Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 14:98–113, 2011 Copyright © American Society for the History of Rhetoric ISSN: 1536-2426 print/1936-0835 online DOI: 10.1080/15362426.2011.559406 Nietzsche’s Sophist: Rhêtôr, Musician, Stoic NATHAN CRICK Lousiana State University Traditional readings of Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” tend to emphasize the clash between philosophy and rhetoric in the form of two distinct personae—the intuitive, Sophistical artist who embraces the rhetorical power of language to create and destroy on the one hand, and the rational, Stoic philosopher who uses concepts to order the world into a block universe on the other. However, I argue that his essay presents us with not two characters but three—the Stoic philosopher, political rhêtôr, and the Dionysian artist. Furthermore, none of these three characters can be said to be representative of Nietzsche’s attitude toward the Sophists. This article thus proposes a model of the Sophistical artist which combines aspects from each of these personae in a way that brings together the power of tragic suffering, persuasive word, and passionate music, respectively. This reading of Nietzsche’s work discloses an ideal image of a “new” Sophist as an unfettered spirit for whom Dionysian music and philosophical word cooperate to produce a complex rhetorical discourse capable of overcoming the nihilism of the modern age in order to produce a higher culture. This attitude would therefore make the new Sophist capable of grand aspirations and opportune actions while always remaining cognizant of the sublime and terrible nature that underlies his fragile dreams of beauty. In the struggle between philosophy and rhetoric for the mantle of supreme discipline, few thinkers have appeared more partisan than Friedrich Nietzsche. Against the Socratic, Platonic, and Stoic traditions, Nietzsche aligned himself with the Sophists, those fellow immoralists who refused Address correspondence to Nathan Crick, 136 Coates Hall, Department of Communication Studies, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA. E-mail: crick@lsu.edu 98 Nietzsche’s Sophist 99 the anodyne of philosophy and chose instead to do battle in the competitive fields of high culture wielding only the weapons of the rhetorical artist. As Scott Consigny has shown, Nietzsche used the Sophists to exemplify a rhetorical attitude toward language in which truth is always a product of perspective, our notions of goodness were always “anchored in the contingencies of specific rhetorical situations,” and the “fundamental linguistic unity to be a creative maneuver in a verbal agon,” (1994, 13–14). Nietzsche thus used the Sophists to counterbalance a metaphysical stance in which the good and the true stand complete outside of language, awaiting proper actualization. Consequently, as Douglas Thomas has advanced, Nietzsche can be interpreted as offering “two competing views of the world: the philosophical, Platonic view . . . in which language plays a secondary role; and the rhetorical view, which treats language as primary, understanding the world as that which is negotiated by and through language” (1999, 1). Not only, then, does Nietzsche interpret the Sophists rhetorically; he appears to present their perspective as the only alternative to the established philosophical worldview. This partisan reading of Nietzsche seems reinforced by his essay, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in which we seem to find a veritable celebration of the sophistical spirit in the form of the “man of intuition” who triumphs over the philosophical “man of reason” (Nietzsche 1999b, 152). Both, he says, “desire to rule over life,” but they do so employing different methods (152). The man of reason guides his actions by “concepts and abstractions” to ward off misfortune, avoid pain, seek happiness, and thereby use his knowledge “to cope with the chief calamities of life by providing for the future, by prudence and regularity” (152–153). He is the paradigm of the Greek virtues of temperance, wisdom, and piety, a man who is capable of guiding judgments in times of uncertainty. The man of intuition, by contrast, chooses to act as “an ‘exuberant hero’ who does not see those calamities and who only acknowledges life as real when it is disguised as beauty and appearance” (152). Compared to the man of reason, the intuitive man suffers greater “because he does not know how to learn from experience and keeps on falling into the very same trap time after time”; yet his suffering is compensated by “a constant stream of brightness, a lightening of the spirit, redemption, and release” (153). At this point Nietzsche concludes with narrative flourish: How differently the same misfortune is endured by the stoic who has learned from experience and governs himself by means of concepts! This man, who otherwise seeks only honesty, truth, freedom from illusions, and protections from the onslaughts of things which might distract him, now performs, in the midst of misfortune, a masterpiece of pretence, just as the other did in the midst of happiness; he does not wear a twitching, mobile, human face, but rather a mask, as it were, with its 100 N. Crick features in dignified equilibrium; he does not shout, nor does he even change his tone of voice. If a veritable storm-cloud empties itself on his head, he wraps himself in his cloak and slowly walks away from under it. (Nietzsche 1999b, 153) This ending appears to offer ready proof to the assumption that there are only two characters in this story, one a valiant hero and the other a prudish dullard. For instance, J. Hillis Miller interprets this final scene in “Truth and Lying” as portraying the opposition between “the Stoic philosopher, protected by his cloak, and the artist, exposed to danger” (1981, 51). Compared to the steady life of the rational man, the intuitive man vacillates between extreme