2. Logology
6. Archetype and Entelechy
1972
This essay is the second of two lectures delivered by Kenneth Burke at Clark University in 1971 as the Heinz Warner lecturer. Entelechy is an old friend in Burke, going back, as it does, to the early fifties and his work on the dramatistic poetics and the original Symbolic of Motives. Burke borrowed the term from Aristotle and modified it to apply to literary texts, especially tragedy. Later, he expanded its application so that it applied to all symbolic action and became one of the prime functions of language and central concepts of logology. Language, or, perhaps, just the human mind, seeks perfection, is compelled to go to the "end of the line" in its many endeavors. Burke calls this the "entelechial motive" and studies it in text after text. One of the main arguments of his dramatistic poetics is that literature goes to the "end of the line" more often than other kinds of verbal acts and hence is a valuable source of knowledge for the study of humans, the symbol-using animals.
The main argument of this essay is that archetypes are genetic and hence ahistorical. They occur over and over again everywhere in the human world without any evidence anywhere that they have been transmitted from one culture to another. But entelechy, or the entelechial motive, is a function of language and is rooted in history, in a verbal action by a human agent in a specific sociopolitical scene. The entelechial motive is one of the most purely human motives in Burke. In his definition of man, Burke says that we humans are "rotten with perfection." It is language—symbolic action—that makes this motive available to us because the human mind and imagination can freely explore possibilities in the verbal realm that are impossible to explore in the physical realm. This is also true of other forms of symbolic activity—painting, films, music, sculpture, TV, drama— in which reality is transformed into art to create something that never was, which is free of the constraints of brute reality—the laws of physics, of matter, of the time-space continuum.
To put it differently, language is an archetype that makes entelechy possible. We do not know whether language developed simultaneously in different parts of the globe or whether once developed, it was always transmitted and modified as humans colonized the globe. What we do know, and what Burke makes a big point of stressing, is that all normal humans are born with the capacity to learn a language and do learn the language of their tribe in a fabulous feat of memory, which is even more fabulous if they also learn reading and writing. Once humans have language they have entelechy and what goes with it as part of their inheritance.
This germinal, seminal essay provides Burke with many of the key terms and concepts that make up his final, logological body of work.
The previous talk attempted to survey some aspects of my "dramatistic" perspective in general, the particular selection being intended to serve as introduction to a quite different kind of summarization, in the sense that both "archetype" and "entelechy" in themselves designate summarizing principles.[1]
The logic (or logologic) underlying the first talk was this: Nomenclatures are formative, or creative, in the sense that they affect the nature of our observations, by turning our attention in this direction rather than that, and by having implicit in them ways of dividing up a field of inquiry. In this respect, one can in effect "prophesy after the event" by "generating" the nature of the observations from the nature of the terms by which those observations were guided.
On the assumption that Aristotle's nomenclature is highly dramatistic in its essence, there was an earlier draft of the first talk which became overly involved in the minutiae of a dramatistic attempt to "generate" the nomenclature of Aristotle's Poetics. So I excised a lot, though leaving enough (let's hope) to at least illustrate the proposition that, however empirical Aristotle's study of literary specimens had been, his nomenclature had equipped him in advance to "meet them halfway"—and in this sense the nature of his observations could in effect be deduced from the implications of his dramatistic terminology in general.
But, as dramatistic as Aristotle's nomenclature is, it doesn't exhaust the field (surely no human perspective ever will!). Suggestions from such varied sources as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and a book by the anthropologist George Thomson, throwing further light on the concept of "catharsis," added unruly considerations that involve ultimately the distinction between "body" and "mind" (or rather, in the dramatistic analogue, the realms of sheer physical motion and symbolic action). Then followed a survey of some methodological statements that I view as basic to the study of a text. And this summarization led to the thought, along somewhat Spinozistic lines, that one could assume absolute determinism in the realm of physical or biological motion, while looking for the ground of "freedom" in the realm of "symbolic action."[2]
I might revert to one other point as regards the first talk, and develop it a bit further. We had considered the "autonomy" of the specialized sciences. What, then, of the " interdisciplinary"? At a time when I happened to be working on precisely that subject, I attended a conference at which one speaker proposed that a certain kind of material should be
Usually, the problem is "solved" by not even being considered. You pick from different fields items that you like, as though interdisciplinary decisions were not much different from shopping at a department store—and that's about what it amounts to, so far as the methodology of your choice is concerned.
I say this quite tentatively, but here is the only methodological approach that a dramatistic perspective (with its strongly logological emphasis) would deem possible, when confronting this problem of the interdisciplinary: One thing common to all the specialized sciences is the fact that each specialist uses some kind of terminology. If, then, you specifically subscribe to some one overall nomenclature, or theory of terminology in general, any choice you make from among competing specialists outside your field can be methodologically justified in terms of your particular overall terministic perspective.
True, an opponent may not subscribe to the particular model in terms of which the given decision is rationalized. But at least, specific methodological grounds for that decision have been offered. And if he would reject it by proper methodological procedure, then let him propound or subscribe to some other perspective, and justify his decision in terms of that. Only thus, so far as I can see, is it possible to justify one interdisciplinary combination rather than another on a methodological basis.
On the other hand, as regards the "generating" of a choice, if one does have an overall nomenclature, and if one justifies picking a certain aspect of Freud rather than Jung, or vice versa, the choice is in effect as though one's particular perspective had "generated" that observation which one actually owes to someone else, but which in principle is "derived" from the perspective on the grounds of which the borrowing took place.
The thought may help clarify what I mean by the self-appointed task of prophesying after the event," or in principle "generating" a text, as with my article "The First Three Chapters of Genesis" (reprinted in The
These were afterthoughts concerned with the previous talk. But let's turn now to the topic scheduled for this evening, "Archetype and Entelechy."
Jumping into the very middle of the issue, let us consider the matter of the "entelechy" with reference to the "archetype" or "prototype" of the "primal crime" which Freud associates with his concept of the Oedipus complex.
Recall in the Poetics the passage where Aristotle is discussing the kinds of situation best suited to serve as a theme for tragedy. The tragic calamity, he says, should involve conflicts among intimates. For instance, "When brother kills brother, or a son kills his father, or a mother her son, or a son his mother—either kills, or intends to kill."
It is hard to find an exact translation of the word I have translated as "intimates." Butcher's version is "someone near and dear." The Loeb edition uses "friends." The word is etymologically of the same root as the word for "love" in the Rhetoric, though all the examples there given happen to concern intimacy among males.
Regrettably, Freud never (to my knowledge) commented on the passage I have quoted with regard to Aristotle's variations on the theme of tragic killing. Also, with relation to the great emphasis Freud placed upon one of Aristotle's situations (in which son kills father), it is interesting to note that Aristotle omitted from his list the theme of father killing son. Yet the very tragedies he was dealing with were especially partial to myths deriving from the curse on the house of Atreus, a kind of dynastic "original sin" descending from a ruse whereby a father unknowingly ("unconsciously"?) ate the hearts of his two sons. For all Freud's emphasis on the fatherkill, it's worth remembering that the prime instance of the sacrificial motive in the Old Testament is the story of Abraham's pious willingness to sacrifice Isaac. And the entire logic of the New Testament is built about the story of a divine father who deliberately sent his son on a mission to be crucified.
To this extent, whereas the basic lines of Western thought come to a focus in variations on the theme of son, rather than father, as prime sacrificial figure, out of the several combinations that Aristotle mentions as ideal conditions for tragic victimage Freud's stress upon one Sophoclean tragedy, Oedipus Rex (to which Aristotle also was highly partial, though for quite different reasons) deflected our attention from both the sheer poetics of the case and the infanticidal implications in other tragic recipes.
In The Rhetoric of Religion I consider reasons why the sacrificial principle itself is integral to the social order. Thus where Aristotle had asked what would be the perfect kinds of character for tragedy as a literary mode, one might rephrase the question by asking, "What would be the ‘perfect imitated victim’?" The distinction between the tragic imitation of victimage as a source of poetic pleasure and the engrossment with actual victimage would be the difference between the Athenian theater and the Roman gladiatorial contest. Newspapers and documentary broadcasts appeal in a kind of intermediate realm by a record (thus a symbolizing) of real victimage. The thought suggests why the poetic imitation of imaginary pitiable situations involves in itself a certain degree of "purgation." All told, we encounter here some tangled relationships among the actual, the documentary copy, and the artistic imitation.
Be that as it may, the issue comes to a focus in questions about the recipe for perfect victimage—and by "entelechy" I refer to such use of symbolic resources that potentialities can be said to attain their perfect fulfillment. We shall come upon this notion by various routes. Aristotle's Poetics is a handy benchmark for our survey since it proceeds in this spirit, asking what form of plot would best fulfill the tragic telos, what kind of situation, what kind of characters and what kind of style. Whereupon, by comparison and contrast (and here at last I'm jumping in medias res!) I would quote a passage from my "Definition of Man" (reprinted in Language as Symbolic Action, 1966):
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (near the end of Chapter 5) Freud explicitly calls upon us "to abandon our belief that in man there dwells an impulse towards perfection, which has brought him to his present heights of intellectual prowess and sublimation." Yet a few sentences later in that same closing paragraph, we find him saying, "The repressive instinct never ceases to strive after its complete satisfaction." But are not these two sentences mutually contradictory? For what could more clearly represent an "impulse to perfection" than a "striving" after "complete satisfaction"? (17)
The alternative that Freud offers is his concept of the "repetition compulsion," which he also calls a "destiny compulsion." It is decidedly not within my competence to dispute Freud's concept itself, as designation for a psychopathic tendency to relive some prior traumatic situation by so confronting a totally different set of later circumstances that they are interpreted by the sufferer in terms of the original painfully formative situation. I am far from disputing the likelihood of such a tendency. I am but proposing to consider how it looks, as viewed in the light of an "entelechial" principle having wider functions than the manifestations
Is not the sufferer exerting almost superhuman efforts in the attempt to give his life a certain form, so shaping his relations to people in later years that they will conform perfectly to an emotional or psychological pattern already established in some earlier formative situation? What more thorough illustration could one want, of a drive to make one's life "perfect," despite the fact that such efforts at perfection might cause the unconscious striver great suffering?
Without casting the slightest doubt upon Freud's concept of a psychopathic tendency, or temptation, to endow wholly different people with imputed roles corresponding to the actual roles that other persons had played in the original inflicting of the psychic wound, we could view such a compulsion as an "entelechial" or "perfectionist" motive if we but "widen the concept of perfection to the point where we can also use the term ironically, as when we speak of a ‘perfect fool’ or a ‘perfect villain.’ " Thus: "The Nazi version of the Jew, as developed in Hitler's Mein Kampf, is the most thorough-going instance of such ironic ‘perfection’ in recent times, though strongly similar trends keep manifesting themselves in current controversies between ‘East’ and ‘West.’ "
By adopting a general logological approach to a "compulsive" situation which Freud confronts from his specifically psychoanalytic point of view, one would add considerations of this sort: A traumatic experience can, as it were, endow a person with a key terminology, in terms of which he frames his attitude towards life—and the terminology can shape what he comes to expect of people in keeping with the tenor of that attitude. Simplest example: An overly trusting person who was rudely betrayed, and who (in line with the proverb, "once burned, twice shy") might thenceforth so expect betrayal as in effect to invite betrayal. And such an attitude can also function as a kind of "generating principle," in the sense that a dramatist, when organizing a play designed to embody such an attitude, would develop a cast of characters so related to one another that, as these relationships unfolded in the development of the plot, one particular character who came close to standing for the author himself could end in the attitude of embitterment which I have called a "generating principle" behind the relationships among such a cast of characters. And all the main characters would be what we could call "key terms" involved in the forming of the summational attitude.
Turn now to a corresponding situation in real life. The cast of characters, in their nature as "key terms," would act as a "repetition compulsion"
A "repetition compulsion" would be manifest in any subsequent tendency to view new circumstances and persons in terms of the original dramatic personae (hence assigning roles whereby the sufferer unconsciously so imagines or interprets wholly different people as to make them fit the pattern of his original and originating distress). The same process would be "entelechial" or "perfectionist" in the ironic sense of the term, insofar as the sufferer was in effect striving to impose a "perfect" form by using the key terms of his formative wound as a paradigm.
Exactly how, then, would the entelechial principle figure here, with regard to the Freudian archetype of the "primal crime"? You are, let us say, trying to sum up the nature of the monogamistic, patriarchal family as you conceive of it. If you are a Freud your summational paradigm will be formed in terms of the tensions that you consider intrinsic to the family structure. These tensions would strike you as being of such a nature that they would attain perfect representative fruition in a kind of development and fulfillment whereby the sons joined forces, murdered their father, and took possession of the women.
Freud would be the first to recognize that so perfect a pattern of family outbursts was never found in any single one of his cases. But if you viewed family tensions in principle, this is the kind of culmination that would be the perfect representative expression of the tensions he viewed as intrinsic to the family structure.
This entelechial, summational, culminative, or paradigmatic version of what is ultimately implied in the nature of family tensions is not viewed as a state to be fulfilled in time. There is no attempt to postulate that so thoroughgoing an outcome will actually happen to families.
On the contrary, the culminative principle represented in the hypothesis of the fatherkill is transferred to the prehistoric past, along with subsequent corrective ambiguities whereby one is left a bit uncertain as to whether such a convulsion in the "primal horde" actually did take place,
In this respect "archetypes" or "prototypes" can be mythic ways of formulating entelechial implications (or possible summings-up in principle) by translating them into terms of a vaguely hypothetical past.
Entelechially, you might say, "Given such-and-such a family structure, you can expect to find such-and-such tensions. And these tensions would so add up that, if they were perfectly expressed in all simplicity, they would culminate in the outburst which Freud epitomizes in his archetype of the ‘primal crime.’ " Thus, what was really not temporal at all, but was the idealizing or the imaginative and conceptual perfecting of a situation that, in its actual temporal variants as recorded and analyzed in case histories, fell far short of such paradigmatic clarity, got vaguely attributed to the prehistoric past. Here was an area where nineteenth-century evolutionary historicism led to quasi-scientific derivations that were in form much like primitive creation myths, as when a tribe derives its present nature from some primal, mythic ancestral past.
This is a process that in my Grammar of Motives (1945) I call the "temporizing of essence." But my fullest treatment of it is in The Rhetoric of Religion, the section entitled "The First Three Chapters of Genesis," where the process operates along these lines: By the very fact of setting up an order, you make men potentially transgressors. For you give orders only to the kind of being who might possibly disobey them. Thus, order makes man in principle subject to temptation. (Otherwise put: Saint Paul said that the law made sin, Jeremy Bentham said that the law makes crime.) Myth (story) translates statements about principles into archetypal, quasi-temporal terms, quite as the Latin and Greek words principium and arché, respectively, mean "beginning" in the sense of both temporal priority and logical priority (or "first principles"). Hence, the mythic or narrative or archetypally quasi-historical ways of saying that "the setting up of an order makes man in principle subject to temptation" is to tell how the first man said no to the first thou-shalt-not imposed upon him by the first and foremost authority.
This process gets things reversed, as Marx says about "ideology." Thus, mythically, "Romulus" was the eponymous founder of "Rome," whereas etymologically the derivation was exactly the reverse.
This quasi-temporal nature of "archetypes" is to be seen in a halfway stage as regards the Platonic doctrine of "anamnesis." Many primitive languages arose, flourished, and died without ever being formally reduced to such principles of grammar and syntax as we expect not only in studies of classical idioms like Latin and Greek, but even of tribal tongues that anthropologists codify though the natives themselves have no such compilations. In actual practice, a missionary or explorer or fieldworker who formulates such a structure begins with the language as he hears it spoken, then gradually codifies the grammatical and syntactical rules that are implicit in the conventions of its usage. However, once he has built up such paradigms, there is a sense in which they are formally "prior" to their application in particular cases. For they are at a level of generalization, or abstraction, whereby each such principle can first be formulated as a title or class name under which endless individual examples, some actually recorded, others possible, could be included.
Along those lines, one can readily imagine a Platonic dialogue in which Socrates, by adept questioning, proves that no matter how naive a member of the tribe might be, in but properly abiding by the conventions of his given dialect he is at heart an expert grammarian without knowing it. Insofar as the verbs of his language were reducible to several conjugations, for instance, and the speaker spontaneously exemplified the rules to which a grammarian has reduced all such conjugations, mere questioning could establish the fact that the speaker knew by which paradigm, or set of rules, a given verb was to be conjugated, how its forms should end if active, if passive, how it should be modified if changed from past to future, or from first person to second person, and so on.
Where, then, did this "innate" knowledge of such grammatical "archetypes" come from? If such principles are logically "prior" in the sense that any such classification of rules can be viewed grammatically as "preceding" all possible examples of usages classifiable under that given head, and if this purely technical kind of "priority" is stated in temporal terms, then it follows that this unconscious grammarian, who knew more than he knew he knew, must have experienced such "pure" forms (or archetypes) in a stage of temporally prior existence. And by adroit questioning, Socrates is helping him to "remember" when he had experienced them in their "pure" state (which any particular examples partake of "imperfectly").
As a current instance of how readily an uncritical use of the archetypal can get things backwards, consider this dialectical distortion in Norman
Division, duality, two sexes. … Dual organization is sexual organization. … The prototype of all opposition or contrariety is sex. The prototype of the division into two sexes is the separation of earth and sky, Mother Earth and Father Sky, the primal parents.
"Prototype" here does the trick. Go along with such maneuvers, and you let yourself in for total obfuscation. To say that "sex is dialectical" would pass well enough, in the sense that an act of copulation in effect "unifies" the duality of the sexual partners. But give Brown his way with the archetypes (or prototypes, he uses both words), and things get reversed whereby dialectics is sexual; specifically, "Every sentence is dialectics, an act of love." Thus in effect a quite viable proposition, "sex is dialectical" gets archetypally transformed into "dialectics is sexual." And whereas it would be reasonable enough to say that sex relations can be discussed in terms of unity and division, Brown's ideological reversal gives us what would amount to saying that the principles of unity and division (applications of which are available to all language systems) are but special cases of sex, earth, and sky.
A related temptation is to be seen in Freud's comments on "condensation" and "displacement" as exemplified in the symbolism of dreams. Freud shows clearly enough how such operations take place in dreamsymbols. Yet such resources of substitution are by no means confined to the language of dreams or neurosis. There is a kind of displacement if I use a symbol for an equation in mathematics, or translate a German sentence into French. And any step to a higher level of generalization involves a kind of condensation, as "siblings" includes both "brother" and "sister," and "parents" condenses "mother" and "father." There are times when such "normal" resources of symbolization can raise trouble. But we'd get things backwards if we derived displacement and condensation from dreams, rather than seeing in dream-symbols special applications of these wider symbolic resources.
If you ever run across the winter 1971 issue of Salmagundi, a little magazine published under the aegis of Skidmore College, please take a glance at my article, "Doing and Saying," concerned with a process of
In one sense we are all myth-men, insofar as no important incident in our lives seems quite complete (that is, entelechially perfected) unless some expert in the resources of mythopoeia has rounded things out with a mythic counterpart. There we see the rudiments of what I mean by the entelechial principle. The important consideration is not where such mythic completions come from geographically, but what they add up to symbolically.
True, since any given ritual has developed through time, an account of its historical development is a wholly proper inquiry. Thus Aristotle's early chapters in his Poetics are concerned with the incunabula of tragedy prior to the era when it attained its "finished" form, as defined in Chapter 6, where he gives his definition, and thereafter in effect "derives" his analysis by working out the kind of observations that were implicit in that definition. Similarly, along with the possible history of a ritual's development, we might generate it " nontemporally," in principle, from the dramatistic analysis of mythopoeia itself, viewed as a species of symbolic action.
For instance, any recurrent ritual is a narrative prephilosophic mode of classification, insofar as it in effect includes many different temporal events under the same head. And it becomes entelechial, or perfectionist, as in the case of a ceremony that, in effect classifying a whole group of initiates under the same head, thereby transcends their nature as individuals. By the ceremony they are "perfected" in the sense that, regardless of what they variously might be, they are being considered from the standpoint of one particular absolute principle, namely, their identity and corresponding reidentification, as initiates. In all likelihood this entelechial aspect of the case will show up in terms of a myth relating the incident to some imputed primal past.
Perhaps it should also be pointed out that the culminative aspect of the entelechial principle is not confined to symbolic structures that have the quality of summaries and paradigms. It can also come to a focus in the symbolizing of an attitude, since attitudes possess a summarizing quality. Similarly an attitude towards a situation can be developed in terms of a narrative that sums up a situation not by discussing the situation as such, but by depicting a thoroughgoing response to it. One can discern this element by thinking of the contrast between a discussion of
Surely the purely formal, entelechial principle is an important motivational ingredient in system-building types of insanity. The person who has built up an elaborate structure of persecution has a kind of psychic treasure which could not be renounced without a sense of great impoverishment, despite the suffering that may be connected with it. I know of one case where an almost "air-tight" fantasy of deception, involving many members of a family, had been worked out. But one person whom the sufferer still inclined to trust broke the perfect symmetry. Then, lo! this person died—and immediately the sufferer began putting new light on certain things that had been said, remarks that came to be interpreted as a kind of deathbed confession about the suspected plottings of all the others. I told the ardent system-builder: "In the first place, I am sure that your whole scheme is all wrong. In the second place, on the basis of what I know about the deceased I think you must be misremembering—for I believe that, even if all this were true, the deceased is not the kind of person who would have told you. However, you have built up such a case, I realize how empty the world would seem if you abandoned it. So don't abandon it. And since you are a writer, write it up. Make all the characters involved even more egregiously a set of monsters than you now think them to be. Modify the details in a fiction that deliberately perfects the conspiracy." I won't flatter myself with the assumption that my advice was taken—but there is a vast amount of writing that gets done exactly thus. And my claim is, of course, that Freud's dramatic "archetypal" fulfillment of family tensions in terms of a quasi-prehistoric criminal outburst is so to be entelechially understood.
