jour nal of Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 41 (2010) 106–114 pheno menol ogical psych ology brill.nl/jpp Heidegger’s Nietzsche, the Doctrine of Eternal Return, and the Phenomenology of Human Finitude* Robert D. Stolorow Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles Abstract Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return of the same, seen through the lens of Heidegger’s interpretation, captures the groundlessness of existence in a technological world devoid of normative significance. The author contends that the temporality depicted poetically in the thought of eternal return is the traumatic temporality of human finitude, to which Nietzsche was exposed at the age of 4 when the death of his father shattered his world. Nietzsche’s metaphysical position is seen as a metaphorical window into the phenomenology of finitude and of the struggle to overcome it. Keywords Nietzsche, Heidegger, eternal return, finitude, nihilism, temporality, trauma The Dryads have been taken out of the trees.—Aldous Huxley It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has heretofore been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.—Friedrich Nietzsche I am merely my father once more.—Friedrich Nietzsche *) The idea for this article took form as a result of my participation in a seminar on Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures taught by Professor Mark Wrathall at the University of California at Riverside. I am most grateful to him for the deft guidance he provided in the journey through these difficult texts. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/156916210X503119 R. D. Stolorow / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 41 (2010) 106–114 107 Setting the Stage In Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Charles Taylor (1989) gives a masterful historical account of the evolution of the modern identity—“the senses of inwardness, freedom, individuality, and being embedded in nature” (p. ix)—from ancient Greek philosophy to the Enlightenment. I begin my essay by summarizing Taylor’s account of this “historically local self-interpretation” (p. 113) in some detail, as I believe that the historical progression that he describes is crucial for an understanding of Nietzsche. Nietzsche, I will contend, is the philosopher who first brings into sharp focus the dark underside of this progression toward the Enlightenment. Taylor begins his story with Plato, to whom he attributes the concept of a unified self, without which “the modern notion of interiority could never have developed” (p. 120). But, according to Taylor, Plato does not use the inside/outside dichotomy. . . . The oppositions which are crucial to Plato are those of soul as against body, of the immaterial as against the bodily, and of the eternal as against the changing. (p. 121) For Plato, correct reason or rationality is the perception of the right order, the ontic logos, the Idea of the Good—the eternal, immaterial form that orders both the cosmos and the human soul and to which the inner/outer distinction is superfluous. It is in the Ideas that true being is to be found. “On the way from Plato to Descartes stands Augustine” (p. 127), claims Taylor. Augustine takes over Plato’s Ideas, which become the thoughts of God, and the universe is comprehended as their external realization. For Augustine, however—and this is historically crucial—the soul/body, eternal/changing dichotomy is coextensive with that between inner and outer. Thus, “inward lies the road to God” (p. 129), to the eternal truth dwelling within. Augustine, in contrast with Plato, adopts a first-person standpoint on true being, a stance that will become so fundamental for Descartes. Fatefully, unlike both Plato and Augustine, Descartes rejects any notion of ontic logos in favor of a universe that is to be understood mechanistically, according to Galilean method. Ideas henceforth become intrapsychic contents, things in the mind, that more or less accurately represent objects in external reality. The order of ideas becomes something we build rather than find. The world becomes objectified, “disenchanted,” mere extension 108 R. D. Stolorow / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 41 (2010) 106–114 and mechanism devoid of any immaterial or spiritual essence, a domain of dispassionate instrumental control. Being rational is no longer gazing upon a divine cosmic order; it is constructing orders according to the canons of evidence. As Taylor notes, “this new conception of inwardness, . . . of autonomous powers of ordering by reason, prepared the ground for modern unbelief ” (p. 138). Locke, according to Taylor’s account, extends the Cartesian ideal of disengaged instrumental control to the subject himself/herself, eventuating in what Taylor calls the punctual self—an agent who is not only master of the earth but of himself/herself as well. Just as the world has been stripped of all teleology, so too is human nature. Locke reifies mental life to an extraordinary degree, picturing it as assembled mechanically from atomic sensations and simple ideas. What is assembled can be demolished and rebuilt, presumably making it possible for human beings to remake themselves in more rational and advantageous