Abstract By means of Peirce’s categorial method, this paper explores the selfhood identified in sign activity from two dimensions of semiotic agency: the practical and the theoretical. The paper considers the intelligibility of aesthetic value co-existing with Thirdness and the ethical implications of narrativity in selfhood. Peirce’s phenomenological category of Firstness, as a poetics of possibility, interplays with Secondness, of actuality, in the experience of the sense of other and the self in narrative. Then Thirdness mediates the sense of other with the sense of the self, seeking generality of feeling. As a vital matter in the conduct of moral life, the survival value of not solely enhancing survival which characterizes aesthetic behavior in the human animal, the role of sentiment in morality, and the poetics of the will with its moral capacity in narrative semiosis, are investigated in the paper. Thus, a pragmatic inquiry into the self, along with a developmental approach, will illustrate three phases of the self: aesthetic behavior in the biosemiotic self; value-driven dynamics in the agentive self; and ethical implications in the narrative self. The analysis will take the Korean science fiction film, Jung-E , as a case study to illustrate the two dimensions of semiotic agency.
Yunhee Lee (Thu,) studied this question.