variations on "providence"

The University of Notre Dame

Variations on "Providence"Author(s): Kenneth BurkeSource: Notre Dame English Journal, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Summer, 1981), pp. 155-183Published by: The University of Notre DameStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40062490 .

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VARIATIONS ON "PROVIDENCE"

Kenneth Burke

Since the time when I began planning to write some "variations on the theme of 'Providence,' " there have been some developments which decided me to say much more by way of introduction than I had originally intended. In particular, Wayne C. Booth's admirable volume, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism, has been published, and some of his astute comments that bear upon my work have helped me to clarify my position, which comes to a focus methodologically in what I would call a distinction between History and Logology. Happily, the distinction is not "invidious." That is to say, the Logologer could not properly ask anyone to make an either-or choice between these two ways of specu- lating on the subject of "the human condition." And the more information historians have presented in organized form, the better supplied Logology is with the kind of documents and admonitions that are most helpful for its kind of perspectives.

Logology, Historiography, Historicism

However, Logology would have to propose an invidious distinction between Historiography, a noble calling, and Historicism, a kind of ex- cess caused by a kind of insufficiency. Historicism would not be content with writing history; it would go further, and hold that we are nothing but the products of the particular age in which we happen to live (or, as Hei-

degger puts it, to be "thrown") . Logology, on the other hand, would start from a generic definition of our specific nature as human beings. What, then, is the "substrate" of which we are historical manifestations?

The term "Logology" itself has two meanings, one theological, one

purely secular. In its theological meaning, as attested in the OED, it means "the Doctrine of the Logos," of Christ the Word, as narrated in the Book of John. In its other meaning, "logological" is synonymous with

"philological," referring to "words" in the wholly secular sense, an empirical position which can make no judgment about either the Tightness or



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wrongness of theological doctrine. Logology, as I thus use the term (meaning etymologically "words about words") starts from a definition that applies physiologically (I am sure you all will agree) to every human being except, as per the Book of Genesis, our first ancestors. Namely: our history and prehistory, viewed logologically, from the standpoint of "words about words," is the written and/or unwritten story of a biological organism that is gestated as a wordless foetus in a maternal body, is born wordless, and develops out of its infancy (that is, its state of wordlessness) while acquiring a verbal medium which, in effect, builds up a set of duplicates for its nonverbal environment (in Spinoza's terms an or do idearum to match an ordo rerum, though his "order of things" includes much personalistic content not reducible to terms of the sheerly nonsymbolic) .

All told, Logology would classify this necessarily imperfect duplica- tion as a distinction between two realms of nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action (for symbol-systems in the history of culture also include such mediums of expression and communication as music, painting, sculpture, dance, etc.). The strictly empirical mode of placement here would be analogous to the traditional metaphysical or theological pair: body and mind, matter and spirit, though not identical with them. In this respect Logology's main foes would be the Behaviorists, who monistically reduce any such dualistic distinction between motion and action to but a matter of degree, whereas Logology would be emphatic in viewing the distinction between physiological behavior and verbal behavior as qualitative, a matter of kind.

Logology would also emphasize an empirical analogue of the Thomistic principium individuationis. For the Summa Theological word "matter" as the "principle of individuation," Logology's corresponding term would be "nonsymbolic motion." At parturition each human physiological organism becomes a separate being, a biological organism with its own unique sensations, pleasures and pains (local to itself, as focused by the centrality of the nervous system). Each such individual lives and dies as a material thing, like other animals in the realm of motion.

But unlike all other earthly animals (to our knowledge) the human kind is genetically, physiologically, materially endowed with the ability to learn the kind of language which Logology would call "symbolic action," and which monistic reductionists would call "verbal behavior." Thus Logology would not consider experiments on laboratory animals adequate to encompass a study of the human animal.

A few further introductory remarks are needed. For Logological pur-



Variations on "Providence" 157

poses, the metaphysical design of Leibniz's "monadology" can be given sheerly empirical analogues, thus:

Throughout the Universe, in the realm of natural motion, at every in- stant there is an infinite number of DISCRIMINATIONS taking place. An obvious instance: a quantity of H2O is in the liquid form of water. The

temperature drops, and at a "critical point" the liquid "discriminates" by behaving as a solid, ice. Or the temperature rises to a critical point where the liquid becomes a gas, steam. Presumably every cell of our body is making discriminations of some sort, in the processes of metabolism, the realm of material motions, by which the body exists as a physiological organism.

Obviously, we are aware of but few such discriminations. Insofar as we are aware of discriminations, let us call that condition "consciousness."

By the "unconscious" would be meant the processes within and about us that we are unaware of, including even our wnawareness, our unconscious- ness, of the ways whereby we are conscious.

I don't see how Behaviorists (and I delight in haggling with them in matters of this sort) could possibly rule out such an obvious discrimination, in their missionary zeal to find no room for "consciousness."

But that brings me to my ultimate Logological dispute with the Be- haviorists. They would rule out "mind"? Then how about defining "mirid" this way: By "mind" is meant "the human being's genetically (that is, physiologically) endowed ability to acquire the special arts of verbal behavior."

One more point, and I think I can round out this introduction by tying our modes of symbolicity in with my opening Logological distinction between History and Historicism.

I take it that the kind of aptitude for what is called "verbal behavior" (which also includes the acquiring of symbol-systems generally, such as music, painting, sculpture, dance, etc.) can be posited as the differentia that defines us empirically as our specific kind of animal. Such "arbitrary, conventional" symbol-systems have come and gone since the days of prehistory when our kind began developing these aptitudes, the ability to do so being grounded in the body as a physiological organism. This minimum

equivalent of what in metaphysics or theology would be called "mind" or

"spirit" would involve a social or collective medium. Anthropologists would assign it to the realm of "culture" as distinct from "nature," though in its primitive stages the two realms might not look much different from each other, as adjoining things seen from a distance seem to merge.

As our terms for images, concepts, ideas, properties, attitudes, para-



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digms, perspectives, situations, processes, relationships, etc. took form, they became in effect a universe of their own. Also, the mediums using these purely symbolic devices made possible the kinds of attention and communication that gradually led to the invention and distribution of tools (with corresponding methods and attitudes) . And thus we now confront the gradual accumulation of man-made new-things that constitute what we call the institutions of "technology."

Radiations of the Subject

This subject lends itself to so many "radiations," so many "crossroads," as one thing leads to another, that it is advisable for me to foretell from the start where these observations about foretelling plan to end up. By "radiations" I have in mind incidental encounters of this sort: The thought of Providence as prescience, foresight, foreknowledge can comprise manifestations as various as Divine Fore-Ordination (Predestination, eternal damnation as "correlative" to "life eternal"), insurance against risk of loss (a side-road that in turn could lead to modes of investment as different as those treated in a stockbroker's market report and the kind of "hedging" to the ends of eternal salvation conceived of in "Pascal's wager," Pascal's exceptional genius along the lines of the esprit de geometrie having enabled him to work out the mathematics of the odds in the combina- tions of cards that happened to be in one's hand when gambling) ... or the principle of "sacrifice" implicit in all trade, which "sacrifices goods" of one sort for the benefit to be gained by acquiring in exchange "goods" of another sort - whereat another almost glorious side-road turns up, as the imitation of sacrifice in classic tragedy is seen to be a grand stylizing of such barter, while the story of the sacrifice in terms of which the Chris- tian Church is rationalized conceives of a divine ransom in this regard . . . and also along the line we encounter Behaviorist projects promising techniques of prediction and control. Or there is belief and there is credit - etc.