misery and ecstatic joy, and he is as unreasonable in both states as he is passionate. Nietzsche thus appears to leave us with a forced choice—live a creative life of unreason or a rational life devoid of passion. Yet this simple binary understanding breaks down as soon as one realizes that the Stoic who walks off stage at the end of Nietzsche’s essay is neither the man of intuition nor the man of reason. That this Stoic cannot be the “man of reason” is clear once we recall that the paradigmatic Stoic lives according to nature, meaning not the physical “earth,” but the Logos, the rationale of world order. The goal here is not happiness and prudence; it is to live according to nature even at the cost of great suffering. The Stoic thus seeks “honesty, truth, freedom from illusions, and protection from the onslaughts of things which might distract him” (Nietzsche 1999b, 153). Like the man of reason, the Stoic, too, uses concepts (because he uses language); but whereas the man of reason uses logos to prudently change things from worse to better, the Stoic uses logos to produce a disciplined character capable of gaining knowledge (epistêmê) of the rational laws of the universe through the study of phenomena while at the same time achieving a state of freedom from affect (apathia), which is a necessary condition for a clear mind and a virtuous soul. The man of reason is far less concerned with these things. True, he seeks to be guided by knowledge of concepts and abstractions, but the goal of his life is conventional success, honor, prudence, regularity, and the power to provide for the future, ward off misfortune, and attain happiness. The man of reason is no reclusive philosopher; he belongs to the rhêtôrs, those “politicians who put forth motions in the courts or the assembly” (Schiappa 2003, 41). He is, in fact, closer in character to a student of the Sophists. The fact that the Stoic philosopher makes such a sudden arrival and dramatic exit at the end of “On Truth and Lying” suggests in Nietzsche an interest beyond merely rehabilitating the original image of the Greek Sophist as an aesthetic curative to modern philosophical malaise. Following this line of inquiry, this article argues that Nietzsche’s “ideal” Sophist was more than simply the fusion of the political rhêtôr with the Dionysian artist; this new Sophist had also absorbed the sum of the wisdom of the Stoics. The result Nietzsche’s Sophist 101 was a character capable not only of expressing the creative intuition and dealing prudently with the affairs of life but also committed to a regiment of a cruel self-discipline, which was necessary to achieve far-reaching greatness. Nietzche’s “new” Sophist combines the power of music and word in a rhetorical discourse that points us towards the possibility of a higher culture. More than simply eloquent teachers of speech, these new Sophists would be more akin to gay Stoics for whom the highest goal in life would be the “the activity of confronting and overcoming resistance” and the greatest accomplishment the act of self-overcoming (Reginster 2006, 136). In the face of world-weariness, these new Sophists would create a new meaning for the earth by using the tools of the Stoic, the musician, and the rhêtôr to justify a discipline of suffering in the name of beauty. THE SOPHISTS ON POWER AND LOGOS If there is an “essence” to being a Sophist, it is the capacity to achieve victory in agons of the polis through deployment of the conscious arts of language. On this point, Nietzsche was clear. In Greece, he writes that “every talent must unfold itself in fighting: that is the command of Hellenic popular pedagogy. . . . And just as the youths were engaged through contests, their educators were also engaged in contests with each other. . . . [I]n the spirit of the contest, the sophists, the advanced teacher of antiquity, meets another sophist. . . . [T]he Greek knows the artist only as engaged in a personal fight” (Nietzsche 1954, 37). Consequently, while it is true that the Sophistas-artist was a master at turning rhetorical events into what John Poulakos calls “spectacular theatrical performances,” the Sophist-as-educator was not out to train the new avant-garde (1995, 42). The students of the Sophists were not artists of the radical intuition but citizens seeking power in the polis by gaining instruction in (to use the words of Plato’s “Protagoras”) “sound deliberation, both in domestic matters—how best to manage one’s household, and in public affairs—how to realize one’s maximum potential for success in political debate and action” (1997, 319a). The need for a training in logos was thus a natural consequence of a democracy in which power accrued to the word; the Sophists simply recognized that “logos itself is a powerful medium” and “those who know how to handle it effectively can themselves become powerful in their society” (Poulakos 2004, 70). But for the Sophists, power accrues to a speaker neither by mouthing conventional platitudes nor by expressing the radical intuition but by inventing new arguments that could be used as potent weapons of civic combat. The Sophists discovered less the persuasive nature of language, which had been known all along, than the method of developing of this resource into a technê, or what Michel Foucault calls a “savoir-faire that by taking general principles into account would guide action in its time, according to 102 N. Crick its context, and in view of its ends” (1985, 62). In his lectures on rhetoric, for instance, Nietzsche says that the sophistical technê of rhetoric is simply a development, “guided by the clear light of the understanding, of the artistic means which are already found in language,” a means which Nietzsche (1989, 21) defines as the “power to discover and make operative that which works and impresses” with respect to each thing. Their invention was the conscious art of using language to transform one’s world through the power of the word—a power which had always existed but which now finally had become a subject of inquiry and mastery. This is not to deny the radical character of the Sophists in their time. In developing this art and distributing it to a rising entrepreneurial class of citizens, the Sophists facilitated the centrifugal tendencies of Greek society by replacing the power of inherited tradition with the power of the creative word. Describing the Sophists, Poulakos observes that they were “neither aristocratic nor democratic but logocratic,” meaning that they “emphasized the primacy of logos as the medium circulating between human beings and constituting both human beings and the world” (1995, 15). What made them radical was the fact that this logocracy turned a monovocal world polyvocal one in which “the status of all things is questionable; and this is why people often find themselves at odds with one another, disagreeing, differing, and seeking to resolve their differences symbolically” (58). Logos, for them, constituted both human beings and the world, but it did so without a plan, through a playful and unpredictable process of dissoi logoi, the clashing of differing perspectives out of which genuine novelty (and also power) emerges. It was for this reason they represented such a challenge to the established order. The so-called immoralism of the Sophists was therefore less an intentional stance than a side effect of having wide experience with a diversity of audiences, each of whom possesses its own unique perspective on truth and virtue. The Older Sophists were products of an age of power, growth, movement, and plurality, and their status as itinerant teachers made them a combination of what Poulakos calls a “nomad” and a “bricoleur” (1995, 25). They were thus in the tradition of Nietzsche’s free spirit, that person who Nietzsche calls a “wanderer on the earth,” who “will watch and observe and keep his eyes open to see what is really going on in the world,” who “may not let his heart adhere too firmly to any individual thing” and in whom “there must be something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transience” (1996, §638). Particularly for a cosmopolitan figure like Gorgias, it was wholly natural that he would articulate what Consigny describes as the antifoundationalist position that “every assertion is always generated within a web of assumptions, procedures, and judgments; and the notion that any viewpoint is impartial is misguided and often self-deceptive” (2001, 64). Likewise, Nietzsche describes the Sophists as symptoms of a cosmopolitan age in which “good and evil of differing origin are mingled” and the Nietzsche’s Sophist 103 “boundary between good and evil is blurred” (1967b, §427). Unlike those who clung to archaic notions of unitary aristocratic virtue, the Sophists possessed “the courage of all strong spirits to know their own immorality,” which is to say that “a ‘morality-in-itself,’ a ‘good-in-itself’ do not exist” and that it is a “swindle” to claim otherwise (§429, §428). By no means did this position make sophistical teaching applicable only to radical immoralists, however. Quite the opposite: rejecting “morality-initself” merely allowed them to embrace a relativistic and wholly pragmatic method of teaching virtue directed toward making “men of reason” into genuine powers in the city. For instance, in the Anonymous Iamblichi, a fourth century BCE sophistical text, the writer complains that “most men are lacking in self-discipline” and encourages the pursuit of “wisdom, manliness, fluency, or virtue,” by “keeping away from what is wrong in both speech and habits, practicing other things and bringing them to fruition over a long period of time and with great care” (Sprague 1972, 89.1, 89.2). Similar claims are found as well in the fifth century fragments of Hippias, Prodicus, and Antiphon. Rather than encourage impulsive expressions of intuition, the Sophists gave instruction in how to use language to give shape and form to one’s life, to cultivate what Foucault calls “an aesthetic of existence, the purposeful art of a freedom perceived as a power game” (1985, 253). Their criticism and rejection of traditional notions of truth and virtue was grounded less in a conscious skepticism than it was a practical necessity; to instruct citizens in virtues of the new logocracy one had to challenge those of the old aristocracy and know how the One could be turned into the Many. All of this is to say that, even in Nietzsche’s own writings, the portrait of the Sophist bears at least as much resemblance to the “man of reason” as it does the “man of intuition.” Clearly, Nietzsche valued the Sophists less for the fact that they trained rhetors whose existence is necessary for the production of a “higher culture” than for their acknowledgment of the rhetorical nature of the language and their recognition of the importance of perspectivism in our attitudes toward epistemology and morality. Yet this valuation does not negate the fact that although the Sophists were certainly iconoclasts and artists, the success of their profession relied upon attracting various “men of reason” from across Greece to be trained in the arts of rhetoric to become acquire power in their city and household. It is important to point out that Nietzsche did not advocate, even in “On Truth and Lying,” the absolute victory of intuition over reason, rhetoric over philosophy, or poetry over logic. In fact, he takes care to note that a “culture can take shape” only when the man of intuition and the man of reason “stand side by side,” with perhaps the man of intuition having a slight advantage to his counterpart (Nietzsche 1999b, 152). What Nietzsche sought was a way of properly balancing tensions. The fact that a large part of sophistical training was dedicated to producing the self-disciplined rhetors was not something 104 N. Crick shameful; it was a necessary