Abstract

This dissertation is a study of revision in philosophy, both as a type of interpretive practice and as a structuring condition of Western philosophical texts. Martin Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche serve as my primary example of a philosophical revision. I also use Heidegger's thought to develop a theoretical model of revisionist interpretation within the history of Western philosophy. I supplement specific points of my theory of revision with analysis of Harold Bloom's work on poetic revision and Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays on history and self-reliance. ;In Chapters one and three I address specific revisions within Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche: the first chapter is on Heidegger's re-interpretation of the relation of art and truth in Nietzsche's later writing, and the third on Heidegger's understanding of "eternal recurrence" and its relation to "life". In each of these chapters I attempt to exhibit the logical and rhetorical gestures that Heidegger's text effects in order to refigure the difference between itself and Nietzsche's text as a self-difference already implicit within Nietzsche's own thinking. Between these two interpretive chapters, in chapter two, I analyze how Heidegger contextualizes his readings within a larger critique of "Western metaphysics," and how his understanding of the history of metaphysics can contribute to a more general theoretical model of revision as a structure of philosophical thinking. ;Any revisionist reading seeks an audience, not only for its particular interpretation, but for its construction of the "proper" context and intention of the text it reads. Since Heidegger tends to efface his own practice of constructing Nietzsche's "proper" text for an audience, his reading is of limited usefulness for an account of revision's influence upon other readers. Therefore, in chapter four I turn to Harold Bloom and Ralph Waldo Emerson, each of whom foregrounds the tendency of interpretations to impose upon future readers as well as upon the past texts they alter. Revision in philosophy is not only an ex post facto alteration of past history, but a proleptic alteration of future histories as well--precisely the future histories of the text that has been revised