Nietzsche's Teacher: The Invisible Rhetor

Abstract

Due to its favorable reception circa 1970, the essay “Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” has solidified Nietzsche's monumental status within the field of rhetoric and writing studies, allowing those inheriting this perspective to put the essay to use without attending to its intertextual background. This article argues that examining the intertextual reception of Nietzsche's essay will not only disclose an invisible, and hence unacknowledged rhetor—Arthur Schopenhauer—hiding in the shadows of Nietzsche's fragmentary essay; doing so will also reveal to what degree this monument's preservation requires its background to remain forgotten.

Notes

¹I thank RR reviewers Michelle Ballif and Edward Schiappa, as well as Tom Miller, Ken McAllister, Alan D. Schrift, and Zach Warzecka for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

²Translations of “Über Lüge und Wahrheit im aussermoralischen Sinne” have rendered “aussermoralischen” as “Extra-Moral,” “Ultra-moral,” and “Nonmoral.” I employ the latter due to the editors of The Rhetorical Tradition having selected Breazeale's translation of T&L and because this translation has been frequently cited.

³These texts were all published between 1971–72: Pautrat's Versions du soleil, Rey's L'enjeu des signes, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's “Rhétorique et langage,” and Kofman's Nietzsche et la métaphore.

⁴It is fitting that while aptly using T&L, Brooke omits its citation in the bibliography.

⁵The introduction to T&L in The Rhetorical Tradition, second edition, provides an exhaustive bibliography of scholarship concerning T&L. See Miller (“Boundary”), Hinman, and Heckman for three notable readings; see Murphy and Tell for discussions of Nietzsche's understanding of metaphor and metonymy as the essence of language; also see Vitanza and those affiliated with a Nietzschean third sophistic, including Davis, Ballif, Hawk, and Rickert.

⁶To fully elucidate this claim requires its own article-length treatment.

⁷Both Emden (38) and Brobjer (32) affirm Nietzsche's second-hand appropriation of Kant.

⁸In “Cutting the Edge of the Will to Truth,” I too employed Nietzsche's rhetorical insight as an extended conceit to explore and critique the formation of truths within process and postprocess approaches to the teaching of writing.