The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  The castaway, who by now is quite well educated and curious about the world, forms the habit of taking a walk on the beach early in the morning. Here he regularly comes upon bottles which have been washed up by the waves. The bottles are tightly corked and each one contains a single piece of paper with a single sentence written on it.

  The messages are very diverse in form and subject matter. Naturally he is interested, at first idly, then acutely—when it turns out that some of the messages convey important information. Being an alert, conscientious, and well-informed man who is interested in the advance of science and the arts, and a responsible citizen who has a stake in the welfare of his island society, he is anxious to evaluate the messages properly and so take advantage of the information they convey. The bottles arrive by the thousands and he and his fellow islanders—by now he has told them of the messages and they share his interest—are faced with two questions. One is, Where are the bottles coming from?—a question which does not here concern us; the other is, How shall we go about sorting out the messages? which are important and which are not? which are more important and which less? Some of the messages are obviously trivial or nonsensical. Others are false. Still others state facts and draw conclusions which appear to be significant.

  Here are some of the messages, chosen at random:

  Lead melts at 330 degrees.

  2 +2 = 4.

  Chicago, a city, is on Lake Michigan.

  Chicago is on the Hudson River or Chicago is not on the Hudson River.*

  At 2 p.m., January 4, 1902, at the residence of Manuel Gómez in Matanzas, Cuba, a leaf fell from the banyan tree.

  The British are coming.

  The market for eggs in Bora Bora [a neighboring island] is very good.

  If water John brick is.

  Jane will arrive tomorrow.

  The pressure of a gas is a function of heat and volume.

  Acute myelogenous leukemia may be cured by parenteral administration

  of metallic beryllium.

  In 1943 the Russians murdered 10,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest.

  A war party is approaching from Bora Bora.

  It is possible to predict a supernova in the constellation Ophiuchus next month by using the following technique—

  The Atman (Self) is the Brahman.

  The dream symbol, house with a balcony, usually stands for a woman.

  Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.

  Truth is beauty.

  Being comprises essence and existence.

  As the castaway sets about sorting out these messages, he would, if he followed conventional logical practice, separate them into two large groups. There are those sentences which appear to state empirical facts which can only be arrived at by observation. Such are the sentences

  Chicago is on Lake Michigan.

  Lead melts at 330 degrees.

  Then there are those sentences which seem to refer to a state of affairs implicit in the very nature of reality (or some would say in the very structure of consciousness). Certainly they do not seem to depend on a particular observation. Such are the sentences

  Chicago is on the Hudson River or Chicago is not on the Hudson River.

  2 + 2 = 4.

  These two types of sentences are usually called synthetic and analytic.

  For the time being I will pass over the positivist division between sense and nonsense, a criterion which would accept the sentence about the melting point of lead because it can be tested experimentally but would reject the sentences about the dream symbol and the metaphysical and poetic sentences because they cannot be tested. I will also say nothing for the moment about another possible division, that between those synthetic sentences which state repeatable events, like the melting of lead, and those which state nonrepeatable historical events, like the murder of the Polish officers.

  It is possible, however, to sort out the messages in an entirely different way. To the islander indeed it must seem that this second way is far more sensible—and far more radical—than the former. The sentences appear to him to fall naturally into two quite different groups.

  There are those sentences which are the result of a very special kind of human activity, an activity which the castaway, an ordinary fellow, attributes alike to scientists, scholars, poets, and philosophers. Different as these men are, they are alike in their withdrawal from the ordinary affairs of the island, the trading, farming, manufacturing, playing, gossiping, loving—in order to discover underlying constancies amid the flux of phenomena, in order to take exact measurements, in order to make precise inductions and deductions, in order to arrange words or sounds or colors to express universal human experience. (This extraordinary activity is first known to have appeared in the world more or less simultaneously in Greece, India, and China around 600 B.C., a time which Jaspers calls the axial period in world history.)

  In this very large group, which the islander might well call “science” in the broadest sense of knowing, the sense of the German word Wissenschaft, the islander would put both synthetic and analytic sentences, not only those accepted by positive scientists, but the psychoanalytic sentence, the metaphysical sentence, and the lines of poetry. (He might even include paintings as being, in a sense, sentences.) If the physicist protests at finding himself in the company of psychoanalysts, poets, Vedantists, and Scholastics, the islander will reply that he is not saying that all the sentences are true but that their writers appear to him to be engaged in the same sort of activity as the physicist, namely, withdrawal from the ordinary affairs of life to university, laboratory, studio, mountain eyrie, where they write sentences to which other men assent (or refuse assent), saying, Yes, this is indeed how things are. In some sense or other, the sentences can be verified by the readers even if not testable experimentally—as when the psychiatric patient hears his analyst explain a dream symbol and suddenly realizes that this is indeed what his own dream symbol meant.

