Theology and LogologyAuthor(s): Kenneth BurkeSource: The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Winter, 1979), pp. 151-185Published by: Kenyon CollegeStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4335027Accessed: 04/10/2010 10:05

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THEOLOGY AND LOGOLOGY Kenneth Burke

Foreword

T m HERE is the possibility of confusion, in connection with my use of the term "logology." Though I shall constantly be en- countering occasions where theology (as "words about God")

and logology (as "words about words") overlap, particularly as when logology was taken literally to mean "the Doctrine of the Logos" (the reference to Christ as The Word in the book of John), in my discussion I shall be stressing the secular meaning of the term.

Technically, each term could treat the other as of narrower scope. For logology in the secular sense could class all sorts of "isms" and "ologies" and many other kinds of utterance, including itself, as modes of "verbal behavior." And theology would certainly look upon any such theorizing as far less comprehensive in scope than theology's concern with the relations between the human, word-using animal and the realm of the supernatural.

Professor J Hillis Miller, most notably in his essay on "The Linguistic Moment in 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' " (The New Criticism and After, edited by Thomas Daniel Young [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976], pp 47-60), has expertly discussed Hopkins's way of fusing a fascination with words in general and a devotion to Christ as the creative Logos. And when elsewhere he refers to "the peculiarly precarious Feuerbachian poise which says, in effect, 'All the affirmations of Christianity are true, but not as the believers believe,' " I thought of the Kabbalists who said that Biblical references to God as though he had a human body are not figurative; they are literal. But only God knows how to interpret their literal meaning-and the nearest we can come is by understanding them as figures of speech.

Our bodies are gestated and born in wordlessness-and out of such a state grows the doctrinal (that is, the verbal, the scriptural even). Themselves speechless, they help us learn to speak.

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I

W E HAVE heard much talk of a "birth trauma," the shock of a foetus in being exiled from an Edenic realm in which it had flourished but which its own stage of growth had begun to

transform from a circle of protection into a circle of confinement. With its first outcry after parturition it is started on its pilgrimage as a separate organism, its sensations, its feelings of pleasure and pain, being im- mediately its own and none other's. We assume that such immediate experiences of a particular physiological organism are like the ex- periences of similar other organisms. But at least they are far from identical in the sense that your pleasures and pains are exclusively yours, and no one else's.

Whether or not the organism's radical change of condition at birth is a "trauma," a wound that leaves a deep scar, we do know that under ordinary favorable conditions the organism begins to flourish, and even so much so that in later life the vague memories of its early years can assume an "Edenic" quality, presumably the material out of which myths about a primal "golden age" can take form. And this is the stage of life during which the infant (that is, literally the "speechless" human organism) learns the rudiments of an aptitude which, to our knowledge, distinguishes us from all other earthly beings: namely, language (or, more broadly, familiarity with arbitrary, conventional symbol-systems in general-insofar as traditions of dance, music, sculpture, painting, and so on are also modes of such "symbolic action").

But the kind of arbitrary conventional symbol-system that infants acquire in learning a tribal language differs from the other mediums in at least this notable respect: it is the one best equipped to talk about itself, about other mediums, and even about the vast world of motion that is wholly outside all symbol-systems, that was going on long before our particular kind of symbol-using animal ever came into existence, that is the necessary ground of our animal existence, and that can go on eternally without us.

Rousseau tells us that our kind was born free. But that formula can be misleading in its implications. Every infant emerges from organic infancy (speechlessness) into language during a period of total subjection-subjection to the ministrations of "higher powers," the familial adults with whom it comes to be in what Martin Buber would call an "I-Thou" relationship. Under favorable conditions these powers are benign; sometimes they are malign; or there is an ambiguous area, inasmuch as ministrations that the powers conceive of as well- intentioned may be interpreted otherwise by the maturing infant, since

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its condition does not enable it to clearly recognize the limitations im- posed upon the higher powers which the infant conceives of as all- powerful.

The first cry of the infant had been a purely reflex action. But as the aptitude for symbolic action develops, the child acquires a way of transforming this purely reflex response into the rudiments of com- munication. In effect, the cry becomes a call, a way of summoning the higher powers by supplication. In out-and-out language, it becomes a way of saying "please." There we see emerging the profound rela- tionship between religion and prayer. The Wailing Wall is not a cry of despair. The Wailing Wall is a cry of hope. It is not the cry of Hell, as with Dante's line, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." The cries of Hell are eternally hopeless. But the prayers of religion are in their essence as with the infant's cries, which had become transformed from a con- dition of sheerly reflex expression into a plea, the very essence of prayer.

I would consider these paragraphs a logological observation about the "cradle" of theology. Theology is words about God; logology is words about words. Logology can't talk about God. It can only talk about words for "God." Logology can make no statement at all about the "afterlife" and the related concept of the "supernatural." Logo- logy can't either affirm or deny the existence of God. Atheism is as far from the realm of logology as is the most orthodox of Fun- damentalist religions. All logology is equipped to do is discuss human relations in terms of our nature as the typically symbol-using animal. In that regard, without pronouncing about either the truth or falsity of theological doctrine, logology does lay great emphasis upon the thought that theology, in purely formal respects, serves as a kind of verbal "grace" that "perfects" nature. It "rounds things out," even if such fulfillment happened to be but the verbal or doctrinal completing of the pattern that the infant "naturally" experiences when first learning language, and its modes of supplication in an "I-Thou" (familial) relationship with "higher powers."

Logology involves only empirical considerations about our nature as the symbol-using animal. But for that very reason it is fascinated by the genius of theology; and all the more so because, through so much of our past, theologians have been among the profoundest of our inventors in the ways of symbolic action. Also, everywhere logology turns, it finds more evidences of the close connection between speech and theologic doctrine. St Paul tells us, for instance, that "faith comes from hearing [ex auditu]," which in the last analysis amounts to saying that theology is exactly what it calls itself etymologically, an "ology." The story of creation in Genesis is an account of successive verbal fiats ("and God

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said"). And in the New Testament the Book of John tells us that in the beginning was the Logos.

But these issues don't stop with such obvious cases as that. In my essay on "Terministic Screens" (Language as Symbolic Action [Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1973], pp 44-62) after having noted how the nature of our terms affects the nature of our observations, by directing our attention in one way rather than another (hence "many of the 'observations' are but implications of the particular terminology in terms of which the observations are made" [p 46]), I turned to the formula which Anselm had developed at great length from Isaiah 7:9 (nisi credideritis, non intelligetis): "Believe, that you may understand" (crede, ut intelligas).

It is my claim that the injunction, "Believe, that you may understand," has a fundamental application to the purely secular problem of "terministic screens."

The "logological," or "terministic" counterpart of "Believe" in the formula would be: "Pick some particular nomenclature, some one terministic screen." And for "That you may understand," the counterpart would be: " That you may proceed to track down the kinds of observation implicit in the terminology you have chosen, whether your choice of terms was deliberate or spontaneous. " [p 47]

Or, in my The Rhetoric of Religion ("On Words and the Word: Sixth Analogy" [1961; reprint edition, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970], pp 29ff) I have tried to show how "the relation between the name and the thing named would be the Power (equals the Father); the name would be the Wisdom (equals the Son, which the Father "generates" in the sense that the thing named calls for its name); and the two together "spirate" Love (equals the Holy Spirit, in the sense that there is the perfect correspondence between the thing and its name, and the perfect term for such correspondence or "com- munion" between the terms would be Love).

And as for "Perfection" itself, the theological idea of God as the ens perfectissimum has a striking logological analogue in the astound- ingly many ways in which terminologies set up particular conditions for the tracking down of implications. The whole Marxist dialectic, for instance, is so designed as to foretell fulfillment in what logology would class as an Utopian perfection, a dialectic so "perfect" that it is to inevitably culminate in the abolition of itself (with the "withering away of the state," a state of the political state that may be quite dubious, but that can make claims to inevitability if we substitute for the state of the body politic the analogous state of the human body).

In more restricted ways, the tracking down of implications towards various perfections manifests itself in our many technological

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nomenclatures, each of which suggests to its particular votaries further steps in that same direction. Such expansionist ambitions are near- infinite in their purely visionary scope; but though they have no inner principle of self-limitation, their range of ideal development is restricted by the ways in which they interfere with one another, including academic problems to do with the allocation of funds among the various depart- ments.

This logological principle of perfection (which I would call "entelechial," restricting the Aristotelian concept of the "entelechy" to the realm of nomenclature, "symbolicity") can also be seen to operate in areas which we do not ordinarily associate with the idea of perfection, except in such loose usages as "perfect fool" or "perfect villain." But its powers along that line are terrifying. It showed up repeatedly in theological charges of heresy, in which the heretics were nearly always saddled with the same list of hateful vices. And in our day the Nazis did the most outrageous job with "perfection" in that sense by the thoroughness of their charges against the Jew. It takes very little in- ducement for us to begin "perfecting" the characters of our opponents by the gratuitous imputation of unseemly motives. Thus, all told, in my logological definition of humankind, I put a high rating on my clause, "rotten with perfection." Satan was as perfect an entelechy in one sense as Christ was in another. Doubtless Machiavelli was thinking along those lines when he told his Prince that, whereas one should be wary of hiring mercenaries, the way to get the best fighters is make the war a holy war.

