Time and Becoming in Nietzsche's Thought

A clear sense of Nietzsche's aspiration to realise the potential of the Heraclitean conception of nature, and undo the mistakes of Parmenides, emerges from Small's detailed and persuasive analysis of Nietzsche's account of this problematic in pre-Socratic philosophy in the opening sec...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Philosophy (London) 2011, Vol.86 (335), p.134-138
Main Author: Schuringa, Christoph
Format: Review
Language:English
Subjects:
Aspiration
Causality
Persuasion
Philosophy
Reviews
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Summary:A clear sense of Nietzsche's aspiration to realise the potential of the Heraclitean conception of nature, and undo the mistakes of Parmenides, emerges from Small's detailed and persuasive analysis of Nietzsche's account of this problematic in pre-Socratic philosophy in the opening sections of the book. [...]the flux is to be thought of as driven onwards by a process of conflict between opposites (a feature of Heraclitus' account that appealed to Nietzsche's sense for the agonistic). Small unfortunately never gives these questions the sustained attention they deserve, as he is diverted from his discussion of the 'conflict model' by a consideration of 'conflict within the individual person' (40), which does not throw light on the central claim that a conception of nature featuring causality and stable objects should be replaced with one of conflictual flux. [...]although Small's analyses in the first half of his book are instructive taken by themselves, it is difficult to distil an overall conception of what becoming is supposed to be, and why, according to Small, for Nietzsche becoming is a fact, and his 'models' of time a set of interpretations of that fact (2).
ISSN:0031-8191
1469-817X
DOI:10.1017/S0031819110000665