Humanistic Critique of Education. Группа авторов
bring out the formal considerations of the differential (language-using, or symbol-using), we slight the material considerations of the genus (animal). Or, otherwise put: We must guard lest, in our zeal for a terminology of action, we overlook the areas properly chartable in terms of motion.
Accordingly, a “dramatistic” terminology built about this definition for man will not exalt terms for “action” to the exclusion of terms for “motion.” If, by the physical realm, we mean the nonverbal (“subverbal” or “extraverbal”) realm, then the physical realm is properly treated in terms of motion. And “action” (ethics, “personality,” and the like) will be confined to the realm of symbol-using, with its appropriate principles. Thus, a “dramatistic” perspective, as so conceived, would decidedly not oblige us to treat of “things” in the terminology proper to “persons” or vice versa.
The problem is complicated by the fact that, while there can be motion without action (as with a falling material object, or the operations of some purely mechanical device), there can be no action without motion (as one cannot think or speak or carry out a decision without a corresponding set of sheerly neural and muscular goings-on). Thus, there is a sense in which every human act is merged with its sheerly physical or physiological ground. For instance, whereas the actions of a game are motivated by the logic of the rules, such acts also involve the sheer physical motions of the players and their instruments, in varying quantitative distribution about the field. (Nulla actio sine motione. A team can’t win a game unless it knows how to “throw its weight around.”)
Or consider cases where moral attitudes affect physiological functioning (as when emotional disturbances produce disorders of the bodily organs). Here the realm of action (and its “passions”!) is seen to infuse the realm of motion in ways grotesquely analogous to the powers of a “grace” that, according to the theologians, “perfects” nature.
Thus, though the realms of “action” and “motion” are discontinuous in so far as the “laws” of action are not in strict principle reducible to the “laws” of motion (quite as the rules of grammar could not properly be reduced to terms suitable for electronics), the two realms must be interwoven in so far as man’s generic animality is experienced by him in terms of his specific “symbolicity.”
Suppose, for instance, that we tried to conceive of “property” in as purely “physical” a sense as possible. We might note respects in which an organism “accumulates private property” by adapting to its particular needs certain portions of its environment. Its food, its air, its water, its sunlight, its space, its shelter, its mate—some or all of these things may be “appropriated,” in accordance with the specific nature of the organism. In this sense, assimilation could be said to involve a purely physiological kind of “private property,” however mutual may be the relationships prevailing among various organisms, or “substances,” in their “ecological balance.”
Here is the realm of “animality,” of sheer physical “necessity.” If the organism is denied the proper “motions” of assimilation or digestion needed for its survival, it dies. It must take into itself alien substances, in accordance with the nature of its substance. Some degree of such purely material appropriation, with the many material “motions” involved in these processes, is necessary to sheer animal survival. And man, as an animal, confronts the same necessities.
Think next of the many ways whereby such rudimentary needs are transcended, once we move into the realm of “symbolic action.” Here we come upon the vast structure of “rights” and “obligations” that takes form when “property” is conceived legalistically (as with the “legal fictions” of a modem financial corporation, which the courts treat as a “person”). Surely no one would hold that the “needs” of such a “body” are reducible purely to terms of a few biological necessities. Ownership, as so conceived, involves a fantastically intricate network of purely symbolic operations, as evidenced by the army of clerics who in one way or another are occupied with promulgating, recording, interpreting, and enforcing the sheerly man-made laws of property.
To consider this realm intelligibly, we must discuss symbolic manipulations as such. For obviously, they have a “perfection” of their own, a formal resourcefulness that transcends the nonsymbolic or extrasymbolic realm of purely biological functioning. And such a realm of “personality” goes so far beyond the needs of sheer “animality,” that whereas a physical organism can “biologically own” only so much as it can take into its body, or as it can by purely physical powers deny to another, a member of the symbol-using species may “symbolically own” resources that, in his capacity as a sheer physical organism, he could not exhaust in a million lifetimes.
Indeed, once ownership becomes modified by the conditions of purely symbolic action, a realm of fantasy and paradox arises. Does a great leader, for instance, “own” his office as head of a state? Or is he not rather “owned” by his subjects who consider themselves “consubstantial” with him, so far as their sense of participation in a common cause is concerned? Whatever your answer to this quandary may be, you will grant that such thoughts confront us with a great drama of human relations. For quite as a state is held together physically by a network of purely material communicative resources (things that exist and operate in accordance with the laws of motion), so this network itself is guided in its construction and control by a network of purely symbolic acts and symbol-guided purposes, ranging from the lowly processes of bookkeeping and accountancy to the over-all terminology of “right,” “justice,” “beauty,” “propriety,” “truth,” the “good life,” etc., in which the logic of a given social order comes to an ideal, theoretic head.
Above sheer human animality, then (above man’s genus as rooted in the laws of material motion), there has been erected a social complexity that could not have existed without the aid of man’s differentia (his capacity for symbolic action). And in this sense, though we would warn against the temptation to forget the genus in our concern with the differentia, we would hold that the proper approach to the genus is through the study of symbolic action, as such action takes form in the drama of human relations. Otherwise, for reasons that we shall consider as we proceed, the failure to detect the full scope of the “linguistic dimension” in human affairs and human attitudes obscures our undemanding of both the linguistic and the extralinguistic. According to the position here advocated, there is a “pageantry” in objects, a “socioanagogic” element imposed upon them, so far as man is concerned, because man necessarily approaches them in accordance with the genius of his nature as a symbol-human species. Since language is social in the political, administrative sense, the purely physical sociality of nonlinguistic things thus subtly partakes of this purely symbolic spirit, so far as human dealings with “nature” are concerned.
Here is the problem at the bottom of our search, as at the bottom of a well. Our motto might be: By and through language, beyond language. Per linguam, praeter linguam.
The “dramatistic” is to be distinguished from the “dramatic,” in that drama proper is the symbolizing or imitating of action, whereas the “dramatistic” is a critical or essayistic analysis of language, and thence of human relations generally, by the use of terms derived from the contemplation of drama.
But the dramatistic can take great dramas as its point of departure. They provide the set forms in conformity with which we would construct our terminology. Since the real world of action is so confused and complicated as to seem almost formless, and too extended and unstable for orderly observation, we need a more limited material that might be representative of human ways while yet having fixity enough to allow for systematic examination.
In this respect, great dramas would be our equivalents of the laboratory experimenter’s “test cases.” But this kind of “controlled conditions” would differ from the arbitrary controls of a typical laboratory experiment. The losses are obvious, the gains less so, unless one stops to realize how hard it is to set up laboratory conditions for establishing instances of symbolic action that, while having a form sufficiently stable to be methodically observable, are also sufficiently complex and mature to be representative of human motives.2
But we may be on less cogent ground when laying primary emphasis upon the examining