ABSTRACT
The affinity between Friedrich Nietzsche’s view of language and classical rhetorical theory, the relationship between a rhetorical theory of language and an attitude towards literary style, and the kinship between Nietzsche’s quasi-mythical, tropic mode of writing and the dazzling stylistic of the Platonic text-are connections reflected in the consonance between the linguistic theorizing inscribed throughout the Platonic text and the theory presented in Nietzsche’s lectures on classical rhetoric and “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” However rarely such a Nietzsche-Plato affiliation might be commented on, Sarah Kofman invites us to imagine that Nietzsche himself might have gauged the relation (see “Explosion I,” Metaphor). Kofman’s account suggests that, however ambiguous Nietzsche might sometimes seem towards the Platonic text-thus notwithstanding his markedly ambivalent treatment of the character Socrates-he exhibits great admiration for the writer Plato. She directs us, for instance, to the passage in Beyond Good and Evil where Plato is depicted as an “interpreter” who uses Socrates as a “popular tune from the streets” and then, like Bach or Beethoven, submits these themes “to infinite and impossible variations” (BGE 190). The paramount status of music in the Nietzschean hierarchy of symbolic spheres provides a glimpse of the esteem for the Platonic text that is recorded in this musical variation metaphor (Metaphor 7-11).
