[KB] Burke and Connotation
Edward C Appel
edwardcappel at frontier.com
Fri Apr 3 13:24:29 EDT 2015
Burkophiles,
A retired Republican state senator used to write a column for our afternoon newspaper. In a piece I strongly disapproved of, he quoted Harry Truman to make his main polemical point. I called him on the phone to complain. The Senator said, “I didn’t say that. Harry Truman said that.”
Most disingenuous. The Senator was using what we might call “reluctant” testimony to round out his case. He wouldn’t take ownership.
How many times have I heard this week references to Bill Clinton and his signing, in 1993, of the federal religious rights act. The Republican governors of Indiana and Arkansas, and their supporters, have zealously enlisted this Democratic president in pursuit of their cause. “See,” they are implying, “even godless liberals acknowledge the need for religious freedom, freedom of conscience.”
Remember the going linkages on the Right: “Democrat” =”liberal”=”godless[ness]=”persecution of Christians.” Conservative provocateur Ann Coulter memorialized those associations in the very title of one of her books. Last night in his opening “memo,” Bill O’Reilly linked the gay rights street protestors directly to the Muslim Jihadis who have recently massacred Christians in Kenya and elsewhere. These enemies of the faith are all of a piece, out to bring down Christian religion anyway they can.
Our daughter Beth is a Presbyterian minister. Two weeks ago she was interviewed on gay marriage, point/counterpoint, on a radio show in Providence, RI. She argued in support of gay marriage. Beth is not “godless,” nor, I don’t believe, is she “anti-Christian.” There is not a “religious Left,” however, in the pinched worldview of the Coulters and O’Reillys.
Which brings me to the “reluctant” aspect, or close to it, of a quotation I put in a footnote a few posts back. It had to do with the title of an article in The New Republic. It went something like, “I Hated the ‘New Atheists’ Until I Read Sam Harris’s New Book.” Now, I want to make clear, I personally do not even use the word “atheist” in my own discourse, private or public. I say “nontheist.” This rhetorical choice mirrors my disdain for the term “prostitute,” as well. I substitute “sex worker.” “Nontheist” and “sex worker” both carry the message, “I do not condemn you.” As Burke says in PLF, p. 35, “The overtones of a usage are revealed ‘by the company it keeps’ . . . .” On the small, isolated island called “Academe,” the word “atheist” keeps very good company. In the Great Wide World, though---not so much. Tuesday a week ago, CNN aired a program entitled “The Atheists.” One of
the nonbelievers interviewed acknowledged the invidious connotations of that word. He feared “coming out” in that “company.”
I personally do not “hate” the “new atheists,” as they are currently and publicly labeled, the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens. Nor was I trying to make a point on the back of the TNR author. To me, “atheist,” as in “new atheists,” refers only to public figures who write books and go on television for the purpose of stamping out all religious faith, or who attend conventions like the one held a few years back in California, where the Dawkinses strategize their antireligious program of action. They are the extreme “antis.” I do oppose their AGENDA.
I preached on the “new atheists” at UUCL. I noted that Sam Harris, in The End of Faith, holds liberal theists in the highest contempt. Liberal theists lend some cover to the Fundamentalists. That’s bad enough. Worse still, unlike Evangelical Protestants, liberals of faith don’t recognize the danger Islam poses for America and Europe, as well as the Middle East. Liberals are tolerant toward everybody! That goes double or triple for UUs. People of all faith or nonfaith orientations are explicitly welcomed to our fellowship in the “Opening Words.” A mobile with about a dozen religious symbols, including Islam’s, hangs from the ceiling in the front of our sanctuary. UUs are the most divorced from “reality,” according to Harris.
Anyway, I apologize to anyone who may have been offended by the title of that TNR article. I thought there was a bit of humor in it, the notion that anyone writing for that “godless,” “liberal” publication would actually “hate” the “new atheists.” How droll.
Have a blessed Easter, whatever your orientation.
