Humility depends on recognizing what is relative between us and God. God is All; relative to the All, we are nothing, purely contingent, existing solely by God's will. The more we recognize that God is All and that we are nothing, the more humble we shall be.
We must recall that the deeper a canyon is, the taller are the walls of that canyon; hence height and depth are two sides of the same coin, relative to where one stands. If one stands at the top of a canyon, the canyon is deep; if one stands at the bottom of the canyon, its cliffs are tall.
In our relation with God, we stand at the bottom of a canyon. We shall recognize that as we descend deeper and deeper through humility, God becomes more exalted through faith. But we also know through faith that God does not abandon us in our wretchedness but desires to save us. Hence the deeper we go, the more exalted God becomes, but also the more intimate and immanent God becomes through charity. The three work together simultaneously, enhancing each other. Humility, faith, hope, charity, humility, faith, etc.
Showing posts with label relative being. Show all posts
Showing posts with label relative being. Show all posts
Monday, January 12, 2015
Monday, December 29, 2014
Alasdair MacIntyre on the Fiction of Human Rights
[81] I take it that both the utilitarianism of the middle and late nineteenth century and the analytical moral philosophy of the middle and late twentieth century are alike unsuccessful attempts to rescue the autonomous moral agent from the predicament in which the failure of the Enlightenment project of providing him with a secular, [82] rational justification for his moral allegiances had left him. I have already characterized that predicament as one in which the price paid for liberation from what appeared to be the external authority of traditional morality was the loss of any authoritative content from the would-be moral utterances of the newly autonomous agent. Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology or hierarchical authority; but why should anyone else now listen to him? It was and is to this question that both utilitarianism and analytical moral philosophy must be understood as attempting to give cogent answers; and if my argument is correct, it is precisely this question which both fail to answer cogently. Nonetheless almost everyone, philosopher and non-philosopher alike, continues to speak and write as if one of these projects had succeeded. And hence derives one of the features of contemporary moral discourse which I noticed at the outset, the gap between the meaning of moral expressions and the ways in which they are put to use. For the meaning is and remains such as would have been warranted only if at least one of the philosophical projects had been successful; but the use, the emotivist use, is precisely what one would expect if the philosophical projects had all failed.
Contemporary moral experience as a consequence has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also becomes engaged by modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us to do so except by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case. The incoherence of our attitudes and our experience arises from the incoherent conceptual scheme which we have inherited.
Once we have understood this it is possible to understand also the key place that three other concepts have in the distinctively modern moral scheme, that of rights, that of protest, and that of unmasking. By 'rights' I do not mean those rights conferred by positive law or custom on specified classes of persons; I mean those rights which are alleged to belong to human beings as such and which are cited as a person for holding that people ought not to be interfered with in their pursuit [83] of life, liberty and happiness. They are the rights which were spoken of in the eighteenth century as natural rights or as the rights of man. Characteristically in that century they were defined negatively, precisely as rights not to be interfered with. But sometimes in that century and much more often in our own positive rights—rights to due process, to education or to employment are examples—are added to the list. The expression 'human rights' is now commoner than either of the eighteenth-century expressions. But whether negative or positive and however named they are supposed to attach equally to all individuals, whatever their sex, race, religion, talents or deserts, and to provide a ground for a variety of particular moral stances.
It would of course be a little odd that there should be such rights attaching to human beings simply qua human beings in light of the fact, which I alluded to in my discussion of Gewirth's argument, that there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression 'a right' until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let alone in Old English, or in Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth century. From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns.
The best reason for asserting so bluntly that there are no such rights is indeed of precisely the same type as the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no witches and the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no unicorns: every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed. [There is also a connection here to that form of relative being within the realm of ens rationis, crucial to the possibility of confusing reality with fiction and vice versa, but MacIntyre doesn't bring this up.] The eighteenth-century philosophical defenders of natural rights sometimes suggest that the assertions which state that men possess them are self-evident truths; but we know that there are no self-evident truths. Twentieth-century moral philosophers have sometimes appealed to their and our intuitions; but one of the things that we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy is that the introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument. In the United Nations declaration on human rights of 1949 what has since become [84] the normal UN practice of not giving good reasons for any assertions whatsoever is followed with great rigor. And the latest defender of such rights, Ronald Dworkin (Taking Rights Seriously, 1976) concedes that the existence of such rights cannot be demonstrated, but remarks on this point simply that it does not follow from the fact that a statement cannot be demonstrated that it is not true (p. 81). Which is true, but could equally be used to defend claims about unicorns and witches.
