No More Learning

What is left for us to say, if not this: Zarathustra's doctrine does not bring redemption from revenge? We do say it. Yet we say it by no means as a misconceived refutation of Nietzsche's philosophy. We do not even utter it as an objection against Nietzsche's thinking. But we say it in order to turn our attention to the fact that-and the extent to which-Nietzsche's thought too is animated by the spirit of prior re- flection. Whether the spirit of prior thinking is at all captured in its definitive essence when it is interpreted as the spirit of revenge-this question we leave open. At all events, prior thinking is metaphysics, and Nietzsche's thinking presumably brings it to fulfillment.
Thus something in Nietzsche's thinking comes to the fore which this thinking itself was no longer able to think. Such remaining behind what it has thought designates the creativity of a thinking. And where
230 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
a thinking brings metaphysics to completion it points in an exceptional way to things unthought, cogently and confusedly at once. Yet where are the eyes to see this?
Metaphysical thinking rests on the distinction between what truly is and what, measured against this, constitutes all that is not truly in being. However, what is decisive for the essence of metaphysics is by no means the fact that the designated distinction is formulated as the opposition of the suprasensuous to the sensuous realm, but the fact that this distinction-in the sense of a yawning gulf between the realms -remains primary and all-sustaining. The distinction persists even when the Platonic hierarchy of suprasensuous and sensuous is inverted and the sensuous realm is experienced more essentially and more thoroughly-in the direction Nietzsche indicates with the name Dionysos. For the superabundance for which Zarathustra's "great long- ing" yearns is the inexhaustible permanence of Becoming, which the will to power in the eternal recurrence of the same wills itself to be.
Nietzsche brought what is essentially metaphysical in his thinking to the extremity of ill will in the final lines of his final book, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. Nietzsche composed the text in October of 1888. It was first published in a limited edition twenty years later; in 1911 it was taken up into the fifteenth volume of the Grossok- tav edition. The final lines of Ecce Homo read: "Have I been under- stood? -Dionysos versus the Crucified. . . . "
Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? He is the advocate of Dionysos. That means that Zarathustra is the teacher who in and for his doctrine of overman teaches the eternal return of the same.
Does the preceding statement provide the answer to our query? No. Nor does it provide the answer after we have pursued all the references that might elucidate the statement, hoping in that way to follow Zara- thustra-if only in that first step across the bridge. The statement, which looks like an answer, nonetheless wants us to take note, wants to make us more alert, as it conducts us back to the question that serves as our title.
Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? The question now asks who this teacher is. Who is this figure which, at the stage of metaphysics' com- pletion, appears within metaphysics? Nowhere else in the history of
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 231
Western metaphysics has the essential figure been expressly created in this way for its respective thinker-or, to put it more appropriately and literally, nowhere else has that figure been so tellingly thought. No- where else-unless at the beginning of Western thought, in Par- menides, though there only in veiled outlines.
Essential to the figure of Zarathustra remains the fact that the teacher teaches something twofold which coheres in itself: eternal re- turn and overman. Zarathustra is himself in a certain way this coher- ence. That said, he too remains a riddle, one we have scarcely envisaged.
"Eternal return of the same" is the name for the Being of beings. "Overman" is the name for the human essence that corresponds to such Being.
On what basis do Being and the essence of human being belong together? How do they cohere, if Being is no fabrication of human beings and humanity no mere special case among beings?
Can the coherence of Being and the essence of human being be discussed at all, as long as our thinking remains mired in the previous conception of man? According to it, man is animal rationale, the ra- tional animal. Is it a coincidence, or a bit of lyrical ornamentation, that the two animals, eagle and serpent, accompany Zarathustra; that they tell him who he must become, in order to be the one he is? In the figure of the two animals the union of pride and discernment is to come to the fore for those who think. Yet we have to know what Nietzsche thinks concerning these two traits. Among the notes sketched during the period when Thus Spoke Zarathustra was com- posed we read: "It seems to me that modesty and pride belong to one another quite closely. . . . What they have in common is the cool, unflinching look of appraisal" (XIV, 99). And elsewhere in these notes (101):
People talk so stupidly about pride-and Christianity even tried to make us feel sinful about it! The point is that whoever demands great things ofhim- self, and achieves those things, must feel quite remote from those who do not. Such distance will be interpreted by these others as a "putting on airs"; but he knows it [distance] only as continuous toil, war, victory, by day and by night. The others have no inkling of all this!
232 THF. ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
The eagle: the proudest animal; the serpent: the most discerning animal. And both conjoined in the circle in which they hover, in the ring that embraces their essence; and circle and ring once again inter- fused.
The riddle of who Zarathustra is, as teacher of eternal return and overman, is envisaged by us in the spectacle of the two animals. In this spectacle we can grasp more directly and more readily what our presen- tation tried to exhibit as the matter most worthy of question, namely, the relati. on of Being to that living being, man.
And behold! An eagle soared through the air in vast circles, and a serpent hung suspended from him, not as his prey, but as though she were his friend: for she had coiled about his neck.
"These are my animals! " said Zarathustra, and his heart was filled with joy.
