" The
temptation
to take the thought of return merely as some- thing obvious, to take it therefore at bottom as either contemptible mumbling or fascinating chatter, is overcome.
Heidegger - Nietzsche - v1-2
Hence at the conclusion of the Prologue to Thus
Spoke Zarathustra we find the words:
"Thus I bid my pride always to accompany my discernment. And if my discernment should one day leave me-alas, she loves to fly off! -then let my pride fly with my folly! "
Thus began Zarathustra's downgoing.
A curious downgoing, which commences by exposing itself to the supreme possibilites of Becoming and Being. These cohere in the es- sence of will to power; that is to say, they are one.
What we set out to do here was to indicate briefly what the figures of Zarathustra's two animals, eagle and serpent, symbolize: first, in their circling and coiling-the circle and ring of eternal return; second, in their essential character as pride and discernment, respectively, these constituting the basic stance of the teacher of eternal return and his mode of knowledge; third, as the animals of his loneliness, being su- preme exactions on Zarathustra himself. Zarathustra's animals are all the more implacable inasmuch as we hear them-not expressing cer- tain propositions or rules or admonitions-but saying from out of their essential natures what is essential, and saying it with growing lucidity through the palpable presence of sensuous imagery. Sense-images speak only to those who possess the constructive energy to give them shape, so that they make sense. As soon as the poetic force-that is, the higher constructive energy-wanes, the emblems turn mute. They petrify, become sheer "facade" and "ornament. "
8. "The Convalescent"
The reference to Zarathustra's animals has left us not totally unpre- pared to grasp the episode that, along with "On the Vision and the Riddle," considered earlier, treats the eternal return in a more direct fashion. This episode, the fourth-to-last of Part III, entitled "The Con- valescent,'' remains in mysterious correspondence to that earlier one. In "The Convalescent" Zarathustra's animals speak to him about what they themselves symbolize: they speak of eternal return. They speak to Zarathustra, hovering about him, and remain present to his solitude until a particular moment when they leave him alone, cautiously steal- ing away. Their standing by him suggests that they are curious about him and are ever on the search for him; they want to know whether he is becoming the one he is, whether in his Becoming he finds his Being. But Zarathustra's Becoming commences with his downgoing. The downgoing itself comes to its end in Zarathustra's convalescence. Everything here is indicative of the most profound strife. Only when we grasp the various facets of the strife will we near the thought that is hardest to bear.
We shall place special emphasis on the characterization of the doc- trine of eternal return, as befits the preliminary elucidations we are now engaged in. Yet we must continue to keep to the style of the present work; we must grasp everything that happens, in the way that it happens, in terms of that work itself. We must also understand the teaching, as taught, in connection with the questions as to who Zara- thustra is, how the teacher of that teaching is, and in what way the teaching defines the teacher. That is to say, precisely where the teach- ing is most purely expressed in doctrines, the teacher, the one who teaches and speaks, dare not be forgotten.
50 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
How do matters stand with Zarathustra at the beginning of the sec- tion entitled "The Convalescent"? What is happening here? Zarathus- tra has returned once again to his cave, home from his sea voyage. One morning soon after his arrival he leaps from his bed and cries out like a madman, gesturing frantically, "as though someone were still lying in his bed and refused to get up. " Zarathustra rages in a frightful voice in order to wake this other and to make sure that he will remain awake in the future. This other is his most abysmal thought, which, although it lies with him, still remains a stranger to Zarathustra; the other is his own ultimate recess, which Zarathustra has not yet con- ducted to his supreme height and to the most fully wakeful of lives. The thought lies beside him in bed, has not yet become one with him, is not yet incorporated in him and hence is not yet something truly thought. So saying, we indicate what is now to happen: the full import and the whole might of the thought that is hardest to bear must now rise and reveal itself. Zarathustra roars at it, calls it a "sluggish worm. " We easily discern the meaning of the image: the sluggish worm, lying as a stranger on the floor, is the counterimage to the ringed serpent who "wrings" his way to the heights, soaring there in vast circles, vigilant in friendship. When the invocation of the most abysmal thought begins, Zarathustra's animals grow fearful; they do not flee in consternation, however, but come nearer, while all the other animals about them scatter. Eagle and serpent alone remain. It is a matter of bringing to the light of wakeful day, in purest solitude, what the ani- mals symbolize.
Zarathustra invokes his ultimate recesses and so conducts himself to himself. He becomes what he is and confesses himself to be the one who he is: "the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle. " Living, suffering, and circling are not three distinct matters. They belong together and form one: being as a whole, to which suffering, the abyss, belongs and which is inasmuch as, circling, it recurs. These three manifest their mutual affinity when they are gathered in the light of day, that is, when they are thought in their unity by Zarathustra's supreme "Yes. " In that supreme moment, when the thought is comprehended and is truly thought, Zarathustra cries, "Hail me! " Yet his "Hail me! " is at the same time a "Woe is me! "-for
"The Convalescent" 51
his is the victory that overcomes even itself as its greatest danger, the victory that grasps itself as downgoing.
Scarcely is it accomplished, when Zarathustra collapses. After he regains his senses he takes to his bed for seven days and seven nights. "But his animals did not abandon him, neither by day nor by night. " Even so, Zarathustra remains in his solitude. The eagle, the proudest animal, flies off alone to fetch all sorts of nourishment. That means to say that Zarathustra does not lose himself, that he continues to nourish his pride and to secure the certainty of his rank, even though he must lie prostrate, even though his discernment does not bother about him now, so that he cannot even tell himself what he knows. Among other things, the eagle brings him "yellow and red berries," and we recall the earlier reference to "deep yellow and fiery red" (cf. Part III, "On the Spirit of Gravity"). Taken together, these two colors conform to what Zarathustra wants to have in sight: the color of deepest falsehood, er- ror, and semblance, and the color of supreme passion, of incandescent creation.
When interpreting the two colors we have to keep in mind the fact that for will to power "error" constitutes the necessary essence of truth and that it is therefore not at all to be valued negatively. "Deep yellow" may also be interpreted as the gold of the "golden flash of the serpent vita" (WM, 577), which is "the serpent of eternity" (XII, 426). For the second interpretation "deep yellow" is the color of the eternal recur- rence of the same, "fiery red" the color of will to power. For the first interpretation the two colors display the essential structure of will to power itself, inasmuch as truth as that which fixates and art as creation constitute the conditions of the possibility of will to power. In both cases the mutual affinity of the two colors points toward the essential unity of the Being of beings as thought by Nietzsche.
But after seven days "the animals felt that the time had come to t:ilk with him. " Zarathustra is now strong enough actually to think and to express himself about his most difficult thought, his ultimate recess. For what the eagle and serpent (the loneliest loneliness) wish to talk about-the only thing they can talk about-is the thought of eternal return. In the dialogue between Zarathustra and his animals the thought of thoughts is now brought to language. It is not presented as
52 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
a "theory"; only in conversation does it prove itself. Fot here the speak- ers themselves must venture forth into what is spoken: conversation alone brings to light the extent to which the speakers can or cannot advance, and the extent to which their conversation is only empty talk.
The two animals open the conversation. They inform Zarathustra that the world outside is like a garden that awaits him. They sense somehow that a new insight has come to him, an insight concerning the world as a whole. It must therefore be a pleasure to proceed to this newly constituted world, since all things are bathed in the light of the new insight and want to be integrated into the new dispensation. Inso- far as they are so illuminated and integrated, things corroborate the insight in a profound way; they heal the one who up to now has been a seeker, they cure him of the disease of inquiry. That is what the animals mean when they say to Zarathustra, "All things yearn for you. . . . All things want to be doctors to you! " And Zarathustra? He listens to the animals' talk, indeed gladly, although he knows that they are only jabbering. But after such solitude the world is like a garden, even when it is invoked by mere empty talk, in the sheer play of words and phrases. He knows that a cheerful loveliness and gentle humor settle over the terrifying thing that being genuinely is; that being can conceal itself behind semblances in what is talked about. In truth, of course, the world is no garden, and for Zarathustra it dare not be one, especially if by "garden" we mean an enchanting haven for the flight from being. Nietzsche's conception of the world does not provide the thinker with a sedate residence in which he can putter about unper- turbed, like the philosopher of old, Epicurus, in his "garden. " The world is not a cosmos present at hand in itself. The animals' allusion to the garden has the sense of rejecting any sedate residence; at the same time, indirectly, it has the task of referring us to the concept of world in the tragic insight. Here we must ponder an important note by Nietzsche (XII, 368, from 1882-84):
Solitude for a time necessary, in order that the creature be totally permeated --cured and hard. New form of community, asserting itself in a warlike manner. Otherwise the spirit grows soft. No "gardens" and no sheer "eva- sion in the face of the masses. " War (but without gunpowder! ) between different thoughts! and their armies!
"The Convalescent" 53
The animals talk to Zarathustra about his new insight in seductive words that tempt him to sheer intoxication. Yet Zarathustra knows that in truth these words and tones are "rainbows and sham bridges con- necting what is eternally distinct. " Where things most reminiscent of other things are named in the conversation, when it sounds as though the same is being said, then and there comes the loveliest lie: "For the smallest gap is the hardest to bridge. "
What is Zarathustra thinking about? Nothing else than the sole mat- ter under discussion, the world, being as a whole. But what response did the dwarf give to this riddle? The dwarf said that the avenues of the gateway, running counter to one another, meet in the infinite; every- thing turns in a circle and is a circle. And what did Zarathustra call himself when he thought his most difficult thought out of his ultimate recess, a thought he did not take lightly, as the dwarf did? He called himself the "advocate of the circle. " Hence the two of them, the dwarf and Zarathustra, say the same thing. Between them lies only "the smallest gap": in each case it is an other who speaks the same words. Otherwise that same word, "circle," is but a sham bridge between things that are eternally distinct. Thus one man's circle is not another man's circle. What now comes to light is that whenever the Being of beings as a whole is to be uttered the semblance of unanimity is great- est and correct understanding-which is decisive and determinative of rank-most difficult.