In one draft of these talks, I began by an ironic exemplifying of the entelechial principle before the principle itself had been discussed. Borrowing the title of William Ernest Henley's "Invictus" (the poem that rings out so challengingly, "I am the master of my fate, / The captain of my soul") I proposed to give such thoughts of invincibility this turn:
| If things are bad, and I can't make them better, | |
| then all the more I'll be mine own begetter. | |
| Adversity shall be my universe, | |
| making me free to act to make things worse. |
In this regard, satire can exemplify a strongly entelechial bent. Whereas certain ills that beset our society can become so depressing that we would gladly close our minds to them, satire as a stylistic strategy can so turn
As regards the ultimate philosophic problems imposed upon us by the high development of technology, they seem now to culminate in some kind of confrontation between "Humanism" and "Technologism." At various times in the history of Western thought, "Humanism" has been defined by a close relation to different adversaries or partners. Some brands of Humanism, for instance, have been antithetical to Supernaturalism, others have contended that human personality must be grounded in a transcendent principle of personality. Or there was the Humanism of Neoclassicism, grounded in ancient Greek and Latin texts. Marxist Humanism is integrally associated with secular socialism. Today, it seems to me, our quandaries sum up as the need for a kind of Humanism that would be defined as antithetical to "Technologism."
"Technologism" itself would be a term provided by its Humanistic opponent. As distinct from mere technology, "Technologism" would be built upon the assumption that the remedy for the problems arising from technology is to be sought in the development of ever more and more technology. That blithe spirit, Buckminster Fuller, would be one of its high priests. Land developers whose prowess as promoters is a national disaster where considerations of ecology are concerned would be on the dismal end of such a hierarchy. It would seem that, until quite recently, the Army Corps of Engineers has been desolatingly Technologistic in its policies and practices—but things are changing somewhat. For instance, after having done much havoc as regards the Tocks Island project on the Delaware, it is now apparently considering an adverse report by an authority that it itself had appointed.
Humanism, as so conceived, would look especially askance at the typical
But I spoke of "entelechies" in the satiric sense. In the winter 1971 issue of The Sewanee Review I tried an exercise of that sort. And the idea started from the subject of "energy." On one of the all-night radio programs with which I sometimes while away insomniac hours, I heard an ardent proponent of Technologism (an anima naturaliter Technologistica) ridiculing reactionary idealists who kept asking whether it might be possible to clear up the pollution in Lake Erie. They should look forward, not back, he said—and rather than trying to clean up Lake Erie, they should pollute it ten times as much, then find a way to extract from its wastes a new kind of energy.
Hehadtheangle. Invictus! "Adversity shall be my universe, making me free to act to make things worse." We now have the resources to let loose and freely pollute the entire world, while building a Perfectly Air-Conditioned Culture-Bubble on the Moon. An ideal Womb-Heaven (I called it "Helhaven"), made possible by man's momentous advances in technology—hence,the Ultimate Culmination,Edenand the Towerinone.
And I had my ending, too. You recall William Jennings Bryan's famous speech in behalf of free silver, where he ended on a posture befitting his final, perorating words: "Crucified on a Cross of Gold." I saw a way of ending my exercise (which I also used in a public talk) on not just one posture, but a succession of three, as with my "finalizing" lines:
Let there be no turning back of the clock. Or no turning inward. Our Vice-President has rightly cautioned: No negativism. We want AFFIRMATION—TOWARDS HELHAVEN.
ONWARD, OUTWARD, and UP!
A. APPENDIX A
To guard against a possible misunderstanding, I might point out: Both Aristotle's concept of the entelechy and its modified role in Leibnizian "monadology" use the term in ways that could be applied to any being or "substance," such as an amoeba or a tree, or even some one particular pebble viewed as being moved to fulfill the potentialities peculiar to its kind.
Also, whatever may be our objections to an uncritical use of the term "archetype," it is in its way as dramatistic as the term "entelechy." The terms are allies, in their antithetical relation to behavioristic reductionism; and in this respect the areas they cover greatly overlap.
And as we must be on guard lest the "temporizing of essence" in the term "archetype" gets tied up with notions of a quasi-historical past, so there are risks that the concept of the entelechy may take on quasifuturistic assumptions, by reason of the fact that the potentialities of a perfected symbol-system can be made to seem too "clearly" like the proclaiming of a predestined era still to come.
Such "millenarian" possibilities are exploited rhetorically in the burlesqued, élitist Utopianism of the Helhaven project, which alas! comes close to being technologically feasible; and it is already with us "in principle" whenever promoters, by projects that are disastrous to some aspect of the world's ecological balance, can buy themselves an estate in an area not yet thus ravaged.
B. APPENDIX B
The dialectical design underlying the entelechial principle (in our strictly "logological" sense of the term) can be summed up thus:
- There is the thing, bread.
- There is the corresponding word, "bread."
- Language being such as it is, with no trouble at all I can make up the expression, "perfect bread."
- We may disagree as to which bread could properly be called "perfect."
- A mean man, or a dyspeptic, or a philosopher might even deny that in this world there can be such a thing as "perfect bread."
- Nevertheless, theologians can speak of God as the ens perfectissimum, and the expression "perfect bread" is a secular counterpart of such dialectical resources.
- Nay more. Even if there is no such thing as perfect bread in actuality, I can consider bread from the standpoint of perfect bread "in principle."
Whereupon I confront these quite different alternatives:
- "Here is some perfect bread"; or
- "As compared with perfect bread, this bread I am offering you is a dismal substitute"; or
- "I can assure you that, humble as it is, this bread represents perfect bread in principle." (It "stands for the spirit of perfect bread.")
In effect, Freud's "Just-So Story" of the primalkill combines clauses 6 and 10. It is the ideally culminative exemplar of the monogamistic situation he would analyze (or in terms of which he would analyze his patients). But he would consider any particular case as but a partial instance of such a pattern, or paradigm.
C. APPENDIX C
We might throw further light on the subject by considering how the issue looks, as regards Joseph Fontenrose's book Python, a Study of Delphic Myth and its Origins (1959). In an essay, "Myth, Poetry, and Philosophy" (reprinted in Language as Symbolic Action), I use this book as a point of departure for several lines of speculation not directly germane to our present concerns. But it might be mentioned here because of its concern with the "origins" of what the author called the "combat myth." For the discussion obviously involves two quite different kinds of origin: (1) the possible transformations of the myth in the course of time, along with the likely steps of its geographic diffusion; (2) a paradigm summarizing the main themes of the combat myth, in its nature as a story with beginning, middle, and end.
My essay was designed to show how this second kind of origin has nothing to do with temporal succession, but is essentially concerned with such purely formal principles as the first of these two talks discussed with reference to Aristotle's Poetics. In effect the paradigm which Fontenrose sets up, and which all the many versions of the myth are said to exemplify somewhat but not totally, is like Aristotle's definition of tragedy. For it considers all cases in the summarizing terms of a "perfect"
Also, besides observations analogous to Aristotle's concern with the perfection of tragedy as a form, a somewhat adventitious scenic (or "environmentalist") test of "perfection" had to be introduced when we consider the fact that the champion of the combat is said to have "instituted cult, ritual, festival, and built a temple for himself." In this regard, as distinct from asking just what might be the principles of a "perfect" combat myth (in the sense that Fontenrose's paradigm embodies Aristotle's preference for a "complex" plot with peripety), I felt the need to introduce a kind of Darwinian speculation, by asking exactly how a combat myth, whatever its origins, might happen to be a "perfect" candidate for survival in connection with a cult. We'd here confront the difference between the combat myth's "perfection" sheerly as a form of story, and its nature as a contribution to the sanctioning of the offices performed by the specific priesthood with which one version or another of the myth happened to be identified. For instance, a myth might have special survival value if it was associated with a cult which had perfected rituals for, as it were, "causing" spring to return in the springtime, summer in the summertime, and so on. That is, the best conditions for establishing the authority of a priesthood's magic would be those involving the regularities rather than the uncertainties of nature. And such conditions would be fulfilled insofar as a cult and its corresponding myth became associated with sky-gods, and thus with the annually repeated cycle of the seasons, and the gradually accumulating lore about the recurrent configurations of the heavens. A myth could be perfectly formed as regards poetic tests of perfection, without having this added "Darwinian" kind of aptitude that happened to endow it with summationally cosmic connotations of authority.
NOTES
This essay originally appeared in Dramatism and Development (Barr, Mass: Clark University Press, 1972), 33–62.
1. Dramatism and Development consists of two essays. The title of the first
2. In the Journal of Social Issues for October 1962 there is an article, "The Image of Man," by Isidor Chein, which led to a controversy ideal for our purposes. Dr. Chein's overurgent aim to celebrate the dignity of Man as an "active" being tricks him into using but half a dialectic, thereby totally overlooking the states of passivity to which this "active" being is prone (as per the many pages "On Human Bondage" in Spinoza's Ethics). The subject is summed up in my Language as Symbolic Action (1966), 58–62.
7. (Nonsymbolic) Motion / (Symbolic) Action
1978
The dualism of this title provides Kenneth Burke with the main opposition that organizes many of his later essays. But the dualism is not so simple nor so stark as it might seem from the title. People act; things move. We can have body without mind (language); but no mind without body. All symbolic action originates in a body and must carry traces of that body in whatever form it is preserved— say, in a printed text. It is by means of human action that we transform nature or pure "motion" and the world of things. But conversely, the body powerfully affects the mind as does nature and things, and vice versa. So we have a powerful dualism but not a separation, and never a monism. Many primitive people carried this dualism into all of their relationships with the nonhuman world. Animals, trees, places had spirit as well as matter.
Burke has insisted on an absolute distinction between these two realms because he wants to place such a heavy burden upon language and the realm of symbolic action. He even argues in reverse that things are inspirited with language and that there is no such thing as an unmediated (by language) experience of things and nature. To name something, which we have done to everything so far discovered on earth and in those parts of the cosmos which we can "see" or photograph, is to transform it into a term and insert it into the logological realm where it can be manipulated according to the logological principles everywhere at work in the realm of symbolic action. Burke's prime example of this is his "bread" illustration. Starting with actual bread, he reviews what we can do to this material object once it has become the term "bread," or the word for the thing. It finally enters the entelechial realm as "perfect bread"—a pure symbolic realm that can never be defined because it does not exist, and there could be thousands, perhaps millions of "perfect" breads. This is the realm of subjectivity and relativism—both real problems for Burke. Imagine trying to decide on the "perfect text" or the "perfect place" or the "perfect mate" or the "perfect steak." It is easy enough to establish a hierarchy within any of these categories, but unless one is talking about God, there seems to be nowhere to stop. Perfection is a moveable feast with no upper limit or an opposite bottom limit. Only the hierarchy remains.
Are there degrees of perfection? Maybe, but they would change with the observer, and unless one posits an absolute timeless realm, as in Plato, or an absolute, eternal, all powerful realm, as in Christianity, there seems to be no stopping point for entelechial speculations, just more analyses of symbolic action. As Burke points out many times, no two things are exactly alike. This provides him with a neat concept of individualization, individuality, and uniqueness, but
― 140 ―it terrorizes the entelechial principle, making the application of it always fraught with irony, ambiguity, enigma, further complications within further complications.
1.
This is the basic polarity (like the traditional pair res and verba, things and the words for things).
It's at the root of such distinctions as mind-body, spirit-matter, superstructure-substructure, and Descartes' dualism, thought and extension.
I say "at the root of such distinctions" though no such terms quite match the motion-action pair.
Thus we can begin by logologically secularizing the theological (Thomist) view of "matter" as the "principle of individuation."
The human body, in its nature as a sheerly physiological organism, would thus be in the realm of matter, for which our term is "motion."
In that respect it would be like a fish or a tree or one of B. F. Skinner's operationally conditioned pigeons.
But the use of such resources as a tribal language would be in the realm of "action."
Action, as so defined, would involve modes of behavior made possible by the acquiring of a conventional, arbitrary symbol system, a definition that would apply to modes of symbolicity as different as primitive speech, styles of music, painting, sculpture, dance, highly developed mathematical nomenclatures, traffic signals, road maps, or mere dreams (insofar as a dream is interpretable as "symbolic" of the dreamer's "psyche," or whatever such term a psychologist might prefer to work with).
Thus this present use of language is an example of symbolic action in which we variously participate by means of a "conventional, arbitrary symbol system"—this particular brand of English.
Since the overall topic of the conference at which the substance of this talk was originally given was "Self and Culture," I take it that "Self" is meant to designate in some sense what has here been referred to as the "principle of individuation."
I take it that, even if the "Self" were thought to merge into the "Culture" as a whole, each member of the "Culture" would be thought of as having in some way a "Self" different from each and every other member.
It would be grounded in the realm of nonsymbolic motion and would mature into what one would call a "person" in the realm of symbolic action.
So far as is known at present, the only typically symbol-using animal existing on Earth is the human organism.
The intuitive signaling systems in such social creatures as bees and ants would not be classed as examples of symbolic action.
They are not conventional, arbitrary symbol systems such as human speech, which is not inborn but has to be learned depending upon where the child happens to be "thrown," an accident of birth that determines whether the child learns Chinese, or French, or whatever idiom may prevail in the given locality.
Symbol systems of that sort also differ from intuitive signaling systems in that they have a second-level (or "reflexive") aspect.
That is to say: they can talk about themselves.
Cicero could both orate and write a treatise on oratory. A dog can bark but he can't bark a tract on barking.
If all typically symbol-using animals (that is, humans) were suddenly obliterated, their realm of symbolic action would be correspondingly obliterated.
The Earth would be but a realm of planetary, geologic, meteorological motion, including the motions of whatever nonhuman biologic organisms happened to survive.
The realm of nonsymbolic motion needs no realm of symbolic action; but there could be no symbolic action unless grounded in the realm of motion, the realm of motion having preceded the emergence of our symbol-using ancestors; and doubtless the time will come when motions go on after all our breed will have vanished.
With regard to the theory of evolution, obviously critical conditions for the emergence of Culture arose at that stage in the prehistoric past when our anthropoid ancestors underwent a momentous mutation.
In their bodies (as physiological organisms in the realm of motion) there developed the ability to learn the kind of tribal idiom that is here meant by "symbolic action."
And thereby emerged what we might call a "mechanism" for the steps from nonsymbolic motion to symbolic action.
Descartes, in his speculations on a possible bridge between his polar realms of "thought" and "extension," proposed the possibility that a small gland in the brain, the pineal gland, might provide the medium.
But with regard to the materials for an intermediate step between the realms of "motion" and "action" we need not look for so recondite a locus.
The necessary materials are implicit in the physiological nature of sensation.
In his early essay on "Nature," Emerson described the process transcendentally, tender-mindedly thus:
Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history; the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted; Spirit primarily means wind; transgression the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature.
Jeremy Bentham would deal with considerations of this sort, perhaps not tough-mindedly but at least matter-of-factly thus:
All our psychological ideas are derived from physical ones—all mental from corporeal ones. In no other manner can they be spoken of. … In the case where to the object thus spoken of, existence is actually an object of one of the five senses, and in particular of the sense of touch or feeling … here there is no fiction—as this man, this beast, this bird. … The object spoken of may be a real entity.
On the other hand in the case in which the object is not a tangible one, the object, the existence of which is thus asserted, not being a real existing one, the object, if it must be termed an entity—as on pain of universal and perpetual non-intercourse between man and man, it must be—it may, for distinction's sake, be termed a fictitious entity.
― 143 ―To every word that has an immaterial import there belongs, or at least did belong, a material one. In a word, our ideas coming, all of them, from our senses,… from what other source can our language come?
Thus, if we say that a given object leans at an inclination of thirty degrees, in Bentham's sense we should not be applying a fiction. But a fictitious expression enters when we say that a person has an "inclination" to do such-and-such.
Or a "corporeal" reference, such as "this object is so many feet distant from that object" would differ from a "fictitious" reference to the "great distance" between A's position and B's.
And "corporeal" ideas such as "hot" or "cold" as terms for physical sensations become "fictitiously" extended in words like "hothead" and "cold-blooded" as terms for personal traits.
Bentham's position was quite in line with the scholastic formula, "There is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses (nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu)."
To which Leibniz had added, "Except the intellect itself (nisi intellectus ipse)."
Thereupon, logologically shortcutting metaphysical issues, considering the matter purely from the standpoint of nomenclature (symbolic action), we could equate intellectus ipse with the elements of grammar and syntax that are intrinsic to any given language and are not directly reducible to the issue stressed in the quotes from Bentham and Emerson.
Though the mutation that makes speech possible is itself inherited in our nature as physical bodies (in the realm of motion), the formation of a nomenclature referring to sensory experiences is on the side of symbolic action.
All such developments constitute a medium that provides motives intrinsic to itself.
With the wider use of physicalist terms as necessary "fictions" for reference to supposed nonphysical entities or processes, the realm of specifically symbolic action is strongly involved, and is completed with the formally stylistic use of metaphor, or equivocation generally.
The nature of language is such that it could not possibly be confined to strictly literal, univocal usage.
If words did not admit of loose application, you couldn't apply the same terms to a variety of objects, processes, circumstances.
For in its details, every situation is unique.
In his book entitled Poetic Diction: A Study in Meanings (London, 1928),Owen Barfield would want to deny that the step from terms for sensation to their use in referring to nonsensory "entities" is metaphorical.
He would hold that the material objects (to which such terms had literally referred) themselves contain such a range of what Emerson would call "supernatural" connotations.
To meet the minimum conditions of what is meant here by "symbolic action" all that is necessary is the inability of words to "stay put," as when even a proper name like "Caesar," referring to one particular person in history, gives birth to such words as "Kaiser" and "Czar."
The purely physiological aspect of the Self (its grounding in the realm of motion) is characterized by the centrality of the nervous system.
Its sensations are immediately its own, not thus felt by any other organism.
Like organisms presumably have similar pleasures and pains, but these are immediately experienced only within the centrality of each one particular organism's nervous system, as individuated at parturition.
The Self as a "person," member of a community (Culture) characterized by motives in the realm of symbolic action, is not thus differentiated.
In this respect the Self becomes a product of the Culture.
Whatever may be the genetic traits differentiating one individual from another, and whatever the distinct histories of individuals, the nature of symbolic action shapes the Self largely in modes of role, of sociality.
Here figure the individual's relations to family, to groups, to ever widening and partially conflicting organizations such as church, business, political party, nation, "global" tentatives.
Here, in contrast with the immediacies of the body, we confront for our overall "reality" an indeterminately interwoven complexity of symbols, reports about local, national, and international affairs, about history, psychology, geology, astronomy, expectations true or false, promissory or forbidding, and so forth.
Though "reality" (the "world") as thus symbolically conceived, embraces
In sum, when to the principle of individuation (involving the underlying physiology of sheer motion) there is added an organism's ability to parallel the realm of sensations by learning to use words for them, the concept of Self must necessarily be defined in terms of polarity.
In terms of nonsymbolic motion, the Self is a physiological organism, separated from all others of its kind at the moment of parturition.
In terms of symbolic action, it becomes a person by learning the language of its tribe, with corresponding identity and roles (beginning with the equivalent of a proper name and expanding variously in keeping with the currently available resources of symbolism and the institutional structures reciprocally made possible by them), the three corresponding Dramatistic axioms being:
There can be motion without action (as the sea can go on thrashing about whether or not there are animals that have a word for it).
There can be no action without motion (as we animals could not have words for anything except for the motions of our nervous systems and the vibrations that carry our words from one of us to another through the air or that make words visible on the page).
But (and this is the primary axiom that differentiates Dramatism from Behaviorism) symbolic action is not reducible to terms of sheer motion. (Symbolicity involves not just a difference of degree, but a motivational difference in kind.)
Yet this difference in kind amounts to a primary duplication.
This is due to the fact that the nomenclature of symbolic placement is borrowed from the materials of sensory motion.
And the terms are of such a nature that they are "fictions" or analogical extensions of their beginning in reference to physical processes and objects.
A Culture's symbolically conceived "world," or "universe of discourse," is thus built figuratively of terms originally grounded in reference to the nonsymbolic realm of motion.
Otherwise put: The realm of what is usually called "ideas" is constructed of symbolic material usually called sensory "images."
The Self, like its corresponding Culture, thus has two sources of reference for its symbolic identity: its nature as a physiological organism, and its nature as a symbol-using animal responsive to the potentialities of symbolicity that have a nature of their own not reducible to a sheerly physiological dimension.
Symbolicity itself being of a nature that can rise to higher levels of generalization until all is headed in some all-inclusive title, we can readily understand why psychologists like Jung are moved to talk of an overall oneness, an Unus Mundus.
Yet in the light of the critical Dramatistic distinction between the motives of a psychological organism as such and the motives of such a Self as personalized by participation in its particular Culture's modes of literal (univocal), equivocal, and analogical symbol-using, we can at least glimpse why Jung could be exercised by such a symbolically engendered "idea" or "ideal" of Ultimate Unity.
And by the same token we should see why the motion-action "polarity" is unbridgeable in the sense that, although, in every tribal idiom however rudimentary, there is a wholly reliable basic correspondence between a thing and its name; never the twain shall meet.
That might seem quite obvious, as regards the kind of "polarity" that prevails with the correspondence between a tree and the word "tree."
But look how far afield from such obviousness you get when the distinction shifts from the realm of sheer motion (as with the physicality of a tree) to the corresponding word (which is in the realm of symbolic action) and you confront what Dramatism would view as inaccurate equivalents, such as "matter" and "spirit," "matter" and "mind," or even "brain" and "mind."
There could be no total unity between the realms except along the lines of orthodox religion's promise to the faithful that their bodies will be restored to them in heaven.
An unchartable complexity of behavings among the cells of the body may add up, for instance, to an overall "unitary" sense of well-being; but no sheer term for an ideal unity (such as Jung's expression, Unus Mundus) can match that purely physiological kind of "attitude."
Keats, dying, modified a passage in Shakespeare to state it thus, "Banish
Though any attitude, even in purely theoretic matters, has a summarizing, unifying aspect, it must prevail only insofar as in some way it is grounded in purely physiological behavior (as per William James's charming and often quoted statement that we're sad because we cry).
In his chapter on "Attitudes" (The Principles of Literary Criticism [London, 1924]), I. A. Richards was presumably speculating on a behavioristic parallelism of this sort when he wrote:
Every perception probably includes a response in the form of incipient action. We constantly overlook the extent to which all the while we are making preliminary adjustments, getting ready to act in one way or another. Reading Captain Slocum's account of the centipede which bit him on the head when alone in the middle of the Atlantic, the writer has been caused to leap right out of his chair by a leaf which fell upon his face from, a tree.
Whatever the implications of an attitude, as a kind of incipient or future action, it must be by some means grounded in the set of the body now; and thus, though an attitude of kindness may be but the preparation for the doing of a kind act (a subsequent mode of behavior), it is already "behaving" physiologically in ways of its own (as a dog's implicit way of "conjugating the verb ‘to eat’ " is to begin by salivating, a bodily motion that in effect implies the future tense, "I will eat"; the present tense of the verb being bodily conjugated by eating, and "I have eaten" is also in its way a now, as the dog curls up for a comfortable, satisfied snooze).
