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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you
from the Stanford campus.
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Frederick Nietzsche and Echae-Omo, "I am to express it in the form of a riddle,
already dead as my father, while as my mother, I am still living and becoming old.
This dual descent, as it were, from both the highest and lowest rung of life,
at the same time a decadent and a beginning.
This, if anything, explains that neutrality, that freedom from all partiality
and relation to the problem of life, that perhaps distinguishes me."
That perhaps distinguishes me? Come now, Freddie.
Modesty doesn't sit well with you.
After all, you're the one who claimed future history would be divided into BZ and AZ
before Zara-Thustra and after Zara-Thustra.
You're the one who declared, "I am no man, I am dynamite."
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Now that's more like it.
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That's the Nietzsche we love.
The one who exploded all prior foundations in order to create new ones.
The transvaluator of all values.
Listen to him retrace the history of an error in his twilight of the idols,
as it passes through six stages, each of which unfolds the course of plate-nism
until its final overturning by Nietzsche himself.
"The true world we have abolished, what world has remained?
The apparent one perhaps? But no. With the true world, we have also abolished the apparent one.
Noon, moment of the briefest shadow, end of the longest error, high point of humanity,
Incipit Zara-Thustra.
The phrase "incipit Zara-Thustra" refers to a principle of initiation.
It is a typically Nietzsche and principle whereby ends and endpoints are converted into new beginnings,
metamorphosed into a child to recall Zara-Thustra's famous allegory.
But let's raise the overwhelming question, shall we?
Does Nietzsche really take a step beyond the end of metaphysics, call it nihilism, or does he finalize that end?
If you follow Heidegger, Nietzsche was the last metaphysician of the West, not the most recent, the last.
His thinking marks the culmination, not the overcoming of nihilism,
where Nietzsche projects a new beginning, Heidegger sees a paradoxical consummation of the end.
Jacques Derrida by contrast found in Nietzsche's style of writing,
"In de mache de fronci s'more u de tons grésial emposibl."
A crossing over or an impossible transgression of metaphysics.
And is typically coquette mode, "Derrida speaks of Nietzsche's pa or doula,"
which can be understood either as the step beyond or as the not beyond.
No comment, "Guad de passe."
When France overbecc arrived in Turin on January 9, 1889, a few days after Nietzsche's mental collapse,
he found Nietzsche crouched in the corner of a sofa, reading the proofs of Nietzsche-Kontravogner.
As far as we know, he may have been reading the epilogue, where Nietzsche writes, "As for my long sickness, I owe it a higher health.
Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit, as the teacher of great suspicion, which turns every u into an x,
a real genuine x, that is, the letter before the penultimate one."
In Nietzsche's alphabet of the ultimate, suffering turns every u into an x, the letter before the penultimate one,
the ultimate letter is z, of course, but we know that Zarathustra figures as a beginning beyond the end.
The ultimate, in other words, overcomes the end.
Between the u and the z lies the turning point, that is to say the x.
The Nietzsche and x is a crossing of many crosses.
In the passage quoted earlier, it alludes to the crucifixion of personal suffering.
However, the x also defines the relationship of Nietzsche and Wagner.
In Echeo Monetre talks about sending a copy of human all-to-human to Wagner,
"By a miraculously meaningful coincidence, I received at the same time a beautiful copy of the text of Parcival.
This crossing of the two books, I felt as if I heard an ominous sound as if two swords had crossed."
In Nietzsche, Konnter of Wagner, Nietzsche remarks that Wagner "suddenly sank down helpless before the Christian cross."
What did Parcival mean, he asks, "In the end, a self-abnegation, a self-crossing out on the part of an artist who had previously aimed at the very opposite of this."
We have to wonder whether the same could be said of Nietzsche at the moment of his mental collapse,
whether in the alphabet of the ultimate Nietzsche, in fact, remain nailed on the cross of the x.
This would explain why he signed many of his last mad letters, the crucified,
and why the title of his last, if not ultimate book, Echeo Monetre, identifies its author with Christ.
Is the Z of Zarathustra a veritable innkipit, a new beginning beyond the end, or does Nietzsche's thinking end up circling eternally around the mystery of the crucifixion, even as it moves beyond the logic of plate-nism?
This is one of the questions I will be raising with my guest today, Andrew Mitchell.
Professor Mitchell is well-known to many of the listeners in entitled opinions.
Thanks to two memorable shows I did with him in the years past on the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Andrew, it's a real pleasure to have you back on the show and welcome back to California.
The last time you were on entitled opinions was two years ago, you were on your way to Emory University to become an assistant professor of philosophy.
How are things working out for you over there so far?
Thanks for having me back, Robert. It's an honor to be back on this show. I've been listening since I've been gone.
I've converted a number of people into new listeners as well. Emory's been great, everyone's very supportive, they like what I do, and I feel like it's a great place for me to be and thrive.
It couldn't be better, really.
Well, it could be better if you were here at Stanford with us, I have to reiterate that.
Not for the moment, I think you're at the right place at the right time, and maybe one day back here.
I raised some questions here.
Very general regarding Nietzsche's career as a thinker, his breakdown, and the role that the ex understood in a variety of different modes might play in his alphabet of the ultimate, as it were.
All of this in allusion to his phrase, "Incubit sera throughstra," which is, of course, an allusion to the book, "The Spoke Sera Throughstra."
We know from Echae Omo that Nietzsche really believed that that book was one of the most fundamental events.
His other writings, he refers to it throughout, and it always comes up as a pivotal moment in his thinking.
The crux of his thought, to follow your idea of an ex.
So, here's the question I'd like to start with. One is that many people find "Zero Throughstra," an alienating book of philosophy, because it doesn't speak the ordinary prose, a treatise-like prose.
It is a full of parables, it has this character, legendary mythological, I don't know how you would characterize them.
It's portentious, it's prophetic, it's all sorts of things, lyrical at the same time.
Some people find it preachy. Very preachy. I don't think one can deny that it's preachy.
Do you go along with Nietzsche in believing that it's his major work?
I do. I do. The relationship between that and the book before gay science, I think,
either of those would be the major work, and they cover the same ground more or less.
But, insofar as "Zero Throughstra" has this amazing style, this off-putting style to many, who seek in it philosophical treatise of sorts, or on the other side, who look for a novel in it with a coherent plot
or an engaging plot. There's no car chases. There's just chapter after chapter of "Zero Throughstra," speaking to or about a variety of sick people.
It's a diagnostic of society. I read it myself almost as a DSM of problems of the soul.
Sickness is illnesses of the soul, maladies of the soul, you see the representatives, the living representatives of them, and they are addressed by "Zero Throughstra."
That's the style of it. It's a hybrid of philosophy and literature. That's what makes it a great book.
The ideas aren't simply presented in abstract. They're embodied in characters, and those characters are the physical manifestation of those ideas.
That's one of the key points of the book I would think, that this issue of embodiment.
And the book itself begins with this epigram or subtitle, the book for all and none.
And I think that's also very important for approaching the book.
I mean, it's prima facie paradoxical to say it's for all and for none.
But I think it's meant to speak to all of us, "Quah, human." And so far as we're human, this book is for us.
But as none of us are the uber-mensch or the overman, if you will, and we should speak about that definitely. It's for none.
Yeah, we will speak about various doctrines that are contained articulated in the book.
I would say that the literary genre through which it comes to us puts those doctrines sometimes in doubt about whether they're intended in the way that many readers have intended.
You refer to the subtitle about a book for everyone and no one.
This in a certain way is a prelude to Xerathrus Tras, self-presentation at the beginning of the book, where he has been living in solitude for the last 10 years.
And he decides to get come down from his mountain where he has been a no one, vis-a-vis the human society below.
And he descends into the marketplace, which is the place of everyone if he like.
And there he begins his preaching to all these people that you were referring to.
And of course it could be that he's preaching to everyone, but no one really understands that.
And it's very interesting as well that in the mountains he lives in a cave too.
So we have this whole reversal of Platonism operative where he leaves a cave as the philosopher and Plato's Republic leaves the cave.
But in the Republic they leave the cave to find truth and the true light of the sun.
Here he leaves the cave to go to, as you say, the marketplace.
And part of the import of that is Xerathrus Tras can't live alone.
I mean, I think there's a serious critique of the idea of self-sufficiency.
He has to give, right?
And so he sees the sun, the sun is always giving and donating this energy, and he wants to be like the sun.
He needs someone to receive his gift, to receive his teaching.
And the whole book, to me, is also articulating a logic of reception, giving and receiving.
You can't just give if there's no receiver.
And so the whole, the plot of the book is him trying to find someone to receive his teaching.
When he's going down into the marketplace, he actually doesn't, there's a little encounter that he has in the forest with a hermit or a saint in calls him.
And if a saint tries to discourage him from going, he says, "Is Xerathrus, or you lived in your solitude as in a sea, a last, would you now climb ashore?"
And Xerathrus Tras answers, "I love man."
And the saint says, "Man is for me to imperfect a thing. Love of man would kill me."
And there, as you said, Xerathrus Tras did I speak of love? I bring men a gift.
And then the saint becomes emphatic and says, "Do not go to man, stay in the forest, go rather even to the animals. Why do you not want to be as I am, a bear among bears, a bird among birds?"
The answer is that he has a gift for man, but is it not also the case Andrew that at the end of Xerathrus Tras he actually returns to his cave on the mountain top.
And has almost despair of the recipients that you're talking about all the amount of men.
And he really communes ultimately with his animals more than anyone else.
Yeah, I think that's right. He returns to the cave a couple of times in the book.
That passage when he meets the hermit is also very interesting because the hermit says, "Stay up here in the mountains."
As though that's a viable option for living a true life.
And Xerathrus Tras says, "What has he not heard? God is dead. God is dead and this man is not heard."
And so I take the hermit's position that you can live alone as an idea that depends on the existence of a God.
But now that God is dead, that option is off the table. There's no independent life.
There's only this social project that we have here with each other in a human community.
And so the whole book, the books, Aatutur, is written in the wake of the death of God.
