On the paths of semiotic discourse on corporeality and mentality in the existence modes of multiple selves

The following paper aims at investigating the paths in philosophical thinking about corporeality and mentality as inseparable constituents and aspects forming the individual human being, understood in terms of the self, who is able to engage in significative-communicative activities with his/her/its natural and cultural environments. With the focus on the existence mode of the human self, the subject matter of an analytical confrontation will constitute its physical fleshly ability for performing sensorial activities of perceiving, identifying, recognizing, or identifying, and with its spiritual intellectual aptitudes for being competent in thinking, reasoning and understanding, interpreting, imagining, and the like. Tracing the sign-and-meaning-oriented trajectories of selected conceptions of the anthropological category of man as homo animal symbolicum or the semiotic animal, the paper will inquire into the discursive ways and means how the material composition of human body and the spiritual dimensions of human mind have permeated, in particular, the conceptions of man, as successive points through which the philosophical legacy of Western thought has moved, starting from the Antiquity. What deserves to be investigated and described here includes the distinctions between the powers of the spirit (divine, sapient, comprehending intelligence) and abilities of the body (organs for displaying motoric motions, emotions or will). Further issues will be referred to the (im)mortality of the soul, single and plural souls, carnal and mental bonds of the soul, duality of mind and body or psychosomatic unity of man, the subjectivity of the substantial or insubstantial self and identity, the agency and subjectivity of the human self, somatic, psychic and environmental foundations of the multiple self. With the belief in view how far the relationship between soma and psyche is decisive for the understanding of the essence of man, the paper will argue that his objective and subjective existence have constituted at first the subject of metaphysical deliberations about the conception of spiritual self, which have been subsequently replaced by the conception of social self, and ultimately complemented by the conception of cognitive self, appreciating the importance of embodied perception, lived experience, and behavior, with special reference to signification and communication. The delineation of separable stages in the semiotic discourse on the understanding of corporeality and mentality will finally lead to expressing the certitude that it is also possible to demonstrate how the trajectories in the semiotic reasoning about the dual character of sign-and-meaning in both the outer and inner self, with respect to its sensibility and intelligibility, have found reflections in the continuance of recent conceptual and methodological frameworks. A separate observation will be made regarding the tendency, which prevails in present-day investigative approaches, to treat the empirically accessible body and the rationally inferable mind of the individual as an integrated psychosomatic whole. This viewpoint will be shown as relevant for phenomenologically inclined practitioners, who expose the first-person perspective in order to describe the lived experiences of individual semiotic selves in a sensorial way, when they communicate with one another, verbally or nonverbally, at interactional and transactional levels in various domains of their life.
País: 
Polonia
Temas y ejes de trabajo: 
Fundación y fundamentos lógicos de la semiótica
Semiótica y filosofía
Institución: 
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
Mail: 
elusia.wasik@gmail.com

Estado del abstract

Estado del abstract: 
Accepted
Desarrollado por gcoop.