Language is one vast menagerie of implications-and with each channel of such there are the makings of a corresponding fulfillment proper to its kind, a perfection in germ. For the logological study of dialectic teaches us that there are two quite different ways of introducing the "entelechial principle of perfection," thus:

(1) There is the thing, bread. (2) There is the corresponding word, "bread." (3) Language being such as it is, with no trouble at all I can make up the ex- pression, "perfect bread." (4) We may disagree as to which bread could properly be called "perfect." (5) A mean man, or a dyspeptic, or a philosopher might even deny that in this world there can be such a thing as "perfect bread." (6) Nevertheless, theologians can speak of God as the ens perfectissimum-and the expression "perfect bread" is a secular counterpart of such dialectical resources. (7) Nay more. Even if there is no such thing as perfect bread in actuality, I can consider bread from the standpoint of perfect bread "in principle." (8) "Here is some perfect bread"; or (9) "As compared with perfect bread, this bread I am offering you is a dismal

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substitute"; or (10) "I can assure you that, humble as it is, this bread represents perfect bread in principle." (It "stands for the spirit of perfect bread.") (Kenneth Burke, Dramatism and Development [Barre, Massachusetts: Clark University Press, 1972], p 59; appendix to essay on "Archetype and Entelechy.")

But the question of the relation between logology and theology also requires that we look in another direction, namely, the question of the relation between logology and behaviorism. A handy way to in- troduce this issue is by reference to a passage in my review of Denis Donoghue's recently published admirable collection of essays, The Sovereign Ghost: Studies in Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976):

On going back over Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, I ran across a footnote in which with regard to the "desynonymizing" of the terms "imagination and "fancy," he says: insofar as any such distinctions become accepted, "language itself does as it were think for us." It is a chance remark which the structuralists would make much more of than would either Coleridge or Donoghue. ("The Sovereign Ghost by Denis Donoghue," The New Republic 177 [September 10, 1977]: 30-3 1)

In effect Coleridge is saying that words are doing what the theologian would say that the "mind" is doing, an interesting twist inasmuch as Coleridge, in his day, was known much better for works like his theological Aids to Reflexion than as a literary critic, though his works generally had a theological cast. Yet in passing, Coleridge there hit upon a quite strategic substitution, since the immediate context of situation in which words are learned is the realm of nonsymbolic motion, whereas "mind" is more readily associated with an ultimate super- natural ground beyond the realm of physical and physiological motion.

Logology here is in an intermediate position between theology and behaviorism (which monistically acknowledges no qualitative difference between a human organism's verbal and nonverbal behavior). Logology is as dualistic in its way as theology is, since the logological distinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion is as "polar" as theology's distinctions between mind and body, or spirit and matter. Logology holds that "persons" act, whereas "things" but move, or are moved. And "personality" in the human sense depends upon the ability and opportunity to acquire an arbitrary, conventional symbol- system such as a tribal, familial language.

However, logology need not be driven to a "mentalist" position when in controversy with a behaviorist. Indeed, seizing upon a behaviorist term, logology needs but point to the empirical distinction between verbal behavior (which logology would call "symbolic action")

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and "molecular" behavior (which logology would call "nonsymbolic physiologic motion").

To adapt some comments from Western Speech (Summer 1968), I read somewhere that, when thrillers are shown in movie houses, the air- conditioning plant must be accelerated, owing to the audience's in- creased rate of respiration, and so forth, in response to the excitement of the fiction. The fiction is in the realm of "symbolic action," with which the air-conditioning plant has no relation whatever. The air- conditioner's "behavior" is in the realm of nonsymbolic motion, which relates directly to the physical conditions produced in the theatre by the body's nonsymbolic molecular motions correlative with the symbol- using organism's responses to the story (which as a story is wholly in the realm of symbolism, though the sights and sounds of the story, in their role as mere uninterpreted vibrations, are but in the realm of motion). For in the empirical realm, no symbolic action is possible without a grounding in motion, as words on the screen can't even be words unless they can be seen or heard.

But logology would hold that their symbolic dimension cannot be monistically reduced to the order of physical motion alone. Whatever the mutation whereby our prehistoric ancestors acquired their aptitude with symbolicity, from then on the human animal was a composite organism, be the duality conceived in theological terms of mind and body, or in logological terms of symbolic action and nonsymbolic physiological motion. The principle of individuation was in the body, with the im- mediacy of its sensations. The realm of symbolism, with its many modes of identification (family relationships, geology, history, politics, religious doctrine, and so on), shaped the public aspects of human awareness and personality.

II

W ITH Coleridge's passing remark that, if a new distinction becomes generally established, in effect the corresponding words think for us, we are at the very center of logological

inquiry: the close but indeterminate relationship between substitution and duplication. There is obvious duplication in the very fact that we have verbal parallels for nonverbal things, processes, and relationships. There is substitution inasmuch as, given the thing bread and the word "bread," the person who asked for bread with the proper symbol (the word for bread in that particular language) might be given instead another symbol, the money with which to buy it. One could spend a lifetime doing nothing more than tracking down the intricately in-

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terwoven manifestations of these two principles, which are perhaps more accurately discussed not just as aspects, but as the very essence, of language. For present purposes, let us cite a few such aspects at random:

First, there are the extensions of language by analogy, what Bentham called "fictions," a term that itself is probably a metaphorical extension of the expression "legal fictions." Terms that have a quite literal meaning as applied to physical conditions can be adapted figuratively to subject matter that does not admit of such usage. For instance, if we speak of one object as being at a certain "distance" from another, our statement can be strictly literal, capable of verification by measuring the distance. But if we speak of one person's views as being "distant" from another's, we are employing a "fiction" which admits of no such literal physical test. Or, in saying that a certain leaning object has an "inclination" of 30 degrees, we are using the term literally, in contrast with the statement that a person has an "inclination" to do such-and-such. In this connection Bentham observes that our entire vocabularies of psychology and ethics are made up of such "fictive" duplicates, without which we could not talk about such matters at all. Go to the etymological origins of all such terms, and you will spot the literal images implicit in such ideas.

The relation between our sensory experience as individual speechless physical organisms and the vast public context of symbolicity we acquire as social beings sets up the endlessly complex conditions for such duplication as is revealed in the spontaneous use of terms for the weather as a nomenclature for "states of mind," or "attitudes." And one can glimpse how a whole magic world of human relations might develop from that mode of duplication whereby, as one pious person fearsomely plants a crop, another (an expert in the lore of mythic counterparts) "collaborates" by contributing his skill to the process, in scrupulously performing the "necessary" attendant ritual of a planting song ("necessary" because, man being the symbol-using animal, the realm of nonsymbolic natural motion is not completely humanized until reduced to terms of symbolicity; hence spring calls for a spring song, harvest for a harvest song; marriage, death, changes of status, and so on similarly attain their "completion" when thus ritually paralleled).

The resources of duplication and substitution are revealed most clearly of all in such mathematical operations as the use of the symbol n instead of 3.1416, or the internal relationships whereby 2 plus 2 can be the same as 4 times 1. And surely mathematics began with that primal substitution whereby, in making three marks to stand for three apples, one also had a sign that would stand for three of anything, whereupon one's symbol had advanced to a "higher level of generalization" whereby the number itself could be operated on in its own right, without

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reference to any particular numbered things. On inspecting more closely this aspect of what we might call the

"duplication-substitution complex," we come upon a similar usage that, at first glance, might seem of a quite different sort. Insofar as some particular ritual is ceremonially repeated in identical fashion on different occasions (which would also include annual seasonal occurrences, since no two situations are identical) in effect the ritual acts as a mode of classification that abstracts from any particular occasion, just as numbers become abstracted from any one particular instance of their use. Thus, a marriage rite is an institution whereby all sorts of couples are "processed" in identical fashion. It is not like a situation where John and Mary are consulting a marriage counselor about their particular problems. Rather, it is individualized only insofar as there is a blank space to be filled with whatever proper names are to be included under that head this time.

The ubiquitous resources of substitution probably attain their profoundest theological embodiment in the doctrines and rites of vicarious sacrifice. I plan to discuss later the distinctions between theological and logological concerns with the principle of sacrifice. But let us now consider the astounding thoroughness (even to the edge of paradox) wvith which Christian theology developed the logological principle of substitution. Of all victims that were ever offered as redemption for the guilt of others, surely Christ was conceived as the most perfect such substitute, even to the extent of being perfectly abhorrent, as bearer of the world's sinfulness. Thus Luther said:

All the prophets saw that Christ would be the greatest brigand of all, the greatest adulterer, thief, profaner of temples, blasphemer, and so on, that there would never be a greater in all the world. . . . God sent his only begotten Son into the world, and laid all sins upon him, saying: "You are to be Peter the denier, Paul the persecutor, blasphemer, and wild beast, David the adulterer, you are to be the sinner who ate the apple in the Garden of Eden, you are to be the crucified thief, you are to be the person who commits all the sins in the world." (I translate from Leon Chestov, Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle [Paris: Vrin, 1948].)

