Date: Wed, 12 Apr 95 12:13 BST
From: WIDDER-AT-VAX.LSE.AC.UK
Subject: Re: Nietzsche & psychology


Thanks to Dan for coming upon the idea that the eternal return is not the
repetition of the same but the repetitions of difference (He wrote:  "One
possibility which occurs is that N. is talking about the eternal return of
Change as the only eternal truth - this would be consistent with
elements of his philosophy which emphasize cycles of growth and degeneration
which never result in any Hegelian conclusion").

Walter Kaufmann really deserve, I don't know, something on the order of being
flogged with limp speghetti for getting so many people to think that 
Nietzsche's eternal return is the return of the same events -- that, given a
finite amount of energy and an infinite amount of time, the same combinations
will happen again and again and again.  In the first place, this interpretation
simply flies in the face of all of Nietzsche's critiques of identity, sameness,
etc. (see, for example, the first chapter of HUMAN ALL TO HUMAN in this regard,
but there are many other places as well).  Further, in the sections where the
eternal return is thought of as the return of the same, it is always referred
to as 'the highest point of nihilism', which must be worked through and 
overcome (see the notes at the end of WILL TO POWER).  Zarathustra reprimands
the drawf and his animals for formulating the eternal return as the return of
the same (see 'On the Vision and the Riddle' and 'The Convalescent') and
Zarathustra himself never articulates any such understanding of eternal return.
What the eternal return is aligned with is eternal creativity (see WILL TO POWER
again, some note in the 600's, I think, but also some of the notes at the end --
the eternal return is the being of becoming, but becoming is always creation).
Nietzsche, by the way, also claims the conservation of energy, with its notion 
of a finite energy in the universe, to be nihilistic.

What the eternal return does is install a 'law' of mutation into the world.  Now
there are a number of different readings concerning the scope of this mutation.
Some say this is a cosmological doctrine, others insist it is just a 
pschological one, some say its an idea used for human therapy which has no more
truth than any other idea.  I would strongly oppose referring to it as simply a
counter-metaphysical idea, just another hypothesis with no more truth validity.
I say this NOT because I think the eternal return is 'the truth', but rather it
is precisely the consequence of the loss of truth, and the critique of 
metaphysics.  It's not something Nietzsche just invented as a counter-idea --
it follows directly from his critique of metaphysical notions of repetition,
which treat repetition as the repetition of an Idea or Form or Truth,
controlled by a demiurge or God, etc.  It is not repetition in the form of a 
copy of an original model -- Nietzsche virulently opposes the notion of any
simple origin, as everyone on the list should know.  It is repetition without
an original to guide it, repetition that always installs difference into what
is repeated.  And this is why eternal return can be opposed to metaphysics,
God, truth, etc.

Nathan
widder-AT-vax.lse.ac.uk


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