It is easy for anyone and everyone to say, "A being is," and "A being becomes. " Everyone thinks that anybody can understand that. Mean- while, talking this way, "man dances above and beyond all things. " Man, drifting along as he usually does, oblivious to the true dimen- sions and proper stages of genuine thinking, needs that kind of dance, that kind of jabbering, and Zarathustra takes joy in it. Yet he also knows that it is an illusion, that this garden is not the world, that "the world is deep, and deeper than the day has thought" (Part III, "Before Sunrise").
Thus Zarathustra does not allow the animals' talk to seduce him away from what he has known now for seven days and nights. He can find nothing reassuring in the fact that everyone confidently asserts-as though it were evident-that "everything turns in a circle," thereby to
54 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
all appearances agreeing with him in their empty talk. But the animals reply, "To those who think as we do, all things themselves dance. " We do not dance above and beyond the things, they seem to say, but see the things' own dance and sway: you can trust us. And now they tell how the world looks under the new sun of eternal recurrence:
Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of Be- ing. Everything dies, everything blooms again; eternally runs the year of Being.
Everything sunders, everything is joined anew; eternally the identical House of Being is built. Everything departs, everything greets again; eternal- ly true to itself is the Ring of Being.
In every instant Being begins; around every Here the sphere of There rolls. The center is everywhere. Curved is the path of eternity.
Thus talk Zarathustra's animals. And why shouldn't they, they who are only insofar as they soar in vast circles and form rings? Could eternal return of the same be portrayed in more elegant words and more striking images than those employed here? How different this speech seems from the contemptuous grumblings of the dwarf! Never- theless, the speeches of the dwarf and the animals betray a fatal resem- blance. The dwarf says "All truth," that is to say, what is truly in being, in its passage and passing, "is curved. " The animals say, "Curved is the path of eternity. " Perhaps the animals' talk is only more effervescent, more buoyant and playful than-yet at bottom identical with-the talk of the dwarf, to whom Zarathustra objects that he makes things too easy for himself. Indeed, even the speech of his very own animals, who present his teaching to him in the fairest formulas, can- not deceive Zarathustra: " 'Oh, you rascally jesters and barrel organs,' answered Zarathusra, smiling again, 'how well you know what had to be fulfilled in seven days-' . " Yet their knowing is not knowledge. If Zarathustra calls it that he is only being ironic and is really suggesting that they know nothing. They are barrel organs: they turn his words concerning the eternal return of the same, words obtained only after the hardest struggle, into a mere ditty; they crank it out, knowing what is essential about it as little as the dwarf does. For the dwarf vanishes
"The Convalescent" 55
when things take a serious turn and all becomes foreboding, when the shepherd has to bite off the head of the black snake. The dwarf experi- ences nothing of the fact that really to know the ring of rings means precisely this: to overcome from the outset and perpetually what is dark and horrid in the teaching as it is expressed, namely, the fact that if everything recurs all decision and every effort and will to make things better is a matter of indifference; that if everything turns in a circle nothing is worth the trouble; so that the result of the teaching is disgust and ultimately the negation of life. In spite of their marvelous talk about the Ring of Being, Zarathustra's animals too seem to dance over and beyond what is essential. His animals too seem to want to treat the matter as men do. Like the dwarf they run away. Or they too act as mere spectators, telling what results if everything revolves. They perch before beings and "have a look at" their eternal displacement, then describe it in the most resplendent images. They are not aware of what is going on there, not aware of what must be thought in the true thinking of being as a whole, namely, that such thinking is a cry of distress, arising from a calamity.
And even if the anguished cry is heard, what is it that usually hap- pens? When the great man cries the little man hastens to the scene and takes pity. But everything that smacks of pity keeps to the periphery, stands on the sidelines. The little man's gregariousness accomplishes only one thing: his petty consolations diminish and falsify the suffer- ing, delay and obstruct the true insight. Pity has not an inkling of the extent to which suffering and outrage crawl down the throat and choke a man until he has to cry out, nor does it know the extent to which this is "necessary to attain the best" in man. Precisely the knowledge that chokes us is what must be known if being as a whole is to be thought.
This marks the essential and altogether unbridgeable difference be- tween the usual kinds of spectation and cognition, on the one hand, and proper knowing, on the other. And it suggests what the dwarf failed to see when he misinterpreted eternal recurrence and turned it into a mere ditty, into empty talk. It should be apparent by now that nothing is said here about the content of the doctrine beyond what is said in the animals' ditty, that Zarathustra does not contrapose any
56 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
other presentation to theirs, and that in the course of the conversation we are told always and only by indirection how the teaching is-Qr is not-to be understood. Nevertheless, the "how" does provide an essen- tial directive for our understanding of the "what. "
It is our job to pursue that directive more keenly and to ask: What is it that turns the doctrine into a ditty? The latter concedes that things do depart, die, and disintegrate; it also accepts everything destructive, negative, adverse, and outrageous. Yet at bottom these things are con- ceived of as eventually passing away in the world's circuitry, so that other things will come and everything shall take a turn for the better. Hence all is bound for perpetual compensation. Such compensation in fact makes everything indifferent: striving is flattened out into mere alternation. One now possesses a handy formula for the whole and abstains from all decision.
Looking back to the earlier episode, we may now ask: In what way does the dwarf make the interpretation of the imagery, that is, of the gateway and the two avenues, too easy for himself? Zarathustra indi- cates the answer when he goes on to command, "Look at the gateway itself-the Moment! " What does that directive mean? The dwarf merely looks at the two paths extending to infinity, and he thinks about them merely in the following way: If both paths run on to infinity ("eternity"), then that is where they meet; and since the circle closes by itself in infinity-far removed from me-all that recurs, in sheer alter- nation within this system of compensations, does so as a sequence, as a sort of parade passing through the gateway. The dwarf understands nothing of what Zarathustra means when he says-bewilderingly enough-that the two paths "affront one another" in the gateway. But how is that possible, when each thing moves along behind its predeces- sor, as is manifest with time itself? For in time the not-yet-now becomes the now, and forthwith becomes a no-longer-now, this as a perpetual and-so-on. The two avenues, future and past, do not collide at all, but pursue one another.
And yet a collision does occur here. To be sure, it occurs only to one who does not remain a spectator but who is himselfthe Moment, performing actions directed toward the future and at the same time accepting and affirming the past, by no means letting it drop. Whoever
"The Convalescent" 57
stands in the Moment is turned in two ways: for him past and future run up against one another. 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. * To see the Moment means to stand in it. But the dwarf keeps to the outside, perches on the periphery.
What does all this say about the right way to think the thought of eternal recurrence? It says something essential: That which is to come is precisely a matter for decision, since the ring is not closed in some remote infinity but possesses its unbroken closure in the Moment, as the center of the striving; what recurs-if it is to recur-is decided by the Moment and by the force with which the Moment can cope with whatever in it is repelled by such striving. That is what is peculiar to, and hardest to bear in, the doctrine of eternal return-to wit, that eternity is in the Moment, that the Moment is not the fleeting "now," not an instant of time whizzing by a spectator, but the collision of future and past. Here the Moment comes to itself. It determines how everything recurs. Now, the most difficult matter is the most tremen- dous matter to be grasped, and the tremendous remains a sealed door to little men. Yet the little men too are; as beings they too recur forever. They cannot be put out of action; they pertain to that side of things that is dark and repulsive. If being as a whole is to be thought, the little men too wait upon their "Yes. " That realization makes Zara- thustra shudder.
And now that his most abysmal thought has been thought in the direction of that abyss, Zarathustra's animals "do not let him talk any- more. " For when Zarathustra recognizes that the recurrence of the little man too is necessary; when he grapples with that "Yes" spoken to
• Indem er den Widerstreit des Aufgegebenen und Mitgegebenen entfaltet und aus- hiilt. Aufgegebenen could of course also have to do with surrender, but I am conjectur- ing that Heidegger here wants to juxtapose the task (cf. Aufgabe) that we project into and as the future to the endowment (cf. Mitgabe, Mitgift) of skills we bring to the task from our past. For here there often seems to be a disparity, a striving, and strife. Cf. the similar phrasing in Heidegger's Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1960), p. 89 (top), ably rendered by Albert Hofstadter in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 77 (middle). And see sections 24 and 26, below.
58 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE o~· THE SAME
everything that over the years wearied and sickened him, to everything he wanted to repulse; when he conquers his illness with that "Yes" and so becomes a convalescent; then his animals begin to speak again. Once more they repeat their message: the world is a garden. Again they call for Zarathustra to come out. But now they say more. They do not simply tell him to come out so that he can see and experience how all things are yearning for him. They call to him that he should learn from the songbirds how to sing: "For singing does a convalescent good.
" The temptation to take the thought of return merely as some- thing obvious, to take it therefore at bottom as either contemptible mumbling or fascinating chatter, is overcome.
By now the dialogue between the animals and Zarathustra is moving upon a ground that has been transformed by the conversation itself. The animals are now speaking to a Zarathustra who has come to grips with his illness and overcome his disgust with the little man by achiev- ing the insight that such adversity is necessary.
