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
