“Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative” in “Nietzsche's Esistential Imperative”
Nietzsche’s Eternalistic Countermyth
I was the first to see the real opposition: the degenerating instinct that turns against life with subterranean vengefulness (Christianity, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, in a certain sense the philosophy of Plato, and all idealism as typical forms) versus a formula for the highest affirmation, born of fullness, of overfullness, a Yes-saying without reservation, even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything that is questionable and strange in existence.
THE “MYTH” IN NIETZSCHE’S COUNTERMYTH
The previous chapter has shown why the putative truth-value of the doctrine of eternal recurrence is of little consequence. What the doctrine of eternal recurrence teaches is not what the world is, but how it might be taken, given a certain attitude toward it. That attitude is one of radical affirmation—indeed I have called it celebrating life—and is thus to be understood as the form of life which is no longer nihilistic. The attitude the doctrine wishes to portray is the one which is the opposite of the spirit of decline of life, decadence; in a word, worldweariness. The doctrine of eternal recurrence is intended to capture the attitude of Übermenschlichkeit. But we must also recall Nietzsche’s other point that attitudes toward life—estimates of life’s value—are to be understood in a self-referring sense. Curiously, therefore, recurrence captures the attitude of radical affirmation because it is already that form of life which has ceased to devalue life, has ceased to devalue the highest values. Recurrence expresses the attitude of Übermenschlichkeit because it captures the being-in-the-world of the Übermensch.
Here, then, the literal thrust of the doctrine has a value. In order to understand the attitude of Übermenschlichkeit, in order to grasp it conceptually, I must “picture” it. To picture it, however, is to behave for the moment as if recurrence were true.1 A parenthetical caution needs to be inserted here, however. There is a temptation to construe the doctrine of eternal recurrence as if belief in it produced Übermenschen. Resist such temptation; for such an interpretation would be erroneously causal, disappointing, and ludicrous. It would be erroneously causal because eternal recurrence expresses an antecedently achieved attitude, a form of life, if you will. It does not cause or induce genuine affirmation. Such an interpretation, further, would invariably be disappointing as well, as any freshman Nietzschephile can attest, because once the doctrine is “understood” no automatic liberation seems to follow. But wouldn't it be ludicrous to suppose that any doctrine, for Nietzsche, could cause Übermenschheit, including his own? Recall that for him to have to fight instinct is a formula for decadence. Accordingly, if I have to rush eternal recurrence into service to try to affirm my life, my life is not yet affirmative. Certainly there can be no question of an instinct to affirm in such a case. Rather, it is decadence which one attempts in such a case to combat.
So the value of eternal recurrence, when depicted, lies primarily in its diagnostic thrust. For those of us who are captured by traditional nihilism, in Nietzsche’s sense, captured by traditional devalued forms of thought, speech, and action, eternal recurrence accomplishes two things in one stroke. It tells us what affirmation is and how far removed we are from it. Let us, therefore, “picture” recurrence to ourselves now. Consider what it would mean to regard the doctrine as true. According to Nietzsche’s doctrine, this moment has occurred an infinity of times before, as have its consequences asd outcome. Yet individual memory only functions within each recurrence. Memory functions as a durational element within a recurrence. It is not transphenomenal. And yet, according to the literal version of the eternal recurrence notion, this moment is but a repetition of an infinity of identical moments. Consequently, whatever my life entails, I only know that it will recur eternally and, also, that the outcome of my action has been decreed unto all eternity. My conduct, although apparently free, has been preordained.
Nietzsche consciously opposed himself to Plato in most of his writings, as we saw earlier. His distinctions between “true” and “apparent,” being and becoming, carry with them the overtones of the Platonic dialectic. And just as Nietzsche sought to transvaluate Platonic values in aesthetics, so he attacks the theory of recollection through the doctrine of eternal recurrence. There is, for Nietzsche, no inherent region of Forms (eidos, idea) which the soul recalls. On the contrary, the mind cannot even recall its own ineluctable fate, while the world recurs in eternal and monotonous self-identity. I only know what my life has been unto all eternity after I come to know what it is and will he. There are no fortunes to be told.
The literal version of the doctrine of eternal recurrence poses an existential paradox. In the absence of a memory of previous states I am free to choose my own destiny. I do not know what I shall become except in so far as I actually choose. Still, eternal recurrence intensifies the dynamics of choice, because whatever I choose to be, that I shall be for infinite recurrences. There is no immortal soul, for each moment is immortal. Once a moment has passed it does not sink into a past forever beyond recall. It shall eternally recur.
This strange and puzzling literal version of the doctrine enjoins us to become what we are (a phrase of which Nietzsche rarely tires) not merely in the sense that we must fulfill our inner nature. It admonishes us to stamp the character of eternity upon our lives. It is the most extreme intensification and revaluation of the moment, by eternalizing it. The eternal 'future' is cast by our conduct in this life. Thus, through the interpenetration of an infinite 'future' and infinite 'past' within the finite moment, the present also is eternalized. Paradoxically, I am free to create my determined fate.
The paradox, that we are free to create our determined fate, is not accidental. Nietzsche understood the parallel difficulty at the heart of Christianity and, no doubt, exploited that parallelism. For, as has often been argued, if it is true that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, it is difficult to see how man could be free.
If God is omniscient, he knows everything; more than that, he always knew everything. Among the things God always knew is the class of events in nature called “human actions.” But that means that God knows my future actions. Indeed he always knew them. If God does not know future actions, he does not know everything. But if he does not know everything he cannot be all-knowing, i.e., omniscient. Not knowing anything, any X, is sufficient to defeat the omniscienceclaim. In consequence, to claim omniscience is to claim to know everything, including future actions. Am I then “free” to behave in the way God knows that I will? Must I behave that way? Am I free? Much depends, of course, on what is meant by “free.” There is good reason to suppose that whatever else “freedom” might mean, it must mean the capacity to act in alternate ways. That is what we ordinarily mean by having a “choice,” i.e., the capacity to act in alternate ways. A stone, for instance, is neither “free” to fall nor to forbear falling. It has no choice. It is not possible for a stone to decide to behave in alternate ways, to choose between alternatives, because its behavior is determined, not self-determined. Now if God knows our future actions, can we forbear performing them? Consider your reading this sentence. We want to say that you “chose” to read it, were “free” to read it. That means that an alternative might have been selected; not reading this sentence, for instance. But if God knows future actions, could you not have read this sentence? Probably not.2 An omniscient God would have had to know, first, that you felt you could read or not read this sentence; second, that you felt that you chose to read this sentence; third, that you read this sentence. In point of fact, however, God would have known how you felt and how you behaved. In consequence, it would not have been possible to act in alternate ways, even though you felt otherwise. Moreover, God knows that too.
Considerations not unlike the sort just offered led Luther to conclude that man is not free, that God punishes us for actions we cannot forbear performing (although God, all-powerful, could have prevented us), and that this mystery constitutes Gods mercy and love. The logical consequence of such a view is Calvins theory of predestination.
