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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN PSYCHOLOGY
PSYCHOLOGY AND CULTURAL DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE

Robert E. Innis

Between
Philosophy
and Cultural
Psychology
SpringerBriefs in Psychology

Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science

Series Editors
Giuseppina Marsico, University of Salerno; Centre for Cultural Psychology,
Aalborg University, Salerno, Salerno, Italy
Jaan Valsiner, Centre for Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg,
Denmark
SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science is an extension
and topical completion to IPBS: Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science
Journal (Springer, chief editor: Jaan Vasiner) expanding some relevant topics in the
form of single (or multiple) authored book. The Series will have a clearly defined
international and interdisciplinary focus hosting works on the interconnection
between Cultural Psychology and other Developmental Sciences (biology,
sociology, anthropology, etc). The Series aims at integrating knowledge from
many fields in a synthesis of general science of Cultural Psychology as a new
science of the human being.
The Series will include books that offer a perspective on the current state of
developmental science, addressing contemporary enactments and reflecting on
theoretical and empirical directions and providing, also, constructive insights into
future pathways.
Featuring compact volumes of 100 to 115 pages, each Brief in the Series is meant
to provide a clear, visible, and multi-sided recognition of the theoretical efforts of
scholars around the world.
Both solicited and unsolicited proposals are considered for publication in this
series. All proposals will be subject to peer review by external referees.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/subseries/15388

Robert E. Innis

Between Philosophy
and Cultural Psychology

123
Robert E. Innis
University of Massachusetts Lowell
Lowell, MA, USA

ISSN 2192-8363 ISSN 2192-8371 (electronic)

SpringerBriefs in Psychology
ISSN 2626-6741 ISSN 2626-675X (electronic)
SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science
ISBN 978-3-030-58189-3 ISBN 978-3-030-58190-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58190-9
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Series Preface

Deep Humanity Returns

Anybody who has encountered Bob Innis—in person or through his writings—has
experienced the deep humanism that covers all of his philosophically sophisticated
discussions of ideas. Whether he brings to our attention the work of classic kind
(e.g., that of Karl Bühler or Susanne Langer) or expands his philosophical
Weltanschauung to new efforts in interdisciplinary scholarship—all this is
accomplished with deep concern for the triumph of the humanistic existential
feeling, even in the contexts of sufferings and uncertainties of living.
The present monograph is an excellent example of such explication of humanity
in the developing field of cultural psychology. As psychology attempts to preserve
its image as science, it has become—over the last century—mechanistic and
overlooking of basic human life issues. Cultural psychology emerged in the 1990s
as an effort to not reduce the socially embedded selves to the neural networks of the
brain or the seemingly solid reduction to genes. In this effort, it has rediscovered the
pragmatist philosophical traditions of John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and
William James, not to speak of the existential philosophical traditions of the
twentieth century. In this book, Innis weaves an intricate carpet of ideas that link
our present day cultural psychology with the contemporary semiotic presentations
of the human ways of living. From his deeply humanistic perspective, Innis brings
back to psychology—through his contribution to cultural psychology—the cen-
trality of philosophical feeling-through of complex issues of human existence. This
has been of inspiration for some young scholars in the field of cultural psychology.
This is the case of the commentaries that nicely complement Innis’ monograph and
that are the extraordinary results of the fertilizing work that Bob has been doing
over decades in different places in the world.
There is no linearity in human existence—we are all involved in a dynamic
spiraling matrix of feeling as Innis shows, after Susanne Langer. The roots of the
idea go further back (Innis, 1982)—Karl Bühler’s organon-model of communication
guarantees that always reconstructed spiral (maybe better seen in third dimension—
helical) process of understanding through necessary non-understanding is involved

v
vi Series Preface

in the communication process. The use of the Cannon-Weaver model of communi-

cation—that fits perfectly in the case of technical communications—does not fit in the
case of any social, aesthetic, or psychological case where innovation is the name of the
game. Our human placeways are filled with constant innovation—ranging from
minimal altering of our immediate living environments to the solving of scientific
problems that have been unsuccessfully attempted over centuries. We are the bene-
factors of the bottomless lake of consciousness (the expression by Charles Sanders
Peirce that Innis creatively builds upon in this book). Cultural psychology is like a
boat in which we paddle along that lake—fearful to take a dive to explore the horizon
of its bottomless nature. Innis’ philosophical emphasis in this book encourages us to
try. This is an important message that—if taken as a guideline—could keep cultural
psychology from vanishing into the history of psychology as yet one more effort to
understand the human psyche that, like others, has failed.
The innovation that cultural psychology has brought into scientific discourse is
that of affectivation—creating the feelings-full context to our actions and meanings
(Cornejo, Marsico, and Valsiner, 2018). That concept helps us to maintain the
primacy of affect over cognition in human meaning-making. The role of Susanne
Langer—a recurrent intellectual interlocutor for Innis over decades (Innis, 2009)—
is the crucial connection point between philosophy and cultural psychology. The
affectivating feature of signs unites speech and music with imageful art and
imageless thought—thus making it possible to develop psychology as a science of
human ways of subjectivity in society (Valsiner, Marsico, Chaudhary, Sato, and
Dazzani, 2016). The playful complexity of the human psyche becomes the target of
serious human science that treats the subjective realities with respect. Innis’ final
point in the book is worth re-emphasizing here:
It is this dynamic multiform milieu in all its breadth and depth and its spiraling and
ramifying differentiations of felt meanings and their material embodiments that is the focal
concern that joins philosophy and cultural psychology together. In this sense, affectivation
—in all its conceptual dimensions—describes not just a research topic of cultural psy-
chology and philosophy but their existential goal (p. LAST).

Lowell, MA, USA Aalborg-Salerno

July 2020 Jaan Valsiner
Giuseppina Marsico

References

Cornejo, C., Marsico, G., and Valsiner, J. (Eds) (2018). I activate you to affect me. Vol 2. In
Annals of Cultural Psychology series. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers.
Innis, R. E. (1982). Karl Bühler: Semiotic Foundations of Language Theory. New York: Springer
Innis, R. E. (2009). Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Valsiner, J., Marsico, G., Chaudhary, N., Sato, T., and Dazzani, V. (Eds.) (2016). Psychology as
the science of human being. Cham: Springer.
Preface

I have previously discussed both the background and foreground themes of this book
in long and short formats (Innis 1982, 1994, 2002, 2009, 2012a, b, 2014, 2016a, c, d).
They, among others, bear witness to winding and intersecting paths of reflections
on human meaning-making. The present small book in the SpringerBriefs for-
mat, practicing a kind of method of rotation, takes them up, reconfigures, integrates,
refocuses, and at times expands them in light of topics addressed in seminars and
workshops during the 5 years, 2015–2019, of my appointment as Obel Foundation
Visiting Professor at the Niels Bohr Center for Cultural Psychology at Aalborg
University. The book is not a survey of various possible philosophical dimensions
of cultural psychology. It keeps its focus resolutely on the links between a specific
set of fundamental analytical resources for the framing of issues bearing on how we
are to understand ourselves as encultured organisms operating at multiple levels of
meaning-making at the thresholds of sense. I am indebted to Jaan Valsiner for
many years of stimulating discussions and work on common projects. I have found
in him as a person a true and generous philosophical friend and in his work a
wealth of insight. I wish also to thank Giuseppina Marsico for her intellectual
enthusiasm and collegial support for a book that straddles the non-secured fences
between philosophy, semiotics, and cultural psychology. I want to acknowledge the
intellectual generosity of my colleagues in Norway, Brazil, and Italy, Line Joranger,
Marina Assis Pinheiro, and Raffaele de Luca Picione, for their stimulating com-
mentaries that extend and frame in novel ways the themes of this book.

Lowell, MA, USA Robert E. Innis

vii
Contents

1 Introduction: Linking Philosophy and Cultural Psychology . . . . . . . 1

2 Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts, Situations,
and Backgrounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Situations and Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Scope and Relevance of Scharfstein’s Schematization of Contexts . . . . . 18
On Selective Interests and the Expanding Spheres of Context . . . . . . . . 21
On the Betweenness of Atmospheres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Between Force and Meaning: Turning to the Semiotic Dimension . . . . . 28
3 Semiotic Framing of Thresholds of Sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 31
Turning to Semiotics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 31
Peirce’s Semiotic Triads and the Bottomless Lake of Consciousness ... 33
Language, Abstraction, and Diacrisis: Bühler’s Analytical
Exemplifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 39
Sense Functions and the Vortices of Consciousness: The Case
for Cassirer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 44
Between Signs and Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 46
Transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... 48
4 Feeling, Abstraction, Symbolization: Langer’s Aesthetic Model
of Minding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Interpretive Disciplines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Abstraction: Generalizing and Presentational . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
The Art Image as Image of Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Contours of Experiencing: Some Analytical Lessons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
A Normative Pointer: Aesthetic Rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
5 Affectivation: Life-Giving Signs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
On the Notion of Affectivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
On Interruption, Resistances, and Reflection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

ix
x Contents

Semiotic Embodiment and Affectivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

Existential Dimensions of Symbolic Affectivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Conclusion: The Continuum of Affectivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

Extensions and Continuations: On Power and the Limits

of Logocentrism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Body, Affectivity and Language: The Affective Semiosis
of the Emergence of the New . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
The Double Faces of Each Semiotic Process. The Multiple
Dynamics of the Mind Between Form and Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
About the Author

Robert E. Innis is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of

Massachusetts Lowell, USA, where he had been named University Professor.
During the period 2015–2019, he was Obel Foundation Visiting Professor at the
Niels Bohr Center for Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has
been Fulbright Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, visiting
professor in the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu and in the
Department of Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. He
has also been Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the University of Cologne. He has
published many articles, monographs, and books on the intersections between
philosophy, semiotics, and the human sciences. His books include Karl Bühler:
Semiotic Foundations of Language Theory, Consciousness and the Play of Signs,
Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense, and Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic
Mind.

xi
Chapter 1
Introduction: Linking Philosophy
and Cultural Psychology

Abstract Cultural psychology has multiple points of intersection with central

themes and issues of philosophy, especially a philosophy informed by a broad-based
semiotics. The shared problems of philosophy and of cultural psychology are our
problems, vitally important issues embedded in what John Dewey called the ‘prob-
lematic situations’ that are the defining matrices for the conduct of life. This chapter
foregrounds the links and themes taken up in the following chapters: (a) human beings
as multileveled embodied agents and sign-users; (b) the relations between descrip-
tive analyses and normative reflection; and (c) the diverse analytical resources, taken
from different traditions, that philosophy can put at cultural psychology’s disposal in
determining the thresholds and frames of meaning-making and self-formation that
make up the cultural world and their effects upon the felt qualities of our lives.

Keywords Thresholds of sense · Embodiment · Normative and descriptive

analysis · Frames of meaning-making · Self-formation · Philosophical semiotics ·
Felt qualities of life · Philosophy and cultural psychology

Cultural psychology has multiple points of intersection with central themes and issues
of philosophy, especially a philosophy that is not self-absorbed with problems purely
of its own making or over which it claims exclusive rights even if they clearly need
multiple analytical approaches. The shared problems of philosophy and of cultural
psychology should be, and are, our problems, vitally important issues embedded
in what John Dewey called ‘problematic situations’ that bear upon what for the
pragmatist tradition are the defining matrices for the conduct of life. These situations
are not just to be described and explained. They are, as Dewey wrote, to be subjected
to criticism:
… criticism of the influential beliefs that underlie culture; a criticism which traces the beliefs
to their generating conditions as far as may be, which tracks them to their results, which
considers the mutual compatibility of the elements of the total structure of beliefs. Such
an examination terminates, whether intended or not, in a projection of them into a new
perspective which leads to new surveys of possibilities. (1931b, 215).

