No More Learning

What does it mean to say "I no longer believe in anything"? Usually such an asseveration is testimony to "absolute skepticism" and "nihilism," doubt and despair of all knowledge, all order, and hence a sign of flight in the face of all decision and commitment; normally it is an expression of dissolution, where nothing holds and nothing is worth the trouble. Yet in the present instance unbelief and unwillingness to take-for-true mean something else. They mean refusal to embrace without further ado whatever is pregiven; refusal to rest content and delude oneself with merely ostensible decisions; refusal to shut one's eyes to one's own complacency.
What is the true, according to Nietzsche's conception of it? It is whatever in the perpetual flux and alteration of Becoming is fixated, whatever it is human beings have to get a firm grip on, whatever they
• "lhr Selbststiindigen-ihr miisst euch selber ste/len Iemen oder ihr fa/It urn. " I t is by no means clear what Nietzsche's admonition amounts to: sich ste/len means to turn oneself in, to volunteer, to muster, and even (though the context makes this unlikely) to deceive, to fake; umfa/Jen literally means to fall over, but it is a colloquialism for chang- ing one's mind at every whim. Nietzsche may be advising those who seek self-reliance to muster enough confidence to assert themselves and to fight-or to surrender-or to fake it-whatever it takes not to be a "pushover. " Heidegger clearly understands Nietzsche's remonstrance to mean that if self-reliant persons are those who lean on no one and no thing for support then they must learn to achieve a truly independent stance-without holding on.
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will to get a firm grip on. The true is what is firm. It is that about which human beings draw a boundary, as if to say "Off limits! " to all inquiry, all disturbance, all probing. In that way human beings in- troduce a sense of permanence into their own lives--even if it is simply the permanence of what they are used to, what they can dominate, what serves as a protection against all discomfiture and grants the con- solation of tranquillity.
To believe in Nietzsche's sense is thus to fixate the ever-changing throng of beings we encounter in the specific guiding representations of whatever is permanent and ordered. To believe, furthermore, is to entrench oneself in this fixating relationship in the very terms of what is fixated. In accordance with this conception of belief, which is abso- lutely essential in all of Nietzsche's thought (belief as self-entrench- ment in fixation), the phrase "I no longer believe in anything" suggests the very opposite of doubt and paralysis in the face of decision and action. It means the following: "I will not have life come to a standstill at one possibility, one configuration; I will allow and grant life its inalienable right to become, and I shall do this by prefiguring and projecting new and higher possibilities for it, creatively conducting life out beyond itself. " The creator is thus necessarily a nonbeliever, granted the designated sense of belief as bringing to a standstill. The creator is at the same time a destroyer with respect to everything con- gealed or petrified. But he is such only because ahead of time and above all else he communicates to life a new possibility as its higher law. This is what the next maxim (number 69; XII, 250) says: "All creation is communication. The knower, the creator, the lover are one.
Creation as communicatiorr-it is important to listen here in the right way. Every creating is a sharing with others. This implies that creation in itself grounds new possibilities of Being--erects them, or, as Holderlin says, founds them. Creation allots a new Being to prior beings, communicates it to them. Creation as such, and not only in its utilization, is a gift-giving. Genuine creation does not need to ask, does not even possess the inner possibility of inquiring, whether and how it might best be practicable and serviceable. Only where every trace of creative force and creative standards are lacking; only where merely
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mimetic machinery grinds into action; only where nothing can be shared in some creative process, inasmuch as the very creativity is missing; only there do we find some purpose proclaimed and acclaimed-retrospec- tively, if need be, but more auspiciously by way of anticipation- which provides the rationale for a whole line of products.
To create is to share-the most genuine service we can think of, because the most reticent. Genuine creation is thus utterly remote from the danger of becoming its own purpose; it does not even need to defend itself against such a misunderstanding. Only the sheer sem- blance of creativity needs to be constantly and vociferously reassured that it does not exist for its own sake but performs a service.
However, creation can appear in yet another guise, no less corrupt- ing than the one just mentioned. The sovereign sufficiency that be- longs essentially to creation, which does not need to posit an extraneous purpose, can assume the appearance of mere purposeless whimsy, of l'art pour l'art. Yet this is as far removed from genuine creation, or sharing-with, as the semblance cited above. The outcome of all this is simply the fact that creation itself and what is created are always extremely difficult to recognize and to unravel. And it is good that this is so. For it is their best protection, the guarantee that they will be preserved as something that can never be lost.
