(This is the eighth part of an essay from the book The Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, presenting a previously unpublished genealogy of the thought of Eternal Recurrence in Nietzsche’s thinking. The first seven parts of the essay can be read >> here.)
After the note we might regard as the culmination of Nietzsche’s reflections on the thought that seized him by the rock at Surley—the note known in the literature as the “cosmological argument”—Nietzsche turns to the ontology of becoming. He returns to thoughts that had haunted him even before the thought of Eternal Recurrence, evidently seeking to weave them together and bring them together as one. To what extent is Eternal Recurrence compatible with the ontology of becoming? Can the becoming of all things also provide the basis for the workings of the ring of eternal recurrence…? Let us see how this teaching, so closely related to Eternal Recurrence, begins to take shape…
“Things” do not exist
For Nietzsche, “things” do not exist (11[151]); in the world there is “eternal change, the eternal flux of all things” (11[149]). In this flux, even the distinction between the dead and the living is lost. For even the dead cannot resist the flux, and so we imagine its transition from one state to another as “the transition from an enduring ‘dead’ state into a different enduring ‘dead’ state”. The living thus turns out to be a special case of the dead (11[150]).
In note 11[152], meanwhile, Nietzsche starts from the premise that all possibilities in the order and relation of forces must already have been exhausted and concludes that “…everything must have already existed, countless times.” Existed? After so much becoming, we might at least expect “existed” to appear in quotation marks.
The ontology of becoming (“Our intellect is not equipped to comprehend becoming”)
It seems to us that in the third book of his Nietzsche—The Will to Power as Knowledge—Heidegger takes up the thought in Nietzsche’s next note and sketches a different theory of knowledge from the one presented in Being and Time. In this note, Nietzsche draws another cold conclusion, colder and deeper than those before it, with still more unfathomable consequences: “Our intellect is not equipped to comprehend becoming” (11[153]); it is adapted to comprehend being, not the eternal flux of all things. To grasp “things,” it must somehow bring them to a halt, “freeze” them in time. Hence “our space amounts to an imaginary world” in which things exist, while of the space beyond it Nietzsche says: “We know nothing of the space that belongs to the eternal flux of things” (11[155]). And it is precisely within this “space that belongs to the eternal flux of things,” it seems, that Nietzsche seeks to place the ring of Eternal Recurrence.
What, then, remains of us in this flux? In the lengthy note 11[156], Nietzsche turns the question of becoming toward the individual and his faith in his own permanence:
Knowledge, based on the faith in permanence, stands in the service of cruder forms of permanence (masses, common people humankind) and wants to weed out and kill the finer forms, idiosyncratic taste; it works against individualization, the taste that is a condition of life for only one person. (11[156])
The species is “the cruder error,” the individual “the finer error.” The deeper we descend into reality, the more refined the errors become. They seem closer to the truth of becoming, yet they do not cease to be errors. The individual himself, as something unchanging, does not exist: in the next moment, however brief, he is already something else. What, then, might be least entangled in error? “The infinitely tiny moment,” Nietzsche replies:
The infinitely tiny moment is the higher reality and truth, a lightning image out of the eternal flux. (11[156])
And yet, at the end of the same note, he also associates the creative moment with the finest error. Nietzsche leaves us with a riddle here: the moment is “the higher reality and truth,” yet even within it we have not freed ourselves from error. And it is of these infinitely tiny moments, we conjecture, that the ring of Eternal Recurrence is composed.
A little later, in note 11[162], it becomes clearer why we find it so difficult to free ourselves from error. Nietzsche follows his reflections on the truth of the eternal flux of things with a somewhat unexpected conclusion: this truth does not tolerate incorporation! “Our organs (for living) are equipped [only] for error.”
Life is the condition of knowing. Erring the condition of life […] This is not something bitter! We must love and nourish erring, it is the womb of knowledge. Art as the nourishing of delusion—our cult. (11[162])
More telling still: “Knowing about erring does not suspend it!” (11[162]). What is there to say after these words—what paths has this most profound, yet perhaps also strangest and most capricious thinker of all time set out upon! We have known his thought of art as the “healer of all wounds,” and of the cultivation of illusion, since The Birth of Tragedy. His old and new thoughts seem to meet once again: what we cannot bear as truth, perhaps we can come to love through art.
