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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 in moral matters—its ability to symbolically present vital concepts key to moral experience. This is Kant’s notion of “hypotyposis,” or the vivid presentation of a concept that ordinarily escapes our ability to understand it empirically. Second, I examine Kant’s account of rhetoric and how it differs from the sorts of art (e.g., poetry) that are said to be able to produce edifying effects. What I argue is that Kant’s reading of rhetoric is not wholly or simply negative; he leaves conceptual room for a positive use of communicative means of interacting with other humans. Third, to exemplify the textual basis for such a recovery of rhetoric in Kant, I argue that the status of fine art isn’t as clearly superior to rhetoric as many read it. In the third Critique Kant even foregrounded reasons to question whether poetry and fine art were ultimately productive of the free play of our mental faculties, thus undercutting a vital part to his reading of art as an experiential symbol of moral importance. The way to save poetry lies in the orientations of those producing and receiving it. If we can recover poetry, why can’t we redeem rhetoric in a similar way? This is the new experiment in which this book engages when trying to reconstruct the sense of educative rhetoric buried in Kant’s various texts.

The Experiential Value of the Beautiful

The experience of the beautiful, or what Kant discusses as the “judgment of taste,” the experiences we have in light of scenes of natural beauty or works of fine art concerns those moments when we are captivated by some object or scene and foreground a disinterested attention that transcends our personal (and specific) interests. There is a pleasure, but not the sort of pleasure that accompanies looking at a new car listed at a bargain price. It is a disinterested pleasure in the mere experience of that object or scene. The experience is also connected with a sense of its universal nature—we expect others to similarly judge this object. This idea of the aesthetic is a vital topic in Kant’s third Critique. There are many specific questions and interpretive challenges associated with understanding what exactly Kant meant with his judgment of taste. Many have analyzed this rich topic before, and it is integral to understanding Kant’s aesthetics.² Here I sidestep the aesthetic questions that can be posed concerning this work and instead focus on one aspect useful in the quest to understand the place of rhetoric in Kant’s philosophy. One such part is the value that the type of unique, reflective experience signified by the judgment of taste holds in relation to Kant’s moral system. This moral system becomes increasingly prominent in this rereading of Kant on rhetoric, but what one sees in the third Critique is the move to connect the experience of the beautiful closely to the moral qualities of disinterestedness, universality, a certain lack of purposiveness, and necessity. The judgment of taste is a subjective judgment (it concerns an object’s effect on me), yet it is a judgment that comes with the expectation that all similar beings would feel the same reflective universality.

Why might Kant extol the free play of the faculties experienced in the judgment of taste or in the specific experience created by the fine arts? The experience of beauty for Kant is linked to the idea of moral improvement in a variety of ways.³ Here I focus on the experiential ways beauty is linked to morality, since such an experiential aspect is vital in my later attempts to connect rhetorical activity to moral improvement. In section 59 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant describes the role that the beautiful can play in indirectly representing an important aspect of our capacities as rational agents. Giving an alternate account from the analysis in section 29 of the intellectual interest in the beautiful, Kant argues in section 59 that the beautiful can cultivate a subject’s awareness of moral value.⁴ In addition to all the other effects of the judgment of taste on an individual, this section argues that it serves as a symbol of the beautiful and, as such, aids in the subject’s awareness of the possibility of moral action in the world. Kant begins this section of the third Critique by highlighting the only way our concepts can be shown to be real—through the provision of some sort of intuition of them. In regard to empirical concepts, such intuitions are “examples”; whereas if they are pure concepts of the understanding, they are “schemata” (5:351). Our concept of “cup” is shown to be real through and by those objects we point out with that concept in the physical world. The ideas of reason (such as God, freedom, and human immortality), however, can never be given adequate intuitions in the realm of experience. They are not the kind of objects we see in everyday life. They can be presented, however, in what Kant labels a “hypotyposis [Hypotypose]” (5:351) or a presentation (Darstellung) of a concept as sensible through means other than the giving of a corresponding empirical intuition. In schematic presentation, a corresponding intuition of a concept of the faculty of understanding is given a priori, or before any given experience. The other option for a presentation that goes beyond mere empirical instantiation in intuition (in experience, in other words) is presentation through symbolic means. In this case, the power of judgment provides a rule concerning the form of the reflection between object and concept similar to that of schematization but eschews utilizing the intuition itself as a representative token of the concept (5:351). In this way, a concept of reason can be presented by intuition but not directly in intuition; one does not “see” freedom or one’s moral vocation, but one can experience something analogous to it in one’s reflective experience of a presentation of it through sensible means (such as narrative).

The symbols involved in hypotyposis utilize analogy to exhibit a specific concept that has no corresponding intuition. The power of judgment first applies a concept to the physical object at hand and then applies a rule of reflection concerning that object to the conceptual object that lacks representation. Take for instance the analogy Kant draws between the hand mill and the tyrannical state. The idea of such a state is represented in Kant’s hand mill analogy by drawing on the rule of similar causality. While Kant is not explicit about the content of this analogy, Kirk Pillow finds that Kant is drawing attention to how both the hand mill and the despot mangle anything that is fed to them—in the former, substance, and in the latter, the freedom of human subjects.⁵ The actual concept is not contained within the presentation, but is merely the rule or symbol for reflection of the subject. The hand mill functions as a symbol for the causality of the despotic state, instantiating reflection concerning the similar operation of each in its respective domain. The symbol serves as a presentation of a concept that has no direct representation, thereby allowing the individual subject to grasp the reality of the concept in question.

Why does Kant claim that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good in section 59 of his Critique of the Power of Judgment? The experience of the beautiful involves the presentation of several central features of moral experience. It is not identical to moral experience, but it is so similar in its form and operation (its “rule of causality”) that Kant finds it to be a valuable symbol of the moral experience (which seems to lack a pure and clearly identifiable phenomenal representation). Kant even labels the experience of beauty as a type of duty we expect of others, a claim that may cause some misinterpretations unless tempered by his moral philosophy. Kant surely cannot be talking about a duty to experience the beautiful, as he clearly leaves any such duty out of his moral writings (such as the Groundwork). Instead, he posits in later works such as the Metaphysics of Morals that respect for natural and animal beauty is an indirect duty to one’s self. Kant, unlike Friedrich Schiller, does not claim that taste is a necessary and sufficient condition for moral worth; Kant sees the symbolic presentation of beauty as an instrument for the development of rational control over one’s inclinations and the attainment of moral virtue. Kant’s argument in section 59 stems from the fact that the symbol of morality, the beautiful, is experientially available to all humans because their faculties are all similar in arrangement and can be naturally “activated” in free play by beautiful objects. What is demanded of everyone is the inherent claim within a judgment of taste—it demands the assent of all rational subjects sharing the same mental faculties (CJ 5:353).

It is in this judgment of taste (i.e., of the beautiful) that subjects gain a symbolic presentation of their moral vocation as a free being. Kant points out that in this experience, “the mind is at the same time aware of a certain ennoblement and elevation above the mere receptivity for a pleasure from sensible impressions, and also esteems the value of others in accordance with a similar maxim of their power of judgment.” The experience of the beautiful highlights the capacity of the agent to be separate from mere sensibility in terms of pleasure, which Kant links to an agent’s ability to be causally moved by nonsensuous reasons (the moral law). The power of judgment, through such judgments of taste, sees itself as giving law to itself—one is being pleased by some aspect of the world that is not directly related to their interests as a specific, animal being. The rules that apply seem to be supplied by the mind itself, even though the mind did not design this object or scene. This experience of the beautiful is contrasted by Kant to the “heteronomy of the laws of experience” in terms of empirical judging (CJ 5:353). In the latter instance, the power of judgment has laws foisted on it by understanding. In the case of judgments of taste, the power of judgment is the source of its own reflective laws.

