The order and connection of ideas follows the order and connection of things.
Spinoza, Ethics, II, P7
We describe matter in figures of speech because the figure of speech is what matter indestructibly is.
F. J. E. WoodbridgeFootnote 1
BURKE AS MODERN ONTOLOGIST?
In 1941, in his bellwether text The New Criticism, John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974), poet, literary theorist, and influential editor of the Kenyon Review, called for an “ontological critic.” Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) was the logical candidate. Burke had been writing important “speculative” literary criticism since the 1920s, publishing essays in the Kenyon Review and the Southern Review, two New Critical journals. Yet reviewing Burke's The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941) that year, Ransom objected to Burke's “strenuous rationality” and his “effort to find in a poem . . . dialectical or social ‘truth.’”Footnote 2 Though Burke would be associated with Ransom's New Criticism, one critic then observed that their two books “conspicuously mark discernible poles of literary opinion concerning the nature and purpose of poetry.”Footnote 3
The 1920s modernist incarnation of The Dial had launched Burke's career. While he worked as an all-around editor, the magazine printed his stories, essays, reviews, and translations of Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, and Oswald Spengler, and serialized his novel Towards a Better Life alongside essays by Bertrand Russell, Georges Santayana, and John Dewey. During the 1920s and 1930s, he also freelanced for the Rockefeller Foundation, researching drug addiction and crime.Footnote 4 After The Dial folded in 1929, Burke and his young family lived simply on his rustic New Jersey farm while he eked out a living writing and teaching part-time at various colleges. During the Depression, Burke became involved with the Communist Party-dominated League of American Writers (LAW), publishing in left journals such as the New Masses, the New Republic and Science and Society, as well as mainstream ones including the Saturday Review of Literature. Though never a party member, Burke called himself “communist,” siding with the Stalinists throughout that decade.Footnote 5
As an outspoken 1920s modernist aesthete and then a Depression-era and mid-century theorist, Burke was also a public intellectual. He makes noteworthy cameos in intellectual histories of the 1930s literary left.Footnote 6 Called a “critic's critic,” writers and thinkers as disparate as Ralph Ellison, Robert Penn Warren, Alan Tate, Susan Sontag, Erving Goffman, C. Wright Mills, and Edward Said have all claimed his influence.Footnote 7
The New York Herald Tribune hailed Burke's first book of critical essays, Counter-statement (1931), as having “revolutionary importance” for bringing a “natural . . . clarity into the field of aesthetics.”Footnote 8 The next seven critical books detailed how aesthetic relations operated. Permanence and Change (1935) and Attitudes toward History (1937) began to develop Burke's signature theory of “symbolic action”—socially situated linguistic responses and their cues—to be expanded in The Philosophy of Literary Form. A Grammar of Motives (1945), presenting “dramatism,” and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) have long been considered classics of theoretical criticism. Burke claimed that “poetry” or literature was the ideal place to view social motives; The Rhetoric of Religion (1961) further suggested that “logology,” the study of theological terms, revealed subterranean verbal hierarchies. Language as Symbolic Action (1966) was his final major compilation, though he continued to teach, publish, and lecture.
An originator of modern rhetorical analysis, over six decades Burke argued that all communication was creative, persuasive, and socially embedded, offering an early perspective on the century's linguistic turn. Today we consider this idea a premise for sophisticated critical thinking. In Metahistory, Hayden White credited Burke with helping him frame his own theoretical question: “What are the ‘artistic’ elements of a ‘realistic’ historiography?” Or, should historians reconceive their narratives as art rather than as representation?Footnote 9
Burke's stock rose as post-structuralism, reader-response, and Marxist critical theory launched successful attacks on the hermetic New Criticism in American university literature departments during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Since then he has been duly recognized for wittily anticipating central tenets of those theories. Suggesting that linguistic behaviors are part of wider cultural “rationalizations,” originating concepts such as “perspective by incongruity” and “terministic screens,” and wryly recasting terms such as “piety” and “conversion,” Burke brought a modernist's ironic eye to the epistemological presumptions behind literature.
Debra Hawhee has described the early Burke as a thoroughgoing Nietzschean perspectivist and Timothy Crusius has claimed Burke for a non-metaphysical “postphilosophy” like that of neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty.Footnote 10 Certainly, what Burke said of Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge in 1937 also applied to himself:
You may decide that all philosophies are nonsense . . . Or you may become a kind of referee for other men's contests . . . The new perspective . . . would not be simply a rival perspective; it would be a theory of perspectives . . . its contribution would reside in its ability to make the perspective process itself more accessible to consciousness.Footnote 11
Burke also proposed that “language uses us,” and in later work argued that things were “the signs of words.”Footnote 12 Thus some critics read him as a “structuralist” or linguistic determinist with parallels to Roman Jakobson or Ferdinand Saussure.Footnote 13
Burke, however, defies simple intellectual categories. Despite finding “perspectives” the volatile center of modern thought, Burke baffled later antifoundationalists by attempting to create a meta-perspective to rebalance an intellectual world that Darwin and Nietzsche had set askew. He claimed that we might still glean a “skeptical grounding for our own certainties” by using “conscious dialectic discipline” to play “moral weightings against one another.”Footnote 14
Throughout his career, Burke called himself a philosophic “realist.” He explained literary creativity using a modern concept of body and a modern realist epistemology. Writing for a skeptical century, Burke still maintained the central realistic tenets: (1) the independent existence and intelligibility of an external world beyond the mind, and (2) the substantive meaning and existence of universal, collective, or general terms, significantly that of “man,” the “symbol-using animal.” For twentieth-century realists, ideas were real events—natural objects with material effects. Intelligibility and communicability relied on linguistic universals—generating and related to further ideas and effects. A modernist with a naturalistic orientation, Burke merged a quasi-Platonism with biological and psychological theories of process and function to arrive at his original American aesthetics.Footnote 15
Since Burke emphasized perspectives, function, and process, interpreters who consider him in light of today's broad definition of pragmatism do, with caveats, call him a pragmatist.Footnote 16 Yet realism stood alongside arguments for a perspectival and sociohistorical approach throughout his career. Since his insights remain curiously fresh, one asks, how did his thought work these tensions?
Burke's realism consistently overrides his pragmatism. Some scholars have complained that “dramatism” and “logology” forgo earlier radically critical views for essentialist ones.Footnote 17 Fredric Jameson even charged Burke with a retrograde “ideology of representation” purveying “metaphysically coherent meanings and organic forms,” a volley the octogenarian swiftly returned. Recently, one scholar criticized his “ethereal principles” and “distracting mysticism.”Footnote 18 Was Burke's antiessentialism irresolute? Or might we better understand him as determined to fashion what Sidney Hook called a “home-baked objective relativism?”Footnote 19
Burke scholars have certainly referenced his realism. Robert Wess describes it as “group realism” and “rhetorical realism,” and Bryan Crable defends dramatism as “ontological and literal”— deliberately describing extramental principles. Walter R. Fisher and Wayne Brockriede find Burke a “linguistic realist,” noting rhetoric's inherent realistic bias, and Bernard Brock and Andrew Kidd call him a “critical realist.” Only one scholar, Robert Heath, has made realism central to an extended study. But while Heath considers Platonic dialectic and gives essentialist readings of Burke's use of Aristotelian categories, he leaves out American realism.Footnote 20
In the closing argument of Permanence and Change (1935), Burke likened his position to that held by a “new realist,” and no scholar has yet noted its significance.Footnote 21 This essay attempts to correct that omission by showing how modern American realism, especially new realism, influenced the development of central features of Burke's original American aesthetics. Probing the historical roots of Burke's philosophic views allows apparently divergent positions to appear as prongs of a continuous argument and exposes reverberations of philosophic realism in twentieth-century American intellectual culture.
