I've gone back to Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle and its dualism of the chaotic unconscious forces undermining the agent's conscious identity. When we left it a while ago, we were struggling with the 2nd chapter on the experience of eternal return.
The strength of Klossowski's text is that reconnects in classical antiquity's conception of philosophy as "a calling," intrinsically connected to the living of life in opposition to the modernist conception that "severed life from thought."
As I naively understand it, the eternal recurrence of the self-same is a philosophical thought exercise aimed at redirecting our attention to our presently-existing world, and away from all the escapist, pain-relieving, heavenly otherworlds, (eg., Christianity).
Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence (sections 285 and 341 in the Gay Science) is formulated to situate ourselves in the world we presently live, since eternal recurrence precludes the possibility of any final escape from the misery of the present world.
The doctrine also functions as a measure for judging our overall psychological strength and mental health, since the doctrine of eternal recurrence is hard to accept and affirm.
Klossowski, in contrast, reads eternal recurence as a form of fatalism in which consciousness, meaning and goal are lost because there is no point on the circle that cannot be both the beginning and the end. The unconscious rules.
What then of Nietzsche, as a fragmented and fragile personality, living the philosophical life in struggling to shake off the effects of the old valuations and create new ones? Is this not a transformation of our understanding of the world we live and a transfornmation of the self?
Klossowwski does not connect the attention Nietzsche pays to himself and his subjectivity to Nietzsche living the philosophical life. He downplays Nietzsche's conscious attention and vigilance to what he does and is as a lived way of living through a reevaluation of previously created values and a creation of a new form of thinking, feeling, and seeing.
Or is the idea of Nietzsche, living the philosophical life wearing just another literary mask? What we have is Nietzsche living in a condition of ill-health and often intense physical pain. So why not a therapeutic Nietzsche creating a perspective that makes the chaos of life more sustainable by making life more joyful, even in difficult situations. Why not a philosophy that deals with many of the problems associated with mental illness.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 17, 2005 01:46 PM | TrackBack