Abstract

The central unifying thread of this thesis is that Nietzsche differentiated two different senses of body in his published works between 1872 and 1888, and that he used these different senses to accomplish different tasks. The familiar sense of body, body as an object understood as the correlate of mind, is, for Nietzsche, a derivative sense of body. The emphasis on this sense of body has led to a cultural malaise expressed through both the Judeo-Christian and Platonic philosophical traditions with their emphasis on elevating the activities of mind and deprecating the passions and drives of the body. ;The other sense of body, body as the fundamental ground of experience, is, I argue, the sense of body that Nietzsche used when he formulated a positive philosophy of the future in terms of the Dionysian experience and the "Ubermensch. I believe that Nietzsche introduced the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy as a fundamental metaphor of the body as experienced. The characterization of the metaphor in that work, however, was wrought with a metaphysical dualism that, in his later works, he argued against. Consequently, he abandoned the use of that metaphor and eventually constructed a new one in the character of the "Ubermensch. His characterization of the " Ubermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra captures his new sense of the body as experienced in the context of his discussion of self-overcoming the spirit of gravity through the affirmation of the doctrine of eternal recurrence by dancing and laughing. Nietzsche then reformulated the Dionysian metaphor to include overcoming the sense of gravity through an experience of the body in the present moment as he has life, in the form of Dionysus and the eternal recurrence, first dance with the suffering soul, and then actually marry her. ;The Dionysian metaphor, therefore, is always present in Nietzsche, although it was transformed, like fruit growing on a tree, from its earliest to its latest formulations in Nietzsche's works. I conclude by showing that Nietzsche himself argued in favor of a methodological principle which understands the development of philosophical ideas as a matter of organic growth