Karl Lowith: Nietzsche's Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence

Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same Karl Lowith Translated by J. Harvey Lomax Foreword by Bernd Magnus UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley / Los Angeles / London This book was originally published as Nietzsches Philosophic der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen. Copyright © 1978 Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press London, England Copyright © 1997 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lowith, Karl, 1897-1973. [Nietzsches Philosophic der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen. English] Nietzsche's philosophy of the eternal recurrence of the same / Karl Lowith; translated by J. Harvey Lomax; foreword by Bernd Magnus. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-06519-0 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. 2. Eternal return. 3. Resemblance ( Philosophy) I. Title. B3318.E88L63 1996 193—dc20 96-19802 CIP Printed in the United States of America 123456789 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 © In memory of Kurt Riezler Translation dedicated to Hans-Georg Gadamer and Kate Gadamer-Lekebusch Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IX FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION XI TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION XIX Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same Foreword to the First Edition 3 Foreword to the Second Edition 7 1 Nietzsche's Philosophy: A System in Aphorisms 11 2 The Division of Nietzsche's Writings into Periods 21 3 The Unifying Fundamental Idea in Nietzsche's Philosophy 27 The Liberation from "Thou Shalt" to "I Will" 27 The Liberation from the "I Will" to the "I Am" of the Child of the World 36 viii CONTENTS The Death of God and the Prophecy of Nihilism 36 "Noon and Eternity," or the Prophecy of the Eternal Recurrence 55 The Reversal of the Will to the Nothing into the Willing of the Eternal Recurrence 56 The Eternal Recurrence in the Parable of Zamthustra 60 The Double Equation for the Allegory of the Eternal Recurrence 82 The Problematic Unity in the Discord of the Double Equation 94 4 The Ami- Christian Repetition of Antiquity on the Peak of Modernity 108 5 "How One Becomes What One Is" in the Idea of the Eternal Recurrence 122 6 The Problematic Connection between the Existence of Man and the Being of the World in the History of Modern Philosophy 137 7 The Eternal Recurrence of the Same and the Repetition of the Selfsame 156 8 The Critical Yardstick for Nietzsche's Experiment 174 APPENDIX: ON THE HISTORY OF THE INTERPRETATION OF NIETZSCHE (1894-1954) 195 REFERENCES 231 AUTHOR'S NOTES 233 TRANSLATOR'S NOTES 259 INDEX OF NAMES 273 Acknowledgments The preparation of this volume was made possible by a grant from the Translations Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent Federal agency, and by grants from the Earhart Foundation and the University of Memphis. The Bradley Foundation munificently provided support for the Translator's Intro- duction, and Hillel Fradkin merits special thanks. Robin Cackett made literally thousands of helpful suggestions and translated all the French passages. Werner Dannhauser generously con- tributed in many ways, both to inspire the project and to improve the final product. Not only in general, but especially for this translation, the boundless friendship and unstinting support of David N. Cox, William R. Marty, and James D. King in Memphis, of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kate Gadamer-Lekebusch, and Rudiger Volkel in Heidelberg, and of Heinrich and Wiebke Meier in Munich proved indispensable. The translator's debt to Joseph Cropsey can hardly be overestimated, and George Anastaplo, Lawrence Berns, and Ralph A. Rossum also deserve acknowl- edgment for their important assistance. Sharon Beasley and Laura Ebke kindly typed and proofread manuscripts. Ed Dimendberg of the Uni- versity of California Press earned a special place in heaven for his super- human patience, without which the present book would not exist. - Foreword to the English Translation The best of all places to hide, typically, is in plain sight. Heidegger once called this "the inconspicuousness of the obvious." I call attention to this provocative suggestion because for many decades I have been at a loss to explain why there has been no English translation of Karl Lowith's magisterial Nietzsche study, Nietzsches Philosophic der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen, 1 while during these same decades the ruminations of virtually every European Nietzsche scribbler—from the insightful to the laughable—have been translated and discussed. In the meantime, Lowith's Nietzsche remained shrouded in silence. The reason now seems both obvious and inconspicuous to me. It is entirely political. Lowith was a Jew, in early self-imposed exile from Nazi Germany (thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation); he was strikingly clearheaded about National Socialism at the very beginning of its hegemony in Germany; and he was an apostate student of Martin Heidegger who saw in Heidegger's unpublished Nietzsche studies as well as in his other writings an intrinsic affinity to Nazism.2 It has taken Anglophone scholarship more than half a century to recapture Lowith's insight. 