*** A NOTE ON THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Nietzsche himself knew that his "most abysmal thought" remains a riddle. All the less reason for us to imagine that we can solve the riddle. The obscurity of this last thought of Western metaphysics dare not tempt us to circumvent it by some sort of subterfuge.
At bottom there are only two such routes of escape.
Either one avers that this thought of Nietzsche's is a kind of "mysti- cism" that our thinking should not bother to confront.
Or one avers that this thought is as old as the hills, that it boils down to the long-familiar cyclical notion of cosmic occurrence. Which no- tion can be found for the first time in Western philosophy in Hera- clitus.
This second piece of information, like all information of that sort, tells us absolutely nothing. What good is it if someone determines with respect to a particular thought that it can be found, for example, "al- ready" in Leibniz or even "already" in Plato? What good are such references when they leave what Leibniz and Plato were thinking in the same obscurity as the thought they claim to be clarifying with the help of these historical allusions?
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 233
As for the first subterfuge, according to which Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence of the same is a mystic phantasmagoria, a look at the present age might well teach us a different lesson-presupposing of course that thinking is called upon to bring to light the essence of modern technology.
What else is the essence of the modern power-driven machine than one offshoot of the eternal recurrence of the same? But the essence of such machines is neither something machine-like nor anything me- chanical. Just as little can Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence of the same be interpreted in a mechanical sense.
That Nietzsche interpreted and experienced his most abysmal thought in terms of the Dionysian only speaks for the fact that he still thought it metaphysically, and had to think it solely in this way. Yet it says nothing against the fact that this most abysmal thought conceals something unthought, something which at the same time remains a sealed door to metaphysical thinking.
(See the lecture course "What Calls for Thinking? " taught during the winter semester of 1951-52 and published in book form by Max Niemeyer, Tiibingen, in 1954. *)
*Translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray as What Is Called Thinking? in 1968 for the Harper & Row Heidegger Series.
ANALYSIS AND GLOSSARY
Analysis
By DAVID FARRELL KRELL
Heidegger is so insistent about our heeding the kinds of music eternal recurrence makes-whether it is a thought plucked on skillfully fash- ioned lyres or cranked out of barrel organs-that we may be justified in listening now to a brief selection of its orchestrations. I shall pass over in silence a large number of the thought's earlier echoes, such as those pious ones we find in Goethe, and cite a few of the more daring anticipations and recapitulations of Nietzsche's most thoughtful bur- den.
Early in 1902, seven years before the first English translation of Also sprach Zarathustra appeared and six years before H. L. Mencken be- gan to exalt Nietzsche to the English-speaking world, a young Ameri- can novelist on the threshold of a lifelong conversion to socialism sported briefly yet passionately the banner of overman:
I sat in silence. "Do I gather from your words," I asked, "that immortality is not one of the privileges of this race? "
He smiled again. "The spiritual life," he said, "does not begin until the thought of immortality is flung away. . . . "
"This people," I asked-"what do they know about God? "
"They know no more than men do," was the answer, "except that they know they know nothing. They know that the veil is not lifted. It is not tha~ for which they seek-life is their task, and life only; to behold its endless fruition; to dwell in the beauty of it, to wield power of it; to toil at its whirling loom, to build up palaces of music from it. . . . "
UPTON SINCLAIR, The Overman
Yet Upton Sinclair was not the first American writer to respond to the raptures of Nietzschean thought. Another managed it when Nietz-
238 THE ETERI\'AL RECURREI\'CE OF THE SAME
sche himself was only six years old. Herman Melville places poor Queequeg in his coffin, then observes:
How he wasted and wasted away in those few long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weak- ened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick, chapter CX
Queequeg survives the illness, of course, and uses his coffin as a sea-chest. After the catastrophe Ishmael will use it as a writing table. Ishmael's account will unite the two principal sources of Zarathustran imagery-mountain summits and the sea-the heights and depths visited by Zarathustra's eagle:
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
Moby-Dick, chapter XCVI
A more recent attestation to the thought of eternal recurrence in- volves the demise and return of a "distinguished phenomenologist," and hence expresses the more scientific side of Nietzsche's fundamen- tal thought:
Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?
Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his come- tary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly
Analysis 239
he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an es- tranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or of the silver king.
What would render such return irrational?
An unsatisfactory equation between an exodus and return in time through reversible space and an exodus and return in space through irreversible time.
JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses, "Ithaca"
Finally, the following poem by Rainer Maria Rilke expresses the more playful side of the thought that is hardest to bear, indeed as though spinning to a hurdy-gurdy tune:
The Carrousel
Jardin du Luxembourg
With a roof and the roof's vast shadow turns awhile the whole assembly
of pinto ponies fresh from the country which, long delaying, finally goes down. True, some are hitched to wagons, Though mien and mane are fierce;
an angry snarling lion goes with them and now and then a snow white elephant.
Even a buck is there, as in a wood, except he wears a saddle, and astride, a little girl in blue, strapped tight.
And a boy palely rides the lion
and grips with a warm hand,
while the lion bares its teeth, loops its tongue.
And now and then a snow white elephant.
