[KB] Burke, Deacon, and Theology
Edward C Appel
edwardcappel at frontier.com
Mon Mar 16 14:44:17 EDT 2015
Burkophiles,
According to Deacon and Cashman, the second of the three “synergies” that accompanied the evolution of language, and that undergird the religious sensibilities of the symbolic species, is the symbol-induced tropism toward conception of “a bi-layered world,” i.e., perception of “a pattern-behind-the-pattern,” an almost compulsive “metaphysical dualism” common to religions in general.”
At the outset, let me say I tend to read with the cluster/agon procedure at least in the back of my mind. To some extent, I’m checking the what-goes-with-what, the what-vs.-what, and the from-what through-what to-what. I did no formal cluster work on “The Origins of Religion,” but I’ve tried to put 2 and 2 together with Burke’s method in mind
So, some of the things I’ll say here are “inferences,” as in “Fact, Inference, and Proof in the Analysis of Literary Symbolism” (1954). Deacon and Cashman nowhere say that religion is a pox on the symbol-using animal. But I think in this, the second section of the body of their treatise, the authors perhaps hint at a dismissive attitude toward this inevitable---their take---human singulaity.
Recall what I said in a previous post: The most common scientific explanation for religion references its perhaps once-useful, but now nonadaptive, qualities as a genre of symbolic action. Religion is a “by-product,” the Goulds, Lewontins, and Dawkinses say, a “misapplication” of a kind. Deacon and Cashman’s critique is that this notion is way too superficial. However, D and C allow that their richer and more nuanced treatment can incorporate something of that orthodox view. In this division of their article, the authors might, in fact, be so incorporating.
As I infer, reading a bit between the lines, over the course of a long evolutionary history, hominids lost a great deal of the sensory acuity of nonhuman and prehuman mammals, but, compensatorily, acquired, via natural selection, a linguistic facility that overmatched that deficit. Symbols enabled an exponentially more supple, varied, and potent means of manipulating natural resources in service to human ends than anything that went before. Along with that new “tool,” however,” came the “by-product,” a terministic link, Deacon and Cashman make, back to the orthodox schema, a reader would presume.
Another hint of a dislogistic sort in this second section on the symbolic “bi-layered world” is how Deacon, along with Cashman, handle the term “symbolic savant.” I made reference to this term in a previous post. Deacon employes it in another of his articles on the “Symbolic Species.” There, in contrast, the expression stands alone in its grandeur. Here, “symbolic savant” is explicitly joined at the hip with the analogous term it so readily brings to mind: “idiot savant.” “Idiot savants” can wondrously perform cognitive feats that flabbergast the rest of us, like solve complex math problems in an instant. But in most other arenas of life, they’re not so proficient.
Add to these dribs and drabs of cold water the authors may be splashing on religion two more points: Deacon and Cashman conclude here that the religious sensibility they describe is altogether “natural” in origin. Nothing “supernatural” is involved. That’s surely what we would expect. Deacon adds in his second Ginn Lecture, though, that transcendentalizing “teleology” is “redundant.” Exactly what Deacon means by that isn’t clear. But its implication is.
This intro to the second division of “Role of Symbolic Capacity in the Origins of Religion” took longer than I expected. I’ll get to the details of the section part of the authors’ argument in the next post.
Ed
P.S. I forgot to mention, in this section of “Origins of Religion,” Deacon and Cashman add “music” as part and parcel of this “by-product” scenario. “Music,” the authors say, is a “semiotic vehicle able to transport us into a world of fluid half emotions lying behind and evoked by the sounds.” Interestingly, mega-orthodox evolutionists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin add female orgasms to religion and music as “nonadaptive byproducts” of the evolutionary process (“The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptionist Programme,” 1979). I’ve always said on this matter, check first with a paid soprano in a church choir.
