The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  Why then do we believe the apostle? We believe him because he has the authority to deliver the message. The communication of the genius (the scientific message in the bottle) is in the sphere of immanence. “A genius may be a century ahead of his time and therefore appear to be a paradox but ultimately the race will assimilate what was once a paradox in such a way that it is no longer a paradox.” Given time, knowledge may be arrived at independently on any island. It is otherwise with the apostle. His message is in the sphere of transcendence and is therefore paradoxical. It cannot be arrived at by any effort and not even eternity can mediate it.

  How then may we recognize the divine authority of the apostle? What, in other words, are the credentials of the newsbearer? The credential of the apostle is simply the gravity of his message: “I am called by God; do with me what you will, scourge me, persecute me, but my last words are my first; I am called by God and I make you eternally responsible for what you do against me.”

  Kierkegaard recognized the unique character of the Christian gospel but, rather than see it as a piece of bona fide news delivered by a newsbearer, albeit news of divine origin delivered by one with credentials of divine origin, he felt obliged to set it over against knowledge as paradox. Yet to the castaway who becomes a Christian, it is not paradox but news from across the seas, the very news he has been waiting for.

  Kierkegaard, of all people, overlooked a major canon of significance of the news from across the seas—the most “Kierkegaardian” canon. One canon has to do with the news and the newsbearer, the nature of the news, and the credentials of the newsbearer. But the other canon has to do with the hearer of the news. Who is the hearer when all is said and done? Kierkegaard may have turned his dialectic against the Hegelian system, but he continued to appraise the gospel from the posture of the Hegelian scientist—and pronounced it absurd that a man’s eternal happiness should depend not on knowledge sub specie aeternitatis but on a piece of news from across the seas. But neither the Hegelian nor any other objective-minded man is a hearer of news. For he has struck a posture and removed himself from all predicaments for which news might be relevant. Who is the hearer? The hearer is the castaway, not the man in the seminar, but the man who finds himself cast into the world. For whom is the news not news? It is not news to a swallow, for a swallow is what it is, no more and no less; it is at home in the world and no castaway. It is not news to unfallen man because he too is at home in the world and no castaway. It is not news to a fallen man who is a castaway but believes himself to be at home in the world, for he does not recognize his own predicament. It is only news to a castaway who knows himself to be a castaway.

  Once it is granted that Christianity is the Absolute Paradox, then, according to Kierkegaard, the message in the bottle is all that is needed. It is enough to read “this little advertisement, this nota bene on a page of universal history—‘We have believed that in such and such a year God appeared among us in the humble figure of a servant, that he lived and taught in our community, and finally died.’”

  But the message in the bottle is not enough—if the message conveys news and not knowledge sub specie aeternitatis. There must be, as Kierkegaard himself saw later, someone who delivers the news and who speaks with authority.

  Is this someone then anyone who rings the doorbell and says “Come!” No indeed, for in these times everyone is an apostle of sorts, ringing doorbells and bidding his neighbor to believe this and do that. In such times, when, everyone is saying “Come!” when radio and television say nothing else but “Come!” it may be that the best way to say “Come!” is to remain silent. Sometimes silence itself is a “Come!”

  Since everyone is saying “Come!” now in the fashion of apostles—Communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses as well as advertisers—the uniqueness of the original “Come!” from across the seas is apt to be overlooked. The apostolic character of Christianity is unique among religions. No one else has ever left or will ever leave his island to say “Come!” to other islanders for reasons which have nothing to do with the dissemination of knowledge sub specie aeternitatis and nothing to do with his own needs. The Communist is disseminating what he believes to be knowledge sub specie aeternitats—and so is the Rockefeller scientist. The Jehovah’s Witness and the Holy Roller are bearing island news to make themselves and other islanders happy. But what if a man receives the commission to bring news across the seas to the castaway and does so in perfect sobriety and with good faith and perseverance to the point of martyrdom? And what if the news the newsbearer bears is the very news the castaway had been waiting for, news of where he came from and who he is and what he must do, and what if the news-bearer brought with him the means by which the castaway may do what he must do? Well then, the castaway will, by the grace of God, believe him.

  * Some of the bottles must have been launched by Rudolf Carnap, since the sentences are identical with those he uses in the article “Formal and Factual Science.”

  * See, for example, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger in What Is Life? and the psychiatrist C. G. Jung in Der Geist der Psychologie.

  † I wish to make an objective distinction here without pejoration to castaways on the one hand or scientists, scholars, mystics, and poets, on the other—while at the same time readily admitting we could use a few more of the absent-minded variety at , this time.

  * If the depth psychologist objects that the scientist and artist is no different from anyone else: he undertakes his science and his art so that he may satisfy the deepest unconscious needs of his personality by “sublimating” and so on— the castaway will not quarrel with him. He will observe only that, whatever his psychological motivation may be, the scientist and artist—and depth analyst—undertake a very extraordinary activity in virtue of which they stand over against the world as its knowers.

