chapter 6

Archetype and Entelechy

1972

This essay is the second of two lectures delivered by Kenneth Burke at Clark University in 1971 as the Heinz Warner lecturer. Entelechy is an old friend in Burke,
going back, as it does, to the early fties and his work on the dramatistic poetics and the original Symbolic of Motives. Burke borrowed the term from Aristotle and modied it to apply to literary texts, especially tragedy. Later, he expanded its application so that it applied to all symbolic action and became one
of the prime functions of language and central concepts of logology. Language,
or, perhaps, just the human mind, seeks perfection, is compelled to go to the
end of the line in its many endeavors. Burke calls this the entelechial motive
and studies it in text after text. One of the main arguments of his dramatistic poetics is that literature goes to the end of the line more often than other kinds
of verbal acts and hence is a valuable source of knowledge for the study of humans, the symbol-using animals.
The main argument of this essay is that archetypes are genetic and hence ahistorical. They occur over and over again everywhere in the human world without
any evidence anywhere that they have been transmitted from one culture to another. But entelechy, or the entelechial motive, is a function of language and is
rooted in history, in a verbal action by a human agent in a specic sociopolitical
scene. The entelechial motive is one of the most purely human motives in Burke.
In his denition of man, Burke says that we humans are rotten with perfection.
It is languagesymbolic actionthat makes this motive available to us because
the human mind and imagination can freely explore possibilities in the verbal
realm that are impossible to explore in the physical realm. This is also true of
other forms of symbolic activitypainting, lms, music, sculpture, TV, drama
in which reality is transformed into art to create something that never was, which
is free of the constraints of brute realitythe laws of physics, of matter, of the
time-space continuum.
To put it differently, language is an archetype that makes entelechy possible.
We do not know whether language developed simultaneously in different parts
of the globe or whether once developed, it was always transmitted and modied
as humans colonized the globe. What we do know, and what Burke makes a big
point of stressing, is that all normal humans are born with the capacity to learn
a language and do learn the language of their tribe in a fabulous feat of memory, which is even more fabulous if they also learn reading and writing. Once humans have language they have entelechy and what goes with it as part of their
inheritance.
This germinal, seminal essay provides Burke with many of the key terms and
concepts that make up his nal, logological body of work.

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***
The previous talk attempted to survey some aspects of my dramatistic
perspective in general, the particular selection being intended to serve as
introduction to a quite different kind of summarization, in the sense that
both archetype and entelechy in themselves designate summarizing
principles.1
The logic (or logologic) underlying the rst talk was this: Nomenclatures are formative, or creative, in the sense that they affect the nature of
our observations, by turning our attention in this direction rather than
that, and by having implicit in them ways of dividing up a eld of inquiry. In this respect, one can in effect prophesy after the event by
generating the nature of the observations from the nature of the terms
by which those observations were guided.
On the assumption that Aristotles nomenclature is highly dramatistic in its essence, there was an earlier draft of the rst talk which became
overly involved in the minutiae of a dramatistic attempt to generate
the nomenclature of Aristotles Poetics. So I excised a lot, though leaving enough (lets hope) to at least illustrate the proposition that, however
empirical Aristotles study of literary specimens had been, his nomenclature had equipped him in advance to meet them halfwayand in
this sense the nature of his observations could in effect be deduced from
the implications of his dramatistic terminology in general.
But, as dramatistic as Aristotles nomenclature is, it doesnt exhaust
the eld (surely no human perspective ever will!). Suggestions from such
varied sources as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and a book by the anthropologist George Thomson, throwing further light on the concept of catharsis, added unruly considerations that involve ultimately the distinction
between body and mind (or rather, in the dramatistic analogue, the
realms of sheer physical motion and symbolic action). Then followed a
survey of some methodological statements that I view as basic to the
study of a text. And this summarization led to the thought, along somewhat Spinozistic lines, that one could assume absolute determinism in
the realm of physical or biological motion, while looking for the ground
of freedom in the realm of symbolic action.2
I might revert to one other point as regards the rst talk, and develop
it a bit further. We had considered the autonomy of the specialized sciences. What, then, of the interdisciplinary? At a time when I happened to be working on precisely that subject, I attended a conference at
which one speaker proposed that a certain kind of material should be

