Abstract
Kant’s legacy to the nineteenth century was twofold. In the aesthetic realm, he presented imagination as engaged in interplay with other psychological powers. This led, through Fichte and Schelling, to the Romantic overgrowth of imagination conceived as not just artistic but creative and higher than reason. Baudelaire, developing a theory of works of art as images that are their own originals, brought more sobriety to the conception of art by taking careful account of the painstaking psychological and technical processes involved in artistic production. Kant’s idea of the interplay of psychological powers eventually led to the Freudian theory of dream symbols and the Lacanian understanding of the unconscious as structured like language. This notion of the connection between imagination and language was the second, more cognitively important Kantian legacy. His theory of the schema, a transcendental function of imagination uniting concepts with images, raised the question of the imaginative-conceptual character of language, although Kant himself scarcely addressed it. This question was in essence a return to Plato, who had understood logoi, words in discourse, as a fundamental kind of human imagining. Hegel tried to derive words from images using dialectical reason, but his claim that the process removed all sensory character obscured his other insights into imagination. By contrast, the language theories of three thinkers most responsible for the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy, Peirce, Saussure, and Wittgenstein, conceived language as originating in productive imagination and the fusion of fields of imaginative appearance.
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Notes
- 1.
Das Aussprechen eines Wortes ist gleichsam ein Anschlagen einer Taste auf dem Vorstellungsklavier.
- 2.
Most persuasively in Longuenesse 1998.
- 3.
See Heidegger 1929, 37 (§6) and 160–161 (§31). The passage in Kant is at A15/B29 (references to the First Critique will take this form of citing pages in the A edition followed by pages in the B edition, unless the passage in question occurs in just one of them).
- 4.
This happens chiefly in the sections devoted to pure principles of the understanding. The supreme principle of analytic judgments is not intrinsically temporal (A152–153/B192). It is the supreme principle of synthetic judgments that introduces the unique “sum total that contains all our presentations: viz., inner sense, and its apriori form, time” (A155/B194). The schematic implementation of time commences with the axioms of intuition and culminates in the three analogies of experience (see especially the A edition’s general statement of the principle of analogy, A176–177).
- 5.
The course was held in the summer semester of 1925 and first published as volume 20 of the Gesamtausgabe of Heidegger’s works. See Heidegger 1979, 267 and 442.
- 6.
A reminder: “conceptual topography” indicates a particular way of interpreting the possibilities opened by an underlying conceptual topology. See Sect. 3.6, above.
- 7.
Fichte regularly lectured on Wissenschaftslehre or “Doctrine of Science” over two decades. The most historically influential was the first version of 1794 along with the two introductions (1794 and 1798; they are included in Fichte 1970 [1794]). But the last word about the meaning and scope of imagination in Fichte has not been written.
- 8.
Whether Kant ever noticed that he in essence was reaffirming Aristotle’s principle that there is “no thinking without phantasms,” at least for thinking about the natural realm, is uncertain.
- 9.
There is no lack of secondary literature on Romanticism and its sources, although the historical scope is rarely sufficiently ample and the philosophical analysis rarely deep. For a standard account, see Engell 1981. For a literary-critical approach that is philosophically incisive and acutely attentive to Romanticism’s use and abuse of Fichte, see Walser 1981, 11–75.
- 10.
See Fichte 1994, 56. Fichte distinguished between the ordinary empirical sense of self (corresponding to Kant’s inner sense of temporality) and the philosophically educated transcendental experience of self as active and productive.
- 11.
This tendency to subordinate imagination to more reliable powers is the engine of Castoriadis’s critical history of the imagination. In a more constructive vein, while conceding that imagination must “lean on” nature, he argues that without imagination our rational explanations fail to achieve the total determination of natural things and events, and that not even natural causality and rationality together can account for human and social reality. Imagination, by leaning on nature, brings the human and social world into full being, and it always remains creatively open to the future. Thus politics, ethics, religion, language, and even the institution of science are all part of the “imaginary institution of society.” His account of the schemas of legein and teukhein (speaking–conceiving and making) are perhaps the most rigorous extension of Kant’s schemata since Kant himself. See the introduction to Chap. 9, below, and Castoriadis 1987 [1975]. Another notable attempt to develop schematism in a new, more comprehensive direction is Johnson 1987.
- 12.
See the Second Critique’s discussion of symbols, the typics of practical reason, and imagination in “On the Typic of the Pure Practical Power of Judgment” (Kant 1900 ff., 5: 67–71—henceforth Kant 1900 ff. will be referred to as “Akad.,” and the translations of passages from the Second and Third Critiques will be drawn from Kant 2002 [1788] and Kant 1987 [1790], respectively); also section 59 of the Third Critique, “On Beauty as the Symbol of Morality” (Akad. 5: 351–354). Fichte’s theory of artworks, “On the Spirit and the Letter in Philosophy,” dates from 1795, the year after the first Wissenschaftlehre; see Fichte 1984 [1795].
