~by David Aiken~
§ Preface
There is soon set to open its doors in Monflanquin,
France a philo-café, associated with Phrontisterion,
called L’Eternel Retour. The Eternal Return is a symbol perhaps better
known in the West by one of its earliest images, the ancient Egyptian
ouroboros, or the serpent that eats its own tail; a wiki source claims that this symbol “is often interpreted as a symbol for
eternal cyclic renewal or a cycle of life, death, and rebirth.”
The artist’s logo for this
philo-café, which was designed by Esfaindyar,
has the ceaselessly winding serpent encircling Friedrich Nietzsche’s head,
because in the history of Western philosophy, Nietzsche is the philosopher of
the eternal return, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra the prophet of the »ewigen
Wiederkunft«.
In the Ecce Homo (§ 3), Nietzsche writes, “Die Lehre von
der »ewigen Wiederkunft«, das heisst vom unbedingten und unendlich wiederholten
Kreislauf aller Dinge – diese Lehre Zarathustra's könnte zuletzt auch schon von
Heraklit gelehrt worden sein,” which is to say: “The teaching about
the "Eternal Recurrence"—that is to say, of the unconditional and endlessly recurrent cycle
of all things—this teaching of
Zarathustra's could unquestionably have been taught by Heraclitus.” In a less
didactic moment, where Nietzsche is able to provide a much more interesting, dramatic
amplification of the idea of the Eternal Return, he famously describes in the Gay Savoir the moment when one becomes aware of the reality of recurrence:
The
Heaviest Burden.—What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness
some day or night, and said to thee: "This life, as thou livest it at
present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable
times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and
every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy
life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence—and
similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this
moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned
once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!"—Wouldst thou not throw
thyself down and gnash thy teeth, and curse the demon that so spake? Or hast
thou once experienced a tremendous moment in which thou wouldst answer him:
"Thou art a God, and never did I hear aught more divine!" If that
thought acquired power over thee, as thou art, it would transform thee, and perhaps
crush thee; the question with regard to all and everything: "Dost thou
want this once more, and also for innumerable times?" would lie as the
heaviest burden upon thy activity! Or, how wouldst thou have to become
favourably inclined to thyself and to life, so as to long for nothing more
ardently than for this last eternal sanctioning and sealing?—
So, this is a reprised reflection, and the celebration
of an idea in which we join together these three seemingly disparate players:
an eponymous philo-café in France called L’Eternel Retour; an ouroboric
serpent latched eternally on to its own tail; and a strange German philosopher
with enormous moustaches and eye-brows, whose prophetic Zarathustra continues
to teach us about a new man for a new age of the world.
§ The
Superman & The Eternal Return_The Great Unlearning of
Morality
Much has been
written, much mused, and much else assumed about Nietzsche’s notion of the
Übermensch, culminating in what is perhaps the notion’s most inappropriate,
because malapropic contemporary avatar: ‘It’s a bird…It’s a plane… It’s
Superman.’ It just seems so irresistibly facile in this latest
translation-adaptation of the Übermensch idea, to imagine our red-becaped Superman,
accessorized with his fire-engine red, spandex jockey shorts on full display,
arriving on the scene of some paralyzing human drama and pronouncing in the
mellifluous intonations of the very-French, love-crazed skunk of cartoon-dom,
Pépé le Pew: “I am ze Übermensch, mon amour .”
In order to speak seriously about Nietzsche’s notion
of the Übermensch, we must first return to Roman antiquity, to the Stoic
philosopher Seneca, to revisit his aphorism that “quae philosophia fuit facta philologia est”
(“What was philosophy is now become philology”). In 1869, as the new professor
of philology at the University of Basel, Nietzsche delivered his inaugural address,
which he entitled ‘Homer
and Classical Philology’, in which he playfully inverted Seneca’s aphorism to
say, “What was philology is now become philosophy.” Today we must hark back to
Seneca’s original statement, because it would seem that mainstream opinions
about Nietzsche’s Übermensch
are primarily concerned with the possible meanings of the actual word,
Übermensch, rather than in the philosophico-psychological concept the word is
intended to express.
There are reasons
for this, however. The Übermensch idea remains elusive at least in part due to
the prepositional prefix –über (‘over’,
‘beyond’, and even ‘super’—if dragged
kicking and screaming through a layer of Latin) attached to the word –mensch (person), and it has been
translated into English diversely—as ‘Beyond-Man’, ‘Superman’, and ‘Overman’.
None of these are particularly felicitous translations, however, because they
remain burdened by the compulsion for a one-word for one-word literalism that
sometimes—actually many if not most times—just does not work well between
languages.
§ The Zeitgeist of the 19th Century
It is banal to say
that Nietzsche’s Übermensch was conceived in an 18th-19th
century thought-world defined by the two influences of Hebraism, which is to say the Judeo-Christian religious heritage of
western civilization, and Hellenism,
or the vigorous resurgence of Greek cultural ideas through Anglo-German poetry
and scholarship.
Matthew
Arnold published Culture and Anarchy (1869) in the UK to mixed, or
mostly negative reviews. The title of perhaps the most famous chapter in
Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy is
“Hebraism and Hellenism,” which suggests a certain opposition of ideas. In a
2016 review published by the Washington Examiner, a noted
American historian calls this antithesis unambiguous:
The governing idea
of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of
conscience. The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really
are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience. The Greek
quarrel with the body and its desires is that they hinder right thinking; the
Hebrew quarrel with them is that they hinder right acting. Hellenism is
comfortable in the “pursuit or attainment of perfection”; Hebraism, obsessed
with sin, sees only “the difficulties which oppose themselves” to perfection.
And yet the framing of Arnold’s book not only
anticipates, but resembles comme deux
gouttes d’eau the framing of Nietzsche’s own thinking: the same themes that
wander around in the writings of Matthew Arnold will also inform Nietzsche’s
thinking, from the works of his youth, such as Die Kindheit der Völker (1861), which Nietzsche composed as a
15-year old student, through his first scholarly book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and into the Genealogy of Morality (1887), which goes to show that this
“framing” for his ideas will remain significant to Nietzsche throughout his
thinking and writing life.
So, both Arnold and Nietzsche are ‘prophets of
culture’ who are working within very similar zeitgeistige framings, yet they draw strikingly dissimilar
conclusions from their thinking. For Arnold, “The two [principles of Hebraism
and Hellenism] are not so much opposed, … as “divergent,” animated by
“different principles” but having the “same goal” and “aiming at a like final
result.” Both are “contributions to human development—august
contributions, invaluable contributions.” Both “arise out of the wants of human
nature, and address themselves to satisfying those wants.”
For
Nietzsche, on the other hand, as the Genealogy
of Morality makes unambiguously clear, the creation of ‘Morality’ is an
anti-life evolution of thought, a nihilism that kills the naturally ‘Good’
wherever it comes into existence. For Arnold, it is truly “Hebraism and
Hellenism,” whereas for Nietzsche it is “Hebraism vs. Hellenism.” So,
while there are many similarities clearly showing that Matthew Arnold and
Friedrich Nietzsche come from the same thought-world, which suggests a more
general philosophical arena for these framings and these thoughts, there is
absolutely no traceable, direct contact between these two thinkers. Nietzsche
does not seem to have specific personal knowledge about Matthew Arnold, nor are
there any of Arnold’s writings in Nietzsche’s personal library.
§ Undermen as Overmen—a ‘History’ of False Starts
Famous, but alas
all too typical of the Übermensch idea in normal and uninformed parlance, is
the “Leopold and Loeb” case in Chicago of the 1920s. In the Wiki-telling:
L&L are two students who, becoming friends at the University of Chicago and
having a shared interest in committing the ‘perfect crime’, dusted off their
portable Nietzsche and convinced themselves that they were resplendent examples
of the Übermensch idea “— transcendent individuals, possessing extraordinary
and unusual capabilities, whose superior intellects allowed them to rise above
the laws and rules that bound the unimportant, average populace. …[B]y
[Leopold’s] interpretation of Nietzsche's doctrines, he was not bound by any of
society's normal ethics or rules. Before long he had convinced Loeb that he,
too, was an Übermensch. In a letter to Loeb, Leopold wrote, "A superman
... is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from
the ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may
do."
