Rhetoric

53rd installment to my philosophical system.

Rhetoric is to speech what style is to writing. With the use of it, one can more often than not make the insane sound plausible and, in doing so, appear more intelligent than they really are. It’s no wonder rhetoric has, throughout history, been considered a heretical art, a type of cognitive astrology from which one can prophesy the future—can determine from a simple analysis of terms all the logical faults in an argument and reduce it to absurdity.

For myself, I’ve never been one to try and convince someone otherwise than as they already think. Reason is a value, not a tool for discovering truth, and so, when one holds to a patently erroneous position, I assume them to hold to it not because they think it’s true, but because they know it is not but do not care. I was once a staunch defender of rhetoric and would have gone to battle with anyone to the ends of the Earth to defend it; but, thankfully, as I aged—and hopefully became a bit wiser within that time—I saw how silly it is to think reason and evidence alone actually change a person’s mind. It must never be forgotten that good faith discussion, reasonable arguments, and evidence are themselves things which must be valued by both parties before anyone can employ the use of them—if, that is, the whole point of your engaging with them is to convert them or convince them of your position over the one they already hold. This is the aspect of reasonable debate which all the Enlightenment thinkers seemingly forgot: they all assumed, I think wrongly, that both sides are after the truth completely and totally. Why this assumption was never doubted by them, I will never understand.

Rhetoric is for people whose temperaments are such that they enjoy intellectual dueling. There’s a certain art in being able to tactically marshal your objections and defeaters against another’s position. It takes a ready memory, a combative soul, and a hardy ambition to be right, along with, perhaps, a sheer love of proving the other wrong. Whether it is done solely for the sake of proving the other wrong or feeling a sense of pride in one’s own abilities to make the absurd appear right, I cannot venture a guess. As I see it, that is a strictly private matter and ought to be considered from that standpoint alone. If we may attempt a psychological generalization, however, I would suspect that those who enjoy rhetoric are the same who have a deep passion for truth in the objective sense.

Now, as I’ve argued somewhere else before, all debates are predicated on the notion of there being one correct position—that is, a position considered true by both parties; indeed, I’ve even heard the definition of truth as the following: “that which is evidentially the case,” or, “a position held to that has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt—affirmed on the basis that it is objectively verifiable, or that it is incontrovertible.” If there were not facts to the contrary of what reality really is, there would be only one reality by which to reference; but because man, in all his wisdom, conjures up different ways of interpreting reality, there is no ‘one’ reality that we all inhabit. Those who assume there is do so on prejudice, not reason—and, more often than not, these are the same people who assert there’s a reason for everything, or who believe that truth is mind-independent and has a sort of metaphysical status in the world: what bold fellows we have here on Earth. I would say I’m shocked at man’s vanity, but at this point in my life, I would be hard-pressed to find any counter to the overabundance of dunces who walk among us.

With ignorance being the common mode of the day, it’s no wonder why so many morons take a perverse pleasure in rhetoric and argumentation. These people treat debates as the ultimate guarantors of truth, as duels upon which the truth rises or dies on the spot—sad, poor, nasty, brutish, idiotic fellows. They always have, and always will, conflate truth with performance—indeed, in reality, they care very little for truth, for to them, truth is performative. They don’t actually believe the truth is divine, eternal, all-powerful, etc.; their actions reveal their honest intentions, and they hold the same position I do without knowing it—truth, for them, is a value upon which all things hang; and, unlike me, they struggle as the noose strangles them, while I hang contentedly, happily watching them thrash about, for I don’t hold something so petty as the truth as divine.

Truth is a value not worth valuing, especially not today, for men have always used it on behalf of their attempts to dominate and subjugate, to justify to themselves after the fact. Truth has never been some serene destination at which to arrive honestly, but rather has always been the courtesan to man’s own reason; what is considered reasonable is considered right from the start, and nothing can ever change that erroneous presupposition; nay, it is a dogma that has nourished itself, like a vampire, on the body of many long-dead arguments which no longer hold up to scrutiny. If truth were actually what all these sham philosophers thought it was, there would be no need to defend it—it would simply exist in harmony with all our opinions regarding the world and wouldn’t seek its ‘evidence’ everywhere it doesn’t belong.

In much the same way apologists use nature as evidence for God’s existence, these wannabe philomaths all assume that truth is everlasting, all around us, in the air we breathe, justifies itself, is self-evident, and remains atop the pinnacle of human endeavors. If it isn’t already obvious, they haven’t the slightest clue what they speak of and are merely projecting their own desires out into the world like a New Age spiritualist projecting ‘good vibes’ out into the universe in order to ensure they’re in harmony with nature. This kind of debasing ignorance cannot be helped, however, for as Pliny the Elder once said, “No mortal man, moreover, is wise at all moments.” Likewise, so long as man is condemned to rely on what he values rather than what he actually knows with certainty, he will forever come to a crossroads in his thinking where he must either choose between a stagnant rationality or a fluid practicality. In my own case, I chose the latter, for it was by far the more honest option—not to mention all the hurdles I instantly overcame when I no longer felt subjected to reason’s domineering hammer blows.

Rhetoric makes a man do silly things, such as argue for positions which no rationality, no matter how powerful, can ever assent to without blushing at the monstrous absurdity it so clearly is. In such instances, more often than not, men try to hide the shallowness of their thoughts by dressing them up in a jargon not even they can fully understand; what is jargon, after all, anyway but the attempt to make truth appear out of thin air through an effluence of verbiage that is thinly veiled, and so, scantly clad, attracts more eyes to it than it really deserves. This right here is the essence of all modern media: the commodification of attention through outrage, clickbait, violence, perversity, and falsehood propped up as truth or factual information. Of all these, the one the common folk are most susceptible to is falsehood—not only because it’s the hardest to recognize but because it’s the most sly in its presentation. It doesn’t help that people already treat truth as beneath contempt, and that, combined with a precipitous decline in critical thinking skills, you have yourself a recipe for intellectual disaster.

