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  • Back to the Future:Eternal Recurrence and the Death of Socrates
  • Tom Stern

One sense in which Thus Spoke Zarathustra might indeed be a book "for none" is that none of us can agree what it says. But in the last few decades it seems that certain questions have achieved some recognition as questions that the Zarathustra commentator might want to answer. These questions look something like this: Is it really Nietzsche's most philosophically significant book (as he sometimes claims)? How does it fit together with his other books? Is part IV an embarrassing addition or a central and indispensable conclusion to the book? Is there a coherent conception of the Übermensch ? Does Nietzsche consider the latter desirable or even possible? Does Zarathustra? What is the Eternal Recurrence—a cosmological doctrine or a thought experiment (or something else)? How does the Übermensch (apparently associated with progress) fit together with the Eternal Recurrence (apparently associated with the impossibility of meaningful progress)?

The answers to these questions may depend on the answers to deeper questions about how one approaches Nietzsche in general. Do we think of him as the kind of philosopher who buries faintly perceptible clues deep within his works (even those written years apart), which only the bravest and boldest Nietzsche scholars are able to pick out and reassemble? Do we think that the unpublished notes form a kind of "subconscious" in relation to the "conscious" published works, such that scholars can casually dip into the former to reveal what Nietzsche was really thinking in the latter? Do we view Nietzsche as a philosopher who changed his mind frequently about important issues or as a philosopher who had one (very complicated) idea and spent his working life trying to express it? In other words, in Isaiah Berlin's terms, was he a hedgehog (that is, he does one thing very well) or a fox (he does many things fairly well)? Berlin, incidentally, thought hedgehog.1

The connections between answers to the second set of questions and answers to the first set of questions may or may not be obvious. If you think that Nietzsche was, broadly speaking, a consistent philosopher with a single message, then the fact that the Übermensch and the Eternal Recurrence virtually drop out of his writing after Z becomes a matter of significant intrigue. If they seem so important here, then why not there? Perhaps they really are somehow "present" in the later works, but we need a special interpretation to see why. And so [End Page 73] on. If you think of him as changing his mind, then you might just think that he got interested in other things and moved on. The same basic question may also motivate one's attitude to the unpublished notes. If Nietzsche, hedgehog-like, struggles to reveal his one great insight, then the notes and the published works are both simply evidence of that one great struggle. But if we see Nietzsche, like the fox, chasing after different goals in different ways, adapting and changing his mind, then perhaps what he chooses to publish takes on a kind of significance that it otherwise might not. It might matter when he said it and whether or not he finalized it for publication. This then feeds into the Zarathustra questions: much of Nietzsche's writing about the Eternal Recurrence shows up in unpublished notes. These are the only place in which Nietzsche toys with an explicit "proof" of Eternal Recurrence. To some, this must hold the key to understanding Z. To others, it is an interesting piece of trivia. After all, if he had a proof, why didn't he publish it? Or (for those who think that traces of the proof are found in Z) why did he choose to publish it as part of an obscure dialogue between an ancient Persian prophet and a crippled, talking half-dwarf half-mole? Was his claim that he was only to be understood years later an oblique reference to the fact that the answers were in his diaries? Similarly for the significance of his remarks about the importance of Z, even if he claims in one place that it's his...

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