Abstract

This dissertation takes as its point of departure the hermeneutical problem of interpreting Nietzsche's philosophy, one which contains many seemingly explicit and intentional contradictions. Rather than interpret away these contradictions, we propose a reading of Nietzsche in which the unity of these oppositions is maintained, a unity which we propose to be the Leitmotif of Nietzsche's thinking, and which we call the Gesamtkunstwerk. ;Through an analysis of Schopenhauer and Wagner, we show that the fundamental problem faced by these two figures is the disparity between the supersensible and sensible worlds, a disparity which each in their own way sought to overcome through art, though in vain. It is in this tradition of art conceived of as that which promises to overcome the bifurcation of reality into metaphysical and phenomenal worlds--a split foreboding nihilism--that we turn to a detailed analysis of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. There we see both an advance over Schopenhauer's and Wagner's formulation of the problem, and a fundamental--eventually ill-fated--complicity with their thought. We find both in The Birth of Tragedy and Nietzsche's last writings the thought of the overcoming of this problem of metaphysics in the person of the overman, but, because of Nietzsche's concepts of time and language, this overman, in whom a reconciliation of the metaphysical and phenomenal and thereby a completion of the project of the Gesamtkunstwerk is to occur, is himself sundered, that is, irrevocably displaced as impossible. This sundering and displacement is the reassertion of nihilism in Nietzsche's thought. ;In our concluding chapter we take up Heidegger's thought--principally that of Being and Time and "The Origin of the Work of Art" to show that essential to the countermovement to nihilism sought by Nietzsche is the establishment of Dasein and the artwork in which the truth is set to work. Only through the preservation of that place of the advent of language does art come into its true nature in the face of advancing nihilism