The Global-Institutionalized Mind: Crisis and Prospects of Human Sciences/Semiotics

1. The Deterioration of the Current Theoretical Humanities in the Globalization age; the epistemological necessity of functional division between the social and human sciences

The humanities or human sciences, whose traditional theoretical basis had been philosophyof various kinds, should have become the most important and required academic realm in all human knowledge because they are closest to the spiritual life of humanity or human life; nevertheless, they have turned to be the least productive/less desirable practices today in our time of globalization. The fundamental issues of meaning, value, life and belief, which are extremely crucially related to the historical existence of mankind, have historically evolved or transformed from the traditional mode of the humanities, which mainly consists of classical philosophy/history/literature, into their modern forms that should be more advanced towards the modern human sciences. However these traditional issues have not been regarded as scientifically feasible types of subjects and have even been taken as useless in our materialist-commercial community. In the totally technicalized/commercialized world of today, the humanities have been already encircled within the specially organized academic-autonomous campus and treated merely as educational training sites for gaining various preconditioned jobs. The humanities today have still kept one of their classical tasks, embodied in traditional disciplines like philosophy, literature and history, that functions as the practice of a spiritual/intellectual delectation, while another central task aims at the use of scientific sources for increasing advanced social or political knowledge and wisdom, but this has been mostly weakened or even lost because of their systematical disconnection with actual life. A positive aspect is the fact that the roles of the classical humanities in these practical fields have been shifted to the newly established academic realm of the social sciences. Another negative aspect, however, lies in that the so-called post-modern and de-scientific form of current theoretical humanities tends to be less and less concerned about social/cultural realities and excludes rational-humanist ethics so as to present an irrational tendencyfor reasoningin general.

      For the sake of better understanding our critical position concerning the humanities or the human sciences we should firstly explain a current usage of the discipline’s classification. This author especially emphasizes the significance of the functional division between the social and human sciences in the academic system despite the fact that the contents or subject material of the two categories certainly extensively overlap. From a pragmatist/behaviorist point of view, such a division between the social and the human sciences seems unnecessary and is even not true, but from a structural/semiotic viewpoint such a division is absolutely necessary, justified and necessary if we attempt to pay closer attention to advancing descriptive/analytical precision at the micro-functional levels/aspects concerned. Despite the linguistic-expressive restrictions regarding disorderly human/historical phenomena, we can only more reasonably apply natural languages to describe and explain the rational/scientific-directed problems about semantically complicated human affairs. In fact, it is the progress of the modern natural sciences that stimulates us to search for a more rationalized and more advanced re-compartmentalization of scholarly disciplines concerning society, culture, history and the essence of human being. As a matter of fact, the exact meaning of the title “social sciences” is relative to its chosen usages. Broadly, it can certainly cover the entire realm of social and human scientific thought, just as it is still used this way in many areas. Our so-called functional division of it is to more clearly demarcate a scientific-operative line between its more empirical/applicable part and its more delicate-theoretical/ethical-intelligible part. So in our usage we only use it to refer to the former and prefer to include the latter in the human sciences. Similarly, we can also explain the referred area of the human sciences as well. Thus, more widely or practically speaking, these two realms concerning human-social affairs are of course closely overlapped and intersected.^[1] This artificial division of academic zones, initiated by recent French academics, is indeed able to elaborate the precision of objective description and theoretical analysis. By the way, our chosen position does not mean we give complete affirmation to this French theoretical contribution with respect to the general scientific development of the human-social sciences. The advantages and disadvantages can be unevenly ascribed to different schools/streams. In general we certainly recognize that the social sciences (namely, applied social sciences and their theories at a technical level) in the Anglo-American area have attained the most advanced level and the significance of theoretical creations of the French human sciences is mainly expressed in its originality to stimulate our continuing rethinking about how to more effectively and delicately modernize the global human sciences at the epistemological level. The latter, however, implies also its weakness in social-political applications. We focus on it merely as a theoretical model for enlightening us to more productively reorganize our epistemological/methodological orientation but, at the same time, also to perceive its serious shortcomings in its social/political applicability. So, the so-called functional division of the disciplinary classification also implies a division of praxis by distinguishing elaboration at a purely theoretical level and feasibility at a practical level. Nevertheless, a popular conceptual confusion occurring in the pragmatic/behavioral-directed social sciences is perhaps due to the general neglect of the scientific necessity of this theoretical elaboration about the more ambiguously formulated ethical/psychological/axiological studies. (The same reason can be used to explain the lasting debates about epistemology/methodology in the international semiotics and Sinology.)

      Therefore all of our critical discussions should be based on this functional division of disciplinary classification in spite of the fact that even in actual departments the contents of social and human sciences are largely mixed together regarding their substantive material compositions. This functional division of disciplinary systems is also able to more clearly help distinguish between different scientific orientations of the Anglo-American-directed and the continental-directed social-human sciences in general and make us more distinctly understand our actual scholarly situations. Accordingly, we may more intelligibly make clear that, in recent decades, the latter remains more theoretical-creative in their research about theoretical human sciences while the former is certainly stronger in their contributions to the social sciences. Therefore this basic division makes us pay more emphatic attention to the latter in order to more relevantly grasp the pure theoretical problems in human science. In addition, the correct scientifically-developing orientation of social sciences has already been well fixed in international academia, which is why we can safely exclude the problems of the applied social sciences from our present discussions.^[2]

      Moreover, one of the main reasons why people tend to neglect this functional division about scholarly practices is caused by a professional utilitarianism prevailing in our commercial age, characterized by its encouragement of benefit competitions. As I have pointed out frequently before, following the steady developments of the natural and social sciences over the past few centuries, the scientific character of the modern humanities during the last century has been remarkably developed as well. Roughly speaking, among a lot of types of scientific progress in the humanities within the 20^th century, the two biggest philosophical/theoretical movements with a stronger scientifically modernizingtendency were characteristically shaped. The first one was aroused by the German/Austrian trend of Geisteswissenschaften that was guided by some new types of philosophical schools (neo-Kantianism, historical hermeneutics, phenomenology, neo-positivism, Freudianism and others) since the later 19^th century and continuously developed until the disaster of Nazism in the middle of the 1930s; the second was launched by the French/Italian pan-structuralism that was stimulated by the European interdisciplinary, theoretically directed (namely de-philosophy-central-directed) linguistic, historiographic, sociological and literary-criticalstreams that energetically continued until the end of the Cold War. (It is interesting to note that the former was suddenly stopped by the start of the global Hot War and the latter was gradually weakened by the end of the global Cold War.) The two great intellectual/human science movements had been characterized by their respectively different “special-scientific/rational orientations/characters” and they both have indeed created substantially rich theoretical heritages with a strongenlightening instruction;the humanities could, as well as should, become a scientifically-directed practice too, although their scientific practices are different from those of natural and social sciences in their typology. Nevertheless, when we praise the contributions of some movements or schools of philosophy and humanity-theories, what we really affirm are only the chosen positive aspects of them rather than their entire academic consequences that naturally comprise some other not positive or even negative elements. In fact, any scholarly/scientific progress in history is only realized in some aspects of the related phenomena in favor of promoting general human sciences development in future and in reference to their own temporal/partially effective results. In other words, our positive evaluation of some theoretical streams is mainly focused on its potential for stimulating the continuing theoretical construction of the human sciences in their historical entirety.

      We exclude the great analytic-philosophical movement from our discussion with a similar reason to that about the social sciences. Analytical philosophy is of course a very important scientific-directed theoretical achievement despite the fact that its typical logical/natural scientific character also narrows and limits its intellectualinsights,excluding or weakening a lot of traditional humanities issues through its more exact scientific-styledfiltering. As a result, together with natural and social sciences, as well as other modern human science results, it must become quite the positive source of knowledge that can indeed help in promoting the reformulation of human sciences. The special status of the latter is by contrast characterized by its particular synthetic-theoretical requirement that must relevantly combine the traditional humanities-related issues and modern scientific criteria so as to make the former more rationally/scientifically dealt with. This is the very goal of the transformation from the traditional humanities to the modern human sciences; namely, that all important humanities-related intellectual and spiritual issues can be tackled in a really scientific way – the earlier two great movements of theoretical humanitiesmentioned aboveshould be taken as only temporary/relativeprogress, attained at certain stages along the same pan-scientific/rationalist orientation. Accordingly, the humanities-related issues could recover their traditional top privilege in the new civilization and the understanding/reconstruction of the related projects could be really effectively treated and solved. It seems to be understandable that only when the humanities become more scientific in a relevant sense could they become more able to increase meaningfully their social/cultural/political influences in these post-industrial times. That the slogan “knowledge is power/force” is also true with respect to the humanities is only valid under the conditions that they should be a knowledge with a really relevant-scientific/rationalist character; by contrast, we may cite too many examples from modern history that have disclosed the inefficiency or mistakes committed by the so-called theoretical statements/inferences of thetheoreticalhumanities, especially their theoretical kernel – contemporary philosophies – that have been more and more reduced to the useless or even misleading metaphysical/ontological rhetoric concerning the wise guidance of human life. In this sense, neither the irrational type of the theoretical humanities nor the natural science-type humanities can be taken as the effective intellectual/scientific force/power for reconstructing the genuine human sciences and advancing the intelligibility of human life, although any works of the humanities can be easily used as means/instrumentsto serve any kind of utilitarian or superstitious or ideological purpose.

      By the way, however, we should avoid wrongly mixing the notions of rational-effective strength and rational-scientific efficiency. Only the latter is what we should search for; the former may refer to any kind of social or non-scientific effect. We should not search for any more effective rhetorical-persuasive means in order to merely increase any influence and recognition in society. The telos of the two kinds of rationality must be distinguished too and this misleading idea has been just what we have criticized before as well. This reminder also has the very important and real implication that such a mixture could be commonly made just because the majority of scholars in the social and human sciences have already got used to the rigidified mental habit: to do an excellent job in the field just means winning credit from academic authorities and to obtain huge influence in academia or the market; in short, to search only for professional success! As a result, the scholars tend to be overly self-confident in professional and competitive contexts and become reluctant to reflect or recognize their own scholarly shortcomings/errors as long as they can effectively carry out their professional procedures.

      As we said above, the scopes and contents of social and human sciences largely overlap and even mostly combine in projects of scholarship because the two classes of praxis are both involved with man and society. However, distinguishing between the two academic categories mainly refers to a functional/operational separation, as we pointed out. Some new types of epistemological/methodological approaches, such as phenomenology, semiotics and hermeneutics, are focused on distinguishing efforts that are not only directed towards the more clearly outlined disciplinary compartmentalization but also towards the more delicate outlooks of different “realities” within the practices of the humanities.

2. The Objective Determination of the Soft Powers and the Epistemological Stagnation of Current Human Sciences judged in terms of the model of division of history 1 and history 2

In other places (see Chapter Two in this book) I have raised a conception of the double historical tracks stating that the civilized history of mankind mainly consists of dichotomous driving lines, one of which is related to social-materialist organizing activities (history 1) and the other to intellectual-spiritual creating activities (history 2). The so-called bifurcation of historical processes is expressed in sets of operative zones/developing lines/driving motivations/social-cultural teleology so as to remarkably highlight the two original driving mechanisms leading to separate orientations, operative ways and practical contents respectively produced along dualist lines of human history. But this model concerning “the general historical theory” especially stresses two central parts: the original driving impulses/motivations in human nature and the special mechanisms/functions of practices. The first internal (psychological) part is about instinctive origins and the second external (natural-social) part is about productive designs and behavioral styles as the resultant machineries of the interaction between the subjective and objective parts. This author asserts that the fundamental causation of human history is rooted in the dualist instincts of the constant human nature, although the historical unfolding is shaped by the interaction between the twin-original motivations (one is the lust for power of all kinds and the other is the desire for rational-spiritual creation) and the external circumstances. The total historical processes/phenomena consist of miscellaneous elements throughout which penetrate the two series of continuous organized actions determined by their original motives, divergent teleologies and operative mechanisms. We name them as historical-function 1 and historical-function 2, or just function 1 and function 2, in our discussions to focus on the different functions of the two prefixed mechanisms. Therefore the concepts of the modes of abstract historical functions should be distinguished from the concrete historical events/agents. In other words, although the two general historical functions are originally triggered/carried out/embodied by concrete individuals/actions, the two historical mechanisms are mainly expressed at the functional levels because the substantial contents of historical processes are mixed together. The functional presentations and the personal actions/results are mutually intersected and substantially intermixed. An individual person/action can be a carrier of different functional elements, and many persons/actions can share the same set of functional elements as well.

      Genealogically speaking, however, the above can be more understandably described in the following. There have indeed existed the two major historical zones where are produced concrete events, processes and phenomena, and the two major functions are originated from the two corresponding mechanisms. The above distinguishing parameters are intended to separate more clearly the two historical dimensions: that of the substantial material and that of the functional mechanisms that operate the former. So in our discussions we will tackle the historical problems from an angle of functional mechanisms. More essentially speaking, our notion of the historical bifurcation is preferably to focus on the very kernel of the historical driving mechanics: the motivational kernels. After all, the basic triggering impulses/developing directions in the historical evolution of mankind are rooted in unchanged human nature. The latter is the originality of historical productions of any kind. Thus, we can say, the substantial contents, such as the individual’s personality, his actions, the produced results and the social-cultural zones where individual actors operate are the carriers of various functional/non-functional operations performed at their different substantial aspects. By the way, the distinction of the functional mechanisms, which have been constantly enriched/elaborated in historical developments, is only related to the characteristics in their operations whose technical efficiency is constantly advanced in history. Regarding the problem of the ethical/axiological evaluation of the historical-functional mechanisms, we only need to indicate here that function-2 implies consistent/essentially timelessethical criteria (the positive valuation in humanist-spiritual creations is always affirmative) and function-1 implies consistent/essentially timeless utilitarian criteria (the positive valuation in social/political productions can be either good or bad in ethical terms). Accordingly, substantially speaking, the contents of the two kinds of activities are largely overlapped and externally interact with each other while both are essentially segregated and relatively independent from each other at the functional and teleological levels. In essence, they are driven respectively by divergent psychological impulses in human instincts: one by an impetus for power-seizing, order-establishing and materialist-directed constructing and the other by an impetus for intellectual/spiritual creation/elaboration.

      Generically speaking, a synthetically characterized way to indicate this bi-contrasting model can be summarized as the power/materialist-organizing mechanism vs. the conscience/spiritual-creating mechanism; or, more simply, the collective power vs. individual ethics.

      The contents and modes of the two historical tracks have been continuously enriched and changed following social/cultural developments. In general they are characterized by distinctly heterogeneous drives, aims and styles and those factors can determine their respective developing orientations with the consequent results, although all related/used elements are intermixed and overlapped in the same historical-phenomenal compound: the same intuitively-presented historical stream. In a simplified description we may say that the two historical tracks are characterized by the materialist-social-directed “power-passion” and by the intellectual-cultural “spirit-passion”. Despite the necessary coexistence of their respective productions operating at the same historical stage and being defined by the commonly shared time/space, they are driven by essentially different goals, interests, ambitions and motivations during the same historical periods. In this article we mainly talk about subject matters related to function 2 (or simply, history 2), to which the humanities exclusively belong. Nevertheless, the external interactions between history 1 and history 2 will be also involved. More exactly, our topic is about the interrelationship and interaction between the soft-power systems of history 1 and the humanities of history 2. The crucial point rests in distinguishing their respective autonomous driving mechanisms and their external interactions. Accordingly we should distinguish between the heterogeneous intentions of history 1 and history 2 (or exactly, historical function 1 and historical function 2) as well as their separate mechanisms; their autonomous identities are totally defined in terms of the corresponding independent mechanisms. Even an intention (to say) of an agent in history 2 is directed to an item of history 1; this intention, however, cannot play its conceived role in the other zone effectively – instead it functions only as the material to be tackled by the mechanism of history 1 rather than that of history 2. (For example: philosophy cannot influence politics directly by its own idea; any philosophical idea can only be operated by the agents using political strategy/tactics.)

      Regarding the typology of power, we can generally divide this into two categories: the hard type and the soft type, depending on their different operative realms/objects/modes. The hard type, or the traditional type, originating in primitive history and persisting until today, is mostly realized/reactivated in social, political, military, judicial and economic realms, with which we are all familiar and have personal experience. The soft types of power are derived/developed gradually during historical evolution; we may simply name them as the “soft powers” that, unlike the physical/coercively dominative mode of the hard-powers, exercise only indirect influences or determination on various historical objects, including those included in history 2. Since the outset of the post-industrial period, the soft-powers have been greatly enriched and played increasingly significant and independent roles in the ever-expanded realms, including the cultural/academic/scholarly realms. In our present discussions we will especially focus on the relationship between the soft-powers and the humanities

      Regarding the traditional type of regimes, for example, if history 1 is triggered and operated through all the hard/soft-power systems that are basically driven by the rooted desires in human nature for interpersonal domination and securing social orders, then by contrast history 2 is triggered and operated through the instinctive desires for the intellectual/high cultural creation/spiritual sublimation that is permanently stimulated by ethical conscience in human nature. Quite simply, we may safely judge that these two eventual driving forces in history are innately rooted in human nature; the one is indicated by the desire for power and the other by the ethical conscience. Essentially, these two oppositional/contrasting human-natural instincts are the genuine sources of the historical tensions existing between the spiritual-productive strength/energy and the will of material-productive/interpersonal domination, although the resulting changeable phenomena produced by their separate mechanisms can be expressed in countless other internal/external factors. The operative mechanisms of powers are performed in history 1 while their influential effects will reach entire historical processes. History 2, or spiritual-cultural history, maintains and performs its own separate driving mechanism but it cannot avoid being involved in interactions with history 1. This interaction/intermixture in historical processes will also influence the resulting modes of the developing track of history 2. In human history there are always sharp tensions existing between the operations of two historical driving forces. In our theory the so-called basic history-driving force/type is defined at the collective/functional level, although it is certainly embodied intuitively by individual entities. The two basic driving-forces can be exclusively/totally realized in different individual persons or unevenly co-realized/shared by different persons. The actual/eventual modes of realizing those driving forces in historical processes are made by a variety of subjective-objective factors appearing in historical events. But at collective functional levels of history, we may see that the two general driving orientations realized in these divergent resultant consequences, which can be respectively traced back to the pan-materialist-political and the pan-cultural-spiritual mechanisms, are ultimately still triggered by divergent driving impulses/instincts in human nature.

