Yet he or she is not thinking the thought in its
essential
domain until the black snake has penetrated the gorge and its head has been bitten off.
Heidegger - Nietzsche - v1-2
Nietz- sche's philosophy, in the intrinsic movement of its thought, is a coun- termovement.
Yet it may well be that a countermovement is what every philosophy is, opposing every other philosophy.
Nevertheless, in Nietzsche's thinking the movement of this countering has a special sense.
It does not wish to reject that which is countered in its thought, in order to replace it with something else.
Nietzsche's thinking wills to invert.
Yet that toward which the inversion and its particular kind of countermovement aim is not some arbitrary past tendency (or even present trend) in one type of philosophy or another.
It is rather the whole of Western philosophy, inasmuch as such philosophy remains the form-giving principle in the history of Western man.
The collective history of Western philosophy is interpreted as Pla- tonism. Plato's philosophy provides the standard of measure for the way we conceive of all post-Platonic as well as pre-Platonic philos- ophy. That standard remains determinative inasmuch as philosophy posits specific conditions for the possibility of being as a whole and for man as being within this whole. Such conditions set their seal on being. That which first and last obtains, that which accordingly consti- tutes the condition of "life" as such, Nietzsche calls value. What prop- erly sets the standard are the uppermost values. If therefore Nietzsche's philosophy wants to be the countermovement to the whole of prior Western philosophy in the designated sense, it must set its sights on the uppermost values posited in philosophy. But because Nietzsche's countermovement possesses the character of an inversion, when it homes in on the uppermost values it becomes a "revaluation of all values. "
A countermovement of such scope and significance must of course be sufficiently necessary. Whatever impels it cannot rest on some gratuitous views and opinions concerning what is to be overcome. That in opposition to which the countermovement would set to work must itself be worthy of such work. Hence the most profound acknowl- edgment lies concealed in the countermovement that manifests such a
172 THE ETERJ\AL RECURREJ\CE OF THE SAME
style; the countermovement takes whatever has donned the colors of the opposition with consummate seriousness. In turn, such esteem presupposes that whatever stands in opposition has been experienced and thought through in its full power and significance; that is to say, has been suffered. The countermovement must in its necessity arise from such an original experience; and it must also remain rooted in such an experience.
Now, if the eternal return of the same is the fundamental thought of Nietzsche's philosophy proper, and if his philosophy is itself a counter- movement, then the thought of thoughts is inherently a counter- thought. The essence of this thought and its thinking, however, are a taking-for-true in the sense explained earlier: they are a belief. The thought of eternal return of the same is thus the counterbelief, the sustaining and guiding stance in the entire countermovement. The counterbelief itself is rooted in a particular experience involving prior philosophy and Western history in general, the experience t~at gener- ates the necessity of a countermovement or inversion in the sense of a revaluation.
What is this experience? What kind of need is experienced in it, as a need that makes a wending of the way necessary, a needful wending that calls for a revaluation and thereby a new valuation? * It is that propriative event in the history of Western man which Nietzsche designates by the name nihilism. What this word says is not something we can gather in some arbitrary way from a hodgepodge of political notions or world views. We must define it solely in terms of its meaning for Nietzsche. In his experience of the development of nihilism, the whole of Nietzsche's philosophy is rooted and suspended. At the same time, that philosophy strives to clarify in an initial way the experience of nihilism and to make the scope of nihilism increasingly transparent. With the unfolding of Nietzsche's philosophy we also find a deepening of Nietzsche's insight into the essence and the power of nihilism, as well as a development of the need and the necessity of its overcommg.
What we have just said also suggests that the concept of nihilism can
*On the "needful wending," Not-wend-igkeit, see the note on page 175, below.
The Domain of the Thought of Return 173
be thought adequately only if we assimilate simultaneously the funda- mental thought-the counterthought-of Nietzsche's philosophy. Hence the reverse obtains as well: the fundamental thought, to wit, the doctrine of eternal return, can be grasped solely on the basis of the experience of nihilism and knowledge of the essence of nihilism. If we are to take the measure of the full domain of this most difficult thought; if our gaze is to penetrate at one and the same time the regions of that thought's provenance and dominion; then we must also adjoin to our provisional characterization of the thought's import and the manner of its communication a characterization of nihilism.
If we turn to the word itself we may say that nihilism is an event-or a teaching-whereby it is a matter of the nihil, the nothing. Con- sidered formally, the nothing is a negation of something-indeed of every kind of something. What constitutes being as a whole is every such something. To posit the nothing is thus to negate being as a whole. Nihilism thereby has as its explicit or tacit fundamental teach- ing the following: being as a whole is nothing. Yet precisely this avowal can be understood in such a way that it would be susceptible to the Nietzschean suspicion that it is not at all an expression of nihilism.
That which determines being as a whole is Being. At the beginning of his general metaphysics (in The Science of Logic) Hegel makes the following statement: Being and the Nothing are the same. One can also easily alter the proposition to read as follows: Being is the Nothing. Yet the Hegelian proposition is so little nihilism that it can be said to embody something of that very "grandiose initiative" that Nietzsche sees in German idealism (WM, 416*) which would overcome nihilism. The practice of referring broadly to "nihilism" whenever the nothing emerges in Hegel's text, especially when it stands in essential relation to the doctrine of Being; and furthermore the practice of speaking of nihilism in such a way as to give it a tinge of "Bolshevism," is not merely superficial thinking but unconscionable demagogy.
• WM, 416 (CM, W I 8 [106]) begins as follows:
The significance of German philosophy (Hegel): to constitute in thought a pantheism in which evil, error, and suffering are not felt to be arguments against divinity. This grandiose initiative was misused by the reigning powers (the state, etc. ), as though to sanction the rationality of whoever happened to be ruling.
174 THE ETERJ\'AL RECURRENCE O f THE SAME
Above all, such trivial reductions fail to grasp or even touch on Nietzsche's thought, either in terms of its understanding of nihilism or in the kind of nihilism that is proper to it. For Nietzsche does understand his own thinking in terms of nihilism: his thinking passes through "consummate nihilism," and Nietzsche himself is "Europe's first consummate nihilist, one who in himself has lived nihilism as such to its end, who has left it behind, beneath, and outside himself" (WM, Preface, section 3). "
The domain of the thought of eternal return of the same-of that thought's provenance and dominion-will open itself to us only when we have come to recognize the propriative event of nihilism, that is, only when we ponder the fact that Nietzsche experienced and thoroughly interrogated nihilism as the fundamental development of history as such. Nietzsche experienced and interrogated nihilism to the utmost by pursuing the path of his own thinking. The thought of eternal return thinks being in such a way that being as a whole sum- mons us without cease. It asks us whether we merely want to drift with the tide of things or whether we would be creators. Prior to that, it asks us whether we desire the means and the conditions by which we might again become creators.
lnsightinto nihilism remains something terrifying. Hence it is terri- bly difficult to think the thought that is hardest to bear and to prepare for the coming of those who will think it truly and creatively. What is most difficult at the outset is the confrontation with nihilism along with the thought of return, inasmuch as the latter itself betrays a nihi- listic character in the fact that it refuses to think of an ultimate goal for beings. From one point of view, at least, this thought ascribes the "in vain," the lack of an ultimate goal, to eternity. To this extent it is an utterly crippling thought (WM, 55; from the years 1886-87):
Let us think this thought in its most frightful form: existence as it is, without meaning and goal, yet inevitably recurring; existence with no finale to sweep it into nothingness: eternal recurrence.
• In I961 Heidegger added the following in square brackets: "A detailed explication and discussion of the essence of nihilism is to be found in Volume II of the present publication. " See Volume IV of this English-language series, entitled Nihilism.
The Domain ofthe Thought ofReturn 175 That is the utterly extreme form of nihilism: the nothing ("meaningless-
ness") eternally!
Yet when we think the Nietzschean thought of eternal return in this way we are doing so halfheartedly-in fact we are not thinking it at all. For we are not grasping it in its character as decision, the character of the moment. Only when this happens do we plumb the depths of the thought in its proper domain; only when this happens is there in Nietz- sche's view such a thing as the overcoming of nihilism. As an over- coming, the thought obviously presupposes nihilism, in the sense that it takes up nihilism into its thought, thinking it through to its uttermost end. Understood in this way, the thought of return too is to be thought "nihilistically," and only so. But this now implies that the thought of return is to be thought only in conjunction with nihilism, as what is to be overcome, what is already overcome in the very will to create. Only the one whose thinking ventures forth into the uttermost need of nihil- ism will be able to think the overcoming thought, which is the needed thought-the thought that wends its way toward the need as such. "'
• Nur wer in die iiusserste Not des Nihilismus hinausdenkt, vermag auch den iiber- windenden Gedanken als den not-wendenden und notwendigen zu denken. Cf. Heideg- ger's brief Foreword to the fourth edition of Erliiuterungen zu Holder/ins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1971), p. 7. The above phrase plays on the rootedness of both "overcoming" and "necessity" in a kind of wending or turning toward the need in our destitute time. See also the discussion of need and needlessness in Volume IV of this series, pp. 244-50, including the note on pp. 244-45.
24. Moment and Eternal Recurrence
What is the fundamental position in the midst of beings that results from such thinking? Earlier we heard that the serpent that coils itself in rings about the eagle's throat, thus becoming a ring that itself turns in the widening spiral of the eagle's ascent into the heights, is the image of the ring in the doctrine of eternal return. In the middle of our account of "The Vision and the Riddle," while we were recounting Zarathustra's tale told on shipboard of how he had once climbed a mountain in company with the dwarf, we broke off at a particular point with the remark that the remainder of Zarathustra's tale would become comprehensible only later. We have now arrived at that junc- ture at which we can take up the matters postponed earlier. At the same time we can once again think through the entire tale-the tale that thinks the thought that is hardest to bear.
W e recall that Zarathustra poses two questions to the dwarf concern- ing the vision of the gateway. The second question the dwarf does not answer. Indeed, Zarathustra reports that his own talk concerning what is decisive in this vision of the gateway-namely, the question of the "moment"-grows softer and softer, and that he himself begins to fear his "own thoughts and hinterthoughts. " He himself is not yet master of this thought-which is tantamount to saying that the victory of his thought is not yet decided, not even for Zarathustra. True, he tells the dwarf, "It is either You or me! " and he knows that he is the stronger one; still, he is not yet master of his own strength; he must test it and thus attain it for the first time, in confrontation. Whither the con- frontation tends, and what domain of provenance and dominion the thought of thoughts occupies, we have in the meantime considered.
