Walker Percy's 'Theory of Man'and the Elimination of Virtue

A Political Companion to R PY O C Walker Percy Edited by IG PETER AUGUSTINE LAWLER H and D TE BRIAN A. SMITH L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 3 4/5/2013 10:53:43 AM Contents C Series Foreword 000 R PY O Introduction: Walker Percy, American Political Life, and Indigenous American Thomism 000 Peter Augustine Lawler and Brian A. Smith 1. Walker Percy: A Brief Biography Ralph C. Wood 000 H IG 2. The Moviegoer’s Cartesian Theater: Moviegoing as Walker Percy’s Metaphor for the Cartesian Mind 000 Woods Nash D TE 3. Walker Percy’s Critique of the Pursuit of Happiness in The Moviegoer, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, and The Thanatos Syndrome 000 Elizabeth Amato 000 A M 4. On Dealing with Man James V. Schall, S.J. TE 5. Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” and the Elimination of Virtue Nathan P. Carson 000 L 7. Walker Percy’s Alternative to Scientism in The Thanatos Syndrome 000 Micah Mattix IA R 6. Confessing the Horrors of Radical Individualism in Lancelot: Percy, Dostoevsky, Poe 000 Farrell O’Gorman 8. Love and Marriage among the Ruins 000 Richard M. Reinsch II 9. Walker Percy’s Last Men: Love in the Ruins as a Fable of American Decline 000 Brian A. Smith Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 5 4/5/2013 10:53:43 AM 10. The Second Coming of Walker Percy: From Segregationist to Integrationist 000 Brendan P. Purdy and Janice Daurio 11. Walker Percy, Alexis de Tocqueville, and the Stoic and Christian Foundations of American Thomism 000 Peter Augustine Lawler C Selected Bibliography O List of Contributors 000 000 Index 000 D TE H IG R PY L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 6 4/5/2013 10:53:43 AM 5 Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” and the Elimination of Virtue C Nathan P. Carson R PY O D TE H IG It is no overstatement to say that throughout his entire authorship, the critique of our current cultural anthropology, together with the formulation of a new “theory of man,” was Walker Percy’s central concern. In many of his earliest essays, most of which predate his first and highly acclaimed novel, The Moviegoer, Percy outlines what he sees as the currently fractured state of our theory of humanity and emphasizes the need for an empirically demonstrable consensus view regarding what human beings most distinctively are. Throughout his career, Percy repeatedly attempts to articulate just what such a consensus view could be, for without it, modern human beings (in his view) remain lost to themselves amid the ruins of modernity.1 In this chapter, I examine Percy’s theory of human nature, with a particular emphasis on what an ideal person in Percy’s economy might be like, including the virtues such a person must possess. In focusing on Percy’s anthropology, with its empirically evident and natural ground for virtues, I do not attend to Percy’s political thought as such. Rather, I will examine Percy’s account of our distinctive proper function as human beings, for it is a function that grounds political community and the virtues that sustain it and provides its teleological and hence normative dimensions. My ultimate aim is to determine how successfully Percy’s anthropology performs this task. In this essay, then, after summarizing Percy’s critique of our incoherent Darwinian and Cartesian conceptions of humanity, I examine Percy’s view that symbolic representation is the unique capacity that makes us human. Then, I elucidate his claim that unlike everything else in our world, we L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 87 4/5/2013 10:53:50 AM 88 Nathan P. Carson TE H IG R PY O C humans are “unsignifiable” and cannot be captured under the auspices of symbolic predication. I show that for Percy, unsignifiability entails an ineradicable and God-given anxiety, making both our self-placement in the world and transcendent orientation unavoidable. Then, after examining the necessity and normativity of our relatedness to other signifying selves, I conclude my exposition by examining what an ideal self-placement in the world might look like, including its ecstatic orientation toward the world, others, and God. Next, in the constructive portion of the chapter, I offer extended speculation regarding what virtues might be proper to the kind of beings that Percy thinks we are, and how such virtues positively sustain human inquiry, interpersonal communion, and the goods of community that undergird the human polis. Finally, however, I argue that Percy’s commitment to human unsignifiability radically undermines most of these positive prospects. For this unsignifiability, which preserves for Percy our proper orientation toward the world, others, and God, is deeply incompatible with either virtue predication or virtue possession. Present Anthropological Incoherence D Percy claims that, on the one hand, many people in the post-Enlightenment age see the human being as merely an “organism in an environment,” an anthropology built on the developments of Darwinian science and B. F. Skinner’s condition-response behaviorist theories. Percy exerts singleminded persistence in demonstrating how inadequately the “organism-inenvironment” theory explains humanity. He argues that one cannot simply take “this or that laboratory hypothesis—say, learning theory as applied to organisms in a laboratory environment—and by verbal sleight-of-hand stick the label onto man.” For those in this Darwinian-behaviorist camp, says Percy, it may be “quite natural to think of man as you think of rats or chimpanzees, as an organism, a biological energy system, not qualitatively different from other such energy systems.” On this view, Percy adds, any unique characteristic of human beings is seen as “yet another evolutionary stratagem” for adapting to or conquering an environment. Yet if human beings are mere organisms, Percy queries, how can it be that they are unhappy even in the most perfect environment? Even if we grant such qualities as abstract thinking, art, culture, and the use of tools as mere results of evolutionary progress, this theory still is unable to account for many things. What L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 88 4/5/2013 10:53:51 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 89 D TE H IG R PY O C other organism makes war against its own species, commits suicide, or is vulnerable to manifold self-psychoses?2 However, what is the alternative? Here Percy notes that many people seem to know that humanity has unique properties that must be accounted for, and so they fill this gap by holding onto an anthropology—“implicit in Western civilization itself”—comprised of the leftovers of a burned-out Judeo-Christianity that includes such vague ideas as “freedom,” “mind,” the “sacredness of the individual,” and the like.3 Percy says that most people, while holding the organism theory in one hand, hold these “traditional” Greek and Judeo-Christian dualist teachings about the nature of human beings in the other. However, for Percy, this traditional view of the human self as an “intermediate being,” as a composite or synthesis of body and soul (for example), is unhelpful precisely because it is held incoherently in tandem with the “organism-in-environment” view and because the terms of traditional Judeo-Christian definitions no longer hold any meaning for the average Western person.4 What is more, the traditional Judeo-Christian “intermediate” view of humanity as both angel and beast suffers from a cultural Cartesianism that renders it deformed and unintelligible. For example, Percy situates many of his critiques of the intermediate view in the context of Cartesian dualism that split the consciousness of Western humanity into “body and mind,” a “strange Janus monster” that has subsequently been methodologically presupposed in the natural and psychological sciences. In Percy’s view, then, we are incoherently positioned between the reductionistic organism theory of humans as Darwinian beasts and the unintelligible theory of humans as Cartesian angels, most of us holding to both without knowing exactly how the two hang together.5 Attempting to move beyond this predicament, Percy seeks an empirically accessible anthropological theory, one that overcomes the incoherence and limitations of either the Darwinian beast view, the Cartesian angel view, or their awkward Frankensteinian marriage. As they presently stand, says Percy, none of these approaches are of any help scientifically; they are even a hindrance if we think they offer a comprehensive anthropological theory. As an alternative, Percy seeks something within science itself that can account for both humanity’s creatureliness and its intermediate uniqueness.6 So, he searches for an empirical insight that could offer a coherent, empirically accessible, and experientially validated L IA R TE A M 89 Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 89 4/5/2013 10:53:51 AM 90 Nathan P. Carson view of human beings, offering a way out of our present anthropological incoherence. The Symbol-Mongering Being D TE H IG R PY O C To make a start at pinpointing such an insight, Percy says, “When man doesn’t know whether he is an organism or a soul or both, and if both how he can be both, it is good to start with what he does know.”7 What we do know, says Percy, is that human begins talk. Here is a starting point that everyone, theologians and scientists alike, can agree upon. For Percy, language (and the symbolic representation behind it) is the unique marker of human being, but also fully empirically evident and hence something that may bring disparate theories together into a cohesive whole.8 The human phenomenon of language is no evolutionary advancement or adaptation, according to Percy. The appearance of a symbol-mongering being in the evolutionary record is, he argues, “as sudden as biblical creation.” The human brain, Percy continues, increased in weight by as much as 54 percent in a few thousand years, “much of this increase occurring in the cortex,” especially “around the Sylvan fissure implicated in the perception and production of speech.” Taking his cue from writers, linguists, psycholinguists, and semioticians such as Charles Sanders Peirce, Suzanne Langer, Ernst Cassirer, and Noam Chomsky, Percy sees this breakthrough into the “daylight of language” as an “all-or-none threshold” and “a spectacular quantum jump that made man human,” such that we now