Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  Suddenly you feel like a castaway on an island. You can’t believe your good fortune. You feel for broken bones. You are in one piece, sole survivor of a foundered ship whose captain and crew had worried themselves into a fatal funk. And here you are, cast up on a beach and taken in by islanders who, it turns out, are themselves worried sick—over what? Over status, saving face, self-esteem, national rivalries, boredom, anxiety, depression from which they seek relief mainly in wars and the natural catastrophes which regularly overtake their neighbors.

  And you, an ex-suicide, lying on the beach? In what way have you been freed by the serious entertainment of your hypothetical suicide? Are you not free for the first time in your life to consider the folly of man, the most absurd of all the species, and to contemplate the comic mystery of your own existence? And even to consider which is the more absurd state of affairs, the manifest absurdity of your predicament: lost in the Cosmos and no news of how you got into such a fix or how to get out—or the even more preposterous eventuality that news did come from the God of the Cosmos, who took pity on your ridiculous plight and entered the space and time of your insignificant planet to tell you something.

  The consequences of entertainable suicide? Lying on the beach, you are free for the first time in your life to pick up a coquina and look at it. You are even free to go home and, like the man from Chicago, dance with your wife.

  The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o’clock on an ordinary morning:

  The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

  The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn’t have to.

  (12) The Impoverished Self:

  How the Self can be Poor though Rich

  MOTHER TERESA OF CALCUTTA recently remarked about some affluent Westerners she had met—including Americans, Europeans, capitalists, Marxists—that they seemed to her sad and poor, poorer even than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor, to whom she ministered.

  Question: What kind of impoverishment can be attributed to the denizens of Western technological societies in view of the obvious wealth of such societies in such categories as food, shelter, goods and services, education, technology, and cultural institutions?

  (a) There is no such sadness and impoverishment. Mother Teresa makes such a charge because Western societies, with their increasing acceptance of contraceptive birth control and abortion, offend her Roman Catholic religious beliefs.

  (b) There is, in fact, such a sadness and an impoverishment, due at least in part to a loss of respect for human life as evidenced not only by the acceptance of abortion but by mounting child abuse, euthanasia, and indifference to human suffering. Recent studies have shown, however, that Westerners, that is, Europeans and Americans, own more pets than ever and spend more money on pet food and veterinarians than the food costs of the entire Third World.

  (c) There is such a sadness and impoverishment because in an affluent society, where there is a surfeit of goods and services, there is a corresponding devaluation. Whereas the poor peoples of the Third World, despite or because of their material deprivation, appreciate the simple things in life. Small is beautiful, the best things in life are free, etc.

  (d) Because the poor in heart are blessed, i.e., receptive to the Gospel, whereas the rich may gain the whole world but lose their souls.

  (e) Because Western society is an ethic of power and manipulation and self-aggrandizement at the expense of the values of community, love, innocence, simplicity, values encountered both in childhood and in non-aggressive societies (e.g., the Eskimo). As Ashley Montagu says, adulthood in the Western world is a deteriorated and impoverished childhood.

  (f) Because Western society is itself a wasteland, its values decayed, its community fragmented, its morals corrupted, its cities in ruins. In the face of the deracination of Western culture, all talk of self-enrichment through this or that psychological technique is cosmetic, like rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic. The Moral Majority is right. The only thing that can save us is a return to old-time religion, a revival of Christian Fundamentalism.

  (g) None of the above. All arguments between the traditional scientific view of man as organism, a locus of needs and drives, and a Christian view of man as a spiritual being not only are unresolvable at the present level of discourse but are also profoundly boring—no small contributor indeed to the dreariness of Western society in general. The so-called détentes and reconciliations between “Science” and “Religion” are even more boring. What is more boring than hearing Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations enlisted in support of the freedom of the will? The traditional scientific model of man is clearly inadequate, for a man can go to heroic lengths to identify and satisfy his needs and end by being more miserable than a Calcuttan. As for the present religious view of man, it begs its own question, the question of God’s existence, which means that it is not only useless to the unbeliever but dispiriting. The latter is more depressed than ever at hearing the goods news of Christianity. From the scientific view at least, a new model of man is needed, something other than man conceived as a locus of bio-psycho-sociological needs and drives.

  Such an anthropological model might be provided by semiotics, that is, the study of man as the sign-using creature and, specifically, the study of the self and consciousness as derivatives of the sign-function.

  Thought Experiment: If Mother Teresa is right and there exists in modern technological societies a paradoxical impoverishment in the midst of plenty, in the face of what is by traditional objective scientific criteria the most extensive effort in all of history to identify and satisfy man’s biological, psychological, sociological, and cultural needs, consider a different model. Consider a more radical model than the conventional psycho-biological model, a semiotic model which allows one to explore the self in its nature and origins and to discover criteria for its impoverishment and wealth.

