Signposts in a Strange Land

Essays

Walker Percy

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781453216378
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Saggi letterari

Writings on the South, Catholicism, and more from the National Book Award winner: "His nonfiction is always entertaining and enlightening" ( Library Journal ).
Published just after Walker Percy's death, Signposts in a Strange Land takes readers through the philosophical, religious, and literary ideas of one of the South's most profound and unique thinkers. Each essay is laced with wit and insight into the human condition. From race relations and the mysteries of existence, to Catholicism and the joys of drinking bourbon, this collection offers a window into the underpinnings of Percy's celebrated novels and brings to light the stirring thoughts and voice of a giant of twentieth century literature.

Two
Science, Language, and Literature

Is a Theory of Man Possible?

THE ANSWER IS “YES,” I think so. But a more interesting question to me is whether the question makes any sense to you. I can’t help but wonder how you respond: Is a theory of man possible? Do you shrug and say to yourself: But I thought that was settled. Or do you tend to regard the question, as well as any answer, as hopelessly grandiose in our present state of knowledge? Or does the question stir memories of ancient and boring quarrels about the nature of man which you would as soon not rehash?

The question suggests that a theory of man does not presently exist or at least that traditional theories of man have been seriously challenged. Yet I suspect that most of us, whether we consciously profess it or not, are already equipped with a theory of man. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how one can live one’s life and work with other people day in and day out unless one has already made certain assumptions about one’s own nature as well as other people’s. It may be as impossible for us not to have a theory of man as it is impossible for primitive man not to have a theory of the world and its origins.

The next question is whether the theories we more or less unconsciously profess make any sense, or are of any help to us as students of behavior.

Some of us, for example, would reflexly refer this question to certain traditional Greek and Judeo-Christian teachings about the nature of man which are implicit in Western civilization itself. Thus, if one is a professing Christian or Jew, or even if one is not, it still comes second-nature to us to think of man in such terms as body and soul, flesh and spirit, mind and matter, matter and form, the mental and the physical, and so on.

By the same token, some of us may find it equally natural to think of man in quite different terms—terms which are nevertheless as much part and parcel of this same Western tradition, or at least the last two hundred years of it. I mean, of course, that for a person who has spent his entire intellectual life in the scientific tradition, with, say, twenty-six years of schooling culminating in a degree in medicine or psychology or sociology or med tech or nursing or whatever, it may be quite natural to think of man as you think of rats or chimpanzees, as an organism, a biological energy system, not qualitatively different from other such energy systems. True, it is generally recognized that the human species does seem to possess certain unique properties such as language, abstract thinking, complex tool using, art, culture, and so on. Surely everyone would admit, even the most mechanistic behaviorist, that men write books about chimpanzees and dolphins but that chimpanzees and dolphins do not write books about men.

Yet these differences may not shake one’s conviction that man is still an organism among organisms, responding to his environment just as other organisms do, and that these unusual traits are the consequences of evolutionary and genetic changes which have befallen man and which may appear different but are not qualitatively different from the behavior of other organisms—just as one thinks of a bird’s flight as a successful genetic adventure which has worked because, under the dispensation of the natural laws of evolution, it gives the organism a better chance of occupying this or that ecological niche in its environment.

In the case of man, what is more natural than to think of man’s peculiar gifts of language, culture, and technology as but yet another evolutionary stratagem not only for adapting to an environment but also for conquering it? If we overlook some of man’s perverse traits, his peculiar penchant for making war against his own species, his discovery of suicide, and his vulnerability to psychosis and such, what more spectacular proof do we have of Darwin’s naturalistic theory than man’s conquest of the earth through a few mutations such as upright gait, opposition of thumb and fingers, language, and cognitive process?

Does it not, in fact, offend one’s sense of the continuity of science if somebody suggests that man is truly unique—unique in a sense not allowed by the organismic view of man?

What I wish to suggest to you is that these two traditional Western ways of thinking about man, the Greco-Judeo-Christian and the scientific-organismic, may presently do us a disservice as far as a workable behavioral theory is concerned. That is to say, they may very well conceal more than they reveal. For both traditions make some basic and unexamined assumptions about the nature of man and so give all the appearance of theory without being able to do what valuable theory does; namely, shed light and provide groundwork where questions can be asked and coherent answers looked for.

Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge. Thus, if I were to raise with you the question of the nature of the red spot on the planet Jupiter, you might be curious, because we don’t know what causes the red spot on Jupiter and we know we don’t know. But if one raises the question of the nature of man, about which we know even less than we know about the red spot on Jupiter, one is apt to encounter blank looks, shrugs. That is, until recent years, when things began to fall apart. At least, nowadays, people are becoming aware of the incoherence of the present theories.

It is not difficult to demonstrate that there does not presently exist a coherent theory of man in the scientific sense—the sense in which we have a coherent theory about the behavior of rats and, more recently, a theory about what causes the red spot on Jupiter. I suspect that most of us hold to both traditions, man as body-mind and man as organism, without exactly knowing how he can be both—for if man is yet another organism in an environment, he is a very strange organism indeed, an organism which has the unusual capacity for making himself unhappy for no good reason, for existing as a lonely and fretful consciousness which never quite knows who he is or where he belongs.

I hasten to add that I do not presume to call into question the value and truth of either the Judeo-Christian or the Darwinian-naturalistic concept of man. As a matter of fact, I happen to subscribe to the former theologically and to the latter scientifically, regarding it as an extremely useful and well-established theory and a valuable method of accounting for the immense variety of structure and function in the over two million earth species.

What I am suggesting is that it is of little help to us scientifically to regard man as a composite of body, mind, and soul, and that it is a positive hindrance if we think this explains anything. And it is equally stifling to scientific curiosity if we imagine that we have explained anything at all, let alone man in all his perversity and uniqueness, if we take this or that laboratory hypothesis—say, learning theory as applied to organisms in a laboratory environment—and by verbal sleight-of-hand stick the label onto man. Then we find ourselves stuck with some all-too-familiar still-born monsters. We may say, for example, that organism A endowed with genetic constitution B and subjected to environmental stimulus C will respond with behavior D if it has been rewarded by reinforcing stimulus E. Now, we know from many arduous and painstaking experiments that this model is a useful way of thinking about the behavior of many organisms. The damage is done, however, and science is affronted and curiosity depressed when in the next breath one hears something like this: Human being A endowed with brain B responds with pleasure to experience C—say, viewing the Mona Lisa in the Louvre—with behavior D, the exclamation “Beautiful!” because human being A has learned through operant conditioning E that such an expression is met with approval and an increase in status among one’s peers.

Or, if we do not have the modesty of Freud, it is all too easy to play psychological parlor games and to pretend to account for Dostoevsky’s The Gambler or Kafka’s The Castle as an expression of such-and-such libidinal energies.

But the main error, it seems to me, of both the armchair behaviorist and the armchair psychologist is not the quick extrapolation from the simple hypothesis to complex human reality but rather the willingness of both to accept the age-old split of the human creature into this strange Janus monster comprising body and mind.

The biologist and learning theorist can’t get hold of mind and usually don’t want to. The Freudian psychologist, on the other hand, has trouble getting out of the psyche—his own psyche and that of his patients.

The question I am trying to raise with you is whether or not we have settled for a view of man which is grossly incoherent by any scientific canon. That is to say, I wonder if through a kind of despair or through sheer weariness we have not given up the attempt to put man back together again, if indeed he was ever whole, or whether man isn’t like Humpty Dumpty, who fell off the wall three hundred years ago, or rather was pushed by Descartes, who split man into body and mind—two disparate pieces which, incidentally, Descartes believed were connected through the pineal body. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure we’ve made a better connection between the two since.

To bring matters closer to home and to our own interests and concerns, I would propose to you this little hospital as a kind of microcosm of this schism in Western consciousness which we accept as a matter of course. I am wondering whether, like the rest of us, in doing work here, treatment, teaching, research, you have not already proceeded on the tacit assumption that man is composed of body and mind, and that between the two there is only a nodding acquaintance.

