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