  The following section, an intermezzo of some forty pages, can be skipped without fatal consequences. It is not technical but it is theoretical—i.e., it attempts an elementary semiotical grounding of the theory of self taken for granted in these pages. As such, it will be unsatisfactory to many readers. It will irritate many lay readers by appearing to be too technical—what does he care about semiotics? It will irritate many professional semioticists by not being technical enough—and for focusing on one dimension of semiotics which semioticists, for whatever reason, are not accustomed to regard as a proper subject of inquiry, i.e., not texts and other coded sign utterances but the self which produces texts or hears sign utterances.

  A Semiotic* Primer of the Self

  A Short History of the Cosmos with Emphasis on the Nature and Origin of the Self, plus a Semiotic Model for Computing Impoverishment in the Midst of Plenty, or Why it is Possible to Feel Bad in a Good Environment and Good in a Bad Environment

  From the beginning and for most of the fifteen billion years of the life of the Cosmos, there was only one kind of event. It was particles hitting particles, chemical reactions, energy exchanges, gravity attractions between masses, field forces, and so on. As different as such events are, they can all be understood as an interaction between two or more entities: A↔B. Even a system as inconceivably vast as the Cosmos itself can be understood as such an interaction:

  DIAGRAM 1

  Every element in the Cosmos is in interaction with every other element. The elements and systems of the Cosmos are still in interaction whether we are speaking of the radiation of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum or the attraction of gravity between bodies. In a sense, astrologers are right. The planet Saturn has an influence on me; it exerts a small gravitational attraction. I in turn exert a slight pull not only on the planet
Saturn but upon the entire M31 galaxy in Andromeda. When I take a single step, I affect the rotation of the earth.

  II

  Some three and a half billion years ago, organic life began on this planet, perhaps earlier on other planets, perhaps not at all. A discharge of lightning might have caused the formation of organic molecules in the primordial soup, molecules which sooner or later happened to replicate themselves, though it is difficult to imagine how these events could have occurred accidentally. Perhaps there was another cause. Perhaps God was the cause. We do not know. At any rate, a new kind of system came into being, the organism. It had the extraordinary property of maintaining its internal milieu, its homeostasis, and of reproducing itself. Yet, different though it was from other systems, events within the organism and across the membrane of the organism as well as events in its environment could still be understood as the same kind of events—dyadic interactions which had occurred before:

  The interactions of organisms with each other, whether sexual, combative, or predatory, could be similarly understood:

  It is all very well to speak of the wonders of the Cosmos as testimony to the glory of God, and it may in fact be true, but it, the Cosmos, is hardly perceived as such in modern technological societies. For most scientists, it seems fair to say, these same wonders, including the behavior of organisms, can be explained as an interaction of elements. The wonder to the scientist is not that God made the world but that the works of God can be understood in terms of a mechanism without giving God a second thought. Is it not indeed more wonderful to understand the complex mechanisms (dyads) by which the DNA of a sperm joins with the DNA of an ovum to form a new organism than to have God snap his fingers and create an organism like a rabbit under a hat?

  The real wonder is not that the Cosmos is now seen as wonderful but that it is not. Despite its inconceivable vastness, it is seen not as wonderful but as something that can be explained as a dyadic system.

  III

  It became useful to think of an organism as an open system which through the selective processes of evolution had developed a genetic code which enabled it to maintain an internal steady state (homeostasis) in a changing environment and to reproduce itself. Thus, all the elements and events in the Cosmos, including other organisms, could be thought of as the environment of the organism. The organism “responded” to those segments of its environment to which, through evolution, it had become genetically coded—hardwired—to respond: eating, fighting, avoiding some, approaching and mating with others. Those segments of the environment which were without biological significance were ignored:

  There are many gaps in the environment of an organism. This is to say that though there may be an interaction between the mass of the organism and the mass of Jupiter, the organism does not respond to Jupiter in any observable way. Yet the organism, as in the case of a migrating bird, has been shown to respond to the magnetic field of the earth or the position of the sun.

  IV

  An organism may also, either by being genetically coded or by learning—that is, by modifying certain neurones in its central nervous system—respond to certain signals in its environment by a behavior oriented toward other segments of the environment. Thus, a Texas leaf-cutting ant which discovers a food source too big to move will deposit a trail of pheromones on the ground, which other ants will follow for several hundred meters from the nest:

  The Texas leaf-cutting ant is genetically programmed so to respond. But Pavlov’s dog—or any other mammal exposed to certain changes in its environment—can learn to respond to a signal in an appropriate manner—by eating, fleeing, or fighting—through modification of cells in its central nervous system.

  A gorilla (A) in its natural state can utter one of a dozen or so vocal signals which are responded to by other gorillas (B, C, ... ) in an appropriate fashion—e.g., the bark wraagh is a signal of a sudden alarming situation, such as unexpected contact with buffalo, which signals flight in other gorillas.

