In subsections 11 and 12 (pgs. 25-29) Deleuze leaves Heraclitus behind and tries to describe a specifically Nietzschean concept of existence as an innocent game. Naturally, this game has the same paradoxical recursive structure we tried to describe last time. But Nietzsche feels its stakes a little differently than Heraclitus. As a 'late' thinker, Nietzsche's biggest problem is not to avoid a premature judgement of existence, but to escape the nihilism he sees looming in the wake of the collapse of the Christian interpretation of existence.
"One interpretation among others was shipwrecked, but as it passed for the only possible interpretation it seems that existence no longer has meaning, that everything is in vain" (VP III 8). (NP, 23)
Nietzsche's solution to nihilism isn't to invent some new transcendent meaning for existence that replaces the Christian one. Nor is it to claim that this meaning must somehow come from within the authentic individual in the sense that (humanist) existentialism argues. Both of these would just be other ways of depreciating existence, of blaming it if it falls short of some eschatalogical goal (whether this is the grace of God or our own mysterious 'free will' -- which as we've seen are perhaps not so different). In fact, the root of the problem lies in thinking that existence needs a goal or purpose to justify it. Instead, Nietzsche would like to push nihilism so far that it overcomes itself and converts into its opposite. He tries to conceive of the idea of an existence that has absolutely no meaning or purpose in a positive light. As a result, he wants us to affirm that existence is entirely a game of chance. We are asked to take joy in the view that all of existence is entirely random.
This new metaphor has the effect of turning the moments of the game we saw last time (becoming and the being of becoming) into the throw of a dice.
The game has two moments which are those of a dicethrow - the dice that is thrown and the dice that falls back. Nietzsche presents the dicethrow as taking place on two distinct tables, the earth and the sky. The earth where the dice are thrown and the sky where the dice fall back ... (NP, 25)
Though it may seem that these would be two distinct throws of the dice taking place on two distinct tables, we've already seen that any logic of opposition, in this case between "throwing" and "falling back" or between "earth" and "sky", is done away with through the depth of affirmation. Becoming went so far as to affirm the being of becoming. Likewise, if we affirm existence as a dicethrow, throwing and falling back become two asymmetric sides of a single cycle. This is why Deleuze emphasizes repeatedly that there is a single throw of the dice.
It is not a matter of several dicethrows which, because of their number, finally reproduce the same combination. On the contrary, it is a matter of a single dicethrow which, due to the number of the combination produced, comes to reproduce itself as such. It is not that a large number of throws produce the repetition of a combination but rather the number of the combination which produces the repetition of the dicethrow. (NP, 25)
The idea that a single and unique combination keeps coming up, so that all the multiple throws are effectively a unity, reminds me of the absurd coin flipping scene in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It gives us a new pair of non-dual terms that are only superficially opposites: chance and necessity. In affirming this one throw, in this moment, as entirely chance, we end up affirming its inseparable connection to all the other throws in all the other moments, and thereby affirm all of existence as nothing but chance. But this affirmation is exactly what brings this moment and its combination back again, and with it everything else, thus converting pure chance into absolute necessity.
The dice which are thrown once are the affirmation of chance, the combination which they form on falling is the affirmation of necessity. Necessity is affirmed of chance in exactly the sense that being is affirmed of becoming and unity is affirmed of multiplicity. (NP, 26)
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One might object here that we could see each individual moment as a completely separate and atomic chance. Wouldn't chance be better affirmed if there were no connections between past, present, and future, and each moment appeared to us unrelated to any other? While intriguing, I think there are two problems with this idea. First, it requires us to have some definition of 'a moment' as a thing can exist intrinsically on its own. But we don't really have a sense of what the smallest moment might be; if we pay careful attention we seem to find ever-smaller instants that might qualify, strongly suggesting that we are only ever encountering the specious present. Second, and more importantly, our actual experience of any moment is almost never of it as something utterly unrelated to all other moments. Even if we focus carefully on the smallest slices of time accessible to us, we don't discover that they increasingly bear no relationship to one another and that time ceases to have an order to it. Even an instant seems to carry its context of its experience with itself. The hypothesis of the atomic moment would thus involve condemning as illusory a great deal of our experience. This runs counter to the idea we're developing that all of experience is to be affirmed, and none of its negated as mere illusion or madness or hallucination. On top of this, we would be left with a seemingly insoluble problem of how we ever thought that there was a connection between moments. It seems impossible for the illusion of continuity to get off the ground and keep flying if moments are inherently individual.
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The non-duality of chance and necessity is precisely the context for the Eternal Return, which alternately sickens and elates us. If we see that to fully affirm even one moment we must affirm all of them (and all the suffering and pettiness we know they contained) ER becomes the greatest weight. But if we see that our affirmation of any moment must liberate and redeem all the rest of them, we may join Nietzsche in saying, "... never have I heard anything more divine" (GS, #341). It's as if chance is such a densely woven fabric that in picking up any thread of it, we inevitably drag along the whole. Chance affirmed as a whole becomes necessity, which necessarily brings back the single moment of affirmation that perpetually relaunches the cycle of return. The secret of ER always lies in the understanding that what comes back is everything and all the things.
What Nietzsche calls necessity (destiny) is thus never the abolition but rather the combination of chance itself. Necessity is affirmed of chance in as much as chance itself affirmed. For there is only a single combination of chance as such, a single way of combining all the parts of chance, a way which is like the unity of multiplicity, that is to say number or necessity. There are many numbers with increasing or decreasing probabilities, but only one number of chance as such, one fatal number which reunites all the fragments of chance, like midday gathers together the scattered parts of midnight. This is why it is sufficient for the player to affirm chance once in order to produce the number which brings back the dicethrow. (NP, 26)
The overarching point in all this is to understand that in losing a final transcendent meaning and purpose, the universe does not thereby lose any concept of order and law. Return is the immanent law of becoming. Just as we saw that starting with becoming, we also affirmed the being of becoming, we find that starting with chance, we also affirm the necessity of chance. These double affirmations are the true mark of a good player, one who is untouched by a craving that the universe should be different, one who has overcome all desire for negation, and has, "released the world from its servitude under purpose". That's why the good player doesn't need multiple throws to get the 'right' combination; when we live affirmatively, every toss is heads, no matter how tragic.
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