Revenge of the Spiders!

Volume 2 of the Heidegger lectures closes with a separate talk called "Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?" which he gave in 1953, nearly 15 years after those in the main text.  Despite the intervening years, it picks up where the 1937 lecture course left off, with the idea that ER is Nietzsche's attempt to, "stamp Becoming with the character of Being" (WTP #617).  This seems to be the phrase that earns Nietzsche his place in Heidegger's system as the one who, "brings metaphysics to completion" (H,2,230) (followed naturally enough by Heidegger, who is the one who starts something new beyond metaphysics).  While these lectures have made me more curious about Heidegger's overall philosophy, I can't say I'm terribly interested in his obsession with the history of the metaphysical 'essence' of Western thought, a history that, shockingly enough, seems to lead straight to Heidegger's doorstep.  However, his talk does focus on an issue that is important to understanding Zarathustra -- the concept of metaphysical revenge.

Revenge is mentioned a bunch of times in TSZ, almost always as a type of thinking to be avoided, with the exception that proves this rule being "On the Bite of the Adder" (1.19).  But the theme is really first taken up in earnest in "On the Tarantulas" (2.7).  These spiders are the teachers of revenge, while Zarathustra teaches us that our path to the overhuman lies in overcoming revenge.

For that mankind be redeemed from revenge: that to me is the bridge to the highest hope and a rainbow after long thunderstorms.
But the tarantulas want it otherwise, to be sure. "That the world become full of the thunderstorms of our revenge, precisely that we would regard as justice," – thus they speak with one another.
"We want to exact revenge and heap insult on all whose equals we are not" – thus vow the tarantula hearts.
"And 'will to equality' – that itself from now on shall be the name for virtue; and against everything that has power we shall raise our clamor!" (TSZ, 86)

Revenge is the response of the powerless, of those who have suffered at the hands of life, of those who feel themselves victims.  These tarantulas feel that a crime has been done to them by someone who must have had power over them.  But instead of simply fighting back and taking an eye for an eye, the tarantulas, in their powerlessness, dress up their desire for revenge -- their desire for power over their persecutor -- as a desire for justice and equality.  Their justice punishes and levels those with power, bringing them down to the tarantulas own level of powerlessness.  We recognize this description as Nietzsche's diagnosis of what it means to be religious in BGE.  The tiny spider's deadly poison is a leveling justice and equality that would make everyone equally powerless, that would turn everyone into a victim.  This is how the powerless spider gains power over others and over their own suffering.  They interpret it as 'original sin' or the 'human condition' that we all suffer.  They interpret this life as punishment because that is how it feels to them, and they invent a life and a world beyond this one that would redeem it and give all this suffering meaning.  In this other world, we are all saved and at rest in a happily ever after.

There's nothing more anathema to Nietzsche than equality and equilibrium.  He always writes in praise of the distinguishing and ranking power of 'nobility', of the tension in the bow and the ceaseless motion of the cosmos.  Without these forces of inequality, nothing ever gets created.  Power always involves some inequality as the driving force or energy capable of moving us away from equilibrium.  This is why Zarathustra constantly reminds us of the necessity of distance, war, and having enemies.  So it's no surprise that the next passage in this section praises a sort of divine striving.

And look here, my friends! Here, where the tarantula's hole is, the ruins of an ancient temple are rising – look here now with enlightened eyes! Indeed, the one who once heaped his thoughts skyward here in stone – he knew the secret of all life like the most wise!
That struggle and inequality and war for power and supremacy are found even in beauty: he teaches us that here in the clearest parable. How divinely the vault and the arch bend and break each other as they wrestle; how they struggle against each other with light and shadow, these divinely struggling ones –
In this manner sure and beautiful let us also be enemies, my friends! Divinely let us struggle against each other! (TSZ, 88)

For all his vitriol and praise of conflict though, we always misunderstand Nietzsche if we think he is creating a simple and universal opposition between forces of good and forces of evil.  The will to power is beyond these moral judgements because there is nothing outside the will to power.  The spider's justice and equality is really just another form of struggle, albeit one that hides its intentions.  We can already see this creeping into Zarathustra's speech in the way he describes the spider's hole as built on the ruins of an ancient temple whose stones piled up to defy the equilibrium of gravity.  But in the final passage of this section he goes much further in confusing the opposite sides he has outlined while still maintaining a sort of tension between them.

Alas! Then the tarantula bit me, my old enemy! Divinely sure and beautiful it bit me on the finger!
"Punishment and justice must be" – thus it thinks. "Not for nothing shall he sing his songs in honor of hostility here!"
Yes, it has avenged itself! And alas! Now it will also make my soul whirl with revenge!
But so that I do not whirl, my friends, bind me fast to this pillar here! I would rather be a stylite than a whirlwind of revenge!
Indeed, Zarathustra is no tornado or whirlwind; and if he is a dancer, nevermore a tarantella dancer! – (TSZ, 88)

