Jay wrote:
>So you might say that what I am after is not just another academic
>discourse that neuters feeling, but a different kind of practice
>that does not need to, that does not sacrifice the uses of
>theoretical and semiotic analysis (or perhaps in this case, of
>synthesis, of production), but finds ways to make meanings about
>feeling that also evoke our feelings (delightful and apprehensive)
>about meanings.
I am glad, Jay, you emphasize that. I have some misgivings with my
own discourse presenting semiotic ecology. It's not avoidable to
speak academese in some sense, to be capable of being listened to by
the scientists. On the other hand, semeco is many things and must be
read forward and backward (as Schopenhauer for one demands of his
readers). For understanding the basics requires understanding the
consequences as much as understanding the consequences requires
understanding the basics.
So I should like to add to my short sketch of cognemot ideas which
concentrated on structural and dynamic aspects that I think the
essential of emotion and feeling is value. The academic world has
thrived by the decision to treat of facts independent of values. Thus
to exclude feelings, or rather to forbid them (so that they operate
in allegedly innocent phases of research such as selecting topics,
objects, procedures etc.). Of course this strategy cannot succeed, it
splits our world in two. We should not tolerate that.
And I should promise that I'm going to embed that idea in its broader
field, later. I think Semiotic Ecology proffers conceptual tools that
make it possible to understand values as relations among facts or
factual constellations. No longer two worlds. I know, this is a
highly abstract statement. Its scope will only become visible with
patience. This is no facile integration. It goes ways beyond semantic
games. Affect, affinity or valuation, both sympathetic or affine or
antipatethic or disaffine, or some other generic equivalent thereof
is a fundamental, indispensable factor of any generative semiosis.
Soit's always present when presenting anything in semeco terms.
It is a delusion of sorts to make a safe symbol world and to pretend
it to represent an unsafe real world. And instrumentalize that safe
symbol world (Science & Co., Logic & Co., for instance), to produce
new parts to it and making thereby the real world increasingly more
unsafe, as it is a major effect of developing the techniques over the
last few centuries.
It's not amazing but as reassuring as calamitous -- indeed, Eric,
these ideas are not at all new -- that both Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche have been mentioned in these postings. They both have been
giving strong, though eventually not acceptable, impulses toward
giving the feeling and willing side of the psyche greater respect. In
my view neither of them has attained a balance-capable conception.
Schopenhauer, in particular, is a plain and ardent dualist, Eric. I
cannot accept his idea in §2 of the first book of' Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung' you may have in mind, that only one's body or external
things can be an object to a subject, and that "That which cognizes
All and is cognized itself by None, is the subject. It is therefore
the carrier of the world, the thoroughgoing, ever implied condition
of all appearance, of all objects; for, only for a subject is,
whatever is here at all." (My translation. You may have another
passage in mind.) Schopenhauer in this very sentence has presented
his (presumed) knowing about the subject (his own). And when such is
entering further inference and observation, there is nothing to be
gained by building upon such a contradictory presumption.
Alfred
--Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland http://www.langpapers.net --- alfred.lang@psy.unibe.ch
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