Eternal Recurrence: Art, Pain and Consciousness

Ann McCulloch

‘Eternal recurrence’1 is the belief that one’s life will repeat itself forever and that the higher human being, the truly free spirit, will be glad, will celebrate every repetition of suffering as well as happiness.

Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence has received attention from many perspectives. In first coming across this theory one is immediately, almost involuntarily, forced into a response. It simultaneously invokes the kind of response that makes one aware that self-consciousness has entered into the equation and has simultaneously questioned the nature and understanding of consciousness. It is an awareness of what it means to ‘be’ in the fullest sense, and what it means to be conscious of one’s ontology. Eternal recurrence is a doctrine that fights the compulsion to forget and is formed from the cognitive knowledge that forgetting structures the nature of what is known. There is, as Paul Ricoeur explains, an uncertainty regarding the essential nature of forgetting and it is this uncertainty that gives the search its unsettling character. Ricoeur characterizes this search as being driven by fears of things being forgotten ‘temporarily or for good, without being able to decide, on the basis of the everyday experience of recollection, between two hypotheses concerning the origins of forgetting. Is it a definitive erasing of the traces of what was learned earlier, or is it a temporary obstacle – eventually surmountable – preventing their awakening?’ (Ricoeur 2004: 27). Ricoeur in his analysis of different kinds of memory and different kinds of forgetting and erasure sees Freud’s representation of the unconscious as ‘helpful in breaching the impasse

1 Also referred to in English as ‘eternal return’. I have mainly used the term ‘eternal recurrence’ in this essay. 248 Ann McCulloch of the analytical colloquy’ (2004: 445). His analysis of ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’ and ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ focuses on blocked memory and recalls Freud’s remark at the beginning of the first work:

[T]he patient repeats instead of remembering. ‘Instead of’: repetition amounts to forgetting. And forgetting is itself termed a work to the extent that it is the work of the compulsion to repeat, which prevents the traumatic event from becoming conscious […] the trauma remains even though it is inaccessible, unavailable. (2004: 445)

The allure of eternal recurrence stems from its power perhaps to rescue us from the past, from its pain, from its selected memories and from a past that we are helpless within, in that we cannot change it. Married to the psychological insight that in certain circumstances entire parts of a forgotten past can return, a belief in eternal recurrence might be able to rescue the person from this kind of forgetting and therefore from the anguish that compulsive repetition causes. Raymond Belliotto acknowledges that it is difficult to know whether the doctrine of eternal return is ‘a cosmological doctrine, a hypothesis, a moral imperative, a psychological test, a reaffirmation of the death of god, or an attempt at secular redemption from the nihilistic moment’ (Belliotto 1998: 78). Like Belliotto I consider that the ‘psychological testing’ that the doctrine evokes is most pertinent. It is elucidated when Nietzsche’s doctrine is understood in the context of his work as a whole. To comprehend its metaphor requires an acceptance of Nietzschean perspectivism (that knowledge is provisional and truth-finding occurs from multi-perspectives); that metaphor itself for the poet, and I would add the philosopher, is not a rhetorical figure but a vicarious image with which he has replaced the concept; (‘[t]he sphere of poetry’, Nietzsche argues, ‘does not lie outside the world, like some fantastical impossibility contrived in a poet’s head; poetry aims to be the very opposite, the unvarnished expression of truth, and for this very reason it must cast off the deceitful finery of so-called reality of cultured man’ [Nietzsche 1999: 41]); that Dionysian insight, shared with Zarathustra, of the unbearable insight of life requires the veil of illusion or the Apollonian form in order to be experienced at all and the experience of eternal recurrence comes with the functioning of the will to power. Art, as Simon Schama notes, ‘begins with resistance to loss’, and that