Cry me an eagle

General Philosophy
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Walker Percy, novelist and philosopher, was fascinated by Helen Keller’s leap into language. In his Message in a Bottle we get this:

Undoubtedly there were three elements somehow involved in the event — Helen, the water, and the word water. But how ? What was the base of the triangle? What is the nature of the mysterious event in which one perceives that this (stuff) “is” water? What is the natural phenomenon signified by the simplest yet most opaque of all symbols, the little copula “is” ?

Somehow (?) the word “water” is water, and yet a word spelled on the hand is of course not water.

Percy is fascinated by our human use of signs, but I would like to look at the simpler language of a relative.

Vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) at Amboseli, Kenya, give acoustically different alarm calls to different predators. Each alarm evokes contrasting, seemingly adaptive, responses. Animals on the ground respond to leopard alarms by running into trees, to eagle alarms by looking up, and to snake alarms by looking down.

What does the eagle cry “mean” to the vervet monkey who hears it ? Can we work in the elusive copula celebrated above by Percy ? I think so.

I propose that the warning cry is the oncoming eagle. The vervet monkeys “enlarge” the incoming eagle so that it arrives a little earlier, but not yet with its talons. The monkeys “add an aspect” to the eagle itself.

This is absurd, for “clearly” the cry is vibrating air or the modification of monkey brain tissue through its ear —or something else that isn’t a damned eagle.

Yet the offering of this evasive/reductive statement to another human is by means of marks that just as “clearly” aren’t the “meaning” of those offered marks.

Questions for others:

Do you at least understand why someone might try to understand the cry as eagle itself ?

How might you otherwise make sense of the “meaning” of this cry ?

Does a copula, some kind of identification of the sign and the object, make sense ?

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I am not sure that this can be called language, or even a sign, in the human sense.

I have written elsewhere that a sign is something that has its own temporality and can be separated from its bearer. But can animals separate the sign from the situation? Or do they act more like biological organisms automatically responding to a stimulus?

Human language can be explained through Saussure: the relation between signifier and signified, the arbitrariness of the sign, the differential structure of meaning. But does this really apply to animals?

I am inclined to think that many philosophical concepts may not be directly applicable to animals, at least not without serious modification. Philosophy is, to a large extent, thinking about thinking, while animal “thinking” — if we can call it that — may have a very different structure. We culturally construct specialized theories and then apply them in places where they may not quite belong.

Can an emotion be considered a sign? I do not mean joy as a sign that denotes joy, but whether joy itself is a sign.

The cries of animals can also be considered in an emotional context. This is close to what Heidegger calls mood or attunement. Emotion is a way of transmitting mood, but not every way of transmitting something is language. Moreover, it is not even clear that mood can be called information.

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I think the monkeys show us the ur-phenomenon. Consider this passage from Being and Time :

for primitive man, the sign coincides with that which is indicated. Not only can the sign represent this in the sense of serving as a substitute for what it indicates, but it can do so in such a way that the sign itself always is what it indicates. This remarkable coinciding does not mean, however, that the sign-Thing has already undergone a certain ‘Objectification’ — that it has been experienced as a mere Thing and misplaced into the same realm of Being of the present-at-hand as what it indicates. This ‘coinciding’ is not an identification of things which have hitherto been isolated from each other : it consists rather in the fact that the sign has not as yet become free from that of which it is a sign.
…
Such a use of signs is still absorbed completely in Being-towards what is indicated, so that a sign as such cannot detach itself at all. This coinciding is based not on a prior Objectification but on the fact that such Objectification is completely lacking. This means, however, that signs are not discovered as equipment at all-that ultimately what is ‘ready-to-hand’ within-the-world just does not have the kind of Being that belongs to equipment.

(page 113)

For us, the sign has become equipment. We can see that the cry is not the eagle. But the cry “must” be the eagle for the monkey in order to function. Likewise the little number “must” be the temperature itself for the thermometer to function — at least in its typical non-breakdown mode.

I remember years ago when US politicians were debating whether burning the US flag should be outlawed. The flag “is” the nation, for some. Proximally and for the most part, we are vervet monkeys — to overstate things.

Yes. Percy emphasizes this on page 130.

Insofar as a man is objective-minded, no sentence is significant as a piece of news. For in order to be objective-minded one must stand outside and over against the world as its knower in one mode or another. As empirical scientists themselves have noticed, one condition of the practice of the objective method of the sciences is the exclusion of oneself from the world of objects one studies.'" The absent-minded professor, the inspired poet, the Vedic mystic, is indifferent to news, sometimes even news of high relevance for him, because he is in a very real sense “out of this world.”

