PresentaciónDavid Kaye
The New School for Social Research, EE. UU.
PhD Candidate
Adjunct Professor of philosophy at St. John’s University in New York City. Ph.D. candidate at The New School for Social Research. His area of expertise is 19th and 20th century Continental philosophy, and he is the author of several essays on Nietzsche, Arendt, and Heidegger.
Abstract
Nietzsche, Timely and Untimely: The Overcoming of Metaphysics, Environmental Ethics, and Politics
What are the important issues at stake in Nietzsche’s essential project to overcome metaphysics? Is Nietzsche, himself, a metaphysician? Is he or is he not a-political? What might a Nietzschean political philosophy resemble? Finally, why is temporality so important to the Nietzschean project that he would go so far as to make the seemingly dubious claim that the rather ambiguous and relatively unexciting concept of the eternal return is his most important concept? It would seem, on the surface, that such seemingly diverse questions would occupy the better part of several dissertations on the topic. Yet, this essay attempts to demonstrate that these questions, are, in fact, quite intimately connected. I will examine two integral components of Nietzsche’s later philosophy—temporality and metaphysics—and a third, politics, which can only be understood through a meditation on the first two. In doing so, I will demonstrate how, precisely, these components intersect in Nietzsche’s mature oeuvre. Thus, I will illuminate what this intersection reveals about the Nietzschean corpus and its lofty aspirations.
I intend to show how Nietzsche’s project to overcome metaphysics elucidates a richer conception of time beyond that found in his notion of the eternal return, and to demonstrate why time is ultimately so integral to the Nietzschean program. In turn, I intend to elucidate what this broader conception of time, and its inherent shortcomings, elucidates about Nietzsche’s political or apolitical inclinations. Finally, I will bring these temporal and political considerations to bear on how we might best understand Nietzsche’s relation to metaphysics. In doing so, I will examine Nietzsche’s contributions to the topic vis-à-vis what are often considered to be the competing concepts of the eternal return and the overman, how temporality and politics illuminate what metaphysics means, and how a fully realized project designed to overcome the nihilism of metaphysics might resemble a kind of environmental ethics.