No More Learning

In modern metaphysics, there for the first time expressly and explic- itly, the Being of beings appears as will. Man is man insofar as he comports himself to beings by way of thought. In this way he is held in Being. Man's thinking must also correspond in its essence to that toward which it comports itself, to wit, the Being of beings as will.
Now, Nietzsche tells us that prior thinking has been determined by the spirit of revenge. Precisely how is Nietzsche thinking the essence of revenge, assuming that he is thinking it metaphysically?
In the second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the episode we have already mentioned, "On Redemption," Nietzsche has Zarathus- tra say: "This, yes, this alone is revenge itself: the will's ill will toward time and its 'It was. ' "
That an essential definition of revenge emphasizes revulsion and defiance, and thus points to revenge as ill will, corresponds to our characterization of it as a peculiar sort of persecution. Yet Nietzsche does not merely say that revenge is revulsion. The same could be said of hatred. Nietzsche says that revenge is the will's ill will. But will signifies the Being of beings as a whole, and not simply human will- ing. By virtue of the characterization of revenge as "the will's ill will," the defiant persecution of revenge persists primarily in relationship to the Being of beings. It becomes apparent that this is the case when we heed what it is on which revenge's ill will turns: revenge is "the will's ill will against time and its 'It was. ' "
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When we read this essential definition ofrevenge for the first time- and also for a second and a third time-the emphatic application of revenge to time seems to us surprising, incomprehensible, ultimately gratuitous. It has to strike us this way, as long as we think no further about what the word time here means.
Nietzsche says that revenge is "the will's ill will toward time. . . . " This does not say, toward something temporal. Nor does it say, toward a particular characteristic of time. It simply says, "Ill will toward time. . . . "
To be sure, these words now follow: ". . . toward time and its 'It was. ' " But this suggests that revenge is ill will toward the "It was" of time. We may insist, quite rightly, that not only the "it was" but also the "it will be" and the "it is now" also pertain just as essentially to time. For time is defined not only by the past but also by future and present. If therefore Nietzsche stresses the "It was" of time, his char- acterization of the essence of revenge obviously refers, not to time as such, but to time in one particular respect. Yet how do matters stand with time "as such"? They stand in this way: time goes. And it goes by passing. Whatever of time is to come never comes to stay, but only to go. Where to? Into passing. When a man dies we say he has passed away. The temporal is held to be that which passes away.
Nietzsche defines revenge as "the will's ill will toward time and its 'It was. ' " The supplement to the definition does not mean to put into relief one isolated characteristic of time while stubbornly ignoring the other two; rather, it designates the fundamental trait of time in its proper and entire unfolding as time. With the conjunction and in the phrase "time and its 'It was,' " Nietzsche is not proceeding to append one special characteristic of time. Here the and means as much as "and that means. " Revenge is the will's ill will toward time and that means toward passing away, transiency. Transiency is that against which the will can take no further steps, that against which its willing constantly collides. Time and its "It was" is the obstacle that the will cannot budge. Time, as passing away, is repulsive; the will suffers on account of it. Suffering in this way, the will itself becomes chronically ill over such passing away; the illness then wills its own passing, and in
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 225
so doing wills that everything in the world be worthy of passing away. Ill will toward time degrades all that passes away. The earthly-Earth and all that pertains to her-is that which properly ought not to be and which ultimately does not really possess true Being. Plato himself called it me on, nonbeing. *
According to Schelling's statements, which simply express the guid- ing representations of all metaphysics, the prime predicates of Being are "independence from time," "eternity. "
Yet the most profound ill will toward time does not consist in the mere disparagement of the earthly. For Nietzsche the most deepseated revenge consists in that reflection which posits supratemporal ideality as absolute. Measured against it, the temporal must perforce degrade itself to nonbeing proper.
Yet how should humanity assume dominion over the earth, how can it take the earth as earth into its protection, so long as it degrades the earthly, so long as the spirit of revenge determines its reflection? If it is a matter of rescuing the earth as earth, then the spirit of revenge will have to vanish beforehand. Thus for Zarathustra redemption from revenge is the bridge to the highest hope.
