Semiotics as a Pathway to Spiritual Science: From the Culture of Addiction to Absolute Freedom

The appearance of semiotics in the early twentieth century signifies an increase in awareness of the communicative powers of our entire environment.  Once we are able to attain the level of abstraction in which a word is a sign, we can then readily perceive clothing, gesture and traffic light as signs whose semiotic structure, whose semioses, must always already bear strong resemblances to the semioses of words.  The expansion of the communicative universe through the research and articulations of semiotics opens to semiotic analysis the entire field of our experience, in which any and all stimuli become potential meaning bearers.  It is thus no wonder that semiotics has become an approach in all areas, such as biology, comparative religion, and sociology, in which senders and receivers communicate by using one thing that stands for something else.

 

The unbounded generosity of semiotics, in its energetic donation of its own body to the uses of other disciplines, however, brings semiotics to the question of its own limit.  Is there anything, sensory or imagined, that is not a sign?  Is there anything, sensory or imagined, that cannot be something standing for something else?

 

We begin our exploration of this territory by trying to find a pure sign.  We consider an ordinary traffic stop sign.  Constructed of metal and/or wood, freestanding on their own posts or attached to other poles, these signs are erected at corners facing oncoming flows of vehicular traffic.  They usually have only two colors, such as red and white, black and white, or yellow and black.  In the red and white case, common in the US, the flat dimension is approximately one meter by one meter square, with all four corners cut off to form a regular hexagon.  The physical sign is uncontroversial.  There is no reason for anyone to contest factual assertions about the materials of which the sign is made, its structure, its process of assembly or its means of installation.  The physical sign is a pure sign at the physical pole of signification.  This purely physical sign is the sign as physical substrate of semiosis.

 

The signifieds of the red and white traffic stop sign, other than the physical, however, are mixed.  A stop sign signifies a text; the text is a written law or statute that prescribes the behavior of vehicle drivers, including bicyclists, who approach the corner on which the sign stands.  A particular stop sign may also signify a local memory stream.  A small child rode a tricycle rapidly off the curb one day into the street and was killed by an oncoming truck.  After six months of pressure from local parents for a sign, and pressure from local commuters against a sign, the city erected the stop sign.  Additional signifieds could be the memory stream of some commuters that includes rolling through the intersection on the way to work because, at that early hour, almost no cars drive through the intersection on the cross street.  Finally, a stop sign signifies a physical gesture for which it stands-stock still at a corner.  That gesture is bringing a vehicle to a complete stop before the vehicle crosses the pedestrian crosswalk or enters the intersection.   At this point, the physical position of the sign, on the corner at which vehicles are required to stop, and the immobility of the sign, both deploy simile or mimesis to signify the specific gesture.  Specific signifieds of a particular stop sign are mixed, but the sign function of the sign is not.  In every semiosis, the sign stands for something other than itself.  By abstracting from a multitude of semioses, we obtain a pure sign at the mental pole of signification.

 

Of what could the purity of the sign at either the physical or the mental pole consist?  Let us entertain the options.  First, the pure sign at the physical pole consists of one and only one substance and that substance is the simplest in nature.  The pure sign at the physical pole would thus be one hydrogen atom.  Second, the pure sign at the mental pole refers to nothing, not even itself.  Such a sign, purified of all signification, is not even imaginable.  It is an empty logical possibility.  Third, the pure sign at the mental pole refers only to itself.  Such a sign would be a sign of itself; however, it would have to be unique such that no class attributes would have any members other than itself.  Again, such a pure sign is imaginable only as an empty logical possibility.  Fourth, a pure sign at the mental pole would refer to one and only one thing other than itself.  Let us suppose that there were a uniquely occurring compound with only two instances in the entire universe.  One instance of that compound could then be taken as standing for both of them.  However, no such compound has yet been discovered, so we must count this possibility also as merely logical.  Fifth, we suppose again about the physical universe that every existing thing is absolutely unique, such that no thing shares any class attributes with any other thing.  In this situation, which again receives no confirmation from natural science, no thing would refer to any other thing except at the most abstract possible level at which every existing thing, in its utter uniqueness, would signify the utter uniqueness of every other existing thing. 

