The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  Existence is attained immediately in the judgment; but judgments necessarily entail the use of phantasms, and, except in direct judgments of existing material things, the phantasms employed are symbolic. The philosopher must go through phantasm to reach being.

  Perhaps it would be truer, genetically speaking, to say that the primitive act of symbolization, occurring as it does prior to conception and phantasm, consists in the application, not of the phantasm, but of the sensuous symbol to the existing thing. A being is affirmed as being what it is through its denotation by symbol.* Is it not possible that what I primarily want in asking what something is is not an explanation but a validation and affirmation of the thing itself as it is—a validation which can only be accomplished by laying something else alongside: the symbol?

  We might therefore reverse Korzybski’s dictum: It is only if you say what the object is that you can know anything about it at all.

  The symbol meaning relation may be defined as not merely an intentional but as a cointentional relation of identity. The thing is intended through its symbol which you say and I can repeat, and it is only through this quasi identification that it can be conceived at all. Thus it is, I believe, that an empirical and semiotical approach to meaning illumines and confirms in an unexpected manner the realist doctrine of the union of the knower and the thing known. The metaphysical implications of semiotic are clear enough. Knowing is not a causal sequence but an immaterial union. It is a union, however, which is mediated through material entities, the symbol and its object. Nor is it a private phenomenon—rather is it an exercise in intersubjectivity in which the Thou serves as an indispensable colleague. Both the relation of intersubjectivity and the intentional relation of identity are real yet immaterial bonds.

  To render human cognition physico-causally can only end in the hopeless ambiguity of current semioticists who must speak in two tongues with no lexicon to translate, the language of the scientist who deals with signs as natural existents and the language of the formal logician who deals with the syntactical relations between signs.

  The intentional relation of identity is not only the basic relation of logical forms, as Professor Veatch has pointed out; it is also the basic relation of symbolization. No wonder, then, that the symbolic logician has no use for it—for once the intentional character of knowing is recognized, “so far from being independent of metaphysics or first philosophy, [it] necessarily presupposes it.”

  * C. W. Morris: “Languages are developed and used by living beings operating in a world of objects, and show the influence of both the users and the objects. If, as symbolic logic maintains, there are linguistic forms whose validity is not dependent upon nonlinguistic objects, then their validity must be dependent upon the rules of the language in question.” Characteristically, semioticists do not find it remarkable that sign-using animals should have developed symbolic logic “whose validity is not dependent on non-linguistic objects.” It is therefore not worth investigating how this could have come about but only necessary to note that it has and to define this unusual activity as the “syntactical dimension” of semiotic.

  † Nor should one be confused by the encyclopedists’ disavowals of determinism in favor of the probability approach, which is supposed to resolve the nomothetic-ideographic dichotomy of object-science and history. For, as becomes abundantly clear, the laws of probability are relied upon quite as heavily as strict causality. As Nagel insists, although laws connecting micro-states may be statistical in character, that does not mean that laws connecting macro-states are not strictly deterministic.

  ‡ For example, the methodological negation of mental entities and the inability to take account of Gestalt qualities.

  * J. F. Anderson: “This is the last word of symbolism; it is the last word because symbolism moves in the order of univocal concepts, concepts which are merely given an ‘analogical’ reference by the mind; and through univocal concepts one can never acquire any proper and formal knowledge of reality as such, because reality as such is analogical. Follow the via symbolica as far as you like; follow it as far as it goes; it will never lead beyond agnosticism, either in metaphysics or theology.”

  * “It will be convenient to have special terms to designate certain of the relations of signs to signs, to objects, and to interpreters. ‘Implicates’ will be restricted to Dsyn, ‘designates’ and ‘denotes’ to Dsem and ‘expresses’ to Dp. The word ‘table’ implicates (but does not designate) ‘furniture with a horizontal top on which things may be placed,’ designates a certain kind of object, denotes the objects to which it is applicable, and expresses its interpreter.”

  Note the ambiguity of the term “expresses its interpreter.” “Implicates,” “designates,” and “denotes” are purely semantical-syntactical terms with no biological analogue. But what are we to take “expresses” to mean? Is it to be taken in the biological sense of a sign “announcing” its significatum to its interpreter or in the symbolic sense of “expressing a meaning”?

  * For example, in answer to the charge that his “Snow is white” sentence seems to imply a naïve realism when it lays down the condition “if and only if snow is white,” he writes: “…the semantic definition of truth implies nothing regarding the conditions under which a sentence like (1) snow is white can be asserted. It implies only that, whenever we assert or reject this sentence, we must be ready to assert or reject the correlated sentence (2): the sentence ‘snow is white’ is true.

  “Thus we may accept the semantic conception of truth without giving up any epistemological attitude we may have had; we may remain naïve realists, critical realists, or idealists—whatever we were before. The semantic conception of truth is completely neutral toward all these issues.”

