Kant's Philosophy of Communication by Gina L. Ercolini (review)

It is fitting that 2016 was the year that saw the publication of Gina Ercolini's triumphant defense of Enlightenment rhetoric, Kant's Philosophy of Communication, because this was the year in which we realized that we are all Kantians. However, many people do not realize that this is the case. In practice, we are all Kantians—and proudly so. In the wake of the new irrationalism, anyone who has championed the recalcitrance of facts over the hubris of whim, who has called for a new communicative ethic of considering the perspectives of others before acting, who has rejected passionate incoherence in the name of logical consistency, and who has accepted that the complexity of the world demands the use of public reason to come to reasonable judgments in the name of universal peace, is carrying on Kant's legacy.

I say Ercolini's book is a "triumphant" defense for the simple reason that it triumphs commandingly over all of the traditional, lazy, and very often incoherent criticisms of Kant that have been leveled at him over the centuries to become talking points in graduate seminars. Against the caricature of Kant as dull and uninteresting, Ercolini narrates, "Kant was such a good billiards player when he was young that he was able to pay for additional courses with the proceeds" (7–8). Against the notion that he was a detached researcher, she emphasizes, "Kant was both a dedicated educator and public rhetor" (24). Against the assumption that Kant's sole concern was with the categorical imperative to do one's duty, she points out that in his anthropological writings, "the experiment of the human enterprises to make something of oneself, to experience with reagents toward the hypothetical imperatives of moral happiness" (109). Against the claim that Kant posited an unchanging, block universe, she shows a Kant very much interested in contingency, recognizing that "even the smallest misstep can threaten an experiment of ethics in the lived world, and viewing this enterprise with a sense of danger, indeterminacy, and unpredictability" (109). Against the pervasive presumption that Kant has nothing to teach us about communication, Ercolini argues that "Kant advances a robust philosophy of communication that, contrary to the caricature of the figure and his work, demonstrates a dedicated commitment to the realm of human interaction and exchange, with communication at the very forefront of his critical philosophical enterprise" (220). She defends all of these claims in a style that reflects the best of enlightenment rhetoric, with its emphasis on clarity, perspicuity, and liveliness.

The basic argument of the book is that despite Kant's frequent criticisms in his major works of the strategies of persuasion and popularization, which he associated with the crassly manipulative and the vapidly fashionable, a more constructive notion of rhetoric emerges from reading his Critique of Judgment alongside his less-read works (what she calls the "B-sides of Kant's discography"), including his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and Lectures on Logic (8). Ercolini thus engages in a process of creative construction, piecing together a Kantian art of rhetoric from multiple parts that were not originally "rhetorical" in their design. These "parts" include the following Kantian concepts: true popularity, which is the "effort to synthesize the new ways of thinking into something that can connect with popular understanding, expression, and idiom" (74); hypothetical imperative, which "deals with conditional and contingent action concerned with and oriented toward particular results" (95); the practical, which "concerns the realm of action, the faculty of desire, and the autonomy of the will" (101); affect, which is "a temporary interruption of the faculties of the mind meeting to productive reflection and contemplation" (197); tone, which is "an underlying affective score disposing the audience in fundamental ways in artistic expression" (197); style, which is "the balance of the logical and the aesthetic, suited to the subject, to the writer, to the audience" (196–197); and rhetorical judgment, which is the "practices of...