Ed
--------------------------------------------
On Thu, 4/2/15, Edward C Appel <edwardcappel at frontier.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: [KB] Evolutionary Confirmation and "Deacon"-struction
To: kb at kbjournal.org
Date: Thursday, April 2, 2015, 1:02 PM
Burkophiles,
A few concluding reflections on Deacon,
his semiotic and evolutionary theories, and my take on one
or two aspects of it all:
In highlighting these continuities, as I
see them, between Burke’s dramatism and Deacon’s
research and publications, I function basically as a
conduit, not a critic. Deacon is a biological
anthropologist and lab neuroscientist. I’m not
conversant with those disciplines. I can only point
to, and expand a bit on, the points of correlation and
support I see in Deacon’s work. The fact that Deacon
has become an international star in his fields, however,
lecturing across the U.S. and in prestigious foreign venues,
along with the fulsome praise his books have received
(eighteen encomiums cited in the paperback printing of
Incomplete Nature), gives strong intersubjective witness to
the value of Deacon’s claims. One reviewer compared
the anthropologist even with Darwin and Einstein.
I will reference here, on behalf of full
truth in advertising, one resounding demurrer: Colin McGinn
in The New York Review called Incomple Nature the
worst-written book he had ever read, one that completely
spoiled his summer vacation. It’s style, McGinn
asserted, is heavy with jargon, neologisms, and tortured
prose, its content unoriginal and “incomplete,” the case
it makes unconvincing, compared with similar treatments
McGinn goes on to name (“Can Anything Emerge from
Nothing,” NYR, June 7, 2012). McGinn has a point on
Deacon’s style in this particular offering: Unlike the
many articles of Deacon’s I’ve been mining for Burkean
look-alikes, Incomplete Nature is a tough slog, even with
its helpful Glossary.
One question that vexes this Burkean on
those middle steps between “spontaneous,” entropy-driven
mechanism, the “homeodynamics” of the nonliving
universe---i.e., those middle steps the “morphodynamics”
of self-organizing, not-yet-living systems that eventually
generate the “teleonomy” (not yet “teleology”) of
nonsymbolic living beings, even those, apparently, on the
cellular level---how do we characterize the nature of those
presymbolic living results, those seemingly yet unsentient,
surely undramatic, trial-and-error activities in response to
a “negative” sensibility of some kind that does not
“moralize”? As I indicated, pentadic/hexadic
language, along with hints of the terms for order, seep
downward in Deacon into realms Burkeans might find
uncomfortable. Yet, the case both Deacon and Bateson
make for something revolutionary, something dislocative,
happening with the emergence of living beings generally, not
just with
the evolution of the “symbolic species,” is
compelling.
I have no answer at this point.
Anyway, McGinn had trouble with the
“nothing,” the “absential feature,” that apparently
serves as source of “causation,” even on the level of
very simple life forms, in Deacon’s scheme of
things. Deacon’s central idea, as McGinn sees it, is
that “absential phenomena” are not “materially
present.” Thus, “Nature has an inherently
‘incomplete’ or ‘absential’ character.” But,
“He [Deacon] does not offer any rigorous treatment of the
ontological standing of such putative ‘absences,’
puzzling as they are.”
McGinn is correct about the
“absential” in Deacon in respect to any precise
characterization. Analogously, it serves kind of like
“dark energy” for astrophysicists. We can
“see” its effect, but we can’t quite limn its
contours. That seems the case for Deacon’s
“absential,” as well.
Of course, positivists, scientists, and
empiricist have said much the same thing about the
linguistic negative, quite tangibly present in human
languages. They’ve tied themselves in knots
attempting to explain it away. I’ve dealt with these
unconvincing ploys in my article on Burke and the negative,
and in Chapter 4 of the Primer.
Still and all, Burkeans would likely have
questions about the prelinguistic “negative” that Deacon
does not fully answer.