  The chimpanzee Lana has been taught by the Rumbaughs, through a learning program of rewards, to punch differently marked keys of a computer and “ask” for food, liquids, music, etc.

  Next the Rumbaughs taught two chimpanzees to communicate with each other, e.g., one chimp punching a marked key to ask another chimp for a certain food to which the importuned chimp had access. The Rumbaughs called the marks on the computer keys “symbols” and the transaction between the two chimps “the first successful demonstration of symbolic communication between two nonhuman primates.”

  Whereupon B. F. Skinner showed that two domestic pigeons (Columba livia domestica) could learn spontaneously to use such “symbols” to communicate with each other. The two pigeons, named Jack and Jill, could conduct a “conversation.” Jack was the observer and Jill the informer. Jack and Jill first learned to associate marked keys with three colors. Jill was taught to “name” three colors to respond to the keyboard-question “What color?” Jack was taught to select the color corresponding to the name. When the pigeons were correct, they were rewarded with grain. Then Jack learned to ask Jill for a color name by depressing the WHAT COLOR? key. Then Jill looked behind a curtain at a color hidden from Jack. Then, while Jack watched, Jill selected a “symbolic name” for the color. When Jill was right, Jack rewarded her by pushing the THANK YOU key. Then, while Jill moved to her reward, Jack selected the right color. Then Jack was rewarded.

  Whether Skinner was out to discomfit the Rumbaughs and prove that pigeons are as smart as chimps, or whether both were out to prove that pigeons and chimps are as smart as people, or at least that their intelligences are not qualitatively different, we must admire the skill of both teams of investigators in teaching communication skills. But what has been called into question in these and like experiments is the use of words such as language, symbols, sentences to describe this kind of communication. Investigators such as Terrace and Sebeok have shown that such communication does not bear the test of language in the human sense, e.g., having a rule-governed syntax. One of the weaknesses of semiotics is the all-too-frequent use of words like language and sentence in a loose analogical sense.

  This argument aside, what matters here is that these communications in Skinner’s pigeons and the Rumbaughs’ chimps can be understood perfectly well by Peirce’s familiar dyadic model, as a sequence of interactions or dyads:

  This sequence can of course be broken down into smaller dyads, e.g., interactions between Jack’s conditioned neurones, electrical discharges along the efferent nerves leading to Jack’s pecking muscles, and so on.

  An African gray parrot named Alex at Purdue University has been taught to call forty objects by name, identify five colors, and distinguish between a square, a triangle, and a pentagon. When he wants to return to his cage, he says, “Wanna go back.”

  Many people, including some scientists, like to speak of the “language” of the Rumbaughs’ chimps, Skinner’s pigeons, and the Purdue parrot, to say nothing of the song of the humpback whale. These communications, however, bear little if any resemblance to human language. The former can be understood as dyadic events not qualitatively different, albeit much more complex, from other dyadic events in the Cosmos. The latter cannot be so understood.

  V

  Extremely recently in the history of the Cosmos, at least on the earth—perhaps less than 100,000 years ago, perhaps more—there occurred an event different in kind from all preceding events in the Cosmos. It cannot be understood as a dyadic interaction or a complexus of dyadic interactions.

  It has been called variously triadic behavior, thirdness, the Delta factor, man’s discovery of the sign (including symbols, language, art).

  This phenomenon occurred in the evolution of man. It may have occurred elsewhere in the Cosmos, or it may have occurred in other creatures on earth. We do not know. But it is not known to have occurred elsewhere in the Cosmos and it has not been proved—despite heroic attempts with chimps, gorillas, and dolphins—to have occurred in other ea
rth species.

  The present argument does not require that triadic behavior be unique in man. Perhaps it is not. Semiotics proposes only that where triadic behavior occurs, certain new properties and relationships also come into existence,

  Triadic behavior is that event in which sign A is understood by organism B, not as a signal to flee or approach, but as “meaning” or referring to another perceived segment of the environment:

  This triad is irreducible. That is to say, it cannot be understood as a sequence of dyads, as could the events, say, when Miss Sullivan spelled C-A-K-E into Helen’s hand and Helen went to look for cake—like one of Skinner’s pigeons.

  At any rate, a triadic event has occurred and it is unprecedented in the Cosmos. Thus, there is a sense in which it can be said that, given two mammals extraordinarily similar in organic structure and genetic code, and given that one species has made the breakthrough into triadic behavior and the other has not, there is, semiotically speaking, more difference between the two than there is between the dyadic animal and the planet Saturn.

  Certain new properties appear. For example, all triadic behavior is social in origin. A signal received by an organism is like other signals or stimuli from its environment. But a sign requires a sign-giver. Thus, every triad of sign-reception requires another triad of sign-utterance. Whether the sign is a word, a painting, or a symphony—or Robinson Crusoe writing a journal to himself—a sign transaction requires a sign-utterer and a sign-receiver.