Finding Truth in ‘Lies’: Nietzsche's Perspectivism and its Relation to Education

In his 2001 article ‘Teaching to Lie and Obey: Nietzsche on Education’, Stefan Ramaekers defends Nietzsche's concept of perspectivism against the charge that it is relativistic. He argues that perspectivism is not relativistic because it denies the dichotomy between the ‘true’ world and the ‘seeming’ world, a dichotomy central to claims to relativism. While Ramaekers' article is correct in denying relativistic interpretations of perspectivism it does not go far enough in this direction. In fact, the way Ramaekers makes his case may actually encourage the charge of relativism, especially when it comes to his appropriation of perspectivism for education. This article proposes to pick up where Ramaekers left off. It will argue that Nietzsche's denial of the opposition between the ‘true’ world and the ‘seeming’ world opens up the possibility for the reestablishment of truth, albeit in a modified form. After examining Nietzsche's modified ‘realist’ epistemology, the paper will explore the implications of it for his philosophy of education. It will be argued that Nietzsche's educational philosophy is founded on his concept of perspectivism in so far as he demands that students be rigorously inculcated into a pedagogical framework that teaches students to discriminate between ‘true’ and ‘false’ perspectives. This framework is essential for the development of an intellectually robust and life‐affirming culture.     

Debating without judges

The long history of the Christian prophetic vision shows that the vision's popularity has fluctuated markedly and that its ideological content has been modified frequently. This essay seeks to explain the distinct persuasive appeal which accounts for the vision's fluctuating popularity and to identify the ways in which the vision, when modified to meet extant rhetorical situations, functions rhetorically.     

Calculating the Weather: Deductive Reasoning and Disciplinary Telos in Cleveland Abbe's Rhetorical Transformation of Meteorology

This paper explores the rhetorical basis of a major paradigm change in meteorology, from a focus on inductive observation to deductive, mathematical reasoning. Analysis of Cleveland Abbe's “The Physical Basis of Long-Range Weather Forecasts” demonstrates how in his advocacy for a new paradigm, Abbe navigates the tension between piety to tradition and dissent necessary for innovation through the rhetorical imagination of and appeal to a disciplinary telos. This strategy allows him to dismiss the traditions of meteorology while simultaneously creating common ground between a new paradigm and an audience of contemporary scientists whose traditions he rejects.     

What is a dysfunctional school?

Abstract

Whether or not a school is dysfunctional depends largely on how dysfunctionality in schools is defined and measured. Dysfunctionality, as any construct, is subject to definition and interpretation, and it is thus always marked by perspectivism. But regardless of the definition games occasionally played by academics, some form of reality takes place beyond the constructivist horizon. Moreover, perspectivism and definition games may justify and even create adverse consequences within a school's lived reality. A definition focussing on Grade 12 pass rates, for example, tends to implicate teachers, while a definition focussing on infrastructure tends to exculpate teachers and incriminate government and administration. Accordingly, this article will not end but begin with the adage that a dysfunctional school is what one defines a dysfunctional school to be, and it will explore the conditions and consequences of conceptual variations.     

A footnote in the psychology of persuasion

The rhetorical problem of concretizing the ideal is explored via the relationship between form and fact in Richard Weaver's theory of truth. The investigation reveals that reliance on analogic form permits Weaver's arguments to function externally as if empirically grounded and internally in the analytic fashion of logico‐mathematical reasoning. Explication of Weaver's rhetorical method suggests that analogic structure, example, and analogy are fundamental ways of rhetorical knowing.     

Training four minute men at Vassar

The rhetorical appeal of Styron's novel as a symbolic response to contemporary American racial tensions is explicated through an examination of its strategic ramifications as a “meditation on history” and its sociopsychological implications with respect to violence, self‐definition, and social reform.     

The field of speech, 1953: An overview

Inherent in the rhetorical tradition of symbolic form is the search for the rhetorical processes which convert experience into the social forms of community. Fusing Robert Scott's notion of rhetoric as dynamic with the rhetorical concept of “spectacle,” this essay explores “the dynamic spectacle” as a rhetorical document of community building. Black America's struggle for identity in White America is offered as a case study.     

