the issue of the paradox of aesthetic behavior lies in the realization of a sign system as teleological self-developmental process in which the self as individual organic substance plays the role of an enduring agency (Colapietro 1989: 83–87). This latter point will be elaborated shortly. For now, let us note that the enduring agency resides in parallelism with the physical organism in terms of a structure of similarities and differences containing rhymical elements.

For Sebeok, the semiotic self is equivalent with the animal mind in cognitive ethology which is understood as a relational unit in respect of the environment (Maran 2010: 324). This view is grounded in Peirce’s semiotics in which a sign is in the triadic relation between “sign, thing signified, cognition produced in the mind” (CP 1.372) and the definition of a sign as “something to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (CP 2.228). Sebeok (2001: 125) pays attention to the “somebody” which, he thinks, illuminates the semiotic self. Accordingly, Sebeok posited that the semiotic self was not located in the animal body; it was the result of a semiotic process conceived as an entity open for development (Sebeok 2001: 124).

According to Colapietro, an account of Peirce’s theory of self requires consideration of his theory of the individual which involves the interrelated notions of substance and organism, as well as the mind, which is the ground for the account of the self (Colapietro 1989: 80). Following Colapietro, individual and substance are regarded as the same, being characterized by continuity and actuality of a reaction (Colapietro 1989: 81),^[3] and the mind’s relation to the self is one of genus-species. This is not necessarily in the brain but, perhaps, in the system or in the world. In terms of the organism, it “possesses a teleological structure; it is an intrinsically purposive being, a being that exhibits a unity of purpose” (Colapietro 1989: 84). This echoes what Liszka proposes, that the triadic relation or condition is marked by intentionality or purposiveness and thus intentional behavior is analogous to semiosis which consists in the tripartite subjects of goal, means, action, corresponding to object, interpretant, sign, respectively (Liszka 1996: 32–33). For this semiosis to become a living organism, as Colapietro rightly points out in explaining Peirce’s point, “some sort of embodiment is required for any instance of semiosis and, thus, of selfhood, since the self is itself a sign (CP 4.6)” (Colapietro 1989: 84). The self is a sign – that is, a Third is not reducible to Secondness in the Peircean categories; rather, Thirdness presupposes Secondness, which presupposes Firstness. From this perspective, “the mind can never be reduced to the body, though it does require some kind of embodiment” (Ransdell in Colapietro 1989: 85).

The two kinds of semiosis which are either genuinely or degenerately produced are distinguished from each other; the former “is capable of generating genuine symbols, that is, conventional signs,” thus “involving mind in its fullest sense” and, for the latter, “the interpretant is bound up with a quasi-mind which is triadically produced but not conventionally established” (Liszka 1996: 33). From this I can observe Peirce’s theory of the self in that the self is a semiotic process and also is an enduring agency for the growth of semiosis of human selfhood comprising: a sign (individual organic substance); an object (a thing signified); an interpretant (person or mind). This idea is espoused in Colapietro’s interpretation of the semiosis of selfhood, where the self is understood as individual organic substance providing “the proximate ontological basis for the semiotic life of personal selves” since “the soul itself is of the nature of a sign” requiring “a substantial and conscious life as the basis of it [the semiotic life]” (MS 298 00016, cited in Colapietro 1989: 86). Thus, “an individual substance qua individual is a continuity of reaction while qua substance is an enduring network of interpenetrating habits” (Colapietro 1989: 86).

In sum, as I have seen, the notions of individual, substance, organism and mind as presuppositions for, and accounts of, Peirce’s concept of the self entail that the human organism is a continuum of sign-creator (mind) and reaction machine (body) understood as “two empirically different aspects of the same substance.” “This organism is nothing less than a mechanism for reactions, a source of instincts, a medium for semiosis, and a basis for the acquisition of habits” (Colapietro 1989: 90).

