No More Learning

What does all this say about the right way to think the thought of eternal recurrence? It says something essential: That which is to come is precisely a matter for decision, since the ring is not closed in some remote infinity but possesses its unbroken closure in the Moment, as the center of the striving; what recurs-if it is to recur-is decided by the Moment and by the force with which the Moment can cope with whatever in it is repelled by such striving. That is what is peculiar to, and hardest to bear in, the doctrine of eternal return-to wit, that eternity is in the Moment, that the Moment is not the fleeting "now," not an instant of time whizzing by a spectator, but the collision of future and past. Here the Moment comes to itself. It determines how everything recurs. Now, the most difficult matter is the most tremen- dous matter to be grasped, and the tremendous remains a sealed door to little men. Yet the little men too are; as beings they too recur forever. They cannot be put out of action; they pertain to that side of things that is dark and repulsive. If being as a whole is to be thought, the little men too wait upon their "Yes. " That realization makes Zara- thustra shudder.
And now that his most abysmal thought has been thought in the direction of that abyss, Zarathustra's animals "do not let him talk any- more. " For when Zarathustra recognizes that the recurrence of the little man too is necessary; when he grapples with that "Yes" spoken to
• Indem er den Widerstreit des Aufgegebenen und Mitgegebenen entfaltet und aus- hiilt. Aufgegebenen could of course also have to do with surrender, but I am conjectur- ing that Heidegger here wants to juxtapose the task (cf. Aufgabe) that we project into and as the future to the endowment (cf. Mitgabe, Mitgift) of skills we bring to the task from our past. For here there often seems to be a disparity, a striving, and strife. Cf. the similar phrasing in Heidegger's Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1960), p. 89 (top), ably rendered by Albert Hofstadter in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 77 (middle). And see sections 24 and 26, below.
58 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE o~· THE SAME
everything that over the years wearied and sickened him, to everything he wanted to repulse; when he conquers his illness with that "Yes" and so becomes a convalescent; then his animals begin to speak again. Once more they repeat their message: the world is a garden. Again they call for Zarathustra to come out. But now they say more. They do not simply tell him to come out so that he can see and experience how all things are yearning for him. They call to him that he should learn from the songbirds how to sing: "For singing does a convalescent good. " The temptation to take the thought of return merely as some- thing obvious, to take it therefore at bottom as either contemptible mumbling or fascinating chatter, is overcome.
By now the dialogue between the animals and Zarathustra is moving upon a ground that has been transformed by the conversation itself. The animals are now speaking to a Zarathustra who has come to grips with his illness and overcome his disgust with the little man by achiev- ing the insight that such adversity is necessary.
Now Zarathustra agrees with his animals. With their injunction to sing, the animals are telling him of that consolation he invented for himself during those seven days. Once again, however, he warns against turning the injunction to sing into a call for tunes on the same old lyre. What is being thought here? This, that the thought most difficult to bear, as the convalescent's conquering thought, must first of all be sung; that such singing, which is to say, the poetizing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, must itself become the convalescence; but also that such singing must be singular, that it dare not become a popular tune. Zarathustra therefore calls himself a poet as well as one who guesses riddles. Poet and riddler, but not in the sense that he is a poet and something else in addition, namely, one who solves riddles. Both these roles are thought in an original unity, thought therefore ultimately as some third thing. Hence poetry, if it is to fulfill its task, can never be a matter for barrel organs and ready-made lyres. The lyre, viewed now as an instrument for the new singing and saying, has still to be created. The animals know that-after all, they are his animals. In the words they utter they gradually come closer to Zarathustra, the more so as Zarathustra comes closer to himself and to his task: "First fashion for yourself a proper lyre, a new lyre! " "For your animals know well, 0
"The Convalescent" 59
Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, you arc the teacher o f the eternal return--that is now your destiny! "
yct if Zarathustra is the first to have to teach that teaching, must he not, as the teacher, know it ahead of time, prior to anyone else; and must he not know it differently than those who are merely learning it? Indeed, he must know that by virtue of the teaching itself, and in conformity with it, "the great destiny" is also to be his greatest danger and disease. Only when the teacher comprehends himself in terms of the teaching as inevitably a victim, as one who must go down because he goes over in transition, only when the one going under gives him- self his blessing as such a one, does he reach his end and goal. "Thus [that is, in this way] ends Zarathustra's downgoing," say the animals.
