The second conception of motive was generative. The basic question for those of us interested in social communication is not the discovery of drives nor the analysis of the individual psyche. The key to understanding one another is not in studying the ways in which we discharge feelings but in how we name them.
Feeling becomes emotion because it can be communicated.
How it is communicated determines whether we will act together in love, hatred or indifference. Thus, the proper study of motives is not how we discharge feelings, but how we express them. As even the most junior Burke scholar knows, the master divided motive into three parts and arranged the parts in a hierarchy suspended between Heaven and Hell. As always, Burke numbered and named the beast. He called the three kinds of motives, the personal, the categorical and the generic.