condition to produce a higher culture that was not to wash away in the next rainstorm. DIONYSIAN MUSIC, APOLLONIAN WORD Nonetheless, given Nietzsche’s love of Dionysius, the Sophists might seem an odd choice as a model of his new breed of free spirits. This is because, like all followers of Apollo, the Sophists were primarily artisans of the word. For Apollo not only represents “the urge to perfect self-sufficiency, to the typical ‘individual,’ to all that simplifies, distinguishes, makes strong, clear, unambiguous, typical: freedom under the law” (Nietzsche 1967b, §1050); he also represents a commitment to logos as the conceptual medium whose function is “ordering the chaos of life” (Whitson and Poulakos 1993, 136). This commitment by no means excludes the possibility of sophistical playfulness with language and the capacity to turn arguments on their heads; it suggests only that regardless of what gymnastics are performed by a speaker, the end result is the construction of some conceptual edifice that uses concepts to bring Apollonian order to the world. Nietzsche articulates this position in “On Truth and Lying.” He writes: “[E]ach word immediately becomes a concept, not by virtue of the fact that it is intended to serve as a memory (say) of the unique, utterly individualized, primary experience to which it owes its existence, but because at the same time it must fit countless other, more or less similar cases” (Nietzsche 1999b, 145). It is this conceptual quality of words that makes both science and poetry vehicles for meanings no more or less than philosophy and rhetoric. By contrast, the Dionysian artist begins not with the word but with music. In contradistinction to the individual dream world of Apollo, in which images and concepts attain a certain clarity, the Dionysian intuitive artist is immersed in a drunken state of movement, plurality, and flux permeated by an “eternal will to procreation, to fruitfulness, to recurrence; the feeling of the necessary unity of creation and destruction” (Nietzsche 1967b, §1050). But this also means that these individuals have transcended the limits of the conceptual word to embrace the spirit of music. According to Nietzsche (1999a, 36), “music refers symbolically to the original contradiction and original pain at the heart of the primordial unity, and thus symbolizes a sphere which lies above and beyond all appearance.”. In contradistinction, language is the “organ and symbol of phenomena, [and] can never, under any circumstances, externalize the innermost depths of music” (36). Thus understood, even the Sophists, insofar as they rely on language alone to amaze and startle their audience, remain within the realm of Apollonian conceptual form. However, music and word need not stand in opposition to each other in rhetoric any more than in Greek poetry and drama. For instance, what Nietzsche’s Sophist 105 makes Greek tragedy so unique, for Nietzsche, is its ability to praise both the gods of Dionysius and Apollo. Prior to Nietzsche, this dual aspect of Greek tragedy had been overlooked. In the aesthetic tradition Nietzsche had inherited, Apollonian beauty and Dionysian sublime were usually placed in opposition to each other. The beautiful was said to seduce us by presenting works of art that appeal to the senses and bring about a sense of familiarity and comfort, while the sublime was something which overwhelmed us with a sudden revelation of its magnitude and results in inhibition and expansion beyond our familiar limits. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche challenged this view by defining the beautiful (Apollo) and the sublime (Dionysus) as qualitative episodes within a continuous dramatic performance whose consummation was tragic experience. Nuno Nabais and Martin Earl write that “the beautiful that redeems the sublime is Nietzsche’s invention. In a Dionysus which aspires to the state of Apollo, there lies the ecstatic experience which aspires to be itself, which is justified by itself alone” (2006, 34). In Nietzsche’s formulation, the dramatic arc which originates in the sublime Dionysian formless frenzy and consummates in a redemptive, Apollonian beauty is analogous to how escaping into a warm, fire-lit room redeems us after having endured struggled through the dark and wind and rain of a thunderstorm. In Dionysian art, a state of intoxication is produced whereby one casts off the illusion of individuality in a “state of ecstasy,” meaning “subjectivity disappears entirely before the erupting force of the general element in human life, indeed of the general element in nature” (Nietzsche 1999a, 120). In this moment, the “aristocrat and the man of lowly birth unite in the same Bacchic choruses” as they “express their membership of a higher, more ideal community” (120). Here, one is not simply drunk; one is presented with the sublime formlessness of nature and human existence which immerses one in what Nietzsche calls “the chaos of the Will before it has assumed individual shape” (122). Apollonian art then responds to this condition with the “transfigured world of the eye which is artistically creative in dream, when our eyes are closed” (127). Apollo temporarily blinds us to the formless sublimity of existence in favor of the “gaze, the beautiful, semblance” (127). Whereas Dionysus wreaks havoc on our sculptured illusions, Apollo reconstructs them by use of “measure and limits” based on knowledge (128). In the face of the Dionysiac intoxicated frenzy, Apollo urges restraint, discipline, measurement, and individuation. Thus it is that the “myth recounts that Apollo joined Dionysos together again after he had been dismembered. This is the image of Dionysos created anew by Apollo and saved from his Asiatic dismemberment” (124). The myth, in short, dramatizes the ethical redemption of the sublime (evoked by music and dance) by the beautiful (brought forth through word and image). What applies