Lost in the Cosmos

(12) The Impoverished Self: How the Self can be Poor though Rich

MOTHER TERESA OF CALCUTTA recently remarked about some affluent Westerners she had met — including Americans, Europeans, capitalists, Marxists — that they seemed to her sad and poor, poorer even than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor, to whom she ministered.

Question: What kind of impoverishment can be attributed to the denizens of Western technological societies in view of the obvious wealth of such societies in such categories as food, shelter, goods and services, education, technology, and cultural institutions?

(a) There is no such sadness and impoverishment. Mother Teresa makes such a charge because Western societies, with their increasing acceptance of contraceptive birth control and abortion, offend her Roman Catholic religious beliefs.

(b) There is, in fact, such a sadness and an impoverishment, due at least in part to a loss of respect for human life as evidenced not only by the acceptance of abortion but by mounting child abuse, euthanasia, and indifference to human suffering. Recent studies have shown, however, that Westerners, that is, Europeans and Americans, own more pets than ever and spend more money on pet food and veterinarians than the food costs of the entire Third World.

(c) There is such a sadness and impoverishment because in an affluent society, where there is a surfeit of goods and services, there is a corresponding devaluation. Whereas the poor peoples of the Third World, despite or because of their material deprivation, appreciate the simple things in life. Small is beautiful, the best things in life are free, etc.

(d) Because the poor in heart are blessed, i.e., receptive to the Gospel, whereas the rich may gain the whole world but lose their souls.

(e) Because Western society is an ethic of power and manipulation and self-aggrandizement at the expense of the values of community, love, innocence, simplicity, values encountered both in childhood and in non-aggressive societies (e.g., the Eskimo). As Ashley Montagu says, adulthood in the Western world is a deteriorated and impoverished childhood.

(f) Because Western society is itself a wasteland, its values decayed, its community fragmented, its morals corrupted, its cities in ruins. In the face of the deracination of Western culture, all talk of self-enrichment through this or that psychological technique is cosmetic, like rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic. The Moral Majority is right. The only thing that can save us is a return to old-time religion, a revival of Christian Fundamentalism.

(g) None of the above. All arguments between the traditional scientific view of man as organism, a locus of needs and drives, and a Christian view of man as a spiritual being not only are unresolvable at the present level of discourse but are also profoundly boring — no small contributor indeed to the dreariness of Western society in general. The so-called détentes and reconciliations between “Science” and “Religion” are even more boring. What is more boring than hearing Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations enlisted in support of the freedom of the will? The traditional scientific model of man is clearly inadequate, for a man can go to heroic lengths to identify and satisfy his needs and end by being more miserable than a Calcuttan. As for the present religious view of man, it begs its own question, the question of God’s existence, which means that it is not only useless to the unbeliever but dispiriting. The latter is more depressed than ever at hearing the goods news of Christianity. From the scientific view at least, a new model of man is needed, something other than man conceived as a locus of bio-psycho-sociological needs and drives.

Such an anthropological model might be provided by semiotics, that is, the study of man as the sign-using creature and, specifically, the study of the self and consciousness as derivatives of the sign-function.

Thought Experiment: If Mother Teresa is right and there exists in modern technological societies a paradoxical impoverishment in the midst of plenty, in the face of what is by traditional objective scientific criteria the most extensive effort in all of history to identify and satisfy man’s biological, psychological, sociological, and cultural needs, consider a different model. Consider a more radical model than the conventional psycho-biological model, a semiotic model which allows one to explore the self in its nature and origins and to discover criteria for its impoverishment and wealth.

The following section, an intermezzo of some forty pages, can be skipped without fatal consequences. It is not technical but it is theoretical — i.e., it attempts an elementary semiotical grounding of the theory of self taken for granted in these pages. As such, it will be unsatisfactory to many readers. It will irritate many lay readers by appearing to be too technical — what does he care about semiotics? It will irritate many professional semioticists by not being technical enough — and for focusing on one dimension of semiotics which semioticists, for whatever reason, are not accustomed to regard as a proper subject of inquiry, i.e., not texts and other coded sign utterances but the self which produces texts or hears sign utterances.

A Semiotic^* Primer of the Self

A Short History of the Cosmos with Emphasis on the Nature and Origin of the Self, plus a Semiotic Model for Computing Impoverishment in the Midst of Plenty, or Why it is Possible to Feel Bad in a Good Environment and Good in a Bad Environment

From the beginning and for most of the fifteen billion years of the life of the Cosmos, there was only one kind of event. It was particles hitting particles, chemical reactions, energy exchanges, gravity attractions between masses, field forces, and so on. As different as such events are, they can all be understood as an interaction between two or more entities: A↔B. Even a system as inconceivably vast as the Cosmos itself can be understood as such an interaction:

DIAGRAM 1

Every element in the Cosmos is in interaction with every other element. The elements and systems of the Cosmos are still in interaction whether we are speaking of the radiation of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum or the attraction of gravity between bodies. In a sense, astrologers are right. The planet Saturn has an influence on me; it exerts a small gravitational attraction. I in turn exert a slight pull not only on the planet Saturn but upon the entire M31 galaxy in Andromeda. When I take a single step, I affect the rotation of the earth.

II

Some three and a half billion years ago, organic life began on this planet, perhaps earlier on other planets, perhaps not at all. A discharge of lightning might have caused the formation of organic molecules in the primordial soup, molecules which sooner or later happened to replicate themselves, though it is difficult to imagine how these events could have occurred accidentally. Perhaps there was another cause. Perhaps God was the cause. We do not know. At any rate, a new kind of system came into being, the organism. It had the extraordinary property of maintaining its internal milieu, its homeostasis, and of reproducing itself. Yet, different though it was from other systems, events within the organism and across the membrane of the organism as well as events in its environment could still be understood as the same kind of events — dyadic interactions which had occurred before:

The interactions of organisms with each other, whether sexual, combative, or predatory, could be similarly understood:

It is all very well to speak of the wonders of the Cosmos as testimony to the glory of God, and it may in fact be true, but it, the Cosmos, is hardly perceived as such in modern technological societies. For most scientists, it seems fair to say, these same wonders, including the behavior of organisms, can be explained as an interaction of elements. The wonder to the scientist is not that God made the world but that the works of God can be understood in terms of a mechanism without giving God a second thought. Is it not indeed more wonderful to understand the complex mechanisms (dyads) by which the DNA of a sperm joins with the DNA of an ovum to form a new organism than to have God snap his fingers and create an organism like a rabbit under a hat?

