Nietzsche on Rhetoric
Abstract: I provide a brief and basic reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of “rhetoric” and how it relates to his greater notion of the “ubermensch.”
If Plato is concerned with establishing a relation between philosophical knowledge and political power, Nietzsche flips this question on its head, arguing instead that philosophical knowledge is always and already a form of political power. Or, in other words, the split between philosophy and rhetoric is itself an act of power. Unpacking Nietzsche’s analysis of slave morality, and in particular of Socrates, makes this clear.
Nietzsche’s critique of Hegel’s historicism leads him to argue that the “peak” of human civilization is not the culmination of history in his contemporary era, but the early age of Greece.[i] It was in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, and tragedy especially, that Nietzsche found the affirmative elements of man’s suffering that would come to characterize much of his later philosophy. For Nietzsche, the health of a culture may be measured by how well that culture maximizes the outputs and channels of human creativity and strength[ii]; it is this instinctual and life affirming capacity that Nietzsche appreciates in Greek culture, and he comes to call this attitude toward reality as the “master morality.” According to Nietzsche, however, Socrates’ intervention signals the decline of Greek culture and introduces “slave morality” into the world. In contrast to the vigorous and strenuous (if not intellectually bereft) life of the master, the slave is weak, unable to participate as the master’s equal and thus privy to the instincts and commands of his greater counterparts. The slave’s weakness incites the passions, and the slave comes to resent the master morality. This form of “vengefulness,” what Nietzsche terms ressentiment (or “a desire to deaden pain by means of affects”), is precisely the Socratic ethic: rather than engaging with the world in positive and creative ways, ressentiment is a reactive and principally negative morality. (Gen. 127) Because the slave cannot compete with the master in the “real” world, the slave’s ressentiment leads to the creation of an abstract intellectual realm whereby “morality” is invented as the “transvaluation of all values.” (Gen. 36) By positing this realm, the slave can come to judge the actions of the master morality through an invented ethical frame, transferring power from the brutish capacities of the strong to the intellectual judgments of the weak. It is due to Socrates’ lack of master capacities that he is forced to rather “turn reason into a tyrant,” imbuing reason with a power that was previously missing. (Twi. 478) He thus crippled the master morality irredeemably. Socrates, in separating reason from rhetoric, was actually providing the world with a radically new morality—one that conceals its own origins in the “will to power,” defined as the descriptive condition of reality where overcoming, struggle, triumph and strength are the principle grounds of man’s existence.[iii]
In Nietzsche’s historical analysis,[iv] The Socratic morality becomes the Christian ethos, and the Christian ethos universalizes Socratic morality. While Nietzsche is explicit in his critique of slave morality, he also importantly notes that it is the first moment in man’s history that man is made “deep.” (Gen. 33) It is this deepening of man, where man no longer comes to trust his senses and instincts, which ultimately leads to the development of critical science: an attempt to see past the world of appearances that in itself constantly limits its own claims to knowledge. It is modern science, according to Nietzsche, which has crippled the valuation of values and produced the “death of God.”[v] It is a great irony for Nietzsche that the intellectual course established by Christian moralizing and the sickly, priestly ascetic ideal would lead, ultimately, to the infinitely-probing standards of the sciences and the realization that man has himself created God. (Gen. 153) And so, when Nietzsche refers to the death of God, it is a statement against the crisis of his modern age. Nietzsche sees processes of nihilism taking the place of the promise of human creativity: the death of God robs man of his capacity to envision life-affirming ends, and, while the death of God opens man to the possibilities of his own morality-creation, Nietzsche instead recognizes in his contemporary moment the growth of nihilism.[vi] The original split between reason and rhetoric developed by Socrates would lead to the evolution of reason up until the point where reason attacks its own foundations, leaving man to navigate an infinite ocean with only the desperate desire to reach back to land. (Gay. 180) It is at this juncture, with the prevalence of a nihilistic rationalism, that Nietzsche posits the “final man,” a being “on the horizon” who is so lacking in faith and will that his only desire is for a listless self-preservation. The final man stares into the abyss: “’We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” (Zar. 18)
Nietzsche’s analysis of “rhetoric” should be read as a response to this final man. Contrary to this life-desiccating image, Nietzsche also posits the possibility of the ubermensch.[vii] The ubermensch sees in the death of God the opportunity to exercise his own self-law-making capacity; the ubermensch invents the horizon of its own being, and accepts fully the indefinability of man as a final essence. Nietzsche at one point refers to this ubermensch as, among other things, a “poet who does not lie”: where Socrates posited an entirely other plane by which to judge the actual world, the ubermensch lives fully and instinctively in the world of appearances and instincts. He creates a morality that is valuable for the ends he has set upon his own life. But the creation of morality is, for Nietzsche, not an act of reason, but rhetoric.
