Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  I mention these well-known and fundamental divergences between the subject matters of the medical sciences and the psychiatric sciences to raise nagging questions; namely, whether this split of the human species into body and mind is not intractable, whether it is not in the very nature of things that we shall always be dealing with somatic complaints on the first floor and emotional complaints on another floor or another wing, and whether the two will ever have much more to do with each other than they do now—and to raise an even more distressing question: Is the very nature of mindstuff such that we will never be able to get hold of it, converge on it, and that schools of psychotherapy will continue to proliferate?

  I mention this all too familiar state of affairs to bring to your attention the glimmer of a new way of looking at things. This is not to suggest that Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again. If modern man was split in two by Descartes’s mind-body theory three hundred years ago, it is unlikely that he can be pasted back together by yet another theory. But it may be possible that we can at least see the fragments, Humpty Dumpty’s fragments, not as disparate parts, body and mind, which never seem to have fit together, but at least as parts of the same creature.

  By a “new way of looking at things,” I refer to what is called variously triadic theory, semiotics, semiosis. It is not new, being in the main the discovery of the American logician and philosopher Charles Peirce some seventy-five years ago.

  Charles Peirce’s triadic theory applies mainly to man’s strange and apparently unique capacity to use symbols and, in particular, to his gift of language.

  It might be well to begin with what I take to be a growing consensus about the nature of language itself—which is central to our thesis. A curious swing-back of the pendulum has occurred in recent years. To oversimplify the case, one might describe the traditional view of man, say, up to one hundred years ago, as the centerpiece of creation, made in the image of God, distinguished from the beasts in being endowed with soul, intellect, free will, reason, and the gift of language. He could name things, think about things, was free to do all he wanted, convey his thoughts by words which could be understood by other men.

  At the opposite swing of the pendulum—say, thirty to fifty years ago, following the victory of early Darwinism, at the full tide of Pavlovian and Watsonian behaviorism and with the gathering impetus of Freud’s discovery of the power of the irrational forces of the unconscious—man was not only dethroned from his lordship of creation, but his very reason, and the autonomy of his consciousness, was called into question. And as for the one faculty which even Darwin admitted seemed to set him apart from the beasts, the gift of language, even that seemed explainable, or was held explainable, at least in principle, as a response, the learned response of an organism, admittedly more complex than the response of a rat to a signal, but not qualitatively different.

  Now, let me quickly summarize what I take to be the present position of some recent writers, linguistic theorists, psycholinguists, semioticists, and the like. I have in mind not only Charles Peirce but Suzanne Langer, Ernst Cassirer, and Noam Chomsky.

  The consensus, it seems fair to state, is: Man’s capacity for language and the use of symbols does indeed seem to be unique among species. It cannot be explained by the known laws of learning theory or any refinement of adaptation of these laws. The contrast is dramatic. Take a human child and the most intelligent of the nonhuman primates, a young chimpanzee. Following the most rigorous training, months and years of input, a chimpanzee can be taught perhaps seventy-five hand signals by means of which he can communicate this or that need, “Want banana, hug me, tickle me,” and so on. In the case of the human child, during this same period of time and without anybody taking much trouble about it, the child will learn to utter and understand an infinite number of new sentences in his language. Chomsky actually uses the word “infinite” to describe this language competence.

  This capacity for language seems to be, in the evolutionary scale, a relatively recent, sudden, and explosive development. A few years ago, it was thought to have begun to happen with Homo erectus perhaps a million years ago. Now, as Julian Jaynes at Princeton, among others, believes, it appears to have occurred in Neanderthal man as recently as the fourth glaciation, which lasted from about 75,000 to 35,000 years ago. During this same period, especially around 40,000 years ago, there occurred an explosive increase in the use and variety of new tools. The human brain increased in weight about fifty-four percent, much of this increase occurring in the cortex, especially in those areas around the Sylvan fissure implicated in the perception and production of speech. There are new structures, not present or else extremely rudimentary in even the highest apes. Moreover, recent experiments have shown that if one destroys this cortical region in other primates, it has no effect on vocalization, which is mediated not by a cortical but rather by the limbic system.

  What does this mean? It means, for one thing, that there occurred in the evolution of man an extraordinary and unprecedented event which in the scale of evolutionary time was as sudden as biblical creation and whose consequences we are just beginning to explore. A fifty-four percent increase in brain weight in a few thousand years is, evolutionarily speaking, almost an instantaneous event. Anatomically speaking, it is perhaps not too much to say that this spectacular quantum jump is what made man human.

  What is important to notice is that this change is not merely yet another evolutionary adaptation or adventure, however extraordinary. Man is not merely another organism which has learned to utter and understand sounds. Language is apparently an all-or-none threshold. As the linguist Edward Sapir said, there is no such thing as a primitive language. Language is unlike bird’s flight. Some birds are superb flyers; others are lousy. But every normal human has the capacity for uttering and understanding an infinite number of sentences in his language, no matter what the language is. As Helen Keller said, once she discovered that the word “water” was the name of the liquid, she then had to know what everything else was.

