104 Peter Bornedal

PETER BORNEDAL

ETERNAL RECURRENCE IN INNER-MENTAL-LIFETHE ETERNAL-RECURRENCE-THOUGHT AS DESCRIBING

THE CONDITIONS OF THE POSSIBILITY FOR KNOWLEDGEAND PLEASURE

Abstract: The essay introduces an interpretation of Nietzsches Eternal-Recurrence-Thought dis-tinct from traditional cosmological as well as ethical interpretations. The interpretation sug-gests that eternal recurrence is a conceptualization of intellectual and volitional processes. Eter-nal recurrence is understood as a concept articulating peculiarities about mental processesrelated to knowledge and pleasure.

Keywords: Eternal Recurrence, Loop, Will, Nietzsche

Abstract: Der Aufsatz stellt eine Interpretation von Nietzsches Gedanken der Ewigen Wiederkunftvor, die weder kosmologisch noch ethisch sein mchte. Diese Interpretation hlt die EwigeWiederkunft fr eine Konzeptualisierung von Verstandes- und Willensakten. Der Begriff derEwigen Wiederkunft wre somit entworfen, um Besonderheiten der Prozesse des Seelenlebenszu artikulieren, die mit Erkenntnis und Lust zu tun haben.

Keywords: Ewige Wiederkunft, Schleife, Wille, Nietzsche

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The hardworking artist desires to rest, he longsto get away from the demanding diversity ofphenomena and to take shelter in the bosom ofsimplicity and immensity; a forbidden penchantthat is entirely antithetical to his mission and, forthat very reason, seductive a proclivity for theunorganized, the immeasurable, the eternal: fornothingness. To rest in perfection: that is what thestriver for excellence yearns for; and is not no-thingness a form of perfection?

Thomas Mann: Death in Venice 1

I) Introducing Three Different Forms of Return

(i) A Brief Preliminary about Repetition and Joy

The Song of Joy from Joseph Haydns Die Jahreszeiten introduces us to a cel-ebration of the return of spring.

See the lilies, see the roses, see all the flowers! / See the rivers, see the meadows, see allthe fields! / O, how lovely it is to behold the fields now! Come, you young girls, let uswander over the spectacular scene / See the earth, see the water, see the light sky! /Everything lives, everything is hovering, everything so full of activity. / See the lamb-kins, how they spring about! / See the fish, how they are teeming! / See the bees, howthey are swarming! / See the birds, how they flutter! / Everything lives, everything ishovering, everything so full of activity. / Oh what pleasure, what enjoyment, swells inour heart! / Sweet drives, gentle raptures, swell in our breast.2

Spring returns as if it had been traversing a circle. During one revolution, theyear has been sapped of energy, but now, miraculously, it returns reinvigorated tobegin a new rotation. At this entry to the return of spring, the chorus of revelersis pregnant with anticipation. Spring is the birth of a new year; at the birth of thisbirth, on the first day of spring, everybody sings out in joy.

Everything begins again and anew, but as the same. Life starts over, but as thesame life. In Haydn, we have a simple example of eternal return; an example onreturn that is easy to accept. Besides the plain fact that seasons come and go,the Dionysian celebration of the seasonal re-birth of the world has accumulateda vast number of cultural manifestations, and can be found in mythology, re-ligion, anthropology, poetry, and music.

1 Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales. Translated by J. Neugroschel, New York 1998,p. 318.

2 From Joseph Haydn, Song of Joy, The Seasons. Translated from the libretto included in the KarlBhm & Wiener Philharmonics recording of Haydns Die Jahreszeiten. Deutsche Grammophon.The ode does not have a single author, but is a collaborative effort of a number of writers; in con-formity with common practice in Haydns days.

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The celebration has a material basis, as Marx undoubtedly would have re-minded us. A sense of joy kicks in when people experience that the difficult,dark, and cold winter-days are finally receding. The world is warming up, theflora is blossoming, and the fauna is proliferating. Survival becomes easier; onecan finally again begin to eat well. (It is a joy so thoroughly incorporated, onedare suggest, that it still exists in the modern human as a shadowy repositoryfrom our pre-historical past.)

But a sense of joy is of course different from its ever-so sobering material con-ditions, and it needs another description. Whether the joy is triggered by the an-ticipation of abundance and fertility, it is described in Haydn as a joy in seeing thesame again; of seeing what is utterly familiar; a joy, thus, of seeing again what isalready known. This joy in the repetition of the same is marked in the incantationof the repetitious see the rivers, see the earth, see the flowers, see the birds,etc. It is a joy described by Kierkegaard as repetitions love [Gjentagelsens Kjr-lighed ]: Repetitions love is in truth the only happy love.3

Finally, we notice another source indicative of joy in Haydn; a source theode itself is unaware of. It is explicit in Haydn that the subject-object relation isbeing simplified in the seeing of the seeing subject, as the subject is proddedto see this, see that. As language tells its user to see, it erases itself andits user in front of that at which it points. Language neutralizes itself as it is beingreduced to simply a pointer. Language, obviously, is still being used to prod theseeing, but it forgets itself as a tool as well as the subject for whom it is a tool; we only see. This seeing is joyful, even euphoric, because the subject forgetsitself; the ode, however, disregards this seeing or, strictly, re-seeing as asource of joy (exactly because seeing is self-unconscious activity). Ostensibly,the ode posits the experience of the return of spring as joyful. But not only a yearstarts over as the same year; knowledge starts over as the same knowledge; andfinally, moments start over and over as the same moments. There is joy in thisrepetitious return of the same. As Kierkegaard before Nietzsche (and Freudafter Nietzsche) understood, repetition is a source of joy.

Haydns celebration of the coming of spring reminisces Nietzsches descrip-tions of Dionysian festivals from the beginning of Die Geburt der Tragdie:

Whether under the influence of narcotic intoxicants of which all original humans andpeoples speak in their songs, or because the powerful coming of spring penetrates allnature with joy, the Dionysian emotions are awoken, and as they grow everything sub-jective disappears in complete self-forgetfulness. Also in the German Middle Agesthe ever-increasing crowd would be wheeling from place to place, singing and dancingunder the influence of the same Dionysian force. [] There are people, who from

3 See Sren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling & Repetition. Translation H. V. & E. H. Hong,Princeton 1983, p. 131.

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lack of experience or out of insensitivity, would turn themselves away from such phe-nomena as from a folk-disease; in contempt and convinced of their own health.These poor folks obviously have no idea of how corpselike and ghostly their ownhealth looks, when the Dionysian crowds roar past them in their radiant life. (GT 1,KSA 1, pp. 28f.)

Haydn and Nietzsche could for that sake be describing the same MedievalGerman festivals. In Nietzsche, these festivals are understood under the labelDionysian; explicitly, the self-forgetfulness they impress upon the participants istheir most significant quality. Early on in Nietzsches writings, self-forgetfulnessis a positive quality. It will continue to return in various disguises, more or lesssubliminally, more or less explicitly and elaborately into his very latest writ-ings; like (apropos) a Wagnerian leitmotif attached to certain characters, andfrequently repeated.

This brief poetizing preliminary brings us straight to the pivotal argument ofthe present essay. Instead of classifying eternal recurrence as either subjective orobjective (as in many standard interpretations promoted over one hundred yearsof Nietzsche-reception; e. g., as anthropological vs. cosmological in K. Lwith),or as classifying it as either theoretical or ethical (as seen in more recent interpre-tations; cf. B. Magnus, W. Mller-Lauter, or G. Deleuze), I shall instead classifyand categorize eternal recurrence in three alternative main forms, where thefirst form includes most, if not all, of the standard interpretations. First, returnas simple and mechanical return of some-thing; in Haydns example, the year.Secondly, return of the same perception or knowledge the subject appropriat-ing and stabilizing knowledge in repetitious interpretive processes as in repetitiveinterpretation-processes. Thirdly, return of the self-same moment indicatingan over-joyful neutralization of subjectivity (of the principium individuationis, asNietzsche after Schopenhauer puts it in GT) as self-repetition of self-presence.

(ii) Return as Simple and Mechanical Rebirth

Spring returns with one-year intervals. We will therefore say that the recur-rence in Haydns example has a rate of return of a year; or alternatively, it has aone-year frequency.

However, not all occurrences have one-year frequencies or return-rates.When in Die frhliche Wissenschaft Nietzsche introduces recurrence as the repeti-tion of every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everythingunspeakably small or great in your life (FW 341, KSA 5, p. 570), the frequencywould be in the order of a life (ignoring for now that this particular passagefrom FW has a famous alternative interpretation). This one-life frequencyis also addressed, but less ambivalently, in the Nachla from 1884, as well as inZarathustra:

108 Peter Bornedal

And when you once again are re-born, then it will not be to a new life or a better life ora similar life, but to the one and only selfsame life which you already now have chosen,in what is smallest and greatest. (Nachla 1884, KSA 11, 25[7])

I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent not toa new life or a better life or a similar life: I come back eternally to this same, selfsamelife, in what is greatest as in what is smallest, to teach again the eternal recurrence ofall things, (Za III, Der Genesende, KSA 4, p. 276).