But whatever the correspondence between purely symbolic attitudinizing and the kind of immediacy that poor Keats, with his dying body, confronted, his very efforts to endow his poetic attitudes with sensuous immediacy made him all the more cruelly aware of the respects in which the poet's modes of symbolic action were comparatively (to use his own word for his own poetry) "abstract."
His "Ode on a Grecian Urn" symbolically enacts the "transcending" of the body.
But that letter he wrote to Fanny Brawne while nearing death was concerned with a situation in which the sheer nonsymbolic realm of motion (the plight of his diseased body) was taking over; for such in
All told, in our Selves sheerly as physiological organisms, our world is made of what George Santayana would describe as but a single line drawn through an infinity of possible "essences."
But all of them are experienced immediately, as yours and no one else's, though you doubtless rightly assume that others of your kind experience similar immediate sensations.
Beyond that, in polar distinction, is the vast symbolic realm of tribal sociality, or orientation, as shaped by the influences that you encounter by reason of your being a symbol-using animal, whose "reality," at every stage, is determined by such terms.
In Santayana's Realms of Being, his Realms of Matter would correspond to what is here called the realm of nonsymbolic motion (for which his word is sometimes "flux," sometimes "action," though I must here employ a different usage).
His passionate Realm of Spirit would be much what I mean by "symbolic action."
And his Realm of Essence would deal with "sensation" as the bridge between the realms of "matter" and "spirit," though his term "intuitions" here would ambivalently include both bodily sensations (such as color) and purely symbolic fictions (such as the character of Hamlet).
The Self as a "person," beyond the individual's identity as a strictly physiological organism, confronts with varying degrees of comprehensiveness and profoundness the interrelationships among the manifold details of "reality" (whatever that "orientation" may be) as known and interpreted in terms of the symbolic lore current in the Culture of that time.
Necessarily, any individual's formal or informal version of such lore is selective, in keeping with the limitations and engrossments besetting that individual (as both person and physiological organism).
The interrelationships among such a conglomerate will be related consistently (this therefore that), antithetically (this however that), adventitiously (this and that).
When such an aggregate is felt to fall together "holistically," the gratification of such a purely symbolic symmetry rise to an ecstasy of conviction that we call "mystical."
The fall from such a state (whereby the fullness, pleroma, of purely symbolic exercising gives way to a sense of its underlying emptiness as tested by a similarly structured physiological counterpart) is called "accidie," acedia, sloth, torpor, drought.
Or the sense of such a confluence among motives can also have the allness of a pandemonium, a Pandora's box let loose, a Walpurgis Night, a jangling conflict of all the pieces with one another, the very fullness being felt as a drought.
In the state of contemporary Culture, I take it, the corresponding Self is likely to manifest "in principle" fragmentary aspects of all three such symbolically engendered "fulfillments."
The fragmentary delight is in putting anything together. The drought is usually met by purchasing some form of entertainment.
The variant of pandemoniac entanglement can even be attenuatively transformed into a bit of research on the problem itself.
Hart Crane is a notably pathetic example of a poet whose mode of mysticism terminated in a corresponding drought.
While he was writing portions of The Bridge there were times when everything seemed to fall ecstatically into place, its many disjunctions inspirited by one transcendent principle of unity.
But the very strength of his hopes for the work as a wholly organic solution for his problems as a personal Self set the conditions for the drought that was necessarily implicit in his reliance upon symbolicity alone.
There may be drought, not as a comedown from the mystic exaltation of "holistic" symbolizing, but as a kind of sloth implicit in the sheer failure to take delight in the wonders of purely symbolistic enterprise.
For such a condition there are direct (nonsymbolic) resources available to the Self—and they are widely resorted to.
I refer to the many drugs that act directly upon the Self as a physiological organism (in the realm of motion), though there are attendant difficulties due to the fact that each such physical means of gratifying the organism also happens to tax the health of that organism; and even if it didn't, there is the problem that the very directness and efficiency
But surely, above all, in confronting the tangle of "global" problems that beset the current state of affairs, we should pay wan appreciative tribute to the remarkable symbolic resources whereby "pandemonium" can become "attenuatively transformed."
All about us there are our various Selves, each to varying degrees tracking down the implications of his particular nomenclature.
For I take it that, just as each good poet speaks an idiom of his own, so it is with each symbol-using animal—and there is a kind of reciprocating relationship whereby the Self selects its key words, and they in turn become formative, to shape further developments of the Self, along with countless such unchartable interactions, including reactions back upon the behavior of the Self's sheer physiology.
The reference to physiology enters here in connection with the concept of "psychogenic illness," which refers to a reverse relationship whereby, just as drugs can produce physical effects recorded as a corresponding "attitude" or "state of mind," so such attitudes or states of mind can function suggestively to induce corresponding physiological behavior (in the sense that, if you received some information you believed in, and the information was highly disturbing, it would affect your bodily behavior, your blood pressure, respiration, heartbeat and the like quite as though the situation were actually so, though the information happened to be in error).
In this sense there is the "polar" relationship whereby an individual's mode of symbolic action (his investment in a particular kind of literary style, for instance) might attain an organic replica in a kind of physical behavior that happened to be a kind of disease.
In cases of that sort there could be a mutually reinforcing relationship (a "feedback"?) between the author's symbolic prowess and corresponding processes of his body whereby the development of his skill at his particular mode of symbolic action would be making him sick and keeping him sick, as his symbolic exercising was reinforced by the effects of his physiological "misbehavior."
Our attitudes toward past or future (remembrances or expectations) are products of our symbolicity.
But their behavioral counterparts in the realm of physiological motion must be in the immediate present.
For the only way a body can possibly behave is from one present moment to the next.
In the realm of symbolicity, there are two totally different notions of sequence the temporally prior (yesterday/today/tomorrow) and the logically (nontemporally) prior (as with the syllogism, first premise/second premise/conclusion).
Myth, being narrative, features the modes of temporal priority (as discussed in the section on "The First Three Chapters of Genesis," in my Rhetoric of Religion [Boston, 1961; reprinted Berkeley, 1970]).
The same work deals "logologically" with respects in which even temporal terms can be treated as in nontemporal relationships to one another (as per my "Cycle of Terms Implicit in the Idea of ‘Order’ ").
The strategic intermediate term here is implications.
Thus the terms "order" and "disorder" are nontemporally related in the sense that, being "polar," each implies the other, regardless of whether we go from the idea of "order" to the idea of "disorder," or vice versa.
But narrative (myth) can set up a temporal sequence whereby the story goes irreversibly "from" one "to" the other.
Insofar as implications all fall harmoniously into place, any given exercise in symbolic action approaches the feel of mystic unity.
Insofar as they add up to a jangle (and though "polar" terms such as "order" and "disorder" imply each other without strife, they imply much conflict when reduced to terms of irreversible story, the implications are under the sign of pandemonium.
Insofar as, of a sudden, all such symbolic enterprise seems vacuous in comparison with the immediacies of physiological sensation (in the realm of motion), we are on the slope of sloth, of drought, for which the alternative "remedies" are either physical "dissipation" (as with direct recourse to drugs) or further study (as thus fittingly when on the subject of sloth, Dante sums up for us the entire rationale of the Purgatorio, in this very canto where we are assured that, though rational [d’animo] love may err, "the natural" [lo natural] is always senza errore).
Gershom Scholem's engrossing studies of the kabbalists enable us to
We see hermeneutic ways whereby, though the teacher would not so much as modify a single letter of the Torah, while honoring the text as the very signature of JHVH Himself, and considering the Law so basic to Creation that it was propounded before Creation(there’s a"priority"for you), the disciple was taught modes of transformation that enabled him to see all such literalnesses double, in terms of esoteric implications.
And thus some of us goyim can glimpse how Saint Paul was doing exactly that, long before the kabbalists, when scrupulously leaving the Old Testament letter of the Law intact, he but introduced New Testament interpretations (as with the shift from a strictly physiological behavior of circumcision, which obviously had its symbolic aspects, he improvised a new symbolism, "circumcision of the heart").
Much of our engrossment with all such interpretations and reinterpretations (as exemplified, for instance, in the various schools of psychoanalysis) stems from the vibrancy of interrelated implications that thus suggest themselves for the spinning.
And "case histories" are, as it were, the translation of such logically, doctrinally interrelated terms into the corresponding parables of narrative (the "mythic" parallel).
Thus the catalogues, or "inventories," of Whitman's poetry are unfoldings of terms that imply one another, their associative interrelationship being revealed in a succession of tiny plots.
Since the principle of duplication begins in the polarity of our dual nature as symbol-using animals, the split across the two realms of nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action will necessarily manifest itself in endless variations on the theme of duplication.
For it is the combination of bodily sensation with symbolic counterparts and corresponding analogical extensions that "keeps body and soul together" until the last time.
And neither realm can be complete without the other, nor can they be identical.
Thus ultimately, when properly discounted along "logological" lines (whereby his "archetypes" are seen as quasi-temporal terms for terms logically prior), Plato's version of imitation, as a species of duplication, will be seen to go much deeper than Aristotle's.
But Plato was digging into the implication that once we turn from the realm of motion to the realm of symbolicity and try to envision everything in terms of that ideal symbolic universe, then all actual things in nature become in effect but partial exemplars of what they are in essence, as no single object can fit the exact description of the countless other and different objects classifiable under that same head.
Possibly the motion-action distinction, as conceptualized in this statement, implies that the line of demarcation between "conscious" and "unconscious" should be moved farther to the side of sheer motion.
That is, dreams would not be on the side of the "unconscious" insofar as dreams, like the most mature works of science, philosophy, literature, or the arts generally, admit of analysis as modes of symbolicity.
The "unconscious" would be relegated to such processes as digestion, metabolism, the healing of a wound, even if we study the physiology of such behavior.
Thus in my chapter on "Varieties of Unconscious" (Language as Symbolic Action [Berkeley, 1966], pp. 67–72), I begin with "the unconscious aspect of sheerly bodily processes," which would be in the realm of nonsymbolic motion.
From there I proceed to aspects of the "unconscious" in the realm of symbolicity, with Freud as my point of departure.
Much of this could be treated as variants on the term "implication," as used in this paper.
Similarly, if we locate the principle of individuation in the body as a physiological organism (as per our logological adaptation of a Thomist theological principle) it would seem to follow that Claude Lévi-Strauss draws the line between "Nature" and "Culture" at the wrong place.
For both "Nature" and "Culture" would be on the symbolism side of the line.
Thus, in effect, the case for the relation between biology and symbolism would be overanthropologized, as both "Nature" and "Culture" would be stages of "Culture," whereas "Nature" is the precultural state out of which the human infant develops in acquiring the Culture of its tribe, however primitive.
Whatever the possible range of incidental readjustments, duplication is so basic to the relation between motion and symbolicity, nothing of moment seems quite complete unless we have rounded things out by translation into symbols of some sort, either scientific or aesthetic, practical or ritualistic.
Sex is not complete without love lyrics, porn, and tracts on sexology. The nonsymbolic motions of springtime are completed in the symbolic action of a spring song.
The realms of nonsymbolic motion and symbolicity (with its vast range of implications) are so related that the acquiring of skill with symbol-systems is analogous to a kind of "fall" into a technical state of "grace" that "perfects" Nature.
2. SOME COMMENTS ON WILLIAM WILLEFORD'S "JUNG'S
POLARISTIC THOUGHT IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING"
WILLEFORD: The historical trends that Jung rejected in Freud's thought can be summed up under the names mechanism—seen, for example, in Freud's use of the expression ‘psychic apparatus'—and positivism, the belief extolled by A. Comte, H. Spencer and others, that culture was destined to pass through an evolutionary development from magic through religion to science. Although Jung was profoundly committed to the values of empirical science, he regarded the positivistic program as an illusion, because the religious impulse was for him a permanent reality of the human mind, not a stage of culture that would yield to Progress" ["Jung's Polaristic Thought," Analytische Psychologie 6 (1975): 218–39].
COMMENT: Obviously the Dramatistic Perspective would be on Jung's side insofar as terms like "psychic apparatus" implied a reduction of "symbolic action" to "nonsymbolic motion." But as compared with Behavioristic psychologies, Freud is far from any such reductionism.
In the Dramatistic ("logological") Perspective represented by the present article on the motion-action pair, regardless of the truth or falsity of religion, Martin Buber's "I-Thou" relation is here viewed as in its way the "perfect" expression of the form basic to the sentence: speaker/speech/spoken-to. One here directly addresses the most distinguished audience conceivable; and in prayer (petition, in effect saying, "Please") there is most grandly enacted the attitude of submissiveness to an all-powerful magistrate. Magic by comparison "commands." Applied
WILLEFORD: I will focus upon Jung's tendency to conceive the world as basically consisting of polarities of various kinds. Day and night, sun and moon, heaven and earth, right and left, such mythical twins as the Dioscuri (born of a single egg) and Romulus and Remus, the doubleheaded Janus, such ornaments and cult objects as the double spiral, twining snakes, the double-headed axe, the double-headed eagle, pairs of horns; the wealth, antiquity and wide distribution of such symbols suggest an archetypal basis. I will be concerned not with these but with the attempts of certain thinkers to give their subjective sense of polarity a philosophical form.
COMMENT: Though language does talk a lot, the very essence of its genius is in its nature as abbreviation. A sentence such as "The man walks down the street" is in effect a kind of title that sums up an unchartable complexity of details involved in any particular situation to which such words might be applied. (This issue is discussed at some length in my essay "What Are the Signs of What? A Theory of ‘Entitlement," reprinted in my Language as Symbolic Action.) And what more "perfect" abbreviations are possible than the replies "Yes" and "No"? In fact, the choice is ideally so perfect, except with the kind of questions artificially set up for examination papers, we usually have to settle for a mere Maybe as the answer. Most voting says Yes or No to a decision that is at best a Maybe. All antitheses embodied in polarities of the sort listed by Willeford are by comparison but weak attenuations of this "ideal" form. (An aspect of "logological" theory is the stress upon what it calls an "entelechial" principle underlying the trends intrinsic to the nature of symbolicity as a realm of motives considered in its own right. Any strictly psychological manifestation would be classed as but a special case of such symbolic resources in general.)
But prior to such polarities of antithesis within the nature of symbolicity, there is the incentive to duplication inherent in the unresolvable polar relationship between symbolicity and the nonsymbolic realm of motion.
WILLEFORD: For Jung "consciousness is always subject to the unconscious background; and the ego, no matter what pride it takes in its powers, is always subordinate to the self, the purposes of which the ego cannot appropriate except by the difficult way of individuation."
COMMENT: To quote the presumably persuasive TV commercial on the principle of individuation's grounding in the strictly physiological (the realm of motion), it's "my" acid indigestion, and "my" gas, for which I (my ego) take this medical material. But my ego is an aspect of my Self, which is developed through modes of sociality (Culture) made possible by the resources of symbolism. I shall reserve until later a discussion of the "logological" equivalents for the relation between "consciousness" and the "unconscious."
WILLEFORD: Polaristic thinking is even present in Kant, whom Goethe (in a letter to Schweigger in 1814) acknowledged as the authority for his own tendency to think in polarities. … In the Farbenlehre (The Theory of Colors) he says that, no matter how one tries to think about a phenomenon, one cannot escape seeing that it implies an original division capable of unity, or of an original unity capable of division, and he claims that to divide what is united, to unite what is divided, is the life of nature.
COMMENT: Yes, here is a basic correspondence between the realms of motion and action. We can put things together and take things apart. And as Socrates says in the Phaedrus, the dialectician is skilled in the use of words that can perform similarly in the realm of ideas. Henri Louis Bergson has astutely shown how this very nature of words leads to "pseudoproblems," as theorists speculate on how to "resolve" antitheses in nature that were already "resolved" because they didn't exist in the first place and were but the result of symbolism's failure to formally recognize its limitations as a medium for the discussion of wholly nonsymbolic processes (in the realm of motion). Psychologically, we encounter naivetés of this sort: according to primitive belief, there were ceremonies in which a sacred animal could be torn into bits, with each member of the tribe eating a portion. Here certainly was the principle of division, separation (in early Greek ceremonies called sparagmos). But it was matched by a principle of merger inasmuch as all members of the tribe were felt to be made consubstantial by eating of this same numinous substance. The difference between a "logological" treatment of such matters and the views too closely wedded to mythological origins of human thinking resides in the fact that stress upon the mythic would tend to derive the sheerly dialectical principles from their operation in such primitive rites, whereas Logology would view the primitive rites as a special case of the more general dialectical principles. A similar risk is to be seen in some Freudian thinking, with regard to the processes of "condensation" and "displacement" in the symbolism of dreams. Symbolism in its most general sense permits of these two processes, which thus are not derivable from such manifestations of them
WILLEFORD: These examples from Nietzsche, Jung, Goethe, and Schiller illustrate a tendency, extremely pronounced in the early part of the nineteenth century, to conceive difference as the result of division, which is finally the expression of universal antagonistic principles. The antagonism of these principles, and a contrary tendency to resolve it give rise to the forms and energies of nature (Goethe), of the human mind (Hegel, Fichte, Schelling), of art generally (Schelling), and of poetry specifically (Schiller). Indeed, the influence of this polaristic thinking is strongly present in all of the major forms of depth psychology, but it is in some ways especially pronounced in Jung.
COMMENT: Add Heraclitus (as Willeford does later) and the list would have its perfect top. Apparently in his scheme, all was strife; and the strife added up to perfect harmony. The theory of the U.S. Constitution viewed a conflict of powers as a balance of powers.
WILLEFORD: The first source of this polaristic thinking is the nature of the human mind. … Polaristic thought has an archetypal basis in that the human mind is disposed to structure its experience by making distinctions between what something is and what it is not, between a thing of one kind and a thing of another. This may be seen in the binomial properties of language—the tendency to pair words and concepts in various ways.
COMMENT: Logologically, the stress would be not upon "the human mind" but upon the nature of symbolism. High among my reasons for this statement of the case is my belief that we should not take on more obligations than necessary. Why haggle with Behaviorists when you don't need to? They can't deny that our kind of animal behaves by a lot of verbalizing. So let's account for as much as we can in such terms. To my way of thinking, in carrying out the implications of that one shift of locus, we completely invalidate Skinner's attacks upon the concept of what he calls "autonomous man" (which I interpret as his own addition of a straw man).
WILLEFORD: The individuation process described by Jung is governed by the self which is a principle of unity and purpose in the unfolding of the personality.
COMMENT: Though I have already "translated" Jung's nomenclature into "logologese" on this point, one further qualification is here suggested. In the realm of sheer motion, the individual organism is motivated by such obvious "purposes" as the need for food. But once you turn from the need for food to the ways of buying food with money, you're in a realm where "purpose" involves modes of authority, enterprise, and the like not even remotely reducible to the sheerly physiological needs of living. And, incidentally, the concern with a principle of individuation is itself a notable step in the right direction. Since, in the last analysis, each thing is but a part of everything, there is far too much tendency to overstress this principle of merger at the expense of concerns with a principium individuationis (such as the centrality of the nervous system so obviously supplies).
WILLEFORD: The "Panlogism" of Heraclitus, the idea that all things partake of the logos, which reconciles the opposites. …
COMMENT: Logologically, all things partake of the Word in the sense that all discussion of them is by the same token in the "universe of discourse" (the Greek word logos encompassing a range of meanings, such as "basic principle," that favor such an extension). We have already noted the modes of stylization whereby competition can be a form of cooperation (as competing teams on the ball field in effect cooperate to make a good expert game).
WILLEFORD: Schelling was influenced by Boehme's idea of the Ungrund as part of God.
COMMENT: Ultimate "polarity" in symbolism is made possible by the fact that any term of highest generalization, such as "ground" or "being," can have the grammatical addition of a negative, as "un-ground" or "non-being," for such are the resources "natural" to dialectic. Thus, in Kant's dialectic (explicitly so named) his overall term for the phenomenal, empirical world of the "conditioned" sets up the purely terministic condition for the term "unconditioned" as applied to the noumenal "ground" of this world's conditions. Whether it means anything or not, any synonym for "everything" can still have verbally as its ultimate "context," some synonym for "nothing." Hegel was quite clear on that point.
WILLEFORD: The first stage, then, in the development of mythology is [according to Schelling] one of relative "monotheism," a monotheism that includes the possibility of polytheistic development.
COMMENT: In my essay "Myth, Poetry, and Philosophy" (Language as Symbolic Action, pp. 406–9) I discuss the sheerly terministic aspects of this question. Suffice it here to say that any concepts of priority with regard to mythic thinking center in an ambiguity whereby the "logically prior" becomes confused with the "temporally prior," since myth is by its nature a vocabulary that states theoretic "principles" in narrative terms. Thus the issue becomes somewhat like trying to decide whether the "divinity" of godhead in general is "prior" to some one god's nature as a particular "person." One even encounters paradoxes whereby a monotheistic religion can become "a-theistic" in comparison with polytheism. For instance, many institutions that monotheism treats in purely secular terms (such as Finance or Agriculture) would merit in primitive paganism special temples to their corresponding deities. Logology holds that, regardless of whether one believes or disbelieves in religious nomenclature, one should study theology for the light that "words about God" throw upon "words about words."
WILLEFORD: Jung came to regard the archetype as "psychoid," as transcending the psyche, and as occupying an indeterminate position between Geist and Stoff, between spirit and matter.
COMMENT: That would be translated into "logologese" thus: Since the archetypes all have a notable imagistic feature, they relate to the role that sensation plays in providing the material for symbolic action's nomenclatures. And by the same token they are in an "intermediate position" between the realms of "matter" (nonsymbolic motion) and "spirit" (symbolicity in its full development, via the fictions of analogical extension). Their "psychoid" identity would reside in the fact that their role as an aspect of nomenclature could not be treated as encompassing the full development of a human being in response to those manifold resources and influences of sociality we sum up as Culture.
WILLEFORD: Jung's attempt to solve the problem of the opposites is concerned with the archetype of the unus mundus, the unity of the cosmos. … Jung writes that "While the concept of the unus mundus is a metaphysical speculation, the unconscious can be indirectly experienced via its manifestation. …The contents of the unconscious … are mutually contaminated to such a degree that they cannot be distinguished from one another and can therefore easily take one another's place, as can be seen
COMMENT: Unus isn't so clearly an "archetypal" term as "images" can be. It figures thus among the transcendentals, terms or properties which the mediaeval scholastics said go with all things of whatever sort: Res, Ens, Verum, Bonum, Aliquid, Unum. In that sense anything we look at is a one. And the obviously summarizing nature of a title is implicit in Jung's usage, as with our wishful title, "United States." And quite as "God" is the overall title of titles in theology, so Logology looks upon any expression like Unus Mundus as high up in the scale of "god-terms," if but in the technical sense of what Alfred Korzybski would have called a high level of generalization. For think of how vastly much is encompassed by your title "One World" if, when you say, "I am talking about everything," you feel that you really are talking about everything.
