Attitudes Toward History

I. Acceptance and Rejection
The first part of Attitudes Toward History deals with the concepts of "yes" and "no," as well as "maybe" Burke accomplishes his analysis of acceptance and rejection through an analysis of literary figures and genres.

Chapter One: "William James, Whitman, and Emerson"
Burke uses William James, Whitman, and Emerson to illustrate acceptance, rejection, and the middle ground between. He finds in all of them a pluralism that is useful in articulating the central concepts of acceptance, rejection, and passivity.
Burke begins the chapter with a description of William James juxtaposing acceptance of the universe or protest against it in the face of evil. "Characteristically, James looks for a way of avoiding both," Burke notes (3). James is a "meliorist," and states that a solution is to be found only " 'by taking neither absolutely' [ . . . ] Where resignation must be, it will be 'provisional' " (3).
James also allows Burke to place an emphasis on action, and the relationship between action and attitude (which, Burke notes in the introduction, is where the emphasis should be placed when considering the title of the book). According to James, the "worth" of an action is in an attempt to improve, not in a result. "Action requires programs – programs require vocabulary" (4) Hence, using the right or wrong words is crucial: vocabularies allow us to name friendly and unfriendly, to form attitudes, and to take appropriate actions. Speaking of the code of names used by philosophers, poets, and scientists, Burke says: "These names shape our relations with our fellows. They prepare us for some functions and against others, for or against the persons representing these functions, The names go further: they suggest how you shall be for or against" (4). Naming, attitudes, and actions bring us to Burke's definition of "frames of acceptance," which are "the more or less organized system of meanings by which a thinking man gauges the historical situation and adopts a role with relation to it" (5).
Other key points Burke makes about James include pluralism, compromise, comparative analysis, and a frame of acceptance supported by a trinity of "rationality, activity, and faith," all related to action and "designed to equip him and others for living" (5).
Whitman is "the poetic replica of James," and Burke calls attention to many of the same qualities. Whitman, too, is a pluralist. Faced with a "good-bad tangle, [Whitman] transcends the contradiction by a synthesizing attitude, whereby the good element is taken as the essence of the pair" (15). Whitman's transcendentalism allows him to speak of death with joy (16).
In Emersonian thought, "we arrive at the meliorist emphasis in a project for living by the extending of the cosmos farther into the realm of chaos for cosmic purposes" (19). Essentially, by seeking a solution for the conflict between good and evil, the "solution moved the issue to a 'higher' level" (19).

"Acceptance" and "Passivity"
"all symbolic structures are designed to produce such 'acceptance' in one form or another" (19-20). Burke notes that the trivial form of acceptance is "the Pollyanna solution: If you break your leg, thank God you didn't break your neck" (20).
It is important to note that " '[f]rames of acceptance' are not the same as passiveness" (20). Frames of acceptance include both the good and the bad, the friendly and the unfriendly. Passiveness indicates an inclination to "draw the line of battle differently" (20). Burke uses the examples of Aquinas and Marx to illustrate his point: Aquinas saw class divisions as a "punishment for the fall of man," and therefore inevitable, whereas Marx "accepted the need of eliminating classes, hence he drew the line of battle differently" (20-1). In Burke's mind, the bourgeoisie approach passivity with a frame that "smeared the [class] issue out of mind" and replaced it with initiative, supposedly a classless resource available to all.

Rejection
" 'Rejection' is but a by-product of 'acceptance' " (21). Burke describes rejection as being a reaction to symbols of authority. Because rejection is "the heretical aspect of an orthodoxy" it shares much with that orthodoxy (21).
"[Rejection] somewhat robs a thinker of his birth-right, his right to 'consume' reality without regurgitation" (22). It is also an incomplete negation, partial where acceptance is complete (22).
Historical frames are stressed when they are forced to deal with new factors. They become even more stressed by attempts to extend their applicability, and can force a rejection of the frame. This rejection can cause a "radical reversal" or a "transvaluation of values," an inversion and codification of the frame (24-5).

The Changing Emphasis of Frames
"When surveying the historic curve on the graph of Western culture, we can better understand what was accomplished by the shift from the classical emphasis upon resignation to the liberal ('Faustian') emphasis upon freedom" (25).
Burke notes that a preoccupation with status, where privilege is fixed, becomes a preoccupation with advancement, which is in many way the democratization of "a sense of personal mastery" and advantage. He relates this to another shift, from the qualitative to the quantitative. In qualitative efforts, results are judged by their goodness or badness, by the virtue or vice. The organizing principles in a qualitative system are grounded in notions of the "good life" and based upon custom: this type of system is not suited for "discursive reason" (26). In contrast, the quantitative system assesses good and bad by the numbers at the bottom of a balance sheet. Burke argues that this concentration on profit changes rationality and removes it from a realm concerned with concepts such as virtue and vice (25-6).
These shifts occurred at a time when the Church and the elite had stretched the limits of the existing system so far as to make it nearly impossible to accept. This change of frame was a positive and necessary change at the time. Liberalism and individualism allowed for global exploration and for expansions and improvements in commerce and industry. Though necessary at the time, the liberal, individualistic frame is now stretching to its own limits. This is a pattern Burke sees repeating throughout history: a system becomes strained, and eventually a shift will occur. There is initially much flexibility and "laxity" (27) in the system, but eventually the system is bureaucratized, and proliferates to the point of strain once more: the system is harmful or difficult for many to accept. "To the extent that new opportunities are not provided [within the system or by a shift in frame], we get decadence, neurosis, anger (expressing itself in wither external war or internal antagonism, the devices whereby a people 'projects' its uneasiness upon a scapegoat)" (27).
Even seemingly functional or stable frames eventually are unable to handle new social and cultural "material" (27). Using Marx's critiques of production as an example, Burke shows that "While the frame centers the attention upon some relationships, by this very thoroughness it obscures the perception of new factors that are of critical importance" (28). Clergy, because of occupational psychoses, are liable to see the new factors symptoms instead of causes, and to deal with them verbally, though Burke acknowledges that secular authorities (such as legislators who try to control the factors though a proliferation of laws) may also have this tendency (28).
Rejection is again treated as an incomplete frame: Burke says that frames built upon rejection are incomplete and not well-rounded, and that they create fanaticism because they identify only one element and base reactions solely upon the rejection of this element (29). He notes that the philosophies of Marx, a product of a period of great negativism, are marked by rejection, but that Marx also has realist influences (pre- pr pr-realist), and so his philosophies also lay a foundation for a new frame of acceptance. (29).
Romanticism, which also influenced Marx, is "marked with rejection frames," often featuring a " 'tragic ambiguity" whereby a growing trend is at once recommended and punished" (29). Burke's examples here include Goethe's Faust, Shakespeare's Macbeth, and Byron's Faustian heroes. Tragic ambiguities are often a feature of those who may be religious, but who are drawn in by scientific ideas. They reject the church and withdraw into art, a symbolic rejection of the world. This creates a "two-world" system which Burke says can be "labeled, as you prefer, either by their 'acceptance' of the esthetic or their 'rejection' of the practical" (30).