The real wonder is not that the Cosmos is now seen as wonderful but that it is not. Despite its inconceivable vastness, it is seen not as wonderful but as something that can be explained as a dyadic system.

III

It became useful to think of an organism as an open system which through the selective processes of evolution had developed a genetic code which enabled it to maintain an internal steady state (homeostasis) in a changing environment and to reproduce itself. Thus, all the elements and events in the Cosmos, including other organisms, could be thought of as the environment of the organism. The organism “responded” to those segments of its environment to which, through evolution, it had become genetically coded — hardwired — to respond: eating, fighting, avoiding some, approaching and mating with others. Those segments of the environment which were without biological significance were ignored:

There are many gaps in the environment of an organism. This is to say that though there may be an interaction between the mass of the organism and the mass of Jupiter, the organism does not respond to Jupiter in any observable way. Yet the organism, as in the case of a migrating bird, has been shown to respond to the magnetic field of the earth or the position of the sun.

IV

An organism may also, either by being genetically coded or by learning — that is, by modifying certain neurones in its central nervous system — respond to certain signals in its environment by a behavior oriented toward other segments of the environment. Thus, a Texas leaf-cutting ant which discovers a food source too big to move will deposit a trail of pheromones on the ground, which other ants will follow for several hundred meters from the nest:

The Texas leaf-cutting ant is genetically programmed so to respond. But Pavlov’s dog — or any other mammal exposed to certain changes in its environment — can learn to respond to a signal in an appropriate manner — by eating, fleeing, or fighting — through modification of cells in its central nervous system.

A gorilla (A) in its natural state can utter one of a dozen or so vocal signals which are responded to by other gorillas (B, C, …) in an appropriate fashion — e.g., the bark wraagh is a signal of a sudden alarming situation, such as unexpected contact with buffalo, which signals flight in other gorillas.

The chimpanzee Lana has been taught by the Rumbaughs, through a learning program of rewards, to punch differently marked keys of a computer and “ask” for food, liquids, music, etc.

Next the Rumbaughs taught two chimpanzees to communicate with each other, e.g., one chimp punching a marked key to ask another chimp for a certain food to which the importuned chimp had access. The Rumbaughs called the marks on the computer keys “symbols” and the transaction between the two chimps “the first successful demonstration of symbolic communication between two nonhuman primates.”

Whereupon B. F. Skinner showed that two domestic pigeons (Columba livia domestica) could learn spontaneously to use such “symbols” to communicate with each other. The two pigeons, named Jack and Jill, could conduct a “conversation.” Jack was the observer and Jill the informer. Jack and Jill first learned to associate marked keys with three colors. Jill was taught to “name” three colors to respond to the keyboard-question “What color?” Jack was taught to select the color corresponding to the name. When the pigeons were correct, they were rewarded with grain. Then Jack learned to ask Jill for a color name by depressing the WHAT COLOR? key. Then Jill looked behind a curtain at a color hidden from Jack. Then, while Jack watched, Jill selected a “symbolic name” for the color. When Jill was right, Jack rewarded her by pushing the THANK YOU key. Then, while Jill moved to her reward, Jack selected the right color. Then Jack was rewarded.

Whether Skinner was out to discomfit the Rumbaughs and prove that pigeons are as smart as chimps, or whether both were out to prove that pigeons and chimps are as smart as people, or at least that their intelligences are not qualitatively different, we must admire the skill of both teams of investigators in teaching communication skills. But what has been called into question in these and like experiments is the use of words such as language, symbols, sentences to describe this kind of communication. Investigators such as Terrace and Sebeok have shown that such communication does not bear the test of language in the human sense, e.g., having a rule-governed syntax. One of the weaknesses of semiotics is the all-too-frequent use of words like language and sentence in a loose analogical sense.

This argument aside, what matters here is that these communications in Skinner’s pigeons and the Rumbaughs’ chimps can be understood perfectly well by Peirce’s familiar dyadic model, as a sequence of interactions or dyads:

This sequence can of course be broken down into smaller dyads, e.g., interactions between Jack’s conditioned neurones, electrical discharges along the efferent nerves leading to Jack’s pecking muscles, and so on.

An African gray parrot named Alex at Purdue University has been taught to call forty objects by name, identify five colors, and distinguish between a square, a triangle, and a pentagon. When he wants to return to his cage, he says, “Wanna go back.”

Many people, including some scientists, like to speak of the “language” of the Rumbaughs’ chimps, Skinner’s pigeons, and the Purdue parrot, to say nothing of the song of the humpback whale. These communications, however, bear little if any resemblance to human language. The former can be understood as dyadic events not qualitatively different, albeit much more complex, from other dyadic events in the Cosmos. The latter cannot be so understood.

V

Extremely recently in the history of the Cosmos, at least on the earth — perhaps less than 100,000 years ago, perhaps more — there occurred an event different in kind from all preceding events in the Cosmos. It cannot be understood as a dyadic interaction or a complexus of dyadic interactions.

It has been called variously triadic behavior, thirdness, the Delta factor, man’s discovery of the sign (including symbols, language, art).

This phenomenon occurred in the evolution of man. It may have occurred elsewhere in the Cosmos, or it may have occurred in other creatures on earth. We do not know. But it is not known to have occurred elsewhere in the Cosmos and it has not been proved — despite heroic attempts with chimps, gorillas, and dolphins — to have occurred in other earth species.

The present argument does not require that triadic behavior be unique in man. Perhaps it is not. Semiotics proposes only that where triadic behavior occurs, certain new properties and relationships also come into existence,

Triadic behavior is that event in which sign A is understood by organism B, not as a signal to flee or approach, but as “meaning” or referring to another perceived segment of the environment:

This triad is irreducible. That is to say, it cannot be understood as a sequence of dyads, as could the events, say, when Miss Sullivan spelled C-A-K-E into Helen’s hand and Helen went to look for cake — like one of Skinner’s pigeons.

At any rate, a triadic event has occurred and it is unprecedented in the Cosmos. Thus, there is a sense in which it can be said that, given two mammals extraordinarily similar in organic structure and genetic code, and given that one species has made the breakthrough into triadic behavior and the other has not, there is, semiotically speaking, more difference between the two than there is between the dyadic animal and the planet Saturn.

