It can be animated and guided by a range of orientations in both speaker and audience member. In other words, various ways of valuing self and other lie behind a variety of its specific instantiations. Before we can identify a positive sense of rhetoric and communicative means in Kant’s architectonic thought, it is important to see the ends at which rhetoric might be aimed and the sort of orientation it ought to instantiate. As the previous chapter indicates, one of Kant’s reservations about rhetoric was a moral consideration—rhetors treated their audience members as machines or objects to be moved about, not like free rational agents. This objection is clearly in line with Kant’s primary value of freedom. Indeed, in his lectures on ethics (as recorded by Collins), given in the winter semester of 1784–85, Kant claims that since humans alone can motivate their actions from considerations separate from the realm of nature, “Freedom is thus the inner worth of the world” (LEC 27:344).1 Yet freedom is not a given in this ultimate and valuable sense. It easily can be rendered nonideal. If freedom is lawless and random by being tied to changeable and nonsustainable inclinations, Kant finds that “insofar as it [freedom] is not restrained under certain rules of conditioned employment, it is the most terrible thing there could ever be. . . . If freedom is not restricted by objective rules, the result is much savage disorder” (27:344). This notion of freedom and its related concept—autonomy—are vitally important for Kant’s moral system. If his moral philosophy amounts to anything of enduring value, it must be in positing an endpoint for our endeavors to become better individuals and better group members through freedom.
What is at stake for rhetoric in Kant’s political philosophy? One way to answer this question is by evoking a common distinction, that between coercion and persuasion. Persuasion is typically seen as the desirable member of this distinction, since coercion seems to rest on the use of one-sided force. One coerces me into a car at gun point, against my choice and wishes; alternatively, one might persuade me to follow them by using words with which I agree. This is a standard way of parsing the forces involved in each of these activities. Coercion seems problematic because it violates a sort of value we place on selves as agents. Persuasion is often connected to our rhetorical activities, since such practical discussion and argument move people in purposive ways without resorting to overt force. What Kant contributes to this distinction is complexity—Kant’s views on rhetoric move it closer to a coercion with words, and his views on political philosophy hold a rational role for the coercing of individuals through threats of force and punishment. Thus rests the complex fortunes of freedom and human agency in a world filled with subtle and explicit forces that often threaten action based on reason. Kant’s moral and political philosophy not only holds obstacles to seeing a vibrant role for rhetoric in the public sphere but also creates the challenge that I argue rhetoric can solve: how we can use persuasion, not force, to effectively create better agents and communities.
This chapter sets the stage for the reading of Kantian rhetoric as moral persuasion that I wish to give. Revising the role for rhetoric in Kant means being clear on the permissible ends that rhetoric may be called on to achieve and the ways in which such ends can be achieved without violating the respect we owe to other agents. In other words, the task is to give a reading of rhetoric as allowable persuasion, not as manipulative use of coercive forces. Differentiating manipulative communication from nonmanipulative communication implies a conception of individual autonomy, as well as a notion of coercion of otherwise free agents. I argue that Kant’s moral system posits autonomy—in its individual and systemic instantiations—as the ultimate moral end. Later chapters make the case that rhetoric is an important means by which humans can cash out the promise of socialized living that Kant emphasizes in his anthropology lectures, published as Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View: “The human being is destined by his reason to live in a society with human beings and in it to cultivate himself, to civilize himself, and to moralize himself by means of the arts and sciences. No matter how great his animal tendency may be to give himself over passively to the impulses of ease and good living, which he calls happiness, he is still destined to make himself worthy of humanity by actively struggling with the obstacles that cling to him because of the crudity of his nature” (7:324–25). We are destined to cultivate ourselves into free, autonomous moral agents. Creating and sustaining political communities of a certain sort are part of this process, but what else can we do to overcome the obstacles of our human nature? I ultimately argue that rhetoric—eloquent human communication—serves as one clear means of moral cultivation in Kant’s system. Rhetoric in its nonmanipulative form is an important means to move humans toward the dispositions constitutive of true freedom.
Yet I must provide a rough sketch as to what this moral system entails. Using the central idea of freedom, this chapter examines the problematics of two of Kant’s most famous works: the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Metaphysics of Morals (1797). As discussed in the previous chapter, there is evidence that the first text was intended as some sort of rejoinder to Christian Garve and the popular philosophers, so our examination starts there. Whatever its intentions, the Groundwork’s exposition of the core of Kant’s philosophy has had important intellectual impacts; Paul Guyer notes that it “has remained one of the most important and influential works in modern moral philosophy since it was published in 1785. . . . The Groundwork can be regarded as the paradigmatic expression of the ideals of the European Enlightenment.”2 While Kant’s ideas on autonomy evolved, the Groundwork remains a vital expression of this central value and endpoint in Kant’s moral thought. Indeed, one can see the Groundwork as putting “before us an image of the nobility of the life we can lead if we try to regulate our conduct by the fundamental principle of morality instead of acting out of self-interest and excusing our so acting by denying our own freedom.”3
The task of this chapter is to flesh out this image of the moral agent and freedom as an individual and communal ideal in Kant’s Groundwork and Metaphysics of Morals. This notion of freedom can be seen both as freedom from sensuous causes such as inclination and as freedom of positive determination (through the moral law). This composite notion of freedom is what Kant refers to as “autonomy,” or the self-direction through the moral lawgiving of one’s will. Kant’s reading of the value of autonomy is complex, and its details evolved from the 1780s to the late 1790s. Thus, this chapter first examines Kant’s exposition of the moral law through its various formulations in the Groundwork before considering his later work on the value of freedom. The Groundwork is an incredibly rich starting point for explicating Kant’s ethical system and, as such, has been addressed by a multitude of Kant scholars, including Allen Wood, Henry Allison, and Paul Guyer.4 This chapter cannot supplant such detailed work; indeed, it heavily relies on interpretations and arguments exposed in this tradition of Kant scholarship. I emphasize one reading of the sequence of various formulations of the moral law to highlight the notions of freedom and moral cultivation that assumes importance in later chapters. Such a progression in the Groundwork eventually culminates with the autonomy of a specific agent imagined in harmony with all other such agents (viz., the ideal of the kingdom of ends). This transition is discussed, since it signals a transition from individual notions of autonomy to a harmony of universal legislators (agents) that individual moral acts presuppose as an ideal. After this has been examined, Kant’s discussion of this idealized kingdom of ends in Groundwork III is examined in regard to how the two-fold perspective of the world of nature and the intelligible world (the kingdom of ends) relates to the human agent. Kant was always fascinated by the dual nature of humans—both as creatures of the natural, causal world and putatively of the moral realm of reason. While humans are torn between both realms, the ultimate message of the Groundwork is that humans must presuppose their participation in the intelligible realm and, more important, tailor their actions and exercises of will to approximate this state in their physical condition. Kant’s Groundwork sets this project in both individual and communal terms, a theme that is magnified in the analysis of his Metaphysics of Morals in the latter half of this chapter.
Formulations of the Categorical Imperative
In his analysis of moral worth in the Groundwork, Kant argues that the moral law can be expressed in a variety
