Murphy Shimamoto

A Time for Life and a Time for Death:
Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence and its Reversal of Plato and St. Paul

Introduction

Paul S. Loeb’s The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra offers a rigorous and convincing account of Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal recurrence, its centrality to his philosophical project, and its connection to other core ideas such as the superman. However, one of his main targets is Heidegger whose Nietzsche analysis belittles the importance of eternal recurrence. Yet Loeb leaves unexamined a key insight unearthed in the essay Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead’. There, Heidegger astutely notices that what Nietzsche accomplishes with regards to metaphysics is not necessarily an overcoming but a reversal, in that Nietzsche reverses the traditional relationship between the sensory and the supersensory. This paper wants to take up this Heideggerian insight of Nietzsche as a reverser and apply it to Loeb’s exegesis of eternal recurrence. In so doing, this paper aims to demonstrate that Nietzsche’s understanding of time could be read as a reversal of the concepts of time held by two of his philosophical enemies: Plato and St. Paul. Having done this, we can see that Nietzsche is not offering a philosophical innovation with respect to time. Rather, given that he views these two alternative notions of time as life-denying, in order to construct a life affirming notion of time Nietzsche reverses them. With regards to Plato he reverses eternal being into eternal becoming and with St. Paul the old man, new man dichotomy with the human, no longer human one. This essay will proceed with an eclectic compilation of Nietzsche’s remarks from the Gay Science onwards, as well as extensively drawing on Loeb’s own exegesis, in order to chart a constellation which reveals aspects of Nietzsche’s temporality that can be read as reversals.

Plato

Nietzsche’s famous aphorism on the dying Socrates says “‘O Crito, I owe Asclepius a rooster.’ This ridiculous and terrible ‘last word’ means for those who have ears: ‘O Crito, life is a disease.’…Socrates suffered from life.”¹ According to Nietzsche, Socrates unequivocally revealed his pessimistic hatred of life on his deathbed. This Socratic view is contrasted, exactly one aphorism later, with Nietzsche’s counterconcept of the eternal recurrence. Whereas Socrates accepts death as a return to the eternal forms out from the miseries and impurities of life, Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence is meant as absolute life-affirmation where one would “long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation”² of eternally reliving the selfsame life. Furthermore, in the next aphorism Nietzsche invokes Zarathustra saying “this cup wants to become empty again, and Zarathustra wants to become human again”³ belying where such a life-affirming relation to time is exemplified. This section will juxtapose Nietzsche’s concepts of becoming, eternal life, amor fati, and recollecting-forgetting against Plato’s counterconcepts in order to reveal that Nietzsche reverses them so as to invert a life-denying temporality into a life-affirming one.

Plato’s Socrates distinguishes between the visible sensible world of becoming and the permanent realm of being to which the former is an imperfect mirror. What is pertinent to this essay is that Nietzsche reverses the relation between them and in so doing eradicates the latter affirming only the former. As Heidegger notes “because the hitherto highest values ruled the sensory from the height of the supersensory, and because metaphysics is what structured that rule, to establish the new principle of the revaluation of all values is to bring about the reversal of all metaphysics.”⁴ Once Nietzsche has reversed the supersensory and the sensory he simultaneously swaps out the temporality of the supersensory with the sensory’s, i.e. he reverses the primacy of permanent being with transient becoming. This is confirmed in Zarathustra’s Blessed Isles speech where he lambasts God and metaphysics for making “and all that is not everlasting be merely a lie” and proclaims that “the best parables should speak about time and becoming: they should be praise and justification of all that is not everlasting.”⁵ Here Nietzsche directly associates time and becoming against being and permanence. We must now see how this reversal conditions subsequent reversals of Platonic concepts involving time and being.

