Only in this way: as passing away it must not only
continuously
go, but must also always come.
Heidegger - Nietzsche - v1-2
We wrongly associate the word Sucht with suchen, "to seek" and "to be driven.
" But the old word Sucht (as in Gelbsucht, "jaundice," and
Schwindsucht, "consumption") means illness, suffering, pain. Longing is the agony of the nearness of what lies afar.
Whither the one in transition goes, there his longing is at home.
The one in transition, and even the one who points out the way to him, the teacher, is (as we have already heard) on the way home to the essence that is most proper to him. He is the convalescent. Immedi- ately following the episode called "The Convalescent," in the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is the episode entitled "On the Great Longing. " With this episode, the third-to-last of Part III, the work
218 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a whole attains its summit. In a note from the posthumously published materials (XIV, 285) Nietzsche observes, "A divine suffering is the content of Zarathustra III. "
In the section "On the Great Longing" Zarathustra speaks to his soul. According to Plato's teaching-a teaching that became definitive for Western metaphysics-the essence of thinking resides in the soul's solitary conversation with itself. The essence of thinking is logos, han aute pros hauten he psyche diexerchetai peri han an skopei, the telling self-gathering which the soul itself undergoes on its way to itself, with- in the scope of whatever it is looking at (Theaetetus, 189e; cf. The Sophist, 263e). "
In converse with his soul Zarathustra thinks his "most abysmal thought" ("The Convalescent," section one; cf. Part III, "On the Vi- sion and the Riddle," section 2). Zarathustra begins the episode "On the Great Longing" with the words: "0 my soul, I taught you to say 'Today' like 'One day' and 'Formerly,' I taught you to dance your round-dance beyond every Here and There and Yonder. " The three words "Today," "One day," and "Formerly" are capitalized and placed in quotation marks. They designate the fundamental features of time. The way Zarathustra expresses them points toward the matter Zara- thustra himself must henceforth tell himself in the very ground of his essence. And what is that? That "One day" and "Formerly," future and past, are like "Today. " And also that today is like what is past and what is to come. All three phases of time merge in a single identity, as the same in one single present, a perpetual "now. " Metaphysics calls the constant now "eternity. " Nietzsche too thinks the three phases of time in terms of eternity as the constant now. Yet for him the constan- cy consists not in stasis but in a recurrence of the same. When Zara-
• Schleiermacher translates the Theaetetus' definition of dianoia, "thinking," as fol- lows: "A speech which the soul goes through by itself concerning whatever it wants to investigate. " And Cornford translates it: "As a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering. " The passage from The Sophist reads as follows:
Oukoun dianoia men kai logos tauton. Plen ho men entos tes psyches pros hauten
dialogos aneu phones gignomenos tout'auto hemin epijnomasthe, dianoia?
Then, thought and speech are the same, except that the inner conversation of the soul with itself, which proceeds altogether without sound, is called thinking?
Theaetetus replies on behalf of Western intellectuality as a whole: "Certainly. "
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 219
thustra teaches his soui to say those words he is the teacher of eternal return of the same. Such return is the inexhaustible abundance of a life that is both joyous and agonizing. Such a life is the destination toward which "the great longing" leads the teacher of eternal return of the same. Thus in the same episode "the great longing" is also called "the longing of superabundance. "
The "great longing" thrives for the most part on that from which it draws its only consolation, that is to say, its confidence in the future. In place of the older word "consolation," Trost (related to trauen, "to trust," "to betroth," and to zutrauen, "to believe oneself capable"), the word "hope" has entered our language. "The great longing" attunes and defines Zarathustra, who in his "greatest hope" is inspired by such longing.
Yet what induces Zarathustra to such hope, and what entitles him to it?
What bridge must he take in order to go over to the overman? What bridge enables him to depart from humanity hitherto, so that he can be released from it?
It derives from the peculiar structure of the work Thus Spoke Zara- thustra, a work that is to make manifest the transition of the one who goes over, that the answer to the question we have just posed appears in the second part of the work, the preparatory part. Here, in the episode "On the Tarantulas," Nietzsche has Zarathustra say: "For that man be redeemed from revenge-that is for me the bridge to the high- est hope and a rainbow after long storms. "
How strange, how alien these words must seem to the customary view of Nietzsche's philosophy that we have furnished for ourselves. Is not Nietzsche supposed to be the one who goads our will to power, incites us to a politics of violence and war, and sets the "blond beast:' on his rampage?
The words "that man be redeemed from revenge" are even italicized in the text. Nietzsche's thought thinks in the direction of redemption from the spirit of revenge. His thinking would minister to a spirit which, as freedom from vengefulness, goes before all mere fraternizing -but also before all vestiges of the sheer will to punish. It would minister to a spirit that abides before all efforts to secure peace and
220 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
before all conduct of war, a spirit quite apart from that which wills to establish and secure pax, peace, by pacts. The space in which such freedom from revenge moves is equidistant from pacifism, political violence, and calculating neutrality. In the same way, it lies outside feeble neglect of things and avoidance of sacrifice, outside blind inter- vention and the will to action at any price.
Nietzsche's reputation as a "free spirit" arises from the spirit of free- dom from revenge.
"That man be redeemed from revenge. " If we pay heed even in the slightest way to this spirit of freedom in Nietzsche's thinking, as its principal trait, then the prior image of Nietzsche-which is still in circulation-will surely disintegrate.
"For that man be redeemed from revenge-that is for me the bridge to the highest hope," says Nietzsche. He thereby says at the same time, in a language that prepares yet conceals the way, whither his "great longing" aims.
Yet what does Nietzsche understand here by "revenge"? In what, according to Nietzsche, does redemption from revenge consist?
We shall be content if we can shed some light on these two ques- tions. Such light would perhaps enable us to descry the bridge that is to lead such thinking from prior humanity to the overman. The desti- nation toward which the one in transition is heading will only come to the fore in the transition itself. Perhaps then it will dawn on us why Zarathustra, the advocate of life, suffering, and the circle, is the teacher who simultaneously teaches the eternal return of the same and the overman.
But then why is it that something so decisive depends on redemption from revenge? Where is the spirit of revenge at home? Nietzsche re- plies to our question in the third-to-last episode of the second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which bears the heading "On Redemption. " Here the following words appear: "The spirit ofrevenge: my friends, up to now that was man's best reflection; and wherever there was suffer- ing, there also had to be punishment. "
This statement without reservation attributes revenge to the whole of humanity's reflection hitherto. The reflection spoken of here is not some fortuitous kind of thinking; it is rather that thinking in which
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 221
man's relation to what is, to being, is fastened and hangs suspended. Insofar as man comports himself toward beings, he represents them with regard to the fact that they are, with regard to what they are and how they are, how they might be and how they ought to be-in short, he represents beings with regard to their Being. Such representing is thinking.
According to Nietzsche's statement, such representation has hereto- fore been determined by the spirit of revenge. Meanwhile human be- ings take their relationship with what is, a relationship that is determined in this fashion, to be the best possible sort of relationship.
In whatever way man may represent beings as such, he does so with a view to Being. By means of this view he advances always beyond beings-out beyond them and over to Being. The Greeks said this in the word meta. Thus man's every relation to beings as such is inher- ently metaphysical. If Nietzsche understands revenge as the spirit that defines and sets the tone for man's relationship with Being, then he is from the outset thinking revenge metaphysically.
Here revenge is not merely a theme for morality, and redemption from revenge is not a task for moral education. Just as little are revenge and vengefulness objects of psychology. Nietzsche sees the essence and scope of revenge metaphysically. Yet what does revenge in general mean?