Now Zarathustra agrees with his animals. With their injunction to sing, the animals are telling him of that consolation he invented for himself during those seven days. Once again, however, he warns against turning the injunction to sing into a call for tunes on the same old lyre. What is being thought here? This, that the thought most difficult to bear, as the convalescent's conquering thought, must first of all be sung; that such singing, which is to say, the poetizing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, must itself become the convalescence; but also that such singing must be singular, that it dare not become a popular tune. Zarathustra therefore calls himself a poet as well as one who guesses riddles. Poet and riddler, but not in the sense that he is a poet and something else in addition, namely, one who solves riddles. Both these roles are thought in an original unity, thought therefore ultimately as some third thing. Hence poetry, if it is to fulfill its task, can never be a matter for barrel organs and ready-made lyres. The lyre, viewed now as an instrument for the new singing and saying, has still to be created. The animals know that-after all, they are his animals. In the words they utter they gradually come closer to Zarathustra, the more so as Zarathustra comes closer to himself and to his task: "First fashion for yourself a proper lyre, a new lyre! " "For your animals know well, 0
"The Convalescent" 59
Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, you arc the teacher o f the eternal return--that is now your destiny! "
yct if Zarathustra is the first to have to teach that teaching, must he not, as the teacher, know it ahead of time, prior to anyone else; and must he not know it differently than those who are merely learning it? Indeed, he must know that by virtue of the teaching itself, and in conformity with it, "the great destiny" is also to be his greatest danger and disease. Only when the teacher comprehends himself in terms of the teaching as inevitably a victim, as one who must go down because he goes over in transition, only when the one going under gives him- self his blessing as such a one, does he reach his end and goal. "Thus [that is, in this way] ends Zarathustra's downgoing," say the animals.
"Downgoing" here means two things: first, transition as departure; second, descent as acknowledgment of the abyss. This dual character- ization of downgoing must at the same time be grasped in its temporal- ity, in terms of"eternity," correctly understood. The downgoing itself, thought with a view to eternity, is the Moment; yet not as the fleeting "now," not as mere passing. Downgoing is indeed the briefest thing, hence the most transient, but is at the same time what is most accom- plished: in it the most luminous brightness of being as a whole scintil- lates, as the Moment in which the whole of recurrence becomes comprehensible. The apposite imagery here is the coiling serpent, the living ring. In the image of the serpent the connection between eterni- ty and the Moment is established for Nietzsche in its unity: the living ring of the serpent, that is to say, eternal recurrence, and-the Mo- ment. In one of his late sketches (WM, 577; from the year 1887) Nietzsche contrasts his concept of eternity with the extrinsic sense of that notion as the "eternally unchanging": "As opposed to the value of the eternally unchanging (note Spinoza's naivete, and Descartes' as well), the value of the briefest and most transient, the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the serpent vita. " In the end, Zarathustra hears which eternity it is that his animals are proclaiming to him, the eterni-
ty of the Moment that embraces everything in itself at once: the down- gomg.
When Zarathustra heard these words of his animals' "he lay still" and
60 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
communed with his soul. But the serpent and the eagle, finding him thus, so silent, honored the vast stillness about him and cautiously stole away.
In what way is Zarathustra now silent? He is silent inasmuch as he is communing with his soul alone, because he has found what defines him, has become the one who he is. He has also overcome outrage and repugnance by learning that the abyss belongs to the heights. To overcome outrage is not to put it out of action but to acknowledge its necessity. As long as outrage is merely repudiated in disgust, as long as our contempt is determined merely by nausea, that contempt remains dependent upon the contemptible. Only when contempt stems from love of the task, being transformed in such a way that, undergirded by an affirmation of the necessity of outrage, suffering, and destruction, it can pass by in silence; only when the silence of such loving passing-by previals; only then does the vast stillness extend and the sphere expand about the one who in this way has become himself. Only now that the vast stillness pervades Zarathustra's spirit has he found his loneliest loneliness, a solitude that has nothing more to do with a merely pe- ripheral existence. And the animals of his solitude honor the stillness, that is to say, they perfect the solitude in its proper essence in that now they too "cautiously steal away. " The eagle's pride and serpent's dis- cernment are now essential qualities of Zarathustra.
Zarathustra himself has become a hero, inasmuch as he has incor- porated the thought of eternal return in its full import as the weightiest of thoughts. Now he is a knower. He knows that the greatest and smallest cohere and recur, so that even the greatest teaching, the ring of rings, itself must become a ditty for barrel organs, the latter always accompanying its true proclamation. Now he is one who goes out to meet at the same time his supreme suffering and supreme hope. We have already heard Nietzsche's answer to the question, "What makes someone heroic? "(V, 204), that is, what is it that makes a hero a hero? The response: "Going out to meet one's supreme suffering and su- preme hope alike. " But thanks to the motto of our own lecture course we also know that "everything in the hero's sphere turns to tragedy. "
"Once I had created the overman, I draped the great veil of Becom- ing about him and let the midday sun stand over him" (XII, 362). The
"The Convalescent" 61
veil of Becoming is recurrence, as the truth concerning being as a whole, and the midday sun is the Moment of the shortest shadow and the most luminous brightness, the image of eternity. When "the great- est burden" is assimilated to Dasein, "Incipit tragoedia. " The two final sections of The Gay Science, which communicate the doctrine of re- turn for the first time, employ the two italicized phrases as their titles. The intrinsic connection between these two concluding sections becomes clear on the basis of that work which is designed to create poetically the figure who is to think the eternal return of the same.
With Zarathustra "the tragic age" commences (WM, 37). Tragic knowing realizes that "life itself," being as a whole, conditions "pain," "destruction," and all agony; and that none of these things constitutes an "objection to this life" (WM, 1052). The customary notion of "the tragic," even when it is more exalted than usual, sees in this realization nothing more than guilt and decline, cessation and despair. Nietz- sche's conception of the tragic and of tragedy is different; it is essential- ly more profound. The tragic in Nietzsche's sense counteracts "resignation" (WM, 1029), if we may say that the tragic still finds it necessary to be "counter" to anything. The tragic in Nietzsche's sense has nothing to do with sheer self-destructive pessimism, which casts a pall over all things; it has just as little to do with blind optimism, which is lost in the vertigo of its vacuous desires. The tragic in Nietzsche's sense falls outside this opposition, inasmuch as in its willing and in its knowing it adopts a stance toward being as a whole, and inasmuch as the basic law of being as a whole consists in struggle.
By means of our renewed reference to the connection between these two passages, passages that constitute the first communication of the thought of eternal return of the same, we have also clarified the inner relationship between the first communication (in The Gay Science) and the second (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra). We arrive at a juncture where we will have to reflect awhile on our procedure up to now. Such considerations will quite likely remain fruitless-unless several steps in the procedure have actually been executed by now.
We have presented two of Nietzsche's communications concerning his fundamental thought. Our interpretation of that thought has been
62 THE ETER! \:AL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
animated by several different points of view. In the first communica- tion it was a matter of referring to the tragic insight and the fundamen- tally tragic character of beings in general. In the second communi- cation it was above all the reference to the "Moment" that prevailed, that is to say, the kind of posture in which and on the basis of which the eternal recurrence of the same is to be thought, the way in which this thinking itself is to be. By means of both references the following has become clear: the matter into which we are here inquiring, being as a whole, can never be represented as some thing at hand concerning which someone might make this or that observation. To be transposed to being as a whole is to submit to certain inalienable conditions.
To elaborate such issues until they converge in the essential contexts - w e will of necessity do more and more of this as our presentation of Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal return proceeds. And we will do so in such a way that the sundry issues converge on a particular center. This
is what we must ponder if we are to prevent the presentation from being misunderstood as a pointless exhibition of Nietzsche's views and opinions. If we think forward unabatedly to further contexts, then we will begin to perceive the basic traits of what will later be recognized as Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position.
9. The Third Communication of the Doctrine of Return
People usually take Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra to be the very summit of his creative work. The writings that appeared after 1884 are taken as mere commentaries and reiterations, or as desperate attempts to realize in a direct fashion what Zarathustra merely intimated. We hear it said that after Zarathustra Nietzsche could not see his way further. Such a judgment may always safely be taken as a sign that not thinkers but their know-it-all interpreters cannot see their way further. With hopeless ineptitude the interpreters conceal their predicament behind an inflated pedantry. We leave aside the question as to whether after Zarathustra Nietzsche could not go farther or whether indeed he could-not because the question must remain undecided but because
it is not a question one poses with regard to a thinker. For to the extent that he perdures in his thinking and inquiring the thinker is always already "farther" than he himself knows or can know. In any case the designations "farther" and "not farther" are unsuited to the matter in question; they pertain to the realm of "science" and "technology," where progress is a prerequisite and where alone "farther" and "not farther" can be reckoned. In philosophy there is no "progress," hence no regress, either. Here, as in art, the only question is whether or not it is itself. We shall now merely register the fact that the third com- munication of the thought of eternal return of the same is found in Beyond Good and Evil. This book, which appeared two years after the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, also yields the motto we have chosen for our own lecture course. Beyond Good and Evil has as its subtitle "Prelude to A Philosophy of the Future. " Curious subtitle for
64 THE ETERJ\:AL RECURREJ\:CE OF THE SAME
a philosophy that is not supposed to know whether it can see its way further!
In order for us to understand the third communication too it is decisively important that we state where and in what context it stands. The passage belongs to the third major division of Beyond Good and Evil, embracing numbers 45 to 62, entitled "The Quintessence of Religion. " The state of affairs is growing ever more riddlesome, be- cause Zarathustra constantly calls himself the "god-less" in his speeches and with waxing vigor announces there that "God is dead. " At the very commencement of his wanderings Zarathustra encounters in the forest an old man, with whom he begins to converse. After- wards, however, "when Zarathustra was alone he spoke thus to his heart: 'Could such a thing be possible! This old saint in his forest has as yet heard nothing of this, that God is dead! ' "(Prologue, section 2, conclusion).