We end the section on revenge with Zarathustra's own best enemy taking revenge on him.  Here, the two sides he has laid out -- the desire for revenge against life and the desire for more life -- whirl together as yin and yang.  Suddenly the spider is exactly the "divinely sure and beautiful" enemy that Zarathustra claims he wants as a friend.  And its poison threatens to make Zarathustra "whirl round" (as Graham Parkes translates it) like a tarantella dancer (a dance which may have origins in a cult of Dionysus).  In turn, our dancing hero lashes himself to a column like Odysseus to his mast in order to hear the spider's song of revenge while avoiding the whirlpool of Charybdis (again, Parkes' translation differs slightly here in a way that emphasize the connection to book 12 of the Odyssey).  Surely, none of this imagery of spinning in circles and binding oneself to a fixed position at the center is by accident.  It all connects directly to the idea of the eternal return, though in the most ambiguous way.  If the spirit of revenge is something we are meant to completely overcome, why is it described in terms that make it almost a double of ER?  And why is there a spider lurking around the Moment of eternal return? (GS, #341) (TSZ, 136)

HEIDEGGER GETS IT:

The connection between revenge and ER becomes much more explicit later in TSZ, in the chapter titled "On Redemption" (2.20).  Here, Zarathustra gives a more precise and 'metaphysical' definition of revenge that becomes the central point in Heidegger's talk.

Willing liberates, but what is that called, which claps even the liberator in chains?
'It was': thus is called the will's gnashing of teeth and loneliest misery. Impotent against that which has been – it is an angry spectator of everything past.
The will cannot will backward; that it cannot break time and time's greed – that is the will's loneliest misery.
Willing liberates; what does willing plan in order to rid itself of its misery and mock its dungeon?
Alas, every prisoner becomes a fool! Foolishly as well the imprisoned will redeems itself.
That time does not run backward, that is its wrath. 'That which was' – thus the stone is called, which it cannot roll aside.
And so it rolls stones around out of wrath and annoyance, and wreaks revenge on that which does not feel wrath and annoyance as it does.
Thus the will, the liberator, became a doer of harm; and on every- thing that is capable of suffering it avenges itself for not being able to go back.
This, yes this alone is revenge itself: the will's unwillingness toward time and time's 'it was.' (TSZ, 121)

For Heidegger, the central equation of modern metaphysics (including Nietzsche's metaphysics) is always Being = Willing (H,2,222).  So he interprets the "will's unwillingness" or the "will's ill-will" (as Parkes' and Krell have it) as a revenge on Being as a whole.  Hence it comes as no surprise that for Heidegger, this spirit of revenge is best expressed as a revenge against Time.  As a result, he interprets this passage as saying that revenge is directed against the whole concept of Time, in other words, against Time's infamous passing, its transiency.  Revenge, in short, becomes revenge against impermanence.

    Nietzsche defines revenge as "the will's ill will toward time and its 'It was.' " The supplement to the definition does not mean to put into relief one isolated characteristic of time while stubbornly ignoring the other two; rather, it designates the fundamental trait of time in its proper and entire unfolding as time. With the conjunction and in the phrase "time and its 'It was,' " Nietzsche is not proceeding to append one special characteristic of time. Here the and means as much as "and that means." Revenge is the will's ill will toward time and that means toward passing away, transiency. Transiency is that against which the will can take no further steps, that against which its willing constantly collides. Time and its "It was" is the obstacle that the will cannot budge. Time, as passing away, is repulsive; the will suffers on account of it. Suffering in this way, the will itself becomes chronically ill over such passing away; the illness then wills its own passing, and in so doing wills that everything in the world be worthy of passing away. Ill will toward time degrades all that passes away. The earthly - Earth and all that pertains to her - is that which properly ought not to be and which ultimately does not really possess true Being. Plato himself called it me on, nonbeing. 
    According to Schelling's statements, which simply express the guiding representations of all metaphysics, the prime predicates of Being are "independence from time," "eternity."
   Yet the most profound ill will toward time does not consist in the mere disparagement of the earthly. For Nietzsche the most deep-seated revenge consists in that reflection which posits supratemporal ideality as absolute. Measured against it, the temporal must perforce degrade itself to nonbeing proper. (H,2,224)

The whole Western metaphysical search for the eternally permanent then becomes a story of revenge against the impermanent, essentially a story of (one?) Being's revenge on Time.  I have no doubt that Nietzsche has in mind something like this story.   We already saw something like it when we discussed the aphorism "How the 'True World' Finally Became a Fable: History of an Error".  The "error" that constitutes the "true world" is in that case the universalized self-identity of a subject.  In Plato's case, this isn't really revenge, because the noble Plato genuinely assumes that he himself is the universal subject.  But once confidence in this eternal self-identity is shaken, it can only be restored by removing it to increasingly distant worlds, at the cost of denigrating the reality of the "apparent" world.  We also see the same idea in this chapter of TSZ, though given its more polemic and poetic language, the focus is clearly on the Christian step in the fable.

The spirit of revenge: my friends, that so far has been what mankind contemplate best; and wherever there was suffering, punishment was always supposed to be there as well.
For 'punishment' is what revenge calls itself; with a lying word it hypo- critically asserts its good conscience.
And because in willing itself there is suffering, based on its inability to will backward – thus all willing itself and all living is supposed to be – punishment!
And now cloud upon cloud rolled in over the spirit, until at last madness preached: 'Everything passes away, therefore everything deserves to pass away!
And this itself is justice, this law of time that it must devour its own children' – thus preached madness.
'All things are ordained ethically according to justice and punishment. Alas, where is redemption from the flux of things and from the punishment called existence?' Thus preached madness.
'Can there be redemption, if there is eternal justice? Alas, the stone "it was" is unmoveable; all punishments too must be eternal!' Thus preached madness.
'No deed can be annihilated; how could it be undone through punishment? This, this is what is eternal about the punishment called existence, that existence must also eternally be deed and guilt again!
Unless the will were to finally redeem itself and willing became not- willing – '; but my brothers, you know this fable song of madness! (TSZ, 122)

