A Life Worth Living? Nietzsche on Transience and Nihilism

This project focuses on the relation between the experience of time as transience and nihilism. The sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues that the acceleration of life under capitalism leads us to perceive reality as increasingly transient: nothing lasts long enough to meaningfully connect with, we feel alienated and depressed. Already 150 years ago, Friedrich Nietzsche had concluded that the experience of transience led the West to nihilism: an existential stance for which life has no purpose and is meaningless. As Nietzsche's diagnosis is influential, I approach the issue of transience through a phenomenological reading of his thought. While most commentators understand nihilism in terms of a loss of value, I argue that it is better understood in relation to time and that nihilism can be resisted by experiencing transience differently. I seek to outline and analyse a new existential stance proposed by Nietzsche,focusing on the untimeliness and the paradoxical extension of the moment.

My approach differs from Espen Hammer (2011) who argues that Nietzsche fails to provide a solution to the issue of transience because he asks us to deny the past. I differ by arguing that Nietzsche proposes anew way of relating to the past rather than wanting its denial. John McCumber's claims (2011) that Nietzsche falls short of providing us with means to respond to the radical openness of the future after God's death. Yet, the ER and the notion of the untimely may outline an existential stance for constraining meaningfully the openness of the future. This project would then contribute a new perspective on how past, future and present could be bound together into a meaningful totality that is the moment.Nietzsche offers a way of relating to time which affords a person who learns to experience the moment appropriately a hermeneutic perspective from which their life as a whole (and the passing of time) can be made meaningful.
Method
This research will be informed by a phenomenological approach, seeking with Nietzsche to understand how a person who experiences time nihilistically understands self and world. What does it feel like to experience transience in a nihilistic way? What are the structures of such experience (if any)? Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z) is a key text, dealing with issues of transience, suffering, nihilism and time. An exegetical reading of Genealogy of Morals (GM) could reveal further insights into how we experience and relate to time through values. And The Gay Science (GS) offers descriptions of the experience of the death of God,the eternal recurrence and the existential stance of the 'untimely'. Where appropriate I may further draw on other writings such as Untimely Meditations (UM) where Nietzsche discusses our relation to history and his description of nihilism in The Will to Power (WP). Being a German native speaker, I am able to read Nietzsche in the original text and to also access the extensive German secondary literature on his work.

Schedule
Oct. 2021 - 2022:
Chapter I: The relation between transience and nihilism.
Ancient and Christian understandings of time, transience and eternity.
The death of God, changes in temporal perception and nihilism.
Nietzsche's phenomenology of transience and nihilism.

Oct. 2022 - 2023:
Chapter 2: The ER as a new relation to time.
The ER in relation to standard understandings of time.
Thinking ER as a way of establishing duration by relating differently to past and future.
Nietzsche's phenomenology of the moment and its paradoxical relation to duration.

Oct. 2023 - 2024:Chapter 3: How does one become untimely?
Examining the relation between untimeliness and history - untimeliness as the discontinuity of history.
Untimeliness as a way of structuring time by establishing endings, transitions, and section.
The timeliness of living and dying at the right time.