Tag: Nietzsche

The philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Simone Weil are certainly distinct, but both note — to a degree not noted or pursued by modern conventional thinkers — the characteristic violence embedded in ancient Greek culture. Both Nietzsche and Weil were scholars of Greek and understood the literature and spirit of ancient Greek cultural expression perhaps better than most contemporaries. They both see in Homer the purest expression of human nature in culture and society, extrapolating to an understanding of how ancient Greek psychology is the foundation of modern Western thought and institutions.

In Weil’s essay “The Iliad, or The Poem of Force” (1940), the culmination of warfare and savagery highlighted by descriptions in Homer’s Iliad renders Homer’s work a clear paean to force or violence. The contemporary gods encourage and abet the madness, and Homer’s cosmogony presents human nature as corrupt, vain, jealous, vengeful, and debased. Weil suggests that the Greek model adapted by the West in Greek politics, aesthetics, and intellectualism inevitably absorbed premises about human nature as well, embracing the premises of the mindless warriors and the supposed heroism of war.

Nietzsche, too, was influenced by philosophers about human nature, but he sees Greek culture in a more benign light. In his short essay “Homer’s Contest” or ”Homer’s Strife” (1872), Nietzsche argues that the Greek goddess Eris, who incites war and destruction among humans, is accompanied by a good second Eris who incites (only) jealousy and envy. Eris (the second one) only foments struggles that include a sense of competition or contests. This influence is useful to human productivity, says Nietzsche. But it is not a tenable presentation of Homer, where no such temperate sentiment drives the absolute violence and cruelty of the Trojan War, where no sense of fair competition is in sight. Nietzsche is searching for an exemplar of how Greek culture made itself superior to contemporaries, but his assumptions are untenable compared to Weil’s keen understanding.

The ancient Greeks (says Nietzsche) consciously pursued the “contest” because it challenged everyone to strive to perform to their best ability. The contest assured the generation and distribution of jealousy, rivalry, and envy, because those were virtues that maintained and extended accomplishment. The domination of envy in the Greek mindset is demonstrated not merely on the large theater of war, as in Homer’s Iliad, but at lesser levels of conflict, as Nietzsche himself notes. A representative example of poisonous envy Nietzsche points out is that in Ephesus the philosopher Hermodorus was banished simply because of envy. Nietzsche writes:

“If one wants to observe this conviction — wholly undisguised in its most native expression — that the contest is necessary to preserve the health of the state, then one should reflect on the original meaning of ostracism, for example, as it is pronounced by the Ephesians when they banish Hermodorus: ‘Among us, no one shall be the best; but if someone is, then let him be elsewhere and among others.’ Why should no one be the best? Because then the contest would come to an end and the eternal source of life for the Hellenic state would be endangered. … Originally this curious institution is not a safety valve but a means of stimulation: the individual who towers above the rest is eliminated so that the contest of forces may reawaken an idea that is hostile to the ‘exclusiveness’ of genius in the modern sense and presupposes that in the natural order of things there are always several geniuses who spur each other to action, even as they hold each other within the limits of measure. That is the core of the Hellenic notion of the contest: it abominates the rule of one and fears its dangers; it desires, as a protection against the genius, another genius.” (Walter Kaufmann translation)

Ostracism or banishment in the ancient Greek world exiles the offender to eremos, a desert place, a place of desolation. And eremos is the root word of eremite or hermit. And so Nietzsche indirectly provides a description of the historical hermit: best at whatever it is that provokes resentment among the authorities.

For Nietzsche, this essay is an early one, still under the influence of his The Birth of Tragedy, with its bipolar contrast of Apollonian and Dionysian. Later, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche will pursue the element of “contest” no longer in a literal sense but as an individual project, the transformation of self that coincidentally recognizes the superiority of the hermit life, the life of solitude, which is at the same time a projection of Nietzsche’s own life and vicissitudes.

Why is eternal return, or eternal recurrence, largely associated with the philosopher Nietzsche, although eternal return appears widely in ancient Eastern and Greek thought?

The short answer is the context of the times: in the mid-nineteenth century, the West had just begun translating the classics of the East and reading them seriously, or at least airing them. Schopenhauer heard details about Buddhism, for example, enough to confirm his pessimism and to prompt comments on eternal return, but there is no direct evidence that Nietzsche had a similar interest. Instead, Nietzsche attributes eternal return to his fictional character Zarathustra. While Zoroastrianism did address eternal return, it was not as thorough-going as in India, not that Nietzsche had read documents of Zoroastrianism either. Nietzsche had identified Zarathustra as a prophet not dependent on Judeo-Christian tradition, and that was sufficient for Nietzsche, who saw himself as a prophet, and Zarathustra as a persona. To Nietzsche, eternal return was not a doctrine so much as a good thought-experiment appropriate to his aphoristic style, which would not have fit the style of the formal philosophy of his day.