Indeed, this hospital strikes me as an excellent model both of the virtues of modern medical and psychotherapeutic practice and of the schism we have accepted, consisting as it does of two stories, an upstairs-downstairs world where somatic disorders are treated on the ground floor where medical theory is well grounded, and psychic dysfunctions are treated on the second story. I wonder if the planners of this arrangement didn’t unconsciously know what they were doing when they put the psychotherapist somewhat up in the air, so to speak? This is not to impugn either physicians or psychotherapists, but only to suggest that we laymen tend to think of the internist and surgeon as dealing with matters rather firmly grounded in the biological sciences, while we think of the psychotherapist as treating disorders which are no less real but which are notoriously hard to get hold of and even harder to connect up with the great body of the physical sciences.

To get down to cases, wouldn’t it strike us all as inappropriate if a patient walked in with a case of hemorrhoids and had to get on the elevator and go upstairs for treatment—while a patient suffering from free-floating anxiety was sent down to the basement? It offends our sense of the order of things.

This is only to assert what is surely a commonplace; namely, that the medical and surgical disciplines attempt and often succeed in dealing with matter in interaction and so generally preserve a degree of continuity with the well-established laws of the chemical, physical, and biological sciences. Whereas in the case of the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic disciplines, through no fault of theirs, and however they choose to define themselves, nearly all of them address themselves—must address themselves—to mental or subjective realities. A standard textbook of psychotherapy published over ten years ago lists ten different schools of psychotherapy, running from Freud’s psychoanalysis to Sullivan’s theory of interpersonal relations—and this does not include the more recent and promising schools of transactional analysis and Gestalt therapy. As diverse as all these systems are, they share one trait in common: they all deal, by and large, with subjective, mental, or emotional entities, events and states which cannot be seen or measured but can only be reported by the patient. Even the stimulus-and-response therapy of Dollard and Miller stretches the term “response” to include what they call “subjectively observable responses”—in short, any mental state the patient chooses to report.

It is also surely a commonplace to say that to many physicians and surgeons such a proliferation of theory suggests that the subject matter of psychiatry and psychotherapy is both more difficult and, in a real sense, harder to get hold of by the scientific method, and that a single “correct” theory has not yet been hit upon in the sense that, say, a single theory of the mechanics of ovulation or renal function is generally agreed to exist.

I mention these well-known and fundamental divergences between the subject matters of the medical sciences and the psychiatric sciences to raise nagging questions; namely, whether this split of the human species into body and mind is not intractable, whether it is not in the very nature of things that we shall always be dealing with somatic complaints on the first floor and emotional complaints on another floor or another wing, and whether the two will ever have much more to do with each other than they do now—and to raise an even more distressing question: Is the very nature of mindstuff such that we will never be able to get hold of it, converge on it, and that schools of psychotherapy will continue to proliferate?

I mention this all too familiar state of affairs to bring to your attention the glimmer of a new way of looking at things. This is not to suggest that Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again. If modern man was split in two by Descartes’s mind-body theory three hundred years ago, it is unlikely that he can be pasted back together by yet another theory. But it may be possible that we can at least see the fragments, Humpty Dumpty’s fragments, not as disparate parts, body and mind, which never seem to have fit together, but at least as parts of the same creature.

By a “new way of looking at things,” I refer to what is called variously triadic theory, semiotics, semiosis. It is not new, being in the main the discovery of the American logician and philosopher Charles Peirce some seventy-five years ago.

Charles Peirce’s triadic theory applies mainly to man’s strange and apparently unique capacity to use symbols and, in particular, to his gift of language.

It might be well to begin with what I take to be a growing consensus about the nature of language itself—which is central to our thesis. A curious swing-back of the pendulum has occurred in recent years. To oversimplify the case, one might describe the traditional view of man, say, up to one hundred years ago, as the centerpiece of creation, made in the image of God, distinguished from the beasts in being endowed with soul, intellect, free will, reason, and the gift of language. He could name things, think about things, was free to do all he wanted, convey his thoughts by words which could be understood by other men.