BURKE, NATURALISTIC REALISM, AND UNIVERSALS IN THE 1920S
Burke has been studied by literary critics, communications experts and sociologists, but neglected by academic philosophers. Yet he is part of a tradition of philosophic realism in the United States traceable to the Scottish “commonsense” moralists whose ideas predominated in American colleges from the colonial period up through the Civil War. Philosophic idealism replaced realism in the wake of academics’ German training and the sea change to the secular research institution.Footnote 22 Late nineteenth-century Kantian idealism represented advanced thought in philosophy departments when pragmatist William James notably challenged his idealist Harvard colleague, Josiah Royce. Subsequently, several of Royce's and James's former students launched a scientific “new realism” in opposition to idealism in the early twentieth century.
Despite pragmatism's present revival and ascription to many early twentieth-century intellectuals, it then still had limited influence over academic philosophy.Footnote 23 American philosophic realism was a going concern. No less than C. S. Peirce and Santayana argued realistic positions. Educated in the 1910s, Burke witnessed the rush of new views in philosophy, social science, and art. Period intellectuals such as Dial publisher James Sibley Watson, influential collector Albert Barnes, Lewis Mumford, and Dewey all maintained that modern aesthetics could offer views as “objective” and systematic as science.Footnote 24
Burke's interest in the workings of language began in childhood, and flourished in Manhattan's literary salons and magazines, but his formal philosophic training was brief. After one term studying European literature at Ohio State University, in February of 1917 he entered Columbia University to major in classics and philosophy but stayed for just under two terms.Footnote 25 At Columbia he befriended philosopher Richard McKeon and poet and journalist Matthew Josephson. They read philosophy with Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, then considered one of the most influential “new naturalist” philosophers of the early twentieth century's “insurgency” and cofounder of the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods. A modern metaphysical realist with a strong empirical bent, Woodbridge championed Aristotle, Spinoza, and Darwin, later guiding McKeon's dissertation on Spinoza.Footnote 26 Burke's library also contains multiple editions of Spinoza's writings, all heavily annotated.
Burke's generation dismissed the “genteel tradition” of philosophic idealism and embraced a lively naturalism. They held with Dewey that Darwin had “conquered the phenomenon of life for the principle of transition, and thereby freed the new logic for application to mind and morals and life.”Footnote 27 “We are all naturalists now,” declared “critical realist” philosopher Roy Wood Sellars in 1922.Footnote 28 This naturalism had tenets traceable back to early modern philosophy and designated philosophies as different as Santayana's and Dewey’s: Nature was a contiguous whole, humanity within it. Burke considered his own thinking naturalistic, but his attention to rhetoric and aesthetics put him at odds with reductive philosophical and literary naturalisms, while his concern with action and history distinguished him from idealists and the New Critical formalists.
During Burke's sojourn, Columbia naturalists included three major philosophical realists: William P. Montague, Walter B. Pitkin and Woodbridge.Footnote 29 In 1910, Montague and Pitkin joined with Ralph Barton Perry and Edwin B. Holt of Harvard, and Edward G. Spaulding and Walter T. Marvin of Princeton and Rutgers, to issue their manifesto in the Journal of Philosophy.Footnote 30 Their book, The New Realism: Cooperative Studies in Philosophy (1912), intended to make philosophy “scientific”—naturalistic and collaborative, its knowledge cumulative.Footnote 31
Insisting on an intelligible external “reality,” these “new realists” countered late idealism's “Absolute Knower” with independent active subjects immersed in a living environment. Since science required shared concepts, Perry attacked idealists for a solipsistic “egocentric predicament” that made existence reliant on a mind. Montague asserted that reality was not “dependent upon the fact that anybody experiences it, perceives it, conceives it, or is in any way aware of it.”Footnote 32 With Woodbridge, neorealists stressed that “structures”—dynamic relations described by the sciences and mathematics—began in an actual physical nature; discovery was temporal and empirical. Even geometry was a posteriori.Footnote 33
Like other students, Burke read William James and Bertrand Russell, the pillars of new realism.Footnote 34 “Relations,” personal and interactive for James, logical for Russell, connected them both to neorealism. The “radical empiricist” James had claimed “conjunctive relations” such as “with,” “and,” “along,” and so on, as real in situ, and characterized “knowing” as a relation between two separate things. If a and b were real, their relation R, whatever it was, was equally real—a public, accessible fact.Footnote 35 Russell also treated conjunctions, prepositions, and relations (e.g. Edinburgh is “north” of London), as linguistically real. And, wrote Russell, “Nearly all the words in the dictionary stand for universals.”Footnote 36 While James saw any cosmic coherence as the transitory product of relations between individual things, for new realists “structure” was no happenstance but an order of dynamic relations to be revealed and communicated by modern biology, psychology, mathematics, and physics.Footnote 37
As one philosopher later observed, the Columbia naturalists—realists and pragmatists—were responsible for changing the terminology from the remote “matter, motion, and energy” to a more immediate one of “events, qualities, and relations,” and for stressing the distinction between a term and its referent.Footnote 38 Woodbridge had described consciousness as “a relation,” arising from “the interaction between organism and environment.”Footnote 39 Incorporating Charles Sherrington's discovery of a central nervous system, new realists proposed that the neurological subject directly engaged the ecology of physical and mental “objects.”Footnote 40 We “actualized consciousness” when “selecting” features such as color or shape from an amorphous field much as a searchlight scanned the ocean.Footnote 41
In accepting the empirical reality of geometry and logic, realists also accepted the validity of universal terms, the names or titles of classes of “essentially” similar things, such as “cat” to name all cats, “chair” for chairs, and so on. While Platonists described individual members of a class “participating” in the logically prior “Form,” Aristotelians and Russell reversed it, finding universals immanent in particulars and abstracted from sense experiences.Footnote 42 Neorealists accepted both positions, claiming that “immanence and transcendence are compatible and not contradictory predicates.”Footnote 43
