by Walker Percy
3
I don’t even know what to call it, the object of this mild twenty-year obsession. If I say “language,” that would be both accurate and misleading—misleading because it makes you think of words and different human languages rather than the people who utter them and the actual event in which language is uttered. So the book is not about language but about the creatures who use it and what happens when they do. Since no other creature but man uses language, it is really an anthropology, a study of man doing the uniquely human thing.
The proper study of man is man, said Pope. But that’s a large order, especially nowadays, when there is no such thing as a study of man but two hundred specialties which study this or that aspect of man. Ethnologists and anthropologists study man’s culture and evolution. Linguists study languages. Psychologists study stimuli and responses. Ethologists study those drives and instincts man shares with other creatures. Theologians study God and man’s relation to God. But only a Martian can see man as he is, because man is too close to himself and his vision too fragmented. As a nonpsychologist, a nonanthropologist, a nontheologian, a nonethologist—as in fact nothing more than a novelist—I qualify through my ignorance as a terrestrial Martian. Since I am only a novelist, a somewhat estranged and detached person whose business it is to see things and people as if he had never seen them before, it is possible for me not only to observe people as data but to observe scientists observing people as data—in short to take a Martian view.
Imagine how it must appear to the Martian making his first visit to earth. Let us suppose that he too is an intelligent being, whose intelligence has, however, evolved without the mediation of language but rather, say, through the development of ESP. So he is something like the angels who, according to Saint Thomas, can see things directly in their essences and communicate thought without language. What is the first thing he notices about earthlings? That they are forever making mouthy little sounds, clicks, hisses, howls, hoots, explosions, squeaks, some of which name things in the world and are uttered in short sequences that say something about these things and events in the world.
This behavior seems a good deal stranger to the Martian than it does to us. This is the case because language is the very mirror by which we see and know the world and it is very difficult to see the mirror itself, to see how curiously wrought it is.
In order to see the mirror of language, it is necessary to turn it around so that it no longer reflects, distorts, transforms. Say the word glass. It is almost impossible to hear the sounds for themselves because they have already been transformed: they sound like glass. The word glass sounds brittle, shiny, transparent.
Now try this. Repeat the word aloud fifty times. What happens? Somewhere along the way the word loses its magic transformation and, like Cinderella’s other slipper at midnight, becomes the ugly little vocable it really is: a small explosion of the back of the tongue against the palate, the rush of air around the sides of the tongue, a bleat ending in the hissing of breath between the teeth and tip of tongue.
A very odd business.
The Martian is surprised by what he sees and hears. In order to prepare himself for the journey to earth, he has read many scientific books and journals brought to Mars by astronauts. These works, in biology, psychology, physiology, have led him to believe that man is not much different from other earth creatures, certainly not qualitatively different. He has the same kind of anatomical equipment—nerve, bone, and blood—exhibits the same chemical reactions, the same transactions across his bodily membranes, the same capacity to respond to stimuli, adapt to environments, and so on. Imagine the Martian’s astonishment after landing when he observes that earthlings talk all the time or otherwise traffic in symbols: gossip, tell jokes, argue, make reports, deliver lectures, listen to lectures, take notes, write books, read books, paint pictures, look at pictures, stage plays, attend plays, tell stories, listen to stories, cover blackboards with math symbols—and even at night dream dreams that are a very tissue of symbols.
Earthlings in short seem to spend most of their time trafficking in one kind of symbol or another, while the other creatures of earth—more than two million species—say not a word.
When he asks his hosts (in ESP) about this strange behavior, he gets a curious answer from earth scientists. Mostly they seem anxious to convince him how much they are like other creatures rather than different. “Ever since Darwin,” say the scientists, “we have known that man is not qualitatively different from other animals. In fact the whole burden of earth science is to discover similarities, not differences, to establish continuities, not gaps.”
“Yes,” replies the Martian, “but you talk all the time; you’re talking now.”
The earth scientists insist that man is an animal like other animals, that in fact the government is spending millions of dollars investigating the behavior of monkeys and apes in order to learn more about man, that ethologists, trying to account for man’s madness, spend much of their time investigating aggressive and territory-protecting behavior among other animals, even a small fish such as the stickleback.
“Yes, but you’re still talking,” says the Martian. “Why don’t you investigate that?”
They refer him to linguists and psychologists, who tell him a great deal about the structure of languages, grammar, phonemes, and morphemes; about the relation of one language to another, the historical changes in a language, the acoustics of language, the physics and physiology of speech; about the rules by which one sentence can be transformed into another; about information theory; about stimulus-response theory; about learning theory, according to which a person learns a language in a way not really different from the way a rat learns to thread a maze or a pigeon learns to do a figure eight.
“But wait,” says the Martian. “What about the actual event of language? The central phenomenon? What happens when people talk, when one person names something or says a sentence about something and another person understands him?”
