Podcasts about for kant

In this episode I give voice to my cri de coeur that argumentation, debate, and even discussion have been ruled out of court by the present cultural currents, which reduce us to disputing sources instead of drawing out implications of facts, and in which every witness reads as either will-to-power or advertising. Who shall rescue us from this mind of death and how? Does reason need faith's help nowadays? If so, how can we bring it to bear in civil contexts where we cannot presume, much less impose, convictions of faith? Dad advises epistemological humility and interpersonal charity—easier said than done. Follow our conversation if you too are wondering how on earth to say anything anymore. 1. Tertullian is attributed with the expression credo quia absurdum, but on investigation I found out that he didn’t really say it quite like that. 2. Anselm did actually say fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) in his Proslogion. Whew! 3. Not quite sure about Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” But a good line, whoever said it first. 4. Reinhold Niebuhr discusses the limitation of the social sciences in The Nature and Destiny of Man 5. Arnold Kling, The Three Languages of Politics 6. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 7. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 8. Plato talks about how lousy a form of knowledge pistis (faith) is in The Republic 9. For Bonhoeffer's discussion of reason and faith in his Ethics, see pp. 339–341 of this edition, and the opening chapter for more on God’s love for the world. 10. Thomas Aquinas’s insistence on treating your opponent’s argument with charity and understanding is exemplified in the formal method of disputation he employs; see pretty much anything in his Summa Theologiae 11. “Hinlicky’s Law” paraphrases this into a hermeneutical rule: “You are not permitted to criticize until you can restate an opponent’s position with such sympathy and insight that, were your opponent present, she would exclaim, ‘That’s it! I couldn’t have said it better myself!’ Then and only then may you criticize because then and only then are you dealing with the real thing, not a convenient fiction of your own imagination.” 12. Michelle Obama is the first lady who said: “When they go low, we go high.” (See everywhere on the internet.) 13. The Martyrdom of Polycarp 14. For Luther on pacifism and civil resistance, see my article “Martin Luther, Pacifist?” 15. See Dad’s Beloved Community pp. 42–55 for more on the ubiquity of believing in human reason and pp. 82-84 on the tripartite form of knowledge with subject, object, and audience. 16. President Lincoln spoke most famously and eloquently about the cost of slavery extracted by the war from white Americans in his Second Inaugural Address. 17. Michael Rectenwald, Springtime for Snowflakes 18. For Kant on the subject-object split, see Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason 19. Auguste Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy 20. Charles Saunders Peirce, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" 21. For more on the denominational competitiveness lurking behind theories of church history, see my article “Beggars All: A Lutheran View of the 2017 Reformation Anniversary,” in Remembering the Reformation More about us at www.sarahhinlickywilson.com and www.paulhinlicky.com!

Welcome Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. Today's episode is brought to you by the Humanities Media Project and viewers like you, because today is a listener-suggested topic. Today we’re going to talk about Longinus, which is to say we’re going to talk about On the Sublime,which is to say we're going to talk about the sublime. We don’t know anything about Longinus except that he wrote On the Sublime, and, if we’re going to be strictly honest, we don’t know whether the author of On the Sublime  was actually named Longinus. So we have this key rhetorical text and the only thing we know for sure about its author is that they wrote this key rhetorical text.   Maybe that’s over-stating it. Maybe this was Dionysies of Halicarnassus. You remember him, Greek fellow, loved Romans? Maybe it was Hermagoras, whom you might remember from the stasis episode. Or it was this other bloke, Cassius Longinus. It’s all very confusing, and you’d think the Roman empire could come up with a naming system that didn’t rely on like the same four names and a series of embarrassing nicknames, but evidentally not. Also, authorship wasn’t so well documented. So all of this is conjecture, but  for the sake of the podcast today we’re going to say that Longinus was the author of “On the Sublime“ and leave it at that.   Historical vaguaries aside, in “On the Sublime,” Longinus advances a poetics that is rhetorical not in the sense that he expects poetry to develop and elaborate explicit persuasive claims, but rather seeks “to transport [audiences] out of themselves” (163). You may be familiar with a bastardization of the word “sublime” that talks about sublime chocolate or music, but the idea of the sublime is that it’s such a consuming process that you lose yourself completely. The chocolate becomes your entire experience.This  “irresistible power and mastery” has greater influence over the audience than any deliberate persuasive argument (163). Is the sublime, then a competitor with rhetoric or is it a mode of rhetoric? Is the sublime just high-falutin’ flowery language or something more? Longinus is vague about this point.   While the sublime comes from the world of poetry, it doesn’t exclusively reign there. Longinus may keep a traditional view of persuasion out of the sublime, but he does allow for sublime moments in traditionally persuasive orations, including legal discourse. Yes, in addition to waterfalls and chocolate, legal briefs can be sublime. I knew that, but then, I watched a lot of old school Law and Order. In such cases, when a sublime visualization is “combined with factual arguments it not only convinces the audience, it positively masters them” (223). Both poets and orators, then, can use the sublime to control an audience and “carry the audience away ” (227). With such incredible power, sublimity seems to be the ultimate skill to develop.            But while Longinus advises us in methods to improve our likelihood of sublimity (choosing weighty words for weighty topics, considering the context, borrowing from the greats, etc.), ultimately he gives us no great writer, nor any great work, as a model of constant sublimity. The sublime comes rather as “a well-timed flash” or “a bolt of lightning” that “shatters everything […] and reveals the power of the speaker” (163-4). This lightning bolt metaphor highlights some of Longinus’ difficulty in teaching someone to be sublime: sublimity is sudden, short, and almost divine in origin.  As you put it, the sublime “takes you out of this world into a heavenly life” (22/02/2011).                       But just as we aren't so sure whether Longinus wrote On the Sulime, we also seem to be constantly redefining what the Sublime is and how much we think Longinus' conception of the Sublime should set the tone for every else. Pretty much, everyone wants to redefine the sublime. The modern mania for the sublime started in in 1671 with a translation of Longinus into the French. But the real break for Longinus in the modern work was Edmund Burke’s “Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” in 1757. That date make clue you in that this is the Burke who was a politician in the late 18th century, not the 20th century rhetorician. This Burke, Edmund, defined the sublime a little more narrowly: the sublime is “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger.” I can see where Burke is coming from on this--what takes you away from the every day and focuses your attention more than the threat of imminent danger? Still, it somewhat restricts what the sublime can be. Now rather  than just a “bolt of lightning” it’s a bolt of lightning on a dark and stormy night.            This broodiness led to the sublime being picked up by all those romantic poets fifty years later, who loved to stand on top of Alpine cliffs in the fog and stare into the abyss and all that. Wordsworth, who was always have out-of-body sublime moments, wrote in “Tintern Abbey” about “of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood/ in which the burden of the mystery/ in which the heavy and weary weight of all this unintelligible world”--certainly solemn stuff. Wordworth’s sister, Dorothy, made fun of some tourists who were unforuntate enough to talk with Coleridge at a waterfall. She relates “Yes, sir’, says Coleridge, ‘it is a majestic waterfall.’ ‘Sublime and beautiful,’ replied his friend.” Coleridge thought this was the funniest thing ever and straight away ditched the tourists and came to his poet friends to laugh about how people were overusing the word “sublime.” Jerk move on Coleridge’s part, but gets to the point of how the “sublime” was becoming a specific term for the Romantics.            This isn’t to say everyone in the 18th and early 19th century had one idea about what the sublime is. Kant, for instance, found the sublime not in nature, but in the “presentation of an indeterminate concept of reason.” Yes, while Longinus describes the sublimity of language and the Romantics found the sublime in nature, Kant can be carried away by an abstraction. For Kant, the sublime isn't just about aesthetics, but about the contrast between something very big and grand and the littleness of man—you can try to comprehend something incomprehendable when you encounter the sublime. That's heavy stuff.            The sublime has continued to fascinate modern rhetoricians and thinkers. More recently, in the 1980s Suzanne Guerlac has contended that Longinus' “On the Sublime" “has traditionally been read as a manual of elevated style and relegated to the domain of the 'merely' rhetorical. The rhetorical sublime has in turn been linked with a notion of affective criticism in which analysis of style and expression centers upon questions of subjective feeling and emotive force” (275). Instead, and remember this is the 80s, she salutes “on the sublime” as being an assault on simple subjectivity, disrupting binaries like form/content and means/ends (276). The sublime in Longinus is about being sincere, but a sincerity that can be forced.  This isn't the only contradiction, but one that is representative of the paradoxes of art. " The Longinian sublime implies a dynamic overlapping, or reciprocity, between the orders of the symbolic and the imaginary" writes Guerlac (286).            The little essay that maybe Longinus wrote, or maybe someone else wrote, has had a big influence in art, literature and rhetoric. Also, evidentally, waterfall-watching.  Do you know what else is influential? Email I get. Even those I don't respond to for like, more than a year.  That's my bad. Mike Litts wrote in asking for an episode on the sublime back in 2015, but here we are, a year and a half later and by gum, we've done an episode about the sublime. If you like delayed gratification, please feel free to write in to mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com and suggest your own favorite topic. No, I'm just kidding. I think I fixed my email problem, so if you write in, I'll respond in less than a year. And won't that be sublime?      

