Review Essay
Recurrence-Awareness: Eternal Return or Epigenetic Evolutionary Biology?
Thomas Steinbuch
Review of Nietzsche and Eternal Recurrence, by Bevis E. McNeil, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Print ISBN 978-3-030-55295-4; ebook ISBN 978-3-030-55296-1; number of pages XVI, 278. Reviewed for New Nietzsche Studies, general editor Babette E. Babich.
Overview: Professor McNeil has written about the eternal recurrence from the perspective that it is objective cosmology for N (1.5). That position is vulnerable to the criticism that we do not find a proof of the ER in the published works but mostly in the notebooks. The exceptions are two passages from GS (109 and 341) but they are couched in metaphor. McNeil thus turns to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and states that there, in "Vision and Riddle" the metaphor of eternal recurrence is “strengthened and developed into a deductive proof” (99f)." He accepts Paul Loeb’s reading that together, “Vision and Riddle” and “The Convalescent” contain a prospective memory. Z has a dying prospective memory of the shepherd and the snake that amounts and it shows up in fact in "The Convalescent" and this shows recurrence-awareness and so is a fictional presentation of evidence that the eternal recurrence is objective cosmology. But McNeil’s attempt to establish that N intended a deductive proof of the eternal recurrence as objective cosmology in “Vision and Riddle” fails because the context strongly suggests otherwise, and he does not address it. He does not address Laurence Lampert’s commentary on this section in Nietzsche’s Teaching that sharply calls the thesis he advances into question, stating: “this chapter seems to go out of its way to mock syllogistic or formal argument as a way of dealing with fundamental questions” (166). It is a scholarly lapse that McNeil does not engage this context, nor Lampert’s development of the foregoing critique to which the context of the deduction gives rise. Also in “Vision and Riddle” and “The Convalescent” in following Paul Loeb, McNeil would seem to assuming that, having left metaphor behind, there is only one literal reading possible and that is the reading of recurrence-awareness. I will challenge that inference with a different literal reading of recurrence awareness in “Vision and Riddle” and “the Convalescent” from an evolutionary biology perspective as epigenetic evolution of novel mental life, and raise the question of what “is true” might then mean in the statement “the eternal recurrence is true."
Along these same lines of establishing that N believed that the eternal recurrence was objective cosmology, McNeil presents the idea in Chapter 2 that Nietzsche found a precedent of his idea of the eternal recurrence as objective cosmology in the Stoics and Heraclitus, and in that chapter he relies on N.’s notebooks to make his case that the eternal recurrence for N was a cosmological project as it was for the Stoics. Although there is interesting material in Greg Whitlock’s translation of N.'s Pre-Platonic Philosophers lectures, they are very early in Nietzsche career, before the crisis of 1879 that is the starting point for his tragic wisdom in EH, that date specifically cited there for its importance in his self-discovery of the meaning of his inheritance from his father as the same year of life as his father’s death. He says the decline in 1879 set off his will to health out of which he made his philosophy, which would seem be an identification of origins. McNeil develops this connection from Heraclitus to the eternal recurrence, stating that in the fragments of Heraclitus “we find the originating core of N.’s philosophy of the eternal recurrence” based on the lectures (234f). It becomes his main criticism of Heidegger’s interpretation in section 4.5 that he overlooks the Heraclitean element of play in N.’s cosmology, so the connection of the ER to Heraclitus it a key connection for different arguments. But in his section 2.4.1 in his introduction to Greek Philosophy and the Eternal Recurrence, almost all the relevant citations of N.’s idea of the eternal recurrence that could link it to the Stoa are from the notebooks: WTP and one from an early notebook, and as I take it, Professor McNeil felt that by this point in his book he had established that N thought the eternal recurrence was objective cosmology in the published writings in 2.3.4, as the metaphorical trappings of GS were not to be found in the literal presentation in “Vision and Riddle” where, putatively, a deduction of eternal recurrence is given, so that the notebooks can now come into use. The one exception of note in this chapter, and it is cited here and in 1.6 on Eternal Recurrence and Ancient Greek Philosophy, and also cited as the text on which Heidegger relies for his connection of the ER to Greek cosmology (159, n. 7), is a citation at EH/Books/BT/3 where N writes that the eternal recurrence could have been taught by Heraclitus – the word “could” is important. In this passage, N.’s tracing to the Greeks goes back to the myth of Dionysus and the idea of rejoicing in the inexhaustibility of life even though the highest types are sacrificed, which he, N, says was a tragic wisdom and that he was, likely, the first philosopher to have tragic wisdom, and so, likely, first tragic philosopher. The tragic pathos of joy in destruction, which is the "Yes" saying pathos, became the Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence, (EH/Books/Z/1/). Maybe he is the first, he says, but traces of eternal recurrence are in Stoic cosmology and they received all their main ideas from Heraclitus. N mentions Heraclitus twice in EH/Books/BT/3, and in both cases the mention is that perhaps the tragic pathos of joy in destruction is what he, Heraclitus, was getting at, that Heraclitus may have been a tragic philosopher too. That is what would be hard to ascertain, whether the philosophy of Heraclitus is a transposition of tragic wisdom. But reading EH from the beginning, by the time we reach this text in EH/Books, we have been already introduced to N.’s Dionysian tragic wisdom from chapter one, "Why I am So Wise," and a glance at that chapter shows that N.'s tragic wisdom is what he learned by his experience of his inheritance of the condition from his father of death in life, that it was a “stimulus to Mehrleben.” He was thrown a bad curve ball by his inheritance, he devised techniques of affirmative psychology to address