TOWARDS A UNIFIED CONCEPTION OF THE LINGUISTIC SELF WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF SEMIOTIC PHENOMENOLOGY
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland
Abstract
This paper focuses on the human self as a member of a society and an active participant of observable interpersonal and assumable intersubjective collectivities in relation to its linguistic and communicative properties. Making use of the notion of the self originating in the philosophical works of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910) and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), it opts for explaining the nature of self-consciousness in terms of the duality of its manifestations in the mind. Accordingly, it treats the human self as (1) the subject (or the I who experiences, thinks, and speaks), and (2) the object of his or her own experiences, thoughts and utterances (or the me as a physical person). By the way, attention will be paid to the fact that, regarding the specificity of particular languages, the distinction between the mental subject and the physical person expressible in English does not make sense in the same way, for example, in Spanish, Portuguese or Italian where one speaks rather about twofold qualities of an ego, i.e., corporeal-empirical and subjective-rational. Thus, with regard to sending or receiving and understanding or interpreting activities of communication participants, one refers to inter-corporeal and inter-subjective relationships among them. To end with, one must emphasize that the notion of the self as such is not fully mutually translatable from one language into another and has different connotations, for example, in English, German and Polish.
All in all, the aim of this paper is to report on steps of its author’s reasoning which allowed her to propose the notion of the linguistic self approachable predominantly, if not exclusively, from the viewpoint of the significative-communicative acts performed by humans in their life-worlds. Thus, the paper will expound on selected philosophical outlooks on man and his mental endowment responsible for the emergence of language. In particular, the subject of deliberations will constitute such terms as conceptual and methodological tools as (1) the ecology of organisms from biology, (2) existence and transcendence from phenomenology, (3) the distinction between the physical and logical domains from human linguistics, and (4) forms of beings of the subject and modalities of their expression in verbal and nonverbal means from existential semiotics.
1. Introductory remarks
This paper discusses foundations of a positivistic conception of the human individual from the perspective of self-oriented studies. It focuses on the self in relation to its linguistic and communicative properties as a member of society and an active participant of observable interpersonal and assumable intersubjective collectivities. Making use of the notion coming from philosophy and psychology, it explains the consciousness of the self in terms of the duality of its manifestations in the mind. Accordingly, it treats the human self as: (1) a mental subject, i.e., the I as an internally conceivable experiencing agent who formulates and interprets his thoughts in sign patterns, (2) a physical person, i.e., the Me as an externally observable object of experience who sends and receives its messages through sign practices.
The aim of this paper is to convey a report on reasoning steps which has allowed the author to propose the notion of the linguistic self approachable from the viewpoint of its significative-communicative acts performed in the domains of its everyday life. In expounding on selected outlooks on the species-characteristic endowments of man responsible for the emergence of language, it exposes particularly the notions of (1) ecology derived from biology, (2) existence and transcendence – from phenomenology, (3) physical and logical domains of communication – from human linguistics, and (4) forms of beings of the subject and modalities of their expression in verbal and nonverbal means from existential semiotics.
2. On the linguistic faculty of humans
Whenever issues of the relationships between language and man, language and thought, and of the approachability of language in social interactions are under consideration, it is right to note that the emergence of the linguistic faculties of humans goes hand in hand with their intellectual and emotional growth. This ascertainment clearly follows from scientific evidence provided, inter alia, by such contemporary scholars and researchers as especially Tomasello (1999, 2003, 2008), Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002), Jackendoff (2002), Jackendoff, Pinker (2005), Pinker (1994, 2002), Pinker, Jackendoff (2005) and others, regardless of to what degree they acknowledge genes or the environment to be decisive factors in the development of language. To be precise, some psychic, cognitive and interpersonal abilities in conjunction with language skills cause that human individuals are aware of their own knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, preferred values, desires, goals and intentions. Moreover, as it results from arguments set forth by respective authors, it is exactly thanks to linguistic abilities that human individuals, on the one hand, realize the non-identity of their own mental states with the mental states of others, and, on the other, are capable of sharing intentional states with others as well as ascribing their mental states to other individuals.
Taking up the topic of the human self in the context of the study of language and communication, it is worthwhile remembering that language may fulfill manifold roles in relation to a human individual. For example, Joseph A. DeVito, an American scholar whose books on interpersonal communication have appeared since 1970s, maintained, with reference to functions of language distinguished by Roman Jakobson (1960), that languages, acquired through social interaction allow human individuals to develop speaking skills and that their use results not exclusively from pure communicative matters but is conditioned by culture. DeVito (1976: 34–36) pointed out that human communication, when looking from the point of view of higher needs of its participants, serves to stimulate thoughts, to provoke questions, to entertain others, to reinforce or to change attitudes and to change the behavior of others. It is thus understandable that human beings, distinguished by their capacity for acquiring and using natural languages try to understand and influence their environment, for example, in the domains of philosophy, religion, art and science. In fact, symbolic communication constitutes a prerequisite for the emergence of society based on shared norms and values where individuals realize their roles in the domains of everyday life.
