The Decipherment of God's Signs

The Decipherment of God’s Signs In Modern Semiotic Thought Marcus Lyra MA. Semiotics ‐ Faculty of Semiotics, Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics (FLFI) History of Semiotics University of Tartu January 8th, 2014 Abstract Much have been done in a long process of formulation of the modern thought towards what comes to be renown as Sign, from the first sight of a thing involved with a mystical meaning deriving from the deepest comprehension among the religious men from the archaic cultures, to the most complex and evolved modern science themata that guides the eyes and the intentions underlining every step in human discovery process. The discourse is being constantly reformatted to fit the spectacle of the new discoveries, discourse that was gradually transformed from lines in plain texts into technical images and their power of representation of a fictitious world, but essentially on the very basis, something remains untouched and still reserves its mystical value, having crossed the enlightenment process and acquiring a new configuration. In this paper, a brief historical process of the Sign will be drawn in the attempt to demonstrate that there are various mystical elements from the scholastic period that are still present on the modern mode of thinking and comprehending of a Sign, that can drive its conclusion into something transcendentally connected, in between humans and gods, knowledge and deities, the logic and the cosmos. The Signs studies, thus, remain in a certain aspect of obscurity. Keywords: sign, semiotics, semiology, medieval studies, philosophy, sacred, profane, hierophany, themata, logic, hermeneutics, exegese, god, religion, linguistics, skepticism, science. 1.The World As An Open Book It is long known in humanity the idea of sign and sign relations, since the first moment that a conscious mind stared at something and intentionally or unintentionally applied to it the value of a second something. This comes along with the first perceptions and descriptions of reality of human beings since civilizations are capable of self description, in a movement of applying 2 connections between things to which bond belongs to human imaginary models. The bond or abstract connection between two different things was firstly operated with the usage of mystical or magical knowledge in order to justify these relations, nevertheless it is not something from a remote past but seems to be a permanent role in human cognoscente constructions in so far as it is understood as a human condition for description of its realityi. Mircea Eliade in a long journey of studies of the notion of the sacred and the profane in human symbolic constructions came over with the term Hierophany that states the manifestations of the sacred, being extremely variable throughout different cultures. Eliade proposes the division of the perception of the meaningful or sacred and the profane or meaningless as something linear along the human history in several distinct cultures, he says: “For the religious man, space is not homogeneous: the space presents ruptures, breaks, there are portions of space qualitatively different from each other. "Do not come any closer, God said. Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." (Exodus 3:5) There is therefore a sacred space, a "strong" one, a meaningful, and there are others in consequence with no structure, no consistency, in short, amorphous.” (ELIADE 2010:25) Moreover, the meaningful relations established by ancient civilizations built up a conception of a world full of nuances to be discovered, sacred meanings to go through disclosure, an opened book ready to be deciphered from those who have the proper contact with the systems that allows the extraction of the holy meanings out of the world of the mortals; Eliade continues: “It is though, necessary to say that the religious experience of the non‐homogeneity of the space constitutes a primordial experience, that corresponds to the “world’s foundation”. It is not about a theoretical speculation, but a primary religious experience that precedes the whole perception of the world.”(ELIADE 2010:26) As the proposed, this sacred aspect of the world in the mind of the religious men is not a phenomenon that belongs to the past neither it is related to levels of complexity of comprehension as if the modernity could have brought the answers and finally stanched permanently the religious aspect of the perception of the world around. Even after the whole process of the enlightenment period and the rise of the scientificized perception and instrumental knowledge, most of the modern thinking is still engaged to the a Priori source of knowledgeii in a process which the names are different but the circumstances where answers are sought derive from the same premise; to say, the hidden truth of the universe is meant to be properly deciphered through the mathematical knowledge, roughly, a system that allows the comprehension of another system of different values though the application of similarities between them, so, Resemblance. 3 2. Ancient Symbolic Perception When it comes to the study of the process of Meaning and sign relations, it is definitely necessary to track the way this relations changed thought time and historical human perceptions, avoiding to fall into the positivist comprehension of a modern enlightened perception, supposedly free of any imaginary of idelological construction. We are in a world governed by Images. The images are taken as the fundamental signs in this new Episteme, being virtual projections of human intellectual appropriations of a given reality. In his book entitled The Universe of the Technical Images, Vilém Flusser, a Czech‐Brazilian philosopher says: “The new images does not occupy the same ontological level of the traditional images, because they are a phenomenon with no parallels in the past. The traditional images are surfaces abstracted from volumes, while the technical images are surfaces build up with dots.” (FLUSSER 2008:16) The complete