Monday, August 27, 2007
Is empathy grounded in the play of signs? I'm putting the question to Jesper Hoffmeyer even though others (Donald Favareau, for instance) have already expanded on his work and reformulated the problem. Hoffmeyer remains, however, an exemplar of the semiotic point of view on empathy. He sees empathy as a therapeutic response to a uniquely human existential terror stemming from the thought that one could be replaced, a thought that creates a split between an emotionally whole self and an emotionally neutral player who is free to contemplate his or her mortality (Signs of Meaning in the Universe, p. 132). He says:
The interchangability of the players implies an emotional and cognitive relationship between them. Human beings could never have learned to put themselves in someone else's psychological place if they had not already learned to see themselves reflected in that other person, to see the other person as a creature just like them.
The terror and the empathy go hand in hand and language is their medium. In actual fact it was not humanity, much less erectus, who engendered them. It was a little child. Lacan's reflection theory holds the key: the mutual empathy between mother and child provided the protection necessary to cope with the unleashing of the awful isolation inherent in the idea of "not."
(pp. 132-133)
Phenomena like atruism in chimpanzees suggest that either chimpanzees are more intellectually capable than Hoffmeyer gives them credit for (calling into question the uniqueness of the existential terror of imagining oneself as interchangable), even though they lack language. Such phenomena might also call into question the notion that empathy emerges as response to a kind of cognition. We needn't turn to the behavioural studies of primates however in order to philosophically question this premise. Kojima, for instance, talks about the ontic meaning of the other being present to us immanently prior to any perspective that would allow for an exchange of viewpoints, and he speaks of an ontological anticipation of alterity that precedes any introjection of one's own being into other bodies. Favareau might tell us that such ontological anticipations are also a kind of neurological interpretation (and therefore also "cognitive"), but I wonder if instead we might question the semiotic nature of empathy.
If empathy is semiotic in anything like a Peircean sense, it would seem to involve multiple interpretants. The stubbed toe affects its owner and any empathetic witnesses at once. I can't say whether Peirce ever provided a satisfactory account of empathy or compassion, but the very idea of com-passion challenges my understanding of the idea that sign relations are purely triadic. Sign relations in empathy appear to be tetrahedral, at the least. I see meaning in the relationship between interpretants, but I don't know what semiotic model would be capable of exploring it.
I've quoted Jean-Luc Nancy before as saying:
Meaning is the exhibition of the foundation without foundation, which is not an abyss but simply the with of things that are, insofar as they are. Logos is dialogue, but the end of dialogue is not to overcome itself in "consensus"; its reason is to offer, and only to offer (giving it tone and intensity), the cum-, the with of meaning, the plurality of its springing forth.
(Being Singular Plural, pp. 86-87).
Now I want to ask whether meaning is always meaning towards something, or more simply meaning something. (A secondary question concerns whether meaning is always for somebody–I'll leave that aside for the moment.) Is meaning towards a thing qualitatively the same as meaning towards another person? Nancy invites us to roam in a region of meaning between singularities. Can this meaning of the with also be thought of as a meaning towards, or would that necessarily imply a kind of foundation that Nancy rejects? I'm not sure.
All told the semiotic depiction of empathy feels a little cold to me. Perhaps there are senses in which empathy is grounded in the play of signs, but I'm having a hard time envisaging a semiotic approach that doesn't obliterate the meaning of the other or, alternatively, the meaning of being with others. What sense of meaning, if any, does the phenomenon of empathy call for?
Labels: chimpanzees, compassion, Favareau, Hoffmeyer, Kojima, meaning, Nancy, Peirce, uniqueness
Sunday, December 10, 2006
The objectivity of the Umwelt is semiotic. This is what I took from Bains chapter on Umwelten (The Primacy of Semiosis, pp. 59-84). It requires just a little explanation. There is more at stake, however, than a question of how the environment is interpreted. It becomes a question of the nature of experience, whether experience is, as is claimed, primarily semiotic, and if so then what sense of being is proper to experience.
What does it mean to say that the objectivity of the Umwelt is semiotic? Jakob von Uexküll's basic insight is that the Umwelt, or environment, is specific to each species of organism (an idea I first encountered via Lewontin), and that furthermore, the relationship between an organism and its environment is one of interpretation. This is where Peirce's semiotics comes in handy, because it allows for the effects of a sign to be energetic as well as ideational, and thus, pace Uexküll, to see the Umwelt as an objective world. "Objective worlds," Bains writes, "are not in binary opposition with the modern sense of the subjective. Objective worlds as experienced include a shifting amalgam of mind-dependent and mind-independent aspects (or the 'psychical' and 'physical') through the univocal being of sign relations"(p. 74).