  In the second group the islander would place those sentences which are significant precisely in so far as the reader is caught up in the affairs and in the life of the island and in so far as he has not withdrawn into laboratory or seminar room. Such are the sentences

  There is fresh water in the next cove.

  A hostile war party is approaching.

  The market for eggs in Bora Bora is very good.

  These sentences are highly significant to the islander, because he is thirsty, because his island society is threatened, or because he is in the egg business. Such messages he might well call “news.”

  It will be seen that the criteria of the logician and the positive scientist are of no use to the islander. They do not distinguish between those messages which are of consequence for life on the island and those messages which are not. The logician would place these two sentences

  A hostile war party is approaching.

  The British are coming [to Concord].

  in the same pigeonhole. But to the islander they are very different. The islander lumps together synthetic and analytic, sense and nonsense (to the positivist) sentences under the group “science.” Nor is the division tidy. Some sentences do not seem to be provided for at all. The islander is fully aware of the importance of the sentence about the melting point of lead and he puts it under “science.” He is fully aware of the importance of the sentence about the hostile war party and he puts it under “news.” But where does he put the sentence about the approach of the British to Concord? He does not really care; he would be happy to put it in the “science” pigeonhole if the scientists want it. All he knows is that it is not news to him or the island.

  If the islander was asked to say what was wrong with the first division of the logician and scientist, he might reply that it unconsciously assumes that this very special posture of “science” (including poetry, psychoanalysis, philosophy, etc.) is the only attitude that yields significant sentences. People who discover how to strike this attitude of “science” seem also to dec
ide at the same time that they will only admit as significant those sentences which have been written by others who have struck the same attitude. Yet there are times when they act as if this were not the case. If a group of island logicians are busy in a seminar room sifting through the messages from the bottles and someone ran in crying, “The place is on fire!” the logicians would not be content to classify the message as a protocol sentence. They would also leave the building. The castaway will observe only that their classification does take account of the extraordinary significance which they as men have attributed to the message.

  To the castaway it seems obvious that a radical classification of the sentences cannot abstract from the concrete situation in which one finds oneself. He is as interested as the scientist in arriving at a rigorous and valid classification. If the scientist should protest that one can hardly make such a classification when each sentence may have a different significance for every man who hears it, the castaway must agree with him. He must agree, that is, that you cannot classify without abstracting. But he insists that the classification be radical enough to take account of the hearer of the news, of the difference between a true piece of news which is not important and a true piece of news which is important. In order to do this, we do not have to throw away the hard-won objectivity of the scientist. We have only to take a step further back so that we may see objectively not only the sentences but the positive scientist who is examining them. After all, the objective posture of the scientist is in the world and can be studied like anything else in the world.

  If the scientist protests that in taking one step back to see the scientist at work, the castaway is starting a game of upstaging which has no end—for why not take still another step back and watch the castaway watching the scientist—the castaway replies simply that this is not so. For if you take a step back to see the castaway classifying the messages, you will only see the same thing he sees as he watches the scientist, a man working objectively.

  Then, if the castaway is a serious fellow who wants to do justice both to the scientists and to the news in the bottle, he is obliged to become not less but more objective and to take one step back of the scientist, so that he can see him at work in the laboratory and seminar room—and see the news in the bottle too.

  What he will see then is not only that there are two kinds of sentences in the bottles but that there are two kinds of postures from which one reads the sentences, two kinds of verifying procedures by which one acts upon them, and two kinds of responses to the sentences.

  The classification of the castaway would be something like this:

  The Difference between a Piece of Knowledge

  and a Piece of News

  (1) The Character of the Sentence

  By “piece of knowledge” the castaway means knowledge sub specie aeternitatis. By sub specie aeternitatis he means not what the philosopher usually means but rather knowledge which can be arrived at anywhere by anyone and at any time. The islanders may receive such knowledge in the bottle and be glad to get it—if they have not already gotten it. But getting this knowledge from across the seas is not indispensable. By its very nature the knowledge can also be reached, in principle, by the islander on his island, using his own raw materials, his own scientific, philosophical, and artistic efforts.

  Such knowledge would include not only the synthetic and analytic propositions of science and logic but also the philosophical and poetic sentences in the bottle. To the logician the sentence “Lead melts at 330 degrees” seems to be empirical and synthetic. It cannot be deduced from self-evident principles like the analytic sentence “2 + 2 = 4.” It cannot be arrived at by reflection, however strenuous. Yet to the castaway this sentence is knowledge sub specie aeternitatis. It is a property of lead on any island at any time and for anyone.

