Humanistic Critique of Education. Группа авторов
statements about the nature of symbolic action in general. With this to start from, teacher and class are on a voyage of discovery together. Ideally, we keep open the channels that take us back and forth between general principles and casuistry, and, whereas certain methods for tracking things down have already been developed, teacher and class are engaged in a joint enterprise for perfecting these. But, whereas the original reading might have sought to track down a “villain,” we rather would seek to track down the nature of the author’s idea of “villainousness” conceived, not just historically, with regard to the “climate of opinion” that prevailed in a given social order but, universally or formally, with regard to the modes and motives of such symbolizing in general.
We proceed by systematically “suffering” a given text, in the hope of discovering more about the symbolic activity in its particular kinds of sufferance. “Formal discipline” is identical with the carrying out of such an investigation. “Truth” is absolute, in the sense that one can categorically make assertions about certain basic resources and embarrassments of symbols. It is nearly absolute, as regards certain “factual” statements that can be made about the terms of a given work. It is highly problematical, as regards the question that ultimately concerns us most: What is the nature of a symbol-using animal? Here, at least ideally, however emphatic we may become on the spur of the moment, we adopt as our primary slogan: “All the returns aren’t in yet.” And we would continue to keep alive this attitude (the “Deweyite” emphasis) by embodying it in methods that practically compel one to be tentative, at least during the preparatory stage when one is trying to locate all the significant correlations in a book, without deciding whether they are “good” or “bad,” but trying rather simply to find out exact1y what they are.
Since every course in the curriculum is a symbolically guided mode of action, a placement of all courses from the standpoint of symbolic action violates none of them, though with regard to many scientific disciplines the linguistic approach can be irksome to instructors who would persuade themselves and their classes that they are talking about “objective reality” even at those times when they happen to be but going through sheerly linguistic operations. Since every specialty has its terminology, it can be studied like any poem or philosophic treatise, for its “equations.” And, indeed, if you inspect any given scientific writer’s terminology closely enough, you can hope to find the bridges that join his purely technical nomenclature with the personal realm.
But though such statements are required for a full account of human action in the realm of physical motion, a “dramatistic” approach by no means requires that laws of motion as such be equated with action. Indeed, we have tried to show how the very self-consciousness of our stress upon action forces us to distinguish action from sheer motion (a distinction that is obscured, for instance, in Aristotle’s term kinesis, though that very ambiguity is helpful in warning us how the two usages can cross, as when Aristotle himself “dramatistically” discusses the realm of physics in terms of “action” and “passion”).
Though the student would not be abiding by the spirit of the enterprise if he merely set about such a fragmentary search as often characterizes doctoral theses, in all methods there is a large percentage of “neutrality,” in the sense that a theory of ballistics could be called “neutral,” since it could be employed by either side to slay the other. Accordingly, analysis can be carried into lines that take us far from our primary search (any method being ambiguous enough in its potentialities to become detached from the attitude for which it was designed).
Indeed, one can even imagine situations where, even if mankind did amass an authoritative lore on the odd kinds of “somnambulism” to which our nature as symbolists makes us susceptible, there might arise some calamitously endowed “throw-back” who used it all to make things worse rather than better, somewhat as when rules for the cure of souls are transformed into the techniques of “psychological warfare.” For, since every point of view has its corresponding “pragmatics,” this dilemma of the ambiguities in power or method is not confined to pragmatism. And, at least, the admonitory aspects of our position can prevent us from thinking of any human resource, such as “mind,” “spirit,” “eloquence,” “imagination,” “intellect,” “understanding,” “rationality,” as intrinsically good, rather than as prone to the trickeries (and the grandeurs!) of the symbolic order upon which such resources so strongly rely.
The principle of “negativity” which is basic to the “dramatistic” approach, being essentially of a “repressive” nature (in contrast with liberal practices that often seemed to do all in their power to avoid the spirit of the thou-shalt-not), this approach must cope with the great threat to student interest that goes with such a concern. However, as contrasted with earlier modes of scholastic regimentation, it says no with a difference. It says no by studying “no,” by trying systematically to discover just how vast a domain the principle of negativity does actually govern, despite our assumptions to the contrary. Nor is such an investigation undertaken purely in the hope that, by such insight, one may be better qualified to emancipate one’s self from the “reign of no.” One must take it for granted that negativity of some sort is inevitable to social order, as conceived and constructed by an inveterately symbol-using species. And one must remember that the “negatives” of property and propriety are very “positive” in the sense that they affirm the given society’s co-operative norms. Negatives shared in common can be like wealth shared in common.
It is not for us a question whether man is naturally good or naturally depraved; it is simply a question of realizing that, as animality in general comprises a set of positive needs, appetites, and gratifications (ultimately reducible to terms of material motion), so the distinctive trait of man, his way with symbols, or languages, centers in his ability to use the negative of “conscience,” a symbolically guided ability that is also interwoven with the thou-shalt-not’s, or no-trespassing, of property.
Curriculum Organization
To guide our search, we keep in mind a curricular distribution of this sort:
First, there are the sciences of motion, such as physics, mechanics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, mineralogy, oceanography. Though the building of such disciplines is in the realm of symbolic action, their subject matter is exclusively the realm of nonsymbolic motion, except in so far as they must criticize their own terminology.
The biological sciences would also fall under the heading of motion, though less absolutely. One may argue that there are the rudiments of symbolism in all living organisms, as attested by experiments with “conditioning” and “unconditioning,” alterations of behavior which might be classed as the lowest kind of “learning,” or “interpretation.” But though one might possibly contend that there are respects in which nonhuman animals could be said to “read the signs,” no one, within our present range of knowledge at least, considers any of these species “typically language-using, or symbol-using.”
Recent studies of the motions of bees and ants would seem to indicate that these species have a highly organized code of signals whereby individuals can communicate precise information to one another. So it is remotely conceivable that eventually investigators may “crack” the expressiveness of animal gestures sufficiently to find even the rudiments of a grammar in the ways whereby dumb animals behavioristically influence one another by the use of posture and sound to convey the sheerly “motive” equivalents of “meaning.”
In any case, we could still propose a way of distinguishing “symbolic action proper” from what we might call “sign-affected motion.” Symbolic action proper is attested by a kind of “second-level” possibility. There is a sense, for instance, in which monkeys could be said to use tools as with situations wherein, if two sticks are so constructed that the end of one can be inserted into the end of the other to make a longer stick, the monkeys can learn this operation and apply it to procure something that was beyond the reach of either stick singly. We might call such behavior the rudimentary “inventing of a tool.” Yet we should not expect the monkeys to go a step farther and construct the device that made the two sticks joinable. That is, they do not manifest the rudiments of such “second-level” behavior as the making of tools for the making of tools. And human intelligence is marked by this second-level kind of activity,