Zarathustra’s Prologue 2-3. The God who died is the Gnostic God. It is easy to think that it’s the Christian God. It is, but only one incarnation of that God — an incarnation that could never release itself from gnosis as the mechanism of salvation. We must always bear in mind, however, that the death of God is and was the eternal recurrence of a murder. We created God, and we have murdered Him — and continue to do so. Nietzsche wants to find in the founding murder, not nihilism, but, in the words of Zarathustra, love and hope.

The Übermensch is introduced as the antidote to the Gnostic God. The mixture is nearly inseparable:

Behold, I teach you the overman [Übermensch]. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!

Gnosticism writes off this world as irredeemable and therefore an object of scorn. The Übermensch orients to this world and remains faithful to the earth. This orientation requires the Gnostic God to be dead. “Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of this, that God is dead?”

It couldn’t be more clear that the saint in the forest is a Gnostic: “Why,” asked the saint, “did I go into the forest and the desert? Was it not because I loved man all-too-much? Now I love God; man I love not. Man is for me too imperfect a thing. Love of man would kill me” (Z I 2). Gnostics hate this world as fallen. They build ladders out of it.

When forced to live horizontally with the rest of us, Gnostics seek their own containers — gated communities, border walls, private clubs — and when those fail, they build rockets to Mars as the last grasp at the vertical exit.

………..

Horizontal sin. Zarathustra’s coming is the announcement of the transformation of sin from the vertical to the horizontal: “Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died and those sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing…”

What is sin? It is clearly still necessary for Zarathustra’s coming. It is the substance of his announcement. When God died, only a particular experience of sin died — a self-poisoning, ressentiment-fueld practice of sin. Gnostic sin is not Zarathustrian sin.

This is not the end of sin; it is its reorientation from the vertical against God to the horizontal against the earth. Thus a new orientation of sin is called for by Zarathustra. It is essential to the Übermensch. Zarathustrian sin — and thus the Übermensch — orients horizontally to the earth and not vertically to the otherworldly. Zarathustra sees his mission as a bridge, not a ladder.

……….

Über = over, above, across. Why “overman” (Kaufmann)? Why “Superman” (Common, Hollingdale)? Those prefixes — over and Super — bias the English translation toward a vertical orientation rather than horizontal. It feels Hegelian where the horizontal dialectic is resolved through the rising up of Aufheben. If we shove Nietzsche into this logic — which Nietzsche himself recognized when he reread his “offensively Hegelian” Birth of Tragedy — it becomes difficult to differentiate Nietzsche from Gnosticism. The logic of Aufheben made his thought susceptible to appropriation by fascists.

Zarathustra’s mission is to build a bridge, not a ladder. Yes, bridges go over something, but if over was Nietzsche’s intent, it certainly seems he could have chosen a specifically vertical metaphor. He chose a horizontal one that is a crossing, not a climbing.

We need to rethink this translation. We need to look back at Alexander Tille’s first English translation: beyond-man so long as we think of beyond as bridge, not ladder.

……….

Mensch = human. Why “overman” and “Superman”? Isn’t Mensch better translated as human, not man? Perhaps we should translate Übermensch as trans-human or beyond-human? This would make more sense, especially today. This new translation shifts the orientation of Nietzsche’s concepts from the vertical to the horizontal, and this makes all the difference.

Let’s make the substitution:

Behold, I teach you the trans-human [Übermensch]. The trans-human is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the trans-human shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!

We would see all of Nietzsche’s concepts for what they are: the means to transformation of our values within the world, not a Gnostic attempt to escape or permanently transform the world to our own ends. Eric Voegelin showed us how the latter is fundamental to fascism. Similarly, rather than the revaluation of values, what if the better term is transvaluation of values — a movement across one set of values to another? Or, better: a movement that translates one set of values to another.

……….

