736
PARTISAN REVIEW
RHETORIC OF RHETORIC
A RHETORIC OF MOTIVES. By Kenneth Burke. Prentice-Hall. $5.00.
This is the second volume of Mr. Burke's proposed trilogy on
the meaning of meaning, an ambitious and recondite inquiry purporting
to examine the relationship of words to human motives. The first volume,
A Grammar of Motives,
appeared in 1945, the third,
A Symbolic of Mo–
tives,
is forthcoming. This trilogy already exerts a good deal of influence
in our intellectual life. The
Rhetoric
indicates that the trilogy will be
a prime handbook for those who now join in the abandonment of our
naturalist and humanist inheritance in favor of the charismatic glamor of
ultimate politics and ultimate metaphysics.
If
we mean by "semantics" a discipline for investigating the relation
of words to non-verbal reality with a minimum of metaphysical bias and
with the intent of clarifying our scrutiny of the function of words, then
Mr. Burke is hardly a semanticist at all, or, to put it another way, he is
so much more than a semanticist that his semantic becomes hopelessly
obscured in the wilderness of its own uncontrolled extensions.
A Grammar
of Motives,
as Mr. Isaac Rosenfeld said in a brilliant account of the
book
(Kenyon Review,
Spring 1946), was not a Grammar at all but,
among other things, "another bit of philosophy, a substance metaphysics."
A Rhetoric of Motives
is less a Rhetoric than what might be called a
substance metapolitics. It is a vast and centerless farrago which, besides
categorizing linguistics in the five terms of Scene, Act, Agent, Agency,
and Purpose, draws attitudes of linguistic analysis from Marx, Bentham,
Carlyle, Veblen, and Empson, and, from the whole, attempts to evolve
a universal "purification" of language with the help of the "ultimate
vocabulary" of Marxist dialectic and of the anagogic method of the
medieval writers.
One will be disappointed if one expects from Mr. Burke as rhetori–
cian a firm and adequate idea of politics-and such an idea surely must
be implied by (though not confused with) any responsible investigation
of rhetoric. The book carries a very heavy charge of political implication,
but the author, like so many of his admirers and so much of the modern
world, is beyond politics. He has no idea of man as a social animal, no
idea of the state, no idea of democratic, socialist, or even aristocratic
institutions, and no idea, in any concrete form, of either the philosophy
or the rhetoric of politics. He has "purified" politics and political man
out of existence.
A small example, or "anecdote," as Mr. Burke would say, mav
get us to the central issues. Our author discusses at some length the