So, the rate of return can be of a year or of a life. However, if the thought ofrecurrence is supposed to address the repetition of certain decisive historicalperiods and events, the rate of return is again something different. In that case,the rate of return would be in the order of a few millennia. Although I have neverseen the view of historical recurrence purported by Nietzsche himself,4 oneoften sees it applied to Nietzsche. It is for example assumed in the commonplacecomparison of Nietzsches circular model of time to Hegels linear, the com-parison often implying a political critique. In Hegel, the famous thesis, anti-thesis,synthesis dialectics supposedly illustrates how conflicting positions in the historyof consciousness are eventually resolved in a new overarching position includingthe old positions, but simultaneously becoming the steppingstone for new con-flicts. As such Hegels model, adopted and put back on its feet by Karl Marx,represents history as a progressive linear development brought to a halt only inthe Absolute Spirit (or the Communist Society), while by contrast Nietzschesmodel suggests a circular and non-progressive history, being frustratingly in lackof telos.5 This is understood as not only non-progressive, but also as inherentlyreactionary; commentators taking for granted that world history must bethe object and rate of return of eternal recurrence. E. g., Nietzsches nostalgicyearning for the Ancient Greek Dionysos-cult is projected forwards as the

4 Nietzsche, on the contrary, has in various contexts been explicit about the irreversibility of time. InSchopenhauer als Erzieher, Nietzsche, adopting the persona of a traveller who seems for a mo-ment to be his mouthpiece, explicitly rejects the possibility of re-living the same life: Essentially,every man knows quite well that, being unique [als ein Unicum ], he will exist in the world onlyonce, and that not even the most strange accident will ever for a second time unify so wonder-fully colorful a diversity as we are: he knows this, but hides it as a bad conscience. (UM III 1,KSA 1, p. 337).

5 Whereas Nietzsche does not advance the notion of an eternal recurrence of particular historicalevents or periods, he is frequently advancing an anti-Hegelian doubt in the historical process asprogressive and teleological. Such anti-Hegelianism is succinctly expressed in the following frag-ment labeled Progression [Fortschritt ]: So that we dont deceive ourselves! Time movesforwards, we might believe that all what is in it, also moves forwards that development is aforward-moving development [Vorwrts-Entwicklung ] This is an illusion, seducing the mostsensible person: but the nineteenth century is not an advancement over the sixteenth cen-tury [] Humankind [Menschheit] does not progress, it does not even exist The total aspect[Gesamtaspekt ] is that of an enormous experimental workshop, where a few things succeed, andinnumerable things misfire, where all order, logic, relation and relationships fail. (Nachla 1888,KSA 13, 15[8]).

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empty ideal for a new future for the resurrected Dionysos, as Habermas criti-cizes in a variation over the idea.6

Finally, we notice that according to the so-called cosmological interpre-tation of eternal recurrence, the rate of the return would seem to be in the orderof millions or billions of years. The following is not exactly Nietzsches model ofthe universe, but certain recent speculations of contemporary physics could sup-port the idea of recurrence on a cosmological scale. Some physicists speculatethat if our universe is a bubble that ultimately bursts or collapses, one must as-sume that another bubble will eventually emerge (or does already exists in paral-lel with our current universe) within which a solar system similar to ours willmaterialize, providing the conditions for life-forms similar to ours. Given suffi-ciently many bubbles, one bubble will necessarily have the exact same composi-tion as our current bubble. In the realm of infinity, nothing is impossible. Wenote that the inherent presupposition in this contemporary bubble-theory cor-responds to Nietzsches observation: In infinite time every possible combi-nation would at some point have been realized once; moreover, it would havebeen realized an infinite number of times. (Nachla 1888, KSA 13, 14[188]).7

(The theory might also be seen as a variation of Leibnizs immortalized theory ofthe best of all possible worlds except for the fact that to Leibniz, the law ofsufficient reason would dictate that there could be only one such best of allworlds; in other words, we may live in a multi-verse of infinitely many bubbles,but God has in his wisdom arranged for only one to be inhabitable.)

Now, the circle of eternity can have different rates of return: a year, a life, afew millennia, or billions of years. Commentators of Nietzsche have typicallyasked, what is recurring in eternal recurrence? and have answered by choosingone of the possible rates of return. In this, one chooses ones object, and con-sequently, interpretation. Depending on the return-rate one assigns to the doc-trine, it is for example interpreted as either subjective or objective. Assigningto the doctrine the return-rate of a year, as in the Haydn example, would give itobjective value; so would assigning to the doctrine a return-rate of billions ofyears. Assigning to the doctrine the return-rate of a life would give it subjectivevalue; our life or particular intensified moments in our life return.

6 See Vorlesung IV: Eintritt in der Postmoderne; Nietzsche als Drehschreibe in: Jrgen Haber-mas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Zwlf Vorlesungen, Frankfurt am Main 1988,pp. 104ff.

7 Astronomer and Physicist Max Tegmark introduces the bubble-theory in an article from ScientificAmerican. Compare the following statement to Nietzsche: In infinite space, even the mostunlikely events must take place somewhere. There are infinitely many other inhabited planets,including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name andmemories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices. Max Tegmark,Parallel Universes, in: Scientific American, May 2003, p. 41. See also Martin Rees, Our CosmicHabitat, Princeton 2001.

110 Peter Bornedal

In this spectrum of interpretations, we move from the cold dark blue to thehot dark red! At one end of this spectrum of interpretations, we thus find thecosmological interpretation as the most objective, while at the other end,we find a subjective interpretation applied to the single individual. There seemsto be an interpretation to every taste! However, whatever return-rate we arediscussing in the above, they are in all the interpretations addressing what I callsimple and mechanical return. Something (a year, a life, a cosmos) runs itscourse, as if in a circle. It starts in 12 oclock position, traverses the circular orbitdrawing still closer exhausted and sapped of energy to the same 12 oclockposition. Here it snaps. Inexplicably and incomprehensibly, that which is dying,in the very instance of its death, is reborn; that which has imploded into nothing,starts over again in an explosion of new energy. The reversal is mechanical andself-propelled. No doubt, the thought is easiest to accept applied to the seasonalrejuvenation of the year. But the thought is also present is contemporary astro-physics as intimated above. If our universe (according to one theory) eventuallyimplodes in a big crunch, then given that the total amount of mass never dim-inishes one surmises that the crunch will reverse itself in a new super-hot bigbang explosion, giving rise to a new universe. From birth in 12 oclock positionto death in 12 oclock position, where everything snaps and life is reborn out ofdeath: a young small universe starts its new explosive life.

In one significant attempt to re-interpret recurrence, born out of frustrationwith the empirical rotation and the incomprehensible snap, one has takenNietzsches doctrine beyond the old objective subjective dichotomy, and re-appliedit within a theoretical practical dichotomy. Given this modification, the doctrine isno longer seen as description, but as a practical or ethical prescription of how tolive and love ones life. One applies to it Humes famous principle that one can-not derive an ought from an is, nor an is from an ought. If the doctrine ispractical, it is no longer stating a fact. We can therefore effectively relinquishthe circle as a model of empirical return, with this, the idea of some-thing pos-sessing a specific rate of return. Recurrence is now a question : if you were giventhe chance, would you be willing to live this life again as the self-same life? aquestion or a suggestion proposed in the hypothetical conditional. It is no longerseen as a statement about material return, but appears rather as an imperativeentreating the subject to inject into its life love and self-affirmation. It becomesin famous formulations an existential imperative for the being-in-the-worldof the Overman. The doctrine is Bernd Magnus and Wolfgang Mller-Lauters,who have most prominently defended the ethical interpretation,8 but also

8 The formulations are almost identical in Magnus and Mller-Lauter. In Magnus it reads:[Recurrence] is the emblematic of the attitude of bermenschlichkeit and is the being-in-the-world of bermenschen. Bernd Magnus, Nietzsches Existential Imperative, Bloomington, Lon-

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Gilles Deleuze has insisted on the interpretation;9 already Heidegger wasin fact aware of this normative component of recurrence as introduced inFW 341.10

(iii) A Preliminary Introduction of Two Alternative Interpretationsof Recurrence

Over a century of Nietzsche reception, almost exclusively, the literature onNietzsches recurrence has been addressing the so-called simple and mechanicalreturn. From George Simmel to recent commentary in especially the Anglo-Saxon tradition, its logical feasibility has been and is still being appraised (gen-erating lots of head-shaking and clever counter-argument). In this essay, I shallallow myself to treat it as the least interesting, the least pervasive, as well as the leastscientific 11 interpretation of recurrence. The rough outline above of some of thestandard manifestations of the interpretation I will therefore regard as sufficient,and I shall permit myself to leave them behind in order to concentrate on thetwo more interesting and scientific alternatives: Return as Repetitive Interpre-tation-Process and Return as Self-Repetition of Self-Presence.

The two interpretations take Nietzsches thought of thoughts to a new, albeitmore abstract, theoretical level. The two interpretations are not completely orig-inal. We find them, in various stages of development and introduced more or lessself-consciously, in a number of commentators. To mention just a few such com-

don 1978, p. 142. In Mller-Lauter it reads: The Yes to eternal recurrence is the being-in-the-world of the overman. Wolfgang Mller-Lauter, Nietzsche. His Philosophy of Contradictionsand the Contradictions of his Philosophy. Translation, D. J. Parent, Urbana / Chicago 1999,p. 100. For a critical discussion, see also Gnter Abel, Nietzsche. Die Dynamik der Willen zurMacht und die ewige Wiederkehr, 2nd edition, Berlin / New York 1998, pp. 259ff.

