Lava Light
After reading the first section of Grammar the image of the pentad has come into sharper focus, not as a kind of wagon wheel as I had, before now, pictured it, but as Burke prefers it, a thing both more massy and less predictable. The analogy makes more sense in terms of invention and rhetorical inquiry. It we use the pentad heuristically (e.g. as an invention tool), it reflects the relatively quick (and imperceptible) geologic processes happening at the center of the Earth. While the gravitational pull of the spinning planet (a kind of exigency) certainly influences how and why things happen in the molten center, its effects are by not predictable, except through a kind of theory (or grammar). When the pentad is used heuristically, it can help generate ideas about how one can discuss the way lava might flow; it gives rise to possibilities that extend exponentially when combined (alchemically) increase exponentially.
If the pentad is employed hermeneutically, it begins to show the promise that inheres in the question "What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?" (xv). The grammar (pentad) itself answers the first part ("what is involved?") but the idea of the center of the pentad as a molten mass goes further in providing a visual of the rest of the question. None of pieces of the grammar are separable in any material sense; theoretically, however, we can attempt to lay a grammatical frame, (a kind of geology) over the situation to attempt to understand it as a rhetorical happening.
I was wondering
I like what you are saying here about the pentad helping use to understanding how an idea can be generated. I was wondering how you felt or how you would interpret the idea of “transformation” and how that might play in the idea of how ideas are generated?
Good point
I think you're referring to the section on page xix where Burke says:
"Let one of these crusted distinctions return to its source, and in this alchemic center it may be remade, again becoming molten liquid, and may enter into new combinations, whereat it may be again thrown forth as a new crust, a different distinction. So that A may become non-A. But not merely by a leap from one state to the other. Rather, we must take A back to the ground of its existence, the logical substance that is its causal ancestor, and on to a point where it is consubstantial with non-A; and then we may return, this time emerging with non-A instead."
The process of transformation Burke indicates here seems to be a geo-logical one; Burke describes following an element "A" back along a chemical trail that implies the existence of Non-A in its lineage. As Burke implies, it is not just a change in state (say, water from liquid to ice) wherein the properties remain, but a shift in sub-stance. In terms of the pentad and causalities, the ratios provide such causal substance mixing. A situation that is seen, for instance, through a scene-agent ratio will be of a new substance, not simply a change in state in either scene or agent.