But in what does redemption from ill will toward transiency consist? Does it consist in a liberation from the will in general-perhaps in the senses suggested by Schopenhauer and in Buddhism? Inasmuch as the Being of beings is will, according to the doctrine of modern meta- physics, redemption from the will would amount to redemption from Being, hence to a collapse into vacuous nothingness. For Nietzsche redemption from revenge is redemption from the repulsive, from defi- ance and degradation in the will, but by no means the dissolution of
• Heidegger's remarks recall the decisive words of Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, Part One (lines 1338-40): " . . . denn alles, was entsteht, I 1st wert, dass es zugrunile geht. " "For everything that comes to be is worthy of its own demise. " Yet because Heidegger here speaks of Vergehen, Vergiingliches, his phrasing has a diabolical way of embracing the concluding words of Part Two (the very words Nietzsche parodied in the first of his Songs o f the Outlaw Prince), words that try to reduce "all that passes away" to a mere image of eternity. Thus Mephisto and the chorus mysticus, the good and evil of metaphysics and morals, join voices to chant revenge, to denigrate time and its "It was. "
226 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
all willing. Redemption releases the ill will from its "no" and frees it for a "yes. " What does the "yes" affirm? Precisely what the ill will of a vengeful spirit renounced: time, transiency.
The "yes" to time is the will that transiency perdure, that it not be disparaged as nothing worth. Yet how can passing away perdure? Only in this way: as passing away it must not only continuously go, but must also always come. Only in this way: passing away and transiency must recur in their coming as the same. And such recurrence itself is per- durant only if it is eternal. According to the doctrine of metaphysics, the predicate "eternity" belongs to the Being of beings.
Redemption from revenge is transition from ill will toward time to the will that represents being in the eternal recurrence of the same. Here the will becomes the advocate of the circle.
To put it another way: Only when the Being of beings represents itself to man as eternal recurrence of the same can man cross over the bridge and, redeemed from the spirit of revenge, be the one in transi- tion, the overman.
Zarathustra is the teacher who teaches the overman. But he teaches this doctrine only because he is the teacher of eternal recurrence of the same. This thought, eternal recurrence of the same, is first in rank. It is the "most abysmal" thought. For that reason the teacher comes out with it last, and always hesitantly.
Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? He is the teacher whose doctrine would liberate prior reflection from the spirit of revenge to the "yes" spoken to eternal recurrence of the same.
As the teacher of eternal recurrence, Zarathustra teaches the over- man. According to an unpublished note (XIV, 276), a refrain accom- panies the latter doctrine: "Refrain: 'Love alone will make it righf-{the creative love that forgets itself in its works). "
As the teacher of eternal recurrence and overman, Zarathustra does not teach two different things. What he teaches coheres in itself, since one demands the other as its response. Such correspondence-in the way it essentially unfolds and the way it withdraws-is precisely what the figure of Zarathustra conceals in itself, conceals yet at the same time displays, thus allowing the correspondence to provoke our thought.
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 227
Yet the teacher knows that what he is teaching remains a vision and a riddle. He perseveres in such reflective knowledge.
We today, because of the peculiar ascendancy of the modern sciences, are caught up in the strange misconception that knowledge can be attained from science and that thinking is subject to the juris- diction of science. Yet whatever unique thing a thinker is able to say can be neither proved nor refuted logically or empirically. Nor is it a matter of faith. We can only envisage it questioningly, thoughtfully. What we envisage thereby always appears as worthy of question.
To catch a glimpse of the vision and the riddle which the figure Zarathustra manifests, and to retain that glimpse, let us once again cast our eyes on the spectacle of Zarathustra's animals. They appear to him at the outset of his journeyings:
. . . He looked inquiringly into the sky-for above him he heard the piercing cry of a bird. And behold! An eagle soared through the air in vast circles, and a serpent hung suspended from him, not as his prey, but as though she were his friend: for she had coiled about his neck.
"These are my animals! " said Zarathustra, and his heart was filled with joy.
A passage we cited earlier-yet purposely only in part-from the first section of "The Convalescent" reads: "1, Zarathustra, the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle-1 summon you, my most abysmal thought! " In the second section of the episode "On the Vision and the Riddle," in Part III, Zarathustra describes the thought of eternal recurrence of the same in identical words. There, in his confrontation with the dwarf, Zarathustra tries for the first time to think that riddlesome thing which he sees as meriting his longing. The eternal recurrence of the same does remain a vision for Zarathustra; but it is also a riddle. It can be neither proved nor refuted logically or empirically. At bottom, this holds for every essential thought of every thinker: something envisaged, but a riddle-worthy of question.
Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? We can now reply in the following formula: Zarathustra is the teacher of eternal return of the same and the teacher of overman. But now we can see more clearly-perhaps also beyond our own formula-that Zarathustra is not a teacher who
228 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
instructs us concerning two sundry items. Zarathustra teaches the over- man because he is the teacher of eternal return of the same. Yet the reverse is also true: Zarathustra teaches eternal return of the same be- cause he is the teacher of overman. These doctrines are conjoined in a circle. In its circling, the teaching corresponds to that which is-to the circle which as eternal recurrence of the same makes out the Being of beings, that is, what is permanent in Becoming.
The teaching, and our thinking of it, will achieve such circling whenever they cross over the bridge called "Redemption from the Spirit of Revenge. " In this way prior thinking is to be overcome.
From the period immediately following the completion of the work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the year 1885, comes a note that has been taken up as number 617 in the book that was pieced together from Nietzsche's literary remains and published under the title The Will to Power. The note bears the underscored title "Recapitulation. "" Here Nietzsche with extraordinary perspicuity condenses the principal matter of his thinking into just a few sentences. A parenthetical remark appended to the text makes explicit mention of Zarathustra. Nietzsche's "Recapitulation" begins with the statement: "To stamp Becoming with the character of Being-that is the supreme will to power.
The supreme will to power, that is, what is most vital in all life, comes to pass when transiency is represented as perpetual Becoming in the eternal recurrence of the same, in this way being made stable and permanent. Such representing is a thinking which, as Nietzsche em- phatically notes, stamps the character of Being on beings. Such think- ing takes Becoming, to which perpetual collision and suffering belong, into its protection and custody.
Does such thinking overcome prior reflection, overcome the spirit of revenge? Or does there not lie concealed in this very stampin~which takes all Becoming into the protection of eternal recurrence of the same-a form of ill will against sheer transiency and thereby a highly spiritualized spirit of revenge?
We no sooner pose this question than the illusion arises that we are • See the explanatory note on pp. 201-02, above.
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 229
trying to discredit Nietzsche, to impute something as most proper to him which is precisely what he wants to overcome. It is as though we cherished the view that by such imputation we were refuting the thought of this thinker.
The officious will to refute never even approaches a thinker's path. Refutation belongs among those petty intellectual entertainments which the public needs for its amusement. Moreover, Nietzsche him- self long ago anticipated the answer to our question. The text that immediately precedes Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Nietzsche's corpus appeared in 1882 under the title The Gay Science. In its penultimate section (number 341), under the heading "The Greatest Burden," Nietzsche first delineated his "most abysmal thought. " Following it is the final section (342), which was adopted verbatim as the opening of the Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the posthumously pub- lished materials (XIV, 404 ff. ) we find sketches for a foreword to The Gay Science. There we read the following:
A spirit fortified by wars and victories, which has developed a need for conquest, adventure, hazard, pain; become accustomed to the crispness of the upper air, to long wintry walks, to ice and mountain crags in every sense; a kind of sublime malice and extreme exuberance of revenge-for there is revenge in it, revenge on life itself, when one who suffers greatly takes life
under his protection.
What is left for us to say, if not this: Zarathustra's doctrine does not bring redemption from revenge? We do say it. Yet we say it by no means as a misconceived refutation of Nietzsche's philosophy. We do not even utter it as an objection against Nietzsche's thinking. But we say it in order to turn our attention to the fact that-and the extent to which-Nietzsche's thought too is animated by the spirit of prior re- flection. Whether the spirit of prior thinking is at all captured in its definitive essence when it is interpreted as the spirit of revenge-this question we leave open. At all events, prior thinking is metaphysics, and Nietzsche's thinking presumably brings it to fulfillment.
Thus something in Nietzsche's thinking comes to the fore which this thinking itself was no longer able to think. Such remaining behind what it has thought designates the creativity of a thinking. And where
230 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
a thinking brings metaphysics to completion it points in an exceptional way to things unthought, cogently and confusedly at once. Yet where are the eyes to see this?
Metaphysical thinking rests on the distinction between what truly is and what, measured against this, constitutes all that is not truly in being. However, what is decisive for the essence of metaphysics is by no means the fact that the designated distinction is formulated as the opposition of the suprasensuous to the sensuous realm, but the fact that this distinction-in the sense of a yawning gulf between the realms -remains primary and all-sustaining. The distinction persists even when the Platonic hierarchy of suprasensuous and sensuous is inverted and the sensuous realm is experienced more essentially and more thoroughly-in the direction Nietzsche indicates with the name Dionysos. For the superabundance for which Zarathustra's "great long- ing" yearns is the inexhaustible permanence of Becoming, which the will to power in the eternal recurrence of the same wills itself to be.
