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3 The Language of Poetry, “Dramatistically” Considered6

In the first section of this paper, partially following and partially departing from Cicero’s “three offices of the orator,” we propose that four “offices” be considered as essential to the analysis of poetic symbolism. Since our discussion in this first part is in general terms, we alter the procedure in the second section by using Goethe’s Faust as text and making specific observations about it, along the lines previously indicated. As regards the relation between individual texts and social motives in general (poetic “beauty” as seen in terms of social tensions), we aim to indicate how the work reflects, and “cathartically” transforms for aesthetic purposes, the “pyramidal” motives of the social order, by the tragic symbolizing of a “perfect” victimage. We lay special stress upon the Negative here, because of its relation to the ethical (which characteristically heads in such negatives as the Decalogue). In the third section we seek to round out our concerns by indicating how the symbolizing of perfect victimage relates to a purely technical kind of perfection (the “entelechial” principle that we consider natural to the genius of language).

I

We would spin this discussion from Cicero’s terms for the “three offices of the orator.” (See Orator, De Oratore, and St. Augustine’s use of this alignment for his analysis of Christian persuasion in his De Doctrina Christiana.)

First office: to teach or inform (docere). Second office: to please (delectare). Third office: to move, or “bend” (movere, flectare).

Thus instead of beginning with a theory of “signs,” and looking for ways to “expand” it into a theory of “symbols,” we begin with terms that assume the full ‘‘emotionality’’ of speech. 7

The first office (docere) would be the indicative or scientific function of speech, its relation to matters of knowledge. The third office (movere) would be the persuasive or rhetorical function of speech, its use to arouse in an auditor some attitude that implies a desired kind of act or acquiescence in a desired kind of policy. The second office, to please or entertain (delectare), must, for our purposes, be redefined.

In its simplest guise, the “entertainment” aspect of an orator’s speech corresponds to the fiction in a popular commercial magazine. The fiction is nominally of the “art for art’s sake” sort. But it functions rhetorically to assemble an audience which the rhetorical advertisements can then address as prospective customers. Similarly, an orator who is trying to persuade an audience to some decision or attitude must find ways of keeping his audience sufficiently amused so that they will continue to be an audience (though the purpose of his address is not to amuse them, but to enlist them in some “cause”). For the purposes of this paper, however, the “second office” must be greatly expanded beyond so rudimentary a notion of the pleasurable.

The first and third offices concern elements outside the address. (The first is, at least ostensibly, concerned with information about nonverbal “reality”; and the third is directed toward the moving of the auditor to attitudes with practical consequences which, it is hoped, will prevail after the speech is over.) But we would expand the second office in keeping with a principle of internality.

Insofar as a work is appealing through the laws of its resources as a medium, we would treat such appeal as a function of the second office.

Man being the typically language-using species, there is for him an intrinsic delight in the sheer exercising of his distinctive characteristic (language, or symbol-using in general). This delight in itself is not addressed either to “reality” or to “the auditor.” It is a delight in the internal consistency of a symbolic structure as such (in such a spinning-out-of-itself as Santayana calls the distinguishing mark of dialectics).

Aristotle, it will be recalled, had divided up the field of rhetoric somewhat differently. He distinguished not three offices of the orator but three kinds of oratory: the deliberative (as with debates on public policy); the forensic (as with pleas in the law courts); and the epideictic or demonstrative (concerned with matters of praise and blame). The third would probably have included such modern variants as a publicity man’s attempt to “build up” his client in the public imagination. A patriotic oration delivered at a celebration of Independence Day would be a closer approximation.

The nearest overlap between Aristotle’s way of carving up the field and Cicero’s is the area where Aristotle’s category of the “epideictic” or “demonstrative” overlaps upon Cicero’s second office. The overlap becomes more obvious when we think of oratory in decay. The decadent Athenian orator, for instance, might deliver an oration in praise of his beloved’s cosmetics; or the decadent Roman orator might delight his audience by improvising a trick-laden oration on a topic called out to him from the audience. And you could, as you prefer, class such toying with the medium for its own sake either as an instance of the second Ciceronian office or as an instance of Aristotelian epideictic.

