A Social World Called to Communion
If the “godless” do “rise” as a political force, then the “culture wars” may well burn brighter. It’s an interesting thought experiment to work through causes and ends for our body politic. To follow up on a previous sentiment, I’ll blame Immanuel Kant.
Kant put “freedom” at the heart of his pursuit of knowledge. But to what end? I have argued that the project of grounding existence in the “autonomous individual” is an enterprise fundamentally unresponsive to the fulfillment of human need and desire. I also think that the modernity begun with Kant, the umbrella from which we cannot easily escape, is a rejection of productive argument about many divisive topics. I like to think of rhetoric as that which creates an informed appetite for the “good,” which moves the “soul” with a movement which cannot finally be justified logically. This can only be valued analogically with reference a supreme image.
There is, then, a hierarchical order leading to the “ultimate good,” and all terms of a rhetorical vocabulary are like links in a chain stretching up to some master link which transmits its influence down. (Following Richard Weaver and some Catholic writers like Mary Ann Glendon). It is thus impossible to talk about rhetoric or persuasion as “effective expression” without having a term giving intelligibility to the whole discourse, that is, the Good. We should all be concerned with cultural crisis engendered by science, big government, industrial capitalism, and “mass” education and communication and many other “masses.”
If “language is sermonic,” as he insists, it would be beneficial to spurn the social-scientific, journalistic, and general semantics view that humans may utilize neutral, objective, and scientific communication. Instead, I think that all acts of communication take a point of view and attempt to persuade. Dialectic, Weaver has written, is “abstract reasoning on the basis of propositions; rhetoric is the relation of the terms of these to the external world in which facts are regarded with sympathy and are treated with that kind of historical understanding and appreciation which lie outside the dialectical process.” The perennial appeal of the anti-modernist view we should embrace is its assertion that the autonomous self is prone to loneliness. We are social creatures created for communion. In seeking to restore the values of region, family, and community to public life, this rejection of the “autonomous liberal self” is a return to a language of natural law displaced by the liberal writers of Enlightenment who insisted that people could know, without a community united through sacred texts, rituals, and oratory, what morality requires.
The insistence upon the availability of a non-perspectival truth and on the need for an organic community extending from the family is not a particularly popular stance in our or any liberal culture, but similar arguments have influenced a variety of writers uncertain of the focus on autonomy and open to the notion that rhetoric in its truest sense is a clarifying vision, a means by which the impulses of the person and community can find some form of redemption. And so a “rejection” of rhetoric is in the elevation of personal autonomy and individual choice: the art of rhetoric is dangerous to the freedoms and rationalizations of the autonomous, and the power of oratory derailing to the prospects of knowledge.
The rejection of rhetoric is both implicit and explicit in the writings of Immanuel Kant, perhaps the most influential theorist of liberalism in the Western democracies. The very philosophy of liberal democracy itself was based on a fundamental distrust of persuasion, of back and forth argument of difficult issues, and once the autonomous individual rather than the family or community became the fundamental building block of politics, any effort to subvert that autonomy, whether through rhetoric or violence, came to be viewed by Kant’s many and varied followers as an unwelcomed imposition.
Let us turn away from this, by embracing our families and our local communities, and by actively listening to, respecting, and seeking clarification in our discussions. We are not autonomous individuals. Our opinions are not terribly important – but our relationships are. We are products of a social world called to full communion with each other and with Christ.
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Kant put “freedom” at the heart of his pursuit of knowledge. But to what end?
This simply is not true. For Kant “freedom” is a postulate of pure reason. It is not in any way the “heart” of knowledge. See the third antimony of the Critique of Pure Reason for this, as well as the Groundwork. Nature seems to suggest to us that human freedom is an illusion, so Kant postulates freedom as a transcendental possibility in order to explain morality in terms that are not grounded in the causal explanation of nature. What Kant attempted to achieve in his practical philosophy was a notion of the dignity of persons according to their ability to be practical reasonsers and moral beings who possessed the freedom to follow objective moral law. Kant was responding largely to Hume.
I have argued that the project of grounding existence in the “autonomous individual” is an enterprise fundamentally unresponsive to the fulfillment of human need and desire.
As I have argued before, your previous arguments take the “autonomous individual” of the British and Scottish enlightenment and mistake it for the that of the German Enlightenment. Neither Kant nor his immediate German disciples understood autonomy as isolation or as monadic existence. Rather, it is the natural rights theorists (esp. Hobbes, Locke, and Burlamaqui) and the subsequent “liberty” theorists (esp. Hume, Smith, Burke, and Bentham) who place “liberty” and “autonomy” at the center of human existence.