If at first we keep to the meaning of the word, although at the same time trying not to be myopic, we may be able to find a clue in it. Revenge, taking revenge, wreaking, urgere: these words mean to push, drive, herd, pursue, and persecute. In what sense is revenge persecution? * Revenge does not merely try to hunt something down, seize, and take possession of it. Nor does it only seek to slay what it persecutes. Vengeful persecution defies in advance that on which jt avenges itself. It defies its object by degrading it, in order to feel superior to what has been thus degraded; in this way it restores its own self-esteem, the only estimation that seems to count for it. For one who seeks vengeance is galled by the feeling that he has been thwarted and injured. During the years Nietzsche was composing his work Thus
• The clue may reside in the fact that the word here translated as "persecution," Nachstellen, is a morphological pendant to the word Vorstellen, "representation. "
222 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Spoke Zarathustra he jotted down the following observation: "I advise all martyrs to consider whether it wasn't vengeance that drove them to such extremes" (see the third Grossoktav edition, XII, 298).
What is revenge? We can now provisionally say that revenge is per- secution that defies and degrades. And such persecution is supposed to have sustained and permeated all prior reflection, all representation of beings? If the designated metaphysical scope may in fact be attributed to the spirit of revenge, that scope must somehow become visible in terms of the very constitution of metaphysics. In order to discern it, if only in rough outline, let us now turn to the essential coinage of the Being of beings in modern metaphysics. The essential coinage of Being comes to language in classic form in several sentences formulated by Schelling in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence ofHu-
man Freedom and the Objects Pertaining Thereto (1809). The three sentences read:
-In the final and highest instance there is no other Being than willing. Willing is primal Being, and to it [willing] alone all the predicates of the same (primal Being] apply: absence of conditions; eternity; independence from time; self-affirmation. All philosophy strives solely in order to find this supreme expression. *
Schelling asserts that the predicates which metaphysical thought since antiquity has attributed to Being find their ultimate, supreme, and thus consummate configuration in willing. However, the will of the willing meant here is not a faculty of the human soul. Here the word willing names the Being of beings as a whole. Such Being is will. That sounds foreign to us-and so it is, as long as the sustaining thoughts of Western metaphysics remain alien to us. They will remain alien as long as we do not think these thoughts, but merely go on reporting them. For example, one may ascertain Leibniz's utterances concerning the Being of beings with absolute historical precision- without in the least thinking about what he was thinking when he defined the Being of beings in terms of the monad, as the unity of perceptio and appetitus, representation and striving, that is, will. What
* Heidegger cites F. W. f. Schellings philosophische Schriften (Landshut, 1809), I, 419. In the standard edition of Schelling's Siimtliche Werke (1860), VII, 350.
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 223
Leibniz was thinking comes to language in Kant and Fichte as "the rational will"; Hegel and Schelling, each in his own way, reflect on this Vernunftwille. Schopenhauer is referring to the selfsame thing when he gives his major work the title The World [not man] as Will and Representation. Nietzsche is thinking the selfsame thing when he acknowledges the primal Being of beings as will to power.
That everywhere on all sides the Being of beings appears consistently as will does not derive from views on being which a few philosophers furnished for themselves. No amount of erudition will ever uncover what it means that Being appears as will. What it means can only be asked in thinking; as what is to be thought, it can only be celebrated as worth asking about; as something we are mindful of, it can only be kept in mind.
In modern metaphysics, there for the first time expressly and explic- itly, the Being of beings appears as will. Man is man insofar as he comports himself to beings by way of thought. In this way he is held in Being. Man's thinking must also correspond in its essence to that toward which it comports itself, to wit, the Being of beings as will.
Now, Nietzsche tells us that prior thinking has been determined by the spirit of revenge. Precisely how is Nietzsche thinking the essence of revenge, assuming that he is thinking it metaphysically?
In the second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the episode we have already mentioned, "On Redemption," Nietzsche has Zarathus- tra say: "This, yes, this alone is revenge itself: the will's ill will toward time and its 'It was. ' "
That an essential definition of revenge emphasizes revulsion and defiance, and thus points to revenge as ill will, corresponds to our characterization of it as a peculiar sort of persecution. Yet Nietzsche does not merely say that revenge is revulsion. The same could be said of hatred. Nietzsche says that revenge is the will's ill will. But will signifies the Being of beings as a whole, and not simply human will- ing. By virtue of the characterization of revenge as "the will's ill will," the defiant persecution of revenge persists primarily in relationship to the Being of beings. It becomes apparent that this is the case when we heed what it is on which revenge's ill will turns: revenge is "the will's ill will against time and its 'It was. ' "
224 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
When we read this essential definition ofrevenge for the first time- and also for a second and a third time-the emphatic application of revenge to time seems to us surprising, incomprehensible, ultimately gratuitous. It has to strike us this way, as long as we think no further about what the word time here means.
Nietzsche says that revenge is "the will's ill will toward time. . . . " This does not say, toward something temporal. Nor does it say, toward a particular characteristic of time. It simply says, "Ill will toward time. . . . "
To be sure, these words now follow: ". . . toward time and its 'It was. ' " But this suggests that revenge is ill will toward the "It was" of time. We may insist, quite rightly, that not only the "it was" but also the "it will be" and the "it is now" also pertain just as essentially to time. For time is defined not only by the past but also by future and present. If therefore Nietzsche stresses the "It was" of time, his char- acterization of the essence of revenge obviously refers, not to time as such, but to time in one particular respect. Yet how do matters stand with time "as such"? They stand in this way: time goes. And it goes by passing. Whatever of time is to come never comes to stay, but only to go. Where to? Into passing. When a man dies we say he has passed away. The temporal is held to be that which passes away.
Nietzsche defines revenge as "the will's ill will toward time and its 'It was. ' " The supplement to the definition does not mean to put into relief one isolated characteristic of time while stubbornly ignoring the other two; rather, it designates the fundamental trait of time in its proper and entire unfolding as time. With the conjunction and in the phrase "time and its 'It was,' " Nietzsche is not proceeding to append one special characteristic of time. Here the and means as much as "and that means. " Revenge is the will's ill will toward time and that means toward passing away, transiency. Transiency is that against which the will can take no further steps, that against which its willing constantly collides. Time and its "It was" is the obstacle that the will cannot budge. Time, as passing away, is repulsive; the will suffers on account of it. Suffering in this way, the will itself becomes chronically ill over such passing away; the illness then wills its own passing, and in
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 225
so doing wills that everything in the world be worthy of passing away. Ill will toward time degrades all that passes away. The earthly-Earth and all that pertains to her-is that which properly ought not to be and which ultimately does not really possess true Being. Plato himself called it me on, nonbeing. *
According to Schelling's statements, which simply express the guid- ing representations of all metaphysics, the prime predicates of Being are "independence from time," "eternity. "
Yet the most profound ill will toward time does not consist in the mere disparagement of the earthly. For Nietzsche the most deepseated revenge consists in that reflection which posits supratemporal ideality as absolute. Measured against it, the temporal must perforce degrade itself to nonbeing proper.
Yet how should humanity assume dominion over the earth, how can it take the earth as earth into its protection, so long as it degrades the earthly, so long as the spirit of revenge determines its reflection? If it is a matter of rescuing the earth as earth, then the spirit of revenge will have to vanish beforehand. Thus for Zarathustra redemption from revenge is the bridge to the highest hope.
But in what does redemption from ill will toward transiency consist? Does it consist in a liberation from the will in general-perhaps in the senses suggested by Schopenhauer and in Buddhism? Inasmuch as the Being of beings is will, according to the doctrine of modern meta- physics, redemption from the will would amount to redemption from Being, hence to a collapse into vacuous nothingness. For Nietzsche redemption from revenge is redemption from the repulsive, from defi- ance and degradation in the will, but by no means the dissolution of
• Heidegger's remarks recall the decisive words of Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, Part One (lines 1338-40): " . . . denn alles, was entsteht, I 1st wert, dass es zugrunile geht. " "For everything that comes to be is worthy of its own demise. " Yet because Heidegger here speaks of Vergehen, Vergiingliches, his phrasing has a diabolical way of embracing the concluding words of Part Two (the very words Nietzsche parodied in the first of his Songs o f the Outlaw Prince), words that try to reduce "all that passes away" to a mere image of eternity. Thus Mephisto and the chorus mysticus, the good and evil of metaphysics and morals, join voices to chant revenge, to denigrate time and its "It was. "
226 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
all willing. Redemption releases the ill will from its "no" and frees it for a "yes. " What does the "yes" affirm? Precisely what the ill will of a vengeful spirit renounced: time, transiency.
