I'm picking up some serious Strong Defense vibes from this. The study of eloquence builds a community, a world.

I'm in.

This sounds like Lanham's strong defense of rhetoric, the idea that meaning is communally negotiated and anchored to socio/political/cultural contexts. Although here Locke is not happy about that.

Lanham says, "The Strong Defense assumes that truth is determined by social dramas, some more formal than others but all man-made. Rhetoric in such a world is not ornamental but determinative, essentially creative" (156). If that defense is not just restricted to "man-made" social dramas but cultural dramas, to dramas rooted in a particular historical and cultural context (joining Rickert's sense of rhetorics), then it can also be opened up to material forces beyond the human.

Is this the Strong Defense of rhetoric again? Meaning arrived at not through empiricism but a communal negotiation?

There's a weird tension here for me between the idea of rhetoric as "determinative, essentially creative." I'm perhaps inserting a reading that focuses too much on the similar-but-different word "determinate" rather than "determinative." I don't object to the creative aspect, but identifying something as "determinative" seems to suggest a kind of rigidity antithetical to the fluid, contextual nature of rhetoric that Lanham outlines. I might just be spitting hairs here, but it struck me as odd.

It may ignore rhetoric, but it does have its advantages. Factors like your audience, topic, or motive all play role in your usage of the strong or weak defense. And, we've all seen the weak defense beat the strong defense several times this past year.

It seems as though this reading vacillates between weak defense and strong defense more than others.

The strong defense of the will to power.

To oscillate between the weak and strong defenses.

This phrase is certainly a challenge. And of course there are etymological links between virtue and *virtuosity".

This is a very helpful way to understand the relationship between the Weak and the Strong defenses. That is, what the Weak Defense will treat as an absolute, the Strong Defense will treat as contingent.