Abstract

The present dissertation adds another voice to the small but growing trend in communication scholarship examining the relationship between Kenneth Burke's dramatism and existential phenomenology, represented here by Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. While these two theoretical traditions might, in some ways, be seen as an unlikely pair, the dissertation demonstrates many points of compatibility between them. In addition, the two approaches to human existence and interaction were applied to a concrete aspect of social life: motives. Beginning with a puzzling phrase found in Burke's A Grammar of Motives one essentially suggesting that motives are created through action, this study investigates the phenomenon of motives through a detailed exploration of human action. Each chapter unfolds a different aspect of human action, but does so in a holistic way, keeping the project as a whole always in sight. Therefore, the early chapters, dealing with action versus knowledge, human embodiment, and the lived world, find their full clarification only in the final substantive chapter, which studies the relationship between temporality, human finitude, and action. In the conclusion, it is suggested why these discussions of human action, far from reaching a conclusion, are but an initial framework for further inquiry into both the phenomenon of motive and the interconnection of dramatism and existential philosophy