Thinking with Christian Existentialism: Freedom in Burke’s Dramatism and Berdyaev’s Dostoevsky

Kenneth Burke’s logology is a way of thinking about how to understand the useof language—what he calls “symbolic action”—and how to use language to makesense of various human practices, including interpretive acts. This is a dialectic inthought between rhetoric as language-use and interpretation as making-sense. InThe Rhetoric of Religion Burke’s theotropic logology uses theology to interpretsymbolic action and symbolic action to interpret theology. Burke extends to otherinterpretive projects this same rhetorical-hermeneutic strategy of analogicallytranslating words from one domain into another, from one meaning into another.This strategy is one way Burke thinks with other authors and their texts. Thepresent essay uses some of Burke’s published and unpublished work to show howhe thinks with the Christian Existentialism of Nicholas Berdyaev and FyodorDostoevsky, especially on the topic of freedom. In his thinking with Berdyaev,Burke agrees with the Russian theo-philosopher about the importance of freedom.Indeed, the act of freedom, dramatized in Dostoevsky and described by Berdyaev,forms the very center of Burke’s theory of symbolic action, his Dramatism andultimately his Logology. Freedom is the condition of possibility for human actionas opposed to mere motion, and free will is the necessary product of the cycle ofterms implicit in the idea of hierarchical order presented in Burke’s The Rhetoricof Religion.