approach must cope with the great threat to student interest that goes with such a concern. However, as contrasted with earlier modes of scholastic regimentation, it says no with a difference. It says no by studying “no,” by trying systematically to discover just how vast a domain the principle of negativity does actually govern, despite our assumptions to the contrary. Nor is such an investigation undertaken purely in the hope that, by such insight, one may be better qualified to emancipate one’s self from the “reign of no.” One must take it for granted that negativity of some sort is inevitable to social order, as conceived and constructed by an inveterately symbol-using species. And one must remember that the “negatives” of property and propriety are very “positive” in the sense that they affirm the given society’s co-operative norms. Negatives shared in common can be like wealth shared in common.
It is not for us a question whether man is naturally good or naturally depraved; it is simply a question of realizing that, as animality in general comprises a set of positive needs, appetites, and gratifications (ultimately reducible to terms of material motion), so the distinctive trait of man, his way with symbols, or languages, centers in his ability to use the negative of “conscience,” a symbolically guided ability that is also interwoven with the thou-shalt-not’s, or no-trespassing, of property.
Curriculum Organization
To guide our search, we keep in mind a curricular distribution of this sort:
First, there are the sciences of motion, such as physics, mechanics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, mineralogy, oceanography. Though the building of such disciplines is in the realm of symbolic action, their subject matter is exclusively the realm of nonsymbolic motion, except in so far as they must criticize their own terminology.
The biological sciences would also fall under the heading of motion, though less absolutely. One may argue that there are the rudiments of symbolism in all living organisms, as attested by experiments with “conditioning” and “unconditioning,” alterations of behavior which might be classed as the lowest kind of “learning,” or “interpretation.” But though one might possibly contend that there are respects in which nonhuman animals could be said to “read the signs,” no one, within our present range of knowledge at least, considers any of these species “typically language-using, or symbol-using.”
Recent studies of the motions of bees and ants would seem to indicate that these species have a highly organized code of signals whereby individuals can communicate precise information to one another. So it is remotely conceivable that eventually investigators may “crack” the expressiveness of animal gestures sufficiently to find even the rudiments of a grammar in the ways whereby dumb animals behavioristically influence one another by the use of posture and sound to convey the sheerly “motive” equivalents of “meaning.”
In any case, we could still propose a way of distinguishing “symbolic action proper” from what we might call “sign-affected motion.” Symbolic action proper is attested by a kind of “second-level” possibility. There is a sense, for instance, in which monkeys could be said to use tools as with situations wherein, if two sticks are so constructed that the end of one can be inserted into the end of the other to make a longer stick, the monkeys can learn this operation and apply it to procure something that was beyond the reach of either stick singly. We might call such behavior the rudimentary “inventing of a tool.” Yet we should not expect the monkeys to go a step farther and construct the device that made the two sticks joinable. That is, they do not manifest the rudiments of such “second-level” behavior as the making of tools for the making of tools. And human intelligence is marked by this second-level kind of activity, which we dramatistically attribute to the kind of intelligence implied in the ability to use language. For language readily uses not only signs but also signs about signs, as general words can be used to sum up a set of particular words, or as the written word “table” can be a sign for the spoken word, which in turn is a sign for the thing itself, or as we can talk about talk, a glory that attains its somewhat unwieldy flowering in a critic’s critical critique of the criticism of criticism.
Empirically and experimentally, at least, that would be our basis of distinction, until or unless further insight discloses the need for different dividing lines. And in view of the respects in which colonies of ants and bees are like burlesques of human social orders, presenting a set of motions that are crudely analogous to the actions and passions of a political community, we think it significant that these species seem to be the ones closest to being capable of human language. Presumably, such complex technology-like regimentation is possible only to a species capable of signalling fairly precise information or instruction.
Though all action involves motion, we may next make a distinction between practical and symbolic action (each of which requires a mediatory ground of motion). Practical action would be ethical (the doing of good), political (the wielding and obeying of authority), economic (the construction and operation of utilities, or powers). To say as much, however, is to realize that the practical realm is strongly infused by the symbolic element (since ideas of goodness, right, and expediency so obviously play a part in these practical acts). Yet in extreme cases at least, there is conceivable a clear distinction between practical and symbolic activity. It is a practical act to get in out of the rain, and a symbolic act to write a poem about getting in out of the rain; it is a practical act to eat, and a symbolic act to speak of eating.
On the symbolic side of our alignment, we would make a further distinction, between the “artificial” and the “neurotic.” A poem would be an “artificial” symbolic act; and so likewise with a philosophy or scientific theory. While pure theory would be on the symbolic side of our chart, the various applied sciences would fall on the practical side, though books about them would be but symbolic artifice. Historiography would thus be an aspect of artificial symbolic action, for however real the man Napoleon may have been, his place in a history or a biography is that of one symbol among others. He is a word.
Rhetoric would likewise be artificial symbolic action. Aristotle calls it a “counterpart of dialectic,” thus putting it in the realm of sheer words. But its use for ethical, political, and economic purposes also brings it close to the practical side. For example, Longinus’s On the Sublime deals largely with examples from oratory that was originally designed for a practical end but, long after the practical occasion had passed, was “appreciated” by him purely a: poetry, because of its beauty or “imagination” as a robust symbolic exercising to be enjoyed and admired by readers in and for itself.
The other aspect of the purely symbolic, the “neurotic,” might be subdivided into a distinction between those pathological conditions wherein the sufferer is still within bounds of communication and pathological conditions beyond communication. The latter kind (as with complete schizophrenia) might seem almost like a return to sheer motion, as though the sufferer had become but a vegetable; yet indications are that purely symbolic activity may here have attained a “simplicity” and “perfection” of inner consistency not possible to a symbol-system under normal conditions. Within communication would be the various partial “mental” disorders, high among which would also be the realm of “psychogenic illnesses,” wherein the motions of the body have been radically disturbed by the passions that go with disorders of linguistic action. The artificial symbolic action of a poem becomes symbolic action of the neurotic sort in so far as the poem reflects the poet’s attempts by purely symbolic means (by “beauties of the imagination”) to solve problems that require practical solutions (ethical, political, economic).
But as soon as one stops to think how readily the artifice of a poem’s symbolic action takes on neurotic ingredients, one may congratulate one’s self that one’s own favorite poets do not thus succumb; or one may congratulate one’s self that one is not a poet but a “practical man of action.” A linguistic approach to the study of human relations, on the other hand, would suggest rather the possibility that we are “poets all.” Maybe, then, with a typically symbol-using creature, no solution of his difficulties but a perfectly symbolic one
