Systems of univocal signs participate in the production of ideas only to a small degree. As an outgrowth of signals, initial signs are univocal. Feathers are definitely not from fish or mammals; blood stains are from wounds; four-legged animals leave different marks than biped humans. Polysemy (more than one meaning assignable to the sign) is a gradual acquisition and reflects the principle of retroaction of meaning on the carrier: words, drawings, sounds, etc. A drawing of an animal points to what is depicted, or to things associated with the animal: the softness of fur, savage behavior, meat, etc.
Philosophy and literature (and the arts, in general) became possible only at a certain level of language development brought about by the practical experience of society confronted with new tasks related to its survival and further evolution. The philosopher, for example, resorts to common speech (verbal language) but uses it in an uncommon way: metasemically, metaphorically, metaphysically. Ancient philosophy, important here for its testimony regarding language and literacy, is still so metaphoric that it can be read as literature, and actually was enjoyed as such. Modern philosophy (post-Heidegger) shows how relations (which it points out and dwells upon) have absorbed the related. As a formalized argumentation, freed of restrictions characteristic of literacy, but also so much less expressive than the philosophy of the written word and the endless interpretations it makes possible, philosophy generates its own motivations and justifications. Its practical consequences, within a pragmatics based on different forms of semiotic functioning than those of literacy, diminish constantly.
The distance between the verbal and the significance of the idea is itself a parameter of the evolution from nature to culture. Words such as space, time, matter, motion, become possible only after experience in writing. But once written, there is nothing left of the direct, probably intuitive, human experience of space and time, of experience with matter in its various concrete forms, or of the experience of motion (of the human body or other bodies, some flying, some swimming, running, falling). Visual representations-other forms of writing-are closer to what they report about: the Cartesian coordinates for space, the clock for a cyclical perception of time, etc. They express particular instances of relations in space or time, or particular aspects of matter or motion.
The word is arbitrary in relation to the idea it embodies. The idea itself, getting its life in instances of activity, is knowledge practically revealed in the order of nature or thought. In expressing the idea, rational rigor and expressiveness collide. Synthesizing ideas is an instance of the self-constitution of the human being. Ideas express the implicit will of the human being to externalize them (what Marcuse called "the imperative quality" of thought). Once written, words not only defy the ephemerality of the sounds of speech, but also enter the realm of potentially conflicting interpretations. These interpretations result from the conversion of the way we use words in different pragmatic contexts.
To be literate means to be in control of language, but it also means acceptance and awareness of being hostage to the experiences of the past in which its rules were shaped. When spelling, for instance, is disassociated from the origin of the word, a totally arbitrary new realm of language is established, one in which transitory conventions replace permanency (or the illusion of permanency), and the appearance of super-temporality of ideas is questioned. Each idea is the result of choices in a certain paradigm of existence. Its concrete determination, i.e., realization as meaning, comes through its insertion in a pragmatic context. When the context changes, the idea might be confirmed, contradicted (it becomes equivocal), or open to many interpretations (it becomes ambiguous). To give an example, the idea of democracy went through all these stages from its early embodiment in Greek society to its liberal application, and even self-negation, in the civilization of illiteracy. It means one thing- the power of people-but in different contexts, depending on how people was defined and how power was exercised. It means so many things in its new contexts that some people really wonder if it actually means anything at all anymore.
Literacy made communication of ideas possible within a scale of humankind well served by linear relations and in search of proportional growth. But when ideas come to expression in a faster rhythm, and turn in shorter cycles from the univocal to the ambiguous stage, the medium of literacy no longer does justice either to their practical function or to the dynamics of an individual's continuous self-constitution. Moreover, it seems that ideas themselves, as forms of human projection, are less necessary under the new projection of pragmatic circumstances we examine. What once seemed almost as the human's highest contribution impacts today's society less and less. We live in a world dominated by methods and products, within which previous ideas have, so it seems, cultural significance, at most. Knowledge is reduced to information; understanding is only operational. Artificial languages, which keep multiplying, are more and more geared towards methods and products. In the interconnected world of digitally disseminated information, we do not need Esperanto, but rather languages that unify the increasing variety of machines and programs we use in our new experiences on the World Wide Web. Efficiency in this world refers to transactions which do not necessarily involve human beings. Independent agents, active in business transactions of what emerges as the Netconomy, act towards maximizing outcome. Such agents are endowed with rules of reproduction, movement, fair trade, and can even be culturally identified. Even so, the Netconomy is more a promise than a reality. The functioning of such agents allows us to see how the metaphor of language functioning reverts to its literal meaning in the civilization of illiteracy.
Making thoughts visible
At a minimum, the object for which the written sign-the word, sentence, or text-stands is the sign of speech. But writing came a relatively long way before reaching this condition. In prelinguistic forms, graphic representation had its object in reality-the re-presentation of the absent. What is present need not be represented. The direction impressed on visual representation is from past to present. What must be retained is the originating tendency of distancing in respect to the present and the direct, what I called the alienation of immediacy. Initial representations, part of a rather primitive repertory, have only an expressive function. They retain information about the absent that is not seen (or heard, felt, smelled) for future relationships between human beings and their environment. The image belongs to nature. That which is communicated is the way of seeing or perceiving it, not what is actually seen. The execution of the written sign is not its realization as information, as is the case with pictographic representations, some leading to the making of things (tools, artifacts). What matters is not how something is written, but what it means. A relatively small number of signs-the alphabet, punctuation and diacritical marks-participate in the infinite competence of writing.
No matter how we conceive of human thought, its stabilization comes about with that of writing. The present captured in writing loses its impact of immediate action. No written word has ever reached the surface without being uttered and heard, that is, without being sensed. The possibility of meaning (intended, assigned) stems from the establishment of language within human praxis. It is not accidental (cf. Leroi-Gourhan) that spatial establishment (in village-type settlements) and the establishment of language in writing (also spatial in nature) are synchronous. But here a third component, the language of drawings, no matter how primitive, helping in the making of things related to shelter and to work, needs to be acknowledged, too.
This is the broader context leading to the great moment of Greek philosophy in the temporal context of alphabetization, and the cultural context of all kinds of forms of craftsmanship, architecture probably in the lead. Socrates, as the philosopher of thinking and discovering truth through dialogue, defended oral culture. Or at least that is what Plato wanted us to believe when he mentioned Socrates' opposition to writing. The great artisans of Socrates' time shared this attitude. For building temples, conceiving tools, creating all kinds of useful objects, writing is not a prerequisite. Heuristics and maieutics, as methods of questioning human choices, those of craftsmen included, and generating new options, are essentially oral. They presuppose the philosopher's, or the architect's, physical presence. Not too much has changed since, if we consider how the disciplines of design and engineering are taught and exercised. But a lot is changing, as design and engineering practical activities rely more and more on digital processing. Computational practical experiences, as well as genetic engineering or memetics, are no longer in continuation of those founded on literacy.