This issuing of laws to one’s self involves the power of judgment in both the inner realm of mental faculties of the subject as well as with general qualities of experienced external objects. Thus, the intersubjective validity of judgments of taste comes from the power of judgment’s connection to the ground of inner freedom of the subject as a moral agent—this is the supposed supersensible that connects the theoretical faculty with the practical faculty to form a unity. As intimated in his previous two critiques, Kant is always concerned with how the two varieties of reason (practical and theoretical) serve each other or combine together. He posits in section 59 that the very ground that allows for claims of taste to be universally valid also relates to an experience (albeit symbolic) of such a substratum of freedom that connects the realms of reason and nature. While earlier parts of the “Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment” (a subsection of the CJ) deal with reasons why judgments of taste claim intersubjective validity, Kant claims in section 59 that the beautiful can provide particular subjects an experience of their moral freedom through symbolic presentation.

There are four main parallels between the experience of the beautiful and the morally good. First, Kant notes that judgments about the beautiful please immediately through the act of reflection and not through concepts, as is done by the good. The immediacy of feeling after the experiences of the beautiful or the morally good is a common element in this symbolization of the latter in the former. The second aspect concerns the nature of this pleasure—both the beautiful and the morally good lack a connection to antecedent desires. Interests arise after the experience of the beautiful or the morally good (moral feeling, empirical or intellectual interest in the beautiful, etc.). The pleasure created by both experiences comes from human nature’s implication of elements that go beyond sensible determination. In the case of the morally good, the moral law is the nonsensuous source of our autonomy, and for the beautiful, our mental faculties and their interaction with nature highlight a source of pleasure that transcends sensuous pleasure. The third important convergence is that the freedom of the imagination in judging the beautiful object is “in accord with the lawfulness of the understanding.” In moral experience the freedom of the will agrees with itself through its own rational lawgiving—it gives its own law to itself. In the experience of beauty, it is as if the imagination was issuing law in line with the dictates of the understanding, leaving these two faculties outside of their normal hierarchical relationship. Fourth, “the subjective principle for judging of the beautiful is represented as universal, i.e., valid for everyone, but not as knowable by any universal concept” (CJ 5:354). The concepts implicated in morality are universally valid, but they are determinate concepts; this feature results in a strict demand for adherence from subjects. The beautiful involves such a universal validity, but the lack of determinate conceptual content leads one away from demanding of others that they recognize a given object as beautiful. While the beautiful and the morally good differ in important ways, Kant finds that there are enough similarities in their experiential qualities to identify the former as a symbolic presentation of the latter in an agent’s interaction with the physical world.

Being the symbol of the morally good, the beautiful illustrates that the worlds of nature and freedom can converge. It is as if a part of the world of nature, in the experience of the beautiful object or scene, was designed by us to please our faculties of sense and understanding. The harmony created in us by such experiences seems as if it must be purposeful. While judgments of taste fall short of being an actual phenomenal experience of freedom, they can point the reflective agent to the realm of the moral through the world of nature.⁶ This bridging of the two realms through the sensible experience of the beautiful is Kant’s answer in the Critique of the Power of Judgment to doubts about the possibility of living up to the strict demands of morality in the physical world. Duty involves the idea of a will that includes subjective hindrances (inclinations) and as such locates the challenge to duty in the physical world—if an agent is to be virtuous, one must be able to surmount the physical forces (inclinations) in the physical world. The symbolic presentation of the morally good through the beautiful supports the possibility of countervailing inclinations being overcome in a human agent by respect for the moral law. This symbolic experience is taken by Kant to be more concrete evidence for the reality of the demands of morality—the only difference is that the present presentation of the beautiful provides for the possibility of future realizations of moral worth in a given agent’s will. Kant finds solace with the unification here of the two aspects of his critical philosophy—the straightforward command of the moral law and the possibility of the physical world being amenable to our following of this moral vocation.

Kant finds that such a presentation offered by the experience of the beautiful can have definite effects in moral development in addition to being a symbol of the morally good (aiding in comprehending moral experience and duty). Humans typically associate beauty with implications of moral quality, but the actual experience of the symbolic presentation of the morally good can have an even greater cultivating effect on an agent. Discussing this value of beauty as a symbol of the morally good and its associated judgment of taste, Kant states, “Taste as it were makes possible the transition from sensible charm to the habitual moral interest without too violent of a leap by representing the imagination even in its freedom as purposively determinable for the understanding and teaching us to find a free satisfaction in the objects of the senses even without any sensible charm” (CJ 5:354). Several claims are evident in this passage. First, Kant explicitly connects the judgment of beauty with moral development, although not in a causally necessary manner. The experience of beauty is one of the types of experience that can help us morally improve. Second, the way taste operates involves the transcending of mere sensible charm to a purposeless purposiveness. In other words, the experience of an object, especially one without a designer or creator, seems designed to get us to react in a perfectively harmonious fashion. This latter state transcends the agendas of specific, limited physical creatures. Taste—reflected and promoted in the experience of the beautiful by a particular subject—is important because it is a means self-cultivation from mere animality to the type of autonomous agent moved not by sensibility but by practical reason.⁷ It helps us become fully free and rationally self-directing by showing us our freedom. The imagination is experienced as free from the constraints of nature in terms of purposive determination and also in its assisting the individual in locating pleasure free of sensuous interests. At the conclusion of section 59, Kant makes the important claim that receptivity to the commands of the moral law is heightened by and through the exercise of taste, leading one to suspect that beauty as a symbol holds more potential than merely clarifying the nature of duty. As the present chapter shows, moral duty in Kant’s scheme involves a rigorous commitment to a form of disinterestedness or at least to a revaluing of self in regard to others. In addition to showing us an experiential analogue to the disinterested pursuit of duty, the experience of the beautiful can function in moral motivation as an incentive to be moral. It is an experience that informs as well as forms us into moral agents. With the experience of freedom revealed, we also are motivated to be and act as free in our future endeavors.

Rhetoric and the Beautiful

The experience of the beautiful is clearly linked to moral cultivation in Kant’s account. Beauty as analogical presentation of vital parts to moral experience helps us experientially understand and will what is commanded by morality. But rarely does one see the concept of rhetoric linked to either beauty or moral improvement in accounts of Kant’s thought. Why does rhetoric lack the qualities necessary to promote such instances of hypotyposis, or symbolic presentations and experiences of morally edifying concepts? This book’s overarching argument is that rhetoric can create such experiences, but here we must examine why many see rhetoric as antithetical to such morally improving uses of human skill. Kant’s putative hostility toward rhetoric emerges most clearly in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. There, after discussing the free play of the faculties in experience of natural beauty, he expands his inquiry into the beautiful arts (schönen Künste). The subdivision most relevant to this inquiry is his division of “the arts of speech” (redenden Künste), which is subdivided into poetry (Dichtkunst) and rhetoric (Beredsamkeit) (5:321). This division of the speaking arts is also made in his textbook (derived from earlier lectures), Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798).⁸ There, he makes the same division between poetry and rhetoric (Dichtkunst and Beredsamkeit), but adds that they share the common characteristic of being “aimed at a frame of mind [Stimmung des Gemüths] whereby the mind is directly aroused to activity, and thus they have their place in a pragmatic anthropology, where one tries to know the human being according to what can be made of him” (7:246). Both are characterized as arts that have an effect on the mind or orientation of the listener. Yet Kant distinguishes between them based on how this effect is pursued. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant describes them as follows: “Rhetoric is the art of conducting a business of the understanding as a free play of the imagination; poetry that of carrying out a free play of the imagination as a business of the understanding” (5:321).⁹ In his Anthropology, a similar distinction emerges: “poetic art [Dichtkunst] as contrasted with rhetoric [Beredsamkeit] differs from it only by the way understanding and sensibility are mutually subordinated: poetic art is a play of sensibility ordered through understanding; rhetoric is a business of understanding animated through sensibility” (7:246). In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant expands his notion of rhetoric in the same fashion: “The orator [Redner] thus announces a matter of business and carries it out as if it were merely a play with ideas in order to entertain the audience. The poet announces merely an entertaining play with ideas, and yet as much results for the understanding as if he had merely had the intention of carrying on its business” (5:321). The poet, whose art induces a free play of the auditor’s faculties, does not intend this specific outcome. Poets are merely playing with concepts, and their artistic skill makes this a significant use of artistic materials in terms of the experience created in their audience. The orator, on the other hand, intends to accomplish goals and projects that are most likely connected to reasoning and concepts. The troublesome point, for Kant, is that the orator makes this look like play. They are conducting “business” (Geschäfte), a term saturated with end-directed, self-focused projects. Yet they play with metaphors, allusions, and all sorts of tropes just like poets do in their art. On the terms of Kant’s aesthetic theory (viz., practices that create the free play of the faculties), the poet comes out more respected than the orator.

