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TRACING THE 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 Metaphysics. This book was eventually published in April 1783. In a lengthy appendix Kant challenges the anonymous author of the Göttingische review to answer Kant’s defense of his critical philosophy. Of course, he says, such an answer must involve publicly revealing the reviewer’s identity.

Garve, seeking improved relations with Kant, answered Kant’s challenge. In a July 13 letter to Kant, Garve reveals himself as the author the Göttingische review, albeit with Feder’s heavy editorial hand.⁷ Garve apologizes for his review insofar as he claims he was unaware of the scope and content of Feder’s changes. Kant seems to agree with Garve’s assessment, and all seems well between the two men in correspondence from early August 1783. Yet when Kant sees Garve’s original review in late August 1783, he finds that he is still being radically misunderstood. As Kuehn puts it, “Garve’s original review was really no better than the one that appeared in the Göttingische Anzeigen. It was just longer, and it did not mention Berkeley by name. Kant complained, and he felt he was being treated ‘like an imbecile.’”⁸

With this background of increasing animosity between Kant and Garve, we turn to Kant’s growing work on moral philosophy. Kuehn reports that Kant was working on a project he hoped would complete his Metaphysics of Morals in 1782, yet he continued to be delayed by the Garve-related publication of the Prolegomena and the tasks associated with buying and renovating a new house.⁹ His work seemed to start off as a textbook on morals and then eventually changed into his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, which would be published in 1785. Why did his project shift in this more specific, and theoretical, direction? In 1783 Kant read the newly published translation and commentary on Cicero by Garve, Philosophische Anmerkungen und Abhandlungen zu Ciceros Büchern von den Pflichten. This was an adaptation of Cicero’s On Duties. Garve’s book “brought home to Kant not only the importance of Cicero, but also his continuing effect on Kant’s German contemporaries.”¹⁰ Kant already had been exposed to Cicero in his early education, but with Garve’s book the connection between a classical rhetorical scholar and a prominent opponent of Kant’s thought was made explicitly. As Kuehn argues, “Garve was important. He dared to criticize Kant’s first Critique in a review, and Kant had been moved to criticize Garve in return.” Displaying his argumentative nature, Kant set out to use his work in moral philosophy as an answer or indictment of Garve’s Cicero; Kant’s friend and correspondent Hamann “reported early in 1784 that Kant was working on a ‘counter-critique’ of Garve. . . . It was intended to be an attack not on Garve’s review but on Garve’s Cicero—and it was an attack that would constitute a kind of revenge.” Yet Hamann’s interest in academic fights was soon let down. Kuehn points out that merely “six weeks later he [Hamann] had to report that the ‘counter-­critique of Garve’s Cicero had changed into a preliminary treatise on morals,’ and that what he had wanted to call first ‘counter-critique’ had become a predecessor (prodrome) to morals, although it was to have (still, perhaps?) ‘a relation to Garve.’”¹¹ The eventual product of Kant’s efforts was his Groundwork, which has no explicit references to Garve or Cicero.

There is much debate over the question of whether the Groundwork was an explicit response to Cicero or Garve. Klaus Reich takes Cicero’s philosophy (as filtered through Garve’s translation) to be causally influential in Kant’s formulations of the moral law in the Groundwork, going so far as to point out Ciceronian equivalents of the Formula of Humanity as an End in Itself and the Formula of the Kingdom of Ends.¹² Gregory DesJardins also argues that Cicero directly influenced Hume and Kant in the content of their arguments, including the latter’s Groundwork.¹³ Yet others disagree with the strong causal hypothesis, pointing out that Kant knew of Cicero before his conflict with Garve and that Kant’s moral terminology was developed even before he wrote the first Critique.¹⁴ Allen Wood even refers to Reich’s “unprovable hypothesis” about the influence of Cicero on the philosophical content of the Groundwork and states that “the argument of the Groundwork, regarding what is philosophically interesting in it, proceeds very much as if Kant had not been thinking about Cicero or Garve at all.”¹⁵ Yet things may be different if we change the question from “Did Garve’s Cicero causally influence Kant’s moral philosophy?” to “How might Kant’s notion of rhetoric have been shaped by Garve’s Cicero?” The latter question is more speculative in nature, but such speculation may help us in our quest to resuscitate a notion of rhetoric in Kant’s philosophy. I submit that one can discern interesting answers to this question from the divergence between Garve and Kant on subject matter and style in philosophy. This will allow us a way around the overly simplistic judgments about Kant hating rhetoric as a unified and coherent whole, such as Bryan Garsten’s claim that Kant “objected to rhetoric because it dispersed judgment and so posed a threat to that authority [of reason].”¹⁶ Understanding why Kant may have focused on a limited conception of rhetoric shows us ways to find rhetoric in his system in an imaginative fashion, thus avoiding the need to judge Kant as for rhetoric or against it.