(Indeed, precisely when such oratory is in decay its condition may best reveal the delight in the linguistic forms as such. Whereas the formal devices were invented for the purposes of intense persuasion, a weakening of moral urgency brought strongly to the fore the cult of sheer formality. When men had nothing much to say they could still enjoy the purely internal exercise of the saying.)

Over and beyond the profound significance of the reference in Spinoza’s Ethics, the work has appealed to men because it “dramatizes” the principle of internal development. Spinoza’s proposal to spin his demonstrations more geometrico from a limited number of definitions and axioms was a very entertaining gesture. All cogent argument has an appeal of this sort, the appeal of symbolic structure developing from its own internal resources, in accordance with its own principles. But in Spinoza’s case the principle of internality was more than merely formal, it was challengingly formalistic. Considered as rhetoric, it was a kind of stylistic “conceit”; and in this sense it meets the requirements of Cicero’s second office (though, of course, only for readers who can find such a difficult device of exposition “entertaining”).

The often-heard statements that mathematics is “elegant,” or that the solving of problems in physics can be “beautiful,” or that there can be something “aesthetic” in “science,” would seem to involve our proposal for widening the scope of Cicero’s second office to include this sheer delight in symbolic unfolding for its own sake (a delight one could expect of an animal species whose every attainment and every misfortune strikingly shows the results of its symbol-using fury).

Science, as knowledge or information, would obviously belong with the first office. But in its nature as expression for its own sake a scientific exposition would be like a “poem.” Indeed, though scientific utterance is primarily indicative, “descriptive,” it can also be analyzed secondarily as either poetically expressive or rhetorically hortatory; similarly, even “pure” poetry can be analyzed secondarily as “scientific information” or as “rhetorical propaganda”; and rhetoric has both its measure of “truth” and its measure of “poetry.” (In his treatise On the Sublime Longinus shows us how, once the urgency of the occasion is past, an orator’s attempts to move an audience to practical decisions involve formal devices that can be enjoyed for themselves, as pure appeals to the “imagination.”)

In sum, arbitrarily assigning to the letters svid the meaning “a loathsome person,” if one says, “Mr. Q is a svid” not just because he is but because one wants the auditor to loathe him, one is using the term rhetorically. If one says “Mr. Q is a svid” not because he is, or because one wants people to loathe him, but just because one takes delight in vituperation as such, then one is using the term poetically (as sheer exercising of the linguistic medium). If one says “Mr. Q is a svid” purely because Mr. Q is actually deemed loathsome, one is using the term scientifically, indicatively. And the test of this usage would be in the fact that one could accomplish one’s purpose as well, if not better, by a “neutral” paraphrase, as were one to add, “And by a ‘svid’ I mean a person deemed loathsome by persons who may or may not be justified in their judgment.” Though a complete absence of attitude is probably impossible, a typical scientific expression can at least point in that direction, whereas rhetorical expression will seek to make the attitude as intense as is deemed proper to the desired practical (“external”) result, while poetry will seek to make the attitude as intense as is deemed proper to the desired “aesthetic” (“internal”) result.

Such a purely “aesthetic” aim can greatly contribute to “science” (or perhaps, more properly, to “philosophy,” science in the sense of “wisdom” rather than “knowledge”): for, by sheerly internal spinning, it may seek complications of itself, as were the poet at one point to have his “hero” admired for doing much the same thing as his “villain” was loathed for doing at another point; and out of such sheer “exercising” of the medium’s resources there can unfold, at least in glimpses, deftly “perverse” moments that lead toward a profoundly humane pity.

Doctor Nagel’s essay on “Symbolism and Science” divides his terms into three classes: “descriptive symbols,” “auxiliary symbols,” and “maxims.” Do we not here find the three “offices,” but transformed to fit the specific needs of his field? The “descriptive” symbols would correspond to the external or scenic reference of the first office. Since he defines an “auxiliary symbol” as one “whose primary function is to serve as a connection between other symbols,” he would here seem to be discussing the sheerly internal aspect of a symbolism, the inter-connective devices whereby it can be spun out of itself. This would fit perfectly with the second office, once its scope had been expanded to include the appeal of symbolic internality as such (an “aesthetic” appeal that Doctor Nagel has also mentioned, though in a somewhat different placement). And since “maxims” are said to “formulate instructions or resolutions as to how to employ symbols,” here would be the hortatory function of the third office.

