Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric. Scott R. Stroud
SOURCES OF KANT’S APPARENT ANIMOSITY TO RHETORIC
Most of what people know about Kant comes from his “critical writings,” those in the 1780s and 1790s that expand on the basic project of his magisterial Critique of Pure Reason. This work was the product of an older Kant, a philosopher focused on what he thought he could contribute to the debates of his day. His writing then does have a certain flair, but one may be tempted to see a comprehensively antirhetorical figure. One might think that Kant was fixated on “pure reason” and never came close to the realm of rhetoric—the messy, but important, everyday world. If we look at Kant’s activity as a younger lecturer in the 1760s, however, we see a different communicative moxie. Kant ate every meal somewhere outside his home until well in the 1780s. He ate at friends’ houses for lunch if invited (lunch was the biggest meal of the day in Prussian culture); if not, he ate at a pub (öffentliches Speishaus). He seemed to have liked the social aspects to such meals and the chance to get to talk to everyday, “common” denizens of Königsberg. Kant is said to have left certain places when the discussions became too “affected” and nonconversational or when others expected him to lecture to them ex cathedra.1 Kant enjoyed talking with others as equals. Such conversational vigor transferred to his classroom, where it came out in the form of eloquent lectures. Kant’s lectures are said to have drawn many more students than his own lecture hall could hold. More than this, his style was excellent. A student of his in the 1760s, Johann Gottfried Herder, recalled Kant’s eloquence many years later, even after the two had suffered a drastic difference in opinion over how one should philosophically investigate the human condition. Herder remembered that Kant as lecturer “had the most cheerful sprightliness of a youth . . . his open brow, made for thinking was the seat of clarity; and the most profound and pleasant speech came from his eloquent mouth. Jest, wit, and caprice were in his command—but always at the right time so that everyone laughed. His public lecture was like an entertaining conversation. He spoke about his author, thought on his own, and often beyond the author.”2 Even though Herder would advocate a more popular and rhetorical form of philosophy, he remembered Kant as being a masterful and eloquent rhetor more than thirty years later. What happened to this rhetorical side to Kant? Why do we know him only as the dry, metaphysically focused philosopher who disparaged the arts of rhetoric later in his life?
Part of my overall argument is that part of the blame lies with Kant for this common view that rhetoric played no role in his philosophy; another part of the blame, however, lies in how we imaginatively or unimaginatively approach his thought with rhetorical interests in mind. Why do we commonly think that Kant disparaged the art of rhetoric? If we take the term “rhetoric” to be inherently unstable and ambiguous, we might find it profitable to refine our question—what image of rhetoric did Kant hate in his time, and why did he feel this way toward it? Such a constructive, albeit historically informed, approach might yield further understanding as to why and how Kant overemphasized a certain practice in his pejorative mentions of rhetoric in his later work. It also grants us the conceptual room, fully illustrated in the next chapter, to fill out the sort of beneficial or moralized eloquence that Kant himself displayed in his lively and informative lectures from the 1760s and 1770s. This chapter aims to create an opening for the project of this book by arguing that it is not clear that Kant’s philosophical system necessarily excludes a role for rhetoric as persuasive human communication. The parts of Kant’s work that castigate any notion of rhetoric might simply be an overreaction to dominant forms of philosophizing that overtly allied themselves as “rhetoric.” Understanding the sort of practice of rhetoric that Kant disagrees with is the first step to positively enunciating a sense of Kant’s educative rhetoric. As the later chapters show, one can see Kant’s work in the 1790s as explicating rhetorical, symbolic means of communicating with others that assist in the project of moral cultivation. Here I start this process by attempting to explain the roots of Kant’s hostility to certain uses or types of skill in persuasive speaking (rhetoric, for short). I discuss the historical events that may have led to Kant’s overly negative view of rhetoric.