Non-Socratic Questions. One of Zarathustra’s means for building the bridge is the way in which he asks questions of himself and his interlocutors:

“What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour in which your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.” (Z I 3)

Contempt — yes, it is negation, but it is negation as the ability to suspend the knee-jerk valuation of all that we value, even what we think is happiness. This is the beginning of affirmation and the beginning of the transvaluation of values. It starts with questions that cannot be answered with Socratic definitions as the tracing of all beliefs back to a source. The questions pile up and are additive. In the act of adding question upon question, firmly held beliefs are broken. Two examples will suffice:

“The hour when you say, ‘What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.’

“The hour when you say, ‘What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.” (Z I 3)

Zarathustra asks not “What is?” but “What matters?” One by one, he asks “What matters?” about each of philosophy’s and religion’s sacred words: happiness, reason, virtue, justice, pity. These questions are not questions of Being, but questions that turn back on the problem of meaning — not “What is?” but “What matters?” The movement is, as we have already seen, from the vertical (“What is?”) to the horizontal (“What matters?). Philosophy, religion, and their sins and virtues are thus reoriented.

This is Nietzsche’s demonstration of the trans-human as an act of teaching: the questions end with “Behold, I teach you the trans-human: he is this lightning, he is the frenzy.” Thus the trans-human reworks philosophy’s questions from “What is?” to “What matters?”

……….

Kant’s unanswerable questions. Kant’s opening sentence of Preface A reads in one English translation, “Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions that it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems [aufgegeben] by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason” (Critique of Pure Reason, Preface A, my emphasis). Another translator renders the passive voice even stronger: “Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented [aufgegeben] by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.”

Aufgegeben, past participle of aufgeben — to give, to abandon, to give up, to relinquish, to pose (as in a question), to post (as in a letter). In Kant’s Preface A, reason gives-posts-abandons questions to itself that it cannot avoid and that it cannot answer. But what is the specific character of human reason that has determined its fate? It is the nature of how questions are given by reason to itself as burdens. Let’s read the middle section of Kant’s sentence again. We find that reason is the bearer of a burden that is a self-given gift: “[Human reason] is burdened with questions that it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer…”

We have not yet answered our own crucial question in this passage. We have merely said that reason is burdened with questions it has given itself, but we have not understood why these questions are burdens. Why cannot reason answer some of these questions? We have to ask ourselves what is the specific burden that Kant finds at the heart of human reason? It is a 2200 year old Socratic obligation to ask and answer philosophical questions in a particular way. Philosophical questions come in the form of “What is _______?” and they seek definitive answers. To be sure, Socrates inherited this from the Eleatics. All questions seek their answers in the stability of Being because the Greeks had no concept of nothingness and no numerical concept of 0 as a positive definition of nothingness. The Greeks could not ask of themselves, “What is nothing?” Nor could they ask, “How does something come from nothing?” To be meant to be something, and you can only talk about things that exist. Non-Being is not the opposite of Being in the sense of Being versus Nothingness. Non-Being simply designates what you cannot talk about because it does not exist and is therefore not available to logos.

To answer our question, reason’s burden is this: we imagine philosophical questions as answerable by Socratic definitions, and when reason presents philosophical problems to itself it can only imagine one way to answer the question — with a definitive statement about Being.

……….

Dasein. Heidegger’s critique of Kant in Being and Time uncovered this bias toward the What is? questions. For Heidegger, Kant was the heir of Descartes who was the heir of the “Greek ontology” — a bias toward thinking about all phenomena as having ousia (essence). Thus speaking and thinking as logos takes on the burden of disclosing essence, i.e., “the simple apprehension of something objectively present in its sheer objective presence [Vorhandenheit], which Parmenides already used as a guide for interpreting being — has the temporal structure of a pure ‘making present’ of something” (Being and Time, Int. II, 26, Joan Stambaugh trans.).