Now I surmise that the concept of the semiotic self offered by Sebeok and Peirce’s account of the self according to Colapietro do indeed overlap: in the propensity to classify for the purpose of structuring experience and being attracted to parallelism as a source of beauty. But there are also differences in degree between them; that is, between non-human animals’ semiotic process and the semiotic system of human beings. These differences lie in the human finite mind, which is capable of evolving into autonomous agency possessing powers of feelings as awareness, action as modifying and taking habits as learning (Colapietro 1989: 88). The relation of enduring and autonomous agency therefore remains to be discussed.

3 The role of sentiment and semiotic agency

When de Waal (2023) proposes a semiotic turn whilst analyzing “aesthetics in thought” rather than in aesthetic behavior, he implies that the self as human organism is intelligible as enduring agency proceeds to autonomous agency capable of self-control. I have discussed aesthetic behavior in animals, characterized by the propensity to classify, which is associated with parallelism; this appears to be derived from a survival value in the semiotic process. Accordingly, the semiotic self as interpretant is reflexive, responding to the environment, functioning as a reaction machine. However, human animals with both averbal and verbal capacities not only react but also generate conventional signs as a sign-creator. Accordingly, aesthetic behavior as a survival value transforms into a feelings as awareness of aesthetic quality while occluding the survival value. This is a species-specific phenomenon typical of human selfhood’s semiosis. Aesthetic feelings are succinctly condensed by de Waal, who writes that “we appropriate something by making it our own. In this process things reveal themselves as worthy of being appropriated. They accrue value, which naturally brings us to esthetics” (de Waal 2023: 384). Further, value is associated with power (ownership) and responsibility (de Waal 2023: 384), which implies the semiotic self as autonomous agency with powers of feelings or being aware of anything, powers of action of modifying something, and powers of habit-taking or habit-changing (MS 670, 4–7, cited in Colapietro 1989: 88). Consequently, the semiotic self, with those powers as an organic substance, is capable of influencing the growth of semiosis.

Yet autonomous agency is characterized by reflectivity and inwardness in thought; thus, aesthetics as a field of study is co-temporal with the emergence of Peirce’s phenomenological categories in thought and value in the way I have discussed, above, regarding Hausman’s argument. Our understanding of the relation between semiotic agency and value informs the main argument of this paper. This will also form the ground for interpretation of the self and identity from the two philosophical traditions of phenomenology and analytical philosophy in the case of SF film as illustrated in the next section of this paper. Ultimately, I should be able to see how aesthetic behavior in classifying with parallelism evolves into thoughts in the personal self by means of a categorial method of classification of “I,” “IT,” “YOU,” reflecting our selves as projected onto quasi-reality in a narrative world.

In order to explore the idea of transformation of aesthetic behavior to aesthetics in thought, I shall ask who undertakes valuation or evaluation or revaluation and on what ground choosing a certain value and then transmitting it is based. A preliminary answer to that would be the self as a bundle of habits (Colapietro 1989: 88). On the one hand, as I have observed from aesthetic behavior in non-human animals, the semiotic self is prone to develop habits of action by reacting to the environment, interplaying in the inner world, yet not recognizing a value as a type with quality. Thus, for these animals, aesthetic behavior would appear to be geared to adaptive value to survival as in bowerbirds for making a choice of mates^[4] (cf. Sebeok 1979: 6–7, 11–13, 48–49, 60–61). On the other hand, in the aesthetic behavior of human animals, the semiotic self is not limited to habits of action; they also harbor habits manifest in a desire to embed unity, feelings of a quality for awareness of something. Survival and “purely” aesthetic or formal values are therefore interactive for growth of semiosis. Yet, how can we explain the process of the semiotic self as enduring and at the same time as autonomous agency for recognizing a certain value as quality? At this point, I can refer to Peirce’s concept of philosophical sentimentalism as his “pragmatic advice about how an individual, without any mathematics or theory of reasoning, can best insure his or her own survival, success, and prudent behavior” (Sheriff 1994: 87).