Natural or human rights then are fictions—just as is utility—but fictions with highly specific properties.
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Source: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2007), 81–84.
Contemporary moral experience as a consequence has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also becomes engaged by modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us to do so except by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case. The incoherence of our attitudes and our experience arises from the incoherent conceptual scheme which we have inherited.
Once we have understood this it is possible to understand also the key place that three other concepts have in the distinctively modern moral scheme, that of rights, that of protest, and that of unmasking. By 'rights' I do not mean those rights conferred by positive law or custom on specified classes of persons; I mean those rights which are alleged to belong to human beings as such and which are cited as a person for holding that people ought not to be interfered with in their pursuit [83] of life, liberty and happiness. They are the rights which were spoken of in the eighteenth century as natural rights or as the rights of man. Characteristically in that century they were defined negatively, precisely as rights not to be interfered with. But sometimes in that century and much more often in our own positive rights—rights to due process, to education or to employment are examples—are added to the list. The expression 'human rights' is now commoner than either of the eighteenth-century expressions. But whether negative or positive and however named they are supposed to attach equally to all individuals, whatever their sex, race, religion, talents or deserts, and to provide a ground for a variety of particular moral stances.
It would of course be a little odd that there should be such rights attaching to human beings simply qua human beings in light of the fact, which I alluded to in my discussion of Gewirth's argument, that there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression 'a right' until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let alone in Old English, or in Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth century. From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns.
The best reason for asserting so bluntly that there are no such rights is indeed of precisely the same type as the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no witches and the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no unicorns: every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed. [There is also a connection here to that form of relative being within the realm of ens rationis, crucial to the possibility of confusing reality with fiction and vice versa, but MacIntyre doesn't bring this up.] The eighteenth-century philosophical defenders of natural rights sometimes suggest that the assertions which state that men possess them are self-evident truths; but we know that there are no self-evident truths. Twentieth-century moral philosophers have sometimes appealed to their and our intuitions; but one of the things that we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy is that the introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument. In the United Nations declaration on human rights of 1949 what has since become [84] the normal UN practice of not giving good reasons for any assertions whatsoever is followed with great rigor. And the latest defender of such rights, Ronald Dworkin (Taking Rights Seriously, 1976) concedes that the existence of such rights cannot be demonstrated, but remarks on this point simply that it does not follow from the fact that a statement cannot be demonstrated that it is not true (p. 81). Which is true, but could equally be used to defend claims about unicorns and witches.
Natural or human rights then are fictions—just as is utility—but fictions with highly specific properties.
---
Source: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2007), 81–84.
Monday, November 3, 2014
Circumstance as sign and opportunity
We often view circumstances in a fatalistic way. Circumstances "happen." The famous bumper sticker comes to mind. Circumstances are interpreted as beyond our control, or otherwise they are placed in an evaluative framework of what is in our control and not.
Maybe it is not so. Maybe circumstances are very deliberate processes, deliberate but not deterministic. Maybe circumstances are the expressions of conscious processes, meeting, connecting, bouncing off of and bumping into each other.
If we take it as true that all things are governed by God's Providence, then a thread of intelligibility, of love, of wisdom, runs through all things. All things have a conscious direction even if asymmetrical. Perhaps intelligibility doesn't equate with symmetry and balance, but perhaps reality as intelligible is intelligible precisely as a mixture of symmetry and asymmetry, of order and chaos, of articulate and ineffable.
Maybe, then, circumstances even those circumstances that are not apparently caused by human consciousness are nevertheless not things we can try to control or fall under the control of but rather the sort of possible encounter that reality proposes to us here and now.
I am sick. In the common view of circumstance, my sickness is not under my control, but I do everything I can to alleviate it. I complain of its grasp on my life, my livelihood. Perhaps sickness is something else; perhaps it is a link in a chain of possibility, connection both to God, to myself, to others, to the underlying intelligibility of the universe, an opportunity for transcending myself here and now.