renunciation, and he developed life in himself to Mehrleben, evolution beyond necessary survival adaptations. The subject matter of EH/Wise is N.'s evolution. EH/Wise is also heuristic in revealing that the starting point of his development was the “highest opposition” life can face (at the variant to the epigraph at KSA 13, 23[14]) and yet the ending turned out so well in Mehrleben, and so he has very great confidence in life's inexhaustibility and indestructibility no matter how deeply it is cut into. This is his ethos appeal. So, reading EH from the beginning, by the time we reach Books/BT/3, we recognize that in his statement there that his doctrine of the eternal recurrence is a philosophical transposition of tragic wisdom, the wisdom referred to is in EH/Wise, that the will to power in life needs resistance to bring itself up to the next level and brings resistance upon itself that it may do so, and did so in him to the point setting before him the highest opposition it had, but instead of being destroyed by it, he reached the highest rung on the ladder of life -- and this is testimony to how the will to power works in us. The takeaway from the reference to tragic wisdom in EH/Books/BT/3 is that the tragic wisdom he acquired by his experience of the inheritance of death in life from his father but that led to Mehrleben in EH/Wise is his autobiographical introduction to the idea of the eternal recurrence, of why he is in a position to speak so confidently in this matter. Heuristically, the message of the ER is that we should discipline ourselves against renunciation and a philosophy of pessimism, opposing it instead with a philosophical form of thinking that disciplines us to accept that there will be no remission of destruction, that destruction will be unconditional always, that it is not going to ease up for us, thus to embrace destruction as the law of evolution. To fully defeat philosophical pessimism we should think of the developmental character of life as being in a closed circle from which we cannot escape, that the circle keeps going on forever -- not that that thought makes literal sense as life cannot keep evolving to Mehrleben if it is going in a circle. But none of his wisdom, which makes an ethos appeal, is relevant to cosmology as an a priori project The only mention of the eternal recurrence in EH/Wise is in Wise/3 final daft about how he cannot will the eternal recurrence out of an objection to the recurrence of his mother and sister; besides the gloss at Books/BT/3, there are two other mentions in EH, at Book/Z 1 and Z 6. McNeil quotes the text from EH/Books/BT/3 in two sections 1.6 and 2.4.1 connecting the eternal recurrence to the Stoics and Heraclitus, but the connection is not direct and cannot support McNeil’s reading that N.’s idea of the eternal recurrence had its origin in Heraclitus’s cosmology. The text at EH/Books/BT/3 says that the eternal recurrence has is origin in N.’s tragic wisdom, and so connects it to EH/Wise, yet, in section 4.6 on Dionysus and the Eternal Recurrence, McNeil associates Dionysian Übermütigkeit, prankishness, with Heraclitean play (240) without consulting EH/Wise. But N.'s fractured mind split into a second Döppelgänger self (Wise/3, superseded draft) is just in the context of this Dionysian "prankishness," and that is a context of evolution and the context we should be using to test whether Heraclitean cosmic play is in this thought, which, after all, is before the idea of evolution. One might also consult KSA 11: 26[243] on Dionysian Wisdom. In that notebook text, will to power in life chooses for destructive paths as worthy of eternal recurrence because they are recognized as part of the process of evolution, why else? Finally, in EH/Books/BT/3, N refers us to TI, the chapter “What I Owe to The Ancients,” in TI/Ancients/5, and again N identifies himself as the philosopher of Dionysus and as the teacher of the eternal recurrence. There is no mention of Heraclitus in this chapter on the topic of what he owes to the ancients. When the text of EH/Books/BT/3 is studied in relation to texts relevant to it, it cannot bear the argumentative weight Professor McNeil puts on it. Both of McNeil’s attempts to read the eternal recurrence as objective cosmology in the two published works cited, here and in “Vision and Riddle” that do not couch it in the metaphorical language of GS that has caused others to reject it as cosmology, fail. The idea that the originating thought of the eternal recurrence appeared for N in his reading of Heraclitus fails as its actual origin is N.’s own original tragic wisdom of gratitude for death in life, as he states in EH, and the ER bears similarity to Heraclitus only if he too somehow possessed tragic wisdom and turned it into Philosophy as he, N, did. That makes the chapter on the Stoics incidental and makes the criticism of Heidegger for missing the Heraclitean element of play in the eternal recurrence cosmology a discussion entre eux. EH/Wise tells us about N.'s tragic wisdom. We learn that it is wisdom about the role of destructiveness to life in the workings of evolution in ourselves. Life seeks to develop itself to become more in and by power over a resistance which cuts into it. He survived the worst of it and that is his ethos appeal why he can set the heuristic of the ER before us. The tragic wisdom that he transposed into the Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence is a set of empirical statements.
EH/Wise/4 and Wise/5 contain affirmation psychology in the setting of N.’s development from the highest opposition to life to Mehrleben. There is use of recurring time in both sections. The central activity in each is how affirmative psychology elides the vengeful constructions of the art of the ill will. Mehrleben is the result because vengefulness is avoidance of will to power and affirmativeness lines us up with it: we become rich in life as we are not vengeful (Wise/6). It is clear that N evolved acquired characteristics per these psychologically affirmative exercises; he designated these as being privileges owed to his father in inheritance from him, and that is the evolutionary pathway. So, must we not ask whether the affirmative psychology of willing the eternal recurrence presented in Z performs an evolutionary role, just as do the affirmative psychological exercises in Wise/4 and Wise/5 presented in the work that was to autobiographically introduce affirmative thinking of the ER in UAW IV?