The "yes" to time is the will that transiency perdure, that it not be disparaged as nothing worth. Yet how can passing away perdure?
Only in this way: as passing away it must not only continuously go, but must also always come. Only in this way: passing away and transiency must recur in their coming as the same. And such recurrence itself is per- durant only if it is eternal. According to the doctrine of metaphysics, the predicate "eternity" belongs to the Being of beings.
Redemption from revenge is transition from ill will toward time to the will that represents being in the eternal recurrence of the same. Here the will becomes the advocate of the circle.
To put it another way: Only when the Being of beings represents itself to man as eternal recurrence of the same can man cross over the bridge and, redeemed from the spirit of revenge, be the one in transi- tion, the overman.
Zarathustra is the teacher who teaches the overman. But he teaches this doctrine only because he is the teacher of eternal recurrence of the same. This thought, eternal recurrence of the same, is first in rank. It is the "most abysmal" thought. For that reason the teacher comes out with it last, and always hesitantly.
Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? He is the teacher whose doctrine would liberate prior reflection from the spirit of revenge to the "yes" spoken to eternal recurrence of the same.
As the teacher of eternal recurrence, Zarathustra teaches the over- man. According to an unpublished note (XIV, 276), a refrain accom- panies the latter doctrine: "Refrain: 'Love alone will make it righf-{the creative love that forgets itself in its works). "
As the teacher of eternal recurrence and overman, Zarathustra does not teach two different things. What he teaches coheres in itself, since one demands the other as its response. Such correspondence-in the way it essentially unfolds and the way it withdraws-is precisely what the figure of Zarathustra conceals in itself, conceals yet at the same time displays, thus allowing the correspondence to provoke our thought.
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 227
Yet the teacher knows that what he is teaching remains a vision and a riddle. He perseveres in such reflective knowledge.
We today, because of the peculiar ascendancy of the modern sciences, are caught up in the strange misconception that knowledge can be attained from science and that thinking is subject to the juris- diction of science. Yet whatever unique thing a thinker is able to say can be neither proved nor refuted logically or empirically. Nor is it a matter of faith. We can only envisage it questioningly, thoughtfully. What we envisage thereby always appears as worthy of question.
To catch a glimpse of the vision and the riddle which the figure Zarathustra manifests, and to retain that glimpse, let us once again cast our eyes on the spectacle of Zarathustra's animals. They appear to him at the outset of his journeyings:
. . . He looked inquiringly into the sky-for above him he heard the piercing cry of a bird. And behold! An eagle soared through the air in vast circles, and a serpent hung suspended from him, not as his prey, but as though she were his friend: for she had coiled about his neck.
"These are my animals! " said Zarathustra, and his heart was filled with joy.
A passage we cited earlier-yet purposely only in part-from the first section of "The Convalescent" reads: "1, Zarathustra, the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle-1 summon you, my most abysmal thought! " In the second section of the episode "On the Vision and the Riddle," in Part III, Zarathustra describes the thought of eternal recurrence of the same in identical words. There, in his confrontation with the dwarf, Zarathustra tries for the first time to think that riddlesome thing which he sees as meriting his longing. The eternal recurrence of the same does remain a vision for Zarathustra; but it is also a riddle. It can be neither proved nor refuted logically or empirically. At bottom, this holds for every essential thought of every thinker: something envisaged, but a riddle-worthy of question.
Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? We can now reply in the following formula: Zarathustra is the teacher of eternal return of the same and the teacher of overman. But now we can see more clearly-perhaps also beyond our own formula-that Zarathustra is not a teacher who
228 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
instructs us concerning two sundry items. Zarathustra teaches the over- man because he is the teacher of eternal return of the same. Yet the reverse is also true: Zarathustra teaches eternal return of the same be- cause he is the teacher of overman. These doctrines are conjoined in a circle. In its circling, the teaching corresponds to that which is-to the circle which as eternal recurrence of the same makes out the Being of beings, that is, what is permanent in Becoming.
The teaching, and our thinking of it, will achieve such circling whenever they cross over the bridge called "Redemption from the Spirit of Revenge. " In this way prior thinking is to be overcome.
From the period immediately following the completion of the work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the year 1885, comes a note that has been taken up as number 617 in the book that was pieced together from Nietzsche's literary remains and published under the title The Will to Power. The note bears the underscored title "Recapitulation. "" Here Nietzsche with extraordinary perspicuity condenses the principal matter of his thinking into just a few sentences. A parenthetical remark appended to the text makes explicit mention of Zarathustra. Nietzsche's "Recapitulation" begins with the statement: "To stamp Becoming with the character of Being-that is the supreme will to power.
The supreme will to power, that is, what is most vital in all life, comes to pass when transiency is represented as perpetual Becoming in the eternal recurrence of the same, in this way being made stable and permanent. Such representing is a thinking which, as Nietzsche em- phatically notes, stamps the character of Being on beings. Such think- ing takes Becoming, to which perpetual collision and suffering belong, into its protection and custody.
Does such thinking overcome prior reflection, overcome the spirit of revenge? Or does there not lie concealed in this very stampin~which takes all Becoming into the protection of eternal recurrence of the same-a form of ill will against sheer transiency and thereby a highly spiritualized spirit of revenge?
We no sooner pose this question than the illusion arises that we are • See the explanatory note on pp. 201-02, above.
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 229
trying to discredit Nietzsche, to impute something as most proper to him which is precisely what he wants to overcome. It is as though we cherished the view that by such imputation we were refuting the thought of this thinker.
The officious will to refute never even approaches a thinker's path. Refutation belongs among those petty intellectual entertainments which the public needs for its amusement. Moreover, Nietzsche him- self long ago anticipated the answer to our question. The text that immediately precedes Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Nietzsche's corpus appeared in 1882 under the title The Gay Science. In its penultimate section (number 341), under the heading "The Greatest Burden," Nietzsche first delineated his "most abysmal thought. " Following it is the final section (342), which was adopted verbatim as the opening of the Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the posthumously pub- lished materials (XIV, 404 ff. ) we find sketches for a foreword to The Gay Science. There we read the following:
A spirit fortified by wars and victories, which has developed a need for conquest, adventure, hazard, pain; become accustomed to the crispness of the upper air, to long wintry walks, to ice and mountain crags in every sense; a kind of sublime malice and extreme exuberance of revenge-for there is revenge in it, revenge on life itself, when one who suffers greatly takes life
under his protection.
What is left for us to say, if not this: Zarathustra's doctrine does not bring redemption from revenge? We do say it. Yet we say it by no means as a misconceived refutation of Nietzsche's philosophy. We do not even utter it as an objection against Nietzsche's thinking. But we say it in order to turn our attention to the fact that-and the extent to which-Nietzsche's thought too is animated by the spirit of prior re- flection. Whether the spirit of prior thinking is at all captured in its definitive essence when it is interpreted as the spirit of revenge-this question we leave open. At all events, prior thinking is metaphysics, and Nietzsche's thinking presumably brings it to fulfillment.
Thus something in Nietzsche's thinking comes to the fore which this thinking itself was no longer able to think. Such remaining behind what it has thought designates the creativity of a thinking. And where
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a thinking brings metaphysics to completion it points in an exceptional way to things unthought, cogently and confusedly at once. Yet where are the eyes to see this?
Metaphysical thinking rests on the distinction between what truly is and what, measured against this, constitutes all that is not truly in being. However, what is decisive for the essence of metaphysics is by no means the fact that the designated distinction is formulated as the opposition of the suprasensuous to the sensuous realm, but the fact that this distinction-in the sense of a yawning gulf between the realms -remains primary and all-sustaining. The distinction persists even when the Platonic hierarchy of suprasensuous and sensuous is inverted and the sensuous realm is experienced more essentially and more thoroughly-in the direction Nietzsche indicates with the name Dionysos. For the superabundance for which Zarathustra's "great long- ing" yearns is the inexhaustible permanence of Becoming, which the will to power in the eternal recurrence of the same wills itself to be.
