Nietzsche and nihilism

grantor: University of TorontoThe failure of Hegel's attempt at a 'grand' synthesis of Platonic and Christian thought has forced upon continental philosophy a radical rethinking and re-evaluation of both metaphysics and theology--what Heidegger has called the onto-theological tradition. Nietzsche's re-evaluation of that tradition results in the thesis of philosophic nihilism--that philosophy itself, since Parmenides' thesis of the identity of thought and 'Being', is complicitous in nurturing the modern sense of meaninglessness which Nietzsche calls European nihilism. If nihilism is viewed as being at the very centre of Nietzsche's thought, then very different conclusions may be drawn, than by those interpreters who take his `doctrines' of the ubermensch, the eternal recurrence, and the will to power, too literally as 'solutions' to the 'problem' of nihilism. The recognition of nihilism as the culmination of a long historical process which begins, philosophically, with 'morality' as the unexplored substratum of all claims to truth, forbids further solutions in the form of 'overcoming' or 'progress'--the modernist strategy by which the past is hollowed out, denigrated, in the interest of a newer truth. Instead Nietzsche responds to European nihilism with an exploration of the possibilities of history--foremost of which is the notion of eternal recurrence. Here the eternal recurrence is taken figuratively, a poetic device which points to a new definition of philosophy which "so far as it is science and not legislation,... means only the broadest extension of the concept of history."Ed.D