1. Wiederkunft in the 1935 edition, Wiederkehr in the 1956 and subsequent editions. 2. This may also help to explain why some of Lowith's other books were translated into English or first published in English and were well received—e.g., Meaning in His- tory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); Nature, History, and Existentialism (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1966); From Hegel to Nietzsche (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964)—while his incisive 1953 Heidegger study (Hei- degger: Denker in diirftiger Zeit [ Frankfurt am Main: S Fischer Verlag]) was not translated until 1995 ("Heidegger- Thinker in a Destitute Time," in the volume of selections xii FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION As J. Harvey Lomax points out in his Introduction to this volume, it took considerable courage for Gerhard Bahlsen, owner of the press "Die Runde," to publish Lowith's Nietzsches Philosophic der ewigen Wieder- kunft des Gleichen {Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same) in 1935, in the capital of Hitler's Germany. By 1935 several other German presses and journals had already begun to refuse to publish Lowith's work, including Kantstudien. Indeed, the entire Appen- dix to Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkunft des Gleichen could not be published in the 1935 edition, primarily because it consisted of twelve book reviews, each one of which incisively critiqued the author under review, including Alfred Baeumler, a Nazi Party hack and third- rate scholar whose 1931 publication Nietzsche: Der Philosoph und Poli- tiker{ "Nietzsche: The Philosopher and Politician") had become a sta- ple of the Party's propaganda machine and made Baeumler, in effect, the "official" interpreter of Nietzsche for the Nazis. To appreciate the fully noxious aroma in Germany when Lowith's classic work was writ- ten, it should also be recalled that Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Forster- Nietzsche, was still alive at the time that Lowith submitted his manu- script to Bahlsen from Rome. There were very few Germans who rivaled Elisabeth in her admiration for Hitler and the Party, and none who worked as diligently as did she to accommodate Nietzsche's writings to Nazi ideology. To be sure, while much of this may help to explain the initial lack of influence of Lowith's book in Germany, none of this explains why the English-speaking community should have ignored Lowith's Nietzsche book for so long. Indeed, should not his status as a virtual persona non grata in Nazi Germany have recommended him to us instead? There are many possible and competing explanations for this in- congruity. The most obvious one is that Lowith's book does not rise to the stature of other already-translated Nietzsche studies—for ex- ample, Karl Jaspers's Nietzsche und das Christentum (1938, translated as Nietzsche and Christianity, 1961), his Nietzsche (1936, translated 1965), Georg Simmel's Schopenhauer und Nietzsche (1907', translated as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, 1986), or Hans Vaihinger's Die Philoso- phie des Als Ob ( 191 1, translated as The Philosophy of "As If/' 1924), to mention only some of the better-known translated works that deal with Nietzsche. There is no a priori way to settle such an important from Lowith published as Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, ed. Richard Wolin, trans. Gary Steiner [New York: Columbia University Press]). — FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION xiii question. The reader must study each author's translated Nietzsche commentary, compare it with this Lowith volume, and then decide. My own hunch is strikingly different. Just as his Jewish ancestry func- tioned as a defeating condition, in Germany, for serious study of Nietz- sche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, his well-known differences with Heidegger and especially their differences about Nietz- sche played a similar role in the United States. Heidegger's influence among English-speaking professors of philosophy who are (mistak- enly) characterized as "Continental philosophers" 3 has been nothing short of extraordinary from the 1960s until today. It is no exagger- 4 ation to say that Heidegger is widely regarded among SPEPies as the most important philosopher of our times. For those of us who have witnessed the recent revival of an old controversy concerning Heidegger's relationship to the Nazis, the zealousness and idolatry of American Heideggerians is difficult to overestimate. Given this milieu, Lowith 's Nietzsche study drew limited—and often unsympathetic attention. What, then, recommends Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recur- rence of the Same> Until the 1930s, Nietzsche was almost universally regarded—in Germany and beyond its borders—primarily as a liter- ary phenomenon.

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