From that period on in which Nietzsche's great thought comes to him he recites again and again in various turns of phrase the trinity of knowing, creating, and loving. Love he comprehends as gift-giving and in terms of the giver; often he calls it by these very names. Instead of "knowers" he also likes to speak of "teachers. " If we follow Nietzsche's lead and substitute "the philosopher" for "the knower," "the artist" for "the creator," and "the saint" for "the lover," then the phrase we intro- duced a moment ago tells us that the philosopher, artist, and saint are one. However, it is not Nietzsche's purpose here to concoct an amal- gam that would consist of all the things these words used to mean. On the contrary, he is seeking the figure of a human being who exists simultaneously in the transformed unity of that threefold metamorpho- sis-the knower, the creator, the giver. This human being of the future is the proper ruler, the one who has become master of the last man, indeed in such a way that the last man disappears. His disappearance
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indicates that the ruler is no longer defined in opposition to the last man-which is what always happens as long as future humanity, spawned by what has gone before, has to grasp itself as over-man, that is to say, as a transition. The ruler, that is, the designated unity of knower, creator, and lover, is in his own proper grounds altogether an other. Yet in order that the new form of humanity come to be and provide a standard, the figures of the knower, creator, and giver must themselves be prepared by way of a novel metamorphosis and unifica- tion. Nietzsche at one point expresses the matter in the following way: "The giver, the creator, the teacher-these are preludes to the ruler. " (See the supplements to Thus Spoke Zarathustra from the years 1882- 86; XII, 363. )
In the fresh light cast by this new perspective on the matter we have to understand maxims like the following one, which, bearing the num- ber 70, follows directly upon number 69 in the series we have been considering (XII, 250): "'Religious man,' 'fool,' 'genius,' 'criminal,' 'tyrant'-these are imperfect names and mere details, as approxima- tions to something ineffable. " If Nietzsche includes the notion of the "religious man" among the others in this sequence, we have to be quite careful. We have to think matters over quite precisely before we earmark the thought of return as a "religious" thought, in effect ostra- cizing it from Nietzsche's "body of knowledge," his "doctrine. " Any reflective person, following the lead of our necessarily limited and scarcely elucidated comments, will already have realized how ridicu- lous such a procedure makes itself look. Precisely the thinking of the most difficult thought becomes supreme knowledge, it is in itself a creating; its creating is a communicating, gift-giving, and loving; and it thereby appears in the fundamental figure of the "saint" and the "reli- gious. " Yet Nietzsche does not designate this thinking of the most difficult thought as believing because it is holy and religious, that is, thanks to its character as creative love; he calls it a believing because as a thinking of beings as a whole it fixates beings themselves in a projec- tion of Being. The thought's character as belief does not in the first place spring from its religious character; rather, the aspect of belief springs from its character as a thinking, inasmuch as thinking, repre- senting relationships and constellations, always erects and intends something that is permanent.
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The thinking of the most difficult thought is a believing. It holds firm in the true. Truth for Nietzsche always means the true, and the true signifies in Nietzsche's view being-that which is fixated as per- manent. This occurs in such a way that the living creature secures its subsistence in and through the circle of what is fixated. As fixation, belief is the securing of permanence.
The thought of eternal return of the same fixates by determining how the world essentially is-as the necessitous chaos of perpetual Becoming. The thinking of this thought holds firm in being as a whole in such a way that for it the eternal return of the same serves as the Being that determines all beings. Such a truth can never of course be directly proven to particular human beings by way of particular pieces of evidence; it can never be demonstrated in its actuality by way of certain facts, inasmuch as it involves being as a whole. We come to being as a whole always and only by means of a leap that executes our very projection of it, assisting and accomplishing that projection in its process. We never come to being as a whole by moving tentatively and haltingly through a sequence of particular facts and constellations of facts aligned in terms of cause-effect relations. Consequently, what is thought in this thought is never given as some particular, actual thing at hand; it is always proffered as a possibility.
But then does not the thought lose all its weight? When Nietzsche concedes that his thought is merely a possibility, does he not forfeit the right to be taken seriously-surrender the claim that his thought is to be taken seriously? By no means. For the concession actually expresses the fact that to hold firm in this thought is essentially to co-constitute its being true; the fact that the hold itself is defined by the stance, and not vice-versa. Nietzsche provides a helpful point of reference when he says in note 119 (XII, 65):
Even the thought of a possibility can shake us and transform us; it is not merely sensations or particular expectations that can do that! Note how effective the possibility of eternal damnation was!
On the basis of this remark we also recognize the fact that it was no accident that Nietzsche chose the particular form he did for the first communication of his thought in The Gay Science, the form of the demon who interrogates us by opening up a possibility: "What would
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happen if . . . ? *The interrogative mode of thinking corresponds to the heart's core of what is being thought here. The possibility in question-which indeed has to be interrogated thorougly-is mightier as a possibility than anything actual or factual. One possible thing generates other possibilities, inherently and necessarily bringing them to the fore along with itself. What is possible in a given thought transposes us to a number of possibilities: we may think it in this or that way, assume a stance within it in this or that fashion. To think through a possibility truly-that is to say, with all its consequences-means to decide something for ourselves, even if the decision calls for nothing more than a retreat from and exclusion of the possibility.
In accord with the entire history of Western humanity hitherto, and in accord with the interpretation of beings that sustains that history, we are all too accustomed to thinking purely and simply in terms of ac- tualities, to interpreting in terms of the actual (as presence, ousia). For this reason we are still unprepared, we feel awkward and inadequate, when it comes to thinking possibility, a kind of thinking that is always creative. Hence, to the extent that the thought of return involves our adopting this or that stance within the whole of beings, a range of possibilities of decision and scission opens up for human existence in general. t Nietzsche says that the thought contains "the possibility of defining and ordering anew individual human beings in their affects" (number 118). In order to elicit the full content of this statement we have to know that according to Nietzsche it is affects and drives that define the given perspectives within which human beings perceive the world. Such perspectives determine the corner for that Little Jack Horner called "man. "
In the light of the thought of return a decision has to be reached as to who has or does not have the energy and the attunement required to
• See section 3, above: "Nietzsche's First Communication of the Doctrine of Return. " On the power of the possible, cf. Being and Time, sections 31 and 53; see also the "Letter on Humanism," Basic Writings, p. 196.
t "Decision and scission" renders Heidegger's phrase Entscheidung und Scheidung. His coupling of these two words emphasizes the root of decision, meaning to cut off, sever, separate. Decision does not mean a subject's making up his or her mind; it means the realization that one has reached a point of radical change. Entscheidung suggests the crossing of a kind of watershed, Wasserscheide.
