A demonic inspiration, yes, but not science; a
terrifying
condition, yes, but not "gay"!
Heidegger - Nietzsche - v1-2
We might be tempted to make light of the way Nietzsche speaks of himself in his writings, thinking that an exaggerated tendency to self-observation and self-exhibition un- derlay his work.
If we add to that the happenstance that Nietzsche's life ended in insanity, then we can readily close the case: the proclivity to take his own person so seriously we may consider the herald of his later madness.
The extent to which this view is mistaken will have become obvious by the time our lecture course has come to a close.
Even his final autobiographical work, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, written in the autumn of 1888, on the very eve of his collapse, a work that does not appear to be lacking in extreme self-inflation, may not be judged in terms of the insanity that follows it.
That book too must attain its significance from the context in which all of Nietzsche's autobiographical observations belong; that is to say, from the task of his thought and the historical moment of that task.
If Nietzsche always and again meditates on himself, it is nonetheless the very opposite of~ vain self-mirroring.
It is in fact Nietzsche's perpetually renewed readi- ness for the sacrifice that his task demanded of him; it is a necessity that Nietzsche had sensed ever since the days of his wakeful youth.
How else can we account for the fact that on September 18, 1863, as a nineteen-year-old secondary school pupil, Nietzsche writes a sketch of his life that contains sentences like these: "As a plant I was born close
10 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
to God's green acres,* as a human being in a pastor's house. " The conclusion of this text, tracing the path of his life up to that moment, reads as follows:
And so the human being outgrows everything that once surrounded him. He does not need to break the fetters; unexpectedly, when a god beckons, they fall away. And where is the ring that ultimately encircles him? Is it the world? Is it God? t
This autobiographical sketch was first discovered in 1936 among the papers that were in the possession of Nietzsche's sister. Upon my recommendation the Nietzsche Archive published it in a special edi- tion. My intention in making the recommendation was to provide contemporary and future German nineteen-year-olds with some essen- tial food for thought.
Nietzsche's retrospective and circumspective glances at his life are never anything else than prospective glances into his task. For him that task alone is reality proper. Within it all relationships hang suspended -those he has to himself, to the friends who are closest to him, and to those strangers he would win over. This fact accounts for Nietzsche's remarkable habit of writing drafts of his letters directly into his manu- scripts. He does that, not because he wants to economize on paper, but because his letters pertain to his oeuvres. Letters too are meditations. But only the magnitude of the task and the fortitude in fulfilling it give Nietzsche the right to such concentration on the solitary self. Better said, they make such concentration imperative. Nietzsche's reports concerning himself may therefore never be read as though they were someone's diary entries; they dare not be scanned solely in order to satisfy our idle curiosity. No matter how often appearances may suggest the contrary, these reports were the most difficult things for him, inas- much as they pertain to the utter uniqueness of his mission, a mission that was his and his alone. Part of that mission consisted in telling his own story, a telling that makes palpable the fact that in a time of
• Gottesacker: literally, the cemetery.
t Heidegger cites the first edition of this text, My Life: Autobiographical Sketches of the Young Nietzsche (Frankfurt am Main, 1936). See Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Biinden (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1956), Ill, 107-10.
The Genesis ofthe Doctrine ofReturn 11
decline, a time when all is counterfeit and pointless activity, thinking in the grand style is genuine action, indeed, action in its most powerful
- t h o u g h most silen~form.
"mere theory" and useful "praxis" makes no sense. But Nietzsche also knew that it is the exceptional quality of the creator not to need others in order to be liberated from his own petty ego. "When was a great man ever his own devotee, his own disciple? He had already set him- self aside when he went over to the side of greatness! " (XII, 346; from the years 1882-84). But this does not preclude-it in fact requires- that the genuine thinker stand firm on the granite within him, the bedrock of his essential thought. "Are you one who as a thinker is faithful to his principle, not after the manner of a quibbler, but like a soldier faithful to his command? " (XIII, 39; cf. 38). Such remarks ought to prevent our misinterpreting Nietzsche's reports about himself -that is to say, about the task within him-either as moody brooding or as the sheer flaunting of his own ego.
The biographical sketch we mentioned earlier, that of the nineteen- year-old Nietzsche, concludes with the following questions: "And where is the ring that ultimately encircles him [the human being]? Is it the world? Is it God? " Nietzsche answers the question concerning the ring that encircles and embraces beings as a whole some two decades later-with his doctrine of the eternal return of the same. In the final episode of Part Three of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "The Seven Seals (or The Yea-and-Amen Song)," from the year 1884, Nietzsche writes: "Oh, how could I not be ardent for eternity and for the hymeneal ring of rings, the ring of return? " In one of the earliest plans for the presen- tation of the doctrine of return, marked "Sils-Maria, August 26, 1881" (XII, 427), we read: "Fourth book: dithyrambic, all-embracing: 'An-
nulus aeternitatis. 'The desire to experience it all once again, an eter- nity of times. " Answering the question posed earlier-as to whether this ring be the world or God, or neither of the two, or both together in their original unity-proves to be the same as explicating the doc- trine of the eternal return of the same.
Our first task is to hear Nietzsche's report concerning the genesis of the thought of eternal return of the same. We find that report in the book mentioned earlier, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One
Here the actual distinction between
12 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Is, written in 1888 but first published in 1908 (now in volume XV of the Grossoktav edition). The third division of that text bears the title "Why I Write Such Good Books. " Here Nietzsche describes in chronological order each of his published writings. The section on Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One begins as follows (XV, 85):
I shall now relate the history of Zarathustra. The basic conception of the work, the thought ofeternal return, the highest formula of affirmation that can ever be achieved, originates in the month of August in the year 1881. It is jotted on a page signed with the phrase "6,000 feet beyond humanity and time. " On the day I wrote it I had gone walking in the woods by the iake of Silvaplana. By a mightily towering pyramidal boulder not far from Surlei I stopped. The thought came to me then.
The thought of eternal return came to Nietzsche in the landscape of the Oberengadin, which Nietzsche visited for the first time during that summer of 1881. The landscape of the Engadin seemed to him one of life's greatest gifts; from that point on it became one of his principal places of work. (Whoever is unfamiliar with this landscape will find it portrayed in the opening pages of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's fiirg Jenatsch. )* The thought of eternal return was not discovered in or
• Conrad Ferdinand Meyer published Jiirg Jenatsch: A Tale of County Biinden in 1874, about six years before Nietzsche's first visit to Sils-Maria. The countryside near the Julier Pass, the locale of Meyer's novel, lies a mere five kilometers from Lake Silvaplana, some ten kilometers from Sils-Maria. At the risk of transforming the Heidegger/Nietz- sche encounter into a bucolic travelogue, I translate the opening paragraphs of Meyer's tale:
The midday sun shone above the bare heights of the Julier Pass and its ring of moun- tain cliffs in the county of Biinden. The stone walls were baking and shimmering under the stinging, vertical rays. Every now and then, when a mighty stormcloud rolled out of the distance and drifted overhead, the mountain walls seemed to move, approach one another threateningly and uncannily, oppressing the landscape. The sparse patches ofsnow and the tongues ofglaciers suspended between the mountain crags first glared, then receded into frosty green obscurity. A humid silence covered all, broken only by the vague sound of a lark flitting among the smooth boulders. From time to time the sharp whistle of a woodchuck pierced the wilderness.
Between the soaring peaks of the pass, to the right and left of the donkey path, stood two truncated columns of rock that must have been defying time there for thousands of years. Storms had hollowed out the top of one of the columns like a basin. There
The Genesis ofthe Doctrine ofReturn 13
calculated from other doctrines. It simply came. But like all great thoughts it came only because, surreptitiously, its way had been paved by long labors and great travail. What Nietzsche here calls a "thought" is-grasped in a provisional way-a projection upon beings as a whole, with a view to the question of how being is what it is. Such a projection opens up beings in a way that alters their countenance and importance. Truly to think an essential thought of this sort means to enter into the novel lucidity opened up by the thought; it means to see all things in its light and to find oneself totally ready and willing to face all the decisions implicated in the thought. Of course, we are inclined to take such thoughts as "mere" thoughts, as something unreal and ineffectual. In truth, this thought of eternal return of the same has a shattering impact on all Being. The span of the thinker's vision no longer ends at the horizon of his "personal experiences. " Something other than he himself looms there, abiding beneath, above, and beyond him, something that no longer pertains to him, the thinker, but to which he can only devote himself. This characteristic of the event is not contradicted by the fact that the thinker at first and for a long time preserves the insight as totally his own, inasmuch as he must become the site of its development. That is the reason why Nietzsche initially says so little concerning his insight into the "eternal return of the same. " Even to his few intimates he speaks only by way of indirection. Thus on August 14, 1881, he writes from Sils-Maria to his friend and assistant Peter Gast:
Now, my dear and good friend! The August sun is over us, the year is in retreat, and it grows quieter and more peaceful in the mountains and woods. Thoughts loom on my horizon the like of which I've never seen-I'll allow nothing to be uttered of them and will preserve myself in imperturbable tranquility. I shall have to live a few years longer!