Sentimental Acceptance in Futurism
The futurists "occupy an important place in this trend" of acceptance and rejection (30). Futurists see the world developing in a way that is abhorrent, and yet, in an effort to salute accept the times, they accept these developments. This leads to brutality, especially in literary images and uses of language (30-1). Examples include proclaiming the beauty of the horror of war and stench, producing manifestoes advocating "syntactical confusions" written in syntactically normative prose, or agreeing that the modern world was a disease, but a perfect disease (31-2). Futurism, seemingly a frame of complete activity and assertiveness, is really the most passive of frames. The futurists are an important example for Burke:

"A well-rounded frame of acceptance involves constant discrimination. But this [the futurist project] was a project for gluttony, a blanket endorsement of historical trends as they were. As a cult of yea, it would say yea to the reigning symbols of authority at all costs. We cite it because of its 'chemical' purity. It has exploited a trend so thoroughly that there is no possible step in the same direction beyond it" (33).

Chapter Two: "Poetic Categories"
In this chapter, Burke analyzes genres, with a specific focus upon the historical and cultural situations that give rise to each. Literary works provide an entry into the "structures of symbolism" because "each of the great poetic forms stresses its own peculiar way of building the mental equipment (meanings, attitudes, character) by which one handles the significant factors of his time" (34).

Epic
Epic is "a typical frame of symbolic adjustment under primitive conditions," and "arises under primitive, non-commercial conditions" (34). Epic is "deliberately anachronistic" and nostalgic, suggesting composition at a time of transition, when a new frame was beginning to take hold. Homer and Virgil both stand as examples: Homer as a poet writing in a period immediately before a period of commercial "enlightenment", and Virgil as a poet writing at the "close of commercial freedom" (35).
Epic is intended to make man comfortable in pre-commercial settings, especially through poetic magnification of the "warlike hero," with which an audience identifies (35-6). The hero "risks himself and dies that others may be vicariously heroic" (36). There is an important balance between humility and self-glorification in and identification with the epic hero. An epic hero mediates between the divine and the human. The divine tends to be humanized by the presence of some flaw in the hero. Through identification " the invitation to seek the flaw in oneself promotes in the end an attitude of resignation (which when backed by a well-rounded symbolic structure, is nothing other than the inventory of one's personal limits)" (37).

Tragedy
"The resignation of tragedy is based upon this same sense of personal limits; but the cultural materials with which the tragic playwright works are much more urban, complex, sophisticated than those that prevailed at the rise of the primitive epic" (37).
Burke notes that the same three features, fatality, magnification, and humility are central to tragedy, as well, but are "submerged beneath a more 'enlightened' scheme of causal relationships" (37). While epic flourishes in a pre-commercial society, tragedy flourishes in a society where commerce "had been strongly superimposed upon the earlier primitive-collectivist structure" (37). There is a shift from giving to getting, a "basic 'transvaluation of values' " (37).
Commercial relationships lead to more intricate social fabric. Forensic increases, producing metaphysical and then scientific structures, which are then in turn applied to magic and religion in the form of causal structures. This new attitude is explicit in Aristotle and implicit in the "great writers of tragedy that preceded him" (38). Fatality and forensic come together in tragedy, and so a causal structure shapes a tragedy. Burke writes, "the events of a tragedy are made to grow out of one another in keeping with the logic of scientific cogency, the Q.E.D. of Euclid and the political oration" (39). There is again a resignation, this time to personal limitations. Pride becomes the focus of a tragic ambiguity, and is depicted as a crime. Fortune is feared "as the first sign of punishment from the gods" (39).

Comedy, Humor, the Ode
The partiality of frames and class interests can account for dramatic irony in the frame. "Materials incorporated within the frame are never broad enough to encompass all the necessary attitudes [. . . .] Class interests provide the cues that distort the interpretive frame making its apparent totality function as an actual partiality." Favorable and unfavorable are all exaggerated, and through this exaggeration, "the very glories of the frame become a menace" (40). The frame can also be "deceptive when it provides too great a plausibility for the writer who would condemn symptoms without being able to gauge the causal pressure behind the symptoms" (41). This occurs when those well-served by the frame cannot see the limitations of that frame for a "culturally dispossessed" group. (40-1).
Tragedy and comedy both focus on pride, but whereas pride is crime in tragedy, it is depicted as stupidity in comedy. "The progress of humane enlightenment," Burke writes, "can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken" (41). By emphasizing the absolute case, where all are mistaken, and that "every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy" (41). Because the audience is aware of the ironies within a comedy, they learn that "when intelligence means wisdom [ . . . ] it requires fear, resignation, the sense of limits" (42).
Because comedy is concerned with "man in society, tragedy with the cosmic man," comedy must develop forensic and syllogistic reasoning to the greatest extent possible. Comedy cannot rely on divine or cosmic devices to shape the causal structure of the plot (42).
Humor is different from comedy: humor is "the opposite of the heroic": while the heroic magnifies, humor minimizes. Humor is not an accurate gauge of a situation, and so is not as "well-rounded a frame of acceptance as comedy" (43).
As Burke prepares to turn to negative emphases in poetic forms he offers this summary: In the epic, tragic, and the comic frames the element of acceptance is uppermost" (44). In the next several forms discussed, the opposite is true.

Negative Emphasis: the Elegy, or Plaint
The elegy or plaint is similar to humor: it "does not properly gauge the situation" (44). It distorts relationships more than humor: citing William Epmson, Burke describes how the heroic is identified with humble people, and the "lowly are pictured as the bearers of the true nobility" (48).  This is "ironic humility" (48).

Satire
"Satire is as confusing as the plaint. For the satirist attacks in others the weaknesses and temptations that are really within himself" (49). The satirist is simultaneously "gratifie[d] and punishe[d]" (49). Satire features a linking of contrasting imagery: external approaches to the internal, a linking of love and death, and a connection between love and filth (50-1).

Burlesque
Unlike satire, burlesque is completely external. "The writer of the burlesque makes no attempt to get into the psyche of his victim. Instead, he is content to select the externals of behavior, driving them to a 'logical conclusion' that becomes their 'reduction to absurdity' " (54).
Burlesque is partisan and incomplete, and therefore is not a well-rounded frame. This is evident in the burlesque aspects of liberalism, where freedoms are proposed, but responsibilities or obligations are not. Dewey's ideas are an example: Dewey is "trying to introduce a plea for collective elements without admitting that a collective frame requires us to stress ambivalence [as opposed to unidirectionality] of rights and obligations." (56). Burke finds the concept of freedom problematic: freedom from the land, for serfs, meant an alienation from the land and a form of dispossession. " 'Freedom' is a truncated concept, an unintended caricature of human relations" (56).