control of the images now belong to these dots, the minimum particles of the visual world are the cradle of the modern crisis of the dimensions, he then says: “In a way that, while we turn to this images, we are not returning from the unidimensionality to the bidimensionality, but driving ourselves from the unidimensionality to the abysm of the zero‐dimensionality. (FLUSSER 2008:16) The modes of relation between human beings and its reality apart of being indeed of such complexity, carries also some aspects of linearity in terms of how the reality is constructed and managed towards our purposes and ends; whether the sacred world as an open book ready to be meticulously deciphered or the universe corresponding to the human logical sign constructions, every time that we engage in a discussion about Signs, it comes to be as conclusion that this is something that stands for something else through a system of connection made up by an intermediary element, the last one, an abstract construction lied over a historical cultural process – or more drastically, according to the structuralism, a linear perception and relation from material to abstract worlds. While dealing with the chosen methods meant to be capable of guarantee an ascetic model or perception and description, the modern science lacks of ontological apparatus to behold human comprehension beyond all the methodically cataloging image‐converted information. The universe preserves its aspect of a Pandora’s box waiting to be disclosed. Gilbert Durand in his book named L’imaginaire complements as follows: “This role of the image as an imaginary embryo of the scientific creation – as found almost all the great thinkers since Francis Bacon during 17th century to Poincaré in 1908 was properly shown by Gerard Holton, an American doctor, who showed the directional role of the systems of image (thematic presuppositions or thêmata) in the singular process of discovery. This thêmata contributed to what Einstein called Weltbild, an image of the world.”(DURAND 2011:69‐70). But where does these conceptions of meaningful hidden transcendent elements come from? According to the history of the meaning in documented human 4 description, both, science and the religious perceptions seems to derive from the same genesis.iii 3. The Resemblance and Unclosed World In a chapter entitled The Prose of the World, Foucault in his book “The Order of Things” shows the process of construction of what culminated in the creation of the modern thought and perception of meaning as sign relations. By presenting the cases of similitudes developed in the sixteenth century, in a process called Resemblance, that guided the exegesis processes in the study of the holy texts, Foucault shows how the aesthetics of a deciphered world shaped the western thought. The Resemblance as a tool to decipher the universal symbolic expressions had in hands some combinatory possibilities as any other system derived from human logic, they where the constitution of the semantic web of the resemblance with: “Amicitia, Aequalitas (Contractus, Consensus, Matrimonium, Societas, Pax and Simila), Consonantia, Concertus, Continuum, Paritas, Proportio, Similitudo, Conjunctio, Copula. And there are a great many other notions that intersect, overlap, reinforce, or limit one another on the surface of thought” (FOUCAULT 2002 :20) As the embryo of the semiotic studies, there has had a wide sort of qualities that could be arranged to convey a meaning out of a natural phenomenon that supposedly was encrypted by God in a mythical description (teogony) of the Abrahamic religions. The process of being able to comprehend the secrets of the universe and give them a name as well as to discover its function to humanity delivered by the deity, is to be able of, through the resemblance knowledge “holding the extremes apart (God and matter), yet bringing them together in such a way that the will of the Almighty may penetrate into the most unawakened corners.” (FOUCAULT 2002 :21). Hence, and also the most important aspect in this essay, is to grasp the idea of a particular relation between humanity and its given circumstances in order to organize the knowable world into a model of perfect relations; these relations between things, are exactly what makes something be in place of something else in a sign‐system construction, where the juxtaposition ‐ in this case explicitly mystical but nowadays still existent – comes from ideological and imaginary instances of the social construction, circumscribing the way we perceive things and can attribute the values of something to something else. Nevertheless, “the sixteenth century superimposed the Hermeneutics and Semiology in the form of similitude. To search for a meaning is to bring to light a resemblance”(FOUCAULT 2002 :33) and the processes of description of reality kept being sought in an ornamental method where “everything would be manifest and immediately knowable if the hermeneutics of resemblance and the semiology of signatures coincide without the slightest parallax.”(FOUCAULT 2002:33) 5 4. The Medieval Sign and the Triadic Systems One of the distinctive aspects of modern Semiotics is its triadic scheme, largely influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce as will be seeing later in this essay. Although the beginning of the triadic relations recalls the period between 14th and 17th centuries where the previously mentioned Resemblance faced a moment of complete reconstruction of its basis in logic, and the Sign could not be described with a clear direct physical proposition between two things, but was made necessary a third instance to connect them. “The logic de Port Royal states this as follows: the sign encloses two ideas, one of the thing representing, the other of the thing represented; and its nature consist in exciting the first by means of the second” (FOUCAULT 2002:70) which description made essential part of most of the medieval philosophy and comprehension of what a Sign comes to be, but Foucault continues stating that this description