Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  One can draw a picture with things (matter) and arrows (energy) connecting them, setting forth the behavior both of the chimp Washoe and the pre-language human infant with its responses to sights and sounds, its crying for mama and milk. But one cannot draw such a picture of an eighteen-month-old human who looks at mama, points to cat, and says “Da cat.”

  One would suppose that the appropriate scientist, the developmental psychologist, the psycholinguist, whoever, would zero in on this, the transformation of the responding organism into the languaged human. For it is undoubtedly the most extraordinary natural phenomenon in all of biological behavior, if not in the entire cosmos, and yet the most commonplace of events, one that occurs every day under our noses.

  Unfortunately, such is not the case. What one finds in the scientific literature is something like this: a huge amount of information about the infant as organism, its needs and drives, its behavior and physiology. But when it begins to speak, what? What is thought to happen? What one finds are very careful studies of the structure of the earliest utterances and their development, the rules by which an eighteen-month-old will say “That a my coat,” but not “A that my coat.”Rules, grammar, linguistic structure are what we find, the same formal approach which issues later in the splendid disciplines of structural linguistics and even in “deconstructionism.”

  We go from biology (dyadic science) to grammar (triadic science) without anybody seeming to notice anything strange. Such belle indifférence can only have come to pass either because the scientist has not noticed that he has jumped the chasm or because he has noticed but is at a loss for words.

  In sum, the scientists of man have little or nothing to say about jumping from the science of neurology, as Freud did, to a science of the psyche, whether Freudian and Jungian or what; or jumping from the natural science of biology to the formal science of grammar and structure.

  Neither we nor the scientists seem to notice anything remarkable about this leap. Suffice it to say that such behavior in any other human would be regarded as strange, if not schizoid. It is as if we lived in a California house straddling the San Andreas Fault, a crack very narrow but deep, which has, however, become as familiar as an old shoe. After all, you can get used to anything. We can hop back and forth, feed ourselves and the dyadic dog on one side, or sit on the other, read Joseph Campbell or write a triadic paper, and never give it a second thought. Once in a while we might look down into the chasm, become alarmed, and take up a New Age religion like Gaia.

  On one side are the dyadic sciences from atomic physics to academic psychology with its behaviorism and the various refinements and elaborations thereof. And on the other are the “mental” psychologies with such entities as consciousness, the unconscious, dreams, egos, ids, archetypes, and such.

  I trust, incidentally, that when I speak of dyadic phenomena as descriptive of “matter” in motion, it will be understood that I am using the word “matter” to mean whatever you please—as long as it is also understood that such phenomena, at least at the biological level, are not challenged by so-called chaos science or the indeterminancy of particle physics, however vagarious and mystical the behavior of some particles and however chaotic some turbulences. Which is to say: Even though it has been tried, it is surely a silly business to extrapolate from the indeterminacy of subatomic particles to such things as the freedom of the will. At the statistical level, large numbers of atoms behave lawfully. Boyle’s Law still obtains. If the will is free, it is no thanks to Heisenberg. As for chaos theory, it has been well described, not as a repudiation of Newtonian determinism, but as its enrichment.

  Accordingly, like Charles Peirce, I insist on the qualitative and irreducible difference between dyadic and triadic phenomena. It is easily demonstrated. Take sociology, which concerns itself with the group behavior of human organisms. Now, we have a familiar scientific model for a dyadic science like the physiology of organisms. Though the phenomena may be very complex, I can draw you a picture of what is going on when there are transactions across a cell membrane. All I have to do is draw a line for the membrane and arrows going across it both ways. But sociologists are very fond of talking about such things as role-taking. Can you draw me a picture of role-taking? Who, what, takes the role? The human organism? How does an organism take a role? By becoming a person? How does an organism get to be a person?

  Strangely enough, or perhaps not so strangely, a “mental” discipline like Freudian psychology lends itself very well to the Peircean dyadic model once one accepts the immateriality of the entities. One can very easily make a diagram showing things like ego, super ego, the unconscious, and using arrows to represent drives, repression, sublimation, and such—even though one recognizes that the whole drama takes place on the far side of the chasm from such “real” things as organisms, neurones, stimuli, responses. Valuable though Freudian psychology might be, it must nevertheless be understood as a transposition of dyadic theory to the realm of mental entities, with no account of how it got there.

  But if scientists, both “physical” scientists and “mental” scientists, can operate comfortably on both sides of the Cartesian split, what happens when the serious scientist is obliged to look straight down at the dysjunction? That is to say, what is one to make of language, that apparently unique property of man, considered not as a formal structure but as a natural phenomenon? Where did it come from? What to make of it in anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary terms? The chasm must make one dizzy. Not many psychologists or neuro-anatomists want to look down. Norman Gesschwind is one who has. He points out that there are recently evolved structures in the human brain which have to do with speech and understanding speech, such as the inferior parietal lobule which receives information from the “primary sensory projection systems”; that is, the cerebral cortex which registers seeing and feeling water and hearing the word “water.” These are described as “association areas.” But Charles Peirce would call such associations dyadic events, as he would “information processing systems” like a computer. A computer, in fact, is the perfect dyadic machine.