"Downgoing" here means two things: first, transition as departure; second, descent as acknowledgment of the abyss. This dual character- ization of downgoing must at the same time be grasped in its temporal- ity, in terms of"eternity," correctly understood. The downgoing itself, thought with a view to eternity, is the Moment; yet not as the fleeting "now," not as mere passing. Downgoing is indeed the briefest thing, hence the most transient, but is at the same time what is most accom- plished: in it the most luminous brightness of being as a whole scintil- lates, as the Moment in which the whole of recurrence becomes comprehensible. The apposite imagery here is the coiling serpent, the living ring. In the image of the serpent the connection between eterni- ty and the Moment is established for Nietzsche in its unity: the living ring of the serpent, that is to say, eternal recurrence, and-the Mo- ment. In one of his late sketches (WM, 577; from the year 1887) Nietzsche contrasts his concept of eternity with the extrinsic sense of that notion as the "eternally unchanging": "As opposed to the value of the eternally unchanging (note Spinoza's naivete, and Descartes' as well), the value of the briefest and most transient, the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the serpent vita. " In the end, Zarathustra hears which eternity it is that his animals are proclaiming to him, the eterni-
ty of the Moment that embraces everything in itself at once: the down- gomg.
When Zarathustra heard these words of his animals' "he lay still" and
60 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
communed with his soul. But the serpent and the eagle, finding him thus, so silent, honored the vast stillness about him and cautiously stole away.
In what way is Zarathustra now silent? He is silent inasmuch as he is communing with his soul alone, because he has found what defines him, has become the one who he is. He has also overcome outrage and repugnance by learning that the abyss belongs to the heights. To overcome outrage is not to put it out of action but to acknowledge its necessity. As long as outrage is merely repudiated in disgust, as long as our contempt is determined merely by nausea, that contempt remains dependent upon the contemptible. Only when contempt stems from love of the task, being transformed in such a way that, undergirded by an affirmation of the necessity of outrage, suffering, and destruction, it can pass by in silence; only when the silence of such loving passing-by previals; only then does the vast stillness extend and the sphere expand about the one who in this way has become himself. Only now that the vast stillness pervades Zarathustra's spirit has he found his loneliest loneliness, a solitude that has nothing more to do with a merely pe- ripheral existence. And the animals of his solitude honor the stillness, that is to say, they perfect the solitude in its proper essence in that now they too "cautiously steal away. " The eagle's pride and serpent's dis- cernment are now essential qualities of Zarathustra.
Zarathustra himself has become a hero, inasmuch as he has incor- porated the thought of eternal return in its full import as the weightiest of thoughts. Now he is a knower. He knows that the greatest and smallest cohere and recur, so that even the greatest teaching, the ring of rings, itself must become a ditty for barrel organs, the latter always accompanying its true proclamation. Now he is one who goes out to meet at the same time his supreme suffering and supreme hope. We have already heard Nietzsche's answer to the question, "What makes someone heroic? "(V, 204), that is, what is it that makes a hero a hero? The response: "Going out to meet one's supreme suffering and su- preme hope alike. " But thanks to the motto of our own lecture course we also know that "everything in the hero's sphere turns to tragedy. "
"Once I had created the overman, I draped the great veil of Becom- ing about him and let the midday sun stand over him" (XII, 362). The
"The Convalescent" 61
veil of Becoming is recurrence, as the truth concerning being as a whole, and the midday sun is the Moment of the shortest shadow and the most luminous brightness, the image of eternity. When "the great- est burden" is assimilated to Dasein, "Incipit tragoedia. " The two final sections of The Gay Science, which communicate the doctrine of re- turn for the first time, employ the two italicized phrases as their titles. The intrinsic connection between these two concluding sections becomes clear on the basis of that work which is designed to create poetically the figure who is to think the eternal return of the same.
With Zarathustra "the tragic age" commences (WM, 37). Tragic knowing realizes that "life itself," being as a whole, conditions "pain," "destruction," and all agony; and that none of these things constitutes an "objection to this life" (WM, 1052). The customary notion of "the tragic," even when it is more exalted than usual, sees in this realization nothing more than guilt and decline, cessation and despair. Nietz- sche's conception of the tragic and of tragedy is different; it is essential- ly more profound. The tragic in Nietzsche's sense counteracts "resignation" (WM, 1029), if we may say that the tragic still finds it necessary to be "counter" to anything. The tragic in Nietzsche's sense has nothing to do with sheer self-destructive pessimism, which casts a pall over all things; it has just as little to do with blind optimism, which is lost in the vertigo of its vacuous desires. The tragic in Nietzsche's sense falls outside this opposition, inasmuch as in its willing and in its knowing it adopts a stance toward being as a whole, and inasmuch as the basic law of being as a whole consists in struggle.
By means of our renewed reference to the connection between these two passages, passages that constitute the first communication of the thought of eternal return of the same, we have also clarified the inner relationship between the first communication (in The Gay Science) and the second (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra). We arrive at a juncture where we will have to reflect awhile on our procedure up to now. Such considerations will quite likely remain fruitless-unless several steps in the procedure have actually been executed by now.
We have presented two of Nietzsche's communications concerning his fundamental thought. Our interpretation of that thought has been
62 THE ETER! \:AL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
animated by several different points of view. In the first communica- tion it was a matter of referring to the tragic insight and the fundamen- tally tragic character of beings in general. In the second communi- cation it was above all the reference to the "Moment" that prevailed, that is to say, the kind of posture in which and on the basis of which the eternal recurrence of the same is to be thought, the way in which this thinking itself is to be. By means of both references the following has become clear: the matter into which we are here inquiring, being as a whole, can never be represented as some thing at hand concerning which someone might make this or that observation. To be transposed to being as a whole is to submit to certain inalienable conditions.
