DiCaglio - Language and The Logic of Subjectivity - Whitehead and Burke in Crisis

Language and the Logic of Subjectivity: Whitehead and Burke in Crisis
Author(s): Joshua DiCaglio

Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 50, No. 1 (2017), pp. 96-118
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/philrhet.50.1.0096
Accessed: 10-01-2018 19:55 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Philosophy & Rhetoric
This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Wed, 10 Jan 2018 19:55:23 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Language and the Logic of Subjectivity:
Whitehead and Burke in Crisis
Joshua DiCaglio
a b s t r ac t
This article examines the meaning of the subjective in rhetorical modes of inquiry
in contrast to the other-oriented nature of social critique. I reopen the problem of
consciousness for interpretation by examining challenges to scientific authority in
the 1930s, specifically how Kenneth Burke and Alfred North Whitehead respond to
a “crisis in mathematics” born out of Whitehead’s attempt, with Bertrand Russell,
to reconcile logic and mathematics. Whitehead uses Russell’s paradox to demon-
strate the necessary return of subjective inquiry as a legitimate mode of knowledge.
Burke’s Permanence and Change develops Whitehead’s arguments to justify inter-
pretative approaches to knowledge. Examining their arguments reveals an analo-
gous “crisis in the humanities” in which language or culture is substituted for the
examination of subjectivity. Such misplaced concreteness risks omitting interpre-
tive aspects of rhetorical inquiry in favor of the social or political when such social
aspects only emerge within the field of subjective experience.
Keywords: rhetorical theory, subjectivity, rhetoric and science, Kenneth Burke,

Alfred North Whitehead
Bruno Latour, the increasingly popular French philosopher and founda-

tional thinker for science studies, once wrote: “I know neither who I am
nor what I want, but others say they know on my behalf, others who will
define me, link me up, make me speak, interpret what I say, and enroll me”
(1988, 192). This invocation of an “other” as a self-definition is no longer sur-
prising nor radical but has long been a common answer to Plato’s famous
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2017

Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
language and the logic of subjectivity
and persistent insistence that we must, before all else, know o urselves.
I cannot know myself except insofar as I know and encounter others,
who through a collective process, determine what I am. Within rhetoric,
Diane Davis (2010), in her recent account of the “prior rhetoricity” of being,
uses philosophers making similar claims to provide a theoretical grounding
for her argument, including Jean-Luc Nancy, who claims that “what com-
munity reveals to me . . . is my existence outside myself,” and Emmanuel
Levinas, who states that “paradoxically enough, thinkers claim to derive
communication out of [a] self-coinciding” that “precedes any relationship
of the ego with itself ’” (10, 13). This same point is again found in George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s account of the fundamentally metaphori-
cal nature of being: “The capacity for self-understanding presupposes the
capacity for mutual understanding” (2008, 232). The possibility of articulat-
ing any kind of self-coinciding is yielded up to a relation with an other,
which presents me with my existence and being.
We find ourselves speaking of rhetoric and philosophy, of persuasion
and wisdom, with this assumption already incorporated, as if the inquiry
can move forward past this question. Persuasion, posits Davis, already
begins with this otherness. In doing so, this being who speaks or thinks has
already been turned inside-out. Any notion of a looking inside has already
been declared to be nothing more than an encounter with the outside—a
looking to others to tell me what I am. The Mobius strip (Davis 2010, 4;
see also Rickert 2007, 50) loops in only one direction: any time I consider
what I am, all I see is outside. But to consider what I am already resists or
obscures the question of what was inside to begin with. What am I, such
that I am moved or persuaded? If I seek to know myself and only see the
other, then I have only traveled the Mobius strip once. But to return back
again requires the possibility of reflection—to look back and see what it
means to be here, encountering the rhetorical encounter—and this reflec-
tion has likewise been critiqued and disavowed as a possibility within
theoretical circles.1
This outward-looking privileges the political over and against other
concerns, an emphasis that cuts across disciplines and investments in the
humanities. Whether one follows pragmatism or Levinas, the endgame
still resides in the same place: skip by the metaphysical questions and get
to the political encounter with the other. The social, the cultural, and the
political—whatever difference various scholars grant to these terms—are
invoked and exalted again and again as the subject of study for both rhetoric
97
joshua dicaglio
and philosophy. Our collective scholarly consciousness has integrated this

emphasis into its very heart. We demand that there be something “political”
in theoretical conversations and thus re-render interpretive possibilities as
ideologies. We invoke the social constitution of scientific facts through the
proliferation of more objects and actants. We shy away from sounding too
abstract or too far from these supposedly concrete concerns of politics and
culture. In this vein, Davis disclaims, “But I’m not going mystical or even
particularly abstract on you here” (2).
What we examine here, however, is mystical and abstract. The request
that we study the social, cultural, or political already assumes that the sub-
ject of our studies—the “humans” of the “humanities”—is only comprehen-
sible in the externally derived aggregate of socially bound others. However,
it is not clear that what I am, this being who interprets and is moved, is
only created by others despite the frequency of this affirmation. Nor is the
commonly invoked alternative—the humanistic subject—sufficiently clear
and well defined that it might manipulate presupposed objects. Indeed, in
deconstructing the subject-object dichotomy, as Lakoff and Johnson do in
their examination of metaphor, scholars have persistently assumed that the
traits attributed to objects are prior to those generally attributed to subjects.
As we have seen, in determining the locus of interpretation and meaning, I
turn to others as a field of objects that via a relation to me (also treated as
an object) determine my interpretation, meaning, and even my very being.
Something peculiar has occurred, which cannot go unnoticed if we are
to inquire, as Davis, Lakoff and Johnson, and Latour all do, into some kind
of fundamentally persuasive nature of being. In making otherness the start-
ing point for being and interpretation, interpretive inquiry has replicated
the mechanistic assumptions that have been critiqued by both scientists
and humanists over the course of the twentieth century. Mechanistic phi-
losophy posits that objects are moved by external rather than internal impe-
tus. If you want to understand how objects move, the mechanist says, you
have to consider only how objects are acted on by others. Following a post-
humanist line of thought, the general critique of the mechanistic approach
has focused on what is granted agency, a generalized agential nature being
granted to these objects as actants.2 While this critique does reject one
mechanistic assumption, the externally oriented nature remains: whatever
might be added to complicate this scheme, we still look at objects interact-
ing in order to determine the mode of meaning, interpretation, and being
of what we are studying. Rhetoricity must begin with the other. Philosophy
must begin with the other. Interpretation must be derived from the other.
98
But who is doing all of this persuading, philosophizing, and interpreting?