According to Loeb’s exegesis “Socrates argues that life and death are contradictory opposites…Since the living come from the dead, there must be a timeless place outside this cycle of eternal rebirth where the disembodied souls of the dead exist before coming to life again. This is why Socrates hopes that his purified soul will be permanently released into this timeless place at the moment of his death.”⁶ The key claim of Plato’s Socrates for Nietzsche’s purposes is that “living people are born from the dead, and the souls of the dead exist.”⁷ In this way the transient becoming of life is subordinated to the permanent realm of being which persists before birth and after death. In that realm are located the eternal forms of which the living world are mere imperfect reflections. Nietzsche, however, inverses this relationship so as to subordinate death to life. Loeb continues “Nietzsche begins by noting Socrates’ short-sighted perspective on the beginning and end of life. If Socrates had taken a longer perspective…he would have deduced that time itself recurs and that life and death do not really contradict each other…all things are knotted together in a way that the world eternally recycles itself and all living things within it.”⁸ Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence replaces the primacy of the undying with the living. Heidegger notes, in the context of the relationship between the sensory and supersensory, that “However, every reversal of this kind will only be a self-binding entanglement in what is the same though become unrecognizable.”⁹ What is meant in this insight is that once the illusions of something supersensory have been unmasked as sensory in their origin, the supersensory ceases to have relevance as a category of thought in itself. Loeb recognizes the consequences of Nietzsche’s technique of reversal when he writes that life and death no longer contradict each other. Yet he fails to discern that this is part of a wider method employed by Nietzsche throughout his philosophy, especially evident in his reworking of temporality. The effect of this reversal is that one’s “dying consciousness is immediately succeeded by his returned awakening consciousness…‘Timelessness and succession accommodate themselves to one another.’”¹⁰ Hence, Nietzsche has, by subordinating death to life, collapsed the firm Platonic-Socratic distinction between the two, relegating death to a mere passageway to reliving the self-same life. Crucially, Nietzsche maintains eternity as a temporal category but puts it in service of life rather than death. Whereas for Plato’s Socrates death is a gateway to the eternal forms beyond life, Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence renders life, not death, eternal. Having reversed the primacy of death to life found in Phaedo, Nietzsche destroys the distinction between the two and puts the concept of eternity in the service of life.

This reversal also stretches into their competing concepts of love. For Plato’s Socrates “the goal of love’s ways” is to love, “this beauty always is, and doesn’t come into being or cease…nor does it undergo any change.”¹¹ Platonic-Socratic love is oriented towards the permanent realm of being where beauty is an unchanging and eternal form. Nietzsche’s concept of love and beauty, however, exists within the realm of flux and life. Nietzsche writes “I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them - thus I will be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on!”¹² It must be noted that the object of Nietzsche’s love, lived fate, is itself still unchanging and eternal. What distinguishes this view from the Platonic-Socratic is that the eternal unchanging object of love is meant to be the realm of living-becoming itself and not beyond in its opposite. Consequently, the means by which one loves are also radically reversed. In the Platonic-Socratic conception, one’s love is led “towards forms of knowledge, so that he sees their beauty too. Looking now at beauty in general and not just at individual instances.”¹³ In this progression from particulars to universals, one abstracts from oneself and the individuated entities found in life towards their eternal forms found in the non-life realm of being. For Nietzsche, however, “You have to be firmly grounded in yourself, you have to stand bravely on your own two feet to be able to love at all.”¹⁴ Whereas Platonic-Socratic love involves a self-abstracting, self-negating stance which undifferentiates what is superficially distinct, Nietzsche’s amor fati consists in a deeply grounded self-love and self-affirmation of all the particulars of one’s life.