I am late. Therefore I try to speed to work. Maybe there is something else going on here; maybe the circumstance is a symptom, a sign.
If circumstances are signs instead of chance events, then I can dialogue with circumstance and draw it up into a greater conversation, the conversation of my life.
Maybe it is not so. Maybe circumstances are very deliberate processes, deliberate but not deterministic. Maybe circumstances are the expressions of conscious processes, meeting, connecting, bouncing off of and bumping into each other.
If we take it as true that all things are governed by God's Providence, then a thread of intelligibility, of love, of wisdom, runs through all things. All things have a conscious direction even if asymmetrical. Perhaps intelligibility doesn't equate with symmetry and balance, but perhaps reality as intelligible is intelligible precisely as a mixture of symmetry and asymmetry, of order and chaos, of articulate and ineffable.
Maybe, then, circumstances even those circumstances that are not apparently caused by human consciousness are nevertheless not things we can try to control or fall under the control of but rather the sort of possible encounter that reality proposes to us here and now.
I am sick. In the common view of circumstance, my sickness is not under my control, but I do everything I can to alleviate it. I complain of its grasp on my life, my livelihood. Perhaps sickness is something else; perhaps it is a link in a chain of possibility, connection both to God, to myself, to others, to the underlying intelligibility of the universe, an opportunity for transcending myself here and now.
I am late. Therefore I try to speed to work. Maybe there is something else going on here; maybe the circumstance is a symptom, a sign.
If circumstances are signs instead of chance events, then I can dialogue with circumstance and draw it up into a greater conversation, the conversation of my life.
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
The Importance of Humility in Relation to God
[384] Saint Angela of Foligno writes:
The more the soul is afflicted, stripped, and deeply humiliated, the more it acquires, with purity, an aptitude for the heights. The elevation of which it becomes capable is measured by the depth of the abyss in which it has its roots and foundations (Cf. Sainte Angèle de Foligno; French trans. by Hello, ch. xix).[385] [...] Ruysbroeck remarks also that humility does not necessarily have its source in sin:
Our sins...have become for us sources of humility and of love. But it is important to be mindful of a source of humility much higher than this. The Virgin Mary, conceived without sin, has a humility more sublime than the Magdalen's. The latter was pardoned; the former was without spot. But that absolute immunity, more sublime than any pardon, causes a higher thanksgiving to mount from earth to heaven than does the conversion of Mary Magdalen (Cf. Ruysbroeck, French trans. by Hello, Bk. III, "L'Humilité").Saint Therese of the Child Jesus counts on this attractiveness of humility and of poverty to make the divine mercy descend to her soul. The love of poverty becomes the fundamental quality of her way of spiritual childhood. In a letter to her sister Marie [she] writes:
O my dearest Sister, please understand your little sister, understand that to love Jesus, to be His victim of love, the weaker one is, without desires or virtues, the more apt one is for the operations of that consuming and transforming Love. (Letter to Marie, Sept. 17, 1896; Collected Letters, p. 289) [...][387] Everywhere that [humility] is found, there God is. And everywhere that God is here below, He clothes Himself, as it were, with a garment that conceals His Presence from the proud and reveals it to the simple and the little ones. When Jesus came to this world, it was as an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes. That was the sign given to the shepherds [....] The sign of humility always marks the Divine here below. [...]
[388] "Height and depth bring forth one another," declares Saint Angela of Foligno.
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Source: Fr. Marie-Eugène, I Want to See God, trans. by M. Verda Clare (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1953), 384–388.
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Saint Angela of Foligno reveals that humility is fundamentally about relation. Height and depth are relative to where one stands. If one is at the bottom of a canyon, the canyon walls seem high, but from the top of the canyon, its depths are far below. Humility links the Infinite height of God with our finite miserableness. This is why the foundation of the spiritual life is humility: the depths of humility draw down the heights of Divine Mercy and to the precise proportion of one to the other. Further, when God wishes to raise us to the mystical heights, He no longer allows us to develop our humility based on our own efforts but fills us with transcendent light that so thoroughly reveals our littleness beyond any effort of our own, we cannot but simultaneously be filled with the mercy that this wretchedness calls out to.