With one eye on this domain we may now proceed to interpret the remainder of Zarathustra's tale.
Moment and Eternal Recurrence 177
Zarathustra is approaching his ownmost thought, fearing it more intensely with each advancing step. "Then suddenly I heard a dog nearby howling. " It is now a dog that comes into Zarathustra's vicinity, not an eagle with a serpent coiled about its throat; and now we hear, not the singing of songbirds, but a "howling. " Now all the images turn counter to the mood of the thought of eternal return.
When the dog howls Zarathustra's thoughts "race back" to his child- hood. The reference to childhood shows that we are now retreating to the earlier history of Zarathustra, the thinker of the thought of return, and also to the vast prehistory of that thought-to the genesis and emergence of nihilism. At some point in his childhood Zarathustra saw a dog, "bristling, its head raised, shivering in the stillest midnight, when even dogs believe in ghosts. " The scene, with all its counter- images, is thus defined in greater detail. It is midnight, the most remote time, the hour that is farthest removed from midday-midday being the time of the most luminous, shadowless moment. "For at that instant the full moon, silent as death, rose over the house and then stood still, a round, glowing coal; stood still on the flat roof, as though trespassing on a stranger's property. . . . " Instead of the brilliant sun it is the full moon that is shining here; it too is a light, but a merely borrowed light, the most pallid reflection of actual illumination, a diaphanous ghost of light. Yet it shines enough to affright the dogs and set them baying-"since dogs believe in thieves and ghosts. " At that time the child took pity on the dog that took fright at a ghost and yowled and raised a great din. In such a world compassion is most likely to be found among children-who comprehend nothing of what is happening and who are not of age with respect to being.
"And when I heard such howling once again I took pity. " Zarathus- tra reports that even now-though he is no longer a child-he slip~ into the mood of pity and compassion, imagining on the basis of that mood how the world must look. Through Zarathustra's words, Nietz- sche is here alluding to the time when Schopenhauer and Wagner determined his outlook on the world. Both of them taught, albeit in divergent ways, a form of pessimism-ultimately the flight into disso- lution, into nothingness, into sheer suspension, into a sleep which promised itself an awakening only in order that it might go on sleeping undisturbed.
178 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Meanwhile, Nietzsche himself had renounced all slumbering and dreaming; for he had already begun to question. The world of Scho- penhauer and Wagner became questionable to him early on, earlier than even he knew, already at the time he was writing the third and fourth of his Untimely Meditations, "Schopenhauer as Educator" and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. " However much in both of these writ- ings he appeared to be an advocate of Schopenhauer's and Wagner's, and however much he wanted to be precisely that, here already we see a struggle for release, though not yet a real awakening. Nietzsche was not yet his own man, was not yet hard by his own thought. He first had to pass through the prehistory of that thought, and through the limbo that always leaves us so perplexed-a limbo of past experiences which we cannot truly come to terms with and of things to come which we cannot yet truly penetrate. Where exactly was Zarathustra? "Was I dreaming? Was I awakening? At one stroke I stood among wild cliffs, alone, bleak, in the bleakest moonlight. " Bleakness pervades the period
1874 to 1881, the years Nietzsche once described as the period in which his life plunged to its nadir. Nevertheless, the bleakness of this lunar light was peculiarly bright, bright enough to enable him to see and to be visionary, especially when he heard the howling of a dog, having in the meantime developed an ear for that miserable specimen which is more whelp than human being and which has lost all pride, believing only in its own believing and nothing more.
And what did Zarathustra descry in this bleak lunar light? "A man was lying there! " The italic print lends special emphasis to what is seen: a human being lying prostrate on the ground-not erect and standing. Yet this is not enough. "And, truly, what I now saw was unlike anything I had ever seen. " A man lying on the ground may be nothing unusual; and the experience that human beings do not often rouse themselves to stand, do not take a stand, that they generally lurch on with the help of crutches and supports, is a common one; and that humankind is in a wretched state is the customary jeremiad of pessimism, with all its inexhaustible twists and turns. Yet the way in which Zarathustra saw humanity at that moment was a way it had never been seen before. A human being, prostrate. But of what sort, and in what circumstances? "I saw a young shepherd, writhing, chok-
Moment and Eternal Recurrence 179
ing in spasms, his face distorted; a thick black snake hung out of his mouth. " It is a young man, then, one who has barely left his child- hood behind; perhaps he is the very one who heard the howling dog, namely, Zarathustra. A young shepherd, one who intends to guide and lead. He lies prostrate in the bleak light of illusion. "Had he been sleeping? A snake crawled into his mouth-and there it bit fast. "
By nuw we are sufficiently prepared to discern in the "thick black snake" the counterimage of the serpent that winds itself about the ea- gle's throat, the eagle in turn soaring in the midday sky and holding effortlessly in the heights. The black snake is drear monotony, ulti- mately the goallessness and meaninglessness of nihilism. It is nihilism itself. Nihilism has bitten the young shepherd during his sleep and is now firmly entrenched. Only because the shepherd was not vigilant could the power of the snake assert itself, could the snake wriggle its way into the young shepherd's mouth, incorporating itself in him. When Zarathustra sees the young shepherd lying there, he does the first thing anyone would do. He pulls at the snake, tugs at it, "-in vain! "
The implication is that nihilism cannot be overcome from the out- side. We do not overcome it by tearing away at it or shoving it aside- which is what we do when we replace the Christian God with yet another ideal, such as Reason, Progress, political and economic "So- cialism," or mere Democracy. Try as we might to cast it aside, the black snake attaches itself ever more firmly. Zarathustra thus immedi- ately gives up such rescue operations. "With one cry," he now relates, "it cried out of me. " What is this it? Zarathustra replies, "All my goodness and my wickedness. " Zarathustra's complete essence and his entire history precipitate in him and cry out, "Bite! You must bite! " W e need not say a great deal more in order to make the meaning of the passage perfectly clear. The black snake of nihilism threatens to inc~r porate humanity altogether; it must be overcome by those who are themselves inflicted with it and endangered by it. All tugging-all that frantic activity from the outside, all temporary amelioration, all mere
repulsion, postponement, and deferment-all this is in vain. Here nothing avails if human beings themselves do not bite into the danger, and not blindly, not just anywhere. We must bite off the head of the
180 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
black snake, its properly definitive and leading part, which looms at the forefront.
Nihilism will be overcome only from the ground up, only if we grapple with the very head of it; only if the ideals which it posits and from which it derives fall prey to "criticism," that is, to enclosure and overcoming. Yet such overcoming transpires only in the following way: everyone who is affected-and that means each of us-must bite into the matter for himself or herself; for if we leave it to another to tug at the darkling need that is our own, all will be futile.
-But the shepherd bit as my cry urged him to, bit with a good bite! He spewed out the snake's head, spat it far away, and leapt to his feet.
No longer a shepherd, no longer human, but as one transformed, il- luminated--one who laughed!
What sort of gaiety gives vent to such laughter? The gaiety of the gay science. Now, at the end of our long path, we recognize-and we recognize it as no accident but as the most intrinsic necessity-that at the conclusion of the treatise which Nietzsche entitled The Gay Science the thought of eternal return of the same is communicated for the first time. For this thought is the bite that is to overcome nihilism in its very foundation. Just as Zarathustra is no one else than the thinker of this thought, so too is the bite nothing other than the over- coming of nihilism. Thus it becomes transparently clear that the young shepherd is Zarathustra himself. In this vision Zarathustra is advancing toward himself. With the full force of his complete essence he must call out to himself, "You must bite! " Toward the end of the tale that Zarathustra recounts to the seamen-those searchers and re- searchers-Zarathustra poses this question to them: "Who is the shep- herd into whose gorge the snake crawled? " We can now reply that it is Zarathustra, the thinker of the thought of eternal return. Zarathustra's ownmost animals, his eagle and his serpent, exalt him only after he has overcome the world of the howling dog and the black snake. Zara- thustra becomes a convalescent only after he has passed through a period of illness, only after he has come to know that the black snake that chokes us pertains to knowledge as such, that the knower must also come to terms with the disgust occasioned by the contemptible human being as something that is necessary.
Moment and Eternal Recurrence 181
Now for the first time we can recognize the inner correspondence of the two passages from Part III of Thus Spoke Zarathustra on which we have been commenting. Now we understand why Zarathustra replies as follows to his animals, who wish to perform for Zarathustra's enjoy- ment the delightful ditty of the eternal return of the same in the loveli- est words and tones: "The intense disgust with man-this choked, me, this had crawled into my throat, this and also what the soothsayer had said: 'It is all alike, nothing is worthwhile, knowledge chokes. ' " Who- ever takes the thought of eternal return to be a ditty belongs among those who flee from genuine knowledge, inasmuch as such knowledge "chokes. " Thus in the episode entitled "The Convalescent," with ex- plicit reference to the section "On the Vision and the Riddle," precise- ly at the point when Zarathustra begins to respond to the animals' ditty, we hear the following:
"Oh, you rascally jesters and barrel organs, be still now! " replied Zara- thustra, smiling once again. "How well you know what had to be fulfilled in seven days-and how that beast wriggled down my throat and choked me! But I bit its head off and spewed it far away from me.
And you? You've made a hurdy-gurdy song out of it! Here am I, lying here, weary of this biting and spewing, still sick from my own redemption. And you looked on all the while?
These two distinct episodes, "On the Vision and the Riddle" and "The Convalescent," hence coalesce, both in terms of their content and their place in the work in question. We achieve a more balanced understanding of the book as a whole. Yet we must guard against the presumption that we now belong among those who really understand. Perhaps we too are mere onlookers. Perhaps we do not heed the second question Zarathustra poses straightaway to the crew. He asks not only "Who is the shepherd? " but also "Who is the human being into whose gorge all that is heaviest and blackest will creep? " The answer is that it is the one who thinks-in company with others-the thought of eter- nal return.
Yet he or she is not thinking the thought in its essential domain until the black snake has penetrated the gorge and its head has been bitten off. The thought is only as that bite.
