Between Never-Never Land and the Essence of Things:
The Truth of Metaphor in Nietzsche and Gorgias
In the Western intellectual life, few figures inspire as much controversy as Gorgias of Leontini and Friedrich Nietzsche (unhappily, as he often claims) of Germany, two master stylists forever resisting fixedly falling into the categories – philosophy, poetry, sophistry – thrown at them by a Western tradition unsettled by their playfully serious provocations. Nietzsche himself directly links his work to Gorgias by claiming that, after all, the sophists, Gorgias included, were right. When Nietzsche writes that “[e]very advance in epistemology and moral knowledge has reinstated the Sophists” (The Will to Power, 233), he of course implies that his own anti-metaphysical move beyond good and evil, as the major advance in epistemology and moral knowledge, is in a fundamental sense in line with the work of the sophists.1 The precise nature of Nietzsche’s reinstatement of sophism, however, remains a matter of debate.2 Engaging in just such a debate is perhaps one way – a compelling one, I believe – to characterize and contextualize contemporary conversations and contentions in many fields of intellectual endeavor. Between the increasingly merely playful dance of differance carried out by gleefully-postmodern academics, on one side, and the increasingly reactionary and dogmatic assertions of anti-anti-foundationalists, on the other, figures such as Gorgias and Nietzsche are points of contention, usually claimed as heroes of multiplicitous invention by postmodern theorists and vilified as enemies of the good by critics of postmodernism. Perhaps, though, Gorgias and Nietzsche actually, and maybe even most radically, offer a middle way, an alternative between meaningless play and falsely-secure seriousness. This paper, in examining Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense”3 and Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen,4 seeks to trace a suggestive though by no means complete sketch of such a Nietzschean-Gorgianic middle way, a middle way that can most succinctly be described as the way of metaphor.5 Both Gorgias and Nietzsche assert the fundamentally tropological nature of human language and perception, and they thereby affirm that fitting or “true” logos is a logos that is self-aware of its non-absolute status and that, in and through this self-awareness and its concomitant “danger,” combines play and seriousness in a discourse that can serve the human good.
While Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” utilizes imagistic and metaphorical means6 so as to disclose the unavoidably metaphorical nature of human discourse, Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen functions as a kind of praxis, a metaphor-in-action illustrating how a discourse that makes its own metaphoricity thematic can uniquely serve the human good. As such, the two texts are here treated in reverse chronological order, Nietzsche’s more theoretical text grounding the reading of Gorgias’s Helen. Such an approach overtly seeks to interpret Gorgias’s text through a Nietzschean lens; nevertheless, it certainly cannot be denied that this Nietzschean lens itself draws on and is partially constituted by the insights that Gorgias’s text makes possible. Suffice it to say, both Gorgias and Nietzsche would be at home with, and no doubt delight in, such interpretive circularity.
In “On Truth and Lying,” Nietzsche claims that, at each stage of human perception and communication, the fundamental material of perception – for Nietzsche, nerve stimuli – is translated from one medium to another, just as in metaphor two distinct entities are “falsely” – in other words, metaphorically – equated. As Nietzsche writes: “First, he [a human being] translates a nerve stimulus into an image! That is the first metaphor. Then, the image must be reshaped into a sound!7 The second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overlapping of spheres” (“Truth and Lying,” 248-249). For Nietzsche, the metaphorical activity of perception and communication necessitates that all communication, and thus all language, is always already rhetorical, for humans do not communicate reality itself but rather the relational ground in which reality is apprehended in a metaphorical manner. 8 Persuasive metaphors, and not facts, are the true unit of exchange in the human realm. “What is truth?” Nietzsche writes in a passage that deserves to be cited in full. It is
a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions, worn-out metaphors without sensory impact, coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins. (“Truth and Lying,” 250)
Note Nietzsche’s use of metaphor – truth is “a mobile army of metaphors,” truths are “coins” – to describe the metaphorical nature of truth. Such metaphors of metaphor – Gorgias’s “Speech is a powerful lord” (Helen, 52) is another example – are true to the metaphoricity that, for Nietzsche, is unavoidable in human formulations of the truth, a metaphoricity that is apt to be forgotten when truths become “solid,” “canonical,” and “binding.” To forget the metaphoricity of truth – its poetic, rhetorical, and relational nature – requires a “lie,” one that, in taking truth not as metaphorical but as absolute, makes of truth itself an illusory kind of anti-metaphor that does not recognize its own metaphoricity and thus lies about its own truthful untruth, as it were. The seemingly paradoxical jumbling of “truth” and “lies”/“untruth” in the preceding sentence, as well as in “On Truth and Lying” itself, is purposeful, for in effect Nietzsche plays with these terms, in the process transforming them into metaphors of one another. His ultimate aim in this most Odyssean of endeavors is to illustrate that human speech is most true when it does not attempt to extricate itself from the non-absolute intersecting gradations of similarity and difference in which it is by its very nature fastened. In sum, then, despite the undeniable polemicism of both Nietzsche’s argument and the mobile army of metaphors of metaphor used to carry it out, Nietzsche does not here claim that human truths are mere fabrications and thus absolutely not true. Rather, Nietzsche suggests that truth taken absolutely is untrue insofar as it forgets or denies its ground in the “primeval faculty of human fantasy” (252).
