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Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 14:98–113, 2011Copyright © American Society for the History of RhetoricISSN: 1536-2426 print/1936-0835 onlineDOI: 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 tocreate and destroy on the one hand, and the rational, Stoic philoso-

pher who uses concepts to order the world into a block universe onthe other. However, I argue that his essay presents us with not twocharacters 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 dis-closes 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 remain-ing 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 FriedrichNietzsche. Against the Socratic, Platonic, and Stoic traditions, Nietzschealigned 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:

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the anodyne of philosophy and chose instead to do battle in the competi-tive fields of high culture wielding only the weapons of the rhetorical artist.

As Scott Consigny has shown, Nietzsche used the Sophists to exemplify arhetorical attitude toward language in which truth is always a product of

perspective, our notions of goodness were always “anchored in the con-tingencies of specific rhetorical situations,” and the “fundamental linguisticunity to be a creative maneuver in a verbal agon,” (1994, 13–14). Nietzschethus used the Sophists to counterbalance a metaphysical stance in which thegood and the true stand complete outside of language, awaiting proper actu-alization. Consequently, as Douglas Thomas has advanced, Nietzsche can beinterpreted as offering “two competing views of the world: the philosoph-ical, Platonic view . . . in which language plays a secondary role; and therhetorical view, which treats language as primary, understanding the worldas that which is negotiated by and through language” (1999, 1). Not only,

then, does Nietzsche interpret the Sophists rhetorically; he appears to presenttheir 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 verita-ble 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 employingdifferent methods (152). The man of reason guides his actions by “conceptsand 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 theparadigm of the Greek virtues of temperance, wisdom, and piety, a man whois 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 thosecalamities and who only acknowledges life as real when it is disguised asbeauty and appearance” (152). Compared to the man of reason, the intuitiveman suffers greater “because he does not know how to learn from experi-ence 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 haslearned from experience and governs himself by means of concepts! Thisman, 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



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features in dignified equilibrium; he does not shout, nor does he evenchange his tone of voice. If a veritable storm-cloud empties itself on hishead, he wraps himself in his cloak and slowly walks away from underit. (Nietzsche 1999b, 153)

This ending appears to offer ready proof to the assumption that thereare only two characters in this story, one a valiant hero and the other aprudish dullard. For instance, J. Hillis Miller interprets this final scene in“Truth and Lying” as portraying the opposition between “the Stoic philoso-pher, protected by his cloak, and the artist, exposed to danger” (1981, 51).Compared to the steady life of the rational man, the intuitive man vacillatesbetween extreme misery and ecstatic joy, and he is as unreasonable in bothstates as he is passionate. Nietzsche thus appears to leave us with a forcedchoice—live a creative life of unreason or a rational life devoid of passion.

Yet this simple binary understanding breaks down as soon as one real-izes that the Stoic who walks off stage at the end of Nietzsche’s essay isneither the man of intuition nor the man of reason. That this Stoic can-not be the “man of reason” is clear once we recall that the paradigmaticStoic lives according to nature, meaning not the physical “earth,” but theLogos, the rationale of world order. The goal here is not happiness and pru-dence; it is to live according to nature even at the cost of great suffering.The Stoic thus seeks “honesty, truth, freedom from illusions, and protectionfrom the onslaughts of things which might distract him” (Nietzsche 1999b,153). Like the man of reason, the Stoic, too, uses concepts (because heuses language); but whereas the man of reason uses logos to prudently change things from worse to better, the Stoic uses logos to produce a dis-ciplined character capable of gaining knowledge (epistêmê ) of the rationallaws of the universe through the study of phenomena while at the sametime achieving a state of freedom from affect (apathia), which is a neces-sary condition for a clear mind and a virtuous soul. The man of reason is farless concerned with these things. True, he seeks to be guided by knowledgeof concepts and abstractions, but the goal of his life is conventional suc-cess, honor, prudence, regularity, and the power to provide for the future,

ward off misfortune, and attain happiness. The man of reason is no reclu-sive philosopher; he belongs to the rhêtôrs , those “politicians who put forthmotions 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 anddramatic exit at the end of “On Truth and Lying” suggests in Nietzsche aninterest beyond merely rehabilitating the original image of the Greek Sophistas an aesthetic curative to modern philosophical malaise. Following this lineof inquiry, this article argues that Nietzsche’s “ideal” Sophist was more thansimply 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




