Not

Reading Kenneth Burke’s “Definition of Man” resurrected some weird thoughts. He placed a big emphasis on the importance of man’s negative approach to morality: Thou shalt not. However, not is a complex operator. We separate existence by declaring this not that. It’s a gesture of definition; things are divided into named quantities, defined more by what they are not rather than what they are. Unable to establish authority to declare what something is, we reach to define by surrounding it, rather than embracing it. Somehow, this becomes refined into binary negations, which if combined, cancel each other. The picture becomes clearer. Just add it up: if a is not b, and these two quantities cancel each other, then they are opposites. But this is a special case, not the norm, in the land of not.

Dialectic operates on the principle of canceling the oppositions to simplify things. If a is in conflict with b and a is true, then b must be false and discarded, because only one proposition can be true. There is no room for relative levels of true, in the land of not. If a quantity is judged “good” and other things are not like it, then they must be the negation, or “bad.” This is physis. A thing cannot be both what it is, and what it is not. The foundation of this is in the literate creation, the verb to be. But are all questions, particularly moral ones, assertions of being true or false? Sometimes, things just are. Outside the question of right and wrong, there is the purely relative realm of story.

I am beginning to see a large connection between story and sermon. Richard Weaver, in his article “The Cultural Role of Rhetoric” asserts that dialectic “fails to see that language is sermonic.” By substituting an ideal realm of abstract “gods” like truth or deity, it breeds a sort of agnosticism that seeks to break ties with any sort of belief in the truth of culture as a whole, or nomos. It sets up abstract texts, whether they be religious or theoretic, as a measurement of value that sidesteps the question of value itself. It creates a closed system of truth, where everything outside is by definition not truth. This circling of the wagons of culture to exclude culture as a standard in and of itself is dangerous. I like the way he puts it:

This brings us to the necessity of concluding that upholders of mere dialectic, whether they appear in this modern form or another, are among the most subversive enemies of society and culture. They are attacking an ultimate source of cohesion in the interest of a doctrine which can issue only in nullity. It is of no service to man to impugn his feeling about the world qua feeling. Feeling is the source of that healthful tension between man and what is— both objectively and subjectively. If man could be brought to believe that all feeling about the world is wrong, there would be nothing for him but collapse.

The hazards of dialectic reductionism are also neatly expressed by Kenneth Burke by reworking an old nursery rhyme:

If all the thermo-nuclear warheads
Were one thermo-nuclear warhead
What a great thermo-nuclear warhead that would be.

If all the intercontinental ballistic missiles
Were one intercontinental ballistic missile
What a great intercontinental ballistic missile that would be.

If all the military men
Were one military man
What a great military man that would be.

And if all the land masses
Were one land mass
What a great land mass that would be.

And if the great military man
Took the great thermo-nuclear warhead
And put it into the great intercontinental ballistic missile
And dropped it on the great land mass,

What great PROGRESS that would be!

It’s a sticky mess. The coherence of popular opinion creates culture. However, it is constantly assailed as a standard, particularly by those who would call upon an external agency to stabilize a particular position. However, it can’t be excluded in the fashion that dialectic seeks to attain. It took a long time for me to realize that the only difference between dialectic and dialogic is that dialectic implies a power relation. However, it seems that the notion of a dialogic approach to knowledge is also doomed by its multiplicity. I don’t trust popular opinion much either. But must these terms be negations? I respect more and more William Blake’s opinion that there are substantial differences between negations and contraries. Both positions seem essential. As Blake puts it, “Without Contraries there is no progression.”

We preach our positions to one another. We choose among available positions to form our own lifestyles. Society cannot exist without nomos. But we are subject to natural laws of physis. The strong do dominate the weak. But there has to be a balance somewhere, and an understanding of what authorizes one position in relationship to the other. We need to figure out how to assign value without exclusion, but more than that we need to know how to choose what to believe. There is no society without belief.