The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  * When the two-year-old child discovers one day that the sound ball is no longer a direction, look for ball or fetch ball, but “is” the ball for him and me, he experiences a sudden access of recognition and joy which is something quite different from all previous need-satisfactions. (Cf. Ernest Schachtel: “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 a curious fact that intentionality, one of the favorite theses of the phenomenologist, is least congenial to the solipsistic character of transcendental phenomenology. As Collins has observed, the one thing Husserl fails to explain is the intentional character of consciousness. What is intended?

  * Roy Wood Sellars used “denote” more or less interchangeably with “perceive” and “intend”: “…we should need to distinguish between the intuition of a sensory appearance, which alone is given, and the denotative selection of a thing-object which is believed in and characterized.”

  † Cassirer thus stands at the opposite pole from the semanticists. So far from it being a case of a thing being known and a label later attached by a semantic rule, it is the symbolic formulation itself which is the act of knowing. The “real” object tends to vanish into Kant’s noumenon.

  * Is not symbolization, the pairing of sensuous symbol with an impression, a kind of judgment and abstraction? In even its most primitive form, a pointing at and naming, it is a saying that that over there is “one of these.” It is an abstraction, however, which is a far cry from the conventional notion of concept formation by which two given representations are combined. We must, as Cassirer says, take a step further back. This will take us to Lotze’s “first universal,” the primitive abstraction by which impressions are first raised to symbolizations.

  13

  SYMBOL AS HERMENEUTIC IN EXISTENTIALISM

  IF IT IS TRUE that both Anglo-American empiricism and European existentialism contain valid insights, then in respect of the failure to make a unifying effort toward giving an account of all realities, the former is surely the worse offender. For the existentialists do take note of empirical science, if only to demote it to some such category as problem Seiendes, or passionate abstract. But the empiricists are notably indifferent toward existentialism. In the empirical mind, existential categories are apt to be dismissed as “emotional” manifestations, that is, as dramatic expressions of a particular historical circumstance, or—what is worse—as exhortatory, and deserving the same attention as any other pulpiteering. Such notions as dread, Dasein, boredom, and the dichotomies authenticity—unauthenticity, freedom-falling-prey-to, aestheticethical, will inevitably appear as reducibles—if they have any meaning at all. Whatever significance they have will be assumed to yield itself in their objective correlates.

  That empiricism has not found a fruitful method of dealing with these distinctively human realities is no mere normative judgment but may be inferred from the confusion of the social sciences themselves. If there is an unresolved dualism of questioner-and-nature in the professed monism of the empiricist, its difficulties do not become apparent as long as the questions are asked of nature. The canons of induction-deduction hold good: data, induction, hypothesis, deduction, test, verification, prediction, planning. But as soon as the data come to comprise not the physical world or subhuman biology but other questioners, other existents, the empirical method finds itself in certain notorious difficulties (1) The imperialism of the social sciences. As long as there is one datum man and several disciplines, each professing a different irreducible—i.e., cultural unit, libido, social monad, genetic trait—there is bound to result a deordination of the sciences of man with each claiming total competence and each privately persuaded that the other is pursuing a chimera. (2) The transcending of the questioner by his own data. Sociological material resists fixed inductions. A familiar example is the transposition of a biological method, the human subject conceived as an organism with an inventory of “needs,” with “cultural needs” as well as caloric needs. But the delineation of a “cultural need” tends to bring about the transcendence of this need by the very fact of its delineation. (3) The practice of smuggling in existential activities in a deterministic discipline. In psychoanalysis, for example, which in Freud’s words derives all mental processes from an interplay of forces, the crucial act of therapy is the exercise by the patient of a choice, that is, the assumption of a burden of effort in overcoming resistances. (4) The uncritical taking for granted or the equally uncritical ignoring of consciousness and intersubjectivity. Behaviorism ignores both, but what account can behaviorism give of the behavior of the questioner himself? The sociologist and anthropologist practice intersubjectivity; that is, they are not content merely to observe the externals of cultural traits—they try to understand the meaning of them. But what account are they prepared to give of this intersubjectivity? If Kant called it a “scandal of philosophy” that intersubjectivity had found no solution in the thought of his day, it is no less a scandal now.

  Perhaps the difficulties arise not through an innate limitation of empiricism—an experiential and heterodox empiricism which, according to Hocking, would include the method of Gabriel Marcel—but because of what Dawson calls the religious presuppositions of a naturalist social science. The doctrinal precondition of this particular kind of “theological” sociology is that (1) the sociology is of the same order of determinism as physical science, (2) man is a fixed social unit, an integer, and can be regarded as a receptacle of quantifiable needs. Having laid down such a substratum, the social scientist deprives himself of the means of taking notice of existentialia in his data, let alone of giving an account of them.