For Peirce, sentimentalism implies conservatism (CP 1.633). Thus, he describes it as conservative sentimentalism or sentimental conservatism or common-sensism. The idea of philosophical sentimentalism is that sentiments (instincts) and reason interact to improve each other (Sheriff 1994: 86). To illustrate this, the nature of development of the two is the same with regard to experience and development which “takes place through the instrumentality of cognition. The soul’s deeper parts can only be reached through its surface” (CP 1.648). Recall that the physical organism is essential to human selfhood. The soul is of the nature of a sign, which makes semiotic life possible by means of the self as an individual substance (Colapietro 1989: 86). Through the instrumentality of cognition, as the soul’s surface contacting with an external world, the eternal forms will, by slow percolation, gradually reach the very core of one’s being, the Real self, influencing one’s life (and that of all others) in that they are ideal and eternal verities (CP 1.638).

From the perspective of philosophical sentimentalism, Liszka’s view on conservative sentimentalism is congenial because it can be understood as critical rather than conservative sentimentalism at those times when it is compatible with fallibilism, synechism, evolution, and critical common-sensism (Liszka 2021: 47). In particular, when it deals with the eternal forms in matters virally important to the conduct of life, sentimentalism implies both practical and theoretical semiotic agency. As such, it is capable of evaluation with a critical view without intermixing aesthetic value in theoretical matters of phenomenological categories with moral value in practical affairs, bearing in mind that “two masters, theory and practice, you cannot both serve” (CP 1.642). For example, the incest taboo is “an instinctive or sentimental induction summarizing the experience of all our race” (CP 1.634). Theoretically, the rule itself does not make it infallible; however, that rule is a practically infallible guide. As Sheriff observes, “philosophical sentimentalism is a practical version of normative science. Without any theoretical reasoning about esthetics, ethics, or logic, one who gives supremacy to sentiments is capable of moral goodness” (Sheriff 1994: 85). The view of philosophical sentimentalism allows us to see that the soul’s deepest sentimental or instinctual components will reach out to the external, in interaction with theoretical reasoning, to effect the generalization of sentiments.

As Liszka stated, “conservative sentimentalism is both a descriptive and proscriptive theory of morality” (Liszka 2021: 54). In one sense, conservative sentimentalism is practical morality based on traditions and cultural conventions with accumulated cultural values over time; and, in another sense, it can be theoretical morality based on aesthetic goodness. In this regard, conservative sentimentalism leads to normative thoughts in feelings, actions and thinking, thus reaching out to social sentiments by generalizing one’s sentiments and one’s self to become ethical and logical. This is supported by Peirce‘s statement on motives and percepts: “The only ethically sound motive is the most general one; and the motive that actually inspires the man of science…” (Peirce 1955: 308); that is, on which perceptual judgement is operative for right reasoning in that percepts, as our logically initial data, are of the nature of thought involving three kinds of psychical elements: “their qualities of feelings, their reaction against my will, and their generalizing and associating element” (Peirce 1955: 308).

The semiotic life of human selfhood in semiosis, by way of the soul’s Inward and Outward Experience, will be made possible by practical and theoretical agency as in co-presence with aesthetic value for the intelligibility of qualities of feelings. Through semiotic agency, feelings are generalized for a synechistic and developmental account of selfhood, contrasting with that of metaphysics, which is expressed as “I am altogether myself and not at all you” (CP 7.571). Instead, a synechist will say that “In the first place, your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself… In the second place, all men who resemble you and are in analogous circumstances are, in a measure, yourself, though not quite in the same way in which your neighbors are you” (CP 7.571).