Natural and Technological Powers

Since Technology figures so notably in all the secular "radiations" of our key term, before moving on I would quote some paragraphs which give the gist of my historical speculations in the spirit of Logology. (They were published in the Winter 1978 issue of Critical Inquiry) :




Let's go to the very center of the issue, namely: the relation between "natural" powers and "technological" power. "Natural" powers can do only what they are doing. If it can rain, it is raining. If all that nature could bring about in a certain region at a certain time is a state of drought, there is the irrefutable evidence, an actual state of drought. When there can be an earthquake, there is an earthquake. Nature "unaided" can manifest only the combination of conditions that add up to exactly what they do add up to in relation to one another.

But introduce the symbol-guided techniques of technology, and nature can be made to undergo quite startling anthropomorphizing transformations. Unaided nature, under present conditions, couldn't have produced our present vast arsenals of atomic bombs. Such instruments could not have been brought into existence ("created") without the savoir-faire of human prowess, which has thus in effect been sculpting its self-image in the materials of nonhuman nature, in effect leaving signs everywhere announcing, "Kingkill Kilroy was here."

By placing the whole stress upon the flat distinction between supernatural and natural terms for discussing the "descent of man," Dar- winism deflected attention from the critical distinction between human animals and other animals, a distinction which, though grounded in the human animal's sheer physiology, made possible the realm of tech-

nological counter-nature, which began to take form with the first innovations of instruments and corresponding methods but has developed at a greatly accelerating rate since the start of the industrial revolution

(page Henry Adams on the "law of the acceleration of history," given the turn from the "Virgin" to the "Dynamo") .

Vico's "Providence" in effect De-Christianizes

Vico's New Science offers a handy way into this discussion, including the fact that his work has so many radiations when looked back upon in

the light of subsequent developments. Logologically considered, his no-

tions of "Providence" are seen to embody theological connotations of

such Foresight, even while primarily furthering secular variations on the

same theme. Also, at the roots of Christian theology (which is ardently monistic atop its Trinitarian aspect) there is what might be called an am-

bivalently "a-theistic" attitude, or latitude, as compared with polytheistic nomenclatures. (The point is discussed on pp. 406-08, in my Language as

Symbolic A ction.) In pagan polytheism :

any motive, habitat, natural power, institution, or means of livelihood could by linguistic abstraction become a "god." Often the process was

hardly more than the effect we get by capitalizing a word, writing "Thunder" instead of "thunder," plus mythic personifying of such



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abstractions. Where we might go from "finance" to "Finance," polytheism could readily go a step further, to the personal god, Plutus.

Thus whereas Christian moralists have warned against the evil tendency to "make gods" of our ambitions, the early Greek philosopher Thales piously proclaimed the world "full of gods," and (as Aristotle reports in the De Anima) "he said that the magnet has a soul in it because it moves the iron." In Vico, the notion of God's will as "Providentially" motivating (fore-ordaining) the course of history gets a partially de-Christianized slant by introducing a different dimension. In particular Vico's study of Greek and Roman history had led him to a secular theory of cultural cycles in general. And thus, although he did treat of historical development in terms of "Providence," it was a term applied in a theory of similar unfoldings local to different peoples without relation to the all-important re- demptive role of the Christian sacrifice in the design.

His religious, heroic, philosophic (scientific) stages, with relapses into barbarism, anticipate the kind of cycles that Spengler was later to develop; it was a pattern that implicitly allowed for Spengler's schematizing of the "contemporaneous" in ways whereby the same stages of different cultural cycles would be analyzed (analogized) as "contemporaneous" with each other. And he introduced this notion: the rulers of each stage themselves bring about conditions that lead to their own undoing, thus giving rise to the next phase. This prime irony was rhetorically relished by the Marxist dialectic.

With regard to the present discussion, I recall a passage which I have referred to elsewhere in words of my own; but I cannot remember exactly where it is in Vico's New Science, hence I cannot cite it as accurately as I wish I could. The design (viewed Logologically) is:

Humans are by nature cruel. Add Foresight, Providence, and their cruelty becomes transformed into the "arts of defense." Humans are by nature greedy. Add Foresight, Providence, and this greed becomes transformed into the "arts of commerce." Humans are by nature vicious [mean? overbearing? arrogant? "ambitious" in a bad sense? - here's where I wish I could verify the wording]. Add Foresight, Providence - and the corresponding transformation is the "arts of statecraft."

I have not yet been able to quote this passage more accurately. But in any case, the account is accurate enough to substantiate my conclusion that Vico's treatment of the relation between Divine Providence and the corresponding enactments in the antics of human society involves a con- siderable step in the direction of modern social science and away from




theological answers to questions about "The Providence of God" as propounded in the two great Thomist texts.

Eliot's Quartets in the Light of Vico

Though Logology qua Logology can make no judgments about the

possible truth or falsity of theological doctrine, it is obvious to Logology that the terms of Vico's perspective, near the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, do with "Providence" as a qualitative step much the same as Blake's doctrine of Imagination (near the end of the century) does, in

adding a dimension that distinguishes ideal human motivation (and cor-

responding "vision") from that of the sheerly "natural." I shall say more about Blake's position (which was impatient with the pious cult of Nature involved in the high value Wordsworth placed upon the role of the Imagi- nation) . But first I would take this opportunity to cite a case where I was

obviously aiming at a variant of the distinction that Vico's usage suggests, though I did not mention it because I did not know of it at the time.

I am referring to a section, "Eliot: Early Poems and 'Quartets,' " in

my Rhetoric of Motives. Here the equivalent of "Providence," as a term that stands for the introduction of a new generating principle, is the specific turn that is programmatically announced in Eliot's public platform: "an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in

politics." (In For Lancelot Andrewes, 1928.) Here is what I was trying to suggest in those pages: The poet's public

was expected to interpret his variations on the characteristic "Prufrock" role in the early poems as a dramatic fiction. But the "Quartets" were a devout doctrinal statement of attitude by Mr. Eliot in person, not as an artist depicting an imaginary character for pure literary effect. Rather,

they are expected to be read as wholly sincere, poems as direct in their

way as the Confessions of St. Augustine; otherwise the poet would be a

hypocrite. Since Eliot's "Prufrock" poem was entitled "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," I might bring out my point most bluntly by pro- posing, if it were not meant as personally sincere, some such grotesque "literary" title as "Four Devotional Poems, by J. Alfred Prufrock, Esq., Recently Reborn in Christ." It would be a title unfit quite to the point of

indecency. Hence, in the light of Vico's formula for "Providence" as generating a motivational leap, what is involved here?

As with Greek myth, or the Psalms of the Old Testament, poetry begins in modes of expression such that religious and artistic motives and styles are inextricably interwoven. We also recognize cultural developments



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whereby the sacred and the profane, as with much big business in the cur- rent entertainment industry, become quite distinct. And there is a notable intermediate area where religious attitudes survive vestigially in estheti- cized form. The traditional use of Greek myth in Western poetry is an obvious example of this turn, which gets impressive lyrical expression in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Wordsworth's variant involves verse em- bodying a literary cult of nature that is conceived as divinely infused. Even so hilarious a medium as Aristophanic comedy has important affinities of this sort, owing to the association of phallic rites with supernatural powers of fertility. There are crude vestiges in soap opera.

