Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric
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Immanuel Kant is rarely connected to rhetoric by those who study philosophy or the rhetorical tradition. If anything, Kant is said to see rhetoric as mere manipulation and as not worthy of attention. In Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric , Scott Stroud presents a first-of-its-kind reappraisal of Kant and the role he gives rhetorical practices in his philosophy. By examining the range of terms that Kant employs to discuss various forms of communication, Stroud argues that the general thesis that Kant disparaged rhetoric is untenable. Instead, he offers a more nuanced view of Kant on rhetoric and its relation to moral cultivation. For Kant, certain rhetorical practices in education, religious settings, and public argument become vital tools to move humans toward moral improvement without infringing on their individual autonomy. Through the use of rhetorical means such as examples, religious narratives, symbols, group prayer, and fallibilistic public argument, individuals can persuade other agents to move toward more cultivated states of inner and outer autonomy. For the Kant recovered in this book, rhetoric becomes another part of human activity that can be animated by the value of humanity, and it can serve as a powerful tool to convince agents to embark on the arduous task of moral self-cultivation.
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KANT AND THE PROMISE OF RHETORIC
Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric
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The most defensible route would be to recognize that the concept of communicatively interacting with others extends beyond one way of inflecting the practices of persuading others. What often misleads us are the simplifications and choices necessarily involved in translation and interpretation. Beredsamkeit is translated in the Critique of the Power of Judgment as “rhetoric” and, more important, as a practice that entails manipulation. Nearby, however, Eloquenz and Rhetorik are used and translated as “eloquence” and “rhetoric” in nonmanipulative senses. Beredsamkeit could as easily been translated as “eloquence.” Clearly, the larger genus of “skilled speaking” or eloquence is relevant to Kant’s moral project. If one honors the complexity of the phenomena of human communication and the range of terms being used by Kant, one can conceptualize rhetoric simply as the persuasive use of language in community with others. The clearest point at which Kant’s various senses of rhetoric come into contact occurs in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. In one important passage that I have already noted, we see the foundation for the multivalent sense of rhetoric I want to make explicit in Kant’s thought. There, he differentiates “rhetoric [Beredsamkeit], insofar as by that is understood the art of persuasion, i.e., of deceiving by means of beautiful illusion (as an ars oratoria)” from “skill in speaking (eloquence and style) [bloße Wohlredenheit (Eloquenz und Stil)]” (5:327). Kant then objects to rhetoric being used in education or civil affairs, since these are such serious matters. What is telling, however, is the room for alternate conceptions of rhetoric that Kant leaves while he castigates one specific form of communicative practice. Kant advises that instead of rhetoric in these serious matters, we ought to rely on
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