Elaine P. Miller

The dissertation analyzes interpretations of the construction of nature and culture in the philosophies of nature of Immanuel Kant, Johann Wilhelm von Goethe, Friedrich Holderlin, Georg W. F. Hegel, and Friedrich Nietzsche. It traces the trajectory of the claim that the human mind can function only by projecting nature to be a series of unities, by making fictions about nature. Both Kant and Nietzsche make this claim, but the implications they draw from it are strikingly divergent. While Kant believed that human thinking would simply have nowhere to go if it did not project form onto nature, and thus advocated a limited teleology of nature in analogy with human art, Nietzsche attempted to expose the falsity of projections of unity and to analyze nature from a radically non-purposive standpoint. ;Nietzsche questioned the specific form that the "fictionizing" Kant describes always takes. Why must "form" imply "unity" or "totality"? Nietzsche speculated that human beings create fictions like final causes, atoms, ideal forms, rather than imagining a chaotic universe of continually metamorphosing constellations of forces with no stable building blocks, by basing scientific theories on the "crude perspective" of our own animal bodies. As creatures that are capable of carrying our bodies around as self-enclosed and self-motivated separable entities, we tend to forget that most of nature is much less conducive to being separated into distinct entities. ;Following Goethe, who specified in his Metamorphosis of Plants that no plant can be called an individual, and Holderlin, who describes his most beloved characters as plants within the realm of nature, Nietzsche uses plant figuration to describe the human being's situation in the world. Thus we will oppose what we call a plant reading of human being--found in Goethe, Holderlin, and Nietzsche--to an animal understanding of individuation that privileges form, unity, self-reflection, and purposiveness, exemplified by Kant and by Hegel's philosophy of nature