--------------------------------------------
On Fri, 3/13/15, Edward C Appel <edwardcappel at frontier.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: [KB] Burke, Deacon, and Theology
To: "Clarke Rountree" <rountrj at uah.edu>
Cc: "kb at kbjournal.org" <kb at kbjournal.org>
Date: Friday, March 13, 2015, 4:36 PM
Burkophiles,
On the “synergy” that generates
narrative, the first of the three ways evolved symbolic
capacity transformed the pre-human mammalian brain into the
powerful force for “action,” and theotropic speculation
and motivation, it is today, according to Deacon and
Cashman:
All mammals (maybe birds, as well),
Deacon and Cashman say, possess two mnemonic systems, two
means of generating the memory that makes for enhanced
adaptation to an environment and shifting
circumstances. One mnemonic agency is
“procedural.” The other is “episodic.” D
and C label the procedural, seemingly the lower-level,
apparatus for retaining memory traces,
“diachronic.” The diachronic is concerned with, or
pertains to, the historical DEVELOPMENT of something.
It is not of a uniform age or time. Hence, diachronic
or procedural memory fixes in the mammalian brain the means
for rote motor skills, habits, eventually automatic
responses that become “second nature,” as repeated again
and again, Procedural memory particularly enlists the
basal ganglia, the motor cortex, and the cerebellum.
(These would appear to be lower-order
neuro-mechanisms. Yet, Deacon has said to me in
correspondence that he does not hold to any strict notion
of the tripartite brain. This stance would seem to
suggest that the brain works as something of a whole, an
integrated unit of a sort. So, I would need further
clarification from Deacon on distinctions between
“higher” and “lower” neuro-operations, a distinction
he and Cashman seem to be making in this article.
)
“Episodic” memory, which I will call
here a higher-order mnemonic system (after D and C, note
below) is “synchronic,” Deacon and Cashman assert.
Episodic memory pertains to “individual events and
relationships.” It has to do with the state of
something at one particular time. Though “classes of
episodic memories” can be retained, the “different
[neuro] structures” involved make for a “different kind
of redundancy” in respect to the episodic. “Serial
redundancy is unavailable.” The hippocampus is
integral to the “distributive” nature of episodic
retention. “The hippocampus is reciprocally
connected with many different areas of generalized
neocortex.” Nested in the cerebrum, it “correlates
converging information from higher-order processing in each
sensory modality.” Episodic “redundancy” is
found “in context to other events to which it was
linked.”
Now, as already indicated, all mammals,
maybe birds, also, benefit from both kinds memory, the
procedural and the episodic. In those nonsymbolic
animals, however, the two memory systems are separated, not
integrated. The symbolic capacity that the emerging
species homo sapiens evolved into across the 2-million-year
Quaternary brought the two mnemonic systems into a
revolutionary synergy. It is symbols that integrated
and integrate the two types of memory. The following
is the result: This is how it is done:
“ Syntax,” word order,
“becomes part of our procedural memory system.”
“When we produce a sentence, it is a bit like riding a
bike . . . . It is proceduralized. But what we are
doing with it is accessing and ‘downloarding’
information from episodic memory in order to express an idea
or accomplish a communicative action.”
Thus, “the interplay between
the serial [that is, the procedural] and distributive
associative [i.e., the episodic] tendencies brought into
interaction by language provides a way to organize episodic
memory into sequences.” And so, “the narrative
predisposition [that results] can be understood as an
emergent consequence of the unique mnemonic synergy that
language has made possible.”
So aver Deacon and Cashman.
Now, what is distinctive about
the ensuing “narrative” that nudges symbolizers toward
religion, or metaphysical speculations? Narrative is
not merely the equivalent of the proverbial put-down of
“history” as simply “one darned thing after
another.” Narrative is not just stories about
synchronic episodes that progress according to diachronic
habitual sequences. Narratives tend to be peculiarly
“directed” sequences, explanations, interpretations,
allegations, justifications, commentaries, personal or group
representations of the facts of the matter, made via causal
connections, with indictment or praise for the parties
involved (Deacon & Cashman; Shorter OED). Indeed,
narratives can generate “a sense of present or potential
loss” that fuses “present, past, and imagined
experiences” (Deacon & Cashman) in a way that conjures
Neo-Freudian Norman O. Brown’s dramatistic explanation of
how human narration creates “time.”