Nietzsche brought what is essentially metaphysical in his thinking to the extremity of ill will in the final lines of his final book, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. Nietzsche composed the text in October of 1888. It was first published in a limited edition twenty years later; in 1911 it was taken up into the fifteenth volume of the Grossok- tav edition. The final lines of Ecce Homo read: "Have I been under- stood? -Dionysos versus the Crucified. . . . "
Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? He is the advocate of Dionysos. That means that Zarathustra is the teacher who in and for his doctrine of overman teaches the eternal return of the same.
Does the preceding statement provide the answer to our query? No. Nor does it provide the answer after we have pursued all the references that might elucidate the statement, hoping in that way to follow Zara- thustra-if only in that first step across the bridge. The statement, which looks like an answer, nonetheless wants us to take note, wants to make us more alert, as it conducts us back to the question that serves as our title.
Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? The question now asks who this teacher is. Who is this figure which, at the stage of metaphysics' com- pletion, appears within metaphysics? Nowhere else in the history of
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 231
Western metaphysics has the essential figure been expressly created in this way for its respective thinker-or, to put it more appropriately and literally, nowhere else has that figure been so tellingly thought. No- where else-unless at the beginning of Western thought, in Par- menides, though there only in veiled outlines.
Essential to the figure of Zarathustra remains the fact that the teacher teaches something twofold which coheres in itself: eternal re- turn and overman. Zarathustra is himself in a certain way this coher- ence. That said, he too remains a riddle, one we have scarcely envisaged.
"Eternal return of the same" is the name for the Being of beings. "Overman" is the name for the human essence that corresponds to such Being.
On what basis do Being and the essence of human being belong together? How do they cohere, if Being is no fabrication of human beings and humanity no mere special case among beings?
Can the coherence of Being and the essence of human being be discussed at all, as long as our thinking remains mired in the previous conception of man? According to it, man is animal rationale, the ra- tional animal. Is it a coincidence, or a bit of lyrical ornamentation, that the two animals, eagle and serpent, accompany Zarathustra; that they tell him who he must become, in order to be the one he is? In the figure of the two animals the union of pride and discernment is to come to the fore for those who think. Yet we have to know what Nietzsche thinks concerning these two traits. Among the notes sketched during the period when Thus Spoke Zarathustra was com- posed we read: "It seems to me that modesty and pride belong to one another quite closely. . . . What they have in common is the cool, unflinching look of appraisal" (XIV, 99). And elsewhere in these notes (101):
People talk so stupidly about pride-and Christianity even tried to make us feel sinful about it! The point is that whoever demands great things ofhim- self, and achieves those things, must feel quite remote from those who do not. Such distance will be interpreted by these others as a "putting on airs"; but he knows it [distance] only as continuous toil, war, victory, by day and by night. The others have no inkling of all this!
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The eagle: the proudest animal; the serpent: the most discerning animal. And both conjoined in the circle in which they hover, in the ring that embraces their essence; and circle and ring once again inter- fused.
The riddle of who Zarathustra is, as teacher of eternal return and overman, is envisaged by us in the spectacle of the two animals. In this spectacle we can grasp more directly and more readily what our presen- tation tried to exhibit as the matter most worthy of question, namely, the relati. on of Being to that living being, man.
And behold! An eagle soared through the air in vast circles, and a serpent hung suspended from him, not as his prey, but as though she were his friend: for she had coiled about his neck.
"These are my animals! " said Zarathustra, and his heart was filled with joy.
*** A NOTE ON THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Nietzsche himself knew that his "most abysmal thought" remains a riddle. All the less reason for us to imagine that we can solve the riddle. The obscurity of this last thought of Western metaphysics dare not tempt us to circumvent it by some sort of subterfuge.
At bottom there are only two such routes of escape.
Either one avers that this thought of Nietzsche's is a kind of "mysti- cism" that our thinking should not bother to confront.
Or one avers that this thought is as old as the hills, that it boils down to the long-familiar cyclical notion of cosmic occurrence. Which no- tion can be found for the first time in Western philosophy in Hera- clitus.
This second piece of information, like all information of that sort, tells us absolutely nothing. What good is it if someone determines with respect to a particular thought that it can be found, for example, "al- ready" in Leibniz or even "already" in Plato? What good are such references when they leave what Leibniz and Plato were thinking in the same obscurity as the thought they claim to be clarifying with the help of these historical allusions?
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 233
As for the first subterfuge, according to which Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence of the same is a mystic phantasmagoria, a look at the present age might well teach us a different lesson-presupposing of course that thinking is called upon to bring to light the essence of modern technology.
What else is the essence of the modern power-driven machine than one offshoot of the eternal recurrence of the same? But the essence of such machines is neither something machine-like nor anything me- chanical. Just as little can Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence of the same be interpreted in a mechanical sense.
That Nietzsche interpreted and experienced his most abysmal thought in terms of the Dionysian only speaks for the fact that he still thought it metaphysically, and had to think it solely in this way. Yet it says nothing against the fact that this most abysmal thought conceals something unthought, something which at the same time remains a sealed door to metaphysical thinking.
(See the lecture course "What Calls for Thinking? " taught during the winter semester of 1951-52 and published in book form by Max Niemeyer, Tiibingen, in 1954. *)
*Translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray as What Is Called Thinking? in 1968 for the Harper & Row Heidegger Series.
ANALYSIS AND GLOSSARY
Analysis
By DAVID FARRELL KRELL
Heidegger is so insistent about our heeding the kinds of music eternal recurrence makes-whether it is a thought plucked on skillfully fash- ioned lyres or cranked out of barrel organs-that we may be justified in listening now to a brief selection of its orchestrations. I shall pass over in silence a large number of the thought's earlier echoes, such as those pious ones we find in Goethe, and cite a few of the more daring anticipations and recapitulations of Nietzsche's most thoughtful bur- den.
Early in 1902, seven years before the first English translation of Also sprach Zarathustra appeared and six years before H. L. Mencken be- gan to exalt Nietzsche to the English-speaking world, a young Ameri- can novelist on the threshold of a lifelong conversion to socialism sported briefly yet passionately the banner of overman:
I sat in silence. "Do I gather from your words," I asked, "that immortality is not one of the privileges of this race? "
He smiled again. "The spiritual life," he said, "does not begin until the thought of immortality is flung away. . . . "
"This people," I asked-"what do they know about God? "
"They know no more than men do," was the answer, "except that they know they know nothing. They know that the veil is not lifted. It is not tha~ for which they seek-life is their task, and life only; to behold its endless fruition; to dwell in the beauty of it, to wield power of it; to toil at its whirling loom, to build up palaces of music from it. . . . "
UPTON SINCLAIR, The Overman
Yet Upton Sinclair was not the first American writer to respond to the raptures of Nietzschean thought. Another managed it when Nietz-
238 THE ETERI\'AL RECURREI\'CE OF THE SAME
sche himself was only six years old. Herman Melville places poor Queequeg in his coffin, then observes:
How he wasted and wasted away in those few long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weak- ened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick, chapter CX
Queequeg survives the illness, of course, and uses his coffin as a sea-chest. After the catastrophe Ishmael will use it as a writing table. Ishmael's account will unite the two principal sources of Zarathustran imagery-mountain summits and the sea-the heights and depths visited by Zarathustra's eagle:
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
Moby-Dick, chapter XCVI
A more recent attestation to the thought of eternal recurrence in- volves the demise and return of a "distinguished phenomenologist," and hence expresses the more scientific side of Nietzsche's fundamen- tal thought:
Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?
Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his come- tary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly
Analysis 239
he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an es- tranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or of the silver king.
What would render such return irrational?
An unsatisfactory equation between an exodus and return in time through reversible space and an exodus and return in space through irreversible time.
JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses, "Ithaca"
Finally, the following poem by Rainer Maria Rilke expresses the more playful side of the thought that is hardest to bear, indeed as though spinning to a hurdy-gurdy tune:
The Carrousel
Jardin du Luxembourg
With a roof and the roof's vast shadow turns awhile the whole assembly
of pinto ponies fresh from the country which, long delaying, finally goes down.
