Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  Another notion we may be familiar with from the existentialist analysts is the concept of world as opposed to an environment, Welt instead of Unwelt. But this is rather a vague and unsatisfactory distinction from the point of view of behavioral science—what do you mean by “world”?—yet a semiotic analysis provides an immediate clarification and empirical grounding. For once the symbol threshold is crossed, we all have a world whether we like it or not. Other organisms respond only to those stimuli in the environment which satisfy needs or threaten. A chicken has an environment but it does not have a world. It notices the shadow of a hawk and responds accordingly. But it pays no attention to a walnut or the shadow of a tree. But once Helen Keller knew the name of water, she had to know the name of everything else until the world was named for her. A two-year-old child goes about naming everything under the sun or asking its name. Men account for the world and its organism, willy-nilly correctly or incorrectly. But chickens have no myths. It is both the glory and the folly of man that the world he perceives is the occasion of all manner of wonder, discovery, and explanation as well as misperception and gross distortions.

  Then there is the peculiar predicament of the human self, the “I” and the “you” and the “they” vis-à-vis the world.

  If there is any one characteristic which sets psychiatry apart from other medical disciplines, it is surely this peculiar trait of its subject matter: that, unlike any other organism, man is subject to the wildest and most erratic fluctuations in his own perception of himself. Scripture says (and semiotics would agree) that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards. Do not psychiatry and psychotherapy have for their very subject matter those manifold anxieties, depression, suspicions, self-hatred, feelings of inadequacy, and all the rest, which the human self falls uniquely prey to?

  Semiotics would call attention to the strange position of the symbolizing self in the world which it discovers. In a word, the self can perceive, formulate, symbolize everything under the sun except itself. A self stands in the dead center of its universe, looking out. The paradox of consciousness is that the stranger we meet on the street and glance at for a second or two we see more clearly than we shall ever see ourselves. Hence the tortuous pilgrimage of the self in search of its own identity, a search which involves role-taking, ego states, growth, and self-testing which, of course, are the everyday business of psychotherapy.

  The “you” or “thou” is, as you see, assigned a unique position in the semiotic model. In other words, the I-you or interpersonal relation is, accordingly, not merely a desirable state of affairs, as Buber would say, but is rather the very condition of being and knowing and feeling in a human way. It, this interpersonal relation, is a major variable in all semiotic transactions and its manifestations occur in a continuum running from the I-it through the I-you-they to the I-all-of-you.

  The “they” in its turn can be understood as either participating in the interpersonal community or as being assigned a separate status as world object, along with shoes and ships and sealing wax.

  Please note that once the symbol-mongering organism has a world, he must place himself in this world. He has no choice. He cannot not do it. If he refuses to make a choice, then he will experience himself placed in this world as one who has not made a choice. He is not like a dog or a cat who, when deprived of all stimuli, goes to sleep. Unlike an organism in an environment, a man in a world has the unique capacity for being delighted with the world and himself and his place in the world, or being bored with it, anxious about it, or depressed about it. He can exploit it, celebrate it, be a stranger in it, or be at home in it. He has, moreover, the perverse capacity for getting things backwards and upside down. He, of all creatures, is capable of feeling good during hurricanes and sad on ordinary Wednesday afternoons.

  It would not be difficult, in fact, to make out the case that most of modern literature, the novel and poetry in particular, is nothing more or less than a calling attention to the remarkable fact that contemporary man feels strangely out of place in the very world he, more than any other man in history, has most successfully transformed for his own use. The hero or anti-hero of the contemporary novel is a man who finds himself stuck into a world without knowing how or why, or understanding his relation to it, and yet cannot escape his dilemma.

  Then, is a theory of man possible?

  By “theory” in this case, I, of course, do not mean a comprehensive anthropology, philosophy, or theology but rather a minimal coherent working model which can accommodate both a view of man—man as organism in an environment—which he is—and also those unique, triumphant, and perverse options—options for misery and joy—to which man seems particularly prone.