live in a whole new world. Hence, Percy claims, “so sweepingly has his [humanity’s] life and his world been transformed by his discovery of symbols that it seems more accurate to call man not Homo sapiens—because man’s folly is at least as characteristic as his wisdom—but Homo symbolificus, man the symbol-mongerer, or Homo loquens, man the talker.” Here Percy suggests that if human beings are truly unique in this capacity and acquisition, then “surely a good place to look for a minimum consensus view of man is as languaged creature, not man the mind-body composite.”9 In his examination of man the symbol-mongerer, Percy turns to the semiotic work of pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce and his distinction between the only two kinds of natural interactions in the cosmos: those involving “dyadic relations” and those involving “triadic relations.” The latter, Percy argues, is unique to human beings and different in kind from all L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 90 4/5/2013 10:53:51 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 91 D TE H IG R PY O C other physical or biological interactions that happen. A dyadic event may be briefly described as a cause-effect relation or a stimulus-response occurrence such as subatomic particle collision or a man’s response to female pheromones. For Percy, human transaction with symbols is the only kind of natural event that we know of that cannot be reduced to such a dyadic relation or causal interaction. Following Peirce, Percy calls such symbolic activity “triadic” due to this fundamental irreducibility between symbol (signifier), the object (signified), and the mind of the symbol user itself.10 Percy himself was struck by the uniqueness and importance of this aspect of being human while reading the story of Helen Keller’s breakthrough into the symbolic world. For the first seven years of her life, Keller seemed to operate in dyads, as, for instance, when her teacher, Miss Sullivan, “spelled C-A-K-E into Helen’s hand and Helen went to look for cake—like one of Skinner’s pigeons.” The qualitative leap between the “dyadic” Helen of those first seven years and the “triadic” person she becomes after April 5, 1887, captivated Percy and fueled much of his anthropological theory. The significant occurrence happened as Miss Sullivan placed one of Helen’s hands under the running water at a well-house pump and spelled W-A-T-E-R in the other. In that moment, Helen, for the first time, understood the word water to be the substance running over her hand. She broke through the threshold of symbol and language when she finally made the connection between naming and being.11 With regard to this triadic breakthrough, Percy notes that “man’s capacity for symbol-mongering in general and language in particular is so part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing, of his very consciousness itself, that it is all but impossible for him to focus on the magic prism through which he sees everything else.”12 Given her age, Keller’s case is valuable because her breakthrough is simply more discernible as the amazing “quantum leap” that it actually is. This leap, though a precondition for myriad human maladies, is for Percy nothing less than the entrance of the child into full humanness. It is “the discovery of the world and the coming to oneself as a person” and involves “the secret of knowing what the world is and of becoming a person in the world.”13 L IA R TE A M The Human Task: Communion through Symbolic Naming The connection Percy draws between triadic language, “discovery of the world,” and the task of “becoming a person in the world” is crucial. By vir- Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 91 4/5/2013 10:53:51 AM 92 Nathan P. Carson D TE H IG R PY O C tue of our own nature as symbol-mongering creatures, we are saddled with the ineradicable and twofold task of naming the world, on the one hand, and of achieving selfhood by rightly positioning ourselves in the world, on the other. I will examine each of these tasks, beginning with the task of naming. In Percy’s view, Homo symbolificus (or man the symbol-mongerer) not only has and responds to the cosmic environment, as do other organisms, he also has a world. The sign-user goes around making signs, naming things around him, and creating a symbolic world of meaning within the physical world of the cosmos. Here, everything has a place, is accounted for, and named. Percy claims, “It is of the nature of the symbol-mongering consciousness to delineate and transform all sensory data into intentional symbolic forms. The whole objectizing act of the mind is to render all things . . . formulable.” Moreover, since the act of naming is a fundamental aspect of human consciousness, the symbolic rendering of all things formulable grants the sign-user epistemic access to the world around her. For Percy, triadic symbolization is a necessary condition for knowing or cognizing something as an object, since without a sign, precisely nothing is known or so cognized.14 So, for Percy’s triadic self, everything encountered must be known as something, or else it is not known at all: “Once it dawns upon one, whether deaf-mute or not, that this is water, then the first question is What is that, and so on, toward the end that everything is something. There has come into existence an all-construing mode of cognition in which everything must be formulated symbolically and known intentionally as something.” In order that a particular bird be “known and affirmed,” a “pairing is required: the laying of symbol alongside thing” (for example, that bird is a robin). In this way, naming moves the namer beyond mere biological orientation to an ontological orientation toward being, providing us with access to being such that the world may be discovered, unveiled, and celebrated with joy. Notably, the symbolizing activity in question here is “a means of knowing . . . not in the sense of possessing ‘facts’ but in the Thomistic and existential sense of connatural identification of the knower with the object known.”15 Here we reach the first significant point about Percy’s view of human selfhood as task, as I began to discuss above. One telos of this task of naming is the achievement of symbolic communion of the symbolizing self with everything other in the symbolic order, as the other is “fixed and formulated by the symbol.”16 Now, Percy holds that we can engage in this activity in bet- L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 92 4/5/2013 10:53:51 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 93 D TE H IG R PY O C ter or worse ways, but our task of knowing by naming ideally opens up the created order, inviting it into a communion between knower and known; and it is a task that can occasion wonder and joy in the namers themselves. I now turn to a second crucial aspect of the human task, occasioned by our encounter with things we either do not or cannot know. This, as I stated above, is the task of human self-placement in the symbolic world. Given our ubiquitous need for symbolically formulating our world, Percy contends that the absence of knowledge through symbolic communion may occasion helplessness or acute anxiety for the symbol-mongering self in the face of the unnameable and unknowable. And, as it so happens, Percy argues that the symbol-mongering creature himself can never be symbolically captured; she is utterly immune to any “stable symbolic transformation” or semiotic closure of being. Percy puts it this way: “It is the requirement of consciousness that everything be something and willy-nilly everything is something—with one tremendous exception! The one thing in the world which by its very nature is not susceptible of a stable symbolic transformation is myself! I, who symbolize the world in order to know it, am destined to remain forever unknown to myself.”17 To myself, the sign-maker, all significations apply, yet none of them apply. I cannot capture myself and pin myself down; I am a slippery being that is always, maddeningly, becoming. The selfhood of the symbol-mongerer amounts to an inexhaustible subjectivity that refuses the solidity and reduction that an accompanying symbol would entail. Percy famously depicts this view in Lost in the Cosmos: TE A M L IA R Semiotically, the self is literally unspeakable to itself. One cannot speak or hear a word which signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else, e.g. apple, Canada, 7-Up. The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally. You are Ralph to me and I am Walker to you, but you are not Ralph to you and I am not Walker to me. . . . For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos. You are not a sign in your world. Unlike other signifiers in your world Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 93 4/5/2013 10:53:51 AM 94 Nathan P. Carson which form more or less stable units with the perceived world-things they signify, the signifier of yourself is mobile, freed up, and operating on a sliding scale. . . . The signified of the self is loose and caroms around the Cosmos like an unguided missile.18 D TE H IG R PY O C Percy calls this unsignifiability “the symbolic predicament of the self.” Nonetheless, says Percy, such “problematic” self-unnameability is precisely that which grounds human being in the task of human becoming. It is indeed a creational given that roots the human self in relation to “other,” but only becomes “problematic” when, as Percy so aptly demonstrates in his fictional characters, a person attempts to grasp himself as an autonomous subject apart from such relationality. The symbolic and hence relational character of epistemology means that the self cannot know itself as “something” apart from relational pairing of itself with the “other.”19 This brings us to our next problem, which further illumines the nature of the self’s task. If the self is unnameable to itself, then the issue of selfplacement within one’s own symbolic world arises. Percy argues, “As soon as the self becomes self-conscious—that is, aware of its own unformulability in its world of signs—from that moment forward, it cannot escape the predicament of its placement in the world.” For Percy, placing oneself in one’s world is inescapable, yet also highly problematic: M L IA R TE A Please note that once the symbol-mongering organism has a world, he must place himself in this world. He has no choice. He cannot not do it. If he refuses to make a