Nietzsche, however, does not abandon the notion of a love of wisdom. He merely reverses where that wisdom is to be found, i.e. in living-becoming not in non-life being. For Plato’s Socrates, the soul “whenever it studies alone by itself it departs yonder towards that which is pure and always existent and immortal and unvarying…and this condition of it is called ‘wisdom’, is it not?”¹⁵ This self-abstraction from life towards the immortal eternal forms is the Platonic-Socratic means of actuating a love of wisdom. This is achievable because of the Socratic concept of recollection whereby the immortal soul recollects that which had been imprinted upon it from beyond mortal life. As Cebes said, “Socrates…that theory you’re always putting forward, that our learning is actually nothing but recollection…But that would be impossible unless our souls existed somewhere before being born in this human form; so in this way too, it appears that the soul is something immortal.”¹⁶ Nietzsche takes an antithetical stance with regards to wisdom. As Loeb writes “Zarathustra can recollect wisdom about the afterlife without ever having existed outside his body.”¹⁷ Since the Platonic-Socratic soul is immortal, it recollects forgotten wisdom from the non-life realm of being. Nietzsche, however, operates with the notion of a “‘mortal soul’”¹⁸. Therefore, when a soul firmly grounded in life recollects forgotten knowledge, that knowledge is self-enclosed within the eternally recurring world of living-becoming. As Loeb writes “each of us has already died and recurred innumerable times, and that this buried knowledge of our life’s eternal recurrence may be recollected.”¹⁹ Nietzsche, having reversed the Platonic-Socratic immortal soul into a mortal one, simultaneously reverses what wisdom it is meant to be recollected, i.e. wisdom of an eternal non-life being into wisdom of an eternally recurring living-becoming.

St. Paul

It was not sufficient for Nietzsche’s project of engineering a life-affirming concept of time to merely reverse Plato’s Socrates as another major life-negating temporality would have been left untouched. This alternative life-negating temporality comes from St. Paul. If we juxtapose St. Paul’s dichotomy between the old man and new man up against Nietzsche’s dichotomy of the human and no longer human, we can see that Nietzsche reverses a life-negating temporality of remembrance and forgetting into a life-affirming one wherein redemption from sin becomes a self-redemption from the past.

According to St. Paul “this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before.”²⁰ In this excerpt St. Paul seems to be setting up a clear temporal orientation in which one should forget the past and look only towards the future. However, when we juxtapose this citation against others from the Gospels and his letters we notice that the Christian, properly remembers and forgets qualitatively different aspects of the pasts while anticipating and ignoring qualitatively different types of futures. Matthew advises “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”²¹ We can understand the apparent discrepancy between Matthew’s exhortation towards future disregard and St. Paul’s future orientation when we recall that a Christian is meant to “Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.”²² Here, St. Paul reintroduces a dichotomy between the sacred and profane, heavenly and earthly which applies likewise to his concept of time. With this we can see that Matthew is reminding the Christian to forget the worldly things of tomorrow whereas St. Paul is orientated towards that future event which is of ultimate significance to the Christian, parousia. The Christian properly has “to wait for his son from heaven.”²³ This also allows us to make sense of how, in Philippians, St. Paul cautioned forgetfulness of the past whereas in Corinthians he recalls The Last Supper. St. Paul writes “eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me…this cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.”²⁴ When we read these excerpts together we can see that the Pauline concept of time is one where a Christian forgets and disregards the worldly past and future respectively and instead remembers the self-sacrifice and anticipates the coming of the savior. For it is through remembrance of the crucifixion that a Christian “Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.”²⁵ Through the crucifixion of Christ, the sins of the world have been redeemed. When one follows Christ they shed their worldly, sinful old man and “put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.”²⁶ This new man, remembering the sacrifice of his savior and anticipating his return, thus lives in a holy way redeemed from sin, as opposed to the old man awash in sin taking care of and burdened by the worldly aspects of his future and past. It is worth recalling the interrelation between sin and death. St. Paul writes “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”²⁷ Sin, disobedience to God, brought death into the world as punishment. Through God’s mercy he sacrificed his Son who taught the righteous path whereby one can be redeemed from eternal death and become reborn in Christ who will save the holy with eternal life. St. Paul’s temporality of the new man is thus the temporal orientation of the Christian which redeems him from death and sin.