In summary, the hearer of news is a man who finds himself in a predicament. News is precisely that communication which has bearing on his predicament and is therefore good or bad news. The question arises as to whether news is not the same thing as a sign for an organism, a sign directing him to appropriate need-satisfactions, like the buzzer to Pavlov’s dog, or warning him of a threat, like the lion’s scent to a deer. The organism experiences needs and drives and learns to respond to those signs in its environment which indicate the presence of food, opposite sex, danger, and so on.

This may very well be a fair appraisal of the status of the news we are talking about here-providing the notions of “organism” and “sign” be allowed sufficiently broad interpretation. For the organism we speak of here is not only the physiological mechanism of the body but the encultured creature, the economic creature, and so on. The sign we speak of here is not merely the environmental element; it is the sentence, the symbolic assertion made by one man and understood by another. The scientists use the word in the broadest possible sense to include philosophers and artists as well as positive scientists-has abstracted from his own predicament in order to achieve objectivity. His objectivity is indeed nothing else than his removal from his own concrete situation. No sentence can be received by him as a piece of news, therefore, because he does not stand in the way of hearing news.

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To me this touches on the thesis that “objects are generalized signs.” Basically the world is “primordially” significant. A friendly smile means something to me, imposes on my trajectory.

We might explore picking out signs in terms of a tacit copula. The smile is arguably a “natural” manifestation of joy. But we can read the smile, as joy itself, as being identified with something else. Perhaps we take joy as the sign of wisdom, where wisdom is initially differentiated from joy.

To read joy as a sign of wisdom is ( arguably ) to identity it as “part” of wisdom.

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Odd how we so automatically treat words as names.

Look at the use: hide from danger above!

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I agree. I’d just say that we can thematize some signs for criticism and analysis only while “living in” others naively. In the concrete communication context there is a moment of passivity. I “hear through the sounds” to their situational-import. After I “suffer” this import, I can hold up the objectified or separated message as an object for analysis.

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But the cry, in my view, is not a name. It is an eagle with talons.

Is that visceral enough ?

How does the pilot experience the incoming missile warning ? With theoretical repose ? Or as an incoming missile ?

Obviously we can stop trusting the system. We can thematize the sign itself, but I suggest it primarily functions in terms of a tacit copula.

Names might play a role here. If someone tells me that “Larry is here,” I experience the hereness-of-Larry, not a “name.” The theory that comes later perhaps loses something primary.

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The number 9:15 on the clock “means” I-am-late-for-work-!

That number is my being late for work as I “live in” the clock as functioning sign. The deactivated sign is present as “only a sign.”

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Only, as you pointed out, it isn’t.

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Yes, but this is quite different from the theory of signs in the structuralist or post-structuralist sense, and it is difficult to connect it to the idea that everything is a sign. I think the eagle-call should more properly be called a signal rather than a sign, for the sake of distinction. The differences between a signal, a sign, and a symbol may be fundamental.

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Emotions do not necessarily function as meaning or sense. They simply guide or drive us. In a certain sense, they can be understood as Deleuze’s desiring-machines, or as a biological machine.

Meaning appears where there is a separation from life-processes. Consciousness is a kind of micro-death: at the moment of consciousness, it separates us from life as process, just as a sign separates itself from the situation and changes its temporality.

The object and the sign differ precisely in their mode of existence and in their mode of time. A sign is an object that has lost its time and its embodiment.

An object is something that exists here and now, in a concrete situation, as something unique. A sign, by contrast, is detached, repeatable, and exists not in the situation itself, but in the moment of reading, transmission, or reproduction.

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To this I can relate. The cry can stop being an eagle and become a mere cry. The sign is “born” as a sign when the pre-theoretical mode “dies” into a theoretical mode.

The car in the rearview mirror is the car behind me, while and because it dies as sign and merges with the indicated. Likewise the car behind me becomes an image in the rearview mirror when the sign is extruded from the de-lived situation.

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I am inclined to suppose that death, consciousness, the sign, and meaning are somehow fundamentally connected. Not in the sense that we become aware of the meaning of life because of death — that would be too banal — but in the sense that we possess consciousness at all because we are mortal, and that the essence of consciousness is a separation from the flow of life. It is not exactly a rehearsal of death, but something that has a similar nature.

Also, we are too dependent on modern thinking and on the Cartesian paradigm of controlling the body from within through consciousness. I think consciousness, in general, is a rather rare event. Most of the time, a person exists in a flow where the sign does not exist as a sign: one is rather led by the situation itself. Signs are, in this sense, rare flashes, or parts of recoded flows. True consciousness is an event — something close to what Heidegger described as anxiety.

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I think I’m with you on this. This fits to some degree with Peirce — inquiry as the smoothing of the ruffled feathers of belief — and Heidegger — the suddenly thematized failing tool jutting out from the frozen flow of the autocircumspective continuum.