9 So Deleuze: The eternal return gives the will a rule as rigorous as the Kantian one. [] As anethical thought the eternal return is the new formulation of the practical synthesis: whatever youwill, will it in such a way that you also will its eternal return. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy.Translation H. Tomlinson, New York 1983, p. 68.

10 So Heidegger: What would happen if one day The thought is introduced as a question and apossibility. [] Imagine what would happen if in such loneliest loneliness a demon were to stealupon you and confront you with the eternal return of the same: The eternal hourglass of exist-ence turning over and over and you with it, speck of dust! Nietzsche does not say what would infact happen. He continues to question instead, and he uncovers two alternatives. Would you cursethe demon, or would you perceive in him a god. [] Nietzsche does not invoke being as awhole. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche vol. II. Translation D. F. Krell, San Francisco 1979, pp. 24f.

11 I employ here the term with some leniency; approximately as follows: scientific = an in principlecommunicable, systematizable, and defensible theoretical position. This re-application of the term is not,however, completely random and whimsical. We recall that the German Wissenschaft and theScandinavian Videnskab/Vetenskab are broader concepts than the Anglo-Saxon Science, frequentlyapplied also in the humanities. In Northern Europe, Comparative Literature comes forexample under the label, Literaturwissenschaft or Literaturvidenskab.

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mentators to use them as signposts, giving a first indication of the direction ofour analysis we remark that the first interpretation is anticipated in Heideggersthinking of recurrence, but it is more fully developed, being carried beyond philo-sophys self-reflection of Being, and given universal interpretation-theoretical sig-nificance, in Gnter Abels work; from where we take the following stipulationas emblematic for the suggested interpretation: The Recurrence-Thought[Wiederkunfts-Gedanke ] is essentially of meaning- and interpretation-logical nature.12 Wesee traces of the second interpretation in Klossowskis work on Nietzsches eter-nal return, here addressed as a phantasmatic so-called high tonality of the soul.13

It is persistently addressed in much of Joan Stambaughs work; Stambaugh oftenintroducing the interpretation under the label the innocence of becoming.14

As I am applying the two sets of interpretation in the present essay, the firstset purports to describe the conditions of possibility of knowledge, the secondpurports to describe the conditions of possibility of pleasure. Alternatively, ifone position means to describe knowledge-constitution; the other means to describepleasure-constitution; if Heidegger and Abel tend to focus on knowledge-constitu-

12 See Abel, Nietzsche, p. 248. Heidegger understands Nietzsches Will-to-Power and Eternal Re-currence as the latest interpretations of the world as respectively Being and Becoming, Nietzschetaking the interpretation of the world, as it originates with Parmenides and Heraclitus, to its finalculmination point. In the early days of Greek thinking, philosophy took a deep breath, held it forover two thousand years, until finally, entering Nietzsche, it can exhale. As such Nietzsche isthinking the end of metaphysics, but thinking still within the metaphysical tradition. His twokey concepts are intertwined because to say that being as a whole is eternal recurrence of thesame means that being as a whole is, as being, in the manner of eternal recurrence of the same.(Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2, p. 199.) To Heidegger, during the History of Being, philosophershave always been asking the question of Being. Their different answers have been formative forour history; our ability, for example, to manipulate nature, for our technological development,and for our essential understanding of our historical destiny. As such, the answer to the questionof Being has interpreted human history and self-understanding, but in an interpretation that hasalways concerned the human as species; species, for example, in Feuerbachs sense. GnterAbel, also uniquely emphasizing will-to-power-processes being interpretation-processes, andalso coupling these interpreting will-to-power-processes with eternal recurrence, has nonethe-less a significantly different analytical project. Abels referent is not Being as a whole; now theanalysis is moved into the territory of the individuals cognitive interaction with the world. Theindividual certainly interprets, but not necessarily his species, and not necessarily by in the formof interpreted Being articulating a single overarching interpretation formative for his historicaldestiny. The mind interprets; and Nietzsches thinking becomes essentially a theory of mind. Thislatter perspective is adopted in the present essay, where the project has become to reconcile aconcept so mysterious and enigmatic (traditionally understood) as eternal recurrence with in-sights on the verge of becoming generally accepted in the cognitive sciences and in neuroscience.

13 The phrase is Klossowskis blanket expression for a psychical mood that to Nietzsche requiresarticulation in the correspondingly intense thought on return. See Pierre Klossowski, Nietzscheand the Vicious Circle. Translation D. W. Smith, Chicago 1997, e. g., pp. 56 and 60.

14 See the following works by Joan Stambaugh, Nietzsches Thought of Eternal Return, London,Baltimore 1972; The Problem of Time in Nietzsche, Lewisburg 1987; The Other Nietzsche,New York 1994; finally, the recent article: All Joys Want Eternity, in: Nietzsche-Studien 33(2004), pp. 335341.

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tion, Klossowski and Stambaugh tend to focus on pleasure-constitution.Therefore, as the two positions are understood in this essay, they both describecertain inherent cognitive and volitional conditions of possibility in the subject. We are inother words talking about inner-mental-processes. If eternal recurrence is pri-marily an attempt to describe processes of knowledge- and pleasure-constitu-tion, these processes would as their referent have certain inner-mental operationspertaining to perception, memory, knowledge, will, and desire; i. e., pertainingto mind. Pursuing this more discriminating interpretation, the understanding ofeternal recurrence as actual and empirical return of some-thing will necessarilyrecede as uninteresting and unscientific; in our context, as a metaphor at best.15

In the following, I shall suggest that the two aspects of the eternal-recurrencethought, rather than supporting one another, exist in a complementary relation-ship. As such, they exist as two opposing and irreconcilable parts, which neverthelessform a universal whole, like oppositions such as violet and yellow; night andday; man and woman; or yin and yang. They are intertwined opposites, existingtogether, but like the two different faces of the same coin, unable to see, orto touch, one another. The interpretation introduced under the label Return asRepetitive Interpretation-Process stands opposed to, but complements, the interpre-tation under the label Return as Self-Repetition of Self-Presence, and vice versa. As afirst approximation, one might say that if Return as Repetitive Interpretation-Processdescribes an epistemological attitude in the subject, Return as Self-Repetition of Self-Presence describes an aesthetic attitude; if Return as Repetitive Interpretation-Process isan essential will-to-power-manifestation, Return as Self-Repetition of Self-Presence isan essential will-to-nothing-manifestation. Will-to-power asserts or generatesas its enigmatic counterpart a will-to-nothing. The subject is like encircled by thisnight and day of two different returns. Let us suggest this image: the subject islike a rubber band; on the one hand, it stretches itself far and way beyonditself to stamp upon its existence an essential interpretation; on the other hand,it always exists under the temptation to slip back to its old essential zero-tensionrest-position. (We recall: the subject is like a camel that in its final trans-formation desires to become a child, cf. Za I, Von den drei Verwandlungen,KSA 4, pp. 29ff.). Toward the end of the essay, I shall argue that the two com-plementary positions can be comprehended within a single theory of time-con-sciousness; with this I hope to give the theory a universal logical justification and foun-dation.

It is probably fair to say that Nietzsche in the eighties was still in the process ofbecoming aware of recurrence as having universal theoretical significance

15 If this can be established, it will imply that some of Nietzsches commentators have been guilty inliteralness. They have studied a metaphorical language as if it is factual and propositional. Theyhave read Zarathustra as creationists read the Book of Genesis.

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beyond the idea of the simple and mechanical return. Thus, although assess-ments of Nietzsches level of awareness must remain speculation, we will in thefollowing assume that we are reconstructing two of the deepest intentions inNietzsches thought of thoughts; intentions that he (mostly in his unpublishedfragments) probes and investigates in his writings, but elliptically, and still with-out full lucidity and without absolute self-consciousness.16

One indication of this maturing awareness is Nietzsches search for the ad-equate model for recurrence: was the circle in fact its most felicitous configuration?Let this question mark our starting point.

II) Recurrence as Circle or Loop

The standard idea that the formal configuration for Eternal Recurrence isbest conceived as a circle finds obvious textual confirmation in Nietzscheswork. It is Nietzsche himself who in Zarathustra talks about everything comingback and about eternal recurrence as a wheel and a ring. There is hardly any-thing more circular than a ring.

Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being, Every-thing dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being.Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same house of being isbuilt. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring ofbeing remains faithful to itself.In every Now, being begins; around every Here rolls the sphere There. The center iseverywhere. Bent is the path of eternity. (Za III, Der Genesende, KSA 4, pp. 272f.)

However, in conflict with this economical introduction of Eternal Recur-rence, we are explicitly warned against thinking the time of recurrence as a circleelsewhere in Zarathustra. In the more detailed formulation of the Eternal Recur-rence from the section, Vom Gesicht und Rthsel, the dwarf, suggesting that timeis to be thought as a circle, is mistaken and is being taken to task by an impatientZarathustra. In this narrative representation, Zarathustra is first introducing in

16 Many commentators would sympathize with Eugen Finks frustration, when he observes thatNietzsches most profound intuition eludes a conceptual grasp; it lacks a clear conceptualdefinition and form; it defies the word: This thought [eternal recurrence] is more impliedthan truly explicated. Nietzsche appears almost afraid to articulate it. In essence, his reflectiondefies the word. It is a secret understanding. Nietzsche hesitates and conceals his secret behindincreasing walls because his most profound intuition eludes a conceptual grasp. The secret of thefundamental thought remains for itself in mysterious darkness. [] The eternal return of thesame, Nietzsches most abysmal thought appears to be ambiguous. It seems that the thoughtlacks a clear conceptual definition and form. It rather resembles a somber prophecy or an oracu-lar and mystical revelation than a rational conception. (Eugen Fink, Nietzsches Philosophy,London / New York 2003, pp. 74 and 80).