Thus new realists resisted nominalism, which held that universal terms covering disparate individuals were merely “linguistic conveniences” or, as David Hume had concluded, names for accidental associations linked by temporal sequence or habit.Footnote 44 Perry found it impossible for Hume “to know that the world is a flux, unless this general flux character could somehow be repeatedly and consistently asserted at different moments.”Footnote 45 In this way, neorealists attempted to “engraft the Platonic realism of logical entities upon [a] naïve realism,” though no naturalist endorsed a separate world of Forms.Footnote 46 While philosopher Morris R. Cohen approved the realists’ “revival of the Platonic insight,” their fusion had its problems.Footnote 47 Dewey challenged privileging certain natural events as “knowledge,” jibing that realists remained part of an “epistemological industry.”Footnote 48 Direct realists were also compelled to draw awkward metaphysical distinctions between “subsistent” logical “objects” and “existent” sensible ones, and “critical” realists soon demanded explanations for perceptual errors—hallucinations and optical illusions.Footnote 49
Some naturalists read Plato's doctrine of Forms as static teleology, though Plato had also described relational Forms such as those of size, identity and difference, oneness and multiplicity as generative and dynamic, determining individuals’ relational characters—their moving definitional boundaries. Later, discussing dramatism and universals, Burke explained, “a dramatist stress upon act suggests an origin in verbs,” which are “always abstract and generic,” noting that “a key word of traditional realism was being or essence . . . a verbal noun, the most abstract and general form of the abstract and general act.”Footnote 50
Burke warily moved towards Platonism in order to provide a stable concept of the human. Plato's conversational dialectic later would serve as his paradigm for moral and social development.Footnote 51 Reviewing New Humanist Paul Elmer More's The Religion of Plato in 1922, Burke found his own hero, Spinoza, whose naturalistic psychology put humanity inside nature, within “close range of Plato,” suggesting that each thinker found demonstrations perfectly synchronous with their ethical insights, i.e. their logics of geometrical method or dialectic. These logics exposed “a universal structure” and “this structure's relation to human standards of excellence.” Burke responded as an aesthete to Nietzsche's transvaluation of values, deciding that even “if a system of ethic” could no longer be considered absolutely “true,” an ordered presentation might be “absolutely beautiful.”Footnote 52
Following the review's publication, fellow writer Waldo Frank and Burke exchanged letters. An idealist, Frank pressed Burke for consistency and argued absolutist metaphysics: “beauty” was the recognition of a harmonious subsuming of parts to a “whole” that grounded “truth.”Footnote 53 But James, Russell, pragmatists, and new realists had all rejected aspects of this idea. New realists used logic and geometry as evidence of universal intelligibility dispensing with an Absolute. Burke claimed further that with “the connecting link of logic,” one could derive metaphysics from aesthetics instead of the reverse. Beauty was “implicated in this universal logic,” and at moments there was “absolutely no difference between the mathematician and the artist.” The source was real and external: “whatever facet of the universe we may [personally] emphasize . . . we are limited and compelled by something which exists outside the mind . . . the one universal logic” in explaining “the same primal substance.”Footnote 54
Burke wished to “escape out the back door” rather than commit to Plato's ideal Forms. Citing critic Remy de Gourmont he observed that “man is an intellectual constant” and suggested a “generic man” to be, contra religion, “the measure of all things human.” Modern aesthetics was the naturalistic discovery of these human universals. “It matters not whether the universe is harmonious or chaotic; man loves harmony.” Psychology should move “from the study of formal reality to the study of those permanent laws which govern his desires.”Footnote 55
The supra-natural aspect of Forms remained troubling. In 1924 Burke told Malcolm Cowley, “My own nebbing in the matter revolves about the displacement of Plato's universals.” His “The Poetic Process” (1925) naively answered nominalists who found general terms “hypostatization” by suggesting, “we need but take [Plato’s] universals out of heaven and situate them in the human mind (a process begun by Kant), making them not metaphysical but psychological.”Footnote 56 Robert Heath suggests that Burke wanted to “discover the universals of appeal in the generic mind.”Footnote 57
Permanent laws of “generic man” involved active bodies. Neorealistic “neutral monism” characterized nature as initially formless yet potentially intelligible via neurological and psychological engagement.Footnote 58 In 1924, Cambridge critic I. A. Richards suggested a new “speculative criticism” to describe the total psychological processes in authors and readers that produced beauty as a physiological “effect.” Burke offered his rhetorical–neurological theory of aesthetic form in “Psychology and Form” and “The Poetic Process.”Footnote 59 Instead of “beauty,” he examined processes of appeal calling form “species-genetic,” arguing that humans possessed an innate “potentiality for being interested by certain processes or arrangements,” such as “crescendo, contrast, comparison, balance, repetition, disclosure, reversal . . . and so on.” These were “minor divisions of the two major ‘forms,’ unity and diversity,” that were tied to our experiences of the natural world's rhythms as, for instance, in falling bodies, storm cycles, growing crops, and sex.Footnote 60
These early essays augured Burke's theory of “symbolic action” as a total physiological “method.” Artists tapped universal forms: “Form is the creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite.” The “temporary frustrations” involved were “simply a more involved kind of satisfaction.” As universals, while “forms need not be prior to experience, they are certainly prior to the work of art exemplifying them,” since “Form is the appeal.”Footnote 61
Whether instantiated repetitively or progressively, form was “emotionally natural,” and its creation and reception neurological:
desire is perceptible, as when a succession of monosyllables arouses the need of a polysyllabic word to break their monotony . . . Systole and diastole, alternation of the feet in walking, inhalation and exhalation . . . A rhythm is a promise the poet makes to the reader . . . in all rhythmic experiences one's “muscular imagination” is touched.Footnote 62
Burke's rhetorical–neurological criticism had used contemporary realism to answer I. A. Richards's call. The Depression revealed the body's social situation.