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hold firm in the truth. Those who do not "believe" in it are the "fleet- ing ones. " By that Nietzsche means two things. First of all, the fleeting ones are fleeing ones, in flight before magnificent, expansive prospects, which presuppose an ability to wait. The fleeting ones want their hap- piness right there where they can latch onto it; and they want the time to be able to enjoy it. These people who flee are fleeting in yet another sense: they themselves are without stability, are transient creatures; they leave nothing behind; they found nothing, ground nothing. The others, those who are not fleeting, are "the human beings with eternal souls and eternal Becoming and pains that tell of the future. " We might also say that they are the human beings who bear within them- selves a great deal of time and who live to the full the times they
have-a matter that is quite independent of actual longevity. Or, to turn it around the other way: it is precisely the fleeting human being who is least fit to serve as the human being of proper transition, though appearances seem to suggest the opposite, insmuch as "transition" im- plies evanescence. The fleeting ones, who do not and cannot think the thought, "must, according to their own nature, finally die om""Only those who hold their existence to be capable of eternal repetition will remain: and with such people a condition is possible to which no utopian has ever attained! " (number 121). "Whoever does not believe has a fleeting life in his consciousness" (number 128).
The thought does not "work its effects" in that it leaves behind particular consequences for later times. Rather, when it is thought, when the one who is thinking it stands firm in this truth of beings as a whole, when thinkers who are of such a nature are, then beings as a whole also undergo metamorphosis. "From the very moment this thought exists, all colors change their hue and a new history begins" (number 120; cf. number 114*).
The most difficult thought is here grasped as the thought that inaugurates a new history. It is not merely that another series of hap- penstances unfolds; what is different is the kind of happening, acting, and creating. Color, the very look of things, their eidos, presencing,
• GOA, XII, number 114 is cited in section 18, pp. 138--39, below. In CM see M III I [148].
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Being-this is what changes. "Deep yellow" and "incandescent red" begin to radiate.
However, must not a question finally claim its rights at this junc- ture, a question that causes the very essence of this thought, whole and entire, to dissolve into thin air? If everything is necessary-the world as a chaos of necessity-and if everything recurs as it once was, then all thinking and planning become superfluous, indeed are impossible from the outset; we must take everything as it comes; and all is indiffer- ent. Instead of providing us with a burden, the thought deprives us of the ballast and the steadying weight of decision and action, divests us of every sense of planning and willing. It harnesses us to the self- propelling, necessitous course of an eternal cycle, opening up all ave- nues at once to lawlessness and sheer contingency. It ends by causing us to founder in sheer inaction-we let it all slide. And, for good measure, such a thought would not be a "new" burden at all, but an ancient one. For it was the history of antiquity that allowed itself to get bogged down in fatalism.
18. The Thought of Return- and Freedom
When we pause to think about these things we come up against a question. We would mistake what is most difficult in this exceedingly difficult thought were we to take it too lightly, that is, were we to encounter it in a merely formal dialectical way. Instead of conducting us to supreme and ultimate decisions, the thought appears to let us submerge in vacuous indifference. Yet precisely this trait-the fact that the semblance of its utter opposite dwells right alongside the proper truth of the thought-indicates that here it is a question of thinking a genuine philosophical thought. If we reflect on the question for a mo- ment, if we make even the slightest effort to recollect it, this will suffice to reveal the profile of an earlier, truly ancient question. The difficulty that has only now emerged seems to refer us back to that earlier dilemma, which runs as follows: All being, taken as a whole and as a plenitude of details in any of its given sequences, is forged in the iron ring of the eternal recurrence of the identical collective state; whatever enters on the scene now or in the future is but a recurrence, unalterably predetermined and necessary. But then in this ring what are action, planning, resolve-in short, "freedom'~supposed to be? In the ring of necessity freedom is as superfluous as it is impossible. But that is a rebuff to the essence of man; here the very possibility of his essence is denied. If we wish that essence to prevail nevertheless, it is wholly obscure how it may do so.
Obviously, the thought of eternal recurrence of the same guides us back to the question of the relationship between freedom and necessi- ty. The upshot is that this thought cannot be, as Nietzsche claims, the
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thought of thoughts. For if the thought of return pertains to the do. main of the question of freedom and necessity, something fundamen. tal has already been decided about its possible truth. Someone will. surely point out that the question of a possible accord between necessi- ty and freedom belongs among those unavoidable yet insoluble ques- tions which set in motion a ceaseless dispute as soon as they intimate what it is they would like to put into question. *
Indeed, from the moment we learn about Nietzsche's doctrine of return such reflections force themselves upon us. We will be all the more inclined to such reflections since we are familiar with the young Nietzsche's school essays, "Fate and History" and "Free Will and Fate," written during the Easter holidays in 1862 (see the Historical- Critical Collected Edition, volume II, pages 54-63). t If at the same time we think of the nearly contemporary autobiographical composi- tion by Nietzsche which we cited earlier, and of the fact that this early thought of his was later to become the essential center of his thinking,
• Heidegger's use of the word "dispute" (Widerstreit) echoes Kant's throughout the "Antinomies" of the Critique ofPure Reason. Heidegger's reference is of course to the third Antinomy (see KrV, A 444 I B 472) and to Kant's entire project of a Critique of Practical Reason.