choice, then he will experience himself placed in this world as one who has not made a choice. He is not like a dog or a cat who, when deprived of all stimuli, goes to sleep. Unlike an organism in an environment, a man in a world has the unique capacity for being delighted with the world and himself and his place in the world, or being bored with it, anxious about it, or depressed about it. He can exploit it, celebrate it, be a stranger in it, or be at home in it.20 Why does Percy take the task of placing the unsignifiable self in a world of signs to be an unavoidable predicament? Self-unsignifiability is one part of the answer. However, the answer also involves recognizing Percy’s explicit debt to Søren Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, in which objectless anxiety (over “nothing”) is an ineradicable and God-given emotion that reveals to people their transcendent orientation and inescapable freedom and Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 94 4/5/2013 10:53:51 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 95 D TE H IG R PY O C task to become selves before God.21 Unlike Kierkegaard, however, Percy treats anxiety as a necessary consequence of our nature as self-unsignifiable symbol-mongering beings: “The being of the namer slips through the fingers of naming. If he tries to construe himself in the same mode by which he construes the rest of the world, he must necessarily construe himself as a nothing, as Sartre’s characters do. But this is not to say that I am nothing; this is only to say that I am that which I cannot name. I am rather a person, a namer and a hearer of names.”22 Here, borrowing from while altering Kierkegaard, Percy claims that self-unsignifiability and the attendant problem of self-placement in the symbolic world cause anxiety over “nothing.” Unlike object-based anxiety, says Percy, “the anxiety which follows upon symbolization is ambiguous” because it is anxiety over the “nothing” that is the unsignifiable self. As it is the native ability of the symbol-mongerer to name and place things in her world, when faced with herself as the unnameable, anxiety over nothing settles in. Since this situation is, for Percy, part of the very nature of what it means to be Homo symbolificus, we can conclude that for Percy, as for Kierkegaard, anxiety is a given and inescapable characteristic of human nature. The catastrophic fall into a self-absorbed “suck of self,” shame, despair, and myriad inauthentic symbolic identifications of the self with either God or things in the world only occurs, it would seem, as a result of the sign-user freely “turning from the concelebration of the world to a solitary absorption with self.”23 This is further verified by Percy’s arguments, in “The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry,” against those in the human sciences who treat anxiety as purely pathological, since it is biologically counterproductive. If human beings are mere organisms in an environment, as many in the human sciences presuppose, asks Percy, then why do human beings seem to be the only organism in the cosmos capable of pure self-imposed misery in a perfect environment? Given their reductively biological view of humanity, says Percy, the social sciences must treat biologically useless anxiety as pathological. However, in doing so, these sciences render themselves “unable to take account of the predicament of modern man.”24 In opposition to this, Percy affirms Erich Fromm’s view that anxiety may be an “appropriate” reaction “for the man who confronts himself and discovers—nothing.” Thus does Percy suggest that “anxiety may be quite the reverse of a symptom” which, together with our symbol-mongering L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 95 4/5/2013 10:53:51 AM 96 Nathan P. Carson D TE H IG R PY O C and self-unsignifiability, point us toward “goals beyond the biological,” a “true estate” of human being involving “a concept of human nature and what is proper to it.” Indeed, Percy claims that anxiety marks an “incurable God-directedness” or transcendence in human beings. It is not merely the consequence of living in a consumerist age of biological needs satisfaction, though this surely makes its occurrence more acute.25 Rather, Percy holds that anxiety, an ineradicable indicator of our transcendent orientation, is ultimately entailed by our symbol-mongering nature and inability to fix ourselves under a stable signifier. The perennial character of this condition is further verified by Percy’s endorsement of the existentialist insight that anxiety reveals to us our freedom and task of becoming a self. Hence Percy comments that “anxiety may be quite the reverse of a symptom. It may be the call of the self to the self, in Kierkegaard’s words: the discovery of the possibility of freedom to become a self.”26 As mentioned above, anxiety only becomes pathological (and hence a form of despair), when the self encounters its own unsignifiability in a world of signs and responds with a self-conscious, narcissistic inward collapse, grasping to make of itself, in Cartesian fashion, a reified something in the world of signified things. In The Second Coming, for example, Will Barrett runs into just such unsignifiability and task of self-placement, and his response is terribly misguided: M L IA R TE A He gazed at himself in the bathroom mirror, turned his head, touched his cheek like a man testing whether to shave. Presently his face canceled itself out. The bright-faceted forehead went dark, the deep-set eyes began to glow, the shadowed pocked cheek grew bright. The mirror, he noticed, did not reflect accurately. It missed the slight bulge of forehead, the hollowing of temple which showed in photographs. Even when he turned his head, his nose did not look snoutish as it did in a double mirror. Something stirred in him. He looked at his watch. In three minutes Kitty would slip out into the cloud. When he thought of her standing in the summerhouse, hugging herself, wrapped in fog, he smiled. She would sit on the damp bench, straddling slightly, her thighs broadening and filling the creamy linen skirt. Yes, it was in her, not in a mirror, he would find himself. Entering her, he would be answered, responded to, delineated. His life would be proved by her. She would echo him, print him out, trace his shape like radar. He could read himself in her. His heart gave a big pump. Did Kitty want what she appeared to want? Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 96 4/5/2013 10:53:51 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 97 Did she want him to fuck her in the summerhouse? Yes! And it was Kitty’s ass he wanted. Yes! 27 D TE H IG R PY O C Here, Will is looking for himself, but finds nothing. The mirror signifies some things, but it fails to pin Will down in his own symbolic world. In the mirror’s reflection, Will’s face “canceled itself out” as the mirror “missed” him and “did not reflect accurately.” He is stuck with the problem of selfplacement in his own world and, disappointed by the mirror’s inability to signify him or give him such a place, he turns excitedly to another mode of self-placement. Illicit sex with Kitty Vaught may be just what Will needs to be “delineated,” printed out, traced like radar. While this passage appears to deal with anything but anxiety, anxiety is nonetheless the chief matter at hand, especially when we consider the implicit connection here between anxiety and desire, a pairing that becomes explicit later in the novel. For Percy, nonpathological anxiety is precisely a form of desire and longing that attracts and repels as it coaxes the self out of its present state toward its telos of resting transparently under God in consciousness of itself as a self. Will Barrett, by contrast, responds to his own unsignifiability with despair. His creational “anxiety over nothing”— the anxious longing for signification that marks the “God-directedness” in Will and compels some kind of placement in the world—is transmuted into a compulsive and inordinate sexual desire. Will plans to place himself in the world by “entering” Kitty Vaught. In the forgoing discussion I have tried to show why, for Percy, the human task of self-placement in the world is unavoidable. If, as Percy supposes, anxiety indicates an “incurable God-directedness” that is mutually entailed by our symbol-mongering nature and our own unsignifiability, and if such anxiety reveals our inescapable freedom, then human beings are stuck with the predicament of placing themselves, unsignified, in a world of signs. L IA R TE A M Proper Self-Placement in the World I now want to turn to Percy’s constructive vision for what it means to be rightly placed in the world as an unsignifiable and nonpathologically anxious human person. While Percy is undeniably a comic master at depicting and diagnosing mis-placements, I will focus strictly on his positive vision and ultimately on the virtues that might be needed to sustain this vision. To Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 97 4/5/2013 10:53:51 AM 98 Nathan P. Carson D TE H IG R PY O C understand Percy’s notion of proper self-placement, we must first grasp his view about social consciousness and co-signification. Along the way, Percy’s view of proper placement in the world will come clear, amounting also to a serious critique of the individualist or hyperautonomous Cartesian and Kantian ego. These points will also figure prominently in my later discussion of Percian virtues. Earlier I examined Percy’s view of the symbol as epistemic need, which is the view that without triadic-symbolic representation, human beings neither have nor know a world. A relation to the “other” that is my symbolically ordered world is an essential element in the constitution of the symbolmaking self, and communion with that other is one of its goals. However, Percy expands this position to a far more ambitious one: the notion that representational acts are irreducibly social, and indeed that consciousness itself is irreducibly social or intersubjective in character. Put briefly, Percy claims that consciousness is not a psychological “state” of one sort or another, but rather a con scio, a “knowing with” or relation that occurs within the shared symbolic world of triadic co-signification. I am conscious that “this is a robin” not because I have conjured up a unique sign in my own private language, but because it is a robin “for you and me.” Reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning as use in a social form of life, Percy borrows the view from George H. Mead that consciousness is “a phenomenon arising from the social matrix through language,” and hence meaning as well. Thus not only Descartes but the phenomenologist and the existentialist tell only half of the story, because awareness is symbolic in character, and such symbols are irreducibly intersubjective in character: “I am not only conscious of something; I am conscious of it as being what it is for you and me.”28 Hence, Percy flatly rejects any theoretical or normative conception of the human being as an autonomous subject, or even as a form of the phenomenologist’s prereflective transcendental ego. Percy contends that the “prime reality of human consciousness” is not the Cartesian cogito (“I am conscious of this chair”), nor the Sartrean prereflective and impersonal cognito (“There is consciousness of this chair”), since both of these approaches presuppose consciousness. Rather, for Percy, the proper construal of the “originary act of consciousness is the joint affirmation that the object is there for you and me,” a co-designation by means of symbol that “is itself the constituent act of consciousness” (“This is a chair for you and me”). This, says Percy, offers a “symbolic corrective” to both Anglo-American L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 98 4/5/2013 10:53:51 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 99 D TE H IG R PY O C empiricism and existentialism in their attempts to defeat both the Cartesian cogito and the Kantian transcendental ego. “The decisive stroke against the myth of the autonomous Kantian subject,” says Percy, “is the intersubjective constitution of consciousness. There is a mutuality between the I and the Thou and the object which is in itself prime and irreducible.”29 This means, among others things, that Percy envisions human beings as irreducibly in need of one another for that which makes them distinctively human. Regarding the self that unavoidably must operate within a symbolic world, Percy says, “You—Betty, Dick—are like other items in my world—cats, dogs, and apples. But you have a unique property. You are also a co-namer, co-discoverer, co-sustainer of my world—whether you are Kafka whom I read or Betty who reads this. Without you—Franz, Betty—I would have no world.”30 To have no symbolic world is to be subhuman, or potentially human at best. For Percy, then, inasmuch as the symbol is humanly requisite for epistemology, and shared meaning is a necessary condition of consciousness, symbol-mongering persons are irreducibly dependent on others for their very status as conscious human beings. Indeed, Percy claims that “it is inconceivable that a human being raised apart from other humans should ever discover symbolization.”31 From this social view of the nature of consciousness, Percy advances further, moving toward a normative conception of human relationality and intersubjective communion. Percy grounds this conception in the empirical reality of symbolic exchange between human beings. Moving beyond his initial Peircian triad—symbol-maker, symbol, and object—Percy pairs two triadic sign-transactions into his “symbol tetrad,” bringing the “utterer” and “receiver” together. He thus forms an integrated account and normative construal of consciousness that includes Marcel’s intersubjectivity, Buber’s authentic “I-Thou” relation (and the possibility for “I-it” inauthentic relation), and Mead’s social construal of consciousness: 32 L IA R TE A M Symbol You (organism2) I (organism1) Referent Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 99 4/5/2013 10:53:51 AM 100 Nathan P. Carson D TE H IG R PY O C This “tetrad” adds new dimensions to C. S. Peirce’s triad, and it illustrates that for Percy, without a symbolic meaning that is intersubjectively shared and co-affirmed, the symbol-mongerer has no world. However, it also clarifies that the “I-Thou” interpersonal relation is not only “the very condition of being and knowing and feeling in a human way,” as Percy claims, but that this relation also includes an inescapably normative dimension. Hence, Percy says, “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.” In a reversal of Sartre’s aggressively objectifying stare, Percy claims that the “look” of the other can disturbingly expose my inauthentic modes of self-placement, for what the look “discovers” and affirms about me is my literal “unspeakableness” (unsignifiability). Rather than affirming my unauthentic self-construal as an autonomous something or an object in its world, the truly intersubjective look of the Thou exposes me “not as a something” but as “nothing.” Moreover, when both the “I” and “Thou” mutually share this affirmation of unsignifiability, the mutual gaze turns from aggressive “exposure” to “love in the communion of selves.”33 Where authentic love occurs in such intersubjective communion, anxiety over one’s own unsignifiability turns outward into a direct desire for the other, and ultimately into an anxious longing for the transcendent source of that love, of which the love itself is a sign. Toward the close of The Second Coming, for example, Will Barrett comes to realize that Allie, and the love they share, is a gift and hence “a sign of a giver.”34 Thus, Percy does not bring Will through his entire pilgrimage simply to fall in love with a girl. There is indeed a “God-directedness” at the core of Will’s anxious longing, and Allie serves as a horizontal, sacramental sign, a message in a bottle pointing him to a vertical relation to God. For Percy, the experience of intersubjective communion between Allie and Will is not a tetradic end in itself, a closed system of human intersubjectivity. Rather, it is a relation that is, like Kierkegaard’s self-as-relation, a “derived, established relation” that finds its telos only in God. Percy’s understanding of human nature and proper self-placement is further clarified by the one sustained moment in which he speculates on the nature of unfallen symbol-mongering beings. We catch glimpses of this in the novels, of course, but these glimpses are often intermingled with the intractable personal pathologies of Percy’s fictional characters. L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 100 4/5/2013 10:53:51 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 101 H IG R PY O C Percy’s clearest speculation on unfallen symbol-mongering beings takes the form of a discussion about aliens, in which he reflects on the possibility that other intelligences in the cosmos could also have broken through the dyadic barrier into self-consciousness and the symbolic world, but without falling into the inauthenticity of grasping for themselves as autonomous, solitary somethings. Percy queries, “Might they not have achieved the world of signs without succumbing to the terrible penalty? Might there not exist preternatural [prelapsarian] intelligences who do not necessarily share the shadow-life of the earth-self?”35 If so, what does this Edenic life look like? In the first of his two “Space Odyssey” short stories, toward the end of Lost in the Cosmos, Percy describes an imagined conversation between humans and another race of intelligent, sentient beings who seem to have retained their unfallen state. Claiming that their race possesses an unfallen “C1 consciousness,” the alien spokesman describes their “preternatural” state: D TE [It is] something like the consciousness of a child grown mature and sophisticated but maintaining its innocence permanently and avoiding the malformations of self-consciousness, enjoying the beauty of our planet and each other and our science and art without weariness, boredom, fear, guilt, or shame. Like what you call the Helen Keller phenomenon . . . [which is] the joy of consciousness and the discovery of the Cosmos through the mediation of symbols and the cooperation of others and the preservation of this joy against the incursions of boredom, fear, anger, despair, shame, and the love of war and death and the secret desire for the misfortune of others. TE A M L IA R To this, Percy adds that “a C1 consciousness is selfless . . . unaware of self, because it is looking out, seeing things, and symbolizing through intersubjective transactions with others.”36 With these unfallen aliens in mind, together with our analysis above, we may safely formulate Percy’s ideal conception of human nature, leading to fruitful reflection on the virtues of beings with such a nature. Although we are indeed intermediate “angel-beasts” and in some sense organisms, the chief unique human ability is triadic symbolization expressed in language, and this makes human beings fundamentally relational and capable of intersubjective tetradic communion. Normatively, then, the ideal self is one that refuses, in its anxiety, to grasp for the “nothing” of autonomous being. Rather, it bypasses the narcissistic “fall” into solitary subjectivity Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 101 4/5/2013 10:53:52 AM 102 Nathan P. Carson occasioned by its unsignifiability, and turns instead to place itself outward toward the world of signs, toward other signifying selves, and through that communion, toward the Sign-Giver. The Virtues of the Symbol-Mongering Self Intellectual Virtues TE H IG R PY O C With a robust grasp of Percy’s theory of human nature and its proper function and tasks, we may now move to a speculative discussion about the sorts of virtues that such beings might need to possess. As stated above, such reflection is a necessary propaedeutic to Percy’s politics proper. For, through it we gain an initial understanding of how Percy’s “theory of man” and its complementary virtues both sustain and provide normative standards for the individual goods, communal goods, and practices that undergird the human polis. After some extended reflection on the positive virtue-ethical prospects in Percy’s economy, I will then argue, in the final section of this chapter, that Percy’s rather central notion of “unsignifiability” undermines most (if not all) of these positive prospects. D Some virtue and vice categories appear unavoidable in Percy’s economy. First, there are the intellectual virtues associated with our native task of signifying and so knowing and discovering the world as well as the wonder, delight, and communio entium that can result from this. This is an activity in which we symbol-mongerers can engage either excellently or not, and hence requires