Love and Strife

Abstract

In A Rhetoric of Motives Kenneth Burke revises the traditional understanding of rhetoric as persuasion.He introduces the concept of identification to define persuasion dialectically by locating it in a formal opposition to identification. The ultimate motives that drive this dialectical tension are love and strife. As dialectical creatures, human are drawn toward each other and seek to distinguish themselves from one another. For a world threatened by its own misunderstanding of ambition and its unreflective acceptance of historical identities, Burke's philosophy of rhetoric offers a way to understand what itmeans to be a dialectical being at a particular point of history, and it does so because it has the practical objective of making the world more just.