Kenneth Burke - Symbolism as a Realistic Mode

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chapter 9

Symbolism as a Realistic Mode

“De-Psychoanalyzing” Logologized

1979

The main interest of this essay is in Kenneth Burke’s recapitulation of the placeof entelechy in his work from Philosophy of Literary Form (1941) throughDramatism and Development (1972) in the “Addendum.” Other points of in-terest are his various definitions of what he means by “logological realism” and

his often-repeated distinction between archetype and entelechy. The subtitle de-scribes the logologizing process that Burke kept performing in so many of theselate essays, translating the work of other thinkers (Plato, Marx, Freud, Jung,Saint Augustine) into logological terms. There is a certain amount of repetitionin these late essays because Burke likes to use the same examples over and overagain, and the logologizing process is itself somewhat repetitive because the mainlogological coordinates and assertions about language do not change.

The distinction Burke makes between “timeless” and historically “uncaused”recurrent archetypes and Burkean “entelechy” is crucial for logology and, goingback a ways, for his dramatistic poetics. Entelechy, as Burke uses it, is a function

of language; it is the ability, or the possibility, of developing a terministic set tothe end of the line, or “to perfection.” God is one example, but so is the devil.Tragedy, for example, is the perfect cathartic form of drama because it has themost perfect tragic protagonists and victims. At a more mundane level, we canlinguistically arrive at the idea of “perfect” bread or the “perfect storm,” or the“mother of all battles.” Though none of these “perfections” could possibly ex-ist. Burke’s specialty is verbal texts. One of his best examples of “entelechial”analysis and thinking can be found in his essay “The First Three Chapters of Genesis” in The Rhetoric of Religion (1961), especially in the section devoted tothe “cycle of terms implicit in the Idea of ‘Order’” (see the chart on page 184).

Burke was always an extremely careful and accurate entitler. Symbolism is arealistic mode because language (which is what symbolism means here) is usedto describe and discuss real events and things in the real world. Even a text is re-alistically what it is: a verbal structure in which the words are facts that can beempirically studied. A text, as such, is as realistic as any other physical thing orobject. The subtitle “ ‘De-Psychoanalyzing’ Logologized” is a little more com-plicated. Burke tended to argue with a great many major thinkers in his defenseof logology. These included Freud, Jung, B.F. Skinner, N.O. Brown, Buckmin-ster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, René Wellek, Fredric Jameson, J. Hillis Miller,Cleanth Brooks, Wayne Booth, and many others. In “De-Psychoanalyzing” psy-choanalysis, which Burke considers too idealistic, he translates it into terms of logological realism. Psychoanalysis, in whichever specific form it is practiced, isalways bound to an idealized cycle of terms, a nomenclature. Burke wants a the-ory of the mind and body (of the self) that is more materialistic and realistic than

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the idealized view of the self found in most psychoanalysis. “Psychoanalytic ap-proaches to symbolic activity are clearly a form of idealistic social science” (3).“Logological realism” is the key term here, which Burke defines in a variety of ways throughout the essay.

This is the last of the four logology essays in this group. However, many otheressays in this collection also deal extensively with Burke’s logological views and,especially, with the connections he works out between logology and technology.See, for example, “Why Satire, With a Plan for Writing One,” “Towards Look-ing Back,” and especially “Variations on ‘Providence.’” Burke also discusses lo-gology at some length in the interview “Counter-Gridlock.”

***

i

On reading the very suggestive article by Anthony Burton in your fall

1978 issue, “Beauty and the Beast: A Critique of Psychoanalytic Ap-

proaches to the Fairy Tale,” I was moved to make some comments

which, I hope, might in turn call forth further comments. We should

probably begin with the term “symbolism.”

In my “dramatistic” view of “language as symbolic action,” the most

general meaning of the term “symbolism” is “communication in terms

of a symbol-system.” That is, in the United States we speak an “Ameri-

can” brand of English—and my particular application of that langue in

this article is an instance of symbolic action. But Freud uses the term

“symbolic action” in a more specialized sense, as synonymous with

“symptomatic action.” The “symbols” of a dream are “symptomatic” of

psychological perturbations in the “psyche” of the dreamer. Aristotle’s

term “imitation,” as applied to tragedy, would involve another aspect of

the “symbolic” in the sense that an Athenian tragedy was but a symbolic

enactment of suffering, in contrast with the use of “real” victims in thegladiatorial contests of the Roman theater. Any Marxist theory of the

distinction between “bourgeois cosmopolitanism” and “socialist real-

ism” would also exemplify a concern with particular dialects of sym-

bolism within the realm of symbolism in general. And so on, including

for instance the “four-fold” scheme of mediaeval hermeneutics.