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license 1
to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
R. E. Innis, Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology,
SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58190-9_1
2 1 Introduction: Linking Philosophy and Cultural Psychology

Like such a pragmatist philosophy and other traditions that look outward over the
broad landscape of life, cultural psychology is concerned with the manifold ways of
knowing, acting, and feeling that mark the intentional bonds and webs of transactions
between us and what we call ‘the world.’ It recognizes a plurality of exemplifications
of affectively charged forms of apprehension and patterns of meaningful action,
especially in their social contexts and conditions. It further recognizes, in line with
a broadly conceived semiotic turn in philosophy, that the defining feature of human
beings is rooted (a) in differentiated processes of the production and interpretation of
signs, a range of meaning-making powers unmatched in nature that unfolds at both
the upper and lower thresholds of what Michael Polanyi (1969) called sense-giving
and sense-reading, (b) in the systematic production and use of tools, instruments,
and objects to modify the environment and the producers themselves and which
materially embody existential stances, values, and ends-in-view, and (c) in the affect-
laden patterns of actions embedded in habits and institutions and other cultural orders.
As language animals, to use Charles Taylor’s term (Taylor 2016). we can admit that
the key exemplar and condition of possibility of this semiotic, materially productive,
and affective-behavioral power is language, a characteristic already noted by Greek
philosophy’s genial description of humans as those animals that ‘divide their voice,’
turning it into speech.
Systematic tool use—and its extension into the technological sphere—is parasitic
on human semiosis, as are the properly human ‘sentiments.’ Cultural psychology, and
a philosophically informed semiotics, sees this semiotic power as dividing the whole
sensory continuum and the domains of human meaningful action at their significant
joints and recombining them into stable forms that embody meanings that cannot
also be captured in discourse. Such are the meanings presented or embodied in the
pregnant symbolic configurations of art, myth, religion, and sacramental acts and
rituals. A philosophical semiotics and cultural psychology, while clearly discursive
disciplines, are not, indeed cannot be, logocentric. Following Cassirer (1944), we
can say that the language animal is also essentially in the broadest sense animal
symbolicum.
That human beings are not just sign-users and sign-interpreters, but also material
agents that engage the material world and transform it for use, highlights the need
to attend to artifacts, including institutions, of all sorts that satisfy their needs on
many levels, adding a ‘second nature’ to the ‘first nature’ out of which they have
emerged. This second nature, the human cultural world, is what we can call an
exosomatic body, infused with meaning and indwelt by us. We are assimilated to
it, and it is assimilated to us, the way the blind person’s stick or the dentist’s drill
is fused with their users. Our assimilation into, or fusion with, a linguistic ‘idiom’
is isomorphic with the fusion of body and tool, or system of tools, in skillful or
pragmatic action. We are subject to their various ‘logics’ even as we are enabled by
them by reason of their potencies. The circuit of perception and action out of which we
construct our worlds of meaning is an open-ended, but not materially or semiotically
unconstrained, spiral. Such a circuit of perception and action is sketched in Dewey’s
indispensable 1896 article on the reflex arc. This article, as I will point out, has
high and permanent heuristic import for sketching essential components of the lower
1 Introduction: Linking Philosophy and Cultural Psychology 3

threshold of signification that cultural psychology seeks in a general psychology

that has relevance for its tasks, as Jaan Valsiner has strongly emphasized. Indeed,
Dewey’s article, which Gordon Allport found of profound importance, anticipates
in substantial ways Jakób von Uexküll’s functional circle elaborated primarily in his
Bedeutungtheorie (1942), a schema whose philosophical importance was recognized
by Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer in their projected laying of the foundations of
a semiotic philosophy of culture.
Cultural psychology stands in a relationship of mutual enrichment or codepen-
dence with philosophy, especially a form of philosophy such as a semiotically aware
phenomenology that ‘pushes meaning down’ to the lower levels of sensibility and
affectivity and ‘pushes meaning up’ to levels beyond and even within discourse (Innis
1994). But both levels are marked by ‘liminality’ of various sorts (Crosby 2014;
Stenner 2017; Corrington 2013; Innis 2008a, b). Pushing meaning ‘down’ toward
the body as locus of meaning-making points to and foregrounds the phenomenon of
embodiment or embodied tacit knowing. Pushing meaning ‘up’ points toward another
kind of embodiment, what I would call semiotic or technological embodiment or,
from a cultural or social psychological angle, institutional embodiment. These forms
of embodiment extend the concept of embodiment and indwelling developed, in
dialogue with psychology, by the phenomenological tradition’s reflections on the
lived body (Merleau-Ponty 1945, Todes 2001) and by Michael Polanyi’s (1958;
1966) cognate reflections on the tacit dimension and the ‘logical’ structure of skills,
grounded in what Harry Collins (2010) calls ‘somatic tacit knowing.’
Cultural psychology is of special interest for a philosopher (or for philosophical
semiotics) by reason of its focus on the embodied frames of meaning-making and
their forms of ingression into our life worlds. Cultural psychology faces interpre-
tive tasks on many levels, just as philosophy does. Along with a broadly conceived
philosophical semiotics, it wants to determine how human beings make sense of
themselves and the world and the psychic matrices and effects of the mediating tools
and instruments employed, no matter what their modality (Vygotsky 1986; Brown
and Stenner 2009). It is concerned not just with the diverse origins or ‘psychic loca-
tions’ of meanings of all sorts, a genetic side, but with their structures and contents.
It wants to uncover the actual experienced impacts and variable consequences of
assimilating or accomodating oneself to the vast array of possible ways of taking
up an existential stance, individually and socially, in the various spheres of meaning
that range from the most private and idiosyncratic to the most public and long-term
contexts in which we live out our lives. Cultural psychology is no disengaged inquiry,
a reflection on human oddities that do not touch us, and no more than philosophy is
it a mere play with abstruse abstractions. Both are thoroughly treading in what Kant
called the “fertile lowlands of experience,” the realm of ‘stamped form.’
Looked at with a philosophical eye, cultural psychology has a semiotic and
phenomenological descriptive task. It can be seen as an empirical or material
phenomenology that does not look for or attempt to construct ideal types but to
map or chart the great varieties of ways in which meaning-systems, which are real in
that they stand over against us and cannot be dispersed by a wave of the hand, take on
life in experience, shaping and enabling it, opening it out, and constraining it within
4 1 Introduction: Linking Philosophy and Cultural Psychology

limits, whether, from a philosophical point of view, they are true or not. Cultural
psychology and social semiotics in the philosophical mode share a common task,
although each has a different focus. Cultural psychology is, as Jaan Valsiner (2007,
2014, 2017) has likewise pointed out, a specific kind of material phenomenology,
not just ‘placing’ culture in minds but also placing minds in culture. Institutions such
as marriage, political orders, prisons, hospitals and healthcare institutions, mental
illness and asylums, public parks with their art works, and so forth are social facts
with a psychological reality, although the relations are not baldly causal but symbi-
otic and dynamically reciprocating. Philosophy needs to recognize this, too, as has
been forcefully shown, with practical intent, by Line Joranger in a wide ranging set
of studies with rich examples from the history of thought (2010, 2013, 2015, 2019).
We are ‘in’ these institutional orders just as much as they are ‘in’ us. The lines
between a philosophically aware descriptive social semiotics, a material archeology
of institutions, and cultural psychology are not clear-cut, although it appears to me
that cultural psychology is in some sense ‘richer’ in that it is closer to the lived
world and not focused just on explicit contents but also on the lived contexts, in
Dewey’s sense, in which contents function and are framed. While, to be sure, as the
Latin adage puts it, individuum est ineffabile, that is, there is something ‘unsayable’
about the felt quality of each person’s life, still the individual is a locus or point of
intersection of multiple systems of meanings that are in important respects, but not
totally, publicly accessible. They shape and form the distinctive feel of life as lived
in each individual instance and in each collective or social psychological instance
(Stenner), although such a feel can only be gestured at or triangulated by means of
discourse. It is able, however, to be presented in other ways.
A descriptive phenomenology of meanings and a descriptive phenomenology
of lived values, whether in the philosophical and more abstract mode or the more
concrete mode of cultural psychology, go hand in hand. Values are likewise embodied,
rooted in objects as reservoirs of memory, attachment, and ultimate concern. Walter
(1998) writes:
Our perceptions are inherently expressive, and the core of every phenomenon holds a kernel
of expressive energy. Perception remains alive and vibrant—not a dead record of things—
because phenomena live and vibrate. The energy of phenomena moves people to feel, think,
and imagine. The world of experience trembles with excitement. (170)

For Walter (131), “the totality of what people do, think, and feel in a specific loca-
tion gives identity to a place, and through its physique and morale shapes a reality
which is unique to places—different from the reality of an object or a person,” with
which, nevertheless, it is inextricably linked. A place, on his conception, including, I
would add, a ‘semiotic place’ where the meanings of life are played out, is a “location
of mutual immanence, a unity of effective presences dwelling together”—or being
ripped apart by irreconciliable differences, both personal and social. “Human experi-
ence makes a place, but a place lives in its own way. Its form of experience occupies
persons—the place locates experience in people. A place is a matrix of energies,
generating representations and causing changes in awareness” (p. 12). The idea of a
1 Introduction: Linking Philosophy and Cultural Psychology 5

place “locating” experience in people is a provocative one, as is the contention that

“the energies of a place flow through its meanings.”
The pursuit of meanings and values, rooted in the spectrum of desires that push
human activity from behind and as lures pull it from the front, has psychological
consequences and effects resulting from the various kinds of choices and forms of
action that transform the physical world and social world alike. The physical world
is transformed by being turned into systems of artifacts and tools and objects of
use as well as objects of contemplation, self-display, and ornamentation (Valsiner
2018). Tools, machines, irrigation systems, housing materials, cities, temples and
churches, monasteries, and schools have material reality and are experienced as loci
of embodied meanings and reservoirs and exemplars of value or at least of what
is valued, a positive fact. Cultural psychology, like philosophy, takes as object of
inquiry norms and the various ends-in-view that humans pursue and attempt not just
to realize but also to stabilize. Its focus on the background conditions, rooted in
lived experience and its contexts, that incline us to establish these norms and effect
these ends are of great philosophical relevance. One point of deep connection is with
‘moral psychology,’ in some to-be-determined meaning of that term, with its fusion
of philosophical and psychological dimensions, including the all-important social
and cultural ones.
Cultural psychology shares a descriptive role with phenomenology and semiotics.
It focuses on the multiform psychological reality and consequences of the world
pictures and meaning frames which shape and form our self-conceptions, our insti-
tutions, and our patterns of action and feeling. The cultural psychologist as inquirer,
like the philosopher, is also informed by a world picture and a schema of values.
These need to be raised to explicitness in order for both philosopher and cultural
psychologist to grasp where they stand and how such informing has psychological
reality and force. Here is a critical link of cultural psychology with philosophy, and its
concern with self-understanding as an existential task, such as is illustrated in Sven
Hroar Klempe’s (2014) and Vincent McCarthy’s (2015) discussions of Kierkegaard
and the rise of modern psychology. But the point is quite general. Every researcher
is already embodied in sets of fore-structures or operative premises and needs to
achieve self-understanding and not just explore the self-understandings of others.
There are many helpful ways of schematizing the ‘livingness’ of premises and their
bearing upon the criticism and reconstruction of the contexts of beliefs. Heidegger’s
schema, for instance, has, in spite of its etiology, general import for the pragmatist crit-
icism of cultures envisaged by Dewey and others in their different ways. Heidegger
distinguished three pivotal fore-structures: Vorhabe, Vorsicht, and Vorgriff . We can
interpret these terms for our use in the following way. Vorhabe (a ‘fore-having’) is
also a ‘being-had,’ a kind of affectively charged Deweyan ‘disposition’ that marks a
fundamental ‘feeling tone’ that accompanies and conditions all our access structures
to the world. Vorsicht (a ‘fore-seeing’) encompasses embedded perceptual habits
and skills, modes of attending to and into ‘the given’ that progressively becomes
discriminated and divided up into terms and relations. Vorgriff (a ‘pre-grasping’)
refers to the antecedent conceptual structures and systems of signs that represent and
articulate symbolically the ‘meanings’ or ‘significations’ of the experiential flow.
6 1 Introduction: Linking Philosophy and Cultural Psychology

