Time and Becoming in Nietzsche's Thought (review)

Nietzsche's interpretation and conceptualization of becoming have already generated a lot of discussion, but less attention has been paid to his treatment of the specifically temporal aspects of the process of becoming. And to the extent that Nietzsche's approach to time and temporality has been discussed, the issue tends to be reduced to his thought of eternal recurrence. In his new study, Robin Small argues that there is much more to say about Nietzsche's conception of temporality: about "his approach to questions about the nature of becoming, and about past, present and future"; about the specifically human experience of temporality; and about the interconnected notions of memory, guilt, and responsibility (2).

Small's first two chapters are dedicated to showing the interrelations between the two main themes of his book, time and becoming. Small argues that Nietzsche regarded the "reality of becoming" as an absolute fact, and he shows how Nietzsche developed his main arguments for this fact in dialogue with contemporaries such as Afrikan Spir, Eduard von Hartmann, Philipp Mainländer, and Eugen Dühring. According to Small, Nietzsche presents time primarily as an interpretation of the fact of becoming, and he distinguishes from this a more primal, actual time(-chaos)—that is, the time of becoming itself, in which the representation of time takes place. As a part of the struggle of becoming, Small argues, the human organism acquires a personal "measure of time"—a notion inspired by Karl Ernst von Baer—on the basis of which it projects a particular rhythm as a form upon the continuous process of becoming. With this context in mind, Small devotes his third chapter to a careful analysis of Nietzsche's early design of a "time-atom theory" (KSA 7:26[12]). Small interprets this theory as an attempt to develop an alternative to the dominant scientific outlook that goes back to the ancient atomistic and Eleatic thinkers and which gives priority to space over time. He concludes, however, that Nietzsche's attempt to invert this model in his theory of temporal "time-points" cannot account for the radical continuity of becoming and eventually leads to "a hyper-Eleatic apotheosis of the moment as a radically isolated monad"—something the later Nietzsche will consider "an unreal abstraction from becoming" (76-77).

According to Small, Nietzsche starts to use new, metaphorical expressions to symbolize time, motion, and becoming in his later work, especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. More specifically, Small argues in the fourth and fifth chapters of his book that the images of the mountain path, the gateway, and the lanes in the "On the Vision and the Riddle" chapter of Z presuppose a context of power and conflict. The mountain path symbolizes the parts of time, whereas the gateway and the lanes represent the forms (eideai) of time (past, present, and future). Accordingly, the mountain path, stretched out between the high peak and the abyss down below, and in tension between the way upward and the way down, symbolizes the struggle of forces within the human organism. As a result of this struggle, the human organism acquires its personal measure of time. Accordingly, Small interprets the image of the gateway-Augenblick not just as a perspectival representation of the forms of time (past and future, from the perspective of the present moment) but also as a dynamic representation of the conflict between past and future.

Now, according to Small, recognizing the perspectival and dynamic nature of the moment is of pivotal importance for understanding the riddle of the gateway. He argues that Zarathustra blames the dwarf for discarding the perspectival aspect of the moment when he replies that "all that is straight lies" and that "all truth is crooked" and from these concludes that "time itself is a circle."¹ In a very interesting discovery, Small finds a literal parallel between the reply of the dwarf and a passage in Gustav Teichmüller's Darwinismus und Philosophie.² In...