In an odd shift, meaning becomes a matter of looking outward: I don’t
know how I am moved or why I am persuaded but others seem to know,
and so I will look to them to say how this rhetorical work functions and
what all of this means. I then replicate this same assumption when looking
at how others are persuaded, attending only to their persuasion from the
perspective of the outside.
This article argues that this external approach makes interpretive work
not only confusing but difficult. Such an approach forces us to consider,
first and foremost, the relation between the objects of culture, or historical
interactions, or political investments, leading us to neglect the site of per-
suasion itself: the field of awareness within which we all exist. This move
bears not only on how we approach our interpretive or critical inquiries but
also on the authority we would like to retain for the humanities. In con-
trasting themselves to the scientific, rhetoric and social hermeneutics shift
the objects and relations emphasized from the smaller ones of science (cells,
atoms, genes) to the larger ones of concern to human beings (the linguistic/
cultural/political). As rhetoricians and philosophers, we would like to call
these concerns qualitative in contrast to quantitative and to claim them
as authoritative independent of empirical, logical, or mathematical modes
of inquiry. But they still deal with the relations between objects exter-
nally derived, however variable this field of multiplicity might be. When
approached in this way, such concerns are amenable to being converted into
the quantitative, into the where, when, and what of an externalized set of
relations, the domain in which data mining is thought to yield meaning. In
losing sight of the site of interpretation, interpretation itself has given way
to the political calculus of external relations.
This examination attempts to reopen this fundamental question of the
site—this “who”—of interpretive inquiry, both to outline its importance
and to reconsider the study of interpretation as a means of studying con-
sciousness that attends to the fullness of experience. I point here to what
it might mean to study persuasion from the inside, although a full account
eludes such a short examination. As a way into this question, we can recon-
sider a moment when the foundations of both scientific and interpretive
inquiry were up for question, even as science was solidifying its authority
in the shape that we have come to know today. This moment was a widely
perceived crisis in mathematics that arose from an examination of the
grounds for mathematical and logical statements. The crisis in mathematics
generated widespread commentary not only by mathematicians, logicians,
99
joshua dicaglio
and scientists but also by those who did not consider themselves tied to
the constraints of logic—philosophers, rhetoricians, and literary critics. The
crisis called into question the legitimacy of using clearly defined sets of
objects and their relations as the foundation for claims about truth. Some
commentators saw this crisis as demonstrating the need for a foundational
study of being, subjectivity, or consciousness that necessitated an attending
to the nuances of interpretation through a method of reflection.
After outlining the nature of the crisis, I examine responses by Alfred
North Whitehead and Kenneth Burke in order to see how the problems
arising from this crisis were rallied to justify a subjective mode of inquiry.
The two primary concepts introduced by Whitehead—the theory of logi-
cal types and the problem of misplaced concreteness—help clarify why
objective inquiry necessitates the subjective. These concepts show how in
attempting to perform a subjective inquiry, one can fall into the same prob-
lems that created the crisis in mathematics. This crisis is replicated within
the interpretive work of rhetoric and philosophy by the externalization of
the mode of inquiry, which turns it into an investigation of the relation
between a series of objects—particularly, the objects of language—viewed
from the outside. We find that from the beginning interpretation must
undertake a reflective mode of inquiry. The difficulty we face is that this
reflection forces us to consider reality beyond its appearance within a field of
relations. From the depths of this reflection, the subject of c onsciousness—
and what it means to study or access it—becomes more apparent.
the crisis of subjectivity

In a letter dated 29 November 1934, John Riordan, a researcher at Bell Labs,
presented Kenneth Burke with a logical paradox: “Here is the same animal
in Bertie Russell’s skin: ‘There is a certain village V, and a barber B, living
in V. The barber B shaves all those, and only those, who live in V and who do
not shave themselves. Now does B shave himself ?’ If he does, he doesn’t. If
he doesn’t, he does.” For Riordan, this paradox points to a larger crisis fac-
ing mathematics: “These little gems give at least a suggestion of the ‘crisis’
in mathematics, and possibly of the lunacy it shares with the rest of the
world.”3
Here is Burke, the modernist and burgeoning literary critic, encoun-
tering a moment in mathematics that pushes at the form and scope of
logical inquiry for understanding the world. When Burke received this let-
ter, he had just finished the manuscript of Permanence and Change (PC),
100
which justifies the study of poetics in the face of the growing authority of
science. The connection between PC and this “crisis” is not incidental: the
epigraph of PC, is a quotation from the mathematician and philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead, and Whitehead is also referenced several times
in the book. Twenty years before, Whitehead had coauthored the Principia
Mathematica with his student Bertrand Russell (“Bertie” in the letter). This
work took the faith in logic to its logical end point by attempting to reduce
mathematics to a series of logical statements. Famously, the project was
not entirely successful. Both Russell and Whitehead were shaken by the
project’s failure, but they responded to that failure in different ways. Russell
went on to lay the foundations for twentieth-century analytic philosophy,
pursuing new logical solutions to these problems. Whitehead, on the other
hand, spent the remaining decades of his life writing a series of philosophi-
cal tracts that reworked his conception of science, logic, mathematics, and
subjectivity, culminating in his landmark work, Process and Reality, pub-
lished in 1929. In 1933, he published two lectures under the title Nature
and Life that provided a concise version of his basic conclusions about the
limits, scope, and state of scientific thinking. Burke reviewed this book in
November 1934—just as he was finishing PC.
The paradox Riordan posed to Burke brings us to a particular event
in which the authority and shape of logic exposed itself to a different kind
of inquiry couched in a different understanding of language and its rela-
tionship to reality. Russell elaborated the paradox in his 1903 Principles
of Mathematics as a response to Georg Cantor’s set theory, which defines
how mathematicians group various parts of the world together into the
single variables used for mathematical statements. To simplify somewhat,
Russell’s paradox was a challenge to Cantor because it questioned the abil-
ity to clearly define mathematical objects. For Russell, a better formulation
was needed; indeed, in Principles of Mathematics, he posits that mathemat-
ics and logic are identical. Russell thus sets up a large task for himself: he
must refine the foundation of mathematics in order to make it fully logical
in spite of the paradox he identifies. This is the task Russell and Whitehead
undertook in Principia Mathematica.
Russell’s paradox and the failure of the Principia Mathematica to
resolve it generated a crisis in which logic itself required something beyond
logic in order for it to provide an adequate description of the world. While
a full genealogy is beyond the scope of this article, one can note that ana-
lytic philosophy’s logic and logical positivism’s justifications of the sciences
were built, at least partially, on the foundation that was laid in the wake
101
joshua dicaglio
of this crisis. Likewise, it must be noted that philosophical hermeneutics