Now Nietzsche was fully aware of the Christian puzzle, I believe, and exploited the force of its contradiction, while avoiding its unhappy consequences. Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence, when pictured literally, differs from the God-hypothesis because the actor writes his own scenario in the performance. Without a God there is no divine foreknowledge, no script we act out as the sum and substance of our lives. Nietzsche’s anti-Christian myth attempts to retrieve the dignity of man and world by eternalizing each moment, without contamination from a “beyond.” Eternal recurrence proclaims a fate which we can presumably embrace, because it is one which we alone shape. The attitude which would eternalize the moment through eternal recurrence is the most extreme affirmation; the most extreme approximation of a world of becoming to that of being. It is, in fact, the deification of the world. That, after all, was Nietzsche’s highest and most hoped-for achievement.
MYTH AND ONTOLOGICAL ALLEGORY : PLATO
Apart from the now obvious contrast between the myths of recurrence and salvation, I have alluded repeatedly to that other “fable” which Nietzsche’s existential imperative counters: Plato’s allegory of the cave. Plato’s allegory is surely the most famous single “myth” in the history of philosophy. From it derives Platonism in its quintessential outlines. In its essentials, it, too, is what Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence seeks to overcome. At the continued risk of boredom, I reproduce it here in fulsome detail:
Next, said I, here is a parable to illustrate the degrees in which our nature may be enlightened or unenlightened. Imagine the condition of men living in a sort of cavernous chamber underground, with an entrance open to the light and a long passage all down the cave. Here they have been from childhood, chained by the leg and also by the neck, so that they cannot move and can see only what is in front of them, because the chains will not let them turn their heads. At some distance higher up is the light of a fire burning behind them; and between the prisoners and the fire is a track with a parapet built along it, like the screen at a puppet-show, which hides the performers while they show their puppets over the top.
I see, said he.
Now behind this parapet imagine persons carrying along various artificial objects, including figures of men and animals in wood or stone or other materials, which project above the parapet. Naturally, some of these persons will be talking, others silent.
It is a strange picture, he said, and a strange sort of prisoners.
Like ourselves, I replied; for in the first place prisoners so confined would have seen nothing of themselves or of one another, except the shadows thrown by the fire-light on the wall of the Cave facing them, would they?
Not if all their lives they had been prevented from moving their heads.
And they would have seen as little of the objects carried past.
Of course.
Now, if they could talk to one another, would they not suppose that their words referred only to those passing shadows which they saw?
Necessarily.
And suppose their prison had an echo from the wall facing them? When one of the people crossing behind them spoke, they could only suppose that the sound came from the shadow passing before their eyes.
No doubt.
In every way, then, such prisoners would recognize as reality nothing but the shadows of those artificial objects.
Inevitably.
Now consider what would happen if their release from the chains and the healing of their unwisdom should come about in this way. Suppose one of them set free and forced suddenly to stand up, turn his head, and walk with eyes lifted to the light; all these movements would be painful, and he would be too dazzled to make out the objects whose shadows he had been used to see. What do you think he would say, if someone told him that what he had formerly seen was meaningless illusion, but now, being somewhat nearer to reality and turned towards more real objects, he was getting a truer view? Suppose further that he were shown the various objects being carried by and were made to say, in reply to questions, what each of them was. Would he not be perplexed and believe the objects now shown him to be not so real as what he formerly saw?
Yes, not nearly so real.
And if he were forced to look at the fire-light itself, would not his eyes ache, so that he would try to escape and turn back to the things which he could see distinctly, convinced that they really were clearer than these other objects now being shown to him?
Yes.
And suppose someone were to drag him away forcibly up the steep and rugged ascent and not let him go until he had hauled him out into the sunlight, would he not suffer pain and vexation at such treatment, and, when he had come out into the light, find his eyes so full of its radiance that he could not see a single one of the things that he was now told were real?
Certainly he would not see them all at once.
He would need, then, to grow accustomed before he could see things in that upper world. At first it would be easiest to make out shadows, and then the images of men and things reflected in water, and later on the things themselves. After that, it would be easier to watch the heavenly bodies and the sky itself by night, looking at the light of the moon and stars rather than the Sun and the Sun’s light in the day-time.
Yes, surely.
Last of all, he would be able to look at the Sun and contemplate its nature, not as it appears when reflected in water or any alien medium, but as it is in itself in its own domain.
No doubt.
And now he would begin to draw the conclusion that it is the Sun that produces the seasons and the course of the year and controls everything in the visible world, and moreover is in a way the cause of all that he and his companions used to see.
Clearly he would come at last to that conclusion.
Then if he called to mind his fellow prisoners and what passed for wisdom in his former dwelling-place, he would surely think himself happy in the change and be sorry for them. They may have had a practice of honouring and commending one another, with prizes for the man who had the keenest eye for the passing shadows and the best memory for the order in which they followed or accompanied one another, so that he could make a good guess as to which was going to come next. Would our released prisoner be likely to covet those prizes or to envy the men exalted to honour and power in the Cave? Would he not feel like Homer’s Achilles, that he would far sooner 'be on earth as a hired servant in the house of a landless man' or endure anything rather than go back to his old beliefs and live in the old way?
Yes, he would prefer any fate to such a life.
Now imagine what would happen if he went down again to take his former seat in the Cave. Coming suddenly out of the sunlight, his eyes would be filled with darkness. He might be required once more to deliver his opinion on those shadows, in competition with the prisoners who had never been released, while his eyesight was still dim and unsteady; and it might take some time to become used to the darkness. They would laugh at him and say that he had gone up only to come back with his sight ruined; it was worth no one’s while even to attempt the ascent. If they could lay hands on the man who was trying to set them free and lead them up, they would kill him.
Yes, they would.3
As we have said, this allegory, Plato’s allegory of the cave, is perhaps the most famous one in the history of Western philosophy. It has generally been construed as emblematic of the Platonic philosophy simpliciter. It has also been the beneficiary of over two thousand years of discussion. But I do not propose to crowd yet another marginal comment into an already overcrowded Plato-literature. The allegory of the cave is cited here with quite different purposes in mind.
It has been suggested in the last section and elsewhere that Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence serves the function of a countermyth, an eternalistic countermyth which serves to sanctify and consecrate the transient flow of experience, that temporal flux which philosophers since before Plato have baptized with the name “becoming.” The doctrine of eternal recurrence, then, is a sort of deification of that which is transient, by eternalizing it. Temporality is eternalized in Nietzsche’s doctrine, if the myth is construed factually.
But the doctrine of eternal recurrence, the eternalistic countermyth, is always presented in Nietzsche’s published writings in allegorical disguise. Like Plato’s allegory of the cave, Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence is always presented as an ontology in allegory.
The English word “allegory” probably derives directly from the French allégorie. Allégorie in turn was used interchangeably with the Latin allegoria as late as the 16th century. “Allegory,” “allégorie,” and “allegoria' derive from the Greek a̓λλƞγoρía, which literally means “speaking otherwise than one seems to speak,” to speak (áγoρεύειʋ) in another (ἄλλως) manner, sometimes in the public assembly (a̓γoρà).
The Greek meaning of “allegory” has been quite well preserved in English usage. Thus, for example, The Oxford English Dictionary still captures the Greek sense of “allegory” fully: “Description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive resemblance. . . . An instance of such a description; a figurative sentence, discourse, or narrative, in which properties and circumstances attributed to the apparent subject really refer to the subject they are meant to suggest; an extended or continued metaphor.”