Explore incomplete ethics. Consider the appearance of ethics with purpose (major) and rule (minor). For the Utilitarian, the purpose is maximum pleasure. In Utilitarianism, as a society, what rules will produce the maximum total pleasure? Consider the appearance of ethics with purpose (major) and character (minor). Consider an ethic with the purpose of a community of love. Consider the appearance of ethics with rule (major) and character (minor). Where do rules come from? For Kant, the one thing all people recognize as good is a good will. Consider the appearance of ethics with rule (major) and purpose (minor). Explore the example of the rule, “You ought to maximize pleasure.” Consider the appearance of ethics with character (major) and rule (minor). The critique is that the more you build something in as a habit, the less it is a choice. Consider the appearance of ethics with character (major) and purpose (minor). In conclusion, we note that Christ's intent to produce an end will always be accompanied by the end actually being accomplished. Christ will always have intent and actual results united.

Sometimes I make a podcast and I think, “Golly I hope I did justice by that idea, person and movement that shaped rhetorical history.” Sometimes I make a podcast on the work of someone living, like Scott Stroud’s book about John Dewey, and sometimes I make a podcast on someone dead, like Kant. If I misrepresent a dead person, who will stop me? A living one. today, on Mere rhetoric, not exactly a retraction, but a revision of a previous episode on Immanual Kant, the philosopher who has been long-identified, including by me, as diametrically opposed to the field of rhetoric. Scott Stroud’s Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric, today on Mere Rhetoric.   Intro music   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, a podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren, specially thanks to the Humanities Media Project at the University of Texas for their support in making these new episodes both possible and awesome. Also thanks to Jacob in the booth, and Scott Stroud, also of the University of Texas. I emailed Dr. Stroud when I talked about his book in the Dewey episodes, and he told me he was working on a book on Kant that may change my opinion on him. Alright, I thought, let’s hear it.   And I did. Stroud wrote a few articles about Kant’s views of education which suggested that there may be a rhetoric of Kant after all, and they piqued my interest to the point when I was ready to jump on this book when it released.   Essentially Stroud argues that Kant didn’t hate rhetoric as much as we think so, which is pretty high because Kant says things like, “Man, I hate rhetoric.” Stroud even points out that Kant turned down a position as professor of poetry even though he wanted “academic advancement and funds” (4), just because he seemed to dislike linguistic fla-dee-la. But it’s possible that some of Kant’s antipathy towards rhetoric is just antipathy towards a certain kind of rhetoric.   Kant’s frienemy, Christian Garves, was a loud-and-proud Ciceronian, which criticized Kant openly and behind anonymity. “Kant rejected this way of doing philosophy,” Stroud writes “and in doing so, rejected the notion of rhetoric that appeared connected to it in practice” (23). He hated the idea of all the self-interest inherent in Garves’ understanding of rhetoric, felt like it was categorically opposed to the categorical imperative: that any action you undertake could be a universal law. Remember when your mom would catch you littering or picking the neighbors’ flowers and ask, “What if everyone did that? What would happen then?” That’s essentially the mom version of the categorial imperative.   But rhetoric isn’t about universals. It’s not about telling people to do things that are applicable to everyone in every situation--it’s hopelessly conditional. Garston in Saving Persausion, another book we’ve talked about on the podcast, banishes Kant from the world of rhetoric because he loved universals so much. Stroud responds to GArston’s complaints. “Rhetorical message are primarily not universal, since few things relevant to pressing decisions in the present are of such general scope,” he admits “Yet Kant’s philosophy seems to demand that practices be universalizable.” (187) The detachment usually described as a condition of scholarly logic is actually “an orientational or dispositional feature as as such is applicable to all forms of communicative activity” (189)  There are things that are universalizable in how we do rhetoric, even if each instance of rhetoric may be specific to its moment of kairos. As Stroud says, “Kant did not insist that a reason be a reason for every potential listener; he does seem to insist, however, that it be a reason for everyone in a comparable situation” (190).   Okay, that’s all well and good, but what about the fact that Kant pretty much straight out says, “Do you know what I hate? rhetoric. I really hate that field. Ugh.”