to drama also applies to rhetoric. Although the Sophists were not “pure” intuitive artists, Nietzsche clearly saw an intuitive side to 106 N. Crick the Sophists despite their Apollonian commitments. He notes that Gorgias and the Sophists took “pleasure in beautiful discourse” in a way which is “a refreshing pause for a nation of artists” who wish to “indulge in an exquisite treat in oratory” (Nietzsche 1989, 216). In sophistical oratory, Nietzsche clearly saw a parallel with the Greek folk song which articulated the “only possible relationship between music, word, and sound: the word, the image, the concept seeks expression in a manner analogous to music and thereby is subjected to the power of music” (Nietzsche 1999a, 34). It was this musical, Dionysian undercurrent of their spirit that gave the language of the Sophists a degree of rhythmic intoxication capable of balancing the Apollonian wordimage. Unlike the vertical, rigid structure of purely philosophical discourse, the Sophists employed a parataxical narrative form that was linear, aural, and harmonic. Susan Jarratt describes this style as creating “the effect of evolving in time, through sound striking the ears, minds, and bodies of its listeners in a temporal sequence” (1991, 27). This style is particularly evident in Gorgias, whose speeches were known for their unique stylistic forms that undoubtedly acquired their power from an oral delivery that did not translate as well on the page. Nietzsche’s portrait of the Greek Sophist thus combines aspects of both the “man of intuition” and the “man of reason.” Neither purely an intuitive artist nor a rational teacher of ethics, they acknowledged the power of the Dionysian musical sublime while nonetheless basing their ethos on their capacity to teach virtue and the arts of self-discipline. On the one hand, their viability as a profession was contingent on their possession of a technê, which created what Foucault describes as “the possibility of forming oneself as a subject in control of his conduct; that is, the possibility of making oneself like the doctor treating sickness, the pilot steering between the rocks, or the statesman governing the city—a skillful and prudent guide of himself, one who had a sense of the right time and the right measure” (1985, 138–139). On the other hand, they also transcended their teachings as performers, using music and word to keep alive the tragic spirit of their age and the sense that the mystery, horror, truth, and beauty of the world was greater and more sublime than could be put into speech. Their end was to create good citizens, yes, but citizens of a great culture capable of producing great things. It was this ability to combine both Dionysian and Apollonian spirits that undoubtedly inspired Nietzsche’s praise. THE STOIC CHARACTER OF THE NEW SOPHIST Given this favorable portrait of the Sophist, why does Nietzsche end “On Truth and Lying” with the mysterious image of the Stoic walking off into the rain? Given the occasionally derogatory remarks Nietzsche makes about the Stoics, it is easy to interpret this scene as a mockery of their attitude. For Nietzsche’s Sophist 107 instance, at one point he refers to Stoic way of life as that of “petrification” and at another he describes it as an art of turning the body to stone, thus including it among an unflattering list of “gloomy religio-moral pathos, Stoic self-hardening, Platonic slander of the senses, preparation of the soil for Christianity” (1974, §326; 1967b, §427). In short, Nietzsche presents Stoicism as a masterpiece of self-deception in which one creates a protective cloak around oneself by replacing the chaos of the actual world with one’s orderly (and false) concept of that world. He thus chastises them: “‘According to nature’ you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! . . . [W]hile you pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law in nature, you want something opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to impose your morality, your ideal, on nature,” thus making “all existence to exist only after your own image—as an immense eternal glorification and generalization of Stoicism” (Nietzsche 1966, §9). Understood through Nietzsche’s eyes, the Stoic dictum to live according to nature really amounts to the command to have faith in one’s own illusions, even if those illusions are utterly unfounded in reality. Embracing only this negative evaluation of the Stoics is tempting, for it allows us to reaffirm our simplistic binary between philosophy and rhetoric, the former representing a cowardly flight from nature and the latter being its heroic embrace. However, this binary interpretation breaks down as soon as one recognizes that Stoicism has an undeniable attraction for Nietzsche. Indeed, he praises the Stoic character as an embodiment of a disciplined will that made one ready “to swallow stones and worms, slivers of glass and scorpions without nausea” (Nietzsche 1974, §306). Martha Nussbaum goes so far as to describe Nietzsche’s moral project as seeking “to bring about a revival of Stoic values of self-command and self-formation” (1994, 140). For what made the Stoics such noble figures was the capacity for a “long compulsion,” meaning an “obedience over a long period of time and in a single direction” (Nietzsche 1966, §188). In contrast to proponents of hedonism, utilitarianism, or eudaemonism (who measure the value of things by their degree of pleasure, the greatest good, and happiness, respectively), the Stoics advocate what Nietzsche calls the “discipline of suffering, of great suffering,” a discipline he feels that alone has “created all enhancements of man so far” (1966, §225). Their discipline made them more capable of suffering for the attainment of a greater virtue than their Epicurean counterparts who rarely left their private gardens for fear of encountering the slightest displeasure. In fact, Nietzsche goes so