 

Sixth, the pure sign at the mental pole refers to a class of things that are absolutely unique in the sense that it is impossible for a normal observer to mistake them for anything other than what they are.  The condition of normal observation, however, removes this type of sign from ordinary sensory perception, because perception shifts according to lighting, health, age, attitude, perceptual acuity, strength of memory, etc.  Normal perception defines a range of possible observations that must be checked and rechecked in order to ensure validity.  This condition also requires a differentiation between ordinary conditions and laboratory conditions.  Observing a chemical compound with a spectroscope in a laboratory and there identifying it is quite different than observing a bird in flight in the wild and trying to identify it there.  In this sense of the pure sign, its scope is so limited that, while it is physically possible, it has little use in the ordinary world.  We all repeatedly mistake one thing for another for a great number of reasons.  Correcting this kind of mistake, whether it is in literary criticism, art criticism, remembering telephone numbers or sorting laundry is an ongoing human task that we cannot reduce or avoid.  The notion of the pure sign at the mental pole indeed seems elusive.

 

Seventh, we recall here the signification of the red and white stop sign that was the physical gesture of making a full stop at an intersection corner.  In the clearest possible sense, the stop sign stands for something else.  Even though the sign stands immobile at the corner, it is not in its own existential constitution the physical gesture of stopping a vehicle.  There is a clear difference in qualities between the sign and the signified.  Part of the meaning of the pure sign at the mental pole must then be that the sign can be clearly distinguished from the signified both epistemologically and ontologically, that is, as something known mentally and as something experienced existentially. Minimally, therefore, we may suggest that signification requires epistemological and ontological difference.

 

How, then, are we to understand the nature of this difference? This difference must be recordable in some mental act as part of knowledge, belief, opinion, etc., and experiencable in some empirical event as a real part of the universe, whether the subdomain is visual, aural, olfactory, tactile or otherwise.  We may reinforce this recognition with the observations that we carry not only a dual hemisphere brain but also dual major sense receptors for both vision, hearing and smell and multiple sense areas for taste, pressure, heat, pain and pleasure.  In no functional sense are our sensory organs, enteric nervous system or central nervous system cyclopean.  Our biologically evolved organism embodies complexity that is unimaginable without multiple layers, levels, scales, quantities, qualities and degrees of difference.  This focus however takes in only the region of sensory energy.  Along with this region are the regions of biophotonic/bioluminescent energy, psychic energy (involving such phenomena as hand healing, precognition and telepathy), and spiritual energy (involving visions, mystical experiences, numinous experiences, etc.).  The quality of knowledge of energy changes with each change in the type of energy as does the mode of experience of the existing energy.  Throughout all types of energy, however, there is a difference between the experiencer as human being and the energy as non-human but humanly accessible.  All regions are therefore subject to and subjects of semiosis.  Indeed, from the smallest discernible wave/particles to the largest possible structures of matter and space, from the richest sensory experience to the subtlest spiritual experience, our universe shows division and difference on every scale.  The divisions, however, are not static but dynamic.  Wave/particles come into existence and go out of existence; stars are born and die into diaphanous clouds of dust that dissipate into even emptier configurations of electromagnetic energy and space.  Since we find dynamism everywhere in the region of sensory energy, why would we not expect and predict it in other regions as well?

 

Indeed, everywhere that human beings have exercised their imaginations to bring into words and images the characteristics of non-sensory energy, they have reproduced the divisions of the sensory world.  Gods and demons, saints and sinners, saviors and destroyers, beneficent beings and maleficent beings, friends of humans and enemies of humans abound in all mythical and religious systems.  Natural and supernatural realms both present themselves to and through human experience and articulation as dually structured.  This fact points in a direction that is of special interest here: the representational capacity of human beings mirrors, reflects and participates in the dual structures of reality.  Duality is not simply or merely an invention of the human mind; nor is it either simply or merely an artifact of the human brain.  Rather, the brain itself is part of the dual structures of energy.  And more than part of it, our brains are the means by which we access those structures and bring them into tangible representations.  A sign as one thing standing for another is an intrinsic part of the universe of which we are a part.  The complete meaning of something thus encompasses its birth and its death, its bright side and its dark side, its constructivity and its destructivity, its most minute components and its most robust totality.  The South Pole is incomprehensible without the North Pole; the desert as a region of great aridity is incomprehensible without the ocean as a region of complete fluidity; positively charged energy is meaningless without negatively charged energy; and, gods without devils are senseless.  In every direction of our exploration, therefore, we must encounter dynamic differentiations whose variations in quality and quantity are endless. 

