Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

This book - “the last self-help book” - is designed to make you question your basic assumptions about who you think you are, what you think you believe and value, and what you think you’re doing here.Walker Percy delves into the problematic nature of “the self”: me, I. We have no problem observing other people and things and describing them, because we can “see them” with our eyes and describe them as objects. But my self is not an object that is visible to my eyes. My self is the subject that is having the experience of seeing other things. And my self is the person who has to go out in the world and do stuff, including interacting with other selfs. When I see my self, I see the reasons I have to be and do what I am and am doing. I see my subjective “excuses”. I don’t see my objective behavior.“Who” is this “me” who is doing stuff and interacting with others? Percy says most of us simply have no clue who we actually are. We do not so much “describe” our self as we construct and “wear” some self or other. And we put on different selfs for different circumstances. We project an image of a self that we think is appropriate or serves our interests in various circumstances. Is one or any of these projections our “real” self? Is it even possible to live as a “genuine” person who behaves as he/she is, rather than behaves as his/her present version of its self thinks it “should”?The book was published in 1983. By now (2019) most people are aware of the “consciousness” movement: the effort to wake up out of the false realities we have been lulled into believing in, and see actual reality clearly. The “awakened” self sees that none of its self-images are the real me, and tries to strip them away to discover who “me” really is. To do this requires mentally stepping back and viewing your self as an object, rather than “being” your self as an image-projecting subject. Then you will see yourself as an image-projecting “phony”, and maybe you will be able to find some more genuine way to be in your life here.Percy gets into semiotics (sign-using); and dyadic and triadic relationships. Our use of signs (like words) makes us triadic beings. We are not like amoeba who probably never think about what they’re doing. When there is food, they wrap themselves around it and consume it. The amoeba never thinks it is eating food. It is in a simple dyadic relationship with its food: food-eat. The words “food” and “eat” are alien to the amoeba’s reality.We are not like that. We say, “This is water”, as if the word water is the thing we’re referring to. But we are referring to the sensation of a liquid flowing over our hands or down our throat, not the sound of the spoken word water or the sight of the written word water. As triadic beings, we tend to confuse the sign (the word) for the thing; then we get ourselves into all kinds of confusion when we define words and expect the things to behave like our flawed, incomplete definition of the words. We define our self with words, then try to behave as that kind of thing “should” behave. When we fail to behave “according to definition”, we are even more confused.Percy does not really offer a way out of the confusion. He leaves us Lost in the Cosmos, wondering who we are, how we got here, why we are here at all, and what we should do next. His is the “last” self-help book, maybe because after reading this book you will see that self-help books typically help you try to meet the requirements of some arbitrary definition of what you temporarily think you should be. Those books “help” you get even further lost in your image-projection of your most recent version of “me”.

I had that weird realization about 3/4 into this book that the author knows me better than I know myself. If I had to sum up the book I’d say it is a critique and satire of all the failing strategies of modernism to find a meaningful connection to reality. The book cover gives you the impression that this book is like “A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,” but it’s quite different. There’s dry humor for sure, but the book is overall more philosophical, subtle, wiser, and a little pessimistic. I think the comparison to Pascal is accurate. Be prepared to work on this one. I have a degree and philosophy and I had to chew on some of this a bit to get it, but it’s worth the effort; There’s real treasure here.

Walker Percy is very much a modern-day Pascal, in that he is wrapped up in the project of waking up modern man from his numb, jaded, over-entertained stupor into realizing what a predicament he is in. It's an existentialist concern, in the Christian-existentialist sense of Kierkegaard, especially insofar as both Percy and the Melancholy Dane are obsessed with the problem of subjectivity, and our awareness of it, and the paltry ways we try, unsuccessfully, to transcend it.So, this is NOT really a humor/satire book, per se, although the dust jacket's description tries to bill it as such (perhaps to expand the market appeal? Feh!). Early on, though, there is a send-up of the Phil Donahue show that is just *hilarious*. Most of the book is a series of (fairly involved) rhetorical questions, about such things as who in a hypothetical situation you would identify with the most, and why. The way the questions are counterposed, one could accuse Percy of making his points backhandedly via strawman-demolition, but that would be beside the point. Percy's overall aim is to get at the background of all our operating assumptions, and the ways in which we judge and evaluate others in relation to self, and what that says about what kind of thing man is.In the middle of the book is a digression on semiotics, the theory of signs. One of Percy's central ideas here is that man's cardinal innovation over other animals is his use of signs and not just signals. The "sign" usage is essentially triangular, involving subject, object, and the intersubjective sign, whereas an animal "signal" is two-dimensional, such as "danger, run away." All of our thought and communication is predicated on that sign-based three-dimensional framework. The self constantly has to situate oneself with respect to other selves and in the intersubjective framework that marks our communicative network.The main human predicament is that that intersubjective framework is essentially unstable due to our confusion about ourselves, and our desire to cover up our insecurities. No solution to this problem is forced upon the reader, although some suggestion of one is implied. The humanist and religious outlooks are both presented, fairly, I think, and the reader is left to evaluate the human condition as portrayed.The book ends with a couple of arresting sci-fi scenarios, that for thought-provocation, I haven't seen since the likes of Arthur C. Clarke's _Childhood's End._ This is a no-holds-barred look at ourselves that is rewarding as it is unflinchingly realistic, and I highly recommend it.

"...The self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out..""(In the post-religious age)...Unlike the use of spirits in the past, the purpose of alcohol is not to celebrate the festival but to anesthetize the failure of the festival. The locus of the failure is the self. Accordingly, the subject to be anesthetized is the self. Richard Pryor: Why free-basing? Because it wipes out the self."This book reminds us that it is okay to be lost in the cosmos. To be aware of feeling lost is to be compelled to search (for truth, meaning, God...).

Absolutely wonderful

written as a series of questions this book really gets you thinking. Absolutely great