In Defense of Rhetoric: Or How Hard It Is to Take a Writer Seriously

• Date: 01 August 2013
• Author: Tracy B. Strong
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591713488395
• Published date: 01 August 2013
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Theory

41(4) 507 –532

© 2013 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591713488395

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Article

In Defense of Rhetoric:

Or How Hard It Is to

Take a Writer Seriously:

The Case of Nietzsche

Tracy B. Strong1

Abstract

Interpretations of Nietzsche, particularly about politics, cover an exceptionally

wide range. Additionally, Nietzsche is often said to commit “rhetorical

excesses.” I argue and show that Nietzsche consciously crafted his published

works to allow this range of interpretations, that he did this for critical

purposes, and that his so-called rhetoric is there to serve this purpose.

Keywords

Nietzsche, politics, rhetoric, self-criticism

You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you stand between it and the mirror

of your imagination. You may not see your ears but they will be there.”

Mark Twain, A Fable (1909)

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to

the person to whom you speak.

R. W. Emerson, “Eloquence”

1University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Tracy B. Strong, University of California San Diego,

9500 Gilman Dr La Jolla, CA 92093-0521, USA.

Email: tstrong@ucsd.edu

488395PTX41410.1177/0090591713488395Political TheoryStrong

research-article2013

508 Political Theory 41(4)

There is an enormous range and diversity of readings of Nietzsche. Why? For

illustrative purposes, I shall start from the point of view of political alle-

giances. It is well known that those who claim to have learned from or been

influenced by Nietzsche have covered the widest possible range, and this

from the end of the nineteenth century. In Germany, Social Democrats such

as Kurt Eisner, murdered in January 1919 just after his defeat for reelection

as head of the Bavarian Republic, found Nietzsche to be a “diagnostician of

genius.” Additionally, anarchists, progressives hostile to laws oppressing

socialists, feminists, and youthful populist romantics of the Wandervogel

movement all found common ground in Nietzsche. And this is only on the

more-or-less left.1 The great social scientist Max Weber wrote to a student

that a modern scholar must, if he is honest, admit, “he could not have accom-

plished crucial parts of his own work without the contributions of Marx and

Nietzsche.”2 The political right—for instance those who made up the

Georgekreis, with its Hellenic inspired voluntarist protest against material-

ism and naturalism—read deeply into Nietzsche and sometimes became fer-

tile ground for sympathies to Nazism (even if the poet Stefan George himself

kept his distance until his death in late 1933).3 Geneviève Bianquis has dem-

onstrated that the range of those similarly affected in France was the same.4

A simple listing of those whose thought would not have been the same

includes, off the top of one’s head, Max Scheler, Karl Jaspers, and Martin

Heidegger in Germany; in France Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, Gilles

Deleuze, and Michel Foucault; as well as existentialism and deconstruction-

ism in general. Theologically, he crosses religions as one finds Paul Tillich,

Lev Shestov, along with Thomas J.J. Altizer, and Martin Buber (who trans-

lated the first part of Zarathustra into Polish). In psychology, Adler and Jung

were deeply influenced, as was Sigmund Freud, who said of Nietzsche that

he had “a more penetrating understanding of himself than any man who ever

lived or was ever likely to live.”5 Nor was his influence limited to Europe.

Early on he was of importance in Japan; Chinese intellectuals such as Lu Xun

and Guo Moro, both later to become prominent in the Chinese Communist

Party, were early readers of Nietzsche.6 Politically, Maurice Barrès, T.E. Lawrence,

as well as even less savory characters such as the members of the Cagoule

and the Croix de Feu come to mind. Novelists and literary figures include

Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, André Malraux, André Gide, George

Bernard Shaw, H.L. Mencken, Rainer Maria Rilke, and William Butler Yeats,

as well as John Gardner and John Banville among contemporaries. One could

even come down to Milos Forman and Arnold Schwartzenegger.7

In the political theory of the contemporary period, the range of readings

has remained as extensive. From various points of view and with many oth-

ers, scholars such as William Connolly, Mark Warren, Bonnie Honig, Dan