Bains, Paul. The Primacy of Semiosis. An Ontology of Relations.

Deely, John

BAINS, Paul. The Primacy of Semiosis. An Ontology of Relations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. xii + 186 pp. $53.00--This is a book rather to be read than read about, for the tale that it tells in brief compass is astonishing. Relation as a feature of the mind-independent world, affirmed by Aristotle and Aquinas but denied by Ockham and the moderns, Bains here presents in the light Charles Peirce (as Poinsot before him) came to see it: as the one mode of being which is unaffected intrinsically by the surrounding circumstances which make the relation in question belong primarily to the mind-dependent or mind-independent order, and hence as the one mode of being which makes communication possible in the first place and "real" whenever it occurs, regardless of whether the communication in question bears upon a being as real as Napoleon, as fictional as Hamlet, or any objective mixture of reality and fiction in between.

This notion of relation as irreducible in its proper being to the division between the "real and unreal," the "mind-independent and the mind-dependent," is what Bains calls "ontological"; and he presents this singularity as the opening whereby semiosis, or the action of signs as involving relations irreducibly uniting three terms, enters and permeates the order of finite being. And it is the recognition of semiosis that marks the frontier and divide--at least within philosophy--between thought that is merely "modern" (however advanced) and irreducibly "postmodern" by restoring "reality" to the knowable without reducing reality to what is independent of mind (which was the original point of the contrast between ens reale and ens rationis, for example, in the Latin Age).

Perhaps because he comes to the problem with no specialist background in scholasticism in general or Thomistic thought in particular, Bains astonishingly treats the Latin notion of "species" (that is, of the forms which specify the awareness of animals) with a deftness and accuracy that completely bypasses the "quo/quod fallacy" that beset the whole of twentiety-century Neothomism (see pp. 45-58, esp. 50):

"As the Latins said, the concept as a formal sign is that by which--or rather, that on the basis of which--we know (id in quo); it is not that which we know (id quod). So the contrast: the species impressae is that 'by which' (id quo) we are determined (or 'specified') so as to become aware of this rather than that environmental aspect; the species expressa (id in quo) is that 'on the basis of which' the environmental stimulus is experienced as an object; while in both cases the object itself (id quod) is distinct from the species, just as a terminus is distinct from the foundation of a relation. We will come to see that the species expressae is functioning as a Peircean interpretant."

With the Neothomist conflation of expressa to impressa removed by foregrounding the role of relation, Bains is further able to clear aside some facile but false oppositions that have become fashionable in contrasting Thomism with Scotism in matters epistemological.

This book deserves more space than is available to me for the purposes of this review. So let me say in general terms that Bains has provided in the area of philosophy the single most outstanding example I have seen of the "ecumenicalism in semiotics" that Prof. Thomas Sebeok constantly called for: there is nothing on the market to compare with this book in its comparative scope. Modestly presented by its author, the work breaks open the dialogue most central to semiotics today in quite a startling manner. Bains manages to bring to the surface a thread of fundamental discourse whose breadth of commonality on the contemporary scene probably no one, certainly not me, heretofore suspected. I have long made the claim that the development of fundamental semiotics is the positive essence of what is truly postmodern in intellectual culture. But what Bains has done is to demonstrate that this thesis is implicit in a broad range of contemporary works (well beyond what I myself have ever had occasion to focus upon). In doing this, he shows the need to revisit philosophy's whole history in a semiotic light, particularly the standardly neglected Latin centuries between Ockham and Descartes.

Moreover, this book is the first book to show a systematic appreciation of the insight and implications of what is historically the earliest systematic semiotic, namely, the Treatise on Signs of John Poinsot. My emphasis here is on the word "implications." For what Bains has accomplished is to show the relevance of Poinsot's doctrine that signs formally consist in "external relations" to a whole range of contemporary thinkers whose work is already, on other grounds, in the thick of contemporary discussions. Although in his preface Bains mentions Deleuze, Poinsot, and Deely as his "three principal theorists," in fact the reader winds up crossing paths with many more authors in considerable fashion on the contemporary scene--not only the inevitable Felix Guattari and Claire Parnet, but Heidegger, Latour, Stengers, Muralt, Maturana, Varela, Whitehead, and a considerable number of others. I learned with surprise and pleasure of the semiotic insights common across this timely range of thinkers, insights which transform the early twenty-first-century intellectual landscape when Poinsot and von Uexkull are brought into the mix.

All of this is truly groundbreaking, and should assure a wide interest in Bains's book that will translate into some classroom adoptions in advanced undergraduate courses and graduate study. For what Bains provides is a concrete and detailed illustration of Ratzinger's thesis as first expressed in 1970: "the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality."--John Deely, University of St. Thomas, Houston.