Emden situates Nietzsche’s writings on language and rhetoric within their wider historical context. He demonstrates that Nietzsche is not as radical in his thinking as has been often supposed, and that a number of problems with Nietzsche disappear when Nietzsche’s works are compared to works on the same subjects by writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Further, the relevance of rhetoric and the history of rhetoric to philosophy and the history of philosophy is reasserted, in consonance with Nietzsche’s own statements and practices. Important in this regard are the role of fictions, descriptions, and metaphor.
Emden situates Nietzsche’s writings on language and rhetoric within their wider historical context. He demonstrates that Nietzsche is not as radical in his thinking as has been often supposed, and that a number of problems with Nietzsche disappear when Nietzsche’s works are compared to works on the same subjects by writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Further, the relevance of rhetoric and the history of rhetoric to philosophy and the history of philosophy is reasserted, in consonance with Nietzsche’s own statements and practices. Important in this regard are the role of fictions, descriptions, and metaphor.
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Emden situates Nietzsche’s writings on language and rhetoric within their wider historical context. He demonstrates that Nietzsche is not as radical in his thinking as has been often supposed, and that a number of problems with Nietzsche disappear when Nietzsche’s works are compared to works on the same subjects by writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Further, the relevance of rhetoric and the history of rhetoric to philosophy and the history of philosophy is reasserted, in consonance with Nietzsche’s own statements and practices. Important in this regard are the role of fictions, descriptions, and metaphor.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252091094 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Series: | International Nietzsche Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 368 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body
By Christian J. Emden
University of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-02970-7
Chapter One
The Irreducibility of Language: The History of Rhetoric in the Age of Typewriters
Between 1872 and 1874 Nietzsche composed three lecture series on the history and theory of rhetoric, as well as an introductory course on Aristotle's treatise on rhetoric. At first sight Nietzsche's interest in this topic is by no means surprising. After all, at this time he was a relatively young professor teaching Greek language and literature at both the University of Basel and the city's preparatory school, the so-called Pädagogium. Much has been said about Nietzsche's early years in Basel and especially about his first book, the long-awaited study on the origin of tragedy entitled Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872), which led to a complete scholarly disaster after Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff—a young colleague in Prussia who was to become one of the most influential classicists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—rejected Nietzsche's philological theories as misleading spare-time metaphysics with little historical or literary evidence. Nietzsche's own attempt to enrich his views on tragedy with Schopenhauer's philosophy of the will and Wagner's foggy musical aestheticism did not help his scholarly reputation. As a consequence, Nietzsche's early work has long been regarded as mainly philosophical, and following the influential studies by Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Walter Kaufmann, and R. J. Hollingdale, among others, his work in classical scholarship has been somewhat neglected. Only relatively recently have scholars attempted a fuller understanding of Nietzsche's work in classical philology, revising many of the commonly held beliefs about its status as incoherent, fruitless, and negligible. Indeed, revisiting Nietzsche's philological work may well be worthwhile. Specifically, locating it in its wider intellectual context may offer a new picture of his scholarly preoccupations that portrays his approach as a valuable and largely underestimated link between, on the one hand, the rise of classical studies in Germany at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries and, on the other, the perspective of more anthropologically and interdisciplinarily inclined scholars from the late nineteenth century, such as Hermann Usener and Jane Ellen Harrison. Such a project calls for detailed examinations to highlight such issues as Nietzsche's discussions of mythology and religion, his interest in the relationship between orality and literacy, his assumption of a specifically Greek linguistic culture, his ideas about the methodology and the historical perspective of philological scholarship, and his general move toward a more anthropological attitude concerning cultural and religious developments in archaic and ancient Greece. Such examinations remain to be undertaken, as does a more detailed investigation into the way Nietzsche's work as a classical scholar informs prominent themes of his philosophical enterprise as a whole, but we cannot ignore the relevance of philological research for his developing views on language and knowledge. In fact, as I will show, many of his later philosophical ideas about the relationships among language and knowledge, physiology, and the mind often take recourse to topics that he discussed first in his philological writings. It is therefore not surprising that many of his early reflections on language are related to his lectures and fragmentary notes on the history and theory of rhetorical thought in ancient Greece and, to some extent, Rome. Nietzsche's discussion of the emergence of classical oratory and eloquence will prove to have provided a crucial paradigm for his own thought. This paradigm allowed him to combine a well-informed philological approach with a thorough philosophical perspective on language, which ultimately enabled him to relate his reflections on language to both a critique of knowledge and a physiologically inspired model of mental processes. In this chapter, however, I offer a detailed examination of his interest in rhetorical education and the evolution of a rhetorical consciousness. On the one hand, this will provide a model for Nietzsche's understanding of the historically tense relationship between rhetorical theory and philosophical argument; on the other, it will explain some of the historical backgrounds for his approach to the complex relationships among language, thought, and human knowledge.
