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Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Sempiternal Recurrence


When I remarked before that Nietzsche's doctrine of the Eternal Return is grounded in an experience, not a theory, I was not making things up. Although I do not, in fact, believe in Eternal Recurrence, I know very well what it is to so believe. Well before I read Nietzsche, I had lived through what Nietzsche describes in The Gay Science and in Zarathustra: the actual experience of "seeing" that Recurrence just is. (Just for the record, there were no drugs involved.) This is not, in any way, for me, a freeing or yea-saying experience; it is on the contrary extremely paralyzing. Maybe I am just a 'weak soul,' as he might put it, but I doubt very much that many readers of Nietzsche have actually drank as deeply from that well as I have.

[added later: I realize that this sounds like some kind of magic trump card, and an unverifiable one at that. OK. But I should clarify at least that what I'm claiming here is certainly not that I know my Nietzsche better than anyone else. I mean that when I read most people on Nietzsche, I rarely get the sense they've really felt the looming reality (even if that reality is phantasmal) of the Eternal Return -- seen it, grasped (or been grasped by) it, the way one occasionally really does see that you and all your loved ones are mortal and will die. This isn't a deduction from premises, it's a change of premises. I will add that I'm aware of a few exceptions to this generalization about Nietzsche readers, and would be very interested to learn of more. I'm sticking this paragraph in here near the top to forestall misunderstanding, but I say it in a little more detail in a comment below.]

I'm not concerned here to argue for the dispositive validity of "subjective" experiences, mine or anyone else's; or to explain them (whether "away" or not) either. I have reached provisional interpretations of these experiences and could doubtless reach others -- probably will, in fact. My Nietzscheanism is heterodox, (no doubt like, mutatis mutandis, my Christianity), and while I suspect there is "something to" the vision of Recurrence (as also to Reincarnation), it is not, in my onto-cosmology, precisely as Nietzsche says. And I might add, with great fervor, Thank God for that.

I'm not going to try to articulate this idiosyncratic vision here (the short version is: there may well be "closed time-like loops," but no one has to be stuck in them; compare Ousepnsky's Strange Life of Ivan Osokin), partly because it's too inchoate; but mainly because describing the experience -- a kind of Déjà vu to the nth power -- is a hopeless cause; if you don't immediately meet my eye and say "Oh my God, Yeah, I know!," the best you will be able to do is politely assume I'm not crazy. Maybe later.

My point here is far more modest. I want to contest an alternative vision of Nietzscheanism which claims that one doesn't need a truth-claim for the Return. All one needs is to treat it as a kind of useful fiction. This is Nietzscheanism "Als-ob" style: who cares if Eternal Recurrence is True? Just live as if it were true! This rationale runs thus: whether or not we can "believe" in Eternal Recurrence, it is at least starkly immanent; it refuses any recourse to a great beyond, which is (per argument) indisputably a good thing, since the allure of transcendence has made such mischief in its "world-denying" nay-saying. Whatever the merits of this critique of Transcendence, this argument will not do on hermeneutic grounds. It is not what Nietzsche means. Yes, I know that Nietzsche offers seems in some places to offer his doctrine as if it were a kind of litmus-test for Yea-Saying ("Have you said yes to a single joy?"), and downplays the question of its truth or falsity. But no "As If" will salvage the Nietzschean demon scenario as he recounts it in The Gay Science. I know this may seem beside-the-point (especially considering Nietzsche's well-known disdain, at least in some moods, for proof and refutation), but the issue is not merely exegetical. The demon is to be imagined as suggesting a true (i.e., a "literal") situation. The question is not, Can you live as though this were "figuratively" true? The question is, What would be your response if you saw that this was inescapably the way things are? One may adjust the terminology as one likes, but do not suppose that you can evade the "Eternal Return" by calling it a myth -- the only thing that gives it its ethical force is that it is accepted per hypothesis, and the hypothesis is that it is so, in the same way that, as the demon puts it this very night and this dog barking and "I myself" are so. What if you really had to live your life over and over, and every last detail remained unaltered, because that's Just How Things Are? Nietzsche's meta-ethical point only comes through if you take this question absolutely seriously. Otherwise one is like Zarathustra's dwarf, "making things too easy on yourself".