Schwindsucht, "consumption") means illness, suffering, pain. Longing is the agony of the nearness of what lies afar.
Whither the one in transition goes, there his longing is at home.
The one in transition, and even the one who points out the way to him, the teacher, is (as we have already heard) on the way home to the essence that is most proper to him. He is the convalescent. Immedi- ately following the episode called "The Convalescent," in the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is the episode entitled "On the Great Longing. " With this episode, the third-to-last of Part III, the work
218 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a whole attains its summit. In a note from the posthumously published materials (XIV, 285) Nietzsche observes, "A divine suffering is the content of Zarathustra III. "
In the section "On the Great Longing" Zarathustra speaks to his soul. According to Plato's teaching-a teaching that became definitive for Western metaphysics-the essence of thinking resides in the soul's solitary conversation with itself. The essence of thinking is logos, han aute pros hauten he psyche diexerchetai peri han an skopei, the telling self-gathering which the soul itself undergoes on its way to itself, with- in the scope of whatever it is looking at (Theaetetus, 189e; cf. The Sophist, 263e). "
In converse with his soul Zarathustra thinks his "most abysmal thought" ("The Convalescent," section one; cf. Part III, "On the Vi- sion and the Riddle," section 2). Zarathustra begins the episode "On the Great Longing" with the words: "0 my soul, I taught you to say 'Today' like 'One day' and 'Formerly,' I taught you to dance your round-dance beyond every Here and There and Yonder. " The three words "Today," "One day," and "Formerly" are capitalized and placed in quotation marks. They designate the fundamental features of time. The way Zarathustra expresses them points toward the matter Zara- thustra himself must henceforth tell himself in the very ground of his essence. And what is that? That "One day" and "Formerly," future and past, are like "Today. " And also that today is like what is past and what is to come. All three phases of time merge in a single identity, as the same in one single present, a perpetual "now. " Metaphysics calls the constant now "eternity. " Nietzsche too thinks the three phases of time in terms of eternity as the constant now. Yet for him the constan- cy consists not in stasis but in a recurrence of the same. When Zara-
• Schleiermacher translates the Theaetetus' definition of dianoia, "thinking," as fol- lows: "A speech which the soul goes through by itself concerning whatever it wants to investigate. " And Cornford translates it: "As a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering. " The passage from The Sophist reads as follows:
Oukoun dianoia men kai logos tauton. Plen ho men entos tes psyches pros hauten
dialogos aneu phones gignomenos tout'auto hemin epijnomasthe, dianoia?
Then, thought and speech are the same, except that the inner conversation of the soul with itself, which proceeds altogether without sound, is called thinking?
Theaetetus replies on behalf of Western intellectuality as a whole: "Certainly. "
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 219
thustra teaches his soui to say those words he is the teacher of eternal return of the same. Such return is the inexhaustible abundance of a life that is both joyous and agonizing. Such a life is the destination toward which "the great longing" leads the teacher of eternal return of the same. Thus in the same episode "the great longing" is also called "the longing of superabundance. "
The "great longing" thrives for the most part on that from which it draws its only consolation, that is to say, its confidence in the future. In place of the older word "consolation," Trost (related to trauen, "to trust," "to betroth," and to zutrauen, "to believe oneself capable"), the word "hope" has entered our language. "The great longing" attunes and defines Zarathustra, who in his "greatest hope" is inspired by such longing.
Yet what induces Zarathustra to such hope, and what entitles him to it?
What bridge must he take in order to go over to the overman? What bridge enables him to depart from humanity hitherto, so that he can be released from it?
It derives from the peculiar structure of the work Thus Spoke Zara- thustra, a work that is to make manifest the transition of the one who goes over, that the answer to the question we have just posed appears in the second part of the work, the preparatory part. Here, in the episode "On the Tarantulas," Nietzsche has Zarathustra say: "For that man be redeemed from revenge-that is for me the bridge to the high- est hope and a rainbow after long storms. "
How strange, how alien these words must seem to the customary view of Nietzsche's philosophy that we have furnished for ourselves. Is not Nietzsche supposed to be the one who goads our will to power, incites us to a politics of violence and war, and sets the "blond beast:' on his rampage?
The words "that man be redeemed from revenge" are even italicized in the text. Nietzsche's thought thinks in the direction of redemption from the spirit of revenge. His thinking would minister to a spirit which, as freedom from vengefulness, goes before all mere fraternizing -but also before all vestiges of the sheer will to punish. It would minister to a spirit that abides before all efforts to secure peace and
220 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
before all conduct of war, a spirit quite apart from that which wills to establish and secure pax, peace, by pacts. The space in which such freedom from revenge moves is equidistant from pacifism, political violence, and calculating neutrality. In the same way, it lies outside feeble neglect of things and avoidance of sacrifice, outside blind inter- vention and the will to action at any price.
Nietzsche's reputation as a "free spirit" arises from the spirit of free- dom from revenge.
"That man be redeemed from revenge. " If we pay heed even in the slightest way to this spirit of freedom in Nietzsche's thinking, as its principal trait, then the prior image of Nietzsche-which is still in circulation-will surely disintegrate.
"For that man be redeemed from revenge-that is for me the bridge to the highest hope," says Nietzsche. He thereby says at the same time, in a language that prepares yet conceals the way, whither his "great longing" aims.
Yet what does Nietzsche understand here by "revenge"? In what, according to Nietzsche, does redemption from revenge consist?
We shall be content if we can shed some light on these two ques- tions. Such light would perhaps enable us to descry the bridge that is to lead such thinking from prior humanity to the overman. The desti- nation toward which the one in transition is heading will only come to the fore in the transition itself. Perhaps then it will dawn on us why Zarathustra, the advocate of life, suffering, and the circle, is the teacher who simultaneously teaches the eternal return of the same and the overman.
But then why is it that something so decisive depends on redemption from revenge? Where is the spirit of revenge at home? Nietzsche re- plies to our question in the third-to-last episode of the second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which bears the heading "On Redemption. " Here the following words appear: "The spirit ofrevenge: my friends, up to now that was man's best reflection; and wherever there was suffer- ing, there also had to be punishment. "
This statement without reservation attributes revenge to the whole of humanity's reflection hitherto. The reflection spoken of here is not some fortuitous kind of thinking; it is rather that thinking in which
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 221
man's relation to what is, to being, is fastened and hangs suspended. Insofar as man comports himself toward beings, he represents them with regard to the fact that they are, with regard to what they are and how they are, how they might be and how they ought to be-in short, he represents beings with regard to their Being. Such representing is thinking.
According to Nietzsche's statement, such representation has hereto- fore been determined by the spirit of revenge. Meanwhile human be- ings take their relationship with what is, a relationship that is determined in this fashion, to be the best possible sort of relationship.
In whatever way man may represent beings as such, he does so with a view to Being. By means of this view he advances always beyond beings-out beyond them and over to Being. The Greeks said this in the word meta. Thus man's every relation to beings as such is inher- ently metaphysical. If Nietzsche understands revenge as the spirit that defines and sets the tone for man's relationship with Being, then he is from the outset thinking revenge metaphysically.
Here revenge is not merely a theme for morality, and redemption from revenge is not a task for moral education. Just as little are revenge and vengefulness objects of psychology. Nietzsche sees the essence and scope of revenge metaphysically. Yet what does revenge in general mean?
If at first we keep to the meaning of the word, although at the same time trying not to be myopic, we may be able to find a clue in it. Revenge, taking revenge, wreaking, urgere: these words mean to push, drive, herd, pursue, and persecute. In what sense is revenge persecution? * Revenge does not merely try to hunt something down, seize, and take possession of it. Nor does it only seek to slay what it persecutes. Vengeful persecution defies in advance that on which jt avenges itself. It defies its object by degrading it, in order to feel superior to what has been thus degraded; in this way it restores its own self-esteem, the only estimation that seems to count for it. For one who seeks vengeance is galled by the feeling that he has been thwarted and injured. During the years Nietzsche was composing his work Thus
• The clue may reside in the fact that the word here translated as "persecution," Nachstellen, is a morphological pendant to the word Vorstellen, "representation. "
222 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Spoke Zarathustra he jotted down the following observation: "I advise all martyrs to consider whether it wasn't vengeance that drove them to such extremes" (see the third Grossoktav edition, XII, 298).