At that time Nietzsche planned to lapse into silence for the following ten years, in order to make himself ready for the development of the thought of return. True, he broke this planned silence several times
rainwater had gathered. A bird hopped about its edge and sipped at the clear, lustral water.
Suddenly, out of the distance resounded the barking of a dog, reiterated, mocked by an echo. . . .
14 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
the next year and in subsequent years; nevertheless, in his writings he spoke of his fundamental thought either in very brief straightforward references or only circuitously, in cryptic passwords and parables. Sev- eral years later, in 1886, he characterized the attitude that encouraged his silence concerning the most essential things in these words: "One no longer loves his insight sufficiently when he communicates it" (Beyond Good and Evil, number 160).
At the moment when "the thought of eternal return" came over him, the metamorphosis which his fundamental mood had been un- dergoing for some time now reached its final stage. Nietzsche's readiness for a metamorphosis is betrayed in the very title of a book published a bit earlier in the year 1881, The Dawn. That book bears as its motto an epigram from the Indian Rigveda: "There are so many dawns that have not yet begun to break. " The final fortification of that transformed fundamental mood, in which Nietzsche now for the first time stood firm in order to confront his fate, is announced in the title of the book that appeared the following year, 1882: The Gay Science ("La gaya scienza"). After an introductory "Prelude," the text is divided into four books. In the second edition (1887) a fifth book and an ap- pendix were added, along with a new preface. At the conclusion of the first edition of The Gay Science Nietzsche for the first time spoke publicly of his thought of eternal return. And so it seems that hardly a year had passed when Nietzsche not only broke his proposed silence but also neglected to love his insight so well that he dare not commu- nicate it. Yet his communication of it is quite strange. It is merely appended to the conclusion of The Gay Science as an afterthought. The thought of return is not presented there as a doctrine. It is tacked on as an eccentric notion, as though the idea had just struck Nietz- sche, as though he were playing with thoughts that were merely possi- ble. The communication is not a genuine sharing with others; it is
rather a veiling. That is also true of Nietzsche's next utterance con- cerning the thought of return, which comes three years later in the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1884). Here Nietzsche does speak directly of the eternal return of the same, and in greater detail, but he does so in the poetic form of a speech placed in the mouth of a poetically fashioned figure, namely, Zarathustra (VI, 223 ff. ). Fur-
The Genesis ofthe Doctrine ofReturn 15
thermore, the third and final communication by Nietzsche of his most essential thought is kept quite short and is merely posed in the form of a question. It appears in Beyond Good and Evil, published in 1886.
When we survey this series of three utterances it seems to offer precious little for a thought that is to be the fundamental thought of an entire philosophy. Such "precious little" in the communication amounts in effect to silence. And yet it is fitting silence. Whoever grows entirely taciturn betrays his silence, but the one who speaks sparely in veiled communication grows silent in such a way that genu- ine silence prevails.
Ifour knowledge were limited to what Nietzsche himselfpublished, we could never learn what Nietzsche knew perfectly well, what he carefully prepared and continually thought through, yet withheld. Only an investigation of the posthumously published notes in Nietz- sche's own hand will provide a clearer picture. These preliminary sketches of the doctrine of eternal return have in the meantime been published; they are scattered throughout volumes XII-XVI, the Nachlass volumes, of the Grossoktavausgabe. *
But in order for us to penetrate successfully the fundamental thought of Nietzsche's philosophy proper, it is very important that at the outset we distinguish between what Nietzsche himself communi- cated and what he withheld. Such a distinguishing between dire~t, presumably merely foreground communication and what seems to be an inscrutable taciturnity i s - i n philosophical utterances generally, and especially in those by Nietzsche-absolutely indispensable. At the same time, we dare not judge the matter pejoratively, as though what Nietzsche communicated were less significant than what he sup- pressed.
Philosophical communications are altogether different from scholar- ly publications. We have to make the distinction between these tWo perfectly clear, because we are all too inclined to measure philosoph- ical communications against the standard of publications in the
• A detailed critical account of these GOA volumes is hardly possible here. But see section II of the Analysis for a discussion of Nietzsche's unpublished sketches of eternal recurrence.
16 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
learned disciplines. In the course of the nineteenth century these disci- plines began to operate like industries. The point was to get the prod- uct that had been manufactured out onto the market as quickly as possible, so that it could be of use to others, but also so that the others could not pinch our discoveries or duplicate our own work. This has especially become the case in the natural sciences, where large-scale, expensive series of experiments have to be conducted. It is therefore altogether appropriate that we at long last have research facilities where we can gain a complete overview of the dissertations and reports on experimental results that have already clarified this or that question in this or that direction. To mention a negative example, for purposes of illustration: it has now come to light that the Russians are today con- ducting costly experiments in the field of physiology that were brought to successful completion fifteen years ago in America and Germany, experiments of which the Russians are totally unaware because of their boycott against foreign science.
The destiny of today's science too will be determined in conformity with the general trend in the history of man on our earth for the past hundred and fifty years, the trend, that is to say, toward industrial and technological organization. The significance of the word Wissenschaft will therefore develop in the particular direction that corresponds to the French concept of la science, whereby what is meant are the math- ematical, technical disciplines. Today the major branches of industry and our military Chiefs of Staff have a great deal more "savvy" con- cerning "scientific" exigencies than do the "universities"; they also have at their disposal the larger share of ways and means, the better resources, because they are indeed closer to what is "actual. "
What we call Geisteswissenschaft" will not regress, however, to the status of what were formerly called the "fine arts. " It will be transmogrified into a pedagogical tool for inculcating a "political worldview. " Only the blind arid the hopelessly romantic among us can still believe that the erstwhile structure and divisions of the sciences
• I. e. , the so-called "human" or "historical" or "cultural" sciences, such as economy, law, art, and religion. The word was introduced by the German translator of John Stuart Mill, who sought to render with its help Mill's "moral science. " The major theoretician of Geisteswissenschaft is of course Wilhelm Dilthey (Introduction to Geisteswissenschaft, 1883; The Construction ofthe Historical World in the Geisteswissenschaften, 1910).
The Genesis of the Doctrine of Return 17
and of scientific endeavor generally during the decade 1890-1900 can be preserved forever with all the congenial facades. Nor will the technical style of modern science, prefigured in its very beginnings, be altered if we choose new goals for such technology. That style will only be firmly embedded and absolutely validated by such new choices. Without the technology of the huge laboratories, without the technology of vast libraries and archives, and without the technology of a perfected machinery for publication, fruitful scientific work and the impact such work must have are alike inconceivable today. Every attempt to diminish or to hamper this state of affairs is nothing short of reactionary.
In contrast to "science," the state of affairs in philosophy is alto- gether different. When we say "philosophy" here, we mean only the creative work of the great thinkers. In the very way it is communicated such work arrives in its own time, knows its own laws. The haste to "get it out" and the anxiety about "being too late" do not apply here, if only because it belongs to the essence of every genuine philosophy that its contemporaries invariably misunderstand it. It is also the case that the philosopher must cease to be a contemporary to himself. The more essential and revolutionary a philosophical doctrine is, the more it needs to educate those men and women, those generations, who are to adopt it. Thus, for example, it still requires a great deal of effort for us today to grasp Kant's philosophy in its essential import and to liber- ate it from the misinterpretations of its contemporaries and advocates.
As for Nietzsche, he does not want to instill perfect comprehension by means of the few, cryptic things he says about his doctrine of eternal return. Rather, he wants to pave the way for a transformation of that fundamental attunement by which alone his doctrine can be compre- hensible and effective. What he hopes for his contemporaries is that they become fathers and forefathers of those who surely must come. (See Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, "On the Blessed Isles. "). "'
• Here Zarathustra calls himself a chilling north wind that tumbles ripe figs to the ground; those sweet fruits are his doctrines. He continues:
Once we said "God! " when we scanned distant seas. But now I have taught you to say ''Overman! "
God is a conjecture; but don't let your conjectures go farther than your will to create.
18 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
For all these reasons we will first bring before us those communica- tions ventured by Nietzsche himself; we will have to restrict ourselves to an altogether provisional commentary on them. After that we shall survey the materials that Nietzsche withheld.
Could you create a god? Then tell me no tales of gods! But you could well create the overman.
Perhaps not you yourselves, my brothers! But you could recreate yourselves into fathers and forefathers of the overman, and may this be your best creating!