  What do biologists and anthropologists make of the emergence of language in the evolutionary scheme? The advantages of language in the process of natural selection are obvious. Julian Jaynes would go further and say that “the language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of gods.” Maybe, but setting aside for the moment “the language of gods,” what goes on with the language of men? Jaynes doesn’t say.

  This is what Richard Leakey, the anthropologist, says, describing what happens in a human (not a chimp) when a human uses a word as a symbol, in naming or in a sentence: “Speech is controlled by a certain structure of the brain, located in the outer cerebral cortex. Wernicke’s area of the brain pulls out appropriate words from the brain’s filing system. The angular gyrus … selects the appropriate word.”

  Pulls out? Selects? These are transitive verbs with subjects and objects. The words are the objects. What is the subject? Draw me a picture of Wernicke’s area pulling out a word or the angular gyrus selecting a word. Is there any way to understand this, other than supposing a tiny little person, a homunculus, doing the pulling and selecting?

  Then, there is what is called the speech-act theory of Austin, Searle, and others, promising because it is the actual utterances of sentences which are studied. Thus, Austin distinguishes between sentences which say something and sentences which do something. The sentence “I married her” is one kind of speech act, an assertion about an event. “I do” uttered during the marriage is another kind, part of the performance of the ceremony itself. The classes of speech-act behavior have multiplied amid ongoing debate. But once again the Emperor’s little boy becomes curious. “Speech-acts?” he asks. “What do you mean by acts? You never use the word ‘acts’ in describing the behavior of other creatures.” An act entails an actor, an agent which initiates the act. Draw me a picture of a speech-act. Where, what, is
the actor?

  Such are a few of the manifold discomforts of the natural scientist who finds himself astride the Cartesian chasm, one foot planted in dyadic territory, the other in triadic. What happens is, he very quickly chooses one side or the other.

  But how does Charles Sanders Peirce help us here? Are we any better off with Peirce’s thirdness, his triadic theory, than we were with Descartes’s res cogitans and res extensa?

  Let me first say that I do not have the competence to speculate on the brain structures which may be implicated in triadic behavior. Nor would I wish to if I had the competence. Such a project is too uncomfortably close to Descartes’s search for the seat of the soul, which I believe he located in the pineal gland.

  No, what is important to note about the triadic event is that it is there for all to see, that in fact it occurs hundreds of times daily—whenever we talk or listen to somebody talking—that its elements are open to inspection to everyone, including natural scientists, and that it cannot be reduced to a complexus of dyadic events. The chattering of an entire population of rhesus monkeys is so reducible. But the single utterance of a two-year-old child who points and says “that a flower” cannot be so understood—even though millions of dyadic events also occur: light waves, excitation of nerve endings, electrical impulses in neurones, muscle contractions, and so on.

  So what? one well might ask. Which is to say: Admitting that there is such a thing as an irreducible triadic event in language behavior, are there any considerable consequences for our anthropology in the strict sense of the word, the view of man that comes as second nature to the educated denizen of modern society?

  There are indeed, and they, the consequences, are startling indeed.

  For once one concedes the reality of the triadic event, one is brought face to face with the nature of its elements. A child points to a flower and says “flower.” One element of the event is the flower as perceived by sight and registered by the brain: blue, five-petaled, of a certain shape; and the spoken word “flower,” a Gestalt of a peculiar little sequence of sounds of larynx vibrations, escape of air between lips and teeth, and so on. But what is the entity at the apex of the triangle, that which links the other two? Peirce, a difficult, often obscure writer, called it by various names, interpretant, interpreter, judge. I have used the term “coupler” as a minimal designation of that which couples name and thing, subject and predicate, links them by the relation which we mean by the peculiar little word “is.” It, the linking entity, was also called by Peirce “mind” and even “soul.”

  Here is the embarrassment, and it cannot be gotten round, so it might as well be said right out: By whatever name one chooses to call it—interpretant, interpreter, coupler, whatever—it, the third element, is not material.

  It is as real as a cabbage or a king or a neurone, but it is not material. No material structure of neurones, however complex, and however intimately it may be related to the triadic event, can itself assert anything. If you think it can, please draw me a picture of an assertion.

  A material substance cannot name or assert a proposition.

  The initiator of a speech act is an actor, that is, an agent. The agent is not material.

  Peirce’s insistence on both the reality and the nonmateriality of the third element—whatever one chooses to call it, interpretant, mind, coupler—is of critical importance to natural science because its claim to reality is grounded not on this or that theology or metaphysic but on empirical observation and the necessities of scientific logic.

