(Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence — INTRODUCTION, aph. 7)

There is yet another reason why the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence does not come into conflict with other religions. It generously leaves to them the answer to the question of what (it is that) returns… Who are we who return, and what is this world that returns? The Doctrine says very little about this. It does not tell us whether we are ‘selves’, ‘egos’, ‘subjects’, or something else; divine beings, human animals, or merely ‘brains in vats’; whether some God, Brahman, apeiron, or perhaps pure Nothingness is ‘at play’ — or something, at this moment, wholly unimaginable and inconceivable. We are simply parts of that something in which we are immersed.

The only thing the Doctrine speaks about concerns what each of us immediately finds within our own experience, regardless of whether that experience is real, constructed, or illusory. What we encounter are ‘states of consciousness’ (a phenomenon that could be named otherwise and that does not prejudge the existence of anything like consciousness — we have merely chosen to call our experience so) which, whether we are willing to admit it or not, stand at the foundation of everything else, including ‘our’ existence and life itself. ‘States of consciousness’ are the only certainty of which we have experience. They are the eyes through which we observe and experience the world, through which we think and decide what to do or which possibility within it to choose — without having to know what these states are ‘in themselves’.

But when we say ‘our’ ‘states of consciousness’ — what exactly do we mean? Do we mean our ‘self’, our ‘ego’, or something else? When we say ‘our’ states of consciousness, we mean individuated states of the Whole that are capable of experiencing other states of that same Whole — even though the manner of this experience remains enigmatic to us. In other words, the very possibility of encountering other states in experience is what makes these states ‘states of consciousness’. And since such an individuated state continually encounters new states — that is, the changes of the Whole itself — it becomes a witness to the Whole’s temporal unfolding. The possibility of memory — of retaining states that the Whole has already assumed — forms what we call ‘our’ states of consciousness. These states are nothing outside the Whole; they are immanent to it.

This temporally unfolded coherence and unity that we are is what, in this book, we have called the Particularity, or the Properness, of the Whole — rather than a ‘self’. For unlike the ‘self’, the Properness of the Whole is not something ‘programmed’ from without, nor is it determined by so-called ‘social factors’. Nor is it some kind of ‘ego’, since it includes no a priori, conditioned, and indisputable psychological aspect of a being — no inherent qualitative feature in a spiritual sense that would possess value in itself. ‘Our’ states of consciousness, as ‘our’ Particularity of the Whole, are merely connected possibilities among countless other connected and unconnected possibilities that the Whole receives within itself… One Properness or Particularity of the Whole cannot be another — and for that reason alone it is ‘ours’. It is meaningless to determine in advance ‘our’ states of consciousness as the Properness of the Whole; every such determination arises only a posteriori. Just as we cannot conceive our hand apart from the body to which it belongs, so too we cannot conceive ‘our’ Properness/Particularity of the Whole — including within it both our body and our spirit — apart from the Whole into which it is woven. The awareness of this aspect of ourselves — that we are Particularities of the Whole rather than thrown ‘selves’ into the world — places us in a disposition receptive to insight into the philosophical character of the thought of Eternal Recurrence and to the feeling of its certainty.

We may always speculate about God and the Whole, or, in agreement with the poststructuralists, cry out: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”[1] Insight into the nature of that ‘What?’ which returns remains unattainable; the only thing we can know is that we return — indeed, this is the only certainty we can have about this world, one that even the poststructuralist ‘murderers of metaphysics’ have overlooked. We have long known that the question ‘How?’ is answered by science together with analytic philosophers; and now we see that to the question ‘What?’ — the simpler version of the more perilous ‘Why?’ — the final answer can only be religion, some form of belief, or perhaps a new continental philosophy. We do not know who we are or what we are; our ultimate, ‘Holy-Grail’ identity remains in darkness, just as we do not know the ground upon which this world rests. The only thing we know is that within it we return — inevitably and without exception — and nothing more. And this is the central hypothesis of this book.

The fourth chapter of this book is devoted to ‘our’ states of consciousness as Propernesses — that is, Particularities — of the Whole.

[1] “There is nothing outside the text.” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158.