any number of intellectual virtues such as intellectual courage, integrity, deliberative excellence, scientific knowledge, understanding, and intellectual equity. More significantly, however, the communio entium brought about by the exercise of these virtues is finally nothing less than a communio personarum, since we are irreducibly in need of one another in this task that is ultimately a co-naming of the world and placing ourselves in a life-giving, concelebratory orientation toward it. Here there appears a possibility for scientific practice, and the virtues belonging to it, that avoids the scientific self-abstraction of “angelism” Percy is so worried about. For the scientist can be rooted in a community of inquirers who together take delight in the open-handed intersection of naming and being. Central to this “angelism” corrective is Percy’s clear emphasis on the emotional dimension of the ac- L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 102 4/5/2013 10:53:52 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 103 R PY O C tivity of naming, where the inquiry itself issues not in a theory abstracted from the inquirer herself, but in one that is intimately connected with her ordinary human passions and loves, as well as those of the others in her community of inquiry. This underscores the plausible and appealing supposition that the finest excellences or virtues of human naming are excellences of the whole person. An understanding construed as a purely cognitive and perceptual grasp of a body of knowledge is, in Percy’s economy, an impoverished sort of understanding compared to one that involves appreciation, or attunement to the evaluative dimensions of what is known, where such appreciation is partly constituted by the affective and motivational dimensions characteristic of human love, joy, delight, and wonder. Virtues of Acknowledged Dependence D TE H IG A second group of virtues (and related vices) that appears categorically unavoidable in Percy’s world consists in what Alasdair MacIntyre calls the “virtues of acknowledged dependence.”37 For MacIntyre, these virtues include gratitude, humility, compassion, generosity, kindness, and gentleness. Moreover, he approaches virtues of dependence by claiming that our human dependence and fragility are best understood by considering what we have in common with nonhuman animals, often at the biological level.38 In striking contrast to this approach, Percy bases the need for virtues of acknowledged dependence on our qualitative uniqueness as human beings; these are the very traits of ours and correlative needs that cannot be reduced to the biological. Our own capacity for symbolic representation (for example), our ability to have a world, is fundamentally dependent on others at the level of consciousness and nonreducible to the biological sphere. Moreover, both the activity of naming and the ability to enjoy our symbolic order at the intersection of naming and being are fundamentally dependent on the co-naming and co-celebration of other signifiers. Ultimately, that which makes me distinctively human—my triadic ability to name the world and celebrate it—could never occur apart from the existence and naming activity of other persons. More important, perhaps, the virtues of acknowledged dependence are crucially needed for avoiding what Percy calls the great “suck of self.” This is Percy’s equivalent of the “fall” for human beings who, when becoming self-consciously aware of their own unsignifiability in a world of signs, freely fall into a narcissistic self-absorption that includes construing oneself L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 103 4/5/2013 10:53:52 AM 104 Nathan P. Carson D TE H IG R PY O C as an autonomous subject to which stable predicates may be applied. The “I-Thou” exchange of intersubjectivity is critical here for, as we have noted, Percy holds that we are fundamentally dependent on others not only for co-validating our symbolic enterprise in the world as namers and knowers, but also for the sort of communion that can expose our inauthenticity and reaffirm the truth of our unsignifiability. Both the very fact of our unsignifiability and the anxiety this produces and the fact of our fallen inauthentic modes of selfhood that deny such unsignifiability underscore the irreducible place of the other in preserving with us a proper orientation toward ourselves and the world.39 This becomes crystal clear when we consider Percy’s critique of the pagan Stoic code of honor in the aristocratic ideals of the American South. This virtue ethics—exemplified so well by Emily Cutrer of Percy’s The Moviegoer and the Compson family in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury—elevates personal, self-absorbed autonomy and self-sufficiency as the highest achievement in virtue. It is marked by a self-conscious and dignified protection of one’s own virtue, and it is this reflective and egoistic eudaimonism that motivates the concern for virtues like a sense of duty, generosity, nobility of soul, honor, and the like. Percy considered this sort of Stoicism, especially in its individualistic pop-Cartesian form in the South, as the perfect recipe for suicide, as demonstrated in the case of Quentin Compson. By contrast, Percy’s view that self-consciousness is pathological (excepting awareness of oneself as unsignifiable), consciousness is irreducibly social, and that communal intersubjectivity is central to the naming project, constitutes a counterideal to this Stoic “wintry kingdom of the self,” as he calls it.40 There is little place in Percy’s economy of virtues for such self-sufficient and self-reflective Stoicism, or indeed for an Aristotelian megalopsuchos or Nietzchean Übermensch who enjoys his self-sufficiency and benevolence while disdaining dependence on others.41 What virtues of acknowledged dependence, then, might be compatible with Percy’s vision? First, given that my only knowledge of the cosmos is mediated through triadic language, and given also that my symbolic world is essentially dependent on the co-signification of others (I have no independent and self-sufficient consciousness), it would seem that the virtue of humility finds a natural home in Percy’s account, especially the virtue of epistemic humility. Recall that at least one case of madness in Percy’s novels involves Will Barrett’s descent into his Cartesian cave by virtue of a lust for L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 104 4/5/2013 10:53:52 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 105 epistemic certainty about God’s existence. Note also the absence of this lust at the close of the novel, when it is chastened by the interrogative: “Is she [Alison Huger] a gift and therefore a sign of a giver?”42 Other-Regarding and Communal Virtues D TE H IG R PY O C Second, given Percy’s emphasis on the maladies of acute self-consciousness as well as our native orientation outward toward the world, others, and God, it would seem that other-regarding virtues are crucial in Percy’s economy, some of which are also virtues of acknowledged dependence. These virtues include, among others, gratitude, compassion, generosity, kindness, and gentleness. When the other is God, especially in light of our anxiously acknowledged unsignifiability and consequent transcendent orientation, the theological virtues of faith and hope have an ineradicable place as well. In a moment of Kierkegaardian comparison, for instance, we could say that nonpathological anxiety over the “nothing” of unsignifiable selfhood can and should drive us toward transparent faith in the God who constituted us with this restless task of becoming a self. Third, the virtues that sustain the goods internal to communities seem rather central, given Percy’s emphasis on both intersubjectivity and authentic “I-Thou” human community. Although some of these virtues aren’t directly forms of acknowledged dependence, they operate within a broader context of acknowledged dependence in that their expression in action exhibits a tacit appreciation of the value of the communities that sustain us. Here, I have in mind the virtues of collegiality, conscientiousness, appreciative regard and respect for persons, love, and the disposition to be forgiving. Expanding on this, a community-sustaining (and other-regarding) virtue that might be especially apt in light of Percy’s project is, in my view, the virtue of being disposed to be attentive to the good-making characteristics of others. The expression of this virtue in the activity of focused and just attention, expounded so ably by Iris Murdoch, is an explicit counter to what she calls the “gravity” of our self-centered egoism, whose chief characteristic is the unimaginative reification of other persons under a limited set of signifiers. Illustrating the attentive counter to this, Murdoch imagines a case in which a mother-in-law (“M”) views her daughter-in-law (“D”) as “positively rude [and] tiresomely juvenile” as well as “vulgar.” However, M is self-critical enough to look again, giving “careful and just attention” to that which confronts her, resulting in her discovery that D is “not vulgar L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 105 4/5/2013 10:53:52 AM 106 Nathan P. Carson but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous,” and so on.43 This Murdochian vision seems at least compatible with Percy’s ideal for “IThou” intersubjective communion. For the parties to a Percian community lovingly and attentively resist closure of predication, but instead seek new and ever-deepening appreciation of one another’s qualities, affirming the inexhaustibility of signifiers assignable to the being and personhood of the other. C R PY O The Problem of Virtue Predication and Possession D TE H IG Up to this point I have discussed a number of virtue categories that we humans might need in order to flourish in light of our native and natural capacity for triadic language, the task of naming and knowing productive of communion, the interdependent character of consciousness and signifying activity, and self-unsignifiability. From intellectual virtues and virtues of dependence to community-sustaining virtues and Murdochian attentiveness, Percy’s account of human uniqueness appears to offer a rich storehouse of virtues and their communal flourishing. However, there is good reason to think that, given Percy’s account, the storehouse is quite bare. Here I want to focus on a special problem arising