  But the existentialists suffer in their own way from the same deordination of the ways of knowing as the empiricists. In the Anglo-American view, existential insights appear to be “in the air”—either manifestly reducible or insufficiently grounded by causal strata. The confusion among the existentialist only confirms these suspicions. To some (Kierkegaard) the existentialia are psychological, to others (Heidegger) ontological, that is, they are the constituent traits of Dasein. Phenomenological bracketing is taken by the empiricist to be a confession of causal rootlessness.

  The need of the empirical sciences of man is of an insight, a proper empirical finding, that will introduce an order of reality, a reality of existential traits, which latter, if they cannot be reduced to supposedly prime elements or verified by measurement, can at least be validated experientially and hierarchically grounded in a genuinely empirical framework.

  The need of existentialism—in the empirical view at least—is a deliverance from Kantian subjectivity, whether it be Sartrean or Jasperian. As Collins puts it, the task is to take account of Kierkegaard without surrendering to Kant. This is to be achieved, as far as the sciences of man are concerned, not by a precipitous search for a regional ontology, such as the ontologizing of the existentialia of the Dasein, but by an “open” experiential empiricism which tacitly posits the world. After all, scientific method has never had much use for the Kantian Copernican revolution. But in the empirical view, the ordination of the sciences, if it is to be accomplished at all, must be accomplished from “below,” that is, from an empirically valid substratum.

  The necessary bridge from traditional empiricism to existential insights may have already been supplied—unwittingly, and from the empirical side of the gulf—by the study of that particular human activity in which empiricism intersects, so to speak, with existentialism—language. It is the discovery of the symbolic transformation as the unique and universal human response.

  Its crucial importance lies in its recognition as belonging to an order radically different from the purely behaviorist or causal theory of meaning. As Susanne Langer points out, any attempt to reduce the symbol function to a signal process will leave out pr
ecisely that which is unique in the symbolic relationship. A symbol is the vehicle for the conception of an object and not a term in a reflex schema which directs the organism to a referent.

  The inadequacy of doctrinal empiricism and the deliverance of the symbolic transformation are perhaps best illustrated by beginning with the emblem of positivist semiotic, Ogden and Richards’s triangle symbol-reference-referent. This relation is alleged to be a refinement of the signal-significatum relation and is to be conceived in a strictly causal context. Meaning is a stimulus-response sequence in which reference follows symbol in the same way as dog salivation follows the buzzer signal. As Charles Morris puts it, a symbol is nothing more than a signal produced by the interpretent which acts as a substitute for some other sign with which it is synonymous. Thus in the absence of food, when the buzzer sounds, hunger cramps may come to be a “symbol” for food.

  What is omitted in this schema is the obvious but nonetheless extraordinary characteristic of symbolization—that the symbol denotes something. It is the name of something. It is the vehicle by which we are able to speak and perhaps to think about something. The relationship between symbol and conception is generically and irreducibly different from the purely causal order of signal-significatum.

  It is the very indispensability of the role which symbolization plays in cognition which prevents our seeing its unprecedented character. The most graphic warrant for its uniqueness and for the qualitative difference between the signal world and the symbol world is the unwitting testimony of blind deaf-mutes like Helen Keller and Laura Bridgeman.

  Of the many consequences of the insight into the uniqueness of the symbolic function, there are two or three which are particularly relevant to our purpose.

  Once it dawns upon one, whether deaf-mute or not, that this is water, then the first question is What is that, and so on, toward the end that everything is something. There has come into existence an all-construing mode of cognition in which everything must be formulated symbolically and known intentionally as something. There is a need for formulation of such a degree that that which is not fixed and formulated by the symbol is the source of a disability before the thing which, depending upon the formidability of the thing, can range from a simple insentience—not “knowing” the thing because it has not been named for one—to acute anxiety before a pressing something which is unformulated.

  Besides the symbol, the conception, and the thing, there are two other terms which are quite as essential in the act of symbolization. There is the “I,” the consciousness which is confronted by the thing and which generates the symbol by which the conception is articulated. But there is also the “you.” Symbolization is of its very essence an intersubjectivity. If there were only one person in the world, symbolization could not conceivably occur (but signification could); for my discovery of water as something derives from your telling me so, that this is water for you too. The act of symbolization is an affirmation: Yes, this is water! My excitement derives from the discovery that it is there for you and me and that it is the same thing for you and me. Every act of symbolization thereafter, whether it be language, art, science, or even thought, must occur either in the presence of a real you or an ideal you for whom the symbol is intended as meaningful. Symbolization presupposes a triad of existents: I, the object, you. Hocking suggests that the symbol arises from the direct experiential knowledge that “We are.” But surely it is that the “We are” follows upon and is mediated by the symbolization, the joint affirmation that this is water.

  What has this to do with existentialism?