Introduce the rationale of religion into any vexatious or exacting situation, and you can notably modify the quality of the motives in terms of which you confront that situation. Thus, in early days when believers assumed that the Second Coming was near at hand, an insomniac could have transformed his burden into a rite of watching and waiting, that is, keeping vigil. And there are at least traces of a different motivational quality if some bore or nuisance of a neighbor is referred to not as a bore or a nuisance, but as one's "cross to bear."

Along that line I would say: By his conversion Eliot didn't simply abandon the kind of attitudes, or temperamental habits that he gave formal poetic expression to in the poetry of his early Prufrock days. He re- tained them, but in a critically reconstituted form. It would be like the difference between dieting because of obesity or indigestion or high blood pressure, and dieting as a matter of principle. For a seeing in ways of our own, we can refer in advance to the place where we consider how, with St. Augustine, theology's views on predestination could well accommodate even the sack of Rome. For the design was comprehensively developed over many years under pressure of many varied needs.

"Providentially," one might say in good faith: Implicit in the gesture of the somewhat precious, literarily elegant lament that was embodied in Eliot's way of adopting and adapting the skillful stylistics of Jules La- forgue there were the beginnings of its transfiguration in terms of the outright theological perspective intrinsic to the "Quartets."

Once we stop to consider the two stages in this light, the first stage being not abandoned in the second stage, but transformed (as the analogue of Vico's "Providence" in effect added to the second stage a kind of "grace" that "perfected" rather than "abolished" the "nature" of stage one) we see that Eliot has said as much in his own terms. Consider, for instance, the opening lines:



Variations on "Providence" 1 63

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past,

a design repeated more formulaically in the second poem, "In my beginning is my end," which is also stated in reverse. There are many variants, for instance this repetition of the same term, but with shifted connotations:

The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Or the rock of the parched desert in "The Wasteland" can become the rock of religious fortitude; talk of a rose garden can refer to memories of a secular sort, then take on dimensions of a somewhat mystic unfolding and enfoldment. Or consider the upgrading of "turn," as we turn from its incidence in "Prufrock" (1917) and "Ash Wednesday" (1930), while one might, in the light of hindsight, note the incipiently punning predes- tinations ("rock" and "pure frock") in the syllables of the poet's early surrogate.

Denis Donoghue's Thieves of Fire

Logology being by definition quite "word-conscious," the subject of "Providence" can readily radiate into speculations about Prometheus, whose name is etymologically a synonym for "foresight." And this hero-

ically enduring Titan, whose sufferings, like those of the Christians' God, marked him as a sacrificial victim in behalf of humankind's welfare, also belongs in our commentaries because of his mythic association with the

beginnings of Technology. And there are further grounds for turning next to this figure because we can approach the subject through a highly suggestive book by Denis Donoghue, Thieves of Fire, the printed version of several T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures entitled "The Prometheans," a name he gives to members of a literary tradition with which Eliot was

quite programmatically at odds. Denis Donoghue presents the case thus:

It is proper to say of the Promethean intervention in human history that it was a once-for-all affair, as a result of which we know we can't go home again: the intervention is historical and irrevocable, its chief characteristic is that it cannot be deleted. Theft of the divine power of knowledge made reflection possible and therefore necessary; it made men self-aware, self-conscious, it made the human race a multitude of



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reflexive animals. But the gift of consciousness is stolen, it introduces division into consciousness itself, as a mark of guilt. . . . Consciousness is stolen fruit or stolen fire, in either form the original sin, source of a correspondingly original guilt. Men take the harm out of it by convert- ing some of its energy to a pious end, the knowledge of God, or its secular form, the knowledge of Nature. But forgiveness is never complete. . . . The reflexiveness of mind, which is in one sense its glory, is in another a token of its criminality, its transgression at the source. . . . The theft also gave men the power and the habit of self-expression by re- course to symbols; it allowed them to mediate between two kinds of experience lately sundered - nature and man, or as we would now say, nature and culture. . . . Above all, Prometheus made possible the imaginative enhancement of experience.

The sometimes quaint book, Mythology, of Thomas Bulfinch (1796- 1867) brings out the related set of implications regarding the role of Prometheus :

With this gift man was more than a match for all other animals. It enabled him to make weapons wherewith to subdue them; tools with which to cultivate the earth; to warm his dwelling, so as to be com- paratively independent of climate; and finally to introduce the arts and to coin money, the means of trade and commerce.

Grammar being what it is, and myth being nothing if not grammatical, Prometheus had a brother Epimetheus. They were thus related as pro- logue is to epilogue, as Forethought is to Afterthought. And it was After-

thought to whom Pandora (which means "giver of all" as an epithet applied to Earth, and "all-endowed" as a proper name, and whose box was to raise so much trouble when things got loose) was sent down as the first woman, and was welcomed by After-Thought despite the admonitions of Fore-Thought. Logology needs but put all these pieces together in one bundle in connection with the fact that, as Bulfinch says, when "there

escaped a multitude of plagues for hapless man," there was left but one

good. But it was a strongly futuristic one, thus at least on the slope of the

providential: hope.

Related Observations Anent Logology

I particularly relish that because, though the tinkerings of Technology have been almost fabulously profuse in the proliferation of man-made

instruments, methods, and world-wide interrelationships that are con-

stantly getting out of order, at the same time there is always an equal pro-




fusion of hopeful assurances that, with but a bit more tinkering, all will be in order. Along with its great multiplication of things, Technology promises us that in time there will be a pill for everything. Logology, I fear, has but what most people would probably consider a dreary substitute for

hope; namely: the futuristically slanted methodological engrossment in the tracking down of implications, which may amount to translating the

grand oracular utterance, "Know thyself" into "Spy on thyself." Myths are more hospitable to several meanings than are the dogmas of

theology, the definitions of philosophy, and the mathematically precise measurements of science. Thus besides the relation of Prometheus to fire as a prime material power in the shaping of human destiny, there is the

fiery Promethean truculence as depicted in the only tragedy that survives from the trilogy of Aeschylus - and Donoghue takes off from that in se-

lecting the four turbulent geniuses, Milton, Blake, Melville, and D. H. Lawrence whom he selects to discuss as his examples of the type, the epithet being one which Rimbaud applied to "the poet" in general.

I see them as variously responsive to motivational situations which are

poignantly responsive to notable changes produced by the increasing pace of technological advance in the state of Counter-Nature that could not have emerged in their times without the accumulated operations of pecu- liarly human inventions. These developments could be said to have been

mythically foretold as a tortured Titan's gift of stolen fire to humankind

(thus human nature's prowess in transforming the conditions of nonhuman nature by both intent and accident, that is, the hopes in a new order, along with the hopes of controlling the riot of new disorders that arose as unintended by-products of the innovations) . For I would hold that there is an ironic kind of predestination let loose but concealed here, in a tacit

assumption. I would call it the "instrumentalist fallacy," which prevails not by being

affirmed but by being overlooked in particular cases, although whenever it is mentioned people are quite likely to agree in general that it is a

fallacy. The "instrumentalist fallacy" (or perhaps "quandary") is the un- stated assumption that any improvement in instruments or methods is to be evaluated solely in terms of its nature as that improvement. But everything has a nature of its own, and this identity is not reducible to its nature as the function for which it was rationally designed.

