Kant, Theremin, and the Morality of Rhetoric
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In the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) Immanual Kant calls rhetoric "a deceitful art" that "is not worth any respect at all" (CPJ, 5:328;205n).1 Even by the standards of the long and conflicted relationship between philosophy and rhetoric, Kant's disdain for rhetoric is extraordinary. While historians of rhetoric frequently acknowledge this dismissal of their subject, they understandably often hurry on to Enlightenment figures more sympathetic to the art of persuasion. Certainly, the notorious density of Kant's prose, combined with the brevity of his critique of rhetoric and the intensity of his hostility toward it, hardly invites rhetoricians to linger in Kantian thought.2 And yet, a simple acknowledgement of Kant's animosity toward rhetoric does not convey the full significance of his critique. A careful examination of Kant's indictment of rhetoric in the Critique of the Power of Judgment and elsewhere in his works reveals not only an attack on the morality of rhetoric but an attempt to alter the traditional relationship between rhetoric and poetics, to rhetoric's detriment. Kant thus prepares the way for the Romantic assault on rhetoric and the nineteenth-century fragmentation of the classical conception of rhetoric.
Kant's characterization of rhetoric as unethical, illusive, and inferior to poetics did not go unchallenged. The Protestant theologian Franz Theremin (1780–1846), in Eloquence a Virtue (1814), presented a vigorous and comprehensive response to Kant's critique. Theremin does not merely rebut Kant's charges against rhetoric but, rather, he confronts Kant in his own critical domain. Theremin does this not only by asserting the virtue of rhetoric, but by demonstrating that rhetoric can, and indeed does, conform to Kant's own standards of morality.
So infused with morality is Eloquence a Virtue that in late nineteenth century America3 the "able German rhetorician, Theremin," was widely credited for making rhetoric "a purely ethical procedure" (Day 1990, 866).4 But if Kant's dismissal of rhetoric has been, for the most part, but briefly noted, Theremin's [End Page 274] work has been almost entirely ignored by historians of rhetoric.5 Yet Eloquence a Virtue remains a remarkable response to a crucial philosophical indictment of rhetoric. Ultimately, then, I will argue that Kant's critique and Theremin's reply represents a key, but overlooked, juncture in the debate between rhetoric and philosophy.
Kant's Critique of Rhetoric
The Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant's great work of aesthetics, confronts the aesthetic problem of beauty and assigns rhetoric to the province of the beautiful. Beauty is, in general, "the expression of aesthetic ideas" and this expression is particularly manifest in beautiful art (CPJ, 5:320;197). There are, says Kant, three categories of beautiful arts: the arts of speech, the pictorial arts, and the arts of the play of sensations. Rhetoric, together with poetry, comprise the two arts of speech. Although rhetoric and poetry are assigned to the same category, their relationship is not complementary, but rather antithetical. Kant explains the antithesis in this way: "Rhetoric is the art of conducting a business of the understanding as a free play of the imagination; poetry that of carrying out a free play of the imagination as a business of the understanding. The orator thus announces a matter of business and carries it out as if it were a mere play with ideas in order to entertain the audience. The poet announces merely an entertaining play with ideas, and yet as much results for the understanding as if he had merely had the intention of carrying on its business" (5:321;198).6
This intriguing, if not entirely clear, antithesis between rhetoric and poetry is further complicated by Kant's division of rhetoric into two parts: persuasion and eloquence. Rhetoric, as persuasion, is the
art of deceiving by means of beautiful illusion (as in ars oratoria), and not merely skill in speaking (eloquence and style), is a dialectic, which borrows from the art of poetry only as much as is necessary to win minds over to the advantage of the speaker before they can judge and to rob them of...