For Heidegger, philosophical thought must bear the burden of jettisoning this “inherited ancient ontology” (25) so as to restore Dasein to its rightful place as the questioning of being before any imposed assumptions about ousia [presence] as the proper form of the answer. Dasein, therefore, is necessarily doubly entangled: 1) entangled in the world as its inescapable condition and 2) entangled in the inherited Greek ontology that circumscribes the way Dasein asks questions about being entangled in the world:

Dasein not only has the inclination to be entangled in the world in which it is and to interpret itself in terms of that world by its reflected light; at the same time Dasein is also entangled in a tradition which it more or less explicitly grasps. This tradition deprives Dasein of its own leadership in questioning and choosing. This is especially true of that understanding (and its possible development) which is rooted in the most proper being of Dasein — the ontological understanding. (Int. II 21)

Dasein is, therefore, being as the questioning of what it means to be in the world, i.e., ontological understanding. But as such it is burdened with an inherited ancient ontology that prevents it from posing questions to itself about being-in-the-world (existence) other than through this inheritance. To restore its leadership, Dasein must turn its attention to the history of how questions about being-in-the-world are posed (see especially Int. II 22-24).

The upshot is that Dasein gets stuck in philosophical proofs as its fundamental mode of being thought. This is particularly true of Heidegger’s critique of Kant: “The ‘scandal of philosophy’ does not consist in the fact that the proof is still lacking up until now, but in the fact that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again” (I.VI 205). We must be clear because this is the heart of Heidegger’s restoration of Dasein to its true leadership position in philosophy. To treat questions of being-in-the-world as proofs is to impose a prior expectation on Dasein that prevents it from asking questions about being-in-the-world in different ways. It’s not that proofs are impossible. Nor is it that we haven’t yet found the right method for proving something definitive about Being. It’s that Dasein is trapped in this expectation: “The preconceived opinion would persist that basically and ideally a proof must be possible” (I.VI 205).

This expectation traps Kant in a “line of questioning” that forces him to think about subjectivity as being present to oneself, which is his Cartesian inheritance. This subject is posited as worldless (206) and thus initially skeptical about anything that exists outside of itself. Heidegger’s restoration of Dasein requires him to question this line of questioning as conditioned by the Greek ontology:

It is not a matter of proving that and how an “external world” is objectively present, but of demonstrating why Dasein as being-in-the-world has the tendency of “initially” burying the “external world” in nullity “epistemologically” in order to then resurrect it through proofs. The reason for this lies in the falling prey of Dasein and in the diversion motivated therein of the primary understanding of being to the being of objective presence. (I.VI 206)

In doing so, the entire edifice of Western philosophy after Parmenides comes crumbling down. Once Dasein is free of the expectation of proof and once those questions are free of answering in terms of ousia — i.e., What is? questions — then Dasein becomes a way of experiencing time as fundamental to existence. And once this happens, philosophical thought is no longer a dispassionate pursuit of logical certainties. It becomes transformative of being-in-the-world because it restores its capacity to ask new questions without the burden of proof.

……….

Being as Time. We have just seen how Heidegger made much of how philosophy poses its questions. We have also just introduced how his meditations on questions are inseparable from “thinking Being as Time” (Nietzsche Vol 1, David Ferrell Krell trans., 20). To think Being as Time is to raise questions that are difficult to answer because those questions pose a fundamental challenge to reason as Kant (and Descartes and the Greek ontology) conceived of it — as logically coherent answers to “What is?” questions. The Kantian unanswerables form the boundary between the reasoning subject’sr inside and outside. More than this, the unanswerables turn reason back on itself to understand its own internal workings armed fundamentally with “What is?” questions about itself.

What reason finds there is something with all the internal precision of one of John Harrison’s clocks. In other words, Reason is not a monad. It is made up of component parts — concepts such as transcendental aperception are spatial, essential, and outside of time. They exist and have always existed from the beginning of human experience. Kant is simply the one who has found their adequate expression in philosophical language. The Critique of Pure Reason, therefore, seeks an exit from time because it reconnects thought with Reality via definitive answers to the “What is?” questions of Reason (now with a capital “R”) and human experience. By placing some “What is?” questions off limits, it reinforces its internal coherence.