Thus, in terms of the specifically "Christian Logology," the most perfect divine Logos also became the perfect fiend, in serving as the substitute vessel for the guilt of all.

With regard to the vexing issue of the relation between words and "mind" (whereby some nomenclatures would substitute "words" for "mind," as per the tangential remark we have cited from Coleridge), before moving on to other aspects of our subject we should consider Professor J Hillis Miller's ingenious and penetrating essay, "The Linguistic Moment in 'The Wreck of the Deutschland.' " This essay is

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particularly relevant since Hopkins's exceptional involvement in strictly logological concerns is so strikingly interwoven with the most poignant of theological devotions. Miller here notes "three apparently incompatible theories of poetry. . . each brilliantly worked out in theory and exemplified in practice":

Poetry may be the representation of the interlocked chiming of created things in their relation to the Creation. This chiming makes the pied beauty of nature. Poetry may explore or express the solitary adventures of the self in its wrestles with God or in its fall into the abyss outside God. Poetry may explore the in- tricate relationships among words. These three seemingly diverse theories of poetry are harmonized by the application to them all of a linguistic model. This model is based on the idea that all words rhyme because they are ultimately derived from the same Logos. Nature is "words, expression, news of God" (Sermons, p. 129), and God has inscribed himself in nature. The structure of nature in its relation to God is like the structure of language in relation to the Logos, the divine Word; and Christ is the Logos of nature, as of words. [pp 47- 481

Coleridge, when commenting on how words can think for us, and noting that the two words "imagination" and "fancy" (the one from the Latin, the other from the Greek) were often used synonymously, proposed to "desynonymize" them, so that they would have different meanings. But Hopkins proceeded in the other direction; he let the word "Logos" think for him by refusing to distinguish between its secular meaning as a word for "word" and its meaning in Chnstian theology, where the New Testament word for Christ was the "Word." Hopkins's thinking could not possibly have been as it was had those early sectaries, the "Alogians," succeeded in their attempts to exclude the Gospel of John and Revelations from the Christian canon because in both texts Christ was referred to as the Logos.

St Augustine had in effect desynonymized the two usages by explicitly referring to his conversion from his career as a pagan rhetorician (a "peddler of words," venditor verborum) to a preacher of the Christian Word. But he had also Christianized the very beginning of the Old Testament by noting that God's successive acts of Creation had been done through the Word (when he had said, "Let there be . . .")-and thus in effect the Creation was done by the Father's Word, which was the Son.

Miller begins his essay: "By linguistic moment I mean the moment when language as such, the means of representation in literature, becomes a matter to be interrogated, explored, thematized in itself" (p 47). While his engrossing study of what B F Skinner might call Hopkins's "verbal behavior" is essentially logological, the very fact of Hopkins's refusal to "desynonymize" the two usages keeps the study of the

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"linguistic moment" constantly infused with the theological impli- cations of Hopkins's poetics.

As might be expected, variations on the theme of "duplication" and "repetition" are plentiful; even talk of a "primal bifurcation" is a signal to look for ways of tying the issue in with the distinction between speechless nonsymbolic physiological motion (analogous to the traditional terms, "matter" or "body") and the publicly infused realm of symbolic action (analogous to the traditional terms, "spirit" or "mind"). In this connection Miller has a footnote which succinctly bears upon "polar" aspects of the human being as a dualistic, "composite" individual, in contrast with the monistic assumptions of behaviorism, which denies any qualitative distinction between verbal behavior and nonverbal behavior (in brief, it "thinks" by refusing to "desynonymize" the term "behavior"). Referring to an "admirable passage in Hopkins's commentary on The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius," Miller quotes:

And this [my isolation] is much more true when we consider the mind; when I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man. [p 47]

In my view of logological dualism (which Hopkins comes close to replacing with a monism exactly the reverse of the behaviorists', insofar as Hopkins would reduce everything to terms of the universal Logos) the "linguistic moment" proclaimed by that resonant sentence implicitly pronounces the principle of "inscape" in what are essentially "problematical" terms. The "selfhood" of a Catholic priest must obviously be grounded in Catholic doctrine, which is necessarily "spiritual," on the side of what logology would call public "sym- bolicity." But he expresses the sense of his separate identity in terms of immediate sensation, which is in the realm of the individual's sheer physiology.

True, poets have traditionally used the terminology of sensation to give the feel of the internal immediacy that Hopkins aims to suggest. And there is no good reason for denying poets such a time-honored rhetorical device. I am but pointing out that the essential polarity or duality of the human condition is not actually bridged (it can't be) but is stylistically denied. The mode of expression is thus in effect a "linguistic element" that represses an explicit statement of the case. Whereupon the "return of the repressed" reveals itself in the person of Hopkins himself as the "wreck" with which the poem starts out (significant timing!) by being explicitly and exclusively concerned.

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The first five stanzas are in the form of an "I-Thou" prayer. Forty lines in all, there are nineteen cognates of the first-person pronoun, fourteen of the second. The second half of the First Part is transitional, in that the pronouns move farther off (first-person plural and third-person singular). The Second Part, two-thirds of the poem, is built explicitly around the wreck of the Deutschland, a "pied" name if there ever was one ("0 Deutschland, double a desperate name!"-as the home of both the nun Gertrude, "Christ's lily," and the "beast," Luther). With regard to the poem as a structure, we could say that it transforms the "pied" nature of the poet's personal problems into the grander interwoven ambivalences of sinking and salvation.

At the end of the essay Miller adds a footnote:

Kenneth Burke, in remarks about this paper after its presentation at the Ransom Symposium at Kenyon College in April of 1975, argued that I should add something about the multiple meaning of the word wreck in the title. The poem, he said, is about Hopkins's wreck. This was a powerful plea to relate the linguistic complexities, or tensions, back to their subjective counterparts. Much is at stake here. That the poem is a deeply personal document there can be no doubt. Its linguistic tensions are "lived," not mere "verbal play" in the negative sense. . . . In "The Wreck of the Deutschland" Hopkins is speaking of his own wreck. . . . The danger in Burke's suggestion, however, is, as always, the possibility of a psychologizing reduction, the making of literature into no more than a reflection or representation of something psychic which precedes it and which could exist without it. . . . Subjectivity, I am arguing, with all its intensities, is more a result than an origin. To set it first, to make an ex- planatory principle of it, is, as Nietzsche says, a metalepsis, putting late before early, effect before cause. Ipp 59-60n]

I wrote Miller, calling attention to the closing paragraph of an essay by me concerning Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ("Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats," A Grammar of Motives 11945; reprint edition, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969], pp 447-63). In that essay I had noted respects in which traces of the symptoms of the disease he was to die of manifested themselves. But I added this qualification:

We may contrast this discussion with explanations such as a materialist of the Kretschmer school might offer. I refer to accounts of motivation that might treat disease as cause and poem as effect. In such accounts, the disease would not be "passive," but wholly active; and what we have called the mental action would be wholly passive, hardly more than an epiphenomenon, a mere symptom of the disease quite as are the fever and the chill themselves. Such accounts would give us no conception of the essential matter here, the intense linguistic activity. [pp 462-68]

In that last paragraph, I wrote Miller, "at least I say I'm not doing exactly what you say I am doing." Then I added: "However, I'll

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meet you halfway. I think the relation between the physiology of disease and the symbolic action of poetry can be of the 'vicious circle' sort. One's poetizing, in the very act of transcending hints got from the body's passions, can roundabout reinforce the ravages of such sufferings." I had in mind here such a "reflexive" process (I guess current cant would call it "feedback") as the role of "psychogenic" asthma in Proust's search for essence by the "remembrance of things past."

III

L r ET us now list some cases the discussion of which might most directly help us inquire, by comparison and contrast, into words about the divine, the supernatural (theology) and words about

words (logology) including words for the divine and supernatural, whether or not there be such a realm, which theologies have words for.

Since theology in our tradition is so clearly grounded in the relation between the Old Testament and the New, let's begin logologically from there. The formula of the Christian theologians was stated thus: Novum Testamentum in Vetere latet, Vetus in Novo patet. How translate it exactly? "The N T was latent in the 0 T. The 0 T becomes patent in the N T." Or "The implications of the 0 T became explicitly manifest in the N T." It was a way of both letting the Jews in and keeping them out, unless they became converted or, like an 0 T patriarch, each had been an anima naturaliter Christiana; I forget whether Socrates was adjudged such, but his association with the symbolic action of Platonism might well include him, for his Hellenic contribution to the cult of Logos that the early Alogian Christians wanted to rule out.