The Grotesque
The grotesque and the didactic are transitional forms, unlike the positive and negative forms detailed earlier in the chapter. "The grotesque focuses in mysticism; the didactic to-day is usually called propaganda" (57).
Burke notes that mystics may appear individually at any time, but that "mysticism as a collective movement belongs to periods marked by great confusion of the cultural frame" and a change in "allegiance to symbols of authority" (57-8). Unlike humor, which provides laughter through the diminution of problems, the "grotesque is the cult of incongruity without the laughter" (58). Grotesque is not comic or humorous, but extremely serious.
Oxymorons can be an expression or marker of the grotesque. Burke admits that the grotesque is difficult to analyze, but offers readers a summary: "the grotesque comes to the fore when confusion in the forensic patterns gives more prominence to the subjective elements of imagery than to the objective, or public, elements" (60). In the examples following, Burke mentions such psychological imagery or "motives" as "the pit, symbolic castration, rebirth, [and] the mystic awe of light" (60). Burke theorizes that such an explanation could account for the homosexual and androgynous, especially in literature.
In the grotesque we get the "symbolizing of parallels," which confuse identity: for example, Joyce using the Odyssey to "chart" life in the twentieth century (63). Symbols are linked together in "indiscriminate" patterns that, as clusters, function as oxymorons (64).
Burke notes that the "charting of such territories may not be worth the while, except perhaps for therapeutic purposes, when we seek to repair a man's equipment for living by discovering which of his clusters draw the lines at the wrong places" (68). Analyzing these clusters, however, and looking at the relationship between the internal constellations through external counterparts "should give us a phenomenological science of psychology, rather than the tenuousness of the purely introspective or the impoverishment of the purely behavioristic" (68).

Monasticism and the Transitional
The sincere monastic order (as opposed to one organized as a business opportunity, especially in a theocratic state) "tend[s] to enlist their members at a point of crisis" or transitional point (69). This crisis is often marked by "self-punishment" and "overt or symbolic castration" (69). While a transitional period would naturally pass in time, the monastic "institutionalizes the mentality prevailing at the point of crisis," thus institutionalizing the transitional and offering man a world organized and "formed of this midway state" (70). As monasticism is bureaucratized, private becomes socially negotiable. A two-world situation arises. Burke uses the examples of the doctrines of "poor church" and "poor science" to illustrate: both orders have a higher goal than the accumulation of wealth, but through the institutionalization and bureaucratization of the order, the "essentially non-capitalist insight is made to serve capitalistic ends" (72).
The reversal of the monastic is gang mentality, a "philosophy of force, vengeance, polemical compulsion," in which guilt is not met with monastic contrition, but with "explicit rejection of contrition" (72).
Gang morality occurs when people are dispossessed, being either unable or unwilling to participate in the orthodox system: negativism results, and the new group finally achieves transcendence by "converting old negatives into new positive – and by [the new group's] values the derivations of the individuals (with relation to the orthodox frame) are 'justified' " (73).
In the monastic pattern, spiritual becomes material, while in the secular pattern, the material becomes spiritual. These corrective patterns allow the possibility for secular, negative patterns to develop positive aspects such as " 'comradeship,' 'party discipline,' solidarity,' thereby restoring the ingredient of charity necessary for co-operative enterprises" (74).
Burke's summary of the monastic is a follows: "the monastic order begins with 'spirituality,' and in the course of 'implementing' it with relation to all human necessities, arrives at 'material' organization. The treatment of the transitional emphasis in Marxist 'class morality' begins with materiality, and in the course of organizing it, arrives at 'spiritual' organization, or 'consciousness' " (74).

The Didactic
While "the mystical-grotesque makes for passivity in the frame of acceptance," didactic is its active counterpart. Burke argues that the imaginative precedes the "conceptual-critical" in a trend, and that didactic strives to reverse this "by coaching the imagination in obedience to critical postulates" (75).
Didactic tends to transcend earlier positions by reconciling opposites though higher synthesis (80).
Didactic "Transcendence" in Hesiod
Hesiod and the "negation of negation": by assigning a minor value or role to an earlier resentment and adopting a "wider and subtler perspective," the earlier resentment is transcended (81). However, when this transcendence does not rectify the injustice Hesiod experiences, he does not attempt to transcend to yet a higher level, but instead "seeks to exploit this level as it is, to find whatever limited 'cash value' it may have to offer" (82). Hesiod eventually becomes enraged with the process of transcendence itself and rejects it and the gods, "the ultimate concretion of the transcendental process" (82-3). His negation does have a positive counterpart: "naturalism and work" (83).

Burke's conclusion: "Adding up, we get as the sum of his character: hard-working, complaining, resentful and resentful-of-resentfulness, pious, free-thinking, enjoying-and-suffering simultaneously –– and expressing the whole moralistically, didactically" (83).

Didactic Transcendence in Eliot
Eliot, like Hesiod, expresses the "didactic-sentimental-transcendental nexus" (83).Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral also contains an instance of " 'negating the negation' " (84). Burke states that the plot of this play is a wheel, turning "from poetry, to polemic prose, back to poetry," each signaling an apparent shift in the identity of the author – the form "states stylistically what the speech of Thomas had stated philosophically: That the turning of the wheel goes on, that in turning it remains where it was, that each morning the poet will arise, will slay himself, the critic will step forth, towards nightfall the Phoenix-poet will rise again, and this progression will continue, being forever new and forever the same, and the writer, in affirming it by the activity of his work, is being at once active and passive" (86).

Other Instances of Transcendence
"The point to be stressed is that the process of transcendence, basic to thought, is revealed most simply in didactic-moralistic literature" (86).
Burke's other instances of transcendence include works by Thales, Lola Ridge, Wagner, Hegel, and Marx. "such considerations may offer reasons why, when a problem is handled in too simple a frame, as the needs of propagandistic exhortation are often felt to demand, critics are led to attach the didactic as 'allegory,' 'literature of the will,' and 'sentimentality [. . . ] It is questionable, however, whether historical issues can be handled in any other way. All we can ask it that the modes of 'prayer' employed (with their reverse, invective) shall be sufficiently mature and complex to take the key factors of the situation properly into account" (91).

Chapter Three: "The Destiny of Acceptance Frames"
Burke opens this chapter with two descriptive and clear paragraphs, quoted below:
"Play, love, war, work––these are the names for the ways in which a man is engrossed. The putting of them together, the 'allocating' of them, is 'religion,' leading to some manner of transcendence or other."
"One confronts contradictions. Insofar as they are resolvable contradictions he acts to resolve them. Insofar as they are not resolvable, he symbolically erects a 'higher synthesis,' in poetic and conceptual imagery, that helps him to 'accept' them" (92).
Burke points out that Thomism presents certain contradictions of property ownership as irresolvable, while the same contradictions are seen as resolvable by Marx (92). With this case as an example, Burke notes: "Each frame enrolls for 'action' in accordance with its particular way of drawing the lines" (92).
Motives of comic ambivalence and "debunking" schemes of motives are to be distinguished from one another: the comic frame functions from both supernatural and "debunking" schemes of motives at once (92-3).
Burke uses capitalism as an example to articulate the above ideas more fully: "But once the comic proviso is added, the whole terminology of capitalism is found remarkable for its clear simplification of social processes. All the time that savants were concerning themselves with [various types of psychology and schemas for charting and simplifying human complexity], we were ignoring the most ingenious and suggestive vocabulary of all, the capitalist vocabulary of behavior. It is collective in its origin, it arose by the 'dialectic' interaction of mental and material factors; and at best it was comic, in that it gave the human, social equivalents for concepts previously handled in superhuman terms. Thus, 'providence' became 'investment for profit'; the process of 'justification' took the simple form of 'advertising,' 'salesmanship,' and 'success'; the close relationship between morality and utility came to a head in the 'gospel of service'; the devices of perfidy were exposed in the legal manipulations of contract; the synthesizing tendencies of man were manifest, as they could never be by experiments with decerebrated frogs, in the growth of holding companies; corporate identity itself was shorn of its unwieldy mysticism when the member of the church, as the 'body of Christ,' became simply the holder of voting stock. And so on: the morphological parallels could be piled up endlessly" (93-4).
Burke again stresses that comic ambivalence is quite different from debunking which, when it prevails over the comic, causes "the qualifications of comic charity [to] drop away" (94). At this point, to 'cash in' and to 'sell out' become synonymous, and man in this system is "embittered" whether he sells out or is incapable of selling out.
Burke notes that Marx "seems to have relegated the business of mediation to a historical process alone. But when this same act of mediation is done, not by 'history,' but by people, the sharpening of class lines tends to be obliterated" (95).

