Synchronicity and Responsibility in Semiotics

Abstract

Abstract The synchronic vision is the expression of conscious awareness of the present situation, a totalizing vision capable of gazing at all of life responsibly, at all semiosis over the planet. John Deely’s vision of synchrony’s inevitable seepage into diachrony is connected with the fact that we are members of the societies of human animals who first engendered a “community of inquirers focused on the action of signs”. Deely reconstructs the pathway that from Saussurean semiology leads through Charles Peirce, Charles Morris, and Thomas Sebeok to the new “science of signs” conceived, recovering Locke, as the “doctrine of signs”. Insofar as the human animal is a “semiotic animal” he or she is capable of metasemiosis and therefore of knowledge and control. Consequently, the human animal, a semiotic animal, is also susceptible of responsibility: responsibility that concerns not only the human world and the possibility of the future of anthroposemiosis, but rather all of semiosis, all of terrestrial life, “Gaia”. Insisting on the interdependency, in semiotics, between synchronicity and responsibility, Deely evidences the specific task of semiotics, which is a task that is reserved to the semiotician as such.