School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemNietzsche's philosophy of time( 2006)In this work I offer a new interpretation of Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence. Most prior writers on the topic have attempted to understand the thought as a cosmological or metaphysical thesis, or as a moral imperative. My thesis is that the idea is but one facet of a broader public action by which Nietzsche hoped to introduce the reader in a bodily compelling way to the possibility of seeking out generally unrealised modes of being. In order to motivate my interpretation, and so as to elaborate on the specific modes of being Nietzsche urges, much of the present work is spent giving very close readings for certain of his early texts. I take the central text for understanding the significance of the idea of recurrence to Nietzsche's philosophical project more generally to be the surreal sequence, from the third part of his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, entitled "Of the Vision and the Riddle". To make sense of this very obscure chapter I spend much of the thesis examining the texts preceding it that Nietzsche himself prepared for publication. Nietzsche, particularly in his Zarathustra but in his other works too, makes great use of imagistic tropes. It is my contention that, whilst Nietzsche is unsystematic in his use of terms, he is consistent in his use of images. Further, I hold that we can usefully fill out the images he employs by seeking their antecedents in the philosophical cannon. The readings I present here proceed in large part by comparing Nietzsche's texts with works by Plato, Schopenhauer and Descartes, because in these works I find images excitingly similar to those used by Nietzsche.