In the “id” there is no time, says Freud.
In the ego, however, “Time has to be constructed by an
animal that has guilt [or a sense of loss] and seeks to
expiate [or redeem or correct that sense of loss].”
Such a being must create and dwell on the notions of a
“past” and a “future.” “Archaic man [sic;
and modern man and woman] experiences guilt and therefore
time” (Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical
Meaning of History, 1959, pp. 274, 276, 278, 87-109).`
Even more to the point than the
inherently dramatic nature of narrative plot lines and
narrative’s temporal fusion of “loss” with a vision of
something redemptively better, is the stark contrast between
the “telos” essential to the narrative impulse, and the
lack of such consummation in many, can we not say all, human
lives. The sense of narrative near impels symbolizers,
Deacon and Cashman contend, toward transcendental plot
lines. “They [narratives] do not simply stop
arbitrarily, as do most lives,” Deacon and Cashman
observe. “Instead, in the narrative of a life,
whether real or imagined, birth and death are events that
are usually subordinated to some telos, . . . .” The
gross narrative of a human life as actually lived, abridged
of any larger meaning in itself, tends to be “embedded”
in, or related to, a larger narrative that overmatches the
glaring limitations of the “brief candle” of human
existence.
“Telos”: “End, purpose,
(an) ultimate object or aim” (Shorter OED).
Later, two more “synergies,”
generated by language, that might well help to explain still
further the otherwise strange otherworldliness of the
symbol-using animal.
Ed
--------------------------------------------
On Thu, 3/12/15, Edward C Appel <edwardcappel at frontier.com>
wrote:
Subject: Re: [KB] Burke, Deacon, and Theology
To: "Clarke Rountree" <rountrj at uah.edu>
Cc: "kb at kbjournal.org"
<kb at kbjournal.org>
Date: Thursday, March 12, 2015, 3:53 PM
Burkophiles,
At the outset of their article, “The
Role of Symbolic Capacity in the Origins of Religion”
(2009), Terrence W. Deacon and his coauthor Tyrone Cashman
cite polling data that 86 percent of human beings believe
in
God or some sort of Supreme Being. Burke, as I’ve
argued, gives good reasons why that is the case
IMPLICITLY. From a very different academic vantage
point, Deacon and Cashman do so EXPLICITLY. Language
is central in the case they, the three of them, make for
the
ubiquity of belief in the god-term, and the case for the
global occurrence of belief in the Divine, as
characterized
in many variant ways.
Deacon, the biological
anthropologist/neuroscientist (I know nothing about
Cashman)
is coming at the relationship between symbolic capacity
and
the religious “predisposition” very much from an
evolutionary and neuroscientific angle. One notable
point needs made at the outset: Forget about homo
sapiens/homo dialecticus, language in tow, suddenly
appearing on the scene circa 200,000 years ago. D and
C say language development and brain size-and- structure
development gradually and reciprocally occurred over the
entire Pleistocene, which is to say, across the whole
near-2-million-year duration of the Quaternary Period.
Brain evolution gradually brought linguistic facility into
being, while, at the same time, emerging symbolic capacity
reciprocally altered the human brain.
(Sounds a bit analogous to the
Wallace/Lovelock/Gaia hypothesis on reciprocal changes in
both life and the nonliving material scene over 3.5
billion
years, but that’s another matter.)