Eternal return refers to the repetition of grand cyclical epochs of universal time from beginning to end -— and then starting again, more or less as before. Eternal return is part of the genre of mythic cataclysm or catastrophe in many world religions. In ancient Hindu thought, transmigration of the human soul is subordinate to this process, with human beings having no say in the cyclical process. The idea was pan-Indian, informing Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain thought. Cyclical catastrophe characterized ancient Babylonian thought as well. In ancient Greek thought several variations were presented by Hesiod, Empedocles, Heraclitus, the Stoics, and eventually Plato. [The best summary of the history of eternal return is still Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954).

These speculations were all versions of cyclical returns. Universal cataclysm is an integral part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, wherein Christianity maintains the sequence of Anti-Christ, Armageddon, Second Coming, and ending. But in opposition to Asian religions presenting cyclical eschatologies, Christianity presents linear eschatologies, hence not returns.

As mentioned, Nietzsche’s original pessimism was drawn from Schopenhauer, who noted simply that no one in possession of his faculties could wish to go through cyclical return. Cyclical return would not alter events, persons, or circumstances, in the least. Sufferings, degradations, ills experienced in lifetimes would simply be repeated, all decisions, all minutiae, inevitably and irrevocably. To Schopenhauer, eternal return demonstrates the absence of free will, yet the drive of will lingers in human consciousness as a source of suffering. For Schopenhauer, eternal return may be a version of Buddhism in its perpetual revolutions in eons of time, manifesting eternal fatalism, eternal absence of succor. In any case, the notion captured Nietzsche’s imagination, but while accepting the return exactly in every respect, he makes exception for the will. Thus, return is not a repeat of mistakes but a test of one’s life at the moment, is not an eternal repetition of mistakes only but a chance to rectify will, perceptions, and meaning.

Nietzsche only mentions eternal return twice. In Gay Science (or Joyful Wisdom), he wonders how we might react to the notion of death initiating a cyclical return, and what we would think if a demon whispered into our ear that everything we are doing and thinking would be repeated infinitely. Would we not be aghast?

Thus Spoke Zarathrustra does not overthrow eternal return at all, for overthrowal would presumably liberate humanity from the misery and suffering of eternal return, but represent to Nietzsche a falsehood and a return to the myth of contemporary religious culture, including linear cataclysm with its illusion of joy and triumph. Rather, he accepts the inevitability and suffering of reality (eternal return) but insists that the person, the self, must change perception. This change of perception must address only oneself, for no other expectation or altered circumstance but only sheer will, insight, and perception, can give us a new ability to understand, tolerate, and transcend suffering. The present moment of existence must become the tablet on which to etch one’s aspirations, intentions, conclusions, directions, not change any external curcumstances but to see through everything, to live in its contradictions.

Eternal return is purgation of past weaknesses, failure, error, desire. The self must embrace not only the will to pursue a new self but what would be associated with Nietzsche as the will to power, meaning no more than the taking control of one’s self in life and destiny. Because this self-made destiny is the fruit of a personal struggle,the self must overcome much that is irrevocably external affecting the inner person. The will must transform the self not through attack but through transvaluation, the will overcoming obstacles, subjectivities, falsehoods, not reliant on society, culture, others, but forging one’s own path and system of thought and values. Who can achieve this state Nietzsche dubs the “overman” (übermensch), often misconstrued as the “superman.” The overman is not a powerful, grasping, obnoxious personality but thoughtful and collected one who rejects inherited assumptions of the world to discover what is real, if not what is true.

Talk of overman and transvaluation suggests bravado and arrogance, but Nietzsche was not such a person. He was reclsuive, solitary, with very few friends, living alone, eating abstemiously, always thinking, reading, writing, and walking alone in the mountains of Switzerland and northern Italy. He suffered intensely from the debilitating hereditary ilness CADASIL, which refers to constricted blood vessels to the brain, resulting in increasing strokes, migraine, vision pain, extreme light sensitivity, nausea, vomiting, deteriorating cognitive function and memory, and culminating in dementia, paralysis, and early death.

Nietzsche’s philosophical resources, too, predated psychology and sociology. Such tools were for the future, of course. The absence of many factors in his thinking is telling today — psychological, sociological, cultural, the unavailability or absence of intellectual and historical knowledge, plus the value of a keener awareness of the everyday factors in the material contexts of the daily lives of the masses and their effects.

But given the nineteenth-century context in the West, eternal return was bound to be unpopular even as a device, for there was not much in it that could be celebrated. Eternal return adds nothing particular to metaphysics or to our daily way of life, and may as well be non-return. But Nietzsche is using it to point to a modern theme: living in the moment and crafting a path for doing so. He correctly argues that our struggle to overcome self and context, to rise above it, is all that we can do, but also it is what we must do, and that in doing so is the only way that we can establish meaning. And what a thing if we can do it!