“On Truth and Lying” goes on to argue that the human intellect – prone to arrogance and self-delusion – fashions the original intuitive metaphors of perception into concepts, those “worn-out metaphors” that “after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation” (250). Precisely because the intellect “forgets that the original intuitive metaphors are indeed metaphors and takes them for the things themselves” (252), it can build overarching conceptual structures that allow the human being to put “his actions under the rule of abstractions” (252). Such conceptual structures, though they help bring about a distinctively human world, do not ultimately satisfy what Nietzsche calls the “drive to form metaphors, that fundamental desire in man, which cannot be discounted for one moment, because that would amount to ignoring man himself” (254). The drive to form metaphors, which “rational man” both utilizes and stifles so as to form conceptual abstractions, eventually “seeks a new province for its activities… and generally finds it in myth and in art” (254). The “intuitive man,” as exemplified by the artist and the mythmaker, “constantly confuses the categories… [thus] showing the desire to shape the existing world of the wideawake person to be variegatedly irregular and disinterestedly incoherent, exciting, and eternally new, as is the world of dreams” (254). In self-consciously working with intuitive metaphors, the intuitive man rediscovers his inventive capacity and the inherent flexibility of the human world. In putting himself “under the rue of abstractions” that results when human concepts are not themselves recognized as metaphors, the rational man denies his inventive capacity and essentially severs the basis of his connection to the world.9
Because Nietzsche frequently describes the conceptual order of the rational man in undoubtedly negative terms – for example, as “a prison fortress” (254) – many a postmodern theorist has taken Nietzsche to be wholeheartedly urging the endless deconstruction of meaning, the creative artist’s inspired assault against the conceptual order propagated by the falsely secure rational man. To read Nietzsche as univocally championing intuitive man, however, is, just like reading Nietzsche as simply declaring that truth of any kind does not in fact exist, to mistake Nietzsche’s polemicism for absolutism – a move that Nietzsche himself warns against by questioning absolutist readings, even absolutist readings of non-absolutism. As Nietzsche writes when attacking rigid conceptual assumptions:
[E]ven our distinction between individual and species is anthropomorphic and does not stem from the essence of things, although we also do not dare to say that it does not correspond to it. For that would be a dogmatic assertion, and as such just as unprovable as its opposite. (249-250)
For Nietzsche, the dogmatic assertions of delusional absolutism are best combated by situating one’s discourse within a middle position that cannot run for cover toward either absolute truth or absolute meaninglessness. In the end, “On Truth and Lying” suggests that human beings, in order to rise above pure animality, cannot avoid building with concepts. Nietzsche cautions, however, that “the building must be light as gossamer” (252). Rather than taking their conceptual structures as absolute truths, conceptual artists of a Nietzschean bent remain aware of the non-absolute metaphorical base of all their concepts, remembering that “the origin of language is not a logical process, and the whole material in and with which the man of truth, the scientist, the philosopher, works and builds, stems, if not from a never-never land, in any case not from the essence of things” (249).10 Maneuvering between these two “nots” – the absolute freedom of a never-never land and the absolute truth of the essence of things – the speech-artist Gorgias demonstrates with his Encomium of Helen that a speech that makes its own metaphoricity thematic can serve the human good by experientially provoking the realization that the human truths crafted in speech can never obtain an absolute status that makes them canonical and binding in every particular situation. If, then, Nietzsche’s text points the way to how truth can be told in an extra-moral sense, Gorgias’s text exemplifies such truth-telling.
Gorgias’s ostensible task in the Encomium is “to refute those who rebuke Helen… to free the accused of blame and, having reproved her detractors as prevaricators and proved the truth, to free her from their ignorance” (50), a task that Gorgias carries out by arguing that, whether persuaded by fate, force, logos, or love, Helen possessed zero freedom and therefore deserves zero blame. However, the stated task of proving “the truth” proves problematic because, from the Encomium’s opening lines, the Gorgianic notion of truth is anything but straightforward. Though Gorgias claims that truth is becoming to a speech (50), the overall category of the “becoming” – fitting, ordered, cosmic (class lecture) – is primary, while truth, as in essence a species of the larger genus “becoming,” is secondary. Further, Gorgias almost immediately revises his initially stated goal of proving the truth: “I shall go on to the beginning of my future speech, and I shall set forth the causes through which it was likely that Helen’s voyage to Troy should take place” (51). In a Gorgianic cosmos in which absolute knowledge is not possible – “it is not easy for [humans] to recall the past nor to consider the present nor to predict the future” (52) – the very idea of the truth, it seems, is supplanted by the likely. Even more than the slippery nature of the Gorgianic conception of truth, though, the following statement calls into question Gorgias’s stated purpose in the Encomium: “All who have and do persuade people of things do so by molding a false argument” (52). The inclusion of both past and present verb tenses suggests that, even as Gorgias argues that Alexander used a false argument to persuade Helen to accompany him to Troy, Gorgias himself acknowledges that this very argument taking place in theEncomium is itself false! No wonder that Gorgias’s claim in the Encomium’s final line that it is a “diversion” is often taken as an acknowledgment that Gorgias, as a precursor to postmodernism, realizes that his discourse inevitably contradicts itself and in effect unsays the very possibility of its own saying.