from Percy’s unsignifiability claim which, as I have shown, is indispensably central to his account of human nature, our intersubjective communion, and our transcendent orientation. The general worry I have is this. Most traditional conceptions of virtue, from at least Aristotle on, hold that virtue is a hexis, a settled state or diachronically stable disposition of character such that it can be predicated of a whole person, rather than simply of his activities or actions in circumscribed roles or contexts.44 Now, given human unsignifiability, can virtue truly be predicated of a person? It would appear that the answer is no. However, if virtue cannot be truly predicated of an unsignifiable self, then it follows that one could never be truly praised or blamed for possession or nonpossession of a virtue. We then arrive at the very un-Percian conclusion that no matter how we place ourselves in the world, we cannot be morally or personally criticized for it. If I happen to place myself in the world like Binx Bolling, with a new MG and the thigh of a secretary to cure my malaise, then I cannot be criticized, for the predicate “inauthentic” cannot be applied to me. Now, all of this depends on what Percy really means by the unsignifi- L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 106 4/5/2013 10:53:52 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 107 ability of the self. One obvious response to the above problem is to say that the unsignifiability of selfhood applies only to the first-personal standpoint, whereas it is perfectly possible and desirable for others to predicate certain virtue or vice terms of me, and especially authenticity or its lack. This reply could be drawn from the passage cited earlier: H IG R PY O C Semiotically, the self is literally unspeakable to itself. . . . The self of the signuser can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally. You are Ralph to me and I am Walker to you, but you are not Ralph to you and I am not Walker to me. . . . For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.45 D TE Here Percy predicates of himself both the virtue of courage and the vice of cravenness, while suggesting that a host of other contradictory predicates could apply, although he is ultimately stuck with none of them. For he himself stands at the center of his own signifying universe, looking out. So, perhaps the point is that in the case of self-signification, it is necessarily the case that we cannot predicate virtue of ourselves, and this might helpfully preclude virtue-ethical egoism or fastidiously Stoic preoccupation with one’s own virtue or flourishing. Notably, though, Percy also claims that others can both assign and rule out predicates in my case. So, the solution to the worry above might be this: I cannot truly predicate virtue of myself but you, as my co-namer and communicant, can engage in such predication. However, here we encounter another problem: Percy doesn’t think co-namers ought to be doing this. For instance, elsewhere, Percy is absolutely clear that in the best cases of “I-Thou” communion, the communicants do not pin each other down with determinate and stable predicates, unlike the case of Murdochian attentiveness. Rather, as I’ve noted above, the best cases of intersubjective communion are those in which the look of the other reveals to me my unformulability and unsignifiability, and so offers a corrective for any inauthentic modes of self-placement I may have adopted whereby I identify myself with some thing in the world, like a new car. It is only a nonloving or perverted L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 107 4/5/2013 10:53:52 AM 108 Nathan P. Carson D TE H IG R PY O C Sartrean stare that objectifies and so shames the other by reducing him to a thing, like an “ink pot on the table.”46 The Second Coming provides an excellent example of this. As Alison Huger is treating Will Barrett’s wounds after his fall into her greenhouse, the narrator comments, “It was no trouble handling him until he came to and looked at her. She could do anything if nobody watched her. But the moment a pair of eyes focused on her, she was a beetle stuck on a pin, arms and legs beating the air. There was no purchase. It was an impalement and a derailment.” However, when Will does look at Allie for the first time, “Her back felt looks,” but his “looks did not dart or pierce or impale. They did not control her. They were shyer than she and gave way before her, like the light touch of a child’s hand in the dark.”47 For Percy, while the other “can be objectized and relegated to the order of the stable configuration,” this is a fundamental falsification of intersubjective community and of the being of the persons involved. Hence he says, “The look is of the order of pure intersubjectivity without the mediation of the symbol,” and that what is revealed to me in “the discovering look of the other, 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.”48 In other words, what the other discovers and affirms about me, in the best cases of intersubjective communion, is my unsignifiability. So, my unsignifiability cannot be limited merely to my own subjective self-consciousness; it is affirmed and discovered by the look of the other. The difference, perhaps, is that while I am necessarily unspeakable to myself, it is merely possible that you recognize my unsignifiability, and this is what the best cases of human communion require. Why is this required? Because, for Percy, such appreciation of unsignifiability is authentically just; it gets at the truth of the matter about human beings. The truth is not that I am a “nothing” in the hypostasized Sartrean sense, but rather, as Percy says, “I am that which I cannot name. I am rather a person, a namer and a hearer of names.”49 This last quotation raises a new response to my worry. Doesn’t Percy simply object to codifying the human person in the same way that we codify beetles on pins or ink pots? Isn’t he just pointing out the truth of the existentialist insight that the being of persons is qualitatively different than the being of things in the world? For he clearly thinks that some stable L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 108 4/5/2013 10:53:52 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 109 D TE H IG R PY O C predicates or names apply to us, none of which are clearly predicable of nonhuman things. This list includes, for example, namer, hearer of names, talker, symbol-mongerer, person, and child of God. This response is certainly on target. However, the problem is that these signifiers only isolate the sort of beings that humans are, and not the character traits or virtues that might be proper to such beings. As Percy himself notes, the realities of language, self-consciousness, and unsignifiability introduce for us “a concept of human nature and what is proper to it.”50 But the moment we begin talking about the excellences proper to such a being, where the excellences in question are stable character predicates like generous, just, or charitable, then it seems that we’ve contradicted Percy’s claim that “the one thing in the world which by its very nature is not susceptible of a stable symbolic transformation is myself!”51 The objection that the inability to give stable (or any) predication applies only to the first-personal perspective fails, for we have already noted that the truth discovered in ideal cases of second-personal “I-Thou” communion is, for Percy, the same. Appreciation of the “Thou,” if it is just, does not assign virtue or vice as a stable disposition of character to the other (“Walker is generous”), but simply appreciates the kind of being that the other is: unnameable, a namer, a person, and so on. While we could predicate virtue of others, we should not, for such predication somehow limits or falsifies the unsignifiable being of the other.52 While this seems damaging enough, the problem also moves beyond mere speech and predication to the level of ontology. If, ontologically speaking, we are truly unsignifiable beings, then there appears to be a deep contradiction between the sort of beings that we are (unsusceptible of stable signification) and what the virtues of such a being would have to be, in order to count as virtues (relatively stable dispositions of character). If I do happen to have a virtue, an excellence that is a stable disposition of my character, then it runs ontologically counter to that unsignifiability that makes me anxious, aware of my freedom, and directed toward world, others, and God. In a very real sense, then, either virtue predication or virtue possession runs counter to that which makes me most deeply human. Put simply, if virtue predication limits or falsifies, then a fortiori (in Percy’s economy) genuine virtue possession does so as well. Given unsignifiability, human beings cannot coherently possess virtues. I have not discussed every aspect of Percy’s thoughts on unsignifiabil- L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 109 4/5/2013 10:53:52 AM 110 Nathan P. Carson D TE H IG R PY O C ity. So there may be some other promising way of reconciling it with both predication and possession of virtues that are proper to beings like us, such that our ecstatic orientation toward the world, others, and God is retained. At this point, however, I don’t see how. Given the unsignifiable sort of beings that we are, it would seem that virtues either cannot or should not be predicated or possessed. However, surely we (and Percy) want to say that in the best cases of intersubjective appreciation, we can and should predicate stable virtue characteristics of others when they in fact possess them. Perhaps I am in fact generous, kind, cruel, or niggardly. A just appreciation, while not reducing my being as a person to those characteristics, should recognize that those character traits are mine and, in a real and stable sense, are truthful ontological characteristics of me as a whole person. At the end of the day, perhaps we should charitably note that Percy himself humbly called his anthropological theory “nothing more than a few trails blazed through a dark wood, most dead-ended. I should consider it worthwhile even if it established no more than that there is such a wood—for not even that much is known now—and that it is very dark indeed.”53 Percy’s trailblazing, even if not systematically coherent, remains a rich storehouse of reflection on what it is to be truly human amid the ruins of post-Cartesian modernity. M L IA R TE A In this chapter I have tried to articulate Percy’s critique of our current cultural anthropology together with his formulation of a new “theory of man” from the empirical starting point of human language. I have tried to show that Percy’s account—including the sociality of consciousness, self-unsignifiability, anxiety, and intersubjective communion—offers substantial resources for reflection on the human virtues. His conjunction of the ontological joys of scientific and philosophical inquiry, on the one hand, and radical dependence, other-regard, and community, on the other, is a refreshing and rare combination. Indeed, this pairing forms a particularly apt prescription for our time in which, all too often, the activity of discovery in the sciences and the goods of interpersonal communities are seen as opposed at worst or irrelevant to one another at best. And although I have found some reasons to worry about whether we can genuinely predicate or possess such virtues, his critique of the modern malaise, articulation of the unavoidability of selfplacement, and ability to pinpoint human teloi beyond the biological remain profoundly important achievements for our age of the lost self. Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 110 4/5/2013 10:53:52 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 111 Notes D TE H IG R PY O C 1. I must note here, as I do toward the end of this essay, that Percy himself never thought he had achieved a comprehensive anthropology. In the opening pages of Message in the Bottle, Percy’s most mature anthropological text, he writes this overly humble yet revealing disclaimer: “It [his theory of man] . . . is nothing more than a few trails blazed through a dark wood, most dead-ended. I should consider it worthwhile even if it established no more than that there is such a wood—for not even that much is known now—and that it is very dark indeed.” Walker Percy, “The Delta Factor,” in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975), 10. Hereafter I will cite this work as MB, followed by article title and page number(s). 2. Walker Percy, “Is a Theory of Man Possible?” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway, S.J. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991), 112–14. Subsequent references will be cited as SP, followed by the title of the article and page number. 3. MB, “The Delta Factor,” 9, 20. 4. SP, “Theory of Man,” 111–12. Clearly, what Percy refers to here as “the traditional Judeo-Christian teaching” is less Judeo-Christian than it is Hellenistic and Platonic. This may be due in part to Percy’s (self-admitted) oversimplification of the categories, wherein on several occasions he lumps “Greek and Judeo-Christian teachings” together to represent the same anthropological view (ibid., 111, 113). As far as I can tell, however, Percy does not hold this extreme dualism to be the proper Christian position, as ample evidence throughout his novels and other writings makes clear (cf. his sacramental realism and emphasis on the unity of the “angel-beast” wayfaring person). In the context of some of these “traditional” comments, then, Percy appears to be referring to Descartes’ “strange Janus monster,” the anthropology that has the trappings of Christianity but is responsible for “the fateful rift,” that “San Andreas Fault” between body and mind (SP, “Fateful Rift,” 271). For Percy’s more orthodox and Thomistic characterizations of “the Judeo-Christian tradition,” which affirm human possession of a soul and our place “between the beasts and angels,” see MB, “The Delta Factor,” 18, 23–24. Cf. also Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983), 208–12. Subsequent references will be cited as LC, followed by the page number. 5. Percy does not reject every aspect of each of these two theories. He comments that he scientifically “subscribes” to the “Darwinian naturalistic concept of man.” Also, however, he theologically subscribes to the Judeo-Christian view that we have a soul. So Percy does indeed view the human person as an “intermediate L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 111 4/5/2013 10:53:52 AM 112 Nathan P. Carson D TE H IG R PY O C being,” a synthesis or composite entity composed of elements like body and soul. SP, “Theory of Man,” 113–15. Cf. also SP, “Rediscovering A Canticle for Leibowitz,” 228. Cf. also Walker Percy, “An Interview with Walker Percy,” interview by John C. Carr (Georgia Review 25 [Fall 1971]), in Conversations with Walker Percy, ed. Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 63–64. Also, note Percy’s frequent fictional portrayals of the organic unity of the categories “angel” and “beast” as a return to the Edenic creational ideal, as in Love in the Ruins. In this novel the protagonist, Tom More, expresses his ideal for his psychiatric patients: “What if man could reenter paradise, so to speak, and live there as both man and spirit, whole and intact man-spirit, as solid flesh as a speckled trout, a dappled thing, yet aware of itself as a self!” Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins (New York: Dell, 1971), 35. 6. For instance, Percy says that “the source of the incoherence lies within science itself, as it is presently practiced, and the solution of the difficulty is not to be found in something extra scientific, not in the humanities or in religion, but within science itself. When I say science, I mean science in the root sense of the word, as the discovery and knowing of something which can be demonstrated and verified within a community” (SP, “Fateful Rift,” 271–72). The sciences he has in mind include psychology, psychiatry, linguistics, developmental anthropology, and sociology. Cf. SP, “Fateful Rift,” 272–73. 7. MB, “The Delta Factor,” 9. Cf. also MB, “Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism,” 279. 8. MB, “The Delta Factor,” 7; SP, “Theory of Man,” 122. 9. SP, “Theory of Man,” 118–20, 122. 10. MB, “The Message in the Bottle,” 126. Cf. also MB, “Toward a Triadic Theory of Meaning,” 161–62. Percy writes, “From the beginning and for the most of fifteen billion years of life in the Cosmos, there was only one kind of event. It was particles hitting particles, chemical reactions, energy exchanges, gravitational attractions between masses, field forces, and so on.” The same dyadic exchange also characterizes all biological organism interactions on our planet. However, even those attempts by scientists to get chimpanzees involved in linguistic exchange with each other, or B. F. Skinner’s stimulus-response experiments with rats and “symbolic communication” exercises with pigeons, are simply dyadic interactions, though more complex. LC, 85, 90, 92–94, 100. Cf. also SP, “Theory of Man,” 120–21. 11. LC, 95, 98. 12. MB, “The Delta Factor,” 29. 13. SP, “Naming and Being,” 130–31. 14. MB, “Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism,” 283, and cf. “Symbol as Need” in MB, 288–97. For instance, Percy says that a “symbol is the vehicle for the L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 112 4/5/2013 10:53:52 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 113 D TE H IG R PY O C conception of an object . . . the vehicle by which we are able to speak and perhaps to think about something.” MB, “Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism,” 280. The “perhaps” here may be important, for otherwise, Percy’s view might implausibly preclude pre-triadic symbol-making children from cognizing anything as an object through some sort of pre-linguistic mental representation. 15. MB, “Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism,” 281; SP, “Naming and Being,” 134; MB, “Symbol as Need,” 296–97. 16. For Percy, such a “fixing” or “formulating” carries an inherent risk. In its ideal employment, the symbol or the name assigned to something brings about— for the namer—“a new orientation toward the world” whereby—in Heideggerian fashion—being itself is revealed or unveiled, discovered, and celebrated. However, the symbol or name may also ossify rather than unveil freshness of being: “the selfsame symbol which discloses being may be the means by which being is concealed and lost.” In the case of the above example, if a wonderful bird is “known” and “named” as a “robin,” eventually the wonderment of that creature is emptied out; it is relegated to the domain of the commonplace: that bird is only a robin. When such “words no longer signify,” as Percy’s fictional characters so often point out, freshness of being must be recovered through renewed deployment of symbols (SP, “Naming and Being,” 134–35). 17. MB, “Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism,” 283. In his article “Is a Theory of Man Possible?” Percy puts it another way: “Semiotics would call attention to the strange position of the symbolizing self in the world which it discovers. In a word, the self can perceive, formulate, symbolize everything under the sun except itself. A self stands in the dead center of its universe, looking out. The paradox of consciousness is that the stranger we meet on the street and glance at for a second or two we see more clearly than we shall ever see ourselves.” SP, “Theory of Man,” 127. On anxiety in the face of the unnameable, see MB, “Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism,” 281. 18. LC, 106–7. Here Percy jumps directly from this unsignifiability into a description of fallen people in despair, “lost in the cosmos.” Given his other texts and comments on the reality of unsignifiability as a creational aspect of human constitution, we must not interpret this text in LC to mean that the unnameability of the self is only a fallen predicament. Certainly for Percy, unsignifiability is a huge postlapsarian problem. However, the reality that “the being of the namer slips through the fingers of naming” is a creational reality, tied as it is to the very makeup of triadic consciousness and being. And it is this unsignifiability that forever binds human beings to the “flux of becoming.” Hence human beings are, in Percy’s view, always tied to the task of human becoming. Cf. SP, “Naming and Being,” 136. 19. MB, “Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism,” 282. L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 113 4/5/2013 10:53:52 AM 114 Nathan P. Carson D TE H IG R PY O C 20. SP, “Theory of Man,” 127. Cf. LC, 109–10. 