To elaborate such issues until they converge in the essential contexts - w e will of necessity do more and more of this as our presentation of Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal return proceeds. And we will do so in such a way that the sundry issues converge on a particular center. This
is what we must ponder if we are to prevent the presentation from being misunderstood as a pointless exhibition of Nietzsche's views and opinions. If we think forward unabatedly to further contexts, then we will begin to perceive the basic traits of what will later be recognized as Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position.
9. The Third Communication of the Doctrine of Return
People usually take Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra to be the very summit of his creative work. The writings that appeared after 1884 are taken as mere commentaries and reiterations, or as desperate attempts to realize in a direct fashion what Zarathustra merely intimated. We hear it said that after Zarathustra Nietzsche could not see his way further. Such a judgment may always safely be taken as a sign that not thinkers but their know-it-all interpreters cannot see their way further. With hopeless ineptitude the interpreters conceal their predicament behind an inflated pedantry. We leave aside the question as to whether after Zarathustra Nietzsche could not go farther or whether indeed he could-not because the question must remain undecided but because
it is not a question one poses with regard to a thinker. For to the extent that he perdures in his thinking and inquiring the thinker is always already "farther" than he himself knows or can know. In any case the designations "farther" and "not farther" are unsuited to the matter in question; they pertain to the realm of "science" and "technology," where progress is a prerequisite and where alone "farther" and "not farther" can be reckoned. In philosophy there is no "progress," hence no regress, either. Here, as in art, the only question is whether or not it is itself. We shall now merely register the fact that the third com- munication of the thought of eternal return of the same is found in Beyond Good and Evil. This book, which appeared two years after the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, also yields the motto we have chosen for our own lecture course. Beyond Good and Evil has as its subtitle "Prelude to A Philosophy of the Future. " Curious subtitle for
64 THE ETERJ\:AL RECURREJ\:CE OF THE SAME
a philosophy that is not supposed to know whether it can see its way further!
In order for us to understand the third communication too it is decisively important that we state where and in what context it stands. The passage belongs to the third major division of Beyond Good and Evil, embracing numbers 45 to 62, entitled "The Quintessence of Religion. " The state of affairs is growing ever more riddlesome, be- cause Zarathustra constantly calls himself the "god-less" in his speeches and with waxing vigor announces there that "God is dead. " At the very commencement of his wanderings Zarathustra encounters in the forest an old man, with whom he begins to converse. After- wards, however, "when Zarathustra was alone he spoke thus to his heart: 'Could such a thing be possible! This old saint in his forest has as yet heard nothing of this, that God is dead! ' "(Prologue, section 2, conclusion).
What should someone who, like Zarathustra, lives and judges on the basis of such knowledge-what should Nietzsche himself-have to adduce concerning "the quintessence of religion"? Whatever it is, we want to hear it right away, and without circumlocutions. In section 56 of the third major division, "The Quintessence of Religion," we hear the following:
Whoever as a result of some enigmatic craving has, as I have, long endeav- ored to think pessimism down to its depths and to redeem it from the half- Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which pessimism has most recently been presented in this century, namely, in the form of Scho- penhauerian philosophy; whoever has with an Asiatic and Hyperasiatic eye gazed into and down upon the most world-denying of all possible modes of thought-gazed beyond good and evil and no longer, like Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the spell and delusion of morality-; such a one has perhaps, without explicitly willing it, opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: to the ideal of the boldest, most vital, and most world-affirming human being who has not only made his peace and learned to get along with whatever was and is but who wills to have it again precisely as it was and is into all eternity, calling insatiably da capo not only to himself but to the entire play and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle but at bottom to Him who has need of precisely this spectacle-who makes it necessary because he
The Third Communication ofthe Doctrine 65 forever has need of himself-and makes himself necessary. -How's that?
Would this not be-circulus vitiosus deus? *
Although we cannot discuss the matter more closely here, it is im- portant to note that the entire passage is constructed as a single sen- tence, in such a way that its articulated divisions reflect linguistically the structure of an essential thought. Such passages enable us to imag- ine the sort of work that would have come into being had Nietzsche been able to complete his magnum opus. At first we are struck by the "content" of the section we have read. W e cannot believe our eyes and ears: "circulus vitiosus deus? " Circulus means the circle and the ring, hence eternal recurrence, indeed as vitiosus; vitium means defect, malady, something destructive; circulus vitiosus is the ring that also necessarily brings recurrently this vitium. Is it deus? Is it the god him- self, the one to whom Nietzsche at the end of his way still call~is it Dionysos? And in the sphere of this god-the world? The eternal re- turn of the same: the collective character of being as a whole?