When we are dealing with psychoanalytic modes of interpretation

such as Freud’s and Jung’s, the overall “logological” fact is that we are

necessarily involved in theories of analogy. The manifest content of somesymbolic expression is the analogue of a latent content, the nature of

which is defined in accordance with the particular theories of motivation

and interpretation propounded by the given psychological nomencla-

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ture. On page 255, on the subject of “archetypes,” Burton quotes Jung’s

quite relevant comment to this effect: “We are concerned first and fore-

most to establish certain analogies, and no more than that; the existence

of such analogies does not entitle us to conclude that the connection isalready proven. . . . The existing analogies, however, are significant

enough in themselves to warrant the prominence we have given them.”

And he quotes a later statement, saying that the archetypes “are without

known origin; and they reproduce themselves at any time or in any part

of the world—even where transmission by direct descent or ‘cross-fertil-

ization’ must be ruled out.”

Then, in reference to a work by Joseph L. Henderson, a Jungian psy-

chologist who has written on “Beauty and the Beast,” Burton says:

Initiation, he claims, is an archetype. But he applies the term broadlythroughout his book, Thresholds of Initiation, to trials of strength, rites of vision, and many other cultural activities. . . . He brings the Hopi snakeyouth myth, the Beauty and the Beast tale, and the Dionysius cult togetherwith many other events as examples of one subcategory of this onearchetype. Treated ahistorically in this way, the construct is too vague to beuseful. These are little more than resemblances. Marriage is also claimed tobe an archetype, and includes motherhood. But marriage takes many

forms. . . . What is to be made archetypally of polyandry, polygyny,kibbutzim, communal and single mother arrangements, or of the situationin which the mother’s brother normally acts as the cultural father? Tosubsume all these under one archetype does not seem realistic. Hendersonseems oblivious to the problem. (255–56)

Accordingly, Burton asks: “When is an archetype not an archetype?”

I can’t promise to “solve” that problem. But it might serve as a good

point of departure in the direction of questions about the relation be-

tween symbolism in general (“logology”) and the role of analogy in thepsychoanalytic study of mythology.

ii

First, the resources of analogy being what they are, we could say “ahis-

torically” that any such terms as “archetype” or “initiation” are at a

high level of generalization. Any pronounced transformation from one

state to another could be conceivably classifiable under the head of “ini-tiation,” particularly if there were some rite that formally commemo-

rated the development or event as a change of social status. Burton com-

plains that such laxity with “archetypes” is not “realistic.” But though I

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grant that Jung is far out on the slope of idealism, his references to anal-

ogy with regard to archetypes would strike me as a quite realistic obser-

vation about such terms. Surely, archetypes are not “things” with defin-

able edges, like tables or chairs (which, as terms, by the way, quickly takeon analogical usage, as per “water table” or “cathedral”). They are ti-

tles for some kind of “principle.” And their embodiment in story

(“myth”) quite spontaneously destroys borders. (For instance, some par-

ticular archetypal ceremony for marriage might incorporate imagery of

plowing a field for planting. Or a magical imagery of planting might well

help things out by incorporating connotations of a story [“myth”] in

which a woman is being impregnated.) Jung came quite close to getting

this matter straight. But he couldn’t get it wholly straight because of theterministic pressure whereby, though the “methodology of logology” re-

quires us to go from concerns with “symbolism in general” to the tech-

nical analysis of psychoanalytic nomenclature, the pressure of the won-

ders that were by psychoanalysis revealed kept even Jung from making

the step from implicit psychological idealism to explicit logological real-

ism. But in those passages I have quoted, he was obviously quite close.

Let’s see how things look if, using the same most helpfully accurate

essay as our point of departure, we proceed with the help of quotations

from Burton’s able statement of the case.