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treated by combining insights derived from the sciences of anthropology,

psychology, and sociology. But which anthropology, which psychology,
which sociology? For instance, the speaker recommended borrowings
from Freud and Jung, as though they were quite the same thing, and
without reference to the fact that often you would have to choose between them. Since each of these three special sciences is marked by much
internal controversy among specialists within that eld, on what
methodological grounds can someone outside any such particular eld
justify his choice among rival experts within the eld?
Usually, the problem is solved by not even being considered. You
pick from different elds items that you like, as though interdisciplinary
decisions were not much different from shopping at a department
storeand thats about what it amounts to, so far as the methodology
of your choice is concerned.
I say this quite tentatively, but here is the only methodological approach that a dramatistic perspective (with its strongly logological emphasis) would deem possible, when confronting this problem of the interdisciplinary: One thing common to all the specialized sciences is the
fact that each specialist uses some kind of terminology. If, then, you
specically subscribe to some one overall nomenclature, or theory of terminology in general, any choice you make from among competing specialists outside your eld can be methodologically justied in terms of
your particular overall terministic perspective.
True, an opponent may not subscribe to the particular model in
terms of which the given decision is rationalized. But at least, specic
methodological grounds for that decision have been offered. And if he
would reject it by proper methodological procedure, then let him propound or subscribe to some other perspective, and justify his decision
in terms of that. Only thus, so far as I can see, is it possible to justify one
interdisciplinary combination rather than another on a methodological
basis.
On the other hand, as regards the generating of a choice, if one does
have an overall nomenclature, and if one justies picking a certain aspect
of Freud rather than Jung, or vice versa, the choice is in effect as though
ones particular perspective had generated that observation which one
actually owes to someone else, but which in principle is derived from
the perspective on the grounds of which the borrowing took place.
The thought may help clarify what I mean by the self-appointed task
of prophesying after the event, or in principle generating a text, as
with my article The First Three Chapters of Genesis (reprinted in The

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Rhetoric of Religion [1961]), where in effect I derive the text dramatistically from a Cycle of Terms Implicit in the Idea of Order.
These were afterthoughts concerned with the previous talk. But lets
turn now to the topic scheduled for this evening, Archetype and Entelechy.
Jumping into the very middle of the issue, let us consider the matter
of the entelechy with reference to the archetype or prototype of
the primal crime which Freud associates with his concept of the Oedipus complex.
Recall in the Poetics the passage where Aristotle is discussing the
kinds of situation best suited to serve as a theme for tragedy. The tragic
calamity, he says, should involve conicts among intimates. For instance,
When brother kills brother, or a son kills his father, or a mother her
son, or a son his mothereither kills, or intends to kill.
It is hard to nd an exact translation of the word I have translated as
intimates. Butchers version is someone near and dear. The Loeb
edition uses friends. The word is etymologically of the same root as
the word for love in the Rhetoric, though all the examples there given
happen to concern intimacy among males.
Regrettably, Freud never (to my knowledge) commented on the passage I have quoted with regard to Aristotles variations on the theme of
tragic killing. Also, with relation to the great emphasis Freud placed
upon one of Aristotles situations (in which son kills father), it is interesting to note that Aristotle omitted from his list the theme of father
killing son. Yet the very tragedies he was dealing with were especially
partial to myths deriving from the curse on the house of Atreus, a kind
of dynastic original sin descending from a ruse whereby a father unknowingly (unconsciously?) ate the hearts of his two sons. For all
Freuds emphasis on the fatherkill, its worth remembering that the
prime instance of the sacricial motive in the Old Testament is the story
of Abrahams pious willingness to sacrice Isaac. And the entire logic of
the New Testament is built about the story of a divine father who deliberately sent his son on a mission to be crucied.
To this extent, whereas the basic lines of Western thought come to a
focus in variations on the theme of son, rather than father, as prime sacricial gure, out of the several combinations that Aristotle mentions as
ideal conditions for tragic victimage Freuds stress upon one Sophoclean
tragedy, Oedipus Rex (to which Aristotle also was highly partial, though
for quite different reasons) deected our attention from both the sheer
poetics of the case and the infanticidal implications in other tragic recipes.

