After Deely: If I walk the “way of signs,” where am I going?

Abstract

Deely has written whole of philosophy from point of view of presence and absence of sign, taking its point of departure from Augustine's late-fourth to early-fifth century inquiry into the words of scripture and sacraments of Church. Yet Deely only mentions sacrament six times (never after Latin Age). The Scriptures, indeed, receive twenty-eight references. However, in only five occurrences in text after Latin Age, four of them involve use of Scripture in ignominious opposition to heliocentrism and evolution. Sacrament and Scriptures, it seems, having served their purpose in birthing notion of sign, are - like midwives - paid off and sent away. However, fifth occurrence of Scriptures beyond Latin Age suggests that this is premature, and, indeed, that Deely knows it. The notion of sign, born from need exegesis of sacred texts, disappears, as Deely notes, with the abandonment of textual exegeses of scholasticism, which opened floodgates for what Peirce calls a tidal wave of nominalism. Another recent and more modest history of philosophy, whose author is also accounting death of sign in modernity and post modernity, is Catherine Pickstock's After writing. Pickstock attempts to trace emergence of unliturgical world, which is necropolis of contemporary society, and to counterpoise the liturgical lineaments of sacred polis, which is avowedly semiotic. For Pickstock, like Deely, task is to show Latin solution to problem she finds foreshadowed in sophists, but problem constituted us by moderns like Descartes. It is reasonable to ask if, Deely as well, semiotics points towards liturgical consummation.