Nietzsche and Rhetoric

Bradford Vivian

Douglas Thomas. Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically. New York: The Guilford Press, 1999. 190 pages. $30.00.

Friedrich Nietzsche made revolutionary contributions to Western thought, but rhetorical studies has not yet fully engaged, much less embraced, his insights. Prominent twentieth-century thinkers from Heidegger and Derrida to Foucault and Deleuze acknowledge their indebtedness to Nietzsche, whose philosophy anticipated the revaluation of metaphysical principles that has formed such a defining feature of Western thought over the past century or so. Although he was trained as a classical philologist, lectured on rhetoric at the University of Basel, and refers to rhetoric in important passages throughout his corpus, Nietzsche has garnered relatively little attention in rhetorical studies for one whose challenges to the Western tradition bear directly on issues central to rhetorical inquiry. Douglas Thomas’s Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically responds to this deficiency with a sincere and enthusiastic effort at demonstrating the ways in which Nietzsche’s thought not only warrants a rethinking of rhetoric, but also enables us to recognize the centrality of rhetoric to enduring metaphysical questions concerning language, subjectivity, and truth. Readers will find in Thomas’s book a sufficient provocation to substantive and sustained discussion on the importance of Nietzsche to our discipline.

In his introduction, Thomas proposes that Nietzsche’s critique of Platonism corresponds to a revised conception of rhetoric. He argues that "Nietzsche’s importance can be marked both through a critiquing of earlier (primarily Platonic) theories of representation and through a revisioning of the concept of rhetoric that allows for a different system of interpretation of language and the world" (1). The logic of Thomas’s inquiry is shaped by his understanding that Nietzsche distinguishes between Platonism and, in Thomas’s phrasing, a "rhetorical" worldview. Nietzsche’s texts, Thomas explains, feature "two competing views of the world: the philosophical, Platonic view, which treats the world as the reflection or appearance of abstract essences, in which language plays a secondary role; and the rhetorical view, which treats language as primary, understanding the world as that which is negotiated by and through language" (1). Thomas detects in Nietzsche’s inquiry the appearance of a critical space in which language, style, and perspective—in a word, rhetoric—cannot help but acquire a value denied them by the metaphysical tradition.

Thomas subsequently argues that the concepts of representation and interpretation comprise two primary axes along which Nietzsche critiques Platonism and thereby cultivates a transformed understanding of rhetoric. He begins by rehearsing Nietzsche’s famous insight that the allegedly transcendent values of metaphysical thought—its versions of truth and morality, for example—have acquired their transcendent value only because we have forgotten their history and their debts to language. "All values and systems of values have histories," Thomas writes, "and these histories are embedded in the nature, structure, and order of language and representation and always reveal that interpretation, an individual interpretation, is always at the heart of any value. That history, Nietzsche contends, is forgotten because as words become commonplace their history becomes unrecognizable" (16). The allegedly eternal values of Platonism are thus rhetorically produced—produced by linguistic representations and interpretations—but nevertheless disavow that production to attain their transparency and ideality.

Consequently, the reigning Platonic view of representation and interpretation maintains a hierarchy in which knowledge, truth, and their expression in language must be evaluated according to immutable ideals. Hence, Thomas explains, Nietzsche underscores the moral imperative according to which Western thought has been unified: a universal command to represent knowledge truthfully and to interpret reality objectively. Nietzsche’s questioning of this incessant will to truth amounts to "something more than a destruction of the world of ‘Ideas’ or appearances and essences; rather, it is a deconstruction of those very concepts, a tracking down of the motivations inherent in Platonism, and an analysis of the modes of valuation that produce and sustain such a system of thought or inquiry" (41). But how is this deconstruction achieved? By the danger that rhetoric represents to Platonism, according to Thomas.

