No More Learning

More than fifteen years separate the public lecture "Who Is Nietz- sche's Zarathustra? " from the lecture course on eternal recurrence. Yet the consistency of theme is remarkable. Not that the Heidegger/Nietz- sche confrontation experienced no ups and downs. In the early 1940s Heidegger's waxing anxiety concerning the will-to-will that then seemed on the rampage drew Nietzsche into its somber sphere. In·
1939, while lecturing on "Will to Power as Knowledge," Heidegger was jotting a number of notes on "Nietzsche's Metaphysics" that were devastatingly critical and even polemical: he called Nietzsche's meta- physics the most extreme form of alienation from Greek civilization, a turgid expression of planetary technology, a pan-European rather than a truly "German" style of thinking. Not only did Nietzsche lack con-
254 THE ETERl'\AL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
ceptual rigor, even his enthusiasm for artistic creation boiled down to a fascination with technical achievement: the greatest stimulans to life was ultimately no more than an object of calculative thought, a pre- scription for "genius. " And so on.
The patient, measured reading of "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? " is thus a bit of a surprise. It seems as though in the early 1950s Heideg- ger executed a sympathetic return to Nietzsche-not primarily as the metaphysician of will to power and technician of artistic frenzy but as the thinker of eternal recurrence. The lecture "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? " springs from the 1951-52 lecture course at Freiburg en- titled "What Calls for Thinking? " There Heidegger calls Nietzsche, not the last metaphysician, but the last thinker of the Western world. 1 Here too Heidegger stresses the difficulty of Nietzsche's thought in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: no matter how intoxicating its language may be, the book's "fundamental thought" and "provenance" remain sobering challenges. In "What Calls for Thinking? " Heidegger advises his students to equip themselves for these challenges by studying Aristotle for ten or fifteen years! In "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? " (as in the second part of "What Calls for Thinking? ") Heidegger conjoins the names of Nietzsche and Parmenides.
Zarathustra is the advocate of life, suffering, and the circle. He teaches the doctrines of eternal recurrence and overman. The circle of life and suffering and the coherence of will to power, eternal return, and overman take center stage in Heidegger's reflections. At the begin- ning and end of his lecture stands the emblem of Zarathustra's ani- mals, the sign of both Nietzsche's and Heidegger's longing. Eagle and serpent are totems of Zarathustra, the thinker of eternal return, and talismans for Heidegger, who thinks the relationship of Being and hu- man being. The teaching of eternal recurrence is nothing whimsical: dismay marks Zarathustra's very style, consternation in the face of his most abysmal thought. Nor is the doctrine of overman an expression of boldness and presumption. "Over-man" Heidegger defines as "that hu-
1 Martin Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? (Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1954), p. 61. English translation by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, What Is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 46.
Analysis 255
man being who goes beyond prior humanity solely in order to conduct such humanity for the first time to its essence. " Overman is Nietz- sche's answer to the question of whether man is prepared to assume dominion over the earth. Heidegger's own reflection has less to do with achieving dominion than with rescuing the earth; yet he puts this dif- ference in abeyance and focuses on Zarathustra as the teacher of eter- nal return. That teaching points the way of transition to the overman, although the destination itself remains remote. If dismay is the first of Zarathustra's characteristics, then the second is longing. The episode "On the Great Longing" begins with Zarathustra's invocation of "To- day," "One day," and "Formerly" as aspects of the perpetual now of eternity. True, Nietzsche's is an eternity of recurrence rather than a
nunc stans; yet the tendency of Heidegger's argument here is to reduce the doctrine of return to familiar metaphysical structures.
A second thrust of inquiry now intervenes and proves to be less familiar. Once again the theme of time occupies the spotlight, when Heidegger asks about the bridge to overman. That bridge is called "Redemption from the Spirit of Revenge," and revenge is defined as man's ill will toward time and its "It was. " Nietzsche diagnoses such revenge at the heart of all the tradition held most sacrosanct, including its ''best reflection. " His understanding of revenge is thus metaphysi- cal, in the sense that he understands it as having determined man's relation to all being. If in modern metaphysics man's best reflection is
representation (Vorstellen), the shadow of representation is persecution (Nachstellen). In the defiant projection of beings in modern meta- physics and science, in its aggressive disparagement of transiency, Hei- degger discerns something that more than resembles revenge. He will later shrink from the full consequences of his own discovery and en- deavor to "leave the question open"; yet these pages on revenge, which the earlier lecture course needed but did not find, retain their own force.
The introduction of Schelling's identification of primal Being as willing has a double edge in Heidegger's text. One edge cuts Nietz- sche, the philosopher of will; the other cuts metaphysics, the tradition of ill will. It remains to be seen whether Heidegger himself escapes
256 THE ETERl'\AL RECURREI\CE OF THE SAl\1E
unscathed. The forceful analysis of revenge now deepens into an in- quiry into time. Most surprising perhaps is the fact that now the "It was" of time all but swallows the two remaining ecstases or phases of time. Whereas in Being and Time and the writings surrounding it the priority of the future is emphasized again and again as the origin of transcendence, projection, and existentiality, it is now the passing away of time that marks time's essential unfolding: time, and that means, its "It was. " From Plato's disparagement of me on to Schel- ling's embrace of "eternity" and "independence from time" the ill will toward time and transiency vents its subtle spleen. Yet Heidegger em- phasizes not the deprecation of the sensuous realm as such but the sheer distinction between being and a supratemporal ideality, the cho- rismos or gap, that runs through metaphysics from its inception to its end.
