My Unique Interpretation of Eternal Return
My interpretation and Analysis: People have often found it hard to reconcile the idea of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of the Same as a a type of circular time as it is presented in The Gay Science:
“The heaviest weight. - What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine. ' If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, 'Do you want this again and innumerable times again?' would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” - The Gay Science
(My interpretation and Analysis continued): …with another idea Nietzsche seems to play around with, being the bountiful transience of creative chance (which Gilles Deleuze will emphasize in his own philosophy of Difference in Itself). Here is a passage of Zarathustra that more speaks to this metaphysical vision somewhat:
Nietzsche Quote: “For all things are baptized at the well of eternity and beyond good and evil; good and evil themselves, however, are only shadows in between and damp glooms and drift-clouds. Truly it is a blessing and no blasphemy when I teach: “Over all things stands the sky accident, the sky innocence, the sky chance, the sky mischief.” “By chance” – that is the oldest nobility in the world, I gave it back to all things, I redeemed them from their servitude under purpose. This freedom and cheerfulness of the sky I placed like an azure bell over all things when I taught that over them and through them no “eternal will” – wills. This mischief and this folly I placed in place of that will when I taught: “With all things one thing is impossible – rationality!” A bit of reason to be sure, a seed of wisdom sprinkled from star to star – this sourdough is mixed into all things: for the sake of folly, wisdom is mixed into all things! A bit of wisdom is indeed possible; but I found this blessed certainty in all things: that on the feet of accident they would rather – dance. Oh sky above me, you pure, you exalted one! This your purity is to me now, that there is no eternal spider and spider web of reason: – that you are my dance floor for divine accident, that you are my gods’ table for divine dice throws and dice players!” - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(My interpretation and Analysis continued): I think it is interesting to note that in certain passages of Zarathustra like the Song of Yes and Amen, Nietzsche seems to play with both notions of reality in the same section:
Nietzsche Quote: “If ever a breath came to me of creative breath and of that heavenly necessity that forces even accidents to dance astral rounds (me analyzing: This section seems to gesture at the Return of the Same): If ever I laughed with the laugh of creative lightning that follows rumbling but obediently the long thunder of the deed: If ever I rolled dice with gods at the gods’ table of the earth, so that the earth quaked and ruptured and snorted up rivers of fire – – because the earth is a gods’ table, and it trembles with creative new words and gods’ throws” (me analyzing: : emphasis here on the new words and gods throws as gesturing at a kind of creative chance) - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
(My interpretation and Analysis continued): I would like to offer my own, more or less baseless yet creative interpretation of the Eternal Return which I call the “anamnesis of forgetting itself”. Throughout Nietzsche’s works he emphasizes forgetting as a powerful creative force in the human psyche that is the minimum amount of emptied space that allows anything new to enter into the mind at all:
Nietzsche Quote: “I love the one whose soul is overfull, so that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his going under.” - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nietzsche Quote: “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel rolling out of itself, a first movement, a sacred yes-saying. Yes, forthe game of creation my brothers a sacred yes-saying is required. The spirit wants its will, the one lost to the world now wins its own world..” - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nietzsche Quote: “To breed an animal with the right to make promises-is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? is it not the real problem regarding man? That this problem has been solved to a large extent must seem all the more remarkable to anyone who appreciates the strength of the opposing force, that of forgetfulness. Forgetting is no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression, that is responsible for the fact that what we experience and absorb enters our consciousness as little while we are digesting it (one might call the process "inpsychation") as does the thousandfold process, involved in physical nourishment-so-called "incorporation. It To close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time; to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle of our underworld of utility organs working with and against one another; a little quietness, a little tabula rasa of the consciousness, to make room for new things, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for regulation, foresight, premeditation (for our organism is an oligarchy)-that is the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette: so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness” - On The Genealogy of Morals
(My interpretation and Analysis continued): Anyway what essentially my interpretation of Eternal Return as the “anamnesis of forgetting itself” is on the basis of this, the constitutive active forgetting of the psyche; is the narcissistic identification with one’s own forgetting rather than one’s own particular memories. Which actually if you will notice this memory of forgetting is paradoxically, the MEMORY AND RETURN OF ALL MEMORIES, as every moment that you ever remembered is itself constituted by a minimum state of forgetting that allowed it to be a moment in the first place. Thus every moment that is truly open in an affirmation and forgetting, truly released from the resentment of memory IS ALREADY RETURNING TO THOSE MEMORIES, AND LIBERATING THEM. Thus, when one wills their own forgetting, and the joy and woe that such forgetting has been filled with and can always be filled with, forgetting itself becomes the highest and most childlike affirmation as we are reconciled with all of time and history almost becoming omnipresent in it through the power of identifying with the pulse or space of forgetting that was and will be in every moment. This memory OF forgetting, is both the infinite reclamation of the past, and thus its Eternal Return and an openness to chance to be encountered and brought into the space of forgetting we always already were. Thus The Eternal Return of the Same is not a story like repetition of a series or moments laid out in a circular causal chain, but the totality of life itself already in a single moment’s depth once we have forgotten it and thus affirmed chance and necessity as one unfolding power: The Power of Forgetting which we ARE… These moments of forgetting as self are, in contrast to some sort of ascetic release, are actually a saturated depth that due to the power of the moment’s forgetting, allows the moment itself to be filled with affirmative life and joy of the moment’s texture of power. This joy found in the saturated depth is what I think Nietzsche refers to as “deep eternity” in Zarathustra’s Roundelay:
. O man! Attend! What does deep midnight’s voice contend? ‘I slept my sleep, ‘And now awake at dreaming’s end: ‘The world is deep, ‘And deeper than day can comprehend. ‘Deep is its woe, ‘Joy—deeper than heart’s agony: ‘Woe says: Fade! Go! ‘But all joy wants eternity, ‘Wants deep, deep, deep eternity!’