Between philosophy and cultural psychology: Pragmatist and semiotic reflections on the thresholds of sense

Abstract

Cultural psychology has multiple points of intersection with some of the central themes and issues of philosophy, especially a philosophy that is not self-absorbed with problems purely of its own making or over which it claims exclusive rights even if they clearly need multiple analytical approaches. The “problems of philosophy” should be, and are, our problems, vitally important issues embedded in what John Dewey called “problematic situations” that bear upon what for the pragmatist tradition are the defining matrices for “the conduct of life.” Like such a pragmatist philosophy and other traditions that look outward over the broad landscape of life, cultural psychology is concerned with the manifold “ways of knowing and acting” that mark the intentional bonds and webs of transactions between us and what we call “the world.” It recognizes a plurality of forms of apprehension and patterns of meaningful action especially in their social contexts and conditions. It further recognizes, in line with the semiotic turn in philosophy, that the defining feature of human beings is rooted in (a) differentiated processes of the production and interpretation of signs, a meaning-making power unmatched in nature that unfolds at both the upper and lower thresholds of sense-giving and sense-reading and (b) the systematic production and use of material tools, instruments, and objects to modify the environment and the producers themselves and which embody or exemplify existential stances, values, and ends-in-view.

Keywords

Philosophical semiotics pragmatism John Dewey Susanne Langer C. S. Peirce form symbol embodiment

Some general considerations

Like such a pragmatist philosophy and other traditions that look outward over the broad landscape of life, cultural psychology is concerned with the manifold “ways of knowing and acting” that mark the intentional bonds and webs of transactions between us and what we call “the world.” It recognizes a plurality of forms of apprehension and patterns of meaningful action especially in their social contexts and conditions. It further recognizes, in line with the semiotic turn in philosophy, that the defining feature of human beings is rooted in (a) differentiated processes of the production and interpretation of signs, a meaning-making power unmatched in nature that unfolds at both the upper and lower thresholds of sense-giving and sense-reading and (b) the systematic production and use of material tools, instruments, and objects to modify the environment and the producers themselves and which embody or exemplify existential stances, values, and ends-in-view. As language animals, we can admit that the key exemplar of this semiotic and materially productive power is language, a characteristic already noted by Homer in his description of humans as those animals that “divide their voice,” turning it into speech. Systematic tool use—and its extension into the technological sphere—is parasitic on semiosis in the strict sense. Cultural psychology, and a philosophical semiotics, sees this semiotic power as dividing the whole sensory world and the domain of human meaningful action and recombining them into stable forms that embody meanings that cannot be captured in discourse. Such are the meanings found in art, myth, religion, and sacramental acts and the prime symbols in which they are embodied. A philosophical semiotics and cultural psychology are not, indeed cannot be, logocentric.

That human beings are not just sign-users and sign-interpreters, but also material agents that engage the material world and transform it for use, highlights the need to attend to artifacts of all sorts that satisfy their needs on many levels, adding a “second nature” to the “first nature” out of which they have emerged. This second nature is, along with sign systems, an exosomatic body, infused with meaning. This is the technological or “made” world that along with first nature is perceived as well as dealt with and which likewise informs the circuit of perception and action out of which we construct our worlds in an open-ended, if not materially unconstrained, spiral.

Cultural psychology stands in a relationship of mutual enrichment or co-dependence with philosophy, especially a form of philosophy that “pushes meaning down” to the lower levels of sensibility and affectivity and “pushes meaning up” to levels beyond discourse. Pushing meaning “down” points toward the body as locus of meaning-making, foregrounding the phenomenon of embodiment or embodied knowing. Pushing meaning “up” points toward another kind of embodiment, what I would call “semiotic” or “technological” embodiment. This notion is a specification of the more general notions of embodiment and indwelling developed, in dialogue with psychology, by the phenomenological tradition's reflections on the lived body and by Michael Polanyi's cognate reflections on the tacit dimension and the “logical” structure of skills, what Harry Collins (2010) calls “somatic tacit knowing.”

Cultural psychology, looked at philosophically, studies in close detail the embodied frames of meaning-making and their forms of ingression into the life worlds of sense-giving and sense-reading agents. This is a distinctively “existential” and “hermeneutical” dimension in the broadest sense of that term and sets for cultural psychology interpretive tasks on many levels. It, along with a broadly conceived philosophical semiotics, wants to make sense of how human beings make sense of themselves and the world and the tools and instruments employed, no matter what their modality is. It is concerned not just with the diverse origins of meanings of all sorts, a genetic side, but with their structures and contents, and with the actual experienced impacts and variable consequences of assimilating oneself to or accommodating oneself to the vast array of possible ways of taking up an existential stance in the various spheres of meaning, ranging from the most private and idiosyncratic to the most public and long-term contexts in which we live out our lives.

So, in one way cultural psychology has an essentially descriptive task, which I would call “semiotic-phenomenological.” It is a kind of “empirical” phenomenology in that it is not, in itself, looking for or attempting to construct ideal types but to map or chart the great varieties of ways in which meaning-systems, which are “real” in that they stand over against us and cannot be dispersed by a wave of the hand, “take on life” in experience, shaping and enabling it, opening it out, and constraining it within limits, whether, from our philosophical point of view, they are true or not. Here, cultural psychology and social semiotics share a common task, although each has a different focus. Cultural psychology is, as Jaan Valsiner has pointed out in his inaugural lecture, a kind of “material” phenomenology in that it does not think of meaning-systems as purely mental, something “in the mind.” Institutions such as marriage, political orders, prisons, insane asylums, public parks with their art works, and so forth and so on are “social facts” with a “psychological reality.”

We are, to allude to a central Peirean idea, “in” them just as much as they are “in” us. The lines between a philosophically aware descriptive social semiotics and cultural psychology are not clear in many respects, although it appears to me that cultural psychology is in some sense “richer” in that it is closer to the lived world and not focused predominantly on contents but on the lived contexts, in Dewey's sense, in which contents function. While, to be sure, as the Latin adage puts it, individuum est ineffabile, that is, there is something “unsayable” about the felt quality of each person's life, still the individual is a locus of multiple systems of meanings that are in important respects, but not totally, publicly accessible and that shape and form the distinctive feel of life as lived in each individual instance and in each collective instance, although such a feel can only be gestured at or triangulated by means of discourse. It also has a tacit dimension, what Collins, extending Polanyi (1958, 1966) and Polanyi and Harry (1973), called “collective tacit knowing.”

A descriptive phenomenology of meanings and a descriptive phenomenology of values, whether in the philosophical and more abstract mode or the more concrete mode of cultural psychology, go hand in hand, for values are likewise embodied, rooted in objects as reservoirs of memory, attachment, and ultimate concern, a theme pursued in a number of works by the cultural geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan (2001), as well as many others (Walter, 1998). The pursuit of values, rooted in the spectrum of desires that push human activity from behind and pull it from the front, has psychological consequences and effects, resulting from the various kinds of choices and forms of action that transform the physical world and social world alike. The physical world is transformed by being turned into systems of artifacts and tools and objects of use as well as objects of contemplation and self-display. Tools, machines, irrigation systems, housing materials, cities, temples and churches, monasteries, and schools have material reality and are experienced as embodied meanings and reservoirs and exemplars of value or at least of what is valued, a positive fact. Cultural psychology will take as object of inquiry norms and the various ends-in-view that humans pursue and attempt not just to realize but to stabilize. And it will study the background conditions, rooted in lived experience and its contexts, that incline us to establish these norms and effect these ends. But, it is clear, this is also a deep concern of “moral psychology,” in some to-be-determined meaning of that term, with its fusion of philosophical and psychological concerns.

Cultural psychology, in its descriptive role which it shares with phenomenology, is focused on the multiform psychological reality and consequences of our world-pictures or world-models which shape and form our self-conceptions, our pictures of ourselves and what we want to be and can be. The cultural psychologist, as inquirer, is also informed by a world-picture and a self-picture and a schema of values, which inform inquiry in its role as a proponent and model of human flourishing. Here is a critical link with philosophy and its concern with self-understanding as an existential task, such as is illustrated in Sven Hroar Klempe's (2014) discussion of Kierkegaard and the rise of modern psychology. As I see it, the point of cultural psychology, and of a great part of philosophy, is not purely theoretical or contemplative, and it is not value-free. Admittedly, the variety of meaning-systems and value-systems in which people live and the variety of material contexts of their lives, their cultural and ecological niches, elicit from us curiosity and show the incredible diversity of things that matter for humans, and what matters for most is themselves and their conception of themselves as well as the conception others have of them, which entails a demand, with different levels of explicitness, for recognition and acceptance, a theme developed extensively in the Hegelian tradition and in the pragmatist reflections of Mead.