was a character capable not only of expressing the creative intuition anddealing prudently with the affairs of life but also committed to a regimentof a cruel self-discipline, which was necessary to achieve far-reaching great-ness. 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 bemore akin to gay Stoics for whom the highest goal in life would be the “theactivity of confronting and overcoming resistance” and the greatest accom-plishment the act of self-overcoming (Reginster 2006, 136). In the face of

world-weariness, these new Sophists would create a new meaning for theearth by using the tools of the Stoic, the musician, and the rhêtôr to justify adiscipline 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 tal-ent must unfold itself in fighting: that is the command of Hellenic popularpedagogy. . . . And just as the youths were engaged through contests, theireducators were also engaged in contests with each other. . . . [I]n the spirit of the contest, the sophists, the advanced teacher of antiquity, meets anothersophist. . . . [T]he Greek knows the artist only as engaged in a personalfight” (Nietzsche 1954, 37). Consequently, while it is true that the Sophist-as-artist was a master at turning rhetorical events into what John Poulakoscalls “spectacular theatrical performances,” the Sophist-as-educator was notout 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 thepolis by gaining instruction in (to use the words of Plato’s “ Protagoras ”)“sound deliberation, both in domestic matters—how best to manage one’shousehold, and in public affairs—how to realize one’s maximum potentialfor success in political debate and action” (1997, 319a). The need for a

training in logos was thus a natural consequence of a democracy in whichpower 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). Butfor the Sophists, power accrues to a speaker neither by mouthing conven-tional 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, whichhad been known all along, than the method of developing of this resourceinto 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



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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 adevelopment, “guided by the clear light of the understanding, of the artisticmeans 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 theconscious art of using language to transform one’s world through the powerof the word—a power which had always existed but which now finally hadbecome 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 “emphasizedthe primacy of logos as the medium circulating between human beings andconstituting both human beings and the world” (1995, 15). What made themradical was the fact that this logocracy turned a monovocal world polyvo-cal one in which “the status of all things is questionable; and this is why people often find themselves at odds with one another, disagreeing, differ-ing, and seeking to resolve their differences symbolically” (58). Logos, forthem, constituted both human beings and the world, but it did so without aplan, through a playful and unpredictable process of dissoi logoi , the clash-ing of differing perspectives out of which genuine novelty (and also power)emerges. It was for this reason they represented such a challenge to theestablished order.

The so-called immoralism of the Sophists was therefore less an inten-tional stance than a side effect of having wide experience with a diversity of audiences, each of whom possesses its own unique perspective on truthand virtue. The Older Sophists were products of an age of power, growth,movement, and plurality, and their status as itinerant teachers made them acombination 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 andkeep 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 tran-sience” (1996, §638). Particularly for a cosmopolitan figure like Gorgias, it

was wholly natural that he would articulate what Consigny describes as theantifoundationalist position that “every assertion is always generated withina 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 cosmopoli-

tan age in which “good and evil of differing origin are mingled” and the




“boundary between good and evil is blurred” (1967b, §427). Unlike those who clung to archaic notions of unitary aristocratic virtue, the Sophists pos-sessed “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-in-itself” merely allowed them to embrace a relativistic and wholly pragmaticmethod of teaching virtue directed toward making “men of reason” intogenuine powers in the city. For instance, in the Anonymous Iamblichi , afourth century BCE sophistical text, the writer complains that “most men arelacking in self-discipline” and encourages the pursuit of “wisdom, manliness,fluency, or virtue,” by “keeping away from what is wrong in both speechand 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). Similarclaims 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 andform 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 wasgrounded less in a conscious skepticism than it was a practical necessity;to instruct citizens in virtues of the new logocracy one had to challengethose of the old aristocracy and know how the One could be turned intothe Many.