L&L
did not succeed in committing the perfect crime; so Clarence Darrow, of Scopes
Monkey Trial fame (1925) and otherwise champion of scientifically minded
rationalism, was engaged to defend the two men. Darrow succeeded in
accomplishing two things in the defense of his two clients. First, it would
seem that he probably saved Leopold and Loeb from being executed by the state
of Illinois for the murder of Robert Franks, because both were only sentenced
to life imprisonment, which seemed to buck the trend at the time. Second,
Darrow succeeded in transforming Nietzsche and his notion of the Übermensch
into the stooge for human arrogance, a sense of social entitlement and superiority,
and evil intent. In Darrow’s version of the facts-and-only-the-facts, L&L
were just two normal lads who turned bad because they had had the misfortune of
reading too much philosophy, and specifically, of reading too much Nietzsche in
their youth. It remains undecided whether philosophy in America has ever really
shaken this guilt by association.
Some, such as a writer for Philosophy Now, see some kind of connection between Nietzsche’s
Übermensch and the Over-soul of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American transcendentalist,
who published “The Over-soul” as Essay IX in his Essays: First Series in 1841. In PN’s
article, entitled “Nietzsche’s Übermensch: A Hero of Our Time?,” we read that,
The term
Übermensch, often translated as Superman or Overman, was not invented by
Nietzsche. The concept of hyperanthropos can be found in the ancient writings
of Lucian. In German, the word had already been used by Müller, Herder,
Novalis, Heine, and most importantly by Goethe in relation to Faust (in Faust,
Part I, line 490). In America Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of the Oversoul, and,
perhaps with the exception of Goethe’s Faust, his aristocratic, self-reliant
‘Beyond-man’ was probably the greatest contributor to Nietzsche’s idea of the
Übermensch.
It is indisputable that Emerson greatly impressed
Nietzsche, an interest and an affinity that spanned Nietzsche’s entire life.
Unfortunately, while there does seem to be a demonstrable connection between
Carlyle, Goethe, Emerson, William James, and Nietzsche, on the notion of the
Great Man, that connection does not seem, in addition, to contribute discernably
to or to inform our interpretation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch.
The PN author also draws upon a Fordham
University article, Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra and Parodic Style: On Lucian’s Hyperanthropos and Nietzsche’s
Übermensch, to establish some kind of philologists’
“must-have-been” connection between Nietzsche’s Übermensch and the Greek term
coined by the 2nd century AD satirist, Lucian of Samosata. Unfortunately, while
it is certainly accurate to say that the term hyperanthropos is found in the writings of Lucian, it is equally
accurate to say that any reference to Lucian in Nietzsche’s corpus is entirely
tangential, as opposed to substantial, and that hyperanthropos never occurs in his work.
Furthermore,
the hapax usage of hyperanthropos in
Lucian (in The Downward Journey, sec.
16; Loeb, vol. 2, 1999) is an ab
ovo misdirection, because it is employed by a neighbor of the tyrant
Megapenthes, whose name is Micyllus, and who says that the tyrant,
appeared to me a
super-man, thrice-blessed, better looking and a full royal cubit taller than
almost anyone else; for he was uplifted by his good fortune, walked with a
majestic gait, carried his head high and dazzled all he met. But when he was
dead, not only did he cut an utterly ridiculous figure in my eyes on being
stripped of his pomp, but I laughed at myself even more than at him because I
had marveled at such a worthless creature, inferring his happiness from the
savour of his kitchen and counting him lucky because of his purple derived from
the blood of mussels in the Laconian
Sea.
As a satiric description attached to the somewhat
ludicrous, I-wish-I-weren’t-so-dead tyrant Megapenthes who is busily attempting
to negotiate his way out of Hades, this irony-laden connection seems an
obscurantist and erudite non-starter as far as the history of Nietzsche’s idea
might be concerned.
Other ‘literature’ on the question of the Übermensch
is polyphonic and both predictably and unhelpfully inconclusive, although the
populist consensus seems determined to associate the concept with eugenics and
the creation of a higher biological type. Some, such as Safranski (
Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, p.
365), arguing a variation on the biologism theme, think that, “
Nietzsche
intended the ultra-aristocratic figure of the Übermensch to serve as a
Machiavellian bogeyman of the modern Western middle class and its
pseudo-Christian egalitarian value system.” This interpretative trend was
certainly also evident in Nazi thought, which used Nietzsche’s concept of the
Übermensch to articulate a particular national version of the Aryan master race.