And on the ponies they glide by,
girls, too, aglow, this leap of ponies almost outgrown; as they plunge
they look up, gaze absently, this way-
240 THE ETER! \:AL RECURRENCE OF THE SAJ\H, And now and then a snow white elcph;mt.
On and on it whirls, that it might end; circles and spins and knows no goal.
A red, a green, a gray sailing by,
a tiny profile, just begun-.
And, turned this way, sometimes a smile, beaming, blinding, lavished utterly
on this breathless sightless play. . . .
from Neue Gedichte, 1907
In 1936 Heidegger began his series of lecture courses on Nietzsche's philosophy with an inquiry into will to power as art, now published as Volume I of this series. The axial question of that inquiry proved to be the discordant relation in Nietzsche's thought between art and truth. The latter was no longer to be associated primarily with knowledge (Erkenntnis) but with the grand style of artistic creativity. What role "the rigor of knowledge" might play in Nietzsche's philosophy became the object of Heidegger's 1939 course on will to power as knowledge, published in Volume III of this series. The centrality of "the grand style of creation" was clear from the start, however: art and the artist's devotion to eternal recurrence were to serve as the countermovement to nihilism, the theme of Heidegger's fourth and final lecture course on Nietzsche, delivered in 1940 and now appearing in Volume IV of this series. Thus the thought of eternal return of the same, which Heidegger interpreted during the summer semester of 1937, serves as a point of convergence or departure for virtually all of Heidegger's lec- tures on Nietzsche's philosophy.
Yet the significance of that thought extends beyond the scope of the lecture courses themselves. Whereas the essays of the 1940s tend to constrict the thought of eternal return in a schematic, quasi-scholastic interpretation-will to power as the essentia of beings, eternal recur- rence as their existentia--the 1937 lecture course remains sensitive to the multiplicity of perspectives and the full range of registers in eternal recurrence, a thought that encroaches on the fundamental experience of Being and Time and on the experience of thinking in Heidegger's
Analysis 241
later work. Hence it is to the 1937 lecture course that Heidegger's renewed preoccupations with Nietzsche in the early 1950s repair. For all these reasons, "The Eternal Recurrence of the Same" may be called the summit of Heidegger's lecture series, or, paraphrasing Nietzsche, the peak of Heidegger's meditation.
I. THE STRUCTURE AND MOVEMENT OF THE 1937 LECTURE COURSE AND THE 1953 PUBLIC LECTURE
In the first section of the lecture course Heidegger sketches the four major divisions he intends his course to have. The first is to be a "preliminary presentation" of the doctrine of eternal return in terms of its genesis, its sundry configurations, and its unique domain. The sec- ond major division is to define the essence of a "fundamental meta- physical position" and to delineate various such positions in prior metaphysics. The third is to interpret Nietzsche's as the last possible position. Finally, the fourth is to thematize the end of Western philos- ophy as such and the inauguration of a new, "other" commencement.
A remark that Heidegger makes at the end of section 24 suggests that only two of the original plan's four divisions saw the light of day. As was quite often the case, Heidegger had planned more than he could deliver. No more than the first division received full treatment; time permitted only a brief sally into the second. A fin du semestre Coda on the themes of Nietzschean amor Eati and Heideggerian "telling silence" brought the course to its precipitous close.
The first major division of the course (sections 1-24) focuses on Nietzsche's communication of the eternal recurrence of the same; the second interprets that doctrine as a fundamental metaphysical position. Each objeet commands its own methodology, the first division requirJ ing a close reading of Nietzsche's texts, the second a daring yet more distant effort to locate Nietzsche in the history of Western philosophy as a whole. The juxtaposition of these two strategies-close contact and vast distance, detail and perspective, thrust and feint, reading and writing-lends the lecture course its particular tension. Nevertheless, the entire drama develops but one theme. The first sentence of the first section of the first division reads: "Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysi-
242 THE ETERNAL RECURREI'<CE OF THE SAME
cal position is captured in his doctrine of the eternal return of the same.
The first major division presents Nietzsche's own communications of eternal return. Yet a curious rift threatens its very structure. In the middle of his account of "On the Vision and the Riddle" (in section 6) Heidegger stops abruptly. The occasion for the caesura is that curious shift of scene in the vision-from the gateway "Moment" to the strick- en shepherd. Heidcgger does not recommence his account of the latter until section 24. In other words, sections 7 to 23, the bulk of the course as such, constitute a kind of parenthesis in Heidegger's analysis of the second (and principal) communication of eternal recurrence. The larger part of that parenthesis deals with Nietzsche's unpublished notes on eternal return. However, no matter how vital Heidegger be- lieves such notes to be, he carefully inserts his entire discussion of them into that communication of Nietzsche's entitled Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In fact, he begins to discuss the notes only after he has moved forward unobtrusively to the themes of Zarathustra's solitude, his animals, and his convalescence (sections 7 and 8). He even ad- vances to Nietzsche's third communication of eternal return, in Beyond Good and Evil. In retrospect, this unobtrusive move forward to "The Convalescent," seeking as it does to define the thought that is hardest to bear in terms of Nietzsche's own communication of it, is the most communicative gesture of the entire lecture course.