NEUROLOGY, TELEOLOGY, AND FORM IN THE 1930S
The Depression was difficult for Burke; besides suffering the loss of The Dial and the commercial failure of his novel, he divorced, and soon married his wife's younger sister. Americans were now alienated from the purposeful bodily activity and social integration afforded by labor. Advising writers on pro-socialist propaganda, Burke retained his earlier neurological essentialism describing a biological telos orienting the species individual. His unpublished “Auscultation, Creation, and Revision” (1932–3) complained that 1920s aesthetes too recklessly abandoned their earlier biological critiques for those of Marxian materialism. Both symbols and technology remained tied to bodily structure: “Insofar as we retain hands, and insofar as levers themselves are merely stronger hands, we may expect us all to have ‘hand thoughts.’” Appeal addressed a universal body; writers should recognize that bourgeois and proletarian were similar.Footnote 63
The articles “Boring from Within,” “War, Response, and Contradiction,” “The Nature of Art under Capitalism,” and “My Approach to Communism” from 1931 to 1934 noted that both “naturalism and religion” fused work, aesthetics, and ethics. Burke counseled propagandists to heed Americans’ Protestant ethic; he also defended popular commercial entertainments for sustaining workers despite Marxist dismissals.Footnote 64 Rejecting “class-consciousness,” he insisted that all behavior was based in the common human plant and asked writer Robert Cantwell to press Marxists for a definition of economically antithetical classes, “whereby I can distinguish the acts, thoughts, criteria, method of sustenance, etc. of the proletarian class from those of the bourgeois class.” Antithetical class concepts were false universals, “mankind” an authentic one.Footnote 65
Burke endorsed Enlightenment terminology when it coincided with realistic principles. Invited by the LAW to speak to the 1935 Writers’ Congress, calling himself “bourgeois,” his “Revolutionary Symbolism in America” suggested that writers advocate for “the people” instead of “the worker.” Tedious labor held no appeal and divisive class rhetoric failed to embody its primary purpose of social cohesion: “In the last analysis, art strains toward universalization . . . it seeks to consider the problems of man, not of classes of men.”Footnote 66 Though it provoked hostility, Burke's call for an inclusive rhetoric was soon echoed by the Communist Party's order for a popular front.Footnote 67 Apparently, this rhetorical shift wholly convinced him. Despite receiving wiser counsel regarding the Spanish Civil War and the Moscow trials, Burke remained a vocal fellow traveler defending Moscow and advising nonintervention in Europe until Pearl Harbor.Footnote 68
Neorealists’ psychology of purpose had bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Darwinists, they dismissed a preordained “chain of being,” yet observed that teleology as psychic “purpose” remained a necessary category for thinking or acting. In a 1903 essay, Woodbridge wrote that though we might “deny design in nature” and “reject final causes as explanations,” we could not “define a single problem, isolate a single field of inquiry, determine the requisites of the solution of a single question” without it.Footnote 69 Montague distinguished the new realist position on the “naturalization of teleology” from those of “mechanists and parallelists” who saw “the cerebral machine” as “blind,” and “vitalists and interactionists” who accepted teleology as caused by a “supernatural entity such as a vital force or soul.” Recognizing “the telos of a process” and an “efficacy of purpose” for living things “possessing mind,” they denied any “non-natural factor operating outside the material system.”Footnote 70
A consistent theme of 1920s criticism by T. S. Eliot, Joseph Wood Krutch, and others was how the naturalistic discrediting of religious teleology had demoralized moderns.Footnote 71 Using arguments congruent with earlier realism, Burke's 1935 Permanence and Change responded directly to these anxieties over teleological collapse now represented by the fall of the economy. Its subtitle was “An Anatomy of Purpose” and it “search[ed] for arguments . . . whereby Purpose may be restored as a primary term for motivation,” perhaps not in “nature” as a whole, but certainly as “applying to the nature of man.” He offered a neurological–linguistic understanding of purpose as a “metabiology,” by which symbolic form expressed the purposeful quest for sustenance.Footnote 72
Without claiming teleology as actual cosmological order, Burke delicately pushed purpose back into nature by demonstrating expectations based upon intelligible relations that were innate to all living things. Alongside the human, Permanence and Change bursts with flora and fauna; without formal language, these creatures represented animating principles. The opening section, entitled “All Living Things Are Critics,” described an experienced trout warily rejecting a baited hook and Ivan Pavlov's salivating dog interpreting a ringing bell. Hungry dogs in gestalt experiments recognized relations of “large” to “small”—anticipating where food would be placed in bowls of varying sizes. Was such contextualization mere stimulus-response conditioning or interpretive “higher-order thinking?” Besides Sherrington’s, Burke ransacked behaviorist experiments by Richard Paget, Pavlov, John B. Watson, Hermann von Helmholtz, and William McDougall to illustrate his arguments for a purposive body negotiating its environment via “structured” linguistic relations.Footnote 73 Following Veblen's and Frazer's anthropologies, he found a vestigial “animism” retained in modern habits, and insisted that our animal faith in everyday order and meaning was wholesome method for survival, not “pathetic fallacy.” Our linguistic labors were more than “occupations”; infused with desire, they were “preoccupations.”Footnote 74
Editors had rejected the arguments of “Auscultation” against Marxian materialism and base–superstructure causality. Hound and Horn's Lincoln Kirstein called it “curiously unreal” and suggested that Burke remained caught in the 1920s.Footnote 75 Two years later, right before Permanence and Change was printed, Burke sent McKeon the manuscript and discussed relations:
Pragmatism, as the philosophy of science, seems to have led people, even in many non-pragmatic schools, to discuss symbolism with relation to operations. But there is also a legitimate symbolism of relationships. (One group may perfect linguistic implements . . . another group may perfect other linguistic implements . . . when you bring these two groups together there would have to be another order of language . . . for handling the relationships that arose from the coexistence of two distinct operational patterns.) . . . I would not hold . . . attitudes as are symbolized by totem, racial, religious, national or class concepts are merely “magical” simply because one can't find objective [concrete] referents for them. Relationships are social facts . . .Footnote 76
As modernity transformed our methods, we required a further unifying order of abstraction “biologically grounded” in patterns of need. Poets and critics operated at this intersection.Footnote 77
Along with our dependence on “purpose,” new realism had supported a relational psychology and linguistics. Intelligibility depended on context. Marvin had claimed that acquiring a Spinozistic perspective—sub specie aeternitatus—is what “all men . . . attempt to do almost every moment . . . namely, to foresee the future” and, “asserting the position of any term in time is always done by means of a larger system as a logical background.”Footnote 78 To define a “situation,” interpreting inchoate experience, Burke used two versions of “perspective” in tandem—limiting and lengthening views. “Context” did not mean purely provisional or historically conditioned meanings. Instead, Burke grounded his analysis of shifting relations in a perceiving body continuously referring the creature, human or not, to a larger “whole.” His “perspective by incongruity” dissociated habitually associated concepts—he called it “verbal atom-cracking”—to “see around corners,” unlocking a wider view.Footnote 79
Burke's explicit reference to “the new realist” appears in the closing argument of Permanence and Change in a “qualified defense” of D. H. Lawrence's provocation from Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922): “Growing crops make the sun shine.” In his “Science and Poetry” (1926), I. A. Richards had charged Lawrence with “ethical universe-building,” or revising common sense to fit his vitalism. Then, in a discussion that would become foundational for New Critics and echoed by positivists, Richards separated empirically based “statements” of fact from Lawrence's “pseudo-statements”—poetic utterances conjuring ethical possibilities.Footnote 80
Burke demurred. Since all behaviors, mental or physical, changed universal relations in toto, there was no absolute ontological difference between poetic symbolic “actions” and the mechanical “responses” that the behaviorists examined. Poetry was as valid a mode of communication as science; both heuristics used analogy and metaphor. Though too blithely ignoring science, Lawrence did “explain a partial event by reference to a total event.” Crops and sun were each partial perspectives on the entire relations of the solar system; positivists merely reversed the causality. Burke observed, “If there is a total causal structure . . . any given selection from the whole may be discussible as either the cause or result.” Furthermore, “the ethical bent from which one approaches the universe is itself a part of the universe.” A frame of reference or “situation” was also a natural “object”:
Who, after all, decrees what we shall call a separate event? Why must I call crops one thing and sunlight something essentially different . . . The new realist considers experience by precisely such an altered way of dividing wholes when he says that we must not speak of green as an “illusion,” a mere phenomenal restating of certain vibrations affecting nerve tissues. Instead, he says, we must consider the entire “arc” as the “real experience,” accepting as one event the external vibrations, the nervous responses, and the resultant sense of green. By this method, the quality green becomes as “real” in our speculations as it is in our everyday experience. It is not an “illusion” but an actual part of the universe.Footnote 81
Qualities, events, relations. Burke's views here were not mystical, as some suggest, but offered a linguistic approach aligned with the capacious naturalism regnant in his youth.Footnote 82 Burke held his views of a contiguous and comprehensive universe bound by logical relations well into the 1940s, finding the realist's “purposive or teleological metaphor (the metaphor of human action or poetry),” more biologically consistent than the passive “mechanistic metaphor.” Though poetry, like religion, drew from interiority, “the biologic metaphor” was not irrational, since poetry's modes of appeal might “be analyzed, quite as we may analyze the methods of production in a machine.”Footnote 83
Burke argued for poetry's psychosocial value without accepting Richards's line between poetry and science; purpose as linguistic teleology applied to any discourse. Richards, who used his poetry classes to run experiments in close reading, had claimed attitudes as incipient actions; actions were situated in the material world. So, Burke asked, how was this firm linguistic division maintained?Footnote 84
INTO THE 1940S: LITERARY FORM, DRAMATISM AND THE “NEW SEMANTICISM”
New realists had promoted scientific “analysis” but stated that “quantitative verification” by the natural sciences was not “the only admissible hypothesis,” nor was “the physical complex the only ‘fact’.”Footnote 85 A quarter-century later, intellectual critics watched quantum physics overtake biology as exemplary science and epistemological model. Certain philosophers pursued an amalgam of syntactical and logical analysis and scientific reduction. Set against a backdrop of a brewing war against Fascism and deepening distrust of the Communist Party, various language theorists began targeting propaganda as the nadir of communication. Ideology and metaphysics, universals, even abstraction all fell under suspicion. As a litterateur, rhetorician and devoted leftist, Burke worked defense.