Nietzsche brought what is essentially metaphysical in his thinking to the extremity of ill will in the final lines of his final book, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. Nietzsche composed the text in October of 1888. It was first published in a limited edition twenty years later; in 1911 it was taken up into the fifteenth volume of the Grossok- tav edition. The final lines of Ecce Homo read: "Have I been under- stood? -Dionysos versus the Crucified. . . . "
Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? He is the advocate of Dionysos. That means that Zarathustra is the teacher who in and for his doctrine of overman teaches the eternal return of the same.
Does the preceding statement provide the answer to our query? No. Nor does it provide the answer after we have pursued all the references that might elucidate the statement, hoping in that way to follow Zara- thustra-if only in that first step across the bridge. The statement, which looks like an answer, nonetheless wants us to take note, wants to make us more alert, as it conducts us back to the question that serves as our title.
Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? The question now asks who this teacher is. Who is this figure which, at the stage of metaphysics' com- pletion, appears within metaphysics? Nowhere else in the history of
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 231
Western metaphysics has the essential figure been expressly created in this way for its respective thinker-or, to put it more appropriately and literally, nowhere else has that figure been so tellingly thought. No- where else-unless at the beginning of Western thought, in Par- menides, though there only in veiled outlines.
Essential to the figure of Zarathustra remains the fact that the teacher teaches something twofold which coheres in itself: eternal re- turn and overman. Zarathustra is himself in a certain way this coher- ence. That said, he too remains a riddle, one we have scarcely envisaged.
"Eternal return of the same" is the name for the Being of beings. "Overman" is the name for the human essence that corresponds to such Being.
On what basis do Being and the essence of human being belong together? How do they cohere, if Being is no fabrication of human beings and humanity no mere special case among beings?
Can the coherence of Being and the essence of human being be discussed at all, as long as our thinking remains mired in the previous conception of man? According to it, man is animal rationale, the ra- tional animal. Is it a coincidence, or a bit of lyrical ornamentation, that the two animals, eagle and serpent, accompany Zarathustra; that they tell him who he must become, in order to be the one he is? In the figure of the two animals the union of pride and discernment is to come to the fore for those who think.
Yet we have to know what Nietzsche thinks concerning these two traits. Among the notes sketched during the period when Thus Spoke Zarathustra was com- posed we read: "It seems to me that modesty and pride belong to one another quite closely. . . . What they have in common is the cool, unflinching look of appraisal" (XIV, 99). And elsewhere in these notes (101):
People talk so stupidly about pride-and Christianity even tried to make us feel sinful about it! The point is that whoever demands great things ofhim- self, and achieves those things, must feel quite remote from those who do not. Such distance will be interpreted by these others as a "putting on airs"; but he knows it [distance] only as continuous toil, war, victory, by day and by night. The others have no inkling of all this!
232 THF. ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
The eagle: the proudest animal; the serpent: the most discerning animal. And both conjoined in the circle in which they hover, in the ring that embraces their essence; and circle and ring once again inter- fused.
The riddle of who Zarathustra is, as teacher of eternal return and overman, is envisaged by us in the spectacle of the two animals. In this spectacle we can grasp more directly and more readily what our presen- tation tried to exhibit as the matter most worthy of question, namely, the relati. on of Being to that living being, man.
And behold! An eagle soared through the air in vast circles, and a serpent hung suspended from him, not as his prey, but as though she were his friend: for she had coiled about his neck.
"These are my animals! " said Zarathustra, and his heart was filled with joy.
*** A NOTE ON THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Nietzsche himself knew that his "most abysmal thought" remains a riddle. All the less reason for us to imagine that we can solve the riddle. The obscurity of this last thought of Western metaphysics dare not tempt us to circumvent it by some sort of subterfuge.
At bottom there are only two such routes of escape.
Either one avers that this thought of Nietzsche's is a kind of "mysti- cism" that our thinking should not bother to confront.
Or one avers that this thought is as old as the hills, that it boils down to the long-familiar cyclical notion of cosmic occurrence. Which no- tion can be found for the first time in Western philosophy in Hera- clitus.
This second piece of information, like all information of that sort, tells us absolutely nothing. What good is it if someone determines with respect to a particular thought that it can be found, for example, "al- ready" in Leibniz or even "already" in Plato? What good are such references when they leave what Leibniz and Plato were thinking in the same obscurity as the thought they claim to be clarifying with the help of these historical allusions?
