Symbol and existence will prove fascinating to Walker Percy scholars and fans who wish to decipher Percy's authentic philosophical stance. Percy, an existentialist Catholic at his core, was also a scientist seeking an objective paradigm to portray his views. Symbol and existence demonstrates that Percy was quite methodical and logical in his thought and provides an entirely new perspective on his scholarship. Much of this book is unique and has never been published before; however, some (...) sections were revised and published as isolated journal articles or book chapters, never presented as the unified whole that Percy intended. The orderly unity of Percy's work has not previously been accessible to scholars and fans. Symbol and existences systematic presentation and its new material offer fresh insight and a more accurate view of Percy's ideas. His early philosophical writings were often revised and significantly modified by outside editorial intent to conform to prevailing intellectual currents of the time. Readers of some published articles with corresponding passages in Symbol and Existence will be surprised to discover major changes in meaning from Percy's initial writing due to editorial intrusion and loss of context upon their removal from Symbol and existence. As the only known systematic representation of Percy's general working theory, Symbol and existence gives an important framework for his diverse intellectual background--philosophy and psychology, medicine and anthropology, semiotic and zoology--creating a coherent view of Percy's "radical anthropology. (shrink)

This memorable essay offers in lay language a profound criticism of the limitations of modern thought as based on Descartes, Darwin, and Freud. It highlights the decissive role of Peirce's approach to language and human activity in order to close the modern rift between matter and mind, between biology and grammar.

Throughout his literary career Walker Percy read and studied the philosophical thought of Charles Sanders Peirce in an attempt to re-present in language the world as Percy knew it. Beginning in 1984 and ending in 1990, the year of his death, Percy corresponded with Kenneth Laine Ketner about the "semiotic" of Peirce. Their letters - honest, instructive, and often filled with down-home humor - record an epistolary friendship of two men both passionately interested in Peirce's theory (...) of signs. This volume of letters provides a rich philosophical perspective for better understanding the fiction and nonfiction of Walker Percy. (shrink)

Suicidal Thoughts is a compilation of some of the most moving and insightful writing accomplished on the topic of suicide. It presents the thoughts and experiences of fifteen writers who have contemplated suicide-some on a professional level, others on a personal level, and a few, both personally and professionally. Through this collection, the reader is able to bear witness to the struggle between life and death and to the devastating aftermath of suicide. Suicidal Thoughts provides readers with a better understanding (...) of the reasons why some individuals give serious consideration to killing themselves. (shrink)

In his theoretical essays on language, Walker Percy criticizes contemporary linguistics for overlooking the deep, existential impact that language acquisition has on human life. This acquisition, for Percy, radically transforms the human being’s mode of existence. With the acquisition of language, the world and our role in it change. The meaning of the world comes to be revealed through the ongoing life of human discourse: through books, conversations, philosophical inquiry, and so on. This chapter clarifies and elaborates (...) on Percy’s critique by showing how it arises as a central insight in twentieth-century German phenomenology, particularly in the later work of Martin Heidegger and in the hermeneutic phenomenology of Heidegger’s student, Hans-Georg Gadamer. (shrink)

In this book, Justin N. Bonanno builds off of the recent philosophical work on Walker Percy’s writings. While it is valuable to appreciate Percy as a novelist, Bonanno approaches Percy from the perspective of Continental philosophy and the rhetorical tradition. Unpacking the works of several key authors that influenced Percy (e.g. Sartre and Heidegger), Bonanno offers a fresh philosophical account of Percy's ideas concerning the relationship between symbols and existence. In particular, he focuses on (...) how Percy’s ideas emerge from the thought of Ernst Cassirer, Susanne Langer, Jacques Maritain, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, Martin Heidegger, Viktor Shklovsky, Søren Kierkegaard, and St. Thomas Aquinas. (shrink)

The American novelist Walker Percy (1916-90) considered himself a "thief of Peirce", because he found in the views of C.S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, an alternative approach to prevailing reductionist theories in order to understand what we human beings are and what the peculiar nature of our linguistic activity is. -/- This paper describes, quoting widely from Percy, how abduction is the spontaneous activity of our reason by which we couple meanings and experience in our linguistic (...) expressions. This coupling of personal creativity and cultural tradition makes it possible to bridge the gaps between persons and cultures. (shrink)