- 13.
See, e.g., Casey 2000, 177.
- 14.
Baudelaire’s implicit analogy is between the successive phases of realization and the 6 days of creation in Genesis. My analysis is heavily indebted to Frey 1996, esp. 61–98. This translation of the Baudelaire passage appears on p. 72 of Frey; the original is from the section “The government of imagination” of The Salon of 1859.
- 15.
This would be the place to reflect on another mid-nineteenth-century phenomenon, the philosophy and the imaginative practice of another urban flâneur–critic of bourgeois society, Søren Kierkegaard.
- 16.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe extended the idea of the transcendental functions of imagination to these more particularized approaches in his scientific research and historiography. See Sepper 2009.
- 17.
In the Second Critique Kant begins his discussion of respect for the moral law by remarking that “the moral law as determining basis of the will, by infringing all our inclinations, must bring about a feeling that can be called pain; and here we have, then, the first and perhaps also the only case where we have been able to determine a priori from concepts the relation of a cognition (here a cognition of pure practical reason) to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (Akad. 5: 73). At Akad. 5: 117, however, Kant notes parenthetically that “an intellectual feeling would be a contradiction.” The Third Critique’s investigation of the intellectual feeling of the sublime takes place from sect. 24 to sect. 29. The sublime is specifically defined as a (disproportionate) relationship between imagination and reason, and Kant arrives in sect. 26 at a definition: “Sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense” (Akad. 5: 250).
- 18.
There is, moreover, another point to be made: that with enough columns, even direct sense perception can be inadequate for counting them (for example, counting the columns visible around the base of the exterior of the Panthéon’s dome). Not even perception translates immediately into accurate conception—which reinforces the need to distinguish cooperating psychological powers in every mental act rather than proscribe their participation.
- 19.
- 20.
The step from the unconscious structuring to the structuring of the entire soul is short, in particular since in all Freudian topographies of the soul the infant is almost totally dominated by the as yet undisciplined id or unconscious. Any higher powers must be, quite literally, the result of partial structurings of the unconscious, and over time the unconscious as such is shaped by the experiences of the subject. When in the main text I say that there is a linguistic structure supervening on the natural, I am looking beyond Freudianism to include a more Aristotelian conception, in which the soul is the fundamental actuality of the organized body. The virtues or excellences are structurings by experience of the natural pleasure/pain and desire/aversion one feels, and thus they supervene on natural structures. Similarly and more basically, to train an infant to use a spoon or a cup is to restructure natural powers.
- 21.
Lacan eventually conceived the structuring of the soul according to three major aspects, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. The brief explanation I give here of the mirror experience does not observe the precision and complexity of Lacan’s presentation, but it does, I hope, give an at least initial insight into the entanglement of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Lacan’s original paper on the mirror stage, presented but interrupted (by the session chair, Freud’s student and biographer Ernest Jones) at the 1936 International Congress of Psychoanalysis, was lost. The most accessible later consideration is the paper Lacan delivered at the 1949 International Congress of Psychoanalysis; see Lacan 2006.
- 22.
Of course the wide availability of large, high-quality mirrors in a domestic setting makes it far more likely that the scenario will be played out as described. This and related historical and cultural contingencies raise important questions about the sequence of acquiring linguistic competencies as well as about whether there is a truly decisive aha!–moment in the acquisition of the ego function. Unlike with the Oedipus complex, however, they are not likely to evoke simple incredulity about the general plausibility of the theory. Such problems in fact invite further development of the theory (e.g., might historical, technological, and cultural differences affect the ways in which personhood and the I–function are lived out in various cultures) rather than dogmatic reassertion.
- 23.
The entwinement was expressed emblematically in the Borromean knot.
- 24.
See Sect. 6.9, n. 53, above.
- 25.
Lenses and lens systems have two points of focus, in two different planes: one is at the object, the other where the (subject’s) eye is positioned to see the object clearly. This is of course one of the themes that Lacan exploited in his 1950s presentations of the mirror stage.
- 26.
This reiterated movement between objects and ego can be traced back to Fichte’s Ich/Nicht–Ich dialectic.
- 27.
Reality not as res but as the condition of the possibility of any institution/constitution of the psyche.
- 28.
The point is not that interpreting color according to musical concepts is true or thoroughgoingly useful, but that the very fact of trying to correlate one field with another helps one to make more careful discriminations and distinctions. All the better, however, if the correlation is perfect!
- 29.
There is no doubt that Lacan was inclined to speculation and, especially in his later work, obscure. And there is, in addition, the worry that at moments he deliberately acted the provocateur—or, to put it less flatteringly, as Noam Chomsky did, that he was a bit of a charlatan. I would be the last to argue against the importance of trust in the sciences, but it is too easy an out for inquirers to make the accusation of charlatanry against someone and thereby to be done with whatever he said. The nihilistic rejectionism that I brought up in Chap. 1 has many forms. Moreover, it is worth more than just a moment’s reflection to consider that a charlatan’s success depends crucially on producing at least a simulacrum of truth according to imaginative possibility.