Plato’s myth of the cave is an extended metaphor which appears to be the description of imprisoned and bound cave-dwellers, guessing at shadows only. But the circumstances and the situation’s overt subject matter constitute, indeed, “some other subject matter of aptly suggestive resemblance.” The cave allegory’s covert subject is the human condition, the nature of reality, and the relation which obtains between a philosopher’s perception of truth and reality and his reception among less enlightened natures.
Every feature in this parable, my dear Glaucon, is meant to fît our earlier analysis. The prison dwelling corresponds to the region revealed to us through the sense of sight, and the fire-light within it to the power of the Sun. The ascent to see the things in the upper world you may take as standing for the upward journey of the soul into the region of the intelligible; then you will be in possession of what I surmise, since that is what you wish to be told. Heaven knows whether it is true; but this, at any rate, is how it appears to me. In the world of knowledge, the last thing to be perceived and only with great difficulty is the essential Form of the Good. Once it is perceived, the conclusion must follow that, for all things, this is the cause of whatever is right and good; in the visible world it gives birth to light and to the lord of light, while it is itself sovereign in the intelligible world and the parent of intelligence and truth. Without having had a vision of this Form no one can act with wisdom, either in his own life or in matters of state.
So far as I can understand, I share your belief.
Then you may also agree that it is no wonder if those who have reached this height are reluctant to manage the affairs of men. Their souls long to spend all their time in that upper world—naturally enough, if here once more our parable holds true. Nor, again, is it at all strange that one who comes from the contemplation of divine things to the miseries of human life should appear awkward and ridiculous when, with eyes still dazed and not yet accustomed to the darkness, he is compelled, in a law-court or elsewhere, to dispute about the shadows of justice or the images that cast those shadows, and to wrangle over the notions of what is right in the minds of men who have never beheld Justice itself.4
Plato’s extended metaphor invites that systemic dualism which followed in its wake and which Nietzsche so urgently deplored. To distinguish between philosophers and non-philosophers, Plato distinguishes sharply between knowledge and belief. Moreover, he not only distinguishes two different states of mind but argues that there are two different sets of objects which correspond to these two different states of mind. The philosophers state of mind is knowledge (epistemē), even noesis in the perception of the Form of the Good (auto to agathon). And the objects of knowledge are Beauty itself, Justice itself; the Forms. The non-philosophers state of mind, on the other hand, is belief, and its objects are the many particular things—acts, events, situations. Plato maintains, moreover, that Forms are absolutely distinct from things and that, in consequence, the state of mind which apprehends them—knowledge—is absolutely distinct from belief, opinion (doxa, pistis). Opinions are changeable, fallible, the result of convention or persuasion. Ultimately, opinions are irrational. Knowledge, on the other hand, is rational, clear, exact; indeed, it is infallible. Moreover, knowledge which is derived from teaching, for example, is really a process of recollection (hence the metaphor of the philosopher-teacher as a midwife). We recall the Forms seen with the mind’s eye before the body imprisoned and confused us, Plato argues. The things we now perceive remind us of the Forms they are said to imitate. So the hypothesis that there are Forms has one additional consequence; Plato’s insistence that the soul (psychē) is immortal as he argues in the Phaedo.
As concerns the nature of the soul itself, in The Republic Plato suggests a tripartite division: the natural appetites, the spirit or resolution by which we can (if we will) resist the appetites, and reason that determines when we should resist. Virtue (aretē) consists in the proper functioning of these three elements of the soul. A man is wise, therefore, if his reason decides rightly; brave, if his spirit carries out the decision firmly; temperate and just, if the better part rules the worse and when each part confines itself to its own proper business. Vice, as contrasted with virtue, consists ultimately and necessarily in disharmony among the parts of the soul. Vice is a soul in anarchical conflict with itself.
Since Plato also viewed the state as the individual writ large, it followed for him that the ideal polis would mirror the harmonious soul. In such a city-state, in such a polis, a small class of soldiers will be separated from the appetitive masses, from the hoi polloi. They will live together communally, without private property or nuclear family, and will be rendered utterly devoted to the republic’s protection by their education. Within this “spirited” element of the polis a few philosophic souls will finally emerge, through a series of examinations, higher education in mathematics and dialectics. The philosophers alone will understand the Form of the Good, which, in turn, imposes upon them the duty to rule the republic—though not the desire to rule it. The philosopher-king’s wisdom imposes upon him the obligation to rule, in short.
COUNTERMYTH AND ONTOLOGICAL ALLEGORY : NIETZSCHE
On at least one occasion Nietzsche characterized Christianity as Platonism for the masses. Both Platonism and Christianity suffer from persistent defects, namely the denigration of becoming, the justification of man and world by recourse to a beyond, a consolatory account of experience. Platonic-Christian “otherworldliness” may be said to be symptomatic of decadence for Nietzsche, because it takes life itself to be a condition of distress, something to be surmounted.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence is intended to function as a countermyth, an allegory pitted against what he took to be the dominant allegory: Platonism Christianized. And it is Zarathustra who teaches that doctrine, appropriately enough at noon, at the moment of the briefest shadow, when the distinction between a shadowy apparent world, a cave-world indeed, and a plenary realm of light and truth has been eclipsed. “The true world we have abolished: Which world remained? The apparent one perhaps? . . . But no! With the true world we have abolished the apparent one as well! (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)5
And just as Plato’s ontology unfolds under the guise of the allegory of the cave, so Nietzsche’s doctrine emerges in Zarathustra’s parables. The most sustained parable which deals with the doctrine of eternal recurrence is to be found in the Third Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the famous section titled “On the Vision and the Riddle.” Let us now turn to it in some detail.
Zarathustra had been on board ship among sailors for two days, during which period he remained utterly silent.
When it got abroad among the sailors that Zarathustra was on board—for another man from the blessed isles had embarked with him—there was much curiosity and anticipation. But Zarathustra remained silent for two days and was cold and deaf from sadness and answered neither glances nor questions. But on the evening of the second day he opened his ears again, although he still remained silent, for there was much that was strange and dangerous to be heard on this ship, which came from far away and wanted to sail even farther. But Zarathustra was a friend to all who travel far and do not like to live without danger.6
Zarathustra breaks his silence on the evening of that second day and blurts out the riddle, the vision he had seen.
And behold, eventually his own tongue was loosened as he listened, and the ice of his heart broke. Then he began to speak thus:
To you, the bold searchers, researchers, and whoever embarks with cunning sails on terrible seas—to you, drunk with riddles, glad of the twilight, whose soul flutes lure astray to every whirlpool, because you do not want to grope along a thread with cowardly hand; and where you can guess, you hate to deduce —to you alone I tell the riddle that I saw, the vision of the loneliest.7
The vision which Zarathustra then describes is laden with powerful symbols, many of which play the same sort of paradigmatic role in Nietzsche’s thought as do the metaphors of caves, prisoners, shadows and sunlight, in the thought of Plato.
