Sounds like a nice law firm, doesn’t it? But no… one you’ve probably heard of, the other you haven’t. At least that’s how I started.
Edmund Burke was an 18th-century philosopher, statesman, and one of the foremost political thinkers of his day. He’s best known for his work Reflections on the Revolution in France and his stance against the uprising. Russell Kirk was heavily influenced by Burke, and thus many consider E. Burke as the philosophical founder of modern conservatism.
Kenneth Burke was born in 1897 and introduced a new form of rhetorical criticism in the 1960′s that has forever changed the discipline. Instead of considering a piece of discourse strictly from straight facts and logical reasoning, K. Burke argued for a new style of criticism based upon his “Pentad”.
The Pentad is made up of five core components:
K. Burke’s whole argument revolved around his belief that the world really was a stage, that rhetors took their cues from the audience, audiences responded to the rhetors, and as agents both rhetor and audience contribute to the act, scene, agency, and purpose.
In a very real sense, E. Burke & K. Burke were polar opposites — one disdained the French Revolution while the other was heavily influenced by Marx and Nietzsche. One lived in the 18th century, the other in the 20th. But this they do have in common: they saw the world as a dramatic stage on which the characters spoke and acted and related to one another and participated in a world much greater and far beyond themselves.
Edmund Burke: “Only by standing on the shoulders of giants have I been able to see so far” and, later paraphrased by Kirk, we are “dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, able to see farther than their ancestors only because of the great stature of those who have preceded us in time.”
Kenneth Burke: ”Where does the drama get its materials? From the ‘unending conversation’ that is going on at the point in history when we are born.”
