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

Perhaps what needs most to be emphasized is the intimate relation between the phenomenological structure of intersubjectivity and being-in-the-world, on the one hand, and the empirical event of symbolic behavior, on the other. The existential modes of human living do not take place in an epistemological seventh heaven wholly removed from the world of organisms and things. Rather do they follow upon and, in fact, can be derived only from this very intercourse: one man encountering another man, speaking a word, and through it and between them discovering the world and himself.

* See, for example, David McK. Rioch: “The theory [Sullivan’s theory of interpersonal relations] is very effective in dealing with the behavior of organisms, as it provides a comprehensive framework for dealing with the interaction of multiple factors, including the observer.”

† See, for example, Joseph Jaffe: “The measurement of human interaction has recently been approached through a variety of techniques, ranging from interpretive content analyses to objective recording of temporal patterns in behavioral interaction.”

‡ “Social psychology, considered as a branch of psychology, is the study of individual responses as conditioned by stimuli arising from social or collective situations; considered as a branch of sociology or as collective psychology, it is the study of collective responses or of the behavior of groups and other collectivities.” (L. L. Bernard, “Social Psychology.”)

* See Chapter 12.

* A symbol, according to Charles Morris, is a sign produced by its interpreter which acts as a substitute for some other sign with which it is synonymous. Thus hunger cramps might take the place of the buzzer announcing the food and become a symbol for the dog.

* See Chapter 11.

† See also Alfred Tarski. Other writers interpret semantics not merely as a formal science but as a quasi-ethical science in which users of words are scolded for not using them at the proper level of abstraction. See, for example, Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity.

‡ General linguistics is, of course, an empirical science, but, except for acoustics, only at the comparative level. In phonetics, phonemics, morphophonemics, syntax, and lexicography, the linguist describes the structure of the languages of the earth as they are found to occur. What one fails to find in the literature, however, is an empirical study of the language event in itself as a generic event. It is much as if biologists were interested in describing the various kinds of mitotic division among different species, but were not interested in studying the process of mitosis.

* I have in mind Paul Weiss’s exasperation with behavioral scientists’ perennial recourse to such terms as levels of organization. “We are struck with a lack of a practical, realistic, analytic approach that will go beyond the mere statement of the fact that we have hierarchical nature, that it does consist of a system of Chinese boxes one inside the other, that they are integrated, interrelated, coordinated and all these other terms.”

* This schema, which is designed to apply alike to animal behavior and to human speech, follows, in the main, that of Morris with modifications by Ogden and Richards.

* Cf. p. 259.

* And even Samuel Pepys. For, although he kept his journal for himself and in a private code, he was nevertheless formulating experience and so setting it at a distance for a someone else — himself.

* Much of the formulating and objectifying function of the symbol has been set forth by Ernst Cassirer; see in particular vol. 1, Language. But the empirical insights are so submerged by the apparatus of German idealism that they are salvaged only with difficulty. Cassirer was concerned to extend the Kantian thesis to the area of culture and symbols and so to establish that it is through symbols that one not merely knows but constitutes the world. The task of the behavioral scientist is different. He confronts symbolic behavior from the same posture with which he studies sign behavior: as events in a public domain which he shares with other scientists. He sees people using words to name things and to assert states of affairs, just as he sees rats threading their way through mazes. He is concerned to explain what he sees by the use of mechanisms and models. I confess that this posture presupposes a species of philosophical realism.

* This notion of world and environment is close to the Welt and Umwelt of the Binswanger school. See Ludwig Binswanger, “The Existential Analysis School of Thought,” in Existence. It is important to note, however, that this distinction is yielded by an empirical analysis of the language event and does not depend for its validity on the Daseinanalytik of Heidegger or on any other philosophical anthropology.

* It is characteristic of the current confusion of the behavioral sciences that theorists find themselves speaking of true myths and are even driven to the extremity of prescribing myth as such for the ills of contemporary society. (See, for example, Henry A. Murray, “A Mythology for Grownups.”) The confusion can be traced, I believe, to the failure of behavioral theory to give an account of different modes of symbolic activity, in this case that of scientists and nonscientists. Thus when psychiatrists and clinical psychologists say that people nowadays need viable myths, they seem to be saying that scientists are different from people: scientists seek the truth and people have needs. Coherent theory would not, presumably, require such a generic distinction.

†The Bororo does not intend that he is literally a parakeet (he does not try to mate with other parakeets), yet he clearly intends it in a sense more magical than ordinary factual statements. See the “mystic identification” of L. Lévy-Bruhl in How Natives Think.

* Lévy-Bruhl’s categories of “iprelogical” thought are not, in my opinion, a genetic stage of psychic evolution but simply a mode of symbolic behavior to which a denizen of Western culture is as apt to fall prey as a Bororo.

† Sonnet 73.

* Ernest Schachtel has described this “articulating and obscuring function” of language in “On Memory and Childhood Amnesia.” He gives a good example of the sterility of the conventional phrase in which one distorts the ineffable content of memory — as when one reports having an “exciting time.” He says, “No object perceived with the quality of freshness, newness, of something wonder-full, can be preserved and recalled by the conventional concept of that object as designated in its conventional name in language” (p. 9). It seems to me, however, that he is describing terms that have deteriorated in their semantic evolution rather than the entire spectrum of language itself. Symbols may conceal, distort, render commonplace, yes; but since people are not angelic intelligences, symbols are their only means of knowing anything at all.

†”Horrenjus” is borrowed from Norman A. McQuown’s linguistic analysis of an interview reported by Otto A. Will and Robert A. Cohen, but the exchange is otherwise hypothetical and is offered not as clinical evidence but only illustratively, to exemplify some traits of symbolic structure.

‡ Reading is, it is true, an event of symbolic behavior, but it must be studied as such, as an event open to an appropriate phenomenology and not as a substitute for hearing.

* What psychiatrist has not been disturbed by this penchant for “scientizing” concrete experience? When, for example, a patient reports that he has a “personality problem” at the office, the psychiatrist may pay proper respect to his patient’s knowledgeability and objectivity, but he may also have good reason for wishing that he had said instead, “Oh God, how I hate my boss!”