Joseph Cleveland

Nietzsche's Aesthetic Revaluation of Knowledge Joseph Cleveland

This thesis examines Nietzsche's employment of skeptical strategies towards a 'revaluation of values', the goal of On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). Nietzsche developed his position as an argument against Paul R?e's The Origin of the Moral Sensations (1877), and reinterprets from an aesthetic perspective the fields of knowledge he uses: history, psychology, and physiology. The first chapter examines the connections between Nietzsche's aesthetic history and his epistemological doctrine of perspectivism. The second chapter considers Nietzsche's rejection of utilitarian psychology and the skeptical concepts which found the new aesthetic approach he advocates. The third chapter discusses Nietzhsce's aesthetic revaluation of physiology and his explanation of evolutionary development through an endogenous creative force he terms 'the will to power'.