21. For a thorough treatment of the parallels between Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety and Percy’s project as a whole, see my unpublished Th.M. thesis, “At the Heart of Anthropology: Søren Kierkegaard and Walker Percy on the Nature and Shape of Creational Selfhood” (Regent College, 2007). 22. SP, “Naming and Being,” 136–37. 23. Ibid., 135; LC, 108–9. For Kierkegaard’s treatment of the “ambiguous” and yet revelatory character of “anxiety over nothing,” see Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, trans. and ed. Reidar Thomte, in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 41–45. Subsequent citations to this work will be given as CA. 24. SP, “The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry,” 251–62. In this article Percy draws from Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society (1955), in which Fromm argues that in humanity there exists a “pathology of normalcy,” such that people who otherwise are considered “normal” by typical social standards are actually pathology ridden and desperately alienated from themselves. 25. Ibid., 252, 254–57. Note also the direct connection to Kierkegaard’s comments in CA: “What effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety” (42). In addition, throughout “The Coming Crisis,” Percy treats the loss of self or the “nothing” of the self and its estrangement from its own being as a result of a society that defines human beings as isolated subjects and organisms in environments. This, of course, would prevent us from interpreting anxiety as a constituent element of human nature, since it would turn out to be a predicament brought about by pathological cultural factors. However, in the midst of his attack on the present maladies of this age, Percy also makes it clear that anxiety points us to a “transcendence” or “incurable God-directedness” that is “in man’s nature” and is no less than “the one distinguishing mark of human existence.” Thus, even though (here and elsewhere) Percy argues against the cultural factors that bring about “the loss of the creature”—much in the same way that Kierkegaard takes issue with the loss of the individual in the Hegelian Christendom of Denmark—there is plentiful evidence that Percy views the creational self as necessarily marked by anxiety in light of semiotic unsignifiability, as I have demonstrated above. SP, “The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry,” 260–61. For further evidence supporting this view, see LC, 109–11. 26. LC, 255. Elsewhere Percy speaks of anxiety as the agent of “a summons to authentic existence, to be heeded at any cost” (SP, “The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry,” 259). In his supposition that anxiety is a mark of transcendence, Percy aligns quite explicitly with the existentialists, noting how they too “view man’s plight . . . as the perennial condition of human existence, a condition necessarily entailed by man’s freedom.” In the context of these comments on anxiety, Percy further states that ex- L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 114 4/5/2013 10:53:52 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 115 D TE H IG R PY O C istentialists, theistic or atheistic, agree “that transcendence is the one distinguishing mark of human existence” that amounts to humanity’s “incurable God-directedness.” 27. Walker Percy, The Second Coming (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980), 171–72. Subsequent citations to this work will be given as SC. 28. SP, “Theory of Man,” 124; MB, “Symbol, Consciousness, and Intersubjectivity,” 266, 268, 274. Although Percy affirms Mead’s socially constructed consciousness, he argues that Mead’s thesis fails precisely at the point at which he treats human beings as dyadic creatures engaged in stimulus-response behaviors. 29. MB, “Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism,” 282–83. 30. LC, 101. To avoid confusion, we must note here that for Percy the presence of another human being is not a necessary condition for the existence of symbolic and socially constructed consciousness. Percy’s assertion that “all such triadic behavior is social in origin” (ibid., 96) is described in more detail in MB, “The Symbolic Structure of Interpersonal Process,” 200, where he states, “The second person is required as an element not merely in the genetic event of learning language but as the indispensable and enduring condition of all symbolic behavior. The very act of symbolic formulation, whether it be language, logic, art, or even thinking, is of its very nature a formulation for a someone else. Even Robinson Crusoe, writing in his journal after twenty years on the island, is nevertheless performing a throughand-through social and intersubjective act.” 31. MB, “Symbol, Consciousness, and Intersubjectivity,” 270, 272. 32. This diagram is a combination of two that Percy draws up. SP, “Is a Theory of Man Possible?” 124; MB, “The Symbolic Structure of Interpersonal Process,” 200. 33. SP, “Theory of Man,” 127; MB, “Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism,” 285. 34. SC, 360. 35. LC, 109. 36. Ibid., 208, 211. A contrast between this Edenic C1 self and the fallen C2 self is helpful here: “A C2 consciousness is a consciousness which passes through a C1 stage and then for some reason falls into the pit of self. . . . In some evolving civilizations, for reasons which we don’t entirely understand, the evolution of consciousness is attended by a disaster of some sort which occurs shortly after the Sy [symbolic] breakthrough. It has something to do with the discovery of the self and the incapacity to deal with it, the consciousness becoming self-conscious but not knowing what to do with the self, not even knowing what the self is, and so ending by being that which it is not, saying that which is not, doing that which is not, and making others what they are not. . . . A C2 consciousness . . . looks out, sees, and symbolizes but has also become self-conscious. But the self is literally inconceivable—unlike a tree or a star or you, it cannot be conceived under the auspices of a symbol—and is referentially mobile.” Ibid., 211–12. L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 115 4/5/2013 10:53:53 AM 116 Nathan P. Carson D TE H IG R PY O C 37. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999). 38. With MacIntyre, however, it is not clear why our dependence is supposed to issue from our commonality with other animals, since we appear to be far more dependent and fragile, in many ways, than they. Moreover, acknowledged animality does not always lead to acknowledged dependence, as is clear in Aristotle, whose thoroughgoing acknowledgement of animality is quite compatible with an ethics that elevates human self-sufficiency. 39. For the best description of Percy’s “fall,” see LC, 107–9. For intersubjective exposure of inauthenticity, see MB, “Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism,” 285. 40. SP, “Stoicism in the South,” 83–89. 41. The obvious legitimacy of this critique of Nietzsche is perhaps less obvious in the case of Aristotle, for whom self-sufficiency figures less prominently in ethics than it does in the Stoics, for example. Here MacIntyre helpfully notes how it is that Aristotle throws up barriers to understanding human fragility and dependency: (1) in his ethical and political inquiry he systematically refrains from consulting women, slaves, and laborers (“for whom the facts of affliction and dependence are most likely to be undeniable”); (2) he says that manliness entails not wanting others to share our grief; and (3) that the magnanimous man likes to confer benefits, as this is the mark of a superior person, but does not like to acknowledge benefits received. All of these deficits appear to stem from Aristotle’s preoccupation with self-sufficiency. MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 6. 42. SC, 360. 43. Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection,” in The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 2001), 16–17. 44. This is of course only the traditional view. In the contemporary virtue ethics literature, a number of views affirm the “modularity” of virtues, that is, that they are limited to contexts and domains with which their possessor has adequate life experience. If I possess the virtue of courage on the battlefield, I may lack that virtue when suddenly faced with the realities of becoming a father for the first time. Much of the literature pursuing this treatment of virtue must, of course, either deny or mitigate the traditional thesis of the unity of the virtues. As far as Percy is concerned, it does not ultimately matter whether we take the traditional mutual entailment view or go with a modular view of virtues. For either approach requires predicating a stable virtue of a person; it is only the scope of the predicate domain that is different. 45. LC, 106–7 (for the phrase “to itself,” emphasis is mine). 46. MB, “Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism,” 284–85. 47. SC, 233, 236. L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 116 4/5/2013 10:53:53 AM Walker Percy’s “Theory of Man” 117 D TE H IG R PY O C 48. MB, “Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism,” 286 (my emphasis on the word “discovering”). 49. SP, “Naming and Being,” 136–37. 50. SP, “The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry,” 257. 51. MB, “Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism,” 283. 52. Percy’s worry appears to be the reductive character of such a predication. Saying that “Walker Percy is generous” seems to amount, in his view, to a kind of wholesale identity claim. So perhaps Percy’s view is that for any predicate P assigned to any given person S (including the predicate “nothing”), it is not the case that P = S in the sense of exhaustively capturing S’s identity. But why does Percy worry about this? The copula is doesn’t perform this hypostasizing function in the case of anything else, so why should it in the case of persons? When I say, “That is a robin,” there is always the danger of reductively and absurdly claiming “That is only a robin.” But of course a robin is also a bird, a winged creature, a mother (in some cases), and turdus migratorius. In the case of persons, the claim that “Walker is generous” is perfectly compatible with the claim that “Walker is kind” or “Walker is witty,” and so on. We’re simply adding noncontradictory predications to the original one. 53. MB, “The Delta Factor,” 10. L IA R TE A M Lawler Walker Percy BOOK.indb 117 4/5/2013 10:53:53 AM