As soon as we understand this we realize why Zarathustra grows fearful when he thinks the thought of the moment, and why the dwarf,
182 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
rather than answering, simply vanishes. The moment cannot be thought before the bite has occurred, because the bite answers the question as to what the gateway itself-the moment-is: the gateway of the moment is that decision in which prior history, the history of nihilism, is brought to confrontation and forthwith overcome.
The thought of eternal return of the same is only as this conquering thought. The overcoming must grant us passage across a gap that seems to be quite narrow. The gap opens between two things that in one way are alike, so that they appear to be the same. On the one side stands the following: "Everything is nought, indifferent, so that noth- ing is worthwhile-it is all alike. "And on the other side: "Everything recurs, it depends on each moment, everything matters-it is all alike. "
The smallest gap, the rainbow bridge of the phrase it is all alike, conceals two things that are quite distinct: "everything is indifferent" and "nothing is indifferent. "
The overcoming of this smallest gap is the most difficult overcoming in the thought of eternal return of the same as the essentially overcom- ing thought. If one takes the thought ostensibly "for itself' in terms of its content-"Everything turns in a circle"-then it is perhaps sheer delusion. But in that case it is not Nietzsche's thought. Above all, it is not the thought "for itself," inasmuch as for itself it is precisely the overcoming thought, and this alone.
If we survey once again at a single glance our presentation of Nietz- sche's thought of eternal return of the same, we cannot but be struck by the fact that our explicit discussion of the thought's content has receded markedly before our constant emphasis on the right way of approaching the thought and its conditions. The conditions may be reduced to two-and even these cohere and constitute but one.
First, thinking in terms of the moment. This implies that we trans- pose ourselves to the temporality of independent action and decision, glancing ahead at what is assigned us as our task and back at what is given us as our endowment.
Second, thinking the thought as the overcoming of nihilism. This implies that we transpose ourselves to the condition of need that arises with nihilism. The condition requires of us that we meditate on the
Moment and Eternal Recurrence 183
endowment and decide about the task. Our needy condition itself is nothing other than what our transposition to the moment opens up to us.
Yet what accounts for the fact that with this thought it is precisely thinking, and the conditions of thinking, that are emphasized so essen- tially? What else could it be but the thought's "content," what it gives us to think? Accordingly, the content does not really go into abeyance, as it seemed to; rather, it comes to the fore in a singular way. For now the conditions of the thought-process as such thrust their way to the forefront. With the thought in question, what is to be thought recoils on the thinker because of the way it is to be thought, and so it compels the thinker. Yet it does so solely in order to draw the thinker into what is to be thought. To think eternity requires that we think the moment, that is, transpose ourselves to the moment of being-a-self. " To think the recurrence of the same is to enter into confrontation with the "it is all alike," the "it isn't worthwhile'; in short, with nihilism.
Only by way ofnihilism and the moment is the eternal recurrence of the same to be thought. Yet in such thinking the thinker as such slips into the ring of eternal recurrence, indeed in such a way as to help achieve the ring, help decide it.
Whence does it arise that precisely in the fundamental thought of Nietzsche's philosophy the recoil of what is to be thought on the think- er-and the thinker's being drawn into what is thought-come so deci- sively to light? Is it because this kind of relation between thought and thinker is instituted in Nietzsche's philosophy alone? Or does such a relation obtain in every philosophy as such? If the latter, to what extent is this the case? With that question we arrive at the second major division of our lecture course.
• See chapter 4 of Being and Time, sections 25-27. Cf. p. 24, above.
25. The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position; The Possibility of Such Positions in the History of
Western Philosophy
Whenever we think the thought of eternal recurrence of the same, what is to be thought recoils on the one who is thinking,· and the thinker is drawn into the thought. The reason for this is not simply the fact that the eternal recurrence of the same is being thought, but that this particular thought thinks being as a whole. We call such a thought "metaphysical. " Because the thought of return is the metaphysical thought in Nietzsche's case, it is characterized by the relationship of the recoil that includes and the inclusion that recoils. Of course, there must be a special reason for the fact that this relationship comes to prevail in such a conspicuous way precisely with Nietzsche, and that reason can lie only in Nietzsche's metaphysics; we can say where and how and why it lies there only if we have defined what we call meta- physics by means of a sufficiently clear concept. Such a concept must clarify what we mean by a "fundamental position. " In the designation "fundamental metaphysical position" the word metaphysical is not ap- pended in order to indicate a special case among "fundamental posi- tions. " Rather, the word metaphysical designates the domain that is opened up as metaphysical only by virtue of the articulation of a fun- damental position. If this is so, then what does the phrase fundamental
metaphysical position mean?
The title of this section, which indicates the task we have just out-
lined, bears a subtitle. The subtitle invokes the possibility of a
The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position 185
fundamental metaphysical position in the history of Western philos- ophy. Here it is not so much a matter of referring to the manifold approximations to such fundamental metaphysical positions and to their historical sequence. Rather, what we must emphasize is the fact that what we are calling a fundamental metaphysical position pertains expressly to Western history, and to it alone, helping to determine that history in an essential way. Something like a fundamental metaphysi- cal position was possible heretofore only in our tradition; and to the extent that such positions are attempted in the future as well, what has prevailed up to now will remain in force as something not overcome, not assimilated. Here we intend to discuss the possibility of a funda- mental metaphysical position in the most fundamental sense of the phrase, and not to sketch some sort of historiographical account. In accordance with what we have said, this fundamental discussion will nonetheless be essentially historical.
Since in the present lecture course we are to portray Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position, our discussion of that concept can only be of a preparatory nature. Furthermore, a well-rounded, essen- tial consideration of the matter is quite impossible: we lack all the prerequisites for such a consideration.
It behooves our tentative characterization of the concept fundamen- tal metaphysical position to begin with the word and concept meta- physical. We use the word to designate matters germane to "metaphysics. " The latter has for centuries referred to that range of questions in philosophy which philosophy sees as its proper task. Meta- physics is thus the rubric indicative of philosophy proper; it always has to do with a philosophy's fundamental thought. Even the customary meaning of the word, that is to say, the meaning that has come into general and popular use, still reflects this trait, albeit in a faint and fuzzy way. When we speak of something metaphysical we are pointing to reasons lying behind something else, or perhaps going out beyond that thing in some inscrutable way. We sometimes employ the word in a pejorative way, whereby those "reasons behind" a thing are taken as mere figments and, at bottom, absurdities; at other times we use the word metaphysical positively, taking it as referring to the impalpable and ultimate, the decisive. In either case, however, our thinking hov-
186 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
ers in indeterminacy, insecurity, and obscurity. The word refers more to the end and limits of our thinking and inquiring than to their proper beginning and unfolding.
Yet when we refer merely to the devaluation the word metaphysics has suffered we are not entertaining the proper significance of that word. The word and its origins are quite strange; odder still is its his- tory. And yet the configuration of the Western intellectual world and thereby the world in general depends to an essential extent on the power and preeminence of this word and its history. In history, words are often mightier than things and deeds. The fact that we ultimately still know very little about the power of this word metaphysics and its hegemony makes us realize how paltry and extrinsic our knowledge of the history of philosophy has remained, and how ill-prepared we are to enter into confrontation with that history, its fundamental positions, and the unifying and determinative forces within those positions. His- tory of philosophy is not a matter for historiography, but a matter of philosophy. The first philosophical history of philosophy was that of Hegel. He never elaborated that history in book form, but presented it in lecture courses taught at Jena, Heidelberg, and Berlin.
Hegel's history of philosophy is the only philosophical history heretofore, and it will remain the only one until philosophy is forced to think historically-in a still more essential and original sense of that word-taking its ownmost grounding question as its point of departure. Wherever this is already occurring, in its initial stages, it still seems as if it is all nothing more than a slightly altered formulation of the earlier "historiographical" interpretation of the history of philosophy. The fur- ther illusion arises that historical observation restricts itself to what has been and does not have the courage-does not even have the capacity - t o say something "new" of its own. The illusion will persist as long as there is no one who surmises-and is able to estimate the implica- tions of-the following fact: in spite of the ascendant power of technol- ogy and of the universally technicized "mobilization" of the globe, hence in spite of a quite specific preeminence of an ensnared nature, an altogether distinct fundamental power of Being is on the rise; this power is history-which, however, is no longer to be represented as an object of historiography. We allude to these matters here simply be-
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 187
cause the following historical meditation on the essence of metaphysics may well seem to be nothing more than a highly abridged excerpt from some handbook or other on the history of philosophy.
Metaphysics is the name for the full range of philosophy's proper questions. If these questions are many, they are nonetheless guided by one single question. In truth, drawn as they are into that question, they are in effect but one question. Every question, and especially the one question of philosophy, as a question is always bathed in a light that emanates from the question itself. That is why the very inception of inquiry at the grand commencement of Western philosophy pos- sesses some knowledge of itself. Such autochthonous knowledge of philosophic inquiry initially defines itself by circumscribing and com- prehending what it is asking about. Philosophy inquires into the arche. We translate that word as "principle. " And if we neglect to think and question rigorously and persistently, we think we know what "prin- ciple" means here. Arche and archein mean "to begin. " At the same time, they mean to stand at the beginning of all; hence, to rule. Yet this reference to the designated arche will make sense only if we simul- taneously determine that ofwhich and for which we are seeking the arche. We are seeking it, not for some isolated event, not for unusual and recondite facts and relationships, but purely and simply for being. Whenever we say the word das Seiende, we are referring to everything
that is. But when we inquire into the arche of being, all being-as a whole and in entirety-is placed in question. With the question con- cerning the arche, something about being as a whole has already been said. Being as a whole has now become visible for the first time as being and as a whole.