  What I am saying, along with Peirce, Langer, Cassirer, and Chomsky, is that once man has crossed the threshold of language and the use of other symbols, he literally lives in a new and different world. If a Martian were to visit earth, I think the main thing he would notice about earthlings is that they spend most of their time in one kind of symbolic transaction or other, talking or listening, gossiping, reading books, writing books, making reports, listening to lecturers, delivering lectures, telling jokes, looking at paintings, watching TV, going to movies. Even at night, asleep, his mind is busy with dreams, which are, of course, a very tissue of symbols.

  So sweepingly has his very life and his world been transformed by his discovery of symbols that it seems more accurate to call man not Homo sapiens—because man’s folly is at least as characteristic as his wisdom—but Homo symbolificus, man the symbol-mongerer, or Homo loquens, man the talker. To paraphrase William Faulkner: Even if the world should come to an end and there are only two survivors, what do you think they would be doing most of the time? Talking, talking about what happened and what they plan to do about it.

  Assuming, then, that this is the case, that man is truly a different kind of creature, something new under the sun, a symbol-mongerer, does that bring us any closer to the beginnings of a minimal theory of man; that is to say, a model of man which would do justice to his uniqueness while at the same time giving a coherent account of his place in the hierarchy of creatures, an account, in other words, which might be acceptable both to behavioral scientists and to theologians?

  Charles Peirce’s idea is quite simple really, like all important ideas so simple, in fact, that it is hard to get hold of, so ingrained has become our customary way of thinking about natural phenomena, whether these phenomena are the chemical reactions in a test tube or the metabolism within a cell or the Freudian model of libidinal energies transacting within a psyche.

  Peirce believed that there are at least two kinds of natural phenomena, and
by this he did not mean physical and mental phenomena. He referred to the two as dyadic and triadic events. He made this discovery almost a hundred years ago, but so unfashionable was it that no one paid serious attention until recently. Times have changed. Semiotics is currently the hottest item around, not only in the study of transactions between humans but, in Europe especially, as a new method of literary criticism.

  To make the distinction as briefly as possible: by dyadic events, Peirce meant nothing more or less than the phenomena studied by the conventional sciences, whether the collision of subatomic particles, or the reaction of NaOH with H2SO4, or the response of an amoeba to a change in pH, or the performance of a rat in learning to thread a maze.

  The model which fits any of these events according to Peirce is simply the dyad

  whether A is a subatomic particle or an electrical impulse jumping a synapse in a rat’s brain. Thus, Peirce would probably agree with most behaviorists that when one of Skinner’s pigeons responds to a blue light by doing a figure 8, no matter how complicated the brain event is, no matter how many neurones and synapses are in a neural web, the event can still be set forth as a series of dyads:

  But there is one kind of natural phenomenon which, according to Peirce, cannot be so explained. It is man’s transactions with symbols, of which, of course, the prime example is his use of language.

  Thus, when a two-year-old child learns from his father that the sound “ball” uttered by his father is the name of the round object there on the floor, Peirce would insist that this event, the child naming the ball, cannot be explained as any series or combinations of dyads; that is, by any stimulus-and-response psychology, however elaborated and refined.

  Thus, language in particular and all of man’s transactions with symbols in general are not dyadic but triadic behavior. Three elements are involved in a relationship which is absolutely irreducible. Thus

  and also later in the development of the sentence-utterances, when the child couples not a thing and a sound but the two elements of the primitive sentence

  There are three elements involved in a triadic relationship which cannot be further reduced without destroying the relationship. One important feature of triadic phenomena should be noted first off. We are dealing, not with thoughts or subjective states, but with behavior and observables, with people, words and things, and what people do with words and things—a state of affairs which is surely congenial to the behavioral scientist.

  Now, as you must know, a great deal of effort has been expended by psychologists in trying to explain triadic behavior as a series of stimulus-response dyads. And while I am no judge of this vast literature, I will note only that an increasing number of theorists would agree with Noam Chomsky that the acquisition of language by the human species is a phenomenon for which the natural sciences, as we know them, do not presently have adequate models. Chomsky, I believe, goes too far and falls into the old Cartesian trap, the mind-body split, which to a behavioral scientist must seem like turning back the clock a hundred years.

  But what has all this got to do with our original question, Is a Theory of Man Possible?, and with the chasm between the medical and psychotherapeutic disciplines, a chasm which even now is only bridged with some such tenuous and shaky term as “psychosomatic”?

  I would suggest that if man is indeed unique among the species in crossing the symbols threshold, and if Charles Peirce is right in saying we can study this unique phenomenon as a relationship between observable elements, then surely a good place to look for a minimal consensus view of man is as a languaged creature, not man the mind-body composite, but Homo symbolificus, man the symbol-mongerer.

  So I would like to spend the rest of this time with a few brief remarks about some consequences for behavioral science of the new semiotic or triadic theory, to suggest a few ways in which Charles Peirce’s semiotics may serve both as a fructifying and as a unifying concept in the diverse and often bewildering variety of approaches to the human psyche which we have encountered since Freud.