? Well, first off, that’s paraphrase, but secondly, it’s also translation. There are multiple words that could be translated as rhetoric. Even in English, we have rhetoric and eloquence and persausion and all sorts of words that fan out like a Vann diagram with overlapping meanings. Some of the terms are manipulative, but not all. “clearly, the larger genus of ‘skilled speaking’ or elequence is re (42)levent to Kant’s moral project.” stroud says, but “If one honors the complexity of the phenomena of human communication and the range of terms being used by Kant, one can conceptualize rhetoric simply as the persuasive use of language in community with others “ (43). And that’s something that Kant can get behind Okay, so if we accept that Kant doesn’t have a deep abiding hatred for all things communication, what would a Kantian rhetoric look like? Building fromKant’s philosophy, what if he had taken that poetry job? what would he have said to the writers in his class? That’s the second task that Stroud takes, after his resuscitation of Kant into the field of rhetoric. Or as he himself puts it: “what sense of such rhetorical action are enjoined by Kant’s complex thought on morality, religion, politics, aesthetics, and education? Taking ‘rhetoric’ not as a simple term but as a complex concept, what uses or forms of rhetorical activity fit into Kant’s mature thought, especially the important topic of moral and the formation of the ideal sort of human community?” (7).   There are two venues where Kant’s ideal human community really comes out: education and religion. Both are troublesome to the fundamental question of rhetoric for Kant: how can you honor someone’s autonomy and their freedom and still try to change them? Kant hated manipulation, but you wouldn’t necessarily say that fourth-graders and manipulated into learning long division or state capitals, and you don’t even need to say that they’re manipulated in learning how to share, cooperate and treat others with respect.   Stroud points out that “Kant is notably hostile to rhetoric, but only one version of it--that of persuasive speech used with an orientation toward selfish and manipulative use of one’s social skill. Avoiding such an orientation is the primary aim of education” (106). Part of Kant’s ideal community is that people learn to do the right thing for the right reason. Maybe they can be constrained in the kingdom of right, but in the ideal kingdom of ends, people all do the right thing collectively because they are committed to it individually. Learning how to commit is the object of education.   The most moral way to teach people--especially young people--how to develop the internal discipline to choose the right thing instead of the selfish thing is to present them with lots of good examples. Examples don’t threaten or bully, but present themselves to autonomous agents who can decide for themselves how to interpret the actions and consequences. But since the internal state is key for Kantian ethics, the internal state of the example has to be part of the story. Using examples, especially as a way to teach, uses hypothetical about internal motives for making the choice. “They are, in an important sense, unreal and fictional” (116), even when actual and historical. Take the story of Washington at Valley Forge. If you tell kids that Washington persisted because he believed in the promise of our country, you will forge patriots. If you tell them that he endured because he thought he would wind up on people’s currency you create mercenaries. So in this sense, examples are always fictions of the people who tell them.   Let’s lay aside education and stories for a moment and turn to religion. Religion, too, involves a lot of stories and examples, but it also lets people participate in self-denying actions like prayer, especially traditional, public, set prayers.  When you’re reciting along with other people, you can’t express your inter state as much as alter it to match up with everyone else and the traditional prayer. Praying “forgive us our debts as we forgive our tresspassers” reminds you to be forgiving, even if your inclination is otherwise. Devotees who all gather together, in person or world wide, to say “as we forgive our trespassers” form an “invisible church”: a group of people who all have accepted the same internal conditions together. As Stroud explains it: “the invisible church is the ideal ethical community that we ought to aspire to form--a community that encompasses all agents who are members of it by virtue of their willing of the moral law over the incentives of inclination” (144). As opposed to a nation or a family, these community members opted in because of something they all agreed to believe internally together.   finally Stroud turns to the hardest sell: Kant as political rhetorician. He describes how rhetorical critics (those listening to rhetoric) and critical rhetors (those producing rhetoric) can do so most ethically. there are a lot of lists here, so get out your pens and paper.   So manipulative rhetoric has three characteristics: For Kant, manipulative rhetoric can be seen to have 3 characteristics 1-inequality of knowledge, between speaker and audience 2- this sort of rhetoric exerts a causal force on its listeners. “How rhetoric can treat humans as inherently valuable rational beings, or as machines with causality” (44), 3- idiosyncrasy of the goals of this rhetoric--private own goals. (44)   Non manipulative rhetorics have their own list of four characterstics 1- domain-specific concepts and knowledge--somthing to talk about 2- uses what Kant calls “lively presentations” especially through examples (44-5) 3- nonmanipulative rhetoic doesn’t violate respectability in language and “respect for the various parties in the interaction” (45) 4- public goals or transitive across agents (45)   Above