Against the background of statements characterizing language as a human faculty, theoretical distinctions and concepts, which have paved the way to the crystallization of the notion of the linguistic self, deserve a more detailed explanation. They have been elaborated by representatives of disciplines focusing on man and his broadly understood conditionings, such as ecology, studying interactions of living organisms with each other and with their environments, phenomenology, interested in the nature of human consciousness and experience, human linguistics, treating language as a relational property of communicating individuals and existential semiotics dealing with semiotic processes of human subjects who cope with their being in the world through the rational acts of consciousness.
3. The ecology of biological organisms vs. human ecology
Interests in mutual relationships between communicating individuals and their environments bring to mind the ecological way of reasoning rooted in the naturalist heritage of Ernst (Heinrich Philipp August) Haeckel ([1866]1988). As has been pointed out by Wąsik, E. (2010: 75), the term ecology referred initially, according to this German biologist and philosopher of evolution, to the studies of the relationships existing between organisms and their environments. Subsequently, it became popular in the domain of sociological studies concerned with the spacing and interdependence of people and institutions. The idea of “human ecology”, initiated by Robert Ezra Park and Ernest Watson Burgess (1921), was propagated by Amos H. Hawley (1950). It should be added that the word ecology connoted also the care for endangered species or for the purity of the environment in which living systems function. And more importantly, in the 1970s practitioners of linguistic studies, especially Einar Haugen (1972), put into use the term ecology of language with reference to a neutral understanding of the German term Ökologie coined in 1866, which has been further elaborated, e.g., by Wąsik, Z. (1993a, 1993b) and Wąsik, E. (1999a, 1999b) (see more Wąsik 2010: 75–76).
The notion of the ecology of language has been defined in Wąsik, E. (2010: 75–79) as a domain dealing with extrasystemic conditionings of language or extralinguistic properties of languages spoken and understood in human communication. As it turned out, specifications of the so-called ecological variables which determine the functioning of languages in societies led ultimately to interests in their speakers. According to Haugen (1972), the real ecology of language constitute minds of monolingual or multilingual individuals interacting with each other as members of particular speech communities. Thus, as has been stated by Wąsik, E. (2010: 76), languages depend on people who realize their communicational tasks speaking them. Therefore, external conditionings of verbal forms of communication are factors taken into account by representatives of contact linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and other domains of study. The assumption that the crucial part of the ecology of language constitutes the ecology of language bearers is thus equal to the statement that the only active subjects in linguistic communication are humans as organisms, mental subjects and agents in social encounters.
4. Transcendence and existence as key concepts of phenomenology
Since conscious states of human minds experienced from the first-person perspective are decisive for human action, a way to understand psychological aspects of human communication is to refer to phenomenology concerned with philosophical studies of consciousness. One has to mention that it is things as they appear in human experience, or ways of how human individuals experience things and the meanings of them which have been called phenomena in keeping with the distinction made by Immanuel Kant (1938[1781] between noumenon, i.e., ‘the thing-in-itself’ existing beyond human cognition and phenomenon, i.e., ‘the-thing-for-us’ existing as appearances of cognized reality. It was, however, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1977/1910/[1952/1807/]) who first had applied the term phenomenology to describe the nature of experiential reality in his Phenomenology of spirit (rendered also as Phenomenology of mind), with reference to the distinction made by Kant (cf. Phenomenology online 2014). From among representatives of phenomenology in the 20th century, one has to enumerate here especially Edmund Husserl, the author of Logical investigations (1970[1913/1900/] and 1970[1922/1901/]) and Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy (1970[1913]), Martin Heidegger, the author of, inter alia, Being and time (1962[1927]), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), the promoter of embodied cognition and the author of Phenomenology of perception (1962[1945/1944/]), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), the author of The transcendence of the ego 1960/1991/[1936–1937], and Being and nothingness (1956 [1943]).
These philosophers paid attention to conscious experiences of human individuals, realized by senses from a subjective viewpoint. They tried to get insight into subjective experiences, sensual perceptions, thinking and feeling of humans. What results from the phenomenological approach to man in which the intentional attitude is an inseparable component of experiencing, all human experiences are directed toward things in the world. Consciousness, being always the consciousness of an object, even if the object does not exist in reality, is, according to the proponents of phenomenology, always intentional.
