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

The Enlightenment can be described as an attempt to make reason more worldly in order to make the world more reasonable, and the Enlightenment project is characterized by an unflagging confidence in reason's ability to ensure humanity's progress toward a more peaceful, civilized, and moral social and political order. However, the luminaries of the Enlightenment did not succumb to the naive belief that disembodied reason was capable of exercising an immediate influence on human history. To the contrary, these thinkers recognized that humanity always already mediates between reason and history and that reason only ever becomes efficacious in the world by being at work in and on human beings. Accordingly, they recognized that their attempt to promote human progress could succeed only in and through a program of universal education. The great thinkers of the Enlightenment not only thought deeply about the nature and purpose of education; they also saw their own intellectual efforts as contributions to the education of the human race. Indeed, the great Enlightenment thinkers were driven to serious reflection on their own practice of writing as the vehicle for their overarching attempt to engage, teach, and shape their readers. Though it is now common to describe the Enlightenment as a transition away from humanism's concern with speech, rhetoric, and community toward a one-sided emphasis on mathematics, method, and subjectivity, this characterization is a drastic oversimplification that fails to attend to the necessary and abiding connection between Enlightenment, education, and communication.

Immanuel Kant is exemplary, in this context. For though he did not write an independent treatise on rhetoric, he emphasizes the vital role that rational discourse and effective communication play in promoting freedom and morality. Thus, Kant characterizes the Enlightenment itself as an attempt to educate the human race by cultivating in each individual the capacity and courage to employ their own understanding to make rational judgments without relying on the guidance of authoritative opinion or received custom, and he argues that this pedagogical project requires, as its necessary condition, the public use of reason, in which individuals communicate their own considered views to their community. Kant thereby indicates that the Enlightenment is inseparable from the modes of communication that make Enlightenment possible and a fortiori from an account of what modes of communication are conducive to the Enlightenment project.

G. L. Ercolini's Kant's Philosophy of Communication takes Kant's account of the connection between Enlightenment and the public use of reason as its starting point. Noting that the public use of reason is nothing if not a way of speaking to and with others, Ercolini's principal thesis is that Kant not only offers "a complex philosophy of communication, but, as it turns out, rhetoric, debate, and exchange emerge as central to his enlightenment philosophy" (2). Ercolini begins by noting that historians of rhetoric have tended to overlook Kant completely or to emphasize his noteworthy criticisms of rhetoric (9). However, Ercolini avers that "a little digging" allows us "to get past Kant's curt dismissals" of rhetoric and reveals that there is, in fact, "much in his work that relies on an important role for speech, rhetoric, communication, and public discourse" (6). Accordingly, Ercolini undertakes the daunting but important task of drawing out the theory of communication underlying Kant's various "discussions of rhetoric, ethics, aesthetics, and style" (2).

Ercolini begins her analysis of Kant's philosophy of communication by reviewing Kant's several explicit discussions of rhetoric (chapter 1). She rightly observes that Kant is often quite critical of the art of rhetoric, and she notes that "Kant's objection to rhetoric … is twofold: first, to its deceptive purpose and, second, to its violation of the audience's goodwill and autonomy" (33). That said, Ercolini emphasizes that Kant's criticisms of rhetoric do not prevent him from acknowledging the need to speak well, with practiced eloquence and measured style (40). Indeed, Kant appends an important footnote to his most famous and trenchant...