A
Critique of Burke's 'Substance'
Steven
Long and Bryan Salmons, Southern
Illinois University, Carbondale
Abstract of a Paper
to Be Presented at the 1999 Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society
In
his Grammar Of Motives, Kenneth Burke defines "substance" from a number
of different angles. It is the first subject, in fact, that he puts through the
heuristic process of his pentad. Consequently, as with most of Burke's objects
of scrutiny, even substance ends up taking on a markedly cubist aspect. Burke's
extended definition -- and its accompanying assumption that much can be said about
substance -- runs sharply contrary to philosophical tradition. Although Burke
mentions Aristotle very briefly (Grammar 25), for example, in summarizing
the concept's history, he avoids Aristotle's fundamental definition of 'substance,'
that substance remains "self-identical through change"; For Aristotle, substance
is that which is "neither predicable ("sayable") of anything nor present in anything
as an aspect or property of it" (Cambridge "substance"). What Burke does
in making his own definition, of course, is take a rhetorical turn, making substance
into an act, a form of behavior, a way of interacting, a way of persuading, a
way of seeing, conditional on where one is, etc. Substance becomes, in
other words, part of our individual or sociological belief systems about what
we think constitutes reality, what we think reality should be, and how
humans can or should interact with it
We
would like to examine
Burke's underlying
premises and explore more fully his definition of
substance. It is not an accident that his examination of
substance comes at the beginning of his Grammar and Rhetoric
"Motive Series" because it is what his "system" (if he had
been comfortable with that term) rests. : will explicate
Burke's 'substance' in relation to our post-modern and "post
Bohrian" scientific world-view, in particular how the act of
observation seems to have a direct effect on the nature of
what we are observing or testing. He will also examine
science as
a kind of belief system. Similar to Burke's
pentadic definition, after Bohr, science has become less and
less interested in, or more and more discouraged about,
understanding the fundamentals of nature as they are.
I will critique Burke's definition for what I think might be equivocation. In
his Grammar-, Burke seems to want to agree with Locke, that substance is the undergirding
of things that we can't see or experience in any way but know must be there, but
Burke goes well beyond Lock, turning substance into a much larger concept than
Locke had
originally
intended. It becomes, in fact, epistemological, ethical, and sociological, in
addition to ontological. The final question I will answer, then, is Burke creating
an intellectual object different from substance while riding piggyback
on the prestige and philosophical reputation of the word "substance"?
We will each write
short papers and then read a dialogue between the two of us.
Works
Cited
Burke, Kenneth.
A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1962.
Cambridge Dictionary
of Philosop Robert Audi, ed. New
York: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Return to the 1999 KB Conference Program