Alfred Korzybski's general semantics drew sharp lines between abstract representations and material reality. In one review, Burke slammed semanticist Stuart Chase's 1938 Tyranny of Words for using scientific operationalism to wring out vagueness on the right and the left. Shortly thereafter he delivered his rhetorical analysis of Mein Kampf at the Third American Writer's Congress and in the Southern Review. He reviewed Vienna circle member Otto Neurath's attempt at transparent communication, Modern Man in the Making (1939), more kindly, admiring the “reductive genius” of his “isotypes”—graphic silhouettes used to represent statistics (still used today)—which by illustrating quantities suggested qualitative changes. But even Neurath's witty outlines could not match art's accumulation of telling detail. Quantitative representation expressed an era's “average,” not its “essence.”Footnote 86
Though not known as public intellectuals like Russell or Dewey, by the latter 1930s members of the Vienna and Berlin circles were influential academics. Though never theoretically homogeneous, logical empiricists privileged science and symbolic logic and unilaterally rejected metaphysics. Despite McKeon's fears that a narrow “conception of philosophy” might “dominate” it, in 1936 the University of Chicago's Philosophy Department hired the Vienna circle member Rudolf Carnap.Footnote 87
As the forceful spokesman for logical empiricism and philosophy of science, Carnap argued that logical “analysis” should reduce concepts to their verifiable constituent parts to separate the concrete data from all other vapid, confusing verbiage. Metaphysics or value claims were “poetry” at best, or Wittgenstein's “non-sense.”Footnote 88 More stringent than Korzybski or Chase, logical empiricists argued that serious philosophic statements should keep to unambiguous terms and situations, or logic. Carnap asserted, “a sequence of words is meaningless, if it does not within a specified language constitute a statement. It may . . . loo[k] like a statement . . . in that case we call it a pseudo-statement.”Footnote 89
Carnap's “correctly constructed language” would be concerned only with individual words’ “syntactical type.” To build an ideal syntax, one started with an “elementary sentence,” locating each word's meaning with logical criteria regarding specific verifiable data; that is, by continually reducing related sentences to the observable or to “protocol sentences.” Symbolic logic objectively illustrated relations between the particulars.Footnote 90
Despite their ideal of scientific exactitude, like Dewey and Burke, Carnap and most surviving Vienna circle members were meta-contextualists or coherentists. But Carnap used context against realism, insisting that, to test its meaning, a proposition must be incorporated “into the system of things at a space–time position so that it fits together with the other things,” but only within the framework of the value-neutral languages of the physical sciences. Conceding that the metaphorical languages of religion and art expressed emotional “attitude[s] toward life,” he found that metaphysical statements were muddled representations of these attitudes, less authentic than their originating myths. Utterances regarding “reality” outside scientific frameworks were “empty word arrays”; since no “external” system existed for judging them. Abstract universals had neither sensible referents nor logical status. Carnap even denied nominalism since circle members neither predicated “reality” nor “irreality” on an “external world.” Acknowledging Wittgenstein's famous admonition to keep silent, he rejected it.Footnote 91
In “Semantic and Poetic Meaning” (1938), Burke contested a “semantic ideal” that tried to “evolve a vocabulary that gives the name and address of every event in the universe,” the nominalistic scheme separating an “operational” language of denotation from an aesthetic one of connotation. The semantics of perfect linguistic neutrality was unsustainable, since by purging human attitudes it promoted “the abolition of itself.” The need to communicate was an opportunistic, desperate need for order; against Russell and Carnap's hygienic ideal, Burke said, “A comprehensive vocabulary . . . will not be unweighted . . . it will strike and retreat, compliment and insult, challenge and grovel . . . its test of a ‘true’ meaning will be its ability to fit into a piece with all other meanings.”Footnote 92 Following critic William Empson, Burke argued for ambiguity as the font of literary precision. He aligned Empson's with his own search for “permanent forms that underlie changing historical emphases,” concluding that “the semantic ideal . . . is a fraud . . . because it is impossible.”Footnote 93
Burke continued to express realistic principles in his presentation of symbolic action and dramatism in The Philosophy of Literary Form and A Grammar of Motives. McKeon invited Burke to Chicago in the summer of 1938 to teach a course on Coleridge; it became the title essay of 1941's The Philosophy of Literary Form.Footnote 94 Permanence and Change and Attitudes toward History had presented literature as ideal linguistic strategy for “the encompassing of situations”—situations that were physical, psychological, and sociohistorical. A poem was exemplary symbolic action standing as the freighted linguistic response to a potentially ethical or “dramatic” context, its “essence” and “reality” defined by a complex bodily movement, a patterned neurological response to events. These total situations were personalized as “motives” and symbolized by proverbs because “men now have the same neural and muscular structure as men . . . from past ages,” so “strategies framed in Aesop's Fables . . . name an ‘essence’ . . . ‘the general behind the particular’.”Footnote 95
While working on Coleridge, he wrote to Watson, his former Dial publisher: “Basic slogan, for an objective psychology: the motives of a man's work are identical with the interrelationships within the work itself. Or, in other words, when we know ‘what goes with what’ in his mind, we know his ‘motives’.”Footnote 96 For Burke, the “action” of the piece was not merely its story, but this dramatic movement, a recognizable pattern of inner relations—personal and universal, novel and lawful—transforming the individual's dilemma. Transpiring in a present, it was mirrored by plot, phonetics, images, and symbols found grouped in revealing, repetitive “clusters.”Footnote 97
Burke used his earlier research with narcotics and endocrinology to link Coleridge's gait, addiction, utopianism, and unhappy marriage with narrative and meter in “The Ancient Mariner.” Working backward from the aesthetic object, he aligned neurology, art, and conscience in a demonstrable public process. Philosophy pushed against the rising New Criticism's close readings by suggesting three valid ways into a poem: examine the poetic text alone, examine the poet's body of work, or use biography not only to inform the “poems in particular” but also to read them as “instances of ‘symbolic action’ in general.”Footnote 98
Burke's dramatism was to be presented as a full realistic poetics—a grammar, rhetoric, and symbolic of motives—naturalistic, logical, and universally applicable to all communication. A Grammar of Motives, published as World War II closed, aimed to answer the question, “What is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?”Footnote 99 Its epigraph ad bellum purificandum, the Grammar competed with several other ambitious linguistic projects initiated between the wars to reconcile the public to modern naturalism and promote world peace. These included modern Esperantos such as Richards's and C. K. Ogden's Basic English of under a thousand words, Neurath's “Isotypes,” and the empiricists’ more esoteric symbolic logic. But with Chicago's semiotician Charles Morris, Vienna and Berlin circle members also organized a “Unity of Science” project to promote common terms across the sciences via an encyclopedia and topical monographs.Footnote 100