Beyond merely appearing to enable a free play of an audience’s faculties, Kant’s rhetor also violates moral strictures. In other words, Kant accuses rhetoric of being manipulative. Poetry is said to expand the mind of its auditors by freeing their imagination; it lets auditors feel the strength of their minds by letting them feel their own mental capacities at play (CJ 5:326). As seen in the terms introduced in the next chapter, poetry enhances one’s autonomy or capacity for free action. Rhetoric fails to freely affect such changes on the mindset of its audience. Such manipulation is a vital part to what seems like Kant’s seminal definition of rhetoric: “rhetoric [Beredsamkeit], insofar as by that is understood the art of persuasion [die Kunst zu überreden], i.e., of deceiving by means of beautiful illusion (as an ars oratoria) and not merely skill in speaking (eloquence and style), is a dialectic, which borrows from the art of poetry only as much as is necessary to win minds over to the advantage of the speaker before they can judge and to rob them of their freedom” (5:327). Kant continues on to say that such an art is not recommended for matters of civil deliberation (in courts, say) or in education, since it is merely silver-tongued manipulation.

Such a view of rhetoric as manipulation is noted by many others who have written on Kant’s relationship with rhetoric, yet few have speculated on where it might come from.¹⁰ Kant surely knew of John Locke’s attack on rhetoric in his 1689 work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, as it was integrally tied to epistemological parts of that project that Kant valued.¹¹ In his work Locke put the issue of rhetoric in terms consonant with Kant’s later attack on Beredsamkeit (rhetoric). In Book III of Locke’s work, rhetoric is assailed as part of the “wilful faults and neglects” to which human communication is prone to fall.¹² Culminating Locke’s list of the ways words are misused, figurative speech and rhetoric are defined in a very similar way: “But yet if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment, and so, indeed, are perfect cheats.”¹³ Rhetoric, on Locke’s account, is the purposeful use of figurative speech, allusion, and other such linguistic devices to subvert the true purpose of communication—the direct transmission of ideas for the ends of understanding. Locke, like Kant after him, admits that these devices make for “easier entertainment” while listening to this use of speech. These tactics become useful for the rhetor, however, since rhetoric on this account implicates merely a way to pursue one’s own strategic ends through communication. This end is usually not the normal one of conveying truths. Locke continues his account of the harms of rhetoric (more specifically, of figurative language and allusion) by connecting it to manipulation as Kant does in his account of Beredsamkeit:

Therefore, however laudable or allowable oratory may render them in harangues and popular addresses, they are certainly in all discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where truth and knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the language or person that makes use of them. What, and how various, they are, it will be superfluous here to take notice; the books of rhetoric which abound in the world, will instruct those who want to be informed. Only I cannot but observe, how little the preservation and improvement of truth and knowledge, is the care and concern of mankind; since the arts of fallacy are endowed and preferred. It is evident how much men love to deceive, and be deceived, since rhetoric, that powerful instrument of error and deceit, has its established professors, is publicly taught, and has always been had in great reputation.¹⁴

For Locke, rhetoric was opposed to truth and truth-conveying discourse; it obfuscated important matters, typically for the ends of the orator. Kant’s linkage of rhetoric with deceit and “beautiful illusion” clearly echoes this Lockean criticism, yet Kant adds a more complex moral framework to this objection. Not only does rhetoric obscure truth, it also violates moral limits concerning humans that ought not be transgressed.

How does rhetoric violate not only the demands of truth conveyance but also morality? It does this by being linked to manipulation of humans through their passions, a part of the human character that is importantly separate for Kant from their powers of reason. Reason, in its practical and theoretical form, plays an important role in human self-direction of activities of judgment. The passions were a constant threat to such free determination of our activities in this world. Rhetoric seemed to aim at these passional elements. Where did Kant get this additional characterization of rhetoric? Beyond Garve’s rhetorical self-styling and Ciceronian sympathies, it is useful to look to views of rhetoric that Kant may have had access to in his own time. By its nature, such an endeavor is necessarily speculative, since Kant does not clearly document his rhetorical explorations or influences. Yet we know that Kant seemed to know something about the work of Hugh Blair (who wrote on persuasion, rhetoric, and eloquence), although there are some indications that Kant seemed to not have read him very carefully.¹⁵ Blair had defined the core of rhetoric—“eloquence”—as the “art of persuasion; or the art of speaking in such a manner as to attain the end for which we speak. Its most essential requisites are, solid argument, clear method, and an appearance of sincerity in the speaker, with such graces of style and utterance, as shall invite and command attention.”¹⁶ The German translation of Blair that Kant would have had access to renders eloquence as “the art of persuasion” in the same terms that Kant eventually uses in the third Critique: die Kunst zu überreden.

Yet whereas Blair’s definition of eloquence builds argument into rhetorical practice, other parts of Blair’s work build up the relationship between eloquence as art of persuasion and the passionate aspects of human nature. It is this relationship that Kant emphasizes in his account of Beredsamkeit as die Kunst zu überreden. Kant seems to resonate more with the hints in Blair’s account that describe the nature of the highest form of eloquence as “always the offspring of passion” (in the German translation, “jederzeit die Wirkung der Leidenschaft”).¹⁷ For Blair, this “higher degree of eloquence” involves “a greater power [that] is exerted over the human mind, and by which we are not only convinced, but are interested, agitated, and carried along with the speaker: our passions rise with his; we enter into all his emotions. . . . We are prompted to resolve, or to act, with vigor and warmth.”¹⁸ Blair can be seen as attributing the cause of audience action to the external effect of the orator stoking their emotions, as he explains that “by passion we mean that state of the mind [translated as “Zustand der Seele”] in which it is agitated and fired by some object it has in view.”¹⁹ The mindless, passionate nature of this type of persuasion emerges later in Blair’s description when he glosses it as “the universally acknowledged effect of enthusiasm in public speaking, for affecting their audience.”²⁰ The translation of the latter part of this statement in the German edition of Kant’s day highlights the emotional, almost physical, forces at work: what is recognized is the “allgemein anerkannte Wirkung des Enthusiasmus und Art von Wärme des Redners auf die Gemüther der Zuhörer.”²¹ “Enthusiasm” (Enthusiasmus) in a speaker and the physical “heating” (Wärme des Redners auf die Gemüther der Zuhörer) of the passions of a listener by a speaker are not morally laudatory communicative means for Kant. They are part of the “deceitful art [hinterlistigen Kunst]” that uses language to “move people, like machines, to a judgment in important matters which must lose all weight for them in calm reflection.” The use of emotional appeals to stoke the passions in a way that they would not naturally and of an individual’s own accord be raised is problematic. This was the “art of the orator [Rednerkunst] (ars oratoria)” that used “the weakness of people for one’s own purposes (however well intentioned or even really good these may be)” (CJ 5:328n). From Kant’s point of view, such a powerful use of human communication as encapsulated by the concepts of Beredsamkeit and Rednerkunst was ultimately impugnable on moral grounds. The practice of using language to subvert the understanding through evoking the passions represented an external control over what should be an internally guided agent; such a use of rhetoric violates human autonomy.

