AN EXCHANGE
45
to it. Were I reviewing Burke's
Counter-Statement
I should have had a
great deal to say about his psychology of art, some of it quite apprecia-
tive. But in his present book, the detailed discussion of the poetic meta-
phors, in which the individual frames of reference are expressed, runs
out into the thinnest vagaries. More important, these aesthetic discussions
are matters of detail. They do not concern, as Burke implies they do,
the central theme of his work.
Nor is it apparent what the citation of his prize passage about the
"bureaucratization of the imaginative" proves. In my review I gave a brief
analysis designed to show that his position here reduces either to a truism
or an absurdity.* Then I applied to Burke his
own
principle that a key
metaphor is a better clue to understanding an author than his arguments,
and explored the consequences. Although I do not share Burke's prin-
ciple, the absence of developed argument in his work, justified this ap-
proach. I gave some indication of how it was used on several concrete
occasions, and then proceeded, on Burke's own recommendation, "to
discount" the face value of the phrase, and to note the "interests" it
protected. The few
concrete
situations in which practical social conclu-
sions are implied by this metaphor involve Russia. They are directed, not
only in the cited passage but in others, against socialist critics. If every
venture of the human spirit can be regarded as a bureaucratized com-
promise-even science and the imagimition!-any specific bureaucratic
outrage is part of the natural order of things. Criticism can be dismissed
as Utopianism. This is a cunning but none the less fallacious linguistic
device to attach the emotional associations of authoritative symbols-
science, art, invention-to a specific form of political despotism. Em-
ployed by commercial advertisers, it is a technique which Burke has
castigated elsewhere. Instead of using the hedonic overtones of a sensuous
female in a bathtub to sell a bar of soap, Burke uses the poetical over-
tones of recondite metaphors, whenever his discussion touches concrete
issues, to sell the ideas and practices of totalitarian communism under
Stalin.
(2) Burke has so completely missed the point of my criticism of his
shifts from subjectivism to absolutism that I must repeat it briefly here.
An element of arbitrary choice inheres in any perspective or point of
view. I can look here or there; accept this set of social ideals or that.
But
what can be seen
after I decide to look here or there,
what follows
as a result of actions for or against certain ideals, does not depend upon
my choice. I can change my point of view but not the consequences of
a point of view. The gravamen of my criticism of Burke is that he gets
his relativism and absolutism in the wrong place. When his particular
• In passing I wish to point out that to speak of science as the bureaucratization
of wisdom is not only a misleading but a dangerous metaphor. The methods of
science are the only reliable methods by which
new
knowledge (and the wisdom
relevant to knewledge) are won. Because it never considers any question as closed,
bases its conclusions on verifiable evidence, recognizes no authority except that of
experiment and logic; it represents, where it is free, the end of all bureaucratic
creedal dogmatism.