Whenever we inquire into the arche we experi~nce being as a whole at the very beginning, the very rise of its presence and radiance. When the sun begins to radiate its light we speak of "sunrise"; accordingly, we conceive of the upsurgence of what is present as such as a rise. We are asking about the arche of being as a whole, about its rise, to the extent that this rising pervades being in terms of both what it is and how it is. Thus we are asking about a kind of dominion. We mean to acquire knowledge concerning the rise and dominion of being as a whole; such knowledge of the arche is therefore to know what being is insofar as it
188 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
is being. Accordingly, the question of philosophy, as an inquiry into the arche, may be posed in the following form: What is being, insofar as it is viewed as being? Ti to on hei on? Quid est ens qua ens? This question, once its manner of inquiry has thus been established, may be simplified to the following formula: Ti to on? What is being? To ask this question, to find the answer to it once it has been posed and secured, is the primary and proper task of philosophy-it is prate philo- sophia. At its very commencement Western philosophy delineates philosophic inquiry in terms of the question ti to on? In that com- mencement Western philosophy comes to its essential conclusion. It is Aristotle in particular who achieves this essential clarification of philo- sophic inquiry in the most lucid way. Hence at the outset of one of his essential treatises (Metaphysics, VII, 1) Aristotle writes the following words: Kai de kai to palai te kai nun kai aei dzetoumenon kai aei aporoumenon, ti to on? "And so it is asked, from ancient times to the present, and on into the future, even though the paths to this question stop short or are utterly lacking,-What is being? "
In order for us to understand-and that means to assist in asking- this apparently quite simple question, it is important from the outset to attain clarity concerning the following point, a point we will have to think about again and again: inasmuch as being is put in question with a view to the arche, being itself is already determined. If we ask whence and in what way being rises and, as rising, comes to presence, being itself is already defined as the upsurging and as what holds sway and presences in such upsurgence. The Greeks called such rising- presencing governance physis. The. latter word means something else, something more, than our word nature. At all events, the following becomes clear: when the arche is sought, being itself is defined more closely, determined in a correspondingly far-reaching and penetrating way.
A peculiar experience arises as part and parcel of this process: in addition to beings that come to the fore on their own, there seem to be other beings that are first produced by human beings-whether such production occur in handicraft manufacture, in artistic performances, or in the ordered conduct of public affairs. Accordingly, one proceeds to make a distinction with respect to being as a whole between what is
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 189
preeminently and straightforwardly physis, namely, on physei, and what is on technei, thesei, and nomoi. "'
The definitive meditation on being will always first cast its eye on being as physis-ta physei onta-there to perceive what being as such is. Such knowledge, related as it is to physis, is an episteme physike, "physics," though not at all in the contemporary sense of that word. It is of course nonetheless true that physics today has a great deal of work to do, more than it is aware of, or can possibly be aware of. "Physics" is perspective on, and circumspection within, being as a whole; yet its view to the arche always sets the standard. Thus within the philosoph- ical meditation on being (that is, on physis) there are studies that enter more deeply into being and its various regions, for instance, the inani- mate or animate; and there can also be studies that concentrate less on the characteristic details of a given region than on the question of what being is when viewed as a whole. If we designate the first series of investigations with the word physike, in the sense of scientia physica, then the second series is in a certain sense posterior to it; yet although it follows in the wake of the first series, the second series contains the ultimate and genuine studies. Viewed from the outside, in terms of the order, division, and sequence of the investigations and in terms of the kind of knowledge that is attained in treatises that come post physicam, such studies may be given the Greek designation meta ta physika. At the same time, what we have already indicated readily opens onto a further insight: inquiry into the arche asks what determines and domi- nates being as a whole in its governance. The question ti to on? in- quires out beyond being as a whole, although the question always and everywhere relates precisely back to it. Such knowledge of the physika is not merely post physicam but trans physicam. Metaphysics, meta ta physika, is knowledge and inquiry that posit being as physis. Meta- physics does so in such a way that in and through the positing it. inquires out beyond being, asking about being as being. To inquire into the arche-to ask the question ti to on? -is metaphysics. Or, to put it the other way around, metaphysics is the inquiry and the search
• That is to say, a distinction between beings that rise and come to presence under their own power and those that derive from the arts and crafts (teclmei), or are set down in words (thesei), or are proclaimed in laws (nomoi).
190 THE ETERNAL RECURRf~NCE OF THE SAMF.
that always remains guided by the sole question "What is being? " We therefore call this question the guiding question of metaphysics. *
The question "What is being? " inquires so universally and so en- compassingly that all the efforts incited by it at first and for quite some time afterwards strive after this one thing-to find an answer to the question and to secure that answer. The more this question becomes the guiding question, and the longer it remains such, the less the question itself becomes an object of inquiry. Every treatment of the guiding question is and remains preoccupied with the answer, preoc- cupied with finding the answer. The latter has assumed sundry con- figurations ever since the commencement of Western philosophy with the Greeks, as philosophy pursued its circuitous route through the age of Christendom and into the age of modernity and modernity's con- quest of the world, up to Nietzsche. Yet no matter how varied the configurations have been, they remain unified by the framework of the sole guiding question; once it is posed, the question seems to pose itself automatically-and hence to recede as a question. The question is not unfolded along the lines of its own articulation.
With the responses to this wholly undeveloped guiding question, certain positions adopted toward being as such and toward its arche arise. Being itself, as it is definitively experienced from the outset- whether as physis or as the creation of some Creator or as the realiza- tion of an absolute spirit-and the way being is defined in its arche provide the ground on which, and the respect in which, the guiding question troubles itself about the proffered answers. The questioners themselves, and all those who pattern and ground their essential knowledge and action within the realm of the prevailing response to the guiding question, have adopted a stance toward being as a whole, a stance in relation to being as such, in conformity to the guiding question-whether or not they are aware of the guiding question as such. Because the stance in question originates from the guiding ques- tion and is simultaneous with it, and because the guiding question is what is properly metaphysical in metaphysics, we call the stance that
• See Volume I of this series, section II, pp. 67-68, for further discussion of the
Leitfrage.
The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position 191
derives from the undeveloped guiding question the fundamental meta- physical position. "'
The concept fundamental metaphysical position may be grasped in propositional form as follows: The fundamental metaphysical position expresses the way in which the one who poses the guiding question remains enmeshed in the structures of that question, which is not explicitly unfolded; thus enmeshed, the questioner comes to stand within being as a whole, adopting a stance toward it, and in that way helping to determine the location of humanity as such in the whole of beings.
All the same, the concept of a fundamental metaphysical position is not yet clear. Not only the concept but also the historically developed fundamental positions themselves are necessarily in and for themselves altogether opaque and impenetrable. That is the reason we invariably represent the fundamental metaphysical positions-for instance, those of Plato, or of medieval theology, or of Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel-so extrinsically, according to the various doctrines and propositions expressed in them. The best we can do is to say what predecessors influenced these philosophers and what standpoint they adopt in mat- ters of ethics or in the question of the demonstrability of God's exis- tence or with regard to the issue of the "reality of the external world. " We invoke sundry "aspects," which apparently just happen to be there and which we take up as evident, totally ignorant of the fact that there can be such aspects only because a fundamental metaphysical position has been adopted here. The position in question is adopted because knowledge and thought themselves stand under the dominion of the guiding question from the very beginning. And the guiding question itself is not developed.
The concept of a fundamental metaphysical position and the corre- sponding historical positions themselves attain essential clarity and definition only when the guiding question of metaphysics and thereby metaphysics itself in its essence come to be developed. It is almost
• Die metaphysische Grundstellung, literally, "the metaphysical ground position. " Readers must hea1 in the word fundamental the German word Grund. Heidegger always and everywhere contraposes the guiding question of metaphysics to its grounding ques- tion, die Grundfrage.
192 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
superfluous to say that an original, thoughtful stance adopted with regard to a particular metaphysics is possible and fruitful only if that metaphysics is itself developed in terms of its own fundamental posi- tion and only if the way in which it responds to the guiding question can be defined. The mutually prevailing fundamental positions must first of all be worked out in and for every genuinely philosophical confrontation.
The essence of what we are calling a fundamental metaphysical position develops with and in the unfolding of the guiding question of metaphysics. Such unfolding of the guiding question is not solely and not even primarily motivated by the desire to achieve a better concep- tion of the fundamental metaphysical position as such. Rather, the determining ground of the development of the guiding question is to be sought in a renewed posing of the question, indeed, in a more original asking of that question. Yet that is not a matter we shall be able to treat here. What we are to communicate now is rather the bare result of the development of the guiding question. We shall present it in a highly compressed, well-nigh arid form, in textbook fashion, so that the inner articulation of the guiding question becomes visible-if only as a skeleton devoid of flesh and blood.
The guiding question of Western philosophy is, "What is being? " To treat this question as stated and posed is simply to look for an answer. To develop the question as it is formulated, however, is to pose the question more essentially: in asking the question one enters explicitly into those relationships that become visible when one assimi- lates virtually everything that comes to pass in the very asking of the question. When we treat the guiding question we are transposed forth- with to a search for an answer and to everything that has to be done on behalf of that search. Developing the guiding question is something essentially different-it is a more original form of inquiry, one which does not crave an answer. It takes the search for an answer far more seriously and rigorously than any straightforward treatment of the guid- ing question can-given the particular stance such treatment has adopted. An answer is no more than the final step of the very asking; and an answer that bids adieu to the inquiry annihilates itself as an answer. It can ground nothing like knowledge. It rests content with the
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 193
sheer opinions it traces and in which it has ensconced itself. A ques- tion-especially a question that involves being as a whole-can be appropriately answered only if it is adequately posed in the first place. The guiding question of philosophy is adequately posed only when it is developed. Here the development assumes such proportions that it transforms the very question, bringing to light the guiding question as such in its utter lack of originality. For that reason we call the question "What is being? " the guiding question, in contrast to the more original question which sustains and directs the guiding question. The more original question we call the grounding question.
Whenever we present the development of the guiding question "schematically," as we are now doing, we easily awaken the suspicion that here we are merely making inquiries concerning a question. To question questioning strikes sound common sense as rather un- wholesome, extravagant, perhaps even nonsensical. If it is a matter of wanting to get to beings themselves-and in the guiding question this is surely the case-then the inquiry into inquiry seems an aberration. In the end, such an attitude, asking about its asking, seems nothing short of noxious or self-lacerating; we might call it "egocentric" and "nihilistic" and all the other nasty names we so easily come by.
That the development of the guiding question appears to be merely inquiry piled on top of inquiry-this illusion persists. That an inquiry concerning inquiry ultimately looks like an aberration, a veritable walk down the garden path-this illusion too cannot be squelched. Con- fronting the danger that only a few or no one at all will be able to muster the courage and the energy required to think through and ex- amine thoroughly the development of the guiding question; and in the expectation that these few might stumble against something quite dif- ferent from a question that is posed merely for its own sake or a piec:;e of sheer extravagance, we shall here undertake to sketch briefly the articulation of the developed guiding question.