Thus so far as our adaptation to new experiences is concerned, the Pandora's Box of accumulated Counter-Natural innovations, which come to seem like a "second nature," may require much more analytic research and corrective tinkering than the instrumentalist fallacy admonishes us to



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suspect. We are accustomed now to "impact statements," preparatory research seeking to foretell (be provident or prudent about) the possible cultural and economic effects that some new construction project may have on the surrounding environment. But thoughts of Technological Accumulation as a realm of Counter-Nature lead us to ask whether Tech-

nology's critique of itself may not require constant speculative (analytic, diagnostic, data-gathering) research into the nature of its impact.

Donoghue on Blake

So much for possible ultimate inquiries into the relation between Counter-Nature and the role of cantankerous "Promethean" poets whose

way of confronting such matters may be so roundabout as to seem like involvement in a totally different cultural groove. In any case, when fea-

turing the primarily "literary" aspects of the writers whom he selects as

examples of the "Promethean" temper, Donoghue has done enough, and

amply, in pages vibrantly suggestive. But I can't do his book justice in

detail, for I have contracted to keep moving on as one thing leads to another. However, here is an ideal passage to help me on my way. Blake, he says, is "dedicated to the primacy of vision." (Note that "primacy of vision" is another "Providence" term.) But this faculty is

a strictly human power superhuman in its origin: he feels no loyalty to Wordsworthian recognitions and acknowledgments, that is, to the Wordsworthian cult of loyalty to nature, since these are tokens of a law that man has not established. Blake believes that the natural world may be redeemed by man's imagination, may be rendered human and therefore transfigured. Wordsworth believes that the natural world is already blessed, and that man has but to recognize that condition and live accordingly: such a life would mean man's redemption. Blake's most complete relation is to his own imagination ... his relation to the given world is defiant. ... In Blake, the Promethean imagination is a form of energy [which is projected] into the otherwise merely natural world.

This visionary imagination is "the distinctively original power, the

alpha of human history ... the secular manifestation of divine powers . . . God and the imagination are one." But not only does the notion of the

poetic imagination as a creative power provide an aesthetic substitute for the theology of Providence as a principle of Foreordination. Viewing the

foresight of Blake's prophetic gospel now from the standpoint of histo-

riographic hindsight, we can realize that an answer to his call for the tran-




scending of natural laws by peremptory modes of purely human affirma- tion was even then taking shape. For already, in keeping with what Henry Adams was to propound as the "law of the acceleration of history," the

pace of the Industrial Revolution was beginning to speed up, we might almost say "traumatically." The advances of technology had attained a stage of development that invited many new aspects of pure scientific speculation - and the conditions were such that the imaginings could be practically implemented, even to the extent of imperialistic aggrandizement.

I have been told that I am wrong in my view of what people generally think, with regard to the relation between pure science and applied science. For I would stress the fact that the state of technology itself pro- vides the conditions which open up avenues of "pure" speculation. Instru- ments and methods are like images, in suggesting new sets of implications, variants of the Gidean formula, "what would happen if . . . ?" a species of

gratuitous sophistication not confined to Gidean ethical aberrancies.

Further on Counter-Nature

When Blake was writing, developments were already under way which now promise such transcending of natural conditions as can be provided by advances in genetic engineering. Such a realm of Counter-Nature is to be distinguished from whatever might be called a Supernatural realm. For whereas such a realm is, by definition, outside the natural, the term "Counter-Nature" (to designate the resources made possible by the an-

thropomorphizing genius of technology) has the etymological ambiva- lence of the Latin preposition contra, from which the prefix "counter" is derived. It can mean "against" both in the sense of "opposed to" and in the sense of "in close contact with," as in the sentence "To brace himself he leaned against a tree"; and the same root, contra, gives the patriot his

proud expression, "my country." I previously quoted a passage in which I discussed the difference be-

tween "natural" and "technological" powers. Perhaps I should say more on that point, which comes to a head in my pleas for the term, "Counter- Nature." We are not concerned here merely with the choice of a word. The important thing is: The proposed term points up a matter of derivation that is concealed when we have but the contrast between "natural" and "supernatural" realms, a contrast which the term "Counter-Nature" is specifically designed to obviate. To adapt a bit more from the article I

already mentioned:



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The flat distinction between "ideas" as derivative "from the bottom up" according to the genealogy of Marxist dialectical materialism, and "from the top down" in Hegel's dialectical idealism, invites a kind of "genetic fallacy" whereby overstress upon the origins of some manifestation can deflect attention from what it is, regardless of what it came from.

The difference between technological power and raw natural power is per se evidence of the way in which the transforming potentialities of symbolism's "ideas" can "transcend" nature without being either ortho- doxly supernatural or rooted in a Hegelian Absolute. . . .

Though the change from the human organism's wholly "natural" condition, as an animal like other animals, began with the most primitive uses of language in assisting the development of tools and in reinforcing the imitation of new procedures, I would assume that only within the last two centuries the implementing of such inventiveness (culminating in

laboratory techniques for the ever more efficient invention of further inventiveness) has produced a revolutionary explosion in the corresponding realm of counter-nature (usually referred to as the ability of humankind henceforth to guide its own evolution rather than being subject to the instincts and laws of natural selection, a development which Darwin studied and which Marx heralded as the rise of "new needs" under modern methods of production) . I call that a realm of "counter-nature" in the sense that, if all such man-made equipment were suddenly gone, you'd have to try making a living under "natural" conditions, though we become accustomed to our "unnatural" ways as a kind of "second nature."

Once our kind of physiological organism emerges from infancy (speech- lessness) into familiarity with a symbol-system such as a tribal language ... it is characterized by a property, or faculty, that infuses all experience with its human nature - whence the "anthropomorphism" inherent in what, over half a century ago, I quaintly called "the thing added - the little white houses in a valley that was once a wilderness." By identifying such symbolic prowess with an "entelechial principle" I have in mind the notion that inherent in it there is the incentive to "perfect" itself by cover- ing more and more ground. For such a potentiality is saying in effect: "Whatever the nonverbal, there are words for it, ranging all the way from the technically, scientifically couched analysis of a situation or process to a sheer expression of attitude, as with the poet's feeling that spring re- quires completion in a springsong, or a devout believer's 'gesture' of rev- erence in his symbolic act of prayer."

The rudiment of "Purpose" in this regard I would ground in the sheerly




physiological needs for food, shelter, sex, etc., but the "anthropomorphic" range is the empirical equivalent of unfinishedness, what has been called humanity's "divine discontent." On the side of symbolism, it all begins with the purely formal fact that a sentence is fully a sentence only insofar as it has a meaning, and such a meaning is its purpose. So we "naturally" start from there and aim to endow everything in nature with the kind of

"meaningfulness" that a sentence has. The pragmatic perfecting of the entelechial principle itself in terms of

mediation ( Vermittlung) by ingeniously extending the realm of counter- nature ever further into the realm of nonsymbolic nature is (take your choice) either an overall human purpose, particularly in its attendant needs to worry about its side effects, or a kind of neo-Schopenhauerean compulsion. . . .

Logology must confront history, first of all, not in terms of historical

change, but in terms of the question, "What is it to be the typically symbol-using animal?"

Cromwell on Providence and Necessity

With regard to the term "Providence" itself, rather than its manifold "radiations," here is an instance which does come close (though with a difference) to the Vico formula. (I discuss it in my Rhetoric of Motives, pp. 1 12ff.) It is in connection with a speech delivered by Oliver Cromwell before the House of Commons, January 22, 1 655.

