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       INTRODUCTION: KANT AND RHETORIC?

      Death often brings on its wings chances to reflect on the meaning of life. Indeed, the death of a close friend or relative not only spurs private reflection but also demands rhetorical activity—speech to comfort the living, to praise the dead, and to send the departed away from this life in the right ritual circumstances. Like any rhetorical situation calling for artful speech, the actions employed and effects created depend on the situation and the characteristics of the specific rhetor. It is such a combination that we see when the philosopher Immanuel Kant felt called on to act as more than a thinker when his friend and student, Johann Friedrich von Funk, died on May 4, 1760. Funk had studied with Kant for only a year in Königsberg, but he had impressed the developing philosopher. His death so enlivened Kant that on June 6, 1760—just more than a month after Funk’s passing—Kant penned a letter of condolence to the deceased’s mother. In this document Kant meets the demands of the situation and praises Funk’s character: he extols the “life and character of the blessedly deceased” (2:43) and uses this opportunity to rhetorically “express the respect that I have entertained for my former pupil” (2:41).¹ Funk is said to have “shown much diligence in study,” to have “lived withdrawn and quietly,” and to have prepared for “an uplifting end with the fortitude and ardent devotion of a Christian” (2:43). Kant also assuaged the grieving mother with the thought that her son was buried at the Königsberg cathedral.

      So far, Kant had met the demands of a rhetor eulogizing the deceased—he comforted the survivors and honored the dead. These moves are very much in line with what authorities on epideictic, or ceremonial, speaking, such as Aristotle or Cicero would advise in such situations. Yet Kant was a philosopher, and he was fixating on ends beyond the situation at hand. In addressing the immediate needs of the grieving mother, Kant also wanted to make a deeply philosophical point—one that concerned how we value life and the myriad activities and pursuits it entails. Life was not about mere worldly success or happiness. This was a message that Kant conveyed in many other texts in many other ways. Here, Kant adapted to the situation in making this point, since simply lecturing on the meaning of life and human virtue would not only fail to satisfy the saddened mother; it might anger her. Kant’s message demanded adaptation, so he ensconces his reflections on life and its values in the context created by Funk’s untimely demise. Indeed, Kant begins his letter to Funk’s mother by appealing to the opportunity opened up to him (and perhaps to her) by Funk’s death:

      If people living amidst the turmoil of their practical affairs and diversions were occasionally to mix in serious moments of instructive contemplation, to which they are called by the daily display of the vanity of our intentions regarding the fate of their fellow citizens: thereby their pleasures would perhaps be less intoxicating, but their position would take up a calm serenity of the soul, by which accidents are no longer unexpected, and even the gentle melancholy, this tender feeling with which a noble heart swells up if it considers in solitary stillness the contemptibleness of that which, with us, commonly ranks as great and important, would contain more true happiness than the violent merriment of the flippant and the loud laughing of fools. (2:39)

      Kant is eloquently claiming that we ought to wish for those moments that compel us to consider who we are, what we value, and how we ought to orient ourselves to the changing winds of fate and fortune. Funk’s death, Kant submits, is just that sort of occasion. The deaths brought on by wars often fail to touch those living in “the quiet stillness of civic life” (2:40), but the deaths of those close to us in this life can rattle our everyday slumbers. As Kant puts it to Funk’s mother, seeing the death of one shows us the potential end of our own life—we think, “I am a human being, and what befalls human beings can also happen to me. . . . I find myself in the turmoil of business and in the throng of life’s duties, and my friend just recently also found himself in the same, I enjoy my life quietly and without worry, but who knows for how long?” (2:40). Funk’s death should remind all those close to him—including Kant and Funk’s mother—that the values and ease of everyday life are not as concrete as they may seem.

      Kant wants to use the occasion of Funk’s death not only to speak about the deceased but also to say something of educative value for those listening. As of June 6, 1760, this audience was Kant and the mother receiving the letter. Later that year, however, Kant had his letter published by J. F. Driest to distribute it among his friends.² In one sense, Kant was using this death for a purposeful end. Yet by linking his thoughts on the meaning of life and the wise disposition one ought to take in response to this specific event, Kant opened up rhetorical room for such a merger; in a real sense, Kant’s ruminations were a response to this unfortunate situation and provide the context in which Funk’s way of living can be honored. Beyond this, his rhetorical maneuvering in the face of this tragedy illustrated the value Kant always placed on what can be called “educative” endeavors—activities meant to make the most out of human capacities. When we choose to focus on the wrong things, we suffer and corrupt ourselves. When we attend to the right things and act in the right ways, we become what we should be. Thus, it is not a stretch to claim that Kant is educating the mother—or all who read this letter in its later public iteration—as to the worth of reflecting on what life’s value is. Such a reading, informed by Kant’s activity here as a rhetorical response to this death, is buttressed by Kant’s own thoughts. While consoling Funk’s mother, he also makes a point to all that have been in similar situations: “The man of skill, of merit, of wealth is not always the one to whom providence has set the farthest end to his life in order to fully enjoy the fruits of all of these” (2:41). Our lives are too often cut short for reasons we cannot seem to fathom.

      Kant’s activity in this letter, contrary to the dry and metaphysically focused caricatures we typically receive of his demeanor, is eloquent, rhetorically sensitive, and focused on persuading his readers toward a specific end. Yet the end to which he directs his friends, Funk’s mother, and anyone else listening to these words is uniquely Kantian in that it forcefully advocates the centerpiece to his later

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