THREE

Homecoming, Private
Language, and the Fate
of the Self

(Zarathustra III)

Zarathustra III has frequently been taken to be the culmination of the dramatic action of Nietzsche’s book as well as its philosophical center. Many critics have argued that the book might properly end here and that Zarathustra IV is an embarrassing afterthought. Certainly it is here that there is explicit discussion of the eternal recurrence, which Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo, is believed to have called the fundamental idea of the book. Yet we must note some qualifications to this view at the outset. It is Zarathustra’s animals who speak explicitly of eternal recurrence, rather than the supposed teacher of the doctrine. When they do venture to tell Zarathustra what he believes and teaches he retorts that they have turned his thoughts into a “hurdy-gurdy song” and retreats even from his animals for a more solitary series of songs in which eternal recurrence is treated symbolically and allusively; and since the songs are not overheard they do not teach that thought to anybody.

What Nietzsche says literally in Ecce Homo is that the thought of eternal recurrence is the Grundconception of Zarathustra. He says this in a discussion devoted to explaining the personal circumstances and surroundings that led to the conception and composition of the book. These are the highly stylized reminiscences of an author relating “Why I Write Such Good Books.” In that context it may be significant that Nietzsche speaks not of a Begriff or Idee, the usual German philosophical terms for a comprehensive thought or idea; instead he refers to a Grundconception. This is the language of the artist or writer who lets us in on the genesis of a work, what Henry James called “the germ of a story,” rather than the philosopher explaining the interconnection of his major thoughts. For a Konzept may be a sketch or plan and is frequently used to describe a preliminary outline by a visual artist or draftsman. A Konzeptbuch is a sketch-book. In any case Nietzsche’s expression is hardly unambiguous. In reading Zarathustra III, then, we ought to be guided by the language and presentation of the text and its articulation with the rest of the work rather than by the hermeneutics of the animals or by an interpretation of one of Nietzsche’s later remarks about the genesis of his work.

To see how we ought to situate the eternal recurrence and some of the other themes and events of the third part we need to see what kind of language is being employed there. That is, we need to ask what its fundamental categories are, to whom it is addressed, and how it is connected to the other forms of discourse in the book or to the more prosaic types of discourse into which it is so tempting to translate it. The dominant linguistic move of part three is the exploration of the possibility of a private language; in the material mode it is Zarathustra’s quest for his authentic or genuine self. I will have more to say about these somewhat suspect categories and their connection later but let us begin by reading part of Zarathustra’s first speech in this part. Climbing a mountain which lies on the way that will take him away from the Blissful Islands Zarathustra speaks to himself:

“In the end one experiences only oneself”: this is the formula of a phenomenology of solitude. What the passage announces is a search for the self to be undertaken by a method that excludes going beyond the self.

It soon becomes clear, however, that what Zarathustra has to say about the self here must determine the way in which he says it. The movement of this part of the book is a flight from public speech to the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the self—even perhaps to the point of discovering that it is just one more illusion of the public language. Zarathustra’s voyage home is one in which the public dimensions of language are abandoned one by one. During the journey, which has chapters on both land and sea, Zarathustra speaks to his fellow sailors and to “Zarathustra’s ape” when the latter confronts him in a city he is passing through. Once he has arrived home, however, Zarathustra either is silent or speaks to himself. His speech to his animals is part of this speech to himself which is characterized variously as his speaking “to his rejoicing conscience” (Z, 181; 4, 203) as the “stillest hour” speaking to him (Z, 182; 4, 204) or as the long address to the sky beginning “You abyss of light” (Z, 184; 4, 207). Public speech must be conducted in the public foum, but that forum is poisoned by the “enemies”; that is, ressentiment, the thirst for revenge, rules wherever the binary structure of linear time has not been rethought. In “The Homecoming” Zarathustra sums up this distinction between public and private speech by emphasizing the emptiness and vanity of the former:

In this mood Zarathustra views all public speech as gossip and idle chatter. As in Heidegger’s analysis, the last man, man who has become small (das Man) is the man of idle talk (Gerede). Nietzsche’s account is more historical than Heidegger’s, although the difference is not especially relevant at this point. What Zarathustra is interested in here is the rhetorical basis of this chatter; it is a way of evading the task and problem of being human and living in time. But while Heidegger presents such idle talk as a kind of game which we play in order to hide from our own anxiety, Nietzsche focusses on the importance for public speech of envy and its derivatives. This envy is derived from ressentiment. Public language, even the language of the scholars, is directed at making the great appear small; this is part of the general strategy by which people seek to be revenged for “time and its ‘it was,’ ”:

“The Homecoming” is a turning point because it marks Zarathustra’s arrival at a place where he can comfortably and articulately use the language which is truly his own. It will be worthwhile to look at this chapter in some detail in order to understand both Zarathustra’s gradual abandonment of ordinary language and the singing of new songs which follows his discovery of his own form of language. “The Homecoming” plays on a rich theme in German poetry: being alone when one is at home. (One thinks of Novalis’s solipsistic “immer nach Hause” and of Holderlin’s “Die Heimkunft,” which, as Heidegger points out, has to do with the strangeness and distance of homecoming).¹ Here Zarathustra’s soul coverses with itself joyfully and from the beginning. True homecoming is not simply returning to one’s geographical origins but is experiencing solitude (Einsamkeit) as bliss. The speech of this chapter is a dialogue between Zarathustra and his home—and his home is solitude—that revolves around the meaning of solitary language and its distinction from the discourse of a false community. This internal colloquy is sufficient unto itself; it is a microcosmic version of a poetic cosmos. It offers a distinct alternative to the indefinite metaphorical union with an audience of all or none projected in “Of Reading and Writing” or the metonymical opposition of teacher and disciple or inner and outer discourse found in “Of Poets.” Einsamkeit is not Verlassenheit (loneliness) which one can very well experience in company. Zarathustra’s solitude would reassure him that “Here all things come caressingly to your discourse and flatter you: for they want to ride upon your back. Upon every image [Gleichnis] you here ride to every truth” (Z, 202; 4, 231). Talk in solitude is wholly adequate to things—Zarathustra can speak to them now and they will speak to him. He has overcome the detours of loneliness which forced him to speak to an other. His speech will now be a Dinggedicht, a poetry of things, unlike the speech “down there” where speech is not heard in a deep sense, but simply cheapens and betrays. The inauthentic speech “down there” is constitutive for ordinary morality and knowledge. Those who call themselves “the good” are actually “poisonous flies.” Life among those who conceal their weakness with such words leads to pity—and pity leads to the confusion of names, as when gravediggers are called investigators and scholars. In part one Zarathustra would have metaphorically identified scholars as gravediggers; now that he has his own language of solitude he can say that gravediggers are by confusion called scholars among themselves. Given the adequate circle of one’s own language there is no need to produce a metaphorical chain to move from older meanings to new.

Zarathustra’s solitude is the conscious recognition that his quest is an internal one. There is a subtle distinction between the gaps and obstacles of mundane, external speech and the differences within identity of solitary discourse. The crudity of conceptual and referential speech among the many involves a play on the German philosophical tradition: “He who wants to grasp [begreifen] everything human would have to grapple with [angreifen] everything. But for that my hands are too clean (Z, 203; 4, 233).” As in Kant and Hegel one understands things by means of concepts (Begriffe). Nietzsche’s punning brings out the overtones of grasping with the hands which still cling to this understanding of understanding. Speaking and thinking which are assaults on things necessarily encounter unpleasant objects that one would rather not touch, and only two unsatisfactory possibilties are then open: by greedily grasping everything to oneself all room for the play of thought and discourse is destroyed (Hegel), or else speech must always run up against an impenetrable other (Kant). Here, however, Zarathustra and his solitude, Zarathustra and his animals, Zarathustra and things belong to one another without collapsing into an unqualified identity.² It is in terms of this self-contained play of a language adequate to one’s whole world that we can understand the emphasis on the eternal recurrence as Zarathustra’s own teaching. It is not an abstract doctrine that can be passed from mouth to mouth or hand to hand; its home is in Zarathustra’s solitary silence or song, not in being seized or conceptually understood (angriffen or begriffen).