Other sources might have contributed to this characterization of rhetoric (e.g., that denoted by Kant’s description of Beredsamkeit and Rednerkunst). One of Kant’s pupils from the early 1780s, Daniel Jenisch (1762–1804), translated George Campbell’s 1776 Philosophy of Rhetoric into German in 1791.²² This translation was published a year after the first printing of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment in April 1790, but one can speculate that Campbell’s ideas on rhetoric might have been in circulation in Kant’s intellectual circles before their formal publication. And, like Blair’s work, we can use these in a hermeneutically sympathetic attempt to figure out what trends of the time Kant’s views on rhetoric might reflect. Similar to Blair’s views, Campbell links rhetoric to purposive effects on an auditor’s passions. Campbell saw the art of rhetoric as a “useful art” that “not only pleases, but, by pleasing commands attention, rouses the passions, and often at last subdues the most stubborn resolution.”²³ It is purposive in that it can be aimed at a variety of ends a speaker may pursue; indeed, at the very beginning of Book I, Campbell defines rhetoric by the presence of an end being pursued through speech. This sort of end-directedness combines with a powerful evocation of the passions to form the same sort of worries that Blair’s account might have provoked. But what can be said is that wherever Kant received his views of Beredsamkeit and Rednerkunst, Kant worried about a practice of manipulative rhetoric. This practice, through using and evoking passions in pursuit of a speaker’s own ends, results in an audience member’s “maxims and dispositions” being “subjectively corrupted” (CJ 5:327).²⁴ Put simply, the evocation of emotions subverts the audience’s powers of reason to get their cooperation in pursuit of a speaker’s ends, which renders such a practice manipulative and harmful to audience freedom. Reason is the vital aspect to humans truly determining their own projects and actions. By subverting or minimizing the role of reason in the decision-making activities of their audience, rhetors harm an audience’s capacity for self-direction or autonomy. What Kant is objecting to is the fact that such rhetorical deception moves people without their choosing the maxims of action or without an accurate knowledge of the principle on which they are acting (viz., in cases of deception). As Robert J. Dostal puts it, the externality of this sort of rhetoric’s force means that “Rhetoric confines one to Unmündigkeit [tutelage]—external direction.”²⁵ Of course, we know from Kant’s 1784 essay, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” that “enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority [Unmündigkeit]” (8:35).²⁶ Such a rhetoric moves people as machines and keeps them in a state of non–self-direction. It does nothing to lift them from a state of minority or control by another agent. Kant’s notion of self-direction is elucidated in the 1780s and 1790s in the form of the moral autonomy that he wanted agents to cultivate. In either vocabulary, however, what Kant prized was rational self-direction, and rhetoric seemed to be a threat to the self-direction of those whom a speaker addressed.

Does this demonstrate that Kant clearly had one denotation to the term “rhetoric” and the sort of practice it implied? The negative notion of rhetoric as the “art of the orator” is Rednerkunst, a “deceitful art” (CJ 5:328n). But this is not the whole of rhetoric in Kant, especially if we mean by that term persuasive uses of skilled speech. What one sees is that in all his major discussions of this term as pejorative practice, room is still left for positive employments. We must remember that Kant explicitly excludes from his prominent definition of rhetoric (Beredsamkeit) “skill in speaking (eloquence and style) [bloße Wohlredenheit (Eloquenz und Stil)]” (5:327). And right next to his disparagement of this “deceitful art,” the “art of the orator [Rednerkunst] (ars oratoria),” Kant praises “eloquence and well-spokenness [Beredtheit und Wohlredenheit] (together, rhetoric [Rhetorik])” which “belong to beautiful art” (5:328n). Thus, while Kant hates a sense of rhetoric, it is unclear that his thought excludes all senses of rhetoric as skilled speaking.

Finding a notion of rhetoric in Kant depends on what is identified as textually representing the concept of rhetoric and what interpretative choices are made in its emphasis. If we pose the question in a simple fashion—Kant has a notion of rhetoric, what is it and what is its value?—then the answer we will identify will be equally simple. Yet this simplicity is misleading. Taking Rednerkunst (or Beredsamkeit as eloquence in speaking for harmful goals) as the whole of Kant’s notion of rhetoric leaves us with rhetoric being glossed as manipulative skill in communication. There are other leads to follow, of course, that make the situation much more complex. Taking Kant’s references to Eloquenz and Rhetorik, or his nonpejorative references to the skill of Beredsamkeit or Beredtheit, one sees room to construct a Kantian sense of skillful communication that moves people in a nonmanipulative fashion. Such a sense of nonmanipulative rhetoric focuses on eloquently and skillfully using language to encourage the sort of dispositional change that is the core of Kant’s moral philosophy. Such a reclaimed, sympathetic sense of Kantian rhetoric can unite the goals of education and moral cultivation with the means of communication. Such communicative encouragement is not motivated by intentions to subvert the autonomy of other agents. It will freely educate or cultivate them. Indeed, after he indicates in the Critique of the Power of Judgment that “rhetoric” (as deception) is not suited for education, Kant advocates a certain way of communicating in educational situations—that of the use of ideas of reason (and morality) through “a lively presentation in examples [lebhaften Darstellung in Beispielen]” (5:327). This is similar to his advocacy of religious imagery, examples, and narrative in his Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793) as a “vivid presentation” of the ideas of morality (6:132–33).²⁷ As chapter 5 explicates, the religious context shows the applicability of persuasive communicative means (rhetoric in a nonpejorative sense) to adult development or cultivation. A reclaimed Kantian rhetoric uses examples, imagery, and narrative not to mislead the judgment of agents and thereby harm their quest for autonomy, but instead to engage agents’ judgment with ideas of moral importance.

The main point that emerges from these considerations is that any claim that Kant hates the concept of rhetoric is misleading in how it simplifies both rhetoric and Kant’s stance on that communicative term. One conceptually shorthands the matter when one says, like Don Paul Abbott, that “Kant’s disdain for rhetoric is extraordinary.”²⁸ There are clearly uses of communicative means of which Kant disapproves, but the general concept of rhetoric is not so perfectly determined that one can judge Kant as hostile to all its implications and employments. The fact is that Kant uses a variety of ways to denote communicative means and practices, some of which we have discussed in this chapter and others which appear in later chapters. The multitude of German terms (see table 1) that Kant uses to discuss the general idea of skilled, eloquent speaking necessarily ensures this will be complex conceptual terrain. Which one of these terms stands for rhetoric as a unified conceptual whole? What justifies an interpretative decision to exclude the context and use of some of these terms for the context and use of others? If one defines rhetoric as only that persuasion toward harmful, manipulative ends, then one can rightfully say Kant opposed “rhetoric.” Perhaps one could tether such a view to Kant’s use of Beredsamkeit. But how do we account for Kant’s positive conceptions of eloquence or even Rhetorik? Surely such terms should fit into a comprehensive conception of rhetoric.