Some Historical Sources
At the beginning we need to be cautious. Nietzsche's interest in rhetoric was not based on the fairly trivial and largely unquestioned assumption that knowledge is somehow related to language. Rather, his repeated assertion that knowledge about the human world can be attained only through the use of metaphors radicalizes the interrelation of language and thought. This particular emphasis on metaphor as both the chief trope and a medium for epistemic processes means that the connection between language and thought is rhetorical. In other words, reason begins with rhetoric, and rhetoric itself is largely responsible for the structure, constitution, and development of knowledge—or so Nietzsche seems to have believed in the early 1870s. Within his discussion of language and knowledge, metaphor and rhetoric become powerful explanatory models. Thus, we can also assume language and rhetoric to underlie much of Nietzsche's philosophical enterprise. To ignore the central role of rhetorical discourse for Nietzsche would inevitably be to underestimate his philosophical thought as a whole, although it would be equally problematic to reduce his project to some form of "artistic" philosophy or rhetorical aestheticism.
Given rhetoric's importance for the development of Nietzsche's philosophical perspective, it is hardly remarkable that he turned to rhetorical topics fairly early in his career as a classical scholar. In the essay "Der Florentinische Traktat über Homer und Hesiod, ihr Geschlecht und ihren Wettkampf," which Nietzsche composed at the University of Leipzig as a pupil of the eminent philologist Friedrich Ritschl and which was published under the latter's auspices in 1870 and 1873 in the prestigious journal Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, he already concentrates on several aspects of pre-Platonic eloquence and characterizes the fable of the poetic competition between Homer and Hesiod as an outstanding example of rhetorical consciousness and Greek eloquence (KGW II/1, p. 299). In his "Encyclopaedie der klassischen Philologie"—a substantial introductory course into the methods and the history of classical scholarship that he delivered in Basel in the summer semester of 1871 and modeled on similar contemporary introductions by, among others, Friedrich August Wolf, August Boeckh, Gottfried Bernhardy, and Ritschl—he returns to the rhetorical thought of the Sophists and stresses that the overall development of what he terms the Greek and Latin style resulted largely from the prominent role public oratory played in Greece and Rome (KGW II/3, p. 394). Along similar lines, Nietzsche concludes in his later lecture series on the history of Greek literature (1874–75) that rhetorical thought and practice decisively influenced the unfolding of ancient Greek literature and its linguistic consciousness (KGW II/5, p. 280). His main works on rhetoric, however, are the lectures and notes we now know under the titles "Geschichte der griechischen Beredsamkeit," "Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik," and "Einleitung zur Rhetorik des Aristoteles," as well as the short text "Abriß der Geschichte der Beredsamkeit." Furthermore, his attempt to translate Aristotle's treatise on rhetoric when several standard German translations already existed highlights his continued interest in the subject, even though he never finished this particular project.
