Abstract
This thesis compares the truth skepticism of Friedrich Nietzsche and Emily Dickinson. Using Nietzsche’s theories on metaphor as a theoretical foundation to analyzing Dickinson’s poetry, I argue that both authors produce similar accounts of knowledge as aesthetically constructed analogies derived from the sensations of the body. I further argue that both authors attempt to demonstrate that the limitations of our language to be defined by our physiological needs and capabilities as humans. As a starting point, the introduction focuses upon their similar metaphoric reductions of God to anthropomorphism as a shared rhetorical strategy which serves to symbolically return knowledge back to the sensory processes of the body. This analysis of secularization uses the amputation of God in Dickinson’s “Those - dying then” as a central metaphor throughout the thesis. The first half presents the theoretical foundation within Nietzsche’s writings, as I will explicate his theories that the essentialist metaphysics of Christianity and Platonism are a dangerous strand of ideology which negate the body. I will then further analyze his constructive theory on truth as defined by metaphor derived from our physiological sensations. The second half will compare Nietzsche’s theories to Dickinson’s poems, beginning with a return to “Those - dying then,” and ending with “Water, is taught by thirst” and “I am alive -- I guess.” Through analyzing their similar approaches to dismantling traditional epistemology through the structure of language, I show that both authors’ works can be interpreted to reveal the reality of truth to be absent of any absolute or essential rules -- instead presenting parallel accounts of language and reality as purely subject to aesthetic invention and interpretation.