Words, Concepts and Tropes

What is it about?

This chapter begins with what might be called a traditional account of rhetoric, which is essentially that it is language used to persuade. It draws on both standard sources such as Aristotle and Cicero, and Donald McCloskey, a contemporary economist and economic historian who is one of the leading recent apologists of rhetoric. I then discuss de Man’s theory of tropology, showing how he misreads Rousseau’s Second Discourse, translating the term idée générale as ‘metaphor’ rather than ‘common noun’, and contesting Nietzsche’s claim that since our words and truths are largely dead metaphors they are ‘coins which have lost their image and now can be used only as metal, and no longer as coins’. Since we use words as if they were coins, as their metaphorical origin has been forgotten, they still function, and constitute, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘a sum of human relations’, and so are not merely worn-out pieces of metal. Similarly, de Man’s description of number as a ‘conceptual metaphor devoid of objective validity’ and as ‘derivative and suspect’, is itself devoid of pragmatic consequences.

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