Paul Swift

Nietzsche on Truth and Overcoming traces the development of Friedrich Nietzsche's epistemic criticism. Nietzsche's outright denial of the existence of truth is grounded in his claim that stable metaphysical entities do not exist. The following inquiry examines Nietzsche's method of doubting which compels him to dismiss "being" as a fictitious "perspectival falsification". Nietzsche's denial of the reality of pre-existent "being" creates problems with communicating what he means through normal language. Nietzsche on Truth and Overcoming elucidates the problems which Nietzsche creates through his uprooting of being and provides Nietzsche's hint as to where mankind might still look for the "most real", in art. Through his conception of the Dionysian artist, Nietzsche offers us the tragic annihilator of the "all-too-human" fictions of linguistic truth. This thesis thereby concludes that the Dionysian artist is Nietzsche's "answer" to epistemology, for the tragic wisdom of the Dionysian provides a glimpse into primal reality precisely because he affirms existence in spite of not knowing fiction as the logical opposite of truth.

By reading Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy as an aesthetic intensification of Kant's critical philosophy, I show how the Dionysian and the Apollonian may be read as aesthetic responses to Kant's analytic of the sublime and the analytic of the beautiful. Interpreting epistemology as aesthetics, the noumenal realm also finds expression in the Dionysian as an attempt to "take in" the infinite, the unconditioned, while the phenomenal world finds expression in the light metaphysics of Apollo. Following Rudolf Makkreel, I read the Critique of Judgment as being unified by the theme of "life," as aesthetic judgment invariably refers to an enlivening of the faculties, while the "Critique of Teleological Judgment" represents the culmination of Kant's biological reflections, i.e. attempts to understand "life." Nietzsche is thus closer to Kant than Schopenhauer in regards to the connection of an enlivening to the aesthetic condition. Offering the first scholarship in English directed at Nietzsche's early draft for an 1868 doctoral dissertation on Kant, I also provide the first English translation of "Teleologie Seit Kant" aka "Zur Teleologie" which appears as an appendix in my dissertation. This historical contribution to English scholarship lends concrete support to my thesis that Nietzsche was very much attuned to the "end" of Kant's critical philosophy