Here Zarathustra fully expresses the logic that we inferred from "On the Tarantulas".  The spirit of revenge hides itself as 'justice'.  It covers over its powerlessness and resultant ill will by claiming it is merely working out the beneficent plan of a higher power.  This power beyond us is responsible for our suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous time.  Our mortal existence as a whole is seen as a punishment and the only redemption lies in taking revenge on this world by leaving all the other suckers behind and ascending to heaven or the non-existence of nirvana.  The doctrine of original sin expresses this idea about as succinctly as you could want, and is clearly what Zarathustra takes aim at with his phrase, "eternal punishment".  Being = Time ⇒ Existence = Punishment.

HEIDEGGER DOESN'T GET IT:

So like I said, Heidegger is onto something important when he interprets revenge as revenge against impermanence.  And he is also onto something important when he goes on to read ER as the idea that will enable us to overcome the spirit of revenge.  But I think his reading falters a little when it comes to his characterization of ER as Nietzsche's 'solution' to this problem of revenge.  He misinterprets eternal return as another type of revenge against impermanence because he sees it as a way of paradoxically making impermanence itself permanent.

  The supreme will to power, that is, what is most vital in all life, comes to pass when transiency is represented as perpetual Becoming in the eternal recurrence of the same, in this way being made stable and permanent. Such representing is a thinking which, as Nietzsche emphatically notes, stamps the character of Being on beings. Such thinking takes Becoming, to which perpetual collision and suffering belong, into its protection and custody.
   Does such thinking overcome prior reflection, overcome the spirit of revenge? Or does there not lie concealed in this very stamping which takes all Becoming into the protection of eternal recurrence of the same - a form of ill will against sheer transiency and thereby a highly spiritualized spirit of revenge? (H,2,228)

One way of objecting to this characterization is to simply say that Heidegger is mistaken in assuming that ER is a solution to anything at all.  Despite its apparent role as the culmination of Nietzsche's thought, ER is not a 'belief' in our normal philosophical sense of term.  It is not a representation of, "how things really are".  Strangely, Heidegger already sorta knows this.  Lecture 17 is entitled, "The Thought of Return as a Belief".  And while this chapter has some ambiguities in it, it clearly appreciates the most important aspect of a belief for Nietzsche -- what it says about the life of the believer.  ER is closer to being a religious belief, one that requires a faith, than it is to being a philosophical doctrine, though even characterizing it this way is apt to lead to confusion since its status as a religious belief is closer to Pascal's wager than to any dogma.  In the end, we might simply contend that Heidegger is led astray by his own obsession with "grounds" and "essences" and "fundamental metaphysical positions".  So he misinterprets Nietzsche's question -- Are we capable of believing in ER?  Is it a necessary error, a belief we must hold to be who we are? -- as an answer.

Another way of approaching the Heidegger's mistake would be to trace it back to a very specific misreading of this chapter of TSZ.  I think there are strong textual grounds for suggesting that Heidegger is missing something crucial when he reads the spirit of revenge as a revenge against time as a whole, against the impermanence of time.  Both the text and context of this crucial chapter suggest that revenge is directed against one particular aspect of time, the permanent fixation of the past.  In other words, the will is not stymied by some desire to stop time from passing.  Instead the will seeks revenge for its inability to change the past.  The supreme will to power isn't a desire for permanence, even a paradoxical permanence-of-impermanence, it is a desire for unlimited power, a power that can always overcome the limits of the past.

TEXT:

If you read the text naively and without any grand theory of Time and Being in mind, I think you can immediately see that the focus is on the will's inability to change the past, and not its inability to stop time.  I mean, it's there in black and white.  The word "backward" appears a half dozen times in what we've already quoted.  The stone that the will cannot move, that guards the tomb of a dead man and prevents resurrection, is explicitly called "that which was".  The paired concepts of revenge and redemption which structure the whole chapter inherently refer to differing orientations to a past action that we 'deemed' or 'claimed' (as the roots indicate) was bad.  Finally, the text is in two separate places pretty explicit about what the will's liberation and its redemption from the spirit of revenge look like.

To redeem those who are the past and to recreate all 'it was' into 'thus I willed it!' – only that would I call redemption! (TSZ, 121)

All 'it was' is a fragment, a riddle, a grisly accident – until the creating will says to it: 'But I will it thus! I shall will it thus!'
But has it ever spoken thus? And when will this happen? Is the will already unharnessed from its own folly?
Has the will already become its own redeemer and joy bringer? Has it unlearned the spirit of revenge and all gnashing of teeth?
And who taught it reconciliation with time, and what is higher than any reconciliation?
That will which is the will to power must will something higher than any reconciliation – but how shall this happen? Who would teach it to also will backward [Parkes has: "and want back as well"] (TSZ, 122)