Does Gorgias really want to persuade his audience to believe that Helen is innocent of all blame – in other words, is Gorgias being serious? Or, is the Encomium a mere diversion and therefore not really concerned with persuading the audience of anything – in other words, is Gorgias being playful? The additional possibility that Gorgias’s Encomium enacts a serious form of play from a Nietzschean middle position arises upon considering that by not believing Gorgias his audience experientially discovers the following: speech may indeed be “a powerful lord” (52), but it is not all-powerful. The freedom to disbelieve even the most incantatory, spellbinding speech is directly provoked by Gorgias’s hard-to-believe, though powerfully rendered, argument. To not believe Gorgias’s stated argument is to recognize that the Encomium is most fundamentally a speech about speech in which Gorgias highlights the metaphorical nature of speech. Like Nietzsche, Gorgias most effectively demonstrates the tropological nature of speech when speaking about speech itself in metaphorical terms. After metaphorically defining speech as a “powerful lord” (52), Gorgias goes on to equate speech’s power with, in turn, poetry and sacred incantations. As he remarks upon making these metaphorical shifts, “But come, I shall turn from one argument [logos] to another” (52). Indeed, Gorgias in effect turns the metaphorical power of speech upon itself, trying to capture the ever-flowing creativity of speech within specific moments of creative verbal expression. For Gorgias, as for Nietzsche,logos is metaphor, and thus perhaps Gorgias’s seemingly contradictory claim that all persuasion involves “molding a false argument” is not that contradictory after all. For what else is metaphor but a “false argument,” one that, as Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying” points out, is all-too-often taken as a literal truth. In such a reading, Gorgias’s argument as a whole, precisely in its falseness, serves as an overarching metaphor of metaphor. By disclosing persuasion as metaphorical, Gorgias does not claim that, because of its failure to anchor itself within absolute truth, human discourse is therefore meaningless. He does, however, imply that by seeing that the nature of speech is metaphorical and not absolute, an audience experiences the freedom to evaluate human speech as more or less “becoming” for particular human communities and particular occasions. By not believing that Helen was persuaded by all-powerful speech, Gorgias’s audience comes to believe in their own freedom to avoid “unbecoming” persuasions.
In conclusion, the Nietzschean and Gorgianic texts discussed above reveal that working with intuitive metaphors recognized as metaphors allows humans to rediscover the inventive capacity at the root of their most fundamental linguistic and perceptual interactions with the world. Such a rediscovery promotes an increased sensitivity to the possibilities inherent in any particular human situation, and thus increases human freedom. Even the most buttressed conceptual fortresses, and even the most incantatory speeches seeking to force one into unbecoming belief, cannot enjoy absolute rule when their own ground is disclosed to be the ever-shifting ground – the human ground – of metaphor.
Work Cited
Consigny, Scott. Gorgias: Sophist and Artist. Columbia, South Carolina: University of
South Carolina Press, 2001.
de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1979.
Gorgias. Encomium of Helen. In The Older Sophists. Ed. Rosamond Kent Sprague. Columbia,
South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1972.
South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1972.
Grassi, Ernesto. Rhetoric as Philosophy. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University
Press, 2001.
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Heller, Erich. The Importance of Nietzsche. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press,
1988.
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Krell, David Farrell. Infectious Nietzsche. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1996.
Magnus, Bernd., and Kathleen M. Higgins. “Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to
Nietzsche.” The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Eds. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen
Higgins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
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Magnus, Bernd., and Kathleen M. Higgins. “Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to
Nietzsche.” The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Eds. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen
Higgins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
McComiskey, Bruce. Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern
Illinois University Press, 2002.
Illinois University Press, 2002.
Nehamas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life As Literature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1985.
University Press, 1985.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense.” In Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language. Ed. and Trans. Sander Gilman, Carole Blair, and David Parent.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 246-258.
---The Will to Power. Tr. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage
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---The Will to Power. Tr. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage
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Sallis, John. Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy. Chicago, Illinois: University of
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Thomas, Douglas. Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically. New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 1999.
White, Alan. Within Nietzsche’s Labyrinth. New York, NY: Routledge, 1990.