is found differently during the Renaissance period, where there were no physical relation connecting Signs from Signifier and Signified, but an intermediary logical aspect had to be raised creating three distinct categories BEIG: “that which is marked, that which did the marking and that which made it possible to see in the first the mark of the second, and this last element was, of course, resemblance; a sign provided a mark exactly in so far as it was ‘almost the same thing’ as that which it designated” (FOUCAULT 2002:70). As seeing, even through the most diverse substitutions of concepts about how is the human logic constructo able to infer the values of a first mark to a second mark, firstly in a way that the second mark had something already disposed inherently directing logically to this relation to the first mark, and later in the Renaissance, where a tertiary element arose brought by the perception about the Mediation aspect, that links two different things with different values, was yet connected by traces of resemblance, the mystical aspect of relations, still lying too close to the decipherment process of a deity’s plan over earth. Eliade on the studies of the sacred being perceived even outside a whole spatiality that leads to a mythical contemplation, completes stating that most of the aspect of sacredness of the things around human beings are kept intact no matter which level of complex logical thought had been achieved. There is always something of mystical, hidden, even permeating modern thought even though it is not admitted: ”Taken apart from the strictly religious life, the celestial sacred keeps alive through its symbolism. A religious symbol keeps transmitting its message even when it stops being comprehended, consciously, as a whole, because the symbol acts towards the integral human being and not only its intelligence” (ELIADE 2010:109). This comes along with the very effect of the images over modern human mental models of reality, as Flusser claims, the Praise of Superficiality, “The new consciousness implies in a curious distrust in “deep” ontological level. The scientific explanations and the techniques from them derived are certainly essential for us to imagine Images. Instruments are essential for us to imagine.”(FLUSSER 2008:55) 6 5. The Peirce and the Resemblance Coming back to the process of establishment of modern triadic logic in the comprehension of a Sign, a brief historical overview is made necessary to keep the clarity required in this paper. The medieval description of a given element permeated with Signic value was that something must represents something else in a direct correspondence, where the first element has aspects of the second, and the second only exists by means of the first.iv Hitherto the relational logic of a sign is still established by a dualistic linear uninterrupted reference between two known things that must be in an also potentially known relation.v The new comprehension of Renaissance though, was that this first element that represents a second is also a comprehensible element in itself, both, being something physically present and constant and directing to something other in a representative way. This multiplies the value of the first object and doubles and “this appears to give us three terms: the idea signified, the idea signifying, and, within this second term, the idea of its role as representation. What are faced here is not, however, a surreptitious return to a ternary system, but rather and inevitable displacement within the two‐term figure which moves backward in relation to itself and comes to reside entirely within the signifying element.” (FOUCAULT 2002:71) This lead to the illusion of a creation of a tertiary or triadic system as still existent in modern semiotics, even though, it is just a transformation of perception within the same binary semiotic relation of a sign. “In fact, the signifying element has no content, no function and no determination other than what it represents.” (FOUCAULT 2002:71) The Binary arrangement of the Sign, as it appears in the seventeenth century, replaces an organization which, in different modes, had been ternary ever since the time of the Stoics, and even since the Greek grammarians; and its new binary arrangement presupposes that the sign is a duplicated representation doubled over upon itself” (FOUCAULT 2002:71) When it turns to modern Semiotic studies, especially while contemplating Piercian triadic schemes, most of these ethereal aspects can be tracked in the formulation of his ideas. The most important topic concerning Peirce ́s categories, however, is that they are universal, claims Lucia Santaella while explaining Peircian categories, she completes: “Peirce himself stated that his categories suggest a way of thinking. This is all they pretend to do (CP 1.351). In a further passage he continued with the same idea saying that ‘perhaps it is not right to call the categories conceptions; they are so intangible that they are rather tones or tints upon conception’ (CP 1.353).” (SANTAELLA 1999:3) Moreover, in case we engage in the attempt of description of Iconic relations –the firstness – that is commonly described as ruled by the norms of resemblance, or “which serve to convey ideas of the things they represent simply by imitating them. (PEIRCE 1998:2), it is possible to end up considering this resemblance in terms of experienced situations that allows the description of potentialities, but Peirce himself answers this question taking what he calls the capacity of 7 experience to the explanation of an inconical relation as follows: “It may be objected that likenesses as much as indices are founded on experience, that an image of red is meaningless to the color blind, as is that of erotic passion to the child. But these are truly objections which help the distinction; for it is not experience, but the capacity for experience, which they show is requisite for a likeness; and this is requisite, not in order that the likeness should be interpreted, but in order that it should at all be presented to the sense.” (PEIRCE 1998:5). As the medieval conception of a Sign abovementioned, the way that the sign relation is presented undertakes the same paradox of the twofold object value faced in antique times, for which it must stand for something else while being something that is in itself a potential meaning in another Signic cycle. Peirce states that “A sign (object) stands for something to the idea which it produces, or modifies. That for which it stands is called its object; that which it conveys, it is meaning; and the idea to which it gives rise, its interpretant”.