EH is a work of introduction in which N revealed his psychology and it was to be the autobiographical introduction to his four volume Hauptwerk, UAW. Although it was not completed, all six plans for it culminate in the announcement of the Philosophy of Dionysus, the Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence of the Same, in book IV. A onetime subtitle for Ecce Homo was: „Ecce Homo, oder ein Psychologen-Problem: Warum ich Einiges mehr weiss,“ (KSA 14: 465), and the final subtitle of Nietzsche contra Wagner is „Aktenstücke eines Psychologen“ although it is cited with the same subtitle as the early subtitle for Ecce Homo in his letter to Naumann of December, 17 1888 (KSB 8: 1193) to bring it more into line with The Case of Wagner’s final subtitle – so persistent was N on getting us to understand his psychology, hoping to piggyback on the popularity of CW and communicate his psychology by way of being the antithesis of Wagner in NCW. “Why I am So Wise,” where the psychological problem is stated, stands out in EH as the only chapter that would have been expressly picked up on in UAW in one of the plans for a book from N.’s critical philosophy that was to be titled der Misosoph, (KSA 13, 11 [416]). EH/Wise is very important for the study of the ER. In his letter to Naumann of November 6, 1888, (KSB 8: 1139) N says that because AC will have the benefit of the introduction of EH, the situation he faced five years earlier with Z, presumably the broad misunderstanding of Z, will be averted, which suggests that EH can be read as introductory to Z as well. And, in Wise/3 superseded draft, the last line states that to understand anything at all of Z one must have, like him, a "foot beyond life," which phrase ties to his inheritance from his father. The precondition is in evolution: he enters a world of lofty things as a privilege owed [indirectly] to his father, and that is the world of Z: the implication is that that world came to be as evolutionary from the inheritance of death in life. Finally, and most relevantly, in the case of a text crucial for McNeil's and Heidegger's project of connecting the ER to Heraclitus's cosmology, in EH/Books/BT/3, N says that the psychology of joy in destruction, which is the psychology of the tragic poets, lies behind the idea of the ER. That psychology is in evidence in EH: it is the psychological problem of gratitude for death in life, which is his tragic wisdom. These texts, together with the letter to Naumann, are the basis for my use of EH Wise/4 and Wise/5 on affirmation psychology for my exegesis of the ER in "On Redemption," that shows it does not document the McNeil/Heidegger thesis that the ER was objective cosmology for N. To sum up: the plan for a book, The Will to Power, was superseded by the work N stated to be his Hauptwerk, EH + UAW I-IV, and we do not know that a deductive proof of the eternal recurrence would have appeared in Book IV. Furthermore, N.'s introductory autobiography of tragic wisdom that he transposed into the Philosophy of Dionysus of the ER, as he states in Books/BT/3, is a narrative of his evolution to Mehrleben. Wise/4 and Wise/5 with their disciplines of affirmative psychology, are autobiography of evolution and do not suggest that the intended follow up was to be the ER as objective cosmology. Also, although by the time of Wise/3 final draft N had dropped the plan for a four volume work, that text contains the one explicit mention of the ER in Wise, and we should note that the context in which it is mentioned there is the context of evolution, (KSA 6, 268, 16-18). But McNeil accepts Heidegger's view of the WTP notebooks as reliable in telling us what he thought about the ER although the project was superseded as a literary project.
In EH, Wise/4 and Wise/5, N presents autobiographical narratives of his affirmative psychology. Both open with a statement of beginnings in his inheritance from his father of death in life and have a terminus ad quem in Mehrleben. In a variant to the epigraph we read about how he created ein Mehr of life in himself „als Schöpfung, eine wirkliche Zuthat“ in having faced the highest opposition to life, which, revaluatively, is the highest prize life can get, KSA 13, 23[14]), and how life in him is now at the highest rung, Wise/1, 2nd sentence, and this is a narrative of evolution.
In Wise/4 Nietzsche tells how he does not know the art of making others take and hold things against him, that no one has born him ill will. He adds the words "this too" in reference to this as being a privilege he owes to his father, his "incomparable father" -- so named lest we wonder how he could owe him so much, but it is because it is a negative debt and his father is incomparable in being the source of so consuming a negative effect. The referent of "too" is to the superseded draft of Wise/3, (KSA 14, 473) in which he says that he owes all his privileges to his father, but not either life nor the affirmation of life, and this now also includes the privilege that no one bore him ill will in Wise/4 and of not living among his equals, hard to do, in Wise/5. N neglected to make the correction when he sent in the final version of Wise/3 in which that line is not to be found. Wise/5 also opens with a reference to his father and also identifies a privilege, namely, of never living among his equals, but this section also explains his privilege to be the bearer of heavy guilt per the wrongdoing of others to him, as it is the privilege identified in Wise/4, but in Wise/5 the privilege is of not living among his equals, the privilege of not regarding himself as equally entitled not to be wronged, owed to his father as well. But these privileges belong to life and the affirmation of life, which did not come to him as inheritance from his father, he says as much, nor, obviously, as inheritance from him after life and the affirmation of life is excluded. The privileges have their origin in his "foot beyond life," which is the negative inheritance from his father, but then how did they come to him from that? It is in this line also that N says he owes his privilege of entering a world of lofty and delicate things to his father and that one cannot understand a word of Z apart from entering from a foot beyond life. The world of lofty and delicate things he is privileged to be in is the world of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, owed indirectly to his father from the negative inheritance from him. So the privileges are owed his father by indirection, but then, to ask again, how did the privileges come from the negative inheritance? After the statement of privilege, the narrative of Wise/4 shifts from others as not having ill will against him to his having no ill will against others, even in cases in which he would be upholding a great value by doing having it. Nor does he have ill will against himself, and this (revaluation) marks him as an anti-Christian, he says. It is because he does not have ill will against others that others have never had ill will against him. What he did was affirmative – not having ill will towards others is affirmative, ditto in Wise/5, not blaming the wrongdoer for his wrongdoing as deserving punishment is affirmative. If he did not inherit the privilege of others not having ill will against him from his father but it is still owed him, it must be owed him indirectly, and what he inherited directly that it connects to must be whatever he was designating in the phrase above about having a foot beyond life together with its related expressions in the chapter, and of these most importantly in the riddle of Wise/1 of having already died as his father while still [having to] live and grow old as his mother, (my words in brackets). He owes his privilege of no one having ill will against him to his father, but by reason of his having no ill will against others, which leaves the only way the privilege can be traceable to his father to be if the ill will came from him. That means that his trait of bearing others no ill will was the reversal of that inherited ill will and was autogenetic with N, and that is a phenomenon of evolution on the path of Mehrleben. His privileges were acquired characteristics. He acquired the trait of not disprizing others in ill will and in Wise/5, the trait of not being aggrieved when he is wrongfully treated and is in the right. There, the privilege is not asserting the equal right not to be wronged, not living among his equals. Relinquishing the equal right not to be wronged opens on to blaming himself for the wrongdoing, even up to the point of bearing the “heavy guilt” identified as a privilege as the opposite of blaming in Wise/4, KSA 6, 270, 26). This too is clearly not something his father did before him, so the direct inheritance from him in virtue of which it is owed must have been the ill will disposed to moral aggrievement at being wronged, and the privilege of the heavy guilt then owed him by indirection could only have come autogenetically by mastering the disposition to aggrievement. These are privileges because they came by mastery of wanting to retaliate, which resists the development of life as retaliation is weakening, and the mastery means evolution of Mehrleben to the highest rung of life. He states his privilege of bearing guilt as being to bear a heavy guilt because a heavy guilt is the counterbalance to being severely morally aggrieved, so to bear the heavy guilt means reaching the privilege of the highest richness in life needed to becoming equal to that degree of severity. This is epigenetics, starting with an inheritance of an epigenetic variation from his father and ending with the privileges as acquired characteristics evolved by reprogramming his epigenome by creating a stressful opposing mental environment of affirmative psychology. The acquired characteristics are epigenetic evolution and each is associated with a revaluation.
