The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  (2) The ambiguity of the Thou. The Thou is at once the source of my consciousness, the companion and co-celebrant of my discovery of being—and the sole threat to my unauthentic constitution of myself.

  The Thou is different from the other forms around me in that, while it can be objectized and relegated to the order of the stable configuration, it tends under certain conditions (the stare) to escape symbolization and to recover its unique and indispensable role in the sustaining and validating of my consciousness. When Sartre instances the stare of another as the supreme aggression, he is uncovering but one of two extreme alternatives. The look is of the order of pure intersubjectivity without the mediation of the symbol, and if it can be hatred in the exposure of my impersonation, it can also be love in the communion of selves. The unique importunacy of the look of another, the guardianship which one exercises over one’s own look, and the urgent need to deal with the look of another, derive from a tacit recognition of the absolute character of the alternatives—a look can only be an aggression or a communion, nothing else. It is not formulable. In the exchange of stares everything is at stake. L’enfer c’est autrui. But so is heaven. My vulnerability before the look derives from the aboriginal triadic communion of consciousness. The Thou is the knower, the namer, the co-inspector with me of the common thing and the authority for its name. Whatever devious constitution of self I have been able to arrive at, whatever my “self-system,” my impersonation, it melts away before the steady gaze of another.

  Sartre is surely mistaken in analyzing the source of my shame at being caught out in an unworthy performance by the look of another. It is the other’s objectizing me, he says, that makes me ashamed. I had been aware of myself as not strictly coinciding with what I am. But when he looks at me, “I am sitting like that ink pot on the table…my original fall is the existence of the other, and shame is, in the same way as pride, the becoming aware of myself as a nature.” But surely it is the other way around. What is revealed, as it seems to me, in the discovering look of another, is literally my unspeakableness (unformulability). To be taken for a nature, an ink pot, would be the purest happiness. No. I am exposed—as what? not as a something—as nothing, as that which unlike everything else in the world cannot be rendered darstellbar.

  Who is the Thou that gazes at me? Whoever he may be and despite the importunacy of his gaze and the need at any cost to come to terms with it. I know one thing about him—he is an existent. However successfully I may have been able to objectize him, when he looks at me, his being escapes through his eyes. As Marcel says, it is of the nature of the other that he exists.

  The Sartrean elevation of nothingness as the prime reality of the human existent, the awarding of priority to existence over essence, is perhaps a confusion of the psychological and the ontological orders, a mistaking of human being for the predicament of consciousness. When Matthieu stops in the middle of Pont Neuf and discovers his freedom in his nothingness—“Within me there is nothing, not even a wisp of smoke; there is no within. There is nothing. I am free”—he is after all only hypostasizing the unformulability of self. The telltale sign is his elation, his sense of having at last discovered his identity. He is something after all—Nothing! And in so doing, is he not committing the same impersonation which Sartre so severely condemns in others? If the structure of consciousness is intentional, to be of its essence directed toward the other, a being-towards, then the ontologizing of this self-unformulability as Nought is as perverse as any other impersonation—really a kind of inferior totemism.

  Yet even Sartrean existentialism can only be edifying to the empirical mind. For whatever the sins of bad faith of an existentialism which postulates atheism, it has been able to recover that which the empiricist in his obsessive quest for reducibility and quantification has lost—the uniqueness of human being.

  Prescinding entirely from final ontological constructions as befits an empirical science, and approaching existential realities solely in the light of an empirical finding—the uniquely human symbolic transformation—a science of man can only prove true to itself by seeing the human existent for what, at its minimum reach, it really is—not a quantifiable integer, a receptable of biological needs and so susceptible to fixed inductions, but a transcending reality, and hence a reality which can be studied, not by an uncritical transposition of the method of physical science, but by a broad and untrammelled empiricism, a sensitivity and a neutrality before structures which will neither rule out nor preconceive causal connections for reason of doctrinal requirement.

  14

  SYMBOL AS NEED

  AFTER READING FEELING AND FORM, Susanne Langer’s extraordinary work on aesthetics, one inevitably goes back to her earlier book Philosophy in a New Key, of which according to the author the former is the companion volume—not just to get one’s bearings in the general semiotic on which the aesthetic is based, but in all curiosity to trace out the origins of what is surely an ambiguity in the thought of the recent study. Feeling and Form is written with all the power and contagious excitement of first-class mind exercising a valuable new insight. In brief, it is an application to art of her general thesis that the peculiarly human response is that of symbolic transformation. The communication of meaning, positivists to the contrary, is not limited to the discursive symbol, word, and proposition; the art symbol conveys its own appropriate meaning, a meaning inaccessible to the discursive form. In each medium, the virtual space of the painting, the virtual life of the poem, the virtual time of music, the form which is created represents, symbolizes—not just the thousand and one subject matters of the various arts but rather the feelings, the felt life of the artist and so of the observer. Music symbolizes passage, “the form of growth and attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution,” the pattern in time of sentience. (Here it is worth pointing out that the “feelings” that Mrs. Langer talks about are not at all feelings in the modern sense of the word, that is, “emotions,” amorphous affect, but rather the form of sentience, a notion which it would be interesting to compare with the Thomist concept of the tendential forms of orexis.)

