For those who haven’t been following along with my very slow, very deep exegesis of the preface to The Gay Science, I’m including the section I’ve gone over so far below:

“This book may need more than one preface, and in the end there would still remain room for doubt whether anyone who had never lived through similar experiences could be brought closer to the experience of this book by means of prefaces. It seems to be written in the language that thaws ice and snow: high spirits, unrest, contradiction, and April weather are present in it, and one is instantly reminded no less of the proximity of winter than of the triumph over the winter that is coming, must come, and perhaps has already come.”

In my previous post, I demonstrated that Nietzsche’s observation of natural forces in flux led him to recognize a parallel between the earth’s death in winter, its rebirth in spring, and the body’s convalescence from sickness to health. 

The “wind that thaws ice and snow” and the “proximity of winter” are poetic and scientific metaphors that convey Nietzsche’s exclusive reliance on sense-evidence to interpret the world. In other words, he’s an empiricist, not a transcendental idealist. A proponent of the latter philosophy would adhere to a distinction put forth by Kant in The Critique of Pure Reason between the apparent, phenomenal world—the world of the senses—and the ideal, noumenal world. 

A popular interpretation of this distinction—the two-world interpretation—argues that objects as they exist in themselves, in the noumenal world, are unknowable to the human subject. Objects are re-presented as appearances and transformed by the mind’s innate laws—that is, the pure forms of intuition, space and time—which determine the order and relations between external objects which the mind receives as sense impressions, through its faculty of sensibility, prior to experience. Only those appearances are available and scrutable, not the “things in themselves”—that is, the objects that lie behind them.

Nietzsche, however, throws out the invisible metaphysical world altogether. Why even bother positing a world unknown to the senses? About which nothing can be said? Why not focus exclusively on the phenomenal world, regardless of its illusions, semblances, and deceptive appearances?

Consequently, empiricism and materialism are closely related, thus opposing idealism and metaphysics. Nietzsche, for reasons that I’ll get to later, replaces metaphysics with the eternal recurrence: the idea that time is circular rather than linear and that the same events repeat themselves endlessly in an infinite loop. While metaphysics posits two worlds, the recurrence posits only one: a single life, this life, again and again. The recurrence runs counter to Christian theology, whose dogma depends on metaphysics for support, splitting existence between life on earth and the afterlife in heaven or hell. The metaphysical worlds of the philosophers are, one could say, the backbone of religious otherworlds. 

When Nietzsche says that the triumph over the winter “is coming, must come, and perhaps has already come,” he’s not making a stylistic flourish, but rather expressing a sincere uncertainty about the possibility of recollection. He’s wondering whether he’s already experienced what’s about to happen, which follows from the lack of a sharp division between past and future implicit in the recurrence.

The idea was not Nietzsche’s own but one he borrowed from the Pythagoreans and Stoics, who debated the extent to which cycles are similar. Are they numerically identical, indiscernibly similar, or similar in form but different in content?

“One might raise the problem whether the same time recurs, as some say, or not. “The same” has many senses: the same in form seems to occur as do spring and winter and the other seasons and periods; similarly the same changes occur in form, for the sun performs its solstices and equinoxes and its other journeys. But if someone were to believe the Pythagoreans that numerically the same things recur, then I also will romance, holding my staff, while you sit there, and everything else will be the same, and it is plausible to say that the time will be the same.”

One gains a better sense of how events in a single lifespan resemble each other by recalling what Mark Twain said about history: that it “doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” 

Another interesting connection can be made to Freud’s definition of the uncanny, which refers to the return of once-familiar, but now repressed and forgotten, childhood experiences in adulthood, akin to a frightening kind of déjà vu. 

One may wonder why the return of repressed material would be frightening. Well, Freud attributes it to the fact that repressed material can only force its way through the psyche’s censorship mechanisms once it has broken down the walls built by unconscious attempts to subdue it. An unexpected discharge of pent-up psychic energy will most likely strike the subject as uncanny, especially if the subject fails to realize it’s all-too-familiar source. What the psyche tried to keep in the dark—the past—has now come out into the light, something it could only achieve by altering its appearance and making itself unrecognizable and uncanny, like the ghost of a dead relative.

“The uncanny is nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind which has become alienated from it through the process of repression.”

Interestingly, Freud observes that the psyche often attempts to mitigate the difficulties associated with pure remembering in the following way: it sends the patient down a secondary route, as a suboptimal means of achieving the same aim: repetition of the past. 

“He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past.”

Leaving Freud and the uncanny behind, and returning to Nietzsche and the eternal recurrence, I’d like to discuss why Nietzsche finds the recurrence so attractive as an empowering thought experiment rather than a verifiable hypothesis about the nature of time and the universe. 

Whether the universe does, in fact, travel along a celestial circuit, repeating itself without variation, matters very little to Nietzsche. It seems to him that mankind always needs to believe in something, to have a faith, and that this faith need not be true, only preferable to the metaphysical alternatives—God, heaven, and the immortal soul, for example.

Like Kant, he “denies knowledge in order to make room for faith.” However, he exchanges Kant’s metaphysical faith for one that he believes affirms rather than negates life, which depends on his assessment of the relationship between body and thought, physiology and psychology.

Nietzsche’s training as a philologist and interpreter of ancient texts provided him with the skills that would ultimately make him a brilliant psychologist. His terrible migraines and near blindness made reading impossible; so rather than read ancient texts, he read himself—his own thoughts and beliefs—treating them as symptoms he traced back to the body to determine whether their psychological content masked or compensated for physiological sickness.

