Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric. Scott R. Stroud
respects the audience’s powers of self-direction. This second sense is the sort of morally cultivating or educative rhetoric that this book explores, arguing that there are vital uses of nonmanipulative rhetoric that Kant encourages. As opposed to Dostal’s accusation that Kant’s only positive sense of rhetoric is as “style,” I make the argument that educative rhetoric does specify elements of invention and arrangement of content that have a vital impact on the states and powers of an audience.29 How one talks and argues has important educative significance in the quest to morally affect others. One must also notice that the vital difference between these two classes of rhetoric is not a specific tactic (e.g., the use of imaginative or figurative language) but instead the orientation behind the use of given tactics in specific situations by a rhetor. Figurative language can be used in a speaker’s purposive scheme to disempower the audience, or it could be used with the intention of empowering the audience. The vital feature of the immoral orientation is the valuing of the self-focused ends and goals over the ends and capacity for choice in the audience. The orientation behind manipulative uses of speech by some rhetors foregrounds the intention to use their audience as a mere means, whereas others might want to get their audiences to freely agree to pursue a certain presented path of action.
In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant refers to Quintilian’s ideal rhetor (misattributed to Cicero, however) as a moralized and eloquent agent: “He who has at his command, along with clear insight into the facts, language in all its richness and purity, and who, along with a fruitful imagination capable of presenting his ideas, feels a lively sympathy for the true good, is the vir bonus dicendi peritus, the speaker without art but full of vigor, as Cicero would have him, though he did not himself always remain true to this ideal” (5:328n).30 Regardless of his disagreements with the details of Cicero’s moral thought, Kant agrees with this general ideal of the perfect rhetor—one who is oriented or moralized in the right way and who consequently uses communicative means in interacting with an audience in the right way. Like Kant’s praise of the beautiful, such orators have imaginative ways of presenting ideas central to morality. They have access to domain-specific knowledge, as well as the publically accessible ideas of reason (such as the ideas of morality). Future chapters flesh out what moralization meant to Kant, but here it is enough to say that the orientation or disposition guiding a particular rhetor is vital in determining if the activity manipulates the audience, or if it respects and enhances that audience’s capacity for rational self-direction. The ideas of morality are not simply a way to affect an audience; they also govern a speaker or rhetor’s actions in pursuing specific goals. An ideal rhetor values the persons that compose the audience as morality would command. Assuming the focus on orientation as vital for analyzing the moral worth behind one’s concrete actions, there is much room left for an account of what kinds of communicative choices Kant would allow and encourage and those that he would find to be manipulative. The following chapters in this book provide a full account of what makes those practices typically implied by Kant’s mentions of Beredsamkeit undesirable and those implied by the mentions of Beredtheit, Rhetorik, Wohlredenheit, and Eloquenz desirable. The latter group of practices adds up to Kant’s educative rhetoric and is contrasted to the sense of manipulative rhetoric that Kant castigates.
Problematizing Poetry, Recovering Rhetoric
Even if we see the valuable moral role the experience of beauty plays, and the conceptual room to allow sympathetic senses of rhetoric into our reading of Kant’s overall project, one more problem arises. Rhetoric as purposive language use is not the fine art of poetry. Even if we think of rhetoric as the nonmanipulative use of skilled speech, the danger still exists that it is merely subtle manipulation of an audience through their passions. Poetry, as a fine art, is thought to avoid such a business of affecting a purposive change in an audience, whereas most rhetoric (even sympathetically characterized) does not. Poetry is the sort of linguistic practice that could create the free play of the faculties that Kant tied to the experience of the beautiful. Poetry is connected to taste and beauty primarily because of this freedom from practical ends. Rhetoric frequently moves people (often as machines) because of means enabled by an unscrupulous orator’s orientation, whereas poetry makes no pretenses to such end-based endeavors. Poets merely play with ideas in poems, whereas rhetors seem like they are playing with ideas in their speeches. In reality, rhetors (with good or bad intentions) do this for certain ends of success or effectiveness. This clearly compromises the universality and necessity of the aesthetic experience engendered by the use of persuasive speech, as these ends are one-sided (held only by the rhetor) and are not essential (they are chosen contingently by the rhetor). Kant notes that “beautiful art must be free art in a double sense: it must not be a matter of remuneration, a labor whose magnitude can be judged, enforced, or paid for in accordance with a determinate standard; but also, while the mind is certainly occupied, it must feel itself to be satisfied and stimulated (independently of remuneration) without looking beyond to another end” (CJ 5:321). Beautiful art cannot be an activity done through coercion or force of some sort and must not be connected too closely with a teleological end in the activity. Most rhetoric, on Kant’s account, would definitely fail the latter consideration, as it is clearly end-driven. Indeed, this is what enables its manipulative extremes—an agent wants a goal, so he or she says certain things that are supposed to help achieve that goal when attended to by an audience. The audience’s concerns or status as rational agents are secondary to the achieving of that specific end chosen by rhetors. Even in nonmanipulative employments, the purposiveness still exists—rhetoric seems at base to imply a commitment to somehow persuading or moving an audience to some end.
Poetry lacks such an obvious teleology. All the poet does is “announce a mere play with ideas, but accomplishes something that is worthy of business, namely providing nourishment to the understanding in play, and giving life to its concepts through the imagination” (CJ 5:321). The poet, for Kant, doesn’t try to change the audience; this effect simply happens as a fortunate side effect. This benefit is provided through the free play induced in an auditor by the poet and by the content of poetic art. This latter content is captured in Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas (ästhetischer Ideen). Whereas other ideas and concepts presented in language contain rules for their construction and application, aesthetic ideas share with rational ideas the distinction of going beyond the world of sense in some important fashion. Rational ideas, or ideas of reason (Vernunftideen), contain a concept of the supersensible and thus cannot be wholly captured in any given sensible intuition (5:342). These ideas of reason can be presented through hypotyposis, though. Included in this category are the ideas of freedom, God, and immortality from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788).31 Aesthetic ideas, on the other hand, “cannot become a cognition, because [they are] an intuition (of the imagination) for which a concept can never be found adequate” (5:342). An aesthetic idea is a “representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible” (5:314). Poets can use aesthetic ideas in their work, even though their art is linguistic, because they use language to point at these ideas. Their work does not determinately or concretely exhaust the content of these concepts. Poetry leads to elaborative rich thinking, whereas other uses of language (say, rhetoric) lead to matters being settled in thought or action. On this Kantian view, rhetoric leads to decisive action; poetry leads to more free play involving thought and rich concepts that have no simple meaning.
Thus, two main problems stand out for a comprehensive concept of rhetoric being connected to Kant’s ideal of art that somehow connects to the experiential benefits of the beautiful. First, rhetoric is essentially end-driven, so it might be seen as effectively manipulative and nonaesthetic on Kantian grounds. It does not encourage the free play of the faculties that other linguistic arts (viz., poetry) enable. Focusing on rhetoric as nonmanipulative persuasion (via a speaker’s orientation) might not be enough to alleviate this worry, since its end-directedness and the focus on effectiveness in achieving any end of a speaker renders it teleological in a way that art cannot be. Second, rhetoric’s force also may seem to come from its practical use of determinate concepts (e.g., purposive language designed to affect an end) in its messages. This use of concepts is problematic, as rhetoric seemingly cannot trade in those rich and indeterminate ideas