The final pages of his paper sharpen the issue perfectly. There, on the

subject of “Psychoanalysis and Materialism,” he makes it quite clear

how mere matters of nomenclature (“Logological” considerations) line

up, if we accept the rules that are implicit in reduction to a choice be-

tween idealism and materialism (each of which, after its own fashion,

calls for the adjective “dialectical”).

Burton does a neat job presenting these two terministic operations.

Hegel’s idealistic version dug so deep that even Lenin, on going backover the whole subject, advised Marxists to study Hegel, as a useful step

along the way. And in early books, Marx was classed as a “neo-

Hegelian.” The difference, as Burton’s trim analysis makes clear (hence,

since I am referring to it, I can make further cuts), is reducible to two the-

ories of origin. Namely:

In Hegel, Nature and History are the unfolding of the Absolute Idea

through time. This is a metaphysical analogue of the theological view of

a Divine Spirit made incarnate. And “ideas” are conceived as derived bythat distinguished descent, being made manifest in the logic of history,

which develops as a series of responses to their influence.

In Marx the provenance gets reversed, and ideas arise as a reflection



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of economic conditions. “That is, one could try to explain sociocultural

phenomena and their workings by considering the largely environmen-

tal mental mechanisms of settlement, work, demographic trends, tech-

nology, as prime factors, and relate forms of social organization andideology (i.e., myth, ritual, language, beliefs, etc.) to such ‘earthly’ mech-

anisms” (Burton, 257). In keeping with these options:

Psychoanalytic approaches to symbolic activity are clearly a form of idealistic social science. . . . Symbols are pan-human and universal throughtime and space. They are not seriously modified by cultural factors, andbegan somewhere in archaic time. They function in the psyche according toprinciples that are intended to hold for people everywhere—Oedipalconflict or archetype, in the two cases given here.

Such systems of explanation are idealist in that they are sets of ideas.Symbols, Archaic Time, the Psyche, the Unconscious, Oedipality, Arche-types, are all mental constructs. . . . Their most substantial claim to value isthat they have ameliorative effects when used with patients. (257)

But is our only choice that between idealism and materialism? Might

there be room for a brand of realism that doesn’t quite go along with ei-

ther of those opposing metaphysical nomenclatures, yet finds much of

great value in both? Let’s see what might be said along those lines.

iii

In a supplement to C. K. Ogden and I.A. Richards’s book, The Meaning

of Meaning, the anthropologist Malinowski applies the term “symbolic

action” to a quite realistic situation. A group of illiterate natives are en-

gaged in a cooperative act of catching fish. As part of the process they

use language, in calling back and forth to one another—and whatever

may be their involvement in “myths,” their group coordination by theuse of symbolism in this enterprise is about as realistic an enterprise as

you could ask for. Every utterance is related to the problem at hand, the

mutual interchange of instructions for carrying out an act which could

have only been performed much less efficiently, if at all, without the aid

of symbolism; that is, the vocabulary of their tribal idiom.

Any such symbolic resources are necessarily learned in “contexts of

situation” that are themselves outside the realm of symbolism as such.

Malinowski also touches upon symbolic structures of a quite differentnature (books, for instance, in which the internal relationships among

the terms do not have any such direct bearing upon the “context of sit-

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uation” in which they are being used. In fact, a book is itself a “context”

for any subdivision of the book as a text.

Even Saint Augustine, who, of course, believed that we are born in the

image of God, offered purely realistic speculations as to how, as an in-fant, he learned language by hearing words spoken in nonverbal contexts

of situation, though that wasn’t his name for them. Adam and Eve were

the only human parents who began with linguistic competence (and in

the lingua Adamica even, for the development of which Adam was given

a major assignment in taxonomy). Similarly, though Jeremy Bentham

says that our “fictions” for psychological and ethical terms are borrowed

analogically from the strictly material realm, Emerson agrees with him,

plus a transcendental twist whereby God puts nature here as a kind of raw material for us to work from when etymologically perfecting our ter-

minology of Spirit.

But in any case, we must guard against a “genetic fallacy,” a “fallacy

of origins,” when considering the role of “language as a mode of sym-

bolic action.” Regardless of whether it is a reflection of Hegel’s “Ab-

solute Idea,” also called the “World Spirit” (his idealistically metaphys-

ical analogues of “God”) or but an etymological development from

words for sensations extended analogically in accordance with Ben-

tham’s theory of fictions, in either case, once arisen, it has a nature of its

own, with corresponding powers.