At this point he is apt to encounter a certain evasiveness, even an irritability. From the theoretical linguist he may get (as, in fact, I did) this sort of answer: “Well, I’m not interested in that. What interests me is the formal structure of language—for example, the rules by which new sentences are generated.”
The psychologist might reply, “Well, our knowledge of the brain is not sufficient to outline the exact neural pathways, but of course we believe that language behavior is not qualitatively different from the learned responses of other animals. Read Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.”
“Excuse me,” says the Martian, “but I am not asking you to identify all the neural pathways and brain structures involved. I want to know only what sort of thing happens. Could you draw me a picture or describe a crude explanatory model—something like what your famous Dr. Harvey did when he speculated that perhaps the heart is like a unidirectional pump that sends the blood around in a circle?”
I used to have a professor in medical school who, when a student gave a particularly murky answer, would hand him a piece of chalk, escort him to the blackboard, and say, “Draw me a picture of it.”
The point is that the picture the psychologist draws, showing stimuli and responses, big S’s and R’s outside the brain, little r’s and r’s inside the brain, with arrows showing the course of nerve impulses along nerves and across synapses, no matter how complicated it is, will not show what happens when a child understands that the sound ball is the name of a class of round objects, or when I say The center is not holding and you understand me.
When the Martian says as much to the psychologist, the latter shrugs. “Well, if you’re interested in such matters, go see a linguist or a semanticist or a transformationalist.”
The Martian is astounded by the runaround. On the one hand he is referred to entire libraries of books about learning theory and stimulus-response theory, factual behavioral science which treats the behavior of both men and beasts. This is what he is looking for—behavior
, why men act as they do—but he discovers that these books leave out those very features of language that set it apart from other behavior: for example, that unlike other animals, which learn a very limited repertoire of responses, a four-year-old child can utter and understand an unlimited number of new sentences in his language.
When he mentions this remarkable accomplishment of children, the Martian is referred to linguists who treat the formal and structural features of a body of language.
As for the central phenomenon itself, earthlings seem to know less and, what is more, care less than they do about the back side of the moon.
Could the Martian be mistaken or is it not a fact that earthlings for all their encyclopedic knowledge about the formal and factual aspects of language have managed to straddle the phenomenon itself and miss it?
It is as if neither Dr. Harvey nor anyone else had ever discovered that the heart is a pump and that the blood circulates but in the past three hundred years scientists had amassed huge quantities of data about the chemical reaction of heart muscle, and the composition of blood, had described the distribution of the elements of blood, had made comparisons of the blood systems of thousands of mammals, and, finally, had developed a sophisticated computerized method for calculating the velocity and pressure of the blood in any given artery.
Some scientists, I hasten to add, are more honest. The famous theoretician Noam Chomsky is frank to admit our nearly total ignorance on the subject. He does draw a picture. He indicates the central phenomenon of language by a black box, contents unknown, labeledLAD, the “language acquisition device,” which receives the random input of language a child hears and somehow converts it into the child’s capacity to utter any number of sentences in the language. So certain indeed is Chomsky that what happens inside that box cannot be explained by the S’s and R’s of psychologists that at one time he saw fit to resurrect the old idea of Descartes that only a mind, a mental substance, can account for the extraordinary phenomenon of language. The black box was full of mind stuff, according to Chomsky. Later he said it probably contained computerlike elements.
What is in the black box then, a ghost or a piece of machinery?
How extraordinary, thinks the Martian, that these earthlings who know so much about the back side of the moon know so little about the one observable thing which even Darwin agreed sets them apart from the beasts!
4
If such a gap in our knowledge of language exists, it should undoubtedly be a matter of concern to those interested in that sort of matter—linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, and the like. But if that were all there were to it, the following essays would not have been written, because I have neither the desire nor the competence to venture into theoretical linguistics. It is true that in the end I propose a crude working model, something like Harvey’s notion that perhaps the heart is like a pump, or Malpighi’s hunch that the kidney may be a sort of filter, but only on the grounds that such is the prerogative of the amateur in an area shunned by professionals. Something is better than nothing.
No, what has rather concerned me and fueled my mild obsession over the years has been first the inkling, then the growing conviction, that more is at stake than a theory of language.
It turned out that the quest for a theory of language—that human, uniquely human, all too human behavior—ran head on into the larger question of man himself. If Chomsky, the foremost linguistic theorist of our time, talks one minute about explaining the linguistic capacity as a structure of computerlike components and the next about the mind stuff of Descartes, we can’t escape the conclusion that the newest and most celebrated theory, the transformational linguistics of Chomsky, has landed us in the midst of the oldest and most vexed question of all, the nature of man.
It was no coincidence then when the Martian discovered that earthlings, who have a theory about everything else, do not have a theory about language and do not have a theory about man.
