Rhetoric of Burke and the Essay

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In his essay "Definition of Man," one of the clauses by which Burke describes man is, "separated form his natural condition by instruments of his own making" (Burke 13). This clearly implies an underlying "supposed to be," or ultimate reality, which Gorgias denies.

Another of the Greek Sophists was Protagoras, who -- like the other Sophists generally -- asserted that true knowledge could never really be obtained. He arrived at this conclusion by a very different means than Gorgias, however, simply asserting that the first way of knowing anything, asking the gods, usually did not yield an answer; one could then appeal to science, which gave only incomplete answers and was ultimately up to the interpretation of the third and final source of knowledge, man -- who was imperfect, susceptible to error and influence. Burke might contend that rather than there being no real knowledge, there is actually an overabundance of knowledge created by the human system of language, such as through the invention of the negative, which drives ambiguity and uncertainty and creates the susceptibilities to human error and influence that Protagoras identifies as stemming from a lack of any adequate foundation in the first place.

Burke's philosophy of rhetoric also finds points of connection and departure with that of Isocrates, who believed that the various strategies and forms of rhetoric were themselves enough of a reality for most purposes.

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Believing that rhetoric and even broader but related decision-weighing and making powers could be taught through proper instruction, though natural talent would have a lot to do with determining an individual's ultimate success in the application of this knowledge, Isocrates took a very realist approach to the world and did not engage in a great deal of abstraction (Isocrates). Burke also took a very realist approach to the world, and responded directly to the very practical effects of rhetoric that he saw put to use by Hitler in the years leading up to World War II, but at the same time this realist approach was not freed from or indeed even separate from the world of abstraction. For Burke, the very ability to create abstract conceptualizations through the use of language was precisely what made human beings human, and what gives rhetoric the inordinate amount of power that it can have when skillfully put to use.

Kenneth Burke, Gorgias, Protagoras, and Isocrates all had rhetorical views that were similar in some ways and highly different in others. The Sophists essentially believed that knowledge was ultimately unattainable; Burke agreed with the ambiguities inherent to reality and to language, but saw greater meaning in them rather than no meaning at all. This view is at once more optimistic and more foreboding.

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