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

The merely distinct concept of these sorts of human affairs, combined with a lively presentation in examples [lebhaften Darstellung in Beispielen], and without offense against the rules of euphony in speech or of propriety in expression, for ideas of reason (which together constitute eloquence [Wohlredenheit]), already has in itself sufficient influence on human minds, without it being necessary to also bring to bear the machinery of persuasion [Maschinen der Überredung], which, since it can also be used for glossing over or concealing vice and error, can never entirely eradicate the deep-seated suspicion of artful trickery. (5:327)

This passage, when combined with the former dismissals of rhetoric, contains the distinction between the sort of communicative practices Kant finds as morally valuable and those that he finds morally faulty. We can label these two senses of rhetoric as persuasive communicative interaction with others as (1) manipulative rhetoric and (2) nonmanipulative rhetoric. Later chapters give us the conceptual resources to flesh out the latter category as educative in quality and effect. For now, the conceptual contrast between these two uses is enough to show Kant’s take on the potentialities of communication. Manipulative rhetoric can be seen to have the following three characteristics. First, it involves an inequality of knowledge, mainly between what speakers know about their intentions and what the audience thinks they know about the speakers’ intentions. Such a lack of publicity of the speakers’ ultimate plans for the communicative encounter is essential for the sorts of deception and manipulation that Kant will fault on moral grounds. Second, this sort of rhetoric exerts a causal force on its listeners. It short-circuits their ability to rationally agree to what is said in the same way that speakers agree or disagree (for instance, in the case of speakers not “signing on” to a lie they are telling) and merely moves them as a machine. How rhetoric can treat humans as inherently valuable rational beings, or as machines with causality, is a theme in later chapters of this work. Third, another hallmark to this sort of rhetoric would be the idiosyncrasy of its goals. This is not as evident from the passage as the other two features, but it is there; when one resorts to “trickery,” it is only through keeping private one’s own goals in the interaction. One’s goals and ends in such an interaction tend to be hidden and self-focused—they don’t involve others the same way they implicate one’s self, and one does not give others the chance to rationally agree to help one in the pursuit of these goals. They are moved like machines for one’s purposes.

The second sort of rhetoric—what I call nonmanipulative rhetoric—is intimated in this passage. It has four characteristics, all of which are explicated through the course of this book. First, nonmanipulative rhetoric features domain-specific concepts and knowledge. There is something to talk about and of which to persuade others. These are not merely pure ideas of reason, since Kant draws a distinction in this passage between “ideas of reason” and “the merely distinct concept of these sorts of human affairs.” He must be pointing to different constituents of education: parts that are specific to its practice and parts that reside in one’s faculty of practical reason (ideas of human moral worth, say). Second, when one argues about such matters, they do not speak the language of the mind. Their speech involves what Kant calls “lively presentations,” especially through examples. As demonstrated in later chapters, there are a variety of techniques for using language to make present or palatable ideas resident in human reason. In other words, rhetorical style plays a role in “hypotyposis,” or making understandable abstract ideals to human agents who often want to be very concrete and specific. Third, this nonmanipulative practice of rhetoric does not offend certain negative rules or principles. Kant gestures toward “the rules of euphony in speech [Sprache] or of propriety in expression [Ausdruck],” and we can take him as meaning a moral sense of self-regulation, as hinted at with his use of Wohllauts and Wohlanständigkeit (“euphony in speech” and “propriety in expression,” respectively). He clearly advocates vivid, domain-sophisticated speech that does not cross the lines of “respectability” or “good soundingness.” These terms are not direct analogues with his moral concepts of choice, but it is clear that Kant’s sense of nonmanipulative rhetoric enshrines a great amount of respect for the various parties in the interaction. This respect for the plurality of agents involved in moral activity is a hallmark of Kant’s moral thought, starting with its val­uation of rational agency in any form (as either speaker/agent or audience/patient). Fourth, Kant’s nonmanipulative rhetoric features goals that are public or transitive across agents. Later chapters explore this further, but manipulative rhetoric typically gets its force and direction from individualized ends; nonmanipulative rhetoric features ends that are at least known to all and communicative practices that do not draw their power from sources unknown to one party (such as an audience ignorant of speakers’ lack of belief in their own utterances about some matter).

Manipulative rhetoric is characterized by one agent treating other agents in a way that subverts their rational cooperation, whereas nonmanipulative rhetoric involves an agent using ways of moving and improving other agents that respects the audience’s powers of self-direction. This second sense is the sort of morally cultivating or educative rhetoric that this book explores, arguing that there are vital uses of nonmanipulative rhetoric that Kant encourages. As opposed to Dostal’s accusation that Kant’s only positive sense of rhetoric is as “style,” I make the argument that educative rhetoric does specify elements of invention and arrangement of content that have a vital impact on the states and powers of an audience.²⁹ How one talks and argues has important educative significance in the quest to morally affect others. One must also notice that the vital difference between these two classes of rhetoric is not a specific tactic (e.g., the use of imaginative or figurative language) but instead the orientation behind the use of given tactics in specific situations by a rhetor. Figurative language can be used in a speaker’s purposive scheme to disempower the audience, or it could be used with the intention of empowering the audience. The vital feature of the immoral orientation is the valuing of the self-focused ends and goals over the ends and capacity for choice in the audience. The orientation behind manipulative uses of speech by some rhetors foregrounds the intention to use their audience as a mere means, whereas others might want to get their audiences to freely agree to pursue a certain presented path of action.

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant refers to Quintilian’s ideal rhetor (misattributed to Cicero, however) as a moralized and eloquent agent: “He who has at his command, along with clear insight into the facts, language in all its richness and purity, and who, along with a fruitful imagination capable of presenting his ideas, feels a lively sympathy for the true good, is the vir bonus dicendi peritus, the speaker without art but full of vigor, as Cicero would have him, though he did not himself always remain true to this ideal” (5:328n).³⁰ Regardless of his disagreements with the details of Cicero’s moral thought, Kant agrees with this general ideal of the perfect rhetor—one who is oriented or moralized in the right way and who consequently uses communicative means in interacting with an audience in the right way. Like Kant’s praise of the beautiful, such orators have imaginative ways of presenting ideas central to morality. They have access to domain-specific knowledge, as well as the publically accessible ideas of reason (such as the ideas of morality). Future chapters flesh out what moralization meant to Kant, but here it is enough to say that the orientation or disposition guiding a particular rhetor is vital in determining if the activity manipulates the audience, or if it respects and enhances that audience’s capacity for rational self-direction. The ideas of morality are not simply a way to affect an audience; they also govern a speaker or rhetor’s actions in pursuing specific goals. An ideal rhetor values the persons that compose the audience as morality would command. Assuming the focus on orientation as vital for analyzing the moral worth behind one’s concrete actions, there is much room left for an account of what kinds of communicative choices Kant would allow and encourage and those that he would find to be manipulative. The following chapters in this book provide a full account of what makes those practices typically implied by Kant’s mentions of Beredsamkeit undesirable and those implied by the mentions of Beredtheit, Rhetorik, Wohlredenheit, and Eloquenz desirable. The latter group of practices adds up to Kant’s educative rhetoric and is contrasted to the sense of manipulative rhetoric that Kant castigates.