      This psychological-central model of historical orientations has no intention of presenting a comprehensive causal-explanative scheme of the complicated historical phenomena that must be the consequences of multi-determinative interactions of a variety of factors. Its theme is only focused on the two guiding causal lines in history in reference to the operative-functional mechanisms performed by the dualist-heterogeneous pragmatic logics in the two major historical zones: the materialist-productive and the spiritual-productive ones.

      The hard-powers exercise physically forceful/compulsory roles to control people and maintain social orders; their power-pressure/order-efficiency is operated in a physically direct/coercive way. The efficiency of these powerful operations is essentially based on and linked to the fear of punishment of the people under control and their consequent obedience to the legalized orders. By contrast, however, so-called soft-powers that are factually based on or relatively connected with the hard-power have a more delicately complicated structure consisting of different indirectly determining factors, including the ideological and other kinds. The operative ways of soft-powers are not only indirectly carried out but are also based on the instinctive desires of individuals to hold power or domination over others, a materialist and profitable lust for enjoyment, and social-cultural publicity/privilege; all such instinctive desires are contrary to the other positive instinctive impulses of ethical conscience in history 2. In short, the exercising ways of soft-powers appeal to the quasi-sensuous, self-serving and selfish types of instinctive desires. Therefore, if the hard-powers can directly force people to succumb to their will/orders, then the soft-powers only need to indirectly determine intellectuals to obey/succumb to them through reforming/distorting the mental/behavioral habits of people by dint of allurements and indirect threatening measures.

      The hard-powers, or social-political mechanisms, can only force people to obey the regulated social order because of the natural fear of being physically punished, but this way of exercising power way does not necessarily touch other parts of human nature. That means the character or personality of an intellectual can still keep his relative inner freedom for possible independent development at other levels/realms.^[3] That means, when the soft-powers have been developed/elaborated, they would be capable of changing the personality from the inside, even weakening the ethical spontaneity of conscience if the desires for sensuous/self-serving enjoyment are thoroughly stimulated/organized. Then the institutional contexts, with their moral-legal objective controlled by soft-powers, will replace the ethical conscience/subjectivity of an intellectual/scholar. (We may say that the above wisdom-teaching was originally raised by Confucian ethics.)

      In our discussion here we present two general models of soft-powers that have been shaped since the end of WWII, and especially since the coming of the globalization era, each of which are sketchily represented by three main parameters selected only for a general indication. They are:

a) The power 1 trio:

Axiology-materialism

Communication-commercialization

Process-technicalization

We may say that this power 1 trio mechanism operates mainly at a general social level, becoming a total organizing framework guiding the orientation of social/cultural activities through closely coordinating with the hard-powers in history 1.

b) The power 2 trio:

Research-utilitarianism

Life-professionalization

Method-institutionalization

The power 2 trio refers to the indirect controlling system regarding the cultural/academic spheres, particularly with respect to those non- or less scientific activities, including the humanities or human sciences. In principle all theoretical knowledge belongs to history 2, while the goals of natural/social sciences could be in full coherence/consistence with the requests/goals of all constructive activities of history 1, driven by its hard- and soft-powers, and those true sciences, together with their highly useful technological productions, just become the constituent parts of the reconstructive processes of history 1. Therefore the actual targets of the power 2 trio are mainly the humanities and higher cultural creations, because the latter two are originally driven by subjective freedom and their goals and productions are not certainly consistent with the teleology of the soft-powers. Concretely, the power 2 trio is related to guidance/control over the orientation and styles of academic/cultural productions, which are the closest preconditions and determining mechanisms of the practices of the humanities and high cultural creations.

      By the way, the natural/social sciences are put aside in this discussion because these two kinds of “true scientific” scholarship can not only be directly useful for the teleology of history 1 generally but their genuine scientific characters keep an innate power to maintain the independence of their scientific operations, which becomes the firm objectivist foundation that additionally guarantees their independent scientific operations. In contrast, the vulnerability of the humanities with respect to the influences/pressures from power-trios consists in fact of two aspects: a) the extensive weaker scientific/rational potential at the both the operative-procedural and the signifying-referring (lacking in objective reference) levels, and accordingly the lack of a strong enough scientific-operative space to organize possible resistance or self-defense (by contrast the social sciences have such an objective space for possibly maintaining their scientific-operative autonomy); and b) the largely weakened/disorganized ethical subjectivity of scholarly agents is particularly vulnerable to the pressures/manipulation exerted by a strong external power.

      The term “power” has different kinds of referents that keep different connective distances with the sources of power. In this sense the word “power” keeps different direct/indirect semes as well as relatively indicative/metaphoric semes. In general the two soft power-trios’ determinative roles exerted on the humanities have different degrees of indirectness expressed in the processes of their influence/pressure/control so as not to be easily or clearly felt by humanities scholars. After grasping this determinative link between two power-trios and the current status/situation of the humanities, we would also recognize that the present-day comments/criticism about the decaying situations of the humanities comprise two different aspects; these are mostly only about one aspect, stating that the humanities are unjustly looked down upon by current societies everywhere in the world, and these have now gained a general recognition. However a few comments/complaints in the West are directed to another aspect: the weaker scientific quality of the humanities as such. Nevertheless, this author especially emphasize that it is the latter that is the most relevant reason. It is partly because of the innate shortcomings historically contained in the traditional humanities and partly because of the contemporary radical change of the social-cultural structures that necessarily forces the humanities, especially their theoretical parts, to survive under the social pressures/interference imposed by the two trio-powers. As a consequence, the humanities have been seriously but almost unconsciously weakened with respect to their scientific/rationally-directed impulse/devotion. Simply, it is the hard-powers in history 1 that are restricting/dominating the essential enterprise in history 2 (a mode of the external interaction between history 1 and history 2). Moreover, this collective epistemological/strategic negligence in academia is essentially also caused by the trio-powers, especially owing to the prevailing professional utilitarianism whose internal effect is realized in the universal weakening of the ethical subjectivity/active spontaneity of academic agents.^[4]

      In some sense we may say that the general academic-organizing ways in connection to natural, social and human sciences are similar to each other, or that the educations and activities of the humanities naturally follow those of the much more successful examples of natural and social sciences. However the latter two, because of their true scientific characters, have effectively gone forward by using rigorous scientific procedures. To unevenly exact degrees, the natural and social sciences can be judged to be scientifically positive and empirically applicable in all human communities. Besides, these two types of scientific systems provide practical utility in human social-materialist life as well. Entitled by the designation “science” (even since ancient times), the humanities have never really coherently or continuously presented these scientific or practicable characters in history and therefore in this sense they are not “productive”, or at least not very, in social-materialist terms. The divergence between the former and latter is above all due to the lacking of the humanities in designative-referential objectivity; besides, the humanities, especially their theoretical parts, are not directly usable in economic-industrial affairs, although they could be indirectly or distortionally handled by social-political powers. Therefore, despite all efforts towards knowledge of all sorts being the typical performances in history 2, each sort of human knowledge maintains different degrees of interaction with the power-systems in history 1.^[5] We will emphasize here again that because of the mixed appearance of all sorts of intellectual discourses in history in physical terms, we should distinguish the two kinds of discourses at the historical-functional level: the genuine discourses produced in history 2 in terms of its own mechanism, and that which is intentionally or distortionally used in history 1 with its own different mechanism. The latter’s social-cultural impact is certainly much larger than that of the former. That is why the products of the genuine theoretical humanities are widely constrained by the pseudo-humanities discourses made in history 1, especially through the channel of the media. The latter indeed belongs to history 1, although media-agents always pretend to be the proper branch in the humanities. In addition, we should understand that the majority of public readers work in history 1 too and their passive preference for the distorted humanities discourses manipulated in history 1 often causes misleading effects on the production of the theoretical scholarship performed in history 2 so as to add the difficulty of the development of the human sciences. That is why we need to distinguish between the minority of scientific-devoted scholars and the majority of professionally-motivated scholars/intellectuals who also exist either in the profession of the humanities or in the profession of the media.

      In addition, regarding the confusing relationship of interactions between history 1 and history 2, we have to pay special attention to the transmitting period from the humanities to the human sciences. There exists a deep epistemological divergence between the two conceptions about humanity studies. In fact, from ancient times to the modern historical period, the humanities have always been naturally linked to their possible applications in history 1; actually, the humanities have been taken by most intellectuals just as the intellectual instruments to be used for improving or reforming social, political and cultural realities. Regarding the radically changeable Chinese history over the past century, this pragmatic attitude in modernizing the humanities has been widely accepted: the right humanities-related thinking should be useful methodology that is applied for changing traditional society and politics. Facing such a historical background we can grasp that the thoughts about the historical model, new human sciences and the universal semiotics raised by this author could hardly have been understood. According to the bifurcational historical model and the new idealism of human sciences, we have been attempting to revolutionize the mentality of scholars concerning the theoretical humanities. The suggested segregation of the two heterogeneous practices must be beneficiary to the healthy developments of both sides and the mixture of the two divergent practices belonging to the different zones/mechanisms in history must lead to the damage of both. Simply speaking, shallow or wrong social-human knowledge, used to handle social/political realities, would unavoidably bring about new disorder and social evils, just as we have experienced so frequently at home and abroad. In return, interference with the task of constructing human sciences by social-political powers will just lead to the further deterioration of the humanities.

      Nevertheless, we still emphasize that this vulnerability of the humanities is first of all caused by internal scholarly weakness. Both the rigorous natural sciences and quasi-rigorous social sciences, together with their respective technical applicability in history 1, are characterized by their different rigorous systems of signification/reference that can exclude conceptual/textual ambiguity. On the other hand, the humanities, as the longest form of scholarship in history, are obviously characterized by their polysemous or ambiguous vocabularies and unclear discursive denotations. In other words, true scientific discourses should be capable of signifying/referring to definite realities/facts while the signifieds of discourses of general liberal arts are linked to a variety of multi/mixed “referents” consisting of both empirical and fictional elements, which are complicatedly related to a semantic complex of complicated realities, including natural, social, cultural, scholarly, artistic, psychological and axiological parts. The point lies in that the signifieds of textual expressions of the humanities are often semantically mixed items. That is why the ideal of the currently forming human sciences is designed to reorganize, reformulate and systematically clarify this traditionally ambiguous semantic compound, applied habitually in various branches of the humanities, including that of traditional philosophy, which has traditionally been recognized as the most rational/logical in its way of reasoning.

      Therefore let us turn to a more delicate problem in connection to our topic. As a matter of fact, because of the above explanation, we should also attempt to distinguish between the majority of historically accumulated discourses produced in the field of the liberal arts and their genuinely rationalist, scientifically directed elements/tendencies. The concept of “function 2/mechanism 2” in our historical model refers to only the latter, although the former as well as all other historical phenomena (including all kinds of irrational, fictional and superstitious discourses, activities and their organizational entities) must totally be the object of investigations of historical function 2. In civilized history, genuinely rational and scientifically directed thoughts/efforts can only coexist with all other heterogeneously formed thoughts/efforts in an extensively mixed way. The both are made by divergent mechanisms, and sociologically speaking, it is always the latter that are more powerful and more influential in the same society where the scholars in the former also exist. Accordingly, a genuine, scientifically-devoted humanities scholar has to be in an existential tension caused between his scientific devotion and his need for social survival. In general, a serious ancient thinker with a certain rational-thinking tendency has always existed together with various kinds of attitude-oppositional pseudo-colleagues over the long course of intellectual history; in modern times, a serious scholar in human sciences will be faced with his frequently seen rivals from science/technique/management who are used to combining his naturally scientific notion pragmatically/opportunistically with some superstitious pseudo-theories (such as the Tui-Bei-Tu [推背图]and Yi-Jing [易经]) to “pseudo-logically” support his social-political idea. In short, many scientific experts specialized in one discipline would exercise his irrational/non-scientific way of thought in social-cultural realms. In terms of this intellectual custom, some single-disciplinary scientists/engineers could become the stronger opponents of genuine human sciences theorists! A natural scientist can play a double role in history 1 and history 2 together, just like a human sciences scholar can also play a double role in the two historical zones. The example presents another reason why we should separate the professional practices of a scholar and his scholarly practices guided by function 2. Once again, our historical division is made at the functional level.

      Moreover, regarding the relationship between the human sciences practices of a scholar and his other social-cultural activities, let us look at another related aspect of the problem in order to further understand the significance of the reasonable academic-disciplinary separation made at the functional/operational level. Here we only add the more practical reason that functional separation regarding academic disciplinary systems is also helpful for the more relevant operative division between one’s human science devotion and one’s social commitment, while the relationship between both has been confused for a long time by various philosophical/theoretical ways of thinking. The multiple kinds of intellectual/theoretical labor divisions lead also to more effective functional/operative labor divisions between social activities and academic practices, both of which can share the same used material that is the object of the action of the one and the object of the investigation of the other. The mixture of the two kinds of objects embodied in the same material usually leads to the serious confusion of recognition. The more rationally-tended scholarly labor division between social/political activities and intellectual/spiritual practices can therefore more clearly explain our recently raised notion of the dual historical developing tracks in terms of which of the two growing historical lines is propelled by different original motivations and is carried out by divergent operative mechanisms, and which separately “serves” the different historical telos of mankind. Although there have existed close external interactions between the two developing historical lines, they cannot be directly engaged in each other’s internal operations. A mechanism of history 1 cannot properly carry out the innate jobs of the mechanism of history 2. It is the same case for the reverse description. Accordingly, this intellectual result cannot be designed or applied by the agents of history 2 to the business of history 1 agents, as so many thinkers in the humanities have wishfully expected (that is to say, a philosopher or a literary man is unable to reform/change history 1 (the political/economic/military world) with his own special knowledge created in history 2; in other words, the operative origins/rules in history 1 and history 2 cannot be alternatively used in an exchangeable way). The same case is more clearly explained in the interaction between social activities and the practices in radical/modernist literature/arts that always naively cherish a strong society-reforming ambition with their irrelevantly chosen artistic weapons. The wrong interpretations shared by the two fields are made by blending external/internal interactions of the two separate categories of historical practices. The fact that the functional separation accords with the paralleled existence of the two operative autonomies is established by the two different mechanisms of the historical practices of mankind. On the other hand, this fact indeed allows the two historical mechanisms to influence each other externally through alternatively making use of elements produced by one mechanism for the job to be carried out by the other mechanism. For example, any social practice can make use of the material produced in some intellectual practice in terms of its own mechanism; conversely, any intellectual practice can irrelevantly or unsuitably conceive an aim to influence or carry out, even if vainly, some social/political plans. That is to say, some avant-garde art or philosophy attempts to carry out their social-practical projects in order to improve or reform some social/political reality, eventually leading to irrelevant ends with the result that the irrelevant idea/action could just be used to serve that conservative part. That means the worst result could be that such kinds of artistically-styled efforts, which must be under the surveillance/manipulation of the soft-powers, actually present a potentially collaborative and misleading role/effect just because of its irrelevant, invalid recognition that could help expel more suitable measures for attaining the correct aim. (The same role can be applied to some radical religious practices too: the fictionally-made vision, combined with persuasive strength, can actually exclude effective efforts towards the realist end.) This basic functional/epistemological operative misunderstanding would produce a truly negative effect: to block the genuine autonomous/independent progress of intellectual/spiritual efforts in history 2.

      Therefore we see that the neglect of the functional separation between social and human sciences indicates a long stagnation of many great theoretical trends, including the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, western-Marxist philosophy, existentialism, psychoanalysis and all behavioralist and pragmatist philosophies. This basic way of dealing with social/political and intellectual/spiritual phenomena by blending them together (as well as the epistemological-erring mixture between theoretical and social practices) becomes one of the main reasons why their theoretical analyses are frequently proved invalid or even misleading at both theoretical and practical levels. The lasting coexistence of these mutually competitive schools rooted in the same ambiguously constituted world is partly also due to a basic intellectual individualism innately driving scholars/thinkers, each of whom takes competitive success on the professional chessboard as individual achievement. So intellectual individualism embodied in scholarly originality and fitting in with the establishment based on the soft-powers becomes the true reason why their disorderly cross-arguments naturally produce the artistic style of liberal arts that could even be encouraged and indirectly guided by the two trio-powers just because of their impotence in a scientific/rationalist way of thinking and action. The extensive weakening of the ethical subjectivity of human science theorists in our times is mainly expressed in two aspects: on the one hand, they are lacking in the independent-creative spontaneity with respect to their scholarship, and on the other they are lacking in the strong independent will to resist to any allurements/pressures from academic/professional powers.