Grace, like humility, establishes a relation and exists only in relation of the Creator to the creature. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis explains this unusual relationship when he comments on the verse from St. Matthew, "Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: That you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven" (5:44-45):
[238] "That you may become": the subjunctive mood here ought to instill fear and trembling. We will not become children of God until we put on his mind. It would be a plain evasion to qualify the verb here by translating 'we will not fully be' or something of the sort. One either is a child of someone or is not, just as a woman cannot be "partially pregnant". But the text contains rich seeds of hope. The Lord tells us to love our enemies "that we may become the children of our Father in heaven". A strange expression, since it implies that God can be our Father without our being his children. And so it is. This is a one-way parent-child relationship without analogy, since it refers to the absolute source of our existence on both the natural and the supernatural planes.
Spiritually we cannot be God's children without the interior revolution the Lord is here inviting us to; but, in seeking such an identity, we are not venturing out on a reckless illusion. God already is our Father, so that we will in some sense lack in being if we do not undertake to become his children by putting on his mind. Not only is this venture not something optional, something added as a decoration to the rest [239] of our already existing reality. It is, in fact, the only adventure worth giving one's entire substance to, because what is involved is nothing less than what we shall be and do, in our heart and in our soul and mind, for all eternity. (Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, vol. 1 [San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1996], 238–239)Hence while all being children of the Father at least as Creator, through grace we become children of the Father through adoption. Grace establishes a reciprocal relationship of love that previously could not exist. Likewise, humility reveals to us the truth of our situation relative to God: without God we are incapable of even existing, and all that we have is misery and nothingness, according to St. Teresa of Avila:
I was wondering once why Our Lord so dearly loved this virtue of humility; and all of a sudden—without, I believe, my having previously thought of it—the following reason came into my mind: that it is because God is Sovereign Truth and to be humble is to walk in truth, for it is absolutely true to say that we have no good thing in ourselves, but only misery and nothingness; and anyone who fails to understand this is walking in falsehood. He who best understands this is most pleasing to Sovereign Truth because he is walking in truth. (Interior Castle, VI Mansions, 10: Peers, II, 323)
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
John Deely's Introduction to the Importance of Relation
The following is a video of a very engaging talk that Dr. John Deely gave at the University of Oregon introducing the universality and importance of relation in our world, for the future of our understanding, and the development of philosophical thought.
Cautionary note: Dr. Deely is a bit intentionally provocative. Some of his examples and language are graphic and vulgar.
“Objective Reality and the Physical World: Relation as Key to Understanding Semiosis” — John Deely
Cautionary note: Dr. Deely is a bit intentionally provocative. Some of his examples and language are graphic and vulgar.
“Objective Reality and the Physical World: Relation as Key to Understanding Semiosis” — John Deely
Examples of Bio- and Anthroposemiosis
Here it will be enough to show how the ontological singularity unique to relation in the order of physical being provides the ground for the prior possibility of semiosis at the level of the experience of organisms, which is our main concern here, inasmuch as, as we have already seen, it is at the upper levels of biosemiosis that the basic concepts of semiotics have been fully established.
The common ground of biosemiosis lies in what used to be called "natural signs", but what is now more commonly divided, after Peirce, into indices, icons, and symbols (although of course not all icons or symbols are natural signs, either). A footprint in the sand is indexical of a person's passing, and of the direction of the passing, unless the footprints be the skillful work of a man passing east in such a way as to leave the impression of a man passing west, in which event the footprints remain indexically accurate to a degree but iconically misleading in another degree, and are in fact symbols of an exceptional skill.
Natural signs are essential to the survival of most if not all species of animals. They need to be taken for what they are, or, in the reverse case, mistaken for what they are intended to be mistaken for, if the animal in question is to secure its food. What happens in such a case? Precisely that the foundation for a physical relation is taken or mistaken for a corresponding objective relation, as a result of which food is provided or safety secured.
The relation of clouds to rain is a relation of cause and effect. When that relation has also been experienced, an interpretant becomes established. What was formerly a mere physical relation, a relation of secondness, acquires now, through the interpretant, a thirdness whereby that same relation functions also semiotically. Because the physical relationship as such need only be dyadic, whereas the semiotic relationship is necessarily triadic, there is the possibility of error, or misinterpretation. There is also the possibility of deception. The objective world wherein actual semiosis transpires is only occasionally the same and in large part different from the physical environment. But to the extent that it is the same, to the extent that it overlaps - and this is the extent to which every species depends for its survival on food, which is a considerable extent - that extent and that overlap result from the indifference of intersubjective being to the difference between what is objective and what is physical, as we have seen.
