Nietzsche's Dialogic Ethic After Illusion: Rhetoric and Difference John Prellwitz
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Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Fall 2006 Nietzsche's Dialogic Ethic After Illusion: Rhetoric and Difference John Prellwitz Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Prellwitz, J. (2006). Nietzsche's Dialogic Ethic After Illusion: Rhetoric and Difference (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1062 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Nietzsche’s Dialogic Ethic After Illusion: Rhetoric and Difference A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by John H. Prellwitz November 20, 2006 Chair: Ronald C. Arnett, Ph.D. Reader: Richard H. Thames, Ph.D. Reader: Kathleen Glenister Roberts, Ph.D. Copyright ii Preface Acknowledgements The thanks I mention here merely begin to describe the debts I owe to those who helped to enable my completion of the Ph.D. Program in Rhetoric at Duquesne University: I wish to thank Cindy Burke and Jane Gardner for all their kindness, understanding and support. Duquesne University for the funding of my graduate assistantship that allowed me to complete my studies at a University campus, graduate college, and in a department committed to education for the mind, heart, and spirit. To my many colleagues whose conversations and questions sparked illumination and offered guidance in innumerable ways, thank you. There is not space to mention them all but I wish to briefly name a few. To Marie Baker-Ohler and Melissa Cook for everything. Your friendship I keep close as a treasured gift I hope I show you both how much that means to me always. To Cem for your faithful and enduring friendship and spark of Mediterranean intellect and humor, thank you. The faculty in the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University: Dr. Janie M. Harden Fritz, for her boundless energy, alacrity, and her spiritual grace in everyday living, thank you. I will never forget your fateful welcoming of me into the department and always cherish your continued concern and support. Dr. Calvin L. Troup, for his commitment to the values and ideals of an ethical life, thank you. His family and scholarship serve as testament to his faith and commitment to his family and the Ph.D. program. His decision to take a risk on me and providing opportunity to teach at Duquesne I will always appreciate and turn to as the foundation of my vocation as a professor and scholar. My dissertation committee: Dr. Richard H. Thames, a professor who never failed to ‘got ideas.’ Our conversations and the courses I took from you never failed to spark new questions and inspire learning. For your commitment to the humanities in your teaching and living, I am thankful for the continuing opportunities to learn more of how Burke, Aristotle, and naturalism texture our world. Dr. Kathleen Glenister Roberts, a comrade who entered the department at a similar time and with similar narrative commitments. Thank you for all the laughter and scholarly insight into how to live out Catholic ideals as a professor, scholar, and colleague. iii Dr. Ronald C. Arnett, a mentor who took me headlong into the twisting turns of scholarly writing, teaching, and living. Your example in meeting difficulty will always remain with me as a powerful testament to what wisdom means in living through the mud and mystery of everyday. Thank you for guiding me to questions that spark a life of discovery. For your guidance and considerate burdening, I am thankful and hope I may in some small help to carry on the dialogue your teaching and scholarship has inspired in me and all those willing to listen through the jokes. The laughter and inspiration you bring resonates through your faith and understanding with family, friends, colleagues, and students and others within and without the University community. I am most grateful for meeting you and for the continuing opportunity to learn with you as mentor and friend. I wish now to turn to thank those who have made me who I am and helped to make each day a gift. To my father for leaving me a living example of goodness, I will always await our next encounter and hopefully in some small way I may warm your spirit in my best moments. To my mother, I thank you for showing me how to make life meaningful. Your accomplishments are many but I am always most moved by your gentle heart and tenderness in comforting and brightening troubling times. Thank you for all you are and for setting such a faithful and strong example for what it means to be a good and faithful person. To my sister for her sense of humor and loving unique way, your life never ceases to surprise and inspire me to be more, thank you. To my grandparents, John and Rose Stefansky, for opening your home and hearts to us in a time of sadness, thank you. I will always be thankful for those times and adventures we shared and the laughter and love that helped to make our new house a home. I am proud to carry you in our shared memories forward each day. To Christine for all the reasons you are such a special gift to me, thank you. To all of those mentioned and kept dear to my heart, thank you. iv Abstract What is the nature of the relationship between communication ethics and rhetoric? How may study of the interplay between dialogue as a communication ethic and ground of rhetoric contribute to greater understanding and constructive meeting of the narrative and virtue contention that characterizes the contemporary postmodern historical moment? A prominent alleged source of postmodern value contention and a neglected source for advancing the study of the interpenetration of ethics and rhetoric, Friedrich Nietzsche, as a novel hermeneutic entry to engage these questions and demarcates the fields of inquiry this study addresses. The present work begins with meeting the contemporary historical moment characterized by metanarrative disintegration. With metanarrative disintegration, difference and multiplicity are now privileged. The privileging of difference communicates a turn to dialogue rather than the modern bias towards telling in shaping communicative activity. Meeting the alterity within the temporal existential moment occurs through the operative of metaphor. Levinas’ focus on the dialogic tension between saying and said displays the manner in which meeting emerges to offer temporal ground. The multiplicity of ways meanings emerge to offer temporal ground become realized through the imbricating architectonic Nietzschean metaphors of perspectivism, genealogy, and revaluation of values, producing a dialogic ethic of meeting. This outcome interprets otherwise the work, as Levinas also does, of whom many consider the founder of deconstruction, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s dialogic ethic displays the ongoing interplay of recognition of decaying said and the ongoing hope in the saying as meeting. v Table of Contents Chapter One Nietzsche’s Dialogic Ethic Meeting Metanarrative Disintegration 1 Chapter Two Deconstructing Nietzsche’s Thought within Rhetorical Studies 25 Chapter Three Hermeneutic Background for Interpreting Nietzsche Otherwise 56 Chapter Four Nietzsche’s Perspectivism as Ground of Dialogic Meeting 96 Chapter Five Nietzsche’s Genealogy as Rhetorical Deconstruction 126 Chapter Six Nietzsche’s Epideictic Revaluation of Values 154 Chapter Seven Nietzsche’s Dialogic Ethic After Illusion: Dialogic Meeting 182 Bibliography 194 vi Prellwitz, Chapter One 1 Chapter One: Nietzsche’s Dialogic Ethic Meeting Metanarrative Disintegration The present study articulates a communication ethic that constructively engages difference that drives contemporary narrative and virtue contention in an age after metanarrative disintegration. The ground for this constructive communication ethic arises from interpreting otherwise one of the subterranean springs of our contemporary postmodern historical moment, Friedrich Nietzsche. Dialogue serves as the alternative hermeneutic entrance taken into Nietzsche’s work rather than engaging his writings from the standard deconstructive bias. The present work argues that dialogue, not the monologic, mechanistic unmasking of indeterminacy within texts of human language, animates Nietzsche’s architectonic rhetoric of his communication ethic. Dialogue and rhetoric are viewed as united through their primary interpenetrating function, the disclosure and articulation of meaning, meaning communicable through whatever form the temporal, existential situation avails, through word, gesture, or act, for example. Approached from this dialogic perspective, the meeting of difference embedded in competing values, morals, and traditions affords opportunities for questioning, interpretation, criticism, judgment, and action, the recurring interplay of dialogue and rhetoric that simultaneously gives meaning to our words and deeds. Opportunities discovered through interpreting otherwise Nietzsche’s metaphors of perspectivism, genealogy, and revaluation of values then reveal the architectonic rhetoric of a constructive communication ethic, dialogic meeting. Dialogic meeting, the articulation