Svend Brinkmann (2013) has argued rightly that cultural psychology is a normative science, a position not foreign to the pragmatist tradition and its congeners. While, to follow and extend Wittgenstein's comment about his Philosophical Investigations, we could say that cultural psychology studies “bits and pieces of natural history,” that is, the natural history of human practices as experienced and as self-interpreting, clearly not all meaning-systems or value-systems in fact elicit from us validation or sympathy, even if they do demand from us understanding, that is, a determination of their “lived logic.” The notion of a “lived logic” binds together the conjoint concerns of cultural psychology and of a philosophy open to experience in all its modes but which, on a different level of abstraction, is looking for where to place what Plato called the “significant joints” in a complex reality.

Wittgenstein claimed that philosophy leaves everything as it is, in a kind of counter thesis on Feuerbach. But philosophy in its normative dimension would assert that cultural psychology as a companion human science is not, indeed cannot be, indifferent to human practices and should not consider them merely as exhibits in a kind of museum of curiosities, examined for our amusement or professional or political advancement. Cultural psychology charts and maps for us the range of ways humans, pulled toward ends-in-view, or pushed by an array of compulsions and needs, have formulated frames for flourishing. Looked at normatively, such frames can also be for deviating from flourishing. But in light of the great variation in value schemes, which cultural psychology has studied and uncovered, it is problematic just where cultural psychology is to look for a normative frame or just what such a frame would look like. Peircean philosophical semiotics proposes “concrete rationality” and the taking on of “rational habits.” For Peirce, this involves an apprehension and realization of the “intrinsically worthwhile” or “eminently admirable,” which is the “highest good.” This is an “aesthetic” goal and points inquiry, and life, in the direction of an aesthetics of existence, but in a sense quite different from Michel Foucault's conception, which is an unstable blend of ancient practices of self-cultivation and Nietzschean emphasis on self-creation.

If, as cultural psychology and, for example, a Deweyan pragmatism or a Whiteheadian account of subjectivity hold (see Stengers, 2011), culture permeates us down to the deepest levels of affect and feeling, constituting an existential “tonus” that defines or “qualifies” the “sense” of existing, then we always find ourselves, as agents and inquirers, “turned” or “biased” just as the subjects of our inquiries are likewise “turned” or “biased.” How, then, are we as reflective inquirers to balance tolerance and sympathetic understanding with critical recoil and disapproval when faced with the horrors of history's butcher block, to allude to Hegel's provocative remark? Clearly, this swings our concerns back to philosophy, with its own models of flourishing and norms of existence, often laden with metaphysical premises, which cultural psychology can study but clearly does not construct. Philosophy “legislates” or “lays down the law,” but is in no position to enforce it. It exhorts, while cultural psychology, in its moral dimension, reports, but since it studies the conditions of realization of norms it could, if committed to a schema of values, incline itself to facilitating the acquisition of value systems—and thus involve itself in cultural “moral engineering.” But how would cultural psychology validate its schema? Again, there is swing back to philosophical analysis, which is not itself immune to preferential treatment of its own existential commitments.

Because of its general empirical scope, cultural psychology cannot look away from any human reality in its psychological aspects. And philosophy cannot look away from the display uncovered by cultural psychology which sees our deepest potentialities made visible in the mirror of cultural forms. For both philosophy and cultural psychology, the guiding maxim must be Nihil humanum alienum a me puto. “Know thyself” and “Become who you are” are not achievable solely by introspection without the essential aid of “the other.” To use John Dewey's phrase, which I appropriated as a title for a previous essay (2014), philosophy is helped by cultural psychology to avoid “beating its wings in a void,” and cultural psychology is helped by philosophy, or at least elements from philosophy, in that it supplies analytical tools and concepts that help it “frame the frames” it subjects to close examination.

In what follows I want to go beyond and in a sense beneath these general considerations to show, in highly condensed and schematic fashion, how some selected philosophical analytical tools bear in different ways upon the problem of how to model what I am calling the “thresholds of sense,” that is, how to picture or describe the fundamental matrices in which meaning arises for human beings and gets embodied in cultural forms, the principal theme of cultural psychology and of a philosophical semiotics. Of particular importance is the tension and relations between perceptual and semiotic models of these matrices, which I have discussed at length elsewhere in multiple formats (Innis, 1994, 2002, 2009). In the present instance, I will focus on elements from the work of John Dewey, C. S. Peirce, Karl Bühler, Ernst Cassirer, and Susanne Langer that throw powerful light on this topic. In their work, perceptual and psychological categories function alongside semiotic categories, precisely the conceptual mix upon which cultural psychology relies, or should rely.

On thresholds of sense

On contexts and situations: Beyond the Kodak fixation

Dewey's key thesis about the thresholds of sense is that it is to be found in the system of transactions that enable human beings not so much to take up a purely cognitive stance toward the world in the sense of constructing an explicit cognitive map of it as finding ways to adjust and to cope with the changing contexts and situations of action guided by perception. For Dewey, meaning or significance, in the most rudimentary sense of those words, arises through different types of transactions that occur in a circuit that, depending upon the organism, expands in a widening gyre or spiral, which in the case of human meaning-making has no greatest upper bound, a key thesis of Peirce's concept of unending or infinite semiosis or play of signs, which plays no explicit role in Dewey's thought.²

In a famous and still fundamental 1896 paper on the reflex arc, a paper that supplies one of the keys to his pragmatist approach to knowing and a valuable, if relatively ignored, conceptual link to cultural psychology, John Dewey pointed out that organisms, including humans, do not respond to a “stimulus”; however, we want to define such a notion, but into it and thereby reconstruct the actional-perceptual circuit as well as themselves. Referring to James's famous child-candle example, where the seeing of the candle elicits the action of reaching and the subsequent burn elicits the action of withdrawal, Dewey describes the process not as a linking of discrete units but as a continuing, self-constructing coordination. This notion of a self-constructing coordination is an elementary precursor of rational self-control.

According to Dewey, “the burn is the original seeing, the original optical-ocular experience, enlarged and transformed in its value. It is no longer mere seeing; it is seeing-of-a-light-when-contact-occurs” (1896, p. 264). This “hyphenation” foregrounds what is a “continual reconstruction” of a circuit of multimodal experiencing. The theoretical point of the child-candle example is that “the seeing remains to control the reaching and is, in turn, interpreted [my emphasis] by the burning” (1896, p. 265). Further, Dewey claims there is nothing outside of a functioning circuit of coordinating activities that can be labeled “sensation” or “response.” They are relative to the context.

The stimulus is that phase of the forming coordination which represents the conditions which have to be met in bringing it to a successful issue; the response meeting these conditions, which serves as instrument in effecting the successful coordination. (1896, p. 274)

Coordination is a process of unification, the essential factor in the fundamental copings by which we not only extract meaning from but also give meaning to the world. At the very threshold of sense, Dewey sees mediating coordinations, not mere sequencing, of perceiving and acting. As he writes in his essay, “Perception and Organic Action” (1931c, p. 221): “This functional transformation of the environment under conditions of uncertain action into conditions for determining an appropriate organic response constitutes perception.”

In the case of sign-using organisms such as human beings, this functional transformation of the environment is to be taken in both a literal and a general sense. Coping with the world involves overt action, including, according to Dewey, sign-action, that goes over in the human case to the concrete and semiotic manipulation of the world through, as Dewey writes in his 1929 The Quest for Certainty, “doing acts, performing operations, cutting, marking off, dividing up, extending, piecing together, joining, assembling and mixing, hoarding and dealing out; in general, selecting and adjusting things as means for reaching consequences” (p. 125). These are all mediating activities that occur, in different ways and modalities, at the boundary between organisms of all types and the world. More generally:

Knowing is an act which modifies what previously existed…. The spectator theory of knowing may, humanly speaking, have been inevitable when thought was viewed as an exercise of a “reason” independent of the body, which by means of purely logical operations attained truth. It is an anachronism now that we have the model of experimental procedure before us and are aware of the role of organic acts in all mental processes. (p. 195)

Such a position was foreshadowed in a 1908 paper honoring William James, “The Practical Character of Reality,” where Dewey argued that the systems of transactions constituting knowing are to be considered forms of practice that make a change in the object known, and not just in the object but in the organisms and the situation of perplexity in which knowing takes place and which the organisms, individually or in concert, are trying to resolve. In a remarkable phrase, Dewey claimed that knowing, as process and event, was not a “Kodak fixation.” By this he meant the construction of a stable picture or snapshot of the world that aimed to “mirror” the world in, for example, a set of abstract representations, a position leading to what he called the “intellectual lockjaw” of the epistemology industry: how to find an “outside” standpoint enabling one to distinguish between the mirroring and the mirrored, a problem systematically bedeviling philosophy since Plato.

