More of Kenneth Burke Typed up by me

Here is some more from the excerpts of my Rhetoric book by Brummett as written by a popular theorist Kenneth Burke.

He writes in the Subheading from A Grammar of Motives
Identification and "Consubstantiality"


A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when htheir interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so.
Here are ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B, A is "substantially one" with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an indivudual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another.
While consubstantial with it sparents, with the "firsts" from which it is derived, the offspring is nonetheless apart from them. In this sense, there is nothing abstruse in the statement tha tthe offspring both is and is not one with its paerntage. Similarly, two persons may be identified in tterms of some principle they share in common, and "identification" that does not deny thieir distinctness.
To identify A with B is ot make A "consubstantial" with B. Accordingly, since our Grammar of Motives was constructed about "substance" as key term, the related rhetoric selects its nearest equivalent in the areas of persuasion and dissuasion, communication and polemic. And our third volume, Symbolic of Motives, should be built about identity as titular or ancestral term, the "first" to which all other terms could be reduced and from which they could tehn be derived or generated, as from a common spirit. The thing's identity would here be its uniqueness as an entity in itsaelf and by itself, a demarcated unit having its own particular structure.
However, "substance" is an abstuse philosophic term, beset by a long history of quandaries and puzzlements. It names so paradoxiacal a funciton in men's systemiatic terminologies, that thinkers finally tried to abolish it altogether000and in recent years they ahve otften persuaded themselves that they really did abolish it from their terminaologies of motives. They abolished the term, but it is doubtful whether they can ever abolish the function of that term, or even whetehr they cshould want to. A doctrine of consubstantiality, either explicit or implicit, may be necessary to any way of life. For substance, in the old philosphies, was an act; and a way of life is an acting-together; and in acting together, men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial.
The Grammar dealt with the universal paradoxesz of substance. It considered resources of placement and definition common to all thought. The Symbolic should deal with unique individuals, each its own peculiarly constucted act, or form. These unique "constitutions" being capable of treatment in isolation, the Symbolic should consider them primarily in their capacity as singulars, each a seaprate universe of dicsurse (though there are also respects in which they are consubstantial with others of their kind, since they can be classed with other unique indivudals as joint participants in common principles, possessors of the same or similar properties).
The Rhetoric deals with the possibilities of classification in its partisan aspects; it considers the ways in which individuals are at odds with one another, or become identififed with groups more or less at odds with one another.
Why "at odds," you may ask, when the titular term is "identification"? Because, to begin with "identification" is, by the same token, though roundabout, to confront the implications of division. And so, in the end, men are brought to that most tragicallly ironic of all divisions, or conflicts, wherein millions of cooperative acts go into the preparation for one single destructive act. We refer to that ultimate disease of cooperation: war. (You will understand war much better if you think of it, not simply as strife come to a head, but rather as a disease, or perversion of communion. Modern war characteristically requires a myriad of constructive acts for each destructive one; before each culminating blast there must be a vast network of interlockign operations, directed communally.)
Identification is affirmed with earnestness pricisely because there is division. Identificaiton is compensatory to divison. If men were not apeart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity. If men were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communcication would be of man's very essence. It would not be an ideal, as it now is, partly emboedied in material conditions and partly frustrated by these same conditions; rather, it would be as natural, spontaneous, and total as those ideal prottypes of communcations, the theologian's angels, or "messengers."
The Grammar was a t peace insofar as it contemplated the paradoxes common to all men, the universal resources of verbal placement. The Symbolic should be at peace, in that the individual substances, or entities, or constituted acts are there cnosidered in their uniq1ueness, hence outside the realm of concflict. For individual universes, as such, do not compete