- 30.
For an introduction to Ricoeur’s semantic approach to imagination, see Ricoeur 1978.
- 31.
The topology of the sign relation was not invented by Aristotle, of course. It was already well established in the Hippocratic medical tradition, before which came the use of signs in divination. See Manetti 1993, ch. 1–3. Whether one should make a great deal out of the distinction that Aristotle draws in the passage between symbol (in noun form) and signing or signifying (in verb form) has been a matter of intensive debate since antiquity; see Kretzmann 1974.
- 32.
Unfortunately (or deliberately), in the Republic Plato’s Socrates does not discuss the ontological status of words. One way of putting the question would be to ask where (and whether) words should be positioned along the divided line of Book VI. If they are images they would seem to belong on the “lowest part,” along with reflections in water and mirrors. Insofar as they correlate with concepts, however, they seem to belong on the “highest part,” that of the ideas. Plato appears to leave the question to us; to answer it we would of course need to take into account other dialogues, chief among them the Phaedrus and the Cratylus (without forgetting Socrates’s autobiographical reflections in the Phaedo, where he describes turning away from Anaxogoras’s philosophy to an examination of logoi). I do not believe for a moment that Plato was unaware of the question. I suspect that the answer would have to reflect the fact that Books VI and VII of the Republic present the cosmos as organized by what I called (in Chap. 3, above) “ontological imaging.” That is, language is a human participation in the ontological imaging that, emanating from the good itself, joins all the parts of the line and all the parts of the cosmos into a well-ordered, representative whole.
- 33.
See, for instance, the theory presented by Augustine in De magistro (On the teacher). For Augustine, the role of the sign was incomplete without acknowledgment of the ultimate verbum: the mind of God, Christ, the second person of the Trinity.
- 34.
The distinction is generic because it applies to animals as well as human beings, and in human beings would not distinguish words from whistles or cries of pain. For further discussion, see the next paragraph, below, and Sect. 5.10, above.
- 35.
Recall that “abstraction” is a medieval term that has only limited justification in Aristotle’s Greek. On the “inner word” in medieval adaptations, see Lonergan 1997 (a book first published in 1967 and based on articles published in the 1940s).
- 36.
One cannot simply call schematism a theory of abstraction because it is a two-way street: the way from image to concept is the same as the way from concept to image. Schematism might therefore more properly be called a theory of abstraction–and–concretion.
- 37.
Hegel supervised three editions in his lifetime: 1817, 1827, and 1830. Later editions are typically based on Hegel 1840–1845, which published the three parts of the Encyclopedia—Logic (1840), Philosophy of Nature (1842), and Philosophy of Spirit (1845)—as separate volumes. Hegel 1840–1845 arose as follows. In lecture Hegel read to his students from the book’s sections, which were typically a paragraph or two, and commented on them. After his death, students collated notes they had taken during the lectures and added them, in reduced typeface, to the appropriate sections of the text of Hegel’s third edition. These notes, called Zusätze (plural of Zusatz, “addition”) obviously have lesser authority than the main text, though the editorial care of his students and the clearly high standard of their collective note-taking make them illuminating sources. Since the 577 sections of the Enzyklopädie are individually numbered, I will cite according to these section (§) numbers, with “Zusatz” if the passage is from the student-added notes. All translations are my own.
- 38.
The Philosophy of Spirit begins with §377 and ends with §577. At its outset (§378, thus just the second section of this third part of the Enzyklopädie) he says this: “The books of Aristotle on the soul, along with his treatises on its special aspects and circumstances, are consequently still the choicest or [even] only work of speculative interest about this subject. The essential purpose of a philosophy of spirit can only be this, to introduce the concept once again into the knowledge of the spirit, and thus also to open up once more the meaning of those Aristotelian books.” In a note on De anima from 1820, Hegel described the task of a modern philosophy of spirit this way: “in all this it comes down to translating it into our (admittedly more cultivated) way of thinking” (quoted, in German, in Ferrarin 2001, 234).
- 39.
“Internal senses” doctrines, of course, refer to the late-ancient and medieval theories of mind powers situated between the external senses and the intellect that had been inspired by Aristotle’s psychological writings.
- 40.
In the following brief discussion it is important to keep in mind that Hegel’s dialectical philosophizing is based on the underlying unity of apparent differences that are overcome by the progress of spirit, whether individual or collective spirit. Oppositions and differences start out appearing stark, almost dichotomous, but as they become more familiar one begins to glimpse ways in which they are united and eventually brings about a unity by thinking and living with the differences. This is true whether one is dealing with what is subjective, what is objective, or with the relationship between the subject and object.
- 41.
I prefer the colloquial English cognate “stuff” to the more usual “matter” or “material,” in part because of the diverse denotative range of German Stoff: cloth, fabric, material, matter, solid, stuff, subject matter, (chemical) substance, substrate, tissue. In the first instance what Hegel is indicating is that consciousness faces a world filled with all sorts of things—stuff.