The Grammar directly challenged the “perfectionist” ideals of logical empiricism and its intention “to evolve terms free of ambiguity and inconsistency.” Dramatism admitted human limit: “Insofar as men cannot themselves create the universe, there must remain something essentially enigmatic about the problem of motives.” Furthermore, since no two “things or acts or situations are exactly alike,” all terms entailed a “margin of ambiguity.” Accordingly, Burke looked to uncover “strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise.” Such liminal events disclosed universal structures and deep linguistic drives: the Grammar would “study and clarify the resources of ambiguity,” since it is in “areas of ambiguity that transformations take place.”Footnote 101
Burke's dramatism established a “pentad” and a set of primary “ratios” to mine these resources. New realistic “critical naturalism” had promoted the “analysis of the physical object into elements of content” and the “fundamental concepts of science as ratios . . . involving these elements.” According to Perry, each branch of science, such as chemistry or physics, discovered patterns connected to one “element.”Footnote 102 Burke suggested analogous structural relations illuminating the literary object.
The traditional rhetorical “who, what, where, when, why” became dramatism's pentad of “act, scene, agent, agency, purpose.” These correlated with ontologies—thus in Burke's pentad, realists emphasized “act,” materialists “scene,” idealists “agent,” pragmatists “agency,” and mystics “purpose.” He claimed that pairing two of these pentadic elements generated a ratio allowing the creation and interpretation of form. Thus a “scene–act ratio” situated the drama in the symbolic identification of the environment with the action (Burke used Ibsen's Enemy of the People), while a “scene–agent ratio” might locate a character by his birthplace or environs. Readers could locate ontologically real movements by systematically shifting perspectives via these “ratios.” If the physical sciences were “a calculus of events,” dramatism offered a relational “calculus of acts” in suggesting how these tensions yielded subtleties of human implication.Footnote 103
The ratio was “a formula indicating a transition from one term to another.” Burke's theory attempted to chart symbolic actions occurring in time and space. In a 1952 study of Hawthorne's “Ethan Brand,” Burke insisted that though the heaven and hell described might not be real, “the steps from the writer's talk of the infernal to talk of the heavenly are real.” These elements were empirically available, yet, as changing relations, “the forms (or rather transformations through stages) disclosed by such study are not themselves words used sheerly [sic] as correspondences (as with the relation say between a table and the word for table).” As lawful relations between ideas in flux, such “essences” were never static one-to-one representations.Footnote 104 With this scheme, Burke had finally arrived at his meta-metaphysics via a “structural” aesthetics.
Burke's coherentism allowed for realism and ambiguity. Since situated bodies created or experienced abstract and aesthetic objects, those events all had genuine space–time positions. Like new realists and pragmatists, Burke argued that those positions put them into multiple relations with other public events and objects. “Meanings” necessarily varied for this reason as well, suggesting “a set of concentric circles, of wider and wider scope.”Footnote 105 But no matter how narrowly one confined a verbal situation, scientific or poetic, ambiguity remained the twin of intelligibility. Citing Kant, Burke called his five terms universally “transcendental,” whether true or “false.”Footnote 106
Despite having tried to shed terminological universals, Carnap remained loyal to his unifying universal project—Unity of Science. Though attempting a “synthesis and generalization of the results of the various sciences” by a set of common scientific terms, he claimed it presumed no “knowledge of the essence of things.” Since experimental science relied on generality and abstraction, a pragmatic “tolerance” was offered toward “useful” abstract terms.Footnote 107
In the Grammar Burke again opposed nominalism since it rhetorically treated groups as aggregations of individuals, “in contrast with the realistic position . . . that treats individuals as members of a group.” He concluded that nominalism, “if carried out consistently . . . obliterates . . . the Grammatical basis of social community,” promoting atomism. He echoed Peirce, who had observed eighty years earlier that “though the question of realism and nominalism has its roots in the technicalities of logic . . . [it] is the question whether . . . men really have anything in common, so that the community is to be considered as an end in itself.” Burke remarked that actual nominalists “temper[ed]” themselves by “advocating ‘joint action’ for some social aim or other.”Footnote 108 Whether or not that remark was pointed, Burke surely took a sideswipe at empiricists’ Unity of Science project when quoting Marxist theorist Lewis Feuer, who portrayed it as a maneuver by at-risk scholars to forge a “unity of the intellectual class” and boost their cultural authority. In charges later repeated by others, Feuer accused logical émigré empiricists of a “fetishism of propositions” and political quietism.Footnote 109
If the empiricists examined logical relations obtaining within the linguistic system of “science itself” to expunge metaphysics, Burke's rhetorical meta-analysis incorporated all metaphysical perspectives, privileging realism. The Grammar openly admitted dramatism's cordiality to metaphysics, opposing it to the “implicit kind of metaphysics that often goes by the name No Metaphysics and aims at reduction . . . to some presumably underlying atomic constituent.”Footnote 110
EMPIRICISM AND THE COLD WAR
Following the rise of academic historicism in the 1960s, the stunning Cold War success of analytics’ hermetic practice intimated a retreat serving a larger repression. Credible correlations remain elusive; circle members publicly expressed political opinions ranging from social democratic—Carnap—to utopian socialist—Neurath.Footnote 111 John McCumber has argued that analytics’ postwar success arose from dismissals of academic communists and the chilling effects of Cold War politics, while George A. Reisch has explored empiricists’ FBI files and their strenuous efforts to promote the Unity of Science, which then collapsed during the Cold War.Footnote 112
Reisch and others find the émigrés inherently politically engaged—their scientific criteria integrated with their understanding of democratic values and exemplified by the Unity of Science. Already in 1968, Leszek Kolakowski, though critical of empiricists’ boorish dismissals of philosophic history, located them not as Anglo-liberals but as social democrats. Their purpose: “a humanitarian protest against a world entangled in bloody conflicts”; their faith: the “scientific attitude [as] an effective antidote.”Footnote 113
The empiricists had reasons for distrusting metaphysical talk; Carnap blasted Heidegger’s.Footnote 114 But their militancy undermined their own case for scientific unity. Their elevation of specificity bid “a rhetorical farewell to rhetoric,” as Burke called it, one scorning baggy universals.Footnote 115 As wholes distinct from sums, universals were illusory, unscientific, and open to demagogic misuse, despite the fact that neither science nor language could do without them.