Not long ago I walked gloomily through the deadly pallor of dusk—gloomy and hard, with lips pressed together. Not only one sun had set for me. A path that ascended defiantly through stones, malicious, lonely, not cheered by herb or shrub—a mountain path crunched under the defiance of my foot. Striding silently over the mocking clatter of pebbles, crushing the rock that made it slip, my foot forced its way upward. Upward—defying the spirit that drew it downward toward the abyss, the spirit of gravity, my devil and archenemy. Upward—although he sat on me, half dwarf, half mole, lame, making lame, dripping lead into my ear, leaden thoughts into my brain.
“O Zarathustra,” he whispered mockingly, syllable by syllable; “you philosophers stone! You threw yourself up high, but every stone that is thrown must fall. O Zarathustra, you philosophers stone, you slingstone, you star-crusher! You threw yourself up so high; but every stone that is thrown must fall. Sentenced to yourself and to your own stoning—O Zarathustra, far indeed have you thrown the stone, but it will fall back on yourself.”
Then the dwarf fell silent, and that lasted a long time. His silence, however, oppressed me; and such twosomeness is surely more lonesome than being alone.8
A dwarf is Zarathustra’s “companion” as he attempts to scale the heights, as he attempts to surmount traditional habits of thought, speech, and action; traditional forms of life in short. The ascent begins in the deadly pallor of dusk, along a barren and treacherous mountain path. The spirit of gravity draws Zarathustra toward the abyss in two senses: as gravity impedes physical ascent, and as its spirit—the spirit of the camel—makes transcendence arduous. The weight of the wisdom of two millenia sits on Zarathustra—"half dwarf, half mole, lame, making lame, dripping lead into my ear, leaden thoughts into my brain.” The devil and archenemy, the “last man” in ourselves is, of course, our other self, a self to be uprooted and transfigured. And this silent companion creates a divided self, a twosomeness which is more lonesome than being alone—as the modern institution of marriage has become in so many recent cases.
Finally, having twice summoned his courage, Zarathustra’s vision compels that either he or his dwarf must perish. The dwarf cannot possibly bear the eternal recurrence of himself, Zarathustra’s most abysmal thought.
I climbed, I climbed, I dreamed, I thought; but everything oppressed me. I was like one sick whom his wicked torture makes weary, and who as he falls asleep is awakened by a still more wicked dream. But there is something in me that I call courage; that has so far slain my every discouragement. This courage finally bade me stand still and speak: “Dwarf! It is you or I! But I am the stronger of us two: you do not know my abysmal thought. That you could not bear!”
At that point in the parable the vision of recurrence unfolds. And it is perhaps worth noting now that, philosophically speaking, the parable really consists of two essential conceptual moments. The first is the ideographic presentation of recurrence. The second moment begins with the puzzle of the shepherd.
Then something happened that made me lighter, for the dwarf jumped from my shoulder, being curious; and he crouched on a stone before me. But there was a gateway just where we had stopped.
“Behold this gateway, dwarf!" I continued. “It has two faces. Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end. This long lane stretches back for an eternity. And the long lane out there, that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these paths; they offend each other face to face; and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: 'Moment.' But whoever would follow one of them, on and on, farther and farther—do you believe, dwarf, that these paths contradict each other eternally?”
“All that is straight lies,” the dwarf murmured contemptuously. “All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.”
“You spirit of gravity,” I said angrily, “do not make things too easy for yourself! Or I shall let you crouch where you are crouching, lamefoot; and it was I that carried you to this height.”
Zarathustra commands that the dwarf observe the gateway at which they stand, symbolizing the present, the gateway called “Moment.” Two paths meet at this moment, the past and future. These infinite, contradictory paths meet as past and future may be said to merge in the present.
Notice that when Zarathustra asks the dwarf whether past and future contradict one another, the dwarf replies: “All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.” Notice also that Zarathustra then quickly responds and does so in apparent anger. That is puzzling.
After all, it is the dwarf who suggests that time is a circle. Are we therefore to credit the dwarf, the “last man” and “camel,” with a cyclical insight? Is the dwarf to be understood as the teacher of recurrence?
These questions are rhetorical, of course, but not pointless. What I wish to call attention to is that even the dwarf, in fact especially the dwarf, can “teach” a cyclical cosmology.9 Amor fati, existential imperative and countermyth, may be understood as a cosmology like that of the Stoics. But it is the dwarfs mentality which triumphs in that understanding. Nihilism is not overcome in such a construal. Indeed, it is never even touched.
“Behold,” I continued, "this moment! From this gateway, Moment, a long, eternal lane leads backward: behind us lies an eternity. Must not whatever can walk have walked on this lane before? Must not whatever can happen have happened, have been done, have passed by before? And if everything has been there before—what do you think, dwarf, of this moment? Must not this gateway too have been there before? And are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment draws after it all that is to come? Therefore—itself too? For whatever can walk—in this long lane out there too, it must walk once more.
“And this slow spider, which crawls in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway, whispering together, whispering of eternal things—must not all of us have been there before? And return and walk in that other lane, out there, before us, in this long dreadful lane—must we not eternally return?"
In the actual vision of “recurrence,” Zarathustra sees clearly and squarely the consequence of fatalism entailed by recurrence in the literal sense, as well as most of the conceptual issues we have discussed in earlier chapters.
What can occur? What can happen? “Must not whatever can walk have walked on this lane before? Must not whatever can happen have happened . . .?” Has this moment occurred before? “Must not this gateway too have been there before . . . must we not eternally return?”
Terrified and sickened by the thought of eternal recurrence, Zarathustra hears a dog howl nearby, hears a terrifying plaintive howl. And suddenly, no longer accompanied by his dwarf, Zarathustra spies the young man in whose throat a snake had bit itself fast—that monstrously grotesque metaphor.
Then suddenly I heard a dog howl nearby. Had I ever heard a dog howl like this? My thoughts raced back. Yes, when I was a child, in the most distant childhood: then I heard a dog howl like this. And I saw him too, bristling, his head up, trembling, in the stillest midnight when even dogs believe in ghosts—and I took pity: for just then the full moon, silent as death, passed over the house; just then it stood still, a round glow—still on the flat roof, as if on another’s property—that was why the dog was terrified, for dogs believe in thieves and ghosts. And when I heard such howling again I took pity again.
Where was the dwarf gone now? And the gateway? And the spider? And all the whispering? Was I dreaming then? Was I waking up?
Among wild cliffs I stood suddenly alone, bleak, in the bleakest moonlight. But there lay a man. And there—the dog, jumping, bristling, whining—now he saw me coming; then he howled again, he cried. Had I ever heard a dog cry like this for help? And verily, what I saw—I had never seen the like. A young shepherd I saw, writhing, gagging, in spasms, his face distorted, and a heavy black snake hung out of his mouth. Had I ever seen so much nausea and pale dread on one face? He seemed to have been asleep when the snake crawled into his throat, and there bit itself fast. My hand tore at the snake and tore in vain; it did not tear the snake out of his throat. Then it cried out of me: “Bite! Bite its head off!” Then it cried out of me—my dread, my hatred, my nausea, my pity, all that is good and wicked in me cried out of me with a single cry.
Notice the symmetry of Nietzsche’s ontological allegory. Recall that for him attitudes toward life are self-reference clues. Zarathustra is sickened and terrified by the “abysmal” thought of recurrence because he is sick and terrified, because his being is still abysmal. To affirm recurrence, we have remarked earlier, is to live in such a way that you must wish to live again. But to live in such a way that you must wish to live again is, precisely, to be able to affirm recurrence.
