The thought of Nietzsche in his early period is defined as the artist's metaphysics. It was contrived for an aesthetic justification of existence which in the attempt to overcome a sense of nothingness in life and to affirm the finitude of life by lea...
The thought of Nietzsche in his early period is defined as the artist's metaphysics. It was contrived for an aesthetic justification of existence which in the attempt to overcome a sense of nothingness in life and to affirm the finitude of life by leaving immortal achievements of and individual or community as an artist in immortal by begetting his works. The artist's metaphysics was suggested as an alternative to Plato's philosophy in which the reality of transformation and becoming is denied but the eternity alone in a transcendent world is valued. In the later period, however, Nietzsche concluded that the artist's metaphysics cannot bo an ultimate solution for overcoming the sense of hatred and fear against the reality in becoming and transformation and he thereby invented the concept of Eternal Return.
The idea of Eternal Return is that all things repeat eternally in the way of producing differences. The fact that becoming and transformation are the very vivid realities of the whole cosmos should not be denied nor devalued. The thought of Eternal Return was already latent to his early study of ancient Greek philosophy. At that Time, he had considered the material unity(monism) and the struggle between opposites as a momentum of becoming(pluralism), and thus had conceived the ideas that were needed for the philosophy of becoming and difference.
With the idea of Eternal Return, he contrived the concept of Will to Power so as to dispute the causality that underlies modern science. He argued that the paradigm of modern science, firmly based on a substantialist way of thinking, is disposed to passive nihilism in the way other than theological thinking, and criticized the very nihilism of science. He advocated the idea of interdependence of all things in the world, which is similar to that of intercausality represented in Nagarjuna's thought of Emptiness[空, śūnyatā]. Will to power implies a simultaneous intercausality. It means that things are interdependent on one another, not being as independent substances. 'Eternal Return' is presented with an intent to resist the idea of transcendent substances which Will to Power opposes in terns of time.
Nietzsche disapproves modern philosophy that suppresses the idea of becoming and difference on the ground of the unity, and utilizes positively the thought of Eternal Return in order to realize the project of postmodern philosophy that attempts to provide an alternative to modern philosophy. G. Deleuze's thought especially contributes to criticize the concept of difference in Dialectics(opposition) and to seek for a new concept of difference. The principle of opposition in Dialectics neglects the struggle between diverse differences, abstracting the only polarized difference from them. Nietzsche affirms the creative encounter that brings about transformation and transition with a concern to the Greek competitive instinct(agon) and the struggle between opposites that Heracleitos emphasized. Sometimes the encounter between different things causes conflicts or violent antagonism. Hobbes's sovereignty model suppresses an emergent conflicts by virtue of arousing fear of images of violent combats. And the opposition in Dialectics works in the same way by reducing the n's differences into the binary opposition. On the contrary, the philosophy of difference attempts to remove a fear of the creative conflicts of differences and to affirm diverse encounters of different things as a kind of momentum of becoming.
The philosophy of difference which we aim at should not be depoliticized by confining th problem of difference merely as that of approval. In such a case, the concept of differences will turn out to be nothing but the postmodern version of passive nihilism. The new philosophy of difference suggests not approval of differences but production of them. The production of differences resists any attempt of postmodern dominating strategy in the world market system which tries to capture the effects of differences. The experimental aspect of differences and its impersonality and non-individuality will contribute to achieve an active nihilism for the true self-overcoming of nihilism, suggesting the conditions required for new practical and ethical activities.