We have also seen how Zarathustra jettisons the burden of “What is?” to turn his attention to “What matters?” By doing so, he moves away from a mode of philosophy that is sealed within Reason governed by its own internal logical mechanisms — mechanisms that it can take as its own object of inquiry using those same mechanisms. For Zarathustra, thought moves into the world again to find what matters there. In doing so, thought is no longer only Pure Reason, no longer its own object of inquiry concerned primarily with its ability to be certain about itself and the external world.

As we continue to trace Heidegger’s dismantling of the Greek ontology as our philosophical inheritance, we find that his path took him deep into Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same. In his Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger traces Zarathustra’s movement through Dasein: thought doesn’t move into the world by asking answerable questions about Being. It moves by posing the question of Being as Time where Time brings about the reversal of the Platonic proposition that Being can be understood only by answering the “What is?” questions.

Thinking Being, will to power, as eternal return, thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy, means thinking Being as Time [my emphasis]. Nietzsche thinks that thought but does not think it as the question of Being and Time. (Nietzsche Vol. 1, 20)

What does it mean to think Being as Time? What does it mean to think this thought without thinking it “as the question of Being and Time?” This requires a fundamental reworking of the relationship between questions, answers, and philosophy. When this reworking occupies the fundamental ground of philosophy — its most difficult question about the Being of beings and the meaning of Being — we have arrived at the end of Western philosophy as the end of abstract logical reasoning grounded in the “What is?” We have gotten back to the business of living in the world and finding our values as we make our way.

To be specific, we move away from only focusing on the content of our philosophical thinking — i.e., its internal coherence evaluated by its own logic — to reacquaint thought with being in the world as Dasein — i.e., as a mode of being that asks questions about how we are being-in-the-world. This is what Heidegger found in the will to power as eternal recurrence of the same. We must let Heidegger speak at length on this:

If we survey once again at a single glance our presentation of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal return of the same, we cannot but be struck by the fact that our explicit discussion of the thought’s content has receded markedly before our constant emphasis on the right way of approaching the thought and its conditions. The conditions may be reduced to two — and even these cohere and constitute but one. (Vol. 2, 182)

Before moving onto the two conditions, let us pause to reflect on the movement Heidegger is effecting. It is a movement from philosophical content to a “way of approaching the thought and its conditions.” What does he mean by the latter? Heidegger started his discussion of the eternal return of the same by reminding us of its first communication in The Gay Science 341. In that aphorism, the eternal return is posed as a thought that is not measured only by the content of its truth but how one responds to it when the content is genuinely adopted as true: “Would you curse the demon, or would you perceive in him a god? Would you be dragged into the abyss by the greatest burden, or would you yourself become its even greater counterweight?” (Vol. 2, 25). The eternal return of the same is, therefore, as much about its ability to crush you or transform you than it is an answer to a Socratic “What is?” question about its content.

Let us continue with Heidegger’s elaboration of the two conditions of the thought of the eternal return:

First, thinking in terms of the moment. This implies that we transpose ourselves to the temporality of independent action and decision, glancing ahead at what is assigned us as our task and back at what is given us as our endowment (Vol. 2, 182, my emphasis)

To transpose oneself into temporality is to think of one’s Being as Time. We occupy the gateway that is Augenblick (“Moment”). This is our necessity — that we live in time as the eternal return of Augenblick, i.e., the eternal return of the now as intersection. At that intersection, we must become increasingly aware of our responsibilities (what we are called upon to do) and the myriad histories that have brought us to Augenblick.