In Wise/4's affirmative psychology Nietzsche tells us that, in his encounters with buffoons, bears and lazy students, he tames every bear, that the buffoons mind their manners around him and the that the lazy students were industrious with him and, to anticipate the theme of Wise /5, that he never gave out a punishment to them. These changes are not realized in reality. The starting point is his inclination to take and hold against, which is an artistic construction by the ill will. Of this inclination, he says, he must remain master: "bear” “buffoon” and "lazy" are the work of the disprizing art of the ill will and contain vengeful, abusive thinking, and he must master the ill will in himself that makes these constructions he says, that is, master a first-order psychology of a disprizing and abusive ill will that runs out of control. The same pattern may be found in Wise/5: the privilege is that he does not assert his equal entitlement not to be wronged, he does not “live among his equals” which then becomes the privilege to bear the “heavy guilt” as he says in Wise/4 and is in Wise/5 in the idea of the god who blames himself. The affirmative psychology that leads to the privilege of a heavy guilt is to blame his own innocence for the wronging -- blaming innocence for its liability to wronging -- instead of finding turpitude in the wrongdoer, to thus master moral aggrievement and elide the wrongdoer and sometimes even the wrongdoing. Note that the text is progressive on this point, "equal to" the wrongdoing is harder than to the wrongdoer. What comes from his father is the ill will to be morally aggrieved and he masters aggrievement by the psychological exercise of bearing the guilt for the wrongdoing himself, with Mehrleben as the result associated to that acquired characteristic. It is by this indirection that the privilege is owed. His acquired privileges are his evolution of himself and his revaluations are associated with evolving them.
Affirmative psychological exercises were the key. In Wise/4, N masters his ill will to disprize by the discipline of remaining unprepared. He does not permit himself to negative expectations against which he must brace himself of what is to happen. Instead, by his unpreparedness, what happens is in his experience just as chance would have it and not per his negative forecasting thoughts that would construct it otherwise. He says that he is the equal of any chance event, by which I take him to mean that, in those days at least, nothing like "still a buffoon, but not as bad as I expected he would be" – which would seem to be equal standing against something – is any longer happening, and that, at this point in time at which he is in the position to write Ecce Homo to lead us in the Revaluation, he is capable of full equality to chance. But less-than-full-out equality is implied. Importantly for the study of the meaning of eternality in the idea of the eternal recurrence, he says that he is always equal to chance in Wise/4, that is, he never arouses ill will in others, and in Wise/5 that he never lives among his equals. These tense universals point to how we should be reading eternality in eternal recurrence. Plainly, they are not literal statements but declamations of love of life enough to do this in that it is very painful, and they make his ethos appeal to lead in the Revaluation. My takeaway from these sections of EH/Wise to the ER is that the ER too is affirmative psychology that facilitates evolutionary development.
As acquired characteristics, N.'s privileges could have made changes to his germ-line cells as the variation from his father he was trying to sort was very possibly carried in the germ-line. Weismann's in-famous barrier that would prevent this has been shown to be false. After all, why would N bother with the evolution of acquired characteristics unless he was thinking that acquired characteristics could consolidate into a common inheritance channel going forward as „eins dichte und zusammentrage,“ as he might have been formulating the idea of the Overhuman in “On Redemption”? Note that the acquired characteristics of unpreparedness and relinquishing equal entitlement not to be wronged are also revaluations, revaluation psychology here is evolutionary. Also, the revaluation takes us from a lie to the truth: in Wise/4, the moral lie is that what is merely chance can be bearish, etc. and in Wise/5 the moral lie is that I am equally entitled not to be wronged and so there is wronging. If anything is being set up by this for UAW IV it would be to look for how the affirmative thinking of the ER is a revaluation that brings into being a kind of general acquired characteristic, so it is about evolution, not cosmology, and truth not mendacity.