Home is where we all speak our own private language. Each of us has a shorthand system for registering our typical emotional nuances, our tastes, our sense of what is appropriate and what is jarring. This does not sound like the strict untranslatability which Wittgenstein, for example, would use to describe his concept of a private language. For it seems as if my feelings, even if rather esoteric, can be communicated to you; I can begin to provide rough translations of some of my categories and perhaps I can even produce a sort of line-by-line translation of my most intimate fantasies and emotions. In this case however translation is betrayal, for the very shorthand of my own language, its feeling natural for me, is what allows me to move rapidly over a number of experiences. The translation is ponderous: to perform it is both to stop playing with the web of connections and to fail to provide the sense of that play for the reader of the translation. The question is not just about the ability to provide a lexical equivalent of phrases but also has to do with the much more difficult task of conveying the style of the primary language. Nietzsche’s frequent metaphor in Zarathustra for successful language is the dance; to translate a private language would be like providing a schematic representation of a dance in a written notation. Each would be useful but it would be a mistake to confuse either with the full sense of the original.

We see more of the point of Zarathustra’s discovery of his own language by seeing the stages of that discovery itself. In “Of the Vision and the Riddle” Zarathustra mediates between his own visionary experience and an audience of sailors on the boat which is taking him home. As Zarathustra says, this is a discourse for adventurers and explorers, for it relates his own search on uncharted paths. The experience narrated by Zarathustra is characterized as a vision that occurred during two days of silence on the boat. It is comparable in some ways both to the dream of life and death interpreted in “The Soothsayer” and to the silent experience which precedes the animals’ proclamation of the eternal return. In some of his earlier writings Nietzsche describes the vision (Gesicht) as the primary experience of which the dream is a derivative. It is a clear perception of forms in which we poetically see and construct some important aspect of our lives. Zarathustra’s vision here is distinguished from the earlier dream in several ways. Unlike his disciple, the sailors offer no interpretation of the experience; Zarathustra presents it to them as a riddle. If he has not solved it for himself he will do so soon enough, on completing his homecoming, when he arises from the seven days’ silence of his convalescence. This hermeneutic situation parallels the action of the two parts of the vision. In the first part Zarathustra disputes with the Spirit of Gravity; in the second he breaks his appalled silence to shout at the shepherd to bite off the head of the snake which is choking him. The dream of the prophet was a dream of immobility. There Zarathustra’s ego, the night-watchman, was helpless before death and the life which was an unrecognized part of himself. He lacked that strength to say “It is a dream! I will dream on!” which Nietzsche praises. Here Zarathustra directs the content of his own vision. The dwarf (the Spirit of Gravity) is a heavy force, but he does not prevent Zarathustra from climbing to the top of his path and confronting the dwarf’s nihilism at the gateway marked “Moment” (Augenblick) But he can climb to that gateway only by bearing the weight of the dwarf’s “every stone that is thrown must—fall!” Zarathustra describes his experience of that climb as that of “one sick whom his wicked torture makes weary and who as he falls asleep is awakened by a still more wicked dream” (Z, 177; 4, 198). Dreaming is a waking up within sleep and some are not strong enough even for the dream.

Zarathustra however is not such a dreamer, but perceives himself as like the dreamer. He has the courage not to end the dream scene but to dream on, and he does this by taking command of the dream scene with his courageous “Dwarf! You! Or I!” (It should be noted that Zarathustra’s short address on courage is spoken not to the dwarf in the vision but to the sailors to whom he is relating the vision.) What courage requires is “Was that life? Well then! Once more!” Courageous vision or dreaming requires a continuation of the vision or dream. The dwarf’s reply to Zarathustra’s questions about time takes his own abysmal thought for granted and dismisses it with a “so what?” But Zarathustra instructs the dwarf and explains a crucial aspect of eternal recurrence. The dwarf says that truth is crooked and “time itself is a circle” (Z, 178; 4, 200). What the dwarf is missing is the lightness and mobility of time’s circle. Time’s circularity ought not to be conceived as a weight imposed on it (a punishment perhaps) which would prevent it from ever getting away from its origins. It should be thought of, as in Zarathustra’s query, as becoming and process: “And are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment draws after it all that is to come? Therefore—itself too” (Z, 179; 4, 200). Here Zarathustra stops speaking to an other and falls into a reverie about some early memories; within the dialogue of the dream, he seeks a greater privacy. But he suddenly finds, in an awakening experience, that the dwarf and the whole scenery of that vision have vanished. “Was I dreaming then? Was I waking up?” he asks himself.

The vanishing of the dwarf is significant. Zarathustra remains in the visionary state and is able to continue dreaming after he overcomes this oppressive weight of the other. The dreamer has taken control of the world of vision and dream; that world is a potentially rich field for self-exploration but is also subject to distortion by the envy and revenge of the public world. To have awakened at this point would have been to have had a dream successful in itself; yet the real power of dreaming is manifested in the production of new dreams without having to wake or to fall back into sleep. In this second part of the vision Zarathustra sees the shepherd choked by the snake and after an agony of disgust calls out to him “Bite! Bite!” After spitting out the loathsome head the shepherd jumps up “a transformed being surrounded with light, laughing!” (Z, 180; 4, 202). Here again Zarathustra successfully takes command of his own dream. He is on his way to accomplishing the same in his waking life by making its speech thoroughly his own as he has already mastered the hieroglyphics and the drama of the dream.

On his way home Zarathustra speaks mainly to himself except for an encounter with his ape, the man who has learned to imitate him but lacks his spirit. Zarathustra’s ape “had gathered something of his phrasing and cadences [Satz und Fall der Rede] and also liked to borrow from the treasures of his wisdom” (Z, 195; 4, 222). This ape or mimic is found in the metropolis, for it is the rhetorical aspect of Zarathustra’s speech which he has learned. Rhetoric requires an audience, so the ape cannot leave the great city which he spends so much energy denouncing. The ape’s talk is worth considering if only because it resembles so closely the popular image of Nietzsche as a no-saying prophet:

The ape has become immobilized in the language of enmity which Zarathustra is in the process of leaving behind. If he had the self-knowledge of Caliban, he could say “You taught me language, and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.”