t These two "school" essays, written when Nietzsche was eighteen years old, both of them exhibiting the influence of Emerson, are more intriguing than Heidegger's remarks here suggest. "Free Will and Fate" rejects the spirit of Christian "submission to the will of God" and exalts instead a "strong will. " The longer essay, "Fate and History: Thoughts," bemoans throughout the prejudices that condition a youth's view of the world and make "a freer standpoint" all but impossible. The young Nietzsche designates history and natural science as two havens for his storm-tossed speculations on human fate. Having invoked the long history of human evolution and development, Nietzsche asks, "Does this eternal Becoming never come to an end? " History itself he pictures as an enormous clock: when the clock strikes twelve its hands "begin their course all over again-a new period commences for the world. " Finally, against the determining forces of fatum, Nietzsche deploys the following:
Yet if it were possible for a strong will to overturn the world's entire past, we would join the ranks of self-sufficient gods, and world history would be no more to us than a dreamlike enchantment of the self. The curtain falls, and man finds himself again, like a child playing with worlds, a child who wakes at daybreak and with a laugh wipes from his brow all frightful dreams.
See Friedrich Nietzsche Werke und Briefe (Miinchen: C. H. Beck, 1934), II (Ju- gendschriften), 54-63. These essays unfortunately do not appear in the Schlechta and CM editions.
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then we seem to be on the right track from Nietzsche's own point of view when we subordinate the doctrine of return to the question of freedom and necessity. Nevertheless, such a procedure overlooks what is most essential. Let us try to make this point sufficiently clear, so that our first efforts to get acquainted with Nietzsche's "doctrine" will manage to keep at bay all inadequate approaches.
What we must pay special attention to will be clarified with the help of Nietzsche's own notes, for example, the following (XII, number 116): "My doctrine says that the task is to live in such a way that you have to wish to live again-you will do so in any case! " The appended phrase, "you will do so in any case" appears to obviate the necessity of assigning the task, "live in such a way. . . . "Why wish, why propose, when you have to take everything as it comes "in any case"? Yet if we read the statement in this way we are not gleaning its true import; we are not entering into its matter, not hearing what it says. The statement speaks to everyone, addressing him or her as "you" in the familiar form. It speaks to us as we are; we ourselves are the ones intended. The intention of the thought thus refers us to our own respective Dasein. Whatever is or is to be will be decided in and by Dasein, inasmuch as only those aspects of Becoming that were once a part of my life are destined to come again.
But then do we know what once was? No! Can we ever know such things? We know nothing of an earlier life. Everything we are now living we experience for the first time, although now and again in the midst of our ordinary experiences that strange and obscure experience crops up which says: What you are now experiencing, precisely in the form it is now taking, you have experienced once before. We know nothing of an earlier "life" when we think back. But can we only think back? No, we can also think ahead-and that is thinking proper. 1':1 such thinking we are capable in a certain way of knowing with certain- ty what once was. Strange-are we to experience something that lies behind us by thinking forward? Yes, we are. Then what is it that already was; what will come again when it recurs? The answer to that question is: whatever will be in the next moment. If you allow your existence to drift in timorousness and ignorance, with all the conse- quences these things have, then they will come again, and they will be
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that which already was. And if on the contrary you shape something supreme out of the next moment, as out of every moment, and if you note well and retain the consequences, then this moment will come again and will have been what already was: "Eternity suits it. " But the matter will be decided solely in your moments. It will be decided on the basis of what you yourself hold concerning beings, and what sort of stance you adopt in their midst. It will be decided on the basis of what you will of yourself, what you are able to will of yourself.
Against all this one might say: Merely to represent to oneself that he or she is a progression of processes and is, as it were, forged as a link in a chain of circumstances that enter on the scene time after time in an endlessly circling monotony-merely to imagine such a thing is to be absent from onself, and is not to be the being that inherently belongs within the whole of beings. To represent a human being in this way means to fail altogether to take him into account as a self; it is like someone who undertakes to count the number of people who are present but forgets to count himself. To represent humanity that way means to calculate extrinsically, as though one could slip stealthily outside and remain aloof from it all. When we calculate in such fash- ion we no longer ponder the fact that as temporal beings who are delivered over to ourselves we are also delivered over to the future in our willing; we no longer ponder the fact that the temporality of hu- man being alone determines the way in which the human being stands in the ring of beings. Here too, as in so many other essential respects, Nietzsche has not explicated his teaching and has left many things obscure. Yet certain hints appear over and over again, making it clear that Nietzsche knew and experienced a great deal more about this thought than he either sketched out or fully portrayed.
We may safely
judge how vehemently Nietzsche spurned extrinsic, fatalistic calcula- tion of the import and the consequences of the thought of return, so that such calculation cannot at all be definitive for him, on the basis of note number 122 (XII, 66):
You think you will have a long pause before you are reborn--do not deceive yourselves! Between the last moment of consciousness and the first glimmer of the new life "no time" goes by at all. It passes as quickly as a flash of
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lightning, even if living creatures measure it in terms of billions of years and even then fail to measure it adequately. Timelessness and succession go hand-in-hand with one another as soon as the intellect is gone.