Thus, it is the being proper to relation that is also the being proper to signs, even though relations properly speaking need not be semiosic relations. Not all relations in the ontological sense pass through actual experience, but all relations in the ontological sense are indifferent to the order of physical existence, such that, once taken up into actual experience, they also take on an objective life relatively independent of physical being. It is in this way that they provide the raw material of biosemiosis. The actual being proper to the sign is the being of an ontological relation taken up into the experience of an organism, whether directly from the biological heritage of that organism (so-called "instinctive notions") or culled rather from individual experience, where it serves to connect objectively perceptual and sensory elements. The action of signs first arises precisely from physically related environmental factors coming to be seen objectively as related, and, conversely, from objectively related factors being presented as physically related. The uniqueness of semiosis as an activity and the detached and ambiguous quality it has as an action results from the being peculiar and proper to the ontological relation whereby, as we have seen, it can be neither directly altered nor directly perceived. The permeability of relation as such to realization in either the physical or the objective order also makes the two indistinguishable in direct experience. This is a matter not of confusion but of the reality proper to experience, wherein the objective and the physical are intertwined in the sign. This permeability is why the natural sign provides a common denominator in biosemiosis, even though it can be natural in different ways for different species.
An example of a natural sign unique to the level of anthroposemiosis may help to grasp the general point at stake here. Let us consider the case of a fossil bone. This bone may or may not be known to exist. If not, let us suppose it yet belongs to a class of bones well established among those expert in the Pleistocene. One day the bone is uncovered, but by a gardener, not a paleontologist. Since the bone is in an advanced state of fossilization, let us suppose that our gardener does not even recognize it as a bone, let alone a fossil bone. For that, a more developed interpretant is required, one proportioned more exactly to what the bone relates to in its living past. Nevertheless, a fossil bone is just what it is. Such an interpretant as is required for its recognition nowhere existed actually in the middle ages, let us say, but now, among our postulated Pleistocene specialists, it exists indeed as a common property.
What is this interpretant? Certainly not an idea psychologically considered. It is rather an idea in the semiotic sense, moreover as fashioned publically through the training of paleontologists, such that those who have by training acquired it possess in their minds a foundation or "fundament" whence will result or "dimanate", under appropriate conditions, a network of relations including that bone. But first, one of them at least will have to see the bone in question.
Supposing that occurs. Supposing that one of our students of the Pleistocene visits our gardener just as the gardener is about to deposit into a trash bin the bone which had irritatingly obstructed his gardening. "What is that you have there?" Now our gardener, being also a student of Peirce, may at this point respond, casually tossing the bone toward the trash, "A brute fact at the level of secondness."
But our paleontologist had not asked her question idly. She had spoken out of a glimmer of suspicion, a hint of recognition, as it were - she was voicing in context a low-risk abductive gamble. Into the brute fact at the level of secondness something of thirdness had already, thanks to her training, begun to enter. "Let me have a closer look", she said, moving toward the bone discarded as a peculiarly shaped rock. "This", she announces on careful inspection, "is no rock. This is a rare fossil bone, which just may revolutionize a bit of our understanding of the Pleistocene in this area." Whereupon, clutching the bone with great excitement, she ran off in the direction of the university.
What has happened here? A physical relation, recognized for what it had been, thanks to the dynamic interaction of its fundament (the bone) producing physical changes in the student of paleontology's optic nerves, became at the same moment also a sign of what had been. A transcendental relation, the bone of a dinosaur, which once had a physical relation to that dinosaur, but no more (the dinosaur being dead), yet gave rise to an objective relation corresponding somewhat with the physical relation that had been. The gardener's rock had become the paleontologist's sign.