But Zarathustra also overhears the language of others. He is on his way to thinking the most godless thought of eternal recurrence and so is interested in hearing the last attenuated version of the language of religion and theology. Many of those who once had the courage to reject God have become pious again. Passing through a city Zarathustra hears some of these who have become night-watchmen who “know how to blow horns and to walk about at night and to awaken old things that had long gone to sleep” (Z, 200; 4, 229). We might plausibly think of these night-watchmen as those who have once experienced the death of a living religion but now want to hold on to some vestige of religious consciousness. They know that there is no empirical evidence which would make their belief in God probable but wish to insist on the importance of their thoughts and talk about him. Zarathustra reports that he heard this conversation among night-watchmen:

Like Zarathustra’s achieved language of this part, the talk of the night-watchmen is not referential in any ordinary way. Their discourse is the talk characteristic of passive nihilism. What is important for these people is to keep on talking, to tell a satisfying story which will while away the darkest hours of the night. They are like many existentialist theologians who argue that faith is more heroic and blessed the more absurd and unverifiable its object of belief. Perhaps they resemble even more closely one of the positions adumbrated in John Wisdom’s essay “Gods” in which the dispute about whether a bit of land is a tended garden turns into a kind of ultimate aesthetic choice about two competing forms of language or life. It would be a mistake to conflate this language with Zarathustra’s; as the incident suggests, the stories told by the night-watchmen are the last and most tenuous justifications of a way of life and speech which serves only to maintain the equanimity of the elderly. Zarathustra has his own story to tell about the gods: they died of laughter when one of their number was impudent enough to suggest that he was the only god. Zarathustra’s story is his and he recognizes it as such; it is told for the sake of a laugh, and it parodies the ethereal scholasticism and the guesses about the unknown that we have just heard. If language is to loosen its connection with the world, why bother to refine the old stories when we could be devising new ones? And why should we have to adjust our speech to those who tell such stories? Why should I accept a private language designed by a committee?

On his way home Zarathustra has shown his increasing mastery of his own language in the dream and has observed the emptying out of metaphysical language. Metaphysical language is here understood as all discourse which introduces transphenomenal entities. To speak one’s own language is to speak of one’s experienced world; this is Zarathustra’s phenomenological move in part three. Once this phenomenological limitation or opening is understood, there should be little temptation to construe eternal recurrence as an impersonal cosmological idea. Consider, for example, Zarathustra’s praise of chance in “Before Sunrise”:

Although Zarathustra contrasts chance with purpose here, his description of the spontaneity of experience is also opposed to any deterministic reduction of experienced chance to an epiphenomenon of a world of non-experienced scientific objects and laws. Zarathustra’s opposition to metaphysical language includes the attempts of both religion and science to introduce a world behind the scenes. In the The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche will show the nihilistic affinities between religion and science while demonstrating how scientific language can be made to contradict and overcome itself. The eternal recurrence may now appear even more paradoxical than it did before. Surely, it seems, the cycle of events must be determined if it is to repeat itself, and yet Zarathustra praises the chance quality of events. Of course the phenomenological experience of what is novel and surprising would itself be one of the experiences repeated in eternal recurrence.

The presentation of eternal recurrence in the chapter “The Convalescent” is set within the context of Zarathustra’s search for his own thought and his own language. As with some other difficult philosophical ideas it has been placed at a distance from its author. It is described in the text as Zarathustra’s thought, rather than Nietzsche’s; and even Zarathustra’s affirmation takes place in a complex narrative context. In this respect it is tempting to compare the presentation of the thought with Plato’s presentation of Diotima’s teaching about eros in the Symposium. In the Symposium there are several stories embedded within one another, the last being Diotima’s mysterious teaching about love. Socrates spoke with Diotima, then spoke with others at the drinking party and those who were there passed it on to others who have finally passed it on to us. Plato’s indirectness is congruent with his conception of the distinction between human and divine wisdom. The embodied soul is limited in its ability to recall its most illuminating experiences, so writings about such things should remind us of the need for greater progress in dialectic and vision. There is nothing intrinsically mysterious or unknowable about love, or gods, or the soul. It is just that such matters cannot be fully understood by us while still embodied, and even our highest human insights about them are in danger of being distorted by written communication.

The situation in “The Convalescent” is quite different. While the shadowy figure of Diotima suggests the need for continual progression in moving from human to divine understanding, Zarathustra’s struggle with his thought and his affirmation of it do not point beyond themselves. No authority is mentioned; there is no talk of an otherworldly experience. Zarathustra’s unusual method of communicating his thought arises from the strangeness of the thought itself and from its being very much his thought. As the most godless and this-worldly of thoughts, the one which affirms the world of the senses, becoming, and the body, it must not refer us to a religious or scientific source that would introduce a transphenomenal level behind what William James called “a world of pure experience.” While Plato’s language can point to its own deficiencies in comparison to a purified intellectual intuition, neither the teacher of eternal recurrence nor his author can consistently suggest the inadequacy of the language they employ. If the teaching of recurrence remains unspoken it is because Zarathustra has reached that vanishing point in the search for his own language at which any form of public communication would be stultifying. Zarathustra’s talk is not designed to give us a sense of an important truth which has been seen vaguely. What he has thought and seen has been all too clear and overwhelming. It is very much his own and paradoxical in several ways which we have yet to canvas. Zarathustra’s most intimate experience, like disembodied intuition in Plato, is beyond the reach of public language; the first is the most this-worldly of experiences and the second the most otherworldly.

Zarathustra’s wrestling with eternal recurrence in “The Convalescent” is only possible after he has achieved his own language in “The Homecoming.” In the intervening chapters he must exercise his new linguistic freedom by calling things by what seem to him to be their true names. This is accomplished in Zarathustra’s revaluation of sensual pleasure, lust for power, and selfishness in “Of the Three Evil Things” and in his comprehensive “Of Old and New Tablets.” We might expect, then, to hear a long discourse on Zarathustra’s most abysmal thought soon. But in “The Convalescent” Zarathustra speaks of this thought only very indirectly. Just where we might expect the most important of discourses we find silence, the rebuke of others, and apparent asides that concern not the thought itself but some of Zarathustra’s problems in accepting it. Or, looking at the text of the chapter in more detail, we can note that it is Zarathustra’s animals who speak of the eternal recurrence while he responds to them; yet his response is never on their level of more or less prosaic explanation. Rather than discussing the philosophical thought, Zarathustra comments on the metaphilosophical problems of communicating it. Too many readers and commentators have taken the animals’ exposition of the idea here to be identical with Zarathustra’s comprehension of it, and almost all have then had no hesitation in identifying Zarathustra’s thought with Nietzsche’s. This is to ignore the dialogue which takes place between Zarathustra and his animals as well as the problem of private language which surrounds everything said in this part of the book.

Let us read the text of the chapter as a dialogue held against the background of the private language problem. This sounds as if it verges on the absurd, for one cannot conduct a dialogue in a private language; by definition there can be (at most) one speaker. The dialogue is not in this questionable language, however, but about it. Throughout this part we should take Zarathustra to be approaching this private language, and indicating some of its problems, rather than speaking in it. Or, more precisely, we should think of him as speaking in it only to himself, and only when he is said in the text to be silent. This of course implies that there is a point at which the most developed form of linguistic capability becomes the same as silence; this is one of the many paradoxes which I think the text does indeed seem to suggest. In another sense, this dialogue is very private indeed, for it takes place between Zarathustra and his animals. The cunning serpent and the daring eagle are aspects of Zarathustra; they are some of his virtues in an embodied form. They are with him, even when he is described as solitary, with the exception (discussed below) of his artful desertion of them in part four.

Zarathustra awakes one morning to wrestle with the abysmal thought, which he treats as a body lying in his bed. He calls upon the abyss to speak, and when it seems to be doing so, he collapses with a cry of disgust. After lying for a while as if dead he maintains a seven-day silence, after which his dialogue with the animals begins. It is suggested then that the abyss has spoken to Zarathustra in some form which no one can overhear, and that he has pondered its sayings in a thoughtful silence which is likewise incommunicable. Zarathustra himself does not break the silence, but he does finally reach out for an apple; at this gesture of life “his animals thought that the time had come to speak with him” (Z, 233; 4, 271). They invite him to step out into the garden of the world, assuring him that all things will help him to recover from his oppressive experience. We also see that they have not shared his experience during the silence when they ask “Has perhaps some new knowledge come to you, bitter and hard?” (Z, 234; 4, 272). In fact this gap between the experiences of Zarathustra and of the animals comes as no surprise, for we have already been told that during the wrestling with the thought the animals were merely spectators, while during the seven days’ silence they watched over him, solicitous of his welfare.