What interested me was the Martian method of taking man as he found him and looking at him as if he were the strangest of fauna, which he is. That is to say, instead of coming at man from the traditional approaches, this or that theological assumption or scientific assumption about the nature of man—and, believe me, when it comes to settling man’s status before the fact, so to speak, scientific theory in the twentieth century can be quite as dogmatic as theological theory in the thirteenth, and perhaps with less sanction—why not come at man like the Martian? Instead of marking him down at the outset as besouled creature or responding organism, why not look at him as he appears, not even as Homo sapiens, because attributing sapience already begs the question, but as Homo loquens, man the talker, or Homo symbolificus, man the symbol-monger? Instead of starting out with such large vexed subjects as soul, mind, ideas, consciousness, why not begin with language, which no one denies, and see how far it takes us toward the rest? Instead of having behaviorists trying to explain language by stimulus-response theory, why not try to account for behaviorists by a larger theory of language (for after all the behavior of behaviorists is notable in that it is not encompassed by behavioral theory: behaviorists not only study responses; they write articles and deliver lectures setting forth what they take to be the truth about responses, and would be offended if anyone suggested that their writings and lectures were nothing more than responses and therefore no more true or false than a dog’s salivation)?
Accordingly, the assumption will be made that current theory of language is incoherent, that the formal-descriptive disciplines of linguistics deal with the products, the corpora, of the language phenomenon, that the factual science of psychology deals with the stimuli and responses of organisms, and that between them lies the terra incognita of the phenomenon itself.
A second assumption is that current theories of man, or rather, I should say, notions, are equally incoherent and that one incoherence has something to do with the other, so much so indeed that one suspects that the latter can only be gotten at through the former. If you know why this creature talks, thinks the Martian, you might also know why he behaves so oddly.
Start with God and man’s immortal soul and you’ve lost every reader except those who believe in God and man’s immortal soul.
Start with B. F. Skinner and man decreed as organism who learns everything he does by operant conditioning and you’ve lost every reader who knows there is more to it than that and that Skinner has explained nothing. Skinner explains everything about man except what makes him human, for example, language and his refusal to behave like an organism in an environment.
I take it as going without saying that current theories of man are incoherent. There does not presently exist, that is to say, a consensus view of man such as existed, for instance, in thirteenth-century Europe or seventeenth-century New England, or even in some rural communities in Georgia today. Prescinding from whether such a view is true or false, we are able to say that it was a viable belief in the sense that it animated the culture and gave life its meaning. It was something men lived by, even when they fell short of it and saw themselves as sinners. It was the belief that man was created in the image of God with an immortal soul, that he occupied a place in nature somewhere between the beasts and the angels, that he suffered an aboriginal catastrophe, the Fall, in consequence of which he lost his way and, unlike the beasts, became capable of sin and thereafter became a pilgrim or seeker of his own salvation, and that the clue and sign of his salvation was to be found not in science or philosophy but in news of an actual historical event involving a people, a person, and an institution.
I am not suggesting that there are not believing Christians today for whom this view of man or some variant of it is still viable. What I do suggest is that if one attempts to state a kind of consensus view of man in the present age, the conventional wisdom of the great majority of the denizens of a democratic technological society in the late twentieth century, this Judeo-Christian credo is no longer a significant component.
Wha
t has survived and is significant in the culture are certain less precise legacies of this credo: the “sacredness of the individual,” “God is love,” the “Prince of Peace,” “the truth shall make you free,” etc. Almost everyone is in favor of love, truth, peace, freedom, and the sacredness of the individual, since, for one thing, these prescriptions are open to almost any reading.
What does exist is a kind of mishmash view of man, a slap-up model put together of disparate bits and pieces. The other major component of the conventional wisdom, along with the ethical legacy of Christianity, is what the layman takes to be the consensus of science—whose credentials after all are far more impressive than those of Judeo-Christianity—that, myths aside and however admirable ethics may be, man is an organism among other organisms.
One sign that the world has ended, the world we knew, the world by which we understood ourselves, an age which began some three hundred years ago with the scientific revolution, is the dawn of the discovery that its world view no longer works and we find ourselves without the means of understanding ourselves.
There is a lag between the end of an age and the discovery of the end. The denizens of such a time are like the cartoon cat that runs off a cliff and for a while is suspended, still running, in midair but sooner or later looks down and sees there is nothing under him.
My growing conviction over the years has been that man’s theory about himself doesn’t work any more, not because one or another component is not true, but because its parts are incoherent and go off in different directions like Dr. Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu.
Those who don’t take this matter seriously forfeit the means of understanding themselves. Many people in fact are quite content to live out their lives as the organisms and consumer units their scientists understand them to be; to satisfy their needs, even “higher” needs, according to the prescription of those who profess to understand such things.