Heidegger begins (section 1) by affirming eternal recurrence as the fundamental thought of Nietzsche's philosophy. As a thought that reaches out toward being as a whole, eternal return of the same stands in vigorous opposition to the fundamental metaphysical positions represented by Platonism and by the Christian tradition as a whole. Nietzsche's fundamental thought has its immediate genesis (section 2) in the landscape of the Oberengadin, which Nietzsche first saw in 1881; yet echoes of it can be found in an early autobiographical sketch and in the late work Ecce Homo. Heidegger ventures into these auto- biographical texts, not in order to reduce eternal return to a mere confession of faith on Nietzsche's part, but to establish as the funda- mental task of Nietzsche's life the thinking of eternal recurrence of the
Analysis 243
same. Nietzsche communicates the thought only reluctantly, crypti- cally, and leaves most of his notes concerning it unpublished. His first communication of it (section 3), in The Gay Science, portrays eternal recurrence as "the greatest burden," that is, a thought that both in- quires into being as a whole and testifies to the thinker's "loneliest loneliness. " The affirmation of existence-of our lives as we have lived them-and of the ceaseless reiteration of the same is tied to what Hei- degger calls the "authentic appropriation" of our existence as a "self. " Perhaps for that reason the thought of return (section 4) is said to be the hardest to bear of all thoughts, the tragic thought par excellence. To think it is to join Zarathustra in the fateful and fatal adventure of downgoing (Untergang) and transition (Ubergang). The "eternity" of eternal return provides nothing resembling sanctuary from time, death, or decision.
The second communication of the thought (section 5) occurs in and as Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche creates the figure of Zarathustra for the express purpose of communicating his thought of thoughts. The thought itself appears in that work in "figures of speech," meta- phors, images, simulacra of all kinds; the how of the communication is at least as important as the what. The book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written for everyone and no one, is for those who are learning to be beneficent to life. Yet the difficulties of reading-plus Heidegger's reservations concerning his own procedure-make all complacency impossible. The crucial section of the book proves to be "On the Vi- sion and the Riddle," which Heidegger proceeds to discuss (section 6). After a mammoth interruption (sections 7 to 23), he takes up the thread of the riddle in section 24, the culminating section of the first
major division of his course.
In section 6 Heidegger suggests that the riddle has to do with the
"loneliest loneliness" of the thinker who thinks the truth-that is, the openness and unconcealment, aletheia--of being as a whole. He re- counts Zarathustra's tale of his encounter with the spirit of gravity, the dwarf, at the gateway Augenblick, "Glance of an Eye," or "Moment. " The eternity that each avenue at the gateway traverses--one forward, the other rearward-is for the dwarf a matter of contempt. Thus a
244 THE ETERl\AL RECURREI\:CE OF THE SAME
common interpretation of eternal recurrence (as the cyclical nature of sacred time and the perfect ring of truth) is placed in the mouth of the dwarf who takes things too easily. For the thought itself, suggesting that "in an infinite time the course of a finite world is necessarily already completed," threatens to cripple all action in the present. When Zara- thustra poses his second question to the dwarf, whether "I and you in the gateway" must not have recurred countless times, the dwarf not only fails to reply but vanishes altogether. The spirit of gravity cannot adopt a stance of its own in the Moment and so must disappear, leav- ing riddlers to pose a number of questions concerning the gateway and its avenues--questions such as (l) the infinity of past and future time, (2) the reality or actuality of time as something more than a mere form of intuition, and (3) the finite existence of beings in time. These are among the questions that propel Heidegger to Nietzsche's unpublished notes.
However, before he takes up the suppressed notes Heidegger turns his attention to the animals that accompany Zarathustra up to a certain point in his convalescence (sections 7-8) and to the third communica- tion of eternal return as circulus vitiosus deus (section 9).
These sec- tions constitute no mere interlude in Heidegger's account. In "The Convalescent" (section 8), which we must now recall more closely, Heidegger in fact appears to reach the core of Nietzsche's second com- munication of eternal return.
Zarathustra's animals, his proud eagle and discerning serpent, are the companions and enforcers of his solitude. Their conjunction, a vortex of coils and rings, yields the most compelling emblem of recur- rence. The animals speak to Zarathustra of eternal return during the latter's convalescence, which is the culmination of his downgoing. Their master must recuperate from the encounter with his own most abysmal thought, his own ultimate recess, which he has not yet truly incorporated. The circle of recurrence proves to be the circle of life and suffering; however much the eagle of its emblem soars, the circle itself tends to Untergang. Under the weight of his most abysmal thought, Zarathustra collapses. Seven days and nights he lies prostrate, feeding on the red and yellow berries his pride has fetched, berries of semblance and passionate creativity, the colors of will to power as
Analysis 245
eternal recurrence. The animals now try to seduce Zarathustra back into the world, as though it were a garden of delights rather than the theater of tragedy. The thought of eternal return-seduction and so- briety, intoxication and lucidity, contemptuous grumbling and rhap- sodic song, satyr-play and tragedy, the conjunction in each case bridging the smallest gap-must now become Zarathustra's thought. Yet the suspicion obtrudes that Zarathustra's animals are humming the dwarfs own ditty. How can the difference between the thought's two modes of reception be preserved? What decides whether there is any difference at all? Not for nothing is the thought of return both the hardest to bear and the most difficult: to think being as a whole as eternal displacement of the goal is to utter "a cry of distress and calami- ty," and . not to whistle a happy tune.