Zarathustra replies to the animals and attempts to move the discussion into the linguistic mode:

The animals had invited Zarathustra to be healed and soothed by the things of the world; he moves the conversation into the linguistic mode by praising the soothing music of their invitation. Yet he does not answer their question about his new knowledge, unless we take that knowledge to be (at least in part) the denial of the outside and the idea of language as an illusory musical bridge. “Every soul is a world of its own.” Whatever form one’s communion with one’s own soul takes, it is not communicable to another. Yet we all have a need for the appearance of community and this appearance is fostered by speech. Whatever the cognitive pretensions of speech it can at least function as music which will impart something of the form of what is most one’s own and the feelings connected with the attempt at communicating it.

The animals, however, seem unable to grasp the problem of language; in Zarathustra’s world an animal may be able to talk but it cannot reflect on its own talk in a metalanguage. The serpent and the eagle begin their stubborn pursuit of the thought of eternal recurrence, explaining an idea which they assume that they share with Zarathustra. Their exposition of the idea is concise, clear, and formulaic: “In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.” While Zarathustra had compared the animals’ earlier invitation to the most beautiful music, he now gently rebukes them for this prosaic exposition of his thought; he calls them “buffoons and barrelorgans” and accuses them of having already made his thought into a “hurdy-gurdy song [ein Leier-Lied]” (Z, 235; 4, 273). Zarathustra is still affectionate with his animals, but makes it clear that there is something missing from their account. Again he shifts the attention away from the thought to his own experience in thinking it and to the animals’ role in watching him. Zarathustra suggests that there is no disinterested contemplation: whatever the animals learned while watching him was colored by their feelings about the scene that took place before them. He even wonders whether they could have been enjoying the spectacle of great pain as men so often do. (In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche suggests that most forms of discourse can be understood as internal or external theaters of cruelty.) This is an invitation to the animals to reflect on the rhetorical background of their own interpretation of Zarathustra’s thought and his mission. This thought about men’s cruelty leads Zarathustra to explain his own great struggle with the thought: his disgust with the small man, whose cruelty is always petty and yet must recur eternally. Zarathustra had to break through that disgust in order to think his thought and the memory of that disgust makes him shudder even now. Solicitous once more, the animals tell him to speak no more but to learn singing from the songbirds: “convalescents should sing; let the healthy talk” (Z, 236; 4, 275). In fact Zarathustra will spend most of the remainder of this part of the book dancing and singing. Yet even this late realization by the animals of the linguistic theme of the conversation is not perspicuous, Zarathustra indicates. “That I have to sing again—that comfort and this convalescence did I devise for myself: do you want to make another hurdygurdy song out of that, too?” The prose of the animals must be inadequate to Zarathustra’s own silent times with his thought and to the way in which song issues out of that thought. But the play of opposition between their prosaic version of the experience and his own comprehension of it is necessary. It saves the text from total silence while indicating the problems connected with any linguistic version of the idea.

Heedless of Zarathustra’s subtleties the animals rush ahead to explain why “new lyres are needed for your new songs [Zu deinen neuen Liedern bedarf es neuer Leiern]” (Z, 237; 4, 275). The animals are now confident that they know who Zarathustra is and what he teaches: “behold, you are the teacher of the eternal recurrence!” Yet Zarathustra will teach recurrence only through song and play.³ The animals conclude this long discourse and “expected that Zarathustra would say something to them: but Zarathustra did not hear that they were silent” (Z, 238; 4, 277). The conversation has already broken off and the animals’ conception of Zarathustra as a teacher has been shown to be faulty, for he does not speak in the way that they had expected. The outcome of their speech, in other words, shows its failure of understanding. Throughout, the animals have concentrated on the thought as Zarathustra’s own; it is what he will teach, not simply an idea in the public domain. If he were to die now, they say, he would exclaim “I spoke my teaching, I broke upon my teaching: thus my eternal fate wants it—as prophet do I perish!” Now there is an irony in these words put into their master’s mouth which is not evident to the animals. In order to see it more fully, however, we must approach the thought of eternal recurrence from another angle.

As Zarathustra’s ownmost thought, eternal recurrence exhibits the problems of private language. The attempts to translate it into a more common language exhibit how paradoxical the thought is. That is, any version which we might try to formulate (in a language more or less continuous with that of the animals) will violate some of our most deeply held principles. As soon as we attempt to elaborate upon the animals’ version of the thought—to speak it—we must encounter these problems. There may indeed be some other approach to the thought which Zarathustra indicates several times by the expression “thinking the thought” (rather than speaking it), but for now we are concerned with the problem of articulating the idea in ordinary language or even in any standard form of philosophical language. One of these paradoxes has to do not with what we might call the content of the thought, a thought “for all” without reference to particular persons, but with the thought as held by or thought through in the fullest and deepest sense by an individual thinker.

First let us attend to the thought in so far as it is addressed to all. As Nietzsche himself has described the thought, it is such that it produces the greatest tension. This tension lies not only in the difficulty of affirming even the most repulsive and disgusting aspects of existence by bestowing an eternal value on them, but in the logical contradictions of the thought itself. Most of these have been pointed out by philosophical writers on Nietzsche, so I will not recapitulate their work here.⁴ But it may be valuable to summarize what these problems with the thought are from the standpoint of the prosaic consciousness.

By making temporal sequence into an eternally repeated process, the thought suggests a collapse of the distinction between time and eternity. Now while there may be nothing illogical in denying either temporal becoming or an eternal realm (Parmenides and his many followers deny the first while historicists deny the second), the absolute identification of the two is puzzling, to say the least. The eternal world is just the world of becoming, according to this thought. It may be, however, that this is not a logical problem and that Nietzsche has put his finger on a sloppy assumption characteristic of that metaphysical thinking which supposes the separateness of the temporal and the eternal. In any case there are more serious problems of a logical sort with eternal recurrence. Consider the ways in which the thought seems to combine fate and free will as well as freedom and determinism. Both Zarathustra and his animals, at various points in the book, refer to the way in which a given event or set of circumstances will draw all of its succeeding events along with it. This suggests an inevitability or fate which requires that once X has occurred Y must occur, where Y is the successor of X; and once Y has produced Z and Z has produced A and so on, eventually the “first term” X (and any term may serve arbitrarily here as first term) will be produced once more and it will draw with it an exact repetition of the entire cycle. In Nietzsche’s notes there are some attempts to describe this repetition as determined by physical constants such as the finitude of energy and possible energy-states in the universe. This physical determinism is not explicit in Zarathustra and I have already suggested some reasons for not associating it with the presentation of the thought there. But these deterministic speculations are useful reminders that even in Zarathustra a kind of necessity is ascribed to the repetitive cycles. What needs to be noted now is that the book also insists on the chance character of existence (cf. the discussion of “Before Sunrise”) and on a voluntarism of some kind in which every “it was” can be transformed into a “thus I willed it” (cf. Z, 163). On a certain construction of the thought of eternal recurrence the element of chance might be supposed to be only an appearance due to our ignorance of what is coming next in the cycle; and this ignorance itself is a contingent fact about the cycle, for we can imagine cycles in which some or all of the agents know (at one or all points in the cycle) some or all of the events which, at that point or points in the cycle, have yet to occur. Yet this attempt to reconcile an apparent conflict in Nietzsche’s thought is not true to his insistence that the thought is intimately connected with the dissolution of any distinction between the true and the apparent world (cf. Twilight, “How the True World Became a Fable”). And the appeal to the very distinction between contingency and necessity which the thought may be putting in question is of doubtful value in determining whether or not the thought must put that distinction in question.