What should someone who, like Zarathustra, lives and judges on the basis of such knowledge-what should Nietzsche himself-have to adduce concerning "the quintessence of religion"? Whatever it is, we want to hear it right away, and without circumlocutions. In section 56 of the third major division, "The Quintessence of Religion," we hear the following:
Whoever as a result of some enigmatic craving has, as I have, long endeav- ored to think pessimism down to its depths and to redeem it from the half- Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which pessimism has most recently been presented in this century, namely, in the form of Scho- penhauerian philosophy; whoever has with an Asiatic and Hyperasiatic eye gazed into and down upon the most world-denying of all possible modes of thought-gazed beyond good and evil and no longer, like Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the spell and delusion of morality-; such a one has perhaps, without explicitly willing it, opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: to the ideal of the boldest, most vital, and most world-affirming human being who has not only made his peace and learned to get along with whatever was and is but who wills to have it again precisely as it was and is into all eternity, calling insatiably da capo not only to himself but to the entire play and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle but at bottom to Him who has need of precisely this spectacle-who makes it necessary because he
The Third Communication ofthe Doctrine 65 forever has need of himself-and makes himself necessary. -How's that?
Would this not be-circulus vitiosus deus? *
Although we cannot discuss the matter more closely here, it is im- portant to note that the entire passage is constructed as a single sen- tence, in such a way that its articulated divisions reflect linguistically the structure of an essential thought. Such passages enable us to imag- ine the sort of work that would have come into being had Nietzsche been able to complete his magnum opus. At first we are struck by the "content" of the section we have read. W e cannot believe our eyes and ears: "circulus vitiosus deus? " Circulus means the circle and the ring, hence eternal recurrence, indeed as vitiosus; vitium means defect, malady, something destructive; circulus vitiosus is the ring that also necessarily brings recurrently this vitium. Is it deus? Is it the god him- self, the one to whom Nietzsche at the end of his way still call~is it Dionysos? And in the sphere of this god-the world? The eternal re- turn of the same: the collective character of being as a whole?
The question raised in this same treatise (section 150) is: " . . . and everything in God's sphere turns to . . . to what? 'world' perhaps? " Are world and God thereby the same? Such a doctrine, interpreted as plain fare, is called "pantheism. " Is Nietzsche here teaching a pan-theism? What does the text say? ". . . Would this not be circulus vitiosus deus? " Here a question is posed. If it were pantheism, we would first of all still have to ask what pan-the universe, the whole-and what
theo~God-here mean. At all events, here we have a question! So,
• Circulus vitiosus deus: the adjective "vicious" here links "circle" and "god," forming a particularly rich speculative propostion-one that can and must be traversed forward and back via its gateway. If est is understood at the end, the proposition becomes "God is the vicious circle" and "The vicious circle is god. " Nietzsche may well be alluding to two aspects of the tradition: first, in medieval logic and rhetoric, circulus vitiosus is a "circular argument"; second, in the Latin of the Humanists, circulus vitiosus assumes its modern sense of an unbreakable chain of pernicious causes and effects. The latter, in German, is a Teufelskreis, "a devil's circle. " Nietzsche may therefore be linking-in his vicious circle beyond good and evil-diabolus and deus. The word deus is especially troublesome for the translator of German: because all nouns are capitalized in that language it is difficult to know whether Nietzsche and Heidegger in any given passage are referring to "God" or "the god. " Presumably, both thinkers are enjoying the ambigu- ity in which monotheism and pantheism, Christianity and Paganism, Dionysos and "the Crucified" exchange masks freely.
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then, God is not dead? Yes and no! Yes, he is dead. But which God? The God of "morality," the Christian God is dead-the "Father" in whom we seek sancturary, the "Personality" with whom we negotiate and bare our hearts, the "Judge" with whom we adjudicate, the "Paymaster" from whom we receive our virtues' reward, that God with whom we "do business. " Yet where is the mother who will take pay for loving her child? * The God who is viewed in terms of morality, this God alone is meant when Nietzsche says "God is dead. " He died because human beings murdered him. They murdered him when they reckoned his divine grandeur in terms of their petty needs for recompense, when they cut him down to their own size. That God fell from power because he was a "blunder" of human beings who negate themselves and negate life (VIII, 62). In one of the preliminary sketches for Zarathustra Nietzsche writes: "God suffocated from theology; and morals from morality" (XII, 329). Well, then, God and gods can die? In a preliminary study to The Birth of Tragedy sketched circa 1870, quite early in his career, Nietzsche notes: "I believe in the ancient Germanic dictum, 'All gods must die. ' "
Thus Nietzsche's atheism is something altogether his own. Nietz- sche must be liberated from the dubious society of those supercilious atheists who deny God when they fail to find him in their reagent glass, those who replace the renounced God with their "God" of "Progress. " We dare not confuse Nietzsche with such "god-less" ones, who cannot really even be "god-less" because they have never strug- gled to find a god, and never can. Yet if Nietzsche is no atheist in the usual sense, we dare not falsify him as a "sentimental," "romantic," halfway-Christian "God seeker. " We dare not turn the word and con- cept atheism into a term of thrust and counterthrust in Christianity's duel, as though whatever did not conform to the Christian God were ipso facto "at bottom" atheism. The Christian God can all the less be for Nietzsche the standard of godlessness if God himself, in the desig- nated sense, is "dead. " Zarathustra calls himself and knows himself to be the god-less one. As the god-less one he experiences the uttermost
• Heidegger's phrase echoes that of Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, "On the Virtuous": "You love your virtue, as a mother loves her child. Yet who ever heard of a mother wanting to be paid for her love? "
The Third Communication of the Doctrine 67
need, and thereby the innermost necessity, to create what is most needed. For that reason the one who is god-less in the way we have indicated confronts a question which we might formulate succinctly as follows: What would remain for human beings to create-how could they be human at all, that is to say, how could they become who they are-if gods were always available and merely at hand? If there were gods as simply as there are stones and trees and water? Is it not the case that the god must first of all be created? Do we not require supreme force to be able to create something out beyond ourselves? And prior to that, must not man himself, the last man, the contemptible man, be re-created to that end? Does not man require a burden so that he will not take his god too lightly?
The thought of thoughts derives from these considerations its defini- tion as the greatest burden. Thus is Zarathustra the god-less overcome! To be sure. But has Nietzsche thereby come "farther," or has he slipped back onto the path of Christianity, which laid its very founda- tions by claiming the sole existent God all for itself? No, neither farther ahead nor farther back. For Zarathustra begins by going under. Zara- thustra's commencement is his downgoing. Another essence for Zara- thustra Nietzsche never for a moment entertained. Only the lame, only those who have wearied of their Christianity, look to Nietzsche's statements for quick and easy confirmation of their own specious athe- ism. But the eternal recurrence of the same is the thought that is hardest to bear. Its thinker must be a hero in knowing and willing, one who dare not and cannot explain away the world and the creation of a world with some gratuitous formula. "Everything in the hero's sphere turns to tragedy. " Only in passage through tragedy does the question concerning the god arise, the god in whose sphere-and this too only
as a "perhaps"--everything turns to world.
The nineteen-year-old Nietzsche, as we have already heard, asks at
the end of his autobiographical portrait, "And where is the ring that ultimately encircles him [the human being]? Is it the world? Is it God? " What is now the reply to this early question? The reply is yet another question: "Circulus vitiosus deus? " Yet the ring has now been defined as the eternal return of the same; the circulus is simultaneously vitiosus, the terrifying; this terrifying ring surrounds beings, determines
68 THE ETERI"AL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
them as a whole, defines them as the world. The ring and its eternity can be grasped solely in terms of the Moment. Accordingly, the god who is sought in the experience of the ring of fright will remain a. matter of inquiry solely from within the Moment. Then, the god is only a question? Indeed, "only" a question; that is, he is the one who is asked for, the one who is called. It remains to be considered whether the god possesses more divinity in the question concerning him or in the situation where we are sure of him and are able, as it were, to brush him aside or fetch him forward, as our needs dictate. The god is "only" a question. How do matters stand with this "only"? It is not merely the god who is a question-eternal recurrence too, the circulus vitiosus itself, is also "only" a question.
All three communications of the thought of thoughts are questions that vary in configuration and in stage of development. Even if we are far from penetrating their context and content, even if we are but barely aware of these things, the fact that the communications share the interrogative form is compelling. To be sure, we can clarify the state of affairs at first only with the help of determinations that are more negative than positive. The communication is no "doctrine" and no "disquisition" in the sense of a theoretical scholarly or scientific presentation. It is not some bit of "lore" asseverated by a learned per- son. Nor is it a philosophical treatise of the sort we have inherited from Leibniz or Kant; just as little is it a philosophical and conceptual struc- ture modeled on those erected by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. If therefore Nietzsche's communication does not seem to conform either to the framework of a scientific doctrine or to familiar philosophical discussions as they had been conducted up to Nietzsche's time, or even to the form exhibited by a purely poetic configuration, only one possi- bility appears to remain: it can only be a "personal act of faith," per- haps no more than an "illusory figment of the imagination. " Or does the remaining possibility consist in our having to ask what this thought, in itself and on its own, is in terms of its configuration? In the face of Nietzsche's labors in thought there can no longer be any doubt about whether we are permitted to force the thought summarily into our customary and common rubrics, or whether, on the contrary, such
The Third Communication ofthe Doctrine 69
thinking must induce us to jettison our common notions, induce us to meditate.