3. Nietzsche's First Communication of the Doctrine of Return
Because the context and the mode of presentation are essential to a philosophical communication, our further efforts at understanding the thought of eternal return must be shaped by the fact that Nietzsche speaks of it for the first time in the year 1882 at the conclusion of his book The Gay Science. In the later, second edition, the one usually used today, passage number 341 constitutes the conclusion of Book IV. * Passage number 341, the penultimate one of this text (V, 265 f. ), contains the thought of return. What is said there pertains to "the gay science" as such, and runs as follows:
The greatest burden. -What would happen if one day or night a demon were to steal upon you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you, "You will have to live this life-as you are living it now and have lived it in the past---<>nce again and countless times more; and there will be nothing new to it, but every pain and every pleasure, every thought and sigh, and every- thing unutterably petty or grand in your life will have to come back to you, all in the same sequence and order-even this spider, and that moonlight between the trees, even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of
• Actually, of course, the first edition of The Gay Science closes not with number 341 but with number 342, lncipit tragoedia. But Heidegger wants to suggest that the latter actually belongs to Thus Spoke Zarathustra; that the fourth book of The Gay Sci~nce, "Sanctus Januarius," is the proper culmination of that work; and that number 341, "Das grosste Schwergewicht," is the proper culmination of Book IV. (It is worth noting that Giorgio Colli, the senior partner in the team that prepared the new historical-critical edition of Nietzsche's works, also considers Book IV of The Gay Science to have achieved "the expressive high-point of a magic harmony," while Book V suffers from a certain stridency. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Siimtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in IS Biinden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Munich/Berlin: DTV and Walter de Gruyter, 1980], III, 663. )
20 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
existence turning over and over-and you with it, speck of dust! " Would you not cast yourself down, gnash your teeth, and curse the demon who said these things? Or have you ever experienced a tremendous moment when you would reply to him, "You are a god; never have I heard anything more godly! " If that thought ever came to prevail in you, it would transform you, such as you are, and perhaps it would mangle you. The question posed to each thing you do, "Do you will this once more and countless times more? " would weigh upon your actions as the greatest burden! Or how beneficent would you have to become toward yourself and toward life to demand noth- ing more than this eternal sanction and seal? -
So this is the sort of thing Nietzsche regales us with toward the close of The Gay Science! A frightful prospect of a terrifying collective con- dition for beings in general. What is left of gaiety now? Do we not rather confront the onset of dread? Obviously. We need only cast a glance at the title of the passage that immediately follows and that concludes Book Four, passage number 342, which is entitled "Incipit tragoedia. " The tragedy begins. How can such knowledge still be called "gay science"?
A demonic inspiration, yes, but not science; a terrifying condition, yes, but not "gay"! Yet here it is not a matter of our gratuitous remarks concerning the title The Gay Science. All that matters is what Nietzsche is thinking about.
What does gay science mean? Here science is not a collective noun for the sciences as we find them today, with all their paraphernalia, in the shape they assumed during the course of the last century. Science means the stance adopted, and the will directed, toward essential knowing. Of course, we cannot get around the fact that a certain amount of acquired knowledge is proper to every knowing, and in Nietzsche's time that meant especially knowledge attained by the natu- ral sciences. But such acquired knowledge does not constitute the es- sence of genuine knowing. The latter lies in the basic relation- prevailing at any given time--of man to beings, and consequently also in the mode of truth and in the decisiveness we attain through this basic relation. Here the word Wissenschaft [science] resounds like Lei- denschaft [passion], namely, the passion of a well-grounded mastery over the things that confront us and over our own way of responding to what confronts us, positing all these things in magnificent and essential goals.
Nietzsche's Ji'. irst Communication of the Doctrine 21
Gay science? The gaiety mentioned here is not that of the inane "gay blade. " It is not the superficiality of fleeting enjoyment, the "fun" one might have, for example, even in undisturbed engrossment in scientific questions. What Nietzsche means is the cheerfulness that comes of a certain superiority, a cheerfulness that is not dashed by even the hardest and most terrifying matters. In the realm of knowing, cheerfulness is not dashed by the most questionable matters, but is rather invigorated by them, inasmuch as cheerfulness affirms the necessity of these most questionable things.
Only a gay science understood in this way can embrace a knowing that fathoms the terrifying character of the thought of eternal return- hence, a knowing that fathoms the thought in its essential import. Now we are better prepared to grasp the reason why Nietzsche commu- nicates this demonic thought only at the conclusion of The Gay Science: what is referred to here at the conclusion is-in terms of the matter-not the end but the beginning of the "gay science," its com- mencement and its end alike. The matter in question is the eternal return of the same, which the "gay science" must come to know, first and last, if it is to be proper knowing. "Gay science" is for Nietzsche nothing other than the name for that "philosophy" which in its funda- mental doctrine teaches the eternal return of the same.
Two matters are of equal importance for our understanding of this doctrine: first, the fact that Nietzsche first communicates it at the con- clusion of The Gay Science; and second, the way in which Nietzsche at the outset characterizes the thought of return. The appropriate pas- sage is number 341, entitled "The greatest burden. " The thought as burden! What do we think of when we say the word "burden"? * A burden hinders vacillation, renders calm and steadfast, draws all forces to itself; gathers them and gives them definition. A burden also exerts a downward pull, compelling us constantly to hold ourselves erect; but
• The German word das Schwergewicht nowadays means "heavyweight" and is re- stricted to athletics. But it carries connotations of chiefimportance or principal empha- sis, and I have chosen the word "burden" in order to capture these connotations. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger appear to hear in the word the related term der Schwerpunkt, "center of gravity," and both are aware of the ambiguity attached to matters of "great weight," which may stabilize us or wear us down, but which will most certainly deflect us from our former trajectory.
22 THE ETER! \:AL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
it also embodies the danger that we will fall down, and stay down. In this way the burden is an obstacle that demands constant "hurdling," constant surmounting. However, a burden creates no new forces, while it does alter the direction of their motion, thus creating for whatever force is available new laws of motion.
Yet how can a "thought" be a burden, that is to say, something that becomes determinative as rendering steadfast, gathering, drawing and restraining, or as altering directions? And what is this thought to deter- mine? Who is to be afflicted with this burden, in whom is it to be installed? Who is to bear it to great heights, in order not to remain below? Nietzsche provides the answer toward the close of the passage. As the question "Do you will this once more and countless times more? " the thought would everywhere and at all times weigh upon our actions. By "actions" Nietzsche does not mean merely practical activi- ties or ethical deeds; rather, he means the totality of man's relations to beings and to himself. The thought of eternal return is to be a burden -that is, is to be determinative-for our envelopment within beings as a whole.
Yet now we would really have to insist: How can a thought possess determinative force? "Thoughts"! Such fleeting things are to be a cen- ter of gravity? On the contrary, is not what is determinative for man precisely what crowds around him, his circumstances-for instance, his foodstuffs? Recall Feuerbach's famous dictum, "Man is what he eats. " And, along with nourishment, locale? Recall the teachings of the classical English and French sociologists concerning the milieu- meaning both the general atmosphere and the social order. But by no stretch of the imagination "thoughts"! To all this Nietzsche would reply that it is precisely a matter of thoughts, since these determine man even more than those other things; they alone determine him with respect to these very foodstuffs, to this locality, to this atmosphere and social order. In "thought" the decision is made as to whether men and women will adopt and maintain precisely these circumstances or whether they will elect others; whether they will interpret the chosen circumstances in this way or that way; whether under this or that set of conditions they can cope with such circumstances. That such deci-
Nietzsche's First Communication ofthe Doctrine 23
sions often collapse into thoughtlessness does not testify against the dominion of thought but for it. Taken by itself, the milieu explains nothing; there is no milieu in itself. In this regard Nietzsche writes (WM, 70; from the years 1885-86): "Against the doctrine of influence from the milieu and from extrinsic causes: the inner force is infinitely superior. " The most intrinsic of "inner forces" are thoughts. And if the thought of eternal return of the same thinks some by no means fortui- tous thought, by no means either this, that, or the other; if it instead thinks being as whole, as it is; and if this thought is actually thought, that is, if as a question it installs us amid beings and thereby places us at a distance from them; if this thought of eternal return is "the thought of thoughts," as Nietzsche at one point calls it (XII, 64); then should it not be perfectly capable of being a "burden" to every human being, and not simply one burden among others but "the greatest bur- den"?
Yet why the burden? What is man? Is he the creature that needs a burden, the creature that always afflicts himself with burdens, and has to do so? What sort of treacherous necessity is here in play? A burden can also drag down, can humiliate a man. And when he is all the way down the burden becomes superfluous, so that now, suddenly bereft of all burdens, he can no longer descry what he once was in his ascend- ancy, no longer notice that he is now as low as he can go. Instead, he takes himself to be the median and the measure, whereas these are but expressions of his mediocrity.
Was it only a pointless happenstance, was there nothing behind it, when the thought of this burden came to Nietzsche? Or did it come because all prior burdens had abandoned men and gone up in smoke? The experience of the necessity of a new "greatest burden," and the experience that all things have lost their weight, belong together:
The time is coming when we will have to pay for our having been Christians for two thousand years: we are losing the burden that allowed us to live. For some time we will not know whether we are coming or going. (WM, 30; written in 1888)
This statement, still obscure to us, should for the present merely indicate that Nietzsche's thought of the new "greatest burden" is rooted
24 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
in the context of two millennia of history. That is the reason for the way in which the thought is introduced in its first communication: "What would happen if one day. . . . " The thought is introduced as a question and a possibility. Indeed, the thought is not directly proffered by Nietzsche himself. How should a contemporary man--one who does not know whether he is coming or going, and Nietzsche must account himself such a one-how should such a man come upon this thought all by himself? Rather, what we hear is: "What would happen if . . . a demon were to steal upon you in your loneliest loneli- ness. . . . " Neither does the thought come from any arbitrary human being, nor does it come to any arbitrary human being in his or her most arbitrary everydayness, that is to say, in the midst of all the hub- bub that enables us to forget ourselves. The thought comes in a human being's "loneliest loneliness. " Where and when is that? Is it where and when a human being simply goes into retreat, withdraws to the periph- ery, and busies himself with his "ego"? No, more likely then and there where a human being is altogether himself, standing in the most essen- tial relationships of his historical existence in the midst of beings as a whole.
