Representationalism in Nietzsche’s Early Physics: Cosmology and Sensation in the Zeitatomenlehre

Abstract

Abstract Nietzsche’s 1873 fragment, the Zeitatomenlehre, posits a temporal conception of action at a distance where space is reduced to a single point and time consists only in a series of discrete atoms. Taken as a physical doctrine that destroys all spatial difference, this conception raises serious conflicts with the rest of his work. I describe and situate this theory within the historical context of debates over action at a distance in nineteenth-century physics, distinguish it from physical theories influential on Nietzsche, and argue that these conflicts can be resolved only by viewing it in the anti-metaphysical phenomenalist and representational terms that he also expressed in his early work.