The notions of transcendence and existence refer to two ways of practicing phenomenology. The transcendental phenomenology, concerned with knowledge and cognition, must be characterized as phenomenology of consciousness. It exposed the notion of the transcendental ego, in the consciousness of whom and thanks to consciousness, the being of things was made possible. The notion of transcendence in the study of phenomena was referred, just by Husserl, to the method which he called eidetic reduction. By its means, eidetic or invariant aspects of phenomena as appearances of things should be explained and described with reference to the intentional structure of consciousness of an individual. He postulated an explication of how the meanings of things were constituted by consciousness in consciousness through procedures of reduction and constitution of meaning of which phenomenological reflection consists. While the transcendental reduction amounted to withdrawal from the natural attitude and from the everyday world toward the intersubjective level of the transcendental ego, the constitution of meaning amounted to the return to the world from consciousness as it shows itself in consciousness.
Admittedly, even though Husserl initially insisted upon describing acts of creating the meaning of things performed at the ideal level of a transcendental ego, phenomenology has exposed immediate experience as a source of knowledge and appreciated the role of the human body in shaping mental representations. While this initial phenomenological inquiry of Husserl was the search for transcendental essences and a description of the way how phenomena are constituted in and by consciousness, existential phenomenology was concerned with being and experiences lived by human individuals in their life world. The turn toward existential aspects of experiencing was observed in the philosophy of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but also Husserl opted for including the notion of the life world of everyday experience in the phenomenological considerations in his last work The crisis of the European sciences (1970[1956{1935–1936}]). Heidegger and Sartre believed that human individuals create their own values and determine the meanings for their life through acts of consciousness, subscribed, however, to the idea of the primacy of existence before consciousness. They argued that existence cannot be reduced to consciousness of it, and moreover, that there are also such aspects of existence, or being-in-the-world of which an individual is not conscious.
5. The physical and logical domains of human communication
The terms physical domain and logical domain borrowed from human linguistics promoted by Victor H. Yngve (1996), an American physicist and linguist, are useful for estimating the agency role of communication participants. In accordance with Yngve’s view, what is accessible in the real world is not the language as an abstract system of lexical items but only the people who communicate with each other. Therefore, researchers should depart from the concrete manifestation forms of the linguistic properties of communicating individuals, while studying how they assemble into discursive communities through the realization of shared tasks (as stated in Wąsik, E. 2000 and 2003) as constitutive aspects of human ecosystems formed in the natural and socio-cultural domains of human life (cf. also Wąsik, E. 2010: 75).
Hence, the distinction between the physical domain and the logical domain of communication, including observable and inferable facts as extraorganismic and intraorganismic properties of human individuals, allows practitioners of linguistic studies to apprehend investigative consequences that result from their application (see Wąsik, E. 2010: 91–99; especially 93–94). On the one hand, there are objective facts empirically available through direct testing in actual speech acts, which belong to the physical domain, such as the communication participants as concrete persons, the physical sound waves linking them as speakers and hearers, physical objects and other parts of surroundings utilized by them as relevant for the realization of their tasks. And, on the other hand, there are mentally assumed tasks and the knowledge about the referential value of communicational means they use, which belong to the logical domain being grasped through inferences based on reasoning only. Moreover, human individuals are able to communicate about the nature of things and states of affairs being remote in time and space, which do not constitute parts of their proximate surrounding, or about conceived or imagined facts and this way to transcend or to exceed beyond the boundaries of their current experience.
6. Forms of beings of the subject and modalities of their expression in verbal and nonverbal means as basic concepts of existential semiotics
The nature of the significative-communicative activity of human individuals is explained within the theoretical framework of existential semiotics postulated by Eero Tarasti (cf., inter alia, 2000, 2009, 2011 and 2012). Existential semiotics assumes that four forms of being of a subject or stages in its development from the individual corporeal ego, through the individual observer’s mental ego and the conceptually potential social ego to the actually role-oriented social ego, are pivotal and decisive for semiotic processes (cf., e.g., Tarasti 2011, especially: 328–329). Respective forms of being are, in Tarasti’s model, (1) Being-in-myself, the bodily ego, (2) Being-for-myself, the ego discovering his/her identity and corporeality via habits, (3) Being-in-itself, the ego actualizing or not his/her norms, ideas and values through acts of transcendence while performing his/her institutional roles in socially established practices, and (4) Being-for-itself, the ego implementing or realizing his/her norms, ideas and values through the conduct in his/her universe of existence.