This "loneliest loneliness" subsists prior to and beyond every distin- guishing of I from Thou, of lffhou from the "We," and of the individ- ual from the community. In such loneliest loneliness there is no trace of individuation as isolation. It is rather a matter of that kind of in- dividuation which we must grasp as authentic appropriation, in which the human self comes into its own. * The self, authenticity, is not the "ego"; it is that Da-sein in which the relation of I to Thou, I to "We,"
• "Authentic appropriation" translates Heidegger's word Vereigentlichung. The novel term refers us back to the theme of "authenticity" in Being and Time, especially sections 25-27, on the problem of the selfhood of Dasein, and section 53, "Existential Projection of an Authentic Being toward Death. " Central to the latter is the notion of the death of Dasein as the "ownmost" or "most proper" (eigenste) possibility of existence, a possibility that Dasein must freely face and in this sense "appropriate. " Precisely at this point in Sein und Zeit (p. 264) Heidegger cites Zarathustra's words about the danger of our becoming "too old for our victories. " In Heidegger's subsequent view, thinking the thought of eternal recurrence is one decisive way to confront the danger and to rejuve- nate the task of "authentic appropriation. " See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 12th ed. (Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1972), pp. 263-64. Finally, compare "authentic appro- priation" to what Heidegger in section 24, below, calls "being-a-self. "
Nietzsche's First Communication ofthe Doctrine 25
and "We" to "Ye" is grounded; it is that on the sole basis of which these relationships can first be brought under control-must be brought under control if they are to be a force. In being a self, certain things are decided: the weight that things and human beings will have, the scale on which they will be weighed, and the one who will do the weighing. Imagine what would happen if in such loneliest loneliness a demon were to steal upon you and confront you with the eternal return of the same: "The eternal hourglass of existence turning over and over-and you with it, speck of dust! "
Nietzsche does not say what would in fact happen. He continues to question instead, and he uncovers two alternatives. Would you curse the demon, or would you perceive in him a god? Would you be man- gled by the thought, or would you ask nothing more than that it be true? Would you be dragged into the abyss by the greatest burden, or would you yourself become its even greater counterweight?
The way Nietzsche here patterns the first communication of the thought of the "greatest burden" makes it clear that this "thought of thoughts" is at the same time "the most burdensome thought" (XVI, 414). It is the most burdensome thought in several respects. It is most burdensome, for example, with respect to that which is to be thought in it, namely, being as a whole. The latter commands the heaviest weight and so is more burdensome in the sense of weightiest. But it is also the hardest to bear with respect to the thinking itself, and thus is the most difficult thought. Our thinking must penetrate in thought the innermost abundance of beings, must probe in thought the uttermost limits of being as a whole, and must at the same time proceed in thought through the human being's loneliest loneliness.
By virtue of such distinctions we are trying to clarify Nietzsche's thought. Clarification is always necessarily interpretation. For in it we employ corresponding yet different concepts and words. Let us there- fore insert at this point some remarks on Nietzsche's and our own use of language.
Nietzsche does not invoke "being as a whole. " We use this phrase in order to designate basically everything that is not simply nothing: na- ture (animate and inanimate), history (what it brings about, the per- sonages who fill it, and those who propel it), God, the gods, and
26 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
demigods. When we speak of things that are in being, we are also referring to what comes to be, what originates and passes away. For it already is no longer the nothing, or not yet the nothing. When we allude to things that are in being, we are also referring to appearance, illusion, deception, and falsehood. If such things were not in being they could not delude us and make us err. All these things too are named in the phrase "being as a whole. " Even its limit, nonbeing pure and simple, the nothing, pertains to being as a whole, inasmuch as without being as a whole there would be no nothing. Yet at the same time the phrase "being as a whole" means beings precisely as what we are asking about, what is worthy of question. The phrase leaves open the questions as to what being as such is and in what way it is. T o that extent the expression is no more than a collective noun. But it "col- lects" in such a way as to gather beings together; and it gathers them with a view to the question of the gathering that is proper to being itself. The phrase "being as a whole" thus designates the most ques- tionable matter and is hence the word most worthy of question.
As for Nietzsche, he is secure in his use of language here, but he is not unequivocal. When he means to refer to all reality or to the uni- verse he says "the world" [die Welt] or "existence" [das Dasein]. This usage derives from Kant. Whenever Nietzsche poses the question as to whether existence has meaning, whether a meaning can be defined for existence at all, his use of the word "existence" roughly parallels what we mean by "being as a whole"-though with some reservations. "Ex- istence" has for Nietzsche the same breadth of meaning as "world"; he also uses the word "life" to say the same thing. By "life" Nietzsche does not mean merely human life and human existence. We, on the other hand, use "life" only to designate beings that are vegetable or animal; we thereby differentiate human being from these other kinds, human being meaning something more and something other than mere "life. " For us the word Dasein definitively names something that is by no means coterminous with human being, and something thoroughly distinct from what Nietzsche and the tradition prior to him understand by "existence. " What we designate with the word Dasein does not arise in the history of philosophy hitherto. This difference in usage does not rest on some gratuitous obstinacy on our part. Behind
Nietzsche's First Communication ofthe Doctrine 27
it stand essential historical exigencies. But these differences in lan- guage are not to be mastered by artificial scrutiny and detection. Wax- ing in confrontation with the matter itself, we must become capable of the capable word. (On Nietzsche's conception of Dasein, see, for ex- ample, The Gay Science, Book IV, number 341; Book V, numbers 357, 373, and 374. )*
• In The Gay Science, number 341, Nietzsche speaks of "the eternal hourglass of existence," equating such Dasein with "this life," the Leben toward which one would have to become beneficent. Section 357, one of Nietzsche's most detailed statements on the German philosophical tradition (especially Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel), cites Scho- penhauer's lucubrations on the "value" or "meaning" of "existence" and Hegel's "gran- diose attempt" to convince us of "the divinity of existence. " In passage number 373 Nietzsche doubts whether the paragons of scientific optimism such as Herbert Spencer are capable of espying "genuinely great problems and question-marks," that is to say, questions pertaining to Dasein. Here, as in the earlier passages, Nietzsche equates Da- sein with Welt, identifying optimism as a particularly naive Welt-Interpretation. The latter is capable of seeing only the "most superficial and most extrinsic elements of existence. " Section 374 "Our new 'infinite'," also refers to the conceptual triad Dasein,
Welt, Leben. In reproducing it I have placed these words in capitals:
How far the perspectival character of existence extends, or even whether EXISTENCE has any other character than that; whether it is not the case that an EXISTENCE without interpretation, without "sense," amounts precisely to "nonsense"; whether, on the other hand, all EXISTENCE is not essentially an interpreting EXISTENCE;-it is fitting that these things cannot be descried by even the most diligent, painfully scrupulous analysis and self-examination of the intellect. . . . It is futile curiosity to want to know . . . , for example, whether some creature exists that can experience time as running backwards, or alternately forward and back (at which point another segmentation of LIFE . . . would be at hand). But I think that we today at least are far removed from such ridiculous vainglory. . . . The WORLD has rather once again become "infinite" to us, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it encompasses infinite interpreta- tions. . . .
4. "lncipit tragoedia"
The thought of eternal return of the same, as the greatest burden, is also the thought that is hardest to bear. What happens when we actual- ly think the thought? Nietzsche provides the answer in the title of the section that follows immediately upon his first communication of the most burdensome thought, and that forms the proper conclusion to The Gay Science (1st edition, 1882; number 342): "lncipit tragoedia. " The tragedy begins. Which tragedy? The tragedy of beings as such. But what does Nietzsche understand by "tragedy"? Tragedy sings the tragic. We have to realize that Nietzsche defines the tragic purely in terms of the beginning of tragedy as he understands it. When the thought of eternal return is thought, the tragic as such becomes the fundamental trait of beings. Viewed historically, this marks the beginning of the "tragic age for Europe" (WM, 37; cf. XVI, 448). What begins to hap- pen here transpires in utter stillness; it remains concealed for a long time and to most men; nothing of this history goes into the history books. "It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that approach on doves' feet govern the world" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, conclusion to Part II). "What does it matter that we more cautious and reserved ones do not for the nonce abandon the venerable belief that it is only the great thought that lends greatness to any deed or thing" (Beyond Good and Evil, number 241). And finally: "The world re- volves, not about the discoverers of new forms of hullaballoo, but about the discoverers of new values. It revolves inaudibly' (Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, Part Two, "Of Great Events").