There is a passage in Burton’s article stating that technology could be

viewed either along Hegelian lines as “from heaven to earth,” or along

Marxist lines as “from earth to heaven” (257), though Marxists might

complain unless you put it more strictly: from substructure to super-

structure. But the kind of “logological realism” that I am trying to put

in a word for would be “ahistorical” in the sense that, whether “ideas”

(or language in general) be derived from an idealistic metaphysical back-ground or from a materialistic one, there are many notable realistic ob-

servations that we can make about the resourcefulness of symbol-

systems, as innovative or “creative” forces, in their own right.

We should also remember that, although orthodox theology’s view of

Adam as created in God’s image embodies the provenance “from heaven

to earth,” the account of the Creation is intrinsically interwoven with the

story of the Fall; hence expulsion from the Garden sets up ample condi-

tions for quite “tough-minded” vocabularies of human motivation. (LaRochefoucauld’s Maxims, for instance, or John Mandeville’s “Fable of

the Bees” could fit perfectly with theological views, as portraits of human



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relations in a society that is turned away from God—and Moliere’s por-

trait of Tartuffe was defended as an attack not against the faith but

against religious hypocrisy, a corrupting of the faith.)

However, a purely secular, realistic analysis of motives should be “neu-tral,” rather than embodying a “materialistic debunking” of “idealistic”

pretensions. Marxism is fluctuant in this regard, owing to the fact that

the rationale of the Marxist dialectic allows for a shifting point of view

whereby, for instance, the bourgeoisie can be hailed as “emancipators”

in the struggles against feudalism, yet can also be subjected to ingenious

scorn as foes of socialism—and often these attacks can profit rhetorically

by quasi-theological accents. In The Communist Manifesto, for instance

(a text to match with the Sermon on the Mount as a rock-bottom “the-ory of history”), there are some sizzling passages which seem to “struc-

ture” the topics of persuasion thus: The bourgeois period destroyed the

highly “personal” aspect of the terms for group relationships under feu-

dalism. “In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political il-

lusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

The several following paragraphs that “amplify” this statement are,

beyond all question, a rhetorical marvel. First (thanks to the persuasive

elements that are implicit in the Marxist dialectic, so well designed for

“pointing the arrows” of our expectations), it gives credit to capitalism

for having so effectively introduced the revolutionary policies which

Marxist socialism is but continuing. (Incidentally, much of the “revolu-

tionary,” or “radically innovative” motivation that the manifesto at-

tributes to the bourgeoisie’s tie-in with technology may be largely due to

the nature of technology itself, whatever kind of political system may, af-

ter its fashion, be aiming to profit by the advantages of technology with

a hoped-for minimum of its troublous “side effects.”)

In any case, to the extent that the idea of a socialist “revolution” wasin bad repute among the bourgeoisie, the Marxist dialectic could give the

bourgeoisie “credit” for introducing the revolutionary principle. For

there certainly was no need that the Marxist text run counter to bour-

geois usage, in view of standard references to our “revolution,” the

French, and the term “Industrial Revolution.”

The ingenious rhetorical twist is that the manifesto contrived para-

doxically to excoriate the bourgeois as a kind of relentless personality in

the very act of eliminating personal relations (such as the feudal ration-ale had clung to). In effect, whatever credit might go to the bourgeoisie

for unmasking the element of illusion that Marxism attributed to feu-

dalism’s personalistic view of economic relationships was, at this point,

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played down, and the theme of depersonalization was played up (in

terms of “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation”). It had been the

bourgeois theorists who introduced a “godless” explanation of eco-

nomic hardships.Also, the flat distinction between idealism and materialism gets mod-

ified by the official cult of “socialist realism,” which in effect proclaims

itself to be as personalistic as the religiously infused (hence by Marxist

tests, “illusory”) rationale of feudalism had been. And understandably a

realism of this sort can be so attuned as to become the propagandistic

handmaiden of dialectical materialism’s party politics, in contrast with

the outright materialistic debunking of politics outside the party.

iv

Whereupon it is now time for us to make clear what we mean by “logo-

logical realism.” The most direct way into the subject, as here ap-

proached through Burton’s essay, is on page 255: “When is an archetype

not an archetype?”

