Biosemiotic Anti-Humanism: Why Culture Is an Extension of Biology and a Self-Organizing System of Meaning

摘要

This book is no. 16 in the biosemiotic book series of which I reviewed no. 11: Peirce and Biosemiotics: A Guess at the Riddle of Life recently here in vol. 23 no. 4. That book analyzed the full consequences for biosemiotics of taking Peirce's semiotic philosophy seriously, offering some startling results. According to Charles Sanders Peirce's pragmatic semiotics, symbolic expression and growth are at the root not only of our culture and language but also of the dynamics of natural processes. That is why biosemiotics is no mere supplement to anthroposemiotics. In Peircean cosmogony, the cosmos emerges into existence from emptiness (as in quantum field theory), along with a tendency to take habits. As such, Peirce models the universe as an almost empty vague symbol, developing because it is in the need of manifest interpretation in the form of tokens in its development. This metaphysics is a powerful motif for a transdisciplinary understanding of reality, proceeding from logic as semiotic, through philosophy into science (Kauffmann, 2012), culture, art, politics and religion. As Cobley clearly sees it, this is, on the one hand, not a part of traditional humanistic thinking that posits humans as unique beings outside nature and, on the other, is not a view from traditional mechanistic biology of the selfish gene. We are in new territory or in the process of claiming new land and Cobley is our guide hacking his way with a pretty sharp machete. For Peircean semiotics there is no absolute difference between the sciences and humanities and not even religion is completely isolated in its own part of reality. This is because even scientific knowledge is not absolutely provable. What Peirce calls the principle of synechism or continuity is not an ultimate and absolute metaphysical doctrine; it is a regulative principle of logic, prescribing what sort of hypothesis is fit to be entertained and examined. This is because continuity is the absence of ultimate parts in that which is divisible; whatever is supposed to be ultimate is supposed to be inexplicable. In Peircean semiotics there is no Kantian thing in itself because there can be no limits to knowledge! Thus synechism amounts to the principle that inexplicabilities are not to be considered as possible explanations, as there is no absolute divide between mind and matter. Therefore, no forms of fundamentalism can be true, be they religious, scientific, artistic or political. So what we call the laws of physics are not eternal and transcendental, running the world machine extended in time and space through matter (Res extensa), outside the human mind in a separate Res cogitans placed in its own reality. But the Peircean biosemiotic view sees both realms as connected through real habits in irreversible time. Furthermore, since reality is not a machine it has its own spontaneity, as we see in the quantum vacuum fields. This is the principle Peirce calls Tychism. It is objective chance with the tendency to take habits; it is therefore symbolic. The Cosmos develops through a form of semiotic reasoning process. The foundation of Peirce's view of the forms of knowing is a combination of logic, aesthetics and ethics along with pure mathematics and phaneroscopy: which is his form of phenomenology. In the scientific work of obtaining the "fixation of belief," the ethics of the process is summarized in the slogan "Do not block the way of inquiry." Considering Peirce's fallibilism that no belief is ever ultimately proven fixed, his slogan is pointing to the process character of both logic and scientific knowing as an almost endless striving for truth. It is never the end result we have now. Therefore we must never stop the process of science. We cannot block the path of enquiry on the basis of things we believe we know now, such as humanism's belief in the uniqueness of the human conscious self as being outside nature. As soon as we stop we become fundamentalists. This also means that we are bound to follow the truth-searching process to the results of our inquiry, no matter what social, economic, political or religious consequences we may envision that it may have. The ideas behind our cultural and educational institutions, like the universities and principles of government such as market economic democracy, emerge from the same basic continuum, manifesting as different facets contributing to our cultural rationality. This deep connection is Peirce's principle of synechism or continuity, developed originally by Aristotle as an alternative to Democritus's atomism where reality is built from some smallest completely independent parts or things in themselves. For Peirce, everything is open for inquiry and all forms of knowledge are fallible.