CHAOS AND EXPERIENCE: KANT AND NIETZSCHE AND THE QUESTION OF TIME

An engagement with the notion of time is central to the thought of both Kant and Nietzsche. Both were aware both of time's own contingency and of time as the basis for the contingent being of all other beings. Their attention to the process of a human construction of the radically separate and essentially contingent moments of time into a coherent (and for Kant a priori) whole is the focus of the dissertation.;Nietzsche's thought on time finds its expression in his enigmatic notion of The Eternal Return of the Same. Trying to understand this unencompassable thought, the discussion in the thesis finds, by contrast with Kant's attempts to make time's contingency into a necessary structure, a deconstruction of this structure, a this-worldly freedom which seeks to embrace and celebrate contingency and break the (fictional) hold of the concept of natural causality.;In the exploration of the time theory of both philosophers, the traditional distinction of form and matter is seen to be untenable. Kant pushes the concept of form to its extreme, which allows its collapse to be filled by a union of Dionysus (Nietzsche's closest approach to the concept of matter) and Apollo (representing the pinnacle of pure form) in which neither predominates and each is continually deconstructed and deconstructing.;In Kant's Critique of Pure Reason the pivotal point is the third antinomy of pure reason: its thesis points ahead to the concept of transcendental freedom, which is at bottom a freedom from the negativity of determinate time; its antithesis recapitulates the binding of time into the necessity of natural causality. When Kant can pair freedom and causality as being, both of them, transcendentally necessary, though in two different worlds, he is able, to his satisfaction, to encompass both reason's demand for freedom from time's constraints and understanding's desire for the certainty of the inexorable and unchangeable time of natural causality.