Rhetorical criticism of interpersonal discourse: An exploratory study

This study demonstrates how rhetorical criticism can be utilized to clarify the rhetorical nature of interpersonal discourse. Bitzer's situational theory, Bormann's fantasy theme analysis, and Arnold's criticism of oral rhetoric are synthesized to explain the nature and form of selected portions of taped and transcribed interpersonal dialogue.     

翻译教学中修辞意识的培养

当今翻译教学的目标是培养面向现实需求的翻译人才,有效影响现实译语受众是翻译行为的主要目的。本文尝试在当代修辞理论框架内思考新形势下的翻译教学,呼唤对修辞意识的关注与重视。论文从修辞的工作定义入手,围绕以翻译受众为中心、充分认识译文话语的修辞力量、注重内容和形式的认同感以及适当“施压”、扩大受众视域等方面,说明翻译教学中培养学生修辞意识的必要性和具体实践,强调以现实受众为中心的翻译教学理念。     

Franklin D. Roosevelt,the holocaust,and modernity's rescue rhetorics

This essay provides a rhetorical analysis of the third FDR administration's handling of information on the Holocaust during World War II, and the memories that we have of those events. The author contends that a study of key rhetorical histories shows how President Roosevelt and his advisers had a great deal of information about Hitler's Final Solution, and that they were not as indifferent as we have made them out to be. Between 1940 and 1944, FDR's administrators decided to treat the winning of the war as the ultimate form of rescue, but the purveyors of today's rescue rhetorics contend that Roosevelt's supporters neglected to consider alternate plans for massive rescue missions or negotiations with the enemy.     

A rhetorician's son: His advice to public speakers

J. M. Barrie's 1922 address Courageconstitutes a paradoxical rhetorical text. In his oratorical debut, Barrie offered seniors at St. Andrews poignant and explicit advice concerning life's liminal passages, even as he carefully obfuscated his own identity. This essay offers two readings of the text to illuminate an alternative relationship between text and context in rhetorical criticism. The first interpretation focuses on the obvious textual paradox related to liminality. The second reading moves from the “textual context” to the social and ideological context, and argues that working within the address is the rhetorical form of “the closet.” Recontextualizing Barrie's address from within “the closet,” renders visible a second “invisible context” related to homosexuality, opening a new interpretive doorway for the critic.     

Chapman's Coatesville address: A hermeneutic reading

Rhetoric has claimed Chapman's Coatesville address as its own, but the hermeneutic tradition adds to our understanding of it. As a speech act it was intentionally a non‐event, a memorial for its own failure. This was its strange rhetorical purpose and its claim on a posthumous textual life. In a strange way, it is more a hermeneutic than a rhetorical act, an anticipation of its own future life after death. The open‐ended strategy of the speech is a self‐reflexive enactment. Chapman's Coatesville address is a textual model, illustrating the passage from autobiography to rhetorical engagement, from self to community. Because its community is the nation that as yet has not dealt with its darkest problem, the narrative identity of the speech's audience is an identity in process. Caught up in the reception of the speech, we are still being invited to respond to that lynching at Coatesville.     

A Doubled Heterotopia: Shifting Spatial and Visual Symbolism in the Jewish Museum Berlin's Development

This essay considers the rhetoric of space in a rapidly transforming culture. Using Michel Foucault's concept of “heterotopias” to understand the rhetorical power of a building's disposition, it is argued that the Jewish Museum Berlin contains two heterotopias, one within the other. The first is Daniel Libeskind's original building design in relation to the surrounding city, but the second is the placement of an art installation, Menashe Kadishman's Shalechet, in a central location within the museum. The doubling of heterotopian space uses dialectical–rhetorical transcendence to build identification with the museum's message for an increasingly international audience.     

Winston Churchill's proposal for a united Europe

The 1848 Woman's Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, was the rhetorical event that precipitated the beginning of the woman's rights movement. This essay discusses the First Woman's Rights Convention in light of the rhetorical tensions it produced.     

