American philosopher (1897-1993)
If decisions were a choice between alternatives, decisions would come easy. Decision is the selection and formulation of alternatives.
KENNETH BURKE
Towards a Better Life
We would not deny the mind; but merely remember that as the corrective of wrong thinking is right thinking, the corrective of all thinking is the body.
KENNETH BURKE
Towards a Better Life
For you become your own audience, in some respects a very lax one, in some respects very exacting, when you become involved in psychologically stylistic subterfuges for presenting your own case to yourself in sympathetic terms (and even terms that seem harsh can often be found on closer scrutiny to be flattering, as with neurotics who visit sufferings upon themselves in the name of very high-powered motives which, whatever their discomfiture, feed pride).
KENNETH BURKE
A Rhetoric of Motives
I felt that the man who strove for dignity, nobility, and honour should have his task made as difficult and as hazardous as possible, and that in particular he should be forgiven no lapses in style.
KENNETH BURKE
Towards a Better Life
Man is the symbol-using animal ... But can we bring ourselves to realize just what that formula implies, just how overwhelmingly much of what we mean by "reality" has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems? Take away our books, and what little do we know about history, biography, even something so "down to earth" as the relative position of seas and continents? What is our "reality" for today (beyond the paper-thin line of our own particular lives) but all this clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present? In school, as they go from class to class, students turn from one idiom to another. The various courses in the curriculum are in effect but so many different terminologies. And however important to us is the tiny sliver of reality each of us has experienced firsthand, the whole overall "picture" is but a construct of our symbol systems.
KENNETH BURKE
Language as Symbolic Action
You moralistic dog--admitting a hierarchy in which you are subordinate, purely that you may have subordinates; licking the boots of a superior, that you may have yours in turn licked by an underling.
KENNETH BURKE
Towards a Better Life
Surely, it would not take much to distinguish between the character of a person who foresaw a world ending "not with a bang but a whimper," and one who feared some mighty holocaust, as were the planets ripped into smithereens by explosions from within.
KENNETH BURKE
A Rhetoric of Motives
Since imagery built upon the active, reflexive, and passive forms of death (killing, self-killing, and being killed) so obviously contributes to dramatic intensity, and since thoughts of death are so basic to human motivation, we usually look no farther to account for their use. But there is also an ultimate "Grammatical" incentive behind such imagery, since a history's end is a formal way of proclaiming its essence or nature, as with those who distinguish between a tragedy and a comedy by the outcome alone and who would transform "tragedy" into "comedy" merely by changing the last few moments of the last act.
KENNETH BURKE
A Rhetoric of Motives
Taken simply at its face value, imagery invites us to respond in accordance with its nature. Thus, an adolescent, eager to "grow up," is trained by our motion pictures to meditate much on the imagery of brutality and murder, as the most noteworthy signs of action in an ideal or imaginary adult world. By the time he is fifteen, he has "witnessed" more violence than most soldiers or gunmen experience in a lifetime. And he has "participated in" all this imagery, "empathically reenacting" it. Thus initiated, he might well think of "growing up" (that is, of "transformation") in such excessive terms. His awareness of himself as a developing person requires a vocabulary--and the images of brutality and violence provide such a vocabulary, with a simple recipe for the perfecting or empowering of the self by punishing or slaying of troublesome motives as though they were wholly external.
KENNETH BURKE
A Rhetoric of Motives
A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing--a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B.
KENNETH BURKE
Permanence and Change
When a bit of talking takes place, just what is doing the talking? Just where are the words coming from? Some of the motivation must derive from our animality, and some from our symbolicity. We hear of "brainwashing," of schemes whereby an "ideology" is imposed upon people. But should we stop at that? Should we not also see the situation the other way around? For was not the "brainwasher" also similarly motivated? Do we simply use words, or do they not also use us? An "ideology" is like a god coming down to earth, where it will inhabit a place pervaded by its presence. An "ideology" is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes the body hop around in certain ways; and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it.
KENNETH BURKE
Language as Symbolic Action
Language referring to the realm of the nonverbal is necessarily talk about things in terms of what they are not--and in this sense we start out beset by a paradox. Such language is but a set of labels, signs for helping us find our way about. Indeed, they can even be so useful that they help us to invent ingenious ways of threatening to destroy ourselves. But even accuracy of this powerful sort does not get around the fact that such terms are sheer emptiness, as compared with the substance of the things they name.
KENNETH BURKE
Language as Symbolic Action
Every question selects a field of battle.
KENNETH BURKE
The Philosophy of Literary Form
How could a choice be called free when its consequences are unknown at the time of our choosing?
KENNETH BURKE
Towards a Better Life
God pity the man or the nation wise in proverbs, I told myself, for there is much misery and much error gone into the collecting of such a store.
KENNETH BURKE
Towards a Better Life
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.
KENNETH BURKE
Permanence and Change
When finding that people held the same views as I, I persuaded myself that I held them differently.
KENNETH BURKE
Towards a Better Life
For rhetoric as such is not rooted in any past condition of human society. It is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.
KENNETH BURKE
A Rhetoric of Motives
Men seek for vocabularies that are 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.
KENNETH BURKE
On Symbols and Society
The quickest way to demonstrate the sheer symbolicity of the negative is to look at any object, say, a table, and to remind yourself that, though it is exactly what it is, you could go on for the rest of your life saying all the things that it is not. "It is not a book, it is not a house, it is not Times Square," etc., etc.
KENNETH BURKE
Language as Symbolic Action