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In The Rhetoric of Religion I consider reasons why the sacricial principle itself is integral to the social order. Thus where Aristotle had asked
what would be the perfect kinds of character for tragedy as a literary
mode, one might rephrase the question by asking, What would be the
perfect imitated victim? The distinction between the tragic imitation
of victimage as a source of poetic pleasure and the engrossment with actual victimage would be the difference between the Athenian theater and
the Roman gladiatorial contest. Newspapers and documentary broadcasts appeal in a kind of intermediate realm by a record (thus a symbolizing) of real victimage. The thought suggests why the poetic imitation
of imaginary pitiable situations involves in itself a certain degree of purgation. All told, we encounter here some tangled relationships among
the actual, the documentary copy, and the artistic imitation.
Be that as it may, the issue comes to a focus in questions about the
recipe for perfect victimageand by entelechy I refer to such use of
symbolic resources that potentialities can be said to attain their perfect
fulllment. We shall come upon this notion by various routes. Aristotles
Poetics is a handy benchmark for our survey since it proceeds in this
spirit, asking what form of plot would best fulll the tragic telos, what
kind of situation, what kind of characters and what kind of style.
Whereupon, by comparison and contrast (and here at last Im jumping
in medias res!) I would quote a passage from my Denition of Man
(reprinted in Language as Symbolic Action, 1966):
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (near the end of Chapter 5) Freud explicitly
calls 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. Yet a few sentences later in that same
closing paragraph, we nd him saying, The repressive instinct never ceases
to strive after its complete satisfaction. But are not these two sentences
mutually contradictory? For what could more clearly represent an impulse
to perfection than a striving after complete satisfaction? (17)

The alternative that Freud offers is his concept of the repetition

compulsion, which he also calls a destiny compulsion. It is decidedly
not within my competence to dispute Freuds concept itself, as designation for a psychopathic tendency to relive some prior traumatic situation
by so confronting a totally different set of later circumstances that they
are interpreted by the sufferer in terms of the original painfully formative situation. I am far from disputing the likelihood of such a tendency.
I am but proposing to consider how it looks, as viewed in the light of an
entelechial principle having wider functions than the manifestations

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with which Freud is here concerned. If I may give myself another chance
to make my point, please let me quote this further statement of the case:
Is not the sufferer exerting almost superhuman efforts in the attempt to give
his life a certain form, so shaping his relations to people in later years that
they will conform perfectly to an emotional or psychological pattern
already established in some earlier formative situation? What more
thorough illustration could one want, of a drive to make ones life
perfect, despite the fact that such efforts at perfection might cause
the unconscious striver great suffering?

Without casting the slightest doubt upon Freuds concept of a psychopathic tendency, or temptation, to endow wholly different people
with imputed roles corresponding to the actual roles that other persons
had played in the original inicting of the psychic wound, we could view
such a compulsion as an entelechial or perfectionist motive if we
but widen the concept of perfection to the point where we can also use
the term ironically, as when we speak of a perfect fool or a perfect villain. Thus: The Nazi version of the Jew, as developed in Hitlers Mein
Kampf, is the most thorough-going instance of such ironic perfection in
recent times, though strongly similar trends keep manifesting themselves
in current controversies between East and West.
By adopting a general logological approach to a compulsive situation which Freud confronts from his specically psychoanalytic point of
view, one would add considerations of this sort: A traumatic experience
can, as it were, endow a person with a key terminology, in terms of
which he frames his attitude towards lifeand the terminology can
shape what he comes to expect of people in keeping with the tenor of
that attitude. Simplest example: An overly trusting person who was
rudely betrayed, and who (in line with the proverb, once burned, twice
shy) might thenceforth so expect betrayal as in effect to invite betrayal.
And such an attitude can also function as a kind of generating principle, in the sense that a dramatist, when organizing a play designed to
embody such an attitude, would develop a cast of characters so related
to one another that, as these relationships unfolded in the development
of the plot, one particular character who came close to standing for the
author himself could end in the attitude of embitterment which I have
called a generating principle behind the relationships among such a
cast of characters. And all the main characters would be what we could
call key terms involved in the forming of the summational attitude.
Turn now to a corresponding situation in real life. The cast of characters, in their nature as key terms, would act as a repetition com-

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pulsion insofar as the sufferer experienced his embittered attitude in