Garve and Kant on the Subject Matter of Morality

While Cicero would have shuddered at being called a rhetorician, his thought was obviously focused on the social and on persuasion.¹⁷ Indeed, “‘Human fellowship’ seems to be his most central concern.”¹⁸ What is important for our investigation into a Kantian form of rhetoric would be the ways in which Kant—through his disagreement with Garve—would tend to generalize rhetoric (the persuasive use of language) in a negative fashion. Cicero will play an important role in this account. In his On Duties (De Officiis) Cicero connects morality to nature in a roundabout way, indicating that nature gave human beings the capacity of reason. Thus, his stoic propensities to valorize reasonable restraint are also a way of extolling the worth of nature in moral matters. It is “the same nature, by the power of reason, [that] unites one man to another for the fellowship both of common speech and of life.”¹⁹ Cicero connects the morally worthy to the “honorable,” a word stemming from terms denoting the value accorded to an officeholder by others (honestas, honestum).²⁰ Cicero fundamentally ties his view of the subject matter of ethics to communication, honor, and the explicit judgment of others. Garve extends this notion of Ciceronian moral philosophy, emphasizing social position and the unifying role of the philosopher in harmonizing various ethical codes of social groups. Kant, in thinking about Cicero, was aware of “Garve’s arguments to the effect that each profession had its own moral code, that it should have its own code, and that philosophers should make distinct the ‘obscure maxims which people of different professions follow.’”²¹

In other words, Kant sees Garve as taking honor (Ehre) as a vitally important part of moral philosophy. He also sees the connections between this term (important in Prussian society because of its connection to the artisan guild system) and Cicero’s notion of honorableness. Honor is an interesting term because it implies some amount of externality—others judge one to be honorable. Even if these are implied others, the externality of this Garve-Cicero notion of honor is evident. Later, in Garve’s own summations of moral philosophy in 1798, the externality of honor becomes evident in two of his final summative maxims. In Eigene Betrachtungen über die allgemeinsten Grundsätze der Sittenlehre, Garve writes,

[1] Act so that you appear in your performance as a sensible and noble man and that you express the character of an enlightened, peaceful, loving person, and a fullness of mind.

[2] Act so that you preserve, in your sphere of action, the well-being and the perfection of all living beings in the same grades as their nature itself is sublime and excellent.²²

Here we see the externality of honor and moral worth evident in his use of “appear” (erscheinen) and “express” (ausdrücken). Also, one sees the additional move that Garve makes—connecting honor to “well-being” (Wohlsein). This is a fundamental part of Garve’s philosophy, his commitment to happiness (Gluckseligkeit) as being a central motive of human activity.

This focus on happiness is an important point in a later debate between Kant and Garve. In Kant’s 1793 essay “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice,” he addresses Garve’s attacks on his moral philosophy. Garve had largely contested the Groundwork’s account of action motivated by duty alone, and not happiness. He doubted that one could really know when one is acting from respect for duty or merely from a concern for one’s happiness (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 different from abstract theoretical endeavors, as Kant points out to Garve in a letter from 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?