Can You See the Real Me?

We're officially sidetracked into Walker Percy's semiotic musings about the mysterious coupler that unites word and thing. He's definitely on to something. I'm not sure if he himself ever grasped the full implications, so that's down to us. After all, he was only a distinguished novelist, not an impertinent blogger.

This post will probably be somewhat scattershot, since I'm working from the book Conversations with Walker Percy, which covers the same ground in different ways from interview to interview. 

One of the points that jumped out to me was his assertion that man is an irreducibly triadic animal who tries to describe everything -- including himself -- in dyadic terms. And to the extent that we do this, the result will be what the modern world calls "alienation" -- or what in a later book he would characterize as being Lost in the Cosmos.

I agree 100%, even if I'm not entirely sure what I am agreeing with. Rather, I just know it. Here are some other passages with which I agree:

Q: An anemone on a tidal flat is perfectly at home as far as I can tell.

A: [The anemone] is himself neither more nor less, whereas a man can either be himself or not himself -- he doesn't necessarily coincide with himself. So you have this tremendous gap between accounting for animals..., which can be done by fairly adequate mechanistic models, and accounting for man, who can erect theories and utter sentences about these very creatures.

Now, the conduct of science would be inconceivable without this gap, so it's another one of those things it ignores. Which is fine, so long as we don't conflate this dyadic methodology with a properly triadic ontology.

Another subtle point is that "it is a burden of science to establish continuities, not discontinuities." As Rosen might say, science reduces evident discontinuities to manageable continuities, doing inevitable damage to the very nature of anything more complex than matter-in-motion. 

We've written before -- including in the book -- that the (vertical) hierarchical continuity of the cosmos cannot possibly be explained from the bottom up, rather, only from the top down. 

There is, of course, both continuity and discontinuity -- for they are complementary -- but as with all Primordial Complementarities, one must be ontologically prior, in this case continuity, because -- obviously -- no amount of discontinuity, no matter how fine, results in continuity. Which is why good vinyl sounds better than digital, even though the latter is more convenient.

Likewise, now that I think about it, thinking dyadically about reality is also more convenient. But applied to Life, Person, Consciousness, Spirit, God, and other tricksy wickets, it is ultimately self-beclowning, as we shall see. I AM is not your clown.

Scientists never even address themselves to the gap, let alone try to explain it.

And with good reason, for this is not the role of distinguished scientists, rather, for impertinent bloggers.

I think it's a kind of misplaced religion. The "biological continuum" is almost a sacred dogma.... [T]he qualitative gap between non-speaking and the speaking animal is offensive to a person who posits continuity as the sine qua non of science. But supposing there is a qualitative gap -- what are you going to do about it? 

Me? Keep writing, of course. As we have said on Many Occasions, there is literally an infinite gap between matter and life and between life and self-consciousness: man in particular, in case you haven't gnosissed, is discontinuous, which in turn is a mystery -- the infinitely intelligible kind.

Why? Because the intellect is conformed to the Infinite, that's why. Let's bring in Thomas for some backup: "Our intellect in understanding is extended to infinity." And "This ordering of the intellect to infinity would be vain and senseless if there were no infinite object of knowledge."

Correct: it could be vain and senseless, but we're betting on... the antonyms of vain and senseless, which is to say, productive and sensible. 

As to the Gap, Thomas affirms that "Created things are midway [i.e., in the Gap] between God's knowledge and our knowledge." Thus the Gap abides unless or until we become God. Or unless God becomes man, and has some skin in the game.

Oh, but it is a game, Dude -- a kind of language game, or better, a game of metalanguage. 

I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less.

Say,

Q: What kind of Catholic are you?

A: Bad.

But

Q: How is such a belief possible in this day and age?

A: What else is there?

Reminds me of when Stephen Dedalus is asked why he doesn't abandon Catholicism:

What kind of liberation would that be, to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

I also can't help thinking of Preacher Harry Powell and The religion the Almighty and me works out betwixt us.

As for Percy,

The only answer I can give is that I asked for it, in fact demanded it. I took it as an intolerable state of affairs to have found myself in this life and this age, which is a disaster by any calculation, without demanding a gift commensurate with the offense. So I demanded it.

We've said before that we are -- no offense -- owed the courtesy of an explanation. Perhaps this sounds impertinent -- again -- but God does not give us the gift of intellect only to leave us lost in the cosmos. Rather, he wants us to find him, you might even say desperately. 

We've only just scratched the surface of the Gap. We will continue the discontinuity in the next installment.