I couldn’t offer a blanket answer to that question; but with regard to

Freud’s Oedipal “archetype,” logological realism would answer

promptly, “An archetype is not an archetype when it’s an entelechy.”

This would involve a distinction between Platonic archetypes as ide-

alistic and Aristotelian entelechies as realistic. Since my Grammar of Mo-

tives (1945), I have touched on this matter in many ways—particularly

in my essay on “The First Three Chapters of Genesis” (reprinted in my

Rhetoric of Religion, 1961) and in “Archetype and Entelechy” (the sec-

ond of two talks printed in a volume, Dramatism and Development,

1972). Here I must try merely to give the gist of my position.

There are two kinds of priority: logical (as per the syllogistic design:first premise/second premise/conclusion) and temporal (yesterday/ to-

day/tomorrow). We can also say that the term for a class of objects is

“logically prior” to any and all of the particulars classifiable under that

head. In both Greek and Latin, the same words mean “beginning” in

both senses. Thus, in Latin, the word principium means “principle” as

in the expression “the first principles of science.” But with regard to the

opening words of Genesis, “In the beginning,” the Latin is in principio.

Similarly, the plural of the Greek word arché matches the Latin when re-ferring to “the first principles of a science.” The Gospel of John begins

en arché—and the temporal meaning shows clearly in such words as

“archives” or “archaeology.”



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“Essence” is a word for what something is. In my Grammar of Mo-

tives, my expression “the temporizing of essence” refers to ways whereby

the view of what something is gets presented in terms of the thing’s ori-

gin, what it was or came from. There is a vulgar usage that reveals theprocess most clearly. If A considers B an essentially loathsome fellow, he

can spontaneously say so in quasi-narrative terms by calling B a bastard

or a son of a bitch. In effect, A defines B’s nature now in terms of his

provenance. Fundamentalists resented Darwinian evolutionism because,

by their style, the theory of our “descent” from apes was equivalent to

calling us apes—and at times Darwin became so emphatic in distin-

guishing simply between the “natural” and the “supernatural” that the

important logological distinction between “dumb” animals and the hu-man prowess with “symbol systems” got obscured. Logology here would

introduce reference to the “fallacy of origins.”

Genesis, as a book of beginnings, features the tactics of temporal pri-

ority. Narrative (story, mythos) being a more primitive form of discourse

than philosophy, the Bible doesn’t begin with (say) a logological analy-

sis of the proposition that “implicit in the idea of a social order there is

the idea of possible disobedience to that order.” But that’s the gist of

what it says, in its particular narrative way. It shows God making a crea-

ture in his image, in the most perfect surroundings imaginable. It adds a

Law, whereby disobedience is made possible. And this law, propounded

by the first and foremost authority, is sinned against by our first ances-

tor. So, all told, the Fall was implicit in the Creation, and proneness to

temptation is of our very essence, since we “inherited” such “original

sin” from the “first’’ man “in time.” By the Law we are “tempted in prin-

ciple,” since the Law made temptation possible. One gets glimpses of this

exquisite ambiguity in the Lord’s Prayer, where “Lead us not into temp-

tation” means rather, “Put us not to the test.” And so on.Plato’s archetypes, viewed in terms of logological realism, are derived

thus: The word for a class of objects can be treated as “prior” to any par-

ticulars classified under that head. There is a sense in which it can even

be temporally prior. For instance, if you consult the definition of the word

“table,” you’ll note that it encompasses a class of objects countless num-

bers of which have not even yet been produced. Also, there is no one par-

ticular table which you could point to and say, “That is ‘table.’ ” For any

particular table will have details that distinguish it from every other table.But each table would in its way be an “imitation” of the “ideal form” as

stated in the definition, which would be the “archetype” that was “prior”

to the lot, many instances of which are not even yet in existence. The

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word contains the root arché. Where then was this “pure form” experi-

enced? Actually, as analyzed in terms of logological realism, there is no

“archaic” or “temporally prior” situation involved. It is a purely gram-

matical matter of classification, translated into terms of story.

v

And now to the Freudian “archetype” of the “primal crime” committed

in “prehistory,” and so essentially “originating” that the results of it still

survive, bequeathed to us in the tensions of the modern family. Anthro-

pologists complained that they found no evidence of any such event. But

Freud felt that he needed it as a postulate for his theory.

