Kant and Plato on Rhetoric

Abstract: I give a brief, traditional reading of Kant and Plato’s relation to “rhetoric.”

Kant’s definition of rhetoric as “deceiving by means of beautiful illusions” speaks to the ambivalent role rhetoric has played in the trajectory of western political thought. We may reduce this ambivalence into two principally opposing camps: the first, of which Kant is a member, juxtaposes rhetoric and reason, identifying the former as that which detracts from and limits an agent’s exercise of self-reflection. To this end, rhetoric is seen to be a form of instrumental reason operating on pre- or extra-rational faculties, whether this be in the form of appeals to the passions, appeals to self-interest or appeals to prejudice. In making these appeals, rhetoric is seen to serve instrumental ends, substituting illusions for truths and private ends for public consensus. As Kant puts it, rhetoric constitutes “the machinery of persuasion, which, since it can also be used for glossing over or concealing vice and error, can never entirely eradicate the deep-seated suspicion of artful trickery.”[i] For Kant, rhetoric reduces man to the deterministic qualities of a machine, erasing the promise and progress of Enlightenment thought, primarily in terms of the development and free exercise of one’s capacity to reason.[ii] This is, for Kant, not merely a private concern but a public problem. Kant’s position is indicative of one of the great overarching treatments of rhetoric in relation and contrast to the public use of reason: in short, this view takes rhetoric as an illegitimate power asymmetry which prevents or hinders men to render their reason and think for themselves, thus depleting the public/political arena of its capacity for adequate judgment.

Conversely, in a tradition inaugurated first by Aristotle and subsequently developed by Roman theorists,[iii] rhetoric is seen an expedient and practical art that, when used well, supplements the prescriptions of reason with animating faculties.[iv] Far from depleting men of judgment, rhetoric helps to frame and fashion judgment. Assumed in this trajectory is a motivational deficit at the heart of reasoned argument: men do not act on the cool calculations of reason alone, say defenders of rhetoric; for proposals to be actively binding and realizable, an orator must synthesize the passions to a prescribed line of reasoning. Rhetoric is thus seen as a practical tool aimed at contributing to the realization of the good life, whereby rhetorical methods sustain and contribute to reasoned reflection. Bryan Garsten aptly captures this principle divergence between Kant (as representative of critics of rhetoric) and Aristotle (representative of its defenders): “Kant’s sense that rhetoric aimed to win minds ‘before they have formed a judgment’ can be contrasted with Aristotle’s notion that rhetorical speech should be seen as winning minds by appealing to the faculty of judgment.”[v]

It is in Plato that the original split between reason and rhetoric is established. This split can only be understood in terms of the revolutionary moment that was 5th century Athens: the political upheaval of the Peloponnesian war was set against a greater moment of intellectual revolution, where the principles of logic established by the pre-Socratic philosophers to examine the natural world were challenging traditional modes of religious prophecy. Socrates’ impact is twofold: on the one hand, Socrates’ intervention aimed to bring these principles of logic to bear on the question of human conduct, transforming this burgeoning “natural science” into a science of the self. On the other hand, it is through the development and application of this “art of living” that the inconsistencies and contingencies of the political world (especially in terms of war and instability) may be assuaged. For Socrates, the principle political question, and the ends of political order, is the establishment of justice. But for Socrates, justice is a matter of knowledge: before one may do good, one must first know the good. It is from this basis that Socrates argues for the marriage of political authority and philosophical knowledge: it is only when philosophers come to rule that “political troubles” are mitigated and justice emerges, for only philosophers know the good and therefore can act in accordance with it. (Rep. 473d-e) What, then, is a philosopher, and how is this philosophical identity forged viz. rhetoric?

Defining the philosopher is, for Socrates, a footnote to defining justice. In the Republic, Socrates’ initial attempt to define justice in terms of the individual leads him to juxtapose city and soul as analogous, with an inquiry into the former being a “magnified” version of an inquiry into the latter. (Rep. 368e) By first asking what justice looks like in cities, Socrates hopes to find equivalent principles in the soul. Since a city is composed of naturally distinct parts, for a city to be said to act, it must be properly ordered and act in accord with its most reasoned parts; to the extent that it does so, it not only acts, but acts justly.[vi] Socrates turns to defining what the most reasoned part is to look like, and addresses this question first by positing what the protection of the city is to be. Socrates engages this problem through the design of a guardian caste, selected with certain qualities in mind, to defend and police the city. (Rep. 374b-e) According to Socrates, one of the principle qualities that determines a guardian is, apart from the right type of courage, a love of learning and knowledge: it is only first by knowing friend from foe that the guardian can come to perform his duty fully, making the desire to know a prerequisite to the capacity to act. (Rep. 375e) The notion of instilling the proper knowledge unto the guardian caste thus leads Socrates to address the question of education in the state. The purpose of this education is to produce a certain kind-of moral subject; to this end, the selection of educational devices is key to establishing grace of character in the guardians themselves.[vii] While music and mathematics chisel the mind to become more reasonable and calculating, poetry has a privileged capacity to corrupt and distract. (Rep. 401b) Poetry substitutes falsities for reality, illusions for ideas, examples of bad judgment for models of good judgment; poetry, as a “pernicious pasturage of images of badness,” must be corralled and censored for the good not only of the individual soul, but of the whole city. (Rep. 401a)

