many points in favor of restoring (however differently) the great stress once placed upon language in educational theory. (Recall that the medieval trivium comprised grammar, rhetoric, and logic or dialectic.)
In either case, whether the more thoroughgoing or the less thoroughgoing of these positions is adopted, we shall be considering our subject in terms of symbolic action. We shall look upon language-using as a mode of conduct and shall frame our terms accordingly. We could call this position “dramatistic” because it thus begins with a stress upon “action.” And it might be contrasted with idealistic terminologies, that begin with considerations of perception, knowledge, learning. In contrast with such epistemological approaches, this approach would be ontological, centering upon the substantiality of the act. Also, a “dramatistic” approach, as so conceived, is literal, not figurative. Man literally is a symbol-using animal. He really does approach the world symbol-wise (and symbol-foolish).1
But a “dramatistic” approach, with its definition of man as the typically language-using or symbol-using animal, points two ways. First, the principles of symbol-using must be considered in their own right, as a separate “realm” or “dimension” (not reducible to “nature” in the nonverbal or extraverbal sense of the term). Second, the formula should warn us not to overlook the term “animal” in our definition. Man as an animal is subject to the realm of the extraverbal, or nonsymbolic, a realm of material necessity that is best charted in terms of motion. That is. in his sheer animality, man is to be described in terms of physical or physiological motion, as contrasted with the kind of terms we need for analyzing the realm of verbal action.
Professor Brubacher has touched upon an analogous problem, when referring to the classical definition of man as “rational animal.” As regards those who “subscribed to a humanistic theory of education,” he says: “They held with Aristotle that the distinctive nature of man which set him off from other animals was his rationality. The principal function of education, therefore, was to develop this rationality.”
In general, this partial nonsequitur, in leading some thinkers’ to overstress the differentia (man’s “rationality”), led others to an antithetical overstress upon the genus (man’s “animality”). And if we are to abide by our somewhat similar definition, we must watch lest, in our zeal to bring out the formal considerations of the differential (language-using, or symbol-using), we slight the material considerations of the genus (animal). Or, otherwise put: We must guard lest, in our zeal for a terminology of action, we overlook the areas properly chartable in terms of motion.
Accordingly, a “dramatistic” terminology built about this definition for man will not exalt terms for “action” to the exclusion of terms for “motion.” If, by the physical realm, we mean the nonverbal (“subverbal” or “extraverbal”) realm, then the physical realm is properly treated in terms of motion. And “action” (ethics, “personality,” and the like) will be confined to the realm of symbol-using, with its appropriate principles. Thus, a “dramatistic” perspective, as so conceived, would decidedly not oblige us to treat of “things” in the terminology proper to “persons” or vice versa.
The problem is complicated by the fact that, while there can be motion without action (as with a falling material object, or the operations of some purely mechanical device), there can be no action without motion (as one cannot think or speak or carry out a decision without a corresponding set of sheerly neural and muscular goings-on). Thus, there is a sense in which every human act is merged with its sheerly physical or physiological ground. For instance, whereas the actions of a game are motivated by the logic of the rules, such acts also involve the sheer physical motions of the players and their instruments, in varying quantitative distribution about the field. (Nulla actio sine motione. A team can’t win a game unless it knows how to “throw its weight around.”)
Or consider cases where moral attitudes affect physiological functioning (as when emotional disturbances produce disorders of the bodily organs). Here the realm of action (and its “passions”!) is seen to infuse the realm of motion in ways grotesquely analogous to the powers of a “grace” that, according to the theologians, “perfects” nature.
Thus, though the realms of “action” and “motion” are discontinuous in so far as the “laws” of action are not in strict principle reducible to the “laws” of motion (quite as the rules of grammar could not properly be reduced to terms suitable for electronics), the two realms must be interwoven in so far as man’s generic animality is experienced by him in terms of his specific “symbolicity.”
Suppose, for instance, that we tried to conceive of “property” in as purely “physical” a sense as possible. We might note respects in which an organism “accumulates private property” by adapting to its particular needs certain portions of its environment. Its food, its air, its water, its sunlight, its space, its shelter, its mate—some or all of these things may be “appropriated,” in accordance with the specific nature of the organism. In this sense, assimilation could be said to involve a purely physiological kind of “private property,” however mutual may be the relationships prevailing among various organisms, or “substances,” in their “ecological balance.”
Here is the realm of “animality,” of sheer physical “necessity.” If the organism is denied the proper “motions” of assimilation or digestion needed for its survival, it dies. It must take into itself alien substances, in accordance with the nature of its substance. Some degree of such purely material appropriation, with the many material “motions” involved in these processes, is necessary to sheer animal survival. And man, as an animal, confronts the same necessities.
Think next of the many ways whereby such rudimentary needs are transcended, once we move into the realm of “symbolic action.” Here we come upon the vast structure of “rights” and “obligations” that takes form when “property” is conceived legalistically (as with the “legal fictions” of a modem financial corporation, which the courts treat as a “person”). Surely no one would hold that the “needs” of such a “body” are reducible purely to terms of a few biological necessities. Ownership, as so conceived, involves a fantastically intricate network of purely symbolic operations, as evidenced by the army of clerics who in one way or another are occupied with promulgating, recording, interpreting, and enforcing the sheerly man-made laws of property.
To consider this realm intelligibly, we must discuss symbolic manipulations as such. For obviously, they have a “perfection” of their own, a formal resourcefulness that transcends the nonsymbolic or extrasymbolic realm of purely biological functioning. And such a realm of “personality” goes so far beyond the needs of sheer “animality,” that whereas a physical organism can “biologically own” only so much as it can take into its body, or as it can by purely physical powers deny to another, a member of the symbol-using species may “symbolically own” resources that, in his capacity as a sheer physical organism, he could not exhaust in a million lifetimes.
Indeed, once ownership becomes modified by the conditions of purely symbolic action, a realm of fantasy and paradox arises. Does a great leader, for instance, “own” his office as head of a state? Or is he not rather “owned” by his subjects who consider themselves “consubstantial” with him, so far as their sense of participation in a common cause is concerned? Whatever your answer to this quandary may be, you will grant that such thoughts confront us with a great drama of human relations. For quite as a state is held together physically by a network of purely material communicative resources (things that exist and operate in accordance with the laws of motion), so this network itself is guided in its construction and control by a network of purely symbolic acts and symbol-guided purposes, ranging from the lowly processes of bookkeeping and accountancy to the over-all terminology of “right,” “justice,” “beauty,” “propriety,” “truth,” the “good life,” etc., in which the logic of a given social order comes to an ideal, theoretic head.
Above
