Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric. Scott R. Stroud
(self-love, as Kant often puts it). Thus, Garve doubted the ability of individuals to transcend self-love as a motive in moral action. This position is diametrically opposed to Kant’s moral philosophy. As Kant argues in the Groundwork and the 1793 essay, this focus on happiness is misleading because it makes the ends of morality contingent (only applying to individuals seeking that specific way of being happy), and it renders the achieving of such ends out of one’s control. As he puts it in his “On the Common Saying” essay, the desired connection between actual happiness and worthiness to be happy only places the latter in our control (8:279). How things actually turn out is often out of our control or foresight. Kant’s reply is that Garve is right—“no one can become aware with certainty of having performed his duty quite unselfishly; for that belongs to inner experience” (8:284). One simply can be deceiving one’s self that one’s motives are pure and not involving happiness. Kant points out that even though it may be the case that “no one has ever performed quite unselfishly (without admixture of other incentives) the duty he cognizes and also reveres,” one can still “become aware of a maxim of striving for such purity” (8:285). Thus, one can practically use the maxim of respect for duty to shape one’s character into such a being, as opposed to merely giving up on the entire endeavor of morality (as opposed to idiosyncratic pursuits of self-love) as Garve would seem to advocate. The motive of duty, according to Kant, is simply “far more powerful, forceful, and promising of results than all motives borrowed from the latter, selfish principle” (8:286). Whereas Garve takes self-love as justified by the lack of a certain moral psychology of motives, Kant takes morality in a more normative manner, focusing on how the human could act.
The importance of this debate for Kant’s notion of rhetoric is simple. Such a disagreement can explain why Kant so often restricts his notion of rhetoric to end-based activity, especially those connected to maximizing pleasure. The limited notion of rhetoric and human persuasion in Kant could stem from the sort of Ciceronian concern with the appearance of honor combined with Garve’s focus on happiness as the moral motive. The negative references to rhetoric (typically Beredsamkeit) emerging from this mix would imply the communicative pursuit of favorable judgments of others or the persuading of others to get the objects of one’s happiness. In both cases, the notion of morality implied is not universal enough to fit the demands of Kant’s Groundwork. Rhetoric becomes a tool in a system of moral egoism, or the pursuit of one’s idiosyncratic self-interest. It assumes a fundamentally idiosyncratic notion of morality and thereby doesn’t fulfill Kant’s notion of moral autonomy. This is what Kant calls heteronomy in his moral writings. With Garve-Cicero in the background, one can see why the Groundwork resists conditionally good skills and ends (as in the beginning of the first section) and instead tries to give us the goal of instantiating the “Good Will” through our formation of maxims of action. Whether we can be successful at this project of inner determination is beside the point. Kant believes we can get an ideal of moral conduct from his ruminations and thereby feels no need to go down the path of manipulating others through communication to achieve one’s happiness (e.g., in the partial sense of rhetoric as manipulation). Even though the notion of happiness in Garve and Cicero is not egoistic in the common fashion, happiness of an agent still drives that agent to do good for self and others. This ultimate—if not immediate—focus on self is what often makes Kant suspicious of rhetorical means of interacting with others. Thus, Kant tends to define or explicate rhetoric in the one-sided way that he does because it seems to be a natural implication of the Garve-Cicero reading of morality as being fundamentally about achieving human happiness through interaction with others. If notions of happiness differ, then interactions more than likely will be perceived as manipulative by some of the parties.
Style and Kant’s Notion of Rhetoric
Even beyond this placing of happiness at the root of Garve’s morality and reading of rhetorical activity, one can see a fundamental difference between the styles of Kant and Garve. I argue that Garve, through his translation and commentary on Cicero, provides a sort of contrast class to Kant’s project in philosophy. As Cicero was connected to skilled speaking and rhetoric, this contrast class becomes equivalent to the rhetorical in Kant’s mind. Thus, Garve’s style becomes the style of rhetoric qua practice, often leading Kant to evaluate rhetoric as simply skilled manipulation of unsuspecting others. Garve’s style can be taken in the following three dimensions: (1) his focus on a popular audience, (2) his desire to enlighten this audience in line with his own notions of happiness, and (3) his use of examples in his moral theorizing. Each of these can be contrasted to Kant’s style, which tends to (1) focus on a philosophical audience of specialists, (2) desire systematic coherence or correctness (over audience effects), and (3) emphasize principles and universalization in his argumentation (over examples).
Christian Garve was a philosopher of the common people, or so he thought. He was “a talented translator and publicist who is often regarded as the quintessential representative of the popular philosophy movement that strongly influenced German letters in the period 1760–1790.”23 This group of thinkers was called the Popularphilosophen, and many of them (including Garve) saw themselves as “engaged in an educational task of drawing the public into philosophy and literature, taking very seriously the goal of popular enlightenment.”24 The popular philosophers clearly took issue with “scholastic philosophy,” or the ways of doing philosophy that set up barriers to its application to everyday life. Hence, Garve was concerned that Kant’s new, abstract vocabulary in the first Critique was yet another step away from actually engaging the common public with the activities of philosophy. On the contrary, Garve sought to engage the public through his translations of the classics and of contemporary work from the Scottish and English philosophical scenes.25 The popular philosophers saw their activities as rhetoric, as a persuasive appeal to the public, whether it was in the presentation of a “worthy” classic or the commentary on it that applied the thoughts of another place to contemporary Prussia. Garve and his fellow popular philosophers would later be labeled by Hegel as part of the general category of “Ciceronian philosophy,” further highlighting the linkages between this group of thinkers, Cicero, and the idea of rhetoric.26 Kant, on the other hand, would eschew popularity for a focus on an audience of philosophical peers. One notes that he published the scientific Critique of Pure Reason before the more popular Prolegomena. The latter can even be seen as a forced reaction to counter the bad press that the Garve-Feder review engendered. Kant clearly didn’t see his approach as popular. This may explain why rhetoric in Kant’s corpus tends to assume a popularized meaning—his main adversaries, Garve and his fellow popular philosophers, assumed the popular form of address and often explicitly allied themselves with rhetoric in theory (Cicero) and in practice (their use of literary examples to make philosophical points). Kant rejected this way of doing philosophy and, in doing so, rejected the notion of rhetoric that appeared connected to it in practice.
Another important difference in style was in the ends of scholarship. The popular philosophers were political in a “very broad sense,” with their goal being “to promote the enlightenment of the people through cautious education, to strengthen religious belief and virtuous behavior in the public sphere, and to combat any perversion of reason which might result in immorality.”27 In Garve’s translations and commentaries, he made it clear that his goal was not “historical accuracy” but instead was the improvement of his contemporary audience. His loyalty was clearly with his readers and not the author being translated. Yet this concern for his actual audience betrays one of the fundamental moral worries Kant has with the negative sense of rhetoric—the abridgement of another individual’s autonomy, even if it is done for putatively good reasons. As Fania Oz-Salzberger puts it, “the immaturity of [Garve’s] public demanded, so he felt, conscientious transmission. It meant using the commentary to clarify the text, improve it, emphasize its deserving parts, point out its mistakes, and correct its blunders. The ultimate purpose was to enlighten the readers, not to do justice to an author.”28 This can be contrasted to Kant, who still believed that there was a meaningful difference between philosophy and the popularization of philosophy. Kant simply believed that what he was doing was the former, an abstract and necessarily difficult endeavor. He did not believe it was impossible to popularize these results, but simply that such a task was separate from the task that he set out to accomplish. Popularizing must be