- 42.
Hegel does not mention Aristotle’s conception of contrarieties in sensation. If he had, is there any doubt that he would have been able to develop and ramify them dialectically? There are already hints of this in his anthropological discussion of sensation in §401 and its Zusatz.
- 43.
In the Zusatz to §455, imagination is described as “above all the determining of images” (emphasis in original). Hegel lists the three fundamental kinds of Einbildungskraft as (1) reproductive imagination, (2) fantasy (productive imagination expanded upon as symbolizing, allegorizing, and poetizing imagination), and (3) sign-making fantasy (productive imagination that reaches the verge of abstract thinking); see §§455–457, at αα, ββ, and γγ. The first and second make a standard modern distinction—the first in fact appears to be Hegel’s creative adaptation to his philosophy of Kant’s schemata—whereas the third is Hegel’s true innovation. Especially in light of how he develops sign–making into words and then into thinking in the sections devoted to the third stage of representation, he anticipates to some degree Saussure’s ontology of language–signs.
- 44.
Since the misrepresentation of Hegel’s dialectic as thesis–antithesis–synthesis is still so widespread, I insert the following note: Dialectic understood according to this thetic triad is more Fichtean than Hegelian; it has been handed down to the present chiefly by Marxist tradition. Marx may have acquired it from lectures given in Berlin in the mid-1830s by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus. Hegel occasionally mentions the thetic triad, but when he does so he is critical of it, because he finds it to be an unworthy, merely mechanical understanding of dialectic. On the myth of the Hegelian triad, see Mueller 1958. More genuinely Hegelian is the illustrative image of the dialectical process Hegel gives in the preface to the Encyclopedia (§13): dialectic is a process of breakthrough from an initial circle to a containing circle, and then to yet another circle from the perspective of which the two previous circles are seen as a unity. Thus I have qualified the second position by the term “contextualizing.” In light of the present book’s arguments in behalf of conceptual topology, one might easily argue that this way of understanding dialectic as the re–positioning of circles makes Hegel the philosopher of conceptual topology par excellence. But in his insistence on liberating thought from the falsity of appearance, he falsifies imagination and also reason’s relation to imagination, and in a sense he even becomes unHegelian—that is, he falls short of the greatness of his profoundest thinking.
- 45.
“Perversity” should be taken here literally as well as figuratively. Literally it indicates a thoroughgoing turn away from X (here, the sensory–imaginative) toward its opposite Y (the purely abstract–conceptual). In the literal sense, calling Hegel’s attempt to leave the sensory behind “perverse” is merely factual. In the figurative sense what is “perverse” is ordinarily thought to have something of the immoral about it. The figurative use I intend is ethical insofar as it has to do with the ethos of philosophy and the ethos of inquiry. What consequences are there in denying the importance, relevance, or even being of something that one wants to leave behind in the course of an inquiry? Is the nihilism implied by such denial merely a logical matter, or is it ethical and ontological as well?
- 46.
As a counterexample, recall that, strictly speaking, Aristotle’s “no thinking without phantasms” means that even the most perfectly noetic understanding cannot entirely escape the human condition of having phantasms.
- 47.
This last clause identifies the locus of the problem. The crucial question is whether there is a level of form that is perfectly free of matter. Almost all nonmaterialist metaphysical systems say yes, and they try to get there by a kind of extrapolative argument. What this book has done is to reinforce the question mark after the question; it demands that the philosophers justify rather than merely invoke the right to step beyond the process of extrapolation and actually reach the purely formal realm.
- 48.
Robert Kugelmann has pointed out to me that in Boring (1950), the second edition of Edwin G. Boring’s classic History of Experimental Psychology, the index entry for “imagination” lists a single occurrence. This is a sign of the lack of interest in it as a topic for scientific investigation.
- 49.
I have seen the duck/rabbit figure so often that, when I turn the page of a book and come upon an instance, I see it immediately not as a duck or a rabbit but as “the duck/rabbit.” As a result, one has to be cautious about overgeneralizing Wittgenstein’s point that we do not take these implements on the table as cutlery. There may well be a biographical moment in the life of virtually every diner in which he learns to take knife, fork, and spoon together all at once as cutlery—certainly a cutlery saleman looks at them this way—but that does not mean that henceforth when he comes to table he ascertains first a knife, a fork, a spoon, and then adds to this a mental operation of taking the group as cutlery. That kind of explanation is psychologistic and false. It is false not because there is no psychological activity but rather because the explanation manufactures a scenario corresponding not to what happens but to what the explainer thinks the explanation should look like. Psychologism is often made-up psychology. But antipsychologism cannot guarantee that just by virtuously opposing psychologism it avoids being made up itself.
- 50.
A similar criticism could be made, of course, of cognitive and neurobiological theories that reduce psychology to a sequence of (nervous system) functions.