Knowing, Dewey proposed, with no idealistic intent, is a part of the very reality the “knower” is adjusting to and engaged in changing in light of ends-in-view pursued by organisms of all sorts who strive to complete and respond to the intrinsic tendencies of things and their potentialities for transformation. It is an emergent event and a process that is part of nature, including social-cultural nature, and thoroughly dependent on its organic and socio-cultural conditions, especially the semiotic powers that make possible conceptual systems of high complexity and advanced forms of cooperation and competition as well as the systems of tools and artifacts, as I pointed out earlier. Knowing, on this deeply pragmatist position, is clearly “constructive” of the known, while what is known is not in any coherent sense a “cause” of knowing, but the “outcome” of complex processes on many levels and of many types. The known, Dewey proposes, is accessed “within” processes of engagement of various sorts on multiple levels. Indeed, as Dewey argues in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, the “biological functions and structures prepare the way for deliberate inquiry and … foreshadow its pattern” (1938, p. 30). But deliberate inquiry, we will see and as Dewey clearly argued, is not necessarily theoretical.³

Dewey's naturalistic logic and account of knowing is intent on establishing “continuity of the lower (less complex) and the higher (more complex) activities and forms” (1938, p. 30). Continuity, but not identity. The reason is that Dewey thinks an organism, including the human organism, does not live in an environment as if it were a container: “it lives by means of an environment” and “with every differentiation of structure the environment expands” (1938, p. 32). Life, including social life, with which we are concerned, is for Dewey “a continual rhythm of disequilibrations and recoveries of equilibrium” (1938, p. 34). A consequence of this notion, and another philosophical link with cultural psychology, is that the higher the organism the more complex the efforts to restore equilibrium. Symbolic equilibrium is always unstable, without a rigid center. Cultural processes, and the constant deleterious striving toward hegemonic supremacy on the part of one group within a culture, ideally strive not just toward “the institution of an integrated relation” (1938, p. 35) between ourselves and the world but also between ourselves. Such a relation is always precarious.

An integrated relation is never anything permanent. Symbolic equilibrium, which is intrinsically labile, is a constant project, just as organic equilibrium is. And it is, by reason of the temporal flow of consciousness, dynamically carried toward the future, giving rise to new meaning-configurations and the conflicts between them that are found in the evolving, and emergent, circuits of interactions. Dewey points out that there is “direction and cumulative force” (1938, p. 38) to these meaning-configurations and that its end-effect, and well as motivating matrix, is “the total state of the organism” (1938, p. 37). Cultural psychology is concerned with analyzing the semiotic dimensions of this “total state,” which at the same time is not without deep reverberations in the body of the sign-users and a principal determinant of the somatic tonus that defines each one of us as a unique individual, a topic to which I will return later.

Dewey's approach to the threshold both describes and prescribes, as is evident in the following text, which refers to an essential continuity, but not identity, between the biological and semiotic dimension:

What exists in normal behavior-development is … a circuit of which the earlier or “open” phase is the tension of various elements of organic energy, while the final and “closed” phase is the institution of integrated interaction of organism and environment. (1938, p. 38)

Is it not possible to substitute “semiotic energy” for “organic energy,” or, in fact, to see how organic energy goes over into semiotic energy, manifested in the “circuit” of semiosis in the course of which sign-use becomes conscious and reflective and thus able to be controlled, and in which behavior itself goes over into conduct, including the conduct of thinking?

In a 1905 text (CP, Volume 5, p. 534), Peirce wrote:

For thinking is a kind of conduct, and is itself controllable, as everybody knows. Now the intellectual control of thinking takes place by thinking about thought. All thinking is by signs; and the brutes use signs. But perhaps they rarely think of them as signs. To do so is manifestly a second step in the use of language.

Cultural psychology studies not “brutes,” in Peirce's sense of that term, but human conduct both controlled by and constituted by the use of signs, conduct elicited by and enforced by sign-configurations that for agents are simply “the way the world is,” a form of semiotic reification (ideology). At the same time, this descriptive side of cultural psychology goes over into criticism in as much as cultural psychology, and a cognate philosophical semiotics, interrupts the lived-through use of signs by sign-users and subjects it and them to thematic and critical reflection, tracing signs to their genetic conditions and behind-the-back motivating factors and making us aware of the consequences of semiosis. As Peirce wrote: “The brutes are certainly capable of more than one grade of control; but it seems to me that our superiority to them is more due to our greater number of grades of self-control than it is to our versatility” (CP, Volume 5, p. 533). In Peirce's philosophical project, self-control is manifested in the development of rational habits.

Is cultural psychology on its own in a position to determine whether our conduct is out of control, and hence “irrational?” Here, we encounter once again the problem of cultural psychology as a normative science. A human science such as cultural psychology, which engages self-interpreting human beings, clearly has to settle the issue of whether it intends to, or even would want to, “leave everything as it is,” or whether it can at least determine what simply cannot be left as it is on both the social and personal levels, which are clearly inextricably intertwined. Cultural psychology, by reason of the very subject matter it engages, has also a therapeutic dimension, just as philosophy certainly does, and it has its well-known practitioners such as Sergio Salvatore and Tania Zittoun.

From a Deweyan perspective, we have seen, the point of origin of the open circuit of perceiving/acting/signifying is the apprehension of something in the field of sensibility or experience that functions as a lure for inquiry in the most general sense, something that disturbs an equilibrium and generates activities aimed at restoring balance, which itself is only temporary. Dewey, implicitly accepting the theme-field-margin triad of James's “Stream of Consciousness” chapter from The Principles of Psychology, attempted to show in a number of key and permanently valuable papers the original “theme,” or area of concern, of the field of awareness to be not an “object” in the usual and customary sense of the term but a felt objective perplexity, or “problematic situation,” with a distinctive quality, with reliance on Peirce.⁴ Objects, whatever they may be, are found in a “situation,” which is not a “thing” but indeed a kind of Jamesian field or “relational whole” (Heidegger's Bewandtnisganzheit) that supplies the defining context of any form of inquiry (see also my “On Not Beating One's Wings in the Void,” Innis, 2014).

In his “Qualitative Thought” essay, Dewey defined this central issue of a “situation” as “the subject matter ultimately referred to in existential propositions” and as “a complex existence that is held together, in spite of its internal complexity, by the fact that it is dominated and characterized throughout by a single quality” (1931e, p. 97). A situation is “taken for granted, ‘understood,’ or implicit in all propositional symbolization” (1931e, p. 97). In his essay, “Context and Thought,” which I have discussed elsewhere (Innis, 2014), Dewey assimilated situation to a background that

is implicit in some form and to some degree in all thinking, although as background it does not come into explicit purview; that is, it does not form a portion of the subject matter which is consciously attended to, thought of, examined, inspected, turned over. (1931b, p. 211)

Such a notion of context is similar to Michael Polanyi's idea of a tacit framework of various types of premises that we operatively rely upon without being able to control them explicitly and which he assimilates to the concept of embodiment.

All thought contains components of which we are subsidiarily aware in the focal content of our thinking, and all thought dwells in its subsidiaries, as if they were parts of our body. Hence, thinking is not only necessarily intentional, as Brentano has taught: it is also fraught with the roots it embodies. It has a from-to structure. (Polanyi, 1966, p. x)

We find the following parallel passage in Dewey, which also avails itself of reference to the body:

We cannot explain why we believe the things which we most firmly hold to because those things are a part of ourselves. We can no more completely escape them when we try to examine into them than we can get outside our physical skins so as to view them from without. Call these regulative traditions, apperceptive organs or mental habits or whatever you will, there is no thinking without them. (1931b, pp. 211–212)

A problem for cultural psychology, and for a critical philosophy, is clearly to find a way to access this dimension or at least to recognize that it even exists. It is the pre-thematic dimension explored by the existential phenomenologists and other thinkers from other traditions, relying on different empirical materials (see, for example, as samples form a large literature, Damasio, 2010; Gallagher, 2006; Leder, 1990).

