Global semiotics and its developments in the direction of semioethics

Following an ideal tradition in sign studies that leads from Hippocrates and Galen through John Locke to Charles S. Peirce and Charles Morris, Thomas Sebeok with global semiotics reaches the broadest vision ever concerning what to regard as semiosis or communication: communication or semiosis coincides with life. Where there is life, there are signs, where there is life there is communication, semiosis. And human semiosis? Unlike Saussure’s pioneering sémiologie, in global semiotics, human semiosis is “semiotics” in a special sense. “Semiotics” not only names the general science of signs, but also properly human semiosis. All living beings indifferently are semiosical animals. Instead, anthropos is a semiotic animal, which means to say that humans not only use signs, but they reflect on signs, are endowed with metasemiosis, which invests them with a capacity for conscious awareness and responsibility. But throughout history limitations have been placed on responsibility on the basis of distinctions and separations based on the logic of “identity” and “belonging”. Semioethics evidences how separatism is unwarranted and inevitably leads to conflict. Reconnecting with ancient medical semeiotics and its vocation for health and listening (auscultation), semioethics proposes to interpret symptoms of social disease, through listening and tuning into otherness, and thereby contribute to the health of semiosis, for the sake of the quality of life globally.