Abstract

The aim of my dissertation is to explore the aesthetic approaches to questions of authority and justice in a post-metaphysical age in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt. Both turn from a rationalist foundation for political order, and suggest that our aesthetic response to the world is central in forming our sense of legitimacy and allegiance as well as in orienting us ethically. Central to this response is a celebration of the plurality and relativity of human affairs in the form of a sense of tragic pleasure which I argue is of great ethical relevance to our post-metaphysical condition. This "aestheticization" places both Nietzsche and Arendt's work in great tension with conceptions of politics based primarily on concerns about social and economic justice. I explore these tensions, and argue that the line of thinking begun by Nietzsche is brought to real fruition in Arendt's work. As such, she offers an important alternative to the nihilistic and anti-political tendencies in Nietzsche's work, tendencies which haunt post-structuralist thinkers indebted to Nietzsche. Hence, this dissertation is situated between modernist rationalism and post-structuralist relativism