far as to describe his heroic exemplar, his “free spirit,” as a kind of Stoic, at least insofar as that free spirit has mastered the power of logos to create a disciplined self capable of embracing suffering as necessary component of the virtuous life. This connection is made explicit in Beyond Good and Evil: “Honesty, supposing that this is our virtue from which we cannot get away, we free spirits—well, let us work on it with all 108 N. Crick our malice and love and not weary of ‘perfecting’ ourselves in our virtue, the only one left us. . . . And if our honesty should nevertheless grow weary one day and sigh and stretch its limbs and find us too hard, and would like to have things better, easier, tenderer, like an agreeable vice—let us remain hard, we last Stoics!” (Nietzsche 1966, §227). Honesty, the same virtue that guided the Stoic through the rain, also guides Nietzsche’s free spirits, these last Stoics, and their “adventurous courage,” their “seasoned and choosy curiosity,” and their “subtlest, most disguised, most spiritual will to power” (§227). It is thus fitting that the Stoic is the only one with the wherewithal to actually stride out into the rain that causes all others to cower within their sheltered abodes. What gives the Stoics such power is that they have pushed the conceptual nature of logos to its limits. For them, logos meant far more than simply argument and speech; logos represented the rational order which penetrated into the very “structure of things” (Kerferd 1981, 83). The Stoic logos was not only the argument made in the polis; it was also the Logos of Heraclitus, whose physics posited that “all individual things in the world are only manifestations of one and the same primary substance and that there is a law which governs the course of nature and which should govern human action” (Zeller 1931, 229–230). They saw Logos as a unitary nonhuman force for which “living in accordance with the logos means above all assenting to it, which means recognizing and embracing events from the standpoint of the logos, rather than from the standpoint of one’s own position” (Bardzell 2008, 17). For the Stoics, the ideal was to craft a logos (speech) which was a mirror of a Logos (world order) in such a way as to produce a rational, stable, and accessible conceptual structure and capable of guiding action. Consequently, their approach to developing the art of rhetoric was similar to their perspective on developing the arts of virtue: both had to abide by the natural laws that permeated all Being, even if that commitment brought on considerable suffering. Ironically, then, the Sophists, despite their reputation as being the antithesis of the Stoics, can actually be seen as their progenitors. For what distinguishes language (logos) from other mediums of communication, like music, image, touch, or movement, is its strong tendency to forget its origins in sensory experience and present itself as a world unto itself. Nietzsche writes: “The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it” (Nietzsche 1996, I:§11). This activity is readily apparent in “On Truth and Lying” when Nietzsche narrates the transition from poetic to scientific language. Words, he explains, are the result of a series of metaphorical transformations by which perceptions are translated into images, images imitated by sounds, and sounds finally turned into concepts. At first, these words are Nietzsche’s Sophist 109 recognized for what they are: a “mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration” (Nietzsche 1999b, 146). This is the sophistical attitude toward logos. However, after this transformative process has been forgotten, the concepts begin to petrify and so become “firmly established, canonical, and binding” (146). Here is the Stoic inheritance. The story of the Stoics is thus part of what Nietzsche calls “an ancient, eternal story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today, too, as soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power” (1966, §9). The Stoics, that is to say, merely pushed the rhetorical function of language to its logical end—the complete ordering of appearances through the power of concepts to order the chaos of the world. Nietzsche’s provocative point is that, despite its frequent abuse in history, this perfectionist tendency in language to order the world is a necessary step in the progress of civilization. Nietzsche (1999b) makes it a point to declare as necessary those conceptual fortresses that order the chaos of nature, for only by “forgetting this primitive world of metaphor” and only by forgetting “himself as a subject, and indeed as an artistically creative subject does he live with some degree of peace, security, and consistency” (148). The simple fact is that the “the waking human being is only clear about the fact that he is awake thanks to the rigid and regular web of concepts” (151). Without this web, there is neither truth nor beauty nor intuition, only chaos and madness. The fact that Stoic constructions were designed as temples to the eternal order, while the Sophistical ones were designed to endure as long as the block towers of children, marks them as different in quality but not in kind; the fact that each built something to endure for any length of time demonstrates their shared Apollonian character. The problem of “petrification” arises only when we are not honest enough with ourselves about the illusory nature of our web of concepts. In the case of the Stoics, instead of treating their constructions artistically, as a complex fabrication of their own making, they viewed them as reflections of an underlying order. Artistically and ethically, this attitude manifested itself in terms of what Nietzsche (1999a) calls “aesthetic Socratism,” or the notion that “In order to be beautiful, everything must be reasonable” (62). Instead of embracing the Apollonian dream as temporary respite from the Dionysian