What may grant redemption from the revulsion against time? Nietz- sche does not embrace the Schopenhauerian solution-dissolution of the will as such. He wills instead that transiency perdure. Such perdur- ance can obtain only as eternal recurrence of the same. Heidegger is quick to remind us that in traditional metaphysics "eternity" is predi- cated of primal Being. At this point he once again invokes the essential coherence of eternal return and overman. Eternal return appears to assume preeminence-as the thought that would liberate reflection from revenge and so lead to the overman. Once again Heidegger in- vokes the spectacle of Zarathustra's animals, the emblem of interfused circles, as indicative of the essential affinity of Nietzsche's two princi- pal doctrines and as mimetic of the very Being of beings, eternal recur- rence. And once again the "Recapitulation" note (WM, 617) assumes its central place in Heidegger's interpretation. On the basis of that note Heidegger attributes to Nietzsche himselfthe supreme will to power, that is, the will to stamp Being (as perdurance, stability, fixity, perma- nence of presence) on Becoming. Overlooking the second sentence in that note, which begins, "Twofold falsification. . . ," Heidegger asks whether eternal recurrence itself may not be reduced to such coinage, whether it therefore does not conceal in itself an even more highly spiritualized spirit of revenge than that contained in prior reflection.
He adduces a note from the Nachlass which attributes an "extreme
Analysis 257
exuberance of revenge" to Nietzsche's own will to be life's advocate. And so the case seems to be closed. 2
The lecture "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? " reaches its climax in Heidegger's avowal that Zarathustra's doctrine of eternal return fails to achieve redemption from revenge. His avowal is not meant as a refuta- tion or critique of the Nietzschean philosophy but as a query-an inquiry into the extent to which "Nietzsche's thought too is animated
2 It may be worthwhile noting that Heidegger's reduction of eternal return to a "stamp- ing" of Being on Becoming, overlooking as it does the reservations in WM, 617 ("two- fold falsification"; "closest approximation"), brings his interpretation discomfitingly close to that of Alfred Baeumler. In Chapter Seven of Nietzsche: Philosopher and Politician (Leipzig: P. Reclam, 1931), pp. 79 ff. , Baeumler writes:
At its highpoint the philosophy of will to power and eternal Becoming shifts to the concept of Being. Being is. . . . The problem of the transition from Becoming to Being greatly preoccupied Nietzsche. The doctrine of eternal return belongs among the most famous elements of his philosophy. Objectively considered, this doctrine is nothing else than an attempt to cancel the image of eternal Becoming and to substi- tute for it an image of eternal Being. . . .
Baeumler proceeds to cite WM, 617 precisely in the way Heidegger will later cite it, that is, omitting the second sentence ("Zwiefache Fiilschung . . . ") and indeed the bulk of the note. The result is that eternal recurrence ceases to be the "closest approximation" of a world of Becoming to one of Being, and is reduced to a metaphysical conception pure and simple-hence a conception that could hardly redeem prior reflection from the spirit of revenge. The notion of eternal recurrence, says Baeumler, threatens to "cancel the system" by imposing Parmenidean Being on Heraclitean flux. His formulation here too foreshadows Heidegger's own. Yet for Baeumler eternal return is "without impor- tance" when viewed from the standpoint of Nietzsche's system. Whereas will to power is a "formula for occurrence in general" and thus has "objective sense," eternal recurrence of the same-arising as it does during a time when Nietzsche was "still underway to the system of will to power," a time when he was still "transported by the pipes of the Dionysian Pied Piper" and "led down the garden path" (85)-is no more than a "subjec- tive," "personal," and "religious" Erlebnis (80-81). From the outset of his lecture series on Nietzsche, Heidegger is determined to resist Baeumler's repudiation of eternal recur- rence. Nevertheless, his own reading of WM, 617 brings him perilously close to the. point where Baeumler's exclusion of eternal return seems the only option.
Yet a footnote to this footnote is called for, lest the introduction ofBaeumler's reading of WM, 617 imply something like guilt by association. For Baeumler and Heidegger are by no means alone in reading the note this way: the late Giorgio Colli, principal editor of the new Kritische Gesamtausgabe of Nietzsche's works, surely one who harbored no sympathy for Alfred Baeumler, also cites the note in Baeumlerian fashion, designating it "a specifically metaphysical confession, a declaration on behalf of 'Being' ! " (See the Studienausgabe, CM, /3, 655. )
258 THE ETERI\'AL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
by the spirit of prior reflection. " Finally, Heidegger withdraws or re- treats from Nietzschean suspicion, he leaves "open" the question of revenge in prior thinking; at the same time he imputes to Nietzsche a mere inversion of the Platonic hierarchy, the inversion itself retaining the metaphysical distinction between true being and nonbeing. (The imputation, both here and in the 1937 lecture course, is all the more surprising inasmuch as in his first lecture course on Nietzsche Heideg- ger had shown that when the true world "finally becomes a fable" the very horizon for the Platonic hierarchy evanesces. ) Here once again the theme of Dionysos is not taken up positively but is equated with a still metaphysical conception of the sensuous. The upshot is that Zara- thustra the teacher remains a figure that appears within metaphysics at metaphysics' completion. Heidegger abandons the riddle of Zarathus- tra for the latter's enigmatic emblem, descrying in the encirclements of eagle and serpent a presentiment of "the relation of Being to that living being, man. "
Surely the most curious part of Heidegger's text is its addendum on eternal recurrence of the same. Eternal return, the "last thought of Western metaphysics," remains a riddle which we dare not try to es- cape. The first possible subterfuge, which declares that the thought is sheer mysticism, by now needs no further discussion-and, indeed, Heidegger's introduction of the Adamsian dynamo as an exemplar of eternal recurrence is nothing if not an embarrassment. More intriguing is the way in which criticism of the second possible subterfuge-attri- bution of the thought of eternal recurrence to earlier figures in the tradition such as Heraclitus, Plato, or Leibniz-recoils on Heidegger's own text. If one were to recall Heidegger's use of Schelling with regard to will, one might wonder whether Heidegger's "Note" does not blunt the edge that he would turn against Nietzsche. Similarly, the final words of the "Note," while they do reduce the meaning of Dionysos to metaphysics, concede that Nietzsche's most abysmal and abyssal thought "conceals something unthought, something which at the same time remains a sealed door to metaphysical thinking. "
As this outsized resume draws to a close, we shall have to find our way to some questions. Herewith a first attempt. Hcidegger's inquiry into revenge, the will's ill will toward time and transiency, marks an
Analysis 259
important advance over the 1937 lecture course. In section 12 of that course Heidegger complained that Nietzsche's notes on time-frag- mentary and all too traditional in import-revealed the fact that Nietz- sche had attained no insight into the role of time in the development of the guiding question of metaphysics. Why did the Nietzschean theme of revenge elude him then? Why even in 1953 does he pursue Nietzsche's analysis closely and convincingly, then abandon it in order to leave the matter "open"? Does this eluding, along with the apparent neglect of the emblem of Dionysos, reflect something of Heidegger's perennial fascination with Nietzsche as a thinker-even after he had apparently located Nietzsche securely within metaphysics, in order to proceed unencumbered toward his own "other" commencement?
