[KB] "Deacon"-structing Burke Part Whatever
Edward C Appel
edwardcappel at frontier.com
Fri Oct 31 11:22:25 EDT 2014
Lee, Stan, Greg, and Carrol,
Great contributions all around. I take to heart Lee's point that we create the "sacredness" of texts to various degrees. Most of us are not yet ready to "die" for Burke's treasure trove of pronouncements, but we will, triennially, travel a thousand miles in votive service to its enduring worth.
I also like Stan's point about how the assumed "limitless" gets embodied in the necessarily "limitedness" that characterizes any particular language, of necessity in need of the "discount."
Greg's point about "philosophy" reminds me of the identifying properties of Paul Tillich, when he taught at Union
Seminary in New York (or was it when he was at Harvard?): Professor of Philosophical Theology.
On "psychotic entelechy" transcendentalized: Thirty-five years ago, Jim Chesebro spoke of the church's "profound use of the negative." I mention several of those negatively-induced "perfections" in Evangelical Protestantism in the Primer (on Falwell in Chapter 10) Let me here cite an additional "perfection" extant today even in relatively "comedic" Mainline Protestantism, as well as in still-more-entelechialized Catholicism. I speak of the "til death do us part" proviso in the marriage vow. (When I broached this issue with Daughter Beth, a Presbyterian preacher who has performed many marriages in her ministry, she corrected me with, "as long as you both shall live." There's no difference, I admonished.) The church requires this categorical promise before the altar of God from even teenagers and early-20-somethings. For cryin' out loud, the human brain isn't even fully developed until age 25, and then it takes a couple of years more until somebody
begins to get a good handle on who he or she actually is. Just think through the implications of "as long as you both shall live." What is the church saying, other than it's more righteous to blow your brains out than divorce the person you married at a tender age?
I could go on in respect to this profound proscription, but I sense I may have already offended some subscribers to this list.
Again, peace be with you, however pale and evanescent.
Ed
--------------------------------------------
On Thu, 10/30/14, Cerling, Lee <cerling at marshall.usc.edu> wrote:
Subject: Re: [KB] "Deacon"-structing Burke Part Whatever
To: "Gregory Desilet" <info at gregorydesilet.com>
Cc: "Ed Appel" <edwardcappel at frontier.com>, "kb at kbjournal.org" <kb at kbjournal.org>
Date: Thursday, October 30, 2014, 11:55 PM
Hi, all--
I have lurked on this list for
a long time without contributing, and I think maybe none of
you know me except Clarke Rountree, who was my colleague at
Iowa back in the day. But this has been an intriguing
discussion, and I would like to offer some friendly
resistance to the flow of argument, to see how the argument
plays out. Whether it is a Burkean resistance or not, I
don't know; you all know Burke much better than me, and
you can judge.
That said, I
want to gently probe the concept of "sacred" texts
as it has developed in this thread. It seems to me that a
"sacred" text is a text that has won or earned
"sacredness" by virtue of its constitutive
power--that is, it functions as "sacred" to the
extent that some community is self-consciously shaped and
formed by it. So "inspiration" or source of
inspiration is not the key inflection point, but
accreditation by a community. In this view,
"sacredness" is a matter of degree, and a text is
more or less sacred depending on the degree to which some
living community (or communities) are in some definable
sense "constituted" by it. By that standard, the
Bible is an exceptionally sacred text in that innumerable
communities past and present have been constituted by it;
the Declaration of Independence is also sacred, but less
so. And the writings of Kenneth Burke are only very weakly
sacred, in that this small community is very loosely formed
by it; but not in the sense of its members being willing
(for example) to suffer death for it, as is the case with
more strongly sacred texts, such as the Declaration of
Independence or the Bible or the Koran.
And in this way of thinking,
texts can lose their sacredness: this has certainly been
the pattern in Christianity, where the Bible may become less
and less normative to successive generations, until it is
effectively "desacralized"--no longer normative
for a given community; no longer constitutive of that
community. (I am thinking of the movement from Puritanism
to Unitarianism). So for that community, it is no longer
sacred; whereas for another Christian community (say, the
Amish) its sacredness may be re-affirmed and even
strengthened over time.
My point is this: I do think that texts which
are significantly constitutive in nature, texts to which
human beings have committed themselves, and especially those
texts for which human beings have voluntarily undergone
torture and death, are entitled to a special kind of respect
and reverence in the academy and elsewhere.
That said, I agree with what I
take Greg to be saying below, that no text, regardless of
its sacred status, is thereby exempt from criticism. And
in fact, precisely because of the extraordinary power that
these sacred texts exercise over human beings, it may well
behoove us to give them much more than an ordinary amount of
critical attention. (That is certainly what Augustine does
in the first half of City of God--lavish devastating
critical attention on the primary pagan sacred texts of his
day.)