 

If we accept this much, then we may advance a general answer to the question of the limit of semiosis:  semiosis is impossible without difference.  If no difference exists, then neither signification nor semiosis is possible.  If nothing stands for anything else, if everything is so transparent that no edges, boundaries or limits appear from which to delineate existing things, then no representation is possible.  Without representation of some kind, signification and thus semiosis are impossible.

 

The idea of infinite signification allows us to approach this limit from another direction.  Infinite semiosis involves the elaboration of any particular instance of semiosis into a web whose signifieds expand and multiply as they become signifiers for new semioses that gradually implicate the entire language universe.  Inevitably beginning with a moment of a particular, finite language, this process extends by association and translation into all other languages until the entire sphere of human communication connects multidimensionally with itself.  This connection is not closure, however; rather, it is an ongoing process of working and reworking significations through infinite grades, shades and degrees of meaning that deploy the lexicons of all languages in their explication.  Carried out long enough, every word would gain multiple connections with every other word so that from anywhere in the net as signifier any other place in the net as signified could be reached.  Since this process of one place standing for another could be repeated indefinitely, it leads to infinite signification-the limitless standing of one thing for another.  But if one thing can stand for any other thing, then all specificity has dissolved and therewith all differences as well.  But if all differences dissolve then there is no way to distinguish one thing from another thing.  If there is no way to make such distinctions, then it is impossible to recognize one thing as standing for another or representing another.  Infinite signification brings us to the limit of semiosis:  semiosis is impossible without difference.

 

Why, though, is signification necessary at all?  It is necessary because there is difference.  If everything and everyone were utterly and seamlessly one, then no one thing would not only not have to but also not be able to stand for anything else.  The distinctions that arise with existence of any kind would not be, so nothing would stand apart from anything else and thus nothing could stand for anything else.  The experience of the utter absence of difference, the complete and seamless oneness of all things, carries us from semiotics to spiritual science.  From the energetic workings of mind in making finer and finer distinctions, we move to intuition in which mind becomes quiet, ego puts away its microscopes and knives, and the larger self appears as a living whole.  This step relieves us of the desire to think, say, write and do more.  This step ends the desire for knowledge because it is knowing.  Spiritual knowing is not an object, nor is it a subject.  It is a whole event in which subject and object dissolve into transparency. 

 

Spiritual science thus ends a certain type of craving that civilization cultivates and promotes.  It is the craving to be something other than what we already are.  On behalf of this craving, civilization socializes all of us into the culture of addiction.  In the culture of addiction, we become signs of our own incompleteness.  We stand for our own lacks and deficiencies.  Whatever our present is, it is not good enough.  We must find ways to add to it.  We never know enough, feel enough, have enough or are enough.  We never write enough, speak enough or read enough.  Our very existence signifies incompleteness and the desires we feel to overcome that uncomfortable condition.  Our socioeconomic system readily sympathizes with our plight by providing numerous opportunities for addiction. 

 

How can we understand addiction?  First, addiction requires that human beings be able to control the supply of some substance.  For this reason, no one becomes addicted to air or water.  But human beings control the supply of grapes and broccoli, also, and no one becomes addicted to them.  These examples bring another requirement: the controlled substance must make some noticeable and repeatable change in the human body and mind.  With these two requirements, we have addiction as an uncontrolled use of a substance whose supply is under human control and whose use makes a significant change in a person’s experience.  Clearly the possible sphere of addiction is very large, from new clothes to chocolate, from TV programs to sugar, and from competition to tobacco.   When we add competition, not only as a consumable activity, but also as a characteristic of supply, then speed appears as another major characteristic of the contemporary culture of addiction.  Not everything, however, has been turned into a radius of this sphere.

 

Outside this sphere reside interpersonal events such as love, respect and trust.  We all need these to live well, but no one has yet figured out how to quantify them as substances whose supply can be controlled.  Could you take a pill to respect others more?  Could you drink a bottle of something that would increase your ability to trust?  Could you have an operation on your heart that would allow you to love more?  If any of these were possible, then commercial interests would crystallize around these potencies to create supply controls that would result in addictions to love, respect and trust products.

 

In fact, it should come as no surprise that the first cash crop from the British colonies in America in the seventeenth century was tobacco.  After an enterprising colonist crossed a local strain of tobacco with an imported strain from South American, a hybrid strain with acceptable consumption properties resulted and became the first large-scale export item from the new colonies to England.  As much as some of us may dislike the habit, we cannot deny that tobacco is an emblem, a smoky signifier, of the power of commercialism to create a culture of addiction. 