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an image the three dimensions of time, as traditionally arranged on a line for thepast, the present, and the future.

See this gateway! [Thorweg! ] Dwarf ! I continued to speak: It has two faces. Two roadscome here together: no one has ever followed them to their end.This long lane backward continues for an eternity. And that long lane forward that isanother eternity.They contradict [widersprechen ] each other, these roads; they bang their heads together[stossen sich gerade vor den Kopf ]: and here, in this gateway, is it, they come together. Thename of this gateway is inscribed above: Moment [Augenblick ]. (Za III, Vom Ge-sicht und Rthsel, KSA 4, pp. 199f.)

The dwarf now suggests that instead of conceiving time as two eternal linespointing forwards and backwards, one should understand it rather as a circle, andit is this conception that Zarathustra angrily rejects as simplistic. Zarathustra in-stead describes a configuration that has all the attributes of a loop.

Must not whichever thing can run, have run down this lane before? Must not which-ever thing can happen. have already happened, been done, passed by, before?And if everything has already been there before: what do you think, dwarf, of this mo-ment? Must not this gateway, too, have been there before?And are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment draws after it a l lthings that are to come? Therefore itself too?For whatever of all things can run its course: also into this long lane outward, itmust run it once more. (Ibid., p. 200)

Only in a loop can that which sinks back into the past, and that which runsoff into distant future return to the self-same moment. The circle cannot fulfillthis requirement. If we imagine that we bent the lines of past and future into acircle, they would indeed eventually meet or bang their heads together, but notin the moment; and this is required from Nietzsches passage. If we bent thesetwo lines into a circle they would in fact meet opposite the moment. This is easyenough to realize: we imagine the moment in 12 oclock position; to bend two linesover that pivoting point would eventually cause them to meet (bang their headstogether ) in 6 oclock position. Therefore, we believe that the geometry that isin this context underpinning Nietzsches thought of thoughts must be the loop;i. e., an 8 tipped over; i. e., the following age-old symbol of infinity:

That which runs back into the past, and that which runs off into the future,comes back to the moment only when we bend the lines of past and future overand above themselves, to let them tack on to each other in the gateway, the

8

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moment, the intersection of the model. The ring of eternal recurrence is tworings; the wheel two wheels.17

But does it make any difference? Does it matter whether we think eternal re-currence as a circle or a loop? It seems that applying the adequate formal con-figuration to Nietzsches thought effectively presents it with a new level of clar-ity, where oftentimes it is presented as an irresolvable and obscure paradox. In aperceptive commentator like Joan Stambaugh, the bafflement over this Nietz-schean notion of time is explicit and acknowledged: This gateway has two faces,one toward the long lane continuing backward for an eternity (the past), theother toward the long lane continuing outward for an eternity (the future).These two roads come together in the moment. They bump into each other. Noone has ever gone to the end of these two roads. When they meet in the moment,they contradict each other, what is the meaning with this?18 Stambaugh firstthinks the line, and according to this configuration, it is impossible for anythingrunning off backwards and forwards to ever bump into each other or contra-dict each other. This is truly impossible, as she correctly emphasizes! Stam-baugh also understands that applying the circle to the gateway-image will not re-solve the conundrum, because if one bent the lines of past and future into acircle they would indeed bump into each other, but not in the moment as wenoted above, and Stambaugh concurs. Stambaugh must reject also this model:For Zarathustra, time is not a circle. Past and future come together in themoment, not out there (where?) in an eternal continuance directed away fromthe moment.19 So far, so good! However, since Stambaugh never suggest anyalternative formal configuration which I now argue would have to be theloop she also never gets beyond the conundrum. Consequently, her solutionbecomes, significantly and symptomatically, a pseudo- or a non-solution. Aftercorrectly realizing that neither in the figure of a line nor of a circle, past andfuture could possibly bump into each other in the moment, she declares thatthe meeting of the three temporal dimensions has always-already happened,

17 In an article from a recent issue of Nietzsche-Studien, Michael Skowron comes precariouslyclose to suggesting the loop as an immanent figure underlying Nietzsches thinking, withoutever taking his insights into explicit territory. Skowron compares the gateway from Zarathustrawith the hourglass from Frhliche Wissenschaft (341), and comments: The image of the hour-glass with its two orbits [Kreisen ] that are joined to each other in a narrow passage, correspondsto the two eternities, which in the gateway Moment knock their heads together. As such alsothe gateway has two faces. [] The face of the moment is a Janus-faced two-face [ein Janus-kpfiges Doppel-Gesicht ]. If past and future are eternities, must not also the moment between them,simultaneously joining them together, be eternal? Michael Skowron, Zarathustra-Lehren:bermensch, Wille zur Macht, Ewige Wiederkunft, in: Nietzsche-Studien 33 (2004), pp. 6889,p. 78.

18 Stambaugh, Nietzsches Thought, pp. 37f.19 Ibid., p. 3738.

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is always-already happening, in the self-same moment: Past and future meet inthe moment, and nowhere else. Past and future, and thus all time, thus the eter-nal return itself, are in the moment.20 This reveals a fine understanding forthe critical importance of the moment in Nietzsches thinking, but it does notexplain the gateway-image, and it does not account for how three dimensionspossibly come together in the moment. Three dimensions obviously do not meet ifthey are in fact the same, and have been the same all along. The same certainlydoesnt bump into each other. Two balls may bump into each other, but one balldoesnt bump into itself.

Thinking the loop, the conundrum is solved and everything is simpler.

III) Return as a Repetitive Interpretation-Process

III.1) First Case: Sensation and Perception

(i) Knowledge as Familiarizing the Strange

The loop is also the figure we sometimes see performed in figure skating, theskater being the apt metaphor for a quantum of force traversing the given path,fluently gliding from left to right back to left. It is this movement that uniquelyapplies to the form of return we label a repetitive interpretation-process. Here themetaphorical movement from left to right back to left illustrates the interpre-tive movement from internal to external back to internal. We experience in theinterpretation-process how the internal becomes intertwined with the externalin that very process.

In this context, we are talking about the subject-object relation. In the courseof interpreting, the subject-object relation is obviously not suspended, but theobject is being appropriated by the interpreting subject humanized is Nietzschesusual expression. So, the object as thing stays where is it as thing, i. e., outside thesubject, but in the loop of interpretation, it becomes a thing with meaning, it canbe understood. An interpretation can therefore not touch a thing, it can onlytouch a subject. (An interpreted tree is not a new tree, and does nothing to thetree; the interpreted tree does not shake it branches and shiver in pride over itsnewly won meaning; only a subject can shiver in awe under the majestic crown ofthe tree.) Therefore, what in this logic returns as the same is exactly not thething-like object (this object goes nowhere); what returns as the same is thesubject, since it returns as itself in the interpreted thing. As such all interpretationis an eternal recurrence of the same.

20 Ibid., p. 41.

118 Peter Bornedal

When we say that the subject returns as itself we are employing a shortcut-ex-pression. The subject is here the label of the relevant schemata and taxonomiesthat control the perception of the subjects outer world. These schemata and tax-onomies are not exactly the subjects private depositories. Clearly, they must havebeen consolidated in the individuals ontogenetic past; but if, in a genealogy, theycan be traced back to an origin, that origin does not coincide with the subjectsprivate self. The medium by which we storage such depositories, both transcen-ding the individual, yet a part of individual immanence, is language. As such, theyenable the subject to recognize an impression as being such and such, being thisand not that, following this and preceding that, etc. Without such schemata andtaxonomies, every impression would be what Nietzsche calls strange.

The Orig in of our not ion Knowledge [Erkenntn i s s ] . [] What do they[the common people] want when they want knowledge? Nothing more than this:Something strange [Fremdes ] is to be reduced to something familiar [Bekanntes ]. Andwe philosophers have we by knowledge ever understood anything different fromthis? [] Look, isnt our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, thewill to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something thatno longer disturbs us? Is it not the inst inct of fear that bids us to know? (FW 355,KSA 3, pp. 593f.)

Nietzsche sums up his insight in the neat, was bekannt ist, ist erkannt (ibid.,p. 594). Recurrence of the same is inscribed into the elegant phrase: only whenthe familiar [Bekanntes ] recurs as the same in the other, the other becomes known[erkannt ]. Language is the medium by which we make the strange familiar, andconsequently known.

Already Francis Bacon would realize that knowledge is power; however,knowledge is power in a manner entirely different for Bacon and Nietzsche. ToNietzsche, knowledge is power because it reassures us in our herd-instinct; itreduces what is strange and other to what is familiar for us. It is ultimately a reac-tion to deep-seated fears.