The question raised in this same treatise (section 150) is: " . . . and everything in God's sphere turns to . . . to what? 'world' perhaps? " Are world and God thereby the same? Such a doctrine, interpreted as plain fare, is called "pantheism. " Is Nietzsche here teaching a pan-theism? What does the text say? ". . . Would this not be circulus vitiosus deus? " Here a question is posed. If it were pantheism, we would first of all still have to ask what pan-the universe, the whole-and what
theo~God-here mean. At all events, here we have a question! So,
• Circulus vitiosus deus: the adjective "vicious" here links "circle" and "god," forming a particularly rich speculative propostion-one that can and must be traversed forward and back via its gateway. If est is understood at the end, the proposition becomes "God is the vicious circle" and "The vicious circle is god. " Nietzsche may well be alluding to two aspects of the tradition: first, in medieval logic and rhetoric, circulus vitiosus is a "circular argument"; second, in the Latin of the Humanists, circulus vitiosus assumes its modern sense of an unbreakable chain of pernicious causes and effects. The latter, in German, is a Teufelskreis, "a devil's circle. " Nietzsche may therefore be linking-in his vicious circle beyond good and evil-diabolus and deus. The word deus is especially troublesome for the translator of German: because all nouns are capitalized in that language it is difficult to know whether Nietzsche and Heidegger in any given passage are referring to "God" or "the god. " Presumably, both thinkers are enjoying the ambigu- ity in which monotheism and pantheism, Christianity and Paganism, Dionysos and "the Crucified" exchange masks freely.
66 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
then, God is not dead? Yes and no! Yes, he is dead. But which God? The God of "morality," the Christian God is dead-the "Father" in whom we seek sancturary, the "Personality" with whom we negotiate and bare our hearts, the "Judge" with whom we adjudicate, the "Paymaster" from whom we receive our virtues' reward, that God with whom we "do business. " Yet where is the mother who will take pay for loving her child? * The God who is viewed in terms of morality, this God alone is meant when Nietzsche says "God is dead. " He died because human beings murdered him. They murdered him when they reckoned his divine grandeur in terms of their petty needs for recompense, when they cut him down to their own size. That God fell from power because he was a "blunder" of human beings who negate themselves and negate life (VIII, 62). In one of the preliminary sketches for Zarathustra Nietzsche writes: "God suffocated from theology; and morals from morality" (XII, 329). Well, then, God and gods can die? In a preliminary study to The Birth of Tragedy sketched circa 1870, quite early in his career, Nietzsche notes: "I believe in the ancient Germanic dictum, 'All gods must die. ' "
Thus Nietzsche's atheism is something altogether his own. Nietz- sche must be liberated from the dubious society of those supercilious atheists who deny God when they fail to find him in their reagent glass, those who replace the renounced God with their "God" of "Progress. " We dare not confuse Nietzsche with such "god-less" ones, who cannot really even be "god-less" because they have never strug- gled to find a god, and never can. Yet if Nietzsche is no atheist in the usual sense, we dare not falsify him as a "sentimental," "romantic," halfway-Christian "God seeker. " We dare not turn the word and con- cept atheism into a term of thrust and counterthrust in Christianity's duel, as though whatever did not conform to the Christian God were ipso facto "at bottom" atheism. The Christian God can all the less be for Nietzsche the standard of godlessness if God himself, in the desig- nated sense, is "dead. " Zarathustra calls himself and knows himself to be the god-less one. As the god-less one he experiences the uttermost
• Heidegger's phrase echoes that of Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, "On the Virtuous": "You love your virtue, as a mother loves her child. Yet who ever heard of a mother wanting to be paid for her love? "
The Third Communication of the Doctrine 67
need, and thereby the innermost necessity, to create what is most needed. For that reason the one who is god-less in the way we have indicated confronts a question which we might formulate succinctly as follows: What would remain for human beings to create-how could they be human at all, that is to say, how could they become who they are-if gods were always available and merely at hand? If there were gods as simply as there are stones and trees and water? Is it not the case that the god must first of all be created? Do we not require supreme force to be able to create something out beyond ourselves? And prior to that, must not man himself, the last man, the contemptible man, be re-created to that end? Does not man require a burden so that he will not take his god too lightly?
The thought of thoughts derives from these considerations its defini- tion as the greatest burden. Thus is Zarathustra the god-less overcome! To be sure. But has Nietzsche thereby come "farther," or has he slipped back onto the path of Christianity, which laid its very founda- tions by claiming the sole existent God all for itself? No, neither farther ahead nor farther back. For Zarathustra begins by going under. Zara- thustra's commencement is his downgoing. Another essence for Zara- thustra Nietzsche never for a moment entertained.
Only the lame, only those who have wearied of their Christianity, look to Nietzsche's statements for quick and easy confirmation of their own specious athe- ism. But the eternal recurrence of the same is the thought that is hardest to bear. Its thinker must be a hero in knowing and willing, one who dare not and cannot explain away the world and the creation of a world with some gratuitous formula. "Everything in the hero's sphere turns to tragedy. " Only in passage through tragedy does the question concerning the god arise, the god in whose sphere-and this too only
as a "perhaps"--everything turns to world.
The nineteen-year-old Nietzsche, as we have already heard, asks at
the end of his autobiographical portrait, "And where is the ring that ultimately encircles him [the human being]? Is it the world? Is it God? " What is now the reply to this early question? The reply is yet another question: "Circulus vitiosus deus? " Yet the ring has now been defined as the eternal return of the same; the circulus is simultaneously vitiosus, the terrifying; this terrifying ring surrounds beings, determines
68 THE ETERI"AL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
them as a whole, defines them as the world. The ring and its eternity can be grasped solely in terms of the Moment. Accordingly, the god who is sought in the experience of the ring of fright will remain a. matter of inquiry solely from within the Moment. Then, the god is only a question? Indeed, "only" a question; that is, he is the one who is asked for, the one who is called. It remains to be considered whether the god possesses more divinity in the question concerning him or in the situation where we are sure of him and are able, as it were, to brush him aside or fetch him forward, as our needs dictate. The god is "only" a question. How do matters stand with this "only"? It is not merely the god who is a question-eternal recurrence too, the circulus vitiosus itself, is also "only" a question.
All three communications of the thought of thoughts are questions that vary in configuration and in stage of development. Even if we are far from penetrating their context and content, even if we are but barely aware of these things, the fact that the communications share the interrogative form is compelling. To be sure, we can clarify the state of affairs at first only with the help of determinations that are more negative than positive. The communication is no "doctrine" and no "disquisition" in the sense of a theoretical scholarly or scientific presentation. It is not some bit of "lore" asseverated by a learned per- son. Nor is it a philosophical treatise of the sort we have inherited from Leibniz or Kant; just as little is it a philosophical and conceptual struc- ture modeled on those erected by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. If therefore Nietzsche's communication does not seem to conform either to the framework of a scientific doctrine or to familiar philosophical discussions as they had been conducted up to Nietzsche's time, or even to the form exhibited by a purely poetic configuration, only one possi- bility appears to remain: it can only be a "personal act of faith," per- haps no more than an "illusory figment of the imagination. " Or does the remaining possibility consist in our having to ask what this thought, in itself and on its own, is in terms of its configuration? In the face of Nietzsche's labors in thought there can no longer be any doubt about whether we are permitted to force the thought summarily into our customary and common rubrics, or whether, on the contrary, such
The Third Communication ofthe Doctrine 69
thinking must induce us to jettison our common notions, induce us to meditate.
With this meditation we have encroached on the question of the configuration of the thought of eternal recurrence of the same. The encroachment is intentional. It means to suggest that Nietzsche's own mode of communication must remain definitive whenever we deline- ate the thought's configuration. Such a caution is all the more neces- sary since in relation to the question of configuration a cursory glance at Nietzsche's suppressed notes might easily lead us astray. We shall now try to gain insight into what Nietzsche thought about the eternal recurrence of the same but did not himself make public. Our examina- tion can catch a glimpse of what is essential only if it does not remain mere reportage, only if it is interpretation. On the one hand, the inter- pretation must be instigated by a prior glimpse of the essential ques- tions posed by the thought of eternal recurrence of the same; on the other hand, the interpretation must allow itself to be guided by meticu- lous deference toward what Nietzsche himself said.
10. The Thought of Return in the Suppressed Notes
From the moment Nietzsche's "thought of thoughts" came to him in August, 1881, everything he meditated on and committed to writing concerning that thought but shared with no one was destined to be labeled as his "literary remains. " If the thought of eternal recurrence of the same is Nietzsche's principal thought, then it will have been present to him during the entire subsequent period of his creative life, from 1881 to January, 1889. That this is the case is shown by the later publication of the literary remains which originated during the years mentioned. They are to be found in volumes XII through XVI of the Grossoktav edition. But if the thought of eternal recurrence of the same, the thought of thoughts, necessarily determines all of Nietz- sche's thinking from the very beginning, then his reflections on this thought and the sketches containing those reflections will vary accord- ing to the particular domain, direction, and stage of development in which Nietzsche's philosophical labors happened to be advancing. That means that these so-called "literary remains" are not always the same. Nietzsche's "posthumously published notes" do not comprise an
arbitrary bunch of confused and scattered observations that by chance never made it to the printer's. The sketches differ not only in terms of content but also in their form-or lack of form. They arose out of constantly changing moods, sometimes were caught fleetingly among a melee of intentions and points of view; sometimes they were elaborated fully, sometimes ventured only by way of tentative and faltering experi- ment; and sometimes, quick as lightning, they arrived in one fell swoop. If the thought of eternal recurrence of the same is the thought
Thought ofReturn in the Suppressed Notes 71
of thoughts, then it will be least explicitly portrayed or even named wherever in its essentiality it is to have the greatest impact. If for a certain stretch of time nothing or nothing explicit appears to be said about this thought in Nietzsche's notes, that by no means indicates that it has in the meantime become unimportant or even has been abandoned. We must ponder all these things if we wish to understand Nietzsche's "posthumously published notes" and think them through philosophically, instead of merely piecing together a "theory" out of some remarks we have managed to pick up here and there.
What we are here demanding-and what we will be able to achieve only in a provisional sort of way-is all the more imperative since in the publication of the literary remains heretofore the "material" as a whole has inevitably been arranged in a particular order. Furthermore, the individual fragments on the doctrine of return, which stem from different years and from disparate manuscripts and contexts, have been thoughtlessly strung together in a numerated series. However, anyone who is even slightly aware of the difficulties entailed in finding an appropriate form of publication for Nietzsche's literary remains-espe- cially those from the later years, that is, from 1881 onward-will not inveigh against Nietzsche's initial and subsequent editors because of the procedure they elected to follow. Whatever flaws the prior editions reveal, it remains the decisive achievement of the first editors that they made Nietzsche's private handwritten papers accessible by transcribing them into a readable text. Only they could have done it-above all,
Peter Cast, who after many years of collaborating with Nietzsche in the preparation of those manuscripts that were sent on to the printer was perfectly familiar with Nietzsche's handwriting and all the transforma- tions it underwent. Otherwise a great deal in the scarcely legible manuscripts, and often the most important things, would have r~­ mained sealed to us today.
We shall now attempt a provisional characterization of the stock of sketches that deal explicitly with the doctrine of return, considering them in their chronological sequence. Nietzsche's own threefold com- munication of the thought of eternal return in The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Beyond Good and Evil will mark off the peri- ods for us. It seems plausible that Nietzsche's notes from the period
72 THE ETERl\AL RECURREl\CE OF THE SAME
when the thought first struck him (August, 1881 and immediately af- terward) will assume special significance. V olume XII of the Grossok- tav edition contains unpublished materials from the years 1881-82 and from the period 1882-86 (the Zarathustra period). The remarks con- cerning the doctrine of return from the years 1881-82 are explicitly designated as such in volume XII, pages 51-69; the remarks from the Zarathustra period are for the most part in volume XII, pages 369-71. * The editors avoided an overhasty interpretation by refraining from ordering this stock of observations under other rubrics (metaphysics, epistemology, ethics) and by presenting them in a separate section. Yet the first notes we know of on the doctrine of eternal return, Nietzsche's earliest and most important sketches subsequent to his experience near that boulder at Surlei, are not to be found in the text proper of volume XII. They are appended to that volume in the editors' "Concluding Report" (see the second, revised edition, third printing, pages 425-28). Some of these passages appear scattered throughout the first edition of volume XII, for example, on pages 5, 3, 4, 128, and 6; some of them do not appear at all. The fact that now in the second, revised edition the most important texts are presented in the ''Concluding Report" betrays the total bewilderment of the editors. We shall have to begin with those passages that limp along behind in the appendix of the present edition-passages that are all too easily overlooked.
In addition, we must free ourselves straightaway of a prejudicial view. The editors say (XII, 425): "Right from the start two different intentions run parallel to each other; the one aims at a theoretical presentation of the doctrine, the other at a poetical treatment of it. " Now, to be sure, we too have spoken of a "poetic" presentation of the doctrine of eternal return in Zarathustra. Yet we avoided distinguish- ing it from a "theoretical" presentation, not because the passages cited from The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil are not theoretical presentations, but because here the word and concept theoretical do
• For the notes from 1881-82 see now CM V/2; for the notes from the Zarathustra period (1882-86) see CM Vll/1-3. The Kritische Studienausgabe contains these notes in volumes 9 and J0. -11, respectively. On the "philological question" generally, see Maz- zino Montinari's Foreword to volume 14 of the Kritische Studienausgabe, pp. 7-17; and section II of the Analysis at the end of this volume.
Thought ofReturn in the Suppressed Notes 73
not say anything, especially not when one follows the lead of the edi- tors and of those who portray Nietzsche's "doctrine" by equating theoretical with "treatment in prose. " The distinction "theoretical-po- etical" results from muddled thinking. Even if we were to let it obtain in general, such a distinction would in any case be out of place here. In Nietzsche's thinking of his fundamental thought the "poetical" is every bit as much "theoretical," and the "theoretical" is inherently "poetical. " All philosophical thinking-and precisely the most rigorous and prosaic-is in itself poetic. It nonetheless never springs from the art of poetry. A work of poetry, a work like Holderlin's hymns, can for its part be thoughtful in the highest degree. It is nonetheless never philosophy. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is poetic in the high- est degree, and yet it is not a work of art, but "philosophy. " Because all actual, that is, all great philosophy is inherently thoughtful-poetic, the distinction between "theoretical" and "poetical" cannot be applied to philosophical texts.
