The Two Approaches to Language: Philosophical and Historical Reflections on the Point of Departure of Jean Poinsot’s Semiotic

THE TWO APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE: PHILOSOPHICAL AND HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE POINT OF DEPARTURE oF JEAN PoiNSOT's SEMIOTIC " We publish our position without yielding to contention or jealous rivalry, but giving ourselves to the pursuit of truth, which concerns doctrine and not persons." "To the Reader" of the Cursus Philosophicus of Jean Poinsot. Alcala, Spain, 1631. ( ( RELATIONS DO NOT exist as such; they do not constitute a mode of being; when two entities are related-whether they are related as knower and known, as father and son, as double and half, or any other way-the relation exists entitatively as an accident in each of the relata. It does not exist as something in between them, not inhering in either of them. There is, in short no inter-subjective mode of being; for ev.erything that exists exists either as a subject (i.e., a substance) or in a subject (i.e., an accident )." 1 This proposition, or set of propositions, proved to be, in the light of my five years (1969-1974) as Senior Fellow r.esponsible for the direction and development of language research at the Institute for Philosophical Research in Chicago, the dialectically and philosophically crucial one for understanding (and systematically grasping the remedy for) the inveterate subjectivism and penchant toward solipsism that has beset philosophy 1 Mortimer J. Adler, "Sense Cognition: Aristotle vs. Aquinas," The NI'JW Scholasticism, XLII (Autumn, 1968), p. 58~, in reply to John N. Deely, "The Immateriality of the International as Such," in No. ~ of the same volume and journal; Adler's emphases. 856 THE TWO APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE 857 throughout its career in the national languages of modern times. For, in the course of my investigations into the philosophical literature concerning language, it came to light that in 1632, during the lifetime of Hobbes, Descartes, and Suarez, Jean Poinsot, the last philosopher, practically speaking, to hold the contrary of the above proposition up until Hegel/ was also able to demonstrate that what is at stake in this straightforward proposition is the possible convertibility of being and truth within the order of human understanding, and the successful culmination-through the systematic application to discourse of the contrast between the relative secundum dici and secundum esse-of the old medieval controversies over the " transcendental " properties of being, i. e., the properties whereby the order of the knowable includes indifferently objective elements of being and non-being so far as it falls under perception and conception. We are confronted here with a situation that is, as Jacques Maritain well remarked, "puzzling to realize." 3 Even the most advanced professors and students of philosophy today are unlikely to have encountered the name of Jean Poinsot in the course of their researches and studies.4 The dis2 That is to say, the last proponent at the dawn of the national language phase of Western philosophy of the view that relations as such constitute precisely an intersubjective mode of being, existing according to what is proper to it neither as a subject nor in a subject, but as a suprasubjective means of union betweoo (tertium quid) a subject and some thing that subject is not. 8 " It is puzzling to realize that the treasures contained in their writings "-i.e., the writings of the commentators and defenders of St. Thomas, particularly, perhaps, in Iberia, between the 13th and the 17th centuries-" have remained, for so many generations, unknown except to a very few...." Jacques Maritain, letter to Yves Simon, printed as the "Preface" to The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas [i.e., Jean Poinsot] trans. by Yves R. Simon, John J. Glanville, and G. Donald Hollenhorst (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. v. See the " Thomistic Afterword " at the end of this present article. ' Nonetheless, Poinsot, an Iberian thinker who wrote under the name " Jolm of St. Thomas," was a figure of exceptional prominence in his day. The principal historical materials relating to Poinsot's person and life have been gathered together and analyzed in the "Praefatio Editorum " to Joannis a Sancto Thoma, Cur8'U8 Theologicus, edited by the Benedictine Monks of Solesmes, France (Paris: Desclee, 1931), Vol. I. 858 JOHN N. DEELY...