Thomas proceeds to explore the tincture of danger that has characterized rhetoric throughout the Western tradition and traces the ways in which Nietzsche invokes that danger to accomplish an overturning of Platonism. "At the most basic level," Thomas proposes, "rhetoric questions representation and in so doing questions the fundamental grounding of the field of problems in which philosophy appears. In this space, rhetoric threatens philosophy; it becomes philosophy’s ‘dangerous other,’ both tied to philosophy and a threat to it" (52). Thomas delineates the nature of this danger first through readings of Plato’s Gorgias, Phaedrus, and Sophist (which will prove familiar to those rehearsed in Plato’s polemics against the Sophists) and then according to Nietzsche’s own commentaries on danger. Thomas concludes that Plato’s fervent association of danger with rhetoric represents, for Nietzsche, a particularly telling opprobrium: "Rhetoric, as a dangerous activity, confronts the value of metaphysics by showing not only that its origins are rooted in deceptions and dissimulation, but that metaphysics continues to rely on those processes in the constructions of values and truths" (71). Thus, "Nietzsche’s sense of danger," Thomas adds, "evokes a place or position from which one can ask questions previously unasked and even unaskable" (71)—a place or position whose proper name is rhetoric.

Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically also establishes the importance of vision to Nietzsche’s revaluation of representation and interpretation. Thomas attempts to disclose the function of rhetoric in this revaluation. Thomas claims that language is essential to Nietzsche’s valorization of subjective perspective over the transcendent eye of metaphysics. "Language," he writes, "not only creates particular ways of seeing, it makes seeing at all, in the sense of the attribution of cause and effect or a certain ‘faith in grammar,’ possible" (94). In a compelling interpretation of Aristotle, Thomas proposes that Aristotle’s definition of the art amounts to an affirmation of multiple perspectives, for the rhetor’s techne consists in being able to see all the available means of persuasion in a given case: "It is through the multiplicity of perspectives that rhetoric makes possible the idea of vision, not merely a limited vision, seeking only what is true or good, but a vision that must consider all accounts in any given case" (101). Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric, Thomas suggests, unites the subjective nature of vision, language, and interpretation, for one can speak only on the basis of what one is able to see. "Vision, for Nietzsche, presents a limit to interpretation, at once making the process of interpretation necessarily individualized and, necessarily, incomplete" (104). To paraphrase Thomas, Nietzsche’s conception of vision encompasses a kind of seeing that calls into question the modes of representation and interpretation so formative of metaphysical thought and thereby offers the possibility of seeing from multiple perspectives—of seeing rhetorically, as Thomas would have it.

The final chapter, on style, is the most cogent of Thomas’s study and, in many ways, reads like a synecdoche of the various analyses pursued throughout the previous chapters. Style and rhetoric are given an intimately parallel (if not interchangeable) status in Thomas’s interpretation. He proposes that, "for Nietzsche, rhetoric is never separate from the social dimensions that condition it"; shortly thereafter, he adds, "Style, for Nietzsche, is no mere matter of writing, of transcribing thoughts in some eloquent manner. Instead, style is a matter of living" (127). Not surprisingly, Thomas pits style and rhetoric against the Platonic conception of language, which would strive for a transparency with essences rather than concede that allegedly ideal and original truths are engendered by the stylistic operations of language. "On the one hand," Thomas explains, "style is not in some way accidental to language, but rather is constitutive of it. On the other hand, it is precisely what the metaphysics of representation seeks to conceal; style is what is continually distanced in the act of representation" (136). Nietzsche’s affirmation of style in language, Thomas concludes, amounts to an affirmation of that which metaphysics would bar from the domain of truth and value—namely, the senses, language’s social function, and its nourishment of life in general.

Thomas’s conclusion summarizes his unifying ideas and offers some brief elaboration on select topics by way of a reading of The Birth of Tragedy that situates Nietzsche’s conceptions of language, appearance, and truth within the larger context of Nietzsche’s thinking on art and tragic time. The placement of this reading is somewhat curious given the manner in which it exerts a certain authority over the preceding analysis, and given that Nietzsche himself was harsher on this early work than even his critics were and developed revised conceptions of its subject matter in later texts. This is not to say that such a reading cannot be useful to Thomas’s purpose, only that it may be given a questionable final word in the general economy of the book.