11. The Four Notes Dated August 1881
We turn now to four notes on the doctrine of eternal return from August, 1881. These notes are at the same time sketches for a work, and that fact alone betrays the scope that Nietzsche assigned to the thought of eternal return of the same. In terms of time, the notes were drafted a year prior to Nietzsche's first communication of the thought in The Gay Science; they offer a preview of Nietzsche's whole way of treating the doctrine of return in later years. The notes also serve to corroborate Nietzsche's own words concerning Thus Spoke Zarathus- tra in Ecce Homo, according to which the thought of return is "the fundamental conception of the work. " The first sketch reads as follows (XII, 425)*:
The Return ofthe Same. Plan.
I. Incorporation of the fundamental errors.
2. Incorporation of the passions.
3. Incorporation of knowledge and of the knowledge that can renounce.
(Passion of insight. )
4. The Innocent. The individual as experiment. The amelioration of life,
degradation, ennervation-transition.
5. The new burden: the eternal retum of the same. Infinite importance of
our knowing, erring, our habits, ways of life, for everything to come. What will we do with the remnants of our lives-we who have spent the greater part of them in the most essential uncertainty? We shall teach the
• See CM, II [141]. The first four points of this first sketch appear in GOA in italics, while CM has them in Roman type. I have followed CM throughout in this respect. Entry II [141] includes a long commentary on the fourth point, projecting a "philos- ophy of indifference" and identifying the "innocent" as one who is capable of "child's play. "
The Four Notes Dated August 1881 75 teaching-that is the most potent means of incorporating it in ourselves.
Our kind of beatitude, as teacher of the greatest teaching.
Early August, 1881, in Sils-Maria, 6,000 feet above sea level and much higher above all human things!
The very fact that Nietzsche expressly records the time and occasion of the note speaks for the extraordinary nature of its content and its intent. The doctrine is grasped in terms of the teaching of it and in terms of the teacher.
The title of the "plan" points directly to the sense of the whole. And yet eternal return is mentioned only when we arrive at number five; furthermore, nothing at all is said there about its content, not even by way of vague outline. Instead, the plan's key word is "incorporation. "* The doctrine is called "the greatest teaching" and "the new burden. " Then comes the sudden question: "What will we do with the remnants of our lives? '' Here, then, it is a matter of decision-and of incision-in our lives, a matter of cutting away what has prevailed hitherto, what has by now run its course, from what still "remains. " Obviously, the cut is made by the thought of return, which transforms everything. However, what comes before this incision and what follows
it are not divided into two separate quantities. What has gone before is not rejected. Four other points precede number five, and the fourth concludes with a reference to "transition. " However novel it may be, the doctrine of eternal return does not drop out of the blue, but is yoked to a "transition. " Where we initially expect an explication of the doctrine's essential import, and above all an account of its various aspects and an explanation of it, all we get here, one might say, is something about the doctrine's impact on mankind, and prior to that on the teacher himself and alone. All we get is something about the
• The term Einverleibung, which also may be rendered as "ingestion," reflects Nietz- sche's preoccupation in the summer of 1881 with the natural sciences and especially the science of physiology. He had been studying Wilhelm Roux, The Struggle ofParts in the Organism: A Contribution to the Perfection ofthe Doctrine ofMechanistic Teleolo- gy (Leipzig, 1881), so that these earliest notes on eternal recurrence appear in the often bizarre context of /'homme machine. The term also appears twice in II [134] and once in II [182], notes which W. Miiller-Lauter has traced to Roux. See Miiller-Lauter, "Wilhelm Roux's Influence on Friedrich Nietzsche," Nietzsche-Studien, VII (1978),
189-223.
76 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
"incorporation" of new knowledge and the teaching of such knowledge as a new kind of beatitude. We know from Thus Spoke Zarathustra how essential the question of the "incorporation" of the thought is; we know that Zarathustra first becomes a convalescent after he has incorporated the weightiest elements of the thought. If we pursue the meaning of this word we arrive at the notion of "eating," of devouring and digesting. Whatever is incorporated makes the body-and our embodiment-steadfast and secure. It is also something we have finished with and which determines us in the future. It is the juice that feeds our energies. To incorporate the thought here means to think the thought in such a way that right from the start it becomes our fundamental stance toward beings as a whole, pervading every single thought as such and from the outset. Only when the thought has become the basic posture of our thinking as a whole has it been appropriated-and taken into the body-as its essence demands.
The definitive meditation on the project entitled "the return of the same" advances directly to "incorporation. " The peculiar nature of this first plan remains important. We have no "schema" into which we might pigeonhole this "project" and so make it familiar to us; we must be on the lookout for the project itself, for whatever pertains to it, for its own schema. If this were the plan for a projected book, then the book would have been something altogether its own, not only with regard to its content but also in the way it would have "appeared" as a book and then "had an impact" or "made no impact. " Whatever is taught there, whatever is thought in the thought, recedes before the way it is taught and thought. The plan sketched here is nothing other than the germ of the plan for the coming work, Thus Spoke Zarathus- tra, hence not a sketch toward a "theoretical," prosaic elaboration of the thought of return. Even this much enables us to see how vacuous the distinction discussed earlier is.