Notes
1 For a helpful discussion of sophism as it relates to Nietzsche’s work, see Douglas Thomas’s Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically (especially 51-93). Thomas writes of sophism that it “marks an important transformation from the study of rhetoric as techne, the fairly straightforward study of particular structures and aspects of argument, to the study of rhetoric as imitation or style. Sophistic rhetoric became a means of imparting a style of rhetoric that challenged both long-held beliefs about the nature of the world, the physis, and challenged the moral foundations of Greek culture” (53).
2 A debate, moreover, that essentially takes place on two fronts: scholarship (usually occurring in philosophy departments) concerning Nietzsche’s work per se, particularly his perspectivism; and scholarship (usually taking place in English and communications departments) directly involving the sophists. Regarding the former, Nehamas goes so far as to claim that the problem of Nietzsche’s perspectivism is essentially the challenge confronting all readers of Nietzsche’s work (see Nehamas, 1). In one way or another, determining whether or not Nietzsche is an utter relativist or a relative relativist – and therefore what the nature of Nietzsche’s reinstatemet of the sophists might be – requires grappling with his perspectivism. In claiming that Nietzsche’s perspectivism maintains both that no single perspective is absolute and that nevertheless some perspectives are better than others, Alan White maintains a middle position (Nietzschean that he is, he calls it a Dionysian affirmation of this world) similar to the one attributed to Nietzsche in this paper (see White, especially 3-14). White nicely characterizes the two positions that he seeks to avoid: “I attribute to Nietzsche a perspectivism that avoids both the metaphysical extreme of objectivism or positivism – the insistence that we make epistemic progress by relying on facts while avoiding interpretations – and the postmetaphysical alternative of relativism or idealism – the claim that there are no facts, there are only interpretations” (11). On the other front, debate about the sophists has raged within the humanities ever since the social turn in rhetorical studies, “a turn toward social constructionism and (social) epistemic rhetoric” (McComiskey, 5), took place in the 1970s and 1980s. As McComiskey puts it, “The political commitments that… scholars brought to their disciplines, as well as their concern for recovering marginalized voices in the history of rhetoric, made the sophists an obvious and rich object of analysis… In what had come to be known as ‘the sophists’ – those ancient antifoundationalists, champions of democracy, teachers of rhetoric – many scholars found a friend in the fray, ancient validation for the arguments they wanted to make about contemporary rhetoric” (5). Scholars championing the sophists as anti-foundationalists remarkably similar to many contemporary intellectuals include John Poulakos, Sharon Crowley, Susan Jarratt, and Victor Vitanza. While these (and other) scholars self-consciously blur the line between historical interpretation and historical appropriation – a line that they may indeed argue does not actually exist – Edward Schiappa, among others, argues that sophistic rhetoric as many scholars understand it is actually a “mirage—something we see because we want and need to see it – which vaporizes once carefully scutinized” (5). Regardless of whether or not its historical validity is interrogated, a “new sophistic rhetoric” has been embraced by many scholars. McComiskey succinctly summarizes three essential assumptions of the new sophistic rhetoric: “first, knowledge(s) (that is, epistemologies) can only be understood within the defining context of particular cultures; second, rhetorical methods rely, at least in part, on probability, affect, and kairos; and third, this relativistic rhetoric of the right moment supports democratic power formations that depend on the invention of ethical arguments” (13). For a more detailed discussion of controversies within Gorgianic studies specifically, see below.
3 Of Nietzsche’s posthumously-published manuscripts from the period 1872-74, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” is the most well-known and influential. As Magnus and Higgins point out, “The stock of “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” has risen in the eyes of many scholars over the past few decades, primarily because it analyzes truth in terms of metaphor… The essay’s striking images have also inspired reflection and commentary from contemporary literary critics” (30). Unconcerned as it is with the later Nietzschean notions of will to power and eternal return, though, “On Truth and Lying” by no means exemplifies all the twists and turns of Nietzsche’s thought in toto; nevertheless, it undeniably sums up Nietzsche’s specific ideas about rhetoric and the nature of language. As such, it proves ideal for the present inquiry, not only because the topic of rhetoric overtly brings Nietzsche into an implicit dialogue with Gorgias, but also because “rhetoric” is in many ways the nexus of contemporary academic debate about the nature of ethics, truth, language, and culture: if postmodern theorists celebrate a “new sophistic rhetoric” in which linguistic inventiveness can hail culture into being, foundationalist reactionaries hearken back to Plato’s sentiments in such dialogues as Gorgias and The Sophist as a means of claiming that rhetoric, and hence postmodernism, is nothing more than relativistic opportunism.