owes something essential to this crisis: Heidegger cites the very same crisis
in mathematics in Being and Time as a demonstration of the nonessential
nature of logic and mathematics and a need to return to the question of
being itself (2010, 9). The legacy of Heidegger for hermeneutics and Russell
for analytic philosophy is well known. As in the case of most well-trodden
ground, the questions and concerns by which the path was set are often lost
to sight, and so it will benefit us to reexamine the nature of the crisis so that
we can see how it necessitated a return to being, the subject, or conscious-
ness as a necessary site of inquiry that is, in some sense, fundamental to
knowing the world.
To this end, let us turn to Russell’s paradox as it was given to Burke.4
Why is the statement in the Burke’s letter a paradox? Each sentence sets
up an essential part of the contradiction. The first establishes a set of people
(V) of which the barber (B) is a member. The second contains a statement
about B’s relation to V: “the barber B shaves all those, and only those, who live
in V and who do not shave themselves.” The problem is that B is included
in V, so that making general statements about B’s actions in relation to V
leads to a contradiction. The statement will apply to B differently if it refers
to B in isolation (as the barber) than as B as part of V (someone in the vil-
lage who needs to shave). Thus, the paradox comes from making a general
statement about the village of which the barber is a part. Or, to state it
another way, the statement is paradoxical because it refers back to a part of
itself; hence, this paradox is sometimes called a “self-referential paradox.”
To avoid this problem, Russell and Whitehead proposed the “theory
of logical types,” which delineates between “types” according to levels of
scale or abstraction. One arrives at a new level when one speaks of a set of
sets. What distinguishes one set from another is that a set may not contain
itself. In the present case, the barber and the village are different logical
types because V contains B, and therefore one cannot pair statements about
the barber with all of the villagers. Russell and Whitehead prohibit mak-
ing statements between logical types: doing so will lead to self-referential
paradoxes because we are forced to consider the same item (barber) both
individually and collectively simultaneously: “The vicious circles in ques-
tion arise from supposing that a collection of objects may contain members
which can only be defined by means of the collection as a whole” (1925, 37).
While we may read this logical type distinction as an immutable divi-
sion between parts and wholes, Whitehead argued that self-referential
paradoxes bring awareness to the distinctions made by symbolic structures
102
more generally. One has to separate out logical types precisely because the
language used for one set does not have the capacity to speak of another.
More precisely, the paradox may be a function of the symbolic structure
itself. The paradox arises when one cuts up the world in one way (the
barber) and creates a symbol for it (“barber” or “B”) then cuts up the world
in a different way (the village) with its own symbol (“village” or “V”). When
the two ways of dividing the world are put together (through statements
about the relation of B and V), contradictions emerge.
Thus, even though one could identify any number of logical types
within language, the paradox reveals a fundamental distinction between
symbols and the being they map. In trying to reduce logic to mathemat-
ics, Russell and Whitehead essentially tried to equate symbols and being
itself; however, it is not the function of symbols to do anything more than
map or organize the world. The paradox arises when symbols are taken for
reality, when, in fact, they represent entirely different logical types. In other
words, we assume that “village” and “barber” are both entities in them-
selves. Whitehead calls this problem the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”
because the error lies in assuming the symbols are themselves concrete (see
Whitehead 1979, 11). Although symbols may point to some aspect of being,
to treat them as having reality is to fail to recognize the primary abstraction
enacted by them.
Misplaced concreteness presents a problem for science, since it ques-
tions the ability to generalize scientific claims: “special sciences” are
“concerned with a limited set of various types of things” that necessarily
limits their scope of knowledge (1934, 16), and they cut up the world into
“different modes of togetherness” (18) that inevitably constitute an “abstrac-
tion from the full concrete happenings of natures” (19). While these sciences
may function well enough at describing what they have grouped together,
they fail to explain anything beyond their limited, self-defined set. The error
occurs when science holds persistently to its own divisions, insisting that
they are actual descriptions of being. Although most apparent in symbolic
logic, this reduction of being to symbol is also reflected in the limitation
of legitimate reality to the kinds of sensory experience that can be charted
using symbols and their relations (1934, 9–10).
Russell’s paradox points to the fact that easily designated and symbol-
ized objects are always limited: we are always able to cut up the objects in
a different way, and these symbols will never map the full territory. Yet sci-
ence has invested a great deal of authority in its own distinctions and sets
of objects while leaving aside anything that falls outside of the relations
103
joshua dicaglio
between these objects. One of the best examples of this problem in the
history of science is that action is treated as external to objects. The result,
according to Whitehead, is that we are
left with the notion of an activity in which nothing is effected.