Certain new properties appear. For example, all triadic behavior is social in origin. A signal received by an organism is like other signals or stimuli from its environment. But a sign requires a sign-giver. Thus, every triad of sign-reception requires another triad of sign-utterance. Whether the sign is a word, a painting, or a symphony — or Robinson Crusoe writing a journal to himself — a sign transaction requires a sign-utterer and a sign-receiver.

Other new properties appear, such as the relation between the utterer and the receiver, which are subject to such familiar variables as “intersubjectivity” (I-thou) and “depersonalization” (I-it).

A particularly mysterious property is the relation between the sign (signifier) and the referent (signified). It is expressed by the troublesome copula “is,” when Helen said that the perceived liquid “is” water (the word). It “is” but then again it is not. Herein surely is the root of all the troubles Stuart Chase spoke of when he said that his cat had no dealings with such a relationship and therefore was smarter or at least saner than humans.

Another unique property of the sign-user, of special significance here, is that as soon as he crosses the triadic threshold, he not only continues to exist in an environment but also has a world.

The world of the sign-user is not identical to its environment or the Cosmos.

Relation AC — your giving a name to a class of objects to make a sign, and my understanding or misunderstanding of such a naming — cannot be understood as a dyadic interaction.

Relation BD — the I-you intersubjectivity of an exchange of signs — cannot be understood as a dyadic interaction.

These are two conjoined triadic events which always happen in any exchange of signs, whether in talk, looking at a painting, reading a novel, or listening to music. It allows for such peculiar properties of triadic events as understanding, misunderstanding, truth-telling, lying.

VI

The first Edenic world of the sign-userMiss Sullivan (writing of Helen Keller): As the cold water gushed forth, filling the mug, I spelled “w-a-t-e-r” in Helen’s free hand. The word coming so close upon the sensation of cold water rushing over her hand seemed to startle her. She dropped the mug and stood as one transfixed. A new light came into her face. She spelled “w-a-t-e-r” several times. Then she dropped on the ground and asked for its name and pointed to the pump and the trellis, and suddenly turning around asked for my name. I spelled, “Teacher.” Just then the nurse brought Helen’s little sister into the pump-house, and Helen spelled “baby” and pointed to the nurse. All the way back to the house she was highly excited, and learned the name of every object she touched, so that in a few hours she added thirty new words to her vocabulary. Here are some of them: Door, open, shut, give, go, come, and a great many more.^*Roger Brown and Ursula Belhigi (writing in “Three Processes in the Child’s Acquisition of Syntax”): Some time in the second six months of life most children say a first intelligible word. A few months later most children are saying many words and some children go about the house all day long naming things (table, doggie, ball, etc.) and actions (play, see drop, etc.)^†Philip E. L. Smith: Having inherited from more primitive ancestors large and efficient brains, as well as a serviceable technology, these new humans proceeded to make a quantum jump greater than anything seen before in a comparable length of time. In esthetics, in communication and symbols, in technology and adaptive efficiency, and perhaps in newer forms of social organization and more complex ways of viewing their fellows, these first modern men went on to effect a transformation worldwide in its impact.^*

The signal-using organism has an environment.

The sign-user has an environment, but it also has a world.

The environment of an organism is those elements of the Cosmos which affect the organism significantly (Saturn does not) and to which the organism either is genetically coded to respond or has learned to respond. There are many gaps in an environment, i.e., there are elements which are without significant effect. A honey bee takes account of the bee dance of another bee indicating the direction and distance of a nectar source, but not of a grouse dance.

The sign-user has a world.

The world is segmented and named by language. All perceived objects and actions and qualities are named. Even the gaps are named — by the word gaps. An African Bushman has hundreds of names for plants which are either noxious or medicinally beneficial. But he also has a word bush to name all other plants. The Cosmos is accounted for willy-nilly, rightly or wrongly, mythically or scientifically, its past, present, and future. All men in all cultures know what is under the earth, what is above the earth, and where the Cosmos came from.

The sign Canada is part of the world of most sign-users. It can signify whatever lies at hand to be signified, either a place and a people one knows or a large pink place on a map transected by longitudes and latitudes.

If there is an unknown territory in the heart of Africa, it is labeled as such on maps and known to sign-users as “unknown territory.”

A cat has no myths and names no real or imaginary beings. It responds to the Cosmos exactly as it has learned or been programmed to respond.

For the sign-user, a world is imposed upon the Cosmos — to which he still responds like any other organism.

For example, he still responds to signals, to heat, light, hunger, sudden noises, perhaps also to female pheromones, perhaps even to the magnetic field of the earth and the gravitational attraction of the moon. But there are other segments of the Cosmos to which he does not respond, even though astrologers say he does.

The environment has gaps. But the world of the sign-user is a totality. The Cosmos is totally construed by signs, whether the signs be the myth of Tiamat, Newtonian cosmology, or through the auspices of such popular signifiers as “outer space,” “out there,” “the heavens,” “the sky,” “stars,” and so on.

Not all items of an environment are part of the world. A noxious element — say, an increase in ultraviolet radiation — is a significant environmental factor and may cause skin cancer. But it is unknown to the patient and not part of his world. But the signs unicorn and boogerman may be very much a part of a person’s world and yet have no known counterpart in the Cosmos.

The Strange World of the Triadic Creature

Note some odd things about the self’s world. One is that it is not the same as the Cosmos-environment. The planet Venus may be a sign in the self’s world as the evening star or the morning star, but the galaxy M31 may not be present at all. Another oddity is that the self’s world contains things which have no counterpart in the Cosmos, such as centaurs, Big Foot, détente, World War I (which is past), World War III (which may not occur). Yet another odd thing is that the word apple which you utter is part of my world but it is not a singular thing like an individual apple. It is in fact understandable only insofar as it conforms to a rule for uttering apples. But the oddest thing of all is your status in my world. You — Betty, Dick — are like other items in my world — cats, dogs, and apples. But you have a unique property. You are also co-namer, co-discoverer, co-sustainer of my world — whether you are Kafka whom I read or Betty who reads this. Without you — Franz, Betty — I would have no world.

VII

The world of the sign-user is a world of signs.

The sign, as Saussure said, is a union of signifier (the sound-image of a word) and signified (the concept of an object, action, quality).