The question asks ti to on? What is being? We shall begin to expli- cate the question by following the direction the inquiry itself takes, gradually unraveling all the matters we come across.
The collective history of Western philosophy is interpreted as Pla- tonism. Plato's philosophy provides the standard of measure for the way we conceive of all post-Platonic as well as pre-Platonic philos- ophy. That standard remains determinative inasmuch as philosophy posits specific conditions for the possibility of being as a whole and for man as being within this whole. Such conditions set their seal on being. That which first and last obtains, that which accordingly consti- tutes the condition of "life" as such, Nietzsche calls value. What prop- erly sets the standard are the uppermost values. If therefore Nietzsche's philosophy wants to be the countermovement to the whole of prior Western philosophy in the designated sense, it must set its sights on the uppermost values posited in philosophy. But because Nietzsche's countermovement possesses the character of an inversion, when it homes in on the uppermost values it becomes a "revaluation of all values. "
A countermovement of such scope and significance must of course be sufficiently necessary. Whatever impels it cannot rest on some gratuitous views and opinions concerning what is to be overcome. That in opposition to which the countermovement would set to work must itself be worthy of such work. Hence the most profound acknowl- edgment lies concealed in the countermovement that manifests such a
172 THE ETERJ\AL RECURREJ\CE OF THE SAME
style; the countermovement takes whatever has donned the colors of the opposition with consummate seriousness. In turn, such esteem presupposes that whatever stands in opposition has been experienced and thought through in its full power and significance; that is to say, has been suffered. The countermovement must in its necessity arise from such an original experience; and it must also remain rooted in such an experience.
Now, if the eternal return of the same is the fundamental thought of Nietzsche's philosophy proper, and if his philosophy is itself a counter- movement, then the thought of thoughts is inherently a counter- thought. The essence of this thought and its thinking, however, are a taking-for-true in the sense explained earlier: they are a belief. The thought of eternal return of the same is thus the counterbelief, the sustaining and guiding stance in the entire countermovement. The counterbelief itself is rooted in a particular experience involving prior philosophy and Western history in general, the experience t~at gener- ates the necessity of a countermovement or inversion in the sense of a revaluation.
What is this experience? What kind of need is experienced in it, as a need that makes a wending of the way necessary, a needful wending that calls for a revaluation and thereby a new valuation? * It is that propriative event in the history of Western man which Nietzsche designates by the name nihilism. What this word says is not something we can gather in some arbitrary way from a hodgepodge of political notions or world views. We must define it solely in terms of its meaning for Nietzsche. In his experience of the development of nihilism, the whole of Nietzsche's philosophy is rooted and suspended. At the same time, that philosophy strives to clarify in an initial way the experience of nihilism and to make the scope of nihilism increasingly transparent. With the unfolding of Nietzsche's philosophy we also find a deepening of Nietzsche's insight into the essence and the power of nihilism, as well as a development of the need and the necessity of its overcommg.
What we have just said also suggests that the concept of nihilism can
*On the "needful wending," Not-wend-igkeit, see the note on page 175, below.
The Domain of the Thought of Return 173
be thought adequately only if we assimilate simultaneously the funda- mental thought-the counterthought-of Nietzsche's philosophy. Hence the reverse obtains as well: the fundamental thought, to wit, the doctrine of eternal return, can be grasped solely on the basis of the experience of nihilism and knowledge of the essence of nihilism. If we are to take the measure of the full domain of this most difficult thought; if our gaze is to penetrate at one and the same time the regions of that thought's provenance and dominion; then we must also adjoin to our provisional characterization of the thought's import and the manner of its communication a characterization of nihilism.
If we turn to the word itself we may say that nihilism is an event-or a teaching-whereby it is a matter of the nihil, the nothing. Con- sidered formally, the nothing is a negation of something-indeed of every kind of something. What constitutes being as a whole is every such something. To posit the nothing is thus to negate being as a whole. Nihilism thereby has as its explicit or tacit fundamental teach- ing the following: being as a whole is nothing. Yet precisely this avowal can be understood in such a way that it would be susceptible to the Nietzschean suspicion that it is not at all an expression of nihilism.
That which determines being as a whole is Being. At the beginning of his general metaphysics (in The Science of Logic) Hegel makes the following statement: Being and the Nothing are the same. One can also easily alter the proposition to read as follows: Being is the Nothing. Yet the Hegelian proposition is so little nihilism that it can be said to embody something of that very "grandiose initiative" that Nietzsche sees in German idealism (WM, 416*) which would overcome nihilism. The practice of referring broadly to "nihilism" whenever the nothing emerges in Hegel's text, especially when it stands in essential relation to the doctrine of Being; and furthermore the practice of speaking of nihilism in such a way as to give it a tinge of "Bolshevism," is not merely superficial thinking but unconscionable demagogy.
• WM, 416 (CM, W I 8 [106]) begins as follows:
The significance of German philosophy (Hegel): to constitute in thought a pantheism in which evil, error, and suffering are not felt to be arguments against divinity. This grandiose initiative was misused by the reigning powers (the state, etc. ), as though to sanction the rationality of whoever happened to be ruling.
174 THE ETERJ\'AL RECURRENCE O f THE SAME
Above all, such trivial reductions fail to grasp or even touch on Nietzsche's thought, either in terms of its understanding of nihilism or in the kind of nihilism that is proper to it. For Nietzsche does understand his own thinking in terms of nihilism: his thinking passes through "consummate nihilism," and Nietzsche himself is "Europe's first consummate nihilist, one who in himself has lived nihilism as such to its end, who has left it behind, beneath, and outside himself" (WM, Preface, section 3). "
The domain of the thought of eternal return of the same-of that thought's provenance and dominion-will open itself to us only when we have come to recognize the propriative event of nihilism, that is, only when we ponder the fact that Nietzsche experienced and thoroughly interrogated nihilism as the fundamental development of history as such. Nietzsche experienced and interrogated nihilism to the utmost by pursuing the path of his own thinking. The thought of eternal return thinks being in such a way that being as a whole sum- mons us without cease. It asks us whether we merely want to drift with the tide of things or whether we would be creators. Prior to that, it asks us whether we desire the means and the conditions by which we might again become creators.
lnsightinto nihilism remains something terrifying. Hence it is terri- bly difficult to think the thought that is hardest to bear and to prepare for the coming of those who will think it truly and creatively. What is most difficult at the outset is the confrontation with nihilism along with the thought of return, inasmuch as the latter itself betrays a nihi- listic character in the fact that it refuses to think of an ultimate goal for beings. From one point of view, at least, this thought ascribes the "in vain," the lack of an ultimate goal, to eternity. To this extent it is an utterly crippling thought (WM, 55; from the years 1886-87):
Let us think this thought in its most frightful form: existence as it is, without meaning and goal, yet inevitably recurring; existence with no finale to sweep it into nothingness: eternal recurrence.
• In I961 Heidegger added the following in square brackets: "A detailed explication and discussion of the essence of nihilism is to be found in Volume II of the present publication. " See Volume IV of this English-language series, entitled Nihilism.
The Domain ofthe Thought ofReturn 175 That is the utterly extreme form of nihilism: the nothing ("meaningless-
ness") eternally!
Yet when we think the Nietzschean thought of eternal return in this way we are doing so halfheartedly-in fact we are not thinking it at all. For we are not grasping it in its character as decision, the character of the moment. Only when this happens do we plumb the depths of the thought in its proper domain; only when this happens is there in Nietz- sche's view such a thing as the overcoming of nihilism. As an over- coming, the thought obviously presupposes nihilism, in the sense that it takes up nihilism into its thought, thinking it through to its uttermost end. Understood in this way, the thought of return too is to be thought "nihilistically," and only so. But this now implies that the thought of return is to be thought only in conjunction with nihilism, as what is to be overcome, what is already overcome in the very will to create. Only the one whose thinking ventures forth into the uttermost need of nihil- ism will be able to think the overcoming thought, which is the needed thought-the thought that wends its way toward the need as such. "'
• Nur wer in die iiusserste Not des Nihilismus hinausdenkt, vermag auch den iiber- windenden Gedanken als den not-wendenden und notwendigen zu denken. Cf. Heideg- ger's brief Foreword to the fourth edition of Erliiuterungen zu Holder/ins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1971), p. 7. The above phrase plays on the rootedness of both "overcoming" and "necessity" in a kind of wending or turning toward the need in our destitute time. See also the discussion of need and needlessness in Volume IV of this series, pp. 244-50, including the note on pp. 244-45.
24. Moment and Eternal Recurrence
What is the fundamental position in the midst of beings that results from such thinking? Earlier we heard that the serpent that coils itself in rings about the eagle's throat, thus becoming a ring that itself turns in the widening spiral of the eagle's ascent into the heights, is the image of the ring in the doctrine of eternal return. In the middle of our account of "The Vision and the Riddle," while we were recounting Zarathustra's tale told on shipboard of how he had once climbed a mountain in company with the dwarf, we broke off at a particular point with the remark that the remainder of Zarathustra's tale would become comprehensible only later. We have now arrived at that junc- ture at which we can take up the matters postponed earlier. At the same time we can once again think through the entire tale-the tale that thinks the thought that is hardest to bear.
W e recall that Zarathustra poses two questions to the dwarf concern- ing the vision of the gateway. The second question the dwarf does not answer. Indeed, Zarathustra reports that his own talk concerning what is decisive in this vision of the gateway-namely, the question of the "moment"-grows softer and softer, and that he himself begins to fear his "own thoughts and hinterthoughts. " He himself is not yet master of this thought-which is tantamount to saying that the victory of his thought is not yet decided, not even for Zarathustra. True, he tells the dwarf, "It is either You or me! " and he knows that he is the stronger one; still, he is not yet master of his own strength; he must test it and thus attain it for the first time, in confrontation. Whither the con- frontation tends, and what domain of provenance and dominion the thought of thoughts occupies, we have in the meantime considered.
With one eye on this domain we may now proceed to interpret the remainder of Zarathustra's tale.
