"The general perspective that is interwoven with our methodology of analysis might be summarily characterized as a theory of drama. We propose to take ritual drama as the Ur-form, the 'hub,' with all other aspects of human action treated as spokes radiating from this hub. That is, the social sphere is considered in terms of situations and acts, in contrast with the physical sphere, which is considered in mechanistic terms, idealized as a flat cause-and-effect or stimulus-and-response relationship. Ritual drama is considered as the culminating form, from this point of view, and any other form is to be considered as the 'efficient' overstressing of one or another of the ingredients found in ritual drama. An essayistic treatise of scientific cast, for instance, would be viewed as a kind of Hamletic soliloquy, its rhythm slowed down to a snail's pace, or perhaps to an irregular jog, and the dramatic situation of which it is a part usually being left unmentioned" (Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd edition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973, 103).
Kenneth Burke published the first edition of The Philosophy of Literary Form in 1941. In 1963, a young sociologist by the name of Peter L. Berger (b. 1939) published his thoroughly (but perhaps unknowingly) Burkean Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (New York: Doubleday). Fortunately, I read Berger long before I read Burke--for Burke's labyrinthine and neologism-filled writing style can make reading him quite a struggle. Berger's books (I've read and re-read at least a half-dozen of them over the years) made the assimilation of Burke's Dramatism fairly effortless. Moreover, his work with Thomas Luckmann on the social construction of reality provided a foundation for the sociological perspective I adopted as an undergraduate and have never abandoned.
The move from Ontologism to Dramatism (accomplished by Burke and further articulated by Berger--following not Burke, I take it, but Erving Goffman) involves a Wittgensteinian asceticism that requires resolution to maintain. The call of Being buzzes incessantly in one's ears (witness Heidegger). But, as Wittgenstein taught us, the sheer mystery of Being eludes all speech. And while it is difficult to reconcile oneself to apophasis in matters that one considers to be of paramount importance, the alternative is, more often than not, sheer muddle.
Dramatism does not eliminate Ontologism: it preserves it through the description of setting or scene. Thus preserved, Being is relegated to Michael Polanyi's "tacit dimension." The effort to make the tacit explicit is a critical one; it is also, as Wittgenstein remarked, "like trying to repair a spider's web with one's fingers."
Wittgenstein felt that Tolstoy was less successful in communicating his own apprehension of the tacit dimension when he attempted to make it explicit; some things, he thought, were better left unsaid. In a letter to Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein had this to say about Tolstoy's late novel Resurrection:
"You see, when Tolstoy tells a story he impresses me infinitely more than when he addresses the reader. When he turns his back to the reader then he seems to me most impressive ... It seems to me his philosophy is most true when it's latent in the story" (Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, OUP, 1984, p. 97).
Peter Berger's Dramatism suggests that the attribution of metaphysical properties to socially constructed identities (e.g., "white," "black," "male," "female," "Jew," "Gentile") is fraught with peril: "all such appellations become exercises in [Sartrean] 'bad faith' as soon as they are charged with ontological implications" (Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 157). I could not agree more.
Nevertheless, Berger stops short of adopting Wittgenstein's Tractarian admonition "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." He does not banish the posing of metaphysical questions--for to do so results in an unwitting acceptance of the answers that our socially constructed reality provides--and this, for Berger, is to arrive at "bad faith" from a different direction. The posing of "metaphysical" questions, i.e., questions designed to interrogate the inevitability of the inherited status quo, is to exercise one's freedom. And to exercise one's freedom is, to borrow from Aristotle, to actualize a metaphysical potentiality (see Invitation chapter 6).
This view is similar in tenor to Tolstoy's death-bed assertion that "God is not love, but the more love there is, the more man reveals God, the more he truly exists."
The conversion of the potential into the actual, of fiction into fact, is the ineluctable and ethically charged "call of Being."
Despite our best intentions, we often find our way back to Heidegger. Berger's use of the German philosopher, like Sartre's, was both skillful and sparing. Would that we all had such tact!
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