The Journal of Nietzsche Studies

Nicholas Rennie offers this study on time and recurrence in his three chosen intellectual figures as a contribution to the fields of comparative literature and intellectual history. In particular, he sets out to probe the development of the “moment” as a poetic motif and theoretical construct in Nietzsche, with Goethe’s and Leopardi’s contrasting poetics of time taken as models for Nietzsche’s early negotiations [End Page 198] with the problem of the moment in the untimely meditation on history. Indeed, he wishes to go as far astoclaimthateternalrecurrenceinNietzschecanonlybeeffectivelyunderstoodbymeansofhisrelation to these two literary predecessors, with Nietzsche seen as playing the two figures against one another.

Rennie acknowledges that the history of the motif of the moment in the modern period is a long and varied one, with key contributions being made by the likes of Pascal, Leibniz, and Hume. He suggests that Goethe and Leopardi reformulate, in fact, Pascal’s famous wager, in which the ultimate decision over the time of one’s life takes the form of a gamble: either we bet on our lives on earth having no significance beyond what they appear to be or we can commit ourselves to a faith in the possibility of an afterlife that possesses infinitely greater value. This provides us with a contrast between the time of our mortal life, which has the value of a mere instant, and the eternal condition of death or immortality. What is interesting in this conception, in spite of the theological character of the wager, is that the present acquires a special urgency and worth as the site of a transformative decision (as some commentators have noted—Hannah Arendt for example—Nietzsche’s thought of recurrence can be construed as a thought about immortality, albeit of a highly unorthodox kind).¹ As Rennie writes: “The present has no inherent value, but I can ascribe value to it by treating it as the signifier of a future condition of immense importance” (9). We find an echo of this in Nietzsche’s construal of eternal recurrence: on the one hand, it requires a superhuman creature for its affirmation; on the other, such a thought helps to cultivate such an extraordinary creature. Eternal recurrence is a thought that wants us to have belief in the future, with the superhuman standing for the new Sinn of the earth that is required in the wake of God’s death. The wager is required for Pascal because neither empirical evidence nor rational proof of God’s existence can be made use of. In both Goethe and Leopardi the wager is appropriated so as to conduct an experiment with the present moment that wagers itself. In Rennie’s account, Goethe represents, for Nietzsche, the possibility of revising and endorsing the gamble in Pascal’s wager as an act by which the individual radically affirms the strength and unity of his or her subjectivity; by contrast, Leopardi represents an opposing, self-destructive attitude toward the same gamble. If, for Pascal, the wager opens up the possibility of salvation, Leopardi insists that the most logical conclusion of the gamble is suicide.

The study has a number of important and innovative features, not least the attention it bestows on Leopardi (1798–1837), a fascinating figure in Italian letters and Romanticism and also an important figure in modern European thought—sometimes portrayed as the first nihilist—who was read by Schopenhauer and the early Nietzsche (Nietzsche continued to read him into the 1880s and greatly esteemed him as a writer of distinction). He was to roundly reject his thinking later on and for reasons similar to his rejection of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical pessimism and world denial. Although the relation between Leopardi and Nietzsche has been the subject of an extensive literature in non-English literature, especially Italian and German, Rennie’s prioritizing his significance for a full appreciation of Nietzsche contains fresh insights for English-speaking...