And one last
caveat: I do think that criticism of a (sacred) text
should focus less on "what it contains" than on
"how it has been read." So that I am not
persuaded (at least, not yet) that the New Testament is
anti-semitic; I am persuaded, however, that a strong and
long and honored tradition of reading the New Testament,
from Chrysostom to Luther (and beyond, in both directions)
was deeply and repugnantly anti-semitic. And in my view,
at least, it is not the New Testament texts themselves that
are to be censured, but that tradition of reading the
text.
All for now. My
apologies if this line of thought is too much at odds with
the tenor of what has been a most interesting exchange.
Best regards,
Lee Cerling
Sent from my
iPad
> On Oct 30, 2014, at
2:44 PM, Gregory Desilet <info at gregorydesilet.com>
wrote:
>
> Yes, Ed,
“metaphysical philosophy” isn’t a bad option, though
it might be confused with “spiritual
metaphysics”—which has been co-opted by New Age
philosophy, where at “metaphysical bookstores” you will
find all manner of occult and parapsychological writings
(such as “Seth Speaks” etc.). As for those you reference
as “untraditional mainline Protestants” and the
potential problem of their belief in God, I don’t see a
problem there in placing their approach in the philosophy
category, since many philosophers also express a belief in
God—sans any kind of sacred text. Though perhaps those in
this group could be in a sub-category called
“philosophical theism.”
>
> At any rate, the important thing from my
point of view is advocating the notion that “all texts are
created equal” just as all persons are created equal. And,
just as this does not entail that all persons are of equal
influence, it does not entail that all texts are of equal
influence. The primary thing is that no text be seen as
inherently superior and unquestionable by virtue of a divine
birthright or source. The merit of every text ought to be
weighed by what it contains rather than by who wrote or
inspired it. Currently across the world there are far too
many people who believe in the inherent superiority of
certain texts, regardless of what they actually say, and in
many cases not even reading or fully understanding what is
said in them. This is a state of affairs every
communication, language, and rhetorical scholar should
bemoan.
>
> Greg
>
>
>
>> On Oct 30, 2014,
at 9:55 AM, Edward C Appel <edwardcappel at frontier.com>
wrote:
>>
>>
OK, Greg, howabout if we call the blanched, etiolated
Christianity of the very liberal side of the Mainline
Protestant Church "metaphysical philosophy"?
Burke calls metaphysical philosophy "coy
theology." Maybe we can find a measure of common
ground with that linguistic accommodation.
>>
>> The only
problem there is, such untraditional Mainline Protestants
openly profess belief in a Power that can rightfully be
called "God." They're not particularly
"coy" about their theistic bent.
>>
>> I'll
mull over your demurrers some more and maybe get back.
>> '
>> What I
want mainly to do here is address Stan's term
"psychotic entelechy." I like it. Maybe owing
more to my dour, "morbid" Scaninavian personality,
I've long since thought that Burke's dramatism, and
what I've observed going on around me, had best be
described as half insane. I.e., the "glory" and
the "sickness" of the "symbol-using
animal" (Burke), the "symbolizing animal"
(Condit), or the "symbolic species" (Deacon) can
legitimately be described as half amazingly wonderful and
half bonkers. I'm talking about the "normal"
human race. People give evidence of being nuts whether
that "entelechy" is being immanentized or
transcendentalized.
>>
>> Whithout going into detail, how long
do you think it will take this rapidly expanding species of
animal life to despoil this planet's ecosystems
irreparably, render this "Garden of Eden" half a
wasteland, devoid of so very, very much of its rich
biodiversity, and who knows what else? Humans, in their
entelechial quest for more and more "properties,"
both tangible and symbolic, evince, in the large, no thought
of the vast expanses of geologic time and their import. In
a mere ten thousand years since the end of the last ice
age and beginnings of urban living, homo sapiens
(there's a joke for you) has already altered that brief
Holocene Epoch into what earth scientists are now saying
should be labeled the "Anthropocene," things are
already getting that bad. What are the chances of a
turn-around? What are things likely to look like in
another mere one million eight-hundred-thousand years, the
brief span so far of this, the eleventh period of the
>> Phanerozoic Eon, the Quaternary?
>> '
>> Listen
to Fox News, read the Wall Street Journal, watch China built
another goal-driven power plant each week, read letters to
your local newspaper or posts by the vox populi on the
internet, pay even cursory attention to the campaign
rhetoric now reaching a crescendo, and weep. I see next to
no chance, until things get so bad we're suffocating in
our own effluvia.
