|
Walker Percy's Genesis Phenomenon:
Towards a Radical Anthropology
by
Karey Perkins
In a 1991 posthumously published interview entitled "Questions They Never Asked Me" (Signposts), Walker Percy writes both the questions and the answers to an imaginary interview of himself. He asks:
Q. Haven't you written a little something about language theory?
A. Yes.
Q. Could you summarize your thoughts on the subject?
A. No
But the interview continues anyway:
Q. Why not?
A. It is not worth the trouble. What is involved in a theory of language is a theory of man, and people are not interested. Despite the catastrophes of this century and man's total failure to understand himself and deal with himself, people still labor under the illusion that a theory of man exists. It doesn't. As bad and confused as things are, they have to get even worse before people realize they don't have the faintest idea what sort of creature man is. Then they might want to know. Until then, one is wasting one's time.
In other words, what Percy's language theory does, and Charles Peirce's before it, is to address the riddle of the nature of man - the long standing "mind-body" problem that continues to be unresolved in philosophical circles everywhere. It's not just a philosophical problem, it's a scientific problem and a psychiatric problem, as Percy explains in his 1957 essay, "The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry" (Signposts).
The "mind-body problem" is a three-hundred-years-old issue that began with René Descartes who hypothesized that a "mind," which was of an entirely different and separate substance as a body, not only existed in a body but also related to or communicated with the body. In this view, human beings are a "ghost in a machine." This theory is called Cartesian dualism and it rose to ascendancy in the 1700's and has reigned ever since.
Modern science, which is often uncomfortable with the idea of ghosts or anything that can't be physically accounted for and experimentally verified, has another solution - physicalism. Man is not made of two substances, a "ghost in a machine," but rather, all one substance - a physical substance. Carried to its extreme, physicalism says that man's consciousness, as well as his emotions, is just the by-product of chemicals interacting in the brain - and don't even begin to talk about the idea of soul. Percy cites a psychiatry textbook author as saying: "What can a physiological psychologist say about human self-awareness? We know that it is altered by changes in the structure of chemistry of the brain. We conclude that consciousness is just a physiological function, just like behavior" (Carlson, qtd. in Percy, Signposts, 274).
This solves the problem of how a mind and a body can interact - but raises another problem, at least for some of us. The new problem is that this does away with "mind," in addition to doing away with the idea of consciousness, spirit, soul, and, for some hard-line physicalists, even our emotions become physical reactions. Feeling a little anxious? Take some Prozac. In contemporary society, physical (specifically medical) solutions are applied to emotional problems - whereas past eras had once ascribed such to being symptoms of entities like "the soul" - something no longer universally acknowledged to exist. Other proposals to the problem do not offer any more adequate a solution than physicalism or Cartesian dualism as evidence by the continued and unresolved debate on the topic.
Walker Percy says that when it comes to this subject, that is, explaining a Theory of Man, the inner workings of science are incoherent. With his language theory, Percy accomplishes the amazing and overlooked task of setting science back on the right path - though as a scientist and medical doctor as well as a novelist and philosopher, he doesn't mean to criticize or do away with science itself. He doesn't attack science as an outraged humanist; instead, he sets science aright conspiratorially, as one of "them," saying of his task that "It is more like whispering to a fellow at a party he'd do well to fix his fly" (Signposts 272).
For Percy, science does a marvelous job of explaining most everything in the universe - quasars, black holes, atoms - on a purely physical level, as the domain of science is the physical realm. However, it fails when it comes to man because man is not a purely physical organism. Percy also says that man is not a "ghost in a machine." There's a reason the mind-body problem occupies a whole course in philosophy and countless professional journal articles - because we have not yet stumbled upon a sensible and coherent answer as to "what man is" or a "theory of man." Percy writes, "Modern anthropology deals with man as a physical organism and with the products of man as a culture member, but NOT with man himself as a culture member….Modern anthropology has been everything except an anthropology" (Message 239).
Percy calls for an assessment of man himself, and offers a "radical anthropology." His unique view of man is "monist," in that he perceives man as one substance, but not reducible to a physicalist stance. Percy rejects Cartesian dualism, but does not embrace the popular and usual alternative of physicalism. For Percy, the human being is more than just an organism [re]acting in an environment, as the behaviorists would have him - a victim of cause and effect. Humanity is qualitatively different from animals and the rest of the world, including the animals and higher level primates which, in Percy's view, operate solely by instinct, without "consciousness."