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 233
As for the first subterfuge, according to which Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence of the same is a mystic phantasmagoria, a look at the present age might well teach us a different lesson-presupposing of course that thinking is called upon to bring to light the essence of modern technology.
What else is the essence of the modern power-driven machine than one offshoot of the eternal recurrence of the same? But the essence of such machines is neither something machine-like nor anything me- chanical. Just as little can Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence of the same be interpreted in a mechanical sense.
That Nietzsche interpreted and experienced his most abysmal thought in terms of the Dionysian only speaks for the fact that he still thought it metaphysically, and had to think it solely in this way. Yet it says nothing against the fact that this most abysmal thought conceals something unthought, something which at the same time remains a sealed door to metaphysical thinking.
(See the lecture course "What Calls for Thinking? " taught during the winter semester of 1951-52 and published in book form by Max Niemeyer, Tiibingen, in 1954. *)
*Translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray as What Is Called Thinking? in 1968 for the Harper & Row Heidegger Series.
ANALYSIS AND GLOSSARY
Analysis
By DAVID FARRELL KRELL
Heidegger is so insistent about our heeding the kinds of music eternal recurrence makes-whether it is a thought plucked on skillfully fash- ioned lyres or cranked out of barrel organs-that we may be justified in listening now to a brief selection of its orchestrations. I shall pass over in silence a large number of the thought's earlier echoes, such as those pious ones we find in Goethe, and cite a few of the more daring anticipations and recapitulations of Nietzsche's most thoughtful bur- den.
Early in 1902, seven years before the first English translation of Also sprach Zarathustra appeared and six years before H. L. Mencken be- gan to exalt Nietzsche to the English-speaking world, a young Ameri- can novelist on the threshold of a lifelong conversion to socialism sported briefly yet passionately the banner of overman:
I sat in silence. "Do I gather from your words," I asked, "that immortality is not one of the privileges of this race? "
He smiled again. "The spiritual life," he said, "does not begin until the thought of immortality is flung away. . . . "
"This people," I asked-"what do they know about God? "
"They know no more than men do," was the answer, "except that they know they know nothing. They know that the veil is not lifted. It is not tha~ for which they seek-life is their task, and life only; to behold its endless fruition; to dwell in the beauty of it, to wield power of it; to toil at its whirling loom, to build up palaces of music from it. . . . "
UPTON SINCLAIR, The Overman
Yet Upton Sinclair was not the first American writer to respond to the raptures of Nietzschean thought. Another managed it when Nietz-
238 THE ETERI\'AL RECURREI\'CE OF THE SAME
sche himself was only six years old. Herman Melville places poor Queequeg in his coffin, then observes:
How he wasted and wasted away in those few long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weak- ened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick, chapter CX
Queequeg survives the illness, of course, and uses his coffin as a sea-chest. After the catastrophe Ishmael will use it as a writing table. Ishmael's account will unite the two principal sources of Zarathustran imagery-mountain summits and the sea-the heights and depths visited by Zarathustra's eagle:
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
Moby-Dick, chapter XCVI
A more recent attestation to the thought of eternal recurrence in- volves the demise and return of a "distinguished phenomenologist," and hence expresses the more scientific side of Nietzsche's fundamen- tal thought:
Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?
Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his come- tary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly
Analysis 239
he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an es- tranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or of the silver king.
What would render such return irrational?
An unsatisfactory equation between an exodus and return in time through reversible space and an exodus and return in space through irreversible time.
JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses, "Ithaca"
Finally, the following poem by Rainer Maria Rilke expresses the more playful side of the thought that is hardest to bear, indeed as though spinning to a hurdy-gurdy tune:
The Carrousel
Jardin du Luxembourg
With a roof and the roof's vast shadow turns awhile the whole assembly
of pinto ponies fresh from the country which, long delaying, finally goes down. True, some are hitched to wagons, Though mien and mane are fierce;
an angry snarling lion goes with them and now and then a snow white elephant.
Even a buck is there, as in a wood, except he wears a saddle, and astride, a little girl in blue, strapped tight.
And a boy palely rides the lion
and grips with a warm hand,
while the lion bares its teeth, loops its tongue.
And now and then a snow white elephant.
