Today, most people remember Walker Percy for his fiction. His debut novel The Moviegoer won the National Book Award in 1962, and fans of his comic-apocalyptic Love in the Ruins could be forgiven for thinking that we in the United States increasingly inhabit something out from the darker regions of Percy's imagination. Yet, Percy's thinking and ideas ranged widely, and I believe that he ought to be taken at least as seriously as a social theorist and philosopher, as as a novelist.

           I remember my excitement when I discovered Percy's lifelong fascination with understanding the human person in a key that was both scientific and philosophical. His novels hint at the depth of his thinking about these matters, and his essays present a picture of a mind at work on small parts of a complex whole that no single piece of his could quite address. Until recently, one had to piece his views on the matter together by discovering common threads among about twenty essays on various subjects, approaching them indirectly with his satirical self-help book Lost in the Cosmos, and extrapolating from themes in his novels.

           Beginning in the early 1950s, Percy began drafting Symbol & Existence, which he hoped would articulate the "radical anthropology" necessary for regaining our sense of self. After several attempts at revision, he ultimately abandoned the project when he found success as a novelist. While sections of the manuscript would make their way into the aforementioned essays in philosophical and literary journals, the book fills in the gaps that readers formerly had to fill in themselves.

           Percy presents the book as an inquiry into the nature of language and its place in our life, and a diagnosis of how both materialist science and phenomenology fail to comprehend the full wonder of human personhood. What's striking about this account is that Percy, a deeply faithful Roman Catholic, begins with almost entirely empirical grounds of argument, and then proceeds by induction to an account of what language actually is. He occasionally gestures toward the metaphysical and theological implications of his argument, but largely lets the reader think through what accepting his radical anthropology might mean for grasping what it is to be human.

 

Materialism's discontents

           Symbol & Existence diagnoses the great divide in the Western mind, which Percy argues is not methodological so much as it is metaphysical, a split "so great that the two sides no longer even have the means of arguing with one another" (13). On the one side stands the dominant spirit of the age, that of science and purely materialist philosophy, and the means it uses to describe our life. Materialist philosophy reduces distinctly human things to the subhuman; it denudes the relational person into the realm of impersonal causes and effects. On the other we find approaches that take the self seriously, and that speak powerfully of "the nothingness of self, the alienation, the boredom, the anguish" of human persons, and why these sentiments cannot "be disposed of as an individual malfunction," and instead ought to be recognized as perennial elements of our existence (20).

           Percy believed that the most dangerous characteristic of postwar American intellectual life was the growth of scientism. Science formed the spirit of the age, and as a medical doctor, it was a spirit that Percy himself understood. He repeatedly lauds science as a way of knowing and studying reality, as a vital path to improving the human estate, while also criticizing the overextension of its dominion to areas it is ill-suited to understand. He observed that "there is always the temptation to elevate this elegant method to a totalitarian worldview. Any precision instrument is as dangerous as it is precise. But the real danger is that one should be unaware of the danger" (5).

           Scientists often tend—quite unempirically—to reduce the entirety of reality to what they can measure or understand in materialistic and mechanistic terms. If we can describe animal behavior with a stimulus-response model, why not human beings? Many natural processes in human life can be adequately understood this way. B.F. Skinner's behaviorism in this respect is simply the forerunner of contemporary neuroscience's efforts to reduce the human person to brain waves.

           At the end of this road looms "the raw aching void of existence, one's own existence, which is the great leftover in the otherwise magnificent corpus of objective science" (7). Most Americans—scientists included—distract themselves from the existential questions that their work raises, and throw themselves into distractions to cope with this.

           Consider an important example of the consequences of this "leftover" in what Percy called "the antinomy of science." When materialists study culture, they tend to look to any given culture's contents in an entirely functionalist way. That is, they view a myth or any other system of religious belief not in terms of its truth or falsehood, but merely "as serving an immanent function within a cultural system, just as a biologist construes an activity of ants in an anthill" (26). The antinomy Percy identifies "lies in the circumstances that the very activity that the scientist-spectator rejects as false for himself, he regards as true for the culture under observation" (27).

           A scientist thinking in these terms will never take the products of culture seriously on the terms of truth and falsehood that he would demand for any scientific holding—and never wonder whether that demand for truth might be a clue to something more. At the same time, he would want to be able to argue against evil political projects, but would find himself unable to "make a serious objection on the basis of his science against the Nazi or Communist state" (28). Just as the scientist would be existentially isolated in his in alienation, he would find himself morally adrift against wickedness.

           Efforts to grapple with the human condition on solely materialist grounds therefore founder because of this refusal to engage seriously with what to any non-specialist would probably be obvious: what makes human beings truly distinctive is our use of symbols to create culture. Soon after children can talk, they construct elaborate worlds out of words, craft personas for play which they put on and take off again in rapid succession, and constantly make art. Ironically, it seems that utility is what human beings have to taught; our creativity flows from our nature.

