Re: ER as Ethical Thought
Leonardo Raggo (ac857@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca)
Mon, 2 Jun 1997 15:55:01 -0600 (CST)
It should be bourne in mind that the eternal recurrence does not in
any way justify existence; it's precisely Nietzsche attempt to break from
such a hangman's metaphysics that wants to pass judgment on existence. It
doesn't justify life because it's an empty, profitless repetition. This
is also its harshness that tears us away from the basic assumptions about
what ethics is all about, of all the exchanges that take place, of coming
to be and passing away and how that is conceived in the larger scheme of
things. It doesn't salvage anything for the next cycle but its own
escessiveness, its lack of profit or return. It doesn't open any "other"
possibility, any difference whatsoever which makes it strangely
inconceivable, as what defies the finite repetitions required by language
by projecting an infinity or eternity that doesn't enclose any identity
but its vast and empty being. Nietzsche's operation at this point is to
always hesitate, to dramatize, to introduce distancing fictions, dwarves
and animals, that speak for him and Zarathustra. His difficulty is
focused on the elliptical in the ER. It differs mostly in how we respond
to the insight that life is in vain, that in the eyes of eternity it is
not justified or consummated but is always an excessive passion for living
and expending, an overflow and not an accumulation upon which we can
reflect. The will does not will backwards but can only say to the future
"thus I willed it" and streak down into its comic conclusions. There is a
radical impotence involved with ER that shakes our grasp upon the
"honest, old ego", that makes such a thought unbearable and useless for a
moralizing metaphysics, that makes it unreal, unsatisfying but for all
that selective.
Leonardo Raggo///////\\\
ac857@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca
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