 

The culture of addiction, besides requiring control of supply and personal impact, also requires products that are finite and expendable.  Commercialism cannot survive on handmade goods that last for decades and are handed down for generations in a family.  Commercialism cannot survive on substances like air, water and soil that are freely available, necessary for life, and, with the proper care, infinitely reusable.  No.  Commercialism survives only on products that can be used up and thrown away.  It survives only on products that alter the minds and bodies of the users so that the users want to use the products again and again.  Tobacco, toilet paper and television clearly signify the power of commercialism to create a culture of addiction.  All three products have metamorphosed constantly during the past centuries and decades.  At the beginning of each metamorphosis, potential consumers are met with claims that not only will all of the old functions of the products be fulfilled, but also the new products will refine, improve and advance those functions or even add more.  The culture of addiction thus also depends on the artificial production of novelty.

 

Novelty is itself a stimulus of fundamental importance to living beings such as primates.  Study of primate young, among apes and chimpanzees, has shown how the young seek novelty as part of their natural learning.  By seeking novelty, they continually encounter and expose themselves to differences that stimulate central nervous system development.  Without novelty in the environment, the primate becomes less aware, its attention dulls, it experiences boredom and then-wham!  The tiger jumps out from behind the tree, kills it and eats it.  Novelty seeking is necessary to maintain a certain level of alertness that both protects the primate from dangers and attunes the primate to opportunities. 

 

As primates, we also seek novelty.  Commercialism uses the search for novelty as an innate platform for the promotion of addiction.  It refines the search by recognizing, accurately enough, that some consumers become bored after so many repetitions of the same stimulus and, even though the stimulus may be pleasant, they look for something different.  Difference, though, can only be understood in commercialism as novelty.  Difference by itself is not enough, because novelty also clusters around it additional attractive signifiers of youth, adventure, mystery and perhaps even a taste of danger.  Novelty is thus a primary and necessary ingredient in the construction and maintenance of the culture of addiction.

 

If semiotics can be a path to spiritual science, can it also be a path to a condition other than addiction?  I first encountered the word “semiotics” in a writing by Carl Jung in 1973.  I did not see or use the word after that until 1989, when I started my PhD program in the College of Education at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, Oregon, USA.  My advisor, Chet Bowers, strongly recommended that I study semiotics.  Eventually, I used semiotics, chaos theory and the sociology of knowledge as joint theoretical perspectives in my dissertation on moral education in contemporary, urban Taiwan.  By that time, I had discovered that everything of interest to me had a dual capacity: on the one hand, it was stable; on the other hand, it was always already involved in a process of becoming in which it would transform until it ceased to exist.  Everything both was itself and was becoming other than itself.  The idea of signification, of something standing for something else, struck me as peculiarly powerful.  It captured not only meaningful relations among different things but also the relation a thing had to itself in its own history.  An acorn stands for a particular ecosystem inhabited by squirrels and it stands for the oak tree that the acorn itself will someday become.  Signification fit the ecological insistence on seeing all things as organically related and the spiritual insistence on seeing all things as transparent to their own finitude.

 

The practice of semiotics as an intellectual discipline and approach may thus prepare us for that spiritual knowing in which mental desires attenuate to the point of quietude.  The idea of infinite signification has already led us to the realization that, carried out long enough, every word gains multiple connections with every other word so that from anywhere in the net as signifier any other place in the net as signified can be reached. This process leads to infinite signification-the limitless standing of one thing for another.  Once in the position of this realization, we can see that the temporal process of analysis required by our minds distorts, like a mirror in a fun house, the simultaneity within which everything is already both connected to everything else and transparent to the existence of everything else. The forms are all together in everything.  We analyze and distinguish things according to their properties but in reality everything is one-every one is everything at once.  We cannot say this and make sense because saying, whether in our minds, through our voices or in our writing, obeys linear temporality, but we can experience it.  In Western philosophical history, we are invited to this experience through the aphorisms of Heracleitos, the journey through the gates of night and day of Parmenides, and in Plato’s dialogues, the visions of the beautiful and the good in the Symposium and the Republic and the vision of the one that guides, motivates and leads the Parmenides.

 

We discover, with Heracleitos, that the up down way is one and the same.  A ladder is a ladder whether we climb up it or climb down it.  A stairway is a stairway whether we walk up it or walk down it.  A lift is a lift whether we ride it up or down.  Every wave has both a peak and a trough.  No wave has only a peak or a trough.  Everything in the universe is composed of waves and particles.  Everything moves up and down, with its own peaks and troughs, in its own rhythm.