It is out of or within such a context that “objects,” Dewey argues, are thematized and explicitly apprehended. By an object, Dewey means “some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction” (1931e, p. 97). On this account, the apprehension of objects in the field is effected by a diacritical process, a recognition of difference. Hence, objects emerge in a process of “selective determination … controlled by reference to situation—to that which is constituted by a pervasive and internally integrating quality” (1931e, p. 97). Objects are not “given” but “placed” or “located.” Does not cultural psychology take as one of its tasks to explore these places or locations in their variable social and cultural settings?

Dewey proposes that we consider objects and relations between relations as “crystallized” out of situations, which are unified by a web of affinities, which are felt and which we do not control. Knowing, to be sure, according to Dewey, involves “discrimination” and “segmentation” just as much as its involves “synthesis” and binding. Dewey thinks of the flux of experience as permeated by felt affinities, which James also recognized, due to qualitative links that are operative even before being thematically recognized. This is another important philosophical link to the concerns of cultural psychology that foregrounds the web of felt affinities marking all the levels at which agents encounter the world, especially those that they are unconscious of.

The following paragraph encapsulates Dewey's central thesis.

When it is said that I have a feeling, or impression, or “hunch,” that things are thus and so, what is actually designated is primarily the presence of a dominating quality in a situation as a whole, not just the existence of a feeling as a psychical or psychological fact. To say I have a feeling or impression that so and so is the case is to note that the quality in question is not yet resolved into determinate terms and relations; it marks a conclusion without statement of the reasons for it, the grounds upon which it rests. It is the first stage in the development of explicit distinctions All thought in every subject matter begins with just such an unanalyzed whole. When the subject-matter is reasonably familiar, relevant distinctions speedily offer themselves, and sheer qualitativeness may not remain long enough to be readily recalled. But it often persists and forms a haunting and engrossing problem It is a commonplace that a problem stated is well on its way to solution, for statement of the nature of a problem signifies that the underlying quality is being transformed into determinate distinctions of terms and relations and has become an object of articulate thought. But something presents itself as problematic before there is recognition of what the problem is. The problem is had or experienced before it can be stated or set forth; but it is had as an immediate quality of the whole situation. The sense of something problematic, of something perplexing and to be resolved, marks the presence of something pervading all elements and considerations. Thought is the operation by which it is converted into pertinent and coherent terms. (1931e, p. 100)

But, following up further a link between Peirce and Dewey, it is clear that the experienced fact of perplexity at the very threshold is the manifestation of something that is “other,” something that is opposed to us and not under our control, that resists us, that imbalances us, a feature of experience that Peirce called “secondness.” The ongoing flow of experience, indeed of life itself, is interrupted in many ways and this sense of being interrupted also “affects” us, giving rise to habits of reaction and response, indeed eliciting them in ways not always under our control—and meant not to be under our control. One of the tasks of cultural psychology is, or would be, to study the varieties of felt interruptions that we experience, including those embodied in sign systems that are specifically designed to upset and introduce imbalance, uncertainty, or fear. Of course, this is not perhaps in all cases unjustified and it certainly interrupts the constant practice of what Peirce called the “method of tenacity,” our tendencies to continue in frameworks that deny other options. Here is a generalized notion of “conflict.” It is a formal feature of consciousness, indeed, of life itself. It is the mark of “difference” in the most universal sense of that term, which I have discussed in greater detail in my “Affectivating Signs: On Semiotic Interruptions.”

Cultural psychology, in the pragmatist semiotic mode, will study in more detail the psychic consequences of individual and group encounters with difference and their connection with violence in its different modes as well as the connection with the search for authority to overcome the imbalance, in the individual and in various cultural groupings, introduced by opposition to one's world model. But it would, or might want to, solicit the contributions of philosophy when it turns, as it should, to critical evaluation. Philosophy's main task, for a Deweyan and Peircean pragmatist philosophy, is criticism, broadly understood:

… criticism of the influential beliefs that underlie culture; a criticism which traces the beliefs to their generating conditions as far as may be, which tracks them to their results, which considers the mutual compatibility of the elements of the total structure of beliefs. Such an examination terminates, whether so intended or not, in a projection of them into a new perspective which leads to new surveys of possibilities. (1931b, p. 215).

In such a passage, we see a clear fusion of description, explanation, and criticism and an indisputable fusion of philosophical and cultural psychological concerns. The value dimension of both a philosophical semiotics and cultural psychology is exemplified very clearly in the phrase “new surveys of possibilities.” While cultural psychology is clearly not a branch of positive psychology with its connection to the human potential movement, its studies of the varieties of forms of human self-realization show a kind of affinity with it as well as a healthy hesitation to apply a single template to the varieties of human flourishing, which, after all, have very different generating conditions and metaphysical and ethical premises, reflection on which is one of philosophy's main tasks.

There is, when it comes to human well-being, an essential tension between analysis and advocacy. How does one negotiate the shifting lines of demarcation? This is a permanent reflective methodological problem for both philosophy and cultural psychology, more serious for the latter perhaps than for the former.

The signs of consciousness: Three triads

Dewey is a valuable heuristic guide for arriving at a model of the organism–world relation in light of his clear fusion of psychological and semiotic categories and descriptions that establish the ultimate factors in this relation. In a fundamental essay, “Peirce's Theory of Quality,” Dewey (1935) controversially claimed that Peirce's most fundamental philosophical discovery was his theory of quality, which, as is well known, is systematically connected with his triad of categories and his fundamental triad of sign types, which Dewey was aware of but did not foreground. Just as cultural psychology is permeated by philosophical concerns, so philosophy, as exemplified in the pragmatist mode by Peirce and Dewey and in other key thinkers with important links to cultural psychology, is permeated by psychological concerns, in spite of Peirce's contestations to the contrary. The correlation of Peirce's triad of categories of consciousness—feeling, reaction, thought—with the triad of metaphysical categories—firstness, secondness, and thirdness—is not of any substantive importance for the tasks of cultural psychology, however important it may be for philosophy and for understanding the thrust of Peirce's great intellectual project and its theoretical core: semiotics. But the correlation of the triadic schema of the categories of consciousness with the well-known triad of sign types—icons, indices, and symbols—is of the utmost importance even if, as in the cases of Karl Bühler and Ernst Cassirer, this schema, or rather this type of schema, may not be as singular or unique as Peirce himself thought and the basis of such a correlation not restricted to what Peirce himself used.

Peirce explored sets of interlocking triads over the whole course of his intellectual career in his efforts to schematize the ultimate contours of the intentional bond between organism and world and the determination of ultimate meaning frames at the threshold of sense. Cultural psychology will be interested most of all in following up in concrete research Peirce's correlation between the categories of consciousness and the triad of sign types and seeing what type of work it can do for and within cultural psychology's own concerns, which, with its focus on the effects of signs in experience, would flesh out the play of what Peirce called “interpretants” in the concrete life of social and cultural groups. Cultural psychology focuses on the psychological reality, and consequent cultural variation, of interpretants as attached to the circulation of signs in society and culture.

Peirce proposed a striking image for consciousness:

… a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way. But in this water there are countless objects at different depths; and certain influences will give certain kinds of those objects an upward impulse which may be intense enough and continue long enough to bring them into the upper visible layer. After the impulse ceases they commence to sink downwards. (CP, Volume 7, p. 547).

Consciousness for Peirce, on the subjective side, is in the last analysis a triadic congeries of (a) feelings or affective configurations, (b) felt senses of resistances that distinguish between, as well as connect, self and other, and (c) abductive processes of synthesizing, or bringing into unity, of an affective/indexical array, reducing multiplicity to unity by means of an “idea.”