- 51.
The games can cross boundaries, of course. When the doctor jumps off the elliptical machine to assist the weightlifter whose knees buckled during a power lift, he is (figuratively) jumping back into the way of life of his medical practice.
- 52.
Wittgenstein 1922. This was a dual-language edition, with German and English on facing pages. The German version had been published a year earlier in Annalen der Naturphilosophie. The work is divided into short sections—some only one sentence long—that are enumerated decimally (thus section 1 has a subsection 1.1, which has three subsubsections, 1.11, 1.12, and 1.13, followed by subsection 1.2 and its single subsubsection, 1.21). I shall cite the work using these decimal numbers. I will often modify the English.
- 53.
The early positivist exploitation of the Tractatus referred to anything said about what was at the top of the ladder as nonsense, Unsinn, but their use of the word had a quite different valence from Wittgenstein’s. From the logical/scientific/linguistically expressible standpoint of Wittgenstein, any attempt to bespeak these things does not make sense, because language is about and directed to the scientifically describable world. The distaste that reverberates in the exploiters’ usage has little in common with Wittgenstein’s; it is an emotion-laden accusation rather than the ascertainment of a basic incapacity of language (in particular of scientific language). Whether metaphysical and ethical “things” “exist” is beyond the capacity of language to express and scientists (and philosophers) to judge; only human beings can decide, according to a different and perhaps more basic experience than that of the logically expressed world.
- 54.
Grimms Wörterbuch says that the word was originally applied to statues, then extended to paintings and drawings and appearances more generally.
- 55.
From this point onward I will refer to the major proposition N at the start of the Nth part as “proposition N,” and to the entirety of the Nth part as “section N.”
- 56.
My renderings diverge from that of translations that, till recently, have been standard—with the Tractatus having entered the public domain new translations are proliferating—but my choices are lexically and contextually every bit as justified as the standards. I will retain the conventional “fact” for Tatsache, because there are not many alternatives and because it is relatively unproblematic as long as one avoids the word “fact” for rendering other terms (e.g., as when Sachverhalt gets turned into “elementary fact,” “atomic fact”).
- 57.
My divergence from the standard translations is simply a question of not getting ahead of ourselves (much less ahead of Wittgenstein!) by overinterpreting at the outset. Tatsachen, facts, are the way the world falls into parts; the facts can be ultimately analyzed down into elementary facts, beneath which there is no further possibility of analysis, but complex facts are facts, too. “Existence” would be unproblematic for Dasein or Existenz but is too tendentious for Bestehen. In older philosophical parlance this would be better translated by “subsistence,” which can be used of the existence of both substances and accidents of substance and tends to suggest persistence in existence, as Bestehen in fact does. As for Sachverhalt, pl. Sachverhalten: it should be out of the question to translate it with any version of “fact,” since it is historical accident that English fact corresponds to German Tatsache, deed–thing, and that Sachverhalt contains the stem Sach– that also appears in Tatsache. Doing otherwise is to confuse matters. Wittgenstein immediately establishes a basic synonymy of Sache with Gegenstand and Ding, which should only reinforce the decision to render Sache, unless circumstances demand otherwise, with the generic English “thing.” Verhalt– appears also in Verhältnis, which variously can mean “proportion,” “circumstance,” “condition,” “relation(ship)”; and verhalten as reflexive verb indicates acting or behaving, conducting or comporting (oneself). “State or states of affairs” would thus be a somewhat anodyne but acceptable alternative.
- 58.
See the end of the next paragraph for a justification of “projecting.”
- 59.
Wittgenstein may have been thinking of this kind of model in 2.0272 of the Tractatus, and in 3.1431 when he says that the “sense of the sentence” (regarding “tables, chairs, books”) is expressed by the reciprocal spatial situation of these spatial objects. The Paris court scenario is mentioned in the notebook entry dated 29 Sept. 1914; see Wittgenstein 1998, 7; also the discussion in McManus 2006. For a strong philosophical-historical presentation of Wittgenstein’s theory of the unity of proposition and image throughout his career, see Perrin 2007.
- 60.
This is intensively dealt with in propositions 2.0121–2.0124, which are comments on 2.012: “In logic nothing is accidental: if the thing [Ding] can occur in the relation of things, then the possibility of the relation of things must already be prejudged in the thing.”
- 61.
Like Kant’s, Wittgenstein’s basic theory of imagination is transcendental. One consequence is that later quasi-Wittgensteinian theories of imagining that conceive it as an attitude (such as believing or supposing) toward a proposition are talking about something peripheral, something other than and secondary to a more primordial imagining that propositions reflect in their very constitution.
- 62.
Saussure’s use of “phonology” basically corresponds to contemporary “phonetics.” Both terms refer to meaningful sound in language. Contemporary linguists use “phonology” to refer to the principles of sound production governing a specific language, whereas the general theory of linguistic sound production is called “phonetics.” Thus the French u is not part of English phonology, although it is part of phonetics.