And on the ponies they glide by,
girls, too, aglow, this leap of ponies almost outgrown; as they plunge
they look up, gaze absently, this way-
240 THE ETER! \:AL RECURRENCE OF THE SAJ\H, And now and then a snow white elcph;mt.
On and on it whirls, that it might end; circles and spins and knows no goal.
A red, a green, a gray sailing by,
a tiny profile, just begun-.
And, turned this way, sometimes a smile, beaming, blinding, lavished utterly
on this breathless sightless play. . . .
from Neue Gedichte, 1907
In 1936 Heidegger began his series of lecture courses on Nietzsche's philosophy with an inquiry into will to power as art, now published as Volume I of this series. The axial question of that inquiry proved to be the discordant relation in Nietzsche's thought between art and truth. The latter was no longer to be associated primarily with knowledge (Erkenntnis) but with the grand style of artistic creativity. What role "the rigor of knowledge" might play in Nietzsche's philosophy became the object of Heidegger's 1939 course on will to power as knowledge, published in Volume III of this series. The centrality of "the grand style of creation" was clear from the start, however: art and the artist's devotion to eternal recurrence were to serve as the countermovement to nihilism, the theme of Heidegger's fourth and final lecture course on Nietzsche, delivered in 1940 and now appearing in Volume IV of this series. Thus the thought of eternal return of the same, which Heidegger interpreted during the summer semester of 1937, serves as a point of convergence or departure for virtually all of Heidegger's lec- tures on Nietzsche's philosophy.
Yet the significance of that thought extends beyond the scope of the lecture courses themselves. Whereas the essays of the 1940s tend to constrict the thought of eternal return in a schematic, quasi-scholastic interpretation-will to power as the essentia of beings, eternal recur- rence as their existentia--the 1937 lecture course remains sensitive to the multiplicity of perspectives and the full range of registers in eternal recurrence, a thought that encroaches on the fundamental experience of Being and Time and on the experience of thinking in Heidegger's
Analysis 241
later work. Hence it is to the 1937 lecture course that Heidegger's renewed preoccupations with Nietzsche in the early 1950s repair. For all these reasons, "The Eternal Recurrence of the Same" may be called the summit of Heidegger's lecture series, or, paraphrasing Nietzsche, the peak of Heidegger's meditation.
I. THE STRUCTURE AND MOVEMENT OF THE 1937 LECTURE COURSE AND THE 1953 PUBLIC LECTURE
In the first section of the lecture course Heidegger sketches the four major divisions he intends his course to have. The first is to be a "preliminary presentation" of the doctrine of eternal return in terms of its genesis, its sundry configurations, and its unique domain. The sec- ond major division is to define the essence of a "fundamental meta- physical position" and to delineate various such positions in prior metaphysics. The third is to interpret Nietzsche's as the last possible position. Finally, the fourth is to thematize the end of Western philos- ophy as such and the inauguration of a new, "other" commencement.
A remark that Heidegger makes at the end of section 24 suggests that only two of the original plan's four divisions saw the light of day. As was quite often the case, Heidegger had planned more than he could deliver. No more than the first division received full treatment; time permitted only a brief sally into the second. A fin du semestre Coda on the themes of Nietzschean amor Eati and Heideggerian "telling silence" brought the course to its precipitous close.
The first major division of the course (sections 1-24) focuses on Nietzsche's communication of the eternal recurrence of the same; the second interprets that doctrine as a fundamental metaphysical position. Each objeet commands its own methodology, the first division requirJ ing a close reading of Nietzsche's texts, the second a daring yet more distant effort to locate Nietzsche in the history of Western philosophy as a whole. The juxtaposition of these two strategies-close contact and vast distance, detail and perspective, thrust and feint, reading and writing-lends the lecture course its particular tension. Nevertheless, the entire drama develops but one theme. The first sentence of the first section of the first division reads: "Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysi-
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cal position is captured in his doctrine of the eternal return of the same.
The first major division presents Nietzsche's own communications of eternal return. Yet a curious rift threatens its very structure. In the middle of his account of "On the Vision and the Riddle" (in section 6) Heidegger stops abruptly. The occasion for the caesura is that curious shift of scene in the vision-from the gateway "Moment" to the strick- en shepherd. Heidcgger does not recommence his account of the latter until section 24. In other words, sections 7 to 23, the bulk of the course as such, constitute a kind of parenthesis in Heidegger's analysis of the second (and principal) communication of eternal recurrence. The larger part of that parenthesis deals with Nietzsche's unpublished notes on eternal return. However, no matter how vital Heidegger be- lieves such notes to be, he carefully inserts his entire discussion of them into that communication of Nietzsche's entitled Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In fact, he begins to discuss the notes only after he has moved forward unobtrusively to the themes of Zarathustra's solitude, his animals, and his convalescence (sections 7 and 8). He even ad- vances to Nietzsche's third communication of eternal return, in Beyond Good and Evil. In retrospect, this unobtrusive move forward to "The Convalescent," seeking as it does to define the thought that is hardest to bear in terms of Nietzsche's own communication of it, is the most communicative gesture of the entire lecture course.