All three, we repeat, have been transformed to meet the specific requirements of the subject-matter. Thus we are most decidedly not saying that a scientific “maxim” would be “nothing but” what Cicero meant by devices for “moving” an audience. On the contrary! But it seems that, mutatis mutandis, the principles of the three “offices” still figure here. (Logic, as the orderly generalizing of observed “facts,” would lean toward the office of docere; insofar as logic appeals by reason of our delight in the sheer exercising of its own internal resources, it would lean toward the office of delectare; and the office of movere, of persuasion, would be provided by the “cogency” of the maxims in guiding the reader to the desired conclusions.)

But though we have considered an utterance in terms of external reference (“objective reality”), internal development (consistency), and effect upon the auditor (persuasion), there is a fourth “office” still to be taken care of. We refer to the utterance as “portraiture,” as the “self-expression” of an agent, as an act characteristic of the poet’s “personality” whether or not he so wills it. Aristotle deals with this problem from the purely rhetorical point of view when discussing devices whereby the speaker can deliberately promote an audience’s confidence in him simply as a person, regardless of the cause that is being advocated or of the speaker’s true nature. And Cicero impinges upon this fourth consideration in the very form of his formula, which concerns the three offices of the orator.

A poetic symbolism, when appreciated in its internality, is received as a kind of symbolic action undertaken in and for itself, a “free exercise” implicitly guided by the developmental principles which it embodies. In this respect it differs from the “reconnaissance,” or preparation for action, which is the indicative function of scientific utterance, and from the inducement to action which is the persuasive function of rhetorical utterance. But in its role as self-portraiture, poetic symbolism obligates us to a different kind of search.

The “weighting” of words arises from extra-poetic situations in the social order. A relative fixity of conditions in the social order (what Malinowski would have called the “context of situation”) makes it possible for a person to learn what Bentham would call the “censorial” nature of terms (“appellatives”). One learns it by hearing the terms used in contexts that imply moral judgments. However, one may next “play with” such terms, experimentally giving them a range of meanings that do not fit their orthodox use as sheer instruments of “social control.” That is, by setting up special conditions within a given work of art one might, without “demoralization,” even bring things to a point where, in effect, terms for the loathsome could be applied to a most admirable person and vice versa.

Some critics might grow morally indignant. In effect, they would be saying that the simple rhetorical usefulness of the term was being endangered by such “free” poetic exercising. If the term was weighted for practical ends, and if such orthodox rhetorical weighting is poetically undone, then a tiny verbal revolution has taken place. And a vigilant orthodoxy might choose to be outraged at this implied threat to the given social order. 8

There are other possibilities, of course. For instance, a more liberal-minded critic might hold that, even as a means of social control, the weighting of words in poetry should not be too strict, too much like the manifestation of a sheerly mechanical conditioning. Such a critic might hold that in the long run art better serves even a purely pragmatic function, as an instrument of social cohesion, when it can admit to contemplation a very wide range of meanings.

The liberal critic might also point to the fact that, in the given work, a special set of conditions was more or less clearly posited. In this respect he might point out that the transformations of the terms were controlled, as in the dialectic of a properly controlled dialogue. (If they really were!) In any case, here would seem to be the situation, as regards the “portraiture” (be it voluntary or involuntary) in a work of art:

Human personality is not just “pure.” It is formed with reference to social roles. Accordingly, the “personality” in a work of art impinges upon the social situation in general. Intrinsic analysis leads us to study the work of art as a kind of act in and for itself. But a concern with the “personality” of a work involves us in the study of the work as the act of an agent in a scene.

Of what sort, then, is the agent? And of what sort is his scene? Otherwise put: What is his biography? And where is it placed in history?

Obviously, there is a great range of answers possible to such questions. We can conceive of biography in the most minute sense: detailed information regarding some particular taxpayer at some particular time and place. Or, at the other extreme, we can think of the given work’s “personality” as the snapshot of some one posture that is at least momentarily typical of “mankind” in general. And the intermediate views are many, if not infinite. Is there, then, a special argument for a single emphasis among the lot?

Probably not, “in general.” As many angles as there are, or can be, are “right.” For there is a sense in which every perspective upon existence, as viewed from some individual existing spot, is “justified” by being what it is. And there might properly be even more biographies than there were people. But when we narrow our considerations to the special terms of a symbolism seminar, do not the conditions of our inquiry itself point toward the criterion we are looking for? That is: Should we not consider the “personality” of a poem in terms of the symbolic ingredients in personality?