4 It should be noted that Gorgianic interpretation is an especially problematic endeavor because the surviving texts of Gorgias are fragmentary at best and are often transcriptions, citations, or paraphrases written by later commentators. Scott Consigny, in Gorgias: Sophist and Artist, claims that two distinct modes of reading Gorgias have arisen in response to the particular hermeneutical aporia presented by the problematic status of Gorgias’s surviving texts (see especially the chapter “Seeking the Sophist,” 1-35). On the one hand, the “subjectivist” or rhapsodic interpreters such as Eric White argue that “Gorgias sees reality as a Heraclitean flux in which every unprecedented kairotic moment is apprehensible only through subjective intuition” (Consigny, 27). Objectivist interpreters, on the other hand, argue that Gorgias most fundamentally espouses rational argumentation and the development of a scientific approach to logos. In the objectivist view, Gorgias works against traditional associations of logos with magic and witchcraft. Consigny, influenced particularly by contemporary postmodern pragmatists such as Rorty and Fish, proposes a third interpretive approach: “In order to avoid the Scylla of objectivism and the Charybdis of rhapsodism in our attempt to escape the hermeneutic aporia that we face in seeking Gorgias, I suggest that we adopt a model of interpretation that may be characterized as pragmatic, conventionalist, or ‘communitarian’ – a model adumbrated by Protagoras and developed more recently by such scholars as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kenneth Burke, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Fish… In this model of interpretation, there is no original and determinate text to be discovered, for texts themselves are fabrications made available through the use of hermeneutic conventions. That is, there are no ‘uninterpreted texts’ that exist apart from, and prior to, interpretations. Since the texts themselves are available only through the conventions and procedures of the interpretive community, it is only within these interpretations that an author’s thought becomes available, and there is no external entity or meaning that the interpretations represent” (17-18). Consigny’s approach, which articulates the necessity of grounding one’s arguments within a specific interpretive community, undoubtedly has affinities with the “middle way” I trace in this paper. However, whereas my middle way relies heavily on a “tropist” approach to philosophical rhetoric, Consigny, Rotry et al. tend to rely more on an argumentative approach to rhetoric (for the “tropist”- “argumentative” split, see endnote number four below). By emphasizing image and metaphor, a tropist approach ultimately claims that the tropological nature of discourse exists even prior to its embodiment within particular interpretive communities. In other words, a tropist approach emphasizes the individual process of ingenious discovery arising out of the fundamentally metaphorical ground of human existence, thus claiming that particular discourses are “discovered” within the metaphorical dynamics of the world per se rather than “thought up” within the logical repartee of intellectual communities.
5 The Nietzschean/Gorgianic middle way as I present it here has strong affinities with what Timothy W. Crusius, in his Forward to Ernesto Grassi’s Rhetoric as Philosophy, calls the tropist approach, as opposed to the rhetoric-as-argument approach, to philosophical rhetoric. Crusius helpfully outlines these two “paths” characterizing rhetorical studies: “Philosophical rhetoric has taken and continues to take one of two paths, already well worn by the time the Sophists were contending with Plato and Aristotle. On the one hand, we have rhetoric as argument, represented in recent thought by Chaim Perelman, Stephen Toulmin, Wayne Booth, and James Crosswhite, among many others. For them, rhetoric is informal reasoning about issues that arise in a radically contingent and uncertain world, especially public issues, where, if sweet reason fails to address difference, contention translates all too readily into power politics and the use of force. In a world armed to the teeth and always at war or on the edge of war, one need not strain to defend a rhetoric of reason. On the other hand, we have the “tropists” of modern rhetorical theory, who see the power of language as residing more in image and metaphor than in argument. Were it not for Kenneth Burke, whose thinking is tropist…Grassi would have no serious competitor on the ingenium side of recent rhetorical thought. As it is, the two must share the stage and continue to inspire resistance to the seductive narrowing of rhetoric to informal reasoning. Rhetoric is much more than a rhetoric of good reasons; if formal reasoning depends on ingenium for its beginning points, informal reasoning surely depends on ingenium no less” (xvii-xviii). As is evident from Crusius’s discussion, Grassi locates image and metaphor as primary for the inventive faculty of ingenium (for Grassi’s discussion of the notion of ingenium as it derives from Cicero, see Grassi 8-10; for his discussion of metaphor as the basis of rhetoric and philosophy, see especially 32-34). Without ever explicitly mentioning Nietzsche, Grassi throughout his Rhetoric as Philosophy articulates a tropological conception of human perception and communication that is remarkably similar to Nietzsche’s claims in “On Truth and Lying” (see, for example, Grassi, xv, 33, 61, 65, and 89). What Grassi’s amazing little book does so successfully is trace the intellectual genealogy of the placement of metaphor at the center of human life from Cicero and Quintilian through the Italian Humanists (Pico, Bruni, and others) to Vico. All of these thinkers, according to Grassi, view metaphor not as secondary or added to a non-metaphorical primary reality, but as constituting the human reality of life in the world. Rather than serving as a possible embellishing tool of reason, metaphor as conceived by the line of thinkers Grassi discusses is actually the fundamental ground of reason. Grassi argues that without the inevitably metaphorical first principles (for the claim that all first principles are metaphorical in nature, see 33) that rational thought needs to carry out logical demonstrations (proofs) – first principles that are ingeniously “discovered” rather than rationally proven – rational thought could not do its work (see especially 21, 44, 62).
