Zugl.: Trier, Univ., Diss., 2006 u.d.T.: Werquet, Jan: Historismus als gesellschaftliche Repräsentation

Against the prevalent psychological interpretation of the will to power, I textually substantiate the claim that Nietzsche sees it as a cosmological principle driving both biological and cultural evolution. I deploy this strong view in securing the coherence of On the Genealogy of Morals, long regarded as a hopelessly disjointed work. I show that for Nietzsche the historical development of values reflects the constructive activity of the will to power as it transforms the human species into a more powerful social organism. On my view, the Three Essays comprising the Genealogy address three different historical periods during the evolution of morality; I treat them in chronological order. The Second Essay presents Nietzsche’s speculative account of the earliest stages of this process. He identifies several basic features of human nature and details how they evolved along with certain prehistoric social institutions. In the First Essay Nietzsche explains how religious leaders in the ancient world effected a value reversal in morality: they redefined the “good” of the noble ruling class as “evil” and created a new standard of good based on the needs and desires of the underclass. I argue that Nietzsche’s explanation can be understood fully only by taking into consideration the features of human nature which evolved during the prehistoric era described in the Second Essay. Finally, the Third Essay reveals the ramifications for contemporary Western culture of this evolutionary process and the subsequent transformation of values. / text

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This thesis outlines Nietzsche's view of Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy. Socrates is first argued to be the father of science and then, after having explained the artistic nature of the world and ourselves according to Nietzsche, Socrates' degenerative, nihilistic influence upon the world is detailed. Science is then explained to have originated in a moral perspective on the world, the latter growing out of self-denial, and ultimately illness. The "dying Socrates" is Nietzsche's symbol of science as a negative positing of the artistic forces one is, from whence Nietzsche concludes the impossibility of escaping from oneself by such means.

The author argues that Nietzsche's discussion of Kant in Twilight of the Idols illuminates a very troubling tension at the heart of political philosophy. By looking at two sections, the author shows the way in which Nietzsche understands Kantian philosophy as an outcome of a historical movement he refers to as the "devaluation of values". Nietzsche's claim is that Kantian critique, rather than establish grounds, ultimately exposes the lack of ground truth and value have in objective reality.

This thesis will seek to examine the parallel which it will argue exists between the theorising of artistic inspiration and the resulting conception of the figure of the artist in the works of Joyce and Nietzsche. Recent critical work on the relationship between Joyce and Nietzsche has tended to focus exclusively on the question of influence. In ‘The Struggle against Meta (Phantasma)-Physics: Nietzsche, Joyce and the “Excess of History”’, for example, drawing his reading in particular from The Use and Abuse of History, Joseph Buttigieg gives a broad account of Nietzsche’s conception of history, but, in effect, uses his reading of Nietzsche to simply augment his reading of Joyce, arguing that his conception of the ‘postmodern’ Nietzsche can ‘illuminate and give depth’ to the works of the ‘modernist’ Joyce. In The Aesthetics of James Joyce, Jacques Aubert discusses what he calls the ‘Nietzschean overtones’ of Joyce’s work. Aubert focuses on what he argues is Hegel’s crucial influence on Joyce and appears to align Nietzsche, and Nietzsche’s influence on Joyce, with what he allusively refers to as ‘post-Hegelian’ or ‘Neo-Hegelian’ philosophy, though it is never clear precisely what he intends these to denote. In ‘Beyond Truth and Freedom: The New Faith of Joyce and Nietzsche’, Joseph Valente gives an illuminating account of Joyce and Nietzsche’s mutual rejection of metaphysics, but focuses exclusively on the later Joyce and Nietzsche. Again, Valente frames his argument specifically in terms of an influence, drawing on an idiosyncratic reading of the concept of the ‘superman’ and identifying Stephen Stephen as ‘recognizably Zarathustrian’. The central problem with the critical approach these accounts share in common, which concerns itself with the question of influence, is that it obliges itself to attribute a detailed and philosophically thoroughgoing reading of Nietzsche’s works to Joyce, one not always necessarily in evidence in the criticism itself. It must thus be at pains to stretch available biographical information on Joyce’s reading of Nietzsche, as well as examples drawn from Joyce’s texts, in order to fit a partial, incomplete or inaccurate characterisation of Nietzsche’s thought; threatening to transform Joyce into some kind of ‘Nietzschean’ and Nietzsche into some kind of anticipatory ‘Joycean’. By contrast, then, this thesis will seek to set aside the problematic question of influence from the outset, instead seeking to examine the mutually illuminating parallel which it will argue exists between the theorising of artistic inspiration and the resulting conception of the figure of the artist in the works of Joyce and Nietzsche. It will argue that this parallel has mutually illuminating consequences for an understanding of both Nietzsche and Joyce’s relationships to metaphysics and, through this, to Romanticism. It will be the task of this thesis to explain the way in which both Nietzsche and Joyce retain the key terms of Romantic accounts of artistic inspiration, whilst rejecting the metaphysical claims at stake in them.

Thèse (Ph. D.)--Université Laval, 2007. / Bibliogr.: f. [211]-217. Publié aussi en version électronique dans la Collection Mémoires et thèses électroniques.