It is part of the stock in trade of Philosophy in a New Key—one of the unquestioned assumptions-behind-the-questions which, as Mrs. Langer says, are the most interesting thing about any philosophy — that the development of thought is linear. The history of philosophy could be written as the periodic sloughing of worn-out world views in favor of new generative ideas, of new ways of conceiving the world (she does not distinguish science and philosophy). The contrary notion, that truly generative ideas might be centripetal in action, that is, that they might progressively illuminate and specify a perennial humanist philosophy, is not allowed in court. Thus the Cartesian cogito can only be seen as one in a series of generative ideas because by the very nature of things there can be no criteriology to discriminate and measure, on the one hand, the unquestioned service of Descartes in clearing the decks of a corrupt Scholasticism, or on the other, the disastrous effects of the mind-matter split. She is committed to the uniform and irreversible action of her “generative ideas.” The worth of an idea is measured by the enthusiasm it generates; there is no good and bad to it. And so the later difficulties of Cartesianism must be ascribed to just the inevitable exhaustion of a great concept rather than the reaping of noxious tares planted in the beginning.
The naturalist orthodoxy of Philosophy in a New Key is well known, indeed repeatedly avowed (could the wheel have come full turn? — one can’t help thinking of the protestations of Christian orthodoxy by Hobbes and Locke), but what is not recognized as widely is the thorough wrecking job done on behaviorist theories of meaning.
The new key in philosophy — and a truly exciting idea it is — is the universal symbolific function of the human mind. The failure of behaviorism to give an adequate account of meaning has been pointed out before (Urban, Barfield). Charles Morris has tried to justify a purely behaviorist semiotic on a methodological basis, declaring that his purpose is simply to advance semiotic as a science, and that there can be no science where there is no observable behavior. This conclusion might be warranted if it were true, as he assumes, that the symbolific function in the human is of the same order as the signal function in the animal. The fact is, however, as Mrs. Langer so admirably sets forth, that it is radically different, and any science which assumes that the symbolic transformation is but a genetic extension of the function of signification must omit precisely that which is peculiar to human semiotic.
For once and for all, we hope, Mrs. Langer has made clear the generic difference between sign and symbol, between the subject-sign-object triad and the subject-symbol-conception-object tetrad. Signs announce their objects. Thunder announces rain. The bell announces food to Pavlov’s dog. When I say James to a dog, he looks for James; when I say James to you, you say, “What about him?”—you think about James. A symbol is the vehicle for the conception of an object and as such is a distinctively human product.
This distinction of sign function and symbol function, she admits, is in direct contravention of the old biogenetic motto: Nihil est in homine quod non prius in amoeba erat. Heretofore the symbol function had been hailed by the psychogeneticists as a useful variation of the sign function, enabling man the better to adapt to his environment — and likened, we all remember, to the telephone exchange with its trick of sidetracking and storing messages. That it does not so operate is sufficiently attested by the positivists themselves (Ogden and Richards, Korzybski, Chase, Ritchie, et al.) who somewhat anachronistically complain about man’s abuse of language and scold him for his perversities. All in all, the anthropologists and geneticists have had a bad time of it in their attempts to fit man’s manifold follies into a plausible evolutionary scheme. It is as if he had not proven worthy of a decent evolutionary past.
Although Mrs. Langer credits several sources for the discovery of the new idea — namely, physical science, logical positivism, mathematics, Freudian analysis, German idealism — it would appear from her subsequent thought that the empirical and logical disciplines have actually had very little to do with the truly generative force of the idea, that is, the transformational character of the symbol function. Such arbitrary designations, for example, as let x equal an unknown, let a equal a variable, let p equal a proposition, are indeed symbol formations in the sense that x and a and p are convenient substitute counters for unwieldy concepts and so can be used in calculations. But this simple proxy relation would seem to have little bearing on the far more seminal and revolutionary concept of symbol as vehicle for meaning, the sensory form which is in itself the medium for organizing and re-presenting meaning.
It is the idealists and notably Ernst Cassirer who must be credited with the clearest explication of the peculiar nature of the symbol; and it is Mrs. Langer’s distinction to have rescued it from the toils of idealism. After a shrewd look at the metaphysical antecedents of the insight, she saw clearly that there is no reason why it must remain as the end product of speculation on a world spirit and whatnot, that in fact it only achieved its true vitality when seen as detached: as a finding, a human activity, and the beginning rather than the end of a science. (It is curious that Cassirer in his youth foundered on the same rock as the naturalists: the difficulty of reconciling human stupidity with a monist view of reality. But instead of throwing up his hands at folly, he began to study it as a significant human activity and it was in this pursuit — in the act of boarding a streetcar, he relates — that the great idea came to him that by the symbol man conceives the world.)
Cassirer asks the question, How can a sensory content become the vehicle of meaning? and answers in effect that it cannot, unless it, the symbol, the word, the rite, the art form, itself constitutes the meaning. (And here, as much as in Hegel, or for that matter, as in naturalist anthropology, there is excluded in the assumption any criterion of truth or value except an evolutionary one — in this case the extent to which the symbol is elaborated: Thus the Mass is indeed a “higher” form than a native dog dance, but only in the sense that it is more highly developed.) According to Cassirer, the only alternative to an idealist theory of meaning is a skeptical one, and to Urban the particular skepticism of the causal sign theories. As Richards puts it: We can never expect to know what things are but only how they hang together.
How indeed can a sensible, a vocable, an odd little series of squeaks and grunts, mean anything, represent anything? Therein surely lies the mystery of language. The word buttermilk and the word William (if I know a William) mean, represent, the objects referred to in a wholly different sense than thunder means rain, and different too from the etymological intention of the word. There is an articulation of word to thing so powerful that word can still be taken for thing (i.e., the false onomatopoeia of words like fuzzy, scream, limber, slice). Is not a profound avenue of thought opened up by the realization that the sound I make can become for me the thing I see? Marcel has said that when I ask, “What is that flower?” I am not satisfied merely to be given a definition. I am only satisfied to be told, “That flower is a lupin,” even though the word lupin may convey nothing to me.
But now we find the real paradox — the first unscientific answer, which consisted in giving the name of the flower, although it had practically no rational basis, yet satisfied the demand in me which the interpretation by reduction tends on the contrary to frustrate.