Recent studies question whether Carnap and other empiricists such as Schlick and Reichenbach began as true empiricists or as neo-Kantian idealists drilling for reliable epistemological “structures.” Alan Richardson and Michael Friedman, as well as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, read Carnap's project as one supporting the objectivity of scientific knowledge, i.e. defending scientific realism using modern mathematics and logic. They rely on Carnap's early Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928) to make their case. These readings expose historical parallels between Carnap's quest for a “structural objectivity” and the project of the American neorealists and Burke. Plainly, all aimed for a linguistic order consistent with naturalism as they conceived it. But it fell to the linguistically impure Burke—modernist aesthete, declared communist propagandist, historicist, metaphysical rhetorician—to conceive and then defend a realistic philosophy of language.Footnote 116
RANSOM AND THE NEW CRITICISM
Logical empiricists had rejected meaningful universals while maneuvering to keep abstract terms for scientific discourse.Footnote 117 By the end of that decade, literary critics were drawn to an even more severe particularism or nominalism. Ransom, a central figure in the influential “New Criticism” of the 1940s and 1950s, would assert that poetry's unique subject matter was the contingent, irreducible particular—the “texture” held within the “structure” of discursive meaning. Was aesthetic experience grounded in universals? Ransom said “no.”
While Burke developed his theory of rhetorical form in the 1920s, Ransom was teaching at Vanderbilt and leading the southern “fugitive” poets to distinction. He too attempted to divine an aesthetics in his early manuscript “The Third Moment” (unpublished). Ransom there divided experience into three “moments”: immediate unreflective perceptions, buried in the unconscious and revealed in dreams, myths, and religion; abstraction and organization of experience for practical ends; and finally art, the “third moment,” which used abstraction to reclaim raw experience.Footnote 118
Ransom's God without Thunder (1930) made an aesthetic case for Old Testament religiosity over scientific Christianity. The son of a preacher, he praised ancients and mystics who abandoned “occidental” logic and surrendered to fatalistic “organic sensibility.” Ransom opposed science, utility, and generality, which “crucif[ied]” sensibility on behalf of “abstracts”—collective concepts such as “gravity” or “Pennsylvania.”Footnote 119
Suspicion of the general prevailed again in Ransom's Depression-era social theory, notably the agrarian anticapitalist manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930). With essays written by “Twelve Southerners,” including “fugitives” Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren, it promoted southern ruralism and counseled resistance to industrialism.Footnote 120 Southern agrarians denounced scientific rationalism and sociological “abstractions.” Later repudiating this “nostalgia,” Ransom acknowledged its influence on their aesthetics.Footnote 121
Daniel Joseph Singal describes Ransom's “radical empiricism” as “assaulting naturalism at its philosophic roots” to restore immediate “belief in the transcendent and mysterious.” Burke doubted Ransom's religious antimodernism. Assigned to review God without Thunder, he wrote to Tate, “Imagine a Fundamentalist papa bringing up his child to believe that the whole thing was an as if.” Burke never finished the review, but Tate sent the quip to Ransom.Footnote 122 When Burke reviewed the agrarian sequel Who Owns America? (1936), he called theirs “a heretical sect reaffirming orthodox commercial values” with property as “absolute.”Footnote 123
Ransom codified earlier arguments in The World's Body (1938). In the oft-cited chapter “Criticism, Inc.,” he asked that critics explore the “autonomous” poem by purging contextual, “unliterary” discursive elements—politics, synopsis, etymology, historical studies, psychology, and “autobiographical evidences” mining what remained. Criticism was “objective,” not “subjective”; study of technique should address “the nature of the object rather than its effects upon the subject.” Burke held that psycho-neural effects were not “subjective,” but somatically based in universal capacities. Ransom insisted that physiological effects or rhetorical elements evoking them were not criticism's purview.Footnote 124
Ransom further pushed Richards's division between prose and poetry, asserting that poetry's aesthetic energy derived from an experience unique, elusive, and finally unintelligible. Since the poet preserved something “qualitatively infinite” continually “killed by prose,” the “ontological” critic's obligation was to quarantine the aesthetic. The poem must be defended from “violent” reduction to its logical “prose core,” by highlighting its “differentia, residue, or tissue.”Footnote 125
It is unclear whether Burke fathomed the depth of difference between Ransom and himself. He compared the poem to an arpeggio—moving “from,” “through,” and “to.” Ransom's object faded while the poet marked its moment; Burke's object, poet, and reader were surviving, acting, transforming along universal patterns. Similar to logical empiricists, Ransom distinguished poetry's hermetic mode from others, insisting that art required special procedures of analysis. For realistic, universalistic Burke, poetry was paradigmatic communication—linguistic form-making and part of a shared human nature.Footnote 126
If debates over the social dimension of analytic philosophy have lately heated up, contention regarding the phenomenal influence of New Criticism is long-standing and vast. Recently, Robert Genter suggested that critical interest in the “autonomy” of aesthetic objects followed commodification in a postwar boom. Other scholars argue over whether American aesthetic modernism was a victim or an instrument of anticommunism. Did New Critical aesthetics repudiate or embody origins in farm culture and southern paternalism? Was it characteristically opposed to or in fact aligned with scientific discourses?Footnote 127 If a consensus exists that New Criticism succeeded because it somehow suited the mid-century cultural and political mentality and a similar consensus has grown up around logical positivism, none exists on their linguistic functioning within that mentality.Footnote 128
As yet there is no agreement on how or why analytic philosophy and New Criticism attained their academic influence and funding during the Cold War. What seems evident is that both employed a technical rhetoric promising exactitude and explicitly opposing universals. Rationales differed—Carnap and Neurath found Platonic universals “unscientific,” obfuscating, while Ransom and Tate found them too scientific and rationalistic. The New Critical position initially was submerged beneath wartime social unity and the empiricists supported the progressive Unity of Science, yet both championed an almost existentialist rhetoric of individuation that distrusted unifying general terms—centers of meaning holding a wide circumference. Burke continued to defend universalism and universals.Footnote 129
BURKE VERSUS RANSOM
Correspondence between Ransom and Burke began in 1938. Disagreement over empirical “statement” and poetic “pseudo-statement” surfaced in letters on Burke's 1941 essay “Four Master Tropes” (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony), planned for Kenyon Review. Burke argued that both aesthetic and scientific heuristics functioned within a further category of rhetorical abstraction—what David Tell has called “core epistemological practice.”Footnote 130
Their discussion soon turned to universals. In 1942 review of The Philosophy of Literary Form, “An Address to Kenneth Burke,” Ransom had written that Burke “does not have a philosophy of poetry, or does not have the right one,” complaining that Burke read into poems “everything possible along the lines of his own strenuous rationality and very little of the thing that makes the poem poetic.” Calling Burke “no lover of nature,” Ransom denied any unity to natural objects:
No harmony exists logico-mathematically among the heterogeneous properties of a natural object . . . how can you compose a red and a sweet and a round and a heavy into one apple? . . . The assemblage . . . strikes us as arbitrary and contingent, a pure gift or datum, which reason cannot understand though sense witnesses it indubitably . . . The difference between heterogeneous properties is absolute.Footnote 131
In Burke's relational view, qualities were similar and different, “shad[ing] off into each other.”Footnote 132 As for Burke's description of poetry's “dialectic,” Ransom found dialectic invariably tendentious. Burke was like Plato, coercively utopian, part of a “First Moment” in philosophy—looking for “homogeneity” in nature, worshipping mathematics, aiming to fit “the citizen to the society.” In a footnote, Ransom offered a political spin:
I would have proposed . . . two exciting terms taken from politics: Leftist, for the logico-mathematical or Platonic or idealistic philosophy, involving the ontology and the religion and the ethics as well as the politics which that term connotes; and Rightist, for the substantival or aesthetic ontology, religion, ethics, and politics.