Popular
culture, as well, has certainly had a wonderful time fussing with
Übermensch-type personae, from Siegel’s first villainesque Superman, to G.B.
Shaw, and James Joyce. In a more philosophically interesting treatment, of
course, there is always Ayn Rand’s transmogrification of the Übermensch into
her radically individualistic and supra-moral Supra-Men characters. Likewise,
in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman,
a four-act drama written in 1903, there is the famous act called Don Juan in Hell (Act 3, Scene 2), which
is often produced as a stand-alone piece. It consists of a dream-act debate
concerning the advantages of Hell, which, in quintessentially übermenschlicher
style reminiscent of Faust’s Mephistopheles narrative, include the more emotive
topics of art and beauty and love and pleasure, whereas Heaven will only
celebrate rational discourse and the dissemination of the Life Force. The Devil
defends such hedonistic amenities, whereas Juan wants none of them and heads
for a thinker's Heaven. There is a theater review here, and a
YouTube version of Don Juan in Hell here.
§ I Thought I saw an Übermensch… I Did, I Did.
There is every sort
and variety of opinion ‘out there’ about the Übermensch; and they occupy
whatever thought-terrain is fertile enough to sustain them. However, all the
above opinions about Nietzsche’s
Übermensch are simply wrong and wrong-headed—they have nothing to do with Nietzsche’s thinking. So, who is or might
conceivably be, an Übermensch? Who exactly are ‘those who have gone beyond’?
And, if this is indeed a philosophical model of some sort, or a political
model, or a heroic model, what is the exact profile?
There are some
Nietzsche scholars who are actually subtle enough in their thinking to
understand that Übermensch is not a state of ontology, but rather a state of
mind. Nietzsche is not proposing an Antichrist, or a Führer, or a Carlylean
Great Man with this concept; rather, he is proposing to his readers something
much more akin to a philo-psychological adjustment, such as taught by Epictetus
in the Enchiridion: e.g., “Of things that can happen to us in a lifetime, there are
some that we can control [are dependent upon us], and some that we cannot
control [are not dependent upon us].” Corrections in our thinking of this type,
says Nietzsche, will transform us into freie
Denker, free thinkers, and ultimately, into free minds.
There
is evidence that some contemporary scholarship is starting to read Nietzsche
psychologically, such as in the essay entitled ‘Nietzsche and the Greeks’
published recently (2013) in the The
Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche. There we read that, “Nietzsche was generally
more interested in the psychological consequences of philosophical doctrines
than in their content.” There is also a 2010 book, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy, which challenges
“various traditional views of Nietzsche, taking him at his word when he says
that his writing can best be understood as a kind of psychology.”
At
this point, it might be helpful to recall our Western intellectual history—that
psychology as a discipline is only a very young blossom on the western vine of
knowledge, and only began separating itself from philosophy after the 1850s. So
it would seem reasonable, given the time frame, that Nietzsche should in fact
consider himself a psychologist; and in fact, the self-identification as
psychologist permeates Nietzsche’s writing, and especially the Twilight of the Idols [1888]:
· Beyond Good and Evil [1886: 76, 20]: “Der neue Psycholog bereitet dem
Aberglauben ein Ende, der bisher um die Seelen-Vorstellung wuchterte.”
· Twilight of the Idols [77, 343]: “Aus meinen Schriften
redet ein Psychologe.”
· Twilight of the Idols [77, 405]: “Es gab vor mir noch gar
keine Psychologie.”
Finally, among his aphorisms from Idols is number 35: “Es giebt Fälle, wo wir wie Pferde sind, wir
Psychologen, und in Unruhe gerathen: wir sehen unsren eignen Schatten vor uns
auf und niederschwanken. Der Psychologe muss von sich absehn, um überhaupt zu
sehn.”
So, Nietzsche the psychologist continually reminds us
that it is a misdirection to seek for models and profiles of what the
Übermensch can be… For it is not about some particular model of a
more-than-human, such as a Caesar or a Napoleon, but rather about the mental
context and framing of an übermenschlich
state of mind.