It’s already here. The world of barbaric ignorance and declining interest in values is upon us; the more we fight it, the harder it will fight back—but this is a battle I feel we cannot lose, for the very future depends upon it. A world where the average person cannot distinguish what is valuable from what is useless is a world run by demagogues and dogmatism: a new Dark Age, if you will, an age of serfs and lords, of illiteracy and squalor, of factions and divisions large enough to cause disturbance—none of this should be returned to, and it is advisable we change course now lest we find ourselves in a pickle from which we cannot extricate ourselves.

It is a lamentable fact, too, that rhetoric is so in vogue, helped along by sensationalism and hypocrisy. People would deliberately cull from their minds the most bizarre thought experiments imaginable in order to justify to themselves a position they would actually be ashamed to hold were they to give it the proper thought it required to see through. People are so ignorant, however, that they would go along with an argument so long as it sounds good to them, not actually caring for the logical merits of it, to say nothing of the evidence to support it—more often than not, nonexistent. It sadly cannot be overcome, however, for today more than ever, greatness is the mark and accusation is the game—and in our present informational landscape, one can hardly voice an opinion on anything without the most nonsensical rebuttal to it.

Why does every opinion have to be defended as if it were a truth? An opinion, after all, is a personal truth and nothing more. I can never simply say my piece on truth, though, for every time I bring it up, it wishes to wage a war against me; and though I’m a strong advocate for peace and in every way a pacifist, I will gladly go toe-to-toe with truth if it means I can once and for all overcome it eternally, flawlessly, never having to worry about it again. Alas, just when I think I’ve finally delivered the last word on truth, it always resurrects itself, and so I’m in a perpetual state of down-going and overcoming—I am like Nietzsche’s tight-rope walker in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, forever balancing over an abyss, a dangerous void of chaos from which, should I fall, I will be unable to return. So be it; I will continuously be at war all my life should I need be; in fact, my whole life is a dialectical war between myself and the world at large. Am I not the most contemporary man alive? A man who so accurately portrays the issues of modernity so clearly it may as well be representative for all people unfortunate enough to be alive today? So it is, forever onwards, evermore, moving and retreating, twisting and turning, saying more than I should, meaning less than I wish, always two steps ahead all the while moving backwards as I progress. It is all a delicate contradiction, a delicacy that to break would be tantamount to lying to myself—and this, as I’m sure you know by now, dear reader, I would rather die than do. I cannot, in fact, though, do any more than I initially set myself to do, and so, I move on.

Regarding the nature of rhetoric proper, it takes a certain type of temperament to delight in it—to delight in argumentation for its own sake. Indeed, rhetoric is the art of confuting what someone said by deliberately misinterpreting it, and in doing so, providing it with a hermeneutic so absurd nobody could possibly believe it—not even the one arguing for it. Everywhere one turns in this world, the words of critics are there to slash to pieces the integrity of what was said. If arguments carried half as much weight as truth itself supposedly did, no one would argue at all—there would be no need to, for the mere mention of truth would be enough to put the fear of Veritas into everyone’s heart.

With this clearly not being the case, and with man being totally ignorant of truth at all, he tries to make up for it by pompous displays of his intellect—because, of course, he would conflate performance with intelligence; you see at once how little these so-called lovers of truth actually care about the principles of truth. Truth to them is a value to be changed on a dime; they don’t even have a pretense to integrity with respect to their own conceptions of truth—all their values are decadent by reason of their own irrationality. They’re unable to overcome this trap they’ve set for themselves—by placing too high a value on truth, they subordinate other important facets of life to it, and in doing so make it impossible to affirm contradictions, and deny outright any notion of speculative philosophy or dialectics. As a result, they are woefully under-prepared mentally to endure the harsh tenor of the world—the facts of everyday life, where truth is falsehood and vice versa—and so, instead of hearing it and overcoming it, they, like Odysseus, bind themselves to the mast of falsehood in order to avoid the allure of the Sirens’ songs of truth.

A better analogy could not be used, for hearing the Sirens’ songs leads to death, and, just like in real life, the truth hurts more than people are willing to endure, for the pain of being proven false is like that of death; and so, man flees from the truth like a child from the dark. To think how empty our consistent love for truth really is when compared to a person who acts in contradiction to it, just because they can, just because they want to, just because their value for life and action is stronger than their slavish adherence to truth. I wish I could’ve been the first immoralist—the first honest human being—but alas, Nietzsche has beaten me to it—and, far beyond me, has already diagnosed everything, as well as assigned a prognosis (further nihilism and decay) and a therapeusis (Selbstüberwindung). The future rests not in those who seek truth, but in those who wish to live perfectly well in the absence of it; the future calls on those who are actually capable of affirming and denying at will, powerfully agreeing with themselves, and taking to the fullest extent their power with respect to everything they value in life.

Life can no longer be about being right, or keeping the peace, or keeping calm while carrying on—but rather must be lived dangerously, intimately, honestly, vulnerably, in the face of ridicule and insanity on all sides, at every moment, in every occasion it offers up. One must strike a path of their own. One must chart their own course and, whether fair or countervailing winds appear, must be tolerated nonetheless, all the while working on your individuality, becoming a genius in all things you, in all things personal, in all things important to your heart. “What is the solution to nihilism?” you may ask. “Will-to-life,” I say. Action, abundant action, taken on account of your own soul, and no one else’s.