Also, this activity, thus considered, discloses no ground for its own
coherence. There is merely a formula for succession. Of course, it
was always possible to work one’s self into a state of complete con-
tentment with an ultimate irrationality. The popular positivistic
philosophy adopts this attitude. The weakness of this positivism
is the way in which we all welcome the detached fragments of
explanation attained in our present stage of civilization. (1934, 24)
Positivism thus fails twice: by mistaking fragments of analysis for the whole
(failing to distinguish logical types) and by mistaking symbolic (mathemat-
ical) descriptions of activity for an accurate description of the world (fallacy
of misplaced concreteness).
For Whitehead, both logical types and misplaced concreteness come
together in the question of subjectivity. In limiting appropriate inquiry
to the clearly designated objects and their relations, modern science con-
sistently “omit[s] those aspects of the universe as experienced and of our
modes of experiencing, which jointly lead to more penetrating ways of
understanding” (10). Subjectivity presents us with a different logical type
problem:
Our experience of the world involves the exhibition of the soul

itself as one of the components within the world. Thus, there is a
dual aspect to the relationship of an occasion of experience as one
relatum and the experienced world as another relatum. The world
is included within the occasion in one sense, and the occasion is
included in the world in another sense. For example, I am in the
room, and the room is an item in my present experience. But my
present experience is what I now am. (1934, 40)
Here, Whitehead essentially rearticulates the problem of logical types

through subjectivity. The scientific way of viewing subjectivity leads into
a self-referential paradox that might be phrased thusly: “To understand
the world you must find knowledge outside yourself. You are also a part
of the world and can only receive information through your interaction
104
with the world. If you see the world, you are not seeing yourself. If you see
yourself, you are not seeing the world.” This paradox emerges from treating
the division between self and world, mind and body, and objectivity and
subjectivity as concrete, which sets up a logical type problem between one’s
experience and the whole of reality. If science, or any mode of inquiry, is
attempting to understand reality, it must include those aspects usually con-
signed to the realm of the subjective.
A subjective form of misplaced concreteness arises when we assume
that the “I” of experience is a separate object from the “other” of reality.
However, because our experience is part of the world, what we call an
exchange between subjectivity and objectivity is actually one world viewed
from two perspectives. From the point of view of the totality, we are part of
the experience itself. From the point of view of an individual (“my present
experience”) the whole world originates locally (within one’s experience).
We tend to focus on the first viewpoint at the expense of the second, with-
out understanding the relationship between this view of the totality and
my present experience. To clarify, we can distinguish between an internal
and an external means of dissecting the subject/object distinction based
on where we begin: externally, we might take the broader world as coming
first and thereby determining “my experience.” Internally, we might take
one’s experience as this being/world emerging “where I now am.” However,
because all experience emerges first “where I now am”—within a field of
experience for a subject or observer—the external mode does not avoid the
problem of misplaced concreteness because it must distinguish something
in the experience as “other” prior to instigating an examination of the expe-
rience. In doing so it produces a series of externalized relations that exem-
plify Whitehead’s critique of science as producing “merely a formula for
succession.” Thus, one can return to the view of totality only by means of the
subjective experience, given that the totality of being will always be experi-
enced from this internally present perspective. When one moves along the
Mobius strip inside-out in this manner, one encounters the true concrete-
ness that comes from attending carefully to experience as it originates not
just in the senses (such a position is already posited via empiricism) or in
logic but in the whole of what is present. In a seemingly counterintuitive
move, we find that the paradox is only resolved when we say that that which
we call consciousness or subjectivity is, in actuality, the concrete.
In summary, Whitehead suggests that science can only arrive at a
more accurate view of the world if it pays attention to the very thing it
tries to avoid: subjectivity, point of view, experience, soul, or consciousness.
105
joshua dicaglio
The problem of logical types reveals a fundamental flaw in our way of

classifying the world. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness ties this flaw
to an overinvestment in divisions and the symbolic structures attached to
those divisions. Once one places concreteness in the totality of being rather
than the symbolic descriptions of that reality, one can see that Russell’s
paradox is an artifact of our division between barber and village (our group-
ing into sets) and, most importantly, holding this division to be in being
itself. Whitehead’s reading of the paradox makes us aware of the limits of
any such symbolic structure—whether logic or semiotic—and forces us to
look at subjectivity—the one who divides into sets—if we are to under-
stand reality.
interpretation inside-out
We can now add Burke’s response to Whitehead’s to see how the results
of the crisis might be rallied to justify a broader mode of inquiry. In PC,
Burke picks up on this question of the subject of inquiry: “Were science
completely enshrined tomorrow by attaining its ultimate political equiva-
lents, we might all the more easily perceive precisely what was lacking in the
scientific ideal and frame our corrective philosophy accordingly” (1984, 62).
In line with Whitehead, Burke advances a “corrective philosophy” that
examines the limits of science, as described by itself, to find what else we
need for an accurate way of relating to the world. In PC, Burke notes that
those “philosophical scientists, who have carried the study of scientific
method to the point where it begins to undermine the key assumptions of
science itself, are ridiculed as mystics and reactionaries” (1984, 62–63). The
“philosophical scientists”—Whitehead and other “process philosophers”—
have been rejected as mystics because they appear to work outside of what
Burke refers to as the “technological psychosis” formulated by science, but-
tressed by logic, and embodied by technology (1984, 44). Yet, for Burke, the
intensification of technological psychosis reveals the limits of its own logic:
“Meaning or symbolism becomes a central concern precisely at that stage
when a given system of meaning is falling into decay” (162). For both Burke
and Whitehead, the various crises of the 1930s paired with the increas-
ing power and persistent authority of technical psychosis highlighted the
problem of interpretation: “We do not here aim to discredit the accom-
plishments of science, which are mainly converted into menaces by the
inadequacies of present political institutions. We desire simply to indicate
that the region where testing is of vital importance, where the tests of success
106
are in turn to be tested, is the region of Weltanschauung” (101–102, his i talics).