The parable ends, after the shepherd heeds Zarathustra’s advice to bite off the snake’s head, with a transfigured shepherd. “No longer shepherd, no longer human—one changed, radiant, laughing!” But just before the metamorphosis of the shepherd, we are challenged to guess the riddle, to interpret the vision of the loneliest. “ What did I see then in a parable? And who is it who must yet come one day? Who is . . . the shepherd? Who is the man into whose throat all that is heaviest and blackest will crawl thus?”
The answer to some of these questions is clear from the text itself. To other questions Nietzsche himself provides some answers, in a later section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, titled “The Convalescent.” Here Nietzsche once again unfolds his ontology in allegory and at the same time makes plain what Zarathustra saw in the parable, makes plain who must yet come one day and simultaneously shows the nature of the snake which chokes and disgusts.
Zarathustra is catapulted to his feet one morning from his resting place in his own cave. Yet, despite his dark fury, he behaves as if half of him were still resting on the ground, inert. He summons his most abysmal thought, the thought of recurrence, as if to awaken it, too, out of its sleepy depths. Zarathustra summons recurrence. Zarathustra, who advocates life, suffering, the circle, summons recurrence.
One morning, not long after his return to the cave, Zarathustra jumped up from his resting place like a madman, roared in a terrible voice, and acted as if somebody else were still lying on his resting place who refused to get up. And Zarathustra’s voice resounded so that his animals approached in a fright, while out of all the caves and nooks that were near Zarathustra’s cave all animals fled—flying, fluttering, crawling, jumping, according to the kind of feet or wings that were given to them. Zarathustra, however, spoke these words:
Up, abysmal thought, out of my depth! I am your cock and dawn, sleepy worm. Up! Up! My voice shall yet crow you awake! Unfasten the fetters of your ears: listen! For I want to hear you. Up! Up! Here is thunder enough to make even tombs learn to listen. And wipe sleep and all that is purblind and blind out of your eyes! Listen to me even with your eyes: my voice cures those born blind. And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally. It is not my way to awaken great-grandmothers from their sleep to bid them sleep on!
You are stirring, stretching, wheezing? Up! Up! You shall not wheeze but speak to me. Zarathustra, the godless, summons you! I, Zarathustra, the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle; I summon you, my most abysmal thought!10
The first summons is abortive and aborted. Zarathustra falls, prostrate and insensate “as one dead.” Then, trembling and denying food and drink, he lies there for seven days (the allusion here is to Genesis and, perhaps, even too obvious to have mentioned). His animals abide with him, and his eagle, symbol of pride, forages for food.
No sooner had Zarathustra spoken these words than he fell down as one dead and long remained as one dead. But when he regained his senses he was pale, and he trembled and remained lying there, and for a long time he wanted neither food nor drink. This behavior lasted seven days; but his animals did not leave him by day or night, except that the eagle flew off to get food. And whatever prey he got together, he laid on Zarathustra’s resting place; and eventually Zarathustra lay among yellow and red berries, grapes, rose apples, fragrant herbs, and pine cones. But at his feet two lambs lay spread out, which the eagle had with difficulty robbed from their shepherds.
His animals implore him to arise after seven days.
At last, after seven days, Zarathustra raised himself on his resting place, took a rose apple into his hand, smelled it, and found its fragrance lovely. Then his animals thought that the time had come to speak to him.
“O Zarathustra,” they said, “it is now seven days that you have been lying like this with heavy eyes; won't you at last get up on your feet again? Step out of your cave: the world awaits you like a garden. The wind is playing with heavy fragrances that want to get to you, and all the brooks would run after you. All things have been longing for you, while you have remained alone for seven days. Step out of your cave! All things would be your physicians. Has perhaps some new knowledge come to you, bitter and hard? Like leavened dough you have been lying; your soul rose and swelled over all its rims.”
Zarathustra now becomes responsive for the first time.
“O my animals,” replied Zarathustra, "chatter on like this and let me listen. It is so refreshing for me to hear you chatter: where there is chattering, there the world lies before me like a garden. How lovely it is that there are words and sounds! Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart?
“To every soul there belongs another world; for every soul, every other soul is an afterworld. Precisely between what is most similar, illusion lies most beautifully; for the smallest cleft is the hardest to bridge.
“For me—how should there be any outside-myself? there is no outside. But all sounds make us forget this; how lovely it is that we forget. Have not names and sounds been given to things that man might find things refreshing? Speaking is a beautiful folly: with that man dances over all things. How lovely is all talking, and all the deception of sounds! With sounds our love dances on many-hued rainbows.”
And yet, precisely at the point in the parable at which Zarathustra should articulate his most abysmal thought, it is his animals who intercede in his behalf.
“O Zarathustra,” the animals said, “to those who think as we do, all things themselves are dancing: they come and offer their hands and laugh and flee—and come back. Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same house of being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.”
His animals intone the recurrence litany, not Zarathustra: “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being . . . eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself . . . Bent is the path of eternity.” I want for the moment to underscore the fact that here, and indeed throughout this parable, Zarathustra does not articulate the outlines of a cyclical cosmology. His animals do that in “The Convalescent,” just as the dwarf does that in “On the Vision and the Riddle.” Zarathustra cannot articulate recurrence because he is overwhelmed by nausea, to be sure. But remember Nietzsche’s point that estimates of life are, in a very important sense, clues to the estimator, insights into the being of the assessor. So if the thought of recurrence nauseates, as it does Zarathustra, that is because Zarathustra cannot will the eternal recurrence of the moment without devaluing it, and hence life, in the extreme. That Zarathustra must overcome his nausea is evidence of his decadence—recall Nietzsche’s pithy observation that to have to fight instinct is itself a symptom of decadence.
If I am right in insisting that Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence is not intended as a cyclical cosmology at all, then we can understand why the dwarf offers a mechanical and mechanistic rendition of it. We are also, then, equipped to understand that Zarathustra’s animals must “speak” the doctrine, rather than nauseated Zarathustra. “Are not words and sounds rainbows and illusive bridges between things which are eternally apart,” Nietzsche reminds us. Recurrence as empirical cosmology is a bridge to recurrence in the existential imperative sense, just as dwarf and animals are a bridge to Zarathustra. And yet they are eternally apart.
But I digress. Zarathustra reproaches his animals for having made a hurdy-gurdy song of his struggle and of recurrence, and, surprisingly, identifies his suffering with that of the shepherd of our earlier parable. The snake “crawled down my throat and suffocated me,” Zarathustra says. And it is he who “bit off its head and spewed it out.” And, revealingly, Zarathustra lies there still sick from his own redemption.
“O you buffoons and barrel organs!" Zarathustra replied and smiled again. “How well you know what had to be fulfilled in seven days, and how that monster crawled down my throat and suffocated me. But I bit off its head and spewed it out. And you, have you already made a hurdy-gurdy song of this? But now I lie here, still weary of this biting and spewing, still sick from my own redemption. And you watched all this? O my animals, are even you cruel? Did you want to watch my great pain as men do? For man is the cruelest animal.