There is not, as Kant supposed, a sense of causality [Causalitts-Sinn ]. One is sur-prised, one is disturbed one desires something familiar one can hold on to. As soonas something old is pointing us into the new, we are calmed. The so-called causality-instinct [Causalitts-Instinkt ] is merely the fear of the unfami l iar and the attemptto uncover in it something fami l iar [] The ca lcu labi l i ty of an event does notconsist in the fact that a rule is followed or a necessity obeyed, or that a law of causal-ity was projected by us into all that happens: it consists in the recur rence of ident ica l cases. (Nachla 1888, KSA 13, 14[98])

Psychologica l explanat ion. To trace something unknown back to somethingknown is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power.Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown the first instinct is to e l iminatethese distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. (GD, Dievier grossen Irrthmer 5, KSA 6, p. 93)

Eternal Recurrence in Inner-Mental-Life 119

This process of familiarization is, first, a process of interpretation; second, a will-to-power-process, and third, recurrence of the same. We appropriate (i. e., make our-selves masters of) what is strange, dangerous, Other in this appropriating will-to-power-process interpreting the Other as the Same (i. e., let the old return in thenew), as a recurrence of identical cases.

The thinking of familiarization can be more precisely captured by the follow-ing three formulaic expressions, all of them suggesting the aspiration to humanize(i. e., mastering by interpreting) a hostile, dangerous, and inexplicable exterior world.The subject engaged in generating meaning is invariably: 1) reducing the other to thesame; 2) familiarizing the strange; and, since these two expressions indicate the sameprocess and operation, 3) transforming some unknown x into some known X.21

This process is typically in Nietzsche applied to explanations of how webecome conscious of sensations, bearing in mind that sensations can be both ex-ogenous and endogenous. Sensations constitute everything from the perceptionof sunlight reflected in water, reading a page in a book, the smart of a bee sting,stomach ache, the taste of chocolate, the sound of water dashing upon the shore,the smell of meat being grilled, to the list is of course endless. In all of theseendless cases, we invariably Reduce the Other to the Same, Familiarize the Strange, orTransform some Unknown x into some Known X.

(ii) Time-Reversal and Delayed Perception

In the tradition of the British Empiricists, primarily Locke and Hume, oursensations travel as in a straight line from the outside to the inside where they be-come nested as ideas. The senses are seen as entrances for material that willeventually fill up and furnish the mind. Once sense-material is inside, it can bemanipulated and combined at our pleasure to form imagined objects. We can im-agine a golden mountain even if no golden mountain exists, because we havehad the sensory experiences of gold and mountain as Hume argues.22 Thisconception is compelling in its simplicity; sense-material travels from outsideto inside along a linear trajectory. Moreover, according to the conception,we suppose a one-to-one relationship between the inside images and the outsideobjects; and if inside images are complex, the different parts of which theyare composed still have a one-to-one relationship with outside objects (cf. the

21 For a brief history of X in the philosophical literature, see the article: Werner Stegmaier, DasZeichen X in der Philosophie der Moderne, in: Werner Stegmaier (ed.): Zeichen-Kunst, Frank-furt am Main 1999, pp. 231ff.

22 When we think of a golden mountain, we only joined two consistent ideas, gold and mountain,with which we were formerly acquainted. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning HumanUnderstanding, Indianapolis, Cambridge 1993, p. 11.

120 Peter Bornedal

golden mountain ). Finally, since the trajectory is linear, chronology and causal-ity is also firmly established between the outside and the inside; the outside isfirst, the inside second; the outside is the cause, the inside is the effect.

In Nietzsche, this linear trajectory has been replaced with the loop. Nietzschechallenges the Empiricist conception in a number of aphorisms, for example inthe following two fragments from 1884 and 1888:

Like in dreams we look for the cause for a canon-shot and first then hear the shot(that therefore a time-reversal [Zeit-Umkehrung ] has taken place: this t ime-reversa la lways occurs, also when we are awake. The cause is imagined [imaginirt ] a f terthe deed. I mean, our ends and means are consequences of a process?? [Vor-ganges??]) We only accept the canon-shot when we have figured out from whatpossibility it originated. [] Also every so-called sense-perception [Sinneswahrneh-mung ] is preceded by a judgment , which before the process enters consciousness is af f i r med or denied [be jah t oder v e r n e in t ]. (Nachla 1884, KSA 11, 26[35])

The phenomenal i sm of the inner wor ld .The chronological inversion [d i e Chr ono l og i s ch e Umdr ehung ], so that the causeenters consciousness later than the effect.we have learned that pain is projected to a part of the body without being situatedtherewe have learned that sense impressions naively supposed to be conditioned by theouter world [Auenwelt ] are, on the contrary, conditioned by the inner world [Innen-welt ]; that we are always unconscious of the real activity of the outer world Thefragment of the outer world of which we are conscious is born after an effect [nachge-boren nach der Wirkung ] from outside has impressed [ gebt ] itself upon us, and is sub-sequently projected [nachtrglich projicirt ] as its cause.In the phenomenalism of the inner world we invert the chronological order of causeand effect.The fundamental fact of inner experience is that the cause is imagined after the ef-fect has taken place [die Ursache imaginirt wird, nachdem die Wirkung erfolgt ist ]. (Nach-la 1888, KSA 13, 15[90]; cf. WM 479)23

Nietzsche challenges most obviously Empiricism in the passages: Alsoevery so-called sense-perception [Sinneswahrnehmung ] is preceded by a judg-ment and we have learned that sense impressions naively supposed to beconditioned by the outer world [Auenwelt ] are, on the contrary, conditioned bythe inner world [Innenwelt ] (ibid.).

However, it is critical here to read Nietzsche with some caution; it is not hispostulate that we create or invent the outer world from within, implying that theouter world is nothing but our idea (in Berkeleys sense) or Vorstellung (in Scho-penhauers sense). If this were the case, Nietzsche would be defending a modelas simplistic as the model of the British Empiricists, but just in the reverse; i. e., a

23 See also Schlimgens comments on the fragment: Erwin Schlimgen, Nietzsches Theorie des Be-wutseins, Berlin / New York 1999, pp. 134f.

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linear trajectory, where the line was simply conceived to travel from inside tooutside. It is clear that Nietzsche tries to avoid this equally unattractive interpre-tation, when in the fragment from 1888 he continues: The fragment of theouter world of which we are conscious is born after an effect from outside hasimpressed itself upon us, and is subsequently projected as its cause. (ibid.). Inthis passage, the outside world is not conceived as idea or Vorstellung. The outsideworld explicitly impresses itself upon our sense-organs as raw sense-material;thereupon the impression is interpreted, as such made familiar [Bekanntes ] en-abling us to consciously perceive the material. The interpreted perception we see asoutside; however, it is intertwined with our inside.24

It is the proposed Zeit-Umkehrung or Chronologische Umdrehung in this con-ception I depict in the figure of a loop. Something is entering the loops rightside, runs its course from right to left back to its point of origin, before it is fullyinterpreted. Given this essential interpretive nature of the loop of our selves, some un-known x is transformed into some known X. This process helps us to characterize asensation (exogenous or endogenous) that is at first uncharacterized. As an illus-tration, let us here suggest an analysis of how the endogenous sensation thirst istransformed from unknown to known.25 First, thirst announces itself as blindand confused raw sensation it is so far an unknown x-sensation (or maybe it is

24 The fragment from 1888, included in The Will to Power, has been together with Nietzsches earlyessay On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense crucial in the formulation of AmericanDeconstruction. It is cited by Paul de Man in Allegories of Reading (see Paul de Man, Allegories ofReading, New Haven, London 1979, p. 107), and subsequently by Jonathan Culler in his influen-tial On Deconstruction (see Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction. Theory and Criticism after Struc-turalism, Ithaca, NY 1982, p. 86); recently, it re-appeared in Wayne Kleins De Manian commen-tary to Nietzsches early work (Wayne Klein, Nietzsche and the Promise of Philosophy, NewYork 1997). In these Deconstructionist readings, Nietzsches epistemology is read as Idealism.The rational potential in Nietzsches observations, for example their foreshadowing of contem-porary neurological discoveries, were of no interest to Nietzsches American readers in the post-modernist and Deconstructionist camp. Rather, they constructed a Schopenhaurian Nietzschefrom fragments like the one above, and from the work of his youth still steeped in the teachingsof Schopenhauer. In this, American Deconstructionists are perhaps not so much heirs ofNietzsche, as they are heirs of Schopenhauer. Nietzsches notion that perception of the exteriorworld is effected from within, is replaced with the curious notion that the exterior world is cre-ated, constructed, or made from within. The distinction is crucial, since the first notionsimply implies that we have evolved a mental apparatus by which to process and sifter in-formation received from without; while the second notion implies that the world originates inus (qua our language and interpretations), thus has no independent existence. However, if con-temporary Idealism is neo-Schopenhauerian, it is a repressed neo-Schopenhauerianism, since ithas never been taken up as an object of post-modernist self-reflection; it exists merely as a partof the postmodernist unconscious. Contemporary Idealism is most typically unwitting and uncon-scious Idealism; it is advocated as a set-knowledge ready-at-hand, more often implied than ac-tually asserted.

25 My example suffers from what examples usually suffer from, simplification and abstraction; it isprobably unlikely that it describes the actual processes as they occur in the mind, but it does ap-proximately represent Nietzsches way of thinking these processes.