All of this is to say that, even in Nietzsche’s own writings, the portraitof the Sophist bears at least as much resemblance to the “man of reason”as it does the “man of intuition.” Clearly, Nietzsche valued the Sophistsless for the fact that they trained rhetors whose existence is necessary forthe production of a “higher culture” than for their acknowledgment of therhetorical nature of the language and their recognition of the importanceof 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 importantto point out that Nietzsche did not advocate, even in “On Truth and Lying,”the absolute victory of intuition over reason, rhetoric over philosophy, orpoetry over logic. In fact, he takes care to note that a “culture can takeshape” only when the man of intuition and the man of reason “stand sideby side,” with perhaps the man of intuition having a slight advantage to hiscounterpart (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



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shameful; it was a necessary condition to produce a higher culture that wasnot to wash away in the next rainstorm.

DIONYSIAN MUSIC, APOLLONIAN WORD

Nonetheless, given Nietzsche’s love of Dionysius, the Sophists might seeman 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 thetypical ‘individual,’ to all that simplifies, distinguishes, makes strong, clear,unambiguous, typical: freedom under the law” (Nietzsche 1967b, §1050); healso represents a commitment to logos as the conceptual medium whosefunction is “ordering the chaos of life” (Whitson and Poulakos 1993, 136).

This commitment by no means excludes the possibility of sophistical play-fulness with language and the capacity to turn arguments on their heads;it suggests only that regardless of what gymnastics are performed by aspeaker, the end result is the construction of some conceptual edifice thatuses concepts to bring Apollonian order to the world. Nietzsche articulatesthis 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 asa memory (say) of the unique, utterly individualized, primary experience to

which it owes its existence, but because at the same time it must fit countlessother, more or less similar cases” (Nietzsche 1999b, 145). It is this conceptualquality of words that makes both science and poetry vehicles for meaningsno more or less than philosophy and rhetoric.

By contrast, the Dionysian artist begins not with the word but withmusic. In contradistinction to the individual dream world of Apollo, in whichimages and concepts attain a certain clarity, the Dionysian intuitive artist isimmersed 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 orig-inal pain at the heart of the primordial unity, and thus symbolizes a sphere

which lies above and beyond all appearance.”. In contradistinction, lan-guage is the “organ and symbol of phenomena, [and] can never, under any circumstances, externalize the innermost depths of music” (36). Thus under-stood, even the Sophists, insofar as they rely on language alone to amazeand startle their audience, remain within the realm of Apollonian conceptualform.

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




makes Greek tragedy so unique, for Nietzsche, is its ability to praise boththe gods of Dionysius and Apollo. Prior to Nietzsche, this dual aspect of Greek tragedy had been overlooked. In the aesthetic tradition Nietzsche hadinherited, 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 witha sudden revelation of its magnitude and results in inhibition and expansionbeyond our familiar limits. In The Birth of Tragedy , Nietzsche challengedthis view by defining the beautiful (Apollo) and the sublime (Dionysus)as qualitative episodes within a continuous dramatic performance whoseconsummation was tragic experience. Nuno Nabais and Martin Earl writethat “the beautiful that redeems the sublime is Nietzsche’s invention. Ina 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 thesublime Dionysian formless frenzy and consummates in a redemptive,

Apollonian beauty is analogous to how escaping into a warm, fire-lit roomredeems us after having endured struggled through the dark and wind andrain 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 thegeneral 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 membershipof a higher, more ideal community” (120). Here, one is not simply drunk;one is presented with the sublime formlessness of nature and human exis-tence which immerses one in what Nietzsche calls “the chaos of the Willbefore it has assumed individual shape” (122). Apollonian art then respondsto this condition with the “transfigured world of the eye which is artisti-cally 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 sculp-tured 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 itis that the “myth recounts that Apollo joined Dionysos together again afterhe had been dismembered. This is the image of Dionysos created anew by Apollo and saved from his Asiatic dismemberment” (124). The myth, inshort, dramatizes the ethical redemption of the sublime (evoked by musicand 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



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the Sophists despite their Apollonian commitments. He notes that Gorgiasand the Sophists took “pleasure in beautiful discourse” in a way which is “arefreshing pause for a nation of artists” who wish to “indulge in an exquisitetreat 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 issubjected to the power of music” (Nietzsche 1999a, 34). It was this musical,Dionysian undercurrent of their spirit that gave the language of the Sophistsa degree of rhythmic intoxication capable of balancing the Apollonian word-image. Unlike the vertical, rigid structure of purely philosophical discourse,the Sophists employed a parataxical narrative form that was linear, aural, andharmonic. Susan Jarratt describes this style as creating “the effect of evolvingin 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 undoubt-edly acquired their power from an oral delivery that did not translate as wellon the page.

