Abstract

Guiding questions in this dissertation: Does indeterminacy of interpretation imply no standards and limits of meaning? Is Nietzsche "modern" or "postmodern" in his approach to this and other problems? What is Nietzsche's "affirmative" message? What are the implications for the identity and future of philosophy? ;If Nietzsche has freed the signifier from any transcendental signified, how do we know when the free play of reading has utterly departed from the text? How do we recognize that one reading of a text or one account of the world is better than another? ;Nietzsche said, "What was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all 'truth' but something else--let us say, health, future, growth, power, life." Truth in the service of life: Truth understood as transitory boundaries or limits without which life is impossible. As esteemers, we always impose limits, constraints. Hence, limits are absolutely necessary, never absent, though never fixed and absolute. Temporary fixity is ensured and so is truth in this sense. Conflict is resolved not by "truth," but by the demands of life, in response to which "truth" has its meaning. It is through Nietzsche's interplay of philological rigor and interpretive play that we can avoid the result in which "the text disappears under the interpretation." ;Nietzsche said, "My style, which is affirmative ... deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means." It is a means for something not easily captured in language, and certainly not in any set of logical inferences: A transformation of the attitude of resentment toward the challenge and struggle of life, and overcoming the desperate desire for salvation from suffering, insecurity, uncertainty, i.e., salvation from oneself and life through "truth." The overcoming of such motives is troped in the myth of the ubermensch and in the transforming ideas of eternal recurrence and amor fati. These are signifiers of a possible type of consciousness, a way of living in which we have a radically different relationship to our beliefs, and are no longer trapped by our "truths" in our unceasing attempt to say the unsayable, to interpret the enigma that is life