The central doctrines of N.'s ideas about of evolution are that all living things seek to become more, that they seek out resistances to do so, that a resistance must be equal, not above or below (see Wise/7 also, which perhaps was written intending to autobiographically introduce these ideas), and that the will to power in life interprets the overall resistance it faces to make it to be its equal, that is, it scopes the resistance down to an aspect it can face as equal and progresses up the chain of stronger resistance (WTP 656, 688; KSA 12, 2[148], and 2[151]. In Wise/4 equality is to the compulsion to disprize is full-out, and that means being equal to pure chance: the affirming discipline of unpreparedness has elided from imagination all there is to disprize as bearish, and for any value presented it is just chance. We find the same idea in Wise/5, which repeats Z 1“The Adder's Bite” on the point, where he neutralizes the wrongdoing to himself by the revaluation that he does not have an equal right not to be wronged although innocent, so he is always equal to not living among his equals, always relinquishing equal entitlement not to be wronged when wronged. He is equal, as equal in will to power, to the wrongdoer's innocence contra his compulsion to blame. So, equality is full out in these sections, making his ethos appeal. He masters aggrievement at his innocence wronged by the psychological exercise of foregoing that he has an equal right not to be wronged, and thus the ill will's imagining of wrongdoing and the wrongdoer cathected with vengefulness and the idea of deserved punishment are elided. The psychology of the ill will in Wise/5 is in the thought: "But I am his equal, equal-in-rights equal, and it is as his equal-in-rights that I am wronged,” and he says that he never asserts his equal right not to be wronged. We find the same critique of asserting equal rights AC/57. Always equal to chance, so not in ill will of expectations for others, and always equal (in will to power) to not living among his equal-in-rights equals so not falling to aggrievement, are declamations, not literal statements. They declare love of life. While the exercises lead to Mehrleben and imply the tragic psychology of joy in destruction, they are very painful at the level at which we have to live them and take a lot of courage to do. Both are psychological exercises to control vengefulness and clearly, they had lesser results early on as he applied them, and chance and moral guiltlessness are just neutralities left after the ill will has run itself out. Applying the psychological exercise elides an intentional object of the ill will cathected with vengefulness and replaces it with a neutral an sich.
N.’s wisdom, possessing it or not, is at the heart of the statement at EH/Books/BT/3, KSA 6, 313 7-12 that Z.’s idea of eternal recurrence might be traceable to Heraclitus. It an important text for McNeil and Heidegger. N asks the question whether his idea of the eternal recurrence is distinctive in Philosophy, that he has transposed Dionysianism into a tragic philosophy. In Dionysianism we find that in face of the fact that life sacrifices its highest expressions, Dionysianism responds by rejoicing in life's inexhaustibility. This become the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poets of joy in destruction. The point of the section that stands out is the statement that N alone was in the position to transpose Dionysianism into Philosophy, tragic pathos into philosophical pathos, because before him, tragic wisdom was lacking among philosophers, but he is not sure if completely so. He then asks whether there were antecedents of his tragic wisdom and he thinks that maybe it may be found in Heraclitus. If Heraclitus possessed tragic wisdom, his cosmology might be a philosophical transposition of the Dionysian, just as is N.’s. Clearly, if his thought of being the first philosopher to have tragic wisdom is so in play in this history of the ER at Books/BT/3, before drawing any conclusions we should ask what it was that he presented as his wisdom in the first chapter “Why I am So Wise," and the least glance at the chapter shows that its subject is evolution. The tragic wisdom of EH/Wise is that destruction is resistance for the will to power, and that otherwise we will not evolve. But then how can the ER be a priori cosmology if it transposes a biological law of our evolution which is empirical? It is heuristic that the ER is a declamation of resolve to commit to develop life under this law, the resolution that, so to speak, overcomes itself as resolve to make resolve a binding necessity and to so identify with it. What is left is ER's truth content, but it is just what coincides with the empirical law of our evolution: that will to power needs resistance to develop life and so resistance will keep happening because evolution keeps happening. Combined, these become N.'s Philosophy of Dionysus: The Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence, but this combination would seem not to be literal cosmology. He may well have first encountered the idea of eternal recurrence in his early studies of Greek Philosophy but that does not mean that he later took it over as cosmology and was writing about it as such in Z, and there is much to suggest that he had not.
In EH/Wise we find that the starting point for N is in his inheritance from his father. Next there is a change by means of self-imposed psychological disciplines that address vengefulness against life as cathected in the disprizing constructions of the ill will, and then the creation of life to Mehrleben. This is evolution. From what we know about epigenetics, N.'s affirming psychological exercises functioned to create an artificial environment of psychological stress against a first-order psychology that induced change in his inherited epigenetic profile from his father by working against its associated mood disorder. The affirming psychology results in Mehrleben because it clears up vengefulness and turns us towards the will to power. But it must be asked why is N telling us all this about himself, how can the revaluation pass through him? Perhaps N.’s epigenetic evolution went beyond the idiosyncratic because by reversing what was sui generis in his inheritance from his father he was reversing something wider that was also in that inheritance from him, namely, the socio-biology behind Christian socialization. From my research, which is limited, it is within theoretical possibility that because of his progressive brain disease, KLN experienced trauma that induced further regulation of the epigenetic code in him already associated with the mood disorder of revenge that is a single identity in the socialization of Christianity. That further regulation of that identity then affected FN so that in dealing with his father the personal and the universal became indistinguishable for him. N.'s evolution then becomes all our evolution.
Professor McNeil cites “Vision and Riddle” and “The Convalescent” as containing documentation that the eternal recurrence was objective cosmology for N, stating that there is a deduction of the ER in “Vision and Riddle” that is free from the metaphorical presentation of it in GS, and that Paul Loeb has shown that in this text Z dies and has a prospective memory of his struggle with disgust at humanity that he picks up again reborn in his next life in “The Convalescent” thus to give evidence of recurrence awareness. McNeil writes that in “Vision and Riddle”: “the cosmological metaphor of eternal recurrence in GS 109 and 341 is strengthened and developed into a deductive proof" (99). Laurence Lampert argued, and at length, in Nietzsche’s Teaching that it cannot be judged with confidence what N.’s intention was in presenting the deduction in “Vision and Riddle,” (160-171). Z tells his vision of eternal return to the sailors whom he praises for choosing not to “grope along a thread with a cowardly hand” the thread of argument, hating to deduce a truth they should be courageously guessing at instead. They are identified as the true audience for the riddle in EH/Books/3. It is not a guess at a possible deductive outcome, not like: 'Gödel guessed at formal undecidability before proving it,’but as an alternative that hates to deduce. They must already know it is true. And, per Professor Loeb’s interpretation, I will offer an alternative literal reading of recurrence awareness in "Vision and Riddle" that does not require us to conclude that N believed in the objectivity of eternal return cosmology.