The second plan that is relevant here is as "prosaic" as it is "poeti- cal. " It bears no title and does not pertain to the project that is presented first in the Grossoktav edition. Among Nietzsche's notes it does not stand together with the first plan, but is presented as fragment number 129 in volume XII. " It reads:
• Heidegger presents the second note in two phases, first the opening paragraph, then the four points of the plan itself, listed below. See CM, II [144].
The Four Notes Dated August 1881 77
It would be a dreadful thing if we were still to believe in sin: but no matter what we do, if we repeat it countless times it is innocent. If the thought of the eternal return of all things does not overwhelm you, that is no one's fault; and it is not to its credit if it does do so. -W e judge our predecessors more gently than they themselves judged: we regret the errors they incorpo- rated, not their wickedness.
The passage enlightens us as to why in point four of the first project "the innocent" is mentioned. With the death of the moral God, the sinners and the guilty parties vanish from being as a whole, and the necessity of being-as it is-assumes its prerogative.
The second plan proceeds now to reverse the sequence of the princi- pal thoughts, inasmuch as ii begins with the thought of return. It runs (XII, 426):
I. The mightiest insight.
2. Opinions and errors transform mankind and grant it its drives, or: the
incorporated errors.
3. Necessity and innocence. 4. The play oflife.
This plan also provides directives in some other respects: "necessity" does not refer to any arbitrary kind of necessity but to that of being as a whole. "The play of life" reminds us immediately of a fragment of Heraclitus, the thinker to whom Nietzsche believed he was most close- ly akin, that is to say, fragment 52: Aion pais esti paidzon, pesseuon; paidos he basileie. "The aeon is a child at play, playing at draughts; dominion is the child's" (that is to say, dominion over being as a whole).
The suggestion is that innocence pervades being as a whole. The whole is aion, a word that can scarcely be translated in an adequate way. It means the whole of the world, but also time, and, related by time to our "life," it means the course oflife itself. We are accustomed to defining the meaning of aion thus: "Aeon" suggests the "time" of the "cosmos," that is, of nature, which operates in the time which physics measures. One distinguishes time in this sense from the time we "live through. " Yet what is named in aion resists such a distinction. At the same time, we are thinking of kosmos too cursorily when we represent it cosmologically.
78 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Nietzsche's use of the word life is ambiguous. It designates being as a whole and also the way in which we are "caught up in the melee" of the whole. The talk of "play" is correspondingly equivocal. "
The intimations in the direction of Heraclitus are not fortuitous, especially since Nietzsche in his notes of this period often touches on another thought which one customarily-and Nietzsche too follows custom here--designates as Heraclitus' principal thought: panta rhei ["everything flows"]. But this is a statement which for all we know does not even stem from Heraclitus. Far from characterizing his thought, it distorts his thought beyond recognition.
The second plan for the thought of eternal return which we have adduced here does not think primarily about the "impact" of the doc- trine on mankind or on the transformation of human "existence" with- in being as a whole. Rather, it thinks about being as a whole itself. Here it is more a question of catching a glimpse of the "metaphysical" character of the doctrine of return, whereas in the prior plan the doc- trine's "existentiell"t sense preponderated-if we may employ these designations that are still common today. Or does the distinction between "metaphysical" and "existentiell," if it is a clear and viable distinction at all, have as little to do with Nietzsche's philosophy as that other one which tried to distinguish between its theoretical-prosaic and its poetical character? We will be able to decide this question only later.
The plan projected next seems to assume yet another shape. t Of it the editors assert that it is "the sketch for the poetical idea" of the doctrine of return:
Midday and Eternity
Pointers Toward a New Life
Zarathustra, born on Lake Urmi, left his home during his thirtieth year, went to the province of Aria, and in the ten years of his mountain solitude composed the Zend-Avesta.
• Heidegger here adds a parenthetical reference to Nietzsche's poem "To Goethe," the first of the "Songs of the Outlaw Prince," published as an appendix to the second edition of The Gay Science in 1887. He also draws attention to Nil, 380f. , where that poem is presented and discussed. See Volume IV, Nihilism, pp. 235-37.
t On existentiell, as opposed to existenzial, see Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 55 n.
t See CM, II [195-96].
The Four Notes Dated August 1881 79 Once again the sun of insight stands at midday: and coiled in its light lies
the serpent of eternity-it is your time, ye brothers of noon!
The key word in this plan is midday. "Midday and Eternity": both are concepts and names for time-provided we are aware of the fact that we think eternity too solely in terms of time. Now that the thought of eternal return is thought, it is "midday and eternity" at one and the same time; we could also say that it is the Moment.