This difference is that man speaks. The difference between man and the animals is this capacity for language, which is nothing more than man's unique ability to do commerce in symbols. Percy writes, "The truth is that man's capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is…intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness…" (Message 29). In fact, we can only "know" the world, on a conscious level, through the naming/language act. If we cannot name a thing, we cannot know it except as it relates to our instinctual nature and physical survival (Signposts 261, 274, 282). Naming bridges the gap between empiricism and existentialism (Message 280), between the "behavioristics of Mead and the existentialia of Marcel" (Message 272) - an appropriate discovery for, and perhaps only possible by, someone who was both scientist and novelist/philosopher. In other words, man's capacity for symbol and language effectively answers the mind-body dilemma in a way that physicalism and dualism cannot.
For Percy, commerce in symbols is not a dyadic stimulus-response event as most semioticians and language theorists view it. Language is not a Pavlovian salivation; it is not the same thing as an animal reacting to a command, such as "Fetch" or "Sit." If you say "James" to a dog, he will look for James; if you say "James" to a human, he will wonder about James (Message 203). Percy believes that all attempts to teach language to animals such as dolphins and chimps still remain qualitatively different from what happens when a human being speaks. They are in realm of "sign and response" to satisfy a biological survival need, because animals do not have the capacity to understand symbol.
Symbol-mongering cannot be explained by behaviorist theory or as a space-time event or as a succession of energy states. This is, for Percy, a:
shattering of the old dream of the Enlightenment - that an objective-explanatory-causal science can discover and set forth all the knowledge of which man is capable….Man is not merely a higher [purely biological] organism responding to and controlling his environment. He is, in Heidegger's words, that being in the world whose calling it is to find a name for Being, to give testimony to it, and to provide for it a clearing (Message 158).
Percy explains the inadequacy and contradictions of both science and the scientific method as the sole attempt to explain who and what man is - as well as the limitations of current cultural anthropology and semiotics. Why do current anthropological and semiotic theories (operating primarily on the behaviorist model) fail to adequately describe the nature of man? Simply because, while they adequately account for cause-effect actions, responses to stimuli, survival and instinctual behavior, they do not explain symbol. Symbol is NOT a dyadic event, as in:
A---------------->B
So the communication act is NOT a cause-effect experience, as many linguists would have it, as in the following example Percy uses when the father points to a balloon and tells his child that that is balloon:
Balloon---------------------------------------------->Balloon
(actual object)-------------------------------------->(sign, word, utterance)
This is also how science functions to explain most of the physical world we live in. "Dyadic events are, presumably, those energy exchanges conventionally studied by the natural sciences: subatomic particles colliding, chemical reactions, actions of force-fields on bodies, physical and chemical transactions across biological membranes, neuron discharges, etc." (Message 162). This works very well for most of the world:
Release Ball --------------------> Ball drops
Bell rings----------->Pavlov's dog salivates
Say "Fetch"------------------->Rover fetches
Sue hears loud noise------------->Sue jumps
There can even be a succession of dyadic events:
A-->B-->C-->D-->E
which might look like:
Release Ball-->Ball drops--> Ball rolls-->Dog sees movement-->Dog runs after ball
All well and good, and generally speaking, it works. The problem for Percy arrives when you apply this to language. For many semioticians, the language event looks like this:
Word "ball"------------------->Object "ball"
which can also become a succession of dyadic events:
I speak word "ball" -->Child hears word "ball" -->Child looks at "ball" -->Child responds
Percy however, would beg to differ. Something more than biology occurs in the "naming" act. Language is not a matter of inherent instinctual response, but a matter of understanding and affirmation of the thing. When human beings name (the first and simplest language act) and later, when they use words and phrases together in sentences, they are not responding to stimuli, but they are symbolizing.
Borrowing heavily from Charles Peirce, 19th century mathematician and pragmatist, Percy proposes a different kind of event for "symbol-mongering," which is how he describes language, among other things. Symbols entail triadic events and are not reducible to dyadic ones; language is instead a "non-linear, nonenergic natural phenomenon" that Percy calls the "Delta factor" (referring the triangle created in diagramming this phenomenon) (Message 39). Percy calls this the structure of symbolic behavior:
Balloon---------------------------------------------->Balloon
(actual object)--------------------------->(sign, word, utterance)
Organism
(or interpreter)
The third element is the human element and as such, it contains many elements that cannot be grasped…it is a mystery (Message 150). It contains elements of the human existential condition, and the message is then filtered, understood, modified by the addition of the third element. Percy's last sentence in Message in the Bottle, ending his primary text devoted to this language theory, says: "The apex of the triangle, the coupler, is a complete mystery. What it is, an 'I,' a 'self,' or some neurophysiological correlate thereof, I could not begin to say" (Message 327). Only something that is uniquely human enables naming and language to occur, but what that is, is a mystery.
