Maritain’s “Sign and Symbol”-part i

[essius]

In honor of Jacques Maritain’s hundred and twenty-seventh birthday, and in order to reinitiate semiotic inquiry and discussion here on LiveJournal, I offer here a few brief comments on Maritain’s analysis of the nature of signs. In his essay “Sign and Symbol,”* Maritain begins with the following strong remarks:

There are no more complex problems, no problems of wider bearing on psychology and on culture than those pertaining to the sign. The sign involves the whole extent of moral and human life; it is in the human world a universal instrument, just as is movement in the physical world. (217)

Because he is a disciple of Thomas Aquinas and John Poinsot (John of St. Thomas), Maritain is careful to point out that signs are even more universal than human psychology and culture, for the sign “is bound up with all knowing, even animal knowing. In the psychic life of animals not endowed with reason signs play a great part” (219). The basis for this claim is the scholastic analysis of what constitutes a sign: a sign is anything that presents knowledge of something other than itself. On this accounting, even the external senses-the powers of sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing-depend on the action of signs: “For the use of the sign does not necessarily involve inference and comparison. There is thus a certain presence-presence of knowability-of the signified in the sign; the former is there in alio esse,, in another mode of existence” (220).

Maritain’s main concern in this essay (and the others that occur in the same volume) is to attend to “man in his cultural life and in the complex patterns of his earthly destiny” (ix). But unlike the semiological tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure, he does not detach human knowing from animal knowing. Instead, he anticipates Thomas Sebeok’s important distinction between anthroposemiosis and zoösemiosis (i.e., between human and nonhuman sign-processes). And there is also in his analysis, at least in virtual form, justification for the semiotic discipline today known as biosemiotics.

Next time we’ll take a look at just how Maritain thinks the move is made from nonhuman to human signs.

*English translation of Maritain’s 1938 “Signe et symbole,” appearing as Ch. IX of Ransoming the Time (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941).