In any case, the Christian theology, with regard to the relation

lAny such possible relationship between personal tensions and their use as material for intense linguistic activity (to be analyzed and admired in its own terms) might figure thus. But there are special, purely logological, incentives for such a relationship between poetic activity and psychological passion. On various occasions (particularly the essay, "The First Three Chapters of Genesis," in my Rhetoric of Religion) I have discussed the process whereby the effort to characterize conditions now turns into a "story" of "origins" then, often a purely "mythic" past. This endeavor can come to tie in with purely psychological motives in such cases as, for instance, a poet's inclination to dwell "regressively" on thoughts of early years, actual or imaginary vestigial memories of infancy. Thus Wallace Stevens's puzzlements about the "first idea" seem to me an attempt, by an act of the "imagination," to recover a sense of what things must have seemed like to a child before things became codified by names, or even colored by the assumption that anything unnamed was potentially namable.

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between 0 T and N T, would see in the 0 T many stories about characters that were conceived as what they were only insofar as they were "types of Christ." Indeed, the Jewish tribe itself, in its exodus from Egypt, was but a type of Christ. Thus its Jewish identity was, in effect (in principle), being viewed not as that of a tribe in its own right, but as an emergent stage of the Christian future.

Exactly, then, what does logology, as a purely secular cult of the logos, do with that particular localization of dialectical resources? Obviously, the 0 T story of Abraham and Isaac (telling of how the father, in obedience to God's Law, would consent to sacrifice even his most beloved person, his son) can be conceived of as incipiently, prophetically a type of the N T story of an all-powerful Father, the very soul of justice, who actually does fulfill the pattern, in completing the sacrifice of his most precious person, his only begotten Son. And logology looks upon both stories as variations on the theme of sacrifice.

In my early scattered readings among mediaeval texts, I found a sentence that fascinated me. It was probably a rule of some monastic order, I don't know which. And though I have lost track of the original, I still incline to go on repeating my translation, which is as resonant as I could make it: "If any one have any thing of which he is especially fond, let it be taken from him." There is even the ironic possibility that I got the Latin somewhere from Remy de Gourmont, a nonbeliever if there ever was one; and he taught me to appreciate, in a kind of twisted nostalgia, the forlorn fragmentary beauty of such accents. The fan- tastically "materialistic" Santayana's gallant Realm of Spirit is also in that groove.

But the main consideration, from the standpoint of logology, is the fact that, however variously theologians may treat of the relation between the 0 T and the N T, they have in common the theological stress

Incidentally, with regard to Keats's ode (which I take to envision a kind of "art- heaven," a theological heaven romantically aestheticized), by my interpretation, the transforming of his disease's bodily symptoms (fever and chill) into imaginal coun- terparts within the conditions of the fiction would be a poetic embodiment of the or- thodox religious promise that the true believers would regain their "purified" bodies in heaven. That is, the symptoms would have their "transcendent" counterparts in poetic diction as indicated in my analysis.

I review these various considerations because the discussion of them offers a good opportunity to at least indicate "humanistic" concern (the admonition to "know our- selves") that I take to be involved in the logological distinction between the human organism's realm of nonsymbolic motion and the kind of "self" it "naturally" acquires through its protracted, informative traffic with the (learned) public modes of symbolic action.

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upon the principle of sacrifice. As viewed from the standpoint of logology, even the most primitive offering of animals on the altar can be equated with the Crucifixion of Christ insofar as any and all such rites embodv the principle of sacrifice (which, given the ubiquitous logological resources of substitution, turns out to be synonymous with vicarious sacrifice).

As viewed logologically, the theological story of the Creation and the Fall (in the opening chapter of Genesis) would be summed up thus:

The story of Creation, in representing the principle of Order, necessarily introduced a principle of Division, classifying some things as distinct from other things. In this purely technical sense, Creation itself was a kind of "Fall," inasmuch as it divided the principle of Unity into parts, each of which has a nature of its own, regardless of how they might in principle be "unified." (As seen from this point of view, even a project for "unification" implies a grammatical gerundive, a "to-be- unified.") Thus, viewed from the other side, the Orderly principle of Division is seen to contain implicitly the possibility of Divisiveness.

The possibility of Divisiveness calls for a Law against Divisiveness. (In a world set up by the creative word, how keep Division from becoming Divisive except by a word, a Law, that says "Don't do whatever would disrupt the Order"?) So the story includes a "don't" that, stories of that sort being what they are, stands for the sheer principle of Law, as the negative aspect of Order. But implicit in the idea of "Don't" there is the possibility of Disobedience. One says "Do" or "Don't" only to such kinds of entities as can be able to respond (that is, can have the responsibility) by in effect saying "Yes" or "No" (that is, being obedient or disobedient).

But St Paul's theology was quite in keeping with logology when he said that the Law made sin, as Bentham was to say that the law makes crime. However, note that, in introducing, via Law, the possibility of Disobedience, one has by implication introduced the principle of Temptation (the incentive, however originating, to fall afoul of the Law). Where, then, locate the "origin" of that Temptation, as befits the nature of narrative (story, myth)?

At this point, the implications of terms for Law and Order surface by translation into terms of role. These are two kinds of "priority." There is logical priority in the sense of first premise, second premise, conclusion. Or in the sense that the name for a class of par- ticulars is "prior" to any particular included under that head, quite as the term "table" already "anticipates" the inclusion of countless particular objects that don't even yet exist. Or there is temporal priority in the sequence yesterday-today-tomQrrow.

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As a result of this doubling, one can state matters of principle (that is, firsts or beginnings) in terms of either logical or temporal priority. (Hence in my Rhetoric of Religion I put major emphasis upon the etymological fact that both the Greek and Latin words for "prin- ciple" [arche and principiumJ refer to priority in both the logical and temporal senses of the term.) I said somewhere (I think in my Grammar of Motives, but I can't locate it) that a Spinozistic translation of the first words in the Vulgate Bible, "In principio Deus creavit, " would be not "in the beginning God created," but "in principle God created." For his basic equation, Deus sive Natura, amounts exactly to that, since he would never associate the words "God" and Nature" in terms of a temporal priority whereby God "came first" in time. Though such equating of God and Nature was pantheistic, hence anathema, in its sheer design it resembled the thinking of those orthodox Christians who attacked Arianism by insisting that the "priority" of Father to Son was not in any sense temporal. We here confront a purely logological kind of "priority," as we might well say that the number 1 is "pnror" to any other number, but only "in principle"; for no number in time is "prior" to any other, since an internal relationship among numbers is non- temporal. "Before numbers were," 3 was less than 4 and more than 2, though we can "go from" one such to another. And logologically we confront an analogous situation with regard to the narrative or "mythic" translation of "nontemporal" implications among terms into terms of story, as with the narrative ways of stating the principles of Order in the first three chapters of Genesis, under "primal" conditions involving an audience for whom the poetic ways of story came first; however, such expressions were later to be sophisticated by the "traumatic" step from poetry and mythology to criticism and critically mature theology.

The Old Testament begins in its way quite as the N T Gospel of John begins in its, with pronouncements that overlap upon these two kinds of priority. Genesis "tells the story" of the divine word's in- formative power. John tells the story of the Logos, a Hellenistic stress upon the word that a "Judaizing" sect among the emergent Christian doctrinarians had unsuccessfully attempted to exclude from the canon. Hence, though the term in English seems to have begun by reference to the Logos in the Book of John (a usage that is ambiguously implicit in these present shuttlings between theology and logology), both the Book of Genesis and the Book of John present their cases in terms of story. And we now take on from there.

Logologically, we confront the fact that, given the fluid relation between logical and temporal priority, the logical "firstness" of prin-

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ciples, when stated in the ways of story (mythos), as with the opening chapters of Genesis, calls for translation into terms of temporal priority. Thus the narrative way of saying what St Paul had in mind when saying that the Law made sin and Bentham when he said that the law made crime was to say that the first human being sinned against the first law decreed by the first and foremost law-giver.

The principle of the law, implicit in the principle of order, is identical with an astounding seiendes Unding that human language has added to nature, the negative (a purely linguistic invention unknown to the world of sheer wordless motion, which can be but what it positively is). Thus, implicit in the legal negative, the "thou shalt not" of the Law (which, the story of Beginnings tell us, was born with the creation of worldly order) is the possibility that its negativity can be extended to the negating of negativity. There is thus the "responsibility" of being able to say no to a thou-shalt-not.

But the tactics of narrative personalizing (in effect a kind of substitution that represents a principle in terms of a prince) raise a problem local to that particular mode of representation itself. If this kind of "first" is to represent the possibility of disobedience that is implicit in the decreeing of a law, where did the "temptation" to disobedience "come from"? Up to this point, we have been trying to show that a logological analysis of the case would coincide with a theological presentation, in that theology has said implicitly what logology says explicitly; namely: the conditions of the Fall were inherent in the conditions of the Creation, since the divisiveness of Order was reinforced by the divisive possibility of saying either yes or no to the primal law of that order.

However, the sheer psychology of personality is such that an act of disobedience is but the culminating stage of an inclination to disobey, a guilty disobedient attitude. And where did that prior step, the emergent temptation to disobey, originate? Here theology's concern with the sources of such an attitude introduces a causal chain that turns out to involve a quite different provenance.

