Kant's Enlightenment legacy: Rhetoric through ethics, aesthetics, and style.

摘要

The relationship between Enlightenment and rhetoric is complicated, involving the simultaneous movements towards style's eradication and exaggerated effusion. Immanuel Kant, thinker of the Enlightenment par excellence, is widely considered no enthusiast of rhetoric. In Critique of Judgment Kant claims that oratory deserves no respect whatsoever. However, he immediately retracts that dramatic pronouncement in a footnote that distinguishes bad rhetoric (manipulative oratory that evacuates the listener's ability to use his or her own judgment) from good rhetoric (defined as the combination of eloquence and well-spokenness), where sufficient influence on the mind can be effected without the machinery of persuasion. Without such a distinction, a curious enigma emerges: how can a thinker reject rhetoric while defining enlightenment as the public exercise of reason, at every point?;Examining Kant's complicated and conflicted attitudes towards rhetoric requires looking beyond the curt dismissal in the third Critique and to his extensive commentary on not only rhetoric but several related themes that cut across his popular and critical philosophy more broadly. This project does just that in examining Kant's comments, across a broad swath of his works, on a constellation of topics related to rhetoric such as eloquence, the persuasion/conviction distinction, rhetoric's relation to poetry and philosophy, and his sustained interest in the notion of popularity in philosophy. Furthermore, rhetoric plays a role in Kantian ethics, particularly the emphasis in his anthropological ethics on conversation and sociable exchange to better the mind through the body. In Kantian aesthetics, the crucial role of reflective judgment and the orientation of "critique"---especially the important turn it takes in the Critique of Judgment---was in no small part actually influenced by British rhetorical and aesthetic theory. Kant also wrote extensively on style, fashioning his own stylistic orientation that emphasizes balancing both the logical and aesthetic, producing a natural style that effaces itself, and that is suitable to the writer, audience, and occasion (rather than merely following fashion). In examining Kant's "What is Enlightenment" in the context of these themes, an important if not central role for rhetoric in enlightenment, and Kantian philosophy more broadly, emerges.