The chronological development of these lectures and notes, and of Nietzsche's interest in rhetoric as a whole, remains uncertain, but his interest in this topic became increasingly manifest around 1872, although he would have been familiar with the tradition of rhetorical thought much earlier: by that time both his historical overview of Greek eloquence and his introduction to Aristotle were completed, and the "Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik," which contains some of the more theoretical reflections, was at least partially written. During his relatively short-lived professorship at the University of Basel, which lasted only until 1879, he announced a total of nine lecture series and courses on rhetorical topics, of which at least four did not take place.
But Nietzsche may have turned his attention to rhetoric before he prepared this 1872–73 lecture series. He had become familiar with Aristotle and Cicero as a pupil at the prestigious Pforta boarding school and later as a student of classical philology in Bonn and Leipzig, and in Basel he again consulted different editions of Plato's works between April 1870 and December 1878. Also in 1870 he returned to Cicero, Quintilian, and Aristotle, and in May and October 1870 he apparently studied two of the standard collections of Greek rhetoricians—Johann Georg Baiter and Hermann Saupp's Oratores Attici (1839–50) and Christian Walz's Rhetores Graeci (1832–36)—after he had consulted the first volume of Friedrich Blass's seminal study on the history of ancient Greek rhetoric, Die attische Beredsamkeit (1868–80), for more detailed historical information. In addition, between 1870 and 1878 Nietzsche undertook a diligent and precise reading of a great many secondary sources. These included, among others, Richard Volkmann's highly influential Hermagoras oder Elemente der Rhetorik (1865) and Die Rhetorik der Griechen und Römer in systematischer Übersicht (1872), as well as Anton Westermann's Geschichte der Beredtsamkeit in Griechenland und Rom (1833–35) and Rudolf Hirzel's widely read Ueber das Rhetorische und seine Bedeutung bei Plato (1871).
At the same time, the first volume of Gustav Gerber's Die Sprache als Kunst (1871–74) played a crucial yet still often exaggerated role for Nietzsche's understanding of rhetoric. Even though Nietzsche quotes Gerber at some length in his lectures and notes on rhetoric, as well as in his essay "Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne" (1873), and even though he found in Gerber a thoroughly formulated theory that links the rhetorical aesthetics of language to philosophical considerations about the nature of reference and knowledge, Gerber does not seem to have been the main source for his reflections on rhetoric. Nietzsche's account of rhetoric, as I will show, begins with a historical perspective on the emergence of ancient Greek and Roman eloquence within specific cultural and political circumstances, whereas Gerber approaches rhetorical thought and its philosophical implications not by adverting to a historical or philological perspective but by presenting an argument based on the aesthetic dimension of language and its influence on thought and on a systematic analysis of figures and tropes. Nietzsche's own understanding of rhetoric, however, and of the multifaceted relationship between language and knowledge, was influenced by a historical point of view, and his awareness of the serious philosophical consequences of rhetorical thought was shaped considerably by this perspective. Within this context, Nietzsche discovered the tense relationship between rhetorical thought and philosophical discourse, which would profoundly influence his later reflections on language, knowledge, and the mind.
The Emergence of Rhetorical Thought
The basic historical framework for Nietzsche's account of ancient Greek oratory scarcely advanced beyond mainstream philological research in nineteenth-century Germany. As such, his approach is largely based on an interpretation of the relation between language and culture in antiquity. Although Nietzsche often decries the "Grecomania" and "philhellenism" that dominated the professional ideology of German classicists in the nineteenth century, most of his philological writings largely agree with the tradition, from Winckelmann to Wilhelm von Humboldt and beyond, that ancient Greece should be understood as the paradigmatic cultural foundation of European thought. It thus becomes clear why Nietzsche contends that the origin of rhetoric must be understood as dependent on a specific cultural model and that the influence of rhetorical education on ancient Greek linguistic consciousness was itself the product of particular historical circumstances—namely, the culture of orality and the Athenian democracy of the fifth century B.C.