This argument is essentially that all as-if claims are conceptually dependent upon the possibility of unmodifiedly assertive claims. This is similar to, and perhaps an instance of, the Brandomian privileging of assertions:
Why privilege assertion? Because the other speech acts depend on it. For instance, ordering or commanding someone to do something is not just producing a performance that obliges them to do it. It is specifying what one is being commanded to do by
describing it, by saying what it is one is to do. So I take it that no-one who does not understand the claim “The door is shut,” can understand the order “Shut the door,” (although they could learn to respond appropriately to those noises).(Brandom, 1999 Interview)
Brandom's argument is broader than mine, and I don't necessarily wish to sign on to its every nuance, but I do believe he names a practical and pragmatic wrinkle that must be faced by every Wittgensteinian retreat to where "my spade is turned." Yes, explanations "come to an end somewhere," and one may name this "where" practice, but there are practices and practices, and the practice of giving reasons has a different grammar than that of other practices, for instance of command-and-response, or of "as if".

Nonetheless, a Wittgensteinian of my stripe (by which I mean, the kind that foregrounds continuity rather than discontinuity between his early and late work) can counter that it is simply the grammar of giving reasons that sets this language-game apart, and this grammar is just a feature of this particular practice; so one may elaborate and spell out this grammar as much as one likes, but it remains a practice among practices, unless one is prepared to grant a kind of "unsayable" rationale ("rationale" is already far too said, too "explicit"), such as Wittgenstein hazarded in the Tractatus. This would be a sort of transcendental seeing of the structure of propositionality as such. For Wittgenstein (at this stage), "logic is transcendental" (Tractatus 6.13), but so too, "ethics is transcendental" (ibid. 6.421). Both are bound up with the idea of the world as a whole, or "contemplated...sub specie aeterni."

In Nietzsche, this contemplation has short-circuited. The horror of the Eternal Return, for me, is precisely that Nietzsche conflates eternity with sempiternality -- his return is a continuous stuck repeat button, and things "unfold"-- with nothing New ever. How this could have appealed to Deleuze, with his persistent pursuit of the Whiteheadian question "how can there be something new?", is an occasion for bafflement. The Return is mere serial recurrence, recurrence in Time. If Nietzsche had expressed (here) an inkling of actual Eternity, things might be different.

But then, in order to speak of Eternity, we must admit speaking of Transcendence -- or at least, with Wittgenstein, of admitting that Transcendence "shows itself".

12 comments:

  1. Well, I had composed something in response -- because it seemed wrong to leave out so many other ideas connected to the idea of the eternal recurrence (amor fati, will to power, transvaluation); because I do not agree that eternal recurrence meant being "stuck on repeat," or that things just "unfold"; because of your assertion of an "actual Eternity" (faith, I guess?); and because it seems absurd to say that for Nietzsche there was "nothing New ever" (why no discussion of "becoming," at least?). Suffice it to say, I erased it all.

    Nietzsche's text is a field of contradictions. I don't like how you seem to have interpreted them away (saying your interpretation is tentative isn't an excuse, because the fact is, you're still making one, and that's a choice). But there are too many contradictions for me to advance a counter-interpretation (and didn't Nietzsche aspire to a form of reading which did not interpret? but then how could we ever interpret him...). (Now picture me erasing even more of what I said.)

    To put it bluntly: I can't speak for dead men, but I find it of utmost important to let dead men speak. So instead of defending Nietzsche with my own ideas, let Bataille speak, from his book, On Nietzsche:

    "...I think the idea of the eternal return should be reversed. It's not a promise of infinite and lacerating repetitions. It's what makes moments caught up in the immanence of return suddenly appear as ends. In every system, don't forget, these moments are viewed and given as means: Every moral system proclaims that 'each moment of life ought to be motivated.' Return unmoviates the moment and frees life of ends-- thus first of all destroys it. Return is the mode of drama, the mask of human entirety, a human desert wherein each moment is unmotivated."

    So let me say this. "Eternal return" is the crazy-dreadful experience of starting over each time, paired with a total lack of reasons for starting out. (Imagine me erasing, again. Imagine me starting out again, without being able to, but also without needing to.)

    In fact, why even publish this? (I just erased another huge paragraph.) (And another.)

    Tim.

