Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful. That things should be able to pass from the plane of exter¬ nal pushing and pulling to that of revealing themselves to man, and thereby to themselves; and that the fruit of communication should be participation, sharing, is a wonder by the side of which transubstantiation pales. When communication occurs, all natural events are sub¬ ject to reconsideration and revision; they are re-adapted to meet the requirements of conversation, whether it be public discourse or that preliminary discourse termed thinking. Events turn into objects, things with a mean¬ ing. They may be referred to when they do not exist, and thus be operative among things distant in space and time, through vicarious presence in a new medium. Brute efficiencies and inarticulate consummations as soon as they can be spoken of are liberated from local and acci¬ dental contexts, and are eager for naturalization in any non-insulated, communicating, part of the world. Events when once they are named lead an independent and double life. In addition to their original existence, they are subject to ideal experimentation: their meanings may be infinitely combined and re-arranged in imagination, and the outcome of this inner experimentation — which is thought — may issue forth in interaction with crude or raw events. Meanings having been deflected from the rapid and roaring stream of events into a calm and tra- versible canal, rejoin the main stream, and color, temper NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 167 and compose its course. Where communication exists, things in acquiring meaning, thereby acquire represen¬ tatives, surrogates, signs and implicates, which are infi¬ nitely more amenable to management, more permanent and more accommodating, than events in their first estate.
By this fashion, qualitative immediacies cease to be dumbly rapturous, a possession that is obsessive and an incorporation that involves submergence: conditions found in sensations and passions. They become capable of survey, contemplation, and ideal or logical elaboration; when something can be said of qualities they are purveyors of instruction. Learning and teaching come into being, and there is no event which may not yield information. A directly enjoyed thing adds to itself meaning, and en¬ joyment is thereby idealized. Even the dumb pang of an ache achieves a significant existence when it can be designated and descanted upon; it ceases to be merely oppressive and becomes important; it gains importance, because it becomes representative; it has the dignity of an office.
In view of these increments and transformations, it is not surprising that meanings, under the name of forms and essences, have often been hailed as modes of Being beyond and above spatial and temporal existence, invul¬ nerable to vicissitude; nor that thought as their posses¬ sion has been treated as a non-natural spiritual energy, disjoined from all that is empirical. Yet there is a natural bridge that joins the gap between existence and essence; namely communication, language, discourse. Failure to acknowledge the presence and operation of natural interaction in the form of communication creates the gulf between existence and essence, and that gulf is factitious and gratuitous.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE The slight respect paid to larger and more pervasive kinds of empirical objects by philosophers, even by pro¬ fessed empiricists, is apparent in the fact that while they have discoursed so fluently about many topics they have discoursed little about discourse itself. Anthropologists, philologists and psychologists have said most that has been said about saying. Nevertheless it is a fact of such distinction that its occurrence changed dumb creatures — as we so significantly call them — into thinking and know¬ ing animals and created the realm of meanings. Speak¬ ing from the standpoint of anthropology Franz Boas says: “The two outer traits in which the distinction between the minds of animals and man finds expression are the exist¬ ence of organized articulate speech in man and the use of utensils of varied application.”1 It is antecedently prob¬ able that sole external marks of difference are more than external; that they have intimate connection with such intrinsic differences as religion, art and science, industry and politics. “Utensils” were discussed in the last chap¬ ter, in connection with the useful arts and knowledge, and their indispensable relation with science pointed out. But at every point appliances and application, uten¬ sils and uses, are bound up with directions, suggestions and records made possible by speech; what has been said about the role of tools is subject to a condition supplied by language, the tool of tools.
Upon the whole, professed transcendentalists have been more aware than have professed empiricists of the fact that language makes the difference between brute and man. The trouble is that they have lacked naturalistic conception of its origin and status. Logos has been cor- 1 The Mind of Primitive Man, p. 98.
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 169 rectly identified with mind; but logos and hence mind was conceived supernaturally. Logic was thereby supposed to have its basis in what is beyond human conduct and relationships, and in consequence the separation of the physical and the rational, the actual and the ideal, received its traditional formulation.
In protest against this view empirical thinkers have rarely ventured in discussion of language beyond refer¬ ence to some peculiarity of brain structure, or to some psychic peculiarity, such as tendency to “outer expres¬ sion” of “inner” states. Social interaction and institu¬ tions have been treated as products of a ready-made specific physical or mental endowment of a self-sufficing individual, wherein language acts as a mechanical go- between to convey observations and ideas that have prior and independent existence. Speech is thus regarded as a practical convenience but not of fundamental intellec¬ tual significance. It consists of “mere words,” sounds, that happen to be associated with perceptions, senti¬ ments and thoughts which are complete prior to language. Language thus, “expresses” thought as a pipe conducts water, and with even less transforming function than is exhibited when a wine-press “expresses” the juice of grapes. The office of signs in creating reflection, fore¬ sight and recollection is passed by. In consequence, the occurrence of ideas becomes a mysterious parallel addi¬ tion to physical occurrences, with no community and no bridge from one to the other.