What turns the doctrine into a ditty? The assurance that all is bound for Emersonian compensation-though, to be fair, Emerson too, as Nietzsche well knew, had recurrent doubts-implies that we may dis- pense with all decision. Thus the dwarf makes light of the thought of return. He refuses to abandon his perch on the periphery and to enter the gateway itself. He declines to stand in the Moment. Viewed from the sidelines, the two avenues diverge as if to meet indifferently in some distant eternity. Yet when a self stands in the gateway where past and future "affront one another" and "collide," existence ceases to be a spectator sport. In the "flash of an eye" the thinker must look both fore and aft, "turned in two ways," and must study the internecine strife of time. "Whoever stands in the Moment lets what runs counter to itself come to collision, though not to a standstill, by cultivating and sustaining the strife between what is assigned him as a task and what has been given him as his endowment. " It is the effrontery of time that in it we collide against mortality and strive with it, closing in the glance of an eye and not in some remote infinity. Nevertheless, the strife of time dare not provoke our revulsion or antagonism; it is not effrontery after all but an affronting, or better, a confronting. To stand in the Moment-to be the Moment-is to decide how everything recurs. Certain matters are of course already decided. The eternal re- turn of the Last Man, the little man, for example. As though he had as much right to the gateway as one's self. Zarathustra's heroism rests in
246 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
his having gone to meet his supreme suffering-the eternal recurrence of the Last Man-as well as his supreme hope-the inception of over- man. At this juncture Heidegger reminds us of the motto inscribed over his own lecture course, as over a gateway: "Everything in the hero's sphere turns to tragedy. . . . " With Zarathustra the tragic era begins. Tragic insight has nothing to do with either pessimism or opti- mism, "inasmuch as in its willing and in its knowing it adopts a stance toward being as a whole, and inasmuch as the basic law of being as a whole consists in struggle. " In such struggle the teacher of eternal return must come to understand himself as transition and demise, Obergang and Untergang. "In the end, Zarathustra hears which eterni- ty it is that his animals are proclaiming to him, the eternity of the Moment that embraces everything in itself at once: the downgoing. "
Thus the entire discussion of Nietzsche's first two communications of eternal return, in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, respectively, comes to a head in section 8, "The Convalescent. " The first communication stresses the essentially tragic nature of beings in general, the second the tragic insight gained in the glance of the e y e - eternity as the Moment. These communications converge, according to Heidegger, in the matter of thinking, namely, thinking eternal recurrence in the essential context of the question of being as a whole, in pursuit of Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position. The third communication of eternal return (section 9) takes us one step closer to that position.
The third communication proceeds from "Zarathustra the godless" to "the quintessence of religion. " The latter is the circulus vitiosus deus, the "ring" of recurrence that conjoins divinity and " 'world' per- haps? " Because the Christian God of morality is utterly dead, the ques- tion of world, of being as a whole, becomes compelling. The question itself necessitates the creation of gods and the re-creation of humanity. Reason enough to call it the greatest burden! The circulus vitiosus itself exhibits the trajectory of downgoing, the descensional movement of tragic inquiry.
Heidegger's reading of the posthumously published notes on eternal recurrence (sections 10-21) is preceded by a warning "that Nietzsche's own mode of communication" in his published writings must set the
Analysis 247
standard. Heidegger recognizes that his own procedure is duplex and even duplicitous: his interpretation must be guided by a prior sense of the questions at stake in eternal recurrence-lest it be a mere rehash;- and yet that interpretation must be undertaken in a spirit of "meticu- lous deference" to Nietzsche's own texts. Heidegger divides the sup- pressed notes (section 10) into three principal groups: (1) those stemming from the initial discovery of the thought of return in 1881- 82; (2) those from the period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883-84; and (3) those pertaining to plans for a major work, roughly, 1884-88. He criticizes the lack of order in the first group as presented in the Gross- oktav edition and the editors' division of the notes into "theoretical" and "poetical" groups. Principal themes in the first group are those of "incorporation," foreshadowing the lesson of Zarathustra's convales- cence, and of "teaching" and "decision," the latter to have an impact on being as a whole now that mankind has reached its "midday. " Heidegger attempts a summary presentation (section 12) of Nietzsche's doctrine as contained in the first group of notes: eternal return applies to the world in its collective character, or to being as a whole, whether animate or inanimate; that character shows itself as force, limited force, the world totality thus proving to be finite; although "infinite" in
the sense of "immeasurable," the world totality exists as exertions of limited force in bounded space and unlimited time ("eternity"). Force, finitude, perpetual Becoming, immeasurability, bounded space, and infinite time are all predicates of chaos. Yet the crucial issue turns out to be, not this or that cosmological speculation on chaos, but Nietz- sche's "negative ontology," as it were, in which one must be on guard against every humanization and deification of being as a whole. For Nietzsche the world as such is an arreton. The "necessitous" character of cosmic chaos is to guide us toward the notion of eternal return. Bl! t how? It is precisely in the thought of return that the circle or ring of humanity and being as a whole is joined (section 13). Thus it is a matter neither of pseudo-scientific skepticism nor of religious faith, but of questioning being as a whole. Such questioning bears a special rela- tion to language. Yet neither Nietzsche nor philosophy prior to him raises that question adequately.