Logological realism could have shown him how his problem could

have been “solved” by the simple expedient of turning from thoughts of

Platonic archetypes to thoughts of Aristotelian entelechies. Aristotle uses

the term “entelechy” to designate the efforts of each thing to fulfill the

potentialities of its kind—a fish aiming to be perfectly or thoroughly a

fish, a tree to evolve in keeping with its nature as a tree.

Logological realism would restrict this notion to an incentive in lan-

guage; namely, “the tracking down of implications.” The nomenclatureof physics, for instance, suggests certain possibilities of further develop-

ment. The nomenclature of psychology suggests possibilities in another

direction, economics in another, politics in another. Henry James’s pref-

aces often tell of some likely turn he proceeded to develop, by going from

step to step. I call this an “entelechial” aspect of symbolic motivation. It

involves all sorts of strivings after “perfection,” whereas Freud had de-

nied “perfection” as a motive.

Cutting many corners, saying here only enough to convey the gist, I’dhave Freud say:

Thinking of representative family tensions in the light of the entelechialprinciple (replacing psychological idealism by concepts of logologicalrealism), I’d state the situation thus: The representative tensions of thefamily as I have studied it would come to a “perfect fulfillment” if theyoung males banded together against the father, slew him, and took overthe women, with corresponding psychological results such-and-such.

As so considered, the psychoanalytic nomenclature has no need topostulate that such a “culmination” ever did happen or ever will happen.

It is simply an instance of “carrying things to the end of the line,” “track-

ing down implications to the point where we don’t need to distinguish



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too scrupulously between ‘logical conclusion’ and ‘reduction to absurd-

ity,’ and all the more so since we’re in a field where things get quite un-

settled, almost as a matter of course.”

Freud’s view of human relations is in its very essence highly “drama-tistic.” He was in effect conceiving of the “perfect family drama” to ex-

press the tensions as he sized them up. But owing to the ever recurrent

ambiguity whereby statements of “essence” can get phrased in terms of

an “archaic” (mythic) past, despite his great symbolic shrewdness, he hy-

pothesized an actual event where no actuality of any sort (nothing but

symbolism) was needed.

addendum to symbolism as a realistic mode

Perhaps the handiest way into my proposed adaptation of Aristotle’s

term “entelechy” (to name a generative principle that is usually classed

under the head of “archetype”) is by some references in my Philosophy

of Literary Form (1941) where I hadn’t yet quite got to it. I had been

working with the two notions of self-expression and communication,

and I ran into the need for a third term, thus:

He would change the rules, and burn out temptation by efficient excess of it. He would start . . . on an uncompromising journey “to the end of theline.” (38n)

Books that take us to the end of the line . . . that would seek Nirvana byburning something out. (70)

Note a “serial” quality in the “to the end of the line” mode—a kind of “withinness of withinness.” . . . One may get the pattern in Coleridge’s line,“Snow-drop on a tuft of snow.” And in Moby Dick there is an especially“efficient” passage of this sort, prophetically announcing the quality of

Ishmael’s voyage: after walking through “blocks of blackness,” he enters adoor where he stumbles over an ash box; going on, he finds that he is in aNegro church, and “the preacher’s text was about the blackness of dark-ness.” (88)

There are related references on pages 3, 86, 118, 161, 166.

In my Grammar of Motives (430–40), the notion is further developed,

though without reference to either “archetype” or “entelechy.” There,

with regard to “the temporizing of essence,” I specifically criticize

Freud’s hypothesis of a primal “horde ruled over despotically by a pow-erful male.” And my criticism is built around my point about the am-

biguous relation between terms for logical and temporal priority whereby

statements about how something essentially is can be phrased narratively

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in terms of derivation from how it originally was (a device all the more

“natural” to an age so Darwinian in its thinking).

Though anthropologists said that they found no evidence of any such

prehistoric situation, Freud still clung to it, albeit apologetically: “I thinkit is creditable to such a hypothesis if it proves able to bring coherence

and understanding into more and more new regions.” He “needed” the

story only because he was spontaneously characterizing the essence of a

situation now in terms of temporal priority. And if the “essence” of fam-

ily tensions now must be stated in such quasi-evolutionary terms (of an

analogically imputed prehistoric past ) then “whatever doubts one might

cast upon the pattern of the primal horde as an existent, he needed the

concept as a term in his description of the family essence.”I was getting close to the out-and-out distinction between archetype and

entelechy when, in the next paragraph I referred to Plato’s Meno in which

the principles of knowledge are presented as innate in us, and “remem-

bered from a past existence.” The section next develops at some length an

analysis of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt as a narrative form in which essential motives

are properly presented in terms of temporal priority (as, I could have

added, is similarly the case with Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past ).