Discomfitures of Rejection
The poetic categories reviewed earlier "illustrate some major psychological devices whereby the mind equips itself to name and confront its situation" and provide cues for the analysis of the curve of history Burke undertakes in the second section of this text (99).
"The difficulty with any such terms [referring to the five developmental stages] arises from the way in which economic patterns overlap upon one another. Sometimes we use our terms to designate the distinctive features of a pattern, sometimes we include features that it has in common with other patterns. Thus, when an average compatriot expresses his allegiance to capitalism, he is not considering merely the things that make it different from other economic systems. The symbol also includes for him such notions as family, friendship, neighborliness, education, medicine, golf, tools, sunlight, future, and endless other such sundries" (99).
"This problem of dissociation always arises to make trouble when conditions require a shift in our patterns of allegiance": oftentimes, a rejection of authority forces men into " 'anti-social' attitudes" (100). This is more common the more well-rounded the frame of acceptance is (100).
Examples include Luther, "whose Protestant frame is closely analogous to the Catholic," "prepare[s] himself to admit his German princes by a psychology of Satanism" (100). Burke notes a similar phenomenon in Milton and in nineteenth-century frames of rejection (100).
Splintering of radical groups may also arise from "such irrational causes, no matter how thoroughly the impulse may be rationalized" (100) Use of defensive metaphors, use of polemic, and use of pseudonyms may also support Burke's speculation. Groups splinter further and further, and finally reach a limit, at which point they may reverse directions, often in the form of a call for a 'unified front,' but the persistence of sectarian thinking can result in demoralization (101). Burke says that "only by the adoption of a wider frame (essentially 'comic') can this problem be met actively, positively. The comic frame relieves the pressure towards opportunism by a broadening, or maturing, of sectarian thought" (102).
"A well-rounded frame serves as an amplifying device [. . .] the questioning of a little becomes the questioning of a lot, until a slight deviation may look like the abandonment of all society [. . .] Often, the defense against this is 'dissociation,' which in time leads to 'atomism,' 'splintering.' There is another strategy, however, which we might call the 'stealing back and forth' of symbols" (103). By the stealing back and forth of symbols, Burke means that different sects claim embodiment of orthodoxy at different times: they claim orthodoxy and use the same symbols, but to different or opposing ends. One example is the divine right of kings, which has alternately been used by monarchs to justify secular control and by clergy to justify allegiance to the secular state powers. Marx, too, uses slogans from capitalism to serve his purposes (103).

Chapter Four: "Conclusion"
"We have attempted, in the foregoing pages, to illustrate some of the major factors involved in the 'strategy' of writing and thinking" (106). The fourth chapter summarizes the first part of this work in a brief two-page synopsis. The important points are as follows:
1. Man "builds frames of acceptance or rejection by overt or covert acts of 'transcendence' " (106).
2. "We hope, incidentally, to have so weighted our discussion that the comic frame will appear the most serviceable for the handling of human relationships. It avoids the dangers of euphemism that go with the more heroic frames of epic and tragedy" (106).
3. "By astutely gauging situation and personal resources, it [the comic frame] promotes the realistic sense of one's limitations, hence has a proper ingredient of 'Entsagen,' [abjuration, abdication, abnegation] yet the acceptance is not passive" (107)
4. "To say as much is not to imply that the other frames do not have their uses. We should test the value of literature as a body [ . . . ] We are merely suggesting that, when you lump the lot, discounting each poetic category according to its nature, they seem to add up nearest to comedy. Which is a roundabout way of saying: whatever poetry may be, criticism had best be comic" (107).

II. The Curve of History
From the introduction: "Our second section, 'The Curve of History,' seeks to chart the overall problem of merger and division (with corresponding confusion and profusion of orthodoxy, heresy, sect, and schism) that marked our particular Western culture. Dramatistically inclined, we conceive of these developmental stages after the analogy of a five-act play" (np). Each of the stages are acts in the play, and each is described and analyzed in a separate chapter in the second part of the book. The dramatic structure is as follows:

Act One: "Christian Evangelism"
Act Two: "Mediaeval Synthesis"
Act Three: "Protestant Transition"
Act Four: "Naive Capitalism"
Act Five: "Emergent Collectivism"

Chapter One: "Christian Evangelism"
Burke's focus in this portion of the book will be on the 'collective poems' of aggregates, as opposed to the previous focus on the individual (111). "The two emphases are not mutually exclusive, since the individual's frame is built of materials from the collective frame, but the change from one to the other shifts the emphasis from the poetic to the historical" (111).
"[. . .] the drama of the past must frequently be rewritten––and the last act in one version may even become the first act of a later version" (111).
"In Act I of a drama we get the situation out of which the action will arise. It presents in a lump a myriad of prior dramas" (112).
Empires build up "public equipment" and "[i]n short, a great many spiritual factors are 'bureaucratized' in an objective, material order––and any new cultural enterprise must be built of this material" (112). Physical and spiritual roads are constructed, and these roads, built for expansion (of empire and of thought) in one direction, can later be used for expansion in the other direction.
In this Act or stage, mobility and percentages are important: the mobile elite of Egypt are like a shifting crust, and move upon an immobile base. Extant documents are misleading, mostly because they do not represent the percentage or proportion of "cultural ingredients" such as dance steps or the "posture of men at work in the fields" (112-3).  Burke uses anarchism in the nineteenth century as an example: the non-anarchist is horrified by the lack of organization, structure, and regularity in anarchic ideas: the anarchist, however, understands that anarchy is to be built upon the current organizational structure. The anarchist assumes that printing presses, book stores, and regular train service, for example, will remain, because the new system could not function without the organization of the old (113).
"Act I confronts this problem. We suggest the issue comes to a head in the ratio of mobility to immobility" (113)
Immobility is not "radically impaired unless a conquered area is actually repeopled, as when Rome during its period of upbuilding cleared out the old inhabitants and settled its army on appropriated lands. To-day, imperialism makes for revolutionary mobility by introducing a new technique of production, and recruiting in its service natives whose minds were formed by an older techniques of production" (114).
During the imperial period, Stoicism "centered about a contradiction" (117). Burke notes that before the bureaucratic system had "crystallized" and private business flourished, taxes were regularized, but that "[a]s things became tighter, there was a tendency, like the earlier practice in Greece, to meet public expenses by putting wealthy citizens in office, and requiring munificent outlays from them in exchange for the 'honor.' Ironically, as the financial situation tightened, we see a subtle reversal in the connotations of this practice, until public honor became a form of punishment visited upon wealthy Christians and Jews" (118). Burke further notes in a footnote to this passage: "Such shifts in connotation are always of great importance in providing us with cues for the interpretation of a curve in history" (118).
The rise of Christianity is directly related to the Stoic communicative frame and its inadequacies. The frame was not of the immobile base but of the elite Stoic crust and was "abstract and superficial," divorced from labor (120-21). The function of the stoic frame was to oversee, not to engage in, work (121).
"In place of the abstract Stoic absolute, the cult of the state, [Christianity] proposed an 'intimate' absolute, a single personal god with whom one could carry on the subtlest kind of commercial transactions" (122). Christianity also emphasized "positive magic" such as communion with men and the supernatural, purification, and acquisition of strength by the symbolic consumption of the god. (122).
"Act I of our historical drama must stress these two themes. Hellenistic Stoicism in decline, Christian evangelism emergent, each of them a world view to match the Roman cosmopolitan orbis terrarum, as developed by the pax Romana. [. . .] If you would end Act I on a strong curtain, you may restate Prudentius' picture, of the divine and worldly interweaving, and then shift abruptly to the barbarians' sack of Rome. For a quiet curtain," Burke proposes two other alternatives (122-3). The first is Constantine's recognition of the Christian church, the other the "imperial edicts fixing the status and location of the workers": the latter takes away material freedom, but the former provides compensatory spiritual freedom. Burke notes that "[b]y it [referring to Christianity], a man could be tied to one place, and yet range far" (123).