Whatever his notebooks might suggest, Nietzsche does not try to
248 TilE ETER:>;AL RECURREt\0: OF THE SAi\·ll~
"prove" eternal return "scientifically" (sections 14-16). The finitude of Becoming and the necessary recurrence of the same in infinite time remain staples of Nietzsche's thought; yet Nietzsche himself is keenly aware of the dilemma in which his passion to eliminate anthropomor- phisms places him with regard to all such staples, When he opts for both dehumanization and maximal humanization in will to power, he compels but does not elaborate the question of Da-sein. The thought of return cannot be designated as a "belief" (section 17), unless we are willing and able to reinterpret the meaning of religion and of all tak- ing-for-true. The latter is not only an expression of Nietzsche's passion to dehumanize, however; Heidegger stresses the sense of creative knowing, giving, and loving-the sense of thoughtful possibility. The thought of return therefore involves the problem of freedom and neces- sity (section 18), not as an antinomy of reason, but as an invitation to rethink the temporality of the moment as a matter of and for decision. Such decision, Heidegger says, is a taking up of one's self into the willing act. Yet precisely how this is to occur Nietzsche never managed to communicate. Heidegger suggests that while such taking up is an authentic appropriation of self it is also the propriative event for histori- cal mankind as a whole. As Ereignis, eternal recurrence of the same displays the covert, essential relationship of time to being as a whole. Yet it is a time, we might add, which for Heidegger hovers somewhere between the ecstatic temporality of individualized Dasein and the essentially historical unfolding of Being. The latter, in 1937, is still beguiled by the hollow rhetoric of "peoples" and "nations" in "com- petition with one another. "
The posthumously published notes from 1881-82 (section 19) al- ready stress the fact that the thought of return refers to being as a whole and to the need for a thinker and teacher to execute its thinking. The notes from the Zarathustra period (section 20) demonstrate that the thought of return is most resistant to incorporation, unless it be con- ceived as redemption from the flux of Becoming. Such redemption does not freeze the flow of Becoming, but, in the moment of decision, prevents Becoming from being reduced to endless repetition. All de- pends on how the possibility of recurrence is thought through. "Nietz- sche knows only thoughts that have to be wrestled with. " Finally, the
Analysis 249
unpublished materials from 1884 to 1888 (section 21) indicate the way in which eternal recurrence dominates Nietzsche's philosophy of will to power. Eternal return is the culminating thought for will to power, both as an interpretation of all occurrence and as a revaluation of all values. Eternal return is the essential counterthrust to nihilism. Hei- degger's principal question directed to the notes taken up into The Will to Power, is as follows: "How do will to power, as the pervasive consti- tution of beings, and the eternal return of the same, as the mode of Being of beings as a whole, relate to one another? " The relationship cannot be expressed in terms of conditions or presuppositions.
Yet what if the will to power, according to Nietzsche's most proper and intrinsic intentions, were in itself nothing else than a willing back to that which was and a willing forward to everything that has to be? What if eternal recurrence of the same--as occurrence--were nothing other than the will to power, precisely in the way Nietzsche himself understands this phrase. . . ? If matters stood this way, then the designation of being as will to power would only be an elaboration of the original and primary projection of being as eternal recurrence of the same. In truth, matters do stand this way.
Thus it is not so much that Nietzsche's thinking of will to power and eternal return must be reduced to the metaphysical categories of es- sentia and existentia. It is rather that the mysterious coherence of these two notions impels the question "as to what is being thought here in general and how it is being thought. " The conjunction of the what and how Heidegger formulates as Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position.
In order to bring the first major division of his course to its question, Heidegger inquires into the "configuration" of the doctrine of return (section 22) and its "domain" (section 23). By configuration, Gestalt, Heidegger means the inner structure of the doctrine's truth, that is, the openness of being that shows itself in it. His strategy is to study the three axes in Nietzsche's plans for a magnum opus, to wit, eternal return, will to power, and revaluation of all values. Yet Heidegger is aware that merely to juggle these titles is an extrinsic procedure that may never catch sight of the "inner structure" of Nietzsche's philos- ophy. Because the thought of return involves the thinker and his his-
250 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
torical moment, the question of its domain, Bereich, assumes preemi- nence. The thought's domain is staked out by nihilism, the event in which being as a whole comes to nothing. Nietzsche's thought is a countermovement to nihilism, eternal recurrence its counterthought. Eternal recurrence shares in the essence of nihilism inasmuch as it commits the goallessness of being to eternity-"the nothing ('meaning- lessness') eternally! "-and yet its creative impulse, "in its character as decision, the character of the moment," shows that eternal return is "the thought that wends its way toward the need as such. " Hence Heidegger's return to the crucial matter of the Augenblick, the mo- ment of eternal recurrence, in section 24.