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  2. In response to this:

    "I want to contest an alternative vision of Nietzscheanism which claims that one doesn't need a truth-claim for the Return. All one needs is to treat it as a kind of useful fiction. This is Nietzscheanism "Als-ob" style: who cares if Eternal Recurrence is True? Just live as if it were true! This rationale runs thus: whether or not we can "believe" in Eternal Recurrence, it is at least starkly immanent; it refuses any recourse to a great beyond, which is (per argument) indisputably a good thing, since the allure of transcendence has made such mischief in its "world-denying" nay-saying. Whatever the merits of this critique of Transcendence, this argument will not do on hermeneutic grounds. It is not what Nietzsche means. Yes, I know that Nietzsche offers seems in some places to offer his doctrine as if it were a kind of litmus-test for Yea-Saying ("Have you said yes to a single joy?"), and downplays the question of its truth or falsity. But no "As If" will salvage the Nietzschean demon scenario as he recounts it in The Gay Science. I know this may seem beside-the-point (especially considering Nietzsche's well-known disdain, at least in some moods, for proof and refutation), but the issue is not merely exegetical. The demon is to be imagined as suggesting a true (i.e., a "literal") situation. The question is not, Can you live as though this were "figuratively" true?"

    I think there is a confusion going on, and it's not trivial. If you're going to speak for Nietzsche and definitively assert "what he means" (which you do...) then let's look at your argument. You say "The question is not, Can you live as though this were "figuratively" true?" Agreed. But you've sneaked (snuck?) in a fallacious second "as if" here, a straw man that says in effect "Can you live 'as if' eternal return is an 'as if'?" But neither Nietzsche nor an astute reader would countenance that formation for a moment. There is only a single as if at play here: "Can you life as if eternal return is true?" And that single 'as if' doesn't (for me) undermine the existential and ethical force of the demon's offer.

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  3. A second response. You critique Nietzsche on his confusion of eternity with sempiternality. But is he really talking about eternity here? Isn't he speaking of a specific *type* of eternity, an eternity of "returns"? And isn't there implied in amor fati a pagan, Beowulf-like sense that the only eternal life one has is in how one's song rings out with "fame" (in all its valences) for the aeons following?

    It's easy to forget that eternal return isn't just a personal solipsistic repeat of a single track on a tape. It's a repeat of every ripple from every action one performs -- your life becomes an artwork extending well beyond your body and your time, so (to borrow from David Mitchell and Tykwer and the Wachowskis) "Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future." And even though I'm pretty sure Nietzsche would derisively sniff out aspects of slave-morality in the emphasis on kindness here, I think every bit of this passage is implied by the demon's offer, and *that* is an eternity I can buy into.

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  4. Wham, Bam! I'll take youse guys in turn, but we'll have to see who gets schooled.

    Tim, I plead guilty to filtering Nietzsche's text through my own concerns. In my defense let me say these are experiential, and not academic. You are right, "a field of contradictions" indeed, and I don't believe N has a single doctrine but many competing ones jostling each other. In any case I didn't mean this post to be, primarily, a close reading of N (though I did have recourse to "hermeneutics," which may be a problem); it is a "grammatical," if you will, argument. (Hence the rather odd insertion of Brandom into a set of questions about Nietzsche). In short, I'm more interested in how one would/should/can interpret, or not, the experience of "just seeing that" the Return is so, than in what N intended by this or that passage at any given stage of his career. Bataille's alternative reading (and it has this going for it, it too is experiential) is surely more than merely admissible, and probably in conversation you and I could reach some Aha moment where the duck turned into a rabbit. I'm very open to the possibility that N himself meant to encourage such a moment of insight. What I don't concede is that N. was just interested to see what would happen if you ran the thought-experiment. (And here I do gesture towards some close-reading, but it really is only a gesture, in my citation of the conversation between Zarathustra and the dwarf -- which I hasten to add, I could be wrong about.)

    Alf, as to your point that I've included and excluded an As-If at the same time, I wondered if someone (you) would call me out on that, though I saw it somewhat differently. To some degree this underscores the limits of my agreement w/ Brandom (insofar as I understand him, which is probably not much, and maybe the post would be better w/o that foray). To wit: although I have grave suspicions about letting As-If be the key of engagement, nonetheless I don't see that As-If-ness is eliminable. If I read you right, you see me as insinuating a meta- As-if: the point here would be that seeing a placebo as a placebo undermines the placebo effect (which for all I know may even be false). But (I take you to go on), "Live as if the Return were so!" does not mean "Live as if you pretended the Return were so!" Now you are right, but my point here has to do with the grammar here of "is so," which (you point out) does not inherently include anything like overt pretense (but then, what is overt about pretense?); but which, I counter, also undermines the initial "as-if". But we equally well could say, the as-if undermines the is-so. In short, "Live as if X were so", whatever the X, is a statement in tension. It's this tension I insist upon.

