Orientarsi e agire nel mondo. Il senso come grandezza vettoriale

This paper aims at drafting a conception of sense in dynamic, and not content related or formal, terms: it is therefore alternative to both the objectual paradigm (Plato, Frege) and the structural paradigm (structuralism). Sense produces an orientation in our field of existence, turning the environment, which we live in, into a world. It can therefore be conceived as a “vector”, a magnitude defined by an intension (what is understood), an orientation (a particular disposition), a direction, and an applicative element (an object and/or a practical effect). From a historiographical point of view, we can find some elements for such a conception of sense in philosophical hermeneutics, which produces a re-definition of the Husserlian concept of intentionality in more clearly energetic and pragmatic (i.e. in dynamic and temporal, and not only static or spatial) terms. It presupposes, on the one hand, the criticism of the Cartesian concept of the world as mere extension (as a geometric magnitude), and, on the other hand, the renewal of the Leibnizian conception of the substantial forms or forces, which introduce a dynamic dimension into the world. It is Heidegger’s theoretical innovation to introduce these “forms” into the conception of sense and consequently into the conception of the world, the world thus becoming a semantic and not a mathematical space. The world is the habitat of Dasein: the verb habitare is chosen by Heidegger to indicate existence, the factually being-in-the-world, but it also refers (through other derivatives of habeo, as habitus, which means a modality of behaviour induced by a disposition, a certain orientation in respect to the world) to practical aspects. Dasein draws his world through signs, which are means to orientate oneself, to indicate a direction. Through the sign dynamis enters into reality, since the orientative indication of the sign involves an anticipation of something, which is not yet and therefore is still only a possibility: thus meaning is the consequent, of which the sign is the antecedent. This structure of the semantic relation can be expressed in inferential terms and is iconically symbolized by the arrow: “A → B” (“if A, then B”, or, as in the Stoic logic, “A means B”). In this way, sense opens the geometric spatiality of the world to time, because only the beings, which understand the antecedent and the consequent, the sign and its meaning, or which, generally speaking, have signs, have also an understanding of time, and only so, can they make projects and anticipate the future, i.e. orientate their life. To have a world is to be able to move oneself in it and to produce directrixes of sense: this tropism marks the difference between the stone (completely unable to move and to orientate itself, i.e. without world), the animal (able of a minimal tropism, i.e. poor on world), and the human being (able to orientate himself on the basis of intentional signs, i.e. maker of world). This way of understanding sense (as vector orientating human behaviour in the world) and the semantic space (as a vector field) constitutes eventually a way of stressing its physical and not metaphysical dimension: it does not concern only the intellectual (formal and mathematical) but also the practical (existential) dimension of human life. Sense is a dynamic phenomenon, which intrinsically refers to movement.