Chapter Two: "Mediaeval Synthesis"
People must struggle: if we do not we "rot" (124). Struggle is tied to the need for justification and the problem of earning. Accumulation of commodities figure strongly here: consumers justify themselves through the accumulation of commodities, and this is problematic because commodities are simply put to use. We do not earn them as an inventor does: what comes after has not earned value from what goes before (124-5) To avoid these problems (Burke calls this a "form of impoverishment"), we must "earn an inheritance by taking it as the basis of a new problem," the clutter will cause alienation and lead to an empty life (125).
"The Christian frame of acceptance, that arose from the cluttered accumulations of Rome, and finally attained completion in the Summa of Aquinas, dealt explicitly with this problem of guilt, justification, earning and alienation" (126). In this case, "[w]e see the whole curve, by merely charting the sequence in which the great monastic orders were established" (126). Burke also points out that each order emphasizes a certain aspect or element, and that the stressing of certain particulars threatens the unity of the whole (127).
"Act II of our historical drama is concerned with mediaeval feudalism, so thoroughly interweaving a vast symbolic architecture with the concomitant patterns of production that the confusions arising from out attempts to reshape it are with us still" (128).
The need for justification and individual initiative is not necessary in this frame: membership in the Church allows one to share in perfection. Society was organized according to an organic theory, where everyone contributed to society in his or her own way. Burke notes parenthetically: "Its organic theory 'transcended' the discordancies of noble and serf by a 'synthesizing' reference to their common citizenship in heaven" (128).
Along with organic society, the "other key metaphor was that of the family" (129). The church functioned as a family, incorporated familial titles (father, sister), and emphasized obedience to figures of authority within the hierarchal structure (129). "Any resistance to this frame, at any point, was necessarily felt as 'guilt,' hence the frame tended to be self-sustaining" (129).
In contrast to the extremes of the evangelical frame, the medieval, specifically Thomist, frame "had developed the compromises required to fit a theory of spiritual perfection into a material 'imperfect world' " (129). It is only the heretics who get trapped by the limitations of either-or thinking. The Thomist frame incorporates mitigating fictions: a man can be materially poor and spiritually wealthy, or saintly and corrupt. Both free will and determinism exist. At the same time, a mitigating fiction "is a device of ambivalence," and while a strength in some situations, it can also be exploited (130).
Heresy (on a larger scale) has economic factors. These come into play "when different factions have 'moved in on' the resources afforded by the orthodoxy and the resources afforded by the heresy, so that clashing modes of life are organized about the symbolic differences" (131).
The Thomist frame is stretched in order to accommodate new cultural materials, but the ambivalence and compromise of the frame finally go too far: "in the end it is felt, not as a reclamation but as a demoralization." The frame breaks, and "we find three important symptoms": casuistry, force, and prayer (134). Clergy meet "the stringencies of the 'moving in on' process [ . . . ] by petition and invective. In short, they threatened to force the recalcitrant beyond the pale of orthodoxy's 'graded series' for salvation. The period of Protestantism was at hand" (134).

Chapter Three: "Protestant Transition"
"Act III is our 'peripety,' with a radical turn in the arrows of the plot. Here is the act of marked transition, the 'watershed' of the historic drama. Renaissance and Reformation. At this point, a negativistic emphasis becomes organized, both in materials of pure thought and in economic implementation. Beginning with separation of church and state, we formally inaugurate the dissociative process that will end with the theoretical separation of everything" (135).
"[ . . . ] individualistic enterprise, stimulated by colloquial translations of the Bible [ . . . ] served to intermingle material ambition with high moral motives" (136). Also, Calvinism democratized " 'investment for profit' " as a ' "salvation device' " (136). Once interest, formerly disallowed for all but the church, was allowed to all, "Calvinism found that one could make profits for the glory of God––every trade was a 'vocation'–– and if one worried lest, by Calvinist doctrine, he was one predestined by God for damnation, let him attain material prosperity as the visible sign of God's favor" (137).
The negativism of the inductive method, from Descarte's "organized doubt," proposes to change uncertainty into a "positive, creative principle" (137). This has worked with regard to technological advancement, but "the non-transcendental theory of motives [ . . . ] provided a rationalization of acts in frank accordance with criteria of material aggrandizement" (137-8).
There are important ambiguities and paradoxes in the Protestant transition. Freedom meant deteriorating conditions for many: alienation from the land, starvation, migration to industrial towns, unemployment, and the failure of church charities all added to social problems, but there were rationalized by quantitative analyses of profit (138). Another paradox Burke points out is that Protestants place an emphasis on uniformity, but by placing such stress on uniformity, the greatest heterogeneity arises: any slight difference of belief produces a different sect, which then will enforce uniformity among members (138).
Frames develop by-products (138). "In aiming at one thing, we incidentally bring about something else. Such cultural by-products are of many sorts––and they lead to the full range of 'alienation,' are regards the people's participation in both material and spiritual properties" (139). When by-products become more important than the frame from which they developed, "a new shift in the methodology of purpose is necessary," but the bureaucratization of the older system has already occurred (139). At this point, " '[c]ultural lag,' 'class morality,' and 'inner contradictions' thus become interchangeable terms, as a special group becomes organized whose mode of prosperity requires the retention of the alienating by-products" (140). Again, the frame is stretched and strained, and a new, transcendental frame is needed. Again, there will be a rise in the antisocial as well as in psychological manifestations such as negativism, dissociation, disintegration, sectarianism, and splintering – or – a compensatory strategy will be developed, such as the mitigating fiction discussed earlier.