6 For a provocative discussion of Nietzsche’s style, which, in its reliance on images and metaphor, is described as “the grand style… of creative self-affirmation and world-affirmation” (60), see David Farrell Krell’s Infectious Nietzsche, particularly 56-82.
7 Two fruitful discussions of Nietzsche’s conception of language occur in Erich Heller’s “Wittgenstein and Nietzsche” (in his The Importance of Nietzsche, 141-157) and in Paul de Man’s “Rhetoric of Tropes” (in hisAllegories of Reading, 103-119).
8 In unpunlished lecture notes contemporaneous with “On Truth and Lying,” Nietzsche explicitly claims that all language is both rhetorical and metaphorical (poetic): “language is rhetoric, because it desires to convey only a doxa [opinion], not an episteme [knowledge]” (23, brackets Gilman, Blair, and Parent); “What is usually called language is actually all figuration… the tropes are not just occasionally added to words but constitute their most proper nature” (25).
9 John Sallis’s Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy, especially 9-42, investigates in the context of a detailed analysis of The Birth of Tragedy the way that, for Nietzsche, images possess the ability to open up the specificity of the world in a particularly human manner.
10 In a similar fashion, Grassi points out the disguised metaphoricity operative in the ostensibly purely rational realm of logic (i.e., the realm of the scientist and many a philosopher): “One problem, however, seems yet unsolved, namely, that an essential moment of rhetorical speech is metaphor. Can we claim that the original, archaic assertions on which rational proofs depend have a metaphorical character? Can we maintain the thesis that the archai have any connection with images as the subject of a ‘transferred’ meaning? Surprisingly enough, perhaps, we can speak about first principles only though metaphors; we speak of them as ‘premises,’ as ‘grounds,’ as ‘foundations,’ as ‘axioms.’ Even logical language must resort to metaphors, involving a transposition from the empirical realm of senses, in which ‘seeing’ and the ‘pictorial’ move to the foreground: to ‘clarify,’ to ‘gain insight,’ to ‘found,’ to ‘conclude,’ to ‘deduce.’ We also must not forget that the term ‘metaphor’ is itself a metaphor; it is derived from the verb metapherein ‘to transfer,’ which originally described a concrete activity” (33).
Notes
1 For a helpful discussion of sophism as it relates to Nietzsche’s work, see Douglas Thomas’s Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically (especially 51-93). Thomas writes of sophism that it “marks an important transformation from the study of rhetoric as techne, the fairly straightforward study of particular structures and aspects of argument, to the study of rhetoric as imitation or style. Sophistic rhetoric became a means of imparting a style of rhetoric that challenged both long-held beliefs about the nature of the world, the physis, and challenged the moral foundations of Greek culture” (53).
2 A debate, moreover, that essentially takes place on two fronts: scholarship (usually occurring in philosophy departments) concerning Nietzsche’s work per se, particularly his perspectivism; and scholarship (usually taking place in English and communications departments) directly involving the sophists. Regarding the former, Nehamas goes so far as to claim that the problem of Nietzsche’s perspectivism is essentially the challenge confronting all readers of Nietzsche’s work (see Nehamas, 1). In one way or another, determining whether or not Nietzsche is an utter relativist or a relative relativist – and therefore what the nature of Nietzsche’s reinstatemet of the sophists might be – requires grappling with his perspectivism. In claiming that Nietzsche’s perspectivism maintains both that no single perspective is absolute and that nevertheless some perspectives are better than others, Alan White maintains a middle position (Nietzschean that he is, he calls it a Dionysian affirmation of this world) similar to the one attributed to Nietzsche in this paper (see White, especially 3-14). White nicely characterizes the two positions that he seeks to avoid: “I attribute to Nietzsche a perspectivism that avoids both the metaphysical extreme of objectivism or positivism – the insistence that we make epistemic progress by relying on facts while avoiding interpretations – and the postmetaphysical alternative of relativism or idealism – the claim that there are no facts, there are only interpretations” (11). On the other front, debate about the sophists has raged within the humanities ever since the social turn in rhetorical studies, “a turn toward social constructionism and (social) epistemic rhetoric” (McComiskey, 5), took place in the 1970s and 1980s. As McComiskey puts it, “The political commitments that… scholars brought to their disciplines, as well as their concern for recovering marginalized voices in the history of rhetoric, made the sophists an obvious and rich object of analysis… In what had come to be known as ‘the sophists’ – those ancient antifoundationalists, champions of democracy, teachers of rhetoric – many scholars found a friend in the fray, ancient validation for the arguments they wanted to make about contemporary rhetoric” (5). Scholars championing the sophists as anti-foundationalists remarkably similar to many contemporary intellectuals include John Poulakos, Sharon Crowley, Susan Jarratt, and Victor Vitanza. While these (and other) scholars self-consciously blur the line between historical interpretation and historical appropriation – a line that they may indeed argue does not actually exist – Edward Schiappa, among others, argues that sophistic rhetoric as many scholars understand it is actually a “mirage—something we see because we want and need to see it – which vaporizes once carefully scutinized” (5). Regardless of whether or not its historical validity is interrogated, a “new sophistic rhetoric” has been embraced by many scholars. McComiskey succinctly summarizes three essential assumptions of the new sophistic rhetoric: “first, knowledge(s) (that is, epistemologies) can only be understood within the defining context of particular cultures; second, rhetorical methods rely, at least in part, on probability, affect, and kairos; and third, this relativistic rhetoric of the right moment supports democratic power formations that depend on the invention of ethical arguments” (13). For a more detailed discussion of controversies within Gorgianic studies specifically, see below.
