Having been boiled, it would lose heat more rapidly served in a wide-brimmed bowl, thus becoming less painful to the mucosal membranes of the mouth when consumed. After all, coffee could be served in a glass jar. Of a given height, width, depth, with a certain cylindrical design often wider at one end than the other, and having a loop to the side of it, the object is said to be a “coffee cup.” It is generally considered the most appropriate instrument for this purpose, although I doubt few could immediately explain why if asked. Here in America, there is a standing tradition involving the use of a certain object made from ceramic or plastic or other heat-resistant material. The principle point of the above discussion has been that the reading of signs, derived through biological development, closes off the possibility of direct knowledge of any entity, since the entity is always read as a sign, and a sign cannot signify itself (except perhaps in the most trivial manner). So, let’s begin again, this time within the realm of the human. However, the matter gets a little complicated after birth and quite quickly. We are born to sign and to respond to signs. The point then is that signification and sign-response, for humans, remains behavior extrapolative from tendencies of response developed in the process of evolution. We can’t know what “consciousness” might mean for a chimp, let alone for a rose bush.
All living beings do seem to respond to their environment as though responding to signs in the environment, but only in a gross way. That the mechanism involved is “an energy wave of a given frequency” – the sunlight itself – is accidental to the plant’s response.īut before we get into some weird discussion of a possible “vegetable consciousness,” let me remark again that much of what can be said of life forms engaging in sign-response remains figurative and always tentative. The plant isn’t bending towards the sunlight for the sake of sunlight, but because chemical reactions in the plant interact with the sunlight as a trigger for the process of photosynthesis. As a sign, it can only signify something other than itself. Now, it is the case that a thing cannot be perceived except that insofar as it is also perceived as a sign. The plant can be said (figuratively) to be “perceiving,” sunlight only insofar as it is of use to it.
Sunlight is necessary for photosynthesis, which keeps keeping a plant alive. This doesn’t suggest any aesthetic appreciation of sunlight per se. We know many plants bend towards sunlight. Biology itself indicates one major reason why: No living being appears to perceive any phenomenon (event or other being) except insofar as the phenomenon interests the perceiving being as concerning its own survival. There seems to be little doubt that there is a residual sensibility of the innocence of our formative infancy, to be found in a nostalgia that the material universe should be somehow available to us directly, without mediation that god or some principle of biology defining the “rational animal” should equip us with some epistemological mechanism so we can perceive things-as-they-are.
DEATHMETAL ALPHABET TATTOO OUTLINES MOVIE
Consider the crucifix: if found in a Catholic church we interpret it one way in a vampire movie another and hanging around the neck of a Hell’s Angel motorcyclist something else altogether, depending on what we know of the particular motorcyclist.
Semiotic interpretation is important, and yet it is somewhat variable and changeable, depending on the context in which it occurs.
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