What stands under “reason” for Nietzsche is not further reason, but the more animal instincts of the ego. “Reason” is thus the product of deeper instincts, rhetorically sublimated: reason stands not in contrast to rhetoric, but as one of its consequences. This is due to the nature of rhetoric being intertwined with the use of language, and comes to the fore when we consider the problem of “truth.” Language does not convey truth, but rather opinion: language is, by definition, first and foremost a vehicle for persuasion. As such “language is rhetoric, because it desires to convey only a doxa, not an episteme.”[viii] For Nietzsche, truth is a social convention, a “movable host of metaphors,” rhetorically constructed; it is the correct assignment of words to things, mediated by the culture in which it exists.[ix] Words become concepts because they enjoin unlike things under an abstracted likeness, by “making equal what is unequal.” It is this act—which Nietzsche sees as a form of lying—that is the first rhetorical and creative use of language. The ubermensch does not construct his morality by lying (as language itself is already a lie), but by accepting the rhetorical foundations of “truth” and creatively asserting a new standard. The attempt to do away with illusion entirely—the push of rationalism converted into science—is precisely what has lead man into nihilism. To this end, the ubermensch recognizes the irreducible necessity of illusion; he does not attempt to rid the world of illusion, but to produce an illusion that’s value to life may be affirmed and felt.[x] Rhetoric thus produces illusions; the more totalizing (not systematic) the illusion, the more it is “truth.” Nietzsche complicates the original binary between philosophy and rhetoric by collapsing the binary entirely, seeing behind any and all philosophies the rhetorical foundations of an active “will to knowledge,” which Nietzsche further defines as a valence of the will to power. To this end, Nietzsche would say that the division between philosophy and rhetoric, rhetoric and reason is a false one that is itself a form of power operating on life to conform to given (life-rejecting) ends. Rhetoric does not work on reason so much as it forges and creates regimes of reason; this power is reserved, for Nietzsche, in the ubermensch.[xi]
[i] “For what they [the pre-Socratics] invented was the archetypes of philosophic thought. All posterity has not made an essential contribution to them since.” Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, p. 31
[ii] I take this definition from Nietzsche’s early engagement with David Strauss. See Nietzsche, “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer”
[iii] “The criterion of truth resides in the enhancement of the feeling of power.” Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 290
[iv] We might say that Nietzsche is performing a “critical” history throughout most of his work, given the definitions of the uses of history he sets down in “The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.”
[v] See Nietzsche, Gay Science, pp. 181-182: “‘Whither is god?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers.”
[vi] Nihilism, for Nietzsche, is effectively the belief that nothing is true, and thus everything is possible; while this may seem like value to Nietzsche, he finds nihilism leading to the erasure of the will rather than its realization.
[vii] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 12: “I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome, What have you done to overcome him?”
[viii] See Nietzsche, On Rhetoric and language,
[ix] See Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies,” p. 84
[x] See Nietzsche, Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, p. 92: “There can be neither society no culture without untruth…Everything which is good and beautiful depends upon illusion: truth kills—it even kills itself…” Nietzsche Makes this point even more forcibly in The Will to Power: “We have need o flies in order to conquer this reality, this ‘truth,’ that is, in order to live—that lies are necessary in order to live is itself part of the terrifying and questionable character of existence.” Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 451
[xi] Admittedly, the political implications of this are somewhat ambiguous to me. It is clear that throughout Nietzsche’s work he denounces democracy (rule of mediocrity) and the masses and prefers a version of aristocracy, but it is unclear whether his idea of the ubermensch is to take up a position of leader re: the masses. Elsewhere, it seems that the ubermensch wants nothing to do with the masses and thus rejects political power.
For a copy of the transcript for the YouTube video “On Nietzsche’s Concept of Rhetoric”, please see below: