Nietzsche, Dühring, and Time

Nietzsche, Dtihring, and Time ROBIN SMALL ARGUMENTS DIRECTED AGAINST AN INFINITY OF PAST TIME have given rise tO many philosophical debates: for instance, between al-Ghazali and Averroes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, or St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth. The subject of this article is a similar debate occurring in the nineteenth century, one that has attracted little attention. Although Eugen Dtihring and Friedrich Nietzsche are not its only participants, they are the ones I will concentrate on, because their disagreement brings out the important features of the debate. In fact, it is Nietzschc's attack on the position taken by Dfihring that is most instructive for an understanding of the issues. That attack is closely related to Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence, which says that every event occurs not just once but an infinite number of times. The doctrine also says something about time, or rather, it implies certain theses about time which need to be accepted before any argument about the recurrence of events can be properly assessed. I think that we can readily state three such assumptions. Firstly, time must be infinite, since nothing can occur an infinite number of times without taking an infinite time to do so, assuming a finite period of time between any one occurrence and any other occurrence. Secondly, time must be linear rather than circular in form, since a circular time would presumably be finite, in that no two occurrences within it could be separated by more than a certain period of time. Thirdly, time must be distinct from the events within it, since there is no recurrence unless the same event occurs at different times. Anyone who holds that the concept of an event includes the specifying of a single time at which it occurs will comment that, on this definition, recurrence is simply impossible. However, I intend to set aside this objection, resting as it does either on an arbitrary stipulation about the term 'event', or on further arguments which would have to be considered at length. Now each of these assumptions can be identified in Nietzsche's writings. For instance, they include a number of passages in which he asserts that time is 230 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:2 APRIL 1990 infinite? The second point is harder to judge, in that the image of a circle abounds in Nietzsche's writings, and especially in relation to the doctrine of eternal recurrence." Yet the claim that "time itself is a circle" is explicitly rejected, if not by Nietzsche himself, at least by his spokesman Zarathustra.3It seems therefore that the image, as he uses it, represents the set of events that recur, not the time in which they do so. That Nietzsche considers time to be independent of the events within it is shown in another fact: his reasons for holding time to be infinite are quite separate from his reasons for holding that the course of becoming has no absolute beginning. No state can be the first, Nietzsche argues, because each is produced by what has gone before, so that a state not preceded by a different one would not in its turn have given rise to a succession of different states, but would have lasted forever? This argument is neutral in relation to the alternatives of an infinite time and a finite but unbounded time: it sets out only to decide whether that time is wholly occupied by a changing course of events. The main purpose of my discussion is to examine Nietzsche's approach to the question we have seen to be basic to these points, namely, the problem of the infinity of time. Nietzsche defined his position here in relation to a particular argument advanced by several writers of his time. It is an argument which sets out to show that time cannot be infnite, at least in the direction of the past. The traditional consensus is that there is no particular problem in an infinity of future time, when this is expressed by the concept of an infinite progress from the present moment. But there has been disagreement over whether the notion of an infinite...