Redemption from revenge happens when we are able to will the past.  This is obviously a paradoxical idea, but it's the central core of the feeling of eternal return.  Looked at from one angle, the past is just the long chain of flying billiard balls that terminate in the coincidence of now.  It's filled with stupid suffering that seems to serve no purpose and follow no plan.  We had no choice in it, can't do anything about it now, and certainly would never have designed it this way.  History is just one damn thing after another.  It is filled with fragmentary actors who understand only a tiny piece of its trajectory, and our place in it is just another random location.  Who wouldn't want to take revenge for this insult?  Looked at from another angle, however, all of those same forces and coincidences were completely necessary to bring us to this moment right here and now, in which your friend and humble narrator is unfolding this very story.  We can see the entirety of past coincidence as redeemed by the fact that it brought about the present moment.  If we love where we are at now, we can begin see the past as aimed at the present, as if the universe had all along been conspiring to bring us to this Moment.  All that suffering had a purpose after all; it was necessary for me to become who I am.  To will ourselves to be as we are, to fundamentally affirm ourselves, is to want the past to be just what it was, to want it all to come back in the identical way so that we reach this same culminating present moment again.  We want to be able to redeem our past as something that we chose, that we ourselves willed, rather than revenging ourselves against it because it brought us to this place of misery, or even simply reconciling ourselves to the fact that, sadly, "it had to be this way".  This positive orientation towards time is the core of the eternal return.  When Nietzsche says that he wants to, "stamp Becoming with the character of Being", I think he has in mind stamping the historical process of becoming by which we came to be here as something we would will into being again.  It's a stamping that reiterates all of becoming exactly as it is.  You can't want to take revenge on something that has brought you to such a joyful place.

CONTEXT: 

At this point, it might seem that we have refuted the final conclusion of Heidegger's essay.

What is left for us to say, if not this: Zarathustra's doctrine does not bring redemption from revenge? We do say it. (H,2,229) 

But things are not that simple.  If we back up to consider the context and the setting of Zarathustra's speech, some new suspicions dawn on us that force us to draw out the implications of all that "willing the past" truly entails.  It's no coincidence that the speech begins as a response to a crippled hunchback.  The hunchback asks Zarathustra why he doesn't heal cripples like Jesus used to do.  

"Behold, Zarathustra! The people too learn from you and are gaining faith in your teaching; but in order to believe you completely, they need one more thing – you must first persuade us cripples! Here you have a fine selection and truly, an opportunity with more than one scruff! You can heal the blind and make the lame walk; and for the one who has too much behind him, you could surely take a bit away – that, I believe, would be the right way to make the cripples believe in Zarathustra!" (TSZ,119)

Notably, Zarathustra doesn't actually respond to this question directly and in his own voice.  He says that "the people teach" that healing a cripple, relieving him of his specific burden, will only make him see how awful life is in general.

Zarathustra, however, responded to the speaker thus: "If one takes the hump from the hunchback, then one takes his spirit too – thus teach the people. And if one gives the blind man his eyesight, then he sees too many bad things on earth, such that he curses the one who healed him. But the one who makes the lame walk causes him the greatest harm, for scarcely does he begin to walk when his vices run away with him – thus teach the people about cripples. And why should Zarathustra not learn also from the people, if the people learn from Zarathustra? (TSZ, 119)

After this he goes on to tell the hunchback that there are even worse things than being a cripple.  He could be an "inverse cripple" -- someone who has too much of one body part, and hence proportionally lacks all the rest, as opposed to a cripple who lacks or has a defect in just one part.  While society looks at these inverse cripples as "great men" because of their one overdeveloped talent, they too are really nothing but fragments of what humanity could be.  

At this point in his speech, Zarathustra turns away from the hunchback and addresses his disciples, beginning the speech we've already seen culminates in the idea that redemption from the spirit of revenge depends on our ability to will the past.  But the way this speech begins introduces a couple of ambiguities.  First, Zarathustra explicitly characterizes himself as redeeming the fragments of humanity like the cripples and inverse cripples. So maybe he will take away the hunchback's burden after all?  

"Truly, my friends, I walk among human beings as among the fragments and limbs of human beings!
This is what is most frightening to my eyes, that I find mankind in ruins and scattered about as if on a battle field or a butcher field.
And if my gaze flees from the now to the past; it always finds the same: fragments and limbs and grisly accidents – but no human beings!
The now and the past on earth – alas, my friends – that is what is most unbearable to me. And I would not know how to live if I were not also a seer of that which must come. (TSZ, 120)

...

I walk among human beings as among the fragments of the future; that future that I see.
And all my creating and striving amounts to this, that I create and piece together into one, what is now fragment and riddle and grisly accident.
And how could I bear to be a human being if mankind were not also creator and solver of riddles and redeemer of accident?
To redeem those who are the past and to recreate all 'it was' into 'thus I willed it!' – only that would I call redemption! (TSZ, 121)

Second, Zarathustra explicitly says that his task of building a bridge to the future overhuman through willing the past turns him into a cripple as well.

A seer, a willer, a creator, a future himself and a bridge to the future – and alas, at the same time a cripple at this bridge: all that is Zarathustra. (TSZ, 120)

Given the context, he presumably means that Zarathustra is a type of inverse cripple, whose sense of suffering the fragmentary nature of human beings has become dangerously overdeveloped.  So the speech we saw before -- about how the greatest redemption from revenge would be recomposing the fragments of the past as if we had willed them to be that way -- begins in a way that identifies the speaker as a crippled redeemer of a crippled humanity.  In short, the context here paints Zarathustra exactly as Nietzsche always describes Jesus.  And if this weren't enough to alert us to some impending enantiodromic inversion, the speech also ends in an abrupt and curious fashion.