These are for Peirce “constant ingredients of our knowledge” and are due to “congenital tendencies of the mind” (CP, Volume 1, p. 374). With reference to Scholastic philosophy's influence on his thought Peirce even goes so far as to say that this triad could be taken as referring to “three parts or faculties of the soul or modes of consciousness” (CP, Volume 1, p. 374). Peirce in his review of James's Principles of Psychology asked whether James's classification of “mental states” into feelings and thoughts, a duality, was sufficiently scientific. In its place, he proposed replacing “mental states” with a logical division of mental elements: feeling-qualities, reactions, and habit-taking. And while in his 1868 paper “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” he said that consciousness is “a very vague term” (CP, Volume 8, p. 256), he still continued to maintain that these elements of consciousness, while radically different, are an analytical ultimate “these and no more” (CP, Volume 1, p. 382): immediate feeling, the polar sense and synthetical consciousness (“the consciousness of a third or medium” (CP, Volume 1, p. 382).

Cognitional structure for Peirce, the pattern informing conscious appropriation of the world is complex, for “every kind of consciousness enters into cognition” (CP, Volume 1, p. 381). Although, as Peirce writes, feelings “form the warp and woof of cognition,” and while “the will, in the form of attention [to the other], constantly enters,” cognition is neither feeling nor the polar sense. It is “consciousness of process, and this in the form of the sense of learning, of acquiring, of mental growth.” It cannot be immediate for it cannot be “contracted into an instant.” It is “the consciousness that binds our life together. It is the consciousness of synthesis” (CP, Volume 1, p. 381).

It is well known that Peirce correlated the categorical triad of forms of consciousness, formulated in psychological terms but with a Kantian tone, with the three major classes of signs, the triad of icons, indices, and symbols.⁵ In as much as “all thought is in signs,” this triad, according to Peirce, makes up the ultimate supports upon which we rely to make sense of the world and to capture it in stable forms, although their stability is not absolute by any means. The function of signs is to make their objects known through an interpretant, what Peirce calls the “proper significate effect” of a sign and a “more developed sign” than the original sign in an unending process of semiosis. Focusing on the fundamental ways a sign is related to an object, that is, can represent the object or make it known, yields the well-known triadic “logical” relation based on resemblance, existential connections and convention. Icons of all sorts (images, diagrams, metaphors in Peirce's division) function as signs of the unique or defining qualities of objects. Indices function as signs by being “really” connected with their objects, as, to use one of Peirce's examples, a weather vane points to the direction the wind is blowing by being really affected by the wind. Symbols, with language and mathematics being paradigm instances, function as signs by reason of an “idea” or “thought” that bears upon a regularity or law and engenders a habit of expectation about the course of experience.

This classification of signs, which I have sketched here in the briefest way, is, however not our concern at the present moment. It is rather the implication for cultural psychology of this classification for sketching the forms of consciousness that arise through our embodiment and what they reveal about the factors at work at the threshold where self and world mutually inform one another through semiosis. It is the complexities of this mutually informing that have the most importance for cultural psychology.

In as much as iconic signs, the supports of the iconic element or mode of consciousness, relate us to the qualitative aspect of an object or situation, its unique quality or suchness, which Dewey, relying on Peirce, foregrounded, quality appears as the object of a distinct feeling, which is what Peirce called its interpretant. Dewey in fact thought Peirce's theory of quality to be his most fundamental philosophical discovery, but clearly without dismissing his theory of signs. According to Dewey, Peirce's discovery made possible a truly experiential philosophy that did not sever the links between experience and nature (a title of one of Dewey's major books). In his essay, “Peirce's Theory of Quality,” Dewey saw Peirce's key insight as uncovering the phenomenon of a “sheer totality and pervading unity of quality in everything experienced, whether it be odor, the drama of King Lear, or philosophic or scientific systems”(Dewey, 1935, p. 371).⁶ This “totalizing unifying quality” (p. 372) marks cultural and social systems, and the subsystems that they encompass and upon which they rely, even the paradoxical unifying quality of discord or dissonance. Dewey thought that “the world in which we immediately live, that in which we strive, succeed, and are defeated is preeminently a qualitative world. What we act for, suffer, and enjoy are things in their qualitative determinations” (1931e, p. 195). This is what Dewey called “the boundless multiplicity of the concrete experiences of humanity” (Dewey 1931a, p. 216), the matrix of what Valsiner calls the making of meaning out of ordinary life, which cultural psychology wants to explore along with the great pregnant images of art, ritual and myth, and the sacramental acts that inform the life of feeling at the thresholds of sense. It is the specific function of iconic signs, which on the human level belong to the symbolic order, to capture and embody the feeling-qualities of the world, a process Susanne Langer will throw especially strong light on within a rather different division of the semiotic continuum, which we will turn to later in this paper.⁷ Such accessing of the world through feeling-signs gives rise to what Peirce called emotional or affective interpretants, the proper significate effect of a sign or sign-configuration. But, if Peirce and Dewey are right, there is a permanent feeling dimension to every sign form, based on what Peirce called the material quality of a sign.

The indexical element of consciousness is marked by a permanent consciousness of vectors or directive lines of force that constrain, or interrupt, our attention and lure it, often without our control, toward a to-be-integrated focus of particulars that mark a felt difference. Dewey's analysis of the circuit of behavior foregrounds this pragmatic engagement with the world, our “dealing concernedly” with it in an interlocked network of receptivity and activity. Karl Bühler (1927, 1934), likewise rejecting “epistemologism,” called this the “steering function” of signs and of the data of sense quite generally. It is exemplified in the role of perceptual vectors and particulars in everyday life and in, for example, connoisseurship in artwork authentication, reading of X-rays, wine tasting, medical diagnoses, and so forth. This realm of indices is clearly differentiated into various levels of articulation, as Peirce, with his variety of examples, so clearly showed and are now embedded in symbolic signs. The ability to codify indices, as in the description of symptom patterns in disease or patterns in weather systems and so forth and so on, enlarges our perceptual capacities and guides them. Cultural psychology can study the variability of the systems of indices, forms of natural knowledge as they function as determining features of a culture. But, most importantly, the feature of constraint or otherness marks what Peirce called “secondness,” a permanent component of the self-world relation. Peirce correlates the indexical dimension with what he calls the “energetic interpretant,” since real connections in things involve interactions, forms of action and not just forms of feeling.

The symbolic element of consciousness, as Peirce defines it, is constituted by the grasp of a unity, coherence or focus in the experiential array by a mediating synthesis that generates some sort of typological constancy or regularity of expectations in the total object of consciousness, some “idea” which holds things together. This is what Peirce calls the “logical interpretant.” But on the human level of semiosis, marked by what Peirce called thirdness, the level of law, regularity, rational habits, the prior levels of iconicity and indexicality are transformed and embedded in properly symbolic formations and there is no turning back, although there can be regressions and distortions, as the loss of symbolic capacities due to trauma and so forth, which were studied by Cassirer (1929) under the rubric of the “pathology of symbolic consciousness.” Iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity permeate the field of consciousness as semiotically defined and intertwined modes of intending, and they are present simultaneously, with different weightings, in different patterns of experiencing or intending the world, such as the aesthetic, the mythic-religious, the scientific, and so forth. We are simultaneously affected, induced to act, and led to understand at the threshold. All these patterns on the human level are permeated by symbolicity in the sense that they are mediations or perhaps “intermediations.”

As I pointed out earlier, it is axiomatic for philosophical semiotics, and for cultural psychology, that all meanings are embodied in sign and sign systems that make their objects known according to the specific semiotic powers that make up and drive the flow of consciousness. When Peirce writes that a sign “must plainly have some characters which belong to it in itself … the material qualities of the sign” (CP, Volume 4, p. 447), his position is echoed in, but not strictly identical with, Vološinov's assertion that “consciousness itself can arise and become a visible fact only in the material embodiment of signs” (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language 11). The symbolic dimension is the defining frame of human intercourse with the world; the semiotic core that holds experience together and around which sense-making grows and develops. And in its material qualities, it operates at the threshold of sense, since it must itself be felt as having a quality. Signs themselves are perceived, even in their “transparency,” but it is the function of philosophy and cultural psychology to make us aware of them in a thematic way.

Clearly, there is, to be sure, a genetic dimension to the common concerns of pragmatist philosophical semiotics and cultural psychology. This applies to cultural psychology more so than to philosophical semiotics. But their investigations are also linked by a framework of concepts that are meant to be general and on a high level of abstraction. Both disciplines combine analyses of the typology of signs with a close examination of their empirical exemplifications in the various realms of signifying activities with which human beings live out their lives with the goal of human flourishing. If, as general semiotics and cognate disciplines hold, symbolicity marks humans as a unique species, then one of the central issues is not just the consequences of symbolicity but the thresholds across which, and out of which, symbolization works its magic. Dewey and Peirce have, each in their own “pragmatist” ways, proposed indispensable ways of framing these thresholds, but their proposals do not exhaust the ways in which philosophy and cultural psychology could engage and enrich one another.