In the same note, Nietzsche speaks of “Giving existence an aesthetic significance”—in our reading, of giving precedence to the beauties of moments lived rather than to some ultimate meaning. “Love and promote life for the sake of knowledge, love and promote erring imagining for the sake of life” (11[162])—only with these aesthetic spectacles perched on our noses does this thought become clearer and more acceptable…
On the ontology of becoming and the thought of Eternal Recurrence
But what of the ring itself, within which all this is supposed to repeat eternally? Let us return to note 11[157]. Nietzsche continues to weave two great thoughts into a single whole, a single pattern in which reality should take shape. The circle of Eternal Recurrence itself is not something that has come into being, and the cycle itself has no goal:
…everything is eternal, not developed: if a chaos of forces existed, then the chaos too was eternal and returned in each ring. (11[157])
If the world has “become” rational at one stage, it can be utterly irrational at another; “rationality or irrationality are not predicates” of it (11[157]).
From the question of what the world is like, Nietzsche now turns to how we are to live with this thought of it. In the notes that follow, an almost solemn mood takes hold of him. “Let us press the image of eternity on our life!” he writes in note 11[159]. He knows that this is only the beginning of the journey, the first steps in teaching the mightiest and most exalted thought on Earth. Yet he also knows that the thought of Eternal Recurrence must remain “small and impotent” for a long time to come, and warns us against teaching it “like a sudden religion” (11[158]).
He even finds time to address those who do not believe in Eternal Recurrence. “Whoever does not believe [in Eternal Recurrence] has a fleeting life in his consciousness” (11[160]). The thought of Eternal Recurrence threatens no one with hell, as some religions do. This note nevertheless suggests that Nietzsche did, at certain moments, attribute a kind of religious significance to the Teaching of Eternal Recurrence.
“Live in such a way that you must wish to live again”
And then, in note 11[161], comes the proclamation of that ungrounded imperative supposedly underlying the thought of Eternal Recurrence from its very inception. Many Nietzschean and non-Nietzschean minds would later appeal to it, believing that this was what had made the thought intelligible and palatable. In this note, Nietzsche writes quite explicitly:
Not to gaze out on distant unknown blisses and blessings and pardons, but to live in such a way that we want to live again and live this way in eternity! (11[161])
A little further on, in note 11[163], the imperative grows sharper:
My teaching says: live in such a way that you must wish to live again is the task—you will do so anyway! Whoever feels best from striving, let him strive: whoever feels best from resting, let him rest; whoever feels best from arrangement conformity obedience, let him obey. Only may he be aware of what makes him feel best and spare no means! At stake is eternity! 11[163]
But as we have already mentioned, and may mention a few more times, Karl Löwith had already drawn attention in his book on Nietzsche to the tension between the necessity of Eternal Recurrence and the demand that we shape our lives so that we wish to live them again. What sense does this demand make if every attempt to reshape our lives already repeats eternally? This tension surfaces in Nietzsche’s own addition after “is the task”—“you will do so anyway.”
One can only learn to accept such a life, although even this acceptance, this reconciliation in consciousness with such a life, has already occurred countless times. We shall break our teeth on this observation of Nietzsche’s about Eternal Recurrence yet—elsewhere, in the third chapter—for it leads us into the deepest paradoxes and the unfathomable consequences this thought can have for us.
Life as a work of art
The last note in this sequence to address the thought of Eternal Recurrence directly, 11[165], sets out “the main idea”—that life should be understood as a work of art. The surrounding notes still speak of incorporation, the similar and the same, eternal and fleeting things, up to note 11[168], which we may regard as Nietzsche’s return to his usual reflections. Here he considers how a son inherits his father’s “most practiced habits.” (Although this note opens with a thought that is more than a little intoxicating: “Whoever sows on the spirit plants trees that grow tall very late.” 11[168])
To conclude, then, let us return to art and read note 11[165] in full:
We want to experience an artwork again and again! Thus one should shape one’s life so that one has the same wish with respect to its individual parts! This the main idea! Only at the end is the teaching then presented of the repetition of all that has been, after the tendency has been implanted to create something that can flourish a hundred times more strongly under the sunshine of this teaching! (11[165])
Does this note mean that Nietzsche wishes to postpone presenting the Teaching of Eternal Recurrence until a person begins to shape a life he would want to live once more? It seems as though this is precisely what he intended: first learn to live so that you come to love your life, and then I shall tell you that you will live it eternally!