  * If one thinks of the Christian gospel primarily as a communication between a newsbearer and a hearer of news, one realizes that the news is often not heeded because it is not delivered soberly. Instead of being delivered with the sobriety with which other important news would be delivered—even by a preacher—it is spoken either in a sonorous pulpit voice or at a pitch calculated to stimulate the emotions. But emotional stimuli are not news. The emotions can be stimulated on any island and at any time.

  * Einstein’s discovery of the equivalence of matter and energy and of the ratio of the equivalence was a momentous advance of science. As it happened, it was also a piece of good news for the Allies in World War II. Indeed, pure science, research sub specie aetemitatis, may be undertaken under the pressure of a historical predicament. But the point is that it may also be undertaken—and Einstein’s research was undertaken—with no thought of its possible bearing on politics.

  † True, after the announcement, the way out could then be seen by the conferee from where he sits, and so the news verified before it is heeded and acted upon. The event then takes place at an organic level of animal response. But the difference still holds: the prime importance which the hearer attaches to the announcement, even

  though it is of no greater scientific significance than the sentence “There is a fly on your nose”; the response of the hearer of the sentence, the getting out rather than the verification in situ.

  * Although primarily a teacher, a Person, Christianity, of course, involves a teaching too.

  * A similar distinction is made by Newman between real assent and notional assent.

  7

  THE MYSTERY OF LANGUAGE

  LANGUAGE IS AN extremely mysterious phenomenon. By mysterious I do not mean that the events which take place in the brain during an exchange of language are complex and little understood—although this is true too. I mean, rather, that language, which at first sight appears to be the most familiar sort of occurrence, an occurrence which takes its place along with other occurrences in the world—billiard balls hitting other billiard balls, barkings of dogs, cryings of babies, sunrises, and rainfalls—is in reality utterly different from these
events. The importance of a study of language, as opposed to a scientific study of a space-time event like a solar eclipse or rat behavior, is that as soon as one scratches the surface of the familiar and comes face to face with the nature of language, one also finds himself face to face with the nature of man.

  If you were to ask the average educated American or Englishman or Pole, or anyone else acquainted with the scientific temper of the last two hundred years, what he conceived the nature of language to be, he would probably reply in more or less the following way:

  When I speak a word or sentence and you understand me, I utter a series of peculiar little sounds by which I hope to convey to you the meaning I have in mind. The sounds leave my mouth and travel through the air as waves. The waves strike the tympanic membrane of your outer ear and the motion of the membrane is carried to the inner ear, where it is transformed into electrical impulses in the auditory nerve. This nerve impulse is transmitted to your brain, where a very complex series of events takes place, the upshot of which is that you “understand” the words; that is, you either respond to the words in the way I had hoped you would or the words arouse in you the same idea or expectation or fear I had in mind. Your understanding of my sounds depends upon your having heard them before, upon a common language. As a result of your having heard the word ball in association with the thing ball, there has occurred a change in your brain of such a character that when I say ball you understand me to mean ball.

  This explanation of language is not, of course, entirely acceptable to a linguist or a psychologist. But it is the sort of explanation one would give to a question of this kind. It is the sort of explanation to be found in the Book of Knowledge and in a college psychology textbook. It may be less technical or a great deal more technical—no doubt modern philosophers of meaning would prefer the term response to idea in speaking of your understanding of my words—but, technical or not, we agree in general that something of the kind takes place. The essence of the process is a series of events in space-time: muscular events in the mouth, wave events in the air, electrocolloidal events in the nerve and brain.

  The trouble is that this explanation misses the essential character of language. It is not merely an oversimplified explanation; it is not merely an incomplete or one-sided explanation. It has nothing at all to do with language considered as language.

  What I wish to call attention to is not a new discovery, a new piece of research in psycholinguistics which revolutionizes our concept of language as the Michelson-Morley experiment revolutionized modern physics. It is rather the extraordinary sort of thing language is, which our theoretical view of the world completely obscures. This extraordinary character of language does not depend for its unveiling upon a piece of research but is there under our noses for all to see. The difficulty is that it is under our noses; it is too close and too familiar. Language, symbolization, is the stuff of which our knowledge and awareness of the world are made, the medium through which we see the world. Trying to see it is like trying to see the mirror by which we see everything else.

  There is another difficulty. It is the fact that language cannot be explained in the ordinary terminology of explanations. The terminology of explanations is the native attitude of the modern mind toward that which it does not understand—and is its most admirable trait. That attitude is briefly this: Here is a phenomenon…how does it work? The answer is given as a series of space-time events. This is how C works; you see, this state of affairs A leads to this state of affairs B, and B leads to C. This attitude goes a long way toward an understanding of billiards, of cellular growth, of anthills and sunrises. But it cannot get hold of language.