From form to symbol

Susanne Langer's work, developed independently of Dewey and Peirce, attempted to show that the power of symbolization arises out of a deep felt matrix of activities marked by an endogenous and exogenous polarity or what Dewey characterized as a dialectic of undergoing and doing and Langer characterized as the duality of impulse and impact. Langer pushes meaning-making down to the very level of the emergence of sentience and traces the trajectories of semiosis along paths that intersect in important ways with both Dewey's and Peirce's insights and concerns. But in doing so, she divides the experiential and semiotic continuum rather differently and thus throws new light on the fundamental forms of semiosis, which define the thresholds of sense. She adds to the set of important analytical tools that a philosophical semiotics can offer to cultural psychology.

Langer is perhaps best known for her classic Philosophy in a New Key (cited hereafter as PNK), published originally in 1942, which is the indispensable background to her whole philosophical-semiotic project. The main goal of that book is to chart the varieties of what she called “symbolific” activity proper to humans and to mark them off from the types of signifying processes that humans share with other organisms, from the lowest to the highest. As I have shown in more detail elsewhere (Innis, 2013), Langer's semiotic schema intersects with Peirce's and Dewey's in many important ways, changing emphases and supplementing some of Peirce's and Dewey's suggestions that were not developed further. I will only indicate here for discussion what is of especial importance for linking philosophy and cultural psychology in a common enterprise and what Langer adds to what we have already discussed.

Langer's model of signs, unlike Peirce's, is based upon a set of dichotomies rather than a triad of distinctions, although in the end there is no difference in result but in background conditions and concerns as well as empirical exemplifications. Langer has, however, no use for Peirce's ontological categories, which Peirce considered central to his philosophical project. Her metaphysics is naturalistic, albeit non-reductive, and in no way tempted either by Peirce's objective idealistic inclinations or the transformed pan-psychism of Whitehead.

The first dichotomy divides the semiotic continuum into two major modes of signification, what Langer calls indication and symbolization, which gestures not toward Peirce's use of this term but to a central distinction between types of signs in the philosophical tradition.

With respect to indication, Langer points to the universal fact that humans and other living beings are guided and steered by following up and engaging webs of felt significance and existential connections encountered in experience, which we have seen schematized by Dewey and Peirce. Features of the environment with unique physiognomic qualities define spaces of action and possibilities of perception in ways that correlate closely with the bodies and their intrinsic powers of the moving and sensing organisms. No organism can continue to exist without a power to recognize qualities, types of resemblances, and operationally defining features of things and situations in their environment, whatever they may be. Langer points out, however, that the mode of indication is intrinsically “practical” in the sense that the qualities and diacritical features that have a function to play in the action-based life contexts of organisms are restricted in their range of generality. “Indication” according to Langer clearly encompasses essential aspects of Peirce's distinction between iconicity, with its relation to quality, and indexicality, with its relation to existential connections. Both semiotic modes are, in various ways and at different levels, exemplified in all organisms, albeit in radically attenuated forms, to the exploration of which biosemiotics and ethnology have devoted their efforts, with various levels of conceptual clarity and analytical frameworks.

Cultural psychology admits, in concert with its linkage with biosemiotics and its founding father, Jakob von Uexküll (1940) (Theory of Meaning), that the Umwelt of all organisms, while infused with “meaning” in some sense, is dependent on the endosomatic conditions of each organism's body which, in its public sides or manifestations, is itself a congeries of embodied signs for other beings and even, in the proprioceptive mode, for the organism itself. Langer is certainly right in seeing indication in the sense defined as the background against which symbolization in the authentic human sense, which her focal concern, is to be seen.

Langer sees, with many others, of course, symbolization as a distinctively human achievement that involves the formation of concepts and general ideas, the creation of an “open ambient” as opposed to the closed world of other organisms, no matter how subtle from the sensory and physical-ability side their patterns of perception and action may be. Langer thinks of symbolization as essentially connected with abstraction, the nature of which she was at pains to determine and the types of which is one of the keys to her approach to symbolization and its importance as a philosophical tool for cultural psychology. In her classic, Feeling and Form (cited hereafter as FF), which continued and expanded Philosophy in a New Key, adverting to Whitehead, Langer defined a symbol as “any device whereby we are enabled to make an abstraction” (FF, p. xi). But already in her first 1930 book, The Practice of Philosophy (cited as PP), she had contended that “abstraction … is the explicit recognition of a form which may be variously exemplified” (PP, p. 130 and, further, that “every entity has some logical form” (PP, p. 123). The notion of “logical form” as Langer is using it is assimilated by her in this early work to Gestalt as a “new primitive notion … a conceived form where it is expressed in nature” (PP, p. 132), and not just in nature, for, in Langer's laconic formulation, “meaning … accrues essentially to forms” (PNK, p. 90), which are always, in Polanyi's phrase, “ordered contexts,” including the ordered contexts or “configurations” (PNK, p. 73) that the power of seeing takes as symbols, whether natural or created by us.

In accord with the notion of thresholds that I have been using, Langer held to the position that sense experience itself is “a process of formulation” (PNK, p. 89) and that “a mind that works primarily with meanings must have organs that supply it primarily with forms” (PNK, p. 45). The selection of “certain predominant forms,” Langer writes, is the “primitive root of all abstraction” (PNK, p. 90) and as a result she thinks that “all sensitivity bears the stamp of mentality” (PNK, p. 90) in some sense of that term, although it is “symbolic transformation” that marks human mentality, as Peircean semiotics so emphatically affirms.

One of Langer's major contentions is that on the human level “all conscious experience is symbolically conceived experience; otherwise, it passes ‘unrealized’” (Langer, 1967, p. 100) and that “the human response [is] a constructive, not a passive thing” (PNK, p. 24). Construction for Langer is construal, interpretation, rooted in our power to recognize “relations, systematic form, and analogies” (PP, p. 102), which in Dewey's phrase “go out into symbolization.”

This “going out” involves abstractive techniques and proceeds along two genuinely symbolic paths, corresponding to two essentially different types of abstraction resulting in two very different systems of symbolization: generalizing abstraction and presentational abstraction. This is one of Langer's most important proposals, rich in developmental possibilities and relevance for cultural psychology.

Generalizing abstraction, as Langer conceives it, leads to discursive forms, where the meaning-carrier or sign-configuration is marked by the following features, constituting the semiotic mode of “discursivity,” exemplified in language and language-like systems. Language for Langer is the paradigm of a discursive form and is subject to the following conditions. (a) It must have a vocabulary and a syntax, what Karl Bühler called the “dogma of lexicon and syntax.” (b) The units must be able to be defined in terms of other units, that is, it must be able to construct a dictionary with its set of internal relations. (c) Each language as a system must be able to be translated into another language, although there is no strict isomorphism between source and target languages, there always being an incompatibility and untranslatable residue between the two systems. Language, Langer affirms, is “in a sense conception, and conception is the frame of perception” (PNK, p. 126), a thesis Langer supports with a citation from Sapir, although she by no means holds to any dogmatic or naïve version of the linguistic relativity theory. Nevertheless, when Langer states that “our primary world of reality is a verbal one” (PNK, p. 126), the primacy has nothing to do with exclusivity, but with a recognition that the language animal first constructs its articulate sense of reality discursively and that this process exemplifies most clearly to us “formulative, abstractive experience … symbolic transformation and abstraction” (PNK, p. 127), out of which the great realm of mathematics itself, as a continuation of generalizing abstraction grows. The ultimate trajectory of such abstractive techniques is the development of formal systems far from the intuitive supports of natural languages, which Ernst Cassirer (1923) pointed out was the basis and the object of the semiotic mode of Darstellung, or “representation.” The recent work in cognitive linguistics with its foregrounding of image-schemas is intimately connected with this mode.