Only the few, the rare, only those who have ears for such inaudible
revolutions will perceive the "Incipit tragoedia. " Yet how does Nietz- sche understand the essence of the tragic and of tragedy? W e know that Nietzsche's first treatise, published in 1872, was devoted to the ques- tion of "the birth of tragedy. " Experience of the tragic and meditation
"lncipit tragoedia" 29
on its ongm and essence pertain to the very basis of Nietzschean thought. Nietzsche's concept of the tragic grew steadily clearer in step with the inner transformation and clarification of his thinking. From the very outset he opposed the interpretation of Aristotle, according to which the tragic is said to accomplish katharsis, the moral cleansing and elevation that are attained when fear and pity are aroused. "I have repeatedly put my finger on the egregious misconception of Aristotle, who believed he had found the tragic emotions in two depressive af- fects, namely, terror and pity" (WM, 851; from the year 1888). The tragic has absolutely no original relation to the moral. "Whoever en- joys tragedy morally still has a few rungs to climb" (XII, 177; from 1881-82). The tragic belongs to the "aesthetic" domain. To clarify this we would have to provide an account of Nietzsche's conception of art.
10 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
to God's green acres,* as a human being in a pastor's house. " The conclusion of this text, tracing the path of his life up to that moment, reads as follows:
And so the human being outgrows everything that once surrounded him. He does not need to break the fetters; unexpectedly, when a god beckons, they fall away. And where is the ring that ultimately encircles him? Is it the world? Is it God? t
This autobiographical sketch was first discovered in 1936 among the papers that were in the possession of Nietzsche's sister. Upon my recommendation the Nietzsche Archive published it in a special edi- tion. My intention in making the recommendation was to provide contemporary and future German nineteen-year-olds with some essen- tial food for thought.
Nietzsche's retrospective and circumspective glances at his life are never anything else than prospective glances into his task. For him that task alone is reality proper. Within it all relationships hang suspended -those he has to himself, to the friends who are closest to him, and to those strangers he would win over. This fact accounts for Nietzsche's remarkable habit of writing drafts of his letters directly into his manu- scripts. He does that, not because he wants to economize on paper, but because his letters pertain to his oeuvres. Letters too are meditations. But only the magnitude of the task and the fortitude in fulfilling it give Nietzsche the right to such concentration on the solitary self. Better said, they make such concentration imperative. Nietzsche's reports concerning himself may therefore never be read as though they were someone's diary entries; they dare not be scanned solely in order to satisfy our idle curiosity. No matter how often appearances may suggest the contrary, these reports were the most difficult things for him, inas- much as they pertain to the utter uniqueness of his mission, a mission that was his and his alone. Part of that mission consisted in telling his own story, a telling that makes palpable the fact that in a time of
• Gottesacker: literally, the cemetery.
t Heidegger cites the first edition of this text, My Life: Autobiographical Sketches of the Young Nietzsche (Frankfurt am Main, 1936). See Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Biinden (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1956), Ill, 107-10.
The Genesis ofthe Doctrine ofReturn 11
decline, a time when all is counterfeit and pointless activity, thinking in the grand style is genuine action, indeed, action in its most powerful
- t h o u g h most silen~form.
"mere theory" and useful "praxis" makes no sense. But Nietzsche also knew that it is the exceptional quality of the creator not to need others in order to be liberated from his own petty ego. "When was a great man ever his own devotee, his own disciple? He had already set him- self aside when he went over to the side of greatness! " (XII, 346; from the years 1882-84). But this does not preclude-it in fact requires- that the genuine thinker stand firm on the granite within him, the bedrock of his essential thought. "Are you one who as a thinker is faithful to his principle, not after the manner of a quibbler, but like a soldier faithful to his command? " (XIII, 39; cf. 38). Such remarks ought to prevent our misinterpreting Nietzsche's reports about himself -that is to say, about the task within him-either as moody brooding or as the sheer flaunting of his own ego.
The biographical sketch we mentioned earlier, that of the nineteen- year-old Nietzsche, concludes with the following questions: "And where is the ring that ultimately encircles him [the human being]? Is it the world? Is it God? " Nietzsche answers the question concerning the ring that encircles and embraces beings as a whole some two decades later-with his doctrine of the eternal return of the same. In the final episode of Part Three of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "The Seven Seals (or The Yea-and-Amen Song)," from the year 1884, Nietzsche writes: "Oh, how could I not be ardent for eternity and for the hymeneal ring of rings, the ring of return? " In one of the earliest plans for the presen- tation of the doctrine of return, marked "Sils-Maria, August 26, 1881" (XII, 427), we read: "Fourth book: dithyrambic, all-embracing: 'An-
nulus aeternitatis. 'The desire to experience it all once again, an eter- nity of times. " Answering the question posed earlier-as to whether this ring be the world or God, or neither of the two, or both together in their original unity-proves to be the same as explicating the doc- trine of the eternal return of the same.
Our first task is to hear Nietzsche's report concerning the genesis of the thought of eternal return of the same. We find that report in the book mentioned earlier, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One
Here the actual distinction between
12 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Is, written in 1888 but first published in 1908 (now in volume XV of the Grossoktav edition). The third division of that text bears the title "Why I Write Such Good Books. " Here Nietzsche describes in chronological order each of his published writings. The section on Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One begins as follows (XV, 85):
I shall now relate the history of Zarathustra. The basic conception of the work, the thought ofeternal return, the highest formula of affirmation that can ever be achieved, originates in the month of August in the year 1881. It is jotted on a page signed with the phrase "6,000 feet beyond humanity and time. " On the day I wrote it I had gone walking in the woods by the iake of Silvaplana. By a mightily towering pyramidal boulder not far from Surlei I stopped. The thought came to me then.
The thought of eternal return came to Nietzsche in the landscape of the Oberengadin, which Nietzsche visited for the first time during that summer of 1881. The landscape of the Engadin seemed to him one of life's greatest gifts; from that point on it became one of his principal places of work. (Whoever is unfamiliar with this landscape will find it portrayed in the opening pages of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's fiirg Jenatsch. )* The thought of eternal return was not discovered in or
• Conrad Ferdinand Meyer published Jiirg Jenatsch: A Tale of County Biinden in 1874, about six years before Nietzsche's first visit to Sils-Maria. The countryside near the Julier Pass, the locale of Meyer's novel, lies a mere five kilometers from Lake Silvaplana, some ten kilometers from Sils-Maria. At the risk of transforming the Heidegger/Nietz- sche encounter into a bucolic travelogue, I translate the opening paragraphs of Meyer's tale:
The midday sun shone above the bare heights of the Julier Pass and its ring of moun- tain cliffs in the county of Biinden. The stone walls were baking and shimmering under the stinging, vertical rays. Every now and then, when a mighty stormcloud rolled out of the distance and drifted overhead, the mountain walls seemed to move, approach one another threateningly and uncannily, oppressing the landscape. The sparse patches ofsnow and the tongues ofglaciers suspended between the mountain crags first glared, then receded into frosty green obscurity. A humid silence covered all, broken only by the vague sound of a lark flitting among the smooth boulders. From time to time the sharp whistle of a woodchuck pierced the wilderness.
Between the soaring peaks of the pass, to the right and left of the donkey path, stood two truncated columns of rock that must have been defying time there for thousands of years. Storms had hollowed out the top of one of the columns like a basin. There
The Genesis ofthe Doctrine ofReturn 13
calculated from other doctrines. It simply came. But like all great thoughts it came only because, surreptitiously, its way had been paved by long labors and great travail. What Nietzsche here calls a "thought" is-grasped in a provisional way-a projection upon beings as a whole, with a view to the question of how being is what it is. Such a projection opens up beings in a way that alters their countenance and importance. Truly to think an essential thought of this sort means to enter into the novel lucidity opened up by the thought; it means to see all things in its light and to find oneself totally ready and willing to face all the decisions implicated in the thought. Of course, we are inclined to take such thoughts as "mere" thoughts, as something unreal and ineffectual. In truth, this thought of eternal return of the same has a shattering impact on all Being. The span of the thinker's vision no longer ends at the horizon of his "personal experiences. " Something other than he himself looms there, abiding beneath, above, and beyond him, something that no longer pertains to him, the thinker, but to which he can only devote himself. This characteristic of the event is not contradicted by the fact that the thinker at first and for a long time preserves the insight as totally his own, inasmuch as he must become the site of its development. That is the reason why Nietzsche initially says so little concerning his insight into the "eternal return of the same. " Even to his few intimates he speaks only by way of indirection. Thus on August 14, 1881, he writes from Sils-Maria to his friend and assistant Peter Gast:
Now, my dear and good friend! The August sun is over us, the year is in retreat, and it grows quieter and more peaceful in the mountains and woods. Thoughts loom on my horizon the like of which I've never seen-I'll allow nothing to be uttered of them and will preserve myself in imperturbable tranquility. I shall have to live a few years longer!
At that time Nietzsche planned to lapse into silence for the following ten years, in order to make himself ready for the development of the thought of return. True, he broke this planned silence several times
rainwater had gathered. A bird hopped about its edge and sipped at the clear, lustral water.
Suddenly, out of the distance resounded the barking of a dog, reiterated, mocked by an echo. . . .
14 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
the next year and in subsequent years; nevertheless, in his writings he spoke of his fundamental thought either in very brief straightforward references or only circuitously, in cryptic passwords and parables. Sev- eral years later, in 1886, he characterized the attitude that encouraged his silence concerning the most essential things in these words: "One no longer loves his insight sufficiently when he communicates it" (Beyond Good and Evil, number 160).