Chapter Four: "Naive Capitalism"
"We now come upon the period in which the negativistic feature of the Protestant dissociation contrives to take on positive ingredients, the old abnormality having become the new norm [ . . .] the new ambitiousness" (142). Burke states that people had been accustomed to subsistence economies, and so the bare essentials of life were sufficient for most (with the exception of the elite). In this period, ambition is democratized.
A turn from illiteracy to literacy can be "cashed in on" with a similar turn from status to contract in property law "(i.e., from unwritten custom to written legality)" (144). Under a new contract system, the longer one owned property, the less likely one would be to have a written deed to show ownership. The Acts of Enclosure of 1688 further changed property rights: the "means for the private appropriation of communal areas were regularized" (144).
Both England and America have had "rationally perfect" frames imposed upon them (England by William the Conqueror, America through the slaughter of Indians). Because of this, each provided good "resources for the bureaucratization of capitalist possibilities" (145-46). America, however, is more "chemically pure" than England, which grew out of feudalism.
In America, resistance, especially from local communities, "could be obliterated by the unifying devices of abstract finance" which controlled the periphery via the organizing resources of the center (146). Regional genius is reshaped into the genius of capitalism (147).
In England, there is more alienation because the frame was more superficial and abstract. Am important part of this was the " 'antithetical' " relationship between the language of the Norman rulers and the Anglo-Saxon "underlings" (147). This becomes gradually democratized by the incorporation of Norman speech (148).
The ides of a "favorable balance of trade" is reversed, "transcended," though "recourse to matter of symbolism; namely: 'bullion' " (148-9). Exports, a material loss, become a profit when seen as "symbolic imports," basically, money (149). Burke sees this paradox as "the very center of capitalist difficulties" (149). This paradox is basically "anti-patriotic," because it acts against the welfare of the nation as a whole, but acts in the interest of specific groups (149).
Adam Smith's theories allow "market law" to replace " 'natural law' " and result in a "mechanical Providence" (154). This mechanical Providence allowed for the formation of economic empires, which are supported by their "grip upon the legislative, educative, and constabulary functions" (156). This grip, or power, derives from implicitness, from the fact that it is implicit in the frames of acceptance, not explicitly aggressive" (156).

Chapter Five: "Emergent Collectivism"
"Act V of one's historic drama should be left partly unfinished, that readers may be induced to participate in the writing of it" (159). Burke's previous four acts are arranged to point in a direction, "that the reader will continue in the same spirit" (159). He states: "A history of the past is worthless except as a documented way of talking about the future" (159).
"The contemporary symbols of authority being in disarray, one forms his mind with relation to an 'ideal' concept of authority [ . . .' One constructs his 'frame of acceptance' for the present by reference to these futuristic norms" (159).
Burke reviews Acts I-IV, and argues that "collectivism must emerge," and that it likely will arrive " 'by the back door,' " signaled, in his mind by the "highly ironic term of modern economists, the 'socialization of losses' "(160). "In this sense, 'by the back door,' cyclical depressions bring capitalism progressively closer to socialism" (161). We recover the positive connotations of servility, especially though social service, which is both a "community values" and a "collective attribute" (162).
Regarding service "(bondage) to the collectivity" (164), Burke says: "We would begin with that, since it enables us, even in a society where talk of 'freedom' is being so steadily 'cashed in on' for apologetic purposes, to point out that the individual is a bondsman, who 'justifies' himself by paying tribute to the norms of his society. The issue then ceases to be a squabble over 'freedom vs. bondage'; it becomes a weighting of various frames in which a bondage-freedojm ambivalence can express itself" (165).

Chapter Six: "Comic Correctives"
"This notion of ambivalence gets us to our main thesis with regard to the propagandistic (didactic) strategy. We hold that it must be employed as an essentially comic notion, containing two-way attributes lacking in polemical, one way approaches to social necessity" (166).
"A comic frame of motives avoids these difficulties, showing how an act can 'dialectically' contain both transcendental and material ingredients, both imagination and bureaucratic embodiment, both 'service' and 'spoils.' Or, viewing the matter in terms of ecological balance [ . . .] one might say of the comic frame: It also makes us sensitive to the point at which one of these ingredients becomes hypertrophied, with the corresponding atrophy of the other. A well-balanced ecology requires the symbiosis of the two" (167).
"The comic analysis of exploitation prompts us to be on the lookout also for those subtler ways in which the private appropriation of the public domain continues. It admonishes us that social exigencies and 'goodwill' are as real a vein to be tapped as any oil deposit in Teapot Dome" (169). Additionally, the "comic synthesis of these antithetical emphases [man in nature and man in heaven] would transcend them by stressing man in society. As such, it would come close to restoring the emphasis of Aristotle, with his view of man as a 'political animal' " (170).
"In sum, the comic frame should enable people to be observers of themselves, while acting. Its ultimate would not be passiveness, but maximum consciousness. One would transcend himself by noting his own foibles. He would provide a rationale for locating the irrational and the non-rational" (171).
The materials for a comic frame are "all about us" (172). They are found in psychoanalytic criticism, in economic psychoanalysis (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Voltaire, Bentham, Marx, and Veblen), and in the reinterpretation of formulae made in "euphemistic or debunking modes of emphasis" (172).
The comic frame cannot mitigate against the results of alienation. "For alienation of this sort [ . . . ] the comic frame could not, and should not, offer recompense. Its value should only reside in helping to produce a state of affairs whereby these rigors may abate" (175).


Part III:  Chapter One

The General Nature of Ritual
   
Use of symbols as key in that “even in the ‘best possible of worlds,’ the need for symbolic tinkering would continue.” (179)
    -Symbolism as guiding “social purpose”
    -Role of social norms and personal thought in each person’s symbols
    -Symbols are seen as a kind of “spiritual currency.”
   
Symbolic Synthesis is “a rationale of imaginative and conceptual imagery that ‘locates’ the various aspects of experience” (179)
   
Man attempts to cope with rationality and the “incongruous perspectives of sleep.”(180)
“To an extent, therefore, mystery and mystification seem inevitable.” (180)
        -Psychoanalytic and surrealist notion of the mind
        -“Symbolic crimes” unknowingly committed during sleep=continual guilt (181)
        -Criminal as well as good can take place during sleep (181)
        -Each person has their own mystery (183)
            *Examples of Poe and Dostoievsky
   
    “For various reasons, one has many disparate moods and attitudes.” Each person has their own set of many “sub-identities” (184).
        -When different thoughts are integrated they make “symbolic super structures” (184)
        -“The natural tendency of symbolic enterprise toward integration.” (184)
            *explains the rage against class struggle in bourgeois states
            *socialists as bridging conflict
        -Many factors move people toward the “construction of symbolic mergers” (185)
   
Ambiguities of symbolism

        -Role of the critic in the socialists state (185)
        -Importance of symbolic fantasy even in a socialist system.  There is animportance to non-state supported thinking/games/play IF it keeps those things              from actually happening. (187)
            *allows such ‘self-indulgence’ to be vented (188)
            *art as a function of the socialist state
            *example of Russian opera “Lady Macbeth of Mzensk” (185-9)
        -Discussion of various types of tragedy (188)
            *“universal”-everyone is seen as evil
            *“factional”-only one specific group is evil
   