That Kant hated a narrow, manipulative sense of rhetoric, or skilled speaking, seems a settled debate to many—indeed, Robert J. Dostal notes that Kant “forthrightly castigates rhetoric” in his review of the fine arts.3 But why did Kant tend to emphasize such a negative and limited view, as opposed to his positive mentions of eloquence or rhetoric? Pointing to the fact that Kant defined rhetoric as end-driven, nonaesthetic manipulation of free agents does not give us the full answer we desire, since many in the field of rhetoric could simply wonder, why did Kant tend to define rhetoric as only manipulation? Why didn’t he amplify the positive forms of eloquence and well-spokenness he mentioned in the Critique of the Power of Judgment and displayed in his public lectures? The answer to this question, I submit, is that Kant had strategic, agonistic reasons to tend to conceptualize rhetoric in line with the views of Christian Garve. In addition to teaching rhetoric, Garve translated Aristotle’s On Rhetoric and Cicero’s On Duties into German. His thought privileged social position, happiness as a motive, and honor. Garve clearly was influenced by rhetoric and the rhetorical tradition, including both Aristotle and Cicero. Might Kant have overemphasized a negative sense of rhetoric because of the sort of rhetorical commitments he saw evidenced in the form of the popular philosophers? This thesis is difficult to establish with certainty, since Kant surely knew of Cicero, Quintilian, and rhetoric through his Latin education. Yet this way of framing the debate over Kant’s ultimate view of rhetoric may be useful to enunciate a different way of taking rhetoric on Kantian grounds. It might give us further detail into the kind of persuasive communication that Kant did not see as playing a vital role in his system of moral cultivation. In this chapter, I detail Kant’s relationship to Garve and then argue that differences between these two thinkers in subject matter and style are what drove Kant to propose and reject rhetoric as manipulation. Kant erred on the side of his antirhetorical mentions because he hated the connotations and commitments of one of rhetoric’s most prominent defenders, Christian Garve.
Amity and Animosity Between Kant and Garve
The relationship between Kant and the Breslau philosopher Christian Garve was one of respect and antagonism. Garve, like Kant, was the son of an artisan. Like Kant, he also was plagued by illnesses, both real and imaginary. And most important, he shared an interest in the enlightenment of the public. As Manfred Kuehn recounts in detail, Garve’s relationship with Kant became prominent in the 1780s.4 Kant published his immense Critique of Pure Reason in July 1781. Many of the early readers of this work were relatively stunned by Kant’s rather idiosyncratic vocabulary and his treatment of the work’s central problematics. For instance, Kant’s friend Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88) would pen a metacritique of it on the grounds that it ignored the natural use of language in human societies, but he would not allow publication of this work until after his own death. One of the first prominent public reviews of the work appeared on January 19, 1782, in an anonymous piece in the Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen. The review had two main criticisms of Kant’s first critique. First, it situated and criticized Kant in the tradition of Berkeley’s idealism and insinuated that other arguments are indebted to Hume’s original positions. Thus, the review of Kant “calls attention to two philosophies that had at that time a rather dubious reputation in Germany. . . . The review characterizes Kant’s philosophy in such a way that it would have been viewed by many as dangerous and something that needs to be avoided.”5 Second, the review also criticized Kant’s style of presentation. Overall, the reviewers criticized the first critique for being incredibly hard to comprehend, even by specialists in metaphysics.
While the review was anonymous, we now know that it was penned by Garve. More than this, Garve’s original version was heavily edited by the journal’s editor, Georg Friedrich Heinrich Feder. As Kuehn indicates, “Of the 312 lines of Garve’s original review, Feder took over unchanged only 76 lines; a further 69 lines were changed insignificantly, but the rest was changed significantly.”6 Feder was the source of the references to Berkeley and Hume. Kant, of course, knew nothing of this authorship story. Yet he continued to work on a popular exposition of the critical philosophy, a task he sensed as urgent as early as September 1781 (shortly after the publication of the first critique). This hostile review, however, catalyzed his angst and energy and spurred him to work on his Prolegomena to Any Future