At the moment when "the thought of eternal return" came over him, the metamorphosis which his fundamental mood had been un- dergoing for some time now reached its final stage. Nietzsche's readiness for a metamorphosis is betrayed in the very title of a book published a bit earlier in the year 1881, The Dawn. That book bears as its motto an epigram from the Indian Rigveda: "There are so many dawns that have not yet begun to break. " The final fortification of that transformed fundamental mood, in which Nietzsche now for the first time stood firm in order to confront his fate, is announced in the title of the book that appeared the following year, 1882: The Gay Science ("La gaya scienza"). After an introductory "Prelude," the text is divided into four books. In the second edition (1887) a fifth book and an ap- pendix were added, along with a new preface. At the conclusion of the first edition of The Gay Science Nietzsche for the first time spoke publicly of his thought of eternal return. And so it seems that hardly a year had passed when Nietzsche not only broke his proposed silence but also neglected to love his insight so well that he dare not commu- nicate it. Yet his communication of it is quite strange. It is merely appended to the conclusion of The Gay Science as an afterthought. The thought of return is not presented there as a doctrine. It is tacked on as an eccentric notion, as though the idea had just struck Nietz- sche, as though he were playing with thoughts that were merely possi- ble. The communication is not a genuine sharing with others; it is
rather a veiling. That is also true of Nietzsche's next utterance con- cerning the thought of return, which comes three years later in the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1884). Here Nietzsche does speak directly of the eternal return of the same, and in greater detail, but he does so in the poetic form of a speech placed in the mouth of a poetically fashioned figure, namely, Zarathustra (VI, 223 ff. ). Fur-
The Genesis ofthe Doctrine ofReturn 15
thermore, the third and final communication by Nietzsche of his most essential thought is kept quite short and is merely posed in the form of a question. It appears in Beyond Good and Evil, published in 1886.
When we survey this series of three utterances it seems to offer precious little for a thought that is to be the fundamental thought of an entire philosophy. Such "precious little" in the communication amounts in effect to silence. And yet it is fitting silence. Whoever grows entirely taciturn betrays his silence, but the one who speaks sparely in veiled communication grows silent in such a way that genu- ine silence prevails.
Ifour knowledge were limited to what Nietzsche himselfpublished, we could never learn what Nietzsche knew perfectly well, what he carefully prepared and continually thought through, yet withheld. Only an investigation of the posthumously published notes in Nietz- sche's own hand will provide a clearer picture. These preliminary sketches of the doctrine of eternal return have in the meantime been published; they are scattered throughout volumes XII-XVI, the Nachlass volumes, of the Grossoktavausgabe. *
But in order for us to penetrate successfully the fundamental thought of Nietzsche's philosophy proper, it is very important that at the outset we distinguish between what Nietzsche himself communi- cated and what he withheld. Such a distinguishing between dire~t, presumably merely foreground communication and what seems to be an inscrutable taciturnity i s - i n philosophical utterances generally, and especially in those by Nietzsche-absolutely indispensable. At the same time, we dare not judge the matter pejoratively, as though what Nietzsche communicated were less significant than what he sup- pressed.
Philosophical communications are altogether different from scholar- ly publications. We have to make the distinction between these tWo perfectly clear, because we are all too inclined to measure philosoph- ical communications against the standard of publications in the
• A detailed critical account of these GOA volumes is hardly possible here. But see section II of the Analysis for a discussion of Nietzsche's unpublished sketches of eternal recurrence.
16 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
learned disciplines. In the course of the nineteenth century these disci- plines began to operate like industries. The point was to get the prod- uct that had been manufactured out onto the market as quickly as possible, so that it could be of use to others, but also so that the others could not pinch our discoveries or duplicate our own work. This has especially become the case in the natural sciences, where large-scale, expensive series of experiments have to be conducted. It is therefore altogether appropriate that we at long last have research facilities where we can gain a complete overview of the dissertations and reports on experimental results that have already clarified this or that question in this or that direction. To mention a negative example, for purposes of illustration: it has now come to light that the Russians are today con- ducting costly experiments in the field of physiology that were brought to successful completion fifteen years ago in America and Germany, experiments of which the Russians are totally unaware because of their boycott against foreign science.
The destiny of today's science too will be determined in conformity with the general trend in the history of man on our earth for the past hundred and fifty years, the trend, that is to say, toward industrial and technological organization. The significance of the word Wissenschaft will therefore develop in the particular direction that corresponds to the French concept of la science, whereby what is meant are the math- ematical, technical disciplines. Today the major branches of industry and our military Chiefs of Staff have a great deal more "savvy" con- cerning "scientific" exigencies than do the "universities"; they also have at their disposal the larger share of ways and means, the better resources, because they are indeed closer to what is "actual. "
What we call Geisteswissenschaft" will not regress, however, to the status of what were formerly called the "fine arts. " It will be transmogrified into a pedagogical tool for inculcating a "political worldview. " Only the blind arid the hopelessly romantic among us can still believe that the erstwhile structure and divisions of the sciences
• I. e. , the so-called "human" or "historical" or "cultural" sciences, such as economy, law, art, and religion. The word was introduced by the German translator of John Stuart Mill, who sought to render with its help Mill's "moral science. " The major theoretician of Geisteswissenschaft is of course Wilhelm Dilthey (Introduction to Geisteswissenschaft, 1883; The Construction ofthe Historical World in the Geisteswissenschaften, 1910).
The Genesis of the Doctrine of Return 17
and of scientific endeavor generally during the decade 1890-1900 can be preserved forever with all the congenial facades. Nor will the technical style of modern science, prefigured in its very beginnings, be altered if we choose new goals for such technology. That style will only be firmly embedded and absolutely validated by such new choices. Without the technology of the huge laboratories, without the technology of vast libraries and archives, and without the technology of a perfected machinery for publication, fruitful scientific work and the impact such work must have are alike inconceivable today. Every attempt to diminish or to hamper this state of affairs is nothing short of reactionary.
In contrast to "science," the state of affairs in philosophy is alto- gether different. When we say "philosophy" here, we mean only the creative work of the great thinkers. In the very way it is communicated such work arrives in its own time, knows its own laws. The haste to "get it out" and the anxiety about "being too late" do not apply here, if only because it belongs to the essence of every genuine philosophy that its contemporaries invariably misunderstand it. It is also the case that the philosopher must cease to be a contemporary to himself. The more essential and revolutionary a philosophical doctrine is, the more it needs to educate those men and women, those generations, who are to adopt it. Thus, for example, it still requires a great deal of effort for us today to grasp Kant's philosophy in its essential import and to liber- ate it from the misinterpretations of its contemporaries and advocates.
As for Nietzsche, he does not want to instill perfect comprehension by means of the few, cryptic things he says about his doctrine of eternal return. Rather, he wants to pave the way for a transformation of that fundamental attunement by which alone his doctrine can be compre- hensible and effective. What he hopes for his contemporaries is that they become fathers and forefathers of those who surely must come. (See Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, "On the Blessed Isles. "). "'
• Here Zarathustra calls himself a chilling north wind that tumbles ripe figs to the ground; those sweet fruits are his doctrines. He continues:
Once we said "God! " when we scanned distant seas. But now I have taught you to say ''Overman! "
God is a conjecture; but don't let your conjectures go farther than your will to create.
18 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
For all these reasons we will first bring before us those communica- tions ventured by Nietzsche himself; we will have to restrict ourselves to an altogether provisional commentary on them. After that we shall survey the materials that Nietzsche withheld.
Could you create a god? Then tell me no tales of gods! But you could well create the overman.
Perhaps not you yourselves, my brothers! But you could recreate yourselves into fathers and forefathers of the overman, and may this be your best creating!
3. Nietzsche's First Communication of the Doctrine of Return
Because the context and the mode of presentation are essential to a philosophical communication, our further efforts at understanding the thought of eternal return must be shaped by the fact that Nietzsche speaks of it for the first time in the year 1882 at the conclusion of his book The Gay Science. In the later, second edition, the one usually used today, passage number 341 constitutes the conclusion of Book IV. * Passage number 341, the penultimate one of this text (V, 265 f. ), contains the thought of return. What is said there pertains to "the gay science" as such, and runs as follows:
The greatest burden. -What would happen if one day or night a demon were to steal upon you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you, "You will have to live this life-as you are living it now and have lived it in the past---<>nce again and countless times more; and there will be nothing new to it, but every pain and every pleasure, every thought and sigh, and every- thing unutterably petty or grand in your life will have to come back to you, all in the same sequence and order-even this spider, and that moonlight between the trees, even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of
• Actually, of course, the first edition of The Gay Science closes not with number 341 but with number 342, lncipit tragoedia. But Heidegger wants to suggest that the latter actually belongs to Thus Spoke Zarathustra; that the fourth book of The Gay Sci~nce, "Sanctus Januarius," is the proper culmination of that work; and that number 341, "Das grosste Schwergewicht," is the proper culmination of Book IV. (It is worth noting that Giorgio Colli, the senior partner in the team that prepared the new historical-critical edition of Nietzsche's works, also considers Book IV of The Gay Science to have achieved "the expressive high-point of a magic harmony," while Book V suffers from a certain stridency. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Siimtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in IS Biinden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari [Munich/Berlin: DTV and Walter de Gruyter, 1980], III, 663. )
20 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
existence turning over and over-and you with it, speck of dust! " Would you not cast yourself down, gnash your teeth, and curse the demon who said these things? Or have you ever experienced a tremendous moment when you would reply to him, "You are a god; never have I heard anything more godly! " If that thought ever came to prevail in you, it would transform you, such as you are, and perhaps it would mangle you. The question posed to each thing you do, "Do you will this once more and countless times more? " would weigh upon your actions as the greatest burden! Or how beneficent would you have to become toward yourself and toward life to demand noth- ing more than this eternal sanction and seal? -
So this is the sort of thing Nietzsche regales us with toward the close of The Gay Science! A frightful prospect of a terrifying collective con- dition for beings in general. What is left of gaiety now? Do we not rather confront the onset of dread? Obviously. We need only cast a glance at the title of the passage that immediately follows and that concludes Book Four, passage number 342, which is entitled "Incipit tragoedia. " The tragedy begins. How can such knowledge still be called "gay science"?