Nietzsche’s portrait of the Greek Sophist thus combines aspects of boththe “man of intuition” and the “man of reason.” Neither purely an intuitiveartist nor a rational teacher of ethics, they acknowledged the power of theDionysian musical sublime while nonetheless basing their ethos on theircapacity 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 thestatesman 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 thesense that the mystery, horror, truth, and beauty of the world was greaterand 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 greatthings. It was this ability to combine both Dionysian and Apollonian spiritsthat undoubtedly inspired Nietzsche’s praise.

THE STOIC CHARACTER OF THE NEW SOPHIST

Given this favorable portrait of the Sophist, why does Nietzsche end “OnTruth and Lying” with the mysterious image of the Stoic walking off into therain? Given the occasionally derogatory remarks Nietzsche makes about the

Stoics, it is easy to interpret this scene as a mockery of their attitude. For




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, thusincluding it among an unflattering list of “gloomy religio-moral pathos, Stoicself-hardening, Platonic slander of the senses, preparation of the soil for

Christianity” (1974, §326; 1967b, §427). In short, Nietzsche presents Stoicismas a masterpiece of self-deception in which one creates a protective cloakaround oneself by replacing the chaos of the actual world with one’s orderly (and false) concept of that world. He thus chastises them: “‘According tonature’ you want to live ? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words theseare! . . . [W]hile you pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law innature, you want something opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers!

Your pride wants to impose your morality, your ideal, on nature,” thus mak-ing “all existence to exist only after your own image—as an immense eternalglorification 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 thoseillusions are utterly unfounded in reality.

Embracing only this negative evaluation of the Stoics is tempting, for itallows us to reaffirm our simplistic binary between philosophy and rhetoric,the former representing a cowardly flight from nature and the latter beingits heroic embrace. However, this binary interpretation breaks down as soonas 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 goesso far as to describe Nietzsche’s moral project as seeking “to bring abouta 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 “longcompulsion,” meaning an “obedience over a long period of time and in a

single direction” (Nietzsche 1966, §188). In contrast to proponents of hedo-nism, 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 suffer-ing for the attainment of a greater virtue than their Epicurean counterparts

who rarely left their private gardens for fear of encountering the slightestdispleasure.

In fact, Nietzsche goes so far as to describe his heroic exemplar, his “freespirit,” as a kind of Stoic, at least insofar as that free spirit has mastered thepower of logos to create a disciplined self capable of embracing suffering asnecessary component of the virtuous life. This connection is made explicitin 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



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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 liketo have things better, easier, tenderer, like an agreeable vice—let us remain

hard , we last Stoics!” (Nietzsche 1966, §227). Honesty , the same virtue thatguided the Stoic through the rain, also guides Nietzsche’s free spirits, theselast 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 toactually stride out into the rain that causes all others to cower within theirsheltered abodes.

What gives the Stoics such power is that they have pushed the con-ceptual nature of logos to its limits. For them, logos meant far more thansimply argument and speech; logos represented the rational order which

penetrated into the very “structure of things” (Kerferd 1981, 83). The Stoiclogos 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 areonly manifestations of one and the same primary substance and that there isa law which governs the course of nature and which should govern humanaction” (Zeller 1931, 229–230). They saw Logos as a unitary nonhuman forcefor which “living in accordance with the logos means above all assenting toit, which means recognizing and embracing events from the standpoint of the logos, rather than from the standpoint of one’s own position” (Bardzell2008, 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 similarto their perspective on developing the arts of virtue: both had to abide by the natural laws that permeated all Being, even if that commitment broughton considerable suffering.

Ironically, then, the Sophists, despite their reputation as being theantithesis of the Stoics, can actually be seen as their progenitors. For whatdistinguishes language (logos) from other mediums of communication, like

music, image, touch, or movement, is its strong tendency to forget its originsin 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 therest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it” (Nietzsche1996, 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 transforma-tions by which perceptions are translated into images, images imitated by

sounds, and sounds finally turned into concepts. At first, these words are




recognized for what they are: a “mobile army of metaphors, metonymies,anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have beensubjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decora-tion” (Nietzsche 1999b, 146). This is the sophistical attitude toward logos.