Cromwell refers to the Revolution as an instance of "God manifesting Himself." The fact that the Revolution succeeded is cited as per se evidence of God's will. He sees in it a "necessity" imposed by "Providence." The Vico touch figures thus :

Religion was not the things at first contested for "at all": but God brought it to that issue at last; and gave it unto us by way of redun- dancy; and at last it proved to be that which was most dear to us.

Again, after asserting that "they do vilify and lessen the works of God" who accuse him of "having, in these great Revolutions, made Necessities," he says:

There is another Necessity, which you have put upon us, and we have not sought. I appeal to God, Angels and Men, - if I shall now raise money according to the Article in the Government, whether I am not compelled to do it!



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The role of "God" or "Providence" here (as we may refer either to God as Providence or the "Providence of God") is stressed in answer to the

charge that the success of the Revolution depended upon his special skill as a conspirator:

"It was," say some, "the cunning of the Lord Protector," - I take it to myself, - "it was the craft of such a man, and his plot, that hath brought it about!" And, as they say in other countries, "There are five or six cunning men in England that have skill; they do all these things." Oh, what blasphemy is this! Because men that are without God in the world, and walk not with Him, know not what it is to pray or believe, and to receive returns from God.

And he clinches matters thus:

If this be of human structure and invention, and if it be an old Plot- ting and Contriving to bring things to this Issue, and that they are not the Births of Providence, - then they will tumble.

More on Nature and Counter-Nature

Somewhere (I forgot where, and I've never been able to find someone who could tell me where) in references to scholastic theology I ran across a definition of God as "the ground of all possibility." It always seemed to me that, if such a "ground" were not defined as "personal" or "intellectual" (a Being Who might make Covenants with us), even a confirmed atheist could go along with that definition. It's somewhat in the same groove with the definition of politics as "the art of the possible."

I would introduce it here as a bridge to a terminology of a quite different temper. The secular analogue of what Cromwell calls "the Births of Provi- dence" in connection with the success of a Revolution that put the de- posed monarch to death would be, in the Marxist nomenclature of dialectical materialism, the prime emphasis upon the "necessities" of the "ob- jective situation," the "scientific" instruction that the Revolution could succeed only when the time was ripe.

Logological doctrine goes along with Cromwell and Marx here, in not- ing that technological powers can "succeed" only to the extent that they accommodate themselves to the "necessities" of the situation as "deter- mined" by the natural conditions which are the material "ground" of their operation. "Fore-ordination" of some sort is implicit in the fact that the foetus of one animal does not develop into the offspring of another. And




if the presently emergent skills of biogenetic engineering develop to the

point where transformations of exactly that sort can be proposed (with, say, further insight into the resources of recombinant DNA), the same underlying laws of motion that made such a development impossible without the intervention of human bioengineering would still circumambiently prevail, just as the natural conditions that made possible the accumulation of 30 to 50 thousand chemical waste disposal dumps (many of them toxic) across the country were not "abolished" by technologers' "free" acts when setting up a realm of Counter-Nature in those areas. Nature can do no wrong, for whatever it does is nature. Its role as "Counter-Nature"

figures only with reference to its man-made plastic effects upon nature. At present, only with the aid of symbol-guided technologic powers could

sheerly natural powers do a grand job of world-wide genocidal pollution. Incidentally, although I can't resist heckling now and then, in bringing

out the suicidal-genocidal aspects of technological power gone wrong, I do not judge my position as outside the technological orbit. In fact, I take it that Logology's wan methodological analogue of HOPE, its involvement with "the tracking down of implications," is at every point following implications that Technology itself brings to the fore, through the sugges- tiveness of its concepts and ideas, of its things as a kind of imagery, and

particularly with regard to possible relations between artificial Counter- Nature and the body's origins in nature old-style - origins that are not

away back and now abandoned, but are still immediately with us every time we breathe - and they had better be, unless each member of our

species is to be supplied with an artificial respirator like those provided in

hospitals ("provided" - there's that word again!), provided for patients whose bodies suffer from the privation of an aptitude normal and natural to our species.

Logology is vigilant with admonitions (and corresponding perspectives) that the resources of Technology have brought into being by exactly those conditions - hence a whole new set of moot questions arises. It's not inconceivable that full technological development could be the flower of Western culture gone to seed in a desert of its own making. Or, otherwise put: So far as I can make out, a computer has no more "sense of

principles" than does a stone rolling down a hill. Its imitation of the "rational" is an "efficient" reduction of human "reasonableness" to the edge of absurdity. It can't distinguish one Ism from another. It could dis-

tinguish between a Marxist and a non-Marxist only if one could say "shibboleth" and the other had to say "sibboleth" - or by some other such distinction purely in the realm of motion (as those two sounds are). It's



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useful, but quite dangerous if too many decisions (questions of motivation) are delegated to such devices as surrogates for "brains."

Marx's Counterpart of Divine Predestination

The Marxist dialectical counterpart of Divine Predestination is, of course, the theory of successive transformations in the nature of class conflict, with each stage bringing about the conditions that prepare the way for the next stage. Marx explicitly says that although the stress upon class conflict is usually associated with his name, he got such leads from the bourgeois economists. His contribution was the version of history designed to foretell (I have to check on the specific "Providence" word he uses here, but I think it was "prove") the inevitable development of the class struggle until the ultimate stage of class society, the dictatorship of the proletariate, which would in turn inevitably lead to the abolition of all class conflict.

On this score Logology's stress upon the purely verbal (symbolic) nature of the negative points out a strategic transformation of the dialectical design in terms of which the various transformations of the class

struggle through its successive stages are said to have taken place. When

turning Hegel's idealistic dialectic into the contrary terms of dialectical materialism, Marx in effect "reified" the negative, as though it were real in the sense of a material thing. The term "Negativity," as applied by Hegel to the positive world of material "objects," was a metaphysical con-

cept much like Spinoza's formula, omnis determinatio est negatio. When

you scrap Hegel's idealistic rationale, and apply the term quasi-scientifically to relations in the world of tumultuous historic details, much that is

actually a matter of opposition (as with the concept of "class-conflict" itself) gets treated in terms of "negation," as one might loosely speak of rivals in a game or of political factions as "negating" each other whereas a Marxist narrative of such historic transformations involves a vast welter of such positive details as characterize all actual contests (that is, oppositions). And although they may be summed in terms of "antithesis," that term itself is etymologically the Greek word that corresponds exactly to the Latin word "opposition."

Thus, a Marxist history of the past bristles with positive descriptions of

constantly changing oppositions, or antitheses that lead to new adjust- ments, or transformations which, in keeping with the same etymological root, can be classified as "syntheses." In brief, old oppositions can become transformed into new compositions, which are positions that lead




to new oppositions, quite as the stages of growth from seed to sprout to stock to branch to bud to flower to seed are not a succession of "nega- tions" but a sequence of transformations, as weights in balance (for which a synonym could be "in opposition") are not "negating" each other.

But hold! The dialectical design itself undergoes a notable transformation when it turns from the records of the past to "providential" discussion of the future, which by the nature of the case can have no welter of positive documentary details, empirical data, to write the history of and thus to write history with. Whereat lo! of a sudden a genuine negative enters the design. The past has been a succession of class conflicts (oppositions) , all capable of description by research and organization of details. But in the ideal future, class conflict disappears and is replaced by a state that is class-less. Here is an outright negative, got by the abolition of classes.