  Not the least remarkable thing in a remarkable book is how very close at times she comes to a Scholastic view of art, and that in a theorist with an otherwise encyclopedic grasp of her subject, there is not a single reference to Maritain or any other Scholastic source (not that this is surprising from the author of Philosophy in a New Key). This resemblance may be noted without in the least suggesting that her theory should be judged by a Scholastic standard of aesthetics, if indeed there is any such thing, or that she is approaching analogously “what the Schoolmen knew all along”—for the fact is that her contribution is in the highest degree original and potent in its unifying effect, and if any one thing is certain it is that she owes not the slightest debt to a Scholastic source. As we shall see, she has the most compelling of all reasons—one’s own philosophical presuppositions—for steering as far clear of Scholasticism as ever she can, and so it is all the more remarkable that from such a heroically disinterested source there should come forth

  The making of the symbol is the musician’s entire problem, as it is, indeed, every artist’s.

  That, whereas language is the discursive symbol, the word symbolizing the concept,

  Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feelings.

  That is why [because it gives the forms of imagination] it has the force of a revelation and inspires a feeling of deep intellectual satisfaction, though it elicits no consciousness of intellectual work (reasoning).

  And in protest against Croce’s equating “intellectual” and “discursive”:

  But by contemplating intuition as direct experience, not mediated, not correlated to anything public, we cannot record or systematize them, let alone construct a “science” of intuitive knowledge which will be the true analogue of logic.

  Compare with Maritain

  The sphere of Making is the sphere of Art.

  Art is above all
intellectual.

  Beauty is essentially the object of intelligence, for what knows in the full meaning of the word is the mind.

  …it is mind and sense combined, the intellectualized sense which gives rise to aesthetic joy in the heart.

  …the splendor or radiance of form glittering in the beautiful thing is not presented to the mind by a concept or an idea but precisely by a sensible object, intuitively apprehended.

  The capital error in Benedetto Croce’s neo-Hegelian aesthetics…is the failure to perceive that artistic contemplation, however intuitive it may be, is none the less above all intellectual. Aesthetics ought to be intellectual and intuitivist at the same time.

  Maritain is more explicit about the dual role of the art symbol in his latest work than in Art and Scholasticism.

  Be it painting or poem, this work is made object—in it alone does poetic intuition come to objectivization. And it must always preserve its own consistence and value as object. But at the same time it is a sign—both a direct sign of secrets perceived in things, of some irrecusable truth of nature of adventure caught in the great universe, and a reversed sign of the subjective universe of the poet, of his substantial Self obscurely revealed.

  A text from Thomas Aquinas is interesting in this connection:

  Therefore beauty consists in proper proportion because the sense derives pleasure from things properly proportioned as being similar to itself for sense also is a kind of reason (logos tis) like every cognitive virtue and as knowledge comes about through assimilation and similtude is concerned with form, the beautiful strictly pertains to the concept of a formal cause.

  It is apparently Saint Thomas and not Mrs. Langer or Cassirer who had the first inkling of the mysterious analogy between the form of beauty and the pattern of the inner life.

  It is not intended here to make out a case but only to draw attention to a rather remarkable example of two thinkers converging on the same truths from opposed positions and—unlike experimental science—each arriving and remaining unaware of the other. For although the idioms are different—to read one after the other, it is necessary to make a conscious shift of media, like changing languages—they are both saying the same things: (1) that art is a making and appreciation is a knowing, intellectual but peculiarly distinct from discursive knowing, and that delight is secondary and logically subsequent to the knowing; (2) that the art symbol represents both thing and self. It is a formidable construction indeed that is arrived at from exactly opposite directions, from a logical empiricism in one and a theistic realism in the other—though perhaps it must be allowed that in order of achievement, in her breaking away from the restrictive a prioris of pragmatism and psychologism, the experiential aesthetics of Dewey, and the “minute stimuli” aesthetics of Richards, and in respect of the powerful and explicit delineation of a uniquely human faculty, it is Mrs. Langer who has come the longer way.

  Since, however, her naturalism is apparently as stoutly avowed as ever, and since at the same time her debt to Cassirer and idealism is freely acknowledged, we turn or return to Philosophy in a New Key to discover how she has come to this pass, from logical positivism (she wrote a textbook on the subject) to a near-realistic aesthetic by way of idealism—and kept her old allegiance, or whether, in truth, she has. What we must evaluate are the consequences of her insight, what she calls her “heresy,” for an empirical science of man. Has she exposed a fatal weakness in an exclusively empirical semiotic and anthropology, deliberately in the former and perhaps inadvertently in the latter? Is her heresy, in short, an apostasy?