So one of Percy's concerns is then this: that which is inside the human being, what linguist-philosopher Noam Chomsky calls the "black box" or "language acquisition device" in the mind of man that enables him to comprehend language (Message 15). Chomsky concludes first that the black box is "mind stuff" and then "computerlike elements" (Message 16). For Percy, what is contained in this black box is entirely different than what Chomsky labels it.
Therefore, Percy's language theory disagrees with BOTH the Skinnerians and the Chomskians. His philosophy begins with a tenet that for him, the modern age questions: that man has a "soul, mind, freedom, will, Godlikeness" (Message 7), that transforms these mere physical objects into symbols. For him, "Earthlings seem to spend most of their time trafficking in one kind of symbol or another, while the creatures of earth - more than two million species - say not a word" (13). Thus he sees an understanding of the nature of the language process to be intimately and indissolubly tied up in an understanding of the nature of man because only man speaks, and only man is capable of what he refers to as "symbol-mongering."
While what goes on with the child, the human being, in the language event is something of a mystery to Percy, he, and others such as Susanne Langer, insist that humans NEED to symbolize; in fact, it is THE basic human need (Message 288-296). Percy explains 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 classification. If I see a strange bird, ask my bird-watcher friend what it is, and he tells me it is blue-gray gnatcatcher, I am obscurely disappointed. I cannot help thinking he is telling me something ABOUT the bird-that its color is blue-gray and that it catches gnats - and what I really want to know is what it IS. He will tell me that I am only falling victim to primitive word-magic…[but] there is another reason for my satisfaction. It has to do with the new orientation which has come about as the result of naming. The orientation is no longer biological; it is ontological. (Signposts 133-134)
The significance of the act of naming cannot be underestimated - not only does it merely satisfy a basic human need, but it is what makes man human - it creates consciousness itself. With the act of naming, man becomes conscious and becomes a human being. Symbolization is the "very condition of our knowing anything" (Signposts 132), and through naming, we are able to know everything else.
Percy says it is without precedent in human history. With naming, whether it is the event 40,000 years ago when the human species acquired language, or the individual toddler who goes around pointing in joy at common household objects and exclaiming its name, not only is this an event in which "something new has happened, but …the event is probably the most portentous happening in the development of a person" (132). Percy continues, explaining that, "A dog's response to the signal "ball" is a function of the stimulus and the electrocolloidal state of the dog's brain…. An animal also only takes notice of those things that may be dangerous or beneficial to it" - those things relevant to its survival (Signposts 133). 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. It is no longer an "interaction" but an AFFIRMATION, a "yes-saying."
To give something a name is at "first sight the most commonplace of events, but in reality, a most mysterious act…" (Message 254) It is what enables us to know "being," to KNOW the things we name, since we cannot know it directly. We must, instead, "sidle up to it" through symbolization (Message 264). Therefore, naming and knowing are not causal dyadic sequences, but UNIONs, equations. The word "is" - a coupler - is used to name. "That IS a ball." The use of symbol is a "pairing [as opposed to a succession], a laying of symbol alongside thing" [my italics] (Signposts 134) It is "intentional relation of identity" (Signposts 134). Simultaneity is implied here, which belies a cause-effect paradigm in which events are separate, separated in time as well as space. It connotes simultaneous identity, not a succession of related occurrences. In addition, the nature of the now-named ball and our relationship to it is modified and elaborated by its having a name and a place in our world. With the word, we understand and grasp and affirm the "ball," incorporating it into our world, whereas before its name, it was relevant to us only if it had use to us biologically. The name gives life and being to the object, and transforms it.
Naming is an act of "joy" for humans (something the animals are not capable of) (Message 259) - a spiritual event not entailed in an "environment." Percy cites the "Helen Keller phenomenon," that famous moment that blind and deaf Helen Keller relates in her autobiography in which she UNDERSTOOD that the sign language motions her teacher made in Helen's one hand related, stood for, symbolized, meant, the water in the other hand (Message 35). Helen's subsequent and continuing joy at this experience, at participating in the act of language, is explained by Percy: "Unquestionably Helen's breakthrough was critical and went to the very heart of the terra incognita. Before, Helen had behaved like a good responding organism. Afterward, she acted like a rejoicing, symbol-mongering human" (Message 38).
