[KB] Burke, Deacon, and Theology
Edward C Appel
edwardcappel at frontier.com
Tue Mar 24 13:38:16 EDT 2015
Burkophiles,
Before I get into summary reflections on Deacon/Cashman, symbolism, theology, and dramatism, I think I need to add more on D and C’s take on the third synergy, the one that begets the particularly “religious” emotions. The reason is, as I read between the lines, the dislogistic expressions “idiosyncratic” and “idiot savants” ring in the background, for me at least, in the authors’ treatment of the emergence of “narrative” and the “virtual” symbolic world of “hidden” meanings and beliefs that derives from the “thesaurus” complex. These two coalescences lead, as I mentioned, or can be seen to lead, up and into the airy realm of supernatural Beings, essences, and eternal destinations. If you’re a scientist, you’re in trouble going there. Kenneth Miller at Brown University (author of Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution) is both a renowned evolutionary biologist
and practicing Roman Catholic, but you won’t find many in that mold. That’s why Miller is called on so frequently to testify against Creationists in states like Kansas. He has impeccable credentials on both sides of the debate. Call it a kind of cross-referencing ethos. Call it the power of dialectical identification.
In what we’ve said so far about Deacon and Cashman on the emotional synergy, there’s more of an implicit respect emanating there, I surmise, owing to a somewhat less supramundane trajectory from those discordant combinations of the cognitive-cum-emotional features of mammals in general. This globally sublime, more universally applicable, sense of emotional emergence comes out strongest in the authors’ treatment of the distinctively “ethical” dimensions of symbolic life.
Deacon and Cashman suggest more regard for the emotional synergies that anatomize these “religious/spiritual experiences: awe, reverence, a sense of the sacred,” yes, but also “selfless action for others, a sense of unity with the cosmos, charity, humility and lovingkindness.” These higher-order, ethically-tinged, emotional synergies can characterize nontheistic Buddhists, the religiously tolerant humanists I commune with at UUCL, the spiritual dimensionality sought by the Sam Harrises of the world,* anyone who thinks deeply and inclusively about man and woman’s creaturely place and social obligations in this unfathomable universe. “Religion” in this sense becomes a common quest for inner peace and harmony that goes beyond brand-name transcendental dogmas. I sense Deacon and Cashman’s putting more of an imprimatur on such dispositions, accessible to all.
Here’s the ethical/emotional injunction Deacon and Cashman find most illustrative of the novel, contradictory, and emergent nature of distinctively human feelings and attitudes: “One of the most extreme cases of symbolic synergy in the ethical realm is the religious virtue indicated by the request: ‘Love thine enemies. Do good to those who harm you.’ Clearly, this is an injunction that juxtaposes some of the most deeply ingrained but mutually incompatible emotional predispositions. What the reductionist explanations of religious origins overlook, then, is the authentic human value of emergent emotional experiences that are the intended effect of certain religious symbols and practices.” Such a radical cognitive-emotional synergy “undermine[s] the more mundane and normal relationships with the physical world” no nonsymbolic mammal would have a clue to.
Maybe a summation yet before I invite you to retreat back into your dogmatic slumbers.
Ed
*”I thought I Hated the New Atheists, Then I Read Sam Harris’s New Book,” Trevor Quirk, New Republic, September 10, 2014, review of Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.
--------------------------------------------
On Fri, 3/20/15, 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 20, 2015, 12:45 PM
Burkophiles,
Up to this point, Deacon and Cashman say,
their analysis of the emergence of religion via symbolism
can fit at least in part within the “reductionistic”
put-downs of most previous evolutionary schemas.
Religion can be shoehorned into the “spill-over” bin, or
the “by-product” box, in the sense that “narrative”
at its base does not equal religion. Only the tendency
toward a “telos” inherent in the narrative mode will
lead almost inevitably in that direction, at least in terms
of a capacity for conceiving of religious dimensions of
life. As for the “metaphysical dualism” theme,
that scenario begins with the
dictionary/thesaurus/words-in-their-inherent-and-separate-interconnectedness
intuition that only secondarily, as it were, ramifies
perceived underlying connections outward and upward toward
some ultimately meaningful and explanatory
“beyond.” Sounds to a Burkean like the motive of
perfection at work in each case, the
dialectical “Upward Way,” the imperious negative,
opening vistas of infinity, eternity, and transcendental
fulfillment of one kind or another.
The third “synergy” generated by
symbols cannot be so extenuated, the authors assert.
This emergent coalescence of generic mammalian faculties
that symbols induce results in complex, unprecedented
emotions drawn from primary ones chimps presumably
possess. These emergent emotions include,
among others, “elation,” “awe,” “equanimity,”
and “spiritual renewal.” These human
transcendences result from no “simple mix.”