Eve was the immediate temptress. But she had been tempted by the serpent. But the serpent was not "entelechially perfect" enough to be the starting place for so comprehensive, so universal (so "catholic") a theological summation. The principle of substitution gets "perfect" embodiment here in that the serpent becomes in turn the surrogate for Satan, the supernatural tempter beyond which no further personal source of temptation need be imagined, since his personality and his role as ultimate tempter were identical, in such total consistency that this supreme "light-bearing" angel was the most thorough victim of his own vocation.

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IV

IN HIS epic, Paradise Lost, Milton turns that story into a further story. Beginning with theology's search for the grandest personalized source of temptation, Milton reverses the mode of derivation as we

have traced it logologically. Thus, whereas logologically the story of the revolt in Heaven would be derived from motivational ambiguities whereby the eventuality of the Fall was implicit in the conditions of the Creation, Milton's theological route would proceed from the revolt in Heaven to the Fall, and consequent expulsion from the Garden.

Although there are many respects in which logology and theology are analogous (respects in which the two usages, words about words and words about the Logos, can go along in parallel) there are also the many occasions when, as we have here been noting, they will unfold a series of interrelated terms in exactly the reverse order. A good example is a creation myth that I learned of from Malinowski (compare Language as Symbolic Action, pp 364-65n).

According to this myth, the tribe is descended from a race of supernatural ancestors (in this case, subterranean ancestors, since their original ancestors were thought to have lived underground). These mythic ancestors had a social order identical with the social order of the tribe now. When they came to the surface, they preserved the same social order, which has been handed down from then to now. In this case, obviously, whereas conditions now are mythologically "derived" from imputed primal conditions "then," logologically the mythic imputing of such primal conditions "then" would be derived from the nature of conditions now. (I hope later to discuss respects in which we might distinguish between mythology and theology; but in a case of this sort they are analogous with regard to their difference from logological derivation. And they have the advantage of providing much simpler examples, at least as usually reported. Also, their polytheistic aspect makes them much easier to "rationalize" than the ways of the single all- powerful personal God of monotheistic theology, who tolerates so much that seems to us intolerable. Since logology makes no judgment at all about the truth or falsity of theologic doctrine, its only task is to study how, given the nature of symbolism, such modes of placement are logologically derivable from the nature of "symbolic action.")

Logologically considered, the issue may be reduced to the matter of the negative, another aspect of the condition that arose in the story of the Creation when God introduced the "thou shalt not" of the law. Implicit in the negative is the possibility of polar terms which bear a timeless relationship to each other. This relationship is "timeless" in the

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sense that although, with polar terms like "order" and "disorder," each implies the other, their relationship doesn't involve a temporal stepfrom one to the other. But the supernatural realm of eternity is timeless. And heaven was the realm of timeless perfect order. But inasmuch as the genius of the negative makes such terms as "order" and "perfection" polar, so far as such terms were concerned they contained the timeless implication of their contrasting term. Also, there are two kinds of polar negative: the propositional ("is, isn't"), the hortatory ("do, don't"). And they tend to lose their initial distinctness.

Myth, story, narrative makes it possible to transform this timeless relation between polar terms into a temporal sequence. That is, myth can tell of a step from either one to the other. Thus, with regard to the perfection of heaven outside of time, the resources of narrative made it possible to carry out the implications of polar terms such as "order" and "perfection" by such stories as the revolt of Lucifer in heaven. And the timeless nature of such polarity is maintained eternally in the unending establishment of heaven and hell, the one all Yes, the other all No.

Polytheistic myths didn't have the acute problems with this terministic situation that monistic theology has. Joseph Fontenrose's volume, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins (New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1959) (which I use as the basis of my essay, "Myth, Poetry, and Philosophy," reprinted in my Language as Symbolic Action), takes as its point of departure the myth of the combat between Apollo and Python, then extends the discussion to two main types in general. There is a late type, concerning a struggle between an "older" god and a "new" god, with the new god triumphing and founding a cult. But this is said to be derived from an earlier type, concerning a struggle between a dragon and a sky-god, with the sky-god triumphing.

In such cases, the principle of negation in polar terms can ac- commodate itself easily to such stories of personal combat. Also, the timeless nature of the negative in such terms can be preserved, since the vanquished combatant, though "slain," is yet somehow still surviving, like Typhon buried by Zeus beneath Sicily and fuming through Aetna, with the constant threat that he may again rise in revolt. Or the two may reign in succession, the vanquished principle taking over periodically, for a season. Or under certain conditions the opposition can be translated into terms more like cooperation, with both powers or principles being necessary to make a world, whereby the principle becomes itself a species of order, too. Even the kingdom of Darkness is not just a rebellion against Light, but has its own modes of organization. Polytheistic mythology could thus readily accommodate temples to rival gods, for there was general agreement that all such powers should be propitiated.

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And the meaner they were, the more reason there was to appease them with cult.

In transforming these resources of polytheistic myth, monistic theology encounters many serious embarrassments. And some years back, when I happened to be dealing with some of my logological speculations in a seminar at Drew University, William Empson's polemical volume, Milton's God (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), came along. Obviously, Empson had decided to play the role of a very bad boy. But what interested me in the book was the fact that its quarrels with Milton's theology would serve so well to help point up my "neutral" concerns with logology.

As judged from the logological point of view, there is no "combat" among terms. In my Rhetoric of Religion, the "Cycle of Terms Implicit in the Idea of 'Order' " is a set of mutually interrelated terms which simply imply one another. Though terms can confront each other as antithetically as "reward" and "punishment," nothing "happens" until they are given functions in an irreversible, personalized narrative. Terms like "disorder," "temptation," "disobedience" come to life when Adam is assigned the role of personally representing the principle of sin, and Satan is assigned the role of ultimate tempter. God has the role of setting up the Order and giving the critical negative order, so terministically necessary before a Fall can even be possible.

There is no one strict way to select the "cycle of terms" for such a chart. In general, the ones I suggest are quite characteristic of the theological tradition for the discussion of which I am offering a pragmatically designed pattern (with, behind it or within it, thoughts on the strategic interwoven difference between temporal priority and logical priority, the distinction itself being logological).

The interesting twist involves the way in which "supernatural" timelessness parallels logological timelessness, with both becoming "mythologized" (that is, translated into terms of a temporally irreversible story, along with an ambiguity whereby history can be viewed as both in time and in principle, for instance when Christ's Crucifixion is both said to have happened historically once, and to be going on still, in principle). Thus, quite as orthodox Christian theology would condemn Arianism because it treated the Son's coming after the Father in a temporal sequence, whereas the Father's priority was but such in principle, so logology would point out that there can be no temporal priority between two such terms. The very relationship that makes a son a son is, by the same token, the relationship that makes a father a father. Thus, in effect, the Father can but "generate" the Son in principle.

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Looking upon both mythology and theology as involved in the problem of translating supernatural "timeless" relationships into terms of temporal sequence, logology tentatively views monotheism as in various ways struggling to "perfect" the simpler rationales of polytheism while still deeply involved in the same ultimate motivational quandaries. But logology approaches the matter this way: If you talk about local or tnrbal divinities, you are on the slope of polytheism. If, instead, you talk about "the divine" in general, lo! you are on the slope of monotheism. (On pp 406-09 of my Language as Symbolic Action, in the article I have mentioned on "Myth, Poetry, and Philosophy," I list several ways in which polytheism "verbally behaved" in this situation. And I do think that on p 408, with regard to my point about "the divine," I stumbled into a real surprise, though my inadequacies as a scholar make me fear that something may have gone wrong with my Greek. I await advices.)

In any case, logology quotes this passage from a letter of St Ambrose:

The devil had reduced the human race to a perpetual captivity, a cruel usury laid on a guilty inheritance whose debt-burdened progenitor had trans- mitted it to his posterity by a succession drained by usury. The Lord Jesus came; He offered His own death as a ransom for the death of all; He shed His own Blood for the blood of all. (Drawn up by His Eminence Peter Cardinal Gasparri, The Catholic Catechism, translated by Reverend Hugh Pope [New York: P J Kenedy & Sons], p 291)

Logology tends to see in such statements vestiges of the tran- sitional stage from polytheism to monotheism when the pagan gods were viewed not as mere figments of the imagination but as actually existent demons. You pay such high ransom only to someone who has terrific power over you, not to someone to whom you needed but to say, "be gone for good," and he'd be gone for good. Logology leaves it for the scruples of theology to work out exactly why that damned nuisance has to be put up with, by an all-powerful Ordainer of all Order. Logology's only contribution to the cause is the reminder that, to our knowledge, the Law, be it St Paul's kind or Bentham's, is the flowering of that humanly, humanely, humanistically and brutally inhumanely ingenious addition to wordless nature, the negative, without which a figure like Satan would be logologically impossible, as also it would be impossible to put next a live wire a sign saying: "Danger, don't touch." Could even heaven be possible, if not defined by reference to its polar contradictory, hell? I have quoted from Fritz Mauthner's Worterbuch der Philosophie: "Die Bejahung ist erst die Verneinung einer Verneinung" (Language as Symbolic Action, "A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language and Postscripts on the Negative," p 419). On the same page, from

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Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques: "Le neant n'est qu'un mot," but think what it has looked like, with "being" grounded in "non- being."