With regard to the bourgeois version of secular providence in foretell-

ing the abolition of slavery, the Marxist dialectic interpreted this development in accordance with the principle of transformation. That is, it diag- nosed the historic development as a change from slavery explicitly so called to "wage slavery." But when confronting the possible future after

capitalism, instead of asking what new kind of classification might de-

velop out of the change in property relationships the Marxist dialectic

abruptly changed the rules and disposed of the issue by then, for the first

time, introducing an absolute negative. Logologically, the issue would be sized up thus: The promises of the

French Revolution were sloganized in keeping with Rousseau's distinction between freedom (independence) and slavery (subjection). The in-

adequacies of so blunt a distinction still figure, even after the step from

"wage-slavery" has, by definition, been culminatively taken. In a per- fectly socialized society that was functioning well, the individual citizen would not be independent of his fellows (that should be an outgrown bourgeois ideal) . All are mutually interdependent upon the competence and goodwill of one another. And the fictions of private property would be replaced by the actualities of control (a development already quite evident in the conditions of social labor, as contrasted with individual en-

terprise, that are manifested in the corporate organizations of capitalism) . Administration is controlled not by the owners (the stockholders) but

by the managers, who usually own but a small proportion of the stock. In

fact, the more widely the stock gets distributed, the easier it is for insiders to keep control in their own hands, since the wider the distribution of

ownership among small stockholders the harder it is for the owners to unite in the control of administrative policies which would bring a higher



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proportion of the corporation's profits to the owners, and less to the

managers. In the case of an ideal communist future, even if one grants for the sake

of the argument that it is working justly, there would still be grounds for

contending that such a social order should not be defined as individual

independence (freedom from subjection) but as mutual subjection of all to all in a way that is gratifying to all. In fact, it's hard to imagine how any society that would involve so extensive and manifold modes of interaction as advanced technology necessarily does could, by sheer definition, involve not maximum independence but maximum interdependence, though the word spontaneously suggests a riot of problems.

Providence in St. Thomas Aquinas

At this point we confront a major moment, perhaps the major moment, in this rambling survey (necessarily "rambling," since the "radiations," or

"ripples," that follow from the term "Providence" as starting point are so manifold, urgent, and directly or fragmentarily relevant to the "eschato-

logical" aspects of the subject). The Marxist theory of history (past and

predicted) reminds us that "Providence" in the sense of thoughts on first and last things is explicitly treated in Question 22 of St. Thomas's Summa Theologica and in Chapter 64 of his Summa addressed "to the Gentiles." And behind those there are St. Augustine's major writings on matters of "Predestination." (I have especially in mind that astounding work of genius, The City of God. Recall also the burning words on the Last Judg- ment in the last book of the New Testament.)

But my Logological approach to a text permits me to make no judgments whatever about the truth or falsity of Theological teachings. Hence I can discuss such texts only as forms of "symbolic action" that are to be analyzed purely as examples of verbal behavior. Consider, for instance, the doctrine of metempsychosis, "transmigration of souls," in some Eastern religions. It implies different relations between the natural and supernatural orders than those propounded in connection with Western tradition. In the Eastern rationale, a person born subject to great hardships and pri- vations is thought to have merited these conditions as the result of evil ways in his previous existence. And if he behaves better this time, he will merit correspondingly better conditions on "his next time around," when his soul will have migrated into another body.

Obviously, a theological rationale of that sort would be at odds with the Augustinian design of Predestination, involving Providential modes of




Fore-Ordination on God's part that would call for quite different terminis- tic behavior on the part of the author's text. And within the necessary con- fines of Logology, I could not properly choose between those two kinds of eschatology. I could but observe how each design is worked out with regard to its own internal consistency, and how it figured in the shaping of its believers' attitudes toward conditions in this world, a kind of speculation that would be sociologically relevant, whether one or the other or neither rationale or Weltanshauung, or orientation or perspective or para- digm happened to be theologically true.

This position by no means belittles the gravity of the issues ultimately involved. But Logology, in the secular sense of the term, is by its own definition totally incapable of making a single statement about the realm of the supernatural. Its orbit being confined to the study of the word-using animal (or, more broadly, the symbol-using animal) as born wordless and

learning language in "infancy," it can but make statements about the

empirical realm of symbolic action, which does, however, include words for the supernatural - and in my judgment that Logologer is a poor one indeed who is not profoundly impressed by the subtlety, profundity, bril-

liance, and scope of the great theological and theologically tinged texts that mark the history of Western thought and Western social organization.

Meanwhile, these developments seem to be approaching a temporary culmination of sorts in a state of affairs not Supernatural, but Counter- Natural, human nature's self-portraiture via the ingenious innovations im-

posed by human enterprise upon the realm of nonhuman nature, though there are the problems that Logology would sum up under the head of the "instrumentalist fallacy," "instrumentalist quandary," the constantly re-

curring temptation to ignore the fact that every device or operation has a nature of its own, quite outside its nature as instrumental to some particular human purpose - and lo! there is the Pandora's box of plagues let loose in the multifarious gifts connected with the Promethean fire and thus Pro-

videntially implicit in the Greek myth of Technology's beginnings (now speeding up exponentially in what Henry Adams called "the law of the acceleration of history") .

With regard to the nomenclature of Thomas's texts (viewed as what

they Logologically are, to begin with, a set of terms dialectically adapted to one another) the "radiations" that most directly suggest themselves concern the relations of these texts to Augustine, Aristotle, and Duns Scotus; and, of course, the term "Providence" is integrally interwoven with the other terms in the text concerning God and God's powers, plus the fact that the key terms, "intellect," "will," and "good," in connection



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with Divine Providence must be used not literally, but analogically, as

compared with their application to the field of human psychology, where the term "prudence" (of the same derivation etymologically as "providence") is, as I think Thomas indicates, a better fit because it applies to a kind of judgment, or way of sizing things up, that would have no place in an all-seeing Intellect. However, in Q. 22, Art. 1, Thomas does offer reasons why, "though to take counsel may not be fitting to God, insofar as counsel is inquiry into matters that are doubtful," the term "prudence" can be applied analogously to God.

The issue as to whether Intellect precedes Will is much like the question of procession in the three Persons of the Trinity. It is, by definition, not a temporal progression, since the timeless nature of a Supreme Being would preclude temporal succession among such Powers.

At first I logologically lined up the key terms thus: In God Providence would necessarily be in itself an act of Creation, and hence of Fore- Ordination. For the very act of Foreseeing the Future would be tanta- mount to Creating that future. By definition a Divine Intelligence cannot be wrong, and nothing that is understood by such a Timeless Intellect to be there could have been there prior to the understanding of it; thus the understanding of it would be one with the willing of it, that is, the creating of it. And since God is by definition simple, God's Intellect and His Will are one with each other and with God's Providence. Also, what is understood to be there and is willed to be there would also necessarily be Good, since an act implies a purpose, and God's universal act of Creation would necessarily be Good, since as Aristotle says in the Nicomachaean Ethics, "The good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim." But here the act would be the creation of the good rather than the pursuit of it. Hence that would be supremely so in the case of God and in the Book of Genesis it is explicitly said that God found His Creation good.

