Philosophy & Rhetoric

Some attempts have been made in recent research on Immanuel Kant and rhetoric to enunciate guidance he may have for communicative practice and ethics. This is promising, since Kant has held a relatively minor role in contemporary analyses of rhetoric and communication ethics, due to misunderstandings both on his part and on the part of commentators. I firmly believe that Kant's works contain insights on community and the role of rhetoric therein, and that accounts that attempt to mine these resources must do appropriate justice to the depth and breadth of his writings. Otherwise, one risks "solving" problems that Kant already solved elsewhere, or worse yet, one risks misidentifying a problem in Kant by not giving his developed thought due attention in the first place. In what follows, I will discuss one recent contribution to the philosophy and rhetoric literature by Pat Gehrke in this journal that I believe falls prey to such problems.¹ While I applaud his attempt to bring Kant back into discussions of communication ethics and rhetoric by "rebuilding" a Kantian notion of community, I must voice some concerns I have over his account of Kant on community. Indeed, this seems to be in the spirit of Gehrke's analysis, which begins by lamenting the loss of "much richness and complexity of Kant's thought" in the work of modern commentators, as well as their lack of focus on what Kant's own works say about "his articulation of a ground for a duty to community."² I take Gehrke at his word, and will explore how true of an account this is in terms of both the problems in Kant's thought as well as Gehrke's putative "Kantian" solution.³

Research considering the relationship between Kant's moral philosophy and rhetoric has been quite sparse. Robert Dostal's account notes Kant's hostility to rhetoric as conceived in terms of the manipulative production of what we can call "human effects," but ends right where Kant becomes interesting—the connection between historical/religious forms of community and communicative interaction among agents.⁴ A more recent analysis of Kant's implications for rhetoric comes from Gehrke. Gehrke's purpose is to combine "a reading [End Page 157] of Kant's metaphysics of experience with his moral philosophy to articulate a communication ethic grounded in community."⁵ His argument appears to be based on Kant's "Third Analogy of Experience" in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787 CPR),⁶ which details a necessary condition of experiencing objects in a theoretical manner (as objects of possible experience).⁷ From this necessary precondition of our theoretical cognition, Gehrke relates the notion of community to Kant's ethical writings, which culminates in his showing how "Kant's own work undermines the primacy of autonomy and better supports a communication ethic grounded in a duty to community."⁸ What he appears to strive for is a notion of Kantian ethics that allows for diversity without a formalistic insistence on the value of autonomy culminating in sameness, communality, and so on. Gehrke believes one can find a Kantian notion of community that embraces such interests of the (post) modern world, a notion that is supposedly in Kant's own writings. The crux of Gehrke's argument seems to be the carry-over of the third analogy's notion of reciprocal causation into the ethical world, which Gehrke believes Kant cashes out in terms of uniformity of moral behavior/description of each individual as a moral agent and significant difference insofar as "our differences that separate us are also critical to community."⁹ Indeed, it is the dialectic of sameness and difference that makes community recognizable for Gehrke:

Objects in coexistence and mutual causation in a dynamic community, while requiring a universality and organized into a totality, must also maintain difference in their particular determinations, especially their relative position in space and time, to provide for the possibility of experience. . . . Similarly, the differences in the determinations of particular subjects are essential to the recognition of one's own subjectivity and one's duties as manifest.¹⁰

Gehrke then connects this similarity...