II. CONTEXTS
The structure and movement of Heidegger's 1937 lecture course, especially its first major division, indicates that Heidegger felt obliged to divide his attention between Nietzsche's published and unpublished writings on eternal return. In no other lecture course does Heidegger pay such scrupulous attention to Nietzsche's communication of his thought in the figures, images, emblems, and tropes of Nietzsche's texts; and nowhere else does Heidegger devote so much time and ener- gy to a thoughtful reconstruction of the Nietzschean Nachlass. Here we find the fitting context for matters touching philology in Heideg- ger's reading of Nietzsche.
In 1935 Heidegger had asked his students whether what they were hearing in his courses was "a mere product of the violent and onesided Heideggerian method of exegesis, which has already become proverb- ial. "3 In the meantime it has become a commonplace in criticism of Heidegger's Nietzsche interpretation that there is more to Nietzsche than meets Heidegger's eye; much of that criticism has placed the blame on Heidegger's evaluation and treatment of the posthumously published notes.
3 Martin Heidegger, Einfiihrung in die Metaphysik (Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1953), p. 134; English translation by Ralph Manheim, An Introduction to Metaphysics (Gar- den City: Anchor-Doubleday, 1961), p. 147.
260 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
A more finely differentiated criticism is called for. In the confined space of these "contexts" I would like to examine at least three aspects of the problem: first, Hcideggcr's treatment of the early notes on eter- nal recurrence from the years 1881-82; second, his treatment of Nietz- sche's plans for a magnum opus during the years 1884 to 1888, plans dominated during the middle years by the title Der Wille zur Macht, with special reference to the position of eternal return in those plans; and third, the nature of Hcidegger's own research at the Nietzsche- Archive in Wcimar in the late 1930s and early 1940s and the extent of his familiarity with the holograph materials. Discussion of these three aspects may contribute to a more balanced critique and appreciation of that truly proverbial Heidcggerian method of exegesis.
Nietzsche's earliest notes on eternal recurrence of the same appear in the notebook labeled M III 1 in the Nietzsche-Archive. 4 This notebook embraces a great variety of themes-although such variety is typical of almost all the notebooks-from the mild aroma of tea and the stimulus of coffee to the depredations of Occidental moralities. The sheer variety tempts one to adopt the minimalist strategy of Jacques Derrida, who suggests that all of Nietzsche's notes arc as resistant to interpretation as one we find in the subsequent notebook (N V 7 [62]): "'I forgot my umbrella. '"5 However playful Derrida's minimalism may be-inasmuch as his own willingness to interpret Nietzsche's texts quite seriously is visible throughout Spurs-it serves as a warning to all who trespass on the Nachlass. Particular fragments leap out at the reader (different ones to different readers) and there is no way to take a high, abstract view of these materials. Walter Kaufmann phrase! d it well years ago: " . . . we look into a vast studio, full of sketches, drafts, abandoned attempts, and unfinished dreams. And in the end we should be less tempted than ever to mistake a random quotation for an ultimate position. "6
4 In CM this notebook is found at V/2, 339-474; in the Studienausgabe, which I will be citing throughout the Analysis, at 9, 44I-575.
5 See Jacques Derrida, Eperons (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1978), pp. 103 If. Read- ers will be relieved to know that the missing umbrella has been found and returned to the pages of Research in Phenomenology, XIII (1983), 175-82.
6 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 557.
