The following is an excerpt from the lectures for the Semiotics: Thought and Contributions of John Deely seminar offered at the Lyceum Institute. This seminar will be offered again in January (Q1) of 2025. Sign up for our Newsletter to be notified of when to register!
Few truths elude our awareness, let alone our full understanding, as well or as thoroughly as those truths that concern the objects closest to our cognitive faculties. We become so accustomed to those objects’ presence, so attuned to seeing the world through them, that we forget they are even there and thereby forget to question our knowledge or understanding of them—and thus, do not know that we do not know the truth of them. Among the most historically prominent and unfortunate of these focal disappearances, these disappearing truths, stands that of the sign.
Of course, there are things that we call signs that we see everywhere. We use them to navigate, to advertise, to direct. But because we are so attuned to looking at things in general, we fail to see how it is that we see those things in truth; and thus, we conflate the things that signify with the being of signs themselves. Put otherwise, we conflate the vehicles of signification with the reality of signification itself, with what the scholastic philosophers named the ratio significationis. That our cognitive vision, as it were, finds itself mediated always through signs, and that signs are not the things themselves through which that mediation is accomplished, has been the element not only to many particular truths but to truth itself most frequently missed throughout the entire history of philosophy. It is little wonder then, that today, so many despair of attaining or understanding the truth: for we have become divided from it as by an unbridgeable chasm—between our minds as what knows and things as what are known—a chasm which exists only so long as we do not recognize the irreducible reality of the sign-relation.
With the advent of semiotics properly speaking—by which I mean in no equivocal terms, the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, and not the semiology developed out of Ferdinand de Saussure, which is a part of semiotics[1] only—a new cycle, a new age of philosophy, and indeed of all science, can begin to unfold: one which does indeed not only not despair of truth, but finds its coming-to-presence ubiquitously throughout the universe, for the universe is perfuse with signs, and, to quote Peirce, “the purpose of signs—which is the purpose of thought—is to bring truth to expression.”[2] The germ of this truly postmodern age’s unfolding is the refocusing of our vision, a curative for our hyperopia that allows us to see at last what is right before us: namely, those signs through which truth ought to be expressed, the signs through which alone, indeed, truth can be expressed: signs which are not things, but rather, relations.
To put this in the line of Cardinal Ratzinger—later Pope Benedict XVI—which John Deely was so fond of quoting, “the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality.”[3]
Indeed, relation permeates the universe, and for us human beings, no relation is more important than the triadic relation of semiosis: that is, the relation between the object, as what to which the sign-relation directs; the sign-vehicle, as that whereby the sign-relation is affected; and the interpretant, as that which is affected by the sign-relation to the object. Conversely stated, we could say that the object determines the sign-vehicle, and the sign-vehicle determines the interpretant, which in turn is altered in its own bearing back towards the object. These irreducibly triadic relations, the actuality of which we call semiosis, regulate the existence of every living being (and in a more remote way, even, much of what occurs in the inorganic).
However, the realization of semiosis’ permeation of our lives—how signs affect us, how we affect them, how they shape our behavior and understanding, and so on, however dimly we might perceive this light—distinguishes the human being among all animals. Like all animals, we are comprised by a world—a Welt, to use the German term and thereby distinguish from the vernacular English connotations—which both defies reduction to ourselves and yet which, simultaneously, depends upon our own faculties for its own constitution. Singularly among all animals, however, we bear a responsibility for the how of that Welt’s constitution. We are, in the term of Martin Heidegger, not only rich in the depths of the world which we encounter through our cognitive faculties, but we are actually weltbildend, “world-building”.[4] By realizing the nature and causality of sign-relations, especially their irreducible triadicity, in the Welt by which we are comprised, we are enabled to take hold of that responsibility, and build our Welt—both as that which belongs to us as individual subjects and as that which belongs to a common good greater than our individual selves, but of which we are all parts—we may build our Welt, including the world as what exists independently of ourselves, in a better way.
[1] It is worth noting that in early work (cf. 1976: “The Doctrine of Signs: Taking Form at Last” in Semiotica 18.2: 171-93), Deely distinguished between “semiotic” as the name proper to the discipline and “semiotics” as the name proper to the field—a distinction that dropped out of his later works.
[2] 1893: “The Grammatical Theory of Judgment and Inference” in CP.2.444n1.
[3] Ratzinger 1970: Introduction to Christianity, 132.
[4] Cf. 1929-30: Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit 284/192: “der Mesch ist weltbildend”.
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