As a follow up to "Nietzsche's Teacher: the Invisible Rhetor" (Rhetoric Review. 32.4. 2013), and serving as the second part of a trilogy examining the complex rhetorical relationship between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer's Telescope: Tracing the Mind of a Clever Animal," was published in Issue 3 (2020) of the online journal Intraspection.
In this article I attempt a close reading of Schopenhauer's rhetorical maneuvers as they appear in Nietzsche's unpublished essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral sense," which itself serves as both a stylistic homage to the elder philosopher and an effort to escape from the debt Nietzsche owed to his educator. Reading both together interrogates the rhetorical role philosophical discourse plays in bringing its addressee into “illumination,” while also permitting subtle rhetorical cues to emerge that spell the impossibility of any such illumination--despite cogently argued declarations to the contrary.
In this article I attempt a close reading of Schopenhauer's rhetorical maneuvers as they appear in Nietzsche's unpublished essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral sense," which itself serves as both a stylistic homage to the elder philosopher and an effort to escape from the debt Nietzsche owed to his educator. Reading both together interrogates the rhetorical role philosophical discourse plays in bringing its addressee into “illumination,” while also permitting subtle rhetorical cues to emerge that spell the impossibility of any such illumination--despite cogently argued declarations to the contrary.