Rhetoric and Perspectivism

But, if perspectivism liberalizes in this sort the plurality of meanings which the tematizations of truth have, on the contrary, always tried to restrain and reduce to canonical forms, ideally to univocal propositions, this is because in its origin one may find the concept of language that Nietzsche early claimed. The bases of perspectivism are, and this is the thesis we here suggest, rhetorical.
By establishing the primacy of interpretation over the fact, what is acclaimed is a generalized primacy that forbids the valuation of any particular perspective. In no way has it to do with warning us that no other world independent from the perspectives that configurate it exists to highlight that the world is always and, in each case, the result of a combination of perspectives. This being so, perspectivism enunciates, as its first demand not to be excluded from the concept it outlined as it discovered that “men are seduced by grammar of the language they speak and implicitly believe they are describing the world when, in fact, the world as they conceive it is only a reflection of the structure of their tongue”. (Danto, 1980, p. 84)
The question is, then, to know what this structure is. The answer, or at least the essential of what is important to highlight here, can be found in Nietzsche’s texts on language written by 1872, where he says that “it is not difficult to prove that what is called “rhetorical” as a means of conscious art, had been active as a means of unconscious art in language and its development indeed, that the rhetorical is a further development, guided by the clear light of understanding, of the artistic means which are already found in language.
There is obviously no unrhetorical “naturalness” of language to which one could appeal, language itself is the result of purely rhetorical arts”. (in Gilman, Blair, Parent, eds., 1989, p. 21).
Thus, the statute of the trope in language is altered, once the difference between the current speech and the figurative speech are shaded of. The elimination of these differences bring along important consequences, fact to which Nietzsche will vehemently refer when exposing, in 1873, that which I call the rhetorical bases of perspectivism: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and antropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations, which after a long use seem firm, economical and obligatory to people: truths and illusions which one has long forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” (in Kaufman, 1971, pp. 46 – 47). It is this concept of language in which the proeminence given to its rhetoricity subordinates, the representative register of referentiality, that P. de Man sees the central device of Nietzsche’s critique to metaphysics (cf. Man 1979, chapters 3 and 4) suggesting the consideration of a central aporia between, on the on one hand, a persuasive rhetoric, of a perfomative nature and, on the other hand, a topic rhetoric, of deconstructive intentions.
2.2. An interesting approach of this aporia is, today, one of the main aspects of the theory of interrogativity developed by M. Meyer.
Interrogation, on a hasty analysis, might seem to be a phenomenon that a grammatical or linguistical analysis can perfectly explain. In any case, it is this idea that generally leads to its reduction to the propositional form and to its submission to the alternative true/false. Nevertheless, everything happens in a quite different way if we substitute these presuppositions for an analysis of interrogativity that is based on a critical position in what regards proportionalism.
Proportionalism establishes itself whit the Aristotelian these that the unity of reason is to be found in judgement. It gradually established itself as the interrogative practice being integrated in a logic of answers: this is the route which leads from Socratic interrogativity to the Platonism of ideas and, finally, to the Aristotelian theory of judgment; on this route is established most of the philosophical, but also scientific, Eastern tradition. Therefore the decisive step toward an interrogative approach lies on the replacement of the difference between the questions and answers, step which is taken by Meyer based on the idea that the use of language has always to do whit the solving of questions, of problems. But this use has two forms one should distinguish, depending if one is expressing a problem of which one has the answer of if one puts a question that, implicitly or explicitly, refers to a problem. In one case, a problem is expressed, for instance, “what time is it?”, in the other one, for instance “it is a beautiful day”, one is expression a solution.
What we are trying to demonstrate is that there is a central duality in language, given by the registers of the question and of the answer that affect and mark all of its uses therefore, interrogativity does not exclude itself from the declarative form of language as well as it cannot be reduced to the phrasal form of interrogation. Far from assuming itself any grammatical or linguistical determination, it scrutinizes them as they all have a difference between the questions and answers, which Meyer called problematological difference. We can now better understand the aporetical dynamic suggested by P. de Man. It is found in the tension between the literal and the figurative poles of this difference, in which figurativity increases and literarity decreases the element in which the dynamic (and diversity) of language is rooted: its problematicity.