The second condition is crucial because without it we don’t know what to make of Augenblick:

Second, thinking the thought as the overcoming of nihilism. This implies that we transpose ourselves to the condition of need that arises with nihilism. The condition requires of us that we meditate on the endowment and decide upon the task. Our needy condition itself is nothing other than what our transposition to the moment opens up to us. (Vol. 2, 182)

Let us dwell for a moment on the last sentence as it explains why Heidegger says that the two conditions “cohere and constitute but one.” The first condition — “our transposition to the moment” — creates the “needy condition” that is the second condition. We do not discover the nothingness of Being when we make this transposition from thinking of ourselves as essential beings to thinking of our being as time. We create it as a consequence that “opens up to us” when we made the first move.

We are at the heart of the Death of God, which requires the embrace of the second condition: the choice we make as to how we will respond to this needy condition that we have created for ourselves by embracing eternal return as true. We choose to create the possibility of nihilism in order to overcome nihilism. God had to be murdered (and continue to be murdered) for this condition to become possible. Thus the Death of God is inseparable from thinking of Being as Time. It requires a courageous act of overcoming of nihilism at the moment Being as Time creates the possibility of nihilism.

We must be careful with this thought. As Heidegger’s student Agamben warned us, we are on the verge of an as if philosophy that consciously adopts an untenable self-imposed illusion in order to overcome nihilism. Heidegger is clear that the eternal return of the same is not a delusion: “If one takes the thought ostensibly ‘for itself’ in terms of its content — ‘Everything turns in a circle’ — then it is perhaps sheer delusion” (Vol. 2, 183). Eternal recurrence as will to power must be understood as the necessity of the fundamental temporality of Being. Otherwise, this is all pure self-delusion, which yields nothingness as nihilism. It is a matter of courage and being a strong enough mind to handle the power of the thought, which requires that one understand eternal recurrence as true. It also requires us to never reduce Nothingness to a stable Being or Being to a stable Nothingness.

Far from a delusion, the necessity of eternal return must be understood as an insight. I consciously use the Buddhist term because of the appreciation that Buddhism has for thoughts that have a great weight. An insight is a thought that transforms you. An insight, in other words, is split across its truth content and its transformative power without making its truth content into a self-imposed fiction.

……….

Of snakes and emptiness. Let us jump back several centuries from Heidegger to Nagarjuna for some help differentiating the Being of Nothingness from the emptiness of emptiness:

By a misperception of emptiness
A person of little intelligence is destroyed.
Like a snake incorrectly seized
Or a spell incorrectly cast. (MMK XXIV.11)

When seeking to overcome nihilism, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Heidegger, and Nargajuna all turn to the image of a snake “incorrectly seized” as a way of portraying strength of mind and will. Zarathustra tells the story of the shepherd writhing on the ground, “gagging, in spasms, his face distorted, and a heavy black snake hung out of his mouth” (Z III 2, “On the Vision and the Riddle”).

Let us engage Heidegger’s reading of this passage as it will illuminate the power and danger of Nagarjuna’s emptiness, which is not the West’s nothingness. Heidegger reads the snake as the “monotony, ultimately the godlessness and meaninglessness of nihilism” (“Moment and Eternal Recurrence,” Nietzsche Vol. 2, 179). Of course, this is Nietzsche’s last man, ascetic ideal, and ressentiment all rolled together. The shepherd, in other words, is the last man, and the black snake is ressentiment that has sunk its teeth into him. The shepherd has realized his nihilistic ressentiment but is struggling to release himself from the burden. Zarathustra tries to pull the snake out of the shepherd’s mouth — “in vain!” “The implication is that nihilism cannot be overcome from the oustide. We do not overcome it by tearing away at it or shoving it aside — which is what we do when we replace the Christian God with yet another ideal, such as Reason, Progress, political and economic “Socialism,” or mere Democracy” (179).

Each of us must undertake the struggle against nihilism on our own: “everyone who is affected — and that means each of us — must bite into the matter for himself or herself; for if we leave it to another to tug at the darkling need that is our own, all will be futile” (180). This is the personal transformation that is required of each of us to overcome nihilisim. No law or State or social contract can do it for us. We cannot start from the systematic organization of the Social as if goodness will emanate from the center outward to all of us. The problem, as Plato clearly recognized, starts with our souls.