>>
>> On the transcendental craziness, more
later, if I can screw up the courage to risk offending some
subcribers to this list. You know, the "free
speech"/don't-"hurt"-the-feelings-of-others
quandary.
>>
>>
"Psychotic entelechy"? Well, I guess.
>>
>>
>>
>> Ed
>>
>>
>>
>> Ed
>>
>>
>> -----
---------------------------------------
>> On Thu, 10/30/14, Gregory Desilet
<info at gregorydesilet.com>
wrote:
>>
>>
Subject: Re: [KB] "Deacon"-structing Burke Part
Whatever
>> To: "Ed Appel"
<edwardcappel at frontier.com>
>> Cc: "Stan Lindsay" <slindsa at yahoo.com>,
"kb at kbjournal.org"
<kb at kbjournal.org>
>> Date: Thursday, October 30, 2014, 3:40
AM
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Many good points have been made by
>> several
>>
persons, so there is much to respond to and if I do not
>> touch on someone’s
>> point here that will be because of my
limits as a mere human
>> and not
because I
>> view a particular point
as not meriting a response. Turning
>>
to Ed’s comments
>> first, he points
out that his definition of “religion”
>> is different from mine.
>> But I think this kind of response gets
off on the wrong foot
>> with regard
to the
>> thrust of what I’m
attempting to say. Granted, it is
>>
perfectly sensible and
>> legitimate
in a discussion of religion to say, “this is
>> what I mean by
>> religion.” But when Ed says “Greg
means something
>> different,” I
believe more
>> than that is going on.
True, we can each have our different
>> definitions of
>> religion and go our separate ways, but
what I’m attempting
>> to do is
argue
>> (persuade) others that the
term “religion” ought not to
>> be
applied in certain
>> ways due to the
circumstance that it thereby loses much of
>> its usefulness as a
>> term. For example, if we call every
bright light in the sky
>> a
“star,” that’s
>> okay but there
is benefit to be gained by refining our
>> distinctions to separate
>> out stars, planets, comets, galaxies,
etc.Ed has seemingly accepted my
>>
challenge to distinguish
>> religions
that abandon the sacred text notion from
>> philosophical study and
>> inquiry by offering the following:I
regard its [religion’s] primary
>>
reference as
>> characteristic of one
who believes in an Originary Power we
>> can rightfully call
>> "God." For me, as a
Burkean, I would reductively
>> define
that
>> Power as the "Great
Potential."In other words, divinity or God
>> becomes the
>>
“Great Potential.” All such reasoning is well and
good,
>> but what becomes of the
>> status of what have been called
religious texts by way of
>> such a
view of
>> religion? Are these texts
in some way the “voice” of the
>>
“Great Potential”? Or
>> as Stan
says, are they wholly inspired, substantially
>> inspired, or only
>> partially inspired by the Great
Potential? And what makes
>> these
religious texts
>> substantially
different from other texts such as those
>> written by Plato, Aristotle,
>> Descartes, Spinoza, etc? Are not these
latter texts also
>> inspired by the
“Great
>> Potential”? In fact, is
not EVERYTHING inspired by the
>>
“Great Potential”?When we humans sever, cloud, or
>> muddy the link
>> between a text and a divine source of
that text, we in
>> effect place that
text
>> alongside all other texts
composed by human hands. Who is to
>>
say, for example,
>> that Oscar
Wilde’s “De Profundis” is not as much or
>> more divinely inspired than
>> any text of the Bible—if the
divinity is regarded as the
>>
“Great Potential”? The
>> problem
is that deciding if texts are religious in nature
>> and in inspiration
>> becomes a very arbitrary issue. From
within this view, we
>> may as well
call every such text “religious” or
>> every such text “secular” because
there is no longer a
>> distinction
between the two
>> that can be
convincingly defended. At least I am not
>> convinced and I hope I
>> have convinced others not to be
convinced.As soon as we no longer have a very
>> direct and
>>
clear link to a divine source (a higher being),
manifested
>> decisively in some
>> texts and not in others, we have a
situation where every
>> text
discussing the
>> nature of “life”
effectively reduces to the category of
>> philosophy. Some of
>> these texts may be valued more than
others by particular
>> individuals
but none
>> of these texts any longer
have a source or origin
>>
unquestionably superior to
>> any
other. The benefits of each text must be constantly
>> ARGUED and not assumed.
>> This attitude toward texts makes a big
difference in how
>> texts are
approached
>> and in how they are
valued. I believe the use of the term
>> “philosophy” to
>> describe such texts and associated
practices is better than
>>
“religious” because
>> it reduces
the chances for conveying an authoritarian
>> quality in the text—the
>> quality traditionally associated with
so-called religious
>> texts.
>> Greg
>
>
>
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