A demonic inspiration, yes, but not science; a terrifying condition, yes, but not "gay"! Yet here it is not a matter of our gratuitous remarks concerning the title The Gay Science. All that matters is what Nietzsche is thinking about.
What does gay science mean? Here science is not a collective noun for the sciences as we find them today, with all their paraphernalia, in the shape they assumed during the course of the last century. Science means the stance adopted, and the will directed, toward essential knowing. Of course, we cannot get around the fact that a certain amount of acquired knowledge is proper to every knowing, and in Nietzsche's time that meant especially knowledge attained by the natu- ral sciences. But such acquired knowledge does not constitute the es- sence of genuine knowing. The latter lies in the basic relation- prevailing at any given time--of man to beings, and consequently also in the mode of truth and in the decisiveness we attain through this basic relation. Here the word Wissenschaft [science] resounds like Lei- denschaft [passion], namely, the passion of a well-grounded mastery over the things that confront us and over our own way of responding to what confronts us, positing all these things in magnificent and essential goals.
Nietzsche's Ji'. irst Communication of the Doctrine 21
Gay science? The gaiety mentioned here is not that of the inane "gay blade. " It is not the superficiality of fleeting enjoyment, the "fun" one might have, for example, even in undisturbed engrossment in scientific questions. What Nietzsche means is the cheerfulness that comes of a certain superiority, a cheerfulness that is not dashed by even the hardest and most terrifying matters. In the realm of knowing, cheerfulness is not dashed by the most questionable matters, but is rather invigorated by them, inasmuch as cheerfulness affirms the necessity of these most questionable things.
Only a gay science understood in this way can embrace a knowing that fathoms the terrifying character of the thought of eternal return- hence, a knowing that fathoms the thought in its essential import. Now we are better prepared to grasp the reason why Nietzsche commu- nicates this demonic thought only at the conclusion of The Gay Science: what is referred to here at the conclusion is-in terms of the matter-not the end but the beginning of the "gay science," its com- mencement and its end alike. The matter in question is the eternal return of the same, which the "gay science" must come to know, first and last, if it is to be proper knowing. "Gay science" is for Nietzsche nothing other than the name for that "philosophy" which in its funda- mental doctrine teaches the eternal return of the same.
Two matters are of equal importance for our understanding of this doctrine: first, the fact that Nietzsche first communicates it at the con- clusion of The Gay Science; and second, the way in which Nietzsche at the outset characterizes the thought of return. The appropriate pas- sage is number 341, entitled "The greatest burden. " The thought as burden! What do we think of when we say the word "burden"? * A burden hinders vacillation, renders calm and steadfast, draws all forces to itself; gathers them and gives them definition. A burden also exerts a downward pull, compelling us constantly to hold ourselves erect; but
• The German word das Schwergewicht nowadays means "heavyweight" and is re- stricted to athletics. But it carries connotations of chiefimportance or principal empha- sis, and I have chosen the word "burden" in order to capture these connotations. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger appear to hear in the word the related term der Schwerpunkt, "center of gravity," and both are aware of the ambiguity attached to matters of "great weight," which may stabilize us or wear us down, but which will most certainly deflect us from our former trajectory.
22 THE ETER! \:AL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
it also embodies the danger that we will fall down, and stay down. In this way the burden is an obstacle that demands constant "hurdling," constant surmounting. However, a burden creates no new forces, while it does alter the direction of their motion, thus creating for whatever force is available new laws of motion.
Yet how can a "thought" be a burden, that is to say, something that becomes determinative as rendering steadfast, gathering, drawing and restraining, or as altering directions? And what is this thought to deter- mine? Who is to be afflicted with this burden, in whom is it to be installed? Who is to bear it to great heights, in order not to remain below? Nietzsche provides the answer toward the close of the passage. As the question "Do you will this once more and countless times more? " the thought would everywhere and at all times weigh upon our actions. By "actions" Nietzsche does not mean merely practical activi- ties or ethical deeds; rather, he means the totality of man's relations to beings and to himself. The thought of eternal return is to be a burden -that is, is to be determinative-for our envelopment within beings as a whole.
Yet now we would really have to insist: How can a thought possess determinative force? "Thoughts"! Such fleeting things are to be a cen- ter of gravity? On the contrary, is not what is determinative for man precisely what crowds around him, his circumstances-for instance, his foodstuffs? Recall Feuerbach's famous dictum, "Man is what he eats. " And, along with nourishment, locale? Recall the teachings of the classical English and French sociologists concerning the milieu- meaning both the general atmosphere and the social order. But by no stretch of the imagination "thoughts"! To all this Nietzsche would reply that it is precisely a matter of thoughts, since these determine man even more than those other things; they alone determine him with respect to these very foodstuffs, to this locality, to this atmosphere and social order. In "thought" the decision is made as to whether men and women will adopt and maintain precisely these circumstances or whether they will elect others; whether they will interpret the chosen circumstances in this way or that way; whether under this or that set of conditions they can cope with such circumstances. That such deci-
Nietzsche's First Communication ofthe Doctrine 23
sions often collapse into thoughtlessness does not testify against the dominion of thought but for it. Taken by itself, the milieu explains nothing; there is no milieu in itself. In this regard Nietzsche writes (WM, 70; from the years 1885-86): "Against the doctrine of influence from the milieu and from extrinsic causes: the inner force is infinitely superior. " The most intrinsic of "inner forces" are thoughts. And if the thought of eternal return of the same thinks some by no means fortui- tous thought, by no means either this, that, or the other; if it instead thinks being as whole, as it is; and if this thought is actually thought, that is, if as a question it installs us amid beings and thereby places us at a distance from them; if this thought of eternal return is "the thought of thoughts," as Nietzsche at one point calls it (XII, 64); then should it not be perfectly capable of being a "burden" to every human being, and not simply one burden among others but "the greatest bur- den"?
Yet why the burden? What is man? Is he the creature that needs a burden, the creature that always afflicts himself with burdens, and has to do so? What sort of treacherous necessity is here in play? A burden can also drag down, can humiliate a man. And when he is all the way down the burden becomes superfluous, so that now, suddenly bereft of all burdens, he can no longer descry what he once was in his ascend- ancy, no longer notice that he is now as low as he can go. Instead, he takes himself to be the median and the measure, whereas these are but expressions of his mediocrity.
Was it only a pointless happenstance, was there nothing behind it, when the thought of this burden came to Nietzsche? Or did it come because all prior burdens had abandoned men and gone up in smoke? The experience of the necessity of a new "greatest burden," and the experience that all things have lost their weight, belong together:
The time is coming when we will have to pay for our having been Christians for two thousand years: we are losing the burden that allowed us to live. For some time we will not know whether we are coming or going. (WM, 30; written in 1888)
This statement, still obscure to us, should for the present merely indicate that Nietzsche's thought of the new "greatest burden" is rooted
24 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
in the context of two millennia of history. That is the reason for the way in which the thought is introduced in its first communication: "What would happen if one day. . . . " The thought is introduced as a question and a possibility. Indeed, the thought is not directly proffered by Nietzsche himself. How should a contemporary man--one who does not know whether he is coming or going, and Nietzsche must account himself such a one-how should such a man come upon this thought all by himself? Rather, what we hear is: "What would happen if . . . a demon were to steal upon you in your loneliest loneli- ness. . . . " Neither does the thought come from any arbitrary human being, nor does it come to any arbitrary human being in his or her most arbitrary everydayness, that is to say, in the midst of all the hub- bub that enables us to forget ourselves. The thought comes in a human being's "loneliest loneliness. " Where and when is that? Is it where and when a human being simply goes into retreat, withdraws to the periph- ery, and busies himself with his "ego"? No, more likely then and there where a human being is altogether himself, standing in the most essen- tial relationships of his historical existence in the midst of beings as a whole.