Even if some way of evading these apparent conflicts were devised, there would be another logical objection to the thought of eternal recurrence. The problem is in the conception of an event or series of events being exactly the same as and yet distinct from another event or series. There is no discernible way in which any event can be distinguished from its repetition; but then, by the identity of indiscernibles, those two events (or two series) are the same event (or series). Yet if they are precisely the same thing, how can we differentiate them, as talk of recurrence seems to presuppose? The eternal recurrence collapses the distinction between the one and the many by suggesting that a single integral thing—the sequence of all events—is many things. Equally it suggests that the many repetitions of an event are just one thing, “the same.” Bernd Magnus has argued that the thought of eternal recurrence does indeed violate the principle of identity.⁵ But he assumes somewhat hastily that this incoherence of the thought shows that time cannot be cyclical. This is perhaps a bit misleading, for we can conceive of a non-repeated circle of events each of which is continuous either in a causal sense, or in a phenomenological sense, or both with its immediate antecedents and consequences. It would be an “eternal cycle of becoming” but not an eternal recurrence. This thought may be close to that of the Spirit of Gravity while that of recurrence is Zarathustra’s.

I am reviewing the difficulties connected with a prosaic reconstruction of eternal recurrence in order to suggest that Nietzsche has good reasons for not putting any such version of the thought into Zarathustra’s mouth. One might agree with some of the above criticisms but attempt to shift the perspective by arguing that even if the thought is absurd, Nietzsche’s interest is not in securing our contemplative acceptance of it but in having us confront the possibility of willing it. It is that thought which produces the greatest tension in us because it asks us to affirm the infinite and eternal importance of each of our experiences. It could thus be understood as a practical imperative: live each moment as if it were of infinite importance. This interpretation is also open to question and further interpretation. It attempts to preserve the value of the thought by shifting from the prose of understanding to the prose of action. Yet the thought resists translation into any prosaic form. Taking the thought as an “existential imperative” (in Bernd Magnus’s useful phrase) supposes some things about who acts on imperatives and what it is to act on an imperative. An imperative is addressed to someone by someone. In some cases, as in that of Kant’s categorical imperative, the one who lays down the imperative (the “imperator”) is identical (in some sense) with the one to whom the imperative is addressed (the “imperatee”). So there is a certain plurality which is always present in such giving of orders and obeying, whether or not more than one “person” (in the conventional sense) is involved in the process. Nietzsche suggests that any willing or commanding involves something of such a plural character:

In the same section Nietzsche goes on to argue that “ ‘freedom of the will’ is essentially the affect of superiority in relation to the one who must obey: ‘I’ am free, ‘he’ must obey.” If willing is essentially plural, however, what becomes of an imperative in which the conception of my action is central? That is, if “I” am seen as a plurality of some kind, the insistence on designating certain actions as just mine becomes a troublesome one. Now interpreted as an imperative the eternal recurrence does seem to accord such a special status to my actions and my experiences. In this respect it involves a concentration on the self that is not typical of all imperatives. Those issued by religious authorities typically prescribe or proscribe certain acts but they do not necessarily require an attention to each of one’s actions and experiences as specifically one’s own. Even Kant’s categorical imperative has to do with treating all rational beings (including oneself) as ends; the emphasis is not so much on the continuity and quality of individual experience but on having intentions of a certain general form.

Now it is just this stress on the mineness (one might think here of Heidegger’s Jemeinigkeit) of my experience in the thought of eternal recurrence that renders it practically paradoxical. For the thought, when thought through, is not congenial to that conception of a unitary and constant self which is required in order to support such an emphasis on mineness. Soon I will be suggesting that the many figures suddenly introduced in part four of Zarathustra are partial selves and that Zarathustra’s distancing himself from the higher men is also a way of refusing to be tied down to any determinate, atomic identity. But now we are more concerned with the thought as a thought and the implications which that thought has for the notion of personal identity. We have already noted that the crucial confrontation with the thought is deliberately set within the context of an exploration of the possibility of a private language, yet if the thought is in some way inimical to a conception of personal identity, must it also be inconsistent with the ideal of a purely private language? This is the bullet (or snake) which Zarathustra must and does bite. The results should not be surprising to those who have considered Wittgenstein’s remarks about solipsism (in the Tractatus) and his discussion of private language (in the Philosophical Investigations). For in each case the point is that the most extreme insistence on the mineness of all my thought, experience, or language renders questionable the very notion of the individual self. When all is mine there is no longer the possibility of distinguishing myself from another or what is mine from what is not; so that “I,” “mine” and so on, when pushed beyond a certain limit, cease to have any meaningful application. The same point is made by Hegel in the first chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit where he shows that the absolute insistence on the inevitability of my experience being “my experience of this, here and now” makes not only the indexical terms “this,” “here” and “now” abstract and useless, but shows the “I” and the “my” to be similarly absurd.⁶ Now before discussing the analogous dialectical movement in Nietzsche’s text it should be noted that the attitude taken toward this insight there is quite different than Wittgenstein’s or Hegel’s. Those philosophers saw the point as a reductio ad absurdum of the notion of an absolute self with a private language; having seen the absurdity, we are to turn with relief to the more concrete and actual uses of language or to the more determinate categories of science. Zarathustra, on the other hand, joyfully accepts the idea of the dissolution of the self. He (and Nietzsche) do not retreat to common sense or to systematic philosophy but welcome this strange avenue to a radical dissolution of selfhood.

To see these radical implications of the thought of eternal recurrence, it will be useful to consider another view which takes a somewhat more conventional view of the thought’s purpose. The interpretation I wish to examine somewhat critically is that of Alexander Nehamas who argues that the point of the thought, for Nietzsche, is to provide the one who thinks it with a means of strongly integrating all of his or her experiences, that is, of attaining an organically unified self. Like some other recent philosophical writers on Nietzsche, Nehamas approaches his work through its concern with literary and textual models and analogies. For him the thought of eternal recurrence must be understood in terms of “Nietzsche’s overarching metaphor of the world as a text that is to be interpreted.”⁷ In this case the text would be that of one’s own life, and the point of teaching eternal recurrence would be to urge the thinker to seek that interpretation of his or her own text that would lead to seeing the text of the life as completely integrated and definitive. As Nehamas says, this view “assimilates the ideal person to an ideal literary character and the ideal life to an ideal story.”⁸ Like Nehamas I have been relying heavily on Nietzsche’s use of textual models; unlike him, however, I have been focussing attention, especially in the case of Zarathustra, on the actual development and articulation of Nietzsche’s text, rather than constructing a general view of what Nietzsche thinks about textuality. By tracing some difficulties in Nehamas’s treatment of eternal recurrence I hope to show some of the radical questions and possibilities that Nietzsche’s texts are designed to lead us to confront. In the process I also want to suggest that Nietzsche’s conception of text and interpretation does not lend itself to the Aristotelian or Hegelian idea of organic unity which governs Nehamas’s construction; Nietzsche’s own conception, as writers such as Deleuze, Klossowski, and Derrida have suggested in various ways, is deconstructive and dispersive rather than totalizing and integrating.

