The Most Extreme Form of Nihilism -
A Reading of Nietzsche's "Lenzer Heide" Notebook
Keith Ansell Pearson

(Excerpt)

With respect to the presentation of eternal return we encounter in the notebook of 1887 attention must be focused on the specific manner in which Nietzsche now relates the thought to the will to nothingness. This is something Deleuze was the first to indicate in his book of 1962 Nietzsche et la philosophie (Deleuze 1983, p. 70; Deleuze also made use of the notes that make up this notebook in vulgarised form in the French text, La volont é de puissance ). It is not a completely new configuration of the thought of return that Nietzsche introduces in 1887. What is different is that Nietzsche now weds or binds the thought to the whole phenomenon of European nihilism. When Nietzsche first sketches out the thought of eternal return in August 1881 he does so "6000 feet beyond man and time" and in the context of a new set of tasks he thinks modern human beings must now take up, including the incorporation of truth and knowledge, adopting a stance of indifference towards the first and last things of metaphysics, and so on. Although the thought of eternal return is an elevating one - elevating in the sense of the sublime - and although the thought first comes to Nietzsche when he is at an elevated position in the mountains of Sils-Maria, at a point of great distance with respect to man and time, the thought in its initial articulations attempts nothing other than a re-thinking of man and time, that is, what it might now mean to be human and to live in time. In 1887, however, Nietzsche utilises the thought of eternal return for quite different ends and in the context of a different set of problems. We are used to receiving the thought of return as "the highest formula of affirmation" that can be attained, as Nietzsche puts it for the benefit of his readers in Ecce Homo . In the notebook of 1887, however, it is presented in disconcerting terms as "the most extreme form of nihilism". How are we to make sense of this? How can the same thought be offered as both a formula of the highest affirmation attainable and as the most extreme form of nihilism?

On my reading of the notebook Nietzsche figures eternal return as the most extreme form of nihilism for two principal reasons: the first is to expose the error of any and all attempts to resolve the problem of meaning on a cosmological level; the second is to utilise the thought so as to effect a selection with regard to the new ordering of rank that is called for between the different forces that are struggling and competing within nihilistic modernity. The most progressive forces that Nietzsche locates are those represented by the moderate human beings who can live gaily and cheerfully without any need for extreme articles of faith. The question is whether this might also encompass the hypothesis of the eternal return. We need to pay very close attention to the manner in which Nietzsche links eternal return with nihilism and posits it as the most extreme form of nihilism.