– But at this point in his speech Zarathustra suddenly broke off and looked entirely like one who is appalled in the extreme. Appalled he looked at his disciples, his eyes penetrated their thoughts and their secret thoughts [Parkes: "the motive behind their thoughts"] as if with arrows. But after a little while he laughed again and said, more calmly:
"It's difficult to live with people because keeping silent is so hard. Especially for someone who is talkative." –

Thus spoke Zarathustra. The hunchback meanwhile had listened to the conversation with his face covered, but when he heard Zarathustra laugh he looked up inquisitively and slowly said:
"But why does Zarathustra speak otherwise to us than to his disciples?"
Zarathustra answered: "What's to wonder about in that! One is allowed to speak hunched with hunchbacks!"
"Good," said the hunchback, "and with pupils one may tell tales out of school.
But why does Zarathustra speak otherwise to his pupils – than to himself?" – (TSZ, 123)

What is it about this speech that scares even Zarathustra himself?  Why does he suddenly look around to see what his disciples are thinking?  And what exactly is this knowing hunchback (who seems related to the dwarf and jester characters) onto when he claims that Zarathustra isn't telling them everything?

CONCLUSION:

I think we can bring all the strands we've talked about together if we look at the entire arc of the plot of the first three parts of TSZ (the role of part 4 is a separate discussion for another time).  Basically, it's the story of how Zarathustra becomes capable of affirming ER.  

In the first part, we grapple with the problem of how to affirm anything in a world where God is dead because we've begun to question the presumed unity of a subject capable willing.  Somehow there needs to be a goal, an aim, some energetic force that creates a will in us.  This is what the figure of the overhuman represents.  

In the second part -- which includes both the "On the Tarantulas" and "On Redemption" chapters we've been discussing -- we learn more about the content we need to affirm in order to reach beyond the human.  We have to overcome the spirit of revenge and redeem all of past humanity as a bridge to the overhuman.  We need to want the past back again in order to cross the bridge to the future.  And, as we've seen, we also get some foreshadowing that this affirmation might not be as easy as it sounds at first.  Indeed, in the final two chapters of part 2 that follow "On Redemption" characterize the overhuman as a devil (TSZ, 125) and tell us explicitly that Zarathustra himself is not yet ripe for the fruits of his own teaching (TSZ, 128).  The goal has become questionable and the path to it too hard for even the teacher to bear.  

Finally, in part 3, the idea of ER is presented directly as that which we need to fully affirm in order to affirm our own capacity to will.  But we find that the idea is dramatically more difficult to swallow than we have so far suspected.  In fact, we have to literally choke on the snake of ER (TSZ, 137) before we can incorporate it completely.  We have to confront the way the thought of ER is always a double of itself (TSZ, 188) that can redeem us only after sickening us, which is why the climax of part 3 is the chapter entitled "The Convalescent" (TSZ, 193).  Ultimately, what we have to confront is the fact that affirming ER means affirming the very smallness and powerlessness of humanity that we were hoping to overcome.

All too small the greatest one! That was my surfeit of [Parkes: "loathing of"] humans! And eternal recurrence of even the smallest! – That was my surfeit of [Parkes: "loathing of"] all existence!
Oh nausea! Nausea! Nausea!" – Thus spoke Zarathustra and sighed and shuddered, because he remembered his sickness. But his animals did not allow him to continue.
"Speak no more, you convalescent!" – answered his animals. "Rather go outside where the world awaits you like a garden. (TSZ, 192)

With this overall story in mind we can easily see what scares Zarathustra in "On Redemption".  Willing the past and its fragmentary human beings means affirming all the cripples and wanting them all over again.  Suddenly Zarathustra glimpses the fact that to will the 'It Was', to redeem the past as the path to the overhuman, means precisely to affirm all the smallness of humanity, to affirm all the underhumans we thought we were trying to overcome.  And this includes willing back even our own disgust with that past.  It includes wanting back even the way the thought of seeing the whole parade of stupidity we call human history play out again in exactly the same tragic and pointless way -- the very thought of Eternal Return -- makes us nauseous.  To affirm ourselves here and now, we have to affirm even the worst of ourselves and humanity.  Zarathustra must to become the one who can and who needs to swallow this most bitter pill where all stupidity and meaninglessness recur eternally.

Now we can finally understand why redemption and revenge are such close cousins throughout TSZ, and why Heidegger is not quite wrong when he suggests that ER might be a, "highly spiritualized spirit of revenge".  After all, when we want to overcome humanity aren't we implicitly seeking a sort of revenge against its pettiness?  This would seem to be an inevitable consequence of interpreting the overhuman as a fixed goal or endpoint that would forever do away with all of our earlier errors.  Now that we're overhumans, let's not go back to the bad old days, right?  That was revolting.  Zarathustra's scare stems from the fact that he sees the way the spirit of revenge can still be present within his disciples' and even his own motives in wanting to affirm ER as a once-and-for-all overcoming of humanity.  The spirit of revenge isn't overcome until we so genuinely love our own and everyone else's smallness that we have no interest in overcoming it, but actually want to 'go over' it again and again ad infinitum.  As Zarathustra says: 

"I taught you contempt that does not come like a gnawing worm, the great, loving contempt that loves most where it has the most contempt." (TSZ, 194)

