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A GRAMMAR OF MOTIVES
Ad bellum purificandum
Boo\s by Kenneth Bur\e
The White Oxen and Other Stories (1924)
Counter-Statement (1931)
Towards a Better Life: A Series of Declamations (1932)
Permanence and Change (1935)
Attitudes Toward History (1937)
The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941)
A GRAMMAR
OF MOTIVES
by
KENNETH BURKE
New York PRENTICE-HALL, INC. i94j
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^
Copyright, 1945, by
PRENTICE-HALL, INC.
70 Fifth Avenue, New Yor\
All rights reserved. No part of this boo\ may be
reproduced in any form, by mimeograph or any other
means, without permission in writing from the
publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
To Elizabeth
WITHOUT WHOM NOT
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Portions of this book have previously been published in Accent, Chimera, The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, and View. And I wish to ac- knowledge here my indebtedness to the editors of these magazines.
I also wish to state my indebtedness to various publishers, editors, and authors for permission to quote certain copyrighted material; thus:
To International Publishers, for permission to quote from V. I. Lenin's What Is To Be Done?
To The Macmillan Company, for permission to quote from Marianne Moore's Selected Poems and What Are Years? — and from Herbert Read's Poetry and Anarchism.
To the University of Chicago Press, for permission to quote from George Herbert Mead's The Philosophy of the Act and Otto Neurath's Foundations of the Social Sciences.
To Little, Brown and Company, for permission to quote from Ralph Barton Perry's The Thought and Character of William James.
To the University of California Press, for permission to quote from Josephine Miles's Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century.
To Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., for permission to quote from I. A. Richards' Principles of Literary Criticism and Matthew Josephson's ]ean- Jacques Rousseau.
To Peter Smith, Publisher, for permission to quote from Baldwin's Dic- tionary of Philosophy and Psychology.
To the Houghton Mifflin Company, for permission to quote from The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams.
To Random House, Inc., for permission to quote from Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra.
To Mr. Yvor Winters, for permission to quote from his Primitivism and Decadence, published by Arrow Editions.
To Mr. Allen Tate, for permission to quote from his Reason in Madness, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons.
To Mr. Edgar Johnson, for permission to quote from his One Mighty Torrent: The Drama of Biography, published by Stackpole Sons.
To The New Republic, for permission to quote from Stark Young's review of Clifford Odets' Night Music.
To Partisan Review, for permission to quote from the essay by John Dewey that appeared in the "Failure of Nerve" controversy.
To Science & Society, for permission to quote from an article by Lewis S.
vii
Vlll ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Feuer on "logical empiricism" and one by K. Ostrovitianov on principles of the Russian economy.
To View, for permission to quote from Parker Tyler.
To The New Yor\ Times and Mr. Arthur Krock, for permission to quote from a column by Mr. Krock entitled: "Is There a Way to Dispense with Elections?"
To The "Virginia Quarterly Review and M. Denis de Rougemont, for permission to quote from his essay, "The Idea of a Federation," appearing in the Autumn 1941 issue.
To The University Review and the authors, for permission to quote from a series of essays on the theory and practice of literary criticism by R. S. Crane, Norman Maclean, and Elder Olson.
K. B
CONTENTS
Introduction : The Five Key Terms of Dramatism xv
PART ONE— WAYS OF PLACEMENT
I. Container and Thing Contained 3
The Scene-Act Ratio 3
The Scene-Agent Ratio 7
Further Instances of These Ratios 9
Ubiquity of the Ratios 11
Range of All the Ratios 15
II. Antinomies of Definition 21
Paradox of Substance 21
^Contextual Definition 24
Familial Definition 26
purvey of Terms for Substance 29
Lfialectic Substance 33
The Paradox of Purity 35
Dialectic of Tragedy 38
Actus and Status 41
Universal Motives as Substance 43
Intrinsic and Extrinsic 46
The Rhetoric of Substance 51
Two Kinds of Departure 53
The Centrality of Substance 55
III. Scope and Reduction 59
The Representative Anecdote 59
The Way of Creation 62
Act as Locus of Motives 64
The "Grounds" of Creation 69
ix
X CONTENTS
Pantheism and Ontology 72
Grammatical Steps to Naturalism 74
Circumference 77
Monographic Terms of Placement 85
Monetary Reduction 91
Kinds of Reduction 96
Complexity of a Simple Motive 101
Money as a Substitute for God 108
The Nature of Monetary "Reality" 113
Love, Knowledge, and Authority 117
PART TWO— THE PHILOSOPHIC SCHOOLS
I. Scene 127
Scene in General 131
Hobbes . ... , 132
Spinoza 137
Alignment of Terms in Spinoza 146
Darwin 152
The Two Great Hellenistic Materialisms 159
Rhetorical and Symbolic Levels 161
II. Agent in General * 171
Idealization 172
Unification 175
Berkeley 177
Hume 181
Leibniz ; 184
Kant 185
Moral Transcendence in Kant 192
Idealism After Kant 198
Marxism 200
Hegel 202
Communist Manifesto 204
A Dramatist Grammar for Marxism 209
Santayana 214
Imagination 223
CONTENTS XI
III. Act 227
Aristotle and Aquinas 227
The "Pathetic Fallacy" 232
"Incipient" and "Delayed" Action 235
Realist Family and Nominalist Aggregate 247
Further Remarks on Act and Potency 252
Psychology of Action 262
IV. Agency and Purpose 275
The Philosophy of Means 275
The Range of Pragmatism 281
Conditions 281
The "Facts" 282
Two Principles of Truth in fames 282
Symbolic of Agency 283
Purposive Agencies of Applied Science 286
Ends 287
Modifications of Purpose 292
Purpose in Aristotle 292
Platonist and Neo-Platonist Purpose 293
Physiology of Mysticism 294
Purposiveness in the Negative 294
Unity and the Reflexive 297
Mysticism and Idealism: The Self 299
Images and the "Demonic Trinity" 300
Silence and the Hunt 303
The Mystic "Moment" 305
Mysticism of Means 309
Rationalism and the Verbal Medium 311
Means and Ends of This Grammar 317
PART THREE— ON DIALECTIC
I. The Dialectic of Constitutions 323
Necessity for Representative Case 323
The Two Circles 325
Xll CONTENTS
Terminal as Anecdote 326
Representativeness of Total War 328
The Constitutive and the Admonitory 330
Peace: Constitutive or Directive? 332
Futurism: Religious and Secular 333
Our Position Epitomized 335
Imagistic and Conceptual Summaries 338
Five Basic Terms as Beginning 340
Meanings of "Constitution" 341
Technical Immunity of "Anarchism" as Ideal 344
" Anarcho-Syndicalism" — the Ideal Organized 345
The Anarcho-Syndicalist "Constitution" 346
A New Constitution for Laissez faire 349
A Spectrum of Terms Between "Freedom" and "Capitalism" 350
Strategic Choice of Circumference for "Freedom" 354
Money as "God-term" 355
"Principles" and "Reform" 356
Constitutions and the Opponent 357
Constitutions — Addressed by Agents to Agents 360
Constitution-Behind-the-Constitution 362
Shifts in the Locus of the "Representative" 363
The Generalizing of Wishes 365
Limits and Powers of a Constitution 367
Constitutional Tactics of Coleridge's "Pantisocracy" Project 368
Constitutions but Partially Representative 371
Principles of the Conflict Among Principles 373
Constitution Ma\es Extra-Constitutionality Mandatory 376
Some Degrees of Constitutionality in Every Law 378
"Essentializing" and "Proportional" Strategies of Interpretation 380
Marshall's Argument for Right of Judicial Review 385
Constitutional Unity and Political Diversity 388
Role of the President 391
Political Rhetoric as Secular Prayer 393
War and Collectivistic Nature of Sacrifice 394
CONTENTS Xlll
The Dialectics of Federation 398
II. Dialectic in General 402
The Transformation of Terms 402
Merger and Division 403
Dialectic of the Scapegoat 406
Per Genus et DifTerentiam 408
More Variants of Merger and Division 410
The Mind-Body, Being-Nothing, and Action-Passion Pairs 418
The Socratic Transcendence 420
The Temporizing of Ussence 430
Dissolution of Drama 440
A Neo-Liberal Ideal 441
APPENDIX
A. Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats 447
B. The Problem of the Intrinsic 465
C. Motives and Motifs in the Poetry of Marianne Moore 485
D. The Four Master Tropes 503
Index 519
INTRODUCTION: THE FIVE KEY TERMS
OF DRAMATISM
What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? An answer to that question is the subject of this book. The book is concerned with the basic forms of thought which, in ac- cordance with the nature of the world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing of motives. These forms of thought can be embodied profoundly or trivially, truthfully or falsely. They are equally present in systematically elaborated metaphysical structures, in legal judgments, in poetry and fiction, in political and scientific works, in news and in bits of gossip offered at random.
We shall use five terms as generating principle of our investigation. They are: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose. In a rounded state- ment about motives, you must have some word that names the act (names what took place, in thought or deed), and another that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it oc- curred) ; also, you must indicate what person or kind of person (agent) performed the act, what means or instruments he used (agency), and the purpose. Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the character of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to name the act itself. But be that as it may, any complete statement about motives will offer some hind of an- swers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose).
If you ask why, with a whole world of terms to choose from, we se- lect these rather than some others as basic, our book itself is offered as the answer. For, to explain our position, we shall show how it can be applied.
Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose. Although, over the centuries, men have shown great enterprise and inventiveness in pondering mat- ters of human motivation, one can simplify the subject by this pentad of key terms, which are understandable almost at a glance. They need
xv
XVI INTRODUCTION
never to be abandoned, since all statements that assign motives can be shown to arise out of them and to terminate in them. By examining them quizzically, we can range far; yet the terms are always there for us to reclaim, in their everyday simplicity, their almost miraculous easi- ness, thus enabling us constantly to begin afresh. When they might become difficult, when we can hardly see them, through having stared at them too intensely, we can of a sudden relax, to look at them as we always have, lightly, glancingly. And having reassured ourselves, we can start out again, once more daring to let them look strange and diffi- cult for a time.
In an exhibit of photographic murals {Road to Victory) at the Mu- seum of Modern Art, there was an aerial photograph of two launches, proceeding side by side on a tranquil sea. Their wakes crossed and recrossed each other in almost an infinity of lines. Yet despite the in- tricateness of this tracery, the picture gave an impression of great sim- plicity, because one could quickly perceive the generating principle of its design. Such, ideally, is the case with our pentad of terms, used as generating principle. It should provide us with a kind of simplicity that can be developed into considerable complexity, and yet can be dis- covered beneath its elaborations.
We want to inquire into the purely internal relationships which the five terms bear to one another, considering their possibilities of trans- formation, their range of permutations and combinations — and then to see how these various resources figure in actual statements about hu- man motives. Strictly speaking, we mean by a Grammar of motives a concern with the terms alone, without reference to the ways in which their potentialities have been or can be utilized in actual statements about motives. Speaking broadly we could designate as "philosophies" any statements in which these grammatical resources are specifically utilized. Random or unsystematic statements about motives could be considered as fragments of a philosophy.
One could think of the Grammatical resources as principles, and of the various philosophies as casuistries which apply these principles to temporal situations. For instance, we may examine the term Scene simply as a blanket term for the concept of background or setting in general, a name for any situation in which acts or agents are placed. In our usage, this concern would be "grammatical." And we move into matters of "philosophy" when we note that one thinker uses "God" as
INTRODUCTION Xvii
his term for the ultimate ground or scene of human action, another uses "nature/' a third uses "environment," or "history," or "means of production," etc. And whereas a statement about the grammatical principles of motivation might lay claim to a universal validity, or com- plete certainty, the choice of any one philosophic idiom embodying these principles is much more open to question. Even before we know what act is to be discussed, we can say with confidence that a rounded discussion of its motives must contain a reference to some \ind of back- ground. But since each philosophic idiom will characterize this back- ground differently, there will remain the question as to which charac- terization is "right" or "more nearly right."
It is even likely that, whereas one philosophic idiom offers the best calculus for one case, another case answers best to a totally different calculus. However, we should not think of "cases" in too restricted a sense. Although, from the standpoint of the grammatical principles inherent in the internal relationships prevailing among our five terms, any given philosophy is to be considered as a casuistry, even a cultural situation extending over centuries is a "case," and would probably re- quire a much different philosophic idiom as its temporizing calculus of motives than would be required in the case of other cultural situations.
In our original plans for this project, we had no notion of writing a "Grammar" at all. We began with a theory of comedy, applied to a treatise on human relations. Feeling that competitive ambition is a drastically over-developed motive in the modern world, we thought this motive might be transcended if men devoted themselves not so much to "excoriating" it as to "appreciating" it. Accordingly, we began taking notes on the foibles and antics of what we tended to think of as "the Human Barnyard."
We sought to formulate the basic stratagems which people employ, in endless variations, and consciously or unconsciously, for the out- witting or cajoling of one another. Since all these devices had a "you and me" quality about them, being "addressed" to some person or to some advantage, we classed them broadly under the heading of a Rhet- oric. There were other notes, concerned with modes of expression and appeal in the fine arts, and with purely psychological or psychoanalytic matters. These we classed under the heading of Symbolic.
We had made still further observations, which we at first strove un- easily to class under one or the other of these two heads, but which we
XV111 INTRODUCTION
were eventually able to distinguish as the makings of a Grammar. For we found in the course of writing that our project needed a grounding in formal considerations logically prior to both the rhetorical and the psychological. And as we proceeded with this introductory ground- work, it kept extending its claims until it had spun itself from an in- tended few hundred words into nearly 200,000, of which the present book is revision and abridgement.
Theological, metaphysical, and juridical doctrines offer the best illus- tration of the concerns we place under the heading of Grammar; the forms and methods of art best illustrate the concerns of Symbolic; and the ideal material to reveal the nature of Rhetoric comprises observa- tions on parliamentary and diplomatic devices, editorial bias, sales methods and incidents of social sparring. However, the three fields overlap considerably. And we shall note, in passing, how the Rhetoric and the Symbolic hover about the edges of our central theme, the Grammar.
A perfectionist might seek to evolve terms free of ambiguity and in- consistency (as with the terministic ideals of symbolic logic and logical positivism). But we have a different purpose in view, one that prob- ably retains traces of its "comic" origin. We take it for granted that, insofar as men cannot themselves create the universe, there must re- main something essentially enigmatic about the problem of motives, and that this underlying enigma will manifest itself in inevitable ambiguities and inconsistencies among the terms for motives. Accordingly, what we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise.
Occasionally, you will encounter a writer who seems to get great exal- tation out of proving, with an air of much relentlessness, that some phil- osophic term or other has been used to cover a variety of meanings, and who would smash and abolish this idol. As a general rule, when a term is singled out for such harsh treatment, if you look closer you will find that it happens to be associated with some cultural or political trend from which the writer would dissociate himself; hence there is a certain notable ambiguity in this very charge of ambiguity, since he presumably feels purged and strengthened by bringing to bear upon this particular term a kind of attack that could, with as much justice, be brought to bear upon any other term (or "title") in philosophy, includ- ing of course the alternative term, or "title," that the writer would
INTRODUCTION XIX
swear by. Since no two things or acts or situations are exactly alike, you cannot apply the same term to both of them without thereby in- troducing a certain margin of ambiguity, an ambiguity as great as the difference between the two subjects that are given the identical title. And all the more may you expect to find ambiguity in terms so "titular" as to become the marks of a philosophic school, or even several philo- sophic schools. Hence, instead of considering it our task to "dispose of" any ambiguity by merely disclosing the fact that it is an ambiguity, we rather consider it our task to study and clarify the resources of ambi- guity. For in the course of this work, we shall deal with many kinds of transformation — and it is in the areas of ambiguity that transforma- tions take place; in fact, without such areas, transformation would be impossible. Distinctions, we might say, arise out of a great central moltenness, where all is merged. They have been thrown from a liq- uid center to the surface, where they have congealed. Let one of these crusted distinctions return to its source, and in this alchemic center it may be remade, again becoming molten liquid, and may enter into new combinations, whereat it may be again thrown forth as a new crust, a different distinction. So that A may become non-A. But not merely by a leap from one state to the other. Rather, we must take A bade into the ground of its existence, the logical substance that is its causal ancestor, and on to a point where it is consubstantial with non-A; then we may return, this time emerging with non-A instead.
And so with our five terms: certain formal interrelationships prevail among these terms, by reason of their role as attributes of a common ground or substance. Their participation in a common ground makes for transformability. At every point where the field covered by any one of these terms overlaps upon the field covered by any other, there is an alchemic opportunity, whereby we can put one philosophy or doctrine of motivation into the alembic, make the appropriate passes, and take out another. From the central moltenness, where all the elements are fused into one togetherness, there are thrown forth, in separate crusts, such distinctions as those between freedom and necessity, activity and passiveness, cooperation and competition, cause and effect, mechanism and teleology.
Our term, "Agent," for instance, is a general heading that might, in a given case, require further subdivision, as an agent might have his act modified (hence partly motivated) by friends (co-agents) or enemies
XX INTRODUCTION
(counter-agents). Again, under "Agent" one could place any personal properties that are assigned a motivational value, such as "ideas," "the will," "fear," "malice," "intuition," "the creative imagination." A por- trait painter may treat the body as a property of the agent (an expression of personality), whereas materialistic medicine would treat it as "scenic," a purely "objective material"; and from another point of view it could be classed as an agency, a means by which one gets reports of the world at large. Machines are obviously instruments (that is, Agen- cies) ; yet in their vast accumulation they constitute the industrial scene, with its own peculiar set of motivational properties. War may be treated as an Agency, insofar as it is a means to an end; as a collective Act, subdivisible into many individual acts; as a Purpose, in schemes proclaiming a cult of war. For the man inducted into the army, war is a Scene, a situation that motivates the nature of his training; and in mythologies war is an Agent, or perhaps better a super-agent, in the figure of the war god. We may think of voting as an act, and of the voter as an agent; yet votes and voters both are hardly other than a poli- tician's medium or agency; or from another point of view, they are a part of his scene. And insofar as awote is cast without adequate knowl- edge of its consequences, one might even question whether it should be classed as an activity at all ; one might rather call it passive, or pe Aaps sheer motion (what the behaviorists would call a Response to a Stimulus).
Or imagine that one were to manipulate the terms, for the imputing of motives, in such a case as this: The hero (agent) with the help of a friend (co-agent) outwits the villain (counter-agent) by using a file (agency) that enables him to break his bonds (act) in order to escape (purpose) from the room where he has been confined (scene). In selecting a casuistry here, we might locate the motive in the agent, as were we to credit his escape to some trait integral to his personality, such as "love of freedom." Or we might stress the motivational force of the scene, since nothing is surer to awaken thoughts of escape in a man than a condition of imprisonment. Or we might note the essen- tial part played by the co-agent, in assisting our hero to escape — and, with such thoughts as our point of departure, we might conclude that the motivations of this act should be reduced to social origins.
Or if one were given to the brand of speculative enterprise exempli- fied by certain Christian heretics (for instance, those who worshipped
INTRODUCTION XXJ.
Judas as a saint, on the grounds that his betrayal of Christ, in leading to the Crucifixion, so brought abqut the opportunity for mankind's redemption) one might locate the necessary motivational origin of the act in the counter-agent. For the hero would not have been prodded to escape if there had been no villain to imprison him. Inasmuch as the escape could be called a "good" act, we might find in such motiva- • tional reduction to the counter-agent a compensatory transformation whereby a bitter fountain may give forth sweet waters. In his Anti- Duhring Engels gives us a secular variant which no one could reason- ably call outlandish or excessive:
It was slavery that first made possible the division of labour be- tween agriculture and industry on a considerable scale, and along with this, the flower of the ancient world, Hellenism. Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without slavery, no Roman Empire. But without Hellenism and the Roman Em- pire as a basis, also no modern Europe.
We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development has as its presupposition a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognized. In this sense we are entitled to say : Without the slavery of antiquity, no modern socialism.
Pragmatists would probably have referred the motivation back to a source in agency. They would have noted that our hero escaped by using an instrument, the file by which he severed his bonds ; then in this same line of- thought, they would have observed that the hand holding the file was also an instrument; and by the same token the brain that guided the hand would be an instrument, and so likewise the educa- tional system that taught the methods and shaped the values involved in the incident..
True, if you reduce the terms to any one of them, you will find them branching out again; for no one of them is enough. Thus, Mead called his pragmatism a philosophy of the act. And though Dewey stresses the value of "intelligence" as an instrument (agency, embodied in "scientific method"), the other key terms in his casuistry, "experi- ence" and "nature," would be the equivalents of act and scene respec- tively. We must add, however, that Dewey is given to stressing the overlap of these two terms, rather than the respects in which they are distinct, as he proposes to "replace the traditional separation of nature
XX11 INTRODUCTION
and experience with the idea of continuity." (The quotation is from Intelligence, and the Modern World.)