Presentational abstraction, according to Langer, gives rise to presentational symbols and relies upon a form of abstractive seeing that take experiential configurations themselves—dancing flames, waterfalls, sunrises and sunsets, violent deaths, heroic acts of self-sacrifices, snakes and crocodile, sharks, a mother's smile, a crucifix, the pole star, ritual acts of washing, and so forth—and transforms them into symbols by creating perceptible forms that are visible presentations, carriers of “ideas that haunt the human mind, yet are never satisfactorily stated in words” (PP, p. 156). It is the function of myth, ritual, sacrament, and art to articulate these ideas and make them “present,” without merely pointing to them. This is the domain of what Langer calls “life symbols” (see Cassirer, 1925). Life symbols are embodied in images that express or exemplify what Langer calls a “form of feeling.” Langer's indispensable contention, which recurs throughout all her work, is that feelings have “definite forms, which become progressively articulated” (PNK, p. 100) and the symbolic structures that do this do not lend themselves to “analytic and genuinely abstractive techniques” (PNK, p. 201) in the discursive mode. Their function is to articulate a form of minding, and of being related to the world, that is felt as the intensified process of “the experience of being alive” (PNK, p. 147). It involves the articulation of import rather than abstract concepts, the development of a “semantic of vital and emotional facts” (PNK, p. 235), enabling us to capture the world as a panorama of affective tones and forms of feeling.

It is clearly a being endowed with language that can develop such a form of symbolic transformation of experience, which presents or constructs (or enacts in the case of ritual) experiential configurations as symbolic forms not reducible to discourse but not in any way bearing upon an inaccessible content. Their content may be ineffable, but not meaningless. Presentational forms are beyond language but not beyond meaning.

The rise and development of presentational symbolization was a new departure in semantic … The recognition of vague, vital meanings in physical forms—perhaps the first dawn of symbolism—gave us our idols, emblems, and totems; the primitive function of dream permits our first envisagement of events. The momentous discovery of nature-symbolism, of the pattern of life reflected in natural phenomena, produced the first universal insights. Every mode of thought is bestowed on us, like a gift, with some new principle of symbolic expression. It has a logical development, which is simply the exploitation of all the uses to which that symbolism lends itself. (PNK, p. 201)

Presentational symbolization sees deep resemblances between experiential configurations and forms of feeling and stabilizes and develops these configurations into complex symbols that convey an “unspeakable import” (PNK, p. 100), a felt import that informs a “pattern of sentience—the pattern of life itself as it is felt and directly known” (FF, p. 31), but not in any necessarily thematic way. Such a notion is close to Peirce's “affective interpretant.” The various patterns of sentience are among the main objects of a cultural psychology that engages the felt dimension of life and not just its ideological expressions on the level of discursively articulated content. Langer's analysis clearly bears directly upon Peirce's own treatment of iconism as a sign of quality revealed in feeling as its proper significate effect or interpretant. The presentational symbol does not directly cause a feeling, but presents the pregnant image of a form of feeling and hence induces a felt insight into its object or theme, the discursive articulation of which always remains incomplete.

What such a symbolic form of feeling displays is first and foremost, Langer says, “a stream of tensions and resolutions” (FF, p. 372) and it makes them visible to us and induces in us not so much attempts at verification as at validation, to use a valuable distinction of Polanyi's.⁸ Validation is a process of self-identification within an array of forms of feeling in which one actualizes oneself within this array and it engages us “all the way down.” Langer states a profound truth in this respect in a passage that echoes the implications of Dewey's analysis of the circuit of behavior and its aesthetic expansion in his Art as Experience. Langer writes:

Sentient beings react to their world by constantly changing their total condition. When a creature's attention shifts from one center of interest to another, not only the organs immediately involved … but hundreds of fibers in the body are affected. Every smallest shift of awareness calls out a readjustment, and under ordinary circumstances such readjustments pass easily into another. (FF, p. 372)

Compare the following astute and psychologically pertinent passage from Art as Experience (cited as AE):

It is not just the visual apparatus but the whole organism that interacts with the environment in all but routine action. The eye, ear, or whatever, is only the channel through which the total response takes place. A color as seen is always qualified by implicit reactions of many organs, those of the sympathetic system as well as of touch. It is a funnel for the total energy put forth, not its well-spring. Colors are sumptuous and rich just because a total organic response is deeply implicated in them. (AE, p. 127)

Presentational symbols embody in their multiplicity these smallest shifts of awareness, making them visible to us. The paradigmatic role of art for philosophy and for culture as a whole and clearly for cultural psychology is, however, not to think of culture as a consciously constructed work of art, a symbolic form in the presentational mode. It is rather to learn to not focus inordinately upon the explicit ideas carried by cultural forms in abstraction from what Peirce called the material qualities of the sign or sign-configuration and its heuristic role in uncovering the enfolded acts of sentience visible in its structure. Langer's notion of a presentational form incorporates this idea of a material quality of a sign and takes it further than Peirce himself did.

Langer's thesis, then, that art works, both “high” and “low,” are images of felt life does not apply just to art of all forms, both “high” and “low.” It points to the heuristic value or power of art for making visible key aspects of the thresholds of sense and of sense-giving quite generally. For Langer all art works, independently of their aesthetic value, formulate felt life and in this way art “molds the objective world for the people” and thus, ideally, is in a position to be a “defense against outer and inner chaos” (FF, p. 409). But, by extension, it could also be both a mirror and a furtherer or enabler of outer and inner chaos, a manifestation of a culture gone sour, and also a devastating criticism of such a culture. The background to this assertion is encapsulated in the following passage:

… It is perception molded by imagination that gives us the outward world we know. And it is continuity of thought that systematizes our emotional reactions into attitudes with distinct feeling tones, and sets a certain scope for an individual's passions. In other words: by virtue of our thought and imagination we have not only feelings, but a life of feeling. (FF, p. 372)

It is true that the idea of semiotic embodiment implies that the objective world in both its non-aesthetic and aesthetic dimensions can be thought of as a defense against chaos—but what if it engenders chaos, both inner and outer? What if we find dimensions of the lived world that are devoid of continuity and coherence, that make impossible what Peirce and Dewey called rational habits? Cultural psychology cannot stand apart from this issue, which I have explored in earlier parts of this paper and elsewhere (Innis, 2016). A model of perception derived from and explicated by a phenomenological semiotics is also a normative model. It gives us an ideal toward which to strive and a set of criteria for measuring the values of the experienced cultural forms. It is for this reason that Dewey remarked that “to esthetic experience, then, the philosopher must we must go to understand what experience is” (AE, p. 286).

In an important sense, the cultural psychologist and the artist have much in common in terms of what they are looking for. “The artist's eye sees in nature, and even in human nature betraying itself in action, an inexhaustible wealth of tensions, rhythms, continuities and contrasts … those are the ‘internal forms’ which the ‘external forms’ … express for us” (1967, p. 87). From a perspective informed by Langer, we could propose a cultural psychology of these “internal forms” that sees, as Langer puts it, all cultural forms as the objectification of feeling and the subjectification of nature, “one vast phenomenon of ‘felt life’ stretching from the elementary tonus of vital existence to the furthest reaches of mind” (1967, p. 151), marked by what she calls “gradients” that inform the flux of experience and the objects that animate it.

These gradients are also the objects of a cultural psychology that focuses on the life of feeling and its flux, with its currents and eddies, to use James's expression. When Langer writes that “gradients of all sorts—of relative clarity, complexity, tempo, intensity of feeling, interest—permeate all artistic structure” (1967, p. 211) and make up its “rhythmic quality” (1967, p. 212), what she says is not to be restricted to art works but to cultural forms of all sorts—cities and villages, civic monuments that embody an “ethnic domain,” and so forth. All cultural forms are engaged and engage us, having a “significate effect” on us, and all cultural forms exemplify a “pattern of sentience—the pattern of life itself, as it is felt and directly known” (FF, p. 31). The goal of cultural psychology, along with a reflective philosophy, is to raise such a pattern to explicit consciousness and to determine the nature and scope of its rhythms.