Problematizing Poetry, Recovering Rhetoric

Even if we see the valuable moral role the experience of beauty plays, and the conceptual room to allow sympathetic senses of rhetoric into our reading of Kant’s overall project, one more problem arises. Rhetoric as purposive language use is not the fine art of poetry. Even if we think of rhetoric as the nonmanipulative use of skilled speech, the danger still exists that it is merely subtle manipulation of an audience through their passions. Poetry, as a fine art, is thought to avoid such a business of affecting a purposive change in an audience, whereas most rhetoric (even sympathetically characterized) does not. Poetry is the sort of linguistic practice that could create the free play of the faculties that Kant tied to the experience of the beautiful. Poetry is connected to taste and beauty primarily because of this freedom from practical ends. Rhetoric frequently moves people (often as machines) because of means enabled by an unscrupulous orator’s orientation, whereas poetry makes no pretenses to such end-based endeavors. Poets merely play with ideas in poems, whereas rhetors seem like they are playing with ideas in their speeches. In reality, rhetors (with good or bad intentions) do this for certain ends of success or effectiveness. This clearly compromises the universality and necessity of the aesthetic experience engendered by the use of persuasive speech, as these ends are one-sided (held only by the rhetor) and are not essential (they are chosen contingently by the rhetor). Kant notes that “beautiful art must be free art in a double sense: it must not be a matter of remuneration, a labor whose magnitude can be judged, enforced, or paid for in accordance with a determinate standard; but also, while the mind is certainly occupied, it must feel itself to be satisfied and stimulated (independently of remuneration) without looking beyond to another end” (CJ 5:321). Beautiful art cannot be an activity done through coercion or force of some sort and must not be connected too closely with a teleological end in the activity. Most rhetoric, on Kant’s account, would definitely fail the latter consideration, as it is clearly end-driven. Indeed, this is what enables its manipulative extremes—an agent wants a goal, so he or she says certain things that are supposed to help achieve that goal when attended to by an audience. The audience’s concerns or status as rational agents are secondary to the achieving of that specific end chosen by rhetors. Even in nonmanipulative employments, the purposiveness still exists—rhetoric seems at base to imply a commitment to somehow persuading or moving an audience to some end.

Poetry lacks such an obvious teleology. All the poet does is “announce a mere play with ideas, but accomplishes something that is worthy of business, namely providing nourishment to the understanding in play, and giving life to its concepts through the imagination” (CJ 5:321). The poet, for Kant, doesn’t try to change the audience; this effect simply happens as a fortunate side effect. This benefit is provided through the free play induced in an auditor by the poet and by the content of poetic art. This latter content is captured in Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas (ästhetischer Ideen). Whereas other ideas and concepts presented in language contain rules for their construction and application, aesthetic ideas share with rational ideas the distinction of going beyond the world of sense in some important fashion. Rational ideas, or ideas of reason (Vernunftideen), contain a concept of the supersensible and thus cannot be wholly captured in any given sensible intuition (5:342). These ideas of reason can be presented through hypotyposis, though. Included in this category are the ideas of freedom, God, and immortality from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788).³¹ Aesthetic ideas, on the other hand, “cannot become a cognition, because [they are] an intuition (of the imagination) for which a concept can never be found adequate” (5:342). An aesthetic idea is a “representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it, which consequently, no language fully attains or can make intelligible” (5:314). Poets can use aesthetic ideas in their work, even though their art is linguistic, because they use language to point at these ideas. Their work does not determinately or concretely exhaust the content of these concepts. Poetry leads to elaborative rich thinking, whereas other uses of language (say, rhetoric) lead to matters being settled in thought or action. On this Kantian view, rhetoric leads to decisive action; poetry leads to more free play involving thought and rich concepts that have no simple meaning.

Thus, two main problems stand out for a comprehensive concept of rhetoric being connected to Kant’s ideal of art that somehow connects to the experiential benefits of the beautiful. First, rhetoric is essentially end-driven, so it might be seen as effectively manipulative and nonaesthetic on Kantian grounds. It does not encourage the free play of the faculties that other linguistic arts (viz., poetry) enable. Focusing on rhetoric as nonmanipulative persuasion (via a speaker’s orientation) might not be enough to alleviate this worry, since its end-directedness and the focus on effectiveness in achieving any end of a speaker renders it teleological in a way that art cannot be. Second, rhetoric’s force also may seem to come from its practical use of determinate concepts (e.g., purposive language designed to affect an end) in its messages. This use of concepts is problematic, as rhetoric seemingly cannot trade in those rich and indeterminate ideas that Kant notes as “aesthetic ideas.” Poetry can use such ideas, since it lacks specific ends that would be gained through determinate concept usage. It is not overtly aimed toward the persuasion of the audience, on this account. How can such objections be overcome if one wants to sort out a Kantian sense of rhetoric as artful and as an important part of his moral project?

I offer an answer to this question by first problematizing poetry and then by reclaiming it as art along with rhetoric in its good employments. While Kant clearly elevated poetry as a beautiful art over rhetoric, one can see that Kant was ultimately skeptical of such fine art as a disinterested creator of the free play of the faculties. Why would poetry, for example, come under such skeptical criticism given its stated ability to convey aesthetic ideas? The reason is simple. Fine art, as a human endeavor, is saturated with concepts and the teleology they presuppose. Art is created by a purposive agent (the artist), and this more often than not brings in concepts of ends that are desired. These could simply be mimetic ends (a desire to accurately represent real object x), but they are still the sort of limited conceptual overlay on the art object about which Kant is concerned. Such a conceptual overlay of specific desired ends introduces ideas of perfection and aptness of the object to those ends and hence hurts an art object’s universal or free beauty (CJ 5:230). For Kant, fine art cannot match the nonpurposive purpose seen in works of natural beauty—the latter seem designed to evoke a harmonious response in us, even though we have no evidence there was a designer behind the appearance of that landscape, say. He argues that one can be taken by the song of a nightingale as a beautiful object until one discovers it is merely a deceptive ploy of a landlord attempting to please guests at his house (5:302). Once it is discovered that the pleasing sound is not of nature but is of human construction (a hidden whistling servant), one is distracted by the conceptual overlay of deception for a specific end (pleasing paying customers). The conceptual content is what evokes and controls our response to the fake birdsong, and this is not radically different from other putatively nondeceptive works of well-wrought drama.

Kant is concerned about the teleological directing of one agent’s experience by another agent’s activity. As Paul Guyer notes, this shaping of experience is problematic on moral grounds as “our response to the beauty and sublimity of nature stands in more intimate connection, both as it were theoretical and practical, to our freedom than does our response to art.” Kant assumes that “a work of art may either be taken for a natural beauty, in which case it defrauds us and is thereby obviously disqualified from even symbolic moral significance by its own immorality, or else that it is explicitly recognized as the product of the intentional activity of another person, in which case it can hardly symbolize our own autonomy.”³² The fake birdsong deceptively mimics nature. Even if it were performed in a concert hall, Kant would still wonder if our response to it was truly autonomous, or if it was merely falling in line with the forethought and desires of the creating artist. Like rhetoric, art seems to fall into concerns about manipulation. While Kant advances a theory of genius to allow for art that creates its own rules (through naturally inspired talent), it is clear that genius also could be misused in manipulative or nonoriginal senses. Again, one can ask, why insist on the division between poetry as art and rhetoric as manipulation if both sorts of purposive human activities have worrisome aspects?

Given this newly enunciated doubt about poetry, must rhetoric necessarily be opposed to poetry and to nonmanipulative ways of communicating? If this is the case, the hope for this project of elucidating a Kantian rhetoric would be slim. Or might rhetoric be redeemed in the same way that poetry could be saved? Many think that Kant is prima facie opposed to rhetoric as a beautiful art—a practice that is nonmanipulative and correlated with the free play of the faculties. Indeed, Kant gives this impression when he sometimes characterizes rhetoric as mere manipulation. But two things should give us pause here. (1) As noted in the previous section, Kant does not equate rhetoric qua manipulation to all human communication. Thus, it seems that Kant does not a priori exclude rhetoric from art or from nonmanipulative communicative activities. (2) The division of the beautiful arts and their modalities (word, gesture, and tone) in the section of the Critique of the Power of Judgment that defines poetry and rhetoric is clearly labeled as an “experiment [Versuch]” (5:320). Even more than this, it is identified as only one of “several experiments [mancherlei Versuchen]” (5:320n) or attempts that could be made at dividing up the beautiful arts. Not only could other attempts be made at analyzing the arts, but Kant indicates that these could and should (kann und soll) be attempted (5:320). Might another Kantian way of analyzing rhetoric and poetry delineate and preserve space for the nonmanipulative sense of rhetoric I have argued is present in Kant’s aesthetic system?