Subjective forms of being are manifested in the communicative behavior of human individuals. During their significative activity triggering the creation of verbal signs, values, which are transcendental, are transformed through the modalities of their expression, indispensable for articulating their positions towards existential reality. Through their utterances in verbal communication, human individuals articulate their attitudes, desires or expectations in volitional, epistemic, deontic and obligational modalities consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or pointless, directly or indirectly. These modalities of verbal expression are also accompanied by gestures and facial movements, prosody, pitch, volume, intonation, etc. One must stress, however, that sign processes appear in the minds of human individuals in consequence of their psychological states. At first the products of these sign-processes have a significative value for their originators and afterwards they may be interpreted to their recipients.
To explain the social behaviors of people including their verbal products, in terms of existential semiotics, it is essential to remember that the acts of human consciousness precede and determine the creation of signs which constitute the representations of internal awareness of the individual’s mind pertaining to his/her own subjective states. In view to the fact that human individuals constantly shape themselves through their significative-communicative activity, the subject-oriented semiotics should investigate language along with other semiotic means, such as clothes, dance and music, etc. knowing that the signs convey information about bodily, psychological and socio-cultural conditionings of their creators.
7. On the concept of the self in the study of human communication
The examination of the forms of being of human individuals on the basis of their signs is a complement to how to approach the communicating self from the point of view of its activity. Thus, it should be noted that the concept of the self as such, widespread in philosophy and psychology, which presupposes that a human individual is simultaneously an exceptional and irreplaceable acting subject and the object of his/her own experience who stands in relationships with other individuals and other living beings while establishing and sustaining meaningful contacts with their social and natural environments, had been adopted by American theoreticians of communication already starting from the 1960s. In accordance with definitions delivered by American philosophers of pragmatism, as especially William James (1890 and [1892]1961/2001) and George Herbert Mead (1934), the concept of the self presupposes, if one relies particularly on their particular stances that thinking processes of an individual consist in internal conversations, in which the I, i.e., the self as a subject, responses to the Me, i.e., the self as an object of experience. By the way, it must be stressed, however, that, due to specificity of particular languages, the distinction between a subjective mental I and an objective physical Me, expressible in English or French, does not occur in the same way, for example, in Spanish, Portuguese or Italian. In some languages, one has to speak about the twofold qualities of an ego, i.e., corporeal-empirical and subjective-rational. Thus, with regard to sending or receiving and understanding or interpreting activities of communication participants, one refers to inter-corporeal and inter-subjective relationships among them. One must emphasize that the notion of the self as such is not fully translatable from one language into another and has different connotations, for example, in English, German and Polish.
Alluding to the notion of the self, communication scientists working in the intellectual climate of the American pragmatism (cf., e.g., Barker 1977: 111–132) have formulated general statements pertaining to communicating selves. Basing on their views, one can say that different parts of the self of an individual are activated in the course of communication. Recognizing him- or herself as being separate from the environment but having common properties with other members of the group, an individual behaves stimulated by feelings of which and the stimuli of which he/she is usually aware, and which are discernible by others. Repetitive behaviors, called habits, of which individuals are predominantly unaware, are activated automatically; they relate to the public and private spheres of the selves. Moreover, reactions of communicators to particular situations reflect their values, i.e., moral or ethical judgments of things being sometimes sources of conflict within an individual and barrier between individuals, their attitudes, i.e., learned tendencies to react positively or negatively to objects or situations, as well as their beliefs, opinions and prejudices, since individuals act according to what they accept as true. The communicative behavior of individuals must be, therefore, considered as resultant from all these factors and dependencies between them, which are not always perceptible by other communication participants or researchers.
8. Concluding remarks
Communicating individuals function within their physical and social environments both, in the physical dimension, as concrete persons who send and receive messages as observable meaning bearers and, in the logical dimension, as mental subjects who generate and interpret messages as meaningful and understandable. Accordingly, the personal Me of the self appears to outsiders as an empirically accessible object and the subjective I only as an rationally assumable agent. A clue to the self, both a physical person and a mental subject constitutes both verbal and nonverbal signs, but only verbal signs allow to probe into existential problems in the best way, as far as all kinds of signs can ultimately be translated into the signs of natural languages. Languages provide for human subjects a base for expressing the content of their experience at the level of vocabulary and grammar while reflecting their inner thoughts and emotions and helping to describe their own forms of being. To sum up, the obvious truth that natural languages contribute to the formation of linguistic communities, in which the individual selves live, and to determine the ways of their living as social selves in their world of everyday life constructed, shaped and modelled collectively through communication, undoubtedly justifies to use notion of the linguistic self.
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