THE UNENDING CONVERSATION: KENNETH BURKE AND RICHARD MCKEON'S AESTHETIC PRAGMATISM, 1920–1960

Abstract

Historians of pragmatism have long overlooked Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon. This has not been without good reason. At first glance, the two read more like critics than adherents of the tradition. Yet placing Burke and McKeon's writings from the 1920s to the late 1950s in the context of their development reveals a shared project aimed at reforming pragmatism. While pragmatists such as John Dewey and Sidney Hook alleged a conceptual fidelity between the scientific method and democratic processes such as public debate, Burke and McKeon questioned this link. Metaphors drawn from science, they believed, blinded pragmatists to the nature of communication. Due to this oversight, pragmatists ignored the ideological ambiguity that surrounded terms like “science” and “democracy” during the mid-twentieth century. Burke and McKeon sought to fix this omission. Pragmatists, they argued, needed to trade the language of science for a terminology drawn from a source more attuned to the power of communication: the arts. By advancing this case, Burke and McKeon crafted an aesthetic form of pragmatism—a variant of the philosophy that, ultimately, contemporaries would barely recognize as such.