Analysis 26I
That said, I do want to compare my own reading of M III I to Heidegger's. In my view the following three points may safely be made concerning the contents of this notebook. First, notes on a variety of problems in the natural sciences obtrude, reflecting Nietzsche's study of a number of "popularizing" works on mechanics, chemistry, and physiology. 7 The notes on eternal recurrence are thus embedded in preoccupations with the notion of Kraft, physical, cosmic, and organic force or energy. Second, many of the notes contained in M III I are early drafts of passages in The Gay Science. For example, a number of the words whispered by that demon who steals upon us in our loneliest loneliness appear scattered throughout the notebook in slightly different form. Whereas the demon of The Gay Science speculates in what way the thought of eternal return would transform you "if that thought carrie to prevail in you" (Wenn jener Gedanke iiber dich
Gewalt bekiime), the earlier note [I43] betrays a more naturalistic flavor: "If you incorporate the thought of thoughts into yourself. . . . " (Wenn du dir den Gedanken der Gedanken einverleibst. . . ). And third, the notes (especially the outlines and plans) concerning eternal return do seem to possess the special significance in M III I that Heidegger ascribes to them. Whatever unity the notebook manifests derives from the thought of recurrence. There is in fact a great deal of material on "the world's circulation" that Heidegger does not cite in support of his interpretation. Yet these same notes also betray a more tentative and "experimental" character than the material Heidegger presents. Specifically, Nietzsche is undecided about whether or not a finite source of cosmic energy can in an infinite time produce situations that are precisely the same: the return of the "same" is not confidently proclaimed here as a doctrine but debated back and forth as a possibility. The greater number of notes support the "conclusion" that recurrence of the same is plausible, but a considerable range of
7 Among these works are: (I) J. R. Mayer, Thermal Mechanics, 1874; (2) the first volume of J. G. Vogt, Force: a Realist-Monistic View of the World, 1878, which treats "the energy of contraction, the single ultimate mechanical-causal form by which the world substrate works its effects"; (3) Wilhelm Roux, The Struggle ofParts in the Organ- ism, 1881, which represents "the doctrine of mechanistic teleology", and (4) a transla- tion of Herbert Spencer's Ethics published in 1879.
262 THE ETER! \:AL RECURRENCE m· THE SAME
notes cast doubt on the entire matter. 8 Perhaps the principal flaw in Heidegger's presentation of these notes and plans from late summer, 1881, is that it pays insufficient heed to the tensions and misgivings that pervade the thought of recurrence. The principal virtue of his presentation is its avoidance of the selection of notes taken up into The Will to Power and its detailed criticisms of the Grossoktavausgabe treatment of M III 1.
Turning now to the second area of inquiry, we may ask whether Heidegger's treatment of the plans from the period 1884-88 (the so- called "Will to Power" period) is adequate. Since Heidegger depended on the GOA for the Nachlass texts-in spite of whatever direct access he may have had in the 1930s to the manuscripts themselves-this question implies a further one: How satisfactory is the GOA selection of those plans? Finally, what is the relationship between the thought of eternal recurrence and the hypothesis of will to power during these years? Does eternal return retain its early supremacy as Nietzsche's thought of thoughts up to the end?
In an effort to reply to these questions I have catalogued some 140 plans and titles projected by Nietzsche for his major philosophical work between 1884 and 1889. I should emphasize that I deliberately overlooked several series of plans, namely, those that seemed mere reiterations or only slight modifications of immediately preceding ones. Merely to list the catalogue numbers of these notes would fill a page of text, so that in what follows I will refer to but a small selection of the relevant materials.
Our first response to these questions must be that Heidegger does follow the GOA in streamlining the astonishing variety and complexity of Nietzsche's plans for a magnum opus. For instance, in the year 1884 alone we find plans and titles (most of them foreshadowing themes taken up into Beyond Good and Evil) such as the following: Philosophy ofthe Future, Wisdom and Love ofWisdom, The Way to
8 Among the many notes that affirm the plausibility of a repetition of the "same," see numbers 152, 232, 245, 269, and 305; doubts are forcefully expressed however in frag- ments such as 202, 254, 292, 293, 311, 313, and 321. It is also noteworthy that one of the earliest references to the notion of will to power in Nietzsche's thought occurs in the second-to-last note of this same notebook: number 346.
Analysis 263
Wisdom, To the Wind "Mistral", The New Hierarchy, To the Higher Men, The New Enlightenment, The Good European, and Knowledge and Conscience. Nevertheless, Heidegger is correct when he asserts that the thought of eternal return dominates the plans and titles early in this period, during the years 1884-85. A representative example is the following plan (W I 1 [6]; cf. [323]) from the spring of 1884:
The Eternal Return
A Prophecy First Major Division "It Is Time! "
Second Major Division
The Magnificent Midday
Third Major Division
The Oathtakers
The thought of eternal recurrence appears to suffer eclipse in the course of the year 1885, especially as the notion of will to power,"the ultimate fact we come down to" (WI 7a [61]), assumes preeminence.
