Nietzsche, immortality, singularity and eternal recurrence1



76


S. Afr. J. Philos. 2007, 26(1)

tural space) and falling (the concomitant tendency to succumb to the suffocating pres-
sure of conventional practices).9

The degree to which Heidegger's thinking here corresponds to Nietzsche's is more
apparent when one remembers that ‘projection’ means the capacity of individuals - re-
gardless of how seldom it is actualized - to appropriate a given situation, characterized
by what Heidegger terms ‘everydayness’ (cultural and social situations broadly gov-
erned by custom, convention, or what is ‘fashionable’), and transform it creatively.
This could happen by the individual seizing every possible opportunity to actualize
one's own, distinctive ‘project’, even if the tendency to ‘fall’ back into the comfort
zone of tradition and convention always exercises its gravitational pull on them. Like
Nietzsche before him, Heidegger is acutely aware of the ubiquity of axiological-cul-
tural conservatism or inertia.10

Although necessary, ‘breaking’ cultural (artistic, literary, philosophical, political)
‘rules’ is not sufficient for a person to emerge from the ranks of the conventional
masses as a distinctive, ‘immortal’ individual. What else is required, according to
Nietzsche? It seems to me that his difficult notion, ‘Become who you are’ (which is
encountered throughout his work; see Nehamas (1985: 171-172), and which is related
to the notion of the singularity of an individual or ‘free spirit’, points in the direction
of one such requirement. Not only is Nietzsche's intellectual autobiography,
Ecce
Homo
(1979; written in 1888), subtitled ‘How one becomes what one is’,11 but the
idea appeared in his thought as early as 1874 (Nehamas 1985: 171), and could be seen
as a
leitmotiv in Thus spoke Zarathustra (1984: 351; written in the early to middle
1880s).

9 Heidegger formulates the relationship between the individual and tradition or convention (that is, the re-
lationship between thrownness, projection and falling) in terms of ‘care’ (1978: 458):

Dasein exists as an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is itself an issue. Essentially ahead of
itself, it has projected itself upon its potentiality-for-Being
before going on to any mere consider-
ation of itself. In its projection it reveals itself as something which has been thrown. It has been
thrownly abandoned to the ‘world,’ and falls into it concernfully. As care - that is, as existing in the
unity of the projection which has been fallingly thrown - this entity has been disclosed as a ‘there.’

10 In similar vein, one could cite Lacan's claim, that (1997, pp. 21-22): ‘... the ethical limits of psychoanal-
ysis coincide with the limits of its practice. Its practice is only a preliminary to moral action as such... ‘.
What he describes as ‘assuming one's desire’ (with the help of psychoanalysis) is only a
preparation for
possible
ethical action on the part of the client, and a condition for it, because such ‘taking up’ of one's
uniquely personal ‘desire’ - which is irreducibly singular for each person (Lacan, 1997: 24) - would in-
variably have the character of a transgression of conventional (that is, conventionally sanctioned) moral-
ity. It is striking that, the differences in idiom notwithstanding, Nietzsche preceded Lacan to a remark-
able degree by putting forward an axiological argument in favour of the ‘free spirit’ transgressing the
confines of conventional practices, including moral ones (see Olivier 2005 in this regard). Because it is
difficult to give ‘positive content’ to such transgressive action, it is at least partly understandable that, as
Nehamas (1985: 221-222) points out, Nietzsche's ‘positive’ views on morality are banal and vague,
among other things. The frequency with which he speaks approvingly of ‘evil’, however, has to be seen
in the same light as ‘transgressive action’ in the sense specified here. In
The Gay Science (1984b: 93),
for instance, he says: ‘The new is always
the evil, as that which wants to conquer, to overthrow the old
boundary stones and the old pieties; and only the old is the good... But all land is finally exhausted, and
the plow of evil must always return'. Clearly, ‘the old’ means (or at least includes) custom, convention,
or tradition, here.

11 To anyone familiar with Kierkegaard this may ring a bell - the one attached to Kierkegaard's so-called
‘ethical’ model of existence, according to which one should live in such a way that one continually and
increasingly makes one's life into an integrated or unified ‘work of art’ (Kierkegaard 1971: 141;
Melchert 1991: 434; see also Olivier 2005a).



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