The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  The single utterance of the therapist, “horrenjus,” reveals a mode of the participant-observer stance, of necessity a kind of straddle in which the therapist stands outside and over against the world—including his patient—and yet enters into an interpersonal relation with his patient. He accomplishes the feat in this case through a kind of indulgent playfulness, tempered effectively, as McQuown comments, by his use of his pipe. The playful irony of “horrenjus!” pronounced with an exaggerated vaudeville-British propriety, expresses mock scandal at the patient’s decision to approach the woman in his dream, a device which serves at once to neutralize the patient’s anxiety and to extend to him a friendly hand: Come join me in a bit of good-natured deprecation of the Puritan streak in our culture. Yet, as sincerely warm as the therapist may feel toward his patient, there is hardly a second when his own objective placement in the world is not operative.* In fact, the very act which expresses his friendliness, the horrenjus! and the indulgent pipe-fondling behavior, also serves to set him gently but firmly apart as an elite-member, a tolerant Thalesian revolutionary who has made it his business to stand over against a sector of reality and study it according to the objective method.

  The stance of the pure scientist is that of objectivity, a standing over against the world, the elements of which serve as specimens or instances of the various classes of objects and events which comprise his science. The behavior of the scientist, like any other mode of symbolic behavior, also implies a dimension of intersubjectivity; this is, of course, the community of other scientists engaged in the same specialty. Whether he is working with a colleague or alone, publishing or not publishing, the very nature of the scientific method with its moments of observation, concept formation, hypothesizing, verification, is a making public, a formulation for someone else.

  But in the psychiatric interview the objective stance of the scientist with its attendant community of other scientists is overlaid by a second interpersonal relation, that of the therapist with his patient. This relation differs from that between the therapist and his colleagues. The latter is a Thalesian community, which is set apart from the everyday world by its esoteric knowledge of the underlying principles of some world phenomena. The relation between the therapist and his patient is, or at least might be, very much in the world. It might be called a Samaritan-Jew dyad—one man in trouble and another man going out of his way to help him.

  The world of the patient and his being-in-the-world. This patient is in his world in a way wholly different from that of his therapist, yet it is a way which is heavily influenced by the presence of science in the world. The patient, let me postulate, is the sort of person who has also adopted the objective point of view but has adopted it secondhand. He is convinced that the scientific world view is the right way of looking at things, but since he is not a scientist and does not spend his time practicing the objective method, his objective-mindedness raises some problems. Deprived of the firsthand encounter with the subject matter which the scientist enjoys, he is even more apt than the scientist to fall prey to what Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”* and so to bestow upon theory, or what he imagines to be theory, a superior reality at the expense of the reality of the very world he lives in. His problem is not, as is the scientist’s, What sense can I make of the data before me? but is instead, How can I live in a world which I have disposed of theoretically? He is like the schoolgirl who, on seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, is unimpressed, either because she has already “had” it in geology or because she has not yet had it. Such a misplacement of the concrete is a serious matter because, although one may dispose of the world through theory, one is not thereby excused from the necessity of living in this same world. This patient’s mode of life is open to considerable anxiety and he is apt to conceive of his predicament and its remedy in the following terms: I am having trouble living in the world which I see objectively; therefore I shall apply for relief to the very source of my world view, the scientist himself. His seduction by theory is such, however, as to place him almost beyond the reach of the therapist. Paradoxically, it is his veneration of psychiatry which all but disqualifies him as a candidate for psychiatric treatment. For it is a necessary condition of the therapist’s method that he abstract to a degree from the individuality of his patient and see him as an instance of, a “case of,” such and such a malfunction.* But the patient is peculiarly prone to extrapolate a methodology into a way of living. He is pleased when the dream he offers to the therapist turns out to be a recognizable piece of pathology. He does not conceive a higher existence for himself than to be “what one should be” according to psychiatry. But science cannot tell one how to live; it can only abstract some traits from a number of people who do manage to live well—he has read no doubt that one should have an “integrated personality” or that one should be “creative” or “autonomous,” and the like. But the patient who sets out to become an integrated personality has embarked on a very peculiar enterprise. An almost intractable misunderstanding is apt to arise between therapist and patient. It is of this order: The therapist offers the assistance of the method and technique of his science and hopes that the patient can make use of it to become the individual he is capable of becoming. But the patient in his anonymity labors under the chronic misapprehension that he is trying to become “one of those”—that is, an integrated personality. The patient as good as asks: Am I doing it right now? Am I not now an individual in my own right?

