unreasonable teacher in a grade school can serve as an object-lesson more effective than precepts for teaching students how not to be unreasonable. Nothing is more unforeseeable than the fate of a doctrine at the hands of its disciples.
There is a sense in which the study of man as symbol-using animal can be tied to as many different local faiths as can the view that there is or is not a personal God. The analysis of language quickly teaches us the importance of combinations. A thinker can start with an unpromising term but can surround it with good ones, while another person can start with an excellent term and surround it very dismally indeed.
But secondarily, a linguistic approach involves us in a social philosophy because of its accidental relation to certain social forces that may happen to favor or hinder it. It must be secular, for instance; for though it is not antagonistic to religious doctrine, it must approach such doctrine formally (“morphologically”) rather than as doctrinally true or false. Accordingly, churchmen themselves can admit of such a formal approach, and often have done so; but where they would not do so, the linguistic approach would find itself accidentally allied with a secular “social philosophy.” Or, if pressure groups who are so minded and can exert sufficient influence objected to the stress upon linguistic sophistication, then “dramatism” would find itself allied with a liberal social philosophy, even in a militant sense. And, of course, the position is uncompromisingly liberal in the sense that its first principle must be the systematic distrust of any social certainties as now set (our position here necessarily reaffirms the Deweyite prizing of the experimental attitude, backed by experimental method).
Naturally, we identify such a program with both patriotism and international co-operation. It should be an aid to patriotism by helping to make demagoguery more difficult and by fostering an attitude that would make international co-operation easier. It would sharpen our sense of the fact that all men, as symbol-users, are of the same substance, in contrast with naïve views that in effect think of aliens as of a different substance. Dramatism thus, by its very nature, implies respect for the individual. Again, we should recognize that our stress upon the major importance of the negative may seem “reactionary” to some Liberals, particuIar1y those who have striven valiantly to find ways of “not saying no” to children.
Perhaps we might best indicate the nature of our social philosophy by referring to the kind of “linguistic exercising” that we think wholly in keeping with the spirit of this project:
If one should read in a newspaper some “factual” story that obviously produced a pronounced attitude for or against something, while reading it one would try to imagine how the same material might have been presented so as to produce other attitudes, It is not, thus, a matter of deciding about the “factual accuracy” of the story, a matter about which in most cases you will not be equipped to make a decision. You will permit yourself speculatively a wider range of freedom as regards its stylization. That is, you counteract “slanting,” not by trying to decide whether the reporter is honest or a liar, or even whether he is fair or unfair, but by leaving unquestioned the facts as given and merely trying to imagine different ways of presenting them, or by trying to imagine possible strategic omissions.
Or, were the earlier pedagogic practice of debating brought back into favor, each participant would be required, not to uphold just one position but to write two debates, upholding first one position and then the other. Then, beyond this, would be a third piece, designed to be a formal transcending of the whole issue, by analyzing the sheerly verbal maneuvers involved in the placing and discussing of the issue. Such a third step would not in any sense “solve” the issue, not even in the reasonable, sociological sense of discovering that, “to an extent, both sides are right.” Nor would we advise such procedures merely as training in the art of verbal combat. For though such experience could be applied thus pragmatically, the ultimate value in such verbal exercising would be its contribution toward the “suffering” of an attitude that pointed toward a distrustful admiration of all symbolism, and toward the attempt systematically to question the many symbolically-stimulated goads that are now accepted too often without question.
Or a student might write an essay analyzing the modes of utterance in two previous essays he had written, one of which traced man’s progress “upward” from “savagery” to the “high standard of living” provided by modem technology, while the other treated this same development as deplorable “degeneration,” with profound tribal conscientiousness overgrown by a wilderness of superficial abstract law.
We can never sufficiently emphasize, however, that we are thinking of education as a tentative, preparatory stage in life, not as a final one. It is final only in the sense that it possesses its own kind of completeness and thus, ideally, should be recoverable at all stages in one’s life. For it develops to perfection one stage in the confronting of a problem, the stage where one steps aside as thoroughly as possible and attempts, in the spirit of absolute linguistic skepticism, to meditate upon the tangle of symbolism in which all men are by their very nature caught.
The corresponding methods of interpreting man’s entanglements have been sloganized by us elsewhere as the “socioanagogic,” since a primary aim here is to discover in what respects the objects of this world are enigmatic emblems of man’s relation to the social order (that is, in what respects they may possess for man a “symbolic” character, over and above their nature as sheer things). Since language, however manipulated by the individual user, is essentially a collective or social product, the powers of the social order will inevitably be manifested in it, quite as these powers can only be developed by the use of linguistic resources. A social philosophy, as so conceived, would be built about four orders: the verbal or linguistic; the sociopolitical; the natural; the supernatural. And we shall end this section by briefly indicating the relation we think they bear to one another.
The verbal pyramid is most clearly revealed in the design of Platonist and Neo-Platonist dialectic, the upward way from particulars to higher and higher orders of abstraction, matched by a corresponding downward way from the one to the many which are imbued with the substance of its oneness. Such resources become interwoven with whatever social order happens to prevail, or to have prevailed when the symbolic traditions were taking form. Such order has its more or less clearly defined pyramidal structure, with criteria for distinguishing the direction socially up from the direction socially down. Here we would look for the situations which gave form to the terminology for familial relationships, and to the great persecutional words that grandly sum up the principle of negativity inherent in the nature of property.
Third, there is the natural order, whether conceived along Aristotelian lines (as in the medieval concern with the “great chain of being,”) or along Darwinian lines, charting an evolutionary “descent” from “lower” kinds of entities to “higher” kinds. This is the order that, in the dramatistic terminology, is most fittingly discussed in terms of motion.
And finally, there are terms for a supernatural order, a terminology constructed after the analogy of the other three, since there can be no empirically literal vocabulary for the description of a realm that by definition transcends the conditionality of human language and human experience. That is, if the ultimate scene, or “ground of all possibility” is called a “lord,” a supernatural relationship is being named metaphorically, in terms of what is, so far as our institutions are concerned, an obsolete social relationship. And the description of God as “simple” is in accordance with certain dialectical resources that permit of progress toward an over-all “term of terms” that will sum up complexity much as the title of a novel could be said to simplify the myriad details by one word that stood for the single spirit infusing them all. And terms referring to God as a body would be borrowed from the natural order.
But there is a paradox upon which a dramatist philosophy of social motivations lays great emphasis: Whereas we are by the nature of the case compelled to see the part that the other three orders of terms play in the terminology of the supernatural order, and whereas we are familiar with the transcendentalist dialectic of a writer, say, like Emerson,