Consciously or not, Ransom thereby associated Platonic universalism with Burke's Stalinism, affiliating his own nominalism with a rightist politics he had publicly discarded.Footnote 133
Ransom had finally conjured a credible theory separating the two discourses and specializations. If New Critical method aimed at technical mastery, it simultaneously promoted the aesthetics of concrete “nature” over “abstract” science.Footnote 134 Definitively general, always discounting variables, “science” supposedly rejected any individual “texture which seeks to assert itself in the objects.” Poetry resisted this de-individualization with its “stubborn ontological prejudice” recognizing the being of objects, each with “some otherness, some non-structural character.”Footnote 135
Burke initially viewed New Criticism as a misguided revival of aestheticism. A naturalist, he objected to nineteenth-century idealism's “lame attempt to pit art against science,” a split Ransom repeated when cementing dichotomies between the languages of content and form. Burke countered by including a striking rereading of Keats's famous close from “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,” considered the epitome of Romantic aesthetics. Burke instead found Keats intending to equate science and art in a transcendent resolution enabled by his tuberculosis and revealed by the “grammar” of his “intense linguistic activity.”Footnote 136
He responded personally to Ransom's mixed review of A Grammar of Motives,Footnote 137 saving two drafts of his letter. The presumably unsent one reveals him peeved by the review and exasperated by Ransom's most recent note. To Ransom's familiar complaints that dramatism's pentad neglected the particular, Burke commented that Ransom's own concepts of “Structure/Texture” also “obliterated” individuals:
For in their function as names for a class of things in general, they necessarily outrage the nature of these things in particular. If your search for “getting behind the formal analysis” enables you to drop this aspect of your vocabulary [the general term], by God, I will take off my hat to you. Aquinas tells us that angels can communicate without such terms, but you’re the first human critic I ever knew who projected a similar enterprise . . .
He continued,
Do you know what I am beginning to believe? That you may be trying to do something which is fantastic, whereas you think it is positivistic. I believe you may be trying to put your critical and poetical selves together by evolving a kind of criticism which simply writes the poem all over again . . . If it is the poem you want, then for God's sake learn the poem by heart and call it quits. It is the only truly “personal” thing in the whole matter. [E. E.] Cummings found that out years ago and was accurate enough to realize that such an ideal dispensed with the entire critical racket—and was thorough enough to get out and stay out.Footnote 138
For Burke, an aesthetic restriction to particulars was doomed; had it been possible, it would have ended inference, reference, representation—symbolism—and thinking.
The Grammar suggested that nineteenth-century mathematicians had “dialectically” used “imagery to transcend imagery” in forging modern mathematics and physics. Burke here endorsed Platonic rationalism by reversing Ransom's argument from God without Thunder and drawing an analogy between the biblical Creation and Plato's Euthyphro, which expressed “the logic of the scene–act ratio behind the old controversy as to whether ‘God willed the good because it is good,’ or ‘the good is good because God willed it.’” Dramatism found the first more “symmetrical,” since “goodness,” the supreme universal, served as a “ground or scene . . . so real that God himself did not simply make it up, but acted in conformity with its nature when willing it to be the law of his creation.”Footnote 139 Giving the “Form” ontological priority countered Ockham's personalistic and Ransom's irrationalist nominalisms, which on behalf of either faith or sensibility denied any constraints on God's fiat.Footnote 140
CONCLUSION
By 1940, academic philosophical and critical particularism was entirely secular, fitting an ideal of scientific specialization and contributing to an individualistic “contagion of metaphors” for enthusiasms and anxieties in the postwar period.Footnote 141 As the rhetoric of universalism became associated with an earlier communist left, philosophic universals were associated with propaganda by both left and right.Footnote 142 Burke had explained language by connecting it to natural survival on the one hand and potent universals on the other; once he accommodated Marxism and the popular front emerged, he stuck to it. His support for Moscow would stand as an ad hominem argument against him.
Today few argue for universals since essentialism has cast a long shadow. Even Burke admitted that the conveniences of classification had enabled “drastic inconveniences” of racist generalization.Footnote 143 But while academics have deserted the rhetorical atomism of logical empiricists and New Critics, anti-universalism and dismissals of metaphysics linger in post-structuralism and neo-pragmatism.
To discipline modern relativism Burke culled principles from neorealism, having absorbed its neurological direct realism, its neutral monism, and its description of mind as relational and teleological. During the Depression he returned to realists’ arguments on behalf of a reconstructed teleology of “purpose,” refashioning this earlier realism into his language-centered “symbolic action.” His biological–historical approaches to Coleridge (and later Keats) used form to illuminate mind–body identity. And the Grammar's pentadic system provided a structure for understanding how language, inherently metaphysical, animated us; the logico-mathematical “ratios” represented the tensions between the perspectives of act/realism, scene/materialism, and so on.
Period pragmatists and new realists had shared naturalism, but maintained their difference. Upon receiving McKeon's comments on manuscript sections of the Grammar, Burke responded,
I wish you could see something more in my position than sheer pragmatism. (Every position must have its own brand of pragmatism, the pragmatism proper to the position, but my position itself is not pragmatist—or at least not on the level at which you would abandon me.)Footnote 144
Claiming a universal linguistic body, Burke concluded the human necessity of other universals. His “perspective on perspectives” had located presumed ontological relations on which all expression—aesthetic, scientific, and political—relied.Footnote 145
A 1952 story describes an anesthetized patient dreaming the “literal” structure of the universe as spinning, transforming perspectives. Awaiting the knife, Burke's narrator watches “the very essence of realism, through the very essence of criticism, become the very essence of idealism.”Footnote 146 His aesthetic subconscious had finally avowed the Platonic logic of his realism.Footnote 147 In his first essay for The Dial, Burke had quoted Remy de Gourmont: “Man is not at the pinnacle of nature; he is in nature.”Footnote 148 Not only were we natural, but Burke saw language and its relational metaphysics as natural and natural to us; they were our method and our medium.
