A telling silence: Nietzsche on the downfall of the dialectic

Ragaller, Irene 2006. A telling silence: Nietzsche on the downfall of the dialectic. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University.

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Abstract

A Telling Silence: Nietzsche on the Downfall of the Dialectic presents a rereading of Nietzsche's work in the German original with a view to the conspicuous silence in which Nietzsche shrouds his relationship to the dialectic. The study shows how this silence is betrayed in the intricacies of Nietzsche's writing, and in turn betrays the nature of his relationship to the dialectic as integral to his minking and inherent in his historical position as a philosopher. Nietzsche's distinct use of the terms Wiederkehr and Wiederkunft indicates that he thinks his fundamental thought specifically as Wiederkunft and, correspondingly, determines being as bringing-forth, as giving-birth, as Niederkunft. Since Niederkunft, in metaphysical terms, describes the tragic act per se, this definition of being coincides with the definition of being as tragedy, which had preoccupied Nietzsche since his youth. An inquiry into the fact that Nietzsche hardly speaks of work at all shows, accordingly, that he renounces the notion of the human that has characterized Western philosophy since Plato. As the first thinker of the West, he defines the human not in work, but in labour and in this sense not as man, but as woman - signalling, thus, a solution to the dead end of the master-slave-dialectic. Finally, the study questions the tradition of reading Nietzsche's thinking as explosion, which prevails in Nietzsche scholarship to date, and presents Nietzsche's minking as the antidote to the explosive age of dialectics. As it ascribes to Nietzsche's thinking the implosion of the dialectical age as well as the emergence of a new era of human life on earth, it depicts his thinking in essence as the Niederkunft of the Western system of thought, and subsequently examines its implications today.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PD Germanic languages P Language and Literature > PT Germanic literature
ISBN:	9781303207853
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2024 15:44
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/56145

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