If Z is not deducing the ER, what otherwise is going on? I suggest that during the presentation of the deduction of the ER, his evolution to Mehrleben by its affirmative psychology is also occurring. Willing the ER is evolutionary just as are the psychological exercises of Wise/4 and Wise/5. In that case, the deduction is double-signifying: for the dwarf, it is a deduction -- and a bad one as it is an enthymeme -- and he becomes estranged as it takes on its true identity as evolutionary and he vanishes. He vanishes when the task of evolution is accomplished, his discouraging message, perhaps that the Spirit who bears the fatality (Verhängniss) of a task bears the heaviest fate Schicksal, (EH/Books/Z/6, KSA 6, 345, 4-7) overcome by Z’s courage. Z's unfolding of the thought of the ER is accompanied by his awareness of life developing in himself. He recognizes willing the ER as the principle of Mehrleben and runs with it. He hears the dog howling and remembers that he heard a dog howl in his distant childhood and that is his past life and he has died and been reborn. Perhaps what has happened is that given the causal connection between willing the eternal recurrence and the evolution of Mehrleben, he identifies with willing the eternal recurrence as the principle of Mehrleben up to its literal idea of death and rebirth. Z temporarily identifies with the idea of the objectivity the ER, the logical "must," of the deduction, as the principle of the evolution of Mehrleben to the point of believing he has a memory that the dog barking in his present life happened in his past life, and so believing he has awareness of his present life as a recurrence. Recurrence-awareness would then be the evolution of novel mental life that Z creates in himself on the spot as willing the ER is pushed to its literal outcomes.
The point about the sailors guessing is that they do not take the coward’s way in following the ER as deduction but by it, they courageously face their own weakness of vengeful retreat from the law of evolution. The truth they guess is that willing ER is evolutionary, and it must be that they can guess it because they already know it, an anagnorisis of tragic knowledge. So what shall we say “is true” means here? In this reading, recurrence-awareness is not veridical, and the deduction of the ER is not logically sound, but it can be said that as long as I am achieving Mehrleben by believing in eternal recurrence I entirely cease to care about its literal falsehood. That is the reason for believing it although false. However, outside the human life-world, it might mean nothing. Would believing in the eternal recurrence have been developmental for Neanderthals for instance? We do not know whether they needed it. As paleo-epigeneticists mapped out the Neanderthal epigenome and identified the zones of differentiated methylation in their bodies in contrast with ours, they found, as expected, that the zone of highest differentiation was the brain. But then they recognized that one-third of the differences in the human brain had already been traced to cognitive disorders and mental illness in us which Neanderthals, then, must not have had. To go beyond N.'s speculations in GM on the origins of morals, perhaps our moralized vengefullness against will to power in life is traceable to gene regulation in this third of the differences, maybe because we had a different history from Neanderthals, or maybe we came out of the same history differently, or maybe because of the traumatic event that brought about their extinction but which we survived – they vanished about 40,000 years ago when the magnetic poles of the earth reversed, and maybe also because of it – all are ways pathologically weakened life that became so vengeful against the will to power that evolution stalled out could have appeared in us but not in them. Just to develop the point a bit, how otherwise could it have happened that we became vengeful against the will to power in ourselves in the weakness of vengefulness to thus make ourselves even weaker in life and slipping backwards? This would seem not to be possible being selected for as an adaptation except in the case in which it appeared in an environment of a cataclysmic and near extinction event that left a traumatic imprint on the epigenome of the remnant population, and not as in the gradualist Darwinian scenario of point mutations selected for. In this case, we can think about recurrence-awareness as novel mental life that we cause to evolve in ourselves as epigenetic evolution as we reverse the effect of our traumatic past, pushing ourselves to assent to the ER reserved for literal belief. But matters may have stood otherwise with our Neanderthal cousins, and that means that there is a theoretical range in which this statement does not have meaning. So our assent to recurrence-awareness can be stronger than als ob assent and can create epigenetic evolution, but it still can be false outside the human life-world. So I agree with the Loeb/McNeil thesis that we can read recurrence-awareness in "Vision and Riddle," but I think only within this evolutionary framework of novel mental life.
The thought of the ER is first introduced in Z on “On Redemption,” and Professor McNeil writes a section on it, 1.9, but he does not address the leading idea of the section, and that is that we are vengeful against the will to power in life in ourselves and in others and we exculpate ourselves in the thought of the past's pastness being punishment to be in good conscience about why we are suffering. The line that bears this reading is: “’punishment’ is what revenge calls itself, with a lying word it creates a good conscience for itself.” As we unravel this line, it becomes clear that willing the ER is the fix for an empirical a bottleneck in our evolution and not cosmology.
The psychological affirming exercises in Wise/4 and Wise/5 work by creating a psychological inconsistency: it is psychologically impossible both to be unprepared and also to construct the other in disprizing constructions (in Wise/4) and, just the same in Wise/5, it is psychologically impossible both to construct the wrongdoer as deserving punishment and also blame oneself for the wronging. Similarly, in willing the ER, we cannot continue to treat the past’s pastness as a punishment since willing the ER locks out a different past as unavailable to imagination in the recurrence of the same past, so we cannot will both that the actual past recur as the same and also imagine the different past. The imagined different past is cathected with vengefulness against the actual past in which I suffered on account of will to power's development of life. Life will sacrifice itself for power, as N tells us in Z 2: "On Self-Overcoming."