The great disgust with man, Zarathustra tells us, choked him and bit itself fast to his throat. “Naked I had once seen both, the greatest man and the smallest man: all-too-similar to each other . . . All-toosmall, the greatest! . . . And the eternal recurrence even of the smallest—that was my disgust with all existence.”
“The great disgust with man—this choked me and had crawled into my throat; and what the soothsayer said: 'All is the same, nothing is worthwhile, knowledge chokes A long twilight limped before me, a sadness, weary to death, drunken with death, speaking with a yawning mouth. 'Eternally recurs the man of whom you are weary, the small man'—thus yawned my sadness and dragged its feet and could not go to sleep. Man’s earth turned into a cave for me, its chest sunken; all that is living became human mold and bones and musty past to me. My sighing sat on all human tombs and could no longer get up; my sighing and questioning croaked and gagged and gnawed and wailed by day and night: 'Alas, man recurs eternally! The small man recurs eternally!'
“Naked I had once seen both, the greatest man and the smallest man: all-too-similar to each other, even the greatest, all-too-human. All-too-small, the greatest!—that was my disgust with man. And the eternal recurrence even of the smallest—that was my disgust with all existence. Alas! Nausea! Nausea! Nausea!"
But, as we have seen, there is nothing in the nature of things which justifies nausea, justifies the estimate that life is a wretched state-of-affairs, anymore than there is anything in the nature of things which justifies joy, exultation, and the estimate that life is consummate celebration.
In consequence, Zarathustra’s animals interrupt his self-pitying lamentation and remind him to “go out where the world awaits you like a garden . . . But especially to the songbirds, that you may learn from them how to sing! For singing is for the convalescent; the healthy can speak. And when the healthy man also wants songs, he wants different songs from the convalescent.”
So Zarathustra is a convalescent, like ourselves. The disease from which he suffers is no doubt a version of our own disease: nihilism. Nihilism is caused by systemic dualism, the ubiquitous devaluation of the “apparent” world. And if the thesis I am prosecuting in this book is defensibly plausible, we must, like Zarathustra, sing a new song before we can speak. The new song will have to be anti-Christian and anti-Platonic. The thought and speech which overcomes PlatonicChristian “otherworldliness” will still be shrouded in surrogate Platonic thought and speech. Only the healthy may think and speak a postPlatonic idiom. And, presumably, such thought and speech were historically unavailable to Nietzsche’s contemporaries or to his immediate successors.
“O you buffoons and barrel organs, be silent!” Zarathustra replied and smiled at his animals. “How well you know what comfort I invented for myself in seven days! That I must sing again, this comfort and convalescence I invented for myself. Must you immediately turn this too into a hurdy-gurdy song?”
“Do not speak on!” his animals answered him again; “rather even, O convalescent, fashion yourself a lyre first, a new lyre! For behold, Zarathustra, new lyres are needed for your new songs. Sing and overflow, O Zarathustra; cure your soul with new songs that you may bear your great destiny, which has never yet been any man’s destiny. For your animals know well, O Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, you are the teacher of the eternal recurrence—that is your destiny! That you as the first must teach this doctrine—how could this great destiny not be your greatest danger and sickness too?
“Behold, we know what you teach: that all things recur eternally, and we ourselves too; and that we have already existed an eternal number of times, and all things with us. You teach that there is a great year of becoming, a monster of a great year, which must, like an hourglass, turn over again and again so that it may run down and run out again; and all these years are alike in what is greatest as in what is smallest; and we ourselves are alike in every great year, in what is greatest as in what is smallest.
“And if you wanted to die now, O Zarathustra, behold, we also know how you would then speak to yourself. But your animals beg you not to die yet. You would speak, without trembling but breathing deeply with happiness, for a great weight and sultriness would be taken from you who are most patient.
“‘Now I die and vanish you would say, 'and all at once I am nothing. The soul is as mortal as the body. But the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs and will create me again. I myself belong to the causes of the eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent—not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I come back eternally to this same, selfsame life, in what is greatest as in what is smallest, to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things, to speak again the word of the great noon of earth and man, to proclaim the Übermensch again to men. I spoke my word, I break of my word: thus my eternal lot wants it; as a proclaimer I perish. The hour has now come when he who goes under should bless himself. Thus ends Zarathustra’s going under.' "
When the animals had spoken these words they were silent and waited for Zarathustra to say something to them; but Zarathustra did not hear that they were silent. Rather he lay still with his eyes closed, like one sleeping, although he was not asleep; for he was conversing with his soul. The snake, however, and the eagle, when they found him thus silent, honored the great stillness around him and cautiously stole away.
As the parable concludes, Zarathustra’s animals announce that they know who he is and must become—the teacher of eternal recurrence. They remind him that his destiny is also his greatest danger and illness; and then assert what he teaches: “that all things recur eternally, and we ourselves too,” etc., etc. The three paragraphs which precede the concluding one are surely as detailed a “picture” of the doctrine of eternal recurrence as one can possibly paint in cosmogonie terms. Note, too, that Zarathustra’s animals speak in the subjunctive conditional, speak as Zarathustra would speak were he able to proclaim recurrence: “I come again . . . not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I come back eternally to this same, selfsame life, in what is greatest as in what is smallest, to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things, to speak again the word of the great noon of earth and man, to proclaim the Übermensch again to men.”
As we have said, Zarathustra’s animals sing the hurdy-gurdy song of recurrence in the subjunctive conditional, sing recurrence as Zarathustra would if he were able. But he is not able. Not yet, anyway. For “he lay still with his eyes closed, like one sleeping, although he was not asleep.” To become what he is, to fulfill his destiny, requires that the convalescent already achieve health and that, in consequence, he would crave nothing more fervently than the thought of eternal recurrence.
THE COUNTER IN THE COUNTERMYTH
It is almost unavoidable that Nietzsche’s pronouncements about recurrence should have been interpreted with single-minded literalness, as Plato’s allegory of the cave originally was. If an allegory masks its true subject in figurative narrative, then the philosopher-critic’s task is to unmask the parable, to expose its true meaning. And many Nietzsche commentators have wrenched an ontology from his allegory which has puzzled even them. Consider only three examples.
