Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to set out the basic coordinates of a cybersemiotic philology of Buddhist knowledge forms in order to further develop the non-anthropocentric dimensions and process-philosophical potential of both Buddhism and Peircean semiotics. This is also meant to lay the foundations for an interculturally and philologically enriched cybersemiotics. Proceeding from the logical conception of philosophical categories and their philological explication, the transdisciplinary model of a semiotic philology of thought forms develops an intercultural explication of “thought forms” with regard to the three interdependent pillars of philosophy, philology and cultural studies. In a first step, the reconstruction of paradigmatic modes of knowledge representation will be exemplified with regard to the approaches of Aristotelian philosophy, various positions of premodern Indian Buddhism as well as the paradigms of modern science and postclassical physics. In the second step of a cybersemiotic interpretation, Peirce’s synechistic understanding of habit will serve us to enlarge the culture-specific notion of life forms as pragmatically grounded thought forms by making it converge with the ethologically informed, biosemiotic notion of “life forms” embraced by cybersemiotics. Exploring cybersemiotics as developed by Brier from the perspective of Indian Buddhist philosophy intends to work out the phenomenological purport of Peirce’s approach, with its move of locating agency in the process of semiosis, by comparing it to the Buddhist psycho-ontological view of agency expressed in the fundamental principle of “dependent arising”. In view of such synergies, we can bring the cybersemiotic interest in the unfolding of knowledge “from our bio-psycho-socio-linguistic conscious being” to bear upon the Buddhist notion of “no self”. Thus, Kant’s transcendental subject, whose unity of apperception was dynamised by Peirce’s semiotic transformation of the categories, can now “go intercultural” by further desubstantialising signification in terms of a Buddhist cybersemiotics. Such a deconstruction of the supposed stability of “objects” and “concepts” as exemplified by the substance-philosophical belief in an ontological priority of “objects” will be accomplished in view of 1. the Buddhist explanation of unitary, stable objects existing “in name only” with regard to “apperception” and the famous criticism of “conceptual construction” by the epistemologist Dignāga and 2. the cybersemiotic view of “objects and concepts as cognitive invariants” inspired by von Foerster’s second-order cybernetics and the creation of self-organised Umwelten.