My Rhetoric of Motives (1961) moves things farther along by closing

on a summarizing reference to

the rhetorical and dialectic symmetry of the Aristotelian metaphysicswhereby all classes of beings are hierarchally arranged in a chain or ladderor pyramid of mounting worth, each kind striving toward the perfection of its kind, and so towards the kind next above it, while the strivings of theentire series head in God as the beloved cynosure and sinecure, the end of all desire.

As “logologically” adapted, “God” becomes the overall title of titlesfor any system (as “dialectical materialism” might be deemed the “god-

term” of Marxist atheism).

And “perfection” undergoes a transformation of this sort: By “perfec-

tion” is meant the way in which the unfoldings of a terminology are in ef-

fect the “strivings” to the end of the line. Thus, I could include in my def-

inition of the human, symbol-using animal the clause “rotten with

perfection,” having in mind the thought that there can be “perfect” fools

and “perfect” stinkers, and so on—as with Hitler’s “vision of perfection”whereby he “idealized” the Jew, imputing to his chosen victim every vice

connected with the problem at hand, or more grandly, every vice (and in

particular whatever vices his followers might suspect in one another, were



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it not that they could “give their faults the name of the good quality most

like it,” while “perfectly” reversing the procedure when looking for the

meanest way of characterizing any motive of the enemy).

To revise is, in one sense or another, to be aiming at perfection. Andto reject revision is to fear lest a “primal” perfection already there in

essence will get lost. I also touched upon the fact that, given the dram-

atizing possibilities of language, a statement such as “I don’t like you”

could be “perfected” by translation into a statement such as “I could

kill you.” And a dream might thus “perfect” the judgment by dream-

ing of you as dead. (But I am here developing further the statement in

the text.)

In my Rhetoric of Religion the issues so come together that I can herebut indicate the angles. My essay on “The First Three Chapters of Gen-

esis” is designed to show how, in terms of story (narrative, temporal pri-

ority) the account of the integral relation between the Creation and the

Fall is a “mythic” way of saying that the principle of disobedience is im-

plicit in the nature of Order, which comes to a focus in the need for Law,

and the Law “makes sin possible.” (Hence the “first” man could say No

to the first thou-shalt-not. And you must admit that that is a wholly tem-

poral way of showing how the principle of negation presents the possi-

bility of being negated.)

On page 312 I discuss the “principle of perfection” in the idea of Hell.

In my Sixth Analogy (25 ff), on the subject of the Trinity. I discuss the

ambiguities of the difference between logical and temporal priority by

noting how, though the Father is “first,” then the Son, it was deemed a

heresy to conceive of such succession in terms of temporal sequence.

On page 184, I offer a “Cycle of Terms Implicit in the Idea of Order.”

The terms as such imply one another without any temporal dimension.

That is, the term “Order” implies the term “Disorder,” and vice versa.But in narrative accounts, the story can go from a state of Order to a

state of Disorder, or vice versa. The term “Order” implies such terms as

“Obedience” or “Disobedience” to the Order. But in the corresponding

story, they are related in a temporally irreversible sequence, as the First

Authority sets up the Order, then gives the Negative Command that

makes Disobedience possible, and so on.

An explicit reference to “entelechy” and the “logic of perfection” is

on page 300.The head-on discussion is the article on “Archetype and Entelechy,”

the second of two talks published under the title of Dramatism and De-

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velopment (1972). I there build around the passage in the Poetics where

Aristotle says that in tragedy the calamity should involve conflicts among

intimates (or, in Butcher’s translation, “someone near and dear”) “when

brother kills brother, or a son kills his father, or a mother her son, or ason his mother—either kills or intends to kill.” I have never seen evidence

that Freud ever read this passage, which doesn’t at all single out the one

“Oedipal” crime as Freud does. And the curse on the House of Atreus

involved a situation in which a father unknowingly (unconsciously?) ate

the hearts of his sons at a banquet supposedly celebrating a reconcilia-

tion between brothers. I further note:

For all Freud’s emphasis on the fatherkill, it’s worth remembering that the

prime instance of the sacrificial motive in the Old Testament is the story of Abraham’s pious willingness to sacrifice Isaac. And the entire logic of theNew Testament is built about the story of a divine father who deliberatelysent his son on a mission to be crucified.

