of human relations through a study of language in its four major aspects: (a) the logical or indicative; (b) the rhetorical or persuasive; (c) the poetic; (d) the ethical or personal. But only some of the theories and rules of thumb on which this essay is based are directly relevant to the philosophy of education. And in trying to decide which parts of this material should be stressed here, we shall follow the very helpful lead of an article by Professor Benne, “Toward a Grammar of Educational Motives,” published in the January, 1947, issue of Educational Forum. The article is built around a review of the present writer’s book, A Grammar of Motives, which outlines the “dramatistic” view of language and of motivational problems generally. The article makes the following main points:
The Grammar “may be read as a reaction against ‘scientistic’ attempts to ‘reduce’ the explanation of human conduct to the influence of various conditions and causes—physical, chemical, biological or generally environmental.” Burke “finds an irreducible minimum of terms necessary to the adequate discussion of human motivation,” and he derives these “from his analysis of dramatic action.” There are five such terms, which “‘point’ in any human action to an actor, a scene, some agency (means), a purpose, as well as the over-all action in which the other terms are united.”
Again, “Whatever the various motivations of the semanticists, one may see Burke as a semanticist, seeking to give an interpretation of meaning and its transformations in a ‘dramatistic’ as opposed to the ‘scientistic’ perspective which has prevailed in most semantic studies.”
“Still another approach” might stress the fact that “in focusing on the language of any discussion of motives,” the book “is a ‘grammatical’ approach to discourse about motives.” Hence, “on this view, various philosophies become ‘casuistries’ seeking only to apply these grammatical principles in and to ‘the case’ of some actual and given cultural situation.” Accordingly, Burke attempts a “‘casuistry’ of his own, taking major philosophic systems as ‘cases’ and developing their distinctive characters in terms of their varying stress upon one or another of the terms of his pentad,” as materialism features the “scenic” element in motivation, idealism stresses “agent,” pragmatism “agency” (instrument), mysticism “purpose,” and realism “act.” (We might here add that the book also stresses the ways whereby the terms become functions of one another: Thus, by the “scene-act ratio” is meant a statement where the substance of an act is said to have been potentially or analogously present in the scene, and to be derived from the scene; similarly, an “agent-act” ratio derives the quality of the act from the corresponding nature of the agent; the “purpose-agency ratio” concerns the relation of consistency or consubstantiality between end and means; etc.)
The project as a whole (including portions still to be published) aims at an “extended comic treatment of human relations, of the ‘foibles and antics” of “the Human Barnyard.’” Reaffirming “the parliamentary process,” it is motivated by a “humanitarian concern to see how far conflict (war) may be translated practically into linguistic struggle and how such verbal struggle may be made to eventuate in a common enactment short of physical combat.”
Other details noted: “encouraging tolerance by speculation”; a “Neo-Liberal Ideal” that proposes to accept with ironic resignation “the development of technology, a development that will require such a vast bureaucracy (in both political and commercial administration) as the world has never before encountered”; would “confront the global situation with an attitude neither local nor imperialistic”; and is designed to embody its attitude in a method of linguistic analysis.
In his “howevers” (and howevers are of the essence in this perspective) Professor Benne finds that Burke’s book is not sufficiently “normative, preferential.” But there is a partial however to this however: “Nevertheless, one can find implicit norms in his description of his method,” as with Burke’s stress upon the dialectical, which is equated with “dramatism” at one end and with “scientific method” at the other, and with an over-all complexity of view that is ironic. (For irony “arises when one tries, by the interaction of terms upon one another, to produce a development which uses all the terms,” in the methodic search for “a ‘perspective of perspectives’ in which the values of each partial perspective are in some measure preserved.”)
Calling the book “a methodology of practical judgment,” Professor Benne next refers to another work, The Discipline of Practical Judgment in a Democratic Society (by Raup, Benne, Smith, and Axtelle), which “attempts to do justice to the meaning of Burke’s pentad of dramatistic terms in the act of judgment, though without the employment of his terminology.” These two books “seem fruitfully to supplement each other”; and they “make at least a beginning in this task of the interpretation of rationality and of contemporary symbolic adequacy.” Or, in sum: “‘Symbolic adequacy’ can only be developed,” and “mastery of our linguistic resources (which are ultimately our rational resources) can be achieved if acquired in the dramatic perspective of the significant conflicts of our time.”
Among other considerations stressed in this perspective, we night list briefly: Their systematic concern with the principle of “identification” that prevails, for instance, when ruler and subjects, however disparate their ways of living, feel themselves united in some common cause; the gleams of “mystery” and corresponding feelings of guilt that arise when beings of different status are in communication; the modes of symbolic purification ingrained in the nature of symbolic action, and culminating in acts of victimage; the principle of completion to which language vows us, as when we round out a judgment upon others until it returns upon the self (cf. the Kantian “categorical imperative”); the verbal resources of transcendence, implicit in the initial momentous fact that the word transcends the thing it names; and, above all, the workings of that marvel of marvels, not present in nature, and found only in the resources of symbolism, the negative (with its “completion” or “perfection” in the “thou shalt not”).
The approach to human relations through the study of language in terms of drama makes such concerns primary and seeks to build a systematic terminology to treat of human quandaries in such a spirit. It contends that the basic motives of human effort are concealed behind the clutter of the machinery, both technological and administrative, which civilization has amassed in the attempts to live well. It contends that by a methodic study of symbolic action men have their best chance of seeing beyond this clutter, into the ironic nature of the human species. Yet it seeks to be as instrumentalist as the instrumentation it would distrust. But while it would completely grant that terminologies of motion are properly cultivated in those fields of applied science dealing specifically with aspects of motion (as the physical sciences), it would categorically resist any quasi-positivistic tendencies to treat of the human realm in such terms.
We must here leave many relevant questions unanswered. But we might close this section by a reference to the kind of “short-cut” which we consider primary, where the analysis of particular linguistic structures is concerned:
We refer to the notion that the study of symbolic action in particular literary works should begin with the charting of “equations.” That is: When you consult a text, from which you hope to derive insights as regards our human quandaries in general, you begin by asking yourself “what equals what in this text?” And then, next, “what follows what in this text?”
The study of such “equations” is a way of yielding without demoralization. One cannot know in advance what the “equations” are to be (what “hero” is to equal, what “villain” is to equal, what “wisdom” is to equal, etc ).3 Yet in one search for such “equations,” which the author himself spontaneously exemplified rather than upheld as conscious doctrine, one is guided by method. Accordingly, such analysis is no mere surrender, though it does set up a preparatory stage in which one wholly “yields” to the text.
Having thus, without heckling, systematically