      The two aforementioned huge human science movements, together with a lot of other smaller philosophical schools, were seriously weakened or disorganized either by the disaster of World War II (German-linguistic zones have terribly lost their pre-war spiritual-creative energy since then) or by the materialism-centric/technical/commercialized globalization in our new era (we see the ceasing/ebbing of the French structural movement and its deformation to the irrational trends of the so-called post-structuralism or post-modernism). On the other hand, however, these two great movements could only be suitably recognized as two great temporary/tentative achievements attained along the scientific/rational lines of the humanities; they should not be regarded as satisfactorily completeor absolutely correctscientific consequenceswhen the modern theoretical humanitieshave in fact remained in their developing stagesuntil now. In our affirmation about the great humanity-theoretical movements based first in Germany and later in France, we combine the two divergent categories concerning the functional level and the social-cultural areas. The latter only refers to the social-physical substratum of the former and in return the former is the carrier of the functional elements at its certain aspects other than its entire phenomena. So what we affirm is only related to certain substantial aspects and some functional levels that are partly and temporarily presented by the movements; we never attempt to affirm the sufficiently satisfactory or pertinent values caused by theirintellectual entirety. The example can also be used to clarify our conception in general: function 2, for example, is carried out only by some aspects/events at a definite time of the related intellectual phenomenon that consists of the actor, his thought and action, and his result in terms of the definite evaluative standards. Basically, the affirmed parts are relatively defined in terms of the general functional mechanism 2 and therefore are essentially expressed in the epistemological correction of the practical orientation of the related practices. So the affirmed functional part cannot be simply reduced to (although is certainly carried out by) the concrete person or his works. In other words, we do not need to affirm the entirety of the author or his works in an absolute term but mainly accept their relevant parts that relatively represent the elements correctly produced by function 2.^[6] The latter will be included in the intellectual/theoretical treasure as the continuing operative basis for being applied in future. In everyday parlance, people are used to simply following another pragmatic evaluation in order to beautify or adorn excellent authors or works permanently; in modern times this habit of evaluation is transformed to include an added commercial function: to create a famous brand of classic books through using their historically-transmittedvalues. This distinction about the evaluation principle is also indicated between the traditional humanities and the modern human sciences. For the latter, the case is exactly the same as what we see in natural sciences: no historical achievement of an invention can be absolutely established merely owing to the fact that it got affirmation from the authorities of its times; it must undergo a constant check within the entire scientific network/framework.

      For the sake of more clearly explaining our above conception, let us just add some comments on those two great theoretical humanities movements further. Their positive-progressive achievements cannot simultaneously expel their serious mistakes/ignorance committed by the both with regard to their judgments/practices about political-ethical justification concerning their contemporary political circumstances. As is well known, the scholars of the German-centric philosophical stream indicate their general right-wing patriotism, and the intellectuals of the French-centric interdisciplinary-directed theoretical stream indicate their general left-wing tendency. Even the more serious negative consequences co-occurred with their serious positive contributions to the theoretical progresses of the humanities! Nevertheless, this apparently paradoxical phenomenon just proves our conception about historical bifurcation: any humanity-theoretical progresses refer to only certain parts of the related practices; those temporarily affirmed progresses are only semi-products/raw material to be further processed in future; the scientifically affirmed parts produced in history 2 can be used/applied by any actors, including those in history 1. As a result, the relational problems of thought and politics can be handled by means of any strategic/tactical designs/mechanisms. There exists no linear logical/causal connection between the two heterogeneous domains: pragmatic-operated politics and ethical-guided humanities theory. In other words, the appearances of the same moral discourse in history 2 and history 1 are one thing, the two operative mechanisms handling the same discourse in history 1 and history 2 are another thing; and both are heterogeneous in their driving motivations and pragmatic aims. Scholars always merely pay attention to the concrete appearance of “words” but often ignore the operative mechanisms operating with the words. That is why humanities theorists in history have been always confused in this intermediary zone. This is another reason why we raise the model of history 1/history 2. It is interesting here to mention an old famous saying of Marx that “the most important thing is to change the world rather than to know the world”. The “logic” linkage, declared by him to exist between the knowing and the acting, is contrary to our historical model that asserts the separation of the two heterogeneous mechanisms. Marx’s mixture of the two kinds of knowledge is owed to his neglect of the functional distinction mentioned above. Social-political actors of course request the correct related knowledge as their effective instruments consisting of social recognition, which belongs to history 2, but the application of the instruments requests still another kind of instrument consisting of acting tactical skill, which only belongs to history 1. Another important example could be the hotly debated topic about the linkage between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution (and all subsequent revolutions). According to our historical model, the epistemological separation/pragmatic linkage of the two historical phenomena could be more reasonably treated. In terms of the behavioral-pragmatic point of view the focus would be put on their phenomenal connection, but if from our point of view we must distinguish between them then the intellectual part of the Enlightenment would belong to history 2 and its application/operation to history 1. For the latter some thoughts of the former are only the material/instrument to be manipulated in terms of a separate tactical mechanism. It is the same case with the relationship between utopian thought and all social-political activities making use of the utopian thought. Regarding the case of Nietzsche and a great number of other similar examples, we can apply the same analytical method in order to reach the more exact functional details concerned.

      Furthermore, viewed from the angle of the epistemological history of mankind, the scientific developments of the contemporary humanities in general have been stillperformed within the system ofmodern disciplinary compartmentalizationthat maintainsthe epistemological and methodological restrictions caused bythe related institutionalization of the trio-powers. That means all traditional disciplines have been ever more subdivided and accordingly able to be deepened/advanced at the technical levels that are shaped/regulated by various related disciplines. Thus, especially since World War II, there have occurred more and more ever-specialized/institutionalized disciplines in the humanities, each of which has developed to be more and more operatively structured and maintained professional systemsthat have provided certain well-organized technically operable procedural regularities. Despite this general remarkable progressat the operative-technical level,the scientific-theoretical levelhas remained less advanced and its social/cultural influences haveevenbecome more and more diminished just because of the consequences brought about in the processes; namely, their identity and functions have become more and more determined by the social establishment of the academia determined by the two trio-powers. As stated above, the current humanities or human sciences, despite the general scholarly developmentsaccumulated in the processes, have obviously fallen into a period of epistemological stagnation and intellectual-creative impotency in a relative/relevant sense, and any genuinely scientific-theoretical perspective of human sciences has been structurally obstructed or restricted by the inlaid operative-organizing mechanisms directly caused by the trio-power2(namely, scientific technologicalization, professional institutionalization and cultural commercialization). More precisely, they havefunctioned as the sampleprofessional operationswithin the above-mentioned disciplinary-central networksat the quasi-technical levels determined/regulated bythe fixed mechanisms ofrespective disciplines.

      Despite all that has been said above, viewed historically, we may also find another natural reason why we should logically stress the necessity of the all-round interdisciplinary-directed revolutionary reform of the humanities today. The past two hundred years’ vertically-directed development, realized through disciplinary-central deepening and specialization, has now naturally brought about requests forcomprehensive horizontally-directed scientific practices performed with multi/inter-disciplinary interaction. The similar readjustments of epistemological/methodological orientations in natural/social sciences have still been successfully carried out respectively in history while the same scientifically desirable development of the humanities has been structurally blocked by the social/cultural/academic conditions of our times.

3. The Theoretical Humanities under the domination of the Professional Establishment and the Necessity of their scientifically-directed modernization

Most excellent works in the contemporary theoretical humanities (which should be separated from those works popularized or widely accepted merely in classrooms that have been used by a majority of intellectuals for the sake of carrying out purely ordinary occupational procedures) are taken seriously and even loved extensively by professional specialists who are regularly trained on modern campuses. The fact, however, should not be regarded as being equivalent to the genuinely scientific-theoretical progress with their effective applicability in systematic explanations and solutions of human and social affairs. As this author has frequently pointed out, we have to pay serious critical attention to the genuine roles of some major contemporary western philosophies, such as the German philosophy of existence and French existentialism. The epistemological misguidance shared by both the irrationally- and ontologically-formulated philosophies spectacularly indicated in presenting similarly misleading ideas, which were lost either in the rightist extreme ideology or in the leftist extreme one, have not only produced de-constructive effects on the scientific developments of theoretical human sciences or Geisteswissenschaften in general but also caused seriously negative political/social/cultural impacts in particular. As a matter of fact, these two leading postwar speculative philosophies provide intellectuals and humanities scholars with different styles of irrational metaphysics/ontology.^[7] The reason lies in the fact that their texts have been authoritatively approved/confirmed and been regarded as permanent values within the constantly fixed philosophy-disciplinary institutions. This theoretical privilege has been established within the disciplinary system, maintaining a professionally-constant autonomy with eligibility that does not need to be reexamined in reference to the objective justification of their discourses: they can since then live on their own textual bodies as such forever. Thus, the influential philosophical works have been taken as unchanged spiritual values for constant enjoyment rather than as temporary creations to be further improved/corrected with the unified rational/scientific criteria, as we see in natural/social sciences. That is just the main reason why the theoretical humanities cannot be regarded as a scientific-orientated way of thinking, for their mechanism for establishing academic authority is radically different from that of the natural sciences.

      The involved reasons why the humanities have been much less scientifically developed certainly comprise other aspects. A great number of similar successful phenomena have emerged with respect to modern humanities scholarship because of the eligibility they had once won at the professional level, and this academic-authoritative recognition is not determined by their true scientifically-directed contributions but by the actual results that are accepted by the legalized authoritative community of professionals during the related historical processes. Since the outset of the era of commercialization/globalization, the very reason for this pragmatically-given eligibility obtained by the human sciences scholarship becomes more and more clearly determined by their “use-value” of the market when the ecology of the humanities looks more and more like some commercial-like circumstances. In other words, the social/cultural/scholarly utility of the humanities has been further and further disconnected from their scientific potential or reference towards genuine scientific advancement measured in terms of the principles of the genuine human sciences. Since the term “science” in a broad sense is quasi-equivalent to “scholarship” of any kind in modern times, the humanities have been also included in the united system of education and scholarship together with natural and social sciences. Therefore, the three categories of scientific/scholarly systems are not unified or made consistent by their contents, methods and functions but only by a unified organizing framework/mechanism. The scientific/scholarly activities are no longer the behaviors of individuals or individual groups like we see in ancient times; instead, they are more and more strictly organized by the ever-changeable state/society’s power systems, including its hard and soft types alike. By sharing the same organizing ways the humanities have begun to change their traditional operative ecology as well: from the earlier so-called individual/liberal practices to the collective/organized practices. And with the ever-increasing development of commercial globalization, the professionally maintained or socially organized humanities present their organizing/organized tendency more and more and their individual/liberal character less and less. This historically-changed tendency leads the branches of the humanities to be remarkably disconnected with multi-reality, accordingly further losing their applicability to real life or being transformed into a special autonomy for social survival organized in and supported by the unified academic framework based on trio-powers. As a consequence, the more “scientifically” organized humanities increasingly lose their genuinely scientific-creative energy and potential. In short, the humanities today are essentially defined first of all by the status of their being organized by an externally operated multi-academic power/organizer, rather than driven by their own innately intelligent motivation/ethical conviction.

      We should explain another epistemological-pragmatic distinction concerned with the concrete individual/collective and their functional expressions. What we emphasize in our bifurcating historical model in particular is the two autonomously operative mechanisms driving and organizing the two main historical-evolutional lines. Any physically exiting persons engaged in the main historical evolutions are the agents whose related involvements are only the parts of their historical existence. That means any one-functional agent can be also the person who can carry out another function or non-functional affairs. The possible multi-involvements of one person in certain historical processes should be therefore distinguishable from his specific participation in certain historical-functional events. So his various concrete internal/external ideas/actions must be different at the epistemological level from his special involvement with certain functional production. If he happens to be a philosopher and a social activist at the same time he has a chance to carry out his works in the two historical-operative areas, but the results of his efforts should be respectively described/judged in different terms from those defined by the two functional evaluations/mechanisms.

      The cultural/intellectual developments in the processes of modern industrial history lead to highly strung tension appearing in the humanities; on the one hand, the general scientific development in modern history has indeed restructured and reformulated the humanities to a certain degree, transforming them from the mode of their traditional intellectual/artistic creations to the modern scholarly/theoretical mode of the quasi-scientific studies (one example: from traditional novel-creating to the modern study of the former), but on the other hand the unified educational/scholarly organizing powers nevertheless lead them to be less and less genuinely scientific in character because of the guiding domination of the same commercialized organizing powers. In other words, the same organizing systems make natural/social sciences become more and more scientifically productive while, by contrast, they make human sciences less and less scientifically feasible/effective. In other words, the scientific ideal of the functional transformation of the traditional humanities to the modern human sciences has suffered from some structural obstacles. Accordingly there have always emerged divergent and competing opinions about the correct identity and proper function of the humanities: should they remain as a sort of “liberal arts” or change to some special type of “sciences”? (By the way, such delicate theoretical sophistication can never be effectively/relevantly dealt with by analytical/pragmatist/behaviorist philosophers because of their innate epistemological self-restriction: they cannot clearly demarcate the operative-zones concerning the social and the human sciences as well as the existing domains between social-behavioral actions and introspective-psychological motivations.)

      The two kinds of definitions seem to share the same character that all branches of the humanities still need to be referable to actual human life or to social/cultural reality. The reference to natural/social/cultural reality should be the first requirement of the scientific practices despite the fact that the traditional humanities are conventionally involved in imaginative/fictional thoughts as well. Regarding the current idea of human sciences, we should distinguish between two kinds of references to reality: the modern genuinely rational/scientific one and the traditional half-rational/half-fictional one. Of course we should accept the two big separate realities: the physical reality and psychological reality. The relationship between the two kinds of realities cannot be simplistically reduced to a pragmatic/physicalist/operativist monism. The latter can explain why the physicalist-directed philosophy of the United Sciences of the Vienna Circle cannot be fully justified with respect to Geisteswissenschaften. We have to recognize the justification of the notion of multi-rationality in human knowledge, and there especially exists also multi-reality in historical/humanist life; the notion of pluralist-rationality is therefore necessary for us to more properly grasp the genuine meaning of the human sciences. No doubt all types of rationality and reality can become the reasonable objects of certain scientific investigations so long as we can tackle them in terms of correct typology of rationality.

      In addition, there exists also a conceptual distinction concerning the epistemological references to reality: the rational/scientific one and the artistic/intellectual one. Only the former can be taken as being genuinely scientific in nature. Thus, should we think about the problems of the scientific transformation of the traditional humanities in the same way? Herewith let us talk about the above-mentioned two scientific movements of theoretical humanities again. The two historical events indicate similar driving forces in the direction of the scientific-tended transformation of the traditional theoretical humanities and especially of the traditional type of philosophy. The first of the pre-war German-Austrian trends indicates a philosophical/psychological/historical pan-quasi-positivism, including the historical-hermeneutic, the logical/mathematic-psychological, the psychoanalytic, and the physical/mathematic-analytic, but on the whole it was still based on a philosophical disciplinary-centralism; the second of the post-war French-Italian trends also indicates a pan-quasi-positivism performed in the linguistic, sociological and historical domains, including all branches of structural-semiotic practices according to the continental term. A sharp distinction should be made between the two by the fact that the former is characterized by its modernized philosophical-centrism and the latter just by their de-philosophical-centrism or inter-disciplinary-oriented theoretical approaches. By different epistemological and methodological strategies, both trends in essence share the similar tendency of the somewhat pan-scientific rationalism, including their tentatively rational ways of thinking about irrational phenomena. The shared rational/scientific tendency indicates the similar rationalist impulse with different degrees of epistemological/methodological complicity and different aspects regarding human life/history/rationality and discloses the same wishes for a more rational and effective handling of the problems of spiritual intelligibility and axiological applicability of humanities-related knowledge and updated wisdom concerning the crucial issues of meaning, value and belief, which are innately rooted in human existence itself and cannot be dealt with either by natural or social scientific ways. The traditional fields of philosophy, history and literature remain the relevant realms for understanding and solving the related issues today but their traditional ways of thinking historically prove to be less and less relevantly effective in scientifically applicable terms; or, in other words, those traditional ways of handling the humanities have finished their historical-temporary tasks and therefore must be reformed or revolutionized into their modernized stage, in which natural and social sciences have already made such great progress and been so powerful over the past centuries. That means those exact scientific progresses have forced the humanities to reflect on the problems of their identity, function and methods in consideration of the fact that politics, society, culture and knowledge have undergone so many successful and scientifically-productive transformations in history. Meanwhile, on the other hand, the substantial progresses of natural and social sciences have also constantly disclosed an innate deficiency with respect to their capability of dealing with the issues of human spiritual life: they are just unable to reach the intelligible understanding of meaning, value and beliefs as well as human nature itself, which have historically proved the most significant topics for the fortune of humanity. Concretely almost all tragedies of mankind have been caused by deeply complicated and inaccessible historical/existential situations full of power struggles. Furthermore, the desirable advancement of the quality of human spiritual/intellectual existence in history 2 has also severely suffered from the complicated conditions caused by the hard- and soft-power mechanisms in history 1.

