Abstract
This article argues that organisms, defined by a semi-permeable membrane or skin separating organism from environment, are (must be) semiotically alert responders to environments (both Innenwelt and Umwelt). As organisms and environments complexify over time, so, necessarily, does semiotic responsiveness, or ‘semiotic freedom’. In complex environments, semiotic responsiveness necessitates increasing plasticity of discernment, or discrimination. Such judgements, in other words, involve interpretations. The latter, in effect, consist of translations of a range of sign relations which, like metaphor, are based on transfers (carryings over) of meanings or expressions from one semiotic ‘site’ to another. The article argues that what humans describe as ‘metaphor’ (and believe is something which only pertains to human speech and mind and, in essence, is ‘not real’) is, in fact, fundamental to all semiotic and biosemiotic sign processes in all living things. The article first argues that metaphor and mind are immanent in all life, and are evolutionary, and, thus, that animals certainly do have minds. Following Heidegger and then Agamben, the article continues by asking about the place of animal mind in humans, and concludes that, as a kind of ‘night science’, ‘humananimal’ mind is central to the semiotics of Peircean abduction.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
First published in 1975 as La métaphore vive.
The wine of the Eucharist is both wine and blood: a fact, Bateson noted drily, which escaped Protestant literalism: ‘The very act of translation—[…] from metaphor to simile, and from poetry to prose—can itself become sacramental, a sacred metaphor for a religious stance. Cromwell’s troops could run around England, breaking the noses and even heads and genitals off the statues in the churches, in a religious fervour, simultaneously stressing their own total misunderstanding of what the metaphoric-sacred is all about (Bateson and Bateson 1988: 29).
John Keats, Letter to his brothers George and Tom Keats, 21 December 1817.
References
Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (1979). Dialectic of enlightenment. Tr. J. Cumming. London: Verso.
Agamben, G. (2004). The open: Man and animal. Tr. K. Attell. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.
Auden, W. H. (1976 [1939]). In Memory of Sigmund Freud. Collected Poems, ed. E. Mendelson, London: Faber and Faber.
Baluška, F. et al. (2004). Root apices as plant command centres: the unique ‘brain-like’ status of the root apex transition zone. Biologia (Bratisl.) 59 (Suppl. 13).
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to An Ecology of mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bateson, G., & Bateson, M. C. (1988). Angels fear: Towards an epistemology of the sacred. New York: Bantam.
Bateson, G. (2002). Mind and nature: A necessary unity. Cresskill: Hampton.
Bekoff, M., & Pierce, J. (2009). Wild justice: The moral lives of animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brown, S. (2009). Play: How it shapes the brain, opens the imagination, and invigorates the soul. London: Penguin.
Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body and world together again. Cambridge: MIT.
Damasio, A. (1995). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. London: Picador.
Damasio, A. (2000). The feeling of what happen: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. London: William Heinemann.
Harries-Jones, P. (1995). A recursive vision: Ecological understanding and Gregory Bateson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Heidegger, M. (1995). The fundamental concepts of metaphysics: World, finitude, solitude. Tr. W. McNeill and N. Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hoffmeyer, J. (2008). Biosemiotics: An examination into the signs of life and the life of signs. Tr. J. Hoffmeyer and tr. and ed. Donald Favareau. Scranton and London: University of Scranton Press.
Jacob, F. (1988). The statue within. New York: Basic Books.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books.
Loye, D. (2000). Darwin’s lost theory of love. San Jose: toExcel.
Noble, D. (2006). The music of life: Biology beyond genes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Polanyi, M. (1966). The tacit dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ricoeur, P. (2003). The rule of metaphor: the creation of meaning in language. London: Routledge.
Shubin, N. (2008). Your inner fish: A journey into the 3.5-billion-year history of the human body. London: Allen Lane.
von Uexküll, J. (1982). The theory of meaning. Semiotica, 42–1, 25–80.
Ulanowicz, R. E. (2009). A third window: Natural life beyond Newton and Darwin. West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press.
Wordsworth, W., & Coleridge, S.T. (1968 [1802]). Lyrical Ballads. Eds. R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones. London: Methuen.
Wu, D. (1998). Romanticism: An anthology. London: Blackwell.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wheeler, W. Delectable Creatures and the Fundamental Reality of Metaphor: Biosemiotics and Animal Mind. Biosemiotics 3, 277–287 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9076-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9076-y