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a multifarious sequence of sensations extremely difficult, probably impossible,to decipher as such). Secondly, this announcement triggers an associative chain ofimages of, for instance, glasses of water, oneself drinking, etc. Thirdly, it evokesthe silent thought depicting the cause of thirst, say, because I need water, I feelthirst. Finally, it is pronounced in the full-fledged sentence I am thirsty asknown X-sensation. In pronouncing the sentence, I am thirsty, the unknownx-sensation is identified or characterized. If one was not truly thirsty while hav-ing the blind x-sensation, one is after having articulated the sensation positivelythirsty. The sensation has become known or characterized. Thus, even thoughNietzsche usually suggests that the strange may be identified or interpreted inany sign-system, the word has a unique ability to familiarize the strange; that is, totransform the unknown x into some known X.26

Continuing our reading of the fragment from 1888, Nietzsche offers anexample that is structurally similar to mine: a simple man feels unwell but onlyafter he has figured out why! E. g., I feel unwell such a judgment presup-poses a g reat and la te neutra l i ty of the obser ver ; the simple man al-ways says: this or that makes me fell unwell he makes up his mind about hisfeeling unwell only when he has seen a reason for feeling unwell. (Nachla1888, KSA 13, 15[90]; cf. WM 479).

The simple man feels unwell, but he needs a reason, a cause, before he can besure of feeling unwell. Both in my example, thirst, and Nietzsches, feeling un-well, the sensation is first blind sensation, our so-called x-sensation, and is assuch not yet recognized. Only when the subject has found a reason, blind sen-sation is transformed into recognized sensation, or so-called X-sensation.

26 It is especially by means of language, but not exclusively, that humans acquire the ability to sche-matize inner experiences. It is required that the strange is re-interpreted into something familiarand already known, but this re-interpretation could take place in any sign-system. In the follow-ing passage Nietzsche talks about a language, not language or the language: Inner exper i -ence [ inne r e Er fahrung ] enters our consciousness only after it has found a language the in-dividual understands i. e., a translation of a condition into a condition more fami l iar[bekannt e r e Zustnde ] to him to understand means merely: to be able to express somethingnew in the language of something old and familiar. (Nachla 1888, KSA 13, 15[90]; cf. WM479). We must assume then that when employing a language Nietzsche believes that we are en-gaging any available sign-system in order to familiarize the strange; possibly also pictorial sign-systems; possibly also associative chains of images, as in our dream and fantasy worlds. This as-sumption finds support in Gnter Abels observation: There is no reason to adopt the thesisthat we have to limit our concept of mental representation, as well as generally the question ofthe relationships between consciousness, mind, and world to linguistic systems and forms in anarrow sense. [] Linguistic and propositional representation-symbols were never the onlymeans for mental, imaginary representations and presentations. A comprehensive theory abouthuman consciousness, mind, thinking, and action requires the inclusion also of non-linguistic, aswell as of non-propositional sign and interpretation systems; (that is, e. g., graphical, diagram-matical, or pictorial systems). Gnter Abel, Bewutsein Sprache Natur. Nietzsches Philo-sophie des Geistes, in: Nietzsche-Studien 30 (2001), pp. 143, p. 39.

Eternal Recurrence in Inner-Mental-Life 123

We notice in these examples, that blind sensation, or x-sensation, stands toarticulated sensation, or X-sensation, as unconscious to conscious, as unstruc-tured reality to structured reality, as multifarious super-abundant reality to sim-plified and interpreted reality. Furthermore, it is appropriate to notice that x-sen-sation is not identical to the Kantian Ding-an-sich. It is not beyond our perceptivepossibilities, it is very much there as being received, albeit received in a con-fused and distracted manner. Perhaps it is accurate to determine x-sensation asreceived sensation, and X-sensation as perceived received x-sensation; languagegives us here a number of options; one might also evoke Leibnizs old distinctionbetween perceived and apperceived reality.

(iii) Living in the Mirror of Consciousness

In Die frhliche Wissenschaft Nietzsche continues in aphorism 354 an insightthat was originally Leibnizs. In the New Essays on Human Understanding,27 Leibnizhad observed that we do not perceive the world as consciously as we tend to be-lieve. Due to either the habitualness or superabundance of impressions, we be-come conscious of only a fraction of our surrounding world. Reality is too abun-dant, too heterogeneous and multifaceted for the human to process, and thehuman being is therefore always subjected to an information-overload that it hasto reduce and simplify in order to obtain any information at all. As in Nietzsche,also in Leibniz we suffer under too much reality.28

If now this was granted, according to what principle would our perceptioneventually lighten up the world enfolding us? Leibniz would say that attentiveperception requires memory. In the history of metaphysics, the relationship hadusually been conceived the other way round: memory would seem in some ob-vious sense to require perception; we seem to remember only what we have per-ceived; what else would there be to remember? This was how John Locke, whoLeibniz in his New Essays is responding to, had conceived matters. Now, Leibnizsays instead: Memory is needed for attention : when we are not alerted, so to speak,to pay heed to certain of our own present perceptions, we allow them to slip byunconsidered and even unnoticed. But if someone alerts us to them straight

27 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding. Translated & edited byJ. Bennett and P. Ramnant, Cambridge 1982.

28 For a discussion of this simplification or abbreviation of reality, compare to Werner Stegmaier,Nietzsches Genealogie der Moral, Darmstadt 1994; and Werner Stegmaier, Weltabkrzungs-kunst. Orientierung durch Zeichen, in: Josef Simon (ed.), Zeichen und Interpretation, Frankfurtam Main 1994. See also Peter Bornedal, A Silent World. Nietzsches Radical Realism. World Sen-sation Language, in: Nietzsche-Studien 34 (2005), pp. 147.

124 Peter Bornedal

away, [] then we remember them and are aware of just having had some sense ofthem.29

We know that when we are accompanied by someone, she needs to alert us towhat she sees before we have the same perception as she. Now, we extend thisobservation to our solitary selves. Also when walking around without accom-paniment, our inner self needs to alert us to perceptions. In both cases, someone(or something) must tell us look at that! We are made aware of our perceptionsonly when alerted to them, even if the interval between the actual impressionand the alert is infinitesimal. What alerts us is memory; it tells us remember, youjust saw a car, as the necessary precondition for seeing the car, even if the caris still there, passing me by in the same instance as I remember to look at it;I remember to see.30 From the immediate past, memory informs present percep-tion. This would be the first mental mechanism for stabilizing and fixating aworld of becoming: I see, and become aware of, something as something.

In Leibniz as well as in Nietzsche, perception proper is therefore delayed; im-pressions have to traverse a path (which we here illustrate as a loop), before con-sciousness becomes fully aware of them. The perceived outer-world is thereforethe end-product of a process. That which stands opposed to us the perceived outer-world is therefore, as Nietzsche states, our work:

The reversal of time: we believe that the outer-world [Auenwelt ] is the cause of the ef-fect it has on us [ihrer Wirkung auf uns ], but we have t ransfor med its actual [thatsch-liche ] and unconsciously processed effect into outer-wor ld [zur Auenwe l t v e r -wande l t ]: that, which stands opposed to us, is our work, which only works on usretroactively [zurckwirkt ]. It needs time before it is finished, but the time is so small[klein ]. (Nachla 1884, KSA 11, 26[44])

In aphorism 354 from FW, Nietzsche elaborates on Leibnizs observation.Referring explicitly to Leibniz, he remarks: We could think, feel, will, re-member, and also act in every sense of the term, and yet none of all this wouldhave to enter our consciousness [ins Bewusstsein zu treten ] (as one says meta-phorically) [wie man im Bilde sagt ]. (FW 354; KSA 3, p. 590). Enter conscious-ness is here a metaphor, an image [Bilde ]; something can either enter our con-

29 Leibniz: New Essays, p. 54; my italics.30 To some readers mind, the phrase may sound paradoxical and absurd; but it is plain enough!

I believe that everyone has had the experience of having had to remind themselves to see. If in thesupermarket, I walk idle around, among an abundance of articles, I see explicitly only a smallfraction. Only in a few cases does my perception interact with the memory of an object. Notalways do I see with noticing awareness the chocolate-bar, but when sometimes I do (besidesseeing it in empty perception), a process starts where I start recalling various qualities aboutchocolate, its taste, texture, etc. We may also notice, as a typical shopping experience, that often-times one has to tell oneself to remember to see. One has the hunch that one needs something in thesection for dairy products, and first then one starts to remember to see the abundance of dairy prod-ucts, hopeful that one will eventually also see the product needed.

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sciousness or stay outside. If it stays outside, it is in Nietzsches senseunconscious. In Nietzsche as in Leibniz, we talk about a sight that, although it isimmediately there to be seen, is still not seen with awareness. In this unconsciousmode, we see, but oblivious to the seen the obliviously seen is not an object of re-flection.