Mastering vengefulness against the past means becoming equal in will to power to “same past” for any past that I want difference to, where “equal” in “equal to the same past” is an interpretation by the will to power and not the entire actual past all at once, just what I can handle, and then later "equal to" moves up. The end goal is to replace the thought of the past as punishing by its pastness with the thought of neutral time in which the actual past's pastness is elided by the recurrence of sameness, as with it also the imagined different past as it cannot be imagined.
We learn from EH/Books/BT/3 that the ER is a philosophical transposition of tragic wisdom into Philosophy. N can make this transposition into tragic philosophy because, he is, likely, the first philosopher to have tragic wisdom. In "Why I am So Wise" we learn that his catastrophic inheritance of death in life from his father was a stimulus to evolution, to Mehrleben. He discovered in himself a track of non-Darwinian evolution to life beyond life necessary for survival. His tragic fate was death in life and he experienced it as the highest opposition to life as how life became Mehrleben in him as power over this tendency. He is grateful to it, to his father "I thank my father," as the highest opposition, and his gratitude is the psychology of the tragic poet. His wisdom is that, like it or not, it is the nature of the will to power in life to sacrifice itself for power over a resistance, power that becomes realized in and by the life of Mehrleben, that his inheritance had this meaning. We have tragic fates, but deep within them lie the workings of evolution to develop life in our species. N fused his new interpretation of evolution to the tragic psychology of the poets, and this became the Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence.
In all our lives then, and at all times, is the backdrop of will to power sacrificing life to engage a resistance, chunking the resistance into equal bits little by little, to grow in power over it in and by Mehrleben. But we are not aligned with this tragic law of our evolution and we become vengeful on account of the sacrifice of life will to power has required. We do not acknowledge it as resistence set by will to power we must face to evolve. Instead, in vengeance against it, I shun will to power for doing this to me, and in others, I actively seek to cripple it. I am vengeful against this resistance to life that has set me back, vengeful against the will to power, and, in vengeance, I construct the resistance in ill will as a historical event. In my ill will, I form up the idea of the different past in my imagination and cathect it with vengefulness against the actual past that pastness has locked up in opposing sameness. I have constructed the resistance set by will to power in the ill will and I forego Mehrleben, and so I suffer more. This suffering of which now I myself am the cause has to be hidden, it is telltale, it should not be happening after all, this weakness, and others will wonder. And, of course, I look for the company of those like myself. I lie to myself and to others and hide the trail connecting my suffering to vengefulness against the will to power from my not engaging with it. Were my suffering truthfully exposed and tracked as of my own doing, we would not be allowed to get away with it, as this becomes culture, and -- this is the worry -- an opposing culture might arise that would force me to stop doing it. So, I reconfigure these events to make my suffering come out as punishment and not my own doing, pastness is punishing me, and I disguise myself in good conscience. N used the phrase, "the Machiavellianism of the good and the just," and it would seem apt to this maneuver. The art of the ill will disprizingly reconstructs in imagination the resistance set by will to power to more power as Mehrleben as an event in the historical past with its law of pastness, and imaginatively constructs the different past opposed to it and locked out by pastness cathected with revenge. The true object of revenge is the will to power, revenge that life develops as it does as power, but the vengeful art of the ill will constructs will to power's setting of the resistance in its imagination as an event in the historical past that cannot be different. That thought against it -- sameness that cannot be different -- is full of suffering and revenge and, as this is all about powerlessness, the ill will assigns its suffering to the past's pastness by the further imaginative vengeful construct that the past's pastness is punishment for its suffering, to create the good conscience. My suffering is actually due to my vengefulness against will to power, but I have lied to claim that my suffering is punishment by the past's pastness and that I am good, that is what good is. All things that happen become punishment, the historical itself becomes punishment. I create the good conscience and face others aggressively in good conscience to counter reproach against myself. I do not want to face having to strengthen myself against the resistance set by will to power as I am, of course, weak at that point, otherwise there is no benefit to life to facing it, and so facing it is painful. Behind us all then, with few exceptions, is failure to square up with the process of will to power to evolve life in us as it does by its law of setting a resistance against us to master in Mehrleben. We are always backward looking on our failure because we are vengeful on account of it because more weakened, and remain so in a permanent state. In this way, the culture of Christianity is generated ongoingly. The more I fail off, the more will to power tries to build up life by setting resistances for me, and so the more I fail off as it is now harder. It is a downward spiral, and soon human beings will appear in whom there is so much weakness that they will not be able to square off with anything the will to power sets as resistance, and that will be the beginning of the end of Mehrleben as a potential for our species. Beyond heuristic, the idea of the eternal recurrence unravels the Machiavellian lie about our suffering that the past's pastness is the cause of suffering as punishment, and not that it is failing off engaging with the will to power. It effects an anagnorisis and turns us to engagement with how life evolves in us. Willing the ER destroys the disprizing construction of the historical, destroying the past's pastness and the imagined different past in the recurrence of the same actual past, and so opens on to neutral time, turning us towards engaging with how life evolves itself. Willing the ER is "beyond humanity and beyond time," (EH/Books/Z/1).