If you protest that your world does not consist of signs but rather of apples and trees and people and stars and walking and yellow, Saussure might reply that you don’t know any of these things but only a sensory input which your brain encodes as a percept, then abstracts as a concept which is in turn encoded and “known” under the auspices of language.

Take the sign apple. It consists both of the sound-image apple and also of a kind of general impression of apples you have known, embodying qualities of roundedness, redness, shine, texture, and sound of apple flesh at bite and pop of apple-skin against teeth, tart-tang taste, and so on.^*

One’s world is thus segmented by an almost unlimited number of signs, signifying not only here-and-now things and qualities and actions but also real and imaginary objects in the past and future. If I wish to catalogue my world, I could begin with a free association which could go on for months: desk, pencil, writing, itch, Saussure, Belgian, minority, war, the end of the world, Superman, Birmingham, flying, slithy toves, General Grant, the 1984 Olympics, Lilliput, Mozart, Don Giovanni, The Grateful Dead, backing and filling, say it isn’t so, dreaming …

The nearest thing to a recorded world of signs is the world of H. C. Earwicker in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

VIII

In a sign, the signifier and the signified are interpenetrated so that the signifier becomes, in a sense, transformed by the signified.

Saussure gave a formal analysis of the dual nature of the sign. It remained for Werner and Kaplan and other writers to describe the dynamic process by which the signifier and signified are interpenetrated and the former transformed.

If you do not believe that the word apple has been transformed by the percept apple, do this experiment: repeat the word apple aloud fifty times. Somewhere along the way, it will suddenly lose its magic transformation into appleness and like Cinderella at midnight become the drab little vocable it really is.

Further evidence of the interpenetration of signifier and signified is false onomatopoeia.

Words like boom, pow, tick-tock are said to be onomatopoetic. But what about these words: spatter, slice, brittle, limber, blue, yellow, high, low, rattle? Many people would say that there is some resemblance between these words and the things they signify. Blue sounds more like blue than yellow. Brittle sounds brittler than limber. But there is no such resemblance. Or rather, what resemblance there is, is far more remote and problematical than it appears. The resemblance occurs because the signifier and signified have been interpenetrated through use by the sign-user.

Slimy does not sound slimy to a German speaker.

IX

Signs undergo an evolution, or rather a devolution.^*

At first, the signifier serves as the discovery vehicle through which the signified is known, e.g., Helen Keller discovering water through water—or any two-year-old learning the name of a new object — Peirce’s example:

BOY: What is that?

FATHER: That is a balloon.

Note that when a child hears a new name, he will repeat it; his lips will move silently while he frowns and muses as he considers how this round inflated object can be fitted into this peculiar utterance, balloon.

Next, the signifier becomes transformed by the signified: the signifier balloon becomes informed by the distention, the stretched-rubber, light, uptending, squinch-sound-against-fingers signified.

Next, there is a hardening and closure of the signifier, so that in the end the signified becomes encased in a simulacrum like a mummy in a mummy case.

FIRST BIRD WATCHER: What is that?

SECOND BIRD WATCHER: That is only a sparrow.

A devaluation has occurred. The bird itself has disappeared into the sarcophagus of its sign. The unique living creature is assigned to its class of signs, a second-class mummy in the basement collection of mummy cases.

But a recovery is possible. The signified can be recovered from the ossified signifier, sparrow from sparrow.

A sparrow can be recovered under conditions of catastrophe.

The German soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front could see an ordinary butterfly as a creature of immense beauty and value in the trenches of the Somme.

A poet can wrench signifier out of context and exhibit it in all its queerness and splendor.^*

Cézanne recovered apples from the commonplace sign, apples.

Scientists recover the inexhaustible mystery of the signified from the mundane closed-off simulacrum of the world-sign.

One sees a line of ants crossing the sidewalk and sees it as—ants crossing the sidewalk. Fabre saw ants crossing the sidewalk and stopped to wonder where they came from, where they were going, how they knew how to get there, and why. Then, like von Frisch and his bees, he discovered there is no end to the mystery of ants.

X

Consciousness: Conscious from conscio, I know with.

Consciousness is that act of attention to something under the auspices of its sign, an act which is social in its origin. What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious.

It is no etymological accident that the prefix con- is part of the word, since the origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver.

It is also not an accident that grammatical usage requires that conscious and consciousness are generally followed by of. One is always conscious of something.

It is also the case that one is always conscious of something as something — its sign.

If a hunter is conscious of an animal in the field, it is part of the act of consciousness to place it — as a rabbit, fox, deer. The signing process tends to configure segments of the Cosmos under the auspices of a sign, often mistakenly. It is often possible to see a certain pattern of light and shadow as a rabbit, ears, and all. The hunter coming closer may say with surprise: “I thought it was a rabbit.”

Deer hunters, who are increasingly shooting each other more often than deer, invariably report: “But I saw a deer!”

XI

If the sign-user first enters into an Edenic state by virtue of his discovery and constitution of the world by signs, like Helen Keller or any normal two-year-old, and if aboriginal sign-use is a joyful concelebration of the world through an utterance in which the ancient environment of the Cosmos is transformed and beheld in common through the magic prism of the sign, it is also, semiotically speaking, an Eden which harbors its own semiotic snake in the grass.

The fateful flaw of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension — and that is the sign-user himself.

Semiotically, the self is literally unspeakable to itself. One cannot speak or hear a word which signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else, e.g., apple, Canada, 7-Up.

The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally.

You are Ralph to me and I am Walker to you, but you are not Ralph to you and I am not Walker to me. (Have you ever wondered why the Ralphs you know look as if they ought to be called Ralph and not Robert?)

For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.

You are not a sign in your world. Unlike the other signifiers in your world which form more or less stable units with the perceived world-things they signify, the signifier of yourself is mobile, freed up, and operating on a sliding semiotic scale from —α to α.

The signified of the self is semiotically loose and caroms around the Cosmos like an unguided missile.

From the moment the signifying self turned inward and became conscious of itself, trouble began as the sparks flew up.

No one knows how such a state of affairs came to pass, except through the wisdom (or folly) of religion and myth.^* But, semiotically speaking, it is possible to describe the consequences.

As a consequence of the unprecedented appearance of the triad in the Cosmos, there appeared for the first time in fifteen billion years (as far as we know) a creature which is ashamed of itself and which seeks cover in myriad disguises.

One semioticist defined the subject of his study as the only organism which tells lies.

