Journal of the History of Philosophy

516 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative. Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978. Pp. xxiii + 23t. $17.5o. This is a strange book, and exasperating to a careful reader. It includes verbatim repetitions (recurrences?) of its own material, discussions which sound preliminary but are never followed up, and sets of distinctions and explorations which ought to mesh with one another but do not. It has a title that is never explained and that fails to suggest that the book is about--the eternal recurrence. It misuses logical and mathematical terminology, and twists syntax and diction, and (let me say it all) is alarming with the semicolon. Apparently Professor Magnus has read widely in Nietzsche and in the history of Western theories of recurrence; he has imagination; and he deals with an important issue in Nietzsche scholarship. My guess is that scholars will take the book seriously for a while, before deciding finally that God himself (if he were still alive) would not be able to decide what the author really meant to say. In what follows, I present one reconstruction, with critical comments, of the mind of Magnus. Magnus sees three interpretations of Nietzsche's doctrine: (1) Everything in the universe, down to the smallest details, eternally recurs; this is a a cosmological doctrine . (2) A person should live as if his life and everything else would eternally recur; this is a normative doctrine. (3) The Obermensch, or one like an Ubermensch, would wish his life and everything else to eternally recur; this doctrine is diagnostic of Obermenschlichkeit . There are at least hints of all of these doctrines (and more, I would say) in Nietzsche's texts; but Magnus argues that Nietzsche did not hold ~or 2, or maybe that Nietzsche meant i and ~ but not very seriously. Magnus thinks 3 is the heart of Nietzsche's doctrine. Magnus does not always distinguish between the tenability or truth of a thesis and its presence in Nietzsche's thought. Against the tenability of l, the cosmological doctrine, he mentions casually the scientific difficulties in what seem to be the premises of its proof; and he discusses briefly problems in deriving the doctrine from its alleged premises. He also claims en passant that i is unverifiable in principle. None of these discussions is clear enough or detailed enough to convince. Another brief argument Magnus offers is that the term "possible," which Nietzsche relies upon in the proofs of l, has no meaning if I is true. This strikes me as very weak. Any determinist scheme holds that, in one sense of "possible," only what happens is possible; but there are a lot of other senses of the term, and I imagine that Nietzsche was relying upon one of those. Magnus argues at length that the principle of the identity of indiscernibles makes 1 necessarily false; if b has all the characteristics of a, then b is a, not a recurrence of a. This argument seems sophistical to me, as it would have to A. J. Ayer, whom Magnus quotes; I believe that what a and its recurrence b would not share would be temporal location, and that that is enough to distinguish them. Magnus claims that to say that, we have to presuppose "absolute time" or "extramundane time" or a "spectatorial standpoint" or something of the sort. 1 think this is wrong; all we need is temporal reference beyond the present cosmic epoch: and I do not see any problem BOOK REVIEWS 517 about that. I might add that earlier (p. 63) Magnus claimed that "relational time" supported modern theories of recurrence. All of the above bears on the truth or tenability of 1. If i is untenable, and we assume that Nietzsche did not have any untenable views, then we conclude that Nietzsche did not hold I. Magnus also has a few positive arguments against interpreting Nietzsche as meaning i. The evidence that he meant i comes from the Nachlass, not from the works he published; and that fact has some force. But Magnus goes farther; he argues that what appear to be proofs of i in the Nachlass really are...