ways. The punctual self is consciousness itself—disembodied, extensionless, atemporal, and located in this seemingly limitless power to self-objectify and self-remake. Locke’s punctual self, Taylor contends, is a dominating idea throughout the Enlightenment, aiming at mastery of all that is—a pure culture of Nietzschean will to power. Let us turn now to Nietzsche, the philosopher who was perhaps the first to grasp the dark side of this relentless progress toward modernity. Heidegger’s Nietzsche and the Doctrine of Eternal Return As described in the foregoing paragraphs, the historical progression of philosophical thought from the ancient Greeks to the Enlightenment can be viewed as a progressive weakening of the grip of Platonic and Christian metaphysical ways of thinking, which comprehend the world as a realization of the eternal Ideas or of the thoughts of God. In Heidegger’s (1954) interpretation,1 Nietzsche is the last Western metaphysician, whose “fundamental metaphysical position” (p. 5) supplants that of Plato and Christianity. This position, claims Heidegger, is captured in Nietzsche’s famous doctrine of the eternal return of the same—“of the unconditioned and 1) Throughout this article, I draw heavily on Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche. The Nietzsche I present is Heidegger’s Nietzsche. R. D. Stolorow / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 41 (2010) 106–114 109 infinitely reiterated circulation of all things” (Nietzsche, 1908; quoted in Heidegger, 1954, p. 5). This doctrine is an assertion about how “beings [entities] as a whole” (p. 5) are to be grasped in the modern technological world. In The Gay Science (Nietzsche, 1882) Nietzsche writes for the first time about his doctrine of eternal return: The greatest burden.—What would happen if one day or night a demon were to steal upon you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you, “You will have to live this life—as you are living it now and have lived it in the past—once again and countless times more; and there will be nothing new to it, but every pain and every pleasure, every thought and sigh, and everything unutterably petty or grand in your life will have to come back to you, all in the same sequence and order. . . . The eternal hourglass of existence turning over and over—and you with it, speck of dust!”. . . . If that thought ever came to prevail in you, it would transform you, such as you are, and perhaps it would mangle you. (quoted in Heidegger, 1954, pp. 19–20) Heidegger asks rhetorically, did this terrifying and burdensome thought of eternal return come into being historically “because all prior burdens had abandoned men and gone up in smoke . . . [and] all things have lost their weight” (p. 23)—because, in other words, a disenchanted technological world devoid of any ontic logos has lost its normative significance? In the technological world, we alone, in our “loneliest loneliness,” decide the normative weight that beings will have. The poetic language of the thought of eternal return seems beautifully to capture the nullity and groundlessness of our existence—“you . . . speck of dust!”—endlessly recurring, with no divine goal or purpose, no preordained order or meaningfulness: “God is dead.” “The collective character of the world is . . . to all eternity—chaos” (Nietzsche, 1882; quoted in Heidegger, 1954, pp. 66 & 91). With the thought of eternal return, tragedy begins, where tragedy is understood as affirmation of the terrifying, of “the uttermost ‘no’” (p. 30). The thinker whom Nietzsche (1892) creates to think and teach the thought of the eternal return of the same is, of course, Zarathustra, who, in his “loneliest loneliness,” will utter “the supreme ‘yes’ to the supreme ‘no’” (Heidegger, 1954, p. 32). In an eternally recurring world with no fixed essences or pregiven values to dictate what matters, one is tempted 110 R. D. Stolorow / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 41 (2010) 106–114 to conclude that nothing matters and sink into resignation, apathy, and indifference. But Zarathustra, to the contrary, affirms that each human being must seize the burden of deciding for himself/herself what matters and that, in a godless technological world, it is this moment of individual decision that eternally recurs. Zarathustra embraces the “tragic insight” concerning “the terrifying thing that being genuinely is” (p. 52), plunges into the abyss of human finitude, faces the temptation of nihilism, and emerges voicing a resounding affirmation. As Heidegger puts it: With Zarathustra the “tragic age” commences. Tragic knowing realizes that “life itself,” beings as a whole, conditions “pain,” “destruction,” and all agony; and that none of these things constitutes an “objection to this life.” (p. 61) For Heidegger’s Nietzsche, the thought of the eternal return of the same is a countermovement against the “danger of dangers” (p. 157)—the predisposition to nihilism wrought by the decline of Platonism, including its Christian variants, in the technological world. It is “the watershed of an epoch become weightless and searching for a new center of gravity” (p. 159). In Heidegger’s account, Nietzsche fully immersed himself in the experience of European nihilism—its