      In essence, we attempt to state that all such crucial factors or topics can be included in a general problematization related to the so-called ethical dimension. Both the natural and social sciences can help solve problems about morality/legality in the external social/political term but they are unable to effectively reach the intellectual domains related to the ethical dimension explained above. Thus we may conclude that the very essence of the humanities, regardless of their traditional or modernized modes, just lies in an inside corner of the ethical-spiritual life which we have been far from grasping until now. In other words, the traditional efforts towards ethical reflections should also be relevant and scientifically modernized in order to increase our capability of really understanding and actually solving the top significant problems in the present-day era of commercial/technological globalization, either passively or actively. As a matter of fact, the contemporary task of modernizing the traditional humanities in fact implies two aspects: the passive and the active; namely, in facing the materialist-aggressive expansion of globalization, the humanities should learn how to persist in its innate identity, and at the same time human beings should more meaningfully elaborate their intelligibility concerning its true valuable existence and spiritual sublimation. These two movements of the theoretical humanities should be more seriously concerned with the difficult yet significant issues and therefore require a more epistemological/methodological re-adjustment in their practical strategies. A rational/ethical-directed consciousness has indeed underpinned these two huge movements and has also been expressed relevantly in all other scientifically-directed practices of the humanities for the past two centuries. But on the other hand, the present-day humanities, which have been sufficiently professionalized, are becoming more and more rigidly bound with the mechanically organized/strictly institutionalized academic systems; accordingly, they have weakened or even exclude their subjective motive/ability to courageously deal with the crucially pressing problems. That means all scientific achievements of the humanities in history still need to be improved/advanced, but their continuous progress has been structurally obstructed under the currently totally institutionalized academic world that has powerfully inculcated them with the value of priority of professional profits.

4. The actual conditions concerning the interaction between the Theoretical humanities and the academic Establishment

Regarding the task of modernizing the humanities we should above all understand the nature of the general contexts of the hard/soft-powers operating in the materialist globalization era. We should recognize that both social and human sciences have acquired their scientifically-directed progress under the independent progress of natural sciences, and that all three categories of sciences belong to history 2. Owing to the external interaction between history 1 and history 2, natural sciences and their practical products and technical branches have become the most useful instruments for history 1 and made the latter more and more rationally/effectively strengthened. Thus we see a paradoxical phenomenon in historical development: the natural/social sciences as the products in history 2 become the important tools to highly strengthen history 1 with their rationally developed capability, and they also strengthen the scientific development of the human sciences by making the latter more capable of thinking in a rational/scientific way as well. Nevertheless, another kind of external interaction between the organizational power system in history 1 and the intellectual/spiritual productions in history 2, namely the traditional dominative pressure of the former upon the latter, has led to this dominating strength greatly multiplying. That means the rationally strengthened mechanism 1 has objectively produced an obstructive power to curb the rational/scientific development of mechanism 2. That is why this scientific/rational turn of the humanities has brought about certain scientific progresses that are mostly expressed at the technical level. Nevertheless, an all-round scientific/rationalist advancement of the human sciences would have made them into another kind of intellectual force that could present a more effective mode of questioning/challenging directed to the self-claimed absolute justification of the purely materialist/technical/commercial-directed orientation of human civilization today. As we mentioned above, true intellectual strength can only be of a scientific/rational type, including its related ethical aspects.^[8] In general, any irrational/non-rational intellectual/spiritual practices could be more consistent with the fixed orientation of the trio-power systems. Besides the less scientific/less rationally-tended humanities, we may mention their following “friendly dissidents” who are the popular critics of social/cultural phenomena produced in the trio-power systems: all supernatural spiritual movements, artistic creations, especially the modernist/post-modernist ones, as well as all kinds of sensual entertainments. That is because these kinds of critical expressions are made in irrational/super-realist ways and therefore remain inefficient or even deformedly collaborative in nature. In this sense the post-modernist philosophies, with their various irrational/anti-scientific discourses, can be taken as a typical philosophy of our times, essentially serving the general goal of the pure materialism of the globalization era. This is just because their irrational/nihilist persuasive discourses can only produce certain emotional/aesthetic effects that can never produce some scientifically intelligible theories that really meaningfully confront the present-day social/cultural/scholarly reality.

      In terms of the above interpretive model we have to point out that, owing to different reasons, those efforts towards scientifically modernizing the humanities have been reduced to failure. Let us raise the example of the two major theoretical humanities movements again. These two huge scientifically-rationalizing movements of the humanities in the 20^th century indeed attained their respective temporary achievements, indicating the justified rational/scientific orientation through more rationally modernizing the theoretical humanities. Unfortunately, as we have pointed out, the one was broken by the global war, the other ironically by the unprecedented blossoming of commercial/technological globalization. Nevertheless, both have left their respective great heritages: the one was shown by their common empirical/logical positivist-directed way of reasoning against traditional philosophical-centrism (among them, Husserlian phenomenology remains the most reconstructive contribution), which is made by excluding the various traditional metaphysical/ontological speculations; the other by its multi-interdisciplinary theoretical/semantic-unifying pan-operative-positivism through firstly overcoming any philosophical fundamentalism or natural scientificism. As a result of their successive ebbing, all traditional and modern efforts in the humanities nowadays have been professionally institutionalized under the dominative influences of trio-powers and encircled into a systematically organized/regulated autonomy limited only to the campus. All scholarly practices in these fields have been trained, administered and processed within the strictly organized disciplinary-interweaved systems shaped by the institutionalized campus ecology, and all such practices as the formerly liberal arts are now under the supervision, regulation and control of the institutional powers and have to obey the strictly regulated operative procedures which are structurally defined by almost prefixed aims, criteria and methodological procedures. Living under these mechanically organized and controlled circumstances, all of the elements of the liberal-artistic practices have even lost their earlier creative/energetic spontaneity, for they have to pay closer attention to various external restrictive forces and therefore become merely the material/data to be processed or reproduced along the regulated procedures which are eventually determined by the related determinative power system and the evaluative instruction of academic marketing. In our present-day contexts of materialist/commercialized/technicalized globalization, the humanities, as the existence of cultural cultivation, have changed their earlier freedom in mentality and present a kind of quasi-parasitism depending on the materialist-substantial supports and the collaborative permission of the commercial/technological powers.

      Regarding the question of the relationship between the liberal art humanities and the double trio-powers, there exist several levels of marketing mediation, ranging from the existing academic-intellectual ideological status as the general determinist machine, the organization of academic marketing, the ideological criteria available in the market, the market-related promotion/propaganda apparatus (publishing advertisements), the production mechanism of scholarly works as goods produced on the organized campus, the training processes of the “producers” (students, teachers, writers) according to rigidified standards and procedures, and the ways to produce goods with “famous brands” (distinguished professors and theoretical writers) according to the necessarily followed ideological systems that are characterized by their lacking in capability/potential to question/recheck the general establishment based on the double trio-powers. By the way, unlike the straightforward way of operations of the hard-powers, the constitution of the soft-powers presents a typical intermediary mechanism consisting of different middle-functioning layers.

      Apparently the intellectual/scholarly orientations guiding the liberal art humanities are decided by the “academic masters” in the production of the academic “commodity”, the professors as the makers/producers of the special commodity, while as a matter of fact the intellectual/scholarly choices adopted by professors are indirectly or more basically decided by other concealed forces; they must follow the fashions/rules created in marketing-operation and work according to the generally accepted existing academic ideology that must be ultimately consistent with the scholarly-ideological policies made by the double trio-powers. The latter effectively obey their will through the budget control as the last step of the determinative procedures. As the main agent for realizing the productive processes of the “goods” of the humanities, liberal art professors get used to processes and elaborate the quality of their jobs firstly by means of implementing the standardized, predominant academic ideology that is already built in their scholarly-practicing consciousness/habitude; alternatively, they eventually become merely “classroom existent”, equipped with the scholarly-ideological principles indirectly made by the trio-powers. In other words, the shoddy freedom of thinking in the field can only be realized through professionally and ideologically regulated/restricted channels.

      As a consequence, participants of the professional humanities can seemingly do anything as they did before, but the essential difference between the past and the present is clearly outlined by the related academic ecology, such as that which is mainly determined by the regulated procedures and restricted operative contexts rather than by the performed academic materials such as scholarly texts; essentially, the life of the humanities is determined first of all by the strictly regulated operative systems rather than by the operated material, such as the substantial contents/data contained in works finished in various disciplines. The activities in all fields are no longer motivated and initiated by liberal artists acting as free thinkers who mainly paid attention to the ideas expressed in texts, but unconsciously by the externally dominating rules embodied by professional systems indirectly guided by trio-powers. Or more exactly, the scholars’ choices are made by the multi-interactions of different parameters such as subjective interests, textual values and external governing contexts. The last, which can bring about feasibility, becomes the most determinative factor.

      There exist a lot of externally determinative factors and instructive rules guiding the choosing patterns of individual behaviors; scholars behave like game-players who must follow the preordained game-rules with operative procedures. That means the desired spontaneous freedom of individuals realized in really free intellectual creations/expression no longer exists; scholars must first of all be concerned about and follow professional regulations in order to secure competitive profitability, or they just turn out to be professionalized operators guided by their utilitarian view of life that will be profitably carried out by a variety of professional parameters such as the eligibility of documents, hierarchical titles, and institutionalized ranks as well as marks of honor. Those professional parameters become the very genuine concerns and purposes of the human sciences scholars today and all such related factors can be easily disconnected from rationalist/scientific criteria.

      Living under such a totally professionalized system, scholarly content or expressed thoughts, as we pointed our above, have naturally become the raw material to be processed within the regulated scholarly machine for the sake of searching for determined professional profits. Only the preordained objectives are the genuine concerns of scholars while the contents of created and used thoughts become only the means employed for the purely professional operative goals. During the processes, the contents of thoughts can usually be appreciated or enjoyed, just like a game-player who has indulged in performing their game-steps, and are merely embodied in the processes at the functional level. Thus this kind of quasi-utilitarian concern about or quasi-passion for professional practices function as a camouflage for replacing the really humanity-scientific devotions required. As a result, current humanities scholars would present a twin-feature in their academic careers: on the one hand as a double personality expressed in their apparent traditional love for liberal artistic values and in their essential concerns about professional benefits; on the other as a double-orientated player embodied by a twin-attentive operation towards immediate scholarly favors and mediated professional profits. They talk about content or thought as such but they in fact act according to occupational criteria/rules. The choice of the used content or thought of a scholar depends on its utility or eligibility with respect to the academic market evaluation, although he presents the scholarly discourses as the means directed towards the utilitarian aim. The two divergent processes are therefore particularly overlapped in our totally institutionalized globalization era and the tendency has become the key reason why the modernization of the humanities has been structurally obstructed, owing to the radical development of globalization. As a matter of fact, once again, the scholarly contents used have to be consistent with the commercial fashions or fashionable brands/marks that present the operative eligibility in the professional world. Or, in essence, the scholarly contents are only apparently related to humanities’ values whereas they are actually related to the market values; for only the latter can provide him with operative efficiency in his scholarly pursuance. Just as the favorite brands of goods are in the sway of the unexpected vicissitudes of the favorite fashions, or just like the changeable fashions in general in the consumerist market, the changeability of theoretical interests in the humanities are caused by the occasional alteration of tastes in theoretical reasoning without any rationally justified foundation. The fact can be used to describe the present-day vicissitudes of intellectual or theoretical evolutions too. For example, a variety of philosophical schools or theoretical trends have been formed by the occasional alteration of intellectual/theoretical tastes as well without any objectively or scientifically explainable causes, although people may regard some successively combined sequences that occurred around the related tasteful changes as pseudo-logical developments based on certain intelligible mechanisms. The same can be found with the changing tastes of fashions, supported by any arbitrary interpretation. All such attempts tend to negate the justification of the notion of human sciences. We may then further grasp that some post-modernist nihilism or extreme relativism could be more comfortable in proclaiming that the theoretical humanities can only be taken as the sort of liberal artistic pragmatism that is similar to all kinds of arts.

      As a result, scholarly works play the role of modes of fashion and the choice of the chosen “means” used in academically institutionalized procedure turns out to be much easily handled. Just as fashions have no distinction between “expression” and “content” in their constitution, scholarly works as “instruments” need only to care about their impressive appearance: the sophisticated formalist modes of discourse. As a kind of scholarly commodity, the consumed scholarly content therefore needs only to care about the pragmatic utility of works in the exchange market. This requirement accords with the present-day (especially in the non-western areas) multiple pragmatic styles of performing semiotic projects; then we see that the styles in imitative, repetitive, copyist ways of opportunist scholarly productions could be displayed at both subjective and objective levels. The effective discursive devices must be acceptable in reference to the variation of the market value; the authoritative discursive styles are formed in accordance with successful discursive models, orientations and even styles decided by the recognized “masters” in intellectual/scholarly history. The so-called “accordance” emphasized here is in fact to indicate an essential repetition of the ways of thinking on both aspects of contents and styles. That means only those authoritatively recognized contents and styles can be regarded as the objectively effective, academically qualified “scholarly works” that can be totally acceptable at all levels of power mechanisms. Thus, the discourse, regardless of how skillfully its substantial content and rhetoric style is created, presents a double function at the content plane and expressive plane together. Nevertheless, the actually productive part is always the latter, which mainly refers to its purely pragmatic-operative feature/parameters that are sufficiently suitable to be used in scholarly production/transactions/communication. Thus we can see the more radical development in recent academic contexts that, according to post-modernist epistemology, the formalist manipulation as such functions independently in our new intellectual platforms and would perhaps assert a “new truth”, characterized by its totally denying the traditionally central terms like reality/truth in order to promote an extreme relativist/nihilist epistemology. These prevailing radical theoretical trends that have just been created in our new century, however, that all dominant social power mechanisms are maintaining reinterpreted concepts of reality/truth, have been widely displayed by humanities scholars and are implicitly inconsistent with materialist/technological/commercial teleology. One example can be raised in the following. The dramatically collaborative co-presence of the empirical-realism/positivism of natural/social sciences in history 2 and all power mechanisms in history 1 on one side and the fashionable irrational nihilism in the theoretical humanities mainly traced back to the Heideggerian-like style on the other can stimulate us to pay serious attention to a positive “hermeneutics” about the trio-powers that these two sides could implicitly support each other under a beautification of post-modernist rhetoric, with a rational common sense made by the joint force that the rational/scientific-orientated development of the theoretical humanities must be systematically weakened. Certainly nothing could be caused by real mutual agreement; the actual reason of such a nihilist way of theorizing is essentially due to a pragmatic opportunist/utilitarian spirit covered by pseudo-romantically attractive rhetoric. However, on the other side, all factors leading to the popular acceptance are eventually also the consequence of operations made by the materialist-guided power mechanisms.

5. The contemporary semiotic movement as one of the main attempts for modernizing the theoretical humanities

Now let us turn to the problems concerning the relationship between modern semiotics and the theoretical humanities. Unfortunately the problems can hardly be explained clearly if the reader is not familiar with the many disorderly details involved in the contemporary semiotic movement. This is not only due to the fact that the movement consists of too many divergent and even mutually contradictory conceptions of semiotics but also due to the more complicated issues concerning the unclearly expressed idea about why/how to reform or modernize the traditional humanities today. Accordingly, at least according to the interpretation of this author, the historically meaningful emergence of the contemporary semiotic theories was primarily caused by several great thinkers thoroughly modernizing the theoretical foundations of the traditional humanities. Nevertheless, these original theoretical contributions have been gradually blended and mingled by more and more other kinds of scholarly practices using similar terminology. Without clearly distinguishing between the “genuine” and “less genuine” semiotic practices first, we will not be able to grasp the entire related problematique. This author hopes other parts of this book will be a little bit helpful for the related explanations, although this author discuss this kind of topic mainly in his Chinese writings.

      Above all, the most remarkably misleading confusion about the current semiotic movement has been made by many scientific schools sharing the same linguistic mark – “sign” – that contains a variety of different historical and modern meanings. As a result, the movement has been full of many divergent studies using this central term—sign and this habit of indistinctly using the general term has led to the weakening or even disappearance of the epistemological/methodological consistence of the semiotic scholarship. The most impressive example regarding this case is certainly the lasting coexistence of the European-continental school and the North American school, although these two so-called semiotic orientations are obviously contradictory at the epistemological/methodological level (the same term is universally used to refer to different conceptions). This notorious case of the operative-oppositional scholarly trends preferring to coexist in the same international organization clearly indicates a common utilitarian attitude towards scholarship merely in order to share the same institutional profits in the academic competition. This example discloses how powerful the commercialized academic contexts are that have led current scholars holding different theoretical positions to tolerate the disorderly scientific coexistence in the common forum/platform; after all, the fact means that participants have felt a collective utility to maintain an international organization or to obtain extra institutional supports. This organizational strategy for the movement is clearly based on a collective opportunism that adopts this epistemological disorder/conceptual miscellany and interprets it as a scientific-interdisciplinary feature: the typical semiotic character. As a matter of fact, the requested relevant interdisciplinary principle at the epistemological level is replaced by the disorderly combination of different disciplinary scholarships. By virtue of this pragmatic/tactic replacement, the scientific truth-searching designs have been changed to a professional profit-searching strategy. The operative feasibility of this organizational movement has been dramatically due to the utility of the central fantastic word “sign” that has functioned as the theoretical-operative base to reasonably create a great academic solidarity in the scientific-competitive world. (Simply, a pluralist/mixed usage of the single term plays an additional role for expanding the academic power, with a result of weakening its own scientific elaboration of the movement.)

