Positive, Dialectical, and Ultimate Terms: A Brief Summary of An Excerpt that Corresponds to Chapter 12 in Gusfield's On Symbols and Society

12. “Order,” in A Rhetoric of Motives, 183-203.

Positive, Dialectical, and Ultimate Terms.

Positive terms name things. These are words Bentham called “real entities” in contrast with the “fictitious entities” of the law (183). “In Kant’s alignment, the thing named by a positive term would be a manifold of sensations unified by a concept” (183). In other words, there are a whole bunch of sensations that pile up in order for us to use the positive term and say something like, “This is a house.”

Positive terms are most unambiguous when they name tangible things. “Hence, the positive ideal is a ‘physicalist’ vocabulary that reduces reference to terms of motion” (183).

Some things that can’t be seen are still rendered as “positive” because they are “seen” on dials or are capable of being recorded empirically or “observed.” Positive terms are words for physical and material stuff, and they are not transcendent.

Dialectical terms “are words that belong, not in the order of motion and perception, but rather in the order of action and idea. Here are words for principles and essence” (184). Since dialectical terms don’t refer to just one thing, the terms are ironic in a sense: when we are naming things in the realm of dialectic, we call something something that it both is and is not. “Here are ‘titular’ words” (184). They can’t refer to any specific thing that can be touched or perceived, but they do refer to a “specific” “thing” in general or in principle. Terms of this sort are often polar and can be contrasted with one another or paired with another. Burke says that he equates Bentham’s “fictitious entities” with “dialectical terms” because “they refer to ideas rather than to things” and are “concerned with action and attitude than with perception (they fall under the head of ethics and form rather than knowledge and information)” (185). 

Dialectical terms require more information than just the term itself (again, dialectical terms don’t just refer to one thing only).

The dialectic order puts things into a struggle with one another. The ultimate order puts things in a hierarchic relationship with one another. The ultimate unifies things. It is the “unitary principle” (187). So an ultimate term is a term by which all else is summarized. It is the principle of principles (189). Burke thought about calling this mystical. Ultimate terms are terms by which all else is understood or organized.

Ultimate Elements in the Marxist Persuasion.

It seems like we’ve reached the ultimate oneness of identification and substance, the-is-and-is-not sameness. [Zen?!]

Symbols transcend the things they symbolize. Burke writes that if we say that man is a symbol-using animal, we also say he is a transcending animal. “Thus, there is in language itself a motive force calling man to transcend the ‘state of nature’” (192). [Sounds to me almost like theosis?]

If we believe only in antitheses, we must reject the cult of commodities, but if we believe in hierarchies, we can see that the cult is sincere but ultimately inferior.

Any spot, point, or moment on a hierarchic line can represent the principle of perfection. [Might we say synecdochically?] Each tiny act shares in the creation of the ultimate, total act. “Perception must be grounded in enactment, by participation in some local role, so that the understanding of the total order is reached through this partial involvement” (195). We begin to see ourselves the same way, as part of a greater act. That’s mysticism

“Sociology of Knowledge” vs. Platonic “Myth.”

p. 201-202.

1. Mutual exposure of imperfect ideas (ideas bound to the sensory image).

2. Socratic transcending of this partiality.

3. Socratic summarizing vision of the pure idea.

4. Translation of the pure idea into terms of the mythic image.

5. Whereupon enters Mannheim, who proposes to develop a “sociology of knowledge” by treating the first and last steps as thought they were of the same nature”

6. Etc.

Moving towards ultimate universal ground. That’s what we do if we have identification as a term and try to delineate (trace) its logical possibilities.