Lost in the Cosmos

(16) The Lonely Self: Why the Autonomous Self feels so Alone in the Cosmos that it will go to any Length to talk to Chimpanzees, Dolphins, and Humpback Whales

IN RECENT YEARS a tremendous amount of effort and money has been spent by the government and primatologists in the effort to demonstrate that chimpanzees and other apes can learn human language. Chimps were adopted like children and, unlike children, were subjected to years of concentrated lessons in speech. When attempts to teach chimps to speak failed, sign language was substituted. Glowing successes were reported. Some chimps became famous.

Yet the most recent assessments by responsible scientists are that the primatologists have either deluded themselves or at least made exaggerated claims. It now appears that chimps are not using language after all but are, rather, using signs and responses in order to obtain rewards (e.g., bananas). The basic elements of language are missing: symbols, sentences, productivity, cultural transmission. Now even some of the most evangelical primatologists have modified their claims.

In short, it appears that chimps can’t talk, with either their voices or their hands. Or, as Sebeok puts it, animals have communication but not language.

Yet the public perception is that chimps, and perhaps dolphins and the humpback whale, have crossed the language barrier. There are speculations about the mathematical and metaphysical knowledge of dolphins. For example, according to a recent newspaper account, the song of a humpback whale has ten times as many phonemes as does human speech.

Question: Why do people in general want to believe that chimps and dolphins and whales can speak, and why do some scientists in particular want so badly to believe that chimps can speak that they will compromise their own science?

(a) Because anyone who has invested reputation, a great deal of effort, time, and money in an experiment wants it to succeed.

(b) Because the last three hundred years have seen the dethronement of man from what he believed to be his central position in the Cosmos to an insignificant planet (Copernicus, Galileo), from his uniqueness among the species as the only besouled creature and as created by God in His image (Darwin), and even from the sovereignty of his own consciousness (Freud). Only language and other symbolic behavior (art, music) seems to remain as the sole remaining indisputably unique attribute of man. If language can be shown to be within the capability of apes, dolphins, and humpback whales, the dethronement of man will be complete.

(c) Because man is a lonely and troubled species, who does not know who he is or what to do with himself, feeling himself somehow different from other creatures, both superior and inferior — superior because, after all, he studies other animals and writes scientific articles about them, and other animals don’t study him; inferior because he is not a very good animal, is often stupid, irrational, and self-destructive — and solitary in the Cosmos, like Robinson Crusoe marooned on an island populated by goats. Therefore, he would like to discover his place in the Cosmos, discover a man Friday, or, failing that, at least teach goats to talk. So anxious, in fact, have some people been to communicate with Washoe, the most famous chimp, that in the attempt to make signs for Washoe three psychologists have had their fingers bitten off for their pains. Alas for man: rebuffed again.

(d) Because a primatologist is competing with other primatologists and therefore feels alone even among his colleagues. If he could converse with his chimpanzee, he would have the best of both worlds: (a) beat other scientists, and (b) have someone to talk to.

If man cannot communicate with other creatures, he is alone with himself. Dr. John Lilly, after claiming all manner of mystical and philosophical knowledge for the dolphin and after spending years trying to communicate with dolphins, changed his profession: to the study of the effect of mind-altering drugs on the individual human consciousness. He jumped from a tank of dolphins into the tank of himself.

Thought Experiment: Imagine that you are the scientist who has at last succeeded in puncturing the last of man’s inflated claims to uniqueness in the Cosmos. Now man is proved beyond doubt to be an organism among other organisms, a species in continuity with other species, a creature existing in interaction with an immanent Cosmos like all other creatures, like all elements, molecules, gaseous clouds, novas, galaxies.

Now, having placed man as an object of study in the Cosmos in however an insignificant place, how do you, the scientist, the self which hit upon this theory, how do you propose to reenter this very Cosmos where you have so firmly placed the species to which you belong? Who are you who has explained the Cosmos and how do you fit into the Cosmos you have explained?

Having proved your hypothesis, what do you do next? (1) Publish a paper in Science? (2) Begin to lobby for the Nobel? (3) Worry about three other scientists who are working on the same project? (4) Get drunk? (5) Go home and quarrel with your wife? (6) Take a girlfriend to a motel and watch Deep Throat on closed-circuit TV?

If the last is your choice, explain the connection between the triumph of science as a form of transcendence of the world and pornography as one of the few remaining avenues of reentry.