The exile from Eden is, semiotically, the banishment of the self-conscious self from its own world of signs.

The banquet is still there, but it is Banquo in attendance.

The self perceives itself as naked. Every self is ashamed of itself.

The semiotic history of this creature thereafter could be written in terms of the successive attempts, both heroic and absurd, of the signifying creature to escape its nakedness and to find a permanent semiotic habiliment for itself — often by identifying itself with other creatures in its world.

Among Alaskan Indians, this practice is called totemism. In the Western world, it is called role-modeling.

The question must arise: What is the nature of the catastrophe of the self? Is the catastrophe nothing more or less than the breakthrough itself, the sudden emergence of the triadic organism into a dyadic world? And is the predicament of the self the price of naming and knowing? Or is the catastrophe a subsequent event, a bad move in the exercise of its freedom by the sign-user? Is it a turning from the concelebration of the world to a solitary absorption with self?

It is fruitful to speculate on the possible nature of other intelligences (ETIs) in the Cosmos, if they exist.

Presumably, they too have achieved the triadic breakthrough. Might they not have achieved the world of signs without succumbing to the terrible penalty? Might there not exist preternatural intelligences who do not necessarily share the shadow-life of the earth-self?

Much of current speculation about the nature of ETIs— what level of technology have you achieved? etc. — is misguided. The first question an earthling should ask of an ETI is not: What is the level of your science? but rather: Did it also happen to you? Do you have a self? If so, how do you handle it? Did you suffer a catastrophe?

XII

As soon as the self becomes self-conscious — that is, aware of its own unique unformulability in its world of signs — from that moment forward, it cannot escape the predicament of its placement in the world.

An organism exists in its environment in only one mode, that of an open system responding to those segments of its environment to which it is genetically programmed to respond or to which it has learned to respond.

But a self must be placed in a world. It cannot not be placed. If it chooses by default not to be placed, then its placement is that of not choosing to be placed.

Some Traditional Modes of Self-Placement:

(a) Totemistic.

The self, here drawn as a dotted circle because it is problematical to itself, finds its identity in one or another of the resplendent signs of its world, especially those possessed of those qualities most admired by the self: animals, trees, clouds, thunder, sky, falcon.

QUESTION: What are you?

ALEUT INDIAN: I am bear.

QUESTION: What are you?

MOVIE ACTRESS: I’m a Leo.

(b) Eastern Pantheistic. The self is identified with God, the God which is everywhere in the world, including one’s self, yet behind the illusory appearances of world-signs. Therefore, God is to be found in the true depths of the self.

Both the world and the self are problematical. The self becomes itself by identifying with God, who is found both in one’s self and behind the maya of the world.

Who are you?

I am Atman, which is to say God in myself, but also Brahman, the God of the Cosmos.

(c) Theistic-historical (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). The self becomes itself by recognizing God as a spirit, creator of the Cosmos and therefore of one’s self as a creature, a wounded creature but a creature nonetheless, who shares with a community of like creatures the belief that God transcends the entire Cosmos and has actually entered human history — or will enter it — in order to redeem man from the catastrophe which has overtaken his self.

XIII

In a post-religious technological society, these traditional resources of the self are no longer available, leaving in general only the two options: self conceived as immanent, consumer of the techniques, goods, and services of society; or as transcendent, a member of the transcending community of science and art.

(a) Self as Immanent. The self sees itself as an immanent being in the world, existing in a mode of being often conceived on the model of organism-in-an-environment as a consequence of the powerful credentials of science and technology.

Such immanence is a continuum. At one end: the compliant role-player and consumer and holder of a meaningless job, the anonymous “one”—German man—in a mass society, whether a backfence gossip^* or an Archie Bunker beer-drinking TV-watcher.

At the other end: the “autonomous self,” who is savvy to all the techniques of society and appropriates them according to his or her discriminating tastes, whether it be learning “parenting skills,” consciousness-raising, consumer advocacy, political activism liberal or conservative, saving whales, TM, TA, ACLU, New Right, square-dancing, creative cooking, moving out to country, moving back to central city, etc.

The self is still problematical to itself, but it solves its predicament of placement vis-à-vis the world either by a passive consumership or by a discriminating transaction with the world and with informed interactions with other selves.

(b) Self as Transcendent. In a post-religious age, the only transcendence open to the self is self-transcendence,

The Immanent Self feeling somewhat Problematical and therefore staking everything on Interactions with other Selves and with the WorldInteractions with other selves: more or less successful; that is, at one pole, exploitative, manipulative, etc.; at other pole, caring, creative, imaginative, venturesome, etc.Interaction with world: more or less successful; that is, at one pole, passive consumership of TV, food, drugs, etc.; at other pole, discriminating consumership of do-it-yourself hobbies, participatory sports, gourmet cooking, off-beaten-track travel to Katmandu, etc.

that is, the transcending of the world by the self. The available modes of transcendence in such an age are science and art.

(i) Transcendence by Science. The scientist is the prince and sovereign of the age. His transcendence of the world is genuine. That is to say, he stands in a posture of objectivity over against the world, a world which he sees as a series of specimens or exemplars, and interactions, energy exchanges, secondary causes — in a word: dyadic events. (See diagram 14

The problematical self, like the young Einstein who couldn’t stand the dreariness of everyday life, discovers science and transcends the world. In orbit, he enters an elect community of other scientists, however small, to whom he can address sentences about the world.

The scientist, though transcendent and “in orbit” around the ordinary world, has minimal problems with reentry. That is to say, he is able to maintain a more or less stable orbit so that in ordinary intercourse he is generally seen as no more than “absentminded,” like Einstein, who thought for twenty years about his general theory, and von Frisch, who pondered bee communication for forty years.

Reentry problems become noticeable in less inspired scientists. The divorced wife of an astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory accused her husband of “angelism-bestialism.” He was so absorbed in his work, the search for the quasar with the greatest red shift, that when he came home to his pleasant subdivision house, he seemed to take his pleasure like a god descending from Olympus into the world of mortals, ate heartily, had frequent intercourse with his wife, watched TV, read Mickey Spillane, and said not a word to wife or children.

But at the peak periods of scientific transcendence, he, the scientist, becomes the secular saint of the age: Einstein is still referred to as a benign deity.