Here the dual possibility for our envisaging things comes more clear- ly to the fore: we can estimate and decide about our relationship with beings as a whole from out of ourselves, in terms of the time each of us experiences; or we can remove ourselves from this time of our tem- porality--covertly relying on such time, however-and settle accounts with the whole by means of an infinite calculation. In the two cases the time interval between each of the recurrences is measured accord- ing to totally different standards. Seen in terms of our own experienced temporality, no time at all passes between the end of one lifetime and the beginning of another, even though the duration cannot be grasped "objectively" even in billions of years (see Aristotle, Physics, Book IV, chapters 10-14). *Y et what are billions of years when measured against eternity; that is to say, at the same time, measured against the standard of the moment of decision? What Nietzsche here says about the
• It is difficult to know what to make of this reference to the entire "treatise on time" in Aristotle's Physics, Book Delta, 10-14, unless Heidegger wishes to reiterate Aristotle's importance for his own conception of Dasein as temporality. Two passages in Aristotle's treatise, which Heidegger may have had in mind when making the present reference, are the following. First, the opening of chapter ll:
But neither does time exist without change [metabole}. For when the state of our own minds does not change at all, or we have not noticed its changing, we do not realize that time has elapsed any more than those who are fabled to sleep among the her! Jes in Sardinia do when they are awakened. . . . So, just as, if the "now" were not different but one and the same, there would not have been time, so too when its difference escapes our notice the interval [metaxy] does not seem to be time.
And second, a passage from chapter 14 (223a 21 ff. ), which Heidegger regards as essen- tial to Aristotle's definition of time as the number of motion:
Whether if soul [psyche] did not exist [me ousa] time would exist or not, is a question· that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted. . . . But if nothing but soul, or in soul reason [nous], is qualified to count, there would not be time unless there were soul. . . .
Heidegger's most complete discussion of Aristotle in this respect, a discussion which may be viewed as an elaboration of the final sections of Being and Time, appears as section 19, "Time and Temporality," in Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phiinomenologie (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1975), pp. 327-62, esp. pp. 335 and 360-61.
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timelessness of the "time in between" seems to contradict what is
observed in another note from the same period (number 114):
Man! Your entire life will be turned over and over again like an hourglass; again and again it will run out--one vast minute of time in between, until all the conditions that went into your becoming converge again in the world's circulation.
One vast minute of time in between-well, then, some time does transpire in the "in-between time," indeed "one vast minute"! Yet what Nietzsche says here does not contradict the preceding; it em- braces both ways of viewing the situation in one. Over against the billions of years that are calculated objectively, one minute of time amounts to no time at all; and "one vast minute" is meant to indicate simultaneously that all the conditions for becoming again, for recur- rence, are gathering meanwhile-"all the conditions from which you took your becoming. " Here, to be sure, the decisive condition is not mentioned: the decisive condition is you yourself, that is to say, the manner in which you achieve your self by becoming your own master, and this by seeing to it that when you engage your will essentially you take yourself up into that will and so attain freedom. We are free only when we become free, and we become free only by virtue of our wills. That is what we read in the second section of the second part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written in 1883, "On the Blessed Isles": "To will is liberating: that is the true teaching concerning will and freedom-thus Zarathustra teaches it to you. "
We know that Zarathustra is the teacher of eternal return, and that he is this alone. Thus the question of freedom, and hence of necessity too and of the relation between these two, is posed anew by the teach- ing of the eternal return of the same. For that reason we go astray when we reverse matters and try to cram the doctrine of return into some loilg-ossified schema of the question of freedom. And this is what we in fact do-insofar as the traditional metaphysical question of free- dom is conceived of as a question of "causality," while causality itself, in terms of its essential definition, stems from the notion of being as "actuality. "
We must admit that Nietzsche never pursued these interconnec-
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tions. Yet so much is clear: the doctrine of return should never be contorted in such a way that it fits into the readily available "antino- my" of freedom and necessity. At the same time, this reminds us once again of our sole task-to think this most difficult thought as it de- mands to be thought, on its own terms, leaving aside all supports and makeshifts.
Let us round off our survey of Nietzsche's notes on the doctrine of return from the period when the thought of thoughts first dawned on him (1882) with an observation by Nietzsche that guides us back to his very first plans for that thought, especially the third of these plans, entitled "Midday and Eternity. " The note to which we have already referred (number 114) closes with the following thought:
And in every ring of human existence in general there is always an hour when the mightiest thought emerges, first to one, then to many, and finally to all: the thought of the eternal return of all things. It is, each time, the hour of midday for humanity.
What does Nietzsche want to say here? For one thing, this thought integrates the thought of return itself as propriative event into the circle of beings as a whole, which it creates afresh. The reference to "human existence" here means, not the emergence on the scene of individual beings, but the fundamental fact that a being like human being in general comes to be within the whole of beings. At the same time, the thought tacitly suggests as one of its presuppositions that the thought of thoughts is not always the propriative event in human existence; that event itself has its time, its hour, which is "the hour of midday for humanity. "*
We know what Nietzsche means by this word midday: the moment of the shortest shadow, when fore-noon and after-noon, past and fu- ture, meet in one. Their meeting-place is the moment of supreme
• Heidegger's references to Ereignis, the propriative event, remind us that the lecture on eternal recurrence comes precisely at the time Heidegger was writing his Contribu- tions to Philosophy: On 'Ereignis,' 1936-38. In the first course on Nietzsche, "Will to Power as Art," he invoked Ereignis as the event of nihilism (see V olume I of this series, p. 156 n. ; see also Volume IV, p. 5. ) Here the propriative event involves the thought of eternal recurrence itself, which Nietzsche proffered as the most effective counter to nihilism. The matter is pursued in section 23, below.
