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,