  If I do not think much of man as organism in an environment or of man as body-plus-soul as an adequate model, it is not because I do not believe man is an organism or that man does not have a soul. It is rather that it doesn’t do you or me much good as behavioral scientists to draw a picture of man as superchimp responding to signals, or as angel-beast, a strange composite of mind and stuff.

  Freud’s model makes the same mistake, I believe, as the older behaviorists. Both used dyadic models. The only change Freud made was to transfer the dyadic model from matter interacting with itself to psyche interacting with itself. If you will think about it, most of Freud’s terminology is borrowed from the dyadic sciences and applied to psychic events: such terms as libidinal energy, repression, instincts, drives, aggression, dynamism, cathexis, and so on.

  The upshot, of course, was that the Freudians and the behaviorists were both talking the same language but were sealed off from each other by the mind-body barrier. Unlike Alice’s situation in Through the Looking-Glass, there was no way to step through the mirror in either direction. And so the argument between the behaviorists and Freud was never really joined and now is not even interesting.

  But if we begin with what we know and can observe and point at, that man does indeed transact with his environment and with other men through the mediation of signs, but in a quite different way from other organisms, we can see a beginning. We can see a structure and a relationship between person and person, person and things, person and symbols, a system of transactions quite as open to observation by behavioral scientists as the responses of rats. Yet it is a system which, unlike other energy systems we are familiar with, has a whole new set of parameters and variables.

  It is precisely the value of such a model that such realities as consciousness, the unconscious, community, loss of community, intersubjectivity, alienation, self, loss of self, authenticity, inauthenticity, and so on, can be articulated as parameters and variables of a single model rather than being assigned haphazardly to a mysterious entity called a psyche.

  So here is the beginning of a theory of man as a semiotician might see him: Man is that creature who transacts with his fellow creatures and with the elements of his environment just as other organisms do but in a unique way, unique both in structure and in function, a way which, moreover, can be correlated both with his behavior as we observe it and with new anatomical structures in the cerebral cortex. To say so is only to suggest a minimal working model. As such, it opts neither for mechanism nor materialism nor theism, nor any of the perennial quarrels which have always vexed the larger question of man.

  I can even visualize the hospital of the future in which the first signs the patient sees in the corridor do not read INTERNAL MEDICINE, SURGERY, OBGYN, DERMATOLOGY, PSYCHIATRYUPSTAIRS, but rather two big signs just inside the front door, one pointing left, one right (I won’t say which is which), but one reading DYADIC DISORDERS; the other, TRIADIC DISORDERS.

  Naming and Being

  WHAT IS NAMING? Is it an event which we can study as we study other events in natural history, such as solar eclipses, glandular secretions, nuclear fusion, stimulus-response sequences? Let us take a concrete example. A father tells his two-year-old child that this, pointing to a certain object, is a ball. The child understands him, and wh
enever his father speaks the word, the child looks for the ball and runs to get it. But this is not naming. The child’s understanding is not qualitatively different from the understanding which a dog has of the word “ball”; it can be construed in terms of response conditioning, sound waves, neural impulses, brain patterns. It is, in other words, a sequence of happenings which takes place among material beings and is, in this respect, not utterly different from a solar eclipse, glandular secretion, or nuclear fusion.

  But one day the father utters the word “ball” and his son suddenly understands that his father does not mean find the ball, or where is the ball, but, rather, this is a ball—the word “ball”means this round thing.

  Something has happened. We may quarrel about the good and the bad of it—some saying with the Polish semanticists that what has happened is a major catastrophe for the human race, some saying with Helen Keller that what has happened is nothing less than the discovery of the world and the coming to oneself as a person—but, beyond any doubt, something has happened. During the next few weeks, the child will hold the ball and speak its name a thousand times to anyone who will listen, or to no one at all. In so doing, he experiences a joy which has nothing to do with the biological need-satisfactions which have determined all previous joys. What, then, has happened? Is the child launched upon a delusional state which will plague him the rest of his life, or has he hit upon the secret of knowing what the world is and of becoming a person in the world?