Since Jung equates the One World with the Self, he is in effect trying to deny by idealistic fiat the polarityof Geist and Stoff tha the begins with.
The concept of the "collective unconscious" would seem logologically to involve these possible sources: our responses to the sheer physiology of our bodies, in their metabolistic processes wholly outside our awareness except for the sensations, pleasures, pains that we experience as kinds of summarizing titles for such going on within us, and many of which function as signs that help us find our way about (thereby to that extent becoming "conscious"); the vast social lore that becomes part of us, though most of it does not explicitly engage our attention; the portions of this which, although they explicitly engage us, involve many implications not tracked down as when we do develop thought and conduct in some particular channel; the implications even here, when they but begin to emerge and exercise us greatly until we have brought them into order; the irresolutions involving each of us differently by reason of
Through Freud's stress upon the formative effects of the individual's early history (the period when the physiological organism is but beginning to acquire the symbolic rudiments of a Self), we are introduced to a different aspect of the duplication principle; namely, the paradox whereby the process of temporal progression can by the same token set the conditions for a later corresponding kind of regression. Logologically, the situation would be characterized thus: Since words are a major factor in sharpening the nature of attention, the very paucity of a child's emergent vocabulary causes many experiences to escape the clarity that makes for the kind of observation most conducive to explicit remembrance. Nevertheless, the child's experiences with intimate family relationships serve in effect to surround it with a "cast of characters" and corresponding "plot." These roles (by reason of their temporal priority in the individual's history) become as it were "essential," and thus "dramatically creative" in setting up a pattern of relationships which the individual later duplicates by unknowingly imputing similar roles in situations that, as a matter of fact, are but remotely analogical.
But essentially Jung's difficulties with the problem of polarity involve a complication of this sort:
- There is a sense in which everything merges out of and back into the universal context; and each of us as an individual is but part of that whole, as a single ripple is but a moment on the water and quickly merges back into it.
- The very nature of language is such that we can have generalizing titular terms (like Jung's Unus Mundus) for such ideas of overall consubstantiality, thereby being quite handy for summing up an attitude of sorts, though not reducible to a particular.
- There is a kind of "collective unconscious" we share in the sense that a common language spoken by similar kind of organisms contains a clutter of implications which its users vaguely share parts of, though we manage to make some of it explicit and can go along with much that others of us track down, making other aspects of these implications explicit.
- Though our bodies are like other bodies of our species, hence could be expected to share variously in this corresponding linguistic realm of implications (to be called a "collective unconscious"), there is also the principle of individuation whereby the immediacy of sensuous experiences, pleasures and pains (demarcated by the centrality of the nervous system), cannot be shared in its immediacy.
- Accordingly the polarity between the two realms remains unbridgeable, and we are thus composite creatures, of a nature that can be called either a privilege or a privation, or a mixture of both.
3. THE POLARITY POETICALLY "RESOLVED"
At another meeting of the conference at which I originally presented the substance of the foregoing material there was a paper by Norman Holland, who, in developing a thesis concerning three stages of psychoanalysis (first a stress upon the unconscious, next the ego, and now an "identity phase"), was especially ingenious in subjecting the same poem to the three modes of approach. The poem he chose was Wordsworth's two "Lucy" quatrains beginning "A slumber did my spirit seal" to illustrate the changes of approach.
The choice was a most happy one for my purposes, since it was almost as though deliberately designed to illustrate my notions about the "polar" relationship between the realms of (nonsymbolic) motion and (symbolic) action. I have situated the principle of individuation, with regard to the Self-Culture pair, in the physiological realm of motion, as circumscribed by the "centrality of the nervous system" (whereby the given human individual, as a biological organism, "immediately" experiences only its own sensations, as distinct from the sensations that any other organism, each in its way, immediately and exclusively experiences). The realm of symbolic action, in contrast, is characterized by kinds of behavior (with corresponding modes of identification) that are made possible, for example, by social relations highly dependent on "arbitrary, conventional" symbol systems, of which a tribal language would be the prime specimen.
I have said that the only transcending of the permanent "split between the two realms (of symbol and nonsymbol) would be as in some ultimate condition like that which orthodox Western religions imagine, in promising
| No motion has she now, no force; | |
| She neither hears nor sees | |
| Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, | |
| With rocks, and stones, and trees. |
Lucy now has "no motion" in the sense of her motions as an individual biologic organism. She has "transcended" this divisive state by merging wholly with the motions of rocks and stones and trees as they move in Earth's diurnal course. And the merger with "symbolic action" is embedded in the very constitution of the poetic medium that celebrates her oneness with nature as the ground of all physiologic bodies. I mean: Though she has been reduced to terms of wordless motion, her transformation is being performed in terms of poetry; hence all is as verbal as with God's creative word in Genesis.
Our art-heavens such as Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" bridge the gap by aesthetic conceits, each in its way inviting the realm of symbolic action to take over, in terms of images that stand for things (materials) themselves symbolic. Thus, Yeats:
| Once out of nature I shall never take | |
| My bodily form from any natural thing, | |
| But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make | |
| Of hammered gold and gold enamelling | |
| To keep a drowsy Emperor awake … |
And Keats's urn is a viaticum, with its transcendent destiny already imaged in its nature as a symbol-saturated object.
In sum, in his nature as the typically symbol-using animal, man would make an Unus Mundus by making everything symbolic, as with Baudelaire's great sonnet Correspondences, celebrating Nature as a "temple" where man passes "a travers des forets de symboles." The special poignancy of Yeats's poem is his (essentially hysterical?) gallantry in affirming his aesthetic "solution" in the very midst of recognizing the tyranny of sheerly physiological dimension: "An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing."
In his "Intimations of Immortality" Wordsworth seems to "solve" the problem by interpreting his confused wonder-tinged memories of presymbolic infancy as remembrances of a still further past (a principle
To sum up: The dialectical relationship between Self and Culture centers in a nonsymbolic principle of individuation or rudimentary physiological identity which becomes matched (or countered, or extended) in the full (social) sense by symbolic identifications with both personal and impersonal aspects of the Non-Self.
An obvious example of personal identification would be the relationships involved in primitive kinship systems, membership in secular or religious social bodies, citizenship, occupational status, and the like. The clearest example of impersonal sources would be terminologies developed as per the "inborn psychology" of the individual body's responses to physical processes, conditions, objects, locations by the analogical use of words like "sunny" and "stormy," or "distant" and "intimate," as "fictions" for referring not to climate or extensio (Descartes's term) but to a "person" (a word that itself originally referred to a thing, the material mask worn by an actor). In this sense, as Bentham and Emerson agreed, despite their widely different ways of getting there, all terms for "psychological" or "ethical" subject matter (quite like the believer's words for the realm of heaven) can be traced back etymologically to an origin in sheerly physicalist reference.
There is a kind of "synchronic" relationship between the realm of symbolic action and its grounding in the sensations made possible by the physiology of nonsymbolic motion. Such would seem to be at the roots of Jung's concern (almost nostalgic concern?) with the "polar" problem inherent in his ideal of an overall nomenclature to be formed in the name of Unus Mundus.
Freud's concern with the temporally prior would be on the "diachronic" side, having to do with the fact that the human animal develops from speechlessness (nonsymbolic infancy) through successive stages in the ways of symbolicity (plus corresponding difficulties in the acquisition of such aptitudes, difficulties that cannot be wholly surmounted, if only because the problems do not lend themselves to a wholly adequate solution in symbolic terms, since our empirical problems of life and death are ultimately grounded in physiology, not symbolism).
In any case, both of such concerns (Jung's and Freud's) require us to track down the ultimate implications of what it is to be the kind of animal
But this particular paper should end on at least a paragraph or two listing if only at random some of the many cultural forms which, whatever their nature in their own right, can be glimpsed as responding (in various and even quite contradictory ways) to the principle of DUPLICATION implicit in the motion-action alignment:
Most obvious are the traditional metaphysical or theological distinctions between body and mind (matter and spirit). Others: the microcosm-macrocosm pair, "eternal recurrence," variations on a theme, double plot, cults of the body (attempts to will that all be reduced to the immediacy of physiological sensation), transcendence (attempts like Jung's to have the "polarity" encompassed by an ideal unity), theories of "imitation" (such as Plato's and Aristotle's), bisymmetry, delegation of authority, antecedent and consequent in musical phrasing, identification by association, ritual (which symbolically reenacts some supposedly literal event). In a case of psychogenic illness, is not the body behaving (misbehaving?) in problematical ways of a collateral nature? Are not the symptoms that characterize its illness contriving in spontaneously uncharted ways to duplicate in terms of physiologic motion certain distresses imposed upon an individual socialized self that happens to be entangled in unresolved symbolically engendered vexations? And is not the physical disease in effect a disastrously "literal" translation of the victim's predicament? Indeed, may not the symptoms be so radical a physical counterpart that they in effect serve to reinforce the symbolic burden to which they were originally but a response?
I dare but ask that. However, I would for sure end on this family of DUPLICATIONS:
Quid pro quo, lex talionis, Golden Rule, categorical imperative, guilty suspicion (whereby, if Mr. A has malicious designs on Mr. B, he will suspect Mr. B of having malicious designs on him). In brief, projection. And over all, justice, propriety. If you're to be wholly human, no springtime (motion) is wholly complete without the (symbolic) action of a spring song. Even if we don't know a thing's name, it exists for us only as we think of it as potentially nameable.
But some readers may feel that the Behaviorist aspect of these matters needs further treatment, so I shall end on that.
4. MOTION AND ACTION ON THE SCREEN
The sights and sounds of a motion picture are, in themselves, wholly in the realm of motion. But as interpreted by the audience they become a drama, in the realm of symbolic action. These sights and sounds reach the eyes and ears of the audience through the medium of motion. And the audience hears, sees, and interprets them through the motions of the bodily behavior under the control of the nervous structure without which we could not see the sights, hear the sounds, or interpret them as a "story." Recall our first two Dramatistic axioms. There can be motion without action. (If the film were being played in an empty house, there would be no drama, that is, no symbolic action.) There can be no action without motion. (An audience could not see, hear, and interpret it as a "symbol system" without the aid of the nervous system and its physiological motions.)
But such purely physiological behavior on the part of the audience can figure in a totally different kind of "communication." For instance consider the operations of air-conditioning equipment in a movie house. I have read that if a thriller is being played, this mechanism must work much harder than if the plot is of a milder sort because of the effects which the excitement of the audience has upon the conditions of the atmosphere in the theatre. Such bodily responses as increased warmth and accelerated respiration place a greater burden upon the air-conditioning device, which is equipped with mechanical "sensors" that register the change in conditions and "behave" accordingly.
Obviously, its "sensitivity" is not to the motions on the screen as a drama (hence a process in the realm of symbolic action) but purely to physical conditions produced by the sheer bodies of the audience in their responses to the motions of the film as a drama (hence in the realm of symbolic action, for which the classic word in this connection would be "imitation").
Obviously, the air-conditioning equipment is not concerned at all with the drama as a form of symbolic act, an "imitation." Rather it is responding to a situation purely in the realm of motion, the state of the atmosphere produced by the physiological motions of the audience. Its motions would proceed in the same way even if there were no drama or audience at all but there were some other such condition in the realm of motion that was "communicated" to it by its "sensors."
I stress this distinction because it so clearly indicates two different realms of "behavior" here, the one involving the interpretation of the
The audience possesses such duality by meeting these two conditions: first, its members are biological organisms; second, they are endowed with the ability (and corresponding need, by our tests) to learn an arbitrary conventional symbol system, such as a tribal language, which also has the ability to discuss itself.
There is an admirable article much to our purposes, though we may apply it somewhat differently than the author intended: "Explanation, Teleology, and Operant Behaviorism," by Jon D. Ringen (Philosophy of Science 43 [1976]). I would like to mention it in connection with the paragraph by I. A. Richards that I previously quoted on the subject of "attitudes." When Richards was reading of a man being bitten by a centipede, a leaf fell against his face, causing him "to leap right out of his chair." Richards cites the incident as an indication that "every perception probably includes a response in the form of incipient action. We constantly overlook the extent to which all the while we are making preliminary adjustments, getting ready to act in one way or another." Recall that in connection with Ringen's discussion of the difference between "respondent" behavior and Skinner's ingenious experiments with "operant" behavior. In a typical experiment of Pavlov's, the experimental animal responds by salivating when you give it a sniff of meat. Its response is checked quantitatively by a device that can measure the flow of saliva. Then begin ringing a bell at the same time as you give the sniff of meat. And after having by repetition established the association between the sniff of meat and the ringing of a bell, ring the bell without the sniff of meat, and check on the amount of salivation as a response thus conditioned.
Skinner's "operant" conditioning proceeds quite differently. He gives his animal a goal by setting up some condition whereby, if it pecks at a certain form (or color) or presses a lever, it operates a mechanism that releases a bit of food. Having been systematically starved to about fourfifths of its normal weight, it does whatever it can in its need for food. The laboratory conditions are so set up that there are few things it can do. As the result of its random motions, it learns to repeat the pressing or pecking operation that is both congruent with its "natural endowment" and releases the food. By gradually complicating the conditions Skinner can get his pigeon to make a much more agile series of discriminations than
But note that Richards's anecdote is more in line with the earlier Behaviorism that stressed "response." And as I interpret it, his reference to "a response in the form of incipient action" concerns a bodily state that is collateral with what I would call the "symbolic action" of his reading.
The situation is made still clearer by Ringen's reference to a distinction between "molar" behavior and "molecular" behavior. Skinner's experimental animals would be studied for their "molar" behavior (as, for instance, when they learn the order of key-pecks or lever-presses needed to procure them their food). I would say that Pavlov's measuring of salivation was rather on the side of the animal's "molecular" behavior, as was Richards' behavior when the leaf startled him. Obviously, in that sense, laughter, tears, or prurient responses would be on the slope of the "molecular," along with the suggestion, as Richards' anecdote indicates, that there are many subtler such responses in the body of the reader who is "symbolically reenacting" a text.
Such is my reply to Behavioristic monism. No arguments about "mentalism" need figure. The test is the purely empirical distinction between behavior via symbol systems and the behavior of animals not characterized by human ways with "symbolicity."
That'sit, but let me end with as ection which sums it up and adds abit.
5. AFTER READING THE ESSAY BY JON D. RINGEN
The great improvement that Skinner's concern with "operant" behavior has over the earlier dispensation's study of "respondent" behavior deflects attention from the sheer physiology of an individual organism's response to a stimulus. My earlier reference to Richards indicates at a glance the different kind of observation that gets lost when the emphasis is upon "operant" conditioning. The pigeons' conduct is described in sociological terms, not in terms of sheer motion. My Dramatistic position rebukes Operant Behaviorism for not being behavioristic enough. Through confusing action and motion, it deflects attention from the study of the physiological motions involved in the behavior of conditioned subject. It's too "molar," thereby neglecting the "molecular" aspects of a physiological organism's behavior. Ironically, the "molar" as so conceived in effect makes Operant Behaviorism far too "spiritual."
Before reading Ringen's excellent essay, I had approached the matter from a different angle; namely, my conviction that "symbolic acts" can be performed differently in the realm of motion. Some people's "symbolicity" makes their bodies feel good; others will turn up with peptic ulcers, high blood pressure, secretions of adrenalin, and so forth. (Along those lines, I incline to assume that Marx's writing of Das Kapital helped give him liver trouble.) If "psychogenic illness" isn't a "molecular" aspect of some people's "verbal behavior," then what is it? True, one can experimentally drive animals crazy. But not with "ideas!" I must work on the assumption that there is a fundamental difference between a device that removes food from a hungry animal each time (in keeping with its "genetic endowment") it reaches for the food and the plight of a symbol-using animal who, if he gets drunk, always says exactly what he knows he shouldn't say. Also, the symbol-using animal has many "gradations" of response. For instance, if he is a writer and is so inclined, he might write a book in which he "idealizes" his own waywardness, and turns out a best-seller.
By "gradations" the sort of thing I have in mind is dealt with in the middle paragraph, page 187, of my article "Towards Looking Back" (Journal of General Education [fall 1976]). I refer to the fact that, given the resources of "symbolicity," our kind of animal can make a living by other ways than by solving the problem. He can play variations on the theme of trying to solve the problem. In brief, by dancing various attitudes. If such were not the case, where would pedagogy be? And art? (Tragedy can entertain us by transforming the theme of suffering into a marketable source of pleasure.) The behaviorist's animal either solves the problem or doesn't. But the realm of purely symbolic action allows for a graded series of attitudes such that we can communicate with one another by a deflective variety of ways in which we touch upon the need for a solution. Then, conversely, often our ways of talking about it can involve correlative modes of physiological ("molecular") motion that culminate in trick ailments.
Skinner's simple psychology of operant conditioning deflects attention from the possible distinctions between bodily motion and symbolic action. His concerns are with "molar" (public?) behavior. It's a quite legitimate field of inquiry, and he has done well by it. But it accidentally obscures the true import of the distinction between "verbal behavior" (symbolic action) and "bodily behavior" (physiological motion).
If a physicist sets up an experiment by noting how rays behave when refracted through a prism, there is a qualitative difference between the behavior of those rays and the behavior of the physicist who planned, set up, and interprets the experiment. The physicist would persuade his colleagues. If he tried to argue with his rays, you'd know he's crazy.
Thus my Dramatistic question is: Is Operational Behaviorism physiological enough? Has it not confined itself to observations that are but analogues of sociology?
But if one treats the physiological organism as the principle of individuation, then one has the conditions for a distinction between motion and some such term as "personality" or Self in its role as a social product, developed via the human experience with the resources of symbol systems, along with the corresponding vast, complicated structure of identifications which constitute "reality" (including the lore of the sciences, history, mathematics, human relations, even "gossip," a motivational realm that must be different not just in degree but in kind from that of nonhuman animals).
As I would read and apply the Ringen essay, it confirms and sharpens my position. The distinctions between "operant" and "respondent," coupled with the distinctions between "molar" and "molecular," help greatly to clarify my claim that there is a basic distinction between verbal behavior (which I call "symbolic action") and nonverbal processes (which I call "nonsymbolic motion"). The terms are not important, but the distinction is, whatever be the terms one chooses. The bodily behavior correlative to the "speech act" is quite different from the way "words behave," with a corresponding need that one accentuate the difference rather than obliterate it, as is in effect the case when experiments in the operant conditioning of "dumb" animals are interpreted as adequately representative of matters to do with inducement in the specific realm of human relations. The ironically paradoxical fact is Skinner is able to set up so essentially "rational" a problem ("push that lever, peck that key, or starve") that his animals can in effect behave much more "rationally" than is the case in most human situations having to do with welfare,
Notes
This essay originally appeared in Critical Inquiry 4 (summer 1978): 809–38. Reprinted with permission of the University of Chicago Press.
8. Theology and Logology
1979
The main purpose of this long essay is to define, illustrate, apply, and defend logology —pretty much against all comers. Theology is used as a comparison and contrast to logology and is the central concern of the essay, as it was, say, in The Rhetoric of Religion (1961). This essay is probably the most complete on the subject of logology, how it works, what its basic assumptions are, and why it should be taken seriously as a way of dealing with words (symbolic action) and the human condition (which includes the realm of motion). It is a summing-up essay, which means that there is quite a lot of repetition of material that appears in other essays before and after this one. Burke had finished this essay by the fall of 1977 when he came to Chicago for talks at the National Humanities Institute at the University of Chicago, where I was a fellow. The institute typed the essay for him, and he had made all of his corrections by the spring of 1978, when he returned to Chicago to give a series of talks at Northwestern University that was arranged by Lee Griffin, and featured Burke's latest definition of humans as "bodies that learn language."
Nothing is more basic to late (post 1970) logology than this definition, which replaces his old one, "symbol-using animals." As Burke liked to say, you can "spin" everything else from it, and he did. A distinctive human trait now becomes the intrinsic inherited species trait: the ability to learn a language, any language from the thousands that are spoken worldwide. All "normal" human beings have this ability to understand and speak a language, and, with training, to read and write it. One learns the language of the tribe more or less automatically if one is socialized and grows up where the language is spoken. No other living species that we know of has this ability, perhaps because no others have a neural network complex enough to accomplish the feats of memory required to learn, and learn how to use, thousands upon thousand of words in hearing, speaking, reading, and writing. Prodigious feats of memory are characteristic of humans in their relationship to language.
Burke is not really so interested in these feats of memory as he is in the fact that the ability to learn and use a language is ubiquitous in humans and that language (symbolic action) has a logic (logologic?) of its own that affects every part of our lives, the more so since the advent of the age of print technology and, later, of radio, television, and computers. Logology is the study of words, and words about words. Burke likes to point out that even "reality" is not real, rather than, say, nature or some other nonverbal subject until it has been turned into words, and major events (spring, love, marriage) are not complete until we have a song or poem to go with them. We literally see with words and name everything we see to incorporate it into the verbal realm so that we can refer to it when it is not present and make appropriate use of it. The "illiterate" Indians of the Amazon jungle have named and learned how to use hundreds of natural substances for
― 173 ―medicinal and other purposes. The Eskimos have a huge number of words for every kind of snow. The Plains Indians had a language more complex than Greek. Print technology gave us the world of books, which many of us still inhabit. We may yearn for an unmediated experience of the natural world (Burke's realm of motion) but it is impossible, no matter what the ecocritics and ecologists tell us. We have no images that are not tainted with words. Dogs may smell their way through the world, but we talk our way through it—and beyond it.In these matters, Burke is absolutely correct in his relentless insistence that the way to knowledge and understanding of what it means to be human is through words, in all of their many forms and permutations. In and through words; beyond words he once wrote. But beyond words there is nothing. God after all is nothing but a word in logology. It is hard to imagine what could be beyond words in logology, except nothing. Maybe a pure, powerful musical experience, such as Beethoven's last piano concerto might give us an experience beyond words, though the second music critics or conductors or players begin to discuss it, they have brought it into the realm of words because they have no other way to get it out of the pure musical state it is in when we hear it.
