Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric. Scott R. Stroud
that would be gained through determinate concept usage. It is not overtly aimed toward the persuasion of the audience, on this account. How can such objections be overcome if one wants to sort out a Kantian sense of rhetoric as artful and as an important part of his moral project?
I offer an answer to this question by first problematizing poetry and then by reclaiming it as art along with rhetoric in its good employments. While Kant clearly elevated poetry as a beautiful art over rhetoric, one can see that Kant was ultimately skeptical of such fine art as a disinterested creator of the free play of the faculties. Why would poetry, for example, come under such skeptical criticism given its stated ability to convey aesthetic ideas? The reason is simple. Fine art, as a human endeavor, is saturated with concepts and the teleology they presuppose. Art is created by a purposive agent (the artist), and this more often than not brings in concepts of ends that are desired. These could simply be mimetic ends (a desire to accurately represent real object x), but they are still the sort of limited conceptual overlay on the art object about which Kant is concerned. Such a conceptual overlay of specific desired ends introduces ideas of perfection and aptness of the object to those ends and hence hurts an art object’s universal or free beauty (CJ 5:230). For Kant, fine art cannot match the nonpurposive purpose seen in works of natural beauty—the latter seem designed to evoke a harmonious response in us, even though we have no evidence there was a designer behind the appearance of that landscape, say. He argues that one can be taken by the song of a nightingale as a beautiful object until one discovers it is merely a deceptive ploy of a landlord attempting to please guests at his house (5:302). Once it is discovered that the pleasing sound is not of nature but is of human construction (a hidden whistling servant), one is distracted by the conceptual overlay of deception for a specific end (pleasing paying customers). The conceptual content is what evokes and controls our response to the fake birdsong, and this is not radically different from other putatively nondeceptive works of well-wrought drama.
Kant is concerned about the teleological directing of one agent’s experience by another agent’s activity. As Paul Guyer notes, this shaping of experience is problematic on moral grounds as “our response to the beauty and sublimity of nature stands in more intimate connection, both as it were theoretical and practical, to our freedom than does our response to art.” Kant assumes that “a work of art may either be taken for a natural beauty, in which case it defrauds us and is thereby obviously disqualified from even symbolic moral significance by its own immorality, or else that it is explicitly recognized as the product of the intentional activity of another person, in which case it can hardly symbolize our own autonomy.”32 The fake birdsong deceptively mimics nature. Even if it were performed in a concert hall, Kant would still wonder if our response to it was truly autonomous, or if it was merely falling in line with the forethought and desires of the creating artist. Like rhetoric, art seems to fall into concerns about manipulation. While Kant advances a theory of genius to allow for art that creates its own rules (through naturally inspired talent), it is clear that genius also could be misused in manipulative or nonoriginal senses. Again, one can ask, why insist on the division between poetry as art and rhetoric as manipulation if both sorts of purposive human activities have worrisome aspects?
Given this newly enunciated doubt about poetry, must rhetoric necessarily be opposed to poetry and to nonmanipulative ways of communicating? If this is the case, the hope for this project of elucidating a Kantian rhetoric would be slim. Or might rhetoric be redeemed in the same way that poetry could be saved? Many think that Kant is prima facie opposed to rhetoric as a beautiful art—a practice that is nonmanipulative and correlated with the free play of the faculties. Indeed, Kant gives this impression when he sometimes characterizes rhetoric as mere manipulation. But two things should give us pause here. (1) As noted in the previous section, Kant does not equate rhetoric qua manipulation to all human communication. Thus, it seems that Kant does not a priori exclude rhetoric from art or from nonmanipulative communicative activities. (2) The division of the beautiful arts and their modalities (word, gesture, and tone) in the section of the Critique of the Power of Judgment that defines poetry and rhetoric is clearly labeled as an “experiment [Versuch]” (5:320). Even more than this, it is identified as only one of “several experiments [mancherlei Versuchen]” (5:320n) or attempts that could be made at dividing up the beautiful arts. Not only could other attempts be made at analyzing the arts, but Kant indicates that these could and should (kann und soll) be attempted (5:320). Might another Kantian way of analyzing rhetoric and poetry delineate and preserve space for the nonmanipulative sense of rhetoric I have argued is present in Kant’s aesthetic system?
What I want to propose is that poetry and rhetoric—all the arts in general—can be divided in another way within the bounds of Kant’s general account. This way of analyzing the arts would focus on the disposition or state of mind involved in the activity and its reception. There are ways of taking an object and there are ways of seeing the values of doing that activity as an agent. Thus, a receiver might be oriented toward an action in such a way as to foreground ends and progress or as the kind of object conducive to the free play of one’s cognitive faculties. The same sort of orientation choices confront doers, be they aspiring poets or speakers. Their manner of thinking can focus them on outcomes, or on the process of communicating important ideas. This issue of orientation is the “manner of thinking” (Denkungsart) that Kant discusses (CJ 5:274), as well as the “disposition of mind” (Gemutsstimmung) to which he refers (2:273). He also calls this one’s “comportment of mind” (Gesinnung) at various places. This is what I referred to as the “orientation” of the rhetor in the previous section. G. Felicitas Munzel thoroughly tracks these terms through Kant’s precritical and critical work and finds them to be important constituent parts to what we would identify in Kant as a notion of character. Both of these terms are inherently connected to the project of pursuing morality or the ways we interact with and value other human agents vis-à-vis our own pursuits. Denkungsart deals with how we adopt principles or maxims to guide our thinking and actions; Munzel concludes that “maxim adoption is definitive of the conduct of thought itself.”33
In Kant’s later moral work, this is the choice that comes down to how we guide ourselves in and through evaluative choices inherent in our maxims. Later chapters explore how Kant fleshes this out in his works on morality, but here we can see that consistently setting maxims to determine who we are over a span of activity is a vital part to what it means to take part in forming one’s character. It is a vital component to the Kantian scheme of moral cultivation that I sketch in this book. And it also is an important object of rhetorical activity. Also built into my use of orientation is Gesinnung. This term features prominently in Kant’s work in the 1790s, and it is often difficult to distinguish it as a concept from Denkungsart. Indeed, they both are very similar in that they concern how agents orient themselves toward others through the action-guiding maxims they put in place. Munzel’s analysis integrally connects Gesinnung to the realm of morality: “In a morally good character, comportment of mind consists in conformity to the spirit of the law characterizing the maxims, activities, and capacities of mind.”34 One might be tempted to make the following distinction to clarify matters for the following study. Whereas Denkungsart covers a range of maxim choices, one’s Gesinnung summarizes the moral orientation of agents—how they value and act in light of their ends and the ends of others and how they treat other agents. Both would be ways of pointing out the fact that, for Kant, how agents orient themselves toward others matters. This orientation involves issues of means-ends calculation, systemic unity (among maxims chosen), and, most important, issues of value. What values guide our use of certain means? In Kant’s third Critique, some of these references to orientation come in his discussion of the sublime, which, albeit different from the experience of the beautiful, focuses on similar linguistic or natural objects being taken as sublime or beautiful due largely to the state of mind of a receiver. The example of the “starry heavens” is given as possibly sublime—but only if it is taken or judged not in its conceptual aspects but instead as a “broad all-embracing vault” (CJ 5:270). The sublimity of this natural object depends on the subject taking it in a nonconceptual way. In a similar fashion, Kant discusses art and the necessary purpose that comes with it, but he notes that “beautiful art must be regarded as nature, although of course one is aware of it as art” (5:307).