all right in this lesson we want to look at kenneth burke's idea of logology so we we've met kenneth burke now we want to carry that forward and try to get a sense of what he's doing in his logology which he introduces in his book um the rhetoric of religion and so obviously this is going to be a deeply religious vision because what we're going to find is that basically burke is going to take the idea of logology the study of language the study of words and he's going to say the best way to do that is by exploring it with relation to theology let's take a look at how all of this unfolds for burke so looking at logology burke says look i'm interested in how language functions how it works and one of the things that you have to immediately notice when you when you pick up the world of language is that language is in essence um different from nature nature doesn't really name anything it really doesn't seem to be particularly acquainted with the idea of language or the complexities of language you don't find it out there everywhere so when when you have this kind of a thing that thing right there is really not the sort of thing that has um a sort of overwhelming sense of a need to name the stuff that's down here right that object right there is a real thing and we have to distinguish in our mind and this is central to burke's idea you have to understand that the thing that is out there in the woods this thing growing there that is different from the way we name that thing so the object here is a material reality you meet it in nature you can find it out there you can stub your toe on it all right that thing that you go out to and that you pick fruit from and that you you know chop down and burn to uh to stay warm in the winter that object that thing is natural it occurs in nature it simply is nature being natural it's a material reality in the world when we approach that material reality however we notice something different we human beings tend to give that thing a name and the moment we give it a name burke says language has come into the picture and the first thing that you're going to see is that this word tree is different from that thing that grows out there so the word is not the thing sure absolutely but burke says when you look at this what you discover is that language this idea of tree is in some ways transcendent it rises above the natural order and it does that in a sever in several different ways and that's what burke wants to begin to unpack and explore in logology because burke thinks understanding how the word tree is transcendent rises above the object that grows in the woods understanding that process is central to understanding how language works how language functions so so he says look take one quick example here all right i can take the word tree and i can do things with it i can make things happen with it that i cannot make happen at least not easily or quickly with that object that's growing in the woods so for example if i don't want one tree if i want more than one tree hey that's really simple i just put an s on the end of it and all of a sudden i've gone from a tree to trees all i have to do in language is add that s at the end of the word and suddenly i have manipulated a reality somewhere in somebody's mind in fact i i don't have to just do it with two trees i could do a 5000 trees okay now burke says if you want to understand think about what you did to make a tree into five thousand trees in language really it was quite simple you put that at the end and you added two words five and thousand bingo you're there now you've got five thousand trees but stop think about what would have been involved berg says trying to turn one tree out there in nature one of those things in the forest into 5 000 things in the forest okay well that process would be entirely different utterly unlike what we did with our words our words are freer they're easier to work with they rise above the reality because we can do things with the word that in nature would require effort and time energy almost unimaginable time to turn a tree into 5 000 trees i mean that would just go on and on and on and on and on so somehow the word is actually easier to deal with than nature than the realities the material conditions that are out there so this word is not exactly directly somehow mysteriously connected to these objects out here we can do things with the word that we cannot do with nature or that we cannot do easily with nature so the first thing that burke wants you to notice is that language is somehow separate from nature it seems to be something other than natural you see where that's going right it must be something metaphusis metaphysical supra natura supernatural language functions as if it were itself a participation in reality that is not found in nature and that sets burke to wondering okay wait a minute how does that happen how did we human beings come to that place where the word tree seems to function outside of the conditions of nature so nature is that thing growing out in the woods tree is a word you and i exchange between ourselves that seems to magically transfer thought from one mind to another it's as if the word tree it's as if naming a tree tapped into some kind of reality that is not material it's not found out there naturally in the world and burke is grappling with and he's wrestling with that idea okay that's where he he's he's starting and he says hmm i can kind of see how language becomes transcendent at one level so for example let's take an easy word like grace okay grace is a perfectly common word in latin grazia uh it's just it means um literally just um a favor that somebody does for you you know just a kindness it means a friendship uh act some kind of esteem just a recognition or some service that somebody does for you you know you're i know you're sick so um i got your mail and i put it up at the you know by your front door to help you out that's a grace it's just a friendly gesture a kind of favor a kind of sometimes it's an obligation a duty but basically it's just this common word it doesn't have any particular power but burke says it is occurring however in a culture that does have this concept of a transcendent realm there is a reality up above our natural world in other words burke recognizes that the old romans when they're talking they're talking in a world that is very much plato's world when he talks about the transcendent realm up here he means romans many many romans assumed that the world looked like it did when we talked about plato that there are these realities that are more real than the material world of nature that we run into all the time over here these realities that are more real than the natural world that exists just outside of nature just beyond the border of the natural world and that human beings down here living in their average everyday world are trying somehow to come to understand that transcendent realm that is up there burke says remember they can't talk about it that's what we mean by transcendent it it goes above time and space so the transcendent realm itself there are no words for it you can't talk about it so you have to borrow language out of ordinary life and you have to essentially promote that language you have to bring that language up into the transcendent realm and sort of massage it kind of play with it until it comes to mean something deeper something more real something more transcendent than you had in the natural world and indeed you lift the word grace it just appears it comes up right out of the world of nature there and that becomes a word we begin to change to shape to massage and and slowly over time that word grace turns into something else it doesn't mean favor it means god's favor it means it means esteem some kind of of recognition from god it means an undeserved service something an undeserved gift something that's given to you without any any um uh merit on your part okay grace is basically brought up into the transcendent realm and it is transcendentalized it is made a part