Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric. Scott R. Stroud
for autonomy, but instead to engage agents’ judgment with ideas of moral importance.
The main point that emerges from these considerations is that any claim that Kant hates the concept of rhetoric is misleading in how it simplifies both rhetoric and Kant’s stance on that communicative term. One conceptually shorthands the matter when one says, like Don Paul Abbott, that “Kant’s disdain for rhetoric is extraordinary.”28 There are clearly uses of communicative means of which Kant disapproves, but the general concept of rhetoric is not so perfectly determined that one can judge Kant as hostile to all its implications and employments. The fact is that Kant uses a variety of ways to denote communicative means and practices, some of which we have discussed in this chapter and others which appear in later chapters. The multitude of German terms (see table 1) that Kant uses to discuss the general idea of skilled, eloquent speaking necessarily ensures this will be complex conceptual terrain. Which one of these terms stands for rhetoric as a unified conceptual whole? What justifies an interpretative decision to exclude the context and use of some of these terms for the context and use of others? If one defines rhetoric as only that persuasion toward harmful, manipulative ends, then one can rightfully say Kant opposed “rhetoric.” Perhaps one could tether such a view to Kant’s use of Beredsamkeit. But how do we account for Kant’s positive conceptions of eloquence or even Rhetorik? Surely such terms should fit into a comprehensive conception of rhetoric.
The most defensible route would be to recognize that the concept of communicatively interacting with others extends beyond one way of inflecting the practices of persuading others. What often misleads us are the simplifications and choices necessarily involved in translation and interpretation. Beredsamkeit is translated in the Critique of the Power of Judgment as “rhetoric” and, more important, as a practice that entails manipulation. Nearby, however, Eloquenz and Rhetorik are used and translated as “eloquence” and “rhetoric” in nonmanipulative senses. Beredsamkeit could as easily been translated as “eloquence.” Clearly, the larger genus of “skilled speaking” or eloquence is relevant to Kant’s moral project. If one honors the complexity of the phenomena of human communication and the range of terms being used by Kant, one can conceptualize rhetoric simply as the persuasive use of language in community with others. The clearest point at which Kant’s various senses of rhetoric come into contact occurs in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. In one important passage that I have already noted, we see the foundation for the multivalent sense of rhetoric I want to make explicit in Kant’s thought. There, he differentiates “rhetoric [Beredsamkeit], insofar as by that is understood the art of persuasion, i.e., of deceiving by means of beautiful illusion (as an ars oratoria)” from “skill in speaking (eloquence and style) [bloße Wohlredenheit (Eloquenz und Stil)]” (5:327). Kant then objects to rhetoric being used in education or civil affairs, since these are such serious matters. What is telling, however, is the room for alternate conceptions of rhetoric that Kant leaves while he castigates one specific form of communicative practice. Kant advises that instead of rhetoric in these serious matters, we ought to rely on
The merely distinct concept of these sorts of human affairs, combined with a lively presentation in examples [lebhaften Darstellung in Beispielen], and without offense against the rules of euphony in speech or of propriety in expression, for ideas of reason (which together constitute eloquence [Wohlredenheit]), already has in itself sufficient influence on human minds, without it being necessary to also bring to bear the machinery of persuasion [Maschinen der Überredung], which, since it can also be used for glossing over or concealing vice and error, can never entirely eradicate the deep-seated suspicion of artful trickery. (5:327)
This passage, when combined with the former dismissals of rhetoric, contains the distinction between the sort of communicative practices Kant finds as morally valuable and those that he finds morally faulty. We can label these two senses of rhetoric as persuasive communicative interaction with others as (1) manipulative rhetoric and (2) nonmanipulative rhetoric. Later chapters give us the conceptual resources to flesh out the latter category as educative in quality and effect. For now, the conceptual contrast between these two uses is enough to show Kant’s take on the potentialities of communication. Manipulative rhetoric can be seen to have the following three characteristics. First, it involves an inequality of knowledge, mainly between what speakers know about their intentions and what the audience thinks they know about the speakers’ intentions. Such a lack of publicity of the speakers’ ultimate plans for the communicative encounter is essential for the sorts of deception and manipulation that Kant will fault on moral grounds. Second, this sort of rhetoric exerts a causal force on its listeners. It short-circuits their ability to rationally agree to what is said in the same way that speakers agree or disagree (for instance, in the case of speakers not “signing on” to a lie they are telling) and merely moves them as a machine. How rhetoric can treat humans as inherently valuable rational beings, or as machines with causality, is a theme in later chapters of this work. Third, another hallmark to this sort of rhetoric would be the idiosyncrasy of its goals. This is not as evident from the passage as the other two features, but it is there; when one resorts to “trickery,” it is only through keeping private one’s own goals in the interaction. One’s goals and ends in such an interaction tend to be hidden and self-focused—they don’t involve others the same way they implicate one’s self, and one does not give others the chance to rationally agree to help one in the pursuit of these goals. They are moved like machines for one’s purposes.
The second sort of rhetoric—what I call nonmanipulative rhetoric—is intimated in this passage. It has four characteristics, all of which are explicated through the course of this book. First, nonmanipulative rhetoric features domain-specific concepts and knowledge. There is something to talk about and of which to persuade others. These are not merely pure ideas of reason, since Kant draws a distinction in this passage between “ideas of reason” and “the merely distinct concept of these sorts of human affairs.” He must be pointing to different constituents of education: parts that are specific to its practice and parts that reside in one’s faculty of practical reason (ideas of human moral worth, say). Second, when one argues about such matters, they do not speak the language of the mind. Their speech involves what Kant calls “lively presentations,” especially through examples. As demonstrated in later chapters, there are a variety of techniques for using language to make present or palatable ideas resident in human reason. In other words, rhetorical style plays a role in “hypotyposis,” or making understandable abstract ideals to human agents who often want to be very concrete and specific. Third, this nonmanipulative practice of rhetoric does not offend certain negative rules or principles. Kant gestures toward “the rules of euphony in speech [Sprache] or of propriety in expression [Ausdruck],” and we can take him as meaning a moral sense of self-regulation, as hinted at with his use of Wohllauts and Wohlanständigkeit (“euphony in speech” and “propriety in expression,” respectively). He clearly advocates vivid, domain-sophisticated speech that does not cross the lines of “respectability” or “good soundingness.” These terms are not direct analogues with his moral concepts of choice, but it is clear that Kant’s sense of nonmanipulative rhetoric enshrines a great amount of respect for the various parties in the interaction. This respect for the plurality of agents involved in moral activity is a hallmark of Kant’s moral thought, starting with its valuation of rational agency in any form (as either speaker/agent or audience/patient). Fourth, Kant’s nonmanipulative rhetoric features goals that are public or transitive across agents. Later chapters explore this further, but manipulative rhetoric typically gets its force and direction from individualized ends; nonmanipulative rhetoric features ends that are at least known to all and communicative practices that do not draw their power from sources unknown to one party (such as an audience ignorant of speakers’ lack of belief in their own utterances about some matter).
Manipulative rhetoric is characterized by one agent treating other agents in a way that subverts their rational cooperation, whereas nonmanipulative