3 Of Nietzsche’s posthumously-published manuscripts from the period 1872-74, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense” is the most well-known and influential. As Magnus and Higgins point out, “The stock of “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” has risen in the eyes of many scholars over the past few decades, primarily because it analyzes truth in terms of metaphor… The essay’s striking images have also inspired reflection and commentary from contemporary literary critics” (30). Unconcerned as it is with the later Nietzschean notions of will to power and eternal return, though, “On Truth and Lying” by no means exemplifies all the twists and turns of Nietzsche’s thought in toto; nevertheless, it undeniably sums up Nietzsche’s specific ideas about rhetoric and the nature of language. As such, it proves ideal for the present inquiry, not only because the topic of rhetoric overtly brings Nietzsche into an implicit dialogue with Gorgias, but also because “rhetoric” is in many ways the nexus of contemporary academic debate about the nature of ethics, truth, language, and culture: if postmodern theorists celebrate a “new sophistic rhetoric” in which linguistic inventiveness can hail culture into being, foundationalist reactionaries hearken back to Plato’s sentiments in such dialogues as Gorgias and The Sophist as a means of claiming that rhetoric, and hence postmodernism, is nothing more than relativistic opportunism.
4 It should be noted that Gorgianic interpretation is an especially problematic endeavor because the surviving texts of Gorgias are fragmentary at best and are often transcriptions, citations, or paraphrases written by later commentators. Scott Consigny, in Gorgias: Sophist and Artist, claims that two distinct modes of reading Gorgias have arisen in response to the particular hermeneutical aporia presented by the problematic status of Gorgias’s surviving texts (see especially the chapter “Seeking the Sophist,” 1-35). On the one hand, the “subjectivist” or rhapsodic interpreters such as Eric White argue that “Gorgias sees reality as a Heraclitean flux in which every unprecedented kairotic moment is apprehensible only through subjective intuition” (Consigny, 27). Objectivist interpreters, on the other hand, argue that Gorgias most fundamentally espouses rational argumentation and the development of a scientific approach to logos. In the objectivist view, Gorgias works against traditional associations of logos with magic and witchcraft. Consigny, influenced particularly by contemporary postmodern pragmatists such as Rorty and Fish, proposes a third interpretive approach: “In order to avoid the Scylla of objectivism and the Charybdis of rhapsodism in our attempt to escape the hermeneutic aporia that we face in seeking Gorgias, I suggest that we adopt a model of interpretation that may be characterized as pragmatic, conventionalist, or ‘communitarian’ – a model adumbrated by Protagoras and developed more recently by such scholars as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kenneth Burke, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Fish… In this model of interpretation, there is no original and determinate text to be discovered, for texts themselves are fabrications made available through the use of hermeneutic conventions. That is, there are no ‘uninterpreted texts’ that exist apart from, and prior to, interpretations. Since the texts themselves are available only through the conventions and procedures of the interpretive community, it is only within these interpretations that an author’s thought becomes available, and there is no external entity or meaning that the interpretations represent” (17-18). Consigny’s approach, which articulates the necessity of grounding one’s arguments within a specific interpretive community, undoubtedly has affinities with the “middle way” I trace in this paper. However, whereas my middle way relies heavily on a “tropist” approach to philosophical rhetoric, Consigny, Rotry et al. tend to rely more on an argumentative approach to rhetoric (for the “tropist”- “argumentative” split, see endnote number four below). By emphasizing image and metaphor, a tropist approach ultimately claims that the tropological nature of discourse exists even prior to its embodiment within particular interpretive communities. In other words, a tropist approach emphasizes the individual process of ingenious discovery arising out of the fundamentally metaphorical ground of human existence, thus claiming that particular discourses are “discovered” within the metaphorical dynamics of the world per se rather than “thought up” within the logical repartee of intellectual communities.
