Abstract
The human is an animal that refers to itself as an “I”. According to Descartes, the subject is an axiom, and everything else follows from this primordial certainty. This is a dualism: to postulate an I as separate from the natural world. Prodi rejects this dualism. The challenge of Prodi is to find a naturalistically way to explain how human subjectivity can emerge from the world of things; that is, from biosemiotic complementarity to the I. For Prodi, following Vygotsky’s hypothesis , the “I” qua self-conscious psychological entity, is inseparable from the pronoun “I”, i.e. the discursive capacity to refer to oneself. Human consciousness is therefore the capacity to pay attention to oneself by means of language.
Dualism is not overcome by synthesis, but by the acknowledgement that, at the root of things, there is no dualism at all.
(Prodi 1987b: 119)
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Notes
- 1.
The first application of the Möbius strip to semiotics can be found in Lo Piparo 1992.
- 2.
Nowadays it is becoming less and less certain that the texts traditionally attributed to Vygotsky were actually written by him alone (Yasnitsky, Van der Veer 2016). However, the ideas that one can find in Vygotsky and Luria’s Tool and symbol in child development are very similar to those found in the books that were published under Vygotsky’s name when he was still alive. For this reason, I believe that Tool and symbol in child development can still be considered a reliable source for Vygotsky’s own ideas.
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Cimatti, F. (2018). Attention and Consciousness. In: A Biosemiotic Ontology . Biosemiotics, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97903-8_8
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