Humanistic Critique of Education. Группа авторов
must necessarily adopt some point of view in which all could share. And a formalistic view is such a one, at least in principle. We say “in principle,” since there are still valid points of disagreement as to whether a “dramatistic” species of formalism should be the kind to opt for. And Professor Benne, in this “dramatism,” would prefer a “tragic” to a “comic” one, for reasons he has explained in his article on “Education for Tragedy.” We only contend that a generally linguistic approach to the problem would be the proper counterpart of the purely pragmatic arrangements for having addresses at the United Nations translated into several languages and having choices among these translations made quickly available to the various delegates, with the help of machines.
The same considerations apply, of course, to purely “secular religions,” notably such political philosophies as capitalism or dialectical materialism. These, too, are terminologies of action, hence essentially “dramatistic” in structure—and whatever their vast disagreements, they can at least meet in terms of their nature as terminologies of action. Admittedly, such an approach is not enough to resolve specific issues that lead to blunt, head-on collisions. One cannot ask an educational method to do the impossible. But one can ask that it provide a positive equivalent for the area of commonalty which even opponents must share, if they are to join the same battle.
Where the various “persuasions” are brought together, what topic surely transcends them all but the question of persuasion itself? If one particular persuasion among the lot could triumph, then we’ll concede, however grudgingly, that such a result might be all to the good, though at the very least we’d want to suggest: The differences among the various areas of the world would soon give rise to new local emphases that, to many, would look like outright heresy, whereat the squabbles would begin anew. For such are the temptations to which the symbol-using species is prone, by reason of the nature of symbols. And, for these reasons, at least so far as the linguistic approach to educational problems is concerned, we believe that, faute de mieux, the nearest man will ever get to a state of practical peace among the many persuasions is by theoretical study of the forms in all persuasion.
It is regrettable that the author of the greatest rhetoric wrote his tract before the data on the great world persuasions were available to him. So, while Aristotle’s formal treatment of the subject remains, to this day, the greatest of its kind, regrettably he had but comparatively trivial examples of verbal wrestling to analyze (trivial, that is, as compared with the symbolic ways of the great world religions, both worldly and other-worldly, that took form since his time, or since the awarenesses available to him). But the principles remain intact; and they are in their very essence dramatistic; and a search for the forms of persuasion, as exemplified in later materials, might very profitably abide by the suggestions which his treatise provides. Nor should we forget that, elsewhere in his own work, he supplies the further forms needed for a most ingenious locating of the hierarchal motive, the motive grandly essential to the modes of submission (“Islam”) that characterize the world religions.
All such persuasive powers, the heights of symbol-using genius as embodied in definition, expression, and exhortation, we would with fearsomeness appreciate. Such is the dramatistic variant of the linguistic approach to education, an approach now often called “semanticist.”
Epilogue
But suppose that all did turn out as we would have it, so far as educational programs went? What next? What might be the results?
First: In seeing beyond the limitations of language, many might attain a piety now available to but a few. Many might come closer to a true fear of God, through getting more glimpses into the ultimate reality that stretches somehow beyond the fogs of language and its sloganizing.
Or, on the contrary: There might descend upon mankind a boredom such as never before cursed symbol-using creatures. For all men might come to so distrust the motives of secular ambition, as clamorously established by all who help make secular aims “glamorous,” that the entire pageantry of empire would seem as unreal as a stage set.
But those are the absolute alternatives: the alternatives of absolute piety (or “loyalty to the sources of our being”), and of absolute drought (be it mystic “accidie” or Baudelairean “spleen”).
But here, in parting, once again we would “settle for less,” holding out the hope of only this much: That such an approach should help some of the rawness to abate, by including a much wider range of man’s symbolic prowess under the head of the fearsomely appreciated, and thereby providing less incentives to be overprompt at feeling exalted with moral indignation.
In the educational situation, characteristically, the instructor and his class would be on good terms. They would preferably be under the sign of goodwill. And is not education ideally an effort to maintain such an attitude as thoroughly and extensively as possible without loss of one’s own integrity? If, where we cannot “love” our neighbor’s ways, we might at least “fearsomely appreciate” their form, and in methods that bring our own ways within the orbit of the “fearsomely appreciated,” would we not then be at least headed in the right direction? And is not this direction most urgent, in view of the new weapons that threaten not only our chances of living well but even our chances of living at all?
Bibliographical Note
There is a general sense in which any book could figure in a “dramatistic” bibliography, since any book is by definition an instance of “symbolic action.” More narrowly, we should include here works that are built about the featuring of some term for “action,” ranging all the way from theories of economic or commercial “transactions” to theologies that view God as “pure act.” Spinoza’s Ethics is a good example of the type, because of the symmetry with which it explicitly works out a balance of actives and passives.
All writers who have figured in the shift of emphasis from philosophy to the critique of language could be listed here, as with the traditional battles over “universals” (with nominalists and realists throwing equally important light upon the normal resources of language, and upon our language-ridden views of extralinguistic “reality”). In this regard, even the most positivistic or “scientistic” of semantical theories could properly be included in our bibliography.
And though the empiricist stress of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume would be inferior to the scholastic tradition, when judged as philosophy, in admonitions as regards a critique of language are nearly perfect for our purposes. Our main shift of emphasis would be in the direction of a greater concern with the ways in which sociopolitical motives infuse men’s views of their so-called “sensory” perceptions. Similarly, psychoanalytic and psychosomatic speculations fit well with the dramatistic emphasis, because of their great stress upon forms of symbolic action, though as with empiricism, the overly psychologistic stress usually somewhat deflects attention from the sociopolitical realm of motives.
Specifically, by “dramatism” is meant a linguistic theory expressly built about terms as “action,” “passion,” and “substance,” and designed to consider language in the light of the logic, resources, and embarrassments of such terms. It would be more likely to stress verbs than nouns as the way-in, though for this very reason it finds itself paradoxically quite friendly to Jeremy Bentham’s search for ideal definition in terms of nouns (with his “theory of fictions” designed to take account of the respects in which strongly verb-like and negatively tinged nouns would not lend themselves to his materially positive ideal). Likewise this approach finds much to its purposes in works as different as James Harris’s Hermes and the redoubtable Home Tooke’s Diversions of Purley (with its stress upon the nature of “abbreviations” in language).
In this specific sense, a systematically self-conscious statement of the dramatistic perspective is offered in A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives, by Kenneth Burke (Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1945 and 1950, respectively). The Grammar considers the logic of “substance” in general, the Rhetoric considers its place in personal and social “identifications.” Also, both books offer many examples of the way in which works by other writers can be interpreted as implicit contributions to the dramatistic perspective.
As regards the ethical dimension in language, see particularly “A Dramatistic