Yeah, that's kind of depressing though. I understand what you're saying.
The hermit can live alone because he is not in a state of loneliness because he has his God there to commune with.
And with the death of God.
But he also says, "Why don't you be a bear among bears?"
There is, I would like maybe as too early in our show to throw out this interpretation.
But if the human community and the human project is all that's left in the wake of the death of God, then we're in a sorry state indeed.
That there has to be maybe perhaps some option for the future of a new kind of relationship to the earth and its species and animals.
Yeah.
A new kind of communion with the vegetable and animal world.
And that's the function of the uber-mentch in the book.
Nice.
So why don't we talk about that? The uber-mentch is this, in fact the first thing Zara Throustre does when he goes down into the marketplace is that he gathers these people around him.
He tells this story of, well, he sees, when there's this guy, tight road walker, he wanted to recall it.
And the tight road walker comes out, people gather around.
The whole atmosphere of the book is this strange carnival.
It's where carnival meets religion.
It's very thick symbolic, but without any identifiable signified at times.
I admire people who decode the book and can give an index.
Each figure represents someone and he needs his life or something.
But I prefer the mystery of it to remain.
I think it evokes symbols.
The symbols are evocative, but of no particular, easily unequivocal solution.
So this tight road walker is, in a sense, one of these.
He comes out, the people are gathered around for an entertainment.
And then a dwarf springs out from behind him, runs up, jumps over him.
And in jumping over the tight road walker, he's tasled and falls to his death.
It's not the best end to a performance, I suppose.
Not with the crowd expected.
I think they jeered him maybe or something.
But Zarathustra goes to him and says, because you lived a life of danger, I will bury you myself.
And so he takes him to perform this ritual for him because of his advocacy of danger.
Even in this comical contact.
But doesn't he also use the tight road walker as the occasion to enunciate the idea of the uber-mensch?
Yeah, man.
That man is a crossing over.
He's to be overcome.
Yeah.
Oh man, is something to be overcome now?
Yeah.
Yeah, he's a crossing.
But they don't listen to, I mean, they don't hear him.
So what, the overman, how do you understand the overman, especially with respect to the things that I was mentioning in the lead-in about?
I think that's the first time that I've been able to come to an end and getting beyond the end, going over, overcoming.
Well, I think of it, I maybe have a peculiar interpretation of it, that the first half of the book, books one and two basically, are this kind of diagnosis of, as I said, the maladies of the soul.
And the uber-mensch is functions as a therapeutic manner to cure these problems.
So, Zarathustra meets this motley cast of characters who each suffers in some way.
It's, he meets people who are suffering and who are reacting against that suffering with various philosophies, despisers of the body,
uh, features of death.
All of these people are in, in short, frustrated.
They've put their hopes the whole, in general, if we can speak about them in general.
They've put their hopes in things that either they couldn't achieve that were impossible for them.
They've been deluded, they've misplaced their desires, and they're frustrated.
That frustration turns inward, involutes, poisons them.
And out of the vile and frustration of their inability, they give birth to these philosophies, Christianity, for example,
that preach another world where they would be saved or redeemed.
People whose life is failure, they've misplaced their desires in things.
They thought that objects could satisfy them.
Or, so, there's two sides to it.
They've, they've either placed their desires in something they can never have,
or in something they can have.
And when they get what they wanted, there's no satisfaction in that.
They find, you know, as everyone does, that life is more than these possessions.
And so, they're dissatisfied too.
And that makes them think that life played a trick on them, and they have to attack life.
So, all of these people he meet, he meets, have in various ways turned against life, because they feel it's double-crossed them.
Because of where they've located their treasure, their desire.
And to them, Nietzsche, Zarathustra, offers the uber-ment.
You've misplaced your longing, your desire on something you can achieve, or you can't achieve.
You need to break out of that whole cycle of thinking about desire in this way, and welcome the uber-ment.
The uber-ment becomes this sink for all of their vile, all of their hopes.
They can dump them on the uber-ment, and the uber-ment can receive them.
In the book he calls the uber-mentch a sea in which you can drown.
These people are so cravin', so eaten up with their own bile that they think there's no hope.
And he presents the uber-mentch as something to which they can direct all of that, cleanse themselves,
by putting all their energy, libidinal energy, desire, longing on this figure of the uber-mentch.
But on the figure, or does he call on them to strive to become the uber-mentch in the sense of to overcome all these afflictions that they suffer from?
They do that by changing, this might be worth articulating, changing the register of their desires.
It's no longer about a being, a being that they can't have, or a being that they can't have.
It's about becoming.
And the uber-mentch is this infinite task that can't be achieved.
And so all of the frustrations arise from achievement, either actually achieving, or not at all achieving, impossibility of achievement.
The uber-mentch offers a different order, not achievement, but becoming.
And that is the transition to see that the goal is, in a sense, goallessness, or that we've been caught up in goals too much.
And that's a world of static being, and we need to embrace instead this world of becoming.
And that is the figure of the uber-mentch.
So there's no way that you're subscribing to any notion that the uber-mentch is, will be an eventual point of arrival with some kind of super-race, or the kind of privilege,
aristocracy among human beings, and that it's the super-man in the old sense that was understood.
Especially by the Nazis who read Nietzsche, you know.
Right.
The uber-mentch is not achievable.
No one can be it, but that doesn't mean there are not uber-mentch.
There's no over-ment.
You can only become the uber-mentch, and you can continually become the uber-mentch.
But you can never be the uber-mentch.
So, no, there are, in the strict sense of is being, there are no over-ment.
But we can all, well, maybe all of us, become over-ment.
And that's as good as you can do.
So this issue arises in talking about serotuster himself.
People ask, is there a toaster of the uber-mentch?
Is he not?
Most people say no, he's only the teacher of the uber-mentch.
And he specifies he has two teachings.
They're a toaster.
He teaches the uber-mentch, and he teaches eternal recurrence.
We should talk later about how those really.
And so, because he's just the teacher, he can't be the figure.
But I think no one can actually be it.
Being the teacher of it is a way of becoming the uber-mentch.
And so, to me, he is, and scare quotes, the over-ment.
Yeah.
Well, what he says explicitly when he's referring to the gift that he brings to humankind
from the mountains is the message of the over-man.
And he says, quoting, "The over-man is the meaning of the earth."
Yeah.
And that your will say, "The over-man shall be the meaning of the earth."
And that's where he uses the tight rope walker as the figure.
When he says, "At man is a rope tied between beast and over-man.
Man is a bridge and not an end."
And then, of course, the people mock him and so forth.
So, that idea that man is suspended on this rope between a past and a future,
I think leads right into the idea of the eternal return, which as you rightly say,
I agree with you that it's the second main thing that deserves to resince a communicate to human life.
Maybe we should talk about meaning of the earth before that movie.
Why don't we?
Yeah.
I think this is where I would touch on gay science as well.
But the preface to that book describes Nietzsche writing it after a stage of convalescence,
which is a key issue in the zerithustra.
And there he is overcoming a sickness.
But as we hear of this sickness, he overcame it by being exposed to the winds of his recuperation,
letting the wind in, cleaning the air, new air,
instead of the bad air.
The illness he suffered from was precisely the closure of the metaphysical subject,
of the Cartesian subject.
Metaphysics is ill, is the illness for Nietzsche.
Sickness is metaphysics, believing that you're a self-contained subject in ego.
And coincident with that, seeing yourself as just the thinking side of the ego,
the ego as mind, distinct from body.
So with this advocacy of the ego in metaphysics and with the thought of that ego as utterly distinct from the body as pure intellect,
we have become utterly sick.
That illness, to overcome that illness, is to burst open the bounds of that subject,
and to re-embrace the body, to re-embrace life, nature.
And in so doing, to overcome the artificial separation we've put in place between mind and body,
which makes each of them as pure as possible, and in so doing sets them antagonistically opposed to one another.
The body becomes a brute animality.
And so to restore the two together is to reinvigorate both of them,
put blood into the mind and to give meaning to the body.
In so doing, this transformed understanding of the self as no longer directed by mind-body dualism,
that is the life that needs to advocate in their toaster.
And I think that is the way we give meaning to the earth.
To become the meaning of the earth is to no longer see the earth, the material, the body, as completely devoid of meaning in a separation from mind.
Yeah, I'm all with that. However, I continue to bump up against this scandal on,
and I think Nietzsche also did, which is that the body is not merely this thing that metaphysics has excluded from citizenship in the ego,
but the body is also the place of deformity, decay, death, and suffering.
And many of these people that are through string counters, these sick people that you're referring to,
many of them are cripples, they have handicaps, and they are poor destitute,
and it's in their bodies that they are suffering the most.
And their revulsion against life is not so much, that they're enclosed within Cartesian egos.
And their revulsion against life is that the body is the locus of their most intense suffering,
and they're not able to say yes to life despite its suffering in the way that the overman presumably can say yes to life under those conditions.
Yeah. Well, their abstraction of themselves from the body, and he meets the whole cast of characters,
the abstraction of themselves from their body still leaves them with a body, and that body decays, that body goes unexercised, yeah.
And so what you have in Nietzsche is this advocacy of, well, this understanding of the body as, well, our bodies determine our thoughts in some way.
I mean, this is, if we take Nietzsche seriously, then we have to approach this kind of almost physiognomy in his thinking, this extreme biologism of a sort.
Yeah, this physiologism anyway, where diet shapes how you think, right?
There's these scandalous passages that are considered racist, where, you know, the Indians have a certain kind of thought way of thinking,
because they eat so much rice, he says, and we think that's outlandish, ridiculous, racist blah blah blah.
But if you understand the body, the way Nietzsche does, you have to take these claims seriously, or at least see what is serious in them, that the body in the mind are no longer detached from one another, and there is going to be this kind of influence.
Right.
So he is thinking of a new body.
Yeah, that's what the overman, that might be probably one of the best ways to conceive of it, is if not a new body,
a new senses, a new way of being in the body.
Yeah, absolutely.
