Walker Percy - The Message in the Bottle - How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

Both these sentences are synthetic empirical sentences open to verification by the positive method of the sciences. Yet one is, to the castaway, knowledge sub specie aeternitatis and the other is a piece of news.

Water boils at 100 degrees at sea level.

There is fresh water in the next cove.

The following sentences would qualify as possible news to the castaway.

At 2 p.m., January 4, 1902, at the residence of Manuel Gómez in Matanzas, Cuba, a leaf fell from the banyan tree.

The British are coming.

The market for eggs in Bora Bora [a neighboring island] is very good.

Jane will arrive tomorrow.

In 1943 the Russians murdered 10,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest.

A war party is approaching from Bora Bora.

There is fresh water in the next cove.

What does the positive scientist think of the sentences which the castaway calls news? Does he reject them as being false or absurd? No, he is perfectly willing to accept them as long as they meet his standard of verification. By the use of the critical historical method he attaches a high degree of probability to the report that the British were approaching Concord. As for the water in the next cove, he goes to see for himself and so confirms the news or rejects it. But what sort of significance does he assign these sentences as he sorts them out in the seminar room? To him they express a few of the almost infinite number of true but random observations which might be made about the world. The murder of the Polish officers may have been a great tragedy, yet in all honesty he cannot assign to it a significance qualitatively different from the sentence about the leaf falling from the banyan tree (nor may the castaway necessarily). This is not to say that these sentences are worthless as scientific data. For example, the presence of water in the next cove might serve as a significant datum for the descriptive science of geography, or as an important clue in geology. This single observation could conceivably be the means of verifying a revolutionary scientific theory — just as the sight of a star on a particular night in a particular place provided dramatic confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

The sentences about the coming of the British and the murder of the Polish officers might serve as significant data from which, along with other such data, general historical principles might be drawn — just as Toynbee speaks of such and such an event as being a good example of such and such a historical process.

In summary, the castaway will make a distinction between the sentences which assert a piece of knowledge sub specie aeternitatis and the sentences announcing a piece of news which bears directly on his life. The scientist and logician, however, cannot, in so far as they are scientists and logicians, take account of the special character of these news sentences. To them they are empirical observations of a random order and, if significant, they occupy at best the very lowest rung of scientific significance: they are the particular instances from which hypotheses and theories are drawn.

(2) The Posture of the Reader of the Sentence

The significance of the sentences for the reader will depend on the reader’s own mode of existence in the world. To say this is to say nothing about the truth of the sentences. Assuming that they are all true, they will have a qualitatively different significance for the reader according to his own placement in the world.

(a) The posture of objectivity. If the reader has discovered the secret of science, art, and philosophizing, and so has entered the great company of Thales, Lao-tse, Aquinas, Newton, Keats, Whitehead, he will know what it is to stand outside and over against the world as one who sees and thinks and knows and tells. He tells and hears others tell how it is there in the world and what it is to live in the world. In so far as he himself is a scientist, artist, or philosopher, he reads the sentences in the bottles as stating (or coming short of stating) knowledge sub specie aeternitatis. It may be trivial knowledge; it may be knowledge he has already arrived at; it may be knowledge he has not yet arrived at but could arrive at in time; it may be false knowledge which fails to be verified and so is rejected. It cannot be any other kind of knowledge.

(b) The posture of the castaway. The reader of the sentences may or may not be an objective-minded man. But at the moment of finding the bottle on the beach he is, we will say, very far from being objective-minded. He is a man who finds himself in a certain situation. To say this is practically equivalent, life being what it is, to saying that he finds himself in a certain predicament. Let us say his predicament is a simple organic need. He is thirsty. In his predicament the sentence about the water is received not as a datum from which, along with similar data, more general scientific conclusions might be drawn. Nor is it received as stating a universal human experience, even though the announcement were composed by Shakespeare at the height of his powers. The sentence is received as news, news strictly relevant to the predicament in which the hearer of the news finds himself.

So with other kinds of news, ranging from news relevant to the most elementary organic predicament to news of complex cultural significance.

Here are some other examples of news and their attending contexts.

Mackerel here!

(Malinowski’s Trobriand Island fisherman announcing a strike to his fellows)

Jane is home!

(I love Jane and she has been away)

The market is up $2.00.

(I am in the market)

The British are coming!

(I am a Minute Man. The context here is not organic but cultural. I thrive under British rule but I throw in my lot with the Revolution for patriotic reasons)

The light has turned green!

(I have stopped at a red light)

Eisenhower is elected!

(I voted for Stevenson)

News sentences, in short, are drawn from the context of everyday life and indeed to a large extent comprise this context.

Insofar as a man is objective-minded, no sentence is significant as a piece of news. For in order to be objective-minded one must stand outside and over against the world as its knower in one mode or another. As empirical scientists themselves have noticed, one condition of the practice of the objective method of the sciences is the exclusion of oneself from the world of objects one studies.* The absent-minded professor, the inspired poet, the Vedic mystic, is indifferent to news, sometimes even news of high relevance for him, because he is in a very real sense “out of this world.”†

In summary, the hearer of news is a man who finds himself in a predicament. News is precisely that communication which has bearing on his predicament and is therefore good or bad news.

The question arises as to whether news is not the same thing as a sign for an organism, a sign directing him to appropriate need-satisfactions, like the buzzer to Pavlov’s dog, or warning him of a threat, like the lion’s scent to a deer. The organism experiences needs and drives and learns to respond to those signs in its environment which indicate the presence of food, opposite sex, danger, and so on.

This may very well be a fair appraisal of the status of the news we are talking about here — providing the notions of “organism” and “sign” be allowed sufficiently broad interpretation. For the organism we speak of here is not only the physiological mechanism of the body but the encultured creature, the economic creature, and so on. The sign we speak of here is not merely the environmental element; it is the sentence, the symbolic assertion made by one man and understood by another.