As we shall see later, it is by reason of the pliancy among our terms that philosophic systems can pull one way and another. The margins of overlap provide opportunities whereby a thinker can go without a leap from any one of the terms to any of its fellows. (We have also likened the terms to the fingers, which in their extremities are distinct from one another, but merge in the palm of the hand. If you would go from one finger to another without a leap, you* need but trace the tendon down into the palm of the hand, and then trace a new course along another tendon.) Hence, no great dialectical enterprise is neces- sary if you would merge the terms, reducing them even to as few as one; and then, treating this as the "essential" term, the "causal ances- tor" of the lot, you can proceed in the reverse direction across the margins of overlap, "deducing" the other terms from it as its logical descendants.
This is the method, explicitly and in the grand style, of metaphysics which brings its doctrines to a head in some over-all title, a word for being in general, or action in general, or motion in general, or develop- ment in general, or experience in general, etc., with all its other terms distributed about this titular term in positions leading up to it and away from it. There is also an implicit kind of metaphysics, that often goes by the name of No Metaphysics, and aims at reduction not to an over- all title but to some presumably underlying atomic constituent. Its vulgar variant is to be found in techniques of "unmasking," which would make for progress and emancipation by applying materialistic terms to immaterial subjects (the pattern here being, "X is nothing but Y," where X designates a higher value and Y a lower one, the higher value being thereby reduced to the lower one).
The titular word for our own method is "dramatism," since it invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being devel- oped from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action. The method is synoptic, though not in the histori- cal sense. A purely historical survey would require no less than a uni- versal history of human culture; for every judgment, exhortation, or admonition, every view of natural or supernatural reality, every inten- tion or expectation involves assumptions about motive, or cause. Our work must be synoptic in a different sense : in the sense that it offers a
INTRODUCTION XX111
system of placement, and should enable us, by the systematic manipula- tion of the terms, to "generate," or "anticipate" the various classes of motivational theory. And a treatment in these terms, we hope to show, reduces the subject synoptically while still permitting us to appreciate its scope and complexity.
It is not our purpose to import dialectical and metaphysical concerns into a subject that might otherwise be free of them. On the contrary, we hope to make clear the ways in which dialectical and metaphysical issues necessarily figure in the subject of motivation. Our specula- tions, as we interpret them, should show that the subject of motivation is a philosophic one, not ultimately to be solved in terms of empirical science.
Part One
WAYS OF PLACEMENT
CONTAINER AND THING CONTAINED
The Scene— Act Ratio
U
SING "scene" in the sense of setting, or background, and "act" in the sense of action, one could say that "the scene contains the act." And using "agents" in the sense of actors, or acters, one could say that "the scene contains the agents."
It is a principle of drama that the nature of acts and agents should be consistent with the nature of the scene. And whereas comic and gro- tesque works may deliberately set these elements at odds with one an- other, audiences make allowance for such liberty, which reaffirms the same principle of consistency in its very violation.
The nature of the scene may be conveyed primarily by suggestions built into the lines of the verbal action itself, as with the imagery in the dialogue of Elizabethan drama and with the descriptive passages of novels ; or it may be conveyed by non-linguistic properties, as with the materials of naturalistic stage-sets. In any case, examining first the relation between scene and act, all we need note here is the principle whereby the scene is a fit "container" for the act, expressing in fixed properties the same quality that the action expresses in terms of devel- opment.
Ibsen's An Enemy of the People is a good instance of the scene-act ratio, since the correlations between scene and act are readily observable, beginning with the fact that this representative middle-class drama is enacted against a typical middle-class setting. Indeed, in this work written at the very height of Ibsen's realistic period, we can see how readily realism leads into symbolism. For the succession of scenes both realistically reflects the course of the action and symbolizes it.
The first act (we are now using the word "act" in the purely techni- cal sense, to designate the major division of a play, a sense in which we could even reverse our formula and say that "the act contains its scenes") — the first act takes place in Dr. Stockmann's sitting room, a
3
4 WAYS OF PLACEMENT
background perfectly suited to the thoroughly bourgeois story that is to unfold from these beginnings. In the course of this act, we learn of a scene, or situation, prior to the opening of the play, but central to its motivation. Dr. Stockmann refers to an earlier period of withdrawal, spent alone in the far North. During his isolation, he had conceived of his plan for the public Baths. This plan may be considered either realistically or symbolically; it is the dramatist's device for materializ- ing, or objectifying, a purely spiritual process, since the plot has to do with pollution and purification on a moral level, which has its scenic counterpart in the topic of the Baths.
Act II. Still in Dr. Stockmann's sitting room. Dr. Stockmann has learned that the Baths, the vessels of purification, are themselves pol- luted, and that prominent business and professional men would sup- press this fact for financial reasons. This opposition is epitomized in the figure of Peter Stockmann, the Doctor's brother. The intimate, familial quality of the setting thus has its counterpart in the quality of the action, which involves the struggle of two social principles, the con- servative and the progressive, as objectified and personalized in the struggle of the two brothers.
Act III takes place in the editorial office of the People's Messenger, a local newspaper in which Dr. Stockmann had hoped to publish his evidence that the water supply was contaminated. The action takes on a more forensic reference, in keeping with the nature of the place. In this Act we have the peripety of the drama, as Dr. Stockmann's ex- pectations are reversed. For he learns that the personal and financial influence of his enemies prevents the publication of the article. This turn of the plot has its scenic replica in mimicry involving Peter Stock- mann's hat and stick, properties that symbolize his identity as mayor. In false hope of victory, Dr. Stockmann had taken them up, and strutted about burlesquing his brother. But when Dr. Stockmann learns that the editor, in response to the pressure of the conservatives, will not publish the article, it is Peter Stockmann's turn to exult. This reversal of the action is materialized (made scenic) thus:
Peter Stockmann. My hat and stick, if you please. (Dr. Stock- mann ta\es off the hat and lays it on the table with the stic\. Peter Stockmann ta\es them up.) Your authority as mayor has come to an untimely end.
CONTAINER AND THING CONTAINED 5
In the next Act Dr. Stockmann does contrive to lay his case before a public tribunal of a sort: a gathering of fellow-townsmen, assembled in "a big old-fashioned room," in the house of a friend. His appeal is unsuccessful; his neighbors vote overwhelmingly against him, and the scene ends in turbulence. As regards the scene-act ratio, note that the semi-public, semi-intimate setting reflects perfectly the quality of Dr. Stockmann's appeal.
In Act V, the stage directions tell us that the hero's clothes are torn, and the room is in disorder, with broken windows. You may consider these details either as properties of the scene or as a reflection of the hero's condition after his recent struggle with the forces of reaction. The scene is laid in Dr. Stockmann's study, a setting so symbolic of the direction taken by the plot that the play ends with Dr. Stockmann an- nouncing his plan to enroll twelve young disciples and with them to found a school in which he will work for the education of society.
The whole plot is that of an internality directed outwards. We progress by stages from a scene (reported) wherein the plan of social purification was conceived in loneliness, to the scene in his study where the hero announces in the exaltation of a dramatic finale: "The strong- est man in the world is he who stands most alone." The pronounce- ment is modified by the situation in which it is uttered: as Dr. Stock- mann speaks, he is surrounded by a loyal and admiring family circle, and his educational plan calls not for complete independence, but for cooperation. He is not setting himself up as the strongest man in the world, but merely as one headed in the same direction. And, with the exception of his brother Peter, we may consider his family circle as aspects of his own identity, being under the aegis of "loneliness" since it began so and retains the quality of its ancestry.
The end of the third play in O'Neill's trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra, presents a contrasting instance of the scene-act ratio:
Lavinia. (turns to him sharply) You go now and close the shutters and nail them tight.
Seth. Ayeh.
Lavinia. And tell Hannah to throw out all the flowers.
Seth. Ayeh. (He goes past her up the steps and into the house. She ascends to the portico — and then turns and stands for a while, stiff and square-shouldered, staring into the sunlight with frozen
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eyes, Seth leans out of the window at the right of the door and pulls the shutters closed with a decisive bang. As if this were a word of command, Lavinia pivots sharply on her heel and marches woodenly into the house, closing the door behind her,)
CURTAIN
We end here on the motif of the shut-in personality, quite literally objectified. And the closing, novelistic stage-directions are beautifully suited to our purpose; for note how, once the shutters have been closed, thereby placing before our eyes the scenic replica of Lavinia's mental state, this scene in turn becomes the motivation of her next act. For we are told that she walks like an automaton in response to the closing of the shutter, "as if this were a word of command."
Hamlet contains a direct reference to the motivational aspect of the scene-act ratio. In an early scene, when Hamlet is about to follow the Ghost, Horatio warns:
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o'er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? Think of it;
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.
In the last four lines of this speech, Horatio is saying that the sheer natural surroundings might be enough to provide a man with a motive for an act as desperate and absolute as suicide. This notion (of the natural scene as sufficient motivation for an act) was to reappear, in many transformations, during the subsequent centuries. We find a variant of it in the novels of Thomas Hardy, and in other regionalists who derive motivations for their characters from what Virgil would have called the genius loci. There are unmistakable vestiges of it in scientific theories (of Darwinian cast) according to which men's be- havior and development are explained in terms of environment. Geo- politics is a contemporary variant. From the motivational point of view, there is implicit in the quality
CONTAINER AND THING CONTAINED /
of a scene the quality of the action that is to take place within it. This would be another way of saying that the act will be consistent with the scene. Thus, when the curtain rises to disclose a given stage-set, this stage-set contains, simultaneously, implicitly, all that the narrative is to draw out as a sequence, explicitly. Or, if you will, the stage-set contains the action ambiguously (as regards the norms of action) — and in the course of the play's development this ambiguity is converted into a cor- responding articulacy. The proportion would be: scene is to act as im- plicit is to explicit. One could not deduce the details of the action from the details of the setting, but one could deduce the quality of the action from the quality of the setting. An extreme illustration would be an Expressionistic drama, having for its scenic reflex such abstract prop- erties as lines askew, grotesque lighting, sinister color, and odd objects. We have, of course, chosen examples particularly suited to reveal the distinction between act and scene as well as their interdependence. The matter is obscured when we are dealing with scene in the sense of the relationships prevailing among the various dramatis personae. For the characters, by being in interaction, could be treated as scenic conditions or "environment," of one anodier; and any act could be treated as part of the context that modifies (hence, to a degree motivates) the subse- quent acts. The principles of dramatic consistency would lead one to expect such cases of overlap among the terms; but while being aware of them we should firmly fix in our minds such cases as afford a clear differentiation. Our terms lending themselves to both merger and division, we are here trying to divide two of them while recognizing their possibilities of merger.
The Scene— Agent Ratio
The scene-agent ratio, where the synecdochic relation is between person and place, is partly exemplified in this citation from Carlyle's Heroes and Hero-Worship:
These Arabs Mohammed was born among are certainly a notable people. Their country itself is notable; the fit habitation for such a race. Savage inaccessible rock-mountains, great grim deserts, alter- nating with beautiful strips of verdure; wherever water is, there is greenness, beauty; odoriferous balm-shrubs, date-trees, frankincense- trees. Consider that wide waste horizon of sand, empty, silent,
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like a sand-sea, dividing habitable place from habitable place. You are all alone there, left alone with the universe; by day a fierce sun blazing down on it with intolerable radiance; by night the great deep heaven with its stars. Such a country is fit for a swift-handed, deep- hearted race of men.
The correlation between the quality of the country and the quality of its inhabitants is here presented in quite secular terms. There is a son- net by Wordsworth that is a perfect instance of the scene-agent ratio treated theologically:
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquillity; The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea; Listen! the mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder — everlastingly.
Dear Child! Dear Girl! that walkest with me here, If thou appear untouched by solemn thought, Thy nature is not therefore less divine: Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year; And worship 'st at the Temple's inner shrine, God being with thee when we know it not.
By selecting a religious image in which to convey the purely natural- istic sense of hush, the octave infuses the natural scene with hints of a wider circumference, supernatural in scope. The sestet turns from scene to agent; indeed, the octave is all scene, the sestet all agent. But by the logic of the scene-agent ratio, if the scene is supernatural in qual- ity, the agent contained by this scene will partake of the same super- natural quality. And so, spontaneously, purely by being the kind of agent that is at one with this kind of scene, the child is "divine." The contents of a divine container will synecdochically share in its divinity.
Swift's satire on philosophers and mathematicians, the Laputans in the third book of Gulliver s Travels, offers a good instance of the way in which the scene-agent ratio can be used for the depiction of charac- ter. To suggest that the Laputans are, we might say, "up in the air,"
CONTAINER AND THING CONTAINED 9
he portrays them as living on an island that floats in space. Here the nature of the inhabitants is translated into terms of their habitation.
Variants of the scene-agent ratio abound in typical nineteenth- century thought, so strongly given to the study of motives by the dia- lectic pairing of people and things (man and nature, agent and scene). The ratio figures characteristically in the idealist's concern with the Ein\lang z wise hen Innen- und Aussenwelt, The paintings of the poin- tillist Seurat carry the sense of consistency between scene and agent to such lengths that his human figures seem on the point of dissolving into their background. However, we here move beyond strictly scene- agent matters into the area better covered by our term, agency, since the extreme impression of consistency between scene and agent is here con- veyed by stressing the distinctive terms of the method, or medium (that is, agency), which serves as an element common to both scene and agents.
The logic of the scene-agent ratio has often served as an embarrass- ment to the naturalistic novelist. He may choose to "indict" some scene (such as bad working conditions under capitalism) by showing that it has a "brutalizing" effect upon the people who are indigenous to this scene. But the scene-agent ratio, if strictly observed here, would require that the "brutalizing" situation contain "brutalized" characters as its dialectical counterpart. And thereby, in his humanitarian zeal to save mankind, the novelist portrays characters which, in being as brutal as their scene, are not worth saving. We could phrase this dilemma in another way: our novelist points up his thesis by too nar- row a conception of scene as the motive-force behind his characters ; and this restricting of the scene calls in turn for a corresponding restriction upon personality, or role.
Further Instances of These Ratios
The principles of consistency binding scene, act, and agent also lead to reverse applications. That is, the scene-act ratio either calls for acts in keeping with scenes or scenes in keeping with acts — and similarly with the scene-agent ratio. When Lavinia instructs Seth to nail fast the shutters and throw out the flowers, by her command (an act) she brings it about that the scene corresponds to her state of mind. But as soon as
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these scenic changes have taken place, they in turn become the motivat- ing principle of her subsequent conduct. For the complete embodi- ment of her purposes functions as a "command" to her ; and she obeys it as a response to a stimulus, like a pure automaton moved by the sheer disposition of material factors.
In behavioristic metaphysics (behaviorists would call it No Meta- physics) you radically truncate die possibilities of drama by eliminating action, reducing action to sheer motion. The close of the O'Neill play follows this same development from action to motion, a kind of in- verted transcendence. Because of this change, Lavinia's last moments must be relegated to stage directions alone. She does not act, she is automatically moved. The trilogy did not end a moment too soon; for its close represented not only the end of Lavinia, but the end of the motivating principle of drama itself. The playwright had here obvi- ously come to the end of a line. In his next plays he would have to "turn back." For he could have "gone on" only by abandoning drama for some more "scientific" form. (He might have transcended drama scientifically, for instance, by a collating of sociological observations designed to classify different types of motorist and to correlate them with different types of response to traffic signals.)
We noted how, in Ibsen's drama, the hero's state of mind after his conflict with the townspeople was objectified in such scenic properties as his torn clothing, and the broken windows and general disorder of his study. It is obvious that one might have carried this consistency further in either direction (for instance, spreading it more environ- mentally, as were we to enlist turbulent weather as an aspect of the scene, or more personally, as were we to enlist facial expressions and postures of the body, which of course the actor does, in interpreting his role, regardless of the playwright's omissions). If you took the hero's state of mind as your point of departure here, you could say that the whole scene becomes a mere aspect of the role, or person ("agent") — or that the physical body of the agent is itself but "scenic," to be listed among the person's "properties," as with a dwelling that a man had ordered built in strict accordance with his own private specifications, or as theologians see in "body" the dwelling-place of "soul." We observe the same ratio in Swift's account of his Laputans when, to suggest that in their thinking they could be transcendental, or introvert, or ex- tremely biased, but never well balanced, he writes: "Their heads were
CONTAINER AND THING CONTAINED 11
all inclined, either to the right or to the left; one of their eyes turned inward, and the other directly up to the zenith." But lest our specula- tions seem too arbitrary, let us cite one more anecdote, this time from a tiny drama enacted in real life, and here reported to illustrate how, when a state of mind is pronounced in quality, the agent may be ob- served arranging a corresponding pattern in the very properties of the scene.
The occasion: a committee meeting. The setting: a group of com- mittee members bunched about a desk in an office, after hours. Not far from the desk was a railing; but despite the crowding, all the mem- bers were bunched about the chairman at the desk, inside the railing. However, they had piled their hats and coats on chairs and tables out- side the pale. General engrossment in the discussion. But as the dis- cussion continued, one member quietly arose, and opened the gate in the railing. As unnoticeably as possible, she stepped outside and closed the gate. She picked up her coat, laid it across her arm, and stood waiting. A few moments later, when there was a pause in the discus- sion, she asked for the floor. After being recognized by the chairman, she very haltingly, in embarrassment, announced with regret that she would have to resign from the committee.
Consider with what fidelity she had set the scene for this pattern of severance as she stepped beyond the railing to make her announcement. Design : chairman and fellow members within the pale, sitting, without hats and overcoats — she outside the pale, standing, with coat over her arm preparatory to departure. She had strategically modified the ar- rangement of the scene in such a way that it implicitly (ambiguously) contained the quality of her act.
Ubiquity of the Ratios
If we but look about us, we find examples of the two ratios every- where; for they are at the very centre of motivational assumptions. But to discern them in their ubiquity, we must remain aware of the many guises which the fiwe terms may assume in the various casuistries. In the introduction to his Discourses, for instance, Machiavelli com- plains that people read history without applying its lessons, "as though heaven, the sun, the elements, and men had changed the order of their motions and power, and were different from what they were in ancient
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times." For our purposes, the quotation could be translated, "as though human agents and both the supernatural and the natural scenes had changed, with a corresponding change in the nature of motives."
Besides general synonyms for scene that are obviously of a back- ground character, such as "society," or "environment," we often en- counter quite specific localizations, words for particular places, situa- tions, or eras. "It is 12:20 P.M." is a "scenic" statement. Milton's U Allegro and 11 Penseroso are formed about a scenic contrast between morning and night, with a corresponding contrast of actions. Terms for historical epochs, cultural movements, social institutions (such as "Elizabethan period," "romanticism," "capitalism") are scenic, though often with an admixture of properties overlapping upon the areas cov- ered by the term, agent. If we recall that "ideas" are a property of agents, we can detect this strategic overlap in Locke's expression, "the scene of ideas," the form of which Carl Becker exactly reproduces when referring to "climates of opinion," in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers.
The word "ground," much used in both formal philosophy and everyday speech when discussing motives, is likewise scenic, though readily encroaching upon the areas more directly covered by "agent" and "purpose." We can discern the scenic reference if the question, "On what grounds did he do this?" is translated: "What kind of scene did he say it was, that called for such an act?" Hegelian idealism exploits the double usage (ground as "background" and ground as "reason") by positing "Reason" as the ultimate ground, the Grund- prinzip, of all history. Thus, whereas historicism regularly treats histor- ical scenes as the background, or motive, of individual developments, Hegel would treat Reason as the background, or motive, of historical sequence in general. Let us not worry, at this point, what it may "mean" to say that "Reason" is at once the mover of history and the substance of which history is made. It is sufficient here to note that such terministic resources were utilized, and to detect the logic of the pentad behind them.
The maxim, "terrain determines tactics," is a strict localization of the scene-act ratio, with "terrain" as the casuistic equivalent for "scene" in a military calculus of motives, and "tactics" as the corresponding "act."
