BOOKS
everything seen is seen from some perspective, no perspective can em-
brace everything, and not all perspectives can be held at once.
( 1) If nothing is valid from every point of view and everything is
valid from some point of view, the question naturally arises: why this
point of view rather than that? This question is insoluble except where
a
problem
is clearly defined and
purposes
openly stated. Only when this
is done has the question a meaning, i.e., can conflicting points of view,
attitudes, language structures, be tested. Once a point of view is chosen
as adequate to a situation, then the consequences of acting out the
operations it involves can no longer be called into question by suddenly
shifting to another point of view on the ground of the equal validity
of all points of view
in the abstract.
Nowhere does Burke state clearly
either the problems or purposes which have defined his choice of per-
spectives. The reader never knows what perspective is relevant to what,
whether Burke accepts a perspective because its adequacy is objectively
verifiilble, or because it appeals to him for some purely private reason.
More reprehensible intellectually, are his critiques of perspectives to
which he is hostile. Instead of subjecting them to immanent criticism,
he jumps out of the orbit in which evidence for the perspective is being
considered, to another perspective from which one does not have to con-
sider the evidence offered but can toss it off with a shrug. This is illus-
trated most focally in his ambivalent attitude towards science-strikingly
similar to that of contemporary neo-Thomism-and in his contention that
it is only one of a number of metaphorical approaches to the world. From
the indisputable truth that a perspective enters into all thinking behavior,
Burke goes to the highly dubious proposition that any perspective can
be made to fit the deliverances of experience and vice versa. Nowhere
is there adequate recognition of the objective compulsions of the realm
of fact.
(2) But Burke himself has a definite perspective for which he claims
a superior validity over against competing perspectives. It is a "new co-
operative frame. . . . Coordinated by 'planners.'
Ideal: comic self-
consciousness. 'Neo-Catholicizing.'
Ideological homogenity, to be cor-
rected by a
methodology
of latitudinarianism." In another place he
describes it as "as return to integrative thought (the over-simplification
of which is manifested in adherence to a 'party line')." This ideological
homogenity necessarily demands that the whole of art, science, and
politics be interpreted in the exclusive categories of a single perspective.
Relativism now becomes only a relativity of
phrasing
for the one true
line. The over-simplification of the party-line is to be corrected by
latitudinarianism, which Burke admits "is another word for casuistic
stretching." That is, everyone must
think
the same things but it is permit-
ted to
say
the same things in different language. The task of the critic
is to reaffirm the basic truth of the perspective and by studying the
metaphorical migrations of terms, to bring them home to roost in the
proper ideological yard. The critic therefore is both a propagandist and
a craftsman. But his craftsmanship is really a strategy. It does not justify
itself. All justification flows from the pivotal metaphor of the frame of
acceptance.
There is a reason for this jockeying back and forth between posi-
tions. This will be apparent if we examine some concrete illustrations
which exhibit the pattern of Burke's strategy rather than the promise of
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