Plato, Mary Baker Eddy, and Kenneth Burke:Can We Talk About Substance?

Abstract

Kenneth Burke confessed that Permanence and Change was a secularization of the writing of Mary Baker Eddy that he learned in his Christian Science childhood. Eddy’s Platonic treatment of substance as “truth” engages with the tension between the symbolic and the nonsymbolic, foreshadowing Burke’s treatment of substance in relation to symbol, nonsymbol, and identification. The ways in which substance and identification interact in the works of Plato, Eddy, and Burke follow a line of discursive development that can illuminate critical review of how different forms of public discourse argue for “truth.”

Notes

1 The author thanks RR peer reviewers David Timmerman and Brian Jackson for their particularly insightful and generative feedback, as well as William Keith and S. Scott Graham for suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of this essay. The author also thanks the Mary Baker Eddy Library Archives in Boston, Massachusetts.

² Mary Baker Eddy is the creator and founder of the Christian Science religion. I first saw this quote in Michael Feehan’s chapter “Kenneth Burke and Mary Baker Eddy” in Unending Conversations, a collected volume of essays about Burke (SIU P, 2001). Feehan introduces the chapter with this quote, and proceeds to “revive” the topic of Burke’s “drastic confession,” a topic that faded out of Burkean discourse after the 1983 interview. Feehan’s analysis uncovers some striking parallels between Burke and Eddy, such as their analytical methodologies, Burke’s use of the “pivotal secularizing term” piety, and what Feehan identifies as Eddy’s lexical translation system, which he compares to Burke’s concept of perspective by incongruity. Informed by Feehan’s analysis, I take a slightly different approach to Burke’s perspective by incongruity, comparing it instead to Eddy’s disjointed pairing of materiality with illusion and her attribution of agency to this illusion.

³ The University of Washington in Seattle offers a course titled “Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data” that promises to train students how to distinguish truth from falsehood. The course’s learning objectives include: “Remain vigilant for bullshit contaminating your information diet” and “Figure out for yourself precisely why a particular bit of bullshit is bullshit.” The syllabus also states, “Truth, like liberty, requires eternal vigilance.” The course professes to teach students what does and does not constitute substance, revealing another arena and method in which selected types of knowledge are substantiated. The course description and syllabus can be found at http://callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html#Introduction.

⁴ Wodak argues that identification is one of the primary characteristics of successful public speakers; they use “the right register” to create a sense of “being one of us” (“The Politics of Fear” 125-26).

⁵ Eddy first published Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures in 1875, and made numerous revisions to the manuscript until the publication of the 1907 version, which is used in Christian Science practice today (Gill 209). Science and Health is used in Christian Science church services; it is the “Pastor of the Mother Church,” as Eddy decreed in her missive of December 19, 1894 (Mary Baker Eddy Library Archives, Letters and Manuscripts Collection, L02748). There are no preachers in Christian Science services, only dialogues between readings from the King James Bible and Science and Health. Christian Scientists are instructed to read selected passages from Science and Health on a daily basis, which comprise weekly “lessons” set forth by the Christian Science Board of Directors.

⁶ Eddy may have studied Plato directly or have been exposed to Platonic concepts indirectly. According to one of her biographers, Jewell Spangler Smaus, Eddy’s older brother Albert “may have shared his Greek and Latin grammars with his sister on his visits home from college” (55). These would have included the works of Hugh Blair, especially his 1796 manuscript Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Vols. I-III (London: A. Strahan, and T. Cadell, and W. Creech, Edinburgh), which “was one of the standard texts used in the schools of this period” (Smaus 92). Blair often uses a question-answer strategy and lauds Plato’s use of the dialectic: “Among the ancients, Plato is eminent for the beauty of his Dialogues . . . For richness and beauty of imagination, no Philosophic Writer, Ancient or Modern, is comparable to Plato (Rhetoric 59).” Blair also states, “it is the business of a philosopher to convince us of truth” (Abridgement 123). William Keith states that the influence of style or belles lettres on rhetoric “came directly of out of Hugh Blair’s much used text” (24-25). Keith notes that Blair’s focus on the aesthetic overshadowed rhetoric’s argumentative function, and that this trend reveals that “an explicit civic or religious purpose was no longer at the center of rhetorical theory” (28). In seeming contrast to this trend, Eddy convincingly used Blair’s theories for a religious purpose, yet she did so by calling upon the aesthetic value placed on terminology associated with science and rationalism.

⁷ Like Plato, Eddy was an eloquent and crowd-pleasing public speaker who shunned rhetoric. “Mihi in oratoribus irridendis ipse esse orator summus videbatur” (“In those who mock rhetoric we see the greatest orator.”) (Cicero, De Oratore 1.47).

⁸ “Error” is a key term in Eddy’s work, and is a catchword for all that is wrong, discordant, and problematic. Physical ailments are described as “error.”

⁹ Eddy names seven synonyms for God: “Principle, Life, Truth, Love, Soul, Spirit, Mind” (Science and Health 115). She uses these synonyms throughout her work, and they are stated in the church by-laws. “In their textbook it is clearly stated that God is divine Principle and that His synonyms are Love, Truth, Life, Spirit, Mind, Soul, which combine as one” (Eddy, The First Church of Christ Scientist and Miscellany 225). This statement also defines Christian Science as a Unitarian religion, breaking from the tradition of the Holy Trinity.

¹⁰ James Zappen writes, “This untitled paper was found in two typed copies among the books and papers in Kenneth Burke’s personal library in July 2006” and “was probably written in the mid-1940s.” Zappen situates this piece as a possible response to prevailing discussions on behaviorism and general semantics in the mid-1940s, and concludes his introduction by stating: “[M]ore important, this paper suggests that the final section of A Rhetoric of Motives, titled simply ‘Order,’ is essential to a complete understanding of Burke’s ideas about persuasion and identification since only in this last section does Burke show how competing points of view might be reconciled in an ultimate identification via the dialectical symmetry that he traces through the long history of Platonic thought” (333-34).

¹¹ According to Julie Jung, Burke argues that the quality that distinguishes humans from other beings is “our ability to be revised by our language,” and that “Burke’s key method for achieving this pliancy in thinking is perspective by incongruity, a process whereby a language-user realizes that new points of view can be obtained if she embraces a ‘multitude of imperfect matchings’” (111). Jung states that “an incongruous perspective, one obtained through metaphor, enables a language-user to reclassify old points of view and hence, to see the world anew” (111).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Louise Zamparutti

Louise Zamparutti is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work has been published in Romance Studies and she has presented at numerous conferences. In addition to her continued investigation of the discursive relationship between the work of Mary Baker Eddy and Kenneth Burke, her doctoral research synthesizes perspectives from the fields of technical communication, rhetoric, and sociocultural linguistics in order to examine the use of history and identity construction as persuasive strategies.