Personality so viewed is a kind of “congealed conduct.” Insofar as an act is representative (or “symbolic”) of an agent, that act is the manifestation of some underlying “moral principle” in the agent. Insofar as the act does not represent some underlying principle of the agent’s character, some fixed trait of his personality, then it is not truly characteristic of him. Then it is not so much an act as an accident (so far as its relation to the agent is concerned, though it may be consistent with some motive supplied by the scene).

But surely poetic structures that are developed as the distillations, or summings-up, of long or intense personal experience and of exceptional technical concentration should be studied as “acts,” not as “accidents.” And, symbol-wise, our general approach to the “personality” of any particular symbolic structure would be through considerations of the fact that man is an essentially symbol-using species.

Thus as regards the “personality” of an art work, its “fourth office,” we in a symbolism seminar should approach our problems through a central concern with the characteristics of a society of typically symbol-using organisms (their typical resources and embarrassments). 9

The writer of this paper believes that such an approach centers in the symbolizing of guilt, redemption, hierarchy, mortification, victimage, “catharsis.” And for reasons discussed elsewhere (notably in an essay, “A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language,” now appearing serially in The Quarterly Journal of Speech), he would lay special stress upon the role of negativity in language. For he believes that negativity is a peculiarly linguistic invention; and that “Personality” or “Character,” considered as an overriding or underlying motivational principle in the work of art, profoundly involves the principle of negativity (which takes surprisingly many forms, including many quasi-positive ones).

Though we do not believe that “poetic exercising” as such involves the settling of scores outside the work of art (since the work of art, in its internality, is as extrinsic to the world’s problems as are the purely internal relations of a crossword puzzle), such an admission by no means ties us to the notion that poetry, in its bountiful verbal materiality, is to be considered as thus confined. The work of art is produced by a constant succession of new decisions on the part of the author. Even when a work reaches the fatal point at which it “begins to write itself,” spinning from what has gone before, and perhaps actually forcing the writer to change his original plans (in case he has laid down co-ordinates which, he finds in the course of writing, don’t have the implications he originally imputed to them)—even then, if the agent were not constantly goaded anew, the project would lapse.

And what goads him, over and beyond the “logic” of his premises? Or what goaded him to hit upon such implied premises in the first place? We take it that the goad arises from extra-aesthetic tensions in the social order. At this point the artist’s individual personality dissolves into the “personality” of the given social order, while that in turn dissolves into principles of “sociality” in general. The negative genius of language, or symbol-using, heads in the thou-shalt-not’s of the ethical, proscriptions shaped with regard to the given social order and its corresponding kinds of ownership, expectancy, and obligation. All such “values” provide material for “free” use in a work of art.

In the Poetics Aristotle gives a perfect instance of such use when, having said that a tragedy is more effective if the action is made to seem marvelous, he remarks that accidental occurrences are most likely to arouse a sense of wonder if they are made to seem providential, as when the statue of Mitys fell and killed the man who had killed Mitys. The feeling of fatality is here considered purely as a resource to be exploited for a poetic effect. This is what we would call a “free” use of a religious propensity.

André Gide, as a master of perversity, clearly illustrates such “free” poetic use of a general human propensity by his treatment of the acte gratuit, the pragmatically motiveless crime, done for sheer love of the art, as pure gesture. This conceit, setting up an “aesthetic” of crime, troubles and outrages the reader in a way that even the cruelest of offences cannot do when motivated by no matter how abominable a purpose. About the edges of our consciousness we feel the whole logic of worldly conspiracy being dissolved by this parody of divine freedom, a parody because God’s act of creation was gratuitous. Thus as a poetic device it gives the reader a new “thrill,” getting (in a wholly non-Aristotelian way) the appeal of the “marvelous” in the forming of the plot. It may be studied specifically in terms of Gide’s character (in which connection it seems related to the motives of his work that are manifested in its homosexual motifs). It may be studied more generally in terms of its relation to the contemporary social order, which, for one reason or another, has called forth many excellent works of perverse cast. Or it may be studied more generally still, as one way, among many possible ones, in which the principle of negativity can be “personalized,” in terms of human character. (Gide summed it up formally in connection with his character Lafcadio, to whom “thou shalt not [. . .] ” invariably suggested “what would happen if [. . .] ?”)