  † Nor does the Gestaltist, for that matter, take us an inch closer to the mysterious act of naming. By his concept of field forces and perceptual wholes, he can make sense of molar phenomena which escape the behaviorist. He can arrive at certain traits of configuration which apply alike to chickens and humans (see for example the Jastrow illusion in Koffka’s Gestalt Psychology), But neither the behaviorist nor the Gestaltist has anything to say, indeed does not wish to have anything to say, about the naming act. The very methodology of an object-science precludes its consideration of an object-sentence as such, perhaps for no other reason than that the object-science takes place within the very intersubjective nexus which attends language. (Cf. Marcel: “Without doubt the intersubjective nexus cannot in any way be asserted; it can only be acknowledged. … I should readily agree that it is the mysterious root of language.”

  * Continuity “is the absence of ultimate parts in that which is divisible.” It is “nothing but perfect generality of a law of relationship.”

  * I use the word “causal” unprejudicially, to mean whatever the reader would take it to mean in the context. It does not matter for the argument whether one interprets this cause as efficient causality or as a probability function.

  † C. W. Morris: “…terms gain relations among themselves according to the relations of the responses of which the sign vehicles are a part, and these modes of usage are the pragmatical background of the formation and transformation rules. “

  * It is irrelevant that in the case of thunder announcing rain, the thunder happens to have a real connection with the rain process. The same relation of signification could be made to take place in a deaf organism by using a blue light to announce rain. Thus, to use Saint Augustine’s nomenclature, whether the sign is natural or conventional, the mode of response is the same.

  * If we hoped that Mrs. Langer would follow up the epistemological consequences of this most important insight into the noncausal character of symbolic meaning, we shall be disappointed. She drops it quickly, restates her allegiance to positivism, and goes on to the aesthetic symbol as the form of feeling.

  * For example, she had understood the word water (spelled into her hand) but only as a sign to which she must respond by fetching the mug
, drinking the water, and so on. The significance of her discovery that this is water may be judged from the fact that having discovered what water was, she then wanted to know what everything else was. (Cf. also the experiences of Marie Huertin, Lywine Lachance, and the well-authenticated account of Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, who discovered the symbol despite every attempt of his positivist teacher to present it as a sign of a want.)

  † “These considerations cast some doubt on the adequacy of Freud’s theory of the origin and nature of thought…According to Freud thought has only one ancestor, the attempt at hallucinatory need-satisfaction…I believe that thought has two ancestors instead of one—namely, motivating needs, and a distinctively human capacity, the relatively autonomous capacity for object interest.”

  * It is also true of a human responding to the shout “Firel” in a crowded theater (Mead’s example in Mind, Self and Society). Here, characteristically, the semioticist confuses symbol and sign by citing human significatory responses as illustrative of human meaning in general. One may indeed respond to a word and in this respect our understanding is similar to Helen’s understanding of signs prior to her discovery of the symbol and, in fact, generically the same as a dog’s response to a spoken command. But it is an altogether different situation when a father tells his child that this is fire, and the child awakes to the fact that by this odd little sound of fire his father means this leaping flame.

  † It does not matter for the present purpose that some intelligent responses are acquired by conditioning and that others are congenital dispositions of the organism. The learned response of the dog to the buzzer and the innate response of the chick to the sight of grain are both explicable in physico-causal terms as an event in an electrocolloidal system.

  * If there is a natural wisdom in etymologies, perhaps this is a case of it—for conceive, one suddenly realizes, means “to take with.”

  † George Mead, the great social behaviorist, clearly perceived that language and mind are essentially social phenomena. We owe a great deal to his prescience that the interpersonal milieu is of cardinal importance in the genesis of mind, even though he felt compelled to render this relation exclusively in behavioristic terms for fear of “metaphysical” consequences (it is clear that by “metaphysical” he meant anything airy and elusive). It is typical of his integrity, however, that even with his commitment to behaviorism, he did not shrink from mental phenomena and consciousness, and in fact attempted to derive consciousness from social interaction.

  Having realized that language is an interpersonal phenomenon, however, he set himself the impossible task of deriving the symbol from a stimulus-response sequence. For since it was an article of faith with him that the explanatory science of behavioristics is the only hope of approaching mind, he could not do otherwise than render symbolization as a response. As a consequence, he is obliged to define a symbol as the kind of sign which “calls out” the same response from the speaker as from the hearer. This definition drives him into the absurdity of saying that a word can only mean the same thing for you and me if it provokes the same response from you and me. Thus, if I ask you to get up and fetch the visitor a chair, it must follow that I also arouse in myself the same tendency to get up and fetch the chair. Clearly, as Mrs. Langer noticed, something is wrong here.

  Is it possible, we wonder, that Mead was right in his emphasis of the social bond but mistaken in construing it behavioristically?

  * Hocking writes of intersubjectivity as a direct unmediated bond from which mind and language arise: “…without the direct experiential knowledge of ‘We are,’ the very ideas of ‘sign,’ ‘language,’ ‘other mind,’ itself could not arise.”

  Yet one might wonder whether it is not the other way around—whether the relation “We are” does not arise through a mutual intending of the object through its symbol, the word which you give me and I can say too. It would perhaps be more characteristic of angelic intelligences to experience such an immediate intuitive knowledge rather than a knowledge mediated by sensible signs and objects.