Political commentators now generally use the word "situation" as
CONTAINER AND THING CONTAINED 13
their synonym for scene, though often without any clear concept of its function as a statement about motives. Many social psychologists consciously use the term for its motivational bearing (it has a range extending from the broadest concepts of historical setting down to the simplified, controlled conditions which the animal experimenter imposes upon his rats in a maze). The Marxist reference to "the objective situation" is explicitly motivational, and the theorists who use this formula discuss "policies" as political acts enacted in conformity with the nature of scenes. However, the scene-act ratio can be applied in two ways. It can be applied deterministically in statements that a certain policy had to be adopted in a certain situation, or it may be applied in hortatory statements to the effect that a certain policy should be adopted in conformity with the situation. The deterministic usage (in scene-agent form) was exemplified in the statement of a traveller who, on arriving from France under German domination, characterized the politicians as "prisoners of the situation." And the hortatory usage was exemplified when a speaker said that President Roosevelt should be granted "unusual powers" because our country was in an "unusual international situation." In a judgment written by Justice Hugo L. Black, the Supreme Court ruled that it was not "beyond the war powers of Congress and the Executive to exclude those of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast area at the time they did." And by implication, the scene-act ratio was invoked to substantiate this judgment:
When under conditions of modern warfare our shores are threat- ened by hostile forces, the power to protect must be commensurate with the threatened danger.
Among the most succinct instances of the scene-act ratio in dialec- tical materialism is Marx's assertion (cited also by Lenin in The State and Revolution), that "Justice can never rise superior to the economic conditions of society and the cultural development conditioned by them." That is, in contrast with those who would place justice as a property of personality (an attribute purely of the agent), the dialec- tical materialist would place it as a property of the material situation ("economic conditions"), the scene in which justice is to be enacted. He would say that no higher quality of justice can be enacted than the nature of the scenic properties permits. Trotsky gave the same form an ironic turn when he treated Stalinist policies as the inevitable result
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of the attempt to establish socialism under the given conditions. That is, you can't get a fully socialist act unless you have a fully socialist scene, and for the dialectical materialist such a scene requires a high stage of industrial development.
And there is a variant of the usage in Coleridge (in his early liber- tarian and "necessitarian" period, when he was exalted with thoughts of "aspheterism"). Concerning "Pantisocracy" (the plan of Coleridge, Southey, and their associates to found a communistic colony on the banks of the Susquehanna), he wrote that it would "make virtue inevi- table." That is, the colonists were to arrange a social situation of such a sort that virtuous acts would be the logical and spontaneous result of conditions.
As for "act, " any verb, no matter how specific or how general, that has connotations of consciousness or purpose falls under this category. If one happened to stumble over an obstruction, that would be not an act, but a mere motion. However, one could convert even this sheer accident into something of an act if, in the course of falling, one suddenly willed his fall (as a rebuke, for instance, to the negligence of the person who had left the obstruction in the way). "Dramatisti- cally," the basic unit of action would be defined as "the human body in conscious or purposive motion." Hence we are admonished that people often speak of action in a purely figurative sense when they have only motion in mind, as with reference to the action of a motor, or the interaction of forces. Terms like "adjustment" and "adaptation" are ambiguously suited to cover both action and sheer motion, so that it is usually difficut to decide in just which sense a thinker is using them, when he applies them to social motives. This ambiguity may put them in good favor with those who would deal with the human realm in a calculus patterned after the vocabularies of the physical sciences, and yet would not wholly abandon vestiges of "animism." Profession, vocation, policy, strategy, tactics are all concepts of action, as are any words for specific vocations. Our words "position," "occupation," and "office" indicate the scenic overtones in action. Our words for particu- lar "jobs" under capitalist industrialism refer to acts, but often the ele- ment of action is reduced to a minimum and the element of sheer mo- tion raised to a maximum. (We here have in mind not only certain near-automatic tasks performed to the timing of the conveyor belt, but also many of the purely clerical operations, filing, bookkeeping, record-
CONTAINER AND THING CONTAINED 15
ing, accounting, and the like, necessary to the present state of technol- ogy.) When Christ said, "I am the way" (hodos), we could translate, "I am
the act," or more fully, "I represent a system, or synthesis, of the right acts." Tao and yoga are similar words for act. And we see how read- ily act in this sense can overlap upon agency when we consider our ordinary attitude towards scientific method (met-hodos), which we think of pragmatically, not as a way of life, or act of being, but as a means of doing.
The Greek word for justice (dike) was in its beginnings as thor- oughly an "act" word as tao, yoga, and hodos. Originally it meant custom, usage, manner, fashion. It also meant right. The connection between these two orders of meaning is revealed in our expression, "That sort of thing just isn't done," and in the fact that our word "morality" comes from a Latin word for "custom." Liddell and Scott's lexicon notes that in the Odyssey the word is used of mortals, gods, kings, and suitors, referring to their custom, way of acting, law of being. After the homogeneous tribal pattern of Greek life (with its one "way" or "justice" shared by all) had dissolved into a political state, with its typical conflicts of property interests, di\e became a word of the law courts. Hence, in post-Homeric usage, it refers to legal justice, the right which is presumed to be the object of law. In this form, it could represent a Platonic ideal, that might prevail over and above the real ways of the different social classes. This is the kind of justice that Marx was refuting by a sophisticated reversion to a more "Homeric" usage.
Range of All the Ratios
Though we have inspected two ratios, the five terms would allow for ten (scene-act, scene-agent, scene-agency, scene-purpose, act-purpose, act-agent, act-agency, agent-purpose, agent-agency, and agency-pur- pose). The ratios are principles of determination. Elsewhere in the Grammar we shall examine two of these (scene-purpose and agency- purpose) in other connections; and the rest will figure in passing. But the consideration of words for "ways" calls for special attention to the act-agent ratio.
Both act and agent require scenes that "contain" them. Hence the
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scene-act and scene-agent ratios are in the fullest sense positive (or "positional"). But the relation between act and agent is not quite the same. The agent does not "contain" the act, though its results might be said to "pre-exist virtually" within him. And the act does not "synecdochically share" in the agent, though certain ways of acting may be said to induce corresponding moods or traits of character. To this writer, at least, the act-agent ratio more strongly suggests a tem- poral or sequential relationship than a purely positional or geometric one. The agent is an author of his acts, which are descended from him, being good progeny if he is good, or bad progeny if he is bad, wise progeny if he is wise, silly progeny if he is silly. And, conversely, his acts can make him or remake him in accordance with their nature. They would be his product and/or he would be theirs. Similarly, when we use the scene-act and scene-agent ratios in reverse (as with the sequence from act or agent to corresponding scene) the image of derivation is stronger than the image of position.
One discerns the workings of the act-agent ratio in the statement of a former cabinet member to the effect that "you can safely lodge respon- sibility with the President of the United States," owing to "the tremen- dously sobering influence of the Presidency on any man, especially in foreign affairs." Here, the sheer nature of an office, or position, is said to produce important modifications in a man's character. Even a purely symbolic act, such as the donning of priestly vestments, is often credited with such a result. And I have elsewhere quoted a remark by a political commentator: "There seems to be something about the judi- cial robes that not only hypnotizes the beholder but transforms the
wearer."
Ordinarily, the scene-act and scene-agent ratios can be extended to cover such cases. Thus, the office of the Presidency may be treated as a "situation" affecting the agent who occupies it. And the donning of vestments brings about a symbolic situation that can likewise be treated in terms of the scene-agent ratio. But there are cases where a finer dis- crimination is needed. For instance, the resistance of the Russian armies to the Nazi invasion could be explained "scenically" in terms of the Soviet political and economic structure; or one could use the act- agent ratio, attributing the power and tenacity to "Russian" traits of character. However, in deriving the act from the scene, one would have to credit socialism as a major scenic factor, whereas a derivation of
CONTAINER AND THING CONTAINED 17
the act from the agents would allow for a much more felicitous ex- planation from the standpoint of capitalist apologetics.
Thus, one of our leading newspapers asked itself whether Hitler failed "to evaluate a force older than communism, more instinctive than the mumbling cult of Stalin — the attachment of the peasant masses to 'Mother Russia,' the incoherent but cohesive force of Russian pa- triotism." And it concluded that "the Russian soldier has proved the depth of his devotion to the Russian soil." Patriotism, attachment to the "mother," devotion to the soil — these are essentially motives located in the agent, hence requiring no acknowledgement of socialist motives.
There is, of course, scenic reference in the offing; but the stress upon the term, agent, encourages one to be content with a very vague treat- ment of scene, with no mention of the political and economic factors that form a major aspect of national scenes. Indeed, though our con- cern here is with the Grammar of Motives, we may note a related re- source of Rhetoric: one may deflect attention from scenic matters by situating the motives of an act in the agent (as were one to account for wars purely on the basis of a "warlike instinct" in people): or con- versely, one may deflect attention from the criticism of personal motives by deriving an act or attitude not from traits of the agent but from the nature of the situation.
The difference between the use of the scene-act and act-agent ratios, can also be seen in the motivations of "democracy." Many people in Great Britain and the United States think of these nations as "vessels" of democracy. And democracy is felt to reside in us, intrinsically, be- cause we are "a democratic people." Democratic acts are, in this mode of thought, derived from democratic agents, agents who would remain democratic in character even though conditions required the temporary curtailment or abrogation of basic democratic rights. But if one em- ployed, instead, the scene-act ratio, one might hold that there are certain "democratic situations" and certain "situations favorable to dictatorship, or requiring dictatorship." The technological scene itself, which re- quires the planning of a world order, might be thought such as to favor a large measure of "dictatorship" in our political ways (at least as con- trasted with the past norms of democracy). By the act-agent ratio, a "democratic people" would continue to perform "democratic acts"; and to do so they would even, if necessary, go to the extent of restoring for- mer conditions most favorable to democracy. By the scene-act ratio, if
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the "situation" itself is no longer a "democratic" one, even an "essen- tially democratic" people will abandon democratic ways.
A picturesque effect can be got in imaginative writings by the con- flicting use of the scene-act and act-agent ratios. One may place "fools" in "wise situations," so that in their acts they are "wiser than they know." Children are often "wise" in this sense. It is a principle of incongruity that Chaplin has built upon. Empson would call it an aspect of "pastoral."
Here is an interesting shift of ratios in a citation from an address by Francis Biddle when he was Attorney General:
The change of the world in terms of time and space in the past hundred years — railroad, telegraph, telephone, automobile, movie, air- plane, radio — has hardly found an echo in our political growth, except in the necessary patches and arrangements which have made it so extraordinarily complex without making it more responsive to our needs.
Note first that all the changes listed here refer to agencies of communi- cation (the pragmatist emphasis). Then, having in their accumulation become scenic, they are said to have had a motivating effect upon our political acts ("growth"). But though the complexity of the scene has called forth "the necessary patches and arrangements" (another expres- sion for "acts"), we are told that there are still unsatisfied "needs." Now, "needs" are a property of agents; hence an act designed to produce a situation "more responsive to our needs" would have its most direct locus of motivation under the heading of agent, particularly if these were said to be "primal needs" rather than "new needs," since "new needs" might best be treated as "a function of the situation." I borrow the expression from a prominent educator, Eduard C. Lindeman, who shortly after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor complained of a tend- ency "to believe that morale will now become a function of the situation and that hence it is less important to plan for education."
The ratios may often be interpreted as principles of selectivity rather than as thoroughly causal relationships. That is, in any given historical situation, there are persons of many sorts, with a corresponding variety in the kinds of acts that would be most representative of them. Thus, a given political situation may be said not to change people in their es- sential character, but rather to favor, or bring to the fore (to "vote for"),
CONTAINER AND THING CONTAINED 19
certain kinds of agents (with their appropriate actions) rather than others. Quick shifts in political exigencies do not of a sudden make all men "fundamentally" daring, or all men "fundamentally" cautious, in keeping with the nature of the scene; but rather, one situation calls for cautious men as its appropriate "voice," another for daring men, one for traditionalists, another for innovators. And the inappropriate acts and temperaments simply do not "count for" so much as they would in situations for which they are a better fit. One set of scenic conditions will "implement" and "amplify" given ways and temperaments which, in other situations would remain mere potentialities, unplanted seeds, "mute inglorious Miltons." Indeed, there are times when out-and-out materialistic philosophies, which are usually thought of as "tough," can be of great solace to us precisely because they encourage us to believe in the ratios as a selective principle. For we may tell ourselves that the very nature of the materials with which men deal will not permit men to fall below a certain level of sloth, error, greed, and dishonesty in their relations with one another, as the cooperative necessities of the situation implement and amplify only those traits of character and action that serve the ends of progress.
There is, of course, a circular possibility in the terms. If an agent acts in keeping with his nature as an agent (act-agent ratio), he may change the nature of the scene accordingly (scene-act ratio), and thereby establish a state of unity between himself and his world (scene-agent ratio). Or the scene may call for a certain kind of act, which makes for a corresponding kind of agent, thereby likening agent to scene. Or our act may change us and our scene, producing a mutual conformity. Such would be the Edenic paradigm, applicable if we were capable of total acts that produce total transformations. In reality, we are capable of but partial acts, acts that but partially represent us and diat produce but partial transformations. Indeed, if all the ratios were adjusted to one another with perfect Edenic symmetry, they would be immutable in one unending "moment."
Theological notions of creation and re-creation bring us nearest to the concept of total acts. Among the controversies that centered around Lutheranism, for instance, there was a doctrine, put forward by the theologian Striegel, who held that Christ's work on the Cross had the effect of changing God's attitude towards mankind, and that men born after the historical Christ can take advantage of this change.
20 WAYS OF PLACEMENT
Here we have something like the conversion of God himself, brought about by Christ's sacrifice (a total action, a total passion). From the godlike nature came a godlike act that acted upon God himself. And as regards mankind, it amounts to a radical change in the very structure of the Universe, since it changed God's attitude towards men, and in God's attitude towards men resides the ultimate ground of human action.
A similar pattern is implicated in the close of Aeschylus's trilogy, the Oresteia, where the sufferings of Orestes terminate in the changed identity of the Furies, signalized by their change of name from Erinyes to Eumenides. Under the influence of the "new gods," their nature as motives takes on a totally different accent; for whereas it was their previous concern to avenge evil, it will henceforth be their concern to reward the good. An inner goad has thus been cast forth, externalized; whereby, as Athena says, men may be at peace within, their "dread pas- sion for renown" thereafter being motivated solely by "war from with- out."
Only the scene-act and scene-agent ratios fit with complete comfort in this chapter on the relation between container and contained. The act-agent ratio tugs at its edges ; and we shall close noting concerns that move us still farther afield. In the last example, we referred to God's attitude. Where would attitude fall within our pattern? Often it is the preparation for an act, which would make it a kind of symbolic act, or incipient act. But in its character as a state of mind that may or may not lead to an act, it is quite clearly to be classed under the head of agent. We also spoke of Christ's sacrifice as "a total action, a total passion." This suggests other "grammatical" possibilities that involve a dialectic pairing of "active" and "passive." And in the reference to a state of mind, we casually invite a dialectic pairing of "actus" and
"status."
This group of concerns will be examined in due course. Meanwhile, we should be reminded that the term agent embraces not only all words general or specific for person, actor, character, individual, hero, villain, father, doctor, engineer, but also any words, moral or functional, for patient, and words for the motivational properties or agents, such as "drives," "instincts," "states of mind." We may also have collective words for agent, such as nation, group, the Freudian "super-ego," Rous- seau's "volonte generate " the Fichtean "generalized I."
T,
II
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION
Paradox of Substance
HERE is a set of words comprising what we might call the Stance family, for they all derive from a concept of place, or placement. In the Indo-Germanic languages the root for this family is sta, to stand (Sanscrit, stha) . And out of it there has developed this essential family, comprising such members as: consist, constancy, constitution, contrast, destiny, ecstasy, existence, hypostatize, obstacle, stage, state, status, statute, stead, subsist, and system. In German, an important member of the Stance family is stellen, to place, a root that figures in Vorstellung, a philosopher's and psychologist's word for representation, conception, idea, image.
Surely, one could build a whole philosophic universe by tracking down the ramifications of this one root. It would be "implemented" too, for it would have stables, staffs, staves, stalls, stamens, stamina, stanchions, stanzas, steeds, stools, and studs. It would be a quite re- gional world, in which our Southern Agrarians might take their stand.
Unquestionably, the most prominent philosophic member of this family is "substance." Or at least it used to be, before John Locke greatly impaired its prestige, so that many thinkers today explicitly banish the term from their vocabularies. But there is cause to believe that, in banishing the term, far from banishing its functions one merely conceals them. Hence, from the dramatistic point of view, we are admonished to dwell upon the word, considering its embarrassments and its potentialities of transformation, so that we may detect its covert influence even in cases where it is overtly absent. Its relation to our five terms will become apparent as we proceed.
First we should note that there is, etymologically, a pun lurking be- hind the Latin roots. The word is often used to designate what some thing or agent intrinsically is, as per these meanings in Webster's : "the most important element in any existence; the characteristic and essential
21
22 WAYS OF PLACEMENT
components of anything; the main part; essential import; purport." Yet etymologically "substance" is a scenic word. Literally, a person's or a thing's sub-stance would be something that stands beneath or sup- ports the person or thing.
Let us cite a relevant passage in An Essay Concerning Human Under- standing (Chapter XXIII, "Of Our Complex Ideas of Substances") :
1. Ideas of particular substances, how made. The mind being, as I have declared, furnished with a great number of the simple ideas conveyed in by the senses, as they are found in exterior things, or by reflection on its own operations, takes notice, also, that a certain number of these simple ideas go constantly together; which being presumed to belong to one thing, and words being suited to common apprehensions, and made use of for quick despatch, are called, so united in one subject, by one name; which, by inadvertency, we are apt afterward to talk of and consider as one simple idea, which in- deed is a complication of many ideas together; because, as I have said, not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result; which therefore we call substance.
2. Our obscure idea of substance in general. — So that if anyone will examine himself concerning his notion of pure substance in general, he will find he has no other idea of it at all, but only a sup- position of he knows not what support of such qualities which are capable of producing simple ideas in us; which qualities are com- monly called accidents. If anyone should be asked, what is the subject wherein color or weight inheres, he would have nothing to say but, the solid extended parts. And if he were demanded, what is it that solidity and extension inhere in, he would not be in a much better case than the Indian before mentioned, who, saying that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked, what the ele- phant rested on; to which his answer was, a great tortoise; but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tor- toise, replied — something, he knew not what. And thus here, as in all other cases where we use words without having clear and distinct ideas, we talk like children: who, being questioned what such a thing is which they know not, readily give this satisfactory answer, that it is something; which in truth signifies no more, when so used, either by children or men, but that they know not what; and that the thing they pretend to know and talk of, is what they have no distinct idea of at all, and so are perfectly ignorant of it, and in the dark.
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 23
The idea, then, we have, to which we give the general name sub- stance, being nothing but the supposed, but unknown support of those qualities we find existing, which we imagine cannot subsist sine re substante, "without something to support them," we call that support substantia; which according to the true import of the word, is, in plain English, standing under, or upholding.
The same structure is present in the corresponding Greek word, hy- postasis, literally, a standing under: hence anything set under, such as stand, base, bottom, prop, support, stay; hence metaphorically, that which lies at the bottom of a thing, as the groundwork, subject-matter, argument of a narrative, speech, poem; a starting point, a beginning. And then come the metaphysical meanings (we are consulting Liddell and Scott) : subsistence, reality, real being (as applied to mere appear- ance), nature, essence. In ecclesiastical Greek, the word corresponds to the Latin Persona, a Person of the Trinity (which leads us back into the old argument between the homoousians and the homoiousians, as to whether the three persons were of the same or similar substance). Medically, the word can designate a suppression, as of humours that ought to come to the surface; also matter deposited in the urine; and of liquids generally, the sediment, lees, dregs, grounds. When we are examining, from the standpoint of Symbolic, metaphysical tracts that would deal with "fundamentals" and get to the "bottom" of things, this last set of meanings can admonish us to be on the look-out for what Freud might call "cloacal" motives, furtively interwoven with specula- tions that may on the surface seem wholly abstract. An "acceptance" of the universe on this plane may also be a roundabout way of "making peace with the faeces."
But returning to the pun as it figures in the citation from Locke, we might point up the pattern as sharply as possible by observing that the word "substance," used to designate what a thing is, derives from a word designating something that a thing is not. That is, though used to designate something within the thing, intrinsic to it, the word etymo- logically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it. Or other- wise put: the word in its etymological origins would refer to an at- tribute of the thing's context, since that which supports or underlies a thing would be a part of the thing's context. And a thing's context, being outside or beyond the thing, would be something that the thing is not.