Science on Burke’s view can continue to function as it does, so long as we
do not assume that science covers the full expanse of existence granted
authority as reality. Thus, Burke, like Whitehead, resists the then growing
social sciences, which attempted to apply scientific rationality to human
behavior. Instead, Burke aims to develop a means of examining what sci-
ence fails to take into account: perspective, values, the grounding of ratio-
nality itself—in short, subjectivity.
Burke’s interest in Whitehead is further clarified in his review of Nature
and Life: “But an awareness of aim, [Whitehead] holds, is as much a fact
of our experience as any sensory measurement might be. From this he pro-
ceeds to affirm the importance of the qualitative” (26). Whitehead’s empha-
sis on aim becomes Burke’s emphasis on motivation in PC and later work.
The inversion from mechanism to organism that Burke will develop and
that is captured in the term “metabiology” Burke also sees in Whitehead,
whose refutation of mechanistic philosophy and emphasis on life “would
give us a living universe, organically related, rather than grinding wheels
conceived after the factory model” (26). This living universe is precisely
what Burke wants to learn to analyze in PC.
Burke begins PC with a focus on “orientation,” which he glosses as
a “general view of reality” (1984, 4). The ways orientation can go wrong
demonstrate Burke’s analogues to Whitehead’s concepts. He provides an
example of a fallacy of misplaced concreteness in his reference to “the stu-
pid national or racial wars which have been fought precisely because these
abstractions were mistaken for realities.” And he offers an instantiation of
the problem of logical types in his description of the human species as “the
only one possessing an equipment,” in the form of “the experimental, spec-
ulative technique made available by speech,” that allows it to go “beyond
the criticism of experience to a criticism of criticism” (6). In Whitehead’s
terms, humans have the capacity to operate in abstract logical types that
refer only to themselves. Whitehead also starts his lectures with a focus
on a kind of orientation: “Every age manages to find modes of classifica-
tion which seem fundamental starting points for the researches of the spe-
cial sciences” (1934, 1). Like Whitehead’s “modes of classification,” Burke’s
“scheme[s] of orientation” (1984, 16) are variable: in Burke’s terms, each ori-
entation “entail[s] a different way of linking” an otherwise undifferentiated
reality. In Whitehead’s terms, each form of classification is an “abstraction
from the full concrete happenings of natures” (1934, 19). For both thinkers,
orientation entails cutting up the world into parts that may not adequately
107
joshua dicaglio
capture the whole. This cutting up of a larger continual process is precisely

what Whitehead sees as the central inadequacy of mathematics and what
Burke sees as the primary difficulty of language.
The focus on forms of classification allows both Burke and Whitehead
to emphasize that our understanding of the world proceeds from these acts
of division. Thus, Burke states that “classifications are heuristic by reason of
the fact that, through the processes of abstraction and analogy, they dictate
new groupings, hence new discoveries” (1934, 103). What we call “discover-
ies” are a new way of grouping rather than some kind of unveiling of truth:
When a philosopher invents a new approach to reality, he promptly

finds that his predecessors saw something as a unit which he can
subdivide, or that they accepted distinctions which his system can
name as unities. The universe would appear to be something like a
cheese; it can be sliced in an infinite number of ways—and when
one has chosen his own pattern of slicing, he finds that other men’s
cuts fall in the wrong places. (103)
The cheese metaphor emphasizes reality as an undivided whole that is

divided through the process of abstraction and analogy. Burke’s cheese here
is Whitehead’s “full concrete happenings of nature”; both are concerned
with how language, symbols, and perception divide that whole into various
parts.
The quote from Whitehead’s Nature and Life that Burke uses as an
epigraph to PC is a statement about the continuity between divisions:
“Sharp-cut scientific classifications are essential for scientific method, but
they are dangerous for philosophy. Such classifications hide the truth that
the different modes of natural existence shade off into each other” (Burke
1984 x; Whitehead 1934, 33). Again, sharp-cut distinctions are dangerous
because they erroneously grant concreteness to the distinctions themselves,
displacing the concreteness of the reality these distinctions attempt to
describe. In the original passage, Whitehead emphasizes how even per-
ception relies on the “habits of human life” (1934, 34), a point that Burke
echoes in his discussion of gestalt (Burke 1984, 11–14). Because our modes
of perception chop the world up in a particular way, we must be careful not
to treat these divisions as if they are themselves a reality. In other words, we
must recognize that the means of chopping up reality exist as abstractions
precisely because they “draw away from” the reality that we experience and
are attempting to describe (104).
108
In line with our discussion of Russell’s paradox, Burke sees the most
dangerous kind of abstractions as those that attempt to “seek the whole of
which the event is a part” (1984, 230). An event occurs, regardless of the
mode (scientific, linguistic, sensory, etc.). We attempt to derive a whole by
connecting these parts into an “ever-widening circle of interrelationships”
through which we can formulate generalized principles. This part/whole
relationship presents a methodological dilemma, “for it leads us to select
some portion of the whole and call it the ‘cause’ of the rest” (230). However,
what is selected is necessarily incomplete; the cheese could always be cut up
another way. Hence, Whitehead warns that “it is extremely rash to extend
conclusions derived from observation far beyond the scale of magnitude to
which the observation was confined” (16).
Burke’s “perspective by incongruity” is a technique that uncovers the
abstractions and forgotten or unconscious linkages contained within our
orientation. This technique is rather like Russell’s means of identifying
the paradox within mathematics: one can most clearly see how categories
break down when one places them next to each other in an unexpected way.
Russell’s paradox produces incongruity through a scalar relationship, allow-
ing a larger-scale type (village) that contains a lower scale type (barber) to
come into contact. Whitehead must have something similar in mind when
he states that one finds “difference in the aspects of nature according as we
change the scale of observation” (1934, 34). Burke also gives scalar examples:
“Where accepted linkages have been of an imposing sort, one should estab-
lish perspective by looking through the reverse end of his glass, converting
mastodons into microbes, or human beings into vermin upon the face of
the earth” (120). Or further:
Let us not only discuss a nation as though it were an individual,

but also an individual as though he were a nation, depicting mas-
sive events trivially, and altering the scale of weeds in a photograph
until they become a sublime and towering forest—shifting from
the animal, the vegetable, the physical, the mental, “irresponsibly”
applying to one category the habitual terms of another, as when
Whitehead discerns mere habit in the laws of atomic behavior.
(PC 122)
Such changes in perspective make the experience we thought a word or

concept described look different, allowing us to realize that those terms
we supposed to be concrete are in fact inadequate, incomplete, and subject
109
joshua dicaglio
to modification. The more incongruities we can generate, the more aware

