time fearsome by reason of its very felicity, in so far as the availability of such cunning resources may tempt us to perpetuate an underlying moral ill by cultivating the happy exercise that makes it beautiful. A familiar example appears in the popular art patronized by commercial advertisers which helps make insatiable in real life the very appetites which it symbolically gratifies in the world of make-believe. In any case, by dodging between aesthetic positives and moralistic negatives, one seeks to improvise the “good life.” Such an attempt is always complicated, as Aristotle’s Ethics reminds us, by the fact that, before one can live well, one must contrive to live.
However, when we attempt charting the good life, we must be linguistically shrewd about our own statement, too. There is always the invitation to express such matters in terms more or less flatly opposed (polar terms, they have often been called), with some variant of the thought that what we want is a middle road between the two extremes. A variant is the discovery that, where two opposed principles are being considered, each of which has the “defects of its qualities,” what we want is something that avoids the typical vices of either and combines the typical virtues of both. Or, dialectical resources being what they are, we can readily propose that any troublesome either-or be transformed into a both-and. Thus, when thinking of “authority, control, and discipline” on the one hand, and of “freedom and initiative” on the other, most people are likely to opt for a moderate mixing of the two. “There should be both respect for the individual and subordination of the individual to the group; there should be both patriotism and internationalism, in happy balance; education, as the projecting of traditions into new situations, must combine conservative and progressive tendencies; student interest must not be stifled by overly authoritative guidance, yet the student should not be deprived of such guidance where he requires it,” etc. Such linguistic resources suggest why even excessively one-sided educators might tend to think of themselves as serving under the sign of the golden mean.
And there can be further very good reasons for such a view. As regards the relation between authority and freedom, for instance, the investigating of symbolic action is still in a highly problematical stage, while many teachable principles and rules of thumb have already been formulated; and this situation of itself almost compels one to ask of the student a kind of discipline not distinguishable from pronounced personal initiative.
And there is always the aura of promise in education, a promise implied when it is not made explicit. This promissory motive came to the aid of the various fly-by-night outfits that quickly cooked up likely looking courses to profit by the situation of the returning soldiers, with funds at their disposal under the G.I. educational bill of rights. Courses in vocational training draw especially on such hopefulness, on the willingness of the student-customer to be assured that, if he takes the course, he will somehow have a much better chance to hit the “jack pot” and thereby to experience the deliciously immoral thrill that occurs when a slight gesture, made accidentally at the right time, disproportionately calls forth an abrupt unloosening, an indecent downpour, of revenue.
Thus, the promise will be there to some extent, even when it’s false. And it should never be wholly false, so far as a linguistic approach to education is concerned. For the analysis of symbolic action should not only sharpen kinds of perception that are competitively useful to the manipulating of symbols, it should also contribute to our lore of human foibles in general, and so make for much sheer shrewdness as regards the ways of the scramble. This should be particularly the case if the study of linguistic tactics is extended to a “post-Machiavellian” kind of inquiry in a realm where purely rhetorical devices overlap upon a realm of nonverbal materiality, as with the pronouncements of promoters, politicians, diplomats, editors, and the like, whose use of purely symbolic resources is backed by a tie-in with organizational or bureaucratic forces.
But, ideally at least, viewed in “the absolute,” an educational program of this sort would come closer to such promises as were once called the consolatio philosophiae. Admonition would make of education a watching and waiting, appreciation would seek out the positive attitudes that corrected such negatives. Its great stress upon linguistic skepticism would imply that it is not designed to make up the student’s mind for him. For it could not arrogate to itself the right (or assume that it had the ability) to anticipate the particularity that characterizes an individual’s decisions. In fact, it cannot even deny its knowledge of paradoxical cases where training can be a sheer handicap to a man, as when the sudden introduction of new technological methods required that the former experts be discharged, since their very fitness for the old ways made them less fit for the new ways. It can, however, make such considerations an important part of its teaching, in accordance with the particular kinds of quizzicality in which it would become at home.
Education, as so conceived, would be willing to give full recognition to every important favorable and unfavorable factor in a given situation. If it failed to meet such tests, the failure would be caused by lack of knowledge or perception, not by any categorical claims to individual, professional, national, or universal rights or dignities, except the right and dignity of doing all in its power to study the lore of such rights and dignities.
Such, then, is what we take to be the nature of education as “preparation for adult life.” The obligations of order hang over us, even if we would revolt against order. Out of such predicaments, ingenious fellows rise up and sing; thus promptly have all our liabilities been by symbol-using converted into assets. Similarly aesthetic, from this point of view, is any way of analytically enjoying the ways of rising up and singing. These ways may be “diagnostic,” as all education in one sense is. And so we are led back to the realm of the admonitory.
And finally, and above all, in keeping with our “socioanagogic” search for the ways in which the magic of the social order infuses men’s judgments of the beautiful (quite as it infuses their ethics and their perception of even “natural” things) we watch everywhere for the manifestations of the “hierarchal” motive, what Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida, calls “degree.” It is only “by degree,” he declaims, that communities, schools, brotherhoods, businesses, inheritance, the prerogatives of age and office, even the regularities of nature, “stand in authentic place.” Accordingly, “Take but degree away, untune that string, / And, hark! what discord follows; each thing meets / In mere oppugnancy.” And later, with a strange imagistic paralleling of Othello, he sums up: “Chaos, when degree is suffocate, / Follows the choking.” We cite from this long passage, not exactly to reaffirm the Shakespearean answer, but to recall how vast, in the perspective of Shakespearean drama, was the scope of the question.
School and Religion
The study of religion fits perfectly with the approach to education in terms of symbolic action. What more thorough examples of symbolic action can be found than in a religious service? What is more dramatistic than the religious terminology of action, passion, and personality? What terminology is more comprehensive than the dialectic of a theologian? What is linguistically more paradoxical than the ways wherein the mystic, seeking to express the transcendently ineffable, clothes theological ideas in the positive imagery of sheer animal sensation? Where, more perfectly than in versions of the heavenly hierarchy, can we find the paradigms of hierarchal terminology? And, as regards the principle of negativity, where does it figure more ultimately than in the dialectical subtleties of negative theology?
The great depth and scope of religious terminologies; the range of personalities and problems that have found accommodation within the religious framework; the kind of “inner freedom” that goes with the cult of ultimate praise made possible by the religious rationale; the religious placement of beauty and the practical; the ways in which religious scruples can sharpen even purely secular kinds of sympathy and awareness—to think of such matters is to realize that the long tradition of religion provides us with a field of study as vital and as sweeping as the over-all history of human culture itself.
Thus we could state unequivocally that the language of religion is the most central subject matter for the study of human relations in terms of symbolic action. Or perhaps we should make the claim even