weightlessness, meaninglessness, and valuelessness—and then interrogated it and, with the thought of eternal return, ultimately overcame it. The thought of eternal recurrence “summons us” (p. 174) to make a decision, to take a stand on existence, to assume the responsibility of creating value. It is a countermovement from “nothing matters” to “everything matters.” Temporality, Trauma, and the Phenomenology of Human Finitude Importantly, Heidegger reminds us, “The temporality of the time of that eternity which Nietzsche requires us to think in the eternal return of the same is the temporality in which humanity stands” (pp. 98–99). That is, the temporality of the doctrine of eternal return is not clock time; it is the lived experience of time, the temporality of human existing, of “action and decision” (p. 182). Viewed as a metaphorical rendering of the phenomenology of temporality in a moment of decision about existence in a disenchanted world, the thought of the eternal return of the same bears a striking resemblance to the impact of emotional trauma on our experience of temporality, about which I have previously written (Stolorow, 2007): R. D. Stolorow / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 41 (2010) 106–114 111 Experiences of trauma become freeze-framed into an eternal present in which one remains forever trapped, or to which one is condemned to be perpetually returned [by] life’s slings and arrows. . . . [I]n the region of trauma all duration or stretching along collapses, past becomes present, and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition. (p. 20, emphasis added) Such experiences of endlessly repeating trauma indeed steal upon us in our “loneliest loneliness”: Because trauma so profoundly alters the universal or shared structure of temporality, the traumatized person . . . quite literally lives in another kind of reality, an experiential world incommensurable with those of others. . . . This felt incommensurability, in turn, contributes to the sense of alienation and estrangement from other human beings that typically haunts the traumatized person. Torn from the communal fabric of being-in-time, trauma remains insulated from human dialogue. (p. 20) I have conceptualized emotional trauma as a shattering of the tranquilizing illusions and “absolutisms of everyday life” (p. 16)—those offered by the variants of Platonism, for example—that shield us from our finitude and existential vulnerability. Such shattering plunges us into a form of what Heidegger (1927) calls authentic being-toward-death, wherein death and loss are apprehended as distinctive possibilities that are constitutive of our very existence, of our intelligibility to ourselves in our futurity and finitude—possibilities that are both certain and indefinite as to their “when” and that therefore always impend as constant threats. Stripped of its sheltering illusions, the everyday world loses its significance, and the traumatized person feels anxious and uncanny—no longer safely at home. The eternal return of emotional trauma is insured by the finitude of our existence and the finitude of all those with whom we are deeply connected. Authentic existing that affirms and seizes ownership of its own nullity must bear the agony of thinking the eternal return of the same. However, in contrast with Nietzsche’s Zarathustrean vision, I have contended (Stolorow, 2007) that the darkness can be enduringly borne, not in solitude, but in relational contexts of mutual emotional attunement and understanding. Nietzsche, and later Heidegger, gives us poetic, philosophical language to speak and bring to dialogue the burden we cannot bear alone—the burden of finite existing and of finding meaning and value in a world denuded of ontic logos. 112 R. D. Stolorow / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 41 (2010) 106–114 Nietzsche’s Search for Permanence Nietzsche’s metaphysics is a relational ontology in which beings “are represented as interwoven in one vast nexus of Becoming” (Heidegger, 1954, p. 84). The world in which we stand is one of “perpetual Becoming” (p. 89), flux, and chaos. This representation of the totality of beings as chaos is supposed to achieve an inversion of Platonism, a definitive disenchantment of the world, an expunging of the eternal, the permanent, the unchanging. But does not the thought of the eternal return of the same—that is, the idea of “permanent becoming” (p. 109)—undo this very achievement? “The thought of eternal return of the same fixates by determining how the world essentially is” (p. 129). Eternal return “freezes the eternal flow” (p. 145) and brings “redemption from the eternal flux” (p. 146). “Being is injected into Becoming” (p. 147), permanence into impermanence. The doctrine of eternal return stamps becoming, flux, and chaos with the “emblem of eternity” (p. 201). For Nietzsche, such stamping or “recoining of Becoming as [a] being . . . is the supreme will to power” (p. 202). As Heidegger (1961) characterizes the relationship between Nietzsche’s two basic metaphysical principles, will to power and eternal recurrence, “Will to power in its most profound essence is . . . the permanentizing of Becoming into presence” (p. 156). What would lead a thinker to adopt the permanentizing of becoming, the