Moment and Eternal Recurrence 177
Zarathustra is approaching his ownmost thought, fearing it more intensely with each advancing step. "Then suddenly I heard a dog nearby howling. " It is now a dog that comes into Zarathustra's vicinity, not an eagle with a serpent coiled about its throat; and now we hear, not the singing of songbirds, but a "howling. " Now all the images turn counter to the mood of the thought of eternal return.
When the dog howls Zarathustra's thoughts "race back" to his child- hood. The reference to childhood shows that we are now retreating to the earlier history of Zarathustra, the thinker of the thought of return, and also to the vast prehistory of that thought-to the genesis and emergence of nihilism. At some point in his childhood Zarathustra saw a dog, "bristling, its head raised, shivering in the stillest midnight, when even dogs believe in ghosts. " The scene, with all its counter- images, is thus defined in greater detail. It is midnight, the most remote time, the hour that is farthest removed from midday-midday being the time of the most luminous, shadowless moment. "For at that instant the full moon, silent as death, rose over the house and then stood still, a round, glowing coal; stood still on the flat roof, as though trespassing on a stranger's property. . . . " Instead of the brilliant sun it is the full moon that is shining here; it too is a light, but a merely borrowed light, the most pallid reflection of actual illumination, a diaphanous ghost of light. Yet it shines enough to affright the dogs and set them baying-"since dogs believe in thieves and ghosts. " At that time the child took pity on the dog that took fright at a ghost and yowled and raised a great din. In such a world compassion is most likely to be found among children-who comprehend nothing of what is happening and who are not of age with respect to being.
"And when I heard such howling once again I took pity. " Zarathus- tra reports that even now-though he is no longer a child-he slip~ into the mood of pity and compassion, imagining on the basis of that mood how the world must look. Through Zarathustra's words, Nietz- sche is here alluding to the time when Schopenhauer and Wagner determined his outlook on the world. Both of them taught, albeit in divergent ways, a form of pessimism-ultimately the flight into disso- lution, into nothingness, into sheer suspension, into a sleep which promised itself an awakening only in order that it might go on sleeping undisturbed.
178 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Meanwhile, Nietzsche himself had renounced all slumbering and dreaming; for he had already begun to question. The world of Scho- penhauer and Wagner became questionable to him early on, earlier than even he knew, already at the time he was writing the third and fourth of his Untimely Meditations, "Schopenhauer as Educator" and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. " However much in both of these writ- ings he appeared to be an advocate of Schopenhauer's and Wagner's, and however much he wanted to be precisely that, here already we see a struggle for release, though not yet a real awakening. Nietzsche was not yet his own man, was not yet hard by his own thought. He first had to pass through the prehistory of that thought, and through the limbo that always leaves us so perplexed-a limbo of past experiences which we cannot truly come to terms with and of things to come which we cannot yet truly penetrate. Where exactly was Zarathustra? "Was I dreaming? Was I awakening? At one stroke I stood among wild cliffs, alone, bleak, in the bleakest moonlight. " Bleakness pervades the period
1874 to 1881, the years Nietzsche once described as the period in which his life plunged to its nadir. Nevertheless, the bleakness of this lunar light was peculiarly bright, bright enough to enable him to see and to be visionary, especially when he heard the howling of a dog, having in the meantime developed an ear for that miserable specimen which is more whelp than human being and which has lost all pride, believing only in its own believing and nothing more.
And what did Zarathustra descry in this bleak lunar light? "A man was lying there! " The italic print lends special emphasis to what is seen: a human being lying prostrate on the ground-not erect and standing. Yet this is not enough. "And, truly, what I now saw was unlike anything I had ever seen. " A man lying on the ground may be nothing unusual; and the experience that human beings do not often rouse themselves to stand, do not take a stand, that they generally lurch on with the help of crutches and supports, is a common one; and that humankind is in a wretched state is the customary jeremiad of pessimism, with all its inexhaustible twists and turns. Yet the way in which Zarathustra saw humanity at that moment was a way it had never been seen before. A human being, prostrate. But of what sort, and in what circumstances? "I saw a young shepherd, writhing, chok-
Moment and Eternal Recurrence 179
ing in spasms, his face distorted; a thick black snake hung out of his mouth. " It is a young man, then, one who has barely left his child- hood behind; perhaps he is the very one who heard the howling dog, namely, Zarathustra. A young shepherd, one who intends to guide and lead. He lies prostrate in the bleak light of illusion. "Had he been sleeping? A snake crawled into his mouth-and there it bit fast. "
By nuw we are sufficiently prepared to discern in the "thick black snake" the counterimage of the serpent that winds itself about the ea- gle's throat, the eagle in turn soaring in the midday sky and holding effortlessly in the heights. The black snake is drear monotony, ulti- mately the goallessness and meaninglessness of nihilism. It is nihilism itself. Nihilism has bitten the young shepherd during his sleep and is now firmly entrenched. Only because the shepherd was not vigilant could the power of the snake assert itself, could the snake wriggle its way into the young shepherd's mouth, incorporating itself in him. When Zarathustra sees the young shepherd lying there, he does the first thing anyone would do. He pulls at the snake, tugs at it, "-in vain! "
The implication is that nihilism cannot be overcome from the out- side. We do not overcome it by tearing away at it or shoving it aside- which is what we do when we replace the Christian God with yet another ideal, such as Reason, Progress, political and economic "So- cialism," or mere Democracy. Try as we might to cast it aside, the black snake attaches itself ever more firmly. Zarathustra thus immedi- ately gives up such rescue operations. "With one cry," he now relates, "it cried out of me. " What is this it? Zarathustra replies, "All my goodness and my wickedness. " Zarathustra's complete essence and his entire history precipitate in him and cry out, "Bite! You must bite! " W e need not say a great deal more in order to make the meaning of the passage perfectly clear. The black snake of nihilism threatens to inc~r porate humanity altogether; it must be overcome by those who are themselves inflicted with it and endangered by it. All tugging-all that frantic activity from the outside, all temporary amelioration, all mere
repulsion, postponement, and deferment-all this is in vain. Here nothing avails if human beings themselves do not bite into the danger, and not blindly, not just anywhere. We must bite off the head of the
180 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
black snake, its properly definitive and leading part, which looms at the forefront.
Nihilism will be overcome only from the ground up, only if we grapple with the very head of it; only if the ideals which it posits and from which it derives fall prey to "criticism," that is, to enclosure and overcoming. Yet such overcoming transpires only in the following way: everyone who is affected-and that means each of us-must bite into the matter for himself or herself; for if we leave it to another to tug at the darkling need that is our own, all will be futile.
-But the shepherd bit as my cry urged him to, bit with a good bite! He spewed out the snake's head, spat it far away, and leapt to his feet.
No longer a shepherd, no longer human, but as one transformed, il- luminated--one who laughed!
What sort of gaiety gives vent to such laughter? The gaiety of the gay science. Now, at the end of our long path, we recognize-and we recognize it as no accident but as the most intrinsic necessity-that at the conclusion of the treatise which Nietzsche entitled The Gay Science the thought of eternal return of the same is communicated for the first time. For this thought is the bite that is to overcome nihilism in its very foundation. Just as Zarathustra is no one else than the thinker of this thought, so too is the bite nothing other than the over- coming of nihilism. Thus it becomes transparently clear that the young shepherd is Zarathustra himself. In this vision Zarathustra is advancing toward himself. With the full force of his complete essence he must call out to himself, "You must bite! " Toward the end of the tale that Zarathustra recounts to the seamen-those searchers and re- searchers-Zarathustra poses this question to them: "Who is the shep- herd into whose gorge the snake crawled? " We can now reply that it is Zarathustra, the thinker of the thought of eternal return. Zarathustra's ownmost animals, his eagle and his serpent, exalt him only after he has overcome the world of the howling dog and the black snake. Zara- thustra becomes a convalescent only after he has passed through a period of illness, only after he has come to know that the black snake that chokes us pertains to knowledge as such, that the knower must also come to terms with the disgust occasioned by the contemptible human being as something that is necessary.
Moment and Eternal Recurrence 181
Now for the first time we can recognize the inner correspondence of the two passages from Part III of Thus Spoke Zarathustra on which we have been commenting. Now we understand why Zarathustra replies as follows to his animals, who wish to perform for Zarathustra's enjoy- ment the delightful ditty of the eternal return of the same in the loveli- est words and tones: "The intense disgust with man-this choked, me, this had crawled into my throat, this and also what the soothsayer had said: 'It is all alike, nothing is worthwhile, knowledge chokes. ' " Who- ever takes the thought of eternal return to be a ditty belongs among those who flee from genuine knowledge, inasmuch as such knowledge "chokes. " Thus in the episode entitled "The Convalescent," with ex- plicit reference to the section "On the Vision and the Riddle," precise- ly at the point when Zarathustra begins to respond to the animals' ditty, we hear the following:
"Oh, you rascally jesters and barrel organs, be still now! " replied Zara- thustra, smiling once again. "How well you know what had to be fulfilled in seven days-and how that beast wriggled down my throat and choked me! But I bit its head off and spewed it far away from me.
And you? You've made a hurdy-gurdy song out of it! Here am I, lying here, weary of this biting and spewing, still sick from my own redemption. And you looked on all the while?
These two distinct episodes, "On the Vision and the Riddle" and "The Convalescent," hence coalesce, both in terms of their content and their place in the work in question. We achieve a more balanced understanding of the book as a whole. Yet we must guard against the presumption that we now belong among those who really understand. Perhaps we too are mere onlookers. Perhaps we do not heed the second question Zarathustra poses straightaway to the crew. He asks not only "Who is the shepherd? " but also "Who is the human being into whose gorge all that is heaviest and blackest will creep? " The answer is that it is the one who thinks-in company with others-the thought of eter- nal return.
Yet he or she is not thinking the thought in its essential domain until the black snake has penetrated the gorge and its head has been bitten off. The thought is only as that bite.
As soon as we understand this we realize why Zarathustra grows fearful when he thinks the thought of the moment, and why the dwarf,
182 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
rather than answering, simply vanishes. The moment cannot be thought before the bite has occurred, because the bite answers the question as to what the gateway itself-the moment-is: the gateway of the moment is that decision in which prior history, the history of nihilism, is brought to confrontation and forthwith overcome.