But let's sample a few of the problems that turn up with Milton's theological treatment of some logological situations:

Praise is a basic "freedom of speech." There is great exhilaration in being able to praise, since praise is on the same slope as love. But what of God, as the august recipient of praise? Is He to be a veritable glutton for flattery, with jealous signs of a Jehovah Complex?

However, the principle of hierarchy so intrinsic to Order, and formally perfected in the orders of Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers, could work well in one notable respect. For thus Satan's revolt could be treated as motivation for the obedient revolt of the angels immediately under him. They were loyal to their local leader.

If God in His omnipotence lets the battle rage indecisively for quite some time whereas He could have stopped it the moment it began, there arises the question whether He is as powerful as He is supposed to be, or is cruel. Yet if Milton disposed of the problem from the start, where would the epic be? Under the conditions of polytheism the fight can go on; Fontenrose codifies the stages that can be protracted ad libitum; for both combatants are mighty powers in conflict. But under monotheism there is but one power whose word is power in the absolute, except for the one logological embarrassment that, implicit in polar terms, there is a timeless principle of negativity which not only warns against the wiles of Satan, but creates the need for Satan. The dragging out of the battle is not a theological matter. As The Iliad shows, that's the only way you can write an epic.

Empson seizes upon the notion of the "Fortunate Fall" as a way of indicting the Father on the ground that it proves Adam's fall to have been in the cards from the start and thus to have involved the collusion of God. But as regards the logology of the case, Adam's fall was in the cards from the start in the sense that his task, as the "first" man, was to represent the principle of disobedience that was implicit in the possibility of saying no to the first "thou shalt not." The only way for the story aspect of theology to say that the Law made sin is by translating the statement of such "principles" into temporal terms. Theologically, as a private person, Adam didn't have to sin. But logologically, if he hadn't, the whole rationale of the Bible would have been in ruins. By the logo- logic of the case, he had a task to perform that only the first man could be "principled" enough to perform. Eve couldn't do it. She could but serve as a temptress. For it was a patriarchal culture, and such original

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sin could only be established through the male line. There was a Patripassian heresy that thought of the one God as

offering himself for the redemption of mankind. But the Trinitarian relation between Father and Son allows for a divine self-sacrifice without Patripassianism. Empson considers the same grammar without benefit of logology but in his bad-boy method thus: "What Milton is thinking has to be: 'God couldn't have been satisfied by torturing himself to death, not if I know God; you could never have bought him off with that money; he could only have been satisfied by torturing somebody else to death.' "

There is quite a bit more of such discussion in the pages, "Words Anent Logology," I sent to the members of the class by way of a post mortem on our seminar, later published in Perspectives in Literary Symbolism, edited by Joseph Strelka (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968, pp 72-82). But this should be enough to indicate the relation between theology and logology as revealed by Empson's somewhat naively nonlogological treatment of Milton's theological narrative.

V

A SOMEWHAT oversimplified pattern might serve best to indicate the drift of these speculations. Ideally postulate a tribe of pronouncedly homogeneous nature. Its cultural identity has

developed under relatively autonomous conditions. That is, its contacts with other tribes have been minimal, so that its institutions have taken shape predominantly in response to the local material circumstances on which it depends for its livelihood.

The tribe's poetry and myths would thus emerge out of situations with which the members of the tribe had become familiar in their gradual transformation from wholly dependent speechless organisms, through successive institutionally influenced stages along the way to maturity and death, a major aspect of such institutions being the role of the tribal language in shaping the sense of individual and group identity. In this connection I would place great stress upon the notion that, though the tribe's language and myths were largely the work of adult experiences, usages, and imaginings, they retained the vestiges of their "magical" origins. Important among these would be the child's experiences as living among "higher powers." The proportion of child to adult would thus be mythologically duplicated in the proportion of adult to "supernatural" beings, in a realm also associated with the idea of death (a frequent synonym for which, thanks to the genius of the negative, is "im-

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mortality"). The closeness of the relation between poetry and mythology is

clearly attested by the long tradition of Western "literary" interest in myths of the Greeks. Myths are grounded in beliefs. And beliefs are "myths" to whoever doesn't believe them. And the step from poetry to criticism takes over to the extent that the conditions under which our hypothetical tribe's body of poetry and mythology took form have become notably altered.

One can imagine various such inducements. The tribe's inter- nal development may have introduced new problems (as with the heightening of social inequities). Climatic changes or invasion may cause migration. The tribe may become much more closely associated with some other tribe (by becoming a colony of some imperial power, for instance, or by becoming an imperial power itself). And insofar as the voice of criticism replaces the era of poetry, there is a corresponding step from mythology to theology. At least such is the obvious case with regard to both Jewish and Christian theology, which developed con- troversially (as monotheism versus pagan polytheism), and with tense involvement in problems of empire that radically modified the possibilities of purely internal "tribal" development. But theology as I would place it still does tie in closely with the aspect of mythology that shared the poetic sense of origins in the experiences of childhood, even to the stage when the speechless human organism was but getting the first inklings of the ways with verbal utterance.

Also, it's quite likely that a development purely internal to the medium can favor a great stress upon criticism. The incentives to criticism increase with the invention of writing, and it's doubtful whether criticism could ever realize its fullest potentialities without the acutely anatomical kind of observation that the written version of a work makes possible. At least, after our long reliance on the written or printed text, our reliance on the record has probably hobbled our memory to the point that, whereas a grounding in primitive illiteracy is in all likelihood the best condition for poetry, criticism must write things down, the better to check on all the subtleties of interrelationships among the parts of a text. Yet, although in that respect logology is always much more at home with a text than not, it must constantly admonish itself regarding the limitations of a text as the adequate presentation of a symbolic act, and as instructions for the reader to reenact it. In comparison with a well- edited musical score, for instance, the literary text when considered as instructions for performance is seen to be quite deficient. And think how impoverished the text of a drama is, when viewed as instructions for the reader to reenact it in his imagination.

But what then, in sum, is "logology," in relation to poetry,

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criticism, mythology, theology, and the possible relation that they all have to the realm of nonsymbolic motion in which all such forms of symbolic action are empirically grounded? (That is to say, regardless of whether theology is right or wrong, it is propounded by biological organisms that can themselves propound anything only so long as they are physically alive, hence capable of motion.) Whatever a theologian may be in some supernatural realm, empirically he can't be a theologian except insofar as his symbolizings are enacted through the medium of a body-and logology begins (and also necessarily ends) with questions about his nature thus.

Logology relates to all "ologies" in asking, as its first question, "What all is going on, when someone says or reads a sentence?" There are some things going on, with relation to the specific subject matter of the sentence. And behind or beyond or within that, there are the kinds of processes and relationships that are involved in the saying or un- derstanding of any sentence. That approach to the subject in general sets up logology's first question, which necessarily puts the logologer on the uncomfortable fringes of all the answers to all specific questions. It must start from the fact that logology's first question is a variant of the prime Socratic question, the questioning of itself, and of its relation to nature (whereby it becomes the purely technical analogue of the theologians' "grace" that "perfects" but does not "abolish" the realm of nature's speechlessness).

Even at the risk of resorting somewhat to the mythical, let's end by surveying the field thus, as it looks in terms of logology:

First, although in many respects the speculations of logology bring us much closer to behaviorism than is "naturally" the case with inquiries into the nature of the word, there is one total, unyielding opposition. Behaviorism is essentially monistic, in assuming that the difference between verbal behavior and nonverbal behavior (logology would call it a distinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion) is but a manner of degree. But logology is dualistically vowed to the assumption that we here confront a difference in kind. Hence, it puts primary stress upon DUPLICATION, POLARITY, NEGATION (and countless variations of such) as the very soul of logological inquiry.

And where do such modes of duplication come from? In our nature as sheerly physiological organisms there is the bisymmetry of the body, there are the modes of reciprocating motion (systole and diastole of the heart, the rhythm of respiration, the alternations and com- pensatory balances of walking). And in a vague way the gist of what Newton summed up in his third law of motion, "to every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction," is experienced to the extent that an organism must sense the difference in alterity between pushing a reed

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and colliding with a stone. But a whole further realm of duplication arises from the nature of

discourse as a "reflection" of the nonlinguistic situations in which the human organism's prowess with language is acquired. This is the kind of duplication that shows up most obviously in the critical difference between a physical thing and its corresponding name.

Further, by the nature of language such parallels ("completed" in the relation between spring and a spring song, or between the physical process of planting and a ritual designed to accompany such a process) inevitably give rise to a vast realm of duplication due to the fact that analogy is implicit in the application of the same terms when referring to different situations-and all actual situations are different insofar as no two such situations are identical in their details. Such "idealization," at the very roots of the classifying function intrinsic to the repeated ap- plication of the same terms to different conditions (a property of speech without which no natural language could take form or be learned), itself involves an endlessly repeatable act of duplication.

This analogical aspect of language thus sets up possibilities of further development in its own right, making for the fictive range of identifications and implications and substitutions which add up to the vast complexities of the world as we know it. It becomes a realm in its own right and essentially anthropocentric, in being verbally amplified by our "isms" and "ologies" and mathematical reductions (all instances par excellence of specifically human inventions in the realm of symbolic action).