  It is part of the stock in trade of Philosophy in a New Key—one of the unquestioned assumptions-behind-the-questions which, as Mrs. Langer says, are the most interesting thing about any philosophy—that the development of thought is linear. The history of philosophy could be written as the periodic sloughing of worn-out world views in favor of new generative ideas, of new ways of conceiving the world (she does not distinguish science and philosophy). The contrary notion, that truly generative ideas might be centripetal in action, that is, that they might progressively illuminate and specify a perennial humanist philosophy, is not allowed in court. Thus the Cartesian cogito can only be seen as one in a series of generative ideas because by the very nature of things there can be no criteriology to discriminate and measure, on the one hand, the unquestioned service of Descartes in clearing the decks of a corrupt Scholasticism, or on the other, the disastrous effects of the mind-matter split. She is committed to the uniform and irreversible action of her “generative ideas.” The worth of an idea is measured by the enthusiasm it generates; there is no good and bad to it. And so the later difficulties of Cartesianism must be ascribed to just the inevitable exhaustion of a great concept rather than the reaping of noxious tares planted in the beginning.

  The naturalist orthodoxy of Philosophy in a New Key is well known, indeed repeatedly avowed (could the wheel have come full turn?—one can’t help thinking of the protestations of Christian orthodoxy by Hobbes and Locke), but what is not recognized as widely is the thorough wrecking job done on behaviorist theories of meaning.

  The new key in philosophy—and a truly exciting idea it is—is the universal symbolific function of the human mind. The failure of behaviorism to give an adequate account of meaning has been pointed out before (Urban, Barfield). Charles Morris has tried to justify a purely behaviorist semiotic on a methodological basis, declaring that his purpose is simply to advance semiotic as a science, and that there can be no science where there is no observable behavior. This conclusion might be warranted if it were true, as he assumes, that the symbolific function in the human is of the same order as the signal function in the animal. The fact is, however, as Mrs. Langer so admirably sets forth, that it is radically different, and any science which assumes that the symbolic transformation is but a genetic extension of the function of signification must omit precisely that which is peculiar to human semiotic.

  For once and for all, we hope, Mrs. Langer has made clear the generic difference between sign and symbol, between the subject-sign-object triad and the subject-symbol-conception-object tetrad. Signs announce their objects. Thunder announces rain. The bell announces food to Pavlov’s dog. When I say James to a dog, he looks for James; when I say James to you, you say, “What about him?”—you think about James. A symbol is the vehicle for the conception of an object and as such is a distinctively human product.

  This distinction of sign function and symbol function, she admits, is in direct contravention of the old biogenetic motto: Nihil est in homine quod non prius in amoeba erat. Heretofore the symbol function had been hailed by the psychogeneticists as a useful variation of the sign function, enabling man the better to adapt to his environment—and likened, we all remember, to the telephone exchange with its trick of sidetracking and storing messages. That it does not so operate is sufficiently attested by the positivists themselves (Ogden and Richards, Korzybski, Chase, Ritchie, et al.) who somewhat anachronistically complain about man’s abuse of language and scold him for his perversities. All in all, the anthropologists and geneticists have had a bad time of it in their attempts to fit man’s manifold follies into a plausible evolutionary scheme. It is as if he had not proven worthy of a decent evolutionary past.

  Although Mrs. Langer credits several sources for the discovery of the new idea—namely, physical science, logical positivism, mathematics, Freudian analysis, German idealism—it would appear from her subsequent thought that the empirical and logical disciplines have actually had very little to do with the truly generative force of the idea, that is, the transformational character of the symbol function. Such arbitrary designations, for example, as let x equal an unknown, let a equal a variable, let p equal a proposition, are indeed symbol formations in the sense that x and a and p are convenient substitute counters for unwieldy concepts and so can be used in calculations. But this simple proxy relation would seem to have little bearing on the far more seminal and revolutionary concept
of symbol as vehicle for meaning, the sensory form which is in itself the medium for organizing and re-presenting meaning.

  It is the idealists and notably Ernst Cassirer who must be credited with the clearest explication of the peculiar nature of the symbol; and it is Mrs. Langer’s distinction to have rescued it from the toils of idealism. After a shrewd look at the metaphysical antecedents of the insight, she saw clearly that there is no reason why it must remain as the end product of speculation on a world spirit and whatnot, that in fact it only achieved its true vitality when seen as detached: as a finding, a human activity, and the beginning rather than the end of a science. (It is curious that Cassirer in his youth foundered on the same rock as the naturalists: the difficulty of reconciling human stupidity with a monist view of reality. But instead of throwing up his hands at folly, he began to study it as a significant human activity and it was in this pursuit—in the act of boarding a streetcar, he relates—that the great idea came to him that by the symbol man conceives the world.)

  Cassirer asks the question, How can a sensory content become the vehicle of meaning? and answers in effect that it cannot, unless it, the symbol, the word, the rite, the art form, itself constitutes the meaning. (And here, as much as in Hegel, or for that matter, as in naturalist anthropology, there is excluded in the assumption any criterion of truth or value except an evolutionary one—in this case the extent to which the symbol is elaborated: Thus the Mass is indeed a “higher” form than a native dog dance, but only in the sense that it is more highly developed.) According to Cassirer, the only alternative to an idealist theory of meaning is a skeptical one, and to Urban the particular skepticism of the causal sign theories. As Richards puts it: We can never expect to know what things are but only how they hang together.