Spoke Zarathustra we find the words:
"Thus I bid my pride always to accompany my discernment. And if my discernment should one day leave me-alas, she loves to fly off! -then let my pride fly with my folly! "
Thus began Zarathustra's downgoing.
A curious downgoing, which commences by exposing itself to the supreme possibilites of Becoming and Being. These cohere in the es- sence of will to power; that is to say, they are one.
What we set out to do here was to indicate briefly what the figures of Zarathustra's two animals, eagle and serpent, symbolize: first, in their circling and coiling-the circle and ring of eternal return; second, in their essential character as pride and discernment, respectively, these constituting the basic stance of the teacher of eternal return and his mode of knowledge; third, as the animals of his loneliness, being su- preme exactions on Zarathustra himself. Zarathustra's animals are all the more implacable inasmuch as we hear them-not expressing cer- tain propositions or rules or admonitions-but saying from out of their essential natures what is essential, and saying it with growing lucidity through the palpable presence of sensuous imagery. Sense-images speak only to those who possess the constructive energy to give them shape, so that they make sense. As soon as the poetic force-that is, the higher constructive energy-wanes, the emblems turn mute. They petrify, become sheer "facade" and "ornament. "
8. "The Convalescent"
The reference to Zarathustra's animals has left us not totally unpre- pared to grasp the episode that, along with "On the Vision and the Riddle," considered earlier, treats the eternal return in a more direct fashion. This episode, the fourth-to-last of Part III, entitled "The Con- valescent,'' remains in mysterious correspondence to that earlier one. In "The Convalescent" Zarathustra's animals speak to him about what they themselves symbolize: they speak of eternal return. They speak to Zarathustra, hovering about him, and remain present to his solitude until a particular moment when they leave him alone, cautiously steal- ing away. Their standing by him suggests that they are curious about him and are ever on the search for him; they want to know whether he is becoming the one he is, whether in his Becoming he finds his Being. But Zarathustra's Becoming commences with his downgoing. The downgoing itself comes to its end in Zarathustra's convalescence. Everything here is indicative of the most profound strife. Only when we grasp the various facets of the strife will we near the thought that is hardest to bear.
We shall place special emphasis on the characterization of the doc- trine of eternal return, as befits the preliminary elucidations we are now engaged in. Yet we must continue to keep to the style of the present work; we must grasp everything that happens, in the way that it happens, in terms of that work itself. We must also understand the teaching, as taught, in connection with the questions as to who Zara- thustra is, how the teacher of that teaching is, and in what way the teaching defines the teacher. That is to say, precisely where the teach- ing is most purely expressed in doctrines, the teacher, the one who teaches and speaks, dare not be forgotten.
50 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
How do matters stand with Zarathustra at the beginning of the sec- tion entitled "The Convalescent"? What is happening here? Zarathus- tra has returned once again to his cave, home from his sea voyage. One morning soon after his arrival he leaps from his bed and cries out like a madman, gesturing frantically, "as though someone were still lying in his bed and refused to get up. " Zarathustra rages in a frightful voice in order to wake this other and to make sure that he will remain awake in the future. This other is his most abysmal thought, which, although it lies with him, still remains a stranger to Zarathustra; the other is his own ultimate recess, which Zarathustra has not yet con- ducted to his supreme height and to the most fully wakeful of lives. The thought lies beside him in bed, has not yet become one with him, is not yet incorporated in him and hence is not yet something truly thought. So saying, we indicate what is now to happen: the full import and the whole might of the thought that is hardest to bear must now rise and reveal itself. Zarathustra roars at it, calls it a "sluggish worm. " We easily discern the meaning of the image: the sluggish worm, lying as a stranger on the floor, is the counterimage to the ringed serpent who "wrings" his way to the heights, soaring there in vast circles, vigilant in friendship. When the invocation of the most abysmal thought begins, Zarathustra's animals grow fearful; they do not flee in consternation, however, but come nearer, while all the other animals about them scatter. Eagle and serpent alone remain. It is a matter of bringing to the light of wakeful day, in purest solitude, what the ani- mals symbolize.
Zarathustra invokes his ultimate recesses and so conducts himself to himself. He becomes what he is and confesses himself to be the one who he is: "the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle. " Living, suffering, and circling are not three distinct matters. They belong together and form one: being as a whole, to which suffering, the abyss, belongs and which is inasmuch as, circling, it recurs. These three manifest their mutual affinity when they are gathered in the light of day, that is, when they are thought in their unity by Zarathustra's supreme "Yes. " In that supreme moment, when the thought is comprehended and is truly thought, Zarathustra cries, "Hail me! " Yet his "Hail me! " is at the same time a "Woe is me! "-for
"The Convalescent" 51
his is the victory that overcomes even itself as its greatest danger, the victory that grasps itself as downgoing.
Scarcely is it accomplished, when Zarathustra collapses. After he regains his senses he takes to his bed for seven days and seven nights. "But his animals did not abandon him, neither by day nor by night. " Even so, Zarathustra remains in his solitude. The eagle, the proudest animal, flies off alone to fetch all sorts of nourishment. That means to say that Zarathustra does not lose himself, that he continues to nourish his pride and to secure the certainty of his rank, even though he must lie prostrate, even though his discernment does not bother about him now, so that he cannot even tell himself what he knows. Among other things, the eagle brings him "yellow and red berries," and we recall the earlier reference to "deep yellow and fiery red" (cf. Part III, "On the Spirit of Gravity"). Taken together, these two colors conform to what Zarathustra wants to have in sight: the color of deepest falsehood, er- ror, and semblance, and the color of supreme passion, of incandescent creation.
When interpreting the two colors we have to keep in mind the fact that for will to power "error" constitutes the necessary essence of truth and that it is therefore not at all to be valued negatively. "Deep yellow" may also be interpreted as the gold of the "golden flash of the serpent vita" (WM, 577), which is "the serpent of eternity" (XII, 426). For the second interpretation "deep yellow" is the color of the eternal recur- rence of the same, "fiery red" the color of will to power. For the first interpretation the two colors display the essential structure of will to power itself, inasmuch as truth as that which fixates and art as creation constitute the conditions of the possibility of will to power. In both cases the mutual affinity of the two colors points toward the essential unity of the Being of beings as thought by Nietzsche.
But after seven days "the animals felt that the time had come to t:ilk with him. " Zarathustra is now strong enough actually to think and to express himself about his most difficult thought, his ultimate recess. For what the eagle and serpent (the loneliest loneliness) wish to talk about-the only thing they can talk about-is the thought of eternal return. In the dialogue between Zarathustra and his animals the thought of thoughts is now brought to language. It is not presented as
52 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
a "theory"; only in conversation does it prove itself. Fot here the speak- ers themselves must venture forth into what is spoken: conversation alone brings to light the extent to which the speakers can or cannot advance, and the extent to which their conversation is only empty talk.
The two animals open the conversation. They inform Zarathustra that the world outside is like a garden that awaits him. They sense somehow that a new insight has come to him, an insight concerning the world as a whole. It must therefore be a pleasure to proceed to this newly constituted world, since all things are bathed in the light of the new insight and want to be integrated into the new dispensation. Inso- far as they are so illuminated and integrated, things corroborate the insight in a profound way; they heal the one who up to now has been a seeker, they cure him of the disease of inquiry. That is what the animals mean when they say to Zarathustra, "All things yearn for you. . . . All things want to be doctors to you! " And Zarathustra? He listens to the animals' talk, indeed gladly, although he knows that they are only jabbering. But after such solitude the world is like a garden, even when it is invoked by mere empty talk, in the sheer play of words and phrases. He knows that a cheerful loveliness and gentle humor settle over the terrifying thing that being genuinely is; that being can conceal itself behind semblances in what is talked about. In truth, of course, the world is no garden, and for Zarathustra it dare not be one, especially if by "garden" we mean an enchanting haven for the flight from being. Nietzsche's conception of the world does not provide the thinker with a sedate residence in which he can putter about unper- turbed, like the philosopher of old, Epicurus, in his "garden. " The world is not a cosmos present at hand in itself. The animals' allusion to the garden has the sense of rejecting any sedate residence; at the same time, indirectly, it has the task of referring us to the concept of world in the tragic insight. Here we must ponder an important note by Nietzsche (XII, 368, from 1882-84):
Solitude for a time necessary, in order that the creature be totally permeated --cured and hard. New form of community, asserting itself in a warlike manner. Otherwise the spirit grows soft. No "gardens" and no sheer "eva- sion in the face of the masses. " War (but without gunpowder! ) between different thoughts! and their armies!
"The Convalescent" 53
The animals talk to Zarathustra about his new insight in seductive words that tempt him to sheer intoxication. Yet Zarathustra knows that in truth these words and tones are "rainbows and sham bridges con- necting what is eternally distinct. " Where things most reminiscent of other things are named in the conversation, when it sounds as though the same is being said, then and there comes the loveliest lie: "For the smallest gap is the hardest to bridge. "
What is Zarathustra thinking about? Nothing else than the sole mat- ter under discussion, the world, being as a whole. But what response did the dwarf give to this riddle? The dwarf said that the avenues of the gateway, running counter to one another, meet in the infinite; every- thing turns in a circle and is a circle. And what did Zarathustra call himself when he thought his most difficult thought out of his ultimate recess, a thought he did not take lightly, as the dwarf did? He called himself the "advocate of the circle. " Hence the two of them, the dwarf and Zarathustra, say the same thing. Between them lies only "the smallest gap": in each case it is an other who speaks the same words. Otherwise that same word, "circle," is but a sham bridge between things that are eternally distinct. Thus one man's circle is not another man's circle. What now comes to light is that whenever the Being of beings as a whole is to be uttered the semblance of unanimity is great- est and correct understanding-which is decisive and determinative of rank-most difficult.
