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 most conspicuous divergence between Husserl’s and Mead’s approaches to consciousness is the opting of one for the individual cogito character of consciousness and of the other for its intrinsically social character. In the phenomenological reduction all belief in existents and in one’s theoretical attitude toward existents is suspended. What remains over as a residuum, as the subject matter of an apodictic science? Only consciousness itself, “a self-contained system of being, into which nothing can penetrate and from which nothing can escape; which cannot experience causality from anything nor exert causality upon anything….” Mead, on the other hand, is quite as emphatic in regarding mind and consciousness as developing within the social process, “within the empirical matrix of social interactions.” Let us suppose for the moment that Mead is right — I have not the space here to go into a critical comparison of Mead and Husserl on this point: I only wish to offer a suggestion from the objective-empirical point of view — let us suppose that we may study consciousness as we study anything else, and that, moreover, “it is absurd to look at the mind from the standpoint of the individual organism.” Let us also suppose that Mead, along with many others, is probably right in focusing upon language as a key to the mysteries of mind. “Out of language arises the field of the mind.” The question which must be asked is whether this seminal insight is confirmed by Mead’s behaviorism or whether Mead did not in fact fall short of his goal precisely because of his rigid commitment to the sign-response sequence and his consequent failure to grasp the denotative function of the language symbol. Mead, along with most other American psychogeneticists, has felt obliged to construe the symbol as a variety of sign, and symbolic meaning as a refinement of sign-response. Mead saw no other alternative and was frank to declare that, once you abandon social or biological response, there only remains “transcendentalism.”

It would perhaps not be too gross a simplification to observe that the phenomenologist starts with consciousness but never gets back to organisms and signs, and that the positive psychologist starts with organisms and signs but never arrives at consciousness. Mead’s problem, once he had limited himself to the response as the ground of consciousness, was to derive a set of conditions under which a stimulus evokes the same response from the organism who utters it as it does from the organism who hears it. This is accomplished through role-taking, when the speaking organism comes to respond to its own signs in the same way as the hearing organism. Consciousness is the response of the organism to its own responses. We cannot fail to be aware of the forced character of Mead’s response psychology in coping with human meaning when, for example, he is obliged to say that, when I ask you to get up and fetch the visitor a chair, I also arouse in myself the same tendency to get up and fetch the chair. This strained interpretation is fair warning, as Mrs. Langer has pointed out, that the most important feature of the material is being left out.

What is missing, of course, is the relation of denotation. It may be correct in a sense to say that a word “calls forth a response,” “announces an idea,” and so on. But more important, it names something.’

Now of course there is nothing new in this. Semioticists take due notice of the relation of denotation in semantics, which is that dimension of semiotic which has to do with the rules by which a symbol is said to denote its denotatum. What concerns us, however, is what one is to make of this relation from an objective-empirical point of view, rather than a logical one, as something which is actually taking place in the “data” before us, as assuredly it is taking place. To put the problem concretely: Given the phenomenon in which the normal child or the blind deaf-mute discovers that this stuff “is” water, what we wish to know (and what Mead always wished to know) is not the semantic “rule” by which Helen and Miss Sullivan agree to call the stuff water —this is a convention, not an explanation — what we wish to know is what happens. Certainly, whether we approve or disapprove, something very momentous has taken place when a sign which had been received as a signal — go fetch the water — is suddenly understood to “mean” the water, to denote something. Then what is it that happens? Semioticists dodge the issue by parceling out sign function to “behavioristics” and symbolic denotation to “semantics,” leaving the gap in limbo. Morris, for example, refuses to consider the symbol as anything other than a sign in behavioristics, allowing its denotative function only in semantics. Mead’s objective, however, was to bring all entities, mind, consciousness, sign, symbol, under the single gaze of the objective-empirical method. If, therefore, there is such a thing as denotation, naming, and if it does assuredly take place in the public realm we are studying, then what exactly happens and what relevance does this happening have for the phenomena of intersubjectivity and consciousness? How does it illumine these realities which no refinement of signification seems to get hold of? What would happen if instead of trying to get rid of denotation by calling it semantics, or by reducing it to a response sequence, we examined it as a real event among organisms?

I wish to call attention, without pretending to have determined their entire role in the act of consciousness, to two characteristics of the symbol meaning-relation, as they are empirically ascertainable, which distinguish it from the sign relation and which have the utmost relevance for the topics under consideration.

The first is a unique relation between the “organisms” involved in the symbolic meaning-structure, a relation which can only come about through a radical change in the relations which obtain in the sign-response. Signification is essentially and irreducibly a triadic meaning-relation, whereas symbolization is essentially and irreducibly a tetradic relation. The three terms of the sign-response are related physico-causally.* The schema, sign — organism — significatum, has so persistently recommended itself as the ground of meaning, human and subhuman, because it deals with physical structures and with causal relations and energy exchanges between these structures. Thus, no matter whether we are considering a solitary polar bear responding to the sound of splitting ice, or a bee responding to the honey dance of another bee, or a human responding to the cry of Fire! in a theater, each case is understandable as a sequential stimulus-response action acquired or inherited according to the exigencies of biological adaptation: sign → sound waves → sensory end-organ → afferent nerve impulse → cortical pattern → efferent nerve impulse → motor (or glandular) activity with reference to significatum. Whether we are trying to understand the behavior of a solitary organism in an inorganic environment (polar bear) or a society of organisms (bee hive), the behavior in each case is understood as a response of an organism to its environment. In one case the environment is inorganic (splitting ice), in the other case organic (other bees). But the central concept in both cases is that of an organism-in-an-environment responding and adapting through the mediation of signs.

The symbol meaning-relation is radically and generically different. It is a tetradic relation in which the presence of the two organisms is not merely required as an irreducible minimum but in which the two are themselves co-related in an unprecedented fashion. Denotation, the act of naming, requires the two, namer and hearer. My calling this thing a chair is another way of saying that it “is” a chair for you and me. (Mead’s “conversation of gestures” between two boxers or two dogs would seem also to require the two. However, the boxer or the dog responding to his opponent’s gestures is not generically different from the polar bear responding to splitting ice.) It is inconceivable that a human being raised apart from other humans should ever discover symbolization. For there is no way I can know this “is” a chair unless you tell me so. But not only are the two a genetic requirement of symbolization — as the presence of two is a genetic requirement of fertilization— it is its enduring condition. Even Robinson Crusoe writing in his journal after twenty years alone on his island is performing a through-and-through social act. Every symbolic formulation, whether it be language, art, or even thought, requires a real or posited someone else for whom the symbol is intended as meaningful. Denotation is an exercise in intersubjectivity. The two are suddenly no longer related as organisms in a nexus of interaction but as a namer and hearer of a name, an I and a Thou, co-conceivers and co-celebrants of the object beheld under the auspices of a common symbol.