Karl Löwith, for example, commits what I shall now call the fallacy of misplaced literalness by construing Nietzsche’s countermyth in cosmological terms in the following way:
This effort toward a scientific foundation is no extraordinary detour, but the necessary consequence of the fact that Nietzsche wanted to teach something. A communicable philosophic doctrine cannot be content with the mere reference to an ecstatic vision or a rough sketch. The attempt at a natural-scientific foundation for eternal recurrence, as the temporal structure of the physical world, is to be taken no less seriously than the other attempt to develop it as an ethical postulate.11
But Löwith’s construction fails on an even deeper level. The Nietzsche literature to date has often been seduced along with Löwith into marking a distinction between an “ethical” and a “scientific” (or “empirical” and “normative”) account of the doctrine of eternal recurrence. It is as if Nietzsche had created a schizophrenic ontology in allegory; a normative and a descriptive version of the doctrine.12 And once we interpret the doctrine of eternal recurrence in bifurcated terms we create the problem of offering an empirical cosmology, which in turn leads us into mischaracterizing Nietzsche’s unpublished “proof” of recurrence;13 leads us to emphasize unpublished suppressed notes as if these were the hidden meaning of the published countermyth and existential imperative. The bifurcated account, moreover, makes it difficult to integrate normative and empirical considerations, makes it difficult to reassemble Humpty-Dumpty. Consider, “Although the central importance of the Recurrence is this ethical (or rather aesthetic) application, the doctrine itself is defended as a physical (metaphysical) theory, and Nietzsche extravagantly praises the scientific foundation of his theory.”14 These claims are misleading, to be sure. But if one cleaves to them one might even be tempted to suggest that
the influence of this doctrine has not been extensive—few commentators have even paid attention to it, and the arguments in support of the Recurrence, one of the few completely metaphysical expositions we find in Nietzsche, are so notoriously invalid that one does Nietzsche most credit by not sharing his enthusiasm for this idea.15
But if we make the effort to keep our courage from flagging, and try to account not only for Nietzsche’s doctrine but for his enthusiasm for it, what might we say? We might be tempted to say that
Scientific discoveries, or scientific theories, have at times brought sorrow or joy to philosophical souls. Believers in the freedom of the will suffered under classical mechanics, and took pleasure under quantum mechanics, thinking that here was scientific justification of their cherished belief. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, with its implication that the universe as a whole is cooling down, and that since no external source of heat is available, it must in a finite time achieve a state of maximum disorder which is final, has saddened optimistic spirits despite the remoteness of this predicted result. This was the case especially in the early years of the twentieth century and the later years of the nineteenth when, perhaps, optimism ran higher than it does now and had a cosmic aspect. Even today, there are men who shudder at the idea. The relationship between science and philosophy is complex, and the validity of inferences which run from one to the other is utterly vulnerable to attack. Nevertheless, men have often sought for philosophical assurances in science or responded in a psychological way to scientific teachings, which then led them to seek philosophical interpretations. It was thus with Nietzsche’s teaching.16
This is quite extraordinary. Danto seems to be suggesting here that Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence is an unwarranted psychological response to a scientific theory, Nietzsche’s own “scientific” theory, I should add. This interpretation, too, is unacceptable, as we have shown in earlier chapters. For Danto’s argument is erroneously causal. It assumes that the discovery of the doctrine of eternal recurrence as an empirical cosmology is temporally prior to and hence is the cause of other formulations. The Nachlass does not support such a claim. At best, it supports the view that in 1881 Nietzsche formulated the doctrine of eternal recurrence in normative and empirical terms. Which came first is a moot point. We would in addition have to assume that Nietzsche was satisfied with the adequacy of the empirical formulation he had jotted down in his notes, if Danto were on the right track. I have argued above that this, too, is a dubious assumption. Finally, we would have to assume that after having formulated the cosmological doctrine, Nietzsche then chose not to incorporate it into the book for which these notes are preparatory, The Gay Science. He chose, instead, to incorporate only those formulations which deal explicitly with the normative dimension of the doctrine. Why he should have suppressed material which satisfied him would be puzzling, especially to those who are familiar with Nietzsche’s habits.
Let us not lose sight of our larger point. I consider Löwith, Danto and Solomon to be penetrating interpreters of Nietzsche.17 The point, rather, is to underscore the fact that Nietzsche published the doctrine of eternal recurrence consistently in allegorical rather than discursive terms and that, in consequence, the doctrine’s difficulties are often the result of our own constructions, our own approach.
There is after all an absolutely crucial point of contrast in the Nietzschean and the Platonic allegory-structure. While it can plausibly be argued that Plato’s ontology may be decoded from the allegory of the cave, Nietzsche subscribes, in addition and by way of sharp contrast, to the view that all theories are in some sense allegorical.
Let me try to put this another way. Plato, like most of his predecessors and successors, believed that despite the plethora of worldinterpretations, perspectives, and despite the anarchy of systems, there is nonetheless a true conception of the world. Reality, the true world, is in principle accessible to that theory which would correspond to it, that theory which stands in perfect symmetry to its data. But for Nietzsche asymmetry rules the world. The apparent world, interpretations, are the true world for Nietzsche.
The observation that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is central to his transvaluation of Platonic values generally was already sketched in Chapter One, in the sections on “Will-to-Power as a Metaphysical Principle” and “Will-to-Power as Knowledge.” Some of the remarks made in those sections seem to me to have pointed application here as well.
Nietzsche believed—correctly or incorrectly is not now at issue—that the dominant theme in Western philosophy, morality, and religion is dualism. He believed that Western habits of thought, speech and action were informed, indeed infected at their roots, by a deprecating rationalistic prejudice. That deprecating habitual way of understanding self and world bifurcated reality, he seems to have believed. We customarily contrast, for example, the universal and the particular; essence and existence; reality and appearance; being and becoming; timeless and temporal. There are still other categorial contrasts which are sunk as deep in our collective psyche as the foundational metaphysical ones. We contrast, again for example, soul and body; mind and senses; reason and emotion; freedom and necessity; pleasure and pain; life and death; good and evil. Now Nietzsche does not appear to have maintained that contrasting terms such as those just mentioned are merely one collection of contrasts whose significance is perhaps negligible. Contrasts such as these are, rather, informing and sustaining. They shape our habits of thought, speech and action. The world is their ambiance.
Nietzsche’s insight is of course even more complex. Our dualism is hierarchical, he suggests. In fact, that is one of the central points of dualism, to mark an order of ontological rank in contrasting terms; to bestow ontological dignity: Reality/essence/universal/being/timeless versus existence/particular/appearance/becoming/temporal. Soul/ mind/reason/freedom/pleasure/life good versus body/senses/emotion/necessity/pain/death/evil.
In addition to the insight that we hatemve been hierarchical dualists in our foundational habits, Nietzsche also construes these habits genealogically. From what parentage does hierarchical dualism derive? That is to say, from what need does it arise, to what impulse is it responsive? And as we have seen, since Nietzsche believed that the value of life, existence, cannot be evaluated, cannot be estimated, the question itself becomes transfigured. What does hierarchical dualism tell us about the condition, the mentality, of hierarchical dualists? If dualism renders this world wretched or paltry, Nietzsche seems to have believed that that is so because the dualists were decadent themselves.
The final verdict, then, is that hierarchical dualism derives from decadence; that it is a symptom of the decline of life; that nihilism is its parentage. Dualism is both symptom and further cause of nihilism.
In consequence, in so far as Nietzsche sought to overcome nihilism it became necessary for him to begin to depict that attitude which exhibited the being-in-the-world of the Übermensch; the person whose attitude toward self and world would not yield hierarchical dualism. And as we have said before, the doctrine of eternal recurrence is a visual and conceptual representation of the attitude which is the opposite of decadence, decline of life, worldweariness. Recurrence portrays affirmation, overfullness, ascending life; life in and as celebration. Eternal recurrence captures nihilism already overcome.
It does all this, simplistically put, by simply refusing to acknowledge a rivalry in our putative contrasting terms. The character of being is impressed upon becoming. The particular becomes the universal. Existence becomes essence. The temporal becomes timeless. Our bodies become our souls. Our senses become our mind. Emotion becomes reason. Necessity becomes freedom. Death becomes life. Time becomes eternity. The highest values are impressed upon the world. It becomes an icon. It is deified.