At the outset, also, the coauthors
summarize the three most-cited theories about the origin
of
religion via evolutionary change: religion as
“nonadaptive,” or useless, by-product of formerly
adaptive changes, “misapplications,” so to speak, of
evolved tendencies; more or less “adaptive” proofs
against mortality; and “parasitic memes” concocted
socially, rather than individually, as oppressive
sanctions
of one kind or another. The first of the above is the
most favored. All these explanations are inadequate
“reductionistic” takes on this universal human
phenomenon, Deacon and Cashman contend.
To get to the pith and marrow of the issue, as Deacon and
Cashman see it: With the evolution of language, three
“synergies” emerged that made religious speculation
and
belief, as well as the general “metaphysical” search
for
underlying “First Principles,” an inevitable
consequence
of biological change (“Metaphysics” for
Burke? “Coy theology,” you will recall).
“Synergy”: “The production by two
or more agents, substances [structures, capacities, etc.]
of
a combined effect greater than the sum or their separate
effects . . . Increased effectiveness or achievement
produced by combined action.”
“Emergent,” quite similar in meaning:
“An effect produced by a combination of causes but
unable
to be seen as the sum of their individual effects”
(Shorter OED).
Three “synergies,” occasioned by the
evolution of symbol use over that long span of time,
brought
into being this “religious” or “metaphysical”
being,
the “symbolic species,” making religion, D and C
assert,
humankind’s “synergy of synergies.” These
combinations of, or symbol-generated interactions between,
structures and capacities our mammalian ancestors
possessed
and utilized, are:
(1) “The role of language in a novel
synergy between 2 previously orthogonal modes of memory
storage which is the basis for the narrative
predisposition
that is distinctively characteristic of human reasoning,
identity, and culture.”
(2) A tropism toward conception of what D
and C call a “bi-layered world,” namely, an “evolved
attentional bias toward discerning a pattern
behind-the-pattern, a bias required for language learning,
which makes metaphysical dualism intuitively natural, and
also makes the double-world metaphysics common to most
religions a likely leap of symbolic imagination.”
(3) “The dramatic expansion
and transformation of the mammalian emotional repertoire
by
virtue of the use of symbolic blends to induce
unprecedented
interactions and novel experiential synergies that we
describe as emergent emotional experiences.”
“Orthogonal”: As inferred from Deacon’s work as a
whole, the meaning here, I would assume, is “straight,
normal, proper [I think we can add “natural”], without
external influence,” “completely independent,” which
is to say, “free” of influence by the “absential
feature,” or nonsymbolic negative, that nonhuman living
beings are beholden to. Hence, we’re talking here
about the “orthograde.” “Orthograde,” in
Deaconese, serves, it seems to me, as the opposite of
“contragrade.” “Contragrade” refers to a force
that runs counter to mechanical nonliving processes.
Yet, there seems to me to be an ambiguity
here with this term. “Orthogonal,” seen as a
derivative of “orthograde,” would likely characterize
nonsymbolic living beings, as well as symbolic. Lower
animals and plants appear to be “contragrade,” too, in
the sense that they uniquely resist entropy by way of
reproduction and photosynthesis, or by reproduction and
direct or indirect ingestion of the products of
photosynthesis. Maybe I can get Deacon to bring me up
to speed on the definition “orthogonal,” as employed
here, when I forward the post to him.
I’ll try to unpack the three synergies
in subsequent posts.
Ed
--------------------------------------------
On Fri, 3/6/15, Edward C Appel <edwardcappel at frontier.com>
wrote:
Subject: Re: [KB] Burke, Deacon, and Theology
To: "Clarke Rountree" <rountrj at uah.edu>
Cc: "kb at kbjournal.org"
<kb at kbjournal.org>
Date: Friday, March 6, 2015, 8:57 PM
Clarke,
Thanks for your extended and
insightful reply to my post. Hey, thanks for even
reading
my long rant! You certainly make some good points,
though
I would interpret the "potentiality" claim in RM
as making our emergence out of a "wordless" Ground
as maybe "more complicated" than that. Following
Burke, I could quote Scripture here, a passage in
Romans
and
one in Hebrews on how the visible things of this
world
adumbrate a reality that is beyond. I'll let
Deacon
expand on the matter in his own way in a subsequent
post.