Heidegger begins (section 1) by affirming eternal recurrence as the fundamental thought of Nietzsche's philosophy. As a thought that reaches out toward being as a whole, eternal return of the same stands in vigorous opposition to the fundamental metaphysical positions represented by Platonism and by the Christian tradition as a whole. Nietzsche's fundamental thought has its immediate genesis (section 2) in the landscape of the Oberengadin, which Nietzsche first saw in 1881; yet echoes of it can be found in an early autobiographical sketch and in the late work Ecce Homo. Heidegger ventures into these auto- biographical texts, not in order to reduce eternal return to a mere confession of faith on Nietzsche's part, but to establish as the funda- mental task of Nietzsche's life the thinking of eternal recurrence of the
Analysis 243
same. Nietzsche communicates the thought only reluctantly, crypti- cally, and leaves most of his notes concerning it unpublished. His first communication of it (section 3), in The Gay Science, portrays eternal recurrence as "the greatest burden," that is, a thought that both in- quires into being as a whole and testifies to the thinker's "loneliest loneliness. " The affirmation of existence-of our lives as we have lived them-and of the ceaseless reiteration of the same is tied to what Hei- degger calls the "authentic appropriation" of our existence as a "self. " Perhaps for that reason the thought of return (section 4) is said to be the hardest to bear of all thoughts, the tragic thought par excellence. To think it is to join Zarathustra in the fateful and fatal adventure of downgoing (Untergang) and transition (Ubergang). The "eternity" of eternal return provides nothing resembling sanctuary from time, death, or decision.
The second communication of the thought (section 5) occurs in and as Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche creates the figure of Zarathustra for the express purpose of communicating his thought of thoughts. The thought itself appears in that work in "figures of speech," meta- phors, images, simulacra of all kinds; the how of the communication is at least as important as the what. The book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written for everyone and no one, is for those who are learning to be beneficent to life. Yet the difficulties of reading-plus Heidegger's reservations concerning his own procedure-make all complacency impossible. The crucial section of the book proves to be "On the Vi- sion and the Riddle," which Heidegger proceeds to discuss (section 6). After a mammoth interruption (sections 7 to 23), he takes up the thread of the riddle in section 24, the culminating section of the first
major division of his course.
In section 6 Heidegger suggests that the riddle has to do with the
"loneliest loneliness" of the thinker who thinks the truth-that is, the openness and unconcealment, aletheia--of being as a whole. He re- counts Zarathustra's tale of his encounter with the spirit of gravity, the dwarf, at the gateway Augenblick, "Glance of an Eye," or "Moment. " The eternity that each avenue at the gateway traverses--one forward, the other rearward-is for the dwarf a matter of contempt. Thus a
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common interpretation of eternal recurrence (as the cyclical nature of sacred time and the perfect ring of truth) is placed in the mouth of the dwarf who takes things too easily. For the thought itself, suggesting that "in an infinite time the course of a finite world is necessarily already completed," threatens to cripple all action in the present. When Zara- thustra poses his second question to the dwarf, whether "I and you in the gateway" must not have recurred countless times, the dwarf not only fails to reply but vanishes altogether. The spirit of gravity cannot adopt a stance of its own in the Moment and so must disappear, leav- ing riddlers to pose a number of questions concerning the gateway and its avenues--questions such as (l) the infinity of past and future time, (2) the reality or actuality of time as something more than a mere form of intuition, and (3) the finite existence of beings in time. These are among the questions that propel Heidegger to Nietzsche's unpublished notes.
However, before he takes up the suppressed notes Heidegger turns his attention to the animals that accompany Zarathustra up to a certain point in his convalescence (sections 7-8) and to the third communica- tion of eternal return as circulus vitiosus deus (section 9). These sec- tions constitute no mere interlude in Heidegger's account. In "The Convalescent" (section 8), which we must now recall more closely, Heidegger in fact appears to reach the core of Nietzsche's second com- munication of eternal return.