These fore-structures mark the cultural psychologist just as much as they frame the
ultimate contours of the encultured beings the psychologist is trying to undercover
in their detailed psychic reality.
The point of cultural psychology, and of a great part of philosophy, is not purely
theoretical or objectifying. And it is definitely not value-free. The variety of meaning-
systems and value-systems in which people live, the variety of material contexts of
their lives, and their cultural and ecological niches elicit from us more than mere
curiosity. They show the incredible diversity of things that matter or have import for
humans. What matters for most, presupposing of course a sufficient material base
of life, is their self-conception and the meanings and concepts they have available
to make sense of their lives. Such ‘mattering’ also entails a demand, with different
levels of explicitness, for recognition and acceptance, a theme developed extensively
in the Hegelian tradition and in the pragmatist reflections of G. H. Mead (Mead 2015;
Joas 1997). Encultured beings do not just interact with their meaning-systems and
institutions, they also interact with one another in multiple ways in vast intertwined
communicative networks.
Cultural psychology studies in a systematic manner what Wittgenstein, in another
context, called “bits and pieces of natural history,” that is, the natural history of
human practices as experienced and as self-interpreting, even if the interpretations
radically diverge. It strives to do so within a methodological and theoretical frame-
work (Valsiner 2017; Mammen 2017) and not merely in an ad hoc manner. This
drive toward general categories of analysis brings cultural psychology close to a
philosophical semiotics or a semiotically informed philosophy of culture. While not
all meaning-systems or value-systems elicit from us validation or sympathy, they do
demand from us understanding, that is, a determination of their ‘lived logics’ and
points of origin and reasons (even if bad) for their continuing reality. The notion of
a lived logic binds together the conjoint concerns of cultural psychology and of a
philosophy open to experience in all its modes. Such a philosophy, on a different level
of abstraction, is looking for where to place what Plato called the ‘significant joints’
in a complex reality. Valsiner (2007; 2014; 2017) is right to see cultural psychology as
informed by a search for the significant joints in the cultural matrices and signifying
powers of psyche.
Wittgenstein famously and controversially claimed that philosophy leaves every-
thing as it is, in a kind of counter thesis on Feuerbach. Philosophy in its normative
dimension would assert that cultural psychology as a companion human science is
not, indeed cannot be, indifferent to human practices and should not consider them
merely as exhibits collected for a kind of museum of curiosities, examined for our
amusement or professional or political advancement. Cultural psychology charts and
maps for us the range of ways humans, pulled toward ends-in-view, or pushed by an
array of compulsions and needs, have formulated and built frames for flourishing—or,
looked at normatively, for failing to flourish.
In light of the great variation in value schemes, which cultural psychology has
studied and uncovered, it is problematic just where cultural psychology on its own
is to look for a normative frame or just what such a frame would look like. The
philosophical semiotics of C.S. Peirce proposes ‘concrete rationality’ and the taking
1 Introduction: Linking Philosophy and Cultural Psychology 7

on of rational habits. For Peirce, this involves an apprehension and realization of

the ‘intrinsically worthwhile’ or ‘eminently admirable,’ which is the ‘highest good’
or summum bonum (see Ibri 2017). This is, in the end, an ‘aesthetic’ goal. It points
inquiry and life in the direction of an aesthetics of existence, but in a sense quite
different from Michel Foucault’s conception, which is an unstable blend of ancient
practices of self-cultivation and Nietzschean emphasis on self-creation (Innis 2016;
Joranger 2010, 2019).
Cultural psychology holds that culture permeates us down to the deepest levels
of affect and feeling, constituting an existential ‘tonus’ that defines or ‘qualifies’
the sense of existing (Brown and Stenner 2009). As acting inquirers, we always
find ourselves ‘turned’ or ‘biased’ just as the subjects of our inquiries are likewise
‘turned’ or ‘biased.’ How, then, are we as reflective inquirers to balance tolerance and
sympathetic understanding with critical recoil and disapproval when faced with the
horrors of history’s butcher block, to allude to Hegel’s provocative remark? Clearly,
this swings our concerns back to philosophy, with its own models of flourishing
and norms of existence, often laden with metaphysical premises, which cultural
psychology can study but clearly does not construct.
Philosophy, perhaps presumptuously, legislates or “lays down the law,” but is in
no position to enforce it—unless it is embodied in institutional power structures, with
powers to penalize or to ‘heal’ (Joranger 2019). It exhorts, while cultural psychology,
in its moral dimension, reports, but since cultural psychology studies the conditions
of realization of norms, it could, if committed to a schema of values, incline itself
to facilitating the acquisition of value-systems—and thus involve itself in a kind of
cultural ‘moral engineering.’ But how would cultural psychology itself validate its
schema? Again, there is a swing back to philosophical analysis or to the philosophical
dimension, which is not itself immune to preferential treatment of its own essentially
contestable existential commitments, as its history so lugubriously shows.
Because of its general empirical scope, cultural psychology cannot look away
from any human reality in its psychological aspects. And philosophy cannot look
away from the display uncovered by cultural psychology which sees our deepest
potentialities—for good reason—made visible in the mirror of cultural forms. For
both philosophy and cultural psychology, the guiding maxim must be nihil humanum
alienum a me puto. ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Become who you are’ are not achievable
solely by introspection without the essential aid of ‘the other.’ Philosophy is helped
by cultural psychology to avoid, Dewey put it, “beating its wings in a void.” Cultural
psychology is helped by philosophy, or at least by some elements from certain philo-
sophical projects, in that philosophy can supply analytical tools and concepts that
help it frame the frames its subjects to close examination.
How does one frame the frames within which experience takes on meaning? One
way is to try to outline certain indispensable aspects of the matrices within which we
give meaning to the world and to ourselves. These dynamic matrices are what I am
calling the thresholds of sense. Philosophy and cultural psychology intersect in their
mutual concern to determine these thresholds of sense that mark the boundaries of
the human world. I want to offer in what follows some philosophical and semiotic
ways of marking these boundaries that could be of use for cultural psychology.
8 1 Introduction: Linking Philosophy and Cultural Psychology

Going beyond and in a sense beneath these general considerations, in the following
chapters I want to show in highly condensed and schematic fashion how some selected
philosophical analytical tools bear in different ways upon the problem of how to
model what I am calling the ‘thresholds of sense,’ that is, how to picture or describe the
fundamental matrices in which meaning arises for human beings and gets embodied
in cultural forms, the principal theme of cultural psychology and of a philosophical
semiotics.
Staying within the format of the SpringerBriefs, I cannot engage except allusively
and corollarily all the issues I have foregrounded that bear upon or arise from the
linkages between philosophy and cultural psychology. I want to present some rich
analytical tools of philosophical and semiotic provenance for sketching with suffi-
cient generality the contours of the very ‘thresholds of sense’ that give rise to the
world of cultural forms and the fundamental lines of the ‘cultural subject’ that oper-
ates at these thresholds. I will follow this thread of thresholds and contours through
(a) John Dewey’s pragmatist analysis of contexts, situations, and backgrounds and
the linked notion of atmospheres developed by Gernot Böhme (Chap. 2); (b) the
linkages between C. S. Peirce’s triadic semiotic framing of the bottomless lake of
consciousness, Karl Bühler’s unfolding of the implications of his organon-model of
language into an account of diacrisis and abstraction, and Ernst Cassirer’s analysis of
the triadic formative modes of consciousness that are the source of the form worlds
of culture (Chap. 3); (c) Susanne Langer’s creative development of the heuristic role
of the import of the art image that links feeling, abstraction, and symbolization in
a rich ‘aesthetic model’ of minding and thereby of selving (Chap. 4); and (d) an
extension and exemplification of the rich yet problematic concept of affectivation
by reflecting upon the interruptive nature of semiotic processes, of the tacit roots
of intentional bonds with the world, the nature of semiotic embodiment, and the
existential dimensions of symbolic affectivation (Chap. 5).
The chapters, which are by no means meant as a treatise, are meant as ‘exempli-
fying rotations’ of some of the ways philosophy can supply analytical tools that bear
upon its link with cultural psychology: outlining the very thresholds of sense within
which the experienced world and ourselves are put into play.
Chapter 2
Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts,
Situations, and Backgrounds

Abstract John Dewey, articulating the central idea of his naturalistic yet non-
reductive pragmatism, places the ultimate thresholds of sense within dynamic
systems of transactions that enable human beings to adjust to and to cope with
the changing contexts and situations of action guided by affect-laden perception.
Meaning or significance, in the most rudimentary senses of those words, arises
through different types of transactions that occur within circuits or dynamic frame-
works with distinctive qualities or tones. They expand in a widening gyre or spiral.
These frameworks are indwelt and make up complex felt backgrounds and atmo-
spheres whose complex nature generates severe tensions by reason of the tendency
of human beings to resort to violence when the contexts of their lives become opaque
or incoherent.