So I will be arguing that the aim of the thought of eternal recurrence is just the opposite of what Nehamas sees as its point; to take the thought of eternal recurrence seriously is not to aspire to a deeper, more profound integration of the self, but to confront the disintegration and dissolution of the ordinary self rather than its ideal unification and transfiguration. It is this attack on the integrated self which renders Nietzsche’s thought truly uncanny and abysmal (abgrundlich—lacking a foundation).

As Nehamas says, it is possible to distinguish Nietzsche’s flirtation with cosmological arguments for recurrence from his deeper interest in the psychological meaning of the thought for the one who thinks it. On this question it is significant that Nietzsche did not publish the sketches of a cosmological argument for the doctrine which later appeared in The Will to Power and that his first treatment of the idea, in The Gay Science, has to do with the immense burden presented by the thought and its power to transform the thinker (GS, 341; 3, 570). But what sort of transformation does Nietzsche have in mind? On Nehamas’s view, I (who am thinking the thought) must first realize that it is foolish to think about my having a life related to, but different from, my actual life. That is, if what eternally recurs for me is just this actual life, I should not hope for a better or fear for a worse one; moreover, all counterfactual thoughts about my past and present are rigidly excluded. Since my life is just what it is, I am at best wasting time and at worst wallowing in self-deception by thinking to myself thoughts of the “if only” variety, e.g. “if only I had been born rich,” “if only I had made the right social contacts at the right time.” So far I still agree with Nehamas who sees Nietzsche here as challenging us to accept or reject our lives as a whole: since each part of my life is bound up with all the others, rejection of any one would entail rejection of the whole. Ordinarily one does regret at least part of one’s past, and Nietzsche suggests that resentment of one’s own past may be the deepest root of envy, ressentiment, and other attitudes which he deplores. What eternal recurrence challenges us to do is to overcome such resentment.

Nehamas suggests that the way in which Nietzsche believes we can overcome resentment is through an active process of interpreting and reinterpreting our lives as if we were fictional characters. He finds support for such a view in Nietzsche’s early declaration that “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified” and in his continued exaltation of the artist’s power to transcend the banalities of life (BT, 5; 1, 42-48). The model by means of which each of us can become an artist of his own life is that of the literary character. Literary characters, like any person as understood from the perspective of eternal recurrence, inhabit a world that “does seem to be exhausted by the descriptions of what actually happens in the stories in which they are found.” Nehamas suggests that in following out the thought of recurrence we should strive to see ourselves as such characters, for they offer us a way of seeing how a life can be both necessarily what it is and at the same time coherent, integrated, and aesthetically satisfying. The claim is that this model also illuminates a problem for Nietzsche’s thought by showing in a perspicuous manner how it ascribes a priority to the aesthetic over the moral: a fascinating literary character—like Melville’s Ahab or Proust’s Charlus—“may be a perfect character but (represent) a dreadful person.”⁹

I believe that the model of the “ideal character” in an organically unified text is not helpful in understanding the psychological intent of eternal recurrence. Let us consider this at first indirectly by looking at Nehamas’s description of the process whereby one might decide whether one’s own life approximated that of an ideal character sub specie aeternitatis. The question facing such an interpreter of his or her own life would be whether or not every aspect of it can be integrated in such an ideal.

Consider the consequences of an open-ended process of interpretation which will decide the question of whether or not I can accept eternal recurrence. Eternal recurrence now becomes a regulative rather than a constitutive idea (in Kantian terms). I may never know whether I am worthy of recurring eternally, let alone “once more.” Like the Christian who painfully interrogates his own state of sin or grace, the Nietzschean would live in anguished uncertainty about his or her future redemption. This parallels that dichotomy between the world of experience and the true world which Nietzsche constantly criticizes.

Nehamas then, has produced such a “Christian” version of eternal recurrence by relying upon a view of textual interpretation as tending toward a definitive understanding of an organically unified text. Such a model, it is true, has a very wide following; it receives a classical formulation in Hegel’s Aesthetics and it is the working model of the American New Critics. As the German and French philosophical reception of Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s authority for the deconstructive movement in art and literary criticism suggest, however, Nietzsche’s own model of textual interpretation is congenial to the opposed concepts of difference and plurality. His celebration of the plurality of interpretations ought not to be read as if each interpretation, to be an acknowledged member of the plurality, had to conform internally to the standard of organic unity. That is, his pluralism is more radical than simply allowing that (contra Hegel and the New Critics) there can be many equally valid interpretations which exhibit organic unity. He is claiming that an interpretation—even a strong and vitalizing one—need not present us with an organically unified manifold. From an aesthetic point of view this can be seen in the praise of the Dionysian. From a more general hermeneutical perspective we can think of Nietzsche’s operative principle in Toward a Genealogy of Morals: “only that which has no history can be defined” (GM II, 13; 5, 317). Hegel supposed that the hermeneutic circle of interpretation could be closed and that the person of the interpreter could be added as a footnote to the text. Nehamas appeals to this Hegelian model in citing as an example of the self-interpretation necessary for the affirmation of eternal recurrence Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. There the hero comes to see the earlier moments of his life, which had originally appeared to be disjointed and wasted segments of time, as finally coming to form “parts of a unified pattern, the result of which is his determination to begin at last his first book,”¹¹ i.e., the novel in which his readers read just this. Since Proust’s narrator Marcel is a literary character, he has no future beyond the conclusion of his book and so he would, on Nehamas’s view, be worthy of affirming eternal recurrence. The consequences for the actual historical individual Marcel Proust, who died while still revising his novel, are somewhat different. If Proust was also worthy of affirming eternal recurrence it could only be because he had no future at that point; that is, there were no possible events in his future which could shake the self-interpretation he had produced of himself as having lived “a perfect life.” Notice that this transforms the doctrine of eternal recurrence into another version of Solon’s “count no man happy until he is dead.” On the contrary, Nietzsche has Zarathustra suggest that for the affirmation of eternal recurrence it is enough if we “say yes to one joy” (Z, 331; 4, 402). Significantly, the one character in Thus Spoke Zarathustra whom Zarathustra helps to affirm the eternal recurrence, “the ugliest man,” says that he so affirms because of the joy of “one day, one festival with Zarathustra” (Z, 326; 4, 396). It is of more than coincidental interest that the Hegelian reading of Proust to which Nehamas appeals has been challenged by contemporary theorists of narrative. Although the model of loss and recapture of the narrator’s self in which the narrator in the text comes to coincide with the author is understandably generated in a reading culture that is governed by a regulative ideal of organic unity, some recent critics have demonstrated that other readings of Proust are possible in which this identification does not occur.¹²

Let me now turn to an alternative account of the psychological ramifications of eternal recurrence which, I think, is closer to Nietzsche’s intentions and texts. On this view the primary focus of attention is not on the question of whether or not I am worthy of eternal recurrence, but rather on the consequence of my thinking the thought seriously. The result of such thinking ought to be a dispersive rather than an integrative conception of the self. First, such a result would be compatible (as Nehamas’s is not) with Nietzsche’s frequent critiques of the conception of a substantial self. Typical of such critiques is the polemic in the first part of Beyond Good and Evil in which Nietzsche says that we must “declare war” against an atomistic or individualistic conception of the soul and should, in its place, entertain pluralistic hypotheses according to which the soul or self is composed of a multiplicity of psychic entities (BGE, 12-23; 5, 26-39).