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Contextual Definition
Here obviously is a strategic moment, an alchemic moment, wherein momentous miracles of transformation can take place. For here the intrinsic and the extrinsic can change places. To tell what a thing is, you place it in terms of something else. This idea of locating, or plac- ing, is implicit in our very word for definition itself: to define, or de- termine a. thing, is to mark its boundaries, hence to use terms that pos- sess, implicitly at least, contextual reference. We here take the pun seriously because we believe it to reveal an inevitable paradox of defini- tion, an antinomy that must endow the concept of substance with un- resolvable ambiguity, and that will be discovered lurking beneath any vocabulary designed to treat of motivation by the deliberate outlawing of the word for substance.
Nor is the perplexity confined to abstruse metaphysical theorizing. Note the Tory usage, for instance, in the expression, "a man of sub- stance," or a man of "standing." Note how readily we shunt here be- tween an intrinsic and an extrinsic reference. For those who admire someone as a man of substance, or standing, have in mind not only his personal traits of character, but also the resources that spring from his environmental connections, the external powers that his position, in- come, status put at his command, the outside factors that, in backing or supporting him, enable him to make his personal characteristics count. (Another meaning for the Greek hypostasis, incidentally, was steadfast- ness, endurance, firmness.) And when our Southern Agrarians issue a volume entitled I'll Take My Stand (their "stand in Dixie"), their claims as to what they are get definition in terms of scene, environment, situation, context, ground. Indeed, in the title we can also see another important ambiguity of motive emerging. When taking their stand in Dixie, they are also taking their stand for Dixie. Their stand in Dixie would be a "conditioning" kind of cause; but a corresponding stand for Dixie would be a teleological or purposive kind of cause.
In Spinoza we confront the full intensity of the contextual paradox. Indeed, from our point of view, we might translate both his concept of "God" and his concept of "nature" as "the total, or ultimate scene," since he pantheistically held that God and nature are identical. In the Judaic and Christian theologies, since nature was said to have its ul- timate ground in God as a person, God was a context for nature, as
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 25
nature-and-God was the context for man. But Spinoza, in equating God and nature, gave us a concept of nature that could have no scene be- yond it. For nature was everything — and beyond everything, con- sidered as a totality, there could be nothing to serve as its context.
Hence, starting from the Aristotelian notion that a substance, or be- ing, is to be considered "in itself" (\ath auto, which Spinoza rendered id quod per se concipitur), Spinoza went on to observe that nothing less than the totality of all that exists can meet this requirement. In Aris- totle, each stone, or tree, or man, or animal, could be a substance, capable of being considered "in itself." But Spinoza held that no single thing could be considered "by itself." A distinction between "in itself" and "by itself" might be made here, but the Spinozistic calculus is designed rather to work in the area where the two meanings overlap. Thinking contextually, Spinoza held that each single object in the universe is "defined" (determined, limited, bounded) by the other things that surround it. And in calling upon men to see things "in terms of eter- nity" {sub specie aeternitatis) Spinoza meant precisely that we should consider each thing in terms of its total context, the universal scene as a whole. Only when considering the universe as a whole, and its parts in terms of the whole, would we be making an "intrinsic" statement about substance, since there was but one substance, the universal totality.
And thoroughly in keeping with his contextual strategy of definition, Spinoza explicitly held that all definition is "negation," which is an- other way of saying that, to define a thing in terms of its context, we must define it in terms of what it is not. And with scholastic succinct- ness, he formulated the paradox of contextual definition in four words: "all determination is negation; omnis determinatio est negatio!' Since determined things are "positive," we might point up the paradox as harshly as possible by translating it, "Every positive is negative."
When we refer to "everything," our reference is indefinite, infinite, undetermined, indeterminate. Hence, to treat of things in terms of "everything" is to treat of them in terms of the infinite. Indeed, since "everything" is the "absolute" (that is, unloosed, absolved, "freed," for I think it is good to remind ourselves of the dramatic meanings lurking behind that strategic metaphysical term) we have here a variant of the so-called "negative theology," which conceived of God as the absence of all qualities; and to see things as contextually "determined" by the "absolute" is thus to see them simultaneously in terms of "necessity"
26 WAYS OF PLACEMENT
and "freedom." For Spinoza, says Windelband, "the deity is all and thus — nothing." But we should also remember that the deity is equated with nature. Hence, though Spinoza's pantheism was an important step towards naturalism, in itself it had strongly mystical ingredients. Contextual definition might also be called "positional," or "geomet- ric," or "definition by location." The embarrassments are often re- vealed with particular clarity when a thinker has moved to a high level of generalization, as when motivational matters are discussed in terms of "heredity and environment," or "man and nature," or "mind and mat- ter," or "mechanism and teleology," where each of the paired terms is the other's "context" in the universe of discourse. To define or locate "man" in terms of "nature," for instance, is to "dissolve" man "into" nature. Hence, the more thorough one is in carrying out his enterprise, the more surely he opens himself to the charge of failing to discuss man "in himself." Historicists who deal with art in terms of its background are continually suffering from the paradox of contextual definition, as their opponents accuse them of slighting the work of art in its esthetic aspects ; and on the other hand, critics who would center their attention upon the work "in itself" must wince when it is made apparent that their inquiries, in ignoring contextual reference, frustrate our desire to see the products of artistic action treated in terms of the scene-act, scene- agent, and agent-act ratios.
Familial Definition
However, there is another strategy of definition, usually interwoven with the contextual sort, yet susceptible of separate observation. This is the "tribal" or "familial" sort, the definition of a substance in terms of ancestral cause. Under the head of "tribal" definition would fall any variant of the idea of biological descent, with the substance of the off- spring being derived from the substance of the parents or family.
The Christian notion that the most important fact about mankind and the world is their derivation from God is an instance of "ancestral" definition on the grand scale. We find bastardized variants in political doctrines of race supremacy, such as the Nazi "blood" philosophy. The Latin word natura, like its Greek equivalent physis, has a root signifying to become, to grow, to be born. And the Aristotelian genus is origi- nally not a logical, but a biological, concept. We can discern the
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 27
tribal pattern behind the notion, so characteristic of Greek nationalism, that like causes like or that like recognizes like, as with Democritus' theory of perception. Similarly, there was an ancestral notion behind the Platonic theory of forms; in fact, it was this tribal ingredient that recommended it so strongly to the ages of Western feudalism. Each thing in this world had, as it were, an eponym in heaven, a perfect form from which it was derived — and it shared this derivation with all the other members of its class, or genus. And I think we might most quickly understand the mediaeval speculations as to whether universals were "before the thing, in the thing, or after the thing" if we first tried a dramatist translation of the three formulae respectively thus: "Does the tribe give birth to its members (universal ante rem), or does the tribe exist in its members (universal in re)> or is the tribe merely a name for the sum of its members (universal post rem) ?"
To say yes to the first would make you an extreme mediaeval realist. A realism of this sort was well attuned to feudal collectivism. To say yes to the third would make you a thorough-going nominalist, who treated general terms as mere flatus vocis, conventions of speech, and thus moved towards the disintegration of tribal thinking. To say yes to the second would make you an Aristotelian. The motives would be situated in the individual, yet they would be motives common to the species, or tribe, of which it was a member. That is, an individual stone would have motives proper to stones as a class, an individual man mo- tives proper to men as a class, etc. This doctrine came to a head in the Aristotelian concept of the "entelechy," which we might call the indi- vidual's potentialities for becoming a fully representative member of its class. However, we need not here give more than a cursory glance at any particular use of the ancestral method. It is sufficient if we can indicate its range.
All told, perhaps the quickest and surest way to find oneself at the centre of the subject would be to ponder the four words, "general," "generic," "genetic," "genitive." Though they are all from the same root, only the third unambiguously reveals ancestral connotations. Next removed is "genitive," which refers to either source or possession. But to say that nature is "a part of" God or that man is "a part of" nature would be to use a genitive construction in which one could clearly dis- cern ancestral reference. When we come to "generic," the tribal con- notations are beginning more noticeably to fade, as purely biological
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concepts can be replaced by logical notions of classification. And with "general" this extinction of the familial can be complete. A "family of right-angled triangles in general," for instance, would just about have lost the notion of generation, although we can still, with a little effort, look upon them as a family in the sense that a common set of principles is required for the generating of them.
Similarly, the members of a class derive their generic nature from the "idea" of the class in which they are placed. If I make up a classi- fication, for instance, such as "bald-headed carpenters under forty," I shall have "generated" a corresponding class of "objects." These ob- jects (the people who fit the requirements of the class) will be "imper- fect copies" of my "idea" or "pure form," since they will all possess other attributes that lie outside the strict definition of the class. This would be the strictly methodological equivalent for Plato's doctrine of archetypes. Thinking in familial terms, Plato looked upon the objects of this world as imperfect replicas of their pure "forms" or "ideas" in heaven.
In sum, contextual definition stresses placement, ancestral definition stresses derivation. But in any sustained discussion of motives, the two become interwoven, as with theologies which treat God both as "causal ancestor" of mankind and as the ultimate ground or context of man- kind.
And if we were to extend the Stance family by including different roots similar in meaning, we would promptly move into a set of live and dead metaphors ("abstractions") where our five terms, our ratios, and our strategies of definition could be seen emerging in all sorts of places.
For instance, the key philosophic term, sub-ject (in Latin, thrown under) is the companion to the Greek hypo\eimenon (underlying), a word that can refer to the subject of a sentence, or to the "sub-strate" of the world (the essential constitution of things, hence indeterminately a kind of basis or a kind of causal ancestor). The word can also refer to what is assumed as a ground of argument, in which capacity it serves as a passive for hypotithemi (to place or put under, as a base or foundation, to assume as a principle, take for granted, suppose, from the root of which we get such words as theme, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, while a similar development in Latin, from pono, to place, gives us position, proposition, opposition, composition, positive, and that neat now-you-
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 29
see-me-and-now-you-don't metaphysical nuance, "posit," whereby the metaphysician is enabled to discuss the "positing" of principles without being too clear as to what kind of base they are being placed upon).
The mention of "substrates" brings us close to a third aspect of defini- tion, the kind we get in projects that discuss the world in terms of the "building blocks" of which it is thought to be composed, as were one to define a kind of house in terms of the materials and operations needed for its construction, or to define an action by reducing it to terms of its necessary motions. But from the dramatistic point of view, we can best observe this strategy later, when we consider the subject of "circum- ference" (in the sense that the location, or definition, of an act with reference to "the Mississippi valley" as its motivating scene could be said to involve a narrower circumference than its definition in terms of "the United States"). And we shall here pause to survey characteristic forms which the grammar of substance may embody in particular cal- culi:
Survey of Terms for Substance
Geometric substance. An object placed in its setting, existing both in itself and as part of its background. Participation in a context. Em- bodied most completely in Spinoza's cult of "Euclidean" relations, logi- cally ("necessarily") derivable from one another. These relations exist all at once, implicitly, though they may manifest themselves, or be made manifest, in various sequences. (As soon as certain antecedent steps are taken in the demonstration, certain consequent steps are "in- evitable.") The plastic connotations can lead readily into strictly ma- terialistic notions of determinism, as with the novelist, Theodore Drei- ser, who professes to view all ultimate motives in terms of "chemism."
Familial substance. In its purity, this concept stresses common ances- try in the strictly biological sense, as literal descent from maternal or paternal sources. But the concept of family is usually "spiritualized," so that it includes merely social groups, comprising persons of the same nationality or beliefs. Most often, in such cases, there is the notion of some founder shared in common, or some covenant or constitution or historical act from which the consubstantiality of the group is derived. Doctrines of creation extend the concept of familial descent to cover
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the relationship between the craftsman and his product ("the potter and the pot," as with the agent-act ratio).
This in turn moves us closer to purely logical derivations, of actuali- ties from potentialities, of the explicit from the implicit, of conclusions from principles (that is, "firsts"). Plotinus' characterization of God as to proton would be a case in point, or Bonaventura's notion of the world's development from rationes seminales, an expression clearly combining the ideas of logical and biological descent. The stress upon the informative nature of beginnings can in turn lead us to treat chris- tenings, inaugurations, and the like as aspects of familial substance. There is the girl of high spirits, for instance, who says of herself that she was born during a hurricane, as though the quality of her temper in later life were derived from the quality of the scene prevailing at her birth.
Biologists, in their concern with vital reproduction, necessarily give prominence to concepts of familial substance, in terms for genus and species, cellular structure, and the like. Often they study the responses of organisms at various levels of development, in the expectation that laws of behavior discovered at one level will apply to levels far higher in the scale of complexity. They expect differences, of course, but they also expect the processes at both the higher and lower levels to be "substantially" the same. Thus in an article of biological vulgarization published in one of the "cultural" magazines, a writer observed that, though we may lose confidence in the brotherhood of man, we can still be sure of our consubstantiality in a more inclusive concept of family: "protoplasm" (incidentally, another "first").
Since the taking of nourishment involves a transubstantiation of ex- ternal elements into elements within, we might treat nutritive substance as a combination of the contextual and familial sufficiently notable to deserve a separate designation. Just as the organism dies when de- prived of all food, so it will die in part when certain strategic ingredients are absent from its food. Thus, though one might not want to contend that a sufficiency of iodine will make men wise, we can say that a de- ficiency of iodine will greatly prod them to be stupid. And manganese has been called the chemical of "mother love" because, without manga- nese, hens won't set. (Similarly, the pituitary has been called the "mother love" gland, since a deficiency of the pituitary hormone in the female is accompanied by "lack of devotion to its offspring.") Modern
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 31
chemistry prompts us to stress the scenic aspect of the nutritional mo- tive, as the chemist would seek to reduce the efficient principle in both manganese and the pituitary hormone to a common basis. Even a stock to which a scion has been grafted may be considered, from this point of view, as a part of the scion's environment, hence an environ- mental control upon food supply. For any motivational special factor which is theoretically assigned to the organism (in the sense that a horse and a tiger, a dandelion and a daisy, exemplify in their behavior and development different loci of motion), can be theoretically dissolved into the environmental. If you put a hungry horse and a hungry tiger in a cage together, for instance, you would thereby get not one environ- ment but two, since the tiger would be so drastically momentous an as- pect of the horse's environment, and the horse would be a nutrient as- pect of the tiger's environment. And any change of nutritive elements such as accompanies glandular transplantations or the injection of hor- mones is analyzable as a "new physical situation." Dr. Andras Angyal observes in his Foundations for a Science of Personality , "A morphologi- cal distinction between organism and environment is impossible." He also reminds us, "The blood has been called 'internal environment' by Claude Bernard." Accordingly, he employs the concept of a "bio- sphere" in which "subject (organism)" and "object (environment)" are merged as a single process.
The title of Robert M. Coates's fantasy, Eater of Darkness, could be translated: "The agent whose substance is one with the substance of darkness" (though we should next have to make an inquiry into the author's use of "darkness" to discover the special attributes of the term in his particular thesaurus). Totemic rites and the sacrament of the Eucharist are instances where the nutritive emphasis becomes sub- merged in the notion of familial consubstantiality. "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you what you are."
Directional substance. Doubtless biologically derived from the ex- perience of free motion, since man is an organism that lives by locomo- tion. Frequently, with metaphors of "the way," the directional stresses the sense of motivation from within. Often strongly futuristic, purpos- ive, its slogan might be: Not "Who are you?" or "Where are you from?" but "Where are you going?" Thought in terms of directional substance gained many fresh motives since the Renaissance, and the greater mobility that went with the development from status to con-
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tract, alienation of property, the growth of the monetary rationale, and revolutionary innovations in the means of transportation and communi- cation. The directional is also susceptible of conversion from "free" motion into the "determined." Thus, one may "freely" answer a call, yet the call may be so imperious that one could not ignore it without disaster. And statistical treatment of supposedly "free" choices may disclose a uniform response prevailing among the lot.
The directional has encouraged much sociological speculation in terms of "tendencies" or "trends." With such terms, the substantial paradox is not far in the offing. If a man did not make a certain de- cision, for instance, we might nonetheless choose to say that he had a "tendency towards" the decision. Indeed, any tendency to do some- thing is, by the same token, a tendency not to do it.
The directional is embedded in the very word, "motivation." And we may note four related nuances, or perhaps puns, with corresponding philosophies. Doctrines that reduce mental states to materialistic terms treat motion as motive. When an individual's acts are referred to some larger curve, we get movement as motive. For instance, individual immigrants came to America as part of a general movement westward. "Movement" in such cases can be either purposive or necessitarian, since one's place in a "movement" is like one's enlistment in a "cause" (and Latin causa is defined as : that by, on account of, or through which any- thing ta\es place or is done; a cause, reason, motive, inducement). Terminologies that situate the driving force of human action in human passion treat emotion as motive. (In his Principles of Literary Criti- cism, I. A. Richards offers a good pun for reducing emotion in turn to motion, when he proposes that we speak not of the emotions aroused in us by art but of the commotions.) And one can mystically select the moment as motive. Such "moments" are directional in that, being led up to and away from, they summarize the foregoing and seminally con- tain the subsequent. But in themselves they "just are," being an "eter- nal present" that has wound up the past and has the future wound up.
All metaphors or generalizations, such as homo homini lupus, or "life a pilgrimage," or "the economic man," that treat one order of motiva- tion in terms of a higher order or lower order, are examples of sub- stantiation; and they reveal the paradox of substance in that the given subject both is and is not the same as the character with which and by which it is identified. Such statements about motivating essence, often
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 33
made in passing and sometimes serving as the midrib of a work, are the stock in trade of imaginative literature. As such, they can be most fully studied under the heading of Symbolic. And much that we have written in Permanence and Change, Attitudes Toward History, and The Philosophy of Literary Form could be read as an elaboration of this paragraph. The name of any well-developed character in a fiction is the term for a peculiar complexity of motives.
Dialectic Substance
From the standpoint of our present study, all the foregoing types could be considered as special cases of a more inclusive category: dialec- tic substance. Dialectically considered (that is, "dramatistically" con- sidered) men are not only in nature. The cultural accretions made pos- sible by the language motive become a "second nature" with them. Here again we confront the ambiguities of substance, since symbolic communication is not a merely external instrument, but also intrinsic to men as agents. Its motivational properties characterize both "the human situation" and what men are "in themselves."
Whereas there is an implicit irony in the other notions of substance, with the dialectic substance the irony is explicit. For it derives its character from the systematic contemplation of the antinomies attend- ant upon the fact that we necessarily define a thing in terms of some- thing else. "Dialectic substance" would thus be the over-all category of dramatism, which treats of human motives in the terms of verbal action. By this statement we most decidedly do not mean that human motives are confined to the realm of verbal action. We mean rather that the dramatistic analysis of motives has its point of departure in the subject of verbal action (in thought, speech, and document).
A poem, by shifting the imagery of its metaphors, permits us to con- template the subject from the standpoint of various objects. This effect is dialectical in the sense that we see something in terms of some other. In a more restricted sense, however, the dialectical considers things in terms not of some other, but of the other. The sharpest instance of this is an agon wherein the protagonist is motivated by the nature of the antagonist, as with the situating of socialist motives in resistance to capitalism, or the unifying effect of the Allied Nations' joint opposition to Hitler. There is a grim pleasantry that runs, "Of course we're
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Christians — but what are wc being Christians against?" In earlier days, when the devil enjoyed great personal prominence, he could per- form this noteworthy role of agonistic unification which, in our era of humanistic progress, we generally assign exclusively to human vessels.
The ambiguity of external and internal motivation has recently plagued some enemies of Fascism who saw that an effective war against the Fascist nations would require many "Fascist" measures on the part of the Anti-Fascists. As the Irish poet, George Russell, once stated the form of their predicament: "We become the image of the thing we hate." And the great dialectician, Coleridge, has observed that rivales are the opposite banks of the same stream. And it was dialectically, or dramatically, necessary that the devil should be an angel; for were he of any less noble substance, the Christian agonia would to that de- gree have fallen short of thoroughness in imagining a common ground on which the two great conflicting motives, good and evil, can join battle.
The most thoroughgoing dialectical opposition, however, centers in that key pair: Being and Not-Being. For the contextual approach to substance, by inducing men to postulate a ground or context in which everything that is, is placed, led thinkers "by dialectical neces- sity" to affirm that the only ground of "Being" is "Not-Being" (for "Being" is so comprehensive a category that its dialectical opposite, "Not-Being," is the only term that would be left to designate its ground). The Neo-Platonist, Plotinus, carried such thinking to its ultimate limits, in the direction of that "negative theology" whereby the divine substance, as the ground of all that we experience in the material world, could be designated only by the absence of any attri- butes such as we in our material existence can conceive of. He would evolve a dialectical process that, beginning with material things, in the end had completely transcended its beginnings, thus arriving at a totally immaterial vision of God as an abstract Oneness. Accordingly, in his belief that material existence is estrangement from God, he is said to have been unwilling to name either his parents or his birth- place (the abstract concept of dialectical substance here leading him to proclaim his identity by a negative reference to the familial and the geometric).
