The Conversion Drama of "Self-Reliance": A Logological Study

Abstract

fTfHE title of my essay, as well as several of its claims relation of language to motive in Emerson's religious thought, derives from Kenneth Burke's The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. The guiding assumption for Burke's study is that the necessarily verbal nature of religious doctrines permits adapting statements about nature of 'God' . . . for as purely secular observations on nature of words.' While Burke contends that all -ologies may be studied as verbal actions which necessarily exemplify underlying principles of their verbalization, he maintains that theology (words-about-God) offers most fruitful analogies for metacritical perspective he calls logology (wordsabout-words). In theology proper, and in rhetorical forms of religious discourse (exhortation, praise, confession, etc.), Burke claims that of language is thorough, i.e., words-about-God would be as far-reaching as words can be. Burke means by thorough use not only that many different motives may be converted into symbolic actions of religious rhetoric, but that this conversion is goaded, so to speak, by what he calls the 'principle of perfection', reaching toward first principles that would validate entire terministic enterprise of a language system. In other words, we may expect to find in religious discourse stories or logical arguments a motive to seek an originating principle of existence beyond purely empirical order of things; similarly, we may expect to find in verbal action of such discourse rhetorical strategies that either exemplify or claim to validate what are taken to be primary principles of language. In fact, closer and more consciously articulated correspondence between motives and rhetorical strate-