One more thing here: Unlike Gould and
Lewontin, et al., Deacon does not seem to be saying that, at
bottom, religion and music are “nonadaptive,”
That’s certainly not his attitude with respect to music,
for sure. It prompts emotional meanings that do soothe
the savage breast. Actually, I don’t think we need
to go beyond the title, not the content but merely the
title, of Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s [sic] Search for
Meaning, to account for the presence of both religion and
music in the life of the symbol-user. No arcane
philosophy or scientific probings are required, given what
we plainly experience to be the case for our vulnerable,
evanescent, yet so painfully cognizant species.
One more thing yet for the three of four
subscribers who are actually reading my stuff, then I’ll
stop cluttering your inbox.
Ed
--------------------------------------------
On Wed, 4/1/15, Edward C Appel <edwardcappel at frontier.com>
wrote:
Subject: [KB] Evolutionary Confirmation and
"Deacon"-struction
To: kb at kbjournal.org
Cc: deacon at berkeley.edu
Date: Wednesday, April 1, 2015, 10:10 AM
Burkophiles,
I started this series on Deacon and Burke
last autumn. I opened with a reference to Jim
Chesebro’s criticism at ECA in Portland, Maine, 1992:
Burke stints on nonverbal motivation. So, after all
those points of intersection and confirmation Terrence W.
Deacon affords for Burke’s philosophy---and I do not
claim
the ten supports I presented exhaust the potential
list---one locus of “Deacon”-struction has to be
acknowledged. Burke’s too-often categorical
distinction between “symbolic action” and
“nonsymbolic
motion” needs to be more nuanced.
Burke, of course, does modify that
dialectic a bit, if one looks carefully enough. Bob
Wess reminded us of Burke’s description of nonsymbolic
living beings as “agents-minus.” By implication,
that puts some space between mechanistic nature and the
biosphere. The first couple of paragraphs of P&C
do that even better. In his claim that “all living
things are critics,” with an exemplary trout either
“conscious[ly]” or “unconscious[ly]”
“learning”
to avoid “jaw-ripping food,” that allowance puts
Bateson
and Deacon’s “difference that makes a diefference,”
i.e., a behavioristic orientation to some kind of
“absential feature,” front and center.
The problem is, recognition of that
apparent middle ground between the sheer motion of physics
and chemistry, and the much altered
“behavior”---however
we’re going to account for it---of living organisms,
does
not loom large in Burke. A great scholar in rhet/comm
said to me recently, we need both Burke and Bateson to
access what’s going on in the world. I would amend
his prescient comment with, we need Burke, Bateson, and
Deacon, Bateson’s successor, as it were.
That concluding rant I
threatened you with , later.
Ed
--------------------------------------------
On Tue, 3/24/15, 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: Tuesday, March 24, 2015, 1:38 PM
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
_______________________________________________
KB mailing list
KB at kbjournal.org
http://kbjournal.org/mailman/listinfo/kb_kbjournal.org
--
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
_______________________________________________
KB mailing list
KB at kbjournal.org
http://kbjournal.org/mailman/listinfo/kb_kbjournal.org
_______________________________________________
KB mailing list
KB at kbjournal.org
http://kbjournal.org/mailman/listinfo/kb_kbjournal.org
_______________________________________________
KB mailing list
KB at kbjournal.org
http://kbjournal.org/mailman/listinfo/kb_kbjournal.org
_______________________________________________
KB mailing list
KB at kbjournal.org
http://kbjournal.org/mailman/listinfo/kb_kbjournal.org
_______________________________________________
KB mailing list
KB at kbjournal.org
http://kbjournal.org/mailman/listinfo/kb_kbjournal.org
_______________________________________________
KB mailing list
KB at kbjournal.org
http://kbjournal.org/mailman/listinfo/kb_kbjournal.org
_______________________________________________
KB mailing list
KB at kbjournal.org
http://kbjournal.org/mailman/listinfo/kb_kbjournal.org
_______________________________________________
KB mailing list
KB at kbjournal.org
http://kbjournal.org/mailman/listinfo/kb_kbjournal.org
_______________________________________________
KB mailing list
KB at kbjournal.org
http://kbjournal.org/mailman/listinfo/kb_kbjournal.org
More information about the KB
mailing list