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.