(Not that Deacon is
necessarily a theist. The religious sensibility
that
comes
so "naturally" to the "symbolic species"
is, for Deacon, just that: inevitable, yes, but
natural.
"Teleology" is real, one of the last frames in his
second Ginn Lecture proclaims, but to
transcendentalize it
is "redundant, Deacon avers. An unsatisfactory
denouement for the "symbol-users" or the
"symbolic species," i.e., coming at the matter
from either Burke's perspective, or Deacon's.
That's why 86 percent of Americans believe in God,
or
some such figure, as Deacon and Cashman note at the
beginning of their journal article.)
By way of illustration, I offered in one of my
posts to Deacon the characters in Samuel Becket's
black
comedy, "Waiting for Godot." At the end of the
play, they are still waiting, and the implications
are
that
Godot is not going to show up, yet these forlorn
wretches
will continue to wait . . and wait . . . and wait . .
.
and
never stop waiting.
On
the symbol-user's tendency to "see" drama in,
or superimpose drama on, the supposedly blind motions
of
the
universe---Deacon has a powerful explanation for
that,
which
I'll get to eventually.
Thanks again for replying---and rebutting!
Ed
--------------------------------------------
On Fri, 3/6/15, Clarke Rountree <rountrj at uah.edu>
wrote:
Subject: Re: [KB]
Burke, Deacon, and Theology
To:
"Edward C Appel" <edwardcappel at frontier.com>
Cc: "kb at kbjournal.org"
<kb at kbjournal.org>
Date: Friday, March 6, 2015, 12:23 PM
Dear Burkelers--
My good friend Ed obviously
has a passion for seeing Burke as a theologian
(coy or otherwise), despite Burke’s
insistence that he
isn’t a believer in
God.
Of course one can get around the
problem of Burke not
actually believing in
God through the
Spinozan strategy of making
God equal to Nature, so that the
GROUND of
things
itself is equivalent to God. And,
notably, if verbalizing is
somehow
contained
in or implicit in that GROUND,
then, Ed reasons, that is an
acknowledgment
of
at least a God principle at work. Even
an old atheist like
me will admit that
we humans, surprisingly, arose from a wordless
world, that
post facto we know carried the
potentiality for
creating wordy
creature. Note, also, that Burke insists that
when humans
are gone it will go
back to its wordlessness. (I’m speaking of
Earth only, of
course; I think it
perfectly obvious that there is sentient life
elsewhere in
the universe.)
Last year
my son John and
I published our essay from
the
Burke conference in Belgium where we
argued about the
potentialities and
dangers of the motivational bias of humans.
(We called it a
symbol-users
guide. I don't have the citation handy,
but I can get it
if anyone's
interested.) That is, building on my
“Dramatism as Literal” essay in KBJ (2010), we
noted that it is intrinsic to humans to see
the world
through the grammar of
motives, and that this grammar becomes a
problematic
terministic screen. (It
also is a wonderful thing, of course, as it
makes us
recognizably human—my point
in the 2010 essay.) After mulling over that
issue, I have a
new appreciation
for Burke’s suggestion that toddlers may
learn the idea of
“No” before they
learn the idea of “nothing.” The
implication is that
“scientific” or
“objective”
understandings of the world
are an add-on—something
secondary we have
to learn,
while the search for motives is
primary.
Now, early humans learned
to
search for motives in prey and
in animals
that preyed on them. Scientists may tell us now
that animals don’t
have the
capacity for the kind of actions we may attribute
to them, but
thinking that
way may have been beneficial in making us wary
of what animals
are doing
when they run or attack. Of course, walking around
with a “pentadic”
set of
glasses on the world undoubtedly gives rise to
animism and, later, more
complex forms of religion, with gods in the river,
the
sea,
the sky, etc.