Reflection, originally, is also a metaphor. It implies that the world is doubledin original and image of the original in such a way that the original is reflected inconsciousness as image. Consciousness is consequently like a mirror. Nietzschesinitial question is, what do we need the mirror for? All of life would be possiblewithout, as it were, seeing itself in the mirror [Spiegel ]; and still today, the pre-dominant part of our lives actually unfolds without this mirroring. [] Forwhat do we need consciousness at all [Wozu berhaupt Bewusstsein ] when it is ba-sically superfluous? (FW 354, KSA 3, p. 590). Nietzsches question addressesthe peculiarity that, being conscious, we seem to see twice. First, we see the worldas it presents itself as appearance to our (so to speak) external eyes; thereupon,we see the image of the world again with our (so to speak) internal eyes. Ac-cordingly, we assume that we have a set of eyes directed outwards toward theworld as presentation, but, in addition, that we have a second set of eyesmounted at the inside of our skull, directed towards the images of the world wehave received from external perception. Consequently, we see twice when wesee these images as in the internal mirror. Consciousness always implies adouble mirroring [eine doppelte Spiegelung ] there is nothing immediate [Unmittel-bares ]. (Nachla 1885, KSA 12, 1[54]).

But again, what would we need the mirror for? Why re-flection [orig.: bend-ing back; throwing back]? In Nietzsches Nachla from the years he startsworking on Die frhliche Wissenschaft, (188081), we find several attempts toprovide a more detailed answer to this question. First and foremost, accordingto Nietzsche, it is always indispensable to human survival and self-persever-ance to stabilize a world in flux; the mirror of consciousness is doing this importantjob.

All relationships, which are so important to us, are mir ror- images [Figuren auf demSpiegel ], not the truth. All distance is mirror-optic [Die Abstnde sind die optischen auf demSpiegel ], not the truth. [The statement,] There is no world where there is no mirror, isnonsense. But all our relationships, however exact they may be, are human descrip-tions, not the wor ld . [] It is not appearance, not deception, but a cryptogram[Chiffreschrift ] in which an unknown state of affairs expresses itself. (Nachla 1880,KSA 9, 6[429])

We speak, as if there were endur ing th ings, and our sciences speak only of suchthings. But an enduring thing exists only according to human opt ic ; from this wecannot free ourselves. The becoming of something, a movement in-itself is com-pletely incomprehensible to us. We can only move endur ing th ings [s e i endeDing e ] in this, our world-image depends on the mirror. [] If we now try to con-

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sider/look at [betrachten ] the mirror in itself, then we discover only things. If we try tocomprehend the things, they ultimately only come back in the mirror. (Nachla 1880,KSA 9, 6[433])

For a subject to exist at all, something enduring must exist and likewise there mustexist equality and similarity. [Otherwise,] the absolute ly d i f ferent in perpetualchange would not be arrested, and nothing would arrest it; it would flow away likerain on a stone. [] The mirror always suppose [setzt voraus ] something enduring. But now I believe: the subject could emerge simultaneously to the emergence of theerror of equality. (Nachla 1881, KSA 9, 11[268])

In this mirror-stage of Nietzsches, the prehistoric hominid is transformedinto a subject. In the inner mirror in which we see the world again, we see somethingas something; we commit the error of equalizing a world in flux, a world of be-coming, and emerge after the process as subjects, that is, as equalizers, falsifiers,simplifiers.31

Nietzsches world of becoming, the world in its own self-presence, gives riseto no sense of time and space. First when the world in flux is presented as en-tities arranged next-to- and after-one-another, does a world of identities andsimilarities emerge; a world that can be organized according to the three par-ameters, time, space, and causality.

First the after-one-another [Nacheinander ] produces the sense of t ime [Ze i tvorstel-lung ]. Let us suppose that we did not experience cause and effect, but rather a con-tinuum; in that case we would not believe in time. [] A continuum of force is wi th-out af ter-one-another [Nache inande r ] and wi thout next- to-one-another[Nebene inande r ]. Without after-one-another and next-to-one-another there is nobecoming for us, no multiplicity [Vielheit ]. (Nachla 1881, KSA 9, 11[281])

Nietzsches mental mirror is thus doing more than just mirroring it doesnot produce an exact double of the world it mirrors, in which case it would donothing but replicating the flow of impressions our sense-apparatus receive.Instead, Nietzsches mirror is arranging, organizing, and equalizing the flow ofimpressions. As such, the mirror is a metaphor for what Nietzsche in othercontexts describes as a simplification-apparatus. Consciousness, mirroring, simplify-ing are all attempts to describe the one and same fundamental operation: thenecessity of bringing order into an abundance of received impressions. In thecourse of human evolution, the development of a mirroring consciousness hasbecome an advantage.

If we can extricate ourselves from the postmodernist understanding of lan-guage as a gray blanket that covers up the world in its self-presence and trans-forms it into signifiers, then Nietzsches mirror is language (or more precisely,

31 Since this error is constitutional to our subjectivity, it is not an error that we should desperatelytry to correct. It is obviously part of our evolutionary history, and as such, as Nietzsche empha-sizes time and again, an error necessary for life.

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a sign-system, which can be of either purely linguistic or general semiologicalnature). Nietzsches mirror is an excellent metaphor exactly because we in themirror still see the reflection of the original nothing is truly lost and it is defi-nitely not hidden in the mirror; and yet, we can accept that in the mirror-imagean infinitely deep world has been captured within the simplifying two-dimen-sional frame of the mirror. Nietzsches mirror does not cover the world; it seesit again, but through a linguistic/semiological apparatus that makes everythingsimpler, easier, and plainer and finally, an apparatus that makes communicationpossible.32

In this understanding of the mechanism of perception, perception has be-come re-interpretation; it sees again. The external world that is encountered inthe impression of an object, is taken back, held on to, and looked upon beforeit is properly perceived. The object is thus seen with a certain delay. We notice

32 Originally, Nietzsches prehistoric hominid would communicate thoughts, feelings, or percep-tions neither to itself nor to anyone else. Gradually, however, in the course of evolution, thisuniquely private creature develops a consciousness in synchrony with its need for communi-cation. For the sake of survival, the early human must learn to name impressions. Impressionswould thus have to be taken in, to enter consciousness (they could no longer stay outside ).Furthermore, they would have to be held on to and looked upon once and again i. e., memorized andretrieved from memory until they stabilized as identifiable images that could as such be la-beled, and finally communicated. In this process, the formerly so private self evolved into a so-cial self. It seems to me that the subtlety and strength of consciousness is always related to apersons (or an animals) ab i l i ty to communicate [Mit th e i lung s -Fh i gke i t ]; and the abilityto communicate, in turn, to the need to communicate [Mit th e i lung s -Bedr f t i gke i t ]. []Consc iousness in genera l has deve loped only under the pressure of the need tocommunicate ; at the outset, consciousness was necessary, was useful, only between humanand human. [] Consciousness is essentially only a relations-net [Verbindungsnetz ] betweenhuman and human. [] The solitary and predatory person would not have needed it. [] As themost endangered animal, he needed help and protection, he needed equal beings; he had to ex-press his misery, to be able to make himself understood and for all this, he first and foremostneeded consciousness; that is, simply to know what distressed him, to know how he felt, toknow what he thought. For to repeat: man, like every living creature, always thinks but does notknow it; the thinking which becomes consc ious is only the smallest part of it, lets say the shal-lowest, worst part for only conscious thinking takes p lace in words, that i s, in com-municat ion symbols ; and this fact discloses the origin of consciousness. In short, the devel-opment of language and the development of consciousness [] go hand in hand. (FW 354;KSA 3, pp. 591f.). Originally, we would be unknown to ourselves, and this would havebothered nobody; on the contrary, it would only indicate a certain measure of health andstrength. Now past the dazzle of these wonderful prehistoric days modern man tries tounderstand, tries to force an encounter with this his unique individuality, encouraged by the evi-dent proximity with which he seems to be living with himself. Humans try to turn the tool ofknowledge toward themselves; they try to appropriate themselves as the Same. They direct thistool toward their own subjectivity in an attempt of self-explanation, self-interpretation, and self-appropriation. However, the unique is never expressible by means of the average. Our individu-ality escapes us, because it is not expressible by means of a tool that everyone can take up. As wellas in Wittgenstein, there is in Nietzsche no private language. For an extended discussion of FW354, see also Werner Stegmaier, Nietzsches Zeichen, in: Nietzsche-Studien 29 (2000), pp. 4169,pp. 52ff.

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that as such the impression follows the path of our loop before it is properly per-ceived: it is first sensed and taken back into our memory-systems, where it is ad-justed according to our inner mental mirror; thereupon it shoots out from theseinner recesses, becoming finally a properly perceived object. From the right sideof the loop it travels to the left side, and then back to the right side; in this itin-erary repeating what already is. The impression has as such been through aninterpretation-process, and the properly perceived object emerges as the inter-preted impression. Something as elementary as perception is an example of eter-nal recurrence of the same: Memory maintains the habit of the old interpretations,i. e., of erroneous causality so that the inner experience has to contain withinit the consequences of all previous false causal fictions. Our outer world as we pro-ject it every moment is indissolubly tied to the old error of the ground. (Nachla 1888,KSA 13, 15[90]; cf. WM 479; my italics).

