such persuasive powers, the heights of symbol-using genius as embodied in definition, expression, and exhortation, we would with fearsomeness appreciate. Such is the dramatistic variant of the linguistic approach to education, an approach now often called “semanticist.”
Epilogue
But suppose that all did turn out as we would have it, so far as educational programs went? What next? What might be the results?
First: In seeing beyond the limitations of language, many might attain a piety now available to but a few. Many might come closer to a true fear of God, through getting more glimpses into the ultimate reality that stretches somehow beyond the fogs of language and its sloganizing.
Or, on the contrary: There might descend upon mankind a boredom such as never before cursed symbol-using creatures. For all men might come to so distrust the motives of secular ambition, as clamorously established by all who help make secular aims “glamorous,” that the entire pageantry of empire would seem as unreal as a stage set.
But those are the absolute alternatives: the alternatives of absolute piety (or “loyalty to the sources of our being”), and of absolute drought (be it mystic “accidie” or Baudelairean “spleen”).
But here, in parting, once again we would “settle for less,” holding out the hope of only this much: That such an approach should help some of the rawness to abate, by including a much wider range of man’s symbolic prowess under the head of the fearsomely appreciated, and thereby providing less incentives to be overprompt at feeling exalted with moral indignation.
In the educational situation, characteristically, the instructor and his class would be on good terms. They would preferably be under the sign of goodwill. And is not education ideally an effort to maintain such an attitude as thoroughly and extensively as possible without loss of one’s own integrity? If, where we cannot “love” our neighbor’s ways, we might at least “fearsomely appreciate” their form, and in methods that bring our own ways within the orbit of the “fearsomely appreciated,” would we not then be at least headed in the right direction? And is not this direction most urgent, in view of the new weapons that threaten not only our chances of living well but even our chances of living at all?
Bibliographical Note
There is a general sense in which any book could figure in a “dramatistic” bibliography, since any book is by definition an instance of “symbolic action.” More narrowly, we should include here works that are built about the featuring of some term for “action,” ranging all the way from theories of economic or commercial “transactions” to theologies that view God as “pure act.” Spinoza’s Ethics is a good example of the type, because of the symmetry with which it explicitly works out a balance of actives and passives.
All writers who have figured in the shift of emphasis from philosophy to the critique of language could be listed here, as with the traditional battles over “universals” (with nominalists and realists throwing equally important light upon the normal resources of language, and upon our language-ridden views of extralinguistic “reality”). In this regard, even the most positivistic or “scientistic” of semantical theories could properly be included in our bibliography.
And though the empiricist stress of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume would be inferior to the scholastic tradition, when judged as philosophy, in admonitions as regards a critique of language are nearly perfect for our purposes. Our main shift of emphasis would be in the direction of a greater concern with the ways in which sociopolitical motives infuse men’s views of their so-called “sensory” perceptions. Similarly, psychoanalytic and psychosomatic speculations fit well with the dramatistic emphasis, because of their great stress upon forms of symbolic action, though as with empiricism, the overly psychologistic stress usually somewhat deflects attention from the sociopolitical realm of motives.
Specifically, by “dramatism” is meant a linguistic theory expressly built about terms as “action,” “passion,” and “substance,” and designed to consider language in the light of the logic, resources, and embarrassments of such terms. It would be more likely to stress verbs than nouns as the way-in, though for this very reason it finds itself paradoxically quite friendly to Jeremy Bentham’s search for ideal definition in terms of nouns (with his “theory of fictions” designed to take account of the respects in which strongly verb-like and negatively tinged nouns would not lend themselves to his materially positive ideal). Likewise this approach finds much to its purposes in works as different as James Harris’s Hermes and the redoubtable Home Tooke’s Diversions of Purley (with its stress upon the nature of “abbreviations” in language).
In this specific sense, a systematically self-conscious statement of the dramatistic perspective is offered in A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives, by Kenneth Burke (Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1945 and 1950, respectively). The Grammar considers the logic of “substance” in general, the Rhetoric considers its place in personal and social “identifications.” Also, both books offer many examples of the way in which works by other writers can be interpreted as implicit contributions to the dramatistic perspective.
As regards the ethical dimension in language, see particularly “A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language” (Quarterly Journal of Speech, October and December, 1952, February, 1953) and “Postscripts on the Negative” (same publication, April, 1953).
A work now in preparation, A Symbolic of Motives, will deal with poetics and the technique of “indexing” literary works. Meanwhile, among articles by the present author already published on this subject are: “The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke” (Sewanee Review, Winter, 1950); “Three Definitions” (Kenyon Review, Spring, 1951 ); “Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method” (Hudson Review, Summer, 1951); “Form and Persecution in the Oresteia” (Sewanee Review, Summer, 1952); “Imitation” (Accent, Autumn, 1952); “Comments on Eighteen Poems by Howard Nemerov” (Sewanee Review, Winter, 1952); “Ethan Brand: A Preparatory Investigation” (Hopkins Review, Winter, 1952); “Mysticism as a Solution to the Poet’s Dilemma,” in collaboration with Stanley Romaine Hopper (Spiritual Problems in Contemporary Literature, edited by Stanley Romaine Hopper, published by Institute for Religious and Social Studies, distributed by Harper & Bros., 1952); “Fact, Inference, and Proof in the Analysis of Literary Symbolism,” (paper presented at Thirteenth Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, and published in a volume distributed by Harper & Bros., 1954).
The author’s first book of literary criticism, Counter-Statement (originally published, 1931; republished with new Preface and Epilogue, 1953, by Hermes Publications, Los Altos, California) is relevant to these inquiries because it treats of literary form in terms of audience appeal. His Permanence and Change: An Analysis of Purpose (originally published, 1935, revised edition published, May, 1954 Hermes Publications), centers about problems of interpretation, communication, and “new meanings,” though the perspective is there called not “dramatic,” but “poetic.” An out-of-print work, Attitudes toward History (New Republic, 1937) deals largely with problems of bureaucracy (now often called “organizational behavior”). Another out-of-print work, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Louisiana State University Press, 1941) considers many problems of “indexing,” and outlines the theories of “symbolic action” that he behind such analysis.
Miscellaneous items: Nous Autres Matérialistes (Esprit, November, 1946). analyzing the motives in the “higher standard of living”; “Rhetoric Old and New” (Journal of General Education, April 1951); “Ideology and Myth” (Accent, Summer, 1947); “Thanatopsis for Critics: A Brief Thesaurus of Deaths and Dyings” (Essays in Criticism, October, 1952), a study of motives involved in the imagery of death; “Freedom and Authority in the Realm of the Poetic Imagination” (Freedom and Authority in Our Time, Twelfth Symposium of the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, edited
