Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric. Scott R. Stroud
of taste, sees itself as giving law to itself—one is being pleased by some aspect of the world that is not directly related to their interests as a specific, animal being. The rules that apply seem to be supplied by the mind itself, even though the mind did not design this object or scene. This experience of the beautiful is contrasted by Kant to the “heteronomy of the laws of experience” in terms of empirical judging (CJ 5:353). In the latter instance, the power of judgment has laws foisted on it by understanding. In the case of judgments of taste, the power of judgment is the source of its own reflective laws.
This issuing of laws to one’s self involves the power of judgment in both the inner realm of mental faculties of the subject as well as with general qualities of experienced external objects. Thus, the intersubjective validity of judgments of taste comes from the power of judgment’s connection to the ground of inner freedom of the subject as a moral agent—this is the supposed supersensible that connects the theoretical faculty with the practical faculty to form a unity. As intimated in his previous two critiques, Kant is always concerned with how the two varieties of reason (practical and theoretical) serve each other or combine together. He posits in section 59 that the very ground that allows for claims of taste to be universally valid also relates to an experience (albeit symbolic) of such a substratum of freedom that connects the realms of reason and nature. While earlier parts of the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment” (a subsection of the CJ) deal with reasons why judgments of taste claim intersubjective validity, Kant claims in section 59 that the beautiful can provide particular subjects an experience of their moral freedom through symbolic presentation.
There are four main parallels between the experience of the beautiful and the morally good. First, Kant notes that judgments about the beautiful please immediately through the act of reflection and not through concepts, as is done by the good. The immediacy of feeling after the experiences of the beautiful or the morally good is a common element in this symbolization of the latter in the former. The second aspect concerns the nature of this pleasure—both the beautiful and the morally good lack a connection to antecedent desires. Interests arise after the experience of the beautiful or the morally good (moral feeling, empirical or intellectual interest in the beautiful, etc.). The pleasure created by both experiences comes from human nature’s implication of elements that go beyond sensible determination. In the case of the morally good, the moral law is the nonsensuous source of our autonomy, and for the beautiful, our mental faculties and their interaction with nature highlight a source of pleasure that transcends sensuous pleasure. The third important convergence is that the freedom of the imagination in judging the beautiful object is “in accord with the lawfulness of the understanding.” In moral experience the freedom of the will agrees with itself through its own rational lawgiving—it gives its own law to itself. In the experience of beauty, it is as if the imagination was issuing law in line with the dictates of the understanding, leaving these two faculties outside of their normal hierarchical relationship. Fourth, “the subjective principle for judging of the beautiful is represented as universal, i.e., valid for everyone, but not as knowable by any universal concept” (CJ 5:354). The concepts implicated in morality are universally valid, but they are determinate concepts; this feature results in a strict demand for adherence from subjects. The beautiful involves such a universal validity, but the lack of determinate conceptual content leads one away from demanding of others that they recognize a given object as beautiful. While the beautiful and the morally good differ in important ways, Kant finds that there are enough similarities in their experiential qualities to identify the former as a symbolic presentation of the latter in an agent’s interaction with the physical world.
Being the symbol of the morally good, the beautiful illustrates that the worlds of nature and freedom can converge. It is as if a part of the world of nature, in the experience of the beautiful object or scene, was designed by us to please our faculties of sense and understanding. The harmony created in us by such experiences seems as if it must be purposeful. While judgments of taste fall short of being an actual phenomenal experience of freedom, they can point the reflective agent to the realm of the moral through the world of nature.6 This bridging of the two realms through the sensible experience of the beautiful is Kant’s answer in the Critique of the Power of Judgment to doubts about the possibility of living up to the strict demands of morality in the physical world. Duty involves the idea of a will that includes subjective hindrances (inclinations) and as such locates the challenge to duty in the physical world—if an agent is to be virtuous, one must be able to surmount the physical forces (inclinations) in the physical world. The symbolic presentation of the morally good through the beautiful supports the possibility of countervailing inclinations being overcome in a human agent by respect for the moral law. This symbolic experience is taken by Kant to be more concrete evidence for the reality of the demands of morality—the only difference is that the present presentation of the beautiful provides for the possibility of future realizations of moral worth in a given agent’s will. Kant finds solace with the unification here of the two aspects of his critical philosophy—the straightforward command of the moral law and the possibility of the physical world being amenable to our following of this moral vocation.
Kant finds that such a presentation offered by the experience of the beautiful can have definite effects in moral development in addition to being a symbol of the morally good (aiding in comprehending moral experience and duty). Humans typically associate beauty with implications of moral quality, but the actual experience of the symbolic presentation of the morally good can have an even greater cultivating effect on an agent. Discussing this value of beauty as a symbol of the morally good and its associated judgment of taste, Kant states, “Taste as it were makes possible the transition from sensible charm to the habitual moral interest without too violent of a leap by representing the imagination even in its freedom as purposively determinable for the understanding and teaching us to find a free satisfaction in the objects of the senses even without any sensible charm” (CJ 5:354). Several claims are evident in this passage. First, Kant explicitly connects the judgment of beauty with moral development, although not in a causally necessary manner. The experience of beauty is one of the types of experience that can help us morally improve. Second, the way taste operates involves the transcending of mere sensible charm to a purposeless purposiveness. In other words, the experience of an object, especially one without a designer or creator, seems designed to get us to react in a perfectively harmonious fashion. This latter state transcends the agendas of specific, limited physical creatures. Taste—reflected and promoted in the experience of the beautiful by a particular subject—is important because it is a means self-cultivation from mere animality to the type of autonomous agent moved not by sensibility but by practical reason.7 It helps us become fully free and rationally self-directing by showing us our freedom. The imagination is experienced as free from the constraints of nature in terms of purposive determination and also in its assisting the individual in locating pleasure free of sensuous interests. At the conclusion of section 59, Kant makes the important claim that receptivity to the commands of the moral law is heightened by and through the exercise of taste, leading one to suspect that beauty as a symbol holds more potential than merely clarifying the nature of duty. As the present chapter shows, moral duty in Kant’s scheme involves a rigorous commitment to a form of disinterestedness or at least to a revaluing of self in regard to others. In addition to showing us an experiential analogue to the disinterested pursuit of duty, the experience of the beautiful can function in moral motivation as an incentive to be moral. It is an experience that informs as well as forms us into moral agents. With the experience of freedom revealed, we also are motivated to be and act as free in our future endeavors.
Rhetoric and the Beautiful
The experience of the beautiful is clearly linked to moral cultivation in Kant’s account. Beauty as analogical presentation of vital parts to moral experience helps us experientially understand and will what is commanded by morality. But rarely does one see the concept of rhetoric linked to either beauty or moral improvement in accounts of Kant’s thought. Why does rhetoric lack the qualities necessary to promote such instances of hypotyposis, or symbolic presentations and experiences of morally edifying concepts? This book’s overarching argument is that rhetoric can create such experiences, but here we must examine why many see rhetoric as antithetical to such morally improving uses of human skill. Kant’s putative hostility toward rhetoric emerges most clearly