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.
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FREEDOM, COERCION, AND THE SEARCH FOR THE IDEAL COMMUNITY
Rhetoric, conceptualized as