It is easy for anyone and everyone to say, "A being is," and "A being becomes. " Everyone thinks that anybody can understand that. Mean- while, talking this way, "man dances above and beyond all things. " Man, drifting along as he usually does, oblivious to the true dimen- sions and proper stages of genuine thinking, needs that kind of dance, that kind of jabbering, and Zarathustra takes joy in it. Yet he also knows that it is an illusion, that this garden is not the world, that "the world is deep, and deeper than the day has thought" (Part III, "Before Sunrise").
Thus Zarathustra does not allow the animals' talk to seduce him away from what he has known now for seven days and nights. He can find nothing reassuring in the fact that everyone confidently asserts-as though it were evident-that "everything turns in a circle," thereby to
54 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
all appearances agreeing with him in their empty talk. But the animals reply, "To those who think as we do, all things themselves dance. " We do not dance above and beyond the things, they seem to say, but see the things' own dance and sway: you can trust us. And now they tell how the world looks under the new sun of eternal recurrence:
Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of Be- ing. Everything dies, everything blooms again; eternally runs the year of Being.
Everything sunders, everything is joined anew; eternally the identical House of Being is built. Everything departs, everything greets again; eternal- ly true to itself is the Ring of Being.
In every instant Being begins; around every Here the sphere of There rolls. The center is everywhere. Curved is the path of eternity.
Thus talk Zarathustra's animals. And why shouldn't they, they who are only insofar as they soar in vast circles and form rings? Could eternal return of the same be portrayed in more elegant words and more striking images than those employed here? How different this speech seems from the contemptuous grumblings of the dwarf! Never- theless, the speeches of the dwarf and the animals betray a fatal resem- blance. The dwarf says "All truth," that is to say, what is truly in being, in its passage and passing, "is curved. " The animals say, "Curved is the path of eternity. " Perhaps the animals' talk is only more effervescent, more buoyant and playful than-yet at bottom identical with-the talk of the dwarf, to whom Zarathustra objects that he makes things too easy for himself. Indeed, even the speech of his very own animals, who present his teaching to him in the fairest formulas, can- not deceive Zarathustra: " 'Oh, you rascally jesters and barrel organs,' answered Zarathusra, smiling again, 'how well you know what had to be fulfilled in seven days-' . " Yet their knowing is not knowledge. If Zarathustra calls it that he is only being ironic and is really suggesting that they know nothing. They are barrel organs: they turn his words concerning the eternal return of the same, words obtained only after the hardest struggle, into a mere ditty; they crank it out, knowing what is essential about it as little as the dwarf does. For the dwarf vanishes
"The Convalescent" 55
when things take a serious turn and all becomes foreboding, when the shepherd has to bite off the head of the black snake. The dwarf experi- ences nothing of the fact that really to know the ring of rings means precisely this: to overcome from the outset and perpetually what is dark and horrid in the teaching as it is expressed, namely, the fact that if everything recurs all decision and every effort and will to make things better is a matter of indifference; that if everything turns in a circle nothing is worth the trouble; so that the result of the teaching is disgust and ultimately the negation of life. In spite of their marvelous talk about the Ring of Being, Zarathustra's animals too seem to dance over and beyond what is essential. His animals too seem to want to treat the matter as men do. Like the dwarf they run away. Or they too act as mere spectators, telling what results if everything revolves. They perch before beings and "have a look at" their eternal displacement, then describe it in the most resplendent images. They are not aware of what is going on there, not aware of what must be thought in the true thinking of being as a whole, namely, that such thinking is a cry of distress, arising from a calamity.
And even if the anguished cry is heard, what is it that usually hap- pens? When the great man cries the little man hastens to the scene and takes pity. But everything that smacks of pity keeps to the periphery, stands on the sidelines. The little man's gregariousness accomplishes only one thing: his petty consolations diminish and falsify the suffer- ing, delay and obstruct the true insight. Pity has not an inkling of the extent to which suffering and outrage crawl down the throat and choke a man until he has to cry out, nor does it know the extent to which this is "necessary to attain the best" in man. Precisely the knowledge that chokes us is what must be known if being as a whole is to be thought.
This marks the essential and altogether unbridgeable difference be- tween the usual kinds of spectation and cognition, on the one hand, and proper knowing, on the other. And it suggests what the dwarf failed to see when he misinterpreted eternal recurrence and turned it into a mere ditty, into empty talk. It should be apparent by now that nothing is said here about the content of the doctrine beyond what is said in the animals' ditty, that Zarathustra does not contrapose any
56 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
other presentation to theirs, and that in the course of the conversation we are told always and only by indirection how the teaching is-Qr is not-to be understood. Nevertheless, the "how" does provide an essen- tial directive for our understanding of the "what. "
It is our job to pursue that directive more keenly and to ask: What is it that turns the doctrine into a ditty? The latter concedes that things do depart, die, and disintegrate; it also accepts everything destructive, negative, adverse, and outrageous. Yet at bottom these things are con- ceived of as eventually passing away in the world's circuitry, so that other things will come and everything shall take a turn for the better. Hence all is bound for perpetual compensation. Such compensation in fact makes everything indifferent: striving is flattened out into mere alternation. One now possesses a handy formula for the whole and abstains from all decision.
Looking back to the earlier episode, we may now ask: In what way does the dwarf make the interpretation of the imagery, that is, of the gateway and the two avenues, too easy for himself? Zarathustra indi- cates the answer when he goes on to command, "Look at the gateway itself-the Moment! " What does that directive mean? The dwarf merely looks at the two paths extending to infinity, and he thinks about them merely in the following way: If both paths run on to infinity ("eternity"), then that is where they meet; and since the circle closes by itself in infinity-far removed from me-all that recurs, in sheer alter- nation within this system of compensations, does so as a sequence, as a sort of parade passing through the gateway. The dwarf understands nothing of what Zarathustra means when he says-bewilderingly enough-that the two paths "affront one another" in the gateway. But how is that possible, when each thing moves along behind its predeces- sor, as is manifest with time itself? For in time the not-yet-now becomes the now, and forthwith becomes a no-longer-now, this as a perpetual and-so-on. The two avenues, future and past, do not collide at all, but pursue one another.
And yet a collision does occur here. To be sure, it occurs only to one who does not remain a spectator but who is himselfthe Moment, performing actions directed toward the future and at the same time accepting and affirming the past, by no means letting it drop. Whoever
"The Convalescent" 57
stands in the Moment is turned in two ways: for him past and future run up against one another. 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. * To see the Moment means to stand in it. But the dwarf keeps to the outside, perches on the periphery.
What does all this say about the right way to think the thought of eternal recurrence? It says something essential: That which is to come is precisely a matter for decision, since the ring is not closed in some remote infinity but possesses its unbroken closure in the Moment, as the center of the striving; what recurs-if it is to recur-is decided by the Moment and by the force with which the Moment can cope with whatever in it is repelled by such striving. That is what is peculiar to, and hardest to bear in, the doctrine of eternal return-to wit, that eternity is in the Moment, that the Moment is not the fleeting "now," not an instant of time whizzing by a spectator, but the collision of future and past. Here the Moment comes to itself. It determines how everything recurs. Now, the most difficult matter is the most tremen- dous matter to be grasped, and the tremendous remains a sealed door to little men. Yet the little men too are; as beings they too recur forever. They cannot be put out of action; they pertain to that side of things that is dark and repulsive. If being as a whole is to be thought, the little men too wait upon their "Yes. " That realization makes Zara- thustra shudder.
And now that his most abysmal thought has been thought in the direction of that abyss, Zarathustra's animals "do not let him talk any- more. " For when Zarathustra recognizes that the recurrence of the little man too is necessary; when he grapples with that "Yes" spoken to
• Indem er den Widerstreit des Aufgegebenen und Mitgegebenen entfaltet und aus- hiilt. Aufgegebenen could of course also have to do with surrender, but I am conjectur- ing that Heidegger here wants to juxtapose the task (cf. Aufgabe) that we project into and as the future to the endowment (cf. Mitgabe, Mitgift) of skills we bring to the task from our past. For here there often seems to be a disparity, a striving, and strife. Cf. the similar phrasing in Heidegger's Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1960), p. 89 (top), ably rendered by Albert Hofstadter in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 77 (middle). And see sections 24 and 26, below.
58 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE o~· THE SAME
everything that over the years wearied and sickened him, to everything he wanted to repulse; when he conquers his illness with that "Yes" and so becomes a convalescent; then his animals begin to speak again. Once more they repeat their message: the world is a garden. Again they call for Zarathustra to come out. But now they say more. They do not simply tell him to come out so that he can see and experience how all things are yearning for him. They call to him that he should learn from the songbirds how to sing: "For singing does a convalescent good.
" The temptation to take the thought of return merely as some- thing obvious, to take it therefore at bottom as either contemptible mumbling or fascinating chatter, is overcome.
By now the dialogue between the animals and Zarathustra is moving upon a ground that has been transformed by the conversation itself. The animals are now speaking to a Zarathustra who has come to grips with his illness and overcome his disgust with the little man by achiev- ing the insight that such adversity is necessary.