Such resources can become so highly developed out of them- selves, by analogical extension and the dyplication of such analogies in corresponding material implements and techniques, that the process of duplication can become paradoxically reversed, as in Plato's theory of "imitation." By this twist things are said to "imitate" the "ideas" (logology would call them the "class names") which we apply to them, hence in terms of which we can be said to conceive of them. Here stating thoughts of "essence" in terms of quasi-temporal priority, Platonism concluded that the "ideas" or "forms" (that is, the class names) for the particular existent things of our empirical, everyday world must have been experienced in a supernatural realm prior to their "imperfect imitation" that we see all about us.

As viewed logologically, such "forms" are "prior" in the sense that the name for any class of objects can be viewed as "logically prior" to the particulars classed under that head. And any particular can be called an "imperfect" instance of that class name, because such a word (and its "idea") is not a thing, but a blank to be filled out by a

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definition, which wouldn't be a thing in that sense. Yet no particular thing could perfectly represent the definition. To take Plato's example: there is not one bed which you could point to and say, "That's bed." Nor could any of the countless other beds, variously different in their particulars from one another, and many of them not even made yet, be selected as the bed. You could say, "that's a bed," but not just "bed" or "the bed." Incidentally, though you could thus use an indefinite article, Plato couldn't; for there is no such grammatical particle in his Greek.

That impinges upon another realm of speculation in which logology is properly much interested. Consider the scholastic formula, Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu. There is nothing in the realm of understanding which did not begin in the realm of the senses. Obviously, we are there involved in the ambiguous relation between "images" and "ideas" which directly bears upon the analogical factor operating in the modes of duplication.

To that formula, Leibniz added, nisi intellectus ipse, "except the understanding itself." The strictly logological equivalent of that addition would be a concern with respects in which the given structure of a language (such as its particular grammar, or even such sheer accidental affinities as similarity in sound between particular words in a given idiom) sets up conditions intrinsic to the medium whereby we don't just think with a language, but the language can in effect think for us. Much has already been done along those lines, and much can still be done. Basically, I take it, the study of words as words in contexts asks us to ask how they equate with one another, how they imply one another, and how they become transformed.

There are contexts in the sense that a whole text is the context for any part of the text. There are contexts in the sense of whatever "background," historical, geographical, personal, local, or universal, might be conceived of as the scene to which the symbolic act of the author as agent explicitly or implicitly refers, over and above the nature of the text's sheerly internal relationships.

But now let us consider again the behaviorist angle. On the issue which I am to discuss here, don't fail to consult a truly admirable article, "Explanation, Teleology, and Operant Behaviorism: A Study of the Experimental Analysis of Purposive Behavior," by Jon D Ringen, Philosophy of Science, 43 (1976): 223-53. Though I doubt whether I quite use it the way it was intended, it is so methodologically scrupulous a performance, its accuracy speaks for itself.

There is "operant" conditioning and there is "respondent" conditioning. Pavlov's (or Watson's) was of decidedly a "respondent" sort. The experimental animal responds by salivating when you give it a

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sniff of meat. Test its response quantitatively by checking its flow of saliva. Then, after having by repetition established the association between the sniff of meat and the ringing of a bell, ring the bell without the sniff of meat, and check on the amount of salivation as a response thus conditioned.

B F Skinner experimented with an additional test. Give an animal a goal, set up some simple condition whereby, if it pecks at a certain form (or color) or presses a lever, it operates a mechanism that releases a bit of food. Having been systematically starved to about 4/5 of its natural weight, it does whatever it can in the need for food. The laboratory conditions are so set up that there are few things it can do. As the result of its random motions, it learns to repeat the pressing or pecking operation that is most congruent with its "natural endowment." And conditions are so set up that this operation procures it food. The kind of instrumental "purpose" it thus acquires is called an instance of "molar" behavior. And such methods of "control" can be employed by the experimenter to teach the animal quite specialized modes of behavior, as compared with its natural "repertoire" for getting food. At the same time, of course, there is a kind of "molecular" behavior going on in the animal, the purely physiological correlates of bodily motion such as Pavlov was studying in his technique for measuring the degree of salivation with which his dogs responded to his respondent mode of conditioning.

It is my notion that logology's interest in questions of human "molar" responses would primarily involve considerations of rhetoric and legislation (as with matters of penal law and taxation). But whereas humanistic studies usually show little interest in questions of "molec- ular" behavior, logology must stress this subject since it bears so directly upon the possible correlations between physiological non- symbolic motion and symbolic action along the lines we touched upon in our reference to the air-conditioning plant that had to use propor- tionately more energy when a more exciting motion picture was being shown (which is to say, when the audio-visual motions of the film were being interpreted by the audience in terms of symbolic actions for which the correlative nonsymbolic motions of their bodies put a propor- tionately greater burden upon the air-conditioning mechanism, which could have no direct response to the film itself as a sequence of motions, but which its "sensors" were designed to register, as translated from the film's motions by the audience's actions, which were in turn reflected as correlative bodily motions). I have deliberately left that sentence in its present unwieldy condition, the better to suggest the underlying problematics of such logological concerns, though it is obvious that

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modern technology is developing at a high rate the resources for such clinical inquiries into the "molecular" bodily motions that accompany our ways with symbolic action (apparently including even inquiries into corresponding routines of self-control).

When considering such mythic figures as the Worm Ouroboros, the Amphisbaena, or the world conceived as a mighty Hermaphrodite, one might plausibly derive them from designs purely internal to the resources of symbolicity. For instance, even the range of meanings in the Greek preposition amphi is enough to suggest how the thought of such aroundness and aboutness might be "mythologized" (made narrative) in the image of a creature that went both forwards and backwards. The mutuality of ways in which terms imply one another might well suggest the circular analogy of a creature with its own tail in its mouth (the design here, long before there were dictionaries, suggesting what does characterize the nature of a dictionary, as a wholly self-contained universe of discourse, a kind of "circularity" in the way all the terms "circle back upon" one another). And when the principle of polarity becomes localized in terms of the sexes, it follows as a standard resource of dialectic that such a quasi-antithesis can be "resolved" by the most obvious corresponding term for synthesis.

Logology does tentatively entertain the likelihood that such imaginings may have a grounding in physiologically still existent vestiges of our "ancestral" evolutionary past. However, even if there may happen to be such survivals from our preverbal past, and should they still be manifesting traces of themselves in some of the verbalizing animal's most eschatological myths, logology builds on the assumption that the differentiating modes of sensation as immediately experienced by us animals now contribute most to the imagery out of which a complex texture of concepts and ideas can be developed by the resources of analogy intrinsic to the nature of terms.

By the adjective "intrinsic" here is not necessarily meant a "power" of language. The same property can as accurately be called a mere limitation of language, a limitation due to the fact that we cannot apply the same expression to two situations without to some extent introducing the principle of analogy, metaphor, "fiction," as a "'creative" resource in its own right.

Logology tentatively assumes that, quite as physically grounded "hermaphroditic" tendencies are clearly indicated in many actual in- stances of such "synthesis," so such mythic figures as the primal worm feeding on itself may be a response to physiological conditions (prior even to our uterine stage) still vestigially within us, and acting as a source of imagery. Though one may doubt whether such possibilities may ever

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yield much in the way of further discoveries, I mention them simply to indicate the range of inquiry which would be involved in the study of the human animal's nonsymbolic "molecular" behavior underlying the field of symbolic action.

A more rewarding kind of inquiry along these lines might concern the possibility that the socially morbid featuring of criminality, violence, sadism, terror and the like (many aspects of which show up in folk tales for children) may have a double origin. As a social phenomenon (thus wholly in the realm of symbolic action) the astoundingly large number of mercenaries (writers, actors, and the various kinds of experts employed in the purely technological aspects of such behavior) are obviously producing commodities that are designed to attract ideally a maximum number of viewers as a means of establishing as large a marketplace as possible where the experts in sales promotion can best recommend their clients' products.

The social morbidity of such "art" is greatly aggravated by the nature of current TV realism, in which there is no appreciable difference between a merely simulated act of violence and a real one (which would be the equivalent of saying that there is no appreciable difference be- tween the artistic imitation of suffering in Greek tragedy and the actual brutalities witnessed by the mobs who attended the gladiatorial contests in decadent Rome).

Apologists for the profitable selling of such wares will point to the high degree of violence in, say, the greatest plays of Shakespeare. They make no mention of the fact that the quality of the diction introduces a notably different dimension. And as a matter of fact, writers for the current market operate in a field which, by the very nature of con- temporary realism (or naturalism) as addressed to both eye and ear, wholly obliterates the distinction between real and simulated hap- penings, a confusion so "natural" to the medium that strictly scientific depictions of moon-shots and the like must specifically keep ad- monishing their public when they are not recording an instrument in motion but are merely simulating such.