- 63.
By placing the word between forward-leaning slashes I am referring to the phonetic transcription of the word. I am not actually giving a transcription, however, but merely indicating that one should think of just the sound of the word placed between the slashes. Notice that the idea of the tree fused with the sound /tree/ is a different sign (a sign of English) than the idea of tree fused with the sounds /arbre/ or /arbor/ (signs of French and Latin, respectively).
- 64.
The chief medieval influences on Peirce’s sign theory were John Duns Scotus and John of St. Thomas (also known as Jean Poinsot). In Scotus’ realism the sign has a more direct relationship to the real-world thing than would be true, say, of the Dominican (Thomist) tradition. Given the quasi-Aristotelian background of medieval philosophy in general, the theory was still explained using phantasms. See section 10 (“Mind and Semeiotic”) in Burch 2010, and Dumont 1965.
- 65.
From the last sentence under Question 5 of Peirce 1868a.
- 66.
Peirce 1867. It is divided into 15 “sections,” which range in length from one or two sentences (sections 1 and 2, respectively) to about three pages (section 15). I will cite it by section (§) number.
- 67.
In Categories, ch. 5, 2a11–12.
- 68.
See especially §6 of “New List.” For discussions of the reception of Kant by his early followers, see Beiser 2002.
- 69.
This is not to assert that signs cannot be images or have typical properties of images like resemblance to the things they image. Moreover, since signs are presentations or appearances they have no less an image character than do any other determinate presentations to consciousness. Nevertheless, it is clear that Peirce thinks that the sign is intrinsically mind-directed and mind-directing (i.e., signifying), not entirely dissimilar from the way the great philosophers of imagination understand the image not as a thing but as a dynamic position in a topological field.
- 70.
Whether Kant can literally mean what he says is problematic, however, or at least requires a more refined discrimination of basic cases, since the thaler produced by imagination in its ordinary productive sense (for example, in a story as it is being planned by a novelist) “exists” in the manifold of sensibility for him, even if it is only imaginatively. This does not in itself infirm Kant’s larger point, however: that the conceptual content of any subject is independent of every possible realization, even imaginative ones (which would support his contention that being cannot be a predicate). It would, however, require a nontrivial discussion of whether the manifold of sensibility has different modes in sensation, memory, imagination, and the like.
- 71.
As problematic as it sounds, this assertion has to be right, insofar as Kant offers no alternative “locus” where the imagined as opposed to the real-world thaler has its place. See the previous note.
- 72.
With the basic phenomenology of attention in §3, for example, or in §8, where he explicitly invokes empirical psychology’s discovery that we know qualities only by contrast and similitude.
- 73.
It is as though the plane of the subject and the plane of the predicate separate so that the point of visual focus is no longer in either of those planes. Hegel, of course, also remarked a kind of confused focus in every nonidentical proposition “A is B” (that is, where A ≠ B): the mind, beginning with A, must move to something else, B, following upon which it must (re)establish the unity of the two together.
- 74.
The point being that a certain thing in the world may be indicated by “George” or “Tappan” (that is, by names), but that is not to designate or know its kind.
- 75.
With this remark I am scarcely more than gesturing toward what requires detailed exegesis. Recall, for instance, that although in the first instance Kant understands the schemata as implementing the pure concepts of the understanding (like unity and substance), the examples he actually gives are for schemata of “dog” and “triangle”; see Sect. 7.7, above. Umberto Eco has explored at length the affinity between Peircean semiosis and Kantian schematism in chapter 2 of Eco 2000.
- 76.
I will continue using the spelling I introduced in Sect. 5.13. Peirce uses “prescision.”
- 77.
Recall that it was later interpreters of Aristotle who introduced the process “abstraction.” Aristotle himself calls the process of arriving at this kind of universal epagogē, induction. The infant who learns to say “cat” of some animals and “squirrel” or “dog” of others, and later to say “mammal” and “nonfish” of all three, has recognized different intelligibilities in the phantasms presented by sense through induction.
- 78.
A scientific discipline is constituted by various planes in which theory, laboratory practice, and applications work with the typified objects of the discipline. These are routinizations of the pragmatic signification function, which is capable of routinization in planes or fields precisely because it is constantly, ad hoc, taking a distance from objects and then returning to them.
- 79.
- 80.
In their introduction to the recent discoveries, Bouquet and Engler claim that the influence of the 1916 work kept scholars from seeing the implications of the variants that began appearing in the 1950s and 1960s; see Saussure 2002, 8–11, and Saussure 2006, xii–xiv. Engler’s earlier, magisterial collation (in six parallel columns) of variants of the 1916 Course provided the most abundant evidence of a different Saussure; see Saussure 1968. Agamben 1993 [1977] was brilliantly prescient in presenting him as not merely a great linguistic scientist but also a profound philosopher of language and the language-using mind. Two recent critical works that have helped transform the study of Saussure are Thibault 1997 and Maniglier 2006. The latter especially has allowed me to turn what had been occasional insights and intimations into a focused view of Saussure. The following account could not have been written without it.