The process of transcendence may, of course, be reversed. Then the ultimate abstract Oneness is taken as a source, a "first"; and the steps
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 35
leading up to it are interpreted as stages emanating from it. Or terms that are contextual to each other (such as Being and Not-Being, Action and Rest, Mechanism and Purpose, the One and the Many) can be treated as familially related (as were Being to be derived from Not-Being, Action from Rest, Mechanism from Purpose, the Many from the One). Or, in general, actualities may be derived from po- tentialities that are in a different realm than the actualities. The most obvious instance of such a derivation would be a naturalistic assertion that the "conscious" is derived from a "pre-Conscious," or that the state of life is derived from a condition of "pre-life." However, many less apparent variants are possible. The human person, for instance, may be derived from God as a "super-person." Or human purpose may be derived from an All Purpose, or Cosmic Purpose, or Universal Pur- pose, or Absolute Purpose, or Pure Purpose, or Inner Purpose, etc. And instead of a "pre-conscious" as the source or latent form of conscious- ness, we may have a subconscious or unconscious or "collective uncon- scious," etc.
The Paradox of Purity
Such pairs are in contrasted orders, with one a transcendence of the other, the one latent or covert, the other patent or overt. And the ambiguities of substance here take a form that we would call the "paradox of purity," or "paradox of the absolute." We confront this paradox when deriving the nature of the human person from God as "super-person," as "pure," or "absolute" person, since God as a super- person would be impersonal — and the impersonal would be synony- mous with the negation of personality. Hence, Pure Personality would be the same as No Personality: and the derivation of the personal prin- ciple from God as pure person would amount to its derivation from an impersonal principle. Similarly, a point that Hegel made much of, Pure Being would be the same as Not-Being; and in Aristotle, God can be defined either as "Pure Act" or as complete repose, a rest that is "eternal, unchangeable, immovable." And Leibniz was able to pro- pose something pretty much like unconscious ideas in his doctrine of the "virtual innateness of ideas." (We might point up the oxymoron here by translating "unconscious ideas" as "unaware awarenesses.")
The painter Kandinsky illustrates our subject when, on the sub-
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ject of Schonberg's esthetic, he says that, to the uninitiate, the "inner beauty" of music must seem like ugliness. And when discussing Julien Gracq's Chateau d'Argol, Parker Tyler comes upon the para- dox of the absolute thus:
In the eighth chapter of the book, Albert and Heide, the woman, follow a road which is said to "symbolize pure direction. But look- ing back, they realize that behind them the avenue seems to peter out and to be blocked by thicket and underbrush. It is a blind alley . . ." Like passage through water, passage through this Hegelian reality is pure direction, meaning that, wherever you turn in it, the way must be created, because behind you, the way has ceased to be.
The citation is from the surrealist magazine, View, in another copy of which Harold Rosenberg, writing on "the art of escape," says that "in democratic society, this art tends, like all the other arts, to become Pure" And if the fugitive "can combine within himself perfectly all the elements of the art, he will be able to free himself perpetually." The thought suggests the element of "pure escape" that lies at the roots of liberalism. And it suggests the paradox of "pure escape." For in freeing oneself perpetually, one would in a sense remain perpetually a prisoner, since one would never have definitively escaped.
With regard to Symbolic, one may expect to encounter the para- dox of purity whenever he finds what we have called elsewhere the "withinness of withinness," or the "atop the atop," as when Melville writes in Moby Dic\: "It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness," or as with the pattern in "The Garden," by Andrew Marvell, when the poet speaks of the mind as
. . . that ocean where each kind Does streight its own resemblance find;
• • •
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
And in another issue of View, when Parker Tyler is reviewing a manual of judo as though this kind of combat were simply a kind of dance, a "pure" art done for love of the figures involved, not for the utilitarian purpose of victory over an adversary, he states his position in a similar "atop the atop" kind of image. For he sums up his thesis
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 37
in an image by observing that the high-speed camera has shown us how "a drop of milk falling into a mass of milk creates at the moment a perfectly symmetrical crown, with several points suspended in the air like jewels." His article concludes:
In the largest sense, Mars is an enemy of Apollo. It is only on the esthetic grounds of fantasy that they may meet and fraternize with each other. So, beyond our capacity to discipline our thoughts in relation to "realities," the instinct of free movement typified by Isadora's dance asserts itself, and we may imagine as eternal, if we like, a drop of American blood being poured into its own mass, and erecting over that precious surface a fragile crown of rubies.
In theological and metaphysical works, we can recognize the para- dox of the absolute readily enough. Often, in fact, it is explicitly dis- cussed. But in historicist writings it more easily goes unnoticed. Yet the paradox may be implicit in any term for a collective motivation, such as a concept of class, nation, the "general will," and the like. Technically, it becomes a "pure" motive when matched against some individual locus of motivation. And it may thus be the negation of an individual motive. Yet despite this position as dialectical antithesis of the individual motive, the collective motive may be treated as the source or principle from which the individual motive is familially or "substantially" derived in a "like begets like" manner. That is, to derive the individual motive from the collective motive would be like deriving the personal principle familially from the super-personal principle, whereas contextually the "super-personal" principle would be the other of the personal.
What we are here considering formally, as a paradox of substance, can be illustrated quickly enough by example. A soldier may be nationally motivated to kill the enemies of his country, whereas indi- vidually he is motivated by a horror of killing his own enemies. Or conversely, as a patriot he may act by the motive of sacrifice in behalf of his country, but as an individual he may want to profit. Or a man's business code may differ so greatly from his private code that we can even think of him as a "split personality" (that is, a man of "two sub- stances," or "divided substance"). Or one will find a resistance to people in particular "balanced by" a humanitarian sympathy for man- kind in general.
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Such histories can be imagined in an endless variety of details. What we are suggesting here is that they all embody a grammatical form in accordance with which we should not expect a dualism of motives to be automatically dissolved, as with those apologists of science who believe that in a scientific world ethics become unnecessary. However, to consider these possibilities further, we should move into the areas of Symbolic, involving modes of transubstantiation, rituals of rebirth, whereby the individual identifies himself in terms of the collective motive (an identification by which he both is and is not one with that with which and by which he is identified). At present it is enough to note in a general way how the paradox of the absolute figures grammati- cally in the dialectic, making for a transcending of one term by its other, and for the reversed ambiguous derivation of the term from its other as ancestral principle.
Dialectic of Tragedy
When things are treated in terms of other things, men may even be said to speak for the dumb objects of nature. Nor are the pro- nouncements assigned on a purely arbitrary basis. The use of scales, meters, controlled laboratory conditions, and the like, can set up situa- tions in which speechless things can hand down accurate judgments. Men can so arrange it that nature gives clear, though impartial and impersonal, answers to their questions. The dialectical motives be- hind such methods usually escape our detection, though we get a glimpse of them when Galileo speaks of experimental testing as an "ordeal." Stated broadly the dialectical (agonistic) approach to knowledge is through the act of assertion, whereby one "suffers" the kind of knowledge that is the reciprocal of his act.
This is the process embodied in tragedy, where the agent's action involves a corresponding passion, and from the sufferance of the passion there arises an understanding of the act, an understanding that trans- cends the act. The act, in being an assertion, has called forth a counter-assertion in the elements that compose its context. And when the agent is enabled to see in terms of this counter-assertion, he has transcended the state that characterized him at the start. In this final state of tragic vision, intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are merged. That is, although purely circumstantial factors participate in his tragic
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 39
destiny, these are not felt as exclusively external, or scenic; for they bring about a representative kind of accident, the kind of accident that belongs with the agent's particular kind of character.
It is deplorable, but not tragic, simply to be a victim of circumstance, for there is an important distinction between destiny and sheer vic- timization. Sheer victimization is not an assertion — and it naturally makes not for vision but for frustration. The victimizing circum- stances, or accidents, seem arbitrary and exorbitant, even "silly." But at the moment of tragic vision, the fatal accidents are felt to bear fully upon the act, while the act itself is felt to have summed up the char- acter of the agent. Nor is this vision a sense of cosmic persecution; for in seeing the self in terms of the situation which the act has brought about, the agent transcends the self. And whereas the finality and so- lemnity of death often leads to the assumption that the tragic vision is possible only at the point of death, we must recognize that dialectically one may die many times (in fact, each time an assertion leads beyond itself to a new birth) and that tragedy is but a special case of the dialecti- cal process in general. In the Hegelian dialectic, for instance, the series of dyings is presented as a gradual progress towards greater and greater self-realization. For spirit has its counterpart in objectification; and by seeing himself in terms of objects, "from them the individual proceeds to the contemplation of his own inner being." {Philosophy of His- tory).
We can discern something of the "tragic" grammar behind the Greek proverb's way of saying "one learns by experience"; "ta pathemata mathemata" the suffered is the learned. We can also catch glimpses of a relation between dialectic and mathematics (a kind that might have figured in Plato's stress upon mathematics) in the fact that mathemata means both things learned in general, and the mathematical sciences (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy) in particular. A pathema (of the same root as our word, "passive") is the opposite of a poiema (a deed, doing, action, act; anything done; a poem). A pathema can refer vari- ously to a suffering, misfortune, passive condition, situation, state of mind. The initial requirement for a tragedy, however, is an action. Hence, by our interpretation, if the proverb were to be complete at the risk of redundance, it would have three terms: poiemata, pathemata, mathemata, suggesting that the act organizes the opposition (brings to the fore whatever factors resist or modify the act), that the agent
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thus "suffers" this opposition, and as he learns to take the oppositional motives into account, widening his terminology accordingly, he has arrived at a higher order of understanding. However, this statement may indicate more of a temporal sequence than is usually the case. The three distinctions can be collapsed into a single "moment," so that we could proceed from one to the others in any order.
A similar grammar (with a similar attenuation of the tragic) may be discerned beneath the scholastic formula, intelligere est pati, which we might translate broadly as, "to understand is to be affected by," while remembering however that the deponent verb pati contains the fol- lowing range of meanings: to bear, support, suffer, endure, be afflicted with, pass a life of suffering or privation, permit, experience, undergo, be in a certain state of mind or temper, (and in grammar) to be pas- sive, to have a passive sense, a passive nature. Understanding would be "passive" in the sense that it allowed its way of sizing up things to be moulded by the actual state of affairs. We can best appreciate the dramatistic nature of this realistic formula, which treats of knowledge in terms of action and passion, by contrasting it with Berkeley's sub- sequent idealist formula, "to be is to be perceived" (esse est percipi) which reverses the direction by treating of actuality in terms of knowl- edge.
We may discern a dramatistic pun, involving a merger of active and passive in the expression, "the motivation of an act." Strictly speak- ing, the act of an agent would be the movement not of one moved but of a mover (a mover of the self or of something else by the self). For an act is by definition active, whereas to be moved (or motivated) is by definition passive. Thus, if we quizzically scrutinize the expression, "the motivating of an act," we note that it implicitly contains the para- dox of substance. Grammatically, if a construction is active, it is not passive; and if it is passive, it is not active. But to consider an act in terms of its grounds is to consider it in terms of what it is not, namely, in terms of motives that, in acting upon the active, would make it a passive. We could state the paradox another way by saying that the concept of activation implies a kind of passive-behind-the-passive; for an agent who is "motivated by his passions" would be "moved by his being-movedness," or "acted upon by his state of being acted upon."
The Greek verb corresponding to pati is paschein. Among its more philosophic meanings are : to be actuated by a feeling or impulse, to be
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 41
influenced by a passion; (and as a technical term of the Stoic school) to be acted upon by outward objects, or to take impressions from them. When Lear complains that he is "more sinned against than sinning," we see the two integral aspects of tragedy, the action and the passion, being dissociated.
Actus and Status
We considered the three Greek words, poiema, pathema, mathema (the act, the sufferance or state, the thing learned) because they are at the very center of dialectical motivation. The Greek proverb (ta pathemata mathemata) might be said to have merged poiema and pathema (if, for instance, we translated ta pathemata as "the things undergone," an expression that could embrace both the sort of things a person actively encountered and the sort of things that simply befell him). But there is also a way of bringing out poiema by itself and merging pathema and mathema. For pathema means not only suf- fering, but state of mind, condition — and knowledge is a state. Hence, reduced to a dichotomy, the relation could be formalized in terms of "act" and "state" {actus and status).
The actus-status pair has many possibilities. Often it quite coin- cides with the action-passion alignment. At other points it diverges from common usage. For though a "passion" and a "state of mind" are much the same, we strongly distinguish between a "political state" and a "political passion." The basic contrast between "motion" and "rest" is a variant of the actus-status pair. The contrast between the dramatic and the lyrical would be another variant (since drama centers in an action, whereas the lyric aims to arrest some one mood or moment). Often the traditional "faith" and "knowledge" pair (pistis and gnosis; fides and intellectus) can be treated as an instance of the same grammatical form, with faith as the act (cf. "an act of faith") and knowledge as the state derived from the act, quite as the tragic hero's action, involving his passion, attains its rest and summation in his understanding. From here it is but a brief step to our act-scene pair, inasmuch as the knowledge derived from the act is a knowledge of the act's context, or motivational ground.1
1 Though faith is an act, it is faith in the nature of God as man's ground; hence it also has a strongly scenic reference.
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Philologically, the actus-status pair can be used to characterize a major historical development. Consider, for instance, the Greek word for "virtue" {arete), and the corresponding Latin, virtus. Originally, these words had intensely active meanings. Indeed, arete is from the same root as Ares, the god of war, and as the Latin words for art and military arms. "Prowess" would be a good translation for the word in its origins. Gradually the concept of virtue came to place less stress upon action per se, and more stress upon the potentialities of action.
We can appreciate the transformation in a word of probably the same etymological origins, "hero." A hero is first of all a man who does heroic things; and his "heroism" resides in his acts. But next, a hero can be a man with the potentialities of heroic action. Soldiers on the way to the wars are heroes in this sense. Their heroism resides in their status as soldiers. Or a man may be considered a hero because he had done heroic acts, whereas in his present state as a hero he may be too old or weak to do such acts at all. And similarly, the "virtues" may become in the end purely states of mind; or proper attitudes toward God, things, and people; or not killing, not stealing, not coveting, etc.
Sociologically, this movement from actus to status involves class sub- stance. It centers about the fact that the different occupational acts each have their corresponding properties, and out of these differences in properties there develop in time corresponding differences of status. Though the spread of occupational classification breaks down the purely tribal nature of a culture, notions of familial substance remain prominent.
Because occupational action requires properties, and because property is not an act but a state, in the social field we can readily observe how a ruling class develops from a stage wherein actus and status are of cor- responding importance to a stage wherein the sense of position as an act is slighted and position as a traditional or inherited state is stressed. (Or sometimes we get a new kind of act, not germane to the originat- ing state, as when a nobility, whose privileges grew out of horseman- ship in war, turns to pageantry and sport, and may even employ its inherited privileges to hire or command others to fight in its place.) Kingship is originally an act, like heroism. But gradually, as in- herited, it becomes a sheer state, the nature of the king's extrinsic properties enabling him to be a king by reason of their substantiality alone. He can be a king, while commissioning ministers to perform
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 43
in his stead the kingly acts. (In the mediaeval frame, the primary act, the act of God, is to be.) Indeed, the king's holdings may retain him his position as king, investing him with their substance, long after his acts, or his failures to act, have endangered his kingdom. And may we not discern some such grammar behind the Roi Soleil's pronounce- ment: "L'etat, c'est moi"? Louis's conception of being, or substance, made it quite natural for him to merge the two meanings of state: the state as a governmental property and the state or property of king- ship. The administrative and tax-gathering machinery and the royal domains, we can imagine, could thus be looked upon as an extension of the king's person, a property of his character, like facial traits. In proportion as the quality of a ruling class becomes thus transformed from act to state, we may look for the emergence of a class whose sub- stance centers in a new act.
The actus-status alignment lends itself to another sort of treatment, whereby status is considered as potentiality and actus as its actualization. That is, in a state there are implicit possibilities, and in action these pos- sibilities are made explicit. But we shall treat of these resources when discussing the potentiality-actuality and implicit-explicit pairs.
Universal Motives as Substance
All gods are "substances," and as such are names for motives or com- binations of motives. Polytheistic divinities, besides their personalistic aspects, often represent decidedly geometric, or scenic, kinds of motiva- tion. Indeed, we may even think of local divinities as theological prototypes of contemporary environmentalist, or geographic motives. For to say that a river is a different "god" than a mountain is to say, within the rules of a polytheistic nomenclature, that a river calls for a different set of human actions than a mountain. Whereas the "en- lightened" have too often been content to dismiss the pagan gods merely as instances of animistic superstition, the fact is that the com- plex of social behavior centering about a given "god" was often quite correct, in the most realistically biological sense. Thus, insofar as ade- quate modes of planting and harvesting and distribution are connected with the rites of a given divinity, its name would be the title for a cor- rect summation of motives. However, such concepts of motivation are usually developed to the point where their original reference is
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obscured, being replaced by motivational concepts peculiar to a special- ized priesthood and to the needs of class domination.
Universal religions, proclaiming some one principle of divinity as the ground of being, have assisted the development of world-wide commerce by enabling the believers, who share in this over-all sub- stance, to retain a sense of one master motive prevailing throughout the world. For the believer in such a universal scheme of motives may go to many different scenes, each with its own peculiar motivational texture, without losing his "hypostasis," the sense of his personal iden- tity and of one "real" motivational substratum underlying it. Scien- tific rationalism can also serve this end, as with the Stoic cosmo- politanism that contributed so signally to the intellectual side of Chris- tianity. Romantic stories of the Westerner, drinking himself to death at some outpost in the tropics, indicate that there are local gods (local motives), and that, whereas neither his vestiges of the Christian reli- gion nor his sense of caste permit him to do them formal obeisance, in his dissipation he reveals a distorted response to them. The British official's habit, in the Empire's remotest spots, of dressing for dinner is in effect the transporting of an idol, the vessel of a motive that has its sanctuary in the homeland.
Of course, by the time the monotheistic motive has become embodied in a structure of world empire, it has usually been transformed into its secular analogue, the monetary motive. For the incentive of mone- tary profit, like the One God, can be felt to prevail as a global source of action, over and above any motivations peculiar to the locale. And it serves the needs of empire precisely because it "transcends" religious motives, hence making for a "tolerant" commerce among men whose religious vocabularies of motivation differ widely.
Nonetheless, the greater the diffusion of a motive (be it the One God or the Gold Standard and its later variants) the greater its need to adopt modifications peculiar to specific local scenes. For though a doctrine proclaims a universal scene that is the motivation common to all men whatever their diversities, this "substantial" term must also have "ad- jectival" terms that adapt it to more restricted purposes. We would class as "polytheisms" all terminologies stressing localness of motive (such as nationalism). But we would also recognize that monotheisms (in which we would include any secular title for a universal spring of action, such as "nature" or "the profit motive") can prevail only insofar
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 45
as they are "incipiently" polytheistic, containing motivational terms ("saints") that break down the universality of the motive into narrower reference.
According to the Marxist calculus, insofar as the world becomes in- dustrialized under capitalism, workers everywhere share the same social motives, since they all have the "factory situation" in common. This is the scene that shapes the workers' acts, and their nature as agents, in conformity with it. Stated in terms of money (the capitalist god, from which are derived men's freedom and their necessity) the motive common to the workers is "wage slavery." It is universal as a motive whenever the means of production are private property, with wages and taxes being paid in symbols rather than in kind. But it divides the over-all capitalist motive into two broad economic classifica- tions, the possessors and the dispossessed, with each status analyzable as a different substance, or contrasting bundle of motives.
Translated dramatistically: the sheer wor\ in a factory would not be an act. It would be little more than motion. And this motion be- comes actus only when the workers' status is understood in terms of socialist organization. This act is of revolutionary import since the sheer ownership of the factories is a state: hence the property relation becomes increasingly passive, while the proletarian relation becomes in- creasingly active. However, reversals in keeping with the antinomies of substance complicate the pattern. For the owners' state, in its governmental aspects, is anything but passive. Indeed, the property structure automatically contains an act of expropriation, since the workers receive much less than they produce; and the structure of the state is designed to keep this act of expropriation in force. From this point of view, it is the state that is active, while the workers suffer its action.
