Abstract

This thesis examines Nietzsche's conception of self. The strictly philosophical explication of the self, however, cannot be wholly disentangled from Nietzsche's conception of him-self. This impresses itself upon the reader most powerfully in his autobiography and the set of prefaces he wrote to his earlier works in the period 1886-1888. Taken together these writings provide a retrospective self-image and, it is argued, must be seen as the key to interpreting Nietzsche's text as a whole. More accurately, this is what Nietzsche demanded of the reader and this work attempts to take him at his word; it is a worthy hermeneutical experiment in other words. At first it appears as if this textual reconstruction does nothing but exacerbate the complaints of many philosophers that Nietzsche subordinates substantive argument to style, and often replaces it with inadequate or bizarre psychological or physiological speculation. Paradoxically, however, this experiment makes it possible to juxtapose the most striking image of Nietzsche himself with an equally striking image of the self per se. For the retrospective writings permit the reader to uncover the radical meaning of the dionysian in Nietzsche's first book as an unconscious, formative power, and this constitutes what is called a dionysian "logic of agency". It is an instrument used to understand any human activity and its applicability to both human cognition and conduct is discussed. In each case Nietzsche provides an illuminating view of the self which is both continuous with basic streams of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, and yet transmutes them in a distinctive manner. Then, moreover, Nietzsche goes beyond this and tries to bring the philosophical analysis of cognition and conduct together in an artistic unity. The result is the self-image of the retrospective writings which is an aesthetic consummation of his life and philosophy. This allows the reader to acknowledge the textual ground of a powerful criticism of Nietzsche, but negate the conclusions drawn thereupon by systematically recreating the necessary context in which the text understands itself as it were