What is revenge? We can now provisionally say that revenge is per- secution that defies and degrades. And such persecution is supposed to have sustained and permeated all prior reflection, all representation of beings? If the designated metaphysical scope may in fact be attributed to the spirit of revenge, that scope must somehow become visible in terms of the very constitution of metaphysics. In order to discern it, if only in rough outline, let us now turn to the essential coinage of the Being of beings in modern metaphysics. The essential coinage of Being comes to language in classic form in several sentences formulated by Schelling in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence ofHu-
man Freedom and the Objects Pertaining Thereto (1809). The three sentences read:
-In the final and highest instance there is no other Being than willing. Willing is primal Being, and to it [willing] alone all the predicates of the same (primal Being] apply: absence of conditions; eternity; independence from time; self-affirmation. All philosophy strives solely in order to find this supreme expression. *
Schelling asserts that the predicates which metaphysical thought since antiquity has attributed to Being find their ultimate, supreme, and thus consummate configuration in willing. However, the will of the willing meant here is not a faculty of the human soul. Here the word willing names the Being of beings as a whole. Such Being is will. That sounds foreign to us-and so it is, as long as the sustaining thoughts of Western metaphysics remain alien to us. They will remain alien as long as we do not think these thoughts, but merely go on reporting them. For example, one may ascertain Leibniz's utterances concerning the Being of beings with absolute historical precision- without in the least thinking about what he was thinking when he defined the Being of beings in terms of the monad, as the unity of perceptio and appetitus, representation and striving, that is, will. What
* Heidegger cites F. W. f. Schellings philosophische Schriften (Landshut, 1809), I, 419. In the standard edition of Schelling's Siimtliche Werke (1860), VII, 350.
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 223
Leibniz was thinking comes to language in Kant and Fichte as "the rational will"; Hegel and Schelling, each in his own way, reflect on this Vernunftwille. Schopenhauer is referring to the selfsame thing when he gives his major work the title The World [not man] as Will and Representation. Nietzsche is thinking the selfsame thing when he acknowledges the primal Being of beings as will to power.
That everywhere on all sides the Being of beings appears consistently as will does not derive from views on being which a few philosophers furnished for themselves. No amount of erudition will ever uncover what it means that Being appears as will. What it means can only be asked in thinking; as what is to be thought, it can only be celebrated as worth asking about; as something we are mindful of, it can only be kept in mind.
In modern metaphysics, there for the first time expressly and explic- itly, the Being of beings appears as will. Man is man insofar as he comports himself to beings by way of thought. In this way he is held in Being. Man's thinking must also correspond in its essence to that toward which it comports itself, to wit, the Being of beings as will.
Now, Nietzsche tells us that prior thinking has been determined by the spirit of revenge. Precisely how is Nietzsche thinking the essence of revenge, assuming that he is thinking it metaphysically?
In the second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the episode we have already mentioned, "On Redemption," Nietzsche has Zarathus- tra say: "This, yes, this alone is revenge itself: the will's ill will toward time and its 'It was. ' "
That an essential definition of revenge emphasizes revulsion and defiance, and thus points to revenge as ill will, corresponds to our characterization of it as a peculiar sort of persecution. Yet Nietzsche does not merely say that revenge is revulsion. The same could be said of hatred. Nietzsche says that revenge is the will's ill will. But will signifies the Being of beings as a whole, and not simply human will- ing. By virtue of the characterization of revenge as "the will's ill will," the defiant persecution of revenge persists primarily in relationship to the Being of beings. It becomes apparent that this is the case when we heed what it is on which revenge's ill will turns: revenge is "the will's ill will against time and its 'It was. ' "
224 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
When we read this essential definition ofrevenge for the first time- and also for a second and a third time-the emphatic application of revenge to time seems to us surprising, incomprehensible, ultimately gratuitous. It has to strike us this way, as long as we think no further about what the word time here means.
Nietzsche says that revenge is "the will's ill will toward time. . . . " This does not say, toward something temporal. Nor does it say, toward a particular characteristic of time. It simply says, "Ill will toward time. . . . "
To be sure, these words now follow: ". . . toward time and its 'It was. ' " But this suggests that revenge is ill will toward the "It was" of time. We may insist, quite rightly, that not only the "it was" but also the "it will be" and the "it is now" also pertain just as essentially to time. For time is defined not only by the past but also by future and present. If therefore Nietzsche stresses the "It was" of time, his char- acterization of the essence of revenge obviously refers, not to time as such, but to time in one particular respect. Yet how do matters stand with time "as such"? They stand in this way: time goes. And it goes by passing. Whatever of time is to come never comes to stay, but only to go. Where to? Into passing. When a man dies we say he has passed away. The temporal is held to be that which passes away.
Nietzsche defines revenge as "the will's ill will toward time and its 'It was. ' " The supplement to the definition does not mean to put into relief one isolated characteristic of time while stubbornly ignoring the other two; rather, it designates the fundamental trait of time in its proper and entire unfolding as time. With the conjunction and in the phrase "time and its 'It was,' " Nietzsche is not proceeding to append one special characteristic of time. Here the and means as much as "and that means. " Revenge is the will's ill will toward time and that means toward passing away, transiency. Transiency is that against which the will can take no further steps, that against which its willing constantly collides. Time and its "It was" is the obstacle that the will cannot budge. Time, as passing away, is repulsive; the will suffers on account of it. Suffering in this way, the will itself becomes chronically ill over such passing away; the illness then wills its own passing, and in
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 225
so doing wills that everything in the world be worthy of passing away. Ill will toward time degrades all that passes away. The earthly-Earth and all that pertains to her-is that which properly ought not to be and which ultimately does not really possess true Being. Plato himself called it me on, nonbeing. *
According to Schelling's statements, which simply express the guid- ing representations of all metaphysics, the prime predicates of Being are "independence from time," "eternity. "
Yet the most profound ill will toward time does not consist in the mere disparagement of the earthly. For Nietzsche the most deepseated revenge consists in that reflection which posits supratemporal ideality as absolute. Measured against it, the temporal must perforce degrade itself to nonbeing proper.
Yet how should humanity assume dominion over the earth, how can it take the earth as earth into its protection, so long as it degrades the earthly, so long as the spirit of revenge determines its reflection? If it is a matter of rescuing the earth as earth, then the spirit of revenge will have to vanish beforehand. Thus for Zarathustra redemption from revenge is the bridge to the highest hope.
But in what does redemption from ill will toward transiency consist? Does it consist in a liberation from the will in general-perhaps in the senses suggested by Schopenhauer and in Buddhism? Inasmuch as the Being of beings is will, according to the doctrine of modern meta- physics, redemption from the will would amount to redemption from Being, hence to a collapse into vacuous nothingness. For Nietzsche redemption from revenge is redemption from the repulsive, from defi- ance and degradation in the will, but by no means the dissolution of
• Heidegger's remarks recall the decisive words of Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, Part One (lines 1338-40): " . . . denn alles, was entsteht, I 1st wert, dass es zugrunile geht. " "For everything that comes to be is worthy of its own demise. " Yet because Heidegger here speaks of Vergehen, Vergiingliches, his phrasing has a diabolical way of embracing the concluding words of Part Two (the very words Nietzsche parodied in the first of his Songs o f the Outlaw Prince), words that try to reduce "all that passes away" to a mere image of eternity. Thus Mephisto and the chorus mysticus, the good and evil of metaphysics and morals, join voices to chant revenge, to denigrate time and its "It was. "
226 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
all willing. Redemption releases the ill will from its "no" and frees it for a "yes. " What does the "yes" affirm? Precisely what the ill will of a vengeful spirit renounced: time, transiency.
