Abstract

This dissertation is an attempt to explore the ways in which Nietzsche and Walt Whitman both transform the ethical question of how one should live in their writings. I argue that in Nietzsche's work the ethical question is transformed into the question of ethics, while in Whitman's Leaves of Grass the ethical question is transformed into astonishment at being in the world. The dissertation argues that both thinkers find the ultimate human struggle to be not with the good and evil of any given ethic, but with ethics itself. The possibility is raised and discussed that Nietzsche's attempt to transvalue ethical thought must lead back to the establishment of a new ethic because of its lingering reliance upon a traditional philosophic understanding of truth. Whitman's and Nietzsche's understanding of the ethical self's relation to Being and death is taken up and the great similarities are stressed. But the dissertation concludes with an attempt to explain how two thinkers who put ethics in question in such similar ways could espouse such opposing political organizations: democracy for Whitman and aristocracy for Nietzsche. The answer to this difference is located in the question of which phase of the fragmentation of the self is allowed to determine the self's ethical concern