Chastity for democracy: Surplus repression and the rhetoric of sex education

Moving from opposition to participation, the Adolescent Family Life Act (1981) and the development of abstinence education marks the conservative movement's pivot to a rhetorical strategy of tolerance that enabled it to coopt the public culture of sex discourse. Working from Herbert Marcuse's theory of “surplus repression,” I argue that the New Right seized the liberationist argument for open public discourse about sexuality to sublimate libidinal desires into a national project of familial (re)productivity. The AFLA is significant in the rhetorical history of sex education because it demarcates the transition to a productive form of biopolitics that sought to manage sexuality by instrumentalizing rather than censuring bodily desire. Conservative sex talk illustrates how Eros—transgressive, creative, and erotic desires—is channeled into the discursive production of hyper-functional subjects invested in their own subjugation.     

From the Parlor to the Barnyard: Obama and Holder on Race

This essay explores Barack Obama's “A More Perfect Union” speech and Eric Holder's speech marking African American History Month as a case study of contemporary public discourse on race. This article argues that in these speeches, Obama and Holder perform the social drama of race relations in profoundly different ways. Drawing on the Burkean parlor and barnyard as metaphors of rhetorical form, the analysis demonstrates the interplay of these dialogic and agonistic forms in motivating democratic deliberation on race. Implications of these rhetorical forms for healthy democratic practice are discussed.     

Theodore Roosevelt and the rhetoric of citizenship: On tour in new England, 1902

This study examines the speeches and events of Theodore Roosevelt's New England tour of 1902. Specifically, it looks at how Roosevelt developed a representative anecdote of the “good citizen” as a basis for his political philosophy and his advocacy of policy initiatives. This representative anecdote allowed Roosevelt's audiences to participate in the rhetorical situation as an enactment of the “good citizen” and thus provided a strong presence for Roosevelt's argument. Implications for understanding both Roosevelt's rhetoric as well as the concept of the rhetorical presidency are discussed.     

Muhammad Ali's Fighting Words: The Paradox of Violence in Nonviolent Rhetoric

While Muhammad Ali has been the subject of countless articles and books written by sports historians and journalists, rhetorical scholars have largely ignored him. This oversight is surprising given both the tradition of social movement scholarship within rhetorical studies and Ali's influential eloquence as a world renowned celebrity espousing nonviolence. Ali's rhetorical performances played a pivotal role in radicalizing the civil rights movement as it (d)evolved into twin forces: Black Power and anti-Vietnam war movements. Ali's rhetoric conjoins messages of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, enabling critics to re-envision civil rights texts. Ali's enduring rhetoric provides a model for analyzing texts and social movements invoking the paradox of the violence in nonviolent civil disobedience.     

The rhetoric of oratory and how to teach it

Campbell's reputation has suffered from modem conceptions that assume Aristotle's Rhetoric as the paradigm for rhetorical theory and from modern commitments to epistemic and dialogic rhetorics. A focus on the place of the passions and emotional appeal in Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric (POR) brings his achievement more clearly into view. The “sentiments, passions, dispositions,” three key terms in Campbell's definition of the “grand art of communication,” are an index to his consideration of non‐rational response, a consideration informed by a discussion of “the passions” in the moral psychology of the period and that culminates in Book II of Hume's Treatise on Human Nature. What emerges when POR is seen from this perspective has significance for our understanding of the relationship between reason and passion in persuasion and for our appreciation of POR, which is arguably the most coherent conception of rhetoric that we have.     

Tales of a Texas Cynic: Theodore O. Windt Remembered

In memory of Professor Ted Windt, this essay considers his significant contributions to rhetorical scholarship and pedagogy. It examines his unique contributions to our understandings of American presidential and protest rhetoric of the late 20th century, highlighting his application of Greek cynicism as explanatory schema for American protest rhetoric and then recounting Windt's framework for analyzing “crisis” rhetoric as appropriated by recent American presidents to advance their agendas. The essay then considers Windt's pedagogical perspectives and argues that Windt's teaching itself was acclaimed because it was rooted in the rhetorical and oratorical excellence. In conclusion, it is argued that Ted Windt was a unique and important rhetorical scholar and critic whose life and work provide lasting scholarly contributions and a robust model for achieving excellence in the college classroom.