What I want to propose is that poetry and rhetoric—all the arts in general—can be divided in another way within the bounds of Kant’s general account. This way of analyzing the arts would focus on the disposition or state of mind involved in the activity and its reception. There are ways of taking an object and there are ways of seeing the values of doing that activity as an agent. Thus, a receiver might be oriented toward an action in such a way as to foreground ends and progress or as the kind of object conducive to the free play of one’s cognitive faculties. The same sort of orientation choices confront doers, be they aspiring poets or speakers. Their manner of thinking can focus them on outcomes, or on the process of communicating important ideas. This issue of orientation is the “manner of thinking” (Denkungsart) that Kant discusses (CJ 5:274), as well as the “disposition of mind” (Gemutsstimmung) to which he refers (2:273). He also calls this one’s “comportment of mind” (Gesinnung) at various places. This is what I referred to as the “orientation” of the rhetor in the previous section. G. Felicitas Munzel thoroughly tracks these terms through Kant’s precritical and critical work and finds them to be important constituent parts to what we would identify in Kant as a notion of character. Both of these terms are inherently connected to the project of pursuing morality or the ways we interact with and value other human agents vis-à-vis our own pursuits. Denkungsart deals with how we adopt principles or maxims to guide our thinking and actions; Munzel concludes that “maxim adoption is definitive of the conduct of thought itself.”³³

In Kant’s later moral work, this is the choice that comes down to how we guide ourselves in and through evaluative choices inherent in our maxims. Later chapters explore how Kant fleshes this out in his works on morality, but here we can see that consistently setting maxims to determine who we are over a span of activity is a vital part to what it means to take part in forming one’s character. It is a vital component to the Kantian scheme of moral cultivation that I sketch in this book. And it also is an important object of rhetorical activity. Also built into my use of orientation is Gesinnung. This term features prominently in Kant’s work in the 1790s, and it is often difficult to distinguish it as a concept from Denkungsart. Indeed, they both are very similar in that they concern how agents orient themselves toward others through the action-guiding maxims they put in place. Munzel’s analysis integrally connects Gesinnung to the realm of morality: “In a morally good character, comportment of mind consists in conformity to the spirit of the law characterizing the maxims, activities, and capacities of mind.”³⁴ One might be tempted to make the following distinction to clarify matters for the following study. Whereas Denkungsart covers a range of maxim choices, one’s Gesinnung summarizes the moral orientation of agents—how they value and act in light of their ends and the ends of others and how they treat other agents. Both would be ways of pointing out the fact that, for Kant, how agents orient themselves toward others matters. This orientation involves issues of means-ends calculation, systemic unity (among maxims chosen), and, most important, issues of value. What values guide our use of certain means? In Kant’s third Critique, some of these references to orientation come in his discussion of the sublime, which, albeit different from the experience of the beautiful, focuses on similar linguistic or natural objects being taken as sublime or beautiful due largely to the state of mind of a receiver. The example of the “starry heavens” is given as possibly sublime—but only if it is taken or judged not in its conceptual aspects but instead as a “broad all-embracing vault” (CJ 5:270). The sublimity of this natural object depends on the subject taking it in a nonconceptual way. In a similar fashion, Kant discusses art and the necessary purpose that comes with it, but he notes that “beautiful art must be regarded as nature, although of course one is aware of it as art” (5:307). Such an object striking us as art depends on how we orient ourselves toward it.

By manipulating one’s orientation toward a given communicative act, can one detach such interests while hearing a speech, the paragon of rhetorical practice? For instance, one can admire the beautiful shape or form of “wildflower, a bird, an insect, etc. in order to marvel at it, to love it, and to be unwilling for it to be entirely absent from nature, even though some harm might come to him from it rather than there being any prospect of advantage to him from it” (CJ 5:299). Can one take such an immediate and intellectual interest in a speech or argument? Like the natural object, the speech can represent (1) a threat to the interest of the auditor and (2) an object that is conceptually loaded. Focusing on either of these features decreases the aesthetic impact of such an object. Kant points out that we can take the natural object as if it were free from the limits imposed by (1) and (2); thus it is conceivable that speech artifacts also can be seen as free from their practical effects on us or from their overly intentional nature. How would such auditors orient themselves toward such an art object (a rhetorical artifact) to render it artful on Kant’s account? How could it be part of his moralization of aesthetics, rendered as an instance or symbol of the sort of disinterested freedom he connects to the beautiful at section 59?

Our clue lies in an excursus Kant puts in his Critique of the Power of Judgment—an analysis of three “maxims of the common understanding” (5:294). Here, he indicates that taste and its “fundamental principles” are elucidated by these three maxims: “1. To think for oneself; 2. To think in the position of everyone else; 3. To always think in accord with oneself.” These are all connected to a certain “way of thinking [Denkungsart]” (5:294–95). Notice that these represent an orientation or way of thinking that attempts to do justice to one’s autonomy as an individual agent and as a socially instantiated agent. Kant’s notion of the sensus communis captures this sense of individual uses of reason reflecting social settings. Individuals must consistently think for themselves but must also recognize others as equally autonomous and independent beings. In Kant’s moral philosophy, this is the recognition enshrined in the main three formulations of the moral law in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785).³⁵ As is explored in the next chapter, the Formula of Universal Law (FUL) and the Formula of Humanity as an End in Itself (FHE) capture the systemic consistency of a system of agents, and Kant’s notions of autonomy appearing around the Formula of the Kingdom of Ends (FKE) capture the notion of individual autonomy and worth.

If one wants to find a way that rhetoric or poetry can be nonmanipulative uses of conceptual and purposive language, one need only to look at this orientation or way of thinking available to individuals producing and consuming communicative artifacts. If the speaker or poet fails to respect others in line with FHE or maxim 2, “To think in the position of everyone else,” the moral value of the object in question will be impugned as manipulative. Even if it is well-intentioned, it still fails to respect the audience members as equal to the rhetor or poet. The agent’s orientation fails to place the requisite value on the perspectives of others, and hence the agent’s action is characterized as manipulative. Additionally, the orientation of the auditor makes a difference as to the artful nature of the speech or poem—if the object is seen as if it was concept and purpose free, then one can appreciate it in an aesthetic sense as Kant says we do with the flower or starry heavens. If agents are oriented toward a speech or poem in terms of how it may affect them, then they are not experiencing it in a disinterested fashion. Such a use of a created object by auditors is not necessarily morally questionable (as they did not create the object to manipulate themselves in this fashion), but such experience will clearly not be of the free sort Kant wants occupying the aesthetic portions of our lives. It also risks running afoul of the moral limits discussed in the next chapter concerning how agents ought to be valued.

