All Living Things Are Critics

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Pigment Dyed Forest Green Hat
 100% Cotton Twill

Corresponding Klew: K-9 “All Living Things Are Critics”

Paul Klee, Fish Magic, 1925 ↓

Kenneth Burke:
We may begin by noting the fact that all living organisms interpret many of the signs about them. A trout having snatched at a hook but having had the good luck to escape with a rip in his jaw, may even show by his wiliness thereafter that he can revise his critical appraisals.  His experience has led him to form a new judgment, which we should verbalize as a nicer discrimination between food and bait. A different kind of bait may outwit him, if it lacks the appearances by which he happens to distinguish “jaw-ripping food.”

And perhaps he passes up many a morsel of genuine food simply because it happens to have the characters which he, as the result of his informing experience, has learned to take as the sign of bait. I do not mean to imply that the sullen fish has thought all this out. I mean simply that in his altered response, for a greater or lesser period following the hook-episode, he manifests the changed behavior that goes with a new meaning, he has a more educated way of reading the signs.

Encyclopedia of Lures ↓

 Though all organisms are critics in the sense that they interpret the signs about them, the experimental, speculative technique made available by speech would seem to single out the human species as the only one possessing an equipment for going beyond the criticism of experience to a criticism of criticism. We not only interpret the character of events (manifesting in our responses all the gradations of fear, apprehension, misgiving, expectation, assurance for which there are rough behavioristic counterparts in animals) — we may also interpret our interpretations.

Paul Klee, Around The Fish, 1926 ↓