The Self as a "person," beyond the individual's identity as a strictly physiological organism, confronts with varying degrees of comprehensiveness and profoundness the interrelationships among the manifold details of "reality" (whatever that "orientation" may be) as known and interpreted in terms of the symbolic lore current in the Culture of that time.

Necessarily, any individual's formal or informal version of such lore is selective, in keeping with the limitations and engrossments besetting that individual (as both person and physiological organism).

The interrelationships among such a conglomerate will be related consistently (this therefore that), antithetically (this however that), adventitiously (this and that).

When such an aggregate is felt to fall together "holistically," the gratification of such a purely symbolic symmetry can rise to an ecstacy of conviction that we call "mystical."

The fall from such a state (whereby the fullness, pleroma, of purely symbolic exercising gives way to a sense of its underlying emptiness as tested by a similarly structured physiological counterpart) is called "accidie," acedia, sloth, torpor, drought.

Or the sense of such a confluence among motives can also have the Allness of a pandemonium, a Pandora's box let loose, a Walpurgis Night, a jangling conflict of all the pieces with one another, the very fullness being felt as a drought.


In the state of contemporary Culture, I take it, the corresponding Self is likely to manifest "in principle" fragmentary aspects of all three such symbolically engendered "fulfillments."

The fragmentary delight is in putting anything together. The drought is usually met by purchasing some form of entertainment.

The variant of pandemoniac entanglement can even be attenuatively transformed into a bit of research on the problem itself.

(Kenneth Burke, "(Nonsymbolic) Motionl(Symbolic) Action," 1978, 817-8)

We may as well be frank about it, since our frankness, if it doesn't convince, will at least serve another important purpose of this work: it will reveal a strategic resource of terminology. Being frank, then: Because of our choice, we can treat "war" as a "special case of peace"--not as a primary motive in itself, not as essentially real, but purely as a derivative condition, a perversion. (Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 20)

However, "substance" is an abstruse philosophic term, beset by a long history of quandaries and puzzlements. It names so paradoxical a function in men's systematic terminologies, that thinkers finally tried to abolish it altogether--and in recent years they have often persuaded themselves that they really did abolish it from their terminologies of motives. They abolish the term, but it is doubtful whether they can ever abolish the function of that term, or even whether they should want to. A doctrine of consubstantiality, either explicit or implicit, may be necessary to any way of life. For substance, in the old philosophies, was an act; and a way of life is an acting-together; and in acting together, men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial. (21)

"And because Da-sein is always essentially its possibility, it can 'choose' itself in its being, it can win itself, it can lose itself, or it can never and only 'apparently' win itself." (Heidegger, "Being and Time", 40).

"In Discussing the poiema, pathema, mathema series... The action organizes the resistant factors, which call forth the passion; and the moment of transcendence arises when the sufferer (who had originally seen things in unenlightened terms) is enabled to see in more comprehensive terms, modified by his suffering" (Kenneth Burke, Grammar of Motives, 264).

At this time, the people, by his persuasions, were ready to proceed to pronounce the sentence of ten years' banishment, called ostracism. This they made use of to humiliate and drive out of the city such citizens as outdid the rest in credit and power, indulging not so much perhaps their apprehensions as their jealousies in this way. (Plutarch Lives, Alcibiades)