      The current semiotic movement, basically originating from the stream of French structuralism, may be characterized by its typical interdisciplinary, theoretically-oriented operative pan-positivism. It is a widely popular misunderstanding that the current semiotic movement has been formed by and organized around the general studies about “sign”. The etymologic link of the term semiotics/semiology with the term sign has been simplistically used as the justifying reason of this popular definition that has become one of the main causes leading to the semiotic studies everywhere becoming an ever more popularized and less scientifically-defined profession. As a result, even the studies of the general history of the usage of the term “sign” have been professionally mixed with the theories of the central concept of “sign” that led to the establishment of the revolutionarily novel discipline of “structural linguistics”. The same verbal item “sign” plays completely different roles in different scientific contexts while the semantic mixture of it has been widely employed to support the development of the semiotic organization.

      It is true that in many practical studies about cultural, journalistic and artistic phenomena centered in so-called media-semiotics, the combined application of differently defined concepts of “sign” can be very popular and that is because most of them operate at a practical level to carry out different pragmatic projects in the recently expanded realm of the media market that indicates the establishment of the commercialized media-culture.

      Generally speaking, the lasting co-existing mixture of Anglo-American studies of signs defined in histories of natural sciences and anthropology and the continental studies of signs applied in structural-linguistic theories (created along the Swiss-Danish-French line) has been understandably due to the occasional practices realized in the bi-continental experiences of Jacobson and Levi-Strauss during the WWII period. But the more substantial reason for the building up of the international association until it reached all areas in the world was the uniquely singular organizing talent of the Hungarian-American scholar Sebeok, who had created a scholarly pragmatic strategy/tactics through applying the polysemous term “sign” to unify and solidify this international family across the national and ideological demarcations since the late 1960s, although Sebeok himself had grasped little about the main semiotic base represented and supported by French structuralism and even opposed it strongly. Moreover, what this event really implies is the implicitly determinative factors produced by the rapidly strengthened trio-power systems.

      Since the outset of the current semiotic movement, many scholars have been enwrapped in this mixed conceptual-snare: to vainly attempt to unify the authoritatively accepted two divergent schools, tracing back to Saussureian structural linguistics and Peircian pragmatic sign-philosophy at the theoretical level; or, to attempt to put the two types of “sign” (in Saussure’s line and in Peirce’s line) into a unified theoretical system in order to form a “general semiotics” to help strengthen the proper establishment of a new scientific system. As a result, the superficial priority of the single word “sign”, which is read as the logically firm concept, covers up the deep essence/potential of “semiotic/semiology” formed through the true interdisciplinary theorization. Accordingly, a pan-pragmatic philosophy as the epistemological foundation of Anglo-American sign-studies and a continental interdisciplinary-directed epistemology characterized by its de-philosophy-centrism have been illogically blended by pragmatic-operative academic-organizing tactics that have been essentially motivated by a universal academic-unitarianism. Furthermore, based on this habitual blending of the two divergent semiotic concepts, the semiotic movement, especially since its academic globalization, has become unlimitedly open or liberal or tolerant to almost all kinds of self-claimed “sign-players” that can include almost every topic where people can easily find this kind of (or similar) words and concepts in all social/cultural/scholarly phenomena: actually it can appear in verbal units like word, sign, symbol, index and others. Nevertheless, the empty or unlimitedly open word “sign” and its synonyms can indeed allow semioticians to enlargen the number of their “members” and therefore to shape a ever-expanding organization that can help promote the academic competition without restrictions. Thus, in other words, the shaping of the international organization has been due to two reasons: a) the feasibility is formed by the conceptual ambiguity of the central terms flexibly synonymous with the sign applied quasi-unanimously among members; and b) the motivation is unanimously shared by members to join the powerful organization that can help strengthen professional competitive capability. Eventually, the semiotic organizations function as mere conference organizers to maintain an atmosphere of scientific propaganda by means of a decreasing/relaxing of its academic standards when institutional organizing efficiency plays an increasingly larger role than the scientific quality itself in the professional world of the humanities. For example, regarding each international congress of the IASS, the only concerns of the organizers are embodied in the numbers of possible participants. The academic achievements of each congress could be simply indicated by the increased number of participants alone. The achievements of the semiotic conferences are realized or embodied in any substantial printed material. All participants are also concerned about the scale or profile of the organized events (similar to a regular “academic fest or party”) that can be recognized habitually as the scientific achievements themselves. No doubt the popular style of pursuing semiotic studies this way is also welcomed by all participants who cherish similar psychology because everybody has got used to the institutionalized academic ecology. So what they search for in the organized scholarly contexts is just expressed in solidifying/satisfying their own academic utilitarian goals. In fact, the popularized recognition that semiotics is the study of signs has brought about so many semiotics-irrelevant studies into the field of professional semiotics. Why are serious semiotics scholars also tolerant to the miscellaneous formation of semiotic organizations? It is because of the objective pressure exerted from academic competition and the usually accepted atmosphere caused by prevalent utilitarianism, which make every humanities scholar naturally evaluate the competitive potential that can be obviously strengthened if one appeals to some organizational backing. This attitude of strategic choices will certainly be conductive to seeing that the semiotic-player pays constant attention to the effect/utility of his own organizational affiliation and therefore neglects his serious concerns about the collective scientific quality of the organization.

      As a result, the above tendency towards organizational activities has eventually evolved into a conceptual formation of the “semiotic discipline”, the identity of which is not really defined in the scientific-scholarly term but rather in terms of the practical utility realized at the organizational level within the academic context. As a matter of fact, most semioticians indeed accept, recognize and like to join this particular new discipline titled with the name of “semiotics”, regardless of its contrariness to the very principle of the interdisciplinarity of the semiotic spirit. That means the international semiotic players are not only engaged in a lot of non-genuine semiotic-theoretical studies but are also involved in the utilitarian-pragmatic combined organization regardless of its direct contradiction with the interdisciplinary-directed principle of the true semiotic-spiritual orientation. Nevertheless, on the other hand, from an academic-sociological point of view, we might relax our scientific criterion of concern here and pay attention to another important academic phenomenon: the pragmatic change of the concept of “discipline” created by international semiotics in our new era. The term discipline could be added with a meaning defined in the academic-operative term; namely, it just means an effectively maintained organizational unit. In this sense “semiotics” has its justification in the academic world as long as it can use this universal index “sign” as an effective tool to actually unify the members. Such a purely professional aspect of semiotic activities has nothing to do with our topic so long as we can separate our theme totally from their business. At any rate, however, the ambiguous use of the term “discipline” would naturally lead to the weakened consciousness of insisting on semiotic studies along the relevantly interdisciplinary line. This self-contradictive tendency implied in the current semiotic movement proves that the commercialized utilitarian mentality of the semiotician has been basically created by a prevailing extreme academic utilitarianism purely directed to the single academic goal of professional-competitive success that is defined by the above-mentioned practical parameters rather than by the genuine semiotic-scientific ones. Exactly, the so-called “semiotic discipline” is of course not a true “discipline” in a scientific-academic term; alternatively, the “discipline” used here has the special meaning mentioned above – that it is a merely definite way to organize/maintain a special organizational power beneficiary to members’ possible professional profits. In this sense, a so-called “discipline” just functions as a specially organized “guild”. Accordingly, semiotic gatherings would not become occasions for serious scholarly dialogues/debates but would only be equivalent to a common platform used for promoting benefit-searching/exchanges. As a matter of fact, this development of academic-organizational activities obviously reflects a general tendency of the contemporary commercialized ecology of the humanities as a whole: the scholarly contents have basically been taken as mere instruments to be used to obtain professional-utilitarian benefits. In its extreme case, we can see that the “academic criteria” today could be generally transformed into purely “business criteria” that will be eventually measured by money, power, influence, ranks and eminence. All such commercial and profitable parameters can surely represent the elements used to increase the capability of the professional organizations for strengthening and developing their projects designed for and applied towards professional profits. In essence, the priority of the current scholarly practices of the theoretical humanities/theoretical semiotics could be reduced to better usable instruments, despite the fact that the constitutive contents of the instruments are still represented by scholarly/intellectual materials. What has essentially changed will be expressed at the level of scientific orientation and the social-cultural function of the human sciences, including theoretical semiotics.

      The aim of humanities’ scholarly practices is no longer to express the self-consistent thoughts freely created but rather to create the tools used for carrying out the professionally institutionalized procedure that leads to guaranteeing the practical-materialist goals of professionals. In this case, the success of the humanities scholarship is basically disconnected with the innate values (which are, as is usually said: truth, beauty and good) of the genuinely scientific-scholarly concerns but is connected with the market-determined utility and operative workability in consistence with the willingness of trio-powers. Both the market-utility and workability allowed/decided by trio-powers have become the final determinative sources with respect to the collectively adopted strategy/tactics in tackling the humanities. According to the utilitarian-pragmatic logic of such a prevailing academic background, the currently deviated semiotic activities have more easily found efficient ways being directed towards professional successes just because agents tend to adopt ever more flexible/opportunist scholarly-pragmatic tactics. For the pragmatically chosen definition of semiotics can be made arbitrarily according to the purely professional-operational feasibility in consistence with the same pragmatic logic of the academic market. Among the different factors influencing the deviated development of current semiotic activities, the most determinative one must be the changed external situations described above, although the way of this kind of influence is firstly created through the intermediary alternation of the mentality of individual scholars who can practically perform their choice, although the freedom of this choice can only be realized at the technical level concerning how to more effectively accord to the preordained professional rules.

      In terms of my long experience in promoting Chinese semiotics and coordinating the academic contact of Chinese semiotics with international semiotics, I understand that there is a basic difference of opinion between me and some of the organizers of the international association regarding the aims and methods about how to promote semiotic activities. Eventually I have concluded that what they attempt is different from my related concern that should be definitely linked to the substantial progress of Chinese semiotic science; for them, the true concern is merely about the eligibility or capability of their Chinese partners in effectively joining the existing international semiotic games as described above: basic western language capability, the available budget and the possibility of introducing IASS colleagues’ works to China is all that is requested by them. Of least concern is advancing the real scientific level and the potential of Chinese semiotics for substantial progress in the future. In sum, as long as their Chinese partners are able to join the international semiotic gatherings either at home or abroad, the aims of some international cooperative projects are achieved. For this purpose, fluency in foreign languages and the semiotic ABC talks are especially pertinent for their communication. An added satisfaction can be got if their Chinese partners can present some Chinese culture ABC to stage an ornamental presentation of non-western cultural exotic elements because they could herewith feel that their multi-cultural-directed internationalist programs are actually expanded. As is well-known, the field of foreign languages in China is characterized by relatively lower educational training regarding the knowledge of both western social/human sciences and the Chinese traditional humanities, for the main educational goal has been determined as practical language training over recent decades (this principle was first set up following the USSR model). Nevertheless, the elementary levels of these two kinds of knowledge in the field could become just right with respect to both sides carrying out their shared tasks by merely physically realizing the international communications. Because, after all, most western semioticians and other humanities scholars know little or nothing about the Chinese language and the rich Chinese traditional culture, let alone the advanced studies of Chinese humanities. During my long-term contacts with my western partners I have learnt to be cautious about a sensitive topic: how should genuine international semiotics be promoted if my western partners know little about and are even less interested in learning about Chinese/other non-western knowledge? Gradually I find almost all of them intentionally shun this sensitive questioning in order to avoid reflecting the actual intelligent conditions requested by serious cross-cultural semiotics.^[9] As regards this basic reality I have always emphasized the necessity to organize more advanced scholarly cooperation between western and Chinese partners through some special institutional connection. In any case, advanced western theories and the same advanced knowledge of the traditional Chinese humanities should both be effectively reorganized. For this scholarly request, the current conditions of the Chinese partners, most of which come from the field of foreign languages, are far from being eligible. That is why another aspect of my efforts on China’s side has been in promoting Chinese scholars from philosophy, history and other social sciences to join semiotic activities; this eventually failed, however, owing to various factors (I will go back to this story in a later part of this article). Meanwhile I have constantly explained this request to my western partners during our collaborative efforts to promote Chinese-western semiotic contacts. Unfortunately this explanative effort in my contacts with western partners failed too. They just did not care about this intellectual request and eventually I grasped what could be their true aim: just to expand the academic scale and social influence of their semiotic organization. For this purpose, the status quo of their Chinese partners, characterized by their fluent practical western languages and less specialized knowledge about the western/Chinese humanities, is just sufficient enough. After all, they are so deeply and widely pragmatically-minded nowadays.

      The original theoretical-creative spirits and resultant contributions of contemporary semiotic thought directly originated from the general scientific-directed progress of the humanities of the 19^th century. The latter was certainly based on the general scientific progresses of natural and social sciences that had accumulated at least since the European Enlightenment of the 18^th century. The simultaneously further derived technological and sociological developments have led human civilizations towards an unprecedented new period of the domination of the technological/commercialist culture. Generally speaking, the latter has provided a paradoxical impact on the development of the humanities: to promote their scientific advancement at the scholarly-technical level and to guide their academic orientation in order to force them to serve the new teleology of technical/commercialized civilizations. The current changeable trend of the post-war international semiotic movement has been representative of the contemporary complicated historical situations.

      This paper is not intended to especially deal with the theoretical problems as such. Nevertheless the author will repeat several central points regarding his semiotic-theoretical reflections in the following. Generally speaking, the title “semiotics” covers two main parts: applied/departmental semiotics, which consists of most parts of the semiotic profession and performs the disciplinary-based interdisciplinary projects, and so-called “general semiotics” or theoretical semiotics, which is redefined by myself as the general strategy for reorganizing human sciences (symbolized by the “GS-model”; refer to Chapter Four of this book) by dint of interdisciplinary/cross-cultural approaches. If departmental semiotics is just one field of human sciences, only the GS-model implies a revolutionary meaning and is directed towards the highly significant theoretical-renovating mission for reunifying the entire human sciences.

1. According to the basic division of the semiotic practices, we have applied semiotics (semiotics 1) and general theoretical semiotics (semiotics 2). For the former, the more flexible usage of the concept of “sign” and related methods is more feasible/reasonable while its interdisciplinarity could be less strictly requested. Professionally, semiotics 1 is more successful and it forms the main body of international semiotics. In terms of this the above related criticism is also less relevant to semiotics 1, for its identity/function is defined mainly by its professional/practical efficiency and less to the development of the theoretical humanities. Therefore semiotics 1 is not our topic. Our scholarly theme is exclusively related to semiotics 2 or the so-called “general semiotics” as named in the profession.
2. Semiotics 2, or general theoretical semiotics, should cover the following: general semantics, pan-cultural ideological analyses, pan-academic institutional analyses, the strategy/tactics of pan-global modernization/unification of the humanities, the establishment of the new branch of global semiotic ethics based on interdisciplinary theories, and the new branch of global humanist epistemology/axiology based on the new “united science” that exclusively refers to the human sciences. The central part of semiotics 2 consists of the all-round institutional/organizational analyses. So the so-called semiotics is far from being the studies of signs; despite that, it must cover all relevant sign-studies.
3. In any case, we can only regard the central term “sign” as a general index or brief mark of the significational, causational, symbolic, representative relationships; we should not substantiate it as an independent well-defined concept to be further made into a pan-metaphysical base. In this sense we prefer to popularly call semiotics a universal-semantics or a pan-institutional-analytical theory; both are of course related to human-historical phenomena.

Conclusively speaking, the deteriorating tendency of the international semiotic movement has been caused by several factors; among the above mentioned several major factors we can repeat the following: the original masters’ theories make scientific contributions only for certain aspects and all need to be further creatively developed; and the combination of several collaborative schools is divergently made by their different orientations/methods and the compositional disorder has naturally led to the consequence of unlimitedly/flexibly expanding membership from different scholarly backgrounds, making the association further lacking in its true coherence of scientific collaboration.

