NIETZSCHE AND THE BIRTH OF STRATEGY

Statement of the Problem. The recent ecological crisis has its educational counterpart in virtually all fields of research. Insignificant and redundant information overproliferates and impedes communications among researchers who are pursuing the same problems in different fields of study. The educational policy of Foundations counters this trend by concentrating on the main ideas of the great educators. It turns out that the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche have had a far-reaching interdisciplinary effect on such currently predominant cultural paradigms as general system theory, phenomenology, and Jungian psychotherapy. This study's focus is on the educational problem of ascertaining how Nietzsche was able to exert such a tremendous influence on so many major theorists in different areas of inquiry.;The study's overarching purpose has been to apply Nietzsche's methods to the man himself, and to those who learned from him. The obvious difficulty of observing limitations was solved by utilizing Nietzsche's leading concept of the eternal recurrence of the same as an organizational strategy. This is in keeping with the inquiry's basic structure as a longitudinal study of educational influence. The relatively detailed analyses of Nietzsche's main thoughts made it possible to achieve a more abbreviated account of his successors' ideas, by simple referring the reader back to essentially the same perspectives in earlier passages.;Chapter 1 describes Nietzsche's precursory influence on the general system theorist von Bertalannfy, and delineates the parallels between Nietzsche's and Kuhn's historiographical approaches to inquiry. Chapter 2 develops the perspective of Nietzsche as a protophenomenologist, and provides a selective inventory of his influence on various aspects of 20th-century continental European philosophy.;Conclusions. The conclusions of this study are explored in Chapters 3 and 4. Nietzsche's great success as a teacher was largely the result of his ability to learn from his predecessors. Chapter 3 depicts the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy of pre-phenomenological voluntarism on Nietzsche, and briefly touches on the influence of Hindu philosophy on Schopenhauer.;Methods. The principal procedure in this study consists in describing and evaluating the central concepts and methods developed by Nietzsche and his successors. The inquiry deals in some detail with the thoughts of general system theorists Ludwig von Bertalannfy and Thomas Kuhn; phenomenologists Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, and Carlos Castaneda; and psychologists C. G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Herbert Silberer. Although it is not evident that Nietzsche had any direct evidence on Husserl and Kuhn, these writers are included because they represent a further development of Nietzsche's major lines of thought, and shed light on many of the above mentioned theorists' ideas.;Chapter 4 examines Nietzsche's considerable influence on Carl Jung's model of the human subconscious. Nietzsche's artistic depiction of the subconscious in Thus Spoke Zarathustra also makes it possible to achieve a more complete inventory of Nietzsche's debts to various cultural antecedents, notably the presocratic Greek philosophers. The final two chapters provide a balanced view of Nietzsche's writings within the continuum of Western intellectual history. Thus the conclusions are consistent with the longitudinal (or in Nietzsche's words, genealogical) methods employed throughout the study. These same methods are deployed in the exegesis of Nietzsche's "literary subconscious," and are subsumed under the general heading of his dominant paradigm--the eternal recurrence of the same.