- 81.
Notice that most of the explanation here having to do with the signal or signifier have dealt more with the written forms of differentiation than with the spoken. Dealing with the spoken forms is more complicated, but in that respect more similar to the complications of the signified in use. An indefinite but still limited range of variations of idea/image elicits the same sound–signal; an indefinite but still limited range of sounds (yet all marked by the identical letters on a page, whether one says for “tuba” something that sounds like /too–buh/ or /tyu–buh/ or /too–bah/ or /too–bur/) elicits the same idea/image. One can try to define a social standard of pronunciation and meaning—after all, semiology is social psychology—but it will not for all that always be the authoritative standard for either, and over time any standard will inevitably shift, both in terms of meaning and of sound. See the following paragraphs.
- 82.
One has to wonder whether the usual interpretations of “arbitrary” in the Course is not in part a result of what French linguists call faux amis, linguistic “false friends” (words in different languages that appear to be cognate but are not, or were but have undergone semantic shifts). “Arbitrary” in English can scarcely be used in other than a pejorative sense, but that is not true of the French “arbitraire” even today, and even less so according to its usage a century ago.
- 83.
But let an unconventional-sounding word be introduced in a wildly popular movie and we will suddenly find ourselves (or our children) using a sound we never would have expected.
- 84.
Fictional, but not science fictional: that is, we would not have to postulate a race of Alpha Centaurans whose physiology was based on silicon rather than carbon. It is certainly imaginable that professional auto painters might have words of this general type in their argot. That would go some way toward establishing a Saussurean point: that language (langue) shapes mind to experience the world and to bespeak it (in parole) in the ways that language adumbrates. In that sense it is a form of anticipatory imagination.
- 85.
So, for example, if the new word corresponding to the gleam of the sun off the fading paint of a car hood were “sinteraze,” it would not be the case that all the differentiations of the sound from related sounds in the language would closely parallel all the differentiations of the meaning from related meanings (it is not a sin to sinteraze). But as soon as the word is accepted, it becomes a node not just in two differential networks—of sound on the one hand and meaning on the other—but also in the doubly differential network of language as signs.
- 86.
One might speak of potentiation probabilities here, which will themselves always be differential. It was not inevitable that “google” would be accepted into the English language, although the success of the search engine made it more likely. So did the phonological and morphological characteristics of the word—for example, a word that is more euphoniously pronounced with the various suffixes that a verb will require is more likely to be adopted as a verb than another word that does not suffix as easily. If the Google search engine had been named Basis, we might well not be saying that we are “basising” ourselves.
- 87.
This concept may be annoying to atomistic individualists for whom the social is nothing but the sum of individual choices and acts. But even for atomistic individualists there is a difference in point of view between private and public acts. Hobbes’s theory of language illustrates this: each person is free to reason according to the marks of similarity and dissimilarity of ideas that please him, but in order to communicate he must be willing to surrender this autonomy. (It is impossible, of course, that a real language could come into existence simply on this model.) This is in almost perfect parallel with Hobbes’s conception of how legitimate government (that is, the Leviathan) is constituted. Language is, after all, the first social institution.
- 88.
One has to acknowledge three systems here, precisely because the fused system is not a simple association of the sound system and the mental system. As the next few sentences make clear, the sound system and the meaning system are not and cannot be, overall, isomorphic to one another. But this is not to say that there are not localized isomorphisms in particular locales (/play/ used as the sound fused with the meaning of a certain kind of recreational activity sets up a locale for both sound forms and meaning forms like played, player, playful, playing, displayed, etc.), and schematized general isomorphisms across the entire field of sound–with–meaning (like the –ed suffix lending the sense of pastness to verbs—which is general but not universal, as take–taken exhibits). The recently discovered notes of Saussure emphasize that it is not simply sound per se that gets fused with meaning but a small subset of sounds that are significantly producible (phonemes)—thus this subset has already entered into the realm of significant mental experience and is not totally separate from the “mental system”—and, similarly but not isomorphically, it is only a subset of the blooming, buzzing confusion of mentality that is signified. Saussure’s fundamental insight could be seen as an extension of Descartes’ insight regarding the foundations of analytic geometry. The arbitrary, imaginative naming of geometrical lengths and areas can be done not just ad hoc but with the purpose of incorporating the labeling into formulaic representations of complex mathematical relationships; these in turn are a limited subset of possible formulaic uses, a subset systematically treatable in the more abstract imagining of algebra. Letters are not isomorphic to points and lines, yet they can be combined in a manner that nevertheless allows the mind to recognize and preserve features of the phenomena of interest, beginning with order and measure. But if one is blind to the imaginative character of mathematics, it is easier to be deaf to the dual- or even triple-aspect phenomenality of word–schemata.
- 89.
- 90.