The principle of negativity is personalized differently (becomes a different kind of “strategy”) in Hemingway’s short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” which comes to a focus in the parody of the Lord’s Prayer as the word “nothing” is substituted for nearly all the substantival words in the text, thus: “our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada,” etc.

But the principle of negativity by no means always takes perverse forms. Here, for instance, is a passage in Emerson where it is quite edifying:

Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect the conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion; that every globe in the remotest heaven, every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life, every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine, every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments.

For present purposes, we shall survey (far too briefly, so far as justice to the text is concerned) the first part of Goethe’s Faust. The negative guidance of the work is clear enough, as regards the role of Mephistopheles. Also, we can observe with relative ease the relations between the “character” of the work and the “magic” of the social order (brought together through the personal medium of an author who was both romantic poet and court minister). And by taking a specific case as our text we might be able to discover what kinds of distinctions are necessary or possible for the analysis of poetic symbolism.

A purely indicative function, for instance, may be clearly demarcated from an evocative one where such things as labels on bottles in a laboratory are concerned. But though the name of a character in a fiction is indicative, serving with perfect accuracy to differentiate a reference to this character from a reference to any other ideal entity in the book, there is also a respect in which the name may come to have a kind of “summational” nature, even in its purely indicative functions. That is, the name comes to be a sign for certain kinds of expectancies on the part of the reader, so that, when the character appears, certain kinds of development rather than other kinds are anticipated (or “predicted”). The name here becomes, we might say, the sign not of an entity but of a principle. And though such a principle is a necessary condition for the evoking of emotional attitudes in the reader, it is on the signalizing side of the name’s functioning.

One might state the problem thus: We come to expect of a certain character a certain quality of action. Depending upon our sympathies, we may or may not “want” such action to prevail at a given time in the plot. Or, more accurately, supposing that we don’t want it to prevail, we nonetheless “hope against hope” that, if it does prevail, it will prevail under conditions that will somehow make it acceptable. The “evocative” ingredient in the name depends upon our attitude toward the quality of action expected, as being deemed “natural” to the given character. But regardless of how our sympathies might line up, the name must first of all be purely and simply a true sign for the given quality of action anticipated in connection with it. If it is not, the work is inferior as a fiction. The tendency to equate science with the signatory or indicative and art with the evocative can conceal the exceptional degree to which the “first office” figures in the arousing of poetic expectancies (the proper poetic equivalent of “prediction”).

Conversely, the distinction conceals from us the intense “pageantry” of science, its nature as a social “magic,” as a discipline infused, or made radiant by motives extrinsic to its specialties as such, but intrinsic to it as a mode of action evolved by the symbol-using species of organism. The bottles in the laboratory are not just “labeled.” There is a sense in which they are not merely “perceived,” but evoke “emotions.” Furtively, they become “home,” or “second nature.”

The “personality” of symbols, which they necessarily possess by reason of the fact that they are used by persons, involves ultimately their place in human pageantry generically. And we contend that a study of symbolism should aim to penetrate ultimately into the magic of this hierarchal realm. “Local” problems in the theory of signs, we hold, should be treated in ways that fit well with the analysis of all social pageantry, as determined by the inclusion of linguistic elements.

Let us now turn to Faust, not in the hopes of making an adequate analysis in so brief a space, but by way of illustrating what we consider typical concerns in the “dramatistic” analysis of poetic symbolism.10

[To be concluded]

This essay first appeared in Chicago Review. “The Language of Poetry, ‘Dramatistically Considered.’” Chicago Review 8.4 (Fall 1954): 88–102. Reprinted by permission. The essay was originally written for a symbolism seminar conducted in 1952–1953 by The Institute for Religious and Social Studies, New York.