Keywords John Dewey · Circuit of behavior · Contexts and situations ·

Qualitative backgrounds · Affect-laden perceptions · Atmospheres and staging ·
Symbolization · Communication · Force

John Dewey, articulating the central idea of his naturalistic yet non-reductive prag-
matism, places the ultimate thresholds of sense within a dynamic system of trans-
actions that enable human beings to adjust and to cope with the changing contexts
and situations of action guided by affect-laden perception. The primary stance is
not to accomplish what Dewey called a ‘Kodak fixation’ of the experiential flux and
then interact with it. For Dewey, meaning or significance, in the most rudimentary
senses of those words, arises through different types of transactions that occur in a
circuit that, depending upon the organism, expands in a widening gyre or spiral. In
the case of human meaning-making, this spiral has no greatest upper bound. Peirce’s
concept of unending or infinite semiosis or play of signs, which has no explicit
role in Dewey’s thought, functions implicitly in the evolutionary orientation of his
philosophical naturalism.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license 9
to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
R. E. Innis, Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology,
SpringerBriefs in Psychology and Cultural Developmental Science,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58190-9_2
10 2 Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts, Situations, and Backgrounds

Dewey’s fundamental 1896 paper on the reflex arc supplies one of the keys to
his pragmatist approach to knowing and is a valuable, if relatively ignored, analyt-
ical resource for cultural psychology. Dewey pointed out that organisms, including
humans, do not just respond to a ‘stimulus,’ however we want to define such a notion.
They respond into it, and thereby reconstruct the actional-perceptual circuit, as well
as themselves. In the case of humans, this reconstruction process goes over into
symbolization and interpretation. Referring to James’s famous child-candle example
from the Principles of Psychology (1890), where the seeing of a burning candle
elicits the action of reaching and the subsequent burn elicits the action of withdrawal,
Dewey describes the process not as a linking of discrete units but as a continuing,
self-constructing coordination. This notion of a self-constructing and reconstructing
coordination is an elementary precursor of rational self-control and the develop-
ment of rational habits, the goal of human life, a central idea of Peirce’s semiotic
pragmatism (Colapietro 1988; Ibri 2017).
According to Dewey, “the burn is the original seeing, the original optical-ocular
experience, enlarged and transformed in its value. It is no longer mere seeing; it
is seeing-of-a-light-when-contact-occurs” (1896, 4). This hyphenation foregrounds
what is a ‘continual reconstruction’ of a circuit of multimodal experience. The theo-
retical point of the child-candle example is that the “seeing remains to control the
reaching and is, in turn, interpreted by the burning” (1896, 4). Dewey further claims
that there is nothing outside of a functioning circuit of coordinating activities that can
be labeled ‘sensation’ or ‘response.’ They are relative to the context, clearly a coun-
terthrust to another problematic claim that there are context-independent psychic
atoms.
The stimulus is that phase of the forming coordination which represents the conditions which
have to be met in bringing it to a successful issue; the response is that phase of one and the
same forming coordination which gives the key to meeting these conditions, which serves as
an instrument in effecting the successful coordination. They are, therefore, strictly correlative
and contemporaneous. (1896, 9)

Coordination is a process of unification, the essential factor in the fundamental

copings by which we not only extract meaning from but also give meaning to the
world. At the very threshold of sense, Dewey sees mediating coordinations, not mere
sequencing, of perceiving and acting. As he writes in his essay, ‘Perception and
Organic Action’ (1912, 401): “This functional transformation of the environment
under conditions of uncertain action into conditions for determining an appropriate
organic response constitutes perception.”
In the case of sign-using organisms such as human beings, this functional trans-
formation of the environment is to be taken in a general sense. Coping with the world
involves overt action, including, according to Dewey, sign-action, that goes over in
the human case to the concrete and semiotic manipulation of the world through, as
Dewey writes in his 1929 The Quest for Certainty, “doing acts, performing opera-
tions, cutting, marking off, dividing up, extending, piecing together, joining, assem-
bling and mixing, hoarding and dealing out; in general, selecting and adjusting things
as means for reaching consequences” (125). These are all mediating activities that
2 Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts, Situations, and Backgrounds 11

occur, in different ways and modalities, at the boundary between organisms of all
types and the world. More generally:
Knowing is an act which modifies what previously existed …. The spectator theory of
knowing may, humanly speaking, have been inevitable when the thought was viewed as an
exercise of a ‘reason’ independent of the body, which by means of purely logical operations
attained truth. It is an anachronism now that we have the model of the experimental procedure
before us and are aware of the role of organic acts in all mental processes. (195)

Such a position was foreshadowed in a 1908 essay honoring William James, ‘Does
Reality Possess Practical Character?’ In this paper Dewey argued that the systems of
transactions constituting knowing are to be considered forms of practice that make
a change in the object known. The change, however, is not just in the object but
in the organisms and the situations of perplexity in which knowing takes place and
which the organisms, individually or in concert, are trying to resolve. Knowing, as
a continuous process punctuated by events of culmination, does not entail or aim
to construct a stable picture or snapshot of the experience that would ‘mirror’ it
in, for example, a set of abstract representations. Such a goal, Dewey argued, leads
to the ‘intellectual lockjaw’ of the epistemology industry: how to find an outside
standpoint enabling one to distinguish between the mirroring and the mirrored, a
problem systematically bedeviling philosophy since Plato.
Knowing, Dewey proposed, with no idealistic intent, is a part of the very reality
the knower is adjusting to and engaged in changing in light of ends-in-view. Such
ends are pursued by organisms of all sorts who strive to complete and respond to the
intrinsic tendencies of things and their potentialities for transformation. Knowing
is a process that is part of nature, including social-cultural nature, and thoroughly
dependent on its organic and sociocultural conditions, especially the semiotic powers
that make possible conceptual systems of high complexity and advanced forms of
cooperation and competition, as well as the systems of tools and artifacts. Knowing
on this deeply pragmatist position is clearly ‘constructive’ of the known. What is
known is not in any coherent sense a cause of the knowing. It is rather the ‘outcome’
of many types of complex processes on many levels. The known, Dewey proposes,
is accessed ‘within’ processes of engagement of various sorts on multiple levels.
Indeed, as Dewey (1938), argues in his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, “biological
functions and structures prepare the way for deliberate inquiry and … foreshadow
its pattern” (30). Deliberate inquiry, Dewey argued, is not necessarily theoretical. It
can take many forms, especially in the cases of art, myth, and religion, which are the
joint concerns of philosophy and the cultural sciences.
Dewey’s naturalistic logic and account of knowing is intent on establishing “con-
tinuity of the lower (less complex) and the higher (more complex) activities and
forms” (1938, 30)—continuity, but not identity. For Dewey an organism, including
the human organism, does not live in an environment as if it were a container: “it lives
by means of an environment” and “with every differentiation of structure the environ-
ment expands” (1938, 32). Life, including social life, with which cultural psychology
is concerned, is for Dewey “a continual rhythm of disequilibrations and recoveries
of equilibrium” (1938, 34). A consequence of this notion is that the ‘higher’ the
12 2 Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts, Situations, and Backgrounds

organism, that is, the higher level of sophistication of its semiotic capacities, the
more complex the efforts to restore equilibrium. Symbolic equilibrium is always
unstable, without a rigid center. Cultural processes, including the constant delete-
rious striving toward hegemonic supremacy of various sorts on the part of one group
within a culture, ideally strive toward “the institution of an integrated relation” (1938,
35) between ourselves and the natural and cultural world. Such a relation, however, is
always precarious, a theme developed in the second chapter of his classic Experience
and Nature (1925).
An integrated relation is never anything permanent. Symbolic equilibrium, which
is intrinsically labile, is a constant project, just as organic equilibrium or home-
ostasis is (Damasio 2018). By reason of the temporal flow of consciousness, we are
dynamically carried toward the future. New meaning-configurations, and conflicts
between them, are found in the evolving and emergent circuits of interactions. Dewey
points out that there is “direction and cumulative force” (1938, 38) to these meaning-
configurations and that their end-effect, as well as motivating matrix, is “the total state
of the organism” (1938, 37), a theme central to Damasio’s reflections. Philosophy is
linked with cultural psychology in analyzing the semiotic and ‘psychic’ dimensions
of this ‘total state,’ which is not without deep reverberations in the body of the sign-
users and a principal determinant of the somatic tonus that defines each one of us as
a unique individual.
Dewey’s approach to the theme of a threshold both describes and prescribes,
as is evident in the following passage from his Logic, which refers to an essential
continuity, but not identity, between the biological and semiotic dimension. “What
exists in normal behavior-development is … a circuit of which the earlier or ‘open’
phase is the tension of various elements of organic energy, while the final and ‘closed’
phase is the institution of integrated interaction of organism and environment” (1938,
38). Is it not possible to substitute ‘semiotic energy’ for ‘organic energy,’ or, in fact, to
see how organic energy goes over into semiotic energy, manifested in the ‘circuit’ of
semiosis in the course of which sign-use becomes conscious and reflective and thus
able to be controlled, and in which behavior itself goes over into conduct, including
the conduct of thinking?
In a 1905 text, C. S. Peirce wrote:
For thinking is a kind of conduct, and is itself controllable, as everybody knows. Now the
intellectual control of thinking takes place by thinking about thought. All thinking is by
signs; and the brutes use signs. But perhaps they rarely think of them as signs. To do so is
manifestly a second step in the use of language. (Collected Papers, 5.534; cited hereafter as
CP with volume and paragraph number)

Philosophy and the cultural (human) sciences study not ‘brutes,’ in Peirce’s sense
of that term, but human conduct. Such conduct, even if brutish, is both controlled
by and constituted by the use of signs. It is elicited by and enforced by sign-
configurations that for agents are simply ‘the way the world is,’ a form of semiotic
reification (ideology) and source of violence in its many forms. Description of such
conduct goes over into criticism in as much as it interrupts the lived through use of
signs by sign-users and subjects it and them to thematic and critical reflection, in
2 Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts, Situations, and Backgrounds 13

the process tracing signs to their genetic conditions and behind-the-back motivating
factors and making us aware of the ramifying consequences of semiosis that psycho-
analytical theories explore and mediate. As Peirce wrote: ‘The brutes are certainly
capable of more than one grade of control; but it seems to me that our superiority to
them is more due to our greater number of grades of self-control than it is to our versa-
tility’ (CP, 5.533). In Peirce’s philosophical project, and Dewey’s too, self-control is
manifested in the development of rational habits.
Descriptive procedures on their own are perhaps not in the best position to deter-
mine whether our conduct is out of control, and hence ‘irrational.’ Here, we encounter
once again the problem of cultural psychology as a normative science, a theme
running through Svend Brinkmann’s work (2016). A human science such as cultural
psychology or cultural history, which engages self-interpreting human beings and
their works, clearly has to settle the issue of whether it intends to, or even would
want to, ‘leave everything as it is,’ or whether they can at least determine what simply
cannot be left as it is on the inextricably intertwined social and personal levels. By
reason of the very subject matter engaged, there is also perhaps a therapeutic task to
be undertaken.
Dewey claimed that the point of origin of the open circuit of
perceiving/acting/signifying is the apprehension of something in the field of
sensibility or experience that functions as a lure—a metaphorical burning candle—
for inquiry in the most general sense. Such a lure disturbs an equilibrium and
generates activities aimed at restoring balance, which itself is only temporary.
Dewey, implicitly accepting the theme-field-margin triad of James’s ‘Stream of
Consciousness’ chapter from The Principles of Psychology, argued in a number of
key and permanently valuable papers that the original ‘theme,’ or area of concern,
of the field of awareness is not an ‘object’ in the usual and customary sense of the
term but a holistically felt objective perplexity, or ‘problematic situation,’ with a
distinctive quality accessed through feeling, relying on Peirce’s category of quality,
which he considered Peirce’s most important philosophical discovery. Objects,
whatever they may be, are found in a ‘situation,’ which is not a ‘thing’ but indeed
a kind of Jamesian ‘field’ or ‘relational whole’ (Heidegger’s Bewandtnisganzheit
or ‘relational whole of involvements’) that supplies the defining context not just of
any form of inquiry but of our lives as a whole, which cultural psychology is deeply
concerned with.

