Walker Percy, Lost In the Cosmos

Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book explores self, identity, and alienation--via a rather engaging medium. It is full of hypothetical situations and quizzes, satire and searching questions. It is humorous, acerbic, and profound. Watch for the parakeet diagram, a particular favorite. This is an entertaining addition, even introduction, to a study of identity formation. Read this in conjunction with Wilhelmsen's Metaphysics of Love or MacIntyre's Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. See also my posts on Metaphysics of Love and Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry.

(Table of Contents)
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
or
The Strange Case of the Self, your Self, the Ghost which Haunts the Cosmos
or
How you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians
or
Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos--novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes--you are beyond doubt the strangest
or
Why it is possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life
or
How it is possible for the man who designed Voyager 19, which arrived at Titania, a satellite of Uranus, three seconds off schedule and a hundred yards off course after a flight of six years, to be one of the most screwed-up creatures in California-- or the Cosmos
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A Twenty-Question Quiz which will not help you become rich or more assertive or more creative or make love better but which may--though it probably won't, considering how useless most self- help books are--help you discover who you are not and even--an outside chance--who you are
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A preliminary short quiz which you can take standing in a bookstore and which will allow you to determine whether you need to buy this book and proceed to the Twenty Questions
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A short history of the Cosmos, including a semiotic theory of the Self which explains why it is that man is the only alien creature, as far as we know, in the entire Cosmos
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A space odyssey which gives an account of what can happen to an earthling astronaut if there is somebody out there and what can happen if there is no one out there
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A Preliminary Short Quiz
so that you may determine whether you need to take the Twenty-Question Self-Help Quiz. If you can answer these questions, you are not lost in the Cosmos

Twenty-Question Multiple-Choice Self-Help Quiz
to test your knowledge of the peculiar status of the self, your self and other selves, in the Cosmos, and your knowledge of what to do with your self in these, the last years of the twentieth century

• The Amnesic Self: Why the Self Wants to Get Rid of Itself
• The Self as Nought: How the Self Tries to Inform Itself by Possessing Things which do not Look like the Things They're Used as
• The Self as Nought (II): Why Most Women, and Some Men, are Subject to Fashion
• The Nowhere Self: How the Self, which Usually Experiences Itself as Living Nowhere, is Surprised to Find that it Lives Somewhere
• The Fearful Self: Why the Self is so Afraid of Being Found Out
• The Fearful Self (II): Why the Self is so Afraid of being Stuck with another Self
• The Fearful Self (III): How the Self Tries to Escape its Predicament
• The Misplaced Self: How Two Selves Confronting Each Other can Miscalculate, Each Attributing a Putative and Spurious Reality to the Other and Trying to Match it, with the Consequence that Both Swelves Become Non-selves
• The Promiscuous Self: Why is it that One's Self not only does not Prefer Sex with one's Chosen Mate, Chosen for His or Her Attractiveness and Suitability, even when the Mate is a Person well known to one, knowing of one, loved by one, with a Life, Time, and Family in common, but rather prefers Sex with a New Person, even a Total Stranger, or even Vicariously through Pornography
• The Envious Self (in the root sense of envy: invidere, to look at with malice): Why it is that the Self--though it Professes to be Loving, Caring, to Prefer Peace to War, Concord to Discord, Life to Death; to Wish Other Selves Well, not Ill--in fact Secretly Relishes Wars and Rumors of War, News of Plane Crashes, Assassinations, Mass Murders, Obituaries, to say nothing of Local News about Acquaintances Dropping Dead in the Street, Gossip about Neighbors Getting in Fights or being Detected in Sexual Scandals, Embezzlements, and other Disgraces
• The Bored Self: Why the Self is the only Object in the Cosmos which Gets Bored
• The Depressed Self: Whether the Self is Depressed because there is Something Wrong with it or whether Depression is a Normal Response to a Deranged World
• The Impoverished Self: How the Self can be Poor though Rich

The following section, an intermezzo of some forty pages, can be skipped without fatal consequences. It is not technical but it is theoretical; i.e., it attempts an elementary semiotical grounding of the theory of the self taken for granted in these pages. As such, it will be unsatisfactory to many readers. It will irritate many lay readers by appearing to be too technical; what does he care about semiotics? It will irritate many professional semioticists by not being technical enough and for focusing on one dimension of semiotics which semioticists, for whatever reason, are not accustomed to regard as a proper subject of inquiry., i.e., not texts and other coded sign utterances but the self which produces texts or hears sign utterances.

A Semiotic Primer of the Self: A Short History of the Cosmos with Emphasis on the Nature and Origin of the Self, plus a Semiotic Model for Computing Impoverishment in the Midst of Plenty, or Why it is Possible to Feel Bad in a Good Environment and Good in a Bad Environment

• How the Self Characteristically Places itself vis-a-vis the World, particularly through modes of Transcendence and Immanence
• The Orbiting Self: Reentry Problems of the Transcending Self, or Why it is that Artists and Writers, some Technologists, and indeed Most People have so much Trouble Living in the Ordinary World
• The Exempted Self: How Scientists Don't Have to Take Account of Themselves and Other Selves in their Science and Some Difficulties that Arise when they have to
• 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
• The Lonely Self (II): Why Carl Sagan is so Anxious to Establish Communication with an ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
• The Demoniac Self: Why it is the Autonomous Self becomes Possessed by the Spirit of the Erotic and the Secret Love of Violence, and how Unlucky it is that this should have Happened in the Nuclear Age
• The Self Marooned in the Cosmos: What would you say if you met a man Friday out there? What do you think he would say to you? Could you understand him?
• The Self Marooned in the Cosmos: What do you do if there is no man Friday out there and we are really alone?