If we did begin with a theory of signs in the narrower sense, we should begin realistically rather than epistemologically: that is, our basic proposition would be, “Each thing is the sign of something else” (Not the sign of everything else!). For instance, the symptoms of a disease would be considered as “natural signs” of that disease, regardless of whether they were properly interpreted. And the disease in turn would be the sign of conditions varying in scope. These conditions may, for instance, be the sign of a deficiency in diet, which in turn may in one case be the sign of dietary ignorance, in another case the sign of poverty. And the ignorance or poverty would be signs of still other conditions, our belief in their reality as signs of other things justifying us in our attempt to find out what they may be signs of (as cryptologists seek to interpret the signs of a lost language, the records of which have their particular structure precisely because they are signs, though the analyst when he begins his study has very little idea what they may be signs of). (In this way, to be sure, the quest for signs may expand to the point where the discussion of some one thing leads us into the discussion of almost everything. In this sense, by telescoping all the steps, one might say that each thing is the sign of “everything else,” somewhat as the detective may spin his whole detection from some crucial bit of evidence which could be said to “sum up” the entire chain of his evidence. But insofar as all the intermediate steps of induction and deduction are supplied, the broad interpretation of a tiny detail is not essentially “mystical” or “unscientific.” At the worst it is the inaccurate use of a sound principle.)

Since writing the first draft of these pages I have seen the report of the seminar meeting for February 5th, where Doctor MacIver’s distinction between sign and symbol is well summed up thus: “The sign is a pointer or indicator, the symbol an evoker.” This distinction is unquestionably sufficient for many purposes. But we believe that, where poetry is concerned, the concept of “evocation” must be subdivided. For there is a notable difference between poetic expression and rhetorical persuasion, though both would be aspects of “evocation.”

It is notable that whereas Ogden and Richards in The Meaning of Meaning favor a dichotomy much like the one Doctor MacIver opts for, Richards in his Principles of Literary Criticism attributes to poetry a kind of attitudinizing that is qualified differently from the attitudes evoked by rhetoric. Whereas rhetorical evocation should make us want to “go out and do something about it,” poetic evocation should be a closed system of gratifications. Rhetoric is a stimulus to some subsequent act; but the kind of action proper to the reading of poetry is an end product in itself.

True, there is a sense in which everything has implications beyond itself; even a rock lying inertly by the roadside may have, as part of its “future,” the possibility of being picked up and thrown. Similarly, poetic symbolism may have effects upon our future conduct, in the most practical sense of the term. But, as poetry, its appeal is in its state of completion, not its futurity. It leads into the future only incidentally, or because the future is implicitly in it. It appeals, that is, by its finishedness, or “perfection.”

We believe that such is the case even with so-called “propaganda” art. Imagine a work, for instance, designed to arouse in the audience an attitude of great sympathy or animosity with regard to some contemporary faction or cause. Even so clearly tendentious or didactic a work appeals poetically by the satisfactory exercising of such emotions in the immediate present. Even the sense of “futurity” that might be aroused by such a work appeals by its nature as an attitude summed up, or completed, now. (We shall consider later a notable respect in which a distinction between “sign” and “symbol” necessarily becomes confused, so far as the analysis of poetic expression is concerned; for a poetic expression may in part owe its evocative function to its function as indicative.)

In its function as characteristic perhaps it might as well be considered as but a variant of the “first” office? For it is as much a “natural sign” as are the symptoms of an ailment, though there can be much controversy as to exactly what it may be a sign of.

Incidentally, since we have referred to Doctor Nagel’s paper, we might close this section by saluting what we consider to be a perfectly “dramatistic” moment in it. We refer to his remarks on the principle of causality: “The principle states no ‘law of nature’ and has no identifiable descriptive content. On the contrary, the principle functions as a maxim, as a somewhat vague rule for directing the course of inquiry, as an injunction to interpret and organize our experience in a certain manner. For what the principle says in effect is this: When some occurrence takes place, look for the circumstances which are necessary and sufficient conditions for that occurrence! Do not cease your quest until such circumstances have been discovered, and count no analysis as adequate or complete which does not terminate in the construction of a theory that conforms to the pattern of a deterministic schema of interpretation! [. . .] It is perhaps a debatable question whether the total rejection of the principle does not entail the complete abandonment of the scientific enterprise.” One should also note the strongly negative cast of this statement, first in the explicit negatives, next in the implied negativity of words like “rejection” and “abandonment,” and finally in the fact that Doctor Nagel explicitly points out the negative implications of his words “maxim,” “rule,” and “injunction.” Here is an area where “pragmatism” and “dramatism” quite happily overlap.