Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric by Scott R. Stroud

Author:Scott R. Stroud
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780271064192
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Press
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Five

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RELIGIOUS EDUCATIVE RHETORIC: RELIGION AND RITUAL AS RHETORICAL MEANS OF MORAL CULTIVATION

It is not disingenuous to say that one needs a certain amount of faith to find a sense of rhetoric in Kant. He produced no textbooks on proper speaking, and as illustrated in previous chapters, his pronouncements on the art of rhetoric are too easily construed as hostile and negative. To a very real degree, one must have faith that there is a sense of rhetoric in Kant to unearth rhetoric in Kant. Otherwise, one simply and quickly dismisses any connection between his thought and rhetoric. Looking for terminological symmetry to complement the relation between faith and rhetoric, could one say that there is an account of rhetoric in Kant’s reading of faith? This chapter extends the previous chapter’s analysis of Kantian educative rhetoric in the realm of faith and religious activity. Kant was an intensely religious man, albeit one infused with a unique blend of pietist sensibilities. He saw religion as an inward practice—a feature that attracted him to a reading of Christianity as an “inner” religion of the heart. His critical sensibilities made him recoil from religious claims being granted the same status as “theoretical” or “truth” claims about objects of experience. Instead, religion was akin to the practical. It shaped human activities by offering a vision of hopes and ideals, and it did not replace what could now be called a “scientific” view of the world of objects and phenomena. Kant’s account of religion has received renewed attention in recent years, but its relevance to rhetoric and persuasion remains unexplored.1 Interestingly enough, Robert J. Dostal’s important early examination of rhetoric in Kant’s system largely avoids the relation of rhetoric to religion. He highlights the problems Kant has with rhetoric qua manipulation and ends by claiming that Kant’s “hope for politics is a moral citizenry,” one that “cannot be answered in the politics or history—in the polis.”2 He invokes a quotation from 6:95 in Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793) to the effect that an ideal community of moral wills depends on the improbable cooperation of actual individual wills.3 The emphasis on the communal in Kantian moral cultivation is a step in right direction, but Dostal simply does not see the relevance of Kant’s account of religion for a Kantian account of rhetoric.

Religion and religious activity are vital for Kant, since they concern the synthesis of two vital features to the morally worthy human life—community and moral virtue. As earlier chapters have illustrated, Kantian freedom in its individual and systemic forms requires a certain way of orienting oneself toward others. This way of orienting oneself involves seeing others as fundamentally equal to yourself (per FHE), consistency in willing in relation to others’ purposive willing (per FUL), and the ideal of a system of such agents following these guides (FKE). Yet, as I have argued earlier, one can force others to act morally only in their external freedom (thus, in a state of external rightfulness).

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