This is perhaps “the” counter-natural gesture. As Feuerbach puts it, the distinction between man and nature is man’s creator god religion. Handwringing over “free will” is explicable in these terms. The soul “must” be an orb of self-created freedom like its projection of a creator who enacted the world with a willful word.

One pagan version of this is the stoics, who mortified the otherwise potentially humiliating unpredictable reactivity of flesh. With a brutal imposition of fluorescent conceptual self-presence, they aspired even to negate the death of one’s own child as genuinely significant.

But is there philosophy at all without such mutilation ? I see Heidegger, for instance, as turning this theoretical cruelty back on itself. Nietzsche likewise and also Freud, etc.

Yes, and this is largely how I read Heidegger. The basis is a dim flowing along, interrupted by flashes of thematization that extrude the sign as sign. For the most part, the world itself isn’t genuinely present, as it can be in occasional states of anxiety and wonder.

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At this point, I see a problem concerning the interpretation of violence, separation, and death. The flow of life is not necessarily something absolutely natural. This is a rather crude example, but still: immortal cancer kills both the body and itself. Life-flows as a dark vitality that perishes without remainder are, in my view, described in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

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“That’s not a proof in formal logic. It’s just paper with little ink shapes on it.”

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It is not metaphorical. The cry is the eagle. The vervet monkey doesn’t experience the cry and then infer an eagle. It experiences the eagle coming, as an incoming missile pressing back. That’s the copula.

The moment you separate the cry from the eagle, you’ve killed it as you made it a message hoping to be understood instead of a monkey meeting an eagle that won’t yield.

We keep oscillating between these two: the cry is the eagle, and yet it clearly isn’t. Both are right—the oscillation is alive. It’s what consciousness feels like when you’re genuinely in contact with something that presses back.

The aliveness that only comes through being pressed back on by what’s real.

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Yes ! That is the lived copula, the life of the sign.

Exactly. The Heidegger quote above points at the same phenomenon. The sign in its functioning is the thing itself, an extension of the thing, a strange ontological transformation of the ( lived ) world itself.

I probably agree with you here also, but this is hard for me to parse.

“The oscillation is alive.” That seems to point at our being able, especially as humans, to live the sign as the thing itself but also to thematize the sign as a separate entity.

?

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Percy, an influence here, has a brief technical paper on this issue, where we find this passage relevant to the more complex human situation.

Denotation, the act of naming, requires the two, namer and hearer. My calling this thing a chair is another way of saying that it “is” a chair for you and me. (Mead’s “conversation of gestures” between two boxers or two dogs would seem also to require the two. However, the boxer or the dog responding to his opponent’s gestures is not generically different from the polar bear responding to splitting ice.) It is inconceivable that a human being raised apart from other humans should ever discover symbolization. For there is no way I can know this “is” a chair unless you tell me so. But not only are the two a genetic requirement of symbolization — as the presence of two is a genetic requirement of fertilization — it is its enduring condition. Even Robinson Crusoe writing in his journal after twenty years alone on his island is performing a through-and-through social act. Every symbolic formulation, whether it be language, art, or even thought, requires a real or posited someone else for whom the symbol is intended as meaningful. Denotation is an exercise in intersubjectivity. The two are suddenly no longer related as organisms in a nexus of interaction but as a namer and hearer of a name, an I and a Thou, co-conceivers and co-celebrants of the object beheld under the auspices of a common symbol.
…
It is something of a fool’s errand to attempt to derive intersubjectivity by theorizing about interactions among organisms, responses to responses. Physico-causal theory is formed entirely within the intersubjective milieu and cannot of its very nature transcend it. A physical function, a = f (b), is a saying of one scientist to another, an I to a Thou, that such and such a quantifiable relation obtains among the data before them. It does not say anything about the behavior of the scientists themselves because they are practicing intersubjectivity in their uttering and under standing of their causal function. They are co-knowers and coaffirmers of the function a = f (b), but their co-knowing and coaffirming cannot itself be grasped by this particular instrument which they have devised between them. If we wish to study the knowers themselves, the I-Thou relation, we must use some other instrument, speak some other language, perhaps an ontological one rather than a physico-causal.

The “is and yet is not” is apparent when we consider “a = f(b)” as a mere mark, isolated from context, and the temporally contextual pragmatic import of “a = f(b).” The mark only matters because it is not ( only) a mark. It is not the mark considered as an extremely local phenomenon. The mark “radiates” a significance that is deeply historical as a function of the educations of the scientists and their immersion in a common lifeworld. But the “radiance” metaphor fails to capture the adjustment of human trajectory. The living sign knocks people around by changing where they are trying to go, by reconfiguring their comportment.

This is the stuff we swim in, or it swims as us.

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After being separated, the sign begins to live an independent life. Recall Baudrillard’s simulacra.

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