(Let me
add quickly as
well, that the dramatistic
screen did not handicap humans
in
developing technology and improving their lot;
it’s
just that every agency
was
connected to a human purpose, every scene implicitly
asked “what can be
done
[for humans] with this?” Indeed, that's one of
the warning John and I make--that we have
trouble seeing
anything except as it
relates to us.)
When scientists look at
the
world as objects, they blind
themselves to
this primary way of thinking (though, as Burke
says, not so much that
they
don’t know to treat their fellow chemists
differently
than the chemicals
with which
they work). When people want to look at more than
things,
investigating the
human and the social, wearing these
blinders threaten to make
them miss the
FUNCTIONS of pentadic screens in human
interactions.
Now Burke, looking at
religion, would be missing much if he
were
so blinded; but of course he is not. He not only
accounts for the key term
ACTION in human relations (while excoriating those
who
focus
on MOTION), but he
investigates the potentialities of symbolic action.
That
this leads him to find
a
particularly potent (and “perfected”) symbolic
form
in
religion is
unsurprising—religion is one of the oldest, most
scrutinized, most pervasive,
most defended, most argued over, and (thus) most
perfected
symbolic systems we
have.
Ultimately, I believe that
the perfectedness of religion as
a symbol
system has nothing to do with its intrinsic truth
(except as, perhaps, an "end of the
line" human
truth, an implication of
our terminology). It does have much
to do
with its relation to power, making it a key bone of
contention for those
who
would rise to prominence in social systems. And
Burke’s focus on religion
has more to do with the fact that, given its intense
scrutiny by some of the
brightest minds for millennia (at least since
Augustine)
it
is the most thoroughgoing
symbolic system around. However, as I noted in
a QJS
article on the construction of George
H.W. Bush in the
1992
presidential elections (1995), there are other well
developed symbol systems that have
pushed the envelope of what is “thinkable”
through our
dramatistic grammar—my key
example, criminal law, where hundreds of years
of
Anglo-American law (and
earlier law as well) helped to refine the
possibilities
for
guilt and
innocence.
Had Burke spent more time talking to law folks,
maybe he would have
landed on
criminal law as a perfection of symbol systems
(though, note, he does
spend
a lot of time with constitutions!). That wouldn’t
make him a lawyer; and
finding perfection in religion doesn’t make him a
theologian. Just an admirer
of what has been wrought.
That’s my oar in the
water.
(On a side note, I’m a
great fan of
Ed’s explication of
Deacon’s work and
its implications for understanding
Burke’s work. I look forward to the next
installment.)
Cheers,
Clarke
On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 2:52
PM, Edward C Appel <edwardcappel at frontier.com>
wrote:
Burkophiles,
I’ve posted at length here on
intersections
between Burke and Terrence W.
Deacon, Chair of the
Department of
Anthropology at Cal Berkeley, you may
recall. (Of equal importance, Deacon is a
neuroscientist,
as well.) In response to
a recent e-mail of mine on his
aptly
described “tour de force,” Incomplete Nature:
How
Mind Emerged from Matter (Norton, 2012, 2013),
Professor
Deacon kindly sent me additional
materials of his: two more
of his published
articles, bringing my cache to seven in
toto; and several series of exceedingly well wrought
powerpoint frames and other visuals he has
used in lectures
at the University of Oslo
in Norway, in Holland, the Ginn
Lectures in
Atlanta, and a couple of presentations to
theologians.
As some of you
will likely suspect, the theology
theme
immediately piqued my interest. Here we have, it
seemed to me, another important point of
convergence between
Burke and Deacon,
adding to the considerable list I’ve
already outlined. The focal reference here will
be to
Deacon’s coauthored article (with Tyrone
Cashman), “The
Role of Symbolic Capacity
in the Origins of Religion,”
Journal of
Religion, Nature & Culture, 2009, Vol. 3 No.
4, pp. 490-517.