Yet in a list of his "Collected Works" drawn up in late summer of 1885 (W I 5 [1]) Nietzsche cites after Thus Spoke Zarathustra a projected work with the following title: Midday and Eternity: A Seer's Legacy. In the plans for the volume to be entitled The Will to Power the thought of return at first seems to retreat, only to emerge once again as the very culmination of that project. Among plans from late 1885 through 1886 (W I 8 [70-75]) we find both will to power and eternal recurrence at first subordinated to the themes of Beyond Good and Evil, but then eternal return and "Midday and Eternity" reappear as main titles. Eter- nal return is often the fourth and culminating division of such plans, so that, as Heidegger suggests, will to power indeed appears to be in service to Nietzsche's "most burdensome thought. " In a plan from the summer of 1886 [100] the thought of eternal return seems to have
receded before the issues of nihilism, revaluation, legislation, and "the hammer,"all of which (except perhaps the last) Heidegger would con- sider manifestations of value thinking, Wertdenken. Yet later in the same notebook we find a plan [129] for a separate volume with "eternal return" as its title:
264 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
TI1e Eternal Return Zarathustran Dances and Processions First Part: God's Wake
by Friedrich Nietzsche
I. God's Wake
2. At Magnificent Midday
3. "Where Is the Hand for this Hammer? " 4. W e Oathtakers
In a plan sketched presumably in 1887 (N VII 3 [75]) "eternal re- turn" is again to be the fourth and culminating division of a book with the title The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation ofAll Values. Early in 1888 we find the same phrase in a jumbled list of rubrics. Yet Nietzsche's own numeration of that list suggests that "eternal return," along with "grand politics," will be the work's apotheosis. In the course of the year 1888 references to eternal return dwindle, although we do find "Midday and Eternity" and "The Magnificent Midday" still cited. Eternal return is cited near the end of a plan from spring or summer of 1888 (W II 7a [71-72]), while a detailed plan for The Will to Power [86] drops it. A plan to which Nietzsche attached much importance (Mp XVII 5 and Mp XVI 4b [17]), dated Sils-Maria, the last Sunday of August 1888, has the following as its projected fourth and final divi- sion:
Fourth Book: The Magnificent Midday
First Chapter: The Principle of Life's "Hierarchy. "
Second Chapter: The Two Ways. Third Chapter: The Eternal Return.
Even after Nietzsche had altered the main title of his planned work to The Revaluation of All Values in late summer or fall of 1888, eternal return retained its place as the summit of Nietzsche's thought. In the series of folders and notebooks listed under the archive number 19 we find a plan cited by Heidegger (19 [8]), dated September 1888, which lists as the title of Book Four "Dionysos: Philosophy of Eternal Return. " A similar plan appears in notebook W II 8b [14] from this same period. Only in the final autobiographical plans related to Ecce
Analysis 265
Homo does the thought of eternal recurrence completely disappear- and only after the notion of will to power has gone into eclipse.
The game of hide-and-seek that I am now playing with the title "eternal return" should not distract us however from the decisive point: everything we can gather from Nietzsche's plans between 1884 and
1889 corroborates Heidegger's assertion that eternal return is the abid- ing, crucial thought for Nietzsche, and that will to power, as "ultimate fact," has less staying power, less thinking power, than eternal recur- rence of the same. Even when the locution eternal return disappears behind the rubrics of "yes-saying," "Dionysos," or "midday and eterni- ty," the issue expressed in these turns of phrase carries us back to the experience of the thought "What would happen if . . . ? "
But now to the third and final aspect of the philological context. In more than one place in the Nietzsche volumes (see, for example, NI, 233 and 260) Heidegger indicates that he was familiar with the note- books preserved as Nietzsche's literary remains in the Nietzsche- Archive at Weimar. 9 From 1935 to 1941 Heidegger served as a member of the commission organized in the early 1930s, "The Society of the Friends of the Nietzsche-Archive," in order to prepare a historical-critical edition of Nietzsche's oeuvres. The principal editors were Carl August Emge, Hans Joachim Mette, and Karl Schlechta, although it was another of the "Friends," Walter F. Otto, who urged Heidegger to participate. On December 5, 1934, Otto had reported as follows to the commission:
A task that is as extraordinarily difficult as it is necessary awaits the editors of the posthumous materials from the final years. What is demanded of them is nothing less than that they present the notes on the theme of "will to power" for the first time without arbitrary editorial intrusions; they must present such notes precisely as they are found in the handwritten notebooks. The latter, scarcely legible, must be collated afresh. IO
Whether or not Heidegger was present when Otto read his report, it is certain that he came to share the view held by him and by Mette,
9 The following information concerning Heidegger's connection with the Nietzsche- Archive in Weimar derives primarily from private communications with Professor Otto Poggeler ofthe Hegel-Archive at Bochum. Professor Pi:iggeler worked closely with Heideg- ger during the preparation of the Nietzsche volumes for publication in 1961.
10 Quoted by Mazzino Montinari in his Foreward to Volume 14 of the Studienaus- gabe, p. 12.
266 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
the view that the notebooks would have to be retranscribed. Heideg- ger's own efforts in section 21 of the 1937 lecture course to establish the chronology of the notes on eternal recurrence that were taken up into the Gast-Forster edition of The Will to Power is evidence enough of his sympathy with the commission. Between 1935 and 1941 Hei- degger apparently traveled often to Weimar, where the notebooks that had gone into the making of The Will to Power occupied his attention. He presumably worked through a number of them and familiarized himself with the entire stock of unpublished notes and aphorisms. It is reported that he even presented a plan to the Friends for the publica- tion of the Nachlass. Precisely how extensively Heidegger was able to examine the holograph materials of the Nietzschean Nachlass during these Weimar junkets is impossible to say. Yet a certain amount of internal evidence in the lecture course allows us to speculate on the matter. In section 12 Heidegger evaluates the GOA editors' handling of manuscript M III 1; his detailed criticisms betray a first-hand familiarity with the holograph. Yet later in his lecture course (for ex- ample, in section 21) he uses the GOA uncritically even when similar sorts of criticisms are called for. (An exception is Heidegger's treatment of WM, 1057 and 1058. ) Heidegger does not refer to the later manu- scripts and notebooks from 1884 to 1889 by their catalogue number but solely by the GOA designation. The implication is that Heidegger's detailed work at Weimar never really advanced beyond the Zarathustra period to the more bedeviling problem of that nonbook Der Wille zur Macht. I have not been able to ascertain the precise nature of Heideg- ger's plan for the publication of Nietzsche's literary remains. We may surmise that he opposed the prevailing view that a complicated schol- arly apparatus with variant readings would be necessary for the new collation: we are familiar with his resistance to the passion for "com- pleteness" and the tendency to construct a "biographical" framework into which Nietzsche's every utterance would be fitted. 11 Nevertheless,
11 See Volume I of this series, pp. 9-10. Yet Heidegger's general criticisms of the proposed Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe do not tell us enough about his precise role in the commission. Printed protocols of the commission's meetings are extant, according to Otto Piiggeler, and stored in a Bonn archive. They await some enterprising Sherlock Holmes of a doctoral candidate.