However, after this transformative process has been forgotten, the conceptsbegin to petrify and so become “firmly established, canonical, and bind-ing” (146). Here is the Stoic inheritance. The story of the Stoics is thuspart of what Nietzsche calls “an ancient, eternal story: what formerly hap-pened 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 mostspiritual will to power” (1966, §9). The Stoics, that is to say, merely pushedthe rhetorical function of language to its logical end—the complete orderingof appearances through the power of concepts to order the chaos of the

world.Nietzsche’s provocative point is that, despite its frequent abuse in his-

tory, this perfectionist tendency in language to order the world is a necessary step in the progress of civilization. Nietzsche (1999b) makes it a point todeclare 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 subjectdoes 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 thefact 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 chaosand madness. The fact that Stoic constructions were designed as templesto the eternal order, while the Sophistical ones were designed to endure aslong as the block towers of children, marks them as different in quality butnot 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 honestenough 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 reflectionsof an underlying order. Artistically and ethically, this attitude manifesteditself in terms of what Nietzsche (1999a) calls “aesthetic Socratism,” or thenotion that “In order to be beautiful, everything must be reasonable” (62).Instead of embracing the Apollonian dream as temporary respite from theDionysian turmoil, “human beings now make their actions subject to the ruleof abstractions; they no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impres-sions and sensuous perceptions; they now generalize all these impressionsfirst, turning them into cooler, less colourful concepts in order to harnessthe vehicle of their lives and actions to them” (Nietzsche 1999b, 146). This




The Greeks knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence; in orderto live at all they had to place in front of these things the resplen-dent, dream-born figures of the Olympians. . . . [Thus,] the Greeks wereobliged, by the most profound compulsion, to create these gods. How else could that people have borne existence, given their extreme sen-sitivity, their story desires, their unique gift for suffering , if that sameexistence had not been shown to them in their gods, suffused with ahigher glory? (Nietzsche 1999a, 23–24)

By the time of the Stoics, however, such gods no longer existed. ThePeloponnesian War had shaken the tragic faith of the Greeks and the con-quests of Alexander had destroyed it, and in its wake appeared the specterof nihilism. According to Nietzsche, human “existence on earth contained nogoal; ‘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 asa refrain a yet greater ‘in vain!”’ (1967a, 162). It was to this problem that theStoics provided an answer.

In an era in which heroic action had become impossible, the Stoic per-fected the method of asceticism whereby one preserved the will by turningit back on itself. Instead of directing the will to control the external world,one directed the will to dominate the internal one. Stoic asceticism thusserved to “exploit the bad instincts of all sufferers for the purpose of self-discipline, self-surveillance, and self-overcoming” (Nietzsche 1967a, 128).That Nietzsche praises this facet of the Stoics is without question. Kaufmannmakes this explicit: “Without acquiring a bad conscience, without learn-ing to be profoundly dissatisfied with ourselves, we cannot envisage highernorms, a new state of being, self-perfection. Without ascetic ideals, with-out self-control and cruel self-discipline, we cannot attain that self-mastery

which Nietzsche ever praises and admires” (1967, 12). And what Nietzschepraises and admires about Stoic training in self-discipline is precisely what

was lacking in the training offered by the Sophists. In the Classical Age, self-discipline was a means to power in the polis and was considered a meansto 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, regardlessof 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 capableof long and extended suffering in the pursuit of “truth” for no other reasonthan its possession. Consequently, Nietzsche identifies the inheritors of Stoicasceticism 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 oppositeof the ascetic ideal but rather the latest and noblest form of it ” (Nietzsche1967a, 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, theStoic embraces the world in all its totality without apology or question, not

because the gods have a divine plan behind appearances, but because it isone’s duty to be honest and to love whatever truth is disclosed. The greatflaw 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 characterof the word, remains a vital resource to sustaining a vibrant rhetorical cul-

ture. Yet the challenges of the contemporary world are beyond the reach of eloquent oratory. Nietzsche saw in the Stoics a means not only of overcom-ing the persistent threat of nihilism but also of developing a “gay science”

which would be the “reward of a long, brave, industrious, and subterraneanseriousness” (Nietzsche 1967a, 21). Nietzsche’s “new Sophists” would carry forward the practical and aesthetic insights of the original Sophists whilecommitting 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.

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