Eternity’s Death in Modernity: A Case of Murder? Of Resurrection?

ABSTRACT

The death of God and the death of eternity stand at the portals of modernity. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which Kojève called the modern counterpart to the Bible, concludes with the death of God. Despite Hegel having shown that everything, even God, has a time nucleus, at the level of ‘Absolute Knowing’, he takes eternity back into play, conceiving it as a structure of time, rather than a realm outside time. Thus, he wrenches a concept of eternity from time itself. Even though Hegel and Nietzsche are philosophical antipodes in many senses, we notice an ambivalent relation in Nietzsche’s works towards eternity as well. Nietzsche, the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the other ‘anti-Bible’ of modernity, proclaims eternity to be dead, while at the same time conceiving of an eternal recurrence, that of a dynamic eternity. First, it is argued that for both, eternity is essentially related to action and deed. Second, both highlight the importance of the past in reaching an adequate understanding of time and with it of eternity. Consequently, it is argued that modernity does not offer a vision of the future but a vibrant and often painful consciousness of the past.

KEYWORDS:

• Eternity
• deed
• past
• Hegel
• Nietzsche
• Heidegger
• recycling revolution

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Notes

1. The most famous definition of modernity originates not with a philosopher but a poet. According to Baudelaire, ‘modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable’ (1972, 403). This understanding of modernity captures more than its fleetingness; it shows that anything with the label ‘modern’ has a built-in dimension of transience and finitude, so to speak, and modernity is thus essentially linked to a re-evaluation of time as the essence of being.

2. Nietzsche comments on these affinities, stating that he himself relates to a specific time conception. ‘We Germans are Hegelian even had there been no Hegel, insofar as we (as opposed to the Latins) instinctively attribute a deeper meaning and greater value to becoming and development than to what ‘is’’ (2008, § 357, 218). Since in subsequent passages, I will reflect on Heidegger’s relation to Nietzsche’s conception of time as well, it should be mentioned that among the many differences between Nietzsche and Heidegger, we notice an opposed relation to science and its concept of time. Unlike Heidegger, Nietzsche uses scientific insights, the so-called ‘humble truths’, to dethrone classical metaphysical concepts of time.

3. In this regard, my interpretation leans on Dudley’s interpretation (2002). Against those viewing Hegel and Nietzsche as antipodes, Dudley emphasises, in a very nuanced manner, their closeness in regard to their conceptions of freedom and philosophy. Most notably, Dudley emphasises that a certain kind of a philosophical attitude is indispensable for freedom to be accomplished; in my interpretation, I posit this philosophical stance precisely into a relation of time.

4. The communal anamnesis of Jesus’ ‘Do this in memory of me’ (Luke 22:19) takes the form of spirituality proper (cf. Bouton 2000, 268f.).

5. In numerous passages, Hegel denies the existence of heroism in modernity, claiming that modernity is prosaic. Despite this, Hegel’s success story of European modernity is distinctively heroic. Distinctively, heroic is equally the emphasis on self-constitution. In this sense, I use the term in a modified, non-Hegelian meaning. For a heroism present in Hegelian modernity, see Brandom (2019).

6. For Hegel, world-historical individuals might be the most notable examples of this procedure. Nietzsche takes a different path. In Ecce homo (2005), he fashions his own post-mortem existence by way of immersing in his past. Thus, he relates his past as a series of texts from which the philosopher gradually emerges. Anticipating his imminent retreat, he turns his self into a text from which others can gain ‘inspiration’, in the literal sense of the word: Readers can ‘breathe the air of my writings’ (72) and thus learn what it means to be a philosopher.

7. This is an interpretation already put forward by Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future (2006, 3–16). The virtue of this interpretation is that it can be some sort of reconciliation of two common but opposed interpretations of Nietzsche’s teaching (that he himself calls a ‘riddle’). According to the ‘cosmological interpretation’, the idea of a ‘cosmos cycle’ is a theory about the actual nature of the universe (Löwith 1987). Others suggests that the eternal return is meant to be a thought experiment. In this ‘ethical interpretation’, Nietzsche summons the human being to act ‘as if’ they were to live the life that we live innumerable times (Williams 2001). According to the interpretation put forward in this paper, Nietzsche’s eternal return deals with the nature of time; along these lines, his teaching does elucidate the nature of a key cosmological aspect, namely time. Yet, this cosmological aspect depends on the performance of the human being. In time, there occurs a junction of cosmos and subject, since it is as we relate to the cosmos that we constitute time, and through this, bestow meaning upon it. In this regard, I put forward a hybrid interpretation. For another attempt at such a hybrid interpretation of metaphysics and psychology, see Dudley (2002, 201–210).

8. This type of relation to one’s past differs from what the early Nietzsche calls the ‘historical sense’ which is a typically modern fascination with one’s past treated in ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ (Nietzsche 1997). From the perspective of the ‘historical sense’, the present is fully determined by the past, in fact, it is part of the past. Using the term ‘anamnesis’, Nietzsche has a creative re-appropriation in mind, i.e. the ability to seek potentiality in the past.

9. For an analysis of the intersection of time, fate, and spirituality, see Bouton (2000, 49–52, 275).

10. Cf. Heidegger’s quotation of Hölderlin’s ‘The Journey’, ‘Reluctant to leave the place/Is that which dwells near the origin’ (2002a, 50).

11. Many thinkers are credited to have come up with this saying, most often though, the credit goes to Santayana (1905, 284).