terms of precisely such gures (which had originally worked together so
perfectly towards the traumatic forming of the attitude). One necessarily forms ones experience and expectations in terms of something or
other, even if one is not working formally or deliberately with such structures of interrelated terms as is the case with philosophers, dramatists,
and the like. A traumatic experience can serve to select such a set of key
terms, which will then act as a basic nomenclature, with implications
corresponding to their roles in connection with the original (and originating) traumatic experience involved in their selection as key terms.
A repetition compulsion would be manifest in any subsequent tendency to view new circumstances and persons in terms of the original
dramatic personae (hence assigning roles whereby the sufferer unconsciously so imagines or interprets wholly different people as to make
them t the pattern of his original and originating distress). The same
process would be entelechial or perfectionist in the ironic sense 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 paradigm.
Exactly how, then, would the entelechial principle gure here, with regard to the Freudian archetype of the primal crime? You are, let us
say, trying to sum up the nature of the monogamistic, patriarchal family as you conceive of it. If you are a Freud your summational paradigm
will be formed in terms of the tensions that you consider intrinsic to the
family structure. These tensions would strike you as being of such a nature that they would attain perfect representative fruition in a kind of development and fulllment whereby the sons joined forces, murdered
their father, and took possession of the women.
Freud would be the rst to recognize that so perfect a pattern of family outbursts was never found in any single one of his cases. But if you
viewed family tensions in principle, this is the kind of culmination that
would be the perfect representative expression of the tensions he viewed
as intrinsic to the family structure.
This entelechial, summational, culminative, or paradigmatic version
of what is ultimately implied in the nature of family tensions is not
viewed as a state to be fullled in time. There is no attempt to postulate
that so thoroughgoing an outcome will actually happen to families.
On the contrary, the culminative principle represented in the hypothesis of the fatherkill is transferred to the prehistoric past, along with subsequent corrective ambiguities whereby one is left a bit uncertain as to
whether such a convulsion in the primal horde actually did take place,

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thereby leaving indestructible traces upon the history of human descent. For when anthropologists objected that they found no evidence
of such an event, the formulation of this design, perfect in its simplicity,
was defended by Freud as a hypothesis which might still be deemed
creditable insofar as it proves able to bring coherence and understanding into more and more new regions.
In this respect archetypes or prototypes can be mythic ways of
formulating entelechial implications (or possible summings-up in principle) by translating them into terms of a vaguely hypothetical past.
Entelechially, you might say, Given such-and-such a family structure, you can expect to nd such-and-such tensions. And these tensions
would so add up that, if they were perfectly expressed in all simplicity,
they would culminate in the outburst which Freud epitomizes in his archetype of the primal crime. Thus, what was really not temporal at
all, but was the idealizing or the imaginative and conceptual perfecting
of a situation that, in its actual temporal variants as recorded and analyzed in case histories, fell far short of such paradigmatic clarity, got
vaguely attributed to the prehistoric past. Here was an area where
nineteenth-century evolutionary historicism led to quasi-scientic derivations that were in form much like primitive creation myths, as when a
tribe derives its present nature from some primal, mythic ancestral past.
This is a process that in my Grammar of Motives (1945) I call the
temporizing of essence. But my fullest treatment of it is in The
Rhetoric of Religion, the section entitled The First Three Chapters of
Genesis, where the process operates along these lines: By the very fact
of setting up an order, you make men potentially transgressors. For you
give orders only to the kind of being who might possibly disobey them.
Thus, order makes man in principle subject to temptation. (Otherwise
put: Saint Paul said that the law made sin, Jeremy Bentham said that the
law makes crime.) Myth (story) translates statements about principles
into archetypal, quasi-temporal terms, quite as the Latin and Greek
words principium and arch, respectively, mean beginning in the
sense of both temporal priority and logical priority (or rst principles).
Hence, the mythic or narrative or archetypally quasi-historical ways of
saying that the setting up of an order makes man in principle subject to
temptation is to tell how the rst man said no to the rst thou-shalt-not
imposed upon him by the rst and foremost authority.
This process gets things reversed, as Marx says about ideology.
Thus, mythically, Romulus was the eponymous founder of Rome,
whereas etymologically the derivation was exactly the reverse.

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This quasi-temporal nature of archetypes is to be seen in a halfway