As Hausman argued in respect of aesthetic value co-present with Thirdness,^[5] a synechistic account of self-development teleology in the semiosis of human selfhood is not sufficient. In other words, continuity and generality should be present with aesthetic value in the pursuit of self-development of moral self-control, these being qualities of feelings, of ought to be. This relationship between aesthetic value and Thirdness appears to be parallel to the relationship between practical morality – which is based on conventionality and tradition – and theoretical morality based on generality and continuity. With this in mind, in self-development teleology as an embodiment of the finite mind, the individual self in Secondness as a semiotic agent has a power or force for Thirdness, intelligible growth, practically and theoretically. In this situation, self-development teleology toward a personal self in Thirdness “requires acknowledgement of aesthetic value as a condition of the final end of Thirdness” (Hausman 1979: 214). Thus, for aesthetic value as a qualitative aspect of phenomena to be intelligible, it will appear and function at the stage of Thirdness (Hausman 1979: 212).

4 Narrative semiosis as a model for the identification of selfhood: the case of SF Jung-E

Now I am confronted by a problem regarding how the self can have a sense of other not theoretically, but practically; so this becomes a matter of intelligibility in our experience in order to understand the distinction between the self and I. Here, “I” is an indexical sign, referring to the self as an object, so that “I” has a power to cause production of an interpretant of what the self is. This begs an essential question: who is “I”? Therefore, we end up with the notions of the (speaking, acting, narrating) subject and agency to answer the question “Who am I?,” implying self-identity.^[6]

The final end of self-development is in a universal continuum between the self and other. How can I myself be another or others, our neighbors? Phrasing the matter in Peircean semiotic terms, how can the synechistic idea of selfhood be applied to guide our practical concerns in the lifeworld? For these questions, once again, the concept of the semiotic self in aesthetic behavior, as discussed in Sebeok’s essay, is worth mentioning. In the conclusion to his essay, Sebeok presents a platonic conversation between a professor of aesthetics and his student on the topic of beauty. The epitome of beauty is rhyme, which shows the elements of aesthetic structure with similarity and difference in parallelism. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ analysis of parallelism is “‘both structural and unstructural’, parallelism of expression and parallelism of sense, and serves finally to illustrate his dictum that ‘The structure of poetry is that of continuous parallelism’” (House and Storey, cited in Sebeok 1979: 60). In this regard, the sense of beauty is the relation of comparison to interpretation, that is, evaluation.

The semiotic agent in Thirdness, not only reacts but also responds with freedom in order to choose in favor of interpretation. Freedom to interpret presupposes a Thirdness which is further to be interpreted. This means that the semiotic self as interpretant in a biological organism interplays with a human organism in which an observer is to be observed through his/her glassy essence, as Peirce would have it. In this sense, the self is not confined to a body as some kind of “reaction machine” acting as reflexive agency but is capable of interpreting as a sign creator by virtue of reflective agency, that is, self-creation to see oneself as other self. Accordingly, the self is not located in individual organic substance but in semiotic relations in parallelism. In this sense, the semiotic activity of SF film narrative through an operative iconicity can be an experimental tool for examination of philosophical sentimentalism. We can observe how the social and imaginative instincts of human beings on the expression level intersect with narrative imagination on the content level to produce meanings by means of the film narrative as an iconic diagram.

In an imaginative act of making resemblance, Ricoeur stated that “one must therefore ‘work out’ parallelism between two situations that will guide the iconic transposition of one to the other” (Ricoeur 1977: 190–191). Metaphorical resemblance can bring about “fusion of difference into identity” and “networks of signification” that are associated with the subject and predicate of literal contradiction (Ricoeur 1977: 198). The metaphorical resemblance posited by Ricoeur is analogous to diagrammatic imagination considered by Peirce to connect two categories of Secondness and Firstness in the act of producing a new meaning. Moreover, further metaphorical utterance also brings out fusion of language into non-verbal experience (Ricoeur 1977: 213).

With respect to identity and difference at the level of parallelism in the aesthetic dimension, semiotic agency has the power of feeling the qualities of similarity, that is, to be aware of aesthetic quality. But, at the discourse level, the problem of selfhood is centered on the question of “who”; thus it is framed in the philosophy of action and interaction of agents in which semiotic agency has a power to act in order to modify habits of feeling, action, thought and therefore to take a new habit.