turmoil, “human beings now make their actions subject to the rule of abstractions; they no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions and sensuous perceptions; they now generalize all these impressions first, turning them into cooler, less colourful concepts in order to harness the vehicle of their lives and actions to them” (Nietzsche 1999b, 146). This 110 N. Crick shift toward Socratism occurs, for Nietzsche, as soon as the one ceases to confront the sublime horrors of existence and instead lives under the illusion that everything is comprehensible, rational, and translatable in words. Once we reach this point, the cooperative relationships between music and word in oratory and poetry, between Dionysus and Apollo, break down, degenerating into a simplistic dualism putting “logical schematism” on one side and “naturalistic effects” on the other (Nietzsche 1999b, 169). Of course, this dualism is hierarchical in its origin, with logical schematism occupying a privileged place as the means of accessing and expressing rational virtues and truths, while naturalistic effects as viewed as mere vehicles for their expression or means of decoration. But this also means a similar triumph of words over music: “just as the spirit was so much nobler than the body, the word was supposedly nobler than the accompanying system of harmony” (Nietzsche 1999a, 91). In the Socratic order, music drops into the background merely as a complement to logos, giving it color and emphasis but being essentially disposable. As a result, even dramatic art comes off not as an aesthetic whole but as a kind of rational argument dressed up in spectacular dress. That is to say, when a dramatic artist “has no inkling of the Dionysiac depths of music, he transforms for himself the enjoyment of music into the reason-governed rhetoric of passion” (91). Artists thus cease to build masks to temporarily shield us from the horrors of existence but occupy themselves with developing ways of effectively conveying ideas by making use of tropes and figures. Stoic rhetoricians, meanwhile, lose the musical aspect to their oratory and instead emphasize “brevity, restraint, minimal decoration, and the exclusive appear to the intellect of the audience,” leading to what Marcia Colish describes as a “dry, cramped, charmless style” (1990, 80–81). No wonder, then, that Nietzsche would see in the Stoics the same symptoms of decline and decadence he first saw in Socrates. Yet Nietzsche’s praise of the Stoics demonstrates that there is something to be preserved from their tradition. For despite all their flaws, the Stoics performed a great task—they provided humankind a “purpose for suffering” and thus saved and strengthened the will in the face of nihilism (Nietzsche 1967b, 162). This was a function that neither the Sophists nor the Greek tragedians were called upon to perform. Unlike the Stoics, who first appeared in the context of a polyglot empire, rhetoricians like Gorgias and dramatists like Aeschylus were products of a tragic age in which meaning could be found in even the greatest suffering by interpreting it through the grand narratives of divine justice and cosmic order that were so central to life in the polis. Although they had confronted the sublime magnitude and incomprehensibility of the world, in its awesome ability to destroy without pity, at the same time they felt they had witnessed glimpses of beautiful images of the gods within those terrible appearances. Nietzsche explains: Nietzsche’s Sophist 111 The Greeks knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to live at all they had to place in front of these things the resplendent, dream-born figures of the Olympians. . . . [Thus,] the Greeks were obliged, by the most profound compulsion, to create these gods. How else could that people have borne existence, given their extreme sensitivity, their story desires, their unique gift for suffering, if that same existence had not been shown to them in their gods, suffused with a higher glory? (Nietzsche 1999a, 23–24) By the time of the Stoics, however, such gods no longer existed. The Peloponnesian War had shaken the tragic faith of the Greeks and the conquests of Alexander had destroyed it, and in its wake appeared the specter of nihilism. According to Nietzsche, human “existence on earth contained no goal; ‘why man at all?’—was a question without an answer; the will for man and earth was lacking; behind every great human destiny there sounded as a refrain a yet greater ‘in vain!”’ (1967a, 162). It was to this problem that the Stoics provided an answer. In an era in which heroic action had become impossible, the Stoic perfected the method of asceticism whereby one preserved the will by turning it back on itself. Instead of directing the will to control the external world, one directed the will to dominate the internal one. Stoic asceticism thus served to “exploit the bad instincts of all sufferers for the purpose of selfdiscipline, self-surveillance, and self-overcoming” (Nietzsche 1967a, 128). That Nietzsche praises this facet of the Stoics is without question. Kaufmann makes this explicit: “Without acquiring a bad conscience, without learning to be profoundly dissatisfied with ourselves, we cannot envisage higher norms, a new state of being, self-perfection. Without ascetic ideals, without self-control and cruel self-discipline, we cannot attain that self-mastery which Nietzsche ever praises and admires” (1967, 12). And what Nietzsche praises and admires about Stoic training in self-discipline is precisely what was lacking in the training offered by the Sophists. In the Classical Age, selfdiscipline was a means to power in the polis and was considered a means to an end; in the Stoic Age, self-discipline was an end in itself, justified only by whether it conformed to the Logos and obeyed rational laws, regardless of its external consequences. This turning inward came with all the