Situations and Contexts

In his indispensable ‘Qualitative Thought’ essay Dewey defined this central issue of
a ‘situation’ as “the subject matter ultimately referred to in existential propositions”
and as “a complex existence that is held together, in spite of its internal complexity, by
the fact that it is dominated and characterized throughout by a single quality” (1930,
197). A situation is ‘taken for granted, ‘understood,’ or “implicit in all propositional
14 2 Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts, Situations, and Backgrounds

symbolization” (1930, 197). In his essay, ‘Context and Thought’ to which I will
return, Dewey assimilated situation to a background that:
… is implicit in some form and to some degree in all thinking, although as a background it
does not come into explicit purview; that is, it does not form a portion of the subject matter
which is consciously attended to, thought of, examined, inspected, turned over. (1931b, 211)

Such a notion of context is similar to Michael Polanyi’s idea of a tacit frame-

work of various types of premises that we operatively rely upon without our being
able to control them explicitly and which he connects with an extended concept of
embodiment.
All thought contains components of which we are subsidiarily aware in the focal content of
our thinking, and all thought dwells in its subsidiaries, as if they were parts of our body.
Hence, thinking is not only necessarily intentional, as Brentano has taught: it is also fraught
with the roots it embodies. It has a from-to structure. (Polanyi 1966, x).

A problem for cultural psychology, and for a critical philosophy, is clearly to

find a way to access this dimension or at least to recognize that it even exists. It is
the pre-thematic dimension explored by the existential phenomenologists and other
thinkers from other traditions, relying on different empirical materials (as samples
from a large literature: Damasio 2010; Gallagher 2006; Leder 1990; Todes 2001).
It is out of or within such a context that ‘objects,’ what we are ‘concerned with,’
Dewey argues, are thematized and explicitly apprehended. By an object, Dewey
means “some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the
whole of which it is a distinction” (1930, 197). On this account, the apprehension of
objects in the field is affected by a diacritical process, a recognition of difference,
indeed, as Bateson put it in his essay ‘Form, Substance, and Difference’ (Bateson
1972), differences that make a difference. Objects—including all those ‘semiotic
objects’ that arise and are constituted in sign systems of all sorts—emerge in a
process of “selective determination … controlled by reference to situation—to that
which is constituted by a pervasive and internally integrating quality” (1930, 197).
Objects are not ‘given’ but ‘placed’ or ‘located.’ Does not cultural psychology take
as one of its tasks to explore these places or locations in their variable social and
cultural settings? And, as cultural, are they not semiotic through and through?
Dewey proposes that we consider objects, relations, and relations between rela-
tions as ‘crystallized’ out of situations, which are unified by webs of affinities, which
are themselves felt and which we do not control by thematic action. Knowing, to
be sure, involves ‘discrimination’ and ‘segmentation’ just as much as it involves
‘synthesis’ and ‘binding.’ The flux of experience is permeated by felt affinities in
which we find ourselves carried along. Qualitative links are operative even before
being thematically recognized. The task is to raise to explicit consciousness the oper-
ative web of felt affinities marking all the levels at which agents encounter the world,
especially those of which they are not thematically aware.
When it is said that I have a feeling, or impression, or ‘hunch,’ that things are thus and so,
what is actually designated is primarily the presence of a dominating quality in a situation as
a whole, not just the existence of a feeling as a psychical or psychological fact. To say I have
Situations and Contexts 15

a feeling or impression that so and so is the case is to note that the quality in question is not
yet resolved into determinate terms and relations; it marks a conclusion without statement of
the reasons for it, the grounds upon which it rests. It is the first stage in the development of
explicit distinctions. All thought in every subject matter begins with just such an unanalyzed
whole. When the subject matter is reasonably familiar, relevant distinctions speedily offer
themselves, and sheer qualitativeness may not remain long enough to be readily recalled.
But it often persists and forms a haunting and engrossing problem. It is a commonplace that
a problem stated is well on its way to solution, for statement of the nature of a problem
signifies that the underlying quality is being transformed into determinate distinctions of
terms and relations and has become an object of articulate thought. But something presents
itself as problematic before there is recognition of what the problem is. The problem is had
or experienced before it can be stated or set forth; but it is had as an immediate quality of
the whole situation. The sense of something problematic, of something perplexing and to
be resolved, marks the presence of something pervading all elements and considerations.
Thought is the operation by which it is converted into pertinent and coherent terms. (1930,
198)

The fact of perplexity at the very threshold of an experienced situation is the

manifestation of something that is ‘other,’ something that is opposed to us and not
under our control, that resists us, that imbalances us, a feature of experience that
Peirce called ‘secondness, although Dewey does not use this Peircean terminology
even if he takes over Peirce’s idea of resistances, a notion that plays a key role in Jaan
Valsiner’s high-level reflections on the fundamental analytical and methodological
frame of cultural psychology. The ongoing flow of experience, indeed of life itself,
is interrupted in many ways. This sense of being interrupted also ‘affects’ us, giving
rise to habits of reaction and response. Indeed it elicits habits in ways not always
under our control—and meant, at times, not to be under our control. One of the
common tasks of philosophical analysis and cultural psychology is, or would be,
to study descriptively, explanatorily, and critically the varieties of felt interruptions
that we experience, including those embodied in sign systems that are specifically
designed to upset and introduce imbalance, uncertainty, or fear. Of course, this is not
perhaps in all cases unjustified and it certainly interrupts the constant practice of what
Peirce called the ‘method of tenacity,’ our tendencies to continue in frameworks that
deny other options. Here is a generalized notion of ‘conflict.’ It is a formal feature of
consciousness, indeed, of life itself. It is the mark of ‘difference’ in the most universal
sense of that term.
Cultural psychology in the pragmatist semiotic mode such as proposed by Valsiner
or implied by Dewey, and extended in a different register by Mead and others,
must study in detail across different cultures and subcultures the psychic conse-
quences of individual and group encounters with difference and their connections
with violence in its different modes. Being unbalanced by difference often leads to
the search for an authority, or for an authorization, to overcome by force, even lethal,
the imbalance undergone in the individual and in various cultural groupings that is
introduced by felt opposition to one’s world model. For Dewey, one of the main contri-
butions of philosophy, which is otherwise helpless, is to contravene such recourse to
violence or force by mediating communicative interchange and self-understanding.
In this, philosophy and cultural psychology stand shoulder to shoulder.
16 2 Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts, Situations, and Backgrounds

The value dimension of both a philosophical semiotics and cultural psychology is

exemplified very clearly in Dewey’s idea that in their critical function they can furnish
‘new surveys of possibilities.’ While cultural psychology is clearly not a branch of an
edifying or hortatory positive psychology with its connection to the human potential
movement, its studies of the varieties of forms of human self-realization show a kind
of affinity with it, as well as a healthy hesitation to apply a single template to the
varieties of human flourishing. Such varieties, after all, have very different generating
conditions and metaphysical and ethical premises. Reflection on the ‘logic’ of these
premises is one of philosophy’s main tasks, but charting their ‘realization’ in the
psychic reality of lived cultural contexts involves empirical attention of the highest
order. When it comes to human well-being, there is an essential tension between anal-
ysis and advocacy. Negotiating the shifting lines of demarcation presents a permanent
reflective methodological problem for both philosophy and cultural psychology, more
serious for the latter perhaps than for the former.
The general problem of the ‘background’ of thought that Dewey deals with philo-
sophically in ‘Context and Thought’ is certainly also a core concern for cultural
psychology. Background is the “immanent presence of the contextual setting of a
moving experience” that provides a connection in all our thinking. Inquiry is into
which connections these are and where they come from. It is not enough to claim
there is a general background. The different temporal, or historically effective, back-
grounds of thinking as manifested in the actual behavior of encultured beings, the
uncovering of which is a main task of cultural psychology and the historical sciences,
has, on Dewey’s account, an intellectual, as well as an existential component. It is
part of the ‘funded’ nature of our experiential fields.
The intellectual component—clearly involving both implicit and explicit concep-
tual frameworks—encompasses the lived culture in its entirety, as well as the more
specialized domains of theory embedded in the common sense of a culture and all
of its subsectors. Together they make up a very broad notion of traditions. Dewey
describes its components or constituent features in both technical and imaginal terms.
“Traditions are ways of interpretation and of observation, of valuation, of everything
explicitly thought of. They are the circumambient atmosphere which thought must
breathe; no one ever had an idea except as he inhaled some of this atmosphere”
(Dewey 1931b, 211).
The existential component pinpoints a deep fact about the embodied and not
just atmospherically surrounded nature of our multileveled cognitional ways of
being-in-the-world, where Dewey argues that perception, action, and signification
are indissolubly intertwined.
We cannot explain why we believe the things which we most firmly hold to because those
things are a part of ourselves. We can no more completely escape them when we try to
examine into them than we can get outside our physical skins so as to view them from
without. Call these regulative traditions, apperceptive organs or mental habits or whatever
you will, there is no thinking without them. (Dewey 1931b, 211–212)

The notion of skin is a rich one. It is a semiotic skin, a theme that Nedergaard (2016)
has creatively developed and applied within the ‘context’ of health and medical
communicative practices.
Situations and Contexts 17

On the basis of this analogy of our mode of being aware of our lived body, a
term Dewey does not use but is a core notion of existential phenomenology, Dewey
argues that we can never objectify or make totally explicit the “whole contextual
background” of our thinking. Cultural psychology takes as one of its tasks to discover,
describe, and explain the contextual lived backgrounds of the meaning-systems or
meaning-frames within which human beings live. In this way it aims to make available
an ‘outside view’ that increases our ability to reflect upon them and, if need be, to
free ourselves from them or at least to learn how to navigate within them. From the
point of view of philosophy, it would mediate the emergence of ‘critical selfhood’ or
‘rational self-control’—certainly normative notions. Selfhood, though, arises in the
processes of being engaged by and living through and in structures many of which
we have produced while not being aware of their enabling conditions or being able to
foresee their consequences. These conditions, Dewey rightly claims, do “not come
into question at once.”
There is always that which continues to be taken for granted, which is tacit, being ‘under-
stood.’ If everything were literally unsettled at once, there would be nothing to which to tie
those factors that, being unsettled, are in process of discovery and determination. (Dewey
1931b, 211)

That is why, whether theoretically or in our existential engagements, we need ‘the

other’ to mediate our self-knowledge. Such a tacit background applies to each of us
in the spheres of our everydayness and our funded pre-thematic but operative self-
images (Damasio and autobiographical self). It also applies to cultural psychology
and philosophy in their own theoretical and self-reflective practices, which aim to
be ‘methodical’ in such a way as to acknowledge different methods for arriving at
results, including the result of determining what forms of inquiry they are. Each
has a paradoxical cognitional standing. Each is itself subject to the very conditions
it is studying. So, cultural psychology needs ‘the other’ to become aware of its
own ultimate analytical contexts and their shifting contexts. The primary theoretical
‘others’ for the type of cultural psychology proposed by Jaan Valsiner, for example,
are philosophy and semiotics, especially of the Peircean type. Cultural psychology’s
putative subject matter, the semiosphere enveloping every domain of lived meanings,
also confronts us as our ‘others’ and has to be interpreted and dialogically engaged
(Lotman 1990). Hermeneutical encounters, as distinct from explanatory research,
do not aim at general laws but at a felt grasping of the lived contexts of meaning-
making and action found in the “boundless multiplicity of the concrete experiences of
humanity” (Dewey 1931b, 216). One has to be able to chart how concrete experiences
with their contexts, and these contexts with their contexts, have arisen and been
realized in lived experience.
18 2 Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts, Situations, and Backgrounds