The socialist revolution is designed first to reverse the state (during the "dictatorship of the proletariat") and next to abolish it, or let it "wither away." But our grammar would lead us to doubt whether a "state" can ever really "wither away," and least of all in a complex industrial society. Though it may take strategically new forms, we ex- pect the logic of the actus-status pair to continue manifesting itself. The selection of the proletariat as the vessel of the new act that tran- scends the bourgeois state may or may not be correct as a casuistry, but it violates no law of "grammar." The belief in the withering away
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of the state, however, does seem to violate a law of grammar. For no continuity of social act is possible without a corresponding social status; and the many different kinds of act required in an industrial state, with its high degree of specialization, make for corresponding classifications of status.
Intrinsic and Extrinsic
The treatment of material properties as a "state" brings the actus- status pair in line with the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic substance, or between motivations within the agent and motivations de- rived from scenic sources that "support" (or "sub-stand") the agent. In the introduction to his Philosophy of History, where Hegel places Matter in dialectical opposition to Spirit, he clearly begins by equating Matter with the extrinsic aspect of substance and Spirit with its in- trinsic aspect:
As the essence of Matter is Gravity, so, on the other hand, we may affirm that the substance, the essence of Spirit is Freedom. . . . Matter possesses gravity in virtue of its tendency toward a central point. It is essentially composite; consisting of parts that exclude each other. It seeks its Unity; and therefore exhibits itself as self- destructive, as verging toward its opposite (an indivisible point). If it could attain this, it would be Matter no longer, it would have perished. It strives after the realization of its Idea; for in Unity it exists ideally. Spirit, on the contrary, may be defined as that which has its centre in itself. It has not a unity outside itself, but has al- ready found it; it exists in and with itself. Matter has its essence out of itself; Spirit is self-contained existence (Bei-sich-selbst-sein). Now this is freedom, exactly. For if I am dependent, my being is referred to something else which I am not; I cannot exist independently of something external. I am free, on the contrary, when my existence depends upon myself.
However, before he has proceeded very far, remarks on the relation between the potential and the actual lead into the peculiarly Hegelian theory of the State as the vessel of freedom. For the Spirit is free, we are told, and the State is "the perfect embodiment of Spirit." But by the time we arrive at this point, the intrinsic and the extrinsic have be- gun subtly to change places. One can discern the ambiguity by ex-
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 47
perimentally shifting the accent in Hegel's formula for the nature of the State. We may say either "embodiment of Spirit" or "embodiment of Spirit." Or, since "embodiment" is here a synonym for "materiali- zation," we could make the ambiguity still more apparent by rephrasing it as a choice between "materialization of Spirit" and "materialization of Spirit." For the expression itself is got by the merging of antitheti- cal terms. Hence, when you have put them together, by shifting the stress you can proclaim one or the other as the essence of the pair. Accepting Hegel's definition of Matter, only a State that is the "materi- alization of Spirit" would be "essentially" free. But a State that is the "materialization of Spirit" would be the very antithesis of freedom (and this was precisely the interpretation given by the Marxist reversal of the Hegelian dialectic).
Indeed, we can take it as a reliable rule of thumb that, whenever we find a distinction between the internal and the external, the intrinsic and the extrinsic, the within and the without, (as with Korzybski's distinction between happenings "inside the skin" and happenings "out- side the skin") we can expect to encounter the paradoxes of substance.
Recently, for instance, a "gerontologist," whose specialty is the study of "aging as a physiological process," is reported to have said in an address to a body of chemists:
Aging, like life in general, is a chemical process, and just as chem- istry has been able to improve on nature in many respects, virtually creating a new world by reshuffling nature's molecules, so it may be expected that eventually chemistry will learn to stimulate artificially those powers of "intrinsic resistance" to disease with which man is born.
"Intrinsic resistance," you will note, is a concept that situates a motiva- tional source within the body as agent. But the use of chemical means to stimulate this internal motive would involve the transformation of this "intrinsic" motive into an "extrinsic" motive, since it would be- come but the channel or vessel through which the chemical materials ("scenic," administered "from without") would affect the chemistry of the body. Indeed, since the body is but chemistry, and all outside the body is but chemistry, the very mode of thought that forms a con- cept of the "intrinsic" in these terms must also by the same terms dis- solve it. Everything being chemical, the physiological center of "in-
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trinsic resistance" is but a function of the chemical scene. In fact, in- sofar as chemical stimulants of the required sort were found, a depend- ence upon them would be a dependence upon purely external agencies. And far from "stimulating" intrinsic resistance, the chemicals should be expected to cause a weakening of it, to the extent that the economy of the body grew to require these chemicals. The only place where an intrinsic motive, as a genuinely internal activation, could be said to figure in materialistic medicology is on the occasions when physicians come upon illnesses in which the chances of recovery are felt to depend upon the mental attitude of the patient (whether he "wants" to re- cover). Here one has an intrinsic motive (involving an action) in contrast with such a motive as is supplied by the administering of chemicals (involving sheer motion).2
One of the most common fallacies in the attempt to determine the intrinsic is the equating of the intrinsic with the unique. We recall an instance of this nominalist extreme in an essay by a literary critic who exhorted his fellows to discern the quality of a given poet's lines by finding in exactly what way they were distinct from the lines of every other poet (somewhat as advertisements recommending rival brands of the same product play up some one "talking point" that is said to dis- tinguish this brand from all its competitors). Yet the intrinsic value of a poet's lines must also reside, to a very great degree, in attributes that his work shares with many other poets. We cannot define by differentia alone; the differentiated also has significant attributes as members of its class. The heresy that would define human nature solely in terms of some more inclusive category, such as chemistry, or protoplasm, or colloids, has as its over-compensatory counterpart the heresy that would define solely in terms of distinctive traits, actual or imputed. Thus, an article in one of our best magazines is recom- mended on the grounds that it "applies anthropological method to the diagnosis of our distinctive cultural traits." This is, to be sure, a legit- imate limitation of subject-matter for treatment within the scope of one article; but we should be admonished against the assumption that even a wholly accurate description of our culture in terms of its dis- tinctive traits alone could possibly give us a just interpretation of its motives. Indeed, we can discern a variant of the same error in
2 See in appendix, "The Problem of the Intrinsic/' as indication of the way in which the quandaries of substance figure in literary criticism.
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 49
nationalist and regionalist concepts of motivation as we get in the over-simplifications of literature : the treatment of motivational parts as though they were the motivational whole.
The search for the intrinsic frequently leads to the selection of cal- culi postulating various assortments of "instincts," "drives," "urges," etc. as the motivational springs of biologic organisms in general and of human organisms in particular. Materialistic science prefers this style of vocabulary because it assigns scenic terms to motives situated in the agent; and scenic words generally seem so much more "real" than other words, even though such lists can be expanded or con- tracted ad lib,, quite as suits one's dialectical preferences. Though the treatment of intrinsic motivation in such terms is usually made in good faith, it can also well serve as a rhetorical deflection of social criticism. For instance, if a reformer would advocate important political or social changes on the ground that the present state of affairs stimulates wars, he can be "scientifically refuted" by a calculus which postulates a "combative instinct," or "drive towards aggression," or "natural urge to kill" in all people or certain types of people. For if such motives are intrinsic to human agents, they may be expected to demand expression whatever the social and political structure may be.
When a person has his mind set upon the interpreting of human motivation in a calculus that features an innate "combative instinct" or "natural urge to kill," one may as well accept his decision as a stub- born fact of nature; instead of trying to dispel it, one should try, to get around it. Recalling the paradox of substance, for instance, we are reminded that such "drives" or "urges" are like "tendencies" or "trends," which we discussed when on the subject of "directional" sub- stance. And the man who would postulate an "instinct to kill" can be asked to round out his dialectic by postulating a contrary "instinct not to kill." For there is certainly as much empirical evidence that men let one another live as there is evidence that they kill one another. Hence, whenever such words designate motives that may or may not prevail, we can at least insist that they be balanced with their dialectical counterpart. And once the pattern is thus completed, we are able to see beyond these peculiarly "intrinsic" motives to "extrinsic" or "scenic" motives, in the sense of situations which stimulate one rather than the other of the paired motives, as some situations call forth a greater amount of combativeness and destructiveness, whereas other situations
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call forth a greater amount of cooperation and construction. (There are, of course, complications here that require much more discrimina- tory calculation than could be got by confinement to such pairings. A certain kind of cooperation is stimulated by war, for instance, both at the time and as the result of new methods which, originally designed for military aggression, can later be adapted for peaceful commercial ex- change.)
Spinoza defines substance as "the cause of itself" {causa sui). And we can see how this formulation applies to the search for the intrinsic when we contrast supernaturalist and humanist strategies of motiva- tion. Supernaturalist strategies derive the attributes of human sub- stance and motive from God as their ancestral source, whereas hu- manistic strategies situate the motivational principles within human agents themselves. In brief, humanists assign to man an inherent or intrinsic dignity, whereas supernaturalists assign to man a derived dig- nity. Any motive humanistically postulated in the agent would be a causa sui insofar as it is not deduced from any cause outside itself.
Since agents require placement in scenes, humanism gets its scenic counterpart in naturalism. There is also, of course, a "supernaturalist humanism," but it would be exactly the same as the kind of doctrine we here call simply supernaturalism. And similarly what we here call humanism could be characterized more fully as "naturalistic hu- manism," or simply "naturalism," as in the following citation from an essay by John Dewey, assigning an intrinsic motive to human nature:
Naturalism finds the values in question, the worth and dignity of men and women, founded in human nature itself, in the connections, actual and potential, of human beings with one another in their nat- ural social relationships. Not only that, but it is ready at any time to maintain the thesis that a foundation within man and nature is a much sounder one than is one alleged to exist outside the constitu- tion of man and nature.
By placing man and nature together, in dialectical opposition to the supernatural, Dr. Dewey's remarks here somewhat conceal from us the fact that we are shifting between a scenic location for motives and a location within the agent. Only the second kind would be "in- trinsic" to people; the other kind would be "derivative" from nature as scene instead of from super-nature as scene. (Both "foundation" and
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 51
"constitution" are "stance" words, hence capable of merging intrinsic and extrinsic reference.)
It is possible that the reverse perspective so characteristic of Russian ikons may have originated in a theory of the intrinsic, as is indicated in this citation from The Burlington Magazine for October 1929 ("Greco: the Epilogue to Byzantine Culture," by Robert Byron):
It has been suggested that the habit of inverted perspective which the Greeks perpetuated in Duccio and Giotto, derived from the art- ist's imagining himself within the object portrayed; so that as it pro- gressed in the direction of the beholder it necessarily diminished. Such indeed was the Byzantine vision of form as expressed in terms of light and dark. The head, the arm, was conceived primarily as a dark mass, instead of as a given space to be invested with form by the application of shadow. This principle is explicitly stated in Denys of Fourna's "Guide to Painting" in relation to flesh depiction; and the interest of this instruction lies in the fact that it exhibits the exact converse of the rules for the same process prescribed in mediae- val western manuals such as that of Cennino Cennini.
The notion of "the artist's imagining himself within the object por- trayed" would seem to carry the cult of the intrinsic to the point where it exemplifies the paradox of purity, as with the wag who said that only the homosexual man can be the true admirer of women, since he carries his admiration to such an extent that, identifying himself with them, he adopts their very point of view, and thus falls in love with men. For an "intrinsic" observation of women would look, not towards women, but towards men.
The Rhetoric of Substance
The ambiguity of substance affords, as one might expect, a major re- source of rhetoric. We can appreciate this by referring again to the citation from Locke, when he says that in speaking of substance "we talk like children: who, being questioned what such a thing is which they know not, readily give this satisfactory answer, that it is some- thing; which in truth signifies no more, when so used, either by chil- dren or men, but that they know not what; and that the thing they pretend to know and talk of, is what they have no distinct idea of at all, and so are perfectly ignorant of it, and in the dark." For "the general
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name substance" is "nothing but the supposed, but unknown, support of those qualities we find existing." The most clear-sounding of words can thus be used for the vaguest of reference, quite as we speak of "a certain thing" when we have no particular thing in mind. And so rock-bottom a study as a treatise on the nature of substance might, from this point of view, more accurately be entitled, "A Treatise on the Nature of I-don't-know-what." One might thus express a state of considerable vagueness in the imposing accents of a juridic solidity.
We may even go a step further and note that one may say "it is substantially true" precisely at a time when on the basis of the evi- dence, it would be much more accurate to say, "it is not true." And even a human slave could be defined in Christian doctrine as "sub- stantially" free, by reason of qualities which he had inherited "sub- stantially" from his creator. Even in cases where the nature of the case does not justify the usage grammatically, it can be used without strain for rhetorical purposes. What handier linguistic resource could a rhetorician want than an ambiguity whereby he can say "The state of affairs is substantially such-and-such," instead of having to say "The state of affairs is and/or is not such-and-such" ?
There is a similar usage in the expression, "in principle" (a word furthermore that is literally a "first," as we realize when we recall its etymological descent from a word meaning: beginning, commence- ment, origin). So diplomats can skirt some commendable but em- barrassing proposal by accepting it "in principle," a stylistic nicety that was once very popular with the League of Nations. Positivists who would discard the category of substance assert that the only meaningful propositions are those which are capable of scientific proof; and having thus outlawed the conveniences of a substantive rhetoric, they next blandly concede that the scientific proof is not always pos- sible actually, but must be possible "in principle" — which would leave them pretty much where they began, except that their doctrine won't allow them to admit it. By this device, we can even characterize as "universally valid" a proposition that may in fact be denied by whole classes of people. As one controversialist has phrased it: "To say that a proposition is valid is to say that in principle it can secure the universal agreement of all who abide by scientific method."
Often, of course, this function of language is preserved when there are no such telltale expressions (such as "substantially," "essentially,"
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 53
"in principle," or "in the long run") to make it quickly apparent. For instance, a list of citizens' signatures had been collected for a petition asking that a certain politician's name be placed on the ballot. In court it was shown that some of these signatures were genuine, but that a great many others were false. Thereupon the judge invalidated the lot on the grounds that, the whole list being a mixture of the false and the genuine, it was "saturated" with fraud. He here ruled in effect that the list was substantially or essentially fraudulent. The judgment was reversed by a higher court which ruled that, since the required number of genuine signatures had been obtained, the false signatures should be simply ignored. That is, the genuine signatures should be considered in themselves, not contextually.
Two Kinds of Departure
Since the five key terms can be considered as "principles," and since the margins of overlap among them permit a thinker to consider the genius of one term as "substantially" participant in the genius of an- other, the ambiguity of the substantial makes it possible to use terms as points of departure in two senses. Thus we may speak in the name of God because this expression is the summation of our thinking. Or precisely because we speak in the name of God, we may be freed to develop modes of thought that lead away from supernaturalism, since absolute conviction about religion might serve as ground for a study of nature. And whereas "naturalism" in its beginnings was a con- sistent title, referring to man in nature, it gradually became trans- formed into a surreptitiously compensatory title, referring to techno- logical methods and ideals that are almost the antithesis of nature, with nature itself seen in terms of technology and the monetary. Thus, ironically, though much of the resonance in the term "nature" derives from the supernaturalist attitude, which thought of natural law as derivative from the divine, in time the distinction between the natural and the divine became transformed into a contrast between the natural and the divine. Or, if we think of "God" as the whole and "nature" as a part, we could say that the supernaturalist treated nature as a part synecdochically related to the whole, whereas in time naturalism treated this as a divisive relation. Or, to adopt a very suggestive usage in Charles M. Perry's Toward a Dimensional Realism, the notion of nature
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as a part of God could be converted into the notion of nature as apart from God.
But insofar as this divisive emphasis developed, and the secular ap- peal of "nature" relied less and less upon connotations of the super- natural, "nature" gained resonance from a new source, the romantic reaction against the "unnatural" world progressively created by the technological "conquest" of nature. In this way the selection of "natu- ralism" as the name for a philosophy of applied science may be com- pensatory rather than consistent (somewhat as though one were to call a philosophy "humanistic" because it aimed at the systematic elimina- tion of traits that were formerly considered characteristically human, or as religious doctrines of "personalism" may be formulated, not be- cause the individual person really is in a position of paramount impor- tance, but precisely because he is not).
Such tactics of entitling are as legitimate as any other, once the irony has been made explicit. Indeed, philosophies are never quite "consistent" in this sense. All thought tends to name things not be- cause they are precisely as named, but because they are not quite as named, and the name is designated as a somewhat hortatory device, to take up the slack. As others have pointed out, for instance, if the philosophy of "utilitarianism" were wholly correct, there would be no need for the philosophy. For men would spontaneously and inevitably follow the dictates of utility; whereas in actuality the doctrine pro- claiming the ubiquity of the utilitarian motive was formulated to serve as a plea for the deliberate consulting of the utilitarian motive.
From such ambiguity is derived that irony of historical development whereby the very strength in the affirming of a given term may the better enable men to make a world that departs from it. For the affirm- ing of the term as their god-term enables men to go far afield without sensing a loss of orientation. And by the time the extent of their departure is enough to become generally obvious, the stability of the new order they have built in the name of the old order gives them the strength to abandon their old god-term and adopt another. Hence, noting that something so highly unnatural as technology developed under the name of naturalism, we might ironically expect that, were "technologism" to become the name for "naturalism," the philosophy would be the first step towards a development away from technology. And as indication that this is no mere improvising, the philosophy of
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION 55
"operationalism," modeled after technological procedures, embodies a totally different concept of meaning than the one which, we know as a historical fact, figured as an incentive in the invention of technological devices and their corresponding mathematical formulae. Hence, if carried out rigorously, it would lead to the stabilization of technological operations rather than to the development of new ones. As "natural- ism" would lead us, via technology, away from nature, so perhaps "operationalism" might be a way of leading us, in the name of tech- nological operations, away from technology.
It has been said by one of Descartes' editors, John Veitch, that when Descartes questioned an old dogma, rather than attacking it head on, he aimed at "sapping its foundations." And he got rid of traditional principles "not so much by direct attack as by substituting for them new proofs and grounds of reasoning." Veitch also quotes a defender of Des- cartes who says ironically that his enemies called him an atheist "appar- ently because he had given new proofs of the existence of God." But these new proofs were in effect new qualifications of God. And in this capacity they subtly changed the nature of "God" as a term for motives, so that those who understood by a God only the character possessing the attributes of the old proofs were justified in calling Descartes an "atheist." Here, subtly, the ambiguous resources in the point of de- parture were being utilized.
As regards the principles of humanism, we may note that a super- natural grounding of humanism is "consistent" in the sense that a personal principle is ascribed to the ultimate ground of human action. And having thus been put in, it is there for the philosopher to take out, when deriving the principles of specifically human action by deduction from the nature of the universal ground. A naturalistic grounding of humanism, on the other hand, is "compensatory," in that personal agents are placed in a non-personal scene. The first strategy reasons by a "therefore," the second by a "however."
The Centrality of Substance
Contemporary scientific theory, in proposing to abandon the cate- gories of substance and causality, has done speculation a good turn. For it has made clear wherein the difference between philosophic and scientific terminologies of motivation resides. Philosophy, like com-
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mon sense, must think of human motivation dramatistically, in terms of action and its ends. But a science is freed of philosophic taints only insofar as it confines itself to terms of motion and arrested motion (figure, structure). This convention, almost Puritanical in its severity (surely we should not be far wrong in calling it a secularized variant of Puritanism) has brought about such magnification of human powers that any "objection" to it would have about as much force as an attempt to "refute" Niagara Falls. But such results, however spectacular, do not justify an attempt to abide by the same terminological conventions when treating of human motives. For one could confine the study of action within the terms of motion only by resigning oneself to gross misrepresentations of life as we normally experience it.
Though we here lay great stress upon the puns and other word play in men's ideas of motivation, we do not thereby conclude that such linguistic tactics are "nothing but" puns and word play. Rather, we take it that men's linguistic behavior here reflects real paradoxes in the nature of the world itself — antinomies that could be resolved only if men were able, not in thought, as with the program of Hegelian ideal- ism, but in actual concrete operations, to create an entire universe.
However, strictly for the purposes of our Grammar, we need not defend as much. One might hypothetically grant that the treatment of motives in terms of "action" and "substance" is wholly fallacious, yet defend it as central to the placement of statements about motives. Relinquishing all claims for it as a "philosopher's stone," we might then make claims for it secondarily, as "a philosopher's stone for the synopsis of writings that have sought the philosopher's stone." Men have talked about things in many ways, but the pentad offers a synop- tic way to talk about their talk-about. For the resources of the five terms figure in the utterances about motives, throughout all human history. And even the most modern of scientific tracts can be ade- quately placed only as a development in this long line. From this point of view, terminologies of motion and "conditioning" are to be treated as dialectical enterprises designed to transcend terminologies of action and substance.