I want to begin, in this post, with my take on
Burke’s anfractuous relationship to
theology, then in a
subsequent edition,
summarize Deacon’s position.
Burke, we know, claimed publicly that his
interest in theology was entirely secular.
“Logology,”
the late-Burke title for
his philosophy looked at as an
“epistemology,” was solely about the contours of
symbolic action, its motives and tendentious
operations, not
about any putatively
transcendental reality. Logology was
the
“systematic study of theological terms for the
light
they might throw on the forms of language,”
theological
terms being the most
thoroughgoing, far-reaching, ultimate
terms
in language,” language, in Burke’s pat phrase,
taken to “the end of the line.” Tim
Crusius doubled
down on Burke’s
affirmation in Kenneth Burke and the
Conversation After Philosophy (Southern Illinois UP,
1999),
and in his review of Greig
Henderson’s book, Kenneth
Burke:
Literature and Language as Symbolic Action, in QJS
76
(1990), pp. 340-342.
Add to Burke’s official position on logology
(was it, or was it not, something of a façade
that a
cluster/agon analysis can maneuver
around?---I ask, and have
asked) Burke’s
private claim to have been a nontheist.
Wayne Booth (“Wax ‘N Wayne,” as Burke would
call
him
privately) was a frequent correspondent
of KB’s. In his
chapter, “Kenneth
Burke’s Religious Rhetoric:
‘God-Terms’ and the Ontological Proof,” in
Rhetorical
Invention and Religious Inquiry
(Yale UP, 2000, pp. 25-46),
Booth takes
note of Burke’s demurrer. (See, also, “The
Many Voices of Kenneth Burke, Theologian and
Prophet, as
Revealed in His Letters to
Me,” in Unending Conversations:
New
Writings by and about Kenneth Burke, Eds. Henderson
and
Williams [Southern Illinois UP, 2001, pp.
179-201], where
Booth offers a second
reprise on his 1996 plenary address at
the
Duquesne Conference, i.e., the Third Triennial.)
On his actual belief or nonbelief,
I think we
have to take Burke at his
word. Let’s assume he was the
nontheist
he told people he was.
That having
been said, Burke’s demonstrable
theological obsession cannot be gainsaid. In
Literature
and Language (1988), Henderson looked behind
the curtain:
“For Burke logology is in
some sense a surrogate
theology.” Greig
added, “The analogies he makes for
heuristic purposes betray a psychological need for a
sense
of permanence akin to a religious
faith in the curative
power of the word
made flesh” (p. 105). That same year,
at ECA (April 29), Trevor Melia speculated about
“what
kind of Christian” Burke was, suggested that
the label
“secular Christian” can only
be a starting point, and
concluded that
Burke was at least “up to his ears in
Christianity.”
At length, I had
already corresponded with Burke
on the
matter (late 1983, early 1984), my case, “Kenneth
Burke: Coy Theologian,” later published in
the Journal of
Communication and Religion
(September, 1993). Burke had
even allowed
at the Philadelphia Conference (March,1984)
that I had made a “powerful argument” that he was
a
theologian. I got that news from Herb
Simons, who was
present at the after-hours
discussion several key scholars
had had
with Burke after the first day’s seminars.
Other names that can be added to
these
speculations about Burke and religion
include, as per Booth
in that Yale
publication, Burks, Carter, Duerden, Durham,
Freccero, Gunn, Gusfield, and Jay. And I can
add Richard
Thames and Steven Mailloux to
their number (Steve’s paper
at the Ghent
Conference: “Under the Sign of Theology:
Kenneth Burke on Language and the Supernatural
Order.")
I won’t lay out my entire case on Burke as
“coy theologian.” But I’ll highlight a
few central
points:
The bottom line in my correspondence with KB,
and in my journal piece, was this: It
doesn’t matter what
Burke personally
believed or did not believe. When a
theorist posits that symbolizers are inherently
“theotropic”---I’m borrowing a term from
Steve
here---that theorist is at least a
“generic”
theologian. A “lure” in
rhetoric, whether in
“error” or not,
strongly nudges homo loquax “Upward”
not only toward a “god term” in general, but
also
toward
the most “perfectly” satisfying
God-term of all (GM, pp.