stage as regards the Platonic doctrine of anamnesis. Many primitive
languages arose, ourished, and died without ever being formally reduced to such principles of grammar and syntax as we expect not only
in studies of classical idioms like Latin and Greek, but even of tribal
tongues that anthropologists codify though the natives themselves have
no such compilations. In actual practice, a missionary or explorer or
eldworker who formulates such a structure begins with the language as
he hears it spoken, then gradually codies the grammatical and syntactical rules that are implicit in the conventions of its usage. However, once
he has built up such paradigms, there is a sense in which they are formally prior to their application in particular cases. For they are at a
level of generalization, or abstraction, whereby each such principle can
rst be formulated as a title or class name under which endless individual examples, some actually recorded, others possible, could be included.
Along those lines, one can readily imagine a Platonic dialogue in
which Socrates, by adept questioning, proves that no matter how naive
a member of the tribe might be, in but properly abiding by the conventions of his given dialect he is at heart an expert grammarian without
knowing it. Insofar as the verbs of his language were reducible to several conjugations, for instance, and the speaker spontaneously exemplied the rules to which a grammarian has reduced all such conjugations, mere questioning could establish the fact that the speaker knew
by which paradigm, or set of rules, a given verb was to be conjugated,
how its forms should end if active, if passive, how it should be modied
if changed from past to future, or from rst person to second person,
and so on.
Where, then, did this innate knowledge of such grammatical archetypes come from? If such principles are logically prior in the sense
that any such classication of rules can be viewed grammatically as preceding all possible examples of usages classiable under that given
head, and if this purely technical kind of priority is stated in temporal
terms, then it follows that this unconscious grammarian, who knew
more than he knew he knew, must have experienced such pure forms
(or archetypes) in a stage of temporally prior existence. And by adroit
questioning, Socrates is helping him to remember when he had experienced them in their pure state (which any particular examples partake of imperfectly).
As a current instance of how readily an uncritical use of the archetypal
can get things backwards, consider this dialectical distortion in Norman

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O. Browns book, Loves Body (1966): Dialectics involves the two principles of composition and division (unity and plurality, generalization and
specication). An instance of division would be terms for distinguishing
between the sexes, or a distinction between earth and sky viewed as distinct motivational realms. But heres how quickly Brown can twist that
normal resource of terminology into quasi-vatic nonsense:
Division, duality, two sexes. . . . Dual organization is sexual
organization. . . . The prototype of all opposition or contrariety is sex. The
prototype of the division into two sexes is the separation of earth and sky,
Mother Earth and Father Sky, the primal parents.

Prototype here does the trick. Go along with such maneuvers, and
you let yourself in for total obfuscation. To say that sex is dialectical
would pass well enough, in the sense that an act of copulation in effect
unies the duality of the sexual partners. But give Brown his way with
the archetypes (or prototypes, he uses both words), and things get reversed whereby dialectics is sexual; specically, Every sentence is dialectics, an act of love. Thus in effect a quite viable proposition, sex
is dialectical gets archetypally transformed into dialectics is sexual.
And whereas it would be reasonable enough to say that sex relations can
be discussed in terms of unity and division, Browns ideological reversal
gives us what would amount to saying that the principles of unity and
division (applications of which are available to all language systems) are
but special cases of sex, earth, and sky.
A related temptation is to be seen in Freuds comments on condensation and displacement as exemplied in the symbolism of dreams.
Freud shows clearly enough how such operations take place in dreamsymbols. Yet such resources of substitution are by no means conned to
the language of dreams or neurosis. There is a kind of displacement if I
use a symbol for an equation in mathematics, or translate a German sentence into French. And any step to a higher level of generalization involves
a kind of condensation, as siblings includes both brother and sister, and parents condenses mother and father. There are times
when such normal resources of symbolization can raise trouble. But
wed get things backwards if we derived displacement and condensation
from dreams, rather than seeing in dream-symbols special applications of
these wider symbolic resources.
If you ever run across the winter 1971 issue of Salmagundi, a little
magazine published under the aegis of Skidmore College, please take a
glance at my article, Doing and Saying, concerned with a process of

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mythic doubling. It begins with a hypothetical distinction between one

