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59 Chapter 3 NIETZSCHE’S PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE AFFIRMATION The question, after a brief scheme of Zhuangzi’s philosophy has been presented , now comes to the fore: Who is Nietzsche? Is there such a man, a writer, a philosopher, whom I can present? Who is that man asking, “Why am I so clever?” and,“Why I do write such good books?”? Some would think these are silly questions not worth asking because we have at hand all his texts, published before and after his final breakdown in 1890. But when we refer a name of a thinker to his or her special mode of thinking, the name becomes questionable. Since Nietzsche has attracted great attention in the twentieth-century world, the name “Nietzsche” has been diversified by numerous writers, commentators, and critics. The question of Nietzsche’s name was brought up by Heidegger and raised again by Derrida as the question of whether the thinking we know under the name “Nietzsche” was one single kind of thinking. In his essay Interpreting Signatures, Jacques Derrida accuses Heidegger of claiming that Nietzsche bears only “one single name” or that “his thinking is one.” Derrida refers to Heidegger’s claim that it is Nietzsche who names his thinking and “his naming takes place only once ... at the summit of Western metaphysics, which is gathered together under this name.”1 On the contrary, Derrida contends that Nietzsche, next to Kierkegaard, “was one of the few great thinkers who multiplies his names and played with signatures, identities, and masks.”2 The dispute over Nietzsche’s name has been a watershed in the arguments by different groups of Nietzschean commentators on whether Nietzsche produced a unified philosophy (one name) or fragmentary thinking (multiplied names). As a result of my reading of Nietzsche, which is neither Heideggerian nor Derridian, I would interpret Nietzsche, his life, his writing, and his philosophy as a whole, bearing one name but with many signatures. We can discuss many different theories and attributes of Nietzsche, his ambiguity, inconsistency, and contradictoriness. Yet these all belong to the same person whose name, the only name, is “Nietzsche.” In other words, no matter how many times Nietzsche played with signatures the name he signed for himself 60 LIBERATION AS AFFIRMATION is still one, Nietzsche. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s thinking as a whole is not only one thinking, not even close to one systematic metaphysics as Heidegger has claimed. It is a whole with thorough openness and multiplicity, a name with many signatures and masks, a fragmented discourse with frequent self-contradiction and variation. In this respect I will view the entire corpus of Nietzsche’s philosophy. To view Nietzsche’s corpus will not involve the imposition of a systematic interpretation upon it, but will be an attempt to correlate his major works with one another, early and late, published and unpublished,in order to examine and detect what in these works are Nietzsche’s major themes and whether there is any coherence and consistency to them. This chapter will deal with Nietzsche’s thinking as a whole, and will investigate the ideas that developed over the course of his life. Many postmodernist critics would argue that it is wrong to read Nietzsche as a whole because his thinking is fragmentary, ambiguous, and contradictory. But, are not his ambiguity and contradiction something unique in his thinking that has therefore characterized his name, “Nietzsche”? Is there something that consistently determines his style of inconsistency and ambiguity? Can we find it, under all kinds of masks and disguises? Are there ideas that are clearly and explicitly presented in Nietzsche’s thinking? Are there ideas that Nietzsche never ceased promoting through his life? I believe there are. The idea of “revaluation of all values,” of “will to power,” of “eternal recurrence,” of “affirmation of life,” of “genealogy of morals,” are ideas that Nietzsche consistently and continually pursued in his life, even if at times contradictorily. It is these ideas or “signatures” that created the great name “Nietzsche.” I also believe there is at least one thing that correlates Nietzsche’s ideas, not as an onto-theological center but as a passionate longing for elevating or liberating human life from its course of degeneration, or affirming life as an endless flux of transformation or excess over (über) human-all-too-human limit. As Tyler T. Roberts acutely observed, “The place of religion in Nietzsche‘s writings begs to be reexamined.Nietzsche announces the death...

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