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

To awake to the remarkable circumstance that something has a name is neither a response nor an imputed real identity. No one believes that the name is really the thing, nor does the sentence This is water mean this. Then what is the relation? It might clarify matters to eliminate the mysterious copula, leaving the sentence This: water. Or even more simply, eliminate the word this, leaving a pointing at and a naming (in semiotic language, an indexical sign plus a symbol). In its essence the making and the receiving of the naming act consist in a coupling, an apposing of two real entities, the uttered name and the object. It is this pairing which is unique and unprecedented in the causal nexus of significatory meaning. But what is the nature of this pairing? The two terms, it is clear, are related in some sense of identification, yet not a real identity. To express it in modern semiotical language, the water is conceived through the vehicle of the symbol. In Scholastic language, the symbol has the peculiar property of containing within itself in alio esse, in another mode of existence, that which is symbolized.* Helen knows the water through and by means of the symbol.

The word is that by which the thing is conceived or known. It is, in Scholastic language, an intention. The Scholastics speak of concepts as “formal signs,” intentions whose peculiar property it is, not to appear as an object, but to disappear before the object. But here we are not dealing with concepts or mental entities. We are dealing with natural existents, the object and the vocable, the sound which actually trembles in the air. It is this latter which is in some sense intentionally identified with the thing. Or rather the thing is intended by the symbol. Perhaps much of the confusion which has arisen over the “identification” of the symbol with its designatum could have been avoided by an appreciation of the phenomenological (and Scholastic) notion of intentionality and by distinguishing real identity from the intentional relation of identity.

An interesting question arises in connection with the intentional function of the symbol. Is it possible that the symbol is a primitive precursor of the concept or “formal sign” of the Scholastics? The latter contains its object in an intentional mode of existence, in alio esse. But so in an extraordinary fashion does the sensuous symbol. In cases of false onomatopoeia, the symbol is transformed intentionally to imitate the thing symbolized (for example, crash, glass, limber, furry, slice, and so on). The word glass bears no resemblance to the thing glass. Yet it actually seems to transmit a quality of brittleness, glossiness, and so on. The fact is that a symbolic transformation has occurred whereby the drab little vocable has been articulated by its meaning.*

The semanticists supply a valuable clue by their protestations. Confronted by a pencil, Korzybski says, it is absolutely false to say that this is a pencil; to say that it is can only lead to delusional states. Say whatever you like about the pencil, but do not say that it is a pencil. “Whatever you say the object is, well, it is not.” The pencil is itself unspeakable. True; but insofar as it remains unspeakable — that is, unvalidated by you and me through a symbol — it is also inconceivable. Clearly the semanticists are confusing an epistemological condition with a true identity.

How does it happen, Cassirer asked, that a finite and particular sensory content can be made into the vehicle of a general spiritual “meaning”? And we know his answer. It is the Kantian variant that it is not reality which is known but the symbolic forms through which reality is conceived. Yet the empirical approach belies this. An empirical semiotic deals with natural existents and takes for granted a lawful reality about which something can be truly known. Even a strict behaviorist operates publicly in a community of other knowers and data to be known; he performs experiments on real data and publishes papers which he expects other scientists to understand. What account, after all, can Cassirer or any other idealist give of intersubjectivity? If it was, according to Kant, a “scandal of philosophy” in his day that no satisfactory solution could be found to the problem of intersubjectivity, is it any less a scandal now? But a broad semiotical approach can only bring one into the territory of epistemological realism. Since we do not know being directly, Wilhelmsen writes, we must sidle up to it; and at the symbol-object level, we can only do this by laying something of comparable ontological status alongside.

Existence is attained immediately in the judgment; but judgments necessarily entail the use of phantasms, and, except in direct judgments of existing material things, the phantasms employed are symbolic. The philosopher must go through phantasm to reach being.

Perhaps it would be truer, genetically speaking, to say that the primitive act of symbolization, occurring as it does prior to conception and phantasm, consists in the application, not of the phantasm, but of the sensuous symbol to the existing thing. A being is affirmed as being what it is through its denotation by symbol.* Is it not possible that what I primarily want in asking what something is is not an explanation but a validation and affirmation of the thing itself as it is — a validation which can only be accomplished by laying something else alongside: the symbol?

We might therefore reverse Korzybski’s dictum: It is only if you say what the object is that you can know anything about it at all.

The symbol meaning relation may be defined as not merely an intentional but as a cointentional relation of identity. The thing is intended through its symbol which you say and I can repeat, and it is only through this quasi identification that it can be conceived at all. Thus it is, I believe, that an empirical and semiotical approach to meaning illumines and confirms in an unexpected manner the realist doctrine of the union of the knower and the thing known. The metaphysical implications of semiotic are clear enough. Knowing is not a causal sequence but an immaterial union. It is a union, however, which is mediated through material entities, the symbol and its object. Nor is it a private phenomenon — rather is it an exercise in intersubjectivity in which the Thou serves as an indispensable colleague. Both the relation of intersubjectivity and the intentional relation of identity are real yet immaterial bonds.

To render human cognition physico-causally can only end in the hopeless ambiguity of current semioticists who must speak in two tongues with no lexicon to translate, the language of the scientist who deals with signs as natural existents and the language of the formal logician who deals with the syntactical relations between signs.

The intentional relation of identity is not only the basic relation of logical forms, as Professor Veatch has pointed out; it is also the basic relation of symbolization. No wonder, then, that the symbolic logician has no use for it — for once the intentional character of knowing is recognized, “so far from being independent of metaphysics or first philosophy, [it] necessarily presupposes it.”

* C. W. Morris: “Languages are developed and used by living beings operating in a world of objects, and show the influence of both the users and the objects. If, as symbolic logic maintains, there are linguistic forms whose validity is not dependent upon nonlinguistic objects, then their validity must be dependent upon the rules of the language in question.” Characteristically, semioticists do not find it remarkable that sign-using animals should have developed symbolic logic “whose validity is not dependent on non-linguistic objects.” It is therefore not worth investigating how this could have come about but only necessary to note that it has and to define this unusual activity as the “syntactical dimension” of semiotic.