Really, what you are objecting to is the notion of liberty that has been entrenched in Anglo-American political and moral philosophy from the 1600′s to today.
Policraticus,
I am not nearly as well versed in Kant as you are, but what would be the objection, and why, if someone argued that Kant put freedom at the heart of his theory of knowledge (C. of Pure Reason), of ethics (C. of Pratical Reason, G. of the Metaphysics of Morals), and of asethetics (C. of Judgement)? A philosopher of rhetoric able to read him in German told me this exactly recently, the inspiration for this characterization.
My still-underdevelped understanding is that for Kant freedom means freedom from outside influence, an avoiding of heteronomy, or the rule of the other. The free autonomous subject, choosing the universal moral laws he gives to himself, should avoid rationalizations that might lead to treating another as a means rather than an end, meaning that a universalizing deontological ethics finds the art of persuasion dangerous. If this is the case, then Kant and Rousseau and Hobbes are important sources of modern liberalism as a response to the power of “demagogues” to damper down a dangerous “vice” – enthusiasm.
Does Kant not help to bring about a notion of the self as autonomous by comparison to the “communitarian” view of ethics, of, say, Alasdair MacIntryre?
what would be the objection, and why, if someone argued that Kant put freedom at the heart of his theory of knowledge (C. of Pure Reason), of ethics (C. of Pratical Reason, G. of the Metaphysics of Morals), and of asethetics (C. of Judgement)? A philosopher of rhetoric able to read him in German told me this exactly recently, the inspiration for this characterization.
Simply put, the objection is that it is not correct (whoever told you this does not seem to have read Kant closely). An actual reading of just the three Critiques would show this.
My still-underdevelped understanding is that for Kant freedom means freedom from outside influence, an avoiding of heteronomy, or the rule of the other.
This seems to be a far too broad of reading for Kant. “Freedom” for Kant is moral freedom, not freedom from all outside influence. Kant postulates (postulating is not declaring) that freedom is necessary for a person to be truly moral, that is, the moral choice is made not because of incentives, coercion, or desired effects. Moral freedom for Kant is the will choosing to act morally for the sake of the moral law (this is contrary to Hume and Smith’s sentiment morality and the later utilitarian modes of morality). So heteronomy of the will is not freedom from outside influence, but the mixing of incentive or coercion in moral action. With respect to other practical aims, such as law and politics, personal autonomy does not occupy a central role in Kant’s philosophy (see his political writings, such as Perpetual Peace).
It is the British/Scottish liberal tradition on liberty and autonomy that you seem to want to critique.
If this is the case, then Kant and Rousseau and Hobbes are important sources of modern liberalism as a response to the power of “demagogues” to damper down a dangerous “vice” – enthusiasm.
Kant’s ethics do not keep company either with Hobbes social contract theory or with Rousseau’s humanistic optimism.
meaning that a universalizing deontological ethics finds the art of persuasion dangerous.
This interpretation tends to issue from those who have only read Kant’s Groundwork. Kant does not think that the universal law of morality can be followed by humans unless they are trained in virtue through education and discipline. Persuasion is fine for the refinement of moral maxims so long as it eventually awakens within the individual the capacity to recognize and act from duty. See Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals and Lectures on Pedagogy.
Does Kant not help to bring about a notion of the self as autonomous by comparison to the “communitarian” view of ethics, of, say, Alasdair MacIntryre?
Not so much. It’s the conception of autonomy and liberty found in the Anglo-American tradition (Locke, Hume, Smith, Mill, Burke) that MacIntyre’s critique most addresses. Kant’s notion of autonomy is actually quite compatible with some communitarian models since it involves strictly moral action rather than all practical action. It’s the liberty tradition that inflates autonomy to apply to all practical life.
Ok.
I want to write a paper on Kant’s rhetoric in the next few years after I am read up on him properly, and will be sure to contact for a critique if that happens.
Consider the following facts.
Literally any message can put into words irrespective of its relationship to the truth.
The arts of persuasion can be put to work behind any message, irrespective of its relation to the truth or the motives of the person or persons pushing the message.
People always and everywhere respond to image and emotion much more readily than to reason.
Take a look at Nazi propaganda, America’s commercial culture, the Bush administration’s PR on the Iraq war.
Trust rhetoric?