58
PARTISAN REVIEW
them, discussed very briefly are Christian evangelism, the mediaeval
synthesis, Protestant transition, naive capitalism and emergent collectiv-
ism (Russia). Cultures present the materials out of which, and pose the
problems in relation to which, individual frames are constructed. The
latter are classified in terms of poetic categories; epic, tragic, satiric,
didactic, comic, etc. These supply the key metaphors into which all ex-
perience is translated. Burke recommends the comic frame as an indivi-
dual attitude within the social frame of emergent collectivism (Russia).
Before proceeding to an analysis of this position, I wish to indicate
some of the peculiar features of the book. Its title is quite deceptive. The
individual frames of acceptance or rejection are not attitudes towards
history but attitudes towards life-anytime,
anywhere-while the com-
mon frames are themselves the
stuff
of history. The real problem which
the title suggests, viz., how attitudes and purposes affect theories of his-
torical causation and programs of activity, is hardly touched on. The
poetic names of the individual frames are recondite metaphors. In every
case, Burke's discussion of their nature is open to serious question and
his identification of the comic frame with the attitude of humanism
is arbitrary. Even for an unsystematic writer, the organization of the
book is extremely bad. By the author's own confession, the second volume
adds nothing to the argument of the first: it consists of repetitious notes,
memoranda and irrelevant autobiographical detail which could not be
crammed into the first volume. The excursions into economics are
amateurish and second hand, and the psychoanalysis is not so much
critical as mythological. Burke's ill-digested reading results in a chop
suey of proper names, some of them dragged in, I am sorry to say,
apparently for personal reasons only. The undisguised animus against
critics of the Communist Party and Russia, I shall consider below.
Burke writes as a critic of life and manners. To his credit, be it said,
he has developed independently of technical philosophical thought a kind
of home-baked objective relativism. The critical incidence of this
philosophy is directed against dogmatic monisms which are unaware of
the necessarily partial, limited, and excluding aspects of their central in-
sights. It suggests a method which does not outlaw bias but makes it
rational through analysis of its origins and control of its expression.
Properly understood it justifies resolute action without the by-products of
fanaticism. It relates values to facts without identifying them. Unless
carefully safeguarded, however, this position leads to two fundamental
errors either one of which is sufficient to make the whole position un-
tenable. They are: (1) The tendency to regard what is revealed in any
one perspective of equal validity, in relation to a specific purpose, with
what is revealed in any other; and (2) The tendency to espouse some
frame of reference or evaluation and then, although admitting theoretic-
ally that there
are
other ways of looking at the world, reduce them all
to special cases of the first by stretching a metaphor or formula. Burke
is consistently guilty of
both
errors and hides their contradictory character
from himself by calling the confusion dialectical. This shift from sub-
jectivism to absolutism is basic in all his writing. It reveals much more
about Burke's thought and purpose than those obvious logical lapses
(which we hereafter shall ignore) where he speaks of "a total vision
of reality" correcting the interpretative distortions of class attitudes. On
his view, of course, it is nonsense to speak of a total vision of reality, for