man who is going through the material operations of harvesting a crop,
and another who, being an expert in the ways of symbolic action, provides a ritual counterpart by singing a harvest song, with appropriate
choreography.
In one sense we are all myth-men, insofar as no important incident in
our lives seems quite complete (that is, entelechially perfected) unless
some expert in the resources of mythopoeia has rounded things out with
a mythic counterpart. There we see the rudiments of what I mean by the
entelechial principle. The important consideration is not where such
mythic completions come from geographically, but what they add up to
symbolically.
True, since any given ritual has developed through time, an account of
its historical development is a wholly proper inquiry. Thus Aristotles early
chapters in his Poetics are concerned with the incunabula of tragedy prior
to the era when it attained its nished form, as dened in Chapter 6,
where he gives his denition, and thereafter in effect derives his analysis by working out the kind of observations that were implicit in that definition. Similarly, along with the possible history of a rituals development,
we might generate it nontemporally, in principle, from the dramatistic
analysis of mythopoeia itself, viewed as a species of symbolic action.
For instance, any recurrent ritual is a narrative prephilosophic mode
of classication, insofar as it in effect includes many different temporal
events under the same head. And it becomes entelechial, or perfectionist,
as in the case of a ceremony that, in effect classifying a whole group of initiates under the same head, thereby transcends their nature as individuals.
By the ceremony they are perfected in the sense that, regardless of what
they variously might be, they are being considered from the standpoint of
one particular absolute principle, namely, their identity and corresponding reidentication, as initiates. In all likelihood this entelechial aspect
of the case will show up in terms of a myth relating the incident to some
imputed primal past.
Perhaps it should also be pointed out that the culminative aspect of
the entelechial principle is not conned to symbolic structures that have
the quality of summaries and paradigms. It can also come to a focus in
the symbolizing of an attitude, since attitudes possess a summarizing
quality. Similarly an attitude towards a situation can be developed in
terms of a narrative that sums up a situation not by discussing the situation as such, but by depicting a thoroughgoing response to it. One can
discern this element by thinking of the contrast between a discussion of

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family tensions as such and Freuds dramatic anecdote about the primal crime that he proposed as the archetype of family tension.
Surely the purely formal, entelechial principle is an important motivational ingredient in system-building types of insanity. The person who
has built up an elaborate structure of persecution has a kind of psychic
treasure which could not be renounced without a sense of great impoverishment, despite the suffering that may be connected with it. I know of
one case where an almost air-tight fantasy of deception, involving
many members of a family, had been worked out. But one person whom
the sufferer still inclined to trust broke the perfect symmetry. Then, lo!
this person diedand immediately the sufferer began putting new light
on certain things that had been said, remarks that came to be interpreted
as a kind of deathbed confession about the suspected plottings of all the
others. I told the ardent system-builder: In the rst place, I am sure that
your whole scheme is all wrong. In the second place, on the basis of what
I know about the deceased I think you must be misrememberingfor I
believe that, even if all this were true, the deceased is not the kind of person who would have told you. However, you have built up such a case,
I realize how empty the world would seem if you abandoned it. So dont
abandon it. And since you are a writer, write it up. Make all the characters involved even more egregiously a set of monsters than you now think
them to be. Modify the details in a ction that deliberately perfects the
conspiracy. I wont atter myself with the assumption that my advice
was takenbut there is a vast amount of writing that gets done exactly
thus. And my claim is, of course, that Freuds dramatic archetypal fulllment of family tensions in terms of a quasi-prehistoric criminal outburst is so to be entelechially understood.
In one draft of these talks, I began by an ironic exemplifying of the entelechial principle before the principle itself had been discussed. Borrowing the title of William Ernest Henleys Invictus (the poem that
rings out so challengingly, I am the master of my fate, / The captain of
my soul) I proposed to give such thoughts of invincibility this turn:
If things are bad, and I cant make them better,
then all the more Ill be mine own begetter.
Adversity shall be my universe,
making me free to act to make things worse.

In this regard, satire can exemplify a strongly entelechial bent. Whereas

certain ills that beset our society can become so depressing that we would
gladly close our minds to them, satire as a stylistic strategy can so turn

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things around that we get a smiling variant of the essentially grotesque

perversity embodied in my Invictus lines. That is, whereas we might,
without a twist, write a catalogue of our societys ills (and the more thorough it was, the more depressed wed be, so that our only choice would
be between welcoming despair and seeking distraction), satire can so
change the rules that we have a quite different out. The satirist can set up
a situation whereby his text can ironically advocate the very ills that are
depressing usnay more, he can perfect his presentation by a fantastic
rationale that calls for still more of the maladjustments now besetting us.
For satire can nd ways of making reductions to absurdity look like logical conclusions, surely an entelechial pursuit, and of a sort that allows for
the sheer accent of accentuating the positive atop implications quite
negative. Later I shall say a few more words on this point. Meanwhile, let
us consider a different, but related, mode of summarization.
As regards the ultimate philosophic problems imposed upon us by the
high development of technology, they seem now to culminate in some
kind of confrontation between Humanism and Technologism. At
various times in the history of Western thought, Humanism has been
dened by a close relation to different adversaries or partners. Some
brands of Humanism, for instance, have been antithetical to Supernaturalism, others have contended that human personality must be grounded
in a transcendent principle of personality. Or there was the Humanism
of Neoclassicism, grounded in ancient Greek and Latin texts. Marxist
Humanism is integrally associated with secular socialism. Today, it
seems to me, our quandaries sum up as the need for a kind of Humanism that would be dened as antithetical to Technologism.
Technologism itself would be a term provided by its Humanistic
opponent. As distinct from mere technology, Technologism would be
built upon the assumption that the remedy for the problems arising from
technology is to be sought in the development of ever more and more
technology. That blithe spirit, Buckminster Fuller, would be one of its
high priests. Land developers whose prowess as promoters is a national
disaster where considerations of ecology are concerned would be on the
dismal end of such a hierarchy. It would seem that, until quite recently,
the Army Corps of Engineers has been desolatingly Technologistic in its
policies and practicesbut things are changing somewhat. For instance,
after having done much havoc as regards the Tocks Island project on the
Delaware, it is now apparently considering an adverse report by an authority that it itself had appointed.
Humanism, as so conceived, would look especially askance at the typ-

