Abstract
How are we to live our lives genuinely in an affirmation of both good and evil aspects of effulgent life in all its inevitability? This paper explores Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence in light of an imagery of “halcyon” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and attempts to shed light on the Nietzschean art of living life in the excesses of reason, language and nihilism.
-The coast has vanished, now the last chain has fallen from me; the boundless roars around me, far out glisten space and time; be of good cheer, old heart!(Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
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Notes
- 1.
Gary Shapiro, Alcyone (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991). Shapiro quotes from Nietzsche’s notebook of 1885 his plan to inscribe the songs entitled “Halkyonische Lieder and Ariadne.” One entry from the1885 notebook reads: “Halcyon Interludes/ Toward Rest/ Recovery from Thus Spoke Zarathustra dedicated to his friends” (12, 68). See, p. 124.
- 2.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 24. “I shall join the creators, the harvesters, the celebrants: I shall show them the rainbow and all the steps to the overman…….To my goal I will go-on my way.”
- 3.
In “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” (1886) to the preface, Nietzsche remarks that he made an “audacious” stride in the text (1872) to “look at science in the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life.” (p. 19) “Thus far we have considered the Apollinian and its opposite the Dionysian, as artistic energies which burst forth from nature herself, without the mediation of the human artist-energies in which nature’s art impulses are satisfied in the most immediate and direct way…” ( BT, p. 38).
- 4.
“And do you know what “the world” to me? …..as play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there…a sea of forces flowing and rushing together…with an ebb and a flood of its forms…eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence,…this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself-do you want a name for this world? …-This world is the will to power-and nothing besides! And you yourselves are this will to power-and nothing besides!” (WP, pp. 549–550).
- 5.
“…I seek a conception of the world that takes this fact into account. Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment (or incapable of being evaluated; which amounts to the same thing)…” (WP, p. 377).
- 6.
Ibid. 29, p. 377. “…I seek a conception of the world that takes this fact into account. Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment (or incapable of being evaluated; which amounts to the same thing)…”(p. 377).
- 7.
Ibid. 3, p. 303, #5.
- 8.
David Farrell Krell, Infectious Nietzsche (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 73.
- 9.
Ibid. 3, p. 301.
- 10.
Ibid. 3, p. 306, #7.
- 11.
Ibid. 33.
References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1962. Nietzsche and philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1966. Beyond good and evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The will to power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. On the genealogy of morals & Ecce homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1978. Thus spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
Shapiro, Gary. 1991. Alcyone. Albany: SUNY Press.
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Murata-Soraci, K. (2016). Eternal Recurrence and Nietzsche’s Halcyon Progeny. In: Tymieniecka, AT., Trutty-Coohill, P. (eds) The Cosmos and the Creative Imagination. Analecta Husserliana, vol 119. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21792-5_15
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