Abstract
Semiotican Myrdene Anderson recalls that biosemiotics founder Thomas A. Sebeok would often identify certain prescient thinkers whose work was deeply involved in, and productive for, semiotic analysis without the thinker being aware of it as such (such as Jakob von Uexküll), as cryptosemioticans – while protosemioticians was the name that he would assign to those groundbreaking ancestors of the field before the field per se had been established, such as Charles Sanders Peirce (Anderson 2003: 301). Biosemiotician Kalevi Kull, in considering the belated discovery of F.S. Rothschild’s six decades’ worth of work in a self-proclaimed “biosemiotics” by contemporary biosemioticans only at the turn of the 21st century, wonders whether either of these two terms would rightly apply to Rothschild, given that “he both knew semiotics and applied it [to biology]” and had even been had been the first to use the term biosemiotics in a scientific paper, in 1963.
Friedrich S. Rothschild (1899–1995)
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Notes
- 1.
Rothschild’s analogy with the futility of attempting to analyze word meaning purely as a problem in physics is echoed by Albert Einstein’s observation (recalled by Howard Pattee in Chapter Seventeen of this volume) that one could, if one wished, construct a graph of air pressures as a way of “analyzing” the beauty and emotional power of a Beethoven symphony, but that one would thereby be ignoring the very thing that, in doing so, one first set out to explain. This same logic underlies philosopher Daniel Dennet’s (1992) “flight simulator video game” arguments against the explanatory viability of a purely physicalist explanation of brain activity for understanding and explaining our experience of “mind”. Observing the activity of the electronic impulses taking place on the computer’s circuit board, no matter how minutely, Dennet argues, will not reveal the relevant entities, categories, and relations that constitute the consequential semiotic products of those activities for the user of the software.
- 2.
A virulent and outspoken anti-Semite, Klages’ work today is celebrated on such websites as the one dedicated to the founder of the American Racial Nationalism movement, Revilo Oliver, at: http://www.revilo-oliver. com/Writers/ Klages/Ludwig_ Klages.html. Despite the good deal of fairly scurrilous material on the pages surrounding it, the scholarship on Klages that has been collected at that site is impressive (if a bit fawning) and will certainly prove of interest to those wishing to better understand Rothschild’s thought. We learn there, for instance, that “Klages refuted the doctrine of fixed signs which had so misled his predecessors, who erroneously ascribed atomistic character traits to discrete signs, without perceiving the contextual matrix from which these signs are born. Yet the biocentric investigator does not concern himself with such expressive fragments: for life can only be found in organic wholes” (Cartney: o.l.).
Even more provocatively: “In the unique phenomenology of Ludwig Klages, images constitute the souls of such phenomena as plants, animals, human beings, and even the cosmos itself. These images do not deceive: they express; these living images are not to be ‘grasped,’ not to be rigidified into concepts: they are to be experienced. The world of things, on the other hand, forms the proper subject of scientific explanatory schemes that seek to ‘fix’ things in the ‘grasp’ of concepts. ‘Things’ are appropriated by men who owe their allegiance to the will and its projects. The agents of the will appropriate the substance of the living world in order to convert it into the dead world of things, which are reduced to the status of the material components required for purposeful activities, such as the industrial production of high-tech weapons systems. This purposeful activity manifests the outward operations of an occult and dæmonic principle of destruction. In his three volume Reason as the Antagonist of the Soul, Klages calls this destructive principle ‘spirit’ (Geist) …[arguing that] it is precisely the images and their ceaseless transformations that constitute the only realities” (Cartney o.l.).
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Favareau, D. (2009). Laws of Symbolic Mediation in the Dynamics of Self and Personality. In: Essential Readings in Biosemiotics. Biosemiotics, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9650-1_14
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