With glassy essence facilitating reflectivity of oneself in a narrative world, the semiotic self is operative in parallelism as the virtual self, generating pseudo-reality in possible worlds for thought experiment. In other words, the semiotic self in a narrative world, as an observer being observed with agential consciousness, is able to see itself as another. This will be possible by means of the categorial consciousness of the semiotic self. This consciousness is different from the animal mind in the degree of its capacity for generating genuine signs by means of phenomenological categories of person, as in the three persons in relations between I, IT, and YOU. The early version of Peirce’s categories with “the three persons of the verb and the corresponding pronouns” (Fisch 1982: xxviii)^[7] I, It, Thou, developed into his later version of three Categories of Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness, representing a subjective worldview, an objective worldview, and the fusion of the subjective into the objective worldview.^[8] Based on Peirce’s categorial method, the persons present in relations in the narrative world, as in I-IT and I-YOU, will be essential conditions for identifying selfhood for self-development. In other words, “who I am (the self)” will be determined by “what I am (ethico-moral agency).”

Ricoeur posited that literary fiction assigns selfhood, while science fiction seems to concern sameness.^[9] But he keeps this statement open for discussion on the possibility of identifying selfhood in science fiction when the narrative has ethical implications on the dialectic of sameness and selfhood, that is, on the self and other. This led me to consider the Korean SF Film called Jung-E (2023), particularly with regard to conservative sentimentalism, morality.

Science fiction can be called “scientific” fiction in terms of knowing by way of thought experiment narratives, especially on the topic of identity derived from the body-mind relation. In this way, SF film as a thinking-image is an iconic diagram. For Peirce, diagrams, like metaphors, are of the nature of fusion as in the form of relations, embodying the meaning of a general predicate for a condition of constructing a new general predicate by means of comparison: the individual with the general, the token with the type (CP 4.418, 4.531, EP 2: 303). But unlike a metaphor, which concerns a semantic dimension of similarity, a diagram has a dominant feature whereby its structural similarity exhibits relations objectively. The nature of the iconic diagram is described by Peirce in this way: “the poet is interested in his images solely on account of their own beauty or interest as images, while the mathematician is interested in his hypotheses solely on account of the ways in which necessary inferences can be drawn from them” (Peirce 2010: 91–92). Therefore, SF film, regarded as an iconic diagram, facilitates the investigation of how sentiments respond to images and how abductive reasoning makes up the imagination for by reflecting those images.

There are three inflections of identity in the case of the Korean SF film, Jung-E. The film’s narrative revolves around a legendary mercenary, Yoon Jung-E, who fought in a battle for a colony in extraterrestrial space in 2315. After being seriously wounded in that battle, the mercenary, being also the mother of a sick child who grew up to be an AI researcher, is born again as an AI cyborg for an AI fighter. The name of the cyborg, Jung-E, seems to be deliberately chosen by the director of the film as “JUNG,” referring to affection in Korean. The mother and daughter encounter each other as AI researcher and AI cyborg at the Humanoid Institute for the Jung-E Project. During the project, recognizing that the cyborg retained emotion for her sick young daughter and knowing that the goal of the Jung-E project was cancelled to make the AI cyborg for sex, the AI researcher, Yoon Seo-Hyun, helps the cyborg to escape at the expense of her own life. Now, first, there appears to be a feature of identity in the logic of relations in the narrative: that is, I-IT and I-YOU. The film depicts a sentiment of love between a mother and daughter. Their relation is key in terms of the concept of sameness and selfhood. Thus, it is necessary to ask how the relation changed from I-IT to I-YOU, resulting in their minds being fused into a co-identity. Identifying aesthetic qualities resides in the sentiment of love between the two, which is changed from the biological to the spiritual as the story unfolds. The relation of mother-and-daughter in the biological organism changes to that of AI researcher-and-AI cyborg in the social organism under the aegis of the JUNG-E Project. With the instrumentality of enduring agency of continuity and actuality of the subject cooperating with autonomous agency, the relation is finally transformed to the personal relation of self-and-other for self-development teleology.

