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A review by method3000
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy
2.0
The middle section on semiotics, with its "modes of reentry", is interesting. The rest of the book is entertaining if you can look past how dated everything is, and how weird his frame of mind is.
The general idea of the book is that everyone in modern life is in some way fleeing the self, which operates as a nullity. This claim isn't really supported or investigated; it's the basic premise of the whole book and is supposed to be self-evident from the series of "thought experiments" that he offers, and it's also supposed to follow from the very nature of semiotics, which involves the "ternary" relationship between a percipient, a signifier (word sound) and a signified. Anyway, as a proposition it's not that bad; he means something like, people can't perceive their own "selves" because consciousness looks out on the world of signifieds but can't reduce itself to a signified, so people chase after things in the world to construct an ersatz and vanishing self out of, ultimately making themselves miserable and/or crazy. Percy seems to be particularly interested in the idea that this state of affairs results in both an explosion of sexual license and of violent criminality.
He never fully comes out and says it but the implication is that modern man is afflicted because of the death of god, with all of his attempts at self-definition failing because he is incomplete, ie. in need of redemption. Percy seems to want to advocate for a kind of postmodern Catholicism where adherents believe in the big bang, evolution, and the irreducibility of human consciousness, and otherwise enjoy a serene mysticism which is opposed to overweening "scientism". The way he does this is through a series of cryptic and patronizing set pieces, culminating in a science fiction story wherein the solution for rebuilding the human race is... to reinvent Catholicism. Also this sketch of a short story starts getting aggressively racist out of nowhere...
All in all a strange book. The core idea is worth thinking about though, and there are some provocative passages here and there, strewn between all the references to Elvis and Johnny Carson and Burt Reynolds.
The general idea of the book is that everyone in modern life is in some way fleeing the self, which operates as a nullity. This claim isn't really supported or investigated; it's the basic premise of the whole book and is supposed to be self-evident from the series of "thought experiments" that he offers, and it's also supposed to follow from the very nature of semiotics, which involves the "ternary" relationship between a percipient, a signifier (word sound) and a signified. Anyway, as a proposition it's not that bad; he means something like, people can't perceive their own "selves" because consciousness looks out on the world of signifieds but can't reduce itself to a signified, so people chase after things in the world to construct an ersatz and vanishing self out of, ultimately making themselves miserable and/or crazy. Percy seems to be particularly interested in the idea that this state of affairs results in both an explosion of sexual license and of violent criminality.
He never fully comes out and says it but the implication is that modern man is afflicted because of the death of god, with all of his attempts at self-definition failing because he is incomplete, ie. in need of redemption. Percy seems to want to advocate for a kind of postmodern Catholicism where adherents believe in the big bang, evolution, and the irreducibility of human consciousness, and otherwise enjoy a serene mysticism which is opposed to overweening "scientism". The way he does this is through a series of cryptic and patronizing set pieces, culminating in a science fiction story wherein the solution for rebuilding the human race is... to reinvent Catholicism. Also this sketch of a short story starts getting aggressively racist out of nowhere...
All in all a strange book. The core idea is worth thinking about though, and there are some provocative passages here and there, strewn between all the references to Elvis and Johnny Carson and Burt Reynolds.