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Meaning is the genus of which conscious meaning is the species. Its specific differences from meaning per se must be shaped and delineated with care. This entails that the concept of consciousness will be rotated through different axes of reflection, each of which will serve to undermine the centrality of the concept in a generic semiotics of meaning. The inversion of the accepted genus/species relation, which affirms that meaning is exclusively within the provenance of consciousness, requires a painstaking search for a language that can reflect a genus (meaning) that is fully encompassing and yet incarnated in specific moments of meaning in specific orders of relevance. The principles of such an inversion are the principles of a semiotics of nature, the most generic perspective from/within which to participate in the panoply of meaning. The fact that such a perspective has eluded philosophy and theology is more the function of failed attempts to unfold a nonpolemical understanding of nature than of any structural weakness in the internal equipment of semiotic theory itself. Hence the success of such an enterprise rests on the prior delineations of nature, the most elusive and yet the most essential category within thought itself. On the deepest level, the concept of “nature” functions as both a category and a precategory, but in very different respects (p. 1). |
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