to detect the ways in which the linguistic and social orders affect our ideas of the natural order. And this is the enigma, above all others, with which dramatism, as a social philosophy, is engrossed.
By the socioanagogic emphasis in linguistic criticism, we refer to a concern with the ways in which the structure of the social and linguistic orders affects the metaphors men use for the supernatural order and colors the “empirical reality” which men think they perceive in the natural order. We believe that the natural order is profoundly infused with symbolism, “mystery,” and “divinity” of a purely secular and social sort, however transcendent its gleam may sometimes seem to be. Here, we believe, is a major source of man’s exorbitant goads and false exaltations. We believe it to be a major source of the scramble so incessantly plaguing great nations that most persons seem to take it as “the norm,” sometimes assuring us that man is “naturally predatory,” and sometimes in unconscious sacrilege interpreting such worldly struggle as an evidence of man’s “divine discontent.”
An educational policy constructed in accordance with this principle would ground its techniques in a social philosophy that looked upon such inquiry as the ultimate end of secular study. But one could not know what the actual “alignments” in such a project would be, what social forces would be for it and what against it, unless it were actually attempted on a considerable scale.
The School and the Individual
But our zeal for the negative or admonitory in education should not seem to prevail over its counterpart, the lore of “positive” appreciation. With regard to the three major aims of education as so conceived, training in skills, moral admonition, and aesthetic appreciation (note that they are secular or technical analogues of the trinitarian three: “power,” “wisdom,” and “love”): Here would be an excellent point at which to remember the claims of the third.
Skills, we might say, are like the metal of a coin. On its reverse side is stamped the negativistic, admonitory social or moral philosophy of language. But on its obverse there are markings of a wholly different sort, to signalize the realm of aesthetic delight.
In so far as the suffering of man’s hierarchal burdens is to be as growing old, the aesthetic affirming of the resources natural to such conditions is like being born anew, as with the “equations” of Goethe’s Faust. (And perhaps if we accept a pedagogically “mortifying” device that makes us theoretically old while we are still physically young, we may get “as a bonus” a compensatory device that can keep us theoretically young when we are physically old.)
When we are under the sign of appreciation, the very same things that we had considered “droopingly” can now be viewed with almost the expectant air of a young puppy, that seems always brightly ready for some astounding thing to happen. Here is our chance for an Emersonian recovery, an aesthetic “compensation.”
The negatives we would impose upon the individual (or rather, the negatives we would have him recognize as having already been imposed upon him by the combination of the social and linguistic orders, as re-enforced by the mechanical necessities of the natural order) are “collective,” bearing upon his obligations to the tribe, and to himself as member of the tribe. Here would be a secular variant of “original sin.”
But in contrast, his positive, aesthetic enjoyments can be received by him as an individual (though the public nature of the symbolic medium, through which he aesthetically receives, makes it unlikely that individual delights of this sort can be merely “solipsistic”), and the zeal with which we tell others of our enjoyments indicates how eager we are to “socialize” everything, a tendency which the social nature of language would help impose upon us, but which cannot overweigh the fact that when you enjoy the taste of a particular orange, it is being enjoyed by you and none other.
So, although the tribal negatives are uniquely translated into the decisions of each individual “conscience,” and although aesthetic enjoyment, too, has its “tribal” aspects (as with the distinctive exaltations that can affect public gatherings), we would treat the aesthetically positive under the head of “the school and the individual,” whereas the moralistically negative seems to have fitted best under the head of “school and society.”
As regards this relation between moralistic admonition and aesthetic appreciation, once you “get the idea” of the pattern, you see how readily all ethical misgivings can become transformed into aesthetic promises, thus:
Have we proposed a distrust of ambition? Then see, on the other hand, what great tragic assertions have been made of this distrust, as with the grotesqueries of Macbeth, or the stateliness of murder in Julius Caesar. Do we discern how the motives of sheer ownership figure in relations between husband and wife? Then note how these are made almost exultant in Othello.
Does a writer seem to suggest that he despises all people, either in particular or in general? Then note how, by the very scrupulousness of his work, he shows that he most earnestly respects an audience. And no matter how questionable the scramble, there is a gallantry, an essential cult of the compliment, implicit in the earnestness with which a good artist will bring the best he has to market, even though he suspects that, by not making it worse, he may sell it for less.
Is there an overriding fear of death? Then see how the poet exploits this attitude to the ends of pomp, in the hope of infusing his work with a funereal, corpse-like dignity.
Is there a need of victimage, to relieve ourselves by thoughts of a vicarious sacrifice? Must we look for a goat? Then see how such impulses are made grand by the devices of tragedy.
Does the weight of a social order oppress us grievously, driving us within ourselves, imposing upon us the involuntary vows of psychogenic illness, making us prone to fantasies of sexual perversion that represent, in terms of erotic appetite, the jealousies and malice and self-punishments typical of the “hierarchal psychosis”? All this may, by the “alchemy of the word,” be transformed into an aesthetic “remembrance of things past,” that loves to contemplate the pageantry of corruption. And the tangled social motives may come to take the form that Stanley Hyman has called the “Albertine strategy” (having in mind Proust’s resources whereby a heterosexual love is imagined not directly, but roundabout, by the aesthetic perverting of an experience that, in the real moral realm, had been homosexual).
Have we questioned the entire modern cult of gadgetry by which the wheels of industry are largely kept going, over and above production for war goods? Then note how this same gadgetry becomes the pleasant movement and glitter of a spectacular Hollywood revue, in which woman plays a leading role, as the gadget of gadgets. Well-groomed, specious flesh clothing the skeleton.
There is no tangle so hopeless that it cannot, with the symbol-using species, become the basis for a new ingenious assertion that transcends it, by the very nature of linguistic assertion. No way of life can be so wretched, corrupt, or even boring that some expert symbol user or other can’t make it the subject matter of a good book. Wherever you might moralistically exclaim, “How awful!” there is the opportunity for the aesthetic to answer spiritedly, “But how delightfully awful!”
In sum, there is the transcendence in expression as such (the point emphasized in the Crocean aesthetic). Atop that, there is the transcendence implicit in the processes whereby the work “purifies itself” in the course of its unfolding. And beyond that, there is transcendence by the various ways whereby we feel ourselves similarly purified while undergoing the imaginary discipline of the story’s action and passion (undergoing such either as spontaneous spectators or as students, or both). And so, each time we inspect a great work of human thought (that is, a great symbolic exercising), we can be delighted by the manifestations of its genius, a skill whereby even the accents of lamentation can be transformed into the pleasurable.
Here is a glorious realm