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ical promoters ideal of a constant rapid increase in the consumption of

energy (though perhaps it is a trend that the whole logic of investment comes close to making imperative). And an anti-Technologistic
Humanism would be animalistic in the sense that, far from boasting
of some privileged human status, it would never disregard our humble,
and maybe even humiliating, place in the totality of the natural order.
But I spoke of entelechies in the satiric sense. In the winter 1971
issue of The Sewanee Review I tried an exercise of that sort. And the idea
started from the subject of energy. On one of the all-night radio programs with which I sometimes while away insomniac hours, I heard an
ardent proponent of Technologism (an anima naturaliter Technologistica) ridiculing reactionary idealists who kept asking whether it might be
possible to clear up the pollution in Lake Erie. They should look forward, not back, he saidand rather than trying to clean up Lake Erie,
they should pollute it ten times as much, then nd a way to extract from
its wastes a new kind of energy.
He had the angle. Invictus! Adversity shall be my universe, making me
free to act to make things worse. We now have the resources to let loose
and freely pollute the entire world, while building a Perfectly AirConditioned Culture-Bubble on the Moon. An ideal Womb-Heaven (I
called it Helhaven), made possible by mans momentous advances in
technologyhence, the Ultimate Culmination, Eden and the Tower in one.
And I had my ending, too. You recall William Jennings Bryans famous speech in behalf of free silver, where he ended on a posture betting his nal, perorating words: Crucied on a Cross of Gold. I saw a
way of ending my exercise (which I also used in a public talk) on not just
one posture, but a succession of three, as with my nalizing lines:
Let there be no turning back of the clock. Or no turning inward. Our VicePresident has rightly cautioned: No negativism. We want afrmation
towards helhaven.
onward, outward, and up!

appendix a
To guard against a possible misunderstanding, I might point out: Both Aristotles concept of the entelechy and its modied role in Leibnizian monadology use the term in ways that could be applied to any being or substance, such as an amoeba or a tree, or even some one particular pebble
viewed as being moved to fulll the potentialities peculiar to its kind.

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135

In these pages no such universal metaphysical application of the term

is considered. We are concerned solely with a logological tendency intrinsic to the resources of symbolic action. If it does gure in the realm
of sheer motion, the discussion of it in that respect would require quite
different modes of observation and analysis.
Also, whatever may be our objections to an uncritical use of the term
archetype, it is in its way as dramatistic as the term entelechy. The
terms are allies, in their antithetical relation to behavioristic reductionism; and in this respect the areas they cover greatly overlap.
And as we must be on guard lest the temporizing of essence in the
term archetype gets tied up with notions of a quasi-historical past, so
there are risks that the concept of the entelechy may take on quasifuturistic assumptions, by reason of the fact that the potentialities of a
perfected symbol-system can be made to seem too clearly like the proclaiming of a predestined era still to come.
Such millenarian possibilities are exploited rhetorically in the burlesqued, litist Utopianism of the Helhaven project, which alas! comes
close to being technologically feasible; and it is already with us in principle whenever promoters, by projects that are disastrous to some aspect of the worlds ecological balance, can buy themselves an estate in
an area not yet thus ravaged.

appendix b
The dialectical design underlying the entelechial principle (in our strictly
logological sense of the term) can be summed up thus:
1. There is the thing, bread.
2. There is the corresponding word, bread.
3. Language being such as it is, with no trouble at all I can make up
the expression, perfect bread.
4. We may disagree as to which bread could properly be called
perfect.
5. A mean man, or a dyspeptic, or a philosopher might even deny
that in this world there can be such a thing as perfect bread.
6. Nevertheless, theologians can speak of God as the ens perfectissimum, and the expression perfect bread is a secular counterpart
of such dialectical resources.

