"Good Life"

Citation
Burke, Kenneth. "Good Life." Attitudes Toward History. 3rd ed., University of California Press, 1937, pp.256-260.

Summary
In this essay, Burke describes the characteristics of a "good life," which is necessarily balanced between the physical and the mental. He writes that "There is an over-emphasis upon 'things of the mind,' due partly to snobbism (the insignia of mental work ranking higher than the insignia of physical work)," which can be seen as "a secular variant of the earlier religious duality between 'mind' and 'body'" (257).

Under modern capitalist conditions, Burke pushes back on capitalism's preference for the mind over the body and passion and ambition over sentiment.

He also calls for "Patient study of the 'Documents of Error," which is necessary to avoid "'cultural vandalism'" (259). Crucially, this must not be undertaken in a spirit of contemporary exceptionalism, thinking that we know better than those who came before us because we are more advanced than they.

"Above all, criticism should seek to clarify the ways in which any structure develops self-defeating emphases ('inner contradictions'). It should watch for 'unintended by-products' - and should seek to avoid being driven into a corner in its attempt to signalize them." (259)

-In this statement, I hear some resonances with Steven Mailloux's rhetorical histories, from his book Rhetorical Power. Not so much a seeking to debunk, but to understand the ways in which an idea became persuasive and looking for gaps in its proposed theory.