      From the recent related development of the so-called Chinese semiotic groups, we can see an interesting phenomenon indicating the interactive relationship between the two weak points of the international and the domestic sides. Because of the compositionally mingling character of the present-day semiotic activities and the strengthened pressure of the professional-utilitarian competition, the two newly-joined scholarly branches – the so-called semiotics of media and cognition sciences – have occupied a more and more important position in international semiotic organizations, although these two newly-come so-called “disciplines” keep their obvious epistemological distance from the original semiotic theorists at the both theoretical and practical levels. As a matter of fact, the remarkable promising growths of these two stronger scholarly/cultural fields have their own independent reasons connected with their relationship to the much changed social/cultural/scholarly contexts. That means these two major newcomers keep their own separate professional fields outside the semiotic movement. Their being “included into” the semiotic profession is of course due to the more and more scholarly open-mindedness of the present-day semiotic movement. As a matter of fact, this apparent development of the current semiotics means there can be only certain academic “combinations” (just like the combination of two companies for the sake of mutual strengthening) of the two existing social/cultural/academic professions. Besides, the identity of recognition science looks like that of analytical philosophy while so-called media semiotics is part of the general media culture, whose miscellaneous identity comprising the intellectual and technical aspects should be defined in terms of more complicated social, cultural and technical dimensions and has nothing to do with the original scientific-theoretical spirit. Actually a new science about media culture could be a multiply synthetic study based on a variety of disciplines and social/cultural programs. How could we include such an emerging experimental mode of synthetic analysis into a simply self-defined “discipline” – media semiotics? The so-called rapidly expanded development of media semiotics has only been a result of the above-mentioned practical combination of the two professional complexes. (By the way, the media is a title about social, cultural and ideological technique rather than learning.) The combinations of those separately existing fields and the semiotic profession can indeed enlarge each other’s synthetic influence/power at social, cultural and academic levels. But how can we name such social phenomena of combinations of several separate cultural/academic organizations as some scientific development? Being included into the semiotic realm, they also keep their separate energetic existence. In this case, when the original semiotic organization had been going down, the so-called participation is actually the collaborative contract between two sides. The phenomenon looks like the mutual enlargement of two organizations in order to increase each other’s power in competitive contexts. On the other hand, this utilitarian union of several groups can be declared as a mutual confirmation of each other’s scientific credits through propaganda. Such an apparently scientific development made by dint of tactics of mutual organizational expansion has recently happened during the deteriorating period of the humanities.

6. The essential contrast of life-attitudes between professional profits and the scientific truth; the basic confrontation between objective institutionalization and subjective freedom

Despite the criticism discussed above there seemingly still exists a subjective freedom in carrying out the practice of humanities where the individualist creations should be made. There are two kinds of operative individualism realized either prior to or after the global era of institutionalization. In the former the creative individualism is focused on the original creation of the content of various kinds; in the latter it is focused on the original creation of a more effective/utilizable and profitable modality for leading scholars to be feasible in the market competition. The former is concerned about the spiritual value of their thought itself while the latter about the suitable formality embodied in both the content and style of scholarship. Historically speaking, so-called creative individualism in the humanities, which indeed gets rid of the earlier various compulsory controls in ancient times, could have at the same time lost the objective/public criteria/reference for organizing valuable thoughts and theories in a true scientific way. The same individualism in natural/social sciences under the same social/academic conditions must operate with respect to the confirmable and examinable empirical world. Therefore with rational goals and scientific procedures, their works can be productive in a meaningful sense. Entering the era of institutional globalization, the theorists in the humanities that had already been disconnected from concerns with objective reality have to be directed towards the unique pragmatic scholarly goal: how to attain their own individualist success according to the objectively regulated professional framework. Therefore their individualist freedom for scholarly selection must be relevant to the criteria and rules set up within the objective powerful institutional contexts. In fact, he lives in a “historic” tension between the objective circumstantial determinist machinery and the profit-guided individualist selection that is eventually also determined by the former. In essence, today he has been changed to become a technicalized human being acting subconsciously according to the objectively regulated rules; as a calculating engineering operator he can only invent or create his jobs in his specially designed projects that must accord with multi- restrictive conditions; a liberal art thinker or theorist can only organize his individually finished thoughts under the more and more clearly regulated preconditions established by the trio-powers.

      Certainly, in modern democratic countries, no physically coercive measures would be imposed on the humanities scholars forcing them to do something, unlike what we can see under totalitarian regimes. The way of realizing the will of trio-powers is first of all by changing the subjective spontaneity of the scholars, making the latter carry out their selection according to a structurally reorganized mentality that is concerned much more with their own social/materialist-directed benefits than with the spiritual contentment of free creations as such. Simply, this is the fact we point out: “professional/materialist success” comes prior to, or simply replaces, “scientific/spiritual truth”. Then the essential objective determinism is covered by the subjective freedom. The first difference between ancient and modern philosophers lies in their mental structure or ethical spontaneity. Both ancient and modern intellectuals have to realize their works in reference to the objective conditions. But their differences could be indicated by different selection strategies of their practices under the same knowledge of their objective conditions/limitations. The former are satisfied with realizing, as much as possible, their subjective freedom in their individual creations; in essence their mind is directed towards their own inside aims that are decided by themselves. For the latter, however, their mind is mostly directed to the exterior goals that are guided/dominated by the objective restrictive conditions. Therefore in the past the subjective search for expressing the uniquely original self could be taken as a really self-contained success, despite it not necessarily being in accordance with the scientific direction. As a result, the originality itself expressed by creative talents can be accepted as the absolute spiritual value in intellectual communities in the traditional humanities. In contrast, the current scholarly individualism, under the contemporary systematic pressure of the trio-powers, has been gradually concerned only about the feasible way for profitably participating in the totally institutionalized academic games. Under the new circumstances, both notions of individualism as life-view and as operative originality have changed their traditional meanings. Consequently, so-called scholarly individualism today is reduced to an active individual effort for merely finding a productive stylistic originality that can bring about any competitive privilege within a pre-established operative framework with prefixed game-rules. In other words, these two terms (individualism and originality) are clearly implicative of the instrumental utility. The so-called individualism can be suitably grasped as a self-serving utilitarian spirit and the so-called originality as the purely competitive-technical uniqueness favorable for gaining exchange-value in the market. The latter is therefore one of the main reasons why the rhetoric/formalist novelties can turn out to be the independent value in intellectual/theoretical competition contexts. This pragmatic logic of scholarly praxis looks just like what we see in the current commodity market of fashion/industrial arts.

      In consequence, this formalized individual originality can function well in the institutionalized systems guided by the trio-powers that are tended to weaken or dispel the independent/critical-styled scientific rationality in the humanities. Such formalized originality comes to be recognized as theoretical individualism. In fact, theoretical discourse has only been taken as the operative instrument in the institutionalized systems through merely protruding its formalist aspects. Negative individualism can also easily turn out to be self-interested and self-serving within the totally commercialized academic communities that should follow the principle of competitive utilitarianism. The relationship among different colleagues, who are mentally commercialized by now, in the humanities tends to be similar to that among businessmen. For they all have to exist in mutually competitive relationships within their own respective “quasi-fronts for struggle”. If the humanities scholars, just like businessmen, take their own professional successes as the life-goal in their careers, they would be naturally enwrapped in competitive confrontations. In this case, sincere scholarly collaborations can hardly be organized within the academic framework. On the other hand, as we often stress, substantial scientific progress of the human sciences must depend on the establishment of a collective/collaborative consciousness. The latter is the very precondition for the interdisciplinary/cross-cultural-directed theoretical modernization of the humanities. If so, the cooperative ways of the businessmen, however, should not be the model of the collaborations between/among humanities colleagues; the former is based on the principle of searching for mutual profits and the latter on the principle of the collective interest in searching for common scientific aims. This commercialized style used in carrying out research in the present-day humanities becomes a more and more negative factor, damaging the interdisciplinary projects for the latter, and especially requires the overcoming of the self-serving individualism so as to be able to organize sincere scholarly collaborations in their scientific projects.

      It is also true that scientific progresses have been remarkably and widely attained in different dimensions of the humanities in recent centuries, despite the fact that these progresses have been mostly realized at technical levels. The fact means that there indeed exists the objective availability of the potential for promoting the scientific progresses of the theoretical humanities; the obstacle mainly remains on the subjective side. This hopeful fact is just the reasonable reason why we think we are in time for more effectively redesigning/reorganizing the historically great programs for transforming the traditional humanities to the modern human sciences. It is just these impressive achievements expressed in various levels/aspects in the area of the human sciences that also powerfully encourage us to self-confidently cherish such an ideal. The scientific achievements of the human sciences, including their theoretical parts, are just the foundations for organizing our next developing programs. Nevertheless, in terms of such an explanation, we should see the scientifically-directed achievements in different disciplines of the modern humanities only as the half-prepared products or half-finished raw materials, which should hence proceed through much more synthetic interdisciplinary operations in order to produce more complete products to be effectively used in dealing with investigations of social, human and historical knowledge. So scientific progress in single projects, temporarily finished largely on the basis of single disciplines, should not be taken as the complete or self-contained product that can be safely applied for other projects, just as we see in the natural sciences. Lacking in the absolutely confirmed scientific conditions, all our scientific projects in these areas can only be tentatively and experimentally attempted, but the truly applicable scientifically-directed principles should be applied at the relevant epistemological/methodological levels as well as in the rationalist mentality. Or, we should reform our scientific programs in the field from both the objective and subjective sides.

      From a practical operative angle, as we mentioned before, the concrete strategy/tactics of our task should be converged on the interdisciplinary orientation that can be more conveniently interpreted as an orientational transformation from the past vertical focus to the horizontal focus; or, from the specific-analytical deepening to the wide-synthetic combining in our academic world of compartmentalization. That is why we suggest launching these added horizontal/synthetic interdisciplinary efforts on the basis of the remarkable developments in different individual disciplines, full of a great number of successfully finished individual projects. Even if scholarly individualism is really productive in strengthening scholarship in single disciplines, it will not be productively eligible for being suitably applied in many actually requested scientific subjects that must request further interdisciplinary-operative processing. This principle is demanded by the true semiotic spirit functioning as the general scientific-operative strategy/tactics. That such a clear pragmatic logic has been for a long time neglected by scholarly communities has been, of course, mainly due to the objectively restrictive conditions. As a result, utility/profit-motivated scholars prefer to survive only on chosen single disciplinary-centric systems, with the main reason being that they have to calculate the cost of their intellectual investments during their professional careers that are full of competitive pressures, the only goals of which are directed towards professional profits rather than the scientific truth. The humanities theorists today have been systematically modulated into intellectual beings living for selfish interests, which is in contrast with their traditional counterparts’ view of life of searching for truth, despite the fact that the latter could only mostly be realized in a utopian way in the ancient pre-scientific times. However, what we signify here is not the result/effect but rather the consciousness/attitude; or, the ethical subjectivity.

      Now we may more deeply understand the reason why we need to functionally divide human history into history 1 and history 2. The two historical tracks/mechanisms must be in close multi-interaction with each other externally, but internally they keep each other’s separate operative autonomies with respective divergent origins/logics. The current situations of the theoretical humanities (belonging to history 2) have suffered from the strong influential and indirect dominative factors produced by trio-powers (coming from history 1), which have formed the basic objective obstacles for the modernizing progresses of theoretical humanities and theoretical semiotics. This consequence brings about multiple negative results, as we described above; it also leads us to further understand the high significance of the productive formations of the human sciences as well as the related modernization of semiotics 2 that is supposed as the central strategy/tactics for realizing the former.

7. The changeable interaction between history 1 and history 2 and the possible deformation of human nature in the approaching AI/Robotization era

As we said above, history 1 is essentially driven forward by the interpersonal-dominating power impulses and the so-called materialist-directed constructive processes in history 1 are embodied in different kinds of organizational operations such as the political, military, economic, legal, technical, commercial as well as the cultural and spiritual ones. Clearly, every kind of organizational process where the interpersonal-power/influence relationships are effectively established is the right context. Human beings as the agents playing roles in those organizational processes are naturally trained to form certain specific characters and intelligent wisdoms regarding power struggle/influence-exerting games. Among these, the ancient pan-Chinese Legalism (fajia) strategies/scheming techniques and the pan-western Machiavellian strategy/tactics remain the typical heritages of organizational-technical learning created in history 1 and these intellectual experiences have built up the specific type of personality specialized in the power-operative arts.^[10] Here we should distinguish between the pure cognitional knowledge belonging to history 2 and the technical knowledge belonging to history 1; the former is for the sake of rational understanding and the latter is for the sake of changing the world, although the materials of the two knowledge can also be applied by agents in the two zones for different aims. By contrast, the driving force of history 2 belongs to an oppositional type: the spiritual/intellectual creative impulses that are embodied in the spiritual/intellectual modes of knowledge that have developed through to the modern type of human sciences. But here we should stress that our dividing principle about historical lines is defined merely at the functional level; that means historical phenomena “appear” in a mingling way in both historical-operative zones, although the two lines with their driving forces operate automatically according to their respective functional-operative mechanisms. Therefore the typical products of history 2 could be applied/handled by the way guided in mechanism 1; and similarly, the typical products of history 1 could also be treated/used by the way guided in mechanism 2. For example, the natural, social and human sciences produced in history 2 can be used in history 1, making it serve its special goals; if the natural/social sciences can be directly used to directly serve its materialist-directed constructions, even the “useless” human sciences can be indirectly or distortively applied in history 1 to produce a favorable effect on its special projects as well. The events/experiences shaped in history 1 can become the subject matter of scholarly investigations in history 2. The above explanation can also be used to make clear the interactions between trio-powers and the humanities, as well as those between the professional humanities and the ideal human sciences in semiotics 2, because the former has already been penetrated and controlled by the social-commercial powers; that is to say, the original philosophical texts can be used today as the pure medium that is manipulated to carry out non-scholarly/mixed scholarly purposes; alternatively, the humanities can be taken as the pure instruments used to perform the professional processes that are partly determined by factors in history 1 that attempt to control the orientation and function of the humanities in history 2. In this case we may say that the remaining rational/scientific part of the humanities still belong to history 2 but their distorted part is either inscribed to (and positively or negatively used by) history 1 or reduced to the non-functional stuff.

      In terms of our above heuristic model, a simplified historical composition of mankind can be simplistically divided into four stages:

1. The biological/pre-historical stage, which contains the primitive level of organizational capability that makes mankind a little bit superior to the much lower organizational level of other animals. This survival privilege makes mankind maintain their effective existence and constant development at their life-level. During this period human history has not yet really begun, although we can describe it as a primitive type of society missing the historical dimension. The struggle for survival is made mainly by the competitive mechanism characterized with the physical and violent modes; these are the primitive modes of interpersonal struggles for power.^[11] This stage presents a pan-biological mode of human existence (Mode 1 of human existence: the non-historical period of the purely survival struggle).
2. The pre-ethical social-historical stage, which makes mankind attain a more and more advanced organizational level and more and more advanced skill/wisdom about interpersonal power struggles. All primitive theocratic regimes had already presented the historical track implicative of the purely physical/violent struggles and dominations through inventing the myth of some supernatural supports and creating a historical culture of describing the lineage/line of power-holders authorized by the invented supernatural forces. However, in this period, the primitive intellectual culture is still lacking in the ethical-spiritual elements. We can see the mode in the ancient histories of the Middle East and in Chinese pre-Zhou history (Mode 2 of human existence: the pre-ethical cultural period of power-domination).
3. The mixed cultural period containing the history of power-domination and the history of the ethical-spiritual creations. This period consists of two general parts. The first part consists completely of the historical content belonging to history 1, and the second part consists of the intellectual content belonging to history 2. If the first part implies all heritages from stages a) and b) together, the second part presents a new perspective that turns to exclude the involvement of all elements of the power struggles applied in both the pre-historical and historical stages. This is the unprecedented arrival of the high/ethical culture in human history. In Chinese history it is marked by the birth of the Confucian ethical-directed culture in history 2 (the emergence of the spiritual-cultural world) that co-existed with various elements involved in social/political struggles and power-dominations; in western history, we see the emergence of the Greek philosophical movements. Here we see other modes/grades of human existence: the mode of the materialist-constructive interpersonal domination and the mode of the spiritual/intellectual creation (Mode 3 of human existence: the double-track history).
4. The pan-organizational/institutionalized period of history. Owing to the unlimitedly predominating expansion of AI and robotization, together with the overgrowth of a lot of the new sciences and high technology, the relatively distributive proportion of momentums between history 1 and history 2 has been radically and essentially changed. The risk of the absolute domination of history 1 over history 2 has been continually increasing (Mode 4 of human existence: robotized society vs. spiritual humanism).

As the carriers of historical-cultural phenomena, the biological bodies of mankind have existed through all four historical periods described above. Faced with the up-coming powerful new complex of sciences/technology, the human nature that gradually formed during the past three historical periods will be altered or even extremely disorganized someday. This radically materialist-directed tendency would speed up along the track of history 1 if the creative energy/wisdom in history 2 remains as passive and powerless as what we see today. That is why we should pay closer attention to the modernizing problems of the humanities now and expect that the more effective advancement of the new human sciences could provide more effective balancing to the totally technically institutionalized civilization of history 1.

      The relationship/connection functioning at the physical level is separated from the function/teleology regarding the co-existing way of history 1 and history 2. Therefore the spiritual life of human being is functionally separate from its biological and physiological bases, although the former is based on the latter at the physical level. The physical co-existence of the materialist and the spiritual phenomena should be distinguished from the functional separation of the two phenomena. The interactive confrontation between organizational power and ethical conscience, which are two of the eventually reduced driving kernels in history, will become the central issue of human existence that needs to be more profoundly meditated upon.

      Facing the above-described historically significant problems determining the orientation of human civilization, one of the most dramatic inventions in our globalization era is AI/robotization. This revolutionary development implies a paradoxical double effect. In terms of our ethical humanist angle, this most radical technological revolution could essentially change humanity/humanism/human nature as such, making human beings into quasi-robot-like animals. It is clear that such a deeply mechanizing impact on humanity will completely control the life-space of mankind, tending to eradicate that part of the historically constant human nature that has been ethically and culturally formulated. (For mechanization/robotization will naturally replace the traditionally transmitted historical-cultural sediments that are the basis, origin and spiritual-creative source of the humanities.)

