Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric. Scott R. Stroud
such simple, universal pronouncements about rhetoric in Kant’s thought. If it can be shown that he has a complex take on the value and use of communicative action, then we must not lump all such action into a term we know as “rhetoric” and judge that Kant hated what it denotes. We must resist the urges to fit Kant’s thought—known only as we synthetically translate, interpret, or read it—into narratives with which we may be familiar, as such a move risks closing off the option of finding a sense of Kantian rhetoric that we may otherwise find. This is unfortunately what occurs when Kant is placed (occasionally due to his own sloppy utterances) on the side of Plato in the battle of rhetoric versus philosophy. This is also what happens when we envision Kant’s operative binary as being one of reason versus rhetoric. This book instead takes the notion of rhetoric to imply human communicative practices orientated toward persuasion, belief formation, and actional change and asks the more complex questions: What senses of such rhetorical action are enjoined by Kant’s complex thought on morality, religion, politics, aesthetics, and education? Taking “rhetoric” not as a simple term but as a complex concept, what uses or forms of rhetorical activity fit into Kant’s mature thought, especially the important topic of morality and the formation of the ideal sort of human community?
Asking questions such as these get us beyond simply determining on which side Kant was in the debate between reason and rhetoric or between rhetoric and philosophy. It allows this project to extend the small body of literature on Kant in communication studies and rhetoric that has seen rhetorical promise in his way of thinking about aesthetics and morality.15 Here I engage a wide range of his systematic philosophical thought, including his later works in the 1790s—his Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, his Metaphysics of Morals, and his lectures on anthropology and education. This endeavor demonstrates that a more productive course exists than addressing Kant and rhetoric by simply moving past him or by fixating on him as an enemy of rhetoric. This new path considers the ends and ideals resident in his moral and aesthetic projects not as exclusive of communicative activities but as integrally involving the communicative means and goals we can associate with some rhetorical activity. This more nuanced reading of the value and uses of human communication in his moral project constitutes the rhetorical side that many have overlooked in Kant.
There is a clear need to bring Kant into conversation with communication and rhetoric. His thought has had an undoubted influence on theorizing in many disciplines. His account of aesthetic judgment as detached and disinterested has influenced vital strands of twentieth-century aesthetics. It also serves as a foil for the rhetorical theories that have resisted such disinterestedness. Yet Kant sees the experience of art and the aesthetic as intimately connected to moral matters. This book answers the question: can we reclaim rhetoric as part of Kant’s project of moral improvement, of molding an individual into a caring and consistent community member? Part of the answer lies in understanding Kant and his contemporaries better. Another part of the answer resides in employing a more sympathetic, pragmatic methodology to actively reconstruct and build a role for rhetoric in Kant’s system of moral cultivation. Considering the possibility that not all communicative activity oriented toward specific audiences is forbidden by Kant, we can reconsider ways of reading Kant, interpreting conflicting utterances, and envisioning his moral program in ways that foreground a sense of rhetoric we have overlooked or ignored. In pursuing such a project, we can see a way that rhetoric and human communication can help move us to the sort of ideal community that Kant postulates as the goal of moral improvement.
A central concept in reading rhetoric back into Kant’s philosophy is the notion of rhetorical experience, or the use of the experience of a message receiver in the persuasion of that receiver. When we communicate with others, we use various utterances and appeals that are experienced by us and our audience over time. This experience might be one that actively requires the use of certain capacities (such as attentive reasoning), or it might be one that thwarts such processes. This book serves as a thorough exposition of rhetorical experience and its connection to morality in Kant’s system. This account is grounded in the Kantian project of moral cultivation—how we make ourselves and our communities more virtuous and capable of instantiating autonomy. In Kant’s terminology, the question of moral improvement is how we move to more cultivated, sustainable, and systematic states in terms of how we act as rational agents. My project illustrates the barriers to such moral cultivation noted in Kant’s moral philosophy from the 1790s (namely, the gulf between the orderly use of external freedom and the consistent and respectful exercise of inner freedom) and then discusses how Kant sees religious, aesthetic, and educative means of communication (such as religious narrative and disinterested debate) as ways of noncoercively moving agents toward a more perfect moral state. Thus, my project connects Kantian views of morality, aesthetics, religion, and education through the attention to communicative means en-shrined in the concept of the rhetorical. Such a way of analyzing rhetoric in Kant moves us beyond the simple opposition of the rhetorical versus the rational and into a more nuanced conception of rhetoric as manipulative or nonmanipulative. This is equivalent to what I identify as Kant’s educative rhetoric, since both draw on the powers of reason to imaginatively shape the experience of an audience in such a way as to preserve and promote their autonomy.
This project is a detailed pursuit that requires a sensitivity to a variety of domains of Kant’s architectonic thought. Chapter 1 sets the stage for my constructive engagement with Kantian rhetoric by considering the hostile reaction of many in rhetorical studies to Kant on rhetoric. Twentieth-century work has not fabricated the Kantian distrust of the many communicative practices denoted by the term “rhetoric.” It is real. This chapter explores the historical reasons why Kant may have overstated his case in some of his more exaggerated utterances concerning rhetoric. An important cause of Kant’s distaste for rhetoric evident in some of his negative pronouncements was his relationship with Christian Garve (1742–98), an important German translator of Cicero, friendly antagonist to Kant, and “popular philosopher.” Kant saw such a popular philosophy movement and the rhetorical-artistic means it often employed as exemplifying the manipulation inherent in a rhetorically influenced philosophy.
Chapter 2 engages Kant’s specific criticisms of rhetoric. It explores the reasons that Kant has for his opposition to one conception of rhetoric. Also, I problematize the ways we translate and conceptually simplify the notion of rhetoric in Kant’s corpus. From examining the multitude of rhetorical terms in Kant’s writings and the various valences of their use, it is far from clear that Kant hated any simple, unified thing known as rhetoric. Following an opening in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, I submit both rhetoric and poetry to another experiment in definition and argue that Kant objected to both rhetoric and poetry when they were motivated by certain end-driven orientations or dispositions. He also allowed room for various objects to be experienced as beautiful or sublime depending on the orientation of the observer. Thus, I argue that orientation is a vital part to rendering rhetoric and poetry as types of practices that create vivid presentations of morally edifying ideas and concepts. This account of orientation, creative genius, and aesthetic ideas presages a way to include a reconstructed notion of rhetoric into Kant’s philosophical system, largely through notions of disinterest and the orientation of the ones communicating.
To understand Kant on rhetoric, one must understand Kant on autonomy and freedom. Chapter 3 engages in the necessary step of determining the ends or goals to Kant’s normative scheme. This is absolutely essential to reclaiming a Kantian sense of rhetoric, since some of his utterances and virtually all the readings of his detractors fixate on rhetoric in its immoral or manipulative employments. This book, on the other hand, wants to delineate a nonmanipulative or educative sense of rhetorical activity that fits into Kant’s moral scheme of individual and communal improvement, so attention must be paid to what he thinks human activity ought to accomplish. This chapter explores the ideal of freedom and autonomy in his important moral work the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). This is vital, since nonmanipulative uses of rhetorical means are the uses that preserve and promote individuals’ capability to rationally and freely direct their own projects. Kant’s notion of systemic harmony of individual agents acting and respecting