Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric. Scott R. Stroud
Kunst zu überreden. Kant seems to resonate more with the hints in Blair’s account that describe the nature of the highest form of eloquence as “always the offspring of passion” (in the German translation, “jederzeit die Wirkung der Leidenschaft”).17 For Blair, this “higher degree of eloquence” involves “a greater power [that] is exerted over the human mind, and by which we are not only convinced, but are interested, agitated, and carried along with the speaker: our passions rise with his; we enter into all his emotions. . . . We are prompted to resolve, or to act, with vigor and warmth.”18 Blair can be seen as attributing the cause of audience action to the external effect of the orator stoking their emotions, as he explains that “by passion we mean that state of the mind [translated as “Zustand der Seele”] in which it is agitated and fired by some object it has in view.”19 The mindless, passionate nature of this type of persuasion emerges later in Blair’s description when he glosses it as “the universally acknowledged effect of enthusiasm in public speaking, for affecting their audience.”20 The translation of the latter part of this statement in the German edition of Kant’s day highlights the emotional, almost physical, forces at work: what is recognized is the “allgemein anerkannte Wirkung des Enthusiasmus und Art von Wärme des Redners auf die Gemüther der Zuhörer.”21 “Enthusiasm” (Enthusiasmus) in a speaker and the physical “heating” (Wärme des Redners auf die Gemüther der Zuhörer) of the passions of a listener by a speaker are not morally laudatory communicative means for Kant. They are part of the “deceitful art [hinterlistigen Kunst]” that uses language to “move people, like machines, to a judgment in important matters which must lose all weight for them in calm reflection.” The use of emotional appeals to stoke the passions in a way that they would not naturally and of an individual’s own accord be raised is problematic. This was the “art of the orator [Rednerkunst] (ars oratoria)” that used “the weakness of people for one’s own purposes (however well intentioned or even really good these may be)” (CJ 5:328n). From Kant’s point of view, such a powerful use of human communication as encapsulated by the concepts of Beredsamkeit and Rednerkunst was ultimately impugnable on moral grounds. The practice of using language to subvert the understanding through evoking the passions represented an external control over what should be an internally guided agent; such a use of rhetoric violates human autonomy.
Other sources might have contributed to this characterization of rhetoric (e.g., that denoted by Kant’s description of Beredsamkeit and Rednerkunst). One of Kant’s pupils from the early 1780s, Daniel Jenisch (1762–1804), translated George Campbell’s 1776 Philosophy of Rhetoric into German in 1791.22 This translation was published a year after the first printing of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment in April 1790, but one can speculate that Campbell’s ideas on rhetoric might have been in circulation in Kant’s intellectual circles before their formal publication. And, like Blair’s work, we can use these in a hermeneutically sympathetic attempt to figure out what trends of the time Kant’s views on rhetoric might reflect. Similar to Blair’s views, Campbell links rhetoric to purposive effects on an auditor’s passions. Campbell saw the art of rhetoric as a “useful art” that “not only pleases, but, by pleasing commands attention, rouses the passions, and often at last subdues the most stubborn resolution.”23 It is purposive in that it can be aimed at a variety of ends a speaker may pursue; indeed, at the very beginning of Book I, Campbell defines rhetoric by the presence of an end being pursued through speech. This sort of end-directedness combines with a powerful evocation of the passions to form the same sort of worries that Blair’s account might have provoked. But what can be said is that wherever Kant received his views of Beredsamkeit and Rednerkunst, Kant worried about a practice of manipulative rhetoric. This practice, through using and evoking passions in pursuit of a speaker’s own ends, results in an audience member’s “maxims and dispositions” being “subjectively corrupted” (CJ 5:327).24 Put simply, the evocation of emotions subverts the audience’s powers of reason to get their cooperation in pursuit of a speaker’s ends, which renders such a practice manipulative and harmful to audience freedom. Reason is the vital aspect to humans truly determining their own projects and actions. By subverting or minimizing the role of reason in the decision-making activities of their audience, rhetors harm an audience’s capacity for self-direction or autonomy. What Kant is objecting to is the fact that such rhetorical deception moves people without their choosing the maxims of action or without an accurate knowledge of the principle on which they are acting (viz., in cases of deception). As Robert J. Dostal puts it, the externality of this sort of rhetoric’s force means that “Rhetoric confines one to Unmündigkeit [tutelage]—external direction.”25 Of course, we know from Kant’s 1784 essay, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” that “enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority [Unmündigkeit]” (8:35).26 Such a rhetoric moves people as machines and keeps them in a state of non–self-direction. It does nothing to lift them from a state of minority or control by another agent. Kant’s notion of self-direction is elucidated in the 1780s and 1790s in the form of the moral autonomy that he wanted agents to cultivate. In either vocabulary, however, what Kant prized was rational self-direction, and rhetoric seemed to be a threat to the self-direction of those whom a speaker addressed.
Does this demonstrate that Kant clearly had one denotation to the term “rhetoric” and the sort of practice it implied? The negative notion of rhetoric as the “art of the orator” is Rednerkunst, a “deceitful art” (CJ 5:328n). But this is not the whole of rhetoric in Kant, especially if we mean by that term persuasive uses of skilled speech. What one sees is that in all his major discussions of this term as pejorative practice, room is still left for positive employments. We must remember that Kant explicitly excludes from his prominent definition of rhetoric (Beredsamkeit) “skill in speaking (eloquence and style) [bloße Wohlredenheit (Eloquenz und Stil)]” (5:327). And right next to his disparagement of this “deceitful art,” the “art of the orator [Rednerkunst] (ars oratoria),” Kant praises “eloquence and well-spokenness [Beredtheit und Wohlredenheit] (together, rhetoric [Rhetorik])” which “belong to beautiful art” (5:328n). Thus, while Kant hates a sense of rhetoric, it is unclear that his thought excludes all senses of rhetoric as skilled speaking.
Finding a notion of rhetoric in Kant depends on what is identified as textually representing the concept of rhetoric and what interpretative choices are made in its emphasis. If we pose the question in a simple fashion—Kant has a notion of rhetoric, what is it and what is its value?—then the answer we will identify will be equally simple. Yet this simplicity is misleading. Taking Rednerkunst (or Beredsamkeit as eloquence in speaking for harmful goals) as the whole of Kant’s notion of rhetoric leaves us with rhetoric being glossed as manipulative skill in communication. There are other leads to follow, of course, that make the situation much more complex. Taking Kant’s references to Eloquenz and Rhetorik, or his nonpejorative references to the skill of Beredsamkeit or Beredtheit, one sees room to construct a Kantian sense of skillful communication that moves people in a nonmanipulative fashion. Such a sense of nonmanipulative rhetoric focuses on eloquently and skillfully using language to encourage the sort of dispositional change that is the core of Kant’s moral philosophy. Such a reclaimed, sympathetic sense of Kantian rhetoric can unite the goals of education and moral cultivation with the means of communication. Such communicative encouragement is not motivated by intentions to subvert the autonomy of other agents. It will freely educate or cultivate them. Indeed, after he indicates in the Critique of the Power of Judgment that “rhetoric” (as deception) is not suited for education, Kant advocates a certain way of communicating in educational situations—that of the use of ideas of reason (and morality) through “a lively presentation in examples [lebhaften Darstellung in Beispielen]” (5:327). This is similar to his advocacy of religious imagery, examples, and narrative in his Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793) as a “vivid presentation” of the ideas of morality (6:132–33).27 As chapter 5 explicates, the religious context shows the applicability of persuasive communicative means (rhetoric in a nonpejorative sense) to adult development or cultivation. A