The common ground of biosemiosis lies in what used to be called "natural signs", but what is now more commonly divided, after Peirce, into indices, icons, and symbols (although of course not all icons or symbols are natural signs, either). A footprint in the sand is indexical of a person's passing, and of the direction of the passing, unless the footprints be the skillful work of a man passing east in such a way as to leave the impression of a man passing west, in which event the footprints remain indexically accurate to a degree but iconically misleading in another degree, and are in fact symbols of an exceptional skill.
Natural signs are essential to the survival of most if not all species of animals. They need to be taken for what they are, or, in the reverse case, mistaken for what they are intended to be mistaken for, if the animal in question is to secure its food. What happens in such a case? Precisely that the foundation for a physical relation is taken or mistaken for a corresponding objective relation, as a result of which food is provided or safety secured.
The relation of clouds to rain is a relation of cause and effect. When that relation has also been experienced, an interpretant becomes established. What was formerly a mere physical relation, a relation of secondness, acquires now, through the interpretant, a thirdness whereby that same relation functions also semiotically. Because the physical relationship as such need only be dyadic, whereas the semiotic relationship is necessarily triadic, there is the possibility of error, or misinterpretation. There is also the possibility of deception. The objective world wherein actual semiosis transpires is only occasionally the same and in large part different from the physical environment. But to the extent that it is the same, to the extent that it overlaps - and this is the extent to which every species depends for its survival on food, which is a considerable extent - that extent and that overlap result from the indifference of intersubjective being to the difference between what is objective and what is physical, as we have seen.
Thus, it is the being proper to relation that is also the being proper to signs, even though relations properly speaking need not be semiosic relations. Not all relations in the ontological sense pass through actual experience, but all relations in the ontological sense are indifferent to the order of physical existence, such that, once taken up into actual experience, they also take on an objective life relatively independent of physical being. It is in this way that they provide the raw material of biosemiosis. The actual being proper to the sign is the being of an ontological relation taken up into the experience of an organism, whether directly from the biological heritage of that organism (so-called "instinctive notions") or culled rather from individual experience, where it serves to connect objectively perceptual and sensory elements. The action of signs first arises precisely from physically related environmental factors coming to be seen objectively as related, and, conversely, from objectively related factors being presented as physically related. The uniqueness of semiosis as an activity and the detached and ambiguous quality it has as an action results from the being peculiar and proper to the ontological relation whereby, as we have seen, it can be neither directly altered nor directly perceived. The permeability of relation as such to realization in either the physical or the objective order also makes the two indistinguishable in direct experience. This is a matter not of confusion but of the reality proper to experience, wherein the objective and the physical are intertwined in the sign. This permeability is why the natural sign provides a common denominator in biosemiosis, even though it can be natural in different ways for different species.
An example of a natural sign unique to the level of anthroposemiosis may help to grasp the general point at stake here. Let us consider the case of a fossil bone. This bone may or may not be known to exist. If not, let us suppose it yet belongs to a class of bones well established among those expert in the Pleistocene. One day the bone is uncovered, but by a gardener, not a paleontologist. Since the bone is in an advanced state of fossilization, let us suppose that our gardener does not even recognize it as a bone, let alone a fossil bone. For that, a more developed interpretant is required, one proportioned more exactly to what the bone relates to in its living past. Nevertheless, a fossil bone is just what it is. Such an interpretant as is required for its recognition nowhere existed actually in the middle ages, let us say, but now, among our postulated Pleistocene specialists, it exists indeed as a common property.
What is this interpretant? Certainly not an idea psychologically considered. It is rather an idea in the semiotic sense, moreover as fashioned publically through the training of paleontologists, such that those who have by training acquired it possess in their minds a foundation or "fundament" whence will result or "dimanate", under appropriate conditions, a network of relations including that bone. But first, one of them at least will have to see the bone in question.
Supposing that occurs. Supposing that one of our students of the Pleistocene visits our gardener just as the gardener is about to deposit into a trash bin the bone which had irritatingly obstructed his gardening. "What is that you have there?" Now our gardener, being also a student of Peirce, may at this point respond, casually tossing the bone toward the trash, "A brute fact at the level of secondness."