Scope and Relevance of Scharfstein’s Schematization

of Contexts

Scharfstein (1989), writing about the ‘dilemma of context,’ writes that, for purposes
of analysis, the “idea of context must be broken up or qualified in order to bear
systematic examination” (62). He proposes five divisions or aspects, schematizing
them in a putatively simple and natural sequence of levels, as if a set of Russian dolls:
microcontext, correlative context, macrocontext, metacontext, and universal or meta-
metacontext. Nevertheless, he starts his discussion with the second for reasons that
are certainly familiar to philosophical readers and to methodologically aware cultural
psychologists.
Correlative context is exemplified in the case of philosophical text interpreta-
tion, but as Scharfstein shows in his discussions of cultural relativism, it also bears
upon cultural psychology’s and the historical sciences’ attempts to understand the
emergence, structures, and differences of cultural forms. A philosophical text is only
understood, Scharfstein claims, if we ‘place’ it alongside other texts of the author or
texts to which the author is responding or upon which the author is drawing, explic-
itly, implicitly, or even unwittingly. We are in the same situation with cultural groups
and the meaning-systems that inform their lives. Scharfstein points out that if per
impossibile we could trace with sufficient detail the lateral linkages and dependen-
cies, rarely does an author, or social group, fully agree with an interpretation, and
indeed other interpreters often disagree among themselves for other reasons, and the
self-understanding of social groups or institutions often do not see other groups or
institutions as intrinsically connected with them.
Trying to understand another person, or social group, cultures, and subcultures,
and forms of life as kinds of critical self-writing texts is difficult. Their own self-
understanding, which is not necessarily correct or adequate, is often at variance with
their being understood by others, especially since persons, as Nietzsche and many
others have forcefully argued, often display different ‘faces’ to others depending on
the contexts in which they interact with them. And as to cultures, their narrative lines
are not always unitary. Memories, both individual and social, are often distorted or
even repressed, being accessible only in fragments. Moreover, the lived situations
of lives—being married to this particular person in this particular way or attending
the funeral of an estranged parent with mixed grief and relief—are also only under-
standable by locating it alongside the correlative factors that make it this particular
situation. We are ‘in’ situations rather more than they are ‘in’ us—which, neverthe-
less, they effectively are, since we are ‘outcomes’ of the web of situations in which
we have lived our lives.
As to microcontext, still using the generalizable example of a text, Scharfstein
foregrounds a “more minute scrutiny,” involving sentence by sentence, concept by
concept, or personal context, as source of the “personal resonance” of the words,
style, things said as opposed to merely implied, and so on. A microcontext is marked
by what Peirce called its defining quale. Microcontextual analyses of texts or persons
or cultures cannot be satisfied with the explicit alone; the implied or tacit is also a
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coriander seed. The breakfast before us was a most substantial one, there
being no lack either of welcome, which is the best of cheer, or of mutton, fish,
beer, coffee, milk, and stale black rye-bread. Be it remembered that this
breakfast was neither Icelandic, Danish, nor Scotch; but, exhibiting some of
the characteristics of all three, seemed marvellously adapted to our present
requirements in this distant habitat.
We stepped into the store, and saw exposed for sale hardware and soft goods
of all kinds. In a corner were standing lots of quart-bottles gaudily labelled
“essence of punch,” whatever that may be. Mr. Henderson showed me some
specimens of double refracting calc, or Iceland spar, which is obtained in the
neighbourhood. It only occurs in one place of the island, filling a fissure of
greenstone from two to three feet wide and twenty to twenty-five feet long, on
the north bank of the Reydarfiord, about a thousand feet above the sea level.
There, a cascade rushes over the rock, bringing down fragments of the spar
from time to time. The mass itself gets loosened, bit by bit, through the action
of frost on the moisture which enters edgeways between the laminae, wedging
them apart in the direction of the cleavage of the crystals. Transparent
specimens more than a few inches in size are rare and valuable. Mr. Henderson
presented me with a beautiful large semi-transparent chalcedony weighing 1 ℔
7 oz., and some pebbles.
His partner, Mr. Jacobson, an Icelander, also gave me a young raven to make a
pet of. It was this year’s bird and quite tame. I called it Odin; and, having got
hold of an old box, improvised a door from a few spars, that it might have a
sheltered place to roost in at night till it got to the end of its voyage.
I now wandered up the valley, for an hour or two, alone, and sat down on a
slope, on the right side of it, to look around me and rest. The river, near where
I sit, flashes down over a steep rock and forms a fine waterfall, the roaring of
which is echoed from the chimney-capped amphitheatre of hills opposite.
Beneath the fall, it flows peacefully along, runnelling and rippling on, to the
blue fiord, through the quiet green valley. White streamlets of water trickle
down the trap hill-sides, every forty or fifty yards; the whole producing a
continuous quiet murmur or undertone, not unlike that from the wings of an
innumerable swarm of gnats playing in the sunshine on a warm summer’s day,
but ever broken in upon by the clear liquid tinkle of the streamlets nearest us,
heard drip, dripping, with a clear metallic sound which might be compared to
the chirp of the grasshopper. This solitary glen, now lying bathed in light, is
fanned by the gentle breeze, fragrant with the smell of tedded hay, and richly
variegated with wild flowers—harebells, butter-cups, wild thyme, cotton-grass,
and forget-me-nots—a gathered bunch of which is now lying beside me on a
moss-cushioned rock. Quietly musing here on all, of strange or new, I have
seen since leaving home, and dwelling more particularly on the great kindness
I have received at all hands, I feel grateful to God, who has hitherto opened up
a way for me and given me friends amongst strangers wherever I chanced to
wander.
We saw specimens of surturbrand, which crops out on the top of a steep
mountain, at the mouth of the fiord, on the north side, and obtained a few
more geological specimens and plants.
After dinner, I strolled for a quarter of a mile up the valley with Mr.
Henderson and Dr. Mackinlay, to visit the farm behind the store. It consists of
a group of hovels, the walls are stone and turf, the gables wood, and the roofs
covered with green sod. The entrance is a dark muddy passage leading into a
ground-floor apartment as dark and muddy, where, in winter, cattle are kept.
The kitchen is a dirty, smoky, sooty hole, with fish hanging in it to smoke and
dry; a pot of seal-blubber stands steaming in a corner. The fire is raised on a
few stones above the floor, like a smithy-forge; while there is a hole in the roof
for the smoke. Picking our way through another long passage, dark and dirty,
we found a trap-ladder and ascended to a little garret, where I could only walk
erect in the very centre. The apartment was floored and fitted up with bunks
all round the sides and ends. In these box-beds, at least seven people—men,
women and children—sleep at night, and sometimes a few more have to be
accommodated. The little windows in the roof are not made to open, and no
regard whatever is paid to ventilation. Dr. Mackinlay prescribed for an old man
we found lying ill in this abominable fetid atmosphere, where his chances of
recovery were very slight. He was an old farm servant about whom nobody
seemed to care anything.
 FARM HOUSE, SEYDISFIORD.

In a little apartment shut off from this one, and in the gable portion of the
building which in this case constitutes the front of the house, an old woman at
the window sits spinning with the ancient distaff,[39] precisely as in the days of
Homer.
To amuse the farmer’s daughters I showed them my sketches, with which they
seemed much interested.
 SEYDISFIORD, LOOKING EAST TOWARDS THE SEA.

I understood part of their remarks, and could in some degree make myself
understood by them, with the few Danish and Icelandic words I kept picking
up. On receiving a little money and a few knick-knacks, they, all round, held
out their hands and shook mine very heartily. This, the Icelanders always do,
on receiving a present of anything however trifling.
After sketching the farm-house, I took two views of Mr. Henderson’s store;
one of them from a height behind, looking down towards the fiord, and the
other from the brink of it, looking up the valley. In the latter, a part of the
same farm-house appears, and thus indicates its exact position.[40] With the
assistance of these three sketches taken together, the reader will be enabled to
form some idea, of the appearance presented by this arm of the North Sea.
 SEYDISFIORD, BY FARÖE TO LEITH
We sailed from Seydisfiord at half-past six P.M. on Saturday night, direct for the
Faröe islands.
There is a singular cone-shaped mountain called Brimnæs Fjall at the mouth of
the fiord, showing masses of clay-rock alternating with and pushing up trap,
which is deposited in thin layers of perpendicular structure. Several pillars or
shafts are left standing singly on the very summit, and present a very curious
appearance, distinctly relieved against the amber light of the sky. At Dr.
Mackinlay’s request I made a sketch of it.

BRIMNÆS FJALL.

A vessel of Mr. Henderson’s, which had been given up as lost, now

unexpectedly came in sight, which necessitated Mr. Jacobson and a young
Iceland lad, who were en route to Copenhagen, to get on board her and return
to Seydisfiord to look after her cargo, evidently much to their disappointment.
The wild scenery of the coast, especially at Reydarfiord, was strikingly
picturesque.[41]
Mr. Murray, Professor Chadbourne, Mr. Henderson and I walked the deck till
a late or rather an early hour, and watched the fast receding mountain-ranges
of Iceland—pale lilac, mauve, or deep purple—and the distant horns, shading
through similar tints from rose to indigo, all distinctly seen athwart the golden
light of the horizon which for hours has been ebbing slowly and softly away,
but is now on the turn, and about to flow again.

Sabbath, August 7. The weather is fine; no land or sail in sight all day; whales
playing about the ship. Had many pleasant deck-walks and talks, and several
quiet hours, sitting perched on the stem, reading, or watching the prow, below,
cutting and cleaving through the clear green water like a knife.

Monday morning, August 8. We are sailing between two of the Faröe islands,
bright sunshine lighting up all the regularly terraced trap-rocks, caves, and
crevices of this singular group.
I have now got a pet to look after, and, without Shakspere’s authority for it, we
know that
“Young ravens must have food.”

The last thing I did last night was to shut Odin in his box, and the first thing
this morning to let him out again and give him the freedom of the ship. The
bird knows me, is pleased when I scratch his head, and confidingly runs
hopping to me for protection when the boys about the ship teaze him more
than he likes. His fellow traveller, a young Icelandic fox brought on board at
Reykjavik to be sent to the Marquis of Stafford, also runs about the ship
during the day. At first we had some misgivings on the subject; for
“Treason is but trusted like the fox—
Who ne’er so tame, so cherished, and locked up,
Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.”

