In The Sense of Learning Ann Berthoff offers, Epilogue: Ramus Meets Schliermacher and They Go Off for a Triadic Lunch with Peirce; Vico Drops by, a print version of an imaginary conversation, read aloud. She begins, "This imaginary conversation is not offered as a contribution to the conversation of mankind." She offers the conversation instead as a Burkean "perspective by incongruity," for, she says, "I believe in Kenneth Burke's motto, Ad bellum purificandum, which does not mean, as Professor Kinneavy apparently thinks, "Let's have a good fight which will clear the air," but rather, 'Advance toward the purification of war.' What I am reading today is a further effort at purification by talk." And, I would add, Berthoff's purification through writing, talking, and reading is indeed a contribution to the conversation of humankind.

Before I ever read Berthoff, I planned to throw together a bunch of theorists in an imagined conversation. Indeed, I used epistolary means to "get at Burke," a series of letters addressed to KB, a year after his death, chatty letters, gossipy letters, an admittedly one-sided dialectic in that I couldn't slap a stamp on an envelope and send them off to the great hereafter. Yet, for many of the theorists we are asked to read, or want to read, we are stuck in this same condition, and as Berthoff foregrounds, "Rhetoric--insofar as it has anything to do with teaching--must engage hermeneutics in order to find a place for interpretation" (p).

Like Berthoff, I will prepend my imaginary convo with a list of whyfors and howcomes. I have narrowed my theoretical co-agents to a triad of Burke, Grassi, and Bahktin, and weave in Berthoff to ward off any claims of excessive triadicity. However, Berthoff, my co-agent of "consubstantiality," arrives later. For now, I will turn to my trio of heroes (tm Burke).

1. All three share a common notion that language/ philosophy/ rhetoric must be, indeed *is*, triadic.
2. All three locate a contingent starting place in the hermeneutical circle: Burke with the shifting ratios of dramtism, enacted by the Ingenium, rooted in metaphor; Bahktin, with the clash of thirdness, involved, deeply embedded, in the polyphony of heteroglossia.
3. Metaphor and entelechy constitute grounds for making meaning for all three.
4. All share what I believe to be the hallmark of triadic notions of theory, that which we feeble humans must, or at least should, acknowledge in our finite condition as we postulate on eternal verities. Our court jesterness, in reply to the romantic notions of the rugged, yet exalted poet, inspired by the muses, in reply to the cogito ergo sum is the curative of the fool. We are fools of our own making, ever grounded in our contingent historicity to play out our theoretical notions, never knowing, never proving "scientifically," "logically," through empirical means, through the "cogito" that we "ergo sum" because we are all poised about the (seemingly defunct) existential abyss of nolo comprende de veritas eterna.

   The fool peeks out, smirking, either in Burke's' scene of the Human Barnyard, Grassi's folly, or Bakhtin's carnival. The fool reveals ourselves to ourselves, in our humanity. The court jester points out our foibles, our limitations, our pomposities. We are the fool if we are wise. And the fool is the starting place of the conversation. The fool provides checks and balances to the arrogance of "naming" the world. We are the fool if we are smart. The fool names the situations we have gotten ourselves into with theoretical hubris. The fool is the yeah but. The fool is the bad kid on the block, Sisyphus, the Jungian shadow, the Freudian slip, the unconscious if you will, the "other," the mirror. The fool is both/and the situation and the challenge to the situation, the scene, the act, the agency and purpose. The fool is the voice of the Medusa, challenging academia, the Signifying Monkey taunting the lions of the panopticon, and the elephants of logical reasoning. The fool plays with semiotics through semiosis.