  We will pass over the epistemological consequences of symbolic knowing, the possession of the thing by the symbol rather than adaptation by signal—a knowing which is indeed existential in the broad sense of knowing something by being something—and go at once to the more typical existentialia. The recognition of the uniquely human use of the symbol will provide insights into the favorite concepts of existentialism—serving by no means as a key to their reducibility but as an hermeneutic toward the grounding and ordering of human realities in a hierarchical but nonetheless empirically valid scheme. The act of symbolization is to be conceived as a threshold beyond which new entities come into being, not by fiat, but precisely as they are enabled by the symbol.

  (1) The symbolic predicament of Self. (a) The Self, the object, and the thou.

  A study of the aboriginal symbol relation will be seen to be highly relevant for the existentialia, in particular as it illuminates and rectifies existential theories about the nature of consciousness.

  Sartre, for example, ontologizes the primary transphenomenal consciousness as the being-for-itself, and the transphenomenal object as being-in-itself. The prime reality of human consciousness is accordingly not the Cartesian cogito but a pure impersonal awareness, the “prereflective cognito.” Such an entity is probably fictitious, however, since consciousness is of its nature intersubjective. The originary act of consciousness is the joint affirmation that the object is there for you and me. The formula for the “prereflective cogito” is properly not the Cartesian

  I am conscious of this chair

  nor the Sartrean

  There is consciousness of this chair

  both of which presuppose consciousness but

  This is a chair for you and me

  which joint act of designation and affirmation by symbol is itself the constituent act of consciousness.

  The symbolic corrective is that both the empiricists and the existentialists (excepting Marcel) are wrong in positing an autonomous consciousness, whether a series of conscious “states” or a solitary subjective existent. The decisive stroke against the myth of the autonomous Kantian subject is the intersubjective constitution of consciousness. There is a mutuality between the I and the Thou and the object which is in itself prime and irreducible. Once, in theorizing, this relation is ruptured, it cannot be recovered thereafter—witness the failure of both Sartre and the empiricists to give an account of intersubjectivity.

  Thus the two term subject-object division of the world, as the situation in which one finds oneself, is not the original predicament of consciousness but rather a decadent “unauthentic” state, a falling away from an earlier communion.

  (b) The self and the symbolized other. The world of the Nought and the world of the Other. Being-for-itself and Being-in-itself. Self as Nought.

  It is of the nature of the symbol-mongering consciousness to delineate and transform all sensory data into intentional symbolic forms. The whole objectizing act of the mind is to render all things darstellbar, not “proper” but presentable, that is, formulable. The world before me is divided and configured into a great assembly of autonomous and resplendent forms. The naming judgment, This is a chair, That flower is a lupin—an identification which, as Marcel says, satisfies a peculiar need which has nothing to do with the definatory uses of the name—this naming act is both existential and figurative. It affirms that this is something, but in so rescuing the object from the flux of becoming, it pays the price of setting it forth as a static and isolated entity—a picture-book entity. But at any rate it is the requirement of consciousness that everything be something and willy-nilly everything is something—with one tremendous exception! The one thing in the world which by its very nature is not susceptible of a stable symbolic transformation is myself! I, who symbolize the world in order to know it, am destined to remain forever unknown to myself. The self, that which symbolizes, will, if it perverts its native project of being conscious of something else and tries to grasp itself as a something, either fail and remain as the unformulable, a nothingness (Sartre), the aching wound of self (Marcel)—or it will fall prey to miserable unauthentic transformations (the impersonations of Marcel and Sartre, and in primitive life, the totemic transformation: In the importunate need for construing all things, the self in its terrible inscrutability is as capable of being one thing as another; I can as well “be” a parakeet as an alligator—anything at all is mo
re tolerable than the vacuum which I am). As Marcel puts it: It may be of my essence to be able to be not what I am.

  The motto of the symbolic (and existential) predicament is: This is a chair for you and me, that is a tree, everything is something, you are what you are, but what am I?

  In the situation-in-which-we-find-ourselves, two zones can be delineated, the zone of the nought and zone of the other. The nought of the self is not confined to the enclosure of the knower, but is expansile. The zone of the nought is coextensive with the domain of my property, in which there is a simultaneous exercise of my sovereignty of having and the exclusion of the other’s having. Yet what paradoxically characterizes the zone of having is the progressive annihilation of forms, an emptying out and a rendering nought by the very act of having. In the “passive unauthentic self which has fallen prey to things,” new things enter into the zone of the nought and are devoured. There is a real consumption of goods. A new product, an automobile, resplendent in its autonomous form (and endowed, we shall see later, with certain magic properties by virtue of the mystery and remotion of its manufacture) is loved for the sake of its form—what characterizes an idolatrous desire for a new car is not the need of a means of getting from one place to another but a prime desire to have the car itself. If I can have that car, my life will be different, for my nothingness will be informed by the having of it. But possession turns out to be a gradual neutralization. Once it enters the zone of my nought, the car is emptied out and, instead of informing me, only participates in my nothingness. There is a dynamic quest for resplendent forms—in two separate moments: the assumption of identities (impersonations), and the consumption of goods (in order to be informed by them).