However, these fears were soon dissipated; for Odin can hold his own, and
when the fox, approaching furtively, uses any liberty with his tail feathers, he
suddenly gets a peck from the bird’s great formidable beak, which he does not
seem much to relish. The salutary fear continues for a short time, is forgotten,
and again the dab comes as a reminder. We were often greatly amused,
watching their individual habits and droll ways, when the one intruded upon
the other. It was half play, half earnest, a sort of armed neutrality with a basis
of mutual respect.
On the west coast of Stromoe is the roofless ruin of the church of Kirkuboe.
It was begun in the twelfth century, but never finished. It is built of stone, has
five large windows and several small ones below; a little farm house or hut,
with red tiles on the roof, stands near it. What a strange lonely place for a
church! Thorshavn lies on the other—the east—side of the island. It is only
five miles distant as the crow flies, but as we have to sail round the south
point, and Stromoe is twenty-seven miles long, we do not reach it till near
noon.
On landing, Mr. Haycock accompanied me to call for Miss Löbner, who has
been poorly ever since her sea voyage. Her mother presented wine, cake,
coffee &c., and was most hospitable. None of us being able to speak Faröese,
at first we felt a little awkward; but a brother of the old lady’s who speaks
English soon came to the rescue and acted as interpreter. With justifiable
pride, they again showed us their flower and kitchen garden. I got the whale-
knives, caps, shoes, gloves &c., which had been made or procured for me
during my absence in Iceland. Ere leaving, Miss Löbner appeared to say adieu!
and insisted on my accepting several other specimens of Faröese workmanship
as remembrances of Thorshavn. No people could have been kinder.
Again, wandering about, we explored the town, looked at the church, stepped
into the stores, passed the governor’s garden, and wandered a mile or two in
that direction in order to obtain a view, and get quit of the fishy smells which
superabound in Thorshavn.
On our return we called for Mr. Müller, who presented me with a copy of the
gospel of St. Matthew in Danish and Faröese, arranged in parallel columns. I
understood him to say that this was the only book ever printed in the Faröese
dialect, and that it is now out of print and very rare. It bears the date of 1823.
Here we saw an old man 76 years of age, an Icelander who has been in Faröe
for the last 40 years. He had spent several years in England, and told me that,
in 1815, he saw our regiments land at Liverpool after the battle of Waterloo.
He speaks English fluently.
A Thames fishing smack, and a sloop from Lerwick, are lying in the bay.
Piping and dancing goes merrily on, on board the latter, relieved by intervals
of music alone. In one of these, we heard “The Yellow Hair’d Laddie,”
rendered with considerable taste, although, doubtless, several “improvements
and additions” were made on the original score.
We took some Faröese boatmen into the saloon of the steamer, and I shall not
soon forget the look of wonder and utter astonishment pourtrayed on their
countenances, as they gazed on the mirrors and everything around, or were
shown things with which they were not familiar and heard their uses explained.
They were greatly pleased with my life-belt. Dr. Mackinlay showed them a
multiplying-glass, and, as it was handed from one to another—each man first
making the discovery of what had so inexplicably excited the wonder of the
last looker—the queer exclamations of amazement accompanied by inimitable
pantomimic gestures reached their culminating point, and were irresistibly
droll.

NAALSÖE—FARÖE.

The weather is all we could desire. The sailors are singing some curious Danish
songs, with the time well marked, as they heave the anchor; and at 20 minutes
past 6 o’clock P.M. we are steaming out of the bay. The evening is lovely, and
the Thermometer, on the deck, stands at 68°. Thorshavn soon disappears, and
we leave the Faröe islands astern, relieved against an amber sky, Dimon being
the most striking and conspicuous of the group. A few stars shone overhead,
and I walked the deck till midnight.
 ENTRANCE TO THE SOUND LEADING TO THORSHAVN.

Tuesday, August 9. At breakfast, tasted a whale-steak which Miss Löbner had

yesterday sent on board for me, with particular instructions to the stewardess
to have it properly cooked. The flesh looked and tasted like dry tough beef,
with a slight flavour of venison. The blubber, however was too strong for any
of us to do more than merely satisfy—not gratify—our curiosity.
The day was lovely. Professor Chadbourne invited me to visit and spend a
month with him during his holiday. Indeed, cordial, pressing invitations, all
round, were the order of the day. As fellow-travellers we had been happy
together, and felt sorry at the near prospect of our little party being broken up
and scattered; for several valued friendships had been formed.
Between three and four o’clock in the afternoon, the thermometer indicated
98° in the sun and 75° in the shade. Dr. Mackinlay showed me an old Danish
dollar he had got, in change, at Reykjavik; it bore the date of A.D. 1619, the year
of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers from the May Flower. Part of the day was
spent in writing out these pages from my diary. In the evening we saw, far to
our left, faint and dim on the horizon line, the north-west islands of Shetland;
and by a quarter to 8 o’clock P.M. were sailing twenty miles to the west of Fair
Isle, which lies between Orkney and Shetland. Both groups are in sight. We
have not seen a sail since we left Faröe, and now, what we at first fancied to be
one, off the north end of the Orkneys, turns out to be a light-house, rising
apparently from the sea, but in reality from low lying land which is yet below
the horizon.
The sunset to-night is gorgeous; cavernous recesses opening through a dense
purple cloud-bank into glowing regions of fire; while broad flashing gleams ray
out on every side athwart the sky, as if from furnace-mouths. Then we have
moonlight on a sea smooth as glass, and not even a ripple to be seen. The
Orkney light-house, now gleaming like a setting star, is left far astern. The
phosphoresence along the vessel’s side and in her wake is most brilliant; while,
seething, electric-like, from the screw, it rivals the “churned fire-froth” of the
demon steed. The moon, half-hid, is at times deep crimson and again bright
yellow. Many falling stars are shooting “madly from their spheres;” not that
our music lured them, although, “on such a night” of nights, when all is
harmonious, we cannot but sing. Mr. Murray gives us “Home, sweet home”
and “The last rose of summer,” and ere retiring at midnight, all of us join
together in singing the “Spanish Chant.”

Wednesday morning, August 10. We are off Inverness; wind a-head and rising.
Professor Chadbourne to-day gave me an oak-leaf which he plucked from the
tree, at Upsala, planted by Linnæus with his own hands. Wrote as long as the
heaving of the ship would admit of it, then arranged botanical specimens and
read Wordsworth. The wind is blowing so fresh, off Peterhead, that, with full
steam, we are not making above one and a half knots; and at times can scarcely
keep any way on. Passed the Bell-Rock; the sea still rising. Went to bed at 11
o’clock P.M.; vessel pitching a good deal.

Thursday morning, August 11. Rose at four o’clock and was on deck ere the
Arcturus dropt anchor in Leith Roads. But as we cannot get our traps on shore
till the custom-house officer comes at nine o’clock to overhaul them, we
remain and breakfast on board. The examination made, at half-past ten o’clock
A.M., we landed by a tug steamer, and made for our respective railway stations,
each, on parting, bidding the other “a bright adieu!” in the hope that it might
only be for “a brief absence!” “Odin” was in good feather: his owner sun-
bronzed and strong.
At length, comfortably ensconsed in the fast express, I lay back in the corner
of a compartment, closed my eyes and resigned myself to see pleasant pictures
and dream waking dreams—of snow jökuls, volcanoes, glaciers, and ice-fields;
of geysers, mud-cauldrons, and sulphur-pits; of lava plains, black, wierd and
blasted, or dreary wastes of ice; of deep rapid rivers, flashing waterfalls, leaping
torrents; of frightful chasms, rugged cliffs, and precipitous mountains
mirrored in deep blue fiords; of pathless stony deserts, enlivened at times with
oasis-like spots of tender green herbage and bright coloured flowers; of wild
break-neck rides, over bare rocks, among slabs and lava-blocks of all shapes
and sizes and lying in every conceivable direction; through volcanic sands and
scoriæ; by red and black vetrified craters, or across dangerous fords; of
multifarious scamperings too, and mud-plashings over hill and dale; or wild
rides down rocky steeps, not on a phantom steed, but on a sure-footed Iceland
pony; of pleasant companionship by the way; of cordial welcome and great
kindness received, in quiet homesteads, and at all hands from the people,
wherever we went; then again of Frost contending with Fire, and of all the
varied and marvellous phenomena of Iceland, that singularly interesting island
in the lone North Sea.

STROMOE—FARÖE.
APPENDIX.
 I.

ICELANDIC STORIES AND FAIRY TALES

TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BY THE REV. OLAF PÁLSSON, DEAN
AND RECTOR OF REYKJAVIK CATHEDRAL. REVISED AND
EDITED BY DAVID MACKINLAY AND ANDREW JAMES
SYMINGTON.

STORIES OF SÆMUNDUR FRODI, CALLED THE

LEARNED.[42]

I. THE DARK SCHOOL.

Long, long ago, when Trolls and Giants lived among men, there was a famous
school where curious youths were taught the mysteries of witchcraft. France
and Germany both claim the honour of it, but no one knows where it really
was.
It was kept in a dismal cavern, deep underground, into which no ray of
sunlight ever entered. Here, the scholars had to stay no less than seven winters;
for it took them all that time to complete their studies. They never saw their
teacher from one year’s end to another. Every morning a grey grizzly hand, all
covered with hair, pushed itself through the cavern wall and gave to each one
his lesson book. These books were written all over with letters of fire, and
could be read with ease, even in the dark. The lessons over, the same grizzly
hand again appeared to take away the books and bring in the scholars’ dinner.
At the close of winter, the scholars who had then got through their seven years
apprenticeship were dismissed. The great iron door was opened, and the
master stood watching those who went out; for he had stipulated that the
scholar who walked hindmost, in passing through, was to be seized by him and
kept as a thrall. But who was this strange school-master? Why, Old Nick
himself. No wonder, then, that each of the scholars struggled hard to be first
in passing the fatal threshold.
Once on a time, there were three Icelanders at the dark school; Sæmund Frodi,
afterwards parish priest at Oddi, Kalfur Arnason, and Halfdan Eldjarnsson,
afterwards parish priest at Fell, in Slettuhlid. They were all dismissed at the
same time. Sæmund, to the great delight of his companions, offered to walk
hindmost in going out of school, so he dressed himself in a long loose cloak,
which he took care to leave unbuttoned, and bidding good bye to school-
fellows left behind, prepared to follow his countrymen. Just as he was putting
his feet on the first step of the stair which led up from the school door, Old
Nick, who was watching hard by, made a clutch at the cloak and called out,
“Sæmund Frodi, pass not the door,
Thou art my thrall for evermore.”

And now the great iron door began to turn on its hinges; but, before Old Nick
had time to slam it too, Sæmund slipt his arms out of the sleeves of his cloak,
and sprung forward out of the grasp of his enemy.
In doing so, the door struck him a heavy blow on the heel, which gave him a
good deal of pain, when he said,
“The door hath swung too near the heel,
But better sore foot than serve the Deil.”

And so Sæmund outwitted Old Nick, and got away from the dark school along
with his two friends. Since then, it has become a common saying in Iceland,
when a person has had a narrow escape from danger, that “the door swung
too near his heels.”[43]

II. SÆMUND GETS THE LIVING OF ODDI.

At the time Sæmund, Kalfur, and Halfdan came out of the dark school, there
was no priest at Oddi, for the old priest had just died. All three of them would
fain have the living, and so each went to the king to ask it for himself. The
king knew his men; and so he sent them all away with the same answer, that
whoever reached Oddi first, should be made priest of that place.
Thereupon Sæmund summoned Old Nick and said to him, “Now, I’ll make a
bargain with you, if you swim with me on your back across to Iceland, and
land me there without wetting my coat-tail, I’ll be your servant as long as I
live.” Old Nick was highly pleased with the offer and agreed at once. So, in less
than no time, he changed himself into a seal, and left Norway with Sæmund on
his back.
Sæmund took care to have his prayer book with him, and read bits out of it
every now and then while on the way. As soon as they got close to the shores
of Iceland, which they did in less time than you would think, he closed the
book and suddenly struck the seal such a heavy blow on the neck with it that
the animal went down all at once into deep water. Sæmund, now left to
himself, struck out for the shore and got easily to land. In this way Old Nick
lost his bargain, and Sæmund got the living of Oddi.