all, you are to treat your audience as though it were comprised of autonomous individuals, not elements of the environment that can be manipulated. The best critical rhetors, “ should see the process of public testing as a way to optimize beliefs,” says Stroud, “including their own views. This quest implicates them in using second-personal reasons in an effort to con (214) vince others that the grounds for their views are sufficient subjectively and objectively. Seeing one’s audience as mere causal objects, however, inclines one to find the right utterances to say to move them as causal objects” (215) “Seeing people as part of the natural world is a vital step in using or manipulating them as a mere means, since this conceptualization of a person as an object with predictable causal interaction with other natural objects is a vital starting point to intelligently using them for some contingent purpose” (218).   And when you’re taking in the rhetoric, you similarly must abide by a set of standards:   Rules of criticism always treat the rhetor being studied or listened to as an equal always consider the utterance or object of study as at least a bearer of truth claims and second-person reasons. Do not make casual explanations exclusionary of attributions of dignity to a rhetor Do not believe that your criticism of such utterances is certain or exclusive of alternative readings (229) All of this is pretty life-affirming, and I have to admit that I was moved by Stroud’s (and Kant’s) description of the ideal world of rhetoric, just as I was at the end of his text on Dewey. In fact, I’m going to let Stroud have the last word because he puts the ideal in such a clear way.   “thus, Kant answers the ‘Q question’ [need the rhetor be moral] with a nuance reply--a moral agent may not necessarily be eloquent, but the most complete agent is perfected in pragmatic and moral ways. The complete agent is both a morally good person and person who possess the capacity to speak well” (234). outro

A keynote from the Battle of Ideas 2016 ‘If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all.’ Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment? (1784) When One Direction announced they were splitting up, child psychologists offered parents of grieving tweenies advice on how to console their offspring. In the same month, parents were also told by researchers how long they should read to their children each day. Business Secretary Sajid Javid has ordered university heads to establish a taskforce to take on sexist ‘lad culture’ and guide students to conduct their interpersonal relations in line with enlightened mores. Of course, not everyone follows expert advice on any of the above. Policy advisers and academic experts frequently complain about those who refuse to acknowledge their wisdom and carry on smoking, drinking sugary pop, being laddish. Cutting-edge techniques of behavioural psychology are being marshalled to deal with this problem. The UK’s Behavioural Insights Team, now a private company, has quadrupled in size since it was spun out of government in 2014. It is now working for the World Bank and the UN, while ‘nudge’ teams are being established in Australia, Singapore, Germany and the US. The ubiquity of nudge heralds a new renaissance for unapologetic paternalism. But where does that leave the great Enlightenment breakthrough, the idea that individuals should be self-determining and capable of making their own choices? Kant’s description of ‘mankind’s exit from his self-incurred immaturity’ seems strangely at odds with today’s enthusiasm for paternalistic intervention. For Kant, the outcome of any particular choice was less important than the cultivation of moral autonomy. The Enlightenment idea was that we should stop ‘outsourcing’ decisions about how to live to external agencies, whether the church, the monarchy, or some natural order. Today, though, new forms of authority have taken their place, leaving us just as childlike in relation to the new experts. Sceptics about the idea of autonomy suggest breakthroughs in neuroscience have revealed we are less rational than Enlightenment thinkers suggested. They argue it is wrong for strong-willed individuals to run rough-shod over vulnerable groups with less power. In a complex world of multiple choices, what is wrong with people seeking help to make informed decisions? Is autonomy really undermined if students themselves demand university authorities provide safe spaces, issue trigger warnings on course materials, make lessons in consent compulsory? If we are nudged into the good life, what harm is done? Should we grow up and accept new paternalism or does this mean sacrificing self-dominion and consigning ourselves to a life of permanent dependence? Is individual autonomy an outdated myth? Speakers Dr Tim Black books and essays editor, spiked Dr Katerina Deligiorgi reader in philosophy, University of Sussex; author, The Scope of Autonomy Dr Daniel Glaser director, Science Gallery London, King's College London Professor Mike Kelly senior visiting fellow, Behaviour and Health Research Unit, Institute of Public Health, University of Cambridge; researcher in nudge theory and choice architecture Georgios Varouxakis professor of the history of political thought, Queen Mary University of London; author, Mill on Nationality Chair Claire Fox director, Institute of Ideas; panellist, BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze