Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric. Scott R. Stroud
1783. There, Kant refers to the Göttingische review’s criticism of the first Critique and complains that this is “a criticism that can in fact be made of every philosophical writing, if it is not to conceal what is probably nonsense under a haze of apparent cleverness.”29 Kant was concerned that if one started with the goal of getting the audience to believe some proposition, then one may be committed to obfuscation or manipulation that is in line with this goal. This is what he believed was going on with the “literary cunning” of the anonymous Feder-Garve review, and one can see clearly why Kant would worry about the rhetorical philosophers such as Garve who start out with the primary goal of changing their audience. Garve’s rhetorical style was too close to this driven form of manipulative effect and is thus another reason why Kant was suspicious about any philosophical use of rhetoric.
A third difference in style between Kant and Garve was the method of persuasion each chose. As is evidenced by the Groundwork, Kant used examples in a secondary sense, largely after he had deduced his versions of the moral law. On the other hand, Garve saw examples as the key to philosophical activity. They could serve as the bridge between philosophical activity and the everyday world of his audience. Garve employed examples in his quest to be a model “self-thinker” (Selbstdenker). While this is similar to Kant’s notion of personal enlightenment (Erziehung zur Mündigkeit), Oz-Salzberger points out that “Garve typically preferred education by example, and the appeal to men’s hearts as well as to their reason, to the rigid statement of truths which Kant deemed available to reason alone. Garve argued that Kant’s critical philosophy was not geared towards encouraging independent thinking and criticism in his readers: it was too technical, abstract, and obscure.”30 Garve justifies the use of examples in his commentary on Cicero, since many philosophers (including Cicero) feature examples prominently in their analysis “to make their teaching more charming and less abstract.”31 Examples, when drawn from everyday experience and not merely constructed for the purpose of theory, hold the power to connect with one’s popular audience and to expand what they believe about their era. This was part of Garve’s reasoning in translating texts such as Cicero’s De Officiis or Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The translations themselves served as examples that shed light on one era through their juxtaposition with another time. Within each text, the author can be more or less successful in the contemporary rhetorical situation depending on the sorts of examples on which they draw. For Kant, such a reliance on models and examples in moral theorizing courts disaster. In the Groundwork Kant is quite explicit about the harm that examples can do to morality: “Nor could one give any worse advice to morality than by wanting to derive it from examples [Beispielen]. For, every example of it represented to me must itself first be appraised in accordance with principles of morality, as to whether it is also worthy to serve as an original example [ursprünglichen Beispiele], that is, as a model [Muster]; it can by no means authoritatively provide the concept of morality” (4:408). Kant is worried here with individuals who attempt to derive morality and moral concepts from empirical instances. This is a clear case of the Groundwork responding to the style and rhetorical practices of Garve—examples come after theory, if at all. Kant’s argument is clear: examples presuppose moral theory to accurately and justifiably identify them as instances of morally worthy behavior. He even claims in the Groundwork that we need access to the moral standard of the categorical imperative to recognize “the Holy One of the Gospel” (4:408). Thus, Kant relegates examples to a very minor role in moral theorizing, using them to merely illustrate (but not justify) the categories of duties. The use of examples as the basis for moral theory would be misleading at best and manipulative at worst. As I argue in later chapters, however, examples do serve an important practical, rhetorical function in moral cultivation.
It is clear that Kant’s Groundwork was not a continuation of Ciceronian themes. Instead, one can see it as a response to Garve’s subject-matter (happiness as incentive) and style (a popular, end-driven use of examples). Kant and Garve were wrestling with the difficult relationship of public enlightenment, moral cultivation, and the role that experts such as philosophers were to play in that educative endeavor. Thus, one can see Garve as instantiating the notion of rhetoric that Kant feared. This sense of rhetoric was connected to idiosyncratic incentives (happiness and self-love), a method of presentation that moved the audience without their explicit involvement as autonomous subjects and used forceful examples to get to such ends. As is evident in the next chapter, rhetoric becomes morally and aesthetically suspect when it fails to encourage the sort of spontaneity or freedom that Kant places at the heart of moral or aesthetic experience. Yet, one wonders, could Kant have redefined rhetoric to capture the beneficial senses of the term or perhaps the communicative uses of language that feature prominently in his moral and political thought? There are clearly references to rhetoric and skilled speaking in Kant’s writings that could be emphasized more—by commentators or Kant himself. This is an important question, and I return to Kantian grounds to rethink rhetoric in the next chapter of this study.
With our explanation of the historical animosity between Kant and the popular philosophers completed, we can see better what kinds of theoretical commitments and stylistic practices Kant associated with the negative sense of persuasive communication or rhetoric. This allows us to see an opening for what follows—an exploration into how Kant can and does employ positive rhetorical or communicative means in his scheme of moral cultivation. When we examine his specific complaints about rhetoric in the next chapter, we see the possibility of an alternative way of categorizing and valuing poetry and rhetoric, one that does not essentially connect rhetoric to manipulation and leave mysterious the category of eloquence. As will become evident, Kant said many things both positive and negative about the capacity for persuasive, skilled speech. There is no consistent or coherent terminology employed, however, that captures the evaluative dimension between “good eloquence” and “rhetoric qua manipulation.” Such systemization of the rhetorical is left to us as sympathetic readers and interpreters of what Kant implied in his philosophy. It is all too easy to focus on the negative characterization and assert that Kant simply hated rhetoric. This chapter hopefully has demonstrated that there is more to the story of Kant and the concept of rhetoric and that the negative characterization of rhetoric as manipulation that he emphasized at points could be motivated by a strategic reason: opposing the thought and style of the Ciceronian popular philosophers. We need not be beholden to this past battle for strategic positioning, however. With sympathetic eyes, we can begin to disentangle different uses and senses of persuasive communicative means within the detailed later thought of Kant and begin to enunciate positive means of rhetorical practice. What might we find if we start to decrease our focus on rhetoric as manipulation and start to scour Kant’s work for evidence of skilled speaking and language use as forces that work for the moral development of individuals?
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KANT ON BEAUTY, ART, AND RHETORIC
Kant’s animosity to the rhetorical style evinced by Cicero’s contemporary defender Christian Garve reached its apex in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790).1 This work focused primarily on what Kant calls reflective judgments in both aesthetic and teleological applications. It was in the third Critique that Kant included a specific discussion of rhetoric as well. Kant’s overall view of rhetoric typically is read as negative primarily because of this discussion and the strategic disadvantage to which Kant places rhetoric in comparison to poetry. In Kant’s mature aesthetics poetry, and the beautiful arts in general, seems morally superior to the art of rhetoric. But Kant’s seemingly clear denunciation of rhetoric is a rather complex matter—one that requires us to leave our interpretations open to more nuanced views than we are accustomed to seeing connected to Kant’s philosophical thought. In the following chapters we identify a way that rhetoric can be morally valuable. But here it is essential to lay the groundwork for how the beautiful and the rhetorical can be connected to moral development and cultivation.
As the first step in the reclamation of the rhetorical alongside the other arts, I consider one major power of the beautiful