From Things to Concepts: Cognitive-Semiotic Notes about the «House
of the Philosopher» by Czesław Miłosz

The article offers a cognitive-semiotic analysis of Czesław Miłosz
Polish-language text «Dom filozofa» («A Philosopher's Home», 1991). Simul-
taneously, we discuss the possibility of talking about the algorithms of thinking
in the form of an artistic narrative. How does the philosopher think? This is the
theme proposed by Miłosz. The subject of his essay is the steps of abstraction,
according to which the philosopher goes to the whole picture of the world.

Philosopher works with mental representations – a system of objects of
a complex ontological nature: the woman’s running in a green dress on the
stairs, slamming the car door. The logic of the verbal representation of the world
consists in removing the word from the thing. The philosopher collects the de-
tails of the world in the form of iconic signs. Ascending the steps of abstraction,
he gives autonomy to attributes (running up as such) and, on the contrary, cre-
ates «things in themselves» – objects outside their qualities (stems outside the
girl cutting them, color, forms). The multiplicity of the world is reduced to cata-
logs, where each member (a scream «Oh!») is a sign of a fuzzy set. The thinker
uses the various ways of information compression: paradigms, processes of al-
ternative categorization. In the end, this is the way to the birth of concepts.

The language of thinking is based on working with «living concepts» that
bring abstraction closer to a person. The other side of the word is the image of
another modality. Miłosz puts the emphasis on the verbal-visual representation
of the world – its ocular-centric nature. In the «cognitive tango» of languages, two verbal systems (Polish, Latin) are presented in the current mode, while the
visual image is of a mental nature.

The philosopherʼs eye is similar to J. L. Borges’s Aleph, allowing to see
a space in the form of a «map» – simultaneous plurality of things. His linguistic
consciousness is like a time machine. Existing in the twentieth century, the phi-
losopher «watches» the Venice Council of Ten (1310), the birth of cuneiform,
dinosaur pastures, intergalactic spaces. According to Miłosz, the freedom of
movement through loci and times puts an equal sign between the consciousness
of f man and God, devoid of the mortal body. Modern science is considering the
literature and art as a periphery of cognitive-semiotic studies, where the figura-
tive forms of representation of knowledge (and in the case of Miłosz, its
intuitive foresight) become a tool for popularizing information about the work
of human thinking. In cognitive science the mechanism of thinking, described
by Czesław Miłosz, is analyzed in the framework of the theory of mental spaces,
conceptual integration, double coding of information, image schemes.