Listening to Zarathustra: Friedrich Nietzsche and rhetoric

We associate the name of Friedrich Nietzsche with a crisis---as he asks us to. Given the themes of his writings and their influences upon us, we associate this crisis with a development in the history of the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy.;Nietzsche directly concerned himself with this relationship in several unpublished manuscripts and notes prepared in the early 1870s, and these texts suggest an idea that has become decisive for contemporary studies of these disciplines: all language, even philosophical language, is rhetorical.;Several contemporary publications, the Untimely Considerations of 1873-1876, however, explicitly prefer philosophical to rhetorical discourse. Nietzsche's manuscripts distinguish two senses of rhetoric: a general sense according to which one could consider all discourse rhetorical; and the disciplinary sense of the ancients that developed its own discursive traditions in opposition to philosophy. Nietzsche may critique the pretension to oppose rhetoric in the general sense, but he suggests that the discipline of philosophy suits the study of this sense better than the discipline named rhetoric.;The three parts of Thus spoke Zarathustra published in 1883-1884 no longer directly concern themselves with the abstract relationship between these ancient disciplines. Zarathustra's speeches nevertheless indicate that he wants to speak like a philosopher rather than an orator. Confronting a problem as old as philosophy itself, the problem of creating a discourse suitable both to one's solitary wisdom and to the generalizations demanded by an audience, Zarathustra resolves to address his speeches to those with wills related to his. Failing to find the companions he seeks, Zarathustra leaves others behind and tests his own will through solitary discourse. The teaching of "eternal recurrence" indicates his will to overcome humanity and to become the kind of companion that he once sought among others. Zarathustra addresses itself to such companions, whether or not they exist.;This development of a philosophical discourse indicates Nietzsche's relationship to the history of rhetoric better than the abstract discussions of the manuscripts. Nietzsche wants to create a discourse suited to a philosophical way of life that incorporates and indicates the fullest possible consciousness of the general sense of rhetoric.