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unity for all temporal things in utterly magnificent transfiguration, the moment when they are bathed in the most brilliant light. It is the moment of eternity. The hour of midday is the hour when human existence is each time transfigured to its supreme height and its most potent will. In the word midday a point of time is determined for the propriative event of the thought of eternal return within the eternal return of the same. No timepiece measures this point, here meant as that point in being as a whole when time itself is as the temporality of the moment. The most intrinsic yet most covert relation of the eternal return of the same (as the basic character of beings as a whole) to time now begins to glimmer. Every effort to grasp this teaching depends on our observing the relation that comes to light and on our being able to explicate that relation.
19. Retrospect on the Notes from the Period of The Gay Science, 1881-82
If we now survey the great wealth of material found in the earliest suppressed notes on the doctrine of eternal return, and if we compare all of it with what Nietzsche in the following year proceeds to commu- nicate, then it becomes clear that the published material represents a disproportionately small amount of what Nietzsche already thought and already knew. Yet this remains a purely extraneous finding. Some- thing else is more important, namely, the fact that the two passages which embody Nietzsche's first communication of the thought, at the conclusion of the first edition of The Gay Science, numbers 341 and 342, "The Greatest Burden" and "lncipit Tragoedia," essentially con- join the two fundamental directions taken by the thought in Nietz- sche's very first projected plans: they exhibit the thought of return as one that participates in altering the configuration of being as a whole itself; and they exhibit the thought of return as one which-in order to be a thought, in order actually to be thought-calls for its own thinker and teacher.
In retrospect we may say, and in fact say quite readily, that at the time The Gay Science first appeared with these concluding passages, in the year 1882, it was indeed impossible for anyone to understa11d what Nietzsche knew full well, impossible to understand what he wanted. And in all fairness Nietzsche could not have expected and insisted that he be understood straightaway, especially since such understanding is always a two-edged sword.
Understanding burgeons only when those who understand essential- ly find themselves growing in the direction of the new thought, only
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when they question in the direction of those new questions out of the autochthony of their own need, in this way alone taking up those novel questions anew, and thus transfiguring themselves to a greater clarity. Yet in the education of those who are reaching out in order to under- stand, their own lack of understanding, their noncomprehension of the thought that has been thought prior to them, may well be a formative obstacle, perhaps even a necessary one. We know little about these processes. Those who understand fundamentally, from the ground up, that is, those who think the thought itself creatively again, are never the contemporaries of the first thinkers of the thought. Nor are they the ones who are in a hurry to take up the nascent thought as something "modern," since these are truly vagrant, begging meals wherever they can find anything ala mode. Those who properly understand are al- ways the ones who come a long way on their own ground, from their own territory, the ones who bring much with them in order that they
may transform much. That is what Nietzsche is ruminating in a note which stems from the period we are dealing with, 1881-82 (see XII, 18 f. , number 35), but which belongs to the second division of notes on the doctrine of eternal return-if the schema of the original editors is to serve at all as our standard:
A novel doctrine encounters its best representatives last. These are natures that have long been self-assured and assuring, so that their earlier thoughts exhibit the tangled growth and impenetrability of a fertile primeval forest. The weaker, more vacuous, sicklier, and needier types are those who first contract the new infection-the first disciples prove nothing against a doc- trine. I believe the first Christians were the most disgusting people, with all their "virtues. "
Because Nietzsche's concluding thought in The Gay Science could not be understood as Nietzsche meant it to be understood, namely, as the thought that would inaugurate his new philosophy, it was inevi- table that the following communication too, in Thus Spoke Zarathus- tra, remained uncomprehended as a whole-all the more so since its form could only have alienated readers, ultimately distracting them from a rigorous thinking of the most difficult thought rather than guid- ing them toward it. And yet the poetic creation of the thinker of eternal
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return was for Nietzsche himself the matter that was "deepest" and was thus most essential for him: it took shape in and as the history of the coming to be-and that means the downgoing-of the hero who thinks the thought.
Let us now examine the suppressed materials from the Zarathustra period, basing our search on the understanding of Nietzsche's second communication of the thought of return in the way we have indicated -the communication via Zarathustra in the book Thus Spoke Zara- thustra. Our search will reveal that the ratio of unpublished notes to what Nietzsche himself communicated is precisely the inverse of what it was in the period of The Gay Science and that book's immediate background.
20. Notes from the Zarathustra Period, 1883-84
The notes in question are to be found in volume XII of the Grossoktav edition, pages 369-71, under numbers 719 to 731. A number of scat- tered observations that allude to the thought of return only indirectly might also be drawn into consideration here, along with the quite extensive "materials"-maxims, plans, and references-from the preliminary sketches to Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
What the editors have collected under the specific title "The Eternal Return" is small in scope but significant in import. When we compare these few fragments-most of them consisting of a single statement or question-with those of the preceding period, the first thing that strikes us is the absence of "proofs" derived from the natural sciences. Com- mentators are wont to conclude that Nietzsche himself must in the meantime have given up on such proofs. Yet we find these ostensibly scientific statements also in notes composed some time later. What we must guard against is our own tendency to extract the import of these statements as though they were formulas of physics. If they never were pieces of scientific evidence in the first place, it cannot be a matter of Nietzsche's surrendering erstwhile proofs.
How are we to interpret the following statement? "Life itself created the thought that is hardest for it to bear; life wants to leap beyond its highest barrier! " (number 720). Here it is not a matter of the doctrine's "ethical impact" or "subjective significance. " The thought pertains to "life" itself. "Life" in this case means the will to power. Being itself, as something that becomes, is creative and destructive; as creative it projects the prospects of its transfiguring possibilities ahead of itself.