  Compare the rigor and clarity of Peirce’s semiotic approach to the ancient mind/body problem to current conventional thinking about such matters. We know the sort of answer the psychologist or neurologist gives when we ask him what the mind is: that it is a property of brain circuitry and so on.

  We now know, at least an increasing number of people are beginning to know, that a different sort of reality lies at the heart of all uniquely human activity—speaking, listening, understanding, thinking, looking at a work of art—namely, Charles Peirce’s triadicity. It cannot be gotten round and must sooner or later be confronted by natural science, for it is indeed a natural phenomenon. Indeed, it may well turn out that consciousness itself is not a “thing,” an entity, but an act, the triadic act by which we recognize reality through its symbolic vehicle.

  In any case, it will be a matter of interest, if not of amusement, to see how scientists of the future, with their strong empiricist and materialistic traditions, come to grips with this nonmaterial, non-measurable entity. For sooner or later it must be confronted. There is no alternative if we wish to progress beyond the present incoherence of the social sciences and if we believe that man’s unique behavior of language and symbol-mongering falls within the purview of natural science, which clearly it does. In any case, Peirce’s little triad cannot be ignored as such traditional notions as “mind,” “soul,” “ideas” have been ignored.

  III

  But, and finally, what are the consequences of Charles Peirce’s discovery that precisely that which is distinctive in human behavior, language, art, thought itself, is not accounted for, is not accounted for by the standard scientific paradigm which has been sovereign for three hundred years, that indeed, science as we know it cannot utter a single word about what it is to be born a human individual, to live, and to die?

  There is one consequence which is good news indeed for us humanists. It is quite simply that these “sentences” of art, poetry, and the novel ought to be taken very seriously indeed since these are the cognitive, scientific, if you will, statements that we have about what it is to be human. The humanities, in a word, are not the minstrels of the age whose only role is to promise R&R to tired technicians and consumers after work. Rather are the humanities the elder brother of the sciences, who sees how the new scientist got his tail in a crack when he takes on the human subject as object and who even shows him the shape of a new science.

  What to say about him, then, this strange new creature who symballeins, throws words and names together to form sentences?

  To begin with, what to call it, this entity which symballeins, throws together word and thing? As we have seen, Peirce used a number of words: interpreter, interpretant, asserter, mind, “I,” ego, even soul. They may or may not be semantically accurate, but for the educated denizen of this age they suffer certain semantic impairments. “Interpretant” is too ambiguous, even for Peirce scholars. “Soul” carries too much furniture from the religious attic. “Ego” has a different malodor, smelling as it does of the old Cartesian split.

  Then don’t name it, for the present, but talk about it, like Lowell Thomas coming upon a strange creature in his travels, in this case a sure-enough beast in the jungle.

  There are certain minimal things one can say about it, this coupler, this apex of Peirce’s triangle. For one thing, it is there. It is located in time and space, but not as an organism. It has a different set of parameters and variables. For another, it is peculiarly and intimately involved with others of its kind, so that, unlike the solitary biological organism, it is impossible to imagine it functioning without the other, another. All solitary organisms have instinctive responses. But Helen Keller had to receive the symbol “water” from Miss Sullivan before she became aware of the water. Peirce’s triad is social by its very nature. As he put it, “every assertion requires a speaker and a listener.” The triadic creature is nothing if not social. Indeed, he can be understood as a construct of his relations with others.

  Here’s another trait. It, this strange new creature, not only has an environment, as do all creatures. It has a world. Its world is the totality of that which is named. This is different from its environment. An environment has gaps. There are no gaps in a world. Nectar is part of the environment of a bee. Cabbages and kings and Buicks are not. There are no gaps in the world of this new creature, because the gaps are called that, gaps, or the unknown, or out there, or don’t know.

  For this creature,
moreover, words, symbols, and the things symbolized are subject to norms, something new in the world. They can be fresh and grow stale. Words can tell the truth or lie. Lying is something new in the cosmos.

  There is time now to do no more than call attention to the intriguing and, I think, quite felicitous way in which the properties of this strange triadic creature as arrived at by a scientist and logician one hundred years ago flow directly into the rather spectacular portrait of man by some well-known twentieth-century philosophers who came at the same subject, Homo symbolificus, from the wholly different direction of European phenomenology. Such may be the shape of the science of man to come.

  I will mention only a couple.

  There is Heidegger, who uses the word “Dasein” to describe him, the human creature, a being there. The Dasein, moreover, inhabits not only an Umwelt, an environment, but a Welt, a world.

  Most important, this Dasein, unlike an organism, exists on a normative axis. It can live “authentically” or “unauthentically.” It is capable of Verstehen, true understanding, and Rede, authentic speech, which can deteriorate into Neugier, idle curiosity, and Gerede, gossip.