Analysis 267
Heidegger's treatment of the notes on eternal return in The Will to Power indicates that he accepted the fundamental principles of the Friends' edition: only if the notes were ordered chronologically, and only if an attempt were made to align those notes with the various stages of Nietzsche's plans for a major work, would readers of the Nietzschean Nachlass be adequately served.
Heidegger resigned from the commission in 1941 when the Propa- ganda Ministry-apprised of Nietzsche's derision of all anti-Semitism -claimed the right of Imprimatur for the edition. Indeed, the project as a whole soon foundered: after 1942 no further volumes were pro- duced. Heidegger nonetheless remained interested in the editing cif Nietzsche's works in later years. When the controversial edition by Karl Schlechta appeared in 1956 Heidegger was chagrined. However much he had discouraged an unwieldy apparatus for the historical- critical edition of the Nachlass, Heidegger found Schlechta's assem- blage of "Notes from the 1880s" chaotic. He complained that his own work and that of the commission as a whole had "gone to the dogs. "
It is important to emphasize this second side-surely the less well- known s i d e - o f Heidegger's relationship to philological matters. His opposition to the paraphernalia of scholarly editions did not imply indifference to the matter of providing an adequate textual base. Nor did his active participation in the work of the Friends suggest anything like disdain for collective editorial efforts. Contrary to what Heidegger's critics have often led us to believe, Heidegger's practice in matters of Nietzsche scholarship and of philology in general was remarkably meticulous. One might well contrast Heidegger's care with the far more casual method of Karl Jaspers or of many another commentator who has dealt with Nietzsche in this century. Heidegger's diligence in such matters is no surprise to his students and to those who knew his cautious, painstaking ways; yet the myth of the Olympian Heidegge~ who scorned philology and worked his will on whatever text he treated still enjoys a robust life. Alas, the myth will not in any way be dimin-
ished by the current edition of Martin Heidegger's own Nachlass.
By way of conclusion, one is compelled to appreciate and to criticize Heidegger's use of the "suppressed notes" and plans for a Nietzschean
magnum opus. Given the nature of the materials in the Crossoktav
268 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAM~~
edition that were available to him, and granted that his own work on Nietzsche's manuscripts at Weimar was perforce limited--even in the 1950s philologists at the Nietzsche-Archive were astonished at the amount of material that had not yet even been collated-Heidegger's presentation of Nietzsche's unpublished notes is far more balanced, heedful, and perceptive than his critics have charged. Yet the clarity, range, and power of Nietzsche's own published versions of eternal recurrence, in passages from The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathus- tra, and Beyond Good and Evil which Heidegger himself sets before his listeners and readers, argue against any tendency to regard the sup- pressed notes as the essential source for the thought.
The very worst thing that could happen however is that the thinking of eternal recurrence, a thinking in which Nietzsche and Heidegger share, should get lost in the barren reaches of the philological debate. As important as it is to attain a more highly differentiated critical view of Heidegger's approach to the Nietzschean text, we dare not let such efforts blind us to the larger questions that loom in the thought of return and in Heidegger's thinking of it. Eternal recurrence is not the most burdensome thought simply because its textual base is disputable. It is not the tragic thought merely because it offers innumerable knots for the scholar's unraveling. It is not the scintillating and provocative thought of thoughts solely because of its "hides and hints and misses in prints. "
III. QUESTIONS
Why does Nietzsche's analysis of the revenge against time elude Heidegger's 1937 lecture course? Why in both 1937 and 1953 does Heidegger neglect to pursue the mythic figure of Dionysos? Do the oversight and the refusal tell us anything about Heidegger's ambivalent relation to Nietzsche as the last metaphysician and last thinker of the West? Finally, what does Heidegger's positive interpretation of the mo- ment of eternity as Obergang and Untergang portend with regard to both his earlier attempt to raise the question of Being on the horizon of time and his later attempt at "another" commencement-the adven- ture of Ereignis?
Analysis 269
To these questions one might want to subtend a thesis that would have only heuristic value, a thesis to be planted as a suspicion that may flourish for a time and then go to seed. One of Heidegger's most effica- cious strategies when interpreting the "unthought" of a thinker-the cases of Kant and Hegel immediately come to mind-is to assert that the thinker in question saw precisely what Heidegger sees in the think- er's text but that he shrank back before the abyss of his own insight, leaving what he saw unthought. That strategy allows Heidegger to say that Kant surmised yet did not really know what the transcendental imagination would do to his Critical project, or that Hegel himself experienced yet did not bring to words the groundlessness of all experi- ence as Erfahrung. My thesis, or suspicion, or strategem, asserts that in his interpretation of Nietzsche as a metaphysician Heidegger shrinks from the consequences of his own interpretation of eternal recurrence of the same. Why? Because that thought proves to be too close to unresolved dilemmas in both Being and Time (1927) and the Contri- butions to Philosophy: On "Ereignis" (1936-38). We recall that ac- cording to Heidegger's interpretation eternal return must be thought (1) in terms of the moment, that is, "the temporality of independent ac- tion and decision"; and (2) in terms of the "condition of need" that defines our own "task and endowment. " These two ways of thinking Nietzsche's fundamental thought thus correspond to Heidegger's own thought concerning (l) the "authentic appropriation" required of Da- sein as being-a-self and (2) the "propriative event" of nihilism in West- ern history as a whole. Could it be that in both areas Nietzsche's thinking is too close to Heidegger's own, not in the sense that Heideg- ger foists his own thoughts onto Nietzsche, but that Nietzsche some- how displaces and even undercuts the essential matters of Heideggerian thought? Could it also be the case that Heidegger finds his own cri- tique of modern metaphysical representation-as an aggressive setting upon objects-anticipated and even radicalized in Nietzsche's analysis of revenge?