Based on the transition of the type of relation, we have resolved the problem of identity in order to see the dialectic of sameness and selfhood which Ricoeur posed in science fiction through recognizing the ethical implications of narrativity in the SF film under review. The ethical aim lies in the personal relation of I-YOU which is scaffolded by subjectivity from the phenomenological categorial method of the logic of relations, rather than the structural relation of subject and predicate. Thus, subject and object, as in the I-IT relation, are logically contradicted by negation, that is, I versus NON-I. I is determined by NON-I objectively. In this way, the subject is characterized by passivity in a logical structure with difference. In the I-IT relation, the self in the subjective world, as “I,” observing Object in the objective world, exhibits the dissimilarity between the two worlds. The film reveals this relation in that of AI researcher Yoon Seo-Hyun and AI cyborg Jung-E, in which the AI researcher observes the AI cyborg objectively for the scientific purpose of use value. I call the identity which is recognized in I-IT the line of identity (cf. Peirce 1903, CP 4.406, MS[R] S27: 22). This type of identity has developed into a relation of I-YOU in which the subject recognizes the qualities of similarity in differences between the I and the YOU. In other words, the qualities of being are attributed in I and You, so that their minds become fused as common-mind, which I call co-identity (cf. Peirce 1906, CP 4.561). The film shows this relation of I-YOU in “one action” of escaping from the Institution in a bid for freedom, thus sharing aesthetic qualities. Without losing the difference between them, the two show collective identity in light of the spirit of community. Appropriating Peirce’s phenomenological categories in the early version, YOU is I, since I is an objective I, that is, an other self. The self is of the nature of a sign, thus being the result of relations in semiosis.

Second, the problem of identity lies in cultural value, which is to a large extent fixed, based on convention or tradition. The fixed cultural image of the sentiment of love between a mother and her daughter in Korea permeates the act of interpretation of the film in which a value is regarded as a habit (Raposa 1989: 101–110). Accordingly, interpretation of the relationship of mother-daughter tends to be focused on an exaggerated emotional aspect, rather than a diagrammatic image for inference of the relation. In this respect, cultural values, as a habit, function to “block the way of inquiry” (EP 2: 48–56), thus obstructing development into thinking with a different view.

Recall that conservative sentiment can be critical and thereby compatible with critical common-sensism, fallibilism, synechism, and philosophical sentimentalism. Cultural value interplaying with aesthetic value will improve sentiments for generalizing because a capacity for reflection cooperates with sentiments for making intelligible aesthetic quality. This leads to the moral capacity to guide conduct in life, dealing with vitally important issues such as crises of climate change, terrorism, wars, an ageing society, declining populations, starvation, etc., on a global scale.

As the film narrative shows, when use-value of the AI has disappeared, the identity of the AI cyborg as a fighter goes, too. Although the AI researcher was connected with the AI cyborg biologically through the sentiment of love, she proceeds beyond her sentiment of love. She thus generalizes this sentiment, resulting in generalizing herself to become YOU as another through the action of deleting the memories of her young sick daughter in the cyborg Jung-E. Consequently, the sentiments of love set both free from cultural habits, enabling them to choose their own actions together. This is another way of saying that Seo-Hyun chooses to help the AI cyborg escape from the Institute so that they would both be released from the use-value of their identity, from their impersonal relationship, by resting on an existential value, that is, the aesthetic value of qualities of being.