Section 24 is to bring the first major division of Heidegger's course to a close. Heidegger returns to that point in Zarathustra's account of "The Vision and the Riddle" where a baying hound announces a strik- ing change of scene. The change is to indicate what is decisive in the image of the gateway "Moment" or "Glance of an Eye. " The dog's howling sends Zarathustra racing back to his childhood-the period in Nietzsche's life which Heidegger associates with Schopenhauerian pes- simism and Wagnerian delirium. Yet the vision of the young shepherd and his black snake is a matter of nihilism, not pessimism. Nihilism must be overcome from the inside, bitten off at the head; that bite alone introduces man to golden laughter and the gay science. It now becomes clear why Heidegger moved forward (in section 8) to "The Convalescent," inasmuch as it is here that we learn the identity of the young shepherd-it is Zarathustra himself, seeking to recover from the poison of his contempt for man. It also becomes clear why Zarathustra cannot be fooled by eternal recurrence as a hurdy-gurdy song. To think return is to bite decisively into the repulsive snake of nihilism; it is to choose between the two ways to say "It is all alike," the two ways to define man's fundamental position within being as a whole.
Eternal return thus has its proper content, not in the trite assertion "Everything turns in a circle," but in a dual movement by which the thought recoils on the thinker and the thinker is drawn into the thought. That dual movement occurs when eternal recurrence is thought, first, in terms of the moment, "the temporality of indepen- dent action and decision," and second, in terms of nihilism, the "con-
Analysis 251
clition of need" that defines both the task and the endowment be- queathed to contemporary man. Heidegger stresses the first, "the mo- ment of being-a-self," in an explicit reference back to the analysis of Dasein in Being and Time. Yet the "moment" is now a far more "epochal" gateway than it was in 1927: the focus falls equally on the propriative event of nihilism. The recoil of eternal recurrence on Mar- tin Heidegger is felt in the insistent question of the relation between thought and thinker-the question of what calls on us to think. In the present case, that is how the thinker "slips into the ring of eternal recurrence, indeed in such a way as to help achieve the ring, help decide it. "
The fragmentary "second major division" of Heidegger's course in- quires into the essence and possibility of "fundamental metaphysical positions" in Western philosophy (section 25), as well as into the spe- cific matter of Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position (section 26). Its ironic thesis is that in Western philosophy the metaphysical
Grundstellung is such that the Grundfrage never gets asked: the guid- ing question "What is being? " is not explicated as such. Heidegger's question with regard to Nietzsche is why the relationship of thought and thinker, "the recoil that includes and the inclusion that recoils," becomes so conspicuous with him; presumably, that question is not unrelated to Heidegger's own unrelenting efforts to unfold and develop the guiding question of metaphysics. Philosophy inquires into the arche, the rise and dominion of being as a whole; it takes the beings of physis or "nature" as definitive, although the role of man among the various regions of beings vies with nature for preeminence; it seeks an answer to the question of what being is. The one thing it does not do is unfold the guiding question itself, pose the historical grounding question. The latter confronts something which again may not be to- tally unrelated to Nietzsche, namely, the nothing that surrounds and insidiously pervades the field of being as a whole.
Thus the most durable and unfailing touchstone of genuineness and force- fulness of thought in a philosopher is the question as to whether or not he or she experiences in a direct and fundamental manner the nearness of the nothing in the Being of beings. Whoever fails to experience it remains forever outside the realm of philosophy, without hope of entry.
252 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Finally, Heidegger's effort to unfold the guiding question by way of the grounding question notes that each time the guiding question is raised one region of beings rises to set the definitive standard for being as a whole; and this may have something to do with the theme of "humani- zation" discussed so penetratingly in section 13.
The original title of Heidegger's lecture course as listed in the uni- versity catalogue was "Nietzsche's Fundamental Metaphysical Position in Western Thinking: the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence of the Same. " Perhaps the principal difficulty the course encounters is that whereas Nietzsche's position is identified as the end, accomplishment, or fulfillment of metaphysics, the doctrine of return is seen (at least partly) as a response to the traditional, undeveloped guiding question of metaphysics. Heidegger begins by aligning Nietzsche's two replies to that question-will to power and eternal return-with the traditional distinction between the constitution of being (essentia) and its way to be (existentia). He asserts the coherence of these two answers. Yet before proceeding to demonstrate that coherence Heidegger further de- fines Nietzsche's position at the end of metaphysics. It is the end, Heidegger suggests, because it reaches back to the pseudo-Par- menidean and pseudo-Heraclitean responses to the guiding question, insisting that being both becomes and is. Thus Nietzsche interlocks these responses in such a way that they yield no further food for thought. However, because these responses are in effect derivative Platonistic interpretations of early Greek thinking, the commencement of Western thought remains curiously untouched by the Nietzschean closure. The interlocking takes place when Nietzsche delineates being as both perpetual creation (hence Becoming) and ineluctable fixation (hence Being as permanence of presence). Creative transfiguration too, and not merely metaphysico-moral thought, require the stability that fixation alone grants. The entire question of Nietzsche's fundamental
metaphysical position therefore rests on the further question of what it means that we wish to "imprint the emblem of eternity on our life! " A "recoining" and creative transfiguration of Becoming are to occur. In such reconfiguration Becoming would attain subsistence (Bestand), subsistence of course being the principal metaphysical designation of
Analysis 253
Being as permanence (Bestiindigkeit). However, Heidegger does not push the interpretation in this obvious direction; he insists on creation as transcendence and surpassment, confrontation in the moment of decision. He nonetheless fails to elaborate a positive interpretation of the mythic figure of Dionysos as a way of avoiding any Platonistic (mis)interpretation of creation. Instead, he insists that the Nietzschean inversion of the Platonic hierarchy represents the virtual entrenchment of Platonism. Entrenchment versus end: such is the ambivalence that characterizes Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche from start to finish.
