Biosemiosis

Part II of this book takes the account of human culture developed in Part I and extends it backwards into biological and physical nature to reveal culture’s third dimension of natural ‘depth’. This chapter begins that task by considering the biosemiotics of Aquinas, Cusa, and Poinsot, according to which all organisms live, know, and communicate by means of signs. Together these medieval thinkers offer a rich account of the semiotic processes of receptive sensation and expressive communication in non-human organisms, especially emphasising the diversity of semiotic repertoires among species and the single metaphysics of signification that is common to humans and non-human organisms. The production of meaning through signs is then a vast phenomenon of which human culture is but one local expression. The biosemiosis that is in play among all living things represents the biological depth of culture.

Word

This chapter gives a new, semiotic reading of Thomas Aquinas’ Trinitarian theology, in order to establish the theological ‘height’ of culture. Aquinas develops Augustine’s psychological analogy in explicitly semiotic terms, so that the divine Word is the sign of the Father. He confirms this also in terms of the Son as name and image. Because for Aquinas signs are a kind of relation, his semiotic analysis can be integrated with his notion of divine persons as substantial relations. Aquinas’ semiotic Trinity can be understood as an absolute ‘cultural nature’, in which the divine nature is identical with the semiosis of the persons (signified origin, expressed sign, eternal interpretation). This theological claim suggests a new vantage on the nature-culture question: all created natures possess a cultural dimension, reflecting the absolute cultural nature that is their origin.

Sign

Part I of this book sets out a semiotic theory of human culture. This chapter uses the semiotics of John Poinsot (1589–1644, also known as John of St Thomas) to show how the whole scope of human cultural activity can be understood as at root the work of signs. Poinsot has a very wide-ranging understanding of signification, which includes natural, customary, and stipulated signs; physical and formal/psychological signs; and perceptual and communicative signs. Crucially, a single metaphysics of relations is the common basis for this whole spectrum of signs, so that natural and cultural signs count univocally as instances of signification. Poinsot’s notion of semiotic custom, in which conventional signs are ‘naturalised’ through habit to act as natural signs, is an important theme (to which chapters 5 and 6 will return in an evolutionary context). Poinsot’s semiotics illuminates the full anthropological ‘breadth’ of culture.

Introduction

This introductory chapter sets up the core question of Signs in the Dust: how is cultural meaning related to natural materiality? How is culture related to nature? A brief orientation is given to the contemporary nature-culture discussion that is proceeding across the humanities and sciences. Special attention is given to Bruno Latour’s claim that modern thought is characterised by a nature/culture dichotomy—this view of Latour’s Moderns is the foil against which the theory of ‘natural culture and cultural nature’ is cast. The chapter also forecasts the argument that is made across the book and clarifies the scope of that argument.

Dust

This chapter conducts a thought experiment, which compares the immaterial culture of Thomistic angels with the corporeal culture of humans to clarify the particular contribution that matter makes to cultural life. This suggests two perfections of matter. First is the ‘detour through the real’ that is enforced by matter. Whereas angels use purely intentional signs to know and communicate, corporeal creatures necessarily use material signs, which are not intentional but real. This reflects Trinitarian knowledge and expression, which proceeds through the real sign of the divine Word. Second is the process of biological generation. Whereas an individual angel sustains its own species, organisms must generate one from another within the one shared nature, and this ontological dependence and mutuality reflects the Trinitarian procession of persons within the one divine nature. These perfections of material existence mean that dust is a blessing to the sign, just as signs are a blessing to dust.

Pattern

This chapter uses Aquinas’ doctrine of intentions in the medium to develop a new theory of physiosemiosis (signification in inanimate nature). For Aquinas, intentionality is present not only in mental states but also in bodily senses and inanimate media such as air and water. By this means, for Aquinas, inanimate things participate to some degree in the cognitive processes that are proper to cognitive beings. Intentions in the medium can be understood in modern terms as patterns of matter and energy, which signify the physical things that caused those patterns. There is, then, a rudimentary action of semiosis in the exchange of matter and energy among inanimate things, and the semiotic patterns here give a very diminished but—extraordinary as it sounds—nonetheless true expression of the movement of signification that constitutes culture. This points to a semiotic ontology: being is sign.

Evolution

This chapter takes up the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis in order to empirically enrich the nature-culture theory developed thus far. It considers three themes in the EES—phenotypic plasticity, genetic accommodation, and niche construction—and uses these to argue that the agency of organisms has a nontrivial influence on the evolutionary futures of species. The upshot of this argument is that habits are heritable (though this Lamarckian theme is now to be understood in a Darwinian context). The evolutionary influence of organism agency implies a phylogenetic expression of art in nature. An evolutionary extension of Poinsot’s customary sign is also suggested here, so that nature is ‘habituated’ in its forms and ‘customised’ in its meanings by the natural art of evolution. There is, then, a cultural dimension present through the whole biological order and through all of evolutionary history.

Habit

This chapter takes up the theory of habit developed by Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900) to consider how culture proceeds in non-human species. It argues that the biological body is the fundamental medium of meaning-making. Ravaisson takes Aristotle’s notion of habit as a second nature and extends it beyond the human polis to include the whole biological order. Habit takes the intentional ideas of organisms and embodies them in their real bodies; it is a universal power of ‘second-naturing’ that integrates matter with mind. Ravaisson’s account of habit can combine with Poinsot’s account of semiotic custom, so that the whole of organic life—its meanings and its materiality—can be understood as the locus of second-naturing. The biosemiotic Ravaissonism that emerges here makes a bold proposal: nature is not only the producer of cultures; nature is itself cultural, because its form is shaped over evolutionary time by the semiotically executed habits of organisms.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter situates the theory of natural culture and cultural nature in relation to one of its closest philosophical alternatives, ‘soft dualism’. Soft dualism includes a range of recent philosophies that use a broadly Kantian strategy to preserve cultural phenomena from scientific reductionism. Soft dualism saves culture by insulating it from nature. The theory recommended in this book, on the other hand, saves culture by inflating nature. Therefore, instead of culture ‘transcending’ nature, it is better to say that nature is simply being itself when it is being cultural. The chapter ends with some remarks on the Incarnation, in which the divine Word becomes a sign in the dust.

Art

This chapter considers the semiotics of Nicholas of Cusa (1407–64) in order to integrate the two dimensions of culture—its anthropological breadth (Poinsot) and its theological height (Aquinas)—that were outlined in the previous two chapters. Cusa’s metaphysics of participation is the key theme here. All organisms cognise and communicate by means of signs, and this sign-making attains to truth by participating finitely in the infinite meaning of things hidden in the divine Word. The same process is at work in the making of material artifacts. The making of signs and artifacts is understood as adding to the range of natural forms, so that culture is an elaboration of nature. From this point of view, culture is a ‘diagonal’ process in which the horizontal breadth of creaturely semiosis participates in the vertical height of the semiotic Trinity.