           Any systematic mode of inquiry worth the name would account for the creative rather than environmentally-responsive aspects of our life together using every available tool. Rather than critique science as a method, however, Percy instead asks for scientists to be more scientific in their search for certain knowledge: "if one wishes to be sure, why not push back the starting point of our science one last notch and begin at a point anterior to existential belief?" (141) Practitioners of materialist science generally refuse to examine their own foundational assumptions. They assume that language and consciousness are explicable in purely cause-and-effect terms, when instead, they should search for something that more adequately describes human life.

           Compared to the scientists, phenomenologists and existentialists might be on firmer ground in accepting that human language and consciousness are distinctive and irreducible, but having done so, they move on too quickly to the bigger picture:

It is not only the existentialists who have noticed—as who can fail to notice—that there is throughout the modern world an almost universal experience of estrangement, of uprootedness, of homelessness. Does anyone seriously believe that this sense of alienation is a passing symptom of the post-war years? Does anyone seriously believe that this is a malfunction of the individual organism, a medical symptom to be set right by an objective-empirical discipline, by unearthing a particular historical cause, by readjusting a subconscious tensional system? (21)

           Alas, anyone familiar with the scope of scientism's failures in the 20th century knows that these questions answer themselves in a depressing "yes, of course some very influential people still do."

 

A proposal for reform

           Science's characteristic blindness to these failures necessitates radical treatment. Percy undertook to show that a proper understanding of human beings would contain both philosophic and scientific elements, grappling with the way we are simultaneously spiritual and biological creatures. And what is the most distinctively human capacity that is simultaneously the most fundamental? Percy believed the answer to this question was language.

           He was not alone in this answer. Many scientists would agree with him, but incorrectly assume that their ordinary method can plumb the full depths of language. In truth, they flatten it. To begin with,

           The attitude of the objective-minded man toward language, from the high school psychology student to the linguist, from Locke to Bloomfield, may therefore by summarized as follows: language is a system of signs to which one learns to respond meaningfully; man also applies signs to things as their names and rearranges signs in sentences, which refer to a state of affairs in the world (46).

Percy defines a sign as "an element" that "performs the function of directing the attention of the organism to something else" (50). The trouble here is that the full reality of language transcends the simple cause-effect or stimulus-response chain that reducing language to a system of signs requires.

           Language does not just perform the function of signing, it denotes our relationship with the world: "Denotation is a peculiar relation that the symbol bears directly to the object—the symbol is the name of the object" (54). While this might seem like a minute distinction without much of a difference, much hinges upon it. Percy explains:

 It is the function of denotation that is radically different from any kind of signification.... Dogs are said to understand names and they do. When I say "James" to James's dog, he looks for his master. He responds intelligently to a word-sign. But when I say "James" to you, James's friend, you say, "What about him?" You think about James.... The dog lives in a pure stimulus-response milieu: sign leads to thing.... the one thing that will never dawn in his mind is that the word "ball," a peculiar mouthy little explosion, is the name of the round rubber thing, or in the sense which so scandalizes the positivists: that is a ball (54).

           Consider: a dog might be curious about a new object in its home, but dogs do not bring intentions or ambitions into human life. Humans do. Human beings do not merely respond to cause-effect chains, we imagine, and then the products of our imagination lead us to dream, make plans, and set to work achieving them.

           Percy appropriately calls this a scandal to modern science, for man's use of symbols rather than signs represents "the first event in natural history which transcends the order of causality" (60). Symbols demand the recognition of a realm beyond that of cause-and-effect—a realm that the dogmatic follower of scientism rejects entirely.

           Any science that purports to take human beings seriously must, then, grapple with both the material and mental dimensions of human language. While many scholars in social science now recognize the existence of an intersubjective realm—one where symbols exist and, indeed, form the medium through which we experience all reality—in 1950, this was far from the case.

           Even today, it isn't always true that those who see language in this full reality grasp the implications Percy drew out of this. For example, Percy recognized that human knowledge is fundamentally constrained by our capacity to symbolize our experience. When Percy wrote that "we know nothing directly and of itself—the 'angelic knowledge' of Maritain—but only through the mirrors of something else," he recognized the error of a tradition arising in the eighteenth century and shaping minds to the present. This "magic epistemology" of empiricism offers a view of cognition where we presume ourselves capable of conscious thoughts arising directly from experience, about which we offer labels—but proceeds without grasping the degree to which all conscious thought depends on the prior constraints imposed by the symbolic frames we grow into throughout our lives (93).

           While this overview aims at the essence of Percy's argument, the book itself offers a great deal more to those interested in the philosophy of social science in general, and the issues posed by language in particular. Symbol & Existence proceeds systematically, exploring the ideas of Suzanne Langer, Edmund Husserl, and many others. Percy patiently advances a highly technical argument about the characteristic blind spots of contemporary science and how understanding symbolization correctly might shift our perspective. Rather than delve much more deeply into how Percy proceeds, however, I hope I can entice you to read the book by pointing out some of the consequences that follow from the book's central ideas.

