Klossowski says that Nietzsche's first makes mention of his Sils-Maria experience in The Gay Science. The paragraph referred to is this:
"The Greatest Burden. What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: "This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence-and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!"-Wouldst thou not throw thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse the demon that so spake? Or hast thou once experienced a tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him: "Thou art a God, and never did I hear anything so divine! "If that thought acquired power over thee as thou art, it would transform thee, and perhaps crush thee; the question with regard to all and everything: "Dost thou want this once more, and also for innumerable times?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon thy activity! Or, how wouldst thou have to become favorably inclined to thyself and to life, so as to long for nothing more ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?" (Bk. 4 para 341, pp. 271-2)
That this passage of Nietzsche's Sils-Maria experience is essentially expressed as a hallucination. Nietzsche then seeks to grasp this hallucination at the level of conscious willing?
Why a hallucination? Why not a bit of literary imagination, a religious experience or a philosophical what if? It is reasonable to read the passage as a 'what if' that links back to Descartes demon.
Why does Klossowski adopt the kind of personal experience as a bordering on madness and ego disintegration?
I do not have the answers to, why this kind of reading that reduces everything to what is happening within a world of mirrors inside Nietzsche's subjectivity?
We still had the key texts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morals, to be written. Can these texts be read as signs of an incipient madness or disintegration? Why need the philosopher in terms of repressed desires and his deep antipathy toward Christianity and conventional morality that is fueled by Nietzsche's lifelong struggles with desire and the flesh.
Or is it just the Sils-Maria experience that is to be read as leading to an agonizing illness which left Nietzsche all but severed from everyone around him, and from the world itself.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 2, 2004 09:55 PM | TrackBack