The Tracking Down of Symbols

        -Symbolism works on two levels (symbol vs. underlying other meanings). (191)
        -The meaning of a symbol is found “by examining the internal organization, noting what follows what” in other words by discovering its “function” (191)
        -Symbolism as dealing with “the subjective overtones of objects, putting together symbols for the with reference to a criterion of order that ‘transcends’ the order prevailing in everyday experience” (192)
        -Uncovering the “symbolic organization” gives you their meaning (193)
            *identifies the “social attributes” of the artist to the critic (193)
            *no innate symbolic meaning
            *located between realism and surrealism
        -Symbolic meaning is in “discontinuities in procedure.” Example of Glass speaking of the gold standard and God at the same time (194)
            *use of numerous metaphors
            *“clusters of symbolism”
            *more developed in A Symbolic of Motives

Synthesis and Analysis

        -“A book in itself is a symbolic act of synthesis.” (196)
            *reflects an authors own situation
            *the book is an author’s unique way or “summing up this unique combination (196)
            *an authors situation can be like other people’s
        -Innate gain/loss that comes with personal experience of writing (197)
            *author lets others ‘possess’ his personal property when they read it
            *new text/information as ‘gift’
        -Problem of multiple explanations for one outcome
            *“multiple causation” (198)
            *something can be described in many ways without contradiction
        -Every act is a synthesis (200)
            *symbols can be divided ad infinitem
            *symbolic analysis has no set organization (198-9)
   
Tests of Selectivity
       
        -“The critic’s test, whereby he gets his own patterns of selectivity, choosing to stress some distinctions, is the pragmatic test of use.” (200)
            *importance of the social element in analysis
            *Marxist “revolutionary” analysis
                -hinges on symbols of authority
                -critic as “propagandist” and “craftsman”
        -“Bureaucratizing” his “imaginative” (200)
            *putting thoughts into symbols
            *results in straying from ideas that are original
            *through bureaucratization he distances himself from
              ‘art for art’s sake’ (200)
        -“Style is ‘the ritualistic projection or completion of manners.’” (201)
            *out of “material order” comes specific ideas and actions
            *writer must be conscious of possibility of alienating the reader (202)
        -The critic and writer must look to symbols in art for:  “authority symbols, acceptance and rejection, rituals of purification and rebirth, transcendence, bureaucratization of the imaginative, alienation, identification.”
            *at core of “aesthetic and moralistic strategy”
            *all psychological processes are recorded in art
            *looking at art you can see “the processes of social commerce operating on life as a whole.” (203)
        -Psychology of art performs a social function, or at least ‘should’ (203)

Analytic “Radiations”

        -Symbolic acts involve taking part in something that “radiates in many ways at once” (203)
        -Symbol is “synthetic” and cannot be broken into its parts without distorting it (if at all)
            *examples: Mann’s The Magic Mountain (204) and Wescott’s Apple of the Eye (205)
        -Innate problem in constructing an “analytic dictionary of the ‘symbolic merger’” (205)
        -Contrast between symbolism with Pasteur and Dostoievsky (206-7)   
            *Pasteur-birth control symbols
            *Dostoievsky-realist tendencies early in life

Main Components of Ritual

        -“The organization of a work can be considered with relation to a ‘key’ symbol ofauthority.” (209)
            *childhood concern “rudiments”
            *as an adult are seen in “church, state, society, political party, craft”
        -“Symbolic regression” (209)
            *drawing on information experienced at “autistic” levels even when dealing with forensic and political matters
            *examples: symbolic parricide, incest-awe and symbolic castration (210)
        -Philosophers and scientists as producing “visual reading” (211)
            *“nothing more than a protracted kind of graph”
            *visual over tactile understanding
        -The choice to become a slave to symbolic manipulation
            *example of a person’s job taking the place of other aspects of his life such as ‘mother’ and ‘home’ (212)
            *becoming a symbolic slave fends off alienation
        -Man as “poet-plus-critic, one both acts and observes his act” (213)
            *functions analytically and synthetically
            *through observation the poet-plus-critic perfects his acts with respect to
              those around him (214)
            *in this way people can figure out a way to understand “important factors of reality” (214)

--Chapter Two: Dictionary of Pivotal Terms--

    Alienation
        -“We use it to designate that state of affairs wherein a man no longer ‘owns’ his world because, for one reason or another, it seems basically unreasonable. Alienation has both spiritual and material aspects.  The ‘proletarian’ is materially alienated if he is deprived of the ‘goods’ which his society has decreed as               ‘normal.’  He is ‘spiritually’ alienated insofar as this depravation leads him to distrust the rationale of purposes by which he is deprived.” (216)
        -One “repossesses the world” by finding a new rationale for choices (216)
        -The growth of alienation “greatly increased the mobility in society” (217)
        -It comes into literature by “A given productive pattern leads to the crystallization of a corresponding pattern of manners.” (219)
   
    Being Driven into a Corner
        -In order not to accept one point in a list of criteria the person is forced not to accept anything on the list at all.  Burke states that it “makes it hard for him to question the structure at any one point.” (223)
        -“All or nothing” absolutist thinking (220)
        -Works as an “ ‘amplifying device’ requiring the man who would reject a little to reject a great deal” (222)

    Bridging Device
        -“The symbolic structure whereby one ‘transcends’ a conflict in one way or another.” (224)
        -Symbolic mergers can be included because “they cannot be explained with reference to their face value alone, but are a way across to many other  ingredients” (224)
        -Includes “explicitly consceptual bridging devices” that one may use an opponent’s statement by ‘discounting.’ (224)

    Bureaucratization of the Imaginative
        -Is a “perspective by incongruity’ for naming a basic process of history” (225)
        -It “names the process of dying.”
        -The “carrying-out of one possibility” (225)
        -“An imaginative possibility is (usually at the start utopian) is bureauocratized when it is embodied in the realities of a social texture, in all the complexity of language and habitsm in the proper relationships, the methods of government, production and distribution, and in the development of rituals that re-enforce the same emphasis.” (225)

    Casuistic Stretching
        -“One introduces new principles while theoretically remaining faithful to the old principles” (229)
        -part of a movement by Burke to “enunciate a methodology for casuistry rather than to eliminate casuistry” (232)
        -“The difference between casuistry as method and casuistry as methodology is the difference between mystification and clarification, between the concealing of a strategy and a description of a strategy.” (232)

    Clusters
        -“Significance gained by noting what subjects cluster about other subjects (what images b, c, d the poet introduces whenever he talks with engrossment of subject a).” (232)
        -“By charting clusters, we get our cues as to the important ingredients subsumed in ‘symbolic mergers’” (233)

    Communion
        -“involves the interdependence of people though their common stake in both co-operative and symbolic networks” (234)
        -The artist “generally tends to communicates by reaffirming the norms of the co-operative structure.” (234)
        -Phatic Communion-not to communicate as much as establish a bond (235)   

    Control
        -“To control a bad situation, you seek either to eradicate the evil or to channelize the evil.” (236)
        -Example: lightning rod vs. elimination principle (236)
   
    Cues
        -Nudges or indications that uncover the hidden meanings of words (236-43)
        -Aspects that ‘point’ to a particular meaning not otherwise indicated
        -Examples include: syllables in your name, voice tone and “certain verbalizations”

    Discounting
        -“Making allowance for the fact that ‘things are not as they seem.’  The methods whereby, as one looks at one thing , one reads something else into it.” (244)
        -“The term is basic to an understanding of ‘what is going on.’  By proper discounting everything becomes usable.” (244)
        -An instance would be a person not understanding its meaning “until you know the biographical or historical context subsumed by the speaker when he spoke it.”
        -Logical positivists are incapable of such an act (246)
   