At the very best, we admit, each time you scrutinize a concept of substance, it dissolves into thin air. But conversely, the moment you relax your gaze a bit, it re-forms again. For things do have intrinsic
ANTINOMIES OF DEFINITION ' 57
natures, whatever may be the quandaries that crowd upon us as soon as we attempt to decide definitively what these intrinsic natures are. And only by systematically dwelling upon the paradoxes of substance could we possibly equip ourselves to guard against the concealment of "sub- stantialist" thought in schemes overtly designed to avoid it. Yet these schemes are usually constructed by men who contemn dialectical oper- ations so thoroughly that, in their aversion, they cannot adequately observe them, and are accordingly prompt to persuade themselves that their terminology is not dialectical, whereas every terminology is dia- lectical by sheer reason of the fact that it is a terminology. If you will, call the category of substance sheer error. Yet it is so fertile a source of error, that only by learning to recognize its nature from within could we hope to detect its many disguises from without. Such thoughts apply particularly to Alfred Korzybski's admonitions against Aristotelian "elementalism"; for his aversion leads to so evasive a treatment of the subject that in a very long book he contrives to convey little more than a negative attitude towards it.
So, in sum : The transformations which we here study as a Grammar are not "illusions," but citable realities. The structural relations involved are observable realities. Nothing is more imperiously there for observation and study than the tactics people employ when they would injure or gratify one another — and one can readily demonstrate the role of substantiation in such tactics. To call a man a friend or brother is to proclaim him consubstantial with oneself, one's values or purposes. To call a man a bastard is to attack him by attacking his whole line, his "authorship," his "principle" or "motive" (as expressed in terms of the familial). An epithet assigns substance doubly, for in stating the character of the object it at the same time contains an im- plicit program of action with regard to the object, thus serving as motive.
So, one could, if he wished, maintain that all theology, metaphysics, philosophy, criticism, poetry, drama, fiction, political exhortation, historical interpretation, and personal statements about the lovable and the hateful — one could if he wanted to be as drastically thorough as some of our positivists now seem to want to be — maintain that every bit of this is nonsense. Yet these words of nonsense would themselves be real words, involving real tactics, having real demonstrable relation-
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ships, and demonstrably affecting relationships. And as such, a study of their opportunities, necessities, and embarrassments would be central to the study of human motives.
The design on a piece of primitive pottery may be wholly symbolic or allegorical. But a drawing that accurately reproduces this design in a scientific treatise would be not symbolic or allegorical, but real- istic. And similarly, even when statements about the nature of the world are abstractly metaphysical, statements about the nature of these statements can be as empirical as the statement, "This is Mr. Smith," made when introducing Mr. Smith in the accepted manner.
M,
III
SCOPE AND REDUCTION
The Representative Anecdote
.EN seek for vocabularies that will be faithful reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality. Insofar as the vocabulary meets the needs of reflection, we can say that it has the necessary scope. In its selectivity, it is a reduction. Its scope and reduction become a deflection when the given terminology, or calculus, is not suited to the subject matter which it is designed to calculate.
Dramatism suggests a procedure to be followed in the development of a given calculus, or terminology. It involves the search for a "representative anecdote," to be used as a form in conformity with which the vocabulary is constructed. For instance, the behaviorist uses his experiments with the conditioned reflex as the anecdote about which to form his vocabulary for the discussion of human motives; but this anecdote, though notably informative, is not representative, since one cannot find a representative case of human motivation in animals, if only because animals lack that property of linguistic rationalization which is so typical of human motives. A representative case of human motivation must have a strongly linguistic bias, whereas animal experi- mentation necessarily neglects this.
If the originating anecdote is not representative, a vocabulary devel- oped in strict conformity with it will not be representative. This em- barrassment is usually avoided in practice by a break in the conformity at some crucial point; this means in effect that the vocabulary ceases to have the basis which is claimed for it. The very man who, with a chemical experiment as his informing anecdote, or point of departure, might tell you that people are but chemicals, will induce responses in people by talking to them, whereas he would not try to make chemicals behave by linguistic inducement. And to say that people are "chem-
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icals that talk" is the same thing as saying that people aren't "just chem- icals/' since chemicals don't talk. It is to confront the paradox of substance in a terminology unsuited to the illumination of this paradox.
Conversely, the notion of chemical affinity about which Goethe organizes his novel of sorrowing love, Die W ahlverwandtschaften, is not really the chemicalizing of human substance, but rather the human- izing of chemical substance. For the motive is defined by the action of the characters in a way totally unrepresentative of chemicals; and the situation is not chemical, but thoroughly social. Nothing makes this more quickly apparent than the closing paragraph, where the dead lovers lie buried side by side, surely their nearest approach to a purely chemical condition. Yet the novelist refers to a "peace that hovers over them" and to "the kindred images of angels looking upon them." And what a "gracious moment" it will be, he says, when in the future (dereinst) the lovers awaken together.
Subsequently we shall consider at some length this question of the "representative anecdote," itself so dramatistic a conception that we might call it the dramatistic approach to dramatism: an introduction to dramatism that is deduced from dramatism, and hence gains plausi- bility in proportion as dramatism itself is more fully developed. For the present it is enough to observe that the issue arises as soon as one considers the relation between representation and reduction in the choice and development of a motivational calculus. A given calculus must be supple and complex enough to be representative of the subject- matter it is designed to calculate. It must have scope. Yet it must also possess simplicity, in that it is broadly a reduction of the subject- matter. And by selecting drama as our representative, or informative anecdote, we meet these requirements. For the vocabulary developed in conformity with this form can possess a systematically interrelated structure, while at the same time allowing for the discussion of human affairs and the placement of cultural expressions in such typically human terms as personality and action (two terms that might be merged in the one term, "role").
The informative anecdote, we could say, contains in nuce the termi- nological structure that is evolved in conformity with it. Such a termi- nology is a "conclusion" that follows from the selection of a given anecdote. Thus the anecdote is in a sense a summation, containing implicitly what the system that is developed from it contains explicitly.
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Once we have set seriously to work developing a systematic terminology out of our anecdote, another kind of summation looms up. We might call it the "paradigm" or "prototype."
In selecting drama as our anecdote, for instance, we discover that we have made a selection in the realm of action, as against scientific reduc- tion to sheer motion. And we thereupon begin to ask ourselves: What would be "the ultimate act," or "the most complete act"? That is, what would be the "pure" act, an act so thoroughly an act that it could be considered the form or prototype of all acts ? For if we could have a conception of a consummate act, any less thorough acts could be seen as departures from it, as but partial exemplifications of it. But what- ever qualities it possessed clearly, by reason of its nature as an absolute summation, we could then discern dimly in all lesser acts.
What then would be the "pure act" or "pure drama" that one might use as the paradigm of action in general ? Such a paradigm or proto- type of action, the concept of an ultimate or consummate act, is found in the theologians' concern with the Act of Creation. It "sums up" action quite as the theory of evolution sums up motion, but with one notable difference: whereas one must believe in evolution literally, one can discuss the Act of Creation "substantially," or "in principle."
We shall, then, examine the resources and embarrassments involved in The Creation. And if this seems like a round-about approach to the subject of our chapter, let one ask himself if he could possibly get a more advantageous position from which to observe the aspects of scope and reduction than by beginning with a subject of such compre- hensive scope and reducing it.
Before going further, however, we should note that still another kind of reduction (different from both informative anecdote and para- digmatic summation) arises in the dramatist perspective. This is con- tained in our formula: the basic unit of action in the human body in purposive motion. We have here a kind of "lowest common denomi- nator" of action, a minimal requirement that should appear in every act, however many more and greater are the attributes of a complex act. This is the nearest approach which dramatism affords to the "building block" kind of reduction in materialistic philosophies.
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The Way of Creation
In The Thought and Character of William fames, by Ralph Perry (Vol. II, p. 711) among the letters written by William James to his father there is one in which William is replying to some of his father's theological and ontological speculations. He raises an objection to something his father had written. This objection, he says, "refers to the whole conception of creation, from which you would exclude all arbitrariness or magic." And he continues:
Now I don't see what the word "creation" can mean if this be totally excluded, or what there is to justify its discrimination from panthe- ism. Creation, emanation, have at all times been opposed to pan- theism, immanence; and it is evident from the scorn with which you always mention pantheism that you, too, place a broad gulf between them. The essence of the pantheistic conception, if I understand it, consists in there being a necessary relation between Creator and crea- ture, so that both are the same fact viewed from opposite sides, and their duality as Creator and creature becomes merged in a higher unity as Being. Consequently a conception really opposed to pan- theism must necessarily refuse to admit any such ratio as this, — any such external ratio, — so to speak, between them; must deny that each term exists only by virtue of the equation to which it belongs; the Creator must be the all, and the act by which the creature is set over against him has its motive within the creative circumference. The act must therefore necessarily contain an arbitrary and magical ele- ment— that is, if I attach the right meaning to those words — undeter- mined by anything external to the agent. Of course it is impossible to attempt to imagine the way of creation, but wherever from an absolute first a second appears, there it must be; — and it must be magical, for if in the second there be anything coequal or coeval with the first, it becomes pantheism.8
3 In the immediately following pages we shall have to mull over this passage at considerable length, perhaps even to an extent that will strike the reader as quibbling. These speculations are necessary to the ultimate rounding-out of our position; but they are not necessary to the characterizing and application of the dramatist perspective in general. After the twists and turns which begin at this point, our main line of speculation emerges again on page 74. The reader may have this thought as solace, if these intervening pages greatly worry him. Or he may even skip to page 74.
The pages deal with the halfway stage between doctrines of "the Creation" and doctrines of "Evolution," a stage that is generally called "pantheism," and that marks the area of strategic overlap between terminologies of action and terminolo- gies of motion.
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We should not be disturbed if we find this paragraph difficult to follow. After all, the philosopher is here discussing something which he was in no position to report on. Hence, if we attempt to under- stand his words as information, narration, exposition, we must neces- sarily find them incomprehensible. For there is nothing here to be understood in the sense in which one might try to understand a report about some event in history. James's discussion of the Creation is not "archaeological." He is not offering a "historical reconstruction." As he himself observes, "It is impossible to attempt to imagine the way of creation," or as some contemporary advocates of physicalist vocabu- laries might put it: It is impossible to explain the meaning of "the act of Creation" in terms of concrete operations.
Dramatistically considered, there is a tremendous difference between "the Creation" and "the process of Evolution" as motivational sum- mations. One sums up in terms of action, the other in terms of motion. A statement about Evolutionary motion is "true" only if it names events that literally take place. But "the Creation" is "true," as a prototype of action, if it has the form of the most complete act. We can come nearest to its kind of "truth," in terms of science, when we think of a composite photograph, which is got by superimposing the portraits of mariy individuals upon one another. In being a likeness of their "average," it is not literally a likeness of any. The analogy is not quite satisfactory, however, since a concept of "the Creation," as the prototype of action designates not the "average" act, but the logical con- clusion of the concept of action (an opponent might rather call it the reductio ad absurdum of the concept of action).
Statements about both "Evolution" and "the Creation" are alike in this: despite their reference to matters of sequence, to "befores" and "afters," they are ontological statements, statements about being, about what is. That is, the laws of Evolution are such-and-such; and the structure of the Creation is such-and-such. For even a fundamental- ist who would treat the Creation as an act that was would have to agree that the principles involved in the act are.
We here stand at a moment of great indeterminacy, the watershed moment that slopes down to "being" on one side and "becoming" on the other. It is the ambiguity etymologically present in the Latin, natura (and its Greek counterpart, physis). For though we came to speak of a thing's "nature" as its essence, the word originally had a
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genetic or developmental meaning, a reference to growth and birth.
True, some terminologists would even hold that the laws of becoming themselves become. And this is true in the sense that a new species exemplifies new laws of motion: the particles of matter contained in it behave differently than the particles of matter contained in other species; hence, when this species arises, certain peculiar laws of motion are born, and these laws of motion cease to be when this species becomes extinct. But any such statement about the becoming of becoming ("emergent evolution") can be rephrased as a statement about the "laws" of the becoming of becoming, or as "generalizations" about the becoming of becoming — and this brings us back to the ontological level.
And if even a concept so super-genetic as the evolution of evolution forces us back to an ontological level as soon as we make generalizations about this process of processes, all the more clearly are we found shut- tling between being and becoming in the concept of Creation. The shift is between temporal priority and logical priority. The Creation, considered as a prototype of action in our paradigmatic, or summational sense, involves "principles," and these are not historical or temporal "firsts," but logical firsts. They are the kind of "beginnings" that are always. James speaks of an "absolute first," which admonishes us that we here touch upon the paradox of purity. An "absolute" first is the kind of first that both is and is not followed by a second.
In sum: we are discussing the Creation not as a temporal event, but as the logical prototype of an act. Indeed, even if one believed it literally, one would hardly be justified in treating it as a temporal event, since it was itself the positing of time ; it was the act that set up the conditions of temporal development; hence a terminology that reduced it to terms of time would lack sufficient scope. Thus, even a literal believer would have to treat it in terms that placed it, rather, at an intersection of time and the timeless — a point at which we place ourselves when we discuss it in terms of those non-temporal firsts called "principles."
Act as Locus of Motives
If one would deny pantheism, James had said, "the Creator must be the all, and the act by which the creature is set over against him has its motive within the creative circumference." And the act must
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"necessarily contain an arbitrary and magical element . . . undeter- mined by anything external to the agent." Further, we should note that arbitrariness and magic are equated with novelty, as when James says: "It is impossible to attempt to imagine the way of creation, but wherever from an absolute first a second appears, there it must be; — and it must be magical, for if in the second there be anything coequal or coeval with the first, it becomes pantheism." Indeed, the Creation as an act of God was a total novelty; and it was magic because, just as the magician would make it seem that he pulls a live rabbit out of an empty hat, so God made everything out of nothing.
The magician would have us think that he suspends the laws of mo- tion. And God's act likewise "suspended" the laws of motion, though in an absolute sense: that is, upon his originating act depend all the laws of motion which men necessarily accept as the conditions of action. Indeed, the analogy suggests the thought that "true" magic prevails outside the strict realm of motion, in the area of more-than-motion that we call action. The demand for a kind of human magic that vio- lates natural law is then revealed as a superstitious, quasi-scientific ideal. But magic, in the sense of novelty, is seen to exist normally, in some degree, as an ingredient of every human act; for each act contains some measure of motivation that cannot be explained simply in terms of the past, being to an extent, however tiny, a new thing.
This consideration could be approached in another way. We have said that a fully-rounded vocabulary of motives will locate motives under all five aspects of our pentad. Yet there is a paradoxical tend- ency to slight the term, act, in the very featuring of it. For we may even favor it enough to select it as our point of departure (point of de- parture in the sense of an ancestral term from which all the others are derived, sharing its quality "substantially") ; but by the same token it may come to be a point of departure in the sense of the term that is "left behind." We see this temptation in the search for an act's mo- tives, which one spontaneously thinks of locating under the heading of scene, agent, agency, or purpose, but hardly under the heading of act.
But if the scene of action is there already, and if the nature of the agent is also given, along with the instrumental conditions and the pur- poses of action, then there could be novelty only if there were likewise a locus of motivation within the act itself, a newness not already pres- ent in elements classifiable under any of the other four headings. And
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in this sense an act has an element of "arbitrariness" or "magic" inso- far as it contains a motivational element requiring location under the heading of the term act itself.
At this point, we grant, our thinking departs somewhat from that in the James citation. Or rather, there is a strategic ambiguity in the James passage, as when he writes that, if one would avoid pantheism, "the creator must be the all, and the act by which the creature is set over against him has its motive within the creative circumference." If we think of "the Creator" as an "agent," we might contend that the motives of the act are here situated outside the locus of the term act and within the locus of the term agent. Yet the statement that God's creative act "has its motive within the creative circumference" comes quite close to satisfying our notion that "magic" or "novelty" arises by reason of the motive assignable under the heading of act itself. And the requirement is still more fully met if we recall the scholastic defini- tion of God as "pure act."
But what precisely is our point? What are we trying to prove by an example that, we freely grant, cannot be adduced as the literal founda- tion of an argument? We are reasoning as follows: We are saying that, to study the nature of the term, act, one must select a prototype, or paradigm of action. This prototype we find in the conception of a perfect or total act, such as the act of "the Creation." Examining this concept, we find that it is "magic," for it produces something out of nothing. This enables us to equate magic with novelty — and leads us to look for a modicum of magic in every act to the extent that the act possesses a modicum of novelty. This consideration also admonishes us, however, to make a distinction between "true" and "false" magic. "False" magic is a quasi-scientific ideal that would suspend the laws of motion, as in the attempt to coerce natural forces by purely ritualistic means. "True" magic is an aspect not of motion but of action. And if the motives properly assignable to scene, agent, agency, and purpose are already given, there could be novelty only if we could also assign motives under the heading of act itself. That is, there would be some- thing new intrinsic to the act; and this novelty would be the modicum of motivation assignable under the heading of act rather than under the heading of the other four terms, singly or in combination. There must, in brief, be some respect in which the act is a causa sui, a motive of itself.
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Up to this point, we have simply followed the implications of the prototype. We have found out something about the term, act, as "re- vealed" by the contemplation of "the Creation." Next we must look about, in the world of experience, to see whether our conclusions make sense. Proverbs in particular might help us ; for surely they are in the fladands, safely distant from the magic mountain (though often we may best understand them if we think of them not just as isolated observations, but as fragments of a vast and complex dialectic structure which the proverbialist discerns not sustainedly and systematically, but in glimpses and inklings).
Proverbs such as Vappetit vient en mangeant or Uebung macht den Meister seem well suited to our purposes. Skill and habit are derived from the very acts in which they are practiced. Or let us consider some protracted act, such as the writing of a long book, where the act of the writing brings up problems and discoveries intrinsic to the act, leading to developments that derive not from the scene, or agent, or agency, or extrinsic purposes, but purely from the foregoing aspects of the act itself. That is, there is nothing present in the agent or his situation that could have led to the final stages of this act, except the prior stages of the act itself, and the logic which gradually takes form as the result of the enactment. Or, recalling our poiemata, pathemata, mathemata alignment, we can generalize this consideration by noting that, when an act is performed, it entails new sufferances, which in turn entail new insights. Our act itself alters the conditions of action, as "one thing leads to another" in an order that would not have oc- curred had we not acted.
The mediaeval schoolmen would probably object that we are here confusing "creation" with "generation." In their terminology, only God can create, while his creatures can but generate, as with the par- ents' generation of offspring or the artist's generation of his art work. However, it is not the purpose of our Dramatism to abide strictly by any one system of philosophic terms that happens to exemplify the dramatist pattern. Rather, it is our purpose to show that the explicit and systematic use of the dramatist pentad is best designed to bring out the strategic moments of motivational theory. Accordingly, at this point, we are more concerned to illustrate the Grammatical scruples than to select one particular casuistry as our choice among them. Phi- losophies again and again have got their point of departure precisely
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by treating as a distinction in kind what other philosophies have treated as a distinction in degree, or v.v. And we here come upon considera- tions that permit us to discern a novel ingredient in action, while this ingredient in turn can be equated with the creative.
The Aristotelian God, considered as universal motive, acted upon nature neither as creator nor as generator, but as a motionless induce- ment to development. The world and its genera and species were con- sidered as eternal, hence not as derivations from God as "pure act." God acted upon nature solely as a goal, somewhat as a desired food might, by lying west of a rational and hungry man, induce him to move towards the west; or as the principles of a perfect art might lead the knowing artist to shape his work as nearly as possible in accordance with them.
The Christian merging of Aristotle's self-enwrapt eromenon with the Creator Jehovah (a tribal, tutelary deity made universal), necessarily calls for a drawing of the lines at a different place. In this scheme, stressing plenitude and fertility, God creates and creatures generate. But the Christian terminology also took over the concept of hexis (Latin, habitus; trained disposition), the term Aristotle uses in his Ethics to name that aptitude in virtues which is acquired by the prac- tice of virtues. And we believe that we are but coming upon the function of this term by a different route when we recognize that the resources of the pentad invite us to locate some motives of action under the heading of Act itself.
There would thus be a modicum of novelty in the act, to the extent that the act could be said to have an ingredient not derivable from any other of the terms. And insofar as the act was derivable from the other terms, it would not possess novelty, but would be a mere unfold- ing of the implicit into the explicit.
The modicum of novelty in the act would seem to be the element that justified Coleridge's view of poetry as a "dim analogue of Crea- tion." However, that formula was obscured by the idealist stress upon agent, as locus of the "shaping spirit of Imagination" by which we give forth that which we receive, since "in our life alone does Nature live." And to glimpse more clearly the independent claims of the term, act, we might better go back to Spinoza who, mediating between the mediaeval and the modern, defined the universal Substance as the "cause of itself." God would thus be perfect action, in that there
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would be no motivating principle beyond his own nature (a considera- tion, incidentally, that enables us to see why Spinoza would equate God and Nature).