It is safe to say that psychic events, such as are anything more than reactions of a creature susceptible to pain and diffuse comfort, have language for one of their conditions. It is altogether likely that the “ideas” which Hume found EXPERIENCE AND NATURE in constant flux whenever he looked within himself were a succession of words silently uttered. Primary to these events there was, of course, a substratum of organic psycho-physical actions. But what made the latter identifiable objects, events with a perceptible character, was their concretion in discourse. When the introspec- tionist thinks he has withdrawn into a wholly private realm of events disparate in kind from other events, made out of mental stuff, he is only turning his attention to his own soliloquy. And soliloquy is the product and reflex of converse with others; social communication not an effect of soliloquy. If we had not talked with others and they with us, we should never talk to and with ourselves. Because of converse, social give and take, various organic attitudes become an assemblage of persons engaged in con¬ verse, conferring with one another, exchanging distinc¬ tive experiences, listening to one another, over-hearing unwelcome remarks, accusing and excusing. Through speech a person dramatically identifies himself with poten¬ tial acts and deeds; he plays many roles, not in successive stages of life but in a contemporaneously enacted drama. Thus mind emerges.
It is significant of the differences between Greek and modern experience, that when their respective philoso¬ phers discovered discourse, they gave such different ac¬ counts of it. The moderns made of it a world separate from spatial and material existences, a separate and private world made of sensations, images, sentiments. The Greeks were more nearly aware that it was discourse they had discovered. But they took the structure of dis¬ course for the structure of things, instead of for the forms which things assume under the pressure and opportunity NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 171 of social cooperation and exchange. They overlooked the fact that meanings as objects of thought are entitled to be called complete and ultimate only because they are not original but are a happy outcome of a complex history. They made them primitive and independent forms of things, intrinsically regulative of processes of becoming. They took a work of social art to be nature independent of man. They overlooked the fact that the import of logical and rational essences is the consequence of social interactions, of companionship, mutual assistance, direc¬ tion and concerted action in fighting, festivity, and work. Hence they conceived of ideal meanings as the ultimate framework of events, in which a system of sub¬ stances and properties corresponded to subjects and predicates of the uttered proposition. Things conformed naturally and exactly to parts of speech, some being inherently subject-matter of nouns, proper and common; others of verbs, of which some expressed self-activity, while others designated adjectival and adverbial changes to which things are exposed on account of their own defects; some being external relations in which substances stand to one another, and subject-matter of prepositions.
The resulting theory of substances, essential properties, accidental qualities and relations, and the identification of Being, (by means of the copula “is”) with the tenses of the verb, (so that the highest Being was, is now, and ever shall be, in contrast to existence now and then, occasional, wholly past, merely just now, or possibly at some pas¬ sing time in the future) controlled the whole scheme of physics and metaphysics, which formed the philosophic tradition of Europe. It was a natural consequence of the insight that things, meanings, and words correspond.
EXPERIENCE AND NATURE The insight was perverted by the notion that the correspondence of things and meanings is prior to discourse and social intercourse. Hence, every true affirmation was an assertion of the fixed belonging to one another of two objects in nature; while every true denial was an assertion of intrinsic exclusion of one object by another. The consequence was belief in ideal essences, individually complete, and yet connected in a system of necessary subordinations and dependencies. Dialectic of their relationships, definition, classification, division in arranging essences, constituted scientific truth about the inmost constituents of nature. Thus a discovery which is the greatest single discovery of man, putting man in potential possession of liberation and of order, became the source of an artificial physics of nature, the basis of a science, philosophy and theology in which the universe was an incarnate grammatical order constructed after the model of discourse.
The modern discovery of inner experience, of a realm of purely personal events that are always at the indivi¬ dual’s command, and that are his exclusively as well as inexpensively for refuge, consolation and thrill is also a great and liberating discovery. It implies a new worth and sense of dignity in human individuality, a sense that an individual is not a mere property of nature, set in place according to a scheme independent of him, as an article is put in its place in a cabinet, but that he adds something, that he marks a contribution. It is the counterpart of what distinguishes modern science, experimental, hypo¬ thetical; a logic of discovery having therefore oppor¬ tunity for individual temperament, ingenuity, invention. It is the counterpart of modern politics, art, religion NATURE AND COMMUNICATION and industry where individuality is given room and movement, in contrast to the ancient scheme of ex¬ perience, which held individuals tightly within a given order subordinated to its structure and patterns. But here also distortion entered in. Failure to recognize that this world of inner experience is dependent upon an extension of language which is a social product and operation led to the subjectivistic, solipsistic and egotis¬ tic strain in modern thought. If the classic thinkers created a cosmos after the model of dialectic, giving ra¬ tional distinctions power to constitute and regulate, modern thinkers composed nature after the model of personal soliloquizing.