           You might wonder what failing to recognize the symbolic dimension of the human person actually costs us, especially if we conclude that the scientist's objective approach is what earned us the information revolution and all the other benefits of modern life. Percy believed that in following the rigorous logic of empirical science, scholars had lost sight of the human person. Sometimes it takes an outsider to crystallize what ought to be common sense for those who study a subject.

           Percy tells us that "To give something a name, at first sight the most commonplace of events, is in reality a most mysterious act, one which is quite unprecedented in animal behavior and imponderable in its consequences" (178). Once you accept that what is truly distinctive about human beings is their ability to symbolize, and you recognize all of human life is lived through a mesh of symbols—that is, an immersion in a culture, a place, and a way of being—these symbols and their bearers intuitively possess value.

Conversely, the act of reducing symbols to signs is also to reduce the meaning and value of personhood itself. Some of what is lost is obvious: if we are just like the other animals, only with another stimulus-response channel we call language, a certain devaluation sets in. But other elements of this are less intuitive.

 

The joy of naming

           The essence of man as symbol-user is that he desires to know and be known to others under the auspices of language. We give names to our children and their world becomes real when they transcend the relative darkness of simple sign-usage and walk in the intellectual daylight of symbols. Percy reminds us that one of the great joys of human existence is that of "knowing what was not known—and asserting it" (32). Whether this happens through the elaboration of theory or simple storytelling, we yearn for that moment of recognition when another person sees what we see and understands our thoughts.

           Objective-empirical approaches to human existence would deprive us of that joy, and place the would-be knower in contradiction with himself. Consider the standard story commonly held today by "knowing" scientists: If we tell a child that human beings are just an easily-explicable sack of meat that responds to their environment, the very real feeling of symbol-asserting joy stands in direct contradiction with what they are assured is their reality. That same person, charmed into graduate study in a field, will be locked into that existential torment Percy described—seeing their self as a castoff remainder under the auspices of dignity-demeaning theory. This I noted above, but the consequences of that view are dire.

           While Percy observes that alienation will always be with us, to understand language rightly is to grasp that what happens when we make a friend or attend a great seminar discussion is literally the co-creation of a new world—a proliferating garden of symbolic meanings unavailable to those not present, and that forms a communion of minds that was not there before. Martin Buber called true communication the creation of the "I-Thou" relationship, and Percy puts added conceptual flesh on what this means. As we associate words with events, they change in our consciousness—they are transformed in and through their connotations because our minds process them in their extended context (80–81). A table from the furniture store may just be a table, judged on esthetics or function alone. But a table made by your grandfather, and passed down to you, a part of your home around which you learned to play cards and imbibed family lore, becomes something quite different.

           If we follow Percy on this point, this means that our world of mass psychiatric treatment and pharmacological intervention is in large part a world rent asunder by failed intersubjectivity, and human beings have been sundred from themselves and others by way of misconceiving themselves in relation to the world. Thus, while man's basic condition is alienation, it is the peculiar trait of one's self, that if it tries to grasp its own existence as a what in the same way as it succeeds in grasping other "things," it will inevitably fall prey to impersonations.... The motto for the plight of the self surrounded by a gallery of dense symbol-thing entities is: this is water, that is a chair, you are Ralph, but what am I? (111)

           Percy's point here is subtle. Consider the question at the end: he asks not the typical authenticity-driven question "who am I?," but "what am I?" At face value, one can imagine Percy satirizing those straining to discover one's "true" self as so many children of Rousseau do and understand why he rejects it here. But this latter question actually cuts deeper into what it means to be human; it demands we grapple with our nature as spirit and flesh while also coming to terms with vast gulf that separates human beings from other creatures.

How much worse is our state if the very symbolically-rich theories we use to comprehend our plight deny the most important truths about our existence: that we are intentional-desiring creatures, capable of reasoning and self-discipline, but easily led astray by desire; that our language and our culture deserve respect, and that we individually deserve to be treated with dignity. Once we contemplate the staggering denial of these facts about human personhood in the present age, the reasons for the prevalence of anxiety, depression, and suicide become all too clear.

           We are ever in search of home, Percy tells us, not merely for our bodies, but for our souls, which long for the presence of someone beyond ourselves. Where signs draw our momentary attention to an object and nothing more, symbols can overcome the abyss of solitude and enter us into communion with our fellow man. The fullness of language bridges this gap and makes the full range of human relationships possible.

           Whatever follows the present crisis of the West, Symbol & Existence ought to become a new starting point for a new social science that deals "with that unique joy which marks man's ordainment to being and the knowing of it" (211). Language invites us to wonder, express love, and allows us to give voice to our intuition that there is something more to reality than what we can see, touch, taste, and hear.

Percy provides us a hint of where to start recapturing that joy, and reorienting us to certain truths about our existence. We stand in dire need of institutions and disciplines that can take his insights further.