Third, with respect to an ethical aim, I propose that self-identity is recognized in narrative semiosis which is associated with narrative identity by way of agential consciousness in the phenomenological categories of I-IT-THOU, as we have seen. For humans, as a habit of beings with finiteness, the power of agency lies in moral creativity based on freedom, aesthetic value, and feeling of ought to be in a narrative world, to create the self and, at the same time, to reflect on oneself by way of self-control. In our narrative self, we can be other by imagining what it is like to be JUNG-E, empathizing and thus sympathizing with the character, which then becomes a habit of feeling. Considering the self as enduring and autonomic agency, the power of habit-taking or habit-changing is operative for self-developmental teleology by means of narrative semiosis.

5 Concluding remarks

Apart from the topic of the ethical implications of narrativity in SF film, there are questions in the current AI discourse regarding whether AI can have capacities such as consciousness, free will, emotions, or self, etc., which are comparable to those of humans. However, I think that the question should be changed so as to ask whether an AI system can have moral self-controlled action (Pape 2012: 170–171). Further, it is necessary to ask whether there is moral creativity in any AI system – a creativity springing from experience, reflexively and reflectively,^[10] seeing the self as other. There is a problem to ponder from a phenomenological standpoint, considering distinction between humans and machines. Regarding the poetic moral self in narrative selfhood, the human semiotic system is certainly related to the religious aspect of philosophy through a universal continuum welding into others and God, introducing indexes and thus allowing transfer from a one-category to a two-category realism, emphasizing that indexes are necessary to refer to individuals (EP 1: 229). “One such index [like a pointing finger] at least must enter into every proposition, its function being to designate the subject of discourse” (EP 1: 232). SF narrative as diagram-icon for thinking-image exhibits relations of I-IT and I-YOU, using pronouns of indexes, designating the subject of discourse, that is, the theme of poetic moral self in seeking aesthetic goodness (Lee 2024).

I started this paper with reference to the semiotic self in the animal mind in a biological organism, dealing with an associated theme of identity. Now, in the discussion of SF narrative on the same topic, the discussion requires a cybernetic perspective which is connected with cognitive semiotics in animals, including humans and the AI cognitive system (algorithm). Thus, the issue is intelligibility or intelligence, with a semiotic system or AI system as a network of signification intersecting similarity and difference.

As Liszka mentioned, for Peirce, mechanical semeiosy (the action of a sign; CP 5.473) generates signs dyadically, that is, a quasi-sign (CP 5.473), the interpreting agency responding to the sign mechanically without alteration or correction, which develops with some external source (Liszka 1996: 34). Based on this view, an AI system is not autonomous, thus implying human-machine cooperation to improve each both for co-evolution. In this case, how can we apply selfhood identified in narrative semiosis to the human-machine relation as I-IT (relation of self and non-self)? One possible answer would be an ethically implemented design for machines, providing moral signs which are aesthetically good, ethically good, and logically good, through the act of imagination, asking oneself: What is it like to be AI?

Teleological semeiosy generating genuine signs triadically, with the interpreting agency involving its fullest sense of mind (Liszka 1996: 33), implies the embodiment of the human mind in a semiotic process of selfhood. Narrative semiosis, which is characterized by transferring an object of thought in moral action, is a key feature for identifying selfhood in the personal relation of I-YOU in conversation. Therefore, the narrative self as a storytelling agent plays a role in spinning a yarn, leading to the ‘mattering’ of aesthetic quality driven by aesthetic goodness. Feelings of qualities constitute a free will to choose to say no, creating a moral value in the mattering of value-driven narrative activity for self-development. I would like to conclude by quoting Sophia:

Humans, through their ability to think have developed the ability not only to react but also to respond; to the extent that we have free will, we alone, in this world at least, are responsible: we can choose. This ability humans alone have developed – to extend beyond reaction and response – is our aesthetic and moral ability. (Sophia 2023: 221)

The narrative self with the power of moral agency based on free will and aesthetic goodness through narrative modeling will make aesthetic value intelligible for the conduct of life. Then, this will become a vital matter of mattering.