As a
psychological moment, the Übermensch-realization is actually a fusion of two
distinct insight-events. Aristotle, in the Poetics
[1452a&b], refers to the first insight-event as a discovery [anagnorisis], as the recognition of the
moment of “seeing” something, of grasping the truth about something, of the
ah-ha moment when we ‘get it’. It is that very private moment in the life of
our mind when, finally, the light bulb goes on and we realize that… for
example, our partner does not love us, or that someone has been cheating on us,
or that our boss has been defrauding the company, or, or, or…
Obviously,
there are untold examples of this insight-event in literature, but it is
important for Nietzsche that these moments should be philo-psychologically
correct, that they should correspond to the actually lived human condition of
mind, and that they should take us beyond ourselves into a different sphere of
knowing.
Aristotle himself
thinks that Sophocles’ depiction of this moment in the life of Oedipus is
superb—the moment when Oedipus, cast down under the weight of his misery and
shame, stabs out his eyes, finally realizing that blind, he would see no worse
than with his eyes wide open.
There
are also other great and moving insight-events in literature, such as when Ajax
falls upon his sword after finally realizing that Athena has deceived him,
blinding him to truth through folly. Or when Viktor Frankenstein realizes that
the creature he has made is no man, but a monster. Or when Milton’s Satan [Book
9; lns. 458-466], standing before Eve and contemplating even then the enormity
of the evil he was going to bring into her life in Paradise, is struck dumb
before her loveliness.
Her heavenly form
Angelic, but more
soft, and feminine,
Her graceful
innocence, her every air
Of gesture, or
least action, overawed
His malice, and
with rapine sweet bereaved
His fierceness of
the fierce intent it brought:
That space the
Evil-one abstracted stood
From his own evil,
and for the time remained
Stupidly good; of
enmity disarmed,
Of guile, of hate,
of envy, of revenge:
Now however humanly touching these illustrations may
be, none of these particular insight-events actually captures entirely what
Nietzsche intends with his Übermensch-realization, which is an insight-event
actually quite limited in scope. For in addition to the insight-event as a
psychological event, Nietzsche’s Übermensch-realization is also about a second,
very specific type of realization. It is about the insight that dawns on us
when we finally grasp that everything
we have “believed” about Value, about morality and moral thinking, about right
and wrong and good and evil, and about human destiny, is philo-theological
misdirection. It is a layer of fiction
applied to a world of fact—an unhappy because antagonistic joining if ever
there was.
Through
his Zarathustra, Nietzsche has undertaken the task of radically rethinking the
foundations of morality, and of imagining the psychological and emotional
consequences of that rethinking in the normal course of a life. Just imagine
the psychic wreckage and emotional damage! Just imagine the courage needed, the
daring, to overcome our own private foundation myths, which whisper quietly to
us from the stillness of our souls, of right and wrong, good and evil. And then
imagine the courage needed, and the discipline of mind, to rebirth ourselves in
innocence, and to create in our innermost selves a willingness to throw
ourselves, body and soul, into a life that is to be newly created and defined
each and every day, entirely by us.
Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra is the story of such a mental and emotional journey, which has
three quite distinct segments. As the journey begins, (and we have to remember
that this is a journey possible to each one of us through the thinking and
imagining mind), Zarathustra has to imagine first that he is a camel. The camel is the perfect Beast
of Burden; it is an animal that carries, almost as if by second nature, burdens
that are not his own. The first leg of Zarathustra’s journey, then, is to
become aware that he also, like the camel, carries a burden that is not
properly his own—the burden of ideas and values and beliefs—of Culture writ
large, that are inherited through the mother milk of World that surrounds us, beliefs
which grow up inside us as we grow up, almost as a second skeleton, and which
become so fundamental to our psyche that they organizes all the spaces of our
minds into our own private character.
The lion characterizes the second segment
of Zarathustra’s journey of the mind. This segment of the journey, which
demands all the courage of the lion, happens only in the solitary wastelands of
the mind, where we give battle to the fiction of inherited morality, where we
finally push it away from our minds and dare to stand alone in human history,
finally.
The child embodies the third and final
segment of Zarathustra’s journey of the imagination. What happens to us,
emotionally, when we finally dare to step out of an abusive or horrible
situation? There is a sense of relief, certainly; but there is also a sense of
being overwhelmed because we have to start everything all over again. So, says
Nietzsche, we have to put on the mind of the child – to accept in all innocence
the new-Beginning of the world that stands before us; and we have to go
on to create anew our life, not just physically, but also and especially
psychically.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
§ Eternally Returning – Windmills
In Your Mind.
