A Political Companion to Walker Percy

10. The Second Coming of Walker Percy: From Segregationist to Integrationist

10 The Second Coming of Walker Percy From Segregationist to Integrationist Brendan P. Purdy and Janice Daurio This essay looks at three strands of Walker Percy’s thoughts through the decade or so before his 1956 Commonweal article, “Stoicism and the South.”1 These three strands of thought are semiotics, Catholicism, and Stoicism. Percy’s work on semiotics, his reading of Kierkegaard, and his conversion to Catholicism led him to make the change from being a segregationist southern moderate to an integrationist southern moderate. Or, to put it more precisely, Percy realized that being a southern moderate no longer allowed for the segregationist viewpoint. After examining these three strands, we consider “Stoicism in the South” with respect to historical, cultural, philosophical, and theological concerns. As a frame of reference for this chapter, consider the following story about Percy. During spring break in 1936, Percy and his best friend, Shelby Foote, a novelist and historian (most famously the author of the magisterial three-volume opus The Civil War: A Narrative), took a bus trip to New York City. While traveling Foote opined that integration would “probably not be a bad thing.” Shocked, Percy replied, “I cannot believe that you, a southerner, would say that.”2 This is the position that Percy began with and the purpose of this essay is to describe the Second Coming that transformed Percy from a segregationist to an integrationist. 208 Brendan P. Purdy and Janice Daurio Semiotics Language and Consciousness As an admirer of Charles Sanders Peirce and a novelist, Percy valued language highly. In fact, the analysis and study of language dominates his nonfictional work. In particular, he was interested in semiotics and the philosophy of language. Percy understood the human person to be a symbol maker by nature, as is clear from his essays on semiotics, for example: “Culture : The Antinomy of the Scientific Method,” “Semiotic and a Theory of Knowledge,” and “Symbol, Consciousness, and Intersubjectivity.”3 He also understood that changing language changes ideas, and that what language one uses and the manner in which it is used reflect on the unacknowledged body of beliefs of the community. In particular, Percy believed that naming is a social activity. Naming, and the “misnaming” of metaphors, both makes and reflects one’s world. Human beings are embodied consciousnesses that are part of the natural world, so it is no radical claim to say that naming objects in the world makes the world. However, there is vigorous debate within contemporary philosophy on proper names, and since this debate can be traced back to Peirce’s thought it bears mentioning. Saul Kripke, in the most important work on the philosophy of language to be published after Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (originally published in 1953), argued in Naming and Necessity that proper names are “rigid designators,” that is, they designate the same object in all possible worlds in which that object exists and never designate anything else.4 Thus, a rigid designator merely denotes; here Kripke was arguing against the descriptivist theory of naming of Frege and Russell, who argued that all words, including proper names, have both a sense and a reference (loci classici).5 Thus, Kripke was arguing against the Anglo-American analytic tradition. One important aspect of Kripke’s theory is that an object is “baptized” and this fixes the reference of the object. From here the “name denoting that object is then used to refer to that object.”6 From this one can see why Kripke’s theory is called a causal theory of reference (as opposed to a descriptivist theory like those of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, et al.), since the name is assigned by an initial community of speakers and then from that point on “the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain.”7 To explain Kripke’s thought simply: for example, at a certain point in The Second Coming of Walker Percy 209 time, there was a baptism by the New World colonists to call blacks “slaves.” One such individual is John Punch.8 Kripke would argue that while “John Punch” would refer to the same individual in all possible worlds (unless he does not exist in one of those worlds), it is only (tragically) accidental that in this world “John Punch” is the same as “first African slave in the American colonies.” From the time of the baptism (1640) until the end of the...