Relations: The true substrate for evolution
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Jesper Hoffmeyer
Abstract
The strange “forgetfulness of the notion of the sign” that John Deely puts as an emblem for the third of the Four ages of understanding (Deely, Four ages of understanding: The first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the twenty-first century, University of Toronto Press, 2001: xxx) may also be seen as an emblem for the so-called modern science that grew to unprecedented victories in that same historical period. This was the period where the Newtonian idealization of nature was, somewhat paradoxically, taken as a prime model for good materialistic science. One important consequence of this idealization was that the spectrum of acceptable causalities operative in nature was reduced to just one, the efficient causality of Aristotle. As a consequence the concept of relation disappeared from nature as autonomously existent. Departing from the bioanthropological critique of modern biology launched by Gregory Bateson, the paper reinstates “relative being” — and thus the notion of the sign — as a “unique, suprasubjective mode of being” (Deely, Four ages of understanding: The first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the twenty-first century, University of Toronto Press, 2001: xxxi). The scientific vision of a nature governed by natural laws is thus replaced by a vision of nature as an incessant semiotic emergence brought out by the ever increasing capacity of life for inventing new and more efficient kinds of “interpretance” or, in Peircean terms, a tendency to take habits.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Articles in the same Issue
- Why read Deely? Introduction to the Four ages special issue
- The integration of Thomistic intentionality theory and contemporary semiotics
- The history of philosophy as a semiotic process: A note on John Deely's momumental Four ages of understanding
- Suggestions of a Neoplatonic semiotics: Act and potency in Plotinus' metaphysics
- Two steps toward semiotic capacity: Out of the muddy concept of language
- Relations: The true substrate for evolution
- The church of pragmatism
- Is modernity really so bad? John Deely and Husserl's phenomenology
- Deely, Aquinas, and Poinsot: How the intentionality of inner sense transcends the limits of empiricism
- From sémiologie to postmodernism: A genealogy
- The inferential and equational models from ancient times to the postmodern
- Four Ages of underrating: Philosophy and zoösemiotic issues
- Cosmic semiosis: Contuiting the Divine
- Understanding the four ages of thought
Articles in the same Issue
- Why read Deely? Introduction to the Four ages special issue
- The integration of Thomistic intentionality theory and contemporary semiotics
- The history of philosophy as a semiotic process: A note on John Deely's momumental Four ages of understanding
- Suggestions of a Neoplatonic semiotics: Act and potency in Plotinus' metaphysics
- Two steps toward semiotic capacity: Out of the muddy concept of language
- Relations: The true substrate for evolution
- The church of pragmatism
- Is modernity really so bad? John Deely and Husserl's phenomenology
- Deely, Aquinas, and Poinsot: How the intentionality of inner sense transcends the limits of empiricism
- From sémiologie to postmodernism: A genealogy
- The inferential and equational models from ancient times to the postmodern
- Four Ages of underrating: Philosophy and zoösemiotic issues
- Cosmic semiosis: Contuiting the Divine
- Understanding the four ages of thought