  The following sentences the castaway would consider knowledge sub specie aeternitatis even though they might not have been so considered in the past. Notice that the list includes a mixture of synthetic, analytic, normative, poetic, and metaphysical sentences.

  Lead melts at 330 degrees.

  Chicago is on the Hudson River or Chicago is not on the Hudson River.

  2 +2 = 4.

  The pressure of a gas is a function of temperature and volume.

  Acute myelogenous leukemia may be cured by parenteral administration of metallic beryllium.

  The dream symbol, house and balcony, usually represents a woman.

  Men should not kill each other.

  Being comprises essence and existence.

  He is not saying that all the sentences are true—at least one (the one about leukemia) is probably not. But they are all pieces of knowledge which can be arrived at (or rejected) by anyone on any island at any time. If true they will hold true for anyone on any island at any time. He has no quarrel with the positivist over the admissibility of poetic and metaphysical statements. Admissible or not, it is all the same to him. All he is saying is that this kind of sentence may be arrived at (has in fact been arrived at) independently by people in different places and can be confirmed (or rejected) by people in still other places.

  By a “piece of news” the castaway generally means a synthetic sentence expressing a contingent and nonrecurring event or state of affairs which event or state of affairs is peculiarly relevant to the concrete predicament of the hearer of the news.

  It is a knowledge which cannot possibly be arrived at by any effort of experimentation or reflection or artistic insight. It may not be arrived at by observation on any island at any time. It may not even be arrived at on this island at any time (since it is a single, nonrecurring event or state of affairs).

  Both these sentences are synthetic empirical sentences open to verification by the positive method of the sciences. Yet one is, to the castaway, knowledge sub specie aeternitatis and the other is a piece of news.

  Water boils at 100 degrees at sea level.

  There is fresh water in the next cove.

  The following sentences would qualify as possible news to the castaway.

  At 2 p.m., January 4, 1902, at the residence of Manuel Gómez in Matanzas, Cuba, a leaf fell from the banyan tree.

  The British are coming.

  The market for eggs in Bora Bora [a neighboring island] is very good.

  Jane will arrive tomorrow.

  In 1943 the Russians murdered 10,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest.

  A war party is approaching from Bora Bora.

  There is fresh water in the next cove.

  What does the positive scientist think of the sentences which the castaway calls news? Does he reject them as being false or absurd? No, he is perfectly willing to accept them as long as they meet his standard of verification. By the use of the critical historical method he attaches a high degree of probability to the report that the British were approaching Concord. As for the water in the next cove, he goes to see for himself and so confirms the news or rejects it. But what sort of significance does he assign these sentences as he sorts them out in the seminar room? To him they express a few of the almost infinite number of true but random observations which might be made about the world. The murder of the Polish officers may have been a great tragedy, yet in all honesty he cannot assign to it a significance qualitatively different from the sentence about the leaf falling from the banyan tree (nor may the castaway necessarily). This is not to say that these sentences are worthless as scientific data. For example, the presence of water in the next cove might serve as a significant datum for the descriptive science of geography, or as an important clue in geology. This single observation could conceivably be the means of verifying a revolutionary scientific theory—just as the sight of a star on a particular night in a particular place provided dramatic confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

  The sentences about the coming of the British and the murder of the Polish officers might serve as significant data from which, along with other such data, general historical principles mi
ght be drawn—just as Toynbee speaks of such and such an event as being a good example of such and such a historical process.

  In summary, the castaway will make a distinction between the sentences which assert a piece of knowledge sub specie aeternitatis and the sentences announcing a piece of news which bears directly on his life. The scientist and logician, however, cannot, in so far as they are scientists and logicians, take account of the special character of these news sentences. To them they are empirical observations of a random order and, if significant, they occupy at best the very lowest rung of scientific significance: they are the particular instances from which hypotheses and theories are drawn.

  (2) The Posture of the Reader of the Sentence

  The significance of the sentences for the reader will depend on the reader’s own mode of existence in the world. To say this is to say nothing about the truth of the sentences. Assuming that they are all true, they will have a qualitatively different significance for the reader according to his own placement in the world.

  (a) The posture of objectivity. If the reader has discovered the secret of science, art, and philosophizing, and so has entered the great company of Thales, Lao-tse, Aquinas, Newton, Keats, Whitehead, he will know what it is to stand outside and over against the world as one who sees and thinks and knows and tells. He tells and hears others tell how it is there in the world and what it is to live in the world. In so far as he himself is a scientist, artist, or philosopher, he reads the sentences in the bottles as stating (or coming short of stating) knowledge sub specie aeternitatis. It may be trivial knowledge; it may be knowledge he has already arrived at; it may be knowledge he has not yet arrived at but could arrive at in time; it may be false knowledge which fails to be verified and so is rejected. It cannot be any other kind of knowledge.