What then does Nagarjuna mean by the “misperception of emptiness”? It is the misperception that sees emptiness as Being and Being as emptiness. Put in terms of the philosophical question of Being, emptiness has a “What is?” answer. This is the “snake incorrectly seized.” Nagarjuna immediately follows up with the difficulty of this thought and the problem of teaching it:

For that reason — that the Dharma is
Deep and difficult to understand and learn —
The Buddha’s mind despaired of
Being able to teach it. (XXIV: 12)

If we reduce emptiness to the “What is?” question answerable as ousia, then we stand outside of emptiness looking at it as an object — the snake incorrectly seized. Such a “view upon Being” (to use Krell’s translation of Heidegger’s phrase) can only react in two ways. First, it sees logical incoherence and dismisses it an invalid philosophical concept. If all things are beings, and being is always being something, then emptiness must be something and thus have essential Being. Logicians dismiss emptiness so that they can go on asking their philosophical questions about Being. Logic, in other words, protects itself as the ultimate measure and arbiter of Dasein.

The second reaction is that of the Absurdist. Emptiness is accepted as true but trivialized. We must imagine Sisyphus happy, as if it were that easy. The gap between ourselves and the Sisyphus whom we watch and imagine happy is the gap that ensures emptiness remains a thing with Being. This is the pity that Nietzsche so often criticizes of the last man (and Zarathustra’s animals). We lament the absurdity of life as our reality. From a base of pity, the Absurdist has two directions to go. S/he either embraces the pity as a never-ending “going under,” or s/he pretends Sisyphus is happy. Like Zarathustra’s animals, s/he dances and sings and thus turns the thought of emptiness into “a ditty for barrel organs.”

In a prescient vision of this final scene from Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, Zarathustra presents exactly this problem of watching Sisyphus from a distance:

“O you buffoons and barrel organs!” Zarathustra replied and smiled again. “How well you know what had to be fulfilled in seven days, and how that monster crawled down my throat and suffocated me. But I bit off its head and spewed it out. And you, have you already made a hurdy-gurdy song of this? But now I lie here, still weary of this biting and spewing, still sick from my own redemption. And you watched all this? O my animals, are even you cruel? Did you want to watch my great pain as men do? For man is the cruelest animal. (“The Convalescent”)

Zarathustra is clear that this is pity, but it is pity that has trivialized another’s struggle and turned it into a spectator sport. As spectators, we are not vested in the burden with anything other than a toothless pity. We treat it as an abstraction that is capable of sending Sisyphus, like every victim of a school shooting, only our thoughts and prayers.

Where does this leave us with the “misperception of emptiness”? Nagarjuna, Nietzsche, and Heidegger share this same perspective: when we think of emptiness as a thing, we make it into no-thing, and as a result, we contain it within philosophical abstractions that prevent us from thinking emptiness as a thought that has transformative power. We stare at it from the outside as if it were an object of knowledge, just as the fool stares at Augenblick from the side of the road. Teaching the Dharma reduces it to a “hurdy-gurdy song” played by the endless rotation of a barrel organ. Such trivial teaching removes the difficulty of the thought itself.

We must have courage to stare into the abyss of nihilism and realize that it is our own invention. And if we invented it, then we can overcome it. Weak minds — Nietzsche’s last man and Nagarjuna’s “person of little intelligence” — will be destroyed by emptiness because they concentrate only on the content of these ideas, not on “the right way of approaching the thought and its condition” (Hediegger, “Moment and Eternal Return,” Nietzsche Vol. 2, 182).

It is this right way that we must now turn our attention to, which means coming back to the Buddhist insight.

……….

Two truths. The two truths: conventional truth (samvrti-satya) and ultimate truth (paramdrtha-satya).