“Efforts to explain these phenomena as mere extrapolations
from more basic adaptive mechanisms evolved for more
instrumental purposes” prove unsatisfactory, the authors
claim. “Without the linkages made
possible via symbols, these component [“neuronal”]
processes would not interact, due to mutually exclusive
generative contexts.” Focal dynamic mechanism:
“The ways symbols can reorganize cognition in
unprecedented ways.
”
Recall what I said in a previous post:
Brain evolution in the direction of our species, the
symbolic species, across the length of the Quaternary, was a
RECIPROCAL process, the emerging symbolic faculty altering
brain development, as well as brain evolution facilitating
symbolization.
As they get into the nitty-gritty of this
dynamical process of complex emotional emergence, D and C
make reference to more elaborated treatments of the issue,
including some by Deacon himself, but still soldier on in
abridged explanation. Cognitions and accompanying
emotions are the way of life for symbolizers, as well as
nonsymbolizers. Those emotional “arousal states”
are considerably tamped down, though, or can be so, in human
thought and experience. Prefrontal brain
enlargement, both generating and generated by gradual
evolutionary symbolic progressions, has conferred on
symbolizers an “executive” capacity toward more
pronounced self-control. It, the symbolically enlarged
and enhanced brain, has facilitated not only the cognitive
flexibility to juxtapose and ramify myriad blends of
thoughts and ideas, but also those of accompanying emotions
or arousal states, Those cognitions can be harmonized
or accommodated in their disparity in a
way that the potentially incompatible emotions
cannot. Thus, “symbolic blends can bring together
otherwise incompatible or opposed component
emotions.” To put the matter another way, the
“interaction” of these “blended emotional states . . .
produces a synergistic effect that cannot be reduced to any
simple additive relationship (i.e., not a simple 40 % angry
60 % surprised composition).”
The authors illustrate this unprecedented
emotional synergy effect via analysis of “awe,”
“nostalgia,” and “humor” or the “joke.”
“Awe” results from the clashing together (echoes of
perspective by incongruity?) of “fear” and an
“appreciation of beauty or grandeur.” Our weakness
and vulnerability put in the context of a greatness of power
or achievement far beyond our own results in a novel
feeling, one never before experienced on planet earth.
“Awe” is an especially central ingredient in religious
faith and ritual, as well as elation, and a glowing sense of
transcendence and spiritual renewal.
“Nostalgia” emerges from a
juxtaposition of “past happiness” and sadness over
“present or potential loss,” combined with an
“imagined,” possibly future, denouement. I’ve
already referred to this effect, since cognition accompanies
this emotional synergy. As Freud and Norman O. Brown
argue, a sense of “time” is constructed in just such a
dramatically progressive manner.
The most readily understandable example
of cognitive-emotional synergy Deacon and Cashman advance is
that for “humor.” The “emotional eruption”
here produced, the authors demonstrate, by “incompatible
arousal states,” can be easily appreciated by any Burkean,
indeed any jokester. A sense of “irony” would be
closely associated with this synergistic convergence.
The “eureka” moment the authors
additionally elaborate on combines partly similar, partly
disparate, emotional roots.
More later, perhaps, in summary and with
related reflections.
Ed
--------------------------------------------
On Wed, 3/18/15, 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: Wednesday, March 18, 2015, 4:45 PM
Burkophiles,
Once more:
According to Deacon and Cashman, the
second of the three “synergies” that accompanied the
evolution of language, and that helps 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.
This two-world metaphysics---analogous to
Burke’s assertion that language is a “transcendence”
in and of itself, irrespective of other, more common
notions
of transcendence language may evoke---this two-world
metaphysics goes something like this:
Symbol-users, like nonsymbolic animals,
live in world of “real,” “material,” “tactile
and
visible objects and living beings,” a world of
“concrete
objects and events.” Unlike those reptilian and
mammalian precursors, however, symbolizers inhabit a
“second world” as well. This underlying world is
one of “symbols that are linked together by meaningful
associations,” a “virtual,” indeed a
“spiritual,”
world. The symbolic species is, consequently, a
“bi-layered” being. Just as the religious
sensibility completes, in a sense, the symbol-generated
“narrative” union of mammalian procedural and episodic
memory systems (religion fulfilling most “perfectly”
the
thrust toward a narrative “telos,” or redemptive
consummation, of a morally-tinged, guilt-inaugurated
troublesome tale, to “Burke” the matter a bit), so
religious speculation (call it “imagination” if
that’s
your estimate) brings to closure a
most satisfying harmony between these two disparate
“realities”: life “bottomed on the earth,” to
quote
Melville, and the transcendental world of symbolic
relationships and implications.
