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)
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