drawbacks of petrification, but it also made possible the creation of a wholly new modern character capable of long and extended suffering in the pursuit of “truth” for no other reason than its possession. Consequently, Nietzsche identifies the inheritors of Stoic asceticism not with priests but with scientists. As he explains, as long as it “still inspires passion, love, ardor, and suffering at all, it is not the opposite of the ascetic ideal but rather the latest and noblest form of it” (Nietzsche 1967a, 147). The great doctrine of the Stoics is thus amor fati, “love of fate,” in which “one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not 112 N. Crick in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it . . . but love it” (Nietzsche 1967b, §1041). Like the cosmologist who studies the void of the universe and declares it to be so with courage and honesty, the Stoic embraces the world in all its totality without apology or question, not because the gods have a divine plan behind appearances, but because it is one’s duty to be honest and to love whatever truth is disclosed. The great flaw of the Stoics is that their so-called honesty was complete self-delusion; the implication is that once one comes to terms with the aesthetic nature of their illusions, a greater and more penetrating honesty is possible. If we are looking for a normative portrait of Nietzsche’s ideal Sophist, it is therefore insufficient simply to call forth unaltered the Sophists as they existed in the Classical Age, for their age is not ours. The sophistical attitude, which combined the Dionysian spirit of music with the Apollonian character of the word, remains a vital resource to sustaining a vibrant rhetorical culture. Yet the challenges of the contemporary world are beyond the reach of eloquent oratory. Nietzsche saw in the Stoics a means not only of overcoming the persistent threat of nihilism but also of developing a “gay science” which would be the “reward of a long, brave, industrious, and subterranean seriousness” (Nietzsche 1967a, 21). Nietzsche’s “new Sophists” would carry forward the practical and aesthetic insights of the original Sophists while committing themselves to a discipline of self-mastery capable of pursuing, with single-minded seriousness, works of genuine breadth and greatness, however many storms poured down upon them. And in these new Sophists would be the reconciliation of rhetoric and philosophy. REFERENCES Bardzell, Jeffrey. 2008. Speculative Grammar and Stoic Language Theory in Medieval Allegorical Narrative from Prudentius to Alan of Lille. New York: Routledge. Colish, Marcia. 1990. The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: Stoicism in Classical Latin Literature. Boston: Brill Academic. Consigny, Scott. 1994. “Nietzsche’s Reading of the Sophists.” Rhetoric Review 13: 5–26. ———. 2001. Gorgias: Sophist and Artist. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Foucault, Michel. 1985. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2. New York: Vintage. Jarratt, Susan. 1991. Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Kaufmann, Walter, ed. 1967. Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Geneaology of Morals, 3–14. New York: Vintage Books. Kerferd, G.B. 1981. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche’s Sophist 113 Miller, Hillis. 1981. “Dismembering and Disremembering in Nietzsche’s ‘On truth and lies in a nonmoral sense.’” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 9: 41–54. Nabais, Nuno, and Martin Earl. 2006. Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of the Tragic. London: Continuum. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1954. The Portable Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press. ———. 1966. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage. ———. 1967a. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1967b. The Will to Power. Trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House. ———. 1974. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1989. Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language. Trans. S. L. Gilman, C. Blair, and D. J. Parent. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1996. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999a. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Trans. R. Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999b. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” In The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, 139–153. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 1994. “Pity and Mercy: Nietzsche’s Stoicism.” In Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht, 139–167. Berkeley: University of California. Plato. 1997. “Protagoras.” In Plato: Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper. Trans. S. Lombardo and K. Bell, 746–790. Indianapolis: Hackett. Poulakos, John. 1995. Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. ———. 2004. “Rhetoric and Civic Education: From the Sophists to Isocrates.” In Isocrates and Civic Education, ed. Takis Poulakos and David Depew, 69–83. Austin: University of Texas Press. Reginster, Bernard. 2006. The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schiappa, Edward. 2003. Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric. 2nd ed. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Sprague, Rosamond Kent. 1972. The Older Sophists: A Complete Translation by Several Hands of the Fragments in Die Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker. Ed. Diels-Kranz. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Thomas, Douglas. 1999. Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically. New York: Guilford Press. Whitson, Steve, and John Poulakos. 1993. “Nietzsche and the Aesthetics of Rhetoric.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79: 131–145. Zeller, Eduard. 1931. Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy. Cleveland: Meridian.