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November 18, 2004
I've returned to a cool Adelaide from the hot north winds of Canberra.
Whilst away within the contours and pain of political crisis I thought that I would keep Heidegger's Nietzsche on the desk next to me. It would help me in my struggle with reading Klossowski's interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return in his difficult Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle.
In Bk 3 part Two of 'Nietzsche' Heidegger says:
"Reckoned chronologically, Nietzsche pursued the thought of the eternal return of the same before he conceived of the will to power, eventhough intimatioons f the latter may be found every bit as early...Nietzsche himself was never able to explicitly think through its [eternal return of the same] with will to power as such, nor elevate it into a metaphysical conception. The reason for this is not that the thought remained in any way obscure ot him, but that like all metaphysicans prior to him, Nietzsche was unable to find his way back to the fundamental traits of the guiding metaphysical projection. For the general traits of the metaphysical projection of beings upon beingness, and thereby the representation of beings as such in the domain of presence and permanence, can be known only when we come to experience that projection as historically cast." (p. 164)
'Recurrence' understood as a principle in a metaphysics of becoming is the permanentizing of what becomes: it is the point where becoming of what becomes (eg., an entity) is secured in the duration of its becoming.
The 'eternal' is the point where the permanentizing of such constancy in the direction of its circling back into itself and forward toward itself. What becomes is the same itself.
That's the metaphysics.
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