  The intersubjective community. The character of the community in this example may be inferred from the foregoing. The community is a special instance of the I-you dyad in which the inclusion of the patient implies a significant exclusion. The exclusion is significant because of its function in therapy. Although the encounter is that of a sick man supplicating a healer, a special status is conferred upon the patient by virtue of the technique itself. I may be sick and I may have come to a doctor for help, the patient is saying, but this is no ordinary therapy in which all I have to do is hold still while the doctor works on me; this is analysis. And a good bit of the exchange between therapist and patient consists of the patient’s acceptance of the therapist’s invitation to come see it all from where he sits, as a tolerant pipe-fondling Thalesian, to share in the analyst’s understanding of symptoms, social behavior, culture—an understanding obtained by an elite technique to which to a degree the patient can, by reason of his own gifts, also aspire. Although he may have failed and so needs help, he enjoys a privileged status vis-à-vis the people out there in the street. They don’t know what we know. They don’t even know about themselves what we know about them. Thus the we-community of scientists—I, the therapist, and you, the patient but also now the surrogate scientist—can become a useful therapeutic instrument by means of which the patient’s low self-esteem is offset by Thalesian insights into himself and the society he lives in.

  The interpersonal process is a multilevel one. Some estimation of its immense complexity is made possible by realizing that there occurs at one level the interaction between organisms which the behaviorist speaks of. Conversation is still a space-time journey of energy exchanges between organisms in all its molecular complexity. But this interaction is overlaid by the molar structure of symbolic behavior. Symbolic behavior is in turn as many-tissued as there are participants in the language event and as there are media of communication. The world and the being-in-the-world of the therapist collide with the world and the being-in-the-world of the patient. The possibilities of communication failure are unlimited. Yet it is not sufficient to say that one man says something and another man hears and understands or misunderstands, agrees or disagrees, rejoices or is saddened. It is also necessary to ask and try to answer such questions as: In what mode does the listener receive the assertion of the speaker? In what mode does he affirm it? In what way does his own mode of being-in-the-world color and specify everything he hears?

  Perhaps what needs most to be emphasized is the intimate
relation between the phenomenological structure of intersubjectivity and being-in-the-world, on the one hand, and the empirical event of symbolic behavior, on the other. The existential modes of human living do not take place in an epistemological seventh heaven wholly removed from the world of organisms and things. Rather do they follow upon and, in fact, can be derived only from this very intercourse: one man encountering another man, speaking a word, and through it and between them discovering the world and himself.

  * See, for example, David McK. Rioch: “The theory [Sullivan’s theory of interpersonal relations] is very effective in dealing with the behavior of organisms, as it provides a comprehensive framework for dealing with the interaction of multiple factors, including the observer.”

  † See, for example, Joseph Jaffe: “The measurement of human interaction has recently been approached through a variety of techniques, ranging from interpretive content analyses to objective recording of temporal patterns in behavioral interaction.”

  ‡ “Social psychology, considered as a branch of psychology, is the study of individual responses as conditioned by stimuli arising from social or collective situations; considered as a branch of sociology or as collective psychology, it is the study of collective responses or of the behavior of groups and other collectivities.” (L. L. Bernard, “Social Psychology.”)

  * See Chapter 12.

  * A symbol, according to Charles Morris, is a sign produced by its interpreter which acts as a substitute for some other sign with which it is synonymous. Thus hunger cramps might take the place of the buzzer announcing the food and become a symbol for the dog.

  * See Chapter 11.

  † See also Alfred Tarski. Other writers interpret semantics not merely as a formal science but as a quasi-ethical science in which users of words are scolded for not using them at the proper level of abstraction. See, for example, Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity.

  ‡ General linguistics is, of course, an empirical science, but, except for acoustics, only at the comparative level. In phonetics, phonemics, morphophonemics, syntax, and lexicography, the linguist describes the structure of the languages of the earth as they are found to occur. What one fails to find in the literature, however, is an empirical study of the language event in itself as a generic event. It is much as if biologists were interested in describing the various kinds of mitotic division among different species, but were not interested in studying the process of mitosis.

  * I have in mind Paul Weiss’s exasperation with behavioral scientists’ perennial recourse to such terms as levels of organization. “We are struck with a lack of a practical, realistic, analytic approach that will go beyond the mere statement of the fact that we have hierarchical nature, that it does consist of a system of Chinese boxes one inside the other, that they are integrated, interrelated, coordinated and all these other terms.”

  * This schema, which is designed to apply alike to animal behavior and to human speech, follows, in the main, that of Morris with modifications by Ogden and Richards.

  * Cf. p. 259.

  * And even Samuel Pepys. For, although he kept his journal for himself and in a private code, he was nevertheless formulating experience and so setting it at a distance for a someone else—himself.

