ABSTRACT
All three portray styles very different to Nietzsche. Their texts, unlike those of Nietzsche, yield to categorisation within the tradition, in that their styles readily submit to explication. Moreover all three thinkers set forward their views within the context of a tradition with a clear self-understanding. Schopenhauer saw himself as Kant’s successor in the German idealist tradition and remained (as I shall argue) within the set categories of Kantian epistemology. Dawkins is a thinker with a clear and systematic understanding of his own position, ultimately that of scientific realism. Dennett too, by virtue of what Janice Moulton calls the ‘adversarial culture of philosophy’ (what Dennett himself refers to as his game of ‘Burden Tennis’ with Searle and Nagel) is incessantly clarifying and systematising his own ‘intentional stance’. These thinkers have not exclusively been chosen for their similarity with certain Nietzschean writings, even though in all three there is a considerable overlap, rather the fixity of their thought allows for a representation of these overlapping principles to be contextualised in a manner that Nietzsche himself had no interest
in. They also serve to highlight a strand of Nietzschean thought that I am keen to expose, a progression toward a mechanistic, behaviourist and often reductionist analysis of the self2. By binding such models of self to the ontology of violence that Nietzsche has become synonymous with, I seek in Chapter 3 to utilise such a ‘biological’ understanding in arguing for the precise nature of Nietzsche’s ontology over and against Milbank’s analysis of it as merely ‘one more mythos’3. Finally as representative of this ontology I will seek in my final chapters to engage with such analysis in light of a Christological metaperspective.