  All of the space-time events mentioned in connection with the production of speech do occur, and without them there would be no language. But language is something else besides these events. This does not mean that language cannot be understood but that we must use another frame of reference and another terminology. If one studies man at a so-to-speak sublanguage level, one studies him as one studies anything else, as a phenomenon which is susceptible of explanatory hypothesis. A psychologist timing human responses moves about in the same familiar world of observer and data-to-be-explained as the physiologist and the physicist. But as soon as one deals with language not as a sequence of stimuli and responses, not as a science of phonetics or comparative linguistics, but as the sort of thing language is, one finds himself immediately in uncharted territory.

  The usual version of the nature of language, then, turns upon the assumption that human language is a marvelous development of a type of behavior found in lower animals. As Darwin expressed it, man is not the only animal that can use language to express what is passing in his mind: “The Cebus azarae monkey in Paraguay utters at least six distinct sounds which excite in other monkeys similar emotions.” More recent investigations have shown that bees are capable of an extraordinary dance language by which they can communicate not only direction but distance.

  This assumption is of course entirely reasonable. When we study the human ear or eye or brain we study it as a development in continuity with subhuman ears and eyes and brains. What other method is available to us? But it is here that the radical difference between the sort of thing that language is and the sort of thing that the transactions upon the billiard table are manifests itself to throw us into confusion. This method of finding our way to the nature of language, this assumption, does not work. It not only does not work; it ignores the central feature of human language.

  The oversight and the inability to correct it have plagued philosophers of language for the past fifty years. To get to the heart of the difficulty we must first understand the difference between a sign and a symbol.

  A sign is something that directs our attention to something else. If you or I or a dog or a cicada hears a clap of thunder, we will expect rain and seek cover. It will be seen at once that this sort of sign behavior fits in very well with the explanatory attitude mentioned above. The behavior of a man or animal responding to a natural sign (thunder) or an artificial sign (Pavlov’s buzzer) can be explained readily as a series of space-time events which takes place because of changes in the brain brought about by past association.

  But what is a symbol? A symbol does not direct our attention to something else, as a sign does. It does not direct at all. It “means” something else. It somehow comes to contain within itself the thing it means. The word ball is a sign to my dog and a symbol to you. If I say ball to my dog, he will respond like a good Pavlovian organism and look under the sofa and fetch it. But if I say ball to you, you will simply look at me and, if you are patient, finally say, “What about it?” The dog responds to the word by looking for the thing; you conceive the ball through the word ball.

  Now we can, if we like, say that the symbol is a kind of sign, and that when I say the word ball, the sound strikes your ear drum, arrives in your brain, and there calls out the idea of a ball. Modern semioticists do, in fact, try to explain a symbol as a kind of sign. But this doesn’t work. As Susanne Langer has observed, this leaves out something, and this something is the most important thing of all.

  The thing that is left out is the relation of denotation. The word names something. The symbol symbolizes something. Symbolization is qualitatively different from sign behavior; the thing that distinguishes man is his ability to symbolize his experience rather than simply respond to it. The word ball does all the things the psychologist says it does, makes its well-known journey from tongue to brain. But it does something else too: it names the thing.

  So far we have covered ground which has been covered much more adequately by Susanne Langer and the great German philosopher of the symbol, Ernst Cassirer. The question I wish to raise here is this: What are we to make of this peculiar act of naming? If we can’t construe it in terms of space-time events, as we construe other phenomena—solar eclipses, gland secretion, growth—then how can we construe it?

  The longer we think about it, the more mysterio
us the simplest act of naming becomes. It is, we begin to realize, quite without precedent in all of natural history as we know it. But so, you might reply, is the emergence of the eye without precedent, so is sexual reproduction without precedent. These are nevertheless the same kinds of events which have gone before. We can to a degree understand biological phenomena in the same terms in which we understand physical phenomena, as a series of events and energy exchanges, with each event arising from and being conditioned by a previous event. This is not to say that biology can be reduced to physical terms but only that we can make a good deal of sense of it as a series of events and energy exchanges.

  But naming is generically different. It stands apart from everything else that we know about the universe. The collision of two galaxies and the salivation of Pavlov’s dog, different as they are, are far more alike than either is like the simplest act of naming. Naming stands at a far greater distance from Pavlov’s dog than the latter does from a galactic collision.

  Just what is the act of denotation? What took place when the first man uttered a mouthy little sound and the second man understood it, not as a sign to be responded to, but as “meaning” something they beheld in common? The first creature who did this is almost by minimal empirical definition the first man. What happened is of all things on earth the one thing we should know best. It is the one thing we do most; it is the warp and woof of the fabric of our consciousness. And yet it is extremely difficult to look at instead of through and even more difficult to express once it is grasped.

  Naming is unique in natural history because for the first time a being in the universe stands apart from the universe and affirms some other being to be what it is. In this act, for the first time in the history of the universe, “is” is spoken. What does this mean? If something important has happened, why can’t we talk about it as we talk about everything else, in the familiar language of space-time events?