But of course in another sense this means that the spirit of revenge isn't overcome at all, as this spirit is historically a big part of how we got here.  As we saw, ER is an explicitly religious doctrine, and stems from the same fundamental motivation that Nietzsche attributes to all religious belief -- the will to power to deal with suffering.  Unlike Christianity or Buddhism though, the goal of ER is not to make suffering cease.  Instead it affirms an almost masochistic desire to make suffering return endlessly because this is the only way to convert suffering, exactly as such, into joy.  To want the past to repeat is entirely paradoxical, because it doesn't mean the same thing when it comes back.  Contempt has been converted into joy on the spot, without changing anything except our understanding that the contemptible was necessary for our joy.  This is why ER is constantly haunted by its own double.  Is it cause for dancing and celebration or "the greatest weight" (GS, #341)?  Is it a nihilism that chokes us, or something we "incorporate" into our whole way of being (H,2,76)?  And is it one thought or many?

So I think that while Heidegger is catching something important by suggesting ER is still a form of revenge, he's also partially falling for the double of ER that constantly haunts it.   Because he interprets the goal of ER as overcoming time as a whole, in other words overcoming the infinite splitting of time that constitutes its continual passing, he thinks that we only need to have the thought of ER once.  As if we could stamp Being onto Becoming once-and-for-all, and with this somehow escape time and our suffering at the hands of time.  But if there's one thought you cannot have only once, it's the thought of ER.  We have explained the thought of ER as a special moment that redeems all of the past as if this particular moment were the secret goal of history.  But this is ludicrous!  This moment is just another moment.  The Moment of ER cannot be the last moment.  This too shall pass into the past and we will have to incorporate it as another fragment we must necessarily affirm for another thought of ER.  We will be perpetually reconfiguring all the stupidities and all the triumphs of the past so that they always deliver us to the present, even as this present slips into the past.  Fundamentally, ER overcomes the spirit of revenge by making the past infinitely malleable rather than fixed, by opening it to an infinite number of interpretations (GS, #374).  But it only does this by already, as it were, sucking the present into the past and forcing us to ask even of the present, "what is this?" again and again.

Puttin' da Da back in da Sein

Volume 2 of the Heidegger lectures focus on the idea of the Eternal Return.  I've already written quite a lot about ER in conjunction with reading Difference & Repetition, so a lot of my understanding of what Heidegger is saying is filtered through the lens of Deleuze.  Which may account for the sense I have that both philosophers seem to concur that the most important aspect of ER is the way it throws the identity of its thinker into question, as if he were a snake trying to swallow his own tail.  Their manner of presenting this insight is naturally totally different.  But since Heidegger discusses the text of Zarathustra in some detail, and since this blog is now nominally about TSZ, I'll begin with the way Heidegger presents things, before making it clear where I'm adding a Deleuzian flavor that leads beyond what might plausibly be attributed to Heidegger.

The first moment we see ER mentioned explicitly in TSZ is the chapter called, "On the Vision and the Riddle", when our intrepid hero has a conversation with a dwarf that he carried up the mountain on his back.  

Then something happened that made me lighter, for the dwarf jumped down from my shoulder, the inquisitive one, and he crouched upon a stone there before me. But right there where we stopped was a gateway.
"See this gateway, dwarf!" I continued. "It has two faces. Two paths come together here; no one has yet walked them to the end.
This long lane back: it lasts an eternity. And that long lane outward – that is another eternity.
They contradict each other, these paths; they blatantly offend each other – and here at this gateway is where they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed at the top: 'Moment.'
But whoever were to walk one of them further – and ever further and ever on: do you believe, dwarf, that these paths contradict each other eternally?" –
"All that is straight lies," murmured the dwarf contemptuously. "All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle."
"You spirit of gravity!" I said, angrily. "Do not make it too easy on yourself! Or I shall leave you crouching here where you crouch, lamefoot – and I bore you this high!
See this moment!" I continued. "From this gateway Moment a long eternal lane stretches backward: behind us lies an eternity.
Must not whatever can already have passed this way before? Must not whatever can happen, already have happened, been done, passed by before?
And if everything has already been here before, what do you think of this moment, dwarf? Must this gateway too not already – have been here? And are not all things firmly knotted together in such a way that this moment draws after it all things to come? Therefore – itself as well? For, whatever can run, even in this long lane outward – must run it once more! –
And this slow spider that creeps in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things – must not all of us have been here before?
– And return and run in that other lane, outward, before us, in this long, eerie lane – must we not return eternally? –" (136)

 Here we see the first of two places where Zarathustra explicitly rejects the notion that ER involves a circle.   The riddle of ER asks how the past and the future can avoid perpetually contradicting one another even though they set out in opposite directions from the gateway of Moment.  The dwarf gives what seems like the most obvious response; though they travel in opposite directions, their paths must somehow curve around to touch "at infinity", thus creating a circle.  A diagram will help us see how this answer does not solve the riddle.

On the left, you see the original riddle where past and future diverge from the gateway of moment, and continue to infinity.  On the right you see what happens if you follow the dwarf's proposed solution.  When these diverging paths bend around to touch at their respective infinities, past and future are not thereby harmonized in a seamless circle.  Instead, we create a point of convergence at ∞, but one where past and future arrive, rather than depart, from opposite directions.  We don't get one complete circle, but two disjoint half circles which eternally contradict one another.  For the dwarf's circle to close, we would have to make time circulate always in a single direction.  If it flowed as a river through the gateway of moment, we could then imagine another seamless flow connecting the two ∞ points.  Obviously, this is how we normally think of the "arrow of time" working (minus the connection at infinity).  