The procedure is deeply introspective, as consciousness observes various streams of thought, both as a curious voyeur and a critical analyst. If any seemed to have originated from a pathological source, Nietzsche diagnosed them as such, hoping that a proper diagnosis would enable him to catch them sooner in the future, to distinguish between healthy and harmful, and to cast out the latter, thereby restoring his body to health. So Nietzsche is not only a psychologist but also a physician, who prescribes a kind of surgical self-operation on one’s thought as a means toward altering it and improving one’s physical health.

Thus Nietzsche abhors that a project of deception en masse has concealed the fact that ideas which the metaphysical and Christian traditions baptize as holy are harmful, because weak and weary bodies fabricate and cling to them for survival. He knows this because he saw that metaphysical consolations passed through his mind whenever the torments of his illness became intolerable, whenever the thought of escape from life, of rest and refuge in a transcendent beyond, afforded him momentary relief from suffering. Those thoughts were attempts made by the body to heal itself, like medicine in the form of ideas.

But medicine, too, has an expiration date; it can act like poison for healthier individuals, hell-bent on evolving, whose bodies have grown strong enough to renounce those ideas and illusions that provided comfort to their more feeble selves. 

“Now something that you formerly loved as a truth or probability strikes you as an error; you shed it and fancy that this represents a victory for your reason. But perhaps this error was as necessary for you then, when you were still a different person—you are always a different person—as are all your present “truths,” being a skin, as it were, that concealed and covered a great deal that you were not permitted to see. What killed that opinion for you was your new life and not your reason: you no longer need it, and now it collapses and unreason crawls out of it into the light like a worm. When we criticize something, this is no arbitrary and impersonal event; it is, at least very often, evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm—something that we perhaps do not know or see as yet. —This is said in favor of criticism.”

Hence Nietzsche’s preference for the eternal recurrence, which presupposes an opposite set of physiological conditions: a healthy body. A person can only accept and, in the most impressive cases, even crave life infinitely many times if they are vigorous enough to break through resistance repeatedly and test themselves willingly, even if that means reexperiencing the worst of the worst. For Nietzsche, the kind of person who loves fate, and for whom “even tragedy ceases to look tragic,” looks like this:

“whoever has really . . . looked into, down into the most world-denying of all possible ways of thinking . . . may just thereby, without really meaning to do so, have opened his eyes to the opposite ideal: the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo . . .”

Such a person is the antithesis of the fool as Mephistopheles describes him in Goethe’s Faust, who fails to fathom the connection between hardship and happiness, sacrifice and joy:

            “The way desert and fortune blend,

              The fools will never comprehend.”

Suppose I’ve been contrasting the belief in the eternal recurrence with what Nietzsche judges to be an unhealthier one in the metaphysical heaven. In that case, it’s only because, on a more fundamental level, Nietzsche wants to contrast paganism and Christianity. I’ve already mentioned that the first philosophers to take the eternal recurrence seriously were the pagan Pythagoreans and Stoics. But I haven’t explained how Nietzsche’s allusions to the Roman triumph, when he writes about a “triumph over the winter”—in the original German, a Sieg über den Winter, a dearly purchased victory—implicitly elevate one perspective over another, like salutes toward the more favorable pagan attitude.

In ancient Rome, triumphs were military and religious processions in which a general returning victorious from battle—a triumphator—was drawn through the city in a four-horse chariot, celebrated as a near deity, an Alexandrean or Herculean figure. The symbolic import and magnificence of such an already grand spectacle could be further enhanced if the military victory coincided with the vernal blossom, in the month named after the Roman god of war: Martius in Latin, March in English—after Mars, of course. In alluding to the Roman triumphal tradition, Nietzsche has bestowed upon himself the mythical status of the warrior god, returning victorious from a hard-fought, adventurous battle against illness, an onerous yet salutary erlebnis.

But just as suddenly as Nietzsche declares his kinship with his supposed forebears in the Roman pantheon, effectively inserting himself into their lineage and thereby distancing himself from Christianity—he leaps backward, inverting that gesture by echoing Job’s laments in the Old Testament. In the Book of Job, God authorizes Satan to destroy all of Job’s property and possessions, to kill his children, and to cover his skin in boils, even though Job is a perfectly just and upright man.

Sitting in the dust and ashes that were once his home, scraping his black and burned skin with a potsherd, Job cries that his days “are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope.” He groans: “And where is now my hope? as for my hope, who shall see it?” 

No doubt Nietzsche has these passages from the Old Testament in mind when he writes in the following line of the preface:

“‘Gay Science’: that means the saturnalia of a spirit who has patiently resisted a terrible, long pressure—patiently, severely, coldly, without submitting, but also without hope—and who is now all at once attacked by hope, the hope for health, and the intoxication of convalescence.”

The two words I’ve bolded besides “without hope,” which echo Job, are “saturnalia” and “intoxication.” According to James Frazer in The Golden Bough, the Saturnalia was a Roman winter festival remarkable for its “license,” “wild orgies of lust and crime,” and “mad pursuit of pleasure”—excesses that would horrify a Christian. So why does Nietzsche bring together such a disparate pair as the weary Job and the savage Saturnalia?

Perhaps because he identifies with both. But my readers will have to wait until the next post to find out for sure.

by Adonis Borges

An earlier version of this piece was originally published in Adonis’ Substack, which can be found here.