Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
grounded in one of those religious meanings. They had appropriated a nar-
rative form that assumed a preordained purpose in the passage of time,
and the evolutionary perfection of religious meaning through science now
enacted that purpose. Here is one of the great paradoxes of modernism: the
very possibility of such a reduction that could strip history of spiritual mean-
ing depended upon the spiritualization of history. For the positivists, every-
thing had a natural or scientific explanation, but the historical framework
in which this unfolding naturalism was envisioned was itself not subject to
this reduction. It could not be. Were history to be rendered merely in terms
of some deterministic model in which blind causation rather than purpose
accounted for its course, positivism would lose its gravitational center.
An alternate way to explain the unity that underlies this polysemy
might be to consider the blurred signification that inclines the “reduction”
expressed through metonymy, as Kenneth Burke describes it, to shade into
the kind of “representation” that manifests in the closely related trope of
synecdoche.
48
Metonymy, for instance, when it references articles of cloth-
ing to signify the people inside them—“shirts” for business executives,
“blue collars” or “cloth caps” (as the English say) for laborers—it reduces
one category of meaning to another related to it in some fashion, in these
instances by denoting categories of persons as categories of clothing. Comte
and Saint-Simon attempt something like this when they use the language
of religion to reference what they regard as natural phenomena. It is their
way of saying that religion had merely been science in some evolutionary
stage of becoming. When Saint-Simon declared in his
Lettres d'un habitant
de Genève
à
ses contemporains
(
Letters from an Inhabitant of Geneva to His Con-
temporaries
) (1802-1803) that it was “God who had spoken to me” to reveal
this “superior religion,” the “God” he was talking about was nature and
his “religion” was science.
49
This is roughly analogous to what speakers are
getting at when they describe men who “chase skirts,” namely that while
women seem to be involved, it is really not women that they are after. Corre-
spondingly, for the positivists, the “content” of religion could be reduced to
its “container,” to the natural system of ideas with which religion was once
associated. The religionists of old had been in pursuit of a natural world
they had mistaken for God.
But metonymy, as Burke also notes, is inherently ambiguous and “may
be treated as a special application of synecdoche.”
50
Language that reduces
some content to its container will work as metonymy so long as we remain
mindful of the assumption that content and container are separate enti-
ties, but that assumption can easily drift out of thought. When it does,