we are of our orientation and the less we grant concreteness to these
abstractions.
The problem for both Burke and Whitehead is that science has closed
off a whole set of experiences and has delegitimized incongruity as a method.
The positivist posits that his or her parts do adequately represent the whole.
The poet, however, has always worked through incongruity, changing per-
spective in order to allow for a broader view of the world and to prevent
us from presuming that our categories are adequate. Burke describes the
difference in a discussion of the poet D. H. Lawrence: “The positivist, look-
ing upon the universe as created, says that the last chapter flows inexorably
from the conditions laid down in the first chapter. Lawrence would look
upon the universe as being created. He would restore the poetic point of
view. . . . [H]e seems to be saying simply that the last chapter is not caused
by the first, but that all chapters are merely different aspects of a single
process” (231–32). The poet views the world prior to the classifications set
up within science, viewing all events as one process that may be divided in
countless ways.
Where, however, is the way into this continual process? Burke and
Whitehead engage with this question through a discussion of causality and
motives. Whitehead dismantles the “common-sense notion” that nature is
composed of permanent things that we can understand through various
sensory qualities, particularly the qualities of motion (1934, 2). The central
problem began with science’s discarding of the qualities of sense percep-
tion: “The color and the sound were no longer in nature. They are mental
reactions of the percipient to internal bodily locomotions. Thus, nature is
left with bits of matter, qualified by mass, spatial relations, and the change
of such relations” (6). In mechanistic science, assigning the qualities of
sense perception to the subjective elements of mental reactions allowed a
separation between the observer and the observed that left only external-
ized interactions of inert matter as the valid mode of describing reality.
Newton intensified this externalization by granting properties to forces,
which served to diagram series of motions. Doing so, says Whitehead, “left
Nature still without meaning or value,” since there was never an indica-
tion of why it would behave in any given way (1934, 8–9). This view yields
a “barren concept, namely, a field of perception devoid of any data for its
own interpretation, and a system of interpretation devoid of any reason
for the concurrence of its factors” (9). In other words, once experience is
discarded with sense perception, we cannot account for the interpretive
110
elements manifest in what we encounter as reality. Because Newton does

nothing more than chart positions and relations of positions, we have no
means with which to interpret why anything relates as it does. In this lim-
ited view, science can only look for external motion in space (other objects)
and time (prior) to explain the world. Thus, science has made causality the
apex of inquiry even as it denies everything necessary to understanding
why nature functions as it does. This dualism, which Whitehead attributes
to Descartes, between nature and life creates a false dilemma. If we assume
that nature and life are two different things, we must either claim that
“Nature is mere appearance and mind is the sole reality” or that “physical
Nature is the sole reality and mind is an epiphenomenon” (25). In other
words, the split that makes materialism possible generates the dichotomy
between idealism and materialism, putting the two in opposition (10).
Burke applies this same critique to the way social science describes
motives through a “vis a tergo, the force from behind.” He explains that in
this view of causality “men were not drawn as to a beacon: they were pushed
by the compulsion of prior circumstances” (170). One can no longer talk of
motives as anything internal to the subjects themselves, since all motives
originate externally. A page later, Burke rallies Whitehead to point out that
“scientific method categorically makes discovery of purpose impossible”
(171; cf. Whitehead 1934, 27). Burke returns to this argument in his section
that introduces his metabiology: “The keystone of vis a tergo causality . . .
was an evolutionary relationship between organism and environment. In
true individualistic fashion, the organism was considered as a separate unit
more or less at odds with its environmental context. . . . By this schema, the
environment was causally prior” (232). However, Burke continues, we can-
not tell where we end and the environment begins: “Are the microscopic
creatures in our blood stream separate from us or a part of us?” (233). We
find ourselves in another self-referential paradox: I am part of the environ-
ment yet the environment causes me. What is the cause?
In responding to this paradox, we end up extending our notion of cau-
sality, as we look further and further for the source of our own causality:
“As our range of investigation has increased, this same point of view obliges
us to apply the organic metaphor even to such events as electric fields. . . .
[A] grasshopper’s appetites, and the perspective or system of values that
goes with them, are as real as any chemical” (233). If we follow out exter-
nalized notions of causality far enough, we are forced to acknowledge that
purpose and aim, in fact, saturate the whole process. Or, at least, this is the
conclusion that Whitehead comes to in his concept of “mutual immanence”
111
joshua dicaglio
(1934, 41–42). Similarly, Burke suggests that we must acknowledge that

“man is methodical” (1984, 234). Since “met-hodos” means “way after,” Burke
has gone from a causality “from behind” to a causality that opens up agency
by acknowledging participation. Within his metabiology, causality may be
described as emanating from organisms rather than merely arising from
series of external forces.5
The crucial climax of this argument does not occur until Burke uses
these same arguments to justify poetics (255–61). There, Burke applies his
argument about the continuity of space (environment/organism) to the
continuity of events: “Who, after all, decrees what we shall call a separate
event? Why must I call crops one thing and sunlight something essentially
different, particularly when I have so much evidence to indicate that one
can become the other?” (260). We can hear Whitehead strongly through
Burke here: “The new realist considers experience by precisely such an
altered way of dividing wholes when he says that we must not speak of
green as an ‘illusion,’ a mere phenomenal restating of certain vibrations
affecting nerve tissues” (260). Rather, we must acknowledge the whole
experience—light, color, brain, etc.—as equally “an actual part of the uni-
verse” (260). The metabiological, essentially, chooses the teleological meta-
phor as a more adequate description of reality. Indeed, Burke suggests we
can apply this “purposive or teleological metaphor (the metaphor of human
action or poetry)” to everything:
The notion of life as a method would suggest that all the universe
could likewise be designated as a method or aggregate of meth-
ods. . . .The exclusively mechanistic metaphor is objectionable not
because it is directly counter to the poetic, but because it leaves
too much out of account. It shows us merely those aspects of experi-
ence which can be phrased with its terms. It is truncated, as the
poetic metaphor, buttressed by the concept of recalcitrance, is not.
(260–261, my emphasis)
For Burke, the poetic or teleological metaphor includes more because it does
not systematically ignore, as the mechanistic view does, factors outside the
clearly definable terms and fully externalized motions. Like Whitehead’s,
this argument calls for the integration of subjective experience that is not
easily captured in logical form.
Indeed, Burke asserts the primacy of subjectivity: “But the ‘discoveries’
which flow from the point of view are nothing other than revisions made
112
necessary by the nature of the world itself. They thus have objective v alidity”
(257). Burke places point of view at the center of knowledge—in this case,
granting subjectivity “objective validity” much as Whitehead does. If we
take point of view seriously, the pursuit of knowledge becomes a kind of
“listening” to a universe (99), which is now seen to be dynamic and, most
importantly, is treated as a function of inquiry from the inside-out. Once
one acknowledges the world as lively emergence of internal activity, expe-
rience reveals legitimate knowledge: “The universe ‘yields’ to our point of
view by disclosing the different orders of recalcitrance which arise when the
universe is considered from this point of view” (257). In trying to push at the
world, the poet purposefully applies and reapplies terminologies in various
ways within an internal field of interpretation and experience. Through the
contradictions produced, the poet finds that the universe—the part of being
that appears to exceed current experience—pushes back, resisting some
descriptions more than others. New patterns or ways of understanding can
thus emerge through this decidedly subjective, incongruous method.
By granting reality to “point of view,” Burke and Whitehead are able
to more or less avoid the misplaced concreteness of positivism as well as
relativism by undermining the very source of the distinction between posi-
tivism and relativism. Both Burke and Whitehead rely on a prior sense of
wholeness that makes the world one complete process, separate from any
attempt to chart it in advance in terms of given objects. We can avoid the
self-referential paradox of subjectivity by recognizing that what we have
called “external” is another order of “internal”—but only if we consider the
internal field of experience first. It follows that to study subjectivity criti-
cally in all its variances is to study the ways that we, prior to building solid
categories, can encounter the world.
misplacing the subjective loop