With the waning of transcendence, reentry problems increase. One manifestation, which always amazes laymen, is the jealousy and lack of scruple of scientists. Their anxiety to receive credit often seems more appropriate to used-car salesmen than to a transcending community.

Other examples of reentry failures: the general fatuity of scientists in political matters, their naïveté and credulity before tricksters. The magician Randi says that scientists are easier to fool — e.g., by Uri Geller — than are children.

More distressing consequences occur when the zeal and excitement of a scientific community runs counter to the interests of the world community, e.g., when scientists at Los Alamos did not oppose the bomb drop over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The joys of science and the joys of life as a human are not necessarily convergent. As Freeman Dyson put it, the “sin” of the scientists at Los Alamos was not that they made the bomb but that they enjoyed it so much.

How the Problematical Self can Escape its Predicament by ScienceAB = The problematical self, finding itself in a disappointing world and in all manner of difficult relationships, escapes by joining the scientific community, either by becoming a scientist or by understanding science.BC = The transcending community of scientists.CD = From the perspective of BC, the world can now be seen by A triumphantly as a dyadic system.

(ii) Decayed Orbits of Transcendence. The layman can in some cases participate in the transcendent community of science, but often at a price.

Consider a familiar example, the lay Freudian, that is, the avid reader and disciple of Freud who does, to a degree, share in the excitement of Freud’s insights but whose excitement all too often derives not from a shared discovery but from the sense of election to an elite from which vantage point one can play a one-upmanship game with ordinary folk: “What you say is not really what you mean. What you really mean, whether you know it or not, is—”

Their impoverishment is to be located in both an inflation of theory and a devaluation of the world theorized about. They out-Freud Freud without the scruples of Freud.

Yet they, the lay scientists, those who perceive themselves in the community of scientists and at some remove from the ordinary world, may be better off than those who live immanent lives, beneficiaries of science and technology, but with only a glimmering of the scientists, the glimmering that there are scientists and that “they” know about every sector of the world, including one’s very self. “They” not only know about the Cosmos, they know about me, my aches and pains, my brain functions, even my neuroses. A remarkable feature of the secondhand knowledge of scientific transcendence is the attribution of omniscience to “them.” “They” know.

The Decayed Orbit of the Lay Freudianor, How it is one thing to be Freud and to spend a life inducing a remarkable theory from the endlessly complex manifold of human phenomena and, How it is something else to read some Freud, master a few principles, return to the ordinary world and human relationships with the sense that you alone are privy to the hidden mechanisms of these relationships. Such reentries can be disastrous for both parties, Freudian and non-Freudian.

They are expected to know. Example: a recent Donahue Show in which paraplegics discussed their troubles. The message: rage at doctors. “They” could cure us if they wanted to, took the time, did their research. The powers attributed to them, the scientists — powers which they, the scientists, never claimed — are as magical as those of the old gods.

The layman, dazzled by the extraordinary accomplishments of science and technology, nevertheless gives away too much to science. Where the genuine scientist is generally amazed at the meagerness of knowledge in his own field, the layman is apt to assign omniscience as what he takes to be a property of scientific transcendence.

(iii) Transcendence by Art. If the scientist is the prince of the post-religious age, lord and sovereign of the Cosmos itself through his transcendence of it, the artist is the suffering servant of the age, who, through his own transcendence and his naming of the predicaments of the self, becomes rescuer and savior not merely to his fellow artists but to his fellow sufferers. Like the scientists, he transcends in his use of signs. Unlike the scientists, he speaks not merely to a small community of fellow artists but to the world of men who understand him.

It is no accident that, for the past hundred years or so, the artist (poet, novelist, painter, dramatist) has registered a dissent from the modern proposition that, with the advance of science and technology, man’s lot will improve in direct proportion. The alienation of the artist puzzles many, both the scientists and technologists who are happy and busy and their lay beneficiaries who are happy in the immanence of consumption. Most Danes and Japanese don’t appear to be alienated — though there are those who say that their obliviousness of their own immanence is the worst alienation of all. To most of the happy von Frisches and Rutherfords and to the contented denizens of Silicon Valley, the dark views of modern life held by most serious novelists since Tolstoy, most poets since Tennyson, most painters since Millet, most dramatists since Schiller, have seemed neurotic indulgences. It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal. Indeed, as this dreadful century wears on, even the most immanent Dane and the most proficient IBM computer-engineer is beginning to sense that all is not well, that the self can be as desperately stranded in the transcendence of theory as in the immanence of consumption.

The artist, caught in the predicament of the self, is at once more vulnerable to the predicament of self than the nonartist and at the same time privileged to escape it by the transcendence of his art. He serves others who share his predicament by naming it.

The difference between Einstein and Kafka, both sons of middle-class middle-European families, both of whom found life in the ordinary world intolerably dreary:

Einstein escaped the world by science, that is, by transcending not only the world but the Cosmos itself.

Kafka also escaped his predicament — occasionally — not by science but by art, that is, by seeing and naming what had heretofore been unspeakable, the predicament of the self in the modern world.

The salvation of art derives in the best of modern times from a celebration of the triumph of the autonomous self — as in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — and in the worst of times from naming the unspeakable: the strange and feckless movements of the self trying to escape itself.

Exhilaration comes from naming the unnameable and hearing it named.

If Kafka’s Metamorphosis is presently a more accurate account of the self than Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, it is the more exhilarating for being so.

The naming of the predicament of the self by art is its reversal. Hence the salvific effect of art. Through art, the predicament of self becomes not only speakable but laughable. Helen Keller and any two-year-old and Kafka’s friends laughed when the unnameable was named. Kafka and his friends laughed when he read his stories to them.

The community of art is not the elect community of science but the community of the artist and all who share his predicament and who can understand his signs.

The impoverishment? It comes from the transience of the salvation of art, both for the maker of the sign (the artist) and for the receiver of the sign.

The self in its predicament is exhilarated in both the making and the receiving of a sign — for a while.

After a while, both the artist and the self which receives the sign are back in the same fix or worse — because both have had a taste of transcendence and community.

If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.

Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.

In fact, a catalogue of the spectacular reentries and flameouts of the artist is nothing other than a pathology of the self in the twentieth century, much as the fits and frenzies of Saint Vitus’s Dance were signs of the ills of an earlier age.

What account, then, can a semiotic give of the paradoxical impoverishments and enrichments of the self in the present age?

Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor?

The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment.

