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

Sartre’s even more radical revision of the transcendental consciousness falls that much shorter of the mark. Declaring that the Cartesian cogito is insufficiently radical, that it is a derived condition of consciousness in which consciousness intends itself as an object, Sartre probes back to the “prereflective cogito. ” This fundamental reality is a nonposited, nonobjectified, prereflective consciousness. But is there such a thing? Or is it not the very nature of the search that the most radical backtracking into consciousness cannot carry us beyond what Marcel calls the “intersubjective milieu,” by which he means the prime and irreducible character of intersubjectivity?

Mead’s major thesis was that the individual transcendental consciousness is a myth, that mind and consciousness are indefeasibly social realities. This thesis, it seems to me, is not borne out by Mead’s behavioristics, however refined, but is dramatically confirmed as soon as the peculiar character of the symbolic orientation is recognized.

Sartre would amend the Cartesian and Husserlian formula for the originary act of consciousness,

I am conscious of this chair,

to read,

There is consciousness of this chair,

both of which single out the individual consciousness itself as the prime reality, An empirical study of the emergence of symbolization from the biological elements of signification suggests the further revision of Sartre:

This “is” a chair for you and me,

which co-celebration of the chair under the auspices of the symbol is itself the constituent act of consciousness.

* I use the word “causal” without prejudice, to mean whatever the reader would have it mean in the context. It does not matter for the argument whether it is read as efficient causality or as a probability function.

* Cf. Marcel’s “Intersubjective nexus”: “…It is a metaphysic of we are as opposed to a metaphysic of I think. …But it is apparent by definition that what I may call the intersubjective nexus cannot be given to me, since I am myself in some way involved in it. It may not perhaps be inaccurate to say that this nexus is in fact the necessary condition for anything being given me….Without doubt the intersubjective nexus cannot in any way be asserted; it can only be acknowledged…the affirmation should possess a special character, that of being the root of every expressible affirmation. I should readily agree that it is the mysterious root of language.” (Italics mine.)

* When the two-year-old child discovers one day that the sound ball is no longer a direction, look for ball or fetch ball, but “is” the ball for him and me, he experiences a sudden access of recognition and joy which is something quite different from all previous need-satisfactions. (Cf. Ernest Schachtel: “According to Freud thought has only one ancestor, the attempt at hallucinatory need-satisfaction….I believe that thought has two ancestors instead of one — namely, motivating needs and a distinctively human capacity the relatively autonomous capacity for object interest”)

† It is a curious fact that intentionality, one of the favorite theses of the phenomenologist, is least congenial to the solipsistic character of transcendental phenomenology. As Collins has observed, the one thing Husserl fails to explain is the intentional character of consciousness. What is intended?

* Roy Wood Sellars used “denote” more or less interchangeably with “perceive” and “intend”: “…we should need to distinguish between the intuition of a sensory appearance, which alone is given, and the denotative selection of a thing-object which is believed in and characterized.”

† Cassirer thus stands at the opposite pole from the semanticists. So far from it being a case of a thing being known and a label later attached by a semantic rule, it is the symbolic formulation itself which is the act of knowing. The “real” object tends to vanish into Kant’s noumenon.

* Is not symbolization, the pairing of sensuous symbol with an impression, a kind of judgment and abstraction? In even its most primitive form, a pointing at and naming, it is a saying that that over there is “one of these.” It is an abstraction, however, which is a far cry from the conventional notion of concept formation by which two given representations are combined. We must, as Cassirer says, take a step further back. This will take us to Lotze’s “first universal,” the primitive abstraction by which impressions are first raised to symbolizations.

IF IT IS TRUE that both Anglo-American empiricism and European existentialism contain valid insights, then in respect of the failure to make a unifying effort toward giving an account of all realities, the former is surely the worse offender. For the existentialists do take note of empirical science, if only to demote it to some such category as problem Seiendes, or passionate abstract. But the empiricists are notably indifferent toward existentialism. In the empirical mind, existential categories are apt to be dismissed as “emotional” manifestations, that is, as dramatic expressions of a particular historical circumstance, or — what is worse — as exhortatory, and deserving the same attention as any other pulpiteering. Such notions as dread, Dasein, boredom, and the dichotomies authenticity — unauthenticity, freedom-falling-prey-to, aestheticethical, will inevitably appear as reducibles —if they have any meaning at all. Whatever significance they have will be assumed to yield itself in their objective correlates.

That empiricism has not found a fruitful method of dealing with these distinctively human realities is no mere normative judgment but may be inferred from the confusion of the social sciences themselves. If there is an unresolved dualism of questioner-and-nature in the professed monism of the empiricist, its difficulties do not become apparent as long as the questions are asked of nature. The canons of induction-deduction hold good: data, induction, hypothesis, deduction, test, verification, prediction, planning. But as soon as the data come to comprise not the physical world or subhuman biology but other questioners, other existents, the empirical method finds itself in certain notorious difficulties (1) The imperialism of the social sciences. As long as there is one datum man and several disciplines, each professing a different irreducible — i.e., cultural unit, libido, social monad, genetic trait — there is bound to result a deordination of the sciences of man with each claiming total competence and each privately persuaded that the other is pursuing a chimera. (2) The transcending of the questioner by his own data. Sociological material resists fixed inductions. A familiar example is the transposition of a biological method, the human subject conceived as an organism with an inventory of “needs,” with “cultural needs” as well as caloric needs. But the delineation of a “cultural need” tends to bring about the transcendence of this need by the very fact of its delineation. (3) The practice of smuggling in existential activities in a deterministic discipline. In psychoanalysis, for example, which in Freud’s words derives all mental processes from an interplay of forces, the crucial act of therapy is the exercise by the patient of a choice, that is, the assumption of a burden of effort in overcoming resistances. (4) The uncritical taking for granted or the equally uncritical ignoring of consciousness and intersubjectivity. Behaviorism ignores both, but what account can behaviorism give of the behavior of the questioner himself? The sociologist and anthropologist practice intersubjectivity; that is, they are not content merely to observe the externals of cultural traits — they try to understand the meaning of them. But what account are they prepared to give of this intersubjectivity? If Kant called it a “scandal of philosophy” that intersubjectivity had found no solution in the thought of his day, it is no less a scandal now.