But Zarathustra's riddle doesn't ask about this objective time that is always passing us by.  It begins with the premise that the past and future are different, contradictory.  This reflects our subjective experience of time, whose most salient feature is not that it is always advancing, but that we can change things in one direction and not in the other.  Time viewed from within our experience is always time viewed from the perspective of Moment, that is, time split into two contradictory directions.  When you realize the error the dwarf has made, it becomes easy to see the solution that Zarathustra then poses in the form of another question.  The directions of time could be reconciled if each ∞ point were identical to the gateway moment. 

If P and F are an exact copy of M, then time would split in two directions at each of those points as well.  And of course the same structure would be repeated again starting from each of those splitting points, ad infinitum.  If P = F = M, the directions of time are reconciled because they are never really opposed to begin with.  Time appears to diverge from M, but since M if the F of its own P, and likewise M is the P of its own F, the second level splitting of time at P and F mean that time also converges on M.  Moment is paradoxically both the source and the sink of time that we saw the dwarf accidentally create with his idea of the circle.  In a sense, with ER, time does fall into two completely separate halves, severed by Moment.  But each of those halves it itself split, and split again ad infinitum.  In short, time is not a circle, but an infinitely splitting line.  

While I've already gone a bit beyond Heidegger with this idea of the infinitely splitting line, the ideas of the inadequacy of the dwarf's circle and the importance of the opposition of time at Moment are central to these lectures.  

The dwarf merely looks at the two paths extending to infinity, and he thinks about them merely in the following way: If both paths run on to infinity ("eternity"), then that is where they meet; and since the circle closes by itself in infinity-far removed from me-all that recurs, in sheer alter- nation within this system of compensations, does so as a sequence, as a sort of parade passing through the gateway. The dwarf understands nothing of what Zarathustra means when he says-bewilderingly enough-that the two paths "affront one another" in the gateway. (H,2,56)

That which is to come is precisely a matter for decision, since the ring is not closed in some remote infinity but possesses its unbroken closure in the Moment, as the center of the striving; what recurs-if it is to recur-is decided by the Moment and by the force with which the Moment can cope with whatever in it is repelled by such striving. That is what is peculiar to, and hardest to bear in, the doctrine of eternal return-to wit, that eternity is in the Moment, that the Moment is not the fleeting "now," not an instant of time whizzing by a spectator, but the collision of future and past. Here the Moment comes to itself. It determines how everything recurs. (H,2,57)

For Heidegger, the moment is the site of our most important decision.  It's where we take stock of our past and orient towards our future with a new goal.  It's always a "historic moment" that takes everything into account and changes everything.  But for Heidegger this history is always primarily metaphysical.  I don't mean just that he believes the crucial historical moment is Nietzsche's (and his own) decisive confrontation with the whole of Western philosophy and its conception of what Being means.  I think that for Heidegger, this moment right here, no matter when it is situated historically, can only be truly thought if it reaches out to all of Being.  There are several passages that suggest that his famous Da-sein is essentially his own way of putting Eternity into the Moment.  For example, here he tells us that Dasein is not "coterminous with" human being (which is how I remember most folks thinking of it).

For us the word Dasein definitively names something that is by no means coterminous with human being, and something thoroughly distinct from what Nietzsche and the tradition prior to him understand by "existence." (H,2,26)

And later, as he begins to discuss how the idea of ER could fit with the idea of the Will to Power, that is, how the most humanizing and religious of Nietzsche's ideas could fit with his most dehumanizing and mechanizing, we find the following discussion.

From the very outset we have seen that in the presentation of his fundamental thought what is to be thought - both the world totality and the thinking of the thinker - cannot be detached from one another. Now we comprehend more clearly what this inseparability refers to and what it suggests: it is the necessary relationship of man - a being who is located in the midst of beings as a whole - to that very whole. We are thinking of this fundamental relation in the decisive disposition of human beings in general when we say that the Being of human being - and, as far as we know, of human being alone - is grounded in Dasein: the Da is the sole possible site for the necessary location of its Being at any given time. From this essential connection we also derive the insight that humanization becomes proportionately less destructive of truth as human beings relate themselves more originally to the location of their essential corner, that is to say, as they recognize and ground Da-sein as such. Yet the essentiality of the corner is defined by the originality and the breadth in which being as a whole is experienced and grasped-with a view to its sole decisive aspect, that of Being. (H,2,119)

While his caveat here that human being alone is grounded in Dasein seems to in tension with the first quote, I think we could try to read them together as constituting a general metaphysical statement that has nothing to do with "human existence" per se.  In other words, we can interpret Heidegger as following Nietzsche in attempting to "dehumanize", that is de-anthropomorphize, Being.  The idea seems to be that Being as a whole (Sein) always manifests itself in a particular way (Dasein).  But this particular manifestation is necessarily always oriented towards that whole.  We find ourselves, as humans, in this particular moment, with our particular perspective.  This perspective reaches out towards a whole beyond us, but a whole which includes the question of how this very reaching would work, a question which we shouldn't foreclose in advance by simply calling it "human existence"

With all these pros and cons with respect to humanization, one believes one knows ahead of time what human beings are, the human beings who are responsible for this palpable humanization. One forgets to pose the question that would have to be answered first of all if the suspicions concerning humanization are to be viable or if refutation of those suspicions is to make any sense. To talk of humanization before one has decided-that is to say, before one has asked-who man is, is idle talk indeed. It remains idle talk even when for the sake of its demonstrations it musters all of world history and mankind's most ancient civilizations-things which no one is able to corroborate anyway. Hence, in order to avoid superficial and specious discussion of those suspicions concerning humanization, whether affirming or rejecting them, we must first of all take up the question "Who is man?" (H,2,102)

This reiterates the same structure of circular reference we see in Zarathustra's riddle.  Everything appears as a particularity, yet the particular encompasses everything, including itself.  Even the moment of thinking ER has happened before and will happen again; in what might be the simplest image of pure immanence, the moment is inside itself.