At the opposite swing of the pendulum—say, thirty to fifty years ago, following the victory of early Darwinism, at the full tide of Pavlovian and Watsonian behaviorism and with the gathering impetus of Freud’s discovery of the power of the irrational forces of the unconscious—man was not only dethroned from his lordship of creation, but his very reason, and the autonomy of his consciousness, was called into question. And as for the one faculty which even Darwin admitted seemed to set him apart from the beasts, the gift of language, even that seemed explainable, or was held explainable, at least in principle, as a response, the learned response of an organism, admittedly more complex than the response of a rat to a signal, but not qualitatively different.

Now, let me quickly summarize what I take to be the present position of some recent writers, linguistic theorists, psycholinguists, semioticists, and the like. I have in mind not only Charles Peirce but Suzanne Langer, Ernst Cassirer, and Noam Chomsky.

The consensus, it seems fair to state, is: Man’s capacity for language and the use of symbols does indeed seem to be unique among species. It cannot be explained by the known laws of learning theory or any refinement of adaptation of these laws. The contrast is dramatic. Take a human child and the most intelligent of the nonhuman primates, a young chimpanzee. Following the most rigorous training, months and years of input, a chimpanzee can be taught perhaps seventy-five hand signals by means of which he can communicate this or that need, “Want banana, hug me, tickle me,” and so on. In the case of the human child, during this same period of time and without anybody taking much trouble about it, the child will learn to utter and understand an infinite number of new sentences in his language. Chomsky actually uses the word “infinite” to describe this language competence.

This capacity for language seems to be, in the evolutionary scale, a relatively recent, sudden, and explosive development. A few years ago, it was thought to have begun to happen with Homo erectus perhaps a million years ago. Now, as Julian Jaynes at Princeton, among others, believes, it appears to have occurred in Neanderthal man as recently as the fourth glaciation, which lasted from about 75,000 to 35,000 years ago. During this same period, especially around 40,000 years ago, there occurred an explosive increase in the use and variety of new tools. The human brain increased in weight about fifty-four percent, much of this increase occurring in the cortex, especially in those areas around the Sylvan fissure implicated in the perception and production of speech. There are new structures, not present or else extremely rudimentary in even the highest apes. Moreover, recent experiments have shown that if one destroys this cortical region in other primates, it has no effect on vocalization, which is mediated not by a cortical but rather by the limbic system.

What does this mean? It means, for one thing, that there occurred in the evolution of man an extraordinary and unprecedented event which in the scale of evolutionary time was as sudden as biblical creation and whose consequences we are just beginning to explore. A fifty-four percent increase in brain weight in a few thousand years is, evolutionarily speaking, almost an instantaneous event. Anatomically speaking, it is perhaps not too much to say that this spectacular quantum jump is what made man human.

What is important to notice is that this change is not merely yet another evolutionary adaptation or adventure, however extraordinary. Man is not merely another organism which has learned to utter and understand sounds. Language is apparently an all-or-none threshold. As the linguist Edward Sapir said, there is no such thing as a primitive language. Language is unlike bird’s flight. Some birds are superb flyers; others are lousy. But every normal human has the capacity for uttering and understanding an infinite number of sentences in his language, no matter what the language is. As Helen Keller said, once she discovered that the word “water” was the name of the liquid, she then had to know what everything else was.

What I am saying, along with Peirce, Langer, Cassirer, and Chomsky, is that once man has crossed the threshold of language and the use of other symbols, he literally lives in a new and different world. If a Martian were to visit earth, I think the main thing he would notice about earthlings is that they spend most of their time in one kind of symbolic transaction or other, talking or listening, gossiping, reading books, writing books, making reports, listening to lecturers, delivering lectures, telling jokes, looking at paintings, watching TV, going to movies. Even at night, asleep, his mind is busy with dreams, which are, of course, a very tissue of symbols.

So sweepingly has his very life and his world been transformed by his discovery of symbols that it seems more accurate to call man not Homo sapiens—because man’s folly is at least as characteristic as his wisdom—but Homo symbolificus, man the symbol-mongerer, or Homo loquens, man the talker. To paraphrase William Faulkner: Even if the world should come to an end and there are only two survivors, what do you ...