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Kenneth Burke (1897–1993)

Burke’s central claim is that language is not a tool for describing reality but a mode of action that constitutes reality. Humans are “the symbol-using animal,” and what we call reality is always reality-as-symbolised — filtered through, shaped by, and in important respects created by the symbol systems we inhabit. This makes rhetoric — the study of how symbols work, how they persuade, identify, divide, and constitute — not a secondary discipline applied after the facts are in, but the primary inquiry into how human worlds are made. Burke called his method “dramatism”: all human action can be understood as a drama with agents, acts, scenes, purposes, and agencies, and the way these elements are weighted in any account reveals the account’s implicit worldview.

Life

Born in Pittsburgh in 1897. Largely self-educated — he attended Columbia and Ohio State but did not complete a degree. He lived by freelance writing, translating, and occasional teaching, spending most of his life at a farm in Andover, New Jersey. He was associated with the literary avant-garde of the 1920s–30s (the magazine The Dial, friendships with William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Allen Tate) and with the left-wing intellectual scene of the Depression era — his address to the American Writers’ Congress in 1935, arguing for “the people” over “the workers” as the key term of identification, was shouted down by the Marxist majority.

His academic career was late and peripheral — he held no permanent university position until his sixties, teaching at Bennington College and as a visiting professor elsewhere. His work crossed literary criticism, philosophy, rhetoric, sociology, and linguistics in ways that made him difficult to place institutionally. He was recognised with the National Medal for Literature (1981) and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 1993 at ninety-six.

Language as symbolic action

Burke’s philosophy of language is developed across several works — The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), A Grammar of Motives (1945), A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), Language as Symbolic Action (1966). The central thesis: language does not merely represent a pre-existing reality; it is itself a form of action that shapes what counts as real.

His “Definition of Man” (later revised to “Definition of the Human Being”) states the position compactly: the human is “the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order), and rotten with perfection.”

Each clause does philosophical work. “Inventor of the negative” — the capacity to say “no,” to negate, to distinguish what is from what is not, is a linguistic achievement with no counterpart in nature. “Separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making” — culture, technology, and language interpose between the human and unmediated experience. “Rotten with perfection” — the drive to carry any principle to its logical conclusion, even when that conclusion is destructive.

Dramatism and the pentad

Dramatism is Burke’s method for analysing human action. Any act can be described through five key terms — the pentad:

The analytical power is in the ratios — the way different accounts weight the five terms against each other. A Marxist explanation emphasises scene (material conditions determine action). A psychoanalytic explanation emphasises agent (inner drives determine action). A technological explanation emphasises agency (the tools shape what is done). Burke’s claim is that every explanatory framework is a particular weighting of the pentad, and making the weighting explicit reveals the implicit philosophy.

Identification and division

A Rhetoric of Motives (1950) redefines rhetoric around the concept of identification. Classical rhetoric is the art of persuasion — changing someone’s mind. Burke argues that persuasion is a special case of a more fundamental process: identification, the way in which one person comes to share the substance (attitudes, values, language, situation) of another. “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his.”

Identification always implies its counterpart — division. To identify with one group is to be divided from another. The two are structurally inseparable: “If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity.” Burke’s rhetoric is therefore a study of how human communities are constituted and fractured through symbolic action — not a technique for winning arguments but an inquiry into the symbolic foundations of social life.

Where Burke stops

Burke’s framework is powerful as a mode of analysis — the pentad, identification, symbolic action as constitutive — but it is deliberately anti-systematic. He resisted building his insights into a closed theory, preferring suggestive frameworks, neologisms, and what he called “perspective by incongruity” (juxtaposing incompatible frames to reveal what each conceals). The result is a body of work that is extraordinarily generative for readers who work with it but difficult to summarise, teach, or apply methodically. The absence of a systematic theory is both the strength (it resists premature closure) and the limitation (it leaves later users to do the systematising Burke declined to do).

The relationship between symbolic action and non-symbolic reality is the philosophical boundary. Burke’s claim that reality is always reality-as-symbolised does not deny a non-symbolic world — he distinguishes between “motion” (physical processes) and “action” (symbolic, motivated conduct). But the framework’s analytical tools work on the action side; the motion side is named but not theorised. How symbolic systems interact with material constraints — ecology, biology, physics — is the territory Burke’s dramatism enters only at its edges.

Key works

See also: Arendt · Rorty · Wittgenstein