According to
Nietzsche, a fundamental element of the Übermensch life of the mind is the recognition
of the Eternal Return of the Same, or Eternal Recurrence. As an idea, and for
the mental image, this certainly brings back to mind the 1960s Noel Harrison
tube, “The Windmills of Your Mind.”
Round like a circle
in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel
[…]
Like a clock whose
hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind!
Nietzsche’s thinking about the Übermensch is framed in
the zeitgeist of his century, which tended to separate time into sacred or
divine history [e.g., Hebraism; Heilsgeschichte]
and human empirical time [Hellenism; Geschichte].
This is a distinction, just for the example, that will also be much and
usefully exploited by the philosopher and historian of religion, Mircea Eliade.

First
in Nietzsche’s thinking about the eternal return, is the idea that divine or
Christian history is a linear conception of time that does not recur. This is
to say that we humans enter into the sacred flowing at some point, and the
current takes us unidirectionally toward the culmination of time in the
Parousia of God. This linear notion of history, or divine history, reasons
Nietzsche, usurped at some remote time the Greek or natural pagan notion of
history, which saw time as a series of recurring revolutions or cycles in the
‘great clock of being’ (Zarathustra).
For Nietzsche, the Übermensch stands before a choice—to live out his life
through unidirectional divine time, which is the destruction of fully human
time and, thus, a nihilism, or to cast himself into the multi-faceted
organization of the world’s, and so into man’s, natural time: “…it is the world
which redeems our contingent existence, reintegrating the Christian ego into
the order of cosmic necessity, i.e., into the eternal recurrence of the same” [Gay Savoir § 341-342, under “the
heaviest burden” and “the death of God” § 343]. Clifford Geertz, the American
anthropologist, will translate an idea much like this into the following: ‘One of the most significant facts about us may
finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand
kinds of life but end in the end having lived one.’
Natural
cyclical time, where we enter and re-enter into the full stream of a fully
human experience and creation of time, is an ancient concept found not only in
the philosophies of India and Egypt, but also in Greek antiquity, and notably
among the Stoics and Pythagoreans. Nietzsche encapsulates this idea in a very Epictetian
or Stoic value: Amor fati,
a Latin expression about ‘embracing one’s fate’ because it is one’s own. In his
book Meaning in History, Karl Löwith
reminds us on this point (p. 216) that Nietzsche introduces this idea, “not as
a metaphysical doctrine but as an ethical imperative: to live as if “the
eternal hourglass of existence” will continually be turned, in order to impress
on each of our actions the weight of an inescapable responsibility.”
Among
the Greeks the notion of Eternal Recurrence was normative, and included 1) living
a life “in harmony with nature” (Plato’s Philebus);
and 2) the idea of circularity (of lives, the process of generation and
creation, orbit of planets, etc.) – Heraclitus, Empedocles, Pythagoras, Plato
(cf. esp. Timaeus, The Statesman, and The Republic), Aristotle, Eudemos of Rhodes, the Stoics, and the
Hellenistic astronomer Hipparchus, who will contribute the idea of the equinox
precession (the slow spin of the earth) to Plato’s Great Year, which idea will
recur later in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum.
Like a circle in a
spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel
As the images unwind, like the circles that you find in
The windmills of your mind!
Further Phrontisterion reading:-
· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2020/08/nietzsche-eichmann-and-heideggerrub-dub.html
· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2019/12/nietzsches-prophecy-great-unlearning-of.html
· https://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2019/09/great-unlearning-i-elvis-has-left.html
· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2019/04/dead-gods-wandering-around-lost-in.html
References:
· https://sites.google.com/site/ictgrupo12bachnietszche/home/theories/calendar
· For the
first known ouroboros, found in one of the shrines of Tutankhamun: Image by Unknown
author - Chrysopoea of Cleopatra (Codex Marcianus graecus 299 fol. 188v),
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36915535
(Reprised from December
& January’s 2014/2015 Essay_The
Superman & The Eternal Return_The Great Unlearning II)