The organism is needy or not needy accordingly as needs are satisfied or not satisfied by its environment.

The self in a world is rich or poor accordingly as it succeeds in identifying its otherwise unspeakable self, e.g., mythically, by identifying itself with a world-sign, such as a totem; religiously, by identifying itself as a creature of God.

But totemism doesn’t work in a scientific age because no one believes, no matter how hard he tries, that he can “become” a tiger or a parakeet. Cf. the depression of a Princeton tiger or Yale bulldog, one hour after the game.

In a post-religious age, the only recourses of the self are self as transcendent and self as immanent.

The impoverishment of the immanent self derives from a perceived loss of sovereignty to “them,” the transcending scientists and experts of society. As a consequence, the self sees its only recourse as an endless round of work, diversion, and consumption of goods and services. Failing this and having some inkling of its plight, it sees no way out because it has come to see itself as an organism in an environment and so can’t understand why it feels so bad in the best of all possible environments — say, a good family and a good home in a good neighborhood in East Orange on a fine Wednesday afternoon — and so finds itself secretly relishing bad news, assassinations, plane crashes, and the misfortunes of neighbors, and even comes secretly to hope for catastrophe, earthquake, hurricane, wars, apocalypse — anything to break out of the iron grip of immanence.

Enrichment in such an age appears either as enrichment within immanence, i.e., the discriminating consumption of the goods and services of society, such as courses in personality enrichment, creative play, and self-growth through group interaction, etc. — or through the prime joys of the age, self-transcendence through science and art.

The pleasure of such transcendence derives not from the recovery of self but from the loss of self. Scientific and artistic transcendence is a partial recovery of Eden, the semiotic Eden, when the self explored the world through signs before falling into self-consciousness. Von Frisch with his bees, the Lascaux painter with his bison were as happy as Adam naming his animals.

I say “partial recovery of Eden” because even the best scientist and artist must reenter the world he has transcended and there’s the rub: the spectacular miseries of reentry — especially when the transcendence is so exalted as to be not merely Adam-like but godlike.

It is difficult for gods to walk the earth without taking the forms of beasts.

It is even more difficult for one god to get along with another god. Freud not only could not get along with the Jewish God but frothed and fell out when rivaled by a fellow transcender like Carl Jung.

Two gods in the Cosmos is one too many.

Thus, transcendence, like immanence, has its own scale of enrichment and impoverishment.

Different Reentry Problems of Artist and Art-Receiver: Mainly QuantitativeIt is one thing to write The Sound and the Fury, to achieve the artistic transcendence of discerning meaning in the madness of the twentieth century, then to finish it, then to find oneself at Reed’s drugstore the next morning. A major problem of reentry, not solved but anaesthetized by alcohol.It is something else to listen to a superb performance of Mozart’s Twenty-first Piano Concerto, to come to the end of it, to walk out into Columbus Circle afterwards. At best, a moderately sustained exaltation; at worst, a mild letdown.

Question: In the light of the above description of the semiotic predicament of the self — its unspeakableness in a world of signs — and in the light of the need of the self to become a self and, under the exigency of truth, to become its own self, that and no other — and in the light of the forces of impoverishment and enrichment as well as self-deception, which of the following self-identities would strike you as being (1) the most impoverished, (2) the most enriched?

(a) An Archie Bunker type who lives in Queens

(b) A mathematical physicist working as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton

(c) An Alabama Baptist

(d) A New York novelist removed to a pre-revolutionary Connecticut farmhouse where he is living with his fifth wife

(e) A Japanese Zen master recently removed from Kyoto to La Jolla

(f) An American Zen postulant recently removed from Chicago to Kyoto

(g) A Dublin Catholic

(h) A Belfast Protestant

(i) A housewife who watches five hours of soap opera a day

(j) A housewife who attends a well-run consciousness-raising group

(k) A member of the Tasaday tribe in the Philippines before its discovery by the white man

(l) A Virginia Episcopalian

(m) An Orthodox Jew

(n) An unbelieving Ethical Culture Jew

(o) A Southern poet who has sex with his students

(p) A homosexual poet who calls himself a “flaming fag”

(q) A homosexual accountant who practices in the closet

(r) A four-year-old child

(s) A seven-year-old child

(t) A twelve-year-old child

(u) An Atlanta junior executive who fancies he looks like Tom Selleck, dresses Western, and frequents singles bars

(v) A housewife who becomes fed up, walks out, and commits herself totally to NOW

(w) A housewife who sticks out a bad marriage

(x) A New Rochelle commuter who quits the rat race, buys a ketch, and sails for the Leeward Islands

(y) A New York woman novelist who writes dirty books but is quite conventional in her behavior

(z) A Southern woman novelist who writes conventional novels of manners and who fornicates at every opportunity

(aa) A Texan

(bb) A KGB apparatchik

(cc) A white planter in Mississippi

(dd) A black sharecropper in Mississippi

(ee) A Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus

(ff) None of the above, for reason of the fact that, whatever the impoverishing and enriching forces, it is impossible so to categorize an individual self — except possibly (r), and (bb), but even there, one cannot be sure. As anyone knows, a person chosen from any of the above classes may turn out against all expectations to be either a total loss as a person or that most remarkable of phenomena, an intact human self

(CHECK ONE OR MORE)

^*Semiotics might be defined broadly as the science which deals with signs and the use of them by creatures. Here it will be read more narrowly as the human use of signs. Other writers include animal communication by signals, a discipline which Sebeok calls zoo-semiotics. But even the narrow use may be too broad. There is this perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing.

At best a loose and inchoate discipline, semiotics is presently in such disarray that all sorts of people call themselves semioticists and come at the subject from six different directions. Accordingly, it seems advisable to define one’s terms — there is not even agreement about what the word sign means — and to identify one’s friends and foes.

The friends in this case, or at least the writers to whom I am most indebted, are: Ernst Cassirer, for his vast study of the manifold ways in which man uses the symbol, in language, myth, and art, as his primary means of articulating reality; Charles S. Peirce, founder of the modern discipline of semiotics and the first to distinguish clearly between the “dyadic” behavior of stimulus-response sequences and the “triadic” character of symbol-use; Ferdinand de Saussure, another founding father of semiotics, for his fruitful analysis of

the human sign as the union of the signifier (signifiant) and the signified (signifié); Hans Werner, who systematically explored the process in which the signified is articulated within the form of the signifier; Susanne K. Langer, who, from the posture of behavioral science, clearly set forth the qualitative difference between animal’s use of signals and man’s use of symbols.