      Viewed from this angle, we would like to pay our attention to an unexpectedly fresh problem about the relationship of AI-scientific culture and traditional political/military strategies that can be reduced to instinctive impulses for interpersonal dominating power. Despite the successful arrival of democratic politics and the economic revolutions emerging since the dawn of modern history, the essence of international conflicts has remained unchanged: the struggle for domination over others through conflicts of powers of all kinds, including political, military, economic, technical and even religious types. That means even modernized good political systems cannot avoid being involved in primitive power struggles either at home or abroad; the processes of interpersonal power struggles are more and more transformed into more justified ways for domination and government. The latter has gradually presented a basic changed philosophy about interpersonal organization, government and cooperation, which had been habitually handled by traditional politics – the political/military/economic conflicts, full of the traditional aggressive/conquering intentions/methods, seem to be more and more reformed/refined through the technical level/modality that is especially promoted/guided by joint AI/robotization. From a idealist point of view, either notionally or practically, human history could even predict a promising horizon in that the age of political robotization would come with a double consequence: on the one hand, the permanent tragedy caused by the political culture characterized by cruel struggles in human history could be replaced by the non-personal operative processes of interpersonal management/organization, and on the other hand a perhaps permanent eradication of the involvement of the negative instinct of humanity for power-lust. In case the human instinctive impulse for dominating others is replaced, done away with, or just much-weakened through the positive reconstruction of AI/robotization, the agents and their projects in history 2 would be able to be more constructively developed as well.

      It is true that we should not neglect the approaching challenge. AI-science, genetic sciences, general robot technology, the dreamed space immigration and many other fields will be strongly capable of changing the essential identity and the rooted mental inclinations of human beings, together with radically changed life-manners, as long as the automatically radical growth of high technology, primarily guided by AI science, continues to be so widely applied and developed along the current materialist/technological/commercial track of history 1. Accordingly human beings will be more and more technically/commercially organized with respect to their mentality and behavior patterns, and human nature itself would be perhaps basically/essentially changed as well: the human would be losing its culturally/historically accumulated identity, and the instinctive nature of human beings would be thoroughly deviated and deformed at all aspects of their existence. During this kind of radically transforming evolution/revolution, the typical sciences of logic and nature, and even the empirical/applied social sciences, will not be able to deal with the advanced spiritual/theoretical problems of human sciences and therefore will be incapable of relevantly judging the issues concerning the advantages/disadvantages of the total consequences of this subversive revolution regarding the intellectual/spiritual dimensions of mankind.^[12] A more horrible change could happen in the identity/function of human nature as such(which is the physical/existing base of the historical essence of humanity). And the essential constitution and composition of the traditional humanities, including both their practical and theoretical parts, are rooted in the constant existence of the basic human nature that has been formed in the long course of cultural history. If this human nature, co-shaped historically, biologically and culturally, is destroyed or radically reformed by the robotizational culture, human beings will no longer be human beings; instead they will become a kind quasi-robot-type machine-animal. As a result the ethical part of history 2 will logically disappear and the spiritual/theoretical goal of human sciences will be totally suppressed or removed by the ever more radically materialized history 1.

      On the other hand, however, when AI, robot science and technology gradually start to largely replace the governing/organizing/leading roles that have historically been played exclusively by humans and by virtue of so many severely unhappy stories about power struggles in history, the decrease or recession of the humanist part involved could also largely weaken or even dispel the roles of the latter originating from historical periods over thousands/millions of years. We may hopefully anticipate that the positively-directed development of AI/robotization’s technical revolution could change the general ecology of history 1, using “machinery” to gradually replace most/all intellectual/physical labor operations and leading to the personal labor jobs extensively leaving this historical zone, including both the interpersonal organizations for power struggles and the forms of labor in physical production. The liberated personnel, including those wise “leaders” (power-holders) at various levels, can move into history 2 so as to transform their own life-interests to the intellectual/spiritual creations. When the order-maintaining/power-searching jobs and technical tasks have been significantly replaced or systematically undertaken by the AI-machinery network, the majority of people could also decrease their technological-labor involvement and increase their intellectual contributions. The technicalized being would become an intelligent being of various kinds.

      The contemporary materialist/high-scientific/technological/commercialized civilization has indeed brought about unprecedented advanced knowledge about nature and society as well as highly comfortable social-materialist conditions. Accordingly society, culture and even human nature must have been radically and basically changed as well. In this basically changed historical era the humanities or human sciences, despite their apparently useless nature, are confronted with two major types of historical challenges/pressures. A traditional one is related to the requested strengthening/revival of the scientific potential of human sciences in comparison with natural/social sciences; a rightly emerging novel one is about the desire to advance the meaningful/axiological analytical capability of the genuine sciences concerning human existence and history in confrontation with the high-technical revolutions of the so-called e-civilization guided by AI technology.^[13]

      On the other hand, nevertheless, in confronting the emergent crisis, the traditional type of the current humanities is also unable to effectively deal with and overcome this historical-cultural crisis of the approaching super-technologicalized era. This historically unparalleled existence/challenge to mankind is forcing us to further emphasize the absolute necessity of the advancement and elaboration of the scientific level of the human sciences; the genuine scientific/rationally-directed knowledge about the causal, intelligible and axiological connections concerning the essence of humanity and rational humanism is therefore extremely needed today.

8. The challenge of the new technical-predominant era to humanism/human sciences and the historical tension between the power-organizing motivation in history 1 and humanist ethical subjectivity in history 2

In confrontation with the serious present-day challenge concerning the future of human civilization and the fact that the majority of people, including most scholars in the professional humanities, are automatically enwrapped into the same tendency, the only available remedy for the human sciences to cope with this historical challenge seemingly lies in the remaining traditional-spiritual origin: to refresh the ethical spontaneity within the human science practices. Considering this critical challenge of the era, the modernizing projects of human sciences should readjust their strategy/tactics as a precaution against the absolute restrictions and controls of the materialist/technological/commercial powers imposed at the epistemological/methodological level of the humanities. The present-day scholarly style in the field is easily observed in the phenomena: a distorted self-confidence, and a manipulated superficial individualist arrogance that is specially trained and intentionally encouraged in the pedagogic/academic institutional systems. It is the second kind of individualism mentioned above that leads humanities scholars to be fixed on the same belief and habitude when their life-view/goal has been thoroughly pragmatically materialized, yet instead of maintaining an attitude towards any objective/scientific truth in their practices, their mind is directed to utility/success that is universally authorized and encouraged by the objective multi-historical powers. In their mentality, humanities scholars already no longer believe in objective/scientific truth in their own scholarly practices, in which they are rather comfortable just to follow the logic/orders issued from another objective/scientific truth guided by the materialist powers. This ironical phenomenon of self-contradictory attitudes/life-views can be interpreted as a dramatically sad consequence of the materialist-directed historical development. The liberal artistic intellectuals belonging to history 2, who have given up their own rational/scientific beliefs, have preferably adopted other rational/scientific principles of history 1 on which they are parasitic for a mere comfortable survival.

      The necessity of the scientific modernization of the humanities is invisibly disclosed by an ironical double challenge of the rationalist age that is firstly reflected by the indirect pressure imposed by the scientific rationalism of natural/technical/social sciences, guided by the instrumental-rationalist machinery of hard- and soft-powers, and secondly directly by the weakening or pseudo-scientific deformation of the theoretical humanities today. Regarding the rationally-directed confrontation between history 1 and history 2, the former must, as a result, succeed in forcing the latter to submit to the same materialist and rationally-directed logic. In a deeper sense we may reasonably suppose that either the self-weakening tendency of the rationality or the self-strengthening of the irrationality of the theoretical humanities might disclose, either automatically or sub-consciously, a functionally collaborative tendency to trio-powers.

      Usually we have seen frequently expressed complaints by the humanities scholars about their ever deteriorating social/cultural/economic conditions but few of them (almost none) pay serious attention to or self-critically recognize the status quo of the de-rationalist tendency of the humanities as such. (This is just due to their enfeebling or losing their ethical subjectivity.) The ever-lowering social/academic conditions of the humanities are first of all caused by their own constantly decreased scientific/theoretical level and gradually lowered eligibility in dealing with significant scholarships about humanist-ethical knowledge, cultural history and social reality. As a result, the humanities, under the cover of the term “liberal arts”, remain disorderly composed and less effectively applicable. Besides the traditional innate difficulties of the humanities as such, the more basic reason why the humanities can hardly become scientifically productive in our high scientific times just rests in the subjective state of the humanities scholars, and the latter has been ironically determined by scientific/technical objectivity. Can we imagine: essentially, it could be the natural-scientific power of natural sciences that becomes the obstructive force against the human sciences’ development, even if indirectly, because all modern materialist, technological and commercializing developments have been the consequences of natural sciences. Whereas there are different types of “sciences”, just like there should be different types of rationality, this is just the extreme necessity for making the traditional humanities turn into the modern human sciences. On the other hand, however, such an unfavorable tendency to the scientific/rationalist development of the humanities has been made true by virtue of the ethical subjectivity of the scholarly agents. According to the judgment of this author, the utmost origin of this phenomenon should be reduced to the subjective state of scholars that is almost totally under the sway of materialist/technical-directed objectivity.

      Since the outset of this century the above-mentioned issue has been getting more serious, and even irreversible, because of the much higher technological times that are coming: namely, the AI-robotization era. Following the ever-increasing pressure of the new tech age, the subjectivity of humanities scholars has been further weakened and the related extreme development is expressed in a thorough neglect of the fact. That is why humanities scholars tend to refuse any self-critical attitude towards their real situations. The same utilitarian individualism, however, can strengthen such kinds of excessive self-confidence in themselves, cherishing a materialized/commercialized consciousness that is naturally more and more tuned to textual autonomy and less and less to any objective/realist relevance; the tendency looks like what we see in fictional/entertainment-directed arts/literature. As this de-scientific/irrational aptitude is further strengthened, the phenomenon will ironically indicate an inclination to be coherent with the logic of the materialist power mechanisms. If the traditional type of trio-powers can carry out its materialist will by means of indirectly deforming/deviating the mental inclination/subjective attitude of humanities scholars, the gradually emerging new stage pushed forward by the much more advanced AI science/technology could directly change the identity/constitution of human nature itself, whose constitutive kernel is ethical spontaneity. Facing such a critical situation under the sway of the trio-powers and the approaching vision of the extreme materialist civilization brought about by AI science in future and other new higher science/technology, the present-day humanities have no intellectual/theoretical strength for protecting their own meaningful existence. More serious consequences could happen; for instance, humanity or human nature as such could even systematically and structurally lose their innate identity. A purist materialist-oriented civilization guided by the trio-powers and concomitant AI-products, including a naive human dream for immigrating to outer space, could be equivalent to having disorganized and even destroyed traditional human nature/humanism as such, which has been continuously established and developed in the long course of human history, as we pointed out in the last section. Meanwhile, the extreme materialist tendency created and maintained by the trio-powers and higher science/technology has weakened and even deformed the cultural-historical dimensions through comprehensively technologicalizing the mindsets of mankind. In terms of this unprecedented development, we humanities theorists now have a stronger reason to strengthen the efforts for the scientific modernization of the humanities.

      At this critical moment, we should pay more serious attention to and reconsider the critical problems concerning the concept of “human nature” and its historical/cultural/intellectual productions that have been totally realized during the long history of mankind. Current civilization is totally based on the evolutionary cultural history of over ten thousand years. Its driving force is definitely based on the naturally formed human nature, and the orientation/composition of the resultant civilization has been shaped by the humanist spirit rooted in the same human nature. In this sense, so-called humanism also implies an essential aspect that human beings are defined by the cultural consequences of thousands of years’ of human history. Essential elements implicative in human nature such as instinctive/intelligent desires for meaning, value, belief and epistemic curiosity have been accumulatively cultivated/matured during the long historical process. It is human history that made the human animal eventually turn out to be advanced human beings, whose existential identity is historically defined by unchanged human nature, which refers to the above instinctive elements rather than to the resultant behavioral tendency/habitude.^[14] So humanity and its life processes are basically created by the free driving-will of human beings implicative in human nature. When the theoretical humanities have mostly succumbed to the will of the extreme materialist-technical powers, the intellectuals in the humanities and high culture (popular culture belongs to history 1) will be naturally weakened or lose a central part of their innate human nature, including especially the ethical spontaneity that has been the very central driving force for normally performing all kinds of intellectual/high-cultural creations. At such an extremely challenging moment of the post-industrial/high-technological age any efforts towards the preservation or elaboration of the free-spiritual will of humanity should insist on two preconditions: the humanist-rationalist attitude towards knowing all kinds of human affairs (humanist reality) and the same humanist-rationalist ethical subjectivity. It is just these two preconditions that have been systematically threatened and undermined today. Furthermore, the complex of the trio-powers and the ever more actively energetic productions of AI culture tend to lessen or destroy these two humanist/rationally-directed preconditions.

      Notwithstanding the apparently critical challenge to human civilization, a dialectic way of human-rationalist reconsideration would perhaps lead to the arrival of a happy new Enlightenment if we are able to persist in a thoroughly rationalist way of thinking about this historical predicament. As we pointed out above, if the mechanism of history 2 could be strong enough to provide an effective axiological/cultural balancing of orientation with the extremely materialist/technicalized powers of history 1, human history could be more preferably developed along a more desirable line. And this effective self-defensive effort could perhaps further lead the latter to finish a positive creative transformation of its authority holding powers to a better readjusted culture of quasi-robotization in all organizational/administrative realms, which would someday hopefully lead to the weakening or disappearance of interpersonal power relationships from history 1! That means, humanity can eventually make the complex of machineries undertake the technical aspects of the jobs about maintaining social orders and interpersonal justices. By the way, this part of the discussion looks indeed like a fantasia, but the point of our article is focused on presenting a productive heuristic model concerning the reasonable foresight that is used here only as an alternative possibility to support the reasonability of our rational justification of and anticipation for the modernized human sciences.

      The meaningful active reaction of humanity towards the “AI threat” should not be interpreted as any kind of emotional or vain resistance either. At this especially critical moment we should more profoundly and more rationally reconsider all related factors/problems concerning this unavoidable and preferably favorable fortune of mankind. This romantic-style imagination is justified by a realistic motive in human history: to exclude the possible evil power-holders from historical processes; namely moving, at least partly, the power-holding authority to the “hand” of the non-human machinery in order to decrease or radicalize a rooted-up passion for power in human nature. The idea of strengthening the rational/scientific-directed development of the theoretical humanities attempts to readjust the constitution/orientation of history 1 so as to create a more reasonable and happier mode of the entire human life. Our consideration about the dramatic emergence of AI science/technology operating in history 1 is intended above all to look to redefine our objects/problems/tasks as such: to find out the way to attain a new desirable balance of the multi-tensions involved in the currently radically changing human history.

      The above wishful anticipation could nevertheless function as a hermeneutic model that can help us attain a radical change of the notions of political history and historical philosophy as well: how should we judge/evaluate this most crucial human nature – the lust for power or the lust to dominate others in history? In this regard, we have to exclude the implicit admiration for any power-philosophy in history. Human nature consists of two extreme sides: the lust for seizing interpersonal power and the passion of ethical conscience for spiritual creations. And regarding this human nature spectrum, no doubt, the former has originated in the animal dimension of the human being (Mode 1) and the latter has originated in the humanist dimension of the advanced human being (Mode 3). The lust for power, which has been indicated by a variety of modes of conquering/enslaving others in history which have been stupidly affirmed/praised by a multitude of thinkers in cultural history, is in fact a tragic mixture of the humanist and biological existences. The traditional type of “heroism” characterized by its conquering/dominating power will hopefully be suppressed (rather than further encouraged) by the robotization age.The essence of human existence is reflected in the increasingly rational/spiritual/intellectual creations rather than in mere physical survival or so-called permanent survival.