In his later work, Burke translates his justification of the poetic into a form
of rhetorical criticism. Rhetorical inquiry becomes the examination of the
way language performs the division of the whole in a particular way to
a particular effect. There is, however, a crucial ambiguity within Burke’s
articulation that presents us with a problem in applying our examina-
tion to rhetoric: what is the “reality” that can be considered truly concrete
among the subjective elements of rhetorical inquiry? Briefly, we can note
that Burke undermines his justification of subjectivity by reintroducing
a kind of externalized force from behind. Much like Latour and Davis,
113
joshua dicaglio
Burke externalizes his inquiry by replacing subjectivity with language in his

modes of analyzing motives, thus reintroducing a misplaced concreteness.
In the new prologue added in the later edition of PC, Burke seems
perplexed by his own formulation, downplaying his claims by presenting
metabiology as a “scientific-seeming kind of Aesop’s fable, a metaphori-
cal way of ‘revealing character’”: “For an experiment with organisms that
do not use language cannot tell us anything essential about the distinctive
motives of a species that does use language” (1984, li). This statement should
give us pause. One of the central premises of PC ’s resolution of the self-
referential paradox of subjectivity is that aim, purpose, and perspective are
not separate from the rest of the world: this was a lively universe examined
from the inside. The suggestion that examinations of other organisms can-
not tell us anything essential about humans places humans in a different
realm, as separate kinds of processes.
This new disclaimer points to a split that Burke introduces after PC
between human action and any other kind of motion. Burke reads this
dualism back into PC in his new afterword: “PC has a strongly dual-
ist design which my later nomenclature would sum up as a distinction
between nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action” (303). This distinc-
tion reserves meaning, purpose, and action for what Burke claims are
the only symbol-using animals, humans. In doing so, Burke seems to
forget the original choice that he posed between two inverted ways of
viewing the world: the mechanistic (which describes everything in terms
of externalized motions, passivity, and force) and the organismic (which
describes everything in terms of aim and purpose). Burke’s justification
of subjectivity required a nonseparation between the human and real-
ity; in other words, it required a sense of continuity within being that
human language then divided. Without this, one falls back into the self-
referential paradox. After all, the false divisions that create a need for the
theory of logical types are those created within language as it divides up
the world in multiple, contradictory ways.
In falling back into the self-referential paradox, Burke seems to com-
mit an error that is a humanistic counterpart to the mathematical error that
Whitehead critiques: substituting language for subjectivity. Already in PC
Burke conflates subjectivity and language when he suggests that “the ques-
tion of motives brings us to the subject of communication, since motives
are distinctly linguistic products” (35). The move here from motives to lan-
guage happens quickly and is hardly justified. Most importantly, conflat-
ing motives and language leads us back into the self-referential paradox.
114
To return to our earlier formulation, Burke seems add a component to try

to resolve the paradox:
To understand the world you must find knowledge outside your-

self. You are also a part of the world and can only receive informa-
tion through your interaction with the world. If you see the world,
you aren’t seeing yourself. If you see yourself, you aren’t seeing the
world. However, you are also created by language, so to see lan-
guage is to see yourself, which is to see the world. So if we examine
language, we can both see yourself and the world.
Following this logic, Burke’s later work examines everything that one can
find within language for aspects of motivation. In doing so, Burke exempli-
fies a humanistic analogue to science’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness. If
scientists are at fault for taking their laws, definitions, and mathematical
symbols to be reality, Burke is equally at fault for taking language to be
subjectivity. Burke looks to social and linguistic forces rather than physical
or behavioristic forces, but he still treats them as an externalized origin of
motives.
The situation is rather like that which philosophers of mind have faced
as they have continued to try to explain consciousness in mechanistic terms.
The philosopher David Chalmers (1995) has famously called this the hard
problem of consciousness: “The really hard problem of consciousness is the
problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of
information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel has
put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective
aspect is experience.” We might add that when we examine consciousness,
there is language, there are situations, and there are social needs—but the
subjective aspect is still beyond these divisions in the totality of experience.
An enlightening point of contrast can be found in the work of
the anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, who also uses
Whitehead’s theory of logical types to justify the study of subjectivity
through artistic modes of expression. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1999)
Bateson applies logical types to the abstraction process of language itself:
there can be a language whose purpose is to reflect back on language.
While Burke mentions a similar possibility—the “criticism of criticism” or
“interpret our interpretations” (1984, 6)—he does not appreciate the impli-
cations of this self-reference as a form of logical type. To truly arrive at the
next logical type above language, one would have to see language as only
115
joshua dicaglio
one among many means of dividing the fullness of our encounter with
reality. Such a metalanguage exists for the purpose of both untangling the
misplaced concreteness of language and studying the divisions enacted by
that original division between subjects and objects. A metalanguage can be
used to creatively study subjectivity, both conscious and unconscious, but
only as long as the language is not substituted for the fullness of conscious-
ness. While Burke’s critical method seems similar, because he conflates
motives with language, his metalanguage studies language as if it produces
the internal world. Thus, his metalanguage does not actually become a
language that reflects on the means of language in chopping up reality. In
contrast, Bateson’s metalanguage makes use of language as a tool for dis-
cerning one’s internal structure and the divisions that occur even prior to
their symbolic expression.
Ultimately, the substitution of language for subjectivity changes the
way that we function as critics. Rather than focusing on the experience of a
rhetorical moment, Burke, in his later work, directs us to everything except
the experience of the text or moment to analyze the rhetorical elements
in a situation. Or, in another recognizable resituation, Burke argues that
his metabiology “needs the corrective concern with social motives as such”
(1934, li). Rather than examining what it means to experience where I now
am, I, as a critic, examine everything except where I now am to understand
my experience—the social situation, cultural context, linguistic terminolo-
gies, and so forth. There is nothing wrong with studying these aspects of a
situation, but they are not the “social motives as such” if we ignore or con-
flate them with the experience of these social and linguistic features.
Thus, even the social or linguistic, which appear to originate outside
ourselves, must be studied as functions of consciousness if we are to draw
on them to analyze the fullness of being contained within experience.
Indeed, we can posit a “fundamental rhetoricity” of the sort Diane Davis
claims only if we begin with this internal examination of how conscious-
ness is saturated by persuasiveness. We examine such persuasiveness not by
looking to our various others but by seeing how this multiplicity of sup-
posed others plays out in the field of consciousness. Thus, Bateson suggests
that art and art criticism become “an exercise in communicating about the
species of unconscious” from which the fullness of our being in the world
emerges (1999, 137).
Such an articulation is by no means clear, but this is part of the
point. The examination of subjectivity will necessarily include more than
can be distinguished as a clearly defined set of objects, whether material,
116
social, linguistic, or some combination. We cannot back down in the face