^*I am grateful for the important distinction, clearer in the German language and perhaps for this reason first arrived at by German thinkers, between Well and Umwelt, or, roughly, world and environment, e.g., von Uexkull’s Unwelt as, roughly, the significant environment within which an organism lives, and Heidegger’s Welt, the “world” into which the Dasein or self finds itself “thrown”; also, Eccles’ “World 3,” the public domain of signs and language within which man — uniquely, according to Eccles — lives.

The foes? If there are foes, it is not because they have not made valuable contributions in their own disciplines, but because in this particular context, that of a semiotic of the self, they are either of no use or else hostile by their own declaration.

The first is the honorable tradition of American behaviorism, once so influential, and latterday behaviorist semioticists like Charles Morris — honorable because of their rigorous attempt as good scientists to deal only with observables and so to bypass the ancient pitfalls of mind, soul, consciousness, and self which have bogged down psychologists for centuries. I start from the same place, looking at signs and the creatures which use them.

My difficulty with the behaviorists is that they rule out mind, self, and consciousness as inaccessible either on the doctrinal grounds that they do not exist or on methodological grounds that they are beyond the reach of behavioral science.

It is not necessarily so. The value of Charles Peirce and social psychologists like George Mead is that they underwrite the reality of the self without getting trapped in the isolated autonomous consciousness of Descartes and Chomsky. They do this by showing that the self becomes itself only through a transaction of signs with other selves — and does so, moreover, without succumbing to the mindless mechanism of the behaviorists.

The other semiotic foe is French structuralism — some of its proponents, at least — and its whimsical stepchild “deconstruction.” The structuralists, in high fashion — at least until recently — seek to apply the methods of structural linguistics to such diverse matters as literature, myth, fashion, even cooking. Whatever the virtues of structuralism as a method of linguistics, ethnology, and criticism, it is the self-proclaimed foe, on what seem to be ideological grounds, of the very concept of the human subject. Lévi-Strauss boasts of the dehumanization which his structuralism implies. Michel Foucault argues that with the coming of semiotics the concept of the self has vanished from our new view of reality.

But this may not be the case.

I do not feel obliged to speak of the deconstructionists.

Finally, a terminological confusion needs to be straightened out. There is an almost intractable confusion about the terms sign and symbol. We may know what we mean when we say there is a difference between my dog’s understanding of the word ball—to go and look for it — and your understanding of the same utterance — you may say “Ball? What about it?”—but we need to agree on what words to use to express the difference. Some writers (e.g., Peirce and Langer) would call the former ball a sign and the latter ball a symbol. Others would call the former a signal, the latter a sign. Though I have followed Peirce’s usage in earlier writings, I propose here to use the word signal for the former and, following Saussure, the word sign for the latter, and to avoid symbol as much as possible. This usage seems advisable for two reasons. One is that symbol for most people seems to connote something emblematic like the flag or the cross and not the radical sense in which the common nouns of language are understood as symbols by Peirce, Cassirer, and Langer. The other reason is that the latter usage will be easier to reconcile with Saussure’s valuable dissection of the sign into its two elements, signifier (signifiant) and signified (signifié).

^*Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (New York: Airmont Publishing Co., 1965), p. 187.

^†New Directions in the Study of Language, ed. Eric H. Lenneberg (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1964), p. 131.

^*Philip E. L. Smith in Cro-Magnon Man, ed. by Tom Prideaux (New York: Time-Life Books, 1973), p. 7.

^*I will not try to decide here whether what the word apple conjures up in your mind, its signifié, is a percept or a concept, because it is somewhere in between, A percept refers to an individual apple. A concept is an abstraction from all apples, a definition of apple. But the signifié of apple is both and nejther. What comes to mind when I hear apple, what in fact the word articulates within itself, is neither an individual apple nor a definition of apple but a quality of appleness, such as John Cheever intended in his title, World of Apples. Perhaps it should be called a “concrete concept” or an “abstract percept,” or what Gerard Manley Hopkins called inscape.

Let us take note of a notorious philosophical farrago without attempting to resolve it: Why is it that when we look at an apple, we believe we are looking at an apple out there, and not at sensory impression, a picture, in our brain? This puzzle can hardly be addressed here, since it is nothing less than the main source of the troubles which have dogged solipsist philosophers from Descartes and Locke to the present day. My own conviction is that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language — you have to point to an apple and name it for me before I know there is such a thing — and the existence of a world of apples outside ourselves.

^*The semioticist most acutely aware of this devolution of the sign and its renewal through the “defamiliarization” of art is the Russian formalist, Victor Schklovsky.

^*Does ontogenesis shed any light here?

The two-year-old comes bursting into the world of signs like a child on Christmas morning. There are goodies everywhere. For him, signifying the signified is like unwrapping a gift.

What about a four-year-old? By now he should be a sovereign and native resident of his world, concelebrant with his family, at home in Eden. Listen to Gesell and his colleagues describe him: “The typical 4-year-old.. tends to be rather a joy. His enthusiasm, his exuberance, his willingness to go more than halfway to meet others in a spirit of fun are all extremely refreshing… He is basically highly positive, enthusiastic, appreciative. This makes him fun to be with, an engaging, amusing, ever-challenging friend. You have to be on your toes to keep up with spirited, fanciful FOUR, but at least you have an even chance of success… With other children, things as a rule go rather well. FOURS enjoy each other; they appreciate the challenge that other children offer. This is an age at which children interest and admire each other most…” [Louise Bates Ames et al., The Gesell Institute’s Child from One to Six (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).]

The four-year-old is a concelebrant of the world and even of his own peers.

The seven-year-old? Something has happened in the interval.

“More aware of and withdrawn into self… Seems to be in ‘another world'… Self-conscious about own body. Sensitive about exposing body. Does not like to be touched. Modest about toileting … Protects self by withdrawal. May be unwilling to expose knowledge, for fear of being laughed at or criticized.. Apt to expect too much of self.” [Arnold Gesell and Frances ilg. The Child from Five to Ten (New York: Harper and Row, 1946).]

^*Here might be listed all the “existentialia” of Heidegger, the inauthentic ways in which the Dasein, or self, inserts itself into its world, e.g., Gerede, talk, gossip; Neugíer, curiosity.