  * Cf. her comment on presymbolic thought: “…if a wordless sensation may be called a thought.”

  † In regard to primitive identification, Oliver Leroy writes: “The logic of a Hui-chol (who mystically identifies stag with wheat) would be deficient only on the day when he would prepare a wheat porridge while he thought he was making a stag stew.” Yet in some sense, the symbol is identified with the thing, a sense, moreover, which is open to superstitious abuse.

  * John of St. Thomas: Quid est illud in signato conjunctum signo, et praesens in signo praeter ipsum signum et entitatem ejus? Respondetur esse ipsummet signatum in alio esse. “What may be that element of the signified which is joined to the sign and present in it as distinct from the sign itself? I answer: No other element than the very signified itself in another mode of existence.”

  * “The natural sound element has been taken up into and practically disappears from our consciousness in its significant symbolic connotation. In other words the natural sounds have been completely transmuted into conventional sound symbols.”

  One can establish this transformation to his own satisfaction by a simple experiment. Repeat the word “glass” many times; all at once it will lose its symbolic guise, its “glassiness,” and become the poor drab vocable that it really is. Yet it is from its original poverty that its high symbolic potentiality derives. It is for this reason, as Mrs. Langer says, that a vocable is very good symbolic material, and a peach very poor.

  * Marcel observes that when I ask what is this strange flower, I am more satisfied to be given a nondescriptive name than a scientific classification. “But now we find the real paradox—the first unscientific answer (it is a lupin, it is an orchid) which consisted in giving the name of the flower, although it had practically no rational basis, yet satisfied the demand in me which the interpretation by reduction tends…to frustrate.”

  12

  SYMBOL, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY

  THERE ARE TWO INTERESTING things about current approaches to consciousness as a subject of inquiry. One is that the two major approaches, the explanatory-psychological and the phenomenological, go their separate ways, contributing nothing to each other. They do not tend to converge upon or supplement each other as do, say, atomic theory and electromagnetic theory. One can either look upon consciousness as a public thing or event in the world like any other public thing or event and as such open to explanatory inquiry; or one can regard it as an absolutely privileged realm, that by which I know anything at all—including explanatory psychology. As exemplars of these two approaches, I shall refer in the sequel to the work of George H. Mead and Edmund Husserl. The other interesting thing is that both approaches encounter the same perennial difficulty, albeit each encounters it in its own characteristic way. This difficulty is the taking account of intersubjectivity, that meeting of minds by which two selves take each other’s meaning with reference to the same object beheld in common. As Schutz has pointed out, intersubjectivity is simply presupposed as the unclarified foundation of the explanatory-empirical sciences. A social behaviorist writes hundreds of papers setting forth the thesis that mind and consciousness are an affair of responses to signs or responses to responses; yet he unquestionably expects his colleagues to do more than respond to his paper; he also expects them to understand it, to take his meaning. As regards phenomenology, on the other hand, philosophers as different as James Collins and Jean-Paul Sartre have noticed that the chief difficulty which Husserl (not to mention Hegel and Heidegger) encounters is the allowing for the existence of other selves.

  It is the purpose of this essay to suggest that these two chronic difficulties which have beset the study of consciousness have come about in part at least from a failure to appreciate the extraordinary role of the symbol, especially the language symbol, in man’s orientation to the world. I am frank to confess a prejudice in favor of Mead’s approach to consciousness as a phenomenon aris
ing from the social matrix through language. It seems to me that the psychological approach possesses the saving virtue that it tends to be self-corrective, whereas in transcendental phenomenology everything is risked on a single methodological cast at the very outset, the famous epoché. But I wish to suggest first that positive psychology, in its allegiance to the sign-response as the basic schema of psychogenesis, has failed or refused to grasp the peculiar role of the language symbol. I would further suggest that an appreciation of this role will (1) confirm in an unexpected way Mead’s thesis of the social origin of consciousness, (2) reveal intersubjectivity as one of the prime relations of the symbol meaning-structure, (3) provide access to a phenomenology of consciousness, not as a transcendental idealism, but as a mode of being emerging from the interrelations of real organisms in the world.

  SYMBOL AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY

  I do not think it would be too far from the truth to say that the phenomenologist, having ruled out intersubjectivity in his reduction, has the greatest difficulty in reinstating it thereafter; and that the positive psychologist simply takes intersubjectivity for granted. It is one thing to be aware, as the phenomenologists are aware, that a fundamental connection with the other self must be seized, in Sartre’s words, at the very heart of consciousness. Whether such a connection is allowed by the rigor of the phenomenological reduction is something else again. It is also one thing to be aware, as Mead was aware, of the social origin of consciousness. Whether this connection between consciousness and the social matrix can be demonstrated in terms of a sign-response psychology is something else again. But there is this difference: If Mead’s social behaviorism is too narrow a theoretical base, it can be broadened without losing the posture from which Mead theorized, that of an observer confronting data which he can make some sense of and of which he can speak to other observers. For this reason I shall be chiefly concerned with the general approach of George Mead.