Now Zarathustra agrees with his animals. With their injunction to sing, the animals are telling him of that consolation he invented for himself during those seven days. Once again, however, he warns against turning the injunction to sing into a call for tunes on the same old lyre. What is being thought here? This, that the thought most difficult to bear, as the convalescent's conquering thought, must first of all be sung; that such singing, which is to say, the poetizing of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, must itself become the convalescence; but also that such singing must be singular, that it dare not become a popular tune. Zarathustra therefore calls himself a poet as well as one who guesses riddles. Poet and riddler, but not in the sense that he is a poet and something else in addition, namely, one who solves riddles. Both these roles are thought in an original unity, thought therefore ultimately as some third thing. Hence poetry, if it is to fulfill its task, can never be a matter for barrel organs and ready-made lyres. The lyre, viewed now as an instrument for the new singing and saying, has still to be created. The animals know that-after all, they are his animals. In the words they utter they gradually come closer to Zarathustra, the more so as Zarathustra comes closer to himself and to his task: "First fashion for yourself a proper lyre, a new lyre! " "For your animals know well, 0
"The Convalescent" 59
Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, you arc the teacher o f the eternal return--that is now your destiny! "
yct if Zarathustra is the first to have to teach that teaching, must he not, as the teacher, know it ahead of time, prior to anyone else; and must he not know it differently than those who are merely learning it? Indeed, he must know that by virtue of the teaching itself, and in conformity with it, "the great destiny" is also to be his greatest danger and disease. Only when the teacher comprehends himself in terms of the teaching as inevitably a victim, as one who must go down because he goes over in transition, only when the one going under gives him- self his blessing as such a one, does he reach his end and goal. "Thus [that is, in this way] ends Zarathustra's downgoing," say the animals.
"Downgoing" here means two things: first, transition as departure; second, descent as acknowledgment of the abyss. This dual character- ization of downgoing must at the same time be grasped in its temporal- ity, in terms of"eternity," correctly understood. The downgoing itself, thought with a view to eternity, is the Moment; yet not as the fleeting "now," not as mere passing. Downgoing is indeed the briefest thing, hence the most transient, but is at the same time what is most accom- plished: in it the most luminous brightness of being as a whole scintil- lates, as the Moment in which the whole of recurrence becomes comprehensible. The apposite imagery here is the coiling serpent, the living ring. In the image of the serpent the connection between eterni- ty and the Moment is established for Nietzsche in its unity: the living ring of the serpent, that is to say, eternal recurrence, and-the Mo- ment. In one of his late sketches (WM, 577; from the year 1887) Nietzsche contrasts his concept of eternity with the extrinsic sense of that notion as the "eternally unchanging": "As opposed to the value of the eternally unchanging (note Spinoza's naivete, and Descartes' as well), the value of the briefest and most transient, the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the serpent vita. " In the end, Zarathustra hears which eternity it is that his animals are proclaiming to him, the eterni-
ty of the Moment that embraces everything in itself at once: the down- gomg.
When Zarathustra heard these words of his animals' "he lay still" and
60 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
communed with his soul. But the serpent and the eagle, finding him thus, so silent, honored the vast stillness about him and cautiously stole away.
In what way is Zarathustra now silent? He is silent inasmuch as he is communing with his soul alone, because he has found what defines him, has become the one who he is. He has also overcome outrage and repugnance by learning that the abyss belongs to the heights. To overcome outrage is not to put it out of action but to acknowledge its necessity. As long as outrage is merely repudiated in disgust, as long as our contempt is determined merely by nausea, that contempt remains dependent upon the contemptible. Only when contempt stems from love of the task, being transformed in such a way that, undergirded by an affirmation of the necessity of outrage, suffering, and destruction, it can pass by in silence; only when the silence of such loving passing-by previals; only then does the vast stillness extend and the sphere expand about the one who in this way has become himself. Only now that the vast stillness pervades Zarathustra's spirit has he found his loneliest loneliness, a solitude that has nothing more to do with a merely pe- ripheral existence. And the animals of his solitude honor the stillness, that is to say, they perfect the solitude in its proper essence in that now they too "cautiously steal away. " The eagle's pride and serpent's dis- cernment are now essential qualities of Zarathustra.
Zarathustra himself has become a hero, inasmuch as he has incor- porated the thought of eternal return in its full import as the weightiest of thoughts. Now he is a knower. He knows that the greatest and smallest cohere and recur, so that even the greatest teaching, the ring of rings, itself must become a ditty for barrel organs, the latter always accompanying its true proclamation. Now he is one who goes out to meet at the same time his supreme suffering and supreme hope. We have already heard Nietzsche's answer to the question, "What makes someone heroic? "(V, 204), that is, what is it that makes a hero a hero? The response: "Going out to meet one's supreme suffering and su- preme hope alike. " But thanks to the motto of our own lecture course we also know that "everything in the hero's sphere turns to tragedy. "
"Once I had created the overman, I draped the great veil of Becom- ing about him and let the midday sun stand over him" (XII, 362). The
"The Convalescent" 61
veil of Becoming is recurrence, as the truth concerning being as a whole, and the midday sun is the Moment of the shortest shadow and the most luminous brightness, the image of eternity. When "the great- est burden" is assimilated to Dasein, "Incipit tragoedia. " The two final sections of The Gay Science, which communicate the doctrine of re- turn for the first time, employ the two italicized phrases as their titles. The intrinsic connection between these two concluding sections becomes clear on the basis of that work which is designed to create poetically the figure who is to think the eternal return of the same.
With Zarathustra "the tragic age" commences (WM, 37). Tragic knowing realizes that "life itself," being as a whole, conditions "pain," "destruction," and all agony; and that none of these things constitutes an "objection to this life" (WM, 1052). The customary notion of "the tragic," even when it is more exalted than usual, sees in this realization nothing more than guilt and decline, cessation and despair. Nietz- sche's conception of the tragic and of tragedy is different; it is essential- ly more profound. The tragic in Nietzsche's sense counteracts "resignation" (WM, 1029), if we may say that the tragic still finds it necessary to be "counter" to anything. The tragic in Nietzsche's sense has nothing to do with sheer self-destructive pessimism, which casts a pall over all things; it has just as little to do with blind optimism, which is lost in the vertigo of its vacuous desires. The tragic in Nietzsche's sense falls outside this opposition, inasmuch as in its willing and in its knowing it adopts a stance toward being as a whole, and inasmuch as the basic law of being as a whole consists in struggle.
By means of our renewed reference to the connection between these two passages, passages that constitute the first communication of the thought of eternal return of the same, we have also clarified the inner relationship between the first communication (in The Gay Science) and the second (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra). We arrive at a juncture where we will have to reflect awhile on our procedure up to now. Such considerations will quite likely remain fruitless-unless several steps in the procedure have actually been executed by now.
We have presented two of Nietzsche's communications concerning his fundamental thought. Our interpretation of that thought has been
62 THE ETER! \:AL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
animated by several different points of view. In the first communica- tion it was a matter of referring to the tragic insight and the fundamen- tally tragic character of beings in general. In the second communi- cation it was above all the reference to the "Moment" that prevailed, that is to say, the kind of posture in which and on the basis of which the eternal recurrence of the same is to be thought, the way in which this thinking itself is to be. By means of both references the following has become clear: the matter into which we are here inquiring, being as a whole, can never be represented as some thing at hand concerning which someone might make this or that observation. To be transposed to being as a whole is to submit to certain inalienable conditions.
To elaborate such issues until they converge in the essential contexts - w e will of necessity do more and more of this as our presentation of Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal return proceeds. And we will do so in such a way that the sundry issues converge on a particular center. This
is what we must ponder if we are to prevent the presentation from being misunderstood as a pointless exhibition of Nietzsche's views and opinions. If we think forward unabatedly to further contexts, then we will begin to perceive the basic traits of what will later be recognized as Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical position.
9. The Third Communication of the Doctrine of Return
People usually take Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra to be the very summit of his creative work. The writings that appeared after 1884 are taken as mere commentaries and reiterations, or as desperate attempts to realize in a direct fashion what Zarathustra merely intimated. We hear it said that after Zarathustra Nietzsche could not see his way further. Such a judgment may always safely be taken as a sign that not thinkers but their know-it-all interpreters cannot see their way further. With hopeless ineptitude the interpreters conceal their predicament behind an inflated pedantry. We leave aside the question as to whether after Zarathustra Nietzsche could not go farther or whether indeed he could-not because the question must remain undecided but because
it is not a question one poses with regard to a thinker. For to the extent that he perdures in his thinking and inquiring the thinker is always already "farther" than he himself knows or can know. In any case the designations "farther" and "not farther" are unsuited to the matter in question; they pertain to the realm of "science" and "technology," where progress is a prerequisite and where alone "farther" and "not farther" can be reckoned. In philosophy there is no "progress," hence no regress, either. Here, as in art, the only question is whether or not it is itself. We shall now merely register the fact that the third com- munication of the thought of eternal return of the same is found in Beyond Good and Evil. This book, which appeared two years after the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, also yields the motto we have chosen for our own lecture course. Beyond Good and Evil has as its subtitle "Prelude to A Philosophy of the Future. " Curious subtitle for
64 THE ETERJ\:AL RECURREJ\:CE OF THE SAME
a philosophy that is not supposed to know whether it can see its way further!
In order for us to understand the third communication too it is decisively important that we state where and in what context it stands. The passage belongs to the third major division of Beyond Good and Evil, embracing numbers 45 to 62, entitled "The Quintessence of Religion. " The state of affairs is growing ever more riddlesome, be- cause Zarathustra constantly calls himself the "god-less" in his speeches and with waxing vigor announces there that "God is dead. " At the very commencement of his wanderings Zarathustra encounters in the forest an old man, with whom he begins to converse. After- wards, however, "when Zarathustra was alone he spoke thus to his heart: 'Could such a thing be possible! This old saint in his forest has as yet heard nothing of this, that God is dead! ' "(Prologue, section 2, conclusion).