This paper now seeks to juxtapose Loeb’s astounding interpretation of Nietzsche’s no longer human Zarathustra, grounded on eternal recurrence, against this Pauline conception of time in order to glean from it a reversal in remembrance and anticipation enabled by a reversal in a redeemer from guilt. Loeb recounts that once Zarathustra “has been transformed into an innocent child” that “he has forgotten the world and no longer concerns himself with witnesses…while remembering the sickness and nausea he had to overcome during his confrontation with his most abysmal thought…Zarathustra and his soul sing final dithyrambic songs that are based on forgetting.”²⁸ That abysmal thought and sickness are related to the weight of the eternal recurrence and the disgust Zarathustra feels at the lowest life forms recurring eternally. This excerpt from Loeb indicates the dual forgetting and remembrance which Nietzsche’s Zarathustra contains. Whereas the Christian has clear categories where remembrance and forgetting apply, Christ in the former and the worldly in the latter, once Nietzsche has collapsed a dual world distinction, forgetting and remembering can only take place within the bounds of life itself. Therefore, what Zarathustra must remember is his eternally recurring self-same life. Having done so, Zarathustra is then free to forget or remember events and aspects of that life as he pleases. Nietzsche writes “Let looking away be my only negation.”²⁹ In order to beautify and affirm one’s life, one can choose to ignore or remember aspects of their life. The Nietzschean criteria for remembrance or forgetting is what serves the purposes of life itself.

What defines Zarathustra’s temporal reorientation is “his self-redemptive deed”³⁰ which Loeb frames as “an act of self-overcoming on the part of humankind itself.”³¹ This self-redemptive reorientation of time is achieved by overcoming the temporality which defines the human being. Nietzsche writes of the human animal that it “has bred for himself a counter-device, memory.”³² Through pain and punishment, the human being has developed a concept of the past which allows it to make promises into the future. As Loeb writes “its usual animal forgetfulness was suspended and it was now able to ordain the future in advance…Now, in a parallel fashion, Zarathustra opens with Zarathustra’s call for the superhuman to emerge from the human, just as previously the human had emerged from the animal…the will a new power over time.”³³ According to Loeb’s exegesis, what distinguishes the human animal from others is that it has acquired a past tense which opens up a future in which they can project their will. However, this has also created the psychological concept of guilt derived from the opening of this past horizon. Loeb expands on this writing “According to Zarathustra’s redemption speech, this is because humans have so far lived in accordance with the concept of an immovable ‘it was’ which they cannot escape or forget, which renders important their efforts to create and seek new beginnings, and which burdens them with an ever-accumulating and unredeemable guilt that prevents true life affirmation.”³⁴ This is the concept of guilt, bred from the temporal orientation that defines humankind, from which human beings must redeem themselves. Loeb carries on “the awakened truth of eternal recurrence and the resulting discovery of backward-willing enable Zarathustra to create a new soul that possesses all the traits that he earlier attributed to the child-spirit.”³⁵ According to Loeb, Zarathustra’s redemption from guilt is brought about by a reevaluation of one’s own temporality, through the discovery of backward-willing. This new orientation is defined by the fact that “Zarathustra will no longer share the limited human perception that there is an asymmetry between the past and the future such that the past is always fixed….his eternally returning past also lies ahead of his present and is therefore just as open to his will’s influence as his future.”³⁶ The eternal recurrence is the self-redemptive conception of time which frees human beings from their debt to the past allowing them to see their past and future as a circular interlinked whole that is a domain of creativity for the self-willing no longer human being. As Nietzsche’s reversal collapses the Platonic-Socratic distinction between life and death, he also removes the human contradiction between past and future.

Having put forward Loeb’s exegesis of Nietzsche’s self-redemptive temporal orientation, we must now see how it can be read as a reversal of the Pauline Christian redemption. Once Nietzsche has grounded the debt-guilt which defines humanity within life-time itself, as opposed to a God who resides outside of time, redemption itself must proceed from within the self-transcending human being rather than as a gift from outside it. Whereas Christian sin-debt must be redeemed by God himself who comes down and shows humanity that “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me”³⁷ and counsels that “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me”,³⁸ Zarathustra suggests “Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.”³⁹ This reversal from an externally gifted redemption to an internally self-creative one, however, carries over a dichotomy between the redeemed and unredeemed being. Whereas in the Pauline conception those who have been redeemed by God put on the holy new man overcoming the sinful old man, Zarathustra moves from the guilt-laden human into the no longer human. However, Zarathustra does not merely overcome past-guilt but also has a future orientation as “He is the firstling who must sacrifice himself for the sake of the superhuman.”⁴⁰ This is confirmed in Zarathustra’s Blessed Isles speech where he tells his followers that “you recreate yourselves into fathers and forefathers of the overman: and this shall be your best creating!”⁴¹ Whereas the Pauline new man’s redemption is confirmed by the temporal orientation in which he remembers the crucifixion and awaits the parousia, the Nietzschean no longer human self-redeems through remembrance of his eternal recurrence and projects towards the future by viewing himself as the ancestor of the coming superhumans.

