Percy, Walker. "The Message in the Bottle" 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: Picador.
Percy, probably, refers to this essay in his writings more than any other essay he wrote which indicates it was important to him. It is one of the most important essays he wrote. In it, he divides information into two categories: knowledge and news. He also portrays the nature of human beings as castaways on an island.
He begins the essay with quotes from two different authors: Kierkegaard and Aquinas.
"The act of faith consists essentially in knowledge and there we find its formal or specific perfection.--Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate"
Now, the quote from KIerkegaard's Philosophical Fragments:
"Faith is not a form of knowledge; for all knowledge is either knowledge of the eternal, excluding the temporal and the historical as indifferent, or is it pure knowledge. No knowledge can have for its object the absurdity that the eternal is the historical."
Aquinas seems to be saying faith is knowledge and Kierkegaard that it is not. Do they contradict each other? Why does Percy includes these two quotes? Do they have something to do with The Message in the Bottle? What is Percy's relationship to Aquinas? Kierkegaard?
Percy begins the essay by asking us to imagine a man being a castaway on an island. Percy says that he is a "special sort of castaway" (119) because he has amnesia, and he does not know who he is or where he came from. He only knows that he was "cast up onto the beach" (119). The Island turns out to be a good place to live and it is inhabited with other people. All in all, it is a "pleasant" place to live. He finds out that the island is blesses with a "remarkable culture with highly developed social institutions, a good university, first-class science, a flourishing industry and art" (119). The castaway is welcomed by the people of the island. The castaway quickly assimilates to the island: he "gets a job, builds a house, takes a wife, raises a family, goes to night school, and enjoys the local arts of cinema, music, and literature" (119). He becomes a contributing "member of the community" (119).
The castaway becomes "well educated and curious about the world, forms the habit of taking a walk on the beach early in the morning" (119-20). On his walks, he notices different bottles washed up on the shore. The bottles are "tightly corked and each one contains a single piece of paper with a single sentence written on it" (120).
The messages are different "in form and subject matter" (120). He notices that "some of the messages convey important information" (120). Being an educated man, he wants to evaluates the messages "properly and so take advantage of the information they convey" (120). The bottles that washes up on the shore are in the "thousands." The Islanders has joined in his quest to evaluate these messages. They are confronted with two questions: Where did these bottles originate? Second, How can we categorize or divide the messages? Which are important and which are not? Some of the messages make sense; others do not.
Here are some of the messages:
Lead melts at 330 degrees.
2+2=4.
Chicago, a city, is on Lake Michigan.
Chicago is on the Hudson River or Chicago is not on the Hudson River.
At 2 p.m., January 4, 1902, at the residence of Manuel Gomez in Matanzas, Cuba, a leaf fell from the banyan tree.
The British are coming.
The market for eggs in bora bora [a neighboring island] is very good.
If water John Brick is.
Jane will arrive tomorrow.
The pressure of a gas is a function of heat and volume.
Acute myelogenous leukemia may be cured by parenteral administration of metallic beryllium.
IN 1943 the Russians murdered 10,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest.
A war party is approaching from Bora Bora.
Is it possible to predict a supernova in the constelleation Ophiuchus next month by using the following technique--
The Atman (Self) is the Brahman.
The dream symbol, house with a balcony, usually stands for a woman.
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.
Truth is beauty.
Being comprises essence and existence. (120-21)
As the castaway looks at these messages, he divides them into two different groups. Certain sentences "appear to state empirical facts which can only be arrived by observation" (121). Other sentences "refer to a state of affairs implicit in the very nature of reality" (121). Percy states that these are "synthetic" and "analytic" sentences. He does see other ways of diving them. Some of the senses could be divided into those making sense, and those that do not. He thinks it is possible to divide the sentences in a completely different way. He thinks they could be divided into "knowledge" statements and "news" statements.
He states that some of the sentences "which are the result of a very special kind of human activity, an activity which the castaway, an ordinary fellow, attributes alike to scientists, scholars, poets, and philosophers" (122). Though these thinkers are different, they "are alike in their withdrawal from the ordinary affairs of the island, the trading, farming, manufacturing, playing, gossiping, loving--in order to discover underlying constancies amid the flux of phenomena, in order to make precise inductions and deductions, in order to arrange words or sounds or colors to express universal human experience" (122). Basically, the leaders of the development of the sciences and arts in human culture. This group is pursuing "science" in the broadest sense of knowing, the sense of the German word Wissenschaft" (122). This is different from modern scientism which would include only a small group as pursuing knowledge, would accept only certain types on knowing as true knowledge. The islanders would accept the sentences of this large group as one big group.
The second group of sentences would be what Percy calls "new." Percy says, "In the second group the islander would place those sentences which are significant precisely in so far as the reader is caught up in the affairs and in the life of the island and in so far as he has not withdrawn into the laboratory or seminar room" (123). Percy is saying news would be particularly relevant to the day-to-day situation of the islander. Percy gives two examples: "A hostile war party is approaching. The British are coming [to Concord]" (123). If one asked what might be the problem with the first group of sentences, the islanders might reply that "it unconsciously assumes that this very special posture of 'science' (including poetry, psychoanalysis, philosophy, etc.) is the only attitude that yields significant sentences" (123). To the castaway, it seems that you "cannot abstract from the concrete situation in which one finds himself" (124). Percy seems to be criticizing the excessive objective posture of science. The idea that we separate ourselves completely from the data that we are analyzing. Percy asserts that we need to be able to consider the situation of the hearer when he hears the news, and distinguish between the important piece of news and the insignificant news. Percy does not think that we have to "throw away the hard-won objectivity of the scientist. We have only to take a step further back so that we may see objectively not only the sentences but the positive scientist who is examining them. After all, the objective picture of the scientist is in the world and can be studied like anything else in the world" (125).
In summarizing so far, Percy says that we have two types of sentences in the bottles, two "kinds" of ways of reading them, two "kinds" of ways to verify the messages to "act upon them," and two "kinds" of "responses" to the messages in the bottle.
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