Nietzsche’s “most difficult thought,” as he himself calls it in a posthumously-edited fragment, is his thought on the “eternal return.” Heidegger interprets it as the eternal recurrence of the “same.” Deleuze, instead, as the eternal recurrence of “difference.” Who is right, Heidegger or Deleuze? We would like to venture that they are both right – and both wrong. Right in one way and wrong in a different way, that is; or, rather, right in two different ways if not to the same extent and wrong in the same way and to the same extent. This becomes clear as soon as one considers that Nietzsche “eternal return” means different things in different contexts.
Nietzsche’s earliest in-length thoughts on the “eternal return” can be found in §341 of The Gay Science, and date from 1882. The “eternal return” is there the eternal recurrence of the will affirming itself each time it wills. Therefore, it is both eternal recurrence of the will (hence of the same, as Heidegger contends) and eternal recurrence of the will in its many affirmative instantiations (hence somehow too eternal recurrence of the “difference,” as Deleuze suggests). Additionally, by the eternal recurrence of the will one becomes capable of affirming whatever comes, turning it into something actively willed instead of passively suffered. In other words, the “eternal return of the will” becomes in this sense amor fati, which was first thematised by the Stoics.
Yet in Part III of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, dated in 1887, Nietzsche presents a different version of the “eternal return.” A more complex version. For it involves a new philosophy of time which does not limit itself to postulate time’s circular recurrence, in contrast to what most handbook explanations of Nietzsche’s philosophy contend. Nor does it merely imply the recurrence of the same (Heidegger) in differing occasions as, thereby, something always-already different at least to a certain extent (Deleuze).
The key passage for it is the section titled “On the Vision and the Riddle,” which opens with a dedication to “the riddle-drunk, the twilight-happy whose souls are lured by flutes to every maelstrom.” Quite significantly indeed. For who can the “twilight-happy” be but those who recognise themselves at the time of sunset – that is to say, when Apollo, who in Antiquity had been identified with the Sun, is no longer there? And who can those “whose souls are lured by flutes to every maelstrom” be but Dionysos’s followers, since the flute is the instrument associated to Dionysos? Notice, too, the reference to “every maelstrom” (literally to every “mad throat”) which is clearly reminiscent of Dionysos’s “flood-tide” and to the “sudden swell of the Dionysiac tide” mentioned by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. As for the expression “riddle-drunk”, should it not be viewed, in turn, as a Dionysian (“drunkard”) appropriation, and overturning, of another of Apollo’s features: the “enigma?” Perhaps Nietzsche never carried his “opposition” between Dionysos and Apollo – which is his and betrays the influence of Schopenhauer – as far as he does here.(*)
Be that as it may, we then read – “Zarathustra” speaks:
“See this gateway, dwarf!” […] “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?(**)
It is not “Zarathustra” but the “dwarf” who says that “time is a circle” – one may add: a circle that brings back everything, so that it is that which time brings back once and again that eternally recurs. “Zarathustra,” instead, suggests something else and more disquieting: “now” (this very “moment,” this very “instant,” he says) must also recur endlessly (“itself as well”). Hence it must become indifferent with respect to any other “now,” and thereby all possible “nows” become indistinct from one another. Not only must this moment have endlessly been before now, and not only must it endlessly be in the future: all moments are the same moment, so that past, present, and future, and with them any possible temporal distinctions collapse. For, whence but from outside the eternal return of time, to which there is no outside however, could they be observed as being distinct from one another? Therefore, by virtue of this “now” being equal to any other “now,” all instants are drained into the “maelstrom” of an “eternal return” that is no longer the eternal recurrence of this and that, but of time itself.
There is little mystery, then, that Nietzsche not only qualified his thought on the “eternal return” as his “most difficult” thought, but also as his “most abysmal” thought, the vision of which vanishes as smoke after the aforementioned “dialogue” between Zarathustra and the dwarf. For by its affecting not only the will, but also time, all being is finally and definitely dissolved by Nietzsche into pure becoming. The problem with this is that, when achieved, there is no turning point: the world, too, vanishes. For no world is compatible with pure becoming. No thought can emerge there. No language. Everything is swollen by the current:
the r e s n o t h n g t s y .
In 1856, Wagner – Nietzsche’s idol till 1874 – had written: “I depart from the home of desire, I flee forever the home of delusion; the open gates of eternal becoming I close behind me now […] The blessed end of all things eternal, do you know how I attained it? […] suffering opened my eyes for me: I saw the world end.”
Its psychological concomitants notwithstanding, is it nor from within the unnameable folds of an ended-world that Nietzsche no longer looks at anything in the picture below?
There is another possible interpretation of Nietzsche’s “eternal return.” It consists in interpreting as the vitalist affirmation of life. But Nietzsche himself de-authorises it. When Zarathustra’s animals sing, “Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs eternally. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; the same house of being builds itself eternally. Everything parts, everything greets itself again; the ring of being remains loyal to itself eternally. In every Instant being begins; around every Here rolls the ball There. The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity,” Zarathustra tells them: “Oh you foolish rascals and barrel organs! […] you have already made a hurdy-gurdy song of it?”
(*) On the original Greek distinction between Apollo and Dionysos and their complementarity, see here.
(**) Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. by Adrian del Caro; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 125-126.
Nietzsche in the summer of 1899. Photograph by Hans Olde. Original in the Goethe- and Schiller-Archiv at Weimar, Germany