Zarathustra's animals, his proud eagle and discerning serpent, are the companions and enforcers of his solitude. Their conjunction, a vortex of coils and rings, yields the most compelling emblem of recur- rence. The animals speak to Zarathustra of eternal return during the latter's convalescence, which is the culmination of his downgoing. Their master must recuperate from the encounter with his own most abysmal thought, his own ultimate recess, which he has not yet truly incorporated. The circle of recurrence proves to be the circle of life and suffering; however much the eagle of its emblem soars, the circle itself tends to Untergang. Under the weight of his most abysmal thought, Zarathustra collapses. Seven days and nights he lies prostrate, feeding on the red and yellow berries his pride has fetched, berries of semblance and passionate creativity, the colors of will to power as
Analysis 245
eternal recurrence. The animals now try to seduce Zarathustra back into the world, as though it were a garden of delights rather than the theater of tragedy. The thought of eternal return-seduction and so- briety, intoxication and lucidity, contemptuous grumbling and rhap- sodic song, satyr-play and tragedy, the conjunction in each case bridging the smallest gap-must now become Zarathustra's thought. Yet the suspicion obtrudes that Zarathustra's animals are humming the dwarfs own ditty. How can the difference between the thought's two modes of reception be preserved? What decides whether there is any difference at all? Not for nothing is the thought of return both the hardest to bear and the most difficult: to think being as a whole as eternal displacement of the goal is to utter "a cry of distress and calami- ty," and . not to whistle a happy tune.
What turns the doctrine into a ditty? The assurance that all is bound for Emersonian compensation-though, to be fair, Emerson too, as Nietzsche well knew, had recurrent doubts-implies that we may dis- pense with all decision. Thus the dwarf makes light of the thought of return. He refuses to abandon his perch on the periphery and to enter the gateway itself. He declines to stand in the Moment. Viewed from the sidelines, the two avenues diverge as if to meet indifferently in some distant eternity. Yet when a self stands in the gateway where past and future "affront one another" and "collide," existence ceases to be a spectator sport. In the "flash of an eye" the thinker must look both fore and aft, "turned in two ways," and must study the internecine strife of time. "Whoever stands in the Moment lets what runs counter to itself come to collision, though not to a standstill, by cultivating and sustaining the strife between what is assigned him as a task and what has been given him as his endowment. " It is the effrontery of time that in it we collide against mortality and strive with it, closing in the glance of an eye and not in some remote infinity. Nevertheless, the strife of time dare not provoke our revulsion or antagonism; it is not effrontery after all but an affronting, or better, a confronting. To stand in the Moment-to be the Moment-is to decide how everything recurs. Certain matters are of course already decided. The eternal re- turn of the Last Man, the little man, for example. As though he had as much right to the gateway as one's self. Zarathustra's heroism rests in
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his having gone to meet his supreme suffering-the eternal recurrence of the Last Man-as well as his supreme hope-the inception of over- man. At this juncture Heidegger reminds us of the motto inscribed over his own lecture course, as over a gateway: "Everything in the hero's sphere turns to tragedy. . . . " With Zarathustra the tragic era begins. Tragic insight has nothing to do with either pessimism or opti- mism, "inasmuch as in its willing and in its knowing it adopts a stance toward being as a whole, and inasmuch as the basic law of being as a whole consists in struggle. " In such struggle the teacher of eternal return must come to understand himself as transition and demise, Obergang and Untergang. "In the end, Zarathustra hears which eterni- ty it is that his animals are proclaiming to him, the eternity of the Moment that embraces everything in itself at once: the downgoing. "
Thus the entire discussion of Nietzsche's first two communications of eternal return, in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, respectively, comes to a head in section 8, "The Convalescent. " The first communication stresses the essentially tragic nature of beings in general, the second the tragic insight gained in the glance of the e y e - eternity as the Moment. These communications converge, according to Heidegger, in the matter of thinking, namely, thinking eternal recurrence in the essential context of the question of being as a whole, in pursuit of Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position. The third communication of eternal return (section 9) takes us one step closer to that position.
The third communication proceeds from "Zarathustra the godless" to "the quintessence of religion. " The latter is the circulus vitiosus deus, the "ring" of recurrence that conjoins divinity and " 'world' per- haps? " Because the Christian God of morality is utterly dead, the ques- tion of world, of being as a whole, becomes compelling. The question itself necessitates the creation of gods and the re-creation of humanity.