The Vacant Rostrum

Eduardo Nicol and Philosophical Rhetoric after Ortega

Abstract

This article examines how the exiled thinker Eduardo Nicol, in order to fill the vacant rostrum left by the philosopher-orator José Ortega y Gasset, elaborated the emerging contemporary problem of the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy. This question concerns both the what and the what-for of philosophy. Is there a rhetorical zero degree in thinking? And if it exists, will it be the optimum degree as  regards the social goal of philosophy? Nicol answered (1) by advancing on the phenomenological semiotics of Husserl (and Heidegger) to establish in human communication the simultaneous constitution of expression, meaning, and objectivity; and (2) by renouncing Ortega’s rhetorical brilliance as a paradigm of philosophical influence on culture. Yet in the first way Nicol did not draw all the consequences of his expressionism; in the second, he had to admit a rhetorical norm somewhat different from the zero degree, since humanity was in danger. Nicol’s case, in dialogue with all tendencies of
contemporary philosophy, reasserts the central place that semiotics holds among them.