If one must be so scrupulously specific in keeping that distinction clear, what then of a child who watches quasi-real killings time after time, with no warnings that the simulations appeal to a child's imaginativeness in a way whereby, after a few years of such fare, that child has "been through" all those experiences. The incidents have become "moral" in the most etymologically accurate sense of the term, that is, "customary." In that medium, such modes of conduct have become established as "the norm," and the child has been "educated" to think of human relations in such terms.

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Recall the case of the lawyer who recently tried to get his young defendant declared innocent because the boy had been greatly influenced by the depictions of violence on the Tube. I doubt whether even a Clarence Darrow could have used that defense successfully, if only because there is such a vast investment in the depiction of violence. Yet I personally go along with those who believe that "entertainment," as so conceived, does function as a morbid kind of education. But the pressures of the market are such that the suppliers of commodities for that market must sacrifice a lot when cutting down on violence and hopped-up sex, either of which can be a substitute for the other except when attacks are directed with equal insistence against both. For any radical elimination of them both would leave a void that other forms of symbolic action are not equipped to fill.

But how far should we go when asking what is the source of such appeal in these modes of substitution, depicting "criminal Christs" whose "mission" it is to take on the burden of our guilt, suffer their imitated passions in our behalf (as is also the case of "real victims," offered for the entertainment, fascination even, I mean for that inferior species of the "tragic pleasure" we get from digesting the literal news of each day's crime and disaster)?

Might not the search for such sources of appeal lead us back to a kind of purely physiological frustration? I do not refer to ways whereby imaginary substitutes help us "compensate" by fantasies that fulfill our wishes for dominance, sexual gratification, or vengeance, and like wishes that are both stimulated and repressed by factors in the social order. I have in mind a more paradoxical kind of frustration, namely: If human bodies have been selectively disciplined through countless years of prehistory to endure certain purely physical kinds of strain, might the conditions of civilization frustrate the direct expression of such aptitudes as get developed by, and inherited from, the conditions that prevailed prior to the conditions of civilization?

To illustrate by an oversimplified anecdote, a spirited youth, living almost aimlessly in a modern slum, encounters kinds of frustration that a young healthy Eskimo, at a time before Western civilization had contributed so greatly to the deterioration of his tribal culture, could not have had the slightest notion of. The physicality of his purposes would have been clear. They would have been developed by traditions that also developed his ability to undergo the kinds of effort and corresponding strain indigenous to such a mode of livelihood. The conditions of his situation would also have selectively developed the physical and at- titudinal resources consistent with the purposes that the needs for sur- vival under those conditions called for.

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Insofar as such an endowment was developed in answer to the "challenge" that the conditions themselves helped define, is there not a frustration of the aptitudes that are, as it were, "inborn" in the very "genetic endowment" of a species thus selectively trained, their bodies thus having had "bred into" them whatever abilities to perform are by the same token needs to so perform? After all, I am but saying that, "inbred" in birds there is the ability to fly; and insofar as that ability is not given expression, they are frustrated, in their very nature 'repressed."

Viewed thus, the spirited youth who becomes a "delinquent" might more accurately be thought of as seeking the "moral equivalent of war." But wars are largely social constructs, thus motivated by disorders in the realm of symbolicity; and we are here asking about a possible reduction to the realm of sheer nonsymbolic, physiological motion. The kinds of strain or conflict that are being assumed here, and that the organism's "genetic endowment" needs to "express" if it is not to be "frustrated," would be wholly in the realm of motion. One gets glimpses of such a motive in athletic efforts (now invariably corrupted from the very start by their tie-in with modes of decadent symbolicity known as professional sports). They are grounded in an asceticism of training, training to undergo (and thus express) the potentialities of the physiological organism to endure strain, potentialities that would otherwise be denied expression.

In an early book (1935; Permanence and Change, second revised edition [Los Altos, California: Hermes Publications, 1954]), 1 exercised considerably about a corresponding moral conflict that characterized Nietzsche's cult of tragedy, and that I related also to a salient aspect of his style, its restless hankering after "perspectives by incongruity," in the service of an Umwerthung aller Werthe. In summing things up some four decades later, I find that related speculations should be recalled. Recalling them, I might sum up the whole "logological" situation thus:

There is (1) the principle of polarity with regard to the qualitative distinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion. This is the prime source of duplication, insofar as the experiences of bodily sensation shape the materials which language draws upon as the source of its "fictions," in the realm of symbolicity. Within the realm of symbolicity itself there is (2) the kind of polarity that the negative adds to nonsymbolic nature. It itself splits into the propositional (is-is not) pair and the hortatory (do-do not) pair. In the realm of the body as a sheerly nonsymbolic physical organism there is (3) the polarity of the distinction between the need for struggle (in the effort to attain the means of livelihood) and the rewards of relaxation (when a hunger has been sated).

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In a highly complex social structure the resources of symbolicity are such that the sheer physiology of such a distinction becomes greatly confused by symbolic factors (property relationships, for instance). But we have tried to indicate why we assume that it can function quite paradoxically as a motive. (Leisure, for instance, can function as a mode of psychological unemployment, with twists whereby people can "make work" for themselves by "inventing" confused purposes and relation- ships.)

Formal symbolic structures might be reduced to three terministic relationships: equations (identifications), implications, transformations. For instance, if some particular "ism" or "ology" or personality type or location or whatever is explicitly or implicitly presented as desirable or undesirable, it would be identified with corresponding "values"-and such would be "equations." "Implications" would figure insofar as one term explicitly or implicitly involved a cycle or family of terms, as the idea of "order" implies a companion-term, "disorder," or implicit in the idea of an "act" is the idea of an "agent" who performs the act. By "transformations" would be meant what would be the "from-what," "through-what," "to-what" developments in a symbolic structure. Such unfoldings (from potentiality to actualization via a "peripety" of some sort) can be either narrative or purely conceptual or both. The question of "transformations" necessarily impinges upon the shifting choices between temporal, narrative priority (yesterday/today/tomorrow) and logical priority (the syllogistic first premise/second premise/conclusion design-or the dialectical notion of a class name as "prior" to any particulars that can be classed under that head).

In this connection, the route from logology to theology is via a logological criticism of Plato's mythology because it assigns to his ideal forms a realm narratively prior to their mode of classification as in effect general names for worldly particulars included under those various "ideal" heads. Such a procedure would be called the "temporizing of essence," in that it does "mythologize" (that is, translate into terms of story) a verbal resource of classification that has no temporal dimension.

Since "eternity" is also a kind of nontemporality, the conditions are present whereby the "timelessness" of the supernatural realm after death (by extension involving a realm prior to all wordly existence) ambiguously overlaps upon the purely technical sense of timelessness in the logological sense of polar terms timelessly implying each other. And inasmuch as theology necessarily uses narrative terms with regard to the emergence of time out of timelessness, logology's business is to discuss such embarrassments that survive, even after theology has critically gone beyond mythology.

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But looking in the other direction, whereas logology is vowed by sheer definition to be much concerned with the "molecular behavior" of the body (thereby going along radically with behaviorist inquiries), logology must insist categorically upon a polar distinction between verbal and nonverbal behavior, in contrast with the behaviorists' notion that they are there concerned with but a difference of degree. Logology's distinction between the symbolic and nonsymbolic realms is at least as absolute as any distinction between "mind" and "body," though it has a notably different way of getting there. In fact, the distinction is as basic as that between bread and the word "bread." Or as the distinction between the sea as a "mother symbol" and the sea as the physical body of salt-water it is, vastly a sloshing-around.

With regard to the logological distinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion, it makes no difference whether the human animal "thinks with language," or "thought" and "sym- bolicity" are identical. In either case, insofar as the speechless human organism acquires familiarity with a tribal language there arises a duality of motivational realms whereby the human animal's way with symbols is not reducible to terms of its correlative molecular behavior.

But when I read of hermeneutic experts who congratulate themselves that the traditional Cartesian split between subject and object, thought and extension, is being avoided, I would note that there are two quite different ways of considering any such development. If Descartes' dualism is attacked as a "psychology of consciousness," it is in trouble. But we should not let any reservations regarding the Cartesian formulation of the dualism serve as a device by implication to discredit the dualistic principle itself. For if we do so, we are in effect implying monism either by smuggling in undeclared vestiges of idealism, or by willy-nilly subscribing to the "materialistic" oversimplification of behaviorism. But logology's "dramatistic" (or dialectical) view of language as symbolic action is in its very essence realistic-and such a view is necessarily dualistic, since man is the typically symbol-using animal, and the linguistic invention of the negative is enough in itself to build a dualism, even beyond the other two polarities we also included in our summation.

At least as a tentative working principle, logology holds to the notion that the relations between poetry and mythology (and thence via criticism and writing to theology, plus wholly secular offshoots or disrelated growths, if there are such) must in all likelihood embody "imaginative" traces intrinsic to any symbolic (that is, human) medium in its own right, along with traces of the formative experiences un- dergone while the human animal is gradually acquiring familiarity with

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the medium (such as its initiation in the ways of a tribal language). And such traces of the inceptive are all the more likely to be still with us since experiences of that sort are not a matter merely of a human organism's infantile past, but are ever born anew. For language is innately in- novative. No one could go on making his words mean the same, even if he expended his best efforts to make them stay put.