Let us now see whether the thought of eternal recurrence does support this reconstruction of its import. Keeping our distance from the text long enough for this investigation we will then be able to return to it refreshed, as Zarathustra does after his own period of silence. We can begin by putting the point in a relatively weak and minimal form. The thought of eternal recurrence, unlike typical ideas of religious and philosophical importance, does nothing at all to strengthen the identity of the one who understands, accepts, or affirms it. Usually the acceptance of a major religious or metaphysical belief is seen as marking an important transition within the life history of a continuous individual, or it is regarded as a watershed separating his earlier illusions from a new and conscious identity with his or her deeper, truer, or eternal self. So (to begin a partial and schematic survey of such views), Platonism includes both the idea that reality is an unchanging world of forms and also (as in the myths of immortality) the notion of an eternal soul which can know these forms. In a historical religion such as Christianity, one’s life is divided by the experience of being “born again” which exhibits the before and after of a spiritual quest. In Hegel, who attempts a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, it is through a progression in time that one arrives at one’s true and eternal identity as part of Absolute Spirit. In all of these cases knowledge of or faith in a certain principle is seen as strengthening both one’s commitment to the principle and one’s identity in so far as one is a knower or believer. It should be noted that the importance of these views for the individual is dependent upon either a linear notion of time or a distinction between the temporal and eternal worlds (or both).

Now the idea of eternal recurrence excludes the possibility of structuring my life in terms of a linear sequence marked by the affirmation of the idea itself, for the thought declares that my experiences before my realization of the thought and those which I might have after forgetting it or temporarily ignoring it are of equal importance with those which I have in the most serious meditation upon it. According to the thought all my experiences are of infinite significance. Just as I cannot subordinate my past ignorance to my present or future knowledge, so I cannot subordinate a temporal world of error and illusion to an eternal, enlightened world. This may help to explain Nietzsche’s frequent praise of the healthfulness of forgetting, in contrast to the Platonic enterprise of anamnesis. ¹³ Yet it might be supposed that within a single cycle of my life the thought of eternal recurrence could play an integrating role for me, allowing me to see my life as a meaningful progression. But to the extent to which I affirm the thought I affirm also my error and ignorance of it; for in affirming the whole of my life I must affirm all of those moments before I knew of the thought, or when I rejected it, or when I was considering it, as well as those (possible) moments of my future when I may forget it or (for whatever reason) cease to affirm it. And in such periods of error, ignorance, or backsliding the thought cannot play a major role for me because I will not be affirming it. Any attempt to use the thought in order to make my life history into a meaningful development runs into the danger of complicity in that general revenge which the human race yearns to practice upon “time and its ‘it was.’ ” That is, such an attempt amounts to segmenting my life into a “before” and an “after,” such that I would be permanently fragmented and split, like the fragmented persons that Zarathustra describes in “Of Redemption” as the real cripples of this world.

I introduced these reflections by suggesting that they would establish the minimal point that the thought of eternal recurrence does not reinforce one’s conception of oneself or help one to find one’s true self. The point can now be put more emphatically. The thought of eternal recurrence invites me to affirm all that occurs and so it invites me to affirm all of my actions and experiences. But it does not suggest that I affirm these because of any special order or development which they possess; indeed they may be discontinuous in a number of ways, as reflection on the fact of forgetting suggests. In accepting eternal recurrence, therefore, I accept all that is contingent and accidental about myself. But surely, someone will say, all these experiences are mine, whether or not my life exhibits a meaningful career and whether or not I hold fast to the thought of eternal recurrence. Yet if we look more closely, what the thought affirms is the moment (Augenblick) or rather the entire sequence of moments which constitutes a cycle of the universe or of what we call an individual life. As in Hume or Buddhism or Whitehead, the moments become primary. As Zarathustra has already suggested, the purpose of his most abysmal thought is to provide deliverance from the complex of guilt, revenge, and responsibility in which human beings are generally caught. One of the constant themes of Nietzsche’s work, explicit from The Dawn through his last books, is the connection between our idea of a constant, responsible agent, that is, the ego as classically understood, and this complex of guilt and revenge. In Twilight of the Idols there is an important section entitled “The Four Great Errors.” All of the alleged errors are mistakes made in ascribing independent agency and responsibility to the self. All the errors are construed as motivated by the revenge of “the theologians, who continue to infect the innocence of becoming with ‘punishment’ and ‘guilt’ by means of the concept ‘moral world-order.’ ” In contrast Nietzsche declares that “our teaching” must be that “the fatality of [a human being’s] nature cannot be disentangled from the fatality of all that which has been and will be . . . nothing exists apart from the whole!—That no one is any longer made accountable . . . this alone is the great liberation—thus alone is the innocence of becoming restored.”

We have travelled some distance from the text in attempting to think through the thought of recurrence. I have suggested one line of thought according to which this thought is inconsistent with the romantic heroism and individualism so often ascribed to Nietzsche and his most memorable character, Zarathustra. I have also attempted to place Zarathustra’s confrontation with this thought within the context of the quest for a private language in which one can say that which is truly one’s own. If both the placement of the thought in this context and the interpretation of the thought’s anti-individualism are valid, then Zarathustra’s thinking of this thought (or more precisely Nietzsche’s narration of it) is best seen as a metaphilosophical demonstration of what happens when one explores one’s very own thought in one’s very own language. The eternal recurrence is said to be the most godless thought; it is not difficult to suppose that Nietzsche might think of the most godless thought as also the most individual one. What may not be so apparent is that the death of God must also be the death of the individual as such. For God represents simply the most egregious form of a central organizing principle that would explain the presence of order and value in the world; the idea of an independent ego is simply one more variation on this principle, as are all forms of atomism. If eternal recurrence is the most abysmal or groundless (Abgrundliche) thought, it may be because it lacks the basis of a single thinker as its Grund; it cuts away its own apparent support. In Zarathustra Nietzsche suggests that the look into the abyss can be joyous rather than terrifying if we surrender the search for such a ground where there is none. This, I think, is the import of eternal recurrence, rather than the attempt to become one’s own foundation by means of an interpretation of oneself as absolutely coherent and integrated. The point is not to restore foundationalism by ceaselessly looking for a final interpretation of one’s own text, but to explore a world in which the quest for foundations has been surrendered.

A text from the spring of 1881, before the “discovery” of eternal recurrence, states the theme with some passion.

When Zarathustra finally turns away from his animals, seeming to them to be asleep, he is actually conversing with his own soul. Such interior conversation is a constant theme of the third part of Zarathustra. But this conversation of the soul with itself (recalling Plato’s definition of thinking) and the songs that follow the self-communion bring a new tone to the internal colloquy. The title of the chapter which records the conversation is “On the Great Longing” (Von der grossen Sehnsucht); sehnen and its derivatives suggest not merely desire but more specifically desire from afar that involves the tension of distance. This element of distance becomes constitutive of the picture that Zarathustra draws of his own soul, for he describes it as stretched out, spanning all distances, temporal, spatial, and spiritual:

The soul has been through a process of purification or convalescence that has resulted in its transformation. It is “rescued from all nooks” in so far as it is no longer limited to a precise location. The thought of eternal recurrence is such as to expand the soul’s boundaries to the furthest possible extreme. Zarathustra’s praise of his own soul here (or his love-song to himself) is not the triumphant cry of the hegemonic, imperial self but the joy felt upon release from the constrictions of a narrowly defined identity. Whereas in Plato the soul’s conversation with itself reveals it to be a desiring being that longs for its own completion through the fulfillment of desire, the soul praised by Zarathustra is one which is already overfull in its very openness to things. As Eugen Fink suggests, the great longing is simply openness to the world (Weltoffenheit). Such a longing is content to live with distances, we might say, because it does not have to go anywhere. Its desire is not directed toward any specific objects in their specificity; the desire is rather to dance or play over the many things of human space and time that are separate from one another. Dioynsus is also invoked (although not by name) in this address as the master of that golden marvel, the boat of free will, and as:

Dionysus, the god of intoxication who is continuously torn apart and yet reasserts himself, is the god appropriate to a soul that lacks simple location and dances “over every Here and There and Over-there.”