eternalizing of change, as his fundamental metaphysical position? Such a doctrine would seem to combine an embracing of finitude with a flight from the very finitude that has been embraced. Heidegger (1954), like Nietzsche before him, stresses “the essential involvement of the thinker in the thought”2 (p. 98), so let us look very briefly at Nietzsche’s life history and personal emotional world for some clues. Arnold and Atwood (2005) have elaborated an elegant psychobiographical account of the interweaving themes that circulated throughout Nietzsche’s emotional life and philosophical work, eventuating finally in his madness. According to their account, the watershed event in his development was the death of his beloved father, a revered Protestant clergyman, when Nietzsche was four years old. The death of his father was a 2) My collaborators and I (Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, in press) have applied this principle to aspects of Heidegger’s own thinking. R. D. Stolorow / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 41 (2010) 106–114 113 trauma that shattered the young Nietzsche’s emotional world and left him in a state of psychological chaos and fragmentation prefiguring his later psychosis, much as, according to the philosopher Nietzsche, the death of God had left Europe in a dangerous state of nihilism and groundlessness. As a boy, Nietzsche strove to overcome his emotional devastation by trying to be his lost father, adopting a sermonic, even Zarathustrean manner. This countermovement, in which his emotional world became restitutively enveloped in an image of his dead father, is vividly captured in a dream that he dreamt soon after his father’s funeral and which he reported in a youthful autobiography (Nietzsche, 1858): I dreamt that I would hear the same organ-sound as the one at the burial. While I was looking for the reason for this, suddenly a grave opens and my father, dressed in his shroud, climbs out of it. He rushes into the church and after a short while he returns with a little child [obviously the young Nietzsche] in his arms. The grave opens, he enters, and the cover sinks down again on the opening. (p. 12) Arnold and Atwood (2005) aptly describe the world of Nietzsche’s dream as “a curved space surrounding a black hole in being” (p. 245). Nietzsche’s restorative effort to be his father continued throughout his life, always circling back to the nothingness he was trying to overcome. In his later autobiography, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche (1908) wrote tellingly: My father died at the age of thirty-six. . . . In the same year in which his life went downward, mine, too, went downward: at thirty-six, I reached the lowest point of my vitality—I still lived, but . . . like a shadow. (p. 122) I am merely my father once more, and, as it were, his continued life after an all-too-early death” (p. 228) His father’s all-too-early death confronted young Nietzsche prematurely with the finitude of human existence and the indefinite certainty of death and traumatic loss. Nietzsche’s countermovement was to permanentize his dead father in his own selfhood, but, tragically, in so doing, he recurrently and endlessly circled back to his own psychological annihilation. The thematic parallel to his doctrine of the eternal return of the same, the countermovement through which he sought to overcome European nihilism, is striking. The permanentizing of transience, the infinitizing of 114 R. D. Stolorow / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 41 (2010) 106–114 finitude, the circular ordering of chaos, the ending that goes on forever— does not the doctrine of eternal recurrence poetize a crypto-Platonic evasion of human finitude probably as old as humankind’s capacity for abstract thought? Nietzsche’s fundamental metaphysical position gives us a compelling metaphorical window into the phenomenology of human finitude and of the endless human struggle to overcome it. References Arnold, K. & Atwood, G. (2005), Nietzsche’s madness. In Handbook of Psychobiography, ed. W. Schultz. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 240–264. Heidegger, M. (1927), Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Heidegger, M. (1954), Nietzsche, Vol. II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. D. Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. Heidegger, M. (1961), Nietzsche, Vol. III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. J. Stambaugh, D. Krell, & F. Capuzzi. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Nietzsche, F. (1858), Out of my life (Aus meinem Leben). In Der Werdende Nietzsche, ed. E. Forster-Nietzsche. Munich: Musarion-Verlag, 1924. Nietzsche, F. (1882), The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Nietzsche, F. (1892), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1966. Nietzsche, F. (1908),Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Stolorow, R. D. (2007), Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections. New York: Routlege. Stolorow, R. D., Atwood, G. E., & Orange, D. M. (in press), Heidegger’s Nazism and the hypostatization of being. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. Taylor, C. (1989), Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.