of that transcendent realm okay so burke says hey i can see how the word is functioning every word at one level is functioning in a transcendent way and i can begin to see a little bit of how that happens because the transcendent realm is beyond speech beyond telling we take ordinary words and we bring them up into that transcendent world and we work with them up there to see if we can make them capture some idea of this divine transcendent godly world that's above us now here's the catch burke says once a word has been brought up into the transcendent realm and it's been theologicalized okay it's been turned into a theology a way of theo logos a word about god right theos god logos word theology once a word has been theologicalized it's become a word that helps us talk about god then that new divine meaning that we've put on that word guess what happens well that bleeds back down into ordinary language and all of a sudden now you can talk about um you know grace in a sort of literary way a poetic way oh there's a poetic grace to that story you can talk about grace in a personal context a behavioral context you know you can talk about oh they're they're they're an extremely gracious host or their movements are graceful and all of that this sudden new way of using grace in an ordinary way is is tied to and is sort of infected burke says by the divine realm that the word has visited now if you will think back to our early texts on plato you remember the myth of ur where er goes up into the divine world and comes back down you remember our discussions of the phaedras where the soul struggles to go up and catch a glimpse of the divine world and comes back down once it comes back down it's carrying a sort of glimpse of the holy of the divine and burke says that's what's happening in language language once it is brought up and we try to retool it to talk about the unspeakable realities of the divine world once we've done that to that word it sort of flows back down and that divine ambience begins to infect the ordinary use of the word too so there's a full cycle so the word grace when used about the transcendent world is always an analogy it's never a direct real comparison because of course the transcendent world can never be directly spoken of it's outside of time and space it's beyond the reach of language so when we use ordinary language like a word like favor or friendship and we use that to talk about the divine world we are always using a word as an analogy and burke says once that analogy is complete and we begin to think that we can talk about this word in a way that does capture something about the transcendent world then that meaning that infected divinity falls back down into our ordinary use of the word that's one of the ways burke says language begins to take on the idea of transcendence of being a powerful force for tapping into a different kind of reality that is part part of what burke is dealing with when burke takes up his idea of logology now i said at the beginning logology is going to be a kind of analogy a sort of parallel to the idea of theology all right and remember theology we said it's words about god okay so burke says good we understand theology is a sort of words about god okay great that's spectacular here's what i want to do i want to take up the idea of logology i want to explore words about words that's what's valuable that's what's important to me i'm not so interested about god this is not a concept that ever captures burke's imagination right but he's very interested in language and so he says i see given this transcendent property of language and he's talking here about just ordinary language like the word tree right given the fact that it has a certain kind of an analogy of transcendence about it he says i'm interested in how that happens and the the place to look he says is theology because when we start forming logos words about god that's where we run into this transcendent principle because god it's never nameable right and therefore i want to see what kind of principles are going on when we turn our attention from god to words themselves now burke is going to run into a problem with this okay what he's going to do is he will as he grapples with this and after he publishes his famous book on the rhetoric of religion he begins to realize oh wait a minute hold it in the end if god cannot be spoken of then theology isn't really language about god theology doesn't work like that in the end theology is not words about god theology is words about the word god so it's not god himself that theology is discussing burke says it's the word god it's the meanings that we have brought to or found in or been told to associate with god theology is our words about that word god okay now you with me when we move from theology words about god to theology words about that word god remember he's doing right now to god exactly the word god exactly what he did to the word tree he's saying we're not talking about the reality even if they're put you know he doesn't even take a stand whether there is or is not a reality but that's not what we're talking about if there is a reality that is not what we're talking about what we're talking about in theology is how we talk about the word our understanding of god now remember words about words about logos that complicated word which means reflection it means considerations it means evidences reason reasoning reasons argument it has all these complicated meanings a word logos words plural logoy we're thinking about all the reasons reflections considerations about well same thing reasons reflections considerations so when burke moves from theology words about that word god and how it's used and how it works and how it functions and he begins to talk about words about words he's actually turning his attention now as he will explain to you he's turning his attention to reflections about reflections reasoning about reasoning thinking about thinking and it's of course you very quickly realize okay wait a minute if i do this if i do to logology what i did to theology if i find that i'm not talking about words about god but words about the word god what happens to logology when i go oh i'm not talking about words about words i'm talking about words about the word words okay well okay hold on even for burke and believe me it takes a lot to fluster burke even for burke uh he he he recognizes this is an infinite regression we call it i mean there's just no stopping that once you start that well then you need to talk about the words about the words about the words words right and there's no stopping it so he says you've got to put the breaks on somewhere we've got to get a handle on this or we're never going to understand either language or religion or the relationship between them and so he begins to say look when i talk about reasoning about reasoning here's the bottom line all right this is what i'm finally in the last analysis this is what i'm after i'm after about reasoning about how meaning happens how do we come to understand what it means to think to reason to use language that's what i'm after that's what logology is supposed to tell us and the only way it's going to tell us that is if we look very carefully at how words function in a theological transcendent frame that should tell us about how words function in an ordinary frame and again burke is going to say i'm not saying there is or there isn't a god i'm just saying the way we talk about transcendent reality should show us a great deal about the way we talk period because reasoning seems to follow that same path that you see in theology it's always got this transcendent element and we have to isolate that transcendent element and we need to bring that transcendent element forward to understand the baseline of what's happening because that's the only way we're ever going to understand how meaning gets into our heads how meaning gets associated with words he's going to give us a method for doing that and it's one of the really important things we need to focus on