But there was the controversy with the Scotists, who would feature the Will (hence the Franciscan formula "The good is good because God willed it," as distinct from the Dominican formula, "God willed the good because it is good"). Also, Thomas added a qualification of this sort: God's Will is rational, hence it acts in keeping with the knowledge of the Intellect. Those who would feature the Will over the Intellect might hold that any imputing of a motive for God's creative act implies a limitation of God's freedom. It is, by definition, a problem beyond the range of Logological competence; and in any case, the issue has been decided historically in Thomas's favor.

But an account of humans in purely temporal situations involves a con-




siderable departure from the theological nature of intellect, will, and foresight. Human "prudence," along with "remembrance of things past" (memoria praeteritorum) , and an "understanding of the present" (intel- ligentia praesentium) , from which we gather, conjecture "how to provide for the future" (de futuris providendis) is quite fragmentary, and halting, in contrast with the comprehensive powers of God, operating simulta- neously, "in no time," and omnisciently. Thus, in the Nicomachaean Ethics (1111a) Aristotle lists the various ways in which we may not know the "circumstances of an act," and to that extent we are not free, for "that which is done ... by reason of ignorance is involuntary."

If there are three salads, and we have a choice of one, and do not know that two of them happen to be contaminated, we are not really free to make a "rational" choice unless we know which two of those salads we

absolutely must not choose. This is the sort of situation which would

clearly fit Engels's precept, probably an adaptation of Spinoza, that "freedom is the knowledge of necessity." When we vote, we are "free" to cast a ballot; but what do we know about the circumstances of the act involved in this vote, as a "free" choice? Several of our wars were fought under administrations that had explicitly contracted to keep us out of war. There is no need to view such developments simply as cases of deception. When voting for the future, there is a sense in which nobody knows the circumstances of the act, except as confined to the mere matter of marking a ballot. But by definition the case of a Supreme Omniscient Intelligence, with a Power of Providence that Foreknows down to the last detail, the Act of Predestination is absolutely free and one with Creation and its modes of Ordination.

Thomas is quite explicit about the difference between the literal and

analogical uses of a term. But one can't formulate a general rule specify- ing exactly what the difference is in particular cases. Where speculations involving such terms as Intellect, Will, and Foreknowledge (Providence) are concerned, we must keep in mind the observations in Aristotle's Nicomachaean Ethics to the effect that an act is "involuntary" insofar as the agent does not know enough about the "circumstances" of that act. For God's Powers of Intellect and Will are those of an absolutely omniscient Agent, in comparison with which the analogous competence of human agents would be as the tiniest fraction of a fraction is to infinity. And I would have us keep this consideration in mind because my theory of

Logology involves me in speculatively foretelling a purely temporal culmination, our world's Next Phase, although the design, like Marx's, makes no claim to tell of such ultimate eschatological fulfillments as are so



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powerfully and urgently, even aggressively, depicted in St. Augustine's City of God.

St. Augustine's City of God

Whereas my job is largely but to ask just what are the temporal circumstances that might justify a tract on Logology as my symbolic act, in

Augustine's case the issue was clear, and he treated of it with profusion and effusion of erudition and rhetorical drive enough to humiliate any- body who wants to advocate anything. I'd put his book in the same bin with the ardent apocalypse that the New Testament ends on.

Augustine had long been emphatic in his resistance to any heresy that looks forward to an eventual unfolding whereby things will ease up for the sufferers in Hell, who will eventually be judged to have suffered in-

tensely enough and long enough. On that score, incidentally, George Thomson, in his Aeschylus and Athens, offers ample grounds to assume that the Promethean trilogy was of that design. Thus the first play, the one that survived and that Shelley was so delighted with, starts things out with Zeus as a raw tyrant and Prometheus as a raw rebel, the plan being that, by the end of the third play, they both had eased up, and become recon- ciled. Lenin, along Marxist lines, foresaw a "withering away of the State" such that class conflict would eventually subside. And Shakespeare has in

principle (symbolically) retired from his role as a playwright, when Pros- pero abandoned his magic by freeing Ariel and Caliban, perfect surrogates for the antitheses that drama feeds on. Viewed Logologically, the Christian threat and/or promise of eternal Hell, going at top speed, and with full force, is a "perfect" reflex of the prime ethical distinction between "do" and "don't," two major "topics," which means in Greek etymology "places," for which the Afterlife will establish places actually, actual loca- tions for those ultimate principles of discrimination, Yes and No, "per- fectly edified," that is "comprehensively structured."

And an ultimate irony with regard to the contrast between the Christian and Marxist theories of transformation whereby "the Down shall be Up" (as foretold in The Sermon on the Mount and the Communist Manifesto) is that, in the Christian design those who bear witness (that is, who are martyred, "martyr" being the Greek word for "witness") will thrive for- ever, whereas those who die for the Marxist Revolution will be "gone for good." And the rewards of their efforts will be reaped by later generations who suffered not at all for the Cause, an ironic situation whereby the promises held out to the Revolutionary motivated by the rationale of




dialectical materialism are in one sense much more "idealistic" (as modes of self-sacrifice) than those held out to the Christian martyr.

With regard to the design developed in The City of God (Book XXI, Chapter XXIII) besides quoting Biblical authority (Matthew, 25:6) Augustine offers an explanation which comes close to sheerly logological bookkeeping. In the passage quoted, Christ foretells both "eternal

punishment" for the sinners and "life eternal" for the saints. Augustine comments:

If both destinies are "eternal," then we must either understand both as long-continued but at last terminating, or both as endless. For they are correlative - on the one hand, punishment eternal, on the other hand, life eternal. And to say in one and the same sense, life eternal shall be endless, punishment eternal shall come to an end, is the height of absurdity. Wherefore, as the eternal life of the saints shall be endless, so too the eternal punishment of those who are doomed to it shall have no end.

There are rationales that could allow for both these destinies, as were the reprobates simply to fade out of existence. But the design as Augus- tine knew it, he believed in with an implicit conviction that contributed

notably to the urgent eloquence of his presentation. The invasion of Rome by Alaric's barbarian horde from the North had

been a startling event, though one could argue that it was but a new variant of the many times when Rome's own armies returned after a vic- torious campaign, and the soldiers had to be paid off somehow, as usual with such movements. Also, Alaric was a sort of border politician, well

acquainted with the ways of Roman imperialism and its bargainings. And he was even identified with a Christian heresy, the Arians who believed that the Son followed the Father in temporal succession (for unlike both Johannine and secular Logologists, they were unable to distinguish between priority in time and priority in principle) .

The Gentiles, the non-Christian and non- Jewish citizens of imperial Rome (which had traditionally erected a temple to every god of every dues-paying province, though that particular form of the "cujus regio, eius religio" design was fading fast) had bitterly accused the Christians of

bringing on the public disaster by their monotheistic disdain of the many pagan deities. But rather than merely defending his fellow-Christians

against these charges, Augustine in effect assumed the role not just of an accuser, but of an educator by his version of the historical situation (his tale of two cities, conceived after the design of the Chosen and the Repro-



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bates, though they were not locally separate populations as with other cities, but both kinds of citizens were scattered within each body politic) . And thanks to his eloquent command of what, within the conditions of the times, would be the most relevant and persuasive erudition, he also wrote (we might say, borrowing from Cromwell, "by abundance") the very pro- totype of a history conceived in terms of Absolute Predetermination.