The thought of eternal return of the same is only as this conquering thought. The overcoming must grant us passage across a gap that seems to be quite narrow. The gap opens between two things that in one way are alike, so that they appear to be the same. On the one side stands the following: "Everything is nought, indifferent, so that noth- ing is worthwhile-it is all alike. "And on the other side: "Everything recurs, it depends on each moment, everything matters-it is all alike. "
The smallest gap, the rainbow bridge of the phrase it is all alike, conceals two things that are quite distinct: "everything is indifferent" and "nothing is indifferent. "
The overcoming of this smallest gap is the most difficult overcoming in the thought of eternal return of the same as the essentially overcom- ing thought. If one takes the thought ostensibly "for itself' in terms of its content-"Everything turns in a circle"-then it is perhaps sheer delusion. But in that case it is not Nietzsche's thought. Above all, it is not the thought "for itself," inasmuch as for itself it is precisely the overcoming thought, and this alone.
If we survey once again at a single glance our presentation of Nietz- sche's thought of eternal return of the same, we cannot but be struck by the fact that our explicit discussion of the thought's content has receded markedly before our constant emphasis on the right way of approaching the thought and its conditions. The conditions may be reduced to two-and even these cohere and constitute but one.
First, thinking in terms of the moment. This implies that we trans- pose ourselves to the temporality of independent action and decision, glancing ahead at what is assigned us as our task and back at what is given us as our endowment.
Second, thinking the thought as the overcoming of nihilism. This implies that we transpose ourselves to the condition of need that arises with nihilism. The condition requires of us that we meditate on the
Moment and Eternal Recurrence 183
endowment and decide about the task. Our needy condition itself is nothing other than what our transposition to the moment opens up to us.
Yet what accounts for the fact that with this thought it is precisely thinking, and the conditions of thinking, that are emphasized so essen- tially? What else could it be but the thought's "content," what it gives us to think? Accordingly, the content does not really go into abeyance, as it seemed to; rather, it comes to the fore in a singular way. For now the conditions of the thought-process as such thrust their way to the forefront. With the thought in question, what is to be thought recoils on the thinker because of the way it is to be thought, and so it compels the thinker. Yet it does so solely in order to draw the thinker into what is to be thought. To think eternity requires that we think the moment, that is, transpose ourselves to the moment of being-a-self. " To think the recurrence of the same is to enter into confrontation with the "it is all alike," the "it isn't worthwhile'; in short, with nihilism.
Only by way ofnihilism and the moment is the eternal recurrence of the same to be thought. Yet in such thinking the thinker as such slips into the ring of eternal recurrence, indeed in such a way as to help achieve the ring, help decide it.
Whence does it arise that precisely in the fundamental thought of Nietzsche's philosophy the recoil of what is to be thought on the think- er-and the thinker's being drawn into what is thought-come so deci- sively to light? Is it because this kind of relation between thought and thinker is instituted in Nietzsche's philosophy alone? Or does such a relation obtain in every philosophy as such? If the latter, to what extent is this the case? With that question we arrive at the second major division of our lecture course.
• See chapter 4 of Being and Time, sections 25-27. Cf. p. 24, above.
25. The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position; The Possibility of Such Positions in the History of
Western Philosophy
Whenever we think the thought of eternal recurrence of the same, what is to be thought recoils on the one who is thinking,· and the thinker is drawn into the thought. The reason for this is not simply the fact that the eternal recurrence of the same is being thought, but that this particular thought thinks being as a whole. We call such a thought "metaphysical. " Because the thought of return is the metaphysical thought in Nietzsche's case, it is characterized by the relationship of the recoil that includes and the inclusion that recoils. Of course, there must be a special reason for the fact that this relationship comes to prevail in such a conspicuous way precisely with Nietzsche, and that reason can lie only in Nietzsche's metaphysics; we can say where and how and why it lies there only if we have defined what we call meta- physics by means of a sufficiently clear concept. Such a concept must clarify what we mean by a "fundamental position. " In the designation "fundamental metaphysical position" the word metaphysical is not ap- pended in order to indicate a special case among "fundamental posi- tions. " Rather, the word metaphysical designates the domain that is opened up as metaphysical only by virtue of the articulation of a fun- damental position. If this is so, then what does the phrase fundamental
metaphysical position mean?
The title of this section, which indicates the task we have just out-
lined, bears a subtitle. The subtitle invokes the possibility of a
The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position 185
fundamental metaphysical position in the history of Western philos- ophy. Here it is not so much a matter of referring to the manifold approximations to such fundamental metaphysical positions and to their historical sequence. Rather, what we must emphasize is the fact that what we are calling a fundamental metaphysical position pertains expressly to Western history, and to it alone, helping to determine that history in an essential way. Something like a fundamental metaphysi- cal position was possible heretofore only in our tradition; and to the extent that such positions are attempted in the future as well, what has prevailed up to now will remain in force as something not overcome, not assimilated. Here we intend to discuss the possibility of a funda- mental metaphysical position in the most fundamental sense of the phrase, and not to sketch some sort of historiographical account. In accordance with what we have said, this fundamental discussion will nonetheless be essentially historical.
Since in the present lecture course we are to portray Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position, our discussion of that concept can only be of a preparatory nature. Furthermore, a well-rounded, essen- tial consideration of the matter is quite impossible: we lack all the prerequisites for such a consideration.
It behooves our tentative characterization of the concept fundamen- tal metaphysical position to begin with the word and concept meta- physical. We use the word to designate matters germane to "metaphysics. " The latter has for centuries referred to that range of questions in philosophy which philosophy sees as its proper task. Meta- physics is thus the rubric indicative of philosophy proper; it always has to do with a philosophy's fundamental thought. Even the customary meaning of the word, that is to say, the meaning that has come into general and popular use, still reflects this trait, albeit in a faint and fuzzy way. When we speak of something metaphysical we are pointing to reasons lying behind something else, or perhaps going out beyond that thing in some inscrutable way. We sometimes employ the word in a pejorative way, whereby those "reasons behind" a thing are taken as mere figments and, at bottom, absurdities; at other times we use the word metaphysical positively, taking it as referring to the impalpable and ultimate, the decisive. In either case, however, our thinking hov-
186 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
ers in indeterminacy, insecurity, and obscurity. The word refers more to the end and limits of our thinking and inquiring than to their proper beginning and unfolding.
Yet when we refer merely to the devaluation the word metaphysics has suffered we are not entertaining the proper significance of that word. The word and its origins are quite strange; odder still is its his- tory. And yet the configuration of the Western intellectual world and thereby the world in general depends to an essential extent on the power and preeminence of this word and its history. In history, words are often mightier than things and deeds. The fact that we ultimately still know very little about the power of this word metaphysics and its hegemony makes us realize how paltry and extrinsic our knowledge of the history of philosophy has remained, and how ill-prepared we are to enter into confrontation with that history, its fundamental positions, and the unifying and determinative forces within those positions. His- tory of philosophy is not a matter for historiography, but a matter of philosophy. The first philosophical history of philosophy was that of Hegel. He never elaborated that history in book form, but presented it in lecture courses taught at Jena, Heidelberg, and Berlin.
Hegel's history of philosophy is the only philosophical history heretofore, and it will remain the only one until philosophy is forced to think historically-in a still more essential and original sense of that word-taking its ownmost grounding question as its point of departure. Wherever this is already occurring, in its initial stages, it still seems as if it is all nothing more than a slightly altered formulation of the earlier "historiographical" interpretation of the history of philosophy. The fur- ther illusion arises that historical observation restricts itself to what has been and does not have the courage-does not even have the capacity - t o say something "new" of its own. The illusion will persist as long as there is no one who surmises-and is able to estimate the implica- tions of-the following fact: in spite of the ascendant power of technol- ogy and of the universally technicized "mobilization" of the globe, hence in spite of a quite specific preeminence of an ensnared nature, an altogether distinct fundamental power of Being is on the rise; this power is history-which, however, is no longer to be represented as an object of historiography. We allude to these matters here simply be-
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 187
cause the following historical meditation on the essence of metaphysics may well seem to be nothing more than a highly abridged excerpt from some handbook or other on the history of philosophy.
Metaphysics is the name for the full range of philosophy's proper questions. If these questions are many, they are nonetheless guided by one single question. In truth, drawn as they are into that question, they are in effect but one question. Every question, and especially the one question of philosophy, as a question is always bathed in a light that emanates from the question itself. That is why the very inception of inquiry at the grand commencement of Western philosophy pos- sesses some knowledge of itself. Such autochthonous knowledge of philosophic inquiry initially defines itself by circumscribing and com- prehending what it is asking about. Philosophy inquires into the arche. We translate that word as "principle. " And if we neglect to think and question rigorously and persistently, we think we know what "prin- ciple" means here. Arche and archein mean "to begin. " At the same time, they mean to stand at the beginning of all; hence, to rule. Yet this reference to the designated arche will make sense only if we simul- taneously determine that ofwhich and for which we are seeking the arche. We are seeking it, not for some isolated event, not for unusual and recondite facts and relationships, but purely and simply for being. Whenever we say the word das Seiende, we are referring to everything
that is. But when we inquire into the arche of being, all being-as a whole and in entirety-is placed in question. With the question con- cerning the arche, something about being as a whole has already been said. Being as a whole has now become visible for the first time as being and as a whole.