And this comes up in the preface to gay science as well, or part of the convalescence, the recuperation from this illness of metaphysics, is a restoration of sense.
He talks about becoming ticklish, because now the senses are stimulated, they can feel again.
They don't feel brute animal senses, they feel meaningful sense of the earth, they re-animated.
And he calls not only for these new senses, and the ticklishness of our sense organs suddenly, but also for new organs.
There's passages in the Wilts of Power where you find him calling for us developing new organs, and also for a refinement of the sense organs that we have.
That's part of the new body, a new way of inhabiting the body, and a new way of relating to a new world as well.
Right.
So you were mentioning earlier about these people who have a sickness, a life sickness, who are looking for redemption, either by the possession of things, which doesn't really address the source of their malays, or through a transcendent other worldly God.
And redemption is a crucial concept for Nietzsche, especially in Zarathustra.
He has a chapter on redemption in Zarathustra, which is later in the book, in fact it's right in the very middle of the book appropriately.
So because he's at that moment that we find Zarathustra on a bridge, which is another tightrope, as it were.
And he's surrounded by cripples, blind men, hunchbacks, and beggars.
And a hunchback asks him what redemption he can offer them for their suffering and deformities.
And Zarathustra has an idea of redemption, but it has nothing to do with recompense, because the hunchback wants a recompense.
Right.
But Zarathustra instead he turns to his disciples and says, "Verily, my friends, I walk among men as among the fragments and limbs of men."
This is beautiful because it refers to what you're talking about, maybe even New Organs.
If present human kind, if present mankind is only fragments and limbs of a whole man, then the overman would be presumably a new sort of body of the human.
But for the moment it's just fragments and limbs.
And the present and the past on earth are last, my friends. That is what I find most un-endurable.
And I should not know how to live where I not also a seer of that which must come.
Yeah.
So now we get to this crux that you were referring to earlier.
If Zarathustra can only live because he can see into a better future, a glorious body of some sort.
But if when he looks backwards at what human history has been, he is filled with revulsion himself and he does not know how to endure it.
And this is a sickness of the will too because he will go on saying on that very same bridge,
to redeem those who lived in the past and to recreate all it was into a "thus I will" did, that alone should I call redemption.
But this is almost impossible to do for a human being. Why? Because willing liberates.
But what is it that puts even the liberator himself in fetters?
It was. That is the name of the will's gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy.
Powerless against what has been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past.
The will cannot will backwards and that he cannot break time and times covetousness,
that is will's loneliest melancholy. This indeed and this alone is what revenge is.
The will's revulsion against time and times it was.
Yeah. Before talking about the eternal return doctrine in there, let's talk about the aspect of revenge that's brought up.
I think the two of the main illnesses, the two main illnesses in Zarathustra seems to me, are pity on the one hand and revenge.
These are the ills that so many suffer from and that determine the way they think, the way they are in the world.
I see these as both perversions or distortions of giving and receiving.
Revenge is in gratitude. Something has been given to you. Something has happened to you.
You have this life and event has happened and you resent it rather than welcome it rather than accept it rather than
negotiate with it rather than embrace it in an act of a more fatty or something of this sort rather than incorporate it into your character and stylize it.
You reject it and broil against it and wish for some sort of cancellation of it for some sort of payback.
It's in gratitude. It's a failure to properly receive and pity for its part is a failure to properly give.
If someone is suffering and as he often says in Nietzsche, you step in with your pity and take away the singularity of their suffering from them.
Suffering builds character for Nietzsche as we know. It's the only way to build character.
It opens up levels of feeling within you that can at the same time receive joy more thoroughly as well.
So to give up suffering is to give up depth of character, depth of character that can embrace life and feel its delight.
So to step into someone and say, "Oh, I understand your suffering blah blah blah" is to take the uniqueness of it away from them on the one hand.
And on the other, it's also as he says to get off your own path. You have something you need to be doing and it's so much nicer to put that work aside and comfort someone and pity them.
And to feel your own superiority over them in that act of pitying to praise yourself for how good a friend you are by helping them out and to take the uniqueness of it from them.
So you think you're given and you're really taking. So pity is a failure to give properly.
Revenge is a failure to receive properly.
That's what I would put it nicely said.
So clearly this notion of overcoming revenge which is the will's revulsion against time and times it was.
How can the will will backwards?
Well, the only way Nietzsche thought the will could find a way to will backwards is through willing what the it was forwards again in the mode of repetition.
Is this how you understand the doctrine of the eternal return?
Maybe the eternal return of the same.
Well, everything that has been will be repeated eternally. Can you say yes to that?
Yeah.
Yeah, I take it in a slightly different direction though.
I want to hear more of your view on this.
Everything will return. Everything will recur.
I take that to be a way of thinking,
particularly beings things around us. They exist like an apple, not simply here present here.
They're not simply present here. They're also somewhere in the future as well.
The same apple is often the future and then often the future again further.
And the same apple was here in the past as we go through all of these cycles.
But it's the same apple. I take this idea of recurrence to be a way of destabilizing the present.
The present is no longer self sufficient. It's no longer sufficient to itself.