Notice too that the highest values are not devalued. Being is not transformed into becoming. Reality does not become appearance. The reverse is the case, rather. Becoming is transformed into being. Appearance becomes reality. That is important. For if the highest ontological values were to be devalued, rather than elevating defective ontological categories, nihilism would not be overcome. It would be exacerbated instead.
Plainly, then, Nietzsche’s ontological allegory of recurrence need not be read as prescientific cosmic topography. In fact, it should rather be read as a counter to Plato’s allegory-structure, in bold strokes as well as in detail. If Nietzsche’s countermyth is genuinely to counter Platonism, it must also exclude the very possibility that a “true” conception of the cosmos is possible, a “true” conception of the world in the correspondence sense in which recurrence might be said to map onto it. And as we have seen, Nietzsche consistently argued that there is no “true” world, argued that there are only interpretations. Consider, for example,
Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—There are only facts—I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact “in itself”: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing.
“Everything is subjective,” you say; but even this is interpretation. The “subject” is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.—Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis.
In so far as the word 'knowledge' has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.—"Perspectivism.”
It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.18
Nietzsche’s extreme perspectivism (there are only interpretations), is not unsophisticated. The claim that “everything is subjective” is not a consequence of his epistemological thesis, Nietzsche notes, for that statement, too, is an interpretation. As we have seen, for Nietzsche it is needs that interpret, hence formally constitute, the world. “What is needed is that something must be held to be true—not that something is true”19 Or, “rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme that we cannot throw off.”20 Minimally, what Nietzsche wants to say is that truth in the correspondence theory sense is both a conceptual fixation and is entirely inappropriate. That is to say, he believes that it is in principle impossible for statements once and for all to correspond to states-of-affairs. But Nietzsche says it more flamboyantly of course. “Truth is error.”21 And, “there is no truth.”22 Perhaps most dramatic and succinct of all: “Truth is the kind of error without which a certain kind of living being could not live.”23
It would appear then, given Nietzsche’s radical perspectivism, that the doctrine of eternal recurrence, conceived as a countermyth, is not simply another allegory whose literal philosophic truth lurks just beneath its literary surface. Nietzsche would have it almost the other way around. Beneath every “theory” is its sustaining allegory; every “fact” is a heuristic fiction.
I attempted to characterize this thesis of Nietzsche’s in an earlier chapter by employing and unpacking the following metaphor: Knowledge is like a reconstructed text; the world is like the lost original. That metaphor was motivated by the following scenario. Suppose I show you a Renaissance manuscript which purports to be the legendary but lost Aristotle treatise on the art of letter writing. The manuscript, we believe on decent internal and external evidence, is a copy of the original Aristotle text. In the process of authenticating our Aristotle text, we infer that our copy is copied from lost medieval versions. Each of these copies is, in turn, related to an earlier one and the chain of copies presumably derives from the “original” copy which a scribe transcribed.
Suppose further that we now found several earlier copies, but not the original. Plainly there will be discrepancies between copies. Paragraphs appear to be transposed in some, sentences in others. Gaps appear to exist in several of our text copies. All that is to be expected, for we assume that errors and mistakes have crept into the copies just as typographical errors creep into modern transcriptions, only with greater frequency and scope, to be sure. Each successive scribe no doubt encountered things which were difficult or unintelligible for him, conditioned as he must have been by his linguistic, historical and philosophical limitations. To copy the text frequently meant, therefore, simply to interpret the earlier version, to make emendations and, sometimes, simply to guess where the available text is literally unintelligible. So “interpreted” copies got copied by generations of scribes until we arrive in our scenario at our copies of Aristotle’s epistolary treatise.
Our analogy here concerns knowledge. Knowledge, we said, is like a reconstructed text. This suggests, for us, that the relationship between knowledge and world is like the relationship which obtains between copies of the Aristotle manuscript. The copies do not correspond in any straightforward sense, just as knowledge does not “correspond” to the world simply either.
But to suggest that knowledge is like a reconstructed text is not only to suppose that no correspondence-relation can, strictly speaking, obtain among the several copies; it is also, and perhaps primarily, to presuppose the existence of an accessible original in terms of which we measure the adequacy of the copies. The putative lost original is the standard for our textual reconstruction, indeed, for any reconstruction. So even to speak of “errors” and “mistakes” is to contrast the reconstructed copy with the paradigmatic original version. But we have already granted that the original version is lost, is inaccessible.
So we are in the curious position of ascribing “errors” and “mistakes” to scribes, even in the absence of the lost original, rather than to the author, Aristotle. For to assert that there are errors is to assume that the copy deviates from the inaccessible original text. The paradox is that our copy of Aristotle’s epistolary treatise must agree with, correspond to, the original in order for it to be a “true” representation of Aristotle’s treatise. It is not a true copy if it misrepresents what Aristotle said, if it does not say what he said. But we do not have the original before us. It is inaccessible, after all. And yet the authenticity of our reconstruction is a function of its agreement with that inaccessible original.
To claim, therefore, that the world is like the inaccessible original is, first, to point out that in the knowledge situation there can be no question of a simple isomorphism between propositions and “facts.” The relation between knowledge (reconstruction) and world (inaccessible original) is not a simple copy-relation. There is, strictly speaking, no-thing to copy.
Second, suppose it is the case that there can be no question of reading knowledge off or in reality, anymore than we can decode our copy of Aristotle’s work off or in the inaccessible original. It does not follow from these remarks, however, that we cannot or do not choose between competing manuscript copies. We do choose. Often we choose on the basis of the coherence or utility of a given version. Coherence functions as “correctness” in such a case—whether Aristotle’s inaccessible original is captured in that reconstruction or not. By extension, then, we choose among competing perspectives, too, as if measuring them in terms of their “correspondence” to the world. However, there can be no question of “correctness” here, if Nietzsche is right.
So perhaps we should take Nietzsche’s other point equally seriously. Truth is indispensable. We must hold things to be true, he says. And, further, we are the sort of beings who could not live without truth, Nietzsche says. But the sense of truth we must live by is complex. We must act as if knowledge corresponded to the world, is “true,” even though it does not, is not. We must behave as if knowledge were that reconstructed text which we are comparing to an accessible original. That is the point of Nietzsche’s insistence that rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme we cannot dispose of.
Worldweary “Platonists,” of course, are literal-minded. Theories correspond or fail to correspond to an antecedent and independent state-of-affairs in their litany. Theories are true or false, in their view. In consequence, we may now perhaps see that Nietzsche’s eternalistic countermyth is responsive in its own terms to those features of Platonism and Christianity which he thought had disfigured Western consciousness, had rendered it slavish. Nietzsche’s allegory remains eternalistic because, as in the tradition which preceded him, he believed that eternalizing something presumptively consecrates and sanctifies it. Eternity bestows an order of rank, of ontological dignity.
But the captive power of eternity is based upon an alleged fact about ourselves, Nietzsche thought. Human beings are so constituted psychologically that they cannot endure uncertainty, lack of structure, instability, unpredictability, in a word insecurity. And the archetypal antagonist for security and stability is, of course, “becoming.” So becoming, too, had to be arrested.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.