(Peirce: CP 1.339) Here, yet, the signifying element continues being an empty thing with no content, no function and no determination other than what it represents, thus, standing as not necessarily a triadic system, but a dyadic system whose object stands for what it is meant to represent. In any relation in firstness, secondness or thirdness, Icon, Index or Symbol, as the denouement of a complete series of self‐referential values, a logical trick arises whose accidentally opened gap is promptly filled up with the rules of resemblance. The Iconic relation is clearly and directly ruled by the almighty Likeness (resemblance), but the Idexical signs also keeps being straightly connected with the necessity of a knowable situation to which it is possible to potentially infer the relation between two known things in a known relation, otherwise the indexical values of any causal sequence remain indefinitely obscured. And Symbolic signs, ruled by the conventionalityvi can finally remain as the only original relation solidified over abstract conformations and social constructions derived from the imaginary or the ideology shaping the episteme of an epoch and all its allegories and representations. In sum, the Sign remain obscured, as non correspondent to the universal laws in a positivist way, that orders and demands the comprehension of the universe and the relations between things. Conclusion Throughout most vast and prolific variations of descriptions of a Sign, the humanity had been facing different elements that shaped and transformed the comprehension of our symbolic world every time it was sought for a proper determination and description of what a symbolic appropriation comes to be. From the dyadic systems encountered during the medieval ages, and its correspondent models from the Stoics and Greek Grammarians, the world was long seeing as a place with hidden elements urging to be deciphered, and the 8 division between those in charge of unclosing these encrypted messages were permanent figures in human societies. Sometimes in hands of the Holy people, the ones holding the sacred writings and guiding humanity outside of the profanity and darkness, or among the grammarians from the beginning of the twentieth century who matched the linguistics and the human logic to the ethereal powers of a most absolute connection with the universal laws – mathematic predominance in science, positivism, instrumentalism – the Sign is something that in spite of what is most believed, remain a secret with much more mystical values than the so called modern science would expect. REFERENCES DURAND, Gilbert (2011) O Imaginário. Ensaio Acerca das Ciências e da Filosofia da Imagem. Ed.Difel. Rio de Janeiro ELIADE, Mircea (2010) O Sagrado e o Profano: A Essência das Religiões. Ed. Martins Fontes. São Paulo FLUSSER, Villém (2008) O Universo Das Imagens Técnicas – O elogio da Superficialidade. Ed. Anablume. São Paulo. FOUCAULT, Michel (2002) The Order of Things. Rotledge. New York. PEIRCE, Charle S. (1998) The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2. Peirce Edition Project. Indiana University Press SANTAELLA, Lucia. (1999) Peirce's three categories and Lacan's three registers of human condition. Journal Psicologia USP Volume 10 issue 2. University of São Paulo (81‐91) 9 Notes i Eliade, to resume the conclusions of comparative philology of Georges Dumézil, shows that in all religions, even the most archaic, there is an organization of a network of symbolic images collected in myths and rites that reveal a trans‐story behind all manifestations of religious history. A mythical process that manifests itself by imitative redundancy of an archetypal model (noticeable even in Christianity, where the "events" of the New Testament are repeated without "eliminating" those in the distant the old testament). (DURAND:74) ii The Century of the Lights, in 1793, placed carefully with Immanuel Kant, for example, an impassable boundary between what can be explored (the world of phenomena) the perception and understanding, the resources of Pure Reason, and that will remain unknown forever, as the field of the great metaphysical questions ‐ death, the afterlife and God (the universe of "number") – which, with its possible and contradictory solutions are the "antinomies" of Reason. (DURAND:14) iii It had long being known – and well before Plato’s Cratylus – that signs can be either given by nature or established by man. Nor was the sixteenth century ignorant to this fact, since it recognized human languages to be instituted signs. But the artificial signs owed their power only to their fidelity to natural signs. (FOUCAULT 2002 :68) iv The signifying idea becomes double, since superimposed upon the idea that is replacing another there is also the idea of its representative power. (FOUCAULT 2002:71) v This is not because men are in possession of all the possible signs, but because there can be no sign until there exists a knwon possibility of substitution between two known elements. The sign does not wait in silence for the coming of a man capable for recognizing it: it can be constituted only by an act of knowing. (FOUCAULT 2002:65) vi The word symbol has so many meanings that it would be an injury to the language to add a new one. I do not think that the signification I attach to it, that of a conventional sign, or one depending upon habit (acquired or inborn), is so much a new meaning as a return to the original meaning. (CP 2.281 §6)