At the end of his lecture course Heidegger tries to limn three intri- cate subjects with as many strokes of the pen, peremptory, suggestive, incomplete. First, he juxtaposes Nietzsche's ostensible position with his own Janus-headed counterposition vis-a-vis the commencement, the latter referring both to the beginnings of Western thought and the inauguration of "another" kind of thinking. Second, he discusses briefly the phrase amor fati in terms of both will to power and eternal return as expressions of resolute creativity in thought. Third, he offers a glimpse into his major philosophical work of the 1930s, Contributions
to Philosophy, when he invokes "telling silence" and the theme of language generally in his "other" commencement. The motto from Beyond Good and Evil on tragedy, satyr-play, and world recurs as an epigram of both commencement and close.
More than fifteen years separate the public lecture "Who Is Nietz- sche's Zarathustra? " from the lecture course on eternal recurrence. Yet the consistency of theme is remarkable. Not that the Heidegger/Nietz- sche confrontation experienced no ups and downs. In the early 1940s Heidegger's waxing anxiety concerning the will-to-will that then seemed on the rampage drew Nietzsche into its somber sphere. In·
1939, while lecturing on "Will to Power as Knowledge," Heidegger was jotting a number of notes on "Nietzsche's Metaphysics" that were devastatingly critical and even polemical: he called Nietzsche's meta- physics the most extreme form of alienation from Greek civilization, a turgid expression of planetary technology, a pan-European rather than a truly "German" style of thinking. Not only did Nietzsche lack con-
254 THE ETERl'\AL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
ceptual rigor, even his enthusiasm for artistic creation boiled down to a fascination with technical achievement: the greatest stimulans to life was ultimately no more than an object of calculative thought, a pre- scription for "genius. " And so on.
The patient, measured reading of "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? " is thus a bit of a surprise. It seems as though in the early 1950s Heideg- ger executed a sympathetic return to Nietzsche-not primarily as the metaphysician of will to power and technician of artistic frenzy but as the thinker of eternal recurrence. The lecture "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? " springs from the 1951-52 lecture course at Freiburg en- titled "What Calls for Thinking? " There Heidegger calls Nietzsche, not the last metaphysician, but the last thinker of the Western world. 1 Here too Heidegger stresses the difficulty of Nietzsche's thought in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: no matter how intoxicating its language may be, the book's "fundamental thought" and "provenance" remain sobering challenges. In "What Calls for Thinking? " Heidegger advises his students to equip themselves for these challenges by studying Aristotle for ten or fifteen years! In "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? " (as in the second part of "What Calls for Thinking? ") Heidegger conjoins the names of Nietzsche and Parmenides.
Zarathustra is the advocate of life, suffering, and the circle. He teaches the doctrines of eternal recurrence and overman. The circle of life and suffering and the coherence of will to power, eternal return, and overman take center stage in Heidegger's reflections. At the begin- ning and end of his lecture stands the emblem of Zarathustra's ani- mals, the sign of both Nietzsche's and Heidegger's longing. Eagle and serpent are totems of Zarathustra, the thinker of eternal return, and talismans for Heidegger, who thinks the relationship of Being and hu- man being. The teaching of eternal recurrence is nothing whimsical: dismay marks Zarathustra's very style, consternation in the face of his most abysmal thought. Nor is the doctrine of overman an expression of boldness and presumption. "Over-man" Heidegger defines as "that hu-
1 Martin Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? (Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1954), p. 61. English translation by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, What Is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 46.
Analysis 255
man being who goes beyond prior humanity solely in order to conduct such humanity for the first time to its essence. " Overman is Nietz- sche's answer to the question of whether man is prepared to assume dominion over the earth. Heidegger's own reflection has less to do with achieving dominion than with rescuing the earth; yet he puts this dif- ference in abeyance and focuses on Zarathustra as the teacher of eter- nal return. That teaching points the way of transition to the overman, although the destination itself remains remote. If dismay is the first of Zarathustra's characteristics, then the second is longing. The episode "On the Great Longing" begins with Zarathustra's invocation of "To- day," "One day," and "Formerly" as aspects of the perpetual now of eternity. True, Nietzsche's is an eternity of recurrence rather than a
nunc stans; yet the tendency of Heidegger's argument here is to reduce the doctrine of return to familiar metaphysical structures.
A second thrust of inquiry now intervenes and proves to be less familiar. Once again the theme of time occupies the spotlight, when Heidegger asks about the bridge to overman. That bridge is called "Redemption from the Spirit of Revenge," and revenge is defined as man's ill will toward time and its "It was. " Nietzsche diagnoses such revenge at the heart of all the tradition held most sacrosanct, including its ''best reflection.