The apple doesn't simply here. It's not just what's here. There's more to it.
What the apple is is also the apple often the future, the apple often in the past.
This present, if we think of it as a discrete moment in time, doesn't encapsulate, doesn't accommodate the apple or any particular thing.
All things are stretched beyond themselves into a future, into a past.
Such that the present is not equatable with their existence.
There's more to them than that.
They themselves are opened up into this world.
Their thoughostra's animals say it to him.
O Zarathustra, to those who think as we do, all things themselves are dancing.
That's the idea of the eternal recurrence to me.
That the things themselves dance. They're untethered.
They're no longer grounded in a substantialist metaphysics.
They're lightens. They're allowed to dance to play with this gravity, to be detached from an encapsulated and closed present.
And the eternal recurrence is a way of articulating that.
That all things are not simply what they are.
The present isn't everything. They're not closed off in their present being.
They're rather opened and dancing to us.
And it's only the uber-mensch who is himself herself outside of themselves.
And also a figure of becoming who can interact with this world of becoming things.
I think the crux is to understand becoming in Nietzsche and to do so requires breaking with the thinking of being.
Yeah, that's very high to Gary and very persuasive.
I would like it to correspond to what I think-
Yes, I want to hear it.
The only problem I have with that, Andrew, is that the text, when Zara Throustor articulates the theory of the eternal return,
there's so much insistence on this point of present, this absolute punctual present.
Here at the gateway, the gateway is not a point.
A gateway is not a point.
Well, he says at this point all of the past stretches out to infinity.
We're right here at this punctual moment.
And he seems to want to isolate that moment of presence and deprived of distension.
I mean, it does have distension in the past and future, but it.
And then let's look at what he says.
And this slow spider tells the dwarf, which crawls in the moonlight.
And this moonlight itself.
And I and you in the gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things must not all of us have been there before the
and return and walk in that other lane out there before us in this long dreadful lane must we not eternally return.
So he seems to be proposing eternal return in a literal sense.
But of course, here's where I have- here's where I find that the riddle, because he calls this a riddle, almost undermines the hypothesis.
Thus I spoke and more and more softly for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.
Then suddenly I heard a dog howl nearby.
Had I ever heard a dog howl like this?
Yeah.
My thoughts raised back?
Yes.
When I was a child in the most distant childhood, then I heard a dog howl like this.
Okay, we're in the realm of repetition I heard it before.
And I saw him too bristling his head up trembling in the stillest midnight when even dogs believe in ghosts.
And I took pity.
For just then the full moon silent as death passed over the house.
And that was why the dog was terrified.
And I took pity again.
And then he goes on to say that at that moment among the wild cliffs I stood suddenly alone,
bleak in the bleakest moonlight.
But they're lay a man.
And there the dog jumping bristling whining now he saw me coming and he howled again.
He cried, "Have I ever heard a dog cry like this for help?"
And verily what I saw I had never seen the like.
We'll get back to that phrase.
What he sees is a young shepherd writhing gagging in spasms, his face distorted,
and a heavy black snake hung out of his mouth.
Had I ever seen so much nausea and pale dread on one face,
he seemed to have been asleep when the snake crawled into his throat and there bit itself fast.
My hand tore at the snake and tore in vain.
It did not tear the snake out of his throat.
Then it cried out of me, bite.
Bite its head off it bite.
Thus it cried out of me my dread, my hatred, my nausea, my pity.
All that is good and wicked in me cried out with a single cry.
You bold ones who surround me.
You searchers and researchers.
He means you and me now.
Guess me this riddle that I saw then interpret me the vision of the loneliness for it was a vision and a foreseeing.
We'll keep the shepherd by shepherd.
However, bit as my cry counseled him, he bit with a good bite.
Far away he spewed the head of the snake and he jumped up.
No longer shepherd, no longer human, one changed, radiant laughing.
Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed.
Two points I would do.
My favorite passage, one of my favorite passages.
In German the phrase for the eternal recurrence of the same is the eternal recurrence of the cliche.
Which means like it's the eternal return of the like.
When he says ask himself, "Have I ever heard a dog howl like this?"
Or have I ever seen a shepherd doing like this?
He says, "Verily what I saw I had never seen the like."
What does that mean in the context of the eternal return of the like?
If it is a true eternal return, he must have seen this eternally.
The likeness of it eternally.
And then at the end when he says no longer shepherd, no longer human, one changed radiant laughing.
Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed.
That means there is no eternal return.
There is a newness there which is beyond this nausea.
Yeah, and I would say, "Well the version I'm arguing for, I think we're both arguing against in a sense a very simple reading of it as either literal recurrence or also as a psychological injunction."
It functions in multiple ways.
There's no doubt about it.
Nietzsche has different formulations of it that he provides in various works of his
way where it means, "Well look at your life, do you want to do the same thing a million times if not why are you doing it now?"
That's okay, that's existential, but it's a little banal to me.
I'm sure someone could articulate it more effectively, but I just find that boring.
What I find much richer though is seeing it as a way of understanding particular beings, as no longer being but as becoming.