But our paleontologist had not asked her question idly. She had spoken out of a glimmer of suspicion, a hint of recognition, as it were - she was voicing in context a low-risk abductive gamble. Into the brute fact at the level of secondness something of thirdness had already, thanks to her training, begun to enter. "Let me have a closer look", she said, moving toward the bone discarded as a peculiarly shaped rock. "This", she announces on careful inspection, "is no rock. This is a rare fossil bone, which just may revolutionize a bit of our understanding of the Pleistocene in this area." Whereupon, clutching the bone with great excitement, she ran off in the direction of the university.
What has happened here? A physical relation, recognized for what it had been, thanks to the dynamic interaction of its fundament (the bone) producing physical changes in the student of paleontology's optic nerves, became at the same moment also a sign of what had been. A transcendental relation, the bone of a dinosaur, which once had a physical relation to that dinosaur, but no more (the dinosaur being dead), yet gave rise to an objective relation corresponding somewhat with the physical relation that had been. The gardener's rock had become the paleontologist's sign.
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Source: John Deely, "Chapter 4: Signs: The Medium of Semiosis," in Basics of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990),http://carbon.ucdenver.edu/~mryder/deely/basics/ch4.html.
John Deely on the Two Notions of Relative Being
We see then what is peculiar about the notion of relative being taken in its full extension thus divided: it includes everything that falls within our experience and so is difficult to grasp precisely because the implied term of opposition - nonrelative being, or absolute being - is at the concrete level a phantom of the mind, like the notion of "nonbeing" in general. It is not a question of some beings that are relative and other beings that are not relative, but a question rather of beings all of which are relative, though relative in two sharply contrasting though connected senses: Every being that exists in its own right is, by virtue of that very fact, subjectively relative throughout its existence; but, in addition to this subjective relativity according to which a being proximately depends on some things more than others and influences some things but not others, etc., there is the further relativity according to which the subjects are here and now intersubjectively connected actually to this thing rather than that, and later to another rather than to this, until such time as they cease to be. There is, in short, a twofold dimension or level to the relativity of being: on the one hand, there is an underlay of subjective relativity according to which everything ultimately implies everything else but not in equally direct or proximate ways at the level of possibility or intelligibility, even though everything is not actually related to everything else at the level of existence and physical interaction; and, on the other hand, there is at the same time an overlay of intersubjective relations, both physical and objective, according to which some things are actually interactive with some things but not with others in this or that way.
We are now in a position to answer our question about the living parent whose child has died. The parent remains a parent at the level of transcendental relation, while ceasing to be a parent at the level of physical relation, although this physical relation continues to exist objectively to the extent that the parent or anyone else thinks about it. The same relation formed now only in thought formerly existed also physically, and it is by virtue of that same relation that the parent is a parent.
Of course, if, as happens, a supposed father, say, was deceived into thinking that a child was his when in fact it was begotten by another, the objective relation according to which he was called and thought to be, perhaps even by the child, "father", continues without ceasing in any sense upon the death of the child. It is thus by the relation on its physical side that the father is in fact the father, while it is by that same relation (or by what is thought to be that relation even though it is in fact a different relation owing to the nonexistence of a physical relation for the objective relation to be the same as) that the father is called "father". Thus is the truth of dicisigns a consequence of the relations they embody according to whether what is asserted objectively coincides with or deviates from what exists relative to another order of being than the objective.
We are now in a position to answer our question about the living parent whose child has died. The parent remains a parent at the level of transcendental relation, while ceasing to be a parent at the level of physical relation, although this physical relation continues to exist objectively to the extent that the parent or anyone else thinks about it. The same relation formed now only in thought formerly existed also physically, and it is by virtue of that same relation that the parent is a parent.
Of course, if, as happens, a supposed father, say, was deceived into thinking that a child was his when in fact it was begotten by another, the objective relation according to which he was called and thought to be, perhaps even by the child, "father", continues without ceasing in any sense upon the death of the child. It is thus by the relation on its physical side that the father is in fact the father, while it is by that same relation (or by what is thought to be that relation even though it is in fact a different relation owing to the nonexistence of a physical relation for the objective relation to be the same as) that the father is called "father". Thus is the truth of dicisigns a consequence of the relations they embody according to whether what is asserted objectively coincides with or deviates from what exists relative to another order of being than the objective.
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Source: John Deely, "Chapter 4: Signs: The Medium of Semiosis," in Basics of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), http://carbon.ucdenver.edu/~mryder/deely/basics/ch4.html.
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