Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric. Scott R. Stroud
in experience of natural beauty, he expands his inquiry into the beautiful arts (schönen Künste). The subdivision most relevant to this inquiry is his division of “the arts of speech” (redenden Künste), which is subdivided into poetry (Dichtkunst) and rhetoric (Beredsamkeit) (5:321). This division of the speaking arts is also made in his textbook (derived from earlier lectures), Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798).8 There, he makes the same division between poetry and rhetoric (Dichtkunst and Beredsamkeit), but adds that they share the common characteristic of being “aimed at a frame of mind [Stimmung des Gemüths] whereby the mind is directly aroused to activity, and thus they have their place in a pragmatic anthropology, where one tries to know the human being according to what can be made of him” (7:246). Both are characterized as arts that have an effect on the mind or orientation of the listener. Yet Kant distinguishes between them based on how this effect is pursued. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant describes them as follows: “Rhetoric is the art of conducting a business of the understanding as a free play of the imagination; poetry that of carrying out a free play of the imagination as a business of the understanding” (5:321).9 In his Anthropology, a similar distinction emerges: “poetic art [Dichtkunst] as contrasted with rhetoric [Beredsamkeit] differs from it only by the way understanding and sensibility are mutually subordinated: poetic art is a play of sensibility ordered through understanding; rhetoric is a business of understanding animated through sensibility” (7:246). In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant expands his notion of rhetoric in the same fashion: “The orator [Redner] thus announces a matter of business and carries it out as if it were merely a play with ideas in order to entertain the audience. The poet announces merely an entertaining play with ideas, and yet as much results for the understanding as if he had merely had the intention of carrying on its business” (5:321). The poet, whose art induces a free play of the auditor’s faculties, does not intend this specific outcome. Poets are merely playing with concepts, and their artistic skill makes this a significant use of artistic materials in terms of the experience created in their audience. The orator, on the other hand, intends to accomplish goals and projects that are most likely connected to reasoning and concepts. The troublesome point, for Kant, is that the orator makes this look like play. They are conducting “business” (Geschäfte), a term saturated with end-directed, self-focused projects. Yet they play with metaphors, allusions, and all sorts of tropes just like poets do in their art. On the terms of Kant’s aesthetic theory (viz., practices that create the free play of the faculties), the poet comes out more respected than the orator.
Beyond merely appearing to enable a free play of an audience’s faculties, Kant’s rhetor also violates moral strictures. In other words, Kant accuses rhetoric of being manipulative. Poetry is said to expand the mind of its auditors by freeing their imagination; it lets auditors feel the strength of their minds by letting them feel their own mental capacities at play (CJ 5:326). As seen in the terms introduced in the next chapter, poetry enhances one’s autonomy or capacity for free action. Rhetoric fails to freely affect such changes on the mindset of its audience. Such manipulation is a vital part to what seems like Kant’s seminal definition of rhetoric: “rhetoric [Beredsamkeit], insofar as by that is understood the art of persuasion [die Kunst zu überreden], i.e., of deceiving by means of beautiful illusion (as an ars oratoria) and not merely skill in speaking (eloquence and style), is a dialectic, which borrows from the art of poetry only as much as is necessary to win minds over to the advantage of the speaker before they can judge and to rob them of their freedom” (5:327). Kant continues on to say that such an art is not recommended for matters of civil deliberation (in courts, say) or in education, since it is merely silver-tongued manipulation.
Such a view of rhetoric as manipulation is noted by many others who have written on Kant’s relationship with rhetoric, yet few have speculated on where it might come from.10 Kant surely knew of John Locke’s attack on rhetoric in his 1689 work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, as it was integrally tied to epistemological parts of that project that Kant valued.11 In his work Locke put the issue of rhetoric in terms consonant with Kant’s later attack on Beredsamkeit (rhetoric). In Book III of Locke’s work, rhetoric is assailed as part of the “wilful faults and neglects” to which human communication is prone to fall.12 Culminating Locke’s list of the ways words are misused, figurative speech and rhetoric are defined in a very similar way: “But yet if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment, and so, indeed, are perfect cheats.”13 Rhetoric, on Locke’s account, is the purposeful use of figurative speech, allusion, and other such linguistic devices to subvert the true purpose of communication—the direct transmission of ideas for the ends of understanding. Locke, like Kant after him, admits that these devices make for “easier entertainment” while listening to this use of speech. These tactics become useful for the rhetor, however, since rhetoric on this account implicates merely a way to pursue one’s own strategic ends through communication. This end is usually not the normal one of conveying truths. Locke continues his account of the harms of rhetoric (more specifically, of figurative language and allusion) by connecting it to manipulation as Kant does in his account of Beredsamkeit:
Therefore, however laudable or allowable oratory may render them in harangues and popular addresses, they are certainly in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the language or person that makes use of them. What, and how various, they are, it will be superfluous here to take notice; the books of rhetoric which abound in the world, will instruct those who want to be informed. Only I cannot but observe, how little the preservation and improvement of truth and knowledge, is the care and concern of mankind; since the arts of fallacy are endowed and preferred. It is evident how much men love to deceive, and be deceived, since rhetoric, that powerful instrument of error and deceit, has its established professors, is publicly taught, and has always been had in great reputation.14
For Locke, rhetoric was opposed to truth and truth-conveying discourse; it obfuscated important matters, typically for the ends of the orator. Kant’s linkage of rhetoric with deceit and “beautiful illusion” clearly echoes this Lockean criticism, yet Kant adds a more complex moral framework to this objection. Not only does rhetoric obscure truth, it also violates moral limits concerning humans that ought not be transgressed.
How does rhetoric violate not only the demands of truth conveyance but also morality? It does this by being linked to manipulation of humans through their passions, a part of the human character that is importantly separate for Kant from their powers of reason. Reason, in its practical and theoretical form, plays an important role in human self-direction of activities of judgment. The passions were a constant threat to such free determination of our activities in this world. Rhetoric seemed to aim at these passional elements. Where did Kant get this additional characterization of rhetoric? Beyond Garve’s rhetorical self-styling and Ciceronian sympathies, it is useful to look to views of rhetoric that Kant may have had access to in his own time. By its nature, such an endeavor is necessarily speculative, since Kant does not clearly document his rhetorical explorations or influences. Yet we know that Kant seemed to know something about the work of Hugh Blair (who wrote on persuasion, rhetoric, and eloquence), although there are some indications that Kant seemed to not have read him very carefully.15 Blair had defined the core of rhetoric—“eloquence”—as the “art of persuasion; or the art of speaking in such a manner as to attain the end for which we speak. Its most essential requisites are, solid argument, clear method, and an appearance of sincerity in the speaker, with such graces of style and utterance, as shall invite and command attention.”16 The German translation of Blair that Kant would have had access to renders eloquence as “the art of persuasion” in the same terms that Kant eventually uses in the third Critique: die Kunst zu überreden.
Yet whereas Blair’s definition of eloquence builds argument into rhetorical practice, other parts of Blair’s