 

What of particles?  Particles are a momentary configuration of energy under certain conditions.  Particles are one pole of the most basic rhythm of energy that we know in the physical universe.  The wave/particle duality is that basic rhythm.  It is a vibration.  In these later days of modern physics, we often hear the phrase “wave/particle duality” as though it were an abstract, conceptual notion.  But the pioneers of modern physics, who met the early experimental findings with insight, were perfectly clear that nature vibrated.  We need only borrow a little in passing from Max Jammer’s study, The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics, such as Heisenberg’s idea of an atom as a set of oscillators (191), Lande’s atom as a virtual orchestra (Ibid.), Dellingshausen’s identification of atoms with standing waves and the motion of particles as a vibrational process (246), and De Broglie’s idea of the particle as the seat of a periodic internal phenomenon (247).  The vibration of wave and particle as alternate forms of energy is the most fundamental physical pole of our vibrational universe.

 

The other pole is spiritual.  The human mind moves from mental diversity to spiritual unity and back again.  The desire of scientists in all fields to find unifying theories of their disciplines, whether in psychology, sociology, or physics, reflects this motion.  But the mind is intrinsically incapable of anything more than hypothetical unity.  Actual, experiential unity can be approached by mind but mind is only a step toward unity. This insight, which was fluid and vital in Heracleitos, Parmenides, Anaximander and Plato, became frozen and polemic in the dogmatic philosophies, such as Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism and Cynicism, and monotheistic religions, such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, of Western Eurasian civilization.  In the last century, semiotics has helped to thaw the Western mind and to show, with contributions from thinkers such as Bhaktin, that we are continually involved in simultaneous processes of homogenization and heterogenization, of identification and differentiation.  We continually identify ourselves with larger entities and diverge from those entities through the specificities of our own thoughts, gestures and actions.  Just as the leaf of a tree is both one with all the other leaves and different from them in minute aspects of position, color, size and shape, so are we both one with everything and different from every other person and thing. 

 

Our entire being, from both its most fundamental physical to its most fundamental spiritual states and back again, vibrates.  The simultaneous vibration of our being between identification and differentiation, between oneness and manyness, and between unity and plurality defines the entire sphere of our freedom.  The one who can move from and through unity to diversity and back again is free. The movement, the rhythm, the freedom is in the person as it was in Heracleitos and Hegel. This freedom is absolute because it is the only possible way to be, to move, to realize on this plane, the plane of earth.

 

Plato’s auto kath’auto and Hegel’s absolute Idea are one and the same.  Just as you can think and live up and down the ladder of the divided line in Plato’s Politeia, so you can read Hegel’s Phenomenologie des Geistes backwards and forwards and come to and go from the same place-absolute freedom.

 

We may consider the Greek word “moira”-fate.  Why does the word for fate mean lot?  Because it is the fate of every existing thing to be a part, to be apart, to have a lot or portion (Anaximander) of everything-reality, being, truth, beauty, goodness, evil, oneness, diversity. Participation was Plato’s way of bringing the fluidity of unity/diversity in moira into non-mythical language-everything participates-has a part-has a lot-in everything-thus everything is connected both in Plato and in Hegel.

 

The whole civilization is one rhythm-it is vertical and horizontal at the same time-unifying and diversifying at the same time.  People seek maximum freedom and maximum security at the same time. Can they be found by being utterly alone or can they be found by being utterly welded into a group?  The latter is the direction of unification, the former is the direction of diversification; at one and the same time, being utterly alone is the direction of unification and being welded into a group is the direction of diversification.  Both are happening in all dimensions of this plane simultaneously.

 

What can we hold constant?  It is not light.  It is the rhythm of magnetic field and electrical field that both sequentially and simultaneously constitutes the structure and motion of light.  It is the rhythm of unity and diversity; it is the dance of creation and destruction.  It is Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva all at once.  It is the rhythm of concentration of electromagnetic particles/waves, themselves a rhythm of concentration and dispersion, and their dispersion.  In Chinese philosophy, it is the rhythm of light and dark, night and day, hot and cold, dark and light, dry and wet, not the opposites by themselves that is important.  That is the point-that is freedom and it is absolute because there is no other way to exist in, on or through this plane.

 

 

 

 

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