    Ah, if N had said something like, "The doctrine of Return is True -- deal with it," that would have been (besides out of character), so much simpler! Of course there is a reason why he didn't, but couched it in parables long and short. But to explore that would be to get entangled in exegetical briars too dense for a blog comment.

    As to your second question -- Isn't he speaking of a specific *type* of eternity, an eternity of "returns"? -- seems fair to me and even possibly resonates with the "idiosyncratic vision" I refer to above, but I'm not sure.

    I'll add that this post, short by my standards, and despite appearances among the most personal I ever wrote, probably exhibits symptoms galore. The experience to which I refer is usually (for me) initially scary beyond words. As it progresses there are other emotions as well, and I have learned how to surf it, but anyone who was so inclined could probably read it as some sort of primal trauma. Point being, my account which sets out to sketch some reflections on it may well be rife with tell-tale contradictions of my own.

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  5. Skholiast:
    As offered by Nietzsche the concept of recurrence is a linear one, the possibilities are worked out on a single plane and because they are not infinite they must recur. Things are going nowhere, there is no transcendence. Being caught in a time loop or the feeling that this has happened before, is uncanny but my theory is that these re-experiences are in the full range of sensory experience and the initial first time experience may be in a restricted mode. It may be in a half forgotten dream or a reverie that these images entered into consciousness in a transitory way. You live them in a full way as you undergo them in fully conscious experience. This might have the result of calming the spirit by creating detachment or be a fugue and a lapse into unreality.


















































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  6. Today, I'm a surprised at my irritation after my first reading. (And upon rereading everything, it strikes me that I barely understand anything you've said - which is better than understanding too much, which perhaps at first I did.) Mostly, I wish your post had articulated the 'revised' version of Eternal Return, which you thank God for being different from Nietzsche's. It obviously has to do with the 'actual Eternity' - the Transcendence which 'shows itself' - that appears toward the end. Perhaps someday we will hear more on that.

    The Eternal Recurrence is maybe the most riddle-stricken notion in Nietzsche. Yet it was clearly most important to him. The test of mankind was whether or not it was 'ripe' for this thought, and it was tied to all his other 'motifs': to reject all revenge-taking; to love what happens to you; to crush any idol that would feign 'transform' the universe; love of uncertainty (chance)); "continual creativeness"; and to seeing "it all" as "our work." Perhaps the picture I would paint of it would go like this:

    Nothing about what's happened in the past can change - unless what is in the present changes its relationship to it somehow. One either regrets it or loves it; either way, it happened, and so it repeats.

    But if I add in Nietzsche's emphasis on the need to dissolve oneself ("I wish to teach the thought which gives unto many the right to cancel their existences - the great disciplinary thought," #1056), the Eternal Return can't just mean, "my life repeats over and over in time" (as if I'd be reborn, back at the year of my birth, only to make all the exact same choices). It seems more blasphemously: "I AM the total result, the outcome-without-outcome, of all that has thus far taken place in the universe. And so I have - AM BECOMING - the power to CHANGE EVERYTHING." In other words, identifying in a rather laughable (or tragic) way with the Will to Power subtending the entire universe.

    Thus (1) the ambition to amor fati, (2) the method of transvaluation, (3) the notion that you are Will to Power, and (4) that all combinations possible in the universe do come about - and so return eternally - are all of a piece. In Agamben's lingo: "a potentiality which preserves itself in actuality as potential," pure potency, pure possibility to change-create. That is what "returns," even as all the forms (things) "change." That is why Nietzsche can also say, "everything that is true is eternal: the sea will wash it up again" (#1065) - because what is true is that potential-power, that "ability," inherent in itself, to perceive the universe as forever unfinished, ("the universe can have no goal, no final state, and is incapable of being" (#1062)). (Because if I am me, it is easy to look back with regret; but if I am the universe, there is no looking back - and, on top of that, what on earth could happen to me, when all I can do is keep happening?...)

    So perhaps that was the root of my irritation. Where you painted a picture of "stuck on repeat" - a play of deja-vu mirrors where there is no New - I see the infinity of infancy, the infinity of potential or - Becoming. For "man," existentially, the way to "tap in" to that Becoming is: refuting being (!), refuting the notion of 'errors in the past', crushing ideals and idols that would 'mend'; and thus loving what reality was/is as it is/was, without cover-ups, without justifications; loving aimlessness, and above all loving possibility.