While the two are not synonymous, poetry and rhetoric are closely associated for Plato,[viii] and his attack on poetry can be seen as a window into his concerns regarding rhetoric. The proper way to arrive at true knowledge for Socrates is through the dialectical process, wherein interlocutors exercise reason in order to systematically probe and enquire.[ix] The purpose of dialectics is to generate knowledge, not action. The dialectic seeks to “grasp the explanation of the being of each thing,” and thus acts as a window into the forms, the unchanging essences of things that constitute truth. (Rep. 534b) Dialectics is the tool philosophy uses to increase the influence of philosophy itself: it is through dialectical inquiry that knowledge emerges and a previously unphilosophical subject is made a philosophical one.[x] In contrast to dialectics are poetry and rhetoric, which draw from and operate within the changing world of appearances. In particular, Socrates associates rhetoric with the sophists, teachers-for-hire that use rhetoric in the effort to effect practical changes in crowds and assemblies.[xi] The object of rhetoric so taken is not the production of true knowledge, but of self-interested interventions that require the persuasion of others. There is, in this way, a democratic aspect to rhetoric that Socrates rejects: rhetoric is used and abused in an effort to persuade the masses, and the position of sophist is seemingly open to anyone who has demagogic faculties. Rhetoric does not engage the capacity of reason so much as it does the passions and desires: rhetoric destabilizes the well-constituted subject (where otherwise reason rules over the passions and desires) and prevents the use of reason, and, insofar as that subject is thus distracted from his/her “proper place,” rhetoric in turn destabilizes the community. At this early juncture, Socrates separates philosophy from rhetoric, defining the latter as a force to be controlled and dispelled with viz. the former. While through dialectical reasoning we come to know the Being of the forms, rhetoric degrades reason and upholds a world of appearances, illusions and falsities, crippling the political order and preventing justice from emerging. If a stabilized political world can only come into being when knowledge is given political power, rhetoric prevents this stabilization ad infinitum, reproducing the very uncertainties that Socrates wants purged from the political universe and extinguishing the role of rational judgment.[xii]

[i] Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, pp 204-205 (₽ 53)

[ii] It should be noted that Kant, unlike Plato, separates rhetoric from poetry. Rhetoric “borrows from the art of poetry only as much as is necessary to win minds over to the advtange o fthe speaker befoe rthey can judge…” See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 204 (₽ 53)

[iii] It is beyond the scope of this paper, but a holistic treatment of rhetoric would necessarily take into account its role in the thought of Quintilian and Cicero.

[iv] For Aristotle, rhetoric is the counterpart to dialectics. While dialectics are to be used in the theoretical probing of truths, rhetoric concerns itself with expediencies and contingencies; rhetoric, in this way, is the form of speech applicable to political life (to be split further between political speech and forensic speech), wherein the persuasion of others toward virtuous and practical ends is the primary economy of this arena. For Aristotle, rhetoric that aims strictly at the passions distorts judgment (Rhetoric, 1354a25-30). Of the types of rhetoric, Aristotle favors logos.

[v] Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion, p. 88

[vi] I here refer to Socrates’ “one man, one art” principle. See Republic, 374a: “The proposition was, if you remember, that it is impossible for one person to work properly at more than one area of expertise.”

[vii] See republic, 401d-e: “For someone who is given a correct education, their product is grace; but in the opposite situation it is inelegance.”

[viii] See Gorgias, 502c; Socrates’ discussion of the flattering aspects of tragedy lead him to conclude that “Poetry is a kind of popular harangue”

[ix] See Republic, 402c: “We won’t be cultured either…until we recognize the types…wherever they occur, and notice instances of their presence…”

[x] On this point, see the cave allegory, Republic 514a-518b

[xi] See Republic, 493a-b: “Even though they call it knowledge, every one of those private free-charging individuals—the one who are called sophists and are regarded as rivals by these educators we’ve been talking about—teaches nothing but the attitudes the masses form by consensus.”

[xii] I have taken on a decidedly traditional mode of reading Plato here. For more contemporary treatments that take seriously Plato’s own rhetorical uses, as well as Plato’s vexed relation to rhetoric as found in Gorgias, please see Marina McCoy, Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists.