Language, Time-Consciousness and Image-Making in the Human Mind

Abstract

This paper aims to demonstrate that the “monosemic” approach to the study of meaning (where each linguistic sign – word or grammatical form – is considered, in principle, to have a single underlying meaning) provides a unique understanding of time-consciousness and image-making in the human mind. Taking the actual signs of language as organic properties of mind in their own right yields a set of conceptual properties that are mirrored in striking detail in the universal structure of man’s myths, in the composition of rock and tribal art worldwide, and ultimately in the activity of the human mind operating under conditions of sensory deprivation – in reports of those having experienced hallucinations and altered states of consciousness. From this evidence it is concluded that the signs of language must be operating in tandem with a set of cognitive processes that exist at a supra-rational level of consciousness, beyond our normal awareness. And the rational constructs of consciousness, the ones that produce the sense of different meanings we associate with a given word in a given situation, therefore, need to be understood as the products of a self-referring process of contextualization of a sign’s underlying meaning, already present in consciousness as a potentiality – as a member of a set of primordial, transcendent, archetypal possibility forms that are integral to the conceptualization of time and image-making at the most profound level of consciousness.

Keywords:

• linguistic sign theory
• time-consciousness
• image-making
• primitive art
• transpersonal psychology

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Charles Laughlin for his careful reading and thoughtful critique of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rodney B. Sangster

Rodney B. Sangster, PhD, is a former professor of Slavic linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington, and former director of European programs at the University of California’s system-wide Education Abroad Program. He received his doctorate in linguistics from Indiana University in 1970 and subsequently pursued post-doctoral research in Russia. He is the author of two books on structuralism as a cognitive science: Roman Jakobson and Beyond (Mouton, 1982) and Reinventing Structuralism: What Sign Relations Reveal about Consciousness (DeGruyter, 2013).