of such ambiguity when encountering the difficulty of dwelling with this
reflective activity. Burke himself senses this difficulty, admitting only two
pages before his first motive-language conflation, that “the introspective
search for motives might reveal something dangerously like total empti-
ness” (1984, 33). As those who study consciousness from the inside know,
examinations of consciousness inevitably bring this fear of emptiness. In
fact, the study of consciousness must always flirt with emptiness, since
our attempt to concretely describe our experience with symbols will
never do justice to the richness of consciousness. If we, as philosophers,
critics, or rhetoricians, are going to truly study experience, subjectivity,
and consciousness—in whatever form of expression—we should be wary
of this retreat to the external in the face of the lack of concreteness.
Indeed, if we are going to claim the authority of subjectivity articulated
by PC and Whitehead, we must learn to dwell in this emptiness, always
taking care not to mistake the language about experience for the experi-
ence itself.
Department of English
Texas A&M University
notes
1. Within political theory, this critique owes much to Arendt 1998. For a more recent
rejection of reflection see Barad 2007, 55.
2. For a summary of this scholarship in new materialism and science studies, see
Barad 2007.
3. Riordan to Burke, 29 Nov. 1934, Burke-1, 1906–60, RBM 2619, Kenneth Burke
Papers, Special Collections Library, University Libraries, Penn State University.
4. The reading here differs from but has been assisted by Byrd 2008.
5. See Thames 1998 for a similar discussion of the metabiology and purpose.
works cited
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bateson, Gregory. 1999. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Burke, Kenneth. 1934. “The Universe Alive.” New Republic, 14 Nov., 26.
———. 1984. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
117
joshua dicaglio
Byrd, Don. 2008. “The Emergence of the Cyborg and the End of the Classical Tradition:
The Crisis of Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality.” Configurations
13 (1): 95–116.
Chalmers, David J. 1995. “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.” Journal of
Consciousness Studies 2 (3): 200–219.
Davis, Diane. 2010. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations. Pittsburgh, PA:
University of Pittsburgh Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University
of New York Press.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2008. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Rickert, Thomas. 2007. Acts of Enjoyment. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Russell, Bertrand. 1903. The Principles of Mathematics. New York: Norton.
Russell, Bertrand, and Alfred North Whitehead. 1925. Principia Mathematica. Vol. 1.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thames, Richard. 1998. “Nature’s Physician: The Metabiology of Kenneth Burke.” In
Kenneth Burke and the 21st Century, ed. Bernard L. Brock, 19–34. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1979. Process and Reality. 2nd ed. New York: Free Press.
———. 1934. Nature and Life Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
118

DiCaglio - Language and The Logic of Subjectivity - Whitehead and Burke in Crisis

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

DiCaglio - Language and The Logic of Subjectivity - Whitehead and Burke in Crisis

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Language and the Logic of Subjectivity: Whitehead and Burke in Crisis

Author(s): Joshua DiCaglio

Keywords: rhetorical theory, subjectivity, rhetoric and science, Kenneth Burke,

Bruno Latour, the increasingly popular French philosopher and founda-

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2017

and philosophy. Our collective scholarly consciousness has integrated this

But who is doing all of this persuading, philosophizing, and interpreting?

the crisis of subjectivity

of this crisis. Likewise, it must be noted that philosophical hermeneutics

left with the notion of an activity in which nothing is effected.

Our experience of the world involves the exhibition of the soul

Here, Whitehead essentially rearticulates the problem of logical types

The problem of logical types reveals a fundamental flaw in our way of

are in turn to be tested, is the region of Weltanschauung” (101–102, his i­ talics).

capture the whole. This cutting up of a larger continual process is precisely

When a philosopher invents a new approach to reality, he promptly

The cheese metaphor emphasizes reality as an undivided whole that is

Let us not only discuss a nation as though it were an individual,

Such changes in perspective make the experience we thought a word or

to modification. The more incongruities we can generate, the more aware

elements manifest in what we encounter as reality. Because Newton does

(1934, 41–42). Similarly, Burke suggests that we must acknowledge that

misplacing the subjective loop

Burke externalizes his inquiry by replacing subjectivity with language in his

To return to our earlier formulation, Burke seems add a component to try

To understand the world you must find knowledge outside your-

social, linguistic, or some combination. We cannot back down in the face

You might also like

are in turn to be tested, is the region of Weltanschauung” (101–102, his i talics).