The "yes" to time is the will that transiency perdure, that it not be disparaged as nothing worth. Yet how can passing away perdure?
Only in this way: as passing away it must not only continuously go, but must also always come. Only in this way: passing away and transiency must recur in their coming as the same. And such recurrence itself is per- durant only if it is eternal. According to the doctrine of metaphysics, the predicate "eternity" belongs to the Being of beings.
Redemption from revenge is transition from ill will toward time to the will that represents being in the eternal recurrence of the same. Here the will becomes the advocate of the circle.
To put it another way: Only when the Being of beings represents itself to man as eternal recurrence of the same can man cross over the bridge and, redeemed from the spirit of revenge, be the one in transi- tion, the overman.
Zarathustra is the teacher who teaches the overman. But he teaches this doctrine only because he is the teacher of eternal recurrence of the same. This thought, eternal recurrence of the same, is first in rank. It is the "most abysmal" thought. For that reason the teacher comes out with it last, and always hesitantly.
Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? He is the teacher whose doctrine would liberate prior reflection from the spirit of revenge to the "yes" spoken to eternal recurrence of the same.
As the teacher of eternal recurrence, Zarathustra teaches the over- man. According to an unpublished note (XIV, 276), a refrain accom- panies the latter doctrine: "Refrain: 'Love alone will make it righf-{the creative love that forgets itself in its works). "
As the teacher of eternal recurrence and overman, Zarathustra does not teach two different things. What he teaches coheres in itself, since one demands the other as its response. Such correspondence-in the way it essentially unfolds and the way it withdraws-is precisely what the figure of Zarathustra conceals in itself, conceals yet at the same time displays, thus allowing the correspondence to provoke our thought.
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 227
Yet the teacher knows that what he is teaching remains a vision and a riddle. He perseveres in such reflective knowledge.
We today, because of the peculiar ascendancy of the modern sciences, are caught up in the strange misconception that knowledge can be attained from science and that thinking is subject to the juris- diction of science. Yet whatever unique thing a thinker is able to say can be neither proved nor refuted logically or empirically. Nor is it a matter of faith. We can only envisage it questioningly, thoughtfully. What we envisage thereby always appears as worthy of question.
To catch a glimpse of the vision and the riddle which the figure Zarathustra manifests, and to retain that glimpse, let us once again cast our eyes on the spectacle of Zarathustra's animals. They appear to him at the outset of his journeyings:
. . . He looked inquiringly into the sky-for above him he heard the piercing cry of a bird. And behold! An eagle soared through the air in vast circles, and a serpent hung suspended from him, not as his prey, but as though she were his friend: for she had coiled about his neck.
"These are my animals! " said Zarathustra, and his heart was filled with joy.
A passage we cited earlier-yet purposely only in part-from the first section of "The Convalescent" reads: "1, Zarathustra, the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle-1 summon you, my most abysmal thought! " In the second section of the episode "On the Vision and the Riddle," in Part III, Zarathustra describes the thought of eternal recurrence of the same in identical words. There, in his confrontation with the dwarf, Zarathustra tries for the first time to think that riddlesome thing which he sees as meriting his longing. The eternal recurrence of the same does remain a vision for Zarathustra; but it is also a riddle. It can be neither proved nor refuted logically or empirically. At bottom, this holds for every essential thought of every thinker: something envisaged, but a riddle-worthy of question.
Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? We can now reply in the following formula: Zarathustra is the teacher of eternal return of the same and the teacher of overman. But now we can see more clearly-perhaps also beyond our own formula-that Zarathustra is not a teacher who
228 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
instructs us concerning two sundry items. Zarathustra teaches the over- man because he is the teacher of eternal return of the same. Yet the reverse is also true: Zarathustra teaches eternal return of the same be- cause he is the teacher of overman. These doctrines are conjoined in a circle. In its circling, the teaching corresponds to that which is-to the circle which as eternal recurrence of the same makes out the Being of beings, that is, what is permanent in Becoming.
The teaching, and our thinking of it, will achieve such circling whenever they cross over the bridge called "Redemption from the Spirit of Revenge. " In this way prior thinking is to be overcome.
From the period immediately following the completion of the work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the year 1885, comes a note that has been taken up as number 617 in the book that was pieced together from Nietzsche's literary remains and published under the title The Will to Power. The note bears the underscored title "Recapitulation. "" Here Nietzsche with extraordinary perspicuity condenses the principal matter of his thinking into just a few sentences. A parenthetical remark appended to the text makes explicit mention of Zarathustra. Nietzsche's "Recapitulation" begins with the statement: "To stamp Becoming with the character of Being-that is the supreme will to power.
The supreme will to power, that is, what is most vital in all life, comes to pass when transiency is represented as perpetual Becoming in the eternal recurrence of the same, in this way being made stable and permanent. Such representing is a thinking which, as Nietzsche em- phatically notes, stamps the character of Being on beings. Such think- ing takes Becoming, to which perpetual collision and suffering belong, into its protection and custody.
Does such thinking overcome prior reflection, overcome the spirit of revenge? Or does there not lie concealed in this very stampin~which takes all Becoming into the protection of eternal recurrence of the same-a form of ill will against sheer transiency and thereby a highly spiritualized spirit of revenge?
We no sooner pose this question than the illusion arises that we are • See the explanatory note on pp. 201-02, above.
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 229
trying to discredit Nietzsche, to impute something as most proper to him which is precisely what he wants to overcome. It is as though we cherished the view that by such imputation we were refuting the thought of this thinker.
The officious will to refute never even approaches a thinker's path. Refutation belongs among those petty intellectual entertainments which the public needs for its amusement. Moreover, Nietzsche him- self long ago anticipated the answer to our question. The text that immediately precedes Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Nietzsche's corpus appeared in 1882 under the title The Gay Science. In its penultimate section (number 341), under the heading "The Greatest Burden," Nietzsche first delineated his "most abysmal thought. " Following it is the final section (342), which was adopted verbatim as the opening of the Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the posthumously pub- lished materials (XIV, 404 ff. ) we find sketches for a foreword to The Gay Science. There we read the following:
A spirit fortified by wars and victories, which has developed a need for conquest, adventure, hazard, pain; become accustomed to the crispness of the upper air, to long wintry walks, to ice and mountain crags in every sense; a kind of sublime malice and extreme exuberance of revenge-for there is revenge in it, revenge on life itself, when one who suffers greatly takes life
under his protection.
What is left for us to say, if not this: Zarathustra's doctrine does not bring redemption from revenge? We do say it. Yet we say it by no means as a misconceived refutation of Nietzsche's philosophy. We do not even utter it as an objection against Nietzsche's thinking. But we say it in order to turn our attention to the fact that-and the extent to which-Nietzsche's thought too is animated by the spirit of prior re- flection. Whether the spirit of prior thinking is at all captured in its definitive essence when it is interpreted as the spirit of revenge-this question we leave open. At all events, prior thinking is metaphysics, and Nietzsche's thinking presumably brings it to fulfillment.
Thus something in Nietzsche's thinking comes to the fore which this thinking itself was no longer able to think. Such remaining behind what it has thought designates the creativity of a thinking. And where
230 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
a thinking brings metaphysics to completion it points in an exceptional way to things unthought, cogently and confusedly at once. Yet where are the eyes to see this?
Metaphysical thinking rests on the distinction between what truly is and what, measured against this, constitutes all that is not truly in being. However, what is decisive for the essence of metaphysics is by no means the fact that the designated distinction is formulated as the opposition of the suprasensuous to the sensuous realm, but the fact that this distinction-in the sense of a yawning gulf between the realms -remains primary and all-sustaining. The distinction persists even when the Platonic hierarchy of suprasensuous and sensuous is inverted and the sensuous realm is experienced more essentially and more thoroughly-in the direction Nietzsche indicates with the name Dionysos. For the superabundance for which Zarathustra's "great long- ing" yearns is the inexhaustible permanence of Becoming, which the will to power in the eternal recurrence of the same wills itself to be.