Montgomery makes a retrospective journey with Walker Percy, as Percy comes to an accommodation with the modern world in company with other companionable journeymen. Percy himself enjoyed a large company of pilgrims who prove amenable to his vision of the human condition - in Percy's words, man is "in a predicament and on the move in a real world of real things, a world which is a sacrament and a mystery," words celebratively spoken of as (...) "the holiness of the ordinary," as opposed to what he called the "losangelization" of the popular spirit, a spirit which increasingly takes refuge in enclaves of "selves" in the relapse into tribalism celebrated as our "New Age." Percy's long journey from and then back to the South, his acceptance of what his Uncle Will exhibited as "Southern stoicism," had a reorientation that proved to be a "fortunate fall" very personal to him, occurring in a world far removed from the Southern Delta culture. He begins to read and read: Gabriel Marcel, Kierkegaard, St. Thomas Aquinas, Camus and Sartre and Eliot and others. And he begins distinguishing between valid science and scientism as knowing of reality, recognized as limited by the finiteness of the intellectual soul. Percy left the field of medicine to doctor to man in a different way. When Percy, recuperating with TB, understands the "holiness of the ordinary," he discovers that this world "is a sacrament," and so requires of him through his gifts a deportment to existence itself in celebration of that sacredness. Thus Percy speaks a manner, not presuming himself the agent of grace through presumption of autonomous intellect, amused and as well regretful that so many about him appear lost in the cosmos. He puts that point to a sympathetic audience, down in Louisiana not far from his comforting "place" in Covington: "Catholic or Protestant, the believing writer is usually unhappy. He feels like Lancelot in search of the Holy Grail who finds himself at the end of his quest at a Tupperware party." But not really unhappy - rather sympathetically regretful that his usual hosts at that party (his possible audience) have lost recognition of the holiness of things that requires the pilgrim intellectual soul a deportment to things in "a sacrament" of consent, before the "mystery" larger than the pretenses of scientism. The world, that is, is not a desert to be plundered to self-comfort as justified by a positivistic apotheosis of the "Self" as a sovereign autonomy desert-bound. The "making" of sacramental piety, whether as novelist or Delta planter, requires the stewardship of love to things in themselves. (shrink)

Collection of essays on the connection between medicine and literature and how novelists and physicians are both, in a sense, diagnosticians; the book focuses, in particular, on Walker Percy, a writer who had trained as a pathologist.

This article introduces the work of philosopher-novelist Walker Percy to the Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science readership. After some biographical and contextual preliminaries, I suggest that the conceptual collecting feature to Percy's work is his critique of abstractionism manifest in a tripartite congruence of Cartesianism, derivatively misapplied science, and social atomism.

Over the past twenty odd years, North America has witnessed the complete medicalization of unhappiness by transforming it into depression, which has been conceived in psychologically reductionistic terms. Many are unhappy with this state of affairs, including the contemporary American novelists, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, and Jonathan Franzen. This paper explores why they are unhappy with this trend and why they reject psychological reductionism in favor of a vision of life that is more thoroughly moral in its outlook.

This study reexamines the existentialist nature of Walker Percy's fiction, arguing that his debt to Kierkegaard is more substantial than previously acknowledged. Others have noted his employ of Kierkegaardian stages, terminology, and artistic indirection, but they haven't revealed the extent to which his sources lie in Kierkegaard and the action of his novels occurs within the context of a "Kierkegaardian narrative." Prior critics have overstated both the role his protagonist's "searches" and the assistance of others play in their (...) movement to faith. This study rejects the Marcelian reading of Percy's endings and demonstrates that his characters follow a Kierkegaardian path toward faith; they do not move toward faith via the assistance of an other, but subjectively, by despairing of their efforts to find ontological answers in immanent sources and choosing, in the midst of that despair, a paradoxical faith. ;Chapter one pairs Kierkegaardian philosophy with views espoused by Percy in his nonfiction and interviews in order to establish their intellectual affinities: each uses art as a means of responding to the objectifying forces of rationalism and posits a movement toward self which necessitates the embrace of faith after despairing of an aesthetic existence. The second and third chapters provide extended Kierkegaardian readings of The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman, tracing their sources to his philosophy and demonstrating how each can be read within a Kierkegaardian framework and as a tacit either/or. Percy's protagonists either "come to themselves" by despairing of their own searches and realizing a subjective faith , or they remain in Kierkegaard's aesthetic stage, separated from faith, and thus lost to themselves . Both readings of Percy's novels reveal the ways in which he continually adopts Kierkegaardian categories, images, and details as he works within the larger framework of the paradoxical movement toward faith. The study concludes by emphasizing the Christian character of the narratives of Kierkegaard and Percy and arguing that a strict Kierkegaardian reading of Percy's fiction is more illuminating than the use of multiple existentialist perspectives. (shrink)

Percy has been studied under several headings: Catholic, Southerner, Existentialist. Two such aspects, however, have been neglected: the strong influence of Charles Sanders Peirce, plus Percy’s deep competence in laboratory science. His typescript essay, “Peirce and Modern Semiotic,” presented here, shows that Percy was well ahead of his contemporaries in understanding the scientific and philosophical importance of Peirce’s Semeiotic, the Theory of Semeioses. Percy particularly pointed to the experiential importance of “taking the other’s meaning.” He regarded (...) that common phenomenon as vital, and genuine—a kind of event that behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner or Charles Morris explained away as nothing but a dynamic dyadic causal process. Percy’s essay definitively blocks those reductions. (shrink)