In his Art as Experience, Dewey discussed the core idea of an “esthetic rhythm” (AE, p. 169), a notion not restricted to art works but which points toward an experiential ideal clearly applicable to all perceptual occasions and situations. It functions as a normative notion that applies at the perceptual-affective threshold of our engagement with the world. Such rhythm is defined by Dewey as “ordered variation of energy.” This kind of variation is not only as important as order, but, in Dewey's words, it is “an indispensable coefficient of esthetic order” (AE, p. 170). “Esthetic rhythm,” Dewey writes, “is a matter of perception and therefore includes whatever is contributed by the self in the active process of perceiving” (AE, p. 169). Langer highlights a central aspect of this active process:

And as most of our awareness of the world is a continual play of impressions, our primitive intellectual equipment is largely a fund of images, not necessarily visual, but often gestic, kinesthetic, verbal or what I can only call ‘situational.’ … [W]e apprehend everything which comes to us as impact from the world by imposing some image on it that stresses its salient features and shapes it for recognition and memory. (1967, p. 59)

Langer is concerned to show how this primitive intellectual equipment goes out into and is completed by processes of symbolic transformation in all its modes and the vast panoply of symbolic forms by which the world is endowed with meaning or, paradoxically, made bereft of meaning. The very power of meaning-making can lead to a recognition of the absence of meaning if it presents us with an imaginative vision of an absurd world. Building the human world, according to Langer, involves an “endless rhythm of individuation and involvement” (1967, p. 354). Individuation is a sign of increasing interiority and consciousness of the creation of a unique self, the development of the awareness of being a “subject” of acts that determine who we are and who we want to be. Involvement is the inextricable social web in which we are caught and the constraints on, as well as the enabling conditions of, our actions.

These two poles of building the human world through symbolic transformation remain in perpetual tension and as a consequence are subject to wild swings and imbalances. Still, as if a warning to cultural psychology and to an overgeneralizing philosophy, Langer asserts that

the primal and perennial work of social organization is not to fix the bounds of behavior as permanent lines, which would make all evolutionary process impossible, but to retrieve the vital balance every time some act, public or private, has upset it. (1967, p. 125)

Cultural psychology, as well as philosophy, really cannot leave everything as it is. It works with some ideal of human flourishing that is connected with what Langer calls “intensified life.” The normative question is, to what types of objects and spheres of meaning is this intensification bound? How is the “vital balance” retrieved?

Langer saw the import of art as an essential clue to minding quite generally, without, however, claiming that it is the only, exclusive clue. Discursivity and presentationality are twin sources of the rational—and irrational—orders that make up the realm of cultural forms. While cultural psychology and a descriptive semiotics can answer this question factually and genetically, it is another thing to answer it on the normative level. It is essential to develop an adequate model of the thresholds of sense that function as the points of interpenetration between selves and their worlds.

Builders may know the basics of mechanics, cooks find out chemical properties, and sailors map the sky; but who has any such naïve yet expert knowledge of psychical phenomena? Who knows the essentials of feeling? … The real patterns of feeling—how a small fright, or ‘startle,’ terminates, how the tensions of boredom increase or give way to self-entertainment, how daydreaming weaves in and out of realistic thought, how the feeling of a place, a time of day, an ordinary situation is built up—these felt events, which compose the fabric of mental life, usually pass unobserved, unrecorded and therefore essentially unknown to the average person. (1967, pp. 56–57)

Such is the central task of the phenomenological semiotics that is pursued, each in its own way and at varying levels of abstraction and generality, by philosophy and by cultural psychology: to record the fabric of mental life. Of course, looked at from Langer's standpoint, cultural psychology would see the whole cultural world as an expression of patterns of feeling, patterns that emerge from the life of feeling but then stamp themselves on those who produced them or come to live in them. These patterns, embodied in sign systems of all sorts, clearly do not belong to the aesthetic order exclusively, although as lived through they are perceived and form the frames of perception.

Following up this idea with Langer in mind, we could see the thresholds of sense as the creative matrices of what Ernst Cassirer (1929) called the “vortices of consciousness” marked by various sense-functions or ways of sense-giving that differentiate figures from grounds, which Merleau-Ponty considered something ultimate, in an unending process. In this process, in the words of Cassirer:

Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium. (1944, p. 25)

This artificial medium is a symbolic medium of ever evolving dynamic forms that exemplify every possible pattern of sentience and its intended “objects.” These forms not only reveal and shape the meaning systems in which we live out our lives but the very contours of the thresholds of sense through which the systems of signs must pass in order to capture the world in their nets. Langer's great contribution to the analytic tool box of cultural psychology is to show how, by following up and generalizing the lead of the different semiotic logic of art and of presentationality as semiotic mode, we can extend Peirce's notion of the material quality of a sign to show how to focus in detail on the feeling textures of subjectivity that bind us to the world in a way different from the binding through discursivity. It is clear that the following passage applies beyond art:

Art is the objectification of feeling; and in developing our intuition, teaching eye and ear to perceive expressive form, it makes form expressive for us wherever we confront it, in actuality as well as in art. Natural forms become articulate and seem like projections of the “inner forms” of feeling, as people influenced (whether consciously or not) by all the art that surrounds them develop something of the artist's vision. (1967, p. 87).

Cultural psychology, and philosophy, like art must, Langer asserts, teach eye and ear “to perceive expressive form,” wherever it may be found and to understand just why human being need such forms to satisfy their deepest longings.

These expressive forms and the intertwined diaphanous conceptual webs spun by discursive forms make up the human world which is always subject to crises of imbalance which elicit attempts at rebalancing what Dewey called the “moving unbalanced balance of things” (1925/1988, p. 314), a permanent feature of existence. The life of feeling, Langer teaches us, is a dynamically charged field that directs, motivates, and calls forth the various elements that constitute it. The life of feeling, like an artistic image, is a processive event that gives the appearance of being self-articulating and held together by a “ rhythmic concatenation” of integrated elements that are progressively more and more unified (at least ideally), giving rise to the human agent as a “vital matrix” (1967, p. 322). For Langer, an organism as well as the mind is conceived of as being “made entirely by processes which are vital acts” (1967, p. 327) and “the body, throughout life, is the ‘dynamic equilibrium’ itself, growing and differentiating into articulate forms” (1967, p. 184). The mind, and hence the human self, like an artwork, has a material substrate, a material matrix “which is the counterpart of the functional matrix of activities, and indeed the product, and therefore the exact reflection, of the latter” (1967, p. 184). Hence, the idea of the “mirror of culture,” but not to be understood in any simplistic causal or one-to-one way. The “differentiating into articulate forms” is what Dewey called the “going out into symbolization” and Peirce “semiosis.”

Ideally, this “going out” integrates not just the world but ourselves.

Michael Polanyi, availing himself of a helpful distinction between indication and symbolization remarked that self-centered integrations “are made from the self as a center (which includes all the subsidiary clues in which we dwell) to the object of our focal attention” (1973, p. 71). The clues function as pointers and are fused with the objects that they bear upon, as the features of a face or the properties of wine are integrated to the face or to the wine. In this sense, they disappear into the object, which they indicate.

In “symbolization,” however, in Polanyi's sense, the subsidiary clues “do not function … merely as indicators pointing our way to something else. In this second kind of meaning, it is the subsidiary clues that are of intrinsic interest to us, and they enter into meaning in such a way that we are carried away by these meanings” (1973, p. 71). In the following summary text, what Polanyi says about being carried away bears upon the process of self-integration as a central goal of life. Symbolization as self-integration leads to self-articulation and self-recognition by producing semiotic structures that engage us as prime symbols, symbols that we live by and die for. Polanyi writes:

The symbol, as an object of focal awareness, is not merely established by an integration of subsidiary clues directed from the self to the focal object; it is also established by surrendering the diffuse memories and experiences of the self into this object, thus giving them a visible embodiment. This visible embodiment serves as a focal point for the integration of these diffuse aspects of the self into a felt unity, a tacit grasp of ourselves as a whole person in spite of the manifold incompatibilities existing in our lives as lived. Instead of being a self-centered integration, a symbol becomes a self-giving one, an integration in which not only the symbol becomes integrated but the self also becomes integrated as it is carried away by the symbol–or given to it. (1973, pp. 74–75)

This distinction, which is clearly not absolute, between self-centered and self-giving integrations marks another theme that binds a philosophical semiotics and cultural psychology together in the common task of both studying and evaluating a world in which the felt unity of the self as the goal of the human process has been promoted or blocked by cultural forms of all types which function at and delimit the various thresholds of sense, some key aspects of which have been rotated in schematic fashion in the course of this essay.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Robert E Innis, Professor, Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Obel Foundation Visiting Professor at the Niels Bohr Center for Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University. He has published many articles, monographs, and books on the intersections between philosophy and the human sciences, with special focus on philosophical semiotics, aesthetics, the philosophy of technology, and the philosophy of religion. His books include Karl Bühler: Semiotic Foundations of Language Theory, Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, Consciousness and the Play of Signs, Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense, and Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind. He was named University Professor at UMass Lowell and has been Humboldt Fellow at the University of Cologne and Fulbright Professor at the University of Copenhagen.

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