Language considered as an experienced event enables us to interpret what really happened when rational dis¬ course and logic were discovered by the ancients, and when ‘inner’ experience and its interest were discovered by moderns. Language is a natural function of human association; and its consequences react upon other events, physical and human, giving them meaning or significance. Events that are objects or significant exist in a context where they acquire new ways of operation and new prop¬ erties. Words are spoken of as coins and money. Now gold, silver, and instrumentalities of credit are first of all, prior to being money, physical things with their own im¬ mediate and final qualities. But as money they are sub¬ stitutes, representations, and surrogates, which embody relationships. As a substitute, money not merely facili¬ tates exchange of such commodities as existed prior to its use, but it revolutionizes as well production and consump¬ tion of all commodities, because it brings into being new transactions, forming new histories and affairs. Ex- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE change is not an event that can be isolated. It marks the emergence of production and consumption into a new medium and context wherein they acquire new properties.
Language is similarly not a mere agency for economiz¬ ing energy in the interaction of human beings. It is a release and amplification of energies that enter into it, conferring upon them the added quality of meaning. The quality of meaning thus introduced is extended and trans¬ ferred, actually and potentially, from sounds, gestures and marks, to all other things in nature. Natural events become messages to be enjoyed and administered, pre¬ cisely as are song, fiction, oratory, the giving of advice and instruction. Thus events come to possess characters; they are demarcated, and noted. For character is gen¬ eral and distinguished.
When events have communicable meaning, they have marks, notations, and are capable of con-notation and de-notation. They are more than mere occurrences; they have implications. Hence inference and reasoning are possible; these operations are reading the message of things, which things utter because they are involved in human associations. When Aristotle drew a distinction between sensible things that are more noted — known — to us and rational things that are more noted — known — in themselves, he was actually drawing a distinction between things that operate in a local, restricted universe of discourse, and things whose marks are such that they readily enter into indefinitely extensive and varied discourse.
The interaction of human beings, namely, association, is not different in origin from other modes of interaction. There is a peculiar absurdity in the question of how indi- NATURE AND COMMUNICATION viduals become social, if the question is taken literally. Human beings illustrate the same traits of both immediate uniqueness and connection, relationship, as do other things. No more in their case than in that of atoms and physical masses is immediacy the whole of existence and therefore an obstacle to being acted upon by and effect¬ ing other things. Everything that exists in as far as it is known and knowable is in interaction with other things. It is associated, as well as solitary, single. The catching up of human individuals into association is thus no new and unprecedented fact; it is a manifestation of a com¬ monplace of existence. Significance resides not in the bare fact of association, therefore, but in the consequences that flow from the distinctive patterns of human associa¬ tion. There is, again, nothing new or unprecedented in the fact that assemblage of things confers upon the assembly and its constituents, new properties by means of unlocking energies hitherto pent in. The significant consideration is that assemblage of organic human beings transforms sequence and coexistence into participation.
Gestures and cries are not primarily expressive and communicative. They are modes of organic behavior as much as are locomotion, seizing and crunching. Lan¬ guage, signs and significance, come into existence not by intent and mind but by over-flow, by-products, in ges¬ tures and sound. The story of language is the story of the use made of these occurrences; a use that is eventual, as well as eventful. Those rival accounts of the origin of language that go by the nicknames of bow-wow, pooh- pooh, and ding-dong theories are not in fact theories of the origin of language. They are accounts, of some plausibility, of how and why certain sounds rather than EXPERIENCE AND NATURE others were selected to signify objects, acts and situations. If the mere existence of sounds of these kinds constituted language, lower animals might well converse more subtly and fluently than man. But they became language only when used within a context of mutual assistance and direction. The latter are alone of prime importance in considering the transformation of organic gestures and cries into names, things with significance, or the origin of language.
Observable facts of animal experience furnish us with our starting point. “Animals respond to certain stimuli...by the contraction of certain muscles whose functioning is of no direct consequence to the animal itself, but affects other animals by stimulating them to act...Let us call this class the signaling reflexes. A few, but very diversified examples of the signaling reflexes, are the lighting of a fire-fly, the squeezing out of a black liquid from the ink bladder of a cuttle-fish, the crow¬ ing of a rooster...the spreading of its tail by a peacock. These reflex activities affect other animals by stimulating them. If no other animals are present, or these other animals fail to respond by their own reflexes, the former reflex actions are completely wasted.”2 Sub-human animals thus behave in ways which have no direct consequences of utility to the behaving animal, but which call out certain characteristic responses, sexual, protective, food-finding (as with the cluck of a hen to her chicks), in other animals. In some cases, the act evoked 2 Max Meyer, The Psychology Of The Other One, 1922, p. 195; a statement of behavioristic psychology that has hardly received the atten- tion it intrinsically deserves.