I seem to be far afield, but I'm not. Burke's example of the air conditioner in the movie theater is meant to illustrate how mind affects body, or what the rhetorical properties of a film can do. The body that learns language is also the body that suffers from it—what you see in the theater is nothing but images; what you hear is nothing but words and whatever sound effects and music are part of the movie. There is nothing real about it except that it is happening to you as you internalize what is on the screen and what is coming from the speakers. As Burke points out, no one is really being killed, tortured, burned, buried alive, raped, or having an orgasm up there. There are no real bullfights in Hemingway's novels, nor is there any actual violence in Faulkner's novels. However, the power of words (and of images on the screen) is so great, and the connection between words outside the head and words inside the head is so extensive and the neural network is so complex that the whole body is affected by what it sees and hears. In spite of the fact that we know it is not real, what we read and see on the screen can make us shout, weep, laugh, close our eyes, even leave the theater or TV to avoid any more of that experience. This interactive relationship is the field of logology: the nature of words (symbolic action), what words can do to us, how words behave, what we can do to and with words as bodies that learn language. "No mind without body," Burke says over and over again in discussing the realm of symbolic action. Even inside the head, language is an embodiment and the brain is a clutter of words. There may be 50,000 to 100,000 in there. The only escape seems to occur when we dream, which is often wordless.
This is Burke's realm. If I go on, I'll get lost in it, lost in words about words, lost in the logological trap. Once in there (say, in a text) how can you ever get back out except by using more words about words? Artists painted abstract pictures and left them untitled to escape the tyranny of words. But even to call it "Untitled" is to rely on words again.
FOREWORD
There is the possibility of confusion, in connection with my use of the term "logology." Though I shall constantly be encountering occasions where theology (as "words about God") and logology (as "words about words") overlap, particularly as when logology was taken literally to mean "the Doctrine of the Logos" (the reference to Christ as the Word in the Gospel of John), in my discussion I shall be stressing the secular meaning of the term.
Technically, each term could treat the other as of narrower scope. For logology in the secular sense could class all sorts of "isms" and "ologies" and many other kinds of utterance, including itself, as modes of "verbal behavior." And theology would certainly look upon any such theorizing as far less comprehensive in scope than theology's concern with the relations between the human, word-using animal and the realm of the supernatural.
Professor J. Hillis Miller, most notably in his essay on "The Linguistic Moment in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ " (The New Criticism and After, edited by Thomas Daniel Young [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976], pp. 47–60), has expertly discussed Hopkins's way of fusing a fascination with words in general and a devotion to Christ as the creative Logos. And when elsewhere he refers to "the peculiarly precarious Feuerbachian pose which says, in effect, ‘All the affirmations of Christianity are true, but not as the believers believe,’ " I thought of the kabbalists who said that biblical references to God as though he had a human body are not figurative; they are literal. But only God knows how to interpret their literal meaning—and the nearest we can come is by understanding them as figures of speech.
Our bodies are gestated and born in wordlessness—and out of such a state grows the doctrinal (that is, the verbal, the scriptural even). Themselves speechless, they help us learn to speak.
I
We have heard much talk of a "birth trauma," the shock of a fetus in being exiled from an Edenic realm in which it had flourished but which its own stage of growth had begun to transform from a circle of protection into a circle of confinement. With its first outcry after parturition it is started on its pilgrimage as a separate organism, its sensations, its feelings of pleasure and pain, being immediately its own and none other's.
We assume that such immediate experiences of a particular physiological organism are like the experiences of similar other organisms. But at least they are far from identical in the sense that your pleasures and pains are exclusively yours, and no one else's.
Whether or not the organism's radical change of condition at birth is a "trauma," a wound that leaves a deep scar, we do know that under ordinary favorable conditions the organism begins to flourish, and even so much so that in later life the vague memories of its early years can assume an Edenic quality, presumably the material out of which myths about a primal Golden Age can take form. And this is the stage of life during which the infant (that is, literally the "speechless" human organism) learns the rudiments of an aptitude which, to our knowledge, distinguishes us from all other earthly beings: namely, language (or, more broadly, familiarity with arbitrary, conventional symbol-systems in general—insofar as traditions of dance, music, sculpture, painting, and so on are also modes of such "symbolic action").
But the kind of arbitrary conventional symbol-system that infants acquire in learning a tribal language differs from the other media in at least this notable respect: It is the one best equipped to talk about itself, about other media, and even about the vast world of motion that is wholly outside all symbol-systems, that was going on long before our particular kind of symbol-using animal ever came into existence, that is the necessary ground of our animal existence, and that can go on eternally without us.
Rousseau tells us that our kind was born free. But that formula can be misleading in its implications. Every infant emerges from organic infancy (speechlessness) into language during a period of total subjection—subjection to the ministrations of "higher powers," the familial adults with whom it comes to be in what Martin Buber would call an "I-Thou" relationship. Under favorable conditions these powers are benign; sometimes they are malign; or there is an ambiguous area, inasmuch as ministrations that the powers conceive of as well-intentioned may be interpreted otherwise by the maturing infant, since its condition does not enable it to clearly recognize the limitations imposed upon the higher powers which the infant conceives of as all-powerful.
The first cry of the infant had been a purely reflex action. But as the aptitude for symbolic action develops, the child acquires a way of transforming this purely reflex response into the rudiments of communication. In effect, the cry becomes a call, a way of summoning the higher powers by supplication. In out-and-out language, it becomes a way of
I would consider these paragraphs a logological observation about the "cradle" of theology. Theology is words about God; logology is words about words. Logology can't talk about God. It can only talk about words for "God." Logology can make no statement at all about the "afterlife" and the related concept of the "supernatural." Logology can't either affirm or deny the existence of God. Atheism is as far from the realm of logology as is the most orthodox of fundamentalist religions. All logology is equipped to do is discuss human relations in terms of our nature as the typically symbol-using animal. In that regard, without pronouncing about either the truth or falsity of theological doctrine, logology does lay great emphasis upon the thought that theology, in purely formal respects, serves as a kind of verbal "grace" that "perfects" nature. It "rounds things out," even if such fulfillment happened to be but the verbal or doctrinal completing of the pattern that the infant "naturally" experiences when first learning language, and its modes of supplication in an "I-Thou" (familial) relationship with "higher powers."
Logology involves only empirical considerations about our nature as the symbol-using animal. But for that very reason it is fascinated by the genius of theology; and all the more so because, through so much of our past, theologians have been among the profoundest of our inventors in the ways of symbolic action. Also, everywhere logology turns, it finds more evidences of the close connection between speech and theologic doctrine. Saint Paul tells us, for instance, that "faith comes from hearing [ex auditu]," which in the last analysis amounts to saying that theology is exactly what it calls itself etymologically, an "ology." The story of Creation in Genesis is an account of successive verbal fiats ("and God said"). And in the New Testament the Gospel of John tells us that in the beginning was the Logos.
But these issues don't stop with such obvious cases as that. In my essay on "Terministic Screens" (Language as Symbolic Action [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973], pp. 44–47), after having noted how the nature of our terms affects the nature of our observations, by directing our attention in one way rather than another (hence "many of the ‘observations'
It is my claim that the injunction "Believe, that you may understand," has a fundamental application to the purely secular problem of "terministic screens."
The "logological," or "terministic" counterpart of "Believe" in the formula would be: "Pick some particular nomenclature, some one terministic screen." And for "That you may understand," the counterpart would be: "That you may proceed to track down the kinds of observation implicit in the terminology you have chosen, whether your choice of terms was deliberate or spontaneous." (47)
Or, in my The Rhetoric of Religion ("On Words and the Word: Sixth Analogy" [1961; reprint edition, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970], pp. 29ff) I have tried to show how "the relation between the name and the thing named would be the Power (equals the Father); the name would be the Wisdom (equals the Son, which the Father "generates" in the sense that the thing named calls for its name); and the two together "spirate" Love (equals the Holy Spirit, in the sense that there is the perfect correspondence between the thing and its name, and the perfect term for such correspondence or "communion" between the terms would be Love).
And as for "Perfection" itself, the theological idea of God as the ens perfectissimum has a striking logological analogue in the astoundingly many ways in which terminologies set up particular conditions for the tracking down of implications. The whole Marxist dialectic, for instance, is so designed as to foretell fulfillment in what logology would class as a Utopian perfection, a dialectic so "perfect" that it is to inevitably culminate in the abolition of itself (with the "withering away of the state," a state of the political state that may be quite dubious, but that can make claims to inevitability if we substitute for the state of the body politic the analogous state of the human body).
In more restricted ways, the tracking down of implications towards various perfections manifests itself in our many technological nomenclatures, each of which suggests to its particular votaries further steps in that same direction. Such expansionist ambitions are near-infinite in their purely visionary scope; but though they have no inner principle of self-limitation, their range of ideal development is restricted by the ways in which they interfere with one another, including academic
This logological principle of perfection (which I would call "entelechial," restricting the Aristotelian concept of the "entelechy" to the realm of nomenclature, "symbolicity") can also be seen to operate in areas which we do not ordinarily associate with the idea of perfection, except in such loose usages as "perfect fool" or "perfect villain." But its powers along that line are terrifying. It showed up repeatedly in theological charges of heresy, in which the heretics were nearly always saddled with the same list of hateful vices. And in our day the Nazis did the most outrageous job with "perfection" in that sense by the thoroughness of their charges against the Jew. It takes very little inducement for us to begin "perfecting" the characters of our opponents by the gratuitous imputation of unseemly motives. Thus, all told, in my logological definition of humankind, I put a high rating on my clause "rotten with perfection." Satan was as perfect an entelechy in one sense as Christ was in another. Doubtless Machiavelli was thinking along those lines when he told his prince that, whereas one should be wary of hiring mercenaries, the way to get the best fighters is make the war a holy war.
Language is one vast menagerie of implications—and with each channel of such there are the makings of a corresponding fulfillment proper to its kind, a perfection in germ. For the logological study of dialectic teaches us that there are two quite different ways of introducing the "entelechial principle of perfection," thus:
- There is the thing, bread.
- There is the corresponding word, "bread."
- Language being such as it is, with no trouble at all I can make up the expression, "perfect bread."
- We may disagree as to which bread could properly be called "perfect."
- A mean man, or a dyspeptic, or a philosopher might even deny that in this world there can be such a thing as "perfect bread."
- Nevertheless, theologians can speak of God as the ens perfectissimum—and the expression "perfect bread" is a secular counterpart of such dialectical resources.
- Nay more. Even if there is no such thing as perfect bread in actuality, I can consider bread from the standpoint of perfect bread "in principle."
- "Here is some perfect bread"; or
- "As compared with perfect bread, this bread I am offering you is a dismal substitute"; or
- "I can assure you that, humble as it is, this bread represents perfect bread in principle." (It "stands for the spirit of perfect bread.") (Kenneth Burke, Dramatism and Development [Barre, Massachusetts: Clark University Press, 1972], p. 59; appendix to essay on "Archetype and Entelechy.")
But the question of the relation between logology and theology also requires that we look in another direction, namely, the question of the relation between logology and behaviorism. A handy way to introduce this issue is by reference to a passage in my review of Denis Donoghue's recently published admirable collection of essays, The Sovereign Ghost: Studies in Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976):
On going back over Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, I ran across a footnote in which with regard to the "desynonymizing" of the terms "imagination" and "fancy," he says: insofar as any such distinctions become accepted, "language itself does as it were think for us." It is a chance remark which the structuralists would make much more of than would either Coleridge or Donoghue. ("The Sovereign Ghost by Denis Donoghue," The New Republic 177 [September 10, 1977]: 30–31)
In effect Coleridge is saying that words are doing what the theologian would say that the "mind" is doing, an interesting twist inasmuch as Coleridge, in his day, was known much better for works like his theological Aids to Reflexion than as a literary critic, though his works generally had a theological cast. Yet in passing, Coleridge there hit upon a quite strategic substitution, since the immediate context of situation in which words are learned is the realm of nonsymbolic motion, whereas "mind" is more readily associated with an ultimate supernatural ground beyond the realm of physical and physiological motion.
Logology here is in an intermediate position between theology and behaviorism (which monistically acknowledges no qualitative difference between a human organism's verbal and nonverbal behavior). Logology is as dualistic in its way as theology is, since the logological distinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion is as "polar" as theology's distinctions between mind and body, or spirit and matter. Logology holds that "persons" act, whereas "things" but move, or are moved. And "personality" in the human sense depends upon the ability
However, logology need not be driven to a "mentalist" position when in controversy with a behaviorist. Indeed, seizing upon a behaviorist term, logology needs but point to the empirical distinction between verbal behavior (which logology would call "symbolic action") and "molecular" behavior (which logology would call "nonsymbolic physiologic motion").
To adapt some comments from Western Speech (summer 1968), I read somewhere that, when thrillers are shown in movie houses, the airconditioning plant must be accelerated, owing to the audience's increased rate of respiration, and so forth, in response to the excitement of the fiction. The fiction is in the realm of "symbolic action," with which the air-conditioning plant has no relation whatever. The air conditioner’s "behavior" is in the realm of nonsymbolic motion, which relates directly to the physical conditions produced in the theater by the body's nonsymbolic molecular motions correlative with the symbol-using organism's responses to the story (which as a story is wholly in the realm of symbolism, though the sights and sounds of the story, in their role as mere uninterpreted vibrations, are but in the realm of motion). For in the empirical realm, no symbolic action is possible without a grounding in motion, as words on the screen can't even be words unless they can be seen or heard.
But logology would hold that their symbolic dimension cannot be monistically reduced to the order of physical motion alone. Whatever the mutation whereby our prehistoric ancestors acquired their aptitude with symbolicity, from then on the human animal was a composite organism, be the duality conceived in theological terms of mind and body, or in logological terms of symbolic action and nonsymbolic physiological motion. The principle of individuation was in the body, with the immediacy of its sensations. The realm of symbolism, with its many modes of identification (family relationships, geology, history, politics, religious doctrine, and so on), shaped the public aspects of human awareness and personality.
II
With Coleridge's passing remark that, if a new distinction becomes generally established, in effect the corresponding words think for us, we are at the very center of logological inquiry: the close but indeterminate relationship
First, there are the extensions of language by analogy, what Jeremy Bentham called "fictions," a term that itself is probably a metaphorical extension of the expression "legal fictions." Terms that have a quite literal meaning as applied to physical conditions can be adapted figuratively to subject matter that does not admit of such usage. For instance, if we speak of one object as being at a certain "distance" from another, our statement can be strictly literal, capable of verification by measuring the distance. But if we speak of one person's views as being "distant" from another's, we are employing a "fiction" which admits of no such literal physical test. Or, in saying that a certain leaning object has an "inclination" of thirty degrees, we are using the term literally, in contrast with the statement that a person has an "inclination" to do such-andsuch. In this connection Bentham observes that our entire vocabularies of psychology and ethics are made up of such "fictive" duplicates, without which we could not talk about such matters at all. Go to the etymological origins of all such terms, and you will spot the literal images implicit in such ideas.
The relation between our sensory experience as individual speechless physical organisms and the vast public context of symbolicity we acquire as social beings sets up the endlessly complex conditions for such duplication as is revealed in the spontaneous use of terms for the weather as a nomenclature for "states of mind," or "attitudes." And one can glimpse how a whole magic world of human relations might develop from that mode of duplication whereby, as one pious person fearsomely plants a crop, another (an expert in the lore of mythic counterparts) "collaborates" by contributing his skill to the process, in scrupulously performing the "necessary" attendant ritual of a planting song ("necessary" because, man being the symbol-using animal, the realm of nonsymbolic natural motion is not completely humanized until reduced to terms of
The resources of duplication and substitution are revealed most clearly of all in such mathematical operations as the use of the symbol p, instead of 3.1416, or the internal relationships whereby 2 plus 2 can be the same as 4 times 1. And surely mathematics began with that primal substitution whereby, in making three marks to stand for three apples, one also had a sign that would stand for three of anything, whereupon one's symbol had advanced to a "higher level of generalization" whereby the number itself could be operated on in its own right, without reference to any particular numbered things.
On inspecting more closely this aspect of what we might call the "duplication-substitution complex," we come upon a similar usage that, at first glance, might seem of a quite different sort. Insofar as some particular ritual is ceremonially repeated in identical fashion on different occasions (which would also include annual seasonal occurrences, since no two situations are identical) in effect the ritual acts as a mode of classification that abstracts from any particular occasion, just as numbers become abstracted from any one particular instance of their use. Thus, a marriage rite is an institution whereby all sorts of couples are "processed" in identical fashion. It is not like a situation where John and Mary are consulting a marriage counselor about their particular problems. Rather, it is individualized only insofar as there is a blank space to be filled with whatever proper names are to be included under that head this time.
The ubiquitous resources of substitution probably attain their profoundest theological embodiment in the doctrines and rites of vicarious sacrifice. I plan to discuss later the distinctions between theological and logological concerns with the principle of sacrifice. But let us now consider the astounding thoroughness (even to the edge of paradox) with which Christian theology developed the logological principle of substitution. Of all victims that were ever offered as redemption for the guilt of others, surely Christ was conceived as the most perfect such substitute, even to the extent of being perfectly abhorrent, as bearer of the world's sinfulness. Thus Luther said:
All the prophets saw that Christ would be the greatest brigand of all, the greatest adulterer, thief, profaner of temples, blasphemer, and so on, that there would never be a greater in all the world. … God sent his only begotten Son into the world, and laid all sins upon him, saying: "You are to
Thus, in terms of the specifically "Christian logology," the most perfect divine Logos also became the perfect fiend, in serving as the substitute vessel for the guilt of all.
With regard to the vexing issue of the relation between words and "mind" (whereby some nomenclatures would substitute "words" for "mind," as per the tangential remark we have cited from Coleridge), before moving on too the raspects of our subject we should consider J.Hillis Miller'singenious and penetrating essay"The Linguistic Moment in' The Wreck of the Deutschland.’ " This essay is particularly relevant since Hopkins's exceptional involvement in strictly logological concerns is so strikingly interwoven with the most poignant of theological devotions. Miller here notes "three apparently incompatible theories of poetry … each brilliantly worked out in theory and exemplified in practice":
Poetry may be the representation of the interlocked chiming of created things in their relation to the Creation. This chiming makes the pied beauty of nature. Poetry may explore or express the solitary adventures of the self in its wrestles with God or in its fall into the abyss outside God. Poetry may explore the intricate relationships among words. These three seemingly diverse theories of poetry are harmonized by the application to them all of a linguistic model. This model is based on the idea that all words rhyme because they are ultimately derived from the same Logos. Nature is "words, expression, news of God" (Sermons, 129), and God has inscribed himself in nature. The structure of nature in its relation to God is like the structure of language in relation to the Logos, the divine Word; and Christ is the Logos of nature, as of words. (47–48)
Coleridge, when commenting on how words can think for us, and noting that the two words "imagination" and "fancy" (the one from the Latin, the other from the Greek) were often used synonymously, proposed to "desynonymize" them, so that they would have different meanings. But Hopkins proceeded in the other direction; he let the word "Logos" think for him by refusing to distinguish between its secular meaning as a word for "word" and its meaning in Christian theology, where the New Testament word for Christ was the "Word." Hopkins's thinking could not possibly have been as it was had those early sectaries, the "Alogians," succeeded in their attempts to exclude the Gospel of John and
Saint Augustine had in effect desynonymized the two usages by explicitly referring to his conversion from his career as a pagan rhetorician (a "peddler of words," venditor verborum) to a preacher of the Christian Word. But he had also Christianized the very beginning of the Old Testament by noting that God's successive acts of Creation had been done through the Word (when he had said, "Let there be …")—and thus in effect the Creation was done by the Father's Word, which was the Son.
Miller begins his essay: "By linguistic moment I mean the moment when language as such, the means of representation in literature, becomes a matter to be interrogated, explored, thematized in itself" (47). While his engrossing study of what B. F. Skinner might call Hopkins's "verbal behavior" is essentially logological, the very fact of Hopkins's refusal to "desynonymize" the two usages keeps the study of the "linguistic moment" constantly infused with the theological implications of Hopkins's poetics.
As might be expected, variations on the theme of "duplication" and "repetition" are plentiful; even talk of a "primal bifurcation" is a signal to look for ways of tying the issue in with the distinction between speechless nonsymbolic physiological motion (analogous to the traditional terms, "matter" or "body") and the publicly infused realm of symbolic action (analogous to the traditional terms, "spirit" or "mind"). In this connection Miller has a footnote which succinctly bears upon "polar" aspects of the human being as a dualistic, "composite" individual, in contrast with the monistic assumptions of behaviorism, which denies any qualitative distinction between verbal behavior and nonverbal behavior (in brief, it "thinks" by refusing to "desynonymize" the term "behavior"). Referring to an "admirable passage in Hopkins's commentary on The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius," Miller quotes:
And this [my isolation] is much more true when we consider the mind; when I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man. (47)
In my view of logological dualism (which Hopkins comes close to replacing with a monism exactly the reverse of the behaviorists', insofar as Hopkins would reduce everything to terms of the universal Logos) the
True, poets have traditionally used the terminology of sensation to give the feel of the internal immediacy that Hopkins aims to suggest. And there is no good reason for denying poets such a time-honored rhetorical device. I am but pointing out that the essential polarity or duality of the human condition is not actually bridged (it can't be) but is stylistically denied. The mode of expression is thus in effect a "linguistic element" that represses an explicit statement of the case. Whereupon the "return of the repressed" reveals itself in the person of Hopkins himself as the "wreck" with which the poem starts out (significant timing!) by being explicitly and exclusively concerned.
The first five stanzas are in the form of an "I-Thou" prayer. Forty lines in all, there are nineteen cognates of the first-person pronoun, fourteen of the second. The second half of the first part is transitional, in that the pronouns move farther off (first-person plural and third-person singular). The second part, two-thirds of the poem, is built explicitly around the wreck of the Deutschland, a "pied" name if there ever was one ("O Deutschland, double a desperate name!"—as the home of both the nun Gertrude, "Christ's lily," and the "beast," Luther). With regard to the poem as a structure, we could say that it transforms the "pied" nature of the poet's personal problems into the grander interwoven ambivalences of sinking and salvation.
