“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” Nietzsche – Truth and Lie in the Extra-moral sense
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I wouldn’t divide the space up into picturing and pointing: I think this division is itself a symptom. Both options organize knowing around an immediate subject-object confrontation and then quarrel over the details. But I think the real fault-line is between approaches that bottom-out in a self-certifying Given and those that bottom-out in a discursivity that remains answerable in the space of reasons. On that division, I’d say that picturing and pointing as you’ve described them both fall on the same side of the line.
I think “self-certifying” is too strong, but it’s a good point. Would an approach that bottoms out within the space of reasons, in contrast, need to make a case beyond a coherentist one? – that is, do we need a warrant for believing that our judgments are about more than what the space of reasons permits us to coherently and consistently say?
To be honest, this picture looks to me like the description of a post-structuralist who divides the whole world into his own supporters and everyone else. 
For me, philosophy is neither the first nor the second. I would define philosophy as a spiritual way of life within a certain, mostly Western, tradition.
Is OP pointing or picturing?
Good question 
Derrida made a fuzz about the differences between saying and writing. I’m guessing that the differences between picturing and pointing are discussed here under a similar assumption, i.e. that these differences matter.
They certainly do in some contexts, e.g. you can’t picture 10 dimensions, so you point at graphs and equations.
I don’t think it has to, but there are real costs if it doesn’t. If answerability within the space of reasons bottoms out in coherence among our claims, we’re left with a system of belief spinning free of the world.
The obvious rejoinder is that the picture holds one captive, the pointing shows the way out.
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Exactly. Do you have a favorite approach to providing that connection with the world?
I think you are missing the dialogical structure of this pointing. Call and response is fundamental here, not secondary.
The pointed-at is at least dimly there for me, and I hope that my pointing will receive a counter-pointing that further develops the object. Pointing as “possibility” is not pointing at what is securely given but rather at what suggests itself as concealing as temporal depth.
I almost added that to the end of the OP myself.
I expect that there is no “true state of affairs here.” The signs are there, inscriptions hanging in the marketplace. Do I personally approach signs as picturings or pointing ? Is the meaning in the inscription ? Or between me and the inscriber in our shared world ?
I take you (?) to understand signs to somehow transmit an “internal meaning stuff” between “enclosed minds.”
The term “significance” was an attempt to circumvent dualist assumptions about communication. The term “lifeworld” was an attempt to circumvent the “experience” of the theoretical gaze. For instance, Kant’s notion of experience is directly at Newtonion physics. For many, experience is primarily an epistemological entity.
I’ve razzed you intermittently for griping about the signs “from” one framework from “within” another. "Don’t those silly children know that the signs in my framework suffice ? "
An anti-philosophical cynic could shrug off all philosophy as indulgent poetry. Who needs it ? It doesn’t pay the rent. I refer again to Gellman’s Words and Things as a book that cured me anyway of my OLP pretensions.
I take the joke in a friendly spirit, but there’s a tension in the performance of the transcendence of dialogue within dialogue.
I presume that “spiritual way of life” is essentially other than trading signs here, for instance. And of course I too have a life, even a “spiritual” life, beyond the signs we trade here. But I frankly include dialogue as part of that “spiritual life,” so that my participation here is coherent with the signs I trade.
I mention Bakhtin so often because he is realistic, in the informal sense, about the desire that drives conversation. In my terms, though, I’d suggest this tentative list.
(1) I want to share in a high sociality with others — to share in a view of the world from a high place.
(2) I want to demonstrate my superiority to others. Some participants in the dialogue are only interesting to me as foils. I humiliate them for actual or ideal others, who are my genuine peers.
Probably all dialogue is a blend of both. This (2) takes many forms.
(A) My picture can be far more accurate, for instance, so that “objective reality” is the god who ultimately validates me indirectly through the validation of those who mostly share my superior picture.
(B) My “pomo poetry” can be more “sophisticated.” This is often understood in terms of a flight from naivety. Nietzsche’s “inversion” of Platonism is a nice example. Any shred of belief in anything that smells like “objective reality” is a tainting of our poet of anarchy and difference.
(C) The assertion of the “ineffable” ( beyond what signs can say, what thought can think ) is harder to classify, because we find it in both “reactionary” mystics and “revolutionary” sophisticates. Adorno is not always fair on Heidegger, but he’s right that there is “a jargon of authenticity.”
I think actual people and actual conversation are too complex for this framing to do more than point at this or that moment of dialogue. Eric Berne is an influence here, his “transactional analysis.” His analysis, like any analysis, is subject to degeneration into one more totalizing jargon. Of course.
If we think of belief as primarily visceral and enacted, then the world is quite ready to teach us the “error” of our ways. Joey eats some old noodles in the fridge and spends the night vomiting. Joey is less eager to just stuff old noodles in his maw after that. In other words, his comportment toward food in the fridge is adjusted. He needs to enact new distinctions.