Well, now we're in the thick of it: The univocal being of the sign relation. Bains takes the view, following John Deely, that the being of the sign relation is the being proper to experience. (See also Deely's The Basics of Semiotics, esp. chapter 5; and Gilles Deleuze, Sur Anti Oedipe et Mille Plateaux, Cours Vincennes, 14/01/1974: English translation.) The heart of the argument is that the semiotic approach is truer to experience than other philosophical alternatives. "Experience is not locked into realism or idealism; it is neither/nor, for it is univocal in its being, including both the constructions of the mind and elements that are not reducible to the mind's constructive capacity" (p. 74). And similarly, "Semiotic reality is an interpentetration of the mind's own constructs with aspects of a mind-independent environment woven seamlessly together in the ontological univocity of the sign relation" (p. 77).
It occurs to me that there are other ways of navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of idealism and materialism, but the semiotic approach seems promising. It's been my task over the past twenty-four hours to examine my experience and see whether it resembles a semiotic reality. So far it seems plausible, but I am withholding final judgement pending further study.
Labels: Bains, Deely, Deleuze, experience, ontology, Peirce, semiotics, sign, Uexküll, Umwelt
Friday, December 08, 2006
The following essay by Renee Tursi keeps cropping up in my googles: William James' Narrative of Habit, most recently while searching for the word "tychistic" (prompted by Clark's recent post, Peirce and Consciousness).
Here's a passage from James' The Meaning of Truth:
Are they [theoretical needs and intellectual satisfactions] not all mere matters of consistency--and emphatically not of consistency between an absolute reality and the mind's copies of it, but of actually felt consistency among judgments, objects, and habits of reacting, in the mind's own experienceable world? And are not both our need of such consistency and our pleasure in it conceivable as outcomes of the natural fact that we are beings that do develop mental habits--habit itself proving adaptively beneficial in an environment where the same objects, or the same kinds of objects, recur and follow "law"? If this were so, what would have come first would have been the collateral profits of habit as such, and the theoretic life would have grown up in aid of these. In point of fact, this seems to have been the probable case. At life's origin, any present perception may have been "true"–if such a word could then be applicable. Later, when reactions became organized, the reactions became "true" whenever expectation was fulfilled by them. Otherwise they were "false" or "mistaken" reactions. But the same class of objects needs the same kind of reaction, so the impulse to react consistently must gradually have been established, and a disappointment felt whenever the results frustrated expectation. Here is a perfectly plausible germ for all our higher consistencies. Nowadays, if an object claims from us a reaction of the kind habitually accorded only to the opposite class of objects, our mental machinery refuses to run smoothly. The situation is intellectually unsatisfactory.
In Tursi's narrative, this passage means that "habit gives us footholds in the morass of the unknowable by emptying experience of its uncanniness. Only then do thoughts truly feel sufficient and at home." Well, I'm not totally at home with Tursi's reading of Jamesian Unheimlichkeit. Neither can I say that it's far afield.
More and more in my daily reading I discover that I really don't know very much. I don't know for example what the unconscious is, nor do I have a solid grasp on consciousness. How could I even begin to compare Freud to the Americans James and Peirce? It's just a little unsettling, that's all.
Labels: Freud, James, Peirce, Unheimlichkeit
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Peirce defines the sign: "A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity" (quoted in Beuchot and Deely, Common sources for the semiotic of Charles Peirce and John Poinsot). Pedro da Fonseca defines to signify as "to represent something to a cognoscitive faculty." Beuchot and Deely treat these two definitions as equivalent. I'm not so sure Peirce didn't say exactly what he meant, no more and no less. What are the conditions of possibility of a cognoscitive faculty? What are the conditions of possibility of a somebody?
What can we say about the cognoscitive faculties of the cephalopods? The capacity for semiosis is abundantly evident within that class of organisms, but they do not possess "the cognitive system of a human being," as Beuchot and Deely would have it, and the nature of their cognoscitive faculties remains rather opaque. Is "somebody" then precisely as vague as it needs to be to describe semiosis, or do we need to say more?
John Poinsot gives the following definition: "a sign is that which represents something other than itself to a knowing power." Now I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Poinsot didn't have primarily octopuses in mind by the phrase "to a knowing power." The theological question ("Does God read signs") is not one I'm prepared to deal with. I'm looking at the semiotic question, "To whom is a sign addressed?" and wondering what the bare minimum requirement is for semiosis. Now, does Poinsot's definition imply that in using signs we can't be truly misunderstood? What kind of knowledge/power are we talking about?
Peirce of course says elsewhere that the interpretant is the somebody to whom a sign is addressed, and he describes that sometimes as "thought," that is, the sign represents something to thought. But this use of "thought" is not transparent: Peirce means by it the "mental effect" of the sign. "A representation is that character of a thing by virtue of which, for the production of a certain mental effect, it may stand in place of another thing. The thing having this character I term a representamen, the mental effect, or thought, its interpretant, the thing for which it stands, its object." Surely "somebody" is the clearest way of saying things, but now I can't be sure what is really meant by that.
Labels: Pedro da Fonseca, Peirce, Poinsot, semiotics