    “Earning” One’s World
        -“There is no state of leisure.  Every inheritance must be earned anew (otherwise, you get alienation and demoralization). (246)
        -Can’t help but “hand on to others some measure of our own bureaucratization.  And thereby ‘disposes’ them by this inheritance, unless they find their own               positive ways of ‘earning it anew.’”  (246)
   
    Efficiency
        -“Endangers proper preservation of proportions.” (248)
        -“All emphases, arising out of biological or historical necessities, are efficient in  this way.” (248)
        -“Violates ‘ecological balance,’ stressing some one ingredient rather than maintaining all ingredients by the subtler requirements of symbiosis” (250)

    Essence
        -“An act has either co-operative or competitive features.  You select one of the other as the ‘essence.’ (252)
        -“‘Essence’ is an aspect of ‘efficiency’” (253)
        -Example: “The propagandist writer of the proletarian fiction, believes that class struggle is the essence of the contemporary situation” (253)
   
    Forensic
        -“The material supplied by the forum, the market place.  The materials of law, parliamentary procedure, traffic regulation, scientific-causal relationships                  evolved by  complex and sophisticated commerce (of both the material and spiritual sorts).” (254)
        -Children don’t have an awareness for forensic material (255)
        -The forensic always comes as a “shock.”  It is unnatural.  (255)
   
    Good life
        -‘A project for getting along with people necessarily subsumes a concept of the good life. (256)
        -“Maximum of physicality.” There is too much focus on the musings of the
         mind (256)
        -“Maximum opportunity for expression of the sentiments.  Distrust the passions.” (258)
        -“Construction to channelize the militaristic by ‘transcendence’ into the cooperative” (258)
        -Stress always on the knowledge of limitations.” (259)
   
    Heads I win, tails you loose
        -“A device whereby, if things turn out one way, your system accounts for them— and if they turn out the opposite way, you system also accounts for them.” (258)
        -“The whole matter is related to the scholastic distinction between ‘essence’ and ‘existence.’ (260)
        -Perspective by incongruity (261)

    Identity, Identification
        -An individual or group siding with a particular ideology and then taking that ideology on as their own.  It is important to note that identification doesn’t only come from an individual, but can result from a group. 
        -Identity does not only come from the individual but also from ‘manifestations’ outside of the individual (263).
        -“The so called I is merely a unique combination of partially conflicting ‘corporate we’s’.”
        -Gave Marxist vs. Capitalistic examples of identification (266)  
            *ID with companies
            *ID with an ideology
        -“Roughly, we may say that a man ‘identifies’ the logic of a human purpose with the following points: God, nature, community, utility and history (271).
   
    Imagery
        -“One must chart the overtones of the poet’s imagery by looking for the quality common to all uses of a word.” (274)
        -Gives several examples of imagery in Shakespeare’s plays and their historical significance (273-280).
        - “We cannot long discuss imagery without sliding into symbolism.”(281)
        -“You arrive at an act which a man does because he is interested in doing it exactly as he does do it—and that act is a “symbolic” act.  It is related to his               ‘identity.’”(282)
        -“the presence of symbolic acts only insofar as it bears upon social action, as related to symbols of authority”(287)
   
    Legality
        -Law comes as the “efficient codification of a custom”
        -Law as a form of “secular prayer” (291) The court draws on the same psychological ‘sanctions’ as the church (291)
        -There is naturalism inherent in law (292)
 
        -“Legality, in all forms, makes for the ‘efficency’ of rational isolation, as distinct from ecological balance”(292)
        -“Legality may thus be discerned today in the growing proportion of sales force toproductive force, the “spirituality” of the salesman’s occupation moving them from the productive economy” (293)
   
    Lexicological
        -A writer’s “main emphasis is lexicological, and he reaches conclusions merely as the bi-product of definition.”    (294)
        -“In a general way, our project for a tripartite vocabulary takes the following forms: The religious illustrating the intimate
              The capitalist illustrating the historical
              The esthetic illustrating the social and creative
   
Neo-Malthusian Principle
        -“Designates not the proliferation of people to their physical limits, but the proliferation of habits to their physical limits.” (298)
        -“For instance, the combination of capitalism and technology both permitted a great proliferation of private-enterprise habits and demanded this proliferation.”  (298)
        -Even if a population remained stable it could still experience neo-Malthusian proliferation.
   
    Opportunism
        -“The verbal denial of a fact on occasions when one cannot ‘transcend’ it by adopting a more complex rationale through which he can safely and comfortably admit the fact.” (306)
        -“Technically everyone should be an opportunist, in the sense that he should change his policies in response to changes of situation.” (306)
        -“Caustic stretching, without a sufficiently broad rationale and sufficiently sophisticated methodology to make it positive. (306)
   
    Perspective by Incongruity
        -“A method for gauging situations by verbal “atom cracking.”  That is, a word belongs by custom to a certain category—and by rational planning you wrench it loose and metaphorically apply it to a different category” (308)
        - AKA: “Planned incongruity” is a methodology of the pun.
        -“…carries on the same kind of enterprise in linking hithero unlinked words by rational criteria instead of tonal criteria.  It is ‘impious’ as regards our linguistic categories established by custom.” (309) 
        -“The metaphorical extention of perspective by incongruity involves caustic stretching.” (309)
   
    Problem of Evil
        -“The problem of evil is met by transcendence—the process of secular prayer whereby a man sees an intermingling of good and evil factors, and votes to select either the good ones or the evil ones as the ‘essence’ of the lot.  And a choice between policies is not a choice between one that is a ‘lesser evil’ policy and another that is not.  It is a choice between two lesser-evil policies, with one of them having more of a lesser evil than the other.” (314)
   
    Repossess the World
        -“As the imaginative becomes bureaucratized, the bureaucratic body brings up new problems of its own.”   People who must exist in this sort of system are prone to alienation.(314)
        -In this way people are “robbed of the world” and must “struggle to repossess the world.” (315)  In order to succeed in repossessing  the person must have a  “historical rationale” that deals with solving the problem.
           

    Rituals of Rebirth
        -The person must go through rebirth when a historical change occurs or a personal one in their life. (317)
            *Marriage
            *Divorce
        -A person also must go through rebirth as the go through biological changes.(318)
            *Glandular
   
    Salvation Device
        -“Any conscious or unconscious, adequate or inadequate way of saving one’s soul, saving one’s hide, or saving one’s face is a salvation device.” (319)
            *Political examples
            *Religious examples   
    Sect
        -“Composed of those who, faced with the danger of being ‘driven into a corner,' counter by forming a new collectivity”
        -“A sect is always threatened with defensive, negativistic, splintering tendencies so long as the ingredient of rejection is uppermost”   
   
    Character-building by Secular Prayer
        -“Secular prayer, as a moral act is the coaching of an attitude by the use of mimetic and verbal language.” (322)
        -“Secular prayer involves ‘character building’ in that one shapes his attitudes, the  logic of his life, by the co-ordinates he chooses, and one shapes his actions with reference to the judgments that follow from the co-ordinates.” (326)