Truth, Lies, Literature, Rhetoric, Language, Composition, Nietzsche and Fred Newton Scott

Nietzsche was a brilliant philosopher who is often quoted and referenced in today’s modern philosophy, though he wasn’t as popular in his day because his ideas were so radically advanced for the time. His idea that all language is rhetorical is certainly fascinating and certainly very accurate when looking at it through the lens of semiotics as he does. Nietzsche was similar to John Locke and others in his ideas that words are metaphors for concepts. Humans cannot adequately understand the “essence” of things. Plato also felt there was an “essence” to things, or a “universal” that was imperceptible to the average human. Plato said that reality is “similar to something real, but it isn’t actually real. it looks as though it’s wrong to attribute full reality to a joiner or any artisan’s product.” Thus, Nietzsche ideas on language are similar to Plato's ideas on reality. Nietzsche said in Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense “Human beings... are deeply immersed in illusions and dream images; their eyes merely glide across the surface of things and see ‘forms’...” 

Locke also said that “words having no signification, the idea which each stands for must be learned and retained, by those who would exchange thoughts” (818). The Rhetorical Tradition also explains that “Locke argues that all ideas are mental combinations of sense perceptions and that words refer not directly to things but mental phenomena” (Bizzell 799). Thus, this is similar to Nietzsche's view of language who said “Is there a perfect match between things and their designation? Is language the full and adequate expression of all realities?...When different languages are set alongside one another it becomes clear that, where words are concerned, what matters is never truth, never the full adequate expression, otherwise there would no be so many languages….We believe that when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers, we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entity.” Thus, he agrees that language is not a direct mechanism for communication and can be misinterpreted. hile Nietzsche does argue that language itself is in fact, false “regular and rigid new world is built from its own sublimated products-concepts-in order to imprison it in a fortresses.” The fortress of language is built upon cobwebs. It is fragile.

 However, he does not see this as much of a problem the way Plato and Locke do. Plato said “So if anyone is caught lying in our community...he is to be punished on the grounds that he’s introducing a practice which is just as liable to wreck and ruin a community." On the other hand, Nietzsche does not see what the big deal is about truth in the first place. Lying is how we preserve life: “As a means for the preservation of the individual, the intellect shows its greatest strengths in dissimulation [dishonesty], since this is the means to preserve those weaker, less robust individuals who, by nature, are denied horns or sharp fangs.” Instead of “horns” man was given intellect to protect itself. The truth can be scary or unpleasant. Human beings themselves have an unconquerable urge to let themselves be deceived, and they are as enchanted with happiness when the bard recites epic fairy-tales.” Thus, “truth is a comfortable lie.” 



But do we want to be lied to? To some degree rhetoric helps us seperate the “truth” from the “lies” even if these are both subjective. This leads to the ideas of someone like Berlin who looks at “the ways [rhetoric’s] very discursive structure can be read so as to favor one version of economic, social, and political arrangements over other versions… (477).  Every person delivering a persuasive message has “…assumptions about what is real, what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed” (Berlin 492). One must look at the motives of the speaker that inform their rhetoric if everyone is using the metaphor of language to deceive one another, there is always a motivation behind one’s deception. For example, if one compliments someone, even when they do not mean it, as Nietzsche refers to “white lies” it is usually to maintain a social order, or to advance in one’s career, or some other means to an end.  

Speaking of rhetoric with an agenda, the 19th century is when rhetoric began to make its split from literature, and the idea of “composition” instruction that we still use today took hold. Romantic literature especially began to bring to light the differences between “spontaneity, expression of feeling and imagination” of poetry with writers like Wordsworth, and the “planned discourse” that rhetoric is (995). Composition began to focus on “Bain’s modes of discourse and paragraph unity with Hill’s prescriptivism in grammar, usage and style” (995).  All of these “clear guidelines” are certainly the antithesis of spontaneous poetry meant to convey feelings, and the split between literary criticism and rhetoric makes some sense. In this more stripped-down form rhetoric does seem different than literature. Even though, a poet still has a rhetorical purpose in writing, even if that purpose is to convey feelings. They are certainly feelings they wish to convey more than others, so I would argue that literary criticism and poetry are still forms of rhetoric, especially looking at the way someone like Nietzsche writes where he combines poetry, aphorisms, philosophy and persuasion. But, for the purposes of categorization English departments and rhetoric began to part ways and rhetoric became the domain of speech classes. I thought it was interesting how “in the new middle-class colleges, composition was a required course taught by assistant professors and graduate assistants” (994). Certainly, this is still the case considering I am in the TA program at CSUN and I am currently a grad student about to teach a mandatory class in composition. Students still “generally hope to “leave this subject behind as soon as possible” (995). 

Fred Newton Scott was certainly ahead of his time as one of the only composition professors in the 19th century who believed “that composition is…a social act, and the student [should] therefore constantly [be] led to think of himself as writing or speaking for a specified audience. Thus, not mere expression but communication as well is made the business of composition.” This is much closer to the way we look at rhetoric today in a word where women and people of color finally have a voice, even if it is often subdued. He also though English departments should balance work in rhetoric and linguistics in addition to literary study, which was not done at the time. However, he would be happy to know that is what my graduate degree consists of today.