  Whatever has happened, it is a scandal to modern philosophers of meaning. The semioticists are determined that meaning shall be a response, not utterly different from a solar eclipse or from dog salivation. But, having said this, they are left with the problem of accounting for man’s often foolish behavior with symbols, and of dealing with the offensive little sentence “This is an oyster,” for, clearly, as they never cease to tell us, this is not an oyster and a man cannot eat the word “oyster.” It is for this reason that so many semioticists are bad-tempered—they are forced to be moralists and to scold man for his follies. One can easily imagine that astronomers would be bad-tempered, too, if, after discovering the laws of planetary motion, they discovered that solar eclipses refused to obey these laws and, in general, behaved perversely. But it would be a very poor astronomer who spent his time scolding the planets instead of trying to figure out why they behave as they do.

  Name giving and naming are a scandal to the behaviorist and semanticist, because something unprecedented has taken place: naming is, in fact, utterly different from a solar eclipse or a conditioned response. If one tries to explain naming as a sequential happening among material existents—as a sound calling forth a thought or referential activity—one misses the point, or, as Mrs. Langer says, one leaves out the most essential feature of the material. A name does not call forth something, it names something.

  But it does not help very much to say that a name names something. In leaving it at that, we only succeed in concealing, rather than clarifying, a most mysterious happening. What does take place when something is named? What is the meaning of the mysterious question, What is that? What is the meaning of the even more mysterious answer, “That is a ball”? Let us consider the situation immediately before and immediately after the act of naming. The elements are the same in each case. There are four of them: the father, the child, the ball, and the word “ball,” which trembles in the air. What happens is clear enough in the simple case when the child understands the word “ball” as a signal and looks for the ball. The child’s behavior is a sign-response sequence, strikingly similar to Mead’s “conversation of gesture” involving two dogs, barks, and a bone. But then it dawns upon the child that the sound “ball” means the round thing. He holds the ball before him and utters the same sound, and now he, too, intends that this sound shall mean the ball. From this point forward, we may no longer use the causal-sequential frame of reference which had served so well for the understanding of every event in the universe from stellar phenomena to glandular secretions; henceforward, we must find some other frame of reference. What has changed in the situation? The four elements are still the same: the father, the child, the ball, the word “ball.” And yet we know from the testimony of blind deaf-mutes as well as from the observation of normal maturation not only that something new has happened but that the event is probably the most portentous happening in the development of the person. Here, however, we encounter a difficulty; for trying to penetrate the act of naming is like trying to see a mirror while standing in front of it. Since symbolization is the very condition of our knowing anything, trying to get hold of it is like trying to get hold of the means by which we get hold of everything else. As a consequence, naming passes itself off as the most trivial of events: a thing is named, and what of it? What could be more transparent? Where is the mystery?

  We begin to appreciate the mystery when we realize that the act of naming, or denotation, is generically without precedent in natural history. I mean this in the most radical sense possible. One may reply with a shrug that a glandular secretion or a conditioned response is likewise without precedent in the universe. But considered in the broadest frame of reference, glandular secretions and conditioned responses are the same sort of events as stellar explosions or nuclear fusions. There occurs an energy exchange mediated by structures, a sequential interaction which lends itself to formulation as a function of variables, a=f(b). The state following a nuclear fusion is, thus, a function of the state before. A dog’s response to the signal “ball” is a function of the stimulus and the electrocolloidal state of the dog’s brain. But when one names a thing or understands from another that a thing is so named, the event can no longer be interpreted as a causal function.

