#3 Transgression and the Self; First Thoughts

The eternal recurrence of the same as the production of consciousness

Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal recurrence of the same might be one of his most confusing and contentious points, in part because of the different ways he himself seems to analyse it throughout his life. In The Gay Science it still appears to be a more straight-forward exercise of thought, a way to reflect on our actions: when the demon [1] tells us that all we do and will ever do will repeat itself in the same exact way for all of eternity, it is not so much a metaphysical claim as it is an ethical landing ground after the death of God in an earlier aphorism. [2] It is a moral point of reference that is immanent to life, instead of being transcended to it within the divine. If we were to actually take aphorism 341 as a metaphysical claim, were to extend this claustrophobic return to its fullest without the possibility of breakage, it seems like total despair; the aphorism right after it is called “Incipit tragoedia” – the tragedy begins.

Nietzsche is sometimes seen as a pessimist, and this greatest burden as he himself calls it [3] might appear as one of the greatest arguments for this position. The text itself however asks if this despairing stance should be taken, or if the demons message should not be seen as the most heavenly thing there is. Thus the eternal recurrence of the same might be read more positively, not only in the optimistic sense, but also in the more productive sense. If we choose to read the eternal recurrence not as repetition of being as a whole, but in a totally different way, I believe it can be read as a more constitutive process.

To construct this productive reading of the eternal recurrence we will start by take apart the term, beginning with the eternalness of it. If we take the demons message within aphorism 341 by heart, it seems like being as a whole will be repeated, and thus our consciousness will be repeated in its entirety, which cannot for us be seen until it is revealed; the eternality of the repetition cannot be known until it is revealed. And if we then do believe this eternal return while holding on to this grand metaphysical reading of it, we fall into a kind of vulgar determinism: if everything recurs exactly the same, anything we do to try and live differently will be a part of that cycle, and thus not be different at all. This determinism does not seem very much in line with Nietzsche, who criticises theories that suppose a formal structure within being as a whole. [4] This transcendent analysis of return, as in the return of the whole as a process outside of experience, in fact seems completely against the Nietzschean plea for a more immanent form of living.

It seems then that the eternality of the process should be found immanently, within our life. Eternity is a temporal phenomenon and is therefore found within our experience of time as a whole: although moments not within our experience of time can be conceived, such as our own funeral, they are not an extension of our own temporality but lay fully outside of it. Because of this, immanent temporality is fixed to our experience of time – our time as living beings. An immanent form of eternity will because of this not be placed outside of our experience but within it: a process that is eternal becomes something that spans the entirety of that experience as being: the eternal return is not the repetition of being as a whole but a repetition within the entirety of being.

With the eternal part of the term locked down, we will the ask what is being returned and what recurrence is within itself. Although it would be incorrect to state that being as a whole, i.e. everything that is with a capital I, is being repeated, that which is recurring is in fact being in its entirety: we have found that the eternality of the recurrence must be found immanently within our experience on a fundamental level, and there are two things that at its core constitute the entirety of being and are thus repeated within it: inside-ness and its other.

The cartesian conclusion that thinking proves the existence a thinker shows that within experience there is someone who experiences, or, as we would normally call it, consciousness. There is within experience however also something else: the thing that is experienced, the object. We have therefore within experience a divide between empirical experience, or experience of the outside, and consciousness, the experience of being withing oneself. There is an I within experience, being the one that experiences, and to that I belongs both an inside and an outside, where the outside or the other of the inside is that within experience which is not within itself. The fact that we know about this other within experience shows a certain intentionality inherent to consciousness, in the phenomenological sense of the word: the I aims itself at its other, reaches for it in the act of knowing.

The divide within experience as totality between inside and outside is a difficult one: it has been difficult for most theorists to go from one to the other. Michael Sugrue argues in his lecture on Husserl that most of the continental tradition within philosophy starts by explaining the inside and then finds it difficult to travel outside of that which they just have explained, just as how analytical philosophy starts within the empirical but then find it difficult to aim their theories onto consciousness. [5] There seems to be some truth to this: if we posit truth can be found within one of the two that truthfulness is immediately contrasted with the other one; if we take for example the phenomenological method of Husserl and try to look inwards, we find it exceedingly difficult to transfer the gained knowledge to others within the outside, since it is so steeped in our own subjectivity, whereas the Anglo-American tradition of focus on the outside or the public world makes it very easy to transfer knowledge since it is within our empirical immediacy, but this tradition then tends to do away with the internal world as a whole that constitutes so much of what it means to be a subject. [6]

There seems to be a border between the inside and the outside, like the border of a territory. We constantly experience the difference between the I and its other, between subjective and empirical reality. This difference or incongruence is found for example when discussing a phenomenon with others: when we find that we see an artwork as beautiful but someone else see that same artwork as beautiful, we find that there are different ways to interpret something inside of experience that is not within us, and this difference in interpretation shows if not the opposition then at least the difference between the inside and the outside, for if the two were one then subjectivity would be completely the same as empirical reality and difference in taste or interpretation between people would be impossible.

The goal of this argument is not to argue for a kind of metaphysical dualism for example extension opposed to spirit, as we find within scholastic philosophy, where one transcends the other; no, the aim is to show a difference within our experience immanent to it, between the inside and the outside. What the two are made of is of no concern.

- 𒈗