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Eternal Recurrence, Identity and Literary Characters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

David Conter
David Conter
Affiliation:
Huron College, University of Western Ontario
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Extract

“Think of our world,” writes Robert Nozick, “as a novel in which you yourself are a character.” As we shall see, this is easier said than done. In that case, would the project be worth the effort? Yes, says Alexander Nehamas. In Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Nehamas suggests that we would have a better grasp of some hard doctrines of Nietzsche's, if we accepted literary texts as providing a model for the world, and literary characters as yielding models of ourselves. The idea is intriguing, in part because Nietzsche presents difficulties, and in part because it has some of the alluring obscurity of Nozick's playful charge. In what follows, however, I shall argue that Nehamas's proposals about Nietzsche and literature are not particularly helpful, that Nietzsche's doctrines remain hard to grasp even after we have considered the nature of literary texts, and that Nehamas himself is misled by ambiguities connected with literary characters and the fictional worlds they inhabit.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , Fall 1992 , pp. 549 - 566
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1992

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References

Notes

1 Nozick, Robert, “Fiction,” in Hofstadter, Douglas R. and Dennett, Daniel C., eds., The Mind's I (Toronto and New York: Bantam Books, 1982), p. 461.Google Scholar

2 Nehamas, Alexander, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 3.Google Scholar

3 For this formulation see van Fraassen, Bas C., An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time and Space, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 62.Google Scholar

4 For discussion and references, see Nehamas, Nietzsche, p. 144–53.

5 See, e.g., Shapiro, Gary, Nietzschean Narrative (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 83–84Google Scholar; Magnus, Bernd, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 89–110Google Scholar; and van Fraassen, An Introduction, p. 63–65.

6 Nehamas, Nietzsche, p. 153 and 156.

7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power, translated by Kaufman, Walter and Hollingdale, R. J., edited by Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), sections 545–69.Google Scholar

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9 E.g., Lewis, David, Counterfactuals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 22.Google Scholar

10 Nehamas, Nietzsche, p. 89.

11 Ibid., p. 165. Nehamas has more recently made it clear that determining what is said about a character in a text may involve not merely reading words off the page but engaging in literary interpretation — see his “Writer, Text, Work, Author,” in Cascardi, Anthony J., ed., Literature and the Question of Philosophy (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 265–91; p. 273.Google Scholar

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23 See especially Wolterstorff, Nicholas, Works and Worlds of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 134–49Google Scholar; also van Inwagen, Peter, “Creatures of Fiction,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 14 (1977): 299–308Google Scholar; p. 300; and Currie, Gregory, “Fictional Names,” Australian Journal of Philosophy, 66 (1988): 471–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; p. 480.