What should someone who, like Zarathustra, lives and judges on the basis of such knowledge-what should Nietzsche himself-have to adduce concerning "the quintessence of religion"? Whatever it is, we want to hear it right away, and without circumlocutions. In section 56 of the third major division, "The Quintessence of Religion," we hear the following:
Whoever as a result of some enigmatic craving has, as I have, long endeav- ored to think pessimism down to its depths and to redeem it from the half- Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which pessimism has most recently been presented in this century, namely, in the form of Scho- penhauerian philosophy; whoever has with an Asiatic and Hyperasiatic eye gazed into and down upon the most world-denying of all possible modes of thought-gazed beyond good and evil and no longer, like Buddha and Schopenhauer, under the spell and delusion of morality-; such a one has perhaps, without explicitly willing it, opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: to the ideal of the boldest, most vital, and most world-affirming human being who has not only made his peace and learned to get along with whatever was and is but who wills to have it again precisely as it was and is into all eternity, calling insatiably da capo not only to himself but to the entire play and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle but at bottom to Him who has need of precisely this spectacle-who makes it necessary because he
The Third Communication ofthe Doctrine 65 forever has need of himself-and makes himself necessary. -How's that?
Would this not be-circulus vitiosus deus? *
Although we cannot discuss the matter more closely here, it is im- portant to note that the entire passage is constructed as a single sen- tence, in such a way that its articulated divisions reflect linguistically the structure of an essential thought. Such passages enable us to imag- ine the sort of work that would have come into being had Nietzsche been able to complete his magnum opus. At first we are struck by the "content" of the section we have read. W e cannot believe our eyes and ears: "circulus vitiosus deus? " Circulus means the circle and the ring, hence eternal recurrence, indeed as vitiosus; vitium means defect, malady, something destructive; circulus vitiosus is the ring that also necessarily brings recurrently this vitium. Is it deus? Is it the god him- self, the one to whom Nietzsche at the end of his way still call~is it Dionysos? And in the sphere of this god-the world? The eternal re- turn of the same: the collective character of being as a whole?
The question raised in this same treatise (section 150) is: " . . . and everything in God's sphere turns to . . . to what? 'world' perhaps? " Are world and God thereby the same? Such a doctrine, interpreted as plain fare, is called "pantheism. " Is Nietzsche here teaching a pan-theism? What does the text say? ". . . Would this not be circulus vitiosus deus? " Here a question is posed. If it were pantheism, we would first of all still have to ask what pan-the universe, the whole-and what
theo~God-here mean. At all events, here we have a question! So,
• Circulus vitiosus deus: the adjective "vicious" here links "circle" and "god," forming a particularly rich speculative propostion-one that can and must be traversed forward and back via its gateway. If est is understood at the end, the proposition becomes "God is the vicious circle" and "The vicious circle is god. " Nietzsche may well be alluding to two aspects of the tradition: first, in medieval logic and rhetoric, circulus vitiosus is a "circular argument"; second, in the Latin of the Humanists, circulus vitiosus assumes its modern sense of an unbreakable chain of pernicious causes and effects. The latter, in German, is a Teufelskreis, "a devil's circle. " Nietzsche may therefore be linking-in his vicious circle beyond good and evil-diabolus and deus. The word deus is especially troublesome for the translator of German: because all nouns are capitalized in that language it is difficult to know whether Nietzsche and Heidegger in any given passage are referring to "God" or "the god. " Presumably, both thinkers are enjoying the ambigu- ity in which monotheism and pantheism, Christianity and Paganism, Dionysos and "the Crucified" exchange masks freely.
66 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
then, God is not dead? Yes and no! Yes, he is dead. But which God? The God of "morality," the Christian God is dead-the "Father" in whom we seek sancturary, the "Personality" with whom we negotiate and bare our hearts, the "Judge" with whom we adjudicate, the "Paymaster" from whom we receive our virtues' reward, that God with whom we "do business. " Yet where is the mother who will take pay for loving her child? * The God who is viewed in terms of morality, this God alone is meant when Nietzsche says "God is dead. " He died because human beings murdered him. They murdered him when they reckoned his divine grandeur in terms of their petty needs for recompense, when they cut him down to their own size. That God fell from power because he was a "blunder" of human beings who negate themselves and negate life (VIII, 62). In one of the preliminary sketches for Zarathustra Nietzsche writes: "God suffocated from theology; and morals from morality" (XII, 329). Well, then, God and gods can die? In a preliminary study to The Birth of Tragedy sketched circa 1870, quite early in his career, Nietzsche notes: "I believe in the ancient Germanic dictum, 'All gods must die. ' "
Thus Nietzsche's atheism is something altogether his own. Nietz- sche must be liberated from the dubious society of those supercilious atheists who deny God when they fail to find him in their reagent glass, those who replace the renounced God with their "God" of "Progress. " We dare not confuse Nietzsche with such "god-less" ones, who cannot really even be "god-less" because they have never strug- gled to find a god, and never can. Yet if Nietzsche is no atheist in the usual sense, we dare not falsify him as a "sentimental," "romantic," halfway-Christian "God seeker. " We dare not turn the word and con- cept atheism into a term of thrust and counterthrust in Christianity's duel, as though whatever did not conform to the Christian God were ipso facto "at bottom" atheism. The Christian God can all the less be for Nietzsche the standard of godlessness if God himself, in the desig- nated sense, is "dead. " Zarathustra calls himself and knows himself to be the god-less one. As the god-less one he experiences the uttermost
• Heidegger's phrase echoes that of Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, "On the Virtuous": "You love your virtue, as a mother loves her child. Yet who ever heard of a mother wanting to be paid for her love? "
The Third Communication of the Doctrine 67
need, and thereby the innermost necessity, to create what is most needed. For that reason the one who is god-less in the way we have indicated confronts a question which we might formulate succinctly as follows: What would remain for human beings to create-how could they be human at all, that is to say, how could they become who they are-if gods were always available and merely at hand? If there were gods as simply as there are stones and trees and water? Is it not the case that the god must first of all be created? Do we not require supreme force to be able to create something out beyond ourselves? And prior to that, must not man himself, the last man, the contemptible man, be re-created to that end? Does not man require a burden so that he will not take his god too lightly?
The thought of thoughts derives from these considerations its defini- tion as the greatest burden. Thus is Zarathustra the god-less overcome! To be sure. But has Nietzsche thereby come "farther," or has he slipped back onto the path of Christianity, which laid its very founda- tions by claiming the sole existent God all for itself? No, neither farther ahead nor farther back. For Zarathustra begins by going under. Zara- thustra's commencement is his downgoing. Another essence for Zara- thustra Nietzsche never for a moment entertained. Only the lame, only those who have wearied of their Christianity, look to Nietzsche's statements for quick and easy confirmation of their own specious athe- ism. But the eternal recurrence of the same is the thought that is hardest to bear. Its thinker must be a hero in knowing and willing, one who dare not and cannot explain away the world and the creation of a world with some gratuitous formula. "Everything in the hero's sphere turns to tragedy. " Only in passage through tragedy does the question concerning the god arise, the god in whose sphere-and this too only
as a "perhaps"--everything turns to world.
The nineteen-year-old Nietzsche, as we have already heard, asks at
the end of his autobiographical portrait, "And where is the ring that ultimately encircles him [the human being]? Is it the world? Is it God? " What is now the reply to this early question? The reply is yet another question: "Circulus vitiosus deus? " Yet the ring has now been defined as the eternal return of the same; the circulus is simultaneously vitiosus, the terrifying; this terrifying ring surrounds beings, determines
68 THE ETERI"AL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
them as a whole, defines them as the world. The ring and its eternity can be grasped solely in terms of the Moment. Accordingly, the god who is sought in the experience of the ring of fright will remain a. matter of inquiry solely from within the Moment. Then, the god is only a question? Indeed, "only" a question; that is, he is the one who is asked for, the one who is called. It remains to be considered whether the god possesses more divinity in the question concerning him or in the situation where we are sure of him and are able, as it were, to brush him aside or fetch him forward, as our needs dictate. The god is "only" a question. How do matters stand with this "only"? It is not merely the god who is a question-eternal recurrence too, the circulus vitiosus itself, is also "only" a question.
All three communications of the thought of thoughts are questions that vary in configuration and in stage of development. Even if we are far from penetrating their context and content, even if we are but barely aware of these things, the fact that the communications share the interrogative form is compelling. To be sure, we can clarify the state of affairs at first only with the help of determinations that are more negative than positive. The communication is no "doctrine" and no "disquisition" in the sense of a theoretical scholarly or scientific presentation. It is not some bit of "lore" asseverated by a learned per- son. Nor is it a philosophical treatise of the sort we have inherited from Leibniz or Kant; just as little is it a philosophical and conceptual struc- ture modeled on those erected by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. If therefore Nietzsche's communication does not seem to conform either to the framework of a scientific doctrine or to familiar philosophical discussions as they had been conducted up to Nietzsche's time, or even to the form exhibited by a purely poetic configuration, only one possi- bility appears to remain: it can only be a "personal act of faith," per- haps no more than an "illusory figment of the imagination. " Or does the remaining possibility consist in our having to ask what this thought, in itself and on its own, is in terms of its configuration? In the face of Nietzsche's labors in thought there can no longer be any doubt about whether we are permitted to force the thought summarily into our customary and common rubrics, or whether, on the contrary, such
The Third Communication ofthe Doctrine 69
thinking must induce us to jettison our common notions, induce us to meditate.
