This address reflects on the semiotic nature of placeness and its connection to human freedom, grounding the discussion in Peircean semiotics, biosemiotic thought, and Zhuangzi’s Taoism. Beginning with the paradox of place, between the need to stay and the desire to escape, it considers how human beings, as semiotic animals, are immersed in a lifeworld shaped by meaning-making across three dimensions: the representational, the interpretational, and the existential (Umwelt). The address proposes an inclusive semiotic vision of freedom, comprising intra-semiosic, inter-semiosic, and ultra-semiosic freedom. Central to this inquiry is what I call antisemiosis, inspired by Zhuangzi, to name a mode of transcendence that gestures beyond anthroposemiosis, through de-symbolization and cognitive de-selfing. Rather than treating semiotics as merely a science of signs, the address emphasizes its dual nature as both science and art, capable not only of modeling meaning but of pointing beyond it. In drifting through and with the lifeworld, the human being encounters both the limits and the possibilities of freedom, shaped always by the paradoxes of place, semiosis, and self.
An analysis of the logic function of Analogy as historically adapted by the disciplines of Philosophy and Rhetoric (Communicology, Linguistics, Semiotics). Most cultures assimilate analogy as a disposition for causal thinking [G. aitia] which becomes a habit for making judgments, e.g., deictic expressions of comparison, then contrast. The main illustration is Plato’s Analogy of the Line as used by philosophers (dialectic, mathematic as Ontology) and communicologists (rhetoric, poetic as Epistemology). The discussion covers Scholastic modifications (L. Capta, Data, Verba, Acta) and linguistic applications (Jakobson’s Metaphor/Simile/Metonymy/Synecdoche model). Summary diagrams and tables are given. Passing reference is made to Aristotle’s “Logic Square”, A. J. Greimas’ “Semiotic Square”, and Charles S. Peirce’s “Speculative Rhetoric” which he usually just calls Methodeutic. All these models instantiate Peirce’s (1903: 128) logic of Quateridentity, i.e., triadic quadrature (A : B :: b : a). In cognitive neuroscience the model is called “shared representation”. Both Roman Jakobson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty label the model as Chiasm.
The Polish national anthem, titled “Mazurek Dąbrowskiego”, was composed at a time when Poland was not an independent European state. Józef Wybicki composed the text in Italy in July 1797 on the occasion of General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski’s departure with Polish legions to fight under Napoleon Bonaparte. The legions hoped to secure independence from Poland’s third partition under Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Habsburg Monarchy of Austria. Although the “Mazurek Dąbrowskiego” captures a particular moment of foreign control in Poland’s national history, it represents continuing values of patriotism and nationalism that have persisted with the Polish people through the present day. This article considers the “Mazurek Dąbrowskiego” as an exemplar of a semiotics of hope, distinguishing empirical from phenomenological reality. The history and context of the Polish anthem yield an existential picture of hope as a semiotic act of identification and remembering.
The title of this essay entails a reference to a passage from a poem by William Butler Yeats, “The Circus Animals Desertion”. Yeats’s words conjure an image of the existential ground of human connection, a ground that is not so much seen or recognized but constitutes the possibility of human experience itself. Building from reflections drawn from Laing, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and contemporary theories of family psychology and family systems, this essay considers the philosophical concept of grounding—the existential foundation and premise where all ladders start—as it is revealed not just in the intimacy of human encounter, but in the sustained intimacy upon which we, in our vulnerability, fragility, and mortality, bond as lovers and friends. The matter of precarity as it has emerged as an issue in the human sciences is ultimately a matter of community. That is, the sense of precaritization, of a loss of security and well-being, is not merely an economic matter. My argument is that the sense of abandonment describing much of the Zeitgeist of the twenty-first century demands a closer study of the mutuality and relationality implied by the concept of communication, as well as the epistemic framework in which language, interaction, and meaning have been contextualized over the course of the century.