Yet one would have to modify the thesis, temper the suspicion, and refine the strategy right from the start: in 1951-52, with his lecture course "What Calls for Thinking? " Heidegger returns to Nietzsche's thought with undiminished energy and dedication. "In the face of
270 THE ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
Nietzsche's thinking," he says, "all formulas and labels fail in a special sense and fall silent. "12 In these lectures Heidegger remains true to his own dictum: "If we want to go to encounter a thinker's thought, we must magnify what is already magnificent in that thought. " 13 Symptomatic of the caution he exercises here-as in the first major division of the 1937 course-is the fact that in the tenth lecture of What Calls for Thinking? Heidegger declines to speculate on the success or failure of Nietzschean redemption from the spirit of revenge. Although in other respects "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? " serves as a faithful resume of the 1951-52 lectures, the emphasis on thinking and thoughtfulness in those earlier lectures seems to restrain the interpretation in this one respect. Heidegger does not relegate Nietzsche to a metaphysical tradition which he-Heidegger, and not Nietzsche -would have decisively overcome; he does not insist that Nietzsche's thought is animated by the spirit of prior reflection. In transition to Part Two of the course, on Parmenides, Heidegger instead insists on the "darkness" surrounding the thought of recurrence, its difficulty, and hence its exemplary character for the question "What is called-and what calls us t(}-thinking? "
A further modification of my thesis is called for-so that one must begin to wonder whether theses are worth the trouble. Redemption from revenge, that is, the "success" or "failure" of the Zarathustran venture, is by no means a settled question. We dare not begin by asserting that Heidegger is merely mistaken when in "Who Is Nietz- sche's Zarathustra? " he charges Nietzsche with such failure. In fact, we might well commence our questioning by elaborating a somewhat more "genealogical" account of Nietzsche's failure to secure redemp- tion from revenge. In this way we would support the conclusion of Heidegger's lecture and yet at the same time introduce the disruptive figure of Dionysos into its argument. Why is that introduction neces- sary? According to Eugen Fink, Heidegger's disregard of Dionysos con- stitutes the most serious oversight in Heidegger's entire reading of Nietzsche. Fink's remarks on Dionysian play in Nietzsche's thought will thus guide us toward the central matter of these "questions": I will
12 Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? , p. 21; English translation, p. 51. 13 Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? , p. 72; English translation, p. 77.
Analysis 271
argue that the Nietzschean "moment of eternity," thought in Heideg- gerian fashion as Obergang and Untergang, goes to the heart of the analysis of ecstatic temporality in Being and Time and also to the core of what Heidegger calls Ereignis. Both issues are extremely difficult to think through, and we will have to be content here with mere hints. Finally, extending the Heidegger/Nietzsche confrontation to more re- cent areas of discussion, I will try to see whether Pierre Klossowski and Jacques Derrida shed light on the subversive encroachment of Nietz- sche on Heidegger-Klossowski with respect to the question of being-a- self in the thinking of eternal recurrence, and Derrida with respect to Ereignis. The thesis will then dissolve, the suspicion burst, and the strategy forget itself in a concluding question on the nature of the satyric.
In "Who Is Nietzsche's Zarathustra? " Heidegger expresses doubts as to whether Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence of the same can achieve redemption from the spirit of revenge. These doupts arise from Heidegger's own highly dubious reduction of eternal return to that will to power which stamps Being on Becoming and so proves to be incorri- gibly metaphysical. Yet we may invoke such doubts in another way, a way that is closer to Nietzsche's own genealogical critique of meta- physics and morals, by introducing a theme we might call "the deca- dence of redemption. " In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche writes that when he renounces the Christian God-"previously the greatest objec-
tion to existence"-he denies all answerability in God. He then con- cludes: "Only thereby do we redeem the world" (CM, 6, 97). Yet what makes Nietzschean redemption of the world essentially different from the self-immolation of the Crucified? In his analysis of the "Redeemer- type" in The Antichrist (6, 199 ff. ) Nietzsche isolates two typical "physiological realities" of that type:
[I] Instinctive hatred ofreality: consequence of an extreme capacity for suf- fering and an extreme irritability, which no longer wants to be "touched" in any way, because it feels every contact too deeply.
[2] Instinctive exclusion of all disinclination and animosity, all limits and distances in feeling: . . . unbearable aversion to every resistance or com- pulsion to resist. . . . Love as the sole ultimate possibility of life.
