/lit/ - Literature

>>9051217
>Many more might not, your Caesars and Napoleons who just seem to be grabbing power for the fuck of it, but an ascetic, spiritual Ubermensch like Buddha or Jesus, I would assume, believes his interpretation

what stands under “reason” for Nietzsche is not further reason, but the more animal instincts of the ego. “reason” is thus the product of deeper instincts, rhetorically sublimated: reason stands not in contrast to rhetoric, but as one of its consequences. this is due to the nature of rhetoric being intertwined with the use of language, and comes to the fore when we consider the problem of “truth.” language does not convey truth, but rather opinion: language is, by definition, first and foremost a vehicle for persuasion. As such “language is rhetoric, because it desires to convey only a doxa, not an episteme.” for Nietzsche, truth is a social convention, a “movable host of metaphors,” rhetorically constructed; it is the correct assignment of words to things, mediated by the culture in which it exists--see hobbes' role of the sovereign, and schmitt's splicing of Nietzsche and Hobbes, to find in Nazism the birth of a new aesthetic sovereignty. but for neitzsche, words become concepts because they enjoin unlike things under an abstracted likeness, by “making equal what is unequal.” it is this act—which nietzsche sees as a form of lying—that is the first rhetorical and creative use of language. the ubermensch does not construct his morality by lying (as language itself is already a lie), but by accepting the rhetorical foundations of “truth” and creatively asserting a new standard. the attempt to do away with illusion entirely—the push of rationalism converted into science—is precisely what has lead man into nihilism. to this end, the ubermensch recognizes the irreducible necessity of illusion; he does not attempt to rid the world of illusion, but to produce an illusion that’s value to life may be affirmed and felt. rhetoric thus produces illusions; the more totalizing (not systematic) the illusion, the more it is “truth.” nietzsche complicates the original binary between philosophy and rhetoric by collapsing the binary entirely, seeing behind any and all philosophies the rhetorical foundations of an active “will to knowledge,” which nietzsche further defines as a valence of the will to power. to this end, nietzsche would say that the division between philosophy and rhetoric, rhetoric and reason is a false one that is itself a form of power operating on life to conform to given (life-rejecting) ends. rhetoric does not work on reason so much as it forges and creates regimes of reason; this power is reserved, for Nietzsche, in the ubermensch.

but can the overman ever live in a type of "bad faith" as you suggest? your division between the caesar's and the buddhas seems very relevant...not sure what nietzsche would say to that. perhaps this guy >>9050163 has some further thoughts.