Nietzsche brought what is essentially metaphysical in his thinking to the extremity of ill will in the final lines of his final book, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. Nietzsche composed the text in October of 1888. It was first published in a limited edition twenty years later; in 1911 it was taken up into the fifteenth volume of the Grossok- tav edition. The final lines of Ecce Homo read: "Have I been under- stood? -Dionysos versus the Crucified. . . . "
Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? He is the advocate of Dionysos. That means that Zarathustra is the teacher who in and for his doctrine of overman teaches the eternal return of the same.
Does the preceding statement provide the answer to our query? No. Nor does it provide the answer after we have pursued all the references that might elucidate the statement, hoping in that way to follow Zara- thustra-if only in that first step across the bridge. The statement, which looks like an answer, nonetheless wants us to take note, wants to make us more alert, as it conducts us back to the question that serves as our title.
Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? The question now asks who this teacher is. Who is this figure which, at the stage of metaphysics' com- pletion, appears within metaphysics? Nowhere else in the history of
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 231
Western metaphysics has the essential figure been expressly created in this way for its respective thinker-or, to put it more appropriately and literally, nowhere else has that figure been so tellingly thought. No- where else-unless at the beginning of Western thought, in Par- menides, though there only in veiled outlines.
Essential to the figure of Zarathustra remains the fact that the teacher teaches something twofold which coheres in itself: eternal re- turn and overman. Zarathustra is himself in a certain way this coher- ence. That said, he too remains a riddle, one we have scarcely envisaged.
"Eternal return of the same" is the name for the Being of beings. "Overman" is the name for the human essence that corresponds to such Being.
On what basis do Being and the essence of human being belong together? How do they cohere, if Being is no fabrication of human beings and humanity no mere special case among beings?
Can the coherence of Being and the essence of human being be discussed at all, as long as our thinking remains mired in the previous conception of man? According to it, man is animal rationale, the ra- tional animal. Is it a coincidence, or a bit of lyrical ornamentation, that the two animals, eagle and serpent, accompany Zarathustra; that they tell him who he must become, in order to be the one he is? In the figure of the two animals the union of pride and discernment is to come to the fore for those who think. Yet we have to know what Nietzsche thinks concerning these two traits. Among the notes sketched during the period when Thus Spoke Zarathustra was com- posed we read: "It seems to me that modesty and pride belong to one another quite closely. . . . What they have in common is the cool, unflinching look of appraisal" (XIV, 99). And elsewhere in these notes (101):
People talk so stupidly about pride-and Christianity even tried to make us feel sinful about it! The point is that whoever demands great things ofhim- self, and achieves those things, must feel quite remote from those who do not. Such distance will be interpreted by these others as a "putting on airs"; but he knows it [distance] only as continuous toil, war, victory, by day and by night. The others have no inkling of all this!
232 THF. ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
The eagle: the proudest animal; the serpent: the most discerning animal. And both conjoined in the circle in which they hover, in the ring that embraces their essence; and circle and ring once again inter- fused.
The riddle of who Zarathustra is, as teacher of eternal return and overman, is envisaged by us in the spectacle of the two animals. In this spectacle we can grasp more directly and more readily what our presen- tation tried to exhibit as the matter most worthy of question, namely, the relati. on of Being to that living being, man.
And behold! An eagle soared through the air in vast circles, and a serpent hung suspended from him, not as his prey, but as though she were his friend: for she had coiled about his neck.
"These are my animals! " said Zarathustra, and his heart was filled with joy.
*** A NOTE ON THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Nietzsche himself knew that his "most abysmal thought" remains a riddle. All the less reason for us to imagine that we can solve the riddle. The obscurity of this last thought of Western metaphysics dare not tempt us to circumvent it by some sort of subterfuge.
At bottom there are only two such routes of escape.
Either one avers that this thought of Nietzsche's is a kind of "mysti- cism" that our thinking should not bother to confront.
Or one avers that this thought is as old as the hills, that it boils down to the long-familiar cyclical notion of cosmic occurrence. Which no- tion can be found for the first time in Western philosophy in Hera- clitus.
This second piece of information, like all information of that sort, tells us absolutely nothing. What good is it if someone determines with respect to a particular thought that it can be found, for example, "al- ready" in Leibniz or even "already" in Plato? What good are such references when they leave what Leibniz and Plato were thinking in the same obscurity as the thought they claim to be clarifying with the help of these historical allusions?
Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? 233
As for the first subterfuge, according to which Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence of the same is a mystic phantasmagoria, a look at the present age might well teach us a different lesson-presupposing of course that thinking is called upon to bring to light the essence of modern technology.
What else is the essence of the modern power-driven machine than one offshoot of the eternal recurrence of the same? But the essence of such machines is neither something machine-like nor anything me- chanical. Just as little can Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence of the same be interpreted in a mechanical sense.
That Nietzsche interpreted and experienced his most abysmal thought in terms of the Dionysian only speaks for the fact that he still thought it metaphysically, and had to think it solely in this way. Yet it says nothing against the fact that this most abysmal thought conceals something unthought, something which at the same time remains a sealed door to metaphysical thinking.
(See the lecture course "What Calls for Thinking? " taught during the winter semester of 1951-52 and published in book form by Max Niemeyer, Tiibingen, in 1954. *)
*Translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray as What Is Called Thinking? in 1968 for the Harper & Row Heidegger Series.
ANALYSIS AND GLOSSARY
Analysis
By DAVID FARRELL KRELL
Heidegger is so insistent about our heeding the kinds of music eternal recurrence makes-whether it is a thought plucked on skillfully fash- ioned lyres or cranked out of barrel organs-that we may be justified in listening now to a brief selection of its orchestrations. I shall pass over in silence a large number of the thought's earlier echoes, such as those pious ones we find in Goethe, and cite a few of the more daring anticipations and recapitulations of Nietzsche's most thoughtful bur- den.
Early in 1902, seven years before the first English translation of Also sprach Zarathustra appeared and six years before H. L. Mencken be- gan to exalt Nietzsche to the English-speaking world, a young Ameri- can novelist on the threshold of a lifelong conversion to socialism sported briefly yet passionately the banner of overman:
I sat in silence. "Do I gather from your words," I asked, "that immortality is not one of the privileges of this race? "
He smiled again. "The spiritual life," he said, "does not begin until the thought of immortality is flung away. . . . "
"This people," I asked-"what do they know about God? "
"They know no more than men do," was the answer, "except that they know they know nothing. They know that the veil is not lifted. It is not tha~ for which they seek-life is their task, and life only; to behold its endless fruition; to dwell in the beauty of it, to wield power of it; to toil at its whirling loom, to build up palaces of music from it. . . . "
UPTON SINCLAIR, The Overman
Yet Upton Sinclair was not the first American writer to respond to the raptures of Nietzschean thought. Another managed it when Nietz-
238 THE ETERI\'AL RECURREI\'CE OF THE SAME
sche himself was only six years old. Herman Melville places poor Queequeg in his coffin, then observes:
How he wasted and wasted away in those few long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weak- ened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick, chapter CX
Queequeg survives the illness, of course, and uses his coffin as a sea-chest. After the catastrophe Ishmael will use it as a writing table. Ishmael's account will unite the two principal sources of Zarathustran imagery-mountain summits and the sea-the heights and depths visited by Zarathustra's eagle:
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
Moby-Dick, chapter XCVI
A more recent attestation to the thought of eternal recurrence in- volves the demise and return of a "distinguished phenomenologist," and hence expresses the more scientific side of Nietzsche's fundamen- tal thought:
Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?
Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his come- tary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly
Analysis 239
he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an es- tranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or of the silver king.
What would render such return irrational?
An unsatisfactory equation between an exodus and return in time through reversible space and an exodus and return in space through irreversible time.
JAMES JOYCE, Ulysses, "Ithaca"
Finally, the following poem by Rainer Maria Rilke expresses the more playful side of the thought that is hardest to bear, indeed as though spinning to a hurdy-gurdy tune:
The Carrousel
Jardin du Luxembourg
With a roof and the roof's vast shadow turns awhile the whole assembly
of pinto ponies fresh from the country which, long delaying, finally goes down.