Whenever we inquire into the arche we experi~nce being as a whole at the very beginning, the very rise of its presence and radiance. When the sun begins to radiate its light we speak of "sunrise"; accordingly, we conceive of the upsurgence of what is present as such as a rise. We are asking about the arche of being as a whole, about its rise, to the extent that this rising pervades being in terms of both what it is and how it is. Thus we are asking about a kind of dominion. We mean to acquire knowledge concerning the rise and dominion of being as a whole; such knowledge of the arche is therefore to know what being is insofar as it
188 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
is being. Accordingly, the question of philosophy, as an inquiry into the arche, may be posed in the following form: What is being, insofar as it is viewed as being? Ti to on hei on? Quid est ens qua ens? This question, once its manner of inquiry has thus been established, may be simplified to the following formula: Ti to on? What is being? To ask this question, to find the answer to it once it has been posed and secured, is the primary and proper task of philosophy-it is prate philo- sophia. At its very commencement Western philosophy delineates philosophic inquiry in terms of the question ti to on? In that com- mencement Western philosophy comes to its essential conclusion. It is Aristotle in particular who achieves this essential clarification of philo- sophic inquiry in the most lucid way. Hence at the outset of one of his essential treatises (Metaphysics, VII, 1) Aristotle writes the following words: Kai de kai to palai te kai nun kai aei dzetoumenon kai aei aporoumenon, ti to on? "And so it is asked, from ancient times to the present, and on into the future, even though the paths to this question stop short or are utterly lacking,-What is being? "
In order for us to understand-and that means to assist in asking- this apparently quite simple question, it is important from the outset to attain clarity concerning the following point, a point we will have to think about again and again: inasmuch as being is put in question with a view to the arche, being itself is already determined. If we ask whence and in what way being rises and, as rising, comes to presence, being itself is already defined as the upsurging and as what holds sway and presences in such upsurgence. The Greeks called such rising- presencing governance physis. The. latter word means something else, something more, than our word nature. At all events, the following becomes clear: when the arche is sought, being itself is defined more closely, determined in a correspondingly far-reaching and penetrating way.
A peculiar experience arises as part and parcel of this process: in addition to beings that come to the fore on their own, there seem to be other beings that are first produced by human beings-whether such production occur in handicraft manufacture, in artistic performances, or in the ordered conduct of public affairs. Accordingly, one proceeds to make a distinction with respect to being as a whole between what is
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 189
preeminently and straightforwardly physis, namely, on physei, and what is on technei, thesei, and nomoi. "'
The definitive meditation on being will always first cast its eye on being as physis-ta physei onta-there to perceive what being as such is. Such knowledge, related as it is to physis, is an episteme physike, "physics," though not at all in the contemporary sense of that word. It is of course nonetheless true that physics today has a great deal of work to do, more than it is aware of, or can possibly be aware of. "Physics" is perspective on, and circumspection within, being as a whole; yet its view to the arche always sets the standard. Thus within the philosoph- ical meditation on being (that is, on physis) there are studies that enter more deeply into being and its various regions, for instance, the inani- mate or animate; and there can also be studies that concentrate less on the characteristic details of a given region than on the question of what being is when viewed as a whole. If we designate the first series of investigations with the word physike, in the sense of scientia physica, then the second series is in a certain sense posterior to it; yet although it follows in the wake of the first series, the second series contains the ultimate and genuine studies. Viewed from the outside, in terms of the order, division, and sequence of the investigations and in terms of the kind of knowledge that is attained in treatises that come post physicam, such studies may be given the Greek designation meta ta physika. At the same time, what we have already indicated readily opens onto a further insight: inquiry into the arche asks what determines and domi- nates being as a whole in its governance. The question ti to on? in- quires out beyond being as a whole, although the question always and everywhere relates precisely back to it. Such knowledge of the physika is not merely post physicam but trans physicam. Metaphysics, meta ta physika, is knowledge and inquiry that posit being as physis. Meta- physics does so in such a way that in and through the positing it. inquires out beyond being, asking about being as being. To inquire into the arche-to ask the question ti to on? -is metaphysics. Or, to put it the other way around, metaphysics is the inquiry and the search
• That is to say, a distinction between beings that rise and come to presence under their own power and those that derive from the arts and crafts (teclmei), or are set down in words (thesei), or are proclaimed in laws (nomoi).
190 THE ETERNAL RECURRf~NCE OF THE SAMF.
that always remains guided by the sole question "What is being? " We therefore call this question the guiding question of metaphysics. *
The question "What is being? " inquires so universally and so en- compassingly that all the efforts incited by it at first and for quite some time afterwards strive after this one thing-to find an answer to the question and to secure that answer. The more this question becomes the guiding question, and the longer it remains such, the less the question itself becomes an object of inquiry. Every treatment of the guiding question is and remains preoccupied with the answer, preoc- cupied with finding the answer. The latter has assumed sundry con- figurations ever since the commencement of Western philosophy with the Greeks, as philosophy pursued its circuitous route through the age of Christendom and into the age of modernity and modernity's con- quest of the world, up to Nietzsche. Yet no matter how varied the configurations have been, they remain unified by the framework of the sole guiding question; once it is posed, the question seems to pose itself automatically-and hence to recede as a question. The question is not unfolded along the lines of its own articulation.
With the responses to this wholly undeveloped guiding question, certain positions adopted toward being as such and toward its arche arise. Being itself, as it is definitively experienced from the outset- whether as physis or as the creation of some Creator or as the realiza- tion of an absolute spirit-and the way being is defined in its arche provide the ground on which, and the respect in which, the guiding question troubles itself about the proffered answers. The questioners themselves, and all those who pattern and ground their essential knowledge and action within the realm of the prevailing response to the guiding question, have adopted a stance toward being as a whole, a stance in relation to being as such, in conformity to the guiding question-whether or not they are aware of the guiding question as such. Because the stance in question originates from the guiding ques- tion and is simultaneous with it, and because the guiding question is what is properly metaphysical in metaphysics, we call the stance that
• See Volume I of this series, section II, pp. 67-68, for further discussion of the
Leitfrage.
The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position 191
derives from the undeveloped guiding question the fundamental meta- physical position. "'
The concept fundamental metaphysical position may be grasped in propositional form as follows: The fundamental metaphysical position expresses the way in which the one who poses the guiding question remains enmeshed in the structures of that question, which is not explicitly unfolded; thus enmeshed, the questioner comes to stand within being as a whole, adopting a stance toward it, and in that way helping to determine the location of humanity as such in the whole of beings.
All the same, the concept of a fundamental metaphysical position is not yet clear. Not only the concept but also the historically developed fundamental positions themselves are necessarily in and for themselves altogether opaque and impenetrable. That is the reason we invariably represent the fundamental metaphysical positions-for instance, those of Plato, or of medieval theology, or of Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel-so extrinsically, according to the various doctrines and propositions expressed in them. The best we can do is to say what predecessors influenced these philosophers and what standpoint they adopt in mat- ters of ethics or in the question of the demonstrability of God's exis- tence or with regard to the issue of the "reality of the external world. " We invoke sundry "aspects," which apparently just happen to be there and which we take up as evident, totally ignorant of the fact that there can be such aspects only because a fundamental metaphysical position has been adopted here. The position in question is adopted because knowledge and thought themselves stand under the dominion of the guiding question from the very beginning. And the guiding question itself is not developed.
The concept of a fundamental metaphysical position and the corre- sponding historical positions themselves attain essential clarity and definition only when the guiding question of metaphysics and thereby metaphysics itself in its essence come to be developed. It is almost
• Die metaphysische Grundstellung, literally, "the metaphysical ground position. " Readers must hea1 in the word fundamental the German word Grund. Heidegger always and everywhere contraposes the guiding question of metaphysics to its grounding ques- tion, die Grundfrage.
192 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
superfluous to say that an original, thoughtful stance adopted with regard to a particular metaphysics is possible and fruitful only if that metaphysics is itself developed in terms of its own fundamental posi- tion and only if the way in which it responds to the guiding question can be defined. The mutually prevailing fundamental positions must first of all be worked out in and for every genuinely philosophical confrontation.
The essence of what we are calling a fundamental metaphysical position develops with and in the unfolding of the guiding question of metaphysics. Such unfolding of the guiding question is not solely and not even primarily motivated by the desire to achieve a better concep- tion of the fundamental metaphysical position as such. Rather, the determining ground of the development of the guiding question is to be sought in a renewed posing of the question, indeed, in a more original asking of that question. Yet that is not a matter we shall be able to treat here. What we are to communicate now is rather the bare result of the development of the guiding question. We shall present it in a highly compressed, well-nigh arid form, in textbook fashion, so that the inner articulation of the guiding question becomes visible-if only as a skeleton devoid of flesh and blood.
The guiding question of Western philosophy is, "What is being? " To treat this question as stated and posed is simply to look for an answer. To develop the question as it is formulated, however, is to pose the question more essentially: in asking the question one enters explicitly into those relationships that become visible when one assimi- lates virtually everything that comes to pass in the very asking of the question. When we treat the guiding question we are transposed forth- with to a search for an answer and to everything that has to be done on behalf of that search. Developing the guiding question is something essentially different-it is a more original form of inquiry, one which does not crave an answer. It takes the search for an answer far more seriously and rigorously than any straightforward treatment of the guid- ing question can-given the particular stance such treatment has adopted. An answer is no more than the final step of the very asking; and an answer that bids adieu to the inquiry annihilates itself as an answer. It can ground nothing like knowledge. It rests content with the
The Essence ofa Fundamental Metaphysical Position 193
sheer opinions it traces and in which it has ensconced itself. A ques- tion-especially a question that involves being as a whole-can be appropriately answered only if it is adequately posed in the first place. The guiding question of philosophy is adequately posed only when it is developed. Here the development assumes such proportions that it transforms the very question, bringing to light the guiding question as such in its utter lack of originality. For that reason we call the question "What is being? " the guiding question, in contrast to the more original question which sustains and directs the guiding question. The more original question we call the grounding question.
Whenever we present the development of the guiding question "schematically," as we are now doing, we easily awaken the suspicion that here we are merely making inquiries concerning a question. To question questioning strikes sound common sense as rather un- wholesome, extravagant, perhaps even nonsensical. If it is a matter of wanting to get to beings themselves-and in the guiding question this is surely the case-then the inquiry into inquiry seems an aberration. In the end, such an attitude, asking about its asking, seems nothing short of noxious or self-lacerating; we might call it "egocentric" and "nihilistic" and all the other nasty names we so easily come by.
That the development of the guiding question appears to be merely inquiry piled on top of inquiry-this illusion persists. That an inquiry concerning inquiry ultimately looks like an aberration, a veritable walk down the garden path-this illusion too cannot be squelched. Con- fronting the danger that only a few or no one at all will be able to muster the courage and the energy required to think through and ex- amine thoroughly the development of the guiding question; and in the expectation that these few might stumble against something quite dif- ferent from a question that is posed merely for its own sake or a piec:;e of sheer extravagance, we shall here undertake to sketch briefly the articulation of the developed guiding question.
The question asks ti to on? What is being? We shall begin to expli- cate the question by following the direction the inquiry itself takes, gradually unraveling all the matters we come across.
