The wise (although how seldom one such is found!) directs attention primarily to his great destiny beyond the grave. He does not lose sight of obligation, which is imposed by his position which Providence has designed for him. Rational in his plans, but without obstinacy; confident of the fulfillment of his hope, but without impatience; modest in wishes, without dictating; trusting, without insisting; he is eager in the performance of his duties but ready in the midst of all these endeavors to follow the order of the Most High with a Christian resignation if it is pleasing to Him to call him away from the stage where he has been placed, in the middle of all these endeavors. (2:42)
Kant does not explicitly claim that Funk was such a wise person. But by weaving in this philosophical reflection on the meaning of life as brought on by Funk’s passing, Kant is rhetorically connecting this educative counsel with the task of honoring Funk in speech.
These themes of a rationally guided life, the correct valuation of our projects in comparison to moral duty, and the connection between religion and life are themes that continued to affect Kant’s philosophical work. As is evidenced by his letter to Funk’s mother, Kant clearly had some sort of rhetorical sensibility. One could see his letter as an attempt to reorient those saddened by Funk’s passage (and prescient enough to attend to Kant’s message). Thus, it is not unreasonable to expect some connection between moral cultivation—optimizing how we value ourselves, others, and our various ends—and rhetoric in Kant’s thought. Judging from the received accounts of Kant, however, rhetoric, or the art of persuasion through communicative means, was connected to his system only in a negative capacity. Kant turned down the post of professor of poetry at the University of Königsberg in 1764, even though he was eager for academic advancement and funds. Bravely enough, he even wrote back to the university that he would decline this post in the hopes that a professorship in logic and metaphysics would be open soon.3 It seems Kant would rather not be fully employed in university life if his only choice was that of teaching anything to do with the artful use of language. This reading of Kant’s general attitude toward rhetoric, poetry, and the other arts of communication has never left him. Scholars have, by and large, not taken up the challenge of examining and reassessing Kant’s apparent antipathy to rhetoric. Most fail to see any sympathetic connection between the study of communication and persuasion (“rhetoric,” in short) and Immanuel Kant. Perhaps this is because Kant seemed notoriously hostile to rhetoric—in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), he refers to “rhetoric” as the art of “deceiving by means of beautiful illusion (as an ars oratoria).” He also criticizes rhetoric as moving “people, like machines, to a judgment in important matters” (5:327–28). This perceived antipathy toward rhetoric has not encouraged much sympathetic reflection on Kant’s relation to the rhetorical tradition. Only a handful of articles deal with Kant and rhetoric, and there are no book-length treatments of this subject. Philosophers writing on Kant’s aesthetics follow this lead and do not include any extended, nonpejorative notion of rhetoric in their explanations of Kant.4
Rhetorical scholars tend to dismiss Kant as not relevant to contemporary rhetoric or to read him as an oppositional figure. Clifford Vaida captures the reaction of rhetoricians who do briefly look for Kant’s treatment of rhetoric: “Kant’s explicit comments on rhetoric are few, casual, and derisive. Consequently, he has not been studied closely by rhetoricians.”5 The ones who have attended to Kant’s thoughts on rhetoric—explicit or implicit—have typically followed one of two strategies. The first strategy is to acknowledge that he disliked rhetoric as a whole and then to find a Kantian rhetoric elsewhere. For example, Don Paul Abbott’s study asserts that “Kant’s disdain for rhetoric is extraordinary” and claims that historians of rhetoric too hastily “hurry on to Enlightenment figures more sympathetic to the art of persuasion.” Abbott acknowledges that “Kant’s characterization of rhetoric as unethical, illusive, and inferior to poetics” did evoke a response from contemporaries such as the Protestant theologian Franz Theremin, and Abbott focuses his recovery of a Kantian rhetoric on Theremin’s work on eloquence. This is an interesting project, as it involves a figure (Theremin) who has unfortunately been left out of rhetorical history. For this reason alone, Abbott’s approach has much value. Yet as a recovery of Kantian rhetoric this is less than ideal, since it seems odd for a figure such as Theremin to “present a vigorous and comprehensive response to Kant’s critique” and still represent a true vision of a Kantian approach to rhetoric.6 It also would seem as if Kant disagrees with the exemplar of “Kantian rhetoric.” Perhaps a Kantian rhetoric had to wait for another defender after Kant’s own missteps. One can still wonder, is there really no approach to rhetoric in Kant’s thought? Is it the case that he simply rejected a unified whole denoted by the term “rhetoric”?