On the whole, however, Thomas is to be commended for pointing out that Nietzsche offers us the opportunity to "re-vision rhetoric" (174) rather than simply applying established notions of trope, style, or composition to his writings. In this regard, Thomas identifies such "re-visioning" as the ultimate goal of his text. In his closing paragraph, Thomas remarks that this goal constitutes merely "a beginning in the larger project of resituating Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s intellectual legacy within the broader context of contemporary rhetorical studies" (174). It seems fitting, then, that an evaluation of Thomas’s study should consider the extent to which he has been able to effect such "re-visioning."

Toward that end, one may detect at least two competing senses of rhetoric at work throughout Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically. The first sense appears early in the book as a justification for Thomas’s methodology and relies on an essentially Aristotelian definition of rhetoric as persuasion. "It is difficult to open any of Nietzsche’s books without becoming immediately aware of his distinctly rhetorical sensibility," Thomas writes. "He does not simply argue his case or narrative it; he persuades" (7). Shortly thereafter, Thomas explicitly refers to Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric when he argues that Nietzsche’s system of thought—in contrast to that of Platonism—embraces the contingency of "available means of persuasion" rather than unchanging truths (10). On this account, Nietzsche and Aristotle happily complement one another, which seems odd given Aristotle’s prominence in the metaphysical tradition. One might wonder, then, whether something is lost in Thomas’s untroubled coupling of these thinkers—namely, that Nietzsche may be read as admonishing us to overcome the metaphysical priority of reason or logic intrinsic to any definition of rhetoric as persuasion.

To be fair, Thomas devotes the balance of his study to developing a second sense of rhetoric, which follows from Nietzsche’s understanding that "rhetoric (as the negotiation of world through language) is born out of the most basic human needs, survival and, growing from that, community" (173). Recognizing that rhetorical processes constitute our understanding of the world and its investment with human values, Thomas proclaims, opens a critical space in which rhetoric becomes a vital form of social critique: to transform our understanding of language is to transform our social relations, our guiding truths, and the satisfaction of our "most basic human needs." This second sense of rhetoric creates a certain tension with the former Aristotelian sense that Thomas uses to justify his study. Both senses may prove compatible on some level, but readers of the present study are obliged to ask which conception of rhetoric comprises the ultimate contribution of the book in order to evaluate how effectively Thomas has been able to "re-vision rhetoric" by virtue of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

In this context, the inclusion of more secondary literature might have aided Thomas in honing his contribution to rhetorical theory. Indeed, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically draws upon a somewhat sparse amount of Nietzschean scholarship considering the amount of interdisciplinary literature devoted to Nietzsche’s intellectual significance. So too would Thomas’s pivotal discussion of Plato and the Sophists in chapter 2 have benefited from complementary literatures, for Plato’s polemics in these passages are given undue authority as historical accounts of classical thought. In either case, a thicker incorporation of secondary sources might have helped Thomas sharpen his rendering of the theories he wishes to call into question as well as those emergent theories he wishes to advance, while simultaneously placing his study more definitively within current interdisciplinary conversations concerning Nietzsche’s legacy.

Regardless of these concerns, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically is a welcome contribution to our discipline, not only for its effort to demonstrate the relevance of such a revolutionary modern thinker to rhetorical inquiry, but also for its attempt to use that demonstration to enhance our understanding of rhetoric itself. The manner in which Thomas strives to relate the breadth of Nietzsche’s thought to rhetorical inquiry will provide readers new to Nietzsche with a more meaningful introduction to his writings and will provide those more versant in his thinking with a series of substantive themes according to which the relationship of Nietzsche to rhetoric may be debated in greater detail. Such a sincere engagement with both Nietzsche and rhetoric will undoubtedly produce valuable conversation concerning the nature and history of rhetorical studies. Above all, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically will serve as sufficient provocation for others to take up the larger project that it proposes: that of continuing to relate Nietzsche to rhetorical inquiry in still more transformative ways.