The Buddha’s teaching of the Dharma
Is based on two truths:
A truth of worldly convention [samvrti-satya]
And an ultimate truth [paramdrtha-satya] (MMK XXIV.8)

The ultimate truth (paramdrtha-satya) is emptiness, but emptiness is not nothingness. Nor is it merely the absence of essence (svabhava). It is the fullness of dependent arising (pratitya-samutpada). Things still exist, but they exist because they arise from the practical need for us to create them. Emptiness can thus be understood as truth but cannot be defined as codified and appropriated knowledge. It is an insight that must operate exactly as Heidegger found eternal return — as simultaneously content and a condition that allows the content to work a transformation.

The conventional truth (paramdrtha-satya) is that things do exist but they only exist through the ultimate truth. That is, they only exist because they are created out of a network of other things. Keeping these two truths intertwined — not separate — helps us see all things in the world as constantly in the act of creating, dissolving, and recreating. Because the ultimate truth can only be understood and communicated through conventional truth, the two are inseparable. “But this insight [into the ultimate nature of things as empty] can only be gained through reasoning and hence though language and thought… which are thoroughly conventional and which can only be interpreted literally at the conventional level” (Jay Garfield Commentary on MMK XXIV.10).

Another step must be taken, and it is the most difficult step. To use Heidegger’s phrasing, the content must become a condition. To use Nagarjuna’s phrasing, this is what makes the Dharma deep and difficult to learn. It is a matter of understanding the ultimate truth, but that ultimate truth cannot be merely perceived from the sidelines as an object of abstract knowledge. To use Nietzsche’s phrasing, it has to become a thought that either crushes you or transforms you (GS 341).

What does this mean? For all three thinkers, we have to change our understanding of how being is related to time.

……….

Time and Eternity. If being is not reducible to “What is?” formulations, then being must be thought as temporal first and spatial second. Western Metaphysicians and Nagarjuna’s interlocutors see it the other way around. When Meno asks Socrates if virtue is teachable, Socrates executes the fundamental move that reduces being to a spatialized object: before we can answer the teachability question, we have to answer the prior question, “what do you assert virtue to be?” (Meno 71d, Robert Bartlett trans.). Abstraction as the expression of an essence will lead time back to eternity. In other words, the eternal answer of the “What is?” will be that which makes the time it takes to answer the question into the attempt to overcome time as the reconnection with the eternal. The transcendent must become present, and logical reasoning between interlocutors is the means to that end.

Nietzsche’s presentation of Augenblick as gateway between the past and the future is the crucial metaphor that seeks the reversal of this Platonic bias. Heidegger points out that two different ways of experiencing time are captured in Zarathustra’s “The Vision and the Riddle” and “The Convalescent” which are where Nietzsche most fully elaborates the transformative power of eternal return. This is the heart of Nietzsche’s “second communication” of that concept.

The first way of experiencing time is that of the dwarf. When questioned by Zarathustra, the dwarf transposes the two lines of the path that meet at Moment into an unbroken circle of eternity. This scene hinges on the truth of this insight but also on its trivialization. The dwarf correctly sees the eternal return of the same in the unbroken circle of eternity, but he trivializes it by assuming that the two lines of the circle have already been joined well before one shows up at the gateway of Augenblick. This is a difficult concept, but we must dwell on it because it is fundamental to changing the thought of eternal return from mere abstraction to a condition of thought that either crushes or transforms you.

If eternity is a circle whose closure occurred in the distant past, then time has no meaning and passive nihilism is the only available disposition to living. Let’s take the modern example of the Big Bang. If everything that has been and always will be occurred at that moment 13.8 billion years ago — itself a problematic statement about time’s measurability — then time is either the playing out of what was determined at that moment, or time is fully contained within infinity and everything has already happened — i.e., if time is a circle, then we’ve always already been through this. Our own present has no meaning in terms of our own agency. Like Zarathustra’s dwarf, we sit on the periphery of the scene looking at Augenblick and seeing only the smooth rotation of the future becoming the past.

Here is how Heidegger captures it:

If both paths run on to infinity (“eternity”), then that is where they meet; and since the circle closes by itself in infinity — far removed from me — all that recurs, in sheer alternation within this system of compensations, does so as a sequence, as a sort of parade passing through the gateway. (“The Convalescent,” Nietzsche Vol. 2, 56)

Rather than a smooth passage from an already determined future to the past through a neutral now, we must see Augenblick for what it is — the Moment when the past and the future are joined. Augenblick, in other words, is where eternity is joined, not in a distance past of a Big Bang.

The question becomes: what is the nature of the joining that happens at Augenblick? If it is not time “as a sort of parade passing through the gateway,” then it is the place where agency occurs — where we do the active work of joining the past and the future.

Augenblick is Dasein.

……….

Dasein and Incipit tragoedia. Heidegger does not use Dasien much in his lectures on eternal return of the same. But he does use it at one crucial point: “When ‘the greatest weight’ is assimilated to Dasein, ‘Incipit tragoedia.’” At the heart of Dasein is care. We have to care about our being. Without this care, we can never ask questions about being-in-the-world. We would lack motivation to either ask or answer any such question. In the lectures on eternal return of the same, care = “the tragic.”

The tragic in Nietzsche’s sense counteracts “resignation” (WM, 1029), if we may say that the tragic still finds it necessary to be “counter” to anything. The tragic in Nietzsche’s sense has nothing to do with sheer self-destructive pessimism, which casts a pall over all things; it has just as little to do with blind optics, which is lost in the vertigo of its vacuous desires. The tragic in Nietzsche’s sense falls outside this opposition, inasmuch as in its willing and in its knowing it adopts a stance toward being as a whole, and inasmuch as the basic law of being as a whole consists in struggle. (Lecture on “The Convalescent”, 51)

The tragic is a stance that we consciously adopt to Dasein. To adopt this stance, we have to see Augenblick as true, as Dasien, and as the location of our beings in time. Otherwise, we only have the hurdy gurdy barrel organs of Zarathustra’s animals and the passive onlooking of the fool staring at Augenblick from the outside. In other words, we trade in concepts that never cross a threshold to become the greatest weight.

……….

Bridge to Nagarjuna. If we don’t believe that the Moment is an eternal recurrence, then we seek to empty the moment by looking either backward or forward. We don’t look at the abyss of the Moment itself. This is why eternal recurrence must be posed as a non-Socratic question. It must be posed in such a way that you understand that the Moment is both full and empty at the same time. It is samsara and nirvana knotted into one kairos. It is Madhyamika (the Middle Path).

If samsara is a state of being and nirvana is an exit to a different place, Buddhism is Gnosticism. Spatialized thinking like this makes nirvana appropriable. We think of nirvana as an escape from the here and now of samsara as the essence of a fallen world. Gnosticism.

Nirvana is a practice of time that inhabits samsara not as its undoing, but as katargesis — Paul’s “rendering inoperative” that opens experience to the inappropriable. We do not seek this inappropriable as indifference to samsara. Nor do we seek it through ressentiment of samsara. We do not spatialize either of them. We keep experiencing duration as the weft on warp of our weaving of durations, which is to move in nirvana by moving in samsara and vice versa. Thus they are not essentially different from each other.

There is not the slightest difference
between cyclic existence [samsara] and nirvana.
There is not the slightest difference
between nirvana and cyclic existence.

Wherever is the limit of nirvana,
That is the limit of cyclic existence.
There is not even the slightest difference between them.
Or even the subtlest thing. (XXV.19-18)

Nirvana has limits because it operates within and against samsara and the knee-jerk operation of the skandhas to find essences everywhere. We descend back through samsara, via katargesis, to unlock the inappropriable. But this can only happen in time — it can only happen if we turn time into experience and experience into ever more minute practices of time.