A second strategy taken by those in rhetoric responding to Kant is to pay attention to him as a modern defender of Plato’s attack on rhetoric. This is largely the strategy of Brian Vickers’s admirable study on rhetoric and its detractors, mostly hailing from philosophy. There he documents “Plato’s hostility toward rhetoric, expressed over a thirty-year period,” an animus described as “idiosyncratic and extreme” and as starting a “rivalry between the two disciplines [that] persisted just as long as rhetoric was a living force.”7 Vickers does expend significant interpretive effort detailing a sense of rhetoric in Kant, but it seems like a hollow echo of the Platonic disdain that he finds animating the continuing relationship between these two disciplines. Kant is placed squarely on the philosophy side of this dispute: “like Plato, he made much use of binary categories to privilege one discipline and dismiss another.”8 Kant’s response to rhetoric is said to be bad argument—it is described as a “demolition without examining rhetorical theory, and without analyzing a single text.”9 Rhetoric, and the orators who practiced it, was a magical force that overtook the free choice of rational beings and led them to evil actions. Ironically, Kant’s own attempt to side with Plato and philosophy in the battle against rhetoric is judged to be manipulative: “Kant’s desire to destroy rhetoric is notably short on argument, or logic. Like Plato, he uses binary categories to place rhetoric in the inferior position, before dismissing it altogether. He is more original in the strategies he invents to confuse and alarm the reader, who is to be stampeded into a judgment against rhetoric by being told that otherwise rhetoric will stampede him to judgment. Thus he will be manipulated like a machine over which some other person has total control.”10 Kant, unlike the philosophical approach he is supposedly championing, is as manipulative as the rhetoric he seemingly criticizes. Instead, Kant ought to simply see that “rhetoric [does] not attempt to deprive its listeners of free will, reason, and judgment, but to mobilize them on behalf of a specific issue.”11 This is the same sort of reading of Kant on rhetoric in Bryan Garsten’s project, which examines Kant’s Platonic disdain for rhetoric and finds in it a “fundamental mistrust of ordinary opinion and judgment.”12 Kant’s “quick dismissal of persuasion and rhetoric” is based on seeing it as a “threat to enlightenment and free thought” or as a practice that “dispersed judgment and so posed a threat to that authority [of a sovereign power to settle disputes].”13 If Kant would only recognize the necessity of individual judgment and oratorical adaptation to specific audiences, he would see the value in rhetoric and its art of utilizing messages for persuasive purposes in political communities.14
These dismissals of any form of Kantian rhetoric are important because they try to take Kant’s comments on rhetoric seriously, but they seem to fall short of the sympathy and sensitivity needed to mine the thought of a thinker as complex as Kant. Simply equating rhetoric to adapted and mobilizing discourse leaves out the worry that Kant continues to bring up—are there not bad or harmful ways to adapt appeals to audiences and to mobilize them to an orator’s purposes? The simplistic Platonic move of taking rhetoric to denote only bad ways of moving people to belief is just as simplistic and nonuseful as taking rhetoric to denote only good or beneficial activities of orators concerning the judgment of audiences. More analytical touch is required to truly get beyond seeing Kant as a mere partisan in the debate between rhetoric and philosophy. In addition, it is not clear that Kant thought all human communication oriented toward belief formation in an addressed audience