“From Rational to Semiotic Animal”

An extract from Deely 2006: “Semiotics, History of” in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition (London: Elsevier) v.11: 216–29.

The thinkers of the Latin Age, inspired by Aristotle, liked to distinguish between remote and proximate potentialities. Thus, awareness or knowledge of the action of signs was no more than a remote possibility the long ages of cosmic semiosis (or evolution) that preceded the establishment of those forms that we call “conscious life”, the animals. Even among the animals, however, prior to the human animal, called by Aristotle ζῷον λόγον ἔχον and by the Latins animal rationale, semiotics remained a remote possibility, not a proximate one. For the precursors of human beings in the biological community, the ζῷα λογον οῦκ ἐχων or “nonlinguistic animals” of Aristotle, the animalia bruta of the Latins, make use of signs but without knowing that there are signs. Zoösemiosis, the action of signs in and among animals, gives rise to zoösemiotics only within anthroposemiosis, the human use of signs, not within zoösemiosis as such.

So the actual or proximate possibility of semiotics as a distinctive branch or field of knowledge comes to be only within the emergence on earth of animals capable not just of using signs but also of knowing that there are signs. These animals, originally called, as we have noted, ζῷα λογον οῦκ ἐχων in philosophy in philosophy, later animalia rationalia or “rational animal”, or even as a “thinking thing” (res cogitans, as modernity would conceive it), but in terms of what is most distinctive about the exercise of awareness in such an animal as expressing not only its animality but also its ties to the larger world of nature, inorganic as well as organic. So the richest definition of the human being as ζῷον λόγον ἔχον is the semiotic animal (Deely 2002, 2003 [and let us add, 2010: Semiotic Animal]). And the history of semiotics is the history of the development of the awareness among human beings that there are signs distinct alike from objects and things to the realization that signs in their proper being are invisible to sense and presupposed in their action both to the constitution of objects and the exploration of things.

In fact, the three main definitions philosophy has given of the human being—ζῷον λόγον ἔχον in the Greek period, animal rationale in the Latin Age, and “semiotic animal” today—correspond to the three main stages in the development of semiotic consciousness, as follows. The presemiotic stage begins with the appearance of human beings as the original animals capable of knowing that there are signs, preliminary to realizing that capacity in various theoretical fashions. The protosemiotic stage begins with the first proposal of sign as a general mode of being transcending nature and culture, inner and outer consciousness, in the age of Augustine. And finally the stage of semiotics proper begins as a proximate possibility with the establishment theoretically in the work first of Poinsot and next of Peirce of how it is that the being proper to signs transcends, or, in a certain way, “maintains an indifference to”, the modern division of philosophers into “realists” and “idealists”.

According to this way of considering the matter, the modern period itself, wherein the ζῷον λόγον ἔχον is conceived solipsistically as a res cogitans, appears as a “cryptosemiotic interlude” between the original vindication of semiotic consciousness in 17th century work of John Poinsot and resumption of the development of that consciousness in the late 19th–early 20th century work of Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce stands historically as last of the moderns who is also first of the postmoderns in the matter of semiotics proper, just as his predecessor, John Poinsot, can rightly be termed the last of the medievals who is first of the postmoderns in this same matter of semiotics proper. Poinsot and Peirce, across the centuries separating the Latin Age from postmodern times in intellectual culture, stand shoulder-to-shoulder—indeed, joined at the hip—as the initiators of the postmodern philosophical epoch, inasmuch as both alike are the first among the giants of thought thematically to recognize and systematically to establish the parameters of the Way of Signs, the path leading “everywhere in nature, including those domains where humans have never set foot” (Emmeche 1994: 126). It is to the understanding of this path that semiotics gives us the means integrally to aspire. We are at the nexus and initium of postmodernity.