“Pictorial” because it is quite literally a picture rather than a diagram, though it is used analogically. There is one that is actually more pictorial near the end of part 1: a botanical drawing showing the anatomy of a plant stem (Saussure 1916, 125). But unlike the case of Fig. 8.5, interpreting it is quite straightforward: the difference between a transverse and longitudinal section of the stem is analogized to synchronic and diachronic approaches to language.
- 91.
I have translated the passage in the form given in Maniglier 2006, 278, which produces a smoothly readable version incorporating both the more episodic division of Riedlinger’s notes in Saussure 1968, 253–254 (column 2) and the corresponding, more continuous version of his notes in Saussure 1957, 37–38.
- 92.
- 93.
In the Écrits Saussure says that if we were simply presented with a succession of simple colors (projected from slides onto a screen), “it would appear almost impossible to conceive of all these signs in their sequence, or ‘as a synthesizable sequence, forming a whole’”; but when simultaneously displayed “we will have a pattern, which while not synthesizable for everybody, is at least beginning to become synthesizable and to be a pattern” (Saussure 2002, 109–110; Saussure 2006, 74–75). For Saussure, signitive articulation is a phenomenon that occurs with masses and wholes rather than particulars, with fields rather than objects or points. The language of synthesis suggests more a revised Kantianism than Humean associationism.
- 94.
Today one might be able to design an algorithm and program a device to do some of this classificatory work, but one could hardly maintain that the algorithm and device had no experience of language insofar as their design would be predicated on the programmer–designer’s linguistic competencies, both cultural and scientific.
- 95.
One does not need to be a strong social constructivist to recognize that language is socially constructed. That does not mean, however, that everything about it and its use is irrational, unreal, and artificial. Quite the contrary!
- 96.
The materials are not simple physical entities but materials with established and discoverable expressivity in the art. That is the psychological, indeed social-psychological aspect of the materials. The resultant work of art is also both social-psychological and individually psychological. None of these aspects exists without the network of materials and practices.
- 97.
The comparison limps in the sense that the differentiation between prices (which are signs that fuse goods and exchange value) is purely linear, whereas the signs of language have all the types of differentiation (and more) that Saussure represents in his various diagrams.
- 98.
One small example: the subtle difference in the “p” sounds in pat, bump, bumper cars, and appear.
- 99.
Of course a cognitive scientist might argue that evolutionary physiology must already have solved the problem of combining the three sound–units into a complex sound. But this very statement reveals rather than conceals the point-of-view problem, and analyzing it would reveal the scientist’s multiple acts of imaginative relocation of the original (e.g., reconceiving the situation in the field of physiology, then evolution; or conceiving “put” as /p–u–t/, projecting it into loci of physiological activity in nerves and brain, and projecting that into the framework of information processing). Of course the cognitive scientist might make a counterclaim that Saussureans do the same thing (Saussure agrees!). But that is less a counterclaim than a substantiation of the point this book has been making: that the human mind for the most part, and perhaps universally, thinks imaginatively; it produces fields by cross-sectioning the real world and possibilities of the real world, and it works in and projects to and from such fields, over and over again. The fields and projections of imagining are legion.
- 100.
This allows us to answer Wittgenstein’s question about private language in a Saussurean fashion: no, there can be no private language, because the ideal realm is unstable until it is shaped by signs. Signs are stable because they are a socially enforced psychological fusion of sound and meaning and because as signs they have systematic value relations to one another that reinforce their stability.
- 101.
See Saussure 2002, 44, 64, 73, and 83; Saussure 2006, 25–26, 41, 48, and 57. Saussure 2002, 227 (in English, Saussure 2006, 159–160) suggests that there is nothing for psychology to study beyond what is semiological. This would open up a different kind of critique of psychologism than most existent types: ideas, images, concepts, and the like cannot be studied from the perspective of discrete soul powers because they are always already interactively semiological phenomena. Substitute “semiotic” for “semiological” and one gets the Peircean equivalent.
- 102.
To shift for a moment to Kantian terms: language is a schematism more comprehensive than the First Critique (even amplified by all the other critical writings) explains. The manifold of sensibility is organized not just aesthetically (in the presentations of space and time) and logically (in the forms of the pure concepts of the understanding) but as an accordance with all the forms of one’s native language. This is perhaps what Kant was beginning to recognize with his examples of single schemata like triangle and dog, although the approach was too ad hoc and particular to reflect the systematicity of language that is key to Saussure. And to shift for an even briefer moment to Wittgenstein: if the Tractatus presupposes a kind of transduction of experience into logical form, Saussure’s langue can be understood as the comprehensive transducing machine from which emerges even the forms of logic.
- 103.
This paragraph simply translates into Aristotelian idiom Maniglier’s account of Saussure’s semiology.
- 104.
If there is a second, square-bracketed date, it indicates the year the work first appeared in its original language.
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Sepper, D.L. (2013). After Kant: Appropriating the Conceptual Topology of Imagination. In: Understanding Imagination. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 33. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6507-8_8
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