272 THE ETER:"'AL RECURRENCE OF' THE SAME
The Redeemer-type is a decadent par excellence, one who has ex- changed his dinner jacket for a hairshirt. The very "cry for 'redemp- tion,'" Nietzsche elsewhere concedes, arises from the introverted cruelty that is spawned by ascetic ideals (CM, 5, 390). The will to transfigure the world betrays ressentiment against it. How then can a transition from the spirit of revenge avoid the decadence of redemp- tion? How should yes-saying or the tragic pathos avoid the passion of the Redeemer-type? How may thinking find its way to Dionysos? Do we achieve tragic pathos in the "metaphysical comfort" of one who witnesses tragedy and affirms against Silenus that "in spite of the flux of appearances life is indestructibly powerful and pleasurable" (CM, 1, 56)? In his 1886 "Attempt at a Self-Critique" Nietzsche reaffirms that in the artistry of Greek tragedy "the world is at every moment the achieved redemption of God" (1, 17). Yet is our access to Greek trage- dy invariably one that speaks the vocabulary of redemption? Do we know any way to Dionysos that does not leave us stranded on the Golgotha of the Crucified? Heidegger refers us to Otto and Reinhardt but does not himself undertake to seek the way.
Dionysos, twice born, twice buried, and his mother Semele, "bride of thunder," who casts her shadow across the life and deeds of the god-how do we reach them? However Socratized Euripides may be, in The Bacchae he acknowledges the contradictions of the search:
Dithyrambus, come!
Enter my male womb. (11. 526-27)14
In the action of Euripides' play the god of contradictions prepares to move against Pentheus the King, who prefers human wisdom to divine madness. Conscientious, capable, resolute, this reasonable young man will not risk foolishness, would restore order. Dionysos invokes the god he himself is:
Punish this man. But first distract his wits; bewilder him with madness. (1. 850)
14( use the translation by William Arrowsmith throughout, in the University of Chi- cago Complete Greek Tragedies edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press, 1959).
Analysis 273
"Distract his wits" is a way of translating a word we might also render by its cognate as follows: cause this man to stand outside himself, make him ecstatic, make him existential.
For us latecomers the ecstatic experience of Dionysos is perhaps best captured in the phenomenon of "inspiration," in this case Nietzsche's own inspiration while composing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In Ecce Homo (CM, 6, 335 ff. ) Nietzsche recounts how Zarathustra "swept over" him during this period of "great healthfulness" in his life. Spurn- ing the frigid pieties of the soul, Nietzsche affirms that in artistic inspi- ration "the body is inspired. " However, Nietzsche's "great healthful- ness" does not lie like a dog in the sun; it strides headlong toward its fateful adventure and "initiates the tragedy. " (Recall Heidegger's re- marks on the "commencement" of tragedy in section 4 of the 1937 course: the inception of tragedy is itself the downgoing. ) Merely to recount the ecstasy in which the metaphors and similes of Thus Spoke Zarathustra arrived is nonetheless to exchange the grand style of di- thyramb for a far more pallid kind of language: Nietzsche says of his book that "it is yes-saying unto justification, unto redemption even of everything past" (6, 348). Yes-saying unto redemption-unto the deca- dence of redemption. Thus the thought that ought to be hardest to bear occasionally dwindles to a paltry consolation:
A certain emperor always kept in mind the transiency of all things, in order not to take them too much to heart and to remain tranquil in their midst. To me, on the contrary, everything seems much too valuable to be allowed to be so fleeting: I seek an eternity for everything. Ought one to pour the most costly unguents and wines into the sea? My consolation is that every- thing that was is eternal: the sea spews it forth again. I5
The decadence of redemption: every attempt to communicate the. Dionysian affirmation of eternal recurrence brings us full-circle to the Redeemer-type, excluding all "limits and distances in feeling," all "re- sistance or compulsion to resist. " Gilles Deleuze is right when he in-
15 WM, 1065; CM, W 11 3 [94]; composed sometime between November 1887 and March 1888. See also Krell, "Descensional Reflection," in Philosophy and Archaic Experience: Essays in Honor of Edward C. Ballard, ed. John Sallis (Pittsburgh: Du- quesne University Press, 1982), p. 8.
274 THE ETERf\AL RECURRE! '\CE OF THE SAME
sists that we do not know what a thinking that is utterly stripped of ressentiment (and so redeemed from the spirit of redemption) would be like: eternal recurrence is the "other side" of will to power, an affirm- ative thinking that remains beyond our powers. 16 Clearly, eternal recurrence, under the sign of Dionysos, must be "another" kind of thinking. However much we may try to drag it back to the decadence of redemption or the closure of metaphysics, such thinking, an ungraspablc Maenad, eludes our pursuit.
In the 1937 lecture course Heidegger refuses to entertain the figure of Dionysos, even after his students come to life (for the first and last time) and insist that he do so. He reduces the Dionysian to the sensu- ous realm of a Platonism that has been inverted but is still intact. Fifteen years later he avers that the name Dionysos is an unfailing sign of the metaphysical nature of Nietzsche's thinking. In neither case does Heidegger elaborate Nietzsche's "new interpretation of the sensu- ous," the theme that closed his lecture course on will to power as artY Does Nietzsche's "inversion" of the Platonic hierarchy in fact leave the meaning of sensuousness unchanged? Or, to take another example, does the meaning of sensuousness remain unaltered when Walt Whitman eschews the Gifts of the Holy Ghost and instead intones his litanies to the body?
Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears, Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows,
and the waking or sleeping of the lids. . . . 18
Or when in the Phaedo Plato has Socrates define the sensuous as "contamination" and then gather up Phaedo's curls in his hand, do we with our hasty appeal to "Socratic irony" know precisely what is going on? Is Nietzsche's (or Whitman's or, for that matter, Plato's) a mere "coarsening" of the Platonic position? Or does Heidegger's reluctance to think the body and the realm of sensuousness as a whole indicate the single greatest lacuna in his preoccupations with "neutral" Dasein
16 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et Ia philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), pp. 40-41; 197 ff.
17 See Volume I of this series, pp.