  Let us consider, for example, some of the terms we are accustomed to using when we talk about that aspect of man we ordinarily label as mental or part of the psyche. The question is: Are these terms destined forever to be locked into the psyche? Do we settle permanently for the Cartesian split between body and mind? Or does semiotics give us a new way of looking at things?

  What about the following terms which we are accustomed to using, both in psychotherapy and anytime we are talking about the human psyche, terms which we think we understand and consider meaningful but which are so difficult to bring under the purview of the scientific method—what about such terms as “the conscious” and “the unconscious,” which we associate with Freud; “interpersonal relations,” which we associate with Buber and Sullivan; “self-role-taking” and “inferiority feelings,” which we associate with Adler; “authenticity,” “inauthenticity,” “being oneself” or “failing to be oneself,” which we associate with the existentialist analysts? What about the communication breakdowns emphasized by transactional analysis? What about the sudden insight into the way things are arrived at often under conditions of emotional stress which the Gestalt therapists speak of? Are these concepts destined to remain the exclusive property of this or that particular school of psychotherapy? Or is it possible to approach anthropology or a general theory of man which offers some prospect of bestowing order and relation onto these diverse approaches?

  I will only suggest a beginning.

  Let us look at the general models of man, or men, persons, engaged in that uniquely human activity, indeed in that very act which makes him human: the transaction in which one person utters a symbol—a word—or draws a painting, whatever—and a second person receives the symbol and understands it—or perhaps misunderstands it—to be about something else, which both persons have experienced.

  What we have is two triads pushed together with an interface between them—and there’s the rub of it and also the joy of it: what happens across the interface.

  Notice that we are not talking about psyches—rather, we are talking about a special kind of creature, organism if you like, in interaction with other organisms and with the environment through the mediation of a special kind of stimulus or sign, the symbol.

  If we approach this phenomenon either genetically, as something you discovered when you were about two years old, or phylogenetically, as something the species hit upon some forty thousand years ago, or phenomenologically, as something that is going on right now between us, certain interesting questions arise.

  I will simply list a few.

  Consciousness. Ordinarily, we think of consciousness as a state of the psyche, a more or less isolated awareness which we have trouble relating not only to other consciousnesses but to the very body within which it resides. But notice the etymology of the word, which, as in the case of so many words, is curiously revealing. “Conscious” means “knowing with.” And “knowing with” is not a state of affairs but a relation, or rather two relations, the relation of knowing and the relation of with. Does this offer us a sort of clue for getting at consciousness as something besides a queer kind of ghost inhabiting a machine called the body? The phenomenologists offer us another clue. They say that consciousness is not simply a state—we are never simply conscious—rather we are always, when we are conscious, conscious of something. Consciousness is always intentional. It is always about something else. The semioticist would make a further suggestion: not only are we always conscious of something; we are also conscious of it as something we conceive under the symbol assigned to it. And, without the symbol, I suggest we would not be conscious of it at all. Helen Keller was not really conscious of the water flowing over her hand until Miss Sullivan spelled its name in the other hand.

  To return to the semiotic model, is not consciousness nothing more or less than the act or transaction by which I communicate with you or with myself a symbol, sentence, line of poetry, map, whatever, through which we
both look at and perceive what the thing, the symbol, is about? The transaction can, of course, take place between myself and myself. I can debate with myself, hassle myself endlessly, and be so thoroughly conscious, knowing-with, that I can’t go to sleep. When the dialogue stops, consciousness stops. Sleep ensues.

  Also, the notion of the unconscious, as used by Freud, always bothered me. It seemed to be a region or zone of the psyche, the lower part of this ghost which inhabits the body. It was natural to think of the unconscious as having contents which under certain conditions emerged into consciousness like a creature of the ocean depths breaking water and leaping up into sunlight.

  Yet I wonder if the unconscious is nothing more or less than what we have experienced, either in the world or within ourselves, but have not yet named or formulated or have not yet had it named or formulated for us by something else.

  Are we not all, in fact, familiar with what has been called the Helen Keller phenomenon—wherein Helen rejoiced to have something named for her which she had in a sense known all along, the water: yet, in another sense, had not known. In a sense I say, because she knew it, the water, as an animal knows it, could respond to it, look for it when she got thirsty, but was not conscious of it until another person pointed it out and named it for her. And does it not still happen with us that when we are reading a great novel or a great poem or seeing a great play or film or even listening to music, that in the best parts we experience this same expansion of consciousness, this same sense of discovery, of affirmation, when the novelist writes of an experience we’ve had and only vaguely recognized but had not had it pointed out until this moment. The responses is an affirmation: “Aha! yes, that’s it! Sure enough, that’s the way it is! I never thought of it before but”—and so on.

  The suggestion, then, is that the conscious and the unconscious are major variables in the relations of the semiotic structure—just as reinforcement and extinction are major variables in the stimulus-response dyad.