Garve, seeking improved relations with Kant, answered Kant’s challenge. In a July 13 letter to Kant, Garve reveals himself as the author the Göttingische review, albeit with Feder’s heavy editorial hand.7 Garve apologizes for his review insofar as he claims he was unaware of the scope and content of Feder’s changes. Kant seems to agree with Garve’s assessment, and all seems well between the two men in correspondence from early August 1783. Yet when Kant sees Garve’s original review in late August 1783, he finds that he is still being radically misunderstood. As Kuehn puts it, “Garve’s original review was really no better than the one that appeared in the Göttingische Anzeigen. It was just longer, and it did not mention Berkeley by name. Kant complained, and he felt he was being treated ‘like an imbecile.’”8
With this background of increasing animosity between Kant and Garve, we turn to Kant’s growing work on moral philosophy. Kuehn reports that Kant was working on a project he hoped would complete his Metaphysics of Morals in 1782, yet he continued to be delayed by the Garve-related publication of the Prolegomena and the tasks associated with buying and renovating a new house.9 His work seemed to start off as a textbook on morals and then eventually changed into his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, which would be published in 1785. Why did his project shift in this more specific, and theoretical, direction? In 1783 Kant read the newly published translation and commentary on Cicero by Garve, Philosophische Anmerkungen und Abhandlungen zu Ciceros Büchern von den Pflichten. This was an adaptation of Cicero’s On Duties. Garve’s book “brought home to Kant not only the importance of Cicero, but also his continuing effect on Kant’s German contemporaries.”10 Kant already had been exposed to Cicero in his early education, but with Garve’s book the connection between a classical rhetorical scholar and a prominent opponent of Kant’s thought was made explicitly. As Kuehn argues, “Garve was important. He dared to criticize Kant’s first Critique in a review, and Kant had been moved to criticize Garve in return.” Displaying his argumentative nature, Kant set out to use his work in moral philosophy as an answer or indictment of Garve’s Cicero; Kant’s friend and correspondent Hamann “reported early in 1784 that Kant was working on a ‘counter-critique’ of Garve. . . . It was intended to be an attack not on Garve’s review but on Garve’s Cicero—and it was an attack that would constitute a kind of revenge.” Yet Hamann’s interest in academic fights was soon let down. Kuehn points out that merely “six weeks later he [Hamann] had to report that the ‘counter-critique of Garve’s Cicero had changed into a preliminary treatise on morals,’ and that what he had wanted to call first ‘counter-critique’ had become a predecessor (prodrome) to morals, although it was to have (still, perhaps?) ‘a relation to Garve.’”11 The eventual product of Kant’s efforts was his Groundwork, which has no explicit references to Garve or Cicero.
There is much debate over the question of whether the Groundwork was an explicit response to Cicero or Garve. Klaus Reich takes Cicero’s philosophy (as filtered through Garve’s translation) to be causally influential in Kant’s formulations of the moral law in the Groundwork, going so far as to point out Ciceronian equivalents of the Formula of Humanity as an End in Itself and the Formula of the Kingdom of Ends.12 Gregory DesJardins also argues that Cicero directly influenced Hume and Kant in the content of their arguments, including the latter’s Groundwork.13 Yet others disagree with the strong causal hypothesis, pointing out that Kant knew of Cicero before his conflict with Garve and that Kant’s moral terminology was developed even before he wrote the first Critique.14 Allen Wood even refers to Reich’s “unprovable hypothesis” about the influence of Cicero on the philosophical content of the Groundwork and states that “the argument of the Groundwork, regarding what is philosophically interesting in it, proceeds very much as if Kant had not been thinking about Cicero or Garve at all.”15 Yet things may be different if we change the question from “Did Garve’s Cicero causally influence Kant’s moral philosophy?” to “How might Kant’s notion of rhetoric have been shaped by Garve’s Cicero?” The latter question is more speculative in nature, but such speculation may help us in our quest to resuscitate a notion of rhetoric in Kant’s philosophy. I submit that one can discern interesting answers to this question from the divergence between Garve and Kant on subject matter and style in philosophy. This will allow us a way around the overly simplistic judgments about Kant hating rhetoric as a unified and coherent whole, such as Bryan Garsten’s claim that Kant “objected to rhetoric because it dispersed judgment and so posed a threat to that authority [of reason].”16 Understanding why Kant may have focused on a limited conception of rhetoric shows us ways to find rhetoric in his system in an imaginative fashion, thus avoiding the need to judge Kant as for rhetoric or against it.
Garve and Kant on the Subject Matter of Morality
While Cicero would have shuddered at being called a rhetorician, his thought was obviously focused on the social and on persuasion.17 Indeed, “‘Human fellowship’ seems to be his most central concern.”18 What is important for our investigation into a Kantian form of rhetoric would be the ways in which Kant—through his disagreement with Garve—would tend to generalize rhetoric (the persuasive use of language) in a negative fashion. Cicero will play an important role in this account. In his On Duties (De Officiis) Cicero connects morality to nature in a roundabout way, indicating that nature gave human beings the capacity of reason. Thus, his stoic propensities to valorize reasonable restraint are also a way of extolling the worth of nature in moral matters. It is “the same nature, by the power of reason, [that] unites one man to another for the fellowship both of common speech and of life.”19 Cicero connects the morally worthy to the “honorable,” a word stemming from terms denoting the value accorded to an officeholder by others (honestas, honestum).20 Cicero fundamentally ties his view of the subject matter of ethics to communication, honor, and the explicit judgment of others. Garve extends this notion of Ciceronian moral philosophy, emphasizing social position and the unifying role of the philosopher in harmonizing various ethical codes of social groups. Kant, in thinking about Cicero, was aware of “Garve’s arguments to the effect that each profession had its own moral code, that it should have its own code, and that philosophers should make distinct the ‘obscure maxims which people of different professions follow.’”21
In other words, Kant sees Garve as taking honor (Ehre) as a vitally important part of moral philosophy. He also sees the connections between this term (important in Prussian society because of its connection to the artisan guild system) and Cicero’s notion of honorableness. Honor is an interesting term because it implies some amount of externality—others judge one to be honorable. Even if these are implied others, the externality of this Garve-Cicero notion of honor is evident. Later, in Garve’s own summations of moral philosophy in 1798, the externality of honor becomes evident in two of his final summative maxims. In Eigene Betrachtungen über die allgemeinsten Grundsätze der Sittenlehre, Garve writes,
[1] Act so that you appear in your performance as a sensible and noble man and that you express the character of an enlightened, peaceful, loving person, and a fullness of mind.
[2] Act so that you preserve, in your sphere of action, the well-being and the perfection of all living beings in the same grades as their nature itself is sublime and excellent.22
Here we see the externality of honor and moral worth evident in his use of “appear” (erscheinen) and “express” (ausdrücken). Also, one sees the additional move that Garve makes—connecting honor to “well-being” (Wohlsein). This is a fundamental part of Garve’s philosophy, his commitment to happiness (Gluckseligkeit) as being a central motive of human activity.
This focus on happiness is an important point in a later debate between Kant and Garve. In Kant’s 1793 essay “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice,” he addresses Garve’s attacks on his moral philosophy. Garve had largely contested the Groundwork’s account of action motivated by duty alone, and not happiness.