At its foundation, this “second,”
“spiritually” symbolic world, is epitomized by, or
illustrated via, humankind’s “dictionary” or
“thesaurus” syndrome. It’s the tunnel-vision,
mere “iconic” and “indexical” communication of the
other mammals that functions on the basis of one-to-one,
signifier-signified relationships, diametrically different
from the dictionary/thesaurus obsession of our
species. The “lower” animals “see” a
significant form (the icon) and “point” to it by way
of
a physical or vocal gesture (the index). This kind of
index, the generically mammalian index, “maps onto”
the
object or event one-to-one. It’s a “sinsign,” to
borrow from Charles Sanders Peirce, which Deacon does.
The indexical sinsign is “particular,” not
“general.” There’s no need for learned
skillfulness in “disambiguating” reference.
“Subject/predicate,” “topic/comment,” “indexical
operation/symbolic operation” quandaries do not
apply. I dealt with these matters before in posts
9/16/14 and 10/6/14.
In the communication of the symbolic
species, there are no “sinsigns,” only
“legisigns,”
or generalized signs, to further elaborate on Peirce.
The relationship at the heart of the symbolizers’
communication is signifier-signifier, not
signifier-signified. Their SYMBOLIC communication is
based on a “system-internal web of relationships”
requiring “an associated indexical operation . . . in
order to point outside this system.”
This in-the-mind system of symbolic
relationships is the “other” world, the “second”
world, homo sapiens/homo loqax dwells in. As I said
before, symbols are not, Deacon claims, mere “code,”
“sign,” “icon,” or number, that is, symbols are
not
just pointers, markers, gauges, or portraits of the
kind so often denominated “symbols” in common
parlance. Actual symbols refer, abstractly and
generally, “irrespective of any natural
affinities.” (See GM, where Burke acknowledges that
each of his pentadic terms refers to “no thing.”)
In other words, as per Burke, symbols synthesize,
synthetically, disparate beings, entities, or events for
seemingly pragmatic, culturally-conditioned purposes that
transcend mere appearances of similarity. Contra
Saussure, symbolic reference cannot be “mapped.”
To the extent that a common word or symbol “maps”
anything, it maps a POSITION IN A GIVEN LEXICON IN
RELATION
TO OTHER
TERMINOLOGIES IN THAT SYMBOL SYSTEM.
Maybe a fair illustration of this
symbolic proclivity is how readily our “episodic”
memory
“downloads” various synonyms to insert into the slots
our “procedural” memory vouchsafes as we “ride the
bike” of sentence formation, even in impromptu speech.
Deacon and Cashman assure us that
Children pick up on the vagaries of these “second
world”
relationships with ready facility, just the way they do so
in regard to symbolic indexicality, reference, transition,
etc. (Deacon is now working on a coauthored book with
a linguist. An apparently anti-Chomskyan tome, it will
show that reference to neither nature nor nurture is
needed
to demonstrate how the “rules” of grammar are fixed
early on in the communicative practice of the symbolic
species.)
Once again, the religious imagination
brings to climactic fruition the promptings of the
“second” or “spiritual” world of symbols, as it
confronts, bounces off of, the exigencies and challenges
posed by the “material” world of potential and
inevitable mental and physical hard
knocks. As Carrol says, the things that are
“related” via symbolism may be “real,” but the
relations themselves are not real. Maybe so. To
apply here what Burke says in the Rhetoric, however, call
this propensity, even “compulsion,” to follow the cues
of language through even to the “end of the line,”
call
this “affliction” the ultimate error of the dialectic,
if you will. That need not concern us. This is
how symbolizers think. Emersed as they are in this
“hidden” realm of symbolic inducements and
associations,
they follow this yellow brick road (“the hidden [even
“idiosyncratic”] logic of relationships behind
symbols,” Deacon and
Cashman call it) in myriad, labyrinthine directions,
according to its most alluring incentives.
“Burking” this virtual thoroughfare, we travel by way
of
the pentad/hexad, which inevitably bleeds into the
disorder/guilt/redemption cycle (see RM, p. 276; LASA, pp.
54-55, and the first three chapters of the Primer)
.
Deacon and Cashman find “expression of
[the] deeper hidden realities” beneath the “surface”
appearances of the physical world in the “Dreamline”
myths of Australian aborigines, readings of entrails by
Pagan priests, the Hindu double-world tradition of the
“maya,” Plato’s ideal forms, Acquinas’s “Pure
Ideas” in the Mind of God, and the connective
trajectories
to the Mind of God in the “Western science” of
Galileo,
Kepler, and Einstein.
I ask: Wouldn’t ALL philosophical
speculation be part and parcel with this “virtual,”
“spiritual,” empirically un-“real,” perhaps even
“idiotically” savant-skewered realm of potential
illusion?
The thired “synergy” next time, the
symbolic blending of primary mammalian emotions into the
religiously complex.
Ed
--------------------------------------------
On Mon, 3/16/15, 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: Monday, March 16, 2015, 2:44 PM
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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