The will redeems its suffering foolishly by avenging itself on others. The foolish redemption of the suffering will is by avenging itself on “all who can suffer,” that is, all who do not yet suffer and do not just on account of their being in line with the development of life by will to power, and so who can suffer still. This is what N was reporting in saying pity had destructively intruded on him as he was growing in Mehrleben in all of three cases, (Wise/4, KSA 6, 270, 19-28). We, Christians at any rate, destructively intrude on others in vengefulness against will to power in the development of life working in them. We vengefully seek to create the suffering of weakness in others to get them to fail off trying to master the resistance set before them by will to power, doing so as vengefulness against the will to power ensuring its failure and spreading vengefulness against it. Then life does not evolve anywhere or in anyone, and we are avenged -- the mission of Christianity. This point from "On Redemption" relates by contrast to Wise/4 and Wise/5 where N discloses that this is himself, he is the Christian, but then he shows us how he dealt with it. His ill will is set destructively against the stronger will to power in those he encountered. As he is on the lowest rung on the ladder of life, a case of extreme weakness in life, his first order compulsion is to vengefully attack life in others as vengefulness against stronger will to power. The bears and buffoons and lazy students of Wise/4 and the wrongdoer of Wise/5 are his own disprizing constructions in ill will cathected with vengefulness, as they are always anders. But he masters vengefully striking back by using psychological exercises to create new mental life that replaces the moralizing vengeful ill will of old mental life. In Wise/4, vengeful moralizing has appeared as disprizing others as "bears" and "buffoons" and "lazy." He is inclined by his first-order psychology to want to punish his "lazy" students, but by the psychological exercise of being unprepared, he rethinks them as industrious. He has evolved new mental life as unpreparedness and, in Wise/5 new mental life as not living among his equals to rethink the wrongdoer and wrongdoing as not opprobrious. It is the same with willing the eternal recurrence: it evolves new mental life forcing us out of vengefully interpreting suffering (of weakness) as a punishment by the historical and its pastness to face that we do it to ourselves; "punishment" is the Lügenwort. Willing the ER is on the border line between the foolish redemption of suffering (of weakness) as beings of raging vengefulness on the one side and, on the other, authentic redemption in which I engage positively with the will to power as it works to develop life in myself On the one side is a culture in which we are turned in upon ourselves, abusive of others in their struggles to develop life in themselves, victimizing them in their vulnerability according as they can still suffer, in revenge against the will to power as revenge against the will to power in them. Destructively intruding pity belongs here, (see above). On the other side, I have turned outward away from society and compulsive intrusion on the other to engage alone with the will to power and become who it has set for me to be. N's task as teacher of the ER is to prepare this Selbstbesinnung in humankind.
Professor McNeil has two chapters on Heidegger, 3 and 4. He writes in 3 that Heidegger’s interpretation is “essential to any genuine understanding of [Nietzsche’s] philosophical project” (p.157), a claim many would contest. Chapter 4 is "a full critical appraisal of [Heidegger]" (210), but in these days in which Heidegger has emerged as the central philosopher of a globalizing far right, it should at least be acknowledged that the question of the influence of National Socialism on Heidegger’s interpretation of N is on the minds of many.
My negative review rating is based on Professor McNeil’s scholarly lapses. In Z， in ignoring key leading lines in chapters that decisively impact his position. The leading indicator line in “Vision and Riddle” is that the sailors “hate to deduce, and prefer to guess,” but he ignores the line and does not engage Lampert’s lengthy discussion, based largely on this line, critical of a literal reading of a deduction. Professor McNeil’s decontextualization of the deduction from its complexifying context of deducing being hated versus guessing being preferred is a serious scholarly lapse.
In “On Redemption,” the key indicator line is: “punishment is what revenge calls itself, it creates a good conscience for itself with its lying word” but Professor McNeil does not address it. This line, together with the line that willing the ER delivers us from the Spirit of Revenge, implies that willing the eternal recurrence disabuses us of a self-deception that hides not engaging the will to power to life in ourselves. Professor McNeil should have acknowledged and engaged that line because its implication is that the ER is not objective cosmology. He should have engaged Lampert's critique of Heidegger that ignoring the narrative structure of Z in regard to this chapter set up his mishandling of "Vision and Riddle" and "The Convalescent" in Part III.
Professor McNeil must also be faulted for uncritically following Heidegger in his use of the text of EH/Books/BT/3 as documentation that N believed that precedents of his idea of the eternal recurrence as objective cosmology are to be found in Heraclitus, on the grounds that there are many contextual factors involved in that section that do not allow for this straightforward tracing: that perhaps Heraclitus’s cosmology is a transposition of the tragic wisdom, N is unsure because he is unsure whether Heraclitus possessed tragic wisdom that he otherwise believes was lacking in philosophers before him but which he has achieved, which is philosophical autobiography, which then implies that the point of the comparison to Heraclitus is lost otherwise; that we learn from EH/Wise that the tragic wisdom required to transpose Dionysianism into the Philosophy of the ER is a thesis about evolution that states a contingent truth about how evolution works, and so its carry over to the ER makes its truth content also contingent and so knowable only a posteriori; that the heuristic involved in the ER would seem set up by the declamatory tense universals in the affirmation psychology of Wise/4 and Wise/5 on the matter of N.'s love of life in overcoming vengefulness against resistance set by will to power and engaging it, as it is painful, to make his ethos appeal, that thus suggests introduction to the idea that eternality in the ER is declamatory of love of life despite its terrible law of evolution; that the opening quotation in that text to TI/What I Owe to The Ancients/5 where N also identifies himself as working on Dionysianism as transposed into the Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence and that he is the teacher of the eternal recurrence, makes no reference to Heraclitus, nor elsewhere in the chapter of ancients owed and ancients not owed, where one might expect it, in paragraph 4. Furthermore, N cites the events of 1879 as the beginning of his philosophy and much of the study of Heraclitus cited by McNeil is earlier. All adds up to the conclusion that the linkage of Z's eternal recurrence to Heraclitus’s cosmology at EH/Books/BT/3, KSA 6, 313 7-12 is weak and cannot support McNeil’s strong claim about the role of Heraclitus and the Stoa in Nietzsche’s thinking about the ER as objective cosmology.
For reasons of the objections in the preceding three paragraphs, which are not new, Professor McNeil's book is not recommended.