It must also be recalled that in Christianity sin-guilt brought death into the world. Therefore, in order to be saved from eternal death the Christian must be redeemed by Christ. However, in the Nietzschean case once the no longer human recalls that his life is eternally recurring, the key for self-redeeming from the past, death also fades away. As Loeb writes, “Zarathustra’s perspective on his own death is transformed. Although he realizes that his soul is still as mortal as his body…he now sees that his death is no longer final. Instead, he will be created again by the recurring knot of causes in which he is entangled and return to a life that is qualitatively identical in every respect.”⁴² Whereas Christian temporality requires a redeemer to save humanity from the punishment of eternal death, Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence collapses the distinction between life and the afterlife. Therefore, the self-redeeming no longer human has redeemed himself from death through the knowledge that his life will continually self-resurrect itself. We can now understand Zarathustra’s reversal of the way to redemption. For the Christian following the example of Christ is the sole way towards redemption from sin and eternal death, whereas in Nietzsche once the knowledge of eternal recurrence has been grasped, liberating one from the guilt-past and eternal death, it remains up to the self-redeeming no longer human to “be one of those who make things beautiful.”⁴³

Conclusion

This paper has endeavored to demonstrate that Nietzsche’s life-affirming concept of the eternal recurrence, brilliantly analyzed as Loeb, can be interpreted as a reversal of the life-denying concepts of time exposited by Plato and St. Paul. This reversal has hopefully become clear having juxtaposed their views against Nietzsche’s own. In the case of Plato, Nietzsche reverses being and becoming wherein eternity and love become attached to the transient recurring self-same life and remembrance is directed towards eternal recurrence. With St. Paul, Nietzsche reverses the external salvation of the new man from a guilt owed to God into an internal self-redemption of the no longer human from the guilt of the human ‘it was’. This collapses the paradigm where forgetting and disregard belong to the past and future of the worldly and remembrance and anticipation belong to the crucifixion and coming parousia, in favor of a remembrance of the eternal recurrence and anticipation of the coming superman. In so doing, remembrance and forgetting are placed in the services of the eternally recurring life, casting out the possibility of the eternal damnation of death.

Notes

¹ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 193-4.

² Ibid., 195.

³ Ibid., 195.

⁴ Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 173.

⁵ Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 66.

⁶ Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 62.

⁷ Plato, Phaedo, 72e.

⁸ Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 62.

⁹ Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 173.

¹⁰ Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 68.

¹¹ Plato, The Symposium, 211a-b.

¹² Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 157.

¹³ Plato, The Symposium, 210d.

¹⁴ Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 105.

¹⁵ Plato, Phaedo, 79d.

¹⁶ Ibid., 73a.

¹⁷ Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 74.

¹⁸ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 14.

¹⁹ Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 82.

²⁰ Philippians 3:13

²¹ Matthew 6:34

²² Colossians 3:2

²³ 1 Thessalonians 1:10

²⁴ 1 Corinthians 11: 23-25

²⁵ Romans 6:6

²⁶ Ephesians 4:24

²⁷ Romans 5:12

²⁸ Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 107-8.

²⁹ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 157.

³⁰ Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 146.

³¹ Ibid., 171.

³² Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morality, 36.

³³ Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 215.

³⁴ Ibid., 196.

³⁵ Ibid., 196.

³⁶ Ibid., 225.

³⁷ John 14:6

³⁸ Luke 9:23

³⁹ Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 59.

⁴⁰ Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 199.

⁴¹ Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 65.

⁴² Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 185.

⁴³ Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 157.

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---. The Genealogy of Morality. 1887. Cambridge UP, 2017.

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---. The Symposium. Penguin Classics, 1999.