  * Much of the formulating and objectifying function of the symbol has been set forth by Ernst Cassirer; see in particular vol. 1, Language. But the empirical insights are so submerged by the apparatus of German idealism that they are salvaged only with difficulty. Cassirer was concerned to extend the Kantian thesis to the area of culture and symbols and so to establish that it is through symbols that one not merely knows but constitutes the world. The task of the behavioral scientist is different. He confronts symbolic behavior from the same posture with which he studies sign behavior: as events in a public domain which he shares with other scientists. He sees people using words to name things and to assert states of affairs, just as he sees rats threading their way through mazes. He is concerned to explain what he sees by the use of mechanisms and models. I confess that this posture presupposes a species of philosophical realism.

  * This notion of world and environment is close to the Welt and Umwelt of the Binswanger school. See Ludwig Binswanger, “The Existential Analysis School of Thought,” in Existence. It is important to note, however, that this distinction is yielded by an empirical analysis of the language event and does not depend for its validity on the Daseinanalytik of Heidegger or on any other philosophical anthropology.

  * It is characteristic of the current confusion of the behavioral sciences that theorists find themselves speaking of true myths and are even driven to the extremity of prescribing myth as such for the ills of contemporary society. (See, for example, Henry A. Murray, “A Mythology for Grownups.”) The confusion can be traced, I believe, to the failure of behavioral theory to give an account of different modes of symbolic activity, in this case that of scientists and nonscientists. Thus when psychiatrists and clinical psychologists say that people nowadays need viable myths, they seem to be saying that scientists are different from people: scientists seek the truth and people have needs. Coherent theory would not, presumably, require such a generic distinction.

  †The Bororo does not intend that he is literally a parakeet (he does not try to mate with other parakeets), yet he clearly intends it in a sense more magical than ordinary factual statements. See the “mystic identification” of L. Lévy-Bruhl in How Natives Think.

  * Lévy-Bruhl’s categories of “iprelogical” thought are not, in my opinion, a genetic stage of psychic evolution but simply a mode of symbolic behavior to which a denizen of Western culture is as apt to fall prey as a Bororo.

  † Sonnet 73.

  * Ernest Schachtel has described this “articulating and obscuring function” of language in “On Memory and Childhood Amnesia.” He gives a good example of the sterility of the conventional phrase in which one distorts the ineffable content of memory—as when one reports having an “exciting time.” He says, “No object perceived with the quality of freshness, newness, of something wonder-full, can be preserved and recalled by the conventional concept of that object as designated in its conventional name in language” (p. 9). It seems to me, however, that he is describing terms that have deteriorated in their semantic evolution rather than the entire spectrum of language itself. Symbols may conceal, distort, render commonplace, yes; but since people are not angelic intelligences, symbols are their only means of knowing anything at all.

  †”Horrenjus” is borrowed from Norman A. McQuown’s linguistic analysis of an interview reported by Otto A. Will and Robert A. Cohen, but the exchange is otherwise hypothetical and is offered not as clinical evidence but only illustratively, to exemplify some traits of symbolic structure.

  ‡ Reading is, it is true, an event of symbolic behavior, but it must be studied as such, as an event open to an appropriate phenomenology and not as a substitute for hearing.

  * What psychiatrist has not been disturbed by this penchant for “scientizing” concrete experience? When, for example, a patient reports that he has a “personality problem” at the office, the psychiatrist may pay proper respect to his patient’s knowledgeability and objectivity, but he may also have good reason for wishing that he had said instead, “Oh God, how I hate my boss!”

  † A time which Jaspers has called the axial period in world history.

  * Much of what the existential analysts call being-in-the-world is overlapped by the social scientist’s concept of role taking—although the former also calls into question the authenticity of a self constructed only of roles. The notion of role taking, moreover, hardly does justice to the radical placement in the world required of anyone who has crossed the symbolic threshold.

  * Whitehead speaks here of the “great confusion” which the fallacy has brought to pass in science and philosophy. In my opinion, it has caused greater confusion among lay people and, what is worse, an impoverishment of the very world one lives in.

 
; * As Sullivan pointed out, psychiatry, insofar as it is a science, must have to do with the general and not the individual. “Let me say that insofar as you are interested in your unique individuality, in contradistinction to the interpersonal activities which you or someone else can observe, to that extent you are interested in the really private mode in which you live—in which I have no interest whatever. The fact is that for any scientific inquiry, in the sense that psychiatry should be, we cannot be concerned with that which is inviolably private.”

  10

  CULTURE: THE ANTINOMY OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

  THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD issues in statements about the world. Whether one is a realist, pragmatist, operationalist, or materialist, one can hardly doubt that the various moments of the scientific enterprise—induction, hypothesis, deduction, theory, law—are all assertions of sorts.* Even observation and verification are in the final analysis not the physiological happenings in which the retina and brain of the scientist receive the image of pointer readings—a dog might do the same. They are rather the symbolic assertory acts by which one specifies that the perception, pointer on numbered line, is a significant reading.