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

Having realized that language is an interpersonal phenomenon, however, he set himself the impossible task of deriving the symbol from a stimulus-response sequence. For since it was an article of faith with him that the explanatory science of behavioristics is the only hope of approaching mind, he could not do otherwise than render symbolization as a response. As a consequence, he is obliged to define a symbol as the kind of sign which “calls out” the same response from the speaker as from the hearer. This definition drives him into the absurdity of saying that a word can only mean the same thing for you and me if it provokes the same response from you and me. Thus, if I ask you to get up and fetch the visitor a chair, it must follow that I also arouse in myself the same tendency to get up and fetch the chair. Clearly, as Mrs. Langer noticed, something is wrong here.

Is it possible, we wonder, that Mead was right in his emphasis of the social bond but mistaken in construing it behavioristically?

* Hocking writes of intersubjectivity as a direct unmediated bond from which mind and language arise: “…without the direct experiential knowledge of ‘We are,’ the very ideas of ‘sign,’ ‘language,’ ‘other mind,’ itself could not arise.”

Yet one might wonder whether it is not the other way around — whether the relation “We are” does not arise through a mutual intending of the object through its symbol, the word which you give me and I can say too. It would perhaps be more characteristic of angelic intelligences to experience such an immediate intuitive knowledge rather than a knowledge mediated by sensible signs and objects.

* Cf. her comment on presymbolic thought: “…if a wordless sensation may be called a thought.”

† In regard to primitive identification, Oliver Leroy writes: “The logic of a Hui-chol (who mystically identifies stag with wheat) would be deficient only on the day when he would prepare a wheat porridge while he thought he was making a stag stew.” Yet in some sense, the symbol is identified with the thing, a sense, moreover, which is open to superstitious abuse.

* John of St. Thomas: Quid est illud in signato conjunctum signo, et praesens in signo praeter ipsum signum et entitatem ejus? Respondetur esse ipsummet signatum in alio esse. “What may be that element of the signified which is joined to the sign and present in it as distinct from the sign itself? I answer: No other element than the very signified itself in another mode of existence.”

* “The natural sound element has been taken up into and practically disappears from our consciousness in its significant symbolic connotation. In other words the natural sounds have been completely transmuted into conventional sound symbols.”

One can establish this transformation to his own satisfaction by a simple experiment. Repeat the word “glass” many times; all at once it will lose its symbolic guise, its “glassiness,” and become the poor drab vocable that it really is. Yet it is from its original poverty that its high symbolic potentiality derives. It is for this reason, as Mrs. Langer says, that a vocable is very good symbolic material, and a peach very poor.

* Marcel observes that when I ask what is this strange flower, I am more satisfied to be given a nondescriptive name than a scientific classification. “But now we find the real paradox — the first unscientific answer (it is a lupin, it is an orchid) which consisted in giving the name of the flower, although it had practically no rational basis, yet satisfied the demand in me which the interpretation by reduction tends…to frustrate.”

THERE ARE TWO INTERESTING things about current approaches to consciousness as a subject of inquiry. One is that the two major approaches, the explanatory-psychological and the phenomenological, go their separate ways, contributing nothing to each other. They do not tend to converge upon or supplement each other as do, say, atomic theory and electromagnetic theory. One can either look upon consciousness as a public thing or event in the world like any other public thing or event and as such open to explanatory inquiry; or one can regard it as an absolutely privileged realm, that by which I know anything at all — including explanatory psychology. As exemplars of these two approaches, I shall refer in the sequel to the work of George H. Mead and Edmund Husserl. The other interesting thing is that both approaches encounter the same perennial difficulty, albeit each encounters it in its own characteristic way. This difficulty is the taking account of intersubjectivity, that meeting of minds by which two selves take each other’s meaning with reference to the same object beheld in common. As Schutz has pointed out, intersubjectivity is simply presupposed as the unclarified foundation of the explanatory-empirical sciences. A social behaviorist writes hundreds of papers setting forth the thesis that mind and consciousness are an affair of responses to signs or responses to responses; yet he unquestionably expects his colleagues to do more than respond to his paper; he also expects them to understand it, to take his meaning. As regards phenomenology, on the other hand, philosophers as different as James Collins and Jean-Paul Sartre have noticed that the chief difficulty which Husserl (not to mention Hegel and Heidegger) encounters is the allowing for the existence of other selves.

It is the purpose of this essay to suggest that these two chronic difficulties which have beset the study of consciousness have come about in part at least from a failure to appreciate the extraordinary role of the symbol, especially the language symbol, in man’s orientation to the world. I am frank to confess a prejudice in favor of Mead’s approach to consciousness as a phenomenon arising from the social matrix through language. It seems to me that the psychological approach possesses the saving virtue that it tends to be self-corrective, whereas in transcendental phenomenology everything is risked on a single methodological cast at the very outset, the famous epoché. But I wish to suggest first that positive psychology, in its allegiance to the sign-response as the basic schema of psychogenesis, has failed or refused to grasp the peculiar role of the language symbol. I would further suggest that an appreciation of this role will (1) confirm in an unexpected way Mead’s thesis of the social origin of consciousness, (2) reveal intersubjectivity as one of the prime relations of the symbol meaning-structure, (3) provide access to a phenomenology of consciousness, not as a transcendental idealism, but as a mode of being emerging from the interrelations of real organisms in the world.

SYMBOL AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY

I do not think it would be too far from the truth to say that the phenomenologist, having ruled out intersubjectivity in his reduction, has the greatest difficulty in reinstating it thereafter; and that the positive psychologist simply takes intersubjectivity for granted. It is one thing to be aware, as the phenomenologists are aware, that a fundamental connection with the other self must be seized, in Sartre’s words, at the very heart of consciousness. Whether such a connection is allowed by the rigor of the phenomenological reduction is something else again. It is also one thing to be aware, as Mead was aware, of the social origin of consciousness. Whether this connection between consciousness and the social matrix can be demonstrated in terms of a sign-response psychology is something else again. But there is this difference: If Mead’s social behaviorism is too narrow a theoretical base, it can be broadened without losing the posture from which Mead theorized, that of an observer confronting data which he can make some sense of and of which he can speak to other observers. For this reason I shall be chiefly concerned with the general approach of George Mead.