It's a way of articulating a thinking of becoming where things aren't even static.
They're not static and fixed, but they're always slipping past themselves, behind themselves.
They're interacting with other things with us.
They have resonances.
They can evoke other moments, other events.
This is how I understand the dancing of things.
He can hear this dog how, and it can remind him of another dog how.
I want to understand that as a consequence of the blurred boundaries of one particular event that it's able to then because of that entrance into becoming resonate with other events.
I'd like to say that where we're thinking as a discreet and closed being, we couldn't compare it in the same way.
We could only map it and find it to be identical or not.
That would somehow be, would miss the evocative character of it, precisely how it exceeds itself.
What do you make of the snake?
What is the snake that was crawled into the man's mouth?
Because the snake is on the one hand, the snake figures many times in zero through.
It's also what the eagle has the snake and the snake is a figure of the eternal return because the egg is not.
It's the wraptron, while the eagle goes and cycles.
It bites its own tail and it's the figure of this perfect circle.
Why is it a snake?
What is the liberation that takes place when the head of the snake is bitten off?
It's a shepherd choking on a giant snake.
This is the thought of eternal recurrence that Nietzsche wants to think.
The snake has bitten him and he can't get the snake to bite its own tail.
I think that's how this imagery is functioning in the text.
It's also the poison, the bile that's eating us up inside that we need to spew out.
We're choking on it.
We're suffocating in our resentment and bile and the shepherd has a higher task than that.
The shepherd bites the head off, spews it out, and is transformed.
With this new body, I would say, the transfiguration is the entrance into this new body and then there's this laughter.
That is never heard.
I think laughter is a key component in Nietzsche in Sir Duster as well.
It's not as unambiguous as it's often considered.
Laughter is not simply all laughter is not the same in the book.
There's a sardonic, malicious laughter that we read and we can join in on sometimes.
There's this childish, free, innocent laughter.
I think the point that someone like Derrida makes in reading Joyce talking about laughter is that the laughter is almost ambiguous.
You can't discern that times which laughter it is.
Is it the laughter, a freeing laughter, a pure expression of joy in life or is it the sardonic malicious laughter?
When you read sartooth, there are so many times the laughter is characterized as malicious.
I laughed a malicious laugh and you think, "What? Why is he laughing maliciously or throughout the book?"
There's these strange couplings of emotions, laughter and hatred, malice that don't quite go together so easily.
It's easy to breeze over it in reading, but if you get paused to think the laughter isn't always the same.
But that doesn't go back to the singularity point of not having seen a site like this before.
Well, at the very least there's something deeply paradoxical about invoking the singularity of an event in the context of the doctrine of the eternal return of the same.
If the overman is the meaning of the earth or if it's the will who says the overman shall be the meaning of the earth.
And if the overman is somehow the person who can say yes to the concept of the eternal return, then we better understand what this yes is saying yes to.
And I think one way of how about a crazy interpretation that I propose to you of the eternal return.
But basically, if the eternal return is the idea that is going to liberate the will from its fetters.
And if the will is suffering from the fact that it basically cannot will backwards, then it has to find a way to will backwards, but not in this mechanical, willing to pass forward.
I agree with you. How about the will finding a way to will the origins of things eternally or into the future.
And by the origins of things I mean in an axamander sense of that from which out from which things emerge into the world, namely some kind of matrix of things and especially of species.
And that therefore the the overman would be saying yes to the origins of that which have of the species of the earth in their origination.
And that therefore there would be some kind of affirmation of again, I go back to the animal and not just the merely human because it would seem that rather than transcending on a kind of evolutionary concept.
of going from our origins in the beast because he says the overman is somewhere between the man is at a bridge somewhere between the beast and the overman.
But to will the eternal return is to in a certain sense will the beast into the future, but not the beast understood in the degraded mode of just the animal deprived of its own spirit, fruit and animality.
But a new kind of animality that would not be the privileged domain of the human. So it would not just be the human that has the new body and the new limbs, but that we through that new body we would understand even the animals and even the plant life in a completely new meaning of the earth way that would that would redeem the earth from its degradation in this.
In this other way of thinking. Yeah, I agree completely and I think my version of the eternal recurrence which I'll admit is maybe a little violent not too violent.
Shows things as dancing and by dancing again, I mean they're expanded beyond their boundaries, they're entering into this matrix that you're talking about.
I see the eternal recurrence as a way of thinking becoming becoming as not simply thought transitionally in time, but also transitionally in space that something is not discreetly present, but seeping past itself into this engagement with matrix with with others that you're talking about.
And that makes each of these things a relational entity. It's in a particular place in a particular context and insofar as it occupies that particular place that particular context at that particular time and is a contributing member to that context by being outside of itself.
It is singular. It's unique. Each of these things only by being moments of becoming only only understood through becoming can we understand these things as unique.
So in my interpretation of the eternal recurrence, which is a thinking of becoming, it makes perfect sense that he would see things that he never saw before hear things he never heard before.
Let's also note that it's a seeing and a hearing that requires a transformed organ. So let's say that that embracing becoming is a transformation of the body, transformation of the organs, that transformation allows you to see and hear singularities.