NATURE AND COMMUNICATION in other animals has in turn an important consequence for the first agent. A sexual act or a combined protective act against danger is furthered. In other cases, the con¬ sequences turn out useful to the species, to a numerically indeterminate group including individuals not yet born. Signaling acts evidently form the basic material of lan¬ guage. Similar activities occur without intent in man; thus a babe’s scream attracts the attention of an adult and evokes a response useful to the infant, although the cry itself is an organic overflow having no intent. So too a man’s posture and facial changes may indicate to another things which the man himself would like to con¬ ceal, so that he '‘gives himself away.” “Expression,” or signs, communication of meaning, exists in such cases for the observer, not for the agent.
While signaling acts are a material condition of language they are not language nor yet are they its sufficient condition. Only from an external standpoint, is the original action even a signal; the response of other animals to it is not to a sign, but, by some preformed mechanism, to a direct stimulus. By habit, by conditioned reflex, hens run to the farmer when he makes a clucking noise, or when they hear the rattle of grain in a pan. When the farmer raises his arms to throw the grain they scatter and fly, to return only when the movement ceases. They act as if alarmed; his movement is thus not a sign of food; it is a stimulus that evokes flight. But a human infant learns to discount such movements; to become interested in them as events preparatory to a desired consummation; he learns to treat them as signs of an ulterior event so that his response is to their meaning. He treats them as means to consequences. The hen’s activity is ego-cen- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE trie; that of the human being is participative. The latter puts himself at the standpoint of a situation in which two parties share. This is the essential peculiarity of lan¬ guage, or signs.
A requests B to bring him something, to which A points, say a flower. There is an original mechanism by which B may react to A’s movement in pointing. But natively such a reaction is to the movement, not to the pointing, not to the object pointed out. But B learns that the movement is a pointing; he responds to it not in itself, but as an index of something else. His response is trans¬ ferred from A’s direct movement to the object to which A points. Thus he does not- merely execute the natural acts of looking or grasping which the movement might instigate on its own account. The motion of A attracts his gaze to the thing pointed to; then, instead of just transferring his response from A’s movement to the native reaction he might make to the thing as stimulus, he responds in a way which is a function of A’s relationship, actual and potential, to the thing. The characteristic thing about B’s understanding of.4’s movement and sounds is that he responds to the thing from the stand¬ point of A. He perceives the thing as it may function in A’ s experience, instead of just ego-centrically. Similarly, A in making the request conceives the thing not only in its direct relationship to himself, but as a thing capable of being grasped and handled by B. He sees the thing as it may function in B’s experience. Such is the essence and import of communication, signs and meaning. Some¬ thing is literally made common in at least two different centres of behavior. To understand is to anticipate together, it is to make a cross-reference which, when acted NATURE AND COMMUNICATION 179 upon, brings about a partaking in a common, inclusive, undertaking.
Stated in greater detail; B upon hearing A, makes a preparatory reaction of his eyes, hands and legs in view of the consummatory act of A’s possession; he engages in the act of grasping, carrying and tendering the flower to A. At the same time, A makes a preparatory response to B’s consummatory act, that of carrying and proffering the flower. Thus neither the sounds uttered by A, his gesture of pointing, nor the sight of the thing pointed to, is the occasion and stimulus of B’s act; the stimulus is B’s anticipatory share in the consummation of a trans¬ action in which both participate. (The heart of language is not “expression” of something antecedent, much less expression of antecedent thought. It is communication; the establishment of cooperation in an activity in which there are partners, and in which the activity of each is modified and regulated by partnership. To fail to under¬ stand is to fail to come into agreement in action; to mis¬ understand is to set up action at cross purposes. Take speech as behavioristically as you will, including the elimi¬ nation of all private mental states, and it remains true that it is markedly distinguished from the signaling acts of animals. Meaning is not indeed a psychic existence; it is primarily a property of behavior, and secondarily a property of objects. But the behavior of which it is a quality is a distinctive behavior; cooperative, in that response to another’s act involves contemporaneous response to a thing as entering into the other’s behavior, and this upon both sides. It is difficult to state the exact physiological mechanism which is involved. But about the fact there is no doubt. It constitutes the in- EXPERIENCE AND NATURE telligibility of acts and things. Possession of the capacity to engage in such activity is intelligence. Intelligence and meaning are natural consequences of the peculiar form which interaction sometimes assumes in the case of human beings.