I take it that Aristotle is giving us “the recipe for perfect victimage,”

or rather the “perfect imitated victim”—“and by ‘entelechy’ I refer to

such use of symbolic resources that the potentialities can be said to at-

tain their perfect fulfillment.” Though he does discuss the earlier forms

out of which tragedy developed, his emphasis is upon not its origins but

on its modes of completion.

But Freud (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1922) had called upon

us “to abandon our belief that in man there dwells an impulse towards

perfection, which has brought him to his present heights of intellectual

prowess and sublimation.” And a little later he said, “The repressive in-

stinct never ceases to strive after its complete satisfaction.” I argue that

these two sentences are mutually contradictory. For what could more

clearly represent an “impulse to perfection” than “striving” after “com-plete satisfaction”?

Freud proposes to substitute what he calls a “repetition compulsion,”

or “destiny compulsion,” designations for a psychopathic tendency to

relive some prior traumatic situation by so confronting a totally differ-

ent set of later circumstance that they are interpreted by the sufferer in

terms of the original painfully formative situation. While not disputing

the likelihood of such a tendency, I proposed “to consider how it looks,

as viewed in the light of an ‘entelechial’ principle having wider functionsthan the manifestations with which Freud is here concerned.” And I

stated the case thus:



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Is not the sufferer exerting almost superhuman efforts in the attempt to givehis life a certain form, so shaping his relations to people in later years thatthey will conform perfectly to an emotional or psychological patternalready established in some earlier formative situation? What morethorough illustration could one want of a drive to make one’s life “perfect,”despite the fact that such efforts at perfection might cause the unconsciousstriver great suffering?

I but proposed to widen the concept of perfection as I have already

explained. And I develop the notion that an early “traumatic” experi-

ence might lead one to see life in those terms. Accordingly one might so

interpret a later situation that it was like the older situation over again.

And this process “would be ‘entelechial’ or ‘perfectionist’ in the ironicsense of the term, insofar as the sufferer was in effect striving to impose

a ‘perfect’ form by using the key terms of his formative wound as a par-

adigm.”

I then discuss in effect how Freud psychiatrically reversed this

process by imagining the kind of outbursts that would “perfectly” ex-

press family tensions as he sees them. But owing to the ambiguities

whereby essential situations can be expressed in terms of quasi-

temporal priority, he presents this entelechial symbolizing of fulfillment

as the derivative of an archetypal situation that actually happened in the

“archaic” past.

I discuss several other aspects of the case, all involving the notion that

the “entelechial” motive, the goad to try “perfecting” symbolic struc-

tures by “tracking down implications to the end of the line,” is a kind of

formal compulsion intrinsic to mankind’s involvement in the resources

of symbolic action. And often by the “temporizing of essence,” an over-

stress upon the term “archetype” leads to talk of the “archaic” or “pri-

mordial” where the real issue, as viewed “logologically,” involves but an“entelechial” perfecting of symbol-systems.

Incidentally, the entelechial principle itself can lead to a temporizing

in the other direction. For instance, consider two “theories of history”

such as The Sermon on the Mount and The Communist Manifesto. Both

are perfect patterns of fulfillment, so far as matters of sheer logological

analysis are concerned. Both are so essentially entelechial in their struc-

ture that both are stories of a perfecting process.

Though my book Language as Symbolic Action (1966) has verymany passages that fall under the head of entelechy or perfection, there

are no such entries in the index. Here are a few: 19–27, 54–55, 69–74,

145, 153–56, 160–62, 361, 384–85. The pages on Poe deal with the

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“perfection” of death. And his account of how he “derived” The Raven

is an interesting instance of the shifts between logical and temporal

priority.

notes

This essay originally appeared in the Psychocultural Review 3 (winter 1979):25–37.


Kenneth Burke - Symbolism as a Realistic Mode

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