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

The new ensemble of elements and relations which comes into being does not replace but rather overlays the organismic interaction. People still interact with each other behavioristically as much as do dogs and bees, but they also enter into intersubjective relations and cointend objects through the vehicle of symbols. It is possible, and indeed preferable, to describe symbolic behavior in an operational language which omits reference to mental contents or even to “meanings.” “Ideas” are difficult to define operationally and even more difficult to bring into coherent relation with the observables of behavioral science. As for “meanings,” the word is itself so ambiguous that there is more to be lost than gained from its use. It seems least objectionable to say that in the particular communication event under consideration, an organism intends such and such a designatum by means of such and such a symbol.

This approach still deals with elements and relations, just as does that of the neobehaviorist. A list of the elements and relations of the symbolic meaning-structure, and an example of their clinical application, follows.

The intersubjective community. Whenever behavioral scientists are confronted with a concrete language event, appropriate questions are: What is the community? What is the status of the intersubjective bond? Who is included and who is excluded? Is the community I-you-you or I-you-not you (as it is sometimes when one goes to a very high-toned lecture: we are listening and understanding, and we are quite aware that those out in the street are not)? The community may vary from a face-to-face confrontation of two people and the various colorations of the I-you bond, to the scattered and numerically unlimited community of mass communication in which one person communicates with others through various media. In the latter case, still other questions become pertinent. What is the effect of the interposition of the medium between speaker and hearer? When the President says on television, “I am counting on you right there in your living room to make a sacrifice,” is the sentence received in the same way as it would be in a face-to-face encounter, or is it apt to constitute itself for the viewer as merely another item of “what one hears” on radio and television?

It should be emphasized that this empirical approach does not require the settling or even the raising of the question of the ontological status of the intersubjective relation. The latter is introduced as a postulate which is valid to the extent that it unites random observations and opens productive avenues of inquiry.

The object and the world. The notion of world here is not an epistemological construct, as it is in much of European phenomenology. I am not saying that the world is constituted by the Dasein or the transcendental ego. Nor do I say that a tree is exactly as it appears. I say only that if one makes an empirical study of sign-using animals and symbol-using animals, one can only conclude that the latter have a world and the former do not. Nor does such a notion require the entity “mind” in one and eliminate it in the other. It has only to do with the observable difference between sign behavior and symbolic behavior. A sign-using organism takes account only of those elements of its environment which are relevant biologically. A chick has been observed to take account of the shadow of a hen and the shadow of a hawk but not, I believe, of the shadow of a swallow. A two-year-old child, however, will not only ask for milk, as a good sign-using animal; he will also point to the swallow and ask what it is.

A sign-using organism can be said to take account of those segments of its environment toward which, through the rewards and punishments of the learning process, it has acquired the appropriate responses. It cannot be meaningfully described as “knowing” anything else. But a symbol-using organism has a world. Once it knows the name of trees — what trees “are”—it must know the name of houses. The world is simply the totality of that which is formulated through symbols. It is both spatial and temporal. Once a native knows there is an earth, he must know what is under the earth. Once he knows what happened yesterday, he must know what happened in the beginning. Hence his cosmological and etio-logical myths.* Chickens have no myths.

Nor does the symbol refer to its object in the same mode as the sign does. True, one can use the word mean analogically and say that thunder means rain to the chicken and that the symbol water means water to Helen Keller. But the symbol does something the sign fails to do: It sets the object at a distance and in a public zone, where it is beheld intersubjectively by the community of symbol users. As Langer put it, say James to a dog, and as a good sign-using animal he will go look for James. Say James to you, and if you know a James, you will ask, “What about him?”

The genesis of symbolic behavior, considered both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, is an all-or-none change, involving a symbolic threshold. As Sapir observed, there are no primitive languages. Every known language is an essentially perfect means of expression and communication among those who use it. As Helen Keller put it, once she knew what water “was,” she had to know what everything else was. The greatest difference between the environment ( Umwelt ) of a 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 nonspeaking 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. The primitive has names for edible and noxious plants; but he also has a name for all the others: “bush.” He also “knows” what lies beyond the horizon, what is under the earth, and where he came from.

The distinction between Welt and Umwelt has been made before. Buber characterizes man as the creature who has a world and sets it at a distance, beyond the operation of his drives and needs. But, insightful as such an observation may be, it is of doubtful value to the behavioral sciences until it can be grounded in a coherent theory of symbolic behavior.

The being-in-the-world. Here again, my element is different from the Dasein of the existentialists, akin as the latter is to the transcendental subject of Kant and Husserl. It is no more than a working concept arrived at through the necessity of giving an account of the organism who participates in symbolic behavior. The organism who speaks has a world and consequently has the task of living in the world. It is simply inadequate to describe him in the organismic terms of adjustment, adaptation, needs, drives, reinforcement, inhibition, and so on. A psychiatric patient is, to be sure, an organism in an environment. He is also a creature who is informed by his culture. But he is something more. He is an organism who may not forgo the choice of how he is going to live in his world, for the forgoing is itself a kind of choice by default. It becomes pertinent to ask in what mode he inserts himself in the world. May has suggested that it sometimes seems more appropriate to ask a patient Where are you? rather than How are you? Certainly, becoming aware of the threshold of symbolic behavior makes one very curious about modes of existence: How does the person go about living in his world?

The intentional or quasi identity between the symbol and that which is symbolized. The mysterious “unreal but imputed” relation between the symbol and its designatum, the “wrong” identification of word and thing which the Polish semanticists condemn, never really fitted into a behavioristic theory of meaning. How did it come about that responding organisms imputed an unreal semantical relation between signs and things? How does an organism behave perversely by making a semantic identification at the “wrong” level of abstraction? What kind of organon is the unified science of signs when symbolic behavior is recognized as such by the formal sciences but disqualified by the natural sciences?