All told, contemplating the Grammar in its simplest aspect, we are admonished to expect occasions when, in seeking for the motives of an act, the thinker will in effect locate the motive under the head of Act it- self. However confusing the subject may become in the alembications of theology and metaphysics, it is at least obvious enough on this first level : That among the resources of the pentad is the invitation to locate the motives of an act under the head of Act (as with Faust's formula, Im Anfang war die That) .
Do we not see a scruple of this sort behind the Augustinian claim that God's act of Creation must be wholly without motives ? For any motivation, however slight, would be to that extent a constraint upon God's will — hence his act would not be wholly free.
But though there are ultimate moments when the substantial, all- inclusive act, as it were, is derived out of itself, as regards the pentadic resources generally we must consider rather the transformations whereby we may deal with this motivational locus in terms of the other loci. In particular, one might ask, what has become of our scene-act ratio? And that question will be the subject of our next section.
The "Grounds" of Creation
The Creation, as the ground or scene of human acts, provides the basic conditions utilized by human agents in the motions by which they act. In this sense, it represents an ultimate source of motives, though human agents by their acts may pile up lesser novelties, partial crea- tions which they interpose between themselves and the ultimate ground, and which become a "second nature" with them, a scene hav- ing motivational properties in its own right.
Dramatistically, however, there is an embarrassment as regards God's constitutive act. James touches upon it somewhat when saying that it is impossible to image the "way" of creation. And we see it more clearly when we reflect that a "way" is literally a path across some ground. The symmetry of the pentad requires that even a "first act" must have been enacted in some kind of "scene" (could we call it a "pre-first" scene?). If "the Creation" marks the establishment of time
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and motion, as conditions that followed from the act, we are prompted to look contextually for a counterpart in timelessness and rest, or f amil- ially for some magnitude great enough to produce the universe as its lineal descendant. The concept of God as an agent doesn't quite sat- isfy the dramatistic necessities, for an agent, like an act, must be placed in some scene.
It has been said of Kant that realistic assumptions were necessary as a way into his system, but once you entered it, you had to abandon them if you would stay there. For, as Windelband puts it, "the conception of the sensibility introduced at the beginning involves the causal rela- tion of being affected by things-in-themselves," yet causality is a cate- gory, and according to the doctrine of the Analytic, "categories must not be applied to things-in-themselves." We see here the evidences of a dialectic whereby the point arrived at transcended the point of de- parture. But one may well expect to find such transformations in a work which was, after all, designed to duplicate the total act of crea- tion itself (except that there would be no operationalist account of the "way," which is an important exception).
Perhaps we should always look for "ladders" of this sort when we are on the subject of "everything," ladders that are used only to attain another level of discourse and that would be an encumbrance if one continued to carry them about with him after he had attained this level. In any case, we might detect the vestiges of such a ladder in the notion of a monotheistic God, which developed out of polytheistic thinking. Polytheistic gods usually did not make "everything." Rather, there was usually some primeval scene, more or less chaotic, that provided the materials out of which the god shaped the motivating conditions of human life. Or rather, he shaped some of the motivating conditions, others being supplied by other powers and natures more or less at variance with the purposes of the tutelary deity.
But when one god has risen to such prominence among the gods that he becomes "the" god (taking over, among other things, the role of destiny that serves, in polytheistic schemes, as a kind of over-all motiva- tion summing up, or mediating among, the disparate motives of the various gods), theologians attempt to start their speculations on this final level, abandoning the dialectical ladder by which this level was attained. And here is where the dramatistic embarrassments arise. For whereas the divine agents of polytheism had a scene to contain them
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and their acts, what are we to do with a god who is himself the ground of everything ? When he acts, in what scene does he act ?
We may treat the matter summarily by saying simply that he is super-scene, super-act, and super-agent all in one. But in doing so, we thereby fail to appreciate the full pressure of the dramatistic logic. For Christian theology did speculate about the "grounds" of God's act, as in the scholastics' argument whether God willed the good because it is good or the good is good because God willed it. The first of these is obviously the more symmetrical from the dramatistic point of view, since it does in effect furnish a scene for the act of the Creation. It was the position upheld by Aquinas, the doctrine of the perseitas boni (the "by-itselfness of the good") to which Scotists are said to have objected because it imposed limits upon the freedom of the divine will. We can discern the "scenic" nature of the good, as the principle of God's crea- tion, in Brehier's statement that Duns Scotus "would avoid the need to admit that there existed outside of God, eternal like him and imposing itself upon him, a sort of jatum by which his intelligence and will were guided." {La Philosophic de Moyen Age, p. 387.)
The doctrine that "the good is good because God willed it" points away from dramatistic symmetry and towards the modern centuries of subjectivism and idealism, with their great stress upon the "ego," the "will," and finally the "libido." Among the scholastic upholders of this position, Occam went so far in behalf of God's freedom as to main- tain that God might have willed a quite different set of moral laws, even proclaiming as bad what he did in fact proclaim as good, and v. v. In effect such doctrines ground the act of the Creation in the term agent rather than the term scene, for it is derived directly from the will of God, and will is a property of agents.
In contrast, the scenic emphasis in the Thomist doctrine is further revealed by the fact that the Thomists placed the "true" as of higher rank than the "good." This was managed by proclaiming the ration- ality of the good. (That is, as God willed the good because it is good, the good in turn is good because it is rational.) And we can discern the scenic factor behind such a concept of rationality if we consider such equations as these: what is, is true; what is true, is rational; what is, is rational. In keeping with such equations the principles of goodness, by having an eternal existence in their own right, would be scenic; and a statement about them, in being a statement about what is, would be a
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statement about the rational and the true, hence a statement about the scenic.
Sociologically, we may note that the pattern of the controversy corresponded to a poignant political issue of those times. The proposi- tion that God willed the good because it was good represented the mediaeval theory of sovereignty, according to which even the sovereign obeyed the laws. And the proposition that the good is good because God willed it represented the newer political theories that were arising with the trend towards absolute central authority. This centralizing trend was marked by great legalistic innovation, in contrast with the former appeal to custom as the arbiter of law. The new methods of production and distribution favored and required this stress upon legalistic innovation, such as could be quickly standardized over com- paratively wide areas only if it emanated from a central authority. And in such a state of affairs, since the monarch decreed the laws, the lawful was lawful because the monarch so willed it.
Pantheism and Ontology
We have now discussed three important aspects of "the Creation." We have considered the ambiguity of being and becoming, the equating of "magic" with novelty, and the dramatistic pressure for the formu- lation of a scene in which Creation, as an act, would be situated. We would now consider the relation between the two alternatives which James mentions: "magic" and "pantheism."
Pantheism is defined in Webster as "the doctrine that the universe, taken or conceived of as a whole, is God ; the doctrine that there is no God but the combined forces and laws which are manifested in the existing universe." Its most succinct description is to be found in Spinoza's expression, "God or Nature" (Deus sive ~Natura). In doc- trines of "creation, emanation," nature possesses attributes derived from its divine origin, but it is less than God. God does not need nature. But in doctrines of pantheism, or immanence, "God" and "Nature" are interchangeable terms. James thus situates the essence of the pantheistic conception "in there being a necessary relation between Creator and creature." In pantheism, he says, both the Creator and the created "are the same fact viewed from opposite sides." And "their
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duality as Creator and creature becomes merged in a higher unity as Being/'
This last word, "Being," gives us our cue. For ontology, according to the dictionary, investigates "the principles and causes of being" (the Greek onta means the "things that are'*). We may thus readily discern a "pantheistic temptation" in the very nature of ontology as a subject. For if one would treat of "everything" in terms of "being," "being" would then be the over-all concept, the summarizing "god-term," since the word that summed up "everything" would certainly be the god- term, the universal tide or all-inclusive epithet to which any less gen- eralized terms would be related as parts to whole. This is how we should interpret James's remark that in pantheism the duality of Crea- tor and creature "becomes merged in a higher unity as Being."
Or we could state it thus: James said of the Creation, "Whenever from an absolute first a second appears, there it must be." But to treat of a relation between a first and a second in terms of being is to make one step collapse into the other, so that one has instead a simul- taneity, in adopting a point of view whereby the two steps can be treated as "coeval." "The Creation" is not exacdy an historical process, since it is not just in time and motion, but must be outside to the extent that it is the establishment or inauguration of time and motion. But even if one were dealing with a characteristically historical process, one could view it ontologically, or in terms of being, only insofar as one viewed it in terms of permanent principles that underlie the process of becoming.
"Principles" are "firsts," but they are "absolute" firsts, not the kind of firsts that require a temporal succession as we go from a first to a second. They just are. They have logical, rather than temporal, priority. Hence, to treat of things in terms of their relation to underlying principles is to translate historical sequence into terms of logical se- quence (whereby things can "precede" and "follow" one another in a kind of succession that requires no time coordinate). This is why Spinoza's ontology proposes to treat of things sub specie aeternitatis, which is to say, in terms of timelessness, or being. But if a first and a second are related "logically," they are by the same token related "necessarily." For a logical relationship, or principle of being, always was, is, and will be; and what always was, is, and will be, must be. Whereby ontology merges the "is," the "must be," and the rational
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No aim could be more rational than the desire to find a philosophic language whose order would correspond with the order of things as they are and must be — somewhat as the sequence of letters in a phonetic alphabet corresponds with the sequence of verbal sounds of which these letters are the signs, for though the letters are transposed continu- ally to signalize different sequences of sound, the relation between sound and sign is permanent, involving fixed principles; and when the notation is adequate, the relation between the sign and the signified is "rational."
But if a first and a second are "necessarily" related, James reminds us, we cannot have arbitrariness and magic. Creator (the first) and creature (the second) thus become "coequal and coeval," in being ontologically related (that is, logically related in terms of being). The second is then related to the first somewhat as conclusions are implicit in premises and premises are implicit in conclusions.
Pantheism would result whenever we went about it thoroughly to translate the "historical" account of the Creation in the book of Genesis (or Becoming) into a "flat," or "simultaneous" equivalent (conceived in terms of ontology, or Being). "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" would thus be ontologically translated: "God created the heaven and the earth substantially, in principle."
Grammatical Steps to Naturalism
There are two primary generalizations that characterize the quality of motives: freedom and necessity. And whenever they appear, we may know that we are in the presence of "God-terms," or names for the ultimates of motivation. Doctrines wherein Creator and Creation are not ontologically collapsed into a unity give us a kind of double genesis for motives. Consideration in terms of the Creation leads to "necessity" when, in accordance with the logic of geometric substance, all the parts of nature are treated as necessarily related to one another in their nec- essary relationship to the whole. For "necessity" names the extrinsic conditions that determine a motion and must be taken into account when one is planning an action. And consideration in terms of the Creator leads to "freedom" when, in accordance with the logic of tribal substance, men "substantially" derive freedom (or self-move- ment) from God as its ancestral source. This double genesis allows
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for free will and determinism simultaneously, rather than requiring a flat choice between them. Also, owing to the ambiguity of substance, it permits men to be "substantially" free even when, as regards their natural conditions, they are actually enslaved or imprisoned.
An ancestral source of freedom is in one sense extrinsic to the individ- ual, inasmuch as progenitor is distinct from offspring. Yet origin is intrinsic to the individual in the sense that this genetic or generic fact about his nature is also possessed within him (just as members of a given biological species each possess within them, genitively, the sub- stance or motives proper to the species generally) . And as regards the geometric logic, when a thing's intrinsic nature is defined as part of a universal whole, the reference here is to a context, hence extrinsic. Formally, the issue figures in metaphysical speculations as to whether relations are internal or external, an ambiguity which, from the drama- tist point of view, is implicit in the fact that one can shift between familial and geometric definition, stressing either person (agent) or ground (scene) as a locus of motives.
In pantheistic schemes, the principles of personal (intrinsic) freedom and scenic (extrinsic) determination must collapse into a unity that corresponds to the ontological merging of Creator and Creation. That is, "freedom" and "necessity" become identical, with each definable in terms of the other. Spinoza's pantheism meets this requirement in de- fining substance as causa sui, whereby the concepts of freedom and ne- cessity are merged grammatically in the reflexive. The reflexive form satisfies the requirement, putting active and passive together, since one can be simultaneously free and constrained if the constraints are those of one's own choosing, an identification of scene and philosopher-agent that is possible inasmuch as both nature and the philosophy are rational.
Spinoza likewise adopts the expressions, natura naturans and natura naturata (or "naturing nature" and "natured nature"). Grammati- cally, we could thus treat the ground term, "nature," (which equals "God") as reflexive in form (though one usually reserves the designa- tion for verbs) having active and passive (the ~ans and the -atd) as its dual attributes. And we note a corresponding grammar in his Carte- sian expressions, res cogitans and res extensa, where "thing" (res) would be the reflexive ground, with "thinking" (cogitans) as its active voice and "extended" (extensa) as its passive voice. So we could speak of nature, or thing, naturing, or thinking — and of nature, or thing,
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natured or extended. One can discern here the beginnings of the alignment that was to prevail in modern idealism, as the active parti- ciple becomes the "subjective" and the passive participle the "objective" (a grammar that is precisely reversed in materialism, where nature in extension is treated as the motivational source, while subjective motives are treated as either illusions or reflections).
Or, consider the passages in Aristotle's Physics where he is seeking to establish the number of principles required to account for the changes that take place in the natural world. Here we find a paradigm of grammar in his concern with the reduction of such principles to a pair of opposites, with a possible third term that would be their common ground. Grammatically, these principles are reducible to active, pas- sive, and middle, the concept of self-movement containing active and passive ambiguously in one. Nature, Aristotle says at one point, is like a doctor doctoring himself (a figure that could, if we wanted to translate the universal into medical terms, then give us: doctor doctoring and doctor doctored).
The pantheistic moment in philosophy, by producing a merger of personal and impersonal principles (a merger of personal agent and impersonal scene), can serve well as a bridge leading from theology to naturalism. For theologies are "dramatistic" in their stress upon the personalistic, whereas the terminologies typical of natural science would eliminate the concept of the person, in reducing it to purely scenic terms. Hence, a pantheistic merging of person and scene can add up to the dissolution of the personal into the impersonal along naturalistic lines.
We might sum up the matter thus: Theologically, nature has attri- butes derived from its origin in an act of God (the Creation), but God is more than nature. Dramatistically , motion involves action, but ac- tion is more than motion. Hence, theologically and/or dramatistically, nature (in the sense of God's Creation) is to nature (in the sense of naturalistic science) as action is to motion, since God's Creation is an enactment, whereas nature as conceived in terms of naturalistic science is a sheer concatenation of motions. But inasmuch as the theological ratio between God (Creator) and Nature (Creation) is the same as the dramatistic ratio between action and motion, the pantheistic equat- ing of God and Nature would be paralleled by the equating of action and motion. And since action is a personal principle while motion is
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an impersonal principle, the pantheistic equation leads into the natural- istic position which reduces personalistic concepts to depersonalized terms.
If these steps seem to have been too quickly arrived at, let us try ap- proaching the matter from another angle. Indeed, we need not even hang on, but can almost begin anew.
Circumference
This time all we need for our text is a single word from James, his word "circumference," as when he says that, if one would avoid panthe- ism, "the Creator must be the all, and the act by which the creature is set over against him has its motive within the creative circumference." The word reminds us that, when "defining by location," one may place the object of one's definition in contexts of varying scope. And our remarks on the scene-act ratio, for instance, suggest that the choice of circumference for the scene in terms of which a given act is to be located will have a corresponding effect upon the interpretation of the act it- self. Similarly, the logic of the scene-agent ratio will figure in our definition of the individual, insofar as principles of dramatic consistency are maintained.
That is, if we locate the human agent and his act in terms of a scene whose orbit is broad enough to include the concept of a supernatural Creator, we get a different kind of definition than if our location were confined to a narrower circumference that eliminated reference to the "supernatural" as a motivating element in the scene, and did not permit the scenic scope to extend beyond the outer limits of "nature." Or we may reduce the circumference still further, as when we define motiva- tions in terms of the temporally or geographically local scenes that be- come a "second nature" to us, scenes that may themselves vary in circumference from broad historical situations to the minutely par- ticularized situations of back-stairs gossip.
Now, it seems undeniable, by the very nature of the case, that in def- inition, or systematic placement, one must see things "in terms of . . ." And implicit in the terms chosen, there are "circumferences" of vary- ing scope. Motivationally, they involve such relationships as are re- vealed in the analysis of the scene-act and scene-agent ratios whereby the quality of the context in which a subject is placed will affect the quality
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of the subject placed in that context. And since one must implicitly or explicitly select a circumference (except insofar as he can seem to avoid the predicament by adopting a slung-together terminology that contains a muddle of different circumferences) we are properly admon- ished to be on the look-out for these terministic relationships between the circumference and the "circumfered," even on occasions that may on the surface seem to be of a purely empirical nature.
Thus, when the behaviorist experiments with animals to discover, under "controlled laboratory conditions," the springs of conduct that operate also in human beings, we consider his experiment fully as im- portant as he does, though for a totally different reason. For we take it to indicate, with the utmost clarity possible, the terministic relation- ship between the circumscription and the circumscribed. For no mat- ter how much a matter of purely empirical observation it may seem to be, it actually is a very distinct choice of circumference for the placement of human motives. By the very nature of the case it chooses to con- sider human motives in terms of an animal circumference, an acutely terministic matter, not a matter of merely "empirical observation." And, ironically enough, it is most likely to reveal something about hu- man motives distinctively, only insofar as the conditions established by the laboratory place the animals in a "human" circumference. But though nothing is more distinctly "human" than a scientific laboratory in one sense (for no other species but man is known ever to have made and used one), it is the kind of "humanity" we get in mechanization (a "part of" man that became so poignantly, in industrial routines, "apart from" man). And by the logic of the scene-act ratio, the study of conduct in terms of so mechanistic a scene led to a correspondingly mechanistic interpretation of the act.
This would probably be a good place to repeat that we do not deny the importance of seeking always for "controlled" cases, as anecdotes in conformity with which to form one's terminology for the analysis of human motives. But we maintain that one can avoid the bias of his instruments (that is, the bias of terms too simplist) only if he chooses a representative example of an act. Animal experiments have taught us however (we should at least grant them this) that school-teachers like to send animals to school, that physical sadists who have mastered scientific method like to torture animals methodically, and that those whose ingenuity is more psychiatrically inclined like to go on giving the
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poor little devils mental breakdowns, ostensibly to prove over and over again that it can be done (though this has already been amply proved to everybody's satisfaction but that of the experimenters).
We cherish the behaviorist experiment precisely because it illustrates the relation between the circumference and the circumscribed in mechanistic terms; and because the sharpest instance of the way in which the altering of the scenic scope affects the interpretation of the act is to be found in the shift from teleological to mechanistic philoso- phies. Christian theology, in stressing the rational, personal, and pur- posive aspects of the Creation as the embodiment of the Creator's perva- sive will, had treated such principles as scenic. That is, they were not merely traits of human beings, but extended to the outer circumference of the ultimate ground. Hence, by the logic of the scene-act ratio, they were taken as basic to the constitution of human motives, and could be "deduced" from the nature of God as an objective, extrinsic principle defining the nature of human acts. But when the circumference was narrowed to naturalistic limits, the "Creator" was left out of account, and only the "Creation" remained (remained not as an "act," however, but as a concatenation of motions).
The narrowing of the circumference thus encouraged a shift from the stress upon "final cause" to the stress upon "efficient cause," the kind of cause that would reside not in a "prime mover," but in a "last mover" (as the lever with which a man moves a stone could be called the "last mover" of the stone). We are here in the orbit of the vis a tergo kind of cause, prominent in all theories of motivation that stress "instincts," "drives," or other sheerly compulsive properties. Such terminologies attain a particularly thorough form in behaviorism, with its stress upon reflex action and the conditioned reflex, and its treatment of motivation in terms of Stimulus and Response.
Ironically, the dramatistic logic (that is, the logic of the scene-act and scene-agent ratios) here invokes a non-dramatic mode of analysis. For the naturalistic terminology, in eliminating the principles of personality and action from the ultimate ground of motives, leads consistently to ideals of definition that dissolve the personality and its actions into de- personalization and motion respectively. In naturalism there is no Creator; and nature is not an act, but simply "the given."
However, we should add several important modifications to our no- tions of the movement towards the dissolution of drama. In the first
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place, we should note that in proportion as Naturalism dropped the principles of personality and action from the scene, Humanism compen-