a way to include a reconstructed notion of rhetoric into Kant’s philosophical system, largely through notions of disinterest and the orientation of the ones communicating.
To understand Kant on rhetoric, one must understand Kant on autonomy and freedom. Chapter 3 engages in the necessary step of determining the ends or goals to Kant’s normative scheme. This is absolutely essential to reclaiming a Kantian sense of rhetoric, since some of his utterances and virtually all the readings of his detractors fixate on rhetoric in its immoral or manipulative employments. This book, on the other hand, wants to delineate a nonmanipulative or educative sense of rhetorical activity that fits into Kant’s moral scheme of individual and communal improvement, so attention must be paid to what he thinks human activity ought to accomplish. This chapter explores the ideal of freedom and autonomy in his important moral work the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). This is vital, since nonmanipulative uses of rhetorical means are the uses that preserve and promote individuals’ capability to rationally and freely direct their own projects. Kant’s notion of systemic harmony of individual agents acting and respecting one another equally also is revealed. This importantly leads to the developments in his political and moral philosophy in the 1790s, especially in his Metaphysics of Morals (1797). There freedom is divided into a sense of external freedom of action and internal freedom of end setting. In Kant’s early conception of moral behavior, virtue consists of harmony among agents in their external action and in how their guiding maxims valued self and others. In that ideal, fully autonomous state, one does the right action out of the right motives—respect for the moral law and the equal value of others. This chapter argues that Kant’s scheme of moral cultivation envisions a system of moral agents that progress from externally free and consistent uses of action (the realm of right) to a group of agents that act in such a way because of their free internal choice (the realm of virtue). Yet how such a transition effectively occurs is far from clear. How do we get from people being nonharmful to others out of concern for selfish interests to a situation of helping others based on truly respecting them as equal? Force (viz., coercive laws) can only make an agent act (externally) in a free and consistent sense; it can never compel an agent to freely choose to create such harmony because of a respect of the other’s equal value. This is what can be called the “problem of force” in Kant’s scheme. Societies can enforce duties of right (e.g., those commanding one to not externally harm another’s life or property), but an individual or society cannot do anything positive to move that group of agents toward the inner perfection demanded by the endpoint of virtuous agents in a “kingdom of ends.” If right lies as a necessary, but incomplete, first step toward the system of virtuous agents Kant imagines in his Groundwork, how might we morally and politically encourage movement beyond external consistency of action to the sort of internal respect that characterizes the state of virtue? If rhetoric represents some sort of noncoercive force or persuasion, how can it reliably and ethically move individuals to choose their own paths of moral cultivation?
Chapter 4 begins the recovery of rhetoric in Kant that sees communicative means as a way to noncoercively move others toward more cultivated states. This chapter explores Kant’s thoughts on education, a domain that also was subject to the same constraints as politics due to Kant’s extreme valuation of individual autonomy. As was the case in politics, manipulation was not encouraged in the education or moralization of rational agents. Here, I begin my elucidation of Kant’s nonmanipulative educative rhetoric. Its specifications in pedagogical domains are the focus in this chapter, especially the use of examples by a rhetor or teacher to stimulate the educative experience of critical thinking and moral judgment in an auditor. Previous research on Kant has tended to minimize the rhetorical import of example in his thought. He often maligned examples as encouraging jealousy of the exemplar, as creating mere copying in terms of behavior, and as necessitating moral theory to adjudicate good examples from bad examples. I argue that Kant’s writings on education and example can elucidate one communicative means of noncoercively creating the sort of morally virtuous agent he postulates in his moral theory. Hypothetical examples, as experienced means of moral judgment, instantiate the sort of moral disposition that external coercion (e.g., laws aimed at creating a state of right) cannot create. This allows one to begin to extract an educative rhetoric from Kant’s moral project, one that preserves and enhances human powers conducive to autonomy through human communicative activity. This chapter is largely focused on what can be labeled as his pedagogical educative rhetoric.
Chapter 5 extends the experiential, rhetorical means of moral cultivation resident in Kant’s educative rhetoric from example and pedagogy to his later thought on religious community. Drawing heavily on his Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), I argue that Kant advocates the moralizing use of rhetorical force in the forms of lively verbal discussions and ritual communication. He envisions religious community as a “social solution” to a “social problem” (the existence of selfishness in our will, “evil” in Kant’s philosophy). Yet scholars have consistently missed the rhetorical implications of this move. I argue that Kant’s religious employment of rhetoric utilizes (1) communication and discussion focused on religious narratives and symbols to present the ideal moral disposition in one’s experience, and (2) rituals as formulaic prayer to perform the moral disposition in a communal setting. The former use of religious imagery and narrative is a Kantian endorsement of the classical rhetorical concept of enargeia, or vivid presentation through rhetorical means. The latter use of performed, embodied methods of ritual communication serves as a valuable and disinterested technique to actualize the sort of ideal community in an individual’s experience. Both means comprise what this chapter identifies as Kant’s religious educative rhetoric.
Chapter 6 explores Kant’s advocated form of nonmanipulative rhetoric in its more secular, argumentative forms. A vital part to an enlightened citizenry for Kant was the practice of disinterestedly advocating and criticizing various claims to belief. This chapter examines the argument that Kant abolished critical judgment and speech from the polis, and rejected it. More positively, it extracts from Kant’s various writings on critical thinking, aesthetics, and belief an account of critical rhetorical activity. As this entails the detached advancing and consideration of argumentative claims, it is analyzed in two parts. First, I examine how a critical rhetor would communicate according to this account. The traditional rhetorical topics of how one speaks and how one constructs one’s arguments in regard to others in this Kantian account is explicated. Second, one’s activity as a listener to the arguments of others—or as a rhetorical critic—is examined. We can extract Kantian guidance for how we ought to think about and analyze the utterances of other arguers while donning the right orientation toward them as autonomous agents. Both of these domains together will be said to comprise Kant’s critical educative rhetoric.
The conclusion to this work explores the sort of rhetorical advice that stems from this trifold division of educative rhetoric in Kant. This chapter is the most speculative of those contained in this inquiry, but it is undertaken to show that the practice of rhetoric is not inimical to Kant’s themes of moral cultivation of self and others. How one constructs arguments, uses appeals to passion, and portrays one’s own character are all interesting parts of the human actions denoted by rhetoric. A fully sympathetic Kantian account cannot leave them out simply because Kant chose not to write on them. In this way, the final section to this book places Kant in conversation with rhetorical sources and topics that he did not know of or overtly engage but that nonetheless have something to say about the ideal that he did approvingly cite—Quintilian’s invocation of Cato’s “vir bonus dicendi peritus,” or the good person speaking well.
There will be some still unconvinced by this account, as there are still those unpersuaded by a range of other unique rereadings of Kant’s well-trodden philosophy.16 These will be those readers who fixate on Kant’s utterances that malign and simplify rhetoric and that seem to cohere with the standard Platonic reading of rhetoric as the absolute and manipulative opposite