We’ve had some great discussions on truth. I’ve tried to point at the “visceral feedback” of the world “against our comportment.” I can understand the temptation to say that the “truth” is what makes error error, but I continue to look toward frustration and satisfaction are more important here. As we explain ourselves to other humans, words like “true” are useful and sharing certain tribe-preserving beliefs is necessary. One can understand these claims now as aiming at “truth,” but I continue to find “belief” a rich enough concept for this.
Am I “essentially” trying to picture ? Or is this “picturing” plausible interpretable in terms of interacting with another organism toward a more or less determinate goal ? I do think we want to “share in the world” in some elusive sense, so the “picture” metaphor is not absurd. But for me it’s better to talk of standing on a high place together, not sharing a picture but the world itself from a POV. Experience is already reality, but that experience becomes “more real” in an elusive sense through being shared.
I like to think of each member of the space of reasons to be something like an idiolect of the “communal subject.” This is how novelty can be injected into the-taken-for-granted. If I start “experiencing” and using signs differently, then that novel “abuse” of the old signs can catch on. Today’s innovation is tomorrow’s tired prejudice.
I agree that my message sounded too aggressive, and I apologize. I’ll try to clarify the context.
In my view, any division according to a “main criterion” is too generalizing and directive. To divide thinking into one that seeks description and one that proceeds from the fact that any description is essentially unclosed already pushes the discussion toward a certain conclusion.
Though, of course, this is characteristic of any philosophy. Every philosophy, at its limit, finds one new distinction and divides the world into before and after, treating that distinction as decisive.
But one can propose divisions according to different criteria. I suggested the division into the “spiritual” partly as a caricature of myself, not as a claim of superiority over anyone. Such a division is certainly biased.
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I appreciate your kind clarification ! I hoped that my response would demonstrate that I was not completely “immersed” the signs I present as a kind of “seed.”
Yes indeed. And this structure is almost inescapable if we limit ourselves to a “snapshot.” It’s like Zeno’s arrow. It flies indeed, but only if we reject a thinking of motion as a series of frozen states.
The challenge, from one POV, is weaving a text that betrays itself constantly toward a continual parabasis. This would be an attempt to “say infinity” through the finite.
Right. But that’s understandable. As I see it, subjectivity simply is bias. I wrote the OP basically to explore one way of framing among others. What I primarily had in mind was the difference between indirect realism and “nondual” “pure” realism —and how this affected one’s approach toward signs. Given my own current understanding of signs, I can only expect to be misunderstood. For being heard as one hears oneself is the goal rather than where one starts.
Yes, but it would be unfair to reduce philosophy only to the work of signs, or to reduce the whole problem specifically to signs. One can take any other point of departure — for example, the criterion of “spirituality” — and examine whether spirit develops within a given system, how it develops, or whether it is suppressed.
This also points toward Derrida’s critique of binary oppositions, where in every opposition one element is usually privileged over the other. This is close to what I meant when I wrote that every act of naming is already an act of power: it does not merely designate something, but directs, selects, and limits the field of what is possible.
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Just to be clear, I don’t want to reduce it to signs. I am obviously fascinated by signs at the moment, but signs only have any significance for creatures of flesh-and-blood, who mostly cannot squeeze what they would like to squeeze into signs. One of my themes might be the futility of the sign. The sign as “mere sound-image” is just a perceptual object in the world. I don’t “stuff” the sign with “what it is like for me.” But I might try to do so as a poet, via an “objective correlative.” But all of this depends on a deeper sense of the “ear” of other who is finally an entire world.
Yes, I completely agree with you on that. When I first participated on forums, I was mostly thinking in terms of Nietzsche and Freud and others. I was thinking of the projection of power and authority through discourses which conceal their motive under plays at something “higher.” So my roots are a deep cynicism with respect to fine phrases. Every jargon is a knotty club in the hands of a caveman.
I also connect what you say to what I say about the subject. The subject is a charging prejudicial comportment, whether it wants to be or not. The “vision” of the subject directs, selects, and limits the field of what is possible and in just this sense is also a blindness. To emphasize this is to neglect that, and so on.
Wittgenstein wrote that “the only impossibility is logical impossibility.” But logic is personal. If we get beyond the tacit theology of god’s essences and grasp signs as just objects in the world, then we are freed from “logic” as some kind of atemporal divine constraint. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” My “final vocabulary” is final for me now but not for others and hopefully not for me later. But I don’t currently think ( can’t make sense of ) a subject that escapes subjectivity itself, prejudicial comportment itself. The object shines from the future in terms of the blind expectation of the appropriating-chasing subject. But this is far from the last word on the topic.
For me, the key question is not whether the sign is closed or open-ended — the answer to that seems obvious — but what exactly stands behind this openness. Is it emptiness, or an opening toward infinite transcendence?
For example, Heidegger’s Being/Nothing and Derrida’s différance are similar only in form, but in meaning they are almost opposites. Although Derrida writes that différance is not closed, in practice this seems to me to be mostly a formal gesture, a protection against criticism. He is not looking for an opening into transcendence, but rather closes everything within the concept itself.
In late Heidegger, by contrast, there were clear attempts to find a breakthrough toward the transcendent — through Ereignis, through the worldly and the sacred, through sky and earth.
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