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ANSWERING BURKE IN THE DEBATE ROUND
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- RHETORIC CREATES MORALITY OUT OF THE NEGATIVE
ANSWERING BURKE IN THE DEBATE ROUNDThis is much easier than making use of Burke because Burke is so elitist that he is difficult to make coherent arguments out of and even more difficult to communicate to a judge. This gives the opponent of someone running Burke many advantages. I would attempt to play off of any confusion my opponent had in the communication of Burke. Burke’s ideas are highly abstract and not well understood as large impacts in the debate round. This brings me to my next strategy, which would be to point out that the Burkean critique has no relevant impact to the value debate round. It might be useful for examining the discourse of the debate, and the motives for which the values stand, but the round must ultimately be decided on the basis of ultimate terms, and Burke offers no guidance on which are to be most carefully examined. Burke’s discourse suffers several problems also. He is sometimes thought to be Eurocentric, and doesn’t use bisexual terminology when the politically correct think that he should. He is also rather elitist. This plays well for the opponent of Burke in the debate round where the elitism of Burke can come off as snobbery, especially if it appears to be ridiculously critiquing time tested values such as freedom and equality. The summation of my strategy would be to push my case hard while weighing their impacts to the Burkean critique. The critique impacts are difficult to pull off, and I would doubt that they could be clearly communicated enough to defeat pointed questions. CONCLUSION Kenneth Burke forms the twentieth century part of the tradition of rhetoric. I think it is imperative that debaters learn some of his ideas and understand them as explanations for the ways arguments are made in the debate round and in the real world. Burke claims that rhetoric is a strategy for encompassing a situation within symbols or symbolic communication. This is the most imperative understanding that a debater can get about the idea of debating. The debater’s goal is to most effectively court the judge by use of strategies that encompass a situation.
Kenneth Burke, ATTITUDES TOWARD HISTORY (University of California Press: 1937).
(Waveland Press Inc. Prospect Heights, Illinois: 1991). RHETORIC CREATES MORALITY OUT OF THE NEGATIVE1. MORAL ACTION IS TIED TO LANGUAGE Sonja K. Foss, Karen A. Foss, Robert Trapp, Sonja Foss is Professor of Rhetoric at Washington University, Robert Trapp is Professor of Rhetoric at Willamette University, CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON RHETORIC, 1991, p. 190 Moral action arises only as a consequence of the hortatory, judgmental uses of the negative that are possible in language; moral action is not possible apart from language. Burke reaches this conclusion by examining the relationship between the negative and his starting point for dramatism, action. The negative allows the establishment of commands or admonitions that govern the actions of individuals, which Burke refers to as "thou shalt nots," or "do not do thats. " The Ten Commandments are examples of such "thou shalt nots. " The ability to distinguish between right and wrong thus is a consequence of the concept of the negative. Without the negative implicit in language, moral action, or action based on conceptions of right and wrong behavior (such as law, moral and social rules, and rights), would not exist. 2. HUMAN BEINGS INEVITABLY CREATE HIERARCHIES Sonja K. Foss, Karen A. Foss, Robert Trapp, Sonja Foss is Professor of Rhetoric at Washington University, Robert Trapp is Professor of Rhetoric at Willamette University, CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON RHETORIC, 1991, p. 190 The concept of the negative inherent in language necessarily leads to the establishment of hierarchies constructed on the basis of numerous negatives and commandments and the degree to which they are followed. Hierarchy might be called as well "bureaucracy," "the ladder," "a sense of order," or, as Rueckert describes it, "any kind of graded, value‑charged structure in terms of which things, words, people, acts, and ideas are ranked." It deals with "the relation of higher to lower, or lower to higher, or before to after, or after to before" and concerns the "arrangement whereby each rank is overlord to its underlings and underling to its overlords." Hierarchies may be built around any number of elements‑a division of labor, possession of different properties, differentiation by ages, status positions, stages of learning, or levels of skill. No one hierarchy is inevitable, and hierarchies are crumbling and forming constantly. What is important, Burke emphasizes, is the inevitability of the hierarchic principle ‑the human impulse to build society around ambition or hierarchy on the basis of commandments derived from the concept of the negative.
Sonja K. Foss, Karen A. Foss, Robert Trapp, Sonja Foss is Professor of Rhetoric at Washington University, Robert Trapp is Professor of Rhetoric at Willamette University, CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON RHETORIC, 1991, p. 189 Choice, which we saw earlier is essential for action, is made possible only through the concept of the negative, which provides for distinctions among acts. Burke begins the development of his notion of the negative by examining the world of motion or nature. In this world, he finds, no negatives exist; I everything simply is what it is and as it is. " A tree, for example, is a tree; in no way can it be "not a tree. " The only way in which something can "not be" something in nature is for it to "be" something else. As Burke explains, "To look for negatives in nature would be as absurd as though you were to go out hunting for the square root of minus‑one. The negative is a fiction peculiar to symbol‑systems, quite as the square root of minus‑one is an implication of a certain mathematical symbol system." There is no image of nothing in nature. The negative is a concept that has no referent in reality; it is purely a creation of language. The notion of the negative was added to the natural world as a product of our language; with language, humans invented the negative. The negative is the essence of language, according to Burke, and "the ultimate test of symbolicity. "
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