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Supreme creation is creation of the highest barrier, which is to say, the barrier that embodies the most stubborn resistance to creation itself, thereby catapulting creation magnificently into farther reaches of life- enhancement. The thought of eternal return is the hardest thought for life to think, precisely because life can most easily go astray on account of it, straying from itself as truly creative and allowing everything to submerge in sheer apathy and indifference. In the statement we are considering, eternal recurrence is seen to spring from the essence of "life" itself; hence it is removed at the outset from all fortuitous whimsy and all "personal confessions of faith. " From the present van- tage-point we can also see how the doctrine of eternal return of the same, as a doctrine of perpetual Becoming, relates to the ancient doc- trine of the external flux of all things-a view that is usually called "Heraclitean. "
Commentators are accustomed to equating Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return of the same with the teachings of Heraclitus. Appeal- ing to Nietzsche's own utterances in this respect, they designate Nietz- sche's philosophy a kind of "Heracliteanism. " Now, it is indisputable that Nietzsche sensed a certain kinship between his own and Hera- clitus' teachings-as he saw them, he along with his contemporaries. Especially about the year 1881, immediately prior to the birth of the thought of return, he often spoke of "the eternal flux of all things" (cf. XII, 30; number 57). He even called the doctrine "of the flux of things" the "ultimate truth" (number 89), that is, the truth that can no longer be incorporated. This suggests that the doctrine of the eternal flow of all things, in the sense of thoroughgoing impermanence, can no longer be held to be true; human beings cannot hold firm in it as something true because they would thereby surrender themselves to ceaseless change, inconstancy, and total obliteration, and because everything firm, everything true, would have become quite impossible.
In fact, Nietzsche had imbibed of this basic position vis-a-vis being as a whole, as eternal flow, directly before the thought of eternal return of the same came to him. Yet if as we have seen this thought is the genuine belief, the essential way of holding firm in the true, as what is fixated, then the thought of eternal return of the same freezes the eternal flow; the ultimate truth is now to be incorporated (see the first plans from
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the year 1881). * From our present vantage-point we can see why these first plans speak so emphatically of "incorporation. " As opposed to that, it is now a matter of overcoming the doctrine of the eternal flux of things and its essentially destructive character. Once the doctrine of return emerges, Nietzsche's "Heracliteanism" is a very peculiar affair indeed. The note stemming from Nietzsche's Zarathustra period which we shall now cite (number 723) is crystal clear about this: "I teach you redemption from the eternal flux: the river flows ever back into itself, and you are ever stepping into the same river, as the selfsame ones. "
Nietzsche's utterance is a conscious reply to a thought in Greek philosophy that was associated with Heraclitus-that is to say, with a particular interpretation of his doctrine. According to that thought, we can never step into the identical river, on account of its perpetual and ineluctable onward flow. t Nietzsche designates his doctrine-in
• In the plan dated August 26, 1881 (in CM seeM lll I [197]), Nietzsche entitles the second book of his projected work on eternal recurrence "On the Incorporation of Experiences. " Incorporation, Einverleibung, must be understood initially in biological -not legal-terms, as ingestion; it later assumes a more social, cultural sense. Among the many passages on incorporation (e. g. , M llll [164, 273, 314]) are the two following. Fragment number 162 begins:
In order for there to be some degree of consciousness in the world, an unreal world of error must come to be: creatures that believe in the perdurance of individuals, etc. Only after an imaginary counterworld, in contradiction to absolute flux, had originat- ed could something be recognized on the basis ofit-indeed, we can ultimately get insight into the fundamental error on which all else rests (because opposites can be thought}-yet the error cannot be extirpated without annihilating life: the ultimate truth of the flux of things does not sustain incorporation; our organs (for living) are oriented to error. Thus in the man of wisdom there originates the contradiction oflife and of his ultimate decisions; his drive to knowledge has as its presuppositions the belief in error and the life in such belief.
And at the center of fragment number 262 we find:
Whatever corresponds to the necessary life-conditions of the time and the group will establish itself as "truth": in the long run humanity's sum ofopinions will be incorpo- rated, the opinions that were most useful to them, that is, granted them the possibility of the longest duration. The most essential of these opinions on which the duration of humanity rests are those that it incorporated long ago, for example, belief in same- ness, number, space, etc. The struggle will not turn about these things-it can only be an expansion of these erroneous foundations of our animal existence.
t See, in the Diels-Kranz numeration, B 49a, 91, and 12. See also Jean Brun, Hera- elite (Paris: Seghers, 1965), p. 136 n. 24; and G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Preso- cratic Philosophers, pp. 196-99.
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opposition to the ancient one-as "redemption from the eternal flux. " That does not mean brushing aside Becoming, or petrifying it; it means liberation from the irreducible, ceaseless "forever the same. " Becoming is retained as Becoming. Yet permanence-that is, when understood in Greek fashion, Being-is injected into Becoming.
Being as a whole is still a flux, a flowing in the sense of a becoming. However, recurrence of the same is so essential to this becoming that it is such recurrence that primarily defines the character of Becoming. For Nietzsche a particular notion of what is called an "infinite process" is coined on this basis. "An infinite process cannot be thought of in any other way than as periodic" (number 727). In the infinitude of actual time, the only possible kind of occurrence for a finite world that is now still "becoming" is recurrence-the cycle. The sundry episodes that constitute it are not to be imagined as being lined up in some extrinsic way and then joined end to end, since this would result in a vacuous circulation; rather, every episode, each in its own way, is a resonance of the whole and a harmonious entry into the whole. "Didn't you know? In each of your actions the history of everything that has happened is repeated in condensed form" (number 726). While at first blush the doctrine of return introduces an immense, paralyzing indifference into all beings and into human behavior, in truth the thought of thoughts grants supreme lucidity and decisiveness to beings at every moment.