5 The Nietzschean/Gorgianic middle way as I present it here has strong affinities with what Timothy W. Crusius, in his Forward to Ernesto Grassi’s Rhetoric as Philosophy, calls the tropist approach, as opposed to the rhetoric-as-argument approach, to philosophical rhetoric. Crusius helpfully outlines these two “paths” characterizing rhetorical studies: “Philosophical rhetoric has taken and continues to take one of two paths, already well worn by the time the Sophists were contending with Plato and Aristotle. On the one hand, we have rhetoric as argument, represented in recent thought by Chaim Perelman, Stephen Toulmin, Wayne Booth, and James Crosswhite, among many others. For them, rhetoric is informal reasoning about issues that arise in a radically contingent and uncertain world, especially public issues, where, if sweet reason fails to address difference, contention translates all too readily into power politics and the use of force. In a world armed to the teeth and always at war or on the edge of war, one need not strain to defend a rhetoric of reason. On the other hand, we have the “tropists” of modern rhetorical theory, who see the power of language as residing more in image and metaphor than in argument. Were it not for Kenneth Burke, whose thinking is tropist…Grassi would have no serious competitor on the ingenium side of recent rhetorical thought. As it is, the two must share the stage and continue to inspire resistance to the seductive narrowing of rhetoric to informal reasoning. Rhetoric is much more than a rhetoric of good reasons; if formal reasoning depends on ingenium for its beginning points, informal reasoning surely depends on ingenium no less” (xvii-xviii). As is evident from Crusius’s discussion, Grassi locates image and metaphor as primary for the inventive faculty of ingenium (for Grassi’s discussion of the notion of ingenium as it derives from Cicero, see Grassi 8-10; for his discussion of metaphor as the basis of rhetoric and philosophy, see especially 32-34). Without ever explicitly mentioning Nietzsche, Grassi throughout his Rhetoric as Philosophy articulates a tropological conception of human perception and communication that is remarkably similar to Nietzsche’s claims in “On Truth and Lying” (see, for example, Grassi, xv, 33, 61, 65, and 89). What Grassi’s amazing little book does so successfully is trace the intellectual genealogy of the placement of metaphor at the center of human life from Cicero and Quintilian through the Italian Humanists (Pico, Bruni, and others) to Vico. All of these thinkers, according to Grassi, view metaphor not as secondary or added to a non-metaphorical primary reality, but as constituting the human reality of life in the world. Rather than serving as a possible embellishing tool of reason, metaphor as conceived by the line of thinkers Grassi discusses is actually the fundamental ground of reason. Grassi argues that without the inevitably metaphorical first principles (for the claim that all first principles are metaphorical in nature, see 33) that rational thought needs to carry out logical demonstrations (proofs) – first principles that are ingeniously “discovered” rather than rationally proven – rational thought could not do its work (see especially 21, 44, 62).
6 For a provocative discussion of Nietzsche’s style, which, in its reliance on images and metaphor, is described as “the grand style… of creative self-affirmation and world-affirmation” (60), see David Farrell Krell’s Infectious Nietzsche, particularly 56-82.
7 Two fruitful discussions of Nietzsche’s conception of language occur in Erich Heller’s “Wittgenstein and Nietzsche” (in his The Importance of Nietzsche, 141-157) and in Paul de Man’s “Rhetoric of Tropes” (in hisAllegories of Reading, 103-119).
8 In unpunlished lecture notes contemporaneous with “On Truth and Lying,” Nietzsche explicitly claims that all language is both rhetorical and metaphorical (poetic): “language is rhetoric, because it desires to convey only a doxa [opinion], not an episteme [knowledge]” (23, brackets Gilman, Blair, and Parent); “What is usually called language is actually all figuration… the tropes are not just occasionally added to words but constitute their most proper nature” (25).
9 John Sallis’s Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy, especially 9-42, investigates in the context of a detailed analysis of The Birth of Tragedy the way that, for Nietzsche, images possess the ability to open up the specificity of the world in a particularly human manner.
10 In a similar fashion, Grassi points out the disguised metaphoricity operative in the ostensibly purely rational realm of logic (i.e., the realm of the scientist and many a philosopher): “One problem, however, seems yet unsolved, namely, that an essential moment of rhetorical speech is metaphor. Can we claim that the original, archaic assertions on which rational proofs depend have a metaphorical character? Can we maintain the thesis that the archai have any connection with images as the subject of a ‘transferred’ meaning? Surprisingly enough, perhaps, we can speak about first principles only though metaphors; we speak of them as ‘premises,’ as ‘grounds,’ as ‘foundations,’ as ‘axioms.’ Even logical language must resort to metaphors, involving a transposition from the empirical realm of senses, in which ‘seeing’ and the ‘pictorial’ move to the foreground: to ‘clarify,’ to ‘gain insight,’ to ‘found,’ to ‘conclude,’ to ‘deduce.’ We also must not forget that the term ‘metaphor’ is itself a metaphor; it is derived from the verb metapherein ‘to transfer,’ which originally described a concrete activity” (33).