This "loneliest loneliness" subsists prior to and beyond every distin- guishing of I from Thou, of lffhou from the "We," and of the individ- ual from the community. In such loneliest loneliness there is no trace of individuation as isolation. It is rather a matter of that kind of in- dividuation which we must grasp as authentic appropriation, in which the human self comes into its own. * The self, authenticity, is not the "ego"; it is that Da-sein in which the relation of I to Thou, I to "We,"
• "Authentic appropriation" translates Heidegger's word Vereigentlichung. The novel term refers us back to the theme of "authenticity" in Being and Time, especially sections 25-27, on the problem of the selfhood of Dasein, and section 53, "Existential Projection of an Authentic Being toward Death. " Central to the latter is the notion of the death of Dasein as the "ownmost" or "most proper" (eigenste) possibility of existence, a possibility that Dasein must freely face and in this sense "appropriate. " Precisely at this point in Sein und Zeit (p. 264) Heidegger cites Zarathustra's words about the danger of our becoming "too old for our victories. " In Heidegger's subsequent view, thinking the thought of eternal recurrence is one decisive way to confront the danger and to rejuve- nate the task of "authentic appropriation. " See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 12th ed. (Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1972), pp. 263-64. Finally, compare "authentic appro- priation" to what Heidegger in section 24, below, calls "being-a-self. "
Nietzsche's First Communication ofthe Doctrine 25
and "We" to "Ye" is grounded; it is that on the sole basis of which these relationships can first be brought under control-must be brought under control if they are to be a force. In being a self, certain things are decided: the weight that things and human beings will have, the scale on which they will be weighed, and the one who will do the weighing. Imagine what would happen if in such loneliest loneliness a demon were to steal upon you and confront you with the eternal return of the same: "The eternal hourglass of existence turning over and over-and you with it, speck of dust! "
Nietzsche does not say what would in fact happen. He continues to question instead, and he uncovers two alternatives. Would you curse the demon, or would you perceive in him a god? Would you be man- gled by the thought, or would you ask nothing more than that it be true? Would you be dragged into the abyss by the greatest burden, or would you yourself become its even greater counterweight?
The way Nietzsche here patterns the first communication of the thought of the "greatest burden" makes it clear that this "thought of thoughts" is at the same time "the most burdensome thought" (XVI, 414). It is the most burdensome thought in several respects. It is most burdensome, for example, with respect to that which is to be thought in it, namely, being as a whole. The latter commands the heaviest weight and so is more burdensome in the sense of weightiest. But it is also the hardest to bear with respect to the thinking itself, and thus is the most difficult thought. Our thinking must penetrate in thought the innermost abundance of beings, must probe in thought the uttermost limits of being as a whole, and must at the same time proceed in thought through the human being's loneliest loneliness.
By virtue of such distinctions we are trying to clarify Nietzsche's thought. Clarification is always necessarily interpretation. For in it we employ corresponding yet different concepts and words. Let us there- fore insert at this point some remarks on Nietzsche's and our own use of language.
Nietzsche does not invoke "being as a whole. " We use this phrase in order to designate basically everything that is not simply nothing: na- ture (animate and inanimate), history (what it brings about, the per- sonages who fill it, and those who propel it), God, the gods, and
26 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
demigods. When we speak of things that are in being, we are also referring to what comes to be, what originates and passes away. For it already is no longer the nothing, or not yet the nothing. When we allude to things that are in being, we are also referring to appearance, illusion, deception, and falsehood. If such things were not in being they could not delude us and make us err. All these things too are named in the phrase "being as a whole. " Even its limit, nonbeing pure and simple, the nothing, pertains to being as a whole, inasmuch as without being as a whole there would be no nothing. Yet at the same time the phrase "being as a whole" means beings precisely as what we are asking about, what is worthy of question. The phrase leaves open the questions as to what being as such is and in what way it is. T o that extent the expression is no more than a collective noun. But it "col- lects" in such a way as to gather beings together; and it gathers them with a view to the question of the gathering that is proper to being itself. The phrase "being as a whole" thus designates the most ques- tionable matter and is hence the word most worthy of question.
As for Nietzsche, he is secure in his use of language here, but he is not unequivocal. When he means to refer to all reality or to the uni- verse he says "the world" [die Welt] or "existence" [das Dasein]. This usage derives from Kant. Whenever Nietzsche poses the question as to whether existence has meaning, whether a meaning can be defined for existence at all, his use of the word "existence" roughly parallels what we mean by "being as a whole"-though with some reservations. "Ex- istence" has for Nietzsche the same breadth of meaning as "world"; he also uses the word "life" to say the same thing. By "life" Nietzsche does not mean merely human life and human existence. We, on the other hand, use "life" only to designate beings that are vegetable or animal; we thereby differentiate human being from these other kinds, human being meaning something more and something other than mere "life. " For us the word Dasein definitively names something that is by no means coterminous with human being, and something thoroughly distinct from what Nietzsche and the tradition prior to him understand by "existence. " What we designate with the word Dasein does not arise in the history of philosophy hitherto. This difference in usage does not rest on some gratuitous obstinacy on our part. Behind
Nietzsche's First Communication ofthe Doctrine 27
it stand essential historical exigencies. But these differences in lan- guage are not to be mastered by artificial scrutiny and detection. Wax- ing in confrontation with the matter itself, we must become capable of the capable word. (On Nietzsche's conception of Dasein, see, for ex- ample, The Gay Science, Book IV, number 341; Book V, numbers 357, 373, and 374. )*
• In The Gay Science, number 341, Nietzsche speaks of "the eternal hourglass of existence," equating such Dasein with "this life," the Leben toward which one would have to become beneficent. Section 357, one of Nietzsche's most detailed statements on the German philosophical tradition (especially Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel), cites Scho- penhauer's lucubrations on the "value" or "meaning" of "existence" and Hegel's "gran- diose attempt" to convince us of "the divinity of existence. " In passage number 373 Nietzsche doubts whether the paragons of scientific optimism such as Herbert Spencer are capable of espying "genuinely great problems and question-marks," that is to say, questions pertaining to Dasein. Here, as in the earlier passages, Nietzsche equates Da- sein with Welt, identifying optimism as a particularly naive Welt-Interpretation. The latter is capable of seeing only the "most superficial and most extrinsic elements of existence. " Section 374 "Our new 'infinite'," also refers to the conceptual triad Dasein,
Welt, Leben. In reproducing it I have placed these words in capitals:
How far the perspectival character of existence extends, or even whether EXISTENCE has any other character than that; whether it is not the case that an EXISTENCE without interpretation, without "sense," amounts precisely to "nonsense"; whether, on the other hand, all EXISTENCE is not essentially an interpreting EXISTENCE;-it is fitting that these things cannot be descried by even the most diligent, painfully scrupulous analysis and self-examination of the intellect. . . . It is futile curiosity to want to know . . . , for example, whether some creature exists that can experience time as running backwards, or alternately forward and back (at which point another segmentation of LIFE . . . would be at hand). But I think that we today at least are far removed from such ridiculous vainglory. . . . The WORLD has rather once again become "infinite" to us, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it encompasses infinite interpreta- tions. . . .
4. "lncipit tragoedia"
The thought of eternal return of the same, as the greatest burden, is also the thought that is hardest to bear. What happens when we actual- ly think the thought? Nietzsche provides the answer in the title of the section that follows immediately upon his first communication of the most burdensome thought, and that forms the proper conclusion to The Gay Science (1st edition, 1882; number 342): "lncipit tragoedia. " The tragedy begins. Which tragedy? The tragedy of beings as such. But what does Nietzsche understand by "tragedy"? Tragedy sings the tragic. We have to realize that Nietzsche defines the tragic purely in terms of the beginning of tragedy as he understands it. When the thought of eternal return is thought, the tragic as such becomes the fundamental trait of beings. Viewed historically, this marks the beginning of the "tragic age for Europe" (WM, 37; cf. XVI, 448). What begins to hap- pen here transpires in utter stillness; it remains concealed for a long time and to most men; nothing of this history goes into the history books. "It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that approach on doves' feet govern the world" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, conclusion to Part II). "What does it matter that we more cautious and reserved ones do not for the nonce abandon the venerable belief that it is only the great thought that lends greatness to any deed or thing" (Beyond Good and Evil, number 241). And finally: "The world re- volves, not about the discoverers of new forms of hullaballoo, but about the discoverers of new values. It revolves inaudibly' (Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, Part Two, "Of Great Events").
Only the few, the rare, only those who have ears for such inaudible
revolutions will perceive the "Incipit tragoedia. " Yet how does Nietz- sche understand the essence of the tragic and of tragedy? W e know that Nietzsche's first treatise, published in 1872, was devoted to the ques- tion of "the birth of tragedy. " Experience of the tragic and meditation
"lncipit tragoedia" 29
on its ongm and essence pertain to the very basis of Nietzschean thought. Nietzsche's concept of the tragic grew steadily clearer in step with the inner transformation and clarification of his thinking. From the very outset he opposed the interpretation of Aristotle, according to which the tragic is said to accomplish katharsis, the moral cleansing and elevation that are attained when fear and pity are aroused. "I have repeatedly put my finger on the egregious misconception of Aristotle, who believed he had found the tragic emotions in two depressive af- fects, namely, terror and pity" (WM, 851; from the year 1888). The tragic has absolutely no original relation to the moral. "Whoever en- joys tragedy morally still has a few rungs to climb" (XII, 177; from 1881-82). The tragic belongs to the "aesthetic" domain. To clarify this we would have to provide an account of Nietzsche's conception of art.