306; RM, pp.
275-76, 290-91; RR).
And especially
when it can be related to extant
or
historic theological systems, that generic theology
takes
on some kind of shape, affords a bit of
implicit commentary
this ubiquitous
attribute. I’ve characterized Burke’s
dramatism/logology as a quasi-gnostic (a radical
sense of
a
“Fall” into language, not into a
lustful body)
universalism (the quest for a
“god-term” that unites all
of humanity,
and a focal program aimed at “purifying”
conflict and “war”), friendly to
Whitehead’s process
theology (with its
dialectics, de-perfecting of the Godhead,
and rejection of a life after death; note what Burke
said
in
the movie shown at Airlie House,
1993).
Add to these pillars of
support what I would
conceive as Burke’s
occasional drift into theological
principles in the paradigm sense, i.e., statements
that
have
to do with, or surely adumbrate, the
actual existence of a
Divine Essence of a
kind. When Burke says the
“extrahuman
ground” out of which humans proceeded
“contains the principle of personality, quite as
it
contains the principle of verbalizing,” that
this
“’nonverbal’ ground must have
contained the
‘potentiality’ of the
verbal, otherwise the verbal could
not have
emerged from it,” Burke has crossed the line, I
would suggest, into theology or religion
proper (RM, pp.
289-90).
An analogous proposition is found in the
Calabi-Yau version of string theory via the
“anthropic
principle,” the “notion
that the observed laws of nature
must be
consistent with the presence of intelligent life
and, specifically, the presence of intelligent
observers
like us. Put in other terms,
the universe looks the way it
does because
if conditions were even slightly different,
life would not have formed and humans would not be
around
to
observe it” (Shing-Tung Yau and Steve
Nadis, The Shape of
Inner Space: String
Theory and the Geometry of the
Universe’s
Hidden Dimensions , Basic Books, 2010, p.
345).
Analogous, also, as I see it,
is this quotation
highlighted in one of
Deacon’s two Ginn Lectures: “We
need an
understanding of nature such that it is not absurd
to say that it has us as its products,” by
Belgian chemist
Ilya Prigogine and the
physicist Victor J. Stenger.
(“Naturalizing Teleology: The Redemption of Science
by
the
Rediscovery of Self and Value,”
Deacon, 2014.)
Illustrative of
what different observers will
“see” in
a given statement, question, lacuna, or
phenomenon, Stenger was one of the “new
atheists,”
author of God: The Failed Hypothesis: How
Science Shows That
God Does not Exist,
2007. Stenger, former blogger for the
Huffington Post, famously said, “Science flies you
to
the
moon. Religion flies you into
buildings.” One could
just as
“truthfully” say, “Religion prepares meals,
low cost or free, for the elderly and needy in
Lancaster
Country, Pennsylvania, and in
other communities across the
world. The
likes of godless communism and Nazism kills a
hundred million persons, give or take a few
tens of
millions, in quest of a
‘heaven’ on earth.”
As Burke
says, symbols unite and divide, select
in
and select out, induce attention toward and induce
attention away from. Pick the blinkered
lenses of your
choice. They’re all
free!
So, later, an examination of
the case for the
ubiquity of religion
Deacon and Cashman make in the article
that
concludes: “We speculate that something like a
religious predisposition, in the most general
sense of the
term, should be considered a
universal consequence of the
symbolic
capacity evolving, whether here on earth, or in any
other context where symbolic cognition might
arise.”
Ed
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--
Dr.
Clarke Rountree
Chair and
Professor of
Communication Arts
342 Morton Hall
University of
Alabama in Huntsville
Huntsville, AL
35899
256-824-6646
clarke.rountree at uah.edu
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