Right from the beginning, then, Nietzsche's reflections on language tended to go well beyond a rhetorical aestheticism by establishing a link between language and culture, which forces us to locate his philosophical ideas in a European tradition that stretches back to Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, this link became an increasingly prominent factor in his later "genealogical" project of the 1880s, which contributed to the "anthropology of knowledge" contained in his writings such as Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886) and Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887). Nevertheless, these later writings differ crucially from Nietzsche's earlier philological work: although his lectures and notebooks on rhetoric clearly express the importance of language for the formation of cultural trends and even social processes, Nietzsche was still uncertain about the epistemological foundations and anthropological consequences of such a link. There is a considerable leap from his early work on the "natural history" of truth to the discussions of morality in his later writings.
Referring to Karl Otfried Müller's and Gottfried Bernhardy's highly influential histories of the Greek literary tradition, which set the scholarly benchmark for decades, Nietzsche emphasizes the general importance of ancient Greek as the "most speakable" language for the development of rhetoric: Greek rhetoric begins as a form of "natural eloquence" [naturmäßige Beredsamkeit] (KGW II/4, p. 368). This also means, however, that Greek oratory and eloquence are based on a linguistic consciousness totally alien to our modern understanding of language, for whereas modern European culture is based largely on literacy, ancient Greece was a predominantly oral culture in which writing was of only secondary importance (KGW II/4, p. 425). Orality, in other words, generates the performative quality of eloquence and was thus a decisive factor for the emergence of rhetorical thought. This dominance of the spoken over the written word has a more practical angle, too, for spoken language is often more powerful than written language, because, as Quintilian notes, "The speaker stimulates us by the animation of his delivery, and kindles the imagination, not by presenting us with an elaborate picture, but by bringing us into actual touch with the things themselves."
Nietzsche, however, had a second reason for locating the origin of rhetorical thought in Greece—namely, the relationship between political culture and rhetorical education. Whereas Gottfried Bernhardy, for instance, argues that the Greek language spread as Athens's political influence widened, Nietzsche reverses this perspective and views Greek political and cultural expansion as a direct product of Athen's unusual linguistic power (KGW II/5, p. 14; KGW II/4, p. 367). He regards this power as having stemmed from linguistic purity, an aspect that Greek rhetorical theory describes as hellenismos and Roman rhetoric as latinitas, a quality by which the Greeks could distinguish themselves from the barbaroi. The Greeks, that is, could "speak," whereas the barbarians could merely "croak" (KGW II/4, p. 369). This supposed purity of language, Nietzsche writes in his "Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik," is possible only in a culture with a heightened awareness for the intellectual and cultural functions of language, which could be found especially among the upper social class and its rhetorical education (KGW II/4, p. 428). The political relevance of rhetoric is thus based on the fact that it can be employed to influence the beliefs and opinions of a large audience (KGW II/4, p. 368). Nietzsche contends that the social conditions fostering such a use of rhetoric developed in Athens around 510 B.C.: Hippias, the last tyrant of the Peisistratidai, was expelled from the city, with the subsequent implementation of a civic constitution based on the principles of isonomia, the legal equality of citizens, and isegoria, the freedom of speech. The destruction of authoritative aristocratic structures as a fixed reference point for political decisions inevitably generated the pressing need for consensus to avoid a threatening confusion of social values and administrative responsibilities. Under Pericles political power was transferred to the so-called ekklesia, the civic assembly, which sought to unite legislative, juridical, and executive powers, so that Athens—as Thucydides remarks—became the "school of Hellas." With regard to this political situation, which introduced into Greek culture what George Kennedy once termed a "rhetorical consciousness," Nietzsche concludes that the political constitution of democracy was directly responsible for the widespread use and excessive appreciation of public oratory (KGW II/4, pp. 269, 415). The exchange of opinion, the establishment of consensus, and the influencing of decision makers within Greek politics in many ways depended on a rhetorical education that shaped the political debates. As such, oratory presented itself first and foremost as a practical enterprise that generally preceded any rhetorical theory and that was realized mainly in court hearings, political appeals, and other legal procedures.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body by Christian J. Emden Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.