    But if there's anything I know regarding Nietzsche, it's that every man's "experience of his experience" is unique. Furthermore, by tomorrow, it may change completely. And so it returns.

    Tim.

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  7. It seems really strange to discuss the ennunciative status of eternal return when those are the kinds of discussions he expressly found harmful. I think that kind of handling also leads us away from the virtue of eternal return as an opportunity to escape the paralysis of serialized time.

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  8. @ Anonymous:
    I agree that the discussion is strangely non-Nietzschean. I should say that I don't want to opine on what N himself did mean, But I do find implausible the notion of the Return as a kind of "working hypothesis" that would make us more likely to act ethically. That would make it into a sort of regulative idea. Nietzsche is more Kantian than he cops to, but he's not that Kantian. (Or, alternatively, we could read this backwards and make Kant far more Nietzschean...)

    @ Ombhurbhuva:
    Yes, at least in one register, N's account has to do with the exhaustion of the admittedly enormous but ultimately finite permutations that can transpire. One way of evading this while still giving it its due is by recourse to transfinite mathematics. I suspect that there is more than one reason (including of course prosaic neuro short-circuits) for experiences of this sort, and as I say my own account of "what it all means" is tentative and probably bears a certain resemblance to late-night stoned what-if conversation. But I work with what I have.

    @ Fragilekeys:
    The dissolution of the insular ego is a key aspect of this for me too -- doubtless one of the reasons why the experience is so initially frightening. What is very striking is that we quickly move beyond sets of logically entailed consequences, to plain old experience, or, well, experience and interpretation. (and more interpretation, and more, and counter-interpretation, and so on-- but all interpretations are also experiences. And vice-versa?) All the other motifs you mention -- amor fati, will to power, deliverance from revenge, and so on -- are bound up with this. There are registers in which the experience is one of exhilaration or calm or ecstasy, life-affirming to say the least, and I not only don't want to deny this -- I both depend and insist upon it. There's at least one more post on this to come. But I'm very glad you voiced your irritation, for I truly believe that where the friction is, there will the growth be also. And lest that sound condescending, let me add that there is no predicting what that growth looks like.

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  9. I'll be looking forward to hear more. Your post came very synchronously at a crucial point in my rereading of Nietzsche's Will to Power fragments - a startling coincidence actually. I imagine most of what I said was in working out that reading (also in excitment at the coincidence), and not so much in direct response to you, but I hope my comments were of use somehow. Also, Klossowski's book on the Vicious Circle is really great.

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  10. It's been a while, but as I recall, Klossowski's book is indeed good. (His novel The Baphomet covers some of the same territory in weirder form.) Klossowski belongs to a singular crop of Nietzsche readers (Blanchot, and possibly Bataille, are two others), in that when I read them I get an inkling that they do in fact share the sort of experience I was referencing in the post above. I ought to add, since it's obvious that the post itself came off as playing an "I've read more than all of you" card, that such a claim of erudition was far from what I meant. Rather, I meant to say that 99 percent of the exegetes of Nietzsche who I have read (obviously only a small number of the total) say nothing that leads me to believe they share this experiential base. I certainly do not make the claim that my experience is the same as Nietzsche's (or Klossowski, or Blanchot, etc) -- a claim that would be as foolish and presumptuous as it is unverifiable. But I do say that my position, such as it is, on the Return is won on this subjective but "empirical" ground. Strictly speaking, this point is separable from (1) "what Nietzsche meant" and (2) what I'm willing to bet he didn't mean.

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  11. (1) Yes, what you said.
    (2) We dismiss the cosmological doctrine as test because we wrongly imagine observing the vast stretches of time between incarnations, but subjectively we wouldn't experience that. Your painful death was only a few years ago; your birth is coming up quite soon.
    (3) Compare "of course there is no real hell, but it is an interesting thought experiment which will make you have a passionate desire to be a fundamentalist Christian just by imagining what it *would* involve." Not.

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    1. re (3)., that's funny -- it's almost where I went, and weirdly kind of where I do go -- but surely not as an "interesting thought experiment". More of an existentially inescapable-feeling "Choose!" Es muss sein. As I said a bit later, Gurdjieff sometimes tried to force his students into awakening by pressing them into a kind of double-bind no-escape. Christianity as wisdom-tradition may do something similar, and i wouldn't put it past Nietzsche either. BUT having said that, "thought-experiment" does not aptly describe the maneuver. Hence my insistence on Experience.

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