That you have never encountered before, paradoxically enough eternal recurrence of the similar, what's called following you the same is an embrace of singularity.
Right.
That in that sense it would rejoin real kid in the Dweeno Elegies where he says once and once only all things come around.
So I always thought that there's some deep kinship between real kids of affirmation that everything is once and once only.
It puts as much pressure on the moment of becoming as does any myth of the eternal recurrence.
It's more emphasized as more the reverberations of a particular moment I think than real kids like a breaking glass or something as Nietzsche has this shadowing forward of things.
And I'll say one other thing about this idea of the earth. I think the meaning of the earth is, or to think the earth we have to think differently.
In these abstract concepts as well, the whole nature of what is a concept or how do we think has to change as well.
It has to, we have to think becoming and to think the earth requires sort of messy concepts.
There's no concepts are too often thought as abstractions.
Nietzsche says in truth and lies in an extra moral sense that there are metaphors of metaphors.
The original sensation gets distorted into words, words get abstracted into concepts, etc.
And to think the earth, to understand the meaning of the earth means changing the way we think as well and to think becoming.
So that the boundaries of our concepts begin to blur as well.
Well, there's certainly that notion of blurring which I like because then it would also entail some reconceived notion of what it is not only to be human, but also what it means to be an animal.
And to maybe relate to animals in a way that would be unprecedented vis-a-vis our long history of subjugation and a certain sense of abuse.
I don't think it's by accident that Nietzsche's mental collapse was precipitated by him seeing a horse being flogged in the streets of Turin.
And he went and embraced the horse and really collapsed with his arms around the suffering animal.
And you could say, "Well, he either succumbed to this moment of Christian pity in the bad sense that you were referring to earlier, but I don't think that's at all what happened.
I think that he is seeing that in this animal there is a potential for a mode of being that is the horsemen and human beings in general are not doing justice to this kind of new kind of malady that it's prefigured in his in zerothesis relationship to his own animals.
Well, they're the ones who tell him so many things, especially this line that I love so much that all things are dancing that comes from his animals.
And some people take that as an excuse to then dismiss these lines as a mockery or a parody of their throughstress own thought.
But I find like you to the contrary that the animals speak the truth and the animals, well, let's first note, they're talking animals.
That's a little strange to begin with.
Eagles and what lions, all these figures, these animals in the book don't normally talk.
And so here you have the animal body with intellect.
So there's a re embrace of the two sides in these animals and that is what he's calling for now on the part of the human as well.
I would say that the human re embrace their animal side as these animals have embraced their intellectual side intelligence side.
The book itself ends quite strangely with their throughstress being surrounded by by doves.
It's almost like Garcia Marcus or something with all these doves that come floating around him.
He's surrounded by him. He can't see as his eyes closed, I believe.
And he puts his hands down and suddenly he has his hands in the thick main of a lion.
And there's this lion snuggling up with him as well and he's just surrounded by all these all these animals.
Yeah, and I began by talking about the alphabet of the ultimate and the difference between the last and the final or the ultimate.
And it's true that another aspect of zeroes that we haven't had time to talk about.
We'll do on another occasion as this whole thing about the last man or these last men who are contemporary bourgeois, western things.
And the overman is the man who comes after the last man.
But in order to bring our hour to a conclusion, Andrew, what would you say?
It's been over a hundred years since he wrote Sarah throughstress.
Almost, I guess we're just about a hundred years.
And do you think we're still in the regime of the last man?
Would Nietzsche have thought that we're in the regime of the last man still today?
Yeah, well, we'll never be out of it. I mean, it's impossible to escape it.
The last man is utter complacency with the conditions as they are.
All the last men want to do is have an untroubled sleep.
And so whatever narcotic, whatever lie, has to be embraced to let the last man sleep untroubled will be adopted and defended at all costs.
The last man is bourgeois society, is complacency, is existance as preservation.
It's a total acceptance and satisfaction with your place in life and the attempt to preserve that and defend that at all costs.
Which also thinks that Darwin advocates preservation of the species as his guiding idea in thinking of nature and Nietzsche finds that repugnant.
Because preservation, the goal of the last man, Darwin's whole trajectory is death for him.
Life instead is not preservation, but growth, overstepping, transgression.
All of these have to be encouraged, risk-taking.
This is what it means to take a risk. It's too grow.
If you don't challenge yourself, if you don't live dangerously, then you don't experiment, you don't encounter anything new.
And not all experiments can be a success.
If they were, they wouldn't be experiments.
Experiment means failure and living with failure and incorporating failure, not having to win all the time.
And that's what the last man fears most.
Failure change.
Anything that will disrupt the satisfaction.
They're happy with what they have.
That's death.
They're dying.
Well, let's hope that's not the end of the story.
For all of us.
We can be overmen.
Thanks a lot, Andrew, for coming on.
We've been speaking with Professor Andrew Mitchell from the University of Emory about Frederick Nietzsche.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions.
Please tune in next week.
We'll be with you again.
Bye-bye.
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