  Something has happened, to be sure, but it is not an interaction. It is something utterly different: an affirmation. Naming or symbolization may be defined as the affirmation of the thing as being what it is under the auspices of the symbol. When the child understands that by the word “ball” his father means the round thing, his understanding is of the nature of a yes-saying. Helen Keller’s memorable revelation was the affirmation of the water as being what it is. But an affirmation requires two persons, the namer and the hearer. This is water, means that this is water for you and for me. Only a person may say yes, and he may say it only to another person. A dog may appear to say yes by acquiescing to a command, but its acquiescence is a reaction and not a yes-saying.

  By the sign an organism is oriented to the world according to its needs of survival and reproduction. An animal takes notice only of things which are either dangerous or beneficial to it. That which is neither dangerous nor beneficial is passed over. But the child who learns that this is a ball will then wish to know what is this here and what is that over there. He will wish to know the name of the swallow in the sky, even though the swallow is nothing to him biologically. The swallow is ignored by the tiger, but the child must know what the swallow is. The scandal is, as Gabriel Marcel has said, that when I ask what is this strange flower, I am more satisfied to be given a name, even though the name may mean nothing, than to be given a scientific classification. If I see a strange bird, ask my bird-watcher friend what it is, and he tells me it is a blue-gray gnatcatcher, I am obscurely disappointed. I cannot help thinking that he is telling me something about the bird—that its color is blue-gray and that it catches gnats—when I really want to know is what it is. If he tells me it is a starling, I am satisfied. This is enough to make a semioticist lose his temper. He will tell me that I am only falling victim to primitive word-magic. There is something in what he says, as we shall see; yet it is possible that there is another reason for my satisfaction. It has to do with the new orientation which has come about as the result of naming. This orientation is no longer biological; it is ontological. It has to do with a new need—a need which no longer is an adaptive or reproductive need but the need to affirm the thing as being what it is for both of us. But how can a bird, a flower, be affirmed? It can be aff
irmed only by means of a name. As Allen Tate has pointed out, it was a general belief in the West until the seventeenth century that human beings do not know things directly, as do the angels, but only through the medium of something else: the symbol. In order that the strange bird be known and affirmed, a pairing is required: the laying of symbol alongside thing. This pairing is the source of the scandal, for it occurs by the use of the copula “is.” This is monstrous when understood as a real identity, but the difficulty disappears when it is understood as an intentional relation of identity. Korzybski became angry when anyone picked up a pencil and said this is a pencil. Say anything at all about the pencil, he insisted, but never say it is a pencil. But unless you and I say it is a pencil, unless it “is” a pencil for both of us, we may not say anything about it at all.

  Naming brings about a new orientation toward the world. Prior to naming things, the individual is an organism responding to his environment; he is never more nor less than what he is; he either flourishes or he does not flourish. A tiger is a tiger, no more, no less, whether he is a sick tiger or a flourishing tiger. But as soon as an individual becomes a name-giver or a hearer of a name, he no longer coincides with what he is biologically. Henceforth, he must exist either authentically or inauthentically. An organism exists in the biological scale of flourishing-not-flourishing; a person exists in the normative scale of authentic-inauthentic. The scales are not the same. A person may flourish biologically while, at the same time, living a desperately alienated and anonymous life, or a person may be sick biologically and, at the same time—perhaps even as a result of it—live authentically. In the joy of naming, one lives authentically. No matter whether I give a name to, or hear the name of, a strange bird; no matter whether I write or read a line of great poetry, form or understand a scientific hypothesis, I thereby exist authentically as a namer or a hearer, as an “I” or a “thou”—and in either case as a co-celebrant of what is. But when names no longer discover being but conceal it under the hardened symbol, when the world comes to be conceived as Alice’s museum of name-things: shoes and ships and sealing wax—then I am bored. I exist as a nought in the center of the picture-book world of the en soi. A tiger neither celebrates being nor is he bored by it. Confronted by being which is biologically neutral, he goes to sleep. Since a person does not coincide with what he is, he may be either better or worse than a tiger.