9. The theoretical-semiotic orientation and the profession-institutionalized circumstances– from a practical point of view

In essence, it is the innate weakness/deficiency of the rationalist attitude of humanities scholars/thinkers that has partly caused the continuously increased degree of domination of the trio-powers over high culture and humanist academia. If the agents of the humanities or human sciences are lacking in persistent scientifically-directed interest and rationally/empirically-directed applicability, their knowledge cannot become a kind of effective intellectual force to independently develop itself. As a matter of fact, in our post-industrial age, the requested rational/empirical/scientific orientation of human sciences is extremely necessary for studies about history, literature, philosophy, the arts and religions, just as the same rationalist orientation has been universally requested by those more empirically-positive disciplines in social sciences, such as politics, law and economics. We should note that, regarding these practical sciences about human life/society, no irrational/supernatural words are allowed to play a role and therefore applied social sciences have developed successfully along a high quasi-scientific line and become more and more applicable/usable. Moreover, the natural sciences have completely excluded/expelled any irrational/supernatural elements from their own domains, although they ironically allow or even encourage the humanities to be irrational in character/orientation. No doubt, the identity of the present-day human sciences should not continue being mixed or reduced to that of the ancient humanities, full of irrational, supernatural, emotional, and mythical elements. That is why the new human sciences should not allow any philosophical antiquarianism/romanticism in their theoretical foundations, although they must be their objects. Even the ancient humanities consisted of both scientifically-directed and literary-directed elements, and the philosophical and scientific parts were closely overlapped then. In ancient times the humanities mainly referred to those tentatively imaginative/literary-styled ways of thinking when rational/scientific knowledge of the humanities remained quite primitive in their intelligible level; since the outset of modern scientific times, however, the categorical typology of the humanities, following the general model of modern natural sciences, has accordingly evolved towards the rational/scientific orientation as well, including their philosophical branch. The remarkable scientifically-directed development of the modern theoretical humanities has been especially performed through the formation of modern disciplinary compartmentalization and the disciplinary-specific deepening of their knowledge. In other words, as we pointed out above, the modern theoretical humanities developed over the past two hundred years have presented an all-round vertically-directed deepening effort within various multi-compartmentalized disciplines. Precisely in terms of the innate law of scientific development, it is now time that their subsequent continuous development should be organized/spread out at the level of totally horizontally-directed communication. The rise of contemporary interdisciplinary-semiotic movement was mainly stimulated by the related strategic redesign to overcome these epistemological, methodological and sociological restrictions formed during the last two hundred years of disciplinary-centric/specific progress. More exactly, the developing strategy/tactics of the theoretical humanities today should be evenly carried out along the two coordinative operative orientations: the one is realized in disciplinary-centric (vertically-directed) specification/analysis and the other is realized in interdisciplinary-directed theoretical dialogue/synthesis. The latter is just the task of semiotics 2 (in terms of our GS-model). Clearly, this statement accords with the above-mentioned notional division between the semi-products and the more completed products of the excellent works in history.

      Now let us here outline the central semiotic debates again. The current international semiotic activities consist of the two remarkably different parts that are tentatively named by this author as semiotics 1 and semiotics 2. Semiotics 1 (departmental semiotic studies) applies its scientific rationality productively in its various empirical/positive-directed projects. From a stronger perspective it contains a great number of successfully attained scientific researches centered on different disciplines plus the added interdisciplinary operations; from a less strong perspective, as a professionally defined discipline it reasonably includes many miscellaneous backgrounds of its participants who apply a lot of conceptions and methods that are very flexibly connected with the polysemous term “sign”. The epistemologically miscellaneous use of the semiotic methods/approaches have proved to be professionally workable because the term “sign” can play a role of the symbolic mark to combine, collect, and unify a variety of scholarly projects within a professional collective. Its actively positive significance is expressed in its professionally operative productivity when faced with the present objectively competitive situations. Nevertheless, we should here distinguish between the normal scientific-developmental widening and the professionally-manipulative expansion. By affirming the scholarly achievements of semiotics 1 we deny an assertion that the latter is a proof of the existence/development of a semiotic-scientific system that is logically supported by a general semiotic-theoretical foundation or some “general semiotics”. On the contrary, any so-called general semiotics would improperly interfere in the naturally formed manners of departmental semiotics. The necessity of the above-mentioned distinction can be exemplified again by the recent semiotic phenomena mentioned above: the expansion of the big semiotic family realized through including some other academic/cultural collectives such as media studies and cognitive science. The recent enlargement of the semiotic profession because of the participation of these two new branches can only be regarded as an artificially-made organizational enlargement through combining several separately existing social/cultural/academic complexes. Regarding the profitable success of combining the two academic-intellectual complexes, is it a scientifically-developing success or a mere professionally-operative success? Moreover, is there any distinction between the two that can be recognized by pragmatically-minded scholars?

      In contrast with those productive semiotic studies done at the applied level, since 1994 this author has insisted in saying that the so-called “general semiotics” has been a misleading concept, primarily because the related theorists presuppose those applied semiotic studies should/could be provided with a general, fundamental theoretical system or a semiotic philosophy that would arrange all semiotic studies into a unified scientific system. Such an unfounded theorizing is based on several misunderstanding factors, as follows: a) a wrong idea about the unifying potential of the term “sign”; b) an essentially anti-semiotic idea of accepting the theoretical privilege of the traditional discipline of philosophy; c) a superficially-minded inclination to be allured by the current academic-competitive utilitarianism that leads to a changed scholarly attitude towards professional profits; and d) a consequent tactical consciousness in building-up an international organization for shaping a novel theoretical brand applied in globally competitive academia. In terms of this utilitarian purpose, the members have indeed anticipated the formation of such a general unifying theoretical model. Therefore, going back to the professional reality, the title “semiotics” has been more and more popularized as one of the most accessible international platforms that provides international partners with an honorable publicity favorable to their professional careers that has seemingly acquired a firm general theoretical foundation. As a result, the originally requested scientifically modernized function of semiotics as an interdisciplinary-theoretical exploration has been gradually forgotten about or almost disappeared. For the sake of building up such a general semiotic theory, we have seen many opportunistically-styled theoretical attempts that have been made through easily making the semiotic profession affiliated with some famous philosophical/quasi-scientific schools. Being satisfied with the operative feasibility in the professional-expansive strategy, which keeps few logical ties with original semiotics, the general semiotic theorists prove to be unable to tackle the genuine theoretical-semiotic problematics. In addition, such pragmatically-directed professional expansionism has further made theoretical semiotics disconnected with the more fundamental tasks linked to the modernization of the humanities.

      That is why we are firstly faced with this easily confusing problem about how to properly use generic terms in our scientific practices. With no better choice in our vocabulary available, we attempt to temporarily apply “semiotics 2” to replace the popular term “general semiotics” in order to keep the relevant association with the original theoretical implication represented by the term “semiotics/semiology”. Now let us pay attention to the theoretical-revolutionary aspect of the function of semiotics 2 (or GS strategy). The occurrence of the contemporary semiotic movement implicitly also originated from a spirit/will for resistance/revolt/defense in confrontation of the epistemological bias, sociological pressures, and the organizational manipulation exerted/imposed by all conservative academic establishments. Since the unprecedented high development of the trio- power systems after WWII, semiotic players, just like many other scholars in the theoretical humanities, have gradually changed their traditional inclination so as to give in to these external pressures through a collective self-blinding attitude disguised in a fake consciousness of independence/freedom performed in the campus autonomy that is also eventually governed/guided by those external dominating powers. One of the consequences of this self-succumbing attitude is exhibited by the fact that they recognize and accept the values, criteria, rules and institutionalized channels regulated by their academic system and professional framework. No longer being the theoretical critics honestly facing the prevalent commercially distorted trends of the fixedly compartmentalized humanities, the semiotic activities have also started to follow the same line especially through systematically giving up the strict rational/scientific principles and goals set up by the original semiotic thinkers. As a consequence, on the one hand this collective inclination has weakened semiotics agents’ scientific/rationalist impulse/energy, and on the other it enfeebles the theoretical sensibility and encouragement of semiotic scholars for the sake of undertaking epistemological adventures when faced with the intellectual/existing determinist machinery of the trio-power systems. Guided by the currently deformed epistemology/methodology in the theoretical semiotic profession, the accumulated scientific achievements of the original semiotic practices can still be used as useful material/means for pursuing the current fixed utilitarian-tended programs other than just as epistemologically-directed inspiration/guidance. Or, the famous works could just be used as the mere useful instruments for searching for any utilitarian aims with the semiotic mark/brand rather than being the true theoretical bases for seriously advancing further efforts along the genuine semiotic/interdisciplinary-theoretical line.

      The utilitarian-driven scholarly practices still have a supporting background from our pedagogic systems. This essentially asemiotic-spirit orientation in the professional theoretical-semiotic practices has been collectively accepted and has exerted its influence on all related domains and levels. Even the so-called interdisciplinary-theoretical humanities/semiotics could not help but be deformed under the present-day pedagogic institutions that work in the divided disciplinary-centric educational networks. Living in an academia consisting of hundreds/thousands of disciplines/specialties, the concentrative way of disciplinary specific training (or the PhD programs) based on one or a few disciplinary domains can hardly allow interdisciplinary-theoretical knowledge to be acquired merely from the PhD program, which is based on single-disciplinary-centric, narrow and specific methodological procedures; scholars educated in this pedagogic way of specific scientific training are mostly incapable of carrying out sufficient scientific communications or dialogues with colleagues from a great number of other neighboring disciplines/specific programs at a higher, synthetic scientific-theoretical level. While the single-vertical-lined disciplinary-centric promotion systems could produce misleading or confusing impressions, any full professor in one discipline has naturally gained a scholarly eligibility for participating in interdisciplinary studies/dialogues of any kind as long as his position in the academic hierarchy is advanced to the required high level, or his teaching career has lasted for the required length of teaching. The systematic inconsistence of the one-dimensional academic-bureaucratic hierarchy and the pluralist-intellectual requirements of interdisciplinary communication have been universally neglected because of the universally followed Unitarian life-view in the humanities. That means, the over-confidence of a full professor in his dealing with different disciplinary-based knowledge is not related to his true mastering of the required knowledge of other related disciplines/specialties; instead, his self-confidence in his own scientific capability is in fact firmly linked to his bureaucratic position/title gained through his successfully going through the fixed procedure in the academic hierarchy. In result, as a rule, a full professor trained only in one or a limited few disciplines/specialties can be taken as officially/universally eligible in tackling interdisciplinary-directed projects only on the basis of the knowledge obtained by him in his early, sufficiently deep single-disciplinary-specific training. Thus let us imagine such a scene: when so many full professors who have trained and specialized in respective divergent disciplines get together and talk/argue about the common issues relating to their knowledge of several different disciplines, how could we expect a scientifically meaningful consequence to be effectively produced from the fact that they indeed perform the dialogic behaviors in certain locations? (The point lies in that the character of the liberal arts is able to guarantee the constant feasibility of the practices because of the general lack of true scientifically unified standards for effective checking.) Once again, scientific eligibility is replaced by professional-hierarchical eligibility! This is one of the most serious reasons why the theoretical humanities can hardly be genuinely advanced in a true scientific term.

      As a matter of fact, the really proper ways to solve the difficulty concerning such collaborative interdisciplinary dialogue/studies should be created either by additional emphasis on many more complementary studies by the participants about knowledge of other related disciplines in advance or by organizing serious collaborative relationships through a genuinely semiotic collaborative strategy. Nevertheless, it is difficult for either way to be accepted because of the existing academic institutional restrictions in our professionally regulated system. The involved topic is especially related to the series of questionings about the critical reexamination of the values and limitations of the current disciplinary-centric training in PhD programs and how to promote genuinely effective interdisciplinary collaboration in the theoretical humanities. But the involved problems are too complicated to be discussed here.

      That means, reasonable doubt would not only be due to the mechanically-fixed academic institutions that are dominated by the authoritative academic bureaucracy! Such ambiguously formed interdisciplinary-scholarly gatherings cannot be regarded as the true scientific development of the interdisciplinary scholarship that is especially requested by theoretical semiotics or by the horizontally-directed synthesis of the humanities. The latter first of all requests the multidisciplinary-directed educational preparations for each “semiotician” who is hardly able to do so-called interdisciplinary studies if he is only basing them on his narrowly acquired disciplinary-centric knowledge. In addition, a more basic problem is how to overcome utilitarian-individualism in order to solve the former two problems. If a scholar devotes his research to meet his own professional aims, he will never be able or will never have an intention to solve the above problems. By the way, let me mention a popular example as a secondary support to my reasoning raised above. Why do so many theoretical semioticians, namely those engaged in inventing the general semiotics, choose to follow certain philosophical/scientific trends as their main theoretical foundations when the choices are so obviously contrary to the interdisciplinary-principle of semiotics 2? Calculating their costs spent in their self-educational investment, the scholars dare not spend too much time for enriching their own theoretical knowledge outside their own fields with respect to such sharply competitive academic circumstances. So they prefer to collectively choose a much cheaper or easily accessible way to deal with the problems about the preparation of theoretical knowledge. The result is also due to the fact that philosophy in the academic hierarchy still keeps its old profile of theoretical privilege that can bring about added credit to scholars’ own works. In short, being weakened or lacking in ethical spontaneity, most of them are not courageous enough to independently organize really original/adventurous theoretical explorations out of a risk of confronting the powerful institutionalized academic bureaucracy. Therefore, once again, the ethical spontaneity of the scholar remains to be the very driving force for inquiring into truly scientifically-directed intellectual/theoretical creations. The practical combination between scholarly specialization and pedagogic institutionalization has certainly led to the result of standardizing scholarly criteria and rigidifying the educational procedures influencing the shaping of the mindset of professional scholars. Institutionally-trained knowledge and profitably-oriented mental inclinations are therefore combined to bring about the current tendency of the theoretical humanities, including the part of theoretical semiotics. In other words, the institutionalized ways of pedagogic training in the theoretical humanities tend naturally to lead the students/scholars to weaken/narrow their own range of their intellectual horizon and to enfeeble their independent ethical conscience concerning their scientific-explorative adventures.

10. Conclusion

Considering the powerful objective determinative circumstances, humanities scholars can hardly be expected to still follow traditional ethical idealism in their life-faith to tackle the reformative tasks of human sciences today. What we can reasonably raise at present is only their correct cognition of their true situations rather than vainly suggesting some constructive proposal. The true reason for this passive decision is of course rooted in the established utilitarian mindset of most humanities scholars who have resolved to follow the academic orientation decided by trio-powers to attain their professional profits. Still, theoretically speaking, we have to present our objective diagnosis concerned. As the author frequently expresses in his Chinese writings, if we are still unable to present a real design for the treatment, we are still able at least to present a diagnosis immediately. Confronted with the total predominance of the exclusive economic-centric policy principle in the times of globalization (it is curious to note that everybody is critical and worried about problems of environmental protections but nobody likes to trace them back to their origin: the exclusive priority of the economic growth of the world), and further with the global revolutionary change to the age of de-humanist robotization in near future, we humanist scholars/thinkers should adopt, at least, a double view of life: in addition to unavoidably following the established professional channels, scholarly individuals should pay serious attention to the problems of mankind concerning the desirable development of the new human sciences. Being unable to do something radically changing we can still realize a spiritual way of life in our mind independently; namely, despite the fact that the actual doing/finishing of a project of history 2 depends on the interactive/tensional situations of history 1 and history 2, the actual thinking/understanding of a project of history 2 depends only on the subjective-ethical will rooted in subjectivity. This is sophisticatedly dialectic life-strategic wisdom that has been successfully performed over thousands of years resulting in the spiritual modes of millions of intellectual creations being transmitted continuously, waiting for their favorable interaction with unexpected emerging elements in history. If there is no way to the correct treatment at the moment, the correct diagnosis is always possible so long as the ethical subjectivity subsists. The decision of diagnosis prior to treatment also implies an implicit epistemological stimulant that presses the subject to be immediately faced with the critical tension where he can actively exist without possibly self-deceptively shunning his true existential duty. That means, this critical diagnosis can press the honestly conscious subject to experience the tensional pressure by dint of leading him to clearly know the mechanics of social powers and the epistemological mistakes that dominate the distorted direction of the theoretical humanities; such an apparently passive reaction can indeed play a really productive theoretical role that is freely/independently done within history 2. That is why our first important task at the moment is to fight against the post-modernist/nihilist philosophy whose first aim lies in destroying ethical subjectivity.

      This is also the explanation why we could be so deeply involved in learning Husserl’s egoist subjectivity, which has been undermined/misled even by some irrationally-directed phenomenological experts today. No doubt, the current intellectually deteriorating tendency of international semiotics is only part of the tendency of the current theoretical humanities in general. This article has attempted to point out that the unprecedented significance of the genuine semiotic sciences can only be directed towards a great mission for modernizing the theoretical humanities, while the latter can only be realized through adopting a horizontal/interdisciplinary theoretical-synthetic collaboration/communication in order to get rid of the traditional philosophy-centric dogmatism, even including Husserl’s philosophical fundamentalism, which is also a misleading factor that obstructs the epistemological modernization of the theoretical humanities. So the profound significance of Husserlian philosophy, in our new theoretical context, does not lie in strengthening the traditional type of philosophy as a dominant discipline but in outlining the blueprint for a new discipline about ethical subjectivity. This interpretation of mine about the significance of Husserlian theory is connected with my judgment that a pure ethics should be epistemologically separated from disciplines/fields of philosophy, law, politics and religion (the related analyses are mostly given in my Chinese writings). The more advanced studies along this line will belong to the new theoretical human sciences in the future. However, its currently affirmable justification could be quite properly asserted in terms of the correct theoretical semiotic perspective. Therefore we have to grasp the epistemological/methodologically revolutionary enlightenment of the semiotic 2 way of thinking, which has been unfortunately misunderstood by many self-claimed philosophical-centralist semioticians. On the other hand, philosophy still remains the most important theoretical source in the theoretical human sciences but it must join the current interdisciplinary-theoretical interaction to reorganize/redistribute its own theoretical structures that have accumulated for the past three thousand years. In this sense, strengthened interdisciplinary-directed interaction and collaboration between philosophy and theoretical semiotics would be beneficiary to both sides (this was the original idea of mine for designing the scientific-programmatic direction of the Nanjing 11^th IASS Congress in 2012).