The haunting vision that the thought of return might enervate all being disturbed Nietzsche so profoundly that he was forced to consider quite carefully the consequences of his doctrine: "Fear in the face of the doctrine's consequences: perhaps the best natures perish on ac- count of it? The worst adopt it? " (number 729). The worst adopt it, assert themselves in it, and establish on the basis of it the fact that beings have fallen prey to general indifference and gratuitousness. This as the consequence of a doctrine that in truth wishes to supply the center of gravity and to propel human beings beyond all mediocrity. Yet because this haunting vision cannot be dispelled, because it comes to the fore and oppresses us rudely and relentlessly, it dominates for a time the way we take the doctrine to be true:
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At first the common riffraff will smile upon the doctrine of return, all who are cold and without much inner need. The most vulgar impulse to life will be the first to grant assent. A great truth wins to itself the highest human beings last: this is what anything true must suffer (number 730; cf. number 35). •
When we survey the few fragments of the Zarathustra period that explicitly meditate on the doctrine of return we realize that these are, in terms of import, quite significant; a few vigorous statements and a number of lucidly posed questions say everything that is essential. While Nietzsche's thoughtful and poetically creative work on this most difficult of thoughts drives him to excesses, a kind of pendulum effect intervenes, ensuring that his unrelenting efforts will find the midpoint. Above the turbulence of inquiry and demand prevails the cheerful calm of a victor who is long accustomed to suffering. Nietzsche achieves such calm and tranquillity also with respect to the question of the possible impact of the doctrine (XII, 398; from the year 1883):
The most magnificent thought works its effects most slowly and belatedly! Its most immediate impact is as a substitute for the belief in immortality: does it augment good will toward life? Perhaps it is not true:-may others wrestle with it!
One might be tempted to conclude from this last remark that Nietz- sche himself doubted the truth of the thought and did not take it seriously, that he was only toying with it as a possibility. Such a con- clusion would be a sign of superficial thinking. Of course Nietzsche doubted this thought, as he doubted every essential thought: this per- tains to the style of his thinking. Yet from that we dare not conclude that he failed to take the thought itself seriously. What we must rather conclude is that he took the thought altogether seriously, subjecting it to interrogation again and again, testing it, in that way learning to think on his own two feet, as it were, and conducting himself to knowledge-namely, knowledge of the fact that what is essentially to be thought here is the matter of possibility. Every time Nietzsche writes "perhaps it is not true" he is designating with sufficient clarity
• GOA, XII, number 35 was cited earlier, in section 19, p. 142, above. In CM see M III I [147].
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the character of such possibility. Nietzsche knows only thoughts that have to be wrestled with. It is another question altogether whether he is the victor and master over the thought, or whether it still remains for others to grapple with it.
21. Notes from the Period of "The Will to Power," 1884-88
In the years that immediately followed Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1884 to 1886, we find plans for additions to that book and for an altogether different configuration of it. Here too the thought of return everywhere assumes center-stage in Nietzsche's thinking. The guiding notion for the new configuration is the thought of the "magnificent midday" as the "decisive time" (XII, number 419; from the year 1886).
It is important that we take into account the existence of these plans from the time circa 1886. In line with the general insecurity and the vacillation of Nietzsche interpretation heretofore as regards the doc- trine of return, an erroneous view has recently been propagated, to the effect that Nietzsche allowed the thought of return-which ostensibly was only a personal confession of faith anyway-to recede from his thinking the moment he began to plan and prepare his philosophic magnum opus. It is indeed the case that as soon as he had concluded Zarathustra in 1884 Nietzsche became absorbed in plans for a work that was to present his philosophy as a whole in a systematic way. Labors on this work occupied Nietzsche (with interruptions) from 1884 to the end of his creative life, that is, till the end of 1888.
After everything we have heard up to now concerning Nietzsche's "thought of thoughts," with which he had been grappling ever since the year 1881, it would surely be astonishing if the plan for this major philosophical work were not sustained and not pervaded by the thought of eternal return. At all events, the earlier reference to the plan of 1886 makes one thing perfectly clear; even at this time the thought of eternal return constitutes the fulcrum of Nietzsche's thinking. How could he have prepared his major philosophical work during this period without
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the thought, or after having surrendered it? What more striking proof could we demand than the third communication by Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil (number 56; from the year 1886), which dem- onstrates that the thought of return was not only not surrendered and not cast aside-as though it had been a mere personal confession of faith-but enhanced in a new excursion to the very limits and supreme heights of its thinkability? Was not this new attempt, which was con- temporaneous with Nietzsche's most vigorous labors on his magnum opus, to be in the most intrinsic way at one with and at the heart's core of his projected work? Even if we had no more than the previously cited testimony for the existence of the thought of eternal return in 1886, it would be enough to unmask the erroneous view of the thought's imputed retreat. Yet how do matters stand with regard to the things Nietzsche thought and jotted down in the period 1884-88 but did not elect to communicate?
The stock of unpublished materials from these years is quite exten- sive and is to be found in volumes XIII to XVI in the Grossoktav edition. Yet we immediately have to add that the materials appear here in a way that beguiles and thoroughly misleads all interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy during this decisive period-granted that we are speaking of an interpretation, that is, a confrontation in the light ofthe grounding question of Western thinking. * The principal reason for the misleading nature of the arrangement of these notes lies in a happenstance that is always taken far too casually.