Understood thus, eternal recurrence in no longer a blind, mechanical, self-propelled rhythm (e. g., year follows year, and spring replaces spring, ad infinitum),it is rather a fundamental interpretation-mechanism. It is first after a circular in-terpretation-process, gaining its strength and definition from the memorysystemsthat we always-already are, that the object is perceived as something. We are stillfar removed from Idealism (cf. above, There is no world where there is no mir-ror, is nonsense.) I still have the impressions of tree-stuff; I thereupon take in thetree-stuff and compare it to adequate memories of tree-stuff; I finally discover thetree as my perceptive image, being now able to also communicate my perception:This is a tree! As such, my memory recurs in the impression of the tree, re-form-ing it into the actually perceived (and communicable) tree. And together with thisrecurrence/repetition of what I am in what I see, I have interpreted the world.33 Itis as such we understand perception as repetition of what already is.34

33 Compare to Abel: There is no in-itself of things, but only interpreting and interpreted processesof positing [Fest-stellung ]. This does not imply that there is no reality, that interpretation is merelyfantasy. But that something [Etwas ], which appears as reality and is addressed as such, is notsomething given [Gegebenes ] in an ontological sense. [] Reality is always constructed reality. It isabout production, not about reproduction. Abel: Nietzsche, p. 183.

34 As well as we are inundated with sensations, we are in our inner lives also flooded with thoughts,whether rendered linguistically or pictorially. However, like sensations, also thoughts live mostlyunconscious lives. As they occur, they are not reflected upon; they are not mirrored and thusidentified by the attentive subject. Nietzsche suggests that we think unconsciously, until weneed a reason for thinking about what we are thinking. When eventually we self-consciouslythink, it is always as an after-effect to a question about what we are at present thinking. In theconcrete: we may have been unconsciously thinking about something; suddenly someone asks usabout what we are thinking; by this question, we are forced to take a step back and take anotherlook at what we were thinking just a moment ago; but without the question whether asked by anactual observer or ourselves we do not think about what at present we are thinking. In muchthe same sense, we do not know what we have been dreaming before we begin re-telling to our-selves what we have been dreaming. We remember that in Freud, this re-telling of the dreamwas seen as a re-interpretation of the dream. If the censor-mechanisms in dreams exposed the

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III.2) Second Case: How One Becomes What One Is

(i) The Polemical Environment

Also the recurrence implied in the formula, How One Becomes What OneIs, is most precisely understood according to the configuration of the loop; i. e.,as an interpretation-mechanism and a recurrence of the old in the new.

When Nietzsche in Ecce Homo explains how one becomes what one is, thedictum is applied to the creative economy of the writer. Nietzsche gives us in EcceHomo a recipe on how he became what he is in his most important manifestation,a writer. We notice that when several commentators expound the enigmatic dic-tum, they do not refer to this self-explanation of Nietzsche. Neither Karl Lwith,Alexander Nehamas (who in their work on Nietzsche both devote a chapter to theinterpretation of the maxim), nor Babette E. Babich in a recent article, refer to therelevant passages from Ecce Homo.35 We notice that they substantiate their inter-pretations by copiously referring to Nietzsches work, but doing so, they merelystart an interpretive machine that on the inexhaustible energy-resources of Nietz-sche-quotes runs in all possible directions, except in the direction of Nietzschesself-interpretation. In this oversight or evasion, they invariably view the becomingself as resulting from teleological and conscious operations. The becoming self

original dream-thought to a so-called primary elaboration, we telling the dream to ourselves would expose the dream to an additional layer of interpretation, the so-called secondary elaboration.Now, in much the same sense, when we tell our thoughts to ourselves, our narratives are always,according to Nietzsche, secondary elaboration. (Digression: To these two layers of interpretation,we could add a third layer of interpretation, namely in the form of Freuds, the Doctors, dog-matic interpretation of the dream. In the first layer of interpretation, drives or forces are ca-thected and given representation in primitive images and/or signs; in the second layer of inter-pretation, representations are given narrative, causal, and chronological form; in the third layerof interpretation, a narrative is being hermeneutically appropriated by an analyst, a critic, or adoctor; and is being situated within the reference-frame of a dogmatic (so-called professional)language. The suggestion of such three layers of interpretation corresponds to Gnter Abelsproposal of the three interpretative layers: Interpretation1, Interpretation2, and Interpretation3. Alsothese three layers proceed from a primary world-creating interpretation1 to the dogmatic appro-priating interpretation3 of for example the literary critic. The point is here that we cannot mean-ingfully access or recognize any creeds, ideas, or principles beyond or before the primary inter-pretation1. In the place of the before primary interpretation1, we construct at best only aheuristic and theoretical fiction; we construct the idea of a flow of un-knowable forces, ordrives, or energies, in themselves without representation, but in our fiction meant to representthe nether limit of our universe. See Gnter Abel, Was ist Interpretationsphilosophie?, in: JosefSimon (ed.): Zeichen und Interpretation, Frankfurt am Main 1994).

35 The works here referred to are the following: Babette E. Babich, Nietzsches Imperative as aFriends Encomium. On Becoming the One Your Are, Ethics, and Blessing, in: Nietzsche-Stu-dien 32 (2003), pp. 2958; Karl Lwith: Nietzsches Philosophe der Ewigen Wiederkehr desGleichen, Hamburg 1978. (Translated by J. H. Lomax as Nietzsches Philosophy of the Eternal Recur-rence of the Same, Berkeley 1997); and Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cam-bridge, Mass. 1985.

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becomes the existent self s project; it comes about as the existent self s intentionalpurpose. One unifies oneself with being as a whole (Lwith; cf. n. 43); createsoneself as an author creates a character (Nehamas; cf. n. 36); or teaches oneselfhow to love (Babich; cf. n. 39); assuming, in all these suggestions, that the onewho unifies himself, creates himself, or teaches himself knows what he is doing!36

However, Nietzsche does not know what he is doing! And it is about this fun-damental ignorance, this essential lack of knowledge, that he sets out to express atheoretical rule (doing this i. e., doing theory he is of course distinctly awareof what he is doing, but it is a different level of awareness). Since Nietzschesself-explanation must have a certain overriding authority, I shall in the followingpursue it exclusively.

(ii) The Principle of Self-Development

At one point in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche returns to the subtitle of his work inorder to present us, readers, with an explanation of his enigmatic maxim: At thispoint we can no longer avoid to provide a real answer to the question, how one

36 In his important and influential Nietzsche, Nehamas addresses a self-creation, which in theideal case involves that we form from everything that we have done a coherent whole: Thecreation of the self therefore appears to be [] the development of the ability, or the willingness,to accept responsibility for everything that we have done and to admit that is in any case true.[] The self-creation Nietzsche has in mind involves accepting everything that we have doneand, in the ideal case, binding it into a perfect coherent whole. [] To become what one is [] is toidentify oneself with all of ones actions, to see that everything one does (what one becomes) iswhat one is. In the ideal case it is also to fit all this into a coherent whole. (Nehamas, Nietzsche,pp. 188 and 191; my italics). Since ideal cases are not actualized in all cases; since they are by natureunique and exceptional, the interpretation has two moments: first, becoming oneself means to ac-cept oneself ; then, on top of this self-acceptance, it means to create oneself ; i. e., one creates a co-herent self out of everything that one has done. In this conception, however, Nehamas seemsultimately to be reverting to the notion of a conscious agent, intentionally carrying out therequirement. Nehamas must be presupposing a confused self in a constant process of becoming,and then he must assume that hovering above this confused subject, we have in the ideal case asuper-self arranging all the confused fragments into a coherent whole ( seemingly by default, re-verting to the notion of a doer behind the deed). Nehamas seems to have been seduced by his ownmodel implicit in the subtitle of his work: the super-self creates a self like an author creates acharacter. Like the author is hovering above pen and paper creating on the empty surface of thepaper a coherent character, the super-self is also (somewhere in the abstract) hovering above thechaotic self, creating out of an empty surface a coherent self. The most pertinent problembeing here that if conscious self-creation were an option there would be no need for a coherentself in the first place, because the conscious super-self would be several degrees more coherentthat the self that it would be creating. We notice this contrast between Nehamass conceptionand a fragment on becoming found in Der Wille zur Macht : Becoming must be explained withoutrecourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment (or incapable ofbeing evaluated; which amounts to the same thing); the present must absolutely not be justified by a ref-erence to a future, nor the past by reference to the present. (WM 708; my italics).

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becomes what one i s. (EH, Warum ich so klug bin 9, KSA 6, p. 293). We no-tice from the outset of this self-explanation that Nietzsches becoming self isalways involved in unconscious operations, and never according to a telos directingit. To become what one is, presupposes, that one doesnt have the faintest ideaof what one is. (Ibid.). Consciousness and purpose would immediately ruin theproject. The becoming self must receive no direction from its conscious surface;the becoming self must not adopt any self-imposed purpose, agenda, or telos forits becoming. It cannot create itself, as Nehamass author creates a character.One can only become what one is, if the ego subjects itself to unconscious forcesover which it has no control.

So, there is a chance for the subject to become what it is, only, when uncon-scious wills and forces are allowed to do their work without interference fromthe conscious surface. Given this non-interference, and given unconsciousforces are left alone, a so-called organizing idea begins to rule: Meanwhilethe organizing idea [Idee ] that is destined to rule grows and grows into stilldeeper depths it begins to command; slowly it leads us back from side roadsand wrong roads; [] it trains all subser v ient capacities before giving any hintof the dominant task, goal, aim, or meaning [Ziel, Zweck, Sinn ]. (Ibid.,p. 294). Idea, we notice here, is significantly placed in quotation marks becausethe unconscious forces of which Nietzsche is talking have no actual ideational rep-resentative; they are quantities that eventually, but in their own time, will become aquality. For the same reason, goal, aim