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7. Nay more. Even if there is no such thing as perfect bread in

actuality, I can consider bread from the standpoint of perfect
bread in principle.
Whereupon I confront these quite different alternatives:
8. Here is some perfect bread; or
9. As compared with perfect bread, this bread I am offering you
is a dismal substitute; or
10. I can assure you that, humble as it is, this bread represents
perfect bread in principle. (It stands for the spirit of perfect
bread.)
In effect, Freuds Just-So Story of the primalkill combines clauses 6
and 10. It is the ideally culminative exemplar of the monogamistic situation he would analyze (or in terms of which he would analyze his patients). But he would consider any particular case as but a partial instance of such a pattern, or paradigm.

appendix c
We might throw further light on the subject by considering how the issue looks, as regards Joseph Fontenroses book Python, a Study of Delphic Myth and its Origins (1959). In an essay, Myth, Poetry, and Philosophy (reprinted in Language as Symbolic Action), I use this book as
a point of departure for several lines of speculation not directly germane
to our present concerns. But it might be mentioned here because of its
concern with the origins of what the author called the combat
myth. For the discussion obviously involves two quite different kinds
of origin: (1) the possible transformations of the myth in the course of
time, along with the likely steps of its geographic diffusion; (2) a paradigm summarizing the main themes of the combat myth, in its nature as
a story with beginning, middle, and end.
My essay was designed to show how this second kind of origin has
nothing to do with temporal succession, but is essentially concerned
with such purely formal principles as the rst of these two talks discussed with reference to Aristotles Poetics. In effect the paradigm which
Fontenrose sets up, and which all the many versions of the myth are said
to exemplify somewhat but not totally, is like Aristotles denition of
tragedy. For it considers all cases in the summarizing terms of a per-

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137

fect combat myth which must be conceptualized, or idealized, with corresponding rules, regardless of the fact that no one perfect instance
of the pattern need be offered as justication for all the clauses and
subdivisions (amounting to forty-three in all) that are included in
Fontenroses all-inclusive list. However, a paradigm of this sort is obviously at a much lower level of generalization than the denition of
tragedy in the Poetics.
Also, besides observations analogous to Aristotles concern with the
perfection of tragedy as a form, a somewhat adventitious scenic (or environmentalist) test of perfection had to be introduced when we consider the fact that the champion of the combat is said to have instituted
cult, ritual, festival, and built a temple for himself. In this regard, as distinct from asking just what might be the principles of a perfect combat myth (in the sense that Fontenroses paradigm embodies Aristotles
preference for a complex plot with peripety), I felt the need to introduce a kind of Darwinian speculation, by asking exactly how a combat
myth, whatever its origins, might happen to be a perfect candidate for
survival in connection with a cult. Wed here confront the difference between the combat myths perfection sheerly as a form of story, and its
nature as a contribution to the sanctioning of the ofces performed by
the specic priesthood with which one version or another of the myth
happened to be identied. For instance, a myth might have special survival value if it was associated with a cult which had perfected rituals for,
as it were, causing spring to return in the springtime, summer in the
summertime, and so on. That is, the best conditions for establishing the
authority of a priesthoods magic would be those involving the regularities rather than the uncertainties of nature. And such conditions would
be fullled insofar as a cult and its corresponding myth became associated with sky-gods, and thus with the annually repeated cycle of the seasons, and the gradually accumulating lore about the recurrent congurations of the heavens. A myth could be perfectly formed as regards
poetic tests of perfection, without having this added Darwinian kind
of aptitude that happened to endow it with summationally cosmic connotations of authority.

notes
This essay originally appeared in Dramatism and Development (Barr, Mass:
Clark University Press, 1972), 3362.
1. Dramatism and Development consists of two essays. The title of the rst

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is Biology, Psychology, Words. The essay reprinted here is the second of

the two.
2. In the Journal of Social Issues for October 1962 there is an article, The
Image of Man, by Isidor Chein, which led to a controversy ideal for our purposes. Dr. Cheins overurgent aim to celebrate the dignity of Man as an active
being tricks him into using but half a dialectic, thereby totally overlooking the
states of passivity to which this active being is prone (as per the many pages
On Human Bondage in Spinozas Ethics). The subject is summed up in my
Language as Symbolic Action (1966), 5862.