Fittingly the Last Judgment of the Damned is the subject of the penul- timate book, the work ending in the sign of the Saints and their eternal blessedness. But as compared with the pageant-like, esoteric unfoldings in the Book of the Apocalypse that ends the New Testament, the statuesque work is rather of a practical, even administrative nature, since Augustine, following his conversion, became as much engrossed in the correlation between doctrine and matters of ecclesiastical organization as the writer, or writers, of the Pauline Epistles. He has a chapter, for instance, "Exam- ples from Nature Proving that Bodies may Remain Unconsumed and Alive in Fire," beginning with the fact that "the salamander lives in fire, as naturalists have recorded." Though Logology can make no judgment doctrinally about Augustine's doctrinal conclusions concerning a Last Judgment, it can wholly recognize the intellectual musculature of his efforts in behalf of his Cause.

Henry Adams and Spengler

Among such texts as we have been considering, all of which could strictly or loosely be called "Predestinarian" after their fashion, two modern ones that particularly impressed me (and both in much the same way) were The Education of Henry Adams and Spengler's Decline of the West. The distinction between a strongly agrarian way of life and the later centuries marked by the exponentially expanding scope of the "Industrial Revolution" (summed up figuratively by Henry Adams in terms of "Vir- gin" and "Dynamo") had its analogue in Spengler's distinction between "culture" and "civilization" (which were related somewhat as the body in vigorous years in contrast with that same body when growing old, and consequently marked by hardening of the arteries) ; a certain pliancy is gone.

In an early book, {Attitudes Toward History, 1937) conceived under the influence of those texts, and with that pattern in mind, I built around a concept I called "the bureaucratization of the imaginative." A plan or project, in its early stages would have imaginative pliancy, but insofar as it gets organized (for which the dyslogistic synonym is my formula was




"bureaucratized") it becomes rigidified by the accumulation of incidental details. And considerations of that sort are implicit in my provisional Logological schematizing with regard to the destiny of the relation between language and Technology, due to Technology's radical role in generating a realm of Counter-Nature. I shall try to make this closing statement as brief as possible, by reduction to a series of propositions.

Counter-Nature: "Fulfillment" via Technology

( 1 ) Whatever may be the origins and end of human existence, Logo- logy contracts to say only what can be based on the definition of what, at the very least, we undeniably are; namely: physiological organisms that are born wordless, and normally learn words during the early years of our emergence from infancy (that is, "wordlessness") .

(2) Though the ability to learn such a medium (of "symbolic action") is in us as individual organisms, the medium itself is a social product, and is matured by its use in "contexts of situation" that are grounded in the realm of nonsymbolic motion, to which the realm of symbolism always, more or less directly or indirectly refers.

(3) We can learn language only because its nature is such that we can apply the same words to different situations; for we learn words by hear- ing them said again and again in different situations - and all situations in their details are unique.

(4) Thus implicit in the applying of the same words to different contexts there is a principle of analogical extension (which we also in some cases call a "metaphorical" extension) .

(5) Thus language both sharpens our attention to what a given situation univocally is (insofar as we have the exact words for it) ; or what it is like (in case the actual or imagined situation is straining at the outer edges of a given usage, hence relies upon the more latitudinarian, that is, analogical, aspects of speech). Or if something momentously new turns up, the nature of attention made possible by language may help demar- cate it as a notable detail, worth repeating and even improving.

(6) We now have said enough to indicate how the kind of attention made possible by language could help humans to single out the instrumental aspects of situations (as with the explicit awareness that an operation performed with a rock in one's hand would be more effective than by the fist alone), to which add the fact that language lends itself so well to the communicating of all such innovations, and hence to their distribution.

(7) Whatever the interruptions in such distribution, the slow develop-



182 burke Journal

ment at the start has by now attained dimensions that, in the last two centuries, are more like an explosion than a growth.

(8) The interaction between symbolic prowess and the products of craftsmanship leads to an ever-increasing range of situations to serve as material for analogical extension (like metaphor, the seeing of one situation in terms of another) .

(9) Each specialized nomenclature, with its corresponding modes of attention and suggestion, is the technical equivalent of a vision, and thus goads to further unfoldings, each tentative effort being like an answer to a call.

(10) The conditions brought about by the advances of symbol-guided technology (that is, by man-made transformations of nonhuman natural conditions) have become an authoritative motivational dimension in their own right, generating the conditions that goad human enterprisers to the

generating of further conditions that in turn serve to perpetuate the same

cycle so far as the necessary materials are still available or further advances in technology can bring other resources to fall within the range of

exploitation for the given purpose. (11) Even the correcting of the problems produced by technology

must be accomplished by technological means; they cannot be solved by abandoning the technological way of life, since our modes of livelihood are already so dependent upon its resourcefulness. The "second nature" of Counter-Nature is here to stay, culminatively. Environmentalism is but an intelligent species of technology's self-criticism.

(12) The Logological concept of our species as the "symbol-using animal" is not identical with the concept, homo sapiens, the "rational" animal - for whereas we are the "symbol-using animal" all the time, we are nonrational and even /rrational some of the time. Somewhat along Freudian lines I take it that the very process of learning language long before we have reached the so-called "age of reason" leaves upon us the mark of its necessarily immature beginnings; and only some of these can be called "childlike" in the idyllic sense of the term. Also, since language has so many words for so many things that we don't know enough about, it often extends our ways of being stupid, and talking out of order.

(13) But implicit in its very nature there is the principle of completion, of perfection, of carrying ideas to the end of the line, as with thoughts on first and last things - all told, goads toward the tracking down of implications. And "rationality" is in its way the very "perfection" of such language-infused possibilities. And what more "rational" in that respect than our perfecting of instruments designed to help assist us in the




tracking-down-of-implications, the rational genius of technology thus being in effect a vocational impulsiveness, as though in answer to a call? And how or why turn against the specifically human incitements to de-

velop such astounding powers further and further? And where else can

you turn anyhow since, maybe like Creon in Sophocles' Antigone, even if we would retract our past decrees, we have already brought about a situation which will drive on of itself. Maybe it's here to stay (and why not, when it is the very portrait of ourselves, ourselves flatteringly enlarged even?) - here to stay, regardless of whether to our great benefit or to con- siderable disaster. Yet there is also the fact that the resultant realm of Counter-Nature, for all of its strivings toward perfection, is in itself, by the same token, still imperfect. Above all, there is the problem of its FREEDOM. In two hundred years our nation became technologically the

greatest on earth, thanks to THREE FREEDOMS, namely: THE FREE- DOM TO WASTE, THE FREEDOM TO POLLUTE, THE FREEDOM NOT TO GIVE A DAMN.

Indications are that within the boundaries of that cultural frontier all is now settled, and accordingly, "The Dialectic" being what it is, we confront a state of much new unsettlement. It is the claim of Logology that, for an ad interim design, our cultural task is to build a tentatively Provi- dential body of speculations around the specific question: "Just what is involved motivationally in the possible likelihood that the realm of Counter-Nature produced by symbol-guided (hence man-made) tech-

nology is a kind of culmination, a fulfillment of specifically human self-

engrossments, conceived as an ironic version (a burlesque?) of the 'ego- tistical sublime,' the mirror-image of a spirit in this case materialized!" And why "ironic"? Because any instrument has a nature of its own beyond its nature as an instrument designed for a given purpose - and therein lies the Vast New Realm of Counter-Nature and its Unintended By-Products, to be studied with regard to its possible relations and disrelations to the natural order, including the nature of our species as developed out of the

prehistoric past (a past bodily, physiologically still with us now) in relation to the natural order.



variations on "providence"

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