At the end of the essay Miller adds a footnote:
Kenneth Burke, in remarks about this paper after its presentation at the Ransom Symposium at Kenyon College in April of 1975, argued that I should add something about the multiple meaning of the word wreck in the title. The poem, he said, is about Hopkins's wreck. This was a powerful plea to relate the linguistic complexities, or tensions, back to their subjective counterparts. Much is at stake here. That the poem is a deeply personal document there can be no doubt. Its linguistic tensions are "lived," not mere "verbal play" in the negative sense. … In "The Wreck of the Deutschland" Hopkins is speaking of his own wreck. … The danger in Burke's suggestion, however, is, as always, the possibility of a psychologizing reduction, the making of literature into no more than a reflection or representation of something psychic which precedes it and which could exist without it. …
I wrote Miller, calling attention to the closing paragraph of an essay by me concerning Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ("Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats," A Grammar of Motives [1945; reprint edition, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969], pp. 447–63). In that essay I had noted respects in which traces of the symptoms of the disease he was to die of manifested themselves. But I added this qualification:
We may contrast this discussion with explanations such as a materialist of the Kretschmer school might offer. I refer to accounts of motivation that might treat disease as cause and poem as effect. In such accounts, the disease would not be "passive," but wholly active; and what we have called the mental action would be wholly passive, hardly more than an epiphenomenon, a mere symptom of the disease quite as are the fever and the chill themselves. Such accounts would give us no conception of the essential matter here, the intense linguistic activity. (462–68)
In that last paragraph, I wrote Miller, "At least I say I’m not doing exactly what you say I am doing." Then I added: "However, I'll meet you halfway. I think the relation between the physiology of disease and the symbolic action of poetry can be of the ‘vicious circle’ sort. One's poetizing, in the very act of transcending hints got from the body's passions, can roundabout reinforce the ravages of such sufferings." I had in mind here such a "reflexive" process (I guess current cant would call it "feedback") as the role of "psychogenic" asthma in Proust's search for essence by the "remembrance of things past."[1]
III
Let us now list some cases the discussion of which might most directly help us inquire, by comparison and contrast, into words about the divine, the supernatural (theology), and words about words (logology), including words for the divine and supernatural, whether or not there be such a realm, which theologies have words for.
Since theology in our tradition is so clearly grounded in the relation between the Old Testament and the New, let's begin logologically from there. The formula of the Christian theologians was stated thus: Novum Testamentum in Vetere latet, Vetus in Novo patet. How translate it exactly? "The New Testament was latent in the Old Testament. The Old
In any case, the Christian theology, with regard to the relation between Old Testament and New Testament, would see in the Old Testament many stories about characters that were conceived as what they were only insofar as they were "types of Christ." Indeed, the Jewish tribe itself, in its Exodus from Egypt, was but a type of Christ. Thus its Jewish identity was, in effect (in principle), being viewed not as that of a tribe in its own right, but as an emergent stage of the Christian future.
Exactly, then, what does logology, as a purely secular cult of the Logos, do with that particular localization of dialectical resources? Obviously, the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac (telling of how the father, in obedience to God's Law, would consent to sacrifice even his most beloved person, hisson) can be conceived of asincipiently, prophetically a type of the New Testament story of an all-powerful Father, the very soul of justice, who actually does fulfill the pattern, in completing the sacrifice of his most precious person, his only begotten Son. And logology looks upon both stories as variations on the theme of sacrifice.
In my early scattered readings among mediaeval texts, I found a sentence that fascinated me. It was probably a rule of some monastic order, I don't know which. And though I have lost track of the original, I still incline to go on repeating my translation, which is as resonant as I could make it: "If any one have any thing of which he is especially fond, let it be taken from him." There is even the ironic possibility that I got the Latin somewhere from Remy de Gourmont, a nonbeliever if there ever was one; and he taught me to appreciate, in a kind of twisted nostalgia, the forlorn fragmentary beauty of such accents. The fantastically "materialistic" George Santayana's gallant Realm of Spirit is also in that groove.
But the main consideration, from the standpoint of logology, is the fact that, however variously theologians may treat of the relation between the Old Testament and the New Testament, they have in common the theological stress upon the principle of sacrifice. As viewed from the standpoint of logology, even the most primitive offering of animals on
As viewed logologically, the theological story of the Creation and the Fall (in the opening chapter of Genesis) would be summed up thus:
The story of Creation, in representing the principle of Order, necessarily introduced a principle of Division, classifying some things as distinct from other things. In this purely technical sense, Creation itself was a kind of "Fall," inasmuch as it divided the principle of Unity into parts, each of which has a nature of its own, regardless of how they might in principle be "unified." (As seen from this point of view, even a project for "unification" implies a grammatical gerundive, a "to-be-unified.") Thus, viewed from the other side, the orderly principle of Division isseen to contain implicitly the possibility of Divisiveness.
The possibility of Divisiveness calls for a Law against Divisiveness. (In a world set up by the creative word, how keep Division from becoming Divisive except by a word, a Law, that says, "Don’t do whatever would disrupt the Order"?) So the story includes a "don't" that, stories of that sort being what they are, stands for the sheer principle of Law, as the negative aspect of Order. But implicit in the idea of "Don't" there is the possibility of Disobedience. One says, "Do" or "Don't" only to such kinds of entities as can be able to respond (that is, can have the responsibility) by in effect saying, "Yes" or "No" (that is, being obedient or disobedient).
But Saint Paul's theology was quite in keeping with logology when he said that the Law made sin, as Bentham was to say that the Law makes crime. However, note that, in introducing, via Law, the possibility of Disobedience, one has by implication introduced the principle of Temptation (the incentive, however originating, to fall afoul of the Law). Where, then, locate the "origin" of that Temptation, as befits the nature of narrative (story, myth)?
At this point, the implications of terms for Law and Order surface by translation into terms of role. These are two kinds of "priority." There is logical priority in the sense of first premise, second premise, conclusion. Or in the sense that the name for a class of particulars is "prior" to any particular included under that head, quite as the term "table" already "anticipates" the inclusion of countless particular objects that don't even yet exist. Or there is temporal priority in the sequence yesterday-today-tomorrow.
As a result of this doubling, one can state matters of principle (that is, firsts or beginnings) in terms of either logical or temporal priority. (Hence in my Rhetoric of Religion I put major emphasis upon the etymological fact that both the Greek and Latin words for "principle" [arché and principium] refer to priority in both the logical and temporal senses of the term.) I said somewhere (I think in my Grammar of Motives, but I can't locate it) that a Spinozistic translation of the first words in the Vulgate Bible, "In principio Deus creavit," would be not "in the beginning God created," but "in principle God created" For his basic equation, Deus sive Natura, amounts exactly to that, since he would never associate the words "God" and " nature" in terms of a temporal priority whereby God "came first" in time. Though such equating of God and nature was pantheistic, hence anathema, in its sheer design it resembled the thinking of those Orthodox Christians who attacked Arianism by insisting that the "priority" of Father to Son was not in any sense temporal. We here confront a purely logological kind of "priority," as we might well say that the number 1 is "prior" to any other number, but only "in principle"; for no number in time is "prior" to any other, since an internal relationship among numbers is nontemporal. "Before numbers were," 3 was less than 4 and more than 2, though we can "go from" one such to another. And logologically we confront an analogous situation with regard to the narrative or "mythic" translation of "nontemporal" implications among terms into terms of story, as with the narrative ways of stating the principles of Order in the first three chapters of Genesis, under "primal" conditions involving an audience for whom the poetic ways of story came first; however, such expressions were later to be sophisticated by the "traumatic" step from poetry and mythology to criticism and critically mature theology.
The Old Testament begins in its way quite as the New Testament Gospel of John begins in its, with pronouncements that overlap upon these two kinds of priority. Genesis "tells the story" of the divine word's informative power. John tells the story of the Logos, a Hellenistic stress upon the word that a "Judaizing" sect among the emergent Christian doctrinarians had unsuccessfully attempted to exclude from the canon. Hence, though the term in English seems to have begun by reference to the Logos in the Gospel of John (a usage that is ambiguously implicit in these present shuttlings between theology and logology), both the Book of Genesis and the Gospel of John present their cases in terms of story. And we now take on from there.
Logologically, we confront the fact that, given the fluid relation between
The principle of the Law, implicit in the principle of Order, is identical with an astounding seiendes Unding that human language has added to nature, the negative (a purely linguistic invention unknown to the world of sheer wordless motion, which can be but what it positively is). Thus, implicit in the legal negative, the "thou shalt not" of the Law (which, the story of Beginnings tell us, was born with the creation of worldly order) is the possibility that its negativity can be extended to the negating of negativity. There is thus the "responsibility" of being able to say no to a thou-shalt-not.
But the tactics of narrative personalizing (in effect a kind of substitution that represents a principle in terms of a prince) raise a problem local to that particular mode of representation itself. If this kind of "first" is to represent the possibility of disobedience that is implicit in the decreeing of a Law, where did the "temptation" to disobedience "come from"? Up to this point, we have been trying to show that a logological analysis of the case would coincide with a theological presentation, in that theology has said implicitly what logology says explicitly; namely, the conditions of the Fall were inherent in the conditions of the Creation, since the Divisiveness of Order was reinforced by the divisive possibility of saying either Yes or No to the primal Law of that Order.
However, the sheer psychology of personality is such that an act of disobedience is but the culminating stage of an inclination to disobey, a guilty disobedient attitude. And where did that prior step, the emergent temptation to disobey, originate? Here theology's concern with the sources of such an attitude introduces a causal chain that turns out to involve a quite different provenance.
Eve was the immediate temptress. But she had been tempted by the serpent. But the serpent was not "entelechially perfect" enough to be the starting place for so comprehensive, so universal (so "catholic") a theological summation. The principle of substitution gets "perfect" embodiment here in that the serpent becomes in turn the surrogate for Satan, the supernatural tempter beyond which no further personal source of temptation need be imagined, since his personality and his role as ultimate
IV
In his epic, Paradise Lost, Milton turns that story into a further story. Beginning with theology's search for the grandest personalized source of temptation, Milton reverses the mode of derivation as we have traced it logologically. Thus, whereas logologically the story of the revolt in Heaven would be derived from motivational ambiguities whereby the eventuality of the Fall was implicit in the conditions of the Creation, Milton's theological route would proceed from the revolt in Heaven to the Fall, and consequent expulsion from the Garden.
Although there are many respects in which logology and theology are analogous (respects in which the two usages, words about words and words about the Logos, can go along in parallel) there are also the many occasions when, as we have here been noting, they will unfold a series of interrelated terms in exactly the reverse order. A good example is a creation myth that I learned of from Malinowski (compare Language as Symbolic Action, pp. 364–65n).
According to this myth, the tribe is descended from a race of supernatural ancestors (in this case, subterranean ancestors, since their original ancestors were thought to have lived underground). These mythic ancestors had a social order identical with the social order of the tribe now. When they came to the surface, they preserved the same social order, which has been handed down from then to now. In this case, obviously, whereas conditions now are mythologically "derived" from imputed primal conditions "then," logologically the mythic imputing of such primal conditions "then" would be derived from the nature of conditions now. (I hope later to discuss respects in which we might distinguish between mythology and theology; but in a case of this sort they are analogous with regard to their difference from logological derivation. And they have the advantage of providing much simpler examples, at least as usually reported. Also, their polytheistic aspect makes them much easier to "rationalize" than the ways of the single all-powerful personal God of monotheistic theology, who tolerates so much that seems to us intolerable. Since logology makes no judgment at all about the truth or falsity of theologic doctrine, its only task is to study how, given the nature of symbolism, such modes of placement are logologically derivable from the nature of "symbolic action.")
Logologically considered, the issue may be reduced to the matter of
Myth, story, narrative makes it possible to transform this timeless relation between polar terms into a temporal sequence. That is, myth can tell of a step from either one to the other. Thus, with regard to the perfection of Heaven outside of time, the resources of narrative made it possible to carry out the implications of polar terms such as "order" and "perfection" by such stories as the revolt of Lucifer in Heaven. And the timeless nature of such polarity is maintained eternally in the unending establishment of Heaven and Hell, the one all Yes, the other all No.
Polytheistic myths didn't have the acute problems with this terministic situation that monistic theology has. Joseph Fontenrose's volume Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins (New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1959; which I use as the basis of my essay "Myth, Poetry, and Philosophy," reprinted in my Language as Symbolic Action), takes as its point of departure the myth of the combat between Apollo and Python, then extends the discussion to two main types in general. There is a late type, concerning a struggle between an "older" god and a "new" god, with the new god triumphing and founding a cult. But this is said to be derived from an earlier type, concerning a struggle between a dragon and a sky-god, with the sky-god triumphing.
In such cases, the principle of negation in polar terms can accommodate itself easily to such stories of personal combat. Also, the timeless nature of the negative in such terms can be preserved, since the vanquished combatant, though "slain," is yet somehow still surviving, like Typhon buried by Zeus beneath Sicily and fuming through Aetna, with the constant threat that he may again rise in revolt. Or the two may reign in succession, the vanquished principle taking over periodically, for a season. Or under certain conditions the opposition can be translated into terms
In transforming these resources of polytheistic myth, monistic theology encounters many serious embarrassments. And some years back, when I happened to be dealing with some of my logological speculations in a seminar at Drew University, William Empson's polemical volume Milton’s God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965) came along. Obviously, Empson had decided to play the role of a very bad boy. But what interested me in the book was the fact that its quarrels with Milton's theology would serve so well to help point up my "neutral" concerns with logology.
As judged from the logological point of view, there is no "combat" among terms. In my Rhetoric of Religion, the "Cycle of Terms Implicit in the Idea of ‘Order’ " is a set of mutually interrelated terms which simply imply one another. Though terms can confront each other as antithetically as "reward" and "punishment," nothing "happens" until they are given functions in an irreversible, personalized narrative. Terms like "disorder," "temptation," "disobedience" come to life when Adam is assigned the role of personally representing the principle of sin, and Satan is assigned the role of ultimate tempter. God has the role of setting up the Order and giving the critical negative order, so terministically necessary before a Fall can even be possible.
There is no one strict way to select the "cycle of terms" for such a chart. In general, the ones I suggest are quite characteristic of the theological tradition for the discussion of which I am offering a pragmatically designed pattern (with, behind it or within it, thoughts on the strategic interwoven difference between temporal priority and logical priority, the distinction itself being logological).
The interesting twist involves the way in which "supernatural" timelessness parallels logological timelessness, with both becoming "mythologized" (that is, translated into terms of a temporally irreversible story, along with an ambiguity whereby history can be viewed as both in time and in principle, for instance when Christ's Crucifixion is both said to have happened historically once, and to be going on still, in principle). Thus, quite as Orthodox Christian theology would condemn Arianism because it treated the Son's coming after the Father in a temporal sequence,
Looking upon both mythology and theology as involved in the problem of translating supernatural "timeless" relationships into terms of temporal sequence, logology tentatively views monotheism as in various ways struggling to "perfect" the simpler rationales of polytheism while still deeply involved in the same ultimate motivational quandaries. But logology approaches the matter this way: If you talk about local or tribal divinities, you are on the slope of polytheism. If, instead, you talk about "the divine" in general, lo! you are on the slope of monotheism. (On pp. 406–9 of my Language as Symbolic Action, in the article I have mentioned on "Myth, Poetry, and Philosophy," I list several ways in which polytheism "verbally behaved" in this situation. And I do think that on page 408, with regard to my point about "the divine," I stumbled into a real surprise, though my inadequacies as a scholar make me fear that something may have gone wrong with my Greek.)
In any case, logology quotes this passage from a letter of Saint Ambrose:
The devil had reduced the human race to a perpetual captivity, a cruel usury laid on a guilty inheritance whose debt-burdened progenitor had transmitted it to his posterity by a succession drained by usury. The Lord Jesus came; He offered His own death as a ransom for the death of all; He shed His own Blood for the blood of all. (Drawn up by His Eminence Peter Cardinal Gasparri, The Catholic Catechism, translated by Reverend Hugh Pope [New York: P. J. Kennedy & Sons], p. 291)
Logology tends to see in such statements vestiges of the transitional stage from polytheism to monotheism when the pagan gods were viewed not as mere figments of the imagination but as actually existent demons. You pay such high ransom only to someone who has terrific power over you, not to someone to whom you needed but to say, "Be gone for good," and he'd be gone for good. Logology leaves it for the scruples of theology to work out exactly why that damned nuisance has to be put up with, by an all-powerful Ordainer of all Order. Logology's only contribution to the cause is the reminder that, to our knowledge, the Law, be it Saint Paul's kind or Bentham's, is the flowering of that humanly, humanely, humanistically, and brutally inhumanely ingenious addition to wordless nature, the negative, without which a figure like Satan would
But let's sample a few of the problems that turn up with Milton's theological treatment of some logological situations:
Praise is a basic "freedom of speech." There is great exhilaration in being able to praise, since praise is on the same slope as love. But what of God, as the august recipient of praise? Is He to be a veritable glutton for flattery, with jealous signs of a Jehovah complex?
However, the principle of hierarchy so intrinsic to Order, and formally perfected in the orders of Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers, could work well in one notable respect. For thus Satan's revolt could be treated as motivation for the obedient revolt of the angels immediately under him. They were loyal to their local leader.
If God in His omnipotence lets the battle rage indecisively for quite some time whereas He could have stopped it the moment it began, there arises the question whether He is as powerful as He is supposed to be, or is cruel. Yet if Milton disposed of the problem from the start, where would the epic be? Under the conditions of polytheism the fight can go on; Fontenrose codifies the stages that can be protracted ad libitum; for both combatants are mighty powers in conflict. But under monotheism there is but one power whose word is power in the absolute, except for the one logological embarrassment that, implicit in polar terms, there is a timeless principle of negativity which not only warns against the wiles of Satan, but creates the need for Satan. The dragging out of the battle is not a theological matter. As The Iliad shows, that's the only way you can write an epic.
Empson seizes upon the notion of the "Fortunate Fall" as a way of indicting the Father on the ground that it proves Adam's Fall to have been in the cards from the start and thus to have involved the collusion of God. But as regards the logology of the case, Adam's fall was in the cards from the start in the sense that his task, as the "first" man, was to represent the principle of disobedience that was implicit in the possibility of saying no to the first "thou shalt not." The only way for the story aspect
There was a Patripassian heresy that thought of the one God as offering himself for the redemption of mankind. But the Trinitarian relation between Father and Son allows for a divine self-sacrifice without Patripassianism. Empson considers the same grammar without benefit of logology but in his bad-boy method thus: "What Milton is thinking has to be: ‘God couldn't have been satisfied by torturing himself to death, not if I know God; you could never have bought him off with that money; he could only have been satisfied by torturing someone else to death.’ "
There is quite abit more of such discussion in the pages "Words Anent Logology" I sent to the members of the class by way of a post mortem on our seminar, later published in Perspectives in Literary Symbolism, edited by Joseph Strelka (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968, pp. 72–82). But this should be enough to indicate the relation between theology and logology as revealed by Empson's somewhat naively nonlogological treatment of Milton's theological narrative.
V
A somewhat oversimplified pattern might serve best to indicate the drift of these speculations. Ideally postulate a tribe of pronouncedly homogeneous nature. Its cultural identity has developed under relatively autonomous conditions. That is, its contacts with other tribes have been minimal, so that its institutions have taken shape predominantly in response to the local material circumstances on which it depends for its livelihood.
The tribe's poetry and myths would thus emerge out of situations with which the members of the tribe had become familiar in their gradual transformation from wholly dependent speechless organisms, through successive institutionally influenced stages along the way to maturity and death, a major aspect of such institutions being the role of the tribal language in shaping the sense of individual and group identity. In this connection I would place great stress upon the notion that, though the tribe's
The closeness of the relation between poetry and mythology is clearly attested by the long tradition of Western "literary" interest in myths of the Greeks. Myths are grounded in beliefs. And beliefs are "myths" to whoever doesn't believe them. And the step from poetry to criticism takes over to the extent that the conditions under which our hypothetical tribe's body of poetry and mythology took form have become notably altered.
One can imagine various such inducements. The tribe's internal development may have introduced new problems (as with the heightening of social inequities). Climatic changes or invasion may cause migration. The tribe may become much more closely associated with some other tribe (by becoming a colony of some imperial power, for instance, or by becoming an imperial power itself). And insofar as the voice of criticism replaces the era of poetry, there is a corresponding step from mythology to theology. At least such is the obvious case with regard to both Jewish and Christian theology, which developed controversially (as monotheism versus pagan polytheism), and with tense involvement in problems of empire that radically modified the possibilities of purely internal "tribal" development. But theology as I would place it still does tie in closely with the aspect of mythology that shared the poetic sense of origins in the experiences of childhood, even to the stage when the speechless human organism was but getting the first inklings of the ways with verbal utterance.
Also, it's quite likely that a development purely internal to the medium can favor a great stress upon criticism. The incentives to criticism increase with the invention of writing, and it's doubtful whether criticism could ever realize its fullest potentialities without the acutely anatomical kind of observation that the written version of a work makes possible. At least, after our long reliance on the written or printed text, our reliance on the record has probably hobbled our memory to the point that, whereas a grounding in primitive illiteracy is in all likelihood the best condition for poetry, criticism must write things down, the better to check on all the subtleties of interrelationships among the parts of a text. Yet, although in
But what then, in sum, is "logology," in relation to poetry, criticism, mythology, theology, and the possible relation that they all have to the realm of nonsymbolic motion in which all such forms of symbolic action are empirically grounded? (That is to say, regard less of whether theology is right or wrong, it is propounded by biological organisms that can themselves propound anything only so long as they are physically alive, hence capable of motion.) Whatever a theologian may be in some supernatural realm, empirically he can't be a theologian except insofar as his symbolizings are enacted through the medium of a body—and logology begins (and also necessarily ends) with questions about his nature thus.
Logology relates to all "ologies" in asking, as its first question, "What all is going on, when someone says or reads a sentence?" There are some things going on, with relation to the specific subject matter of the sentence. And behind or beyond or within that, there are the kinds of processes and relationships that are involved in the saying or understanding of any sentence. That approach to the subject in general sets up logology's first question, which necessarily puts the logologer on the uncomfortable fringes of all the answers to all specific questions. It must start from the fact that logology's first question is a variant of the prime Socratic question, the questioning of itself, and of its relation to nature (whereby it becomes the purely technical analogue of the theologians' "grace" that "perfects" but does not "abolish" the realm of nature's speechlessness).
Even at the risk of resorting somewhat to the mythical, let's end by surveying the field thus, as it looks in terms of logology:
First, although in many respects the speculations of logology bring us much closer to behaviorism than is "naturally" the case with inquiries into the nature of the word, there is one total, unyielding opposition. Behaviorism is essentially monistic, in assuming that the difference between verbal behavior and nonverbal behavior (logology would call it a distinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion) is but a manner of degree. But logology is dualistically vowed to the assumption that we here confront a difference in kind. Hence, it puts primary stress upon
And where do such modes of duplication come from? In our nature as sheerly physiological organisms there is the bisymmetry of the body, there are the modes of reciprocating motion (systole and diastole of the heart, the rhythm of respiration, the alternations and compensatory balances of walking). And in a vague way the gist of what Newton summed up in his third Law of motion, "To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction," is experienced to the extent that an organism must sense the difference in alterity between pushing a reed and colliding with a stone.
