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PARTISAN REVIEW
human motives." This ground is mystically felt when we look "socioana–
gogically" at history, social stratification, or literature, wherein we discern
dramatistically bodied forth the ultimate mystery of life, the mystery
of "hierarchy." Thus in the perfection of the "ultimate design . . .
each tiny act shares in the meaning of the total act." And thus we
achieve the ultimate language which may help us toward universal
clarity and the "purification of war."
One may remark that for a writer so given to ultimate vocabularies,
Mr. Burke is extraordinarily sensitive to the vicissitudes of ideology. In
A Grammar of Motives,
written durinOg the war years, he accepted war
as of man's essence (man "has the motives of combat in his very
essence"), and he spoke of the enormous unwieldiness of war "as an
anecdote" due to its being "more of a
confusion
than a form." Yet in
A Rhetoric of Motives,
which makes its commitment to the Wallace
movement, he writes that war is a "perversion" of peace. He finds less
confusion in the phenomenon of war now that the perceptions of
rhetorical method show that the United States is the perverter of an
otherwise potentially peaceful world. In the
Grammar
he spoke of the
"great dialectic interchange still to be completed." In the
Rhetoric
the
dialectic interchange is being sabotaged by the Marshall Plan, which–
though it does not presume to understand Russian policy-the rhetorical
method easily perceives to be nothing but the "sinister" stratagem of
capitalist imperialism. In this age of Communist rhetoric such a pro–
cedure is indefensible.
Mr. Burke repeatedly disavows any didactic intent. He tells us that
this is a linguistic study and should not be taken as indicative of his views
in other areas. But these disclaimers are preposterous. No linguistic study
can be made to bear one tenth the weight of Mr. Burke's ideology and
metaphysics and still remain intelligible as a linguistic study. Equally
unconvincing is Mr. Burke's departure from the reductive biases of
"scientism," since the alternative-"dramatism"-becomes his warrant
for abandoning the admonishments of scientific method on the one hand
and accepting on the other that most frivolous and dangerous of modern
myths, the myth of total rationalizati.on. As for "scientism" the reader
will find its essence in Mr. Burke's proposal to "hire a batch of poets,"
give them the task of imagining the various modes of the final extinction
of life, and then categorize the citizenry as personality types according
to their responses to the different modes. This is what Mr. Burke calls
"our 'neotragic' school of ethnic classification" and is apparently offered
as a joke.
And also unconvincing are Mr. Burke's attacks on technology and