Through naming, you and I become joyful "co-celebrants" in the being of the thing we name (Message 137). Percy expands on his "triadic" theory of language, creating in the end a "tetradic" theory of language: Naming and subsequent language acts must be understood in community and do not exist alone. In addition to the "I" or the human being who names, there must be a "thou" to whom the "I" speaks. The other person, the "thou," understands the "I" because both have agreed upon the name for the object and understand that to be so. This is the concept of "intersubjectivity" or that "without the presence of another, symbolization cannot conceivably occur because there is not one from whom the word can be received as meaningful" (Message 257). He has a tetradic drawing for this interaction:
"Thou"
Balloon---------------------------------------------->Balloon
(actual object)--------------------------->(sign, word, utterance)
"I"
The horizontal axis is a relationship of quasi-identity. In other words, it seems to convey identity, but is not identity. The vertical axis is the relationship of intersubjectivity. For Percy, what happens along the vertical axis deeply modifies and affects what happens along the horizontal axis. Or, in other words, meaning is affected by the condition of the humans sending and receiving the communication. For Percy, "between the sign and organism, organism and object, 'real' causal relations hold. The line between sign and object is dotted because no real causal relations hold but only an imputed relation, the semantical relation of designation" (Message 252).
The term "Genesis Phenomenon" appropriately designates the act of naming, with a four-fold implication:
(1) Naming is the genesis of the human race in the evolutionary process 40,000 years ago.
(2) Naming is one of Adam's first and most important acts in the first book of the Bible, Genesis. Its presence in the Genesis text is the Genesis writer acknowledging the same truth that Percy and Peirce are echoing - the very nature of man, of a human being, is to name. We are created, and then we name.
(3) Naming is the genesis of language and all other language acts. It is the foundational stage for the language development stages to follow - combining words into phrases and phrases into sentences.
(4) The "naming stage" of an individual human's language development - occurring some time around the end of the first year of life is the initiation (genesis) of the individual human, the child, into a "world" that has purpose and meaning, enabling him to act in a conscious way, exercising free will, rather than merely responding as an organism to the objects in his environment.
Percy says, "A sign-using organism takes account only of those elements of its environment which are relevant biologically…but a symbol-using organism has a world" (Message 202). A world entails "naming," and explanations for events, for what happened yesterday, for what happened "in the beginning," and has no "gaps." A world has myths. "Chickens have no myths," Percy explains (Message 202). He writes:
The greatest difference between the environment (Umwelt) of the sign-using organism and the world (Welt) of the speaking organism is that there are gaps in the former but none in the latter. The non-speaking organism only notices what is relevant biologically; the speaking organism disposes of the entire horizon symbolically. Gaps that cannot be closed by perception and reason are closed by magic and myth. (Message 203)
Not all items in an environment are part of a world, and not all items in a world actually physically exist in an environment. For example, ultraviolet radiation exists in an environment, but if one has no knowledge of that, it doesn't exist in their world; the idea of unicorn and boogey-man may be a part of one's world, but not actually exist in an environment. With this concept, what is important to a world is meaning and myth, rather than physical survival.
The inability to name is, for Percy, the real cause of human anxiety, not malfunctioning brain chemicals (though they may interact, he says). This anxiety can range from "slight uneasiness to terror in the face of the uncanny" (Message 136). So Percy believes that the act of communication, of naming, serves the purpose of an existential healing, for it enables a connection of the speaker's ontological self to reality through an epistemological act. In other words, though the word is not really (one with) the object, though it makes a play at approximating the object, the word enables a grasping and an understanding of the object (the world), healing for the modern alienated man, reversing that alienation (Telotte 172). Hence, the joy that Helen Keller experienced at understanding the word "water."
This is significant for Percy because contemporary postmodern society is a world in which we have no way of understanding our selves. We no longer have a communal myth. However, "the self is rich or poor accordingly as it succeeds in identifying itself" and its place and purpose in the world (Lost 122). For thousands of years, myth (whatever myth that might be) enabled us to place ourselves in the world, to tell us who we were, to give us meaning. The twentieth century, with its religious skepticism and physical reductionism, banished that, so man is now "lost in the cosmos."
The problem with science, psychiatry, and current philosophical attempts to understand man is that man is treated as a biological organism with instinctive drives and needs and nothing beyond that. Percy says these disciplines "must take account of man as possessing a unique destiny by which he is oriented in a wholly different direction;" these fields have "almost nothing to say about the great themes that have engaged the existential critics of modern society from Soren Kierkegaard to Gabriel Marcel" (Signposts 252). As Percy says in his National Book Award acceptance speech, "…man is more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more even than a mature and creative individual as the phrase goes. He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim" (Signposts 246).
Works Cited
Percy, Walker. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York:
Picador, 1983.
Percy, Walker. The Message in the Bottle. New York: Picador, 1975.
Percy, Walker. Signposts in a Strange Land. New York: Picador, 1991.
Telotte, J. P. "A Symbolic Structure for Walker Percy's Fiction." Critical Essays
on Walker Percy. J. Donald Crowley and Sue Mitchell Crowley, Eds.
Boston: G.K. Hall, 1989. pp. 171-183.
|
|