But a whole further realm of duplication arises from the nature of discourse as a "reflection" of the nonlinguistic situations in which the human organism's prowess with language is acquired. This is the kind of duplication that shows up most obviously in the critical difference between a physical thing and its corresponding name.
Further, by the nature of language such parallels ("completed" in the relation between spring and a spring song, or between the physical process of planting and a ritual designed to accompany such a process) inevitably give rise to a vast realm of duplication due to the fact that analogy is implicit in the application of the same terms when referring to different situations—and all actual situations are different insofar as no two such situations are identical in their details. Such "idealization," at the very roots of the classifying function intrinsic to the repeated application of the same terms to different conditions (a property of speech without which no natural language could take form or be learned), itself involves an endlessly repeatable act of duplication.
This analogical aspect of language thus sets up possibilities of further development in its own right, making for the fictive range of identifications and implications and substitutions which add up to the vast complexities of the world as we know it. It becomes a realm in its own right and essentially anthropocentric, in being verbally amplified by our "isms" and "ologies" and mathematical reductions (all instances parexcellence of specifically human inventions in the real mofsymbolicaction).
Such resources can become so highly developed out of themselves, by analogical extension and the duplication of such analogies in corresponding material implements and techniques, that the process of duplication can become paradoxically reversed, as in Plato's theory of "imitation." By this twist things are said to "imitate" the "ideas" (logology would call them the "class names") which we apply to them, hence in
As viewed logologically, such "forms" are "prior" in the sense that the name for any class of objects can be viewed as "logically prior" to the particulars classed under that head. And any particular can be called an "imperfect" instance of that class name, because such a word (and its "idea") is not a thing, but a blank to be filled out by a definition, which wouldn't be a thing in that sense. Yet no particular thing could perfectly represent the definition. To take Plato's example: There is not one bed which you could point to and say, "That's bed." Nor could any of the countless other beds, variously different in their particulars from one another, and many of them not even made yet, be selected as the bed. You could say, "That's a bed, " but not just "bed" or "the bed." Incidentally, though you could thus use an indefinite article, Plato couldn't; for there is no such grammatical particle in his Greek.
That impinges upon another realm of speculation in which logology is properly much interested. Consider the scholastic formula Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu. There is nothing in the realm of understanding which did not begin in the realm of the senses. Obviously, we are there involved in the ambiguous relation between "images" and "ideas" which directly bears upon the analogical factor operating in the modes of duplication.
To that formula, Leibniz added, nisi intellectus ipse, "except the understanding itself." The strictly logological equivalent of that addition would be a concern with respects in which the given structure of a language (such as its particular grammar, or even such sheer accidental affinities as similarity in sound between particular words in a given idiom) sets up conditions intrinsic to the medium whereby we don't just think with a language, but the language can in effect think for us. Much has already been done along those lines, and much can still be done. Basically, I take it, the study of words as words in context asks us to ask how they equate with one another, how they imply one another, and how they become transformed.
There are contexts in the sense that a whole text is the context for any part of the text. There are contexts in the sense of whatever "background," historical, geographical, personal, local, or universal, might be
But now let us consider again the behaviorist angle. On the issue which I am to discuss here, don't fail to consult a truly admirable article, "Explanation, Teleology, and Operant Behaviorism: A Study of the Experimental Analysis of Purposive Behavior," by Jon D. Ringen, Philosophy of Science, 43 (1976): 223–53. Though I doubt whether I quite use it the way it was intended, it is so methodologically scrupulous a performance, its accuracy speaks for itself.
There is "operant" conditioning and there is "respondent" conditioning.Pavlov's(or Watson's) was of decided lya"respondent"sort. The experimental animal responds by salivating when you give it asniff of meat. Test its response quantitatively by checking its flow of saliva. Then, after having by repetition established the association between the sniff of meat and the ringing of a bell, ring the bell without the sniff of meat, and check on the amount of salivation as a response thus conditioned.
B. F. Skinner experimented with an additional test. Give an animal a goal, set up some simple condition whereby, if it pecks at a certain form (or color) or presses a lever, it operates a mechanism that releases a bit of food. Having been systematically starved to about four-fifths of its natural weight, it does whatever it can in the need for food. The laboratory conditions are so set up that there are few things it can do. As the result of its random motions, it learns to repeat the pressing or pecking operation that is most congruent with its "natural endowment." And conditions are so set up that this operation procures it food. The kind of instrumental "purpose" it thus acquires is called an instance of "molar" behavior. And such methods of "control" can be employed by the experimenter to teach the animal quite specialized modes of behavior, as compared with its natural "repertoire" for getting food. At the same time, of course, there is a kind of "molecular" behavior going on in the animal, the purely physiological correlates of bodily motion such as Pavlov was studying in his technique for measuring the degree of salivation with which his dogs responded to his respondent mode of conditioning.
It is my notion that logology's interest in questions of human "molar" responses would primarily involve considerations of rhetoric and legislation (as with matters of penal law and taxation). But whereas humanistic studies usually show little interest in questions of "molecular" behavior, logology must stress this subject since it bears so directly upon the possible correlations between physiological nonsymbolic motion and
When considering such mythic figures as the Worm Ouroboros, the Amphisbaena, or the world conceived as a mighty Hermaphrodite, one might plausibly derive them from designs purely internal to the resources of symbolicity. For instance, even the range of meanings in the Greek preposition amphi is enough to suggest how the thought of such aroundness and aboutness might be "mythologized" (made narrative) in the image of a creature that went both forwards and backwards. The mutuality of ways in which terms imply one another might well suggest the circular analogy of a creature with its own tail in its mouth (the design here, long before there were dictionaries, suggesting what does characterize the nature of a dictionary, as a wholly self-contained universe of discourse, a kind of "circularity" in the way all the terms "circle back upon" one another). And when the principle of polarity becomes localized in terms of the sexes, it follows as a standard resource of dialectic that such a quasi-antithesis can be "resolved" by the most obvious corresponding term for synthesis.
Logology does tentatively entertain the likelihood that such imaginings may have a grounding in physiologically still existent vestiges of our "ancestral" evolutionary past. However, even if there may happen to be such survivals from our preverbal past, and should they still be manifesting traces of themselves in some of the verbalizing animal's most eschatological myths, logology builds on the assumption that the differentiating modes of sensation as immediately experienced by us animals
By the adjective "intrinsic" here is not necessarily meant a "power" of language. The same property can as accurately be called a mere limitation of language, a limitation due to the fact that we cannot apply the same expression to two situations without to some extent introducing the principle of analogy, metaphor, "fiction" as a "creative" resource in its own right.
Logology tentatively assumes that, quite as physically grounded "hermaphroditic" tendencies are clearly indicated in many actual instances of such "synthesis," so such mythic figures as the primal worm feeding on itself may be a response to physiological conditions (prior even to our uterine stage) still vestigially within us, and acting as a source of imagery. Though one may doubt whether such possibilities may ever yield much in the way of further discoveries, I mention them simply to indicate the range of inquiry which would be involved in the study of the human animal's nonsymbolic "molecular" behavior underlying the field of symbolic action.
A more rewarding kind of inquiry along these lines might concern the possibility that the socially morbid featuring of criminality, violence, sadism, terror, and the like (many aspects of which show up in folk tales for children) may have a double origin. As a social phenomenon (thus wholly in the realm of symbolic action) the astoundingly large number of mercenaries (writers, actors, and the various kinds of experts employed in the purely technological aspects of such behavior) are obviously producing commodities that are designed to attract ideally a maximum number of viewers as a means of establishing as large a marketplace as possible where the experts in sales promotion can best recommend their clients' products.
The social morbidity of such "art" is greatly aggravated by the nature of current TV realism, in which there is no appreciable difference between a merely simulated act of violence and a real one (which would be the equivalent of saying that there is no appreciable difference between the artistic imitation of suffering in Greek tragedy and the actual brutalities witnessed by the mobs who attended the gladiatorial contests in decadent Rome).
Apologists for the profitable selling of such wares will point to the high degree of violence in, say, the greatest plays of Shakespeare. They make no mention of the fact that the quality of the diction introduces a
If one must be so scrupulously specific in keeping that distinction clear, what then of a child who watches quasi-real killings time after time, with no warnings that the simulations appeal to a child's imaginativeness in a way whereby, after a few years of such fare, that child has "been through" all those experiences. The incidents have become "moral" in the most etymologically accurate sense of the term, that is, "customary." In that medium, such modes of conduct have become established as "the norm," and the child has been "educated" to think of human relations in such terms.
Recall the case of the lawyer who recently tried to get his young defendant declared innocent because the boy had been greatly influenced by the depictions of violence on the tube. I doubt whether even a Clarence Darrow could have used that defense successfully, if only because there is such a vast investment in the depiction of violence. Yet I personally go along with those who believe that "entertainment," as so conceived, does function as a morbid kind of education. But the pressures of the market are such that the suppliers of commodities for that market must sacrifice a lot when cutting down on violence and hoppedup sex, either of which can be a substitute for the other except when attacks are directed with equal insistence against both. For any radical elimination of them both would leave a void that other forms of symbolic action are not equipped to fill.
But how far should we go when asking what is the source of such appeal in these modes of substitution, depicting "criminal Christs" whose "mission" it is to take on the burden of our guilt, suffer their imitated passions in our behalf (as is also the case of "real victims," offered for the entertainment, fascination even, I mean for that inferior species of the "tragic pleasure" we get from digesting the literal news of each day's crime and disaster)?
Might not the search for such sources of appeal lead us back to a kind of purely physiological frustration? I do not refer to ways whereby imaginary
To illustrate by an oversimplified anecdote, a spirited youth, living almost aimlessly in a modern slum, encounters kinds of frustration that a young healthy Eskimo, at a time before Western civilization had contributed so greatly to the deterioration of his tribal culture, could not have had the slightest notion of. The physicality of his purposes would have been clear. They would have been developed by traditions that also developed his ability to undergo the kinds of effort and corresponding strain indigenous to such a mode of livelihood. The conditions of his situation would also have selectively developed the physical and attitudinal resources consistent with the purposes that the needs for survival under those conditions called for.
Insofar as such an endowment was developed in answer to the "challenge" that the conditions themselves helped define, is there not a frustration of the aptitudes that are, as it were, "inborn" in the very "genetic endowment" of a species thus selectively trained, their bodies thus having had "bred into" them whatever abilities to perform are by the same token needs to so perform? After all, I am but saying that "inbred" in birds there is the ability to fly; and insofar as that ability is not given expression, they are frustrated, in their very nature "repressed."
Viewed thus, the spirited youth who becomes a "delinquent," might more accurately be thought of as seeking the "moral equivalent of war." But wars are largely social constructs, thus motivated by disorders in the realm of symbolicity; and we are here asking about a possible reduction to the realm of sheer nonsymbolic, physiological motion. The kinds of strain or conflict that are being assumed here, and that the organism's "genetic endowment" needs to "express" if it is not to be "frustrated," would be wholly in the realm of motion. One gets glimpses of such a motive in athletic efforts (now invariably corrupted from the very start by their tie-in with modes of decadent symbolicity known as professional sports). They are grounded in an asceticism of training, training
In an early book (1935; Permanence and Change, second revised edition [Los Altos, California: Hermes Publications, 1954]), I exercised considerably about a corresponding moral conflict that characterized Nietzsche's cult of tragedy, and that I related also to a salient aspect of his style, its restless hankering after "perspectives by incongruity," in the service of an Umwerthung aller Werthe. In summing things up some four decades later, I find that related speculations should be recalled. Recalling them, I might sum up the whole "logological" situation thus:
There is (1) the principle of polarity with regard to the qualitative distinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion. This is the prime source of duplication, insofar as the experiences of bodily sensation shape the materials which language draws upon as the source of its "fictions," in the realm of symbolicity. Within the realm of symbolicity itself there is (2) the kind of polarity that the negative adds to nonsymbolic nature. It itself splits into the propositional (is-is not) pair and the hortatory (do-do not) pair. In the realm of the body as a sheerly nonsymbolic physical organism there is (3) the polarity of the distinction between the need for struggle (in the effort to attain the means of livelihood) and the rewards of relaxation (when a hunger has been sated). In a highly complex social structure the resources of symbolicity are such that the sheer physiology of such a distinction becomes greatly confused by symbolic factors (property relationships, for instance). But we have tried to indicate why we assume that it can function quite paradoxically as a motive. (Leisure, for instance, can function as a mode of psychological unemployment, with twists whereby people can "make work" for themselves by "inventing" confused purposes and relationships.)
Formal symbolic structures might be reduced to three terministic relationships: equations (identifications), implications, transformations. For instance, if some particular "ism" or "ology" or personality type or location or whatever is explicitly or implicitly presented as desirable or undesirable, it would be identified with corresponding "values"—and such would be "equations." "Implications" would figure insofar as one term explicitly or implicitly involved a cycle or family of terms, as the idea of "order" implies a companion-term, "disorder," or implicit in the idea of an "act" is the idea of an "agent" who performs the act. By "transformations" would be meant what would be the "from-what," "through-what," "to-what" developments in a symbolic structure. Such
In this connection, the route from logology to theology is via a logological criticism of Plato's mythology because it assigns to his ideal forms a realm narratively prior to their mode of classification as in effect general names for worldly particulars included under those various "ideal" heads. Such a procedure would be called the "temporizing of essence," in that it does "mythologize" (that is, translate into terms of story) a verbal resource of classification that has no temporal dimension.
Since "eternity" is also a kind of nontemporality, the conditions are present whereby the "timelessness" of the supernatural realm after death (by extension involving a realm prior to all wordly existence) ambiguously overlaps upon the purely technical sense of timelessness in the logological sense of polar terms timelessly implying each other. And inasmuch as theology necessarily uses narrative terms with regard to the emergence of time out of timelessness, logology's business is to discuss such embarrassments that survive, even after theology has critically gone beyond mythology.
But looking in the other direction, whereas logology is vowed by sheer definition to be much concerned with the "molecular behavior" of the body (thereby going along radically with behaviorist inquiries), logology must insist categorically upon a polar distinction between verbal and nonverbal behavior, in contrast with the behaviorists' notion that they are there concerned with but a difference of degree. Logology's distinction between the symbolic and nonsymbolic realms is at least as absolute as any distinction between "mind" and "body," though it has a notably different way of getting there. In fact, the distinction is as basic as that between bread and the word "bread." Or as the distinction between the sea as a "mother symbol" and the sea as the physical body of saltwater it is, vastly a sloshing-around.
With regard to the logological distinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion, it makes no difference whether the human animal "thinks with language," or "thought" and "symbolicity" are identical. In either case, insofar as the speechless human organism acquires familiarity with a tribal language there arises a duality of motivational
But when I read of hermeneutic experts who congratulate themselves that the traditional Cartesian split between subject and object, thought and extension, is being avoided, I would note that there are two quite different ways of considering any such development. If Descartes's dualism is attacked as a "psychology of consciousness," it is in trouble. But we should not let any reservations regarding the Cartesian formulation of the dualism serve as a device by implication to discredit the dualistic principle itself. For if we do so, we are in effect implying monism either by smuggling in undeclared vestiges of idealism, or by willy-nilly subscribing to the "materialistic" oversimplification of behaviorism. But logology's "dramatistic" (or dialectical) view of language as symbolic action is in its very essence realistic—and such a view is necessarily dualistic, since man is the typically symbol-using animal, and the linguistic invention of the negative is enough in itself to build a dualism, even beyond the other two polarities we also included in our summation.
At least as a tentative working principle, logology holds to the notion that the relations between poetry and mythology (and thence via criticism and writing to theology, plus wholly secular offshoots or disrelated growths, if there are such) must in all likelihood embody "imaginative" traces intrinsic to any symbolic (that is, human) medium in its own right, along with traces of the formative experiences undergone while the human animal is gradually acquiring familiarity with the medium (such as its initiation in the ways of a tribal language). And such traces of the inceptive are all the more likely to be still with us since experiences of that sort are not a matter merely of a human organism's infantile past, but are ever born anew. For language is innately innovative. No one could go on making his words mean the same, even if he expended his best efforts to make them stay put.
NOTES
This essay was first published in The Kenyon Review 1 (winter 1979): 151–85.
1. Any such possible relationship between personal tensions and their use as material for intense linguistic activity (to be analyzed and admired in its own terms) might figure thus. But there are special, purely logological, incentives for such a relationship between poetic activity and psychological passion. On various occasions (particularly the essay, "The First Three Chapters of Genesis," in my Rhetoric of Religion [1961]) I have discussed the process whereby the effort to characterize conditions now turns into a "story" of "origins" then, often a
Incidentally, with regard to Keats's ode (which I take to envision a kind of "art-heaven," a theological heaven romantically aestheticized), by my interpretation, the transforming of his disease's bodily symptoms (fever and chill) into imaginal counterparts within the conditions of the fiction would be a poetic embodiment of the orthodox religious promise that the true believers would regain their "purified" bodies in heaven. That is, the symptoms would have their "transcendent" counterparts in poetic diction as indicated in my analysis.
I review these various considerations because the discussion of them offers a good opportunity to at least indicate "humanistic" concern (the admonition to "know ourselves") that I take to be involved in the logological distinction between the human organism's realm of nonsymbolic motion and the kind of "self" it "naturally" acquires through its protracted, informative traffic with the (learned) public modes of symbolic action.
9. Symbolism as a Realistic Mode
"De-Psychoanalyzing" Logologized
1979
The main interest of this essay is in Kenneth Burke's recapitulation of the place of entelechy in his work from Philosophy of Literary Form (1941) through Dramatism and Development (1972) in the "Addendum." Other points of interest are his various definitions of what he means by "logological realism" and his often-repeated distinction between archetype and entelechy. The subtitle describes the logologizing process that Burke kept performing in so many of these late essays, translating the work of other thinkers (Plato, Marx, Freud, Jung, Saint Augustine) into logological terms. There is a certain amount of repetition in these late essays because Burke likes to use the same examples over and over again, and the logologizing process is itself somewhat repetitive because the main logological coordinates and assertions about language do not change.
The distinction Burke makes between "timeless" and historically "uncaused" recurrent archetypes and Burkean "entelechy" is crucial for logology and, going back a ways, for his dramatistic poetics. Entelechy, as Burke uses it, is a function of language; it is the ability, or the possibility, of developing a terministic set to the end of the line, or "to perfection." God is one example, but so is the devil. Tragedy, for example, is the perfect cathartic form of drama because it has the most perfect tragic protagonists and victims. At a more mundane level, we can linguistically arrive at the idea of "perfect" bread or the "perfect storm," or the "mother of all battles." Though none of these "perfections" could possibly exist. Burke's specialty is verbal texts. One of his best examples of "entelechial" analysis and thinking can be found in his essay "The First Three Chapters of Genesis" in The Rhetoric of Religion (1961), especially in the section devoted to the "cycle of terms implicit in the Idea of ‘Order’ " (see the chart on page 184).
Burke was always an extremely careful and accurate entitler. Symbolism is a realistic mode because language (which is what symbolism means here) is used to describe and discuss real events and things in the real world. Even a text is realistically what it is: a verbal structure in which the words are facts that can be empirically studied. A text, as such, is as realistic as any other physical thing or object. The subtitle " ‘De-Psychoanalyzing’ Logologized" is a little more complicated. Burke tended to argue with a great many major thinkers in his defense of logology. These included Freud, Jung, B. F. Skinner, N. O. Brown, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, René Wellek, Fredric Jameson, J. Hillis Miller, Cleanth Brooks, Wayne Booth, and many others. In "De-Psychoanalyzing" psychoanalysis, which Burke considers too idealistic, he translates it into terms of logological realism. Psychoanalysis, in whichever specific form it is practiced, is always bound to an idealized cycle of terms, a nomenclature. Burke wants a theory of the mind and body (of the self) that is more materialistic and realistic than
― 211 ―the idealized view of the self found in most psychoanalysis. "Psychoanalytic approaches to symbolic activity are clearly a form of idealistic social science" (3). "Logological realism" is the key term here, which Burke defines in a variety of ways throughout the essay.This is the last of the four logology essays in this group. However, many other essays in this collection also deal extensively with Burke's logological views and, especially, with the connections he works out between logology and technology. See, for example, "Why Satire, With a Plan for Writing One," "Towards Looking Back," and especially "Variations on ‘Providence.’ " Burke also discusses logology at some length in the interview "Counter-Gridlock."
I
On reading the very suggestive article by Anthony Burton in your fall 1978 issue, "Beauty and the Beast: A Critique of Psychoanalytic Approaches to the Fairy Tale," I was moved to make some comments which, I hope, might in turn call forth further comments. We should probably begin with the term "symbolism."
In my "dramatistic" view of "language as symbolic action," the most general meaning of the term "symbolism" is "communication in terms of a symbol-system." That is, in the United States we speak an "American" brand of English—and my particular application of that langue in this article is an instance of symbolic action. But Freud uses the term "symbolic action" in a more specialized sense, as synonymous with "symptomatic action." The "symbols" of a dream are "symptomatic" of psychological perturbations in the "psyche" of the dreamer. Aristotle's term "imitation," as applied to tragedy, would involve another aspect of the "symbolic" in the sense that an Athenian tragedy was but a symbolic enactment of suffering, in contrast with the use of "real" victims in the gladiatorial contests of the Roman theater. Any Marxist theory of the distinction between "bourgeois cosmopolitanism" and "socialist realism" would also exemplify a concern with particular dialects of symbolism within the realm of symbolism in general. And so on, including for instance the "four-fold" scheme of mediaeval hermeneutics.
When we are dealing with psychoanalytic modes of interpretation such as Freud's and Jung's, the overall "logological" fact is that we are necessarily involved in theories of analogy. The manifest content of some symbolic expression is the analogue of a latent content, the nature of which is defined in accordance with the particular theories of motivation and interpretation propounded by the given psychological nomenclature.
