In practice, most people oscillate between these selves. In a post-religious technological society, Percy finds there are in general but two options for being a self: the immanent, consumer self, who lives in mass society or the transcendent self, in membership with a community that transcends the world by means of universality, usually art or science. We are unknown, we knowers, to ourselves, and so we have made democracies, to know ourselves writ large. The fateful flaw of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension-and that is the sign-user himself. Percy lays out what is perhaps the fundamental problem animating his work, and, indeed, perhaps life in general:

It therefore needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but is rather a self among other selves. The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection. In Lost in the Cosmos, the novelist Walker Percy wrote: While, in the spirit of English common law, the Declaration then enumerates the injuries and usurpations perpetrated by King George III, Jefferson’s prologue is a masterwork of modern Enlightenment rhetoric. We as Americans have been told that certain truths are self-evident, namely, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Moreover, the Declaration of Independence goes on to say, governments are instituted to secure these undefined rights. Or, Why we as Americans are Obsessed with Presidential Elections and Though we Hate Ourselves for it Cannot Get Enough of 2020 Coverage Despite it Still Being 2019 and Our Day-to-Day Troubles Being Plenty Preoccupying:

Lost in the cosmos percy