Another way of saying this would be to compare Heidegger's "da" to Deleuze's idea of the caesura.  Loyal readers will undoubtedly recall that the caesura was the missing point or 'cut' (in the sense of a Dedekind Cut) that was central to Deleuze's idea of the third synthesis of time.  This cut was constituted by an act that had a similar 'historic' quality to it, in the sense that it was a tremendous event that ordered all of time into before and after, BC and AD.  The caesura was a sort of nothing-in-itself, a literally missing piece, that became adequate to all of time.  If the da is a sort of cut in being, we can also begin to understand why Heidegger ends up talking about how essential "the nothing" is to metaphysical thinking (H,2,195).  And if the circularity of a thinking that constantly enquires into its own ground is essentially related to the immanence of time, then we can start to see how Being can't be thought apart from Time.  The thought of ER happens in the blink of an eye created by "moment":

"Moment" unfortunately fails to capture the dramatically temporal nature of the German Augenblick, literally, the glance or flash of an eye. The drama in question has everything to do with what Heidegger in Being and Time calls "ecstatic temporality," especially in its connection with the analysis of death. (H,2,41)

 

Of course, I think of these ideas in Deleuze's more concrete, almost mathematical imagery.  The Dedekind Cut is a great image for the crux of Zarathustra's riddle.  And the time crystal is a great image for the unfolding of time as a constant splitting that everything happens within.

What constitutes the crystal-image is the most fundamental operation of time: since past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the same time, it has to split itself in two at each movement as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched toward the future while the other falls into the past." (Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 81)  

 

 

 

The Extremely Middle Way

I recently came across fragment 55 in The Will to Power.  It's too long to print here in full, but begins with:

Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones but by extreme positions of the opposite kind. Thus the belief in the absolute immorality of nature, in aim- and meaninglessness, is the psychologically necessary affect once the belief in God and an essentially moral order becomes untenable. Nihilism appears at that point, not that the displeasure at existence has become greater than before but because one has come to mistrust any "meaning" in suffering, indeed in existence One interpretation has collapsed; but because it was considered the interpretation it now seems as if there were no meaning at all in existence, as if everything were in vain.

 

That this "in vain" constitutes the character of present-day nihilism remains to be shown. The mistrust of our previous valua­tions grows until it becomes the question: "Are not all 'values' lures that draw out the comedy without bringing it closer to a solution?" Duration "in vain," ;without end or aim, is the most paralyzing idea, particularly when one understands that one is being fooled and yet lacks the power not to be fooled.

 

Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: "the eternal recurrence". (pg. 35 of the Kaufmann translation)

Here, Nietzsche is setting up the central problem in his philosophy, namely, how we can overcome nihilism.  He explicitly points out that this problem arises out of the failure of the opposite extreme interpretation of existence, ie. that it follows some divine plan.  Normally, we don't think of Nietzsche as a moderate figure who aims at a happy medium.  And indeed, the idea of the eternal return doesn't seem lie between the extremes of perfect meaning and total meaningless, so much as to lie at both extremes at once.  On the one hand, it's characterized as the greatest weight, the heaviest burden, to see the world as senselessness senselessly playing itself back eternally.  On the other hand, if we affirm this return, we land at the opposite extreme where everything seems to mean just what we want it to.  After all, what will return is exactly what we decide to do right now; it's entirely up to us to fill the content of this repetition that will recur eternally down to the last detail.  In as sense, affirming ER places us in the position of God authoring their divine plan.  

So it's somewhat surprising to find that the aphorism ends as follows:

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this [crisis of nihilism]? The most moderate; those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak on that account: those richest in health who are equal to most misfortunes and therefore not so afraid of misfortunes—human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride.

 

How would such a human being even think of the eternal recurrence? (pg. 38-39)

This might be the only place where Nietzsche praises moderation.  Those who will triumph over nihilism's diminishment of humanity are those who don't need to believe anything about the value of humanity in the first place in order to feel sure of themselves.  In other words, these 'moderates' are the ones who can simultaneously believe both conflicting interpretations of ER and continue to thrive.  I hadn't previously thought of eternal return as a doctrine of moderation, but in fact it shows us our greatness together with our pettiness, or perhaps more accurately, our greatness as our pettiness.  And thinking through other aspects of ER, I've gradually come to see how the idea is always designed to merge opposites.  Past and future.  Moment and eternity.  Model and copy.  Self and world.  The doctrine of ER is the middle path for each of these oppositions, not because it lies between them, but because it deconstructs the very line on which they seem to be opposed.  

The way is middle because it's non-dual.  Or as Nagarjuna might say:

Where there is no beginning or end,
How could there be a middle?