Then, in reference to a work by Joseph L. Henderson, a Jungian psychologist who has written on "Beauty and the Beast," Burton says:
Initiation, he claims, is an archetype. But he applies the term broadly throughout his book, Thresholds of Initiation, to trials of strength, rites of vision, and many other cultural activities. …He brings the Hopi snake youth myth, the Beauty and the Beast tale, and the Dionysius cult together with many other events as examples of one subcategory of this one archetype. Treated ahistorically in this way, the construct is too vague to be useful. These are little more than resemblances. Marriage is also claimed to be an archetype, and includes motherhood. But marriage takes many forms. … What is to be made archetypally of polyandry, polygyny, kibbutzim, communal and single mother arrangements, or of the situation in which the mother's brother normally acts as the cultural father? To subsume all these under one archetype does not seem realistic. Henderson seems oblivious to the problem. (255–56)
Accordingly, Burton asks: "When is an archetype not an archetype?" I can't promise to "solve" that problem. But it might serve as a good point of departure in the direction of questions about the relation between symbolism in general ("logology") and the role of analogy in the psychoanalytic study of mythology.
II
First, the resources of analogy being what they are, we could say "ahistorically" that any such terms as "archetype" or "initiation" are at a high level of generalization. Any pronounced transformation from one state to another could be conceivably classifiable under the head of "initiation," particularly if there were some rite that formally commemorated the development or event as a change of social status. Burton complains that such laxity with "archetypes" is not "realistic." But though I
Let's see how things look if, using the same most helpfully accurate essay as our point of departure, we proceed with the help of quotations from Burton's able statement of the case.
The final pages of his paper sharpen the issue perfectly. There, on the subject of "Psychoanalysis and Materialism," he makes it quite clear how mere matters of nomenclature ("Logological" considerations) line up, if we accept the rules that are implicit in reduction to a choice between idealism and materialism (each of which, after its own fashion, calls for the adjective "dialectical").
Burton does a neat job presenting these two terministic operations. Hegel's idealistic version dug so deep that even Lenin, on going back over the whole subject, advised Marxists to study Hegel, as a useful step along the way. And in early books, Marx was classed as a "neo-Hegelian." The difference, as Burton's trim analysis makes clear (hence, since I am referring to it, I can make further cuts), is reducible to two theories of origin. Namely:
In Hegel, Nature and History are the unfolding of the Absolute Idea through time. This is a metaphysical analogue of the theological view of a Divine Spirit made incarnate. And "ideas" are conceived as derived by that distinguished descent, being made manifest in the logic of history, which develops as a series of responses to their influence.
In Marx the provenance gets reversed, and ideas arise as a reflection
Psychoanalytic approaches to symbolic activity are clearly a form of idealistic social science. … Symbols are pan-human and universal through time and space. They are not seriously modified by cultural factors, and began somewhere in archaic time. They function in the psyche according to principles that are intended to hold for people everywhere—Oedipal conflict or archetype, in the two cases given here. Such systems of explanation are idealist in that they are sets of ideas. Symbols, Archaic Time, the Psyche, the Unconscious, Oedipality, Arche types, are all mental constructs. … Their most substantial claim to value is that they have ameliorative effects when used with patients. (257)
But is our only choice that between idealism and materialism? Might there be room for a brand of realism that doesn't quite go along with either of those opposing metaphysical nomenclatures, yet finds much of great value in both? Let's see what might be said along those lines.
III
In a supplement to C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards's book, The Meaning of Meaning, the anthropologist Malinowski applies the term "symbolic action" to a quite realistic situation. A group of illiterate natives are engaged in a cooperative act of catching fish. As part of the process they use language, in calling back and forth to one another—and whatever may be their involvement in "myths," their group coordination by the use of symbolism in this enterprise is about as realistic an enterprise as you could ask for. Every utterance is related to the problem at hand, the mutual interchange of instructions for carrying out an act which could have only been performed much less efficiently, if at all, without the aid of symbolism; that is, the vocabulary of their tribal idiom.
Any such symbolic resources are necessarily learned in "contexts of situation" that are themselves outside the realm of symbolism as such. Malinowski also touches upon symbolic structures of a quite different nature (books, for instance, in which the internal relationships among the terms do not have any such direct bearing upon the "context of situation"
Even Saint Augustine, who, of course, believed that we are born in the image of God, offered purely realistic speculations as to how, as an infant, he learned language by hearing words spoken in nonverbal contexts of situation, though that wasn't his name for them. Adam and Eve were the only human parents who began with linguistic competence (and in the lingua Adamica even, for the development of which Adam was given a major assignment in taxonomy). Similarly, though Jeremy Bentham says that our "fictions" for psychological and ethical terms are borrowed analogically from the strictly material realm, Emerson agrees with him, plus a transcendental twist whereby God puts nature here as a kind of raw material for us to work from when etymologically perfecting our terminology of Spirit.
But in any case, we must guard against a "genetic fallacy," a "fallacy of origins," when considering the role of "language as a mode of symbolic action." Regardless of whether it is a reflection of Hegel's "Absolute Idea," also called the "World Spirit" (his idealistically metaphysical analogues of "God") or but an etymological development from words for sensations extended analogically in accordance with Bentham's theory of fictions, in either case, once arisen, it has a nature of its own, with corresponding powers.
There is a passage in Burton's article stating that technology could be viewed either along Hegelian lines as "from heaven to earth," or along Marxist lines as "from earth to heaven" (257), though Marxists might complain unless you put it more strictly: from substructure to superstructure. But the kind of "logological realism" that I am trying to put in a word for would be "ahistorical" in the sense that, whether "ideas" (or language in general) be derived from an idealistic metaphysical background or from a materialistic one, there are many notable realistic observations that we can make about the resourcefulness of symbolsystems, as innovative or "creative" forces, in their own right.
We should also remember that, although orthodox theology's view of Adam as created in God's image embodies the provenance "from heaven to earth," the account of the Creation is intrinsically interwoven with the story of the Fall; hence expulsion from the Garden sets up ample conditions for quite "tough-minded" vocabularies of human motivation. (La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, for instance, or John Mandeville's "Fable of the Bees" could fit perfectly with theological views, as portraits of human
However, a purely secular, realistic analysis of motives should be "neutral," rather than embodying a "materialistic debunking" of "idealistic" pretensions. Marxism is fluctuant in this regard, owing to the fact that the rationale of the Marxist dialectic allows for a shifting point of view whereby, for instance, the bourgeoisie can be hailed as "emancipators" in the struggles against feudalism, yet can also be subjected to ingenious scorn as foes of socialism—and often these attacks can profit rhetorically by quasi-theological accents. In The Communist Manifesto, for instance (a text to match with the Sermon on the Mount as a rock-bottom "theory of history"), there are some sizzling passages which seem to "structure" the topics of persuasion thus: The bourgeois period destroyed the highly "personal" aspect of the terms for group relationships under feudalism. "In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."
The several following paragraphs that "amplify" this statement are, beyond all question, a rhetorical marvel. First (thanks to the persuasive elements that are implicit in the Marxist dialectic, so well designed for "pointing the arrows" of our expectations), it gives credit to capitalism for having so effectively introduced the revolutionary policies which Marxist socialism is but continuing. (Incidentally, much of the "revolutionary," or "radically innovative" motivation that the manifesto attributes to the bourgeoisie's tie-in with technology may be largely due to the nature of technology itself, whatever kind of political system may, after its fashion, be aiming to profit by the advantages of technology with a hoped-for minimum of its troublous "side effects.")
In any case, to the extent that the idea of a socialist "revolution" was in bad repute among the bourgeoisie, the Marxist dialectic could give the bourgeoisie "credit" for introducing the revolutionary principle. For there certainly was no need that the Marxist text run counter to bourgeois usage, in view of standard references to our "revolution," the French, and the term "Industrial Revolution."
The ingenious rhetorical twist is that the manifesto contrived paradoxically to excoriate the bourgeois as a kind of relentless personality in the very act of eliminating personal relations (such as the feudal rationale had clung to). In effect, whatever credit might go to the bourgeoisie for unmasking the element of illusion that Marxism attributed to feudalism's personalistic view of economic relationships was, at this point,
Also, the flat distinction between idealism and materialism gets modified by the official cult of "socialist realism," which in effect proclaims itself to be as personalistic as the religiously infused (hence by Marxist tests, "illusory") rationale of feudalism had been. And understandably a realism of this sort can be so attuned as to become the propagandistic handmaiden of dialectical materialism's party politics, in contrast with the outright materialistic debunking of politics outside the party.
IV
Whereupon it is now time for us to make clear what we mean by "logological realism." The most direct way into the subject, as here approached through Burton's essay, is on page 255: "When is an archetype not an archetype?"
I couldn't offer a blanket answer to that question; but with regard to Freud's Oedipal "archetype," logological realism would answer promptly, "An archetype is not an archetype when it's an entelechy."
This would involve a distinction between Platonic archetypes as idealistic and Aristotelian entelechies as realistic. Since my Grammar of Motives (1945), I have touched on this matter in many ways—particularly in my essay on "The First Three Chapters of Genesis" (reprinted in my Rhetoric of Religion, 1961) and in "Archetype and Entelechy" (the second of two talks printed in a volume, Dramatism and Development, 1972). Here I must try merely to give the gist of my position.
There are two kinds of priority: logical (as per the syllogistic design: first premise/second premise/conclusion) and temporal (yesterday/ today/tomorrow). We can also say that the term for a class of objects is "logically prior" to any and all of the particulars classifiable under that head. In both Greek and Latin, the same words mean "beginning" in both senses. Thus, in Latin, the word principium means "principle" as in the expression "the first principles of science." But with regard to the opening words of Genesis, "In the beginning," the Latin is in principio. Similarly, the plural of the Greek word arché matches the Latin when referring to "the first principles of a science." The Gospel of John begins en arché—and the temporal meaning shows clearly in such words as "archives" or "archaeology."
"Essence" is a word for what something is. In my Grammar of Motives, my expression "the temporizing of essence" refers to ways whereby the view of what something is gets presented in terms of the thing's origin, what it was or came from. There is a vulgar usage that reveals the process most clearly. If A considers B an essentially loathsome fellow, he can spontaneously say so in quasi-narrative terms by calling B a bastard or a son of a bitch. In effect, A defines B's nature now in terms of his provenance. Fundamentalists resented Darwinian evolutionism because, by their style, the theory of our "descent" from apes was equivalent to calling us apes—and at times Darwin became so emphatic in distinguishing simply between the "natural" and the "supernatural" that the important logological distinction between "dumb" animals and the human prowess with "symbol systems" got obscured. Logology here would introduce reference to the "fallacy of origins."
Genesis, as a book of beginnings, features the tactics of temporal priority. Narrative (story, mythos) being a more primitive form of discourse than philosophy, the Bible doesn't begin with (say) a logological analysis of the proposition that "implicit in the idea of a social order there is the idea of possible disobedience to that order." But that's the gist of what it says, in its particular narrative way. It shows God making a creature in his image, in the most perfect surroundings imaginable. It adds a Law, whereby disobedience is made possible. And this law, propounded by the first and foremost authority, is sinned against by our first ancestor. So, all told, the Fall was implicit in the Creation, and proneness to temptation is of our very essence, since we "inherited" such "original sin" from the "first" man "in time." By the Law we are "tempted in principle," since the Law made temptation possible. One gets glimpses of this exquisite ambiguity in the Lord's Prayer, where "Lead us not into temptation" means rather, "Put us not to the test." And so on.
Plato's archetypes, viewed in terms of logological realism, are derived thus: The word for a class of objects can be treated as "prior" to any particulars classified under that head. There is a sense in which it can even be temporally prior. For instance, if you consult the definition of the word "table," you'll note that it encompasses a class of objects countless numbers of which have not even yet been produced. Also, there is no one particular table which you could point to and say, "That is ‘table.’ " For any particular table will have details that distinguish it from every other table. But each table would in its way be an "imitation" of the "ideal form" as stated in the definition, which would be the "archetype" that was "prior" to the lot, many instances of which are not even yet in existence. The
V
And now to the Freudian "archetype" of the "primal crime" committed in "prehistory," and so essentially "originating" that the results of it still survive, bequeathed to us in the tensions of the modern family. Anthropologists complained that they found no evidence of any such event. But Freud felt that he needed it as a postulate for his theory.
Logological realism could have shown him how his problem could have been "solved" by the simple expedient of turning from thoughts of Platonic archetypes to thoughts of Aristotelian entelechies. Aristotle uses the term "entelechy" to designate the efforts of each thing to fulfill the potentialities of its kind—a fish aiming to be perfectly or thoroughly a fish, a tree to evolve in keeping with its nature as a tree.
Logological realism would restrict this notion to an incentive in language; namely, "the tracking down of implications." The nomenclature of physics, for instance, suggests certain possibilities of further development. The nomenclature of psychology suggests possibilities in another direction, economics in another, politics in another. Henry James's prefaces often tell of some likely turn he proceeded to develop, by going from step to step. I call this an "entelechial" aspect of symbolic motivation. It involves all sorts of strivings after "perfection," whereas Freud had denied "perfection" as a motive.
Cutting many corners, saying here only enough to convey the gist, I'd have Freud say:
Thinking of representative family tensions in the light of the entelechial principle (replacing psychological idealism by concepts of logological realism), I'd state the situation thus: The representative tensions of the family as I have studied it would come to a "perfect fulfillment" if the young males banded together against the father, slew him, and took over the women, with corresponding psychological results such-and-such.
As so considered, the psychoanalytic nomenclature has no need to postulate that such a "culmination" ever did happen or ever will happen. It is simply an instance of "carrying things to the end of the line," "tracking down implications to the point where we don't need to distinguish
Freud's view of human relations is in its very essence highly "dramatistic." He was in effect conceiving of the "perfect family drama" to express the tensions as he sized them up. But owing to the ever recurrent ambiguity whereby statements of "essence" can get phrased in terms of an "archaic" (mythic) past, despite his great symbolic shrewdness, he hypothesized an actual event where no actuality of any sort (nothing but symbolism) was needed.
ADDENDUM TO SYMBOLISM AS A REALISTIC MODE
Perhaps the handiest way into my proposed adaptation of Aristotle's term "entelechy" (to name a generative principle that is usually classed under the head of "archetype") is by some references in my Philosophy of Literary Form (1941) where I hadn't yet quite got to it. I had been working with the two notions of self-expression and communication, and I ran into the need for a third term, thus:
He would change the rules, and burn out temptation by efficient excess of it. He would start … on an uncompromising journey "to the end of the line." (38n)
Books that take us to the end of the line … that would seek Nirvana by burning something out. (70)
Note a "serial" quality in the "to the end of the line" mode—a kind of "withinness of withinness."… One may get the pattern in Coleridge's line, "Snow-drop on a tuft of snow." And in Moby Dick there is an especially "efficient" passage of this sort, prophetically announcing the quality of Ishmael's voyage: after walking through "blocks of blackness," he enters a door where he stumbles over an ash box; going on, he finds that he is in a Negro church, and "the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness." (88)
There are related references on pages 3, 86, 118, 161, 166.
In my Grammar of Motives (430–40), the notion is further developed, though without reference to either "archetype" or "entelechy." There, with regard to "the temporizing of essence," I specifically criticize Freud's hypothesis of a primal "horde ruled over despotically by a powerful male." And my criticism is built around my point about the ambiguous relation between terms for logical and temporal priority whereby statements about how something essentially is can be phrased narratively
Though anthropologists said that they found no evidence of any such prehistoric situation, Freud still clung to it, albeit apologetically: "I think it is creditable to such a hypothesis if it proves able to bring coherence and understanding into more and more new regions." He "needed" the story only because he was spontaneously characterizing the essence of a situation now in terms of temporal priority. And if the "essence" of family tensions now must be stated in such quasi-evolutionary terms (of an analogically imputed prehistoric past) then "whatever doubts one might cast upon the pattern of the primal horde as an existent, he needed the concept as a term in his description of the family essence."
I was getting close to the out-and-out distinction between archetype and entelechy when, in the next paragraph I referred to Plato's Meno in which the principles of knowledge are presented as innate in us, and "remembered from a past existence." The section next develops at some length an analysis of Ibsen's Peer Gynt as a narrative form in which essential motives are properly presented in terms of temporal priority (as, I could have added, is similarly the case with Proust's Remembrance of Things Past).
My Rhetoric of Motives (1961) moves things farther along by closing on a summarizing reference to
the rhetorical and dialectic symmetry of the Aristotelian metaphysics whereby all classes of beings are hierarchally arranged in a chain or ladder or pyramid of mounting worth, each kind striving toward the perfection of its kind, and so towards the kind next above it, while the strivings of the entire series head in God as the beloved cynosure and sinecure, the end of all desire.
As "logologically" adapted, "God" becomes the overall title of titles for any system (as "dialectical materialism" might be deemed the "godterm" of Marxist atheism).
And "perfection" undergoes a transformation of this sort: By "perfection" is meant the way in which the unfoldings of a terminology are in effect the "strivings" to the end of the line. Thus, I could include in my definition of the human, symbol-using animal the clause "rotten with perfection," having in mind the thought that there can be "perfect" fools and "perfect" stinkers, and so on—as with Hitler's "vision of perfection" whereby he "idealized" the Jew, imputing to his chosen victim every vice connected with the problem at hand, or more grandly, every vice (and in particular whatever vices his followers might suspect in one another, were
To revise is, in one sense or another, to be aiming at perfection. And to reject revision is to fear lest a "primal" perfection already there in essence will get lost. I also touched upon the fact that, given the dramatizing possibilities of language, a statement such as "I don't like you" could be "perfected" by translation into a statement such as "I could kill you." And a dream might thus "perfect" the judgment by dreaming of you as dead. (But I am here developing further the statement in the text.)
In my Rhetoric of Religion the issues so come together that I can here but indicate the angles. My essay on "The First Three Chapters of Genesis" is designed to show how, in terms of story (narrative, temporal priority) the account of the integral relation between the Creation and the Fall is a "mythic" way of saying that the principle of disobedience is implicit in the nature of Order, which comes to a focus in the need for Law, and the Law "makes sin possible." (Hence the "first" man could say No to the first thou-shalt-not. And you must admit that that is a wholly temporal way of showing how the principle of negation presents the possibility of being negated.)
On page 312 I discuss the "principle of perfection" in the idea of Hell.
In my Sixth Analogy (25 ff), on the subject of the Trinity. I discuss the ambiguities of the difference between logical and temporal priority by noting how, though the Father is "first," then the Son, it was deemed a heresy to conceive of such succession in terms of temporal sequence.
On page 184, I offer a "Cycle of Terms Implicit in the Idea of Order." The terms as such imply one another without any temporal dimension. That is, the term "Order" implies the term "Disorder," and vice versa. But in narrative accounts, the story can go from a state of Order to a state of Disorder, or vice versa. The term "Order" implies such terms as "Obedience" or "Disobedience" to the Order. But in the corresponding story, they are related in a temporally irreversible sequence, as the First Authority sets up the Order, then gives the Negative Command that makes Disobedience possible, and so on.
An explicit reference to "entelechy" and the "logic of perfection" is on page 300.
The head-on discussion is the article on "Archetype and Entelechy," the second of two talks published under the title of Dramatism and Development
For all Freud's emphasis on the fatherkill, it's worth remembering that the prime instance of the sacrificial motive in the Old Testament is the story of Abraham's pious willingness to sacrifice Isaac. And the entire logic of the New Testament is built about the story of a divine father who deliberately sent his son on a mission to be crucified.
I take it that Aristotle is giving us "the recipe for perfect victimage," or rather the "perfect imitated victim"—"and by ‘entelechy’ I refer to such use of symbolic resources that the potentialities can be said to attain their perfect fulfillment." Though he does discuss the earlier forms out of which tragedy developed, his emphasis is upon not its origins but on its modes of completion.
But Freud (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1922) had called upon us "to abandon our belief that in man there dwells an impulse towards perfection, which has brought him to his present heights of intellectual prowess and sublimation." And a little later he said, "The repressive instinct never ceases to strive after its complete satisfaction." I argue that these two sentences are mutually contradictory. For what could more clearly represent an "impulse to perfection" than "striving" after "complete satisfaction"?
Freud proposes to substitute what he calls a "repetition compulsion," or "destiny compulsion," designations for a psychopathic tendency to relive some prior traumatic situation by so confronting a totally different set of later circumstance that they are interpreted by the sufferer in terms of the original painfully formative situation. While not disputing the likelihood of such a tendency, I proposed "to consider how it looks, as viewed in the light of an ‘entelechial’ principle having wider functions than the manifestations with which Freud is here concerned." And I stated the case thus:
Is not the sufferer exerting almost superhuman efforts in the attempt to give his life a certain form, so shaping his relations to people in later years that they will conform perfectly to an emotional or psychological pattern already established in some earlier formative situation? What more thorough illustration could one want of a drive to make one's life "perfect," despite the fact that such efforts at perfection might cause the unconscious striver great suffering?
I but proposed to widen the concept of perfection as I have already explained. And I develop the notion that an early "traumatic" experience might lead one to see life in those terms. Accordingly one might so interpret a later situation that it was like the older situation over again. And this process "would be ‘entelechial’ or ‘perfectionist’ in the ironic sense of the term, insofar as the sufferer was in effect striving to impose a ‘perfect’ form by using the key terms of his formative wound as a paradigm."
I then discuss in effect how Freud psychiatrically reversed this process by imagining the kind of outbursts that would "perfectly" express family tensions as he sees them. But owing to the ambiguities whereby essential situations can be expressed in terms of quasitemporal priority, he presents this entelechial symbolizing of fulfillment as the derivative of an archetypal situation that actually happened in the "archaic" past.
I discuss several other aspects of the case, all involving the notion that the "entelechial" motive, the goad to try "perfecting" symbolic structures by "tracking down implications to the end of the line," is a kind of formal compulsion intrinsic to mankind's involvement in the resources of symbolic action. And often by the "temporizing of essence," an overstress upon the term "archetype" leads to talk of the "archaic" or "primordial" where the real issue, as viewed "logologically," involves but an "entelechial" perfecting of symbol-systems.
Incidentally, the entelechial principle itself can lead to a temporizing in the other direction. For instance, consider two "theories of history" such as The Sermon on the Mount and The Communist Manifesto. Both are perfect patterns of fulfillment, so far as matters of sheer logological analysis are concerned. Both are so essentially entelechial in their structure that both are stories of a perfecting process.
Though my book Language as Symbolic Action (1966) has very many passages that fall under the head of entelechy or perfection, there are no such entries in the index. Here are a few: 19–27, 54–55, 69–74, 145, 153–56, 160–62, 361, 384–85. The pages on Poe deal with the
NOTES
This essay originally appeared in the Psychocultural Review 3 (winter 1979): 25–37.