Zarathustra’s insight into eternal recurrence cannot be communicated in the prosaic manner that the animals first attempted. In the last three chapters of part three, we find Zarathustra poetically addressing his own soul (in “The Great Longing”), engaging in “The Other Dancing Song” with Life, personified as a woman, and, in a vatic mode, pronouncing the mysteries of “The Seven Seals” whose dark images are meant to protect and enclose the most abysmal thought. Both “The Other Dancing Song” and “The Seven Seals” are love songs suggesting how the thought of recurrence can lead to “the lineaments of gratified desire.” In the first of these, Life is a woman with whom Zarathustra plays a flirtatious game (Life and Wisdom have already appeared as women in “The Dance Song” of part two). She is jealous of his Wisdom and surprised to hear that Zarathustra knows that it is impossible to leave Life for good (he has whispered his knowledge of recurrence to her). Here, too, Zarathustra brings into play the notorious whip which the old woman told him of secretly in part one (“Are you going to women? Don’t forget the whip!”); the actual use of this metaphor, which has been left out of play for so long, does not suggest the sadism that it has been taken to imply when read out of context. Here it is used for keeping time in a dance.

Each part of “The Seven Seals” ends with a refrain expressing the eroticism of eternal recurrence:

The appearance of the erotic here may seem out of place if we think of the recurrence as an impersonal cosmological doctrine. We may even be tempted, knowing of Nietzsche’s shyness and his frustration with women, to interpret these love songs as the expression of what has been repressed. Certainly in a world where everything returns there will also be a return of the repressed. Yet I think it is possible to see a closer connection between the thought of recurrence, the dissolution of the narrowly constructed self, and the eroticism of these songs. From the beginning of his convalescence, Zarathustra knows that song is the best expression of the thought of recurrence. He says that song or music creates bridges which overcome solitude, if only in appearance. Now as I have been reading the development of Zarathustra’s thought in part three, he has sought the most profound solitude only to find that there is no genuine distinction between an absolute solipsism and a view of the world in which the boundaries of the ego are radically expanded or dissolved. Erotic love is traditionally celebrated as such a dissolution of the boundaries of the self, in so far as the self has been conceived as a distinct being with its own principle of identity. This makes the love song a somewhat anomalous genre of literature. On the one hand, as a lyric it expresses the individuality of the singer; on the other its content suggests a dissolution of that individuality which is its formal premise. Now this is precisely the paradox of Zarathustra’s long search for a philosophically and rhetorically appropriate mode of speech in part three: he seeks that which is most his own but discovers, in the process, that the condition of being absolutely at home with himself is one in which the self can no longer be discriminated as a single subject in contrast with others and with an objective world.

We may, for a moment, take seriously Heidegger’s suggestion that Nietzsche is the completion of the Western metaphysical tradition which has its beginning in Plato. Then we may note that Zarathustra’s love songs, expressing as they do his most groundless thought of recurrence, are in some way parallel to those Platonic myths of Eros in the Symposium and the Phaedrus that speak in parables of the soul’s ascent to an eternal ground. In both cases the genuine object of desire is eternity, although Plato construes the eternal as outside of this world and, therefore, its pursuit is endangered by too great a concern with the erotics of this world. There is, however, something parallel to the pattern of self-dissolution which we have found in Nietzsche. The erotic ascent of the soul is one in which it casts off those features which individuate it (traceable in the final analysis to the body) and becomes or merges with soul as such. At the higher Platonic altitudes we use “soul” not to individuate your psyche from mine, but as a mass-word which designates a single stuff like water in which there are no intrinsic divisions. Nevertheless, when soul in its purity completes its Platonic marriage with the eternal, it is quite thoroughly differentiated from that world of appearances and bodies, which Plato describes contemptuously as consisting of animals who can think of nothing but “grazing and mounting each other.”¹⁴ Nietzsche identifies this world, the world of experienced joys and sorrows, as the eternal world; so Zarathustra’s marriage with Eternity is not merely a parable or myth but expresses the eroticism involved in seeing this world as the genuine object of desire. The loosening of the boundaries of the self then has to do with a dispersion into the multiplicity of recurrence rather than with an ascent to a refuge beyond space and time.

In his reading of Heidegger on Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida points to Heidegger’s omission of sexuality in his attempt at a monumental exegesis. Specifically, he notes that in reading Nietzsche’s “How the True World Finally Became a Fable: the History of an Error,” Heidegger does not recognize (let alone comment on) Nietzsche’s italicized “stage direction” for the third, or Christian phase of the error’s history: “it becomes woman [es wird Weib].”¹⁵ This is indeed a surprising omission since Heidegger emphasizes the continuity of the development from Plato to Nietzsche. Yet the omission is typical. Although one often finds slighting references to Nietzsche’s supposed misogyny, there has been little concern with the fact that at one of the crucial points in Zarathustra, Life, Wisdom, and Eternity are all celebrated as women and that Zarathustra hopes for a marriage with Eternity. Eugen Fink suggests that all of “The Seven Seals” may refer to the ancient cosmogony of Father Heaven and Mother Earth.¹⁶ This may well be; in any case, each part of this chapter has an erotic concern that contributes to its songs of love consequent on the thought of recurrence and its transformation of the self. The fifth of these seals has to do with the eroticization of space, for example (I omit the refrain reproduced above):

The sea is a fairly constant object of love in Zarathustra. By itself it suggests the boundlessness of space and the proliferation of adventurous possibilities, as when Zarathustra praises the sailors of the sea in “Of the Vision and the Riddle.” Here those same features of the sea are celebrated and there is a special emphasis on the boundless (das Grenzlose) and the glittering of space and time. The boundless sea is not so much a place as the condition which makes all places possible (to speak with Kant for a moment). Space is not just a system of coordinates but the lived space of a perpetual possibility of adventure. The imagery of this verse of the song suggests that space and time, the two forms of the Kantian transcendental aesthetic, have been collapsed into the single form of space, for “far out glisten space and time.” Nietzsche’s poetic conception of space here is that of a sheer boundlessness giving access to all objects of desire; he calls the heart to participate in the voyage. It is this conception of space as pure openness which Rilke seems to have derived from Nietzsche, as Heidegger notes.¹⁷ Zarathustra says to his soul that eternal recurrence allows it “to say ‘today’ as well as ‘once’ and ‘formerly’ and to dance [its] dance over every Here and There and Over-There.” Now it is space, not the linear time of the Kantian transcendental aesthetic, which offers the sheer availability of all places. Time, as ordinarily understood, is unidimensional; it is constantly eliminating possibilities through what Locke called its “perpetual perishing.” It is the dichotomous aspect of ordinary time which Zarathustra laments in his “Funeral Song.” The spatialization of time is not, in this context, a philosophical error, but an achievement that becomes possible only with great thought and love.