Thus both poetry and rhetoric can be seen as either the manipulative or nonmanipulative uses of linguistic symbols, and the orientations behind the poets or rhetors can be either manipulative or nonmanipulative. Manipulative orientations would be ones that violate the moral strictures of how we ought to value others or that discourage one from thinking from all perspectives. They are defined by an extreme self-focus or valuation. Nonmanipulative uses of language would be ones that respect each point of view involved—the speaker’s and hearer’s perspectives. This sort of nonegoistic use of language is what happens in some poetry, but clearly not all poetry. Kant often worried that poetry was close to egoistic dreaming that others simply could not understand. Good poetry is original and understandable by others.³⁶ This is analogous to the situation in moral experience where a sense of individual direction is limited by a respect for other people’s projects and pursuits. This is the sort of merging of freedom and coercion hinted at in Kant’s vague references to the “art of reciprocal communication” that occur at the end of the first half of his Critique of the Power of Judgment (5:350). This is the use of language that entails thinking through all perspectives and that minds all the consequences involved in the communicative act. All agents are equal on such a scheme. Rhetors cannot be morally effective if they think they are superior to their audience and can operate without full disclosure of important points. Freedom in moral experience and freedom in aesthetic experience, for Kant, have the crucial similarity of respecting both an agent’s response to some stimuli and an agent’s activity toward others. The art object is purposively created, but its creator should not overemphasize its effectiveness in achieving certain ends, nor should its hearer jump toward the ends it projects. In other words, a Kantian sense of nonmanipulative rhetoric would foreground orientations that create rhetoric without remote ends—a rhetoric that features an emphasis on the present communicative experience.

What would it mean to see rhetorical objects without teleological ends or purposes that one pursues? Isn’t this ignoring the purposive nature of rhetorical activity? Explaining this conundrum is the point of this present book. But it is not different in kind from the sort of ignoring that happens when Kant allows art objects created by humans into the pantheon of those things that spur on aesthetic experience. Nothing mysterious happens here in a human’s experience. If orientation can make the difference in relation to art objects (and conceptually loaded natural objects) being experienced with disinterest and a universal appreciation, then one can see the same sort of appreciation occurring with speeches experienced with the right way of thinking. Speeches use metaphors, artistic elements, and so on; art objects often include orations. All of this is so similar that the main difference must be in one’s way of thinking through or engaging these objects. One can appreciate a speech in real life the same way one appreciates a speech in literature—as if it was presented for its form and style. As I explore in chapter 6, there are ways to alter one’s orientation toward linguistic action such that most practical effects are bracketed—this would be a view of argument as free play, and not as a serious business of the understanding. Of course, this represents a disengagement of rhetoric from action to some extent, but Kant would approve of this type of move since it is such disinterest and distance that allows for those maxims of thought to operate. We shall see in future chapters the way this disengagement is effected in specific realms of moral activity. In general terms, one can think from the position of others only when one is distanced from their own affects, passions, and direct drives to action. If one follows this experiment out, Kant would seem to be advancing a certain stoicism of speech reception—appreciating the rhetorical object not for its effects outside the communicative experience, but for its form and performance in that experience.

The role of aesthetic ideas in speech still remains unclear. Poetry is wonderful because it richly incorporates aesthetic ideas as its content. The natural genius of the poet finds novel ways to place these aesthetic ideas in sensuous clothing. No rule could be taught for how to do this, of course. Would not the same sense of creativity apply for rhetorical activity? A great oration would not follow mechanistic rules of eloquence—each speech and speaker would be different in a variety of ways. Additionally, the purposiveness of rhetorical objects does not seem related to the content of aesthetic ideas. Great speeches could just as easily contain the prototypical aesthetic ideas as great poetry. What would genius contribute to rhetorical action? For Kant, it is clear that it would add spirit (Geist). He notes that “Spirit, in an aesthetic significance, means the animating principles in the mind. That, however, by which this principles animates the soul, the material which it uses for this purpose, is that which purposively sets the mental powers into motion, i.e., into a play that is self-maintaining and even strengthens the powers to that end.” This principle is “nothing other than the faculty for the presentation of aesthetic ideas” (CJ 5:313). Genius in rhetorical activity would be the gift of being able to place aesthetic ideas into orations—regardless of the ends that a speaker or listener adds to or subtracts from such experience. The moral use of genius would be the employment in speech creation or the recognition in speech reception of such ideas with the right moralized orientation. The aesthetic ideas are in the content of the oration, as they would be in the poem. Its didactic purpose is something outside of that content determination. Thus, we see that orientation toward rhetoric as manipulation is a separate point from the ability of rhetorical objects—be it in poetry, drama, or real life—to contain aesthetic ideas such as “invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creation, etc.” (5:314). Kant’s frequent emphasis on rhetoric as purely manipulative in orientation does not seem to logically preclude certain types of content in orations. He clearly points out that “poetry and oratory also derive the spirit which animates their works solely from the aesthetic attributes of the objects, which go alongside the logical ones, and give the imagination an impetus to think more, although in an undeveloped way, than can be comprehended in a concept, and hence in determinate linguistic expression” (5:315).

Orientation and Experience

The starting point that this chapter has established is that orientation or disposition will be important terms not only in Kant’s moral thought but also in regard to the linguistic arts. The exact orientation constitutive of moralization is explicated in the following chapters, but here I have advanced the surely controversial point that all uses of language—rhetoric and poetry—can be beautiful arts, but only under certain conditions of disposition of the agents involved. Uses of language can be manipulative or nonmanipulative in how they are conceptualized. The choices between these two orientations occur in the speaker and the auditor. Additionally, these uses of language can be connected to the rich content of aesthetic ideas or bereft of the rich, imaginative use of language and aesthetic ideas. The latter sort of activity may be characterized in standard argumentative prose. The rich and evocative language of speeches (such as the religious sermons Kant often praises) are the sort of “lively presentation” that occurs when aesthetic ideas are instantiated in creative and new ways of using language. It is in these two new dimensions that rhetoric can be seen as equal to poetry and as a valuable part of aesthetic experience.

A crucial point to be made in the following chapters is the functioning of communicative experience in a fashion characterized by hypotyposis. Whereas one reading indicates that only the judgment of the beautiful can stand in as an experiential analogue to moral experience, this chapter has tried to confound such a one-dimensional account with its new experiment in categorizing the arts of language (poetry and rhetoric). Can certain orientations in speakers and listeners turn the communicative experiences of persuasion and rhetoric into experiential analogues of morally educative matters? If we take the right way of thinking about such activities, can they help us become more moral and virtuous? If so, Kant’s nonmanipulative rhetoric can be positively construed as an educative or morally cultivating communicative practice. The account of Kant’s educative rhetoric in the later chapters of this work argues that rhetorical experience can serve as an experiential reminder of vital moral points and in doing so can readily assist us in our cultivation of self and others. In other words, the experience of communicative activity is shown to be morally edifying on Kantian grounds. It both reflects and affects our orientations, and the intelligent use of communicative experience can shape the orientations of attentive others toward a fully moralized state.

To get to this endpoint, we must thoroughly flesh out the sort of nonmanipulative use of language, laden with aesthetic ideas, that is surely the sort of assertive yet respectful discourse that Kant postulated as the enigmatic “art of reciprocal communication.” All these dimensions of the moral employment of rhetorical means are addressed in the following chapters. But first we turn to the issue only anticipated in this present chapter—that a vital point of Kant’s moral philosophy concerns agents donning certain orientations toward self and others. The next chapter details Kant’s moral goal, as well as the fundamental problem of progressing toward sustainable uses of our power of choice, both in external actions and in our internal choice of ends to pursue and value. If I am right that a valuable way of seeing Kant’s moral theory is as an account of how to create agents who use their freedom of choice in certain ways, then the ways of reorienting rational agents assumes much prominence. This would create the space for rhetoric to be used in an attempt to persuasively and freely create such agents. It represents the type of rhetoric that can assume a vital role in Kantian moral cultivation by delineating manipulative and nonmanipulative means to change such agents and their dispositions.