III. THE GOBLIN AND THE COWHERD.

When Sæmund was priest of Oddi, he once had a cowherd—a good servant
withal, but greatly addicted to swearing. Sæmund often reproved him for this,
but all his reproofs were of no avail. At last he told him, he really ought to
leave off his bad habits, for Old Nick and his servants lived upon people’s
curses and wicked words. “Say you so?” said the cowherd, “if I knew for
certain that Old Nick would lose his meals by it, I would never say a bad word
more.” So he made up his mind to mend his ways.
“I’ll soon see whether you are in earnest or not,” said Sæmund, and so, he
forthwith lodged a goblin in the cowhouse. The cowherd did not like his
guest, and no wonder: for he was up to every kind of mischief, and almost
worried the life out of him with his wicked pranks. The poor cowherd bore up
bravely for a time, and never let slip an oath or angry word. The goblin got
leaner day by day, to the intense delight of the cowherd, who hoped, bye and
bye, to see an end of him.
One morning, on opening the byre door, the poor cowherd found every thing
turned topsy-turvy. The milk pails and stools were broken in pieces and
scattered about the floor; and the whole of the cows—and there were many of
them—tied tail to tail, were straggling about without halters, and goring each
other. It needed but half an eye to see who had done the mischief. So the
cowherd in a rage turned round to the goblin who, shrunk and haggard, lay
crouched up in a corner of a stall, the very picture of wretchedness, and
poured forth such a volley of furious curses as would have overwhelmed any
human being in the same plight. The goblin all at once began to revive; his
skin no longer shrivelled looked smooth and plump; his eye brightened up, and
the stream of life again flowed joyously through his veins.
“O, oh!” said the cowherd, as he suddenly checked himself, when he saw the
wonderful effect his swearing had on the goblin, “Now I know for certain that
Sæmund was right.” And from that day forward he was never known to utter
an oath. As for the goblin, he soon pined away again and has long since been
beyond troubling anybody. May you and I, and all who hear this story, strive to
follow the good example of Sæmund’s cowherd!

IV. OLD NICK MADE HIMSELF AS LITTLE AS HE WAS ABLE.

Sæmund one day asked Old Nick how little he could make himself. “Why,”
replied he, “as for that I could make myself as small as the smallest midge.”
Thereupon Sæmund bored a tiny hole in the door post, and asked him to
make good his boast by walking into it. This he at once did; but no sooner was
he in, than Sæmund stopped the hole with a little plug of wood, and made all
fast.
Old Nick cursed his folly, cried, and begged for mercy; but Sæmund would not
take out the stopper till he promised to become his servant and do all that he
was told. This was the reason why Sæmund always had it in his power to
employ Old Nick in whatever business he liked.

V. THE FLY.

As might be expected, Old Nick always harboured a great ill will against
Sæmund: for he could not help feeling how much he was in Sæmund’s power.
He therefore tried to revenge himself on various occasions; but all his tricks
failed, for Sæmund was too sharp for him.
Once, he put on the shape of a little fly, and hid himself—so he thought, at
least—under the film that had gathered on the priest’s milk jug, hoping that
Sæmund would swallow him unawares, and so lose his life. But Sæmund had
all his eyes about him; so instead of swallowing the fly he wrapped it up in the
film, covered the whole with a bladder, and laid the package on the altar.
There, the fly was obliged to remain till after the service, when Sæmund
opened the package and gave Old Nick his liberty. It is told, as a truth, that old
Nick never found himself in a worse case than when lying on the altar before
Sæmund.
 VI. THE GOBLIN’S WHISTLE.

Sæmund had a whistle of such wonderful power, that, as often as he blew it,
one or more goblins appeared before him, ready to do his bidding.[44] One day,
on getting up, he happened to leave the whistle under his pillow, and forgot all
about it till the afternoon when the housemaid was going to make his bed. He
charged her, if she found anything unusual about the bed, she was on no
account to touch it, or move it from its place. But he might have saved himself
the trouble of speaking; for, as soon as the girl saw the whistle, she took it up
in her hand, and looked at it on every side. Not satisfied with much handling
it, she put it to her mouth and blew it lustily. The sound of the blast had not
died away before a goblin stood before her, saying, “what will you have me to
do?” The girl was not a little startled, but had the presence of mind to conceal
her surprise.
It so happened that the hides of ten sheep, that had been killed that day, were
lying on the ground in front of the parsonage. Recollecting this, the girl replied
to the goblin, “Go and count all the hairs that are on the ten hides outside,
and, if you finish your task before I get this bed made, I’ll consent to marry
you.” The goblin thought that a task worth undertaking for such a prize; and
hurrying out, fell to counting the hairs with all his might. The girl who did not
like the idea of being the wife of a goblin, lost no time, you may be sure, in
getting through with her work; and it was well she bestirred herself; for, by the
time the bed was made, the goblin had almost finished his task. Only a few
hairs of the last hide remained uncounted, but they were enough to make him
lose his bargain. When Sæmund afterwards learned how prudently the girl had
got out of her scrape, he was very well pleased.

ICELANDIC FAIRY TALES.

BIARNI SVEINSSON AND HIS SISTER SALVÖR.[45]

Once on a time, a worthy couple, Sveinn and his wife, occupied a farm, on the
shores of the beautiful Skagafiord, in the north country. They were in easy
circumstances and were blessed with two fine children, a son and daughter,
who were the joy of their hearts. Biarni and his sister Salvör—for these were
the names of their children—were twins and greatly attached to each other.
In the spring of the year,[46] about St. John’s day, when these two had reached
the age of twenty, the people of Skagafiord were arranging a party to make a
journey to the mountains of the interior, to gather Iceland-moss for making
porridge. Sveinn promised to let his son go with the party. As soon as Salvör
knew that, she felt a great desire to go too; and so she went to her parents to
ask their consent. This was not so easily got, as they did not wish to part with
both their children at once; and besides, they knew she was ill fitted to bear the
hardships and fatigues of mountain travelling. But she fretted so much at the
thought of being left behind, that, at last, they consented to let her go.
The night before the moss-gatherers were to leave, Sveinn the farmer dreamed
that he had two beautiful white birds, of which he was very fond, and that all
at once, to his great grief, the hen-bird disappeared and could nowhere be
found. On awaking in the morning, he could not help thinking that his dream
betokened no good to his darling Salvör, so he called her to him, and after
telling her his dream, he said to her, “Salvör dear! I cannot bear to part with
you, you must stay at home with your mother and me, for I would never
forgive myself if any ill befel you by the way.” Salvör who had been in great
glee at the prospect of riding, day after day, up the romantic valleys to the
south of Skagafiord, and there tenting out amidst the mountains, was neither
to hold nor to bind, when she found that, after all, she would have to stay at
home; she wept with vexation and distressed herself so much that her father
could not bear it, and again gave an unwilling consent to let her go. So she
accompanied her brother and the rest of the party to the mountains.
The first day after getting there, she gathered Iceland-moss with the others,
but during the night she fell suddenly ill and was unable to leave her tent on
the following day. Biarni stayed with her, and did all that a brother could do to
help and comfort her. For three whole days he was her companion, but, on the
fourth day, he left her for a time in charge of a friend, while he himself joined
the moss-gatherers. After partly filling his bag, he sat himself down by a large
stone, and, resting his head on his hand, brooded over his sister’s unhappy
fate; he feared she was going to die among the mountains.
By and by he heard a great tramping of horses, and, on looking about, he saw
two men riding towards him at a quick pace. One of them wore red coloured
clothes, and had a red horse; the other who was younger, was dressed in black,
and was mounted on a black horse. On reaching the place where Biarni was
sitting, they dismounted and saluted him by name.
“What ails you Biarni,” said the elder of the two strangers. For a time Biarni
answered not a word, but on being pressed to do so, he opened up his heart to
them and told all about his sister’s illness.
“My companions are going to return home, but I must stay to watch over
Salvör; and who knows how soon she may die in my arms.”
“You are in a hard case Biarni,” said the other, “and I am sorry for you, but
won’t you leave your sister with me, and I will take good care of her.”
“No, no,” said Biarni, “that I dare not do, for I know neither who you are, nor
where you come from. But will you tell me where your home is?”
“That’s no business of yours,” said the other, rather gruffly, and then, taking
from his pocket a silver-gilt box set with precious stones, added, “Won’t you
sell me your sister for this box.”
“No,” said Biarni, “nor for a thousand like it. I would not give her to you for
any money.”
“Well! well! there is no help for it, you will at all events accept this box, as a
token that you have met with men among the mountains.”
Biarni took the offered gift with pleasure, and thanked the giver. The two men
then bade him farewell and rode away, while he returned to the tent. Next
morning his companions went away home, leaving him alone with his sister.
Though she was now a little better, he dared not sleep, for he was afraid lest
the strangers should come and steal her away. But, after watching a whole day
and night, he felt overcome with fatigue; so he lay down, and folding his arms
round her waist to protect her, fell into a sound sleep. But, when he awoke, his
sister was gone, and was nowhere to be found. He spent a whole day
sorrowfully wandering from spot to spot, looking and calling for her, but it
was all in vain. He then turned his back on the mountains, and with a heavy
heart went home, and told his parents what had happened.
“Woe is me,” said Sveinn, “what I feared most has come to pass, but God’s
will be done!”
There was great grief in Skagafiord when the news spread from farm to farm;
for Salvör, with all her way-wardness, was a promising girl, and was every
body’s favourite. A party of young men returned to the mountains to look for
her, but nowhere was the least trace of her to be found.
And now ten years had passed away. By this time Biarni was married and
settled on a farm, not far from his father’s. During autumn all his sheep went
amissing, and his shepherd could not discover what had become of them
though he searched diligently for them three whole days. On learning this,
Biarni bid his wife provide him with a week’s supply of food, and an extra pair
of shoes; “for,” said he, “I shall go to the mountains myself to look for the
sheep.” His parents, who were still alive, urged him to stay at home; for they
feared that, if he went to the mountains, they might never see his face again.
“I must go,” said he to them, “I cannot afford to lose the sheep. But be of
good heart, and do not begin to weary for me till the week is over.”
He then went away on foot, and did not leave off walking for three days. At
the end of that time he came to a cavern, where he turned in and lay down to
sleep. On waking, he could not see a yard before him; for a thick fog which
rested on the ground. He continued his journey, but soon lost his way.
Towards evening the fog cleared off, and he found himself in a spacious valley,
not far from a large well built farm house. It was the hay season, so that all the
people of the farm were busy in the meadow. On getting near the house, he
noticed, in particular, two women and a girl who were tedding the hay. “God’s
peace be with you,” said he, on reaching the spot; and then, telling them of his
mishaps, he asked permission to stay all night under their roof. They gave him
a hearty welcome, and the girl went with him to the house. She was of more
genteel appearance than the rest—young and handsome—and, as Biarni
thought, bore some resemblance to his long lost but well remembered sister.
This unexpected circumstance renewed his old griefs, but he did what he could
to seem cheerful before his young hostess. She led him through several
apartments to a large well furnished room, where everything was neat and tidy.
Here, she drew in a chair, and kindly asked him to sit down and rest, while she
brought in supper. He had not long to wait; for she soon placed upon the table
a plentiful supply of meat and wine.
After supper, she showed him to the little room where he was to sleep for the
night; she then took away his wet clothes, wished him a kind good night, and
left the room.
As Biarni lay in bed, he fell a-wondering where he was, and how the sight of
the girl should have so waked up the sad memories of the past. He fell asleep
thinking of these things, but was soon awakened by the sound of singing in a
room over his head. It was the family at evening worship, as is the custom of
the country. He heard both men and women singing, but one voice sounded