Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Originally published in 1945.
What is involved, when we sway what people are doing and why they are doing it? An answer to that question is the subject of this book. The book is concerned with the basic forms of thought which, in accordance with the nature of the world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing of motives. These forms of thought can be embodied profoundly or trivially, truthfully or falsely. They are equally present in systematically elaborated metaphysical structures, in legal judgments, in poetry and fiction, in political and scientific works, in news and in bits of gossip offered at random. (p. xv)
We shall use five terms as generating principle of our investigation. They are: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose. In a rounded statement about motives, you must have some word that names the act (names what took place, in thought or deed), and another that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred); also, you must indicate what person or kind of person (agent) performed the act, what means or instruments he used (agency), and the purpose. (p. xv)
Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the character of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to name the act itself. But be that as it may, any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answer to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose). (p. xv)
Container and the Thing Contained (p. 3)
The Scene-Act Ratio
Using “scene” in the sense of setting, or background, and “act” in the sense of action, one could say that “the scene contains the act.” And using “agents” in the sense of actors, or acters, one could say that “the scene contains the agents.” (p. 3)
It is a principle of drama that the nature of acts and agents should be consistent with the nature of the scene. And whereas comic and grotesque works may deliberately set these elements at odds with one another, audiences make allowance for such liberty, which reaffirms the same principle of consistency in its very violation. (p. 3)
Survey of Terms for Substance
Geometric substance. An object placed in its setting, existing both in itself and as part of its background. (p. 29)
Familial substance. In its purity, this concept stresses common ancestry in the strictly biological sense, as literal descent from maternal or paternal sources. But the concept of family is usually “spiritualized,” so that it includes merely social groups, comprising persons of the same nationality or beliefs. Most often, in such cases, there is the notion of some founder shared in common, or some covenant or constitution or historical act from which the consubstantiality of the group is derived. (p. 29)
The most thoroughgoing dialectical opposition, however, centers in that key pair: Being and Not-Being. For the contextual approach to substance, by inducing men to postulate a ground or context in which everything that is, is placed, led thinkers “by dialectical necessity” to affirm that the only ground of “Being” is “Not-Being” (for “Not-Being,” is the only term that would be left to designate its ground. (p. 34)
So, in sum: The transformations which we here study as a Grammar are not “illusions,” but citable realities. The structural relations involved are observable realities. Nothing is more imperiously there for observation and study than the tactics people employ when they would injure or gratify one another – and one can readily demonstrate the role of substantiation in such tactics. To call a man a friend or brother is to proclaim him consubstantial with oneself, one’s values or purposes. To call a man a bastard is to attack him by attacking his whole line, his “authorship,” his “principle” or “motive” (as expressed in terms of the familial). (p. 57)
An epithet assigns substance doubly, for in stating the character of the object it at the same time contains an implicit program of action with regard to the object, thus serving as motive. (p. 57)
Men seek for vocabularies that will be faithful reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality. Insofar as the vocabulary meets the needs of reflection, we can say that it has the necessary scope. In its selectivity, it is a reduction. Its scope and reduction become a deflection when the given terminology, or calculus, is not suited to the subject matter which it is designed to calculate. (p. 59)
Drmatism suggests a procedure to be followed in the development of a given calculus, or terminology. It involves the search for a “representative anecdote,” to be used as a form in conformity with which the vocabulary is constructed. (p. 59)
In sum: In any term we can posit a world, in the sense that we can treat the world in terms of it, seeing all as emanations, near or far, of its light. Such reduction to a simplicity being technically reduction to a summarizing title or “God term,” when we confront a simplicity we must forthwith ask ourselves what complexities are subsumed beneath it. (p. 105)
When we examine the “scapegoat mechanism” in these terms, we find it a very clear example of the three principles. For the scapegoat is “charismatic,” a vicar. As such, it is profoundly consubstantial with those who, looking upon it as a chosen vessel, would ritualistically cleanse themselves by loading the burden of their own iniquities upon it. Thus the scapegoat represents the principle of division in that its persecutors would alienate from themselves to it their own uncleanliness. For one must remember that a scapegoat cannot be “curative” except insofar as it represents the iniquities of those who would be cured by attacking it. In representing their iniquities, it performs the role of vicarious atonement (that is, unification, or merger, granted to those who have alienated their iniquities upon it, and so may be purified through it suffering). (p. 406)
All told, not what we have here: (1) an original state of merger, in that the iniquities are shared by both the iniquitous and their chosen vessel; (2) a principle of division, in that the elements shared in common are being ritualistically alienated; (3) a new principle of merger, this time in the unification of those whose purified identity is defined in dialectical opposition to the sacrificial offering. (p. 406)
For the alienating of inquities from the self to the scapegoat amounts to a rebirth of the self. (p. 407)
In sum, one’s initial act in choosing “where to draw the line” by choosing terms that merge or terms that divide has an anticipatory effect upon one’s conclusions. (p. 415)
All told, dialectic is concerned with different levels of grounding. It may be arrested after but a brief excursion, hardly more than a half-formulated enumeration of the most obvious factors in a situation. But whatever the range of the enterprise, the procedure is in general thus: Encountering some division, we retreat to a level of terms that allow for some kind of merger (as “near” and “far” are merged in the concept of “distance”); then we “return” to the division, now seeing it as pervaded by the spirit of the “One” we had found in our retreat. (p. 440)
Metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms of something else. It brings out the thisness of a that, or the thatness of a this. (p. 503)
If we employ the word “character” as a general term for whatever can be thought of as distinct (any thing, pattern, situation, structure, nature, person, object, act, role, process, event, etc.,) then we could say that metaphor tells us something about one character as considered from the point of view of another character. (pp. 503-504)
For this purpose we consider synecdoche in the usual range of dictionary sense, with such meaningsas: part for the whole, whole for the part, container for the contained, sign for the thing signified, material for the thing made (which brings us nearer to metonymy), cause for effect, effect for cause, genus for species, species for genus, etc. All such conversions imply an integral relationship, a relationship of convertibility, between the two terms. (pp. 507-508)
Sensory representation is, of course, synecdochic in that the senses abstract certain qualities from some bundle of electro-chemical activities we call, say, a tree, and these qualities (such as size, shape, color, texture, weight, etc.) can be said “truly to represent” a tree. Similarly, artistic representation is synecdochic, in that these certain relations within the medium “stand for” corresponding relations outside it. There is also a sense in which the well-formed work of art is internally synecdochic, as the beginning of a drama contains its close or the close sums up the beginning, the parts all thus being consubstantially related. (p. 508)
True irony, humble irony, is based upon a sense of fundamental kinship with the enemy, as one needs him, is indebted to him, is not merely outside him as an observer but contains him within, being consubstantial with him. (p. 514